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 be 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 eyes of the nineteenth century all that Sterne

he

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

passion and another'. The wretch had the audacity to cry through the mouth of one of his characters, 'Mais vive la joie... Vive l'amour! et vive la bagatelle!' Clergyman though he was, he had the irreverence to reflect, when he watched the French peasants dancing, that he could distinguish an elevation of spirit, different from that which is the cause or the effect of simple jollity.-'In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance.'

It was a daring thing for a clergyman to perceive a relationship between religion and pleasure. Yet it may, perhaps, excuse him that in his own case the religion of happiness had a great deal of difficulty to overcome. If you are no longer young, if you have spent more than you should have done, if your wife is disagreeable, and though you like your daughter, she is parted from you, if, as you racket about France in a post-chaise you are dying of consumption all the time, then the pursuit of happiness is not so easy after all. Still, pursue it one must. One must pirouette about the world, peeping and peering, enjoying a flirtation here, bestowing a few coppers there, and sitting in whatever little patch of sunshine one can find. One must crack a joke, even if the joke is not altogether a decent

one. Even in daily life one must not forget to cry 'Hail ye, small, sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it!' One mustbut enough of must; it is not a word that Sterne was fond of using. It is only when one lays the book aside and recalls its symmetry, its fun, its whole-hearted joy in all the different aspects of life, and the brilliant ease and beauty with which they are conveyed to us, that one credits the writer with a backbone of conviction to support him. Was not Thackeray's coward—the man who trifled so immorally with so many women and wrote love-letters on gilt-edged paper when he should have been lying in bed or writing sermons-was he not something of a stoic in his own way? That he was a very great writer we cannot doubt.

VIRGINIA WOOLF.