Sir Launcelot Greaves | Page 3

Greaves, the plot of which is not only rather meagre but also
far-fetched. There seems to be no adequate reason for the baronet's
whim of becoming an 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