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.  Sterne’s relations with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed at last a profoundly compromising character, and it is far from improbable that the worst construction would have been put upon them by one of the plain-dealing tribunals aforesaid.  Certainly a young woman who leaves her mother at York, and comes up to London to reside alone in lodgings, where she is constantly being visited by a lover who is himself living en garcon in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way.  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 over-indulgence 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 a perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-aesthesia which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of his art.

Injurious, however, as was the effect which Sterne’s philanderings exercised upon his personal and literary character, it is not likely that, at least at this period of his life at Sutton, they had in any degree compromised his reputation.  For this he had provided in other ways, and principally by his exceedingly injudicious choice of associates.  “As to the squire of the parish,” he remarks in the Memoir, “I cannot say we were on a very friendly footing, but at Stillington the family of the C[rofts] showed us every kindness:  ’twas most agreeable to be within a mile and a half of an amiable family who were ever cordial friends;” and who, it may be added, appear to have been Sterne’s only reputable acquaintances.  For the satisfaction of all other social needs he seems to have resorted to a companionship which it was hardly possible for a clergyman to frequent without scandal—­that, namely, of John Hall Stevenson and the kindred spirits