Complete Works of Laurence Sterne

by Laurence Sterne

  The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to take possession of his temporalities. His London triumph had not yet run its course. The first edition of Vols. I. and II. of Tristram Shandy was exhausted in some three months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second; and, concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there appeared — in somewhat incongruous companionship — the announcement, “Speedily will be published, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick.” The judicious Dodsley, or possibly the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would — they, no doubt, thought — be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in finding the kind of article required; and we may be tolerably sure that, even if Sterne did not perceive that fact for himself, his publisher hastened to inform him that “anything would do.” Two of his pulpit discourses, the Assize Sermon and the Charity Sermon, had already been thought worthy of publication by their author in a separate form; and the latter of these found a place in the series; while the rest seem to have been simply the chance sweepings of the parson’s sermon-drawer. The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, must be able — or so it seems to me — to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons are — with but few and partial exceptions — of the most commonplace character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the crambe repetita of a hundred thousand homilies. A single extract will fully suffice for a specimen of Sterne’s pre-Shandian homiletic style; his post-Shandian manner was very different, as we shall see. The preacher is discoursing upon the well-worn subject of the inconsistencies of human character:

  “If such a contrast was only observable in the different stages of a man’s life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder or of just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may naturally enough be supposed to alter a man’s sense of things, and so entirely to transform him that, not only in outward appearance but in the very cast and turn of his mind, he may be as unlike and different from the man he was twenty or thirty years ago as he ever was from anything of his own species. This, I say, is naturally to be accounted for, and in some cases might be praiseworthy too; but the observation is to be made of men in the same period of their lives that in the same day, sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly inconsistent and irreconcilable with themselves. Look at the man in one light, and he shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave; behold him in another point of view, and you see a creature all over folly and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice and indiscretion can make him. A man shall appear gentle, courteous, and benevolent to all mankind; follow him into his own house, maybe you see a tyrant morose and savage to all whose happiness depends upon his kindness. A third, in his general behaviour, is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue; shall have too much conscience and religion to cheat the man who trusts him, and perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor extends shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling of the party’s reputation and good name, the dearest, the tenderest property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, and rob him there without measure or pity.” — Sermon XI. — On Evil Speaking.

  There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, even conveyed as it is in Sterne’s effective, if loose and careless, style; and it is no unfair sample of the whole. The calculation, however, of the author and his shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic merits or demerits of these sermons, they would “take” on the strength of the author’s name; nor, it would seem, was their calculation disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons now lying before me is numbered the sixth, and its date is 1764; which represents a demand for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space of four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially reconciling a certain serious-minded portion of the public to the author. Sterne evidently hoped that they might; for we find him sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after the publication of the book, and receiving in return a letter of courteous thanks, and full of excellent advice as to the expediency of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a style of writing in the future. Sterne, in reply, protests that he would “willingly give no offence to mortal by anything which could look like the least violation of either decency or good manners;” but — and it is an important “but” — he cannot promise to “mutilate everything” in Tristram “down to the prudish humour of every particular” (individual), though he will do his best; but, in any case, “laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as I can.” And laugh he did, and in such Rabelaisian fashion that the Bishop (somewhat inconsistently for a critic who had welcomed Sterne on the appearance of the first two volumes expressly as the “English Rabelais”) remarked of him afterwards with characteristic vigour, in a letter to a friend, that he fears the fellow is an “irrevocable scoundrel.”

  The volumes, however, which earned “the fellow” this Episcopal benediction were not given to the world till the next year. At the end of May or beginning of June, 1760, Sterne went to his new home at Coxwold, and his letters soon begin to show him to us at work upon further records of Mr. Shandy’s philosophical theory-spinning and the simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable that this year, 1760, was, on the whole, the happiest year of Sterne’s life. His health, though always feeble, had not yet finally given way; and though the “vile cough” which was to bring him more than once to death’s door, and at last to force it open, was already troubling him, he had that within him which made it easy to bear up against all such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at their highest. His worldly affairs were going at least as smoothly as they ever went. He was basking in that sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a temperament differing from that of the average Englishman, as does the physique of the Southern races from that of the hardier children of the North; and lastly, he was exulting in a new-born sense of creative power which no doubt made the composition of the earlier volumes of Tristram a veritable labour of love.

  But the witty division of literary spinners into silkworms and spiders — those who spin because they are full, and those who do so because they are empty — is not exhaustive. There are human silk-worms who become gradually transformed into spiders — men who begin writing in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, long after that process has been completely performed, continue writing in order to fill an empty belly; and though Sterne did not live long enough to “write himself out,” there are certain indications that he would not have left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were curiously combined with a distinct admixture of the “potboiler” spirit; and it was with something of the complacency of an annuitant that he looked forward to giving the public a couple of volumes of Tristram Shandy every year as long as they would stand it. In these early days, however, there was no necessity even to discuss the probable period either of the writer’s inspiration or of the reader’s appetite. At present the public were as eager to consume more Shandyism as Sterne was ready to produce it: the demand was as active as the supply was easy. By the end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, and on January 27, 1761, they made their appearance.
They had been disposed of in advance to Dodsley for 380l. — no bad terms of remuneration in those days; but it is still likely enough that the publisher made a profitable bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. Their author’s vogue in London, whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and volume towards the “genteel lodgings.” His dinner list was once more full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington, abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words: “You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.’s head; and for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first rank, as to fear no accident of the kind.” Amusing, too, is it to note the familiarity, as of an old habitué of Ministerial antechambers, with which this country parson discusses the political changes of that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new Premier under the title B —— e; and by a similar use of initials attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public, and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand debate on the German war after the Great Commoner’s retirement from office— “the pitched battle,” as Sterne calls it, “wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet” in defence of his military policy. Thus he describes it:

  “There never was so full a House — the gallery full to the top — I was there all the day; when lo! a political fit of the gout seized the great combatant — he entered not the lists. Beckford got up and begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there, to put off the debate — it could not be done: so Beckford rose up and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly…. Legge answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord K. spoke long. Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious…. Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.’s character. This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the Hanover-score brought us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were the same as at the Peace of Utrecht — that the people behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly end in one.”

  And then the letter, recurring to personal matters towards the close, records the success of Vols. III. and IV.:

  “One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry it up to the skies — the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible.” This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition must have been exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed, another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and early in July he returned to Coxwold.

  From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne’s life was little better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which, in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the hardships of Sterne’s early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his. To him, with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights of Dr. Swishtail’s; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor’s pupils:

  “I rejoice you are in London — rest you there in peace; here ’tis the devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just now lay down and die.”

  It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour’s time “I’ll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it all,” but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much against the prevailing tone of discontented ennui which pervades this letter.

  Apart, moreover, from Sterne’s regrets of London, his country home was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode. His relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year. With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the rôle of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband’s triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of his six months’ revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving so clearly that her husband preferred the world’s society to hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his. Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so comfortable and so hopeless — secure alike against the risk of “scenes” and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from amantium irae against all possibility of redintegratio amoris. To su
ch perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his conjugal relations in this philosophic strain:

  “As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer it would have been a burning shame — else she declares herself happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense, built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe, and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit, though humorous; a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you like the simile?”