The Sentimental Journey was a deliberate composition: that is to say, it was no happy inspiration, no original idea. To write a book of travels was the fashion, and Sterne was not the man to neglect an opportunity merely because others had thought of it first. It does not seem to me necessary to treat Sterne’s contribution to this type of literature as a serious one—any more than we should treat Tristram Shandy as the “life and opinions” of its hero, or as a straightforward work of fiction. It would be little to our purpose to compare the Sentimental Journey with other Travels of the period, in an attempt to show how far Sterne diverged from the normal standard of such works, or how far he was inspired by this, that, or the other particular work. If any particular model was in question, it was Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, which appeared in 1766; but Sterne did not need a model: all he wanted was an excuse, that is to say, an incitement. There was something in Smollett’s phlegmatic matter-of-factness which roused all Sterne’s derisive faculties. But his method was not directly to ridicule Smollett (except for a few moments in the famous Smelfungus passage); but rather to show how nimbly the mind could play above the heavy sediment of a traveller’s observations. To observe and to note down, to be self- consciously solemn and otiosely informative—such had been the method and manner of the fashionable travellers of Sterne’s day. Smollett regarded himself as a “rational enquirer,” and went abroad in a critical spirit. The critical spirit has its uses, and Smollett’s Travels can still be read for their informativeness and for the manly vigour of their style. But a critical spirit has great disadvantages; it prevents the free disposition of sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no true understanding. That is really the burden of Sterne’s work; beneath all its mockery and persiflage there is this earnest doctrine. Sympathy opens the eyes as well as the heart; it is the beginning of knowledge as well as of love and friendship. The Sentimental Journey has done more for the creation of a tolerant European consciousness than all the peace treaties of a century and a half. Separate works have been written on its influence in Germany, France, and Italy.¹ No other English book has so evoked the praise of great men of other nations. The Sentimental Journey is a European book, indeed a universal book; it transcends the language in which it is written and persuades us all to a mutual toleration—and mutual toleration, as the old French officer at the Opera said to Sterne, teaches us mutual love.

Sterne went abroad to observe what we should nowadays call the psychology of nations; that is to say, he was interested above all in the characters he met. He noted the people themselves, “the nakedness of their hearts,” rather than their customs or manners or arts or scenery. It is the primacy of this interest which gives his book its wonderful vitality; each person we meet steps brightly from the page, as if into sunlight before our eyes. Can we discover how it is done? Take the first portrait in the book—that of the poor monk of the Order of St. Francis. There are a number of carefully observed details—“the break in his tonsure, a few scatter’d white hairs upon his temples being all that remained of it”; his eyes which had a fire in them; his wrinkles; features that were mild, pale, penetrating, the look that seemed to be directed towards something beyond this world; the thin, spare form, “something above the common size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forwards in the figure”; his left hand upon his breast (“a slender white staff with which he journey’d being in his right”)—all these details paint the picture. But what brings it to life is the inspired comment with which Sterne, here as always, interlards his description. The eyes “seemed more temper’d by courtesy than years”; “It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted … free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth”; the rest of the outline was “neither elegant or otherwise, but as character and expression made it so”; an attitude of entreaty; an air of deprecation.… On the one hand a visual choice of details; on the other, a delicate perception of ideas.

This devotion to humanity, this absorption with character, is, of course, the faculty with which Sterne transformed the art of fiction from the two-dimensional art it had hitherto been, into the three-dimensional art he first made actual. Sterne did for the English novel what Shakespeare did for the English drama: he gave it depth—not inner profundity so much as physical massiveness. We can walk round Sir John Falstaff and Uncle Toby. Hamlet and Lear, Corporal Trim and Mr. Shandy, live on long after the curtain is lowered or the page closed.

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