Shelburne Essays Part 9

reveled in the fancies of the time, True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic; But all these, save the last, being obsolete, I chose a modern subject as more meet.

Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the established school, he still sought to obtain something of the same large and liberating effect through the use of a frankly modern theme. The task was not less difficult than his success was singular and marked; and that is why it seemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occasional lapse of licentiousness, to read _Don Juan_ with the white reflection of Mont Blanc streaming through the window. Homer might have been so read, or Virgil, or any of those poets who presented life solemnly and magniloquently; I do not think I could have held my mind to Juvenal or Pope or even Horace beneath the calm radiance of that Alpine light.

I have said that the great poets all took a sombre view of the world.

Man is but _the dream of a shadow_, said Pindar, speaking for the race of genius, and Byron is conscious of the same insight into the illusive spectacle. He has looked with like vision upon

this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet,

and will not in his turn refrain "from holding up the nothingness of life." So in the introduction to the seventh canto he runs through the list of those who have preached and sung this solemn, but happily to us outworn, theme:

I say no more than hath been said in Dante's Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes.

It must not be supposed, however, because the heroic poems of old were touched with the pettiness and sadness of human destiny, that their influence on the reader was supposed to be narrowing or depressing; the name "heroic" implies the contrary of that. Indeed their very inspiration was derived from the fort.i.tude of a spirit struggling to rise above the league of little things and foiling despairs. It may seem paradoxical to us, yet it is true that these morbid poets believed in the a.s.sociation of men with G.o.ds and in the grandeur of mortal pa.s.sions.

So Achilles and Hector, both with the knowledge of their brief destiny upon them, both filled with foreboding of frustrate hopes, strive n.o.bly to the end of magnanimous defeat. There lay the greatness of the heroic epos for readers of old,--the sense of human littleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser mould, who knew so well the limitations of their sphere, took courage and were taught to look down unmoved upon their hara.s.sed fate.

Now Byron came at a time of transition from the old to the new. The triumphs of material discovery, "_Le magnifiche sorti e progressive_,"

had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense of life's futility, while at the same time the faith in heroic pa.s.sions had pa.s.sed away. An attempt to create an epic in the old spirit would have been doomed, was indeed doomed in the hands of those who undertook it. The very language in which Byron presents the ancient universal belief of Plato and those others

Who knew this life was not worth a potato,--

shows how far he was from the loftier mode of imagination. In place of heroic pa.s.sion he must seek another outlet of relief, another mode of purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the burlesque came lightly to his use as the only available _vis medica_. The feeling was common to his age, but he alone was able to adapt the motive to epic needs. How often the melancholy sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a burlesque conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, how often does Thackeray in like manner replace the old heroic relief of pa.s.sion by a kindly smile at the brief and busy cares of men. But neither Heine nor Thackeray carries the principle of the burlesque to its artistic completion, or makes it the avowed motive of a complicated action, as Byron does in _Don Juan_. That poem is indeed "prolific of melancholy merriment." It is not necessary to point out at length the persistence of this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-attachments, are all burlesqued; battle ardour, the special theme of epic sublimity, is subjected to the same quizzical mockery:

There was not now a luggage boy, but sought Danger and spoil with ardour much increased; And why? because a little--odd--old man, Stripped to his s.h.i.+rt, was come to lead the van.

In the gruesome s.h.i.+pwreck scene the tale of suffering which leads to cannibalism is interrupted thus:

At length they caught two b.o.o.bies, and a Noddy, And then they left off eating the dead body.

The description of London town as seen from Shooter's Hill ends with this absurd metaphor:

A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town!

Even Death laughs,--death that "_hiatus maxime defiendus_," "the dunnest of all duns," etc. And, last of all, the poet turns the same weapon against his own art. Do the lines for a little while grow serious, he suddenly pulls himself up with a sneer:

Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic, Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that _Don Juan_ is something quite different from the mere mock-heroic--from Pulci, for instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to imitate. The poem is in a sense not half but wholly serious, for the very reason that it takes so broad a view of human activity, and because of its persistent moral sense. (Which is nowise contradicted by the immoral scenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, for example, possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this:

But almost sanctify the sweet excess By the immortal wish and power to bless.

He who could write such lines as those was not merely indulging his humour. _Don Juan_ is something more than

A versified Aurora Borealis, Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.

Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his pa.s.sions which, though heroic in intensity, had ended in quailing of the heart, he sought what the great makers of epic had sought,--a solace and a sense of uplifted freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was gone; but, pa.s.sing to the opposite extreme, by showing the power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth the possibility of standing above and apart from all things. He, too, went beyond the limitations of destiny by laughter, as Homer and Virgil and Milton had risen by the imagination. And, in doing this, he wrote the modern epic.

We are learning a new significance of human life, as I said; and the sublime audacities of the elder poets in attempting to transcend the melancholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as Byron's heroic mockery is turning stale. In a few years we shall have come so much closer to the mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly, that we can afford to forget their rhapsodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to make clear to ourselves the purpose and character of one of the few, the very few, great poems in our literature.

LAURENCE STERNE

A number of excellent editions of our standard authors have been put forth during the last two or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has been of such real service to letters as the new Sterne edited by Professor Wilbur L. Cross.[8]

Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in these editions is in large measure rubbish which had been deliberately discarded by the author and whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his memory. Certainly this is true of Murray's new Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of Hazlitt and Lamb recently published, to go no further afield. But with Sterne the case is different. The _Journal to Eliza_ and the letters now first printed in full from the "Gibbs ma.n.u.script" are a genuine aid in getting at the heart of Sterne's elusive character. Even more important is the readjustment of dates for the older correspondence, which the present editor has accomplished at the cost of considerable pains, for the setting back of a letter two years may make all the difference between a lying knave and an unstable sentimentalist. In the spring of 1767, just a year before his death, Sterne was inditing those rather sickly letters and the newly published _Journal_ to Eliza, a susceptible young woman who was about to sail for India. "The coward," says Thackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friends this while, with sneering allusions to his poor foolish _Brahmine_. Her s.h.i.+p was not out of the Downs, and the charming Sterne was at the 'Mount Coffee-House,'

with a sheet of gilt-edged paper before him, offering that precious treasure, his heart, to Lady P----." It is an ugly charge, and indeed Thackeray's whole portrait of the humourist is harshly painted. But Sterne was not sneering in other letters at his "Brahmine," as he called the rather spoiled East India lady, and it turns out from some very pretty calculations of Professor Cross that the particular note to Lady P[ercy] must have been written at the Mount Coffee-House two years before he ever knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false," "wretched worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," "foul Satyr," "the last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"--for shame, Mr.

Thackeray! Sterne was a weak man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out he was when the final blow struck him in his lonely hired room; but is there no pity and pardon on your pen for the wayward penitent? You had sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the genial Costigans and the others who followed their hearts too readily; have you no _Alas, poor Yorick!_ for the author who gave you these characters? You could smile at Pendennis when he used the old songs for a second love; was it a terrible thing that Yorick should have taken pa.s.sages from his early letters (copies of which were thriftily preserved after the fas.h.i.+on of the day) and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotion at the end of his life? "One solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one gla.s.s!--I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often graced, in those quiet and sentimental repasts--then laid down my knife and fork, and took out my handkerchief, and clapped it across my face, and wept like a child"--he wrote to Miss Lumley who afterwards became Mrs. Sterne; and in the _Journal_ kept for Eliza when he was broken in spirit and near to death, you may read the same words, as Thackeray read them in ma.n.u.script, and you may call them false and lying; but I am inclined to believe they were quite as genuine as most of the pathos of that lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in Thackeray's case is the harder to understand for the reason that to Sterne more than to any other of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to owe his style and his turn of thought. On many a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a direct imitation of _Tristram Shandy_; add but a touch of caprice to Colonel Newcome and you might almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in the nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack of this whimsical touch that makes the good colonel a little mawkish to many readers. And if one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray's exquisite English, whither shall one turn unless to the _Sermons_ of Mr. Yorick?

There is a taint of ingrat.i.tude in his affectation of being shocked at the irregularities of one to whom he was so much indebted, and I fear Mr. Thackeray was too consciously appealing to the Philistine prejudices of the good folk who were listening to his lectures. Afterwards, when the mischief was done, he suffered what looks like a qualm of conscience. In one of the _Roundabout Papers_ he tells how he slept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I went to bed in the room, in _his_ room, when I think how I admire, dislike, and have abused him, a certain dim feeling of apprehension filled my mind at the midnight hour. What if I should see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his sinister smile, his long thin finger pointing to me in the moonlight!"

Unfortunately the popular notion of Sterne is still based almost exclusively on the picture of him in the _English Humourists_.

It is to be hoped that at last this carefully prepared edition will do something toward dispelling that false impression. Certainly, the various introductions furnished by Professor Cross are admirable for their fairness and insight. He does not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr. Fitzgerald in the first edition of the _Life_, nor does he awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, as these are found in the present revised form of that narrative; he recognises the errors of the sentimentalist, but he does not call them by exaggerated names. And he sees, too, the fundamental sincerity of the man, knowing that no great book was ever penned without that quality, whatever else might be missing. I think he will account it for service in a good cause if, as an essayist taking my material where it may be found, I try to draw a little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais whom he has honoured by so elaborate a study.

Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise fully enough the influence of Sterne's early years on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and Shandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne introduces us in the _Memoir_ written late in life for the benefit of his daughter Lydia. The father, a lieutenant in Handaside's regiment, pa.s.sed from engagement to idleness, and from barrack to barrack, more than was the custom even in those unsettled days. At Clonmel, in the south of Ireland, November 24, 1713, Laurence was born, a few days after the arrival of his mother from Dunkirk. Other children had been given to the luckless couple, and were yet to be added, but here and there they were dropped on the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in the end only two, the future novelist and his sister Catherine, who married a publican in London and became estranged from her brother by her "uncle's wickedness and her own folly"--says Laurence. Of the mother it is not necessary to say much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger-on in camps seem to have hardened her, and her temper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called it) was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterne neglected her brutally is a charge as old as Walpole's scandalous tongue, and Byron, taking his cue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusation by saying that "he preferred whining over a dead a.s.s to relieving a living mother." Sterne's minute refutation of the slander may now be read at full length in a letter to the very uncle who set the tale agoing. The boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial temperament, though not his physique:

The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the siege, where my father was run through the body by Capt. Phillips, in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty he survived, though with an impaired const.i.tution, which was not able to withstand the hards.h.i.+ps it was put to; for he was sent to Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which was at Port Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased G.o.d to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.

Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes in the son's record to make it read like a page from _Henry Esmond_; the very texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's.

Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a characteristic sc.r.a.pe. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote in large letters, LAU. STERNE. The usher whipped him severely, but, says the _Memoir_, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before me, that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at York next took charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and afterwards the Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this patron we shall probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his uncle wished him to write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he detested such "dirty work," and got his uncle's hatred in return for his independence. According to the writer of the _Yorks.h.i.+re Anecdotes_, the two fell out over a woman--which sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, Laurence had been successfully courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York, and, during her absence, had been writing those love-letters which his daughter published after the death of her parents, to the immense increase of sentimentalism throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though honestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use of select pa.s.sages at a later date, as we have seen. Miss Lumley became Mrs. Sterne in due time, and brought to her husband a modest jointure, and another living at Stillington, so that he was now a pluralist, although far from rich. The marriage was not particularly happy. Madam, one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and unreasonable, her reverend spouse was volatile and pleasure-loving; and when, in the years of Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she decided to stay there with her daughter. Sterne seems to have been fond of her always, in a way, and in money matters was never anything but generous and tactfully considerate. A bad-hearted man is not so thoughtful of his wife's comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters show him to have been; and even Thackeray admits that his affection for the girl was "artless, kind, affectionate, and _not_ sentimental."

But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only woman at whose feet the parson of Sutton and Stillington was sighing. There was that Mlle. de Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear, dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as she becomes in _Tristram Shandy_), to whom he sends presents of wine and honey (with notes asking, "What is honey to the sweetness of thee?"), and who followed him to London in the heyday of his fame, where somehow she fades mysteriously out of view. "I myself must ever have some Dulcinea in my head," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And, in truth, the soul of Yorick was mewed in the cage of his breast very near his heart, and never stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere.

Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his love of woman had a curious and childlike way of fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour.

Most famous of all was his pa.s.sion--it seems almost to have been a pa.s.sion in this case--for the famous "Eliza." Towards the end of his life he had become warmly attached to a certain William James, a retired Indian commodore, and his wife, who were the best and most wholesome of his friends. At their London home he met Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, and soon became romantically attached to her. When the time drew near for her to sail to India to rejoin her husband, he wrote a succession of notes in a kind of paroxysm of grief for himself and anxiety for her, and for several months afterwards he kept a journal of his emotions for her benefit some day. He was dead in less than a year. The letters she kept, and in due time printed, because it was rumoured that Lydia was to publish them from copies--a pretty bit of wrangling among all these women there was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick! The _Journal_ is now for the first time included in the author's works--a singular doc.u.ment, as eccentric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment is hard to define, a wild and hysterical record. But it rings true on the whole, and confirms the belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, however short-lived they may have been. The last letter to Eliza is pitiful with its tale of a broken body and a sick heart: "In ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India handkerchiefs with it.--It came, I think, from my heart! I fell asleep through weakness. At six I awoke, with the bosom of my s.h.i.+rt steeped in tears." All through the _Journal_ that follows are indications of wasted health and of the perplexities of life that were closing in upon him.

Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten, and we get a picture of serener moments. One day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and it may not be amiss to copy out his note just as he penned it:

But I am in the Vale of c.o.xwould & wish You saw in how princely a manner I live in it--tis a Land of Plenty--I sit down alone to Venison, fish or wild fowl--or a couple of fowls--with curds, and strawberrys & cream, (and all the simple clean plenty w^{ch.} a rich Vally can produce)--with a Bottle of wine on my right hand (as in Bond street) to drink y^{r.} health--I have a hundred hens & chickens [he sometimes spelt it _chickings_] ab^{t.} my yard--and not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit or a Trout--but he brings it as an offering--In short tis a golden Vally--& will be the golden Age when You govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the Mistress of my table & spread it with elegancy and that natural grace & bounty w^{th.} w^{ch.} heaven has distinguish'd You...

--Time goes on slowly--every thing stands still--hours seem days & days seem Years whilst you lengthen the Distance between us--from Madras to Bombay--I shall think it shortening--and then desire & expectation will be upon the rack again--come--come--

But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on a longer journey than Bombay. In England once more, she traded on her relation to the famous writer, and then reviled him. She a.s.sociated with John Wilkes, and afterwards with the Abbe Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on "the Lady who has been so celebrated as the Correspondent of Mr.

Sterne." It is engraved on her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius and benevolence were united in her"; but the long letter composed in the vein of Mrs. Montagu and now printed from her ma.n.u.script belies the first, and her behaviour after Sterne's death makes a mockery of the second.

All this new material throws light on a phase of this matter which cannot be avoided in any discussion of Sterne's character: How far did his immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he was a "foul Satyr"; Bagehot thought he was merely an "old flirt," and others have seen various degrees of guilt in his philanderings. Now his relation to Eliza would seem to be pretty decisive of his character in this respect, and fortunately the evidence here published in full by Professor Cross leaves little room for doubt. There is, for one thing, an extraordinary letter which is given in facsimile from the rough draft, with all its erasures and corrections. It was addressed to Daniel Draper, but was never sent, apparently never completed. The substance of it is, to say the least, unusual:

I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I have not the honour to be known to--a letter likewise upon no kind of business (in the ideas of the world) is a little out of the common course of things--but I'm so myself, and the impulse which makes me take up my pen is out of the common way too, for it arises from the honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and friends.h.i.+p as I bear for Mrs. Draper--if I did not wish to hope and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, dear sir, in love with your wife; but 'tis a love you would honour me for, for 'tis so like that I bear my own daughter, who is a good creature, that I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it--that moment I had would have been the last.

Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing to our purpose.

Now it is easy to say that such a letter was written with the hypocritical intention of allaying Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and certainly the last sentence overshoots the mark. Against the general innocence of Sterne's life there exist, in particular, two damaging bits of evidence--that infamous thing in dog-Latin addressed to the master of the "Demoniacs," whose meaning must have been quite lost upon the daughter who published it, and a pair of brief notes to a woman named Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may say that it was probably written in the exaggerated tone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of both this and the notes one may add that they do not incriminate the later years of Sterne's life. As an offset we now have that extraordinary memorandum in the _Journal to Eliza_, dated April 24, 1767, which states explicitly, and convincingly, that he had led an entirely chaste life for the past fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible, to enter into the evidence further in this place, but the general inference may be stated with something like a.s.surance: Sterne's relation to Eliza was purely sentimental, as was the case with most of his philandering; at the same time in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a life of pleasure such as was by no means uncommon among the clergy of his day. He was neither quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the "old flirt" of Bagehot, but a man led into many follies, and many kindnesses also, by an impulsive heart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his immorality that one has to complain of, and the talk in the books on that score is mostly foolishness; it is rather his bad taste. He cannot be much blamed for his estrangement from his wife, and his care for her comfort is not a little to his credit; but he might have refrained from writing to Eliza on the happiness they were to enjoy when the poor woman was dead--as he had already done to Mlle. Fourmantelle, and others, too, it may be. Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza, had written that she was coming over to England, and the _Journal_ for a time is filled with forebodings of the confusion she was to bring with her. One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a tear over the Postscript added after the last regular entry:

Nov: 1^{st.} All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable than my hopes--M^{rs.} S.--& my dear Girl have been 2 Months with me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at York, after having settled every thing to their hearts content--M^{rs.} Sterne retires into france, whence she purposes not to stir, till her death.--& never, has she vow'd, will give me another sorrowful or discontented hour--I have conquerd her, as I w^{d.} every one else, by humanity & Generosity--& she leaves me, more than half in Love w^{th.} me--She goes into the South of france, her health being insupportable in England--& her age, as she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on the edge of sixty--so G.o.d bless--& make the remainder of her Life happy--in order to w^{ch.} I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year--& give my dear Girl two thousand p^{ds.}--w^{th.} w^{ch.} all Joy, I agree to,--but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french Loans--

--And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee--But What can I say, What can I write--But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wis.h.i.+ng for thy Return--Return--Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever.

So ends the famous _Journal_, which at last we are permitted to read with all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will occur to every reader is surprise that a master of style could write such slipshod, almost illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of the writers of the day were content to leave all minor matters of grammar and orthography to their printer, whom it was then the fas.h.i.+on to abuse. More than one page of stately English out of that formal age would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings, could we see the original ma.n.u.script. But the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault, along with his haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In another way his incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a note that particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when in the _Journal_ he cries out, "Great G.o.d of Mercy! shorten the s.p.a.ce betwixt us--Shorten the s.p.a.ce of our miseries!"--or as when, in that letter to Lady Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations, and in the same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's Prayer for the sake of deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, for there is no reason to believe that Yorick's religious feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, too, as his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an inopportune moment.

"Un pretre corrumpu ne l'est jamais a demi"--a priest is never only half corrupt--said Ma.s.sillon, and there are times when such a saying is true.