Shall I go on? No."
Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it seems to spoil a
touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery.
The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the
sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself--the acute sensibilities
which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has
been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his
pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is
surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above
all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play upon them
unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in
us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is
uppermost--when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating
his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning
fails him altogether. He is at his best in pathos when he is most
the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good
unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour. In this, of
course, there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a
man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest
sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together
lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man's
mysterious life.
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