stram
Shandy_, 1759-1767, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768. _Tristram
Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold together a
number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived
with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province was the
whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are full of
digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings,
mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlyle unite
in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only a
great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne's pathos is
closely interwoven with his humor. He was the foremost of English
sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which
distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's,
for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A
clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings
were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and
affecting. He enjoyed the titillation of his own emotions, and he had
practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the
expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could
summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise,
a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house
fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world
for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he
generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even
from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy
was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little.
Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly
to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the
expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for
him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings both tender and
witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to
the shorn lamb."

A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of
Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels
of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly
Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things
happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters are
true to nature, dra