ess, with its accompanying and inevitable want of
self-criticism, imposed upon that genius. Diderot, though he did not
rhapsodise about Sterne as he rhapsodised about Richardson, was, like
most of his countrymen then, a great admirer of "Tristram," and in an
evil hour he took it into his head to Shandyise. The book starts with an
actual adaptation of Sterne,[377] which is more than once repeated; its
scheme--of a master (who is as different as possible from my Uncle Toby,
except that when not in a passion he is rather good-natured, and at
almost all times very easily humbugged) and a man (who is what Trim
never is, both insolent and indecent)--is at least partially the same.
But the most constant and the most unfortunate imitation is of Sterne's
literally eccentric, or rather zigzag and pillar-to-post, fashion of
narration. In the Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of
genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become
so if either book had been finished; for which reason we may be quite
certain that it was not only his death which left both in fragments. In
the hands of his imitators the boredom--simple or in the form of
irritation--has been almost invariable;[378] and with all his great
intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his _bonhomie_, and other
good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it--has, in fact, rushed upon it
and compelled it to come in. It is comparatively of little moment that
the main ostensible theme--the very unedifying account of the loves, or
at least the erotic exercises, of Jacques and his master--is
deliberately, tediously, inartistically interrupted and "put off." The
great feature of the book, which has redeemed it with some who would
otherwise condemn it entirely, the Arcis and La Pommeraye episode (_v.
inf._), is handled after a fashion which suggests Mr. Ruskin's famous
denunciation in another art. The _ink_pot is "flung in the face of the
public" by a purely farcical series of interruptions, occasioned by the
affairs of the inn-landlady, who tells the story, by her servants, dog,
customers, and Heaven only knows what else; while the minor incidents
and accidents of the book are treated in the same way, in and out of
proportion to their own importance; the author's "simple plan," though
by no means "good old rule," being that _everything_ shall be
interrupted. Although, in the erotic part, the author never returns
quite to his worst _Bijoux Indiscrets_