Travels through France Italy | Page 5

"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. He had no
extraneous means of support. He had neither patron, pension, property,
nor endowment, inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the
burden of a large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided
himself upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a position to
enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to the crowd of
inferior denizens