20 September: Boreham on Tobias Smollett

Iron Age of the Navy
It was on the seventeenth of September that Tobias Smollett said a last farewell to the scenes of his renown. Smollett slipped out of the world a few weeks after Sir Walter Scott had slipped into it. At the age of fifteen, Tobias Smollett had flung himself down on a green hillock overlooking the Clyde and had wept bitterly over the cruel pranks that fate insisted on playing him. Orphaned in infancy, he had been thrown upon the grudging charity of relatives who made no attempt to conceal from him the fact that they regarded him as an unmitigated nuisance. Enchanted by the glamour of his brother's brilliant uniform, he had set his heart on entering the army, only to be told in the most peremptory tones that, whether he liked it or not, he was destined to be a doctor. He little dreamed, as he tearfully dug his fingers into the grass that day, that, centuries hence, his name would be held in grateful reverence, not as that of an illustrious general, nor as that of a distinguished physician, but as that of one of the most honoured founders of our English fiction.

The influence that he has exerted upon our literature can best be appreciated when we reflect on the calibre of two of his most eminent disciples. Charles Dickens owed more to Smollett than to any of his predecessors, for it was Smollett who suggested to him all that is most distinctive and outstanding in his own work. The indebtedness of Capt. Marryat to Smollett is even more marked, for it was Smollett who showed Marryat that the sea opened up an imposing realm that, in fiction, had scarcely been touched. In bringing the tang of the ocean and the atmosphere of the forecastle into the republic of letters, Smollett was breaking entirely new ground. Marryat was quick to perceive the opportunity that Smollet presented, and he exploited that rich vein.

The Portrayals Of Fiction The Finest History
Beggars cannot be choosers. The boy of 15 felt that he had no option. He therefore drudged away at his medical studies until, at the age of 18, he discovered that his grandfather had died without making the slightest provision for his own future. He then resolved to have done with all his kinsfolk and to carve out his own career in spite of them. Leaving Scotland without a sigh, he set out for London, tramping most of the way. He had in his pocket the draft of a tragedy which he hoped might find favour with some enterprising publisher. But, almost as soon as he reached the metropolis, war was declared against Spain; his boyish dreams revived in an accentuated form; and he managed to get himself appointed surgeon's mate on HMS Cumberland. He went on board laughing up his sleeve at the tyrants of his childhood who had sworn that such a life should never be his.

In 1741 he served with Admiral Vernon's unfortunate fleet in its inglorious assault upon Cartagena. It is not one of the most soul-stirring episodes in our naval history. "Indeed, Carlyle has declared in his emphatic way that the only noticeable feature in the whole expedition was the presence on one of the ships of Tobias Smollett. It was Smollett's mission," Carlyle affirms, "to take portraiture of English seamanhood with due grimness and due fidelity and to convey the same to remote generations." If this is to be regarded as Smollett's lifework, it must be admitted that he succeeded most admirably. For any man who desires a description of the British Navy as it existed in the middle of the 18th century will search the libraries in vain for anything more telling than Smollett has given us in "Roderick Random." It is portraiture frank but fine; portraiture marked by stark realism, portraiture that is of inestimable value to those who would catch the real temper of that distant day. As Sir Walter Scott has truly said, Smollett acquired an intimate familiarity with ships and sailers as enabled him to describe them with such truth and cleverness that any other writer who has essayed the same task has seemed to be copying Smollett.

A Novelist Cannot Be Censured For Fidelity
In point of actual time, his maritime infatuation quickly evaporated. Within three years, he was as delighted to leave the Navy as he had been to join it. But, in two separate ways, the brief experience left an indelible impression upon his subsequent career. It furnished him with a wife. While his ship was at Jamaica he fell desperately in love with a beautiful Creole woman. He made her promise that, if he left the sea and established himself ashore, she would join him in London. In 1746, he being then 25, he sent for her, and she remained, to the end of his days, the greatest solace of his troubled life. The other respect in which his naval adventure permanently affected him stands related to the essential character of his literary work. In one sense he left the Navy while still a youth; in another sense he carried the Navy with him to the day of his death. He was drenched in its spirit.

Smollett has been condemned as the Apostle of Brutality by those who have made no serious effort to understand him. Hale, bluff, and kindly, of rotund figure and pleasing countenance, he overflowed with homely virtues and honest goodness of heart. Although tortured by half a dozen diseases which vied with one another for the honour of slaying him, he looked out upon the world with genial and twinkling eyes. His critics must remember that, when he fixed his easel and seized his brushes, he set himself to paint the Navy, and that, in his day, the Navy was disfigured by the coarsest brutality. If the lash fairly shrieked through Smollett's pages, and if the scuppers of all his ships ran red with the blood of their sailors, the reproach must not be laid at Smollett's door. He did not create the sickening conditions that he so faithfully depicts. He sketched things as he saw them. If those things were not dainty, it was no fault of his. He died in Italy at the age of 50, having blazed a trail along which, to the delight of subsequent generations, many gallant spirits have marched to enduring fame.

F W Boreham

Image: Tobias Smollett