The Facts of Fiction (7 page)

Having thus seen Trunnion in his lusty lustful prime
we should know also his tombstone: that is if we have not made it the goal of a pilgrimage already:

Here lies

Foundered in a Fathom and a Half

The shell

Of

Hawser Trunnion, Esq
.

Formerly in command of a Squadron

In His Majesty's Service

Who broached to, at Five p.m. Oct. X
.

In the year of his age

Threescore and nineteen
.

He kept his guns always loaded

And his tackle ready manned

And never showed his poop to the enemy

Except when he took her in tow;

But

His shot being expended

His match burnt out

And his upper works decayed

He was sunk

By Death's superior weight of metal

Nevertheless

He will be weighed again

At the Great Day
,

His rigging refitted
,

And his timbers repaired
,

And, with one broadside
,

Make his adversary

Strike in his turn
.

That typical passage of Smollett, dense with amusing invention, is the epitaph of John Bull afloat: a national, not a personal affair. And it is curious that Scott, who was so deeply impressed by the English nationality of Fielding's genius, should not have noticed that it was the Scotsman, Smollett, who built the new English hero for the new English novel. The nautical novel has, it is true, never been more than a side show in the street of fiction. It first came in the childhood of the art, and has remained very largely for the childhood of the reader. Smollett's greatest debtors are not those who write about the sea—Conrad, for instance, owed him nothing, despite the fact that he thought he did—but those who learnt from him to write interestingly in fiction about almost everything else.

Dr. Baker remarks that “Fielding had dealt in character as well as in characters. Smollett's concern was the superficial features of temperament, mannerisms in which men differ, not with the deeper human qualities that unite them.” It is an excellent distinction. It is as much as to say that Smollett's characters, even his Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker are flat characters to be looked at and laughed at, but not to be walked round and examined.

It is not, however, completely true. For Fielding had his crowded background of flat characters such as Mr. Supple the curate, Mr. Thwackum the divine and Mr. Square the philosopher. But that may have been merely that the eighteenth century was one of three moments—Scott brought in another, and Dickens the last—when minor characters enjoyed all the rights of full citizenship in fiction.

And we should remember that even though Trunnion and Bowling and Strap and Pipes may be no more than flat characters—they certainly only present one face to
the world—they are so substantial that we could spend a whole evening in their company without ever suspecting that, like Scandinavian fairies, they are knife edges of which only the broad side of the blade should ever be looked at.

Perhaps the flattest and thinnest of all the flat characters in fiction are those unfortunate women in the novels of the eighteenth century who stray upon the stage like a dancer in a musical comedy whenever the producer feels that the strain of asking the human mind to work consecutively has grown too great.

These women with a past who are always so eloquently and reminiscently aware of it, are the most tantalising butterflies of fiction. And the eighteenth century author plunged about after them like a kitten. The inordinate length of
The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
makes one ask whether Smollett had the slightest interest in the original story of Peregrine Pickle. Miss Williams again simply steps from the printed page in
Roderick Random
, accosts the author and goes off arm in arm with him for three, long, seamy chapters while the unfortunate reader sits and waits like an anxious wife for his return.

The Lady of Quality, however, had one justification for existence, that silly Miss Williams, the sister of Fielding's Miss Matthews, had not. When
Peregrine Pickle
appeared, the public with its preference for scandal over literature greedily absorbed it more for the sake of the rumoured relation to Lady Vane, Smollett's benefactress, than for the sake of Peregrine Pickle, the Young Man of Bad Quality.

Seven years later when the second edition appeared, and the scandal was about as exciting as
l'affaire Putiphar
, people began to see how good the rest of the book was. And there being no profit in continuing to boast of it,
Smollett industriously began to repent it publicly, and announced that he “had expunged every adventure, phrase and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader,”—i.e. the most delicate reader that Smollett could imagine—“ into a trespass into the rules of decorum ”—probably very much to the annoyance of Lady Vane, whose life does not suggest that shame ever came between her and her sleep, and who probably preferred being reviled to being ignored.

Her career, indeed, is remarkable enough to merit some passing memorial. She married Lord William Hamilton when she was seventeen. A benevolent providence excused his lordship's obligations two years later. Then she married the unfortunate Viscount Vane when she was twenty. The rest of her life was as beautiful as it was brief. She was seventy-five when she died.

It is not altogether clear why
The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
should have been so steadily and ruthlessly condemned. They may be poor fiction, butting in and staying on like an insensitive uninvited guest, but they are reasonably good Smollett.

The objections to Miss Williams go deeper. She was mother—or Moll Flanders was—of a tainted brood of young women with hearts of gold and a powerful narrative style, who are forced usually by their good looks and by the black looks of Fate, into careers which give them unique opportunities both to display their generosity and to acquire material for reminiscence.

In the famous second edition of
Peregrine Pickle
Smollett owns with contrition that in one or two instances he did give way too much to suggestions of personal resentment. But he defies the whole world to prove that he “was ever guilty of an act of malice, ingratitude or dishonour,” a remark that leads one to

wonder whether Smollett had the least notion of what the rest of the world meant by any of those things. Which was very much what Hazlitt was hinting at when he said “that there was a
crude
conception of generosity in some of his (Smollett's) characters ”; a generosity of which Fielding's were incapable.

During his middle years Smollett was working with that energetic vivacity of mind that at the time is so difficult to distinguish from genius. The cry of “overproduction,” which is the tribute that the half sterile always pay to the fully fertile, was raised. Smollett was accused of having “journeymen authors ready to turn out tragedy, comedy, farces, history, novels, voyages, treatises on midwifery and in physics, and all kinds of polite letters.”

Certainly in the twenty-three years between 1748, when he published
Roderick Random
, and 1771, when he published
Humphry Clinker
and died, he wrote enough to establish a myth of the magnitude, if not the mystery, of the myth of Bacon.

He followed
Roderick Random
three years later with
Peregrine Pickle
. Two years later he published
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
, which, if he had not published
The Adventures of an Atom
would have had the distinction of being his most unpleasant work. Another two years, and he had translated the whole of
Don Quixote
. The year following he became editor of the
Critical Review
, worked hard and was imprisoned for his too active editorship. There he wrote
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves
. But hard as he had been working he found to his disgust that someone had been working harder. Hume had already published two volumes of his
History of England
. Smollett therefore accepted the
challenge that Hume had no thought of issuing, read three hundred volumes in two years (so he said), produced four volumes of his history, cornered the market and published another four volumes seven years later. The year after the last volume was published he produced
A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages
, in seven volumes, and after two years of rest another compilation of similar hugeness and uselessness,
The Present State of All Nations
, in eight volumes. During all this time he was a leader writer on the Tory paper,
The Briton
, and on the staff of the
Critical Review
.

But strain as he could, Smollett never managed to run level with life. He was perpetually in debt, troubled by enemies and irreparably damaged by the death of his daughter. By the year 1763 he would have needed two years' start to keep ahead of his affairs.

We might call his youth romantic for want of a better name; and his middle age tragic for want of a worse one. For his whole existence was fitting into just those moulds that Fielding had fitted some fifteen years or so before. When it seemed at last as though Fate had decided that Smollett should conform to the popular impression of a novelist as a human factory working sweated hours on low pay, Smollett went abroad, a broken man too ill to do more than to write two volumes of
Travels through France and Italy
.

Sterne in his
Sentimental Journey
made the work more famous than it ever would otherwise have been by referring to the author as the learned “Smelfungus ” who, “set out with spleen and prejudice, and every object he passed by was discoloured and distorted.” Thus when Smollett came back to England he saw Bath through eyes still discoloured and distorted. He went up to Scotland with the spleen and jaundice working at such a pitch that
everything even in his native land was productive of “misery and disgust.” He temporarily eased the fever of his feelings by a virulent political allegory,
The History and Adventures of an Atom
. Then with that foreknowledge of death that is the privilege of men who have known life well, Smollett set out for perpetual exile in Italy.

A dying man, he could do no more than write his masterpiece,
Humphry Clinker
. Hazlitt declared this work to be “the most pleasant gossipy novel that was ever written,” and Thackeray described it as “the most laughable story that has ever been written, since the goodly art of novel writing began.” But Thackeray, it should be remembered, was prejudiced against Dickens.

Certainly there is no novel in the language that would seem to have been written more completely free of the shadow of madness and death than
Humphry Clinker
. Yet Smollett when he wrote it was never free from the fear that he was losing his reason, and never in doubt that he was dying.

It is after all only just a novel. It was a travel book in design, and a letter-book in form. This opened mail-bag of letters from different people about the same events is simply an opportunity for Smollett to reveal the only psychological discovery that he ever made: that different people have different minds. It was as remote from a book of travels as Mr. Belloc's
Path to Rome
is remote from a Baedeker. Jaundice and spleen are still its principal constituents, and Smollett saw the defects of this world with the acute eye of a sanitary inspector. His work is truly excellent journalism. Consider, for instance, this admirable piece of sensational writing on the pollution of the nation's food.

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 than the meal of corn, thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.

Humphry Clinker
is full of such passages, which have as little to do with fiction as with travel. The book is pure Smollett, recognisable as he was to his mother who had not seen him for years, by the twinkle in his eye. When it appeared, the author was out of all favour in England. And Smollett, who had made more men amused or angry than any other author of his time died in the sad limbo that lies midway between neglect and unpopularity.

His widow continued to live on near his foreign grave, supporting herself obscurely and with difficulty; a shadowy, retreating figure the whole of whose private fortune had been spent by her husband; a woman who in heaven must have found much to talk about with the first Mrs. Fielding.

It would be possible to write a far larger and more comprehensive history than this outline of outlines, yet do no more than touch on the strangely vegetating figure of the Yorkshire Parson, Laurence Sterne. He had a mind which was so peculiarly and richly and vexatiously his own that, though he was later in life imported to London because of it, no one of talent was fool enough to try to model his own style on Sterne's.

And so no school of
Tristram Shandy
—just as there was no school of
Alice in Wonderland
—ever grew up.
Tristram Shandy
was a work which, once done perfectly and by one man, needed never to be done again. And though we may deplore its morals with Hazlitt, its “stupid disgustingness ” with Coleridge, its “bawdry and pertness ” with Goldsmith, and even its very oddity with Dr. Johnson, there are qualities that, sooner or later, persuade us that of its solitary kind it is perfect. And the greatest of these is charity.