In February 1753, Smollett "obliged the town" with his "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The book is Smollett's "Barry Lyndon," yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a "dreadful example," there is none of Thackeray's irony, none of his subtlety. "Here is a really bad man, a foreigner too," Smollett seems to say, "do not be misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset, or gleek. Fathers, on such a rogue shut your doors: collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques. Let all avoid the path and shun the example of Ferdinand, Count Fathom!"Such is Smollett's sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is hardly worse than Roderick or Peregrine. The son of a terrible old sutler and camp-follower, a robber and slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had to live by his wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than Peregrine and Roderick. The daubs of casual generosity were not laid on, and that is all the difference. As Sophia Western was mistaken for Miss Jenny Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince Charles, who, in fact, caused much inconvenience to harmless travellers. People were often arrested as "The Pretender's son" abroad as well as in England.
The life and death of Ferdinand's mother, shot by a wounded hussar in her moment of victory, make perhaps the most original and interesting part of this hero's adventures. The rest is much akin to his earlier novels, but the history of Rinaldo and Monimia has a passage not quite alien to the vein of Mrs. Radcliffe. Some remarks in the first chapter show that Smollett felt the censures on his brutality and "lowness," and he promises to seek "that goal of perfection where nature is castigated almost even to still life . . . where decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a fantastic shadow."Smollett never reached that goal, and even the shadow of decency never haunted him so as to make him afraid with any amazement.
Smollett avers that he "has had the courage to call in question the talents of a pseudo-patron," and so is charged with "insolence, rancour, and scurrility." Of all these things, and of worse, he had been guilty; his offence had never been limited to "calling in question the talents" of persons who had been unsuccessful in getting his play represented. Remonstrance merely irritated Tobias. His new novel was but a fainter echo of his old novels, a panorama of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the virtuous Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read as a sketch of manners, or want of manners. The scene in which the bumpkin squire rooks the accomplished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived, and Smollett's indignation at the British system of pews in church is edifying. But when Monimia appears to her lover as he weeps at her tomb, and proves to be no phantom, but a "warm and substantial" Monimia, capable of being "dished up,"like any other Smollettian heroine, the reader is sensibly annoyed.
Tobias as un romantique is absolutely too absurd; "not here, oh Tobias, are haunts meet for thee."Smollett's next novel, "Sir Launcelot Greaves," was not published till 1761, after it had appeared in numbers, in The British Magazine. This was a sixpenny serial, published by Newbery. The years between 1753 and 1760 had been occupied by Smollett in quarrelling, getting imprisoned for libel, editing the Critical Review, writing his "History of England," translating (or adapting old translations of) "Don Quixote," and driving a team of literary hacks, whose labours he superintended, and to whom he gave a weekly dinner. These exploits are described by Dr. Carlyle, and by Smollett himself, in "Humphrey Clinker." He did not treat his vassals with much courtesy or consideration; but then they expected no such treatment. We have no right to talk of his doings as "a blood-sucking method, literary sweating," like a recent biographer of Smollett. Not to speak of the oddly mixed metaphor, we do not know what Smollett's relations to his retainers really were. As an editor he had to see his contributors. The work of others he may have recommended, as "reader" to publishers. Others may have made transcripts for him, or translations. That Smollett "sweated" men, or sucked their blood, or both, seems a crude way of saying that he found them employment. Nobody says that Johnson "sweated" the persons who helped him in compiling his Dictionary; or that Mr.
Jowett "sweated" the friends and pupils who aided him in his translation of Plato. Authors have a perfect right to procure literary assistance, especially in learned books, if they pay for it, and acknowledge their debt to their allies. On the second point, Smollett was probably not in advance of his age.
"Sir Launcelot Greaves" is, according to Chambers, "a sorry specimen of the genius of the author," and Mr. Oliphant Smeaton calls it "decidedly the least popular" of his novels, while Scott astonishes us by preferring it to "Jonathan Wild." Certainly it is inferior to "Roderick Random" and to "Peregrine Pickle," but it cannot be so utterly unreal as "The Adventures of an Atom." I, for one, venture to prefer "Sir Launcelot" to "Ferdinand, Count Fathom." Smollett was really trying an experiment in the fantastic. Just as Mr. Anstey Guthrie transfers the mediaeval myth of Venus and the Ring, or the Arabian tale of the bottled-up geni (or djinn) into modern life, so Smollett transferred Don Quixote.