STERNE AS A WRITER.--THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM.--DR. FERRIAR'S
"ILLUSTRATIONS."
Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities which win
enduring fame for books and for their authors are not always those
to which they owe their first popularity. It may with the utmost
probability be affirmed that this was the case with _Tristram Shandy_
and with Sterne. We cannot, it is true, altogether dissociate the
permanent attractions of the novel from those characteristics of it
which have long since ceased to attract at all; the two are united in
a greater or less degree throughout the work; and this being so, it
is, of course, impossible to prove to demonstration that it was the
latter qualities, and not the former, which procured it its immediate
vogue. But, as it happens, it is possible to show that what may be
called its spurious attractions varied directly, and its real merits
inversely, as its popularity with the public of its day. In the
higher qualities of humour, in dramatic vigour, in skilful and subtle
delineation of character, the novel showed no deterioration, but, in
some instances, a marked improvement, as it proceeded; yet the second
instalment was not more popular, and most of the succeeding ones
were distinctly less popular, than the first. They had gained in many
qualities, while they had lost in only the single one of novelty; and
we may infer, therefore, with approximate certainty, that what "took
the town" in the first instance was, that quality of the book which
was strangest at its first appearance. The mass of the public read,
and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really
only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digressions, the audacious
impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the
air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine
days' wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been
prepared to pronounce _Tristram Shandy_ a work as original in scheme
and conception as it was eccentric. Some there were, no doubt, who
perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and
the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of
Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered
students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had "seen
something like it before." But no single reader, no single critic of
the time, appears to have combined the knowledge necessary for tracing
these three characteristics of the novel to their respective sources;
and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which the
books and authors from whom they were imitated had been laid under
contribution. No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing
his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from
Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred
whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without
acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his
mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own. Nay, it was not
till full fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were
detected, or, at any rate, revealed to the world; and, with an irony
which Sterne himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a
sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective. In
1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his _Illustrations of Sterne_, and
the prefatory sonnet, in which he solicits pardon for his too minute
investigations, is sufficient proof of the curiously reverent spirit
in which he set about his damaging task:
"Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways
Of antic wit, and quibbling mazes drear,
Let not thy shade malignant censure fear,
If aught of inward mirth my search betrays.
Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days,
Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear," &c.
Thus commences Dr. Ferriar's apology, which, however, can hardly
be held to cover his offence; for, as a matter of fact, Sterne's
borrowings extend to a good deal besides "mirth;" and some of the
most unscrupulous of these forced loans are raised from passages of a
perfectly serious import in the originals from which they are taken.
Here, however, is the list of authors to whom Dr. Ferriar holds Sterne
to have been more or less indebted: Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville,
Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or
pseudonym of "Gabriel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop
Hall. The catalogue is a reasonably long one; but it is not, of
course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally freely from
every author named in it. His obligations to some of them are, as Dr.
Ferriar admits, but slight. From Rabelais, besides his vagaries of
narrative, Sterne took, no doubt, the idea of the _Tristra-paedia_
(by descent from the "education of Pantagruel," through "Martinus
Scriblerus"); but though he has appropriated bodily the passage in
which Friar John attributes the beauty of his nose to the pectoral
conformation of his nurse, he may be said to have constructively
acknowledged the debt in a reference to one of the characters in the
Rabelaisian dialogue.[1]
[Footnote 1: "There is no cause but one," said my Uncle Toby, "why
one man's nose is longer than another, but because that God pleases to
have it so." "That is Grangousier's solution," said my father. "'Tis
He," continued my Uncle Toby, "who makes us all, and frames and puts
us together in such forms ... and for such ends as is agreeable to
His infinite wisdom."--_Tristram Shandy_, vol. iii. c. 41. "Par ce,
répondit Grangousier, qu'ainsi Dieu l'a voulu, lequel nous fait en
cette forme et cette fin selon divin arbitre."--_Rabelais_, book i. c.
41. In another place, however (vol. viii. c. 3), Sterne has borrowed a
whole passage from this French humourist without any acknowledgment at
all.]
Upon Beroalde, again, upon D'Aubigné, and upon Bouchet he has made no
direct and _verbatim_ depredations. From Bruscambille he seems to have
taken little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious
buffoonery of vol. iii. c. 30, _et sqq._; and to Scarron he, perhaps,
owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the _Sentimental
Journey_, an incident which, it must be owned, he vastly improved in
the taking. All this, however, does not amount to very much, and it
is only when we come to Dr. Ferriar's collations of _Tristram Shandy_
with the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ that we begin to understand what
feats Sterne was capable of as a plagiarist. He must, to begin with,
have relied with cynical confidence on the conviction that famous
writers are talked about and not read, for he sets to work with the
scissors upon Burton's first page:
"Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world, the
principal and mighty work of God; wonder of nature, as Zoroaster calls
him; _audacis naturae miraculum_, the marvel of marvels, as Plato; the
abridgment and epitome of the world, as Pliny," &c. Thus Burton; and,
with a few additions of his own, and the substitution of Aristotle for
Plato as the author of one of the descriptions, thus Sterne: "Who made
MAN with powers which dart him from heaven to earth in a moment--that
great, that most excellent and noble creature of the world, the
miracle of nature, as Zoroaster, in his book [Greek: peri phuseos],
called him--the Shekinah of the Divine Presence, as Chrysostom--the
image of God, as Moses--the ray of Divinity, as Plato--the marvel
of marvels, as Aristotle," &c.[1] And in the same chapter, in the
"Fragment upon Whiskers," Sterne relates how a "decayed kinsman"
of the Lady Baussiere "ran begging, bareheaded, on one side of her
palfrey, conjuring her by the former bonds of friendship, alliance,
consanguinity, &c.--cousin, aunt, sister, mother--for virtue's sake,
for your own sake, for mine, for Christ's sake, remember me! pity me!"
And again he tells how a "devout, venerable, hoary-headed man" thus
beseeched her: "'I beg for the unfortunate. Good my lady, 'tis for
a prison--for an hospital; 'tis for an old man--a poor man undone by
shipwreck, by suretyship, by fire. I call God and all His angels to
witness, 'tis to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry--'tis to comfort
the sick and the brokenhearted.' The Lady Baussiere rode on.[2]"
[Footnote 1: _Tristram Shandy_, vol. v.c. 1.]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._]
But now compare this passage from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_:
"A poor decayed kinsman of his sets upon him by the way, in all
his jollity, and runs begging, bareheaded, by him, conjuring him by
those former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, &c., 'uncle,
cousin, brother, father, show some pity for Christ's sake, pity a
sick man, an old man,' &c.; he cares not--ride on: pretend sickness,
inevitable loss of limbs, plead suretyship or shipwreck, fire,
common calamities, show thy wants and imperfections, take God
and all His angels to witness ... put up a supplication to him in
the name of a thousand orphans, an hospital, a spittle, a prison, as
he goes by ... ride on."[1]
[Footnote 1: Burton: _Anat. Mel._, p. 269.]
Hardly a casual coincidence this. But it is yet more unpleasant to
find that the mock philosophic reflections with which Mr. Shandy
consoles himself on Bobby's death, in those delightful chapters on
that event, are not taken, as they profess to be, direct from the
sages of antiquity, but have been conveyed through, and "conveyed"
from, Burton.
"When Agrippina was told of her son's death," says Sterne, "Tacitus
informs us that, not being able to moderate her passions, she abruptly
broke off her work." Tacitus does, it is true, inform us of this. But
it was undoubtedly Burton (_Anat. Mel._, p. 213) who informed Sterne
of it. So, too, when Mr. Shandy goes on to remark upon death that
"'Tis an inevitable chance--the first statute in Magna Charta--it is
an everlasting Act of Parliament, my dear brother--all must die," the
agreement of his views with those of Burton, who had himself said
of death, "'Tis an inevitable chance--the first statute in Magna
Charta--an everlasting Act of Parliament--all must die,[2]" is even
textually exact.
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 215.]
In the next passage, however, the humourist gets the better of the
plagiarist, and we are ready to forgive the theft for the happily
comic turn which he gives to it.
Burton:
"Tully was much grieved for his daughter Tulliola's death at first,
until such time that he had confirmed his mind by philosophical precepts;
then he began to triumph over fortune and grief, and for her
reception into heaven to be much more joyed than before he was
troubled for her loss."
Sterne:
"When Tully was bereft of his daughter, at first he laid it to his
heart, he listened to the voice of nature, and modulated his own unto
it. O my Tullia! my daughter! my child!--Still, still, still--'twas O
my Tullia, my Tullia! Me thinks I see my Tullia, I hear my Tullia, I
talk with my Tullia. But as soon as he began to look into the stores
of philosophy, and _consider how many excellent things might be said
upon the occasion_, nobody on earth can conceive, says the great
orator, how happy, how joyful it made me."
"Kingdoms and provinces, cities and towns," continues Burton, "have
their periods, and are consumed." "Kingdoms and provinces, and towns
and cities," exclaims Mr. Shandy, throwing the sentence, like
the "born orator" his son considered him, into the rhetorical
interrogative, "have they not their periods?" "Where," he proceeds,
"is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos, and Persepolis, and
Agrigentum? What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of
Cyzicum and Mytilene? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon"
(and all, with the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by
Burton) "are now no more." And then the famous consolatory letter
from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of Tullia is laid under
contribution--Burton's rendering of the Latin being followed almost
word for word. "Returning out of Asia," declaims Mr. Shandy, "when I
sailed from Aegina towards Megara" (when can this have been? thought
my Uncle Toby), "I began to view the country round about. Aegina
was behind me, Megara before," &c., and so on, down to the final
reflection of the philosopher, "Remember that thou art but a man;" at
which point Sterne remarks coolly, "Now, my Uncle Toby knew not that
this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius's consolatory
letter to Tully"--the thing to be really known being that the
paragraph was, in fact, Servius Sulpicius filtered through Burton.
Again, and still quoting from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Mr. Shandy
remarks how "the Thracians wept when a child was born, and feasted and
made merry when a man went out of the world; and with reason." He then
goes on to lay predatory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian,
which Burton had quoted before him: "Is it not better not to hunger at
all, than to eat? not to thirst, than to take physic to cure it?"
(why not "than to drink to satisfy thirst?" as Lucian wrote and Burton
translated). "Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, love
and melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a
galled traveller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his
journey afresh?" Then, closing his Burton and opening his Bacon at the
_Essay on Death_; he adds: "There is no terror, brother Toby, in its
(Death's) looks but what it borrows from groans and convulsions, and"
(here parody forces its way in) "the blowing of noses, and the wiping
away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man's bed-room;"
and with one more theft from Burton, after Seneca: "Consider, brother
Toby, when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not," this
extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes.
Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaint old writer of whom
he has here made such free use. Several other instances of word
for word appropriation might be quoted from this and the succeeding
volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The apostrophe to "blessed health,"
in c. xxxiii. of vol. v. is taken direct from the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_; so is the phrase, "He has a gourd for his head and a
pippin for his heart," in c. ix.; so is the jest about Franciscus
Ribera's computation of the amount of cubic space required by the
souls of the lost; so is Hilarion the hermit's comparison of his body
with its unruly passions to a kicking ass. And there is a passage in
the _Sentimental Journey_, the "Fragment in the Abderitans," which
shows, Dr. Ferriar thinks--though it does not seem to me to show
conclusively--that Sterne was unaware that what he was taking from
Burton had been previously taken by Burton from Lucian.
There is more excuse, in the opinion of the author of the
_Illustrations_, for the literary thefts of the preacher than for
those of the novelist; since in sermons, Dr. Ferriar observes drily,
"the principal matter must consist of repetitions."
But it can hardly, I think, be admitted that the kind of "repetitions"
to which Sterne had recourse in the pulpit--or, at any rate,
in compositions ostensibly prepared for the pulpit--are quite
justifiable. Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of
this series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisition,
which so deeply moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on
Conscience, was really the work of Bentley; but Sterne has pilfered
more freely from a divine more famous as a preacher than the great
scholar whose words he appropriated on that occasion. "Then shame and
grief go with her," he exclaims in his singular sermon on "The Levite
and his Concubine;" "and wherever she seeks a shelter may the hand of
Justice shut the door against her!" an exclamation which is taken,
as, no doubt, indeed, was the whole suggestion of the somewhat strange
subject, from the _Contemplations_ of Bishop Hall. And so, again, we
find in Sterne's sermon the following:
"Mercy well becomes the heart of all Thy creatures! but most of
Thy servant, a Levite, who offers up so many daily sacrifices to Thee
for the transgressions of Thy people. But to little purpose, he would
add, have I served at Thy altar, where my business was to sue for
mercy, had I not learned to practise it."
And in Hall's _Contemplations_ the following:
"Mercy becomes well the heart of any man, but most of a Levite.
He that had helped to offer so many sacrifices to God for the multitude
of every Israelite's sins saw how proportionable it was that man
should not hold one sin unpardonable. He had served at the altar
to no purpose, if he (whose trade was to sue for mercy) had not at all
learned to practise it."
Sterne's twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, is merely
a diluted commentary on the conclusion of Hall's "Contemplation of
Joseph." In the sixteenth sermon, the one on Shimei, we find:
"There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season
to give a mark of enmity and ill will: a word, a look, which at
one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the
heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which,
with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object
aimed at."
This, it is evident, is but slightly altered, and by no means for the
better, from the more terse and vigorous language of the Bishop:
"There is no small cruelty in the picking out of a time for mischief:
that word would scarce gall at one season which at another
killeth. The same shaft flying with the wind pierces deep, which
against it can hardly find strength to stick upright."
But enough of these _pièces de conviction_. Indictments for plagiarism
are often too hastily laid; but there can be no doubt, I should
imagine, in the mind of any reasonable being upon the evidence here
cited, that the offence in this case is clearly proved. Nor, I
think, can there be much question as to its moral complexion. For the
pilferings from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow of excuse can,
so far as I can see, be alleged. Sterne could not possibly plead any
better justification for borrowing Hall's thoughts and phrases and
passing them off upon his hearers or readers as original, than
he could plead for claiming the authorship of one of the Bishop's
benevolent actions and representing himself to the world as the doer
of the good deed. In the actual as in the hypothetical case there is
a dishonest appropriation by one man of the credit--in the former
case the intellectual, in the latter the moral credit--belonging to
another: the offence in the actual case being aggravated by the fact
that it involves a fraud upon the purchaser of the sermon, who pays
money for what he may already have in his library. The plagiarisms
from Burton stand upon a slightly different though not, I think, a
much more defensible footing. For in this case it has been urged
that Sterne, being desirous of satirizing pedantry, was justified in
resorting to the actually existent writings of an antique pedant of
real life; and that since Mr. Shandy could not be made to talk more
like himself than Burton talked like _him_, it was artistically
lawful to put Burton's exact words into Mr. Shandy's mouth. It makes
a difference, it may be said, that Sterne is not here speaking in his
own person, as he is in his _Sermons_, but in the person of one of his
characters. This casuistry, however, does not seem to me to be sound.
Even as regards the passages from ancient authors, which, while
quoting them from Burton, he tacitly represents to his readers
as taken from his own stores of knowledge, the excuse is hardly
sufficient; while as regards the original reflections of the author of
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ it obviously fails to apply at all. And in
any case there could be no necessity for the omission to acknowledge
the debt. Even admitting that no more characteristic reflections could
have been composed for Mr. Shandy than were actually to be found in
Burton, art is not so exacting a mistress as to compel the artist
to plagiarize against his will. A scrupulous writer, being also as
ingenious as Sterne, could have found some means of indicating the
source from which he was borrowing without destroying the dramatic
illusion of the scene.
But it seems clear enough that Sterne himself was troubled by no
conscientious qualms on this subject. Perhaps the most extraordinary
instance of literary effrontery which was ever met with is the passage
in vol. v.c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is
startled into pronouncing "singular." Burton had complained that
writers were like apothecaries, who "make new mixtures every day," by
"pouring out of one vessel into another." "We weave," he said, "the
same web still, twist the same rope again and again." And Sterne
_incolumi gravitate_ asks: "Shall we forever make new books as
apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into
another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope,
forever on the same track, forever at the same pace?" And this he
writes with the scissors actually opened in his hand for the almost
bodily abstraction of the passage beginning, "Man, the most excellent
and noble creature of the world!" Surely this denunciation of
plagiarism by a plagiarist on the point of setting to work could only
have been written by a man who looked upon plagiarism as a good joke.
Apart, however, from the moralities of the matter, it must in fairness
be admitted that in most cases Sterne is no servile copyist. He
appropriates other men's thoughts and phrases, and with them, of
course, the credit for the wit, the truth, the vigour, or the learning
which characterizes them; but he is seldom found, in _Tristram
Shandy_, at any rate, to have transferred them to his own pages out
of a mere indolent inclination to save himself the trouble of
composition. He takes them less as substitutes than as groundwork for
his own invention--as so much material for his own inventive powers
to work upon; and those powers do generally work upon them with
conspicuous skill of elaboration. The series of cuttings, for
instance, which he makes from Burton, on the occasion of Bobby
Shandy's death, are woven into the main tissue of the dialogue with
remarkable ingenuity and naturalness; and the bright strands of his
own unborrowed humour fly flashing across the fabric at every transit
of the shuttle. Or, to change the metaphor, we may say that in almost
every instance the jewels that so glitter in their stolen setting were
cut and set by Sterne himself. Let us allow that the most expert of
lapidaries is not justified in stealing his settings; but let us still
not forget that the _jewels_ are his, or permit our disapproval of his
laxity of principle to make us unjust to his consummate skill.