of stops, the
black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw
from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is
one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the
artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may
also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would
have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and
halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free
from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight"
you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of
light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.

But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in
our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already
pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable
instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric,
particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the
brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;
their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a
kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,
perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and
ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.

For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent
confession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a
sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed
the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely
show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:
he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his
_fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not
tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know
that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know
still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the
"Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few
equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents
later. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of
Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those
of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outsid