portrait of a whole as
well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan
excused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making them
more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and
shadows they are!

Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the
women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to
them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more
strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches
which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing
degree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a
suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the
maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and
ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and
blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two
chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two
female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and
incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and
incidental appearance made more alive and more female.

His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and
other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for
this chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative,
whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,
and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into
each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other
things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to
the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on
mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,
machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is
artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by
any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,
but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature
would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a
style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in
Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking,"
vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without
the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To