Count Fathom, part 1 | Page 3

de Melvil, though by no means vivified, is
yet more real than her sister-in-law.
The fact that they are mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise
given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few
of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases
far more distinctly conceived than any of the people in Roderick
Random or Peregrine Pickle. In the second of these, we saw Smollett
beginning to understand the use of incident to indicate consistent
development of character. In Count Fathom, he seems fully to
understand this principle of art, though he has not learned to apply it
successfully. And so, in spite of an excellent conception, Fathom, as I
have said, is unreal. After all his villainies, which he perpetrates
without any apparent qualms of conscience, it is incredible that he
should honestly repent of his crimes. We are much inclined to doubt
when we read that "his vice and ambition was now quite mortified
within him," the subsequent testimony of Matthew Bramble, Esq., in
Humphry Clinker, to the contrary, notwithstanding. Yet Fathom up to
this point is consistently drawn, and drawn for a purpose:--to show that
cold-blooded roguery, though successful for a while, will come to grief
in the end. To heighten the effect of his scoundrel, Smollett develops
parallel with him the virtuous Count de Melvil. The author's scheme of
thus using one character as the foil of another, though not conspicuous

for its originality, shows a decided advance in the theory of
constructive technique. Only, as I have said, Smollett's execution is
now defective.
"But," one will naturally ask, "if Fathom lacks the amusing, and not
infrequently stimulating, hurly-burly of Smollett's former novels; if its
characters, though well-conceived, are seldom divertingly fantastic and
never thoroughly animate; what makes the book interesting?" The
surprise will be greater than ever when the answer is given that, to a
large extent, the plot makes Fathom interesting. Yes, Smollett, hitherto
indifferent to structure, has here written a story in which the plot itself,
often clumsy though it may be, engages a reader's attention. One
actually wants to know whether the young Count is ever going to
receive consolation for his sorrows and inflict justice on his basely
ungrateful pensioner. And when, finally, all turns out as it should, one
is amazed to find how many of the people in the book have helped
towards the designed conclusion. Not all of them, indeed, nor all of the
adventures, are indispensable, but it is manifest at the end that much,
which, for the time, most readers think irrelevant--such as Don Diego's
history--is, after all, essential.
It has already been said that in Count Fathom Smollett appears to some
extent as a romanticist, and this is another fact which lends interest to
the book. That he had a powerful imagination is not a surprise. Any one
versed in Smollett has already seen it in the remarkable situations
which he has put before us in his earlier works. These do not indicate,
however, that Smollett possessed the imagination which could excite
romantic interest; for in Roderick Random and in Peregrine Pickle, the
wonderful situations serve chiefly to amuse. In Fathom, however, there
are some designed to excite horror; and one, at least, is eminently
successful. The hero's night in the wood between Bar-le-duc and
Chalons was no doubt more blood-curdling to our eighteenth-century
ancestors than it is to us, who have become acquainted with scores of
similar situations in the small number of exciting romances which
belong to literature, and in the greater number which do not. Still, even
to-day, a reader, with his taste jaded by trashy novels, will be conscious
of Smollett's power, and of several thrills, likewise, as he reads about

Fathom's experience in the loft in which the beldame locks him to pass
the night.
This situation is melodramatic rather than romantic, as the word is used
technically in application to eighteenth and nineteenth-century
literature. There is no little in Fathom, however, which is genuinely
romantic in the latter sense. Such is the imprisonment of the Countess
in the castle-tower, whence she waves her handkerchief to the young
Count, her son and would-be rescuer. And especially so is the scene in
the church, when Renaldo (the very name is romantic) visits at
midnight the supposed grave of his lady-love. While he was waiting for
the sexton to open the door, his "soul . . . was wound up to the highest
pitch of enthusiastic sorrow. The uncommon darkness, . . . the solemn
silence, and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the occasion
of his coming, and the dismal images of his fancy, to produce a real
rapture of gloomy expectation, which the whole world could not