There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his
character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him
more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his
purposes as a sentimentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he
deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is
the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and
the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence
of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon
affectation. It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in
illustration of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized
(as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly,
caught and put out of the window with the words "Get thee gone, poor
devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for
thee and me." There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in
the apostrophe. This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of
Sterne's objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying
sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium
of his own hypertrophied sensibilities.
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