LAURENCE STERNE.

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14830, 22 November 1913, Page 9

LAURENCE STERNE.

♦ SOME BICKXTEXARY COMMENTS. (By W. Douglass Andrews.) JoHSSOjf. "Any man xrho has a name, or wha ias" the power of p!caei«g, will bo 'v«r seccTOUsiy invited in London. The man I hsv « been io H' tas had cn £»e«ienie for three months." GoLDSSfiTH. — Ar.d a very duJl fellow. Joßssor.— "Wby, no, Sir." BOSWELV. There are great writers whose lives are as inspiring as their writings, laurenco Sterne is not among the number. But though, as the late Andrew Lang was careful to mark, his name does not appear in Mr Paneoast's "Introduction to English literature, Third Edition, Enlarged, New York, 1907,"' scholars less refined than Mr Pancoast have accorded recognition to the wayward "Yorick," and devoted mach time and energy to minute research into the records of his highly unconventional career. "I am bold to profess myself a humble admirer of the late Mr Sterne —as a man of letters," is a convenient summary of the verdict his English biographers feel called upon to give, and indeed most of them, impelled no doubt by the regrettable accident that Sterne was a clerk in Holy Orders, regard tho successive documents of his life as texts for condemnatory sermons. "They order this matter better in France," so at.least we are frequently assured, though a casual perusal of tho'few pages M. Tamo devotes to the subject hardly tends to confirm tho opinion. It goes without saying that there is in those pages abundant evidence of competent knowledge and keen insight, as when ho tells us that to read Sterne wo should wait for days when we are in "a peculiar kind of humour.". But he contrives in his criticism to be more offensive than Sterne at his wildest and worst, and when he gravely writes "in a well-constituted mind ideas march one after another, with uniform motion or acceleration, in this uncouth brain they jump about like a rout of masks at a carnival," he is, by implication of blarni), surely not far from the nadir of criticism.

The Roy. Laurence has a word for him. "Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world —tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst— the cant of criticism is the most tormenting." After all, you can only get from a man what he has to giro is no disputing against "HobbyHorses"-; and to conjecture that a man entirely different would have given something els& may amount to the value of a pious opinion, but is hardlyworth the pains of printing. Sterne is ;not far from the root of the matter, for "this uncouth brain" had moments of most shrewd vision, in. his Chapter of Critics, a chapter which should be printed in capital letters and hung up conspicuously in all places whither critics resort. "I would go fifty miles on foot, for* I have not a horse'worth riding on, to kiss, tho hand- of «that; man whose generous heart will give tip tho reins of his imagination into his author's hands—be- pleased he knows not why, and .cares not wherefore." Which, is as much as to say that sympathy is At the basis of true appreciation,, and that if an author tail to please, .the. blame may lie at his reader's. door. . • "Si vous mc dictes: 'Maistre, il sembleroit que ne fussiez grandemont page do nous escrire ces balivcrries et plaisantes moquettes,' jo vous responds que vous ne l'«stes gueres plus do vous axnuser a les lire." One may quo to the Cur 6of Meudon without scandal on behalf of his scampish, spiritual son! ; ■■'i. ;Butr ii is timo to finish the prologue and; ring up the curtain. Laurence Sferrio, '. whom charity itself could not call •i'grandement sage," was born on 2ith, 1713, at CJonmel, "a jUetrough, post, and market town in Tjj^pcrary,'-» fact which accounts for .Ks- brilliant- German disciple, Heiurich Heine, alluding to him as "tne famous ■Irishman." History repeats itself, and "his father, Roger Sterne, "a little smart . nian, active to the last degree in all : exercises, most patient of fatigue and '.■ disappointment, of which it pleased God to give him full measure," who on a famous occasion, at Gibraltar "was run through the body by Captain Phillips in a . .duel, (the quarrel began about a goose)" appears in the pages of "Esmond" as an Irish, captain. In point of fact, as Thackeray must, havo known, he was a true-bred Englishman* and came of a family hailing ■ from Suffolk. Fate carried him to Ire- ■ land, just- before Laurence*was born, as a subaltern in "Chudleigh's Reciment .of Foot," one of tho lastof tho English regiments to return from, garrison duty in Flanders at, tho close of the Spanish Succession War, and be disbanded from motives of economy.: In 1714- it pleased the powers that were to reenlist it, and for the next nine years, till by the kindness of a-Yorkshire undo ho was sent to school at Halifax. Laurence went with the regiment, and 'learnt that compelling music of the drum, on which Heine descants so

.eloquently in. "Buch Le Grand." •Ho learnt many things besides, sonic of which might with advantage have been left ■unlearned. "Our armies swore terribly in Flanders,". and it is not likely that the men of tho 34th lost the trick in Ireland. . But he gained a precociously early insight into life, a marvellous wealth of memories, a familiarity trith the art.and practice of war, and the importance of geography (v. "Tristram Shandy," Bk. VIII. eh. XIX.), a close and intimate tnowledgo of Dutch William's campaigns in Ireland and the Low Countries, and, precious abovo rubies, the material which he shaped in later years into "My Undo Toby, ,, that noble veteran who "feared nothing but the doing of anything wrong," and his inimitable henchman, who thought so littlo of Squire Shandy's pet philosophy of names, and "fought" just as well "wHen the regiment called Jiim Trim, as when they called him James Butler." The curious in euch coincidences will note tho close parallel which, like everything else than can be said of Sterne, has been pointed out a hundred times before, between this portion of his life and the early years of George Borrow, one of the numerous great writers of tho world, whose debt to Yorick can hardly be overestimated.. :At school in Halifax ho wrote his name on the newly -whitewashed ceiling, and sentimental (so rj least ho fsays) even in those early days learnt "to mourn for Dido." In 1733 he was a

•izar of Jesus College, where he fell ""over head and ears" into that luckless friendship with his distant cousin, Jack Hall. • Stevenson, the Eugenius of "Tristram Shandy," which stained all his later years.- In duo course he •merged from Cambridge a Bachelor of Arts, and being the great-grandson of aa archbishop, and the nephew of Dr. Jacques Sterne, a clerical dignitary of

York, and a great engrosser of ecclesiastical preferments, he naturally but most unluckily took orders. Probably no man was ever more tragically unfit for such a career. His very virtues, for being human ho had virtues, stood in his way. What ho thought in his heart, ho spoke with his lips, forgetting tho judicious, if ungallaut, counsel of Micah the Morasthite. "All truths are not to be told," the saying is Cieorge Herbert's of whom more anon, and cren if we hadn't the "Visitation Dinner," and the profane handling of grave and reverend signiors under the style of Gastriphercs, Didius, Kysarcius, and Phutatorius, wo have his own word for it that the haploss Laurence was more witty than wise. Parson Yorick is Sterne seen through Ins own glasses, glasses, we may suspect, very carefully adapted to rectify defects, not so much of vision ns of tho object visualised. And of Yorick we read, "though ho never .sought, yet, at the same time, he never shunned occasion of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony; he had but too many temptations in his life of scattering his wit and his huinoui —his gibes and his jests about him —and they were not lost for want of gathering." Such a luck of accommodation was bad enough, but the latitude Sterne allowed himself in the choice of his associates was worse. A man is judged by tho company he keeps, and a young- vicar who consorted with the Reverend -"Panty" Lascellcs, that remarkable brace of ■ colonels. Colonel Hall and Colonel Lee, and the other fast and furious 'T>emcniacs" who gathered round Hall Stevenson at "Crazy Castle," and went among them by the facetious soubriquet of the "Blackbird." had not much grounds of complaint if decent people held aloof. Tt is impossible to read "Tristram Shandy" without realising that Sterne knew what it was to incur social ostracism, and his often ill-humoured gibes at "their reverences" suggest that ho was ono of those irrational people who make it a ground of complaint that they cannot havo it both ways. But even this, unhapoilv, does rrot expnust the list of his delinquencies. There is the ticklish question of his relations with his wife, and his sentimental pbilanderings with tho long procession of "inexpressive she's"—

Joan and Jane and Audrio, Another pretty Thomasine, And then another Katharino, And then—a long etctetera. Those who liko this sort of thing ■will find plenty of it in his life and letters. ' Those who don't, will think with Thackeray of the neglected wife, and rather wonder that the Crofts and James stood by their dubious friend, than that his little world at large gave him. the cold shoulder. But if ho left his wife to pay' his debts, it should bo recorded by "way of offset that he cared for her comfort in her journey through France, provided her with sufficient funds to maintain herself in comfort in that'country, and genuinely loved the daughter, Lydia, whom ho adjured to leavo her ''rouge-pots" behind -her when she returned to England, and who by publishing the "Letters Thackeray found so detestable, insured the immortality of her too amiable parent's~disrepute. Nor is it well altogether to overlook the cheerful gaiety, - comparable to Louis Stevenson's, with which he bore the burden of constant ill-health and much medical treatment. There is yet another side to Sterno which must bo dealt with, and which may as well be touched on here, the side that has ranged him with•; the Ishmaels of literature: The 'sicKfly sentimentality which rejoices.an damp cambric handkerchiefs and hysterical outbursts of tears, unconvincing.as Job Trotter's, might be forgiven as at worst a 'literary -convention, a sort or. algebraic formula of emotion. But the animalism, all the more indecorous because half-veiled, the brutal coarse-, ness, tho satyr-like , insistance on the viler hidden things of life, are harder to condone, . We remember that his childhood was not sheltered, that constant bodily sickness promoted morbid humours in his mind, that a "conven-tional-refinement is. often coarser than tbo frankest outspokenness. But these excuses hardly serve. The man is not frank, and on the vulpine face of tho Rev. Laurence in Reynold's familiar portrait is an unmistakable leer. Tried even by the standards of his own age, h& cannot pass muster. Goldsmith loathed him, and recorded his loathing iii "The Citizen of the, World." Johnson disapproved of him. Warburton thought-him an "incorrigible blackguard.'V Hβ stands among the greatest of English men of letters a .leper of imperishable genius, condemned to cry to all the generations, "Unclean!-Un-clean!" But oven a lepor is human, and Sterne, with all his faults, was very human. -. Ho must have had an enormous capacity for enjoyment, as he had an almost xinmatchable gift for seeing and making others see the humour, sometimes grim, sometimes whimsical, sometimes pathetic, sometimes ironic, but always arrestive and full of matter for a thoughtful mind, that interpenetrates the warp and woof of life. Hβ must also have been an amazing good talker ("writing, when properly managed, is but a-different name for conversation"), and was assuredly free from "the .savage and intolerant relevance" that a recent writer finds "so devastatinc to pleasure*' in the conversation of Napoleon. No doubt the incoherence, the perpetual aigressiveness, the endless eccentricity of 'Tristram Shandy," for "Tho Sentimental Journey" pursues an evener course, is much of* it calculated and elaborated rather than tho natural overflowing of what M.. Tame, or at least his translator, oddly styles "an uncouth brain." For there are not so many loose ends and broken threads in the epic of" Tristram as the casual skimmer is apt to imagine, while the amazing range over "which it travels, the heights and depths, and nooks and .crannies of life and letters it flashes its light on, are an index to the multifarious furniture of its author's mind, and demonstrate with eufficieut clearness that he was not often "gravelled for lack of matter." But perhaps tho strangest thing about that singular book is that it came into being with the casualness of a "Don Quixote" or a "Pickwick." as a skit on the unlucky Yorkshire medico pilloried as Dγ Slop, tho man-midwife ("accoucheur, if you please, quoth Dr. Slop:") caught tho fancy of'the town, and made its author, an unknown Yorkshire parson in his forty-seventh year, the lion of, tho day. Hβ goes posting up to London to reap his reward, and like the gentleman in "the old French song, though for a very differe-nt reason,

Lβ grce Yorick voit chatrue jour Cent wiskys a.«sie*g«r M porte, II Teyoit 1» TiU« et U cour, :i* lesomme *ox cieux Iβ porte. His rogue never fails, though th*. tale of his readers falls off as each succeeding rear brings out its whimsical new volumes ("I think, I said, I would write two Volumes every year! ), and in the course of his sentimental journeyings, when he goes-abroad, and makes thl grand tour, he finds himself as_well known, and as kindly received m Pans

nov«J and even worked mto its texture, vere 'bought up as eagerly as "Tristram" iwelf. m the opinion of good judges in tbat kl ° li tlle y "were worth buying t°°» thoug* l • Johnson, "severely j censured them, arter a hasty perusal in a stag©-<» acll > observing in his most awful manner, '"1 should never have dei<med even to look at them had I been at large!' lor-Sterno was an accomplished if not a "painful" preacher, and appropriated the thoughts and expressions of earlier writers, as indeed Oβ freely admits, with the same serene indifference to the rights of literary property he shows in all his works. "He was a royal thief, and stole tho best thing he could find, and no man of letters, with the best intentions can steal more." Who shall exhaust the talo of his borrowings? From Rabelais, from Burton, from Hall, from South, from the scurrilous French writers of the sixteenth century, ho stole unblushingly. No man can lay his hand upon a purple passage, and say with certainty, "This is Sterne's very own." Even tho pretty sentiment from the "Journey," "God tempers tho wind to the shorn lamb,'.' cays Mr Sidney Lee, is a common Lauguedoc proverb, and ho might have added that it occurs in slightly varied phrase in the "Jacula Prudentum" cf Gtjorpe Herbert. Tho very framework of 'Tristram," 6O it is alleged, is "conveyed" from an y earlier writer. He stole the grapes, he stole the wine-press, he stolo the bottles, yei tho wine is all his own, and tho wit with which he fitted his stolen bricks (your metaphor is an unmanageable jade) into his tesselated pavement is as unmatchablo as tho incomparable genius which makes the Shandy k family and their little circle real, as few characters in fiction are real. Squire Shandy,- with his recondite erudition, bought readymade, and delight in dialectic subtlety, is a Eugenist born out of due season, and endowed with a double portion of the confounding frankness which marks the speech and writings of that amazing sect. Mrs Shandy, placid partner of his joys and sorrows, a lady so incurious that "she went out of the world at last without knowing whether it turned round or stood still," in spite of her husband's frequent and officious lectures on tho tonic, has been compared, though with small justice; to Mrs Jsickleby. That gallant gentleman, the captain, who came by his wound and his unwelcome liberty "before the gaie of St. Nicholas, in one of tho traverses of the trench opposite to the salient angle of the demi-bastion of St. Rpch" in tho siege of Namur, and who was co basely cheated out of his hobby-horso and into love by the Treaty of Utrecht; Trim with his Monterb can, and his often interrupted tale of a king of Bohemia and his seven castles; Obadiah, that reckless rider and unprincipled tier of knots; Susannah, who came- by the desire of her heart, the "green satin night-gown"; the foolish fat scullion whose sole remark was "So am not I" ; Jonathan, who never minded death "upon a. coach-box"; that too attractive lady of the melting eye, the Widow Wadham and her faithful Bridget, so handy with a rolling-pin; not forgetting the humorist Yorick and the highly professional Slop—what pen short of their creator's could do justice to them. And then the fun and fancy, and, alas, the squalid coarseness which irradiates and defiles almost every chapter. On the elect Shandean, and the membors of that inconsequent fellowship are not few, the charm of Sterne's inimitable dialogue, so easy, so natural, so whimsical, so full of laughter and tears,. can never pall. Tho pity of it is that it is so encumbered by much that one could vish away. For Sterne is not a writer 'virginibus, puerisque," and indeed, even apart from his coarseness, there is perhaps fortunately, little in him to appeal to their tastes. But as tho late Mr Lang remarks, "readers of mature age who neglect this conte'mplater of human life, this creator of characters, this painter of manners irreparably past," suffer some loss. Those who base their neglect on Thackeray's fierce lecture in the "English Humourists " would not be ill-advised to remember that m another placo the Master has made Sterne say, "my Tristram has "eld his own for a hundred years." Ho holds his own even now. fifty years farther on, and it is a sobering reflection that though the waters of oblivion have long since engulfed 'The Legation of Moses," and even "Tho Tale of a Tub has become "a fragment known to fow, and they for tho more part students by profession, "The Lifo and Opinions, of Tnstram -Shandy, G<mtleman, is still, in its author's own unsavonry phrase, gallantly "swimming down tho gutter of time " °