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.
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