Chapter L: Sterne.’ (1)

The beautiful language with which young ladies were wooed a century ago is a characteristic of that extinct age; at least, we fear that no such beautiful English will be discovered when our secret repositories are ransacked. The age of ridicule has come in, and the age of good words has gone out.

There is no reason to doubt, however, that Sterne was really in love with Mrs. Sterne. People have doubted it because of these beautiful words; but, in fact, Sterne was just the sort of man to be subject to this kind of feeling. He took—and to this he owes his fame—the _sensitive_ view of life. He regarded it not from the point of view of intellect, or conscience, or religion, but in the plain way in which natural feeling impresses, and will always impress, a natural person. 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 best passages in Sterne are those which every one knows, like this:

‘Thou hast left this matter short, said my uncle Toby to the
corporal, as he was putting him to bed,——and I will tell thee
in what, Trim.——In the first place, when thou madest an offer
of my services to Le Fever,—as sickness and travelling are
both expensive, and thou knowest he was but a poor lieutenant,
with a son to subsist as well as himself, out of his pay,—that
thou didst not make an offer to him of my purse; because, had
he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome
to it as myself.——Your honour knows, said the corporal, I had
no orders;——True, quoth my uncle Toby,—thou didst very right,
Trim, as a soldier, but certainly very wrong as a man.

‘In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same
excuse, continued my uncle Toby,——when thou offeredst him
whatever was in my house,—thou shouldst have offered him
my house too:——A sick brother officer should have the best
quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us,—we could tend and
look to him:——Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim,—and
what with thy care of him, and the old woman’s, and his boy’s,
and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set
him upon his legs.——

‘——In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby,
smiling,—he might march.——He will never march, an’ please your
honour, in this world, said the corporal:——He will march, said
my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed, with one
shoe off:——An’ please your honour, said the corporal, he will
never march, but to his grave:——He shall march, cried my uncle
Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without
advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.——He cannot
stand it, said the corporal:——He shall be supported, said my
uncle Toby:——He’ll drop at last, said the corporal, and what
will become of his boy?——He shall not drop, said my uncle Toby,
firmly.——A-well-o’day,—do what we can for him, said Trim,
maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die:——He shall not
die, by G—! cried my uncle Toby.

‘—The ACCUSING SPIRIT, which flew up to heaven’s chancery with
the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL, as
he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it
out for ever.

‘—My uncle Toby went to his bureau,—put his purse into his
breeches pocket, and having ordered the corporal to go early in
the morning for a physician,—he went to bed, and fell asleep.

‘The sun looked bright the morning after, to every eye in the
village but Le Fever’s and his afflicted son’s; the hand of
death pressed heavy upon his eye-lids,——and hardly could the
wheel at the cistern turn round its circle,—when my uncle
Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered
the lieutenant’s room, and without preface or apology, sat
himself down upon the chair by the bed-side, and independently
of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an
old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked
him how he did,—how he had rested in the night,—what was his
complaint,—where was his pain,—and what he could do to help
him:——and without giving him time to answer any one of the
inquiries, went on and told him of the little plan which he had
been concerting with the corporal the night before for him.——

‘——You shall go home directly, Le Fever, said my uncle Toby,
to my house,—and we’ll send for a doctor to see what’s the
matter,—and we’ll have an apothecary,—and the corporal shall be
your nurse;——and I’ll be your servant, Le Fever.

‘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,
super-added, 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 spirit of Le Fever, 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.——

‘Nature instantly ebb’d again,—the film returned
to its place,——the pulse fluttered——stopp’d——went
on——throbb’d——stopp’d again——moved——stopp’d——shall I go
on?——No.’

In one of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ Mr. Thackeray introduces a literary man complaining of his ‘sensibility.’ ‘Ah,’ he replies, ‘my good friend, your sensibility is your livelihood: if you did not feel the events and occurrences of life more acutely than others, you could not describe them better; and it is the excellence of your description by which you live.’ This is precisely true of Sterne. He is a great author because he felt acutely. He is the most pathetic of writers because he had—when writing, at least—the most pity. He was, too, we believe, pretty sharply in love with Mrs. Sterne, because he was sensitive to that sort of feeling likewise.

The difficulty of this sort of character is the difficulty of keeping it. It does not last. There is a certain bloom of sensibility and feeling about it which, in the course of nature, is apt to fade soon, and which, when it has faded, there is nothing to replace. A character with the binding elements—with a firm will, a masculine understanding, and a persistent conscience—may retain, and perhaps improve, the early and original freshness. But a loose-set, though pure character, the moment it is thrown into temptation sacrifices its purity, loses its gloss, and gets, so to speak, out of form entirely.

We do not know with great accuracy what Sterne’s temptations were; but there was one, which we can trace with some degree of precision, which has left ineffaceable traces on his works,—which probably left some traces upon his character and conduct. There was in that part of Yorkshire a certain John Hall Stevenson, a country gentleman of some fortune, and possessed of a castle, which he called Crazy Castle. Thence he wrote tales, which he named ‘Crazy Tales,’ but which certainly are not entitled to any such innocent name. The license of that age was unquestionably wonderful. A man of good property could write any evil. There was no legal check, or ecclesiastical check, and hardly any check of public opinion. These ‘Crazy Tales’ have license without humour, and vice without amusement. They are the writing of a man with some wit, but only enough wit for light conversation, which becomes overworked and dull when it is reduced to regular composition and made to write long tales. The author, feeling his wit jaded perpetually, becomes immoral, in the vain hope that he will cease to be dull. He has attained his reward; he will be remembered for nauseous tiresomeness by all who have read him.

But though the ‘Crazy Tales’ are now tedious, Crazy Castle was a pleasant place, at least to men like Sterne. He was an idle young parson, with much sensibility, much love of life and variety, and not a bit of grave goodness. The dull duties of a country parson, as we now understand them, would never have been to his taste; and the sinecure idleness then permitted to parsons left him open to every temptation. The frail texture of merely natural purity, the soft fibre of the instinctive pagan, yield to the first casualty. Exactly what sort of life they led at Crazy Castle we do not know; but vaguely we do know, and we may be sure _Mrs._ Sterne was against it.

One part of Crazy Castle has had effects which will last as long as English literature. It had a library richly stored in old folio learning, and also in the amatory reading of other days. Every page of _Tristram Shandy_ bears traces of both elements. Sterne, when he wrote it, had filled his head and his mind, not with the literature of his own age, but with the literature of past ages. He was thinking of Rabelais rather than of Fielding; of forgotten romances rather than of Richardson. He wrote, indeed, of his own times and of men he had seen, because his sensitive vivid nature would only endure to write of present things. But the _mode_ in which he wrote was largely coloured by literary habits and literary fashions that had long passed away. The oddity of the book was a kind of advertisement to its genius, and that oddity consisted in the use of old manners upon new things. No analysis or account of _Tristram Shandy_ could be given which would suit the present generation; being, indeed, a book without plan or order, it is in every generation unfit for analysis. This age would not endure a statement of the most telling points, as the writer thought them, and no age would like an elaborate plan of a book in which there is no plan, in which the detached remarks and separate scenes were really meant to be the whole. The notion that ‘a plot was to hang plums upon’ was Sterne’s notion exactly.

The real excellence of Sterne is single and simple; the defects are numberless and complicated. He excels, perhaps, all other writers in mere simple description of common sensitive human action. He places before you in their simplest form the elemental facts of human life; he does not view them through the intellect, he scarcely views them through the imagination; he does but reflect the unimpaired impression that the facts of life, which do not change from age to age, make on the deep basis of human feeling, which changes as little though years go on. The example we quoted just now is as good as any other, though not better than any other. Our readers should go back to it again, or our praise may seem overcharged. It is the portrait-painting of the heart. It is as pure a reflection of mere natural feeling as literature has ever given, or will ever give. The delineation is nearly perfect. Sterne’s feeling in his higher moments so much overpowered his intellect, and so directed his imagination, that no intrusive thought blemishes, no distorting fancy mars, the perfection of the representation. The disenchanting facts which deface, the low circumstances which debase the simpler feelings oftener than any other feelings, his art excludes. The feeling which would probably be coarse in the reality is refined in the picture. The unconscious tact of the nice artist heightens and chastens reality, but yet it is reality still. His mind was like a pure lake of delicate water: it reflects the ordinary landscape, the rugged hills, the loose pebbles, the knotted and the distorted firs perfectly and as they are, yet with a charm and fascination that they have not in themselves. This is the highest attainment of art, to be at the same time nature and something more than nature.

But here the great excellence of Sterne ends as well as begins. In _Tristram Shandy_ especially there are several defects which, while we are reading it, tease and disgust so much that we are scarcely willing even to admire as we ought to admire the refined pictures of human emotion. The first of these, and perhaps the worst, is the fantastic disorder of the form. It is an imperative law of the writing-art, that a book should go straight on. A great writer should be able to tell a great meaning as coherently as a small writer tells a small meaning. The magnitude of the thought to be conveyed, the delicacy of the emotion to be painted, render the introductory touches of consummate art not of less importance, but of more importance. A great writer should train the mind of the reader for his greatest things; that is, by first strokes and fitting preliminaries he should form and prepare his mind for the due appreciation and the perfect enjoyment of high creations. He should not blunder upon a beauty, nor, after a great imaginative creation, should he at once fall back to bare prose. The high-wrought feeling which a poet excites should not be turned out at once and without warning into the discomposing world. It is one of the greatest merits of the greatest living writer of fiction,—of the authoress of _Adam Bede_,—that she never brings you to anything without preparing you for it; she has no loose lumps of beauty; she puts in nothing at random; after her greatest scenes, too, a natural sequence of subordinate realities again tones down the mind to this sublunary world. Her logical style—the most logical, probably, which a woman ever wrote—aids in this matter her natural sense of due proportion. There is not a space of incoherency—not a gap. It is not natural to begin with the point of a story, and she does not begin with it. When some great marvel has been told, we all wish to know what came of it, and she tells us. Her natural way, as it seems to those who do not know its rarity, of telling what happened produces the consummate effect of gradual enchantment and as gradual disenchantment. But Sterne’s style is _un_natural. He never begins at the beginning and goes straight through to the end. He shies-in a beauty suddenly; and just when you are affected he turns round and grins at it. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘is it not fine?’ And then he makes jokes which at that place and that time are out of place, or passes away into scholastic or other irrelevant matter, which simply disgusts and disheartens those whom he has just delighted. People excuse all this irregularity of form by saying that it was imitated from Rabelais. But this is nonsense. Rabelais, perhaps, could not in his day venture to tell his meaning straight out; at any rate, he did not tell it. Sterne should not have chosen a model so monstrous. Incoherency is not less a defect because an imperfect foreign writer once made use of it. ‘You may have, sir, a reason,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘for saying that two and two make five, but they will still make four.’ Just so, a writer may have a reason for selecting the defect of incoherency, but it is a defect still. Sterne’s best things read best out of his books,—in Enfield’s _Speaker_ and other places,—and you can say no worse of any one as a continuous artist.

Another most palpable defect—especially palpable now-a-days—in _Tristram Shandy_ is its indecency. It is quite true that the customary conventions of writing are much altered during the last century, and much which would formerly have been deemed blameless would now be censured and disliked. The audience has changed; and decency is of course in part dependent on who is within hearing. A divorce case may be talked over across a club-table with a plainness of speech and development of expression which would be indecent in a mixed party, and scandalous before young ladies. Now, a large part of old novels may very fairly be called club-books; they speak out plainly and simply the notorious facts of the world, as men speak of them to men. Much excellent and proper masculine conversation is wholly unfit for repetition to young girls; and just in the same way, books written—as was almost all old literature,—for men only, or nearly only, seem coarse enough when contrasted with novels written by young ladies upon the subjects and in the tone of the drawing-room. The change is inevitable; as soon as works of fiction are addressed to boys and girls, they must be fit for boys and girls; they must deal with a life which is real so far as it goes, but which is yet most limited; which deals with the most passionate part of life, and yet omits the errors of the passions; which aims at describing men in their relations to women, and yet omits an all but universal influence which more or less distorts and modifies all these relations.

As we have said, the change cannot be helped. A young ladies’ literature must be a limited and truncated literature. The indiscriminate study of human life is not desirable for them, either in fiction or in reality. But the habitual formation of a scheme of thought and a code of morality upon incomplete materials is a very serious evil. The readers for whose sake the omissions are made cannot fancy what is left out. Many a girl of the present day reads novels, and nothing but novels; she forms her mind by them, as far as she forms it by reading at all; even if she reads a few dull books, she soon forgets all about them, and remembers the novels only; she is more influenced by them than by sermons. They form her idea of the world, they define her taste, and modify her morality; not so much in explicit thought and direct act, as unconsciously and in her floating fancy. How is it possible to convince such a girl, especially if she is clever, that on most points she is all wrong? She has been reading most excellent descriptions of mere society; she comprehends those descriptions perfectly, for her own experience elucidates and confirms them. She has a vivid picture of a _patch_ of life. Even if she admits in words that there is something beyond, something of which she has no idea, she will not admit it really and in practice. What she has mastered and realised will incurably and inevitably overpower the unknown something of which she knows nothing, can imagine nothing, and can make nothing. ‘I am not sure,’ said an old lady, ‘but I think it’s the novels that make my girls so _heady_.’ It is the novels. A very intelligent acquaintance with limited life makes them think that the world is far simpler than it is, that men are easy to understand, ‘that mamma is _so_ foolish.’

The novels of the last age have certainly not this fault. They do not err on the side of reticence. A girl may learn from them more than it is desirable for her to know. But, as we have explained, they were meant for men and not for girls; and if _Tristram Shandy_ had simply given a plain exposition of necessary facts—necessary, that is, to the development of the writer’s view of the world, and to the telling of the story in hand,—we should not have complained; we should have regarded it as the natural product of a now extinct society. But there are most unmistakable traces of ‘Crazy Castle’ in _Tristram Shandy_. There is indecency for indecency’s sake. It is made a sort of recurring and even permeating joke to mention things which are not generally mentioned. Sterne himself made a sort of defence, or rather denial, of this. He once asked a lady if she had read _Tristram_. ‘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,’ said Sterne, ‘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 white tunics): ‘he shows at times a good deal that is usually concealed, but it is all in perfect innocence.’ But a perusal of _Tristram_ would not make good the plea. The unusual publicity of what is ordinarily imperceptible is not the thoughtless accident of amusing play; it is deliberately sought after as a nice joke; it is treated as a good in itself.

The indecency of _Tristram Shandy_—at least of the early part, which was written before Sterne had been to France—is especially an offence against taste, because of its ugliness. _Moral_ indecency is always disgusting. There certainly is a sort of writing which cannot be called decent, and which describes a society to the core immoral, which nevertheless is no offence against art; it violates a higher code than that of taste, but it does not violate the code of taste. The _Mémoires de Grammont_—hundreds of French memoirs about France—are of this kind, more or less. They describe the refined, witty, elegant immorality of an idle aristocracy. They describe a life ‘unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world as the present one,’ in which there are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precepts of morals seem not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and forgotten; such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to lead on this earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity and revolution. This life, though an offence in morals, was not an offence in taste. It was an elegant, a _pretty_ thing while it lasted. Especially in enhancing description, where the alloy of life may be omitted, where nothing vulgar need be noticed, where everything elegant may be neatly painted,—such a world is elegant enough. Morals and policy must decide how far such delineations are permissible or expedient; but the art of beauty,—art-criticism—has no objection to them. They are pretty paintings of pretty objects, and that is all it has to say. They may very easily do harm; if generally read among the young of the middle class, they would be sure to do harm: they would teach not a few to aim at a sort of refinement denied them by circumstances, and to neglect the duties allotted them; it would make shopmen ‘bad imitations of polished ungodliness,’ and also bad shopmen. But still, though it would in such places be noxious literature, in itself it would be pretty literature. The critic must praise it, though the moralist must condemn it, and perhaps the politician forbid it.

But _Tristram Shandy’s_ indecency is the very opposite to this refined sort. It consists in allusions to certain inseparable accompaniments of actual life which are not beautiful, which can never be made interesting, which would, _if_ they were decent, be dull and uninteresting. There is, it appears, a certain excitement in putting such matters into a book: there is a minor exhilaration even in petty crime. At first such things look so odd in print that you go on reading them to see what they look like; but you soon give up. What is disenchanting or even disgusting in reality does not become enchanting or endurable in delineation. You are more angry at it in literature than in life; there is much which is barbarous and animal in reality that we could wish away; we endure it because we cannot help it, because we did not make it and cannot alter it, because it is an inseparable part of this inexplicable world. But why we should put this coarse alloy, this dross of life, into the _optional_ world of literature, which we can make as we please, it is impossible to say. The needless introduction of accessory ugliness is always a sin in art, and is not at all less so when such ugliness is disgusting and improper. _Tristram Shandy_ is incurably tainted with a pervading vice; it dwells at length on, it seeks after, it returns to, it gloats over, the most unattractive part of the world.

There is another defect in _Tristram Shandy_ which would of itself remove it from the list of first-rate books, even if those which we have mentioned did not do so. It contains eccentric characters only. Some part of this defect may be perhaps explained by one peculiarity of its origin. Sterne was so sensitive to the picturesque parts of life, that he wished to paint the picturesque parts of the people he hated. Country-towns in those days abounded in odd characters. They were out of the way of the great opinion of the world, and shaped themselves to little opinions of their own. They regarded the customs which the place had inherited as the customs which were proper for it, and which it would be foolish, if not wicked, to try to change. This gave English country life a motley picturesqueness then, which it wants now, when London ideas shoot out every morning, and carry on the wings of the railway a uniform creed to each cranny of the kingdom, north and south, east and west. These little public opinions of little places wanted, too, the crushing power of the great public opinion of our own day; at the worst, a man could escape from them into some different place which had customs and doctrines that suited him better. We now may fly into another ‘city,’ but it is all the same Roman empire; the same uniform justice, the one code of heavy laws presses us down and makes us—the sensible part of us at least—as like other people as we can make ourselves. The public opinion of county towns yielded soon to individual exceptions; it had not the confidence in itself which the opinion of each place now receives from the accordant and simultaneous echo of a hundred places. If a man chose to be queer, he was bullied for a year or two, then it was settled that he was ‘queer;’ that was the fact about him, and must be accepted. In a year or so he became an ‘institution’ of the place, and the local pride would have been grieved if he had amended the oddity which suggested their legends and added a flavour to their life. Of course, if a man was rich and influential, he might soon disregard the mere opinion of the petty locality. Every place has wonderful traditions of old rich men who did exactly as they pleased, because they could set at naught the opinions of the neighbours, by whom they were feared; and who did not, as now, dread the unanimous conscience which does not fear even a squire of 2000_l._ a year, or a banker of 8000_l._, because it is backed by the wealth of London and the magnitude of all the country. There is little oddity in county towns now; they are detached scraps of great places; but in Sterne’s time there was much, and he used it unsparingly.

Much of the delineation is of the highest merit. Sterne knew how to describe eccentricity, for he showed its relation to our common human nature: he showed how we were related to it, how in some sort and in some circumstances we might ourselves become it. He reduced the abnormal formation to the normal rules. Except upon this condition, eccentricity is no fit subject for literary art. Every one must have known characters which, if they were put down in books, barely and as he sees them, would seem monstrous and disproportioned,—which would disgust all readers,—which every critic would term unnatural. While characters are monstrous, they should be kept out of books; they are ugly unintelligibilities, foreign to the realm of true art. But as soon as they can be explained to us, as soon as they are shown in their union with, in their outgrowth from common human nature, they are the best subjects for great art—for they are new subjects. They teach us, not the old lesson which our fathers knew, but a new lesson which will please us and make us better than they. Hamlet is an eccentric character, one of the most eccentric in literature; but because, by the art of the poet, we are made to understand that he is a possible, a _vividly_ possible man, he enlarges our conceptions of human nature; he takes us out of the bounds of commonplace. He ‘instructs us by means of delight.’ Sterne does this too. Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Mrs. Shandy,—for in strictness she too is eccentric from her abnormal commonplaceness,—are beings of which the possibility is brought home to us, which we feel we could under circumstances and by influences become; which, though contorted and twisted, are yet spun out of the same elementary nature, the same thread as we are. Considering how odd these characters are, the success of Sterne is marvellous, and his art in this respect consummate. But yet on a point most nearly allied it is very faulty. Though each individual character is shaded off into human nature, the whole is not shaded off into the world. This society of originals and oddities is left to stand by itself, as if it were a natural and ordinary society,—a society easily conceivable and needing no explanation. Such is not the manner of the great masters; in their best works a constant atmosphere of half commonplace personages surrounds and shades off, illustrates and explains every central group of singular persons.

On the whole, therefore, the judgment of criticism on _Tristram Shandy_ is concise and easy. It is immortal because of certain scenes suggested by Sterne’s curious experience, detected by his singular sensibility, and heightened by his delineative and discriminative imagination. It is defective because its style is fantastic, its method illogical and provoking; because its indecency is of the worst sort, as far as in such matters an artistic judgment can speak of worst and best; because its world of characters forms an incongruous group of singular persons utterly dissimilar to, and irreconcilable with the world in which we live. It is a great work of art, but of barbarous art. Its mirth is boisterous. It is _provincial_. It is redolent of an inferior society; of those who think crude animal spirits in themselves delightful; who do not know that, without wit to point them, or humour to convey them, they are disagreeable to others; who like disturbing transitions, blank pages, and tricks of style; who do not know that a simple and logical form of expression is the most effective, if not the easiest—the least laborious to readers, if not always the most easily attained by writers.

The oddity of _Tristram Shandy_ was, however, a great aid to its immediate popularity. If an author were to stand on his head now and then in Cheapside, his eccentricity would bring him into contact with the police, but it would advertise his writings; they would sell better: people would like to see what was said by a great author who was so odd as to stand so. Sterne put his eccentricity into his writings, and therefore came into collision with the critics; but he attained the same end. His book sold capitally. As with all popular authors, he went to London; he was fêted. ‘The _man_ Sterne,’ growled Dr. Johnson, ‘has dinner engagements for three months.’ The upper world—ever desirous of novelty, ever tired of itself, ever anxious to be amused—was in hopes of a new wit. It naturally hoped that the author of _Tristram Shandy_ would talk well, and it sent for him to talk.

He did talk well, it appears, though not always very correctly, and never very clerically. His appearance was curious, but yet refined. Eager eyes, a wild look, a long lean frame, and what he called a cadaverous bale of goods for a body, made up an odd exterior, which attracted notice, and did not repel liking. He looked like a scarecrow with bright eyes. With a random manner, but not without a nice calculation, he discharged witticisms at London parties. His keen nerves told him which were fit witticisms; _they_ took, and _he_ was applauded.

He published some sermons too. That tolerant age liked, it is instructive as well as amusing to think, sermons by the author of _Tristram Shandy_. People wonder at the rise of Methodism; but ought they to wonder? If a clergyman publishes his sermons because he has written an indecent novel—a novel which is purely pagan—which is outside the ideas of Christianity, whose author can scarcely have been inside of them—if a man so made and so circumstanced is _as such_ to publish Christian sermons, surely Christianity is a joke and a dream. Wesley was right in this at least; if Christianity be true, the upper-class life of the last century was based on rotten falsehood. A world which is really secular, which professes to be Christian, is the worst of worlds.

The only point in which Sterne resembles a clergyman of our own time is, that he lost his voice. That peculiar affection of the chest and throat, which is hardly known among barristers, but which inflicts such suffering upon parsons, attacked him also. Sterne too, as might be expected, went abroad for it. He ‘spluttered French,’ he tells us, with success in Paris; the accuracy of the grammar some phrases in his letters would lead us to doubt; but few, very few Yorkshire parsons could then talk French at all, and there was doubtless a fine tact and sensibility in what he said. A literary phenomenon wishing to enjoy society, and able to amuse society, has ever been welcome in the Parisian world. After Paris, Sterne went to the south of France, and on to Italy, lounging easily in pretty places, and living comfortably, as far as one can see, upon the profits of _Tristram Shandy_. Literary success has seldom changed more suddenly and completely the course of a man’s life. For years Sterne resided in a country parsonage, and the sources of his highest excitement were a country town full of provincial oddities, and a ‘Crazy Castle’ full of the license and the whims of a country squire. On a sudden London, Paris, and Italy were opened to him. From a few familiar things he was suddenly transferred to many unfamiliar things. He was equal to them, though the change came so suddenly in middle life—though the change from a secluded English district to the great and interesting scenes was far greater, far fuller of unexpected sights and unforeseen phenomena, than it can be now—when travelling is common—when the newspaper is ‘abroad’—when every one has in his head some feeble image of Europe and the world. Sterne showed the delicate docility which belongs to a sensitive and experiencing nature. He understood and enjoyed very much of this new and strange life, if not the whole.

The proof of this remains written in the _Sentimental Journey_. There is no better painting of first and easy impressions than that book. After all which has been written on the _ancien régime_, an Englishman at least will feel a fresh instruction on reading these simple observations. They are instructive _because_ of their simplicity. The old world at heart was not like that; there were depths and realities, latent forces and concealed results, which were hidden from Sterne’s eye, which it would have been quite out of his way to think of or observe. But the old world _seemed_ like that. This was the spectacle of it as it was seen by an observing stranger; and we take it up, not to know what was the truth, but to know what we should have thought to be the truth if we had lived in those times. People say _Eöthen_ is not like the real East; very likely it is not, but it is like what an imaginative young Englishman would _think_ the East. Just so, the _Sentimental Journey_ is not the true France of the old monarchy, but it is exactly what an observant quick-eyed Englishman might fancy that France to be. This has given it popularity; this still makes it a valuable relic of the past. It is not true to the outward nature of real life, but it is true to the reflected image of that life in an imaginative and sensitive man.

Here is the actual description of the old chivalry of France; the ‘cheap defence of nations,’ as Mr. Burke called it a little while afterwards:

‘When states and empires have their periods of declension, and
feel in their turns what distress and poverty is—I stop not
to tell the causes which gradually brought the house d’E—— in
Brittany into decay. The Marquis d’E—— had fought up against
his condition with great firmness; wishing to preserve, and
still show to the world, some little fragments of what his
ancestors had been—their indiscretions had put it out of his
power. There was enough left for the little exigencies of
_obscurity_. But he had two boys who look’d up to him for
_light_—he thought they deserved it. He had tried his sword—it
could not open the way—the _mounting_ was too expensive—and
simple economy was not a match for it—there was no resource
but commerce.

‘In any other province in France, save Brittany, this was
smiting the root for ever of the little tree his pride and
affection wish’d to see reblossom. But in Brittany, there
being a provision for this, he avail’d himself of it; and
taking an occasion when the states were assembled at Rennes,
the Marquis, attended with his two boys, entered the court;
and having pleaded the right of an ancient law of the duchy,
which, though seldom claim’d, he said, was no less in force,
he took his sword from his side—Here, said he, take it; and be
trusty guardians of it, till better times put me in condition
to reclaim it.

‘The president accepted the Marquis’s sword—he stayed a few
minutes to see it deposited in the archives of his house—and
departed.

‘The Marquis and his whole family embarked the next day for
Martinico, and in about nineteen or twenty years of successful
application to business, with some unlook’d-for bequests from
distant branches of his house, return’d home to reclaim his
nobility and to support it.

‘It was an incident of good fortune which will never happen
to any traveller but a sentimental one, that I should be at
Rennes at the very time of this solemn requisition: I call it
solemn—it was so to me.

‘The Marquis enter’d the court with his whole family: he
supported his lady—his eldest son supported his sister, and
his youngest was at the other extreme of the line next his
mother—he put his handkerchief to his face twice—

‘—There was a dead silence. When the Marquis had approach’d
within six paces of the tribunal, he gave the Marchioness
to his youngest son, and advancing three steps before his
family—he reclaim’d his sword. His sword was given him; and the
moment he got it into his hand he drew it almost out of the
scabbard—’twas the shining face of a friend he had once given
up—he look’d attentively along it, beginning at the hilt, as
if to see whether it was the same—when observing a little rust
which it had contracted near the point he brought it near his
eye, and bending his head down over it—I think I saw a tear
fall upon the place: I could not be deceived by what followed.

‘“I shall find,” said he, “some _other way_ to get it off.”

‘When the Marquis had said this, he return’d his sword into its
scabbard, made a bow to the guardians of it—and with his wife
and daughter, and his two sons following him, walk’d out.

‘O how I envied him his feelings!’

It shows a touching innocence of the imagination to believe—for probably Sterne did believe—or to expect his readers to believe, in a _noblesse_ at once so honourable and so theatrical.

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. Highly elaborate the style certainly is, and in a certain sense artificial; it is full of nice touches, which must have come only upon reflection—a careful polish and judicious enhancement, in which the critic sees many a trace of time and toil. But a style delicately adjusted and exquisitely polished belongs to such a subject. Sterne undertook to write, _not_ of the coarse business of life—very strong common sort of words are best for that—_not_ even of interesting outward realities, which may be best described in a nice and simple style; but of the passing moods of human nature, of the impressions which a sensitive nature receives from the world without; and it is only the nicest art and the most dexterous care which can fit an obtuse language to such fine employment. How language was first invented and made we may not know; but beyond doubt it was shaped and fashioned into its present state by common ordinary men and women using it for common and ordinary purposes. They wanted a carving-knife, not a razor or lancet. And those great artists who have to use language for more exquisite purposes, who employ it to describe changing sentiments and momentary fancies and the fluctuating and indefinite inner world, must use curious nicety, and hidden but effectual artifice, else they cannot duly punctuate their thoughts, and slice the fine edges of their reflections. A hair’s-breadth is as important to them as a yard’s-breadth to a common workman. Sterne’s style has been criticised as artificial; but it is justly and rightly artificial, because language used in its natural and common mode was not framed to delineate, cannot delineate, the delicate subjects with which he occupies himself.

That contact with the world, and with the French world especially, should teach Sterne to abandon the arbitrary and fantastic structure of _Tristram Shandy_ is most natural. French prose may be unreasonable in its meaning, but is ever rational in its structure; it is logic itself. It will not endure that the reader’s mind should be jarred by rough transitions, or distracted by irrelevant oddities. _Antics_ in style are prohibited by its severe code, just as eccentricities in manner are kept down by the critical tone of a fastidious society. In a barbarous country oddity may be attractive; in the great world it never is, except for a moment; it is on trial to see whether it is really oddity, to see if it does not contain elements which may be useful to, which may be naturalised in society at large. But inherent eccentricity, oddity _pur et simple_, is _immiscible_ in the great ocean of universal thought; it is apart from it, even when it floats in and is contained in it; very, very soon it is cast out from the busy waters, and left alone upon the beach. Sterne had the sense to be taught by the sharp touch of the world; he threw aside the ‘player’s garb’ which he had been tempted to assume. He discarded too, as was equally natural, the ugly indecency of _Tristram Shandy_. We will not undertake to defend the morality of certain scenes in the _Sentimental Journey_; there are several which might easily do much harm; but there is nothing displeasing to the natural man in them. They are nice enough; to those whose æsthetic nature has not been laid waste by their moral nature, they are attractive. They have a dangerous prettiness, which may easily incite to practical evil; but in itself, and separated from its censurable consequences, such prettiness is an artistic perfection. It was natural that the aristocratic world should easily teach Sterne that separation between the laws of beauty and the laws of morality which has been familiar to it during many ages—which makes so much of its essence.

Mrs. Sterne did not prosper all this time. She went abroad and stayed at Montpellier with her husband; but it is not wonderful that a mere ‘wife,’ taken out of Yorkshire, should be unfit for the great world. The domestic appendices of men who rise much hardly ever suit the high places at which they arrive. Mrs. Sterne was no exception. She seems to have been sensible, but it was _domestic_ sense. It was of the small world, small: it was fit to regulate the Yorkshire parsonage, it was suitable to a small _ménage_ even at Montpellier. But there was a deficiency in general mind. She did not, we apprehend, comprehend or appreciate the new thoughts and feelings which a new and great experience had awakened in her husband’s mind. His mind moved, but hers could not; she was anchored, but he was at sea.

To fastidious writers who will only use very dignified words, there is much difficulty in describing Sterne’s life in his celebrity. But to humbler persons, who can only describe the things of society in the words of society, the case is simple. Sterne was ‘an old flirt.’ These are short and expressive words, and they tell the whole truth. There is no good reason to suspect his morals, but he dawdled about pretty women. He talked at fifty with the admiring tone of twenty; pretended to ‘freshness’ of feeling; though he had become mature, did not put away immature things. That he had any real influence over women is very unlikely; he was a celebrity, and they liked to exhibit him; he was amusing, and they liked him to amuse them. But they doubtless felt that he too was himself a joke. Women much respect real virtue; they much admire strong and successful immorality; but they neither admire nor respect the timid age which affects the forms of vice without its substance; which preserves the exterior of youth, though the reality is departed; which is insidious but not dangerous, sentimental but not passionate. Of this sort was Sterne, and he had his reward. Women of the world are willing to accept any admiration, but this sort they accept with suppressed and latent sarcasm. They ridiculed his imbecility while they accepted his attentions and enjoyed his society.

Many men have lived this life with but minor penalties, and justly; for though perhaps a feeble and contemptible, it is not a bad or immoral life. But Sterne has suffered a very severe though a delayed and posthumous penalty. He was foolish enough to write letters to some of his friends, and after his death, to get money, his family published them. This is the sort of thing:

‘Eliza will receive my books with this. The sermons came all
hot from the heart: I wish that I could give them any title to
be offered to yours.—The others came from the head—I am more
indifferent about their reception.

‘I know not how it comes about, but I am half in love with
you—I ought to be wholly so; for I never valued (or saw more
good qualities to value) or thought more of one of your sex
than of you; so adieu.

‘Yours faithfully,

‘if not affectionately,

‘L. STERNE.’

‘I cannot rest, Eliza, though I shall call on you at half-past
twelve, till I know how you do.—May thy dear face smile,
as thou risest, like the sun of this morning. I was much
grieved to hear of your alarming indisposition yesterday; and
disappointed too, at not being let in. Remember, my dear, that
a friend has the same right as a physician. The etiquettes
of this town (you’ll say) say otherwise.—No matter! Delicacy
and propriety do not always consist in observing their frigid
doctrines.

‘I am going out to breakfast, but shall be at my lodgings by
eleven, when I hope to read a single line under thy own hand,
that thou art better, and wilt be glad to see thy Bramin.’

This Eliza was a Mrs. Draper, the wife of a judge in India, ‘much respected in that part of the world.’ We know little of Eliza, except that there is a stone in Bristol cathedral—

SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
MRS. ELIZABETH DRAPER,
IN WHOM
GENIUS AND BENEVOLENCE
WERE UNITED.
SHE DIED AUGUST 3, 1778, AGED 35.

Let us hope she possessed, in addition to genius and benevolence, the good sense to laugh at Sterne’s letters.

In truth, much of the gloss and delicacy of Sterne’s pagan instinct had faded away by this time. He still retained his fine sensibility, his exquisite power of entering into and of delineating plain human nature. But the world had produced its inevitable effect on that soft and voluptuous disposition. It is not, as we have said, that he was guilty of grave offences or misdeeds; he made what he would have called a ‘splutter of vice,’ but he would seem to have committed very little. Yet, as with most minds which have exempted themselves from rigid principle, there was a diffused texture of general laxity. The fibre had become imperfect; the moral constitution was impaired; the high colour of rottenness had come at last out, and replaced the delicate bloom and softness of the early fruit. There is no need to write commonplace sermons on an ancient text. The beauty and charm of natural paganism will not endure the stress and destruction of this rough and complicated world. An instinctive purity will preserve men for a brief time, but hardly through a long and varied life of threescore and ten years.

Sterne, however, did not live so long. In 1768 he came to London for the last time, and enjoyed himself much. He dined with literary friends and supped with fast friends. He liked both. But the end was at hand. His chest had long been delicate; he got a bad cold which became a pleurisy, and died in a London lodging—a footman sent by ‘some gentlemen who were dining,’ and a hired nurse, being the only persons present. His family were away; and he had devoted himself to intellectual and luxurious enjoyments, which are at least as sure to make a lonely death-bed as a refined and cultivated life. ‘Self-scanned, self-centred, self-secure,’ a man may perhaps live, but even so by _himself_ he will be sure to die. For self-absorbed men the world at large cares little; as soon as they cease to amuse, or to be useful, it flings them aside, and they die alone. Even Sterne’s grave, they say, was so obscure and neglected that the corpse-stealers ventured to open it, and his body was dissected without being recognised. The life of literary men is often a kind of sermon in itself; for the pursuit of fame, when it is contrasted with the grave realities of life, seems more absurd and trifling than most pursuits, and to leave less behind it. Mere _amusers_ are never respected. It would be harsh to call Sterne a mere amuser, he is much more; but so the contemporary world regarded him. They laughed at his jests, disregarded his death-bed, and neglected his grave.

What, it may be asked, is there in such a career, or such a character as this, to remind us of the great writer whom we have just lost? In externals there seems little resemblance, or rather there seems to be great contrast. On the one side a respected manhood, a long industry, an honoured memory; on the other hand a life lax, if not dissolute, little labour, and a dishonoured grave. Mr. Thackeray, too, has written a most severe criticism on Sterne’s character. Can we, then, venture to compare the two? We do so venture; and we allege, and that in spite of many superficial differences, that there was one fundamental and ineradicable resemblance between the two.