SMOLLETT'S NOVELS
The Works of Tobias Smollett. Edited by George Saintsbury. (The Nivarre Society. 12 vols. £2 2s.) A CERTAIN amount of zest and willingness to be pleased must be brought to a reading of Smollett if the experience is to bea success. The defects of the comic picaresque novel, the life- and-adventures story, and of Smollett's methods of caricature in drawing character, arc such that an over-delicate critical palate is as certain to be offended as an over-susceptible moral delicacy. This is coarse, hearty, plentiful fare ; and for complete enjoyment demands the indiscriminate appetite of youth. The most whole-hearted admirers of Smollett are generally young readers who above all things value a good story, plentiful action and simple mirth, and characters with- out too much subtlety ; or very experienced readers who are content to take pleasure in any book that has the merits of its kind; without complaining of the kind's inevitable defects. The rough-and-ready methods of the picaresque story are now rather out of favour. Our novelists take the matter of one out of the hundred chapters of the picaresque writers and skilfully make a whole book from it, with delicate analysis of character and motive and inoenions iinpressionism of milieu. Novelists and public alike have banished to the underworlds of fiction these interminable chains of " surprising adventures," these infinite, peregrinations and changes of fortune, this rough--and-tumble horseplay of genius, these heavily outlined character-types, and, above all, these remarkable feats of the long arm of coincidence in filling the hero's pocket at last with a fortune, uniting him with an heiress, and provoking a pathetic agnition in the penultimate chapter. The novel has covered a surprising amount of ground in the period between Lesage and Proust.
This alteration in taste may imply a much more subtle frame of mind in the upper ranks of novel-readers ; but at the same time it loses us a good deal of ftin if it makes us too fastidious to enjoy Smollett. The ,tender-hearted irascible Scot was a torn stary-telier, With a shrewd eye for'oddities of character. Put aside what is tedious, obsolete and coarse in his novels ; the residpe will be found not unworthy of the master of Dickens. Not one of Smollett'snnvels, not even the admired Humplay- Clinker, can endure a close critical analysis unscathed. But that is only saying that Smollett wrote in the abundant, wilful English way, relying on pure genius, careless of rules and taste and fine proportion, and ready with a volley of testy " Dammce, Sirs," for any luckless connoisseur who should venture a criticism. " When, mon ;Dieu ! " say the French critics, lifting their hands in agitated appeal to the skies of bon goal, " when will your English novelists learn to compose with vraisemblance ? " Never, let. us hope, if non-composition and violation of probability give; us more novels like Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle) Smollett, like Dickens and many another English novelist, belongs to that class of exuberant genius which would fret; itself to inactionand despair if it accepted the discipline which! regulated perfect works of composition like the Princesse de Cleves and Madame Bocary. This impetuous freedom may not produce the best sort of models for training a nation's mind, but Smollett and his like must either be rejected wholesale (which is foolish, but many_ foreign critics do so) or must be given a generous welcome, faults and all. Theirs may not be art at its summit of perfection, but it is.a vision of human life - in all its .abundance and .crudity. Perhaps, if more of our novelists had copied life as Smollett did, instead of copying Smollett, we should have more vigorous originals and fewer cold imitations. . .. • The mature reader enjoys Smollett's novels not for their story (which; for all - its inventions, is generally conventional) but for' the hearty zest of the character drawing, the vividness of 'particular scenes, the unfailing animal spirits which keep. the whole comic pantomime of figures ceaselessly- in action. It is life-like indeed, but it is life with the tempo accelerated-and the humours and oddities and luckless mishaps of men and women ludicrously exaggerated. The ability of writers like Smollett and Dickens to convince us that their creations are living beings is the measure of their genius. We all know-that Mr. Pickwick is real and William IV. a fiction. For most of us life becomes real by passing through a great imaginative mind. Doubtless there existed people like Morgan and Cap- tain Bowling and Commodore Trunnion in the Navy, but nobody saw them until Smollett gave them imaginative being. And what an eye the man had for the common things of 'life and how he could transmute them with a kind of sublimated glory l Dickens is not the only man to note with appreciation that description of a bar-parlour which opens the neglected novel Launcelot Greaves. There is an air of comfort and good- fellowship and cheer in that kitchen " paved with red bricks " and " remarkably clean," with the " three or four Windsor chairs," the " shining plates of pewter, and copper saucepans nicely scoured," the cheerful fire of sea-coal," and the three travellers waiting for the weather to clear up " over a bowl of. rumbo." It is-a warm nook of England as England ought to be. And if we arc inclined to regret its disappearance, Smollett can show us many a dismal haunt of misery and squalor and brutality for whose disappearance we may be profoundly thankful.
But Smollett's greatest glory is his power of giving life to even the least important characters if he so chooses. The last dying speech of old Commodcire Trunnion is certainly among the high scenes of fiction, a little too much in the nautical manner perhaps, but, as Mr. Saintsbury' points out,. full of exquisite traits of living pathos and humour. The Commodore is one of Smollett's big pieees, like Mr: Bramble and his sister Tabitha, on whom he has lavished all his pains but—among a horde of similar minor characters--Frere Balthazar, the Capuchin friar BOderick meets in France; is equally the product of this life-giving imagination. He appears for only a few pages for the purpose of robbing the hero's pocket and complicating the intrigue, but once met with this " thick, brawny young man; with red eyebrows, a book nose, a face covered with freckles " is not quickly forgotten. HuMphry Clinker, that burlesque grand tour of the island, abounds with these whimsical but always convincing. characters. Lisma- hago is on the major scale, but, to stick to -Scottish characters only, who can forget the chivalrous Mr. Mieklewhimmen and his " Na, na, gude faith, charity begins at home " ? Among the many novels written in the almoSt imposSible form' of a series of letters, iheinphry'Clinkeravoidg better than most the inevitable pitfalls of the "genre. Peacock as well as Dickens had his eye on IlUnipliqj Clinker in his novels of English country houses, though fortunately 'neither of *than thought fit to repeat the extraordinary nastiness in which Smollett too often indulges, as in the incredibly revolting account of Dr. L—n's conversation in the pump room at Bath. That is Smollett's worst side ; and yet his love of clumsy' practical joking; of Sounds and sights (and smells) unholy, is perhaps a necessary part of the bustling, uproarious, jostling, hearty phantasmagoria he has created from his experience of life.
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