where Uncle Toby got the wound in his groin has nothing to do with the topogra-
phy of Marlborough’s campaigns. Much earlier, Toby takes to the window a fly he
has caught: ‘go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke to let
it escape; go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? This world surely is
wide enough to hold both thee and me.’ Tristram avers that he often thinks that he
owes ‘one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.’
Poor Tristram had, at the age of 4, suffered another accidental impression, being
half emasculated by the sudden descent of a sash-window. The associations of ideas
in this book are irrational: life outruns all opinions in books. This one ends, with
Tristram still a boy, on an inconsequential anecdote about the infertility of Shandy’s
bull: ‘L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—A COCK and a BULL, said
Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard. THE END.’
Sterne, a country clergyman, gives a portrait of himself in Parson Yorick. ‘Like all
the best shaggy-dog stories’, says the critic Christopher Ricks ofTristram Shandy, ‘it
is somewhat bawdy, preposterously comic, brazenly exasperating, and very shrewd
in its understanding of human responses.’ The shaggy-dog story and cock-and-bull
story are cousins of the ‘Irish bull’, as Ricks reminds us. The Irish Sterne took pleas-
ure in defeating English common sense. What is the point of all this pointlessness?
As the men talk for nine volumes, Tristram’s poor mother says hardly a word. Yet her
last question is connected to her first. All this story is (or pretends to be) about
masculine decline. It is also a potent demonstration of the impotence of human
language and reason. ‘Nothing odd will do long’, said Johnson: ‘Tristram Shandydid
not last.’ But this learnedly perverse joke has appealed, chiefly to men. In this it is not
unlike the post-realist work of James Joyce, himself something of a Smelfungus.
nThe emergence of Sensibility
Ster ne’s last work,A Sentimental Journey, ends:
So that when I reached forth my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s
END OF VOL II.Improper and experimental, this is sentimental only in that it is an old man’s fancy
- which stops itself. But comic pathos is one of Sterne’s specialities – as in Uncle
Toby’s release of the fly.
The generation that followed Pope was readier to show Sensibility. Pope had
censured unfeeling superiority, ‘the arched eyebrow and Parnassian sneer’, and wrote
of his own father that he knew ‘No language, but the language of the heart.’ Of his
own career, he claimed that ‘Not in Fancy’s maze I wandered long / But stooped to
Truth, and moralized my song.’ He moved from pastoral to larger themes, claiming
that he had put wit to responsible public uses, unlike the wits of the Restoration. A
move towards public acceptance and access was general: comedy after Congreve is
less complex, more sentimental. The prose of Swift and Defoe is plain. Watts’s hymns
are clear and sincere. Although Pope did not lack moral philosophy or feeling, his
finesse seems more minute than the broader taste of Hanoverian England.
Sensibility is in part a middle-class modification of upper-class cool. Although
Fielding scorned Methodist enthusiasm, his wit is driven by a strong conviction of
the need for truth-telling, mercy and charity. In his Etonianway, he is as evangelical
as Richardson in his support for oppressed virtue, though he would not call it that.
THE EMERGENCE OF SENSIBILITY 205Eton An English public
school (a type of boarding
school) for the sons of the
upper classes.