The Expedition of Humphry Clinker [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION By common consent The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is Smollett's masterpiece, the one novcl which can bc set beside Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy. Even then, one must distinguish. With all its tediousness, Clarissa Harlowe achieves a tragic dignity beyond the attainment of Smollett. Despite its digressions, Tom Jones is a model of fictional archi-tecture as Humphry Clinker is nót. Amid its buffoonery Tristram Shandy springs from a kind of psychological insight not exhibited in the pages of the Scottish humorist. But there is in Humphry Clinker a compensatory fullness and variety of life which is in somé respects beyond even the broad and tolerant vision of Fielding. It contains more of the eighteenth-century world than do its compeers. If Tom Jones has an enormous dramatis personae and is a 'journey5 book, Clarissa Harlowe and Tristram Shandy each confine themselves to a relatively small group of characters and to a restricted topography. But though Tom in his wanderings covers a good deal of England, he is not curious about the way other people live as Smollett was curious; and if Fielding's imagination created Squire Western, Partridge, Lady Bellaston, and Molly Seagrim, there were whole categories of persons who apparently did not interest him. But in Humphry Clinker we not only travel the roads and live in the cities as did Tom Jones, but we journey into Scotland, catch amusing glimpses of life in Wales and on the Welsh bordér, discover what the American wars were like to a professional soldier, bump into all sorts and conditions of men, and absorb a vast amount of pleasant information concerning life and manners in outlyihg portions of the British Isles. Humphry Clinker is a crowded book, not only because it contains a vast gallery of portraits, actual and imagined, but alsó because the author was eager for readers to share his information about the whole of Great Britain. Humphry Clinker has its 'strong' passages, though whether they are any stronger than much twentieth-century íiction may be doubted. Even the hearty eighteenth century seems to have objected that parts of Smollett were 'low,' so that, revising Peregrine Pickle> he felt compelled to sav that he had expunged