STERNE, LAURENCE. - Novelist, b. at Clonmel
(Ireland) on 24 Nov. 1713 to an English father and an Irish mother, d. in London on 18 March 1768.
He was an Anglican pastor, good-naturedly skeptical and of
less than blameless morals. Of him too, however, it may be
observed that the skepticism of the English eighteenth-century writers is not
animated by a Voltairian spirit (except in a Chesterfield), that their Enlightenment was tempered by the
vague longing for 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
chief model is the Christianity of Cervantes. S. frees himself from every demand of plot, and his work as a narrator is character-ized and dominated by amused and playfully erudite
digression and by the ironic and sentimental analysis
at once of himself and of his characters. It is in fact in
Lamb, the delightful humorist-essayist, that one may point
to the most worthy continuer of his manner in the nineteenth century, while only in our own century has this manner
been readapted to the scale of the novel. The major works
of S. 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 Sept. 1819), where for the first time an epithet
that had such great fortune among the Romantics was under-scored in the title of a novel. Of some interest are his
Sermons of Mr. Yorick, where S. adopted for the first time
the pseudonym that appears at the head of the Journey, and above
all his sentimental correspondence: Letters from
Yorick to Eliza, published posthumously in 1775.
Bibliography6 works
Augusto Guidi