by Will Durant
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 considered how much depended upon what they were 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, … might take their turn from the humors 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.
“Pray, my Dear,” quoth my mother, “have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”—“Good G—!” cried my father, … “Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?”
From that contretemps onward the book consists of digressions. Sterne had no tale to tell, much less that tale of love which is the burden of most fiction; he wished to amuse himself and the reader with whimsical discourse on everything, but in no order; he galloped around the big and little problems of life like a frisky horse in a field. After writing sixty-four chapters he bethought himself that he had given his book no preface; he inserted one at that point; this allowed him to make fun of his critics. He called his method “the most religious, for I begin with writing the first sentence, and trusting to Almighty God for the second,”9 and to free association for the rest. Rabelais had done something of the sort; Cervantes had allowed Rosi-nante to lead him from episode to episode; Robert Burton had roamed the world before anatomizing melancholy. But Sterne raised inconsequence to a method, and freed all novelists from the need to have a subject or a plot.
The leisure classes of Britain were delighted to see how much ado could be made about nothing, and how a book could be written in Anglo-Saxon English in the age of Johnson. Lusty Britons welcomed the jolly novelty of a clergyman talking about sex and flatulence, and the slit in Uncle Toby’s pants. In March, 1760, Sterne went down to London to sip his success; he was happy to find the two volumes sold out; he took £ 630 for them and two to come. Even the Sermons of Mr. Yorick, published four months after Tristram, found ready sale when it was known that Yorick was Sterne. Invitations came to the author from Chesterfield, Reynolds, Rockingham, even Bishop Warburton, who surprised him with fifty guineas, perhaps to escape adorning some satiric page in future volumes. Sterne bought a carriage and team, and drove in merry triumph back to York, where he preached in the great minster. He was presented to a richer parsonage at Coxwold, fifteen miles from York; he took his wife and daughter to live with him there; and there, with inconsequential facility, he wrote Volumes III-IV of Tristram.
In December of that year 1760 he went to London to see these volumes through the press. They were adversely reviewed, but the edition was sold out in four months. Now Tristram reached birth by forceps, which deformed his nose; whereupon the author sailed forth on a long discourse on the philosophy of noses, in the style of the most learned pundits. The shape of a child’s nose, said one authority, was determined by the softness or hardness of the nursing breast: “by sinking into it, … as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourished, plumped up, refreshed, refocillated.”10
After half a year in London Sterne returned to his wife, who told him she had been happier without him. He withdrew into his manuscript, and wrote Volumes V-VI; in these Tristram was almost forgotten, and Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, with their war memories and toy forts, occupied the stage. In November, 1761, the parson went off again to London, and on the last day of the year he saw V-VI published. They were well received. He flirted with Mrs. Elizabeth Vesey, one of the “bluestockings”; vowed he would give the last rag of his priesthood for a touch of her divine hand;11 had a lung hemorrhage, and fled to the south of France. He stopped long enough in Paris to attend some dinners at d’Holbach’s “synagogue of atheists,” where Diderot took a lasting fancy to him. Hearing that his wife was ill, and that Lydia was developing asthma, Sterne invited them to join him in France. All three settled down near Toulouse (July, 1762).
In March, 1764, he left his wife and daughter, with their consent, and returned to Paris, London, and Coxwold. He wrote Volumes VII-VIII of Tristram, received advance payment for them, and sent part of the proceeds to Mrs. Sterne. The new volumes appeared in January, 1765, to waning acclaim; the Shandy-Toby vein was running thin. In October Sterne began a tour of eight months in France and Italy. On his way north he joined his family in Burgundy; they asked to remain in France; he paid their expenses and returned to Coxwold (July, 1766). Between hemorrhages he wrote Volume IX. He went to London to see it born (January, 1767), and enjoyed the furor caused by his skirting the brink of sex in describing Uncle Toby’s wooing of Mrs. Wadman. Scandalized readers wrote to newspapers and the Archbishop of York, demanding that this shameless parson be unfrocked and evicted; the prelate refused. Sterne meanwhile collected subscriptions, totaling £ 1,050, for a promised Sentimental Journey. He sent more money to his wife, and made love to Elizabeth Draper.
She was the wife of an East India Company official then (March, 1767) stationed in India. She had married him at fourteen, when he was thirty-four. Sterne sent her his books, and proposed to follow them with his hand and his heart. For a while they saw each other daily, and exchanged tender missives. The ten “Letters to Eliza” voice the last sad passion of a man dying of tuberculosis. “ ’Tis true, I am ninety-five in constitution, and you but twenty-five; … but what I want in youth I will make up in wit and good humor. Not Swift so loved his Stella, Scarron’ his Maintenon, or Waller his Sacharissa, as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect!”—for “my wife cannot live long.”12 Ten minutes after dispatching this letter he had a severe hemorrhage, and he bled till four in the morning. In April, 1767, Mrs. Draper, summoned by her husband, sailed for India. From April 13 to August 4 Sterne kept a “Journal to Eliza,” a “diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose society he languished.” “I will take thee on any terms, Eliza! I shall be … so just, so kind to thee, I will deserve not to be miserable hereafter.”13 In the journal under April 21: “Parted with twelve ounces of blood.” A doctor told him he had syphilis; he protested it was “impossible, … for I have had no commerce whatever with the sex—not even with my wife, … these fifteen years.” “We will not reason about it,” said the physician, “but you must undergo a course of mercury.”14 Other doctors confirmed the diagnosis; one assured him that “taints of the blood laid dormant twenty years.” He yielded, protesting his virtue.
By June he had recovered, and returned to Coxwold. While writing A Sentimental Journey he suffered more hemorrhages, and realized that he had not long to live. He went to London, saw the little book published (February, 1768), and for the last time enjoyed the undiminished affection of his friends. As Tristram had recalled Rabelais, so the new volume reflected the rising influence of Richardson and Rousseau. But Sterne’s virtue was less irrefragable than Richardson’s, and his tears less hot and sincere than Rousseau’s. Perhaps it was this book, and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), that made sentiment and sentimental fashionable words in England. Byron thought that Sterne “preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother.”15
While Sterne was enjoying his final triumph in London he caught a cold, which grew into pleurisy. He wrote to a Mrs. James a pitiful letter asking her to care for Lydia if Mrs. Sterne should die. Death came to him on March 18, 1768, in an inn on Old Bond Street, with no friends near. He was fifty-two years old. He had a bit of the mountebank in him, and made himself “a motley to the view”; but we can understand his sensitivity to women, and the strain that an unhappy marriage placed upon a man capable of such subtle perceptions and delicate artistry. He suffered much, gave much, and wrote one of the most peculiar books in all the history of literature.
III. FANNY BURNEY
A woman briefly rivaled his success in fiction.
She was born in 1752 to Charles Burney, the future historian of music. She was brought up on notes rather than on letters; till she was eight she could not read;16 no one dreamed that she would be a writer. Her mother died when Frances was nine. As almost all the musicians who performed in London came to her father’s home, and attracted to it a good portion of the elite, Fanny acquired education by listening to words and music. She matured slowly, was shy and plain, and took forty years to find a husband. When her famous novel was published (January, 1778) she was twenty-five, and was so fearful lest it displease her father that she concealed her authorship. Evelina, or A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, made a stir. Anonymity aroused curiosity; rumor said a girl of seventeen had written it. Johnson, who had been praised in its preface, praised it, and recommended it to Dr. Burney. Mrs. Thrale complained that it was too short. When Mrs. Thrale learned the secret it spread over London; Fanny became a lioness of society; everybody read her book, and “my kind and most devoted father was so happy in my happiness.”17
Her art lay in describing, with lingering memory and lively imagination, how the world of London society appeared to an orphaned girl of seventeen who had been brought up by a rural parson not at all like Laurence Sterne. Doubtless Fanny too had thrilled to Garrick’s acting, and had felt as Evelina wrote to her guardian: “Such ease! such vivacity in his manner! such grace in his motions! such fire and meaning in his eyes! … And when he danced, O, how I envied Clarinda! I almost wished to have jumped on the stage and joined them.”18 London, wearying of its vice, felt cleansed by the fresh wind blowing from these youthful pages.
That once famous novel is dead, but the diary that Fanny kept is still a living part of English literature and history, for it offers a near view of celebrities from Johnson and George III to Herschel and Napoleon. Queen Charlotte made Miss Burney her keeper of the robes (1786), and for the next five years Fanny dressed and undressed her Majesty. The constrained and narrow life nearly stifled the authoress; at last her friends rescued her, and in 1793, youth quite gone, she married a ruined émigré, General d’Ar-blay. She supported him by her writings and her income; for ten years she lived with him in France and obscurity, isolated by the intensity of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In 1814 she was allowed to return to England and receive the last blessing of her father, who died at the age of eighty-eight. She herself lived to that age, into quite a different world, which did not realize that the famous Jane Austen (died 1817) had taken her inspiration from the forgotten novels of a forgotten lady who was still alive in 1840.
IV. HORACE WALPOLE
“This world,” he said, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”19 So he learned to smile at the world, even to humor his gout. He chronicled his time, but washed his hands of it. He was son of a prime minister, but had no pleasure in politics. He loved women, from Fanny Burney to the grandest duchesses, but he would have none of them for a wife, nor (so far as we know) for a mistress. He studied philosophy, but thought the philosophers the bane and bore of the century. One author he admired without reserve for her fine manners and unaffected art—Mme. de Sévigné; her alone he sought to emulate; and if his letters did not catch her gay charm and grace, they became, far more than hers, a living daily history of an age. Though he called them annals of Bedlam,20 he wrote them with care, hoping that some of them would give him a nook in man’s remembrance; for even a philosopher who is reconciled to decay finds it hard to accept oblivion.
Horatio (so he was baptized in 1717) was the youngest of five children presented to Sir Robert Walpole, the doughty Premier who sacrificed his reputation by preferring peace to war, but hardly hurt it by preferring adultery to monogamy.21 Perhaps to avenge his first wife, gossipers for a time ascribed Horace’s paternity to Carr, Lord Hervey, brother to the effeminate John, Lord Hervey of Ickworth—who accused Sir Robert of attempting to seduce Lady Hervey.22 These matters are too intricate for present adjudication; we can only say that Horace was brought up with no imputation, by his relatives, of any undue origin. He was treated with busy indifference by the Prime Minister, and (he tells us) was “indulged” with “extreme fondness” by his mother.23 He was a very handsome boy, and was dressed like a prince, but he was frail and diffident, and as sensitive as a girl. When his mother died (1737) many feared that the twenty-year-old youth would die of grief. Sir Robert comforted him with governmental sinecures that paid for his son’s fine clothing, elegant living, and costly collection of art. Horace kept to the end of his life a latent hostility to his father, but always defended his politics.
At ten he was sent to Eton, where he learned Latin and French and formed a friendship with the poet Gray. At seventeen he entered King’s College, Cambridge; there he learned Italian, and imbibed deism from Conyers Middleton. At twenty-two, without taking a degree, he set out with Gray on a tour of Italy and France. After some wandering they settled for fifteen months in a Florentine villa as guests of the British chargé d’affaires, Sir Horace Mann. Walpole and Mann never met again, but they corresponded during the next forty-five years (1741-85). At Reggio Emilia Gray and Walpole quarreled, for Horace had paid all the bills, and the poet could not forgive the superior attentions received by the son of the man who was ruling England. In retrospect Horace took the blame: “I was too young, too fond of my own diversions, … too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation, … not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one I thought below me; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me.”24 They parted; Walpole nearly died of remorse, or quinsy; he arranged for Gray’s passage home. They were reconciled in 1745, and most of Gray’s poems were printed by Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill. Meanwhile, at Venice, Walpole posed for a lovely pastel portrait by Rosalba Camera.
Before reaching England (September 12, 1741), Walpole had been elected to Parliament. There he made a modest and futile speech against the opposition that was bringing to an end his father’s long and prosperous ministry. He was regularly re-elected till 1767, when he voluntarily withdrew from active politics. Generally he supported the liberal Whig program: he resisted extension of the royal power, recommended a compromise with Wilkes, and denounced slavery (1750) nine years before Wilberforce was born. He opposed the political emancipation of English Catholics on the ground that “papists and liberty are contradictions.”25 He rejected the American case against the Stamp Act,26 but he defended the claim of the American colonies to freedom, and prophesied that the next zenith of civilization would be in America.27 “Who but Machiavel,” he wrote (1786), “can pretend that we have a shadow of title to a foot of land in India?”28 He hated war, and when the Montgolfier brothers made their first balloon ascension (1783) he predicted with horror the extension of war to the skies. “I hope,” he wrote, “these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned or the idle, and not be converted into engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science.”29
Finding himself too often on the losing side, he decided to spend most of his time in the country. In 1747 he rented five acres and a small house near Twickenham. Two years later he bought the property, and transformed the building in neo-Gothic style—as we have seen. Into this medievalized castle he gathered a variety of objects distinguished by art or history; soon his home was a museum that required a catalogue. In one room he installed a printing press, where he published in elegant formats thirty-four books, including his own. Chiefly from Strawberry Hill he sent out the 3,601 letters that survive. He had a hundred friends, quarreled with nearly all of them, made up, and was as kind as his delicate irritability would allow. Every day he set out bread and milk for the squirrels who courted him. He guarded his sinecures and angled for more, but when his cousin Henry Conway was dismissed from office Walpole proposed to share his income with him.
He had a thousand faults, which Macaulay meticulously accumulated in a brilliant and ung
enerous essay. Walpole was vain, fussy, secretive, capricious, proud of his ancestry, and disgusted with his relatives. His humor tended to satire with sharp teeth. He carried to his grave, and into his histories, his scorn of all who had shared in deposing his father. He was often wildly biased, as in his descriptions of Lady Pomfret30 or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.31 His fragile frame inclined him to be something of a dilettante. If Diderot, in Sainte-Beuve’s illuminating phrase, was the most German of all Frenchmen, Walpole was the most French of all Englishmen.
He was fearlessly candid about his uncommon tastes and views; he thought Virgil a bore, and a fortiori, Richardson and Sterne; he called Dante “a Methodist in Bedlam.”32 He affected to disdain all authors, and insisted, like Congreve, that he wrote as a gentleman for his own amusement, not as a literary laborer dependent upon the merchandizing of his words. So he wrote to Hume: “You know in England we read their works, but seldom or never take any notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and of course leave them to their colleges and obscurity, by which means we are not troubled by their vanity and impertinence.... I, who am an author, must own this conduct very sensible; for in truth we are a most useless tribe.”33
But, as he admitted, he too was an author, vain and voluminous. Bored in his castle, he explored the past as if wishing to sink the roots of his mind into the richest seams. He drew up a Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758)—their nobility would excuse their authorship, and first-rate men like Bacon and Clarendon could qualify. He had three hundred copies printed, and gave most of them away; Dodsley risked an edition of two thousand copies; they sold readily, and brought Walpole such fame as must have made him hang his head in shame. He compounded his indignity with five volumes of Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-71), an engaging compilation which won Gibbon’s praise.