The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Лоренс Стерн
Читать онлайн книгу.
conversational, unpretentious, too easy to be jerky, and yet too broken to be sustained, suits subject and scheme as few others could.
But there is perhaps little need to say more about a book which, though some say that few read it through nowadays, is thoroughly well known in outline and in its salient passages, and which will pretty certainly lay hold of all fit readers as soon as they take to it. Of its writer a very little more may perhaps be said, all the more so because those who, not understanding critical admiration, think that biographers and editors ought not only to be just and a little kind, but extravagantly partial to their subjects, may conceive that I have been a little unjust, or, at any rate, a little unkind to Sterne. If so, they have not read his own extremely ingenious, and in general, if not in particular, very sound attack on the adage de mortuis. But if not nil nisi, there is yet very much bonum to be said of Sterne. He was not merely endowed with a singular and essential genius; he was not merely the representative and mouthpiece, in a way hardly surpassed by any one, of a certain way of thought and feeling more or less peculiar to his time. These were his merits, his very great merits as a writer. But he had others, and great, if not very great ones, as a man. Though never rich, he seems to have been free from the fault of parsimony; and albeit he died in debt, not deeply tainted with that of extravagance in money matters. For most of his later expenditure was on others, and he might justly calculate on his pen paying, and more than paying, his shot. Little love as there was lost between him and his wife, he always took the greatest care to provide for her wants in the rather costly severance of their establishments, and never even in his most indiscreet moments hints a grumble at her expenditure, a vice of which some people of much higher general reputation have been known to be guilty. Though he was certainly pleased at the attentions of “the great,” I do not know that there is any just cause for accusing him of truckling to, or fawning on them beyond the custom and courtesy of the time. For all his reckless humour, there was no ill-nature in him. His worst enemies have admitted that his affection for his daughter was very pretty and quite unaffected; and his letters to and of Mrs. James show that he could think of a woman nobly and wholesomely as a friend, for all his ignoble and unwholesome ways of thought in regard to the sex. If it had not been for the cruel indiscretion of his Lydia (which, however, has something of the old virtue of conveying the balm as well as the sting), he would probably have been much better thought of than he is. And considering the delightful books here once more presented, I think we may consent to forgive the faults which, after all, were mainly his own business, for the merits by which we so largely benefit and for which he reaped no over-bounteous guerdon.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
Works.—The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Vols. I. and II., 1759; III. and IV., 1761; V. and VI., 1762; VII. and VIII., 1765; IX., 1767; first collected edition, 1767; numerous later editions, chiefly of recent date. Sermons of Mr. Yorick, Vols. I. and II., 1760; III. and IV., 1766; V., VI., and VII., 1769. A Sentimental Journey, 1768; many later editions; Letters from Yorick to Eliza, 1775; Sterne’s Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, 1775; Letters of Laurence Sterne to his most intimate friends, 1775; Original Letters never before published, 1788; Letters of Yorick and Eliza, 1807; Seven Letters written by Sterne and his Friends, hitherto unpublished, 1844; Unpublished Letters of Laurence Sterne, edited by J. Murray, 1856.
Collected editions of the works of Laurence Sterne appeared in 1779, 1780; edited by G. Saintsbury, 1894; by Wilbur L. Cross, 1906.
Life.—An account of the life and writings of the author is prefixed to the edition of his Works, 1779; a life of the author written by himself in edition of works, 1780; by Sir W. Scott in edition of Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1867; by H. D. Traill, 1878; by P. H. Fitzgerald, 1896; Laurence Sterne in Germany, by H. W. Thayer, 1905; Life and Times, by Wilbur L. Cross, 1909; A Study, by Walter S. Sichel, 1910; Life and Letters, by Lewis Melville, 1911.
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS
OF TRISTRAM SHANDY
GENTLEMAN
Ταράσσει τοὺς Ἀνθρώπους οὐ τὰ Πράγματα,
Ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τῶν Πραγμάτων Δόγματα.
A TALE WHICH HOLDETH CHILDREN FROM PLAY& OLD MEN FROM THE CHIMNEY CORNER (-Sir Philip Sidney)
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
MR. PITT
Sir—Never poor Wight of a Dedicator had less hopes from his Dedication, than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retir’d thatch’d house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,——but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life.
I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this book, by taking it——(not under your Protection,——it must protect itself, but)——into the country with you; where, if I am ever told, it has made you smile; or can conceive it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain——I shall think myself as happy as a minister of state;———perhaps much happier than any one (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.
I am, GREAT SIR,
(and what is more to your Honour)
I am, GOOD SIR,
Your Well-wisher, and
most humble Fellow-subject,
THE AUTHOR.
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;——Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,——I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.—Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c., &c.—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.
Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?———Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?———Nothing.