which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has
been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his
pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is
surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above
all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play upon them
unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in
us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is
uppermost--when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating
his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning
fails him altogether. He is at his best in pathos when he is most
the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good
unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour. In this, of
course, there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a
man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest
sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together
lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man's
mysterious life.

CHAPTER XI.

CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is
his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they
sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he
owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last
hyperbolic honour--hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of
a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough
forward through time--that the comparative ease with which it is to be
earned has itself come to be exaggerated. There are so many "deathless
ones" about--if I may put the matter familiarly--in conversation and
in literature, that we get into the way of thinking that they are
really a considerable body in actual fact, and that the works which
have triumphed over death are far more numerous still. The real truth,
however, is, that not only are "those who reach posterity a very
select company indeed," but most of them have come much nearer missing
their destiny than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or score of
writers in one century whom their own contemporaries fondly decree
immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of
the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a
very much smaller proportion as a rule survive. On