STERNE, LAURENCE. — Novelist, born at Clonmel
(Ireland) to an English father and an Irish mother on
24 November 1713, died in London on 18 March 1768.
He was a benevolently sceptical Anglican clergyman of
not entirely irreproachable conduct. It may nevertheless
also be observed of him that the scepticism of the English
eighteenth-century writers was not animated by a Voltairean
spirit (except perhaps in a Chesterfield), that their
Enlightenment was tempered by an aspiration toward a tepid
Christianity, in truth little concerned with the notion of
sin (a sort of sui generis “middle way”), and that, finally,
as has been pointed out by the English critic H. J. C.
Grierson, their schoolmaster is Cervantes’ Christianity. S.
freed himself from every requirement of plot, and his work
as a narrator is characterized and dominated by amused and
playfully erudite digression and by an ironic and at once
sentimental analysis of himself and his characters. It is
in Lamb, the delightful humorist and essayist, that the most
worthy continuator of his manner in the nineteenth century
may be found, whereas only in our own century has this manner
been readapted to the proportions of the novel. S.’s major
works are The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1760–67), considered his masterpiece, and A sentimental
journey through France and Italy (1768, placed on the Index
by decree of 6 September 1819), in which, for the first time,
an epithet that would enjoy such great fortune among the
Romantics was emphasized in the title of a novel. Of some
interest are his Sermons of Mr. Vorich, in which S. adopted
for the first time the pseudonym appearing at the head of
the Journey, and above all his sentimental correspondence:
Letters from Vorich to Eliza, published posthumously in 1775.