ly some fifty per
cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even
upon _their_ brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay.
A single poem, a solitary drama--nay, perhaps one isolated figure,
poetic or dramatic--avails, and but barely avails, to keep the
immortal from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no
disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue
of his creative power as of one great individual creation. His
imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt,
considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough
sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous;
but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for
one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed upon it;
and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Captain Tobias Shandy
which has graven itself indelibly on the memory of mankind. To have
made this single addition to the imperishable types of human character
embodied in the world's literature may seem, as has been said, but
a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the
achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one
creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with
imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall
find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single
hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good
nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution,
or Iago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred; and he contrives to
preserve all the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of
intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, moreover, considered
as an individual character in a specific story, is in complete,
accord. If any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic
power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has commonly
fared with those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to
personify a virtue in a man. Take the work of another famous English
humourist and sentimentalist, and compare Uncle Toby's manly and
dignified gentleness of heart with the unreal "gush" of the Brothers
Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not
believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter. But
Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though
we smile at his naivete, and may eve