ordinance" of his adopted method--perpetually obtruding his own
individuality, and begging us, as it were, to turn from the picture to
the artist, to cease gazing for a moment at his touching creation, and
to admire the fine feeling, the exquisitely sympathetic nature of the
man who created it. No doubt, as we must in fairness remember, it was
part of his "humour"--in Ancient Pistol's sense of the word--to do
this; it is true, no doubt (and a truth which Sterne's most famous
critic was too prone to ignore), that his sentiment is not always
_meant_ for serious;[1] nay, the very word "sentimental" itself,
though in Sterne's day, of course, it had acquired but a part of its
present disparaging significance, is a sufficient proof of that. But
there are, nevertheless, plenty of passages, both in _Tristram Shandy_
and the _Sentimental Journey_, where the intention is wholly and
unmixedly pathetic--where the smile is not for a moment meant to
compete with the tear--which are, nevertheless, it must be owned,
complete failures, and failures traceable with much certainty, or so
it seems to me, to the artistic error above-mentioned.

[Footnote 1: Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage
about the _desobligeante_, which had been "standing so many months
unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessien's coach-yard. Much, indeed,
was not to be said for it, but something might; and, when a few words
will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be
a churl of them." "Does anybody," asks Thackeray in a strangely
matter-of-fact fashion, "believe that this is a real sentiment? That
this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery--out of an
old cab--is genuine feeling?" Nobody, we should say. But, on the other
hand, does anybody--or did anybody before Thackeray--suggest that it
was meant to pass for genuine feeling? Is it not an obvious piece of
mock pathetic?]