Part 13

----A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which _Obadiah's_ exclamation brought into _Susannah's_ head....

--O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried _Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and yellow lutestrings,--her brown taffata,--her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable under-petticoats.--Not a rag was left behind.--"_No,--she will never look up again_," said _Susannah_.

We had a fat, foolish scullion--my father, I think, kept her for her simplicity;--she had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy.--He is dead, said _Obadiah_,--he is certainly dead!--So am not I, said the foolish scullion.

----Here is sad news, _Trim_, cried _Susannah_, wiping her eyes as _Trim_ stepp'd into the kitchen,--master _Bobby_ is dead and _buried_--the funeral was an interpolation of _Susannah's_--we shall have all to go into mourning, said _Susannah_.

I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_ earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope in God the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said _Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive.

I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman!

--He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking! _Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about the corporal.

There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance.

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than an ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their rôles. Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a philosophy, a new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these scenes, which makes of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He was not indulging his author's vanity when he thought of himself as a follower of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them rather than with his great contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his greater successors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is his exact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem to see the embryonic humour of a world coming to the birth and not yet fully formed. Through the crust of the old mediæval ideals the new humanism was struggling to emerge, and in its first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of the old civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those monsters that Nature threw off when she was preparing her hand for a higher creation. There is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the pride of the design that is foreshadowed and will some day come to its own. Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is about his humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside by the new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily the ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of the past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour of man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old ideals had passed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the disguise of liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented his rage in that mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet. His was the sardonic humour. But time that takes away brings also its compensation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, these passionate egotisms are dwindled to mere caprices, and a jest becomes more appropriate than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is left. There is the kindly heart and the humble acknowledgment that we too are seeking our own petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into which Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely whimsical; his smile is almost a caress.

I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying, "We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this world.

It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the blind goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesque mistake in naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of _Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society.

Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire école_. It flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.

Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung, and in part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not prone to fall into cant whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family edition of Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the introduction: "After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one needs strychnine and iron and a complete change of blood." It does not seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais wrote when the human passions were emerging from restraint, and it was part of his humour to paint the lusty youth of the world in colours of grotesque exaggeration. Sterne, coming in an age of conventional manners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed thoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneath all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's, to turn the under side of human nature up to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at the social proprieties; but his instrument was necessarily innuendo instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism. Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a way as to draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really exists. We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this perhaps, though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his suggestive style.

One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the _pueris reverentia_ be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on those who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of life) I am inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those like the _Venus and Adonis_, which throw the colours of a glowing imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am inclined to think that Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds than ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelism is more inflammatory than Shandeism. So far as morals alone are concerned there is a touch of what may be called inverted cant in this discrimination between the wholesome and the unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight-forward, manly way, put the matter right once for all: "It cannot be said that the licentious humour of _Tristram Shandy_ is of the kind which applies itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be harmless as to morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean that his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at times by excess of his method.

The first two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were written in 1759, when Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the first day of the year following. Like many another too original work, it had first to go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the great world, when once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon followed his book to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his fame in London during his annual visits and of his reception in Paris reads like enchantment. "My Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the first flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your Great People of the first Rank, who striue who shall most honor me;--euen all the Bishops have sent their Complim^{ts.} to me, & I set out on Monday Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine w^{h.} Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday L^{d.} Rockingham takes me to Court." Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society. Lord Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, a comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest" Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it may well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram.

Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different times, also, he published two volumes of _Sermons by Mr. Yorick_, which, in their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as theological discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are for one thing almost the finest example in English of that style which follows the sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word.

But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France restored his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him material for the travel scenes in _Tristram Shandy_ and for the _Sentimental Journey_. But that "vile asthma" was never long absent, and there is something pitiable in the quips and jests with which he covers his dread of the spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen how the travail of his broken body wails in the _Journal to Eliza_; and his last letter, written from his lodging in London to his truest and least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity and pardon: "Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next day, for perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live--I want to ask a favour of him, if I find myself worse--that I shall beg of you, if in this wrestling I come off conqueror--my spirits are fled--'tis a bad omen--do not weep my dear Lady--your tears are too precious to shed for me--bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.--Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids.--If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so often condemn'd--which my heart, not my head, betray'd me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?"--I cannot but feel that the man who wrote that note was kind and good at heart, and that through all his wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through the incoherence of his untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine sweetness.

He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, 1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by, when some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying ill in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their old merry-maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it is unique in its terrible simplicity:

About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called "Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr. Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's _Letters and Literary Remains_ for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather mystical novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there is something to make one shudder in the very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been reassuring to know that these remains were for the most part short essays and stories read at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay Society of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such a club are not a source to which one would naturally look for exhilarating literature, yet from them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a volume both interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthouse contributed to these meetings for some twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he withdrew to concentrate his energies upon _John Inglesant_, and it is worthy of notice that his early sketches are, on the whole, better work than the more elaborate essays, such as that on _The Platonism of Wordsworth_, which followed the production of his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary degree _homo unius libri_, almost of a single thought, and there is a certain freshness in his immature presentation of that idea which was lost after it once received the stamp of definitive expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for his later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I have been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure of my own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years, and shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his literary kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne is the fact that he seems from the first to have possessed a native sense of style; what other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In the earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms of _John Inglesant_ are already present, lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came later, but still unmistakable. And at times--in _The Autumn Walk_, for instance, with its "attempt to find language for nameless sights and voices," in _Sundays at the Seaside_, with their benediction of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to the beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty, or in the _Recollections of a London Church_,--at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost or discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the _Recollections_, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more than a boy--might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier himself?--

Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, should haunt me thus. Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the dark and dingy houses round about; and as with the small congregation I listened to the refrain of that sublime litany which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought it all the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her days of trouble and affliction it had supported and comforted her:

By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver us.