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.
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.
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