Travels through France Italy | Page 3

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Travels Through France And Italy
By Tobias Smollett

INTRODUCTION
By
Thomas Seccombe
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