Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew nothing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries.  Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it is a form lower than the poetic—­essentially a prosaic, and in many or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason, that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of art than any other.  As to the question who are its practitioners, it would, of course, be the merest dogmatism to commit one’s self to any attempt at rigid classification in such a matter.  There are few if any writers who can be described without qualification either as realists or as idealists.  Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one moment and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in other moods.  All that need be insisted on is that the methods of the two forms of art are essentially distinct, and that artistic failure must result from any attempt to combine them; for, whereas the primary condition of success in the one case is that the reader should feel the sympathetic presence of the writer, the primary condition of success in the other is that the writer should efface himself from the reader’s consciousness altogether.  And it is, I think, the defiance of these conditions which explains why so much of Sterne’s deliberately pathetic writing is, from the artistic point of view, a failure.  It is this which makes one feel so much of it to be strained and unnatural, and which brings it to pass that some of his most ambitious efforts leave the reader indifferent, or even now and then contemptuous.  In those passages of pathos in which the effect is distinctly sought by realistic means Sterne is perpetually ignoring the “self-denying ordinance” of his adopted method—­perpetually obtruding his own individuality, and begging us, as it were, to turn from the picture to the artist, to cease gazing for a moment at his touching creation, and to admire the fine feeling, the exquisitely sympathetic nature of the man who created it.  No doubt, as we must in fairness remember, it was part of his “humour”—­in Ancient Pistol’s sense of the word—­to do this; it is true, no doubt (and a truth which Sterne’s most famous critic was too prone to ignore), that his sentiment is not always meant for serious;[1] nay, the very word “sentimental” itself, though in Sterne’s day, of course, it had acquired but a part of its present disparaging significance, is a sufficient proof of that.  But there are, nevertheless, plenty of passages, both in Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, where the intention is wholly and unmixedly pathetic—­where the smile is not for a moment meant to compete with the tear—­which are, nevertheless, it must be owned, complete failures, and failures traceable with much certainty, or so it seems to me, to the artistic error above-mentioned.