How excellent all that is! and how perfectly would the scene have ended had it closed with the tender and poetic image which thus describes the dying soldier's commendation of his orphan boy to the care of his brother-in-arms! But what of this, which closes the scene, in fact?
"Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered--stopped--went on--throbbed--stopped again--moved, stopped. Shall I go on? No."
Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery.
The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself--the acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost--when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning fails him altogether. He is at his best in pathos when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour. In this, of course, there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man's mysterious life.
CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.