does in Gil Blas, he brings into prominent relief each disagreeable feature, overloads it with details, without considering whether they are too numerous, without reflecting that they are excessive, without feeling that they are odious, without perceiving that they are disgusting. The public whom he addresses is on a level with his energy and his coarseness; and in order to move such nerves, a writer cannot strike too hard.1

But, at the same time, to civilise this barbarity and to control this violence, a faculty appears, common to all, authors and public: serious reflection attached to the observation of character. Their eyes are turned toward the inner man. They note exactly the individual peculiarities, and mark them with such a precise imprint that their personage becomes a type, which cannot be forgotten. They are psychologists. The title of a comedy of old Ben Jonson's, Every Man in his Humour, indicates how this taste is ancient and national amongst them. Smollett writes a whole novel, Humphrey Clinker, on this idea. No action; the book is a collection of letters written during a tour in Scotland and England. Each of the travellers, after his bent of mind, judges variously of the same objects. A generous, grumbling old gentleman, who amuses himself by thinking himself ill, a crabbed old maid in search of a husband; a lady's maid, ingenuous and vain, who bravely mutilates her spelling; a series of originals, who one after another bring their oddities on the scene, such are the characters: the pleasure of the reader consists in recognising their humour in their style, in foreseeing their follies, in perceiving the thread which pulls each of their motions, in verifying the agreement of their ideas and their actions. Push this study of human peculiarities to excess, and you will come upon the origin of Sterne's talent.

VII.

Figure to yourself a man who goes on a journey, wearing on his eyes a pair of marvellously magnifying spectacles. A hair on his hand, a speck on a tablecloth, a fold of a moving garment, will interest him at this rate he will not go very far; he will go six steps in a day, and will not quit his room. So Sterne writes four

...

.

1 In Novels and Novelists, by W. Forsyth, the author says, ch. v. 159: 'What is the character of most of these books (novels) which were to correct follies and regulate morality? Of a great many of them, and especially those of Fielding and Smollett, the prevailing features are grossness and licentiousness. Love degenerates into a mere animal passion. . . . The language of the characters abounds in oaths and gross expressions. The heroines allow themselves to take part in conversations which no modest woman would have heard without a blush. And yet these novels were the delight of a bygone generation, and were greedily devoured by women as well as men. Are we therefore to conclude that our great-great-grandmothers . . were less chaste and moral than their female posterity? I answer, certainly not; but we must infer that they were inferior to them in delicacy and refinement. They were accustomed to hear a spade called a spade, and words which would shock the more fastidious ear in the reign of Queen Victoria were then in common and daily use.'-TR.

volumes to record the birth of his hero. He perceives the infinitely little, and describes the imperceptible. A man parts his hair on one side this, according to Sterne, depends on his whole character, which is of a piece with that of his father, his mother, his uncle, and his whole ancestry; it depends on the structure of his brain, which depends on the circumstances of his conception and his birth, and these on the fancies of his parents, the humour of the moment, the talk of the preceding hour, the contrarieties of the last curate, a cut thumb, twenty knots made on a bag; I know not how many things besides. The six or eight volumes of Tristram Shandy are employed in summing them up; for the smallest and dullest incident, a sneeze, a badly-shaven beard, drags after it an inextricable network of inter-involved causes, which from above, below, right and left, by invisible prolongations and ramifications, are buried in the depths of a character and in the remote vistas of events. Instead of extracting, like the novel-writers, the principal root, Sterne, with marvellous devices and success, devotes himself to drawing out the tangled skein of numberless threads, which are sinuously immersed and dispersed, so as to suck in from all sides the sap and the life. Slender, intertwined, buried as they are, he finds them; he extricates them without breaking, brings them to the light; and there, where we fancied was but a stalk, we see with wonder the underground mass and vegetation of the multiplied fibres and fibrils, by which the visible plant grows and is supported.

This is truly a strange talent, made up of blindness and insight, which resembles those diseases of the retina in which the over-excited nerve becomes at once dull and penetrating, incapable of seeing what the most ordinary eyes perceive, capable of observing what the most piercing sight misses. In fact, Sterne is a sickly and eccentric humorist, an ecclesiastic and a libertine, a fiddler and a philosopher, who whimpered over a dead donkey, but left his mother to starve,' selfish in act, selfish in word, who in everything is the reverse of himself and of others. His book is like a great storehouse of articles of virtu, where the curiosities of all ages, kinds, and countries lie jumbled in a heap; texts of excommunication, medical consultations, passages of unknown or imaginary authors, scraps of scholastic erudition, strings of absurd histories, dissertations, addresses to the reader. His pen leads him; he has neither sequence nor plan; nay, when he lights upon anything orderly, he purposely contorts it; with a kick he sends the pile of folios next to him over the history he has commenced, and dances on the top of them. He delights in disappointing us, in sending us astray by interruptions and outrages.1 Gravity displeases him, he treats it as

There is a distinct trace of a spirit similar to that which is here sketched, in a select few of the English writers. Pultock's Peter Wilkins the Flying Man, Amory's Life of John Buncle, and Southey's Doctor are instances of this. Rabelais is probably their prototype.-TR.

a bypocrite; to his liking folly is better, and he paints himself in Yorick. In a well-constituted mind ideas march one after another, with uniform motion or acceleration; in this uncouth brain they jump about like a rout of masks at a carnival, in troops, each dragging his neighbour by the feet, head, coat, amidst the most promiscuous and unforeseen hubbub. All his little lopped phrases are somersaults; we pant as we read. The tone is never for two minutes the same; laughter comes, then the beginning of emotion, then scandal, then wonder, then tenderness, then laughter again. The mischievous joker pulls and entangles the threads of all our feelings, and makes us go hither, thither, irregularly, like puppets. Amongst these various threads there are two which he pulls more willingly than the rest. Like all men who have nerves, he is subject to tenderness; not that he is really kindly and tender; on the contrary, his life is that of an egotist; but on certain days he must needs weep, and he makes us weep with him. He is moved on behalf of a captive bird, of a poor ass, which, accustomed to blows, 'looked up pensive,' and seemed to say, 'Don't thrash me with it (the halter); but if you will, you may." He will write a couple of pages on the attitude of this donkey, and Priam at the feet of Achilles was not more touching. Thus in a silence, in an oath, in the most trifling domestic action, he hits upon exquisite refinements and little heroisms, a sort of charming flowers, invisible to everybody else, which grow in the dust of the driest road. One day Uncle Toby, the poor sick captain, catches, after 'infinite attempts,' a big buzzing fly, who has cruelly tormented him all dinner-time; he gets up, crosses the room on his suffering leg, and opening the window, cries: 'Go, poor devil, get thee gone; why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me." This womanish sensibility is too fine to be described; we should have to give a whole story-that of Lefevre, for instance that the perfume might be inhaled; this perfume evaporates as soon as we touch it, and is like the weak fleeting odour of the plants, brought for one moment into a sick-chamber. What still more increases this sad sweetness, is the contrast of the free and easy waggeries which, like a hedge of nettles, encircles them on all sides. Sterne, like all men whose mechanism is over-excited, has irregular appetites. He loves the nude, not from a feeling of the beautiful, and in the manner of painters, not from sensuality and frankness like Fielding, not from a search after pleasure, like Dorat, Boufflers, and all those refined pleasure-seekers, who at the same time were rhyming and enjoying themselves in France. If he goes into dirty places, it is because they are forbidden and not frequented. What he seeks there is singularity and scandal. The allurement of this forbidden fruit is not the fruit, but the prohibition; for he bites by preference where

1 Sterne's Works, 7 vols., 1783, 3; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, vii. ch. xxxii. 2 Ibid. 1, ii. ch. xii.

the fruit is withered or worm-eaten. That an epicurean delights in detailing the pretty sins of a pretty woman is nothing wonderful; but that a novelist takes pleasure in watching the bedroom of a musty, fusty old couple, in observing the consequences of the fall of a burning chestnut in a pair of breeches,1 in detailing the questions of Mrs. Wadman on the consequences of wounds in the groin,2 can only be explained by the aberration of a perverted fancy, which finds its amusement in repugnant ideas, as spoiled palates are pleased by the pungent flavour of mouldy cheese. Thus, to read Sterne we should wait for days when we are in a peculiar kind of humour, days of spleen, rain, or when through nervous irritation we are disgusted with rationality. In fact, his characters are as unreasonable as himself. He sees in man nothing but fancy, and what he calls the hobby-horse-Uncle Toby's taste for fortifications, Mr. Shandy's fancy for oratorical tirades and philosophical systems. This hobby-horse, according to him, is like a wart, so small at first that we hardly perceive it, and only when it is in a strong light; but it gradually increases, becomes covered with hairs, grows red, and buds out all around: its possessor, who is pleased with and admires it, nourishes it, until at last it is changed into a vast wen, and the whole face disappears under the invasion of the parasite excrescence. No one has equalled Sterne in the history of these human hypertrophies; he puts down the seed, feeds it gradually, makes the propagating threads creep round about, shows the little veins and microscopic arteries which inosculate within, counts the palpitations of the blood which passes through them, explains their changes of colour and increase of bulk. The psychological observer attains here one of his extreme developA far advanced art is necessary to describe, beyond the confines of regularity and health, the exception or the degeneration; and the English novel is completed here by adding to the representation of form the picture of deformations.

ments.

VIII.

The moment approaches when purified manners will, by purifying the novel, impress upon it its final character. Of the two great tendencies manifested by it, native brutality and intense reflection, one at last conquers the other: literature, grown severe, expels from fiction the coarseness of Smollett and the indecencies of Sterne; and the novel, in every respect moral, before falling into the almost prudish hands of

1 Tristram Shandy, 2, iv. ch. xxvii.

2 Ibid. 3, ix. ch. xx.

3 Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, Moore, have a tone of their own, which comes from their blood, or from their proximate or distant parentage-the Irish tone. So Hume, Robertson, Smollett, W. Scott, Burns, Beattie, Reid, D. Stewart, etc., have the Scotch tone. In the Irish or Celtic tone we find an excess of chivalry, sensuality, expansion; in short, a mind less equally balanced, more sympathetic and less practical. The Scotchman, on the other hand, is an Englishman, either slightly refined or narrowed, because he has suffered more and fasted more.

Miss Burney, passes into the noble hands of Goldsmith. His Vicar of Wakefield is a prose idyl,' somewhat spoilt by phrases too well written, but at bottom as homely as a Flemish picture. Observe in Terburg or Mieris' paintings a woman at market or a burgomaster emptying his long glass of beer: the faces are vulgar, the ingenuousness is comical, the cookery occupies the place of honour; yet these good folk are so peaceful, so contented with their small but secure happiness, that we envy them. The impression left by Goldsmith's book is pretty much the same. The excellent Dr. Primrose is a country clergyman, the whole of whose adventures have for a long time consisted in 'migrations from the blue bed to the brown.' He has cousins, even to the fortieth remove,' who came to eat his dinner and sometimes to borrow a pair of boots. His wife, who has all the education of the time, is a perfect cook, can almost read, excels in pickling and preserving, and at dinner gives the history of every dish. His daughters aspire to elegance, and even make a wash for the face over the fire.' His son Moses gets cheated at the fair, and sells the pony for a gross of green spectacles. Primrose himself writes treatises, which no one buys, against second marriages of the clergy; writes beforehand in his wife's epitaph, though she was still living, that she was the only wife of Dr. Primrose, and by way of encouragement, places this piece of eloquence in an elegant frame over the chimney-piece. But the household continues the even tenor of its way; the daughters and the mother slightly domineer over the father of the family; he lets them, like a good fellow; and now and again delivers himself at most of an innocent jest, busies himself in his new farm, with his two horses, wall-eyed Blackberry and the other without a tail:

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'Nothing could exceed the neatness of my enclosures, the elms and hedge-rows appearing with inexpressible beauty. . . . Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and a prattling river before; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. (It) consisted but of one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness; the walls on the inside were nicely whitewashed. . . . Though the same room served us for parlour and kitchen, that only made it the warmer. Besides, as it was kept with the utmost neatness, the dishes, plates, and coppers, being well scoured, and all disposed in bright rows on the shelves, the eye was agreeably relieved, and did not want richer furniture.'1

...

They make hay all together, sit under the honeysuckle to drink a bottle of gooseberry wine; the girls sing, the two little ones read; and the parents' would stroll down the sloping field, that was embellished with blue bells and centaury:'

'But let us have one bottle more, Deborah, my life, and Moses, give us a good song. What thanks do we not owe to Heaven for thus bestowing tranquillity, health, and competence! I think myself happier now than the greatest monarch upon earth. He has no such fire-side, nor such pleasant faces about it.'

1 The Vicar of Wakefield, ch. iv.

2 Ibid. ch. xvii.