Chapter VI: Part 6

Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote in large letters, LAU. STERNE. The usher whipped him severely, but, says the _Memoir_, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before me, that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at York next took charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and afterwards the Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this patron we shall probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his uncle wished him to write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he detested such "dirty work," and got his uncle's hatred in return for his independence. According to the writer of the _Yorkshire Anecdotes_, the two fell out over a woman--which sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, Laurence had been successfully courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York, and, during her absence, had been writing those love-letters which his daughter published after the death of her parents, to the immense increase of sentimentalism throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though honestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use of select passages at a later date, as we have seen. Miss Lumley became Mrs. Sterne in due time, and brought to her husband a modest jointure, and another living at Stillington, so that he was now a pluralist, although far from rich. The marriage was not particularly happy. Madam, one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and unreasonable, her reverend spouse was volatile and pleasure-loving; and when, in the years of Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she decided to stay there with her daughter. Sterne seems to have been fond of her always, in a way, and in money matters was never anything but generous and tactfully considerate. A bad-hearted man is not so thoughtful of his wife's comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters show him to have been; and even Thackeray admits that his affection for the girl was "artless, kind, affectionate, and _not_ sentimental."

But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only woman at whose feet the parson of Sutton and Stillington was sighing. There was that Mlle. de Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear, dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as she becomes in _Tristram Shandy_), to whom he sends presents of wine and honey (with notes asking, "What is honey to the sweetness of thee?"), and who followed him to London in the heyday of his fame, where somehow she fades mysteriously out of view. "I myself must ever have some Dulcinea in my head," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And, in truth, the soul of Yorick was mewed in the cage of his breast very near his heart, and never stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere. Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his love of woman had a curious and childlike way of fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour. Most famous of all was his passion--it seems almost to have been a passion in this case--for the famous "Eliza." Towards the end of his life he had become warmly attached to a certain William James, a retired Indian commodore, and his wife, who were the best and most wholesome of his friends. At their London home he met Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, and soon became romantically attached to her. When the time drew near for her to sail to India to rejoin her husband, he wrote a succession of notes in a kind of paroxysm of grief for himself and anxiety for her, and for several months afterwards he kept a journal of his emotions for her benefit some day. He was dead in less than a year. The letters she kept, and in due time printed, because it was rumoured that Lydia was to publish them from copies--a pretty bit of wrangling among all these women there was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick! The _Journal_ is now for the first time included in the author's works--a singular document, as eccentric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment is hard to define, a wild and hysterical record. But it rings true on the whole, and confirms the belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, however short-lived they may have been. The last letter to Eliza is pitiful with its tale of a broken body and a sick heart: "In ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India handkerchiefs with it.--It came, I think, from my heart! I fell asleep through weakness. At six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steeped in tears." All through the _Journal_ that follows are indications of wasted health and of the perplexities of life that were closing in upon him. Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten, and we get a picture of serener moments. One day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and it may not be amiss to copy out his note just as he penned it:

But I am in the Vale of Coxwould & wish You saw in how princely a
manner I live in it--tis a Land of Plenty--I sit down alone to
Venison, fish or wild fowl--or a couple of fowls--with curds, and
strawberrys & cream, (and all the simple clean plenty w^{ch.} a
rich Vally can produce)--with a Bottle of wine on my right hand
(as in Bond street) to drink y^{r.} health--I have a hundred hens
& chickens [he sometimes spelt it _chickings_] ab^{t.} my yard--and
not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit or a Trout--but he brings
it as an offering--In short tis a golden Vally--& will be the
golden Age when You govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the
Mistress of my table & spread it with elegancy and that natural
grace & bounty w^{th.} w^{ch.} heaven has distinguish'd You...

--Time goes on slowly--every thing stands still--hours seem days &
days seem Years whilst you lengthen the Distance between us--from
Madras to Bombay--I shall think it shortening--and then desire &
expectation will be upon the rack again--come--come--

But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on a longer journey than Bombay. In England once more, she traded on her relation to the famous writer, and then reviled him. She associated with John Wilkes, and afterwards with the Abbe Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on "the Lady who has been so celebrated as the Correspondent of Mr. Sterne." It is engraved on her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius and benevolence were united in her"; but the long letter composed in the vein of Mrs. Montagu and now printed from her manuscript belies the first, and her behaviour after Sterne's death makes a mockery of the second.

All this new material throws light on a phase of this matter which cannot be avoided in any discussion of Sterne's character: How far did his immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he was a "foul Satyr"; Bagehot thought he was merely an "old flirt," and others have seen various degrees of guilt in his philanderings. Now his relation to Eliza would seem to be pretty decisive of his character in this respect, and fortunately the evidence here published in full by Professor Cross leaves little room for doubt. There is, for one thing, an extraordinary letter which is given in facsimile from the rough draft, with all its erasures and corrections. It was addressed to Daniel Draper, but was never sent, apparently never completed. The substance of it is, to say the least, unusual:

I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I have not
the honour to be known to--a letter likewise upon no kind of
business (in the ideas of the world) is a little out of the common
course of things--but I'm so myself, and the impulse which makes
me take up my pen is out of the common way too, for it arises from
the honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and
friendship as I bear for Mrs. Draper--if I did not wish to hope
and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, dear sir, in love
with your wife; but 'tis a love you would honour me for, for 'tis
so like that I bear my own daughter, who is a good creature, that
I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it--that moment I had
would have been the last.

Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing to our purpose.

Now it is easy to say that such a letter was written with the hypocritical intention of allaying Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and certainly the last sentence overshoots the mark. Against the general innocence of Sterne's life there exist, in particular, two damaging bits of evidence--that infamous thing in dog-Latin addressed to the master of the "Demoniacs," whose meaning must have been quite lost upon the daughter who published it, and a pair of brief notes to a woman named Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may say that it was probably written in the exaggerated tone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of both this and the notes one may add that they do not incriminate the later years of Sterne's life. As an offset we now have that extraordinary memorandum in the _Journal to Eliza_, dated April 24, 1767, which states explicitly, and convincingly, that he had led an entirely chaste life for the past fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible, to enter into the evidence further in this place, but the general inference may be stated with something like assurance: Sterne's relation to Eliza was purely sentimental, as was the case with most of his philandering; at the same time in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a life of pleasure such as was by no means uncommon among the clergy of his day. He was neither quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the "old flirt" of Bagehot, but a man led into many follies, and many kindnesses also, by an impulsive heart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his immorality that one has to complain of, and the talk in the books on that score is mostly foolishness; it is rather his bad taste. He cannot be much blamed for his estrangement from his wife, and his care for her comfort is not a little to his credit; but he might have refrained from writing to Eliza on the happiness they were to enjoy when the poor woman was dead--as he had already done to Mlle. Fourmantelle, and others, too, it may be. Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza, had written that she was coming over to England, and the _Journal_ for a time is filled with forebodings of the confusion she was to bring with her. One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a tear over the Postscript added after the last regular entry:

Nov: 1^{st.} All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable
than my hopes--M^{rs.} S.--& my dear Girl have been 2 Months with
me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at
York, after having settled every thing to their hearts
content--M^{rs.} Sterne retires into france, whence she purposes
not to stir, till her death.--& never, has she vow'd, will give me
another sorrowful or discontented hour--I have conquerd her, as I
w^{d.} every one else, by humanity & Generosity--& she leaves me,
more than half in Love w^{th.} me--She goes into the South of
france, her health being insupportable in England--& her age, as
she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on the edge
of sixty--so God bless--& make the remainder of her Life happy--in
order to w^{ch.} I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year--&
give my dear Girl two thousand p^{ds.}--w^{th.} w^{ch.} all Joy,
I agree to,--but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french
Loans--

--And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee--But What can I say, What can
I write--But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wishing
for thy Return--Return--Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth
the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever.

So ends the famous _Journal_, which at last we are permitted to read with all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will occur to every reader is surprise that a master of style could write such slipshod, almost illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of the writers of the day were content to leave all minor matters of grammar and orthography to their printer, whom it was then the fashion to abuse. More than one page of stately English out of that formal age would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings, could we see the original manuscript. But the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault, along with his haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In another way his incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a note that particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when in the _Journal_ he cries out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space betwixt us--Shorten the space of our miseries!"--or as when, in that letter to Lady Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations, and in the same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's Prayer for the sake of deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, for there is no reason to believe that Yorick's religious feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, too, as his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an inopportune moment.

"Un pretre corrumpu ne l'est jamais a demi"--a priest is never only half corrupt--said Massillon, and there are times when such a saying is true. It is also true, and Sterne's life is witness thereof, that in certain ages, when compassion and tenderness of heart have taken the place of religion's austerer virtues, a man may preach with conviction on Sunday, and on Monday join without much disquiet of conscience in the revelries of a "Crazy" Castle. There is not a great deal for the moralist to say on such a life; it is a matter for the historian to explain. At Cambridge Sterne had made the acquaintance of John Hall Stevenson, the owner of Skelton, or "Crazy," Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within convenient reach of Sterne's Yorkshire homes. An excellent engraving in the present edition gives a fair notion of this fantastic dwelling before its restoration. On a fringe of land between the edge of what seems a stagnant pool and the foot of some barren hills, the old pile of stone sits dull and lowering. First comes a double terrace rising sheer from the water, and above that a rambling, comfortless-looking structure, pierced in the upper story by a few solemn windows. Terraces and building alike are braced with outstanding buttresses, as if, like the House of Usher, the ancient edifice might some day split and crumble away into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy square tower erected long ago for defence; at the other stands a slender octagonal turret with its famous weathercock, by whose direction the owner regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears an aspect of bleakness and solitude, in startling contrast with the wild doings of host and guests. A study yet to be made is a history of the clubs or associations of the eighteenth century, which, in imitation, no doubt, of the newly instituted Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of adding the sting of a fraternal secrecy to the commonplace pleasures of dissipation. Famous among these were the "Monks of Medmenham Abbey," and the "Hell-Fire Club," and to a less degree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall Stevenson gathered into his notorious abode. If Sterne found his amusement in this boisterous assembly, it is charitable (and the evidence points this way) to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and grotesque pranks of such a company rather than its viciousness. It is at least remarkable that Hall Stevenson, or "Eugenius," as Sterne called him, seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine by more than one piece of practical advice. Above all, there lay at Skelton a great collection of Rabelaisian books, brought together by the owner during his tours on the Continent; and to this Sterne owed his eccentric reading and that acquaintance with the world's humours and whimsicalities which were to make his fortune.

Here, then, in the library of his compromising friend, he gathered the material for his great work, _Tristram Shandy_; and, indeed, if we credit some scholars, he gathered so successfully that little was left for his own creative talents. It is demonstrably true that he made extraordinary use of certain old French books, including Rabelais, whom he counted with Cervantes as his master; and from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ he borrowed unblushingly, not to mention other English authors. We are shocked at first to learn that some of his choicest passages are stolen goods; the recording angel's tear was shed, it appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released long before that gentleman was born to sweeten the world; so too the wind was tempered to the shorn lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added that text to the stock of biblical quotations. But after all, there is little to be gained by unearthing these plagiarisms. _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_ still remain among the most original productions in the language, and we are only taught once more that genius has a high-handed way of taking its own where it finds it.

The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely does more than affect a few of those set pieces or purple patches by which an author like Sterne gradually comes to be known and judged. These are admirably adapted for use in anthologies, for they may be severed from their context without cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one suppose that from reading them he gets anything but a distorted view of Sterne's work. They are all marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos--the recording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly, the dead ass, the caged starling, Maria of Moulines (I name them as they occur to me)--and they give a very imperfect notion of the true Shandean flavour. In their own genre they are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genre which gives pleasure from the perception of the art, and not from the kindling touch of nature, in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic, yet they make no appeal to the heart, and I doubt if a tear was ever shed over any of them--even by the lachrymose Yorick himself. To enjoy them properly one must key his mind to that state in which the emotions cease to have validity in themselves, and are changed into a kind of exquisite convention. Now, it is easier by far to detect the inherent insubstantiality of such a convention than to appreciate its delicately balanced beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much of Sterne's false sentiment from those who base their criticism primarily on these famous episodes. For my part I am almost inclined to place the story of Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder if those who call it pathetic really mean that it has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost me a sigh.

No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are not many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their range of action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a memorable distinctness which have never been surpassed. Not the bustling people of Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor characters of the servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful vividness; and if there is a single failure in all that gallery of portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from the author and is foisted upon the company somewhat unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor is the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. One of the constant creeds of the age, handed down from the old comedy of humours, was the belief in the "ruling passion" as the source of all a man's acts. The persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters and novels are a succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single motive. They are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling passion, both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his _hobbyhorsical_ philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are Tristram's father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted humours--Mr. Shandy, who would regulate all the affairs of life by abstract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart. Between them Sterne would seem to have set over against each other the two divided sources of human activity; and the minor characters, each with his cherished hobby, are ranged under them in proper subordination. The art of the narrative--and in this Sterne is without master or rival--is to bring these characters into a group by some common motive, and then to show how each of them is thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take, for example, the tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. Shandy had "the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr. Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this is one of the more entertaining scenes of the book, for at every step one or another of the listeners throws in an exclamation which intimates how the words are falling in with his own peculiar train of thought. The result is a delightful cross-section of human nature, as it actually exists. "Our armies swore terribly in _Flanders_, cried my Uncle _Toby_--but nothing to this.--For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so."

But it is not this persistent and very human egotism alone which makes the good people of Shandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originator and master of the gesture and the attitude. Like a skilful player of puppets, he both puts words into the mouths of his creatures and pulls the wires that move them. No one has ever approached him in the art with which he carries out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the brain into the most minute and precise posturing. Before Corporal Trim reads the sermon his exact attitude is described so that, as the author says, "a statuary might have modelled from it." Throughout all the dialogue between the two contrasted brothers we follow every movement of the speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh, and when Mr. Shandy breaks his pipe the moment is tense with expectation. But the supreme exhibition of this art occurs at the announcement of Bobby's death. Let us leave Mr. Shandy and my Uncle Toby discoursing over this sad event, and turn to the kitchen. Those who know the scene may pass on:

----My young master in _London_ is dead! said Obadiah.--

----A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice
scoured, was the first idea which _Obadiah's_ exclamation brought
into _Susannah's_ head....

--O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried
_Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a
procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and
yellow lutestrings,--her brown taffata,--her bone-laced caps, her
bed-gowns, and comfortable under-petticoats.--Not a rag was left
behind.--"_No,--she will never look up again_," said _Susannah_.

We had a fat, foolish scullion--my father, I think, kept her for
her simplicity;--she had been all autumn struggling with a
dropsy.--He is dead, said _Obadiah_,--he is certainly dead!--So am
not I, said the foolish scullion.

----Here is sad news, _Trim_, cried _Susannah_, wiping her eyes as
_Trim_ stepp'd into the kitchen,--master _Bobby_ is dead and
_buried_--the funeral was an interpolation of _Susannah's_--we
shall have all to go into mourning, said _Susannah_.

I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_
earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did
in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope
in God the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own
ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of
work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said
_Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive.

I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching
a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman!

--He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the
coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right
arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read
the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the
coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to
this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the
end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an
idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat
upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking!
_Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and
stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The
foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon
her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about
the corporal.

There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance.

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than an ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their roles. Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a philosophy, a new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these scenes, which makes of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He was not indulging his author's vanity when he thought of himself as a follower of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them rather than with his great contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his greater successors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is his exact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem to see the embryonic humour of a world coming to the birth and not yet fully formed. Through the crust of the old mediaeval ideals the new humanism was struggling to emerge, and in its first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of the old civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those monsters that Nature threw off when she was preparing her hand for a higher creation. There is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the pride of the design that is foreshadowed and will some day come to its own. Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is about his humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside by the new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily the ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of the past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour of man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old ideals had passed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the disguise of liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented his rage in that mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet. His was the sardonic humour. But time that takes away brings also its compensation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, these passionate egotisms are dwindled to mere caprices, and a jest becomes more appropriate than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is left. There is the kindly heart and the humble acknowledgment that we too are seeking our own petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into which Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely whimsical; his smile is almost a caress.

I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying, "We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this world.

It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the blind goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesque mistake in naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of _Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society.

Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire ecole_. It flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.

Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung, and in part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not prone to fall into cant whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family edition of Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the introduction: "After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one needs strychnine and iron and a complete change of blood." It does not seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais wrote when the human passions were emerging from restraint, and it was part of his humour to paint the lusty youth of the world in colours of grotesque exaggeration. Sterne, coming in an age of conventional manners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed thoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneath all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's, to turn the under side of human nature up to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at the social proprieties; but his instrument was necessarily innuendo instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism. Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a way as to draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really exists. We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this perhaps, though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his suggestive style.

One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the _pueris reverentia_ be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on those who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of life) I am inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those like the _Venus and Adonis_, which throw the colours of a glowing imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am inclined to think that Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds than ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelism is more inflammatory than Shandeism. So far as morals alone are concerned there is a touch of what may be called inverted cant in this discrimination between the wholesome and the unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight-forward, manly way, put the matter right once for all: "It cannot be said that the licentious humour of _Tristram Shandy_ is of the kind which applies itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be harmless as to morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean that his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at times by excess of his method.

The first two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were written in 1759, when Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the first day of the year following. Like many another too original work, it had first to go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the great world, when once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon followed his book to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his fame in London during his annual visits and of his reception in Paris reads like enchantment. "My Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the first flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your Great People of the first Rank, who striue who shall most honor me;--euen all the Bishops have sent their Complim^{ts.} to me, & I set out on Monday Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine w^{h.} Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday L^{d.} Rockingham takes me to Court." Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society. Lord Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, a comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest" Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it may well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram.

Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different times, also, he published two volumes of _Sermons by Mr. Yorick_, which, in their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as theological discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are for one thing almost the finest example in English of that style which follows the sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word.

But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France restored his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him material for the travel scenes in _Tristram Shandy_ and for the _Sentimental Journey_. But that "vile asthma" was never long absent, and there is something pitiable in the quips and jests with which he covers his dread of the spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen how the travail of his broken body wails in the _Journal to Eliza_; and his last letter, written from his lodging in London to his truest and least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity and pardon: "Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next day, for perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live--I want to ask a favour of him, if I find myself worse--that I shall beg of you, if in this wrestling I come off conqueror--my spirits are fled--'tis a bad omen--do not weep my dear Lady--your tears are too precious to shed for me--bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.--Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids.--If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so often condemn'd--which my heart, not my head, betray'd me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?"--I cannot but feel that the man who wrote that note was kind and good at heart, and that through all his wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through the incoherence of his untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine sweetness.

He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, 1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by, when some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying ill in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their old merry-maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it is unique in its terrible simplicity:

About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill
at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called
"Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite
of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who
were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March,
the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume,
and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr.
Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr.
Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he
did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and
he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said,
"Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and
died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented
him very much.

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's _Letters and Literary Remains_ for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather mystical novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there is something to make one shudder in the very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been reassuring to know that these remains were for the most part short essays and stories read at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay Society of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such a club are not a source to which one would naturally look for exhilarating literature, yet from them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a volume both interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthouse contributed to these meetings for some twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he withdrew to concentrate his energies upon _John Inglesant_, and it is worthy of notice that his early sketches are, on the whole, better work than the more elaborate essays, such as that on _The Platonism of Wordsworth_, which followed the production of his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary degree _homo unius libri_, almost of a single thought, and there is a certain freshness in his immature presentation of that idea which was lost after it once received the stamp of definitive expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for his later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I have been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure of my own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years, and shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his literary kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne is the fact that he seems from the first to have possessed a native sense of style; what other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In the earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms of _John Inglesant_ are already present, lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came later, but still unmistakable. And at times--in _The Autumn Walk_, for instance, with its "attempt to find language for nameless sights and voices," in _Sundays at the Seaside_, with their benediction of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to the beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty, or in the _Recollections of a London Church_,--at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost or discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the _Recollections_, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more than a boy--might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier himself?--

Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom
I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, should haunt me thus.
Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the
dark and dingy houses round about; and as with the small
congregation I listened to the refrain of that sublime litany
which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought
it all the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her
days of trouble and affliction it had supported and comforted her:

By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy
precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and
ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver
us.

And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is decidedly more interesting than might have been expected. The narrative is simply told, and the letters are for the most part quiet expositions of the idea that dominated the writer's mind. Here and there comes the gracious record of some day of shimmering lights among the Welsh hills;--"a wonderful vision of sea and great mountains in a pale white mist trembling into blue," as he writes to Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we are with the author of _John Inglesant_. Joseph Henry Shorthouse was born in Birmingham on September 9th, 1834. His parents belonged to the Society of Friends, and the boy's first schooling was at the house of a lady who belonged to the same body. He was, however, of an extremely sensitive and timid disposition, and even the excitement of this homelike school affected him deplorably. "I have now," says his wife, "the old copy of Lindley Murray's spelling book which he used there. His mother saw, to her dismay, when she heard him repeat the few small words of his lesson, that his face worked painfully, and his little nervous fingers had worn away the bottom edges of his book, and that he was beginning to stammer." He was immediately taken from school, but the affection of stammering remained with him through life and cut him off from much active intercourse with the world. He acknowledged that without it he would probably never have found time for his studies and productive work, and the eloquence of his pen was due in part to the lameness of his tongue. At a later date he went for a while to Tottenham College, but his real education he got from tutors and still more from his own insatiable love of books.

It appears that all his family associations were of a kind to foster the peculiar talents that were to bring him fame. His father while dressing used to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so imbued him with a love for that wonderful country which he himself was never to see. In after years, when the elder Shorthouse came to read his son's novel, he was surprised and delighted to find the scenes he had described all written out with extraordinary accuracy. Even more beneficial was the influence of his grandmother, Rebecca Shorthouse, and her home at Moseley, where every Thursday young Henry and his four girl cousins, the Southalls, used to foregather and spend the day. One of the cousins has left a record of this garden estate and of these weekly visits which might have been written by Shorthouse himself, so illuminated is it with that subdued radiance which rests upon all his works. I could wish it were permissible to quote at even greater length from these pages, for they are the best possible preparation for an understanding of _John Inglesant_:

The old house at Moseley ... was surrounded by a large extent of
garden ground and ample lawns. The gardens were on different
levels--the upper was the flower garden. No gardener with his
dozens of bedding plants molested that fragrant solitude, but
there, unhindered, the narcissus multiplied into sheets of bloom,
the little yellow rose embodied the summer sunshine, the white
roses climbed into the old apple trees, or looked out from the
depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet-briar was there, though
we saw it not.

Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden,
surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond which rose banks
of trees. [The "blue door" in this garden wall is introduced in
the _Countess Eve_, and another part of the garden in _Sir
Percival_.] On these old walls nectarines, peaches, and apricots
ripened in the August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden
stretched a winding lawn, made in the shape of a letter S, and
surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a complete seclusion.
In the broad light of noon, when the lilacs and laburnums and
guelder-roses were full of bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly
burnished, reflected the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious
solitude, where we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts'
content. But as night fell, when "the laurels' pattering talk was
over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, and in its
stillness and loneliness.