Travels through France Italy | Page 6

of Grub Street. Like most people whose social
ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett suffered considerably
on account of these novel aspirations of his. In the present day he
would have had his motor car and his house on Hindhead, a seat in
Parliament and a brief from the Nation to boot as a Member for
Humanity. Voltaire was the only figure in the eighteenth century even
to approach such a flattering position, and he was for many years a
refugee from his own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious
enough to start in rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage,

menservants, and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty
who had a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an incapable in
the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to maintain such a
position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from year's end to year's
end--was a truly Herculean task in days when a newspaper "rate" of
remuneration or a well-wearing copyright did not so much as exist, and
when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of
thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually having recourse to loans. He
produced the eight (or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer
hard writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and his
Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant labour at
ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this cruel compiling he
undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a magazine (The British), and
a weekly political organ (The Briton). A charge of defamation for a
paragraph in the nature of what would now be considered a very mild
and pertinent piece of public criticism against a faineant admiral led to
imprisonment in the King's Bench Prison, plus a fine of £100. Then
came a quarrel with an old friend, Wilkes--not the least vexatious result
of that forlorn championship of Bute's government in The Briton. And
finally, in part, obviously, as a consequence of all this nervous
breakdown, a succession of severe catarrhs, premonitory in his case of
consumption, the serious illness of the wife he adored, and the death of
his darling, the "little Boss" of former years, now on the verge of
womanhood. To a man of his extraordinarily strong affections such a
series of ills was too overwhelming. He resolved to break up his
establishment at Chelsea, and to seek a remedy in flight from present
evils to a foreign residence. Dickens went to hibernate on the Riviera
upon a somewhat similar pretext, though fortunately without the same
cause, as far as his health was concerned.
Now note another very characteristic feature of these Travel Letters.
Smollett went abroad not for pleasure, but virtually of necessity. Not
only were circumstances at home proving rather too much for him, but
also, like Stevenson, he was specifically "ordered South" by his
physicians, and he went with the deliberate intention of making as
much money as possible out of his Travel papers. In his case he wrote

long letters on the spot to his medical and other friends at home. When
he got back in the summer of 1765 one of his first cares was to put the
Letters together. It had always been his intention carefully to revise
them for the press. But when he got back to London he found so many
other tasks awaiting him that were so far more pressing, that this part of
his purpose was but very imperfectly carried out. The Letters appeared
pretty much as he wrote them. Their social and documentary value is
thereby considerably enhanced, for they were nearly all written close
down to the facts. The original intention had been to go to Montpellier,
which was still, I suppose, the most popular health resort in Southern
Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this brings us to
another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's Travels. Typical
Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most Protestant period, and
insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett had knocked about
the world a good deal and had also seen something of the continent of
Europe. He was not prepared to see everything couleur de rose now.
His was quite unlike the frame of mind of the ordinary holiday-seeker,
who, partly from a voluntary optimism, and partly from the change of
food and habit, the exhilaration caused by novel surroundings, and
timidity at the unaccustomed sounds he hears in his ears, is determined
to be pleased with everything. Very temperamental was Smollett, and
his frame of mind at the time was that of one determined