William Henry Oliphant Smeaton

“ It is questionable, however, if any of those exhibited so much insight into the human heart as that of Lieutenant Bowling in Roderick Random, a noble–spirited man if ever one was created. Smollett has since had many imitators, such as Captain Marryat, Mr. Clark Russell, and others, but none of them have excelled the inimitable wit and humour which invest the sayings and doings of these personages. They have become part and parcel of ourselves. We know them and love them, and they live with us, so to speak, in our daily life. ”

“ The morning rises in the poet's description as she does in the Scottish horizon; we are not carried to Greece and Italy for a shade, a stream, or a breeze; the groves rise in our own valleys, the rivers flow from our own fountains, and the winds blow upon our own hills.'
To the fact that Ramsay has painted Scotland and Scottish rustics as they are, and has not gone to the hermaphrodite and sexless inhabitants of a mythical Golden Age for the characters of his great drama, the heart of every Scot can bear testimony. ”

“ Smollett was a poet of distinction!’
Such was the estimate formed by Sir Walter Scott—one of the most incisive and sympathetic critics that ever pronounced judgment—of the element of inspiration in every great writer of fiction. Experimentally conscious of what was of value in his own case,—himself the great Wizard of Fiction,—he would reason by analogy what would be of power to inspire other men. If the poetic faculty were indispensable for the production of The Heart of Midlothian and Ivanhoe, equally would it be needed in Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker. ”

“ Fairer scene never nurtured poet in 'the fine frenzy of his art'; and in long excursions during his spare hours, amidst the silent glens and frowning cleughs of the Pentlands, amidst the romantic scenery clothing the banks of both the Esks, by Almond's gentle flow, and by the wimpling waters of the Water of Leith, our Caledonian Theocritus fed his germing genius on food that was destined to render him at once the greatest and the most breezily objective of British pastoral poets. ”

“ What Smollett’s reason for so acting was, is now hard to divine. His Matthew Bramble in Humphrey Clinker is the exact reproduction of his own character. His kindliness of nature only broke out like gleams of sunshine on a wintry day, while, like Jonathan Oldbuck, the very suggestion of gratitude seemed to irritate him. He was one who all his life preferred to do good by stealth. ”

“ Ramsay possessed all the qualities constituting a song-writer of great and varied genius. His work exhibits ease and elasticity of rhythm, liquid smoothness of assonance, sympathetic beauty of thought, with subtle skill in wedding sense to sound. Though his verse lacked the dainty finish of Herrick and Waller, the brilliant facet-like sparkle of Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace, the tender grace of Sedley, and the half-cynical, half-regretful, but wholly piquant epicureanism, of Rochester and Denham, yet Ramsay had a charm all his own. Witness the 'Lass o' Patie's Mill' ”

“ Even as Thomas de Quincey, sixty years after, was to find Oxford Street a stony–hearted stepmother, so Smollett, alone in the mighty metropolis, was made to realise, with an insistence that burned itself into his inmost heart, that no solitary in the Sahara is more isolated than he who is, unknowing and unknown, an atom in a vast London crowd. Men in after years talked glibly of the irritability of the great novelist. ”

“ Of the latter, many were Scotsmen, and to them the vividly realistic scenes and felicitous character-drawing{101} of The Gentle Shepherd touched, with a power and a pathos almost overwhelming, the subtlest fibres of that love for 'Caledonia, stern and wild,' which, deepened by distance as it is, and strengthened by absence, seems so inwoven with the very warp and woof of the nature of her children that, go where they will, it can never be eradicated, until the last great consummation overtakes them, when earth returns to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. ”

“ Beyond good wishes and a bulky sheaf of introductions, his cousin, James Smollett, had little to give Tobias. As it was, however, the future novelist carried away from his native place the best of all recommendations and heritages, an unsullied character, with an indomitable love of honest independence that atones for a multitude of less lovely traits. ‘What kind of work you individually can do ... the first of all problems for a man to find out, that is the thing a man is born to in all epochs,’ were the wise and weighty words of Thomas Carlyle in his Rectorial address. ”

“ There is another view of the case not so creditable to the future poet, but still within the range of possibility—that the scion of the house of Ramsay, whose anxiety to let the world know he was of gentle lineage was so chronic, may have felt himself a cut above the children of the bonnet-lairdie. Ramsay's nature was not one wherein the finer sympathies and delicate regard for the feelings of others were mortised into a sturdy independence and a desire to carve his fortunes out of the block of favouring opportunity. ”

“ Playing on the popular jealousy of Scotland, Wilkes went on to say that ‘The river Tweed is the line of demarcation between all that is noble and all that is base; south of the river is all honour, virtue, patriotism—north of it is nothing but lying, malice, meanness, and slavery. Scotland is a treeless, flowerless land, formed out of the refuse of the universe, and inhabited by the very bastards of creation ”

“ Poor Smollett! A more pitiable picture can scarcely be conceived than this splendid genius yoked like a pug–mill horse to tasks the most ignoble, in order that he might keep his wife and daughter from feeling the pinch of want. A hero—yea, a hero indeed—one of those heroes in commonplace things, whose virtues are every whit as praiseworthy in their way as though he had led England’s armies to victory, or swept the seas of her enemies. ”

“ Yet when the play was over, the curtain rung down, and the lights gone out, the lapse of time must to him, as to other observers of the period, have driven home with stunning force the conviction that the Union spelled ruin for Scotland as a nation and Edinburgh as a city. For five decades to come a listless apathy, born of despair, strangled Scottish enterprise in its birth. The immediate effect of the Union was a serious diminution in the national trade and commerce. ”

“ Winnifred Jenkins is the prototype of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s Rivals, and is infinitely more amusing. All the vanity, self–assertiveness, and jealousy of a small mind, conjointly with the love of appearing to move in a higher circle of society than she really does, are admirably sketched, while her misappropriate use of the language of that circle is most felicitously rendered. The portrait is Smollett’s best, and no touch is finer than Winnifred’s conduct in the menagerie. Let her speak for herself. ”

“ Patie's cheery bonhomie and vivacious nature, his love of learning and his wise views of life and its duties, find an excellent foil in the slow, bashful, phlegmatic Roger, whose very 'blateness' denies him the bliss he covets in Jenny's love. Peggy is altogether charming,—a lovely, pure-souled, healthful, sport-loving maiden, with enough of her sex's foibles in her to leave her a very woman, yet with as few faults as it is possible for faulty human nature to be without. One of the most delightful heroines in pastoral poetry is Peggy. ”

“ If any doubt had previously existed whether Smollett was worthy to take his place beside Richardson and Fielding, none could be urged now. In all contemporary records we find the three bracketed together, as the great fictional trio whose works were at once the delight and the despair of imitators.
But although his career was so successful, we must not run away with the idea that Smollett had no enemies—that, in a word, admiration had swallowed up animosity. Alas, no! Human nature is human nature through all. ”

“ The author of Tristram Shandy could never forgive the fact that the public preferred Peregrine Pickle to the prurient puerilities of Uncle Toby. Sterne did not take into consideration, moreover, the state of Smollett’s health, and how it would colour every estimate he formed of men, manners, and things. The last in the world was the author of Tristram Shandy to have sat as moral or æsthetic critic on Smollett. How the mighty sledge–hammer of contempt wielded by Sir Walter Scott crushed the unfeeling, though far from radically ill–natured critic! ”

“ In Willie Shakspeare's melodious numbers I forget the dark days for trade, and in auld Chaucer's Tales, and Spenser's 'Queen,' in John Milton's majestic flow, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, in rare Ben and our ain Drummond, I tine the sorrows o' the day in the glories o' the days that are past.'
That we may accept Ramsay's account of the studies of Patie, the Gentle Shepherd, as a type of his own is warranted by something more than tradition. The internal evidence of his works throws a strong colour of probability over the theory. ”

“ From start to finish of his career a subtle egoism, born of his lonely situation in life and fostered by his inordinate vanity, was his distinguishing trait. Generous acts he did, benevolent and kindly on numerous occasions he undoubtedly was, but his charity was not altruism. He was not the man to deny himself for the good of others.
Henceforth Edinburgh was to be Ramsay's life's home. ”

“ Smollett now could contemplate the future with hopefulness. Roderick Random had achieved a success so extraordinary, that even at that early period in his literary career, the booksellers, or, as they would now be termed, ‘publishers,’ were bespeaking his wares ahead. Taken all in all, Smollett accepted his good fortune with conspicuous moderation. Success did not turn his head. He was not like his characters, Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle, extravagantly uplifted by prosperity, plunged into despair by adversity. ”

“ As a pastoral poet, Ramsay excels in painting all those homely virtues that befit the station to which most of his characters belonged. A fault, and a serious one, it was among the writers of conventional pastoral, to make their shepherds and shepherdesses talk like philosophers, and reason upon all the mysteries of life, death, and futurity. ”

“ His expenses of living were considerable, though he never was a man who loved luxury or display. But he had been hampered by debts, by lawsuits, to pay the costs of which he had to borrow money at sixty per cent. Had Smollett’s feet been free from the outset, the £600 per annum, at which he reckoned his income, would have more than sufficed for all his wants. But the interest of borrowed money is like the rolling snowball of which we spoke before,—unless it be paid regularly, it constantly adds to the bulk of the original. ”

“ To rise to the height of spiritual insight that was requisite to conceive and execute a Di Vernon, an Ethel Newcome, or a Rose Vincy, was for him impossible, simply because he could not realise in his earlier years of authorship that women are the equals, not the inferiors of man. The hapless Miss Williams in Roderick Random exhibits this feeling on the part of Smollett. She was nobility itself in character, yet she was made over to Strap. One of the finest of his creations is the hapless Monimia in Count Fathom. Tenderness, purity, grace, and beauty are all united in her. ”

“ The popularity accruing to Ramsay from the publication of the quarto of 1721 was so great that his fame was compared, in all seriousness, with that of his celebrated English contemporaries, Pope, Swift and Addison. No better evidence of the unfitness of contemporary opinion to gauge the real and ultimate position of any author in the hierarchy of genius could be cited than the case now before us. The critical perspective is egregiously untrue. ”

“ In Christ's Kirk on the Green we have stereotyped to all time a picture of manners unsurpassed for vigour and accuracy of detail, to which antiquarians have gone, and will go, for information that is furnished in no other quarter.
In his elegies pure and simple, namely, those divested of any humorous element, Ramsay has done good work; but it is not by any means on a par with what is expected from the poet who could write The Gentle Shepherd. A painter of low life in its aspects both humorous and farcical was Ramsay's distinctive métier. ”

“ He skulked about London like ‘a thief at large,’ ever afraid of feeling a hand on his shoulder, and of beholding a bailiff ready to conduct him to the ‘sponging–house.’ For some years his monetary difficulties, like a snowball, had been always increasing. In his Life of Smollett, Dr. Robert Chambers has drawn a painful picture of the great genius fretting like some noble steed condemned to pack–horse duty, at the unworthy tasks he was obliged to undertake. ”

“ Though Spenser's genius may have had a richer efflorescence than Dunbar's, if the mass of their work be critically weighed, quality by quality, the balance, when struck, would rest remarkably evenly between them. Drummond of Hawthornden is perhaps the most richly-gifted writer in early Scottish literature, as an all-round man of letters. But as a poet the palm must ever remain with Dunbar.
The study of the breaks which occur in the poetic succession of any literature is always interesting. ”

“ We can scarcely form any idea now of the overwhelming enthusiasm that greeted Richardson’s Pamela. For the first time readers saw their own age delineated with a fidelity and withal a fearlessness that had the effect of a supreme moral lesson. Of course, to our ideas of to–day, many of the descriptions in the novels of last [59] century are simply revolting, and would be condemned amongst us as an outrage on good taste. ‘The morals of the young person’ are our nineteenth–century bogey, which ever and anon rises up to scare any luckless novelist who dares to paint life as it really is. ”

“ Such, then, is Ramsay! In his matchless pastoral he will ever live in the hearts of Scotsmen; and were proof needed, it would be found in the increasing numbers of pilgrims who year by year journey to Carlops to visit the scenes amongst which Peggy lived and loved. To any one save the historian and the antiquarian, the remainder of his poetry may now be of little value,—probably of none,—amidst the multifarious publications which day by day issue from the press. ”

“ Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous with national or racial selfishness. More [143] crimes have stained the annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton, and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. ”

“ The chain of incident is every whit as varied, the events as events are more stirring and startling than in the first novel, but there is now the attempt—though as yet but an attempt—to subject the unflagging flow of incident to an artistic adaptation towards definite ends. Incident is no longer piled on incident regardless of the fact whether it tend to advance the development of the characters or not. Then Smollett has learned the value of contrast in character–painting. ”

“ He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled from aught savouring of licence or excess. To coarseness, it is true, he may at times have stooped in his work; but we must remember the spirit of the times was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an implement for disintegrating planetary particles.' To no degree greater than did Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered to have smirched his pages with references either ribald or indelicate. The spirit of the age was in fault when coarseness was rated as wit ”

“ Dissimilar though Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom may be in their impulses toward evil, distinct though Peregrine Pickle is from Launcelot Greaves, Matthew Bramble, and Lismahago in what may be termed his nobler qualities, there is nevertheless in all that happy–go–lucky carelessness, that supreme indifference to consequences, that courage that never flinches from the penalties of its own misdeeds, but accepts them without a murmur—in a word, a bonhomie diversified by egotism, that appears in equal measure in no other novelist of his time. ”

“ His novels present one bewildering succession of accidents, entanglements, escapes, imprisonments, love–makings, and what not, until the mind positively becomes cloyed with the banquet of incident provided for it. A less profound genius than Smollett would in all probability have worn itself out in a vain attempt to rival his great contemporaries, on the principle ‘never venture, never win.’ Smollett was a surer critic, on this point at least, than many of his friends, who were continually urging him to attempt something in the mode of Fielding. ”

“ Worthy of such veneration, then, is he, both as a poet and as a man; and though the extravagant admiration wherewith he was regarded in his own day, has given place to a soberer estimate of his rank in the hierarchy of letters, yet Allan Ramsay can never be held as other than one of the most delightful, if he can no longer be rated as one of the greatest, of Scottish poets. ”

“ A striking insight is thus afforded into the proud, irritable nature of the youth, whom poverty, in place of teaching lessons of patience and gratitude to the kindly hearts that were smoothing his life’s path for him, rather stung into angry repining against such indebtedness, as well as into emphatic asseveration of their action being no more than what was due to him. Humility was at no time one of the virtues in which Smollett excelled. ”

“ The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. ”

“ Smollett, although gaining distinction in other branches of literature, was primarily and essentially a novelist. He wrote history, and wrote it well; drama, and wrote it only passably; travels but little better, and poetry decidedly mechanically, save in the ‘Ode to Independence.’ In the novel alone did he by prescriptive right take his place in the front rank of British writers of fiction. Wherein then lay his strength, and in what respects did he differ from Richardson and Fielding? To institute any comparative estimate between the three is foolish in the last degree. ”

“ After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine, Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to hail him as akin to us in blood ”

“ In depicting the passions, Smollett, I grant, was singularly deficient; in such emotions as patriotism, sympathy with the oppressed, and a pure devotion to the cause of truth, he showed himself a man whose heart was permeated with the warmest and deepest enthusiasm. ”

“ As weighed against his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions, we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel as Humphrey Clinker. ”