but there was one, which we can trace with some degree of precision,
which has left ineffaceable traces on his works,—which probably left
some traces upon his character and conduct. There was in that part of
Yorkshire a certain John Hall Stevenson, a country gentleman of some
fortune, and possessed of a castle, which he called Crazy Castle. Thence
he wrote tales, which he named ‘Crazy Tales,’ but which certainly are
not entitled to any such innocent name. The license of that age was
unquestionably wonderful. A man of good property could write any evil.
There was no legal check, or ecclesiastical check, and hardly any check
of public opinion. These ‘Crazy Tales’ have license without humour, and
vice without amusement. They are the writing of a man with some wit, but
only enough wit for light conversation, which becomes overworked and dull
when it is reduced to regular composition and made to write long tales.
The author, feeling his wit jaded perpetually, becomes immoral, in the
vain hope that he will cease to be dull. He has attained his reward; he
will be remembered for nauseous tiresomeness by all who have read him.
But though the ‘Crazy Tales’ are now tedious, Crazy Castle was a pleasant
place, at least to men like Sterne. He was an idle young parson, with
much sensibility, much love of life and variety, and not a bit of grave
goodness. The dull duties of a country parson, as we now understand
them, would never have been to his taste; and the sinecure idleness then
permitted to parsons left him open to every temptation. The frail texture
of merely natural purity, the soft fibre of the instinctive pagan, yield
to the first casualty. Exactly what sort of life they led at Crazy
Castle we do not know; but vaguely we do know, and we may be sure _Mrs._
Sterne was against it.
One part of Crazy Castle has had effects which will last as long as
English literature. It had a library richly stored in old folio learning,
and also in the amatory reading of other days. Every page of _Tristram
Shandy_ bears traces of both elements. Sterne, when he wrote it, had
filled his head and his mind, not with the literature of his own age, but
with the literature of past ages. He was thinking of Rabelais rather than
of Fielding; of forgotten romances rather than of Richardson. He wrote,
indeed, of his own times and of men he had seen, because his sensitive
vivid nature would only endure to write of present things. But the _mode_
in which he wrote was largely coloured by literary habits and literary
fashions that had long passed away. The oddity of the book was a kind
of advertisement to its genius, and that oddity consisted in the use of
old manners upon new things. No analysis or account of _Tristram Shandy_
could be given which would suit the present generation; being, indeed, a
book without plan or order, it is in every generation unfit for analysis.
This age would not endure a statement of the most telling points, as the
writer thought them, and no age would like an elaborate plan of a book in
which there is no plan, in which the detached remarks and separate scenes
were really meant to be the whole. The notion that ‘a plot was to hang
plums upon’ was Sterne’s notion exactly.
The real excellence of Sterne is single and simple; the defects are
numberless and complicated. He excels, perhaps, all other writers in mere
simple description of common sensitive human action. He places before
you in their simplest form the elemental facts of human life; he does
not view them through the intellect, he scarcely views them through the
imagination; he does but reflect the unimpaired impression that the facts
of life, which do not change from age to age, make on the deep basis of
human feeling, which changes as little though years go on. The example
we quoted just now is as good as any other, though not better than any
other. Our readers should go back to it again, or our praise may seem
overcharged. It is the portrait-painting of the heart. It is as pure a
reflection of mere natural feeling as literature has ever given, or will
ever give. The delineation is nearly perfect. Sterne’s feeling in his
higher moments so much overpowered his intellect, and so directed his
imagination, that no intrusive thought blemishes, no distorting fancy
mars, the perfection of the representation. The disenchanting facts
which deface, the low circumstances which debase the simpler feelings
oftener than any other feelings, his art excludes. The feeling which
would probably be coarse in the reality is refined in the picture. The
unconscious tact of the nice artist heightens and chastens reality, but
yet it is reality still. His mind was like a pure lake of delicate water:
it reflects the ordinary landscape, the rugged hills, the loose pebbles,
the knotted and the distorted firs perfectly and as they are, yet with
a charm and fascination that they have not in themselves. This is the
highest attainment of art, to be at the same time nature and something
more than nature.
But here the great excellence of Sterne ends as well as begins. In
_Tristram Shandy_ especially there are several defects which, while we
are reading it, tease and disgust so much that we are scarcely willing
even to admire as we ought to admire the refined pictures of human
emotion. The first of these, and perhaps the worst, is the fantastic
disorder of the form. It is an imperative law of the writing-art, that
a book should go straight on. A great writer should be able to tell a
great meaning as coherently as a small writer tells a small meaning. The
magnitude of the thought to be conveyed, the delicacy of the emotion to
be painted, render the introductory touches of consummate art not of less
importance, but of more importance. A great writer should train the mind
of the reader for his greatest things; that is, by first strokes and
fitting preliminaries he should form and prepare his mind for the due
appreciation and the perfect enjoyment of high creations. He should not
blunder upon a beauty, nor, after a great imaginative creation, should
he at once fall back to bare prose. The high-wrought feeling which a
poet excites should not be turned out at once and without warning into
the discomposing world. It is one of the greatest merits of the greatest
living writer of fiction,—of the authoress of _Adam Bede_,—that she
never brings you to anything without preparing you for it; she has no
loose lumps of beauty; she puts in nothing at random; after her greatest
scenes, too, a natural sequence of subordinate realities again tones down
the mind to this sublunary world. Her logical style—the most logical,
probably, which a woman ever wrote—aids in this matter her natural sense
of due proportion. There is not a space of incoherency—not a gap. It is
not natural to begin with the point of a story, and she does not begin
with it. When some great marvel has been told, we all wish to know what
came of it, and she tells us. Her natural way, as it seems to those who
do not know its rarity, of telling what happened produces the consummate
effect of gradual enchantment and as gradual disenchantment. But Sterne’s
style is _un_natural. He never begins at the beginning and goes straight
through to the end. He shies-in a beauty suddenly; and just when you are
affected he turns round and grins at it. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘is it not fine?’
And then he makes jokes which at that place and that time are out of
place, or passes away into scholastic or other irrelevant matter, which
simply disgusts and disheartens those whom he has just delighted. People
excuse all this irregularity of form by saying that it was imitated from
Rabelais. But this is nonsense. Rabelais, perhaps, could not in his day
venture to tell his meaning straight out; at any rate, he did not tell
it. Sterne should not have chosen a model so monstrous. Incoherency is
not less a defect because an imperfect foreign writer once made use of
it. ‘You may have, sir, a reason,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘for saying that
two and two make five, but they will still make four.’ Just so, a writer
may have a reason for selecting the defect of incoherency, but it is
a defect still. Sterne’s best things read best out of his books,—in
Enfield’s _Speaker_ and other places,—and you can say no worse of any one
as a continuous artist.
Another most palpable defect—especially palpable now-a-days—in _Tristram
Shandy_ is its indecency. It is quite true that the customary conventions
of writing are much altered during the last century, and much which would
formerly have been deemed blameless would now be censured and disliked.
The audience has changed; and decency is of course in part dependent
on who is within hearing. A divorce case may be talked over across a
club-table with a plainness of speech and development of expression
which would be indecent in a mixed party, and scandalous before young
ladies. Now, a large part of old novels may very fairly be called
club-books; they speak out plainly and simply the notorious facts of the
world, as men speak of them to men. Much excellent and proper masculine
conversation is wholly unfit for repetition to young girls; and just
in the same way, books written—as was almost all old literature,—for
men only, or nearly only, seem coarse enough when contrasted with
novels written by young ladies upon the subjects and in the tone of the
drawing-room. The change is inevitable; as soon as works of fiction are
addressed to boys and girls, they must be fit for boys and girls; they
must deal with a life which is real so far as it goes, but which is yet
most limited; which deals with the most passionate part of life, and yet
omits the errors of the passions; which aims at describing men in their
relations to women, and yet omits an all but universal influence which
more or less distorts and modifies all these relations.
As we have said, the change cannot be helped. A young ladies’ literature
must be a limited and truncated literature. The indiscriminate study of
human life is not desirable for them, either in fiction or in reality.
But the habitual formation of a scheme of thought and a code of morality
upon incomplete materials is a very serious evil. The readers for whose
sake the omissions are made cannot fancy what is left out. Many a girl of
the present day reads novels, and nothing but novels; she forms her mind
by them, as far as she forms it by reading at all; even if she reads a
few dull books, she soon forgets all about them, and remembers the novels
only; she is more influenced by them than by sermons. They form her idea
of the world, they define her taste, and modify her morality; not so much
in explicit thought and direct act, as unconsciously and in her floating
fancy. How is it possible to convince such a girl, especially if she
is clever, that on most points she is all wrong? She has been reading
most excellent descriptions of mere society; she comprehends those
descriptions perfectly, for her own experience elucidates and confirms
them. She has a vivid picture of a _patch_ of life. Even if she admits in
words that there is something beyond, something of which she has no idea,
she will not admit it really and in practice. What she has mastered and
realised will incurably and inevitably overpower the unknown something of
which she knows nothing, can imagine nothing, and can make nothing. ‘I am
not sure,’ said an old lady, ‘but I think it’s the novels that make my
girls so _heady_.’ It is the novels. A very intelligent acquaintance with
limited life makes them think that the world is far simpler than it is,
that men are easy to understand, ‘that mamma is _so_ foolish.’
The novels of the last age have certainly not this fault. They do not
err on the side of reticence. A girl may learn from them more than it is
desirable for her to know. But, as we have explained, they were meant for
men and not for girls; and if _Tristram Shandy_ had simply given a plain
exposition of necessary facts—necessary, that is, to the development
of the writer’s view of the world, and to the telling of the story in
hand,—we should not have complained; we should have regarded it as the
natural product of a now extinct society. But there are most unmistakable
traces of ‘Crazy Castle’ in _Tristram Shandy_. There is indecency for
indecency’s sake. It is made a sort of recurring and even permeating
joke to mention things which are not generally mentioned. Sterne himself
made a sort of defence, or rather denial, of this. He once asked a lady
if she had read _Tristram_. ‘I have not, Mr. Sterne,’ was the answer;
‘and, to be plain with you, I am informed it is not proper for female
perusal.’ ‘My dear good lady,’ said Sterne, ‘do not be gulled by such
stories; the book is like your young heir there’ (pointing to a child of
three years old who was rolling on the carpet in white tunics): ‘he shows
at times a good deal that is usually concealed, but it is all in perfect
innocence.’ But a perusal of _Tristram_ would not make good the plea.
The unusual publicity of what is ordinarily imperceptible is not the
thoughtless accident of amusing play; it is deliberately sought after as
a nice joke; it is treated as a good in itself.
The indecency of _Tristram Shandy_—at least of the early part, which was
written before Sterne had been to France—is especially an offence against
taste, because of its ugliness. _Moral_ indecency is always disgusting.
There certainly is a sort of writing which cannot be called decent, and
which describes a society to the core immoral, which nevertheless is no
offence against art; it violates a higher code than that of taste, but it
does not violate the code of taste. The _Mémoires de Grammont_—hundreds
of French memoirs about France—are of this kind, more or less. They
describe the refined, witty, elegant immorality of an idle aristocracy.
They describe a life ‘unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world
as the present one,’ in which there are no high aims, no severe duties,
where some precepts of morals seem not so much to be sometimes broken as
to be generally suspended and forgotten; such a life, in short, as God
has never suffered men to lead on this earth long, which He has always
crushed out by calamity and revolution. This life, though an offence in
morals, was not an offence in taste. It was an elegant, a _pretty_ thing
while it lasted. Especially in enhancing description, where the alloy
of life may be omitted, where nothing vulgar need be noticed, where
everything elegant may be neatly painted,—such a world is elegant enough.
Morals and policy must decide how far such delineations are permissible
or expedient; but the art of beauty,—art-criticism—has no objection to
them. They are pretty paintings of pretty objects, and that is all it has
to say. They may very easily do harm; if generally read among the young
of the middle class, they would be sure to do harm: they would teach not
a few to aim at a sort of refinement denied them by circumstances, and to
neglect the duties allotted them; it would make shopmen ‘bad imitations
of polished ungodliness,’ and also bad shopmen. But still, though it
would in such places be noxious literature, in itself it would be pretty
literature. The critic must praise it, though the moralist must condemn
it, and perhaps the politician forbid it.
But _Tristram Shandy’s_ indecency is the very opposite to this refined
sort. It consists in allusions to certain inseparable accompaniments of
actual life which are not beautiful, which can never be made interesting,
which would, _if_ they were decent, be dull and uninteresting. There is,
it appears, a certain excitement in putting such matters into a book:
there is a minor exhilaration even in petty crime. At first such things
look so odd in print that you go on reading them to see what they look
like; but you soon give up. What is disenchanting or even disgusting
in reality does not become enchanting or endurable in delineation. You
are more angry at it in literature than in life; there is much which is
barbarous and animal in reality that we could wish away; we endure it
because we cannot help it, because we did not make it and cannot alter
it, because it is an inseparable part of this inexplicable world. But why
we should put this coarse alloy, this dross of life, into the _optional_
world of literature, which we can make as we please, it is impossible
to say. The needless introduction of accessory ugliness is always a sin
in art, and is not at all less so when such ugliness is disgusting and
improper. _Tristram Shandy_ is incurably tainted with a pervading vice;
it dwells at length on, it seeks after, it returns to, it gloats over,
the most unattractive part of the world.
There is another defect in _Tristram Shandy_ which would of itself
remove it from the list of first-rate books, even if those which we
have mentioned did not do so. It contains eccentric characters only.
Some part of this defect may be perhaps explained by one peculiarity of
its origin. Sterne was so sensitive to the picturesque parts of life,
that he wished to paint the picturesque parts of the people he hated.
Country-towns in those days abounded in odd characters. They were out
of the way of the great opinion of the world, and shaped themselves to
little opinions of their own. They regarded the customs which the place
had inherited as the customs which were proper for it, and which it would
be foolish, if not wicked, to try to change. This gave English country
life a motley picturesqueness then, which it wants now, when London ideas
shoot out every morning, and carry on the wings of the railway a uniform
creed to each cranny of the kingdom, north and south, east and west.
These little public opinions of little places wanted, too, the crushing
power of the great public opinion of our own day; at the worst, a man
could escape from them into some different place which had customs and
doctrines that suited him better. We now may fly into another ‘city,’ but
it is all the same Roman empire; the same uniform justice, the one code
of heavy laws presses us down and makes us—the sensible part of us at
least—as like other people as we can make ourselves. The public opinion
of county towns yielded soon to individual exceptions; it had not the
confidence in itself which the opinion of each place now receives from
the accordant and simultaneous echo of a hundred places. If a man chose
to be queer, he was bullied for a year or two, then it was settled that
he was ‘queer;’ that was the fact about him, and must be accepted. In a
year or so he became an ‘institution’ of the place, and the local pride
would have been grieved if he had amended the oddity which suggested
their legends and added a flavour to their life. Of course, if a man was
rich and influential, he might soon disregard the mere opinion of the
petty locality. Every place has wonderful traditions of old rich men
who did exactly as they pleased, because they could set at naught the
opinions of the neighbours, by whom they were feared; and who did not,
as now, dread the unanimous conscience which does not fear even a squire
of 2000_l._ a year, or a banker of 8000_l._, because it is backed by the
wealth of London and the magnitude of all the country. There is little
oddity in county towns now; they are detached scraps of great places; but
in Sterne’s time there was much, and he used it unsparingly.
Much of the delineation is of the highest merit. Sterne knew how to
describe eccentricity, for he showed its relation to our common human
nature: he showed how we were related to it, how in some sort and
in some circumstances we might ourselves become it. He reduced the
abnormal formation to the normal rules. Except upon this condition,
eccentricity is no fit subject for literary art. Every one must have
known characters which, if they were put down in books, barely and as
he sees them, would seem monstrous and disproportioned,—which would
disgust all readers,—which every critic would term unnatural. While
characters are monstrous, they should be kept out of books; they are
ugly unintelligibilities, foreign to the realm of true art. But as soon
as they can be explained to us, as soon as they are shown in their union
with, in their outgrowth from common human nature, they are the best
subjects for great art—for they are new subjects. They teach us, not the
old lesson which our fathers knew, but a new lesson which will please us
and make us better than they. Hamlet is an eccentric character, one of
the most eccentric in literature; but because, by the art of the poet,
we are made to understand that he is a possible, a _vividly_ possible
man, he enlarges our conceptions of human nature; he takes us out of the
bounds of commonplace. He ‘instructs us by means of delight.’ Sterne does
this too. Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Mrs. Shandy,—for in
strictness she too is eccentric from her abnormal commonplaceness,—are
beings of which the possibility is brought home to us, which we feel
we could under circumstances and by influences become; which, though
contorted and twisted, are yet spun out of the same elementary nature,
the same thread as we are. Considering how odd these characters are, the
success of Sterne is marvellous, and his art in this respect consummate.
But yet on a point most nearly allied it is very faulty. Though each
individual character is shaded off into human nature, the whole is not
shaded off into the world. This society of originals and oddities is
left to stand by itself, as if it were a natural and ordinary society,—a
society easily conceivable and needing no explanation. Such is not the
manner of the great masters; in their best works a constant atmosphere
of half commonplace personages surrounds and shades off, illustrates and
explains every central group of singular persons.
On the whole, therefore, the judgment of criticism on _Tristram Shandy_
is concise and easy. It is immortal because of certain scenes suggested
by Sterne’s curious experience, detected by his singular sensibility,
and heightened by his delineative and discriminative imagination. It
is defective because its style is fantastic, its method illogical and
provoking; because its indecency is of the worst sort, as far as in
such matters an artistic judgment can speak of worst and best; because
its world of characters forms an incongruous group of singular persons
utterly dissimilar to, and irreconcilable with the world in which we
live. It is a great work of art, but of barbarous art. Its mirth is
boisterous. It is _provincial_. It is redolent of an inferior society;
of those who think crude animal spirits in themselves delightful; who do
not know that, without wit to point them, or humour to convey them, they
are disagreeable to others; who like disturbing transitions, blank pages,
and tricks of style; who do not know that a simple and logical form of
expression is the most effective, if not the easiest—the least laborious
to readers, if not always the most easily attained by writers.
The oddity of _Tristram Shandy_ was, however, a great aid to its
immediate popularity. If an author were to stand on his head now and
then in Cheapside, his eccentricity would bring him into contact with
the police, but it would advertise his writings; they would sell better:
people would like to see what was said by a great author who was so
odd as to stand so. Sterne put his eccentricity into his writings, and
therefore came into collision with the critics; but he attained the
same end. His book sold capitally. As with all popular authors, he went
to London; he was fêted. ‘The _man_ Sterne,’ growled Dr. Johnson, ‘has
dinner engagements for three months.’ The upper world—ever desirous of
novelty, ever tired of itself, ever anxious to be amused—was in hopes of
a new wit. It naturally hoped that the author of _Tristram Shandy_ would
talk well, and it sent for him to talk.
He did talk well, it appears, though not always very correctly, and never
very clerically. His appearance was curious, but yet refined. Eager eyes,
a wild look, a long lean frame, and what he called a cadaverous bale
of goods for a body, made up an odd exterior, which attracted notice,
and did not repel liking. He looked like a scarecrow with bright eyes.
With a random manner, but not without a nice calculation, he discharged
witticisms at London parties. His keen nerves told him which were fit
witticisms; _they_ took, and _he_ was applauded.