I was for some time in doubt whether “Tristram Shandy” ought to be in my list of masterpieces. In one sense it is hardly a work of fiction at all, for a few rather trifling incidents are made the basis of such endless digressions and ruminations that it is in fact not so much a story as a medley of satire, philosophy, and humor. But the ear-marks of Cervantes and Rabelais appear in it very plainly, and perhaps it is as much entitled to a place here as the burlesques of the celebrated Frenchman.
I began “Tristram Shandy” several times, and read the greater part of it on disconnected occasions; yet the poor hero had such a hard time, through so many hundreds of pages, in getting into the world at all, that I always gave up without reading the book to the end. And, to say the truth, nobody ought to read it consecutively. A part of the humor consists in the endless prolixity with which trifling events are narrated, and a joke thus lengthened out into the enormous dimensions of several volumes becomes too huge to handle all at once. Another part of the humor is displayed in the jumble with which the events and observations upon them are thrown together. The preface, for instance (and a very amusingpreface it is), is pitched into the middle of the book. Whole chapters are omitted and their places supplied by stars, and the subsequent chapters (which tell the whole story) are given to explaining why these omissions were made, namely, that the parts left out were too fine for the rest of the story. The author appropriately asks us, after several volumes of this confusion, how our heads feel!
The style, which is generally conversational and highly idiomatic, is sometimes purposely involved, and gives us a picturesque, vague impression, which is often vivid, though upon analysis it represents nothing in particular. Evidently Carlyle, who was a great admirer of Sterne, imitated his manner in places, though he lacked much of the wit and lightness of fancy of the author of “Tristram Shandy.” There are indeed passages in which the style of the two authors is almost indistinguishable.
Naturally, in such a book a good part of the fun has to be dug out with considerable labor; and this is not always the way in which humor is most attractive. To the reader who is anxious for adenouement, “Tristram Shandy” is a most exasperating work, for there is nodenouementat all. You never get anywhere, and the book ends, like the Sentimental Journey, right at the midst of perhaps the most interesting part of it.
It improves a good deal, however, upon a second reading, when you no longer care how anything is going to turn out, and when the choicemorsels are more easily extracted. It contains a great many observations which go well in a commonplace book, containing as they do a humorous epitome of matters of universal knowledge. Sterne has the Shakespearean quality of filching from others and then transforming his plunder into gold by a striking originality of his own. The actual facts described are very few. Tristram’s birth, with all its accessories, his broken nose, his christening, his father’s odd philosophy and scheme of education, so elaborate that the boy’s actual training had to be abandoned while the father was writing his great Tristrapaedia,—these things, together with the history of Uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, and of his faithful servant Corporal Trim, and finally the episode of the Widow Wadman, who laid siege to Uncle Toby’s heart, an episode broken off in the middle at the end of the book, are pretty much all. But the descriptions of character are admirable. The dear, simple-minded, modest Uncle Toby, with his hobby, to wit: his fortifications and his military science,—Uncle Toby, who continually interrupts the emanations of Shandean philosophy by inapposite remarks, will always be a type in literature.
The coarseness of “Tristram Shandy” excludes the book from indiscriminate reading at the present time, but its coarseness, although in places very great, is, on the whole, of a rather innocent character, and the work will keep its place as a classic among the lovers of genuine humor.
It contains occasional passages of singular beauty. Witness the following.
“Time wastes too fast; every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on,—whilst thou art twisting that lock, see! it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”
“Time wastes too fast; every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on,—whilst thou art twisting that lock, see! it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”