Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 11

  These facts, tho’ they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father’s spirits in relation to this choice. — To say nothing of the natural workings of humanity and justice — or of the yearnings of parental and connubial love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind; — he felt himself concerned in a particular manner, that all should go right in the present case; — from the accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child in lying-in at Shandy-Hall. — He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it.— “Alas, o’day; — had Mrs. Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to lye-in and come down again; — which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, — and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her, — was no such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been alive at this hour.”

  This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable; — and yet, it was not merely to shelter himself, — nor was it altogether for the care of his offspring and wife that he seemed so extremely anxious about this point; — my father had extensive views of things, — and stood moreover, as he thought, deeply concerned in it for the publick good, from the dread he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to.

  He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another, — set in so strong, — as to become dangerous to our civil rights, — though, by the bye, — a current was not the image he took most delight in, — a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down; — a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.

  There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French politicks or French invasions; — nor was he so much in pain of a consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined; — but he verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in a state-apoplexy; — and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.

  My father was never able to give the history of this distemper, — without the remedy along with it.

  “Was I an absolute prince,” he would say, pulling up his breeches with both his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, “I would appoint able judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool’s business who came there; — and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, farmer’s sons, &c., &c., at his backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements. By this means I shall take care, that my metropolis totter’d not thro’ its own weight; — that the head be no longer too big for the body; — that the extremes, now wasted and pinn’d in, be restored to their due share of nourishment, and regain with it their natural strength and beauty: — I would effectually provide, That the meadows and corn-fields of my dominions, should laugh and sing; — that good chear and hospitality flourish once more; — and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of the Squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my Nobility are now taking from them.

  “Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen’s seats,” he would ask, with some emotion, as he walked across the room, “throughout so many delicious provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining Chateaus amongst them are so dismantled, — so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a condition? — Because, Sir,” (he would say) “in that kingdom no man has any country-interest to support; — the little interest of any kind which any man has anywhere in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarch: by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the clouds which pass across it, every French man lives or dies.”

  Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard against the least evil accident in my mother’s lying-in in the country, — was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of power, too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher stations; — which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the constitution was hourly establishing, — would, in the end, prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestick government established in the first creation of things by God.

  In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer’s opinion, That the plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of the world were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern and prototype of this household and paternal power; — which, for a century, he said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a mix’d government; — the form of which, however desirable in great combinations of the species, — was very troublesome in small ones, — and seldom produced anything, that he saw, but sorrow and confusion.

  For all these reasons, private and publick, put together, — my father was for having the man-midwife by all means, — my mother by no means. My father begg’d and intreated she would for once recede from her prerogative in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her; — my mother, on the contrary, insisted upon her privilege in this matter, to choose for herself, — and have no mortal’s help but the old woman’s. — What could my father do? He was almost at his wit’s end; — talked it over with her in all moods; — placed his arguments in all lights; — argued the matter with her like a christian, — like a heathen, — like a husband, — like a father, — like a patriot, — like a man: — My mother answered everything only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her; — for as she could not assume and fight it out behind such a variety of characters,— ’twas no fair match:— ’twas seven to one. — What could my mother do? — She had the advantage (otherwise she had been certainly overpowered) of a small reinforcement of chagrin personal at the bottom, which bore her up, and enabled her to dispute the affair with my father with so equal an advantage, — that both sides sung Te Deum. In a word, my mother was to have the old woman, — and the operator was to have licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father and my uncle Toby Shandy in the back parlour, — for which he was to be paid five guineas.

  I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the breast of my fair reader; — and it is this, — Not to take it absolutely for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropp’d in it,— “That I am a married man.” — I own, the tender appellation of my dear, dear Jenny, — with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge, interspersed here and there, might, naturally enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world into such a determination against me. — All I plead for, in this case, Madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as to yourself, — as not to prejudge, or receive such an impression of me, till you have better evidence, than, I am positive, at present can be produced against me. — Not that I can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam, as to desire you should therefore think, that my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress; — no, — that would be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for, is the utter impossibility, for some volumes, that you, or the most penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really stands. — It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear Jenny! tender as the appellation is, may be my child. — Consider, — I was born in the year eighteen. — Nor is there any
thing unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend. — Friend! — My friend. — Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be supported without — Fy! Mr. Shandy: — Without anything, Madam, but that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex. Let me intreat you to study the pure and sentimental parts of the best French Romances; — it will really, Madam, astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is dress’d out.

  CHAPTER XIX

  I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry, than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father’s great good sense, — knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious too in philosophy, — wise also in political reasoning, — and in polemical (as he will find) no way ignorant, — could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track, — that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it; — and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.

  His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.

  The hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness, — nor had he more faith, — or more to say on the powers of necromancy in dishonouring his deeds, — or on DULCINEA’S name, in shedding lustre upon them, than my father had on those of TRISMEGISTUS or ARCHIMEDES, on the one hand — or of NYKY and SIMKIN on the other. How many CÆSARS and POMPEYS, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and NICOMEDUS’D into nothing?

  I see plainly, Sir, by your looks (or as the case happened), my father would say — that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine, — which, to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom, — I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it; — and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, — not as a party in the dispute, — but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter; — you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men; — and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you, — of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son, — your dear son, — from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect. — Your BILLY, Sir! — would you, for the world, have called him JUDAS? — Would you, my dear Sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address, — and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice, which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires, — Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him? — O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your temper right, Sir, — you are incapable of it; — you would have trampled upon the offer; — you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter’s head with abhorrence.

  Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction, is really noble; — and what renders it more so, is the principle of it; — the workings of a parent’s love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called JUDAS, — the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.

  I never knew a man able to answer this argument. — But, indeed, to speak of my father as he was; — he was certainly irresistible; — both in his orations and disputations; — he was born an orator; — Θεοδίδακτος. — Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him, — and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, — that NATURE might have stood up and said,— “This man is eloquent.” — In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the question, ’twas hazardous in either case to attack him. — And yet, ’tis strange, he had never read Cicero, nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Isocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus amongst the antients; — nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby amongst the moderns; — and what is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius, or any Dutch logician or commentator; — he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad hominem consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in * * * *, — it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society, — that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them.

  To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was, however, perpetually forced upon; — for he had a thousand little sceptical notions of the comick kind to defend — most of which notions, I verily believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and of a vive la Bagatelle; and as such he would make merry with them for half an hour or so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them till another day.

  I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father’s many odd opinions, — but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains, — at length claim a kind of settlement there, — working sometimes like yeast; — but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest, — but ending in downright earnest.

  Whether this was the case of the singularity of my father’s notions — or that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit; — or how far, in many of his notions, he might, though odd, be absolutely right; — the reader, as he comes at them, shall decide. All that I maintain here, is, that in this one, of the influence of christian names, however it gained footing, he was serious; — he was all uniformity; — he was systematical, and, like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature, to support his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again; — he was serious; — and, in consequence of it, he would lose all kind of patience whenever he saw people, especially of condition, who should have known better, — as careless and as indifferent about the name they imposed upon their child, — or more so, than in the choice of Ponto or Cupid for their puppy-dog.

  This, he would say, look’d ill; — and had, moreover, this particular aggravation in it, viz., That when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, ’twas not like the case of a man’s character, which, when wrong’d, might hereafter be cleared; — and, possibly, some time or other, if not in the man’s life, at least after his death, — be, somehow or other, set to rights with the world: But the injury of this, he would say, could never be undone; — nay, he doubted even whether an act of parliament could reach it: — He knew as well as you, that the legislature assumed a power over surnames; — but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step farther.

  It was observable, that tho’ my father, in consequence of this opinion, had, as I have told yo
u, the strongest likings and dislikings towards certain names; — that there were still numbers of names which hung so equally in the balance before him, that they were absolutely indifferent to him. Jack, Dick, and Tom were of this class: These my father called neutral names; — affirming of them, without a satire, That there had been as many knaves and fools, at least, as wise and good men, since the world began, who had indifferently borne them; — so that, like equal forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each other’s effects; for which reason, he would often declare, He would not give a cherry-stone to choose amongst them. Bob, which was my brother’s name, was another of these neutral kinds of christian names, which operated very little either way; and as my father happen’d to be at Epsom, when it was given him, — he would oft-times thank Heaven it was no worse. Andrew was something like a negative quantity in Algebra with him;— ’twas worse, he said, than nothing. — William stood pretty high: — Numps again was low with him: — and Nick, he said, was the DEVIL.