Travels through France Italy | Page 4

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