a husband and author by a wanton defiance of the accepted moral canons, but that he achieved so indisputable a nobility of sentiment as in his creation of Uncle Toby, and so unselfish a devotion as in his relations with his daughter. He was no ‘scamp’ in any accepted use of the term, as Thackeray designates him. He was a volatile, self-centred, morally apathetic man of genius, who was not destitute of generous instincts.
In portraying sympathetically the hysterical working of the tender emotions Sterne was an innovator. He knew little of his greater contemporary Rousseau, who was similarly constituted to himself; and there is no ground for tracing Sterne's sentimentality to any spring outside his natural temperament. But, like Rousseau, Sterne unconsciously represented the reaction which was in the air of western Europe against those dominant principles of thought and action, both in politics and religion, which ignored the emotions altogether. Sterne's sentimentality was not militant, like Rousseau's, but its mildness rendered it even more contagious in both England and France. This characteristic was not altogether disadvantageous. Even in its most mawkish manifestations Sterne's sentimentality had the saving grace of running directly counter to inhuman prejudices of long standing. The exaggerated sympathy that Sterne expressed for dumb animals (even flies) helped to create a new and humanising relation between man and animals. His tearful references to the evils of slavery and to the right of slaves to recognition as human beings helped to set the negroes free (cf. Letters, lxxv–vi.; Tristram, iii. 185; Journey, p. 80; art. Sancho, Ignatius). The worst result that may be traced to Sterne's sentimentality is the vogue of mawkishness and unreality that it introduced for a time into English literature, and the hypocrisy that, according to Coleridge, it long encouraged in English life (Aids to Reflection, 1839, p. 27). Henry Mackenzie's ‘Man of Feeling’ (1771) illustrates its immediate effect on literature. For three years—from 1773 to 1775—worshippers of Sterne concocted month by month in the ‘Sentimental Magazine’ imbecile imitations of his characteristic style and feeling. A little later his sentimentality was responsible for the affectations of Burns's epistolary style. The persistence of its influence may be estimated by the circumstance that it inspired much of the emotional writing of Dickens and Lytton only half a century ago. Seriously minded bystanders could not stem the tide which made Sterne's sentimentality fashionable in thought and speech. Wesley wrote in his ‘Journal’ on 11 Feb. 1772, after looking at the ‘Sentimental Journey:’ ‘Sentimental! What is that? It is not English; he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea; yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one!’ In France the ‘Sentimental Journey,’ mainly on account of its emotional extravagances, enjoyed a popularity even greater than that it could claim in the country of its birth. ‘Sterne à Paris: ou le Voyageur Sentimental,’ by Révoil and Forbin, was a popular vaudeville on the Parisian stage. Saintine's ‘Picciola’ was written largely under Sterne's inspiration. In Germany his sentimentality was avowedly imitated by the novelist Hippel in his ‘Die Lebenslaufe’ (1778–81), and more subtly by Wieland and Jean Paul Richter; while its influence has been detected as far afield as in Russian novels of the close of the eighteenth century (Dunlop, Hist. of Fiction, ii. 649).
One proof of Sterne's popularity lies in the many spurious works published under his name, and in the many barefaced imitations of his efforts that appeared before or immediately after his death. The fraudulent third volume of ‘Tristram Shandy’ (1760), by the impudent hack-writer John Carr (1732–1807) [q. v.], was followed by Samuel Paterson's ‘Another Traveller’ (1767–9), and by John Hall-Stevenson's more mendacious continuation of the ‘Sentimental Journey’ in 1769. These heralded a very long series of contemptible imitations of Sterne's travels. ‘La Quinzaine Angloise à Paris, ou l'art de s'y ruiner en peu de tems, ouvrage posthume du Doctor Stearne traduit de l'anglois par un observateur’ (London, 1776), was an original work in French by James Rutledge [q. v.] William Combe, Samuel Jackson Pratt, Martin Sherlock, and Samuel Ireland showed varying degrees of adroitness in the same direction. Probably the most impudent of the deliberate forgeries undertaken by literary hacks was a volume entitled ‘The Posthumous Works of a late Celebrated Genius, deceased, A.M.’ (1770, 2 vols.), which consisted of a work in two parts called ‘The Koran, or the Life, Character, and Sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno, M.N.A., or Master of No Arts!’ It was by Richard Griffith (d. 1788) [q. v.] There was some clever parodying of the style of thought and language of ‘Tristram Shandy.’ Reprints were frequent. It was included in the first collected edition of Sterne's works (Dublin, 1779), and it was translated into French by A. Hédouin in 1853. In 1783 Leonard McNally [q. v.] plagiarised for
