than his great contemporaries the Richardsons and the Fieldings. Yet there is a difference. For all his interest in psychology Sterne was far more nimble than the masters of this somewhat sedentary school have since become. He is after all telling a story, pursuing a journey, however arbitrary and zigzag his methods. For all our divagations, we do make the distance between Calais and Madane within the space of a very few pages. Interested as he was in the way in which he saw things, the things themselves also interested him acutely. His choice is capricious and individual, but no realist could be more brilliantly successful in rendering the impression of the moment. A Sentimental Journey is a succession of portraits -the Monk, the lady, the Chevalier selling pâtés, the girl in the book-shop, La Fleur in his new breeches; it is a succession of scenes. And though the flight of this erratic mind is zigzag, like a dragonfly's, one cannot deny that this dragonfly has some method in its flight, and chooses the flowers not haphazard but for their exquisite harmonies or for their brilliant discords. We laugh, cry, sneer, sympathize by turns. We change from one emotion to its opposite in the twinkling of an eye. This light attachment to reality, this neglect of the orderly sequence of narrative allows Sterne almost the licence of a poet. He can express ideas which ordinary novelists would have to ignore in language which, even if the ordinary novelist could command it, would look intolerably outlandish upon his page. For example, 'I walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue, and green, running at the ring of pleasure. The old with broken lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards-the young in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay feather of the east-all -all tilting at it like fascinated knights in tournaments of yore for fame and love' There are many passages of such pure poetry in Sterne. One can cut them out and read them apart from the text, and yet-for Sterne was a master of the art of contrast-they lie harmoniously side by side on the printed page. His freshness, his buoyancy, his perpetual power to surprise and startle are the result of these contrasts. He leads us to the very brink of the precipice; we snatch one short glance into its depths; next moment, we are whisked round to look at the green pastures glowing on the other side. If Sterne distresses us, it is for another reason. And here the blame rests partly at least upon the public-the public which had been shocked, which had cried out after the publication of Tristram Shandy that the writer was a cynic, who deserved to be unfrocked. Sterne, unfortunately, thought it necessary to reply. 'The world has imagined,' he told Lord Shelburne, 'because I wrote Tristram Shandy, that I was myself more Shandean than I really ever was.... If it (A Sentimental Journey) is not thought a chaste book, mercy on them that read it, for they must have warm imaginations, indeed!' Thus in A Sentimental Journey we are never allowed to forget that Sterne is above all things sensitive, sympathetic, humane; that above all things he prizes the decencies, the simplicities of the human heart. And directly a writer sets out to prove himself this or that our suspicions are aroused. For the little extra stress he lays on the quality he desires us to see in him, coarsens it, over-paints it, so that instead of humour, we get farce, and instead of sentiment, sentimentality. Here, instead of being convinced of the tenderness of Sterne's heart-which in Tristram Shandy was never in question-we begin to doubt it. For we feel that Sterne is thinking of himself. The beggars gather round him and he gives the pauvre honteux more than he had meant to. But his mind is not solely and simply on the beggars; his mind is partly on us, to see that we appreciate his goodness. Thus his conclusion, 'and I thought he thank'd me more than them all', placed, for more emphasis, at the end of the chapter, sickens us with its sweetness like the drop of pure sugar at the bottom of a cup. Indeed, the chief fault of A Sentimental Journey comes from Sterne's concern for our good opinion of his heart. It has a monotony about it, for all its brilliance, as if the author had reined in the natural variety and vivacity of his tastes, lest they should give offence. The mood is subdued to one that is too uniformly kind, tender, and compassionate to be quite natural. One misses the variety, the vigour, the ribaldry of Tristram Shandy. His concern for his sensibility has blunted his natural sharpness, and we are called upon to gaze a moment too long at modesty, simplicity, and virtue standing still to De looked at. But it is significant of the change of taste that has come over us that it is Sterne's sentimentality that offends us and not his immorality. In the eyes of the nineteenth century all that Sterne wrote was coloured by his conduct as husband and lover. Thackeray lashed him with his righteous indignation, and exclaimed that 'There is not a page of Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption-a hint as of an impure presence'. To us at the present time, the arrogance of the great Victorians seems at least as culpable as the infidelities of the eighteenth-century parson. Where they deplored his lies and his levities, the courage which turned all the rubs of life to laughter and the brilliance of the expression are far more apparent to us. Indeed A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic. It is true that it is a philosophy that was much out of fashion in the Victorian age -the philosophy of pleasure; the philosophy which makes it seem as necessary to behave well in small things as in big, which makes the enjoyment, even of other people, seem more desirable than their suffering. The shameless man had the hardihood to confess to 'having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life', and to add, 'and I hope I shall go on so till I die, being firmly persuaded that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one |