by Will Durant
Amelia is Fielding’s patient Griselda. She has her nose broken in an early chapter, but rhinoplasty repairs it, and she becomes again so beautiful that an attempt is made on her virtue in almost every alternate chapter. She admits her intellectual inferiority to her husband. She obeys him in everything, except that she refuses to go to a masquerade. She attends an oratorio by Handel, but hesitates to expose herself to the gaze of the philanderers in Vauxhall. When Booth returns to her after one of his escapades he finds her “performing the office of a cook with as much pleasure as a fine lady generally enjoys in dressing herself for a ball.” 100 She receives a letter from the evil Miss Matthews betraying Booth’s prison adultery; she destroys the letter, says nothing about it to her husband, and continues to love him through all his drinking, gambling, debts, and imprisonments; she sells her trinkets, then her clothing, to feed him and their children. She is discouraged less by his faults than by the cruelty of the men and institutions that enmesh him. Fielding, like Rousseau and Helvétius, supposed that most men are by nature good, but are corrupted by evil environments and bad laws. Thackeray thought Amelia “the most charming character in English fiction”; 101 but perhaps she was only a husband’s dream. In the end, of course, Amelia turns out to be an heiress; she and Booth retire to her estate, and Booth becomes a good man.
The conclusion is hardly justified by the premises: once a Booth always a Booth. Fielding tried to bring all the tangles of his plot to a happy unity, but here his sleight of hand is too obvious. The great novelist was tired, and he was sickened by his entourage of thieves and murderers. After completing Amelia he wrote: “I will trouble the world no more with any children of mine by the same Muse.” In January, 1752, he started The Covent Garden Journal, contributed some vigorous articles, answered Smollett’s criticism, took a shot at Roderick Random, and then, in November, he let the Journal die. The winter of 1753–54 was too much for his constitution, broken down by work, dropsy, jaundice, and asthma. He tried Bishop Berkeley’s tar water, but the dropsy grew worse. His doctor recommended travel to a sunnier clime. In June, 1754, he sailed on the Queen of Portugal with his wife and daughter. En route he composed his Journal of a Voyage; to Lisbon, one of his most amiable productions. He died in Lisbon October 8, 1754, and was buried there in the English cemetery.
What was his achievement? He established the realistic novel of manners; he described the life of the English middle classes more vividly than any historian has done; his books opened a world. He did not succeed so well with the upper classes; there, like Richardson, he had to be content with an outsider’s view. He knew the body of his country’s life better than its soul, and the body of love better than its spirit; the more delicate and subtle elements of the English character escaped him. Even so, he left his mark upon Smollett, Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray; he was the father of them all.
3. Tobias Smollett: 1721–11
Smollett did not like him, for they competed for the same applause. The younger man was a Scot who agreed with Hume in regretting that England obstructed the way to France. His grandfather, however, had actively promoted the parliamentary union with England (1707), and had been a member of the united Parliament. His father died when Tobias was two years old, but the family financed the boy’s education at Dumbarton Grammar School and Glasgow University, where he took premedical courses. Instead of completing work for his degree, he succumbed to the infection of authorship, and rushed off to London and Garrick with a worthless tragedy; Garrick refused it. Tobias, after a little starvation, signed as surgeon’s mate on the battleship Cumberland, and sailed with it (1740) into the War of Jenkins’ Ear. He took part in the bungled attack on Cartagena, off the Colombian coast. In Jamaica he left the service; there he met Nancy Lascelles, whom he married soon after his return (1744) to England. He took a house in Downing Street and practiced surgery; but the itch to write was too much for him, and his experiences in the navy demanded at least one recital. So in 1748 he published the most famous of his novels.
The Adventures of Roderick Random is the old picaresque romance of events strung upon a character Smollett acknowledged no debt to Fielding, but much to Cervantes and Lesage. He was more interested in men and deeds than in books and words; he packed his story with incidents, gave it the stench of offal and the color of blood, and peopled it with characters reeking with personality and lusty speech. This is one of the first and best of a thousand English novels of the sea. But before being dragooned into the navy Roderick, like his creator, samples English inns and London morals. What have we not missed by not traveling in those eighteenth-century coaches and putting up in those inns!—such a gallery of conflicting egos, decaying soldiers, pimps and bawds, peddlers lugging their bundles and hiding their money, men turning over chamber pots in search of the wrong bed, women shrieking rape and quieted with coin, every poor soul pretending magnitude, and everyone swearing. Miss Jenny calls the peddler “you old cent per cent fornicator!” and asks the captain, “Damn you, sir, who are you? Who made you a captain, you pitiful, trencher-scraping, pimping curler? ’Sdeath! the army is come to a fine pass when such fellows as you get commissions.” 102
In London Roderick (who here = Smollett) becomes a “journeyman apothecary”—a druggist’s assistant. He escapes marriage by finding his betrothed in bed with another man. “Heaven gave me patience and presence of mind to withdraw immediately, and I thanked my stars a thousand times for the happy discovery by which I resolved to profit so much as to abandon all thoughts of marriage for the future.” 103 He contents himself with promiscuity, learns the ways and woes of streetwalkers, cures their infections, denounces the quacks that fleece them, and notes how the prostitute, “although often complained of as a nuisance, still escapes through her interest with the justices, to whom she and all of her employment pay contributions quarterly for protection.” 104
Wrongly accused of theft, he loses his job, and falls into such destitution that “I saw no resource but the army and navy.” He is saved the torment of deciding by a press gang that knocks him unconscious and drags him aboard H. M. S. Thunder. He accepts his fate, and becomes surgeon’s mate. Only after a day at sea does he perceive that Captain Oakum is a half-insane brute, who for economy’s sake keeps sick sailors at work till they die. Roderick fights at Cartagena; he is shipwrecked, swims ashore to Jamaica, becomes footman to an old run-down poetess, falls “in love” with her niece Narcissa, and “conceived hopes of one day enjoying this amiable creature.” 105 And so the narrative runs on, in Smollett’s breathless flow, in paragraphs three pages long, in language simple, vigorous, and profane. In London Roderick makes a new set of eccentric friends, including Miss Melinda Goosetrap and Miss Biddy Gripewell. Then to Bath, with more coach scenes; there he encounters sweet Narcissa, wins her love, loses her, fights a duel.… He rejoins the navy as surgeon, sails to Guinea (where his captain “buys” four hundred slaves to sell them in Paraguay “to great advantage”), again to Jamaica, where he finds his long-lost, now moneyed father; back to Europe; back to Narcissa; marriage; back to Scotland and the paternal estate; Narcissa “begins to grow remarkably round in the waist.” As for Roderick,
If there be such a thing as true happiness on earth, I enjoy it. The tempestuous transports of my passion are now settled and mellowed into endearing fondness and tranquillity of love, rooted by that intimate connection and interchange of hearts which nought but virtuous wedlock can produce.
Roderick Random had a good sale. Smollett insisted now on publishing his play, The Regicide, with a prefatory annihilation of those who had rejected it; throughout his career he gave his temper carte blanche to make enemies. He went up to Aberdeen in 1750 and received the degree in medicine; but his personality impeded his practice, and he sank back into literature. In 1751 he brought forth The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle; here, as in Random, the title invited the reader to a round of exciting incidents in a wandering life; but now Smollett struck a vein of salty humor in his most successful character.
Commodore Trunnion is described as “a very oddish kind of gentleman”; he has been “a great warrior in his time, and lost an eye and a heel in the service”; 106 he insists on telling, for the nth time, how he bombarded a French man-of-war off Cape Finisterre. He commands his servant Tom Piper to corroborate him; whereupon Tom “opened his mouth like a gasping cod, and, with a cadence like that of the east wind singing through a cranny,” gave the required support. (Here, perhaps, Sterne took some hints for Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim.)
Smollett frolics through a boisterous account of how Mrs. Grizzle courts the Commodore, whose one-legged lieutenant, Jack Hatchway, begs him not to let her “bring him to under her stern,” for “if once you are made fast to her poop, egad, she’ll spank it away, and make every beam in your body crack with straining.” The Commodore reassures him, “No man shall ever see Hawser Trunnion laying astern in the wake of e’er a b———h in Christendom.” 107 Sundry stratagems, however, break down his chastity; he consents to “grapple”—i.e., marry; but he goes to the splicing “like a felon to execution, … as if every moment he dreaded the dissolution of Nature.” He insists upon a hammock as a marriage bed; it breaks under the double load, but not before the lady “thought her great aim accomplished, and her authority secured against all the shocks of fortune.” Nevertheless this navel engagement ends without issue, and Mrs. Trunnion falls back upon brandy and “the duties of religion, which she performed with a most rancorous severity.”
Sir Walter Scott pictured Smollett in his forties as “eminently handsome, his features prepossessing, and, by the joint testimony of all his surviving friends, his conversation in the highest degree instructive and amusing.” 108 By all accounts he was a man of hot temper and vivid speech. So he described Sir Charles Knowles as “an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity.” 109 The Admiral prosecuted him for libel, and Smollett suffered three months’ imprisonment and a fine of a hundred pounds (1757). Along with his irascibility went many virtues: he was generous and humane, helped poor authors, and became, said Sir Walter, “a doting father and an affectionate husband.” 110 His house in Lawrence Lane, Chelsea, was a rendezvous of minor scribes, who took his food if not his advice; some of them he organized into a corps of literary aides. He was one of the first prose writers (Dryden the first poet?) to make the booksellers support him in a condition befitting his genius. He earned sometimes six hundred pounds in a year, but he had to work hard for them. He wrote three more novels, two of them negligible; he persuaded Garrick to produce his play The Reprisal, which won success with its attacks upon France; he contributed pugnaciously to several magazines, and edited The Briton as a Tory mouthpiece. He translated Gil Bias, several works of Voltaire, and (with the help of an earlier version) Don Quixote; and he wrote—or presided over—a nine-volume History of England (1757–65). Certainly he used his “literary factory” of Grub Street hacks in compiling a Universal History, and an eight-volume Present State of the Nations.
By 1763, aged forty-two, he had paid with broken health for his eager life of adventure, work, brawls, and vocabulary. His physician advised him to consult a specialist, Dr. Fizes, at Montpellier. He went, and was told that his asthma, cough, and purulent expectoration indicated tuberculosis. Loath to return to England’s verdant moisture, he remained on the Continent for two years, covering his costs by writing Travels through France and Italy (1766). Here, as in his novels, he showed his quick, sharp eye for the signs and mannerisms of individual and national character; but he peppered his description with candid vituperation. He told coachmen, fellow travelers, innkeepers, servants, and foreign patriots just what he thought of them; he challenged every bill, demolished French and Italian art, belabored Catholicism, and dismissed the French as acquisitive thieves who did not always coat their thefts with courtesy. Hear him:
If a Frenchman is admitted into your family … the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece, … or grandmother.… If he is detected … he impudently declares that what he had done was no more than simple gallantry, considered in France as indispensable to good breeding. 111
Smollett returned to England much improved in health. But in 1768 his ailments revived, and he sought a cure in Bath. He found its waters useless to him, and its damp air dangerous; in 1769 he was back in Italy. In a villa near Leghorn he wrote his last and best book, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, which Thackeray thought “the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began.” 112 It is certainly the most pleasant and amiable of Smollett’s books, if we can stomach a little scatology. Almost at the outset we meet Dr. L—n, who discourses on “good” or “bad” smells as purely subjective prejudices, “for that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another’s excretions snuffed up his own with particular complacency; for the truth of which he appealed to all the ladies and gentlemen there present”; 113 followed by a page or two of still more pungent illustrations. Having relieved himself of this morsel, Smollett went on to invent a jolly gamut of characters, who carry the narrative forward by their letters in the most incredible and delightful way. At their head is Matthew Bramble, an “old gentleman” and invincible bachelor who serves as Smollett’s voice. He goes to Bath for health, but finds the stench of its waters more impressive than their curative power. He hates crowds, and once faints at their corporate odor. He cannot bear the polluted air of London, or its adulterated foods:
The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration, but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter.… Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, … and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them.… The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, … so that a man might dine as comfortably on a fricassee of kidskin gloves.… You will hardly believe that they can be so mad as to boil their greens with brass half-pence in order to improve their color. 114
So Matthew hurries back to his rural estate, where he can breathe and eat without risking his life. En route, after the story is one-fourth told, he picks up a poor, half-naked country lad, Humphrey Clinker; “his looks denoted famine, and the rags that he wore could hardly conceal what decency requires to be covered.” This ragamuffin offers to drive the coach; but when he takes the high seat his aged breeches split, and Mrs. Tabitha Bramble (Matthew’s sister) complains that Humphrey “had the impudence to shock her sight by showing his bare posteriors.” Matthew clothes the boy, takes him into his service, and bears with him patiently even when the youth, having heard George Whitefield, becomes a Methodist preacher.
Another facet of the religious situation appears in Mr.H—t, whom Bramble meets in Scarborough, and who boasts of having conferred with Voltaire at Geneva “about giving the last blow to the Christian superstition.” 115 Another maverick, Captain Lismahago, enters the story at Durham—“a tall, meager figure, answering, with horse, to the description of Don Quixote mounted on Rozinante.” He has lived among North American Indians, and he tells with relish how these roasted two French missionaries for saying that God had allowed his son “to enter the bowels of a woman, and be executed as a malefactor,” and for pretending that they could “multiply God ad infinitum by the help of a little flour and water.” Lismahago “dwelt much upon the words reason, philosophy, and contradiction in terms; he bade defiance to the eternity of hell-fire; and even threw such squibs at the immortality of the soul as singed a little the whiskers of Mrs. Tabitha’s faith.” 116
Smollett never saw Humphrey Clinker in print. On September 17, 1771, he died in his Italian villa, aged fifty, having made more enemies and created more vivacious characters than any other writer of his time. We miss in him
the good nature, the healthy acceptance of life, and the painstaking construction of plot, that we find in Fielding; but there is a lusty vitality in Smollett, the tang and smell of Britain’s towns and ships and middle class; and his simple episodic narrative flows on more freely and vividly, unimpeded by homilies. Characterization is less striking in Fielding, but more complex; Smollett is often content to accumulate mannerisms instead of exploring the contradictions, doubts, and tentatives that make a personality. This mode of individualization—by exaggerating some peculiarity as a leitmotiv in each person—passed down to Dickens, whose Pickwick Papers continued the tour that Matthew Bramble began.
Taken together, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett describe mid-eighteenth-century England more fully and graphically than any or all the historians—who lose themselves in exceptions. Everything is here but that upper class which took from France her manners and her colonies. These novelists brought the middle classes triumphantly into literature, as Lillo brought them into drama, and Gay into opera, and Hogarth into art. They created the modern novel, and left it as a heritage unsurpassed.
