The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Penguin Classics)

by Laurence Sterne

  2. uncritical: OED defines this usage of ‘uncritical’ as ‘not critical; lacking in judgment’; more likely, the word here refers to the crisis or turning-point of a disease, although the passage’s precise meaning remains obscure.

  3. serous or globular: Blood was considered separable into two parts, the more glutinous and solid, called the ‘globular’, and the more thin and fluid, called the ‘serous’.

  4. GENTLE… life: In his preface, Cervantes calls his work ‘the Child of Disturbance, engendered in some dismal Prison, where Wretchedness keeps its Residence, and every dismal Sound its Habitation’. In the account of Cervantes prefixed to the Motteux-Ozell translation, Sterne could discover that he lost his hand at the battle of Lepanto. Near the end of Don Quixote (II.III.45) Cervantes invokes the Sun, ‘by whose assistance Man begets Man, on thee I call for help! Inspire me, I beseech thee, warm and illumine my gloomy Imagination, that my Narration may keep pace with the Great Sancho Pança’s Actions…’

  5. cunning… Italy: Sterne was in Italy from November 1765 to May 1766; see Cash, LY, ch. 6. The anecdote told here was reported in the St James Chronicle (14–17 June 1766) as having actually happened to Sterne, the perpetrator being a pregnant laundress who thought the laps would make comfortable ‘head cloathes’ for her baby, and perhaps inspire it with ‘Wit and Humour’. One suspects, however, a more bawdy meaning in Sterne’s rendition, given the italicized fore and out, a meaning clarified in this bit of eighteenth-century verse: ‘For now tormented sore with scalding Heat / Of Urine, dread fore-runner of a Clap! / With Eye repentant, he surveys his Shirt / Diversify’d with Spots of yellow Hue, / Sad Symptom of ten Thousand Woes to come!’

  6. Sienna…Capua: Capua, just north of Naples, on the road to Rome; Raddicoffini (Radicofani), site of a famous castle seventy miles north of Rome; Sienna, forty miles farther north, on the road to Florence. Pauls: paolo, obsolete Italian coin.

  7. keeps his temper: Sterne’s comments here are directed at Smollett, whose account of his own European tour, Travels through France and Italy (1766), is a target in ASJ as well, where he is characterized as Smelfungus: ‘he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted—He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.’ Typically, Smollett said of Sienna that they were lodged in a ‘house that stunk like a privy’.

  8. voitures: Carriages.

  9. ’Tis Maria: In ASJ, Yorick feels compelled to visit the poor Maria, whom ‘my friend, Mr. Shandy, met with near Moulines’. It is possible that Sterne used the scene to ‘advertise’ ASJ, certainly in his thoughts during the composition of Volume IX. Maria, by herself, or with Yorick (Tristram), was the single subject of Sterne’s fiction most often illustrated by artists in the next century.

  10. I would… live: Cf. Sterne’s letter to Elizabeth Montagu in 1764: ‘Would Apollo… had planted me within a League of Mrs Mountague this Summer, I could have taken my horse & gone & fetch’d Wit & Wisdome as I wanted them—as for nonsense—I am pretty well provided myself both by nature & Travel.’

  CHAPTER XXV

  1. foam… his horse: Pliny (Natural History) tells of the painter Protogenes (fourth century BC), who created foam on a dog’s mouth by throwing his sponge, and then adds that Nealces (fl. 245 BC), another Greek painter, did the same to represent a horse’s foam. The story appears often in literature as an illustration of chance, but why Sterne assigns it to Zeuxis, another celebrated fourth-century Greek painter, is unknown.

  2. Gargantua’s shepherds: In Rabelais, I.25, we are offered some forty such ‘unsavory appellations’, from which Sterne selects his small handful.

  3. Spanish proverb: Several proverbs can be suggested, none definitively. Sancho Pança offers ‘a buen entendedor, pocas palabras’ (II.III.37), which may be idiomatically translated as the proverbial ‘A word to the wise is enough.’ Another proverb, ‘A shut mouth catches no flies’, was known in England as a ‘Spanish proverb’. Work (633, n. 1) offers Lope de Vega’s ‘Brief words are a sign of love’; and Ian Campbell Ross, in his annotation for the Oxford edition of Tristram Shandy (1983), offers yet another suggestion, from Calderón: ‘En las venturas de amor / dice maás el que más calla’ (In affairs of love, the less said the better).

  4. condemnation… making it: Cf. ASJ, where Yorick condemns the French practice of ‘making love by sentiments’ and comments: ‘I should as soon think of making a genteel suit of cloaths out of remnants…’ ‘Real presence’ here refers to the Roman Catholic doctrine that the body and blood, soul and divinity, of Christ are really and substantially present in the Eucharist, a doctrine held to be ‘repugnant to the plain words of Scripture’ in article 28 of the Thirty-Nine Articles.

  5. black-pudding: A sausage made of blood and suet, and sometimes meat.

  6. They are written… Book: The Solemnization of Matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer lists three reasons: ‘First, it was ordained for the procreation of children.… Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continency, might marry… Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other…’

  7. they are… comforts: Proverbial.

  8. allons: Let’s go!

  CHAPTER XXVI

  1. the Corporation: Self-governing body of York, which received ratification in 1212.

  2. She had… muscles: Tristram borrows most of his authorities from Chambers; the footnote, typically enough, parodies the appearance of learning in the text. James Drake (1667–1707) wrote Anthropologia Nova, or a New System of Anatomy, Thomas Wharton (1614–73) discussed the nature of the brain in his Adenographia and Regnier de Graaf (1641–73), Dutch physician, wrote, according to Chambers, on ‘the pancreatic juice, and the parts of generation’, precisely as the editor’s ‘correction’ of ‘Mr. Shandy’ indicates.

  3. critick in keeping: Cf. Pope’s comment, in a letter of 1704 to Wycherley, that ‘no Beggar is so poor but he can keep a Cur, and no Author is so beggarly but he can keep a Critic’. Sterne may also be thinking of ‘critics’ (i.e. the stable of hacks) kept by publishing houses; cf. ‘keeping a mistress’.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  1. Maes… Sambre: Cf. n. 1 to II.i.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  1. IT was… morning: Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, I.iii.84–7: ‘O, how this spring of love resembleth / The uncertain glory of an April day, / Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, / And by and by a cloud takes all away.’

  2. quart major to a terce: In piquet, a quart-major is the sequence of ace, king, queen and knave, while a terce is simply any three successive cards in one suit. The phrase implies considerable superiority.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  1. Take a full sheet: Cf. Sterne’s sermon 5, a charity sermon: ‘let any number of us here imagine ourselves at this instant engaged in drawing the most perfect and amiable character… I appeal to your own thoughts, whether the first idea which offered itself to most of our imaginations, would not be that of a compassionate benefactor…’ And cf. sermon 3 (‘Philanthropy recommended’): ‘I think there needs no stronger argument to prove how universally and deeply the seeds of… compassion are planted in the heart of man, than… that from the general propensity to pity the unfortunate, we express that sensation by the word humanity, as if it was inseparable from our nature. That it is not inseparable, I have allowed in the former part of this discourse…’The source of the second passage is Sterne’s favourite sermon-writer, John Tillotson.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  1. CHAP. XXXIII: Sterne borrows his discussion of human sexuality from Pierre Charron’s Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (1612), first noted by Françoise Pellan, ‘Laurence Sterne’s Indebtedness to Charron’, MLR 67 (1972). Charron attempts to systematize the writings of his master, Montaigne, but Sterne is clearly reading Of Wisdome and not Montaigne at this point; the passage is so cent
ral to the meaning of TS that it must be recorded at length:

  Carnell Love is a fever and furious passion, and very dangerous unto him that suffereth himselfe to be carried by it… As it is naturall, so is it violent and common to all, and therefore in the action thereof it equalleth and coupleth fooles and wise men, men and beasts together. It maketh all the wisdome, resolution, contemplation & operation of the soule beastly and brutish…

  Philosophie speaketh freely of all things… [A]ll the motion of the world resolveth and yeeldeth to this copulation of the male and female: on the other side it causeth us to accuse, to hide our selves, to blush for shame, as if it were a thing ignominious and dishonest. We call it a shamefull act, and the parts that serve thereunto our shamefull parts. But why shamefull, since naturall…

  This action then in itselfe, and simply taken, is neither shamefull nor vitious, since it is naturall and corporall…: yea, if it be well ordered, it is just, profitable, necessarie, at the least, as it is to eat and drinke.

  The first point and proofe of the miserie of man is his birth; his entrance into the world is shamefull, vile, base, contemptible; his departure, his death, ruine, glorious and honorable: whereby it seemeth that he is a monster and against nature, since there is shame in making him, honor in destroying him… The action of planting and making man is shamefull, and all the parts thereof, the congredients, the preparations, the instruments, and whatsoever serves thereunto is called and accounted shamefull, and there is nothing more uncleane in the whole nature of man. The action of destroying and killing him honourable, and that which serves thereunto glorious: we gild it, we inrich it, we adorne our selves with it, we carrie it by our sides, in our hands, upon our shoulders… When we goe about to make a man, we hide our selves, we put out the candle, we do it by stealth. It is a glorie and a pompe to unmake a man, to kill him…

  Perhaps no other borrowing by Sterne in TS encompasses more of the meaning of his work than this.

  2. Prolepsis: Figure in rhetoric by which one anticipates or prevents objections.

  3. Diogenes and Plato: Such sentiments abound in Plato’s writings, but why Sterne chose Diogenes (see n. 1 to I.xxiv) is unclear; perhaps his answer to the question of when to marry stuck in his mind: ‘For a young man not yet: for an old man never at all.’

  4. recalcitrate: OED cites this passage as its first illustration: ‘to show strong objection or repugnance’.

  5. congredients: Component parts, ingredients.

  6. great tythes: Church revenues derived from major produce of the soil – corn, hay, wood, and fruit. An ‘impropriator’ was a layman in possession of those revenues; Sterne implies that possession entailed obligations, such as keeping the town bull.

  7. as hairy as I am: Charles Parish, ‘The Shandy Bull Vindicated’, MLQ 31 (1970), argues that this sentence convinces Walter that Obadiah’s child was sired by the bull and hence that the bull can be cleared of the charge of impotence. The implication of bestiality is tied to a similar suggestion in V.iii, where Obadiah is accused of siring a mule; it is reinforced by the allusion to Europa, who was carried away by Zeus after he had taken the form of a bull.

  The argument is based, however, on the assumption that hairiness is a sign of full-term birth, when in fact it is more often associated with pre-term birth – i.e. the lanugo covering which comes in the fifth month and disappears before the ninth. Walter’s response, then, may indicate relief that Obadiah’s wife has ‘come before her time’ and that the bull may yet prove potent.

  8. Doctors Commons: Area near St Paul’s where ecclesiastical courts heard various civil cases, including divorces.

  9. A COCK and a BULL: Story without direction, rambling, idle, often incredible; the term was associated with both prose and verse satire, and with tales of a tub or a roasted horse (and the French coq-à-l’âne); see Wayne C. Booth, ‘Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?’, MP 48 (1951). That Sterne ends TS with a bawdy revivification of a proverbial expression is particularly characteristic.

  *The Romish Rituals4 direct the baptizing of the child, in cases of danger, before it is born;—but upon this proviso, That some part or other of the child’s body be seen by the baptizer:——But the Doctors of the Sorbonne, by a deliberation held amongst them, April 10, 1733,—have enlarged the powers of the midwives, by determining, That tho’ no part of the child’s body should appear,——that baptism shall, nevertheless, be administered to it by injection,—par le moyen d’une petite Canulle.—Anglicé, a squirt.——’Tis very strange that St. Thomas Aquinas, who had so good a mechanical head, both for tying and untying the knots of school-divinity,—should, after so much pains bestowed upon this,—give up the point at last, as a second La chose impossible ;—“Infantes in maternis uteris existentes (quoth St. Thomas) baptizari possunt nullo modo.”—O Thomas! Thomas!

  If the reader has the curiosity to see the question upon baptism, by injection, as presented to the Doctors of the Sorbonne,—with their consultation thereupon, it is as follows.

  *Vide Deventer. Paris Edit. 4to. 1734, p. 366.

  * Pentagraph, an instrument to copy prints and pictures mechanically, and in any proportion.

  * The author is here twice mistaken;—for Litbopcedus should be wrote thus, Litbopcedii Senonensis Icon. The second mistake is, that this Litbopcedus is not an author, but a drawing of a petrified child. The account of this, published by Albosius, 1580, may be seen at the end of Cordceus’s works in Spacbius. Mr. Tristram Shandy has been led into this error, either from seeing Litbopcedus’s name of late in a catalogue of learned writers in Dr. —— or by mistaking Litbopcedus for Trinecavellius— fr om the too great similitude of the names.

  * Vid. Vol. II. p. 159. (Page 128 in present volume.)

  * Vid. Locke.

  * Page 91 in the present edition.

  * As Hafen Slawkenbergius de Nasis is extremely scarce, it may not be unacceptable to the learned reader to see the specimen of a few pages of his original; I will make no reflection upon it, but that his story-telling Latin is much more concise than his philosophic—and, I think, has more of Latinity in it.

  * Hafen Slawkenbergius means the Benedictine nuns of Cluny, founded in the year 940, by Odo, abbé de Cluny.

  * Mr. Shandy’s compliments to orators—is very sensible that Slawken-bergius has here changed his metaphor—which he is very guilty of;—that as a translator, Mr. Shandy has all along done what he could to make him stick to it—but that here ’t was impossible.

  *Nonnulli ex nostratibus eadem loquendi formulaâ utun. Quinimo et Legistæ & Canonistæ—Vid. Parce Bar & Jas in d. L. Provincial. Constitut. de conjec. vid. Vol. Lib. 4. Titul. 1. N. 7. quà etiam in re conspir. Om. de Promontorio Nas. Tichmak. ff. d. tit. 3. fol. 189. passim. Vid. Glos. de contrahend. empt. &c. nec non J. Scrudr. in cap. §. refut. ff. per totum. cum his cons. Rever. J. Tubal, Sentent. & Prov. cap. 9. ff. 11, 12. obiter. V. et Librum, cui Tit. de Terris & Phras. Belg. ad finem, cum Comment. N. Bardy Belg. Vid. Scrip. Argentoratens. de Antiq. Ecc. in Episc. Archiv. fid. coll. per Von Jacobum Koinshoven Folio Argent. 1583, præcip. ad finem. Quibus add. Rebuff in L. obvenire de Signif. Nom. ff. fol. & de Jure, Gent. & Civil. de prohib. aliena feud. per federa, test. Joha. Luxius in prolegom. quem velim videas, de Analy. Cap. 1, 2, 3. Vid. Idea.35

  *Hæc mira, satisque horrenda. 5 Planetarum coitio sub Scorpio Asterismo in nonâ cæli statione, quam Arabes religioni deputabant effecit Martinum Lutherum sacrilegum hereticum, christianæ religiosinis hostem acerrimum atque prophanum, ex horoscopi directione ad Martis coitum, religiosissimus obiit, ejus Anima scelestissima ad infernos navigavit—ab Alecto, Tisiphone et Megera flagellis igneis cruciata perenniter.

  —Lucas Gauricus in Tractatu astrologico de præteritis multorum hominum accidentibus per genituras examinatis.

  *Ce Fœtus n’etoit pas plus grand que la paúme de la main; mais son pere l’ayant éxaminè en qualité de Mádecin, & ayant trouvé que c’etoit quelque chose de plus qu’un Embryon, le fit transporter tout vivant à
Rapallo, ou il le fit voir àJeràme Bardi & àd’autres Medecins du lieu. On trouva qu’il ne lui manquoit rien d’essentiel a la vie; & son pere pour faire voir un essai de son expérience, entreprit d’achever l’ouvrage de la Nature, & de travailler a la formation de l’Enfant avec le même artifice que celui dont on se sert pour faire éclorre les Poulets en Egypte. Il instruisit une Nourrisse de tout ce qu’elle avoit à faire, & ayant fait mettre son fils dans un four proprement accommodè, il reussit à l’élever et a lui faire prendre ses accroissemens necessaires, par l’uni-formité d’une chaleur étrangeáre mesureáe eáxactement sur les deágreás d’un Ther-momeátre, ou d’un autre instrument équivalent. (Vide Mich. Giustinian, ne gli Scritt. Liguri aá Cart. 223. 488.)

  On auroit toujours été très-satisfait de l’industrie d’un Pere si experimenteá dans l’Art de la Generation, quand il n’auroit pû prolonger la vie a son fils que pour quelques mois, ou pour peu d’anneáes.

  Mais quand on se represente que l’Enfant a vecu pres de quatre-vingts ans, & que il a composeá quatre-vingts Ouvrages differents tous fruits d’une longue lecture,—il faut convenir que tout ce qui est incroyable n’est pas toujours faux, & que la Vraisemblance n’est pas toujours du coteá de la Veritè.