Indeed, one might almost say
that in the first half-dozen chapters which so excellently recount
the origin of the corporal's fortification scheme, and the wounded
officer's delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the simple
characters--alike yet so different in their simplicity--of master and
of man becomes definitely fixed in the reader's mind. And the total
difference between the second and the first volume in point of
fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor,
the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from
the humorous essayist, would almost seem to have started into being
as we pass from the one volume to the other. There is nothing in the
drolleries of the first volume--in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy's
crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual collision
between these crotchets and his brother's plain sense--to indicate the
kind of power displayed in that remarkable colloquy _a quatre_, which
begins with the arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim's
recital of the Sermon on Conscience. Wit, humour, irony, quaint
learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of these Sterne had
displayed abundance already; but it is not in the earlier but in the
later half of the first instalment of _Tristram Shandy_ that we first
become conscious that he is something more than the possessor of all
these things; that he is gifted with the genius of creation, and has
sent forth new beings into that world of immortal shadows which to
many of us is more real than our own.
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