Free The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins

as there was no school of
Alice in Wonderland
—ever grew up.
Tristram Shandy
was a work which, once done perfectly and by one man, needed never to be done again. And though we may deplore its morals with Hazlitt, its “stupid disgustingness ” with Coleridge, its “bawdry and pertness ” with Goldsmith, and even its very oddity with Dr. Johnson, there are qualities that, sooner or later, persuade us that of its solitary kind it is perfect. And the greatest of these is charity.
    For what did grow up as a result of
Tristram Shandy
was the novel of sentiment—a term that soon grew to mean so much that it came to mean nothing at all.
    Sterne’s family crest was a starling: a singularly applicable bird. Sterne’s great-grandfather was an Archbishop: a poorer choice of Fate’s. And Sterne in his major writings—his minor works, excellent sermons, served their purpose in York Minster in their own day—lived up to his arms rather than to his ancestor.
    Tristram Shandy
stands out, a lonely and lavish monument to the idleness of the eighteenth century parson. It was composed, starling-wise, of bits that Sterne had caught from Rabelais and Cervantes and Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
and Locke’s
Essay concerning Human Understanding
, and Bacon and Montaigne and any number of military treatises that supplied the gabions and bastions and sally-ports of Captain Shandy’s conversation.
    Indeed, had Sterne not been hailed for a genius he might have been hanged for a thief. His book is a madly unalphabetical and deliberately disarranged catalogue of the respectable learned works in the Library of York Minster, cemented with genius to an equally illogical and jumbled catalogue of the disreputable and amusing works in the library of Skelton Castle; the original of Crazy Castle, where the
fin du dixhuitième siècle
“
Demoniacks,”
originators of the popular Hell Fire Movement, once held their Young Men’s Assemblies.
    As for anyone’s hanging himself who read Richardson for the plot, so anyone should be straightway confined who attempted a second time to read Sterne for that purpose. His mind is so exorbitantly loaded with information and imagination that the slightest push administered by a new idea destroys the equilibrium of narrative. And it is so inquisitive a mind, so everlastingly subject to new attractions, that even stray words sweep him continually away in an instant into a new corner of his mental universe, to revolve for a space a rejoicing, glittering satellite to one of his own thoughts.
    If a reason, other than the simple and sublime fact of his being Laurence Sterne, can be found for this vagary, it is that during his early life he had amassed so great a store of something like learning, yet had so little opportunity inthe Yorkshire parishes of Sutton-in-the-Forest and Stillington of trying it on anyone. It would be as wrong to imagine that Sterne ever allows himself to be accidentally diverted in his thoughts as it would be to imagine that a man who knows the tricks of Hampton Court maze is at fault for not marching straight ahead as inflexibly as a Roman. The only difference is that Sterne is like a man who walks in the shapes of a maze even though the walls of the maze are not there. And it is necessary only to remember the strange disorder in which Life, with its angles and malformations, is laid before us to see that Sterne’s method is at least as true to the passage of life as the unbending roadway, mapped out with the ruler of Time, that the ordinary narrative novelist follows.
    The popularity of
Tristram Shandy
has been fluctuating but, on the whole, declining since the first enthusiasm, when it appeared in 1760. Even in its own day, however, Walpole referred to its “very tedious performances ” and remarked that, “It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours.”