"Forty or fifty years ago, before the great transformation took place on the French Riviera, when Nizza, Villafranca, and Mentone were antique Italian towns, and when it was one of the eccentricities of Lord Brougham, to like Cannes, all that sea-board was a delightful land. Only a hundred years ago Arthur Young had trouble to get an old woman and a donkey to carry his portmanteau from Cannes to Antibes. I can myself remember Cannes in 1853, a small fishing village with a quiet beach, and Mentone, a walled town with mediaeval gates and a castle, a few humble villas and the old Posta to give supper to any passing traveller. It was one of the loveliest bits of Italy, and the road from Nizza to Genoa was one long procession for four days of glorious scenery, historic remnants, Italian colour, and picturesque ports. From the Esterelles to San Remo this has all been ruined by the horde of northern barbarians who have made a sort of Trouville, Brighton, or Biarritz, with American hotels and Parisian boulevards on every headland and bay. First came the half underground railway, a long tunnel with lucid intervals, which destroyed the road by blocking up its finest views and making it practically useless. Then miles of unsightly caravanserais high walls, pompous villas, and Parisian grandes rues crushed out every trace of Italy, of history, and pictorial charm." So writes Mr. Frederic Harrison of this delectable coast, [In the Daily Chronicle, 15th March 1898.] as it was, at a period within his own recollectiona period at which it is hardly fanciful to suppose men living who might just have remembered Smollett, as he was in his last days, when he returned to die on the Riviera di Levante in the autumn of 1771. Travel had then still some of the elements of romance. Rapidity has changed all that. The trouble is that although we can transport our bodies so much more rapidly than Smollett could, our understanding travels at the same old pace as before. And in the meantime railway and tourist agencies have made of modern travel a kind of mental postcard album, with grand hotels on one side, hotel menus on the other, and a faint aroma of continental trains haunting, between the leaves as it were. Our real knowledge is still limited to the country we have walked over, and we must not approach the country we would appreciate faster than a man may drive a horse or propel a bicycle; or we shall lose the all-important sense of artistic approach. Even to cross the channel by time-table is fatal to that romantic spirit (indispensable to the true magic of travel) which a slow adjustment of the mind to a new social atmosphere and a new historical environment alone can induce. Ruskin, the last exponent of the Grand Tour, said truly that the benefit of travel varies inversely in proportion to its speed. The cheap rapidity which has made our villes de plaisir and cotes d'azur what they are, has made unwieldy boroughs of suburban villages, and what the rail has done for a radius of a dozen miles, the motor is rapidly doing for one of a score. So are we sped! But we are to discuss not the psychology of travel, but the immediate causes and circumstances of Smollett's arrival upon the territory of Nice.
VI
Smollett did not interpret the ground-plan of the history of Nice particularly well. Its colonisation from Massilia, its long connection with Provence, its occupation by Saracens, its stormy connection with the house of Anjou, and its close fidelity to the house of Savoy made no appeal to his admiration. The most important event in its recent history, no doubt, was the capture of the city by the French under Catinat in 1706 (Louis XIV. being especially exasperated against what he regarded as the treachery of Victor Amadeus), and the razing to the ground of its famous citadel. The city henceforth lost a good deal of its civic dignity, and its morale was conspicuously impaired. In the war of the Austrian succession an English fleet under Admiral Matthews was told off to defend the territory of the Nicois against the attentions of Toulon. This was the first close contact experienced between England and Nice, but the impressions formed were mutually favourable. The inhabitants were enthusiastic about the unaccustomed English plan of paying in full for all supplies demanded. The British officers were no less delighted with the climate of Nice, the fame of which they carried to their northern homes. It was both directly and indirectly through one of these officers that the claims of Nice as a sanatorium came to be put so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its prestige as a ville forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new character of a ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's historians, Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice. "Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits, under the genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a new man. His notes on the country, its gardens, its orange groves, its climate without a winter, are pleasant and just and would seem to have been written yesterday instead of more than a hundred years ago. . . . His memory is preserved in the street nomenclature of the place; one of the thoroughfares still bears the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James Nash, The Guide to Nice, 1884, p. 110.)]
Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother of George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre Massena, a native of the city, then a lad of six.
Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more seemingly irresistible tirades against French folly: one against their persistent hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le Grand, and the second in ridicule of the immemorial French panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets to Nice he feels a return of the craving to take a hand's turn at depreciatory satire upon the nation of which a contemporary hand was just tracing the deservedly better-known delineation, commencing
Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .
Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not unnaturally suspected by friends in England of having some personal motive. In his fifteenth letter home, therefore, Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming anything of the kind. He begins by attempting an amende honorable, but before he has got well away from his exordium he insensibly and most characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of censure, and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent passagesa disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon lines somewhat similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to which is appended a satire on the duello as practised in France, which glows and burns with a radiation of good sense, racy of Smollett at his best.
To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will recall similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between the lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but, more particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this subject a propos of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided a duel with Prince Eugene in 1716. "We were sitting in company at table, whence the Prince took up a glass of wine and by a fillip made some of it fly in Oglethorpe's face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been counted as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye on the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what His Highness had done in jest, said, "Mon Prince" (I forget the French words he used), "that's a good joke; but we do it much better in England," and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince's face. An old general who sat by said, "Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l'avez commence," and thus all ended in good humour."
In Letter XIII. Smollett settles down to give his correspondents a detailed description of the territory and people of Nice. At one time it was his intention to essay yet another branch of authorship and to produce a monograph on the natural history, antiquities, and topography of the town as the capital of this still unfamiliar littoral; with the late-born modesty of experience, however, he recoils from a task to which he does not feel his opportunities altogether adequate. [See p. 152.] A quarter of Smollett's original material would embarrass a "Guide"-builder of more recent pattern.
Whenever he got near a coast line Smollett could not refrain from expressing decided views. If he had lived at the present day he would infallibly have been a naval expert, better informed than most and more trenchant than all; but recognizably one of the species, artist in words and amateur of ocean-strategy. [Smollett had, of course, been surgeon's mate on H.M.S. Cumberland, 1740-41.] His first curiosity at Nice was raised concerning the port, the harbour, the galleys moored within the mole, and the naval policy of his Sardinian Majesty. His advice to Victor Amadeus was no doubt as excellent and as unregarded as the advice of naval experts generally is. Of more interest to us is his account of the slave-galleys. Among the miserable slaves whom "a British subject cannot behold without horror and compassion," he observes a Piedmontese count in Turkish attire, reminding the reader of one of Dumas' stories of a count among the forcats. To learn that there were always volunteer oarsmen among these poor outcasts is to reflect bitterly upon the average happiness of mankind. As to whether they wore much worse off than common seamen in the British navy of the period (who were only in name volunteers and had often no hope of discharge until they were worn out) under such commanders as Oakum or Whiffle [In Roderick Random.] is another question. For confirmation of Smollett's account in matters of detail the reader may turn to Aleman's Guzman d'Afarache, which contains a first-hand description of the life on board a Mediterranean slave galley, to Archenholtz's Tableau d'Italie of 1788, to Stirling Maxwell's Don John of Austria (1883, i. 95), and more pertinently to passages in the Life of a Galley Slave by Jean Marteilhe (edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1895). After serving in the docks at Dunkirk, Marteilhe, as a confirmed protestant, makes the journey in the chain-gang to Marseilles, and is only released after many delays in consequence of the personal interest and intervention of Queen Anne. If at the peace of Utrecht in 1713 we had only been as tender about the case of our poor Catalan allies! Nice at that juncture had just been returned by France to the safe-keeping of Savoy, so that in order to escape from French territory, Marteilhe sailed for Nice in a tartane, and not feeling too safe even there, hurried thence by Smollett's subsequent route across the Col di Tende. Many Europeans were serving at this time in the Turkish or Algerine galleys. But the most pitiable of all the galley slaves were those of the knights of St. John of Malta. "Figure to yourself," wrote Jacob Houblon [The Houblon Family, 1907 ii. 78. The accounts in Evelyn and Goldsmith are probably familiar to the reader.] about this year, "six or seven hundred dirty half-naked Turks in a small vessel chained to the oars, from which they are not allowed to stir, fed upon nothing but bad biscuit and water, and beat about on the most trifling occasion by their most inhuman masters, who are certainly more Turks than their slaves."
After several digressions, one touching the ancient Cemenelion, a subject upon which the Jonathan Oldbucks of Provence without exception are unconscionably tedious, Smollett settles down to a capable historical summary preparatory to setting his palette for a picture of the Nissards "as they are." He was, as we are aware, no court painter, and the cheerful colours certainly do not predominate. The noblesse for all their exclusiveness cannot escape his censure. He can see that they are poor (they are unable to boast more than two coaches among their whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes both vices unhesitatingly to their idleness and to their religion. In their singularly unemotional and coolly comparative outlook upon religion, how infinitely nearer were Fielding and Smollett than their greatest successors, Dickens and Thackeray, to the modern critic who observes that there is "at present not a single credible established religion in existence." To Smollett Catholicism conjures up nothing so vividly as the mask of comedy, while his native Calvinism stands for the corresponding mask of tragedy. [Walpole's dictum that Life was a comedy to those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, was of later date than this excellent mot of Smollett's.] Religion in the sunny spaces of the South is a "never-failing fund of pastime." The mass (of which he tells a story that reminds us of Lever's Micky Free) is just a mechanism invented by clever rogues for an elaborate system of petty larceny. And what a ferocious vein of cynicism underlies his strictures upon the perverted gallantry of the Mariolaters at Florence, or those on the two old Catholics rubbing their ancient gums against St. Peter's toe for toothache at Rome. The recurring emblems of crosses and gibbets simply shock him as mementoes of the Bagne.
At Rome he compares a presentment of St. Laurence to "a barbecued pig." "What a pity it is," he complains, "that the labours of painting should have been employed on such shocking objects of the martyrology," floggings, nailings, and unnailings "Peter writhing on the cross, Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows, Bartholomew flayed alive," and so on. His remarks upon the famous Pieta of Michael Angelo are frank to the point of brutality. The right of sanctuary and its "infamous prerogative," unheard of in England since the days of Henry VII., were still capable of affording a lesson to the Scot abroad. "I saw a fellow who had three days before murdered his wife in the last month of pregnancy, taking the air with great composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence." Smollett, it is clear, for all his philosophy, was no degenerate representative of the blind, unreasoning seventeenth-century detestation of "Popery and wooden shoes."
Smollett is one of the first to describe a "conversazione," and in illustration of the decadence of Italian manners, it is natural that he should have a good deal to tell us about the Cicisbeatura. His account of the cicisbeo and his duties, whether in Nice, Florence, or Rome, is certainly one of the most interesting that we have. Before Smollett and his almost contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England, though the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later. Most of the "classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme. de Stael, Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant curiosity on such themes was as lively as Lady Mary Montagu had found it in the case of fair Circassians and Turkish harems just thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler. Hence the word came to be applied punningly to the bow depending from a clouded cane or ornamental crook. In sixteenth-century Spain, home of the sedan and the caballero galante, the original term was bracciere. In Venice the form was cavaliere servente. For a good note on the subject, see Sismondi's Italian Republics, ed. William Boulting, 1907, p. 793.] Like so much in the shapes and customs of Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a thing of the past.