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Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon-Part2_HENRY FIELDING(1707-1754)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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have no such pretensions to indulgence; they lie for lying sake,

or in order insolently to impose the most monstrous



improbabilities and absurdities upon their readers on their own

authority; treating them as some fathers treat children, and as



other fathers do laymen, exacting their belief of whatever they

relate, on no other foundation than their own authority, without



ever taking the pains or adapting their lies to human credulity,

and of calculating them for the meridian of a common



understanding; but, with as much weakness as wickedness, and with

more impudence often than either, they assert facts contrary to



the honor of God, to the visible order of the creation, to the

known laws of nature, to the histories of former ages, and to the



experience of our own, and which no man can at once understand

and believe. If it should be objected (and it can nowhere be



objected better than where I now write,[12] as there is nowhere

more pomp of bigotry) that whole nations have been firm believers



in such most absurd suppositions, I reply, the fact is not true.

They have known nothing of the matter, and have believed they



knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matter of doubt but

that the pope and his clergy might teach any of those Christian



heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametrically

opposite to their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster,



Confucius, and Mahomet, not only with certain and immediate

success, but without one Catholic in a thousand knowing he had



changed his religion.

[12] At Lisbon.



What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list

of stupid, senseless, incredible lies upon paper, would be



difficult to determine, did not Vanity present herself so

immediately as the adequate cause. The vanity of knowing more



than other men is, perhaps, besides hunger, the only inducement

to writing, at least to publishing, at all. Why then should not



the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of having seen what

no man ever did or will see but himself? This is the true source



of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, and sometimes, I

believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, of a



kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are

sometimes liable, when, instead of filling their pages with



monsters which nobody hath ever seen, and with adventures which

never have, nor could possibly have, happened to them, waste



their time and paper with recording things and facts of so common

a kind, that they challenge no other right of being remembered



than as they had the honor of having happened to the author, to

whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens to himself.



Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this

kind, that he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity



should he omit the minutest thing in the detail of his journal.

That the fact is true is sufficient to give it a place there,



without any consideration whether it is capable of pleasing or

surprising, of diverting or informing, the reader. I have seen a



play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Behn's or of Mrs.

Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely



ridiculed. An ignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know

not what reason, the conduct of a young nobleman in his travels



is committed, and who is sent abroad to show my lord the world,

of which he knows nothing himself, before his departure from a



town, calls for his Journal to record the goodness of the wine

and tobacco, with other articles of the same importance, which



are to furnish the materials of a voyage at his return home. The

humor, it is true, is here carried very far; and yet, perhaps,



very little beyond what is to be found in writers who profess no




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