The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne

  Vain science! thou assists us in no case of this kind—and thou puzzlest us in every one.

  There was, Madam, in my uncle Toby,2 a singleness of heart which misled him so far out of the little serpentine tracks in which things of this nature usually go on; you can—you can have no conception of it: with this, there was a plainness and simplicity of thinking, with such an unmistrusting ignorance of the plies and foldings of the heart of woman;——and so naked and defenceless did he stand before you, (when a siege was out of his head) that you might have stood behind any one of your serpentine walks, and shot my uncle Toby ten times in a day, through his liver,3 if nine times in a day, Madam, had not served your purpose.

  With all this, Madam,—and what confounded every thing as much on the other hand, my uncle Toby had that unparalleled modesty of nature I once told you of, and which, by the bye, stood eternal sentry upon his feelings, that you might as soon ——But where am I going? these reflections croud in upon me ten pages at least too soon, and take up that time, which I ought to bestow upon facts.

  CHAP. XXX.

  OF the few legitimate sons of Adam, whose breasts never felt what the sting of love was,—(maintaining first, all mysogynists to be bastards)—the greatest heroes of ancient and modern story have carried off amongst them, nine parts in ten of the honour; and I wish for their sakes I had the key of my study out of my draw-well,1 only for five minutes, to tell you their names—recollect them I cannot—so be content to accept of these, for the present, in their stead.———

  There was the great king Aldrovandus, and Bosphorus, and Capadocius, and Dardanus, and Pontus, and Asius,——to say nothing of the iron-hearted Charles the XIIth, whom the Countess of K*****2 herself could make nothing of.——There was Babylonicus, and Mediterraneus, and Polixenes,3 and Persicus, and Prusicus, not one of whom (except Capadocius and Pontus, who were both a little suspected) ever once bowed down his breast to the goddess——The truth is, they had all of them something else to do—and so had my uncle Toby—till Fate— till Fate I say, envying his name the glory of being handed down to posterity with Aldrovandus’s and the rest,—she basely patched up the peace of Utrecht.4

  ——Believe me, Sirs, ’twas the worst deed she did that year.

  CHAP. XXXI.

  AMONGST the many ill consequences of the treaty of Utrecht, it was within a point of giving my uncle Toby a surfeit of sieges; and though he recovered his appetite afterwards, yet Calais itself left not a deeper scar in Mary’s heart,1 than Utrecht upon my uncle Toby’s. To the end of his life he never could hear Utrecht mentioned upon any account what-ever,—or so much as read an article of news extracted out of the Utrecht Gazette, without fetching a sigh, as if his heart would break in twain.

  My father, who was a great MOTIVE-MONGER, and consequently a very dangerous person for a man to sit by, either laughing or crying,—for he generally knew your motive for doing both, much better than you knew it yourself—would always console my uncle Toby upon these occasions, in a way, which she wed plainly, he imagined my uncle Toby grieved for nothing in the whole affair, so much as the loss of his hobby-horse.——Never mind, brother Toby, he would say,— by God’s blessing we shall have another war break out again some of these days; and when it does,—the belligerent powers, if they would hang themselves, cannot keep us out of play.—— I defy ’em, my dear Toby, he would add, to take countries without taking towns,——or towns without sieges.

  My uncle Toby never took this back-stroke of my father’s at his hobby horse kindly.——He thought the stroke ungenerous; and the more so, because in striking the horse, he hit the rider too, and in the most dishonourable part a blow could fall; so that upon these occasions, he always laid down his pipe upon the table with more fire to defend himself than common.

  I told the reader, this time two years, that my uncle Toby was not eloquent; and in the very same page gave an instance to the contrary:——I repeat the observation, and a fact which contradicts it again.—He was not eloquent,—it was not easy to my uncle Toby to make long harangues,—and he hated florid ones; but there were occasions where the stream overflowed the man, and ran so counter to its usual course, that in some parts my uncle Toby, for a time, was at least equal to Tertullus 2—— but in others, in my own opinion, infinitely above him.

  My father was so highly pleased with one of these apologetical orations of my uncle Toby’s, which he had delivered one evening before him and Yorick, that he wrote it down before he went to bed.

  I have had the good fortune to meet with it amongst my father’s papers, with here and there an insertion of his own, betwixt two crooks, thus [ ], and is endorsed,

  My brother TOBY’s justification of his own principles

  and conduct in wishing to continue the war.

  I may safely say, I have read over this apologetical oration of my uncle Toby’s a hundred times, and think it so fine a model of defence,—and she was so sweet a temperament of gallantry and good principles in him, that I give it the world, word for word, (interlineations and all) as I find it.

  CHAP. XXXII.

  My uncle TOBY’s apologetical oration.1

  I Am not insensible, brother Shandy, that when a man, whose profession is arms, wishes, as I have done, for war,—it has an ill aspect to the world;——and that, how just and right so ever his motives and intentions may be,—he stands in an uneasy posture in vindicating himself from private views in doing it.

  For this cause, if a soldier is a prudent man, which he may be, without being a jot the less brave, he will be sure not to utter his wish in the hearing of an enemy; for say what he will, an enemy will not believe him.——He will be cautious of doing it even to a friend,—lest he may suffer in his esteem:——But if his heart is overcharged, and a secret sigh for arms must have its vent, he will reserve it for the ear of a brother, who knows his character to the bottom, and what his true notions, dispositions, and principles of honour are: What, I hope, I have been in all these, brother Shandy, would be unbecoming in me to say: ——much worse, I know, have I been than I ought,—and something worse, perhaps, than I think: But such as I am, you, my dear brother Shandy, who have sucked the same breasts with me,—and with whom I have been brought up from my cradle,—and from whose knowlege, from the first hours of our boyish pastimes, down to this, I have concealed no one action of my life, and scarce a thought in it——Such as I am, brother, you must by this time know me, with all my vices, and with all my weaknesses too, whe ther of my age, my temper, my passions, or my understanding.

  Tell me then, my dear brother Shandy, upon which of them it is, that when I condemned the peace of Utrecht, and grieved the war was not carriedon with vigour a little longer, you should think your brother did it upon unworthy views; or that in wishing for war, he should be bad enough to wish more of his fellow creatures slain,—more slaves made, and more families driven from their peaceful habitations, merely for his own pleasure:——Tell me, brother Shandy, upon what one deed of mine do you ground it? [The devil a deed do I know of, dear Toby, but one for a hundred pounds, which I lent thee to carry on these cursed sieges.]

  If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat, but my heart beat with it—was it my fault?——Did I plant the propensity there?——did I sound the alarm within, or Nature?

  When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England2 were handed around the school,—were they not all purchased with my own pocket money? Was that selfish, brother Shandy? When we read over the siege of Troy, which lasted ten years and eight months,——though with suchatrainofartillery as we had at Namur, the town might have been carried in a week—was I not as much concerned for the destruction of the Greeks and Trojans as any boy of the whole school? Had I not three strokes of a ferula given me, two on my right hand and one on my left, for calling Helena a bitch for it? Did any one of you shed more tears for Hector? And when king Priam came to the camp to beg his body, and returned wee
ping back to Troy without it,3—you know, brother, I could not eat my dinner.———

  ——Did that bespeak me cruel? Or because, brother Shandy, my blood flew out into the camp, and my heart panted for war,—was it a proof it could not ache for the distresses of war too?

  O brother! ’tis one thing for a soldier to gather laurels,—and ’tis another to scatter cypress.——[Who told thee, my dear Toby, that cypress was used by the ancients on mournful occasions?]

  —– ’Tis one thing, brother Shandy, for a soldier to hazard his own life—to leap first down into the trench, where he is sure to be cut in pieces:——’Tis one thing, from public spirit and a thirst of glory, to enter the breach the first man,—to stand in the foremost rank, and march bravely on with drums and trumpets, and colours flying about his ears:——’Tis one thing, I say, brother Shandy, to do this—and ’tis another thing to reflect on the miseries of war;—to view the desolations of whole countries, and consider the intolerable fatigues and hardships which the soldier himself, the instrument who works them, is forced (for six-pence a day, if he can get it) to undergo.

  Need I be told, dear Yorick, as I was by you, in Le Fever’s funeral sermon, That so soft and gentle a creature, born to love, to mercy, and kindness, as man is, was not shaped for this?—— But why did you not add, Yorick,—if not by NATURE—that he is so by NECESSITY?——For what is war? what is it, Yorick, when fought as ours has been, upon principles of liberty, and upon principles of honour——what is it, but the getting together of quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious and the turbulent within bounds? And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I have taken in these things,—and that infinite delight, in particular, which has attended my sieges in my bowling green, has arose within me, and I hope in the corporal too, from the consciousness we both had, that in carrying them on, we were answering the great ends of our creation.

  CHAP. XXXIII.

  I Told the Christian reader——I say Christian——hoping he is one——and if he is not, I am sorry for it——and only beg he will consider the matter with himself, and not lay the blame entirely upon this book,———

  I told him, Sir——for in good truth, when a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy——which, for my own part, if I did not take heed to do more than at first, there is so much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it,—and so little service do the stars afford, which, nevertheless, I hang up in some of the darkest passages, knowing that the world is apt to lose its way, with all the lights the sun itself at noon day can give it——and now, you see, I am lost myself!———

  ——But ’tis my father’s fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambrick, running along the whole length of the web, and so untowardly, you cannot so much as cut out a **, (here I hang up a couple of lights again)——or a fillet,1 or a thumb-stall, but it is seen or felt.———

  Quanto id diligentius in liberis procreandis cavendum, sayeth Cardan.2 All which being considered, and that you see ’tis morally impracticable for me to wind this round to where I set out———

  I begin the chapter over again.

  CHAP. XXXIV.

  I Told the Christian reader in the beginning of the chapter which preceded my uncle Toby’s apologetical oration,— though in a different trope from what I shall make use of now, That the peace of Utrecht was within an ace of creating the same shyness betwixt my uncle Toby and his hobby-horse, as it did betwixt the queen and the rest of the confederating powers.

  There is an indignant way in which a man sometimes dismounts his horse, which as good as says to him, “I’ll go afoot, Sir, all the days of my life, before I would ride a single mile upon your back again.” Now my uncle Toby could not be said to dismount his horse in this manner; for in strictness of language, he could not be said to dismount his horse at all——his horse rather flung him——and somewhat viciously, which made my uncle Toby take it ten times more unkindly. Let this matter be settled by state jockies as they like.——It created, I say, a sort of shyness betwixt my uncle Toby and his hobby-horse.——He had no occasion for him from the month of March to November,1 which was the summer after the articles were signed, except it was now and then to take a short ride out, just to see that the fortifications and harbour of Dunkirk were demolished, according to stipulation.2

  The French were so backwards all that summer in setting about that affair, and Monsieur Tugghe, the deputy from the magistrates of Dunkirk, presented so many affecting petitions to the queen,—beseeching her majesty to cause only her thunderbolts to fall upon the martial works, which might have incurred her displeasure,—but to spare— to spare the mole,3 for the mole’s sake; which, in its naked situation, could be no more than an object of pity——and the queen (who was but a woman) being of a pitiful disposition,—and her ministers also, they not wishing in their hearts to have the town dismantled, for these private reasons, * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *;so that the whole went heavily on with my uncle Toby; insomuch, that it was not within three full months, after he and the corporal had constructed the town, and put it in a condition to be destroyed, that the several commandants, commissaries, deputies, negotiators, and intendants, would permit him to set about it.—— Fatal interval of inactivity!

  The corporal was for beginning the demolition, by making a breach in the ramparts, or main fortifications of the town—— No,—that will never do, corporal, said my uncle Toby, for in going that way to work with the town, the English garrison will not be safe in it an hour; because if the French are treacherous ——They are as treacherous as devils, an’ please your honour, said the corporal——It gives me concern always when I hear it, Trim, said my uncle Toby,—for they don’t want personal bravery; and if a breach is made in the ramparts, they may enter it, and make themselves masters of the place when they please: ——Let them enter it, said the corporal, lifting up his pioneer’s spade in both his hands, as if he was going to lay about him with it,—let them enter, an’ please your honour, if they dare. ——In cases like this, corporal, said my uncle Toby, slipping his right hand down to the middle of his cane, and holding it afterwards truncheon-wise, with his forefinger extended,—— ’tis no part of the consideration of a commandant, what the enemy dare,—or what they dare not do; he must act with prudence. We will begin with the outworks both towards the sea and the land, and particularly with fort Louis, the most distant of them all, and demolish it first,—and the rest, one by one, both on our right and left, as we retreat towards the town; ——then we’ll demolish the mole,—next fill up the harbour,— then retire into the citadel, and blow it up into the air; and having done that, corporal, we’ll embark for England.—— We are there, quoth the corporal, recollecting himself——Very true, said my uncle Toby—–looking at the church.

  CHAP. XXXV.

  A Delusive, delicious consultation or two of this kind, betwixt my uncle Toby and Trim, upon the demolition of Dunkirk,—for a moment rallied back the ideas of those pleasures, which were slipping from under him:——still—still all went on heavily——the magic left the mind the weaker—STILLNESS, with SILENCE at her back, entered the solitary parlour, and drew their gauzy mantle over my uncle Toby’s head;——and LISTLESSNESS, with her lax fibre and undirected eye, sat quietly down beside him in his arm chair.——No longer Amberg, and Rhinberg, and Limbourg, and Huy, and Bonn, in one year,— and the prospect of Landen, and Trerebach, and Drusen, and Dendermond, the next,—hurried on the blood:—Nolonger did saps, and mines, and blinds, and gabions, and palisadoes, keep out this fair enemy
of man’s repose:——No more could my uncle Toby, after passing the French lines, as he eat his egg at supper, from thence break into the heart of France,—cross over the Oyes, and with all Picardie open behind him, march up to the gates of Paris, and fall asleep with nothing but ideas of glory:——No more was he to dream, he had fixed the royal standard upon the tower of the Bastile, and awake with it streaming in his head.

  ——Softer visions,—gentler vibrations stole sweetly in upon his slumbers;—the trumpet of war fell out of his hands,—he took up the lute, sweet instrument! of all others the most delicate! the most difficult!——how wilt thou touch it, my dear uncle Toby?

  CHAP. XXXVI.

  NOW, because I have once or twice said, in my inconsiderate way of talking, That I was confident the following memoirs of my uncle Toby’s courtship of widow Wadman, whenever I got time to write them, would turn out one of the most compleat systems, both of the elementary and practical part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed to the world——are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set out with a description of what love is?1 whether part God and part Devil, as Plotinus will have it——