rightly, the most profound antiquarian and the most deeply read of
the whole school. Many of his critics have lamented the time which he
spent in making elaborate tables of chronology, in studying genealogy,
and annotating Dugdale's 'Monasticon,' or Grosier's 'History of the
Chinese Dynasties,' or the 'Botany' of Linnæus, when he might have
been writing more elegies. There is so much to regret in the world
that one would not waste much lamentation upon might-have-beens. It
is a thousand pities that Burns took to drink, that Byron quarrelled
with his wife, that Shelley was drowned in a squall, and that Gray
wasted intellect upon labours which were absolutely fruitless, but
we cannot afford to sit down and cry over it all. We must take what
we can get, and be thankful. But neither can one quite accept the
optimist theory that Gray really did all that he could have done under
different circumstances. The fire was all but choked by the fuel, and
the cloisters of Pembroke acted as a tolerably effective extinguisher
upon what was left. The peculiar merit of Gray is that he had force
enough, though only at the cost of slow and laborious travail, to find
an utterance for genuine emotion, which was enriched instead of being
made unnatural by his varied culture. The critic in him never injured
the quality, but only reduced the quantity, of his work. What little
he left is so perfect in its kind, so far above any contemporary
performances, because he never forgot, like some learned people, that
the ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing
his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his
skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors. He could rarely
cast aside his reserve, or forget his academical dignity enough to
speak at all; but when he does speak he always shows that the genuine
depth of feeling underlies the crust of propriety. He cannot drop, nor
does he desire to drop, the conventionality of style, but he makes
us feel that he is a human being before he is a critic or a don. He
wears stately robes because it is an ingrained habit, but he does
not suppose that the tailor can make the man. In his letters this is
as clear as in his poetry. His habitual reserve restrains him from
sentimentalising, and he generally relieves himself by a pleasant vein
of sub-acid humour. But now and then he speaks, as it were, shyly or
half afraid to unbosom himself, and yet with a pathetic tenderness
which conquers our sympathy. Such is the beautiful little letter to
Mason on the death of his wife, or still more the letter in which he
confides to his friend Nichols how he had 'discovered a thing very
little known, which is that in one's whole life one can never have
more than a single mother.' Sterne might have written a chapter of
exquisite sentimentalising without approaching the pathetic charm of
that single touch of the reserved and outwardly pedantic don. His
utterance is wrung from him in spite of himself, and still half veiled
by the quaintness of the phrase.
Gray's love of nature shows itself in the same way. He does not
make poetical capital out of it, and indeed has an impression that
it would be scarcely becoming. He would agree with Pope's contempt
for 'pure description.' Fields and hills should only be admitted in
the background of his dignified poetry, and just so far as they are
obviously appropriate to the sentiment to be expressed. But when he
does speak it is always with the most genuine feeling in every word.
There is a charming little description of the Southampton Water and
of a sunrise—he can 'hardly believe' that anybody ever saw a sunrise
before—which are as perfect vignettes as can be put upon paper within
equal limits, worth acres of more pretentious word-painting. He rather
despised Mason's gardening tastes, it seems, on the ground that his
sham wildernesses and waterfalls could never come up to Skiddaw and
Lodore. To spend a week at Keswick is for him to be 'in Elysium.' He
kept notes, too, about natural history, which seem to show as keen
an interest in the behaviour of birds or insects as that of White of
Selborne himself. And yet his sensibility to such impressions has
scarcely left a trace in his poetry, except in the moping owl and the
droning flight of the beetle in the 'Elegy.' The Spring has to appear
in company with the 'rosy-bosom'd hours,' and the Muse and the insects
have to preach a pathetic little sermon to justify the notice which
is taken of them. Obviously this is not the kind of mountain worship
which would satisfy Scott or Wordsworth. Gray was, perhaps, capable
of feeling 'the impulse from the vernal wood' as truly as Wordsworth,
but he would have altogether rejected the doctrine that it could teach
him more than all 'the sages,' and resisted the temptation to throw
his books aside except for a brief constitutional. A turn in the backs
of the colleges was enough for him, as a rule, and sometimes he may
thoroughly enjoy a brief holiday by the side of Derwentwater as a
delightful relief after the muddy oozings of the Cam. Nobody could,
in this sense, love nature with a more sincere and vivid affection;
but such a love of nature is not symptomatic, as with Wordsworth,
or Cowper, or Rousseau, of any preference of savage, or rustic, or
simple life to the existing order of civilised society. It implied
at most the development of a new taste, inadequately appreciated by
the cockney men of letters of his own or the preceding generation,
but not that passionate longing for relief from an effete set of
conventions, poetical, political, and social, characteristic of the
rising school. His head, when he travels, is evidently as full of
Dugdale's 'Monasticon' as of Ossian, and he reconstructs and repeoples
Netley Abbey in fancy to give a charm to the Solent. He places in it a
monk, who glances at the white sail that shoots by over a stretch of
blue glittering sea visible between the oak groves, and then enters
and crosses himself to drive away the tempter who has thrown that
distraction in his way. Gray himself pretty much shared the sentiments
of his imagined monk, and only catches occasional glimpses of natural
scenery from the loopholes of his retreat in an eighteenth-century
cloister.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The last line is an emendation for 'Courage was in his van and
Conquest in his rear,' a line still more _à la Gray_, but removed in
compliance with a criticism of Gray's.
_STERNE_
'Love me, love my book' is a version of a familiar proverb which one
might be slow to accept. There are, as one need hardly say, many
admirable persons for whose sake one would gladly make any sacrifice
of personal comfort short of that implied in a study of their works.
But the converse of the statement is more nearly true. I confess that
I at any rate love a book pretty much in proportion as it makes me
love the author. I do not of course speak of histories or metaphysical
treatises which one reads for the sake of the information or of the
logical teaching; but of the imaginative books which appeal in the
last resort to the sympathy between the writer and the reader. It
matters not whether you are brought into contact with a man by seeing
or hearing, by the printed or spoken word—the ultimate source of
pleasure is the personal affinity. To read a book in the true sense—to
read it, that is, not as the critic but in the spirit of enjoyment—is
to lay aside for the moment one's own personality, and to become a
part of the author. It is to enter the world in which he habitually
lives—for each of us lives in a separate world of his own—to breathe
his air, and therefore to receive pleasure and pain according as the
atmosphere is or is not congenial. I may by an intellectual effort
perceive the greatness of a writer whose character is essentially
antagonistic to my own; but I cannot feel it as it must be felt for
genuine enjoyment. The qualification must, of course, be understood
that a great book really expresses the most refined essence of the
writer's character. It gives the author transfigured, and does not
represent all the stains and distortions which he may have received
in his progress through the world. In real life we might have been
repelled by Milton's stern Puritanism, or by some outbreak of rather
testy self-assertion. In reading 'Paradise Lost,' we feel only
the loftiness of character, and are raised and inspirited by the
sentiments, without pausing to consider the particular application.
If this be true in some degree of all imaginative writers, it
is especially true of humourists. For humour is essentially the
expression of a personal idiosyncrasy, and a man is a humourist just
because the tragic and the comic elements of life present themselves
to his mind in new and unexpected combinations. The objects of other
men's reverence strike him from the ludicrous point of view, and he
sees something attractive in the things which they affect to despise.
It is his function to strip off the commonplaces by which we have
tacitly agreed to cover over our doubts and misgivings, and to explode
empty pretences by the touch of a vigorous originality; and therefore
it is that the great mass of mankind are apt to look upon humour of
the stronger flavour with suspicion. They suspect the humourist—not
without reason—of laughing at their beards. There is no saying where
he may not explode next. They can enjoy the mere buffoonery which
comes from high spirits combined with thoughtlessness. And they can
fairly appreciate the gentle humour of Addison, or Goldsmith, or
Charles Lamb, where the kindliness of the intention is so obvious
that the irony is felt to be harmless. It represents only the tinge
of melancholy which every good man must feel at the sight of human
folly, and is used rather to light up by its gentle irradiation the
amiable aspects of weakness than to unmask solemn affectation and
successful hypocrisy. As soon as the humourist begins to be more
pungent, and the laughter to be edged with scorn and indignation,
good quiet people who do not like to be shocked begin to draw back.
They are half ashamed when a Cervantes or a Montaigne, a Rabelais
or a Swift, takes them into his confidence and proposes in the true
humourist's spirit to but show them the ugly realities of the world
or of his own mind. They shrink from the exposure which follows of
the absurdity of heroes, the follies of the wise, the cruelty and
injustice of the virtuous. In their hearts they take this daring
frankness for sheer cynicism, and reject his proffered intimacy. They
would rather overlook the hollowness of established conventions than
have them ruthlessly exposed by the sudden audacity of these daring
rebels. To the man, on the contrary, who is predisposed to sympathy
by some affinity of character, the sudden flash of genuine feeling is
infinitely refreshing. He rejoices to see theories confronted with
facts, solemn conventions turned inside out, and to have the air
cleared by a sudden burst of laughter, though it may occasionally have
something rather savage in it. He welcomes the discovery that another
man has dared to laugh at the idols before which we are all supposed
to bow in solemn reverence. We love the humour in short so far as we
love the character from which it flows. Everybody can love the spirit
which shows itself in the 'Essays on Elia;' but you can hardly love
the 'Tale of a Tub' or 'Gulliver' unless you have a sympathy with
the genuine Swift which overpowers your occasional disgust at his
misanthropy. But to this general rule there is one marked exception in
our literature. It is impossible for any one with the remotest taste
for literary excellence to read 'Tristram Shandy' or the 'Sentimental
Journey' without a sense of wondering admiration. One can hardly read
the familiar passages without admitting that Sterne was perhaps the
greatest artist in the language. No one at least shows more inimitable
felicity in producing a pungent effect by a few touches of exquisite
precision. He gives the impression that the thing has been done once
for all; he has hit the bull's eye round which inspiring marksmen go
on blundering indefinitely without any satisfying success. Two or
three of the scenes in which Uncle Toby expresses his sentiments are
as perfect in their way as the half-dozen lines in which Mrs. Quickly
describes the end of Falstaff, and convince us that three strokes
from a man of genius may be worth more than the life's labour of the
cleverest of skilled literary workmen. And it may further be said that
Uncle Toby, like his kinsmen in the world of humour, is an incarnation
of most lovable qualities. In going over the list—a short list in any
case—of the immortal characters in fiction, there is hardly any one
in our literature who would be entitled to take precedence of him. To
find a distinctly superior type, we must go back to Cervantes, whom
Sterne idolised and professed to take for his model. But to speak of
a character as in some sort comparable to Don Quixote, though without
any thought of placing him on the same level, is to admit that he is a
triumph of art. Indeed, if we take the other creator of types, of whom
it is only permitted to speak with bated breath, we must agree that it
would be difficult to find a figure even in the Shakespearean gallery
more admirable in its way. Of course, the creation of a Hamlet, an
Iago, or a Falstaff implies an intellectual intensity and reach of
imaginative sympathy altogether different from anything which his
warmest admirers would attribute to Sterne. I only say that there is
no single character in Shakespeare whom we see more vividly and love
more heartily than Mr. Shandy's uncle.
It should follow, according to the doctrine just set forth, that
we ought to love Uncle Toby's creator. But here I fancy that
everybody will be sensible of a considerable difficulty. The judgment
pronounced upon Sterne by Thackeray seems to me to be substantially
unimpeachable. The more I know of the man, for my part, the less I
like him. It is impossible to write his biography (from the admiring
point of view) without making it a continuous apology. His faults may
be extenuated by the customary devices; but there is a terrible lack
of any positive merits to set against them. He seems to have been fond
of his daughter and tolerant of his wife. The nearest approach to a
good action recorded of him is that when they preferred remaining in
France to following him to England, he took care that they should have
the income which he had promised. The liberality was nothing very
wonderful. He knew that his wife was severely economical, as she had
good reason to be; inasmuch as his own health was most precarious,
and he was spending his income with a generous freedom which left
her in destitution at his death. Still we are glad to give him all
credit for not being a grudging paymaster. Some better men have been
less good-natured. The rest of his panegyric consists of excuses for
his shortcomings. We know the regular formulæ. He had bad companions,
it is said, in his youth. Men who show a want of principle in later
life have a knack of picking up bad companions at their outset. We
are reminded as usual that the morals of the time were corrupt. It
is a very difficult question how far this is true. We can only make
a rough guess as to the morals of our own time; some people can see
steady improvement, where others see nothing but signs of growing
corruption; but when we come to speak of the morals of an age more or
less removed, there are so many causes of illusion that our estimates
have very small title to respect. It is no doubt true that the clergy
of the Church of England in Sterne's day took a less exalted view
than they now do of their own position and duties; that they were
frequently pluralists and absentees; that patrons had small sense of
responsibility; and that, as a general rule, the spiritual teachers of
the country took life easily, and left an ample field for the activity
of Wesley and his followers. But, making every allowance for this,
it would be grossly unfair to deny, what is plainly visible in all
the memoirs of the time, that there were plenty of honest squires and
persons in every part of the country leading wholesome domestic lives.
But, in any case, such apologies rather explain how a man came to be
bad, than prove that he was not bad. They would show at most that we
were making an erroneous inference if we inferred badness of heart
from conduct which was not condemned by the standard of his own day.
This argument, however, is really inapplicable. Sterne's faults were
of a kind for which if anything there was less excuse then than now.
The faults of his best known contemporaries, of men like Fielding,
Smollett, or Churchill, were the faults of robust temperament with
an excess of animal passions. Their coarseness has left a stain upon
their pages as it injured their lives. But, however much we may
lament or condemn, we do not feel that such men were corrupt at heart.
And that, unfortunately, is just what we are tempted to feel about
Sterne. When the huge, brawny parson, Churchill, felt his unfitness
for clerical life, he pitched his cassock to the dogs and blossomed
out in purple and gold. He set the respectabilities at defiance,
took up with Wilkes and the reprobates, and roared out full-mouthed
abuse against bishops and ministers. He could still be faithful to
his friends, observe his own code of honour, and do his best to make
some atonement to the victims of his misconduct. Sterne, one feels,
differs from Churchill not really as being more virtuous but in not
having the courage to be so openly vicious. Unlike Churchill, he could
be a consummate sneak. He was quite as ready to flatter Wilkes or to
be on intimate terms with atheists and libertines, with Holbach and
Crébillon, when his bishop and his parishioners could not see him.
His most intimate friend from early days was John Hall Stevenson—the
country squire whose pride it was to ape in the provinces the orgies
of the monks of Medmenham Abbey, and once notorious as the author of
a grossly indecent book. The dog-Latin letter in which Sterne informs
this chosen companion that he is weary of his life contains other
remarks sufficiently significant of the nature of their intimacy.
The age was not very nice; but it was quite acute enough to see
the objections to a close alliance between a married ecclesiastic
of forty-five[8] and the rustic Don Juan of the district. But his
cynicism becomes doubly disgusting when we remember that Sterne
was all the time as eager as any patronage hunter to ingratiate
himself into the good graces of bishops. Churchill, we remember,
lampooned Warburton with savage ferocity. Sterne tried his best to
conciliate the most conspicuous prelate of the day. He never put
together a more elaborately skilful bit of writing than the letter
which he wrote to Garrick, with the obvious intention that it should
be shown to Warburton. He humbly says that he has no claim to an
introduction, except 'what arises from the honour and respect which,
in the progress of my work, will be shown the world I owe so great a
man.' The statement was probably meant to encounter a suspicion which
Warburton entertained that he was to be introduced in a ridiculous
character in 'Tristram Shandy.' The bishop was sufficiently soothed to
administer not only good advice but a certain purse of gold, which had
an unpleasant resemblance to hush-money. It became evident, however,
that the author of 'Tristram Shandy' was not a possible object of
episcopal patronage; and, indeed, he was presently described by the
bishop as an 'irrevocable scoundrel.' Sterne's 'honour and respect'
never found expression in his writings; but he ingeniously managed to
couple the 'Divine Legation'—the work which had justified Warburton's
elevation to the bench—with the 'Tale of a Tub,' the audacious satire
upon orthodox opinions which had been an insuperable bar to Swift's
preferment. The insinuation had its sting, for there were plenty of
critics in those days who maintained that Warburton's apology was
really more damaging to the cause of orthodoxy than Swift's burlesque.
We cannot resist the conviction that if Warburton had been more
judicious in his distribution of patronage, he would have received a
very different notice in return. The blow from Churchill's bludgeon
was, on any right, given by an open enemy. This little stab came from
one who had been a servile flatterer.
No doubt Sterne is to be pitied for his uncongenial position. The
relations who kindly took him off the hands of his impecunious father
could provide for him most easily in the Church; and he is not the
only man who has been injured by being forced by such considerations
into a career for which he was unfitted. In the same way we may pity
him for having become tired of his wife whom he seems to have married
under a generous impulse—she was no doubt a very tiresome woman—and
try to forgive him for some of his flirtations. But it is not so
easy to forgive the spirit in which he conducted them. One story,
as related by an admiring biographer, will be an amply sufficient
specimen. He fell in love with a Miss Fourmantelle, who was living
at York when he was finishing the first volumes of 'Tristram Shandy'
at the ripe age of forty-six. He introduced her into that work as
'dear, dear Jenny.' He writes to her in his usual style of lovemaking.
He swears that he loves her 'to distraction,' and will love her 'to
eternity.' He declares that there is 'only one obstacle to their
happiness'—obviously Mrs. Sterne—and solemnly prays to God that
she may so live and love him as one day to share in his great good
fortune. Precisely similar aspirations, we note in passing, were to
be soon afterwards addressed to Mrs. Draper, on the hypothesis that
two obstacles to their happiness might be removed, namely, Mr. Draper
and Mrs. Sterne. Few readers are likely to be edified by the sacred
language used by a clergyman on such an occasion; though biographical
zeal has been equal even to this emergency. But the sequel to the
Fourmantelle story is the really significant part. Mr. Sterne goes
to London to reap the social fruits of his amazing success with
'Tristram Shandy.' The whole London world falls at his feet; he is
overwhelmed with invitations, and deafened with flattery; and poor
literary drudges like Goldsmith are scandalised by so overpowering a
triumph. Nobody had thought it worth while to make a fuss about the
author of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' Sterne writes the accounts of
his unprecedented success to Miss Fourmantelle: he snatches moments
in the midst of his crowded levees to tell her that he is hers for
ever and ever, that he would 'give a guinea for a squeeze of her
hand;' and promises to use his influence in some affair in which she
is interested. Hereupon Miss Fourmantelle follows him to London. She
finds him so deeply engaged that he cannot see her from Sunday till
Friday; though he is still good enough to say that he would wish
to be with her always, were it not for 'fate.' And, hereupon, Miss
Fourmantelle vanishes out of history, and Mr. Sterne ceases to trouble
his head about her. It needs only to be added that this is but one
episode in Sterne's career out of several of which the records have
been accidentally preserved. Mrs. Draper seems to have been the most
famous case; but, according to his own statement, he had regularly on
hand some affair of the sort, and is proud of the sensibility which
they indicate.
Upon such an occurrence only one comment is possible from the
moralist's point of view, namely, that a brother of Miss Fourmantelle,
had she possessed a brother, would have been justified in
administering a horse-whipping. I do not, however, wish to preach a
sermon upon Sterne's iniquities, or to draw any edifying conclusions
upon the present occasion. We have only to deal with the failings of
the man so far as they are reflected in the author. Time enables us
to abstract and distinguish. A man's hateful qualities may not be of
the essence of his character, or they may be only hateful in certain
specific relations which do not now affect us. Moreover, there is
some kind of immorality—spite and uncharitableness, for example—which
is not without its charm. Pope was in many ways a far worse man than
Sterne; he was an incomparably more elaborate liar, and the amount
of gall with which his constitution was saturated would have been
enough to furnish a whole generation of Sternes. But we can admire the
brilliance of Pope's epigrams without bothering ourselves with the
reflection that he told a whole series of falsehoods as to the date of
their composition. We can enjoy the pungency of his indignant satire
without asking whether it was directed against deserving objects.
Atticus was perhaps a very cruel caricature of Addison; but the lines
upon Atticus remain as an incomparably keen dissection of a type which
need not have been embodied in this particular representative. Some
people, indeed, may be too virtuous or tender-hearted to enjoy any
exposure of human weakness. I make no pretensions to such amiability,
and I can admire the keenness of the wasp's sting when it is no longer
capable of touching me and my friends. Indeed, almost any genuine
ebullition of human passion is interesting in its way, and it would be
pedantic to be scandalised whenever it is rather more vehement than a
moralist would approve, or happens to break out on the wrong occasion.
The reader can apply the correction for himself; he can read satire
in his moments of virtuous indignation, and twist it in his own mind
against some of those people—they are generally to be found—who really
deserve it. But the case is different when the sentiment itself is
offensive, and offensive by reason of insincerity. When the very thing
by which we are supposed to be attracted is the goodness of a man's
heart, a suspicion that he was a mere Tartufe cannot enter our minds
without injuring our enjoyment. We may continue to admire the writer's
technical skill, but he cannot fascinate us unless he persuades us of
his sincerity. One might, to take a parallel case, admire Reynolds for
his skill of hand, and fine perception of form and colour, if he had
used them only to represent objects as repulsive as the most hideous
scenes in Hogarth. One loves him, because of the exquisite tenderness
of nature implied in the representations of infantile beauty. And
if it were possible to feel that this tenderness was a mere sham,
that his work was that of a dexterous artist skilfully flattering
the fondness of parents, the charm would vanish. The children would
breathe affectation instead of simplicity, and provoke only the
sardonic sneer which is suggested by most of the infantile portraits
collected in modern exhibitions.