On the second great count—­character—­Sterne’s record is still more distinguished:  and here there is no legerdemain about the matter.  There is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is an absolute triumph—­even among those who think that, as in the case of Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less attractive.  It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and your sentiment in separate boxes.  Trim is even better:  he is indeed next to Sancho—­and perhaps Sam Weller—­the greatest of all “followers” in the novel:  he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps beats Fielding himself.  About Walter Shandy there is more room for difference:  and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete—­that he is something of a “humour” in the old one-sided and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense.  Nothing that he does or says misbecomes him:  but a good deal that he does not do and say might be added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as well as a live man.  As for the other male characters, Sterne’s plan excused him—­as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy’s case—­from making them more than sketches and shadows.  But what uncommonly lively sketches and shadows they are!

Sterne’s unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the women off with a clean brush:  but the quality of liveness pertains to them in almost a higher measure:  and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing degree.  Even that shadow of a shade “My dear, dear Jenny” has a suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some:  the maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and ladies of the Journey, have flesh which is not made of paper, and blood that is certainly not ink.  And the peculiarity extends to his two chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow.  Never were any two female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and incidental appearance.  Never were any personages of scanty and incidental appearance made more alive and more female.

His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for this chapter is already too long) to his phrase—­in dialogue, narrative, whatever you please to call it.  For the fact is that these two things, and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into each other with Sterne in a manner as “flibberti-gibbety”