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.
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