Travels Through France And Italy
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Travels Through France And Italy
By Tobias Smollett
INTRODUCTION
By
Thomas Seccombe
I
Many pens have been burnished this year of grace for the purpose
of celebrating with befitting honour the second centenary of the
birth of Henry Fielding; but it is more than doubtful if, when
the right date occurs in March 1921, anything like the same
alacrity will be shown to commemorate one who was for many years,
and by such judges as Scott, Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens,
considered Fielding's complement and absolute co-equal (to say
the least) in literary achievement. Smollett's fame, indeed,
seems to have fallen upon an unprosperous curve. The coarseness
of his fortunate rival is condoned, while his is condemned
without appeal. Smollett's value is assessed without
discrimination at that of his least worthy productions, and the
historical value of his work as a prime modeller of all kinds of
new literary material is overlooked. Consider for a moment as not
wholly unworthy of attention his mere versatility as a man of
letters. Apart from Roderick Random and its successors, which
gave him a European fame, he wrote a standard history, and a
standard version of Don Quixote (both of which held their ground
against all comers for over a century). He created both satirical
and romantic types, he wrote two fine-spirited lyrics, and
launched the best Review and most popular magazine of his day. He
was the centre of a literary group, the founder to some extent of
a school of professional writers, of which strange and novel
class, after the "Great Cham of Literature," as he called Dr.
Johnson, he affords one of the first satisfactory specimens upon
a fairly large scale. He is, indeed, a more satisfactory, because
a more independent, example of the new species than the Great
Cham himself. The late Professor Beljame has shown us how the
milieu was created in which, with no subvention, whether from a
patron, a theatre, a political paymaster, a prosperous newspaper
or a fashionable subscription-list, an independent writer of the
mid-eighteenth century, provided that he was competent, could
begin to extort something more than a bare subsistence from the
reluctant coffers of the London booksellers. For the purpose of
such a demonstration no better illustration could possibly be
found, I think, than the career of Dr. Tobias Smollett. And yet,
curiously enough, in the collection of critical monographs so
well known under the generic title of "English Men of Letters"--a
series, by the way, which includes Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria
Edgeworth--no room or place has hitherto been found for Smollett
any more than for Ben Jonson, both of them, surely, considerable
Men of Letters in the very strictest and most representative
sense of the term. Both Jonson and Smollett were to an unusual
extent centres of the literary life of their time; and if the
great Ben had his tribe of imitators and adulators, Dr. Toby also
had his clan of sub-authors, delineated for us by a master hand
in the pages of Humphry Clinker. To make Fielding the centre-piece
of a group reflecting the literature of his day would be an
artistic impossibility. It would be perfectly easy in the case of
Smollett, who was descried by critics from afar as a Colossus
bestriding the summit of the contemporary Parnassus.
Whatever there may be of truth in these observations upon the
eclipse of a once magical name applies with double force to that
one of all Smollett's books which has sunk farthest in popular
disesteem. Modern editors have gone to the length of
excommunicating Smollett's Travels altogether from the fellowship
of his Collective Works. Critic has followed critic in
denouncing the book as that of a "splenetic" invalid. And yet it
is a book for which all English readers have cause to be
grateful, not only as a document on Smollett and his times, not
only as being in a sense the raison d'etre of the Sentimental
Journey, and the precursor in a very special sense of Humphry
Clinker, but also as being intrinsically an uncommonly readable
book, and even, I venture to assert, in many respects one of
Smollett's best. Portions of the work exhibit literary quality of
a high order: as a whole it represents a valuable because a
rather uncommon view, and as a literary record of travel it is
distinguished by a very exceptional veracity.
I am not prepared to define the differentia of a really first-rate
book of travel. Sympathy is important; but not indispensable,
or Smollett would be ruled out of court at once. Scientific
knowledge, keen observation, or intuitive power of discrimination
go far. To enlist our curiosity or enthusiasm or to excite our
wonder are even stronger recommendations. Charm of personal
manner, power of will, anthropological interest, self-effacement
in view of some great objects--all these qualities have made
travel-books live. One knows pretty nearly the books that one is
prepared to re-read in this department of literature. Marco Polo,
Herodotus, a few sections in Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the
early travellers in Palestine, Commodore Byron's Travels, Curzon
and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Mungo Park, Dubois,
Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of Borrow (fact or
fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace,
The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine,
The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have
run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would
not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding
works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should
we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is
good reason to hope, is only one of suspended animation.
To come to surer ground, it is a fact worth noting that each of
the four great prose masters of the third quarter of the
eighteenth century tried his hand at a personal record of travel.
Fielding came first in 1754 with his Journal of a Voyage to
Lisbon. Twelve years later was published Smollett's Travels
through France and Italy. Then, in 1768, Sterne's Sentimental
Journey; followed in 1775 by Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides.
Each of the four--in which beneath the apparel of the man of
letters we can discern respectively the characteristics of police
magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist--enjoyed a fair
amount of popularity in its day. Fielding's Journal had perhaps
the least immediate success of the four. Sterne's Journey
unquestionably had the most. The tenant of "Shandy Hall," as was
customary in the first heyday of "Anglomania," went to Paris to
ratify his successes, and the resounding triumph of his
naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of
London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this particular "judicium
Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in
the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in
successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century
rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this
small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the
Great Cham's Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity
of the "Ossianite" press, it fully justified the assumption of
the booksellers that it would prove a "sound" book. It is full
of sensible observations, and is written in Johnson's most
scholarly, balanced, and dignified style. Few can read it without
a sense of being repaid, if only by the portentous sentence in
which the author celebrates his arrival at the shores of Loch
Ness, where he reposes upon "a bank such as a writer of romance
might have delighted to feign," and reflects that a "uniformity
of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller;
that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and
waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which
neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the
understanding." Fielding's contribution to geography has far less
solidity and importance, but it discovers to not a few readers an
unfeigned charm that is not to be found in the pages of either
Sterne or Johnson. A thoughtless fragment suffices to show the
writer in his true colours as one of the most delightful fellows
in our literature, and to convey just unmistakably to all good
men and true the rare and priceless sense of human fellowship.
There remain the Travels through France and Italy, by T.
Smollett, M.D., and though these may not exhibit the marmoreal
glamour of Johnson, or the intimate fascination of Fielding, or
the essential literary quality which permeates the subtle
dialogue and artful vignette of Sterne, yet I shall endeavour to
show, not without some hope of success among the fair-minded,
that the Travels before us are fully deserving of a place, and
that not the least significant, in the quartette.
The temporary eclipse of their fame I attribute, first to the
studious depreciation of Sterne and Walpole, and secondly to a
refinement of snobbishness on the part of the travelling crowd,
who have an uneasy consciousness that to listen to common sense,
such as Smollett's, in matters of connoisseurship, is tantamount
to confessing oneself a Galilean of the outermost court. In this
connection, too, the itinerant divine gave the travelling doctor
a very nasty fall. Meeting the latter at Turin, just as Smollett
was about to turn his face homewards, in March 1765, Sterne wrote
of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus:
"The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from
Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and
jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or
distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the
account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote
later on, "in the grand portico of the Pantheon--he was just
coming out of it. ''Tis nothing but a huge cockpit,' said he--'I
wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de Medici,' replied
I--for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen
foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet,
without the least provocation in nature. I popp'd upon Smelfungus
again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful
adventures had he to tell, 'wherein he spoke of moving accidents
by flood and field, and of the cannibals which each other eat,
the Anthropophagi'; he had been flayed alive, and bedevil'd, and
used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at.
'I'll tell it,' cried Smelfungus, 'to the world.' 'You had better
tell it,' said I, 'to your physician.'"
To counteract the ill effects of "spleen and jaundice" and
exhibit the spirit of genteel humour and universal benevolence in
which a man of sensibility encountered the discomforts of the
road, the incorrigible parson Laurence brought out his own
Sentimental Journey. Another effect of Smollett's book was to
whet his own appetite for recording the adventures of the open
road. So that but for Travels through France and Italy we might
have had neither a Sentimental Journey nor a Humphry Clinker. If
all the admirers of these two books would but bestir themselves
and look into the matter, I am sure that Sterne's only too clever
assault would be relegated to its proper place and assessed at
its right value as a mere boutade. The borrowed contempt of
Horace Walpole and the coterie of superficial dilettanti, from
which Smollett's book has somehow never wholly recovered, could
then easily be outflanked and the Travels might well be in
reasonable expectation of coming by their own again.
II
In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the
special and somewhat exceptional conditions under which the
Travel Letters of Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have
seen, was one of the first professional men of all work in
letters upon a considerable scale who subsisted entirely upon the
earnings of his own pen. He had no extraneous means of support.
He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment,
inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the burden of a
large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself
upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a
position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to
the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people
whose social ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett
suffered considerably on account of these novel aspirations of
his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his
house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the
Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity. Voltaire was the only
figure in the eighteenth century even to approach such a
flattering position, and he was for many years a refugee from his
own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in
rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage, menservants,
and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty who had
a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an
incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to
maintain such a position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from
year's end to year's end--was a truly Herculean task in days when
a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright
did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers
at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett
was continually having recourse to loans. He produced the eight
(or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer hard
writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and
his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant
labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this
cruel compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a
magazine (The British), and a weekly political organ (The
Briton). A charge of defamation for a paragraph in the nature of
what would now be considered a very mild and pertinent piece of
public criticism against a faineant admiral led to imprisonment
in the King's Bench Prison, plus a fine of £100. Then came a
quarrel with an old friend, Wilkes--not the least vexatious
result of that forlorn championship of Bute's government in The
Briton. And finally, in part, obviously, as a consequence of all
this nervous breakdown, a succession of severe catarrhs,
premonitory in his case of consumption, the serious illness of
the wife he adored, and the death of his darling, the "little
Boss" of former years, now on the verge of womanhood. To a man of
his extraordinarily strong affections such a series of ills was
too overwhelming. He resolved to break up his establishment at
Chelsea, and to seek a remedy in flight from present evils to a
foreign residence. Dickens went to hibernate on the Riviera upon
a somewhat similar pretext, though fortunately without the same
cause, as far as his health was concerned.
Now note another very characteristic feature of these Travel
Letters. Smollett went abroad not for pleasure, but virtually of
necessity. Not only were circumstances at home proving rather too
much for him, but also, like Stevenson, he was specifically
"ordered South" by his physicians, and he went with the
deliberate intention of making as much money as possible out of
his Travel papers. In his case he wrote long letters on the spot
to his medical and other friends at home. When he got back in the
summer of 1765 one of his first cares was to put the Letters
together. It had always been his intention carefully to revise
them for the press. But when he got back to London he found so
many other tasks awaiting him that were so far more pressing,
that this part of his purpose was but very imperfectly carried
out. The Letters appeared pretty much as he wrote them. Their
social and documentary value is thereby considerably enhanced,
for they were nearly all written close down to the facts. The
original intention had been to go to Montpellier, which was
still, I suppose, the most popular health resort in Southern
Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this brings us to
another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's Travels.
Typical Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most Protestant
period, and insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett had
knocked about the world a good deal and had also seen something
of the continent of Europe. He was not prepared to see everything
couleur de rose now. His was quite unlike the frame of mind of
the ordinary holiday-seeker, who, partly from a voluntary
optimism, and partly from the change of food and habit, the
exhilaration caused by novel surroundings, and timidity at the
unaccustomed sounds he hears in his ears, is determined to be
pleased with everything. Very temperamental was Smollett, and his
frame of mind at the time was that of one determined to be
pleased with nothing. We know little enough about Smollett
intime. Only the other day I learned that the majority of so-
called Smollett portraits are not presentments of the novelist at
all, but ingeniously altered plates of George Washington. An
interesting confirmation of this is to be found in the recently
published Letters of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Robert
Chambers. "Smollett wore black cloaths--a tall man--and extreamly
handsome. No picture of him is known to be extant--all that have
been foisted on the public as such his relations disclaim--this I
know from my aunt Mrs. Smollett, who was the wife of his nephew,
and resided with him at Bath." But one thing we do know, and in
these same letters, if confirmation had been needed, we observe
the statement repeated, namely, that Smollett was very peevish. A
sardonic, satirical, and indeed decidedly gloomy mood or temper
had become so habitual in him as to transform the man. Originally
gay and debonnair, his native character had been so overlaid that
when he first returned to Scotland in 1755 his own mother could
not recognise him until he "gave over glooming" and put on his
old bright smile. [A pleasant story of the Doctor's mother is
given in the same Letters to R. Chambers (1904). She is described
as an ill-natured-looking woman with a high nose, but not a bad
temper, and very fond of the cards. One evening an Edinburgh
bailie (who was a tallow chandler) paid her a visit. "Come awa',
bailie," said she, "and tak' a trick at the cards." "Troth madam,
I hae nae siller!" "Then let us play for a pound of candles."]
His was certainly a nervous, irritable, and rather censorious
temper. Like Mr. Brattle, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, he was
thinking always of the evil things that had been done to him.
With the pawky and philosophic Scots of his own day (Robertson,
Hume, Adam Smith, and "Jupiter" Carlyle) he had little in common,
but with the sour and mistrustful James Mill or the cross and
querulous Carlyle of a later date he had, it seems to me, a good
deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or liver,
a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of
Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether
dyspeptic or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see
things through a veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He
felt under no obligation whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a
privilege of social distinction, or its discomforts as things to
be discreetly ignored in relating his experience to the stay-at-home
public. He was not the sort of man that the Tourist Agencies
of to-day would select to frame their advertisements. As an
advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he would have done
well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic of travel
is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means the
case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the
Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his
entry into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many
heroes returned with conquest to their country, by which so many
kings were led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of
so many kingdoms and States approached the seat of Empire, to
deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the
protection of the Roman people."] or the enviable account of the
alfresco meals which the party discussed in their coach as
described in Letter VIII.
As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally
unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open
question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one
of his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience
after this wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords
equally disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish,
and slothful; postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and
impertinent. With this last class of delinquents after much
experience he was bound to admit the following dilemma:--If you
chide them for lingering, they will contrive to delay you the
longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or
horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but
leaves the expletives to our imagination) they will either
disappear entirely, and leave you without resource, or they will
find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The
only course remaining would be to allow oneself to become the
dupe of imposition by tipping the postillions an amount slightly
in excess of the authorized gratification. He admits that in
England once, between the Devizes and Bristol, he found this plan
productive of the happiest results. It was unfortunate that, upon
this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness of margin for
incidental expenses should have debarred him from having recourse
to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as Smollett
himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey with
much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is
instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the
novelist was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel
as an English Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every
point to do it "on the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance
or diligence, and insisted on travelling post and in a berline;
but he could not bring himself to exceed the five-sou pourboire
for the postillions. He would have meat upon maigre days, yet
objected to paying double for it. He held aloof from the thirty-sou
table d'hote, and would have been content to pay three francs
a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were roused
when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by
nature anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I
interpret him at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted,
generous type of man. Like a majority, perhaps, of the really
open-handed he shared one trait with the closefisted and even
with the very mean rich. He would rather give away a crown than
be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little of the
traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going--the Languedocians and Ligurians--were
notorious for their nearness in money matters. The result of all
this could hardly fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to
aggravate the testiness which was due primarily to the bitterness
of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the
complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital
consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was
that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel--a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's
skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The
rubs, the rods, the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be
presented to us more graphically or magisterially than they are
in some of these chapters. Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and
Dickens, Smollett was a connoisseur in inns and innkeepers. He
knew good food and he knew good value, and he had a mighty keen
eye for a rogue. There may, it is true, have been something in
his manner which provoked them to exhibit their worst side to
him. It is a common fate with angry men. The trials to which he
was subjected were momentarily very severe, but, as we shall see
in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to him.
To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and
vigorously by an expert man of letters. They were written ad
vivum, as it were, not from worked-up notes or embellished
recollections. They were written expressly for money down. They
were written rather en noir than couleur de rose by an
experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a disillusioned
traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement that they
were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of course,
true, and explains much. The majority of his correspondents were
of the medical profession, all of them were members of a group
with whom he was very intimate, and the letters were by his
special direction to be passed round among them. [We do not
know precisely who all these correspondents of Smollett were, but
most of them were evidently doctors and among them, without a
doubt, John Armstrong, William Hunter, George Macaulay, and above
all John Moore, himself an authority on European travel, Governor
on the Grand Tour of the Duke of Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful
Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and father of the famous soldier.
Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died 5th March 1763.] In the
circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his original intention
to prune the letters considerably before publication) it was only
natural that he should say a good deal about the state of his
health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to these good
people had he not referred frequently and at some length to his
spirits and to his symptoms, an improvement in which was the
primary object of his journey and his two years' sojourn in the
South. Readers who linger over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and
Mrs. Fielding's toothache are inconsistent in denouncing the
luxury of detail with which Smollett discusses the matter of his
imposthume.
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