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STERNE
id STUDT
Works by the Same ^Author
BOLINGBROKE AND HIS TIMES
BOLINGBROKE: THE SEQUEL
DISRAELI: A STUDY IN PERSON- ALITY AND IDEAS
BEACONSFIELD : A BIOGRAPHY
EMMA, LADY HAMILTON
SHERIDAN (in two volumes)
LAURENCE STERNE
From the Original Oil Painting (in the possession of Theodore Blake Wirgman, Esquire)
STERNE
*A STUDY
BY
WALTER SICHEL
TO WHI
THE JOURNAL TO EJ
There is a fate he place
f OFT
ff UNlVEf
or
LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C . 1910
STERNE
iA STUDY
BY
WALTER SICHEL
TO WHICH IS ADDED
THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA
There is a fatality in it, — I seldom go to the place I set out for."
Sentimental Journey .
OF THE
OF • (FORM
LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C 1910
/
943
St
Sft
TO
LADY STRACEY
// adds something to this fragment of Life."
Sterne.
214699
PREFACE
Sterne's Archbishop of Benevento abridged a treatise which had employed fifty years of his life to the sheet-size of a Rider's Almanac. The prelate set a good example, which 1 have tried to follow. But miniatures of big subjects, if they are to be adequate, involve the compass of larger portraits. The outlines can be reduced, but not the quintessence of character.
This book is a study. It seeks to interpret the problem of the man, to vitalise him and his companions. It does not pretend to be a formal biography, though new facts, as well as old, pervade it.
More than anyone, Sterne demands this treatment, for the romance of him seems only half alive. Professor Cross's careful volume supplies many aids, but much also has been missed. It is striking that no biographer should have yet realised that Mrs Sterne was Mrs Montagu's cousin, or have tracked the lights cast by that celebrity's correspond- ence on her and on Sterne himself. These enable us to make Sterne's wife a speaking figure, while they help to explain her husband. So with Catherine de Fourmentelle, the " dear, dear Jenny " of his Tristram, which holds persistent traces of her elusive presence. From other neglected clues too (however slender) she has been reconstructed here. So again with Mrs Vesey, the belle of the blue-stockings. Sterne's devotion to her began far earlier than has been
Vlll
PREFACE
supposed, and many a hint has escaped notice. So, once more, with Sterne's known letters, which have been left dishevelled, but are now related to their times, circum- stances, and psychological bearings. And in Sterne's books themselves much of significance has been overlooked. Everywhere I have striven to make his voice, and still more his accent, audible. His temperament was his art, and in an unknown letter he told Garrick that his works were a picture of himself. In presenting his nature I have dwelt on features hitherto unperceived. His unnoticed " Reverie of the Nuns " supplies the key to an organisa- tion so dreamily self-centred that the outside world seemed merely its counterpart.
Fresh matter assists these pages. The full meaning of Mrs Draper's long communication to Mrs James (in the British Museum) may be so considered. Two important letters, printed years ago in the Archivist, are now utilised with others. Three or four new autograph letters have also proved serviceable, while the entire "Journal to Eliza," transcribed at the end, speaks for itself.
At least five of the portraits are of new impression. The crayons of Sterne and his wife by Francis Cotes, the fine presentment of him in youth which forms the fronti- spiece, the characteristic one from a rare engraving that corrects Reynolds's delineation, and another taken during his Italian journey, will be of novel interest.
My best thanks are due to Mr Blake Wirgman for per- mitting his picture to be reproduced, and to Mr Vincent O'Sullivan and their owner the Rev. G. W. Blenkin, Prebendary of Lincoln, for enabling me to present the likenesses of Sterne and his wife which Nathaniel Hawthorne paid a pilgrimage to see. And, further, I am much indebted to Mr H. H. Raphael and to Mr Broadley for allowing me to use the letters in their possession.
PREFACE ix
Sterne created signal characters. In his detachment and emergence, his pathetic irony and humour, he is modern. So in style. He has handed down a succession of wide- spread influence. He was a master-impressionist, and an arch-Bohemian. His true home is a fantastic inland : the great highways of literature lie outside it. " For Bohemia (cried my Uncle Toby) being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise. "
WALTER SICHEL.
January 1910.
ADDENDUM
P. 141, fifth line from foot of page.— "Descended to Bowood " and " through the statesman " are mistakes. The portrait was bought by Lord Holland, and acquired, at the sale of his pictures in 1840, by Lord Shelburne's son, the third Marquis of Lansdowne, for the sum of five hundred guineas. It is now at Lansdowne House. Lord Ronald Gower in his Joshua Reynolds (p. 40) has quoted an unpublished letter in which Sterne says that the painter presented him with the picture "as a tribute . . . that his heart wished to pay to my genius. That man's way of thinking and man- ners are at least equal to his pencil." Professor Cross (p. 201) says that the likeness was undertaken "at the request of" Lord Ossory.
P. 163, line 26, delete "bride's."
CONTENTS
CHAP. I.
2.
3-
4- 5- 6.
7- 8.
9-
io. ii.
12. !3-
OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS " LIFE
OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE
ELIZABETH LUMLEY AND THE JESTER'S COURTSHIP
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED .....
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL (174I-I759) THE PREACHER ......
THE UNSENTIMENTAL CASE OF STERNE'S MOTHER "THE HISTORY OF A GOOD WARM WATCH-COAT," TOGETHER WITH ONE OF THE BAD WARM "DEMONIACS"
terne's WIF]
OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS WIFE (KITTY DE FOUR-
MENTELLE AND " TRISTRAM " : MARCH I 759 TO
JUNE I760)
THE URBAN PARSON (COXWOLD AND LONDON AGAIN, I76l) ........
sterne's authorship ......
FRENCH LEAVE (THE STAY IN FRANCE : JANUARY I762 TO MAY I764)
I
7 12
28
50 64
77 98
107 120
128
160 171
211
xii CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
15. UP TO THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (JUNE I 764 TO
OCTOBER I765) ....... 235
1 6. THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (FRANCE AND ITALY J
OCTOBER 1765 TO MAY 1 766) .... 243
17. THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNAL (ELIZA DRAPER : JANUARY
I767 TO JANUARY 1 768) ..... 256
18. THE LAST GASP (FEBRUARY 26 TO MARCH 1 8, 1 768 :
THE SEQUELS) ....... 280
APPENDIX THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA .... 293
INDEX ......... 352
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Sterne ....... frontispiece
From the original oil-painting in possession of Theodore Blake Wirgman, Esquire.
TO FACE PAGE
Mrs Sterne ......... 29
From the original portrait in crayons by Frances Cotes, in possession of the Rev. G. W. Blenkin.
Sterne .......... 77
From original portrait in crayons by Frances Cotes, in possession of the Rev. G. W. Blenkin.
Sterne . . . . . . . . . .135
From an early engraving.
Sterne .......... 142
From a mezzotint after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Parsonage House, Coxwold, Yorkshire . . . .160
The residetice of the Rev. Laurence Sterne. From an old engraving.
The Interior of Coxwold Church . . . . .162
From a drawing by Miss Florence Holms.
Sterne's Letter to Garrick . . . . . .169
From an old facsimile.
Sterne .......... 252
From the old Florentine engraving.
A facsimile page from "The Journal to Eliza" . . 270
Sterne's Daughter with her Father's Bust . . . . 285
From the original engraving in her edition of his letters.
xiii
STERNE
A STUDY CHAPTER I
A vivid likeness of Laurence Sterne still seems to fail the Georgian portrait gallery. The frame is there, and the wan, pensive, roguish face, with the lips maliciously sentimental. But the soul, about which Sterne declared himself so "positive," the soul which contradicted his actions, is missing. He has been much written about, mapped out, dissected, criticised, but maps and anatomical plans are never portraits. We hear too little of his accents, see too little of his gestures. Even the few sketches of him show small perspective, and views without perspective may be decoration, but they are not pictures. Sterne's own " gerund-grinders " (" Smel- fungus " and " Mundungus ") may labour over his " Life," yet what is life without living ? The moles have been busy with the firefly, but the dancing, gleaming thing eludes their patience. Nor have the critics succeeded in capturing him. Even Thackeray, the master who borrowed so many of his strokes, has dwelt on his lubricities, importing the worst of the man into the best of his work ; and about the man, indeed, there is much that is questionable. In this regard Thackeray perhaps should be forgiven no more than
2 STERNE
Sterne. But debtors are seldom the fairest judges of their creditors. More almost than any man of genius in the eighteenth century (except perhaps Boswell), Sterne has been alternately flogged and patronised by his inferiors.
When the French commissary of the posts asked Tristram Shandy who he was, he returned the significant answer, " Don't puzzle me." Though Sterne assured his " Eliza " that he was the most " transparent " of men, and wrote to a friend, " I show all," though Heine, comparing him with Jean Paul, says from a true standpoint that Sterne bares himself naked, a riddle to himself and others he was and wished to be. It was part of his philosophy that the most trivial things are enigmas. But we who watch him in his century, that atmosphere of varnished licence and cruel tenderness, need not be so perplexed. We have fresh lights to guide us. He has written himself down on many of his own pages, and his essence rather than his character — the word "character" mates ill with Sterne — is not fleet- ing, but permanent. For Sterne sums up a modern type, that of the vagabond sentimentalist and fugitive feeler, self- conscious, loose, morbid, errant, artistic, aesthetic to the core. You can watch him, this firefly that fancied himself a star. And though the stars look down on his brief night hour with eternal scorn, we mortals, who flit so often, how- ever highly we aspire, are concerned with his wanderings.
He was the first to strike the note of personal intimacy in
prose fiction. He was its first fantastic, its first master of
pathos ; the first in eighteenth century prose to perceive the
joy, though not the grandeur, of nature, the first to vignette
life. He founded modern impressionism, substituting for
\\ descriptive literature a diary of sensations, and a scale of
\ I cadence for a string of sentences. He went entirely of? the
\1 lines of his environment, contradicting its forms and shocking
I its formality. He was, in the strict sense of the term, an
OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS "LIFE" 3
eccentric. His own words about the elder Shandy fit him well : " The truth was, his road lay so very far on one side from that wherein most men travelled, that every object before him presented a face and section of itself to his eye, altogether different from the plan and elevation of it seen by the rest of mankind — in other words, it was a
different object He saw kings and courts and silks
of all colours in such strange lights ! " Such were the gossamer impressions that Sterne dramatised and christened " Shandean."
But Sterne was more than a channel for these. His essence may be best conveyed by the label of " a detached sensationalist." His personality played on the whole gamut of sensation, but the particular bar that momentarily absorbed him sounded like the whole tune, so poignant was its appeal, so sensitive was his ear. His acute sensationalism indeed precludes him from attaining the highest harmonies. For he could never realise the complete score, so keenly did his favourite notes possess him, the music of his moods. The part detained him from the whole. He was a sequence of interludes, and hence arose his invertebrateness, his lack of centrality ; the mastery of his touch, the limitations of his range. He himself has given us the clue. On one occasion his Parisian admirer, the young Suard, asked him to account for this odd amalgam of the fixed and the fluid — the volatile salt in him, changeful yet consistent. Sterne's answer deserves close attention. He owned, he said, " one of those delicate calibres dominated by the sacred, informing principle of the soul, that immortal flame which at once supports life and consumes it, which sublimes and varies every sensation by unexpected starts." "This creative faculty," he went on, "is named imagination or sensibility according as it gets vent under a writer's pen either in graphic scene-painting, or in the portraiture of the pas-
4 STERNE
sions." 1 So Sterne sums up his own nature, over-dignifying it perhaps, yet warranted by its flitting phases. The salt has not lost its savour. His vein persists both at home and abroad. It will be found leavening Thackeray, Dickens, and even Carlyle ; in more recent days, notably Robert Louis Stevenson, not to speak of moderns like Mr William Locke and Mr Anthony Hope. Sterne's imprint is visible on some of Goethe, more of Jean Paul, and much of Heine. In France he has imbued Xavier de Maistre, and he has tinged Saintine. He claimed that he " would swim down the gutter of Time " : assuredly he has done so.
And his belongings interest us too : his association with " Count " Steele, the strolling artist who brought young Romney to York and painted the future author ; his wife's kinswoman, the redoubtable Mrs Montagu, whom Sterne always called " cosin " and who to the last returned his devotion ; John Blake, the parson headmaster of York Grammar School, who consulted him on his most private concerns and to whom Sterne addressed an amusing letter about his correspondence ; 2 his fitful, shocking friend, John Hall-Stevenson ; his grotesque comrade, Thomas Bridges of York ; his normal friends at Stillington, the comfort- able Crofts ; Fothergill, the wise " F " of his early letters ; and all the setting of the worldly-holy Cathedral circle, with those bickering intrigues after Church perquisites that made it a miniature of London placemanship ; his coquettish daughter Lydia, the self-willed " child of Nature," who might almost have been a creation of his own brain ; his scolding, suffering wife — " a shrill, penetrating sound of itself," he says of the very word — that wife of whom
1 Professor Cross gives this passage (otherwise translated) in his Life and Times of Laurence Sterne. It comes from D. J. Garat's Mdmoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, vol. ii. pp. 147-152.
2 This letter (from the autograph collection of Mr H. H. Raphael, M.P.) is introduced post in Chapter VI.
OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS "LIFE" 5
we hear so little and from whom Sterne heard so much ; and all the other frail wives of his capricious fancy — Kitty de Fourmentelle, the sweet singer of York ; the great lady of Paris ; the " Witty Widow " ; his London Queens of Sheba (his own phrase) who came to visit this equivocal Solomon, and ere the last, the proud Lady Percy and the languishing Eliza Draper.
Sterne is phantasmal. That is at once his distinction as an artist, his drawback as a man. His sentimentality was peculiar. He lived in shadows ; he made a reverie of feeling, and a drama of reverie. This is no generali- sation. His dream of the nun " Cordelia/ ' which first figures in these pages, leads up inevitably to the last chapter of his "Journal to Eliza." It forms a pattern to which he fitted the less living creatures of existence. Nothing in or around him seems real, and the unreality is genuine. All are fantoccini in shadow-land. Yet out of these unsubstantial shapes, and by sheer subtlety of stroke, he bodied forth those undying realities, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and the valet La Fleur ; he presented those immortal interludes of poor Le Fevre and the Dancing Maid of Languedoc ; he wove a spider-web of suggestion which, though it entangled nasty flies in its fine-spun fila- ments, also caught the fresh dew of the morning. He revolutionised style. Moreover, strange as it may appear, ■he exerted a lasting humanitarian influence on our fellow- feeling with dumb animals, unemancipated slaves, misused servants, every victim of bigotry or oppression. And the man who did this was a lanky, spare, meagre, crack-brained parson, a rake at heart, who should never have preached or married, whose ideas (as he owns) were " sometimes rather too disorderly for ... . orders " * ; a consumptive
1 This, Sterne tells us in one of his letters, was an " expression which dropped from the lips of the arch- prelate " (Gilbert of York). He adds that
6 STERNE
with the quick brain and slippery senses — that perverse acuteness which is the heritage of the hectic and hysterical ; a sort of Rousseauite in a country cassock, tied to a jog- trot parish round till he had reached the age of forty-six, an age which the French call " critical." Here, surely, is a point which Smelfungus misses, a point of much meaning as regards Sterne's long concealment and late activities. He had been married close on twenty years before repute and disrepute opened to his own amazement. He was forty-six when he burst upon the world.
the archbishop " in his private hours " was always " most cordial." Cf. Original Letters of the late Mr Laurence Sterne, Logographic Press, London, 1788, p. 27. In another of these letters he speaks of his own "spare, meagre form" (ibid.\ p. m : he was a tall man, he tells us elsewhere, about six feet high.
CHAPTER II
of sterne's life, apart from sterne
Sterne was forty-six when he wrote the two first volumes of Tristram Shandy — in other words, he was forty-six when he was born. If he had not been born then, what were his antecedents ?
I suppose that everybody (that is nobody but you and me and Mr Mundungus) knows that he descended from an old East Anglian family — though Sterne denied his Danish blood — a stock which, by dint of espousing heiresses, had drifted into Yorkshire. That the crest of this family was a " Stearne " or starling, which accounts for the famous " I can't get out " episode in the Sentimental Journey. That in Tristram Shandy Sterne speaks of a " great-aunt Dinah " who left a legacy, and whose " black velvet mask " he turns into a new-fangled form of adjuration. That in the same chapter he tells " Eugenius " (his intimate, Hall-Stevenson) how "for these four generations we count no more than one archbishop, a Welsh judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank," though " in the sixteenth century we boast no less than a dozen alchymists." This first dignitary was his great-grandfather, whose marble effigy in the cathedral Sterne thought so like himself,1 and who had
1 " In the marble whole-length figure which dignifies the monument," Sterne wrote to William Combe, "you will find the likeness stronger" (than in the Jesus College portrait). And he continues : " He was an excellent prelate and an honest man — I have not half his virtues, if report speaks true
7
8 STERNE
been a grave archbishop when Charles the comic came, to his throne.
Sterne's father (a younger son of Simon Sterne and Mary, the wealthy granddaughter of Sir Roger Jaques of Elvington) was a luckless, brisk, feckless subaltern in two successive regiments, one of which was the famous " Handi- sides." This Roger Sterne went about adventuring in the long War of Succession, an unpromoted campaigner who made no stay in any one place, and married the daughter of a camp sutler to pay his debts. Sterne's mother, the vivandiere of the regiment, was born " Agnes Nuttall," and when Roger Sterne took her to wife was the widow of a Captain Hebert, with decent connections in Ireland, and a good-for-nothing son who wasted his substance in that country. The Yorkshire Sternes resented this misalliance, and treated the faithful, vulgar soul with middle-class contempt.
While Bolingbroke was manoeuvring the Peace of
Utrecht, he little dreamed that he was contributing to the
birth of a great humourist, and to that charming piece in
Tristram Shandy where Uncle Toby vindicates the virtue of
war. Shortly after the treaty was concluded, and just a year
preceding the birth of Rousseau (Sterne's temperamental
kinsman), Ensign, or " Captain," Sterne had to come home.
And his wife, hasting with him from Dunkirk to Ireland
for the purpose, brought Laurence Sterne into the world
on the twenty-fourth of November 17 13, almost under the
sign of Capricorn. He was her second child. The first had
been Mary, a beauty sacrificed to a Dublin spendthrift, one
Weemans, who beat and bullied her till she died of a
broken heart.1
of us both — and for his sake I hope it does, and for my own I hope it does not." Cf Original Letters of the late Mr Laurence Sterne, Logographic Press, London, 1788, p. 26.
1 Cf Sterne's Fragment of Autobiography, which prefaced his daughter Lydia's edition of his Letters and is a fine specimen of his style.
OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE 9
Laurence Sterne first saw the light at Clonmel, that " Vale of Honey " which was also a centre of the woollen trade. And throughout his childhood the Irish quarters were the most permanent. Indeed, a collateral branch of the Sternes had settled in Ireland much earlier, had won Church preferment and been associated with Swift.
No rest had Roger Sterne or his wife thenceforward. Child after child appeared, two with fanciful names, and all with frail constitutions — " Joram," " Little Devijeher," and the rest. Only one survived, Catherine, and small affection seems to have subsisted between brother, mother, and sister.
Roger, on the disbanding of his regiment, resought the maternal seat of Elvington, but again the troops were called out, and the nomads set off, with many adventures, to Ireland once more. The Peace of Utrecht and the Hanoverian Succession did not end their wanderings or mend their fortunes. Over Ireland they roved, from garrison to garrison, when the Vigo Expedition, the siege of Gibraltar, and eventually the Triple Alliance sent the regiment off again over seas and lands, the poor undaunted ensign far away, duelling (for a goose) and fighting for his country till, during March 1 731, he drooped and died, a childish imbecile, in Jamaica.
Meanwhile the struggling family were driven from point to point, with hairbreadth escapes by shore and water — to the Isle of Wight, Wales, and over Ireland again. There the boy nearly lost his life in a mill-race — an accident which had happened long before to an ancestor. At the age of eight, the neglected Laurence learned his letters in Dublin Barracks. By the age of ten his father had already removed him from his mother's rather moulting wing and settled him at school near Halifax under the care of a brother, Richard Sterne of Woodhouse Hall. Up to that time Sterne's
io STERNE
childhood was a barrack-room ballad, and the barrack- well seems to have been the source from which he drew the dear old soldier and his faithful servant who are still glories of our literature. " If," Sterne tells us in Tristram Shandy, " if when I was a school-boy I could not hear the drum beat but my heart beat with it, was that my fault ? Did I plant the propensity there ? Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature ? " But now all shifted with the scene. Removed at Halifax from his early surroundings, the lad was thrown in upon himself. He proved the usual dunce- genius, idle though promising. It was said that he would make his name, and at any rate he has himself told us that he scrawled it on the school-room ceiling.
Such, then, is the genesis of Laurence Sterne, sickly by inheritance, gipsy by nature, forced from the stir of war into the tame humiliations of dependence, homeless by fate, with some ancestral fame on one side and a coarse under- current on the other, the sport of circumstance, a bantling of the barracks. Drums and bugles sounded his lullabies, rough soldiers must have tossed the puny boy in their arms, and his mother, I fancy, could use her fists. You would have expected a tough little hero or a hardened little ruffian as the upshot. Not a bit of it ! Nature plays queer tricks with environment. Out of these elements she moulded a dreamy urchin with small relation to his surroundings, who developed into king's jester at the court of Bohemia. Sterne never saw a battle, but the fear and throb of warfare had bitten into his soul. The lawlessness and restlessness of necessity faced a constitution fickle, sensitive, furtive, delicate. He was a waif by birthright, and there is no sustained sentence in any part of his story : rather, it seems all hiatus and parenthesis. In his own words, he was "born for digressions," and perhaps for transgression also. He could rivet himself to nothing. His life and his books were a
OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE n
casual ward. Does not Tristram Shandy (informed by his uncle) start with a gap ante-natal ? Does not Sterne, in the unquoted verses which he contributed to his " Cousin " Hall-Stevenson's Crazy Tales, descant on " the beautiful oblique " of his method —
" . . . . No one notion But is in form like the designing
Of the peristaltic motion ; Vermicular ; twisting and twining
Going to work Just like a bottle screw upon a cork." *
Does not he tell us, in words which Charles James Fox afterwards appropriated, " I begin with writing the first sentence, and trust to Almighty God for the second " ?
Whence, outside the strong after-influences of music and the Bible, he derived his wonderful vocabulary, his rhythm, at once simple and subtle, and the dainty phrasing that interprets the sense, we know not. The artist within him after all may have come from the Irish strain of that common, down-trodden mother. Every quiver of Sterne reflected itself in the troubled pools of emotion. Mere feeling proved his truest experience, and he grew up a perverse child of reverie. He was neurotic. We should, I am afraid, have thought him a horrid boy.
1 " My Cousin's Tale."
CHAPTER III
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE^ WIFE
The child of reverie ! From earliest years Sterne loved his dreamy communings. " How the wind blows I know not," he sighs in one of his late letters, " and I have not an inclination to walk to my window, where perhaps I might catch the course of a cloud and be satisfied.'' He grew weary, he wrote in another, of " talking to the many " : he liked " conversing with the ancient and the modern dead " — the " mutes " who could not resent his handling. But still more he loved to body forth love-episodes alone. Feeling for feeling's sake, however — the sentimentalism which means feeling without passion — is an opiate which, if habitual, soon deadens the heart. During the last year of his life, Sterne wrote to a friend about the Sentimental Journey that " it will, I dare say, convince you that my feelings are from the heart, and that that heart is not one of the worst of moulds." It was not that originally, but Sterne's titilla- tions had so weakened its framework that it could scarcely serve for common use. " I have torn my whole frame to pieces by my feelings," he confessed at the close.1 And so it might almost be doubted whether Sterne ever owned a heart at all save in his own imaginings. If so, it was in the wrong place ; it lay, not in attachments, but in the flutter of his moods, memories, and pulsations. It was a frisking,
1 Cf. Sterne's Letters, published by his daughter (1775), vol. iii. p. 115.
12
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 13
surface heart. True, no less a judge than the poet Heine has traced his pathetic mirth to depths that were personally tragic. This holds good certainly of "that long disease, his life." But it involves no deep sympathy, and perhaps the most exquisite Tenderers of joy and sorrow have felt things more than they have felt with them. Sterne could feel and express life's ironies to perfection ; he vibrated to every gust like an aeolian harp. Beyond question too, and therein lies his greatness, he loved much of human nature. He loved it in his soul, and he presented it so warmly in his works that Carlyle sums him up in his essay on Jean Paul as " our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our finest, if not our strongest." How deeply Carlyle was dipped in Sterne will appear hereafter.
But Sterne's tragedy was seldom too deep for tears that gushed from a perennial fountain. He smiles wist- fully over the wounds which he parades ; and, little as there is in common between Sterne's arabesques and Byron's thunderbolts, in this demand for public pity — the beggar's posture — the two emotionalists are akin.
Sterne's life — his cramped, consumptive life — had neither space nor soil enough for that steadfast love in which the truth of feeling, the felt verity, takes its root. The sweet, sad loveliness of things appealed paramountly 4 to him, and forms his paramount appeal. Loveliness is a truth, but it is not the whole. " Writers of my stamp," he owns, "have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil, deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth than beauty." For sheer and native artistry, Sterne has no rival ; it graces even his rags and tatters. But if this excludes the ugly side of puritan- ism, the more winning side i*' absent also. Sterne was hedonist : hedonist, if it may so be put, without hedonism,
i4 STERNE
for he was receptive, not active. It was the fact of feeling that enthralled him. What he realised was the pang and the thrill, the pleasure of variegated sensation. His tenderness was more towards others than for them ; he draped it in the mists of sentiment, and he made it vocal through the tremolo of his style. By virtue of the extreme sensitiveness of that style his pity stood soliloquising. But directly it stepped forward it often went after what he has himself termed "that tender and delicious senti- ment which ever mixes in friendship where there is a difference of sex." And on that feeling he played his fantasias.
" Sweet pliability of spirit," he was to muse in the Sentimental Journey, " that could at once surrender itself to illusions which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments — long — long since — had ye numbered out my days, had I not trod so great a part of them on this enchanted ground. When my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it to some smooth sentimental path which fancy has scattered over with rosebuds of delights, and having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthened and refreshed. When evils press upon me and there is no retreat from them in this world, then I take a new course — I leave it — and as I have a clearer idea of the Elysian Fields than I have of Heaven, I force myself like iEneas into them. I see him meet the pensive shadow of his forsaken Dido, and wish to recognise it — and I see the injured spirit wave her head and turn off silent from the author of her miseries and dishonour — I lose the feelings for myself in hers, and in those affections which were wont to make me mourn for her when I was at school." Here Heine is justified. Sterne lightens the ills of life by a sensibility to the sorrows of others — and this is tragedy's true function. But here, surely, can be heard
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 15
also the self-indulgence of a self-pity distracted by the quick play of emotions.
And Sterne, as a great and pathetic humourist, pursued this life of sensation far more beautifully and brightly, far more sociably than did Rousseau, though with much the same selfishness that Rousseau used in embarking on like voyages. Should anyone wish to test their likeness and unlikeness in such matters, let them compare Rousseau's mawkish account of his penchant for the Turin tradeswoman with Sterne's famous episode of the Paris grisette. Rousseau is all shy nastiness ; Sterne, all brisk and delightful impres- sion. Rousseau stands greasy and pawing ; there is nothing unctuous about Sterne, who dallies with heart-beats, spruce and smiling, like a child caressing its birthday doll. Rousseau can never throw himself out, Sterne can ; but the self-centred, philandering mood is the same — a mood that retires to feed on itself when it cannot fasten on something outward.
Yes, Sterne was the child of reverie. When he was "curing" (Heaven save the mark !) the souls of a York- shire moorside he thus wrote to a friend in a letter of invitation as yet unquoted, a letter which pictures the re- frain of his life, his Reverie of the Nuns : — '
" After coffee I will take you to pay a visit to my nuns. Do not, however, indulge your fancy beyond measure, but rather let me indulge mine, or at least let me give you the history of it, and the fair sisterhood who dwell in one of its visionary corners. Now what is all this about ? you will say. Have a few moments' patience and I will tell you.
1 This seems to have been no other than William Combe, that strange vagrant in literature whose life was all mystery and moneylessness, and one of whose after-escapades (if Samuel Rogers can be trusted) closely concerned Sterne's own Eliza.
1 6 STERNE
You must know, then, that on passing out of my back door I very soon gain the path which, after taking me through several flattened meadows and shady thickets, brings me in about twenty minutes to the ruins of a monastery, where, in times long past, a certain number of cloistered females had devoted their — lives — I scarce know what I was going to write — to religious solitude. This saunter of mine, when I take it, I call paying a visit to my nuns. It is an awful spot : a rivulet flows by it, and a lofty bank covered with wood, that rises abruptly on the opposite side, gives a gloom to the whole and forbids the thoughts, if they were ever so disposed, from wandering away from the place. Solitary sanctity never found a nook more appropriate to her nature ! It is a place for the antiquary to sojourn in for a month, and examine with all the spirit of rusty research. But I am no antiquary, as you well know, and therefore I come here upon a different and a better errand — that is, to examine myself."
And now observe the attitude : " So I lean lackadaisi- cally over the gate and look at the passing stream and forgive the spleen, the gout, and the envy of a malicious world. And after having taken a stroll beneath mouldering arches, I summon the sisterhood together, and take the fairest among them, and sit down with her on the stone beneath the bunch of alders, and do — what, you will say ? Why, I examine her gentle heart, and see how it is attuned ; I then guess at her wishes, and play with the cross that hangs at her bosom — in short, 1 make love to her. Fie, for shame ! Tristram, that is not as it ought to be. Now I declare, on the contrary, that it is exactly what it ought to be ; for though philosophers may say, among many other foolish things philosophers have said, that a man who is in love is not in his right senses, I do affirm in opposition to all their saws — and see-saws — that he is never in his right
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 17
senses, or I would say rather in his right sentiments, but when he is pursuing some Dulcinea or other." '
This typical day-dream of the sisterhood is no isolated experience. He twice mentions the place of his vision, and " Cordelia," its heroine, in his unpublished " Journal to Eliza," which will be found at the end of this volume ; and he repeats this nun of his fantasy in at least two of his letters.2
The phantom is the more piquant, since at York was a Papist girls' school which its enemies, among whom Sterne ranked foremost, styled the Nunnery. But the ruined abbey was six miles distant from the city, by breezy Coxwold, and there Sterne cast aside his Whig zeal, his petty cares, his sad broodings, and his " solitary sanctity " to drink his fill of airy nothings, by turns attentive to Nature and a dreamer of images cloyed and cloying.
Sterne was no more an " antiquary " than Heine was, but has erring fancy ever found more alluring expression ? He was never " in his right sentiments " (unfrock thee, Tristram ! ) but when he was " pursuing some Dulcinea or other" ! She was naturally not Mrs Sterne, though of her, at first, a Dulcinea he made. Poor Mrs Sterne ! For all her failings, the laugh was rarely on her side, and it had been well for both of them had she never seen and been fascinated by young Laurey's lackadaisical blue eyes.3
1 Original Letters of the late Reverend Mr Laurence Sterne, never before published, London, for the Logographic Press (1788), pp. 2-5. The date is 1764.
2 Cf Sterne's Letters to his Friends on Occasions, London, 1775. This letter (No. VI.) is genuine from internal evidence. A phrase of which Sterne was fond appears in it. The passage runs : " I visited my Abbey as usual every evening — amid the mouldering ruins of ancient greatness, I take my solitary walk ; far removed from the news and bustle of a malicious world I can cherish the fond remembrance of my Cordelia — ' Cordelia, thou wert kind,' " etc. Another and later letter contains much of the same fantasy.
3 Sterne's eyes were of a blue nearly as piercing as Swift's. This is apparent from Mr Blake Wirgman's portrait of him in youth.
1 8 STERNE
For he was in perpetual quest of some pleasant anchorage for his shallop of sensation. He liked to moor it by shimmering banks. Haze was his native air, and three years after this letter was written he again descanted on his own foible in a long appreciation of the valet La Fleur, whose " one misfortune in the world was to be always in love." " I am heartily glad of it," comments Sterne, " having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so till I die, being firmly persuaded that if ever I do a mean action it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another : whilst this interregnum lasts I always perceive my heart locked up — I can scarce find in it to give misery six- pence ; and therefore I always get out of it as fast as I can, and the moment I am rekindled I am all generosity and goodwill again, and would do anything in the world either for or with anyone if they will but satisfy my thirst after sentiment. But in saying this surely I am commend- ing passion and not myself." Flirtation was a fillip for the sickliness of his nerves, and with such potions he braced his wasting fibres. But Sterne's flirtations only objectified his dreams, nor did it matter much where he found them. When at length he met his Eliza, he assured her that he would gladly give her inhuman husband five hundred pounds, " if money could purchase the acquisition," to let her sit by him as he wrote the Sentimental Journey, if only for two hours " in a day." " I am sure," he urged, " the work would sell so much the better for it, that I should be reimbursed the sum more than seven times told." *
Even Goethe once urged that philandering was needful
for his early compositions ; and for Sterne, as for the young
Goethe, some sort of philandering seemed an artistic
requisite ; it " harmonises the soul," he assured a friend.
1 Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1775), PP- 63-4.
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 19
He assured another the year before he died, in a passage which seems to condense the whole of his temperament : " You can feel ! Ay, so can my cat . . ., but cater- wauling disgusts me. / had rather raise a gentle flame than have a different one raised in me. Now I take Heaven to witness, after all this badinage^ my heart is innocent; and the sporting of my pen is equal, just equal, to what I did in my boyish days, when I got astride of a stick and galloped away." * And there was a deeper reason : no one woman, it must be owned, can light every torch with her taper. Are all these quenched tapers to be mourned, and is the enduring torch a mere blaze of selfishness ? Sterne's indiscretions were often (not always) as harmless as Goethe's. Musing in one of his least-known letters on an " affection " which he had " innocently indulged," he says : " It is of a more delicate stamp than the gross materials nature has planted in us. ... I hope ever to retain the idea of innocence and love her still." 2 His best susceptibility resembled thistle-down floating in the air, wavering above the ground as he surveyed it ; and he himself confessed that he was " the most tender fool that ever woman tried the weakness of." This " idea of innocence " (its shape, not its substance) seems ever behind his peccant fancy. He was not always a male coquette, but even when he was in earnest he never regarded woman as a lifelong companion : she was an episode, like everything with which he had to do, and he preferred the episode to be impalpable. Indeed, he has given his own quaint reason for this play with feeling. Never, he says, did he resist temptation : he ran away from it, being convinced that he would get bruised bodily in the conflict.
1 Cf. the letter to " Sir W," 12th September 1767 (Dr Browne's edition of Sterne's Works (1885), vol. iv. p. 584).
2 Sterne's Original Letters to his Friends^ London, 1788, pp. 56-7.
20 STERNE
But this queer St Anthony only ran away from one Dulcinea to another, though sometimes the Dulcinea detained him. He confesses to falling in love regularly every vernal and every autumnal equinox. It was during the autumnal equinox that Sterne was to fall in with Elizabeth Lumley ; but, ere we reach it, a brief impression of the interval must be given.
The protecting uncle died, and a cousin, Richard, reigned in his stead ; nor hitherto has it been noticed that from this cousin Richard, Sterne seems to have derived his character of the elder Shandy.1 Under his aegis, then, Sterne proceeded, in July 1733, with £30 a year irregularly paid, from a school near Halifax, or schools (for researchers differ), to Jesus College, Cambridge. And there he soon received a family perquisite of £30 more from a scholarship founded by his ancestor, the archbishop. Here, again, the sense of unreality which pervades him is manifest. Even his entrance examination was deferred till a more convenient season. Yet there is pathos in the situation. Save for his kinsman, Sterne informs us, he would have been " driven out naked to the world."
" The vivacity of his disposition very early in life dis- tinguished him " : so writes his colleague and crony, John Hall-Stevenson. This " vivacity " lay more in feeling than in fact, and we know of none for whom the exterior of existence was more a mask than for Sterne. Routine was naturally not in his line. Off this and all lines he wandered, diving into back-ways and by-ways of books, credit, perchance
1 In the first volume of Tristram^ speaking of that eccentric's natural eloquence, Sterne relates : " I well remember when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in ... . It was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three Fellows of his learned society, that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with 'em."
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 21
of discredit also. To one of his college tutors, however, — probably John Bradshaw — he was attached, and years later, when the tutor had blossomed into a master, he warmly commended and recommended him to a youth then on the threshold of a career.1
His familiar spirit at College was John Hall, afterwards (by a name bought through marriage) John Hall-Stevenson. Sterne records that he first met him at Cambridge, though a contemporary alleges, and it is just possible, that the acquaintance dated from boyhood.2 John Hall was by two years Sterne's senior. He came of a good Durham family and by a chance inherited the South Yorkshire castle of Skelton, near Saltburn-by-the-Sea. He was a handsome madcap and hypochondriac, with more wit, says Sir Walter Scott, than grace, a dilettante born : dilettante as viveur, as author, as confirmed valetudinarian, as an eccentric in would- be fashion, but this dilettantism must be qualified. He was a dilettante in everything but delicacy, for the delicate was foreign to a mind which in this respect eventually added to his friend's degeneration. A confirmed roue and an ardent book-lover, he plied a cynical tongue, which concealed, Sterne assures us, a kindly heart and many good actions. His mine of scholarship Sterne prized. " He always knows what ought to be liked," he wrote to a friend ; " he is an excellent scholar, and a good critic. But his judgment has more severity than it ought to have, and his taste less delicacy than it should possess. He has also great humanity, but somehow or other there is so often such a mixture of sarcasm in it, that there are many who will not believe that
1 Cf. Stern J s Origt7ial Letters, p. 6 : "He was my tutor when I was at college, and a very good kind of man. He used to let me have my way when I was under his direction, and that showed his sense, for I was born to travel out of the common road. . . . And he had sense to see it, and not to trouble me with trammels."
2 Cf. the preface to the Crazy Tales (1795).
22 STERNE
he has a single scruple in his composition. Nay, I am acquainted with several who cannot be persuaded, but that he is a very insensible, hard-hearted man, which I, who have known him long and know him well, assure you he is not. . . . He will do a kindness with a sneer or a joke or a smile, when perhaps a tear or a grave countenance would better become him. But that is his way ; it is the language of his character." 1
Yet Stevenson could at times be more than an odd lazybones, and in 1 745 he led a " flying squadron," with General Oglethorpe for comrade, against the Young Pre- tender. Sterne undoubtedly proved a stimulant to an associate who always took refuge in bed when the wind was in the east. And here the old anecdote will be remembered, recounting how Sterne changed the direction of the weather-cock to dispel his comrade's humours. Detesting the blasts of his bleak habitat, Hall-Stevenson, in his turn, liked to visit the damp, relaxing valley where his comrade's first parish was situated. This bird of mixed omens assembled a strange medley in his Gothic nest — the mad club of " Demoniacs," a faint reflection of the Medmenham Abbey hell-rakes. To these we must revert hereafter, but his chief intellectual influence over the young Sterne was to bring him into touch with Rabelais and the queer gang of pigmy Pantagruelists who succeeded that giant gipsy, reeking of immense garlic and laying waste the rank places of solemn shams. Such were Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and Bouchet. Who reads them now ? And how little could these triflers have foreseen that two centuries after their gross fancies, a morbid and mocking English parson would sum them up and refine them. For refine them Sterne did. By his elfin obliqueness these Renaissance demons were transformed into Georgian imps. 1 Original Letters \ etc., 1788, pp. 65-7.
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 23
Hall-Stevenson, then, whose craze was for Crazydom, gave Sterne this Gallic impetus, though from his birth the instinct of the French was in him ; his bent was for their style. But he followed the French Rabelaisians far more closely than he was able to follow Rabelais. For Rabelais is the Michael Angelo of grotesque, and such qualities transcended his track. So did those of the romantic satirist whose disciple Sterne always protested himself to be. Even thus early he must have conned Cervantes, nor in all his humours did he ever forget the knight of the rueful countenance and the squire of low degree. Sterne, how- ever, wore no quixotic spurs. He was a knight erring as well as errant ; and though he stamps himself a rescuer of distressed damsels, he displays little of his hero but the roaming fancy. " Fay ce-que voudras " was his Rabelaisian motto. " I generally act," he said, " upon first impulses," or " according as the fly stings." But that fly often stung Sterne to dalliance by the road — with those " angels," as he wrote, to which his "Balaam's ass" conducted him. Neither the beast, however, nor his curveting " hobby-horse " was a steed like Rosinante. Sterne always gave the freest and loosest rein to the instinct which carried him, and he capari- soned his palfrey with such bizarre trappings that we scarcely note its vices or bad breeding. With all his daintiness Sterne ranks among our frankest and freest humourists, both in his tears and laughter. It has been said that the fulness of humour is not for the young, who can only face half of life. Sterne faced the whole, and drew a fantastic philo- sophy from it, though he harped too often on the least savoury side.
Later on, he added to his French literature the sentiment of a novel, he Doyen de Cokrainey and the dull candour of the Paysanne Parvenue.1 Montaigne, too, lay ever on his 1 Whitefoord Papers, p. 230.
24 STERNE
table. In English thought he took Locke for his guide, " that history book," he styles him, " of what passes in a man's own mind " ; and Locke himself would have been startled to find how much his analysis of the senses influ- enced Sterne's sentimentality. A lifelong favourite, too, was Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy ^ that gold-mine of quota- tion and reflection, which has enriched so many authors with inexhaustible ore. Sterne still owes Burton a heavy bill. And he also sought out, now and afterwards, many a rare old English work on alchemy, fortification, and theology — most curious browsing-fields for his whimsical mind. Such were the elements that shaped it.
These and the Restoration dramatists were the Cam- bridge staple of the two companions while they sat and read together under the spreading walnut tree in the inner court of Jesus College. This tree they named " the Tree of Knowledge " — a knowledge, perchance, of evil more than of good : —
" At Cambridge many years ago, In Jesus was a walnut tree ; The only thing it had to show, The only thing folks went to see.
Being of such a size and mass,
And growing in so wise a college, I wonder how it came to pass
It was not called the c Tree of Knowledge.' "
These are Sterne's own verses in his contribution of " My Cousin's Tale " to his friend's Crazy Tales}
1 Hall-Stevenson's Works (1795), vol. iii. p. 28. The subjoined doggerel contained in the gossip of Sterne's friend Croft, also attests Sterne's authorship : —
" This should be the Tree of Knowledge, As it stands in so very wise a college." Cf. Whitefoord Papers, p. 229.
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 25
The world lay before the two fantasts. John Hall soon set off* for the grand tour before he tried to settle down at the castle, which he christened "Crazy." In July 1740, Sterne, with a light heart, empty pocket, and a diffuse tincture of the classics, duly graduated as Master of Arts. Ovid's Art of hove was in his blood, and sanctity held aloof from his nature. Yet the robe of sanctity he was forced to wear ; it was his only outlet for career. This is not an edifying spectacle, but such, in the eighteenth century, was often the profane Church, and it was said at the time that it was far easier to find a bad actor than a good clergyman.
His mother, now in receipt of a ^20 pension, bustled over from Ireland with his sister, in the hope (which her son never encouraged) of settling at Chester ; but she had been repulsed by the grand Sternes of Elvington. To them the drifting youth clung, as his only chance of rising in the world. He had already profited by a Sterne pittance and a Sterne endowment. The Sternes must now find him some curacy. But already he felt himself cut off from the bustle of life. Shortly before he quitted Cam- bridge, he awoke one morning to find his bed deluged with blood. A vessel had burst in his lungs, and he realised, what he never ceased to make light of, that his course would be a long tussle with death. Such a battle he did all he could to convert into a scamper, and more and more he frisked with mortality.
" The deuce take these bellows of mine," wrote Sterne to the Earl of Effingham, when, almost thirty years onwards, he burst another blood-vessel.1 But he did not always mock at his malady. " O blessed health," he exclaims as Shandy, " thou art above all gold and treasure ; 'tis thou who enlargest the soul and openest all its powers to receive 1 Cf. Professor W. Cross's Laurence Sterne, p. 344.
26 STERNE
instruction and to relish virtue. He that has thee has little more to wish for, and he that is so wretched as to want thee wants everything else. . . . O thou eternal maker of all beings, .... thou whose power and goodness can enlarge the faculties of thy creatures to this infinite degree of excellence and perfection, what have we Moonites done ? " ! Nevertheless, in the main, and more and more, he made of death a butt to play his pranks on. One of these pranks, it must be owned, was his ordination.
On 6th March 1737, when he was twenty-four, the irreverend " Mr Yorick " submitted to the ordaining hand of the Right Reverend the Bishop of Lincoln in the Chapel of Buckden Hall. At present, however, the Sternes failed him. The Bishop it was who found the stripling a stopgap of a cure. For a space Laurence Sterne figured as curate of St Ives, near Huntingdon, whose graceful bridge his artistic eye must often have admired. Nothing more of this fugitive start is known but his vicar's name, William Piggot. That he resumed flirtation there is probable from a stray expression in a letter.2 There were few openings at St Ives. After a year and a half the Sternes at last came to the rescue. Cousin Richard was now dead in his turn, like Uncle Richard before him. This time, his uncle Jaques (or Jacob) Sterne befriended the thread- bare curate — Doctor and Prebendary Jaques Sterne, now Canon Residentiary and Precentor of York Cathedral, Archdeacon of Cleveland, and aspirant to an archbishopric, one of those coarse, grasping dignitaries whose life was not the lily,
" If tales tell true, nor wrong these holy men."
No Sterne, he may have thought, should want, even Laurey the wastrel ; and Uncle Jaques, who was a fighting
1 Tristram Shandy, vol. i. p. 117.
2 The episode of " Harriot " to be quoted later.
THE PRELUDE TO STERNE'S WIFE 27
Whig, had need of a ready penman. At Chester, accord- ingly, on 20th August 1738, Laurence Sterne was duly ordained priest. And a few days afterwards the Archbishop of York — that Lancelot Blackburne who had started as a buccaneer — bestowed on him through the uncle's influence the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, in Galways, a swampy village that ill agreed with Sterne's complaint. The stipend was wretched — the " passing rich on forty pounds a year," though ere long it brought with it a chaplaincy and a York prebend. Only eight miles, however, parted it from the county capital. After St Ives, Sutton might seem almost gay, and who knew what tender hand and solid fortune he might be able to hold ? Sterne's future wife was already in sight. Once more, scold and shrew, and worse, as we shall find her, poor, poor Mrs Sterne !
CHAPTER IV
ELIZABETH LUMLEY AND THE JESTER S COURTSHIP
Elizabeth Lumley, afterwards Mrs Sterne, has
never
been characterised. It has escaped biographers that she was the termagant and arrogant cousin of Elizabeth Montagu, " Queen of the Blue-stockings," and a connec- tion of the great Pitt, to whom she sold her Hayes Villa ; or that the saloniste herself branded her as " a fretful porcupine, always darting her quills at somebody or some- thing." 1 These amenities were domestic, not social.
1 Cf. Mrs Climenson's Elizabeth Montagu, vol. ii. p. 177. The cousin- ship with Mrs Montagu arose from the fact that Mrs Sterne's grandmother was half-sister to Mrs Montagu's grandfather. The following is the pedigree from Mrs Climenson's book : —
2nd. Elizabeth Clarke, = Thomas Robinson,
daughter of William son of Sir Leonard
Clarke of Merivale Robinson.
Abbey, Warwickshire, heiress to her brother, William Clarke.
1st. Anthony Light. 1 daughter.
1st. Thomas Kirke 1 of Cockridge,
Co. Yorks,
great virtuoso,
d. 1709.
2nd.
Lydia = The Rev. Robert
Lumley of Lum-
ley Castle,
Bedale, Yorks,
1721-1731.
Matthew = Elizabeth Drake, Robinson daughter of (father of Councillor Mrs Mon- Robert Drake of tagu, and the Drakes of of a son, Ash, Devon. Matthew).
Lydia = Rev. Henry Elizabeth = Rev. Laurence Sterne.
of Albury and Ealing.
5 children.
Lydia,
died an
infant.
28
I Lydia = A. de Medalle.
I Son.
MRS. STER1
iginal portrait in crayons by Frc (In the possession of the Reoerend G. W. Blenkin)
LUMLEY: THE JESTERS- COURTSHIP 29
ne never ceased to ne polish both of her i
her manners, and r.liza Draper — one wh
had never seen, but who detested her — repeated not only Sterne's words, but her Annie James's, when
described her as for is unrivalled " in
Europe.*'1 Such was Mi d, querulous, and
quarrelsome. She grew to b. virago, who as
s went by seems even. to in drink.2
oy it might account for h <d for her
mged reproaches of a Ik.
Her earliest grievance was to perilously near old maidenhc
of Sterne, who afterwards came t< real cai
mgement by his p< warmth of
re sentimental compan: But
ed a chapter of she had
ire had gifted her with a stalwart ded manfully — according to Mrs Montag m of flesh."
om the moment that Sterne espoused s Montagu herself, despite his errors, u Madam," he once wrote to her when for a temporary misunde / from the heart. You, I know, nevei I had nothing to forgive. . . 1 have 1 ink
for, and am, with a heart full of thi , your most affectionate c When Nathaniel Hawthorn- that first appears in this volum< it the
her lengthy epistle from Bombs ;, 1772.
Add. MSS. 34,527, ff. 47-70.
2 Cf. ibid. Mrs Draper's assertion wa 1 ijsses than ;, though he confirmed them.
3 The whole of this interesting lett< . ion of
Raphael.
MISS LUMLEY : THE JESTER'S COURTSHIP 29
Sterne never ceased to praise the polish both of her intellect and her manners, and Sterne's Eliza Draper — one whom she had never seen, but who detested her — repeated not only Sterne's words, but her friend Annie James's, when she described her as for these qualities unrivalled " in Europe."1 Such was Mrs Sterne, proud, querulous, and quarrelsome. She grew to be an excitable virago, who as years went by seems even to have taken refuge in drink.2 If so, it might account for her "madness," and for her prolonged reproaches of abandonment by her kinsfolk.
Her earliest grievance was to be found single at an age then perilously near old maidenhood. She never made the best of Sterne, who afterwards came to contribute real causes for estrangement by his periodical escapes to the warmth of more sentimental companionships. But if her whole life proved a chapter of complaints, she had compensations. Nature had gifted her with a stalwart arm, which she wielded manfully — according to Mrs Montagu's brother, an "arm of flesh." >?^-Or-ti^ ^£v/.
From the moment that Sterne espoused this nettle-bed, Mrs Montagu herself, despite his errors, espoused his cause. " Madam," he once wrote to her when she begged pardon for a temporary misunderstanding, " injuries come only from the heart. You, I know, never intended one, and so I had nothing to forgive. ... I have much to thank you for, and am, with a heart full of the highest ideas of yours, your most affectionate cosin."3
When Nathaniel Hawthorne beheld Cotes's crayon, that first appears in this volume, he pronounced it the
1 Cf. her lengthy epistle from Bombay to Mrs James, of April 15, 1772. Add. MSS. 34,527, ff. 47-70.
2 Cf. ibid. Mrs Draper's assertion was derived from other witnesses than Sterne, though he confirmed them.
3 The whole of this interesting letter is in the autograph collection of Mr H. H. Raphael.
3o
STERNE
visage of one so haughty and unamiable that he wondered how " Sterne ever contrived to live a week with such an awful woman." 1 Nevertheless, this likeness was taken when she was already forty-eight. Hawthorne was mistaken in supposing that her husband " ultimately left her." In the long run it was she who found it more comfortable to quit Sterne. All this, however, belongs to the future. At present she could be even tender. What she became was due partly to Sterne ; what he became, mainly to himself ; though he was never rough to her, and had great provocations.
In 1732 died the Rev. Robert Lumley (erst of Lumley Castle), Vicar of Bedale near Northallerton, a prize living worth close on two thousand pounds a year. He came of true and blue Yorkshire blood ; in his veins ran that of the Rymers and Hoptons. The Lumleys descended from Liulph, a noble of the Conquest, and they could boast a long gallery of armoured ancestors.2 One of these had been famous in the War of Succession, as Sterne did not fail to commemorate after he had married the descendant. " Your honour remembers with concern," said Corporal Trim (in an unnoted passage) to Uncle Toby, " the total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of Landen : everyone was left to shift for himself ; and if it had not been for the regiments of Wyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the retreat over the bridge of Neerspeeken, the King himself would scarcely have gained it." Perhaps Mrs Sterne inherited the martial spirit.
This fortunate incumbent had married a certain Lydia,
1 Cf Our Old Home (* •' Pilgrimage to Old Boston "), modern reprint, p. 134. Professor Cross, in his Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (pp. 109- 10) has made the mistake of confusing this crayon portrait by Francis Cotes with a caricature that Sterne is said to have made of her.
2 Cf Elizabeth Montagu, vol. ii. p. 139, where Mrs Montagu's sister-in- law recounts the glories of the seat near Newcastle.
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widow of Thomas Kirke of Cockridge Hall, near Leeds in the parish of Adel, antiquary, virtuoso, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Lydia' s father was Anthony Light of Cockridge, but she was born in London, and she probably brought grist to the Lumley mill. These Lights recur in a curious connection. When Sterne's " Eliza " quitted England in 1767 to rejoin her husband in India, it was a Miss Light who accompanied her on the voyage.
Of this prosperous marriage sprang two petted daughters, who lived "in a superior style," as befitted their father's income. But on his death they were impoverished, and owed part of their slender means to the intestacy of a nameless relative, as we learn from one of the Montagu letters.1 The elder, Lydia, wedded the Rev. John Botham, the son of the Vicar of Clifton Campden in Staffordshire, where the Lumleys, too, seem to have owned property. At first Rector of Elford in that county, next of Yoxall, this rather wild clergyman eventually became Vicar of Ealing in Middlesex, and Albury in Surrey, where his wife, the spendthrift mother of many children (sometimes god- mothered and always favoured by Mrs Montagu), died in 1753, and lies buried. Elizabeth, the younger of the sisters, was much courted in small circles as an " heiress " ; but before the little windfall of 1741 just mentioned, her income did not exceed £30 a year.2
In 1739, when Sterne first knew Miss Elizabeth Lumley, she was about a year older than her future lover. She divided her time between Clifton Campden and York, where the concerts and assemblies presented the pink of provincial
1 Of 1 74 1 from Lydia, Mrs Sterne's sister. The intestate was "an ancient woman" "in the north," "whose very name I am a stranger to." It consisted of some houses at Leeds of ^60 yearly value. Cf. Elizabeth Montagu, vol. i. p. 85.
2 According to the Montagu letters, only ^30 ; but in Sterne's correspond- ence and his daughter's there are traces of the ^40.
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fashion, especially during the biennial race meetings, which brought together a concourse of youth, sport, and gaiety from all parts of the kingdom. Nor was a lively leaven of foreigners absent. Several French families are known ; there was, too, a Mr Ricord who discounted bills ; and an occa- sional visitor to Bishopsthorpe would be Sam Torriano, the London dandy, who, through Mrs Montagu, became Sterne's friend. Elizabeth Lumley relished these distractions. This independent young woman used to take up her abode in " Little Alice Lane " with a servant for duenna ; the alley lay south of the Minster yard and hard by an arch marking the site of an old gateway into the close. Elizabeth was not beautiful, but she was very musical ; and Sterne, who loved music, was no mean performer on the viol-di-gamba. She liked dancing, and so did Sterne, who must often have led her up in the minuet under the " magnificent lustres " which adorned the gorgeous Egyptian Hall of the York Assembly Rooms, designed after a draught by Palladio.1 Unlike Sterne, she does not appear to have been a draughtswoman. Later still he became a painter in earnest, and the curves of his feminine handwriting attest him an artist. But Elizabeth shared Laurence's taste for reading, and she was thought interesting. At least she would listen to him for hours, and in such cases that is often the test.
For two years, as Sterne has told us and all the world knows, the young parson besieged this vigorous lady, who, though she liked him (for who could talk more beautifully or show a softer pity !), did not capitulate in a moment. Her delay, by his own testimony, was quite unselfish. " She owned she liked me," he wrote in the brief and striking memoir which he left to his daughter ; " but she thought herself not rich enough, or me too poor, to be 1 Cf. Defoe's A Tour through Great Britain, vol. iii. p. 168.
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joined together." ! She feared to burden her wooer ; she shrank from consulting her relations as to his character ; and " woman," Sterne once wrote, " is a timid animal." 2
The young lover had his way to make in this plaguy world, and the height of his present ambition would be the slow provincial preferment, which might be hampered by an early marriage. He was imprudent, too ; even the halfpence burned his pocket, and she longed almost maternally to save him from himself. A wife and family must fare ill if the sum of Laurey's worldly goods amounted to less than one hundred pounds income, and the sole capital would be hers and might be squandered : though, as a matter of fact, she refused to let it be settled on their marriage, nor did Sterne ever abuse a confidence for which he remained grateful.3
Yet how wonderfully the sentimentalist discoursed, how fine she thought his preaching, what a languishment stole from his curious gaze, how sweetly he sighed, and oh, at her slightest pang, how tenderly he wept ! For already Sterne showed the knack, congenital, though heightened by French example, of tearful feeling. His tears were the readiest possible. In the future he was always weep- ing over the sorrows even of insects, though ever with an oblique reference to his own. Nor was this affectation, for two tear-drops still stain a paper which he drew up in solitude, and for the benefit of his wife ere he first journeyed abroad. And when he was not weeping, how often he pressed the hands of women who were usually more interesting than beautiful ! It is extraordinary what good fortune he was to have in this respect ; but his r61e
1 Cf. Letters of the late Reverend Mr Laurence Sterne to his most Intimate Friends, p. 19, by Sterne's daughter Lydia de Medalle, 1775.
2 Cf Original Letters, 1788, p. 196.
3 He records his gratitude in a letter to his uncle.
3
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was ever that of the guide, philosopher, and friend — of that sympathetic guardian who used to be a figure familiar to the stage. In this regard it is perhaps not realised what an original Sterne was in his time and country. His luxury of nerves seemed quite foreign to his age, a totally new sensation, while at this moment of his courtship it was alien to English literature. Defoe had not wept in his Roxana, Fielding was still a pugilist in satire, and Richardson was only on the point of issuing his Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, who, when they came, shed tears of substance compared with Laurey's airy dew. Sterne brought the eighteenth century tears as he brought the woman's standpoint into fashion ; and if, long afterwards, even the dry Hume was to weep when he quarrelled with Rousseau, this was partly of Sterne's doing.
Oft and often would he come to share Elizabeth's modest meal in Little Alice Lane, or in some cottage-nook hard by the city and bowered " in roses and jessamin," which, perhaps remembering Swift, Sterne named "D'Estella."1 In any case the unnoticed fact that in one of the later sections of Tristram he designates himself the " Curate D'Estella," shows that the name did not fade from his remembrance.
With pensive looks, perchance, he held her hand and felt her pulse — the pulse of feeling more than of circulation — as he was to do hereafter in the case of so many fleeting affinities. He made a sympathy of little things. And then he brought her books, and shared her tastes and outdoor pursuits. Shakespeare and music and flowers were his
1 Professor Wilbur Cross, in his elaborate Life and Times of Laurence Sterne^ makes the " roses and jessamin " which Ste# ne mentions in a letter of this date to Miss Lumley refer to a garden round the York lodging ; but this is clearly not so, for Sterne in this very letter writes of " the valley where D'Estella stands," and adds that he " returned home to your lodgings " — the cottage probably belonging to the anonymous "Miss" who was their confidante.
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themes, yet he could handle a gun and manage a horse, though his hacking cough, pale face, and spider shanks pro- claimed him delicate. For all his tears, he was not wholly- morbid ; something there was of wiry robustness about and within him. Sharp wit was on his tongue, and pathos, relieved both by paradox and innuendo. And as he lan- guished, he smiled a romantic smile. How different, this, from the beefy types around her — the clumsy Squire Tunbellies, the pompous deans, the drowsy curates of her acquaintance ! She found it hard to stem his winding approaches.
Yet here once more we are confronted by the essential unreality of Sterne, who breathes in his books far more than in the body. About this man there seems no bone or muscle, only arteries and nerve-centres, little to touch or handle. Glimpses of him we glean on several sides : letters of his remain, self-revelations, in plenty, but we cannot imagine him eating his breakfast, romping with a child (unless it were very pretty), or giving anyone a hearty shake of the hand. He seems always something outside himself, wavering around or over it. But of two elements we may be sure. His being held the seeds — he himself is our in- formant— of two loves, the " sacred " and the " profane," * — though for " sacred " should be read " airy," — and the " profane " preponderated. On that side there was the strain, the nasty strain, belonging to the brotherhood of John Hall-Stevenson, though even here Sterne's bent was far more sensuous than sensual ; on the other, the aerial strain (though etherial never) — the tricksy, forward, laughing
1 Cf. Tristram Shandy, vol. vii. pp. 139-40: "'The latter,' continued he, ' partakes wholly of the* nature of Venus ; the first, which is the golden chain let down from heaven, excites the love heroic, which comprehends in it, and excites too, the desire for philosophy and truth.' ' To be sure,' said my mother, ' love keeps peace in the world.' ' In the house, my dear, I own.' ' It replenishes the earth,' said my mother. ■ But it keeps heaven empty, my dear,' replied my father."
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love that sought, as he himself puts it, " to get out of the body " — no sustained feeling of selfless affection or deep attachment, but a captivating caper of saucy spirits, at once stimulating pity and simulating it. And joined to both sounded those other notes of faun or satyr, of Pan playing on his pipes amid the rushes while the dryads peer from their forest.
There is no need to insist that there is a clean and an unclean Sterne. What must be insisted, however, is that his libertinage is that of the freest fancy, not that of a fleshly rake ; and in this domain, as in the rest, Sterne lacks actuality. His is a blithe, goblin grossness ; and though his coarsest food is no meat for babes, it is not poison. It is bad, but it is not putrid. It does not corrupt, infect, or contaminate. Sterne never means to seduce ; his wanton- nesses are not real, nor is that prurience which only pro- vokes a smile. The whim and wit of them blow away the scandal, just as the same qualities erase the blots in a first- rate French farce. Had it been otherwise, the blameless Lessing would not have loved Sterne's sallies, which were taken literally by the dense critics and caricaturists of his day. Sterne the author is no Lothario. In his own time women favoured his books, from the duchess, it was then said, to " the snuffy chambermaid." In ours, he is mainly read by men. Since Thackeray scourged him with Victorian scorpions, his first admirers have eyed him askance. True, much of Tristram Shandy is not for girlhood (Sterne called j it a book for " the bedchamber "), nor all of the Sentimental Journey, which he styled "a book for the parlour." To that | shelf, however, with some excisions, it might be restored. I The part of Sterne which most shocks womankind is not I his light and occasional lubricity, but the double meanings j and the play at passion. Women realise that he is not virile. Yet, set by Rabelais, who was virile indeed, Sterne I
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is modest — a cascade to Niagara. Compared with Hall- Stevenson, his worst page seems almost stainless ; but compared with Goldsmith, the blemishes are foul indeed. Still, one who could so well idealise the courtship of Uncle Toby and the heart-pangs of Corporal Trim surely saw some vision of love and sacrifice which he could not follow. And this is another instance of what was urged at the outset — that though his cobweb of suggestion entangled filthy flies, it also caught the fresh dew of the morning. Had not that dew been there, who would write about Sterne ? With that dew in such odd commixture, who would not write about him ?
And now that his courtship looms, we must pause awhile to recall his general outlook on love. It was not high, but neither was it mean, though its main limit was gallantry : Sterne, like Boccaccio, romanticised a thrill, not a passion. And romance is the poetry of the nerves. Compare Bandello with Boccaccio, and you have the difference between Stevenson who debased, and Sterne who Decameroned passion. In this respect who can be more candid ? He was not so Shandean as Tristram Shandy — so he protested shortly before he died. Arid, though the dividing line is thin, his flirting fancy was more of the artist than the man. Or, rather, he himself was less a man than an artist. He loved his fancies. He caressed his feelings, not their objects, and even his feelings want sub- stance ; they are lacework.
As a boy, we have seen how he grieved for Virgil's heroine ; and " Oh," he exclaims in another passage, " there is a sweet aera in the life of man when (the brain being tender and fibrillous, and more like pap than anything else) a story read of two fond lovers, separated from each other by cruel parents, and by still more cruel destiny .... affords more pabulum to the brain than all the Frusts,
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and Crusts, and Rusts of antiquity, which travellers can cook up for it." l
Shakespeare's distich —
" Tell me, where is fancy bred — Or in the heart, or in the head ? "
goes to the root of Sterne's love-philosophy. In Tristram is a striking piece showing that Sterne's aesthetic flicker sprang more from the head than from the heart : " It is a great pity — but 'tis certain from every day's obser- vation of man that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end, provided there is a sufficient wick standing out ; if there is not — there is an end of the affair ; and if there is, by lighting it at the bottom, as the flame in that case has the misfortune generally to put itself out — there is an end of the affair again. I, for my part, could I always have the ordering of it which way I would be burnt myself — for I cannot bear the thoughts of being burnt like a beast — I would oblige a housewife constantly to light me at the top, for then I should burn down decently to the socket." 2
With Sterne women were not a shrine, but a picture gallery through which the collector rambles. He discrimi- nated their lights and shades. When Corporal Trim muses on mortality to the waiting-maid : " c I could hear Trim talk so for ever,' cried Susannah — c What is it (Susannah laid her hand upon Trim's shoulder) — but cor- ruption ? ' (Susannah took it off)." And here let Sterne's comment be remarked : " Now I love you for this — and 'tis this delicious mixture within you which makes you dear creatures what you are.' CA11 I can say of the matter is — that he has either a pumpkin for his head — or a pipkin
1 Tristram Shandy, vol. vii. p. 113.
2 Ibid., vol. viii. p. 41.
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for his heart, — and whenever he is dissected 'twill be found so.' " 1
The humourist of sensations makes his Shandy say that love " is not so much a sentiment as a situation, into which a man enters, as my brother Toby would do into a corps— no matter whether he loves the service or no — being once in it he acts as if he did, and takes every step to show himself a man of prowess."2 This is the love of Smollett or of Fielding. But Sterne questions whether love be not a " disease," and in the " Love's Alphabet " which accompanies the story of Widow Wadman he reveals himself by showing that love is the most lyrical of all human passions ; at the same time the most misgiving — and, he adds, " ridiculous." " c You can scarce combine two ideas together upon it, Brother Toby, without an hypallage.' c What is that ? ' cried my Uncle Toby. c The cart before the horse,' replied my father." Often as he dwells on its physical foundation, love's whimsical aspect is never far from his thoughts. Widow Wadman is made to observe, when Uncle Toby stays' with her, that a woman mixes a man up with her house and furniture. And, with the irony which always underlies him, Sterne tells us that in love "the suffering party is at least the third."
Sterne never put love on the pinnacle of chivalry. Though sometimes he idealised, he did not consecrate or shield it with a vestal armour. Nor did he hedge it round with obstacles for knights to vanquish ; or seclude it in wilds inaccessible for daring to penetrate. Love meant for him no Sleeping Beauty, no peerless rose won only through thorns and brambles by some heroic prince. Sterne was a nomad pagan who peeps at love by every wayside corner. And women, he takes as facts : " Nature is Nature," he says in one place. But then neither does
Tristram S 'handy ', vol. viii. p. 144. 2 Ibid.> vol. v. p. 52.
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Sterne wholly profane love, though he will not compound with conventions : love for him is a sensation which he aestheticises : " I said we were not stocks or stones, 'tis very well, — I should have added, nor are we angels. I wish we were ; but we are men, clothed with bodies and governed by our imaginations, and what a junketing piece of work there is betwixt these and our seven senses, especi- ally some of them ; for my part, I own it, I am ashamed to confess. Let it suffice that of all the senses, the eye, for I absolutely deny the touch, though most of your barbati I know are for it, has the quickest commerce with the soul — gives the smarter stroke, and leaves something more in- expressible upon the fancy than words can either convey — or sometimes get rid of." This is nearer the Renaissance. It presents love as an object of art, and the lover as virtuoso. But, though love's dilettante, Sterne could be earnest as well as whimsical. " c I thought love had been a joyous thing,' quoth my Uncle Toby. c 'Tis a most serious thing, an please your honour (sometimes) that is in the world.' " Trim meant his answer ; he had suffered.
We need not doubt that in his own courtship Sterne was serious. He had caught on fire from the " top " ; Elizabeth Lumley appealed to his head. In his after-coquetries, the question might occur as to what the charm of this unsub- stantial man was. For it is certain that women were always as much on his side as most men were against him. Quaint as his strange countenance looked, odd as his harlequin figure, he was the reverse of handsome. His amusements were rather the eccentricities of a worn phthisic racing with death than such as attract the gentle or the gay. I think it was the blend of the two loves already noticed, that drew so many "misunderstood" moths to his pale candle.
His paganism was not materialist, and none could call
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him a voluptuary. Women beheld in him a strange will- o'-the-wisp straying in the twilight of the senses. His mystery summoned them, and his elfin mockeries, far more than any malign, erotic glamour. And something there was in him that called on all who suffered, or thought they suffered, from the normal, brutal man ; the feminine in him appealed to the feminine. Mischievous as he was, he never seems to have done them much harm, nor, outwardly or inwardly, can he be called wholly of the flesh. He got " out of the body " because, except in dreams, he was rarely in it. He was often kind, always considerate, and he could be disinterested. Nay, we know from a letter already cited that he could be genuinely innocent. It concerns " a once sprightly and vivacious Harriot," and expresses unfeigned indignation against the man who had been " the fatal cause of overwhelming the spotless soul, and plunging the yet untainted mind into a sea of sorrow and repentance." " In such cases," he asks, " does not man act the part of a demon ? " " Had I known his pretensions," he resumes, " I should have flown on the wings of friendship, of regard and of affection — and rescued the lovely innocent. ... Be not alarmed at my declaration — I have long been bound to her in the reciprocal bonds of affection. ... I would love the whole sex were they equally deserving." And after a fresh outburst he dwells demurely on the " delight- ful task of whispering peace to those who are in trouble, and healing the broken in spirit." Once more, and in another letter : " Surely the pleasures," he muses, " which arise from contemplating such characteristics " (and he is speaking of gracious ladies) — " embracing the urn which contains their ashes, and shedding tears of friendship for it — are far, far superior to the highest joys of sense, or sensuality." And : " If you do not like the last word," he concludes as Yorick, " I pray you be so kind as to
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scratch it out, for that is a liberty I have never ventured to take myself with anything I write." 1
Sterne, as a man, was a Lothario mainly of the mind. Indeed, he says as much in a late and laughing letter to " Hannah " or " Mrs H., " whom he rallies on vague flirta- tions ; and he mocks at unsubstantial love-making with double amusement to another friend. He liked romances in the air, and the high-born fribbles who humoured and cajoled him never dreamed of Yorick as an earthy gallant. Kitty de Fourmentelle and Eliza Draper were the sole passions of his life, and even these hardly deserve the name. Rather, they were phantoms of passion, as the rest were the sport of sentiment. The miasma lay, not in his hazy actions, but in his brooding nerves, while above that miasma shone a sunshine that often pierced and sometimes dispersed it.
The originality of Sterne's gushes has been hinted ; their mawkishness was tempered by his irony. He was the first to coin the word " sentimental " in our language, and that too in one of the first letters which at this time the plaintive suitor addressed to the lady of his choice. Some have thought that he derived this adjective from France, but when his works were translated into French, "sentimental" had to be repeated, just as in German it was Lessing who suggested to the translator of the Senti- mental Journey the paraphrase of " empfindsam." The term was wholly new, and to it Sterne subsequently added the verb "sentimentalise."2 After promising a correspondent all the joys of the simple life, " In the meantime," he proceeds, " we will philosophise and sentimentalise — the last
1 For the first quotation, cf. Siemens Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, London, G. Kearsly, 1775, pp. 54-62 ; and for the second, ibid., p. 52.
2 Cf Original Letters, etc., 1788, p. 14. It seems addressed to William Combe.
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word is a bright invention of the moment, which was written for yours and Dr Johnson's service — and you shall sit in my study and take a peep into the world as into a show box, and amuse yourself as I present the pictures of it to your imagination. Thus will I teach you to love its follies, to pity its errors and detest its injustice — and I will introduce you among the rest to some tender-hearted damsel on whose cheeks some bitter affliction has placed a tear, and having heard her story you shall take a white handkerchief from your pocket and wipe the moisture from her eyes and from your own. — I love the classics as well as any man ought to love them, but among all their fine science, their fine writings and their fine phrases, their most enthusiastic admirer will not be able to find me half a dozen stories that have any sentiment in them — and so much for that." These late sentences contain the whole man, his artifice and his simplicity, for the two were inex- tricably blended. After Sterne's death, the Abbe Raynal said of him that " he was in love with the whole sex " ; and Sterne, who had said the same, must have told it to the Abbe. A part of the Sentimental Journey concerning women, and written in Paris, reiterates it. " God bless them all," says Sterne. " . . . . There is not a man upon earth who loves them so much as I do : After all the foibles I have seen and all the satires I have read against them still I love them ; being firmly persuaded that the man who has not a sort of affection for the whole sex is incapable of ever loving a single one as he ought." x Dickens's Mr Snevell- icci, it will be remembered, also owned that he loved " every one of them." But then he was otherwise inspired, and he was not a sentimental tramp.
Miss Lumley set off to join her sister at Yoxall rectory ;
1 Cf. Sentimental Journey, vol. ii. p. 65.
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and Sterne, after visiting the cottage of " Miss S.," their mutual friend, actually took on his lady-love's " Minster lodgings," and haunted her deserted precincts. To feast on feeling was ever his regimen. The familiar letter to her in which he first uses the word " sentimental " will bear repetition : —
" Alas, everything has now lost its relish and look ! The hour you left D'Estella I took to my bed — I was worn out with fevers of all kinds, but most of all that fever of the heart with which thou knowest well I have been wasting these two years, and shall continue wasting till you quit S. [Staffordshire]. The good Miss S., from the forebodings of the best of hearts, thinking I was ill, insisted upon me going to her. What can be the cause, my dear L. [Lumley], that I have never been able to see the face of this mutual friend but I feel myself rent to pieces ? She made me stay an hour with her. And in that short space 1 burst into tears a dozen times, — and in such affectionate gusts of passion that she was constrained to leave the room and sympathise in her dressing-room. c I have been weeping for you both,' said she, in a tone of the sweetest pity ; — c for poor L.'s heart I have long known it — her anguish is as sharp as yours — her heart as tender — her constancy as great — her virtue as heroic — Heaven brought you not together to be tormented.' I could only answer her with a kind look and a heavy sigh — and returned home to your lodgings (which I have hired till your return) to resign myself to misery. — Fanny had prepared me a supper — she is all attention to me — but I sat over it with tears ; a bitter f sauce, my L., but I could eat it with no other. For the moment she began to spread my little table, my heart fainted within me ; one solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one glass ! I gave a thousand penetrating looks at the chair thou hast so often graced in these quiet and sentimental repasts
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— then laid down my knife and fork, and took up my hand- kerchief, and clapt it across my face, and wept like a child — I do so at this very moment, my L., for, as I take up my pen, my poor pulse quickens, my pale face glows, and tears are trickling down the paper as I address the word L. Oh, thou blessed in thyself and in thy virtues — blessed to all that know thee — to me most so because more do I know of thee than of all thy sex. — This is the philtre, my L., by which thou has charmed me, and by which thou wilt hold me thine, while virtue and faith hold the world together. — This, my friend, is the plain and simple magic by which I
told Miss I have won a place in that heart of thine on
which I depend so satisfied that time, or distance, or change, or anything which might alarm the hearts of little men, create no uneasy suspicions in mine. ... I told you poor Fanny was all attention to me since your departure — con- trives every day bringing in the name of L. She told me last night (upon giving me some hartshorn) she had observed my illness began the very day of your departure for S. ; that I had never held up my head, had seldom or scarce ever smiled, had fled from all society ; that she verily believed I was broken-hearted, for she had never entered the room or passed by the door, but she heard me sigh heavily. That I neither ate nor slept, nor took pleasure in anything as before. Judge then, my L., can the valley look so well or the roses and jessamin smell so sweet as hereto- fore ? Ah me — but adieu ! the vesper bell calls me from thee to my God ! "
If any other but Sterne or Rousseau had thus written to his sweetheart we should scent hypocrisy. Ruskin has distinguished between hypocrisy and imposture, relegating the first to sentiment. Sterne was no impostor ; in his letters he has told us how on one occasion he would not open a letter, lest he might tell a falsehood to his wife ;
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while, on another, he himself confessed to a white lie in terms that prove that he had a conscience. But he was a morbid, self-concentrated egoist, fondling his fancies and taking them for things. Some design there may have been in one of these sentences, for, " More do I know of thee than of all thy sex " betrays that side-flattery which is perhaps the most captivating to woman. And the whole is impregnated with himself ; the " philtre," the love- potion, whereby she " charmed " him was her sympathy which he mistook for his own. None the less, these out- pourings were not assumed. They stirred him, like the whispers of a breeze, and what he felt for the moment demanded aesthetic expression — the same expression, when the moment returned. Long before he had realised his literary power, he sported with life, flirted it like a fan, toyed with it slowly for the thrill of realising the process. By the by-play of such exercise he titillated and fortified himself, while the suffering which he liked and laughed at was a mere peg for his artistry. He would never have portrayed wretchedness at all, but for the luxury of its appeal. Or rather, he chased away unhappiness, as he did happiness, like butterflies, only to catch them, admire their glint, and put his pin (or pen) through their plumage afterwards. One winged butterfly followed another, till he made a butterfly-dance, away or towards it, of death itself. The physical courage which was his manliest endowment belonged also to this volatile order. All his pangs and ecstasies lay in the allurement, the capture, the impres- sion, and the remembrance ; he may be said to have had a memory for a heart. How true he remained to this way- ward self appears from the fact that long afterwards — in the year preceding his lonely death — he repeated the self-same phases in the progress of his passion for " Eliza." Again he wept over the dishes, again he communed with the maid-
MISS LUMLEY : THE JESTER'S COURTSHIP 47
servant who pitied his broken heart. Again he sought solitude and bemourned his languishing frame, again he poured out his grief to a mutual friend, for a receptacle of woe was indispensable to Sterne. All this will be found in the Journal at the end of this volume. And in both cases it was the pleasure of self-pity that longed for a vent, and received a relief. His whole being was a sieve for feeling ; this one man started that sentimental vogue.
About thirty years after this epistle was posted, and only four after the Sentimental Journey had been published, Goethe, who praised and acknowledged his indebtedness to Sterne,1 surrendered himself for once to the rapture of pulsation, and dedicated it to suicide. Rousseau doubt- less contributed the phase, but Goethe found its remedy in the calm of Goldsmith and the confidence of that very Sterne who had abetted the foible. Every print shop exhibited pictures of Werther prostrate before Charlotte or distraught in his rhapsodies over fate. Put such hysteria into a stronger mould, raise the swell of feeling to the storm of passion, turn the tea into brandy, and we get Byron with his seared heart, defiant on the rock of exile, and a spectacle for mankind. Truly Sterne was a pioneer.
One word more, and we have done with this early love- letter. It introduces another of Sterne's characteristics —those minute touches of observation that actualise his impressionism. The touches themselves are impressionist, for Sterne was the first to subordinate details to the whole, to make them suggestive points in the general out- line, to halve his imagination, as he said, with his reader's. In painting, Turner was to do the same. This quality
1 Cf. {inter alia) Eckermann's Gesfirache mit Goethe \ vol. ii. p. 29. In these conversations Goethe twice again alludes with pleasure to Sterne, and especially to his saying that he regretted that he had not made a more sensible use of misfortune.
48 STERNE
will be treated more fully hereafter, but his own illustra- tion shall be given at once. " There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety," he says when the Grisette shook her head in answer to Sterne's head-shake, "where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and innocence are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them — They are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infector. I leave it to your men of words to swell pages about it — it is enough in the present to say again, the gloves would not do ; so folding our hands within our arms, we both lolled upon the counter — it was narrow, and there was just room for the parcel to lie between us." The famous passage follows about the gloves and their glances, their glances and the gloves. " She looked into my very heart and reins — it may seem strange, but I could actually feel she did." 1
After this, revert to the love-letter which Sterne never meant for publication. How he dallies over the details : " one solitary plate ', one knife, one fork, one glass" " a thousand penetrating looks at the chair" the handker- chief, the " roses and the jessamin " ! This is not the mechanical " realism " of photography, but the miniature strokes that realise the lights and shades of an impression. Everything that Sterne handles becomes a symbol of sensa- tion that converts the commonplace into art, assuages the author's longing to project himself, and builds, so to speak, a bridge of intellectual sympathy. Such handling is abso- lutely modern, and I know not who heralded it, however unconsciously, but Sterne.
Sterne's realist impressionism, moreover, is allied to yet another of his innovations. Colloquy with the reader was initiated by Steele and imitated by Addison, but it was not 1 Cf. The Sentimental Journey, vol. i. pp. 175-7.
MISS LUMLEY : THE JESTER'S COURTSHIP 49
the dramatic monologue of Sterne. Over and over again in these conferences he draws pictures of himself — crying, laughing, fainting, restful, restless, in and out, off and on. He imports himself into all the landscape, and the same traits which disgust many in the man delight most as they are used by the artist. Sterne is the playwright of impres- sionism.
Sterne's maudlin lovesickness, from his wooing onwards, revolts the wholesome male. Many a man must have itched to kick him ; but Philistines were to arise who would have kicked Shelley had he not been so ethereal, and Byron had he not been a pugilist. With the women it fared otherwise. Kitty and Eliza ; the lady at the door of the Calais Remise ; the two Grisettes ; Janatone the Montreuil innkeeper's daughter, distraught Maria, American Miss Graeme (afterwards Mrs Ferguson), and peerless Mrs Vesey — are not all these a cloud of witnesses ?
CHAPTER V
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED
The Sterne idyll proceeded in sequence. There was a quarrel ; there were protests. He was neglectful, and she in dudgeon. " I have offended her whom I tenderly love ! What could tempt me it ! But if a beggar was to knock at thy gate wouldst thou not open the door and be melted with compassion ? I know thou wouldst, for pity has erected a temple in thy bosom. ... I have reconsidered this apology, and alas ! what would it accomplish ? Arguments, even if finely spun, can never change the nature of things ! So a truce with them ! " And then he steals into her heart again, melting it by regret for " a very valuable friend lost by a sad accident." " And what is worse, he has left a widow and five young children to lament this sudden stroke." With Sterne, love lay ever in wait for charity. The sighing and laughing philosopher (and a philosophy Sterne had) grows pensive : the preacher was in him from the first. "These dark and seemingly cruel dispensations of Providence often make the best of human hearts com- plain." He can paint the distress of an affectionate mother "made a widow in a moment, weeping bitterly over a numerous, helpless, and fatherless offspring." Laurey's carelessness was also a providential dispensation, and how would his Elizabeth fare if in a moment she should be widowed also ?
5°
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED 51
He fretted for her return ; she was coming back. " May a kindly angel guide thy steps hither ! Solitude at length grows tiresome. Thou sayest thou wilt quit the place with regret ; I think so too. Does not something uneasy mingle with the very reflection of leaving it ? It is like parting with an old friend " — observe the by- play— "whose temper and company," he proceeds, "one has long been acquainted with. — I think I see you looking twenty times a day at the house, — almost counting every brick and pane of glass, — and telling them at the same time, with a sigh, you are going to leave them. — Oh ! happy modification of matter ! They will remain insensible of thy loss. — But how wilt thou be able to part with thy garden ? The recollection of so many pleasing walks must have endeared it to you. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers, which thou hast reared with thy own hands — will they not droop and fade away sooner upon thy departure ? — Who will be thy successor to nurse them in thy absence ? — thou wilt leave thy name upon the myrtle tree, — if trees, and shrubs, and flowers can compose an elegy, I should expect a very plaintive one upon this subject. Adieu, adieu ! Believe me ever, ever thine."
Already he had caught the art of matching the sound to the sense in the subtle music of phrases. This plasticity of material, interpreting meanings, is of an impressionist's essence ; and Sterne became a musician in words, the Pied Piper at whose call the feelings rushed trooping, and tripped frolicsome.
Sick at heart and sick in body, at last Elizabeth came,
1 pining for Laurence, yet fearing that she would die ; for
in communion with this half-consumptive, she seems to
; have imagined that she was the same. Fancying herself in
a decline, she betrayed the great love that she bore him.
Sterne, in the brief and exquisite memoir bequeathed to
52 STERNE
his daughter, has thus recounted the sequel : — " I wrote to her often. I believe then she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so. On her return she fell into a consumption ; and one evening that I was sitting by her with almost a broken heart to see her so low, she said, ' My dear Laurey, I can never be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live ; but I have left you every shilling of my fortune/ Upon this she showed me her will. This generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that she recovered, and I married her." But if she proved a Xantippe, he was never a Socrates.
No doubt Sterne felt himself flattered by an alliance with one who was cousin to Mrs Montagu — the centre of much fame and fashion, the most embroidered of the blue- stockings. He would scarcely have been so pleased had he read her family's opinion. A month after his marriage, Mrs Montagu's brother, Matthew Robinson, informed her that Betty Lumley was " now married to a parson who once delighted in debauchery, who is possessed of about ^ioo a year in preferment, and has a good prospect of more. What hopes our relation may have of settling the affections of a light and fickle man I know not, but I imagine she will set about it, not by means of the beauty, but of the arm of flesh. In other respects I see no fault in the match ; no woman ought to venture upon the state of Old Maiden without a consciousness of an inexhaustible fund of good nature." And shortly afterwards the great Mrs Montagu herself thus comments in a letter to her sister : " Mr Sterne has one hundred pounds a year living, with a good prospect of better perferment (sic). He was a great rake, but, being japanned and married, has varnished his character. I do not comprehend what my cousin means by their little desires ; if she had said little stomachs it would have been more help to their economies, but when people have not
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED $3
enough for the necessaries of life what avails it that they can do without the superfluities and pomps of it ? Does she mean that she won't keep a coach and six and four footmen ? What a wonderful occupation she made of court- ship ! But it left her no leisure for anything else. I wish they may live well together." '
Elizabeth Lumley soon recovered, and, in an age of feminine abeyance, she herself proposed to her grateful lover : the Assembly Rooms, it is said, were the scene. This speaks something for her will, perhaps aided by the " arm of flesh " which her kinswoman commemorates and the legacy which she had just received. From those Assembly Rooms the pair hurried straight to the minister, and were married by special licence on March 30, 1741, the then Dean officiating. Her wilful suitor professed himself enraptured, and he was in that mood which he depicted long after disillusionment set in. " Hail, ye gentle sympathies," he tirades, " that can approach two humble hearts to each other, and chase every discordant idea from an union that Nature has de- signed by the same happy colouring of character that she has given them ! " 2 And at this very moment Sterne wrote, picturing the future and transported with the prospect, — " Yes ! I will steal from the world, and not a babbling tongue shall tell where I am — Echo shall not so much as whisper my hiding-place ; — suffer thy imagination to paint it as a little sun-gilt cottage on the side of a romantic hill, — dost thou think I will leave love and friend- ship behind me ? " — he always couples the two — " No ! they shall be my companions in solitude, for they will sit down and rise up with me in the amiable form of my L. — We will be as merry and as innocent as our first Parents in Paridise before the wretched Fiend entered that indescrib-
1 Mrs Climenson's Elizabeth Montagu, vol. i. pp. 73-4.
2 Original Letters, 1 788, p. 30.
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able scene. The keenest affections will have room to shoot and expand in our retirement, and produce such fruits as madness, and envy and ambition have always killed in the bud. — Let the human tempest and hurricane rage at a distance : the desolation is beyond the horizon of peace. — My L. has seen a polyanthus blow in December, some friendly wall has sheltered it from the biting wind. No planetary influence shall reach us but that which presides [over] and cherishes the sweetest flowers. God preserve us ! How delightful this prospect is in the idea ! We will build and we will plant in our own way, — simplicity shall not be tortured by art ; — we will learn of nature how to live — she shall be our alchemist, to mingle up the good of life into one salubrious draught — the gloomy family of care and mistrust shall be banished from our dwelling, guarded by thy kind and tutelar deities ; — we will sing our choral songs in gratitude, and rejoice to the end of our pilgrimage. Adieu, my L. Return to one who languishes for thy society." Yet, as time wore on, these songs of gratitude broke into discord. Sterne tuned his pipe for other ears and forsook the house of his pilgrimage. Arcadia palled, and the entrancing shepherdess appeared a beldame. Dazed by the zigzags of the wayfarer's senti- ment, she half lost her reason and was content to fare on without him.
But before the matrimonial knot was tied, Sterne seems to have travelled for some months abroad as tutor to a young pupil. The youth whom he attended was probably Lord Aboyne, whose chaplain he had been appointed, and probability points to an earlier date than has been con- jectured.1 Twice in Tristram Shandy does Sterne refer to
1 Professor Cross puts it immediately after the wedding. But the Sternes appear to have settled down at once to their parish life, and he would hardly have left his bride.
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED 55
the asthma which he contracted while "skaiting against the wind in Flanders " ; 1 and several foreign allusions in the early part of that work, together with a familiarity, seemingly personal, with places both French and Flemish, make it certain that he had taken that trip long before ill-health drove him abroad. There are glimmers of Ghent (though Sterne in childhood may have gleaned Uncle Toby's allusions from his father), and references to old French castles, even a mention of Rome and Loretto. His quality of bear-leader is one to which he recurred much later in his career, when he still hoped for an oppor- tunity of conveying a young gentleman about Europe.
This first journey was notable, for it set him thinking, gave him the zest to roam and a foretaste of sentimental travel. The peep that he gives of it, moreover, is intro- spective : it occurs while he moralises over his self- appointment as " the King's Chief Jester." It is worth mentioning, too, that the Mr " Noddy," whom he piloted in the tour, reappears in Hall-Stevenson's so-called Moral Tales.
"I had just time (he says) in my travels through Denmark with Mr Noddy's eldest son, whom in the year 1741 1 accompanied as governor, riding along with him at a prodigious rate through most parts of Europe, and of which the original journey performed by us two will be given in the progress of this work, I had just time, I say, and that was all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long-sojourner in that country — namely 'That Nature was neither very lavish nor ras she very stingy in her gifts of genius and capacity to its inhabitants ; — but like a discreet parent was moderately kind to them all, observing such an equal tenour in the distribu- ion of her favours as to bring them in those points pretty 1 Tristram Shandy, vol. i. p. 16 ; vol. viii. p. 19.
S6 STERNE
near to a level with each other/ so that you will meet with few instances in that kingdom of refined parts ; but a great deal of plain household understanding amongst all ranks of people, of which everybody has a share, which is, I think, very right. With us, you see, the case is very different ; — we are all ups and downs in this matter ; — you are a great genius ; — or 'tis fifty to one, sir, you are a great dunce and a blackguard, — not that there is a total want of intermediate steps. . . . But the two extremes are more common, and in a greater degree in this unsettled island, where Nature in her gifts and dispositions of this kind is most whimsical and capricious ; Fortune herself not being more so in the bequest of her goods and chattels, than she.,, And then follows his estimate of himself. " This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard to Yorick's extrac- tion. . . . For happen how it would, the fact was this — that instead of the cold phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humour you would have looked for, in one so extracted ; — he was, on the contrary, as mercurial and sublimated a composition, — as heteroclite a creature in all his declensions ; — with as much life, and whim and gaite de cceur about him ; as the kindest climate could have engendered and put together. With all this sail poor Yorick carried not one ounce of ballast ; he was utterly unpractised in the world : and at the age of twenty-six knew just about as well how to steer his course as a romping, unsuspicious girl of thirteen. So that upon his first setting out the brisk gale of his spirits, as you will imagine, ran him foul ten times in the day of somebody's tackling ; and as the grave and slow-paced were oftenest in his way — you may likewise imagine 'twas with such he had generally the ill-luck to get the most entangled. For aught I know there might be some mixture of unlucky wit at the bottom of such Fracas : — For to speak the truth, Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED 57
nature to gravity ; — not to gravity as such ; — for when gravity was wanted he could be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days or weeks together ; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance or for folly ; and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it much quarter. Sometimes in his wild way of thinking, he would say that gravity was an arrant scoundrel ; and he would add, — of the most dangerous kind too, — because a sly one ; and that he verily believed more honest and well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelve- month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say, There was no danger — but to itself : — whereas the very essence of gravity was design and consequently deceit ; 'twas a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth and that with all its pretensions — it was not better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it, viz. : A mysterious carriage of the Body to cover the defects of the Mind : — which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say deserved to be wrote in letters of gold. . . . Yorick had no impression but one, and that was what arose from the nature of the deed spoken of ; which impression he would usually translate into plain English without any periphrasis — and too oft without much distinction of either personage, time, or place ; — so that when mention was made of a pitiful or ungenerous proceeding — he never gave him- self a moment's time to reflect who was the Hero of the piece — what his station — or how far he had power to hurt him hereafter ; — but if it was a dirty action, — without more ado, — The man was a dirty fellow — and so on ; — and as his comments usually had the ill fate to be terminated either in
5 8 STERNE
a bon mot, or to be enlivened throughout with some drollery or humour of expression, it gave wings to Yorick's indiscre- tion. In a word, though he never sought, yet at the same time, as he seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost and without much ceremony ; — he had but too many temptations in life, of scattering his wit and his humour, — his gibes and his jests about him — they were not lost for want of gathering/' They certainly were not.
In "Yorick," Hamlet's jester and Shandy's clergyman, Sterne depicts the best part of himself, just as in the child Tristram he sometimes depicts the worst. These are not the sole occasions where Sterne dwells on his Yorick. He recurs to it in that part of the Sentimental Journey where he observes that the French are apter to " conceive " than to " com- bine," and at the same time rallies a bishop for despising his homilies : " c Good my Lord,' said I, c but there are two Yoricks. The Yorick your lordship thinks of has been dead and buried eight hundred years after he flourished in Horwendillus's court. The other Yorick is myself, who have flourished, my lord, in no court ' — he shook his head. J Good God,' said I, c you might as well confound Alexander the great with Alexander the coppersmith.' "
How true is the self-appraisement of the first quota- tion ? Sterne here (and elsewhere) protests himself a son of the South, doomed somehow to the North's chill counter- blasts ; he repudiates the law of " gravity," and throws down the gauntlet against seriousness ; yet he owns to a sober strain, though he limits it by weeks. Sterne certainly could be solemnly pert and frivolously solemn, and in both capacities he was arch and demure. He was an ironist with a touch of the poet in him, an adorer of beauty, a detester of the formal. And more than once he wrote, and well wrote, of his function, that every time a man
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED 59
smiles, and more so when he laughs, he "adds some- thing to this fragment of life." 1 This was what he termed the true Shandyism, which " opens the lungs and heart," and his commentators have usually claimed for him an animal exuberance. This can certainly be claimed for Rabelais, who shakes the spheres with his gross laughter. But was Sterne quite so joyous as he fancied ? 1 think not. He had the potentiality, but not the physical power, for the romp of spirits : they were not animal. His gaiety was that of sickly genius wrestling with disease, disorder, and ennui. He professes too much mirth to be credited with its full possession. He smiles rather than laughs, and his humour- ous wit is a protest against his frail constitution. This was no jolly wassailer, not even a pococurante, but a poor consumptive court-fool with or without his cap and bells. The chords of his pathos underlie all his grotesque twists, which are themselves pitched in a minor key. His tears and " sensibility" are not merely April showers ; the whole purport of his Sentimental Journey was to show how these can cement strangers together. His tears, he once wrote, were " perpendicular " and " hit his horizontal spirits " at right angles. And of his sensibility he said that though it had often made him wretched, he would not exchange it " for all the pleasure the grossest sensualist ever felt." Has he not confessed, even while descanting on the spell of high spirits, that the very sound of "gaiety" always associates itself with the " spleen " ? "It is true," he added in another place, " I love laughter and merry-making, and all that as well as any soul upon earth ; nevertheless I cannot think of piping and taboring it out of the world like the figures in Holbein's Dance." 2 He did not belong to summer,
1 Original Letters, 1788, p. 7. He also introduced it into one of his dedications.
2 Ibid., p. 23.
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though none could better irradiate the landscape with laughing sunshine. You get it in the Peasant's Grace, which in truth was a dance ; you get it when he wrote that " a man may laugh and sing and dance too, and after all go to heaven." You get it when he wrote in another letter : " How often have I seen at a York Assembly two young people dance down thirty couples, with as grave a counten- ance as if they did it for hire, and were after all not sure of being paid. And here [in France] have I beheld the sun- burnt sons and daughters of labour rise from their scanty meal with not a pulse in their hearts that did not beat to pleasure and, with the brightest looks of satisfaction, make their wooden shoes responsive to the sound of a broken- winded haut-boy." l Above all, you get it in that magic scene of the sunburnt daughter of Languedoc.
Sterne sought after the joy of living just because he had it not, and he satisfies the want by his incomparable union of words and feelings. The emotion sports hand in hand with the sign ; they dance a saraband together. Perhaps this is so with most great humourists, for humour means the quick apprehension of opposites, and sunbeams are more sparkling on a dark surface. Of sentimental chiaroscuro, he was a master. Heine well observed of " the child of tragedy," that Mnemosyne kissed him with her rosy lips till " his heart and his mouth were at singular variance. Just when the heart bled most tragically, then to his own surprise the flippant laughter fluttered from him."2
Sterne here also protests his pure simplicity. " Simplicity," he remarks in one of his sermons, " is the great friend to nature, and if I would be proud of anything in this silly
1 For the sentence cf. Original Letters, pp. 152-6. The picture of the Peasant's Grace comes, of course, from the Sentimental Journey.
2 Cf. Heine's Uber Deutschland, p. 232.
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED 61
world, it should be of this honest alliance." Was he quite so unpractised as he pretends ? Spontaneous he certainly was, under the promptings of a nomad impulse that felt the moment and scampered after it. But was he free at any- time from that morbid self-consciousness which undoes simplicity ? A more self-centred man never existed, and his left hand loved to know what his right was doing. He could not be generous without acting as his own audience. " If a man," he wrote in a letter describing how he had sent a " poor client " back to his home with his comfort and his bond restored, " if a man has a right to be proud of any- thing— it is of a good action, done as it ought to be without any base interest lurking at the bottom of it " ; and he adds characteristically, " Bravo, Bravo ! " 1
His sympathy depended on attraction. What fascinated him, he crept towards, nor was his course ever direct. There is too much of veiled uneasiness to erase the back- ground of design. Rousseau was the same. All that Sterne urges against " gravity " may be pressed against simplicity also : his, dwelt in externals, and was often that of an ingenu. But this innate uneasiness, audible in all his whisperings, never disfigures his grace of manner — a grace rarely linked to so much whim. And in that combination perhaps resides his personal charm. He has himself penned an apotheosis of courtesy : " Hail ye small sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it ! Like grace and beauty which beget inclinations to love, it is sweet ; 'tis ye who open this door and let the stranger in." 2
We left the Sternes married. That midsummer they spent at his parish of Sutton-in-the-Forest-of-Galtrees, where Sterne, for all his irregularities, was long a punctual and
1 Sterne's Letters, 1775, p. 43.
2 Sentimental Journey ', vol. i. p. 161.
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punctilious minister, though delicate health compelled him to employ a curate.1
Bridegroom and bride were not yet disenchanted, the future beckoned cheerfully, and the voice of the turtle was heard in their land. His tumble-down vicarage was scarcely then "a sun-gilt cottage," but they were contented. Few clouds lowered on the horizon which York bounded. He and she both attended the bedsides of suffering, where he rehearsed his coming elegiacs. Of literary aptitude he seems as yet to have been unconscious. For some years no child was born to them, and they took their frugal ease in the country, their scanty pleasures in the town. This was not to last. The sirens played perilous melodies in Laurey's ears. " You will, I am sure," he was to write, " more than understand me when I mention that sense of female perfection — I mean, however, when the female is sitting or walking beside you, — which so possesses the mind that the whole Globe seems to be occupied by none but you two ; — when your hearts in perfect unison, or I should rather say harmony, produce the same chords, — and blossom with the same flowers of thought and senti- ment." This was not written of Mrs Sterne. How changed the scene, when, a quarter of a century onwards, he seems to have looked back on his desentimentalised wife as " a fume of a woman," and sighed that he had been " forced into marriage by the thunder of the Church to a tempest of a woman " ! 2
1 At £10 a year. For Sterne's punctiliousness cf his letter to the Rev. Mr Blake from the series first given by Mr Fitzgerald in his Life, p. 93 : "I know you excuse Formalities of which by-the-bye I am the most punctilious regarder of withal." And this is borne out by the general tenor of his correspondence. On one exceptional occasion, however, years onwards, and in London, he turned up too late to preach a charity sermon at the Foundling Hospital, but this was after time and engagement books were engrossed by applicants.
2 Cf the fragment of "The Notary and his Wife? post, Chapter XIII.
THE COURTSHIP RESUMED
63
His courtship and marriage reveal not only the present, but the future. The author already tinges the man. Sterne would never have been known to diverge, if there had not been a fixed point to diverge from. That point of divergence proved, unhappily, his wife. Readers of Tristram Shandy will remember that when the Widow Wadman felt overpowered by love for the unconscious Toby, she gave, in Sterne's fantastic expression, "a north-east kick." As years rolled on, Sterne's kicks (and canters) were north- easterly indeed !
CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL (174I-I759)
Years of prosaic amity and commonplace occupation were to elapse before the real Sterne appeared in Tristram Shandy. In the very year of his wedding the Sutton vicar, who had obtained the prebendal stall of Givendale, was able to exchange it for the better one of North Newbald with its accompanying Stonegate House in York, and he could now take his turn at city preaching. Three years later,1 through his wife's influence with Lord Fairfax, he further received the adjacent living of Stillington, which introduced him to Squire Stephen Croft, the well-to-do brother of an Oporto wine-merchant. Stephen was very friendly with Sterne, who passed many a pleasant evening by the Hall fireside ; but when the younger brother, John, returned to England, he spread much gossip about Sterne's doings and misdoings, and this remains in two or more letters to Caleb Whitefoord, the ally of Goldsmith, a wine-merchant, diplomatist, and pamphleteer.
1 Professor Cross shows by documents that the date was early in 1743-4 ; but Hall-Stevenson, in his preface to a continuation of Yorick's Sentimental Journey (1774), puts the date as 1745. This is significant as indicating that already, for some years, Hall-Stevenson saw nothing of Sterne ; and Hall- Stevenson was never a good influence. In a letter to Bishop Warburton, of 19th June 1760, Sterne indeed goes so far as to say that so much had his correspondence with this friend been totally interrupted that he had forgotten his very handwriting.
64
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 65
But Sutton, on the other hand, brought Sterne into collision with its testy squire, Philip Harland (and into reconciliations with him), over land bargains, common en- closures, and, curious to add, over music. As prebend and double incumbent, Sterne now enjoyed an income of some £$oy while his wife's was also at his disposal. With a revenue of about ^120 a year he held himself above the pinch of poverty, while he hoped much from land specula- tions and dairy-farming.
A little Lydia, who died early, was born in October 1 743 ; and in 1746 came another, to whom Mrs Montagu con- sented to stand godmother. The sister's name was dear to Mrs Montagu's heart.
Sterne bestowed great pains on his garden, for which, in course of time, he even invented appliances. Mingled with his irregularity, there was always something of the mechani- cal inventor, and this turn was to find ample expression in Tristram. As for literary performance, it was confined to the York pulpits, till the political sequels of 1745 — which drove his friend Stevenson into action — sent Sterne into fights political on behalf of his terrible old uncle Jaques. For eighteen years — from 1741 to 1759 — Sterne remained obscure, and he remained reputable ; of Hall-Stevenson for many years he saw nothing. The man who was to forfeit respect in the future was still a credit to his cloth — " known for his good life and conversation," as the sentence ran in the Dean and Chapter's verbose certificate.1 As for his countenance, it did not yet wear the frail, queer, caustic expression that marks Reynolds's first delineation. Rather, it was a worldly, amused face with the contradiction of poetical eyes, the visage of Cotes's earlier presentment. Nathaniel Hawthorne noted something of this contrast
1 For this and some other details cf. Professor Cross's Life, pp. 50-55-
5
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when this likeness was shown to him in England,1 and the reader who here looks on it for the first time will note other differences also. There is much more morbidity in Sir Joshua's portrayal, and there is far less ease. The sickly parson did not benefit by the social racket. Sterne was not quite certain of his new part.
Only occasional peeps are possible of the protracted interval that separates long obscurity from final fame. We see Sterne stickling for his vocation. Everyone recollects the anecdote, published by Hall-Stevenson, of his reply to the young blasphemer in the Coney Street coffee-house. Sterne told him of his dog, an excellent pointer, but cursed with one infernal fault : " He never sees a clergyman but he immediately flies at him." " How long may he have had that trick ? " asked the coxcomb. " Sir, ever since he was a puppy" rejoined the vicar. Dr Johnson, who hated Sterne, would surely have applauded him here.
We see the odd, gaunt Yorick going his rounds on "as lean and lank and as sorry a jade as Humility her- self could have bestrided," which, in the fitness of his humour, he gave " fifty reasons " for not decking with the fine saddle and bridle that he had purchased in the " pride and prime of life." He " never could enter a village, but he caught the attentions of both old and young — Labour stood still as he passed — the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well, — the spinning-wheel forgot its round — even chuck-farthing and shovel-cap themselves stood gaping till he got out of sight ; and as his movement was not of the quickest, he had generally time enough upon his hands to make his observations — to hear the groans of the serious and the laughter of the light-hearted,
1 Cf. Hawthorne's Our Old Home (" A Pilgrimage to Boston "—modern reprint), p. 134.
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 67
all which he bore with excellent tranquillity. — His character was, — he loved a jest in his heart." Not without reason did Sterne dub the hero of his book " Shandy," which is Yorkshire for "a wee bit daft."
We see him " skaiting " on the Car at Stillington, falling into the ice, and left helpless amid the staring by- standers, who were divided in their allegiance.1 We see him bargaining for queer tomes of ancient learning and animating their dust. We see him driving into York for the concerts ; sauntering into bookshops and coffee-houses ; visiting his friends Blake, Taylor, and Fothergill ; or mountebanking it with his co-jester, Thomas Bridges, as he does in their joint caricature of the clown and " Macaroni " on the stage, with the whole York fair, and all the fair of York, for audience. " He loved a jest in his heart," and in a paper, which he drew up for his wife's provision, he expressly mentions this painting among his treasures, adding that he had given it to a lady.2
We see him (all through the 'forties) consorting with John Blake, the scholar-clergyman who was neither a pedant nor a prude, whose attentions pleased Sterne's bristling wife, and whose recourse to Sterne's counsel must have kept a sense of self-respect alive. Many a jovial evening they passed together. A new letter to him gives wind of one of these junketings. " I hope," writes Sterne, " vou got your coat home safe, tho' in what Plight I fear, as it was a rainy night and ten o'clock at night before we reached Sutton ow[e]ing to vile accidents to which Journiers are exposed." And then follows a parenthetic jest quite of the Tristram order : " Will you be so kind as to forward
1 Cf. Whitefoord Papers, p. 231.
2 These are the interesting memoranda of 28th December 1761. Cf. Elizabeth Montagu, vol. ii. p. 270.
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the note to Mrs Cowper's any time before noon. There is no note enclosed." l
We see him hob-nobbing with Marmaduke Fothergill, one of those true friends, Yorick was to write, that envy spared him, a close correspondent to the last, and the recipient of letters among Sterne's best. And, in 1756, he comes across the young Romney, then apprenticed to the vagabond painter, Christopher Steele, who dubbed himself a count, and eloped with the daughter of a York citizen. In Steele's temporary studio Sterne could indulge his artistic leanings, and sympathise with the struggling genius bound hand and foot to a charlatan. Romney did not forget these meetings. He lived to paint several scenes from Tristram Shandy, which were afterwards raffled for, to defray his expenses.2 One of these pictures portrayed Slop's arrival at Shandy Hall. It would be interesting to compare Romney's delineations with Hogarth's grotesques, and to know whether Gains- borough, who was to strike up a warm friendship with the author, ever tried his hand at illustrating any part of his work. Whither have these Romney illustrations flown, and where, too, is the portrait which Steele painted of Sterne long before he was famous ? All his life the artistic impres- sionist gravitated towards artists, just as, on another side, he gravitated towards sporting squires and jovial parsons.
We see him starting a Sunday covey of partridges as he trudged over the turnips to Stillington with his pointer at his heels. At once he hurries home for his gun and leaves his expectant congregation in the lurch. But we also see him helping to rescue Blake from the toils of lawyers and match-makers, and this correspondence shows
1 Sterne to the Rev. J. Blake, " Monday." From the collection of Mr H. H. Raphael, M.P. The Cowpers were great friends of Mrs Sterne. This letter also mentions Oldfield the York postmaster.
2 So said Richard Cumberland. Cf. Professor Cross's Life^ p. in.
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 69
that Sterne's uncommon " sensibility " did not exclude a shrewd common sense. We see him almost as yokel, threshing his barley, repairing his house, and renewing his garden — in two years expending close on £14 over fruit trees and an " espalier apple hedge " for his orchard. The orchard is not without import, for it gave Sterne the hint for what seems to have been his first essay in dream and fantasy. The piece is noteworthy, and deserves more attention than it has received.
The vicar, writing that he has just been " sporting him- self with some wild Fancies," — they were Fontenelle's — strolls out of his study one midsummer night, and " stoops " musing among his plum trees. Thus pensive, he gazes up at the stars, and asks, as to-day we ask about Mars, why should they not be peopled ?
" The inhabitants of the most inconsiderable planet that revolves round the most inconsiderable star I can pick out of this vast number, look upon their world, I warrant you, as the only one that exists. They believe it the centre of the Universe, and suppose that the whole system of the Heavens turns round them, and was made, and moves purely for their sakes. So considerable do they imagine them- selves, as doubtless to hold that all these numerous stars (our sun amongst the rest) were created with the only view of twinkling upon such of themselves as have occasion to follow their cattle late at night." And then Sterne clearly remembers a line from Pope, prompted by Bolingbroke, " We, on this isthmus of a middle state" : "We are situate" (he says) "on a kind of isthmus which supports infinitys. ... It is hard to say which side of the prospect strikes the imagination most ; whether the solar system or a drop of pepper affords a nobler subject of contemplation, in short whether we owe more to the Telescope or the Microscope."
Pursuing this notion of a microcosm to the absurd, he
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plays with it in a passage that may have suggested one in Tristram. It follows a reference to that essay where Addison depicts Mahomet spirited up to the seventh heaven, yet returning in an instant of time to find his bed still warm, and the water unspilt out of an overturned pitcher. "On one side," Sterne writes, " infinite Power and wisdom appear drawn to full extent ; on the other in miniature, the in- finitely strong and bold Strokes there, the infinitely nice and delicate Touches here, show equally in both the definite end. ... I leave it to future ages to invent a method for making a minute seem a year."
So perpends the comic philosopher, adding that he could conceive two nations on each side of a green leaf as valorous as Alexander, and an Iliad in the sphere of a nutshell. And then he yawns ; it was time for slumber. Here the tone changes with the scene, and the poet within him begins to dream. He finds himself in " a new state of being " with no memory of pre-existence. In its empyrean he discerns greater and lesser lights — " Second Stars," as he calls them. These several orbs mean the fruit, the branches, and the play of the leaves under the moon. And so Sterne reduces the universe to a plum-tree.
A new world plunges him, first in follies, and then in natural philosophy. But, like Faust, he can make little out of it save " a heap of unintelligible jargon." Disillusion sets him roaming " in quest of knowledge." Instead of knowledge he finds " only a vain affectation of misery in order to gain the veneration of the vulgar and thereby serve the ends of Government." Suddenly the configura- tion of the sky changes. The stars behind, seem lower ; those in front, higher. "A huge dusky veil like a Cloud which was only tinsel'd over with a faint glimmer of light, was rising upon the Heavens." This phenomenon was the solid earth, covering the backward "luminanes," and reveal-
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 71
ing new but familiar stars. He has returned whence he set out, but he fares no better. Convinced that the world is a globe, he is nearly burned. For "three or four ages," therefore, he retires into contemplation, fearing lest "the great light should sink under the dark veil and leave us in eternal night." Then he returns to the world, only to find that great revolutions had happened. Religion has yielded to free thought, and now was the time for his scientific theories. "The Raillerie of free thinkers," however, persecutes him as much as the old "fury of bigots." A small party of the broadminded support him, but an irruption of barbarians once more expels him to another country. There he opens a school, but fails to persuade mankind that " the Second Stars are worlds in- habited like ours." While "the wits" deride him a sudden streak of light crosses the dusky veil. This was, in truth, the daybreak piercing the plum-tree's foliage, but the dreamer fancied it a vast planet ushering in a golden age. A fancy follows so akin in spirit to Heine's much weirder dream of the end of the world as to emphasise their partial affinity, though Sterne cannot compare with him as thinker or poet. A cataclysm impended : " At this time began to be heard all over the world a huge noise and fragor in the skys as if all nature was approaching her dissolution. The stars seemed to be turned from their orbs, and to wander at random thro' the Heavens. ... I fixed my attention upon a constellation of the Second Stars," which " seemed to suffer some cruel agitation." Several shot off and forsook the rest. By slow degrees all these lights "were lost in the great dark veil." "And now the fragor increased. The world was alarmed ; all was consternation, horrour and amaze ; no less was expected than a universal wreck of nature." In this crack of doom the dreamer awoke with a start, to find himself in bed. Off he hurried to the orchard, and " by a
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sort of natural instinct made to the plumb-tree " of his " last night's reverie." He observed the face of the heavens unaltered : "A brisk gale of wind, which is common about sun rising, was abroad ! "
" I recollected a hint " — Sterne afterwards " recollected " more — u I recollected a hint that I had read in Fontenelle, who intimates that there is reason to suppose that the Bloom on Plumbs is no other than an immense number of living creatures." He climbed the tree and examined the position of the fruit : — " I found that they hung in the same position, and made the same appearance as the constellations of Second Stars I had been so familiarly- acquainted with, excepting that some few were wanting, which I myself had seen fall. I could then no longer doubt how the matter was." His visionary " plumb-land " had symbolised space, and he ends in a pathetic strain which separates him from the reeling satyrs of " Crazy Castle," and shows that he loved nature and pathos more than Swift or Fontenelle. It is a poetic epilogue : — " Oh World ! wherein I have spent so many happy days ! oh ! the comforts and enjoyments I am separated from ; the acquaintances and friends I have left behind me there ! Oh ! the mountains, rivers, rocks and plains, which ages had familiarized to my view ! With you 1 seemed at home ; here I am like a banished man ; everything appears strange, wild and savage ! Oh, the projects I had formed ! The designs I had set on foot, the friendships I had cultivated ! How has one blast of wind dashed you to pieces ! But thus it is, plumbs fall and planets shall perish. . . . The time will come when the powers of heaven will be shaken, and the stars shall fall like the fruit of a tree when it is shaken by a mighty wind." *
1 This manuscript fragment, addressed to Mr Cook of York, was first published by M. Paul Stapfer in his Laurence Sterne^ sa Personne et ses
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 73
This essay shows many characteristics of Sterne's future style. Mark in the closing part, the scriptural and musical influence. Mark in the earlier, the particularity that lends likelihood to fiction — the constellations of " Second Stars " in the plum corresponding to those in the skies, " excepting that some few were wanting^ which I my- self had seen fall" Mark, too, the certainty of the cowherds that the stars only twinkled for such as " follow their cattle late at night." Swift was an expert in the little-great ; but Swift was not a poet, and he never romanticised his art. And the close sounds the sentimental note, though, to the present peace of the Sterne household, it misses the love-motive. With it included, however, Sterne finds the style which Thackeray copied. Take, in advance, a piece from Tristram Shandy about its "Jenny" and Sterne's " Kitty " — a piece so modern in vein yet so like a morsel of Catullus : — " Time wastes too fast ; every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it more precious — my dear Jenny — than the rubies about thy neck are, flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more ; — everything presses on — whilst thou art twisting that lock ; see ! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to the eternal separa- tion which we are surely to make.
" Heaven have mercy upon us both ! "
The same subdued tone found early utterance as he buried his parishioners. The verses occasioned by hearing
Ouvrages (1870). It came into his hands through a friend who received it from a lady at York. Though unsigned, the autograph seemed entirely Sterne's. I agree with Professor Cross (pp. 144-9) m considering the fragment genuine, if only on internal evidence. Dr J. B. Brown has pub- lished the whole in his edition of Sterne's works (1885). In the original, zodiacal signs indicate " God," " world," and " soul," while there are further abbreviations.
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a pass-bell, which were printed in an antiquary's volume over sixty years ago, demonstrate the protest that he could be "grave." Throughout his life Sterne tried his hand at verses, few of which remain, though he plumed him- self on his muse. There are the lines to Julia in Tristram Shandy. Twice repeated and twice applied is an epitaph on the death of a lady which he quotes in his letters. And there is a trifle, beginning "The lark hath got a shrill fantastic pipe," which biographers have missed, though it has been attributed to Sterne.1 But none of them display the pathetic solemnity of these, some of which have a ring almost of " Omar Khayyam." Here again Sterne muses on the peopling of infinity : —
" Hark ! my gay Friend, That solemn toll, Spreads the departure of a soul ; 'Tis gone, that's all we know — not where Or how the unbodied soul does fare — In that mysterious world none knows But God alone to whom it goes ; To whom departed souls return To take their doom, to smile or mourn.
Oh ! by that glimmering light we view The unknown world we're hastening to ! God has locked up the mystic page, And curtained darkness round the stage ! Wise heaven to render search perplext Has drawn 'twixt this world and the next A dark impenetrable screen All behind which is yet unseen.
This hour perhaps our Friend is well : Death struck, the next he cries c Farewell !
1 Cf. Notes and Queries, 5th series, i. 388.
THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL 75
I die ! ' and yet for ought we see Ceases at once to breathe and be. —
Swift flies the soul — perhaps 'tis gone A thousand leagues beyond the sun, Or twice ten thousand more thrice told Ere the forsaken clay is cold ! And yet who knows if friends we loved Tho' dead may be so far removed ; Only the veil of flesh between Perhaps they watch us, though unseen, While we, their loss lamenting, say They're out of hearing far away ; Guardians of us, perhaps they're near Concealed in Vehicles of air, And yet no notices they give ; Nor tell us where nor how they live."
From such heights we must descend to agriculture. Sterne's farming and his wife's dairy proved failures. She undersold the neighbours and grew unpopular, though her geese were famous and welcomed by her friends. That Sterne found small comfort in the poultry appears from a passage in Tristram where, after praying Heaven to prosper the manufacture of paper " under this propitious reign," he says : " As for the propagation of Geese I give myself no concern — nature is all-bountiful — I shall never want tools to work with." And we can still hear the shrill Elizabeth, standing arms akimbo on his threshold and bidding him pluck the quills of the geese that were being driven round their lawn : " Powl 'em, Laurey, powl 'em ! " as John Croft gives her exclamation in his gossip to Whitefoord.
Sterne reaped little but loss, and long afterwards he
j6 STERNE
dissuaded a friend from repeating his experiment. " You are much to blame," he wrote, " if you dig for marie unless you are sure of it. I was once such a puppy myself as to pare and burn, and had my labour for my pains and two hundred pounds out of pocket. Curse on farming (said I), I will try if the pen will not succeed better than the spade. The following up of that affair (I mean farm- ing) made me lose my temper and a cartload of turnips was I thought very dear at two hundred pounds. In all your observations may your own good sense guide you. Bought experience is the devil."
Try he did whether the pen would not profit more than the spade before he realised his power in fiction. He demeaned that pen to party warfare, but his first literary efforts were his sermons ; and, in tracing the phantasmagoria of twenty years, the preacher and his preaching must not be relegated to the tail-end of a chapter.
vURENCE STERNE
portrait in crayons by Francis Cott an of the Reoerend G. IV. Blcnkin)
CHAPTER VII
HER
reaching, you must k: ic told the Treasurer of
Foundling Hospital, 9 in mates must have moved
a theologic flap upon the heart." A heart-
^Hber Sterne remained in his gown as in his cassock.
Johnson once condemned these discourses as only froth
up of salvation. But in truth they were not the
1 on any cup ; they scarcely profess to quench a
■tual thirst. Rather, they were like Bishop BerkeL
Tar- water with which Sterne used religiously to dose hi jr.
after all-night sittings. Or, to vary the metaphor, they
nble the cupboard where Yorick kept his Sunday
kery. It was refreshing for him each t to
st and examine his curiosities — some it must
owned, exact replicas of ancien -at the
china figures of saints and heroes amends
for the rest of the week, and he con urveyed
:m. From the virtues he woul< it Charity,
he himself was charitable ; and v ndled over
specimens of the vices, his wratl >e reserved
for those sordid sins to which he wa ned, though
me instance — this Foundling H< tppcal — he did
lay stress on " the treachery of the
rne's pulpit gleanings succt >etter than his
1 harvests. Yet he was no born orator. Indeed,
77
CHAPTER VII
THE PREACHER
" Preaching, you must know," Sterne told the Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital, whose inmates must have moved him, "is a theologic flap upon the heart." A heart- flapper Sterne remained in his gown as in his cassock. Dr Johnson once condemned these discourses as only froth on the cup of salvation. But in truth they were not the froth on any cup ; they scarcely profess to quench a spiritual thirst. Rather, they were like Bishop Berkeley's Tar-water with which Sterne used religiously to dose himself after all-night sittings. Or, to vary the metaphor, they resemble the cupboard where Yorick kept his Sunday crockery. It was refreshing for him each Saturday night to dust and examine his curiosities — some of them, it must be owned, exact replicas of ancient models. But the china figures of saints and heroes made some amends for the rest of tbe week, and he could sob as he surveyed them. From the virtues he would single out Charity, for he himself was charitable ; and when he kindled over the specimens of the vices, his wrath would be reserved for those sordid sins to which he was least inclined, though in one instance — this Foundling Hospital appeal — he did lay stress on " the treachery of the senses."
Sterne's pulpit gleanings succeeded better than his temporal harvests. Yet he was no born orator. Indeed,
77
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according to John Croft, "his delivery and voice were so very disagreeable " that half the congregation usually left the church when he rose.1 But half remained, and these were the more cultivated. Sometimes he drew large audiences, while from 1747 onwards his sermons found their way into the press and gained a wide attention. Two only were published separately ; the rest appeared much later in series. Many of them did double duty, being repeated to his parishioners also ; and as for texts, has he not told us in the Sentimental Journey that " Cappadocia, Pontus in Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia " is " as good as any one in the Bible " ? How they would be composed as he jogged along on his broken-down jade, he has chronicled in Tristram Shandy ; and he was proud of the fair handwriting in his manuscript — a fact which has not escaped those pages.2 One of them — the sermon on " Conscience " — figures bodily in the narrative. Few will forget how it fluttered from the volume of Stevinus (the first projector of an air ship or " chariot ") ; air, as Sterne remarks, being cheaper than horses. This was the book which Corporal Trim fetched at the bidding of his master ; and all will remember Trim's attitude as he delivered the discourse, and the interjections of his hearers. As a rule, Sterne's sermons teach little beyond proverbial prudence, and seem, as it were, his briefs for a somewhat worldly heaven. They were orthodox enough. But there are exceptions, and most of them contain dramatic or human touches, while all are distinguished by that oddity which even now seems odd, but which must have irritated the Georgians.
The sermon in point — that which Trim repeated — was preached as late as 1750 before the judges of assize. It is numbered twenty-seven in the collected edition, and
1 [Vhitefoord Papers, p. 231.
2 Yorick's funeral sermon on poor Le Fevre.
THE PREACHER 79
through its insertion in the novel offended the clergy. But Voltaire, in that article of his Dictionnaire Philosophique which deals with the subject, extols the author, and the French Rationalist subscribed for the last instalment of Sterne's sermons. He comments on the part concerning conscience as a deceiver. "The best that has ever been said on this important subject," he remarks, "is to be found in the comic book of Tristram Shandy, written by a clergyman named Sterne. The works of this second * English Rabelais ' [Swift was the first] resemble those little satires of antiquity which held precious essences in their phials. Two old half-pay captains [here Voltaire trips ; Walter Shandy was a merchant], assisted by a Dr Slop, propound the most ridiculous questions as to problems which our own theologians have not been spared. . . . At length they make a Corporal read them an old sermon on Conscience composed by Sterne himself. Among many pictures presenting the paintings of Rembrandt or the sketches of Callot [this conjunction is curious], he draws the portrait of an upright man of the world consuming his days in the pleasures of the table, gaming and dissipating, doing nothing that good company reproaches, and conse- quently never reproaching himself. His conscience and honour follow him to his pleasures, especially when he pays liberally. He punishes the mean rascals who come before him severely. He lives gaily and dies without a touch of remorse. Dr Slop then interrupts the reader to assure him that such a death could never happen to an Anglican, but is peculiar to a Papist. In due course Sterne cites the example of David, who had, he says, a conscience at once sensitive and callous, illuminated and darkened. When he could kill the king in a cave he was contented to cut off a piece of his robe. But he passes a whole year without the slightest twinge for the seduction of Bathsheba and the murder of
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Uriah. . . . Such, he says, are the majority of mankind. We agree with the parson that the great of the world are often in this case. The torrent of pleasure and business carries them away. They have no time for conscience, how- ever well conscience may serve for the people. ... It is therefore good sometimes to awaken the consciences of semp- stresses and kings by a moral that can impress them, but to do so, the language of our day must be bettered."
So much for Voltaire on a sermon including a passage on the Inquisition, which it is strange to find overlooked. Voltaire's praise implies Dr Johnson's censure. In Boswell's pages, Dr Johnson only met Sterne once, and then to amend the English of a dedication to Lord Spencer, which, how- ever, evidently stands as it was written. There is some reason to believe that the great moralist met the great impressionist again at Oxford, and one cannot blame Johnson for disliking so loose a parson. But Yorick's homilies are mild as milk. Some — Mrs Delany among them — would have it that a laugh trembled on his lips, and that the folly-tipped rattle lay in the hands that fingered the pages. In reality, Sterne most restrained himself in the pulpit, and his rather Tupperlike reflections give the sole pretext for Goldsmith's absurd verdict that he was " dull." Johnson's aversion was to the preacher, not to the lectures. He denied, indeed, that he had ever read them. But, when pressed home, he saved his sincerity by admitting that once he had skimmed them in a stage-coach : no other place on earth could have driven him into the perusal. And this was the occasion when he answered the young Miss Monckton (Lady Cork), protesting her partiality : " That is, dearest, because you are such a dunce."
It was not Sterne's sentiment that the sage hated : did he not assure Mrs Thrale that he, too, could be a good
THE PREACHER 81
" feeler " ? What Johnson reprobated in Sterne (and in Swift) was that a clergyman should so behave and keep such company, that he should be both frivolous and profane, although Johnson condoned profanity in Gibbon. The great censor called him " the man Sterne," and he protested that his fame would pass. This, however, is one of many in his long chapter of wrong prophecies ; though here, as always, he expressed the voice of a true citizen. He was our jury incarnate, and Sterne was certainly guilty of not keeping his calling holy. But he set great store by his sermons — he told his Eliza that they came " all hot from the heart" — and they were popular with the ladies. His favourite, as he assured his daughter, was one of his earliest — that on the " House of Feasting and the House of Mourning." It does not, however, rise above graphic platitude.1 It lacks the psychology of some others, and their occasional glimpses of Yorick under his gown. But it is distinguished by a typical trick — that of controverting his text at the outset. In this case it was a verse from Ecclesiastes : " It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of feasting," and he sets out with the words : " That I deny." Nor is this instance out of gear with the man ; it was the neurotic denial of one whose rule was a repugnance to pain. Sterne repeats this trick of denial in the " Conscience " sermon preached on " For we trust we have a good conscience " ; and in Tristram he makes Dr Slop perceive that the writer is a Protestant " by the snappish manner in which he takes up the Apostle." Another pet sermon of Sterne's was the charity sermon on " Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath," preached at St Michael's Church, York — a treatise on compassion which
1 The best sample perhaps occurs in the sermon on " St Paul and Felix," where he psychologises the Roman judge as grasping, but observes that avarice is merely an ancillary vice that ministers to some ruling passion.
6
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he published in 1741, and much later laid at the feet of his " dear, dear Jenny/' It was a billet doux, like that which, years later, he offered to " Eliza."
The best, however, are those which concern himself or portray human nature. The one on " Time and Chance " suggests something of his own circumstances. He describes a man starting life with every worldly advantage, and then he paints a contrast of the reverse : — " He shall come into the world with the most unpromising appearance — shall set forwards without fortune, without friends — without talent to procure him either the one or the other ; — nevertheless you will see this clouded prospect brighten up insensibly, unaccountably, before him ; everything presented in his way shall turn out beyond his expectations ; — in spite of that weight of insurmountable difficulties which first threatened him — time and chance shall open him a way." Another passage from another sermon — that on "The Prodigal Son" — fits his own case also. He is considering " that fatal passion which led the Prodigal — and so many thousands after his example — to gather all he had together and take his journey into a far country." Though the sermon is mainly a guide to the grand tour, the sentimental wayfarer emerges : — " The love of variety, or curiosity of seeing new things, which is the same or at least a sister passion to it — seems wove into the frame of every son of Adam ; it is one of c Nature's liberties.' " And once; more, his sermon on " The History of Jacob " strikes — and in a nobler strain — the note which permeates all his gay defiance of suffering, which mixes pain with pleasure and pleasure with pain, which makes him grieve whenever he has not " turned diseases into commodity," the note which inspires even for the down-hearted and hysterical a chant of rapture. And this was the very note which drew praise from the pagan Goethe : —
THE PREACHER 83
" Grant me, Gracious God, to go cheerfully on the road which thou hast marked out ! — I wish it neither more wide, nor more smooth. — Continue the light of this dim taper thou hast put into my hand. — I will kneel upon the ground seven times a day, to seek the best track I can with it. — And having done that, I will trust myself and the issue of my journey to thee, who art the Fountain of Joy, — and will sing songs of comfort as I go along."
This is a serene philosophy, though the preacher, it is true, sang queer " songs of comfort " as he ambled on in Tristram and the Sentimental Journey, But Corporal Trim, and Uncle Toby, and the pathos of Le Fevre are, surely, fraught with some tiny foretaste of the supreme Fountain !
" Whatever is the proportion of misery in the world," he continues — and whenever he touches this theme he is delightful — " whatever is the proportion, 'tis certain that it can be no duty of religion to increase the complaint ; — or to effect the praise which the Jesuits' College of Granada gave their Sanchez : — that though he lived where there was a sweet garden, yet he was never seen to touch a flower ; and that he would rather die than eat salt or pepper or aught that might give a relish to their meat. I pity the men whose natural consciences are burdens, and who fly from joy (as these splenetic and morose souls do) as if it was really an evil in itself. If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart — the loss of goods, — of health, — of coronets and mitres, are only evils as they occasion sorrow ; take that out, and the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man. Poor unfortunate creature that he is ! As if the causes of anguish in the heart were not enow, — but he must fill up the measure with those of caprice ; and not only walk in a vain shadow, — but disquiet himself in vain too ! "
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The furnace of trial was far from Sterne's musings. Yet he tried hard to warm both hands at it, and, if he had no full joie de vivre, at least he vibrated to the moment. In a preceding sermon, however, he has recognised, in words at any rate, the purifying power of grief : —
" Strange that we should only begin to think of God with comfort when with joy and comfort we can think of nothing else. Man surely is a compound of riddle and contradictions : by the law of his nature he avoids pain, and yet unless he suffers in the flesh he will not cease from sin, though it is sure to bring pain and misery upon his head for ever."
Sterne never dwelt on the goods of life as evils ; it was their misuse that, with a grave face, he reprimanded. We find him so doing in the sermon upon Dives : — " That he had received his good things, — 'twas from Heaven, and could be no reproach. With what severity soever the Scripture speaks against riches, .... all this is not laid to him as a sin, but rather remarked as an instance of God's blessing . . . . ; and whenever these things are otherwise, 'tis from a wasteful and dishonest perversion of them to pernicious ends, — and ofttimes, to the very opposite ones for which they were granted — to glad the heart, to open it, and render it more kind." Here is the keynote of the Sentimental Journey,
His own dual nature underlies his pulpit philosophy. " 'Tis the necessity," he says in the same sermon, " of appearing to be somebody in order to be so, — which ruins the world." He knew, or at any rate came to know, despite his pleas of oddity, that his deeds contradicted his pro- fessions. But he also knew that his life seldom contradicted his feelings, the true pivots on which he hinged — so that he may almost be figured as a kind of "honest Joseph Surface." After he had become famous, he preached a
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notable discourse before the Paris Embassy. His theme was " Hezekiah and the Messengers," his text, " And he said, What have they seen in thine house ? And Hezekiah answered, All the things that are in my house have they seen ; there is nothing amongst all my treasures that I have not shown them." Sterne opened with : " And where, you will say, was the harm in all this ? " But from his main path — the dangers of prosperity — he soon strayed to pursue the contrasts in human nature. In that quest he seems to recognise the frank Sterne as well as the furtive, the pure Sterne as well as the impure. "We are a strange compound," he ponders, " and something foreign from what charity would suspect, so eternally twists itself into whatever we do, that not only in momentous concerns where interest lists under it all powers of disguise, — but even in the most indifferent of all our actions not worth a fallacy, by force of habit we continue it ; so that whatever a man is about — observe him, — he stands armed inside and out with two natures ; an ostensible one for the world, — and another which he reserves for his own private use. — This you may say the world has no concern with ; it might have been so ; but by obtruding the wrong motive upon the world and stealing from it a character instead of winning one, we give it a right and a temptation along with it to enquire into the affair. The motives of the one for doing it are often little better than the other for deserving it. . . . Vanity bids all her sons be generous and brave and her daughters chaste and courteous — But why do we want her instructions ? — Ask the Comedian who is taught to play a part he feels not. — Is it that the principles of religion want strength, or that the real passion for what is good and worthy will not carry us high enough ? God ! Thou knowest they carry us too high ; we want not to be, but to seem ! " He dramatises the knave and the hypocrite. " With what an inflexible sanctity of
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deportment he sustains himself as he advances. Every line in his face writes abstinence ; — every stride looks like a check upon his desires ! See, I beseech you, how he is cloaked up with sermons, prayers and sacraments ; and so bemuffled with the externals of religion that he has not a hand left to spare for a worldly purpose ! .... Is there no serving God without all this ? Must the garment of religion be extended so wide to the danger of its rending ? — Yes, truly, or it will not hide the secret : And what is that ? — That the saint has no religion at all." And then he vindicates sentimentality. " One honest tear shed in private over the unfortunate is worth it all."
So Sterne scathes the Pharisee ; but he himself proved a Pharisee of feeling. The Biblical Pharisee clung to out- ward forms, Sterne, to inward sensations, and both read these into religion. Small trace of the publican is discover- able in the preacher. He seldom stands convicted of sin, or, rather, he seeks to reconcile right and wrong by his emotional medium. Yet his sermons deserve notice, if only for their self-revelation. Perhaps this state-sermon, delivered abroad to versed men of the world, displays the keenest knowledge of mankind. The stress, it will be marked, is laid not so much on the hypocrisy of pretensions as on their mixed consequences — the mongrel brood of distorted motives.
" What a problematic set of creatures," he reflects, " does simulation make us ! Who could divine that all that anxiety and concern so visible in the airs of one-half of that great assembly, should arise from nothing else but that the other half of it may think them to be men of consequence, penetration, parts and conduct ? What a noise about the claimants ! . . . . Behold Humility out of mere pride ! And honesty almost out of Knavery ! Chastity, never once in harm's way ! And Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an
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Italian stage, a bladder full of wind ! Hark ! that, — the sound of that trumpet, — let not my soldier run ; — 'tis some good Christian giving alms ! Oh Pity ! Thou gentlest of human passions, soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord they with so loud an instrument. . . . Imposture is all dissonance, let what master soever of it undertake the part ; let him harmonize and modulate it as may be, one tone will contradict another. . . . 'Tis truth only which is sustained and ever in harmony with itself. . . . Take away the motive of the act, you take away all that is worth having in it ; wrest it into ungenerous hands, you load the virtuous man who did it with infamy. Undo it all, I beseech you. Give him back his honour — restore the jewel you have taken from him ! — replace it in the eye of the world ; it is too late."
But Sterne does not restrict himself to such dramatisa- tions. Sometimes in these sermons he develops theories as wayward and absurd as those of his own Walter Shandy. In one, he even affirms that sympathy improves the constitu- tion. While he preached, the critics — uncomprised in his love of man and beast — were mute. His homilies are not literature, though to them is due the deep acquaintance with Scripture language which enriched his style, and the Bible-assonance that converted a proverb of Provence, " God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," almost into a text.1
That his preaching vein was instinctive, is shown by an early love-letter to Miss Lumley, referring to checks in the course of courtship. After pleading guilty to " an in- dictment in the High Court of Friendship," and deprecating " a too easy pardon," " a miser," he tells his " contem- plative girl," "a miser says, though I do not give of my money to-day, to-morrow shall be marked with some deed
1 This phrasing of "tempers the wind" will be found long before, in a Rabelaisian fragment presently to be noticed.
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of beneficence. — The libertine says let me enjoy this week in forbidden and luxurious pleasures and the next I will dedicate to serious thought and reflection. — The Gamester says let me have one more chance with the dice and I will never touch them more. — The Knave of every profession wishes but to gain independency, and he will become an honest man. — The Female Coquette [and here Yorick is profounder] triumphs in tormenting her inamorato, for fear after marriage he should not [and Sterne did not] pity her." 1 These are the stock instances of his sermons, and a seam of them — taken from Bishop Hall — runs through in a late volume of Tristram Shandy.
He frankly owned a plagiarism which annexed sentences from several divines. The third-rate, who always love to detect the second-hand, charged him with more ; and Sterne made merry in his Tristram over the long pedigree of quotations — " from India to Persia, from Persia to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to France, from France to England," — "so things come round." He plagiarised from Wollaston, as in his books he took ideas from D'Urfey and older authors. But he transformed them by his manner, and one instance may serve to show the valuelessness of such charges. Burns is said to have appropriated his " guinea's stamp " from a sentence in Sterne's dedication of the story of Le Fevre. But the same notion occurs in Wycherley and even earlier.
Sterne himself has laughingly owned — and this has escaped remark — that Dr Clarke (the logical pedant) was a favourite tap. The retort comes from an early fragment in the style of Rabelais, and it is a plea for plagiarism to the rescue. " Homenas " is himself. The phrasing is fully Sternian, and the humour of Shandy's own : —
1 Letters of the late Mr Laurence Sterne, etc., published by his daughter, Mrs Medalle (1775), vol. i. pp. 38-9.
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" Homenas, who had to preach next Sunday (before God knows whom), knowing nothing at all of the matter — was all this while at it as hard as he could drive in the very next room : — for having fouled two clean sheets of his own, and being quite stuck in the entrance upon his third division and finding himself unable to get either forwards or back- wards with any grace, — c curse it/ says he, (thereby excom- municating every mother's son who thought differently) c why may not a man lawfully call in other help in this as well as in other human emergencies ? * So ... . starting up and nimming down .... Clarke — tho' without any felonious intention of so doing, he had begun to clap him in .... ; and because there was a confoundedly high gallery was transcribing it away like a little devil. — c Now,' quoth Homenas to himself, c tho' I hold all this to be fair and square yet if I am found out, there will be the deuce and all to pay. — Why are the bells ringing backwards , you lad? What is all that crowd about, honest man ? — Homenas was got upon Dr Clarke's back, Sir. — And what of that, my lad? — Why, an please you, he has broke his neck and fractured his skull and befouled himself into the bargain by a fall from the pulpit two storeys high. Alas ! Poor Homenas ! Clarke has done his business. Homenas will never preach more while breath is
in his body "
This fragment was not lost in Tristram Shandy : — " c I am to preach at Court next Sunday,' said Homenas ; 1 run over my notes.' So I hummed over Dr Homenas's notes — two modulations very well — 'twill do, Homenas, if it holds on at this rate — so on I hummed — and a tolerable tune I thought it was ; and to this hour, may it please your Reverences, had never found out how low, how flat, how spiritless and jejune it was, but that all of a sudden up started an air in the middle of it, so fine, so rich, so heavenly it carries my soul up with it into the other world."
9°
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None the less, Yorick was not without his ideal of the preacher's office. " Sermons," he says in Tristram, " should come from the heart, not the head. — To preach to show the extent of our reading, or the subtleties of our wit, — to parade it in the eyes of the vulgar — beggarly gains of a little learning, tinselled over with a few words that glitter but convey very little light and less warmth — is a dishonest use of the poor single half hour of the week which is put into our hands. It is not preaching the Gospel — but ourselves."
Sterne preached his York sermons sometimes in the Church of St Michael-le-Belfrey, sometimes in the York Minster, and often he preached them as the substitute for big- wigs who had nothing to say, or something more agreeable to do. In this connection an amusing episode survives in a long letter, shortly to be noticed, to Francis Blackburne, then Archdeacon of Cleveland and the successor of Sterne's uncle, Dr Jaques. This Blackburne must not be confused with Lancelot, the old Archbishop. He had died in 1743, and been replaced by the placid Herring, also a Jesus man and a staunch favourer of Sterne. By 1750, the date of this letter, Herring had been translated to Canterbury, and Matthew Hutton reigned in his stead. Sterne's communi- cation to Blackburne will not be clear without taking stock, as briefly as may be, of his attitude to the tiresome Cathedral circle.
John Fountayne was now Dean in place of that Richard Osbaldestone to whom Sterne dedicated his charity sermon on " Elijah and the Widow." Fountayne, an old college acquaintance, was still his very good friend, though from Mrs Montagu's correspondence we glean that these relations were not to last. Sterne hacked for the Dean, as for others. He composed the Latin oration requisite for his Doctor's degree, he fought his battles ; but he was not to secure his
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gratitude. These things were to come. What concerns the present juncture, however, is only that during this year of 1750 Fountayne claimed a right against his Archbishop of appointing the Cathedral preachers.
Besides these patrons, Sterne could now boast Sir William Penniman, a neighbouring gentleman who appointed him chaplain, and the first Earl of Fauconberg, who had already tried to present him with the adjacent living of Coxwold, which he did not manage to do till after the publication of Tristram ; for the nonce, however, he con- tented himself by conferring two " commissaryships " on Sterne — semi-civil appointments entailing visitations of the clergy and some censorship of district morals.1
He was not yet considered a bad shepherd. Lord Fauconberg oppressed him with attentions, and, in a future letter, Sterne wrote that he found these attentions oppressive. It was something for a stiff nobleman in a dull countryside to take " a peep into the world as into a show-box," as Sterne elsewhere phrased it, with a wit like Yorick for moraliser and showman.
At present he basked in Cathedral sunshine ; his friends at court were manifold. But for some three years a black cloud had been threatening his horizon. This portent was none other than Dr Jaques Sterne, the Precentor, who at length played the part of wicked uncle to the babes in the wood of Sutton. Uncle Jaques (a very cor- morant) had retained Sterne to write weekly pamphlets and paragraphs ever since the rising of 1745 had turned zealots for Walpole into prosecutors and persecutors of Jacobites and Papists. Saul of Tarsus never persecuted heretics more fiercely than the relentless Jaques, who was as insatiable in clapping recusants into jail and striving to suppress a Catholic girls' school as (like Earl Nelson long 1 For details cf. Professor Cross's Life> pp. 92-3.
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after him) he was insatiable — and unsuccessful — in solicit- ing preferments. The nephew's zeal had pleased his uncle in the election of 1741 — a test election after Walpole's downfall — and in coming years he still subserved the old man's fury, hoping doubtless to profit by it. Among its temporary victims was the York leech and antiquary, Dr Thomas Burton, an inditer of medical works with preposterous titles. Laurence Sterne would not let the physician alone, even after his uncle had done with him as a Jacobite spy. He hounded him with vin- dictive raillery in Tristram Shandy, where he stands pilloried as Dr Slop, the man-midwife.
All these hostilities arose from Laurey's forced apprentice- ship ; but suddenly, whether from disgust or ambition, he kicked against the pricks, and refused to abet his uncle's auto-da-fes. He was " tired," he wrote, of employing his "brains for other people's advantage." " 'Tis a foolish sacrifice," he adds, " . . . . made for some years to an ungrateful person." 1 " He quarrelled with me," is his own version in the memoir drawn up for his daughter, "because I would not write paragraphs for the newspapers, — though he was a party man, I was not, and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath me — from that period he became my bitterest enemy." The protest sounds plausible ; but a party man, if actions are sound evidence, the vicar himself had been. And there were other contributing causes to their rupture : one of them, if the gossip of John Croft be true, not very creditable to either of the parties,2 while the other concerned the nephew's behaviour to his importunate mother.
Such, then, was Sterne's position when he took up his pen to complain of the behaviour of one Hildyard, a York
1 Letter to Mrs F [query, Fothergill], * York, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 17 59."
2 The scandal had reference to a lady, cf. the Whitefoord Papers y p. 225.
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bookseller who had set up as a sort of broker for these " preaching by proxy " proceedings. This document, from the Egerton Manuscripts of the British Museum, has been published (in part at least) both by Mr. Fitzgerald and Pro- fessor Cross. But it sheds so much daylight on the York landscape that it must be retranscribed. Its capitals and punctuations follow Sterne's own sweet will,1 and it should be premised that Dr Jaques Sterne wrote afterwards, and had probably written before, that he would rather preach himself than allow " the only person unacceptable to me in the whole Church, an ungrateful and unworthy nephew of my own," to take his turn in the pulpit.2
Sterne's refusal to serve him as mercenary pamphleteer was the chief cause of the bully's wrath. The start is not too lucid : —
"Sutton, Nov. yrd> 1750.
"Dear Sir, — Being last Thursday at York to preach the Dean's turn, Hildyard, the bookseller, who had spoke to me last week about Preaching yours, in case you should not come yourself, told me, he had just got a letter from you directing him to get it supplied — But with an intimation that if I undertook it, that it might be done in such a way, as that it might not Disoblige your Friend the Precentor. If my doing it for you in any way could possibly have endangered that, my Regard for you on all accounts is such, that you may depend upon it, no consideration whatever would have made me offer my Service, nor would I upon any Invitation have accepted it, Had you incautiously press'd it upon me ; And therefore, that my undertaking it at all, upon Hildyards telling me He should want a Preacher, was from a know- ledge that, as it could not in Reason, so it could not in Fact, give the least Handle to what you apprehended. I would not say this from bare Conjecture But known Instances, 1 Cf. Eg. MS., 2325, f. 1. 2 Ibid., 2325, f. 3.
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having preach'd for so many of Dr Sterne's most Intimate Friends since our Quarrel without their feeling the least marks or most Distant Intimation, That he took it unkindly. In which You will the readier believe Me, from the following convincing Proof, That I have preached the 29th of May, the Precentor's own turn, for these two last years together (not at his Request, for we are not upon such Terms) But at the request of Mr Berdmore * who is of a gentle and pacific temper [?and] would not have ventured to have ask'd me to preach it for him the 2nd. Time which I did without any Reserve this last Summer. The Contest between Us, no Doubt, has been sharp, But has not been made more so, by bringing our Mutual Friend into it, who in all things (except Inviting us to the same Dinner) have generally bore them- selves towards Us, as if this Misfortune had never happened, and this, as on my side, so I am willing to suppose on His, without any alteration of our Opionions of them, Unless to their Honor and Advantage, I thought it my Duty to let you know, How this matter stood, to free you of any unnecessary Pain, which my Preaching for you might Occasion upon this score, since upon all others I flatter myself You would be Pleased, As in general it is not only more for the Credit of the Church, But of the Prebendary himself who is about to have his Place supplied by A Prebendy. of the Church where He can be had, rather than by Another, tho' of equal Merit." After this rigmarole comes his encounter with Hildyard, upon the " InsufFerable- ness of whose Behaviour" he dilates with graphic indig- nation. "Hildyard," he says, "gave himself out as the Archdeacon's 'Plenipo' ; how far his Excellency exceeded his instructions you will perceive from the account I have given of the hint in your letter, which was all the foundation for what pass'd. ... I step'd into his Shop just after 1 A Prebendary of York.
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[the] Sermon All Saints when with an air of much Gravity and importance, He beckon'd me to follow Him into an inner Room ; No sooner had he shut the Dore, But with the aweful Solemnity of a Premier who held a Lettre de Chachet [sic] upon whose Contents my Life depended — after a Minuite's Pause — He thus open'd his Commission. Sir, my friend the A-Deacon of Cleveland not caring to preach his Turn, as I conjectured, Has left me to provide a Preacher, But before I can take any Steps in it with Regard to you — I want first to know, Sir, upon what Footing you and Dr Sterne are ? Upon what Footing ! Yes Sir. How your Quarrel stands ? What's that to you ? How our Quarrel stands ! What's that to you, you Puppy ? But Sir, Mr Blackburn would know — What's that to Him ? — But Sir don't be angry, I only want to know of you whether Dr Sterne will not be displeased in ease you should preach — Go Look ; I've just now been preaching and you could not have fitter Opportunity to be satisfyed, — I hope, Mr Sterne, you are not angry. Yes, I am ; but much more astonished at your Impudence. I know not whether the Chancellor's stepping in at this Instant and flapping to the Dore, did not save his Tender Soul the pain of the last Word. However that be, he retreats upon this unexpected Rebuff, takes the Chancellr. aside, asks his Advice, comes back Submissive, begs Quarter, tells me Dr Herding1 had quite satisfied himself as to the grounds of his Scruple (tho' not of his Folly) and therefore beseeches me to let the Matter pass, and to preach the Turn, when I — as Percy complains in Harry ye 4
" c All smarting with my wounds
To be thus pestered by a Poppinjay
Out of my Grief and my Impatience
1 From the date of the letter, Herring was now Archbishop of Canterbury, but presumably remained Chancellor of the York diocese.
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Answered neglectingly, I know not what.
.... for he made me mad
To see him shine so bright and smell so sweet
And Talk so like a waiting Gentlewoman,
Bid him be Gone, and seek Another fitter for his Turn.'
" But as I was too angry to have the perfect Faculty of recollecting Poetry, however pat to my Case, so I was proud to tell him in plain Prose though somewhat elevated — That I would not preach, and that he might get a Parson where he could find one. But upon reflection that Don Joh[n] {torn) had certainly exceeded his instructions, and finding it to be just so, as I had suspected — There being nothing in your letter but a cautious Hint — And being moreover satisfyed in my mind, from this and twenty other Instances of the same kind, That this Impudence of his, like many Others, had issued not so much from his Heart as from his Head, the Defects of which no One in Reason is Accountable for, I thought I should wrong myself to remember it, and therefore I parted friends and told him I would take care of the Turn, wch. I shall do with Pleasure.
" It is Time to beg Pardon of you for troubling you with so long a Letter upon so little a Subject — Which as it has proceeded from the motive I have told you, of ridding you of Uneasiness, together with a Mixture of Ambition not to lose either the good Opinion or the outward Marks of it from any man of worth and character till I have done something to forfeit them, I know your Justice will Excuse.
" I am Revd. Sir with true Esteem and Regard of wch I beg you'l[l] consider this Letter as a Testimony yr. faithful and most Affte. Humble Servt.
" Lau : Sterne.
" P.S. — -Our Dean [Fountayne] arrives here on Saturday. My Wife sends her Respects to you and yr. Lady."
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The whole scene rises before us : the fussy yet servile bookseller, the timid Archdeacon, the Precentor bullying in the background, and the whimsical parson, hat-in-hand to the worldly bread-giver ; though his obsequiousness pales in comparison with the truckling that marked the necessitous curate of this period.1
Nor are personal touches missing. Sterne's war with " gravity " can be traced to its source, while the distinction between the follies of the head and those of the heart is the same antithesis which, towards the close, made his apology for his lapses. The one most pressed against him was his alleged treatment of his mother. Another long letter — from Sterne to his uncle Jaques — goes far to excuse it. Both lapse and letter have been ably handled by Professor Cross ; but they must be treated afresh, for both help to explain the antecedents of Tristram Shandy. .
1 A pamphlet satire in verse of 1765, entitled The Angel and the Curate^ by Nathaniel Weekes, depicts the miserable shifts and the cruel insolence which caused them, on the part of those " who smoke the parson in his shirt." Cf. also Shenstone's remarks about "the journeyman parson" in Hull's Select Letters (1778).
CHAPTER VIII
THE UNSENTIMENTAL CASE OF STERNE's MOTHER
Hitherto Sterne's poor mother, Agnes, and his sister Catherine have been lost in the dust of his controversies and the mists of his sentiment.
"From my father's death," he wrote, "to the time I settled in the world, which was eleven years, my mother lived in Ireland, and as during all that time I was not in a condition to furnish her with money, I seldom heard from her, and when I did, the account I generally had was that by the help of an Embroidery school that she kept, and by a punctual payment of her pension, which is £20 a year, she lived well and would have done so to this hour, had not the news that I had married a woman of fortune hastened her over to England."
This we have seen her doing ineffectually. Hence- forward, outside a few sidelights, our chief authority will be the substance of Sterne's appeal to his uncle during April 1 75 1 — a communication which in great measure absolves him from the sneer of Horace Walpole and Byron's epigram that Sterne starved a living mother while he whined over a dead ass.1
It does not, however, wholly acquit him ; some lack of
1 This letter, large portions of which have been cited both by Fitzgerald and by Cross, is to be found in Add. MSS. 25,479, f. 121. It bears date 5th April 1 75 1.
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natural affection remains. All that his slender purse allowed, he did, though he was hampered by his wife's repugnance to such waste of money. But he had scant love for a mother who had neglected him, nor could he harbour much sym- pathy with the seamy side of her situation. No sooner had Sterne married a pseudo-fortune, than his mother and sister magnified the bride's dowry, and in 1742 resolved to quarter themselves on the young couple. Sterne had hoped that their difficulties were past : he was always willing to spare Agnes what he could, provided she would spare him her company.
" I trust," he wrote much later to a York friend, whom he and his wife had driven over to visit, " that my poor mother's affair is ended to our comfort and, I trust, to hers." But the affair was never ended, and small comfort ensued in the future.
When the son heard of her landing, he posted to Liver- pool, and spent three days urging her to return to a country where a maintenance was assured, and convincing her of the fact that beyond his wife's and his own pittance, he had no outside resources. He was, he urged, bound to respect the provision of one who had generously refused a settlement on her marriage. He gave his mother clothes and the considerable present of twenty pounds, he plied her with persuasion. But remonstrance proved in vain. Directly she had got the money into her pocket, " she told me with an air of the utmost insolence, that as for going back to live in Ireland, she was determined to show me no such sport, that she had found I had married a wife who had brought me a fortune, and she was resolved to enjoy her share of it, and live the rest of her days at ease either at York or Chester." If Sterne's wife grew into a vixen, a vixen his mother seems to have remained all her life long.
The sentimentalist did not wish to inflict on his well-
ioo STERNE
born helpmate the vulgarity of his low-born mother : indeed, had he desired it, as he ought to have done, re- crimination would have been loud and prolonged.
Sterne could not induce Agnes to go back to Ireland, but he did induce her to remove to Chester. " I concluded," he says, "with representing to her the inhumanity of a Mother able to maintain herself thus forcing herself as a burden upon a Son who was scarce able to support himself without breaking in upon the future support of another person whom she might imagine was much dearer to me." Scarcely a dutiful speech ; but it should be borne in mind that Mrs Sterne, by her previous marriage with Captain Hebert, had a son to whom she might as naturally have turned. " I took my leave," adds Sterne, " by assuring her That though my income was so strait, I would not forget that I was a son tho' she had forgot that she was a mother."
But the woman whose whole life had been a battle, and who had experienced little but insult from her husband's kindred, would place no trust in Laurence, nor could the proud Catherine rest satisfied with ordinary assistance. For some three years this unamiable pair stayed on at Chester, remonstrant pensioners. In 1744, however, they took another ply. The widow despatched her daughter (at the son's expense) for a month's visit to Sutton, with the design of working at one stroke both on the brother's pity and the uncle's passion. Sterne had hitherto bestowed no less a sum than ninety pounds on his family ; yet now, despite indorsements on bills drawn by him in their joint favour, Agnes denied receipt, and persisted in an endeavour to set two taps flowing at the isame time. Sterne surely does not exaggerate when he terms this behaviour an "ungenerous concealment." The sister too was cunning, and the sorrows of Agnes Sterne were exploited by the cruel old man to the
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nephew's discredit, so that a fresh sting was thus added to his rupture with the Precentor. It is an unpleasant story, nor have we evidence on the other side. If we had, it would probably amount to little more than the sad want of affection between Sterne and his nearest kindred, or a recital of those quarrels that usually attend generosity with- out feeling. But it seems fairly clear that Sterne's mother and sister clutched all they could and then prejudiced the sinister uncle against their prey.
During the Sutton visit, the Sternes formed several plans for Catherine's advancement. They offered that if she would go to London as milliner and mantua-maker, she should be allowed thirty pounds a year (almost the "fortune " of Mrs Sterne) until business should come in ; and, further, they promised to equip her with the needful outfit. Or, if she preferred an opening in " the family of one of the first of our Nobility," Mrs Sterne (and here surely Mrs Montagu intervenes) would get her " a creditable place," where she would receive not less than eight or ten pounds a year together with other advantages. This post was probably one as housekeeper or confidential maid, nor must the salary be judged by its modern value. The Montagu correspondence mentions just such a place with just such remuneration, gratefully and happily accepted by a well-bred spinster. Sour Lady Disdain, however, despised unpretending employment. She answered her brother with scorn, and told him that he might send his own children to service, when he had any ; but for her part, as she was the daughter of a gentleman, " she would not disgrace herself^ but would live as such " : and this she did after her sister-in-law had exerted herself to secure the possibility of both her offers. Despite Catherine's pride, Sterne still con- tinued to send, and she to take, his bounty. The sequel is strange, and has passed unnoticed. If John Croft's gossip
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holds good,1 the aspiring damsel ended by marrying " a publican in London," and this disgrace was pressed against Sterne's paper-humanity by malicious or ignorant con- temporaries.
It would be interesting to know whether, when the author hurried up to London in 1760 to find both him- self and his fame, he visited his sister's ale-house. Such low connections, it might be feared, would shock a sensi- bility too fine for workaday wear, though, up to the last ebb of his life, Sterne protested that his feelings were too " nice " for " this world," and that the " world " had " killed him." Such might have been our conjecture, yet there is a trace of new evidence to the contrary. In a remarkable paper which Sterne drew up in December 1761, when he thought himself dying, he expressly implored his wife to benefit Catherine : " Leave my sister something worthy of your- self," he begs, " in case you do not think it right to purchase an annuity for your greater comfort ; if you chuse that — do it in God's name." 2 After this avowal, it can scarcely be held that Sterne's feelings never extended to actions.
Four years elapsed before Agnes Sterne reappeared at the critical moment when Dr Jaques most raged against his rebellious nephew. This time she managed thoroughly to poison his mind. In vain did the yet friendly Fountayne seek to heal these dissensions. Son, mother, and exasperated uncle remained irreconcilable. Although Sterne contrived to settle eight pounds a year on the widow, things went from bad to worse. Dr Sterne came to hate Laurence the more because some protegie got mixed up in their quarrel. And, to make the scapegrace or scapegoat a public example, he
1 Cf. Whitefoord Papers, \>. 231.
2 For this new document, already mentioned and afterwards to be quoted in other connections, cf. Elizabeth Montagu, vol. ii. pp. 270-2.
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clapped the poor old lady (now reduced to set up as a laundress) either in Ousebridge jail, or perhaps in some York almshouse, for no offence but her destitution.1 How this was compatible with old Mrs Sterne's "pension," whether she had mortgaged it, or how she had forfeited it, goes unexplained ; nor in the son's recapitulation of the cir- cumstances is there one word about this imprisonment or his desertion ; if the tale be true, the catastrophe seems ante- dated. A subscription was set on foot, and the old lady must have resumed her soap-suds, but among the dirty clothes in her basket, her son's character went uncleansed. The uncle took good care that he should be held up to odium, though he himself confessed that Agnes Sterne was rapacious. The forlorn woman must have cursed the day which related her to those domineering Sternes. Two things, however, seem patent. Dr Sterne was rich and childless, and he had contributed nothing to her support, while he had used her misery as a lever for the persecution of her son. That son, still comparatively poor, had now a beloved child to provide for, and, so far as his own pocket ex- tended, he had emptied it. A right-down good fellow, it will be thought, would have sheltered the poor old thing under his roof, despite a wife unconsulted in other matters of " sentiment." Sterne's point, however, was that he had done what he could.
"Was I, Sir, to die this night," he remonstrated with his uncle, after urging his gratitude to his wife, "was I, Sir, to die this night, I have not more than the very income of £20 a year (which my mother enjoys) to divide equally betwixt my wife and a helpless child and
1 John Croft says, " the common goal [sic] at York," and adds that she died there, which does not seem to have been the case. The Rev. Daniel Watson, vicar of Leake, writing in 1776, says that the place was Ousebridge prison. Cf. Professor Cross's Lifei p. 103. He is by far the best authority on this subject.
io4 STERNE
perhaps a third unhappy sharer, that may come into the world some months after its father's death to claim its part. The false modesty of not being able to declare this has made me thus long a prey to my mother, and to this clamour raised against me ; and since I have made known this much of my condition as an honest man ; it becomes me to add, that I think I have no right to apply one shilling of my Income to any other purpose but that of laying by a provision for my wife and child ; and that it will be time enough (if then) to add somewhat to my mother's pension .... when I have so much to leave my wife who besides the duties I owe her of a husband and the father of the dear child, has this further claim; that she whose bread I am thus defending was the person who brought it into the family, and whose birth and education would ill enable her to struggle in the world without it — that the other person who now claims it from her, and has raised so much sorrow upon that score, brought not one sixpence into the family, — and though it would give me pain enough to report it upon any other occasion, that she was the daughter of no other than a poor Suttler, who followed the camp in Flanders, was neither born nor bred to the expectation of a fourth part of that the Government allows her ; and therefore has reason to be contented with such a provision, though double the sum would be nakedness