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By Root 1659 0

of the pieces and the half-formed idea of the painter are carefully studied; and our very grief for the curious hand, which had been stopped by death, is an additional increase to our pleasure.”18 Hume’s sentimental comment is one of a number of ways in which the unfinished or fragmentary received new attention. Throughout the eighteenth century, for example, the status of the sketch was undergoing profound changes. The later eighteenth century was a time when the unintentionally unfinished was being reevaluated, and even the intentionally incomplete was extolled.

The prime example is James Macpherson’s first Ossianic production, the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, published in 1760, the same year that Tristram Shandy first appeared, though its status—either as a translation of an ancient Scottish poet or as Macpherson’s modern concoction—was controversial. It ushered in the fragment as a poetic genre rather than a scholarly curiosity. In the early nineteenth century, when the long poem was perceived as a contradiction in terms, the fragment became an unacknowledged norm; and it is worth noting that both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey contain “fragments,” designated as such and intended to be enjoyed in and for their fragmentary state. (One can even call the whole of the latter work a fragment, for Sterne, a master of the aesthetics of incompletion, died before writing the last two volumes.) Thomas Keymer’s recent account of Sterne’s serial publication of Tristram Shandy stresses its status from the first volumes in 1759 to the last one in 1767 as a work in progress that made its very incompleteness and responsiveness to critics while the installments were appearing a part of the telling of the story, a view of the novel that is very different from Booth’s notion of the completed whole.19 It is also relevant that Northrop Frye’s characterization of the later eighteenth century as an “age of Sensibility” in which writers were interested in process, not product (in some ways, as we have seen, a return to earlier modes of writing), begins appropriately with the example of Sterne.20 If he looked backward, he was also very much of his own time.

Both views of the conclusion of Tristram Shandy have much to recommend them, but neither of these antithetical positions strikes me as wrong, nor as entirely right. The emphases on the finished and unfinished Tristram Shandy must be taken together for us to see what Sterne was up to. I am tempted to call this my position, but since Sterne almost says as much in a letter, perhaps it would be fairer to call it his. In 1766 he proposed to “begin a new work of four volumes, which when finish’d, I shall continue Tristram with fresh spirit” (Letters, 284). This work would become A Sentimental Journey, of which he lived to complete only the first two volumes, published in 1768, less than three weeks before he died. Although he also wrote a letter claiming that illness kept him from completing a tenth volume of Tristram Shandy, the logic of his comment on the “new work” seems perfectly in keeping with what he actually did until death intervened. Have readers grown a bit tired of Tristram, or has his author grown a bit tired of keeping up with him? He will lie low for a while and let them think that he has come, as he puts it on a few occasions, linking life and book, to the end of the chapter. Then, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff feigning death at the hands of Douglas, he will pop up when least expected and blandly, impertinently, exasperatingly continue where he left off. The last sentence of Swift’s Tale of a Tub provides an exact and explicit analogue for such an interpretation: “… I shall here pause awhile, till I find, by feeling the World’s Pulse, and my own, that it will be of absolute Necessity for us both, to resume my Pen.”21 The comment of John Noorthouck in 1776, therefore, is not the mystified reaction of a benighted contemporary, but precisely the audience response that Sterne counted upon in using his ambiguous form of closure. He wants us to apprehend Tristram Shandy as