Free The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins Page A

True, the book is now more perfectly assured of immortality than any cautious critic or publisher would have cared to predict in its own time; even though Garrick—who was the Mr. Baldwin of his day for recommending semi-officially whatever reasonably good book he had last been reading—was tremulously excited by and about it.
    But
Tristram Shandy
has tended more and more to be read with an anticipation of delight, the quality of giving almost as much as we are getting, that we bestow on books that have become acknowledged literary curiosities.
    No one, I believe, who is not more than a little interested in writing has ever been more than a little interested in reading
Tristram Shandy
. Johnson declared that it wouldnot last. And though it is usual to regard this as one of the Doctor’s critical howlers—like his inability to see more than raffishness in Fielding—perhaps Johnson was saying something nearer the truth than is generally realised.
    That is not to say that Johnson did not display a slight pettishness of temper in his attitude towards Sterne. He, as the devout churchman, outside Holy Orders, could hardly be expected to have been proud of the sentimental Epicurean within the Church.
    And when he made the remark, “Anyone who has a name, or who has the power of pleasing, will be very generally invited in London.
The man, Sterne
, I have been told has had engagements for three weeks,” we see the darkening frown of the everlasting Churchwarden over a poor one of the Cloth whose dignity is not so great as his counsel’s. When Goldsmith quite stupidly bleated out, “And a very dull fellow,” and so provoked Johnson’s “Why, no, Sir,” we are not quite certain whether Johnson was paying a tribute to Sterne or merely disagreeing, as he invariably and conscientiously did, with Goldsmith.
    It is a strange thing that
Tristram Shandy
should ever have been a success; only a mixture of Yorkshire persistence and author’s pride got it printed at all. Dodsley, the cleverest publisher of his time, rejected it, despite the author’s charming letter which accompanied the MS., explaining that “the plan, as you will perceive, is a most extensive one—taking in not only the weak points, the sciences, in which the true point of ridicule lies—but everything else, which I find laugh-at-able in any way.”
    On the whole, we can only sympathise with Dodsley. He was on the point of retiring, and experiment is nopart of the business of retirement. He had seen the rise of English prose fiction and he could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic about the rise of an English prose freak.
    For Sterne was not only revolutionary but reactionary. Literature, which had been steadily progressing, now looked like suffering a set-back. A table of laws as unyielding as the original Mosaic ones of stone had been drawn up, and Sterne, like Moses, had broken them.
    It has been wondered often enough, whether or not
Tristram Shandy
was a parody of the prevailing novel. And the answer would seem to be that it was about as much a parody of
Tom Jones
as
Alice in Wonderland
is a parody of
The Cloister and the Hearth
. It was a joke. But it was not a bitter joke. A parodist is usually a man whose wit has developed beyond his compassion—there must, it is true, be compassion there if the parody is to stick—and Sterne’s compassion was always at melting point. There were fragments of parody like the fragments that a caddis collects around it—Dr. Slop, for example, was Dr. Burton, the obstetrician, of York—but parody was not the prime excuse for the book. Turn to the Dedication:
    To the Right Honourable MR. PITT.
    SIR,
    Never poor Wight of a Dedicator has less hopes from his Dedication, than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retired thatched house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities