York--already, no doubt, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence
to many worthy people in the county--conceived the idea of astonishing
and scandalizing them still further after a new and original fashion.
His impulses to literary production were probably various, and not all
of them, or perhaps the strongest of them, of the artistic order. The
first and most urgent was, it may be suspected, the simplest and most
common of all such motive forces. Sterne, in all likelihood, was in
want of money. He was not, perhaps, under the actual instruction of
that _magister artium_ whom the Roman satirist has celebrated; for he
declared, indeed, afterwards, that "he wrote not to be fed, but to be
famous." But the context of the passage shows that he only meant to
deny any absolute compulsion to write for mere subsistence. Between
this sort of constraint and that gentler form of pressure which arises
from the wish to increase an income sufficient for one's needs, but
inadequate to one's desires, there is a considerable difference; and
to repudiate the one is not to disclaim the other. It is, at any
rate, certain that Sterne engaged at one time of his life in a rather
speculative sort of farming, and we have it from himself in a passage
in one of his letters, which may be jest, but reads more like
earnest, that it was his losses in this business that first turned his
attention to literature.[1] His thoughts once set in that direction,
his peculiar choice of subject and method of treatment are easily
comprehensible. Pantagruelic burlesque came to him, if not naturally,
at any rate by "second nature." He had a strong and sedulously
cultivated taste for Rabelaisian humour; his head was crammed with all
sorts of out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling his comic sense
by its very uselessness; he relished more keenly than any man the
solemn futilities of mediaeval doctors, and the pedantic indecencies
of casuist fathers; and, along with all these temptations to an
enterprise of the kind upon which he entered, he had been experiencing