The full title Lawrence Sterne gave his unconventional mixture of autobiography, travel impressions, and fiction—A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy—is misleading. Sterne told of his travels through France, but he died of tuberculosis before writing the Italian section of his narrative. Sentimental, outrageous, and eccentric in its humorous effects, the novel is replete with delightful accounts and observations of whatever came into the author’s mind. Like The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767), the book broadened the scope of prose fiction for later writers by demonstrating that form and unified plot are not necessary for a successful novel.

In form and apparent subject, A Sentimental Journey follows in the tradition of the grand-tour novel. The depictions of scenes and persons, of escapades on the road, of the cultural adjustments required of an Englishman abroad, and of the things to be learned and the places to be visited were common, enjoyable reading matter for an eighteenth century audience. Sterne’s grand tour, however, sports a delightful touch of irreverence. Its hero, Yorick, is not a typical young gentleman matriculating into a peripatetic finishing school but a low-key picaro buffeted by impulse and whimsy. Therefore, his “traveling” seems random. Unplanned, untimed, it accords perfectly with his sole principle, which, it seems, is to have no principle whatever except obedience to natural affections, to his growing sensibility, and his often unseemly passion. He prefers filles de chambre to cathedrals and a pretty face to a gallery portrait. Given his free-flowing nature, he does not seek to improve himself in accordance with a travel plan; he prefers to stumble over it in following his heart. The point Sterne makes is that a benevolent nature can be trusted not to err in promoting human goodness.

“Sentiment” and a host of such attendant words as “good nature,” “sensibility,” and “affections” were all terms with particular significance in Sterne’s day. The doctrine of sensibility, popularized by the late seventeenth century Latitudinarian divines, urged an inherent goodness in human beings, a“sense” of moral absolutes that expresses itself in acts of charity and social benevolence. Championed philosophically by the third earl of Shaftesbury (in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times, 1711) and in fiction by Henry Fielding, this emphasis on good nature ran counter to the often equally influential tradition expounded by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) and by Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), a tradition that urged self-interest as the basis of all human action. These two forces collide in A Sentimental Journey as Sterne explores what it means to be a good person.

Sterne gave a sidelong glance at Hobbes in several of his characters: the huge oaf who deliberately blocks the view of a dwarf, the postilion who thrashes his horses, and even Yorick himself at the start of the novel when he refuses charity to a monk. Yet this “natural” cruelty—as Hobbes would have defined it—is contrasted with the virtues of a larger number of characters: the old French officer who assists the dwarf, the mourner who laments his dead animal, and the enlightened Yorick who guides the unfortunate Maria. Sterne recognizes only too well human beings’ divided nature, in which good and evil are deeply intertwined, yet he wants to insist that the “deeper affections,” the “eternal fountain of our feelings,” as Yorick says, are also a primary impulse of inordinate strength.

Beneath the surface, A Sentimental Journey is something of an allegory, a type of metaphorical journey in which Yorick, and hence also the reader, discovers...