A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

The Sentimental Journey was a deliberate composition: that is to say, it was no happy inspiration, no original idea. To write a book of travels was the fashion, and Sterne was not the man to neglect an opportunity merely because others had thought of it first. It does not seem to me necessary to treat Sterne’s contribution to this type of literature as a serious one—any more than we should treat Tristram Shandy as the “life and opinions” of its hero, or as a straightforward work of fiction. It would be little to our purpose to compare the Sentimental Journey with other Travels of the period, in an attempt to show how far Sterne diverged from the normal standard of such works, or how far he was inspired by this, that, or the other particular work. If any particular model was in question, it was Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, which appeared in 1766; but Sterne did not need a model: all he wanted was an excuse, that is to say, an incitement. There was something in Smollett’s phlegmatic matter-of-factness which roused all Sterne’s derisive faculties. But his method was not directly to ridicule Smollett (except for a few moments in the famous Smelfungus passage); but rather to show how nimbly the mind could play above the heavy sediment of a traveller’s observations. To observe and to note down, to be self- consciously solemn and otiosely informative—such had been the method and manner of the fashionable travellers of Sterne’s day. Smollett regarded himself as a “rational enquirer,” and went abroad in a critical spirit. The critical spirit has its uses, and Smollett’s Travels can still be read for their informativeness and for the manly vigour of their style. But a critical spirit has great disadvantages; it prevents the free disposition of sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no true understanding. That is really the burden of Sterne’s work; beneath all its mockery and persiflage there is this earnest doctrine. Sympathy opens the eyes as well as the heart; it is the beginning of knowledge as well as of love and friendship. The Sentimental Journey has done more for the creation of a tolerant European consciousness than all the peace treaties of a century and a half. Separate works have been written on its influence in Germany, France, and Italy. ¹ No other English book has so evoked the praise of great men of other nations. The Sentimental Journey is a European book, indeed a universal book; it transcends the language in which it is written and persuades us all to a mutual toleration—and mutual toleration, as the old French officer at the Opera said to Sterne, teaches us mutual love.

Sterne went abroad to observe what we should nowadays call the psychology of nations; that is to say, he was interested above all in the characters he met. He noted the people themselves, “the nakedness of their hearts,” rather than their customs or manners or arts or scenery. It is the primacy of this interest which gives his book its wonderful vitality; each person we meet steps brightly from the page, as if into sunlight before our eyes. Can we discover how it is done? Take the first portrait in the book—that of the poor monk of the Order of St. Francis. There are a number of carefully observed details—“the break in his tonsure, a few scatter’d white hairs upon his temples being all that remained of it”; his eyes which had a fire in them; his wrinkles; features that were mild, pale, penetrating, the look that seemed to be directed towards something beyond this world; the thin, spare form, “something above the common size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forwards in the figure”; his left hand upon his breast (“a slender white staff with which he journey’d being in his right”)—all these details paint the picture. But what brings it to life is the inspired comment with which Sterne, here as always, interlards his description. The eyes “seemed more temper’d by courtesy than years”; “It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted … free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth”; the rest of the outline was “neither elegant or otherwise, but as character and expression made it so”; an attitude of entreaty; an air of deprecation.… On the one hand a visual choice of details; on the other, a delicate perception of ideas.

This devotion to humanity, this absorption with character, is, of course, the faculty with which Sterne transformed the art of fiction from the two-dimensional art it had hitherto been, into the three-dimensional art he first made actual. Sterne did for the English novel what Shakespeare did for the English drama: he gave it depth—not inner profundity so much as physical massiveness. We can walk round Sir John Falstaff and Uncle Toby. Hamlet and Lear, Corporal Trim and Mr. Shandy, live on long after the curtain is lowered or the page closed.

III

Such devotion to humanity is not without its dangers, and this brings us to the very difficult subject of sentimentality. Sterne’s book is called A Sentimental Journey, and there is good reason for the title. “Sentimental” is peculiarly Sterne’s own word. He presumably did not invent it, though actually the first recorded use of the word is his—and this some twenty-seven years before the writing of the Sentimental Journey. In one of the four letters written to Miss Lumley before she became his wife, that is, in 1740, there is the sentence, “I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often graced, in those quiet, and sentimental repasts.” The authenticity of these letters, which were published by Sterne’s daughter in 1775, has been impugned (see a letter from Mr. Lewis P. Curtis in the Times Literary Supplement for June 23rd, 1927), but they have been defended very convincingly by Miss Margaret R. B. Shaw (T.L.S. for July 21st, 1927). Without entering into the details of this controversy, we can admit the substantial authenticity of the letters, but still doubt their literal correspondence to whatever manuscripts were in Mrs. Medalle’s hands. The letters were doubtless edited by Sterne’s rather unscrupulous daughter (she had been capable, as Mr. Curtis points out in the letter just mentioned, of writing to Wilkes after hearing from him that he had destroyed Sterne’s letters, and suggesting that he should “be so good as to write a few letters in imitation of her father’s style, it would do just as well and she would insert them” in her edition) [William Roberts, Memoirs … of Mrs. Hannah More, 1834, i. 67]. This is a very damning piece of evidence, and suggests that although Mrs. Medalle may not have been capable of inventing letters so convincing as the four in question, she would be quite capable of “touching them up” here and there to give them a more contemporary appeal. The addition of the word “sentimental” to the phrase in question would be just such an effective “touch.” I need not insist on this hypothesis; but it has enough probability to make the use of this “key word” so early as 1740 rather doubtful. The first use recorded by the New English Dictionary is dated 1749, and occurs in a letter from Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson:

“What in your opinion is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite? … Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word.… I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk.”

It is strange, to say the least of it, that Lady Bradshaigh should be so astonished to hear in 1749 a word which Sterne had used in 1740. But the question of dates matters very little; whether first used in 1740 or in 1749, the word had at first the same meaning, which was not quite the modern meaning. It stood for any situation “characterised by sentiment,” and this meaning no doubt originated in Locke’s psychology of sensation (we know that Sterne was greatly devoted to Locke’s writings), and at first the word had some kind of scientific justification. But as the word got bandied about in the fashionable world, it lost the definiteness of its impress and came to signify something at once more limited and less exact. A sentiment was, by the middle of the eighteenth century, any refined or tender emotion, especially those portrayed in literature and art. But the emphasis was on the refinement, as we can see from Lady Bradshaigh’s letter, and this was the implication of the word as used by Sterne. It is important that the modern sense of the word should not be imported into Sterne’s use of it, for though modern sentimentality is a direct descendant from the sentimentality of Sterne, it has undergone transformations which make it a quite different and more dangerous faculty. I do not pretend that the sentimentality of Sterne was an entirely admirable thing; it was at once too mannered and too lachrymose. But it was not unrestrained; the mannerism, even, implied a sense of decency and social discipline. That alone would not save the situation; but the fact that sentimentality was always in Sterne’s case balanced, the fact that it always had the force of a compensatory motive—this not only saves the situation, but makes a positive harmony which is one of the great charms of Sterne’s writing. Sentiment, in Sterne, is always set off against humour; the sentimental is relieved by the humorous, the humorous is redeemed by the sentimental—two contrary principles that together give perfect equilibrium.

A modern sentimentalist, appreciating the sentiment, is apt to dislike the humour and throw down the book in disgust; just as one kind of traveller, avoiding the wine but helping himself liberally to the food, is likely to find a foreign meal disagree with him—not realising that the one goes with the other, to form a perfect accord. I cannot imagine Mr. George Saintsbury refusing good wine, but with the possible exception of his master, Thackeray, he is the arch culprit in the other transgression. He has more than once expressed his disapproval of Sterne’s humour, or of certain essential aspects of it, but I am content to refer to his latest, and presumably his most considered, judgment. ² He says that he cannot agree with Professor Cross in his assignment of Yorick’s “inconvenientness” to the score of his humour:

“That Sterne had humour—real humour—hardly the idlest paradoxer, or nobody but the idlest paradoxer—would think of denying. But when he meddled with what somebody calls ‘tumtedy’ his Humour almost always deserted him, and left his Wit (a very different thing) to work its pleasure. Humour always laughs, however earnestly it feels, and sometimes chuckles: but it never sniggers. Sterne, with the rarest exceptions, is always sniggering when he is naughty. Now the snigger is a very unlovely thing. It was apparently unknown in antiquity—there is not a ghost of it even in Aristophanes, even in Lucian. You may perhaps trace its rise in the Greek anthology: but it is not clearly visible till it shows in Berni and others of the Italian Renaissance. There is none in Rabelais himself, nor in his immediate French successors: but it came in to France later, and Voltaire is of course the Prince of Sniggerers. The thing is, again, almost entirely unknown in England till the close of the seventeenth century: and even Prior has only touches of it. Swift is far too great for it. But Sterne, on the worse side of him, is compact of sniggers: the Journey itself of course dealing largely in them. They are in it, as it were refined from their usual form in Tristram and indeed almost quintessenced: though I am perfectly certain that Rabelais’ own ‘La Quinte’ would have used the ‘fair branch of fresh roses’ that she bore to sweep them away and substitute a fragrance for their frowst.”

That, it seems to me, is the statement of a very remarkable point of view. I cannot altogether discount the fact that Mr. Saintsbury prefers the vocabulary of an old maid, with his “tumtedy” and “naughty.” But to take the direct meaning of his judgment: a snigger, says the dictionary, is “a half-suppressed secretive laugh especially of cynical kind or of amusement at obscenity or indecency.” This definition would seen to cover Mr. Saintsbury’s meaning. We gather that he does not object to hearty and open indecency of the kind given us by Aristophanes and Rabelais. Nor can he very well object to the cynicism, for there is little of it in Sterne, and at least as much in Aristophanes and Rabelais. So we are reduced to “half- suppressed secretiveness” as the upshot of the charge.

Let us take an example—it is quite difficult to find one, and it would have been easier to answer the charge had it been supported by evidence. There is positively nothing obscene in the book, even magnifying the slightest hints, and imagining the most inflammable of neurotic minds exposed to them. And even indecency is a strong word to apply to the two or three mildly sexual incidents which some industrious mudraker might find in the book. There are Bevoriskius’s sparrows, which may involve an indecent problem in arithmetic, but no one but a mathematician would insist on exactitude at this point. But let us take as a possible example of the snigger, Sterne’s story of his encounter with the fair fille de chambre (not the Lyonoise, who must have been dark). The chapter is called “The Temptation.” We have the sentimental setting:

“It was a fine still evening, in the latter end of the month of May—the crimson window-curtains (which were of the same colour as those of the bed) were drawn close—the sun was setting, and reflected through them so warm a tint into the fair fille de chambre’s face—I thought she blush’d—the idea of it made me blush myself—we were quite alone; and that superinduced a second blush before the first could get off.”

The sensation of blushing is analysed, and associated with virtue. Then Sterne describes very prettily how the devil was in him and how he struggled against his temptations. There is no snigger in all this. But— “A strap had given way in her walk, and the buckle of her shoe was just falling off—See, said the fille de chambre, holding up her foot—I could not for my soul but fasten the buckle in return, and putting in the strap—and lifting up the other foot with it, when I had done, to see both were right—in doing it too suddenly—it unavoidably threw the fair fille de chambre off her center—and then—” 

The chapter ends on that convenient dash, and in the interval, presumably, we snigger. But not for long, for perhaps Sterne expected us to expect him to snigger, for he is waiting for his accusers in the next chapter:

“Yes—and then—Ye whose clay-cold heads and lukewarm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them? or how his spirit stands answerable to the Father of spirits but for his conduct under them?”

I need not repeat the whole passage here, for it is easy to turn to this chapter which Sterne has called “The Conquest,” and in which he has conquered, not only the devil’s temptations, but also those detractors of his in whom Nature has not so woven her web of kindness, “that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece.”

I do not, therefore, understand this charge of “sniggering.” The snigger is bitter and cynical, and Sterne is tender and generous. Life in his books is a tangled web of love and desire, but otherwise it would not be life, and if desire is treated, not as a dark and sinful horror to be suppressed at any price, but as a natural fact to be given its due place in the picture, we must not grumble if this place is like the jester’s at Court. There was wisdom in the old practice of allowing the lowest and most irreverent of the King’s subjects to consort freely with majesty; and it is the same principle at work in Humour. It would need a psychological excursus to discuss the matter fully, but we know instinctively, and can prove more empirically, that humour is flat and insipid unless it represents the contrast between the desires of the flesh and the aspirations of the spirit. Coleridge put the matter into other words, which I regard as the classical definition of humour. The essence of humour he defines as “a certain reference to the general and the universal, by which the finite great is brought into identity with the little, or the little with the finite great, so as to make both nothing in comparison with the infinite. The little is made great, and the great little, in order to destroy both; because all is equal in contrast with the infinite.”

And Coleridge then specifically relates this definition to Sterne by quoting from Tristram Shandy:

“It is not without reason, brother Toby, that learned men write dialogues on long noses.”

Long noses, of course, are not merely long noses; that is where the humour comes in, and no one entirely human regrets the intrusion.

There is a saying of Goethe’s that is relevant here:

“Yorick Sterne is the best type of wit that ever exerted an influence in literature. Whoever reads him feels himself lifted above the petty cares of the world. His humour is inimitable, and it is not every kind of humour that leaves the soul calm and serene.”

It recalls Sterne’s own words, already quoted: “My design … was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do. …” Goethe bears witness that Sterne had accomplished his design. Humour, too, is a cathartic agent; humour which, in Coleridge’s words again, acknowledges “the hollowness and farce of the world and its disproportion to the godlike within us.” Genuine humour is closely related to genuine tragedy; they deal with the same situation, that is to say, with life, from opposite angles. You cannot imagine genuine tragedy that is not woven out of the tangled threads of love and desire; genuine humour would be equally false if woven out of any less vital stuff.

I would go further than this, to argue that those facts of human life which concern our grossest appetites—eating and drinking, digestion, excretion and copulation—have a special function in the creation of a true humour. These “facts” make up the human little which we have to bring into relation with the human great. The process which Coleridge put forward as an hypothesis in literary criticism could to-day be justified by psychological reasoning—and along two distinct paths.

A defence of Sterne’s humour was a necessary but aggressive duty; to praise his style is merely to join a chorus. Its ease, which is its most admirable quality, is perhaps only obvious to those who themselves struggle for the same mysterious mastery of the obvious. The accomplishment, in Sterne, is closely related to the art of conversation. Sterne was most likely a good talker: we can see it from his letters. His composition begins in conversation and slides naturally into a natural ease. Observe, for example, the opening of this Journey. It begins with a spoken sentence, a question in retort, and then the author is launched on a kind of “interior monologue” which maintains the same accent of ease and actuality to the very end. Other qualities are evolved: the actuality is not only a product of tone, but also of visual imagination. The scenes and events are conceived in simple and significant outlines, and the narrative, when it moves, moves quickly and spontaneously. There is also a very special rhythm—a manipulation of the music of words and the rise and fall of periods—which is an intimate achievement of Sterne’s own. Let the reader turn to the chapter called “The Captive” (pp. 129-131) and read the passage from “I beheld his body …” down to the sentence “I’ll go directly, said I, myself to Monsieur Le Duc de Choiseul.” When Sterne becomes sentimental, in his sense of the word, his pen is muted to a wistful tenderness: we listen to his music in an enchanted stillness; and then, when he has reduced our sensibility to its last defence, he revives us with a sudden vivacious step, a beat of drums and a whistle of fifes. The best example of such modulated phrasing is the famous description of Maria in Tristram Shandy: a passage which rhythmically has much in common with the one I have just referred to. But in spite of this subtle musical structure, Sterne’s prose is anything but ornate. It is, indeed, almost the antithesis of the ornate. In English prose the ornate is represented by two authors—Sir Thomas Browne, who is the romantic extreme, and Milton, who is the passionate extreme. Sterne has nothing in common with these stylists: he stands rather with Shakespeare, who in his prose passages is the extreme of naturalness. Perhaps he lacks Shakespeare’s suavity. His intelligence was as restless as it was brilliant; it abhorred the fixed form, and the awful gravity of logic. His humour just avoided the clarity that is so often banal. He realised that a conclusion is too often a fullstop, and that resumption is a painful process. He is a master of transitions, and almost elf-like in his flights. But the light in his path is humane; his mockery is compassionate. There is a clear affinity between those two great spirits—between the creator of Falstaff and the creator of Uncle Toby. It is true that Falstaff is only one aspect of Shakespeare, and that there is the universe of his poetic sensibility besides; whereas Uncle Toby is practically the whole of Sterne. But it is a great thing to be a peer to any aspect of Shakespeare’s genius, and the most fervent of Sterne’s admirers cannot hope for a higher recognition.

Herbert Read