Fielding's notion of the comic epic in prose had infused new blood into the picaresque tradition in England, but Smollett did not follow Fielding in this and, except for his last novel, was content to follow the traditional picaresque mode and bring his hero's adventures to an end when he had carried through as many adventures as his own experience and invention enabled him to produce. But for both writers, as indeed for all writers of stories hitherto, the narrative line was important and events ordered in chronological order provided the external framework and the formal structure of the work.
Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was an altogether more original figure. His Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, revealed a wholly new concept of form in fiction as well as a kind of sentimental comedy equally removed from Fielding's comic epic and the didactic humors of Humphrey Clinker. Told in the first person by a narrator whose personality and train of association determine the tone and organization of the narrative (and who is not born until near the end of the third volume), Tristram Shandy is on the surface a rambling and eccentric patchwork of anecdotes, digressions, reflections, jests, parodies, and dialogues centering on the character and opinions of the narrator's father, Walter Shandy, and those of his brother, the narrator's Uncle Toby, with other characters and caricatures introduced to provide humorous or sentimental incidents. The punctuation consists largely of dashes, and the book is interlarded with asterisks, blanks, and a variety of typographical and other eccentricities including pages that are solid black, entirely blank, or marbled. The chapters vary in length from several pages to a single short sentence. The author's own views are conveyed partly in his own person and partly in the person of Yorick, a sentimental and jesting person. There are passages of extreme sentimentality, in Sterne's own sense of that term: for Sterne, to be sentimenal was to be self-consciously responsive to the slightest emotional stimulus, to relish every sensation and feeling. This self-conscious responsiveness was both comic and moral. It made its possessor both sympathetic with the feelings of others and so helped to make him charitable and affectionate and at the same time led to awareness of the ludicrous and promoted genial laughter at the idiosyncrasies and private fantasies of individuals. Sterne's treatment of idiosyncrasy is more than humorous in the Jonsonian sense. He had learned from John Locke, his favourite philosopher, that the consciousness of every individual is conditioned by his private train of association; thus every an in a sense lives in a world of his own, with his own "hobby horse" (as Sterne called a private obsession) in the light of which he interprets (or misinterprets) the actions and conversations which other people's hobby horses have led them to engage in. Every man is the prisoner of his private inner world, which in turn is the product of his own "association of ideas which have no connection in nature." It is only by a conscious exertion of fellow-feeling that one man can make contact with another. Walter Shandy's main obsession (he has several) is his theory of names, and Uncle Toby's is the theory and practice of fortification and siege warfare; when Walter harangues Toby about his pet theory Toby misinterprets him and imagines he is talking about the theory of fortification, and in the same way Walter misunderstands Toby. Only the rush of affection can bridge the gulf that lies between individual consciousnesses. One might almost say that for Sterne one must be sentimental to escape from the prison of the private self.
The superficial evidence of chaos in the style and organization of Tristram Shandy is wholly misleading. Sterne knew what he was doin in his multiple digressions and inset anecdotes and tales. He deliberately eschews chronological order, partly because he knows that the past exists in present consciousness and colors and conditions it (we are our memories) and partly because he realizes that time as marked off by experiencing man is not the same as time as ticked off by the clock—a short clock-time can seem, and be, much longer in experience than a much longer clock-time. He has the chronology of his story firmly fixed in his mind; he is writing long after the events he is presenting took place, when some of the main characters are dead, so that he can occasionally leap forward to the present and see his story as history and at times stay with the moment whose events he is describing. A firm skeleton of dates lies underneathe the author's jumping about in time. Uncle Toby's death is described in volume six, but he is alive at the end of volume nine, as is Yorick, who has the last word in the novel, yet who at several earlier points in the book is looked back on as long dead. The author's whimsical, sentimental personality—at once moralist and clown, alternately tender and prurient—controls the whole story, and the digressions not only determine the comic and moral scope of the novel but also, because they are promised, produced, looked back on, in different parts of the book, help to keep the tone personal and even intimate. The suggestiveness, the appeals to the reader (often done very slyly, assuming that the reader is a woman at some moments and at others addressing him as a man), the asterisks and blanks for the reader to interpret and fill up as he wishes, also help to implicate the reader in the novel. The reader is made a conspirator with the writer in producing the work.
The society in provincial England created by Sterne in Tristram Shandy consists largely of the inhabitants of Shandy Hall and certain neighbors; it is, however, sufficiently lively, varied, and representative to stand as a microcosm of human society as a whole. Sterne vents some private dislikes and prejudices throughout the novel, notably in the ludicrous character of Dr. Slop, the man-midwife, but there is nothieng of Smollett's violent malice in these attacks. Everything is subdued to the comis-sentimental-moral picture of individuals in their oddities, obsessions, and fundamental loneliness teasing, misunderstanding, ignoring, amusing, or loving each other. There is also throughout the book a pervasive sense of human inadequacy. Walter Shandy begets the hero with a certain amount of difficulty: he is already a middle-aged man who is worried by thoughts of importance. His plans for his child (based on his own obsessive theories about names, about the importance of long noses, and other eccentric ideas) go ludicrously astray. He is never understood and rarely understands any one else. His wife goes quietly about her business without ever responding to his frequent pedantic arguments, for she never knows what he is talking about. Yorick, the jesting sentimentalist, is misunderstood and ill used. Only Uncle Toby and his man Trim, simpletons both, enjoy (for the most part) living in their private world: their gentle emotional natures cannot understand evil and deceit, and they alone in the book never realize that they are prisoners of their private consciousnesses.
Tristram Shandy is packed with humorous pedantry and mock-pedantry. Nothing more readily illustrates the idiosyncrasies o the human mind than the obsessive love of scholars for their own theories. Walter Shandy is himself an eccentric pedant, and in his conversation Sterne can both parody the solemn disputations of scholars and create his favorite kind of comic moral dilemma. Sterne learned from Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift, and numerous obscure minor works of learning he found in the extraordinary library of his friend John Hall-Stevenson, and he puts his remarkable fragments of erudition together with all sorts of extravagant, fantastic, and sometimes simply nonsensical elements to achieve a chorus of parodied pedantry which sometimes swells out into a full-scale mock-treatise and at other times recedes to a muttering reference or two. Throughout the book he treats sex as both ridiculous and a little sad. He has been often attacked for his prurience and for his mingling of sentimental idealism with low sexual innuendo. But the combination belongs to the essence of his art and his attitude. Man is absurd, and nothing about him is more absurd than his sexual behavior. The novel opens with Mrs Shandy inquirring of her husband, at the very moment when Tristram is about to be procreated, whether he had remembered to wind the clock the first Sunday night of the month "and being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age, at the time I have been speaking of,—he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month." The two activities are thus associated in Mrs. Shandy's mind, even though as it happened this particular occasion, her husband having been away from home, was during the second week of the month. But the association had been set up, hence the question asked at such an unseasonable moment. Now this serves to make sex ludicrous, but not at all (as with Swift) disgusting. Dirty jokes are thus jokes at the expense of human absurdity. They are never obscene in the proper sense of the term, nor are they cruel. They are part of the comic sadness of the human situation.
The sentimentality sometimes rises to heights which offend the modern reade: anecdotes and inset stories of people of the most tender sensibilities weeping in each other's arms are not as popular now as they once were. But thie element in Tristram Shandy (generally associated with aUncle Toby and Trim) is bound up both with its comic and its moral elements. Uncle Toby gently releasing a fly out of the window because he does not want to hurt the creature illustrates the comic simplicity of his character and at the same time presents the moral that kindness both to his fellow men and to other creatures is man's only way of escaping from the prison of self to become a member of God's creation. That Uncle Toby is a retired soldier who spends all his time building models of fortifications and conducting mock sieges makes his tenderheartedness comic in a special way: Uncle Toby would never have though of applying his pacific principles to a consideration of war, because war as a theoretical art was his private obsession. The paradox helps to illustrate the nature of all human obsession; but it does not make Uncle Toby a hypocrite: his eloquent speech in defense of the military profession is wholly sincere—it omits, however, most of the really relevant considerations.
"Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation." This is one of many remarks which Sterne makes to the reader about his method of writing in the course of the novel. The tone of informal conversation or anecdote is sustained throughout the book. The author's personality pervades all, and the multifarious elements which make up this fantastic novel combine into a unity as a result. Sterne thus contrived to create a quite new kind of novelistic form, and gave the novel a kind of freedom it had never previously enjoyed and which novelists were not to take advantage of again until the twentieth century. He is in many ways—in his attitude to time, to the individual consciousness, his use of shifts in perspective—the most modern of eighteenth-century novelists. But the lesson he learned from Locke about human loneliness and the relativity of time was not what other men of his century learned from that philosopher. For other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists, reality remained public and socially recognizable. It was left for twentieth-century novelists, learning from their own philosophers and psychologists lessons similar to that which Sterne had learned from Locke, to develop the novel further along the lines that Sterne had indicated.
In A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) Sterne tried to placate those who complained of his mixing bawdiness with moral feeling in Tristram Shandy. Here he is essentially the man of feeling in Tristram Shandy. Here he is essentially the man of feeling, writing a quite new kind of travel book in which he describes not famous buildings and picturesque scenes but intimate glimpses in the character and emotions of people he happens to meet. It has none of the exuberance, variety, and trickery of Tristram Shandy, being both much shorter and in the same key throughout. The humor is still here, but it is mixed mroe gently with the sentimentality, and even when the author is thrown into comic predicaments with relation to a young lady (as in the concluding scene, when he has to share the one available bedroom in an inn with a Piedmontese lady and finds himself in the end accidentally holding hands with the lady's fille de chambre), the sigh of feeling is always heard. The famous account of the poor man lamenting his dead ass is a studied exhibition of the kind of feeling for which the book implicitly pleads and which its whole tenor illustrates. Yet the narrative moves with speed and is full of surprises. The style, proliferating with dashes, is essentially that of Tristram Shandy, and the pauses, turns, interruptions, and sudden developments in the action, while not as elaborate or extravagant as in the earlier novel, still maintain continuous interest and help to establish that intimate relationship between writer and reader that was so important to Sterne. The exhibitionist exploitation of the author's own generosity and charity is more in evidence in A Sentimental Journey than in Tristram Shandy, for now he is determined to vindicate his character. Yet there is humorous self-deprecation as well, which counterbalances the exhibitionism.
"Feeling" in A Sentimental Journey means something more than the expression of one's own emotions and sensibilities. It is essentially Einfühlung [empathy], the ability to feel oneself into someone else's situation and to be moved by the emotions of others—indeed, sometimes to feel others' emotions more strongly than they do themselves. It is morally good because it is bound up with generosity and Christian charity. Smollett, in his Travels through France and Italy (1766) had vividly expressed his own feelings, but they were feelings of exacerbation and anger, altogether different from Sterne's state of mind. Sterne refers to Smollett's travel book in his own:
The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris—from Paris to Rome—and so on—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed was discoloured or distorted—He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings. . . .
I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell. . . .—he had been flea'd alive, and bedevilled, and used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at—
—I'll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to your physician.
Tristram Shandy was followed by many imitations, none of which showed anything like the genius of the original. There were at the same time other manifestations of the cult of feeling in fiction. (...)
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