Life of Tobias George Smollett. By David Hannay. (Walter Scott.)
—No one who has read "Humphrey Clinker" can doubt that Smollett was a great humourist. It is one of the most amusing tales in the language, and though by no means free from the grossness in which the novelist delighted, is less injured by it than "Roderick Random" and "Peregrine Pickle." Humour is one of the least perishable of a novelist's gifts, and it is the salt that keeps Smollett's often offensive pages from corruption. As we read them we feel an invincible dislike to the writer, but we cannot help laughing at the absurdity of the positions in which he places his dramatis persome. Unlike Fielding and Scott, he rarely makes the reader care for his characters. In this he resembles Le Sage, and our indifference to their fate is akin to what we feel with regard to their author. Thackeray does more than justice to Smollett when he calls him "manly, kindly, honest, and irascible." We suspect that, like Carlyle, he was " gey ill to live with." He seems to have been always quarrelling, and his self-satisfaction was profound. What he wants in his novels (with the exception of "Humphrey Clinker ") is humanity, and that, too, seems wanting in his character. It is but fair to remember what a hard life he led ; and yet where the nature is noble, as in the case of Johnson, hardships do not stifle generous emotions. "That he was an ex- ceptionally tender-hearted and kindly man nobody can believe," is Mr. Hannay's remark, which, coming from a biographer, may perhaps be interpreted to mean that he was inclined to be hard. hearted. Mr. Hannay admits that while in his novels Smollett is always ready to draw a moral, his vivid scenes of cruelty are given without a sign of indignation at the barbarities he describes, and that it was due to a certain intellectual hardness which Smollett shared with Swift, "that he did not see that the mere repetition of horrible things was in itself an offence." No doubt it is true that the great sensitiveness to pain, felt perhaps to excess in our age, was unknown in the last century ; but we need only tarn to the manly pages of Fielding, who cannot be accused of a mawkish feeling for suffering, to see how different was the view of human life taken by the rival humouriste. Sir Walter Scott's brief but adequate biography of Smollett will, we think, fully satisfy the curiosity of most readers. Mr. Hannay's volume has no charm of style to com- mend it ; but his discriminating praise of Smollett for his desoriptions of sea-life, is a feature of the biography not to be found in Scott. In the author's judgment there are but two novelists who combine the faculty of telling a story of enduring literary value with personal knowledge of the sea, and these two are Smollett and Marryat. It was perhaps the lowest period of the English Navy that the author of "Roderick Random" described, and there is a verisimilitude in some of his pictures which prevents our attributing their worst features to the exaggeration of a romance-writer. When the characters are not wholly lifelike, their eccentricities make them infinitely amusing. The humour of "Humphrey Clinker" is irresistible ; but, for the most part, owing to his innate love of nastiness, Smollett repels far more than he attracts readers who do not like garbage.
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