I think, indeed, that I could detect some flaws in the logic by which this conclusion is supported, but I confess that it often seems to possess a considerable plausibility. The peculiar sentimentalism of which Sterne was one of the first mouthpieces would supply many effective illustrations of the argument; for it is a continuous manifestation of extraordinary skill in providing 'sweet poison for the ages' tooth.' He was exactly the man for his time, though, indeed, so clever a man would probably have been equally able to flatter the prevailing impulse of any time in which his lot had been cast. M. Taine has lately described with great skill the sort of fashion of philanthropy which became popular among the upper classes in France in the pre-revolutionary generation. The fine ladies and gentlemen who were so soon to be crushed as tyrannical oppressors of the people had really a strong impression that benevolence was a branch of social elegance which ought to be assiduously cultivated by persons of taste and refinement. A similar tendency, though less strongly marked, is observable amongst the corresponding class in English society. From causes which may be analysed by historians, the upper social stratum was becoming penetrated with a vague discontent with the existing order and a desire to find new outlets for emotional activity. Between the reign of comfortable common-sense, represented by Pope and his school, and the fierce outbreak of passion which accompanied the crash of the revolution, there was an interregnum marked by a semi-conscious fore-feeling of some approaching catastrophe; a longing for fresh excitement, and tentative excursions into various regions of thought, which have since been explored in a more systematic fashion. Sentimentalism was the word which represented one phase of this inarticulate longing, and which expresses pretty accurately the need of having some keen sensations without very well knowing in what particular channels they were to be directed. The growth of the feminine influence in literature had no doubt some share in this development. Women were no longer content to be simply the pretty fools of the 'Spectator,' unworthy to learn the Latin grammar or to be admitted to the circle of wits; though they seldom presumed to be independent authors, they were of sufficient importance to have a literature composed for their benefit.
The phrase 'sentimentalism' became common towards the middle of the century, as I have remarked in speaking of Richardson. Some time earlier Sterne was writing a love letter to his future wife, lamenting the 'quiet and sentimental repasts' which they had had together, and weeping 'like a child' (so he writes) at the sight of his single knife and fork and plate. We have known the same spirit in many incarnations in later days. Sterne, who made the word popular in literature, represents what may be considered as sentimentalism in its purest form; that which corresponds most closely to its definition as sentiment running to waste; for in Sterne there is no thought of any moral, or political, or philosophical application. He is as entirely free as a man can be from any suspicion of 'purpose.' He tells us as frankly as possible that he is simply putting on the cap and bells for our amusement. He must weep and laugh just as the fancy takes him; his pen, he declares, is the master of him, not he the master of his pen. This, being interpreted, means, of course, something rather different from its obvious sense. Nobody, it is abundantly clear, could be a more careful and deliberate artist, though he aims at giving a whimsical and arbitrary appearance to his most skilfully devised effects. The author Sterne has a thorough command of his pen; he only means that the parson Sterne is not allowed to interfere in the management. He has no doctrine which he is in the least ambitious of expounding. He does not even wish to tell us, like some of his successors, that the world is out of joint; that happiness is a delusion, and misery the only reality; nor, what often comes to just the same thing, is he anxious to be optimistic, and to declare, in the vein of some later humourists, that the world should be regarded through a rose-coloured mask, and that a little effusion of benevolence will summarily remove all its rough places. Undoubtedly it would be easy to argue—were it worth the trouble—that Sterne's peculiarities of temperament would have rendered certain political and religious teachings more congenial to him than others. But he did not live in stirring times, when every man is forced to translate his temperament by a definite creed. He could be as thoroughgoing and consistent an Epicurean as he pleased. Nothing matters very much (that seems to be his main doctrine), so long as you possess a good temper, a soft heart, and have a flirtation or two with pretty women. Though both men may be called sentimentalists, Sterne must have regarded Rousseau's vehement social enthusiasm as so much insanity. The poor man took life in desperate earnest, and instead of keeping his sensibility to warm his own hearth, wanted to set the world on fire. When rambling through France, Sterne had an eye for every pretty vignette by the roadside, for peasants' dances, for begging monks, or smart Parisian grisettes; he received and repaid the flattery of the drawing-rooms, and was, one may suppose, as absolutely indifferent to omens of coming difficulties as any of the freethinking or free-living abbés who were his most congenial company. Horace Walpole was no philosopher, but he shook his head in amazement over the audacious scepticism of French society. Sterne, so far as one can judge from his letters, saw and heard nothing in this direction; and one would as soon expect to find a reflection upon such matters in the 'Sentimental Journey' as to come upon a serious discussion of theological controversy in 'Tristram Shandy.' Now and then some such question just shows itself for an instant in the background. A negro wanted him to write against slavery; and the letter came just as Trim was telling a pathetic story to Uncle Toby, and suggesting doubtfully that a black might have a soul. 'I am not much versed, Corporal,' quoth my Uncle Toby, 'in things of that kind; but I suppose God would not have made him without one any more than thee or me.' Sterne was quite ready to aid the cause of emancipation by adding as many picturesque touches as he could devise to Uncle Toby, or sentimentalising over jackdaws and prisoners in the 'Sentimental Journey;' but more direct agitation would have been as little in his line as travelling through France in the spirit of Arthur Young to collect statistics about rent and wages. Sterne's sermons, to which one might possibly turn with a view to discovering some serious opinions, are not without an interest of their own. They show touches of the Shandy style and efforts to escape from the dead level. But Sterne could not be really at home in the pulpit, and all that can be called original is an occasional infusion of a more pungent criticism of life into the moral commonplaces of which sermons were then chiefly composed. The sermon in 'Tristram Shandy' supplies a happy background to Uncle Toby's comments; but even Sterne could not manage to interweave them into the text.
The very essence of the Shandy character implies this absolute disengagement from all actual contact with sublunary affairs. Neither Fielding nor Goldsmith can be accused of preaching in the objectionable sense; they do not attempt to supply us with pamphlets in the shape of novels, but in so far as they draw from real life they inevitably suggest some practical conclusions. Reformers, for example, might point to the prison experiences of Dr. Primrose or of Captain Booth, as well as to the actual facts which they represent; and Smollett's account of the British navy is a more valuable historical document than any quantity of official reports. But in Uncle Toby's bowling-green we have fairly shut the door upon the real world. We are in a region as far removed from the prosaic fact as in Aladdin's wondrous subterranean garden. We mount the magical hobby-horse, and straightway are in an enchanted land, 'as though of hemlock we had drunk,' and if the region is not altogether so full of delicious perfume as that haunted by Keats's nightingale, and even admits occasional puffs of rather unsavoury odours, it has a singular and characteristic influence of its own. Uncle Toby, so far as his intellect is concerned, is a full-grown child; he plays with his toys, and rejoices over the manufacture of cannon from a pair of jack-boots, precisely as if he were still in petticoats; he lives in a continuous daydream framed from the materials of adult experience, but as unsubstantial as any childish fancies; and when he speaks of realities it is with the voice of one half-awake, and in whose mind the melting vision still blends with the tangible realities. Mr. Shandy has a more direct and conscious antipathy to reality. The actual world is commonplace; the events there have a trick of happening in obedience to the laws of nature; and people not unfrequently feel what one might have expected beforehand that they would feel. One can express them in cut-and dried formulæ. Mr. Shandy detests this monotony. He differs from the ordinary pedant in so far as he values theories not in proportion to their dusty antiquity, but in proportion to their unreality, the pure whimsicality and irrationality of the heads which contained them. He is a sort of inverted philosopher, who loves the antithesis of the reasonable as passionately as your commonplace philosopher professes to love the reasonable. He is ready to welcome a reductio ad absurdum for a demonstration; yet he values the society of men of the ordinary turn of mind precisely because his love of oddities makes him relish a contradiction. He is enabled to enjoy the full flavour of his preposterous notions by the reaction of other men's astonished common-sense. The sensation of standing upon his head is intensified by the presence of others in the normal position. He delights in the society of the pragmatic and contradictious Dr. Slop, because Slop is like a fish always ready to rise at the bait of a palpable paradox, and quite unable to see with the prosaic humorist that paradoxes are the salt of philosophy. Poor Mrs. Shandy drives him to distraction by the detestable acquiescence with which she receives his most extravagant theories, and the consequent impossibility of ever (in the vulgar phrase) getting a rise out of her.
A man would be priggish indeed who could not enjoy this queer region where all the sober proprieties of ordinary logic are as much inverted as in Alice's Wonderland; where the only serious occupation of a good man's life is in playing an infantile game; where the passion of love is only introduced as a passing distraction when the hobby-horse has accidentally fallen out of gear; where the death of a son merely supplies an affectionate father with a favourable opportunity for airing his queer scraps of outworn moralities, and the misnaming of an infant casts him into a fit of profound melancholy; where everything, in short, is topsy-turvy, and we are invited to sit down, consuming a perpetual pipe in an old-fashioned arbour, dreamily amusing ourselves with the grotesque shapes that seem to be projected, in obedience to no perceptible law, upon the shifting wreaths of smoke. It would be as absurd to lecture the excellent brothers upon the absurdity of their mode of life as to preach morality to the manager of a Punch show, or to demand sentiment in the writer of a mathematical treatise. 'I believe in my soul,' says Sterne, rather audaciously, 'that the hand of the supreme Maker and Designer of all things never made or put a family together, where the characters of it were cast and contrasted with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and entrusted with so unlimited a confidence as in the Shandy family.' The grammar of the sentence is rather queer, but we can hardly find fault with the substance. The remark is made à propos of Mr. Shandy's attempt to indoctrinate his brother with the true theory of noses, which is prefaced by the profoundly humorous sentence which expresses the leading article of Mr. Shandy's creed: 'Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing.' And, in fact, one sees how admirably the simplicity of each brother plays into the eccentricity of the other. The elder Shandy could not have found in the universe a listener more admirably calculated to act as whetstone for his strangely-constructed wit, to dissent in precisely the right tone, not with a brutal intrusion of common-sense, but with the gentle horror of innocent astonishment at the paradoxes, mixed with veneration for the portentous learning of his senior. By looking at each brother alternately through the eyes of his relative, we are insensibly infected with the intense relish which each feels for the cognate excellence of the other. When the characters are once familiar to us, each new episode in the book is a delightful experiment upon the fresh contrasts which can be struck out by skilfully shifting their positions and exchanging the parts of clown and chief actor. The light is made to flash from a new point, as the gem is turned round by skilled hands. Sterne's wonderful dexterity appears in the admirable setting which is thus obtained for his most telling remarks. Many of the most famous sayings, such as Uncle Toby's remark about the fly, or the recording angel, are more or less adapted from other authors, but they come out so brilliantly that we feel that he has shown a full right to property which he can turn to such excellent account. Sayings quite as witty, or still wittier, may be found elsewhere. Some of Voltaire's incomparable epigrams, for example, are keener than Sterne's, but they owe nothing to the Zadig or Candide who supplies the occasion for the remark. They are thrown out in passing, and shine by their intrinsic brilliancy. But when Sterne has a telling remark, he carefully prepares the dramatic situation in which it will have the whole force due to the concentrated effect of all the attendant circumstances. 'Our armies swore terribly in Flanders,' cried my Uncle Toby, 'but nothing to this.' Voltaire could not have made a happier hit at the excess of the odium theologicum, but the saying comes to us armed with the authority of the whole Shandy conclave. We have a vision of the whole party sitting round, each charged with his own peculiar humour. There is Mr. Shandy, whose fancy has been amazingly tickled by the portentous oath of Ernulfus, as regards antiquarian curiosity, and has at once framed a quaint theory of the advantages of profane swearing in order to justify his delight in the tremendous formula. He regards his last odd discovery with the satisfaction of a connoisseur; 'I defy a man to swear out of it!' It includes all oaths from that of William the Conqueror to that of the humblest scavenger, and is a perfect institute of swearing collected from all the most learned authorities. And there is the unlucky Dr. Slop, cleverly enticed into the pitfall by Mr. Shandy's simple cunning, and induced to exhibit himself as a monster of ecclesiastical ferocity by thundering forth the sounding anathema at the ludicrously disproportioned case of Obadiah's clumsy knot-tying; and to bring out the full flavour of the grotesque scene, we see it as represented to the childlike intelligence of Uncle Toby, taking it all in sublime seriousness, whistling lilliburlero to soothe his nerves under this amazing performance, in sheer wonder at the sudden revelation of the potentialities of human malediction, and compressing his whole character in that admirable cry of wonder, so phrased as to exhibit his innocent conviction that the habits of the armies in Flanders supplied a sort of standard by which the results of all human experience might be appropriately measured, and to even justify it in some degree by the queer felicity of the particular application. A formal lecturer upon the evils of intolerance might argue in a set of treatises upon the light in which such an employment of sacred language would strike the unsophisticated common-sense of a benevolent mind. The imaginative humourist sets before us a delicious picture of two or three concrete human beings, and is then able at one stroke to deliver a blow more telling than the keenest flashes of the dry light of the logical understanding. The more one looks into the scene and tries to analyse the numerous elements of dramatic effect to which his total impression is owing, the more one admires the astonishing skill which has put so much significance into a few simple words. The colouring is so brilliant and the touch so firm that one is afraid to put any other work beside it. Nobody before or since has had so clear an insight into the meaning which can be got out of a simple scene by a judicious selection and skilful arrangement of the appropriate surroundings. Sterne's comment upon the mode in which Trim dropped his hat at the peroration of his speech upon Master Bobby's death, affecting even the 'fat, foolish scullion,' is significant. 'Had he flung it, or thrown it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any possible direction under Heaven—or in the best direction that could have been given to it—had he dropped it like a goose, like a puppy, like an ass, or in doing it, or even after he had done it, had he looked like a fool, like a ninny, like a nincompoop, it had failed, and the effect upon the heart had been lost.' Those who would play upon human passions and those who are played upon, or, in Sterne's phrase, those who drive, and those who are driven, like turkeys to market, with a stick and a red clout are invited to meditate upon Trim's hat; and so may all who may wish to understand the secret of Sterne's art.
It is true, unfortunately, that this singular skill—the felicity with which Trim's cap, or his Montero cap, or Uncle Toby's pipe—is made to radiate eloquence, sometimes leads to a decided bathos. The climax so elaborately prepared too often turns out to be a faded bit of sentimentalism. We rather resent the art which is thrown away to prepare us for the assertion that 'When a few weeks will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them.' So we hate the man who can lift his hand upon a woman save in the way of kindness, but we do not want a great writer to adorn that unimpeachable sentiment with all the jewels of rhetoric. It is just in these very critical passages that Sterne's taste is defective, because his feeling is not sound. We are never sure that we can distinguish between the true gems and the counterfeit. When the moment comes at which he suddenly drops the tear of sensibility, he is almost as likely to provoke sneers as sympathy. There is, for example, the famous donkey, and it is curious to compare the donkey fed with macaroons in the 'Tristram Shandy' with the dead donkey of the 'Sentimental Journey,' whose weeping master lays a crust of bread on the now vacant bit of his bridle. It is obviously the same donkey, and Sterne has reflected that he can squeeze a little more pathos out of the animal by actually killing him, and providing a sentimental master. It seems to me that, in trying to heighten the effect, he has just crossed the dangerous limit which divides sympathetic from derisive laughter; and whereas the macaroon-fed animal is a possible, straightforward beast, he becomes (as higher beings have done) a humbug in his palpably hypocritical epitaph. Sterne tries his hand in the same way at improving Maria, who is certainly an effective embodiment of the mad young woman who has tried to move us in many forms since the days of Ophelia. In her second appearance, she comes in to utter the famous sentiment about the wind and the shorn lamb. It has become proverbial, and been even credited in the popular mind with a scriptural origin; and considering such a success, one has hardly the right to say that it has gathered a certain sort of banality. Yet it is surely on the extreme verge at which the pathetic melts into the ludicrous. The reflection, however, occurs more irresistibly in regard to that other famous passage about the recording angel. Sterne's admirers held it to be sublime at the time, and he obviously shared the opinion. And it is undeniable that the story of Le Fevre, in which it is the most conspicuous gem, is a masterpiece in its way. No one can read it, or better still, hear it from the lips of a skilful reader, without admitting the marvellous felicity with which the whole scene is presented. Uncle Toby's oath is a triumph fully worthy of Shakespeare. But the recording angel, though he certainly comes in effectively, is a little suspicious to me. It would have been a sacrifice to which few writers could have been equal, to suppress or soften that brilliant climax; and, yet, if the angel had been omitted, the passage would, I fancy, have been really stronger. We might have been left to make the implied comment for ourselves. For the angel seems to introduce an unpleasant air as of eighteenth-century politeness; we fancy that he would have welcomed a Lord Chesterfield to the celestial mansions with a faultless bow and a dexterous compliment; and somehow he appears, to my imagination at least, apparelled in theatrical gauze and spangles rather than in the genuine angelic costume. Some change passes over every famous passage; the bloom of its first freshness is rubbed off as it is handed from one quoter to another; but where the sentiment has no false ring at the beginning, the colours may grow faint without losing their harmony. In this angel, and some other of Sterne's best-known touches, we seem to feel that the baser metal is beginning to show itself through the superficial enamel.
And this suggests the criticism which must still be made in regard even to the admirable Uncle Toby. Sterne has been called the English Rabelais, and was apparently more ambitious himself of being considered as an English Cervantes. To a modern English reader he is certainly far more amusing than Rabelais, and he can be appreciated with less effort than Cervantes. But it is impossible to mention these great names without seeing the direction in which Sterne falls short of the highest excellence. We know that, on clearing away the vast masses of buffoonery and ribaldry under which Rabelais was forced, or chose, to hide himself we come to the profound thinker and powerful satirist. Sterne represents a comparatively shallow vein of thought. He is the mouthpiece of a sentiment which had certainly its importance in so far as it was significant of a vague discontent with things in general, and a desire for more exciting intellectual food. He was so far ready to fool the age to the top of its bent; and in the course of his ramblings he strikes some hard blows at various types of hide-bound pedantry. But he is too systematic a trifler to be reckoned with any plausibility amongst the spiritual leaders of any intellectual movement. In that sense, 'Tristram Shandy' is a curious symptom of the existing currents of emotion, but cannot, like the 'Emile' or the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' be reckoned as one of the efficient causes. This complete and characteristic want of purpose may indeed be reckoned as a literary merit, so far as it prevented 'Tristram Shandy' from degenerating into a mere tract. But the want of intellectual seriousness has another aspect, which comes out when we compare Tristram Shandy, for example, with Don Quixote. The resemblance, which has been often pointed out (as indeed Sterne is fond of hinting at it himself) consists in this, that in both cases we see lovable characters through a veil of the ludicrous. As Don Quixote is a true hero, though he is under a constant hallucination, so Uncle Toby is full of the milk of human kindness, though his simplicity makes him ridiculous to the piercing eyes of common-sense. In both cases, it is inferred, the humourist is discharging his true function of showing the lovable qualities which may be associated with a ludicrous outside.
The Don and the Captain both have their hobbies, which they ride with equal zeal, and there is a close analogy between them. Uncle Toby makes his own apology in the famous oration upon war. 'What is war,' he asks, 'but the getting together of quiet and harmless people with swords in their hands, to keep the turbulent and ambitious within bounds? And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I have taken in these things, and that infinite delight in particular which has attended my sieges in the bowling-green, has arisen within me, and I hope in the Corporal too, from the consciousness that in carrying them on we were answering the great ends of our creation.' Uncle Toby's military ardour undoubtedly makes a most piquant addition to his simple-minded benevolence. The fusion of the gentle Christian with the chivalrous devotee of honour is perfect; and the kindliest of human beings, who would not hurt a hair of the fly's head, most delicately blended with the gallant soldier who, as Trim avers, would march up to the mouth of a cannon though he saw the match at the very touchhole. Should anyone doubt the merits of the performance, he might reassure himself by comparing the scene in which Uncle Toby makes the speech, just quoted, with a parallel passage in 'The Caxtons,' and realise the difference between extreme imitative dexterity and the force of real genius.
It is only when we compare this exquisite picture with the highest art that we are sensible of its comparative deficiency. The imaginative force of Cervantes is proved by the fact that Don Quixote and his followers have become the accepted symbols of the most profoundly tragic element in human life—of the contrast between the lofty idealism of the mere enthusiast and the sturdy common-sense of ordinary human beings—between the utilitarian and the romantic types of character; and as neither aspect of the truth can be said to be exhaustive, we are rightly left with our sympathies equally balanced. The book may be a sad one to those who prefer to be blind; but in proportion as we can appreciate a penetrative insight into the genuine facts of life, we are impressed by this most powerful presentation of the never-ending problem. It is impossible to find in 'Tristram Shandy' any central conception of this breadth and depth. If Trim had been as shrewd as Sancho, Uncle Toby would appear like a mere simpleton. Like a child, he requires a thoroughly sympathetic audience who will not bring his playthings to the brutal test of actual facts. The high and earnest enthusiasm of the Don can stand the contrast of common-sense, though at the price of passing into insanity. But Trim is forced to be Uncle Toby's accomplice, or his Commander would never be able to play at soldiers. If Don Quixote had simply amused himself at a mock tournament, and had never been in danger of mistaking a puppet-show for a reality, he would certainly have been more credible, but in the same proportion he would have been commonplace. The whole tragic element which makes the humour impressive would have disappeared. Sterne seldom ventures to the limit of the tragic. The bowling-green of Mr. Shandy's parlance is too exclusively a sleepy hollow. The air is never cleared by a strain of lofty sentiment. When Yorick and Eugenius form part of the company, we feel that they are rather too much at home with offensive suggestions. When Uncle Toby's innocence fails to perceive their coarse insinuations, we are credited with clearer perception, and expected to sympathise with the spurious wit which derives its chief zest from the presence of the pure-minded victim. And so Uncle Toby comes to represent that stingless virtue, which never gets beyond the ken or hurts the feelings of the easy-going epicurean. His perceptions are too slow and his temper too mild to resent an indecency as his relative, Colonel Newcome, would have done. He would have been too complacent, even to the outrageous Costigan. He is admirably kind when a comrade falls ill at his door; but his benevolence can exhale itself sufficiently in the intervals of hobby-riding, and his chivalrous temper in fighting over old battles with the Corporal. We feel that he must be growing fat; that his pulse is flabby and his vegetative functions predominant. When he falls in love with the repulsive (for she is repulsive) widow Wadman, we pity him as we pity a poor soft zoophyte in the clutches of a rapacious crab; but we have no sense of a wasted life. Even his military ardour seems to present itself to our minds as due to the simple affection which makes his regiment part of his family rather than to any capacity for heroic sentiment. His brain might turn soft; it would never spontaneously generate the noble madness of a Quixote, though he might have followed that hero with a more canine fidelity than Sancho.
Mr. Matthew Arnold says of Heine, as we all remember, that:—
The spirit of the world,
Beholding the absurdity of men—
Their vanities, their feats—let a sardonic smile
For one short moment wander o'er his lips—
That smile was Heine.