The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Лоренс Стерн
Читать онлайн книгу.
by the squalid brown of its unrestored, and afterwards made more hideous by the bedizened red of its restored chapel), his body is said to have been snatched by resurrection men. And the myth is rounded off by the addition that the remains, having been sold to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge, were dissected there in public, one of the spectators, a friend of Sterne’s, recognising the face too late, and fainting.
His affairs, which had never been managed in a very business-like manner, were in considerable disorder. Some years before, the carelessness of his curate had caused or allowed the parsonage at Sutton to be burnt to the ground; and Sterne, besides losing valuable effects of his own, was of course liable for the rebuilding. He managed to put this off till his death, after which his widow and administratrix was sued for dilapidations. These, as she was in very poor circumstances, had to be compounded for sixty pounds only, but they probably ranked for a much larger sum in the £1100 at which Sterne’s indebtedness was reckoned. His widow had a little money of her own: £800 was collected for her and her daughter at York races; there must have been profits from the copyrights; and a fresh collection of Sermons was issued by subscription. But though very little is known about the pair, they are said to have been ill off. They applied first to Wilkes and then to Stevenson to write a life of Sterne to prefix to his Works, but neither complied. Mr. Fitzgerald, who seldom deserves the curse laid on those who use harsh judgment, is very severe on both for this. Yet surely each, considering his own reputation, must have felt that he was the last person to set Sterne right with the stricter part of society, and that to write a “Crazy” or “Shandean” life of him would be a cruel crime. It is not known exactly when Lydia married, or when either she or her mother died. Mrs. Sterne must have been dead by 1775, the date of the publication of the letters; Lydia is said to have perished in the French Revolution.
Beginning authorship very late in life, having schooled himself to an intensely artificial method, both in style and in construction, and not allowed by Fate more than a few years in which to write at all, Sterne, as is natural, displays a great uniformity throughout his work. Indeed, it might be said that he has written but one book, Tristram Shandy. The Sentimental Journey (as to the relative merits of which, compared with the earlier and larger work, there is a polemos aspondos between the Big-endians and the Little-endians of Sternism) is after all only an expansion of the seventh book of Tristram, with fioriture, variations, and new divertisements. The sermon which occurs so early is an actual sermon of “Yorick’s,” and a sufficient specimen of his more serious concionatory vein; many, if not most of his letters might have been twined into Tristram without being in the least degree more out of place than most of its actual contents. And so there is more propriety than depends upon the mere fact that Tristram Shandy is the earliest and the largest part of its author’s work, in making no extremely scholastic distinction between the specially Shandean and the generally Sternian characteristics; for, indeed, all Sterne is in it more or less eminently.
No less a critic than M. Scherer has given his sanction to the idea that in Sterne we have a special, if not even the special, type of the humourist; and probably few people who have given no particular thought or attention to the matter, would refuse to agree with him. I am myself inclined rather to a demur, or, at any rate, to a distinction, though few better things have been written about humour itself than a passage in M. Scherer’s essay on our author. Sterne has no doubt in a very eminent degree the sense of contrast, which all the best critics admit to be the root of humour—the note of the humourist. But he has it partially, occasionally, and, I should even go as far as to say, not greatly. The great English humourists, I take it, are Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Thackeray, and Carlyle. All these—even Fielding, whose eighteenth-century manner, the contemporary and counterpart of Sterne’s, cannot hide the truth—apply the humourist contrast, the humourist sense of the irony of existence, to the great things, the prima et novissima. They see, and feel, and show the simultaneous sense of Death and Life, of Love and Loss, of the Finite and the Infinite. Sterne stops a long way short of this; les grands sujets lui sont défendus in another sense than La Bruyère’s. It is scarcely too much to say that his ostentatious preference for the bagatelle was a real, and not in the least affected fact. Nowhere, not in the true pathos of the famous deathbed letter to Mrs. James, not in the, as it seems to me, by no means wholly true pathos of the Le Fever episode, does he pierce to “the accepted hells beneath.” He has an unmatched command of the lesser and lower varieties of the humorous contrast—over the odd, the petty, the queer, above all, over what the French untranslatably call the saugrenu. His forte is the foible; his cheval de bataille, the hobby-horse. If you want to soar into the heights, or plunge into the depths of humour, Sterne is not for you. But if you want what his own generation called a frisk on middle, very middle-earth, a hunt in curiosity-shops (especially of the technically “curious” description), a peep into all manner of coulisses and behind-scenes of human nature, a ride on a sort of intellectual switchback, a view of moral, mental, religious, sentimental dancing of all the kinds that have delighted man, from the rope to the skirt, then have with Sterne in any direction he pleases. He may sometimes a very little disgust you, but you will seldom have just cause to complain that he disappoints and deceives.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (which, as it has been excellently observed, is in reality based on the life of the gent’s uncle, and the opinions of the gent’s father), is the largest and in every way the chief field for these diversions. The apparatus, and, so far as there can be said to have been one, the object with which Sterne marked it out and filled it up, are clear, and even the former must have been clear enough to anybody of some reading and some intelligence long before the excellent Dr. Ferriar, in the spirit of a reverent iconoclast, set himself to work to point out Sterne’s exact indebtedness to Rabelais, Burton, Beroalde (if Beroalde wrote the Moyen de Parvenir), Bruscambille, and the rest. Of this particular part of the matter I do not think it necessary to say much. The charge of plagiarism is usually an excessively idle one; for when a man of genius steals, he always makes the thefts his own; and when a man steals without genius, the thefts are mere fairy gold which turns to leaves and pebbles under his hand. No doubt Sterne “lifted” in Tristram, and still more in the Sermons, with rather more freedom and audacity than most men of genius; but when we remember that he took Burton’s denunciation of the practice and reproduced it (all but in Burton’s very words) as his own, it must be clear to any one who is not very dull indeed that he was playing an audacious practical joke. Where he is best, he does not steal at all, and that is the only point of real importance.
It is somewhat more, I think, the business of the critic (who is here more especially bound not to look only at the stop-watch) to note the far more striking way in which Sterne borrowed, not actual passages and words, but manner and style. Here, perhaps, we shall find him accountant for a greater debt; and here also we may think that though his genius is indisputable, he gives more reason to those who should deny him the highest kind of genius. Beyond doubt not merely his reading, but his temper and his characteristics of all kinds, inclined him to the style to which the French fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave the name of fatrasie, or pillar-to-post divagation, with more or less of a covert satiric aim. But if we compare the dealing of Swift with Cyrano de Bergerac, the dealing of Fielding with the romance and novel as it existed before his time, nay, the dealing of Shakespeare with the Marlowe drama, we shall note a marked difference in Sterne’s procedure. Nobody, even in his own day, who knew Rabelais at all could fail to detect the almost servile following of manner in great things and in small which Tristram displays. No one—a much smaller designation—who knows the strange, unedifying, but very far from commonplace book of which, as I have hinted, I never can quite believe that Beroalde de Verville was the author, can fail to detect an even closer, though a somewhat less obvious and, so to speak, less verifiable following here.
In another region—the purgatory of all Sterne’s commentators—we can trace this corrupt following as distinctly at least, though it has, I think, been less often definitely attributed. Sterne’s too celebrated indecency, is, with one exception, sui generis. No doubt much nonsense has been and is talked about “indecency” in general literature. When it is indulged, as it has been, for instance, in French of late, it becomes a nuisance of the most loathsome kind. It is always perhaps better left alone. But if it be a sin