LIFE AT SUTTON.--MARRIAGE.--THE PARISH PRIEST.
(1738-1759.)
Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fame
and yet die early, must always form more or less perplexing subjects
of literary biography. The processes of their intellectual and
artistic growth lie hidden in nameless years; their genius is not
revealed to the world until it has reached its full maturity, and many
aspects of it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained themselves
if the gradual development had gone on before men's eyes, remain
often unexplained to the last. By few, if any, of the more celebrated
English men of letters is this observation so forcibly illustrated as
it is in the case of Sterne: the obscure period of his life so greatly
exceeded in duration the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity
was so exceptionally profound. He was forty-seven years of age when,
at a bound, he achieved celebrity; he was not five-and-fifty when he
died. And though it might be too much to say that the artist sprang,
like the reputation, full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true
that there are no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in
the earliest public displays of his art. His work grows, indeed, most
marvellously in vividness and symmetry as he proceeds, but there
are no visible signs of growth in the workman's skill. Even when the
highest point of finish is attained we cannot say that the hand is any
more cunning than it was from the first. As well might we say that the
last light touches of the sculptor's chisel upon the perfected statue
are more skilful than its first vigorous strokes upon the shapeless
block.
It is certain, however, that Sterne must have been storing up his
material of observation, secreting his reflections on life and
character, and consciously or unconsciously maturing his powers of
expression, during the whole of those silent twenty years which have
now to be passed under brief review. With one exception, to be noted
presently, the only known writings of his which belong to this
period are sermons, and these--a mere "scratch" collection of pulpit
discourses, which, as soon as he had gained the public ear, he
hastened in characteristic fashion to rummage from his desk and carry
to the book-market--throw no light upon the problem before us. There
are sermons of Sterne which alike in manner and matter disclose the
author of _Tristram Shandy_; but they are not among those which he
preached or wrote before that work was given to the world. They
are not its ancestors but its descendants. They belong to the
post-Shandian period, and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian
style; while in none of the earlier ones--not even in that famous
homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim
preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr. Slop--can we trace
either the trick of style or the turn of thought that give piquancy to
the novel. Yet the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty
of workmanship of which this turn of thought and trick of style were
the product, must of course have been potentially present from the
beginning. Men do not blossom forth as wits, humourists, masterly
delineators of character, and skilful performers on a highly-strung
and carefully-tuned sentimental instrument all at once, after entering
their "forties;" and the only wonder is that a possessor of these
powers--some of them of the kind which, as a rule, and in most men,
seeks almost as irresistibly for exercise as even the poetic instinct
itself--should have been held so long unemployed. There is, however,
one very common stimulus to literary exertions which in Sterne's case
was undoubtedly wanting--a superabundance of unoccupied time. We
have little reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded
and valetudinarian Yorkshire parson was at any period of his life an
industrious "parish priest;" but it is probable, nevertheless, that
time never hung very heavily upon his hands. In addition to the
favourite amusements which he enumerates in the Memoir, he was all
his days addicted to one which is, perhaps, the most absorbing of
all--flirtation. Philandering, and especially philandering of the
Platonic and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the one human
pastime of which its votaries never seem to tire; and its constant
ministrations to human vanity may serve, perhaps, to account for their
unwearied absorption in its pursuit. Sterne's first love affair--an
affair of which, unfortunately, the consequences were more lasting
than the passion--took place immediately upon his leaving Cambridge.
To relate it as he relates it to his daughter: "At York I became
acquainted with your mother, and courted her for two years. She owned
she liked me, but thought herself not rich enough or me too poor to
be joined together. She went to her sister's in Staffordshire, and I
wrote to her often. I believe then she was partly determined to have
me, but would not say so. At her return she fell into a consumption,
and one evening that I was sitting by her, with an almost broken heart
to see her so ill, she said: 'My dear Laury, I never can be yours, for
I verily believe I have not long to live! But I have left you every
shilling of my fortune.' Upon that she showed me her will. This
generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that she recovered, and we
were married in 1741." The name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and
it was to her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which his
daughter included in the collection published by her some eight years
after her father's death. They were added, the preface tells us, "in
justice to Mr. Sterne's delicate feelings;" and in our modern usage
of the word "delicate," as equivalent to infirm of health and probably
short of life, they no doubt do full justice to the passion which they
are supposed to express. It would be unfair, of course, to judge any
love-letters of that period by the standard of sincerity applied in
our own less artificial age. All such compositions seem frigid and
formal enough to us of to-day; yet in most cases of genuine attachment
we usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the
natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above the affected
modulations of the style. But the letters of Sterne's courtship
maintain the pseudo-poetic, shepherd-and-shepherdess strain
throughout; or, if the lover ever abandons it, it is only to make
somewhat maudlin record of those "tears" which flowed a little too
easily at all times throughout his life. These letters, however, have
a certain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensibilities
which Sterne afterwards learned to cultivate in a forcing-frame, with
a view to the application of their produce to the purposes of an
art of pathetic writing which simulates nature with such admirable
fidelity at its best, and descends to such singular bathos at its
worst.
The marriage preluded by this courtship did not take place till
Sterne had already been three years Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, the
benefice which had been procured for him by his uncle the Archdeacon;
through whose interest also he was appointed successively to two
prebends--preferments which were less valuable to him for their
emolument than for the ecclesiastical status which they conferred upon
him, for the excuse which they gave him for periodical visits to the
cathedral city to fulfil the residential conditions of his offices,
and for the opportunity thus afforded him of mixing in and studying
the society of the Close. Upon his union with Miss Lumley, and, in a
somewhat curious fashion, by her means, he obtained in addition the
living of Stillington. "A friend of hers in the South had promised her
that if she married a clergyman in Yorkshire, when the living became
vacant he would make her a compliment of it;" and made accordingly
this singular "compliment" was. At Sutton Sterne remained nearly
twenty years, doing duty at both places, during which time
"books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were," he says, "my chief
amusements." With what success he shot, and with what skill he
fiddled, we know not. His writings contain not a few musical
metaphors and allusions to music, which seem to indicate a competent
acquaintance with its technicalities; but the specimen of his
powers as an artist, which Mr. Fitzgerald has reproduced from his
illustrations of a volume of poems by Mr. Woodhull, does not dispose
one to rate highly his proficiency in this accomplishment. We may
expect that, after all, it was the first-mentioned of his amusements
in which he took the greatest delight, and that neither the brush,
the bow, nor the fowling-piece was nearly so often in his hand as
the book. Within a few miles of Sutton, at Skelton Castle, an almost
unique Roman stronghold, since modernized by Gothic hands, dwelt
his college-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library
contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books--old French
"ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors--books intentionally and
books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an
only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an
acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it
will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of
his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the
mode in which he used them: here it is enough to say generally that
the materials for many a burlesque chapter of _Tristram Shandy_ must
have been unconsciously storing themselves in his mind in many an
amused hour passed by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle.
But before finally quitting this part of my subject it may be as well,
perhaps, to deal somewhat at length with a matter which will doubtless
have to be many times incidentally referred to in the course of this
study, but which I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of
doing more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course to Sterne's
perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a matter almost as
impossible to omit from any biography of Sterne as it would be to omit
it from any biography of Goethe. The English humourist did not, it
is true, engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific,
spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by
the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development;
but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering
propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and
work in more ways than one. That his marriage was an ill-assorted and
unhappy union was hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its
effect. It may well be, of course, that the "dear L.," whose moral and
mental graces her lover had celebrated in such superfine, sentimental
fashion, was a commonplace person enough. That she was really a woman
of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her exasperating
feats as an _assentatrix_ did, as has been suggested, supply the model
for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between the philosopher
and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant for believing. But it
is quite possible that the daily companion of one of the most
indefatigable jesters that ever lived may have been unable to see
a joke; that she regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere
horse-collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler humour
escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it is, to say the
least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all on this ground
from the wounded feelings of the _mari incompris_, while it is next to
certain that it does not need the sting of any such disappointment
to account for his alienation. He must have had plenty of time and
opportunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations during
the two years of his courtship; and it is not likely that, even if
they were as well marked as Mrs. Shandy's own, they would have
done much of themselves to estrange the couple. Sympathy is not the
necessity to the humourist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be
to himself: the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract
from the very absence of sympathy in those about him a keener relish
for his reflections. With sentiment, indeed, and still more with
sentimentalism, the case would of course be different; but as for Mr.
Sterne's demands for sympathy in that department of his life and art,
one may say without the least hesitation that they would have been
beyond the power of any one woman, however distinguished a disciple of
the "Laura Matilda" school, to satisfy. "I must ever," he frankly
says in one of the "Yorick to Eliza" letters, "I must ever have some
Dulcinea in my head: it harmonizes the soul;" and he might have added
that he found it impossible to sustain the harmony without frequently
changing the Dulcinea. One may suspect that Mrs. Sterne soon had cause
for jealousy, and it is at least certain that several years before
Sterne's emergence into notoriety their estrangement was complete. One
daughter was born to them in 1745, but lived scarcely mare than long
enough to be rescued from the _limbus infantium_ by the prompt
rites of the Church. The child was christened Lydia, and died on the
following day. Its place was filled in 1747 by a second daughter, also
christened Lydia, who lived to become the wife of M. de Medalle, and
the not very judicious editress of the posthumous "Letters." For
her as she grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and truly fatherly
affection, and it is in writing to her and of her that we see him at
his best; or rather one might say it is almost only then that we can
distinguish the true notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto
of sentimentalism which distinguishes most of Sterne's communications
with the other sex. There was no subsequent issue of the marriage,
and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly included in Madame de
Medalle's collection, it is to be ascertained that some four years or
so after Lydia's birth the relations between Sterne and Mrs. Sterne
ceased to be conjugal, and never again resumed that character.
It is, however, probable, upon the husband's own confessions, that he
had given his wife earlier cause for jealousy, and certainly from the
time when he begins to reveal himself in correspondence there seems to
be hardly a moment when some such cause was not in existence--in the
person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical damsel or coquettish
matron. From Miss Fourmantelle, the "dear, dear Kitty," to whom Sterne
was making violent love in 1759, the year of the York publication
of _Tristram Shandy_, down to Mrs. Draper, the heroine of the famous
"Yorick to Eliza" letters, the list of ladies who seem to have kindled
flames in that susceptible breast is almost as long and more real
than the roll of mistresses immortalized by Horace. How Mrs. Sterne at
first bore herself under her husband's ostentatious neglect there
is no direct evidence to show. That she ultimately took refuge in
indifference we can perceive, but it is to be feared that she was not
always able to maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure. So, at
least, we may suspect from the evidence of that Frenchman who met
"le bon et agréable Tristram," and his wife, at Montpellier, and who,
characteristically sympathizing with the inconstant husband, declared
that his wife's incessant pursuit of him made him pass "d'assez
mauvais moments," which he bore "with the patience of an angel."
But, on the whole, Mrs. Sterne's conduct seems by her husband's own
admissions to have been not wanting in dignity.
As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have come, though not
without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all
of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, Platonic. In saying this,
however, I am by no means prepared to assert that they would all of
them have passed muster before a prosaic and unsentimental British
jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse. Sterne's relations
with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed at last a profoundly
compromising character, and it is far from improbable that the worst
construction would have been put upon them by one of the plain-dealing
tribunals aforesaid. Certainly a young woman who leaves her mother at
York, and comes up to London to reside alone in lodgings, where she is
constantly being visited by a lover who is himself living _en garçon_
in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to
her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way.
But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally "innocent"
is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot
regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am
not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit
continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much
less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself
and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate;
and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from
the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the
generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the
restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the over-indulgence
of another which stood in at least as much need of chastenment. If his
love-affairs stopped short of the gratification of the senses, they
involved a perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate
sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-aesthesia which,
though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the
weakness, of his art.
Injurious, however, as was the effect which Sterne's philanderings
exercised upon his personal and literary character, it is not likely
that, at least at this period of his life at Sutton, they had in any
degree compromised his reputation. For this he had provided in
other ways, and principally by his exceedingly injudicious choice
of associates. "As to the squire of the parish," he remarks in the
Memoir, "I cannot say we were on a very friendly footing, but at
Stillington the family of the C[rofts] showed us every kindness: 'twas
most agreeable to be within a mile and a half of an amiable family who
were ever cordial friends;" and who, it may be added, appear to have
been Sterne's only reputable acquaintances. For the satisfaction of
all other social needs he seems to have resorted to a companionship
which it was hardly possible for a clergyman to frequent without
scandal--that, namely, of John Hall Stevenson and the kindred spirits
whom he delighted to collect around him at Skelton--familiarly known
as "Crazy" Castle. The club of the "Demoniacs," of which Sterne makes
mention in his letters, may have had nothing very diabolical about it
except the name; but, headed as it was by the suspected ex-comrade
of Wilkes and his brother monks of Medmenham, and recruited by gay
militaires like Colonels Hall and Lee, and "fast" parsons like the
Rev. "Panty" Lascelles (mock godson of Pantagruel), it was certainly
a society in which the Vicar of Sutton could not expect to enroll
himself without offence. We may fairly suppose, therefore, that it
was to his association with these somewhat too "jolly companions" that
Sterne owed that disfavour among decorous country circles, of which
he shows resentful consciousness in the earlier chapters of _Tristram
Shandy._
But before we finally cross the line which separates the life of the
obscure country parson from the life of the famous author, a word or
two must be said of that piece of writing which was alluded to a few
pages back as the only known exception to the generally "professional"
character of all Sterne's compositions of the pre-Shandian era. This
was a piece in the allegoric-satirical style, which, though not very
remarkable in itself, may not improbably have helped to determine its
author's thoughts in the direction of more elaborate literary efforts.
In the year 1758 a dispute had arisen between a certain Dr. Topham, an
ecclesiastical lawyer in large local practice, and Dr. Fountayne, the
then Dean of York. This dispute had originated in an attempt on the
part of the learned civilian, who appears to have been a pluralist of
an exceptionally insatiable order, to obtain the reversion of one of
his numerous offices for his son, alleging a promise made to him on
that behalf by the Archbishop. This promise--which had, in fact, been
given--was legally impossible of performance, and upon the failure
of his attempt the disappointed Topham turned upon the Dean, and
maintained that by _him_, at any rate, he had been promised another
place of the value of five guineas per annum, and appropriately known
as the "Commissaryship of Pickering and Pocklington." This the Dean
denied, and thereupon Dr. Topham fired off a pamphlet setting forth
the circumstances of the alleged promise, and protesting against the
wrong inflicted upon him by its non-performance. At this point Sterne
came to Dr. Fountayne's assistance with a sarcastic apologue entitled
the "History of a good Warm Watchcoat," which had "hung up many years
in the parish vestry," and showing how this garment had so excited
the cupidity of Trim, the sexton, that "nothing would serve him but
he must take it home, to have it converted into a warm under-petticoat
for his wife and a jerkin for himself against the winter." The
symbolization of Dr. Topham's snug "patent place," which he wished
to make hereditary, under the image of the good warm watchcoat, is of
course plain enough; and there is some humour in the way in which the
parson (the Archbishop) discovers that his incautious assent to Trim's
request had been given _ultra vires._ Looking through the parish
register, at the request of a labourer who wished to ascertain his
age, the parson finds express words of bequest leaving the watch-coat
"for the sole use of the sextons of the church for ever, to be worn by
them respectively on winterly cold nights," and at the moment when he
is exclaiming, "Just Heaven! what an escape have I had! Give this
for a petticoat to Trim's wife!" he is interrupted by Trim himself
entering the vestry with "the coat actually ript and cut out" ready
for conversion into a petticoat for his wife. And we get a foretaste
of the familiar Shandian impertinence in the remark which follows,
that "there are many good similes subsisting in the world, but which I
have neither time to recollect nor look for," which would give you an
idea of the parson's astonishment at Trim's impudence. The emoluments
of "Pickering and Pocklington" appear under the figure of a "pair of
black velvet plush breeches" which ultimately "got into the possession
of one Lorry Slim (Sterne himself, of course), an unlucky wight, by
whom they are still worn: in truth, as you will guess, they are very
thin by this time."
The whole thing is the very slightest of "skits;" and the quarrel
having been accommodated before it could be published, it was
not given to the world until after its author's death. But it is
interesting, as his first known attempt in this line of composition,
and the grasping sexton deserves remembrance, if only as having handed
down his name to a far more famous descendant.