Of the early masters of the English novel, Tobias Smollett is the least original and on the whole the least satisfying. But his work was by no means without some considerable influence on the literary taste of his time. His novels are entirely derivative, harking back to the picaresque mode of narrative, whose greatest English exemplar was Defoe, and admittedly based upon the finest of all specimens of this particular form of fiction—the satirical narratives of Spain. Into the framework thus adopted Smollett contrived to instill the restless and combative qualities of his own nature, and an individual, if not a penetrating power of observation.

He was born in the year 1721 at Dalquhurn House, in the parish of Cardross, Vale of Leven Dumbartonshire. His people were gentlefolk, known pretty familiarly in Scotland as the Smolletts of Bunhill, and latterly chiefly engaged in law and medicine. Tobias George Smollett, the novelist, was the younger son of Archibald Smollett, who, himself a younger son, was not in the position to endow the lives of his children in such a way as to have encouraged idleness. So, after some school experience at Dumbarton, where he was noted for his Latin, Tobias was apprenticed to a medical practitioner named Gordon. There is scant record of his life after this until we hear of his arrival in London in 1739, with his first literary work, a tragedy called the Regicide, dealing with the murder of James I of Scotland at Perth, in his pocket.

His life as an apprentice is largely a blank, so far as history is concerned; but Campbell has put it on record, with probably some truth, that he was "a restive apprentice and a mischievous stripling." This description is borne out by an anecdote preserved by his friend and disciple, Dr. John Moore, who had a brief fame as the author of a romance called Zeluco:—

On a winter evening, when the streets were covered with snow, Smollett happened to be engaged in a snowball fight with a few boys of his own age. Among his associates was the apprentice of that surgeon who is supposed to have been delineated under the name of Crab in Roderick Random. He entered his shop while his apprentice wa in the heat of the engagement. On the return of the latter the master remonstrated severely with him for his negligence in quitting the shop. The youth excused himself by saying that while he was employed in making up a prescription a fellow had hit him with a snowball, and that he had been in pursuit of the delinquent.

"A mighty probablestory, truly," said the master, in an ironical tone; "I wonder how long I should stand here before it would enter into any mortal's head to throw a snowball at me?" While he was holding his head erect, with a most scornful air, he received a very severe blow in the face by a snowball.

Smollett, who stood concealed behind the pillar at the shop-door, had heard the dialogue, and perceiving that his companion was puzzled for an answer, he extricated him by a repartee equally smart and apropos.

In starting out to capture London, the young Smollett was armed, besides his tragedy, with a number of letters of introduction to people of eminence. And he was in full hopes of getting the Regicide placed upon the stage with little delay. Through the influence of his friends he got to know such useful men as Lyttelton and Garrick. But in spite of such opportunities as acquaintanceship with the leading patron of letters and the leading actor of the day gave him, the tragedy, which he considered a masterpiece of the first order, but which in reality was very second-rate stuff, was never performed. But not to be entirely defeated he printed the rejected play some years later, in 1749, with a lively preface in which he rated in good round terms all those eminent people who had failed to recognise its hazy merits.

With the failure of his first literary ambitions he turned round for some other means of subsistence, and, as a fleet of warships was on the point of sailing from Spithead for the West Indies, to rap the knuckles of Spain, who had become more than usually annoying in the region of the American colonies, he was fortunate, in so far as useful experience goes, in obtaining an appointment as surgeon's mate on one of His Majesty's ships. England had made up her mind in the matter and was determined to give her ancient enemy and then present irritant a final lesson. Her best ships were gathered together, and in October, 1740, under Sir Chaloner Ogle, they sailed to conquer the marauding armadas of the Far West. It is uncertain which of the line-of-battleships was joined by Tobias Smollett, but it is certain that his experiences on this memorable expedition, which came to so unlucky an end at Carthagena, gave him material for his first notable work, Roderick Random, and incidentally made him the first characteriser of seamen in English fiction.

The navy at this period was perhaps at its lowest point of organisation and efficiency. The hopeless muddle into which things had fallen, coupled with the abominable treatment of the sailors, particularly during active engagements, gave Smollett a theme for his habitual indignation with men and their ways. So excellent are his descriptions of life in the navy during this campaign, that had he written no other book, Roderick Random would have been memorable for this alone. There was a deep-seated irascibility of temper in Smollett, which on more than one occasion militated against his own comfort, but it also served him as the fuel of an indignation, which was quickly aroused in the face of cruelty, treachery, and incompetence. He was one of those who would not suffer fools gladly, and the misery following the reverse of Cathagena, which was brought about by the muddling of officers who were perpetually at loggerheads one with another, was a subject worthy of his steel. He describes with satiric detail the whole series of disastrous events, including the differences of the leaders. Here is his appalling description of the treatment of the wounded during the battle:—

As for the sick and wounded, they were next day sent on board the transports and vessels called hospital ships, where they languished in want of every necessary comfort and accommodation. They were destitute of surgeons, nurses, cooks, and proper provision; they were pent up between decks in small vessels, where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth; myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores, which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves with their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans, lamentations, and the language of despair, invoking death to deliver them from their miseries. What served to encourage this despondence was the prospect of those poor wretches who had strength and opportunity to look around them, for there they beheld the naked bodies of their fellow-soldiers and comrades floating up and down the harbour, affording prey to the carrion crows and sharks, which tore them in pieces without interruption, and contributing by their stench to the mortality that prevailed.

This frank exposure of the condition of things in the navy went some distance towards bringing about that awakening of public feeling which sought by various means to improve the management and organisation of the fleet. Carlyle, in his caustic way, said that the only noticeable thing about the Spanish expedition was the presence of Tobias Smollett; perhaps, in the light of after reforms, it would have been nearer the truth to have said that the most useful member of the expedition was Tobias Smollett.

After the fall of Cathagena the crippled fleet returned to Jamaica, where Smollett retired from the service and settled for a while at Kingston, where he fell in love with and married Nancy Lassells, a lady of some means, whose portrait is drawn in the person of Narcissa, the adored one of Roderick Random. He left Jamaica with his wife in 1744 and set up as a doctor in Downing Street, Westminster. He took his M.D. degree from Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1750. For a time he practised medicine but gradually drifted into a life of letters. His first literary work after his return from the Indies was satire. It was a satirical age, and satirists, since a taste for their wares had been created by the masterpieces of Swift and Pope, grew "plentiful as tabby-cats—in point of fact too many." But Smollett saw possible profit in the prevailing fashion, and, nothing loth, he joined the dance with three satirical poems, The Tears of Caledonia and The Advice: a Satire, in 1746, and with The Reproof: a Satire, in 1747. But it was not until the next year that he made any serious bid for fame, when he made a lasting name for himself with Roderick Random.

This long picaresque novel is based on his own life, but how far it would be safe to accept the story as fact, apart from the admirable passages of certain biographical authenticity, dealing with the Spanish War, is more than doubtful. Smollett, as we have seen, was by no means the inventor of this form of fiction, and, in the preface to Roderick Random, he owns his indebtedness to Le Sage, whose light touch and happily comic sense of human foibles, however, Smollett has not succeeded in catching. Indeed, this was not his aim. His aim was more purposeful, for, like all the notable novelist before Sterne and Scott, he was a moralist, and sought to set his fellows in the right path. His method, like that of a later teacher-novelist, Zola, was not so much to point to the moral of any particular action as to depict human delinquencies in their most lurid colours, and by so doing help the reader to draw his own conclusions.

This treatment had at least the chance of promoting the illusion of reality, fir its users were free of the fatal tendency among moralist and theorists to construct characters in order to wear the garments of abstract ideas. The pitfalls of this sort of realism, on the other hand, were an equally dangerous tendency towards gross frankness. It all, of course, depended upon the novelist. Smollett succeeded in so far as he steered clearly between his desire to please his public and his desire to teach them, and he created quite a number of really life-like people. But there was a coarser strain in his temperament which never permitted him to go far without exaggerating the more material sides of human nature. This wa a matter entirely within the taste of the eighteenth century, but it has gone far towards keeping Smollett out of the modern home or confining him to the locked cabinet.

He conceived the novel as, in his own words, "a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan." And his novels come will within this idea. They are crowded canvases, full of characters and teeming with a coarse vitality. Smollett neither possesses the minute sense of the movement of emotion peculiar to Richardson, nor the jovial and healthy naturalness of Fielding; and it was not until he had read Tristram Shandy (1759-67) that he had any sense of the more subtle, to say nothing of the gentler, forms of humour. The fun in Roderick Random too often becomes mere horse-play, and the action of the volumes is too much in the nature of a carnival of brutality to be entirely pleasing. Yet it is imaginable from what we know of the times that Smollett did not exaggerate over much, or at any rate not deliberately. The brutality of his books is a fault of his realism. He was a quarrelsome, combative person himself, and this characteristic gave colour to his vision of men. He was on the look out for such things, and so got more of them into his books than most people are in the habit of seeing.

He, again, often raises laughter by exhibition of merely brute strength, or by depicting the whims and oddities of people. And his habit of thus depicting eccentricity rather than interpreting character has the effect, whether he is actually guilty of exaggeration or not, of giving his readers the impression that he overstates his case. It is quite natural that such a writer should find little sympathy in France, where people have been long used to a daintier wit, a wit of the rapier, rather than of the broadsword. And when Taine says that "the generous wine of Fielding, in Smollett's hands, becomes brandy of the dram-shop," we feel that he is after all not only speaking for his own nationality, but at the present day, at least, for the majority of novel readers. Smollett was a barbarian in Roderick Random; he had no reticences and no consideration for the feelings of anyone but himself. He satirises and caricatures in bold uncompromising strokes, which are so convinced of their own truth that they cause doubt in the eyes of all who behold them. They lack that little touch of psychology which makes all art kin. If Fielding was the Hogarth, Smollett was the Gilray of novelists.

The success of Roderick Random gave Smollett a more promising means of livelihood than the medical profession, although he did not burn his medical boats with undue haste, in fact, he turned an honest penny by exploiting his professional reputation with his pen in a tract entitled An Essay on the External Use of Water, with Particular Remarks on the Mineral Waters of Bath (1752). In 1751 he published his second novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and in 1753, his third, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. In the first of these he imitated his first success but only succeeded in becoming tedious. Peregrine Pickle has all the faults of Roderick Random, with few of its good qualities, and besides this it lacks the cohesion which distinguished his earlier book whilst Count Fathom is poorer still, it being nothing more than a feeble hotch-potch of Jonathan Wild and Don Quixote. The barbarisms of his first book which are generally made at least tolerable by the skill with which they are held together, become nothing short of an uncalculating savageness in the disjointed pages of these later novels.

Smollett, although now famous, was not well known in literary circles and seems never to have come into the charmed circle of Samuel Johnson. He was not by any means without friends or even a circle of his own, and there are anecdotes left by some of his boon fellows which show him in a pleasant and even convivial light. But he was an ostentatious and dominant man, preferring, as is often the case, the slavish admiration of his inferiors rather than the friendship of his equals. His temperament was strong and self-reliant in so far as equals and superiors went, but he liked to lean on his dependents. In some respects this reminds one of the feudalism of Scott, who loved nothing better than to be surrounded by retainers, but in Smollett this love was not always free from mercenary ends. His retainers and dependents were only too often his literary hacks and slaves.

In this respect Smollett was not an artist, but a business man. Like Defoe he became a busy and productive journalist. But his journalism never approached genius, as it did in the case of the founder of the Review. He edited various journals, among which were The Critical Review, a forerunner of the literary reviews of our own day; and from May, 1762, to February, 1763, he had a brief spell of political journalism in the editorship of The Briton, a journal founded to support the Bute administration. But Smollett's politics proved so unstable that the paper was stopped when Bute found that its methods were making him more enemies than friends. Smollett's other political venture was his pamphlet attacking Pitt, The History of the Adventures of an Atom (1769), one of the bitterest and most offensive lampoons in the language.

Under the term journalism, for the sake of convenience, may be classed all that ephem eral work which he did for the money it would bring in, such as the Compendium of Voyages; the Universal History; The Present State of All Nations; and his History of England. Besides this there were translations, the most notable being that of Don Quixote; and in 1757 a play called The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England, which was produced by David Garrick at Drury Lane. The more enduring Travels through France and Italy was issued in 1766, and his last book, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which with Roderick Random are the two books on which his claim upon the future depends, was issued just before he died in 1771.

In 1752 Smollett took a house named Monmouth House, in Lawrence Street, and now devoted himself entirely to literature, and employed that weird band of hacks who aided him in the manufacture of his histories and other bibliographical wares. There is a famous description of this circle in Humphry Clinker which reminds one of Edgar Poe.

At two in the afternoon, I found myself one of ten messmates seated at a table; and I question if the whole world could produce such another assemblage of originals. Among their peculiarities I do not mention those of dress, which may be purely accidental. What struck me were oddities originally produced by affectation, and afterwards confirmed by habit. One of them wore spectacles at dinner, and another his hat flapped; though as Ivy told me, the first was noted as having a seaman's eye when a bailiff was in the wind, and the other was never known to labour under any weakness or defect of vision, except about five years ago, when he was complimented with a couple of black eyes by a player with whom he had quarrelled in his drink. A third wore a laced stocking, and made use of crutches, because once in his life he had been laid up with a broken leg, though no man could leap over a stick with more agility. A fourth had contracted such an antipathy to the country, that he insisted on sitting with his back towards the window that looked into the garden; and when a dish of cauliflower was set on the table, he snuffed up volatile salts to keep him from fainting. Yet this delicate person was the son of a cottager, born under a hedge, and many years had run wild with asses on a common. A fifth affected distraction. When spoken to he always answered from the purpose: sometimes he suddenly started up and rapped out a dreadful oath; sometimes he burst out a laughing; then he folded his arms, and sighed; and then he hissed like fifty serpents.

This is obviously a caricature, and incidentally it is a good specimen of Smollett's leaning towards the revelation of eccentricity; but it is founded upon the fact of the strange members of his intimate circle of workers. His idiosyncrasy for living a retired busy life among curious nonentities perhaps fostered the querulousness of his nature and often got him into scrapes, which he rather enjoyed than otherwise. He liked a fight, and this was probably the basis of his satire, more than any sense of outraged feelings or crossed convictions. These satires also got him into trouble, and on one occasion he was fined £100 and imprisoned for three months in the King's Bench prison for criticising Admiral Knowles. But this incident throws rather a pleasant light upon Smollett. The criticism was anonymous and appeared in the Critical Review, and the prosecution was, of course, drawn against the printer. But the Admiral said that it was not a legal revenge he wanted, much less against a beggarly printer, but rather did he want to know who the writer of the article was, so that, if the culprit proved to be a gentleman, another form of satisfaction could be taken. Smollett, immediately upon hearing this, declared himself the author of the incriminating criticism. Whereupon the doughty Admiral retreated behind the letter of the law and contented himself with legal revenge. The King's Bench was no trial, for Smollett was treated as a prisoner of State with no other punishment but that entailed by confinement.

In 1755 he went to Scotland and saw his mother, and about this time he visited the Continent. Besides this, he often went from his Chelsea home to Bath, for which town he had a great liking. All this travel does not seem to suggest impoverished conditions, but at this period of his life it would seem he was often in straitened circumstances. The novelist was never a man of robust health, and the failure of his editorship of The Briton worried him and preyed upon his mind at a time when his strength was on the decline, and when, in 1763, he lost his only daughter, the shock so overcame him that he had to go abroad, where he stayed until 1765, visiting France and Italy and publishing his impressions in the book of travels issued in the following year. On his return to England he lived for a while in Bath and went again to Scotland, but his health grew worse, and in 1768 he left England for ever. He hoped to obtain a consulship at Nice or Leghorn, but failed in his attempt to get an appointment. He settled at the latter place, where he finished his Universal History and Humphry Clinker, and there he died in September, 1771.

He met his death with a grim courage which reminds one of a similar courage pervading the death-bed of Tom Hood, who suggested to a sorrowing friend that he would have "to apologise to the worms for offering them nothing but bones." A day or two before Smollett died, in a like spirit, he wrote to a friend:—

With respect to myself I have nothing to say but that, if I can prevail upon my wife to execute my last will, you shall receive my poor carcase in a box after I am dead, to be placed among your rarities. I am already so dry and emaciated that I may pass for an Egyptian mummy, without any other preparation than some pitch and painted linen.

Tobias Smollett was not a novelist whose work was essential to English literature, and yet coming at the time it did, his work, albeit not original in form, was a link of no small importance in the evolution of the novel. The picaresque novel wanted the modern note, such a note as fielding and Richardson and Sterne had put into their own works, and this Smollett gave to it. In many ways he was more modern to his day than either of the other novelist, and perhaps the very note in his work, the gross barbarism of his atmosphere which shocks us now, is a truer picture of the colour and feeling of his environment than anything in the earlier novelists.

Because, after all, Smollett was freer than the other novelist; they all had moral axes to grind, and they let you hear the scraping of the axe as it touched the wheel of imagination. Smollett had an axe to grind also, but it is not so easy to hear it scraping on the wheel of his art. Fielding's realism was a reaction against the sentimentalism of Richardson; the realism of Smollett is an extension of that of Fielding into more material regions. It is more like photography.

His pictures of seamen are masterpieces, and they prepared the way for Marryat. Yet Marryat never drew more vital people than Lieutenant Bowling, Captain Oakum, Commodore Trunnion, or Hatchway. Fielding is undoubtedly a more profound writer; his characters have something more than form—they have psychology; but the best of Smollett's characters can hold their own even in such good company. Humphry Clinker and Winifred Jenkins; Matthew Bramble, Lismahago, and Tabitha Bramble; Strap, the little French friar, and other delightful people are actual creations, and if not always quite so convincing as the realities of Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, they are worthy and companionable additions to the orders of the imagination.

His novels, said Hazlitt,

always enliven, and never tire us: we take them up with pleasure, and lay them down without any strong feeling of regret.

That is quite true. Smollett is never an inseparable friend, inspiring a deep attachment and the responsibilities of friendly relations. He is an entertaining acquaintance. One of those good and pleasant fellows who are known and forgotten, met casually and passed easily in the procession of life, yet giving colour and interest to the show, and supplying a need no less necessary and inevitable than the great friendships.