Part 1 (1/2)

Sterne.

by H.D. Traill.

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 Yorks.h.i.+re vicarage; of his whole history, in fact, up to the age of forty-six, we know nothing more than he has there jotted down. He attained that age in the year 1759; and at this date begins that series of his _Letters_, from which, for those who have the patience to sort them out of the chronological confusion in which his daughter and editress involved them, there is, no doubt, a good deal to be learnt. These letters, however, which extend down to 1768, the year of the writer's death, contain pretty nearly all the contemporary material that we have to depend on. Freely as Sterne mixed in the best literary society, there is singularly little to be gathered about him, even in the way of chance allusion and anecdote, from the memoirs and _ana_ of his time. Of the many friends who would have been competent to write his biography while the facts were yet fresh, but one, John Wilkes, ever entertained--if he did seriously entertain--the idea of performing this pious work; and he, in spite of the entreaties of Sterne's widow and daughter, then in straitened circ.u.mstances, left unredeemed his promise to do so. The brief memoir by Sir Walter Scott, which is prefixed to many popular editions of _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey,_ sets out the so-called autobiography in full, but for the rest is mainly critical; Thackeray's well-known lecture essay is almost wholly so; and nothing, worthy to be dignified by the name of a _Life of Sterne_, seems ever to have been published, until the appearance of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's two stout volumes, under this t.i.tle, some eighteen years ago. Of this work it is hardly too much to say that it contains (no doubt with the admixture of a good deal of superfluous matter) nearly all the information as to the facts of Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be recovered. The evidence for certain of its statements of fact is not as thoroughly sifted as it might have been; and with some of its criticism I, at least, am unable to agree. But no one interested in the subject of this memoir can be insensible of his obligations to Mr. Fitzgerald for the fruitful diligence with which he has laboured in a too long neglected field.

H.D.T.

CHAPTER I.

BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS.

(1713-1724.)

Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one of the last of the English regiments which had been detained in Flanders to supervise the execution of the treaty of Utrecht arrived at Clonmel from Dunkirk. The day after its arrival the regiment was disbanded; and yet a few days later, on the 24th of the month, the wife of one of its subalterns gave birth to a son. The child who thus early displayed the perversity of his humour by so inopportune an appearance was Laurence Sterne. ”My birthday,” he says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have ”antic.i.p.ated the labours” of the biographer--”my birthday was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children.”

Roger Sterne, however, now late ensign of the 34th, or Chudleigh's regiment of foot, was after all in less evil case than were many, probably, of his comrades. He had kinsmen to whom he could look for, at any rate, temporary a.s.sistance, and his mother was a wealthy widow.

The Sternes, originally of a Suffolk stock, had pa.s.sed from that county to Nottinghams.h.i.+re, and thence into Yorks.h.i.+re, and were at this time a family of position and substance in the last-named county.

Roger's grandfather had been Archbishop of York, and a man of more note, if only through the accident of the times upon which he fell, than most of the inc.u.mbents of that see. He had played an exceptionally energetic part even for a Cavalier prelate in the great political struggle of the seventeenth century, and had suffered with fort.i.tude and dignity in the royal cause. He had, moreover, a further claim to distinction in having been treated with common grat.i.tude at the Restoration by the son of the monarch whom he had served. As Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, he had ”been active in sending the University plate to his Majesty,” and for this offence he was seized by Cromwell and carried in military custody to London, whence, after undergoing imprisonment in various goals, and experiencing other forms of hards.h.i.+p, he was at length permitted to retire to an obscure retreat in the country, there to commune with himself until that tyranny should be overpast. On the return of the exiled Stuarts Dr. Sterne was made Bishop of Carlisle, and a few years later was translated to the see of York. He lived to the age of eighty-six, and so far justified Burnet's accusation against him of ”minding chiefly enriching himself,” that he seems to have divided no fewer than four landed estates among his children. One of these, Simon Sterne, a younger son of the Archbishop, himself married an heiress, the daughter of Sir Roger Jaques of Elvington; and Roger, the father of Laurence Sterne, was the seventh and youngest of the issue of this marriage. At the time when the double misfortune above recorded befell him at the hands of Lucina and the War Office, his father had been some years dead; but Simon Sterne's widow was still mistress of the property which she had brought with her at her marriage, and to Elvington, accordingly, ”as soon,” writes Sterne, ”as I was able to be carried,” the compulsorily retired ensign betook himself with his wife and his two children. He was not, however, compelled to remain long dependent on his mother. The ways of the military authorities were as inscrutable to the army of that day as they are in our day to our own. Before a year had pa.s.sed the regiment was ordered to be re-established, and ”our household decamped with bag and baggage for Dublin.” This was in the autumn of 1714, and from that time onward, for some eleven years, the movements and fortunes of the Sterne family, as detailed in the narrative of its most famous member, form a history in which the ludicrous struggles strangely with the pathetic.

A husband, condemned to be the Ulysses-like plaything of adverse G.o.ds at the War Office; an indefatigably prolific wife; a succession of weak and ailing children; misfortune in the seasons of journeying; misfortune in the moods of the weather by sea and land--under all this combination of hostile chances and conditions was the struggle to be carried on. The little household was perpetually ”on the move”--a little household which was always becoming and never remaining bigger--continually increased by births, only to be again reduced by deaths--until the contest between the deadly hards.h.i.+ps of travel and the fatal fecundity of Mrs. Sterne was brought by events to a natural close. Almost might the unfortunate lady have exclaimed, _Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?_ She pa.s.ses from Ireland to England, and from England to Ireland, from inland garrison to sea-port town and back again, incessantly bearing and incessantly burying children--until even her son in his narrative begins to speak of losing one infant at this place, and ”leaving another behind” on that journey, almost as if they were so many overlooked or misdirected articles of luggage. The tragic side of the history, however, overshadows the grotesque. When we think how hard a business was travel even under the most favourable conditions in those days, and how serious even in our own times, when travel is easy, are the discomforts of the women and children of a regiment on the march--we may well pity these unresting followers of the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and she came moreover of a campaigning stock. Her father was a ”noted suttler” of the name of Nuttle, and her first husband--for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married her--had been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served some years' apprentices.h.i.+p to the military life before these wanderings began; and she herself was destined to live to a good old age. But somehow or other she failed to endow her offspring with her own robust const.i.tution and powers of endurance. ”My father's children were,” as Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, ”not made to last long;” but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hards.h.i.+ps of those early years which carried them off in their infancy with such painful regularity and despatch, and that it was to the same cause that their surviving brother owed the beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life was cut short.

The diary of their travels--for the early part of Sterne's memoirs amounts to scarcely more--is the more effective for its very brevity and abruptness. Save for one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than usual at Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of the traveller who never finds time to unpack his portmanteau. On the re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, ”our household,” says the narrative, ”decamped from York with bag and baggage for Dublin. Within a month my father left us, being ordered to Exeter; where, in a sad winter, my mother and her two children followed him, travelling from Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth.” At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne gave birth to a son, christened Joram; and, ”in twelve months time we were all sent back to Dublin. My mother,” with her three children, ”took s.h.i.+p at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow escape from being cast away by a leak springing up in the vessel. At length, after many perils and struggles, we got to Dublin.” Here intervenes the short breathing-s.p.a.ce, of which mention has been made--an interval employed by Roger Sterne in ”spending a great deal of money” on a ”large house,” which he hired and furnished; and then ”in the year one thousand seven hundred and nineteen, all unhinged again.” The regiment had been ordered off to the Isle of Wight, thence to embark for Spain, on ”the Vigo Expedition,” and ”we,” who accompanied it, ”were driven into Milford Haven, but afterwards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to Plymouth again, and to the Isle of Wight;” losing on this expedition ”poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of the smallpox.” In the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Sterne and her family remained till the Vigo Expedition returned home; and during her stay there ”poor Joram's loss was supplied by the birth of a girl, Anne,” a ”pretty blossom,” but destined to fall ”at the age of three years.” On the return of the regiment to Wicklow, Roger Sterne again sent to collect his family around him. ”We embarked for Dublin, and had all been cast away by a most violent storm; but, through the intercession of my mother, the captain was prevailed upon to turn back into Wales, where we stayed a month, and at length got into Dublin, and travelled by land to Wicklow, where my father had, for some weeks, given us over for lost.”

Here a year pa.s.sed, and another child, Devijeher--so called after the colonel of the regiment--was born. ”From thence we decamped to stay half a year with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, about seven miles from Wicklow, who, being a relative of my mother's, invited us to his parsonage at Animo.[1]” From thence, again, ”we followed the regiment to Dublin,” where again ”we lay in the barracks a year.” In 1722 the regiment was ordered to Carrickfergus. ”We all decamped, but got no further than Drogheda; thence ordered to Mullingar, forty miles west, where, by Providence, we stumbled upon a kind relation, a collateral descendant from Archbishop Sterne, who took us all to his castle, and kindly entertained us for a year.” Thence, by ”a most rueful journey,”

to Carrickfergus, where ”we arrived in six or seven days.” Here, at the age of three, little Devijeher obtained a happy release from his name; and ”another child, Susan, was sent to fill his place, who also left us behind in this weary journey.” In the ”autumn of this year, or the spring of the next”--Sterne's memory failing in exact.i.tude at the very point where we should have expected it to be most precise--”my father obtained permission of his colonel to fix me at school;” and henceforth the boy's share in the family wanderings was at an end. But his father had yet to be ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry, where at last a permanent child, Catherine, was born; and thence to Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence of that famous Rock, where the much-enduring campaigner was run through the body in a duel, ”about a goose” (a thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica, where, ”with a const.i.tution impaired” by the sword-thrust earned in his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the ”country fever,” and died. ”His malady,” writes his son, with a touch of feeling struggling through his dislocated grammar, ”took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then in a month or two walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed his last.”

[Footnote 1: ”It was in this parish,” says Sterne, ”that I had that wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known to all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people flocked to seeme.” More incredible still does it seem that Th.o.r.esby should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind to Sterne's great-grandfather, the Archbishop. ”Playing near a mill, he fell within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in the whole wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void place came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards.” (Th.o.r.esby, ii. 15.) But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above pa.s.sage.]

There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the comic and the pathetic in the life-history of this obscure father of a famous son. His life was clearly not a fortunate one, so far as external circ.u.mstances go; but its misfortunes had no sort of consoling dignity about them. Roger Sterne's lot in the world was not so much an unhappy as an uncomfortable one; and discomfort earns little sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its sufferers. He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish heroes--good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, s.h.i.+ftless--whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and half-contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray. He was obviously a typical specimen of that cla.s.s of men who are dest.i.tute alike of the virtues and failings of the ”respectable” and successful; whom many people love and no one respects; whom everybody pities in their struggles and difficulties, but whom few pity without a smile.

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. ”My father,” says Sterne, ”was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased G.o.d to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.” This is a captivating little picture; and it no doubt presents traits which may have impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to ”My Uncle Toby.” The simplicity of nature and the ”kindly, sweet disposition” are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's ”rapid and hasty temper” in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably. And, on the whole, there seems no reason to believe that Sterne borrowed more from the character of his father than any writer must necessarily, and perhaps unconsciously, borrow from his observation of the moral and mental qualities of those with whom he has come into most frequent contact.

That Laurence Sterne pa.s.sed the first eleven years of his life with such an exemplar of these simple virtues of kindliness, guilelessness, and courage ever before him, is perhaps the best that can be said for the lot in which his early days were cast. In almost all other respects there could hardly have been--for a quick-witted, precocious, imitative boy--a worse bringing-up. No one, I should imagine, ever more needed discipline in his youth than Sterne; and the camp is a place of discipline for the soldier only. To all others whom necessity attaches to it, and to the young especially, it is rather a school of license and irregularity. It is fair to remember these disadvantages of Sterne's early training, in judging of the many defects as a man, and laxities as a writer, which marked his later life; though, on the other hand, there is no denying the reality and value of some of the countervailing advantages which came to him from his boyish surroundings. The conception of my Uncle Toby need not have been taken whole from Roger Sterne, or from any one actual captain of a marching regiment; but the constant sight of, and converse with, many captains and many corporals may undoubtedly have contributed much to the vigour and vitality of Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim. So far as the externals of portraiture were concerned, there can be no doubt that his art benefited much from his early military life. His soldiers have the true stamp of the soldier about them in air and language; and when his captain and corporal fight their Flemish battles over again we are thoroughly conscious that we are listening, under the dramatic form, to one who must himself have heard many a chapter of the same splendid story from the lips of the very men who had helped to break the pride of the Grand Monarque under Marlborough and Eugene.

CHAPTER II.

SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY.--HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE.

(1723-1738.)

It was not--as we have seen from the Memoir--till the autumn of 1723, ”or the spring of the following year,” that Roger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to ”fix” his son at school; and this would bring Laurence to the tolerably advanced age of ten before beginning his education in any systematic way. He records, under date of 1721, that ”in this year I learned to write, &c.;” but it is not probable that the ”&c.”--that indolent symbol of which Sterne makes such irritating use in all his familiar writing--covers, in this case, any wide extent of educational advance. The boy, most likely, could just read and write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at school, ”near Halifax, with an able master:” a judicious selection, no doubt, both of place as well as teacher. Mr. Fitzgerald, to whose researches we owe as much light as is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and probably not very interesting period of Sterne's life, has pointed out that Richard Sterne, eldest son of the late Simon Sterne, and uncle, therefore, of Laurence, was one of the governors of Halifax Grammar School, and that he may have used his interest to obtain his nephew's admission to the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax man, and so, constructively, a child of the parish. But, be this as it may, it is more than probable that from the time when he was sent to Halifax School the whole care and cost of the boy's education was borne by his Yorks.h.i.+re relatives. The Memoir says that, ”by G.o.d's care of me, my cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me to the University, &c., &c.;” and it is to be inferred from this that the benevolent guardians.h.i.+p of Sterne's uncle Richard (who died in 1732, the year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge) must have been taken up by his son. Of his school course--though it lasted for over seven years--the autobiographer has little to say; nothing, indeed, except that he ”cannot omit mentioning” that anecdote with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come across the briefest notice of Sterne's life is familiar. The schoolmaster ”had the ceiling of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital letters, LAU. STERNE for which the usher severely whipped me. My master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment. This expression made me forget the blows I had received.” It is hardly to be supposed, of course, that this story is pure romance; but it is difficult, on the other hand, to believe that the incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it happened. That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest--or even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these prophetic moments sometimes)--is, of course, possible; but that Sterne's master was ”very much hurt” at the boy's having been justly punished for an act of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been a delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; and that Sterne's vanity, either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the urchin's freak was only too unhappily characteristic of the man. The trick of befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously all his days; and many a fair white surface--of humour, of fancy, or of sentiment--was to be disfigured by him in after-years with stains and splotches in which we can all too plainly decipher the literary signature of Laurence Sterne.

At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained for about eight years; that is, until he was nearly nineteen, and for some months after his father's death at Port Antonio, which occurred in March, 1731. ”In the year '32,” says the Memoir, ”my cousin sent me to the University, where I stayed some time.” In the course of his first year he read for and obtained a sizars.h.i.+p, to which the college records show that he was duly admitted on the 6th of July, 1733. The selection of Jesus College was a natural one: Sterne's great-grandfather, the afterwards Archbishop, had been its Master, and had founded scholars.h.i.+ps there, to one of which the young sizar was, a year after his admission, elected. No inference can, of course, be drawn from this as to Sterne's proficiency, or even industry, in his academical studies: it is scarcely more than a testimony to the fact of decent and regular behaviour. He was _bene natus_, in the sense of being related to the right man, the founder; and in those days he need be only very _modice doctus_ indeed in order to qualify himself for admission to the enjoyment of his kinsman's benefactions. Still he must have been orderly and well-conducted in his ways; and this he would also seem to have been, from the fact of his having pa.s.sed through his University course without any apparent break or hitch, and having been admitted to his Bachelor's degree after no more than the normal period of residence. The only remark which, in the Memoir, he vouchsafes to bestow upon his academical career is, that ”'twas there that I commenced a friends.h.i.+p with Mr. H----, which has been lasting on both sides;” and it may, perhaps, be said that this _was_, from one point of view, the most important event of his Cambridge life. For Mr.