I
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. Twelve years later was
published Smollett's Travels through France and Italy. Then, in 1768,
Sterne's Sentimental Journey; followed in 1775 by Johnson's Journey to
the Hebrides. Each of the four--in which beneath the apparel of the man
of letters we can discern respectively the characteristics of police
magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist--enjoyed a fair amount of
popularity in its day. Fielding's Journal had perhaps the least
immediate success of the four. Sterne's Journey unquestionably had the
most. The tenant of "Shandy Hall," as was customary in the first heyday
of "Anglomania," went to Paris to ratify his successes, and the
resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action,
secured the vote of London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this
particular "judicium Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui
generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete
form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century
rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small
masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's
Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity of the "Ossianite"
press, it fully justified the assumption of the booksellers that it
would prove a "sound" book. It is full of sensible observations, and is
written in Johnson's most scholarly, balanced, and dignified style. Few
can read it without a sense of being repaid, if only by the portentous
sentence in which the author celebrates his arrival at the shores of
Loch Ness, where he reposes upon "a bank such as a writer of romance
might have delighted to feign," and reflects that a "uniformity of
barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller; that it
is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and
that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the
imagination nor enlarge the understanding." Fielding's contribution to
geography has far less solidity and importance, but it discovers to not
a few readers an unfeigned charm that is not to be found in the pages
of either Sterne or Johnson. A thoughtless fragment suffices to show
the writer in his true colours as one of the most delightful fellows in
our literature, and to convey just unmistakably to all good men and
true the rare and priceless sense of human fellowship.
There remain the Travels through France and Italy, by T. Smollett,
M.D., and though these may not exhibit the marmoreal glamour of
Johnson, or the intimate fascination of Fielding, or the essential
literary quality which permeates the subtle dialogue and artful
vignette of Sterne, yet I shall endeavour to show, not without some
hope of success among the fair-minded, that the Travels before us are
fully deserving of a place, and that not the least significant, in the
quartette.
The temporary eclipse of their fame I attribute, first to the studious
depreciation of Sterne and Walpole, and secondly to a refinement of
snobbishness on the part of the travelling crowd, who have an uneasy
consciousness that to listen to common sense, such as Smollett's, in
matters of connoisseurship, is tantamount to confessing oneself a
Galilean of the outermost court. 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.