Tobias Smollett
Travels through France and Italy
III
As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was almost broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763 with his wife, two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she acted as chaperon, and a faithful servant of twelve years' standing, who in the spirit of a Scots retainer of the olden time refused to leave his master (a good testimonial this, by the way, to a temper usually accredited with such a splenetic sourness), he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a change of climate and surroundings could do for him.
On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the dust of Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, complaints which will remind the reader, perhaps, of George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the effect that he had been beslavered by the venomous foam of every sycophantic lacquey and unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms. But Smollett's griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer could inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom, but ze devil in ze bill"), and he grizzles lamentably over the seven guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.
Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris, Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition and the return journey to Boulogne en route for England, where the party arrive safe home in July 1765.
Smollett's account of Boulogne is excellent reading, it forms an apt introduction to the narrative of his journey, it familiarises us with the milieu, and reveals to us in Smollett a man of experience who is both resolute and capable of getting below the surface of things. An English possession for a short period in the reign of the Great Harry, Boulogne has rarely been less in touch with England than it was at the time of Smollett's visit. Even then, however, there were three small colonies, respectively, of English nuns, English Jesuits, and English Jacobites. Apart from these and the English girls in French seminaries it was estimated ten years after Smollett's sojourn there that there were twenty-four English families in residence. The locality has of course always been a haunting place for the wandering tribes of English. Many well-known men have lived or died here both native and English. Adam Smith must have been there very soon after Smollett. So must Dr. John Moore and Charles Churchill, one of the enemies provoked by the Briton, who went to Boulogne to meet his friend Wilkes and died there in 1764. Philip Thicknesse the traveller and friend of Gainsborough died there in 1770. After long search for a place to end his days in Thomas Campbell bought a house in Boulogne and died there, a few months later, in 1844. The house is still to be seen, Rue St. Jean, within the old walls; it has undergone no change, and in 1900 a marble tablet was put up to record the fact that Campbell lived and died there. The other founder of the University of London, Brougham, by a singular coincidence was also closely associated with Boulogne. [Among the occupants of the English cemetery will be found the names of Sir Harris Nicolas, Basil Montagu, Smithson Pennant, Sir William Ouseley, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir C. M. Carmichael. And among other literary celebrities connected with the place, apart from Dickens (who gave his impressions of the place in Household Words, November 1854) we should include in a brief list, Charles Lever, Horace Smith, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, Professor York Powell, the Marquis of Steyne (Lord Seymour), Mrs. Jordan, Clark Russell, and Sir Conan Doyle. There are also memorable associations with Lola Montes, Heinrich Heine, Becky Sharpe, and above all Colonel Newcome. My first care in the place was to discover the rampart where the Colonel used to parade with little Clive. Among the native luminaries are Daunou, Duchenne de Boulogne, one of the foremost physiologists of the last century, an immediate predecessor of Charcot in knowledge of the nervous system, Aug. Mariette, the Egyptologist, Aug. Angellier, the biographer of Burns, Sainte-Beuve, Prof. Morel, and "credibly," Godfrey de Bouillon, of whom Charles Lamb wrote "poor old Godfrey, he must be getting very old now." The great Lesage died here in 1747.] The antiquaries still dispute about Gessoriacum, Godfrey de Bouillon, and Charlemagne's Tour. Smollett is only fair in justifying for the town, the older portions of which have a strong medieval suggestion, a standard of comparison slightly more distinguished than Wapping. He never lets us forget that he is a scholar of antiquity, a man of education and a speculative philosopher. Hence his references to Celsus and Hippocrates and his ingenious etymologies of wheatear and samphire, more ingenious in the second case than sound. Smollett's field of observation had been wide and his fund of exact information was unusually large. At Edinburgh he had studied medicine under Monro and John Gordon, in company with such able and distinguished men as William Hunter, Cullen, Pitcairn, Gregory, and Armstrong—and the two last mentioned were among his present correspondents. As naval surgeon at Carthagena he had undergone experience such as few literary men can claim, and subsequently as compiler, reviewer, party journalist, historian, translator, statistician, and lexicographer, he had gained an amount of miscellaneous information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days—hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials as regards habitual accuracy of statement have seldom been exceeded. Despite the doctor's unflattering portraits of Frenchmen, M. Babeau admits that his book is one written by an observer of facts, and a man whose statements, whenever they can be tested, are for the most part "singularly exact." Mr. W. J. Prouse, whose knowledge of the Riviera district is perhaps almost unequalled out of France, makes this very remarkable statement. "After reading all that has been written by very clever people about Nice in modern times, one would probably find that for exact precision of statement, Smollett was still the most trustworthy guide," a view which is strikingly borne out by Mr. E. Schuyler, who further points out Smollett's shrewd foresight in regard to the possibilities of the Cornice road, and of Cannes and San Remo as sanatoria." Frankly there is nothing to be seen which he does not recognise." And even higher testimonies have been paid to Smollett's topographical accuracy by recent historians of Nice and its neighbourhood.
The value which Smollett put upon accuracy in the smallest matters of detail is evinced by the corrections which he made in the margin of a copy of the 1766 edition of the Travels. These corrections, which are all in Smollett's own and unmistakably neat handwriting, may be divided into four categories. In the first place come a number of verbal emendations. Phrases are turned, inverted and improved by the skilful "twist of the pen" which becomes a second nature to the trained corrector of proofs; there are moreover a few topographical corrigenda, suggested by an improved knowledge of the localities, mostly in the neighbourhood of Pisa and Leghorn, where there is no doubt that these corrections were made upon the occasion of Smollett's second visit to Italy in 1770. [Some not unimportant errata were overlooked. Thus Smollett's representation of the droit d'aubaine as a monstrous and intolerable grievance is of course an exaggeration. (See Sentimental Journey; J. Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad, 1881, p. 135; and Luchaire, Instit. de France.) On his homeward journey he indicates that he travelled from Beaune to Chalons and so by way of Auxerre to Dijon. The right order is Chalons, Beaune, Dijon, Auxerre. As further examples of the zeal with which Smollett regarded exactitude in the record of facts we have his diurnal register of weather during his stay at Nice and the picture of him scrupulously measuring the ruins at Cimiez with packthread.] In the second place come a number of English renderings of the citations from Latin, French, and Italian authors. Most of these from the Latin are examples of Smollett's own skill in English verse making. Thirdly come one or two significant admissions of overboldness in matters of criticism, as where he retracts his censure of Raphael's Parnassus in Letter XXXIII. Fourthly, and these are of the greatest importance, come some very interesting additional notes upon the buildings of Pisa, upon Sir John Hawkwood's tomb at Florence, and upon the congenial though recondite subject of antique Roman hygiene. [Cf. the Dinner in the manner of the Ancients in Peregrine Pickle, (xliv.) and Letters IX. to XL in Humphry Clinker.]
After Smollett's death his books were for the most part sold for the benefit of his widow. No use was made of his corrigenda. For twenty years or so the Travels were esteemed and referred to, but as time went on, owing to the sneers of the fine gentlemen of letters, such as Walpole and Sterne, they were by degrees disparaged and fell more or less into neglect. They were reprinted, it is true, either in collective editions of Smollett or in various collections of travels; [For instance in Baldwin's edition of 1778; in the 17th vol. of Mayor's Collection of Voyages and Travels, published by Richard Phillips in twenty-eight vols., 1809; and in an abbreviated form in John Hamilton Moore's New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (folio, Vol. 11. 938-970).] but they were not edited with any care, and as is inevitable in such cases errors crept in, blunders were repeated, and the text slightly but gradually deteriorated. In the last century Smollett's own copy of the Travels bearing the manuscript corrections that he had made in 1770, was discovered in the possession of the Telfer family and eventually came into the British Museum. The second volume, which affords admirable specimens of Smollett's neatly written marginalia, has been exhibited in a show-case in the King's Library.
The corrections that Smollett purposed to make in the Travels are now for the second time embodied in a printed edition of the text. At the same time the text has been collated with the original edition of 1766, and the whole has been carefully revised. The old spelling has been, as far as possible, restored. Smollett was punctilious in such matters, and what with his histories, his translations, his periodicals, and his other compilations, he probably revised more proof-matter for press than any other writer of his time. His practice as regards orthography is, therefore, of some interest as representing what was in all probability deemed to be the most enlightened convention of the day.
To return now to the Doctor's immediate contemplation of Boulogne, a city described in the Itineraries as containing rien de remarquable. The story of the Capuchin [On page 21. A Capuchin of the same stripe is in Pickle, ch. Ill. sq.] is very racy of Smollett, while the vignette of the shepherd at the beginning of Letter V. affords a first-rate illustration of his terseness. Appreciate the keen and minute observation concentrated into the pages that follow, [Especially on p. 34 to p. 40.] commencing with the shrewd and economic remarks upon smuggling, and ending with the lively description of a Boulonnais banquet, very amusing, very French, very life-like, and very Smollettian. In Letter V. the Doctor again is very much himself. A little provocation and he bristles and stabs all round. He mounts the hygienic horse and proceeds from the lack of implements of cleanliness to the lack of common decency, and "high flavoured instances, at which even a native of Edinburgh would stop his nose." [This recalls Johnson's first walk up the High Street, Edinburgh, on Bozzy's arm. "It was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. . . . As we marched along he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark!'"] And then lest the southrons should escape we have a reference to the "beastly habit of drinking from a tankard in which perhaps a dozen filthy mouths have slabbered as is the custom in England." With all his coarsenesses this blunt Scot was a pioneer and fugleman of the niceties. Between times most nations are gibbetted in this slashing epistle. The ingenious boasting of the French is well hit off in the observation of the chevalier that the English doubtless drank every day to the health of the Marquise de Pompadour. The implication reminded Smollett of a narrow escape from a duello (an institution he reprobates with the utmost trenchancy in this book) at Ghent in 1749 with a Frenchman who affirmed that Marlborough's battles were purposely lost by the French generals in order to mortify Mme. de Maintenon. Two incidents of some importance to Smollett occurred during the three months' sojourn at Boulogne. Through the intervention of the English Ambassador at Paris (the Earl of Hertford) he got back his books, which had been impounded by the Customs as likely to contain matter prejudicial to the state or religion of France, and had them sent south by shipboard to Bordeaux. Secondly, he encountered General Paterson, a friendly Scot in the Sardinian service, who confirmed what an English physician had told Smollett to the effect that the climate of Nice was infinitely preferable to that of Montpellier "with respect to disorders of the breast." Smollett now hires a berline and four horses for fourteen louis, and sets out with rather a heavy heart for Paris. It is problematic, he assures his good friend Dr. Moore, whether he will ever return. "My health is very precarious."
IV
The rapid journey to Paris by way of Montreuil, Amiens, and Clermont, about one hundred and fifty-six miles from Boulogne, the last thirty-six over a paved road, was favourable to superficial observation and the normal corollary of epigram. Smollett was much impressed by the mortifying indifference of the French innkeepers to their clients. "It is a very odd contrast between France and England. In the former all the people are complaisant but the publicans; in the latter there is hardly any complaisance but among the publicans." [In regard to two exceptional instances of politeness on the part of innkeepers, Smollett attributes one case to dementia, the other, at Lerici, to mental shock, caused by a recent earthquake.] Idleness and dissipation confront the traveller, not such a good judge, perhaps, as was Arthur Young four-and-twenty years later. "Every object seems to have shrunk in its dimensions since I was last in Paris." Smollett was an older man by fifteen years since he visited the French capital in the first flush of his success as an author. The dirt and gloom of French apartments, even at Versailles, offend his English standard of comfort. "After all, it is in England only where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in the French genius. With all their volatility, prattle, and fondness for bons mots they delight in a species of drawling, melancholy, church music. Their most favourite dramatic pieces are almost without incident, and the dialogue of their comedies consists of moral insipid apophthegms, entirely destitute of wit or repartee." While amusing himself with the sights of Paris, Smollett drew up that caustic delineation of the French character which as a study in calculated depreciation has rarely been surpassed. He conceives the Frenchman entirely as a petit-maitre, and his view, though far removed from Chesterfield's, is not incompatible with that of many of his cleverest contemporaries, including Sterne. He conceives of the typical Frenchman as regulating his life in accordance with the claims of impertinent curiosity and foppery, gallantry and gluttony. Thus:
"If a Frenchman is capable of real friendship, it must certainly be the most disagreeable present he can possibly make to a man of a true English character. You know, madam, we are naturally taciturn, soon tired of impertinence, and much subject to fits of disgust. Your French friend intrudes upon you at all hours; he stuns you with his loquacity; he teases you with impertinent questions about your domestic and private affairs; he attempts to meddle in all your concerns, and forces his advice upon you with the most unwearied importunity; he asks the price of everything you wear, and, so sure as you tell him, undervalues it without hesitation; he affirms it is in a bad taste, ill contrived, ill made; that you have been imposed upon both with respect to the fashion and the price; that the marquis of this, or the countess of that, has one that is perfectly elegant, quite in the bon ton, and yet it cost her little more than you gave for a thing that nobody would wear.
"If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, 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. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one but in one shape or another he will find means to ruin the peace of a family in which he has been so kindly entertained. What he cannot accomplish by dint of compliment and personal attendance, he will endeavour to effect by reinforcing these with billets-doux, songs, and verses, of which he always makes a provision for such purposes. If he is detected in these efforts of treachery, and reproached with his ingratitude, he impudently declares that what he had done was no more than simple gallantry, considered in France as an indispensable duty on every man who pretended to good breeding. Nay, he will even affirm that his endeavours to corrupt your wife, or deflower your daughter, were the most genuine proofs he could give of his particular regard for your family.
"If there were five hundred dishes at table, a Frenchman will eat of all of them, and then complain he has no appetite—this I have several times remarked. A friend of mine gained a considerable wager upon an experiment of this kind; the petit-maitre ate of fourteen different plates, besides the dessert, then disparaged the cook, declaring he was no better than a marmiton, or turnspit."
The gross unfairness, no less than the consummate cleverness, of this caricature compels us to remember that this was written in the most insular period of our manners, and during a brief lull in a century of almost incessant mutual hostility between the two nations. Aristocrats like Walpole, Gibbon, and Chesterfield could regard France from a cosmopolitan point of view, as leading the comite of nations. But to sturdy and true-born patriots, such as Hogarth and Smollett, reciprocal politeness appeared as grotesque as an exchange of amenities would be between a cormorant and an ape. Consequently, it was no doubt with a sense of positive relief to his feelings that Smollett could bring himself to sum up the whole matter thus. "A Frenchman lays out his whole revenue upon taudry suits of cloaths, or in furnishing a magnificent repas of fifty or a hundred dishes, one-half of which are not eatable or intended to be eaten. His wardrobe goes to the fripier, his dishes to the dogs, and himself to the devil."
These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's honesty of purpose, however, it may be urged that he was always a thoroughgoing patriot, [Witness his violently anti-French play, the Reprisal of 1757.] and that, coming from a Calvinistic country where a measure of Tartufism was a necessary condition of respectability, he reproduces the common English error of ignoring how apt a Frenchman is to conceal a number of his best qualities. Two other considerations deserve attention. The race-portrait was in Smollett's day at the very height of its disreputable reign. Secondly, we must remember how very profoundly French character has been modified since 1763, and more especially in consequence of the cataclysms of 1789 and 1870.
Smollett's vis comica is conspicuous in the account of the coiffure of the period and of the superstitious reverence which a Frenchman of that day paid to his hair. In tracing the origin of this superstition he exhibits casually his historical learning. The crine profuso and barba demissa of the reges crinitos, as the Merovingians were called, are often referred to by ancient chroniclers. Long hair was identified with right of succession, as a mark of royal race, and the maintenance of ancient tradition. A tondu signified a slave, and even under the Carolingians to shave a prince meant to affirm his exclusion from the succession.
