In This
Connection, Too, The Itinerant Divine Gave The Travelling Doctor
A Very Nasty Fall.
Meeting the latter at Turin, just as Smollett
was about to turn his face homewards, in March 1765, Sterne wrote
of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus:
"The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from
Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and
jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or
distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the
account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote
later on, "in the grand portico of the Pantheon - he was just
coming out of it. ''Tis nothing but a huge cockpit,' said he - 'I
wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de Medici,' replied
I - for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen
foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet,
without the least provocation in nature. I popp'd upon Smelfungus
again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful
adventures had he to tell, 'wherein he spoke of moving accidents
by flood and field, and of the cannibals which each other eat,
the Anthropophagi'; he had been flayed alive, and bedevil'd, and
used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at.
'I'll tell it,' cried Smelfungus, 'to the world.' 'You had better
tell it,' said I, 'to your physician.'"
To counteract the ill effects of "spleen and jaundice" and
exhibit the spirit of genteel humour and universal benevolence in
which a man of sensibility encountered the discomforts of the
road, the incorrigible parson Laurence brought out his own
Sentimental Journey. Another effect of Smollett's book was to
whet his own appetite for recording the adventures of the open
road. So that but for Travels through France and Italy we might
have had neither a Sentimental Journey nor a Humphry Clinker. If
all the admirers of these two books would but bestir themselves
and look into the matter, I am sure that Sterne's only too clever
assault would be relegated to its proper place and assessed at
its right value as a mere boutade. The borrowed contempt of
Horace Walpole and the coterie of superficial dilettanti, from
which Smollett's book has somehow never wholly recovered, could
then easily be outflanked and the Travels might well be in
reasonable expectation of coming by their own again.
II
In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the
special and somewhat exceptional conditions under which the
Travel Letters of Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have
seen, was one of the first professional men of all work in
letters upon a considerable scale who subsisted entirely upon the
earnings of his own pen. He had no extraneous means of support.
He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment,
inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the burden of a
large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself
upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a
position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to
the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 4 of 276
Words from 1541 to 2097
of 143308
