n laugh outright at his boyish
enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a
moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his
character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him
more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his
purposes as a sentimentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he
deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is
the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and
the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence
of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon
affectation. It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in
illustration of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized
(as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly,
caught and put out of the window with the words "Get thee gone, poor
devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for
thee and me." There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in
the apostrophe. This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of
Sterne's objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying
sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium
of his own hypertrophied sensibilities. These lapses, however, are,
fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only as he
appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before
us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue--the man of simple mind
and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking
not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely _naif_, and
delightfully _mal-a-propos_ in his observations, but always
pardonably, never foolishly, so; inexhaustibly amiable, but with no
weak amiability; homely in his ways, but a perfect gentleman withal;
in a word, the most winning and lovable personality that is to be met
with, surely, in the whole range of fiction.

It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of character as
it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of
sentiment. He is never at his best and truest--as, indeed, no writer
of fiction ever is or can be--save when he is allowing his dramatic
imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking
least about himself. This is curiously illustrated in his handling
of what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncaricatured
portraits in the Shandy gal