‘Analogy’ is, even in its least valuable portions, characteristic of
Butler. On topics so peculiar, the minds most likely to hold right
opinions are exactly those most likely to advance wrong arguments in
support of them. The opinions themselves are suggested and supported by
deep and strong feelings, which it is painful to analyse, and not easy to
describe. The real and decisive arguments for those opinions are little
save a rational analysis and acute delineation of those feelings. It will
necessarily follow that the mind most prone to delineate and analyse
that part of itself will be most likely to succeed in the argumentative
exposition of these topics; and this is not likely to be the mind which
feels those emotions with the greatest intensity. The very keenness of
these feelings makes them painful to touch; their depth, difficult to
find: constancy, too, is liable to disguise them. The mind which always
feels them will, so to speak, be less conscious of them than one which
is only visited by them at long and rare intervals. Those who know a
place or a person best are not those most likely to describe it best;
their knowledge is so familiar that they cannot bring it out in words. A
deep, steady under-current of strong feeling is precisely what affects
men’s highest opinions most, and exactly what prevents men from being
able adequately to describe them. In the absence of the delineative
faculty, without the power to state their true reasons, minds of this
deep and steadfast class are apt to put up with reasons which lie on the
surface. They are caught by an appearance of fairness affect a dry and
intellectual tone, endeavour to establish their conclusions without the
premises which are necessary,—without mention of the grounds on which,
in their own minds, they really rest. The very heartfelt confidence of
Butler in Christianity was perhaps the cause of his seeming in part to
support it with considerations which appear to be erroneous.
It seems odd to say, and yet it is true, that the power of the ‘Analogy,’
is in its rhetoric. The ancient writers on that art made a distinction
between the modes of persuasion which lay in the illustrative and
argumentative efficacy of what was said, and a yet more subtle kind which
seemed to reside in the manner and disposition of the speaker himself.
In the first class, as has been before remarked, no writer of equal
eminence is so defective as Butler; his thoughts, if you take each one
singly, seem to lose a good deal from the feeble and hesitating manner
in which they are stated. And yet, if you read any considerable portion
of his writings, you become sensible of a strong disinclination to
disagree with him. A strong anxiety first to find the truth, and next to
impart it—an evident wish not to push arguments too far—a clear desire
not to convince men except by reasonable arguments of true opinions,
characterises every feeble word and halting sentence. Nothing is laid
down to dazzle or arouse. It is assumed that the reader wants to know
what is true, as much as the writer does to tell it. Very possibly
this may not be the highest species of religious author. The vehement
temperament, the bold assertion, the ecstatic energy of men like St.
Augustine or St. Paul, burn, so to speak, into the minds and memories of
men, and remain there at once and for ever. Such men excel in the broad
statement of great truths which flash at once with vivid evidence on the
minds which receive them. The very words seem to glow with life; and even
the sceptical reader is half awakened by them to a kindred and similar
warmth. Such are the men who move the creeds of mankind, and stamp a
likeness of themselves on ages that succeed them. But there is likewise
room for a quieter class, who partially state arguments, elaborate
theories, appreciate difficulties, solve doubts; who do not expect to
gain a hearing from the many—who do not cry in the streets or lift their
voice from the hill of Mars—who address quiet and lonely thinkers like
themselves, and are well satisfied if a single sentence in all their
writings remove one doubt from the mind of any man. Of these was Butler.
_Requiescat in pace_, for it was peace that he loved.
_STERNE AND THACKERAY._[8]
(1864.)
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has expressed his surprise that no one before
him has narrated the life of Sterne in two volumes. We are much more
surprised that he has done so. The life of Sterne was of the very
simplest sort. He was a Yorkshire clergyman, and lived for the most part
a sentimental, questionable, jovial life in the country. He was a queer
parson, according to our notions; but in those days there were many queer
parsons. Late in life he wrote a book or two, which gave him access to
London society; and then he led a still more questionable and unclerical
life at the edge of the great world. After that he died in something like
distress, and leaving his family in something like misery. A simpler
life, as far as facts go, never was known; and simple as it is, the story
has been well told by Sir Walter Scott, and has been well commented
on by Mr. Thackeray. It should have occurred to Mr. Fitzgerald that a
subject may only have been briefly treated because it is a limited and
simple subject, which suggests but few remarks, and does not require an
elaborate and copious description.
There are but few materials, too, for a long life of Sterne. Mr.
Fitzgerald has stuffed his volumes with needless facts about Sterne’s
distant relations, his great uncles and ninth cousins, in which no
one now can take the least interest. Sterne’s daughter, who was left
ill-off, did indeed publish two little volumes of odd letters, which
no clergyman’s daughter would certainly have published now. But even
these are too small in size and thin in matter to be spun into a copious
narrative. We should in this [the _National_] Review have hardly given
even a brief sketch of Sterne’s life, if we did not think that his
artistic character presented one fundamental resemblance and many
superficial contrasts to that of a great man whom we have lately lost. We
wish to point these out; and a few interspersed remarks on the life of
Sterne will enable us to enliven the tedium of criticism with a little
interest from human life.
Sterne’s father was a shiftless, roving Irish officer in the early part
of the last century. He served in Marlborough’s wars, and was cast
adrift, like many greater people, by the caprice of Queen Anne and the
sudden peace of Utrecht. Of him only one anecdote remains. He was, his
son tells us, ‘a little smart man, somewhat rapid and hasty’ in his
temper; and during some fighting at Gibraltar he got into a squabble
with another young officer, a Captain Phillips. The subject, it seems,
was a goose; but that is not now material. It ended in a duel, which was
fought with swords in a room. Captain Phillips pinned Ensign Sterne to
a plaster-wall behind; upon which he quietly asked, or is said to have
asked, ‘_Do_ wipe the plaster off your sword before you pull it out of
me;’ which, if true, showed at least presence of mind. Mr. Fitzgerald, in
his famine of matter, discusses who this Captain Phillips was; but into
this we shall not follow him.
A smart, humorous, shiftless father of this sort is not perhaps a bad
father for a novelist. Sterne was dragged here and there, through scenes
of life where no correct and thriving parent would ever have taken him.
Years afterwards, with all their harshness softened and half their pains
dissembled, Sterne dashed them upon pages which will live for ever. Of
money and respectability Sterne inherited from his father little or none;
but he inherited two main elements of his intellectual capital—a great
store of odd scenes, and the sensitive Irish nature which appreciates odd
scenes.
Sterne was born in the year 1713, the year of the peace of Utrecht, which
cast his father adrift upon the world. Of his mother we know nothing.
Years after, it was said that he behaved ill to her; at least neglected
and left her in misery when he had the means of placing her in comfort.
His enemies neatly said that he preferred ‘whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother.’ But these accusations have never been proved.
Sterne was not remarkable for active benevolence, and certainly may have
neglected an old and uninteresting woman, even though that woman was
his mother; he was a bad hand at dull duties, and did not like elderly
females; but we must not condemn him on simple probabilities, or upon a
neat epigram and loose tradition. ‘The regiment,’ says Sterne, ‘in which
my father served being broke, he left Ireland as soon as I was able to
be carried, and came to the family seat at Elvington, near York, where
his mother lived.’ After this he was carried about for some years, as his
father led the rambling life of a poor ensign, who was one of very many
engaged during a very great war, and discarded at a hasty peace. Then,
perhaps luckily, his father died, and ‘my cousin Sterne of Elvington,’
as he calls him, took charge of him, and sent him to school and college.
At neither of these was he very eminent. He told one story late in
life which may be true, but seems very unlike the usual school-life.
‘My schoolmaster,’ he says, ‘had the ceiling of the schoolroom new
whitewashed: the ladder remained there. I one unlucky day mounted it, and
wrote with a brush in large capitals LAU. STERNE, for which the usher
severely punished me. My master was 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.’ But ‘genius’ is rarely popular
in places of education; and it is, to say the least, remarkable that so
sentimental a man as Sterne should have chanced upon so sentimental an
instructor. It is wise to be suspicious of aged reminiscents; they are
like persons entrusted with ‘untold gold;’ there is no check on what they
tell us.
Sterne went to Cambridge, and though he did not acquire elaborate
learning, he thoroughly learned a gentlemanly stock of elementary
knowledge. There is even something scholarlike about his style. It bears
the indefinable traces which an exact study of words will always leave
upon the use of words. He was accused of stealing learning, and it is
likely enough that a great many needless quotations which were stuck
into _Tristram Shandy_ were abstracted from second-hand storehouses
where such things are to be found. But what he stole was worth very
little, and his theft may now at least be pardoned, for it injures the
popularity of his works. Our present novel-readers do not at all care for
an elaborate caricature of the scholastic learning; it is so obsolete
that we do not care to have it mimicked. Much of _Tristram Shandy_ is a
sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth Saurian jokes play idly in an
unintelligible world.
When he left college, Sterne had a piece of good fortune which in fact
ruined him. He had an uncle with much influence in the Church, and he
was thereby induced to enter the Church. There could not have been a
greater error. He had no special vice; he was notorious for no wild
dissipation or unpardonable folly; he had done nothing which even in this
more discreet age would be considered imprudent. He had even a refinement
which must have saved him from gross vice, and a nicety of nature which
must have saved him from coarse associations. But for all that he was
as little fit for a Christian priest as if he had been a drunkard and a
profligate. Perhaps he was less fit.
There are certain persons whom taste guides, much as morality and
conscience guide ordinary persons. They are ‘gentlemen.’ They revolt from
what is coarse; are sickened by that which is gross; hate what is ugly.
They have no temptation to what we may call ordinary vices; they have
no inclination for such raw food; on the contrary, they are repelled by
it, and loathe it. The law in their members does _not_ war against the
law of their mind; on the contrary, the _taste_ of their bodily nature
is mainly in harmony with what conscience would prescribe or religion
direct. They may not have heard the saying that the ‘beautiful is higher
than the good, for it includes the good.’ But when they do hear it,
it comes upon them as a revelation of their instinctive creed, of the
guidance under which they have been living all their lives. They are pure
because it is ugly to be impure; innocent because it is out of taste to
be otherwise; they live within the hedge-rows of polished society; they
do not wish to go beyond them into the great deep of human life; they
have a horror of that ‘impious ocean,’ yet not of the impiety, but of the
miscellaneous noise, the disordered confusion of the whole. These are
the men whom it is hardest to make Christian,—for the simplest reason;
paganism is sufficient for them. Their pride of the eye is a good pride;
their love of the flesh is a delicate and directing love. They keep
‘within the pathways’ because they dislike the gross, the uncultured, and
the untrodden. Thus they reject the primitive precept which comes before
Christianity. Repent! repent! says a voice in the wilderness; but the
delicate pagan feels superior to the voice in the wilderness. Why should
he attend to this uncouth person? He has nice clothes and well-chosen
food, the treasures of exact knowledge, the delicate results of the
highest civilisation. Is he to be directed by a person of savage habits,
with a distorted countenance, who lives on wild honey, who does not
wear decent clothes? To the pure worshipper of beauty, to the naturally
refined pagan, conscience and the religion of conscience are not merely
intruders, but barbarous intruders. At least so it is in youth, when
life is simple and temptations if strong are distinct. Years afterwards,
probably, the purest pagan will be taught by a constant accession of
indistinct temptations, and by a gradual declension of his nature, that
taste at the best, and sentiment of the very purest, are insufficient
guides in the perplexing labyrinth of the world.
Sterne was a pagan. He went into the Church; but Mr. Thackeray, no bad
judge, said most justly that his sermons ‘have not a single Christian
sentiment.’ They are well expressed, vigorous, moral essays; but they
are no more. Much more was not expected by many congregations in the
last age. The secular feeling of the English people, though always
strong,—though strong in Chaucer’s time, and though strong now,—was never
so all-powerful as in the last century. It was in those days that the
poet Crabbe was remonstrated with for introducing heaven and hell into
his sermons; such extravagances, he was told, were very well for the
Methodists, but a _clergyman_ should confine himself to sober matters of
this world, and show the prudence and the reasonableness of virtue during
this life. There is not much of heaven and hell in Sterne’s sermons, and
what there is seems a rhetorical emphasis which is not essential to the
argument, and which might perhaps as well be left out. Auguste Comte
might have admitted most of these sermons; they are healthy statements of
earthly truths, but they would be just as true if there was no religion
at all. Religion helps the argument, because foolish people might be
perplexed with this world, and they yield readily to another; religion
enables you—such is the real doctrine of these divines, when you examine
it—to coax and persuade those whom you cannot rationally convince; but it
does not alter the matter in hand—it does not affect that of which you
wish to persuade men, for you are but inculcating a course of conduct _in
this life_. Sterne’s sermons would be just as true if the secularists
should succeed in their argument, and the ‘valuable illusion’ of a deity
were omitted from the belief of mankind.
However, in fact, Sterne took orders, and by the aid of his uncle, who
was a Church politician, and who knew the powers that were, he obtained
several small livings. Being a pluralist was a trifle in those easy
times; nobody then thought that the parishioners of a parson had a right
to his daily presence; if some provision were made for the performance of
a Sunday service, he had done his duty, and he could spend the surplus
income where he liked. He might perhaps be bound to reside, if health
permitted, on one of his livings, but the law allowed him to have many,
and he could not be compelled to reside on them all. Sterne preached
well-written sermons on Sundays, and led an easy pagan life on other
days, and no one blamed him.
He fell in love too, and after he was dead, his daughter found two or
three of his love-letters to her mother, which she rashly published. They
have been the unfeeling sport of persons not in love up to the present
time. Years ago Mr. Thackeray used to make audiences laugh till they
cried by reading one or two of them, and contrasting them with certain
other letters also about his wife, but written many years later. This is
the sort of thing:—
‘Yes! I will steal from the world, and not a babbling tongue
shall tell where I am—Echo shall not so much as whisper my
hiding-place—suffer thy imagination to paint it as a little
sun-gilt cottage, on the side of a romantic hill—dost thou
think I will leave love and friendship behind me? No! they
shall be my companions in solitude, for they will sit down and
rise up with me in the amiable form of my L.—We will be as
merry and as innocent as our first parents in Paradise, before
the arch fiend entered that undescribable scene.
‘The kindest affections will have room to shoot and expand in
our retirement, and produce such fruit as madness, and envy,
and ambition have always killed in the bud.—Let the human
tempest and hurricane rage at a distance, the desolation is
beyond the horizon of peace. My L. has seen a polyanthus blow
in December—some friendly wall has sheltered it from the biting
wind. No planetary influence shall reach us, but that which
presides and cherishes the sweetest flowers.—God preserve us!
how delightful this prospect in idea! We will build, and we
will plant, in our own way—simplicity shall not be tortured
by art—we will learn of nature how to live—she shall be our
alchymist, to mingle all the good of life into one salubrious
draught.—The gloomy family of care and distrust shall be
banished from our dwelling, guarded by thy kind and tutelar
deity—we will sing our choral songs of gratitude, and rejoice
to the end of our pilgrimage.
‘Adieu, my L. Return to one who languishes for thy society.
L. STERNE.’
The beautiful language with which young ladies were wooed a century ago
is a characteristic of that extinct age; at least, we fear that no such
beautiful English will be discovered when our secret repositories are
ransacked. The age of ridicule has come in, and the age of good words has
gone out.
There is no reason to doubt, however, that Sterne was really in love with
Mrs. Sterne. People have doubted it because of these beautiful words;
but, in fact, Sterne was just the sort of man to be subject to this kind
of feeling. He took—and to this he owes his fame—the _sensitive_ view
of life. He regarded it not from the point of view of intellect, or
conscience, or religion, but in the plain way in which natural feeling
impresses, and will always impress, a natural person. He is a great
author; certainly not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a
sentence in his writings which can be called a thought; nor from sublime
conceptions which enlarge the limits of our imagination, for he never
leaves the sensuous,—but because of his wonderful sympathy with, and
wonderful power of representing, simple human nature. The best passages
in Sterne are those which every one knows, like this:
‘Thou hast left this matter short, said my uncle Toby to the
corporal, as he was putting him to bed,——and I will tell thee
in what, Trim.——In the first place, when thou madest an offer
of my services to Le Fever,—as sickness and travelling are
both expensive, and thou knowest he was but a poor lieutenant,
with a son to subsist as well as himself, out of his pay,—that
thou didst not make an offer to him of my purse; because, had
he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome
to it as myself.——Your honour knows, said the corporal, I had
no orders;——True, quoth my uncle Toby,—thou didst very right,
Trim, as a soldier, but certainly very wrong as a man.
‘In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same
excuse, continued my uncle Toby,——when thou offeredst him
whatever was in my house,—thou shouldst have offered him
my house too:——A sick brother officer should have the best
quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us,—we could tend and
look to him:——Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim,—and
what with thy care of him, and the old woman’s, and his boy’s,
and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set
him upon his legs.——
‘——In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby,
smiling,—he might march.——He will never march, an’ please your
honour, in this world, said the corporal:——He will march, said
my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed, with one
shoe off:——An’ please your honour, said the corporal, he will
never march, but to his grave:——He shall march, cried my uncle
Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without
advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.——He cannot
stand it, said the corporal:——He shall be supported, said my
uncle Toby:——He’ll drop at last, said the corporal, and what
will become of his boy?——He shall not drop, said my uncle Toby,
firmly.——A-well-o’day,—do what we can for him, said Trim,
maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die:——He shall not
die, by G—! cried my uncle Toby.
‘—The ACCUSING SPIRIT, which flew up to heaven’s chancery with
the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL, as
he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it
out for ever.
‘—My uncle Toby went to his bureau,—put his purse into his
breeches pocket, and having ordered the corporal to go early in
the morning for a physician,—he went to bed, and fell asleep.
‘The sun looked bright the morning after, to every eye in the
village but Le Fever’s and his afflicted son’s; the hand of
death pressed heavy upon his eye-lids,——and hardly could the
wheel at the cistern turn round its circle,—when my uncle
Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered
the lieutenant’s room, and without preface or apology, sat
himself down upon the chair by the bed-side, and independently
of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an
old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked
him how he did,—how he had rested in the night,—what was his
complaint,—where was his pain,—and what he could do to help
him:——and without giving him time to answer any one of the
inquiries, went on and told him of the little plan which he had
been concerting with the corporal the night before for him.——
‘——You shall go home directly, Le Fever, said my uncle Toby,
to my house,—and we’ll send for a doctor to see what’s the
matter,—and we’ll have an apothecary,—and the corporal shall be
your nurse;——and I’ll be your servant, Le Fever.
‘There was a frankness in my uncle Toby,—not the _effect_ of
familiarity,—but the _cause_ of it,—which let you at once
into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature; to
this there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner,
super-added, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to
come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle Toby
had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father,
had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and
had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it
towards him.——The blood and spirit of Le Fever, which were
waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their
last citadel, the heart,—rallied back,—the film forsook his
eyes for a moment,—he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby’s
face,—then cast a look upon his boy,——and that _ligament_, fine
as it was,—was never broken.——
‘Nature instantly ebb’d again,—the film returned
to its place,——the pulse fluttered——stopp’d——went
on——throbb’d——stopp’d again——moved——stopp’d——shall I go
on?——No.’
In one of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ Mr. Thackeray introduces a literary
man complaining of his ‘sensibility.’ ‘Ah,’ he replies, ‘my good friend,
your sensibility is your livelihood: if you did not feel the events and
occurrences of life more acutely than others, you could not describe them
better; and it is the excellence of your description by which you live.’
This is precisely true of Sterne. He is a great author because he felt
acutely. He is the most pathetic of writers because he had—when writing,
at least—the most pity. He was, too, we believe, pretty sharply in love
with Mrs. Sterne, because he was sensitive to that sort of feeling
likewise.
The difficulty of this sort of character is the difficulty of keeping it.
It does not last. There is a certain bloom of sensibility and feeling
about it which, in the course of nature, is apt to fade soon, and which,
when it has faded, there is nothing to replace. A character with the
binding elements—with a firm will, a masculine understanding, and a
persistent conscience—may retain, and perhaps improve, the early and
original freshness. But a loose-set, though pure character, the moment
it is thrown into temptation sacrifices its purity, loses its gloss, and
gets, so to speak, out of form entirely.