once expressed his disapproval of Sterne’s humour, or of certain essential aspects of it, but I am content to refer to his latest, and presumably his most considered, judgment.2 He says that he cannot agree with Professor Cross in his assignment of Yorick’s “inconvenientness” to the score of his humour:
“That Sterne had humour—real humour—hardly the idlest paradoxer, or nobody but the idlest paradoxer—would think of denying. But when he meddled with what somebody calls ‘tumtedy’ his Humour almost always deserted him, and left his Wit (a very different thing) to work its pleasure. Humour always laughs, however earnestly it feels, and sometimes chuckles: but it never sniggers. Sterne, with the rarest exceptions, is always sniggering when he is naughty. Now the snigger is a very unlovely thing. It was apparently unknown in antiquity—there is not a ghost of it even in Aristophanes, even in Lucian. You may perhaps trace its rise in the Greek anthology: but it is not clearly visible till it shows in Berni and others of the Italian Renaissance. There is none in Rabelais himself, nor in his immediate French successors: but it came in to France later, and Voltaire is of course the Prince of Sniggerers. The thing is, again, almost entirely unknown in England till the close of the seventeenth century: and even Prior has only touches of it. Swift is far too great for it. But Sterne, on the worse side of him, is compact of sniggers: the Journey itself of course dealing largely in them. They are in it, as it were refined from their usual form in Tristram and indeed almost quintessenced: though I am perfectly certain that Rabelais’ own ‘La Quinte’ would have used the ‘fair branch of fresh roses’ that she bore to sweep them away and substitute a fragrance for their frowst.”
That, it seems to me, is the statement of a very remarkable point of view. I cannot altogether discount the fact that Mr. Saintsbury prefers the vocabulary of an old maid, with his “tumtedy” and “naughty.” But to take the direct meaning of his judgment: a snigger, says the dictionary, is “a half-suppressed secretive laugh especially of cynical kind or of amusement at obscenity or indecency.” This definition would seen to cover Mr. Saintsbury’s meaning. We gather that he does not object to hearty and open indecency of the kind given us by Aristophanes and Rabelais. Nor can he very well object to the cynicism, for there is little of it in Sterne, and at least as much in Aristophanes and Rabelais. So we are reduced to “half- suppressed secretiveness” as the upshot of the charge.
Let us take an example—it is quite difficult to find one, and it would have been easier to answer the charge had it been supported by evidence. There is positively nothing obscene in the book, even magnifying the slightest hints, and imagining the most inflammable of neurotic minds exposed to them. And even indecency is a strong word to apply to the two or three mildly sexual incidents which some industrious mudraker might find in the book. There are Bevoriskius’s sparrows, which may involve an indecent problem in arithmetic, but no one but a mathematician would insist on exactitude at this point. But let us take as a possible example of the snigger, Sterne’s story of his encounter with the fair fille de chambre (not the Lyonoise, who must have been dark). The chapter is called “The Temptation.” We have the sentimental setting:
“It was a fine still evening, in the latter end of the month of May—the crimson window-curtains (which were of the same colour as those of the bed) were drawn close—the sun was setting, and reflected through them so warm a tint into the fair fille de chambre’s face—I thought she blush’d—the idea of it made me blush myself—we were quite alone; and that superinduced a second blush before the first could get off.”
The sensation of blushing is analysed, and associated with virtue. Then Sterne describes very prettily how the devil was in him and how he struggled against his temptations. There is no snigger in all this. But—
“A strap had given way in her walk, and the buckle of her shoe was just falling off—See, said the fille de chambre, holding up her foot—I could not for my soul but fasten the buckle in return, and putting in the strap—and lifting up the other foot with it, when I had done, to see both were right—in doing it too suddenly—it unavoidably threw the fair fille de chambre off her center—and then—”