Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  Having borne the pain of it for three months together, he resolved to extricate himself.

  He was one morning lying upon his back in his bed, the wound upon his groin allowing him to lie in no other position, when a thought came into his head, that if he could have pasted upon a board a large map of the citadel of Namur and its environs, it might be a means of giving him ease. I note his desire to have the environs along with the citadel, because my uncle Toby’s wound was got in one of the traverses, about a hundred yards from the angle of the trench opposite the demi-bastion of St. Roch: – so that he was pretty confident he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where the stone struck him.

  All this was fulfilled, and not only freed him from a world of sad explanations, but proved the happy means, as you will read, of providing my uncle Toby with his Hobby-Horse.

  CHAPTER 2

  There is nothing so foolish, when you are making an entertainment of this kind, as to let your critics run it down. Nor is there anything so likely to make them do it, as leaving them out of the party, or bestowing your attention upon the rest of your guests, and ignoring the critics at your table.

  – I guard against both; for, in the first place, I have left half a dozen places purposely open for them; and in the next place, I pay them all court.

  – Gentlemen, I kiss your hands; no company could give me half the pleasure, – by my soul I am glad to see you. – Sit down, and fall on heartily.

  I said I had left six places, and I was about to have left a seventh open for them; but being told by a Critic that I had acquitted myself well enough, I shall fill it up directly, and make more room next year.

  ‘How, in the name of wonder! could your uncle Toby, a military man, whom you have represented as no fool, be such a confused, pudding-headed, muddle-brained fellow, as–’

  Go look.

  So, Sir Critic, I could have replied; but I scorn it. ’Tis uncivil language, only fit for a man who cannot give clear accounts of things, or dive deep enough into the causes of human ignorance. It is moreover the reply valiant – and therefore I reject it: for though it might have suited my uncle Toby’s character as a soldier excellently well, (had he not accustomed himself, in such attacks, to whistle Lillabullero,) yet it would not do for me.

  You see plainly, that I write as a man of learning; – that even my similes, my allusions, my metaphors, are erudite, – and that I must sustain my character properly, or what would become of me? Why, Sir, I should be undone; at the very moment that I filled up one place against a critic, I should have made an opening for a couple more.

  Therefore I answer thus:

  Pray, Sir, did you ever read Locke’s Essay upon the Human Understanding? – Don’t answer me rashly – because many, I know, quote the book, who have not read it – and many have read it who do not understand it. If either of these is your case, I will tell you in three words what the book is. It is a history.

  – A history! of who? what? where? when?

  It is a history-book, Sir, of what passes in a man’s own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle.

  But this is by the way.

  Now if you will venture to go along with me, and look into the bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of confusion in a man’s mind is threefold.

  Dull organs, dear Sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight impressions made by the objects. And thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what it has received.

  Call down Dolly your chambermaid, and I will make this matter so plain that Dolly herself should understand it. When Dolly has written her letter to Robin, and has thrust her arm into her pocket;– recollect that the organs of perception can by nothing in this world, be so aptly explained as by that thing which Dolly’s hand is in search of: – an inch, Sir, of red sealing-wax.

  When this is melted, and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles too long for her thimble, the wax will be too hard, and it will not receive the thimble’s mark. Very well. If Dolly’s wax is too soft, – though it may take the impression, it will not hold it; and last of all, supposing the wax good, and also the thimble, but applied too hastily – in any of these three cases, the print left by the thimble will not be true.

  Now you must understand that not one of these was the cause of the confusion in my uncle Toby’s discourse; and it is for that very reason I enlarge upon them for so long, – to show the world what it did not arise from.

  What it did arise from, I have hinted above, is the unsteady uses of words, which have perplexed the clearest understandings.

  If you have ever read the literary histories of past ages; – what terrible battles of words they have perpetuated, with so much gall and ink shed that a good-natured man cannot read them without tears in his eyes – gentle critic! when thou hast considered all this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle Toby’s perplexities. Thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp; his glacis and his covered way; his ravelin and his half-moon. His life was put in jeopardy not by ideas, but by words.

  CHAPTER 3

  When my uncle Toby got his map of Namur, he began immediately to study it diligently; for since his recovery depended upon the passions of his mind, he needed to make himself master of his subject, so as to be able to talk of it without emotion.

  In a fortnight’s close application, which, by the bye, did my uncle Toby’s wound upon his groin no good, – he was able, with the help of Gobesius’s military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from the Flemish, to form his discourse with passable clarity; and after two months, he was right eloquent upon it, and could not only attack the advanced counterscarp, but was able to cross the Maes and Sambre, make diversions as far as Vauban’s line, and give his visitors as distinct a history of these attacks, as of that of the gate of St. Nicolas, where he had received his wound.

  But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!

  The more he drank of this sweet fountain of science, the greater was his thirst, so that before the first year of his confinement had ended, there was scarce a fortified town in Italy or Flanders of which he had not procured a plan, carefully collecting the histories of their sieges, their demolitions, and their improvements, which he would read with such intense delight that he would forget himself, his wound, his confinement and his dinner.

  In the second year my uncle Toby purchased Ramelli and Cataneo, translated from the Italian; Stevinus, Moralis, the Chevalier de Ville, Lorini, Cochorn, Sheeter, the Count de Pagan, the Marshal Vauban, and Monsignor Blondel, with almost as many books of military architecture as Don Quixote had of chivalry in his library.

  Towards the beginning of the third year, in 1699, my uncle Toby found it necessary to understand a little of projectiles. He began with Tartaglia, the first man who detected that a cannon-ball could not do its mischief along a right line. – This Tartaglia proved to be impossible.

  – Endless is the search of Truth.

  No sooner was my uncle Toby satisfied which road the cannon-ball did not go, but he resolved to find out which road the ball did go. For this purpose he was obliged to set off afresh with old Maltus, and studied him devoutly. Next came Galileo and Torricellius, wherein, by certain Geometrical rules, he found the precise part to be a Parabola – or else an Hyperbola – and that the parameter of the conic section of the said path was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct ratio as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence formed by the breech upon an horizontal plane; and that the semiparameter–

  Stop! my dear uncle Toby – stop! Go not one foot farther into this thorny and bewildered track! intricate are the mazes of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom Knowledge will bring upon thee. O my uncle – fly, fly from it as from a serpent.
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  Is it fit that thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings? Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms – evaporate thy spirits – waste thy strength – impair thy health – and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age. – O my uncle! my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 4

  Any writer understands this, – that the best narrative in the world, tacked too close to the last spirited appeal to my uncle Toby, would have felt cold and vapid; therefore I ended the chapter, though I was in the middle of my story.

  Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we think it more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty. This is to be understood with a grain of salt; but as the parallel is made more for the sake of letting the last chapter cool, than anything else, it does not matter greatly whether the reader approves of it or not.

  In the latter end of the third year, my uncle Toby, seeing that the parameter and semiparameter of the conic section angered his wound, left off the study of projectiles in a kind of a huff, and kept to the practical part of fortification only; the pleasure of which, like a spring held back, returned upon him with redoubled force.

  It was in this year that my uncle began to cease to wear a clean shirt daily, – to dismiss his barber unshaven, and to allow his surgeon scarce time enough to dress his wound: lo! all of a sudden, he began to sigh heavily for his recovery, – complained to my father, and grew impatient with the surgeon. One morning, as he heard him coming up stairs, he shut his books, in order to expostulate with him. He dwelt long upon the miseries he had undergone in the last four melancholy years; – adding, that had it not been for his brother’s kindness, he would have sunk under his misfortunes.

  My father was nearby: my uncle Toby’s unexpected eloquence brought tears into his eyes. The surgeon was confounded; in the four years he had attended him, my uncle Toby had never dropped one fretful word; – he had been all submission. So the surgeon was astonished when he heard my uncle peremptorily insist upon his healing the wound directly, or sending for the king’s surgeon to do it for him.

  Mu uncle Toby had a desire of life and health in common with his species; but I have told you before, that nothing affected our family the common way; and from the manner in which this eager desire now showed itself, the penetrating reader will suspect there was some other cause for it in my uncle’s head.

  ’Tis the subject of the next chapter to set forth what that cause was. When that’s done, ’twill be time to return to the parlour fire-side, where we left my uncle Toby in the middle of his sentence.

  CHAPTER 5

  When a man gives himself up to a ruling passion, – or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows headstrong – farewell cool reason!

  My uncle Toby’s wound was nearly well, and the surgeon told him that if no fresh exfoliation happened, it would be dried up in five or six weeks.

  But my uncle Toby now broiled with impatience to carry out his plan; this seemed too long – and so, without consulting with anyone, which, by the bye, I think is right, if you are determined to take no one’s advice, – he privately ordered Trim, his servant, to pack lint and dressings, and hire a carriage to be at the door by twelve o’clock that day. Leaving a banknote upon the table for the surgeon’s care, and a letter of tender thanks for his brother’s, he packed up his maps, his books of fortification, &c., and by the help of a crutch on one side, and Trim on the other, my uncle Toby embarked for Shandy-Hall. The reason was as follows:

  The night before this change happened, my uncle Toby was sitting at his table with his maps, &c., crowded about him; – in reaching for his tobacco-box, he accidentally threw down his compasses, and in stooping to take the compasses up, he knocked over his case of instruments; and in trying to catch the case, he thrust Monsieur Blondel’s volume off the table, and Count de Pagan o’top of him.

  My uncle Toby rung his bell for his man Trim.

  ‘Trim,’ quoth he, ‘see what confusion I have been making – I must have a better table, Trim. Can’st thou order me one twice as big?’

  ‘Yes, your Honour,’ replied Trim; ‘but I hope your Honour will be soon be well enough to get down to your country-seat, where we could manage this matter to a T.’

  I must here inform you that this servant, who went by the name of Trim, had been a corporal in my uncle’s company. His real name was James Butler, but having got the nick-name of Trim in the regiment, my uncle Toby, unless he happened to be very angry with him, would never call him by any other name.

  The poor fellow had been disabled by a wound on his left knee with a musket-bullet, at the battle of Landen, two years before the siege of Namur; and as he was well-beloved in the regiment, and handy into the bargain, my uncle Toby took him for his servant; and of excellent use he was, as a valet, groom, barber, cook, tailor, and nurse; and served him with great fidelity and affection.

  My uncle Toby loved him in return, all the more because of the similitude of their knowledge. – For Corporal Trim, after four years’ attention to his master’s talk upon fortified towns, had become proficient in the science; and was thought by the cook and chamber-maid to know as much about strongholds as my uncle himself.

  I have but one more stroke to give to finish Corporal Trim’s character, and it is the only dark line in it. The fellow loved to hear himself talk. Set his tongue a-going, and you had no hold of him – he was voluble; though so respectful that you could not be angry. My uncle Toby loved him not just as a faithful servant, but as a humble friend; he could not bear to stop his mouth.

  ‘If I durst presume,’ continued Trim, ‘to advise your Honour?’

  ‘Thou art welcome, Trim,’ quoth my uncle: ‘speak without fear.’

  ‘Why then,’ replied Trim, standing as erect as if on parade, ‘I think,’ quoth he, advancing his left leg, and pointing with his right hand towards a map of Dunkirk, which was pinned on the wall, – ‘I think, with humble submission to your judgment, that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and horn-works, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country, and had a quarter-acre or so to do what we pleased with. Your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography–’(‘Call it ichnography,’ quoth my uncle) ‘of the town or citadel, and I will be shot by your Honour upon the glacis, if I did not fortify it to your Honour’s liking.’

  ‘I dare say thou would’st, Trim,’ quoth my uncle.

  ‘For if your Honour,’ continued the Corporal, ‘could but mark me the polygon, with its exact lines and angles, I would begin digging the fossé, and if your Honour could tell me the proper depth and breadth, I would throw out the earth for the scarp and counterscarp accordingly.’

  ‘Very right, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘And when I had sloped them to your mind, and faced the glacis with sods, as the finest fortifications are done in Flanders, I would make the walls and parapets with sods too.’

  ‘The best engineers call them gazons, Trim,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Gazons or sods,’ replied Trim, ‘your Honour knows they are ten times better than a facing of brick or stone.’

  ‘They are,’ quoth my uncle Toby, nodding; ‘for a cannon-ball enters the gazon without bringing any rubbish down, which might fill the fossé and allow the passage over it.’

  ‘Your Honour understands these matters;’ replied Corporal Trim, ‘but if we went into the country, I would work under your Honour’s directions like a horse, and make fortifications, batteries, saps, ditches, and palisadoes, that it should be worth riding twenty miles to see.’

  My uncle Toby blushed with joy; he was fired with Corporal Trim’s description.

  ‘Trim!’ he said, ‘Enough.’

  ‘We might begin the campaign,’ continued Trim, ‘on the very day that the Allies take the field, and demolish them town by town as fast as–’
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  ‘Trim,’ quoth my uncle, ‘say no more.’

  ‘Your Honour might sit in your arm-chair, giving me orders, and I would–’

  ‘Say no more, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘Your Honour would get pleasure, good air, and good health, and your Honour’s wound would be well in a month.’

  ‘Thou hast said enough, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby; ‘I like thy project mightily.’

  ‘And if your Honour pleases, I’ll this moment go and buy a spade, and a shovel and a pick-axe, and a couple of–’

  ‘Say no more, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby, quite overcome with rapture, and thrusting a guinea into Trim’s hand: ‘say no more; but go down, and bring up my supper.’

  Trim ran down and brought up his master’s supper; – yet the plan ran so in my uncle Toby’s head, that he could not taste it.

  ‘Trim,’ quoth my uncle, ‘get me to bed.’ But Trim’s description had so fired his imagination, that he could not shut his eyes. The more he considered it, the more bewitching the idea appeared; so that, two hours before day-light, he had decided on the whole plan of his and Corporal Trim’s decampment.

  My uncle Toby had a little neat country-house, in the village near my father’s estate at Shandy Hall. Behind his house was a kitchen-garden of about half an acre; and at the bottom of the garden, and cut off from it by a tall yew hedge, was a bowling-green of about a quarter-acre: so as soon as Corporal Trim uttered the words, ‘a quarter-acre,’ this bowling-green instantly became painted upon my uncle Toby’s fancy.

  Never did lover hasten to a beloved mistress with more heat and expectation than my uncle Toby did, to enjoy this thing in private. As well as being sheltered from the house by a tall yew hedge, it was screened on the other three sides by holly and flowering shrubs: so that the idea of privacy added to my uncle’s Toby’s pleasure.

  Vain thought! however private it might seem – to think, dear uncle Toby, of enjoying a thing which took up a quarter-acre of ground, – and not have it known!