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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