FRANCE AND ITALY.--MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER.--RETURN TO
ENGLAND.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOL. IX.--"THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY."
(1765-1768.)
In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, Sterne
set out on what was afterwards to become famous as the "Sentimental
Journey through France and Italy." Not, of course, that all the
materials for that celebrated piece of literary travel were collected
on this occasion. From London as far as Lyons his way lay by a route
which he had already traversed three years before, and there is
reason to believe that at least some of the scenes in the _Sentimental
Journey_ were drawn from observation made on his former visit. His
stay in Paris was shorter this year than it had been on the previous
occasion. A month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin,
and by the middle of November he had reached Turin. From this city he
writes, with his characteristic simplicity: "I am very happy, and
have found my way into a dozen houses already. To-morrow I am to be
presented to the King, and when that ceremony is over I shall have my
hands full of engagements." From Turin he went on, by way of Milan,
Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Florence, where, after three days'
stay, "to dine with our Plenipo," he continued his journey to
Rome. Here, and at Naples, he passed the winter of 1765-'66,[1]
and prolonged his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well
advanced. In the month of May he was again on his way home, through
France, and had had a meeting, after two years' separation from them,
with his wife and daughter. His account of it to Hall Stevenson is
curious: "Never man," he writes, "has been such a wild-goose chase
after his wife as I have been. After having sought her in five or six
different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comté. Poor woman!"
he adds, "she was very cordial, &c." The &c. is charming. But
her cordiality had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more
impassioned sentiment, for she "begged to stay another year or so."
As to "my Lydia"--the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne's having
turned out of his road--she, he says, "pleases me much. I found her
greatly improved in everything I wished her." As to himself: "I am
most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. 'Tis at
least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these
latter days, that I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall
die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony,
notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy
on that account." The "fears" and the melancholy were, alas! to be
justified, rather than the "good spirits;" and the shears of Atropos
were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty
months, upon that fragile thread of life.
[Footnote 1: It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French
valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the _Sentimental
Journey_, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour
(if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from
which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed
out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.]
By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very
soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of
_Tristram Shandy_. He was writing, however, as it should seem,
under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two
establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her
husband--who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for
her material comfort--was busy making provision for her to change her
quarters to Chalons. He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty
pounds, and begging him to make her all further advances that might be
necessary. "I have," he says, "such entire confidence in my wife
that she spends as little as she can, though she is confined to no
particular sum ... and you may rely--in case she should draw for fifty
or a hundred pounds extraordinary--that it and every demand shall
be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole
Shandian family are ready to stand security." Later on, too, he writes
that "a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me for six
weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. Germain;" and he adds--in
a tone the sincerity of which he would himself have probably found
a difficulty in gauging--"if my wife should grow worse (having had a
very poor account of her in my daughter's last), I cannot think of her
being without me; and, however expensive the journey would be, I would
fly to Avignon to administer consolation to her and my poor girl.[1]"
[Footnote 1: There can be few admirers of Sterne's genius who
would not gladly incline, whenever they find it possible, to Mr.
Fitzgerald's very indulgent estimate of his disposition. But this
is only one of many instances in which the charity of the
biographer appears to me to be, if the expression may be permitted,
unconscionable. I can, at any rate, find no warrant whatever in the
above passage for the too kindly suggestion that "Sterne was actually
negotiating a journey to Paris as 'bear-leader' to a young nobleman
(an odious office, to which he had special aversion), _in order_ that
he might with economy fly over to Avignon."]
The necessity for this flight, however, did not arise. Better
accounts of Mrs. Sterne arrived a few weeks later, and the husband's
consolations were not required.
Meanwhile the idyll of Captain Shandy's love-making was gradually
approaching completion; and there are signs to be met with--in
the author's correspondence, that is to say, and not in the work
itself--that he was somewhat impatient to be done with it, at any rate
for the time. "I shall publish," he says, "late in this year; and the
next I shall begin a new work of four volumes, which, when finished,
I shall continue _Tristram_ with fresh spirit." The new work in
four volumes (not destined to get beyond one) was, of course, the
_Sentimental Journey_. His ninth volume of _Tristram Shandy_ was
finished by the end of the year, and at Christmas he came up to
London, after his usual practice, to see to its publication and enjoy
the honours of its reception. The book passed duly through the press,
and in the last days of January was issued the announcement of its
immediate appearance. Of the character of its welcome I can find no
other evidence than that of Sterne himself, in a letter addressed to
M. Panchaud some fortnight after the book appeared. "'Tis liked the
best of all here;" but, with whatever accuracy this may have expressed
the complimentary opinion of friends, or even the well-considered
judgment of critics, one can hardly believe that it enjoyed anything
like the vogue of the former volumes. Sterne, however, would be the
less concerned for this, that his head was at the moment full of
his new venture. "I am going," he writes, "to publish _A Sentimental
Journey through France and Italy_. The undertaking is protected and
highly encouraged by all our noblesse. 'Tis subscribed for at a great
rate 'twill be an original, in large quarto, the subscription half a
guinea. If you (Panchaud) can procure me the honour of a few names of
men of science or fashion, I shall thank you: they will appear in good
company, as all the nobility here have honoured me with their names."
As was usual with him, however, he postponed commencing it until he
should have returned to Coxwold; and, as was equally usual with
him, he found it difficult to tear himself away from the delights
of London. Moreover, there was in the present instance a special
difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations
with the history of Sterne's literary work, it would be impossible,
even in the most strictly critical and least general of biographies,
to observe complete silence. I refer, of course, to the famous and
furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper--the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza
Letters. Of the affair itself but little need be said. I have already
stated my own views on the general subject of Sterne's love affairs;
and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their innocence
or otherwise in relation to this particular amourette. I will only
say that were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean
which must be found between Thackeray's somewhat too harsh and Mr.
Fitzgerald's considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie,
it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter's
extreme. This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an
Indian "grass widow" was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage
in Sterne's life. On the best and most charitable view of it, the
flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which
it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most
deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It
was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne's age
and profession; and when it is added that Yorick's attentions to Eliza
were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears
of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him,
its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways.
No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, than the
sentimental lover began to feel so strongly the need of a female
consoler, that his heart seems to have softened, insensibly, even
towards his wife. "I am unhappy," he writes plaintively to Lydia
Sterne. "Thy mother and thyself at a distance from me--and what can
compensate for such a destitution? For God's sake persuade her to come
and fix in England! for life is too short to waste in separation;
and while she lives in one country and I in another, many people will
suppose it proceeds from choice"--a supposition, he seems to imply,
which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her absence scarcely
suffices to refute. "Besides"--a word in which there is here almost
as much virtue as in an "if"--"I want thee near me, thou child and
darling of my heart. I am in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia's eyes
will smart with weeping when I tell her the cause that just now
affects me." And then his sensibilities brim over, and into his
daughter's ear he pours forth his lamentations over the loss of her
mother's rival. "I am apprehensive the dear friend I mentioned in my
last letter is going into a decline. I was with her two days ago, and
I never beheld a being so altered. She has a tender frame, and looks
like a drooping lily, for the roses are fled from her cheeks. I can
never see or talk to this incomparable woman without bursting into
tears. I have a thousand obligations to her, and I love her more than
her whole sex, if not all the world put together. She has a delicacy,"
&c., &c. And after reciting a frigid epitaph which he had written,
"expressive of her modest worth," he winds up with--"Say all that is
kind of me to thy mother; and believe me, my Lydia, that I love
thee most truly." My excuse for quoting thus fully from this most
characteristic letter, and, indeed, for dwelling at all upon these
closing incidents of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their
striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent
nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of
criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his
literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains the
sentimentalist in art.
In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear himself away
from London and its joys, and with painful slowness, for he was now in
a wretched state of health, to make his way back to Yorkshire. "I have
got conveyed," he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall
Stevenson--"I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous
goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the bottom of my chaise
most of the route, upon a large pillow which I had the _prévoyance_ to
purchase before I set out. I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor
to-night, and if possible to York the next. I know not what is the
matter with me, but some derangement presses hard upon this machine.
Still, I think it will not be overset this bout"--another of those
utterances of a cheerful courage under the prostration of pain which
reveal to us the manliest side of Sterne's nature. On reaching Coxwold
his health appears to have temporarily mended, and in June we find him
giving a far better account of himself to another of his friends. The
fresh Yorkshire air seems to have temporarily revived him, and to his
friend, Arthur Lee, a young American, he writes thus: "I am as happy
as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you could see in how princely a
manner I live. 'Tis a land of plenty. I sit down alone to dinner--fish
and wild-fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with cream and all the
simple plenty which a rich valley under Hamilton Hills can produce,
with a clean cloth on my table, and a bottle of wine on my right hand
to drink your health. I have a hundred hens and chickens about my
yard; and not a parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout but
he brings it as an offering to me." Another of his correspondents at
this period was the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity I have been
unable to trace, but who is addressed in a manner which seems to show
Sterne's anxiety to expel the old flame of Eliza's kindling by a new
one. There is little, indeed, of the sentimentalizing strain in which
he was wont to sigh at the feet of Mrs. Draper, but in its place
there is a freedom of a very prominent, and here and there of a highly
unpleasant, kind. To his friends, Mr. and Mrs. James, too, he writes
frequently during this year, chiefly to pour out his soul on the
subject of Eliza; and Mrs. James, who is always addressed in company
with her husband, enjoys the almost unique distinction of being the
only woman outside his own family circle whom Sterne never approaches
in the language of artificial gallantry, but always in that of simple
friendship and respect.[1] Meanwhile, however, the _Sentimental
Journey_ was advancing at a reasonable rate of speed towards
completion. In July he writes of himself as "now beginning to be truly
busy" on it, "the pain and sorrows of this life having retarded its
progress."
[Footnote 1: To this period of Sterne's life, it may here be remarked,
is to be assigned the dog-Latin letter ("and very sad dog-Latin too")
so justly animadverted upon by Thackeray, and containing a passage
of which Madame de Medalle, it is to be charitably hoped, had no
suspicion of the meaning. Mr. Fitzgerald, through an oversight in
translation, and understanding Sterne to say that he himself, and
not his correspondent, Hall Stevenson, was "quadraginta et plus annos
natus," has referred it to an earlier date. The point, however, is of
no great importance, as the untranslatable passage in the letter would
be little less unseemly in 1754 or 1755 than in 1768, at the beginning
of which year, since the letter is addressed from London to Hall
Stevenson, then in Yorkshire, it must, in fact, have been written.]
His wife and daughter were about to rejoin him in the autumn, and he
looked forward to settling them at a hired house in York before going
up to town to publish his new volumes. On the 1st of October the two
ladies arrived at York, and the next day the reunited family went on
to Coxwold. The meeting with the daughter gave Sterne one of the
few quite innocent pleasures which he was capable of feeling; and
he writes next day to Mr. and Mrs. James in terms of high pride
and satisfaction of his recovered child. "My girl has returned,"
he writes, in the language of playful affection, "an elegant,
accomplished little slut. My wife--but I hate," he adds, with
remarkable presence of mind, "to praise my wife. 'Tis as much as
decency will allow to praise my daughter. I suppose," he concludes,
"they will return next summer to France. They leave me in a month to
reside at York for the winter, and I stay at Coxwold till the 1st
of January." This seems to indicate a little longer delay in the
publication of the _Sentimental Journey_ than he had at first
intended; for it seems that the book was finished by the end of
November. On the 28th of that month he writes to the Earl of ---- (as
his daughter's foolish mysteriousness has headed the letter), to thank
him for his letter of inquiry about Yorick, and to say that Yorick
"has worn out both his spirits and body with the _Sentimental
Journey_. 'Tis true that an author must feel himself, or his reader
will not" (how mistaken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian
canon will be noted hereafter), "but I have torn my whole frame into
pieces by my feelings. I believe the brain stands as much in need of
recruiting as the body; therefore I shall set out for town the 20th of
next month, after having recruited myself at York." Then he adds the
strange observation, "I might, indeed, solace myself with my wife (who
is come from France), but, in fact, I have long been a sentimental
being, whatever your Lordship may think to the contrary. The world
has imagined because I wrote _Tristram Shandy_ that I was myself more
Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured world we live
in, and we are often painted in divers colours, according to the ideas
each one frames in his head." It would, perhaps, have been scarcely
possible for Sterne to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of
life so concisely as in this naïve passage. The connubial affections
are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to
the sentimental emotions--as the lower to the higher. To indulge the
former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and carnal; to
devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one's
days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex
indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.
Meanwhile, however, that fragile abode of sentimentalism--that frame
which had just been "torn to pieces" by the feelings--was becoming
weaker than its owner supposed. Much of the exhaustion which Sterne
had attributed to the violence of his literary emotions was no doubt
due to the rapid decline of bodily powers which, unknown to him, were
already within a few months of their final collapse. He did not set
out for London on the 20th of December, as he had promised himself,
for on that day he was only just recovering from "an attack of fever
and bleeding at the lungs," which had confined him to his room for
nearly three weeks. "I am worn down to a shadow," he writes on the
23rd, "but as my fever has left me, I set off the latter end of next
week with my friend, Mr. Hall, for town." His home affairs had already
been settled. Early in December it had been arranged that his wife
and daughter should only remain at York during the winter, and should
return to the Continent in the spring. "Mrs. Sterne's health," he
writes, "is insupportable in England. She must return to France, and
justice and humanity forbid me to oppose it." But separation from his
wife meant separation from his daughter; it was this, of course, which
was the really painful parting, and it is to the credit of Sterne's
disinterestedness of affection for Lydia, that in his then state
of health he brought himself to consent to her leaving him. But he
recognized that it was for the advantage of her prospect of settling
herself in life that she should go with her mother, who seemed
"inclined to establish her in France, where she has had many
advantageous offers." Nevertheless "his heart bled," as he wrote to
Lee, when he thought of parting with his child. "'Twill be like the
separation of soul and body, and equal to nothing but what passes at
that tremendous moment; and like it in one respect, for she will be in
one kingdom while I am in another." Thus was this matter settled, and
by the 1st of January Sterne had arrived in London for the last time,
with the two volumes of the _Sentimental Journey_. He took up his
quarters at the lodgings in Bond Street (No. 41), which he had
occupied during his stay in town the previous year, and entered at
once upon the arrangements for publication. These occupied two full
months, and on the 27th of February the last work, as it was destined
to be, of the Rev. Mr. Yorick was issued to the world.
Its success would seem to have been immediate, and was certainly great
and lasting. In one sense, indeed, it was far greater than had been,
or than has since been, attained by _Tristram Shandy_. The compliments
which courteous Frenchmen had paid the author upon his former work,
and which his simple vanity had swallowed whole and unseasoned,
without the much-needed grain of salt, might, no doubt, have been
repeated to him with far greater sincerity as regards the _Sentimental
Journey_, had he lived to receive them. Had any Frenchman told him a
year or two afterwards that the latter work was "almost as much known
in Paris as in London, at least among men of condition and learning,"
he would very likely have been telling him no more than the truth. The
_Sentimental Journey_ certainly acquired what _Tristram Shandy_ never
did--a European reputation. It has been translated into Italian,
German, Dutch, and even Polish; and into French again and again.
The French, indeed, have no doubt whatever of its being Sterne's
_chef-d'oeuvre_; and one has only to compare a French translation of
it with a rendering of _Tristram Shandy_ into the same language to
understand, and from our neighbours' point of view even to admit, the
justice of their preference. The charms of the _Journey_, its grace,
wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to that most graceful of
languages, and reproduce themselves readily enough therein; while,
on the other hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate
mystifications, the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear
intolerably awkward and _bizzare_ in their French dress; and, what
is much more strange, even the point of the _double entendres_ is
sometimes unaccountably lost. Were it not that the genuine humour of
_Tristram Shandy_ in a great measure evaporates in translation, one
would be forced to admit that the work which is the more catholic
in its appeal to appreciation is the better of the two. But, having
regard to this disappearance of genuine and unquestionable excellences
in the process of translation, I see no good reason why those
Englishmen--the great majority, I imagine--who prefer _Tristram
Shandy_ to the _Sentimental Journey_ should feel any misgivings as to
the soundness of their taste. The humour which goes the deepest
down beneath the surface of things is the most likely to become
inextricably interwoven with those deeper fibres of associations which
lie at the roots of a language; and it may well happen, therefore,
though from the cosmopolitan point of view it is a melancholy
reflection, that the merit of a book, to those who use the language
in which it is written, bears a direct ratio to the persistence of its
refusal to yield up its charm to men of another tongue.
The favour, however, with which the _Sentimental Journey_ was received
abroad, and which it still enjoys (the last French translation is
very recent), is, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, "worthily merited, if grace,
nature, true sentiment, and exquisite dramatic power be qualities that
are to find a welcome. And apart," he adds, "from these attractions
it has a unique charm of its own, a flavour, so to speak, a fragrance
that belongs to that one book alone. Never was there such a charming
series of complete little pictures, which for delicacy seem like the
series of medallions done on Sèvres china which we sometimes see in
old French cabinets.... The figures stand out brightly, and in what
number and variety! Old Calais, with its old inn; M. Dessein, the
monk, one of the most artistic figures on literary canvas; the
charming French lady whom M. Dessein shut into the carriage with the
traveller; the _débonnaire_ French captain, and the English travellers
returning, touched in with only a couple of strokes; La Fleur, the
valet; the pretty French glove-seller, whose pulse the Sentimental one
felt; her husband, who passed through the shop and pulled off his hat
to Monsieur for the honour he was doing him; the little maid in the
bookseller's shop, who put her little present _à part_; the charming
Greuze 'grisset,' who sold him the ruffles; the reduced chevalier
selling _patés_; the groups of beggars at Montreuil; the _fade_
Count de Bissie, who read Shakespeare; and the crowd of minor
_croquis_--postilions, landlords, notaries, soldiers, abbés,
_précieuses_, maids--merely touched, but touched with wonderful art,
make up a surprising collection of distinct and graphic characters."