A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy Laurence Sterne

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy Laurence Sterne The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, Vol. III, Part 1. Selected by Charles William Eliot Copyright © 2001 Bartleby.com, Inc. Bibliographic Record Contents Biographical Note Criticisms and Interpretations I. By Sir Walter Scott II. By Edmond Scherer III. By Professor Saintsbury List of Characters 1. Prologue 2. Calais 3. The Monk. Calais 4. The Monk. Calais 5. The Monk. Calais 6. The Desobligeant. Calais 7. Preface. In the Desobligeant 8. Calais 9. In the Street. Calais 10. The Remise Door. Calais 11. The Remise Door. Calais 12. The Snuff-Box. Calais 13. The Remise Door. Calais 14. In the Street. Calais 15. The Remise. Calais 16. The Remise. Door. Calais 17. The Remise. Calais 18. In the Street. Calais 19. Montriul 20. Montriul 21. Montriul 22. Montriul 23. A Fragment 24. Montriul 25. The Bidet 26. Nampont. The Dead Ass 27. Nampont. The Postilion 28. Amiens 29. The Letter. Amiens 30. The Letter 31. Paris 32. The Wig. Paris 33. The Pulse. Paris 34. The Husband. Paris 35. The Gloves. Paris 36. The Translation. Paris 37. The Dwarf. Paris 38. The Rose. Paris 39. The Fille De Chambre. Paris 40. The Passport. Paris 41. The Passport. The Hotel at Paris 42. The Captive. Paris 43. The Starling. Road to Versailles 44. The Address. Versailles 45. Le Patisser. Versailles 46. The Sword. Rennes 47. The Passport. Versailles 48. The Passport. Versailles 49. The Passport. Versailles 50. The Passport. Versailles 51. Character. Versailles 52. The Temptation. Paris 53. The Conquest 54. The Mystery. Paris 55. The Case of Conscience. Paris 56. The Riddle. Paris 57. Le Dimanche. Paris 58. The Fragment. Paris 59. The Fragment. Paris 60. The Fragment and the Bouquet. Paris 61. The Act of Charity. Paris 62. The Riddle Explained. Paris 63. Paris 64. Maria. Moulines 65. Maria 66. Maria. Moulines 67. The Bourbonnois 68. The Supper 69. The Grace 70. The Case of Delicacy Biographical Note LAURENCE STERNE was born in Clonmel, Tipperary, Ireland, on November 24, 1713. His father, Roger Sterne, was an English soldier who never rose above the rank of lieutenant; and the first ten years of Laurence’s life were passed in various garrison towns, the life of the barracks being occasionally varied by periods spent in the houses of compassionate relatives. In 1723 the boy was placed in a school in Halifax, where he stayed till his father’s death in 1731. Then, after two years of idleness, the liberality of a cousin enabled him to go to Jesus College, Cambridge, whence he graduated in 1736. Though totally without fitness or inclination for the ministry, he took holy orders, and after a short period as curate of Buckden became vicar of Sutton-in-the-Forest, eight miles from York, in 1738. Here he lived for twenty-two years, his income from the living being supplemented by a prebend in York Cathedral and various other ecclesiastical offices. After a two years’ courtship, in his description of which Sterne invented the term “sentimental,” he married in 1741 Elizabeth Lumley. The union did not bring great happiness to either party. Sterne found the life of a country parson somewhat dull, and he sought to vary its monotony by dabbling in music and painting, by wide reading, and by social amusements, notable among which were the carousals at Skelton Hall, where a college friend, John Hall-Stevenson, used to gather a roistering company under the name of “The Demoniacks.” Until he was past forty Sterne had apparently no thought of authorship and had published nothing but one or two sermons. About 1748, however, the success of a privately circulated skit on a local ecclesiastical quarrel suggested a new line of activity, the result of which appeared in the first two books of “Tristram Shandy,” published at York, January 1, 1760. Their success was great and immediate, and in a few months the author went up to London to enjoy his triumph. He was lionized to his heart’s content, his fame bringing him not only the acquaintance of many of the distinguished men of the time, but the more tender attentions of the other sex. Sterne’s relations with women in Yorkshire had been by no means beyond reproach, and now in London he was able to indulge his passion for flirtation on a great scale. The most notorious of his affairs of this kind was with Mrs. Eliza Draper, the young wife of an officer in India. It began in 1765 and led to the composition of “Letters” and the “Journal to Eliza,” and to an endless amount of scandal. In 1760 he was presented to a curacy at Coxwold in Yorkshire, and he moved thither the same year, retaining his other livings. This remained his home for the rest of his life, but he was much in London or abroad. Early in 1762 he was ordered to France for his health, and on crossing to Paris was received with high distinction. When he returned to England in 1764 he left his wife and daughter in the south of France. Meantime he continued to add to “Tristram Shandy,” concluding it with a ninth book in 1766. In the previous year he had made the trip to the Continent that formed the basis of “The Sentimental Journey,” which he finished in 1767. He went to London to attend to its publication, and when it came out in February, 1768, he had the satisfaction of seeing it raise his reputation still higher. Three weeks later, on March 18, he died. A defense of Sterne’s character is impossible; he had no character, but only a temperament. From childhood he was excessively sensitive, and throughout his life the pleasure that he got out of his feelings was the controlling and almost the sole cause of his actions. The extraordinary thing is that the writings of such a man should have had so profound an effect throughout Europe, and an effect largely for good. He did, indeed, set a lamentable fashion of mawkish “sensibility”; but, in an age that had tended to cultivate the reason somewhat exclusively, he did much to restore emotion to its place, and by quickening the power of sympathy, helped to make possible the great humanitarian movements which culminated in such achievements as the abolition of slavery. The sentimentality which brought Sterne immediate popularity is no longer his attraction. Mingled with it there is a delightfully whimsical humor which is entirely his own; and he commanded a style of unsurpassed clarity and ease. The distinctness with which we can picture the successive scenes of his not extraordinary journey and the lastingness of the impressions left on us are the best testimony to his quality as a master of English prose. W. A. N. Criticisms and Interpretations I. By Sir Walter Scott THE STYLE employed by Sterne is fancifully ornamented, but at the same time vigorous and masculine, and full of that animation and force which can only be derived by an intimate acquaintance with the early English prose writers. In the power of approaching and touching the finer feelings of the heart, he has never been excelled, if indeed, he has ever been equaled; and may be at once recorded as one of the most affected, and one of the most simple writers—as one of the greatest plagiarists, and of the most original geniuses whom England has produced.—From “Sterne,” in “Lives of the Novelists” (originally in “Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library.”) Criticisms and Interpretations II. By Edmond Scherer STERNE is at once tender-hearted and sentimental; that is to say, naturally susceptible of sympathetic emotions, and inclined at the same time to invite them for the pleasure that he feels in them, and the credit they gain him. He was very early familiar with the tone of tenderness. See how he describes the solitude in which “his Lumley” has left him. “A solitary plate,” he writes to her, “only one knife, one fork, one glass! I bestowed a thousand pensive and penetrating glances on the chair that you have so often adorned with your graceful person in our tranquil and sentimental repasts.” He insists that when his time comes, he will die alone, far from home, in some inn. If you will believe him, the suffering of friends at such a moment, nay, the last offices of affection, would torment his soul and suffice to kill him. “Thank God!” he cries, “for my sensibility; though it has often caused me suffering, I would not give it for all the pleasures of coarse sensualists.” We can now understand what Sterne means by a “Sentimental Journey.” The traveler à la Sterne is a man who troubles himself but little about the goal for which he is making, or the regions which he traverses. He hardly visits remarkable monuments, he says nothing of the beauty of places; his objects of search are sweet and affectionate emotions. Everything becomes to him matter for sympathy: a caged bird, a donkey sinking under ill treatment, a poor child, an old monk. A sort of universal benevolence makes him take his share of all small sorrows, not exactly for the purpose of consolation, but to enter into them, to taste their savor, and, if I may say so, to extract the picturesque from them. Sentimentalism is perfectly compatible with a certain strain of egotism, and the sentimental traveler is at bottom much more his own master than is thought. It is for this reason that he paints so excellently, for this also that he so often exaggerates and strikes into falsetto.

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