What, then, were his notions of true “sentiment” in literature? We have seen elsewhere that he repeats — it would appear unconsciously — and commends the canon which Horace propounds to the tragic poet in the words:
”Si vis me flere, dolendum
Primum ipsi tibi: tunc tua me infortunia laedent.”
And that canon is sound enough, no doubt, in the sense in which it was meant, and in its relation to the person to whom it was addressed. A tragic drama, peopled with heroes who set forth their woes in frigid and unimpassioned verse, will unquestionably leave its audience as cold as itself. Nor is this true of drama alone. All poetry, indeed, whether dramatic or other, presupposes a sympathetic unity of emotion between the poet and those whom he addresses; and to this extent it is obviously true that he must feel before they can. Horace, who was (what every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an observer of human nature, did not, of course, mean that this capacity for feeling was all, or even the chief part, of the poetic faculty. He must have seen many an “intense” young Roman make that pathetic error of the young in all countries and of all periods — the error of mistaking the capacity of emotion for the gift of expression. He did, however, undoubtedly mean that a poet’s power of affecting others presupposes passion in himself; and, as regards the poet, he was right. But his criticism takes no account whatever of one form of appeal to the emotions which has been brought by later art to a high pitch of perfection, but with which the personal feeling of the artist has not much more to do than the “passions” of an auctioneer’s clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself, Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either the men or the method if he could have come across them. Had he done so, however, he would have been astonished to find his canon reversed, and to have perceived that the primary condition of the realist’s success, and the distinctive note of those writers who have pressed genius into the service of realism, is that they do not share — that they are unalterably and ostentatiously free from — the emotions to which they appeal in their readers. A fortunate accident has enabled us to compare the treatment which the world’s greatest tragic poet and its greatest master of realistic tragedy have respectively applied to virtually the same subject; and the two methods are never likely to be again so impressively contrasted as in King Lear and Le Père Goriot. But, in truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels Balzac’s power not to feel also how it is heightened by Balzac’s absolute calm — a calm entirely different from that stern composure which was merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart with the old Greek tragedians — a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of the hand that moves them.
Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew nothing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries. Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it is a form lower than the poetic — essentially a prosaic, and in many or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason, that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of art than any other. As to the question who are its practitioners, it would, of course, be the merest dogmatism to commit one’s self to any attempt at rigid classification in such a matter. There are few if any writers who can be described without qualification either as realists or as idealists. Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one moment and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in other moods. All that need be insisted on is that the methods of the two forms of art are essentially distinct, and that artistic failure must result from any attempt to combine them; for, whereas the primary condition of success in the one case is that the reader should feel the sympathetic presence of the writer, the primary condition of success in the other is that the writer should efface himself from the reader’s consciousness altogether. And it is, I think, the defiance of these conditions which explains why so much of Sterne’s deliberately pathetic writing is, from the artistic point of view, a failure. It is this which makes one feel so much of it to be strained and unnatural, and which brings it to pass that some of his most ambitious efforts leave the reader indifferent, or even now and then contemptuous. In those passages of pathos in which the effect is distinctly sought by realistic means Sterne is perpetually ignoring the “self-denying ordinance” of his adopted method — perpetually obtruding his own individuality, and begging us, as it were, to turn from the picture to the artist, to cease gazing for a moment at his touching creation, and to admire the fine feeling, the exquisitely sympathetic nature of the man who created it. No doubt, as we must in fairness remember, it was part of his “humour” — in Ancient Pistol’s sense of the word — to do this; it is true, no doubt (and a truth which Sterne’s most famous critic was too prone to ignore), that his sentiment is not always meant for serious; nay, the very word “sentimental” itself, though in Sterne’s day, of course, it had acquired but a part of its present disparaging significance, is a sufficient proof of that. But there are, nevertheless, plenty of passages, both in Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, where the intention is wholly and unmixedly pathetic — where the smile is not for a moment meant to compete with the tear — which are, nevertheless, it must be owned, complete failures, and failures traceable with much certainty, or so it seems to me, to the artistic error above-mentioned.
[Footnote 1: Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage about the desobligeante, which had been “standing so many months unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessien’s coach-yard. Much, indeed, was not to be said for it, but something might; and, when a few words will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them.” “Does anybody,” asks Thackeray in a strangely matter-of-fact fashion, “believe that this is a real sentiment? That this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery — out of an old cab — is genuine feeling?” Nobody, we should say. But, on the other hand, does anybody — or did anybody before Thackeray — suggest that it was meant to pass for genuine feeling? Is it not an obvious piece of mock pathetic?]
In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be described as other than ludicrous. The figure of the distraught Maria of Moulines is tenderly drawn; the accessories of the picture — her goat, her dog, her pipe, her song to the Virgin — though a little theatrical, perhaps, are skilfully touched in; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene prospers well enough. But, after having bidden us duly note how “the tears trickled down her cheeks,” the Traveller continues: “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own — and then in hers — and then in mine — and then I wiped hers again; and as I did it I felt such undescribable emotions within me as, I am sure, could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.” The reader of this may well ask himself in wonderment whether he is really expected to make a third in the lachrymose group. We look at the passage again, and more carefully, to see if, after all, we may not be intended to laugh, and not to cry at it; but on finding, as clearly appears, that we actually are intended to cry at it the temptation to laugh becomes almost irresistible. We proceed, however, to the account of Maria’s wanderings to Rome and back, and we come to the pretty passage which follows:
“How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could not tell; but God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb. Shorn indeed! and to the quick, said I; and wast thou in my own land
, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee; thou shouldst eat of my own bread and drink of my own cup; I would be kind to thy Sylvio; in all thy weaknesses and wanderings I would seek after thee, and bring thee back. When the sun went down I would say my prayers; and when I had done thou shouldst play thy evening-song upon thy pipe; nor would the incense of my sacrifice be worse accepted for entering heaven along with that of a broken heart.”
But then follows more whimpering:
“Nature melted within me [continues Sterne] as I said this; and Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped too much already to be of use, would needs go wash it in the stream. And where will you dry it, Maria? said I. I’ll dry it in my bosom, said she; ‘twill do me good. And is your heart still so warm, Maria? said I. I touched upon the string on which hung all her sorrows. She looked with wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying anything, took her pipe and played her service to the Virgin.”
Which are we meant to look at — the sorrows of Maria? or the sensibilities of the Sentimental Traveller? or the condition of the pocket-handkerchief? I think it doubtful whether any writer of the first rank has ever perpetrated so disastrous a literary failure as this scene; but the main cause of that failure appears to me not doubtful at all. The artist has no business within the frame of the picture, and his intrusion into it has spoilt it. The method adopted from the commencement is ostentatiously objective: we are taken straight into Maria’s presence, and bidden to look at and to pity the unhappy maiden as described by the Traveller who met her. No attempt is made to place us at the outset in sympathy with him; he, until he thrusts himself before us, with his streaming eyes, and his drenched pocket-handkerchief, is a mere reporter of the scene before him, and he and his tears are as much out of place as if he were the compositor who set up the type. It is not merely that we don’t want to know how the scene affected him, and that we resent as an impertinence the elaborate account of his tender emotions; we don’t wish to be reminded of his presence at all. For, as we can know nothing (effectively) of Maria’s sorrows except as given in her appearance — the historical recital of them and their cause being too curt and bald to be able to move us — the best chance for moving our compassion for her is to make the illusion of her presence as dramatically real as possible; a chance which is, therefore, completely destroyed when the author of the illusion insists on thrusting himself between ourselves and the scene.
But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines was, like more than one of Sterne’s efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of its birth. These abortive efforts are no natural growth of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from certain morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which he forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command; but it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without. It came when he was in the dramatic and not in the introspective mood; when he was thinking honestly of his characters, and not of himself. But he was, unfortunately, too prone — and a long course of moral self-indulgence had confirmed him in it — to the habit of caressing his own sensibilities; and the result of this was always to set him upon one of those attempts to be pathetic of malice prepense of which Maria of Moulines is one example, and the too celebrated dead donkey of Nampont another. “It is agreeably and skilfully done, that dead jackass,” writes Thackeray; “like M. de Soubise’s cook on the campaign, Sterne dresses it, and serves it up quite tender, and with a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine feelings, and a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and horses and feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with a dead donkey inside! Psha! Mountebank! I’ll not give thee one penny-piece for that trick, donkey and all.” That is vigorous ridicule, and not wholly undeserved; but, on the other hand, not entirely deserved. There is less of artistic trick, it seems to me, and more of natural foible, about Sterne’s literary sentiment than Thackeray was ever willing to believe; and I can find nothing worse, though nothing better, in the dead ass of Nampont than in Maria of Moulines. I do not think there is any conscious simulation of feeling in this Nampont scene; it is that the feeling itself is overstrained — that Sterne, hugging, as usual, his own sensibilities, mistook their value in expression for the purposes of art. The Sentimental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the same extent as in the scene at Moulines; but a little consideration of the scene will show how much Sterne relied on the mere presentment of the fact that here was an unfortunate peasant who had lost his dumb companion, and here a tender-hearted gentleman looking on and pitying him. As for any attempts to bring out, by objective dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the bereavement or the grief of the mourner, such attempts as are made to do this are either commonplace or “one step in advance” of the sublime. Take this, for instance: “The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door, with his ass’s pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took up from time to time, then laid them down, looked at them, and shook his head. He then took the crust of bread out of his wallet again, as if to eat it; held it some time in his hand, then laid it upon the bit of his ass’s bridle — looked wistfully at the little arrangement he had made — and then gave a sigh. The simplicity of his grief drew numbers about him,” &c. Simplicity, indeed, of a marvellous sort which could show itself by so extraordinary a piece of acting as this! Is there any critic who candidly thinks it natural — I do not mean in the sense of mere every-day probability, but of conformity to the laws of human character? Is it true that in any country, among any people, however emotional, grief — real, unaffected, un-selfconscious grief — ever did or ever could display itself by such a trick as that of laying a piece of bread on the bit of a dead ass’s bridle? Do we not feel that if we had been on the point of offering comfort or alms to the mourner, and saw him go through this extraordinary piece of pantomime, we should have buttoned up our hearts and pockets forthwith? Sentiment, again, sails very near the wind of the ludicrous in the reply to the Traveller’s remark that the mourner had been a merciful master to the dead ass. “Alas!” the latter says, “I thought so when he was alive, but now that he is dead I think otherwise. I fear the weight of myself and my afflictions have been too much for him.” And the scene ends flatly enough with the scrap of morality: “‘Shame on the world!’ said I to myself. ‘Did we love each other as this poor soul loved his ass, ‘twould be something.’”
The whole incident, in short, is one of those examples of the deliberate-pathetic with which Sterne’s highly natural art had least, and his highly artificial nature most, to do. He is never so unsuccessful as when, after formally announcing, as it were, that he means to be touching, he proceeds to select his subject, to marshal his characters, to group his accessories, and with painful and painfully apparent elaboration to work up his scene to the weeping point. There is no obviousness of suggestion, no spontaneity of treatment about this “Dead Ass” episode; indeed, there is some reason to believe that it was one of those most hopeless of efforts — the attempt at the mechanical repetition of a former triumph. It is by no means improbable, at any rate, that the dead ass of Nampont owes its presence in the Sentimental Journey to the reception met with by the live ass of Lyons in the seventh volume of Tristram Shandy. And yet what an astonishing difference between the two sketches!
“’Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well whether he would go in or no. Now, ’tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike. There is a patient endurance of sufferings wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him that it always disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to him; on the contrary, meet him where I will, in town or country,
in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and, as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance — and where those carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, upon the occasion…. Come, Honesty! said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the gate, art thou for coming in or going out? The ass twisted his head round, to look up the street. Well, replied I, we’ll wait a minute for thy driver. He turned his head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the opposite way. I understand thee perfectly, answered I: if thou takest a wrong step in this affair he will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but a minute, and if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set down as ill spent. He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and, in the little peevish contentions of nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and picked it up again. God help thee, Jack! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on’t, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for its wages— ’tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to others. And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and thou hast not a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a macaroon. In saying this I pulled out a paper of ‘em, which I had just purchased, and gave him one; and, at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act. When the ass had eaten his macaroon I pressed him to come in. The poor beast was heavy loaded, his legs seemed to tremble under him, he hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter it broke short in my hand. He looked up pensive in my face. ‘Don’t thrash me with it; but if you will, you may.’ ‘If I do,’ said I, ‘I’ll be d —— d.’”
Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 156
