Part 1 (2/2)

H---- was John Hall, afterwards John Hall Stevenson, the ”Eugenius” of _Tristram Shandy_, the hout life, to be a frequent and most familiar visitor; and, unfortunately, also a person whose later reputation, both as a man and a writer, became such as seriously to compromise the not very robust respectability of his clerical comrade Sterne and Hall were distant cousins, and it uinity which first drew theeniality of the , as undergraduates at Jesus, until the premature death of the elder, they continued to supply each other's minds with precisely that sort of occupation and stirace of nature stood least in need That their close intimacy was ill-calculated to raise Sterne's reputation in later years may be inferred from the fact that Hall Stevenson afterwards obtained literary notoriety by the publication of _Crazy Tales_, a collection of comic but extremely broad ballads, in which his clerical friend was quite unjustly suspected of having had a hand Mr Hall was also reported, whether truly or falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's famous confraternity of Medossip to advance to the assertion that the Rev Mr Sterne had hi acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus e, but did not, was that of a student destined, like hilish letters Gray, born three years later than Sterne, had entered a year after hie as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and the two students went through their terree There was probably little enough in cohtly effeminate pensioner of Peterhouse, and a scholar of Jesus, whose chief friend and comrade was a man like Hall; and no close intimacy between the two men, if they had come across each other, would have been very likely to arise

But it does not appear that they could have ever met or heard of each other, for Gray writes of Sterne, after _Tristram Shandy_ had made him famous, in terraduate

In January, 1736, Sterne took his BA degree, and quitted Cae for York, where another of his father's brothers now makes his appearance as his patron Dr Jacques Sterne was the second son of Siton, and a orous character than any of his brothers What induced him now to take notice of the nephehouardianshi+p of his brother, and brother's son, does not appear; but the personal history of this energetic pluralist--Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon Residentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cuests the surraduate which would make him useful For Dr Sterne was a typical specimen of the Churchman-politician, in days when both coood deal , a Hanoverian to the backbone; and he held it his duty to support the Protestant succession, not only by the spiritual but by the secular arreat electioneerer, as befitted times when the clais, and he took a proreat Yorkshi+re contest of the year 1734 His y, however, wasArchdeacon, not then Archdeacon of the East Riding, nor as yet quite buried under the mass of preferht that this indeed was the crisis of his fortunes, and that, unless he was prepared to die a mere prebendary, canon, and rector of one or two benefices, noas the time to strike a blow for his advance time was indeed portentous, and at last took the forinal of Dr Slop), on suspicion of holding co arh The suspect, holly innocent, was taken to London and kept in custody for nearly a year before being discharged, after which, by way of a slight redress, a letter of reprimand for his _trop de zele_ was sent by direction of Lord Carteret to the nitary But the desired end was nevertheless attained, and Dr Sterne succeeded in crowning the edifice of his ecclesiastical honours[1]

[Footnote 1: A once-familiar piece of hu a clerical pluralist:

”When struggling on the ground was seen A Rector, Vicar, Canon, Dean; You ht the coach was full, But no! 'twas only Dr Bull”

Dr Jacques Sterne, however, ht have been thrown out of one of the more capacious vehicles of the London General O effect upon those who only _heard_ of the e extended by such an uncle to such a nephew received its full equivalent in soives us a clue to the mode in which pay their subsequent rupture, ”quarrelled with raphs in the newspapers; though he was a party- it beneath me From that time he became my bitterest enemy” The date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed; but we gather froraph letter (now in the British Museum) from Sterne to Archdeacon Blackburne that by the year 1750 the two men had for some time ceased to be on friendly terms Probably, however, the breach occurred subsequently to the rebellion of '45, and it may be that it arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which Dr Sterne developed in that year, and which his nephew very likely did not, in his opinion, sufficiently share But this is quite consistent with the youngerup to that time assisted the elder in his party pole ”erateful person,” and the remark is made in a way and in a connexion which seems to imply that the services rendered to his uncle were mainly _literary_ If so, his declaration that he ”would not write paragraphs in the newspapers” can onlythem Be this as it may, however, it is certain that the Archdeacon for so friendly relations with his nephew, and that during that period he undoubtedly did a good deal for his advancement Sterne was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Lincoln in March, 1736, only three ree, and took priest's orders in August, 1738, whereupon his uncle i of Sutton-on-the-Forest, into which he was inducted a few days afterwards Other preferments followed, to be noted hereafter; and it must be adraphs” the Archdeacon did his duty by his nephew after the peculiar fashi+on of that time When that quarrel came, however, it seems to have snapped more ties than one, for in the Meest sister Catherine as ”still living, but ed from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own folly” Of his elder sister Mary, as born at Lille a year before himself, he records that ”she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and left my poor sister to shi+ft for herself, which she was able to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend's house in the country and died of a broken heart” Truly an unlucky fa which the years of their infancy were passed, and this to be the history of two out of the three survivors!

[Footnote 1: The mother, Mrs Sterne, makes her appearance once more for a moment in or about the year 1758 Horace Walpole, and after hi over a dead ass to relieving a living mother,” and the former went so far as to declare ”on indubitable authority” that Mrs Sterne, ”who kept a school (in Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her” Even ”the indubitable authority,”

however, does not positively assert--whateverto assist his erald justly points out that to pay the _whole_ debts of a bankrupt school yman's means Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date than this was actively concerning himself about his mother's interests She afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; and he then writes to a friend: ”I trust my poor mother's affair is by this time ended to _our_ comfort and hers”]

CHAPTER III

LIFE AT SUTTON--MARRIAGE--THE PARISH PRIEST

(1738-1759)

Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fa subjects of literary biography The processes of their intellectual and artistic growth lie hidden in naenius is not revealed to the world until it has reached its full maturity, and many aspects of it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained theone on before men's eyes, remain often unexplained to the last By few, if any, of the lish men of letters is this observation so forcibly illustrated as it is in the case of Sterne: the obscure period of his life so greatly exceeded in duration the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity was so exceptionally profound He was forty-seven years of age when, at a bound, he achieved celebrity; he was not five-and-fifty when he died And though it , like the reputation, full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true that there are no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in the earliest public displays of his art His work grows, indeed, most marvellously in vividness and syrowth in the workhest point of finish is attained we cannot say that the hand is any ht we say that the last light touches of the sculptor's chisel upon the perfected statue are orous strokes upon the shapeless block

It is certain, however, that Sterneup hishis reflections on life and character, and consciously or unconsciouslythe whole of those silent twenty years which have now to be passed under brief review With one exception, to be noted presently, the only knoritings of his which belong to this period are sermons, and these--a mere ”scratch” collection of pulpit discourses, which, as soon as he had gained the public ear, he hastened in characteristic fashi+on to ruht upon the problem before us There are sermons of Sterne which alike in manner and matter disclose the author of _Tristra those which he preached or wrote before that as given to the world They are not its ancestors but its descendants They belong to the post-Shandian period, and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian style; while in none of the earlier ones--not even in that famous homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr Slop--can we trace either the trick of style or the turn of thought that give piquancy to the novel Yet the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty of workht and trick of style were the product, inning Men do not blossom forth as wits, humourists, masterly delineators of character, and skilful perfor and carefully-tuned senti their ”forties;” and the only wonder is that a possessor of these powers--some of them of the kind which, as a rule, and in most men, seeks almost as irresistibly for exercise as even the poetic instinct itself--should have been held so long unemployed There is, however, one very common stimulus to literary exertions which in Sterne's case was undoubtedly wanting--a superabundance of unoccupied time We have little reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded and valetudinarian Yorkshi+re parson was at any period of his life an industrious ”parish priest;” but it is probable, nevertheless, that ti very heavily upon his hands In addition to the favourite amusements which he enumerates in the Memoir, he was all his days addicted to one which is, perhaps, the , and especially philandering of the Platonic and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the one human pastime of which its votaries never seem to tire; and its constant ministrations to human vanity may serve, perhaps, to account for their unwearied absorption in its pursuit Sterne's first love affair--an affair of which, unfortunately, the consequences werethan the passion--took place ie

To relate it as he relates it to his daughter: ”At York I became acquainted with your mother, and courted her for two years She owned she liked h or ether She went to her sister's in Staffordshi+re, and I wrote to her often I believe then she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so At her return she fell into a consu by her, with an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said: 'My dear Laury, I never can be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live! But I have left you every shi+lling of enerosity overpowered me It pleased God that she recovered, and ere married in 1741” The name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and it was to her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which his daughter included in the collection published by her soht years after her father's death They were added, the preface tells us, ”in justice to Mr Sterne's delicate feelings;” and in our e of the word ”delicate,” as equivalent to infirm of health and probably short of life, they no doubt do full justice to the passion which they are supposed to express It would be unfair, of course, to judge any love-letters of that period by the standard of sincerity applied in our own less artificial age All such coh to us of to-day; yet in enuine attachment we usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above the affected modulations of the style But the letters of Sterne's courtshi+p maintain the pseudo-poetic, shepherd-and-shepherdess strain throughout; or, if the lover ever abandons it, it is only to make somewhat maudlin record of those ”tears” which flowed a little too easily at all tihout his life These letters, however, have a certain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensibilities which Sterne afterwards learned to cultivate in a forcing-frame, with a view to the application of their produce to the purposes of an art of pathetic writing which simulates nature with such adular bathos at its worst

The e preluded by this courtshi+p did not take place till Sterne had already been three years Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, the benefice which had been procured for hih whose interest also he was appointed successively to two prebends--preferments which were less valuable to him for their emolument than for the ecclesiastical status which they conferred upon hiave him for periodical visits to the cathedral city to fulfil the residential conditions of his offices, and for the opportunity thus afforded hi the society of the Close Upon his union with Miss Lumley, and, in a somewhat curious fashi+on, by her ton ”A friend of hers in the South had proy became vacant he would ular ”compliment” was At Sutton Sterne re which ti were,” he says, ”my chief amusements” With what success he shot, and hat skill he fiddled, we know not His writings contain not a few musical metaphors and allusions to music, which seem to indicate a competent acquaintance with its technicalities; but the specierald has reproduced from his illustrations of a voluhly his proficiency in this accomplishment We may expect that, after all, it was the first-reatest delight, and that neither the brush, the bow, nor the fowling-piece was nearly so often in his hand as the book Within a few miles of Sutton, at Skelton Castle, an alhold, since e-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books--old French ”ana,” and the learning of mediaeval doctors--books intentionally and books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an acutely hu Later on it will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to exaitih to say generally that the materials for many a burlesque chapter of _Tristra themselves in his mind in many an amused hour passed by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle

But before finally quitting this part of my subject it th with a matter which will doubtless have to be many times incidentally referred to in the course of this study, but which I now hope to relievemore than touch upon hereafter I refer of course to Sterne's perpetually recurring flirtations This is a raphy of Sterne as it would be to olish hue in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific, spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development; but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and work in e was an ill-assorted and unhappy union was hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its effect It may well be, of course, that the ”dear L,” whose races her lover had celebrated in such superfine, sentih That she was really a woman of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs Shandy, and that her exasperating feats as an _assentatrix_ did, as has been suggested, supply the model for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between the philosopher and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant for believing But it is quite possible that the daily coable jesters that ever lived arded her husband's wilder drolleries as , and that the point of his subtler huether But even if it were so, it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all on this ground fros of the _mari incompris_, while it is next to certain that it does not need the sting of any such disappointment to account for his alienation He must have had plenty of time and opportunity to discover Miss Lu the two years of his courtshi+p; and it is not likely that, even if they were as well marked as Mrs Shandy's own, they would have done e the couple Sympathy is not the necessity to the huines, it to be to himself: the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract from the very absence of sympathy in those about him a keener relish for his reflections With sentiment, indeed, and still more with sentimentalism, the case would of course be different; but as for Mr

Sterne's demands for sympathy in that department of his life and art, one may say without the least hesitation that they would have been beyond the power of any one wouished a disciple of the ”Laura Matilda” school, to satisfy ”I must ever,” he frankly says in one of the ”Yorick to Eliza” letters, ”I must ever have soht have added that he found it i the Dulcinea One may suspect that Mrs Sterne soon had cause for jealousy, and it is at least certain that several years before Sterne's eehter was born to theh to be rescued from the _limbus infantium_ by the prompt rites of the Church The child was christened Lydia, and died on the following day Its place was filled in 1747 by a second daughter, also christened Lydia, who lived to become the wife of M de Medalle, and the not very judicious editress of the posthuenuine and truly fatherly affection, and it is in writing to her and of her that we see hiht say it is aluish the true notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto of sentiuishes most of Sterne's communications with the other sex There was no subsequent issue of the e, and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly included in Madame de Medalle's collection, it is to be ascertained that some four years or so after Lydia's birth the relations between Sterne and Mrs Sterne ceased to be conjugal, and never again resumed that character

It is, however, probable, upon the husband's own confessions, that he had given his wife earlier cause for jealousy, and certainly froins to reveal himself in correspondence there seems to be hardly a moment when some such cause was not in existence--in the person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical damsel or coquettish matron From Miss Four violent love in 1759, the year of the York publication of _Tristram Shandy_, down to Mrs Draper, the heroine of the famous ”Yorick to Eliza” letters, the list of ladies who seem to have kindled fla and more real than the roll of mistresses immortalized by Horace How Mrs Sterne at first bore herself under her husband's ostentatious neglect there is no direct evidence to show That she ultie in indifference we can perceive, but it is to be feared that she was not always able to maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure So, at least, we may suspect froreable Tristram,” and his wife, at Montpellier, and who, characteristically sy with the inconstant husband, declared that his wife's incessant pursuit of him made him pass ”d'assez el”

But, on the whole, Mrs Sterne's conduct see in dignity

As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have coh not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all of the this, however, I am by no means prepared to assert that they would all of them have passed muster before a prosaic and unsenti worse Sterne's relations with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assu character, and it is far from improbable that the worst construction would have been put upon the tribunals aforesaid Certainly a young woman who leaves her ings, where she is constantly being visited by a lover who is hiarcon_ in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way

But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally ”innocent”

is the equivalent of the ard the question as worth any very ation I alects his wife to sit continually languishi+ng at the feet of soives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to hioing profligate; and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, froained by the generally Platonic character of his amours For, as it was, the restraint of one instinct of his nature ience of another which stood in at least as much need of chastenratification of the senses, they involved a perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-aesthesia which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of his art