LIFE IN THE SOUTH.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--VOLS. VII. AND VIII.--SECOND
SET OF SERMONS.
(1762-1765.)
The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy
and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time
was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from
the true--in ridding Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham
admirers. This is not to say, of course, that there might not have
been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular
favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's peculiar methods
must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited
gain. The fifth and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere
eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere
eccentricity had begun to pall. But if this were the sole explanation
of the book's declining popularity, we should have to admit that the
adverse judgment of the public had been delayed too long for justice,
and had passed over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences.
For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good
touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in its
concluding chapters; and the fifth and sixth volumes may, at any rate,
quite safely challenge favourable comparison with the fourth--the
poorest, I venture to think, of the whole series. There is nothing
in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most
wearisome exercise in _double entendre_, Slawkenbergius's Tale;
nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the
consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap
with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those
mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a
great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour
of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic
order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in
the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives animation to the volume
almost from beginning to end. The arrival of the news of Bobby
Shandy's death, and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic
father and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable
absurdity, and the "Tristrapaedia," with its ingenious project for
opening up innumerable "tracks of inquiry" before the mind of the
pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of the auxiliary verbs, is
in the author's happiest vein. The sixth volume, again, which contains
the irresistible dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great
question of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if not
wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully entitled to
rank beside its predecessors. On the whole, therefore, it must be said
that the colder reception accorded to this instalment of the novel,
as compared with the previous one, can hardly be justified on sound
critical grounds. But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact,
the cause of _Tristram's_ declining popularity may be confidently
inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its admirably
vivid and spirited scenes of Continental travel, and the eighth and
ninth, with their charming narrative of Captain Shandy's love affair,
were but slightly more successful. The readers whom this, the third
instalment of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine,
those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for the former;
who had been caught by the writer's eccentricity, without appreciating
his insight into character and his graphic power, and who had seen no
other aspects of his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities
which, after first amusing, had begun, in the natural course of
things, to weary them.
Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the Southern warmth
to that buoyancy which never long deserted them, Sterne had begun to
set to work upon a new volume. His letters show that this was not
the seventh but the eighth; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture, that
the materials ultimately given to the world in the former volume were
originally designed for another work, appears exceedingly probable.
But for some time after his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it
would seem, to resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable,
through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies might
anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to Hall Stevenson, "of
an epidemic vile fever which killed hundreds about me. The physicians
here," he adds, "are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most
ignorant of all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out
of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature.
She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and
I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so
that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you
all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become
"stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am," he says,
"busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over
head and ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that
the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy's
ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that
series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded
his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful
Tristram. It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these
sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that
he refers to, when speaking in this letter of "hints and projects
for other works." Originally intended to form a part of the volume
afterwards published as the _Sentimental Journey_, it was found
necessary--under pressure, it is to be supposed, of insufficient
matter--to work them up instead into an interpolated seventh volume
of _Tristram Shandy_. At the moment, however, he no doubt as little
foresaw this as he did the delay which was to take place before any
continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contemplated no very
long absence from England. "When I have reaped the benefit of the
winter at Toulouse, I cannot see I have anything more to do with it.
Therefore, after having gone with my wife and girl to Bagnères, I
shall return from whence I came." Already, however, one can perceive
signs of his having too presumptuously marked out his future. "My
wife wants to stay another year, to save money; and this opposition of
wishes, though it will not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twill not be as
sweet as sugar." And again: "If the snows will suffer me, I propose to
spend two or three months at Barége or Bagnères; but my dear wife is
against all schemes of additional expense, which wicked propensity
(though not of despotic power) yet I cannot suffer--though,
by-the-bye, laudable enough. But she may talk; I will go my own way,
and she will acquiesce without a word of debate on the subject. Who
can say so much in praise of his wife? Few, I trow." The tone of
contemptuous amiability shows pretty clearly that the relations
between husband and wife had in nowise improved. But wives do not
always lose all their influence over husbands' wills along with the
power over their affections; and it will be seen that Sterne did _not_
make his projected winter trip to Bagnères, and that he did remain
at Toulouse for a considerable part of the second year for which Mrs.
Sterne desired to prolong their stay. The place, however, was not to
his taste; and he was not the first traveller in France who, delighted
with the gaiety of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that French
provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is
in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion
that Sterne discovers the cause of his _ennui_ in "the eternal
platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no
originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility
itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do
not mind I shall grow most stupid and sententious." With such
apprehensions it is not surprising that he should have eagerly
welcomed any distraction that chance might offer, and in December we
find him joyfully informing his chief correspondent of the period,
Mr. Foley--who to his services as Sterne's banker seems to have added
those of a most helpful and trusted friend--that "there are a company
of English strollers arrived here who are to act comedies all the
Christmas, and are now busy in making dresses and preparing some of
our best comedies." These so-called strollers were, in fact, certain
members of the English colony in Toulouse, and their performances were
among the first of those "amateur theatrical" entertainments which
now-a-days may be said to rival the famous "morning drum-beat" of
Daniel Webster's oration, in marking the ubiquity of British boredom,
as the _reveil_ does that of British power over all the terrestrial
globe. "The next week," writes Sterne, "with a grand orchestra, we
play _The Busybody_, and the _Journey to London_ the week after; but
I have some thought of adapting it to our situation, and making it the
_Journey to Toulouse_, which, with the change of half-a-dozen scenes,
may be easily done. Thus, my dear Foley, for want of something better
we have recourse to ourselves, and strike out the best amusements we
can from such materials." "Recourse to ourselves," however, means,
in strict accuracy, "recourse to each other;" and when the amateur
players had played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of
contributing to each others' amusement, it is probable that
"recourse to ourselves," in the exact sense of the phrase, was found
ineffective--in Sterne's case, at any rate--to stave off _ennui_.
To him, with his copiously if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his
natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply the line of
Persius,
"Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex;"
but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that numerous
order of intellects which are the convivial associates, rather than
the fireside companions, of their owners, and which, when deprived
of the stimulus of external excitement, are apt to become very dull
company indeed. Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of
mind from his literary work--a form of intellectual enjoyment which,
indeed, more often presupposes than begets good spirits in such
temperaments as his. He declares, it is true, that he "sports much
with my Uncle Toby" in the volume which he is now "fabricating for the
laughing part of the world;" but if so he must have sported only after
a very desultory and dilatory fashion. On the whole one cannot escape
a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn
in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to
"the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife," which he had
left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone.
His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. The winter of
1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course,
before he changed his quarters. "The first week in June," he writes in
April to Mr. Foley, "I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household,
to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills
at Bagnères, where I expect much health and much amusement from all
corners of the earth." He talked too at this time of spending the
winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the
following April by way of Paris; "but this," he adds, "is a sketch
only," and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he was in
any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, be tempted to spend
another winter there. It did not suit his health, as he had hoped: he
complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of
ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagnères; whence after
a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he
passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places
he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter
quarters at Montpellier, where "my wife and daughter," he writes,
"purpose to stay at least a year behind me." His own intention was to
set out in February for England, "where my heart has been fled these
six months." Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic,
or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict of inclination between
himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which he speaks with such a tell-tale
affectation of philosophy. "My wife," he writes in January, "returns
to Toulouse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagnères. I, on the
contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorkshire. We all live the
longer, at least the happier, for having things our own way. This is
my conjugal maxim. I own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain
'tis not the worst." It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate,
should wish to turn his back on Montpellier. Again had the unlucky
invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness; the "sharp air" of the
place disagreed with him, and his physicians, after having him under
their hands more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed
any longer in Montpellier it would be fatal to him. How soon after
that somewhat late warning he took his departure there is no record
to show; but it is not till the middle of May that we find him writing
from Paris to his daughter. And since he there announces his intention
of leaving for England in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that
he had arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before.
His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents--trifling in
themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted. Lord
Hertford, the British Ambassador, had just taken a magnificent hotel
in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its
chapel. The message was brought him, he writes, "when I was playing
a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called
abruptly from my afternoon amusement to prepare myself for the
business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend
to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know
I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my
head." The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15--Hezekiah's admission
of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the
ambassadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the
Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests,
could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded
upon the _mal-à-propos_ text; but still it was unquestionably a fair
subject for "chaff," and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less
a person than David Hume. Gossip having magnified this into a dispute
between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle
story in a passage deriving an additional interest from its tribute to
that sweet disposition which had an equal charm for two men so utterly
unlike as the author of _Tristram Shandy_ and the author of the
_Wealth of Nations_. "I should," he writes, "be exceedingly surprised
to hear that David ever had an unpleasant contention with any man; and
if I should ever be made to believe that such an event had happened,
nothing would persuade me that his opponent was not in the wrong, for
in my life did I never meet with a being of a more placid and gentle
nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character which has given
more consequence and force to his scepticism than all the arguments of
his sophistry." The real truth of the matter was that, meeting Sterne
at Lord Hertford's table on the day when he had preached at the
Embassy Chapel, "David was disposed to make a little merry with the
parson, and in return the parson was equally disposed to make a little
merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and the company
laughed with us both." It would be absurd, of course, to identify
Sterne's latitudinarian _bonhomie_ with the higher order of tolerance;
but many a more confirmed and notorious Gallio than the clerical
humourist would have assumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a
presence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate of
Sterne's dignity, displays him to us as laudably free from hypocrisy.
But the long holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its short last act
of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In the third or fourth week
of May Sterne quitted Paris; and after a stay of a few weeks in London
he returned to the Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent
some thirty months.
Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed since the
publication of the last instalment of _Tristram Shandy_, the new one
was far from ready; and even in the "sweet retirement" of Coxwold
he seems to have made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the "sweet
retirement" itself became soon a little tedious to him. The month of
September found him already bored with work and solitude; and the fine
autumn weather of 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making
at what was even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering-place. "I
do not think," he writes, with characteristic incoherence, to Hall
Stevenson--"I do not think a week or ten days' playing the good fellow
(at this very time) so abominable a thing; but if a man could get
there cleverly, and every soul in his house in the mind to try what
could be done in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in
these affairs. Therefore, as a man may do worse things, the plain
English of all which is, that I am going to leave a few poor sheep in
the wilderness for fourteen days, and from pride and naughtiness
of heart to go see what is doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning
afterwards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now, some folks
say there is much company there, and some say not; and I believe there
is neither the one nor the other, but will be both if the world will
have patience for a month or so." Of his work he has not much to say:
"I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle Toby's amours.
There is no sitting and cudgelling one's brains whilst the sun shines
bright. 'Twill be all over in six or seven weeks; and there are dismal
weeks enow after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside." He
was anxious that his boon companion should join him at Scarborough;
but that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to content
himself with the usual gay society of the place. Three weeks, it
seems, were passed by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of
bodily and mental relaxation--weeks which he spent, he afterwards
writes, in "drinking the waters, and receiving from them marvellous
strength, had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing
the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much." By the end of the
month he was back again at Coxwold, "returned to my Philosophical Hut
to finish _Tristram_, which I calculate will be ready for the
world about Christmas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix
my headquarters at London for the winter, unless my cough pushes me
forward to your metropolis" (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), "or
that I can persuade some _gros milord_ to make a trip to you."
Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse at that thoroughly
desentimentalized "domestic interior" which the sentimentalist's
household had long presented to the view. Writing to request a
remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban--a duty which, to do
him justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed--Sterne adds
his solicitation to Mr. Foley to "do something equally essential to
rectify a mistake in the mind of your correspondent there, who, it
seems, gave her a hint not long ago 'that she was separated from me
for life.' Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may fix a
disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives amongst, 'twould
be unmerciful to let her or my daughter suffer by it. So do be so good
as to undeceive him; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect
it with impatience from her) to rejoin me."
Early in November the two new volumes of _Shandy_ began to approach
completion; for by this time Sterne had already made up his mind to
interpolate these notes of his French travels, which now do duty as
Vol. VII. "You will read," he tells Foley, "as odd a tour through
France as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel-writer
since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good-tempered satire upon
travelling--as _puppies_ travel." By the 16th of the month he had
"finished my two volumes of _Tristram_," and looked to be in London at
Christmas, "whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year.
At least I shall not defer it above another." On the 26th of January,
1765, the two new volumes were given to the world.
Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, and filled
out as it was, even so, by a process of what would now be called
"book-making," this issue will yet bear comparison, I think, with the
best of its predecessors. Its sketches of travel, though destined
to be surpassed in vigour and freedom of draftsmanship by the
_Sentimental Journey_, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want
of connexion with the story--if story it can be called--is so little
felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introduction of Mr.
Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in apparent concession to
the popular prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between
the various parts of a narrative. The first seventeen chapters are,
perhaps, as freshly delightful reading as anything in Sterne. They are
literally filled and brimming over with the exhilaration of travel:
written, or at least prepared for writing, we can clearly see, under
the full intoxicant effect which a bewildering succession of new
sights and sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest
of us, and which would set a head like Sterne's in an absolute whirl.
The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and,
putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these
chapters are, for mere fun--for that kind of clever nonsense which
only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed
the moment spontaneity fails--unsurpassed by anything of the same kind
from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for
the humorous, so sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of
humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who has outgrown
what may be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story
which begins a few chapters afterwards--that of the Abbess and Novice
of the Convent of Andouillets! The adult male person is not so much
shocked at the coarseness of this story as astounded at the bathos of
its introduction. It is as though some matchless connoisseur in wine,
after having a hundred times demonstrated the unerring discrimination
of his palate for the finest brands, should then produce some vile and
loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with all the relish with
which he seems to be swallowing it himself. This story of the Abbess
and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters,
or former volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler passages of
humour to be found there--in downright apprehension lest we should
turn out to have read these "good things," not "in," but "into," our
author. The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering
whether the finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate
equally satisfied with both. But one should, of course, add that it
is only in respect of its supposed humour that this story shakes
its readers' faith in the gifts of the narrator. As a mere piece of
story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure-painting,
it is quite perversely skilful. There is something almost irritating,
as a waste of powers on unworthy material, in the prettiness of the
picture which Sterne draws of the preparations for the departure
of the two _religieuses_--the stir in the simple village, the
co-operating labours of the gardener and the tailor, the carpenter and
the smith, and all those other little details which bring the whole
scene before the eye so vividly that Sterne may, perhaps, in
all seriousness, and not merely as a piece of his characteristic
persiflage, have thrown in the exclamation, "I declare I am interested
in this story, and wish I had been there." Nothing, again, could be
better done than the sketch of the little good-natured, "broad-set"
gardener, who acted as the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the
indiscretions by which he was betrayed into temporary desertion of his
duties. The whole scene is Chaucerian in its sharpness of outline
and translucency of atmosphere: though there, unfortunately, the
resemblance ends. Sterne's manner of saying what we now leave unsaid
is as unlike Chaucer's, and as unlike for the worse, as it can
possibly be.
Still, a certain amount of this element of the _non nominandum_ must
be compounded for, one regrets to say, in nearly every chapter that
Sterne ever wrote; and there is certainly less than the average amount
of it in the seventh volume. Then, again, this volume contains the
famous scene with the ass--the live and genuinely touching, and not
the dead and fictitiously pathetic, animal; and that perfect piece of
comic dialogue--the interview between the puzzled English traveller
and the French commissary of the posts. To have suggested this scene
is, perhaps, the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system of the _Ancien
régime_ upon the grateful remembrance of the world. A scheme of
taxation which exacted posting-charges from a traveller who proposed
to continue his journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of
drollery infused into its mere vexatiousness; but a whole volume of
satire could hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger
light than is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the
astonished Tristram and the officer of the fisc, who had just handed
him a little bill for six livres four sous:
"'Upon what account?' said I.
"''Tis upon the part of the King,' said the commissary, heaving
up his shoulders.
"'My good friend,' quoth I, 'as sure as I am I, and you are you--'
"'And who are you?' he said.
"'Don't puzzle me,' said I. 'But it is an indubitable verity,' I
continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the
form of my asseveration,' that I owe the King of France nothing but
my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health
and pastime in the world.'
"'Pardonnez-moi,' replied the commissary. 'You are indebted to
him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, on
your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for
the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more
than three livres two sous.'
"'But I don't go by land,' said I.
"'You may if you please,' replied the commissary.
"'Your most obedient servant,' said I, making him a low bow.
"The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding,
made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by a bow
in my life. 'The devil take the serious character of these people,'
said I, aside; 'they understand no more of irony than this.' The
comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something
sealed up my lips. I could not pronounce the name.
"'Sir,' said I, collecting myself, 'it is not my intention to take
post.'
"'But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. 'You may
if you choose.'
"'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I
do not choose.'
"'But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.'
"'Ay, for the salt,' said I, 'I know.'
"'And for the post, too,' added he.
"'Defend me!' cried I. 'I travel by water. I am going down the
Rhone this very afternoon; my baggage is in the boat, and I have
actually paid nine livres for my passage.'
"'C'est tout égal--'tis all one,' said he.
"'Bon Dieu! What! pay for the way I go and for the way I do
not go?'
"'C'est tout égal,' replied the commissary.
"'The devil it is!' said I. 'But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles
first. O, England! England! thou land of liberty and climate of
good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!' cried
I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe--when
the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant,
and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at
his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church.
"'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making
me pay for going by oil.'"
[Footnote 1: It is the penalty--I suppose the just penalty--paid by
habitually extravagant humourists, that _meaning_ not being always
expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with
sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of
Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity
designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely
felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked.
The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the
commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of
exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the
revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.]
The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests
that the treatment to which he is being subjected is "contrary to the
law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:"
"'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand.
"'De par le Roi.' ''Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so
read on.... 'By all which it appears,' quoth I, having read it over
a little too rapidly, 'that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris,
he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it.'
"'Excuse me,' said the commissary, 'the spirit of the ordinance is
this, that if you set out with an intention of running post from Paris
to Avignon, &c., you shall not change that intention or mode of
travelling without first satisfying the fermiers for two posts further
than the place you repent at; and 'tis founded,' continued he, 'upon
this, that the revenues are not to fall short through your fickleness.'
"'O, by heavens!' cried I, 'if fickleness is taxable in France, we
have nothing to do but to make the best peace we can.'
"And so the peace was made."
And the volume ends with the dance of villagers on "the road between
Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto wine in all France"--that
charming little idyll which won the unwilling admiration of the least
friendly of Sterne's critics.[1]
With the close of this volume the shadowy Tristram disappears
altogether from the scene; and even the clearly-sketched figures of
Mr. and Mrs. Shandy recede somewhat into the background. The courtship
of my Uncle Toby forms the whole _motif_ and indeed almost the entire
substance, of the next volume. Of this famous episode in the novel a
great deal has been said and written, and much of the praise
bestowed upon it is certainly deserved. The artful coquetries of the
fascinating widow, and the gradual capitulation of the Captain, are
studied with admirable power of humorous insight, and described with
infinite grace and skill. But there is, perhaps, no episode in the
novel which brings out what may be called the perversity of Sterne's
animalism in a more exasperating way. It is not so much the amount
of this element as the time, place, and manner in which it makes its
presence felt. The senses must, of course, play their part in all
love affairs, except those of the angels--or the triangles; and such
writers as Byron, for instance, are quite free from the charge of
over-spiritualizing their description of the passion. Yet one might
safely say that there is far less to repel a healthy mind in the
poet's account of the amour of Juan and Haidee than is to be found in
many a passage in this volume. It is not merely that one is the poetry
and the other the prose of the sexual passion: the distinction goes
deeper, and points to a fundamental difference of attitude towards
their subject in the two writers' minds.
The success of this instalment of _Tristram Shandy_ appears to have
been slightly greater than that of the preceding one. Writing from
London, where he was once more basking in the sunshine of social
popularity, to Garrick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765): "I
have had a lucrative campaign here. _Shandy_ sells well," and "I am
taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which will more
than double the gains of _Shandy_. It goes into the world with a
prancing list _de toute la noblesse_, which will bring me in three
hundred pounds, exclusive of the sale of the copy." The list was,
indeed, extensive and distinguished enough to justify the curious
epithet which he applies to it; but the cavalcade of noble names
continued to "prance" for some considerable time without advancing.
Yet he had good reasons, according to his own account, for wishing to
push on their publication. His parsonage-house at Button had just been
burnt down through the carelessness of one of his curate's household,
with a loss to Sterne of some 350_l._ "As soon as I can," he says, "I
must rebuild it, but I lack the means at present." Nevertheless, the
new sermons continued to hang fire. Again, in April he describes the
subscription list as "the most splendid list which ever pranced before
a book since subscription came into fashion;" but though the volumes
which it was to usher into the world were then spoken of as about to
be printed "very soon," he has again in July to write of them only
as "forthcoming in September, though I fear not in time to bring them
with me" to Paris. And, as a matter of fact, they do not seem to have
made their appearance until after Sterne had quitted England on his
second and last Continental journey. The full subscription list may
have had the effect of relaxing his energies; but the subscribers had
no reason to complain when, in 1766, the volumes at last appeared.
The reception given to the first batch of sermons which Sterne had
published was quite favourable enough to encourage a repetition of the
experiment. He was shrewd enough, however, to perceive that on
this second occasion a somewhat different sort of article would be
required. In the first flush of _Tristram Shandy's_ success, and in
the first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession of the
writer and the unbounded license of the book, he could safely reckon
on as large and curious a public for _any_ sermons whatever from the
pen of Mr. Yorick. There was no need that the humourist in his pulpit
should at all resemble the humourist at his desk, or, indeed, that
he should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure. The great
desire of the world was to know what he _did_ resemble in this new
and incongruous position. Men wished to see what the queer, sly face
looked like over a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight
would be a strange and interesting one, at any rate. Five years
afterwards, however, the case was different. The public then had
already had one set of sermons, and had discovered that the humorous
Mr. Sterne was not a very different man in the pulpit from the dullest
and most decorous of his brethren. Such discoveries as these are
instructive to make, but not attractive to dwell upon; and Sterne was
fully alive to the probability that there would be no great demand for
a volume of sermons which should only illustrate for the second time
the fact that he could be as commonplace as his neighbour. He saw that
in future the Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author
of _Tristram Shandy,_ and it is not improbable that from 1760 onwards
he composed his parochial sermons with especial attention to this mode
of qualifying them for republication. There is, at any rate, no slight
critical difficulty in believing that the bulk of the sermons of 1766
can be assigned to the same literary period as the sermons of 1761.
The one set seems as manifestly to belong to the post-Shandian as
the other does to the pre-Shandian era; and in some, indeed, of
the apparently later productions the daring quaintness of style and
illustration is carried so far that, except for the fact that Sterne
had no time to spare for the composition of sermons not intended for
professional use, one would have been disposed to believe that they
neither were nor were meant to be delivered from the pulpit at all.[1]
Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power
displays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illustration
which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 considerably more
entertaining reading than those of 1761. In the first of the latter
series, for instance--the sermon on Shimei--a discourse in which there
are no very noticeable sallies of unclerical humour, the quality of
liveliness is very conspicuously present. The preacher's view of the
character of Shimei, and of his behaviour to David, is hardly that,
perhaps, of a competent historical critic, and in treating of the
Benjamite's insults to the King of Israel he appears to take no
account of the blood-feud between the house of David and the clan
to which the railer belonged; just as in commenting on Shimei's
subsequent and most abject submission to the victorious monarch,
Sterne lays altogether too much stress upon conduct which is
indicative, not so much of any exceptional meanness of disposition,
as of the ordinary suppleness of the Oriental put in fear of his life.
However, it makes a more piquant and dramatic picture to represent
Shimei as a type of the wretch of insolence and servility compact,
with a tongue ever ready to be loosed against the unfortunate, and a
knee ever ready to be bent to the strong. And thus he moralizes on his
conception:
[Footnote 1: Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some
at least of these sermons were actually composed in the capacity
of _littérateur_ and not of divine--for the press and not for the
pulpit.]
"There is not a character in the world which has so bad an influence
upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with honest
checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world will never
be undone; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both extremes: for
thou corruptest prosperity, and 'tis thou who hast broken the heart
of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits can be ambitious ones
'tis a character we never shall want. Oh! it infests the court, the
camp, the cabinet; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in
every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the
wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei,
haste! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins
and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything
takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on
heavily. Shimei doubles his speed; but 'tis the contrary way: he flies
like the wind over a sandy desert.... Stay, Shimei! 'tis your patron,
your friend, your benefactor, the man who has saved you from the
dunghill. 'Tis all one to Shimei. Shimei is the barometer of every
man's fortune; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations
from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the
simile will admit of.[1] Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs
over Shimei's brow! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the
captain of the host without success? Look not into the Court Calendar,
the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, though
not to Shimei? No matter. The worst officer of the law shall not
be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so
black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must
rise up as one man to reproach it? When it lost everything, did it
lose the right to pity too? Or did he who maketh poor as well as
maketh rich strip it of its natural powers to mollify the heart and
supple the temper of your race? Trust me you have much to answer
for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from spirits
like yours which has gradually taught the world to look upon it
as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst disgrace. And what
is it, I beseech you--what is it that men will not do to keep clear of
so sore an imputation and punishment? Is it not to fly from this
that he rises early, late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness?
that he plots, contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes,
tries all garments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as
it may favour his escape?"
And though the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with an assurance
that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we are surrounded, it is in
our power to "lay the foundation of our peace (where it ought to be)
within our own hearts," yet the preacher can, in the midst of his
earlier reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic outburst:
"O Shimei! would to Heaven, when thou wast slain, that all thy family
had been slain with thee, and not one of thy resemblance left! But
ye have multiplied exceedingly, and replenished the earth; and if I
prophesy rightly, ye will in the end subdue it."
[Footnote 1: Which are not many in the case of a _barometer_.]
Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal himself with more
strangely comical effect under the gown of the divine than in the
sermon on "The Prodigal Son." The repentant spendthrift has returned
to his father's house, and is about to confess his follies. But--
"Alas! How shall he tell his story?
"Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give
in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the
feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East; the
costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them; the
expenses of singing men and singing women; the flute, the harp, the
sackbut, and all kinds of music; the dress of the Persian Court how
magnificent! their slaves how numerous! their chariots, their homes,
their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devoured!
what expectations from strangers of condition! what exactions!
How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated
at Damascus by one of the best men in the world; that he had
lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off
with it to the Ganges; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his
best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead; that
he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to
a worker in graven images; that the images he had purchased produced
him nothing, that they could not be transported across the
wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan; that the apes
and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his
hands; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he
had brought from Egypt; that all had gone wrong from the day he
forsook his father's house?"
All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a sermon. But hear
the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe
the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what
may be called the "professional" moral of the parable, and glides
off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections,
suggested--or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested--by
the text. "I know not," he says, "whether it would be a subject
of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the
Prodigal Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of the
Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance; and that
by the elder brother he intended manifestly the more forward of the
Jews," &c. But, whether it would edify you or not, he goes on, in
effect, to say, I do not propose to provide you with edification in
that kind. "These uses have been so ably set forth in so many good
sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall turn aside from them at
present, and content myself with some reflections upon that fatal
passion which led him--and so many thousands after the example--to
gather all he had together and take his journey into a far country."
In other words, "I propose to make the parable a peg whereon to hang
a few observations on (what does the reader suppose?) the practice of
sending young men upon the Grand Tour, accompanied by a 'bear-leader,'
and herein of the various kinds of bear-leaders, and the services
which they do, and do not, render to their charges; with a few words
on society in Continental cities, and a true view of 'letters of
introduction.'" That is literally the substance of the remainder
of the sermon. And thus pleasantly does the preacher play with his
curious subject:
"But you will send an able pilot with your son--a scholar. If
wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you do
well; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or natural
philosophy but teach him to make a bow, he may be of some service
in introducing your son into good societies, and supporting him in
them when he had done. But the upshot will be generally this, that
on the most pressing occasions of addresses, if he is not a mere man
of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry, and not
the tutor to carry him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme;
he shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not only from
books but from his own experience; a man who has been employed
on such services, and thrice 'made the tour of Europe with success'--that
is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck; for if he is
such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss _valet de chambre_, some
general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months,
'if God permit,' much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at
least: he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from
Calais to Rome; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where
there is the best wine, and sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had
been left to make the tour and the bargain himself. Look at our
governor, I beseech you! See, he is an inch taller as he relates the
advantages. And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use.
But when your son gets abroad he will be taken out of his hand by
his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will pass the
greatest part of his time."
So much for the bear-leader; and now a remark or two on the young
man's chances of getting into good foreign society; and then--the
benediction:
"Let me observe, in the first place, that company which is really
good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this difficulty,
and procured him the best letters of recommendation to the
most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I answer that
he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly stands obliged to
pay on such occasions, but no more. There is nothing in which we
are so much deceived as in the advantages proposed from our connexions
and discourse with the literati, &c., in foreign parts, especially
if the experiment is made before we are matured by years or
study. Conversation is a traffic; and if you enter it without some
stock of knowledge to balance the account perpetually betwixt you,
the trade drops at once; and this is the reason, however it may be
boasted to the contrary, why travellers have so little (especially good)
conversation with the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps
conviction, that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation
of young itinerants worth the trouble of their bad language, or
the interruption of their visits."
Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put; but we seem to have got
some distance, in spirit at any rate, from Luke xv. 13; and it is with
somewhat too visible effect, perhaps, that Sterne forces his way
back into the orthodox routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth,
disappointed with his reception by "the literati," &c., seeks "an
easier society; and as bad company is always ready, and ever lying in
wait, the career is soon finished, and the poor prodigal returns--the
same object of pity with the prodigal in the Gospel." Hardly a good
enough "tag," perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the "And now to," &c.,
as a fitting close to this pointed little essay in the style of the
Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence to show that
this so-called sermon was written either after Sterne's visit to or
during his stay in France; and there is strong reason, I think, to
suppose that it was in reality neither intended for a sermon nor
actually delivered from the pulpit.
No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as this. But in
the famous discourse upon an unlucky text--the sermon preached at
the chapel of the English Embassy, in Paris--there are touches of
unclerical raillery not a few. Thus: "What a noise," he exclaims,
"among the simulants of the various virtues!... Behold Humility,
become so out of mere pride; Chastity, never once in harm's way; and
Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an Italian stage--a bladder full
of wind. Hush! the sound of that trumpet! Let not my soldier run!'
tis some good Christian giving alms. O Pity, thou gentlest of human
passions! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord they with so
loud an instrument."
Here, again, is a somewhat bold saying for a divine: "But, to avoid
all commonplace cant as much as I can on this head, I will forbear to
say, because I do not think, that 'tis a breach of Christian charity
to think or speak ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our
opinion must follow the evidence," &c. And a little later on,
commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan's question, "Does Job
serve God for nought?" he says: "It is a bad picture, and done by a
terrible master; and yet we are always copying it. Does a man from
real conviction of heart forsake his vices? The position is not to be
allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God,
and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric? Does humility clothe
and educate the unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies.
See! is he not the father of the child?" In another sermon he launches
out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which
he was certainly the last person in the world to understand--to wit,
Methodism. He asks whether, "when a poor, disconsolated, drooping
creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till
his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes till his body
is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a wonder that the mechanical
disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty
head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what
they are?" Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti-Catholic
feeling which was characteristic even of indifferentism in those
days--at any rate amongst Whig divines. But in most of them one is
liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to
which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne's sermons
upon a reader that "you often see him tottering on the verge of
laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience."