[Footnote 1: Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some at least of these sermons were actually composed in the capacity of littérateur and not of divine — for the press and not for the pulpit.]
“There is not a character in the world which has so bad an influence upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with honest checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world will never be undone; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both extremes: for thou corruptest prosperity, and ’tis thou who hast broken the heart of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits can be ambitious ones ’tis a character we never shall want. Oh! it infests the court, the camp, the cabinet; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, haste! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on heavily. Shimei doubles his speed; but ’tis the contrary way: he flies like the wind over a sandy desert…. Stay, Shimei! ’tis your patron, your friend, your benefactor, the man who has saved you from the dunghill. ’Tis all one to Shimei. Shimei is the barometer of every man’s fortune; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the simile will admit of. Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs over Shimei’s brow! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the captain of the host without success? Look not into the Court Calendar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei’s face. Art thou in debt, though not to Shimei? No matter. The worst officer of the law shall not be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must rise up as one man to reproach it? When it lost everything, did it lose the right to pity too? Or did he who maketh poor as well as maketh rich strip it of its natural powers to mollify the heart and supple the temper of your race? Trust me you have much to answer for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from spirits like yours which has gradually taught the world to look upon it as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst disgrace. And what is it, I beseech you — what is it that men will not do to keep clear of so sore an imputation and punishment? Is it not to fly from this that he rises early, late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness? that he plots, contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes, tries all garments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as it may favour his escape?”
And though the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with an assurance that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we are surrounded, it is in our power to “lay the foundation of our peace (where it ought to be) within our own hearts,” yet the preacher can, in the midst of his earlier reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic outburst: “O Shimei! would to Heaven, when thou wast slain, that all thy family had been slain with thee, and not one of thy resemblance left! But ye have multiplied exceedingly, and replenished the earth; and if I prophesy rightly, ye will in the end subdue it.”
[Footnote 1: Which are not many in the case of a barometer.]
Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal himself with more strangely comical effect under the gown of the divine than in the sermon on “The Prodigal Son.” The repentant spendthrift has returned to his father’s house, and is about to confess his follies. But —
“Alas! How shall he tell his story?
“Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East; the costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them; the expenses of singing men and singing women; the flute, the harp, the sackbut, and all kinds of music; the dress of the Persian Court how magnificent! their slaves how numerous! their chariots, their homes, their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devoured! what expectations from strangers of condition! what exactions! How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated at Damascus by one of the best men in the world; that he had lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off with it to the Ganges; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead; that he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to a worker in graven images; that the images he had purchased produced him nothing, that they could not be transported across the wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan; that the apes and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his hands; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he had brought from Egypt; that all had gone wrong from the day he forsook his father’s house?”
All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a sermon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what may be called the “professional” moral of the parable, and glides off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections, suggested — or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested — by the text. “I know not,” he says, “whether it would be a subject of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the Prodigal Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of the Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance; and that by the elder brother he intended manifestly the more forward of the Jews,” &c. But, whether it would edify you or not, he goes on, in effect, to say, I do not propose to provide you with edification in that kind. “These uses have been so ably set forth in so many good sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall turn aside from them at present, and content myself with some reflections upon that fatal passion which led him — and so many thousands after the example — to gather all he had together and take his journey into a far country.” In other words, “I propose to make the parable a peg whereon to hang a few observations on (what does the reader suppose?) the practice of sending young men upon the Grand Tour, accompanied by a ‘bear-leader,’ and herein of the various kinds of bear-leaders, and the services which they do, and do not, render to their charges; with a few words on society in Continental cities, and a true view of ‘letters of introduction.’” That is literally the substance of the remainder of the sermon. And thus pleasantly does the preacher play with his curious subject:
“But you will send an able pilot with your son — a scholar. If wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you do well; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or natural philosophy but teach him to make a bow, he may be of some service in introducing your son into good societies, and supporting him in them when he had done. But the upshot will be generally this, that on the most pressing occasions of addresses, if he is not a mere man of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry, and not the tutor to carry him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme; he shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not only from books but from his own experience; a man who has been employed on such services, and thrice ‘made the tour of Europe with success’ — that is, without breaking his own or his pupil’s neck; for if he is such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss valet de chambre, some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months, ‘if God permit,’ much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at least: he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from Calais to Rome; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where there is the best wine, and sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had been left to make the tour and the bargain himself. Look at our governor, I beseech you! See, he is an inch taller as he relates the advantages. And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use. But when your son gets abroad he will be taken out of his hand by his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will pass the greatest part of his time.”
So much for the bear-leader; and now a remark or two on the young man’s chances of getting into good foreign society; an
d then — the benediction:
“Let me observe, in the first place, that company which is really good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this difficulty, and procured him the best letters of recommendation to the most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I answer that he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly stands obliged to pay on such occasions, but no more. There is nothing in which we are so much deceived as in the advantages proposed from our connexions and discourse with the literati, &c., in foreign parts, especially if the experiment is made before we are matured by years or study. Conversation is a traffic; and if you enter it without some stock of knowledge to balance the account perpetually betwixt you, the trade drops at once; and this is the reason, however it may be boasted to the contrary, why travellers have so little (especially good) conversation with the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps conviction, that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation of young itinerants worth the trouble of their bad language, or the interruption of their visits.”
Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put; but we seem to have got some distance, in spirit at any rate, from Luke xv. 13; and it is with somewhat too visible effect, perhaps, that Sterne forces his way back into the orthodox routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth, disappointed with his reception by “the literati,” &c., seeks “an easier society; and as bad company is always ready, and ever lying in wait, the career is soon finished, and the poor prodigal returns — the same object of pity with the prodigal in the Gospel.” Hardly a good enough “tag,” perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the “And now to,” &c., as a fitting close to this pointed little essay in the style of the Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence to show that this so-called sermon was written either after Sterne’s visit to or during his stay in France; and there is strong reason, I think, to suppose that it was in reality neither intended for a sermon nor actually delivered from the pulpit.
No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as this. But in the famous discourse upon an unlucky text — the sermon preached at the chapel of the English Embassy, in Paris — there are touches of unclerical raillery not a few. Thus: “What a noise,” he exclaims, “among the simulants of the various virtues!… Behold Humility, become so out of mere pride; Chastity, never once in harm’s way; and Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an Italian stage — a bladder full of wind. Hush! the sound of that trumpet! Let not my soldier run!’ tis some good Christian giving alms. O Pity, thou gentlest of human passions! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord they with so loud an instrument.”
Here, again, is a somewhat bold saying for a divine: “But, to avoid all commonplace cant as much as I can on this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, that ’tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion must follow the evidence,” &c. And a little later on, commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan’s question, “Does Job serve God for nought?” he says: “It is a bad picture, and done by a terrible master; and yet we are always copying it. Does a man from real conviction of heart forsake his vices? The position is not to be allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God, and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric? Does humility clothe and educate the unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. See! is he not the father of the child?” In another sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which he was certainly the last person in the world to understand — to wit, Methodism. He asks whether, “when a poor, disconsolated, drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a wonder that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what they are?” Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti-Catholic feeling which was characteristic even of indifferentism in those days — at any rate amongst Whig divines. But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne’s sermons upon a reader that “you often see him tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience.”
CHAPTER VII. FRANCE AND ITALY. — MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER. — RETURN TO ENGLAND.— “TRISTRAM SHANDY,” VOL. IX.— “THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.”
(1765-1768.)
In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous as the “Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.” Not, of course, that all the materials for that celebrated piece of literary travel were collected on this occasion. From London as far as Lyons his way lay by a route which he had already traversed three years before, and there is reason to believe that at least some of the scenes in the Sentimental Journey were drawn from observation made on his former visit. His stay in Paris was shorter this year than it had been on the previous occasion. A month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin, and by the middle of November he had reached Turin. From this city he writes, with his characteristic simplicity: “I am very happy, and have found my way into a dozen houses already. To-morrow I am to be presented to the King, and when that ceremony is over I shall have my hands full of engagements.” From Turin he went on, by way of Milan, Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Florence, where, after three days’ stay, “to dine with our Plenipo,” he continued his journey to Rome. Here, and at Naples, he passed the winter of 1765-’66, and prolonged his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well advanced. In the month of May he was again on his way home, through France, and had had a meeting, after two years’ separation from them, with his wife and daughter. His account of it to Hall Stevenson is curious: “Never man,” he writes, “has been such a wild-goose chase after his wife as I have been. After having sought her in five or six different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comté. Poor woman!” he adds, “she was very cordial, &c.” The &c. is charming. But her cordiality had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more impassioned sentiment, for she “begged to stay another year or so.” As to “my Lydia” — the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne’s having turned out of his road — she, he says, “pleases me much. I found her greatly improved in everything I wished her.” As to himself: “I am most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. ’Tis at least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these latter days, that I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony, notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy on that account.” The “fears” and the melancholy were, alas! to be justified, rather than the “good spirits;” and the shears of Atropos were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty months, upon that fragile thread of life.
[Footnote 1: It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the Sentimental Journey, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour (if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.]
By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy. He was writing, however, as it should seem, under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her husband — who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for her material comfort — was busy making provision for her to change her quarters to Chalons. He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty pounds, and begging him to make her all further advances that might be necessary. “I have,” he says, “such entire confidence in my wife that she spends as little as she can, thou
gh she is confined to no particular sum … and you may rely — in case she should draw for fifty or a hundred pounds extraordinary — that it and every demand shall be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole Shandian family are ready to stand security.” Later on, too, he writes that “a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me for six weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. Germain;” and he adds — in a tone the sincerity of which he would himself have probably found a difficulty in gauging— “if my wife should grow worse (having had a very poor account of her in my daughter’s last), I cannot think of her being without me; and, however expensive the journey would be, I would fly to Avignon to administer consolation to her and my poor girl.”
[Footnote 1: There can be few admirers of Sterne’s genius who would not gladly incline, whenever they find it possible, to Mr. Fitzgerald’s very indulgent estimate of his disposition. But this is only one of many instances in which the charity of the biographer appears to me to be, if the expression may be permitted, unconscionable. I can, at any rate, find no warrant whatever in the above passage for the too kindly suggestion that “Sterne was actually negotiating a journey to Paris as ‘bear-leader’ to a young nobleman (an odious office, to which he had special aversion), in order that he might with economy fly over to Avignon.”]
The necessity for this flight, however, did not arise. Better accounts of Mrs. Sterne arrived a few weeks later, and the husband’s consolations were not required.
Meanwhile the idyll of Captain Shandy’s love-making was gradually approaching completion; and there are signs to be met with — in the author’s correspondence, that is to say, and not in the work itself — that he was somewhat impatient to be done with it, at any rate for the time. “I shall publish,” he says, “late in this year; and the next I shall begin a new work of four volumes, which, when finished, I shall continue Tristram with fresh spirit.” The new work in four volumes (not destined to get beyond one) was, of course, the Sentimental Journey. His ninth volume of Tristram Shandy was finished by the end of the year, and at Christmas he came up to London, after his usual practice, to see to its publication and enjoy the honours of its reception. The book passed duly through the press, and in the last days of January was issued the announcement of its immediate appearance. Of the character of its welcome I can find no other evidence than that of Sterne himself, in a letter addressed to M. Panchaud some fortnight after the book appeared. “’Tis liked the best of all here;” but, with whatever accuracy this may have expressed the complimentary opinion of friends, or even the well-considered judgment of critics, one can hardly believe that it enjoyed anything like the vogue of the former volumes. Sterne, however, would be the less concerned for this, that his head was at the moment full of his new venture. “I am going,” he writes, “to publish A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. The undertaking is protected and highly encouraged by all our noblesse. ’Tis subscribed for at a great rate ‘twill be an original, in large quarto, the subscription half a guinea. If you (Panchaud) can procure me the honour of a few names of men of science or fashion, I shall thank you: they will appear in good company, as all the nobility here have honoured me with their names.” As was usual with him, however, he postponed commencing it until he should have returned to Coxwold; and, as was equally usual with him, he found it difficult to tear himself away from the delights of London. Moreover, there was in the present instance a special difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations with the history of Sterne’s literary work, it would be impossible, even in the most strictly critical and least general of biographies, to observe complete silence. I refer, of course, to the famous and furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper — the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza Letters. Of the affair itself but little need be said. I have already stated my own views on the general subject of Sterne’s love affairs; and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their innocence or otherwise in relation to this particular amourette. I will only say that were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean which must be found between Thackeray’s somewhat too harsh and Mr. Fitzgerald’s considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie, it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter’s extreme. This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an Indian “grass widow” was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage in Sterne’s life. On the best and most charitable view of it, the flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne’s age and profession; and when it is added that Yorick’s attentions to Eliza were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him, its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways.
Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 151