Laurence Sterne. (1713–1768). A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
Criticisms and Interpretations
I. By Sir Walter Scott
THE STYLE employed by Sterne is fancifully
ornamented, but at the same time vigorous and masculine, and full of
that animation and force which can only be derived by an intimate
acquaintance with the early English prose writers. In the power of
approaching and touching the finer feelings of the heart, he has never
been excelled, if indeed, he has ever been equaled; and may be at once
recorded as one of the most affected, and one of the most simple
writers—as one of the greatest plagiarists, and of the most original
geniuses whom England has produced.—From “Sterne,” in “Lives of the
Novelists” (originally in “Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library.”)
II. By Edmond Scherer
STERNE is at once tender-hearted and
sentimental; that is to say, naturally susceptible of sympathetic
emotions, and inclined at the same time to invite them for the pleasure
that he feels in them, and the credit they gain him. He was very early
familiar with the tone of tenderness. See how he describes the solitude
in which “his Lumley” has left him. “A solitary plate,” he writes to
her, “only one knife, one fork, one glass! I bestowed a thousand
pensive and penetrating glances on the chair that you have so often
adorned with your graceful person in our tranquil and sentimental
repasts.” He insists that when his time comes, he will die alone, far
from home, in some inn.
If you will believe him, the suffering of friends at such a moment,
nay, the last offices of affection, would torment his soul and suffice
to kill him. “Thank God!” he cries, “for my sensibility; though it has
often caused me suffering, I would not give it for all the pleasures of
coarse sensualists.” We can now understand what Sterne means by a
“Sentimental Journey.” The traveler à la Sterne is a man who
troubles himself but little about the goal for which he is making, or
the regions which he traverses. He hardly visits remarkable monuments,
he says nothing of the beauty of places; his objects of search are
sweet and affectionate emotions. Everything becomes to him matter for
sympathy: a caged bird, a donkey sinking under ill treatment, a poor
child, an old monk. A sort of universal benevolence makes him take his
share of all small sorrows, not exactly for the purpose of consolation,
but to enter into them, to taste their savor, and, if I may say so, to
extract the picturesque from them. Sentimentalism is perfectly
compatible with a certain strain of egotism, and the sentimental
traveler is at bottom much more his own master than is thought. It is
for this reason that he paints so excellently, for this also that he so
often exaggerates and strikes into falsetto. The history of Father
Lorenzo is an example of these exaggerations. Lorenzo had given Sterne
his snuffbox, and some months afterward our traveler, revisiting
Calais, learns that the poor monk is dead. He “burst into tears” at the
tomb. Well and good, but there are too many of these tears in Sterne. I
like him better when his tenderness keeps better measure, or when he
contents himself with a simple humane impulse. In this style of
touching simplicity, he has told stories which are, and deserve to be,
famous, being pure masterpieces, such as the story of Le Fevre, the
death of Yorick, the two donkeys, the dead donkey of Naimport, and him
of the pastry cook. Did Sterne ever write anything more exquisite than
Uncle Toby’s fly? Is not the hero of the siege of Namur all in this
trait?
To sum up, Sterne is a tale-teller of the first order and excellent in
sentimental scenes. But he has the faults of his style: he abuses the
trick of interesting the heart in trifles; he enlarges little things
too much; he scarcely ever declaims, but he sometimes whimpers….
Without going about to do so, we have just drawn the portrait of
Sterne. He had neither ill nature nor egotism; but (which is much more
human) he had weakness and levity. His, says M. Stapfer, was a kind of
optimism which believed in the good of human nature and the moral
government of the world, without denying the evil and the disorder in
both—I should add, especially without taking either tragically or
troubling himself much about them. He writes, “’Tis a good little
world, the world in which we live. I take Heaven to witness, after all
my jesting, my heart is innocent, and the sports of my pen just like
those of my infancy when I rode cockhorse on a stick.” And elsewhere: “Vive la bagatelle!
O my humor, never has thou painted in black the objects I met in my
way. In danger thou hast gilt my horizon with hope, and when death
itself knocked at my door, thou didst tell him to call again with so
gay an air of careless indifference that he doubted his mission.”
There we have him—a light and easy humor, a man who looks at once with
amusement and sympathy at human affairs, who loves the world without
forming too high an idea of it. And we have, as the result, a kindly
satire, where bitterness is replaced by good-humor, contempt by
affection, the spirit of detraction by sensibility, a satire which
inspires us with interest and even affection for the very persons of
whom it makes fun.—From “Laurence Sterne, or the Humorist,” in “Essays
on English Literature,” translated by George Saintsbury.
III. By Professor Saintsbury
THE WAY in which his scenes, sometimes corrected
and finished as punctiliously as a steel engraving, sometimes shaded
off on all sides into a sort of halo of mist, impress themselves on the
mind is unique. Dickens had one of not the least of his flashes of
genius when he made such an apparently unlikely person as Sam Weller
speak of “the gentleman in the black silk smalls as knowed the young
’ooman as kept a goat.” This dramatic-pictorial faculty is, in
combination, very rare, and its effectiveness depends no doubt to some
extent on the want of continuity in Sterne—on the way in which the
shapes arise, grow vivid, flicker, faint, and disappear, speaking all
the time, when they do speak, in strictest conformity with their
presentation. Probably the effectiveness is also due in part to the
fact that there is after all very little of it. Although “Tristram” was
actually and originally dribbled out over a long series of years, and
of cunningly small and widely printed volumes, both it and the
“Sentimental Journey” will go, without “diamond” type, into four still
smaller—two of moderate size, and even one somewhat but not excessively
“squeezed.” The stuff which they contain could not, in fact, be hastily
produced, and probably could not have been produced at all except in
Sterne’s actual “twenty years of shooting, fishing, playing the flute,”
and occasionally performing the light duties of an eighteenth-century
parson, followed by nearly half the time of travel, society, and what
not. Nor could he, as probably, have produced much more if longer life
had been granted him, nor will any wise person wish that he had done
so. Of the good strong ale, and generous port, and subtly flavored
claret, and wisdom-giving amontillado, and inspiring champagne, and
ineffable burgundy of Fielding and Scott and Miss Austen and Dickens
and Thackeray and other great novelists, one never can have too much.
But Sterne is not a drink or a wine either of barley or grape—he is a
liqueur—agreeable, but not perhaps exactly wholesome, artistic but
certainly artificial. And it is only a yokel who wants kümmel or
goldwasser, chartreuse or curaçoa “in a moog.”—From “The Peace of the
Augustans” (1916).
List of Characters
- YORICK, the sentimental traveler.
- FATHER LORENZO, a Franciscan monk.
- MONSIEUR DESSEIN, master of the hotel at Calais.
- MADAME DE L——
- LA FLEUR, servant to Yorick.
- The owner of a dead ass.
- The wife of a glove merchant.
- An old French officer.
- A tall German.
- A dwarf.
- MARQUISINA DI F——
- MADAME DE RAMBOULIET.
- Fille de chambre to Madame R——
- A chevalier of St. Louis.
- MARQUIS D’E——
- COUNT DE B——
- A Parisian landlord.
- A girl selling laces.
- A flattering beggar.
- MARIA, a mad girl.
- A French farmer and his family.
- A Piedmontese lady.
- Her fille de chambre.
© Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Vol. III, Part 1. Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1917; Bartleby.com, 2000
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