Born, at Clonmel, 24 Nov. 1713. At school at Halifax, 1723–31. Matriculated Jesus College, Cambridge, 1732; Sizarship, July 1733; Scholar, July 1734; B.A., Jan. 1736; M.A., 1740. Ordained Deacon, March 1736; Priest, Aug. 1738. Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, Yorks., 1738. Prebendary of York Cathedral, Jan. 1741. Married Elizabeth Lumley, 30 March 1741. Vicar of Stillington, 1741. Curate of Coxwold, Yorks., 1760. Lived mainly in France, 1762–67. Died, in London, 18 March 1768. Buried in Burial Ground of St. George’s, Hanover Square. Works: “The Case of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath considered,” 1747; “The Abuses of Conscience,” 1750; “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy” (9 vols.), 1759–67; “The Sermons of Mr. Yorick” (7 vols.), 1760–69; “A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick” (2 vols.), 1768. Posthumous: “The History of a Good Warm Watch-coat,” 1769; “Letters … to his Most Intimate Friends,” ed. by his daughter (3 vols.), 1775; “Letters from Yorick to Eliza,” 1775; “Letters to his Friends on various occasions,” 1775; “Original Letters, never before published,” 1788; “Seven Letters written by Sterne and his Friends, hitherto unpublished” (priv. ptd.), 1844. Collected Works: ed. by G. Saintsbury (6 vols.), 1894. Life: by P. H. Fitzgerald, 1864.

Personal

  “Tristram Shandy” is still a greater object of admiration, the man as well as the book. One is invited to dinner, where he dines, a fortnight beforehand. His portrait is done by Reynolds, and now engraving. “Tristram Shandy,” Dodsley gives £700 for a second edition, and two new volumes not yet written; and to-morrow will come out two volumes of “Sermons” by him. Your friend, Mr. Hall has printed two Lyric Epistles, one to my Cousin Shandy on his coming to town, the other to the grown gentlewomen, the Misses of York: they seem to me to be absolute madness.

  It having been observed that there was little hospitality in London;—Johnson: “Nay, Sir, any man who has a name, or who has the power of pleasing, will be generally invited in London. The man, Sterne, I have been told, has had engagements for three months.” Goldsmith: “And a very dull fellow.” Johnson: “Why, no, Sir.”

  The fellow himself is an irrecoverable scoundrel.

  Lord Ossory told us that the famous Dr. Sterne dyed that morning; he seem’d to lament him very much. Lord Eglinton said (but not in a ludicrous manner), that he had taken his “Sentimental Journey.”

	Shall pride a heap of sculptured marble raise,
	Some worthless, unmourned, titled fool to praise,
	And shall we not by one poor gravestone learn
	Where genius, wit, and humor sleep with Sterne?

  The celebrated writer Sterne, after being long the idol of this town, died in a mean lodging without a single friend who felt interest in his fate except Becket, his bookseller, who was the only person that attended his interment. He was buried in a graveyard near Tyburn, belonging to the parish of Marylebone, and the corpse being marked by some of the resurrection men (as they are called), was taken up soon afterwards and carried to an anatomy professor of Cambridge. A gentleman who was present at the dissection told me, he recognized Sterne’s face the moment he saw the body.

  In the month of January, 1768, we set off for London. We stopped for some time at Almack’s house, in Pall-mall. My master afterwards took Sir James Gray’s house in Clifford-street, who was going ambassador to Spain. He now began housekeeping, hired a French cook, house-maid, kitchen-maid, and kept a great deal of the best company. About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond-street. He was sometimes called Tristram Shandy, and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentleman’s. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him: the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. “John,” said my master, “go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day.” I went, returned, and said, “I went to Mr. Sterne’s lodging—the mistress opened the door—I enquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five, he said, “Now it is come!” He put up his hand, as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

  We are well acquainted with Sterne’s features and personal appearance, to which he himself frequently alludes. He was tall and thin, with a hectic and consumptive appearance. His features, though capable of expressing with peculiar effect the sentimental emotions by which he was often affected, had also a shrewd, humorous, and sarcastic character, proper to the wit and the satirist, and not unlike that which predominates in the portraits of Voltaire. His conversation was animated, and witty; but Johnson complained that it was marked by licence, better suiting the company of the Lord of Crazy Castle, than of the great moralist. It has been said, and probably with truth, that his temper was variable and unequal, the natural consequence of an irritable bodily frame, and continued bad health. But we will not readily believe that the parent of Uncle Toby could be a harsh, or habitually bad-humoured man. Sterne’s letters to his friends, and especially to his daughter, breathe all the fondness of affection; and his resources, such as they were, seem to have been always at the command of those whom he loved.

  So infamous was his private character, that when he entered the pulpit to preach in York Minister, of which he was a prebend, many of the congregation rose from their seats and left the cathedral. His conduct and temper so much provoked his wife, a loving and patient woman, that she was compelled to live away from him. With health so broken that his continued existence appeared almost miraculous, he entered into an intrigue with a married woman, and, at the age of 54, openly speculating on the prospect of marrying her, when his own wife as well as the lady’s husband should die! The only redeeming feeling in his life, was his devoted love for his daughter, for whom, however, he made not the slightest provision. He died, in lodgings in London, and his attendants robbed him of his gold shirt-buttons as he lay helpless in bed. His letters, which fully expressed his profligacy, were published, seven years after his death, by his daughter—so reduced to poverty by his extravagance that she was compelled to barter his reputation for bread. It is almost inexplicable how such a man as Sterne could have lived so loosely and produced such a pure-minded original as My Uncle Toby, and such a faithful serving man as Corporal Trim, maternal grandfather to Sam Weller, in all probability.

  His patient courtship shows that he was truly in love with his wife. Their marriage, in the face of inauspicious circumstances, proves that they were both in earnest; and his frank acknowledgment, a year after, that he was tired of his conjugal partner, argues no uncommon experience, but a rare and unjustifiable candor.

  And Irishman by birth, and a Yorkshire clergyman by profession, but with a somewhat unclerical, if not a cracked reputation.

  The body of the unfortunate Mr. Sterne was but a poor prize for purposes of dissection. He speaks of his spider legs himself, and the portrait and description of him give one the idea of a lean and emaciated presence.

  What a close to Yorick’s strange career, which began in wanderings, and brought him back thus finally to his old University! There is even a grim lurid Shandeism over the scene, a charnel-house humour in that recognition of the strange lean Yorick features—more lean in death—upon the dissecting table. But the evidence on which the story is founded seems too convincing not to be accepted. There had been many indistinct shapes of the statement—some improbable—but all pointing indistinctly in that direction.

  Hair-brained, light-hearted, and sanguine,—pleased with himself, his whims, follies, and foibles,—he treated misfortune as a passing guest, and even extracted amusement from it while it stayed. He tells us that it was by mirth that he fenced against his physical infirmities, persuaded that every time a man laughed he added something to his fragment of life; and so at Paris he laughed till he cried, and believed that his lungs had been improved by the process as much as by the change of air.

  As to the nature of Sterne’s love-affairs I have come, though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, Platonic. In saying this, however, I am by no means prepared to assert that they would all of them have passed muster before a prosaic and unsentimental British jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse…. But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally “innocent” is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate; and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the overindulgence of another which stood in at least as much need of chastenment. If his love-affairs stopped short of the gratification of the senses, they involved ar perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-æthesia which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of his art.

  This burial-ground of St. George’s Hanover Square, situated in Oxford Street, between Albion and Stanhope Streets, is not so wretched and deserted as Mr. Traill describes it. It is green and well cared for. Entirely shut out from the streets by high walls and houses, its very existence unknown to the thousands who pass by it daily, it is as quiet, secluded, and peaceful as a country churchyard, and in refreshing contrast with some of the modern garish cemeteries of the metropolis. Sterne’s memorial, a high but plain flat stone, stands next to the centre of the west wall of the grounds, under a spreading flourishing old tree, whose lower branches and leaves almost touch it. The inscription is worth preserving, and is here given entire:—

	“Alas, Poor Yorick.
	Near to this Place
	Lies the body of
	The Reverend Laurence Sterne
	Dyed September 13 1768
	Aged 53 Years.
	Ah! Molliter, ossa quiescant.
	If a sound head, warm heart and breast humane,
	Unsully’d worth, and soul without a stain,
	If mental powers could ever justly claim
	The well won tribute of immortal fame,
	Sterne was the Man who with gigantic stride
	Mow’d down luxuriant follies far and wide,
	Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind
	Unseal’d to him the Springs that move the mind.
	What did it boot him, Ridicul’d, abus’d
	By foes insulted and by prudes accus’d.
	In his, mild reader view thy future fate,
	Like him despise what t’were a sin to hate.

This monumental stone was erected to the memory of the deceased by two Brother Masons, for although he did not live to be a member of their Society, yet all his uncomparable Performances evidently prove him to have acted by Rule and Square; they rejoice in this opportunity of perpetuating his high and unapproachable character to after ages.—W. & S.”

  Of all the classical English writers, there is no other, perhaps, who fares so hardly in the present age as Sterne. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that his faults, both as man and author, are the very faults for which this age has the least charity, and that his virtues, both as man and author, are those which at present are least esteemed. Sterne is undeniably loose, sometimes even indecent, in his writings, and, viewed in the light of a parish priest, he falls infinitely below what is now required of a person in that position. The Rev. Laurence Sterne probably never in his life presided at a mothers’ meeting, or held a week-day service, or fasted for the sake of religion. Moreover, Sterne’s reputation has received some savage thrusts from writers who were competent to do it great injury…. Above all, Sterne failed to take either himself or the world seriously; and that, from our present point of view, is almost an unpardonable fault. If Sterne had formulated his paganism in a system, writing two or three dull, serious volumes about it; if, instead of flirting with every pretty woman who came in his way, he had simply broken two or three hearts for his own edification, after the manner of Goethe,—if such had been his course, we would find it easier to appreciate him.

  At Coxwold, fourteen miles from York and in the deeper depths of the shire, that we find many remaining objects that were associated with his work and with that portion of his life which chiefly concerns the literary world…. Within the hamlet we find a low-eaved road-side inn, and by it the shaded green where rural festivals were held, and where, to celebrate the coronation of George III., Sterne had an ox roasted whole and served with great quantities of ale to his parishioners. Just beyond, Sterne’s church stands intact upon a gentle eminence, overlooking a lovely pastoral landscape bounded by verdant hills. The church dates from the fifteenth century and is a pleasing structure of perpendicular Gothic style, with a shapely octagonal tower embellished with fretted pinnacles and a parapet of graceful design. One window has been filled with stained glass, but Sterne’s pulpit remains, and the interior of the edifice is scarcely changed since he preached here his quaint sermons. The walls are plain; the low ceiling is divided by beams whose intersections are marked by grotesque bosses; the whole effect is depressing, and to the sensitive “Yorick”—haunted as he was by habitual dread that his ministrations might provoke a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage—it must have been dismal indeed. Among the effigied tombs of the Fauconbergs which line the chancel we find that of Sterne’s friend who gave him this living. Beyond the church and near the highway stands the quaint and picturesque old edifice where dwelt Sterne during the eight famous years of his life. In his letters he calls it Castle Shandy, and in all the countryside it is now known as Shandy Hall, shandy meaning in the local dialect crack-brained. It is a long, rambling, low-eaved fabric, with many heavy gables and chimneys, and steep roofs of tiles.

  Sterne’s reasoning faculty was incapable of controlling his constitutional sensitiveness to pain and pleasure. His deficiency in self-control induced a condition of moral apathy, and was the cause alike of the indecency and of the sentimentality which abounded in “Tristram Shandy” and the “Sentimental Journey.” Both the indecency and the sentimentality, faithfully and without artifice reflected Sterne’s emotional nature. The indelicate innuendoes which he foists on sedate words and situations, and the tears that he represented himself as shedding over dead asses and caged starlings, had an equally spontaneous origin in what was in him the normal state of his nerves. In itself—with the slightest possible reference to the exciting object—his sensibility evoked a pleasurable nervous excitement, and the fulness of the gratification that it generated in his own being discouraged him from seeking to translate its suggestions into act. The divorce of sensibility from practical benevolence will always justify charges of insincerity. All that can be pleaded in extenuation in Sterne’s case is that he made no secret that his conduct was the sport of his emotional impulses, and, obeying no other promptings, was guided by no active moral sentiment. Gravity, he warned his readers, was foreign to his nature. Morality, which ordinarily checks the free play of feeling and passion by the exercise of virtuous reason, lay, he admitted, outside his sphere. Such infirmities signally unfitted him for the vocation of a teacher of religion, but his confessions remove hypocrisy from the list of his offences. His declared temperament renders it matter for surprise not that he so often disfigured his career as a husband and author by a wanton defiance of the accepted moral canons, but that he achieved so indisputable a nobility of sentiment as in his creation of Uncle Toby, and so unselfish a devotion as in his relations with his daughter. He was no “scamp” in any accepted use of the term, as Thackeray designates him. He was a volatile, self-centred, morally apathetic man of genius, who was not destitute of generous instincts.

Tristram Shandy, 1759–67

  This day is published, printed on superfine writing paper, and a new letter, in two volumes, price 5s., neatly bound, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. York. Printed for and sold by John Hinxham (successor to the late Mr. Hilyard), Bookseller in Stonegate; J. Dodsley, in Pall-mall; and Mr. Cooper, in Paternoster-row, London; and by all the booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland.

  Never poor wight of a Dedicator had less hopes from his Dedication than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye-corner of the kingdom, and in a retir’d thatch’d house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by Mirth; being firmly persuaded, that every time a man smiles,—but much more so when he laughs,—it adds something to this Fragment of Life. I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this Book by taking it—(not under your Protection,—it must protect itself, but)—into the country with you; where, if I am ever told it has made you smile, or can conceive it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain,—I shall think myself as happy as a Minister of State;—perhaps, much happier than any one (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.

	I am, great sir,
	(and, what is more to your honour)
	I am, good sir,
	Your Well-wisher, and
	most humble Fellow-subject.
	THE AUTHOR.

  At present nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance: it is a kind of novel, called “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy;” the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backward…. It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever attempted and missed.

  There is much good fun in it, and humour sometimes hit and sometimes missed.

  However, I pride myself in having warmly recommended “Tristram Shandy” to all the best company in town, except that of Arthur’s. I was charged in a very grave assembly, as Doctor Newton can tell him, for a particular patronizer of the work, and how I acquitted myself of the imputation, the said Doctor can tell him…. If Mr. Sterne will take me with all my infirmities I shall be glad of the honour of being well known to him; and he has the additional recommendation of being your friend.

  “Bless me,” cries the man of industry, “now you speak of an epic poem, you shall see an excellent farce. Here it is; dip into it where you will, it will be found replete with true modern humour. Strokes, Sir: it is filled with strokes of wit and satire in every line.” Do you call all these dashes of the pen strokes, replied I, for I must confess I can see no other? “And pray, Sir,” returned he, “what do you call them? Do you see anything good now-a-days that is not filled with strokes—and dashes?—Sir, a well-placed dash makes half the wit of our writers of modern humour. I bought the last season a piece that had no other merit upon earth than nine hundred and ninety-five breaks, seventy-two ha ha’s, three good things and a garter. And yet it played off, and bounced, and cracked, and made more sport than a fire-work.”… There are several very dull fellows, who, by a few mechanical helps, sometimes learn to become extremely brilliant and pleasing; with a little dexterity in the management of the eyebrows, fingers, and nose. By imitating a cat, a sow and pigs; by a loud laugh, and a slap on the shoulder, the most ignorant are furnished out for conversation. But the writer finds it impossible to throw his winks, his shrugs, or his attitudes, upon paper; he may borrow some assistance, indeed, by printing his face at the title page; but without wit to pass for a man of ingenuity, no other mechanical help but downright obscenity will suffice. By speaking to some peculiar sensations, we are always sure of exciting laughter, for the jest does not lie in the writer, but in the subject.

  Nothing odd will do long. “Tristram Shandy” did not last.

  From beginning to end a piece of buffoonery after the style of Scarron.

  Voltaire has compared the merits of Rabelais and Sterne as satirists of the abuse of learning, and I think has done neither of them justice. This great distinction is obvious: that Rabelais derided absurdities then existing in full force, and intermingled much sterling sense with the grossest parts of his book; Sterne, on the contrary, laughs at many exploded opinions and forsaken fooleries, and contrives to degrade some of his most solemn passages by a vicious levity. Rabelais flew a higher pitch, too, than Sterne. Great part of the voyage to the Pays de Lanternois, which so severely stigmatizes the vices of the Romish clergy of that age, was performed in more hazard of fire than water.

  If we consider Sterne’s reputation as chiefly founded on “Tristram Shandy,” he must be regarded as liable to two severe charges:—those, namely, of indecency, and of affectation. Upon the first accusation Sterne was himself peculiarly sore, and used to justify the licentiousness of his humour by representing it as a mere breach of decorum, which had no perilous consequence to morals. The following anecdote we have from a sure source:—Soon after Tristram had appeared, Sterne asked a Yorkshire lady of fortune and condition whether she had read his book. “I have not, Mr. Sterne,” was the answer; “and, to be plain with you, I am informed it is not proper for female perusal.”—“My dear good lady,” replied the author, “do not be gulled by such stories; the book is like your young heir there (pointing to a child of three years old, who was rolling on the carpet in his white tunics), he shows at times a good deal that is usually concealed, but it is all in perfect innocence!” This witty excuse may be so far admitted; for it cannot be said that the licentious humour of “Tristram Shandy” is of the kind which applies itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt society. But it is a sin against taste, if allowed to be harmless as to morals. A handful of mud is neither a firebrand nor a stone; but to fling it about in sport, argues coarseness of mind, and want of common manners.

  To my mind, Uncle Toby is the most perfect specimen of a Christian gentleman that ever existed…. Sir Charles Grandison is not to be compared to him. Mr. Shandy, an admirably-drawn character also, is cleverer than Uncle Toby; but “My Uncle” is the wisest man.

  If I were requested to name the book of all others which combined wit and humour under their highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be “Tristram Shandy.”

  One of the most fascinating, witty, and dangerous works that has ever been penned in the English language. It is fascinating from its nature and truth. Its wit is like no other man’s wit. It is dangerous because, interwoven with an apparent simplicity of narrative is an insidious indelicacy, which it almost requires a commentary to point out; an indelicacy which never sullied one page of Goldsmith, and from which our great Scott would have shrunk in disgust. Take away this taint, if it be possible to do so, and “Tristram Shandy” is full of exquisite home scenes, and of touching incidents, and noble sentiments.

  Even Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorous authors, and never surpassed in comic conception or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named with his master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What are Siebenkäs, Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes), compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author’s mind, but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own?

  Figure to yourself a man who goes on a journey, wearing on his eyes a pair of marvellously magnifying spectacles. A hair on his hand, a speck on a tablecloth, a fold of a moving garment, will interest him: at this rate he will not go very far; he will go six steps in a day, and will not quit his room. So Sterne writes four volumes to record the birth of his hero. He perceives the infinitely little, and describes the imperceptible. A man parts his hair on one side: this, according to Sterne, depends on his whole character, which is a piece with that of his father, his mother, his uncle, and his whole ancestry; it depends on the structure of his brain, which depends on the circumstance of his conception and his birth, and these on the fancies of his parents, the humour of the moment, the talk of the preceding hour, the contrarieties of the last curate, a cut thumb, twenty knots made on a bag; I know not how many things besides…. His book is like a great storehouse of articles of virtu, where the curiosities of all ages, kinds, and countries lie jumbled in a heap; texts of excommunication, medical consultations, passages of unknown or imaginary authors, scraps of scholastic erudition, strings of absurd histories, dissertations, addresses to the reader. His pen leads him; he has neither sequence nor plan; nay, when he lights upon anything orderly, he purposely contorts it; with a kick he sends the pile of folios next to him over the history he has commenced, and dances on the top of them.

  It is to be hoped that Sterne made a judicious choice of the passages his daughter was to copy, and which his wife was to hear read. His admonition, when he sends to his Lydia, when far away from him, the Spectator and Metastassio, would tend to show that he would not expose her to the influence of the indelicate parts: and the virtuous and sedate character of his wife would not be likely to relish the innuendos and double entendres of his too prurient imagination; for she was not one of those fashionable ladies, who, he says, would read Tristram in the closet, though not in the drawing-room. Indeed his allusion to uncle Toby’s character, only, would imply that he had kept out of their view those offensive passages, which outraged decency, even at a time when manners were not so remarkable for moral refinement as happily they are at the present day.

  In going over the list, a short list in any case, of the immortal characters in fiction, there is hardly any one in our literature who would be entitled to take precedence of him. To find a distinctly superior type, we must go back to Cervantes, whom Sterne idolised and professed to take for his model. But to speak of a character as in some sort comparable to Don Quixote, though without any thoughts of placing him on the same level, is to admire that he is a triumph of art. Indeed, if we take the other creator of types, of whom it is only permitted to speak with bated breath, we must agree that it would be difficult to find a figure even in the Shakespearean gallery more admirable in its way. Of course, the creation of a Hamlet, an Iago, or a Falstaff implies an intellectual intensity and reach of imaginative sympathy altogether different from anything which his warmest admirers would attribute to Sterne. I only say that there is no single character in Shakespeare whom we see more vividly and love more heartily than Mr. Shandy’s uncle.

  As to its morality, I know good people who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits and may have a good many little private sins on his conscience,—but will nevertheless be perfectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of the lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice.

  A singular and brilliant medley of wit, sentiment, indecency, and study of character…. His borrowed plumage and his imitation of Rabelais’ style apart, Sterne had originality, a gift at all times rare, and always, perhaps, becoming rarer. As a humorist, he is to be classed with Fielding and Smollett, but as a novelist, his position in the history of fiction is separate and unique…. The combination of sentiment, pathos, and humour which Sterne sometimes reached with remarkable success, is particularly apparent in every incident which concerns the celebrated Captain Toby Shandy, for the creation of which character this author may most easily be forgiven his indecencies and his literary thefts.

  Sterne carried the humorous novel to its furthest extreme…. The humorous novel, in its narrowest sense, stood chiefly under the influence of Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy.” Sterne’s want of form, his endless digressions, his witty, learned fascinating reflections crammed full of allusions and quotations, his mixture of the pathetic and the comic,—all this attracted writers like Hippel and Jean Paul, and incited them to imitation.

  Genuine sentiment was as strange to Sterne the writer as to Sterne the man; and he conjures up no tragic figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the greenroom. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in “Tristram Shandy.”

  I should have said, with hesitation, that it was one of the most popular books in the language. Go where you will amongst men—old and young, undergraduates at the Universities, readers in our great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, doctors, barristers—if they have any tincture of literature about them, they all know their “Shandy” at least as well as their “Pickwick.” What more can be expected? “True Shandeism,” its author declares, “think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs.” I will be bound to say Sterne made more people laugh in 1891 than in any previous year; and, what is more, he will go on doing it—“‘that is, if it please God,’ said my Uncle Toby.”

  Whose Toby Shandy is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature.

  The story of “Tristram Shandy” wanders like a man in a labyrinth, and the humor is as labyrinthine as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically subtle; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the admirable consistency of the characters.

  “Tristram Shandy,” like Charles the Second, has been an unconscionably long time in dying. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Disraeli was the last man who read “Rasselas,” or that no man living has read “Irene.” But references to these classical compositions would in the best educated company fall exceedingly flat, whereas Uncle Toby’s sayings are as well known as Falstaff’s, and the “sub-acid humour” of Mr. Shandy plays, like the wit of Horace, round the cockles of the heart. It is now a pure curiosity of literature that men have lived who imputed dulness to “Tristram Shandy.”… Those who do not feel the charm of the book cannot be taught it, and those who feel it resent being told what it is. It is impalpable and indefinable, like one of those combinations of colour at sunset for which there are no words in the language and no ideas in the mind. There have been few greater masters of conversation than Sterne, and in what may be called the art of interruption no one has ever approached him. He is one of the makers of colloquial English, and thousands who never heard of Shandy Hall repeat the phrases of the Shandy brothers. Of all English humourists except Shakespeare, Sterne is still the greatest force, and that the influence of Parson Yorick is not extinct may be seen in almost every page of the “Dolly Dialogues.”

  It is indeed a strange book, certainly not everybody’s book. To start with, it is often tedious, sometimes silly, not seldom downright nasty. It does not begin at the end, because it has no end to begin at; but it does begin very nearly as far on as it ever gets, and goes back great distances in between. If anything at all happens—and it is possible to disentangle two or three events—it happens quite out of its right order; if the vehicle moves at all, it is with the cart before the horse; it is purposely so mixed up that a page of uninterrupted narrative is hardly to be found in it. It is a mass of tricks and affectations, some amusing, and some very wearisome. To say that it has no plot is nothing; it takes the utmost pains to persuade you that it has not a plan. It is sometimes obviously and laboriously imitative. Its pathos, sometimes superb, is sometimes horribly maudlin. We must not ask for good taste, and can by no means rely on decency; there is even a preserve spirit of impropriety which seizes occasions and topics apparently quite innocent. This is not a complete catalogue of its sins; these are only a few points which occur to an old friend, a few characteristics which it is well to mention, lest those who do not know the book should suffer too severe a shock on making its acquaintance. For the difficulty with it is in the beginning; to read it the first time is almost hard; every reading after that goes more easily. Nevertheless, although there are, I believe, fanatic admirers who read all of it every time, I am not of those. I think I have earned the right to skip, and I exercise it freely, without qualms of conscience. What’s the use of being on intimate terms with a book if you cannot have that liberty?

The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 1760–69

  Have you read his sermons (with his own comic figure at the head of them)? they are in the style, I think, most proper for the pulpit, and shew a very strong imagination and a sensible heart, but you see him often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of his audience.

  An excellent writer. His sermons will bear a comparison with any in the English language.

  With many serious blemishes, and leavened with much affectation, they are still earnest, dramatic, practical, and simple sermons, with prodigious life and dramatic power, and which, when set off by voice and manner, must have been entertaining and instructive. Besides them, the tame conventionalities of Blair read feebly indeed. And there is in them a triumphant answer to those charges of plagiarism which have been so often swung from hoarse and jangling critical bells.

  Sterne was a pagan. He went into the Church; but Mr. Thackeray—no bad judge—said most justly that his sermons “have not a single Christian sentiment.” They are well expressed, vigorous moral essays; but they are no more…. There is not much of heaven and hell in Sterne’s sermons; and what there is, seems a rhetorical emphasis which is not essential to the argument, and which might perhaps as well be left out.

  The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, must be able—or so it seems to me—to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons are—with but few and partial exceptions—of the most commonplace character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the crambe repetita of a hundred thousand homilies.

  Sterne’s sermons are as a rule professional efforts on common-sense lines, and mainly interest the literary critic by the perspicuity, orderliness, and restrained eloquence of which they prove his literary style to be capable.

Sentimental Journey, 1768

  Sterne has published two little volumes, called “Sentimental Travels.” They are very pleasing, though too much dilated, and infinitely preferable to his tiresome “Tristram Shandy,” of which I never could get through three volumes. In these there is great good-nature and strokes of delicacy.

  I am now going to charm myself for the third time with poor Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey.”

  Sentimental? what is that? It is not English; he might as well say, Continental.

  And with this pretty dance and chorus, the volume artfully concludes. Even here one cannot give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne’s writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption—a hint, as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours, but not all. The foul Satyr’s eyes leer out of the leaves constantly: the last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked—the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon.

  The very idea of the book combines the humorous and the pathetic, in that conscious, playful way which individualizes Sterne among English authors.

  There is no better painting of first and easy impressions than that book; after all which has been written on the ancient régime, an Englishman at least will feel a fresh instruction on reading these simple observations. They are instructive because of their simplicity…. In two points the “Sentimental Journey,” viewed with the critic’s eye and as a mere work of art, is a great improvement upon “Tristram Shandy.” The style is simpler and better; it is far more connected: it does not jump about, or leave a topic because it is interesting; it does not worry the reader with fantastic transitions, with childish contrivances and rhetorical intricacies.

  He loves to suck melancholy out of any passing event “as a weasel sucks eggs;” but he also delights to thrust constantly before our eyes the cap and bells; not that he intends the smile to compete with the tear, but that he prides himself on his personal freedom from the torturing sensibilities over which he claims to have absolute command. Immediately after one of his famous sentimental outbursts, he tells us how good the inn is at Moulines. This is an outrage of a kind he delighted to perpetrate. It seems to say: “Behold! what a master I am! How I can harrow up your feelings! and now I’m off to eat a mutton-chop.” It is the grimace of a bad actor before the tragic business is over, before he quits the stage, and while his face is still turned towards his audience.

  Frenchmen, who are either less awed than we by lecturers in white waistcoats, or understand the methods of criticism somewhat better, cherish the “Sentimental Journey” (in spite of its indifferent French) and believe in the genius that created it. But the Briton reads it with shyness, and the British critic speaks of Sterne with bated breath, since Thackeray told it in Gath that Sterne was a bad man, and the daughters of Philistia triumphed.

General

	Could I, whilst Humour held the quill,
	Could I digress with half that skill;
	Could I with half that skill return,
	Which we so much admire in Sterne,
	Where each digression, seeming vain,
	And only fit to entertain,
	Is found, on better recollection,
	To have a just and nice connexion.

  Of Sterne and Rousseau it is difficult to speak without being misunderstood; yet it is impossible to deny the praise of wit and originality to Yorick, or of captivating eloquence to the philosopher of vanity. Their imitators are below notice.

  A most impure and whimsical writer, whose very humanity is unnatural.

  I have very few heresies in English literature. I do not remember any serious one, but my moderate opinion of Sterne.

	Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways
	Of antic wit, and quibbling mazes drear,
	Let not thy shade malignant censure fear,
	If aught of inward mirth my search betrays.
	Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days,
	Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear.

  His style is … at times the most rapid, the most happy, the most idiomatic, of any that is to be found. It is the pure essence of English conversational style. His works consist only of morceaux,—of brilliant passages. I wonder that Goldsmith, who ought to have known better, should call him “a dull fellow.” His wit is poignant, though artificial; and his characters (though the groundwork of some of them had been laid before) have yet invaluable original differences; and the spirit of the execution, the master-strokes constantly thrown into them, are not to be surpassed. It is sufficient to name them:—Yorick, Dr. Slop, Mr. Shandy, My Uncle Toby, Trim, Susanna, and the Widow Wadman. In these he has contrived to oppose, with equal felicity and originality, two characters, one of pure intellect and the other of pure good nature, in My Father and My Uncle Toby. There appears to have been in Sterne a vein of dry, sarcastic humour, and of extreme tenderness of feeling; the latter sometimes carried to affectation, as in the tale of Maria, and the apostrophe to the recording angel, but at other times pure and without blemish. The story of Le Fevre is perhaps the finest in the English language. My Father’s restlessness, both of body and mind, is inimitable. It is the model from which all those despicable performances against modern philosophy ought to have been copied, if their authors had known anything of the subject they were writing about. My Uncle Toby is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature. He is the most unoffending of God’s creatures; or, as the French express it, un tel petit bon homme! Of his bowling green, his sieges, and his amours, who would say or think any thing amiss!

  The style employed by Sterne is fancifully ornamented, but at the same time vigorous and masculine, and full of that animation and force which can only be derived by an intimate acquaintance with the early English prose-writers. In the power of approaching and touching the finer feelings of the heart, he has never been excelled, if indeed he has ever been equalled; and may be at once recorded as one of the most affected, and one of the most simple of writers,—as one of the greatest plagiarists, and one of the most original geniuses, whom England has produced.

  I think highly of Sterne—that is, of the first part of “Tristram Shandy:” for as to the latter part about the widow Wadman, it is stupid and disgusting; and the “Sentimental Journey” is poor, sickly stuff. There is a great deal of affectation in Sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies are most individual and delightful. Sterne’s morals are bad, but I don’t think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women.

  He terribly failed in the discharge of his duties, still, we must admire in him that sportive kind of geniality and affection, still a son of our common mother, not cased up in buckram formulas as the other writers were, clinging to forms, and not touching realities. And, much as has been said against him, we cannot help feeling his immense love for things around him; so that we may say of him, as of Magdalen, “much is forgiven him, because he loved much.” A good simple being after all.

  We think that, on the whole, Mackenzie is the first master of this delicious style. Sterne, doubtless, has deeper touches of humanity in some of his works. But there is no sustained feeling,—no continuity of emotion,—no extended range of thought, over which the mind can brood, in his ingenious and fantastical writings. His spirit is far too mercurial and airy to suffer him tenderly to linger over those images of sweet humanity which he discloses. His cleverness breaks the charm which his feeling spreads, as by magic, around us. His exquisite sensibility is ever counteracted by his perception of the ludicrous and his ambition after the strange. No harmonious feeling breathes from any of his pieces. He sweeps “that curious instrument, the human heart,” with hurried fingers, calling forth in rapid succession its deepest and its liveliest tones, and making only marvellous discord. His pathos is, indeed, most genuine while it lasts; but the soul is not suffered to cherish the feeling which it awakens.

  Sterne was a very selfish man; according to Warburton, an irreclaimable rascal; yet a writer unexcelled for pathos and charity.

  Sterne, though he could not equal Fielding in fluent wit, is a paragon of lucky quaintness, and in pathos is approached by Mackenzie alone.

  He fatigues me with his perpetual disquiet, and his uneasy appeals to my risible or sentimental faculties. He is always looking in my face, watching his effect, uncertain whether I think him an impostor or not; posture-making, coaxing, and imploring me. “See what sensibility I have—own now that I am very clever—do cry, now; you can’t resist this!” The humour of Swift and Rabelais, whom he pretended to succeed, poured from them as naturally as song does from a bird; they lose no manly dignity with it, but laugh their hearty great laugh out of their broad chests as nature bade them. But this man—who can make you laugh, who can make you cry too—never lets his reader alone, or will permit his audience repose: when you are quiet, he fancies he must rouse you, and turns over head and heels, or sidles up and whispers a nasty story. The man is a great jester, not a great humourist. He goes to work systematically and of cold blood, paints his face, puts on his ruff and motley clothes, and lays down his carpet and tumbles on it.

  No novelist has surpassed Sterne in the vividness of his descriptions, none have eclipsed him in the art of selecting and grouping the details of his finished scenes. And yet, next to Shakspeare, he is the author who leaves the most to the imagination of the reader…. With all this abstinence from explanatory comment at one time, he indulges in it to excess at another. He constantly takes upon himself to act the part of a showman, and disagreeably reminds us that the characters are his puppets. It is the same with his style. It is frequently deformed by insufferable affectation; and then, again, is remarkable for its purity, its ease, its simplicity, and its elegance. The composition of the inimitable story of LeFever is only second to its pathos. The marble leaves, the blank chapters, the false numbering of the pages to indicate that a portion is torn away, are, with a hundred puerilities, only so many proofs that it is possible for great genius to be combined with equal folly. His propensity to provoke curiosity for the mere pleasure of balking it, by running off into digressions, is a sorry jest unworthy a man of wit, and which, however much it might amuse the writer, excites no hilarity in the reader.

  As an author, he has been the father of an immense family of fiction writers. Goethe has had him in his eye, both in the “Sorrows of Werter” and in “Wilhelm Meister.” Rousseau derived a great deal from him. Jean Paul Richter, although possessing far more sincerity and depth of spirit, has copied his affected manner. The Minerva Press was long his feeble echo. Southey’s “Doctor” was very much in his style; and the French novelists are still employed in imitating his putrid sentimentalism, although incapable of his humor and pathos.

  The humour of Sterne is not only very different from that of Fielding and Smollett, but is something unique in our literature. He also was a professed admirer of Cervantes; to as large an extent as Swift he adopted the whimsical and perpetually digressive manner of Rabelais; and there is proof that he was well acquainted with the works of preceding humorists less familiarly known in England. But he was himself a humorist by nature—a British or Irish Yorick, with differences from any of those who might have borne that name before him after their imaginary Danish prototype; and, perpetually as he reminds us of Rabelais, his Shandean vein of wit and fancy is not for a moment to be regarded as a mere variety of Pantagruelism. There is scarcely anything more intellectually exquisite than the humour of Sterne. To very fastidious readers much of the humour of Fielding or of Smollett might come at last to seem but buffoonery; but Shakespeare himself, as one fancies, would have read Sterne with admiration and pleasure.

  There is not much humor, indeed, any where out of Shakspeare and Cervantes which resembles or can be compared with that of Sterne. It would be difficult to name any writer but one of these two who could have drawn Uncle Toby or Trim. Another common mistake about Sterne is, that the mass of what he has written consist of little better than nonsense or rubbish,—that his beauties are but grains of gold glittering here and there in a heap of sand, or, at most, rare spots of green scattered over an arid waste. Of no writer could this be said with less correctness. Whatever he has done is wrought with the utmost care, and to the highest polish and perfection. With all his apparent caprices of manner, his language is throughout the purest idiomatic English; nor is there, usually, a touch in any of his pictures that could be spared without injury to the effect. And, in his great work, how completely brought out, how exquisitely finished, is every figure, from Uncle Toby and Brother Shandy, and Trim, and Yorick, down to Dr. Slop, and Widow Wadman, and Mrs. Bridget, and Obadiah himself! Who would resign any one of them, or any part of any one of them?

  I know not if any of his contemporaries, mighty prose-writers though they were, had, on the whole, so subtle and fine a perception of the various capacities of our language as the author of “Tristram Shandy.” With what finger—how light and how strong—he flies over the keys of the instrument! What delicate elegance he can extract from words the most colloquial and vulgate; and again, with some word unfamiliar and strange, how abruptly he strikes on the universal chords of laughter. He can play with the massive weights of our language as a juggler plays with his airy balls. In an age when other grand writers were squaring their periods by rule and compass, he flings forth his jocund sentences loose and at random; now up towards the stars, now down into puddles; yet how they shine where they soar, and how lightly rebound when they fall! But I should have small respect for the critic who advised the youthful author to emulate the style of Sterne. Only writers the most practised could safely venture on occasional, restrained, imitation of his frolicsome zoneless graces.

  He is a great author; certainly not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a sentence in his writings which can be called a thought; nor from sublime conceptions which enlarge the limits of our imagination, for he never leaves the sensuous,—but because of his wonderful sympathy with and wonderful power of representing simple human nature.

  The merits of Sterne may be discussed as much as anyone likes, but he has a substantive existence: he is there, with his own character, and with a certain rank and prestige as a founder. Everything about him is odd—his life, his personality, his work…. To sum up, Sterne is a tale-teller of the first order and excellent in sentimental scenes. But he has the faults of his style: he abuses the trick of interesting the heart in trifles: he enlarges little things too much: he scarcely ever declaims, but he sometimes whimpers.

  We know of no English author, the perusal of whose works brings more mingled feelings than Laurence Sterne’s. Delight and disgust, admiration and sorrow, the blush of outraged modesty and the throb of excited sensibility, are alternately called forth; and the final sentiment that remains on the mind is the wish that we could expunge from our literature more than one-half of what he has written. A very necromancer of language, he uses the spirit-words which he evokes obedient to his will, now as the ministers of prurient fancies and ribald equivoques, now to convulse us with laughter at some pleasant, harmless humour, or stir the deepest feelings of our nature at the tale of sorrow—uttering words of wisdom with a carelessness that looks almost like levity, and dealing with the virtues, the vices, the foibles of human nature as freely as the anatomist does with the human body.

  There is more originality of manner, and more mannerism in his originality; more sudden and unaffected strokes of nature, and more palpable affectation; more genuinely idiomatical power, and conversational ease in his style, and more constrained and far-fetched attempts to be unconstrained and easy, than in any eminent classical writer of our language that I am acquainted with.

  A perfect literary artist.

  Sterne is in many respects the most eccentric of our prosaists. M. Scherer would have it that he is wilfully sensational and meretricious—a literary mountebank. I should like to find some method in his madness, even to a point where he seems maddest: i. e., his habit of making a chapter of a few words. Chapter xiii, vol. ii, of “Tristram,” contains one paragraph, three sentences (in dialogue)—a total of 29 words. Chapter xxvii, vol. iii, has two paragraphs, four sentences, 83 words. Chapter v, vol. v, has one paragraph, one sentence, 16 words. Chapter xxxix, vol. v, one paragraph, two sentences, 30 words. There are a dozen other chapters similar in length to these. All this is freakish enough, but is not so very odd in view of Sterne’s long study of French models, from which he had learned the trick of the tiny paragraph. He chose to emphasize a thought by paragraphing it, as Anglo-Saxon scribes had done, long before—and it was but one bold step further, in the process of emphasis by mechanical means, to make a chapter of the paragraph as he had made a paragraph of the sentence. It is hardly to the point for a critic to complain that these chapters are logically incomplete. Sterne was analyzing, not logically, but rhetorically; fastening attention on these small stadia simply for the imaginative suggestions involved in their pregnant brevity. I must, for one, confess to thinking the thing sometimes shrewdly done. Sterne is a lawless wight, but his recusancy has given us some things both quaint and good. There is little else of importance to note of Sterne’s paragraphs. In managing dialogue he follows Fielding.

  Laurence Sterne was a born humorist, but his humor was the humor of whimsicality, and at times his oddity grows wearisome. He is too artful to be sympathetic, and his artifice is too obvious. Besides, he is over-fond of innuendo; slyly playing back and forth, he now pretends an innocence more impertinent than diverting, and now suggests that his reader is deeper in the mire than he is; always exhibiting a genius in the art with which he stimulates the latent wickedness whose presence in weak human nature this worldly Ecclesiastes understands all too well.

  There is a singular blend of two qualities in Sterne’s writing, as in his character. Humour and pathos are never in their nature far apart; in Sterne they are almost inextricably combined. His laughter and his tears are both so facile, and their springs lie so near together, that the one almost infallibly provokes the other; he will laugh at sorrow and find matter of sentiment in a comical mishap. It is his keenest pleasure to juggle with these effects; a solemn occasion is to him an irresistible provocative to burlesque, and his pathetic sensibility responds to a touch so light that to a less highly strung nature his tears will seem affected. Yet herein lies the delicacy of his writing, and of those exquisite effects, the despair of many a more robust artist, which are as hard to describe as an odour is to remember. His reader must be incessantly on the alert for surprises; it is only prudent, at a funeral where Parson Sterne officiates, for the guest to attend with a harlequin’s suit beneath his decent garb of black, prepared for either event.

  Though at the present day we do not take Sterne very seriously, his contemporaries not only appreciated him as a humorist, but delighted especially in the depth and originality of his genius, in his “gloomy and mournful appearance,” and in what his translator called “an aroma of sentiment, and a suppleness of thought, impossible to define.” By his countrymen he was praised for his joyous spirit, while in France he was looked upon as a kind of prophet of the new religion just brought into fashion by Rousseau, the religion of the self…. Sterne’s reputation increased when it crossed the water. The Germans hailed him as a philosopher. Lessing was taken with him, and when Sterne died, wrote to Nicolai that he would gladly have sacrificed several years of his own life if by so doing he could have prolonged the existence of the sentimental traveller. Goethe writes: “Whoever reads him, immediately feels that there is something free and beautiful in his own soul.” The philosophy of Sterne is the most brilliant invention of eighteenth century anglomania.

  He was a Cambridge man and well taught;—of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller; he stole from Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy;” not a stealing of ideas only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the strings and lappets of his own abounding humour and drollery, as to give to the whole—thieving and Shandyism combined—a stamp of individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.

  He is colloquial and slipshod, a chartered libertine in language; losing all sense of dignity in his affectation and whimsical conceits; eccentric not from impulse but from wayward artificiality, ruffled into petty and vanishing emotion by every breath of pathos, however false and tawdry; noisy in his childish depreciation of conventionality and order; but yet, withal, imbued with the same cynicism, aiming at the same indifference of demeanour, impressed by the same sense of the “ridiculous tragedy” of human life—above all, with the same vein of humour, but of a richness and fertility which has scarcely ever been approached, and which Chesterfield could never, even remotely, rival. With all his carelessness of diction, with all his affected contempt of scorn, Sterne wrote for a literary age; even in his wildest extravagances he knows how to attune his language to the mood of the moment, and to make it a fitting dress for the most wayward, the most fitful, the most perplexing, and yet the most invincible wit which fancy ever contrived.

  To talk of “the style” of Sterne is almost to play one of those tricks with language of which he himself was so fond. For there is hardly any definition of the word which can make it possible to describe him as having any style at all. It is not only that he manifestly recognised no external canons whereto to conform the expression of his thoughts, but he had apparently no inclination to invent and observe, except indeed in the most negative of senses, any style of his own. The “style of Sterne,” in short, is as though one should say: “The form of Proteus.”… Chaotic as it is in the syntactical sense, it is a perfectly clear vehicle for the conveyance of thought. We are rarely at a loss for the meaning of one of Sterne’s sentences, as we are, for very different reasons, for the meaning of one of Macaulay’s. And his language is so full of life and colour, his tone so animated and vivacious, that we forget we are reading and not listening, and we are as well disposed to be exacting in respect to form as though we were listeners in actual fact. Sterne’s manner, in short, may be that of a bad and careless writer, but it is the manner of a first-rate talker; and this of course enhances rather than detracts from the unwearying charm of his wit and humour.

  Many critics and writers of eminence—Mr. Carlyle, M. Taine, Mr. Elwin, Mr. Traill—have tried to analyse Sterne’s style and methods, contrasting him with Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding and Dickens. The truth is, our author was so capricious and even fragmentary and disorderly in his system that comparison is impossible. The writers just named were really “monumental” in their handling of their characters, and completed their labour before issuing it to the world. Sterne sent forth his work in fragments, and often wrote what was sheer nonsense to fill his volumes. He allowed his pen to lead him, instead of he himself directing his pen. The whole is so incomplete and disjointed that cosmopolitan readers have not the time or patience to piece the various scraps together…. He has given to the world a group of living characters, which have become known and familiar even to those who have not read a line of “Tristram.” These are My Uncle Toby, Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, Yorick—his own portrait—and Dr. Slop. There are choice passages, too, grotesque situations and expressions which have become part of the language. Mr. Shandy, I venture to think, is the best of these creations, more piquant and attractive even than My Uncle Toby, because more original and more difficult to touch. It is in this way that Sterne has made his mark, and may be said to be better known than read. A great deal has been written on the false and overstrained sentiment of his pathetic passages such as in the “Story of Le Fever,” “Maria of Moulines,” “The Dead Ass,” and other incidents. No doubt these were somewhat artificially wrought, but it must be remembered they followed the tone of the time. His exquisite humour is beyond dispute, the Shandean sayings, allusions, topics, etc., have a permanent hold; and, as they recur to the recollection, produce a complacent smile, even though the subject be what is called “broad.”

  Sterne was not a moralist in the mode of Richardson or of Fielding; it is to be feared that he was a complete ethical heretic; but he brought to his country as gifts the strained laughter that breaks into tears, and the melancholy wit that saves itself by an outburst of buffoonery. He introduced into the coarse and heavy life of the eighteenth century elements of daintiness, of persiflage, of moral versatility; he prided himself on the reader’s powerlessness to conjecture what was coming next. A French critic compared Sterne, most felicitously, to one of the little bronze satyrs of antiquity in whose hollow bodies exquisite odours were stored. He was carried away by the tumult of his nerves, and it became a paradoxical habit with him to show himself exactly the opposite of what he was expected to be. You had to unscrew him for the aroma to escape. His unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away at the age of fifty-four, only the last eight of which had been concerned with literature. Sterne’s influence on succeeding fiction has been durable but interrupted. Ever and anon his peculiar caprices, his selected elements, attract the imitation of some more or less analogous spirit. The extreme beauty of his writing has affected almost all who desire to use English prose as though it were an instrument not less delicate than English verse. Nor does the fact that a surprising number of his “best passages” were stolen by Sterne from older writers militate against his fame, because he always makes some little adaptation, some concession to harmony, which stamps him a master, although unquestionably a deliberate plagiarist.

  It was a sad day for English fiction when a writer of genius came to look upon the novel as the repository for the crotchets of a lifetime. This is the more to be lamented when we reflect that Sterne, unlike Smollett, could tell a story in a straightforward manner when he chose to do so. Had the time he wasted in dazzling his friends with literary fireworks been devoted to a logical presentation of the wealth of his experiences, fancies, and feelings, he might have written one of the most perfect pieces of composition in the English language. As it is, the novel in his hands, considered from the standpoint of structure, reverted to what it was when left by the wits of the Renaissance.