have tried to understand him in relation to the norms of eighteenth-century satire; some have even gone so far as to call him the last of the Augustan satirists and these critics insist that a true historical reading of Sterne must begin with that context. He is not odd, that is, in the light of Swift and Pope. An anecdote that Sterne himself recounts encourages this point of view. Speaking of an encounter he had in 1760 with a certain elderly gentleman, Sterne tells us:
He came up to me, one day, as I was at the Princess of Wales's court. 'I want to know you, Mr. Sterne; but it is fit you should know, also, who it is that wishes this pleasure. You have heard, continued he, of an old Lord Bathurst, of whom your Popes, and Swifts, have sung and spoken so much; I have lived my life with geniuses of that cast; but have survived them; and, despairing ever to find their equals, it is some years since I have closed my accounts, and shut up my books, with thoughts of never opening them again; but you have kindled a desire in me of opening them once more before I die; which I now do; so go home and dine with me.
We could pause a long time over these remarks, for they are rich with all kinds of implications (for instance, is the relentlessly mercantile tone of Bathurst's comments a reflection of what traditional patronage feels like from the patron's point of view, or is it Sterne's later coloring, an intriguing revelation about his feelings for a system he regarded with -168- ambivalence?). We should also note that Bathurst never actually says that Sterne is like Swift and Pope, but the story has given license to a number of critics who want to see family resemblances between Sterne and the Augustans. Sterne does share with the Augustans (and with earlier figures, such as Rabelais) a love of elaborate intellectual foolery, the so-called tradition of learned wit we see in works like A Tale of a Tub or the Peri Bathous. But while it is important to understand Sterne as a satirist, it is not necessarily most accurate to see him as an Augustan satirist, and such an attempt may be as anachronistic as the effort to make him modern. In fact, the problems with assigning Sterne a place as the last Augustan are manifold: his temperament is strikingly different, his politics are all wrong, and his aims as a writer, on balance, seem to be quite different. The world of the Augustans was once memorably summed up by one critic with the phrase, 'the gloom of the Tory satirists'; Sterne was not gloomy, he was a staunch Whig, and he lacks the militancy that is at the heart of the kind of Juvenalian satire Pope and Swift most often practiced.
For the contrast in temperament, we can look to Tristram's insistence (which seems very much to be Sterne's) that his book is 'if… wrote against any thing, — 'tis wrote, and please your worships, against the spleen.' Swift and Pope often make us laugh, but they seem intent on embracing spleen, and exploiting it as the organ from which their truest work will emerge. Some of that may have been constitutional, but it was certainly reinforced by their politics and their increasingly splenetic horror at what the Whigs wrought. Sterne, however, was neither a Tory nor a politically angry man. We can see both his politics and their tone in the scene where Toby and Trim must regretfully demolish their toy fortifications in order that they may honor the terms of the Tory Peace of Utrecht. The sentiment is Whig orthodoxy, but the spirit could hardly be gentler (and it is amusing to speculate what Bathurst thought of the scene; his own peerage was one of those created by the Tories so that the Peace of Utrecht could be saved).
The largest difficulty with this approach, however, emerges when we ask the question, what, if Sterne was a satirist, was his satire about? While the capaciousness of the satiric imagination in Swift and Pope is such that we may often wonder if there is a limit to their range, we can also point to a core of issues that form the heart of their enterprise: the Whigs, especially Walpole; abuses in learning; bad writing; religious differences; the sin of Pride. Sterne may have aligned himself with the -169- Whigs, but as the destruction of the toy fortifications suggests, there is little political militancy. He does poke fun at Walter Shandy's mad theorizing on child development, but Walter is a character, not merely an attitude, and the response he generates is complex and in part sympathetic. Sterne undoubtedly wrote A Sentimental Journey to balance genial travels against Smollett's angry ones, but that was only the most minor of his intentions or effects. Sentiment itself, as we have seen, receives ironic treatment, but that irony is only part of the story; Sterne is also genuinely sentimental, and the anthologists erred more by simplifying than by falsifying the role of sensibility in his writing. The fact is, Sterne frequently wants us to adopt an ironic viewpoint toward something in his work, but that irony is only rarely the sum of his intention. This is a crucial point, and we can see it repeated if we look at the way he uses the thought of John Locke. With Locke, the question of what is to be taken ironically and what is to be taken straight is central, but it is also a question without a final answer.
Locke has been a name to conjure with in much Sterne criticism, and he has a central place in the critical tradition that wants to place Sterne firmly in an eighteenth-century setting. Locke clearly belongs in any comprehensive discussion of Sterne (Tristram Shandy is seeded with references, direct and allusive) and several connections between the novelist and the philosopher have been discovered. It has been argued that Locke provided Sterne both with a model of the human mind that we can see at work in his fiction, particularly in the way character unfolds, and that such a model also provided the novelist with a structure for his apparently shapeless work, especially Tristram Shandy. Such a conviction led one critic, writing a few decades ago, to insist that 'in Tristram Shandy, the name and influence of Locke are pervasive.' Are they?
Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding (dated 1690, published 1689) proved in many ways as influential on the philosophy of its time as Newton's physics; indeed, many thought Locke had formulated the laws of thought as reliably as his contemporary had articulated the governing principles of gravity and motion. Locke's aim was to describe how the mind worked, and the mechanics he developed were empirical. At birth, our minds are empty slates, devoid of innate knowledge but nonetheless receptive to new ideas, which come to us and accumulate in our minds through one of two channels: through our experience of outward objects as perceived by our senses, or through the -170- mind's reflection on its own operations. As Locke himself puts it, 'In all that great extent wherein the mind wanders… it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas, which Sense or Reflection have offered for its Contemplation.'
To be sure, Sterne is interested in both sensation and reflection. Tristram Shandy is a work filled with sensation, most of it-though not all-painful; we can balance the hot chestnut in Phutatorius's breeches with the Beguine's tender treatment of Trim's wound. And Tristram is much given to reflection on his mind's operations. The passage quoted above in which he refuses the role of the muleteer-historian is only one of a number of places where the narrator pauses to consider how his mind works. But lurking behind these twin pillars of the Lockean mind is a necessary principle of combination, a process of association; without that, our ideas would remain discrete quanta of intellectual possibility. It is this quality of association that interests Sterne most of all. As early as the fourth chapter of the first volume, he announces, in explanation and extenuation of his mother's ill-timed query about the clock:
From an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, — but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp'd into her head, — & vice versa:-which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sorts of prejudice whatsoever. (Volume 1, chapter 4)
Annotators will typically refer readers of this passage to these words of Locke's:
Some of our Ideas have a natural Correspondence and Connexion one with another… Besides this there is another Connexion of Ideas wholly owing to chance or Custom; Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Mens Minds, that 'tis very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and this one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding, but its Associate appears with it.
Locke here is describing, as Sterne is narrating in the passage about his mother, peculiar associations, and Locke is scrupulous throughout the Essay to acknowledge the individuality of all minds. But the examination of such peculiarity is not Locke's central aim, and he describes such oddity primarily as a concession to the limitations of his larger effort, which is to describe how all minds work and thus what all 'human -171- understanding' has in common. Not so Sterne. His interest in the sagacious philosopher centers on those moments where Locke speaks of human understanding as flawed or ridiculous or, especially, as subjective. And such knowledge intrigues Sterne largely because he finds it so funny. Mrs. Shandy's association of clock winding with conjugal union is «unhappy» only for the Shandy family; for readers, it's meant to be the first good joke in the book. And association will be the source of other jokes, particularly involving Toby, whose mental track of association is worn so smooth that anything-even Walter awkwardly reaching across his body-reminds him of fortifications.
But Sterne (and here we reach the nub of a problem we have seen before), while always a jester, is rarely
