Critical Woodcuts/Laurence Sterne
ONCE upon a time an old gray wolf had a den in the heart of England, from which he emerged and devastated the countryside, terrorizing travelers, plundering sheepfolds and devouring young children. Parties of men with pitchforks and guns were often organized to hunt the brute down, but year after year, by superior strength and fleetness, he always escaped unscathed, leaving deep scars of these encounters upon his pursuers.
Finally an eccentric country parson whose wits had been turned by drink and disease and by reading curious old books got it fixed in his crack-brained noddle that as there are more ways than one of killing a cat, the same must be true of wolves. He made himself a suit of motley, with cap and bells, and, taking a bladder with rattling beans in one hand and a tear-bottle in the other, went forth to hunt the wolf.
When the fierce creature sprang at him the parson stood fast and rattled the bladder till he saw the whites of the wolf's bloodshot eyes. Then he tossed the contents of the tear-bottle into them. Dismayed by this unaccustomed mode of attack the beast turned tail and fied. The parson pursued, through wood and fen, through hedge and ditch, through bush and briar, still shaking the bladder, till the panic-stricken animal leaped over the cliff at Dover and was drowned.
The poor parson, bedraggled, blood-stained, begrimed, exhausted but triumphant, returned to the village, carrying the shreds of the bladder and the emptied tear-bottle in his hand. "Why, parson, are you mad?" cried the innkeeper as he passed the tavern door. "Quite!" gasped the parson and staggered in at his garden gate. "Lord-a-mercy!" exclaimed the maid who was sweeping off the step, "but you've got yourself filthy, master." "Haven't I!" said the parson, and reeled into the parlor, where his wife sat knitting. "Why, John," screamed his wife, "haven't you torn your breeches?" "Badly!" said the parson, and, stumbling up the stairs, threw himself on his bed. His weak heart having been overstrained by excitement, in a little while he died.
Laurence Sterne was that "poor parson" and the "old gray wolf" whom he hunted with jests and tears was the brutal insensitiveness of the healthy, redblooded Englishman. It would, of course, be absurd to represent him as conscious of any passion for any sort of reform. If he accomplished any "good" in the world, if he refined the manners of his time, if he introduced into polite society a new form of feeling, it was by indulging and expressing the pleasures in which his own nature found most gratification—like Montaigne, or, for a modern example, like Mr. George Moore.
We mention by way of background that he published several volumes of sermons, goodish in morality, weak in divinity, and embellished with plagiarisms from his illustrious predecessors. The upbearing wings of his reputation are two world-renowned books, "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey," filled with curious learning and sly wit, pervaded by an original humor, concocted of a half maudlin mirth, a half maudlin pathos and acute sensibility to both. He was author also of a journal and of many letters addressed to various ladies not his wife, steeped in the perfume of sentiment and enlivened by delicate intimations that if God should open the gate (and take Mrs. Sterne to himself), he, Parson Yorick, had already in mind the boudoir which he would fit up in his parsonage for her successor.
I don't know just how to go to work to quarrel with people who hold that this sort of thing is infinitely more detestable than the "healthy animality" of Tom Jones. Think it out for yourself, set down your reasons, and balance them.
Judged as a "man of God" or as a "Christian citizen," Laurence Sterne was a ridiculous fellow. It was part of his own absurdity that his great-grandfather had been an Archbishop of York. His father, & poor ensign in the army, was run through in a duel over a goose. His mother—a "fruitful vine" and little else—produced seven children, four of whom died in infancy, and the three others, including Laurence, were, as he remarked of the brood, of delicate frame, "not made to last long." By the kindness of a cousin he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, and there he formed a lifelong cronyship with John Hall-Stevenson, apparently originating in their common fondness for idling under a walnut tree, reading Rabelais and swapping bawdy stories. In his senior year he had a hemorrhage of the lungs and got well into debt. And so, by a natural rather than logical process of reasoning, he accepted the advice of his uncle, a canon of York, and entered the Church, which in the mid-eighteenth century, was notoriously a refuge for younger sons, a hospital for lame ducks, a club for bibulous old scholars and antiquarians.
Sterne married early, and, in a country parsonage about eight miles from York, slumped down into the indolent bosom of the Church, precisely as scores of other impecunious, ungodly, place-hunting young men were doing—the feebler ones starving, the stronger reaching out fat, greedy hands crammed full of benefices, to see if they could not, by skilfully crooking a little finger, rake in one more. Sterne vegetated, almost unheard of, in his parish till he was forty-six years old.
What was he doing all that time? Well, he preached twice on Sundays when he had no curate, and when he had a sermon ready, and when he felt like it, though it is related that, crossing the fields one afternoon to deliver his second discourse, he started up a covey of partridges, and, returning to the parsonage for his gun, left his congregation gaping for the sacred word in vain. And then, to eke out his slender clerical living, he dabbled in dairy farming and agriculture, till he found that turnips at £200 the load were too dear. In early years he wrote some political paragraphs for the uncle who had beneficed him, but he thought that dirty work, and he was more congenially occupied with hunting and with fiddling on the bass viol and with painting, mainly copying portraits. Besides, he frequented York society, and was a member of the carousing, free-thinking Demoniacks Club, a society of squires and parsons who drank and jested at Crazy Castle, the tumble-down seat of his crony, John Hall-Stevenson, where there was, furthermore, a library very rich in Curiosa, tempting to a parson whom the Lord had not anointed.
We know the reading of this quaint man of God. He had some excellent works of divinity in weekly use—Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Hall, Tillotson, Bishop Berkeley—he had to have them in his business. He had also a tooth for all sorts of treatises on military and medical science, and he had manifest interest in the newly developing branch of obstetrics. But, in the long solitudes and silences of that pastoral study the authors most chewed and inwardly digested were meaty, racy fellows—Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Browne, Locke, Beroalde de Verville, Samuel Butler, Swift, Arbuthnot, Tom Brown and Voltaire.
The incongruity of his inner consciousness with his calling grew upon him till, as Gray suggested, he often must have ascended the pulpit, his fingers fairly itching with desire to throw his periwig in the face of his congregation. As an obvious result of his reading and his week-day way of life he was driven to a point of view at which he and his contemporaries, especially those in cassocks, appeared to him unutterably funny in their spiritual decadence, just as the Holy Catholic Church had appeared to Chaucer in the Middle Ages, just as all the churches appeared to Swift in the age of Anne. His humor was born in the stench of a moribund "Christianity."
Finally, in 1759, at the age of forty-six, on the occasion of a clerical wrangling under the shadow of the cathedral, his pent-up amusement burst forth in "A Political Romance," an allegorical skit in the manner of Swift's "Tale of a Tub," exhibiting himself and his clerical friends and enemies contending over an old "watch-coat," which "Trim" wants to take home "in order to have it converted into a warm under-petticoat for his wife and a jerkin for himself." A small edition of this squib was printed at York, 1759, but, on the advice of Sterne's spiritual superiors, burnt—all but a few copies. It did not make for edification, that is, it did not screen, as the work of a good churchman should, the petty greed and folly which mask under the solemn habiliments of the Church.
Seventeen fifty-nine was a momentous year for Laurence Sterne. His mother died, but that didn't trouble him. His uncle, the canon, died—but that didn't trouble him—leaving him no legacy, which troubled him so much that he refused to wear the mourning he had prepared in celebration of the event. His wife went mad, but that troubled him little; he humored her in it, for he was engaged in an impassioned flirtation—thought to be the cause of his wife's madness—with a professional singer, to whom he was sending wine, honey, sweetmeats and vows of distracted love "to eternity." At the same time he was writing the first instalment of "Tristram Shandy." His hero's name means "the sad crack-brained fellow," and he meant the book to give a true portrait, or rather impression, of himself and his peculiar humor.
It does. The characters, the opinions, the novel style—with its discovery of the intimacy-making uses of punctuation and the pause in the sentence—are Shandian, and so are this most outrageous plot and this most absurd of all conceivable artistic "points of view."
Here is an author undertaking to tell what took place below stairs between the time when his mother's pains came upon her and the time of his own birth. With expectation of the poor woman's deliverance to supply "suspense," the discussions of Walter Shandy, the father, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Doctor Slop and Susannah run on for three volumes before the child is born, and he doesn't get into his breeches till the sixth volume. The "life and opinions" are thus, as it were, framed in a mystery of obstetrics.
And Sterne seems to say to us that all life is like that: a child just barely learning to walk and smiling midway with exultation as he toddles out of the hands of the midwife and totters into the hands of the sexton.
If life is like that, Sterne concluded in the teeth of all the theologians from whom he had plagiarized, success in life consists not in austere and strenuous activity and still less in the shows of pomp and ceremony, but in expanding to the utmost our consciousness of the smiling interval, in multiplying to the utmost the titillations of moments when birth or death or the beating of a fair grisette's pulse under our fingers or a pair of new black silk breeches or a fricasseed chicken or burgundy or a jeweled snuffbox or a pretty act of kindness or a letter from our mistress has given us a childish joy. If life is like that, says Sterne, let us follow our happy and our pathetic impulses, "as the fly stings"—on the spur of the moment—a dreadful notion, of course, unless our first impulses are indeed better than our discreet and cautious second thoughts.
How is it, madam, in your case, and in yours, sir?
Sterne approved the first spontaneous flow of his feelings, and so, to supply his own long-felt want, he invented the word "sentimental" and put it into circulation. He elaborated, if he did not invent, sentimental relations, and he made an ideal of the life of "sensibility." In "Tristram Shandy," in "A Sentimental Journey," in his letters to his various fair ones, in the "Journal to Eliza," he devised for it scores of famous illustrations.
Uncle Toby is sentimental when he carefully puts a fly that has troubled him out at the window, unwilling to hurt a "hair" of its head, being convinced there is room enough in the world for both. The Recording Angel who drops a tear on Uncle Toby's oath in the Book of Life and blots it out is a sentimental angel. Susannah is sentimental when she bursts into a flood of tears at Corporal Trim's dropping his hat to exhibit the transitoriness of life. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is a sentimental proverb, indicating what Sterne himself would have done, had he been God, and had tempering the wind occasioned him no great inconvenience. A starling in a cage, a dead ass by the roadside, may be the occasion of this new sentimentality. The occasion is nothing; the quantity and quality of feeling evoked are everything. Gefühl ist alles. We luxuriate now in emotion for emotion's sake. We count our tears as they fall, with a consciousness of our resources in feeling which renders the pain itself delicious and elevates it to the level of art.
I think there cannot be a particle of doubt that Sterne was perfectly honest when he wrote, "Praised be God for my sensibility." Whether he was equally honest when he declared that, after all his badinage on the verge of "indelicacy," his heart was as innocent as when in his boyish days he got astride of a stick and galloped away—that is a slightly different question.
There is no space here to recall the way Shandian sentimentalism took fashionable London by storm nor the opposition to it of a few stalwarts like Dr. Johnson, nor to describe the disgust of a few "immaculate" imaginations like Dr. Goldsmith's and Richardson's, nor the efforts of a few savage critics and shocked clericals to "Nicodemus" Sterne into nothing. The controversy between those who feel intensely and those who hardly feel at all still rages, and is probably destined to rage as long as two sorts of men recur in society.
But to the fashionable mid-eighteenth century in general, sentimentalism came like rain from heaven after a long dry summer. It was such a joy to weep again, and this country parson Sterne had invented a way of weeping copiously over little things; so that, all the time, one could be half smiling through one's tears; and it hardly hurt at all. No wonder he tickled the bluestockings and the great worldly ecclesiastics and the ministers of state; and became the vogue in Paris and the friend of Diderot; and penetrated into Germany and won the plaudits of Goethe and Lessing and later the enthusiastic homage of that kindred spirit, Heinrich Heine.
Sterne was a sensitive, intuitive person. He felt the winds of revolutionary change in European feeling before they had begun to blow. His type of consciousness ran ahead of his age. Sentimentalism seemed merely the fashionable return to superficial emotion. More deeply considered, it indicated "humanitarianism," the discovery of the individual, democracy, the French Revolution, Catholic Emancipation, Prison Reform, the liberation of black slaves and the Reform Bills. More deeply considered, it meant a revolt against the venality, the nepotism, the inefficiency, the selfishness and the obvious rottenness of the ancient regime—in the Church, out of which Sterne emerged; in the universities; in the entire political and economic system of the State.
One is quite unprepared to understand Sterne in his times unless one sees his crack-brained humor as a product, more or less unconscious—a product, by reaction, of the brutal insensibility of generation after generation of upstanding, two-fisted, go-getting Englishmen, whose cities stank with unchanneled slops, whose gin-sodden peasants toiled like cattle, whose children were wasted in mines, whose prisons were crowded with fever-stricken victims driven there by debt and starvation, whose slave ships sailed blithely from Africa to the Indies with hundreds of blacks bound head to foot on the decks and dying in their chains.
It was time for a little "sensibility," high time.
In his "English Humorists," 1851-'53, Thackeray delivered a famous harsh lecture on Sterne as a man who would neglect his dying mother to weep over a dead ass. In 1864 Walter Bagehot, reviewing Percy Fitzgerald's "Life of Sterne," wrote an essay on "Sterne and Thackeray" in which he piquantly argued that "in spite of many superficial differences, there was one fundamental and ineradicable resemblance between the two"—namely, their exacerbated sensibility. Bagehot's essay is, however, in spite of suppressed struggling sympathies, "eminently Victorian," and is now as completely out of date as Thackeray's.
The "Life of Laurence Sterne" is as indisputably Dean Cross's as the "Life of Henry Fielding" is his. Since his "Development of the English Novel," 1899, he has been growing steadily more intimate with the subject from year to year through a quarter of a century. In 1904 he edited the Works of Sterne, together with Fitzgerald's Life, making many revisions and additions of new material. In 1909, after years of laborious research, he produced his own "Life and Times of Laurence Sterne." This work, as he slyly suggests in the preface to the new edition before us, seemed to be the special occasion for two new English biographies within the next two years. By this fresh and thorough revision Dean Cross reclaims what he had previously made his own, bringing the book abreast of the latest discoveries and enriching it with new materials, especially Sterne's Letter Book, printed from the manuscript now in the Morgan Library.
Sterne is not an author for all times or for all ages or for all sorts of people. He is for those who are ripe and perhaps on the verge of being overripe. He made, for example, little appeal to me when I was a young man, though I remember, about 1899, reading "Tristram Shandy" through one golden afternoon, lying behind a screen of boughs in a clear space in the midst of a New England wood, where an eccentric parson had stationed me to wait for partridges, according to his own mild method of hunting them. I grew tired of the book long before the parson came to guide me out of the wood, for I waited till after dark and the parson never returned at all. He was a Shandian fellow—irresponsible; perhaps he had left his partridges to write his sermon. But that was no way to read Sterne, in great gulps. Sterne wrote dainty little chapters, and for a reason. He wrote them for tired business men to read between stations in the subway. Last year I read both "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey" during leaps of the I. R. T.; I found them entrancing and wished for more such alleviants of the rush and jolting of life.
Sterne is an author for governors who have grown weary in well doing; for secretaries of state who have been baffled at the task of establishing the peace of the world; for judges who have grown skeptical not merely about the possibility but even about the wisdom of enforcing a law; for bishops who find that the Kingdom of God on Earth arrives tardily; and for deans of old New England colleges in hours of relaxation from screwing up the standards. When Dean Cross himself first began to write of Sterne, his sympathy with Sterne's temper and with his form was considerable but not complete. The shadow of Victorianism was still over his author and over him. But Dean Cross, like many other survivors of the august and virtuous Queen, has mellowed with the years, become gently whimsical, mildly epicurean, and now in the perfect sympathy that comes with perfect understanding he takes Sterne kindly by the hand and leads him back to us, and presents him to us as a humorist whom the whirligig of time has made once more singularly in accord with the spirit of a distracted and skeptical age.