Free The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins Page B

of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles—but much moreso, when he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life.
    I humbly beg, sir, that you will honour this book, by taking it—(not under your Protection—it must protect itself, but)—into the country with you; where, if I am ever told that it has made you smile; or can conceive that it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain—I shall think myself as happy as a minister of state;—perhaps much happier than anyone (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.
    I am, great sir
,
    (and what is more to your Honour)
    I am, good sir
,
    Your Well-wisher, and
    most humble Fellow-subject
,
    THE AUTHOR.
    Those are not the words of a literary surgeon, whose words cure only by being cutting. There is none of the orgy of chastisement that we find in Fielding’s Prefaces; none of the thick stick laid across fat shoulders. Sterne, indeed, preferred the method of the sugar-stick to the thick stick, and introduced a sob where Fielding would have provoked a yelp.
    Sterne’s love-letters have their own sweet devoted charm and reveal a lot of the man. Unfortunately, they are not all written to the same woman; a defect more distracting to the reader, doubtless, than to the author.
    Admittedly the letters that Sterne wrote to his wife, Lydia, before marriage are at least as delightful as those he wrote to Eliza after his marriage. But there is an all too human falling off in the Lydia correspondence. Thus we find him assuring his
fiancée
that they would “be as merry and innocent as our first parents in Paradise,” and laterwarning her as his wife, “not to forget your luggage in changing postchaises.” It is a melancholy remark: it drains all the dew out of Paradise. But if Mrs. Sterne really was a luggage-losing kind of woman, she was hopeless; and we can excuse Sterne his devotion to Eliza.
    The love-letters, or at least the loving letters, of Sterne are important because in them Sterne for the first recorded time in the language uses the word “sentimental ”; a word that later came to be used very much as the word “psychological ” is used now. By meaning too much, it grew to mean very little. And the only clarity it acquired in the course of years was that it finally meant something appreciably different from its original intention.
    In 1749 Lady Bradshaigh wrote to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, give me leave to ask you (I forgot it before) what, in your opinion is the meaning of the word
sentimental
, so much in vogue among the polite, both in town and country.… I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a
sentimental
man; we were a
sentimental
party; I have been taking a
sentimental
walk.” Had Sterne been asked, however, he might have replied, in less asphyxiating English of course, with a phrase that, as Mr. Priestley has suggested, might be raped from Hollywood, to describe the intention of a sentimental author, namely, “the making of dimples to catch the tears.”
    Part of this trouble in definition is caused by the fact that in its day “sentiment ” merely meant any indulgence of the emotions for their own sake, and to-day it obstinately means any over-indulgence for the reader’s sake. And the real contribution of sentiment to the novel is not that it taught writers what kind of novel to write, so much as that it gave them an excuse for writing at all. It was the first justification of art for art’s sake; agreeably disguised as art for heart’s sake.
    It is remarkable that Sterne, the founder of sentimental fiction, should not have been a true sentimentalist himself. He was above all things an artist; and artists cannot allow those emotions which affect their art to get out of hand. In the true eighteenth century manner he regarded indulgence of any kind as one of those extravagances which are good