The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete
to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them
in some cases far more distinctly conceived than any of the people in
Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle. In the second of these, we saw
Smollett beginning to understand the use of incident to indicate
consistent development of character. In Count Fathom, he seems fully to
understand this principle of art, though he has not learned to apply it
successfully. And so, in spite of an excellent conception, Fathom, as I
have said, is unreal. After all his villainies, which he perpetrates
without any apparent qualms of conscience, it is incredible that he
should honestly repent of his crimes. We are much inclined to doubt
when we read that “his vice and ambition was now quite mortified within
him,” the subsequent testimony of Matthew Bramble, Esq., in Humphry
Clinker, to the contrary, notwithstanding. Yet Fathom up to this point
is consistently drawn, and drawn for a purpose:—to show that
cold-blooded roguery, though successful for a while, will come to grief
in the end. To heighten the effect of his scoundrel, Smollett develops
parallel with him the virtuous Count de Melvil. The author’s scheme of
thus using one character as the foil of another, though not conspicuous
for its originality, shows a decided advance in the theory of
constructive technique. Only, as I have said, Smollett’s execution is
now defective.
“But,” one will naturally ask, “if Fathom lacks the amusing, and not
infrequently stimulating, hurly-burly of Smollett’s former novels; if
its characters, though well-conceived, are seldom divertingly fantastic
and never thoroughly animate; what makes the book interesting?” The
surprise will be greater than ever when the answer is given that, to a
large extent, the plot makes Fathom interesting. Yes, Smollett,
hitherto indifferent to structure, has here written a story in which
the plot itself, often clumsy though it may be, engages a reader’s
attention. One actually wants to know whether the young Count is ever
going to receive consolation for his sorrows and inflict justice on his
basely ungrateful pensioner. And when, finally, all turns out as it
should, one is amazed to find how many of the people in the book have
helped towards the designed conclusion. Not all of them, indeed, nor
all of the adventures, are indispensable, but it is manifest at the end
that much, which, for the time, most readers think irrelevant—such as
Don Diego’s history—is, after all, essential.
It has already been said that in Count Fathom Smollett appears to some
extent as a romanticist, and this is another fact which lends interest
to the book. That he had a powerful imagination is not a surprise. Any
one versed in Smollett has already seen it in the remarkable situations
which he has put before us in his earlier works. These do not indicate,
however, that Smollett possessed the imagination which could excite
romantic interest; for in Roderick Random and in Peregrine Pickle, the
wonderful situations serve chiefly to amuse. In Fathom, however, there
are some designed to excite horror; and one, at least, is eminently
successful. The hero’s night in the wood between Bar-le-duc and Chalons
was no doubt more blood-curdling to our eighteenth-century ancestors
than it is to us, who have become acquainted with scores of similar
situations in the small number of exciting romances which belong to
literature, and in the greater number which do not. Still, even to-day,
a reader, with his taste jaded by trashy novels, will be conscious of
Smollett’s power, and of several thrills, likewise, as he reads about
Fathom’s experience in the loft in which the beldame locks him to pass
the night.
This situation is melodramatic rather than romantic, as the word is
used technically in application to eighteenth and nineteenth-century
literature. There is no little in Fathom, however, which is genuinely
romantic in the latter sense. Such is the imprisonment of the Countess
in the castle-tower, whence she waves her handkerchief to the young
Count, her son and would-be rescuer. And especially so is the scene in
the church, when Renaldo (the very name is romantic) visits at midnight
the supposed grave of his lady-love. While he was waiting for the
sexton to open the door, his “soul . . . was wound up to the highest
pitch of enthusiastic sorrow. The uncommon darkness, . . . the solemn
silence, and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the occasion
of his coming, and the dismal images of his fancy, to produce a real
rapture of gloomy expectation, which the whole world could not have
persuaded him to disappoint. The clock struck twelve, the owl screeched
from the ruined battlement, the door was opened by the sexton, who, by
the light of a glimmering taper, conducted the despairing lover to a
dreary aisle, and stamped upon the ground with his foot, saying, ‘Here
the young lady lies interred.’”
We have here such an amount of the usual romantic machinery of the
“grave-yard” school of poets—that school of which Professor W. L.
Phelps calls Young, in his Night Thoughts, the most “conspicuous
exemplar”—that one is at first inclined to think Smollett poking fun at
it. The context, however, seems to prove that he was perfectly serious.
It is interesting, then, as well as surprising, to find traces of the
romantic spirit in his fiction over ten years before Walpole’s Castle
of Otranto. It is also interesting to find so much melodramatic feeling
in him, because it makes stronger the connection between him and his
nineteenth-century disciple, Dickens.
From all that I have said, it must not be thought that the usual
Smollett is always, or almost always, absent from Count Fathom. I have
spoken of the dedication and of the opening chapters as what we might
expect from his pen. There are, besides, true Smollett strokes in the
scenes in the prison from which Melvil rescues Fathom, and there is a
good deal of the satirical Smollett fun in the description of Fathom’s
ups and downs, first as the petted beau, and then as the fashionable
doctor. In chronicling the latter meteoric career, Smollett had already
observed the peculiarity of his countrymen which Thackeray was fond of
harping on in the next century—“the maxim which universally prevails
among the English people . . . to overlook, . . . on their return to
the metropolis, all the connexions they may have chanced to acquire
during their residence at any of the medical wells. And this social
disposition is so scrupulously maintained, that two persons who live in
the most intimate correspondence at Bath or Tunbridge, shall, in
four-and-twenty hours . . . meet in St. James’s Park, without betraying
the least token of recognition.” And good, too, is the way in which, as
Dr. Fathom goes rapidly down the social hill, he makes excuses for his
declining splendour. His chariot was overturned “with a hideous crash”
at such danger to himself, “that he did not believe he should ever
hazard himself again in any sort of wheel carriage.” He turned off his
men for maids, because “men servants are generally impudent, lazy,
debauched, or dishonest.” To avoid the din of the street, he shifted
his lodgings into a quiet, obscure court. And so forth and so on, in
the true Smollett vein.
But, after all, such of the old sparks are struck only occasionally.
Apart from its plot, which not a few nineteenth-century writers of
detective-stories might have improved, The Adventures of Ferdinand
Count Fathom is less interesting for itself than any other piece of
fiction from Smollett’s pen. For a student of Smollett, however, it is
highly interesting as showing the author’s romantic, melodramatic
tendencies, and the growth of his constructive technique.
G. H. MAYNADIER
THE ADVENTURES OF FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM
TO DOCTOR ———
You and I, my good friend, have often deliberated on the difficulty of
writing such a dedication as might gratify the self-complacency of a
patron, without exposing the author to the ridicule or censure of the
public; and I think we generally agreed that the task was altogether
impracticable.—Indeed, this was one of the few subjects on which we
have always thought in the same manner. For, notwithstanding that
deference and regard which we mutually pay to each other, certain it
is, we have often differed, according to the predominancy of those
different passions, which frequently warp the opinion, and perplex the
understanding of the most judicious.
In dedication, as in poetry, there is no medium; for, if any one of the
human virtues be omitted in the enumeration of the patron’s good
qualities, the whole address is construed into an affront, and the
writer has the mortification to find his praise prostituted to very
little purpose.
On the other hand, should he yield to the transports of gratitude or
affection, which is always apt to exaggerate, and produce no more than
the genuine effusions of his heart, the world will make no allowance
for the warmth of his passion, but ascribe the praise he bestows to
interested views and sordid adulation.
Sometimes too, dazzled by the tinsel of a character which he has no
opportunity to investigate, he pours forth the homage of his admiration
upon some false Maecenas, whose future conduct gives the lie to his
eulogium, and involves him in shame and confusion of face. Such was the
fate of a late ingenious author [the Author of the “Seasons”], who was
so often put to the blush for the undeserved incense he had offered in
the heat of an enthusiastic disposition, misled by popular applause,
that he had resolved to retract, in his last will, all the encomiums
which he had thus prematurely bestowed, and stigmatise the unworthy by
name—a laudable scheme of poetical justice, the execution of which was
fatally prevented by untimely death.
Whatever may have been the fate of other dedicators, I, for my own
part, sit down to write this address, without any apprehension of
disgrace or disappointment; because I know you are too well convinced
of my affection and sincerity to repine at what I shall say touching
your character and conduct. And you will do me the justice to believe,
that this public distinction is a testimony of my particular friendship
and esteem.
Not that I am either insensible of your infirmities, or disposed to
conceal them from the notice of mankind. There are certain foibles
which can only be cured by shame and mortification; and whether or not
yours be of that species, I shall have the comfort to think my best
endeavours were used for your reformation.
Know then, I can despise your pride, while I honour your integrity, and
applaud your taste, while I am shocked at your ostentation.—I have
known you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly
jealous and awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentments;
and coarse and lowly in your connexions. I have blushed at the weakness
of your conversation, and trembled at the errors of your conduct—yet,
as I own you possess certain good qualities, which overbalance these
defects, and distinguish you on this occasion as a person for whom I
have the most perfect attachment and esteem, you have no cause to
complain of the indelicacy with which your faults are reprehended. And
as they are chiefly the excesses of a sanguine disposition and
looseness of thought, impatient of caution or control, you may, thus
stimulated, watch over your own intemperance and infirmity with
redoubled vigilance and consideration, and for the future profit by the
severity of my reproof.
These, however, are not the only motives that induce me to trouble you
with this public application. I must not only perform my duty to my
friends, but also discharge the debt I owe to my own interest. We live