A number of excellent editions of our standard authors have been put
forth during the last two or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has
been of such real service to letters as the new Sterne edited by
Professor Wilbur L. Cross.[8]
Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in these editions is in large
measure rubbish which had been deliberately discarded by the author and
whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his memory. Certainly this is
true of Murray's new Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of
Hazlitt and Lamb recently published, to go no further afield. But with
Sterne the case is different. The _Journal to Eliza_ and the letters now
first printed in full from the "Gibbs manuscript" are a genuine aid in
getting at the heart of Sterne's elusive character. Even more important
is the readjustment of dates for the older correspondence, which the
present editor has accomplished at the cost of considerable pains, for
the setting back of a letter two years may make all the difference
between a lying knave and an unstable sentimentalist. In the spring of
1767, just a year before his death, Sterne was inditing those rather
sickly letters and the newly published _Journal_ to Eliza, a susceptible
young woman who was about to sail for India. "The coward," says
Thackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friends this while, with
sneering allusions to his poor foolish _Brahmine_. Her ship was not out
of the Downs, and the charming Sterne was at the 'Mount Coffee-House,'
with a sheet of gilt-edged paper before him, offering that precious
treasure, his heart, to Lady P----." It is an ugly charge, and indeed
Thackeray's whole portrait of the humourist is harshly painted. But
Sterne was not sneering in other letters at his "Brahmine," as he called
the rather spoiled East India lady, and it turns out from some very
pretty calculations of Professor Cross that the particular note to Lady
P[ercy] must have been written at the Mount Coffee-House two years
before he ever knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false," "wretched
worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," "foul Satyr," "the last words the
famous author wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor
stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"--for shame, Mr.
Thackeray! Sterne was a weak man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out
he was when the final blow struck him in his lonely hired room; but is
there no pity and pardon on your pen for the wayward penitent? You had
sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the genial Costigans and the
others who followed their hearts too readily; have you no _Alas, poor
Yorick!_ for the author who gave you these characters? You could smile
at Pendennis when he used the old songs for a second love; was it a
terrible thing that Yorick should have taken passages from his early
letters (copies of which were thriftily preserved after the fashion of
the day) and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotion at the end of
his life? "One solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one glass!--I gave a
thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often
graced, in those quiet and sentimental repasts--then laid down my knife
and fork, and took out my handkerchief, and clapped it across my face,
and wept like a child"--he wrote to Miss Lumley who afterwards became
Mrs. Sterne; and in the _Journal_ kept for Eliza when he was broken in
spirit and near to death, you may read the same words, as Thackeray read
them in manuscript, and you may call them false and lying; but I am
inclined to believe they were quite as genuine as most of the pathos of
that lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in Thackeray's case is the
harder to understand for the reason that to Sterne more than to any
other of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to owe his style and
his turn of thought. On many a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a
direct imitation of _Tristram Shandy_; add but a touch of caprice to
Colonel Newcome and you might almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in
the nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack of this
whimsical touch that makes the good colonel a little mawkish to many
readers. And if one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray's exquisite
English, whither shall one turn unless to the _Sermons_ of Mr. Yorick?
There is a taint of ingratitude in his affectation of being shocked at
the irregularities of one to whom he was so much indebted, and I fear
Mr. Thackeray was too consciously appealing to the Philistine prejudices
of the good folk who were listening to his lectures. Afterwards, when
the mischief was done, he suffered what looks like a qualm of
conscience. In one of the _Roundabout Papers_ he tells how he slept in
Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I went to bed in the room, in _his_
room, when I think how I admire, dislike, and have abused him, a certain
dim feeling of apprehension filled my mind at the midnight hour. What if
I should see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his sinister
smile, his long thin finger pointing to me in the moonlight!"
Unfortunately the popular notion of Sterne is still based almost
exclusively on the picture of him in the _English Humourists_.
It is to be hoped that at last this carefully prepared edition will do
something toward dispelling that false impression. Certainly, the
various introductions furnished by Professor Cross are admirable for
their fairness and insight. He does not attempt a panegyric of Sterne,
as did Mr. Fitzgerald in the first edition of the _Life_, nor does he
awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, as these are found in the
present revised form of that narrative; he recognises the errors of the
sentimentalist, but he does not call them by exaggerated names. And he
sees, too, the fundamental sincerity of the man, knowing that no great
book was ever penned without that quality, whatever else might be
missing. I think he will account it for service in a good cause if, as
an essayist taking my material where it may be found, I try to draw a
little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais whom he has honoured
by so elaborate a study.
Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise fully enough the influence
of Sterne's early years on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and
Shandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne introduces us
in the _Memoir_ written late in life for the benefit of his daughter
Lydia. The father, a lieutenant in Handaside's regiment, passed from
engagement to idleness, and from barrack to barrack, more than was the
custom even in those unsettled days. At Clonmel, in the south of
Ireland, November 24, 1713, Laurence was born, a few days after the
arrival of his mother from Dunkirk. Other children had been given to the
luckless couple, and were yet to be added, but here and there they were
dropped on the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in the end only two,
the future novelist and his sister Catherine, who married a publican in
London and became estranged from her brother by her "uncle's wickedness
and her own folly"--says Laurence. Of the mother it is not necessary to
say much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger-on in camps seem to
have hardened her, and her temper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called
it) was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterne neglected her
brutally is a charge as old as Walpole's scandalous tongue, and Byron,
taking his cue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusation by saying
that "he preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living
mother." Sterne's minute refutation of the slander may now be read at
full length in a letter to the very uncle who set the tale agoing. The
boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial temperament, though
not his physique:
The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the
siege, where my father was run through the body by Capt. Phillips,
in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty
he survived, though with an impaired constitution, which was not
able to withstand the hardships it was put to; for he was sent to
Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away
his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or
two, walking about continually without complaining, till the
moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which
was at Port Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a
little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most
patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to
give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and
hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and
so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so
that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had
not been sufficient for your purpose.
Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes
in the son's record to make it read like a page from _Henry Esmond_; the
very texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are
Thackeray's.
Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a
characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly
whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote
in large letters, LAU. STERNE. The usher whipped him severely, but, says
the _Memoir_, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before
me, that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius,
and he was sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went
to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at
York next took charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and
afterwards the Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this
patron we shall probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his
uncle wished him to write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he
detested such "dirty work," and got his uncle's hatred in return for his
independence. According to the writer of the _Yorkshire Anecdotes_, the
two fell out over a woman--which sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile,
Laurence had been successfully courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York,
and, during her absence, had been writing those love-letters which his
daughter published after the death of her parents, to the immense
increase of sentimentalism throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in
sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though honestly enough meant,
no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use
of select passages at a later date, as we have seen. Miss Lumley became
Mrs. Sterne in due time, and brought to her husband a modest jointure,
and another living at Stillington, so that he was now a pluralist,
although far from rich. The marriage was not particularly happy. Madam,
one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and unreasonable, her
reverend spouse was volatile and pleasure-loving; and when, in the years
of Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she decided to stay there
with her daughter. Sterne seems to have been fond of her always, in a
way, and in money matters was never anything but generous and tactfully
considerate. A bad-hearted man is not so thoughtful of his wife's
comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters show him to have
been; and even Thackeray admits that his affection for the girl was
"artless, kind, affectionate, and _not_ sentimental."
But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only woman at whose feet the
parson of Sutton and Stillington was sighing. There was that Mlle. de
Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear, dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as
she becomes in _Tristram Shandy_), to whom he sends presents of wine and
honey (with notes asking, "What is honey to the sweetness of thee?"),
and who followed him to London in the heyday of his fame, where somehow
she fades mysteriously out of view. "I myself must ever have some
Dulcinea in my head," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And, in truth,
the soul of Yorick was mewed in the cage of his breast very near his
heart, and never stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere.
Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his love of woman had a curious
and childlike way of fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour.
Most famous of all was his passion--it seems almost to have been a
passion in this case--for the famous "Eliza." Towards the end of his
life he had become warmly attached to a certain William James, a retired
Indian commodore, and his wife, who were the best and most wholesome of
his friends. At their London home he met Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, and soon
became romantically attached to her. When the time drew near for her to
sail to India to rejoin her husband, he wrote a succession of notes in a
kind of paroxysm of grief for himself and anxiety for her, and for
several months afterwards he kept a journal of his emotions for her
benefit some day. He was dead in less than a year. The letters she
kept, and in due time printed, because it was rumoured that Lydia was to
publish them from copies--a pretty bit of wrangling among all these
women there was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick! The
_Journal_ is now for the first time included in the author's works--a
singular document, as eccentric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment
is hard to define, a wild and hysterical record. But it rings true on
the whole, and confirms the belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine,
however short-lived they may have been. The last letter to Eliza is
pitiful with its tale of a broken body and a sick heart: "In ten minutes
after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick's
gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss
of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India
handkerchiefs with it.--It came, I think, from my heart! I fell asleep
through weakness. At six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steeped in
tears." All through the _Journal_ that follows are indications of wasted
health and of the perplexities of life that were closing in upon him.
Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten, and we get a picture
of serener moments. One day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and
it may not be amiss to copy out his note just as he penned it:
But I am in the Vale of Coxwould & wish You saw in how princely a
manner I live in it--tis a Land of Plenty--I sit down alone to
Venison, fish or wild fowl--or a couple of fowls--with curds, and
strawberrys & cream, (and all the simple clean plenty w^{ch.} a
rich Vally can produce)--with a Bottle of wine on my right hand
(as in Bond street) to drink y^{r.} health--I have a hundred hens
& chickens [he sometimes spelt it _chickings_] ab^{t.} my yard--and
not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit or a Trout--but he brings
it as an offering--In short tis a golden Vally--& will be the
golden Age when You govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the
Mistress of my table & spread it with elegancy and that natural
grace & bounty w^{th.} w^{ch.} heaven has distinguish'd You...
--Time goes on slowly--every thing stands still--hours seem days &
days seem Years whilst you lengthen the Distance between us--from
Madras to Bombay--I shall think it shortening--and then desire &
expectation will be upon the rack again--come--come--
But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on a longer journey than
Bombay. In England once more, she traded on her relation to the famous
writer, and then reviled him. She associated with John Wilkes, and
afterwards with the Abbe Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on
"the Lady who has been so celebrated as the Correspondent of Mr.
Sterne." It is engraved on her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius
and benevolence were united in her"; but the long letter composed in the
vein of Mrs. Montagu and now printed from her manuscript belies the
first, and her behaviour after Sterne's death makes a mockery of the
second.
All this new material throws light on a phase of this matter which
cannot be avoided in any discussion of Sterne's character: How far did
his immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he was a "foul Satyr";
Bagehot thought he was merely an "old flirt," and others have seen
various degrees of guilt in his philanderings. Now his relation to Eliza
would seem to be pretty decisive of his character in this respect, and
fortunately the evidence here published in full by Professor Cross
leaves little room for doubt. There is, for one thing, an extraordinary
letter which is given in facsimile from the rough draft, with all its
erasures and corrections. It was addressed to Daniel Draper, but was
never sent, apparently never completed. The substance of it is, to say
the least, unusual:
I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I have not
the honour to be known to--a letter likewise upon no kind of
business (in the ideas of the world) is a little out of the common
course of things--but I'm so myself, and the impulse which makes
me take up my pen is out of the common way too, for it arises from
the honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and
friendship as I bear for Mrs. Draper--if I did not wish to hope
and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, dear sir, in love
with your wife; but 'tis a love you would honour me for, for 'tis
so like that I bear my own daughter, who is a good creature, that
I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it--that moment I had
would have been the last.
Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing to our purpose.
Now it is easy to say that such a letter was written with the
hypocritical intention of allaying Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and
certainly the last sentence overshoots the mark. Against the general
innocence of Sterne's life there exist, in particular, two damaging bits
of evidence--that infamous thing in dog-Latin addressed to the master of
the "Demoniacs," whose meaning must have been quite lost upon the
daughter who published it, and a pair of brief notes to a woman named
Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may say that it was probably written in
the exaggerated tone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of both this
and the notes one may add that they do not incriminate the later years
of Sterne's life. As an offset we now have that extraordinary memorandum
in the _Journal to Eliza_, dated April 24, 1767, which states
explicitly, and convincingly, that he had led an entirely chaste life
for the past fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible, to
enter into the evidence further in this place, but the general inference
may be stated with something like assurance: Sterne's relation to Eliza
was purely sentimental, as was the case with most of his philandering;
at the same time in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a life
of pleasure such as was by no means uncommon among the clergy of his
day. He was neither quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the "old
flirt" of Bagehot, but a man led into many follies, and many kindnesses
also, by an impulsive heart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his
immorality that one has to complain of, and the talk in the books on
that score is mostly foolishness; it is rather his bad taste. He cannot
be much blamed for his estrangement from his wife, and his care for her
comfort is not a little to his credit; but he might have refrained from
writing to Eliza on the happiness they were to enjoy when the poor woman
was dead--as he had already done to Mlle. Fourmantelle, and others, too,
it may be. Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza, had
written that she was coming over to England, and the _Journal_ for a
time is filled with forebodings of the confusion she was to bring with
her. One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a tear over the
Postscript added after the last regular entry:
Nov: 1^{st.} All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable
than my hopes--M^{rs.} S.--& my dear Girl have been 2 Months with
me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at
York, after having settled every thing to their hearts
content--M^{rs.} Sterne retires into france, whence she purposes
not to stir, till her death.--& never, has she vow'd, will give me
another sorrowful or discontented hour--I have conquerd her, as I
w^{d.} every one else, by humanity & Generosity--& she leaves me,
more than half in Love w^{th.} me--She goes into the South of
france, her health being insupportable in England--& her age, as
she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on the edge
of sixty--so God bless--& make the remainder of her Life happy--in
order to w^{ch.} I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year--&
give my dear Girl two thousand p^{ds.}--w^{th.} w^{ch.} all Joy,
I agree to,--but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french
Loans--
--And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee--But What can I say, What can
I write--But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wishing
for thy Return--Return--Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth
the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever.
So ends the famous _Journal_, which at last we are permitted to read
with all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will
occur to every reader is surprise that a master of style could write
such slipshod, almost illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of
the writers of the day were content to leave all minor matters of
grammar and orthography to their printer, whom it was then the fashion
to abuse. More than one page of stately English out of that formal age
would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings, could we see the
original manuscript. But the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent,
and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault, along with his
haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In another way his
incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a note that
particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly
sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when in
the _Journal_ he cries out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space
betwixt us--Shorten the space of our miseries!"--or as when, in that
letter to Lady Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his
temptations, and in the same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's
Prayer for the sake of deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a
matter of taste, for there is no reason to believe that Yorick's
religious feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, too, as
his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an inopportune moment.
"Un pretre corrumpu ne l'est jamais a demi"--a priest is never only half
corrupt--said Massillon, and there are times when such a saying is true.
It is also true, and Sterne's life is witness thereof, that in certain
ages, when compassion and tenderness of heart have taken the place of
religion's austerer virtues, a man may preach with conviction on Sunday,
and on Monday join without much disquiet of conscience in the revelries
of a "Crazy" Castle. There is not a great deal for the moralist to say
on such a life; it is a matter for the historian to explain. At
Cambridge Sterne had made the acquaintance of John Hall Stevenson, the
owner of Skelton, or "Crazy," Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within
convenient reach of Sterne's Yorkshire homes. An excellent engraving in
the present edition gives a fair notion of this fantastic dwelling
before its restoration. On a fringe of land between the edge of what
seems a stagnant pool and the foot of some barren hills, the old pile of
stone sits dull and lowering. First comes a double terrace rising sheer
from the water, and above that a rambling, comfortless-looking
structure, pierced in the upper story by a few solemn windows. Terraces
and building alike are braced with outstanding buttresses, as if, like
the House of Usher, the ancient edifice might some day split and crumble
away into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy square tower
erected long ago for defence; at the other stands a slender octagonal
turret with its famous weathercock, by whose direction the owner
regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears an aspect of bleakness
and solitude, in startling contrast with the wild doings of host and
guests. A study yet to be made is a history of the clubs or associations
of the eighteenth century, which, in imitation, no doubt, of the newly
instituted Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of adding the
sting of a fraternal secrecy to the commonplace pleasures of
dissipation. Famous among these were the "Monks of Medmenham Abbey," and
the "Hell-Fire Club," and to a less degree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall
Stevenson gathered into his notorious abode. If Sterne found his
amusement in this boisterous assembly, it is charitable (and the
evidence points this way) to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and
grotesque pranks of such a company rather than its viciousness. It is at
least remarkable that Hall Stevenson, or "Eugenius," as Sterne called
him, seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine by more than one
piece of practical advice. Above all, there lay at Skelton a great
collection of Rabelaisian books, brought together by the owner during
his tours on the Continent; and to this Sterne owed his eccentric
reading and that acquaintance with the world's humours and
whimsicalities which were to make his fortune.
Here, then, in the library of his compromising friend, he gathered the
material for his great work, _Tristram Shandy_; and, indeed, if we
credit some scholars, he gathered so successfully that little was left
for his own creative talents. It is demonstrably true that he made
extraordinary use of certain old French books, including Rabelais, whom
he counted with Cervantes as his master; and from Burton's _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ he borrowed unblushingly, not to mention other English
authors. We are shocked at first to learn that some of his choicest
passages are stolen goods; the recording angel's tear was shed, it
appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released long before that gentleman
was born to sweeten the world; so too the wind was tempered to the shorn
lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added that text to the stock of
biblical quotations. But after all, there is little to be gained by
unearthing these plagiarisms. _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental
Journey_ still remain among the most original productions in the
language, and we are only taught once more that genius has a high-handed
way of taking its own where it finds it.
The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely does more than affect
a few of those set pieces or purple patches by which an author like
Sterne gradually comes to be known and judged. These are admirably
adapted for use in anthologies, for they may be severed from their
context without cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one suppose
that from reading them he gets anything but a distorted view of Sterne's
work. They are all marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos--the
recording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly, the dead ass, the caged
starling, Maria of Moulines (I name them as they occur to me)--and they
give a very imperfect notion of the true Shandean flavour. In their own
genre they are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genre which gives
pleasure from the perception of the art, and not from the kindling touch
of nature, in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic, yet they
make no appeal to the heart, and I doubt if a tear was ever shed over
any of them--even by the lachrymose Yorick himself. To enjoy them
properly one must key his mind to that state in which the emotions cease
to have validity in themselves, and are changed into a kind of exquisite
convention. Now, it is easier by far to detect the inherent
insubstantiality of such a convention than to appreciate its delicately
balanced beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much of Sterne's
false sentiment from those who base their criticism primarily on these
famous episodes. For my part I am almost inclined to place the story of
Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder if those who call it pathetic
really mean that it has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost me
a sigh.
No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological
patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are
not many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their
range of action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a
memorable distinctness which have never been surpassed. Not the bustling
people of Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr.
Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor
characters of the servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful
vividness; and if there is a single failure in all that gallery of
portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from the author and is
foisted upon the company somewhat unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor
is the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. One of the constant
creeds of the age, handed down from the old comedy of humours, was the
belief in the "ruling passion" as the source of all a man's acts. The
persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters and novels are a
succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single motive. They
are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence
with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling passion,
both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened
down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by
its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his
_hobbyhorsical_ philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are
Tristram's father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted
humours--Mr. Shandy, who would regulate all the affairs of life by
abstract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely
by the impulses of the heart. Between them Sterne would seem to have set
over against each other the two divided sources of human activity; and
the minor characters, each with his cherished hobby, are ranged under
them in proper subordination. The art of the narrative--and in this
Sterne is without master or rival--is to bring these characters into a
group by some common motive, and then to show how each of them is
thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take, for example, the
tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. Shandy had "the
greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of
his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is, at his
leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to
the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr.
Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the
cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of
Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious
to have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the
Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this
is one of the more entertaining scenes of the book, for at every step
one or another of the listeners throws in an exclamation which intimates
how the words are falling in with his own peculiar train of thought. The
result is a delightful cross-section of human nature, as it actually
exists. "Our armies swore terribly in _Flanders_, cried my Uncle
_Toby_--but nothing to this.--For my own part, I could not have a heart
to curse my dog so."
But it is not this persistent and very human egotism alone which makes
the good people of Shandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originator
and master of the gesture and the attitude. Like a skilful player of
puppets, he both puts words into the mouths of his creatures and pulls
the wires that move them. No one has ever approached him in the art with
which he carries out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the
brain into the most minute and precise posturing. Before Corporal Trim
reads the sermon his exact attitude is described so that, as the author
says, "a statuary might have modelled from it." Throughout all the
dialogue between the two contrasted brothers we follow every movement of
the speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh, and when Mr. Shandy
breaks his pipe the moment is tense with expectation. But the supreme
exhibition of this art occurs at the announcement of Bobby's death. Let
us leave Mr. Shandy and my Uncle Toby discoursing over this sad event,
and turn to the kitchen. Those who know the scene may pass on:
----My young master in _London_ is dead! said Obadiah.--
----A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice
scoured, was the first idea which _Obadiah's_ exclamation brought
into _Susannah's_ head....
--O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried
_Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a
procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and
yellow lutestrings,--her brown taffata,--her bone-laced caps, her
bed-gowns, and comfortable under-petticoats.--Not a rag was left
behind.--"_No,--she will never look up again_," said _Susannah_.
We had a fat, foolish scullion--my father, I think, kept her for
her simplicity;--she had been all autumn struggling with a
dropsy.--He is dead, said _Obadiah_,--he is certainly dead!--So am
not I, said the foolish scullion.
----Here is sad news, _Trim_, cried _Susannah_, wiping her eyes as
_Trim_ stepp'd into the kitchen,--master _Bobby_ is dead and
_buried_--the funeral was an interpolation of _Susannah's_--we
shall have all to go into mourning, said _Susannah_.
I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_
earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did
in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope
in God the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own
ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of
work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said
_Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive.
I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching
a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman!
--He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the
coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right
arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read
the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the
coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to
this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the
end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an
idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat
upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking!
_Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and
stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The
foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon
her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about
the corporal.
There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people
in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his
individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing
quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no
touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly,
quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled
together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies
covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly
in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture
of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the
author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance.
It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than
an ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their
roles. Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more
important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of
the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a
philosophy, a new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these
scenes, which makes of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He
was not indulging his author's vanity when he thought of himself as a
follower of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them
rather than with his great contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his
greater successors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is his exact parentage
hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem to see the embryonic humour of a
world coming to the birth and not yet fully formed. Through the crust of
the old mediaeval ideals the new humanism was struggling to emerge, and
in its first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of the old
civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those monsters that Nature
threw off when she was preparing her hand for a higher creation. There
is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast wallowing unwieldy, in the
creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the pride of the
design that is foreshadowed and will some day come to its own.
Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is about his
humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside by the
new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily the
ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full
and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful
incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of
the past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made
ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour
of man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the
bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old
ideals had passed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw
only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the
disguise of liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented
his rage in that mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet.
His was the sardonic humour. But time that takes away brings also its
compensation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, these passionate
egotisms are dwindled to mere caprices, and a jest becomes more
appropriate than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is left. There
is the kindly heart and the humble acknowledgment that we too are
seeking our own petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into which
Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it for the boisterous
mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely
whimsical; his smile is almost a caress.
I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with
the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon
the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see
one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the
Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features
gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile,
and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying,
"We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the
pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation,
helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides,
is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait
at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred
Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this
world.
It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully
the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere
of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest
way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages,
and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and
we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a
great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to
procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of
Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram
Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the
blind goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her
plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual
sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning
of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against
our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it
plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity
had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins,
brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven
has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me;
and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force
of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole
universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of
the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of
ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But
alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy
in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this
combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the
blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his
unfortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesque mistake in
naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor
is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to
begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of
his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living
through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the
kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable
that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of
nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a
woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying
philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of
_Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It
shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it
according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at
times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty,
too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society.
Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and
little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a
form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the
essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was
indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern
significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his
writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire ecole_. It
flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of
Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more
than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram
Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the
satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.
Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers
from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung,
and in part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not prone to fall
into cant whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family
edition of Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the
introduction: "After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one
needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one
needs strychnine and iron and a complete change of blood." It does not
seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais
wrote when the human passions were emerging from restraint, and it was
part of his humour to paint the lusty youth of the world in colours of
grotesque exaggeration. Sterne, coming in an age of conventional
manners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed thoughts that lurked in
the minds of men beneath all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose
of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's, to turn the under
side of human nature up to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at
the social proprieties; but his instrument was necessarily innuendo
instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism.
Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a way as to
draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really exists.
We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this perhaps,
though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his
suggestive style.
One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of
immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can
come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the _pueris
reverentia_ be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on
those who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of
life) I am inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those
like the _Venus and Adonis_, which throw the colours of a glowing
imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am
inclined to think that Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds
than ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelism is more
inflammatory than Shandeism. So far as morals alone are concerned there
is a touch of what may be called inverted cant in this discrimination
between the wholesome and the unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his
straight-forward, manly way, put the matter right once for all: "It
cannot be said that the licentious humour of _Tristram Shandy_ is of the
kind which applies itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt
society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be harmless as to
morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not
so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he
occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean
that his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at
times by excess of his method.
The first two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were written in 1759, when
Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the
first day of the year following. Like many another too original work, it
had first to go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the
great world, when once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon
followed his book to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his
fame in London during his annual visits and of his reception in Paris
reads like enchantment. "My Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the
first flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your Great People of the
first Rank, who striue who shall most honor me;--euen all the Bishops
have sent their Complim^{ts.} to me, & I set out on Monday Morning to
pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine w^{h.} Lord Chesterfield this
Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday L^{d.} Rockingham takes me to Court."
Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society. Lord
Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, a
comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest"
Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it
may well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated
introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram.
Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the
remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without
getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different
times, also, he published two volumes of _Sermons by Mr. Yorick_, which,
in their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as
theological discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are
for one thing almost the finest example in English of that style which
follows the sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word.
But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain
of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France
restored his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him
material for the travel scenes in _Tristram Shandy_ and for the
_Sentimental Journey_. But that "vile asthma" was never long absent,
and there is something pitiable in the quips and jests with which he
covers his dread of the spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen how
the travail of his broken body wails in the _Journal to Eliza_; and his
last letter, written from his lodging in London to his truest and least
equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity and pardon:
"Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next day, for
perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live--I want to ask a favour
of him, if I find myself worse--that I shall beg of you, if in this
wrestling I come off conqueror--my spirits are fled--'tis a bad omen--do
not weep my dear Lady--your tears are too precious to shed for
me--bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.--Dearest, kindest,
gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your
handmaids.--If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the
follies which you so often condemn'd--which my heart, not my head,
betray'd me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope
you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?"--I cannot
but feel that the man who wrote that note was kind and good at heart,
and that through all his wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through
the incoherence of his untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine
sweetness.
He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March,
1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and
actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by,
when some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was
lying ill in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their
old merry-maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it
is unique in its terrible simplicity:
About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill
at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called
"Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite
of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who
were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March,
the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume,
and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr.
Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr.
Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he
did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and
he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said,
"Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and
died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented
him very much.
We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol
of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of
poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to
stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding
genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose
puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall.