Sterne eBook

Henry Duff Traill
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 198 pages of information about Sterne.

Sterne eBook

Henry Duff Traill
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 198 pages of information about Sterne.
accepts his rebukes.  “Master,” as he once complains, “of one of the finest chains of reasoning in the world, he is unable for the soul of him to get a single link of it into the head of his wife;” but we never hear him lamenting in this serio-comic fashion over his brother’s inability to follow his processes of reasoning.  That is too serious a matter with both of them; their mutual desire to share each other’s ideas and tastes is too strong; and each time that the philosopher shows his impatience with the soldier’s fortification-hobby, or the soldier breaks his honest shins over one of the philosopher’s crotchets, the regret and remorse on either side is equally acute and sincere.  It must be admitted, however, that Captain Shandy is the one who the more frequently subjects himself to pangs of this sort, and who is the more innocent sufferer of the two.

From the broad and deep humour of this central conception of contrast flow as from a head-water innumerable rills of comedy through many and many a page of dialogue; but not, of course, from this source alone.  Uncle Toby is ever delightful, even when his brother is not near him as his foil; the faithful Corporal brings out another side of his character, upon which we linger with equal pleasure of contemplation; the allurements of the Widow Wadman reveal him to us in yet another—­but always in a captivating aspect.  There is, too, one need hardly say, an abundance of humour, of a high, though not the highest, order in the minor characters of the story—­in Mrs. Shandy, in the fascinating widow, and even, under the coarse lines of the physical caricature, in the keen little Catholic, Slop himself.  But it is in Toby Shandy alone that humour reaches that supreme level which it is only capable of attaining when the collision of contrasted qualities in a human character produces a corresponding conflict of the emotions of mirth and tenderness in the minds of those who contemplate it.

This, however, belongs more rightfully to the consideration of the creative and dramatic element in Sterne’s genius; and an earlier place in the analysis is claimed by that power over the emotion of pity upon which Sterne, beyond question, prided himself more highly than upon any other of his gifts.  He preferred, we can plainly see, to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the great sentimentalist; and though the word “sentiment” had something even in his day of the depreciatory meaning which distinguishes it nowadays from “pathos,” there can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Sterne to be, on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather admirable than the reverse.

What, then, were his notions of true “sentiment” in literature?  We have seen elsewhere that he repeats—­it would appear unconsciously—­and commends the canon which Horace propounds to the tragic poet in the words: 

  “Si vis me flere, dolendum
  Primum ipsi tibi:  tunc tua me infortunia laedent.”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Sterne from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.