where all the sober proprieties of ordinary logic are as much inverted
as in Alice's Wonderland; where the only serious occupation of a
good man's life is in playing an infantile game; where the passion of
love is only introduced as a passing distraction when the hobby-horse
has accidentally fallen out of gear; where the death of a son merely
supplies an affectionate father with a favourable opportunity for
airing his queer scraps of outworn moralities, and the misnaming of an
infant casts him into a fit of profound melancholy; where everything,
in short, is topsy-turvy, and we are invited to sit down, consuming a
perpetual pipe in an old-fashioned arbour, dreamily amusing ourselves
with the grotesque shapes that seem to be projected, in obedience to
no perceptible law, upon the shifting wreaths of smoke. It would be as
absurd to lecture the excellent brothers upon the absurdity of their
mode of life as to preach morality to the manager of a Punch show,
or to demand sentiment in the writer of a mathematical treatise. 'I
believe in my soul,' says Sterne, rather audaciously, 'that the hand
of the supreme Maker and Designer of all things never made or put a
family together, where the characters of it were cast and contrasted
with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which
the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers
of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and
entrusted with so unlimited a confidence as in the Shandy family.' The
grammar of the sentence is rather queer, but we can hardly find fault
with the substance. The remark is made _à propos_ of Mr. Shandy's
attempt to indoctrinate his brother with the true theory of noses,
which is prefaced by the profoundly humorous sentence which expresses
the leading article of Mr. Shandy's creed: 'Learned men, brother
Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing.' And, in
fact, one sees how admirably the simplicity of each brother plays
into the eccentricity of the other. The elder Shandy could not have
found in the universe a listener more admirably calculated to act as
whetstone for his strangely-constructed wit, to dissent in precisely
the right tone, not with a brutal intrusion of common-sense, but with
the gentle horror of innocent astonishment at the paradoxes, mixed
with veneration for the portentous learning of his senior. By looking
at each brother alternately through the eyes of his relative, we are
insensibly infected with the intense relish which each feels for the
cognate excellence of the other. When the characters are once familiar
to us, each new episode in the book is a delightful experiment upon
the fresh contrasts which can be struck out by skilfully shifting
their positions and exchanging the parts of clown and chief actor. The
light is made to flash from a new point, as the gem is turned round by
skilled hands. Sterne's wonderful dexterity appears in the admirable
setting which is thus obtained for his most telling remarks. Many of
the most famous sayings, such as Uncle Toby's remark about the fly,
or the recording angel, are more or less adapted from other authors,
but they come out so brilliantly that we feel that he has shown a
full right to property which he can turn to such excellent account.
Sayings quite as witty, or still wittier, may be found elsewhere. Some
of Voltaire's incomparable epigrams, for example, are keener than
Sterne's, but they owe nothing to the Zadig or Candide who supplies
the occasion for the remark. They are thrown out in passing, and shine
by their intrinsic brilliancy. But when Sterne has a telling remark,
he carefully prepares the dramatic situation in which it will have
the whole force due to the concentrated effect of all the attendant
circumstances. 'Our armies swore terribly in Flanders,' cried my
Uncle Toby, 'but nothing to this.' Voltaire could not have made a
happier hit at the excess of the _odium theologicum_, but the saying
comes to us armed with the authority of the whole Shandy conclave.
We have a vision of the whole party sitting round, each charged with
his own peculiar humour. There is Mr. Shandy, whose fancy has been
amazingly tickled by the portentous oath of Ernulfus, as regards
antiquarian curiosity, and has at once framed a quaint theory of the
advantages of profane swearing in order to justify his delight in
the tremendous formula. He regards his last odd discovery with the
satisfaction of a connoisseur; 'I defy a man to swear out of it!'
It includes all oaths from that of William the Conqueror to that
of the humblest scavenger, and is a perfect institute of swearing
collected from all the most learned authorities. And there is the
unlucky Dr. Slop, cleverly enticed into the pitfall by Mr. Shandy's
simple cunning, and induced to exhibit himself as a monster of
ecclesiastical ferocity by thundering forth the sounding anathema at
the ludicrously disproportioned case of Obadiah's clumsy knot-tying;
and to bring out the full flavour of the grotesque scene, we see it
as represented to the childlike intelligence of Uncle Toby, taking
it all in sublime seriousness, whistling lilliburlero to soothe his
nerves under this amazing performance, in sheer wonder at the sudden
revelation of the potentialities of human malediction, and compressing
his whole character in that admirable cry of wonder, so phrased as
to exhibit his innocent conviction that the habits of the armies in
Flanders supplied a sort of standard by which the results of all human
experience might be appropriately measured, and to even justify it in
some degree by the queer felicity of the particular application. A
formal lecturer upon the evils of intolerance might argue in a set
of treatises upon the light in which such an employment of sacred
language would strike the unsophisticated common-sense of a benevolent
mind. The imaginative humourist sets before us a delicious picture of
two or three concrete human beings, and is then able at one stroke to
deliver a blow more telling than the keenest flashes of the dry light
of the logical understanding. The more one looks into the scene and
tries to analyse the numerous elements of dramatic effect to which
his total impression is owing, the more one admires the astonishing
skill which has put so much significance into a few simple words. The
colouring is so brilliant and the touch so firm that one is afraid to
put any other work beside it. Nobody before or since has had so clear
an insight into the meaning which can be got out of a simple scene
by a judicious selection and skilful arrangement of the appropriate
surroundings. Sterne's comment upon the mode in which Trim dropped
his hat at the peroration of his speech upon Master Bobby's death,
affecting even the 'fat, foolish scullion,' is significant. 'Had he
flung it, or thrown it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it
slip or fall in any possible direction under Heaven—or in the best
direction that could have been given to it—had he dropped it like a
goose, like a puppy, like an ass, or in doing it, or even after he had
done it, had he looked like a fool, like a ninny, like a nincompoop,
it had failed, and the effect upon the heart had been lost.' Those
who would play upon human passions and those who are played upon,
or, in Sterne's phrase, those who drive, and those who are driven,
like turkeys to market, with a stick and a red clout are invited to
meditate upon Trim's hat; and so may all who may wish to understand
the secret of Sterne's art.
It is true, unfortunately, that this singular skill—the felicity
with which Trim's cap, or his Montero cap, or Uncle Toby's pipe—is
made to radiate eloquence, sometimes leads to a decided bathos. The
climax so elaborately prepared too often turns out to be a faded bit
of sentimentalism. We rather resent the art which is thrown away
to prepare us for the assertion that 'When a few weeks will rescue
misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of
them.' So we hate the man who can lift his hand upon a woman save
in the way of kindness, but we do not want a great writer to adorn
that unimpeachable sentiment with all the jewels of rhetoric. It
is just in these very critical passages that Sterne's taste is
defective, because his feeling is not sound. We are never sure that
we can distinguish between the true gems and the counterfeit. When
the moment comes at which he suddenly drops the tear of sensibility,
he is almost as likely to provoke sneers as sympathy. There is, for
example, the famous donkey, and it is curious to compare the donkey
fed with macaroons in the 'Tristram Shandy' with the dead donkey of
the 'Sentimental Journey,' whose weeping master lays a crust of bread
on the now vacant bit of his bridle. It is obviously the same donkey,
and Sterne has reflected that he can squeeze a little more pathos out
of the animal by actually killing him, and providing a sentimental
master. It seems to me that, in trying to heighten the effect, he
has just crossed the dangerous limit which divides sympathetic from
derisive laughter; and whereas the macaroon-fed animal is a possible,
straightforward beast, he becomes (as higher beings have done) a
humbug in his palpably hypocritical epitaph. Sterne tries his hand
in the same way at improving Maria, who is certainly an effective
embodiment of the mad young woman who has tried to move us in many
forms since the days of Ophelia. In her second appearance, she comes
in to utter the famous sentiment about the wind and the shorn lamb. It
has become proverbial, and been even credited in the popular mind with
a scriptural origin; and considering such a success, one has hardly
the right to say that it has gathered a certain sort of banality.
Yet it is surely on the extreme verge at which the pathetic melts
into the ludicrous. The reflection, however, occurs more irresistibly
in regard to that other famous passage about the recording angel.
Sterne's admirers held it to be sublime at the time, and he obviously
shared the opinion. And it is undeniable that the story of Le Fevre,
in which it is the most conspicuous gem, is a masterpiece in its
way. No one can read it, or better still, hear it from the lips of a
skilful reader, without admitting the marvellous felicity with which
the whole scene is presented. Uncle Toby's oath is a triumph fully
worthy of Shakespeare. But the recording angel, though he certainly
comes in effectively, is a little suspicious to me. It would have been
a sacrifice to which few writers could have been equal, to suppress or
soften that brilliant climax; and, yet, if the angel had been omitted,
the passage would, I fancy, have been really stronger. We might
have been left to make the implied comment for ourselves. For the
angel seems to introduce an unpleasant air as of eighteenth-century
politeness; we fancy that he would have welcomed a Lord Chesterfield
to the celestial mansions with a faultless bow and a dexterous
compliment; and somehow he appears, to my imagination at least,
apparelled in theatrical gauze and spangles rather than in the genuine
angelic costume. Some change passes over every famous passage; the
bloom of its first freshness is rubbed off as it is handed from one
quoter to another; but where the sentiment has no false ring at the
beginning, the colours may grow faint without losing their harmony.
In this angel, and some other of Sterne's best-known touches, we seem
to feel that the baser metal is beginning to show itself through the
superficial enamel.
And this suggests the criticism which must still be made in regard
even to the admirable Uncle Toby. Sterne has been called the English
Rabelais, and was apparently more ambitious himself of being
considered as an English Cervantes. To a modern English reader he is
certainly far more amusing than Rabelais, and he can be appreciated
with less effort than Cervantes. But it is impossible to mention
these great names without seeing the direction in which Sterne falls
short of the highest excellence. We know that, on clearing away the
vast masses of buffoonery and ribaldry under which Rabelais was
forced, or chose, to hide himself we come to the profound thinker and
powerful satirist. Sterne represents a comparatively shallow vein
of thought. He is the mouthpiece of a sentiment which had certainly
its importance in so far as it was significant of a vague discontent
with things in general, and a desire for more exciting intellectual
food. He was so far ready to fool the age to the top of its bent; and
in the course of his ramblings he strikes some hard blows at various
types of hide-bound pedantry. But he is too systematic a trifler
to be reckoned with any plausibility amongst the spiritual leaders
of any intellectual movement. In that sense, 'Tristram Shandy' is
a curious symptom of the existing currents of emotion, but cannot,
like the 'Emile' or the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' be reckoned as one of the
efficient causes. This complete and characteristic want of purpose
may indeed be reckoned as a literary merit, so far as it prevented
'Tristram Shandy' from degenerating into a mere tract. But the want
of intellectual seriousness has another aspect, which comes out
when we compare Tristram Shandy, for example, with Don Quixote. The
resemblance, which has been often pointed out (as indeed Sterne is
fond of hinting at it himself) consists in this, that in both cases
we see lovable characters through a veil of the ludicrous. As Don
Quixote is a true hero, though he is under a constant hallucination,
so Uncle Toby is full of the milk of human kindness, though his
simplicity makes him ridiculous to the piercing eyes of common-sense.
In both cases, it is inferred, the humourist is discharging his true
function of showing the lovable qualities which may be associated with
a ludicrous outside.
The Don and the Captain both have their hobbies, which they ride with
equal zeal, and there is a close analogy between them. Uncle Toby
makes his own apology in the famous oration upon war. 'What is war,'
he asks, 'but the getting together of quiet and harmless people with
swords in their hands, to keep the turbulent and ambitious within
bounds? And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I
have taken in these things, and that infinite delight in particular
which has attended my sieges in the bowling-green, has arisen within
me, and I hope in the Corporal too, from the consciousness that in
carrying them on we were answering the great ends of our creation.'
Uncle Toby's military ardour undoubtedly makes a most piquant addition
to his simple-minded benevolence. The fusion of the gentle Christian
with the chivalrous devotee of honour is perfect; and the kindliest
of human beings, who would not hurt a hair of the fly's head, most
delicately blended with the gallant soldier who, as Trim avers, would
march up to the mouth of a cannon though he saw the match at the very
touchhole. Should anyone doubt the merits of the performance, he might
reassure himself by comparing the scene in which Uncle Toby makes the
speech, just quoted, with a parallel passage in 'The Caxtons,' and
realise the difference between extreme imitative dexterity and the
force of real genius.
It is only when we compare this exquisite picture with the highest art
that we are sensible of its comparative deficiency. The imaginative
force of Cervantes is proved by the fact that Don Quixote and his
followers have become the accepted symbols of the most profoundly
tragic element in human life—of the contrast between the lofty
idealism of the mere enthusiast and the sturdy common-sense of
ordinary human beings—between the utilitarian and the romantic types
of character; and as neither aspect of the truth can be said to be
exhaustive, we are rightly left with our sympathies equally balanced.
The book may be a sad one to those who prefer to be blind; but in
proportion as we can appreciate a penetrative insight into the genuine
facts of life, we are impressed by this most powerful presentation
of the never-ending problem. It is impossible to find in 'Tristram
Shandy' any central conception of this breadth and depth. If Trim
had been as shrewd as Sancho, Uncle Toby would appear like a mere
simpleton. Like a child, he requires a thoroughly sympathetic audience
who will not bring his playthings to the brutal test of actual facts.
The high and earnest enthusiasm of the Don can stand the contrast of
common-sense, though at the price of passing into insanity. But Trim
is forced to be Uncle Toby's accomplice, or his Commander would never
be able to play at soldiers. If Don Quixote had simply amused himself
at a mock tournament, and had never been in danger of mistaking a
puppet-show for a reality, he would certainly have been more credible,
but in the same proportion he would have been commonplace. The
whole tragic element which makes the humour impressive would have
disappeared. Sterne seldom ventures to the limit of the tragic. The
bowling-green of Mr. Shandy's parlance is too exclusively a sleepy
hollow. The air is never cleared by a strain of lofty sentiment. When
Yorick and Eugenius form part of the company, we feel that they are
rather too much at home with offensive suggestions. When Uncle Toby's
innocence fails to perceive their coarse insinuations, we are credited
with clearer perception, and expected to sympathise with the spurious
wit which derives its chief zest from the presence of the pure-minded
victim. And so Uncle Toby comes to represent that stingless virtue,
which never gets beyond the ken or hurts the feelings of the easy-going
epicurean. His perceptions are too slow and his temper too mild to
resent an indecency as his relative, Colonel Newcome, would have done.
He would have been too complacent, even to the outrageous Costigan.
He is admirably kind when a comrade falls ill at his door; but his
benevolence can exhale itself sufficiently in the intervals of
hobby-riding, and his chivalrous temper in fighting over old battles
with the Corporal. We feel that he must be growing fat; that his pulse
is flabby and his vegetative functions predominant. When he falls in
love with the repulsive (for she is repulsive) widow Wadman, we pity
him as we pity a poor soft zoophyte in the clutches of a rapacious
crab; but we have no sense of a wasted life. Even his military ardour
seems to present itself to our minds as due to the simple affection
which makes his regiment part of his family rather than to any
capacity for heroic sentiment. His brain might turn soft; it would
never spontaneously generate the noble madness of a Quixote, though he
might have followed that hero with a more canine fidelity than Sancho.
Mr. Matthew Arnold says of Heine, as we all remember, that:—
The spirit of the world,
Beholding the absurdity of men—
Their vanities, their feats—let a sardonic smile
For one short moment wander o'er his lips—
That smile was Heine.
There is a considerable analogy, as one may note in passing, between
the two men; and if Sterne was not a poet, his prose could perhaps
be even more vivid and picturesque than Heine's. But his humour is
generally wanting in the quality suggested by Mr. Arnold's phrase.
We cannot represent it by a sardonic smile, or indeed by any other
expression which we can very well associate with the world-spirit.
The imaginative humourist must in all cases be keenly alive to the
'absurdity of man;' he must have a sense of the irony of fate, of the
strange interlacing of good and evil in the world, and of the baser
and nobler elements in human nature. He will be affected differently
according to his temperament and his intellectual grasp. He may be
most impressed by the affinity between madness and heroism; by the
waste of noble qualities on trifling purposes; and, if he be more
amiable, by the goodness which may lurk under ugly forms. He may
be bitter and melancholy, or simply serious in contemplating the
fantastic tricks played by mortals before high heaven. But, in any
case, some real undercurrent of deeper feeling is essential to the
humourist who impresses us powerfully, and who is equally far from
mere buffoonery and sentimental foppery. His smile must be at least
edged with melancholy, and his pathos too deep for mere 'snivelling.'
Sterne is often close to this loftier region of the humorous;
sometimes he fairly crosses it; but his step is uncertain as of one
not feeling at home. The absurdity of man does not make him 'sardonic'
He takes things too easily. He shows us the farce of life, and feels
that there is a tragical background to it all; but somehow he is not
usually much disposed to cry over it, and he is obviously proud of
the tears which he manages to produce. The thought of human folly
and suffering does not usually torment and perplex him. The highest
humourist should be the laughing and weeping philosopher in one;
and in Sterne the weeping philosopher is always a bit of a humbug.
The pedantry of the elder Shandy is a simple whim, not a misguided
aspiration; and Sterne is so amused with his oddities that he even
allows him to be obtrusively heartless. Uncle Toby undoubtedly comes
much nearer to complete success; but he wants just that touch of
genuine pathos which he would have received from the hands of the
greatest writers. But the performance is so admirable in the best
passages, where Sterne can drop his buffoonery and his indecency, that
even a criticism which sets him below the highest place seems almost
unfair.
And this may bring us back for a moment to the man himself. Sterne
avowedly drew his own portrait in Yorick. That clerical jester, he
says, was a mere child, full of whim and gaiety, but without an
ounce of ballast. He had no more knowledge of the world at 26 than
a 'romping unsuspicious girl of 13.' His high spirits and frankness
were always getting him into trouble. When he heard of a spiteful
or ungenerous action he would blurt out that the man was a dirty
fellow. He would not stoop to set himself right, but let people think
of him what they would. Thus his faults were all due to his extreme
candour and impulsiveness. It wants little experience of the world to
recognise the familiar portrait of an impulsive and generous fellow.
It represents the judicious device by which a man reconciles himself
to some very ugly actions. It provides by anticipation a complete
excuse for thoughtlessness and meanness. If he is accused of being
inconstant, he points out the extreme goodness of his impulses; and
if the impulses were bad, he argues that at least they did not last
very long. He prides himself on his disregard to consequences, even
when the consequences may be injurious to his friends. His feelings
are so genuine for the moment that his conscience is satisfied
without his will translating them into action. He is perfectly candid
in expressing the passing phrase of sentiment, and therefore does
not trouble himself to ask whether what is true to-day will be true
to-morrow. He can call an adversary a dirty fellow, and is very proud
of his generous indiscretion. But he is also capable of gratifying
the dirty fellow's vanity by high-flown compliments if he happens to
be in the enthusiastic vein; and somehow the providence which watches
over the thoughtless is very apt to make his impulses fall in with
the dictates of calculated selfishness. He cannot be an accomplished
courtier, because he is apt to be found out; but he can crawl and
creep for the nonce with anyone. In real life such a man is often as
delightful for a short time as he becomes contemptible on a longer
acquaintance. When we think of Sterne as a man, and try to frame a
coherent picture of his character, we must give a due weight to the
baser elements of his composition. We cannot forget his shallowness
of feeling and the utter want of self-respect which prompted him to
condescend to be a mere mountebank, and to dabble in filth for the
amusement of graceless patrons. Nor is it really possible entirely to
throw aside this judgment even in reading his works; for even after
abstracting our attention from the rubbish and the indecency, we are
haunted in the really admirable parts by our misgivings as to their
sincerity. But the problem is often one to tax critical acumen. It
is one aspect of a difficulty which meets us sometimes in real life.
Every man flatters himself that he can detect the mere hypocrite. We
seem to have a sufficient instinct to warn us against the downright
pitfalls where an absolute void is covered by an artificial stratum of
mere verbiage. Perhaps even this is not so easy as we sometimes fancy;
but there is a more refined sort of hypocrisy which requires keener
dissection. How are men to draw the narrow and yet all-important line
which separates—not the genuine from the feigned emotion—but the
emotion which is due to some real cause, and that which is a cause in
itself? Some people we know fall in love with a woman, and others are
really in love with the passion. Grief may be the sign of lacerated
affection, or it may be a mere luxury indulged in for its own sake.
The sentimentalism which Sterne represented corresponded in the main
to this last variety. People had discovered the art of extracting
direct enjoyment from their own 'sensibility,' and Sterne expressly
gives thanks for his own as the great consolation of his life. He has
the heartiest possible relish for his tears and lamentations, and it
is precisely his skill in marking this vein of interest which gives
him his extraordinary popularity. So soon as we discover that a man
is enjoying his sorrow our sympathy is killed within us, and for that
reason Sterne is apt to be repulsive to humourists whose sense of
the human tragi-comedy is deeper than his own. They agree with him
that the vanity of human dreams may suggest a mingling of tears and
laughter; but they grieve because they must, not because they find it
a pleasant amusement. Yet it is perhaps unwise to poison our pleasure
by reflections of this kind. They come with critical reflection,
and may at least be temporarily suppressed when we are reading for
enjoyment. We need not sin ourselves by looking a gift horse in the
mouth. The sentiment is genuine at the time. Do not inquire how far it
has been deliberately concocted and stimulated. The man is not only a
wonderful artist, but he is right in asserting that his impulses are
clear and genuine. Why should not that satisfy us? Are we to set up
for so rigid a nature that we are never to consent to sit down with
Uncle Toby and take him as he is made? We may wish, if we please, that
Sterne had always been in his best, and that his tears flowed from
a deeper source. But so long as he really speaks from his heart—and
he does so in all the finer parts of the Toby drama—why should we
remember that the heart was rather flighty, and regarded with too much
conscious complacency by its proprietor? The Shandyism upon which he
prided himself was not a very exalted form of mind, nor one which
offered a very deep or lasting satisfaction. Happily we can dismiss an
author when we please; give him a cold shoulder in our more virtuous
moods, and have a quiet chat with him when we are graciously pleased
to relax. In those times we may admit Sterne as the best of jesters,
though it may remain an open question whether the jester is on the
whole an estimable institution.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Sterne says in the letter that Hall was over forty; and he was
five years older than Hall.
_COUNTRY BOOKS_
A love of the country is taken, I know not why, to indicate the
presence of all the cardinal virtues. It is one of those outlying
qualities which are not exactly meritorious, but which, for that very
reason, are the more provocative of a pleasing self-complacency.
People pride themselves upon it as upon early rising, or upon
answering letters by return of post. We recognise the virtuous hero
of a novel as soon as we are told that the cat instinctively creeps
to his knee, and that the little child clutches his hand to stay
his tottering steps. To say that we love the country is to make
an indirect claim to a similar excellence. We assert a taste for
sweet and innocent pleasures, and an indifference to the feverish
excitements of artificial society. I, too, love the country—if such a
statement can be received after such an exordium; but I confess—to be
duly modest—that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked
that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those
who know it best. Not long ago, I heard a worthy orator at a country
school-treat declare to his small audience that honesty, sobriety,
and industry, in their station in life, might possibly enable them
to become cabdrivers in London. The precise form of the reward was
suggested, I fancy, by some edifying history of an ideal cabman; but
the speaker clearly knew the road to his hearers' hearts. Perhaps the
realisation of this high destiny might dispel their illusions. Like
poor Susan at the corner of Wood Street, they would see
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside.
The Swiss, who at home regards a mountain as an unmitigated nuisance,
is (or once was) capable of developing sentimental yearnings for the
Alps at the sound of a _ranz des vaches_. We all agree with Horace
that Rome is most attractive at Tibur, and _vice versâ_. It is the man
who has been 'long in populous cities pent' who, according to Milton,
enjoys
The smell of grain or tedded grass or kine,
Or daisy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
and the phrase is employed to illustrate the sentiments of a being
whose enjoyment of paradise was certainly enhanced by a sufficiently
contrasted experience.