Yet though the book, as one thus summarizes it, may appear a mere farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after its peculiar fashion, advances. Such definite purpose as underlies the tricks and grimaces of its author is by degrees accomplished; and before we reach the end of the first volume the highly humorous, if extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott’s to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition — as the study of a man “whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness.” Sterne’s conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not “crack-brained learning” so much as “theory run mad.” He is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever impelling him to push his premises to new conclusions without ever allowing him time to compare them with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest, but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his father’s dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he owed nothing to the logic of the schools. “He was certainly,” says his son, “irresistible both in his orations and disputations,” but that was because “he was born an orator ([Greek: Theodidaktos]). Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of logic and rhetoric were so blended 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.’ And yet,” continues the filial panegyric,
“He had never read Cicero nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus among the ancients, nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby among 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 Crackenthorpe or Burgersdicius or any Dutch commentator: he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam and an argument ad hominem consisted; and 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.”
Surely we all know men of this kind, and the consternation — comparable only to that of M. Jourdain under the impromptu carte-and-tierce of his servant-maid — which their sturdy if informal dialectic will often spread among many kinds of “learned societies.” But such men are certainly not of the class which Scott supposed to have been ridiculed in the character of Walter Shandy.
Among the crotchets of this born dialectician was a theory as to the importance of Christian names in determining the future behaviour and destiny of the children to whom they are given; and, whatever admixture of jest there might have been in some of his other fancies, in this his son affirms he was absolutely serious. He solemnly maintained the opinion “that there was a strange kind of magic bias which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our character and conduct.” How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of their 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 Nicodemus’d into nothing! He was astonished at parents failing to perceive that “when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, ’twas not like a case of a man’s character, which, when wronged, might afterwards 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.” This name-giving injury, he would say, “could never be undone; nay, he doubted 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 further.”
With all this extravagance, however, there was combined an admirable affectation of sobriety. Mr. Shandy would have us believe that he was no blind slave to his theory. He was quite willing to admit the existence of names which could not affect the character either for good or evil — Jack, Dick, and Tom, for instance; and such the philosopher styled “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 among 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 happened to be at Epsom when it was given him, he would ofttimes thank Heaven it was no worse.” Forewarned of this peculiarity of Mr.
Shandy’s, the reader is, of course, prepared to hear that of all the names in the universe the philosopher had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram, “the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world.” He would break off in the midst of one of his frequent disputes on the subject of names, and “in a spirited epiphonema, or rather erotesis,” demand of his antagonist “whether he would take upon him to say he had ever remembered, whether he had ever read, or 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.” It only remained that he should have published a book in defence of the belief, and sure enough “in the year sixteen,” two years before the birth of his second son, “he was at the pains of writing an express dissertation simply upon the word Tristram, showing the world with great candour and modesty the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name.” And with this idea Sterne continues to amuse himself at intervals till the end of the chapter.
That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not substance enough — few of Sterne’s jests have — to stand the process of continual attrition to which he subjects it. But the mere historic gravity with which the various turns of this monomania are recorded — to say nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style — prevents the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome. On the whole, however, one begins to grow impatient for more of the same sort as the three admirable chapters on the Rev. Mr. Yorick, and is not sorry to get to the opening of the second volume, with its half-tender, half-humorous, and wholly delightful account of Uncle Toby’s difficulties in describing the siege operations before Namur, and of the happy chance by which these difficulties made him ultimately the fortunate possessor of a “hobby.”
Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of Sterne’s unceasing interest in his own creations, and of his increasing consciousness of creative power. Captain Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in the first volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on the scene at all; but before the end of the second we know both of them thoroughly, within and without. Indeed, one might almost say that in the first half-dozen chapters which so excellently recount the origin of the corporal’s fortification scheme, and the wounded officer’s delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the simple characters — alike yet so different in their simplicity — of master and of man becomes definitely fixed in the reader’s mind. And the total difference between the second and the first volume in point of fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor, the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from the humorous essayist, would almost
seem to have started into being as we pass from the one volume to the other. There is nothing in the drolleries of the first volume — in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy’s crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual collision between these crotchets and his brother’s plain sense — to indicate the kind of power displayed in that remarkable colloquy à quatre, which begins with the arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim’s recital of the Sermon on Conscience. Wit, humour, irony, quaint learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of these Sterne had displayed abundance already; but it is not in the earlier but in the later half of the first instalment of Tristram Shandy that we first become conscious that he is something more than the possessor of all these things; that he is gifted with the genius of creation, and has sent forth new beings into that world of immortal shadows which to many of us is more real than our own.
CHAPTER V. LONDON TRIUMPHS. — FIRST SET OF SERMONS.— “TRISTRAM SHANDY,” VOLS. III. AND IV. — COXWOLD. — VOLS. V. AND VI. — FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT. — PARIS. — TOULOUSE.
(1760-1762.)
Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron “awoke one morning,” to “find himself famous.” Seldom indeed has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued so eagerly and by such a distinguished crowd of hunters. The chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting impression on the spectators; for it was several years after (in 1773) that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his very just remark that “any man who has a name or who has the power of pleasing will be generally invited in London,” observed gruffly that “the man Sterne,” he was told, “had had engagements for three months.” And truly it would appear from abundant evidence that “the man Sterne” gained such a social triumph as might well have turned a stronger head than his. Within twenty-four hours after his arrival his lodgings in Pall Mall were besieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors; and in a few weeks he had probably made the acquaintance of “everybody who was anybody” in the London society of that day.
How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is revealed, with a simple vanity which almost disarms criticism, in many a passage of his correspondence. In one of his earliest letters to Miss Fourmantelle we find him proudly relating to her how already he “was engaged to ten noblemen and men of fashion.” Of Garrick, who had warmly welcomed the humourist whose merits he had been the first to discover, Sterne says that he had “promised him at dinner to numbers of great people.” Amongst these great people who sought him out for themselves was that discerning patron of ability in every shape, Lord Rockingham. In one of the many letters which Madame de Medalle flung dateless upon the world, but which from internal evidence we can assign to the early months of 1760, Sterne writes that he is about to “set off with a grand retinue of Lord Rockingham’s (in whose suite I move) for Windsor” to witness, it should seem, an installation of a Knight of the Garter. It is in his letters to Miss Fourmantelle, however, that his almost boyish exultation at his London triumph discloses itself most frankly. “My rooms,” he writes, “are filling every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour me.” Never, he believes, had such homage been rendered to any man by devotees so distinguished. “The honours paid me were the greatest that were ever known from the great.”
The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, altogether an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous. But we must not judge Sterne in this matter by too severe a standard. He was by nature neither a dignified nor a self-contained man: he had a head particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation; and it must be allowed that few men’s power of resisting giddiness at previously unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried. It was not only “the great” in the sense of the high in rank and social distinction by whom he was courted; he was welcomed also by the eminent in genius and learning; and it would be no very difficult task for him to flatter himself that it was the latter form of recognition which, he really valued most. Much, at any rate, in the way of undue elation may be forgiven to a country clergyman who suddenly found himself the centre of a court, which was regularly attended by statesmen, wits, and leaders of fashion, and with whom even bishops condescended to open gracious diplomatic communication. “Even all the bishops,” he writes, “have sent their compliments;” and though this can hardly have been true of the whole Episcopal Bench, it is certain that Sterne received something more than a compliment from one bishop, who was a host in himself. He was introduced by Garrick to Warburton, and received high encouragement from that formidable prelate.
[Footnote 1: It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss
Fourmantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the
Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold; and this strange present gave
rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter.]
The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the somewhat precarious money profits which depend on literary vogue. Only a few weeks after his arrival in town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of Coxwold, “a sweet retirement,” as he describes it, “in comparison of Sutton,” at which he was in future to pass most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire. What obtained him this piece of preferment is unknown. It may be that Tristram Shandy drew the Yorkshire peer’s attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman of genius living within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his lordship’s gift, and that this was enough for him. But Sterne himself says — in writing a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance— “I hope I have been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me;” and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss idle tales about Sterne’s having “black-mailed” the patron out of a presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70£ a year net.
There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne and Warburton. Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect himself against the satiric humour of the author of the Tristram Shandy by a substantial present of money. Coming to Garrick’s ears, it was repeated by him — whether seriously or in jest — to Sterne, from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle’s collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence of seven years later. “’Twas for all the world,” he began, “like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood — gave it a suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it…. The story you told me of Tristram’s pretended tutor this morning” — (the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of the novel, under the guise of the hero’s tutor)— “this vile story, I say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air, usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had.” And he goes on to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule. “What the devil!” he exclaims, “is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for my Tristram — are we so run out of stock that there is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst our doctors…but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?” Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom the scandal had reached through a “society journal” of
the time, he asks whether people would suppose he would be “such a fool as to fall foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy off the tutorship of Tristram — or that I should be fool enough to own that I had taken a purse for that purpose?” It will be remarked that Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton, but only his having received it by way of black-mail: and the most mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the strange present of a “purse of gold” from Warburton (whom at that time he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle. “I had a purse of guineas given me yesterday by a Bishop,” he writes, triumphantly, but without volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. Sterne’s letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him “the confutation of an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it.” This, however, can hardly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne to abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious — and for much the same reasons — to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature. He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the bargain between them. The epithet of “irrevocable scoundrel,” which he afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding from Warburton, than it would have been had it come from any one not habitually employing Warburton’s peculiar vocabulary; but it at least argues no very cordial feeling on the Bishop’s side. And, on the whole, one regrets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant story than could be wished. It is impossible to forget, however, that while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly less strict in those days than they are — or, at any rate, are recognized as being — in our own, there is nothing in Sterne’s character to make us suppose him to have been at all in advance of the morality of his time.
Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 146