The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves | Page 2

is the promise that Smollett, after his
departure in Count Fathom from the field of personal experience which
erstwhile he cultivated so successfully, has returned to see if the ground
will yield him another rich harvest. Though it must be admitted that in

Sir Launcelot Greaves his labours were but partially successful, yet the
story possesses a good deal of the lively verisimilitude which Fathom
lacked. The very first page, as we have seen, shows that its inns are
going to be real. So, too, are most of its highway adventures, and also
its portion of those prison scenes of which Smollett seems to have been
so fond. As for the description of the parliamentary election, it is by no
means the least graphic of its kind in the fiction of the last two
centuries. The speech of Sir Valentine Quickset, the fox-hunting Tory
candidate, is excellent, both for its brevity and for its simplicity. Any of
his bumpkin audience could understand perfectly his principal points:
that he spends his estate of "vive thousand clear" at home in old
English hospitality; that he comes of pure old English stock; that he
hates all foreigners, not excepting those from Hanover; and that if he is
elected, he "will cross the ministry in everything, as in duty bound."
In the characters, likewise, though less than in the scenes just spoken of,
we recognise something of the old Smollett touch. True, it is not high
praise to say of Miss Aurelia Darnel that she is more alive, or rather
less lifeless, than Smollett's heroines have been heretofore. Nor can we
give great praise to the characterisation of Sir Launcelot. Yet if less
substantial than Smollett's roystering heroes, he is more distinct than de
Melvil in Fathom, the only one of our author's earlier young men, by
the way, (with the possible exception of Godfrey Gauntlet) who can
stand beside Greaves in never failing to be a gentleman. It is a pity,
when Greaves's character is so lovable, and save for his knight-errantry,
so well conceived, that the image is not more distinct. Crowe is distinct
enough, however, though not quite consistently drawn. There is justice
in Scott's objection [Tobias Smollett in Biographical and Critical
Notices of Eminent Novelists] that nothing in the seaman's "life . . .
renders it at all possible that he should have caught" the baronet's
Quixotism. Otherwise, so far from finding fault with the old sailor, we
are pleased to see Smollett returning in him to a favourite type. It might
be thought that he would have exhausted the possibilities of this type in
Bowling and Trunnion and Pipes and Hatchway. In point of fact,
Crowe is by no means the equal of the first two of these. And yet, with
his heart in the right place, and his application of sea terms to land
objects, Captain Samuel Crowe has a good deal of the rough charm of

his prototypes. Still more distinct, and among Smollett's personages a
more novel figure, is the Captain's nephew, the dapper, verbose,
tender-hearted lawyer, Tom Clarke. Apart from the inevitable Smollett
exaggeration, a better portrait of a softish young attorney could hardly
be painted. Nor, in enumerating the characters of Sir Launcelot Greaves
who fix themselves in a reader's memory, should Tom's inamorata,
Dolly, be forgotten, or the malicious Ferret, or that precious pair,
Justice and Mrs. Gobble, or the Knight's squire, Timothy Crabshaw, or
that very individual horse, Gilbert, whose lot is to be one moment
caressed, and the next, cursed for a "hard-hearted, unchristian tuoad."
Barring the Gobbles, all these characters are important in the book from
first to last. Sir Launcelot Greaves, then, is significant among Smollett's
novels, as indicating a reliance upon the personages for interest quite as
much as upon the adventures. If the author failed in a similar intention
in Fathom, it was not through lack of clearly conceived characters, but
through failure to make them flesh and blood. In that book, however,
he put the adventures together more skilfully than in Sir Launcelot
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 .