Part 3 (1/2)

but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that numerous order of intellects which are the convivial a.s.sociates, rather than the fireside companions, of their owners, and which, when deprived of the stimulus of external excitement, are apt to become very dull company indeed. Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of mind from his literary work--a form of intellectual enjoyment which, indeed, more often presupposes than begets good spirits in such temperaments as his. He declares, it is true, that he ”sports much with my Uncle Toby” in the volume which he is now ”fabricating for the laughing part of the world;” but if so he must have sported only after a very desultory and dilatory fas.h.i.+on. On the whole one cannot escape a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to ”the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife,” which he had left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone.

His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course, before he changed his quarters. ”The first week in June,” he writes in April to Mr. Foley, ”I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household, to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills at Bagneres, where I expect much health and much amus.e.m.e.nt from all corners of the earth.” He talked too at this time of spending the winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the following April by way of Paris; ”but this,” he adds, ”is a sketch only,” and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he was in any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, be tempted to spend another winter there. It did not suit his health, as he had hoped: he complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagneres; whence after a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he pa.s.sed on to Ma.r.s.eilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter quarters at Montpellier, where ”my wife and daughter,” he writes, ”purpose to stay at least a year behind me.” His own intention was to set out in February for England, ”where my heart has been fled these six months.” Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philosophy. ”My wife,” he writes in January, ”returns to Toulouse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagneres. I, on the contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorks.h.i.+re. We all live the longer, at least the happier, for having things our own way. This is my conjugal maxim. I own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain 'tis not the worst.” It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate, should wish to turn his back on Montpellier. Again had the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness; the ”sharp air” of the place disagreed with him, and his physicians, after having him under their hands more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed any longer in Montpellier it would be fatal to him. How soon after that somewhat late warning he took his departure there is no record to show; but it is not till the middle of May that we find him writing from Paris to his daughter. And since he there announces his intention of leaving for England in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that he had arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before.

His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents--trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British Amba.s.sador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. The message was brought him, he writes, ”when I was playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amus.e.m.e.nt to prepare myself for the business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my head.” The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15--Hezekiah's admission of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the amba.s.sadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded upon the _mal-a-propos_ text; but still it was unquestionably a fair subject for ”chaff,” and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less a person than David Hume. Gossip having magnified this into a dispute between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle story in a pa.s.sage deriving an additional interest from its tribute to that sweet disposition which had an equal charm for two men so utterly unlike as the author of _Tristram Shandy_ and the author of the _Wealth of Nations_. ”I should,” he writes, ”be exceedingly surprised to hear that David ever had an unpleasant contention with any man; and if I should ever be made to believe that such an event had happened, nothing would persuade me that his opponent was not in the wrong, for in my life did I never meet with a being of a more placid and gentle nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character which has given more consequence and force to his scepticism than all the arguments of his sophistry.” The real truth of the matter was that, meeting Sterne at Lord Hertford's table on the day when he had preached at the Emba.s.sy Chapel, ”David was disposed to make a little merry with the parson, and in return the parson was equally disposed to make a little merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and the company laughed with us both.” It would be absurd, of course, to identify Sterne's lat.i.tudinarian _bonhomie_ with the higher order of tolerance; but many a more confirmed and notorious Gallio than the clerical humourist would have a.s.sumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a presence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate of Sterne's dignity, displays him to us as laudably free from hypocrisy.

But the long holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its short last act of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In the third or fourth week of May Sterne quitted Paris; and after a stay of a few weeks in London he returned to the Yorks.h.i.+re parsonage, from which he had been absent some thirty months.

Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed since the publication of the last instalment of _Tristram Shandy_, the new one was far from ready; and even in the ”sweet retirement” of c.o.xwold he seems to have made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the ”sweet retirement” itself became soon a little tedious to him. The month of September found him already bored with work and solitude; and the fine autumn weather of 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making at what was even then the fas.h.i.+onable Yorks.h.i.+re watering-place. ”I do not think,” he writes, with characteristic incoherence, to Hall Stevenson--”I do not think a week or ten days' playing the good fellow (at this very time) so abominable a thing; but if a man could get there cleverly, and every soul in his house in the mind to try what could be done in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in these affairs. Therefore, as a man may do worse things, the plain English of all which is, that I am going to leave a few poor sheep in the wilderness for fourteen days, and from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see what is doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning afterwards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now, some folks say there is much company there, and some say not; and I believe there is neither the one nor the other, but will be both if the world will have patience for a month or so.” Of his work he has not much to say: ”I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle Toby's amours.

There is no sitting and cudgelling one's brains whilst the sun s.h.i.+nes bright. 'Twill be all over in six or seven weeks; and there are dismal weeks enow after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside.” He was anxious that his boon companion should join him at Scarborough; but that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to content himself with the usual gay society of the place. Three weeks, it seems, were pa.s.sed by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of bodily and mental relaxation--weeks which he spent, he afterwards writes, in ”drinking the waters, and receiving from them marvellous strength, had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much.” By the end of the month he was back again at c.o.xwold, ”returned to my Philosophical Hut to finish _Tristram_, which I calculate will be ready for the world about Christmas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix my headquarters at London for the winter, unless my cough pushes me forward to your metropolis” (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), ”or that I can persuade some _gros milord_ to make a trip to you.”

Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse at that thoroughly desentimentalized ”domestic interior” which the sentimentalist's household had long presented to the view. Writing to request a remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban--a duty which, to do him justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed--Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Foley to ”do something equally essential to rectify a mistake in the mind of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her a hint not long ago 'that she was separated from me for life.' Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives amongst, 'twould be unmerciful to let her or my daughter suffer by it. So do be so good as to undeceive him; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it with impatience from her) to rejoin me.”

Early in November the two new volumes of _Shandy_ began to approach completion; for by this time Sterne had already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of his French travels, which now do duty as Vol. VII. ”You will read,” he tells Foley, ”as odd a tour through France as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel-writer since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good-tempered satire upon travelling--as _puppies_ travel.” By the 16th of the month he had ”finished my two volumes of _Tristram_,” and looked to be in London at Christmas, ”whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year.

At least I shall not defer it above another.” On the 26th of January, 1765, the two new volumes were given to the world.

Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of what would now be called ”book-making,” this issue will yet bear comparison, I think, with the best of its predecessors. Its sketches of travel, though destined to be surpa.s.sed in vigour and freedom of draftsmans.h.i.+p by the _Sentimental Journey_, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want of connexion with the story--if story it can be called--is so little felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introduction of Mr.

Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in apparent concession to the popular prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between the various parts of a narrative. The first seventeen chapters are, perhaps, as freshly delightful reading as anything in Sterne. They are literally filled and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with the exhilaration of travel: written, or at least prepared for writing, we can clearly see, under the full intoxicant effect which a bewildering succession of new sights and sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest of us, and which would set a head like Sterne's in an absolute whirl.

The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun--for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails--unsurpa.s.sed by anything of the same kind from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who has outgrown what may be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story which begins a few chapters afterwards--that of the Abbess and Novice of the Convent of Andouillets! The adult male person is not so much shocked at the coa.r.s.eness of this story as astounded at the bathos of its introduction. It is as though some matchless connoisseur in wine, after having a hundred times demonstrated the unerring discrimination of his palate for the finest brands, should then produce some vile and loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with all the relish with which he seems to be swallowing it himself. This story of the Abbess and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters, or former volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler pa.s.sages of humour to be found there--in downright apprehension lest we should turn out to have read these ”good things,” not ”in,” but ”into,” our author. The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering whether the finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate equally satisfied with both. But one should, of course, add that it is only in respect of its supposed humour that this story shakes its readers' faith in the gifts of the narrator. As a mere piece of story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure-painting, it is quite perversely skilful. There is something almost irritating, as a waste of powers on unworthy material, in the prettiness of the picture which Sterne draws of the preparations for the departure of the two _religieuses_--the stir in the simple village, the co-operating labours of the gardener and the tailor, the carpenter and the smith, and all those other little details which bring the whole scene before the eye so vividly that Sterne may, perhaps, in all seriousness, and not merely as a piece of his characteristic persiflage, have thrown in the exclamation, ”I declare I am interested in this story, and wish I had been there.” Nothing, again, could be better done than the sketch of the little good-natured, ”broad-set”

gardener, who acted as the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the indiscretions by which he was betrayed into temporary desertion of his duties. The whole scene is Chaucerian in its sharpness of outline and translucency of atmosphere: though there, unfortunately, the resemblance ends. Sterne's manner of saying what we now leave unsaid is as unlike Chaucer's, and as unlike for the worse, as it can possibly be.

Still, a certain amount of this element of the _non nominandum_ must be compounded for, one regrets to say, in nearly every chapter that Sterne ever wrote; and there is certainly less than the average amount of it in the seventh volume. Then, again, this volume contains the famous scene with the a.s.s--the live and genuinely touching, and not the dead and fict.i.tiously pathetic, animal; and that perfect piece of comic dialogue--the interview between the puzzled English traveller and the French commissary of the posts. To have suggested this scene is, perhaps, the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system of the _Ancien regime_ upon the grateful remembrance of the world. A scheme of taxation which exacted posting-charges from a traveller who proposed to continue his journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of drollery infused into its mere vexatiousness; but a whole volume of satire could hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger light than is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the astonished Tristram and the officer of the fisc, who had just handed him a little bill for six livres four sous:

”'Upon what account?' said I.

”''Tis upon the part of the King,' said the commissary, heaving up his shoulders.

”'My good friend,' quoth I, 'as sure as I am I, and you are you--'

”'And who are you?' he said.

”'Don't puzzle me,' said I. 'But it is an indubitable verity,' I continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the form of my a.s.severation,' that I owe the King of France nothing but my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health and pastime in the world.'

”'Pardonnez-moi,' replied the commissary. 'You are indebted to him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, on your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more than three livres two sous.'

”'But I don't go by land,' said I.

”'You may if you please,' replied the commissary.

”'Your most obedient servant,' said I, making him a low bow.

”The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding, made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by a bow in my life. 'The devil take the serious character of these people,'

said I, aside; 'they understand no more of irony than this.' The comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something sealed up my lips. I could not p.r.o.nounce the name.

”'Sir,' said I, collecting myself, 'it is not my intention to take post.'

”'But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. 'You may if you choose.'

”'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I do not choose.'

”'But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.'