independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and parenthetic divagations in the Journey are not quite free from the same suggestion.  In fact if you “can see a church by daylight” you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.

But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in our history.  There is to his credit in general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel—­the novel eccentric, particular, individual.  There is to that credit still more the brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.

For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder’s innocent confession, “Story?  God bless you!  I have none to tell, sir!” in a sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree.  He does not merely show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:  he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his fatrasies as it were novels.  After one or two, brief but certainly not tedious, volumes of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, you know that you are being cheated, and are going to be:  at the end you know still more certainly that you have been.  You have had nothing of the “Life” but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents later.  If you have had any “opinions” they have been chiefly those of Mr. Tristram Shandy’s father and other members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author’s.  In the Journey there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that author himself.  The incidents—­sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie—­have no other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the “gentleman in the black silk smalls” and furnish him with figures as it were for his performance.  Yet you are held in a way in which nothing but the romance or the novel ever does hold you.  The thing is a [Greek:  mythos hamythos]—­story without story-end, without story-beginning, without story-connection or middle:  but a story for all that.  A dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment:  and, even as a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company.  In not a few noteworthy later books—­in a very much greater number of parts of later books—­as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.