Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 4

  Whether I was mistaken or no, I leave to better Judges; but I understood those Words were a very common Preamble to Attestations of Things, to which we bore the clearest Evidence; — However, Dr. Topham, as you have claimed just such another Indulgence yourself, in the Case of begging the Dean’s Authority to say, what, as you affirm, you had sufficient Authority to say without, as a modest and Gentleman-like Way of Affirmation; — I wish you had spared either the one or the other of your Remarks upon these two Passages:

  — Veniam petimus, demusque vicissim.

  There is another Observation relating to this Instrument, which I perceive has escaped your Notice; which I take the Liberty to point out to you, namely, That the Words, “To the best of our Remembrance and Belief”, if they imply any Abatement of Certainty, seem only confined to that Paragraph, and to what is immediately attested after them in it: — For in the second Paragraph, wherein the main Points are minutely attested, and upon which the whole Dispute, and main Charge against the Dean, turns, it is introduced thus:

  “We do particularly remember, That as soon as Dinner was over, &c.”

  In the second Place you affirm, “That it is not Paid, That Mr. Sterne could affirm he had heard you charge the Dean with a Promise, in its own Nature so very extraordinary, as of the Commissaryship of the Dean and Chapter”: — To this I answer, That my true Intent in subscribing that very instrument, and I suppose of others, was to attest this very Thing; and I have just now read that Part of the Instrument over; and cannot, for my Life, affirm it either more directly or expresly, than in the Words as they there stand; — therefore please to let me transcribe them.

  “But being press’d by Mr. Sterne with an undeniable Proof, That he, (Dr. Topham) did propagate the said Story, (viz: of a Promise from the Dean to Dr. Topham of the Dean and Chapter’s Commissaryship) — Dr. Topham did at last acknowledge it; adding, as his Reason or Excuse for so doing, That he apprehended (or Words to that Effect) he had a Promise under the Dean’s own Hand, of the Dean and Chapter’s Commissaryship.”

  This I have attested, and what Weight the Sanction of an Oath will add to it, I am willing and ready to give.

  As for Mr. Ricard’s feeble Attestation, brought to shake the Credit of this firm and solemn one, I have nothing to say to it, as it is only an Attestation of Mr. Ricard’s Conjectures upon the Subject. — But this I can say, That I had the Honour to be at the Deanery with the learned Counsel, when Mr. Ricard underwent that most formidable Examination you speak of, — and I solemnly affirm, That he then said, He knew nothing at all about the Matter, one Way or the other; and the Reasons he gave for his utter Ignorance, were, first, That he was then so full of Concern, at the Difference which arose between two Gentlemen, both his Friends, that he did not attend to the Subject Matter of it, — and of which he declared again he knew nothing at all. And secondly, If he had understood it then, the Distance would have put it out of his Head by this Time.

  He has since scower’d his Memory, I ween; for now he says, That he apprehended the Dispute regarded something in the Dean’s Gift, as he could not naturally suppose, &c. ’Tis certain, at the Deanery, he had naturally no Suppositions in his Head about this Affair; so that I with this may not prove one of the After-Thoughts you speak of, and not so much a natural as an artificial Supposition of my good Friend’s.

  As for the formidable Enquiry you represent him as undergoing, — let me intreat you to give me Credit in what I say upon it, — namely, — That it was as much the Reverse to every Idea that ever was couch’d under that Word, as Words can represent it to you. As for the learned Counsel and myself, who were in the Room all the Time, I do not remember that we, either of us, spoke ten Words. The Dean was the only one that ask’d Mr. Ricard what he remembered about the Affair of the Sessions Dinner; which he did in the most Gentleman-like and candid Manner, — and with an Air of as much Calmness and seeming Indifference, as if he had been questioning him about the News in the last Brussels Gazette.

  What Mr. Ricard saw to terrify him so sadly, I cannot apprehend, unless the Dean’s Gothic Book-Case, — which I own has an odd Appearance to a Stranger; so that if he came terrified in his Mind there, and with a Resolution not to plead, he might naturally suppose it to be a great Engine brought there on purpose to exercise the Peine fort et dure upon him. — But to be serious; if Mr. Ricard told you, That this Enquiry was most formidable, He was much to blame; — and if you have said it, without his express Information, then You are much to blame.

  This is all, I think, in your Reply, which concerns me to answer: — As for the many coarse and unchristian Insinuations scatter’d throughout your Reply, — as it is my Duty to beg God to forgive you, so I do from my Heart: Believe me, Dr. Topham, they hurt yourself more than the Person they are aimed at; and when the first Transport of Rage is a little over, they will grieve you more too.

  — prima est haec Ultio.

  But these I hold to be no answerable Part of a Controversy; — and for the little that remains unanswered in yours, — I believe I could, in another half Hour, set it right in the Eyes of the World: But this is not my Business. — And is it is thought worth the while, which I hope it never will, I know no one more able to do it than the very Reverend and Worthy Gentleman whom you have so unhandsomely insulted upon that Score.

  As for the supposed Compilers, whom you have been so wrath and so unmerciful against, I’ll be answerable for it, as they are Creatures of your own Fancy, they will bear you no Malice. However, I think the more positively any Charge is made, let it be against whom it will, the better it should be supported; and therefore I should be sorry, for your own Honour, if you have not some better Grounds for all you have thrown out about them, than the mere Heat of your Imagination or Anger. To tell you truly, your Suppositions on this Head oft put me in Mind of Trim’s twelve Men in Buckram, which his disordered Fancy represented as laying in Ambush in John the Clerk’s House, and letting drive at him all together. I am,

  SIR, Your most obedient And most humble Servant, LAWRENCE STERNE

  Sutton on the Forest, Jan. 20, 1759

  P.S. I beg Pardon for clapping this upon the Back of the Romance, — which is done out of no Disrespect to you. — But the Vehicle stood ready at the Door, — and as I was to pay the whole Fare, and there was Room enough behind it, — it was the cheapest and readiest Conveyance I could think of.

  FINIS.

  THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY

  One of the most extraordinary novels in the English language, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published in nine volumes across a period of nearly as many years. The first two volumes appeared in 1759, with two more volumes each appearing in 1761, 1762 and 1765. A final volume was published in 1767. Sterne’s correspondence would seem to indicate that a tenth volume was in the offing, but this never materialised. The first two volumes were published anonymously and deliberately omitted any indication of the novel’s having been published in York, which was considered unforgivably provincial by London literary society. Initial sales were slow, but the novel soon became extremely popular.

  The text presents itself as Tristram Shandy’s attempt to tell the story of his life, but is actually a playful account of his failure to do so. Indeed, the main character is not Tristram himself, but rather his immediate forebears, in particular his father, Walter, and his Uncle Toby. Tristram’s birth does not even occur until the third volume. Moreover, as might be expected from the haphazard and unusual method of publication, the story itself meanders apparently at random through an array of comical episodes, philosophical asides, family anecdotes and even medical treaties and disquisitions on military tactics. Sterne and his alter ego, Shandy, are equally candid about the lack of planning that has gone into the work and this unpredictability is part of the novel’s wider aims. That Sterne’s narrator fails catastrophically to marshal the immensity of his life history reflects on the very nature of what a novel is and what it can and cannot achieve, in a m
anner that is often held to foreshadow postmodernist concerns about the ultimate failure of the written word to convey the immensity of individual experience. On one memorable occasion, for example, Shandy finds himself musing on the fact that the moment of death is impossible to convey faithfully in writing, and finds that the only thing that will even remotely do is a blank, black page. This is just one of many graphic features (such as different fonts, an array of asterisks, deliberately eccentric arrangements of footnotes, intentionally ‘incorrect’ pagination and the wonderfully original device of the ‘misplaced’ chapters 18 and 19 of Volume 9) all of which comment upon the contingencies of reading in a printed book. By their very nature, some of these are difficult to reproduce accurately in an electronic format, but this in itself might be seen as emphasising Sterne’s point that the writing of a character’s life is inescapably limited by the styles, genres and material conditions available to the writer at any given time. The idea that a novel could, in itself, be used to question and even satirise conventional ideas about what a novel should look like and how it should function (a device known technically as ‘metafiction’) was a profound influence on Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

  The novel was also influenced by the eighteenth-century movement known as the cult of sensibility. Taking to heart John Locke’s idea that human understanding could only truly originate in individual sensual experience of the world, ‘sentimental’ novelists wrote stories in which the protagonists were distinguished by their capacity to demonstrate their unique ‘understanding’ of the world through a profoundly exaggerated emotional response to everyday occurrences and experiences.

  The novel was heavily influenced by Rabelais and by Cervantes, one of the earliest practitioners of the novel as we would now understand the term, but who was similarly concerned with using fiction to question the ability of narrative prose to represent external ‘reality’. English satirists like Pope and Swift were also a profound influence on the work’s satire on learning and solemnity. In turn, Tristram Shandy itself had an enormous influence all over Europe and eventually worldwide. In fact, European critics such as Voltaire were often more fulsome in their praise of Sterne’s unusual narrative style than were many notable English critics, with Samuel Johnson notoriously dismissing it as a novelty that would not last. On this occasion, Johnson was wrong. The novel has lasted and continues to fascinate and delight.

  Title page of the first edition of Volume Six

  An early edition of the novel, showing Sterne’s use of a black page to convey the Parson Yorick’s death

  CONTENTS

  BOOK I

  BOOK II

  BOOK III

  BOOK IV

  BOOK V

  BOOK VI

  BOOK VII

  BOOK VIII

  BOOK IX

  Detailed table of contents

  The first of a set of illustrations for the novel by George Cruikshank, a Victorian illustrator famous for his work on Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist (1838)

  The second of a set of illustrations for the novel by George Cruikshank

  The third of a set of illustrations for the novel by George Cruikshank

  The fourth of a set of illustrations for the novel by George Cruikshank

  The fifth of a set of illustrations for the novel by George Cruikshank

  The sixth of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for the novel

  The seventh of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for the novel

  The eighth of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for the novel

  DVD cover for the 2006 film A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom’s ingenious screen adaptation of the novel starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as William and Uncle Toby

  TRISTRAM SHANDY: AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY

  It can hardly be said that Sterne was an unfortunate person during his lifetime, though he seems to have thought himself so. His childhood was indeed a little necessitous, and he died early, and in debt, after some years of very bad health. But from the time when he went to Cambridge, things went on the whole very fairly well with him in respect of fortune; his ill-health does not seem to have caused him much disquiet; his last ten years gave him fame, flirting, wandering, and other pleasures and diversions to his heart’s content; and his debts only troubled those he left behind him. He delighted in his daughter; he was able to get rid of his wife, when he was more than usually fatigatus et aegrotus of her, with singular ease. During the unknown, or almost unknown, middle of his life he had friends of the kind most congenial to him; and both in his time of preparation and his time of production in literature, he was able to indulge his genius in a way by no means common with men of letters. If his wish to die in a certain manner and circumstance was only bravado — and borrowed bravado — still it was granted; and it is quite certain that to him an old age of real illness would have been unmitigated torture. Even if we admit the ghastly stories of the fate of his remains, there was very little reason why any one should not have anticipated Mr. Swinburne’s words on the morrow of Sterne’s death and said, “Oh! brother, the gods were good to you,” though even then he might have said it with a sort of mental reservation on the question whether Sterne had been very good to the gods.

  Nemesis, for the purpose of adjusting things, played him the exceptionally savage trick of using the intervention of his idolised daughter. Little or nothing seems to be known of “Lydia Sterne de Medalle,” as she was pleased to sign herself; “Mrs. Medalle,” as her bluff British contemporaries call her. But that she must have been either a very silly, a very stupid, or an excessively callous person, appears certain. It would seem, indeed, to require a combination of the flightiness and lack of taste which her father too often displayed, with the stolidity which (from rather unfair inference through Mrs. Shandy) is sometimes supposed to have characterised her mother, to prompt or permit a daughter to publish such a collection of letters as those which were first given to the world in 1775. Charity, not unsupported by probability, has trusted that Madame de Medalle could not read Latin, but she certainly could read English; and only an utterly corrupted heart, or an incurably dense or feather-brained head, could hide from her the fact that not a few of the English letters she published were damaging to her father’s character. Her alleged excuse — that her mother, who was then dead, had desired her, if any letters should be published under her father’s name, to publish these, and that the “Yorick and Eliza” correspondence had appeared — is utterly insufficient. For Mrs. Sterne, of whose conduct we know nothing unfavourable, and one or two things decidedly to her credit, could only have meant “such of these as will put your father in a favourable light,” else she would have published them herself. Yet though Lydia could, while taking no editorial trouble whatever, go out of her way to make a silly missish apology for publishing a passage in which her charms and merits are celebrated, she seems never to have given a thought to what she was doing in other ways. Nor were Sterne’s misfortunes in this way over with the publication of these things; for the subsequently discovered Fourmentelle correspondence sunk him, with precise judges, a little deeper. No doubt Tristram Shandy, the Sentimental Journey, and the curious stories or traditions about their author, were not exactly calculated to give Sterne a very high reputation with grave authorities. But it is these unlucky letters which put him almost hopelessly out of court. Even the slight relenting of fortune which gave him at last, in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, a biographer very good-natured, very indefatigable, and with a natural genius for detecting undiscovered facts and documents, only made matters worse in some ways. And the consequence is, that it has become a commonplace and almost a necessity to make up for praising Sterne’s genius by damning his character. Johnson, while declining to deny him ability, seems to have been too much disgusted to talk freely about him; Scott’s natural kindliness, warm admiration for my Uncle Toby, and total freedom from squeamish prudery, seem yet to have left him ill at ease and
tongue-tied in discussing Sterne; Thackeray, as is well known, exceeded all measure in denouncing him; and his chief recent critical biographer, Mr. Traill, who is probably as free from cant, Britannic or other, as any man who ever wrote in English, speaks his mind in the most unsparing fashion.

  For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that I do not think letters of this kind ought to be published at all; and though it may seem paradoxical or foolish, I am by no means sure that, if they are published, they ought to be admitted as evidence. That which is not written for the public, is no business of the public’s; and I never read letters of this kind, published for the first time, without feeling like an eavesdropper.[I.1] Unluckily, the evidence furnished by the letters fits in only too well with that furnished by the published works, by his favourite cronies and companions, and by his general reputation, so that “what the prisoner says” must, no doubt, “be used against him.”

  [Footnote I.1: It is perhaps barely necessary to observe that the parallel does not extend to a further parallel between republication and tale-bearing. Once published, the thing is public.]