standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon: -164-
Panegyricks to paste up at this door:
Pasquinades at that: — All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. (Volume 1, chapter 14)
The striking thing about this passage is the way that it can be read both as a statement of an aesthetic of realism and as a devastating critique of all fictional attempts to be real. The historian-novelist who wants to be accurate cannot be a muleteer, but our experience of reading the first thirteen chapters of Tristram Shandy has already insinuated into our minds the sinking feeling that unless a writer is a muleteer, he or she will never finish. We can look at Sterne in two ways: as (at times) a marvelous realist (Ian Watt refers to Sterne's 'mastery of realistic presentation') and as perhaps the eighteenth century's most acute critic of fictional realism. He can be both because he seems to be attracted to both roles, and he will inevitably resist all attempts to slow or stabilize his oscillation between them. The reasons for this oscillation will be explored more fully below; for now, it suffices to say that such an attitude toward realism makes any attempt to understand Sterne as a prophet of modernism inherently problematic.
If the effort to make Sterne not «odd» by aligning him with the familiar voices of modernism runs into trouble, what about the many attempts to deny Johnson's comment precisely by putting these novels into an eighteenth-century context? I will first look at those arguments based on the phenomenon of sensibility, and then move on to look at Sterne's relation to Augustan satire and to John Locke.
'Sensibility' in mid- eighteenth-centuryEngland was not so much a political or intellectual movement as it was a fashion. It certainly had its roots in both religion and philosophy, as a certain strain of English thought from the late seventeenth century onward turned away from the gloomy images of human nature conjured up by Hobbes and by the sterner spokesmen for Calvinistic Protestantism. Sensibility emphasized the infinite capacity of the human heart for sympathetic feeling. We respond to the plight of others instinctively and powerfully, and our tears become the legible sign of our basic goodness. A taste developed for works of art that provoked or at least represented these tender feelings, and in many ways the novel led all the rest. Among Sterne's immediate predecessors, writers as different as Fielding and Richardson show the effects of this taste: with the long-suffering Clarissa, Richardson proved himself a master of the ability to elicit a sympathetic response; -165- Fielding, with heroes like Parson Adams or Tom Jones, consistently created characters with a good heart.
Sterne's name has become almost synonymous with sensibility, and little wonder. In the welter of voices that makes up the texture of Tristram Shandy, one note sounds with apparent clarity again and again-the feeling heart. We see it especially clearly in Toby and his servant Trim: the former famously and literally refuses to hurt a fly, and rushes generously to the bedside of the dying Le Fever, a perfect stranger; the latter poignantly epitomizes the fragility of human life at the death of Bobby Shandy, and is given to melancholy spells when he thinks of the fate of his brother. But sensibility is not merely something Tristram discusses in others-it is a large part of his portrait of himself. Think of his encounter with the ass of Lyons, or with poor, mad Maria, and so on. In the 1780s, the most commonly reprinted version of Sterne's work was a kind of golden treasury called The Beauties of Sterne; Including All His Pathetic Tales, and Most Distinguished Observations on Life, Selected for the Heart of Sensibility, a fact that suggests that for a number of contemporary readers this was the aspect of Sterne that appealed the most. His last work, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, takes the note of sensibility that appeared intermittently in Tristram Shandy and turns it into the dominant strain, as the traveling Yorick moves from one feeling moment to the next. This latter work includes a panegyric on sensibility that effectively sums up both its meaning and its appeal: 'Dear sensibility! sources inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!.. — eternal fountain of our feelings!.. This is the divinity which stirs within me-… that I feel some generous cares beyond myself-all comes from thee, great great SENSORIUM of the world!'
Sensibility, however, was a taste fraught with contradictions. The emphasis was more on the good feelings of the responsive heart than on the heart's responsibility to do anything to relieve the suffering that inspired it. Toby does rush to Le Fever's deathbed and offer help, and he assists Le Fever's son after the child is left orphaned, but our primary focus throughout the episode is on what Toby's feelings tell us about him and his good heart. It is tempting to say that such an emphasis on responses tends to blur the reality of suffering; suffering, in fact, can be seen as a good thing, since we require it-and require it in others! — to know our own generous feelings. In particular, the fact that so much of this pathos was inspired by women and the poor makes many modern -166- readers very uncomfortable, and it is quite possible to perceive at least a tacit complicity between sensibility and oppression of all stripes. The privileged revel in their good hearts, and they relieve suffering only in localized (and perhaps selfish) ways.
Lest we revel too much in the indignation that is our age's sensibility, it is important to examine whether Sterne himself-notwithstanding his status as a high priest in the cult-embraced sensibility in an uncritical way. The panegyric above hints at some ironic distance: Yorick feels divinity within him, and most of Sterne's first readers would have recognized the allusion to the moment in Paradise Lost where Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit; they, too, feel 'Divinity within them breeding wings / Wherewith to scorn the earth.' The possibility that sensibility is, if not an absolutely false divinity, then an ambiguous one, is in fact a far more insistent idea in Sterne than for many of his contemporaries.
Look, for instance, at the scene between the wayfaring Tristram and the pathetic mad girl, Maria: she is 'beautiful,' but 'unsettled in her senses' (thwarted love, of course); she sits upon a bank, her goat beside her, and plays her pipes to the Virgin. Tristram is smitten with the full force of 'an honest heart-ache,' and then:
MARIA made a cadence so melancholy, so tender and querulous, that I sprung out of the chaise to help her, and found myself sitting betwixt her and the goat before I relapsed from my enthusiasm.
MARIA look'd wistfully for some time at me, and then at her goat-and then at me-and then at her goat again, and so on, alternately-
— Well, Maria, said I softly-What resemblance do you find?
I do entreat the candid reader to believe me, that it was from the humblest conviction of what a Beast man is, — that I ask'd the question; and that I would not have let fall an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of Misery, to be entitled to all the wit that ever Rabelais scatter'd-and yet I own my heart smote me, and that I so smarted at the very idea of it, that I swore I would set up for Wisdom and utter grave sentences the rest of my days-and never-never attempt again to commit mirth with man, woman, or child, the longest day I had to live. (Volume 9, chapter 24)
The idea of the 'beauties of Sterne' takes on an entirely appropriate double entendre here, and we must ask, what is Sterne trying to evoke: a tear for Maria? a laugh at his own expense? Both, surely, but also more, for he seems intent as well on exposing for our amused and ironic scrutiny the potentially erotic charge lurking in every «heart-ache» of -167- sensibility. Sterne admits that his pathos is inevitably tinged with something more than a little goat-footed; Richardson, to take just one point of contrast, insists that the slow decline of pious Clarissa only works to throw into higher relief the most important doctrines of Christianity. His own less noble feelings he projects onto Lovelace, whom he conveniently kills off.
Sterne is never only one thing. The anthologists may have wished him safely and solely sentimental, but he is better seen as a unique hybrid, a sentimentalist who is at times perfectly sincere, but one who also often remembers the potential in sentiment for the pompous or the narcissistic or the exploitative or the merely futile (one strong undercurrent in the Le Fever tale is the uselessness of Toby's good feelings). Sterne's sensibility ties him to his era, but the way he weaves it into his work also sets him apart slightly; he remains capable at all times of a canny laugh at the spectacle of his own bleeding heart.
The ironies of the Maria episode inevitably raise questions about Sterne as a satirist, and a number of critics
