comparison—­very much, I need hardly say, to the advantage of the latter—­between the indecency of Swift and that of Rabelais—­that “good giant,” as his countryman calls him, “who rolls himself joyously about on his dunghill, thinking no evil.”  And no doubt the world of literary moralists will always be divided upon the question—­one mainly of national temperament—­whether mere animal spirits or serious satiric purpose is the best justification for offences against cleanliness.  It is, of course, only the former theory, if either, which could possibly avail Sterne, and it would need an unpleasantly minute analysis of this characteristic in his writings to ascertain how far M. Taine’s eloquent defence of Rabelais could be made applicable to his case.  But the inquiry, one is glad to think, is as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable; for, unfortunately for Sterne, he must be condemned on a quantitative comparison of indecency, whatever may be his fate when compared with these other two great writers as regards the quality of their respective transgressions.  There can be no denying, I mean, that Sterne is of all writers the most permeated and penetrated with impurity of thought and suggestion; that in no other writer is its latent presence more constantly felt, even if there be any in whom it is more often openly obtruded.  The unclean spirit pursues him everywhere, disfiguring his scenes of humour, demoralizing his passages of serious reflection, debasing even his sentimental interludes.  His coarseness is very often as great a blot on his art as on his morality—­a thing which can very rarely be said of either Swift or Rabelais; and it is sometimes so distinctly fatal a blemish from the purely literary point of view, that one is amazed at the critical faculty which could have tolerated its presence.

But when all this has been said of Sterne’s humour it still remains true that, in another sense of the words “purity” and “delicacy,” he possesses humour more pure and delicate than, perhaps, any other writer in the world can show.  For if that humour is the purest and most delicate which is the freest from any admixture of farce, and produces its effects with the lightest touch, and the least obligations to ridiculous incident, or what may be called the “physical grotesque,” in any shape—­then one can point to passages from Sterne’s pen which, for fulfilment of these conditions, it would be difficult to match elsewhere.  Strange as it may seem to say this of the literary Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the literary Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot chestnut, it is nevertheless the fact that scene after scene may be cited from Tristram Shandy, and those the most delightful in the book, which are not only free from even the momentary intrusion of either the clown or the caricaturist, but even from the presence of “comic properties” (as actors would call them) of any kind:  scenes of which the external setting is of the simplest possible character, while the humour is of that deepest and most penetrative kind which springs from the eternal incongruities of human nature, the ever-recurring cross-purposes of human lives.