“Nature melted within me [continues Sterne] as I said this; and Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped too much already to be of use, would needs go wash it in the stream.  And where will you dry it, Maria? said I. I’ll dry it in my bosom, said she; ’twill do me good.  And is your heart still so warm, Maria? said I. I touched upon the string on which hung all her sorrows.  She looked with wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying anything, took her pipe and played her service to the Virgin.”

Which are we meant to look at—­the sorrows of Maria? or the sensibilities of the Sentimental Traveller? or the condition of the pocket-handkerchief?  I think it doubtful whether any writer of the first rank has ever perpetrated so disastrous a literary failure as this scene; but the main cause of that failure appears to me not doubtful at all.  The artist has no business within the frame of the picture, and his intrusion into it has spoilt it.  The method adopted from the commencement is ostentatiously objective:  we are taken straight into Maria’s presence, and bidden to look at and to pity the unhappy maiden as described by the Traveller who met her.  No attempt is made to place us at the outset in sympathy with him; he, until he thrusts himself before us, with his streaming eyes, and his drenched pocket-handkerchief, is a mere reporter of the scene before him, and he and his tears are as much out of place as if he were the compositor who set up the type.  It is not merely that we don’t want to know how the scene affected him, and that we resent as an impertinence the elaborate account of his tender emotions; we don’t wish to be reminded of his presence at all.  For, as we can know nothing (effectively) of Maria’s sorrows except as given in her appearance—­the historical recital of them and their cause being too curt and bald to be able to move us—­the best chance for moving our compassion for her is to make the illusion of her presence as dramatically real as possible; a chance which is, therefore, completely destroyed when the author of the illusion insists on thrusting himself between ourselves and the scene.

But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines was, like more than one of Sterne’s efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of its birth.  These abortive efforts are no natural growth of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from certain morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which he forced his artistic genius to subserve.  He had true pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command; but it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without.  It came when he was in the dramatic and not in the introspective mood; when he was thinking honestly of his characters, and not of himself.  But he was, unfortunately, too prone—­and a long course of moral self-indulgence had confirmed him in it—­to the habit of