Throughout A Sentimental Journey, Sterne makes reference to “Smelfungus,” a traveler who embodies the worst possible form of travel, in Sterne’s view: he is predisposed to dislike everything and is closed off to the world and new experiences. Sterne introduces Smelfungus to the reader in Volume 1, satirizing him quite openly:
The learned SMELFUNGUS travelled from Boulogne to Paris— from Paris to Rome—and so on—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted— He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.
Smelfungus is the satirical version of the real Tobias Smollett, himself a novelist and travel writer. By making this allusion to Smollett, Sterne provides a ruthless critique of Smollett's small-minded conception of travel, and Sterne continues his satire of Smollett’s travelogues with the introduction of another traveler, Mundungus, who also has an over-the-top bad attitude:
Mundungus, with an immense fortune, made the whole tour; going on from Rome to Naples—from Naples to Venice—from Venice to Vienna—to Dresden, to Berlin, without one generous connection or pleasurable anecdote to tell of; but he had travell’d straight on looking neither to his right hand or his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out of his road.
A Sentimental Journey is, among other things, an exploration of the meaning and merits of travel—and in Sterne's view, Smollett's opinion of traveling was antithetical to Sterne's own vision of traveling as source of self-reflection, knowledge, and connection with the world. Smelfungus and Mundungus are closed off to new experiences, and they are worse off because of this attitude.
In Volume 1, after some melodramatic deliberation, Yorick at last resolves to invite Madame de L— to join him in his carriage to Paris. As he turns to say as much, he finds that she has walked off by herself, and Yorick immediately begins to catastrophize by assuming that she has abandoned him for good. Sterne's depiction of Yorick's emotional agony relies heavily on satire for its dramatic effect:
She had scarce got twenty paces distant from me, ere something within me called out for a more particular inquiry—it brought on the idea of a further separation—I might possibly never see her more— the heart is for saving what it can; and I wanted the traces thro’ which my wishes might find their way to her, in case I should never rejoin her myself: in a word, I wish’d to know her name—her family’s—her condition; and as I knew the place to which she was going, I wanted to know from whence she came […]
Madame de L— has hardly left his side, and Yorick is already deep into an internal monologue about their final parting. He yearns to know who she is, what she is like, and where she comes from, and he imagines what it would be like to never see her again—this is Yorick at his most sentimental, which is saying something.
The entire novel, as its name would suggest, consistently satirizes Yorick’s sentimentality and hyperemotional state through sequences like these, which transcribe his internal narrative and paint his intensity of feeling in all its ridiculousness.
In Volume 1, as Yorick begins his travels in France, he comes across a begging monk. Sterne's satirical description of the monk, and Yorick's reaction to him, is put into the language of Baroque painting:
It was one of those heads, which Guido has often painted—mild, pale—penetrating, free from all common-place ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth—it look’d forwards; but look’d, as if it look’d at something beyond this world. How one of his order came by it, heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk’s shoulders, best knows: but it would have suited a Bramin, and had I met it upon the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it.
Yorick opens his appraisal of the monk with an allusion to the Italian painter Guido Reni, whose own travels and studies abroad were a source of inspiration to travel writers including Tobias Smollett (the writer lampooned by Sterne as “Smelfungus” in A Sentimental Journey). The invocation of this painter to describe the monk invites the images of Guido’s baroque figuration of angels and biblical scenes—full of characters who "look down upon the earth" with "fat contented ignorance"—into the reader's imagination.
This description is satirical in at least two ways: first, it satirizes Yorick’s own attitude to travel—he preaches openness, inclusivity, and an earnest willingness to learn from new experiences, only to shut down immediately when confronted by the monk at the very beginning of his journey. This passage is only the beginning of his derisive scorn, but his disgust for the monk is as humorous as it is over-the-top. Second, his surprise that a monk should seem otherworldly and have a gaze that looks into the “beyond” also satirizes the self-importance of Christian monastic practices. Who, Yorick exclaims to himself, could have let such a visage “fall upon a monk’s shoulders”?
Just a bit later, the description of the monk continues, also in the metaphorical language of painting as a means to characterize the monk:
The rest of his outline may be given in a few strokes; one might put it into the hands of any one to design, for ’twas neither elegant or otherwise, but as character and expression made it so: it was a thin, spare form, something above the common size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forwards in the figure—but it was the attitude of Intreaty; and as it now stands presented to my imagination, it gain’d more than it lost by it.
As opposed to the monk's head, which appeared to Yorick straight out of a Guido painting, his body is less specific—"any one" could have designed it, and the features are not particularly notable other than the figure's general attitude of "Intreaty," or earnest pleading.
This interaction, at the outset of the novel, sets the tone for the adventure to come. Although A Sentimental Journey is an exploration of travel and Christian virtue, Yorick expresses ambivalence to the point of satire—and certainly hypocrisy—about such virtue.
In Volume 2, Yorick is riding through the countryside when he finds the young "madwoman" Maria weeping under a tree. He leaps out of his carriage to console her, only to find himself overcome with emotion as well. Sterne takes this opportunity to share Yorick's emotional state through both hyperbole and pathos:
I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it in my own—and then in hers—and then in mine—and then I wip’d hers again—and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.
The emphasis on the tears and the repetitive motion of wiping them away with the handkerchief—itself a major symbol of Yorick's sentimentality—playfully builds the pathos of the passage, which further descends into emotional hyperbole as Yorick pronounces to himself that no combination "of matter and motion" could possibly explain his depth of feeling.
Such a melodramatic use of pathos rightly feels satirical, and, indeed, the passage is a wonderful example of Yorick's sentimentality running away from him to the extent that he pulls all attention away from the bereaved and genuinely grieving Maria and onto himself. That his handkerchief should appear, which usually happens in A Sentimental Journey when Yorick's emotions get the best of him (to the point of self-indulgence), only confirms as much.
