Not many Londoners, it seems, know where amongst them Sterne was buried;
but his tomb stands where it did, duly tended, so that the
superscription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound of the voices,
of the feet, of the hootings, and of the wheels on the long westward
road that starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the story told by
the surgeon who thought he recognized a dead man anonymous upon a
dissecting table, at the time of Sterne’s death in Bond-street, has
discouraged the national and the local interest in an accessible London
grave of the great. Yet it matters little whether the dust beneath this
grey, Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous headstone be now
mingled with the dust that was the body of Sterne; or at least it is a
question that touches no more than the fancy.
The lapse of time might be important in our thoughts on Sterne’s tomb if
we measured by the long years of childhood; but we do not, because it is
the short mature years that are historical. Added together the adult two
centuries since Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did garden,
court, or house, remembered with the large remembrance of ancient and
spacious infancy, so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man as
the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp. Time is all depreciated,
disproved. No device, such as Thoreau’s for reducing the past to its
real brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old woman and had
wondered at the date whereto her birth referred him, but bethought
himself how few of such lives as hers outstride all history and the very
life of the race. But to join long life to long life is to pass in fancy
by so many consecutive childhoods, for then the time will seem not short
but immeasurably long. The childish years prolong time; the adult years,
a man’s middle years, the short years of life, make Time’s changes,
doing Time’s work.
A mere score of such decades take us back through Wordsworth and Keats,
the great English painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day
when Sterne was born. What a trifle!
A score of our little adult decades have passed since the _Memoirs of
Martinus Scriblerus_, planned by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit
and actual satire upon science; since a medical pedant—learned, not a
simpleton—was to be rallied for relying upon dreams and certain
prescriptions of Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires since
Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the copyist.) It is the effect
of the twenty poor decades that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of
time. To unpack these years is somewhat like the unloading of a ripe
bulrush, or of some other lately-closed house of seeds in autumn,
whereof the wings were bound until they opened with a spring, never to
close again; and the air is filled with the released burden of the
slender rod.
Not because of the flight of time, then, is this solitude of brilliant
sky, broad grass, and trees tossed by the summer wind, a place of
interest; nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too easily
forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a _Tristram Shandy_ purged (or _à peu
près_), but the stealthy offence is so constant in Sterne’s intention
that something like his own ignoble agility might be necessary for one
who would at every point evade it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or
so (apt action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy), and he
seems to have done the work as well as an honest man ought to hope to be
able to do it. Of that no honest man can be precisely apprised—it would
need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for those who intend to read
_Tristram Shandy_, or to read it again, Henry Morley’s (in the Universal
Library Series) is an edition to be welcomed; to lose one page in ten is
to lose nothing essential to the masterpiece.
What moves curiosity here is the question why this bullying headstone
should have been erected at the will of two anonymous ‘Brother Masons’,
inconsequently so called in their own inscription, inasmuch as Sterne
was not of their craft. Here are the couplets, turned with the metrical
ability of that day, and making slovenly thinking to move with
precision. After announcing that in that place ‘lyes the body of the
Reverend Laurence Sterne, A.M.’—‘Ah! molliter ossa quiescant!’—the lines
run thus:
If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane,
Unsully’d worth, and soul without a stain;
If mental powers could ever justly claim
The well-won tribute of immortal fame;
Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride
Mow’d down luxuriant follies far and wide.
Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind,
Unseal’d to him the springs that move the mind;
What did it boot him? Ridicul’d, abus’d,
By fools insulted and by prudes accus’d.
In his, mild reader, view thy future fate:
Like him, despise what ’twere a sin to hate.
The confusion of images and of purposes in this composition needs no
exposing. Its coherence is nevertheless invested with that virtue of
propriety which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extraordinary
gain of all its secondary literature, and of the less than secondary.
Dignity is too lofty a name for a quality so inessential; but it must be
owned that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning powers of the same
order, and so angry as these two seem to have been, would to-day, or in
any other day than that, have turned their verse with less
self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with a single flourish that
never delighted any human eye, classical and paltry at once, is the
characteristic funereal stone that bears the lines.
Modern philanthropy—perhaps that of the mild reader himself so
inconsequently threatened in the verse—has changed the old burial-ground
into a place of recreation absolutely unnecessary in a road that has
Hyde Park on the other side of its railings. The mild reader has
levelled the grass and cleared all the tombstones—Sterne’s and one or
two more excepted—from the wide square, ranging them against the four
walls, two deep. The names will be but a little the later forgotten. One
poor little name, because of the primness of the title, remains in the
mind—that of ‘Miss Susannah Headlam, who departed this life March the
6th, 1819, aged three years’.
No one comes to the superfluous pleasure-ground. Under the beautiful
plane-trees flocks of sparrows alight with the leaves of a crisp, dry
London autumn having a sun of summer, and the cats look at them, knowing
there is no cover to spring from. Cover or no cover, on the impulse, a
happy dog would hunt these flocks at random; the cat contains the
passion of his wish as he strolls. He makes no crouch or spring, except,
now and then, upon some minute moth which he afterwards eats with much
ado and working of the jaws.
At the entrance stands the Chapel of Rest with the frescoes offered by
Shields to the meditation of whomsoever will pause to take advantage of
the quiet hour; and hither, in fact, come a very few Londoners, out of
the noise.