The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete

Capítulo 1

INTRODUCTION

The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett’s third novel, was

given to the world in 1753. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her

daughter, the Countess of Bute, over a year later [January 1st, 1755],

remarked that “my friend Smollett . . . has certainly a talent for

invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work.” Lady

Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly

think of as Smollett’s was the ability to work over his own experience

into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows

comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett’s

vigorous personality, which in his earlier works was present to give

life and interest to almost every chapter, were it to describe a street

brawl, a ludicrous situation, a whimsical character, or with venomous

prejudice to gibbet some enemy. This individuality—the peculiar spirit

of the author which can be felt rather than described—is present in the

dedication of Fathom to Doctor ———, who is no other than Smollett

himself, and a candid revelation of his character, by the way, this

dedication contains. It is present, too, in the opening chapters, which

show, likewise, in the picture of Fathom’s mother, something of the

author’s peculiar “talent for invention.” Subsequently, however, there

is no denying that the Smollett invention and the Smollett spirit both

flag. And yet, in a way, Fathom displays more invention than any of the

author’s novels; it is based far less than any other on personal

experience. Unfortunately such thorough-going invention was not suited

to Smollett’s genius. The result is, that while uninteresting as a

novel of contemporary manners, Fathom has an interest of its own in

that it reveals a new side of its author. We think of Smollett,

generally, as a rambling storyteller, a rational, unromantic man of the

world, who fills his pages with his own oddly-metamorphosed

acquaintances and experiences. The Smollett of Count Fathom, on the

contrary, is rather a forerunner of the romantic school, who has

created a tolerably organic tale of adventure out of his own brain.

Though this is notably less readable than the author’s earlier works,

still the wonder is that when the man is so far “off his beat,” he

should yet know so well how to meet the strange conditions which

confront him. To one whose idea of Smollett’s genius is formed entirely

by Random and Pickle and Humphry Clinker, Ferdinand Count Fathom will

offer many surprises.

The first of these is the comparative lifelessness of the book. True,

here again are action and incident galore, but generally unaccompanied

by that rough Georgian hurly-burly, common in Smollett, which is so

interesting to contemplate from a comfortable distance, and which goes

so far towards making his fiction seem real. Nor are the characters,

for the most part, life-like enough to be interesting. There is an

apparent exception, to be sure, in the hero’s mother, already

mentioned, the hardened camp-follower, whom we confidently expect to

become vitalised after the savage fashion of Smollett’s characters.

But, alas! we have no chance to learn the lady’s style of conversation,

for the few words that come from her lips are but partially

characteristic; we have only too little chance to learn her manners and

customs. In the fourth chapter, while she is making sure with her

dagger that all those on the field of battle whom she wishes to rifle

are really dead, an officer of the hussars, who has been watching her

lucrative progress, unfeelingly puts a brace of bullets into the lady’s

brain, just as she raises her hand to smite him to the heart. Perhaps

it is as well that she is thus removed before our disappointment at the

non-fulfilment of her promise becomes poignant. So far as we may judge

from the other personages of Count Fathom, even this interesting Amazon

would sooner or later have turned into a wooden figure, with a label

giving the necessary information as to her character.

Such certainly is her son, Fathom, the hero of the book. Because he is

placarded, “Shrewd villain of monstrous inhumanity,” we are fain to

accept him for what his creator intended; but seldom in word or deed is

he a convincingly real villain. His friend and foil, the noble young

Count de Melvil, is no more alive than he; and equally wooden are

Joshua, the high-minded, saint-like Jew, and that tedious, foolish Don

Diego. Neither is the heroine alive, the peerless Monimia, but then, in

her case, want of vitality is not surprising; the presence of it would

amaze us. If she were a woman throbbing with life, she would be

different from Smollett’s other heroines. The “second lady” of the

melodrama, Mademoiselle de Melvil, though by no means vivified, is yet

more real than her sister-in-law.

The fact that they are mostly inanimate figures is not the only

surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise

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

in a censorious age; and an author cannot take too much precaution to

anticipate the prejudice, misapprehension, and temerity of malice,

ignorance, and presumption.

I therefore think it incumbent upon me to give some previous intimation

of the plan which I have executed in the subsequent performance, that I

may not be condemned upon partial evidence; and to whom can I with more

propriety appeal in my explanation than to you, who are so well

acquainted with all the sentiments and emotions of my breast?

A novel is 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 general occurrence, to which

every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be

executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal

personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the

clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his

own importance.

Almost all the heroes of this kind, who have hitherto succeeded on the

English stage, are characters of transcendent worth, conducted through

the vicissitudes of fortune, to that goal of happiness, which ever

ought to be the repose of extraordinary desert.—Yet the same principle

by which we rejoice at the remuneration of merit, will teach us to

relish the disgrace and discomfiture of vice, which is always an

example of extensive use and influence, because it leaves a deep

impression of terror upon the minds of those who were not confirmed in

the pursuit of morality and virtue, and, while the balance wavers,

enables the right scale to preponderate.

In the drama, which is a more limited field of invention, the chief

personage is often the object of our detestation and abhorrence; and we

are as well pleased to see the wicked schemes of a Richard blasted, and

the perfidy of a Maskwell exposed, as to behold a Bevil happy, and an

Edward victorious.

The impulses of fear, which is the most violent and interesting of all

the passions, remain longer than any other upon the memory; and for one

that is allured to virtue, by the contemplation of that peace and

happiness which it bestows, a hundred are deterred from the practice of

vice, by that infamy and punishment to which it is liable, from the

laws and regulations of mankind.

Let me not, therefore, be condemned for having chosen my principal

character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud, when I declare my

purpose is to set him up as a beacon for the benefit of the

unexperienced and unwary, who, from the perusal of these memoirs, may

learn to avoid the manifold snares with which they are continually

surrounded in the paths of life; while those who hesitate on the brink

of iniquity may be terrified from plunging into that irremediable gulf,

by surveying the deplorable fate of Ferdinand Count Fathom.

That the mind might not be fatigued, nor the imagination disgusted, by

a succession of vicious objects, I have endeavoured to refresh the

attention with occasional incidents of a different nature; and raised

up a virtuous character, in opposition to the adventurer, with a view

to amuse the fancy, engage the affection, and form a striking contrast

which might heighten the expression, and give a relief to the moral of

the whole.