Laurentius Sterne

“ He had spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. ”

“ Sterne’s body, as if rooted on the spot, trembled slightly from top to toe with the internal vibration of the ship; from under his feet came sometimes a sudden clang of iron, the noisy burst of a shout below; to the right the leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun, and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their own shimmering around the highest boughs which stood out black against a smooth blue sky that seemed to droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a tent. ”

“ CHAPTER XI. CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.—PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic honour—hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough forward through time—that the comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be exaggerated. ”

“ Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender. What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel in which he might give full play to his simious humour, startle more hideously than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure in the society around him might offer the most tempting butt for ridicule? ”

“ Sterne mumbled angrily to himself, after the stooping back of the chief engineer had disappeared round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no doubt—he thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his prospects. On the contrary, it would blast them utterly as likely as not. He dreaded another failure. He had a vague consciousness of not being much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inexplicably enough, for he had done nothing to them. Envy, he supposed. People were always down on a clever chap who made no bones about his determination to get on. ”

“ Laurence Sterne, at once man of the world and clergyman, with Rabelais as a model, and himself a master of prose, possessing command of humor and pathos, skilled in character sketch and essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all. His aim Is not to depict the traits or events of contemporary society, but to put forth the views of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Yorkshire parson, with many a quaint turn and whimsical situation under a thin disguise of story-form. ”

“ The world has imagined because I wrote Tristram Shandy that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured world we live in, and we are often painted in divers colours, according to the ideas each one frames in his head." It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible for Sterne to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of life so concisely as in this naïve passage. The connubial affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions—as the lower to the higher. ”

“ Under his care, Sterne took deacon’s orders in March 1736 at the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln; and as soon as, two years later, he had been ordained priest, he was appointed to the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, eight miles from York. The uncle and nephew some years later quarrelled bitterly—according to the latter’s account, because he would not write “dirty paragraphs in the newspapers,” being “no party man.” That Sterne would have been particularly squeamish about what he wrote may be doubted ”

“ We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. ”

“ PREFATORY NOTE. The materials for a biography of Sterne are by no means abundant. Of the earlier years of his life the only existing record is that preserved in the brief autobiographical memoir which, a few months before his death, he composed, in the usual quaint staccato style of his familiar correspondence, for the benefit of his daughter. Of his childhood; of his school-days; of his life at Cambridge, and in his Yorkshire vicarage; of his whole history, in fact, up to the age of forty-six, we know nothing more than he has there jotted down. ”

“ Perpetual as are Sterne's affectations, and tiresome as is his eternal self-consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet when once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him there is no writer who ever makes us more completely forget him in the presence of his characters—none who can bring them and their surroundings, their looks and words, before us with such convincing force of reality. ”

“ This skit indicated Sterne's vocation, and in fantastic accord with his irresponsible temperament, a crisis which he disreputably provoked in his domestic affairs gave him, at the mature age of forty-six, an opportunity of pursuing it. Writing in Latin during 1758 to his friend Hall-Stevenson, he expressed himself weary of his wife's society, and announced a visit to London on an adulterous errand (this letter is often misdated 1767) . Within a few months of its composition, in 1758, Sterne's wife was stricken by an attack of insanity. ”

“ Instead of extracting, like the novel-writers, the principal root, Sterne, with marvellous devices and success, devotes himself to drawing out the tangled skein of numberless threads, which are sinuously immersed and dispersed, so as to suck in from all sides the sap and the life. Slender, intertwined, buried as they are, he finds them; he extricates them without breaking, brings them to the light ”

“ It is evident, however, that he succeeded in winning the affection of one who had not too much affection of the deeper kind to spare for any one. The figure of Roger Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of Laurence Sterne's Memoir; and it is touched in with strokes so vivid and characteristic that critics have been tempted to find in it the original of the most famous portrait in the Shandy gallery. ”

“ That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not substance enough—few of Sterne's jests have—to stand the process of continual attrition to which he subjects it. But the mere historic gravity with which the various turns of this monomania are recorded—to say nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style—prevents the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome. ”

“ Hence we need think it no disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual creation. His imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt, considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous; but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed upon it ”

“ The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, altogether an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous. But we must not judge Sterne in this matter by too severe a standard. He was by nature neither a dignified nor a self-contained man: he had a head particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation; and it must be allowed that few men's power of resisting giddiness at previously unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried. ”

“ There was nothing from which I had painted out for my self so joyous a riot of the affections, as in this journey in the vintage, through this part of France; but pressing through this gate, of sorrow to it, my sufferings have totally unfitted me. In every scene of festivity, I saw Maria in the background of the piece, sitting pensive under her poplar; and I had got almost to Lyons before I was able to cast a shade across her.
—Dear Sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! ”

“ And yet, notwithstanding all this, and a pistol tinder-box which was moreover filch’d from me at Sienna, and twice that I pay’d five Pauls for two hard eggs, once at Raddicoffini, and a second time at Capua—I do not think a journey through France and Italy, provided a man keeps his temper all the way, so bad a thing as some people would make you believe: there must be ups and downs, or how the duce should we get into vallies where Nature spreads so many tables of entertainment.—’Tis nonsense to imagine they will lend you their voitures to be shaken to pieces for nothing ”

“ Sterne's manner, in short, may be that of a bad and careless writer, but it is the manner of a first-rate talker; and this, of course, enhances rather than detracts from the unwearying charm of his wit and humour.
To attempt a precise and final distinction between these two last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else would be no very hopeful task, perhaps; but those who have a keen perception of either find no great difficulty in discriminating, as a matter of feeling, between the two. ”

“ I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.—O diem praeclarum!—then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling. ”

“ Does not all the world know, said the curate d'Estella at the conclusion of his work, that Noses ran the same fate some centuries ago in most parts of Europe, which Whiskers have now done in the kingdom of Navarre—The evil indeed spread no further then—, but have not beds and bolsters, and night-caps and chamber-pots stood upon the brink of destruction ever since? Are not trouse, and placket-holes, and pump-handles—and spigots and faucets, in danger still, from the same association?—Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections—give it but its head—'tis like a ramping and a roaring lion. ”

“ It would be as absurd to lecture the excellent brothers upon the absurdity of their mode of life as to preach morality to the manager of a Punch show, or to demand sentiment in the writer of a mathematical treatise. 'I believe in my soul,' says Sterne, rather audaciously, 'that the hand of the supreme Maker and Designer of all things never made or put a family together, where the characters of it were cast and contrasted with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, for this end ”

“ In the hurry and confusion everything had been in the night before, the bakers had all forgot to lay their leaven—there were no butter’d buns to be had for breakfast in all Strasburg—the whole close of the cathedral was in one eternal commotion——such a cause of restlessness and disquietude, and such a zealous inquiry into the cause of that restlessness, had never happened in Strasburg, since Martin Luther, with his doctrines, had turned the city upside down. ”

“ The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those events which must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromising intellectual frailties. ”

“ We have known the same spirit in many incarnations in later days. Sterne, who made the word popular in literature, represents what may be considered as sentimentalism in its purest form; that which corresponds most closely to its definition as sentiment running to waste; for in Sterne there is no thought of any moral, or political, or philosophical application. He is as entirely free as a man can be from any suspicion of 'purpose.' He tells us as frankly as possible that he is simply putting on the cap and bells for our amusement. He must weep and laugh just as the fancy takes him ”

“ What could be wanting in my father but to have wrote a book to publish this notion of his to the world? Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions,—unless he gives them proper vent:—It was the identical thing which my father did:—for in the year sixteen, which was two years before I was born, he was at the pains of writing an express Dissertation simply upon the word Tristram,—shewing the world, with great candour and modesty, the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name. ”