The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
by Laurence Sterne · English · Gutenberg #39270 · 1,142,239 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
Author: Laurence Sterne
Commentator: George Saintsbury
Release date: March 26, 2012 [eBook #39270]
Most recently updated: August 24, 2021
Language: English
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Everyman’s Library
Edited By Ernest Rhys
FICTION
TRISTRAM SHANDY
With An Introduction By
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
This is No. 617 of _EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY_. The Publishers will be
pleased to send freely to all applicants a list of the published
and projected volumes, arranged under the following sections:
Travel * Science * Fiction
Theology & Philosophy
History * Classical
For Young People
Essays * Oratory
Poetry & Drama
Biography
Reference
Romance
[Decoration]
In four styles of binding: Cloth, Flat Back, Coloured Top;
Leather, Round Corners, Gilt Top; Library Binding in Cloth,
& Quarter Pigskin
London: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
New York: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
[Decorative Text:
A TALE
WHICH
HOLDETH
CHILDREN
FROM PLAY
& OLD MEN
FROM THE
CHIMNEY
CORNER
Sir Philip Sidney]
[Decorative Text:
THE LIFE &
OPINIONS of
TRISTRAM
SHANDY *
GENTLEMAN
By LAURENCE
* STERNE
London & Toronto
J·M·Dent & Sons
Ltd. * New York
E·P·Dutton & Co]
First Issue of this Edition 1912
Reprinted 1915, 1917
INTRODUCTION
It can hardly be said that Sterne was an unfortunate person during his
lifetime, though he seems to have thought himself so. His childhood was
indeed a little necessitous, and he died early, and in debt, after some
years of very bad health. But from the time when he went to Cambridge,
things went on the whole very fairly well with him in respect of
fortune; his ill-health does not seem to have caused him much disquiet;
his last ten years gave him fame, flirting, wandering, and other
pleasures and diversions to his heart’s content; and his debts only
troubled those he left behind him. He delighted in his daughter; he was
able to get rid of his wife, when he was more than usually _fatigatus et
aegrotus_ of her, with singular ease. During the unknown, or almost
unknown, middle of his life he had friends of the kind most congenial to
him; and both in his time of preparation and his time of production in
literature, he was able to indulge his genius in a way by no means
common with men of letters. If his wish to die in a certain manner and
circumstance was only bravado--and borrowed bravado--still it was
granted; and it is quite certain that to him an old age of real illness
would have been unmitigated torture. Even if we admit the ghastly
stories of the fate of his remains, there was very little reason why any
one should not have anticipated Mr. Swinburne’s words on the morrow of
Sterne’s death and said, “Oh! brother, the gods were good to you,”
though even then he might have said it with a sort of mental reservation
on the question whether Sterne had been very good to the gods.
Nemesis, for the purpose of adjusting things, played him the
exceptionally savage trick of using the intervention of his idolised
daughter. Little or nothing seems to be known of “Lydia Sterne de
Medalle,” as she was pleased to sign herself; “Mrs. Medalle,” as her
bluff British contemporaries call her. But that she must have been
either a very silly, a very stupid, or an excessively callous person,
appears certain. It would seem, indeed, to require a combination of the
flightiness and lack of taste which her father too often displayed, with
the stolidity which (from rather unfair inference through Mrs. Shandy)
is sometimes supposed to have characterised her mother, to prompt or
permit a daughter to publish such a collection of letters as those which
were first given to the world in 1775. Charity, not unsupported by
probability, has trusted that Madame de Medalle could not read Latin,
but she certainly could read English; and only an utterly corrupted
heart, or an incurably dense or feather-brained head, could hide from
her the fact that not a few of the English letters she published were
damaging to her father’s character. Her alleged excuse--that her mother,
who was then dead, had desired her, if any letters should be published
under her father’s name, to publish these, and that the “Yorick and
Eliza” correspondence had appeared--is utterly insufficient. For Mrs.
Sterne, of whose conduct we know nothing unfavourable, and one or two
things decidedly to her credit, could only have meant “such of these as
will put your father in a favourable light,” else she would have
published them herself. Yet though Lydia could, while taking no
editorial trouble whatever, go out of her way to make a silly missish
apology for publishing a passage in which her charms and merits are
celebrated, she seems never to have given a thought to what she was
doing in other ways. Nor were Sterne’s misfortunes in this way over with
the publication of these things; for the subsequently discovered
Fourmentelle correspondence sunk him, with precise judges, a little
deeper. No doubt _Tristram Shandy_, the _Sentimental Journey_, and the
curious stories or traditions about their author, were not exactly
calculated to give Sterne a very high reputation with grave authorities.
But it is these unlucky letters which put him almost hopelessly out of
court. Even the slight relenting of fortune which gave him at last, in
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, a biographer very good-natured, very
indefatigable, and with a natural genius for detecting undiscovered
facts and documents, only made matters worse in some ways. And the
consequence is, that it has become a commonplace and almost a necessity
to make up for praising Sterne’s genius by damning his character.
Johnson, while declining to deny him ability, seems to have been too
much disgusted to talk freely about him; Scott’s natural kindliness,
warm admiration for my Uncle Toby, and total freedom from squeamish
prudery, seem yet to have left him ill at ease and tongue-tied in
discussing Sterne; Thackeray, as is well known, exceeded all measure in
denouncing him; and his chief recent critical biographer, Mr. Traill,
who is probably as free from cant, Britannic or other, as any man who
ever wrote in English, speaks his mind in the most unsparing fashion.
For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that I do not think letters of
this kind ought to be published at all; and though it may seem
paradoxical or foolish, I am by no means sure that, if they are
published, they ought to be admitted as evidence. That which is not
written for the public, is no business of the public’s; and I never read
letters of this kind, published for the first time, without feeling like
an eavesdropper.[I.1] Unluckily, the evidence furnished by the letters
fits in only too well with that furnished by the published works, by his
favourite cronies and companions, and by his general reputation, so that
“what the prisoner says” must, no doubt, “be used against him.”
[Footnote I.1: It is perhaps barely necessary to observe that
the parallel does not extend to a further parallel between
republication and tale-bearing. Once published, the thing is
public.]
* * * * *
It may be doubted whether it was accident or his usual deliberate
fantasticality that made Sterne, in the well-known summary of his life
which (very late in it) he drew up for his daughter, devote almost the
whole space to his childhood. Perhaps it may be accounted for,
reasonably enough, by supposing that of his later years he thought his
daughter knew quite as much as he wished her to know, while of the
middle period he had little or nothing to tell. In fact, of the two
earlier divisions we still know very little but what he has chosen to
tell us in one of the most characteristic and not the least charming
excursions of his pen. Laurence Sterne was, with two sisters, the only
“permanent child” (to borrow a pleasant phrase of Mr. Traill’s) out of a
very plentiful but most impermanent family, borne in the most
inconvenient circumstances possible by Agnes Nuttle or Herbert or
Sterne, a widow, and daughter or stepdaughter of a sutler of our army in
Flanders, to Roger, second son of Simon Sterne of Elvington, in
Yorkshire, who was the third son of Dr. Richard Sterne, Archbishop of
York. The Sternes were of a gentle if not very distinguished family,
which, after being seated in Suffolk, migrated to Nottinghamshire. After
the promotion of the archbishop (who had been a stout cavalier, as
Master of Jesus at Cambridge, in the bad times), they obtained, as was
fitting, divers establishments by marriage or benefice in Yorkshire
itself. Very little endowment of any kind, however, fell to the lot of
Roger Sterne, who was an ensign in what ranked later as the 34th
regiment. Laurence, his eldest son, was born at Clonmel, in Ireland,
where his mother’s relations lived, and just after his father’s regiment
had been disbanded. It was shortly re-established, however, and became
the most “marching” of all marching corps; for though its headquarters
were generally in Ireland, it was constantly being ordered elsewhere,
and Roger Sterne saw active service both at Vigo and Gibraltar. In this
latter station he fought a duel of an extremely Shandean character
“about a goose.” He was run through the body and pinned to the wall;
whereupon, it is said, he requested his antagonist to be so kind as to
wipe the plaster off the sword before pulling it out of his body. In
despite of this thoughtfulness, however, and of an immediate recovery,
the wound so weakened him that, being ordered to Jamaica, he took fever
and died there in March 1731. As Lawrence had been born on November 24,
1713, he was nearly eighteen; and the family had meanwhile been
increased by four other children who all died, and a youngest daughter,
Catherine, who, like the eldest, Mary, lived. Till he was about nine or
ten the boy followed the exceedingly fluctuating fortunes of his family,
which he diversified further on by falling through, not a millrace, but
a going mill. Then he was sent to school at Halifax, in Yorkshire, and
soon after practically adopted by his cousin Sterne of Elvington, who,
when the time came, sent him to Jesus College at Cambridge, the family
connection with which had begun with his great-grandfather. He was
admitted there on July 6, 1733, being then nearly twenty, and took his
degree of B.A. in 1736, and that of M.A. in 1740. The only tradition of
his school career is his own story that, having written his name on the
school ceiling, he was whipped by the usher, but complimented as a “boy
of genius” by the master, who said the name should never be effaced.
This anecdote, as might be expected, has not escaped the _aqua fortis_
of criticism.
We know practically nothing of Sterne’s Cambridge career except the
dates above mentioned, the fact of his being elected first to a
sizarship and then as founder’s kin to a scholarship endowed by
Archbishop Sterne, and the incident told by himself that he there
contracted his lifelong friendship with a distant relative and fellow
Jesus man, John Hall, or John Hall Stevenson, of whom more presently.
But Sterne had further reason to acknowledge that his family stood
together. He had no sooner taken his degree, than he was taken up by a
brother of his father’s, Jaques Sterne, a great pluralist in the diocese
of York, a very busy and masterful person, and a strong Whig and
Hanoverian. Under his care, Sterne took deacon’s orders in March 1736 at
the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln; and as soon as, two years later, he
had been ordained priest, he was appointed to the living of
Sutton-on-the-Forest, eight miles from York. The uncle and nephew some
years later quarrelled bitterly--according to the latter’s account,
because he would not write “dirty paragraphs in the newspapers,” being
“no party man.” That Sterne would have been particularly squeamish about
what he wrote may be doubted; but it is certain that he shows no
partisan spirit anywhere, and very little interest in politics as such.
However, for some years his uncle was certainly his active patron, and
obtained for him two prebends and some other special preferments in
connection with the diocese and chapter of York, so that he became, as
_Tristram_ shows, intimately acquainted with cathedral society there.
It has been a steady rule in the Anglican Church (if not, as in the
Greek, a _sine quâ non_) that when a man has been provided with a
living, he should, if he has not done so before, provide himself with a
wife; and Sterne was a very unlikely man to break good custom in this
respect. Very soon at least after his ordination he fell in love with
Elizabeth Lumley, a young lady of a good Yorkshire family, and of some
little fortune, which, however, for a time she thought “not enough” to
share with him, but which, as she told him during a fit of illness, she
left to him in her will. On the strength of two quite unauthenticated
and, I believe, not now traceable portraits seen by this or that person
in printshops or elsewhere, she is said to have been plain. Certain
expressions in Sterne’s letters seem to imply that she had a rather
exasperatingly steady and not too intelligent will of her own; and some
twenty or five and twenty years after the marriage, M. Tollot,
a gossiping Frenchman, with French ideas on the duty of husbands and
wives going separate ways, said that she wished to have a finger in
every pie, and pestered “the good and agreeable Tristram” with her
presence. But Sterne, despite his reckless confessions of conjugal
indifference, and worse, says nothing serious or even ill-natured of
her; and one or two traits and sayings of hers, especially her refusal
to listen to a meddlesome person who wished to tell her tales about
“Eliza,” seem to argue sense and dignity. That in the latter years she
cared little to be with a husband who had long been “tired and sick” of
her is not to her discredit. Their daughter, with the almost invariable
ill-luck or ill-judgment which seems to have attended her, printed
certain letters of this courtship time, though she gave nothing for many
years afterwards. The use made of these Strephon or Damon blandishments,
in contrast with the expressions used by the writer of his wife, and of
other women, long afterwards, is perhaps a little unfair; but it must be
admitted that though far too characteristic and amusing to be omitted,
they are anything but brilliant specimens of their kind. In particular,
Thackeray’s bitter fun on the ineffably lackadaisical passage, “My L.
has seen a polyanthus blow in December,” is pretty fully justified.
If, however, the marriage, which, difficulties being removed, took place
on Easter Monday, March 30, 1741, did not bring lasting happiness to
Sterne, it probably brought him some at the time, and it certainly
brought him an accession of fortune; for in addition to what little
money Miss Lumley had, a friend of hers bestowed the additional living
of Stillington on her husband. These various sources of income must have
made a tolerable revenue, which, after the publication of _Tristram_,
was further supplemented by yet another benefice given him by Lord
Falconbridge at Coxwold, a living of no great value, but a pleasant
place of residence. Add to this the profits of his books in the last
eight years of his life, which were for that day considerable, and it
will be seen that, as has been said above, Sterne might have been much
worse off in this world’s goods than he was. He seems, like other
people, to have made some rather costly experiments in farming; and his
way of life latterly, what with his own journeys and sojourns in London,
and the long separate residence of his wife and daughter in France, was
expensive. But he complains little of poverty; and though he died in
debt, much of that debt was due to no fault of his, but to the burning
of the parsonage of Sutton.
It is all the more remarkable in one way, though the absence of any
pressure of want may explain it in another, that Sterne’s great literary
gifts should have remained so long without finding any kind of literary
expression, unless it was in the newspaper way, in respect to which he
first obliged and afterwards disobliged his uncle. There is, I believe,
no dispute about the fact that he distances, and that by many years,
every other man of letters of anything like his rank--except Cowper,
whose affliction puts him out of comparison--in the lateness of his
fruiting time. All but a quarter of a century had passed since he took
his degree when _Tristram Shandy_ appeared; and, putting sermons aside,
the very earliest thing of his known, _The History of a Good Watch
Coat_, only antedated _Tristram_ by two years or rather less. He was no
doubt “making himself all this time;” but the making must have been an
uncommonly slow process. Nor did he, like a good many writers, occupy
the time in preparing what he was afterwards to publish, unless in the
case of a few of his sermons. It is positively known that _Tristram_ was
written merely as it was published, and the _Journey_ likewise. Nor is
even the first by any means a long book. It is as nearly as possible the
same length as Fielding’s _Amelia_ when printed straight on; and even
then more allowance has to be made, not merely for its free and
audacious plagiarisms, but for its constantly broken paragraphs, stars,
dashes, and other trickeries. If it were possible to squeeze it up, as
one squeezes a sponge, into the solid texture of an ordinary book,
I doubt whether it would be very much longer than _Joseph Andrews_.
It will probably be admitted, however, that the idiosyncrasy of the
writings of Sterne’s last and incomplete decade, even if it be in part
only an idiosyncrasy of mannerism, is almost great enough to justify the
nearly three decades of _Lehrjahre_ (starting from his entrance at
Cambridge) which preceded it. It is true that of the actual occupations
of these years we know extremely little--indeed, what we know as
distinguished from what is guesswork and inference is mostly summed up
by Sterne’s own current and curvetting pen thus: “I remained near twenty
years at Sutton, doing duty at both places [_i.e._, Sutton and
Stillington]. I had then very good health. Books, painting, fiddling,
and shooting were my amusements;” to which he adds only that he and the
squire of Sutton were not very good friends, but that at Stillington the
Croft family were extremely kind and amiable. From other sources,
including, it is true, his own letters--though the dates and allusions
of these are so uncertain that they are very doubtful guides--we find
that his chief crony during this period, as during his life, was the
already-mentioned John Hall, who had taken to the name of Stevenson, and
was master of Skelton Castle, a very old and curious house on the border
of the Cleveland moors, not far from the town of Guisborough. The master
of “Crazy” Castle--he liked to give his house this name, which he
afterwards used in entitling his book of _Crazy Tales_--his ways and his
library, have usually been charged with debauching Sterne’s innocent
mind, which I should imagine lent itself to that process in a most
docile and _morigerant_ fashion; but whether this was the case or not,
it is clear that Stevenson bore no very good reputation. It is not
certain, but was asserted, that he had been a monk of Medmenham. He
gathered about him at Skelton a society which, though no such
imputations were made on it as on that of Wilkes and Dashwood, was of a
pretty loose kind; he was a humourist, both in the old and the modern
sense; and his _Crazy Tales_ were, if not very mad, rather sad and bad
exercises of the imagination.
Amid all this dream- and guess-work, almost the only solid facts in
Sterne’s life are the births of two daughters, one in 1745, and the
other two years later. Both were christened Lydia; the first died soon
after she was born, the second lived to be the darling of both her
parents, the object of the most respectable emotions of Sterne’s life,
the wife of an unknown Frenchman, M. de Medalle, and, as has been said,
the probably unwitting destroyer of her father’s last chance of
reputation.
Our exuberant nescience in matters Sternian extends up to the very
publication of _Tristram_, as far as the determining causes of its
production are concerned. It is true that in passages of the letters
Sterne seems to say that his experiment with the pen was prompted by a
desire to make good some losses in farming, and elsewhere that he was
tired of employing his brains for other people’s advantage, as he had
done for some years for an ungrateful person, that is to say, his uncle.
This last passage was written just before _Tristram_ came out; but at no
time was Sterne a very trustworthy reporter of his own motives, and it
would seem that the quarrel with his uncle must have been a good deal
earlier. At any rate, the year 1759 seems to have been spent in writing
the first two volumes of the book, and _The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gent._, published by John Hinxham, Stonegate, York, but
obtainable also from divers London booksellers, appeared on the 1st of
January 1760. I wish Sterne had thought of keeping it till the 1st of
April, which he would probably then have done.
The comparatively short last scenes of his life were as busy and varied
as his long middle course had been outwardly monotonous. Although his
book was nominally published at York, he had gone up to London to
superintend arrangements for its sale there, perhaps not without a hope
of triumph. If so, Fortune chose not to play him her usual tricks. In
York, the extreme personality of the book excited interest of a twofold
and dubious kind; but, to play on some words of Dryden’s, “London liked
grossly” and swallowed _Tristram Shandy_ whole with singular avidity.
Its author came to town just in time to enjoy the results of this, and
was one of the chief lions of the season of 1760, a position which he
enjoyed with a childish frankness that is not the least pleasant thing
in his history. One, probably of the least important, though by accident
one of the best known of his innumerable flirtations, with a Miss
Fourmentelle, was apparently quenched by this distraction when it was on
the point of going such lengths that the lady had actually come up alone
to London to meet Sterne there. He was introduced to persons as
different as Garrick and Warburton, from the latter of whom he received,
in rather mysterious circumstances, a present of money. He haunted
Ministers and Knights of the Garter; he was overwhelmed with invitations
and callers; and, as has been said, he received one very solid present
in the shape of the living of Coxwold. _Tristram_ went into a second
edition rapidly; its author was enabled to announce a collection of
“_Sermons_ by Mr. Yorick” in April; and he went to his new living in the
early summer, determined to set to work vigorously on more of the work
that had been so fortunate. By the end of the year he was ready with two
more volumes, again came up to town, and again, when vols. iii. and iv.
had appeared, at the end of January 1761, was besieged by admirers. For
these two he received £380 from Dodsley, who had fought shy of the book
earlier. They were quite as successful as the first pair; and again
Sterne stayed all the spring and earlier summer in London, returning to
Yorkshire to make more _Shandy_ in the autumn. He was still quicker over
the third batch, and it was published in December 1761, when he was
again in town, but he now meditated a longer flight. His health had been
really declining, and he obtained leave from the archbishop for a year
certain, and perhaps two, that he might go to the south of France. He
was warmly received in Paris, where his work had obtained a popularity
which it has never wholly lost, and the framework of fact (including the
passport difficulties) for the _Sentimental Journey_, as well as for the
seventh volume of _Tristram_, was laid during the spring. His plans were
now changed, it being determined that his wife and daughter (who had
inherited his constitution) should join him. They did so after some
difficulties, and the consumptive novelist, having spent all the winter
in one of the worst climates in Europe, that of the French capital,
started with his family in the torrid heats of July for Toulouse, where
at last they were established about the middle of August.
Toulouse became Sterne’s abode for nearly a year, his headquarters for a
somewhat longer period, and the home of his wife and daughter, with
migrations to Bagnères, Montpellier, and a great many other places in
France, for about five years. He himself--he had been ill at Toulouse,
and worse at Montpellier--reached England again (after a short stay in
Paris) during the early summer of 1764. Nor was it till January 1765
that the seventh and eighth volumes of _Tristram_ appeared. As usual
Sterne went to town to receive the congratulations of the public, which
seem to have been fairly hearty; for though the instalment immediately
preceding had not been an entire success, the longer interval had now
had its effect not merely on the art and materials of the caterer, but
on the appetite of his guests. He followed this up with two more volumes
of Sermons, of a much more characteristic kind than his earlier venture
in this way, and published partly by subscription. These, however, were
not actually issued till 1766. Meanwhile, in October 1765, Sterne had
set out for his second attempt in travel on the Continent, which was to
supply the remaining material for the _Sentimental Journey_, and to be
prolonged as far as Naples. Little is known of his winter stay at that
city and in Rome. On his way homeward he met his wife and daughter in
Franche-Comté, but at Mrs. Sterne’s request left them there, and went on
alone to Coxwold.
He reached England in extremely bad health, and never left it again; but
he had still nearly two years of fairly well filled life to run. The
ninth, or last volume of _Tristram_ occupied him during the autumn of
1766, and was produced with the invariable accompaniment of its author’s
appearance in London during January 1767. This visit, which lasted till
May, saw the flirtation with “Eliza” Draper, the young wife of an Indian
official, who was at home for her health, an affair which exalted Sterne
in the eyes of eighteenth-century sensibility, especially in France,
about as much as it has depressed him in the eyes not merely of the
propriety, not merely of the common sense, but of the romance of later
times. He was very ill when he got back to Coxwold, but recovered, and
in October was joined by his wife and daughter. Even then, however, the
community was a very temporary and divided one, for he took a house for
them at York, and they were not to stay in England beyond the spring. He
himself finished what we have of the _Sentimental Journey_, and went to
London with it, where it was published rather later than usual, on the
27th February 1768. Three weeks later its author, at his lodgings at 41
New Bond Street, in the presence only of a hired nurse and a footman,
who had been sent by some of his friends to inquire after him, took a
journey other than sentimental, and so far unreported. Some odd but not
very well authenticated stories gathered round his death, which occurred
on Friday the 18th March. It was said, and it is probable enough, that
his gold sleeve-links were stolen by his landlady. After his funeral,
scantily attended, at the burying-ground of St. George’s, Hanover
Square, opposite Hyde Park (which used to be known by the squalid brown
of its unrestored, and afterwards made more hideous by the bedizened red
of its restored chapel), his body is said to have been snatched by
resurrection men. And the myth is rounded off by the addition that the
remains, having been sold to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge, were
dissected there in public, one of the spectators, a friend of Sterne’s,
recognising the face too late, and fainting.
His affairs, which had never been managed in a very business-like
manner, were in considerable disorder. Some years before, the
carelessness of his curate had caused or allowed the parsonage at Sutton
to be burnt to the ground; and Sterne, besides losing valuable effects
of his own, was of course liable for the rebuilding. He managed to put
this off till his death, after which his widow and administratrix was
sued for dilapidations. These, as she was in very poor circumstances,
had to be compounded for sixty pounds only, but they probably ranked for
a much larger sum in the £1100 at which Sterne’s indebtedness was
reckoned. His widow had a little money of her own: £800 was collected
for her and her daughter at York races; there must have been profits
from the copyrights; and a fresh collection of _Sermons_ was issued by
subscription. But though very little is known about the pair, they are
said to have been ill off. They applied first to Wilkes and then to
Stevenson to write a life of Sterne to prefix to his Works, but neither
complied. Mr. Fitzgerald, who seldom deserves the curse laid on those
who use harsh judgment, is very severe on both for this. Yet surely
each, considering his own reputation, must have felt that he was the
last person to set Sterne right with the stricter part of society, and
that to write a “Crazy” or “Shandean” life of him would be a cruel
crime. It is not known exactly when Lydia married, or when either she or
her mother died. Mrs. Sterne must have been dead by 1775, the date of
the publication of the letters; Lydia is said to have perished in the
French Revolution.
Beginning authorship very late in life, having schooled himself to an
intensely artificial method, both in style and in construction, and not
allowed by Fate more than a few years in which to write at all, Sterne,
as is natural, displays a great uniformity throughout his work. Indeed,
it might be said that he has written but one book, _Tristram Shandy_.
The _Sentimental Journey_ (as to the relative merits of which, compared
with the earlier and larger work, there is a _polemos aspondos_ between
the Big-endians and the Little-endians of Sternism) is after all only an
expansion of the seventh book of Tristram, with _fioriture_, variations,
and new divertisements. The sermon which occurs so early is an actual
sermon of “Yorick’s,” and a sufficient specimen of his more serious
concionatory vein; many, if not most of his letters might have been
twined into _Tristram_ without being in the least degree more out of
place than most of its actual contents. And so there is more propriety
than depends upon the mere fact that _Tristram Shandy_ is the earliest
and the largest part of its author’s work, in making no extremely
scholastic distinction between the specially Shandean and the generally
Sternian characteristics; for, indeed, all Sterne is in it more or less
eminently.
No less a critic than M. Scherer has given his sanction to the idea that
in Sterne we have a special, if not even _the_ special, type of the
humourist; and probably few people who have given no particular thought
or attention to the matter, would refuse to agree with him. I am myself
inclined rather to a demur, or, at any rate, to a distinction, though
few better things have been written about humour itself than a passage
in M. Scherer’s essay on our author. Sterne has no doubt in a very
eminent degree the sense of contrast, which all the best critics admit
to be the root of humour--the note of the humourist. But he has it
partially, occasionally, and, I should even go as far as to say, not
_greatly_. The _great_ English humourists, I take it, are Shakespeare,
Swift, Fielding, Thackeray, and Carlyle. All these--even Fielding, whose
eighteenth-century manner, the contemporary and counterpart of Sterne’s,
cannot hide the truth--apply the humourist contrast, the humourist sense
of the irony of existence, to the great things, the _prima et
novissima_. They see, and feel, and show the simultaneous sense of Death
and Life, of Love and Loss, of the Finite and the Infinite. Sterne stops
a long way short of this; _les grands sujets lui sont défendus_ in
another sense than La Bruyère’s. It is scarcely too much to say that his
ostentatious preference for the _bagatelle_ was a real, and not in the
least affected fact. Nowhere, not in the true pathos of the famous
deathbed letter to Mrs. James, not in the, as it seems to me, by no
means wholly true pathos of the Le Fever episode, does he pierce to “the
accepted hells beneath.” He has an unmatched command of the lesser and
lower varieties of the humorous contrast--over the odd, the petty, the
queer, above all, over what the French untranslatably call the
_saugrenu_. His forte is the foible; his _cheval de bataille_, the
hobby-horse. If you want to soar into the heights, or plunge into the
depths of humour, Sterne is not for you. But if you want what his own
generation called a frisk on middle, _very_ middle-earth, a hunt in
curiosity-shops (especially of the technically “curious” description),
a peep into all manner of _coulisses_ and behind-scenes of human nature,
a ride on a sort of intellectual switchback, a view of moral, mental,
religious, sentimental dancing of all the kinds that have delighted man,
from the rope to the skirt, then have with Sterne in any direction he
pleases. He may sometimes a very little disgust you, but you will seldom
have just cause to complain that he disappoints and deceives.
The _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent._ (which, as it has been
excellently observed, is in reality based on the life of the gent’s
uncle, and the opinions of the gent’s father), is the largest and in
every way the chief field for these diversions. The apparatus, and, so
far as there can be said to have been one, the object with which Sterne
marked it out and filled it up, are clear, and even the former must have
been clear enough to anybody of some reading and some intelligence long
before the excellent Dr. Ferriar, in the spirit of a reverent
iconoclast, set himself to work to point out Sterne’s exact indebtedness
to Rabelais, Burton, Beroalde (if Beroalde wrote the _Moyen de
Parvenir_), Bruscambille, and the rest. Of this particular part of the
matter I do not think it necessary to say much. The charge of plagiarism
is usually an excessively idle one; for when a man of genius steals, he
always makes the thefts his own; and when a man steals without genius,
the thefts are mere fairy gold which turns to leaves and pebbles under
his hand. No doubt Sterne “lifted” in _Tristram_, and still more in the
_Sermons_, with rather more freedom and audacity than most men of
genius; but when we remember that he took Burton’s denunciation of the
practice and reproduced it (all but in Burton’s very words) as his own,
it must be clear to any one who is not very dull indeed that he was
playing an audacious practical joke. Where he is best, he does not steal
at all, and that is the only point of real importance.
It is somewhat more, I think, the business of the critic (who is here
more especially bound not to look only at the stop-watch) to note the
far more striking way in which Sterne borrowed, not actual passages and
words, but manner and style. Here, perhaps, we shall find him accountant
for a greater debt; and here also we may think that though his genius is
indisputable, he gives more reason to those who should deny him the
highest kind of genius. Beyond doubt not merely his reading, but his
temper and his characteristics of all kinds, inclined him to the style
to which the French fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave the name of
_fatrasie_, or pillar-to-post divagation, with more or less of a covert
satiric aim. But if we compare the dealing of Swift with Cyrano de
Bergerac, the dealing of Fielding with the romance and novel as it
existed before his time, nay, the dealing of Shakespeare with the
Marlowe drama, we shall note a marked difference in Sterne’s procedure.
Nobody, even in his own day, who knew Rabelais at all could fail to
detect the almost servile following of manner in great things and in
small which _Tristram_ displays. No one--a much smaller designation--who
knows the strange, unedifying, but very far from commonplace book of
which, as I have hinted, I never can quite believe that Beroalde de
Verville was the author, can fail to detect an even closer, though a
somewhat less obvious and, so to speak, less verifiable following here.
In another region--the purgatory of all Sterne’s commentators--we can
trace this corrupt following as distinctly at least, though it has,
I think, been less often definitely attributed. Sterne’s too celebrated
indecency, is, with one exception, _sui generis_. No doubt much nonsense
has been and is talked about “indecency” in general literature. When it
is indulged, as it has been, for instance, in French of late, it becomes
a nuisance of the most loathsome kind. It is always perhaps better left
alone. But if it be a sin to laugh now and then frankly at what were
once called “gentlemen’s stories,” then not merely many a gallant,
noble, and not unwise gentleman, but I fear not a few ladies, both fair
and fine, are damned, with Shakespeare and Scott and Southey, with
Margaret of Navarre and Marie de Sévigné, to keep them in countenance.
Yet to merit indulgence, this questionable quality, in addition to being
treated as genius treats, must have certain sub-qualities, or freedoms
from quality, of its own. It must not be brutal and inhuman, since the
quality of humanity is the main thing that saves it. It must not be
underhand and sniggering. It must be frank and jovial, or frank and
passionate. Perhaps, in some cases, it may be saved, as Swift’s is to a
great extent, by the overmastering pessimism of despair, which enforces
its contempt of man and man’s fate by bringing forward these evidences
of his weakness. But Sterne can plead none of these exemptions. He has
neither the frank laughter of Aristophanes and Rabelais, nor the frank
passion of Catullus and Donne. He was incapable of feeling any _sæva
indignatio_ whatever. The attraction of the thing for him was, I fear,
merely the attraction of the improper, because it is improper; because
it shocks people, or makes them blush, or gives them an unholy little
quiver of sordid shamefaced delectation. His famous apology of the child
playing on the floor and showing in innocence what is not usually shown,
was desperately unlucky. For his displays are those of educated and
economic un-innocency. And he took this manner, I am nearly sure, wholly
and directly from Voltaire, who enjoys the unenviable copyright and
patent of it.
The third characteristic which Sterne took from others, which dyed his
work deeply, and which injured more than it helped it, was his famous,
his unrivalled, Sensibility or Sentimentalism. A great deal has been
written about this admired eighteenth-century device, and there is no
space here for discussing it. Suffice it to say, that although Sterne
certainly did not invent it--it had been inculcated by two whole
generations of French novelists before him, and had been familiar in
England for half a century--he has the glory, such as it is, of carrying
it to the farthest possible. The dead donkey and the live donkey, the
latter (as I humbly but proudly join myself to Mr. Thackeray and Mr.
Traill in thinking) far the finer animal; Le Fever and La Fleur; Maria
and Eliza; Uncle Toby’s fly, and poor Mrs. Sterne’s antenuptial
polyanthus; the stoics that Mr. Sterne (with a generous sense that he
was in no danger of that lash) wished to be whipped, and the critics
from whom he would have fled from Dan to Beersheba to be delivered;
--all the celebrated persons and passages of his works, all the
decorations and fireworks thereof, are directed mainly to the exhibition
of _Sensibility_, once so charming, now, alas! hooted and contemned of
the people!
And now it will be possible to have done with his foibles, all the rest
in Sterne being for praise, with hardly any mixture of blame. We have
seen what he borrowed from others, mostly to his hurt; let us now see
what he contributed of his own, almost wholly to his credit and
advantage. He had, in the first place, what most writers when they begin
almost invariably and almost inevitably lack, a long and carefully
amassed store, not merely of reading, but of observation of mankind.
Although his nearly fifty years of life had been in the ordinary sense
uneventful, they had given him opportunities which he had amply taken.
A “son of the regiment,” he had evidently studied with the greatest and
most loving care the ways of an army which still included a large
proportion of Marlborough’s veterans; and it has been constantly and
reasonably held that his chief study had been his father, whom he
evidently adored in a way. Roger Sterne is the admitted model of my
Uncle Toby; and I at least have no doubt that he was the original of Mr.
Shandy also, for some of the qualities which appear in his son’s
character of him are Walter’s, not Toby’s. It would have required,
perhaps, even greater genius than Sterne possessed, and an environment
less saturated with the delusive theory of the “ruling passion,” to have
given us the mixed and blended temperament instead of separating it into
two gentlemen at once, and making Walter Shandy all wayward intellect,
and Tobias all gentle goodness. But if it had been done--as Shakespeare
perhaps alone could have done it--we should have had a greater and more
human figure than either. Mr. Shandy would then never have come near, as
he does sometimes, to being a bore; and my Uncle Toby (if I may say so
without taking the wings of the morning to flee from the wrath of the
extreme Tobyolaters) would have been saved from the occasional
appearance of being something like a fool.
Still, these two are delightful even in their present dichotomy; and
Sterne was amply provided by his genius, working on his experience, with
company for them. His fancy portrait of himself as “Yorick” (his
unfeigned Shakespearianism is one of his best traits) is a little vague
and fantastic; and that of Eugenius, which is supposed to represent John
Hall Stevenson, is almost as slight as it is flattering. But Dr. Slop,
who is known to have been drawn (with somewhat unmerciful fidelity in
externals, but not at all unkindly when we look deeper) from Dr. Burton,
a well-known Jacobite practitioner who had suffered from the Hanoverian
zeal of Yorick’s uncle Jaques in the ’45, is a masterpiece. The York
dignitaries are veritable etchings in outline, more instinct with life
and individuality than a thousand elaborately painted pictures; all the
servants, Obadiah, Susannah, Bridget, and the rest, are the equals of
Fielding’s, or of Thackeray’s domestics; and though Tristram himself is
the shadow of a shade, I confess that I seem to see a vivid portrait in
the three or four strokes which alone give us “my dear, dear Jenny.” Mr.
Fitzgerald, succumbing to a not unnatural temptation, considering the
close juxtaposition in time, approximates this to the “dear, dear Kitty”
of the letters to Miss Catherine de Fourmentelle. But this, taking all
things together, would be a rather serious _scandalum damigellarum_; and
I do not think it necessary to identify, though the traits seem to me to
suit not ill with the few genuine ones in the letters about Mrs. Sterne
herself. That the “dear, dear” should be ironical more or less is quite
Shandean. All these, if not drawn directly from individuals (the lower
exercise), are first generalised and then precipitated into
individuality from a large observation (which is the infinitely higher
and better). I fear I must except Widow Wadman, save in the sentry-box
scene, from this encomium. But then Widow Wadman is not really a real
person. She is partly an instrument to put my Uncle Toby through some
new motions, and partly a cue to enable Sterne to indulge in his worst
foible. As for Trim, _quis vituperavit_ Trim? The lover of the “popish
clergywoman” is simply perfect, with a not much less good heart and a
much better head than his master’s, and in his own degree hardly less of
a gentleman.
The manner in which these delightful persons (I observe with shame that
I had omitted the modest worth of Mrs. Shandy, nearly the most
delightful of them all) are introduced to the reader, may have suffered
a little from that corrupt following of which enough has been said.
I can only say, that I would compound for a good deal more corruption of
the same kind, allied with a good deal less genius. It can scarcely be
doubted that there was a real pre-established harmony between Sterne’s
gifts and the _fatrasie_ manner; certainly this manner, if it sometimes
exhibited his weaknesses, gave rare opportunities to his strength. And
the same may be said of his style. He might certainly have given us less
of the typographical tricks with which he chose to bedizen and bedaub
it, and sometimes in his ultra-Rabelaisian moods --I do not mean of
_gauloiserie_ but of sheer fooling--we feel the falsetto rather
disastrously. It is constantly forgotten by unfavourable critics of
Rabelais that his extravagances were to a great extent, at any rate,
quite natural outbursts of animal spirits. The Middle Ages, though it
has become the fashion with those who know nothing about them to
represent them as ages of gloom, were probably the merriest time of this
world’s history; and the Reformation and the Renaissance, with their
pedantry and their puritanism, and worst of all their physical science,
had not quite killed the merriment when Rabelais wrote. But though
animal spirits still survived in Sterne’s day, it cannot be said that in
England, any more than elsewhere, there was much genuine merriment of
the honest, childish, mediæval kind, and thus his manner perpetually
jars. Still the style, independently of the tricks, was excellently
suited for the work. It is a moot point how far the extremely loose and
ungirt character of this style, which sometimes, and indeed often,
reaches sheer slovenliness and solecism, was intentional. I think myself
that it was nearly as deliberate as the asterisks, and the black and
marble pages. We know from the _Sermons_ that Sterne could write
carefully enough when he chose, and we know from the MS. of the
_Journey_ that he corrected sedulously. Nor is it likely that he had the
excuse of hurry. The shortest time that he ever took over one of his
two-volume batches was more than six months; and looking at the
practice, not of miracles of industry and facility like Scott, but of
rather dilatory writers like Thackeray, one would think that the
quantity (which is not more than a couple of hundred pages of one of
these present volumes) might be written in little more than six weeks.
At any rate, the style, conversational, unpretentious, too easy to be
jerky, and yet too broken to be sustained, suits subject and scheme as
few others could.
* * * * *
But there is perhaps little need to say more about a book which, though
some say that few read it through nowadays, is thoroughly well known in
outline and in its salient passages, and which will pretty certainly lay
hold of all fit readers as soon as they take to it. Of its writer a very
little more may perhaps be said, all the more so because those who, not
understanding critical admiration, think that biographers and editors
ought not only to be just and a little kind, but extravagantly partial
to their subjects, may conceive that I have been a little unjust, or, at
any rate, a little unkind to Sterne. If so, they have not read his own
extremely ingenious, and in general, if not in particular, very sound
attack on the adage _de mortuis_. But if not _nil nisi_, there is yet
very much _bonum_ to be said of Sterne. He was not merely endowed with a
singular and essential genius; he was not merely the representative and
mouthpiece, in a way hardly surpassed by any one, of a certain way of
thought and feeling more or less peculiar to his time. These were his
merits, his very great merits as a writer. But he had others, and great,
if not very great ones, as a man. Though never rich, he seems to have
been free from the fault of parsimony; and albeit he died in debt, not
deeply tainted with that of extravagance in money matters. For most of
his later expenditure was on others, and he might justly calculate on
his pen paying, and more than paying, his shot. Little love as there was
lost between him and his wife, he always took the greatest care to
provide for her wants in the rather costly severance of their
establishments, and never even in his most indiscreet moments hints a
grumble at her expenditure, a vice of which some people of much higher
general reputation have been known to be guilty. Though he was certainly
pleased at the attentions of “the great,” I do not know that there is
any just cause for accusing him of truckling to, or fawning on them
beyond the custom and courtesy of the time. For all his reckless humour,
there was no ill-nature in him. His worst enemies have admitted that his
affection for his daughter was very pretty and quite unaffected; and his
letters to and of Mrs. James show that he could think of a woman nobly
and wholesomely as a friend, for all his ignoble and unwholesome ways of
thought in regard to the sex. If it had not been for the cruel
indiscretion of his Lydia (which, however, has something of the old
virtue of conveying the balm as well as the sting), he would probably
have been much better thought of than he is. And considering the
delightful books here once more presented, I think we may consent to
forgive the faults which, after all, were mainly his own business, for
the merits by which we so largely benefit and for which he reaped no
over-bounteous guerdon.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
WORKS. --The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Vols. I. and II.,
1759; III. and IV., 1761; V. and VI., 1762; VII. and VIII., 1765;
IX., 1767; first collected edition, 1767; numerous later editions,
chiefly of recent date. Sermons of Mr. Yorick, Vols. I. and II.,
1760; III. and IV., 1766; V., VI., and VII., 1769. A Sentimental
Journey, 1768; many later editions; Letters from Yorick to Eliza,
1775; Sterne’s Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, 1775;
Letters of Laurence Sterne to his most intimate friends, 1775;
Original Letters never before published, 1788; Letters of Yorick and
Eliza, 1807; Seven Letters written by Sterne and his Friends,
hitherto unpublished, 1844; Unpublished Letters of Laurence Sterne,
edited by J. Murray, 1856.
Collected editions of the works of Laurence Sterne appeared in 1779,
1780; edited by G. Saintsbury, 1894; by Wilbur L. Cross, 1906.
LIFE. --An account of the life and writings of the author is prefixed
to the edition of his Works, 1779; a life of the author written by
himself in edition of works, 1780; by Sir W. Scott in edition of
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1867; by H. D. Traill, 1878;
by P. H. Fitzgerald, 1896; Laurence Sterne in Germany, by H. W.
Thayer, 1905; Life and Times, by Wilbur L. Cross, 1909; A Study, by
Walter S. Sichel, 1910; Life and Letters, by Lewis Melville, 1911.
⁂ The text which has been here adopted is that of the ten-volume
edition, first printed in 1781, and reprinted several times before the
end of the century, which is as near as anything to the “standard”
Sterne. It seems, however, to have had no competent editing; and the
renumbering of the chapters to suit the _four_ volumes, in which
_Tristram_ was printed, completely upsets the original and important
division into _nine_ volumes, or books, which has here, as in some other
editions, been restored. Another piece of thoughtlessness was that of
sticking the Dedication, which originally came between the eighth and
ninth volumes, or books, at the beginning of the _fourth_ volume as
reprinted, thereby making nonsense or puzzle of Sterne’s joke about _à
priori_. It should be observed that the Dedication to Pitt, which here
leads off, was not prefixed till the _second_ edition of the original,
and that sometimes in the last-century editions it appears displaced at
a later spot. No attempt has been made to correct any oddities of
spelling that are not clearly mere misprints.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BOOK I. 3
BOOK II. 59
BOOK III. 113
BOOK IV. 176
BOOK V. 251
BOOK VI. 300
BOOK VII. 349
BOOK VIII. 395
BOOK IX. 441
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS
OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY
GENTLEMAN
Ταράσσει τοὺς Ἀνθρώπους οὐ τὰ Πράγματα,
Ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τῶν Πραγμάτων Δόγματα.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
_MR. PITT_
SIR, --Never poor Wight of a Dedicator had less hopes from his
Dedication, than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye
corner of the kingdom, and in a retir’d thatch’d house, where I live in
a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and
other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a
man smiles, ----but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to
this Fragment of Life.
I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this book, by taking it----(not
under your Protection, ----it must protect itself, but)----into the
country with you; where, if I am ever told, it has made you smile; or
can conceive it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain ----I shall think
myself as happy as a minister of state; ------perhaps much happier than
any one (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.
I am, GREAT SIR,
(and what is more to your Honour)
I am, GOOD SIR,
Your Well-wisher, and
most humble Fellow-subject,
THE AUTHOR.
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENT.
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about
when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what
they were then doing; --that not only the production of a rational Being
was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and
temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his
mind; --and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of
his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions
which were then uppermost; ----Had they duly weighed and considered all
this, and proceeded accordingly, ----I am verily persuaded I should have
made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader
is likely to see me. --Believe me, good folks, this is not so
inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it; --you have all,
I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from
father to son, &c., &c. --and a great deal to that purpose: --Well, you
may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his
nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their
motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them
into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong,
’tis not a halfpenny matter, --away they go cluttering like hey-go mad;
and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make
a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they
are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive
them off it.
_Pray, my Dear_, quoth my mother, _have you not forgot to wind up the
clock? ------Good G--!_ cried my father, making an exclamation, but
taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, ----_Did ever woman,
since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly
question?_ Pray, what was your father saying? ------Nothing.
CHAPTER II
------Then, positively, there is nothing in the question that I can see,
either good or bad. ----Then, let me tell you, Sir, it was a very
unseasonable question at least, --because it scattered and dispersed the
animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand in
hand with the _HOMUNCULUS_, and conducted him safe to the place destined
for his reception.
The HOMUNCULUS, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear,
in this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice; --to the eye of
reason in scientifick research, he stands confess’d--a BEING guarded and
circumscribed with rights. ----The minutest philosophers, who, by the
bye, have the most enlarged understandings (their souls being inversely
as their enquiries), shew us incontestably, that the HOMUNCULUS is
created by the same hand, --engender’d in the same course of nature,
--endow’d with the same locomotive powers and faculties with us: --That
he consists as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries,
ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals,
humours, and articulations; --is a Being of as much activity, --and, in
all senses of the word, as much and as truly our fellow-creature as my
Lord Chancellor of _England_. --He may be benefited, --he may be
injured, --he may obtain redress; --in a word, he has all the claims and
rights of humanity, which _Tully_, _Puffendorf_, or the best ethick
writers allow to arise out of that state and relation.
Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his way alone!
--or that, through terror of it, natural to so young a traveller, my
little Gentleman had got to his journey’s end miserably spent; --his
muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread; --his own animal
spirits ruffled beyond description, --and that in this sad disordered
state of nerves, he had lain down a prey to sudden starts, or a series
of melancholy dreams and fancies, for nine long, long months together.
--I tremble to think what a foundation had been laid for a thousand
weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the
philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights.
CHAPTER III
To my uncle Mr. _Toby Shandy_ do I stand indebted for the preceding
anecdote, to whom my father, who was an excellent natural philosopher,
and much given to close reasoning upon the smallest matters, had oft,
and heavily complained of the injury; but once more particularly, as my
uncle _Toby_ well remember’d, upon his observing a most unaccountable
obliquity (as he call’d it) in my manner of setting up my top, and
justifying the principles upon which I had done it, --the old gentleman
shook his head, and in a tone more expressive by half of sorrow than
reproach, --he said his heart all along foreboded, and he saw it
verified in this, and from a thousand other observations he had made
upon me, That I should neither think nor act like any other man’s child:
--_But alas!_ continued he, shaking his head a second time, and wiping
away a tear which was trickling down his cheeks, _My Tristram’s
misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world_.
--My mother, who was sitting by, look’d up, --but she knew no more than
her backside what my father meant, --but my uncle, Mr. _Toby Shandy_,
who had been often informed of the affair, --understood him very well.
CHAPTER IV
I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people
in it, who are no readers at all, who find themselves ill at ease,
unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of
everything which concerns you.
It is in pure compliance with this humour of theirs, and from a
backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I have
been so very particular already. As my life and opinions are likely to
make some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in
all ranks, professions, and denominations of men whatever, --be no less
read than the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ itself--and in the end, prove the
very thing which _Montaigne_ dreaded his Essays should turn out, that
is, a book for a parlour-window; --I find it necessary to consult every
one a little in his turn; and therefore must beg pardon for going on a
little farther in the same way: For which cause, right glad I am, that I
have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am
able to go on, tracing everything in it, as _Horace_ says, _ab Ovo_.
_Horace_, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that
gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy; --(I forget
which), --besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. _Horace’s_ pardon;
--for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither
to his rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived.
To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things,
I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining part
of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, ’tis wrote only for the
curious and inquisitive.
------------Shut the door. -------------------------------------- I was
begot in the night, betwixt the first _Sunday_ and the first _Monday_ in
the month of _March_, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred
and eighteen. I am positive I was. --But how I came to be so very
particular in my account of a thing which happened before I was born, is
owing to another small anecdote known only in our own family, but now
made publick for the better clearing up this point.
My father, you must know, who was originally a _Turkey_ merchant, but
had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die
upon, his paternal estate in the county of ------, was, I believe, one
of the most regular men in everything he did, whether ’twas matter of
business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen
of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, --he
had made it a rule for many years of his life, --on the first
_Sunday-night_ of every month throughout the whole year, --as certain as
ever the _Sunday-night_ came, ----to wind up a large house-clock, which
we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands: --And being
somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been
speaking of, --he had likewise gradually brought some other little
family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say
to my uncle _Toby_, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be
no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.
It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell
upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my
grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no
connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother
could never hear the said clock wound up, ----but the thoughts of some
other things unavoidably popped into her head--and _vice versâ_:
----Which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious _Locke_, who
certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men,
affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of
prejudice whatsoever.
But this by the bye.
Now it appears by a memorandum in my father’s pocket-book, which now
lies upon the table, “That on _Lady-day_, which was on the 25th of the
same month in which I date my geniture, ----my father set out upon his
journey to _London_, with my eldest brother _Bobby_, to fix him at
_Westminster_ school;” and, as it appears from the same authority, “That
he did not get down to his wife and family till the _second week_ in
_May_ following,” --it brings the thing almost to a certainty. However,
what follows in the beginning of the next chapter, puts it beyond all
possibility of doubt.
------But pray, Sir, What was your father doing all _December_,
_January_, and _February?_ ----Why, Madam, --he was all that time
afflicted with a Sciatica.
CHAPTER V
On the fifth day of _November_, 1718, which to the æra fixed on, was as
near nine calendar months as any husband could in reason have expected,
--was I _Tristram Shandy_, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and
disasterous world of ours. ----I wish I had been born in the Moon, or in
any of the planets (except _Jupiter_ or _Saturn_, because I never could
bear cold weather) for it could not well have fared worse with me in any
of them (though I will not answer for _Venus_) than it has in this vile,
dirty planet of ours, --which, o’ my conscience, with reverence be it
spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings of the rest;
----not but the planet is well enough, provided a man could be born in
it to a great title or to a great estate; or could any how contrive to
be called up to publick charges, and employments of dignity or power;
----but that is not my case; ----and therefore every man will speak of
the fair as his own market has gone in it; ------for which cause I
affirm it over again to be one of the vilest worlds that ever was made;
--for I can truly say, that from the first hour I drew my breath in it,
to this, that I can now scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got in
scating against the wind in _Flanders_; --I have been the continual
sport of what the world calls Fortune; and though I will not wrong her
by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal
evil; ----yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her,
that in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she
could get fairly at me, the ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set
of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO
sustained.
CHAPTER VI
In the beginning of the last chapter, I informed you exactly _when_ I
was born; but I did not inform you _how. No_, that particular was
reserved entirely for a chapter by itself; --besides, Sir, as you and I
are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been
proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself
all at once. --You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you
see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and
expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a
mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other:
As you proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now
beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one
of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship. --_O diem
præclarum!_--then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling
in its nature, or tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear friend and
companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my
first setting out--bear with me, --and let me go on, and tell my story
my own way: --Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,
--or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a
moment or two as we pass along, --don’t fly off, --but rather
courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my
outside; --and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in
short, do anything, --only keep your temper.
CHAPTER VII
In the same village where my father and my mother dwelt, dwelt also a
thin, upright, motherly, notable, good old body of a midwife, who with
the help of a little plain good sense, and some years full employment in
her business, in which she had all along trusted little to her own
efforts, and a great deal to those of dame Nature, --had acquired, in
her way, no small degree of reputation in the world: ----by which word
_world_, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be
understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the
circle of the great world, of four _English_ miles diameter, or
thereabouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived, is
supposed to be the centre? --She had been left, it seems, a widow in
great distress, with three or four small children, in her forty-seventh
year; and as she was at that time a person of decent carriage, --grave
deportment, --a woman moreover of few words, and withal an object of
compassion, whose distress, and silence under it, called out the louder
for a friendly lift: the wife of the parson of the parish was touched
with pity; and having often lamented an inconvenience, to which her
husband’s flock had for many years been exposed, inasmuch as there was
no such thing as a midwife, of any kind or degree, to be got at, let the
case have been never so urgent, within less than six or seven long miles
riding; which seven said long miles in dark nights and dismal roads, the
country thereabouts being nothing but a deep clay, was almost equal to
fourteen; and that in effect was sometimes next to having no midwife at
all; it came into her head, that it would be doing as seasonable a
kindness to the whole parish, as to the poor creature herself, to get
her a little instructed in some of the plain principles of the business,
in order to set her up in it. As no woman thereabouts was better
qualified to execute the plan she had formed than herself, the
gentlewoman very charitably undertook it; and having great influence
over the female part of the parish, she found no difficulty in effecting
it to the utmost of her wishes. In truth, the parson join’d his interest
with his wife’s in the whole affair; and in order to do things as they
should be, and give the poor soul as good a title by law to practise, as
his wife had given by institution, --he chearfully paid the fees for the
ordinary’s licence himself, amounting in the whole, to the sum of
eighteen shillings and four pence; so that betwixt them both, the good
woman was fully invested in the real and corporal possession of her
office, together with all its _rights, members, and appurtenances
whatsoever_.
These last words, you must know, were not according to the old form in
which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like
cases had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was
according to a neat _Formula_ of _Didius_ his own devising, who having a
particular turn for taking to pieces, and new framing over again, all
kind of instruments in that way, not only hit upon this dainty
amendment, but coaxed many of the old licensed matrons in the
neighbourhood, to open their faculties afresh, in order to have this
wham-wham of his inserted.
I own I never could envy _Didius_ in these kinds of fancies of his:
--But every man to his own taste. --Did not Dr. _Kunastrokius_, that
great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in
combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth,
though he had tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that,
Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting _Solomon_
himself, --have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES; --their running horses,
--their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets,
their fiddles, their pallets, --their maggots and their butterflies?
--and so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along
the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,
--pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
CHAPTER VIII
--_De gustibus non est disputandum_; --that is, there is no disputing
against HOBBY-HORSES; and for my part, I seldom do; nor could I with any
sort of grace, had I been an enemy to them at the bottom; for happening,
at certain intervals and changes of the moon, to be both fidler and
painter, according as the fly stings: --Be it known to you, that I keep
a couple of pads myself, upon which, in their turns, (nor do I care who
knows it) I frequently ride out and take the air; --though sometimes, to
my shame be it spoken, I take somewhat longer journies than what a wise
man would think altogether right. --But the truth is, --I am not a wise
man; --and besides am a mortal of so little consequence in the world, it
is not much matter what I do: so I seldom fret or fume at all about it:
Nor does it much disturb my rest, when I see such great Lords and tall
Personages as hereafter follow; --such, for instance, as my Lord A, B,
C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, and so on, all of a row,
mounted upon their several horses; --some with large stirrups, getting
on in a more grave and sober pace; ----others on the contrary, tucked up
to their very chins, with whips across their mouths, scouring and
scampering it away like so many little party-coloured devils astride a
mortgage, --and as if some of them were resolved to break their necks.
----So much the better--say I to myself; --for in case the worst should
happen, the world will make a shift to do excellently well without them;
and for the rest, ----why ----God speed them----e’en let them ride on
without opposition from me; for were their lordships unhorsed this very
night--’tis ten to one but that many of them would be worse mounted by
one half before to-morrow morning.
Not one of these instances therefore can be said to break in upon my
rest. ----But there is an instance, which I own puts me off my guard,
and that is, when I see one born for great actions, and what is still
more for his honour, whose nature ever inclines him to good ones; --when
I behold such a one, my Lord, like yourself, whose principles and
conduct are as generous and noble as his blood, and whom, for that
reason, a corrupt world cannot spare one moment; --when I see such a
one, my Lord, mounted, though it is but for a minute beyond the time
which my love to my country has prescribed to him, and my zeal for his
glory wishes, --then, my Lord, I cease to be a philosopher, and in the
first transport of an honest impatience, I wish the HOBBY-HORSE, with
all his fraternity, at the Devil.
“MY LORD,
“I maintain this to be a dedication, notwithstanding its singularity in
the three great essentials of matter, form, and place: I beg, therefore,
you will accept it as such, and that you will permit me to lay it, with
the most respectful humility, at your Lordship’s feet, --when you are
upon them, --which you can be when you please; --and that is, my Lord,
whenever there is occasion for it, and I will add, to the best purposes
too. I have the honour to be,
“_My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most obedient,
and most devoted,
and most humble servant_,
TRISTRAM SHANDY.”
CHAPTER IX
I solemnly declare to all mankind, that the above dedication was made
for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate, --Duke, Marquis, Earl,
Viscount, or Baron, of this, or any other Realm in Christendom; ----nor
has it yet been hawked about, or offered publicly or privately, directly
or indirectly, to any one person or personage, great or small; but is
honestly a true Virgin-Dedication untried on, upon any soul living.
I labour this point so particularly, merely to remove any offence or
objection which might arise against it from the manner in which I
propose to make the most of it; --which is the putting it up fairly to
public sale; which I now do.
----Every author has a way of his own in bringing his points to bear;
--for my own part, as I hate chaffering and higgling for a few guineas
in a dark entry; --I resolved within myself, from the very beginning, to
deal squarely and openly with your Great Folks in this affair, and try
whether I should not come off the better by it.
If therefore there is any one Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, or Baron,
in these his Majesty’s dominions, who stands in need of a tight, genteel
dedication, and whom the above will suit, (for by the bye, unless it
suits in some degree, I will not part with it)----it is much at his
service for fifty guineas; ----which I am positive is twenty guineas
less than it ought to be afforded for, by any man of genius.
My Lord, if you examine it over again, it is far from being a gross
piece of daubing, as some dedications are. The design, your Lordship
sees, is good, --the colouring transparent, --the drawing not amiss;
--or to speak more like a man of science, --and measure my piece in the
painter’s scale, divided into 20, --I believe, my Lord, the outlines
will turn out as 12, --the composition as 9, --the colouring as 6, --the
expression 13 and a half, --and the design, --if I may be allowed, my
Lord, to understand my own _design_, and supposing absolute perfection
in designing, to be as 20, --I think it cannot well fall short of 19.
Besides all this, --there is keeping in it, and the dark strokes in the
HOBBY-HORSE, (which is a secondary figure, and a kind of back-ground to
the whole) give great force to the principal lights in your own figure,
and make it come off wonderfully; ----and besides, there is an air of
originality in the _tout ensemble_.
Be pleased, my good Lord, to order the sum to be paid into the hands of
Mr. _Dodsley_, for the benefit of the author; and in the next edition
care shall be taken that this chapter be expunged, and your Lordship’s
titles, distinctions, arms, and good actions, be placed at the front of
the preceding chapter: All which, from the words, _De gustibus non est
disputandum_, and whatever else in this book relates to HOBBY-HORSES,
but no more, shall stand dedicated to your Lordship. --The rest I
dedicate to the MOON, who, by the bye, of all the PATRONS or MATRONS I
can think of, has most power to set my book a-going, and make the world
run mad after it.
_Bright Goddess_,
If thou art not too busy with CANDID and Miss CUNEGUND’S affairs, --take
_Tristram Shandy’s_ under thy protection also.
CHAPTER X
Whatever degree of small merit the act of benignity in favour of the
midwife might justly claim, or in whom that claim truly rested, --at
first sight seems not very material to this history; ----certain however
it was, that the gentlewoman, the parson’s wife, did run away at that
time with the whole of it: And yet, for my life, I cannot help thinking
but that the parson himself, though he had not the good fortune to hit
upon the design first, --yet, as he heartily concurred in it the moment
it was laid before him, and as heartily parted with his money to carry
it into execution, had a claim to some share of it, --if not to a full
half of whatever honour was due to it.
The world at that time was pleased to determine the matter otherwise.
Lay down the book, and I will allow you half a day to give a probable
guess at the grounds of this procedure.
Be it known then, that, for about five years before the date of the
midwife’s licence, of which you have had so circumstantial an account,
--the parson we have to do with had made himself a country-talk by a
breach of all decorum, which he had committed against himself, his
station, and his office; --and that was in never appearing better, or
otherwise mounted, than upon a lean, sorry, jack-ass of a horse, value
about one pound fifteen shillings; who, to shorten all description of
him, was full brother to _Rosinante_, as far as similitude congenial
could make him; for he answered his description to a hair-breadth in
every thing, --except that I do not remember ’tis any where said, that
_Rosinante_ was broken-winded; and that, moreover, _Rosinante_, as is
the happiness of most _Spanish_ horses, fat or lean, --was undoubtedly a
horse at all points.
I know very well that the HERO’S horse was a horse of chaste deportment,
which may have given grounds for the contrary opinion: But it is as
certain at the same time, that _Rosinante’s_ continency (as may be
demonstrated from the adventure of the _Yanguesian_ carriers) proceeded
from no bodily defect or cause whatsoever, but from the temperance and
orderly current of his blood. --And let me tell you, Madam, there is a
great deal of very good chastity in the world, in behalf of which you
could not say more for your life.
Let that be as it may, as my purpose is to do extra justice to every
creature brought upon the stage of this dramatic work, --I could not
stifle this distinction in favour of Don _Quixote’s_ horse; ----in all
other points, the parson’s horse, I say, was just such another, --for he
was as lean, and as lank, and as sorry a jade, as HUMILITY herself could
have bestrided.
In the estimation of here and there a man of weak judgment, it was
greatly in the parson’s power to have helped the figure of this horse of
his, --for he was master of a very handsome demi-peak’d saddle, quilted
on the seat with green plush, garnished with a double row of
silver-headed studs, and a noble pair of shining brass stirrups, with a
housing altogether suitable, of grey superfine cloth, with an edging of
black lace, terminating in a deep, black, silk fringe, _poudré d’or_,
--all which he had purchased in the pride and prime of his life,
together with a grand embossed bridle, ornamented at all points as it
should be. ----But not caring to banter his beast, he had hung all these
up behind his study door: --and, in lieu of them, had seriously befitted
him with just such a bridle and such a saddle, as the figure and value
of such a steed might well and truly deserve.
In the several sallies about his parish, and in the neighbouring visits
to the gentry who lived around him, --you will easily comprehend, that
the parson, so appointed, would both hear and see enough to keep his
philosophy from rusting. To speak the truth, he never could enter a
village, but he caught the attention of both old and young. ----Labour
stood still as he pass’d----the bucket hung suspended in the middle of
the well, ----the spinning-wheel forgot its round, ----even
chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got
out of sight; and as his movement was not of the quickest, he had
generally time enough upon his hands to make his observations, --to hear
the groans of the serious, --and the laughter of the light-hearted;
--all which he bore with excellent tranquillity. --His character was,
--he loved a jest in his heart--and as he saw himself in the true point
of ridicule, he would say he could not be angry with others for seeing
him in a light, in which he so strongly saw himself: So that to his
friends, who knew his foible was not the love of money, and who
therefore made the less scruple in bantering the extravagance of his
humour, --instead of giving the true cause, --he chose rather to join in
the laugh against himself; and as he never carried one single ounce of
flesh upon his own bones, being altogether as spare a figure as his
beast, --he would sometimes insist upon it, that the horse was as good
as the rider deserved; --that they were, centaur-like, --both of a
piece. At other times, and in other moods, when his spirits were above
the temptation of false wit, --he would say, he found himself going off
fast in a consumption; and, with great gravity, would pretend, he could
not bear the sight of a fat horse, without a dejection of heart, and a
sensible alteration in his pulse; and that he had made choice of the
lean one he rode upon, not only to keep himself in countenance, but in
spirits.
At different times he would give fifty humorous and apposite reasons for
riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse, preferably to one
of mettle; --for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and meditate
as delightfully _de vanitate mundi et fugâ sæculi_, as with the
advantage of a death’s-head before him; --that, in all other
exercitations, he could spend his time, as he rode slowly along, --to as
much account as in his study; --that he could draw up an argument in his
sermon, --or a hole in his breeches, as steadily on the one as in the
other; --that brisk trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and
judgment, were two incompatible movements. --But that upon his steed--he
could unite and reconcile every thing, --he could compose his sermon--he
could compose his cough, ----and, in case nature gave a call that way,
he could likewise compose himself to sleep. --In short, the parson upon
such encounters would assign any cause but the true cause, --and he
with-held the true one, only out of a nicety of temper, because he
thought it did honour to him.
But the truth of the story was as follows: In the first years of this
gentleman’s life, and about the time when the superb saddle and bridle
were purchased by him, it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it
what you will, --to run into the opposite extreme. --In the language of
the county where he dwelt, he was said to have loved a good horse, and
generally had one of the best in the whole parish standing in his stable
always ready for saddling; and as the nearest midwife, as I told you,
did not live nearer to the village than seven miles, and in a vile
country, --it so fell out that the poor gentleman was scarce a whole
week together without some piteous application for his beast; and as he
was not an unkind-hearted man, and every case was more pressing and more
distressful than the last, --as much as he loved his beast, he had never
a heart to refuse him; the upshot of which was generally this, that his
horse was either clapp’d, or spavin’d, or greaz’d; --or he was
twitter-bon’d, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had
befallen him, which would let him carry no flesh; --so that he had every
nine or ten months a bad horse to get rid of, --and a good horse to
purchase in his stead.
What the loss on such a balance might amount to, _communibus annis_, I
would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffick, to
determine; --but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore it
for many years without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill
accidents of the kind, he found it necessary to take the thing under
consideration; and upon weighing the whole, and summing it up in his
mind, he found it not only disproportioned to his other expences, but
withal so heavy an article in itself, as to disable him from any other
act of generosity in his parish: Besides this, he considered that with
half the sum thus galloped away, he could do ten times as much good;
--and what still weighed more with him than all other considerations put
together, was this, that it confined all his charity into one particular
channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the least wanted, namely, to
the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving
nothing for the impotent, --nothing for the aged, --nothing for the many
comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where poverty,
and sickness, and affliction dwelt together.
For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expence; and there
appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it; --and
these were, either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his
steed upon any application whatever, --or else be content to ride the
last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and
infirmities, to the very end of the chapter.
As he dreaded his own constancy in the first--he very chearfully betook
himself to the second; and though he could very well have explained it,
as I said, to his honour, --yet, for that very reason, he had a spirit
above it; choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies, and the
laughter of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which
might seem a panegyrick upon himself.
I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this
reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which I
think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight
of _La Mancha_, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more, and
would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the
greatest hero of antiquity.
But this is not the moral of my story: The thing I had in view was to
shew the temper of the world in the whole of this affair. --For you must
know, that so long as this explanation would have done the parson
credit, --the devil a soul could find it out, --I suppose his enemies
would not, and that his friends could not. ----But no sooner did he
bestir himself in behalf of the midwife, and pay the expences of the
ordinary’s licence to set her up, --but the whole secret came out; every
horse he had lost, and two horses more than ever he had lost, with all
the circumstances of their destruction, were known and distinctly
remembered. --The story ran like wild-fire-- “The parson had a returning
fit of pride which had just seized him; and he was going to be well
mounted once again in his life; and if it was so, ’twas plain as the sun
at noon-day, he would pocket the expence of the licence, ten times told,
the very first year: --So that every body was left to judge what were
his views in this act of charity.”
What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life, --or
rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other
people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his own,
and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been sound
asleep.
About ten years ago this gentleman had the good fortune to be made
entirely easy upon that score, --it being just so long since he left his
parish, --and the whole world at the same time behind him, --and stands
accountable to a Judge of whom he will have no cause to complain.
But there is a fatality attends the actions of some men: Order them as
they will, they pass thro’ a certain medium, which so twists and
refracts them from their true directions----that, with all the titles to
praise which a rectitude of heart can give, the doers of them are
nevertheless forced to live and die without it.
Of the truth of which, this gentleman was a painful example. ----But to
know by what means this came to pass, --and to make that knowledge of
use to you, I insist upon it that you read the two following chapters,
which contain such a sketch of his life and conversation, as will carry
its moral along with it. --When this is done, if nothing stops us in our
way, we will go on with the midwife.
CHAPTER XI
Yorick was this parson’s name, and, what is very remarkable in it
(as appears from a most ancient account of the family, wrote upon strong
vellum, and now in perfect preservation) it had been exactly so spelt
for near, ----I was within an ace of saying nine hundred years; ----but
I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however
indisputable in itself; ----and therefore I shall content myself with
only saying ----It had been exactly so spelt, without the least variation
or transposition of a single letter, for I do not know how long; which
is more than I would venture to say of one half of the best surnames in
the kingdom; which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as
many chops and changes as their owners. --Has this been owing to the
pride, or to the shame of the respective proprietors? --In honest truth,
I think sometimes to the one, and sometimes to the other, just as the
temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair it is, and will one day
so blend and confound us altogether, that no one shall be able to stand
up and swear, “That his own great grandfather was the man who did either
this or that.”
This evil had been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of
the _Yorick’s_ family, and their religious preservation of these records
I quote, which do farther inform us, That the family was originally of
_Danish_ extraction, and had been transplanted into _England_ as early
as in the reign of _Horwendillus_, king of _Denmark_, in whose court, it
seems, an ancestor of this Mr. _Yorick’s_, and from whom he was lineally
descended, held a considerable post to the day of his death. Of what
nature this considerable post was, this record saith not; --It only
adds, That, for near two centuries, it had been totally abolished, as
altogether unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court
of the Christian world.
It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than
that of the king’s chief Jester; --and that _Hamlet’s Yorick_, in our
_Shakespeare_, many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon
authenticated facts, was certainly the very man.
I have not the time to look into _Saxo-Grammaticus’s Danish_ history, to
know the certainty of this; --but if you have leisure, and can easily
get at the book, you may do it full as well yourself.
I had just time, in my travels through _Denmark_ with Mr. _Noddy’s_
eldest son, whom, in the year 1741, I accompanied as governor, riding
along with him at a prodigious rate thro’ most parts of _Europe_, and of
which original journey performed by us two, a most delectable narrative
will be given in the progress of this work; I had just time, I say, and
that was all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long
sojourner in that country; ----namely, “That nature was neither very
lavish, nor was she very stingy in her gifts of genius and capacity to
its inhabitants; --but, like a discreet parent, was moderately kind to
them all; observing such an equal tenor in the distribution of her
favours, as to bring them, in those points, pretty near to a level with
each other; so that you will meet with few instances in that kingdom of
refined parts; but a great deal of good plain household understanding
amongst all ranks of people, of which everybody has a share;” which is,
I think, very right.
With us, you see, the case is quite different: --we are all ups and
downs in this matter; --you are a great genius; --or ’tis fifty to one,
Sir, you are a great dunce and a blockhead; --not that there is a total
want of intermediate steps, --no, --we are not so irregular as that
comes to; --but the two extremes are more common, and in a greater
degree in this unsettled island, where nature, in her gifts and
dispositions of this kind, is most whimsical and capricious; fortune
herself not being more so in the bequest of her goods and chattels than
she.
This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard to _Yorick’s_
extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts
I could ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of
_Danish_ blood in his whole crasis; in nine hundred years, it might
possibly have all run out: ----I will not philosophize one moment with
you about it; for happen how it would, the fact was this: --That instead
of that cold phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humours, you would
have looked for, in one so extracted; --he was, on the contrary, as
mercurial and sublimated a composition, --as heteroclite a creature in
all his declensions; --with as much life and whim, and _gaité de cœur_
about him, as the kindliest climate could have engendered and put
together. With all this sail, poor _Yorick_ carried not one ounce of
ballast; he was utterly unpractised in the world; and, at the age of
twenty-six, knew just about as well how to steer his course in it, as a
romping, unsuspicious girl of thirteen: So that upon his first setting
out, the brisk gale of his spirits, as you will imagine, ran him foul
ten times in a day of somebody’s tackling; and as the grave and more
slow-paced were oftenest in his way, ----you may likewise imagine, ’twas
with such he had generally the ill luck to get the most entangled. For
aught I know there might be some mixture of unlucky wit at the bottom of
such _Fracas_: ----For, to speak the truth, _Yorick_ had an invincible
dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity; --not to gravity as
such; --for where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or
serious of mortal men for days and weeks together; --but he was an enemy
to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it
appeared a cloak for ignorance, or for folly: and then, whenever it fell
in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it much
quarter.
Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say that Gravity was an
errant scoundrel, and he would add, --of the most dangerous kind too,
--because a sly one; and that he verily believed, more honest,
well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in
one twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. In
the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say, there was
no danger, --but to itself: --whereas the very essence of gravity was
design, and consequently deceit; --’twas a taught trick to gain credit
of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and
that, with all its pretensions, --it was no better, but often worse,
than what a _French_ wit had long ago defined it, --_viz._ _A mysterious
carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind_; --which
definition of gravity, _Yorick_, with great imprudence, would say,
deserved to be wrote in letters of gold.
But, in plain truth, he was a man unhackneyed and unpractised in the
world, and was altogether as indiscreet and foolish on every other
subject of discourse where policy is wont to impress restraint. _Yorick_
had no impression but one, and that was what arose from the nature of
the deed spoken of; which impression he would usually translate into
plain _English_ without any periphrasis; --and too oft without much
distinction of either person, time, or place; --so that when mention was
made of a pitiful or an ungenerous proceeding----he never gave himself a
moment’s time to reflect who was the hero of the piece, ----what his
station, ----or how far he had power to hurt him hereafter; ----but if
it was a dirty action, --without more ado, --The man was a dirty fellow,
--and so on. --And as his comments had usually the ill fate to be
terminated either in a _bon mot_, or to be enlivened throughout with
some drollery or humour of expression, it gave wings to _Yorick’s_
indiscretion. In a word, tho’ he never sought, yet, at the same time, as
he seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without
much ceremony; ----he had but too many temptations in life, of
scattering his wit and his humour, --his gibes and his jests about him.
----They were not lost for want of gathering.
What were the consequences, and what was _Yorick’s_ catastrophe
thereupon, you will read in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XII
The _Mortgager_ and _Mortgagée_ differ the one from the other, not more
in length of purse, than the _Jester_ and _Jestée_ do, in that of
memory. But in this the comparison between them runs, as the scholiasts
call it, upon all-four; which, by the bye, is upon one or two legs more
than some of the best of _Homer’s_ can pretend to; --namely, That the
one raises a sum, and the other a laugh at your expence, and thinks no
more about it. Interest, however, still runs on in both cases; --the
periodical or accidental payments of it, just serving to keep the memory
of the affair alive; till, at length, in some evil hour, --pop comes the
creditor upon each, and by demanding principal upon the spot, together
with full interest to the very day, makes them both feel the full extent
of their obligations.
As the reader (for I hate your _ifs_) has a thorough knowledge of human
nature, I need not say more to satisfy him, that my HERO could not go on
at this rate without some slight experience of these incidental
mementos. To speak the truth, he had wantonly involved himself in a
multitude of small book-debts of this stamp, which, notwithstanding
_Eugenius’s_ frequent advice, he too much disregarded; thinking, that as
not one of them was contracted thro’ any malignancy; --but, on the
contrary, from an honesty of mind, and a mere jocundity of humour, they
would all of them be cross’d out in course.
_Eugenius_ would never admit this; and would often tell him, that one
day or other he would certainly be reckoned with; and he would often
add, in an accent of sorrowful apprehension, --to the uttermost mite. To
which _Yorick_, with his usual carelessness of heart, would as often
answer with a pshaw! --and if the subject was started in the
fields--with a hop, skip, and a jump at the end of it; but if close pent
up in the social chimney-corner, where the culprit was barricado’d in,
with a table and a couple of armchairs, and could not so readily fly off
in a tangent, --_Eugenius_ would then go on with his lecture upon
discretion in words to this purpose, though somewhat better put
together.
Trust me, dear _Yorick_, this unwary pleasantry of thine will sooner or
later bring thee into scrapes and difficulties, which no after-wit can
extricate thee out of. ----In these sallies, too oft, I see, it happens,
that a person laughed at, considers himself in the light of a person
injured, with all the rights of such a situation belonging to him; and
when thou viewest him in that light too, and reckons up his friends, his
family, his kindred and allies, ----and musters up with them the many
recruits which will list under him from a sense of common danger;
----’tis no extravagant arithmetick to say, that for every ten jokes,
--thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and
raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by
them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.
I cannot suspect it in the man whom I esteem, that there is the least
spur from spleen or malevolence of intent in these sallies ----I believe
and know them to be truly honest and sportive: --But consider, my dear
lad, that fools cannot distinguish this, --and that knaves will not: and
thou knowest not what it is, either to provoke the one, or to make merry
with the other: ----whenever they associate for mutual defence, depend
upon it, they will carry on the war in such a manner against thee, my
dear friend, as to make thee heartily sick of it, and of thy life too.
Revenge from some baneful corner shall level a tale of dishonour at
thee, which no innocence of heart or integrity of conduct shall set
right. ----The fortunes of thy house shall totter, --thy character,
which led the way to them, shall bleed on every side of it, --thy faith
questioned, --thy works belied, --thy wit forgotten, --thy learning
trampled on. To wind up the last scene of thy tragedy, CRUELTY and
COWARDICE, twin ruffians, hired and set on by MALICE in the dark, shall
strike together at all thy infirmities and mistakes: ----The best of us,
my dear lad, lie open there, ----and trust me, ----trust me, _Yorick,
when to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon, that an
innocent and an helpless creature shall be sacrificed, ’tis an easy
matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed,
to make a fire to offer it up with_.
_Yorick_ scarce ever heard this sad vaticination of his destiny read
over to him, but with a fear stealing from his eye, and a promissory
look attending it, that he was resolved, for the time to come, to ride
his tit with more sobriety. --But, alas, too late! --a grand
confederacy, with ***** and ***** at the head of it, was formed before
the first prediction of it. --The whole plan of the attack, just as
_Eugenius_ had foreboded, was put in execution all at once, --with so
little mercy on the side of the allies, --and so little suspicion in
_Yorick_, of what was carrying on against him, --that when he thought,
good easy man! full surely preferment was o’ ripening, --they had smote
his root, and then he fell, as many a worthy man had fallen before him.
_Yorick_, however, fought it out with all imaginable gallantry for some
time; till, overpowered by numbers, and worn out at length by the
calamities of the war, --but more so, by the ungenerous manner in which
it was carried on, --he threw down the sword; and though he kept up his
spirits in appearance to the last, he died, nevertheless, as was
generally thought, quite broken-hearted.
What inclined _Eugenius_ to the same opinion was as follows:
A few hours before _Yorick_ breathed his last, _Eugenius_ stept in with
an intent to take his last sight and last farewell of him. Upon his
drawing _Yorick’s_ curtain, and asking how he felt himself, _Yorick_
looking up in his face took hold of his hand, --and after thanking him
for the many tokens of his friendship to him, for which, he said, if it
was their fate to meet hereafter, --he would thank him again and again,
--he told him, he was within a few hours of giving his enemies the slip
for ever. --I hope not, answered _Eugenius_, with tears trickling down
his cheeks, and with the tenderest tone that ever man spoke. --I hope
not, _Yorick_, said he. ----_Yorick_ replied, with a look up, and a
gentle squeeze of _Eugenius’s_ hand, and that was all, --but it cut
_Eugenius_ to his heart, --Come--come, _Yorick_, quoth _Eugenius_,
wiping his eyes, and summoning up the man within him, --my dear lad, be
comforted, --let not all thy spirits and fortitude forsake thee at this
crisis when thou most wants them; ----who knows what resources are in
store, and what the power of God may yet do for thee? ----_Yorick_ laid
his hand upon his heart, and gently shook his head; --For my part,
continued _Eugenius_, crying bitterly as he uttered the words, --I
declare I know not, _Yorick_, how to part with thee, and would gladly
flatter my hopes, added _Eugenius_, chearing up his voice, that there is
still enough left of thee to make a bishop, and that I may live to see
it. ----I beseech thee, _Eugenius_, quoth _Yorick_, taking off his
night-cap as well as he could with his left hand, ----his right being
still grasped close in that of _Eugenius_, ----I beseech thee to take a
view of my head. --I see nothing that ails it, replied _Eugenius_. Then,
alas! my friend, said _Yorick_, let me tell you, that ’tis so bruised
and mis-shapened with the blows which ***** and *****, and some others
have so unhandsomely given me, in the dark, that I might say with
_Sancho Pança_, that should I recover, and “Mitres thereupon be suffered
to rain down from heaven as thick as hail, not one of them would fit
it.” ----_Yorick’s_ last breath was hanging upon his trembling lips
ready to depart as he uttered this: ----yet still it was uttered with
something of a _Cervantick_ tone; ----and as he spoke it, _Eugenius_
could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a moment in his
eyes; ----faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which
(as _Shakespeare_ said of his ancestor) were wont to set the table in a
roar!
_Eugenius_ was convinced from this, that the heart of his friend was
broke: he squeezed his hand, ----and then walked softly out of the room,
weeping as he walked. _Yorick_ followed _Eugenius_ with his eyes to the
door, --he then closed them, --and never opened them more.
[Illustration (full-page black tombstone)]
He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ------,
under a plain marble slab, which his friend _Eugenius_, by leave of his
executors, laid upon his grave, with no more than these three words of
inscription, serving both for his epitaph and elegy.
____________________
| |
| Alas, poor YORICK! |
|____________________|
Ten times a day has _Yorick’s_ ghost the consolation to hear his
monumental inscription read over with such a variety of plaintive tones,
as denote a general pity and esteem for him; ----a foot-way crossing the
churchyard close by the side of his grave, --not a passenger goes by
without stopping to cast a look upon it, --and sighing as he walks on,
Alas, poor YORICK!
CHAPTER XIII
It is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted
from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him,
merely to put him in mind that there is such a body still in the world,
and whom, upon the best judgment I can form upon my own plan at present,
--I am going to introduce to him for good and all: But as fresh matter
may be started, and much unexpected business fall out betwixt the reader
and myself, which may require immediate dispatch; ----’twas right to
take care that the poor woman should not be lost in the meantime;
--because when she is wanted, we can no way do without her.
I think I told you that this good woman was a person of no small note
and consequence throughout our whole village and township; --that her
fame had spread itself to the very out-edge and circumference of that
circle of importance, of which kind every soul living, whether he has a
shirt to his back or no, ----has one surrounding him; --which said
circle, by the way, whenever ’tis said that such a one is of great
weight and importance in the _world_, ----I desire may be enlarged or
contracted in your worship’s fancy, in a compound ratio of the station,
profession, knowledge, abilities, height and depth (measuring both ways)
of the personage brought before you.
In the present case, if I remember, I fixed it about four or five miles,
which not only comprehended the whole parish, but extended itself to two
or three of the adjacent hamlets in the skirts of the next parish; which
made a considerable thing of it. I must add, That she was, moreover,
very well looked on at one large grange-house, and some other odd houses
and farms within two or three miles, as I said, from the smoke of her
own chimney: ----But I must here, once for all, inform you, that all
this will be more exactly delineated and explain’d in a map, now in the
hands of the engraver, which, with many other pieces and developements
of this work, will be added to the end of the twentieth volume, --not to
swell the work, --I detest the thought of such a thing; --but by way of
commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents,
or innuendos as shall be thought to be either of private interpretation,
or of dark or doubtful meaning, after my life and my opinions shall have
been read over (now don’t forget the meaning of the word) by all the
_world_; ----which, betwixt you and me, and in spite of all the
gentlemen-reviewers in _Great Britain_, and of all that their worships
shall undertake to write or say to the contrary, --I am determined shall
be the case. --I need not tell your worship, that all this is spoke in
confidence.
CHAPTER XIV
Upon looking into my mother’s marriage-settlement, in order to satisfy
myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could
proceed any farther in this history; --I had the good fortune to pop
upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight
forwards, --it might have taken me up a month; --which shews plainly,
that when a man sits down to write a history, --tho’ it be but the
history of _Jack Hickathrift_ or _Tom Thumb_, he knows no more than his
heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,
--or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all
is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer
drives on his mule, --straight forward; ----for instance, from _Rome_
all the way to _Loretto_, without ever once turning his head aside
either to the right hand or to the left, ----he might venture to
foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end; ----but
the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the
least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make
with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He
will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye,
which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he
will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that: ----All which both the man and his mule are quite
exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be
look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies,
which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:
----In short, there is no end of it; ----for my own part, I declare I
had been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,
--and am not yet born: --I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell
you _when_ it happen’d, but not _how_; --so that you see the thing is
yet far from being accomplished.
These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no conception of when I
first set out; --but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase
than diminish as I advance, --have struck out a hint which I am resolved
to follow; ----and that is, --not to be in a hurry; but to go on
leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year;
----which, if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable
bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live.
CHAPTER XV
The article in my mother’s marriage-settlement, which I told the reader
I was at the pains to search for, and which, now that I have found it,
I think proper to lay before him, --is so much more fully express’d in
the deed itself, than ever I can pretend to do it, that it would be
barbarity to take it out of the lawyer’s hand: --It is as follows.
“#And this Indenture further witnesseth#, That the said _Walter Shandy_,
merchant, in consideration of the said intended marriage to be had, and,
by God’s blessing, to be well and truly solemnised and consummated
between the said _Walter Shandy_ and _Elizabeth Mollineux_ aforesaid,
and divers other good and valuable causes and considerations him
thereunto specially moving, --doth grant, covenant, condescend, consent,
conclude, bargain, and fully agree to and with _John Dixon_, and _James
Turner_, Esqrs. the above-named Trustees, _&c. &c._--#to Wit#, --That in
case it should hereafter so fall out, chance, happen, or otherwise come
to pass, --That the said _Walter Shandy_, merchant, shall have left off
business before the time or times, that the said _Elizabeth Mollineux_
shall, according to the course of nature, or otherwise, have left off
bearing and bringing forth children; --and that, in consequence of the
said _Walter Shandy_ having so left off business, he shall in despight,
and against the free-will, consent, and good-liking of the said
_Elizabeth Mollineux_, --make a departure from the city of _London_, in
order to retire to, and dwell upon, his estate at _Shandy Hall_, in the
county of ----, or at any other country-seat, castle, hall,
mansion-house, messuage or grainge-house, now purchased, or hereafter to
be purchased, or upon any part or parcel thereof: --That then, and as
often as the said _Elizabeth Mollineux_ shall happen to be enceint with
child or children severally and lawfully begot, or to be begotten, upon
the body of the said _Elizabeth Mollineux_, during her said coverture,
--he the said _Walter Shandy_ shall, at his own proper cost and charges,
and out of his own proper monies, upon good and reasonable notice, which
is hereby agreed to be within six weeks of her the said _Elizabeth
Mollineux’s_ full reckoning, or time of supposed and computed delivery,
--pay, or cause to be paid, the sum of one hundred and twenty pounds of
good and lawful money, to _John Dixon_, and _James Turner_, Esqrs. or
assigns, --upon TRUST and confidence, and for and unto the use and uses,
intent, end, and purpose following: --#That is to say#, --That the said
sum of one hundred and twenty pounds shall be paid into the hands of the
said _Elizabeth Mollineux_, or to be otherwise applied by them the said
Trustees, for the well and truly hiring of one coach, with able and
sufficient horses, to carry and convey the body of the said _Elizabeth
Mollineux_, and the child or children which she shall be then and there
enceint and pregnant with, --unto the city of _London_; and for the
further paying and defraying of all other incidental costs, charges, and
expences whatsoever, --in and about, and for, and relating to, her said
intended delivery and lying-in, in the said city or suburbs thereof. And
that the said _Elizabeth Mollineux_ shall and may, from time to time,
and at all such time and times as are here covenanted and agreed upon,
--peaceably and quietly hire the said coach and horses, and have free
ingress, egress, and regress throughout her journey, in and from the
said coach, according to the tenor, true intent, and meaning of these
presents, without any let, suit, trouble, disturbance, molestation,
discharge, hindrance, forfeiture, eviction, vexation, interruption, or
incumbrance whatsoever. --And that it shall moreover be lawful to and
for the said _Elizabeth Mollineux_, from time to time, and as oft or
often as she shall well and truly be advanced in her said pregnancy, to
the time heretofore stipulated and agreed upon, --to live and reside in
such place or places, and in such family or families, and with such
relations, friends, and other persons within the said city of _London_,
as she at her own will and pleasure, notwithstanding her present
coverture, and as if she was a _femme sole_ and unmarried, --shall think
fit. --#And this Indenture further Witnesseth#, That for the more
effectually carrying of the said covenant into execution, the said
_Walter Shandy_, merchant, doth hereby grant, bargain, sell, release,
and confirm unto the said _John Dixon_, and _James Turner_, Esqrs. their
heirs, executors, and assigns, in their actual possession now being, by
virtue of an indenture of bargain and sale for a year to them the said
_John Dickson_, and _James Turner_, Esqrs. by him the said _Walter
Shandy_, merchant, thereof made; which said bargain and sale for a year,
bears date the day next before the date of these presents, and by force
and virtue of the statute for transferring of uses into possession,
--#All# that the manor and lordship of _Shandy_, in the county of ----,
with all the rights, members, and appurtenances thereof; and all and
every the messuages, houses, buildings, barns, stables, orchards,
gardens, backsides, tofts, crofts, garths, cottages, lands, meadows,
feedings, pastures, marshes, commons, woods, underwoods, drains,
fisheries, waters, and water-courses; --together with all rents,
reversions, services, annuities, fee-farms, knights fees, views of
frankpledge, escheats, reliefs, mines, quarries, goods and chattels of
felons and fugitives, felons of themselves, and put in exigent,
deodands, free warrens, and all other royalties and seigniories, rights
and jurisdictions, privileges and hereditaments whatsoever. ----#And
also# the advowson, donation, presentation, and free disposition of the
rectory or parsonage of _Shandy_ aforesaid, and all and every the
tenths, tythes, glebe-lands.” ----In three words, ----“My mother was to
lay in, (if she chose it) in _London_.”
But in order to put a stop to the practice of any unfair play on the
part of my mother, which a marriage-article of this nature too
manifestly opened a door to, and which indeed had never been thought of
at all, but for my uncle _Toby Shandy_; --a clause was added in security
of my father, which was this: --“That in case my mother hereafter
should, at any time, put my father to the trouble and expence of a
_London_ journey, upon false cries and tokens; ----that for every such
instance, she should forfeit all the right and title which the covenant
gave her to the next turn; ----but to no more, --and so on, _toties
quoties_, in as effectual a manner, as if such a covenant betwixt them
had not been made.” --This, by the way, was no more than what was
reasonable; --and yet, as reasonable as it was, I have ever thought it
hard that the whole weight of the article should have fallen entirely,
as it did, upon myself.
But I was begot and born to misfortunes: --for my poor mother, whether
it was wind or water--or a compound of both, --or neither; --or whether
it was simply the mere swell of imagination and fancy in her; --or how
far a strong wish and desire to have it so, might mislead her judgment:
--in short, whether she was deceived or deceiving in this matter, it no
way becomes me to decide. The fact was this, That in the latter end of
_September_ 1717, which was the year before I was born, my mother having
carried my father up to town much against the grain, --he peremptorily
insisted upon the clause; --so that I was doom’d, by marriage-articles,
to have my nose squeez’d as flat to my face, as if the destinies had
actually spun me without one.
How this event came about, --and what a train of vexatious
disappointments, in one stage or other of my life, have pursued me from
the mere loss, or rather compression, of this one single member, --shall
be laid before the reader all in due time.
CHAPTER XVI
My father, as anybody may naturally imagine, came down with my mother
into the country, in but a pettish kind of a humour. The first twenty or
five-and-twenty miles he did nothing in the world but fret and teaze
himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expence, which he
said might every shilling of it have been saved; --then what vexed him
more than everything else was, the provoking time of the year, --which,
as I told you, was towards the end of _September_, when his wall-fruit
and green gages especially, in which he was very curious, were just
ready for pulling: ----“Had he been whistled up to _London_, upon a _Tom
Fool’s_ errand, in any other month of the whole year, he should not have
said three words about it.”
For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down, but the heavy
blow he had sustain’d from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully
reckon’d upon in his mind, and register’d down in his pocket-book, as a
second staff for his old age, in case _Bobby_ should fail him. The
disappointment of this, he said, was ten times more to a wise man, than
all the money which the journey, etc., had cost him, put together, --rot
the hundred and twenty pounds, ----he did not mind it a rush.
From _Stilton_, all the way to _Grantham_, nothing in the whole affair
provoked him so much as the condolences of his friends, and the foolish
figure they should both make at church, the first _Sunday_; ----of
which, in the satirical vehemence of his wit, now sharpen’d a little by
vexation, he would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions,
--and place his rib and self in so many tormenting lights and attitudes
in the face of the whole congregation; --that my mother declared, these
two stages were so truly tragi-comical, that she did nothing but laugh
and cry in a breath, from one end to the other of them all the way.
From _Grantham_, till they had cross’d the _Trent_, my father was out of
all kind of patience at the vile trick and imposition which he fancied
my mother had put upon him in this affair-- “Certainly,” he would say to
himself, over and over again, “the woman could not be deceived
herself----if she could, ----what weakness!” --tormenting word! --which
led his imagination a thorny dance, and, before all was over, play’d the
duce and all with him; ----for sure as ever the word _weakness_ was
uttered, and struck full upon his brain--so sure it set him upon running
divisions upon how many kinds of weaknesses there were; ----that there
was such a thing as weakness of the body, ----as well as weakness of the
mind, --and then he would do nothing but syllogize within himself for a
stage or two together, How far the cause of all these vexations might,
or might not, have arisen out of himself.
In short, he had so many little subjects of disquietude springing out of
this one affair, all fretting successively in his mind as they rose up
in it, that my mother, whatever was her journey up, had but an uneasy
journey of it down. ----In a word, as she complained to my uncle _Toby_,
he would have tired out the patience of any flesh alive.
CHAPTER XVII
Though my father travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the best
of moods, --pshawing and pishing all the way down, --yet he had the
complaisance to keep the worst part of the story still to himself;
--which was the resolution he had taken of doing himself the justice,
which my uncle _Toby’s_ clause in the marriage-settlement empowered him;
nor was it till the very night in which I was begot, which was thirteen
months after, that she had the least intimation of his design: when my
father, happening, as you remember, to be a little chagrin’d and out of
temper, ----took occasion as they lay chatting gravely in bed
afterwards, talking over what was to come, ----to let her know that she
must accommodate herself as well as she could to the bargain made
between them in their marriage-deeds; which was to lye-in of her next
child in the country, to balance the last year’s journey.
My father was a gentleman of many virtues, --but he had a strong spice
of that in his temper, which might, or might not, add to the number.
--’Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, --and of
obstinacy in a bad one: Of this my mother had so much knowledge, that
she knew ’twas to no purpose to make any remonstrance, --so she e’en
resolved to sit down quietly, and make the most of it.
CHAPTER XVIII
As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother
should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly;
for which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with
child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so
often heard me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the
famous Dr. _Manningham_ was not to be had, she had come to a final
determination in her mind, ----notwithstanding there was a scientific
operator within so near a call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover,
had expressly wrote a five shillings book upon the subject of midwifery,
in which he had exposed, not only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,
----but had likewise superadded many curious improvements for the
quicker extraction of the fœtus in cross births, and some other cases of
danger, which belay us in getting into the world; notwithstanding all
this, my mother, I say, was absolutely determined to trust her life, and
mine with it, into no soul’s hand but this old woman’s only. --Now this
I like; --when we cannot get at the very thing we wish----never to take
up with the next best in degree to it: --no; that’s pitiful beyond
description; --it is no more than a week from this very day, in which I
am now writing this book for the edification of the world; --which is
_March_ 9, 1759, ----that my dear, dear _Jenny_, observing I looked a
little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five-and-twenty
shillings a yard, --told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so
much trouble; --and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide
stuff of tenpence a yard. --’Tis the duplication of one and the same
greatness of soul; only what lessened the honour of it, somewhat, in my
mother’s case, was, that she could not heroine it into so violent and
hazardous an extreme, as one in her situation might have wished, because
the old widwife had really some little claim to be depended upon, --as
much, at least, as success could give her; having, in the course of her
practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought every mother’s son
of them into the world without any one slip or accident which could
fairly be laid to her account.
These facts, tho’ they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy
some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father’s spirits
in relation to this choice. --To say nothing of the natural workings of
humanity and justice--or of the yearnings of parental and connubial
love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in
a case of this kind; ----he felt himself concerned in a particular
manner, that all should go right in the present case; --from the
accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and
child in lying-in at _Shandy-Hall_. ----He knew the world judged by
events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by
loading him with the whole blame of it. ----“Alas, o’day; --had Mrs.
_Shandy_, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to
lye-in and come down again; --which, they say, she begged and prayed for
upon her bare knees, ----and which, in my opinion, considering the
fortune which Mr. _Shandy_ got with her, --was no such mighty matter to
have complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been
alive at this hour.”
This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable; --and yet, it was
not merely to shelter himself, --nor was it altogether for the care of
his offspring and wife that he seemed so extremely anxious about this
point; --my father had extensive views of things, ----and stood
moreover, as he thought, deeply concerned in it for the publick good,
from the dread he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance
might be put to.
He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had
unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen
_Elizabeth’s_ reign down to his own time, that the current of men and
money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,
--set in so strong, --as to become dangerous to our civil rights,
--though, by the bye, ----a _current_ was not the image he took most
delight in, --a _distemper_ was here his favourite metaphor, and he
would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was
identically the same in the body national as in the body natural where
the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they
could find their ways down; ----a stoppage of circulation must ensue,
which was death in both cases.
There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by
_French_ politicks or _French_ invasions; ----nor was he so much in pain
of a consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours
in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined;
--but he verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all
at once, in a state-apoplexy; --and then he would say, _The Lord have
mercy upon us all_.
My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,
--without the remedy along with it.
“Was I an absolute prince,” he would say, pulling up his breeches with
both his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, “I would appoint able
judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of
every fool’s business who came there; --and if, upon a fair and candid
hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and
come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, farmer’s sons,
&c., &c., at his backside, they should be all sent back, from constable
to constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal
settlements. By this means I shall take care, that my metropolis
totter’d not thro’ its own weight; --that the head be no longer too big
for the body; --that the extremes, now wasted and pinn’d in, be restored
to their due share of nourishment, and regain with it their natural
strength and beauty: --I would effectually provide, That the meadows and
corn-fields of my dominions, should laugh and sing; --that good chear
and hospitality flourish once more; --and that such weight and influence
be put thereby into the hands of the Squirality of my kingdom, as should
counterpoise what I perceive my Nobility are now taking from them.
“Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen’s seats,” he would ask, with
some emotion, as he walked across the room, “throughout so many
delicious provinces in _France?_ Whence is it that the few remaining
_Chateaus_ amongst them are so dismantled, --so unfurnished, and in so
ruinous and desolate a condition? ----Because, Sir,” (he would say) “in
that kingdom no man has any country-interest to support; --the little
interest of any kind which any man has anywhere in it, is concentrated
in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarch: by the sunshine of
whose countenance, or the clouds which pass across it, every _French_
man lives or dies.”
Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard
against the least evil accident in my mother’s lying-in in the country,
----was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of
power, too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his
own, or higher stations; ----which, with the many other usurped rights
which that part of the constitution was hourly establishing, --would, in
the end, prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestick government
established in the first creation of things by God.
In this point he was entirely of Sir _Robert Filmer’s_ opinion, That the
plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts
of the world were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern
and prototype of this household and paternal power; --which, for a
century, he said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a
mix’d government; ----the form of which, however desirable in great
combinations of the species, ----was very troublesome in small ones,
--and seldom produced anything, that he saw, but sorrow and confusion.
For all these reasons, private and publick, put together, --my father
was for having the man-midwife by all means, --my mother by no means. My
father begg’d and intreated she would for once recede from her
prerogative in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her; --my
mother, on the contrary, insisted upon her privilege in this matter, to
choose for herself, --and have no mortal’s help but the old woman’s.
--What could my father do? He was almost at his wit’s end; ----talked it
over with her in all moods; --placed his arguments in all lights;
--argued the matter with her like a christian, --like a heathen, --like
a husband, --like a father, --like a patriot, --like a man: --My mother
answered everything only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her;
--for as she could not assume and fight it out behind such a variety of
characters, --’twas no fair match: --’twas seven to one. --What could my
mother do? ----She had the advantage (otherwise she had been certainly
overpowered) of a small reinforcement of chagrin personal at the bottom,
which bore her up, and enabled her to dispute the affair with my father
with so equal an advantage, ----that both sides sung _Te Deum_. In a
word, my mother was to have the old woman, --and the operator was to
have licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father and my uncle _Toby
Shandy_ in the back parlour, --for which he was to be paid five guineas.
I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the
breast of my fair reader; --and it is this, ----Not to take it
absolutely for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have
dropp’d in it, ----“That I am a married man.” --I own, the tender
appellation of my dear, dear _Jenny_, --with some other strokes of
conjugal knowledge, interspersed here and there, might, naturally
enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world into such a
determination against me. --All I plead for, in this case, Madam, is
strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as to
yourself, --as not to prejudge, or receive such an impression of me,
till you have better evidence, than, I am positive, at present can be
produced against me. --Not that I can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam,
as to desire you should therefore think, that my dear, dear _Jenny_ is
my kept mistress; --no, --that would be flattering my character in the
other extreme, and giving it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has
no kind of right to. All I contend for, is the utter impossibility, for
some volumes, that you, or the most penetrating spirit upon earth,
should know how this matter really stands. --It is not impossible, but
that my dear, dear _Jenny!_ tender as the appellation is, may be my
child. ----Consider, --I was born in the year eighteen. --Nor is there
anything unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear
_Jenny_ may be my friend. --Friend! --My friend. --Surely, Madam,
a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be supported
without ------Fy! Mr. _Shandy_: --Without anything, Madam, but that
tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where
there is a difference of sex. Let me intreat you to study the pure and
sentimental parts of the best _French_ Romances; --it will really,
Madam, astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions
this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is
dress’d out.
CHAPTER XIX
I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry,
than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father’s great
good sense, ----knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and
curious too in philosophy, --wise also in political reasoning, --and in
polemical (as he will find) no way ignorant, --could be capable of
entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track, --that I
fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of
a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he
will laugh most heartily at it; --and if he is of a grave and saturnine
cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and
extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of
christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than
what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.
His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of
magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly
impressed upon our characters and conduct.
The hero of _Cervantes_ argued not the point with more seriousness,
----nor had he more faith, ----or more to say on the powers of
necromancy in dishonouring his deeds, --or on DULCINEA’S name, in
shedding lustre upon them, than my father had on those of TRISMEGISTUS
or ARCHIMEDES, on the one hand--or of NYKY and SIMKIN on the other. How
many CÆSARS and POMPEYS, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names,
have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are
there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their
characters and spirits been totally depressed and NICOMEDUS’D into
nothing?
I see plainly, Sir, by your looks (or as the case happened), my father
would say--that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine,
--which, to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the
bottom, --I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;
----and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am
morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, --not
as a party in the dispute, --but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon
it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;
----you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as
most men; --and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you, --of a
liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it
wants friends. Your son, --your dear son, --from whose sweet and open
temper you have so much to expect. --Your BILLY, Sir! --would you, for
the world, have called him JUDAS? --Would you, my dear Sir, he would
say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address,
--and in that soft and irresistible _piano_ of voice, which the nature
of the _argumentum ad hominem_ absolutely requires, --Would you, Sir, if
a _Jew_ of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered
you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a
desecration of him? ----O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know
your temper right, Sir, --you are incapable of it; ----you would have
trampled upon the offer; --you would have thrown the temptation at the
tempter’s head with abhorrence.
Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that
generous contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction,
is really noble; --and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;
--the workings of a parent’s love upon the truth and conviction of this
very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called JUDAS, --the sordid
and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have
accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a
miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.
I never knew a man able to answer this argument. ----But, indeed, to
speak of my father as he was; --he was certainly irresistible; --both in
his orations and disputations; --he was born an orator; --Θεοδίδακτος.
--Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and
Rhetorick were so blended up in him, --and, withal, he had so shrewd a
guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, ----that NATURE
might have stood up and said, --“This man is eloquent.” --In short,
whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the question, ’twas
hazardous in either case to attack him. --And yet, ’tis strange, he had
never read _Cicero_, nor _Quintilian de Oratore_, nor _Isocrates_, nor
_Aristotle_, nor _Longinus_ amongst the antients; --nor _Vossius_, nor
_Skioppius_, nor _Ramus_, nor _Farnaby_ amongst the moderns; --and what
is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or
spark of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon
_Crackenthorp_ or _Burgersdicius_, or any Dutch logician or commentator;
--he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument _ad
ignorantiam_, and an argument _ad hominem_ consisted; so that I well
remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at _Jesus
College_ in ****, --it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor,
and two or three fellows of that learned society, --that a man who knew
not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that
fashion with them.
To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was,
however, perpetually forced upon; ----for he had a thousand little
sceptical notions of the comick kind to defend----most of which notions,
I verily believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and
of a _vive la Bagatelle_; and as such he would make merry with them for
half an hour or so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them
till another day.
I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the
progress and establishment of my father’s many odd opinions, --but as a
warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such
guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into
our brains, --at length claim a kind of settlement there, ----working
sometimes like yeast; --but more generally after the manner of the
gentle passion, beginning in jest, --but ending in downright earnest.
Whether this was the case of the singularity of my father’s notions--or
that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit; --or how far,
in many of his notions, he might, though odd, be absolutely right;
----the reader, as he comes at them, shall decide. All that I maintain
here, is, that in this one, of the influence of christian names, however
it gained footing, he was serious; --he was all uniformity; --he was
systematical, and, like all systematick reasoners, he would move both
heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature, to support
his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again; --he was serious;
--and, in consequence of it, he would lose all kind of patience whenever
he saw people, especially of condition, who should have known better,
----as careless and as indifferent about the name they imposed upon
their child, --or more so, than in the choice of _Ponto_ or _Cupid_ for
their puppy-dog.
This, he would say, look’d ill; --and had, moreover, this particular
aggravation in it, viz., That when once a vile name was wrongfully or
injudiciously given, ’twas not like the case of a man’s character,
which, when wrong’d, might hereafter be cleared; ----and, possibly, some
time or other, if not in the man’s life, at least after his death, --be,
somehow or other, set to rights with the world: But the injury of this,
he would say, could never be undone; --nay, he doubted even whether an
act of parliament could reach it: ----He knew as well as you, that the
legislature assumed a power over surnames; --but for very strong
reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say,
to go a step farther.
It was observable, that tho’ my father, in consequence of this opinion,
had, as I have told you, the strongest likings and dislikings towards
certain names; --that there were still numbers of names which hung so
equally in the balance before him, that they were absolutely indifferent
to him. _Jack_, _Dick_, and _Tom_ were of this class: These my father
called neutral names; --affirming of them, without a satire, That there
had been as many knaves and fools, at least, as wise and good men, since
the world began, who had indifferently borne them; --so that, like equal
forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they
mutually destroyed each other’s effects; for which reason, he would
often declare, He would not give a cherry-stone to choose amongst them.
_Bob_, which was my brother’s name, was another of these neutral kinds
of christian names, which operated very little either way; and as my
father happen’d to be at _Epsom_, when it was given him, --he would
oft-times thank Heaven it was no worse. _Andrew_ was something like a
negative quantity in Algebra with him; --’twas worse, he said, than
nothing. --_William_ stood pretty high: ----_Numps_ again was low with
him: --and _Nick_, he said, was the DEVIL.
But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable
aversion for TRISTRAM; --he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion
of it of anything in the world, --thinking it could possibly produce
nothing in _rerum naturâ_, but what was extremely mean and pitiful: So
that in the midst of a dispute on the subject, in which, by the bye, he
was frequently involved, ----he would sometimes break off in a sudden
and spirited EPIPHONEMA, or rather EROTESIS, raised a third, and
sometimes a full fifth above the key of the discourse, ----and demand it
categorically of his antagonist, Whether he would take upon him to say,
he had ever remembered, ----whether he had ever read, --or even whether
he had ever heard tell of a man, called _Tristram_, performing anything
great or worth recording? --No, --he would say, --TRISTRAM! --The thing
is impossible.
What could be wanting in my father but to have wrote a book to publish
this notion of his to the world? Little boots it to the subtle
speculatist to stand single in his opinions, --unless he gives them
proper vent: --It was the identical thing which my father did: --for in
the year sixteen, which was two years before I was born, he was at the
pains of writing an express DISSERTATION simply upon the word
_Tristram_, --shewing the world, with great candour and modesty, the
grounds of his great abhorrence to the name.
When this story is compared with the title-page, --Will not the gentle
reader pity my father from his soul? --to see an orderly and
well-disposed gentleman, who tho’ singular, --yet inoffensive in his
notions, --so played upon in them by cross purposes; ----to look down
upon the stage, and see him baffled and overthrown in all his little
systems and wishes; to behold a train of events perpetually falling out
against him, and in so critical and cruel a way, as if they had
purposedly been plann’d and pointed against him, merely to insult his
speculations. ----In a word, to behold such a one, in his old age,
ill-fitted for troubles, ten times in a day suffering sorrow; --ten
times in a day calling the child of his prayers TRISTRAM! --Melancholy
dissyllable of sound! which, to his ears, was unison to _Nincompoop_,
and every name vituperative under heaven. ----By his ashes! I swear it,
--if ever malignant spirit took pleasure, or busied itself in traversing
the purposes of mortal man, --it must have been here; --and if it was
not necessary I should be born before I was christened, I would this
moment give the reader an account of it.
CHAPTER XX
------How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last
chapter? I told you in it, _That my mother was not a papist_.
----Papist! You told me no such thing, Sir. --Madam, I beg leave to
repeat it over again, that I told you as plain, at least, as words, by
direct inference, could tell you such a thing. --Then, Sir, I must have
miss’d a page. --No, Madam, --you have not miss’d a word. ----Then I was
asleep, Sir. --My pride, Madam, cannot allow you that refuge. ----Then,
I declare, I know nothing at all about the matter. --That, Madam, is the
very fault I lay to your charge; and as a punishment for it, I do insist
upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to
the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again. I have
imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor
cruelty; but from the best of motives; and therefore shall make her no
apology for it when she returns back: --’Tis to rebuke a vicious taste,
which has crept into thousands besides herself, --of reading straight
forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition
and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be,
would infallibly impart with them ----The mind should be accustomed to
make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along;
the habitude of which made _Pliny_ the younger affirm, “That he never
read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it.” The stories of
_Greece_ and _Rome_, run over without this turn and application, --do
less service, I affirm it, than the history of _Parismus_ and
_Parismenus_, or of the Seven Champions of _England_, read with it.
------But here comes my fair lady. Have you read over again the chapter,
Madam, as I desired you? --You have: And did you not observe the
passage, upon the second reading, which admits the inference? ----Not a
word like it! Then, Madam, be pleased to ponder well the last line but
one of the chapter, where I take upon me to say, “It was _necessary_ I
should be born before I was christen’d.” Had my mother, Madam, been a
Papist, that consequence did not follow.[1.1]
It is a terrible misfortune for this same book of mine, but more so to
the Republick of letters; --so that my own is quite swallowed up in the
consideration of it, --that this selfsame vile pruriency for fresh
adventures in all things, has got so strongly into our habit and humour,
--and so wholly intent are we upon satisfying the impatience of our
concupiscence that way, --that nothing but the gross and more carnal
parts of a composition will go down: --The subtle hints and sly
communications of science fly off, like spirits upwards, ----the heavy
moral escapes downwards; and both the one and the other are as much lost
to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the ink-horn.
I wish the male-reader has not pass’d by many a one, as quaint and
curious as this one, in which the female-reader has been detected.
I wish it may have its effects; --and that all good people, both male
and female, from her example, may be taught to think as well as read.
MEMOIRE presenté à Messieurs les Docteurs de SORBONNE[1.2]
_Un Chirurgien Accoucheur, represente à Messieurs les Docteurs de
SORBONNE, qu’il y a des cas, quoique très rares, où une mere ne sçauroit
accoucher, & même où l’enfant est tellement renfermé dans le sein de sa
mere, qu’il ne fait parôitre aucune partie de son corps, ce qui seroit
un cas, suivant les Rituels, de lui conférer, du moins sous condition,
le baptême. Le Chirurgien, qui consulte, prétend, par le moyen d’une
_petite canulle_, de pouvoir baptiser immediatement l’enfant, sans
faire aucun tort à la mere. ----Il demand si ce moyen, qu’il vient de
proposer, est permis & légitime, & s’il peut s’en servir dans les cas
qu’il vient d’exposer._
[Footnote 1.1: The _Romish_ Rituals direct the baptizing of the
child, in cases of danger, _before_ it is born; --but upon this
proviso, That some part or other of the child’s body be seen by
the baptizer: ----But the Doctors of the _Sorbonne_, by a
deliberation held amongst them, _April_ 10, 1733, --have enlarged
the powers of the midwives, by determining, That though no part
of the child’s body should appear, ----that baptism shall,
nevertheless, be administered to it by injection, --_par le moyen
d’une petite canulle_, --Anglicè _a squirt_. ----’Tis very strange
that St. _Thomas Aquinas_, who had so good a mechanical head,
both for tying and untying the knots of school-divinity, --should,
after so much pains bestowed upon this, --give up the point at
last, as a second _La chose impossible_, --“Infantes in maternis
uteris existentes (quoth St. _Thomas!_) baptizari possunt _nullo
modo_.” --O _Thomas!_ _Thomas!_
If the reader has the curiosity to see the question upon baptism
_by injection_, as presented to the Doctors of the _Sorbonne_,
with their consultation thereupon, it is as follows.]
[Footnote 1.2: Vide Deventer, Paris edit., 4to, 1734, p. 366.]
REPONSE
_Le Conseil estime, que la question proposée souffre de grandes
difficultés. Les Théologiens posent d’un côté pour principe, que le
baptême, qui est une naissance spirituelle, suppose une premiere
naissance; il faut être né dans le monde, pour renaître en _Jesus
Christ_, comme ils l’enseignent. _S. Thomas, 3 part, quæst. 88, artic.
II_, suit cette doctrine comme une verité constante; l’on ne peut, dit
ce S. Docteur, baptiser les enfans qui sont renfermés dans le sein de
leurs meres, & _S. Thomas_ est fondé sur ce, que les enfans ne sont
point nés, & ne peuvent être comptés parmi les autres hommes; d’où il
conclud, qu’ils ne peuvent être l’objet d’une action extérieure, pour
reçevoir par leur ministére, les sacremens nécessaires au salut:_ Pueri
in maternis uteris existentes nondum prodierunt in lucem ut cum aliis
hominibus vitam ducant; unde non possunt subjici actioni humanæ, ut per
eorum ministerium sacramenta recipiant ad salutem. _Les rituels
ordonnent dans la pratique ce que les théologiens ont établi sur les
mêmes matiéres, & ils deffendent tous d’une maniére uniforme, de
baptiser les enfans qui sont renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres,
s’ils ne font paroître quelque partie de leurs corps. Le concours des
théologiens, & des rituels, qui sont les régles des diocéses, paroit
former une autorité qui termine la question presente; cependant le
conseil de conscience considerant d’un côté, que le raisonnement des
théologiens est uniquement fondé sur une raison de convenance, & que la
deffense des rituels suppose que l’on ne peut baptiser immediatement les
enfans ainsi renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres, ce qui est contre la
supposition presente; & d’un autre côté, considerant que les mêmes
théologiens enseignent, que l’on peut risquer les sacremens que _Jesus
Christ_ a établis comme des moyens faciles, mais nécessaires pour
sanctifier les hommes; & d’ailleurs estimant, que les enfans renfermés
dans le sein de leurs meres, pourroient être capables de salut,
parcequ’ils sont capables de damnation; --pour ces considerations, & en
egard à l’exposé, suivant lequel on assure avoir trouvé un moyen certain
de baptiser ces enfans ainsi renfermés, sans faire aucun tort à la mere,
le Conseil estime que l’on pourroit se servir du moyen proposé, dans la
confiance qu’il a, que Dieu n’a point laissé ces sortes d’enfans sans
aucuns secours, & supposant, comme il est exposé, que le moyen dont il
s’agit est propre à leur procurer le baptême; cependant comme il
s’agiroit, en autorisant la pratique proposée, de changer une regie
universellement établie, le Conseil croit que celui qui consulte doit
s’addresser à son evêque, & à qui il appartient de juger de l’utilité, &
du danger du moyen proposé, & comme, sous le bon plaisir de l’evêque, le
Conseil estime qu’il faudroit recourir au Pape, qui a le droit
d’expliquer les régles de l’eglise, & d’y déroger dans le cas, ou la loi
ne sçauroit obliger, quelque sage & quelque utile que paroisse la
maniére de baptiser dont il s’agit, le Conseil ne pourroit l’approuver
sans le concours de ces deux autorités. On conseile au moins à celui qui
consulte, de s’addresser à son evêque, & de lui faire part de la
presente décision, afin que, si le prelat entre dans les raisons sur
lesquelles les docteurs soussignés s’appuyent, il puisse être autorisé
dans le cas de nécessité, ou il risqueroit trop d’attendre que la
permission fût demandée & accordée d’employer le moyen qu’il propose si
avantageux au salut de l’enfant. Au reste, le Conseil, en estimant que
l’on pourroit s’en servir, croit cependant, que si les enfans dont il
s’agit, venoient au monde, contre l’esperance de ceux qui se seroient
servis du même moyen, il seroit nécessaire de les baptiser sous
condition; & en cela le Conseil se conforme à tous les rituels, qui en
autorisant le baptême d’un enfant qui fait paroître quelque partie de
son corps, enjoignent néantmoins, & ordonnent de le baptiser sous
condition, s’il vient heureusement au monde._
Deliberé en _Sorbonne_, le 10 _Avril_, 1733.
A. LE MOYNE.
L. DE ROMIGNY.
DE MARCILLY.
Mr. _Tristram Shandy’s_ compliments to Messrs. _Le Moyne_, _De Romigny_,
and _De Marcilly_; hopes they all rested well the night after so
tiresome a consultation. --He begs to know, whether after the ceremony
of marriage, and before that of consummation, the baptizing all the
HOMUNCULI at once, slapdash, by _injection_, would not be a shorter and
safer cut still; on condition, as above, That if the HOMUNCULI do well,
and come safe into the world after this, that each and every of them
shall be baptized again (_sous condition_) ----And provided, in the
second place, That the thing can be done, which _Mr. Shandy_ apprehends
it may, _par le moyen d’une petite canulle_, and _sans faire aucun tort
au pere_.
CHAPTER XXI
----I wonder what’s all that noise, and running backwards and forwards
for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing himself, after an hour
and a half’s silence, to my uncle _Toby_, ----who, you must know, was
sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all
the time, in mute contemplation of a new pair of black plush-breeches
which he had got on: --What can they be doing, brother? --quoth my
father, --we can scarce hear ourselves talk.
I think, replied my uncle _Toby_, taking his pipe from his mouth, and
striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left
thumb, as he began his sentence, ----I think, says he: ----But to enter
rightly into my uncle _Toby’s_ sentiments upon this matter, you must be
made to enter first a little into his character, the outlines of which I
shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father
will go on as well again.
Pray what was that man’s name, --for I write in such a hurry, I have no
time to recollect or look for it, ----who first made the observation,
“That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he
was, ’twas a just and good observation in him. --But the corollary drawn
from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a
variety of odd and whimsical characters;” --that was not his; --it was
found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then
again, --that this copious store-house of original materials, is the
true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those
of _France_, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the
Continent: ----that discovery was not fully made till about the middle
of King _William’s_ reign, --when the great _Dryden_, in writing one of
his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it.
Indeed toward the latter end of Queen _Anne_, the great _Addison_ began
to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one
or two of his Spectators; --but the discovery was not his. --Then,
fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate,
producing so strange an irregularity in our characters, ----doth
thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us
merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,
--that observation is my own; --and was struck out by me this very rainy
day, _March_ 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the
morning.
Thus--thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest
of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow
steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical,
physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical,
technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with
fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending as these do, in _ical_)
have for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping
upwards towards that Ἀκμὴ of their perfections, from which, if we may
form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot
possibly be far off.
When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of
writings whatsoever; --the want of all kind of writing will put an end
to all kind of reading; --and that in time, _As war begets poverty;
poverty peace_, ----must, in course, put an end to all kind of
knowledge, --and then----we shall have all to begin over again; or, in
other words, be exactly where we started.
------Happy! thrice happy times! I only wish that the æra of my
begetting, as well as the mode and manner of it, had been a little
alter’d, ----or that it could have been put off, with any convenience to
my father or mother, for some twenty or five-and-twenty years longer,
when a man in the literary world might have stood some chance.----
But I forget my uncle _Toby_, whom all this while we have left knocking
the ashes out of his tobacco-pipe.
His humour was of that particular species, which does honour to our
atmosphere; and I should have made no scruple of ranking him amongst one
of the first-rate productions of it, had not there appeared too many
strong lines in it of a family-likeness, which shewed that he derived
the singularity of his temper more from blood, than either wind or
water, or any modifications or combinations of them whatever: And I
have, therefore, oft-times wondered, that my father, tho’ I believe he
had his reasons for it, upon his observing some tokens of eccentricity,
in my course, when I was a boy, --should never once endeavour to account
for them in this way: for all the SHANDY FAMILY were of an original
character throughout: ----I mean the males, --the females had no
character at all, --except, indeed, my great aunt DINAH, who, about
sixty years ago, was married and got with child by the coachman, for
which my father, according to his hypothesis of christian names, would
often say, She might thank her godfathers and godmothers.
It will seem very strange, ----and I would as soon think of dropping a
riddle in the reader’s way, which is not my interest to do, as set him
upon guessing how it could come to pass, that an event of this kind, so
many years after it had happened, should be reserved for the
interruption of the peace and unity, which otherwise so cordially
subsisted, between my father and my uncle _Toby_. One would have
thought, that the whole force of the misfortune should have spent and
wasted itself in the family at first, --as is generally the case. --But
nothing ever wrought with our family after the ordinary way. Possibly at
the very time this happened, it might have something else to afflict it;
and as afflictions are sent down for our good, and that as this had
never done the SHANDY FAMILY any good at all, it might lie waiting till
apt times and circumstances should give it an opportunity to discharge
its office. ----Observe, I determine nothing upon this. ----My way is
ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to
come at the first springs of the events I tell; --not with a pedantic
_Fescue_, --or in the decisive manner of _Tacitus_, who outwits himself
and his reader; --but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to
the assistance merely of the inquisitive; --to them I write, ----and by
them I shall be read, ----if any such reading as this could be supposed
to hold out so long, --to the very end of the world.
Why this cause of sorrow, therefore, was thus reserved for my father and
uncle, is undetermined by me. But how and in what direction it exerted
itself so as to become the cause of dissatisfaction between them, after
it began to operate, is what I am able to explain with great exactness,
and is as follows:
My uncle TOBY SHANDY, Madam, was a gentleman, who, with the virtues
which usually constitute the character of a man of honour and rectitude,
----possessed one in a very eminent degree, which is seldom or never put
into the catalogue; and that was a most extreme and unparallel’d modesty
of nature; ----though I correct the word nature, for this reason, that I
may not prejudge a point which must shortly come to a hearing, and that
is, Whether this modesty of his was natural or acquir’d. ----Whichever
way my uncle _Toby_ came by it, ’twas nevertheless modesty in the truest
sense of it; and that is, Madam, not in regard to words, for he was so
unhappy as to have very little choice in them, --but to things; ----and
this kind of modesty so possessed him, and it arose to such a height in
him, as almost to equal, if such a thing could be, even the modesty of a
woman: That female nicety, Madam, and inward cleanliness of mind and
fancy, in your sex, which makes you so much the awe of ours.
You will imagine, Madam, that my uncle _Toby_ had contracted all this
from this very source; --that he had spent a great part of his time in
converse with your sex; and that from a thorough knowledge of you, and
the force of imitation which such fair examples render irresistible, he
had acquired this amiable turn of mind.
I wish I could say so, --for unless it was with his sister-in-law, my
father’s wife and my mother----my uncle _Toby_ scarce exchanged three
words with the sex in as many years; --no, he got it, Madam, by a blow.
----A blow! --Yes, Madam, it was owing to a blow from a stone, broke off
by a ball from the parapet of a horn-work at the siege of _Namur_, which
struck full upon my uncle _Toby’s_ groin. --Which way could that effect
it? The story of that, Madam, is long and interesting; --but it would be
running my history all upon heaps to give it you here. ----’Tis for an
episode hereafter; and every circumstance relating to it, in its proper
place, shall be faithfully laid before you: --’Till then, it is not in
my power to give farther light into this matter, or say more than what I
have said already, ----That my uncle _Toby_ was a gentleman of
unparallel’d modesty, which happening to be somewhat subtilized and
rarified by the constant heat of a little family pride, ----they both so
wrought together within him, that he could never bear to hear the affair
of my aunt DINAH touch’d upon, but with the greatest emotion. ----The
least hint of it was enough to make the blood fly into his face; --but
when my father enlarged upon the story in mixed companies, which the
illustration of his hypothesis frequently obliged him to do, --the
unfortunate blight of one of the fairest branches of the family, would
set my uncle _Toby’s_ honour and modesty o’bleeding; and he would often
take my father aside, in the greatest concern imaginable, to expostulate
and tell him, he would give him anything in the world, only to let the
story rest.
My father, I believe, had the truest love and tenderness for my uncle
_Toby_, that ever one brother bore towards another, and would have done
any thing in nature, which one brother in reason could have desir’d of
another, to have made my uncle _Toby’s_ heart easy in this, or any other
point. But this lay out of his power.
----My father, as I told you, was a philosopher in grain, --speculative,
--systematical; --and my aunt _Dinah’s_ affair was a matter of as much
consequence to him, as the retrogradation of the planets to
_Copernicus_: --The backslidings of _Venus_ in her orbit fortified the
_Copernican_ system, called so after his name; and the backslidings of
my aunt _Dinah_ in her orbit, did the same service in establishing my
father’s system, which, I trust, will for ever hereafter be called the
_Shandean System_, after this.
In any other family dishonour, my father, I believe, had as nice a sense
of shame as any man whatever; ----and neither he, nor, I dare say,
_Copernicus_, would have divulged the affair in either case, or have
taken the least notice of it to the world, but for the obligations they
owed, as they thought, to truth. --_Amicus Plato_, my father would say,
construing the words to my uncle _Toby_, as he went along, _Amicus
Plato_; that is, DINAH was my aunt; --_sed magis amica veritas_----but
TRUTH is my sister.
This contrariety of humours betwixt my father and my uncle, was the
source of many a fraternal squabble. The one could not bear to hear the
tale of family disgrace recorded, ----and the other would scarce ever
let a day pass to an end without some hint at it.
For God’s sake, my uncle _Toby_ would cry, ----and for my sake, and for
all our sakes, my dear brother _Shandy_, --do let this story of our
aunt’s and her ashes sleep in peace; ----how can you, ----how can you
have so little feeling and compassion for the character of our family?
----What is the character of a family to an hypothesis? my father would
reply. ----Nay, if you come to that--what is the life of a family?
----The life of a family! --my uncle _Toby_ would say, throwing himself
back in his arm chair, and lifting up his hands, his eyes, and one leg.
----Yes, the life, ----my father would say, maintaining his point. How
many thousands of ’em are there every year that come cast away, (in all
civilized countries at least)----and considered as nothing but common
air, in competition of an hypothesis. In my plain sense of things, my
uncle _Toby_ would answer, ----every such instance is downright MURDER,
let who will commit it. ----There lies your mistake, my father would
reply; ----for, in _Foro Scientiæ_ there is no such thing as MURDER,
----’tis only DEATH, brother.
My uncle _Toby_ would never offer to answer this by any other kind of
argument, than that of whistling half a dozen bars of _Lillabullero_.
----You must know it was the usual channel thro’ which his passions got
vent, when any thing shocked or surprized him: ----but especially when
any thing, which he deem’d very absurd, was offered.
As not one of our logical writers, nor any of the commentators upon
them, that I remember, have thought proper to give a name to this
particular species of argument, --I here take the liberty to do it
myself, for two reasons. First, That, in order to prevent all confusion
in disputes, it may stand as much distinguished for ever, from every
other species of argument------as the _Argumentum ad Verecundiam_, _ex
Absurdo, ex Fortiori_, or any other argument whatsoever: ----And,
secondly, That it may be said by my children’s children, when my head is
laid to rest, ----that their learn’d grandfather’s head had been busied
to as much purpose once, as other people’s; --That he had invented a
name, --and generously thrown it into the TREASURY of the _Ars Logica_,
for one of the most unanswerable arguments in the whole science. And, if
the end of disputation is more to silence than convince, --they may add,
if they please, to one of the best arguments too.
I do therefore, by these presents, strictly order and command, That it
be known and distinguished by the name and title of the _Argumentum
Fistulatorium_, and no other; --and that it rank hereafter with the
_Argumentum Baculinum_ and the _Argumentum ad Crumenam_, and for ever
hereafter be treated of in the same chapter.
As for the _Argumentum Tripodium_, which is never used but by the woman
against the man; --and the _Argumentum ad Rem_, which, contrarywise, is
made use of by the man only against the woman; --As these two are enough
in conscience for one lecture; ----and, moreover, as the one is the best
answer to the other, --let them likewise be kept apart, and be treated
of in a place by themselves.
CHAPTER XXII
The learned Bishop _Hall_, I mean the famous Dr. _Joseph Hall_, who was
Bishop of _Exeter_ in King _James_ the First’s reign, tells us in one of
his _Decads_, at the end of his divine art of meditation, imprinted at
_London_, in the year 1610, by _John Beal_, dwelling in
_Aldersgate-street_, “That it is an abominable thing for a man to
commend himself;” ----and I really think it is so.
And yet, on the other hand, when a thing is executed in a masterly kind
of a fashion, which thing is not likely to be found out; --I think it is
full as abominable, that a man should lose the honour of it, and go out
of the world with the conceit of it rotting in his head.
This is precisely my situation.
For in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all
my digressions (one only excepted) there is a masterstroke of digressive
skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my
reader, --not for want of penetration in him, --but because ’tis an
excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression; --and
it is this: That tho’ my digressions are all fair, as you observe, --and
that I fly off from what I am about, as far, and as often too, as any
writer in _Great Britain_; yet I constantly take care to order affairs
so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.
I was just going, for example, to have given you the great outlines of
my uncle _Toby’s_ most whimsical character; --when my aunt _Dinah_ and
the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles
into the very heart of the planetary system: Notwithstanding all this,
you perceive that the drawing of my uncle _Toby’s_ character went on
gently all the time; --not the great contours of it, --that was
impossible, --but some familiar strokes and faint designations of it,
were here and there touch’d on, as we went along, so that you are much
better acquainted with my uncle _Toby_ now than you was before.
By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself;
two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were
thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is
digressive, and it is progressive too, --and at the same time.
This, Sir, is a very different story from that of the earth’s moving
round her axis, in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her
elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that
variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy; --though I own it suggested
the thought, --as I believe the greatest of our boasted improvements and
discoveries have come from such trifling hints.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; ----they are the life, the
soul of reading! --take them out of this book, for instance, --you might
as well take the book along with them; --one cold eternal winter would
reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth
like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the
appetite to fail.
All the dexterity is in the good cookery and management of them, so as
to be not only for the advantage of the reader, but also of the author,
whose distress, in this matter, is truly pitiable: For, if he begins a
digression, --from that moment, I observe, his whole work stands stock
still; --and if he goes on with his main work, --then there is an end of
his digression.
----This is vile work. --For which reason, from the beginning of this,
you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of
it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the
digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the
whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going; --and, what’s more, it
shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of
health to bless me so long with life and good spirits.
CHAPTER XXIII
I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very
nonsensically, and I will not baulk my fancy. --Accordingly I set off
thus:
If the fixture of _Momus’s_ glass in the human breast, according to the
proposed emendation of that arch-critick, had taken place, ----first,
This foolish consequence would certainly have followed, --That the very
wisest and very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid
window-money every day of our lives.
And, secondly, That had the said glass been there set up, nothing more
would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but
to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical
beehive, and look’d in, --view’d the soul stark naked; --observed all
her motions, --her machinations; --traced all her maggots from their
first engendering to their crawling forth; --watched her loose in her
frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more
solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, etc. ----then taken your
pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have
sworn to: --But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in
this planet; --in the planet _Mercury_ (belike) it may be so, if not
better still for him; ----for there the intense heat of the country,
which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more
than equal to that of red-hot iron, --must, I think, long ago have
vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to
suit them for the climate (which is the final cause); so that betwixt
them both, all the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be
nothing else, for aught the soundest philosophy can shew to the
contrary, but one fine transparent body of clear glass (bating the
umbilical knot)--so that, till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably
wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so
monstrously refracted, ----or return reflected from their surfaces in
such transverse lines to the eye, that a man cannot be seen through;
--his soul might as well, unless for mere ceremony, or the trifling
advantage which the umbilical point gave her, --might, upon all other
accounts, I say, as well play the fool out o’doors as in her own house.
But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this
earth; --our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in
a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that, if we would
come to the specific characters of them, we must go some other way to
work.
Many, in good truth, are the ways, which human wit has been forced to
take, to do this thing with exactness.
Some, for instance, draw all their characters with wind-instruments.
--_Virgil_ takes notice of that way in the affair of _Dido_ and _Æneas_;
--but it is as fallacious as the breath of fame; --and, moreover,
bespeaks a narrow genius. I am not ignorant that the _Italians_ pretend
to a mathematical exactness in their designations of one particular sort
of character among them, from the _forte_ or _piano_ of a certain
wind-instrument they use, --which they say is infallible. --I dare not
mention the name of the instrument in this place; --’tis sufficient we
have it amongst us, --but never think of making a drawing by it; --this
is ænigmatical, and intended to be so, at least _ad populum_: --And
therefore, I beg, Madam, when you come here, that you read on as fast as
you can, and never stop to make any inquiry about it.
There are others again, who will draw a man’s character from no other
helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations; --but this often
gives a very incorrect outline, --unless, indeed, you take a sketch of
his repletions too; and by correcting one drawing from the other,
compound one good figure out of them both.
I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it must
smell too strong of the lamp, --and be render’d still more operose, by
forcing you to have an eye to the rest of his _Non-naturals_. ----Why
the most natural actions of a man’s life should be called his
Non-naturals, --is another question.
There are others, fourthly, who disdain every one of these expedients;
--not from any fertility of their own, but from the various ways of
doing it, which they have borrowed from the honourable devices which the
Pentagraphic Brethren[1.3] of the brush have shewn in taking copies.
--These, you must know, are your great historians.
One of these you will see drawing a full-length character _against the
light_; --that’s illiberal, --dishonest, --and hard upon the character
of the man who sits.
Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the _Camera_;
--that is most unfair of all, --because, _there_ you are sure to be
represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes.
To avoid all and every one of these errors in giving you my uncle
_Toby’s_ character, I am determined to draw it by no mechanical help
whatever; ----nor shall my pencil be guided by any one wind-instrument
which ever was blown upon, either on this, or on the other side of the
_Alps_; --nor will I consider either his repletions or his discharges,
--or touch upon his Non-naturals--but, in a word, I will draw my uncle
_Toby’s_ character from his HOBBY-HORSE.
[Footnote 1.3: Pentagraph, an instrument to copy Prints and
Pictures mechanically, and in any proportion.]
CHAPTER XXIV
If I was not morally sure that the reader must be out of all patience
for my uncle _Toby’s_ character, ----I would here previously have
convinced him that there is no instrument so fit to draw such a thing
with, as that which I have pitch’d upon.
A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act
exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each
other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind;
and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the
manner of electrified bodies, --and that, by means of the heated parts
of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the
HOBBY-HORSE, --by long journeys and much friction, it so happens, that
the body of the rider is at length fill’d as full of HOBBY-HORSICAL
matter as it can hold; ----so that if you are able to give but a clear
description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion
of the genius and character of the other.
Now the HOBBY-HORSE which my uncle _Toby_ always rode upon, was in my
opinion a HOBBY-HORSE well worth giving a description of, if it was only
upon the score of his great singularity; --for you might have travelled
from _York_ to _Dover_, --from _Dover_ to _Penzance_ in _Cornwall_, and
from _Penzance_ to _York_ back again, and not have seen such another
upon the road; or if you had seen such a one, whatever haste you had
been in, you must infallibly have stopp’d to have taken a view of him.
Indeed, the gait and figure of him was so strange, and so utterly unlike
was he, from his head to his tail, to any one of the whole species, that
it was now and then made a matter of dispute, ----whether he was really
a HOBBY-HORSE or no: but as the Philosopher would use no other argument
to the Sceptic, who disputed with him against the reality of motion,
save that of rising up upon his legs, and walking across the room; --so
would my uncle _Toby_ use no other argument to prove his HOBBY-HORSE was
a HOBBY-HORSE indeed, but by getting upon his back and riding him about;
--leaving the world, after that, to determine the point as it thought
fit.
In good truth, my uncle _Toby_ mounted him with so much pleasure, and he
carried my uncle _Toby_ so well, ----that he troubled his head very
little with what the world either said or thought about it.
It is now high time, however, that I give you a description of him:
--But to go on regularly, I only beg you will give me leave to acquaint
you first, how my uncle _Toby_ came by him.
CHAPTER XXV
The wound in my uncle _Toby’s_ groin, which he received at the siege of
_Namur_, rendering him unfit for the service, it was thought expedient
he should return to _England_, in order, if possible, to be set to
rights.
He was four years totally confined, --part of it to his bed, and all of
it to his room: and in the course of his cure, which was all that time
in hand, suffer’d unspeakable miseries, --owing to a succession of
exfoliations from the _os pubis_, and the outward edge of that part of
the _coxendix_ called the _os illium_, ----both which bones were
dismally crush’d, as much by the irregularity of the stone, which I told
you was broke off the parapet, --as by its size, --(tho’ it was pretty
large) which inclined the surgeon all along to think, that the great
injury which it had done my uncle _Toby’s_ groin, was more owing to the
gravity of the stone itself, than to the projectile force of it, --which
he would often tell him was a great happiness.
My father at that time was just beginning business in _London_, and had
taken a house; --and as the truest friendship and cordiality subsisted
between the two brothers, --and that my father thought my uncle _Toby_
could no where be so well nursed and taken care of as in his own house,
----he assign’d him the very best apartment in it. --And what was a much
more sincere mark of his affection still, he would never suffer a friend
or an acquaintance to step into the house on any occasion, but he would
take him by the hand, and lead him up stairs to see his brother _Toby_,
and chat an hour by his bedside.
The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it; --my uncle’s
visitors at least thought so, and in their daily calls upon him, from
the courtesy arising out of that belief, they would frequently turn the
discourse to that subject, --and from that subject the discourse would
generally roll on to the siege itself.
These conversations were infinitely kind; and my uncle _Toby_ received
great relief from them, and would have received much more, but that they
brought him into some unforeseen perplexities, which, for three months
together, retarded his cure greatly; and if he had not hit upon an
expedient to extricate himself out of them, I verily believe they would
have laid him in his grave.
What these perplexities of my uncle _Toby_ were, ----’tis impossible for
you to guess; --if you could, --I should blush; not as a relation, --not
as a man, --nor even as a woman, --but I should blush as an author;
inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that
my reader has never yet been able to guess at anything. And in this,
Sir, I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you was
able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself, of
what was to come in the next page, --I would tear it out of my book.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
I have begun a new book, on purpose that I might have room enough to
explain the nature of the perplexities in which my uncle _Toby_ was
involved, from the many discourses and interrogations about the siege of
_Namur_, where he received his wound.
I must remind the reader, in case he has read the history of King
_William’s_ wars, --but if he has not, --I then inform him, that one of
the most memorable attacks in that siege, was that which was made by the
_English_ and _Dutch_ upon the point of the advanced counterscarp,
between the gate of _St. Nicolas_, which inclosed the great sluice or
water-stop, where the _English_ were terribly exposed to the shot of the
counter-guard and demi-bastion of _St. Roch_. The issue of which hot
dispute, in three words, was this; That the _Dutch_ lodged themselves
upon the counter-guard, --and that the _English_ made themselves masters
of the covered-way before _St. Nicolas_-gate, notwithstanding the
gallantry of the _French_ officers, who exposed themselves upon the
glacis sword in hand.
As this was the principal attack of which my uncle _Toby_ was an
eye-witness at _Namur_, ----the army of the besiegers being cut off, by
the confluence of the _Maes_ and _Sambre_, from seeing much of each
other’s operations, ----my uncle _Toby_ was generally more eloquent and
particular in his account of it; and the many perplexities he was in,
arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling
his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences
and distinctions between the scarp and counter-scarp, --the glacis and
covered-way, --the half-moon and ravelin, --as to make his company fully
comprehend where and what he was about.
Writers themselves are too apt to confound these terms; so that you will
the less wonder, if in his endeavours to explain them, and in opposition
to many misconceptions, that my uncle _Toby_ did oft-times puzzle his
visitors, and sometimes himself too.
To speak the truth, unless the company my father led upstairs were
tolerably clear-headed, or my uncle _Toby_ was in one of his explanatory
moods, ’twas a difficult thing, do what he could, to keep the discourse
free from obscurity.
What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my uncle
_Toby_, was this, --that in the attack of the counterscarp, before the
gate of _St. Nicolas_, extending itself from the bank of the _Maes_,
quite up to the great water-stop, --the ground was cut and cross cut
with such a multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices, on all
sides, --and he would get so sadly bewildered, and set fast amongst
them, that frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save
his life; and was oft-times obliged to give up the attack upon that very
account only.
These perplexing rebuffs gave my uncle _Toby Shandy_ more perturbations
than you would imagine: and as my father’s kindness to him was
continually dragging up fresh friends and fresh enquirers, ----he had
but a very uneasy task of it.
No doubt my uncle _Toby_ had great command of himself, could guard
appearances, I believe, as well as most men; --yet any one may imagine,
that when he could not retreat out of the ravelin without getting into
the half-moon, or get out of the covered-way without falling down the
counterscarp, nor cross the dyke without danger of slipping into the
ditch, but that he must have fretted and fumed inwardly: --He did so;
and the little and hourly vexations, which may seem trifling and of no
account to the man who has not read _Hippocrates_, yet, whoever has read
_Hippocrates_, or Dr. _James Mackenzie_, and has considered well the
effects which the passions and affections of the mind have upon the
digestion--(Why not of a wound as well as of a dinner?)--may easily
conceive what sharp paroxysms and exacerbations of his wound my uncle
_Toby_ must have undergone upon that score only.
--My uncle _Toby_ could not philosophize upon it; --’twas enough he felt
it was so, --and having sustained the pain and sorrows of it for three
months together, he was resolved some way or other to extricate himself.
He was one morning lying upon his back in his bed, the anguish and
nature of the wound upon his groin suffering him to lie in no other
position, when a thought came into his head, that if he could purchase
such a thing, and have it pasted down upon a board, as a large map of
the fortification of the town and citadel of _Namur_, with its environs,
it might be a means of giving him ease. --I take notice of his desire to
have the environs along with the town and citadel, for this reason,
--because my uncle _Toby’s_ wound was got in one of the traverses, about
thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench, opposite to the
salient angle of the demi-bastion of _St. Roch_: ----so that he was
pretty confident he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground
where he was standing on when the stone struck him.
All this succeeded to his wishes, and not only freed him from a world of
sad explanations, but, in the end, it proved the happy means, as you
will read, of procuring my uncle _Toby_ his HOBBY-HORSE.
CHAPTER II
There is nothing so foolish, when you are at the expence of making an
entertainment of this kind, as to order things so badly, as to let your
criticks and gentry of refined taste run it down: Nor is there anything
so likely to make them do it, as that of leaving them out of the party,
or, what is full as offensive, of bestowing your attention upon the rest
of your guests in so particular a way, as if there was no such thing as
a critick (by occupation) at table.
----I guard against both; for, in the first place, I have left half a
dozen places purposely open for them; --and in the next place, I pay
them all court. --Gentlemen, I kiss your hands, I protest no company
could give me half the pleasure, --by my soul I am glad to see
you ------I beg only you will make no strangers of yourselves, but sit
down without any ceremony, and fall on heartily.
I said I had left six places, and I was upon the point of carrying my
complaisance so far, as to have left a seventh open for them, --and in
this very spot I stand on; but being told by a Critick (tho’ not by
occupation, --but by nature) that I had acquitted myself well enough,
I shall fill it up directly, hoping, in the meantime, that I shall be
able to make a great deal of more room next year.
------How, in the name of wonder! could your uncle _Toby_, who, it
seems, was a military man, and whom you have represented as no fool,
----be at the same time such a confused, pudding-headed, muddle-headed,
fellow, as --Go look.
So, Sir Critick, I could have replied; but I scorn it. --’Tis language
unurbane, --and only befitting the man who cannot give clear and
satisfactory accounts of things, or dive deep enough into the first
causes of human ignorance and confusion. It is moreover the reply
valiant--and therefore I reject it: for tho’ it might have suited my
uncle _Toby’s_ character as a soldier excellently well, and had he not
accustomed himself, in such attacks, to whistle the _Lillabullero_, as
he wanted no courage, ’tis the very answer he would have given; yet it
would by no means have done for me. You see as plain as can be, that I
write as a man of erudition; --that even my similies, my allusions, my
illustrations, my metaphors, are erudite, --and that I must sustain my
character properly, and contrast it properly too, --else what would
become of me? Why, Sir, I should be undone; --at this very moment that I
am going here to fill up one place against a critick, --I should have
made an opening for a couple.
----Therefore I answer thus:
Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever
read such a book as _Locke’s_ Essay upon the Human Understanding?
----Don’t answer me rashly--because many, I know, quote the book, who
have not read it--and many have read it who understand it not: --If
either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in
three words what the book is. --It is a history. --A history! of who?
what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself ----It is a history-book, Sir
(which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s
own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe
me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysick circle.
But this by the way.
Now if you will venture to go along with me, and look down into the
bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of obscurity and
confusion, in the mind of a man, is threefold.
Dull organs, dear Sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight and
transient impressions made by the objects, when the said organs are not
dull. And thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what
it has received. --Call down _Dolly_ your chambermaid, and I will give
you my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain
that _Dolly_ herself should understand it as well as _Malbranch_.
----When _Dolly_ has indited her epistle to _Robin_, and has thrust her
arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right side; --take that
opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception
can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by
that one thing which _Dolly’s_ hand is in search of. --Your organs are
not so dull that I should inform you--’tis an inch, Sir, of red
seal-wax.
When this is melted, and dropped upon the letter, if _Dolly_ fumbles too
long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive
the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint
it. Very well. If _Dolly’s_ wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of
a temper too soft, --tho’ it may receive, --it will not hold the
impression, how hard soever _Dolly_ thrusts against it; and last of all,
supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in
careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell; ----in any one of these
three cases the print left by the thimble will be as unlike the
prototype as a brass-jack.
Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the
confusion in my uncle _Toby’s_ discourse; and it is for that very reason
I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists--to
shew the world, what it did _not_ arise
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