CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is
his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they
sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he
owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last
hyperbolic honour--hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of
a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough
forward through time--that the comparative ease with which it is to be
earned has itself come to be exaggerated. There are so many "deathless
ones" about--if I may put the matter familiarly--in conversation and
in literature, that we get into the way of thinking that they are
really a considerable body in actual fact, and that the works which
have triumphed over death are far more numerous still. The real truth,
however, is, that not only are "those who reach posterity a very
select company indeed," but most of them have come much nearer missing
their destiny than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or score of
writers in one century whom their own contemporaries fondly decree
immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of
the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a
very much smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some fifty per
cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even
upon _their_ brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay.
A single poem, a solitary drama--nay, perhaps one isolated figure,
poetic or dramatic--avails, and but barely avails, to keep the
immortal from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no
disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue
of his creative power as of one great individual creation. His
imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt,
considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough
sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous;
but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for
one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed upon it;
and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Captain Tobias Shandy
which has graven itself indelibly on the memory of mankind. To have
made this single addition to the imperishable types of human character
embodied in the world's literature may seem, as has been said, but
a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the
achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one
creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with
imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall
find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single
hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good
nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution,
or Iago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred; and he contrives to
preserve all the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of
intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, moreover, considered
as an individual character in a specific story, is in complete,
accord. If any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic
power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has commonly
fared with those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to
personify a virtue in a man. Take the work of another famous English
humourist and sentimentalist, and compare Uncle Toby's manly and
dignified gentleness of heart with the unreal "gush" of the Brothers
Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not
believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter. But
Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though
we smile at his naïveté, and may even laugh outright at his boyish
enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a
moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his
character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him
more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his
purposes as a sentimentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he
deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is
the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and
the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence
of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon
affectation. It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in
illustration of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized
(as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly,
caught and put out of the window with the words "Get thee gone, poor
devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for
thee and me." There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in
the apostrophe. This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of
Sterne's objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying
sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium
of his own hypertrophied sensibilities. These lapses, however, are,
fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only as he
appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before
us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue--the man of simple mind
and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking
not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely _naïf_, and
delightfully _mal-à-propos_ in his observations, but always
pardonably, never foolishly, so; inexhaustibly amiable, but with no
weak amiability; homely in his ways, but a perfect gentleman withal;
in a word, the most winning and lovable personality that is to be met
with, surely, in the whole range of fiction.
It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of character as
it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of
sentiment. He is never at his best and truest--as, indeed, no writer
of fiction ever is or can be--save when he is allowing his dramatic
imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking
least about himself. This is curiously illustrated in his handling
of what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncaricatured
portraits in the Shandy gallery--the presentment of the Rev. Mr.
Yorick. Nothing can be more perfect in its way than the picture of the
"lively, witty, sensitive, and heedless parson," in chapter x. of the
first volume of _Tristram Shandy_. We seem to see the thin, melancholy
figure on the rawboned horse--the apparition which could "never
present itself in the village but it caught the attention of old and
young," so that "labour stood still as he passed, the bucket hung
suspended in the middle of the well, the spinning-wheel forgot its
round; even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping
till he was out of sight." Throughout this chapter Sterne, though
describing himself, is projecting his personality to a distance, as it
were, and contemplating it dramatically; and the result is excellent.
When in the next chapter he becomes "lyrical," so to speak; when the
reflection upon his (largely imaginary) wrongs impels him to look
inward, the invariable consequence follows; and though Yorick's much
bepraised death-scene, with Eugenius at his bed-side, is redeemed
from entire failure by an admixture of the humorous with its attempted
pathos, we ask ourselves with some wonder what the unhappiness--or the
death itself, for that matter--is "all about." The wrongs which were
supposed to have broken Yorick's heart are most imperfectly specified
(a comic proof, by the way, of Sterne's entire absorption in himself,
to the confusion of his own personal knowledge with that of the
reader), and the first conditions of enlisting the reader's sympathies
are left unfulfilled.
But it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne obtrudes
itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic parts of his work;
and, next to the abiding charm and interest of his principal figure,
it is by the admirable life and colour of his scenes that he exercises
his strongest powers of fascination over a reader. Perpetual as
are Sterne's affectations, and tiresome as is his eternal
self-consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet when
once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him there is no writer
who ever makes us more completely forget him in the presence of his
characters--none who can bring them and their surroundings, their
looks and words, before us with such convincing force of reality.
One wonders sometimes whether Sterne himself was aware of the high
dramatic excellence of many of what actors would call his "carpenter's
scenes"--the mere interludes introduced to amuse us while the stage is
being prepared for one of those more elaborate and deliberate displays
of pathos or humour, which do not always turn out to be unmixed
successes when they come. Sterne prided himself vastly upon the
incident of Le Fevre's death; but I dare say that there is many a
modern reader who would rather have lost this highly-wrought piece of
domestic drama, than that other exquisite little scene in the kitchen
of the inn, when Corporal Trim toasts the bread which the sick
lieutenant's son is preparing for his father's posset, while "Mr.
Yorick's curate was smoking a pipe by the fire, but said not a word,
good or bad, to comfort the youth." The whole scene is absolute life;
and the dialogue between the Corporal and the parson, as related by
the former to his master, with Captain Shandy's comments thereon, is
almost Shakspearian in its excellence. Says the Corporal:
"When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast he
felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me
know that in about ten minutes he should be glad if I would step
upstairs, I believe, said the landlord, he is going to say his prayers,
for there was a book laid on the chair by the bed-side, and as I
shut the door I saw him take up a cushion. I thought, said the curate,
that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your prayers
at all. I heard the poor gentleman say his prayers last night,
said the landlady, very devoutly, and with my own ears, or I could
not have believed it. Are you sure of it? replied the curate. A
soldier, an' please your reverence, said I, prays as often (of his own
accord) as a parson; and when he is fighting for his king, and for
his own life, and for his honour too, he has the most reason to pray
to God of any one in the whole world. 'Twas well said of thee, Trim,
said my Uncle Toby. But when a soldier, said I, an' please your
reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches,
up to his knees in cold water--or engaged, said I, for months together
in long and dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his rear today;
harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded
there; resting this night out upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the
next; benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to
kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can. I believe,
said I--for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation
of the army--I believe, an't please your reverence, said I, that when
a soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson--though
not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said
that, Trim, said my Uncle Toby; for God only knows who is a hypocrite
and who is not. At the great and general review of us all,
corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen
who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we
shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly. I hope we shall, said Trim.
It is in the Scripture, said my Uncle Toby, and I will show it thee in
the morning. In the meantime, we may depend upon it, Trim, for our
comfort, said my Uncle Toby, that God Almighty is so good and just
a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, it
will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat
or a black one. I hope not, said the Corporal. But go on, said my
Uncle Toby, with thy story."
We might almost fancy ourselves listening to that noble prose colloquy
between the disguised king and his soldiers on the night before
Agincourt, in _Henry V._ And though Sterne does not, of course, often
reach this level of dramatic dignity, there are passages in abundance
in which his dialogue assumes, through sheer force of individualized
character, if not all the dignity, at any rate all the impressive
force and simplicity, of the "grand style."
Taken altogether, however, his place in English letters is hard to
fix, and his tenure in human memory hard to determine. Hitherto he has
held his own, with the great writers of his era, but it has been in
virtue, as I have attempted to show, of a contribution to the literary
possessions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in amount as it is
exceptionally perfect in quality. One cannot but feel that, as regards
the sum of his titles to recollection, his name stands far below
either of those other two which in the course of the last century
added themselves to the highest rank among the classics of English
humour. Sterne has not the abounding life and the varied human
interest of Fielding; and, to say nothing of his vast intellectual
inferiority to Swift, he never so much as approaches those problems of
everlasting concernment to man which Swift handles with so terrible
a fascination. Certainly no enthusiastic Gibbon of the future is ever
likely to say of Sterne's "pictures of human manners" that they will
outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the
House of Austria. Assuredly no one will ever find in _this_ so-called
English antitype of the Curé of Meudon any of the deeper qualities of
that gloomy and commanding spirit which has been finely compared to
the "soul of Rabelais _habitans in sicco_." Nay, to descend even to
minor aptitudes, Sterne cannot tell a story as Swift and Fielding
can tell one; and his work is not assured of life as _Tom Jones_ and
_Gulliver's Travels_, considered as stories alone, would be assured
of it, even if the one were stripped of its cheerful humour, and the
other disarmed of its savage allegory. And hence it might be rash to
predict that Sterne's days will be as long in the land of literary
memory as the two great writers aforesaid. Banked, as he still is,
among "English classics," he undergoes, I suspect, even more than an
English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect. Among those
who talk about him he has, I should imagine, fewer readers than
Fielding, and very much fewer than Swift. Nor is he likely to increase
their number as time goes on, but rather, perhaps, the contrary.
Indeed, the only question is whether with the lapse of years he will
not, like other writers as famous in their day, become yet more of a
mere name. For there is still, of course, a further stage to which he
may decline. That object of so much empty mouth-honour, the English
classic of the last and earlier centuries, presents himself for
classification under three distinct categories. There is the class who
are still read in a certain measure, though in a much smaller measure
than is pretended, by the great body of ordinarily well-educated men.
Of this class, the two authors whose names I have already cited, Swift
and Fielding, are typical examples; and it may be taken to include
Goldsmith also. Then comes the class of those whom the ordinarily
well-educated public, whatever they may pretend, read really very
little or not at all; and in this class we may couple Sterne with
Addison, with Smollett, and, except, of course, as to _Robinson
Crusoe_--unless, indeed, our _blasé_ boys have outgrown him among
other pleasures of boyhood--with Defoe. But below this there is yet a
third class of writers, who are not only read by none but the critic,
the connoisseur, or the historian of literature, but are scarcely read
even by them, except from curiosity, or "in the way of business." The
type of this class is Richardson; and one cannot, I say, help asking
whether he will hereafter have Sterne as a companion of his dusty
solitude. Are _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_ destined
to descend from the second class into the third--from the region of
partial into that of total neglect, and to have their portion with
_Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison?_ The unbounded vogue
which they enjoyed in their time will not save them; for sane and
sober critics compared Richardson in his day to Shakspeare, and
Diderot broke forth into prophetic rhapsodies upon the immortality of
his works which to us in these days have become absolutely pathetic
in their felicity of falsified prediction. Seeing, too, that a good
three-fourths of the attractions which won Sterne his contemporary
popularity are now so much dead weight of dead matter, and that the
vital residuum is in amount so small, the fate of Richardson might
seem to be but too close behind him. Yet it is difficult to believe
that this fate will ever quite overtake him. His sentiment may have
mostly ceased--it probably has ceased--to stir any emotion at all in
these days; but there is an imperishable element in his humour. And
though the circle of his readers may have no tendency to increase, one
can hardly suppose that a charm, which those who still feel it feel so
keenly, will ever entirely cease to captivate; or that time can have
any power over a perfume which so wonderfully retains the pungent
freshness of its fragrance after the lapse of a hundred years.
THE END.