handkerchiefs and wiping their eyes; but it is all a transient and often a trumpery emotion, administered too in doses not strong enough to be morbid; it is maudlin; it is theatrical; it gapes for applause, even in the generous outburst anent the negress. Yorick, indeed, flirts with Fancy, and ogles rather than loves her. Thackeray is right. Sterne is an acrobat; his nimbleness and alacrity astonish, but they do not inspire respect. But here cavil must end and criticism admire. How splendidly his tricks are performed! With what ease and grace! with what manner! with what style! How much Thackeray himself borrowed from the rambling, ambling informality of that style! There, in truth, we have the secret of Sterne's immortality-his style; and the style was impressionist, the impressionism of a fantastic juggler with emotions and sensations. At the risk of being wearisome, let us illustrate our point afresh. We are accustomed in the theatre to conceive a character, not so much from the thing said as from the voice, the gesture, the appearance; we have witnessed a notable instance of this lately in the person of Svengali, whose influence is hinted by an assemblage of such indications rather than from any enlightening utterance. Such is Sterne's style; the scent that recalls the flower, the shell that re-echoes the waves, the lock of hair that summons back the vanished presence, the tone of a sentence that imparts the motive of its delivery. And when, as in "Tristram Shandy" and the "Sentimental Journey," the matter is a tissue of humors and vagaries, this manner becomes not only the fittest vehicle, but is itself interwoven with the medley-at once color and substance, as it were, conjoined thermometer and pulse. The style is in such cases the book. Writing [asseverates Sterne] when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation. As ΠΟ one who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; so no author who understands the great boundaries of de corum and good breeding, would presume to think all! The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine in his turn as well as yours. And again:- I would go fifty miles on foot for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands-be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore. And once more: Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty. The first two quotations stamp Sterne as an antagonist of the classical, the last as a champion of the impressionist manner, for by "truth" we take him to mean outward facts and not inward nature; not to speak of another passage, where the author flippantly obsentence, and trusting serves, "I begin with writing the first to Almighty God for the second." Sterne's work manship might not inaptly be called "Pictures without palettes." Every one recollects, if only from Thackeray's repetition of it in his "English Humorists," the famous passage in "Tristram Shandy," beginning, ""Twas in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel," which resembles a glowing pastoral by Gainsborough, and is perhaps the best instance of Sterne's supremacy in word-painting. But there is another less hackneyed and very nearly as fine in the episode of "Poor Maria:”— accent and look so perfectly in tune to a feeling heart, that I instantly made a vow I would give him a four-and-twenty sous piece when I got to Moulins. "And who is poor Maria?" said I. "The love and pity of all the villages around us," said the postillion; "it is but three years ago that the sun did not shine upon so fair, so quick-witted and amiable a maid; and better fate did Maria deserve than to have her banns forbid by the intrigues of the curate of the parish who publish'd them." He was going on, when Maria, who had made a short pause, put the pipe to her mouth and began the air again; they were the same notes-yet were ten times sweeter. "It is the evening service to the Virgin," said the young man; "but who has taught her to play it, and how she came by her pipe, no one knows; we think that Heaven has assisted her in both; for, ever since she has been unsettled in her mind, it seems her only consolation; she has never once had the pipe out of her hand, but plays that service upon it almost day and night." The postillion delivered this with so much discretion and natural eloquence, that I could not help deciphering some. thing in his face above his condition, and should have sifted out his history, had not poor Maria taken such full possession of me. We had got up by this time almost to the bank where Maria was sitting; she was in a thin white jacket, with her hair, all but two tresses, drawn up into a silk net, with a few olive leaves twisted a little fantastically on one side; she was beautiful; and if ever felt the full force of an honest heartache, it was the moment I saw her. "God help her! Poor damsel! above an hundred masses" (said the postillion) "have been said in the several parish churches and convents around for her, but without effect; we have still hopes, as she is sensible for short intervals, that the Virgin at last will restore her to herself; but her parents, who know her best, are hopeless upon that score, and think her senses are lost forever." As the postillion spoke this, 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 her goat before I relapsed from my enthusiasm. Maria look'd wist fully for some time at me, and then at her VOL. XIV. 706 LIVING AGE. goat-and then at me,-and then at her goat again, and so on alternately. Could any impression be more charmingly and delicately rendered? This half-witted, pensive girl, "the air again the same notes-yet ten times sweeter," the chirruping postilion, the man of sensibility in his remise we feel them all and their atmosphere with complete suddenness. What a subject for a painter, yet what artist could Some will tell us rival the author? that Sterne founded himself on his favorite Cervantes and Rabelais; but the flavor that makes his best defies alike pedigree and analysis. It is the gossamer impressionism which he christened "Shandean." Then, again, how exquisitely etched is the death-bed of the elder Le Fevre! There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby,-not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it,-which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this, there was something in his looks and voice and manner superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him. The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart,rallied back; the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he looked up wistfully in my Uncle Toby's face; then cast a look upon his boy; and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken. Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered,-stopp'd,-went on,— throbb'd, stopp'd again, moved, stopp'd.-Shall I go on?—No. How opposite this to the descriptive method! We not only hear the gradually fainter ticking of the heart, but we share the suspense and sorrow. How fine, that phrase of beckoning to the unfortunate "to come and take shelter under him!" The lights and shadows are all there without our knowing why; we are sympathizers as well as spectators by magic-by the magic of the style. And it is not merely in show specimens that the spell is exercised. With what honest unaffectedness is the character of Uncle Toby revealed! Sterne was not always a self-conscious juggler, as the following passage with its inimitable "little circle of thy pleasures" demonstrates. There is no titillation of the heartstrings here. Here-but why here, rather than in any other part of my story? I am not able to tell; but here it is-my heart stops me to pay to thee, my dear Uncle Toby, once for all, the tribute I owe thy goodness. Here let me thrust my chair aside, and kneel down upon the ground, whilst I am pouring forth the warmest sentiment of love for thee, and veneration for the excellence of thy character, that ever virtue and nature kindled in a nephew's bosom. Peace and comfort rest forevermore upon thy head! Thou enviedst no man's comforts, insultedst no man's opinions,-thou blackenedst no man's character,-devouredst no man's bread! Gently, with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou ramble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way; for each one's sorrows thou hadst a tear; for each man's need thou hadst a shilling. Whilst I am worth one to pay a weeder, -thy path from thy door to thy bowling green shall never be grown up. Whilst there is a rood and a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear It is a very window to the soul. So is The young girl made me more a humble courtesy than a low one; 'twas one of those quiet, thankful sinkings where the spirit bows itself down-the body does no more than tell it. I never gave a girl a crown in my life which gave me half the pleasure. And its pendant, "the mortality of "Are we not here now?" continued the corporal; "and are we not" (dropping his hat plump on the ground, and pausing before he pronounced the word) "gone! in a moment?" The descent of the hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it. Nothing could have expressed the sentiment of mortality, of which it was the type and forerunner, like it; it fell dead; the corporal's eye fixed upon it as upon a corpse; and Susannah burst into a flood of tears. Many other illustrations occur to one: but for such as question Sterne's persistence in the world of style, let the reminder serve that, among more than one of the phrases supposed by the modern to be peculiar to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, “But that is another story," is derived from Sterne. This power. "He saw kings, and courts, and was his silks, of all colors in such strange lights," to repeat another sentence of his own; and not only kings and courts, but waifs and strays of the clattering highroad, and the whole coterie of amiable eccentrics whose cream he loved to skim. This, we repeat, was his power. With the weakness ineradicable from his character and life, with his foibles and fickleness, we are not here concerned. It is enough for us to have maintained his right in succession to a throne among the true impressionists of our literature. In John Keats we come to the greatest impressionist we have ever had, or it seems to us, are ever likely to have; for his whole essence, the entire scope of his aspiring genius, is impressionist of the first order. It was not only that he, like Donne in far inferior degree, sought to distil his own emotions into music rather than to record; still less was he cramped by the sentimental staginess of Sterne; but before all things he was the impressionist of nature, tremulous to every mood of awe. homage, or companionship world around can strike into the heart of man. Keats's mastery of the visual and visible does not, however, like Wordsworth's, spring from the observ that the ant eye of imagination, or, like Shelley's, from a heart imbued with the Budded, and swell'd, and, full blown, shed full showers ethereal, but rather from the senses, if Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sound we may so express it. It is sensuous, emotional, impressionist. The voice of such lines as very Zephyr penitent, Who now, ere Phoebus mounts the firmament, divine. It is this enchantment, this "gladness in the air," that endeared Keats to the English Pre-Raphaelites, who were the first to give him popular honor in his own country; this, that would doubt Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain; less have enshrined him in music, had not his too early death robbed song of one of her sweetest singers. Who can Were I in such a place, I, sure, should hear without an half-earthly, half pray heavenly entrancement that most That nought less sweet might call my lovely canzonet which the boyish thoughts away, Than the soft rustle of a maiden's gown Fanning away the dandelion's down; Than the light music of her nimble toes Patting against the sorrel as she goes; painter-musician simply denominated stanzas, and which breathes, SO to speak, the very essence itself of his hectic aspiration to withhold the talons of time from beauty!— In a drear-nighted December, The north cannot undo them, In a drear-nighted December, But with a sweet forgetting, SO About the frozen time. And who ever penned a sonnet quickened with the soul of lyric ecstasy as the exquisite To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven-to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament. Who is more happy, when, with heart's content, Fatigued he sinks into some, pleasant lair served the blow!" buttons! "It would But I shall be buried first before I get to my chapter on never have happened" (quoth my Uncle Toby, drawing himself up ever so little) "had it not been that the uniform was soiled." "By what?" ask'd my father, laying down his pipe, as who should say: something must have wetted it. "A pint of Tarragona, I'll wager by all that's "It must skinful," guffaw'd Dr. Slop. have been the rain," said my mother. "And, faith, 'twas a rain," sighed Trim. "An it please your honor, tell them the story of the gipsy's tears." "Tell it thyself, Trim," resumed my Uncle, "for thou wast the cause of it." "He fisticuffed him?" surmised my father; "gipsies are vagabonds, and doubtless the rascal de66 "Twas a wench," continued my uncle, "whom Trim there saved from drowning." "The uniform?" interrupted the doctor. The honest fellow hung down his head, and blushed at the recollection; he never did a kind action, but I'll swear he blushed at the telling on't; then, clearing his voice, he began "I'm cursed if I let him tell it now. Surely, Some day perhaps, but now! madam, a button is worth more than a tear to you. After all, I protest, what is a tear? A slight moisture from the swelling of the lachrymal gland, nothing more; and yet the round world may be mirrored in that drop! Hath not the too-learned Fandangus in his ponderous "De Ampullis Romanorum" indited a folio fit to fell an ox with on the angelic spell of tearbottles? Did not Gregorio, Archbishop of Treves, prove to a demonstration that the dew falls straight from the orb of Gabriel? One pang for human folly, and it startsa limpid, seraphic grief. It glints-it glides-a drip, drip, drip of crystal gently nearing our duller sphere. Heavenly large at birth, the bubble shrinks by transitsmaller, still smaller-till at length 'tis winnowed into tiny sparkles and drank up by the thirsty fields." "And I hung them out to dry!" sobbed Lavinia. Thus, perchance, Sterne after his man ner. But Keats dazes and sometimes rev in clogs us by the surfeit of his sensuous classical And If an harmonious background for the phantasmagoria of his gorgeous discovered, impressionism was to be surely it was forthcoming here. with what extraordinary genius did this Neo-classic evoke it from the bare limbo of a stale dictionary! In trying to revive the spirit of Athens he became a modern of the moderns, an Elizabethan -a Victorian! |