Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any “injustice to Ireland”—­little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne’s merit or demerit.  He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means:  he is the fourth and almost the necessary one.  In Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been shown, with the exception just noted:  and indeed hardly with that exception, because they showed the way clearly to it.  But its almost illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in Fielding’s half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the work of Swift.  Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than one or two ways.  He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed form, the fatrasie, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were numerous minor examples in French.  He showed how it could be made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of humour itself—­to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever appearing as character in Tristram, or to humorise autobiography as in the Sentimental Journey.  And last of all (whether it was his greatest achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries—­the purpose being to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or “sensibility.”  In none of these things was he wholly original; though the perpetual upbraiding of “plagiarism” is a little unintelligent.  Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him, in the fatrasie; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the “sensibility” kind.  But he brought all together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially to much else.

To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy.  The plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is the least of these:  in fact hardly a fault at all.  The indecency, which was found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious matter—­not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone.  The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind.  Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery—­the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers.  The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the artist’s