Read Online The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins - Free Book Online Page A

have been so steadily and ruthlessly condemned. They may be poor fiction, butting in and staying on like an insensitive uninvited guest, but they are reasonably good Smollett.
    The objections to Miss Williams go deeper. She was mother—or Moll Flanders was—of a tainted brood of young women with hearts of gold and a powerful narrative style, who are forced usually by their good looks and by the black looks of Fate, into careers which give them unique opportunities both to display their generosity and to acquire material for reminiscence.
    In the famous second edition of
Peregrine Pickle
Smollett owns with contrition that in one or two instances he did give way too much to suggestions of personal resentment. But he defies the whole world to prove that he “was ever guilty of an act of malice, ingratitude or dishonour,” a remark that leads one to
    wonder whether Smollett had the least notion of what the rest of the world meant by any of those things. Which was very much what Hazlitt was hinting at when he said “that there was a
crude
conception of generosity in some of his (Smollett’s) characters ”; a generosity of which Fielding’s were incapable.
    During his middle years Smollett was working with that energetic vivacity of mind that at the time is so difficult to distinguish from genius. The cry of “overproduction,” which is the tribute that the half sterile always pay to the fully fertile, was raised. Smollett was accused of having “journeymen authors ready to turn out tragedy, comedy, farces, history, novels, voyages, treatises on midwifery and in physics, and all kinds of polite letters.”
    Certainly in the twenty-three years between 1748, when he published
Roderick Random
, and 1771, when he published
Humphry Clinker
and died, he wrote enough to establish a myth of the magnitude, if not the mystery, of the myth of Bacon.
    He followed
Roderick Random
three years later with
Peregrine Pickle
. Two years later he published
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
, which, if he had not published
The Adventures of an Atom
would have had the distinction of being his most unpleasant work. Another two years, and he had translated the whole of
Don Quixote
. The year following he became editor of the
Critical Review
, worked hard and was imprisoned for his too active editorship. There he wrote
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves
. But hard as he had been working he found to his disgust that someone had been working harder. Hume had already published two volumes of his
History of England
. Smollett therefore accepted thechallenge that Hume had no thought of issuing, read three hundred volumes in two years (so he said), produced four volumes of his history, cornered the market and published another four volumes seven years later. The year after the last volume was published he produced
A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages
, in seven volumes, and after two years of rest another compilation of similar hugeness and uselessness,
The Present State of All Nations
, in eight volumes. During all this time he was a leader writer on the Tory paper,
The Briton
, and on the staff of the
Critical Review
.
    But strain as he could, Smollett never managed to run level with life. He was perpetually in debt, troubled by enemies and irreparably damaged by the death of his daughter. By the year 1763 he would have needed two years’ start to keep ahead of his affairs.
    We might call his youth romantic for want of a better name; and his middle age tragic for want of a worse one. For his whole existence was fitting into just those moulds that Fielding had fitted some fifteen years or so before. When it seemed at last as though Fate had decided that Smollett should conform to the popular impression of a novelist as a human factory working sweated hours on low pay, Smollett went abroad, a broken man too ill to do more than to write two volumes of
Travels through France and