Travels through France Italy | Page 8

occasion, the lack of means or slenderness of margin for
incidental expenses should have debarred him from having recourse to
a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as Smollett himself
avows, he would probably have performed the journey with much
greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is instructive. It
reveals to us the disadvantage under which the novelist was continually
labouring, that of appearing to travel as an English Milord, en grand
seigneur, and yet having at every point to do it "on the cheap." He
avoided the common conveyance or diligence, and insisted on
travelling post and in a berline; but he could not bring himself to
exceed the five-sou pourboire for the postillions. He would have meat
upon maigre days, yet objected to paying double for it. He held aloof
from the thirty-sou table d'hote, and would have been content to pay
three francs a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were
roused when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by nature
anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I interpret him
at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted, generous type of man. Like a
majority, perhaps, of the really open-handed he shared one trait with
the closefisted and even with the very mean rich. He would rather give

away a crown than be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little
of the traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going--the Languedocians and Ligurians--were notorious
for their nearness in money matters. The result of all this could hardly
fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to aggravate the testiness which
was due primarily to the bitterness of his struggle with the world, and,
secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One
capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us,
was that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel--a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to the
student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods, the
crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more
graphically or magisterially than they are in some of these chapters.
Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and Dickens, Smollett was a
connoisseur in inns and innkeepers. He knew good food and he knew
good value, and he had a mighty keen eye for a rogue. There may, it is
true, have been something in his manner which provoked them to
exhibit their worst side to him. It is a common fate with angry men.
The trials to which he was subjected were momentarily very severe, but,
as we shall see in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to
him.
To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and vigorously
by an expert man of letters. They were written ad vivum, as it were, not
from worked-up notes or embellished recollections. They were written
expressly for money down. They were written rather en noir than
couleur de rose by an experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a
disillusioned traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement that
they were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of course, true,
and explains much. The majority of his correspondents were of the
medical profession, all of them were members of a group with whom
he was very intimate, and the letters were by his special direction to be
passed round among them. [We do not know precisely who all these
correspondents of Smollett were, but most of them were evidently
doctors and among them, without a doubt, John Armstrong, William
Hunter, George Macaulay, and above all John Moore, himself an
authority on European travel, Governor on the Grand Tour of the Duke

of Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and
father of the famous soldier. Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died
5th March 1763.] In the circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his
original intention to prune the letters considerably before publication) it
was only natural that he should say a good deal about the state of his
health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to these good people
had he not referred frequently and at some length to his spirits and to
his symptoms, an improvement in which was the primary object of his
journey and his two years' sojourn in the South. Readers who linger
over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and Mrs. Fielding's toothache are
inconsistent in denouncing the luxury of detail with which Smollett
discusses the matter of his imposthume.
What I claim for the present work is that, in the first place, to any