"'Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well whether he would go in or no. Now, 'tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike. There is a patient endurance of sufferings wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him that it always disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to him; on the contrary, meet him where I will, in town or country, in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and, as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance—and where those carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, upon the occasion…. Come, Honesty! said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the gate, art thou for coming in or going out? The ass twisted his head round, to look up the street. Well, replied I, we'll wait a minute for thy driver. He turned his head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the opposite way. I understand thee perfectly, answered I: if thou takest a wrong step in this affair he will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but a minute, and if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set down as ill spent. He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and, in the little peevish contentions of nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and picked it up again. God help thee, Jack! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on't, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for its wages—'tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to others. And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and thou hast not a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a macaroon. In saying this I pulled out a paper of 'em, which I had just purchased, and gave him one; and, at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act. When the ass had eaten his macaroon I pressed him to come in. The poor beast was heavy loaded, his legs seemed to tremble under him, he hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter it broke short in my hand. He looked up pensive in my face. 'Don't thrash me with it; but if you will, you may.' 'If I do,' said I, 'I'll be d——d.'"
Well might Thackeray say of this passage that, "the critic who refuses to see in it wit, humour, pathos, a kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard indeed to move and to please." It is, in truth, excellent; and its excellence is due to its possessing nearly every one of those qualities, positive and negative, which the two other scenes above quoted are without. The author does not here obtrude himself, does not importune us to admire his exquisitely compassionate nature; on the contrary, he at once amuses us and enlists our sympathies by that subtly humorous piece of self-analysis, in which he shows how large an admixture of curiosity was contained in his benevolence. The incident, too, is well chosen. No forced concurrence of circumstances brings it about: it is such as any man might have met with anywhere in his travels, and it is handled in a simple and manly fashion. The reader is with the writer throughout; and their common mood of half-humorous pity is sustained, unforced, but unbroken, from first to last.
One can hardly say as much for another of the much-quoted pieces from the Sentimental Journey—the description of the caged starling. The passage is ingeniously worked into its context; and if we were to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsiderate moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. But, regarded as a substantive appeal to one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms which apply to most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the pathetic. The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the very close of the story of Le Fevre's death—finely told though, as a whole, it is—there is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is breathing his last our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside, and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the literary ingenuities of the man who is describing his end:
"There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him. The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back; the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon his boy—and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken."
How excellent all that is! and how perfectly would the scene have ended had it closed with the tender and poetic image which thus describes the dying soldier's commendation of his orphan boy to the care of his brother-in-arms! But what of this, which closes the scene, in fact?
"Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered—stopped—went on—throbbed—stopped again—moved, stopped. Shall I go on? No."
Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery.
The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself—the acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost—when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning fails him altogether. He is at his best in pathos when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour. In this, of course, there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man's mysterious life.