Many pens have been burnished this year of grace for the purpose
of celebrating with befitting honour the second centenary of the
birth of Henry Fielding; but it is more than doubtful if, when
the right date occurs in March 1921, anything like the same
alacrity will be shown to commemorate one who was for many years,
and by such judges as Scott, Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens,
considered Fielding's complement and absolute co-equal (to say
the least) in literary achievement. Smollett's fame, indeed,
seems to have fallen upon an unprosperous curve. The coarseness
of his fortunate rival is condoned, while his is condemned
without appeal. Smollett's value is assessed without
discrimination at that of his least worthy productions, and the
historical value of his work as a prime modeller of all kinds of
new literary material is overlooked. Consider for a moment as not
wholly unworthy of attention his mere versatility as a man of
letters. Apart from Roderick Random and its successors, which
gave him a European fame, he wrote a standard history, and a
standard version of Don Quixote (both of which held their ground
against all comers for over a century). He created both satirical
and romantic types, he wrote two fine-spirited lyrics, and
launched the best Review and most popular magazine of his day. He
was the centre of a literary group, the founder to some extent of
a school of professional writers, of which strange and novel
class, after the "Great Cham of Literature," as he called Dr.
Johnson, he affords one of the first satisfactory specimens upon
a fairly large scale. He is, indeed, a more satisfactory, because
a more independent, example of the new species than the Great
Cham himself. The late Professor Beljame has shown us how the
milieu was created in which, with no subvention, whether from a
patron, a theatre, a political paymaster, a prosperous newspaper
or a fashionable subscription-list, an independent writer of the
mid-eighteenth century, provided that he was competent, could
begin to extort something more than a bare subsistence from the
reluctant coffers of the London booksellers. For the purpose of
such a demonstration no better illustration could possibly be
found, I think, than the career of Dr. Tobias Smollett. And yet,
curiously enough, in the collection of critical monographs so
well known under the generic title of "English Men of Letters" - a
series, by the way, which includes Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria
Edgeworth - no room or place has hitherto been found for Smollett
any more than for Ben Jonson, both of them, surely, considerable
Men of Letters in the very strictest and most representative
sense of the term. Both Jonson and Smollett were to an unusual
extent centres of the literary life of their time; and if the
great Ben had his tribe of imitators and adulators, Dr. Toby also
had his clan of sub-authors, delineated for us by a master hand
in the pages of Humphry Clinker. To make Fielding the centre-piece
of a group reflecting the literature of his day would be an
artistic impossibility. It would be perfectly easy in the case of
Smollett, who was descried by critics from afar as a Colossus
bestriding the summit of the contemporary Parnassus.
Whatever there may be of truth in these observations upon the
eclipse of a once magical name applies with double force to that
one of all Smollett's books which has sunk farthest in popular
disesteem. Modern editors have gone to the length of
excommunicating Smollett's Travels altogether from the fellowship
of his Collective Works. Critic has followed critic in
denouncing the book as that of a "splenetic" invalid. And yet it
is a book for which all English readers have cause to be
grateful, not only as a document on Smollett and his times, not
only as being in a sense the raison d'etre of the Sentimental
Journey, and the precursor in a very special sense of Humphry
Clinker, but also as being intrinsically an uncommonly readable
book, and even, I venture to assert, in many respects one of
Smollett's best. Portions of the work exhibit literary quality of
a high order: as a whole it represents a valuable because a
rather uncommon view, and as a literary record of travel it is
distinguished by a very exceptional veracity.
I am not prepared to define the differentia of a really first-rate
book of travel. Sympathy is important; but not indispensable,
or Smollett would be ruled out of court at once. Scientific
knowledge, keen observation, or intuitive power of discrimination
go far. To enlist our curiosity or enthusiasm or to excite our
wonder are even stronger recommendations. Charm of personal
manner, power of will, anthropological interest, self-effacement
in view of some great objects - all these qualities have made
travel-books live. One knows pretty nearly the books that one is
prepared to re-read in this department of literature. Marco Polo,
Herodotus, a few sections in Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the
early travellers in Palestine, Commodore Byron's Travels, Curzon
and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Mungo Park, Dubois,
Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of Borrow (fact or
fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace,
The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine,
The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have
run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would
not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding
works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should
we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is
good reason to hope, is only one of suspended animation.
To come to surer ground, it is a fact worth noting that each of
the four great prose masters of the third quarter of the
eighteenth century tried his hand at a personal record of travel.
Fielding came first in 1754 with his Journal of a Voyage to
Lisbon.
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