CHAPTER X.

STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—­HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT.

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 recognized 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.”  He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly irregular, and that was all.  His digressions, his asides, and his fooleries in general would, of course, have in any case necessitated a certain general jerkiness of manner; but this need hardly have extended itself habitually to the structure of individual sentences, and as a matter of fact he can at times write, as he does for the most part in his Sermons, in a style which is not the less vigorous for being fairly correct.  But as a rule his mode of expressing himself is destitute of any pretensions to precision; and in many instances it is a perfect marvel of literary slipshod.  Nor is there any ground for believing that the slovenliness was invariably intentional.  Sterne’s truly hideous French—­French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would have stood aghast—­is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy.  Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords confirmatory testimony to the same point.  His punctuation is fearful and wonderful, even for an age in which the rationale of punctuation was more imperfectly understood than it is at present; and this, though an apparently slight matter, is not without value as an indication of ways of thought.  But if we can hardly describe Sterne’s style as being in the literary sense a style at all, it has a very distinct colloquial character of its own, and as such it is nearly as much deserving of praise as from the literary point of view it is open to exception.  Chaotic as it is in the syntactical sense, it is a perfectly clear vehicle for the conveyance of thought:  we are as 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 little 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.