SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY.--HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE.
(1723-1738.)
It was not--as we have seen from the Memoir--till the autumn of 1723,
"or the spring of the following year," that Roger Sterne obtained
leave of his colonel to "fix" his son at school; and this would bring
Laurence to the tolerably advanced age of ten before beginning his
education in any systematic way. He records, under date of 1721, that
"in this year I learned to write, &c.;" but it is not probable that
the "&c."--that indolent symbol of which Sterne makes such irritating
use in all his familiar writing--covers, in this case, any wide extent
of educational advance. The boy, most likely, could just read and
write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at school, "near
Halifax, with an able master:" a judicious selection, no doubt, both
of place as well as teacher. Mr. Fitzgerald, to whose researches we
owe as much light as is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and
probably not very interesting period of Sterne's life, has pointed out
that Richard Sterne, eldest son of the late Simon Sterne, and uncle,
therefore, of Laurence, was one of the governors of Halifax Grammar
School, and that he may have used his interest to obtain his nephew's
admission to the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax man, and so,
constructively, a child of the parish. But, be this as it may, it
is more than probable that from the time when he was sent to Halifax
School the whole care and cost of the boy's education was borne by his
Yorkshire relatives. The Memoir says that, "by God's care of me, my
cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me to
the University, &c., &c.;" and it is to be inferred from this that the
benevolent guardianship of Sterne's uncle Richard (who died in 1732,
the year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge)
must have been taken up by his son. Of his school course--though it
lasted for over seven years--the autobiographer has little to say;
nothing, indeed, except that he "cannot omit mentioning" that anecdote
with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come across the briefest
notice of Sterne's life is familiar. The schoolmaster "had the ceiling
of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I,
one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital
letters, LAU. STERNE for which the usher severely whipped me. My
master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never
should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was
sure I should come to preferment. This expression made me forget the
blows I had received." It is hardly to be supposed, of course, that
this story is pure romance; but it is difficult, on the other hand,
to believe that the incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it
happened. That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest--or
even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these prophetic moments
sometimes)--is, of course, possible; but that Sterne's master was
"very much hurt" at the boy's having been justly punished for an act
of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege
of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been
a delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which
it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent
with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On
the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that
order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort
of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a
recently-caned boy; and that Sterne's vanity, either then or
afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into
a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the urchin's freak was only
too unhappily characteristic of the man. The trick of befouling what
was clean (and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously all
his days; and many a fair white surface--of humour, of fancy, or of
sentiment--was to be disfigured by him in after-years with stains
and splotches in which we can all too plainly decipher the literary
signature of Laurence Sterne.
At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained for about eight
years; that is, until he was nearly nineteen, and for some months
after his father's death at Port Antonio, which occurred in March,
1731. "In the year '32," says the Memoir, "my cousin sent me to the
University, where I stayed some time." In the course of his first year
he read for and obtained a sizarship, to which the college records
show that he was duly admitted on the 6th of July, 1733. The selection
of Jesus College was a natural one: Sterne's great-grandfather,
the afterwards Archbishop, had been its Master, and had founded
scholarships there, to one of which the young sizar was, a year after
his admission, elected. No inference can, of course, be drawn from
this as to Sterne's proficiency, or even industry, in his academical
studies: it is scarcely more than a testimony to the fact of decent
and regular behaviour. He was _bene natus_, in the sense of being
related to the right man, the founder; and in those days he need
be only very _modicé doctus_ indeed in order to qualify himself for
admission to the enjoyment of his kinsman's benefactions. Still he
must have been orderly and well-conducted in his ways; and this he
would also seem to have been, from the fact of his having passed
through his University course without any apparent break or hitch, and
having been admitted to his Bachelor's degree after no more than the
normal period of residence. The only remark which, in the Memoir, he
vouchsafes to bestow upon his academical career is, that "'twas there
that I commenced a friendship with Mr. H----, which has been lasting
on both sides;" and it may, perhaps, be said that this _was_, from one
point of view, the most important event of his Cambridge life. For Mr.
H---- was John Hall, afterwards John Hall Stevenson, the "Eugenius" of
_Tristram Shandy_, the master of Skelton Castle, at which Sterne was,
throughout life, to be a frequent and most familiar visitor; and,
unfortunately, also a person whose later reputation, both as a man and
a writer, became such as seriously to compromise the not very robust
respectability of his clerical comrade. Sterne and Hall were distant
cousins, and it may have been the tie of consanguinity which first
drew them together. But there was evidently a thorough congeniality of
the most unlucky sort between them; and from their first meeting, as
undergraduates at Jesus, until the premature death of the elder, they
continued to supply each other's minds with precisely that sort of
occupation and stimulus of which each by the grace of nature stood
least in need. That their close intimacy was ill-calculated to raise
Sterne's reputation in later years may be inferred from the fact
that Hall Stevenson afterwards obtained literary notoriety by the
publication of _Crazy Tales_, a collection of comic but extremely
broad ballads, in which his clerical friend was quite unjustly
suspected of having had a hand. Mr. Hall was also reported,
whether truly or falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's famous
confraternity of Medmenham Abbey; and from this it was an easy step
for gossip to advance to the assertion that the Rev. Mr. Sterne had
himself been admitted to that unholy order.
Among acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus might have more
profitably made at Cambridge, but did not, was that of a student
destined, like himself, to leave behind him a name famous in English
letters. Gray, born three years later than Sterne, had entered a
year after him at Cambridge as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and the two
students went through their terms together, though the poet at the
time took no degree. There was probably little enough in common
between the shy, fastidious, slightly effeminate pensioner of
Peterhouse, and a scholar of Jesus, whose chief friend and comrade was
a man like Hall; and no close intimacy between the two men, if they
had come across each other, would have been very likely to arise.
But it does not appear that they could have ever met or heard of each
other, for Gray writes of Sterne, after _Tristram Shandy_ had made
him famous, in terms which clearly show that he did not recall his
fellow-undergraduate.
In January, 1736, Sterne took his B.A. degree, and quitted Cambridge
for York, where another of his father's brothers now makes his
appearance as his patron. Dr. Jacques Sterne was the second son of
Simon Sterne, of Elvington, and a man apparently of more marked and
vigorous character than any of his brothers. What induced him now to
take notice of the nephew, whom in boyhood and early youth he had left
to the unshared guardianship of his brother, and brother's son,
does not appear; but the personal history of this energetic
pluralist--Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon
Residentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of
Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cum-Riston--suggests the surmise that he
detected qualities in the young Cambridge graduate which would
make him useful. For Dr. Sterne was a typical specimen of the
Churchman-politician, in days when both components of the compound
word meant a good deal more than they do now. The Archdeacon was a
devoted Whig, a Hanoverian to the backbone; and he held it his duty
to support the Protestant succession, not only by the spiritual but by
the secular arm. He was a great electioneerer, as befitted times when
the claims of two rival dynasties virtually met upon the hustings, and
he took a prominent part in the great Yorkshire contest of the year
1734. His most vigorous display of energy, however, was made, as was
natural, in "the '45." The Whig Archdeacon, not then Archdeacon of
the East Riding, nor as yet quite buried under the mass of preferments
which he afterwards accumulated, seems to have thought that this
indeed was the crisis of his fortunes, and that, unless he was
prepared to die a mere prebendary, canon, and rector of one or two
benefices, now was the time to strike a blow for his advancement
in the Church. His bustling activity at this trying time was indeed
portentous, and at last took the form of arresting the unfortunate
Dr. Burton (the original of Dr. Slop), on suspicion of holding
communication with the invading army of the Pretender, then on its
march southward from Edinburgh. The suspect, who was wholly innocent,
was taken to London and kept in custody for nearly a year before
being discharged, after which, by way of a slight redress, a letter
of reprimand for his _trop de zèle_ was sent by direction of
Lord Carteret to the militant dignitary. But the desired end was
nevertheless attained, and Dr. Sterne succeeded in crowning the
edifice of his ecclesiastical honours.[1]
[Footnote 1: A once-familiar piece of humorous verse describes the
upset of a coach containing a clerical pluralist:
"When struggling on the ground was seen
A Rector, Vicar, Canon, Dean;
You might have thought the coach was full,
But no! 'twas only Dr. Bull."
Dr. Jacques Sterne, however, might have been thrown out of one of the
more capacious vehicles of the London General Omnibus Company, with
almost the same misleading effect upon those who only _heard_ of the
mishap.]
There can be little doubt that patronage extended by such an uncle to
such a nephew received its full equivalent in some way or other, and
indeed the Memoir gives us a clue to the mode in which payment was
made. "My uncle," writes Sterne, describing their subsequent rupture,
"quarrelled with me because I would not write paragraphs in the
newspapers; though he was a party-man, I was not, and detested such
dirty work, thinking it beneath me. From that time he became my
bitterest enemy." The date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed;
but we gather from an autograph letter (now in the British Museum)
from Sterne to Archdeacon Blackburne that by the year 1750 the two men
had for some time ceased to be on friendly terms. Probably, however,
the breach occurred subsequently to the rebellion of '45, and it may
be that it arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which Dr. Sterne
developed in that year, and which his nephew very likely did not, in
his opinion, sufficiently share. But this is quite consistent with the
younger man's having up to that time assisted the elder in his party
polemics. He certainly speaks in his "Letters" of his having "employed
his brains for an ungrateful person," and the remark is made in a way
and in a connexion which seems to imply that the services rendered
to his uncle were mainly _literary_. If so, his declaration that he
"would not write paragraphs in the newspapers" can only mean that
he would not go on writing them. Be this as it may, however, it
is certain that the Archdeacon for some time found his account in
maintaining friendly relations with his nephew, and that during that
period he undoubtedly did a good deal for his advancement. Sterne was
ordained deacon by the Bishop of Lincoln in March, 1736, only three
months after taking his B.A. degree, and took priest's orders in
August, 1738, whereupon his uncle immediately obtained for him the
living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, into which he was inducted a few days
afterwards. Other preferments followed, to be noted hereafter; and
it must be admitted that until the quarrel occurred about the "party
paragraphs" the Archdeacon did his duty by his nephew after the
peculiar fashion of that time. When that quarrel came, however, it
seems to have snapped more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne
speaks of his youngest sister Catherine as "still living, but most
unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own
folly." Of his elder sister Mary, who was born at Lille a year before
himself, he records that "she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used
her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and
left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able to do but
for a few months, for she went to a friend's house in the country and
died of a broken heart." Truly an unlucky family.[1] Only three to
survive the hardships among which the years of their infancy were
passed, and this to be the history of two out of the three survivors!
[Footnote 1: The mother, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more
for a moment in or about the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and after him
Byron, accused Sterne of having "preferred whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother," and the former went so far as to declare
"on indubitable authority" that Mrs. Sterne, "who kept a school (in
Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter,
would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not
raised a subscription for her." Even "the indubitable authority,"
however, does not positively assert--whatever may be meant to be
insinuated--that Sterne himself did nothing to assist his mother, and
Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out that to pay the _whole_ debts of a
bankrupt school might well have been beyond a Yorkshire clergyman's
means. Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date than this
was actively concerning himself about his mother's interests. She
afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; and he then
writes to a friend: "I trust my poor mother's affair is by this time
ended to _our_ comfort and hers."]