The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness,
the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the
heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such
masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown
in comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Before
the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume
against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out
of Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of
English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal lines
until the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gave
it the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful
inspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul," which leaped
from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventional
restraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired to
declare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century.

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadays
are often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of his
humour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have been
taught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless
to try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of it
and did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and
carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected
to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like
to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on
this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of
expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops,
allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting.
Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex by
our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in these