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;[1] 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.
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