The chapter ends on that convenient dash, and in the interval, presumably, we snigger. But not for long, for perhaps Sterne expected us to expect him to snigger, for he is waiting for his accusers in the next chapter:
“Yes—and then—Ye whose clay-cold heads and lukewarm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them? or how his spirit stands answerable to the Father of spirits but for his conduct under them?”
I need not repeat the whole passage here, for it is easy to turn to this chapter which Sterne has called “The Conquest,” and in which he has conquered, not only the devil’s temptations, but also those detractors of his in whom Nature has not so woven her web of kindness, “that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece.”
I do not, therefore, understand this charge of “sniggering.” The snigger is bitter and cynical, and Sterne is tender and generous. Life in his books is a tangled web of love and desire, but otherwise it would not be life, and if desire is treated, not as a dark and sinful horror to be suppressed at any price, but as a natural fact to be given its due place in the picture, we must not grumble if this place is like the jester’s at Court. There was wisdom in the old practice of allowing the lowest and most irreverent of the King’s subjects to consort freely with majesty; and it is the same principle at work in Humour. It would need a psychological excursus to discuss the matter fully, but we know instinctively, and can prove more empirically, that humour is flat and insipid unless it represents the contrast between the desires of the flesh and the aspirations of the spirit. Coleridge put the matter into other words, which I regard as the classical definition of humour. The essence of humour he defines as
“a certain reference to the general and the universal, by which the finite great is brought into identity with the little, or the little with the finite great, so as to make both nothing in comparison with the infinite. The little is made great, and the great little, in order to destroy both; because all is equal in contrast with the infinite.”
And Coleridge then specifically relates this definition to Sterne by quoting from Tristram Shandy:
“It is not without reason, brother Toby, that learned men write dialogues on long noses.”
Long noses, of course, are not merely long noses; that is where the humour comes in, and no one entirely human regrets the intrusion.
There is a saying of Goethe’s that is relevant here:
“Yorick Sterne is the best type of wit that ever exerted an influence in literature. Whoever reads him feels himself lifted above the petty cares of the world. His humour is inimitable, and it is not every kind of humour that leaves the soul calm and serene.”
It recalls Sterne’s own words, already quoted: “My design … was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do. …” Goethe bears witness that Sterne had accomplished his design. Humour, too, is a cathartic agent; humour which, in Coleridge’s words again, acknowledges “the hollowness and farce of the world and its disproportion to the godlike within us.” Genuine humour is closely related to genuine tragedy; they deal with the same situation, that is to say, with life, from opposite angles. You cannot imagine genuine tragedy that is not woven out of the tangled threads of love and desire; genuine humour would be equally false if woven out of any less vital stuff.
I would go further than this, to argue that those facts of human life which concern our grossest appetites—eating and drinking, digestion, excretion and copulation—have a special function in the creation of a true humour. These “facts” make up the human little which we have to bring into relation with the human great. The process which Coleridge put forward as an hypothesis in literary criticism could to-day be justified by psychological reasoning—and along two distinct paths. The psychologist would probably