I refer of course to Sterne's
perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a matter almost as
impossible to omit from any biography of Sterne as it would be to omit
it from any biography of Goethe. The English humourist did not, it
is true, engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific,
spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by
the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development;
but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering
propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and
work in more ways than one. That his marriage was an ill-assorted and
unhappy union was hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its
effect. It may well be, of course, that the "dear L.," whose moral and
mental graces her lover had celebrated in such superfine, sentimental
fashion, was a commonplace person enough. That she was really a woman
of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her exasperating
feats as an _assentatrix_ did, as has been suggested, supply the model
for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between the philosopher
and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant for believing.
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