humour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and unerring hand.  But when Sterne the man is uppermost—­when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning fails him altogether.  He is at his best in pathos when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour.  In this, of course, there is nothing at all surprising.  The only marvel is, that a man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man’s mysterious life.

CHAPTER XI.

CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.—­PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Subtle as is Sterne’s humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality.  We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic honour—­hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough forward through time—­that the comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be exaggerated.  There are so many “deathless ones” about—­if I may put the matter familiarly—­in conversation and in literature, that we get into the way of thinking that they are really a considerable body in actual fact, and that the works which have triumphed over death are far more numerous still.  The real truth, however, is, that not only are “those who reach posterity a very select company indeed,” but most of them have come much nearer missing their destiny than is popularly supposed.  Of the dozen or score of writers in one century whom their own contemporaries fondly decree immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a very much smaller proportion as a rule survive.  Only some fifty per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even upon their brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay.  A single poem, a solitary drama—­nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dramatic—­avails, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal from putting on mortality.  Hence we need think it no disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual creation.  His imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt, considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous; but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for one that will linger in the memory