Sir Launcelot Greaves | Page 3

English Don Quixote of the eighteenth century, except the chance it gave Smollett for imitating Cervantes. He was evidently hampered from the start by the consciousness that at best the success of such imitation would be doubtful. Probably he expresses his own misgivings when he makes Ferret exclaim to the hero: "What! . . . you set up for a modern Don Quixote? The scheme is rather too stale and extravagant. What was a . . . well-timed satire in Spain near two hundred years ago, will . . . appear . . . insipid and absurd . . . at this time of day, in a country like England." Whether from the author's half-heartedness or from some other cause, there is no denying that the Quixotism in Sir Launcelot Greaves is flat. It is a drawback to the book rather than an aid. The plot could have developed itself just as well, the high-minded young baronet might have had just as entertaining adventures, without his imitation of the fine old Spanish Don.
I have remarked on the old Smollett touch in Sir Launcelot Greaves,--the individual touch of which we are continually sensible in Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, but seldom in Count Fathom. With it is a new Smollett touch, indicative of a kindlier feeling towards the world. It is commonly said that the only one of the writer's novels which contains a sufficient amount of charity and sweetness is Humphry Clinker. The statement is not quite true. Greaves is not so strikingly amiable as Smollett's masterpiece only because it is not so striking in any of its excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions. If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no longer found in a disproportionate degree.
There is little more to say of Sir Launcelot Greaves, except in the way of literary history. The given name of the hero may or may not be significant. It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised (which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there came interest in the Middle Ages and in the most popular fiction of the Middle Ages, the "greatest of all poetic subjects," according to Tennyson, the stories of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which, for the better part of a century, had been deposed from their old-time place of honour. These stories, however, were as yet so imperfectly known--and only to a few--that the most to be said is that some connection between their reviving popularity and the name of Smollett's knight-errant hero is not impossible.
Apart from this, Sir Launcelot Greaves is interesting historically as ending Smollett's comparatively long silence in novel-writing after the publication of Fathom in 1753. His next work was the translation of Don Quixote, which he completed in 1755, and which may first have suggested the idea of an English knight, somewhat after the pattern of the Spanish. Be that as it may, before developing the idea, Smollett busied himself with his Complete History of England, and with the comedy, The Reprisal: or the Tars of Old England, a successful play which at last brought about a reconciliation with his old enemy, Garrick. Two years later, in 1759, as editor of the Critical Review, Smollett was led into a criticism of Admiral Knowles's conduct that was judged libellous enough to give its author three months in the King's Bench prison, during which time, it has been conjectured, he began to mature his plans for the English Quixote. The result was that, in 1760 and 1761, Sir Launcelot Greaves came out in various numbers of the British Magazine. Scott has given his authority to the statement that Smollett wrote many of the instalments in great haste, sometimes, during a visit in Berwickshire, dashing off the necessary amount of manuscript in an hour or so just before the departure of the post. If the story is true, it adds its testimony to that of his works to the author's extraordinarily facile pen. Finally, in 1762, the novel thus hurried off in instalments appeared as a whole. This method of its introduction to the public gives Sir Launcelot Greaves still another claim to interest. It is one of the earliest English novels, indeed the earliest