This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-11,700

RUFF, Lawrence Albert, 1937- THE TRUE LINE OF BEAUTY: STYLE IN TRISTRAM SHANDY.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE TRUE LINE OF BEAUTY: STYLE IN TRISTRAM SHANDY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Lawrence Albert Ruff, B.S. , M. A.

The Ohio State University 1968

Approved by

Ad\^ser Department of English VITA

November 24, 1937 Born - Dayton, Ohio

1958 ...... B.S., University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

1959 ...... M.A. , Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

1960-1963 . . . Instructor, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

1963-1968 . . . Assistant Professor, Univers of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Studies in the Eighteenth Century. Professors Robert C. Elliott, Albert J. Kuhn, John Harold Wilson, Andrew H. Wright

Studies in the Novel. Professors James Hafley, Claude M. Simpson CONTENTS

Chapter Page

1 FORM AND STYLE IN TRISTRAM SHANDY 1

II STYLE OF MAJOR UNITS OF COMPOSITION 17

(i) Positive-negative structures,^ 22

(li) Conditional and volitive structures 67

(iii) Volume I, Chapter 10 as paradigm BO

III STYLE OF MINOR UNITS OF COMPOSITION 97

(.i) Khetorical schemes ot aposiopesis and definition; the gesture 102

(li) Tropes of the journey, music and painting 128

IV CONCLUSION: STYLE IN KELATION TO AESTHETICS AND ETHICS 163

BIBLIOGRAPHY 180

♦ xii I

"I am.telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world . . . I'm trying to say it all in one sentence between one cap and one period. " William Faulkner, letter to Malcolm Cowley

H o w does one tell a story? Tristram Shandy is the first major

English novel to explore this vexatious question with emphasis on the

form of the novel; without, that is, the classical aids so notably, if of­

ten ironically, employed by Fielding, and without the denial of "form"

and the emphasis on "reality" displayed by, say, Defoe or Richardson.

If one defines "novel" as a prose fiction of some length, in which an ac­

tion is imitated by a causal sequence of organically related events, ef­

fecting a fusion of conduct and consciousness, one finds that the fabulist

who would be novelist is confronted by .three general problems: that of

causality, that of characterization of both an individual and a society,

and that of creation of significant form.

Laurence Sterne, drawing upon the resources of tradition and

individual talent, has solved these problems in a fashion that puzzled

and generally delighted his contemporaries, puzzled and often irritated

the readers of the nineteenth century, and has increasingly fascinated

both the writers and critics of the twentieth century, perhaps because

1 2 the latter are attracted by evidences of modernity in Sterne's work.

One problem for the reader, of course, is whether or not to regard

Tristram Shandy as a novel at all, but one need not be distracted by

considerations of autobiography or essay, if one considers the inclu­

siveness of the tentative definition given above, or if one turns to North­

rop Frye and notes the scope allowed by his "anatomy" category. The

anatomy, as he defines it, is extroverted and intellectual, deals less

with people than with mental attitudes, luxuriates in erudition, and even­

tually - for Frye's categories have the frailest of barriers between them -

merges with the novel. And Tristram Shandy, as he views it, is the

greatest success of the kind. W e have, then, definitions and categories

for works as puzzling as Tristram Shandy - and how Sterne would have

relished them! Moreover, we have become accustomed to dispensing

■*-AlanB. How e Yorick and the Critics (New Haven: Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1958) remarks that "the initial success of Tristram Shandy raised Sterne and his work to a position in the public eye which he main­ tained practically unbroken until his death" (p. 3). The reaction, due partially to the flood of imitations success bred (see pp. 175-76), did not begin until the 1780's. Lodwick Hartley Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1966) lists numerous studies comparing Sterne to such modern authors as Hesse, Gide, Woolf, Gogol, Mann, Joyce, and Green.

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 308-12. John Stedmond The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967) agrees with the "anatomy" classification of the novel and concludes that, generi- cally speaking, the novel points two ways. "Historically, Tristram Shandy has obvious links with the works of Rabelais and Burton; psycho­ logically, it also has certain affinities with the modern novel" (p. 20). 3 with plot altogether, or to fragmenting or multiplying it; to doubling, tripling, or further multiplying aspects of character, with what La w ­ rence Durrell calls "prismatic" effect; to playing games with words,

so that our novels m a y become either expanded lyric poems as with

Virginia Woolf, or dictionary exercises in a dozen languages as with

James Joyce. W e no longer expect in a novel coherent plot, objec­ tive characterization, or linguistic decorum. The one twig from the withered branch to which we can still cling, it would seem, is the twig

of form, and Sterne's form fascinates. Edwin Muir says that "about his mastery of form there can be no doubt, for he did exactly what he wanted to do, and one cannot imagine the pattern of his books as being

other than what it is; it ma y appear arbitrary, but it is inevitable.

It is the interest in form which justifies an interest in style.

"Form" and "style" are uncomfortably vague terms; form is so

broad and vague in its implications, style is so limited and yet vague

in its. The two terms, however, are closely related. F o r m is meaning

•^Durrell uses the term "prismatic" in his rather Shandean dis­ cussion of character in spatial-temporal terms: "The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human per­ sonality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? W h o can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy. " Clea (New York: E. P. Dutton &c Co. , I960), pp. 135- 36. Any of Woolf's major novels and Joyce's Finnegan's Wake illus- trate the Shandeism of the modern novel.

^"Laurence Sterne, " in Essays on Literature and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 56.

6 in its first sense, our grasp of the whole character or structure of a thing or experience in its totality. Style is meaning in its final sense, our grasp of "the furthest elaboration of the one concept in its jj;he work'sj center. " Both form and style spring from the same source -

"An individual way of seeing will compel an individual way of using the language" - and they may, indeed must, be considered together, for

"once we do conceive a process, and set the work within it, then formal elements become 'stylistic' elements. F o r m and style then are close­ ly allied, and both, of course, are closely connected with meaning, par­ ticularly moral meaning because they spring from that "individual way of seeing, " the personal moral vision. In Sterne a form and style which could amuse his contemporaries with its "wit" and "sentiment" and us with its "modernity" are joined to a moral vision which cheers by its humor while it braces by i'ts realism. That Sterne did have a serious moral intent is demonstrated by recent studies of his sermons as well as of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; that he had a most unusual form and style to express the intent has been agreed from the time of the initial publication of Tristram Shandy. I should like, then,

^The quotations, in order, are from: W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 11; J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London: Oxford University Press, I960), p. 13; and James Craig La Driere, "Form," in The Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), p. 170. to examine the way in which the moral vision, the form, and the style of the novel work together, with particular emphasis on those aspects of the style which seem to m e to be most indicative of Sterne's moral intent and illustrative of his most beguiling technical effects.

It would be agreeable if one could approach Sterne's style from a slightly broader base than we have, if we could, say, examine the

"early" and the "late" Sterne in order to see precisely those aspects of his style which are most Shandean, just as we might trace the in­ creasingly delicate and tenuous reflective passages as James goes from

The Portrait of a_ Lady to The Golden Bowl to find those things most

Jamesian. But with Sterne we have only a limited oeuvre produced in a comparatively brief time of nine years, and the brevity of his writing career allows little scope for careful focussing on emerging stylistic peculiarities while at the same time it permits doubts concerning the writer's skill and care. ^ Sterne's limitation is, however, his strength, for rather than concerning oneself with change, development or decline, one can view the stylistic elements as a whole and can indicate, hope­ fully, that in Tristram Shandy form, style, and meaning are indeed all of a piece throughout.

^"Sterne, however, late in life turned from the ministry to novel writing, " notes Overton P. James The Relation of Tristram Shandy to the Life of Sterne (The Hague: Mouton & Co. , 1966), p. 21. "He produced, as he naturally would, a masterpiece of disorder. " James apparently refers here to the opinion of certain of Sterne's contemporaries, though the reference is not immediately clear. The problem, therefore, is one of unity and the search for unity in the style is one suggested only recently and pursued only in scattered fashion. Prefatory to a brief but most interesting essay on Sterne, Ian

Watt remarks, "A good deal has been done to demonstrate unity of plot and character, using the criteria that are traditional in dealing with the novel; what follows explores a very different, though not necessarily

n contradictory approach to the novel. " Professor Watt is sweeping in characterizing several recent studies as centered on traditional cri­ teria, but it is true that one of the strongest tendencies in any detailed study of Sterne's style is to approach it in light of its ancestors or its heirs rather than to consider it, itself, as an expression of the novel's form. Although one ma y view with some despair the thirty-six closely printed pages of Henri Fluchere's bibliography or Lodwick Hartley's useful annotated bibliography, one soon finds that Watt is correct, for most of the studies have been but incidentally concerned with style.

There are references to "comic-strip method, " to style "retrieving" a lack of emotional intensity, to "eloquence" or "inimitable style. "

One reads that Sterne's "operation is the operation of pure style" or that the style is "highly flexible, with soft winding beginnings and ab­ rupt endings, " but one finds little description or analysis of the con-

O stituents of purity, inimitability, or eloquence.

"^"The Comic,Syntax of Tristram Shandy, " in Studies in Criti­ cism and Aesthetics, 1660- 1800, ed. Howard Anderson and John Shea (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 315. 7 Insofar as Sterne's style has been described and analysed, it has been seen as impressionistic, sentimental, or "sensationalistic, " as a vehicle of ambivalent social attitudes or a reflection of philosophi­ cal stance. The novel itself has been seen as a gigantic personal essay

or a collection of elegant extracts. 9 Contemporary critics, however, following the path marked by Wayne Booth, tend to view the work as a

coherent whole, unified by Lockean psychology and, connected with this, the role of Tristram. ^ ^

A m o n g those studies which have been centrally concerned with

Sterne's style, the major emphasis has been on his use of traditional

^Cf. George Sherburn in A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc. , 1948), . p. 1022; Cyril Connolly, "Sterne and Swift, " Atlantic Monthly. C L X X Y (1945), 94; Herbert Read, English Prose Style (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 168; Virginia Woolf, "Sterne" in Collected Essays (4 vols. ; London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), III, 93; Edwin Muir, op. cit. , p. 50; H. V. D. Dyson and John Butt, Augustans and Romantics (London: The Cresset Press, 1940), p. 65.

9cf. "Sterne as the Father of Modern Impressionism, " Current Literature, XLI X (1910), 443; Erna Vogelreich, Laurence Sternes Ver- haltnis z u m Publikum und der Ausdruck dieses Verhaltnisses in Stil (Marburg: Herm a n n Bauer, 1938); John Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World; Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1954); Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel, A Panorama (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co. , I960), p. 126; William Hazlitt, "On the English Novelists. "

^®Wayne Booth, "Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy? , " Modern Philology, XLVIII (1951), 172-83; cf. Charles Parrish, T w e n ­ tieth-Century Criticism of F o r m in Tristram Shandy, unpubl. diss. , Ne w Mexico, I960. devices, although his originality has also been examined. For example,

William Farrell views Sterne's use of the figures, gestures, and topics of traditional rhetoric and the "collapsed" structure of the novel as paro­ dy, creating a comic conflict of art and nature which mocks both charac­ ters and reader. D. W. Jefferson briefly and convincingly places Sterne in a tradition of "learned wit, " deriving from parodic and satiric writ­ ing; John Stedmond expands Jefferson's views into a larger examination of Sterne's originality but concentrates on those effects reminiscent of late Renaissance conventions. John Traugott's discussion of the role of Tristram as narrator and facetious rhetor produces exciting results of rhetorical analysis, though he is primarily concerned with the style as related to Locke's theory of associationism. Eugene Hnatko con­ centrates on particular devices - the curt period, special kinds of claus­ al and phrasal modification, the use of parallelism - as they affect our attitudes towards character. Henri Fluchere's discussion of Sterne's use of abstraction, verbal proliferation, metaphor,, pun, and syntax catalogues most of the interesting aspects of the style but treats them fairly generally as appeals to sensibility and emotional response. ^ ^

^ '''William J. Farrell, "Nature Versus Art as Comic Pattern in Tristram Shandy, " English Literary History, X X X (1963), 16-35; D. W. Jefferson, "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit, " Criticism, I (1951), 225-48; Stedmond, op. cit. , pp. 30-47; Traugott, op. cit. , pp. 107-48 especially; Eugene Hnatko, Studies in the Prose Style of Laurence Sterne, unpubl. diss. , Syracuse, 1962. 9

The range of these studies indicates that I need not be particu­ larly concerned with Sterne's debt to either his remote or immediate predecessors, to Burton and Rabelais, or Pope and Swift, or Locke.

It will I trust be taken for granted that ma n y of m y remarks are made with Sterne's debt to his tradition in mind and that his use of traditional rhetorical patterns and Lockean psychology has already been sufficient­ ly explored.

M y chief concern shall be with those aspects of style which con­ tribute most to a coherent view of the novel. I shall isolate those chap­ ters, paragraphs, sentences, and verbal patterns which are peculiar to Tristram Shandy and embody best the unity of Sterne's vision.

A brief review of form, here conceived of as skeletal structure, will be convenient to establish a general pattern which repeats itself constantly within the work. Sterne's plot, as he quickly and frequently tells us, is a puzzle which ma y be arranged and re-arranged according to the fancy of the puzzler as he re-reads chapters, awaits promised events or discussions, and fills in blank pages or missing chapters.

In its broadest outlines, however, taking into account only the most extensive of those digressions which are, we are told, its soul, the plot runs thus: I, 1-21 narrates events connected with Tristram's begetting and birth to Toby's unfinished sentence beginning "I think";

I, 22-11, 5 contains the author's statement concerning his work, his theory of characterization, Toby's background; II, 6-III, 30 tells of 10 events connected with birth; Toby completes his sentence and Walter collapses on his bed; III, 31-IV, 1 has a lengthy digression on noses climaxing in the interpolated tale of Slawkenbergius; IV, 2-V, 16 de­ tails Walter's distresses connected with the birth and baptism of Tris­ tram and the death of Bobby; V, 17-VI, 20 covers the passage of five years, with Tristram's accident, education, and the Tristrapoedia, and five chapters of digression for the story of Le Fever; VI, 21-40 tells of Toby's miniature war and peace in the me a d o w and Mrs. Wad- man; VII, 1-43 is an entire volume devoted to Tristram's flight from death; VIII, 1-IX, 33 are two whole volumes devoted to Toby and Mrs.

Wadman. The chronological sequence is as capricious in outline as the sketch of events suggests: the principal times covered in the sec­ tions are consecutively 1718, 1759, 1693-97, 1718, 1718-19, 1723,

1719, 1706, 1713, 1713-14. 12

This brief review of the events in and the chronology of the

novel indicates two interesting formal points. The story of Toby, which ends the novel and includes Toby's death has no beginning. As

Toby points out in an apologia, neither he nor we can ever know the

source of his military inclinations: "Tell me, brother Shandy, upon

1 ?Invaluable aid in finding one's way through the events and times of Tristram Shandy is found in Charles Parrish, "A Table of Contents for Tristram Shandy, " College English, XXII (1960), 143-50, and in Ian Watt's "Historical and Fictional Chronology" in his edition of the novel (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co. , 1965), xxviii-xxix. what one deed of mine do you ground it? .... If, when I was a school­ boy, I could not hear a dr u m beat, but m y heart beat with it was it m y fault? Did I plant the propensity there? Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature? "I-5 The story of Tristram, which begins the novel, has no end. The book is, indeed, rather like Toby's bridge which

"turned, it seems, upon hinges at both ends of it, one half of which turning to one side of the fosse, and the other, to the other" []3. 25. 213]] and which is incurably defective. If we turn from the principal plots to the interpolated tales, we note that only one, Slawkenbergius' Tale, is complete and that it is not given even the dignity of a chapter n u m ­ ber. The story of Le Fever, like Toby's, has an "end, " since he dies melodramatically, but its origins are obscure; the story of Ama n - dus and Amanda, inserted in Tristram's flight from Death, has a beginning lost in the vague area where history and romance merge and an end in a search for a grave which is certainly not where Tris­ tram expects it and is perhaps nowhere at all. Though Slawkenbergius'

Tale, says the author, has protasis, epitasis, catastasis, and catas­ trophe [4.265]], Tristram's story does not. The general impression is that we have a beginning and a middle, or a middle and an

I Q Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James A. W o r k (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), vol. YI, chap. 32, p. 460. All subsequent references to this edition will be given in arabic numerals in brackets following the quotation; in order, volume, chapter, and page. 12 end, but not all three or, better, not both beginning and end. It is as if Tristram were purposely trying to confuse us with his "ab ovo" re­ ference - as, indeed, he does try - leading us to remember "ab ovo us­ que ad mala" and to reflect that we m a y have eggs or apples, but we

shall certainly not have a prurient appetite for both satisfied.

Second, the review indicates that the divisions are often framed by verbal repetitions, such as Toby's "I think, " Walter's prostration,

or the references to the Tristrapoedia. Even when the major digress­

ions are not so framed, the reader is always aware of echo effects or he is formally reminded that he has lost sight of the point of departure

and formally returned there, as when Tristram tells us: "It is so long

since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted from the mid­ wife, that it is high time to mention her again to him" [l. 13. 35] . Fi­

nally, it is clear that, but for the last three volumes, neither chapter

nor volume divisions necessarily or even generally indicate true divi­

sion, for the sequences of narration, discussion, or dialogue often over­

lap chapters, as in the first dialogue with the reader Q.. 1. 1-2]] .

Digression, repetition, overlap - we readily see that we are

dealing with an "unaccountable" if admirable work. Yet is this struc­

ture so bizarre? If one grants that the purpose of art is the ordering

of experience, and that the definitive purpose of the novel is the order­

ing of experience in temporal terms, one sees that the question of

causality is central to the creation and perception of the form of a 13 novel, and it is the thematic problem of causality that underlies the un­ usual form and style of Tristram Shandy.

The reader desires to be "let into the whole secret from first to last" and for this cause "right glad I am, " writes Tristram, "that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I a m able to go on tracing everything in it, as Horace says, ab ovo" £l. 4. 7^ . Al­ though the misapplication of the Horatian tag ma y strike us, we still see the problem of the egg and the chicken: how is Tristram and how are we to reconcile, to connect two such dissimilar objects? Sterne suggests one answer in his wealth of factual, realistic detail, in the researches of Tristram and the other characters, in the minute descriptions of ges­ ture; he suggests another and more important response in his motto for

Volume I, "It is not actions, but opinions concerning actions, which dis­ turb men. " In spite of the ma n y trappings of the picaresque in the naif hero, the often farcical action, the wanderings in space and time, there is always the sense of striving for connection. W e struggle to discern the form which will bind together the separate worlds of author and read- er, the end of Toby's story with the beginning of Tristram's, the facts and the opinions. The bonds, of course, are those of style.

The bonds are well forged. Our interest in both progression and digression, in connecting both narrative and opinionative sequences, points to the most striking effects of Sterne's style; for example, his 14 use of contrarieties to effect a precarious balance of polar opposites - birth and death, kinesis and stasis, positive and negative - which are often combined in rhetorical units of great variety and complexity, sug­ gesting a proto-Faulknerian urge "to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period, " an urge perhaps strengthened by Sterne's sense of imminent death. Thus, the devices we might expect to find include a rich variety of various schemes of inclusion and repetition: the vari­ ous forms of hyperbaton, especially parenthesis in its varieties of par- embole and paremptosis (or, as William Piper sees it, the explanatory, the opinionative, and the interlude digression^), tautotes, anaphora, synonomy and, for punning effects, antanaclasis. W e also find the de­ vices of exclusion, forcing us to make or try to mak e connections which the laboring author cannot: anastrophe, parataxis - a device enforced by the extravagance of dashes - and the characteristic use of anacolu- thia and aposiopesis. The style is characterized by a most disconcert­ ing combination of lushness and barrenness. W e ma y be told mu c h more

i than we need or want to know or much less than we must know; we find passages whose wandering seems almost demented but whose rhetoric displays the most highly mannered prose. In his discussion of Sterne's learned wit, Jefferson notes Sterne's "curious feeling for order," one of whose manifestations is a "delight in confusion; but in Sterne these

14"Tristram. Shandy's Digressive Artistry, " Studies in English Literature, 1600-1900, I (I960), 65-76. things are not opposites. To dwell upon disorder, reducing it to its particulars and bringing out its perversely twisted pattern, involves

I C the introduction of an element of order. " Sterne's element of order most clearly appears in certain of his structural patterns and tropes;

structures which combine quite often the late-Baroque patterns des­

cribed by Morris Croll, among others, and the Augustan patterns des­

cribed by W. K. Wimsatt and others, and, too, the increasingly nervous

rhythms of modern prose, the "choppy" effect in Sterne admired by

Woolf; tropes which at the most effective are drawn from travel, paint­

ing, and music. The basic structural pattern is found in the yoking to­

gether within single sections and sentences, or at times, single words,

of opposite tendencies of thought, producing opposite movements. The

three principal varieties of this structure are the joined statements of

dual positive and negative possibilities, and the use of volitives and of

conditionals. The trope of travel underscores the constant motif of

movement - the motion of the planets, the journies upon earth, the

vagaries of the human mind - and combines nicely with various rhetori­

cal devices - aposiopesis, definition, and gesture - and with the motifs

of painting and of music to create a constant sense of motion in time and

space, a curiously sinuous line of movement forwards, backwards, side­

ways, which, in conjunction with the movement of entire passages and sentences, creates the "true line of beauty. "

The entire novel ma y be regarded as an expression of tension between poles. The double plot, the interpolated tales, the dual te m ­ poral sequence, the odd similarities among the characters of the Author,

Tristram, Toby, Walter, Yorick, and even T r i m ^ - all suggest a kind of shimmering movement with indeterminate or, at least, undetermined arrest. Sterne's universe is one of endless possibilities, between which or among which the characters, narrator, author, and reader constant­ ly move, never in the nature of things coming to a definite resting place.

■^Rufus Putney is one of the few to note this odd effect in the characterization "Laurence Sterne, Apostle of Laughter, " in Eighteenth- Century English Literature, ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959): p. 279: "Tristram is himself a comic char­ acter in wh o m are blended the diverse strains of the Shandys. F r o m Uncle Toby he inherited pity, from his great Aunt Dinah lascivious­ ness. His obligations to his father are so great that they require a separate paragraph." II

"Peu a peu son esprit n'eut plus d'autre occupation que de chercher a deviner ce qu'a chaque mo m e n t pou- vait faire, at chercher a lui cacher ..." Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

Although I remarked above that one cannot trace the develop­ ment of Sterne's style through a number of years and several works,

I should nevertheless like to introduce this chapter on Sterne's m a n ­ agement of selected passages by examining only two of his letters, first, because they offer a fairly complete view in a limited space of his attitude toward his reader, and, second, because they introduce some of the techniques of which he is particularly fond.

Sterne's relationship with the reader is one of the most inter­ esting aspects of his novel and I suspect the most responsible for what

I find to be the interesting aspects of his style, which is designed to

engage the reader at every point from the beginning to the end of the work in the author's own labors of composition. If, as a minister,

Sterne must needs convince and comfort his congregation, as a writer he must cajole his reader; though Fielding announces his friendship

only at the end of To m Jones, Sterne engages M a d a m in sprightly col­

loquy at the beginning of Tristram Shandy. If his role as minister

17 helps to explain the serious intent of his humor and that as author his

surface sparkle, his less respectable role as flirt ma y explain in part the peculiarities of his style which are labeled indecorous. He wishes neither to harrow our feelings, like Richardson, nor to make us like unto gods, like Fielding, but to ally us with his authorial efforts; in the jargon of our time, "to dialogue" us. As Henri Fluchere remarks, "Son effort d'expression a pour but premier de nous convaincre de la realit/ de l'experience rapportee, c 'est-\.-dire d'entrainer le lecteur au sein de ce monde imaginaire qu'il s'est donne pour agreable tache de construire avec des mots, " and "il lui faut encore entrainer le lecteur dans l'aven- ture, le convaincre de la legitim.it/ d'une telle op/ration, ne pas le laisser

se desinteresser du tout de l'histoire - bref, l'associer'a cette bataille

avec le langage, instrument de communication et de persuasion. His

efforts at engaging us in the struggle, in communicating, in making con­ nections and getting the story told, produce an interesting pair of letters nearly a decade before the first volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared, which indicate the sort of problems that later confront Tristram. In

the first, we see Sterne apologizing for a quarrel arising from a request

to serve as substitute preacher.

I told You above, That I had had a Conference with Hilyard upon this Subject, and indeed should have Said to him, most

^Laurence Sterne: de l' h o m m e \ l'oeuvre (Paris: NRF, Librairie Gallimard, 196 1), pp. 605, 607. 19 of what I have said to You, But that the Insufferableness of his Behaviour put it out of m y Power. The Dialogue between Us had something singular in it, and I think I Ca n ­ not better make You amends for this irksome Letter, than by giving You a particular Acct of it & the Manner I found myself Obliged to treat Hi m w c^ By the By, I should have done with still more Roughness But that He sheltered Hi m ­ self under the Character of Y r Plenipo; H o w far His E x ­ cellency exceeded his instructions You will percieve I know, from the Acc^ I have given of the Hint in your Letter, w°k was all the Foundation for what passed. I step'd into his Shop, just after Sermon on All Saints, W h e n with an Air of mu c h Gravity and Importance, He beckond me to follow H i m into an inner Room; No sooner had he shut the Dore, But with the Aweful Solemnity of a Premier who held a Lettre de Chachet upon whose Contents m y Life or Liberty depended after a Minuits Pause, He thus opens his Commission. Sir M y Friend the A. Deacon of Cleveland not caring to preach his Turn, as I conjectured, Has left m e to provide a Preacher, But before I can take any Steps in it with Regard to You 1 want first to know, Sir, upon what Footing You and D r Sterne are? upon what Footing! Yes, Sir, How your Quarel Stands? What’s that to Y o u ? H o w our Quarrel stands! What's that to You, you Puppy? But Sir, dont be angry, I only want to know of You, whether D r Sterne will not be displeased in Case You Should preach Go Look; Ive just now been preaching and You could not have fitter Opportunity to be Satisfyed. 1 hope, M r Sterne, You are not Angry. Yes I am; But mu c h more astonished at your Impudence. I know not whether The Chancellors stepping in at this Instant & flapping to the Dore, did not save his tender Soul the Pain of the last Word; However that be, He retreats upon this unexpected Rebuff, Takes the Chancell aside, asks his Advice, comes back Submissive, begs Quarter, tells m e D r Hering had quite satisfyed him as to the Grounds of his Scruple (tho' not of his Folly) and therefore beseeches m e to let the Matter pass, & to preach the Turn. W h e n I as Percy complains in Harry ye 4. All smarting with my Wounds To be thus pestered by a Popinjay Out of my Grief and m y Impatience Answered neglectingly, I know not what For He made me Mad To see him Shine so bright & smell so sweet 20

& Talk so like a waiting Gentlewoman --Bid him be Gone-- & seek Another fitter for his Turn

But as I was too angry to have the perfect Faculty of recol­ lecting Poetry, however pat to m y Case so I was forced to tell him in plain Prose tho' somewhat elevated That I would not preach, & that he might get a Parson whe Qrever he cou] Id find one. 2

The careful exploration of the background of the action and vivid des­ cription of the action are striking here. One notes the sentences twist­ ing from fact to possibility with the "I should have done, " "I know not whether, " and the wonderfully appropriate Shakespearean quotation re­ m e m b e r e d too late for the drama but not too late for the narrative; one sees the attention paid to realistic, rapid, almost stichomythic - and repetitious - dialogue; the comic simile of the Premier with a lettre de cachet blended with the very real indignation and anger; the faith that giving a particular account will explain everything; and, finally, the typ­ ically Shandean reflection at the end of the letter "Thatthis Imperti­ nence of his like ma n y Others, had Issued not so mu c h from his Heart, as from his Head. " All these aspects of style appear in the novel, with its combination of the factual and fictive, mixture of times, and serio­ comic response. Tristram and the reader conduct themselves m u c h like Sterne and Archdeacon Blackburne or, alternatively, Mr. Hilyard.

Tristram is quite as fond of pointing out what he might have been or said

^Lewis Perry Curtis, ed. , Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 26-28. or done as is Sterne and quite as adept at making us aware of dual re-

3 sponses.

As this letter illustrates Sterne's techniques of presenting the multiple physical and intellectual facets of an event, a later letter to

Archdeacon Sterne concerning the quarrel inflamed by Sterne's mother

offers an excellent example of Sterne's treatment of a sequence of

events, particularly of causal relationships. On the whole, this later

quarrel was a mor e lengthy and devastating business with possibly grave

consequences, and the prose is a good deal tidier, if rather less dra­ matic. Although the letter is far too long to quote in full, some points m a y be picked out as exemplary. The letter opens with temporal ac­

curacy (" 'tis now three years since I troubled you") and continues with

a strict chronology, but the chronological sequence is so frequently in­

terrupted by explanations of Sterne's motives thaf it nearly disappears.

H e mentions first that he sent Mrs. Sterne to act as intermediary in or­

der to avoid "heat which might arise between you and me " and to insure

a candid hearing since the Archdeacon's "passions would be checked by

^Howard Anderson remarks that, "Far from giving the impres­ sion of having logically thought out everything he wants to say, he typi­ cally is of two minds on a subject. This double point of view convinces the reader that Sterne has not rehearsed his letter. Through this tech­ nique he coolly and objectively undercuts his own apparent enthusiasms, and at the same time broadens his perspective on the subject. " "Sterne's Letters: Consciousness and Sympathy, " in The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed.. Anderson et al. (Lawrence: University of Ka n ­ sas Press, 1966), p. 141. 22 confronting a gentlewoman. " The problem of "heat" suggests two new

reasons for avoiding a personal interview: "I thought you would say no more" and "I saw no reason to trouble you. " The fourth paragraph re­ turns to the beginning of the letter, noting that the case is re-opened af­ ter three years on the advice of friends, and the next three paragraphs,

springing from this remark, describe the good offices of these friends.

The eighth paragraph forms a transition, repeating the idea of

the previous letter quoted, that " M y intent is, by a plain and Honest Na r ­

rative of m y Behavior (& m y Mother's too) to disarm you for the future. "

One imagines the choleric Archdeacon becoming impatient for the begin­

ning of the plain and honest narrative, but his impatience is not quickly

to be satisfied, for after remarking that "It is not necessary to go so far

back as the loss of m y Father Y r Brother" in the ninth paragraph, Sterne

occupies fully a dozen paragraphs detailing the difficulties of the family

after Captain Sterne's death. It is not, in fact, until the twenty-third

paragraph that Sterne discusses the immediate circumstances of the quar­

rel, discussing the current history of his mother and sister and conclud­

ing that his mother has been playing a double game and, in the process,

digressing on his sister's rejection of Mrs. Sterne's offer to find her a

position. These details are followed by half-a-dozen paragraphs des­

cribing Sterne's finances, and the letter ends with two paragraphs of

summary, with a dignified period as conclusion. ^ 23

The writer's persona is most interesting here, for he is a pa­ thetic soul - the sport of a grasping mother as Tristram is later the sport of the ungracious Duchess, Fortune - but still a dignified clergy­ m a n and thoughtful husband, who evinces every sign of practical insight in the midst of pathos. But chiefly interesting is causal sequence; if the truth is to be told, Sterne must mo v e backwards to his father's death and to three years previous, he must move to York and Chester to ex­ plain his mother's and sister's actions; no bit of information seems ir­ relevant to the explanation. And there are the human motives involved:

Sterne presents himself as torn between modesty and the desire for jus­ tice, his uncle as both misled and spiteful, his mother and sister as i m ­ pelled by a mixture of greed, laziness, and snobbery, and, one supposes, as sincerely deceived or self-deceived about Sterne's income. Finally, there are the little turns of phrase that hold this family biography togeth­ er, such as the reference to the plain and honest narrative, or the avowal that "It is not necessary for m y Defence to go so far back" immediately followed by a lengthy history, or the creation of mild suspense in remark­ ing that certain points will be clarified "by and by. " Of course, this let­ ter lacks completely the touch of the humorous, but the structure of human events in the letter is remarkably prophetic of the structure in the novel, for we see that as the quantity of characters and actions increases, the

^Curtis, pp. 32-41. 24 possibility of plain narration diminishes; material grows under our hands,

sequence is disrupted, and prose convolutes.

Finally, the letters as a whole "illustrate how proper art achieves

precisely the objectivity, the distance from self, which is necessary for

true sympathy [for) Sterne; in his letters crosses the space between hi m ­

self and his friends, and from that new vantage point they look out togeth­

er. " Both in structure and tone, there is emphasis on the artlessness

which conceals the art "of communicating an impression of intimate s y m ­

pathy and greater imaginative under standing - the impression of conver­

sation with someone totally present. "5

(i) Positive-negative structures

In the novel, as in the letters, it is the conversational, episto­

lary tone which accounts for some of the trouble we have in judging Sterne's

achievement, for we are constantly moving between the objective and the

sympathetic view. It is the sort of difficulty that always arises when the

narrator is totally present, as contemporary literature shows. Indeed,

we might compare Sterne's approach with that of Ford Maddox Ford,

whose McDowell, like Tristram, adopts the intimate approach; "I shall

just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a

country cottage with a sympathetic soul opposite me. " McDowell's tale

^Anderson, pp. 146-47. 25 is also difficult to interpret; he remarks that "Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Ro m e by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little, foursquare coterie was such another unthinkable event" and, later, that "It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison. " Mouse or Rome, minuet or prison - it is just the sort of choice that Sterne, rather more cheerfully than Ford,

’ur-'-1' • offers the reader and it is to his management of these possibilities in

Tristram Shandy itself that I shall now turn.

Tristram is constantly aware of the multiple difficulties of his task, of the demands of narrative, psychological motivation and literary expression, and it is no surprise to find that some of the most interest­ ing examples of his special style occur when he is directly discussing style. Midway through the novel, he describes his "way" of writing, its origin and rationale.

[1] The ancient Goths of Ge r m a n y , who (the learned Clu- verius is positive) were first seated in the country be­ tween the Vistula and the Oder, and who afterwards in­ corporated the Herculi, the Bugians, and some other Van- dallick clans to 'em, had all of them a wise custom of debating everything of importance to their state, twice; that is, once drunk, and once sober:---Drunk-- that their counsels might not want vigour; and sober that they might not want discretion. [2] N o w m y father being entirely a water-drinker, was a long time gravelled almost to death, in turning this as m u c h to his advantage, as he did every other thing, which the ancients did or said; and it was not till the seventh year

^The Good Soldier (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), pp. 12, 5-7. 26 of his marriage, after a thousand fruitless experiments and devices, that he hit upon an expedient which answered the purpose; and that was when any difficult and mo m e n ­ tous point was to be settled in the family, which required great sobriety, and great spirit, too, in its determination, he fixed and set apart the first Sunday night in the month, and the Saturday night which immediately preceded it, to argue it over, in bed with m y mother; B y which contri­ vance, if you consider, Sir, with yourself [several rows of asterisks] [3] These m y father, humourously enough, called his beds of justice; for from the two different counsels taken in these two different humours, a middle one was generally found out, which touched the point of wisdom as well, as if he had got drunk and sober a hundred times. W It must not be ma d e a secret of to the world, that this answers full as well in literary discussions, as either in military or conjugal; but it is not every author that can try the experiment as the Goths and Vandals did it or if he can, m a y it be always for his body's health; and to do it, as m y father did it, a m I sure it would be always for his soul1 s.-- [5] M y way is this:-- In all nice and ticklish discussion, ( of which, heaven knows, there are but too ma n y in m y book) where I find I cannot take a step without the danger of having either their worships or their reverences upon m y back 1 write one half full, and t'other fasting; or write it all full,-- and correct it fasting; or write it fasting, and correct it full, for they all come to the same thing; So that with a less variation from m y father's plan, than my father's from the Gothick 1 feel myself upon a par with him in his bed of justice, and no way inferior to him in his sec­ ond/ (j6J These different and almost irreconcileable ef­ fects, flow uniformly from the wise and wonderful mechan­ ism of nature, of which, be her's the honour. 0] All that we can do, is to turn and work the machine to the improvement and better manufactury of the arts and sci­ ences. -- Now, when I write full, 1 write as if I was never to write fasting again as long as I live; that is, I write free from the cares, as well as the terrors of the world. [9] I count not the number of my scars, nor does m y fancy go forth into dark entries and bye corners to antedate m y stabs. £10] In a word, m y pen takes its course; and I write on as mu c h from the fullness of my heart, as m y stomach.-- 27 [l l] But when, an' please your honours, I indite fasting, 'tis a different history. [12] I pay the world all possible attention and respect, and have as great a share (whilst it lasts) of that under strapping virtue of discretion, as the best of you. Ql3^ So that betwixt both, I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good-- And all your heads too, provided you understand it. [6.17.434-36]

This passage, comprising the whole of the chapter and present­ ing a typically Shandean appearance of loose association, m a y be divided into three units of thought, remarkably well ordered. Tristram begins with an historical "fact, " shows the application of the historical exemplum first to Walter and then to himself. The historical fact is expressed in a carefully ordered period [l] , with two subordinate clauses in loose, but close, parallel and two explanatory result clauses in perfect anti­ thesis. [2] picks up the causal relation and the antithesis, but, as with everything connected with Walter's use of the intellectual tradition, or­ der disappears almost immediately. There is the vagueness of tempo­ ral sequence ("was a long time gravelled, " "not till the seventh year, "

"after a thousand fruitless experiments") followed by definite time ("the y first Sunday night . . . and the Saturday night") which, however, irre­ sistibly recalls the disastrous effects of Walter's scheduling of his lit­ tle household duties recorded in the first chapter, and which is further undercut by the aposiopestic string of asterisks at the end. Although

[[3] constitutes a new paragraph, it connects with {[2] in continuing the explanation of Walter's method, again in a loose sentence. The reader 28 returns to [i] in [4]] and notes the use of parallel in both the general structure and particular units ("It must not . . . it is not, " "in literary

. . . in military or conjugal," "the Goths and Vandals"), and though the sentence wanders again with the m e m o r y of Walter, the transition from military and conjugal to literary, implying Toby and Walter to

Tristram, is tidily made.

The description of Tristram's own compositional method again picks up the basic drunk-sober antithesis and applies it with elaborate care in the full-fasting antithesis of [V] through jj-Oj . The group of sen­ tences mirrors the tripartite organization of the entire chapter, begin­ ning with general statement ("I write one half full, and t'other fast­ ing"), following with an aesthetic abstraction ("All that we can do, is turn and work the machine"), and applying the full and fasting methods in turn, in sentences loosely periodic and balanced, in "Now, when I write full, " and_"But when, . . . I indite fasting. " Again, the climax is a general statement of the Shandean moral, that the book will do our hearts and heads good, a moral considerably undercut by the abrupt

"provided you understand it, " just as the value of the technique is rather lessened by "they all come to the same thing.

Within this generally balanced structure there is a liberal use of tautotes in the constant repetition of "full" and "fasting, " the use of doublet parallels (e. g. , "turn and work, " "improvement and manufac- tury, " "arts and sciences," "cares" and "terrors," "scars" and "stabs"), and even an elegant anadiplosis ("less variation from m y father's plan, than my father's from the Gothick"). All of these devices hold Qf] through

£l3] together in such a fashion that one reads the series of five paragraphs and nine sentences as if it were a single unit, as of course the curt peri­ od ma y quite properly be read, and certainly the unity of this passage is

striking in comparison with the immediately previous passage of only two

sentences, with its wandering subordination and collapse in a burst of asterisks. W h e n one considers Walter's emphasis on order in both life and rhetoric and Tristram's frequent avowal of being governed by his pen, all disorder in life and rhetoric, one feels that Sterne here uses his style to make his comic point of the ironic contrariness of things.

If we feel that the formal period is an appropriate expression of the gran­

diose historical model which the Shandy father and son follow, we think that the loose structure and the curt period ma y be misapplied. Tris­ tram would seem to deserve the former and Walter the latter, but the

style reverses expectation and makes the comic point.

The novel is shot through with similar textures, often of equally

great length and complication, or greater, a single passage comprising

several pages and crossing numbered chapter divisions before its full

effect is achieved. At the same time that we struggle to find the end of

the thread and are puzzled by inconclusiveness, we are dazzled by in­

clusiveness. 30

Tristram earlier discusses his method in his famous chapter on

Locke [2. 2. 84-86] . Ag ain, an entire chapter falls neatly into three sections: seven sentences of plaintive protest against the critical abili­ ty to find "places" to criticize, followed by eighteen sentences describ­ ing Locke's theory and illustrating it through the story of Dolly, and end­ ing with a refutation of the Lockean explanation. The structure of the first two sections of the passage is generally loose and wandering, ar­ ranged as it is in the form of a chatty dialogue with "Sir Critick, " where­ as the final portion, in which all the elaborate explanation and illustration that preceded are abruptly undercut, is periodic.

One ma y note briefly the movement of the first two parts. Tris­ tram begins by remarking that "there is nothing so foolish" as ordering one's work so that the "gentry of refined taste" m a y denigrate it, and he asserts that he has "left half a dozen places purposely open" for the critics to exercise their ingenuity. Presumably the attentive reader m a y be expected to page back and find the places, but if he does not he will continue to a bit of dialogue. The critic objects to Tristram's charac­ terization of Toby. " How, in the name of wonder! could your uncle

Toby, who, it seems, was a military man, and wh o m you have repre­

sented as no fool, be at the same time such a confused, pudding-head­ ed, muddle-headed fellow, as Go look. " Tristram counters by plung­ ing into possibilities. "I could have replied, " he remarks, with "lan­

guage unurbane" in a reply "valiant, " but he does not for specifically

stylistic reasons: 31

You see as plain as can be, that I write as a ma n of eru­ dition; that even m y similes, m y allusions, m y illus­ trations, m y metaphors, are erudite, and I must sus­ tain m y character properly, and contrast it properly too, else what would become of me ? Why, Sir, I should be undone; at this very mo m e n t that I a m going here to fill up one place against a critick, 1 should have made an opening for a couple. Therefore I answer thus: \j2. 2. 85^]

W h e n the first section of the passage ends thus in the order of the list, the parallels of "sustain" with "contrast," of "would become" with "should be" and "should have made, " and the assertive "Therefore, " we are pre­ pared for an orderly answer to the critic's objections. But, no. Tris­ tram continues by first defining Locke's Essay as a history book, then remarking that the definition is "by the way. " Again, we think that we are to have orderly exposition with the statement that "the cause of ob­ scurity and confusion, in the mind of man, is three-fold" - dull organs, slight and transient impressions, a me m o r y like a sieve - but the triple cause is illustrated in the farrago of Dolly, Robin, sealing-wax, thim­ ble, and brass-jack, in eight sentences in the loosest conversational order. Then, the contrast:

[lj No w you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the confusion in m y uncle Tobyjs dis­ course; and it is for that very reason I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists, to shew the world What it did not arise from. [2]) What it did arise from, I have hinted above, and a fertile cause of obscurity it is, and ever will be,-- and that is the unsteady uses of words which have per­ plexed the clearest and most exalted understandings. [3] It is ten to one (at Arthur's) whether you have ever read the literary histories of past ages; if you have,-- 32

what terrible battles, 'yclept logomachies, have they oc­ casioned and perpetuated with so mu c h gall and ink-shed, that a good natured ma n cannot read the accounts of them without tears in his eyes. M Gentle critick! W h e n thou has weigh'd all this, and consider'd within thyself how mu c h of thy own knowledge, discourse, and conversation has been pestered and dis­ ordered, at one time or other, by this, and this only:-- What a pudder and racket in CO U N C I L S about ouotoL and and in the S C H O O L S of the learned about power and about spirit; about essences, and about quintessences; about substances, and about space. 0 ] What confusion in greater T H E A T R E S from words of little meaning, and as indeterminate a sense;---when thou considers this, thou wilt not wonder at m y uncle Toby1 s perplexities, thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp; his glacis and his covered-way; his ravelin and his half-moon: 'Twas not by ideas, by heaven! his life was put in jeopardy by words. [2.2.87]

Structurally, M and [ 0 form a single period of great formality, with the principal clause withheld until "thou wilt drop, " and one might note that Sterne inserts a full stop before it, so that the sense is withheld not

simply to the end of the sentence but until the following sentence. As we have seen, however, formal division means nothing to Sterne, so one reads the two sentences simply as a single period. The organization is carefully indicated; the principal subordinator "when thou hast weigh'd all this, and consider'd" is repeated immediately before the principal clause: "when thou considers this, thou wilt not"; the internal organi­

zation of the subordinate clause is signalled through the repetition of

"what a pudder and racket" and "what confusion, " the balance of pre­ positional phrases beginning with "about" and "in, " and the constant

doublets, either repetitive or antithetical ("pudder and racket," "es­

sences" and "quintessences"). Last, there is the bond created by the 33 typographical trick of capitalizing the key nouns in the phrases.

Yet, within this formal structure, we detect a doubly comic sty­ listic effect. First, there is an overt appeal to the emotions, and as the formal period is not generally intended to elicit the lacrymose re­ sponse, Sterne deliberately undercuts the stated emotional appeal. Sec­ ond, there is the formal irony of having the most elaborate, compact, and forcible kind of structure used to express the essential unreliabi­ lity - indeed, the danger - of all linguistic structures, even the most basic. In Sterne's combination of polar opposites here, we see that the portion of the chapter which might be called "positive" in that it nar­ rates a perfectly sensible philosophy is characterized by a wandering movement whose sense is destroyed both by structural vagueness and direct statement (while at the same time it nicely mirrors an absurd re­ duction of Lockean theory), while that portion which is "negative" in that it asserts the danger of the word, is characterized by mannered rhetoric.

W e have, then, two systems, the drunk and sober or full and fasting, the formally ordered and the freely loose, and Sterne plays constantly with the implications of his pair of methods.

Just as Locke is disposed of, so is Bacon, in a passage which again combines the stylistic and the physiological. This time we con­ centrate on Walter, and again we feel that clear exposition is intended.

"The two great causes, which conspire with each other to shorten life, says lord Yerulam, are first [jPar2 ^■*ie internal spirit, which like a gentle flame, wastes the body down to death:-- And secondly, the ex­ ternal air, that parches the body up to ashes: which two enemies at­ tacking us on both sides of our bodies together, at length destroy our

organs, and render them unfit to carry on the functions of life" [5. 35. 396^ quotes Walter, and Tristram continues the explanation in an organized

series of antitheses, the internal spirit being repaired by making it

"thick and dense" and by "refrigerating" through opiates and salt-petre, the external frame by unctions which put a stop to all perspiration "sen­

sible and insensible" and by glisters. The precis of Baconian theory is tidy enough, and the conclusion is typical: "What m y father had to say

to m y lord of Verulam's opiates, his salt-petre, and greasy unctions

and glisters, you shall read, but not to day or to morrow: time

presses upon me , m y reader is impatient 1 must get forwards,--

You shall read the chapter at your leisure, (if you chuse it) as soon as

ever the Tristrapoedia is published. "

This passage gains point not only in its disposal of Bacon's theory,

but also in its placement in a larger unit, for it is part of a digression

devoted to Walter's remark that "The whole secret of health depending

upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radi­

cal moisture" [~5. 33. 394] , a fact he proves with "two strokes, the one

at Hippocrates, the other at Lord Verulam" Qj. 34. 395^ . All of Walter's

researches culminate with the memorable bit of advice "that if a child 35 as he grows up, can but be taught to avoid running into fire or water, as either of ’em threaten his destruction,---'twill be all that is needful to be done upon that head" Q j. 36. 397-98] . Walter's medical views oc­ cupy four chapters, and the general effect is similar to that of the chap­ ter on Locke or on Gothick diplomacy - a great deal of explanation de­ voted to a theory that is promptly demolished. In terms of character, it is clear that Tristram's distrust of any single system is in his blood.

Still more, if brief, game is mad e of planned dual systems in the description of Mrs. Wadman's abortive attack on Toby. Tristram, perhaps echoing Walter and certainly indulging his love for double-en­ tendre, comments:

It is a great pity but 'tis certain from every day's ob­ servation of man, that he ma y be set on fire like a can­ dle, at either end provided there is a sufficient wick standing out; if there is not---there's an end of the affair; and if there is by lighting it at the bottom, as the flame in that case has the misfortune generally to put out itself there's an end of the affair again. [8. 15. 553]

Thus,

And so to make sure of both systems, Mrs. W a d m a n predetermined to light m y uncle Toby neither at this end or that; but like a prodigal's candle, to light him, if pos­ sible, at both ends at once. [8. 16. 554]

But,as with Walter's system of solving household problems or Tristram's method of solving compositional difficulties, the plan fails; but in every case the style is similar: there is the sense of beginning on an affirma­ tive note - an historical example, a medical truth, a philosophical trea­ tise, an observed truth. There is fairly steady advance: Walter explains 36

Bacon, Tristram Locke, and Mrs. W a d m a n presses forward with thumb, forefinger and eventually her leg. Then collapse: Walter triumphantly producing the obvious, Tristram throwing Locke aside, and Mrs. Wad- m a n routed by Toby's exasperated "The duce take it. "

True, only the passages on Tristram's technique are fully devel­ oped examples of the technique, with the careful periodic structures de­ veloped at length and contrasted with the loose structures, but it is ar­ guable that the reader, even if not as curious and attentive as Tristram frequently wishes, has the greater elaboration of the early passages firmly in mind, so that the slightest echo of the structures will arouse the same expectations and comic reactions as would their full develop­ ment. The effect is analogous to the musical use of recurrent motifs.

The motif does not, naturally, begin with the first passage quoted above, for Sterne has earlier shown Tristram moving between two ex­ tremes of system and style and even earlier used style to create comedy.

For example, Tristram in one of his excitable moods: "In less than five minutes I shall have thrown m y pen into the fire" But he also plans ahead: "I have but half a score things to do in the time--

I have a thing to n a m e a thing to lament a thing to hope a thing to promise, and a thing to threaten 1 have a thing to suppose---a thing to conceal a thing to chuse, and a thing to pray for. " This series of parallels forms a neat outline, but Tristram does not adhere to the tidy 37 scheme. He names and laments; but then he declares before he hopes; then conceals; then he asks, which was not on the program; and finally he chooses and prays, though the prayer is already answered, an ap­ propriate climax to the prolepsis:

as for your healths, I know, they are mu c h better-- true Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which par­ take of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.

The value of Shandeism appears to lie in movement, and Tristram is more than usually positive here, with the opening outline and its fulfill­ ment, to great degree, but the negative side is clearly indicated, too.

There is the note of imminent disorder of the pen thrown into the fire just salvaged by the outline; the "credit which will attend thee as an au­ thor, shall counterbalance the ma n y evils which have befallen thee as a man"; and the healthful and cheerful values of Shandeism are balanced by two references - "if I live" and "unless this vile cough kills m e " - to ill­ ness and death.

Structurally, the passage is characterized by the movement in time and space that informs the novel. Tristram leads us forward five minutes then promises a chapter on whiskers for next year, and looks forward to Toby's amours, not to come for another three volumes, and to his own fame; he glances back at the preceding four volumes and to

Cervantes; he emphasizes the present place with references to his writing room and to the right and wrong ends of the mysterious Jenny, and finally, the moral is "for the present. " All of these varied references are held together by the "outline, " the words "name, " "declare, "

"hope, " "conceal, " - and "ask" - being italicized; "The thing I lament" opening a paragraph, and the words "chuse" and "prayer" being specif­ ically used. Our total sense of the chapter is thus organized completely in the opening paragraph, but the chapter which follows is the very an­ tithesis of order, since all the material is reduced, as it were, to equality in being "things" connected only insofar as they are all infin­ itives in the "outline. " Death, Toby, Tristram's vocabulary, the

reader's sensibilities, Jenny's ends, the value of Shandeism, the Uto­ pian kingdom of the me r r y and the wise - all merge on that "great wheel of life. " Again, the style conveys clearly the folly of schematization; the passage promising the most orderly of probable developments is one of the most eccentric. But this "Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux" approach does not suggest ridiculous disorder; rather, it

suggests a cheerfully harmonic universe in which the most discrete phenomena blend happily together in the vital being suggested by the infinitive forms.

The point is even more clearly made earlier, in the optative mode, when Tristram interrupts his father's discourse on Locke for

"The Author's Preface, " a section replete with examples of the mo v e ­ ment of which I have been speaking. Tristram begins with a "zealous 39 wish." for wit and judgment in the reader and immediately suggests a series of felicitous and infelicitous effects if the prayer is granted.

Note the contrast, first when we become wits:

Chaste stars! what biting and scratching, and what a rac­ ket and a clatter we should make, what with breaking of heads, and rapping of knuckles, and hitting of sore places, there would be no such things as living for us. C 3 - 20. 195]

Second, when we become me n of judgment:

we should nevertheless, m y dear creatures, be all courtesy and kindness, milk and honey, 'twould be a second land of promise, a paradise upon earth, if there was such a thing to be had, so that upon the whole we should have done well enough.

The structures here are sufficiently similar to indicate conscious use of balance and antithesis: "biting and scratching" versus "courtesy and kindness, " "racket and clatter" versus "milk and honey"; but the trip­ let gerunds of the first passage, "breaking . . . rapping . . . hitting, " become a pair of clauses in the second, one qualifying the other; and, finally, the firmness of conclusion of the first, with its "there would be no such thing, " becomes the qualified "upon the whole we should have done well enough" of the second. In Tristram's view, the negative sense of comic violence in the first passage lends itself mo r e readily to classi­ cal rhetorical neatness than the positive sense of paradise on earth in the second passage; we have here a short example of the use of antith­ esis found in the Gothick debates passage, and, indeed, the whole of the Preface is founded on a similar use of antithesis. The wit-judg­ ment antithesis, which is the basic theme of the Preface, is developed 40 by a most extensive use of parallels of all sorts; in fact, Eugene Hnatko, in a careful count of parallels in Sterne, finds no area of his writing so rich in parallels. But it is not, I think, so mu c h in the single phrases, parallel or not, as in the whole paragraphs and chapters that Sterne's rhetorical structures lead the reader to distrust all schemes. He intro­ duces his elaborate antithesis of wit and judgment with the statement,

"I hate set dissertations, " and when he explains wit and judgment through the example of the knobs on his chair and ends with a gracious dismissal of the pedantic "great wigs and long beards, " the reader quite believes that "the wiping of a looking-glass clean" is not a syllogism and hates set dissertations, too.

Of course, hatred of set dissertations does not prevent one from writing them, as we have seen Tristram do, nor from writing them well.

Tristram's skill ma y be hereditary, for Walter is extremely fond of them and Tristram's fondness for setting up neat rhetorical structures only to deflate them, sooner or later, is most notable in connection with Walter.

Just as Tristram inherits Walter's "beds of justice" notion and reduces it to madness, so he indicates that Walter's schemes always dissolve in hopeless rhetorical confusion; and, just as the son never completes his

"Life and Opinions, " so, and for similar reasons, the father never c o m ­ pletes his Tristrapoedia.

op. cit. , pp. 94-96. Dr. Hnatko's discussion of parallel covers pp. 90-113, and his count of use of parallels is extensive. 41

The passages describing the Tristrapoedia offer further examples of the dual structures under discussion. "In about three years, or s o m e ­ thing more, " Tristram writes, " m y father had got advanced almost into the middle of his work, " and we note with some curiosity that Tristram, too, is on his third annual installment and approximately half-way through

(the sixteenth of forty-three chapters in the fifth of nine volumes). Father, too, suffers from copia: "Matter grows under our hands. Let no ma n say, 'Come I'll write a duodecimo' " Q>. 16. 373^] . Walter's re­ searches lead him to John de la Casse, and it is amusing to note the style of the result:

H o w the holy ma n managed the affair, unless he spent the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers, or play­ ing at primero with his chaplain, would pose any mortal not let into the true secret; and therefore 'tis worth ex­ plaining to the world, was it only for the encouragement of those few in it, who write not so mu c h to be fed as to be famous. I own had John de la Casse, the archbishop of Benevento, for whose m e m o r y (notwithstanding his Galateo) I retain the highest veneration, had he been, Sir, a slender clerk-- of dull wit slow parts costive head, and so forth,-- he and his Galateo might have jogged on together to the age of Methusalah for m e , the phaenomenon had not been worth a parenthesis.-- But the reverse of this was the truth: [5. 16. 373-74^

Again, the statement of non-truth is neatly progressive, a good example of the curt period; the statement of truth, which follows at once, review­ ing la Casse's "fine parts and fertile fancy, " presents an unhappy view of devils tormenting the writer, defines the writer's life "not so mu c h a

state of composition, as a state of warfare" which depends "not half so m u c h upon the degrees of his W I T as his RESISTANCE, " indicates the sad lack of progress in the Tristrapoedia, and draws the melancholy conclusion "That the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them"

Briefly, Walter's efforts at composition are as doomed as Tristram's and the description of them - the wandering sentences, learned allusions, antitheses, the drawing of aphorism from a farrago - is the description of Tristram's own style. Tristram makes the connection plain. "But

'tis m y father's fault, " he says in describing his strange way of telling a story; "and whenever m y brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you s o m e ­ times see in an unsaleable piece of cambrick, running along the whole length of the web, and so untowardly, you cannot so mu c h as cut out a

**" [6. 33.462-63] .

The method is seen, too, in a brief passage when Tristram dis­ cusses the chapter on sash windows.

One would imagine from this (though for m y own part I somewhat question it) that m y father before that time had actually wrote that remarkable chapter in the Tristra­ poedia, which to m e is the most original and entertaining one in the whole book; and that is the chapter upon sash- windows , with a bitter Phillipick at the end of it, upon the forgetfulness of chamber-maids. 1 have but two rea­ sons for thinking otherwise.

The two reasons suggest, of course, the "why" of Tristram's opinions.

As we might expect, the false supposition is displayed in elegant detail; 43

First, Had the matter been taken into consideration, before the event happened, m y father certainly would have nailed up the sash window for good and all; which, considering with what difficulty he composed books, he might have done with ten times less trouble, than he could have wrote the chapter: this argument I foresee holds good against his writing the chapter, even after the event; but 'tis obviated under the second reason, which I have the honour to offer to the world in support of m y opinion, that m y father did not write the chapter upon sash-windows and chamberpots, at the time supposed, and that is this. That, in order to render the Tristrapoedia complete, 1 wrote it myself. (jj. 26. 383-84j

Here one is struck by the elaboration of the prose of the first two para­

graphs, the trailing subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases of the

first passage; the copious chain of reasoning in the second passage with

its repetition of the main points of dispute and of forensic language ("First, "

"which, considering," "argument I foresee, " "second reason"). Then,

the flat truth: "I wrote it myself. " Too, we have a further example of

Sterne's use of the mode of possibility - "would imagine, " "had the ma t ­

ter, " "would have nailed up, " "might have done" - though none of these

possibilities has, in fact, anything to do with the chapter on sash-win­

dows. The curious reader, however, is as usual asked to consider the

possibilities as thoroughly as - in this case, m u c h more thoroughly than -

the actuality. He does, of course, consider them for they are central to

the theme, as well as often part of the style of the novel, as we shall see

presently.

Water is notorious for the complication of his rhetorical machin­

ery, for his elaboration and allusion and general heightening or pomposity 44 of style, and just as notoriously he is an object of critical comedy for this predilection. Tristram early makes the point of the satire on Walter in a structure mu c h like those just examined, when he gives Walter's theory of names.

4 Whether this was the case of the singularity of m y father's notions, or that his judgement, at length became the dupe of his wit; or how far, in ma n y of his notions, he might, tho' odd, be absolutely right; the reader, as he comes to them, shall decide. All I maintain here is, that in this one, of the influence of Christian names, however it gain'd footing, he was serious; he was all uniformity; he was systematical, and like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every­ thing in nature to support his hypothesis. [l. 19. 53]]

The burden of the decision of "whether this was . . . or that . . . or how far" is put on the reader; we are uncertain of the source or truth of Wa l ­ ter's opinion; but the fact and the dismal results of systematization are presented in a series of neat parallels and balanced clauses with the triple repetition of "he was" and the doublets "Heaven and earth" and "twist and torture. "

Later, Walter's theory on noses has more particular, but equally disastrous, effects:

N o w Ambrose Paraeus convinced m y father, that the true and efficient cause of what had engaged so mu c h the atten­ tion of the world, and upon which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so mu c h learning and fine parts, was neither this nor that, but that the length and goodness of the nose was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity in the nurse's breast, as the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was, by the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same or­ gan of nutrition in the hale and lively, which, tho' happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as 45

his nose was so snubb'd, so rebuff'd, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad me s u r a m suam legitimam; but that in case of the flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother's breast, by sinking into it, quoth Paraeus, as into so mu c h butter, the nose was comforted, nourish'd, plump'd up, refresh'd, refocillated, and set a growing for ever.

Exquisite form and ludicrous content. There is the statement of fact based on authority; the basic antithesis is mirrored in minor parallels, and the connection of the whole curt period is clearly indicated by repeti- tion of keywords and phrases, by logical connectives, and by paramoion; again, there is a generally tripartite organization of statement, negative aspects of statement and positive aspects of statement. To be sure, the whole structure is collapsed.

I have but two things to observe of Paraeus; first, that he proves and explains all this with the utmost chastity and de­ corum of expression:---for which ma y his soul for ever rest in peace! And, secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, which Ambrose Paraeus his hypothesis effec­ tually overthrew, it overthrew at the same time the sys­ tem of peace and harmony of our family; and for three days together not only embroiled matters between my father and m y mother, but turned likewise the whole house and every thing in it, except m y uncle Toby, quite upside down. [3. 38. 234-35]

The sense of deflation is neatly mirrored in the exclamatory burst of the first observation, in the trailing modification of the second.

Similarly, Walter's belief in the power of the name or, more generally, the word, appears in his recipe for consolation in sorrow:

'Tis either Plato, or Plutarch, or Seneca, or Xenophon, or Epictetus, or Theophrastus, or Lucian or some one 46

perhaps of later date either Cardan, or Budaeus, or Petrarch, or Stella or possibly it ma y be some divine or father of the church, St. Austin, or St. Cyprian, or Barnard, who affirms that it is an irresistable and natural passion to weep for the loss of our friends or children-- and Seneca (I'm positive) tells us somewhere, that such griefs evacuate themselves best by that particular chan­ nel. And accordingly we find, that David wept for his son Absolom Adrian for his Antinous Niobe for her children, and that Apollodorus and Crito both shed tears for Socrates before his death. M y father managed his affliction otherwise. . . . [5. 3. 35l]]

This passage is an excellent example of the technique described in con­ nection with Walter's debates. The first unit ma y be taken as historical truth. Though Tristram is a bit uncertain of his sources, he has cer­ tainly a sufficiency of them, and he lists them in a neatly wrought period.

The reversal of the thought is equally neat in structure. Father's real practice is, however, delayed a full page so that Tristram ma y "squeeze in a story" - actually an exemplum drawn from Cicero - but when it comes,

Walter's character is fully displayed:

[^Walter's eloquence^ was indeed his strength and his weakness, too. His strength for he was by nature elo­ quent, and his weakness for he was hourly a dupe to it; and provided an occasion in life would but permit him to shew his talents, or say either a wise thing, a witty or a shrewd one (bating the case of a systematick misfor­ tune) he had all he wanted. [5. 3.352]

The sense of progression, of building, so to speak, upon the foundation of precedent and historical awareness of the pagan and Christian tradition in sorrow, dissolves as Walter seizes the opportunity "to say" with gusto, and Tristram records his father's oration on death, an elegant sermon 47 on life, decay, and death, which leads us through time to Troy and Baby

Ion, through space to the Levant and Asia. As a conventional sermon, with text, exempla both historical and personal, and moral, Walter’s discourse is admirable. The trouble is, of course, that the occasion is the reception of the news of Bobby's death, and a whole chapter de­ voted to a catalogue of authorities and a formal sermon seems but slight ly appropriate to the occasion. The reader, though distracted from pathos by the flow of words, m a y think less of Walter here than at any

other point in the novel, and Sterne makes the point clear by framing the rush of rhetoric between two "wordless" scenes, producing a cir­

cular effect in miniature. Immediately before Walter's outburst, Toby

" h u m m e d over the letter" [5. 2. 35(f], and immediately after, Trim

drops his hat and expresses most strikingly: "The one proceeding from

period to period, by metaphor and allusion, and striking the fancy as

he went along, (as m e n of wit and fancy do) with the entertainment and

pleasantry of his pictures and images, ^par.^j The other, without wit

or antithesis, or point, or turn, this way or that; but leaving the images

on one side, and the pictures on the other, going strait forwards as

nature could lead him, to the heart" []5. 6. 359]]. Stylistically, the

sense of Walter's inadequacy is conveyed in high style, burlesque per­

haps, but structurally impressive. W e cannot really quarrel with

Walter's views on death, conventional to the religious and philosophi­

cal tradition as they are, and we cannot but be taken with the excellence of Walter's eloquence. Our objections arise only from Tris­ tram's indication that the eloquence of the style is not suitable to the moment. O n the other hand, Walter uses eloquence as relief, and Tris­ tram himself remarks often enough on the power of words to distract from a harsh reality or to create a new reality. The effect of this pas­ sage seems specifically emotional, as opposed to the mo r e purely in­ tellectual points passages examined previously made.

One final note in connection with Walter's style is the final re­ duction of Walter's stylistic concerns to complete absurdity at the end of this same volume, in the chapter on auxiliaries. "Now the use of the

Auxiliaries, " Walter tells Yorick, "is, at once to set the soul a going by herself upon the materials as they are brought her, " and he illus­ trates with the white bear. The mod e of possibility - "Have I ever . . . might I ever . . . A m I ever . . . Ought I ever . . . Or can I ever . . . '

- goes on for fully twenty-five brief sentences, all concerned with an

object totally foreign to the experience of. the company. Walter's point

is well taken: he can, as he says, "open new tracks of enquiry, and m a k e every idea engender millions" [j5. 43. 406-407^ , and the whole

passage recalls vividly the "questions of narrative" still taught in school

of journalism (and suggests, one might feel in an era of propaganda, the

total irrelevance of language to reality once again). But is this not ex­

actly what Tristram himself does, with his succession of possibilities

and his expectation of the reader's curiosity? Just as Walter finds himself happy as long as he can talk, and Tristram writes his book to compensate for his unhappy life, so the reader presumably is to find his mind and body cheered by the contemplation of endless possibility.

Walter ma y indeed appear heartless and pompous; he m a y b e Sterne's chief vehicle for his satire of formal eloquence, but he is equally, in his theory and often in his practice, a true parent of Tristram's book, for not only does Tristram explore modality with as great a gusto as his father - there is, in fact, almost only modality, for substance is

so vague - but also he uses the formal structures of which his parent is so fond, as well as his techniques of research and combing of authori­ ties. Of course, Tristram does not take the full comfort in words that

Walter finds; in his attitude he more closely resembles Toby, whose life was put in jeopardy by words and to w h o m we shall now turn.

The inarticulate Toby shares a good ma n y characteristics with his articulate brother Walter, in spite of striking differences between them, and their similarities are most notable in what one m a y call their literary endeavors. Both have something of importance, at least to themselves, to say; both go to extravagant lengths in research, in lay­

ing foundations, to say it; both, like Tristram, never quite get it said;

and Tristram uses similar techniques to dramatize Toby's lack of co m ­ m a n d of language as he uses to dramatize Walter's excessive c o m m a n d

of words. Tristram remarks, in connection with the description of the

Tristrapoedia, that Walter’s project is not unlike Toby's: 50

and accordingly m y father gave himself up to it with as m u c h devotion as ever m y uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of projectils. The difference between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia M y father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture to him. p. 16. 372-73^]

It is not strictly true that Toby's research has been confined to Tartag- lia, for like Walter he consulted numerous theorists and, also like Wa l ­ ter, his original task covered some three years. The passage describ­ ing Toby's first researches is stylistically interesting as an example, early in the novel, of the rhetorical patterns we have been examining:

C d But the desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. DO The mor e m y uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it; by the same process and elec­ trical assimilation, as I told you, thro' which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu'd, be-pictur'd, be-butterflied, and be- fiddled. [3] The mor e m y uncle Toby drank of this sweet foun­ tain of science, the greater was the heat and impatience of his thirst, so that, before the first year of his con­ finement had well gone round, there was scarce a forti­ fied town in Italy or Flanders , of which, by one means or other, he had not procured a plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully collating therewith the his­ tories of their sieges, their demolitions, their improve­ ments, and new works, all which he would read with that intense application and delight, that he would forget hi m ­ self, his wound, his confinement, his dinner. [4] In the second year m y uncle Toby purchased Ramelli and Cataneo, translated from the Italian; likewise Ste- vinus, Marolis, the Chevalier de Ville, Lorini, Coehorn, Sheeter, the Count de Pagan, the Marshal Yauban, Mons. Blondel, with almost as ma n y more books of military 51

architecture, as Don Quixote was found to have of chivalry, when the curate and barber invaded his library. Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in August, ninety-nine, m y uncle Toby found it necessary to understand a little of projectiles:-- And having judged it best to draw his knowledge from the fountain-head, he be­ gan with N. Tartaglia, who it seems was the first ma n who detected the imposition of a canon-ball's doing all that mischief under the notion of a right line. [6] This N. Tartaglia proved to m y uncle Toby to be an impossible thing. [Y] Endless is the Search of Truth! Ql. 3. 88-89]

Matter does indeed grow under our hands in this passage which is beauti­ fully exemplary of Tristram writing when sober and fasting. A lengthy passage, comprising half the chapter, it ma y be divided into three logi­ cal units: aphorism, illustration of aphorism, and restatement of ap­ horism. The initial aphorism j]l]] is expressed in a brief loose sentence with the simile in parallel. £2] opens with a causal sequence in loosely parallel structure and ends with an explanatory simile and a neat para- moin. [Y]] repeats the causal parallel opening of [Y] , thus taking us back nearly to our starting point, and continues with two parallel struc­ tures ("so that" and "that"), both of which, as in [2]] , are terminated by parallels, four nouns and four noun phrases, so nearly similar as to be isocolonic. [Y] and £5] each begins a new paragraph but neither ac­ tually indicates a new unit of thought, for both are verbally connected with the first result clause of in their emphasis on temporal se­ quence. [4 ] repeats the rather tiresome listing technique of ['2 J and

[[3"] and ends, like £2]] , with a simile. [5]} involves a quite complicated 52 sequence of causal relationships and ends in [^6^] , not with a dying fall but with a thump. [7J completes a full circle, returning us to and repeating it in even more general and aphoristic terms.

The general movement here is intellectually circular and- gr a m ­ matically parenthetical. W h y does Tristram state the aphorism? B e ­ cause of Toby's experience. And Toby's experience leads to the restate­ ment of the aphorism. Aside from the principal effect, which is primari­ ly comic since so mu c h effort is expended to illustrate what ma y indeed be more truism than aphorism, two effects m a y be noted. First there is a strong impression of order conveyed by the succession of causal structures, the extensive use of parallelism, and the general use of repe­ tition of structure in both major and minor units. Second there is the finale, the causal sequence concerning Toby and Tartaglia, which notably lacks the parallelism and simile of the preceding sentences, notes the

"mischief" of the "notion of a straight line, " leads to Toby's confusion, and is immediately followed by the exclamatory repetition of the apho­ rism. In tone, the passage is positive: balanced, progressive, asser­ tive; even the final impossibility of Toby's comprehending Tartaglia is expressed in positive terms ("This proved to be"), and the impression of Toby's defeat is softened by the reassertion of the aphorism.

Syntactically, we see again the fusion of the Ciceronian and Sene- can styles, and we agree with Hnatko who, after comparing Sterne's logico-syntactic patterns with those of Burton and Montaigne, concludes 53 that "Sterne attempts to make his periods loose and curt, to imitate the seemingly disjunctive movement and poetic skips which defy pattern, but very often the firm pattern of recognizable structure underlies the seeming looseness. As a whole, if we consider the passage as a sin­ gle oratorical period, the generally circular movement, the careful no­ tation of causal relations, and the equally careful marking of temporal movement suggest that the major me m b e r s of the sentence are "so placed with reference to a central or climactic me m b e r " - in this case, the aph- o r i sm - "that they point forward or back to it and give it its appropriate emphasis. "9 In its parts, if we consider each sentence separately, the similes closing and M . the wandering subordinate clause closing

C O . and the even more wandering one closing and the extensive use of catalogue suggest the loose style in their emphasis on the develop­ ment of thought through indication of process and on a final "open-ended­ ness" of effect. Verbally, the lengthy simile of [^2]] is most interesting.

One notes, first, the combination of Latinate and French terms ("as­ similation, " "connoisseurs, " "incumbition") with the less elegant "be- virtu'd" series; second, the scientific air of "process," "electrical

^ Ibid., p. 89

9 This definition of the oratorical period is given in Morris Croll, "The Baroque Style in Prose, " in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. M a x Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 224. 54 assimilation, " "connoisseurs, " and "friction" carried forward by the re­ ferences to science, research, and mathematics in D L M . and [s]; third, the musical reference, "be-fiddled, " and the painterly reference,

"be-pictur'd, " which, though single notes here, suggest the entire i m ­ portant motif of art in the novel, and possibly (though one might well

"read into" the effect), the musical reference suggests the aural effects of the consonances in the proper names of {^4J .

Almost exactly the same structure occurs later, when Toby con­ structs his model town and busily follows the campaigns of the Duke of

Marlborough, step by step, lodgement by lodgement, battered bastion by battered bastion. "The first year's campaign was carried on from beginning to end, in the plain and simple method I've related. [ par f]

In the second year, in which m y uncle Toby took Liege and Ruremond, he thought he might afford the expense of four handsome draw-bridges, of two of which I have given an exact description, in the former part of my work" D .22.446J. And so on, through two chapters, winding along "this track of happiness for ma n y years. "

The search for truth, one is constantly reminded, is endless.

If such passages display Sterne at his positive best and if we take them as wholes, with the loose catalogues in subordinate units subsumed in the generally periodic effect of the whole, we see a loosely periodic structure echoing the technique of such passages as that in [2. 2. 8 7 ] . 55

The chief effect is one of expansion, of quick movement forward and outward, suggested by the constant temporal references and the cata­ logues of objects, the successions of verbs and participles, all, of course, appropriate to the incessant - if objectless - movement of the hobby-horse, and finally by the similes, which suggest still further worlds of the arts and sciences and even the universe itself.

But, just as Walter's methods end in madness and Tristram's composition is an uneven thread at best, so Toby's progression is inter­ rupted. His experience with Tartaglian theory of projectiles is para­ digmatic of his own experience and of Tristram's full and drunken style:

[l] No sooner was m y uncle Toby satisfied which road the cannon-ball did not go, but he was insensibly led on, and resolved in his mind to enquire and find out which road the ball did go: For which purpose he was obliged to set off afresh with old Maltus, and studies him devoutly.-- [2] He proceeded next to Gallileo and Torricellius, where­ in, by certain geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a P A R A B O L A , or else an H Y P E R B O L A , and that the parameter, or latus rectum, of the conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct ratio, as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence, form'd by the breech upon an horizontal plane; and that the semi-parameter, stop! m y dear uncle Toby, stop! go not one foot further into this thorny and bewilder'd track, intricate are the steps! intricate are the mases of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitch­ ing phantom, K N O W L E D G E , will bring upon thee. [^3^] O m y uncle! fly fly fly from it as from a serpent.-- [V] Is it fit, good-natur'd man! thou should'st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings? [jij Alas! 'twill exasperate thy symptoms, check thy perspirations, evaporate thy spirits, waste thy animal strength, dry up thy radical moisture, bring thee, into a costive habit of body, impair 56

thy health, and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age. ^ m y uncle' m Y uncle T o b y ! [j2. 3. 9Cf]

There is, here, a general sense of causal and temporal progression, but there is too an immediate sense of loosening because of the anas- trophic opening, the initial negative ("No sooner," "did not go"), and pair of doublet verbs, both of which seem redundant. There is the ver­ bal confusion of " P A R A B O L A , or else an HY P E R B O L A " followed at

once by the spate of mathematical jargon. (It is, however, interesting to note that Sterne makes perfect mathematical sense and employs cor­

rect terminology for describing the movement of the missile, except

for the term "hyperbola" which makes nonsense of the whole. Too, the

"as the whole line" passage, which grammatically suggests clarification

of the preceding clause is, in fact, a repetition of it in different terms.

The interest in the confusion between "parabola" and "hyperbola" lies

in the fact that, were the missile to describe the latter curve, it would

never land. One inclines to suspect that here Sterne introduces the per­

fect objective correlative of his work.) Further, there is the abrupt

shift from narrative to vocative, with the apostrophe rich in exclama­

tion points, in parallel catalogues, in synonymous indications of disaster.

Verbally, one notes again the scientific, Latinate tone of muc h of the vo­

cabulary; the Biblical tone of the references to " K N O W L E D G E " and "ser­

pent"; and, most important to the general sense of hobby-horsical mo v e ­

ment, the vocabulary of travel ("road, " "go, " "led on, " "set off, " upiro-

ceeded. " etc. ). 57

Syntactically, the passage falls into two parts clearly marked by the shift from narrative past to vocative-imperative present in mid- [YJ .

The movement of the first part begins in confusion and continues with ever increasing confusion of subordination: the rather breathless "For which purpose, " followed by "wherein" separated by a fairly long modi­ fier from its verb, "he found, " and followed by the tangled noun clause.

If the chief function of the loose period is the reflection of the movement of thought, the looseness of the connectives ("Wherein, " "and that, " "was

. . . as") admirably reflects such movement. But it is movement with­ out progress. The movement of the second part is clearly circular: i m ­ perative, vocative, imperative repeated; vocative, imperative, paren­ thetical rhetorical question; reasons for second imperative; repetition of second vocative. Within this circular movement, one is principally struck by tautotes.

The passage embodies an extension of the mo o d suggested by the

"desire of knowledge" passage, with [Y] - mid- [Y] parallel to (jjJ -

[Y]] and mid- [_z\ - {YT] parallel to [j7^ in effect. In both cases there is the sense of confusion rescued; in the first passage, by reassertion of the aphorism; in the second, by complete change of mode and tense.

In the first, causal and temporal progression is enforced by subordinate structures; in the second, causal and temporal progression disappear in a confusion of mathematical jargon quite difficult to follow and doubtless purposely satiric. The parallel structures which, in the first, contribute 58 to a sense of richness of research, although comically exaggerated, in the second describe a series of dreadful effects, again comically ex­ tended. On the intellectual, or spiritual, level, one senses in the style the paradoxical quality of existence, for one feels that cause is trace­ able and ma y be sensibly presented but that effect is unforeseeable and m a y be controlled only by the most violent stylistic devices of apostro­ phe and tautotes. If the endlessness of the search for truth in words is the cause of Toby's initial researches and if Toby's eventual decline is the effect of those researches, we see that cause is likely to present it­

self in passages of neat formal periodicity and elegantly symmetrical

structure, but that effect tends to produce the loose period and the trail­

ing and repetitious sentence.

To return for a mo m e n t to Walter, I should like to cite his re­

search into the problem of Tristram's breeches, for as Toby ransacks

Trataglia, Walter turns to Rubenius:

Albertus Rubenius informed m y father that the Romans manufactured stuffs of various fabricks, some plain, some striped, others diapered throughout the whole contexture of the wool, with silk and gold That linen did not begin to be in co m m o n use, till towards the de­ clension of the empire, when the Egyptians coming to settle amongst them, brought it into vogue. That persons of quality and fortune distinguished themselves by the fineness and whiteness of their cloaths; . . . [6.19.441^]

and so on for a full chapter, employing constant lists and balanced and

antithetical parallel structures. The result, as one might suppose, is 59 identical with those seen before:

Rubenius told him, that the point was still litigating amongst the learned:---That Egnatius, Sigonius, Bossius Ticinensis, Bayfius, Budaeus, Salmasius, Lipsius, Lazius, Isaac Casaubon, and Joseph Scaliger, all differed from each other, and he from them: That some took it to be the button, some the coat itself, others only the col­ our of it:---That the great Bayfius, in his Wardrobe of the ancients, chap. 12. honestly said, he knew not what it was, whether a tibula, a stud, a button, a loop, a buckle, or clasps and keepers.-- M y father lost the horse, but not the saddle They are hooks and eyes, said m y father and with hooks and eyes he ordered m y breeches to be made. (^6. 19. 441-42]

Walter's confusion is here rescued by simple assertion, a strongminded counterpart to Tristram's rescuing Toby first through reasserting the aphorism and next through a series of exclamations. Nor is Walter un­ like Toby in temporal progression:

The first twenty or five-and-twenty miles he did nothing in the world but fret and teaze himself, and indeed m y m o ­ ther too, about the cursed expence, which, he said might every shilling of it have been saved; then what vexed him mor e than every thing else was the provoking time of the year, which, as I told you, was towards the end of September, when his wall-fruit, and green gages especial­ ly, in which he was very curious, were just ready for pull­ ing:-- "Had he been whistled up to London, upon a T o m Fool's errand in any other month of the whole year, he should not have said three words about. " £l. 16. 4l]

The chapter continues with the reader led from the stage of the journey

to Walter's litany of vexation and then pulled back again to the sequence

of stages: "For the next two whole stages, " " F r o m Stilton, all the way

to Grantham, " " F r o m Grantham, till they had crossed the Trent. " And

it ends as such progresses usually do, in nothing, for Mrs. Shandy, sole 60 auditress of the complaints "fretting successively in his mind, " only

"complained to m y uncle Toby, he would have tired out the patience of any flesh alive. "

It seems, then, that the similarities in style are meant to en­ force our sense of the similarities among the characters. There is

Walter, constantly researching and compiling and finally concluding with his own hook-and-eye - the very portrait of a pedant; there is Toby, stumping into mock-battle, with the aid of his newspapers, adding and improving - the epitome of busy-ness; and here is Tristram, following both examples. And none of them accomplishes anything. The point would seem to be, of course, that Sterne wishes to suggest the inextri­ cable confusion of sublunary human existence; not meaninglessness in the contemporary sense of absurdity in vacuo, but meaninglessness sub specie aeternitatis. On this earth, it all has a tendency to come to the same thing. Walter's intellectual activities, devoted to abstractions;

Toby's practical endeavors, centered on things; Tristram's combina­ tion of both the abstract and concrete in his literary endeavors - all are doomed to failure, at least to incompletion, in the long run. But c o m ­ pletion ma y be found, either in another sphere or in the complementary qualities of the character's activities, so Tristram's world is more comically than tragically absurd, as the playful paradoxes of the style show. 61

The style is especially delightful when all three of the elements we have been considering - the characterization of Walter and Toby and the fascination of Tristram with his own project - unite in one conversa­ tion.

— [1] Then it can be out of nothing in the whole world, quoth m y uncle Toby, in the simplicity of his heart, but MODESTY: -- M y sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a ma n come so near her #***. I will not say whether m y uncle Toby had completed the sentence or not; 'tis for his advantage to suppose he had, as, I think he could have added no O N E W O R D which would have improved it. [3] If, on the contrary, m y uncle Toby had not fully arrived at his period's end, then the world stands in­ debted to the sudden snapping of m y father's tobacco-pipe, for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, which Rhetoricians stile the Aposiopesis.-- (4] Just heaven! how does the Poco piu and the Poco me n o of the Italian artists; the insensible M O R E or LESS, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statue ! (]5j H o w do the slight touches of the chisel, the pencil, the pen, the fiddle-stick, et caetera, give the true swell, which gives the true pleasure!-- (6j O m y countrymen! be nice; be cautious of your language; and never, O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend. — hi " M y sister, mayhap, " quoth m y uncle Toby, "does not choose to let a ma n come so near her ****. " [jQ Ma k e this dash, 'tis an Aposiopesis, C9] Take the dash away, and write Backside, 'tis Bawdy. [Jlo] Scratch Backside out, and put Cover'd-way in, 'tis a Metaphor; and, I dare say, as fortification ran so mu c h in m y uncle Toby's head, that if he had been left to have added one word to the sentence, that word was it. Ln] But whether that was the case or not the case;-- or whether the snapping of my father's tobacco-pipe so critically, happened thro' accident or anger, will be seen in due time. \Z. 6. 100-101^ 62

Toby's inarticulateness here produces, contrarily enough, both a de­ fense of the study of nuance and an elaborate example of the style. The eleven statements form three principal units of thought, C O - M con­ stituting the basic theme, Toby's and Tristram's statements, [ 4 ] - [6] forming a long parenthesis suggested by "Aposiopesis, " [ 7 ] r epeating

[l], (ji} - [10] forming still another parenthesis suggested by "Aposio­ pesis, " and Q lj again repeating one of the basic themes. If one views the passage musically, one has theme, development, theme, counter­ point, theme, three units coming to a full circle, for we are finally still uncertain of the "real" meaning of ****. In its syntax, the passage dis­ plays the circular movement, the parenthetical structure, the extensive parallelism and repetition - all the techniques seen before. Verbally, the vocabulary drawn from the criticism of music and art and of formal rhetoric, is important in suggesting the kind of patterns that Sterne in­ tends to form in his prose. And finally, one notes again the emphasis " on causal relations in [3]] , [J5 ~|, Q6^ > C*?] , [iQ3 > relations quite destroyed by the fact that all are based on ****, and we are no more certain at the end of what we have been considering than we are with

Walter's use of auxiliaries in connection with polar bears.

Less elaborate versions of the pattern occur in connection with other of the characters, too, enforcing our sense of the curious con­ cord in the discord of Shandy Hall as the narrator spins his tale, as for example, Trim and Susannah in this conversation: 63

Whether Susannah, by taking her hand too suddenly from off the corporal's shoulder, (by the whisking about of her passions) broke a little the chain of his reflections-- Or whether the corporal began to be suspicious, he had got into the doctor's quarters, and was talking more like the chaplain than himself-- Or whether ------Or whether for in all such cases a ma n of invention and parts m a y with pleasure fill a couple of pages with supposi­ tions which of all these was the cause, let the curious physiologist, or the curious anybody determine 'tis cer­ tain, at least, the corporal went on thus with his harangue. Q>. 10. 364-653

Again, a double possibility is suggested and yet further possibilities are

implied; again, the final decision is left to the curious reader; and the

question of causal relation is again central.

Towards the end of the novel, a further set of examples occurs

in connection with Mr s . Wadman. There is first a passage recalling

those describing the progress of Toby's researches or the Shandys1 re­

turn from London:

The first night, as soon as the corporal had conducted m y uncle Toby up stairs, which was about ten Mrs. W a d m a n threw herself into her a r m chair, and crossing her left knee with her right, which formed a resting-place for her elbow, she reclin'd her cheek upon the palm of her hand, and leaning forwards, ruminated till midnight upon both sides of the question. The second night she went to her bureau, and having or­ dered B_ridget_ to bring her a couple of fresh candles and leave them upon the table, she took out her marriage-set­ tlement, and read it over with great devotion: and the third night (which was the last of m y uncle Toby's stay) when B ridget had pull'd down the night-shift, and was as­ saying to stick in the corking pin-- With a kick of both heels at once, but at the same time the most natural kick that could be kick'd in her sit­ uation for supposing ****** *** to be the sun in its meri­ dian, it was a north-east kick she kick'd the pin out of 64

her fingers the etiquette which hung upon it down-- down it fell to the ground, and was shivered into a thou­ sand atoms. F r o m all which it was plain that widow Wa d m a n was in love with my uncle Toby. [8. 9. 5 4 8 ]

The temporal progression here ends on a positive note, but at the same time we are reminded of the Shandy marriage contract, earlier cited at such length and productive of so ma n y difficulties, and of the verbal a m ­ biguities, in the ***** and double-entendres, of the previous passages.

Shortly after, the negative note appears, in the description of Mrs. Wad- man's eye:

N o w of all the eyes, which ever were created from your own, Mada m , up to those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of eyes as ever stood in a head there never was an eye of them all, so fitted to rob m y uncle Toby of his repose, as the very eye, at which he was looking it was not, Mada m , a rolling eye a romping or a wanton one nor was it an eye spark­ ling petulant or imperious of high claims and terri­ fying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of human nature, of which m y uncle Toby was made up but 'twas an eye full of gentle salutations and soft responses speaking not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ, in which ma n y an eye I talk to, holds coarse converse but whispering soft like the last low accents of an expiring saint "How can you live c o m ­ fortless, captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on or trust your cares to? " [j8. 25. 578^

W e are aware of both what the eye is not and what it is, of both Mrs. Wad- m a n in the narrative past and Ma d a m in the present, of the musical and even the theological claims of eyes; and finally, the complex elements are siammed up in Tristram's remarks immediately preceding the climax, or anti-climax, of Toby's amours: 65

W e live in a world beset on all sides with mysteries and riddles and so 'tis no matter else it seems strange, that Nature, who makes everything so well to answer its destination, and seldom or never errs, unless for pastime, in giving such forms and aptitudes to whatever passes through her hands, that whether she designs for the plough, the caravan, the cart or whatever other creature she models, be it but an asse's foal, you are sure to have the thing you wanted; and yet at the same time should so eter­ nally bungle it as she does, in making so simple a thing as a married man. Whether it is in the choice of the clay or that it is frequently spoiled in the baking; by an excess of which a husband ma y turn out too crusty (you know) on the one hand or not enough so, through defect of heat, on the other or whether this great Artificer is not so attentive to the little Platonic exigencies _of that part of the species, for whose use she is fabricating this or that her Lady­ ship sometimes scarce knows what sort of a husband will do 1 know not: we will discourse about it after supper. [9. 22. 625-26]]

The counter pointed themes of the perfection of Nature's plan in the ab­ stract and the error of Nature's performance in the particular case form an antithesis incapable of synthesis - "I know not. " The mysteries and riddles of existence lead to the neat doublet and triplet phrases ("seldom or never," "forms and aptitudes," "the plough, the caravan, the cart") of the first paragraph and the quartet of antithetical clauses of the second.

But whether it is the material, the formation of the material, the great

scheme itself, or the vagaries of the human mind, Tristram cannot de­ termine. At this point in the novel, of course, one is fairly certain that the plan of Nature is perfect and the human mind imperfect, but the fact

remains that even when near his conclusion, in which nothing is con­

cluded, Tristram still presents the evidence and allows the reader to

draw the conclusion. And, as the narrative of Tristram ends in the 66 famous cock and bull, so the interpolated tales dissolve in final con­ fusion: in Slawkenbergius' Tale, Strasburg decays "owing to this only, that Noses have ever so run in their heads, that the Strasburgers could not follow their business" [~4. 2 1 \\ . In the story of Amandus and Amanda, a nine-chapter journey to the lover's tomb ends in nothing, for "When I c a m e there was no tomb to drop it tear upon" C7 . 40. 532] . Trim's narrative of the King of Bohemia, incessantly interrupted by Toby's liter­ ary critique, shades into the tale of Trim and the beguine, which in turn fades away in aposiopesis: "Whether the corporal's amour terminated precisely in the way my uncle Toby described it, is not material; it is enough that it contain'd in it the essence of all the love-romances which ever have been wrote since the beginning of the world" {^8. 22. 575^] .

It is true that the logico-syntactic patterns I have been describ­ ing, in which an elaborate structure leads nowhither or a loose struc­ ture presents necessary material or a combination of the two leaves the reader a perfectly free choice, do not occur at such great length or so frequently in the latter as in the earlier parts of the novel. Yet, the repetition of the patterns, as in the case of Mrs. Wadman, creates a series of echoes which contribute to our sense of completion. Wayne

Booth's argument that Sterne did complete Tristram Shandy is, then, well supported by Sterne's style. Morally, the repetition of patterns creates a sense of order which transcends the apparent confusion, for

Sterne's prose creates a kind of curious order which comically patterns and thus makes endurable the endless confusion of life. 67

(ii) Conditional and volitive structures

A sense of order, somehow and somewhere, is particularly ap­ parent in Sterne's use of a pattern quite similar to his "dual system"

of presentation, that is, the pattern formed by a series of conditional

and volitive structures throughout the novel.

Tristram is particularly addicted to the use of the conditional mode in rather melancholy circumstances. The general impression is

that "Things would be so different if they were not as they are"; but the

pattern, in spite of the unhappy occasions, nevertheless suggests the

possibility of order.

Tristram uses condition, for example, to indicate the confusion

of the sublunary universe and oppose it to a superior order, as when he

opposes the small accidents of his birth to the better plan of nature:

As Obadiah's was a mix'd case, mark, Sirs, 1 say, mix'd case, for it was obstetrical, scrip-tical, squirt- ical, papistical, and as far as the coach-horse was con­ cerned in it, caball-istical and only partly musical;-- Obadiah mad e no scruple of availing himself of the first expedient which offered; so taking hold of the bag of in­ struments, and gripeing them hard together with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other, putting the end of the hat-band betwixt his teeth, and then slipping his hand down to the middle of it, he tied and cross-tied them all fast together from one end to the other (as you would cord a trunk) with such a multiplicity of round-a-bouts and in­ tricate cross turns, with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the strings met, that Dr. Slop must have had three fifths of Job1 s patience at least to have unloosed them. 1 think in m y conscience, that had N A T U R E been in one of her nimble moods, and in humour for such a con­ test that she and Dr. Slop both fairly started together-- there is no ma n living who had seen the bag with all that 68

Obadiah had done to it, and known likewise, the great speed the goddess can ma k e when she thinks proper, who would have had the least doubt remaining in his mind-- which of the two would have carried off the prize. [3. 9. 166]]

The care with which the disorder of the world is presented is notable: the binding together of phenomena gynecological, authorial, theologi­ cal and equine through the use of parechesis, the detailed description of gesture in temporal progression and spatial intricacy, the sense that the efforts at untying the knots "are obviously emblematic of the narra­ tor Tristram's constantly frustrated efforts to deliver himself of his book. "10 But the orderly description of inextricable knots is balanced by the series of conditions-contrary-to-fact: had Dr. Slop had Job's pa­ tience, had Nature been nimble, then Tristram would not have found his affairs and nose depressed, nor would he have had to abandon the occa­ sions for making the fortunes of his house:

had that trial been mad e for thee, and it was fifty to one but it had, thy affairs had not been so depress'd (at least by the depression of thy nose) as they have been; nor had the fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have so often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee, been so often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrecoverably abandoned as thou hast been forced to leave them! but 'tis over, all but the account of 'em, which cannot be given to the curious till I a m got out into the world. [3.9. 166]]

The same pattern occurs in connection with Locke, Walter, and Toby:

Had the same great reasoner looked on, as m y father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed m y uncle

lOStedmond, p. 93. 69

Toby1 s deportment . . . he would have concluded m y uncle Toby had got hold of the medius terminus; and was syllo­ gizing and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in order as m y father laid them before him. This by the bye, was more than m y father wanted, his aim in all the pains he was at in these philosophic lectures, was to enable m y uncle Toby not to discuss, but c o m ­ prehend to hold the grains and scruples of learning,-- not to weigh them. M y uncle Toby . . . did neither the one or the other. [3.40.238]]

And, again, Tristram:

What a jovial and a mer r y world would this be, m a y it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melan­ choly, large jointures, impositions, and lies ! [6.14.432]

W a s I in a condition to stipulate with death,' as I a m this mo m e n t with m y apothecary, how and where I will take his glister 1 should certainly declare against sub­ mitting to it before m y friends; and therefore, I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments m y thoughts as mu c h as the catastrophe itself, but I constant­ ly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Dis­ poser of all things m a y so order it, that it happen not to m e in m y own house but rather in some decent inn. . . . [7. 12. 4 9 2 ]

The point of these conditions is that they suggest a world in which there is a Disposer, in which Nature does give good chance, in which Locke and logic could rule or prelapsarian joviality could reign, and part of the function of the style is to ma k e us as aware of the happy cosmic pos­

sibilities as of the cheerless mundane realities. Novel-writing itself

gives rise to a series of conditional structures, as Tristram becomes

aware of the possibilities of misinterpretation and guards against them. 70

If the hypercritic will go upon this; and is resolved af­ ter all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;-- and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thir­ teen seconds, and three fifths, would take it upon him to insult over m e for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability, of time; 1 would remind him, that the idea of duration and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas, and is the true scholastic pendulum, and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter, abjuring and detesting the juris­ diction of all other pendulums whatever. [2. 8. 103]

Just as Tristram here clarifies his idea of real duration through first elaborating a condition based upon a false notion of duration, he later clarifies his notion of eloquence - at least insofar as eloquence is a pro­ duct of surprise - through a lengthy description of the conditions of elo­ quence:

It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at Athens and Rome, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you, in petto, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it.

These feats . . . are not to be done, except in those states and times, I say, where orators wore mantles,-- and pretty large ones too, m y brethren, with some twenty or five and twenty yards of good purple, superfine, m a r ­ ketable cloth in them, with large flowing folds and dou­ bles, and in a great stile of design. 14. 185]

The fact that the surprise is seen to consist of producing a pickle pot or a soiled child at the proper mo m e n t considerably undercuts any sense of admiration we m a y have for classical eloquence. The two examples in­ dicate that the conditional mode ma y be used to produce a positive reac­ tion to Tristram's method. If those things which could be true of the 71 world in general are unfortunately not true, those things which could be true of duration and eloquence are most fortunately not true.

Tristram also uses the volitive mod e to persuade the reader to accept his method, as his prayers suggest:

M y most zealous wish and fervent prayer in your be­ half and in m y own too, in case the thing is not done al­ ready for us, is that the great gifts and endowments both of wit and judgement, with every thing which usually goes along with them, such as memory, fancy, genius, eloquence, quick parts, and what not, m a y this precious m o m e n t without stint or measure, let or hinderance, be poured down wa r m as each of us could bear it, scum and sediment an' all; (for I would not have a drop lost) into the several receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormi­ tories, refectories, and spare places of our brains, in such sort, that they might continue to be injected and tunn'd into, according to the true intent and meaning of my wish, until every vessel of them, both great and small, be so re­ plenished, saturated, and fill'd up therewith, that no more, would it save a man's life, could possibly be got either in or out.

Here, the desiderata for the readers of the work "we should make" sug­

gest again the efforts which the reader must make to appreciate Tris- tram Shandy and the riches which a beneficent providence might bestow.

This providence is later addressed, too:

O ye P O W E R S ! (for powers ye are, and great ones too) which enable mortal ma n to tell a story worth the hearing, that kindly shew him, where he is to begin it,-- and where he is to end it, what he is to put into it,-- and what he is to leave out,---how mu c h of it he is to cast into shade, and whereabouts he is to throw his light! Ye, who preside over this vast empire of bio­ graphical freebooters, and see how ma n y scrapes and plunges your subjects hourly fall into; will you do one thing ? 72

B y contrast, in speaking of the family obsession with noses:

Defend me, gracious heaven! from those persecuting spirits who ma k e no allowances for these workings within us. Never, O never m a y I lay down in their tents, who cannot relax the engine, and feel pity for the force of education, and the prevalence of opinions long derived from ancestors! [3. 33. 2 2 0 ]

The two prayers contrast neatly in their content and form. The first, a formal period, the sense suspended through the long series of relative clauses in parallel and then to the next paragraph where the actual plea for a "guidepost" is expressed, suggests the presence of muses who might, if they would, assist Tristram; the second, structurally loose, suggests the malevolent forces which ma y impede comprehension of Tris­ tram's difficulties. The reader is constantly addressed in the volitive, too, presumably to insure that he will be one of the gracious powers who bring order rather than one of the persecuting spirits who remain un s y m ­ pathetic. "Let the reader imagine then, that Dr. Slop has told his tale;

and in what words, and with what aggravations his fancy chooses:--

Let him suppose, that Obadiah has told his tale also, and with such rueful looks of affected concern, as he thinks will best contrast the two figures as they stand by each other:---Let him imagine, that m y father has stepp'd up stairs to see m y mother:-- And, to conclude this work of imagination,

let him imagine the doctor wash'd . . . " [2. 11. 109] . T owards the end of the novel, the reader has heavy work to do: "I beg the reader will assist me here, to wheel off my uncle Toby's ordnance behind the scenes, 73

to remove his sentry-box, and clear the theatre, if possible of horn- works, and half moons, and get the rest of his military apparatus out of the way ..." [6. 29. 455^ , and a bit later, "To conceive this right,-- call for pen and ink here's paper ready to your hand. Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind as like your mistress as you can as un­ like your wife as your conscience will let you 'tis all one to m e -- please put your own fancy in it " C6. 3 8. 4 7 0 ] . If the wishes are fulfilled, if the reader plays his part in scene-shifting and character-drawing, then the novel, to which he is asked to contribute so much, will be writ­ ten and all will be well.

Tristram states the rhetorical function of the volitive quite plainly after Toby confounds Dr. Slop with his remark, "I wish, Dr. Slop, you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders. "

M y uncle Toby's wish did Dr. Slop a disservice which his heart never intended any ma n , Sir, it confounded h i m and thereby putting his ideas first into confusion, and then to flight, he could not rally them again for the soul of him. In all disputes, male or female, whether for hon­ our, for profit or for love, it makes no difference in the case; nothing is mor e dangerous, mada m , than a wish coming sideways in this unexpected manner upon a man: the safest way in general to take off the force of the wish, is, for the party wished at, instantly to get up upon his legs and wish the wisher something in return, of pretty near the same value, so balancing the account upon the spot, you stand as you were nay, sometimes gain the advantage of the attack by it. [3.1. 1S1~\

Dr. Slop, thrown off balance, does not gain the advantage, but the i m ­ plication seems clear enough - the wish, properly treated, can create balance. The volitive mo d e does just that in two key passages early in 74 the novel, the first of which establishes the entire tone of the novel and the second the ensuing complications and reasonances of the tone.

I wish either m y father or m y 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 mu c h depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Be ­ ing was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy forma­ tion 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 con­ sidered all this, and proceeded accordingly, 1 a m verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is like to see me. [1.1.4]

In skeleton, the sentence m a y be seen to run thus:

I wish either . . . had minded what they were about had they duly consider'd how mu c h that not only but that possibly had they duly weighed and considered I a m verily persuaded I should have ma d e

The effect of the first unit, to "accordingly, " is negative: Mr. and Mrs.

Shandy did not mind, nor consider, nor weigh; the conclusion, as one

might in all logic suppose, is inconclusive and negative. Tristram does

not ma k e quite a different figure, and the reader is only "likely" to see.

The neatness of the passage is, however, almost syllogistic, for, al­

though it consists of two major units, the two clauses beginning "had

they, " though verbally parallel to "had minded, " might be considered as

the second of three units. Thus, Major-minor-conclusion. The three 75 clauses dependent on "duly consider'd" also suggest the tripartite pat­ tern of conventional logic and serve to introduce us to the bizarre logic of Tristram's world. The volitive is neatly organized and in form at least suggests logic and a clear view of causal relations. W e see ra­ tionality, fortune, and personal idiosyncracy introduced and we reflect that small accidents do, indeed, produce great effects. But this pleasing clarity is not maintained, for the next volitive occurs quickly, and the results are most confused:

1 wish I had been born in the Moon, or in any of the planets, (except Jupiter or Saturn, because I never could bear cold weather) for it could not well have fared worse with me in any of them (tho' I will not answer for Venus) than it has in this vile, dirty planet of ours, which o' m y conscience, with reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings of the rest; not but the planet is well enough, provided a ma n could be born in it to a great title or to a great estate; or could any how contrive to be called up to publick charges, and employments of dignity or power; but that is not m y case; and therefore every ma n will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it; for which cause I af­ firm it over again to be one of the vilest worlds that ever was made; for I can truly say, that from the first hour I drew m y breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got in seating against the wind in Flanders; 1 have been the continual sport of what the world calls fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever ma d e m e feel the weight of any great or signal evil; yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, that in every stage of m y life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as piti­ ful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small H E R O sustained. Q. 5. lo]

While maintaining a semblance of parallelism and balance and while us­ ing a number of specifically causal connectives, this passage is most difficult to sort out, and the causal connectives are particularly diffi­ cult to assign. Note the phrase "for which cause. " Apparently, "for which" refers to the immediately preceding clause introduced by "there­ fore"; we expect the "therefore" to introduce the result of the initial statements and to lead to the second premise. But, no. W e backtrack to the end of the next preceding unit, "this vile, dirty planet, " but this again makes no sense - or makes nonsense - for in this case the argu­ ment would run, "This is a vile, dirty planet; therefore, it is a vile dirty planet, " a tautology rather than a logical progression. W e go back to

"for" in "for it could not well have fared worse, " and we find the heart of the matter. Actually the movement is not as difficult to follow as I imply; the chain seems to run "since I was not born on the moon, I have been subjected to misfortune, and therefore I affirm this planet to be vile. " But uncertainty remains; the better planet need not necessarily be the moon, though it certainly cannot be Jupiter or Saturn, but might be Venus; the earth might be ("I take it to be") though not necessarily is mad e of shreds and clippings; and indeed the earth ma y b e satisfac­ tory in certain conditions not fulfilled in Tristram's case.

Note, too, the confusion caused by the connective "that. " A glance at the passages indicates that Sterne often, in fact usually, sup­ presses the "that"; in this passage he introduces the word in locutions which compound confusion. "For I can truly say, that" suggests logical sequence, but the "that" actually introduces an adverbial sequence, 77

"from the first hour . . . to this, that I can now, " and the true predi­ cate, "I have been the continual sport, " introduces further digression and qualification rather than clarification. The passage ends finally with a structure similar to that in the first half, a balanced view of fortune paralleling the balanced view of earth, and the positive state­ ment of a dismal fact. Unlike the final statement of Q . 1.4] , however, this statement is not clearly separated grammatically from the rest of the sentence, but is introduced by a trailing series of temporal and spa­ tial adverbial phrases, with a strong effect of diminuendo. The whole passage is a good example of the loose period, and the topics of planets

and fortune suggest the reason for the confusion of the rhetoric. The main business of the chapter, to reveal the date of Tristram's birth,

is given straightforwardly enough (though with anastrophe) in "On the

fifth day of N o v e m b e r , 1718 . . . was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disasterous world of ours. " A defi­

nite time and an assertion of identity, then, are quickly dissolved in

the confusion of the unwieldy second sentence, and as Fortune becomes

the "ungracious Duchess" so the proud "I Tristram Shandy" shrinks in­

to the unfortunate "small HE R O . "

The sense of a better world elsewhere is again struck midway

through the novel, "I wish I could write a chapter upon sleep, "

But for sleep 1 know I shall ma k e nothing of it be­ fore I begin 1 a m no dab at your fine sayings in the first place and in the next, I cannot for m y soul set a 78

grave face upon a bad matter, and tell the world 'tis the refuge of the unfortunate the enfranchisement of the prisoner the downy lap of the hopeless, the weary and the broken-hearted; nor could I set out with a lye in m y mouth, by affirming, that of all the soft and delicious functions of our nature, by which the great Author of it, in his bounty, has been pleased to recompence the suffer­ ings wherewith his justice and his good pleasure has we a ­ ried us, that this is the chiefest (I know pleasures worth ten of it) or what a happiness it is to man, when the an­ xieties and passions of the day are over, and he lays down upon his back, that his soul shall be so seated within him, that which ever way she turns her eyes, the heavens shall look calm and sweet above her no desire or fear-- or doubt that troubles the air, nor ?.ny difficulty pass'd, present, or to come, that the imagination ma y not pass over without offence, in that sweet succession. [4.15.290]

He then quotes Sancho Panza's and Montaigne1 s remarks on the subject with great approval. The most interesting aspect of this passage is that

the volitive structure includes clearly the negative-positive note. In out­

line, the sense is held together by a progression of negatives: I shall

m a k e nothing of it because I a m no dab at fine sayings, nor can set a

grave face on a bad matter, nor can I begin with a lie. But the major

portion of the passage is the polished series of conventional encomia on

sleep, with the opening triad of "refuge, " "enfranchisement, " "lap" ex­

panded by the triple objects of the preposition, "hopeless, " "weary, "

"broken-hearted, " and the second series of parallel clauses introduced

by "that, " whose good order is enforced by the little runs of doublet and

triplet phrases; for example, "soft and delicious, " "anxieties and pas­

sions, " "desire or fear or doubt," "pass'd, present, or to come."

But Tristram cannot do what he does, because he is "no dab at your fine 79 sayings" and, therefore, we ought not expect such eloquence in the W a l ­ ter Shandy manner, and we ought rather to admire the simplicity of San- cho's prayer for God's blessing upon the ma n who invented sleep. If the first set of volitives examined appears to draw us from the contrariness of this world to the sense of a better world, this chapter on sleep seems to draw us from a stately lyric on sleep to a simple and even prayerful meditation, in loose form, on the topic. Again, the order of formal elo­ quence seems closely connected with mundane confusion and the apparent disorder of Shandean style with true insight.

This notion is clear later, when Tristram uses the last of the ex­ tended volitives in the novel and is led to the same unhappy meditations that followed his volitive concerning the place of his birth. "I wish my uncle Toby had been a water-drinker, " he says, for then he might ex­ plain the attraction felt by Mrs. Wadman. But Toby wasn't so Tristram can't; and instead he finds himself in a hopeless tangle:

Inconsiderate soul thatthouart! What! are not the un­ avoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, thou art he m m ' d in on every side of thee are they, Tris- tram, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more? Is it not enough that thouart in debt, and that thou hast ten cart-loads of thy fifth and sixth volumes still still unsold, and art almost at thy wit's ends, how to get them off thy hands. To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma thou gattest in skating against the wind in Flanders? and is it but two months ago, that in a fit of laughter, on see­ ing a cardinal ma k e water like a quirister (with both hands) thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs, whereby in two hours, 80

thou lost as ma n y quarts of blood; and hadst thou lost as m u c h more, did not the faculty tell thee it would have amounted to a gallon? [j3. 6. 545]

Here is the full Shandean circle: the beginning in a desire for a "ration­ al" relation between Toby's dietary habits and Mrs. Wadman's desire, the progress to a series of disasters, echoing strongly those of Q • 5. 1 o], and the final note of crazily paired opposites of cardinals and urination, laughter and hemorrhage.

(iii) Volume I, Chapter 10 as paradigm

The full Shandean circle is perhaps never drawn, for as Henry

James remarked, "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so.

Sterne appears to draw, and quite beautifully too, a full Shandean cir­ cle in a section I should now like to examine in some detail, for it is an excellent paradigm of the form of the entire novel and ma y serve to collect the points I have been making concerning Sterne's larger units of composition. The passage comprises the whole of [l. 10. 17-23] and is in ma n y respects exemplary.

Although this chapter is most interesting on second reading, it

is not especially striking at first; it blends into the whole and makes

"Preface" to Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), p. vii. its effect unobtrusively. Tristram inserts a good deal of personal opin­ ion and advice to the reader in the narrative, he alludes to Don Quixote and devotes some time to Rosinante's sexual propensities, he gives a few picturesque details of village life and he draws an elaborate moral from the farrago, thus combining the farcical and the pathetic in his usual fashion. It is the sort of chapter which ma y cause some irrita­ tion in the reader who has not yet lost his expectation that a novelist will get on with the story and who has not yet been instructed in the theory of progressive digressions, though he is in the middle of the first long one. There are a number of typically Shandean passages.

For example, Sterne's eye for striking comic detail produces the descrip­ tion of the elegant saddle, quilted with green plush, studded with silver and stirruped with brass, edged in black lace and fringed with gold-pow­ dered black silk - a noble object, indeed, to hang behind the door since it would be ludicrous on a boney nag. His touches of sentiment appear in the remark that the parson hangs up the saddle rather than use it,

"not caring to banter his beast. " The motif of the journey occurs in the parson's "several sallies about his parish, and in the neighbouring visits to the gentry who lived around him. "

Of central importance is the treatment of the problem of char­ acter. Yorick is the chief topic of the chapter, but Sterne withholds his name until the next chapter and his detailed narrative uses only

"parson" and the pronouns. The effect of this suspension of the proper 82 name is to mak e Yorick - as I shall call him for convenience - an ab­

stract character rather than a particular person; before we know who he is, we know thoroughly what he is. He is an abstract, exemplary figure, a moral key, and an important clue to the whole complex of

Sterne-Tristram-Yorick or of character generally. Overton James

suggests that in the opening installment of Tristram Shandy, Sterne, making the transition from minister to novelist, uses Yorick "as the

agency by which the minister author insured his distinction from the persona and his participation in the story. " Following the example of his age in adopting the mask, Sterne plays with the mask, first creat­

ing Tristram, who in his first paragraphs speaks "in accents as foreign

to the minister as the choice of a subject was, " then, to further separ­

ate himself from his narrator, introducing a minister w h o m he quickly whisks off-stage. M u c h of Sterne appears in Yorick - especially the

talent for jesting which leads to disaster and the constant misinterpre­

tation of his words and deeds - but Yorick's main function, according

to James, is "to permit the author to have it both ways - be both in and

out of the story" and to enforce the fictional rather than the autobiographi-

1 O cal response to Tristram. Tristram alludes to the importance of the

section later, in referring to his marbled page: "you will no mo r e be

able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem

^ James, pp. 79, 89-90. 83 of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to un­ ravel the ma n y opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mysti­ cally hid under the dark veil of the black one" [3. 36. 226] - and it is the black page which closes the Yorick section.

In its use of key motifs and its treatment of character, then, as well as in its biographical aspects, the importance of Volume 1, Chap­ ter 10 should not be underestimated; and the organization of the whole chapter and its position in the center of the first digression (which also contains the key remarks on hobby-horses and the dedication) suggest that it ma y be a key to the structure as a whole.

The organization of the chapter suggests that it is a "Life and

Opinions" in miniature, for the entire group of thirty-four sentences m a y be considered as a single enclosed unit. There is a strong sense of the opening and closing of parentheses and an impression of a great number of discrete notions, leading, so to speak, in different directions but drawn together at a central point, like the radii of a circle. W e ma y first examine the drawing of the circle.

In the first paragraph, Tristram sets a problem of moral judg­ ment closely related to a problem of causality:

C O Whatever degree of small merit, the act of benig­ nity in favour of the midwife, might justly claim, or in w h o m that claim truly rested, at first sight seems not very material to this history; certain however it was, that the gentlewoman, the parson's wife, did run away at that time with the whole of it: And yet, for m y life, I cannot help thinking but that the parson himself, tho' he 84

had not the good fortune to hit upon the design first,-- yet, as he heartily concurred in it the mo m e n t it was laid before him, and as heartily parted with his mon e y to carry it into execution, had a claim to some share of it, if not to a full half of whatever honour was due to it. [2] The world at that time was pleased to determine the matter otherwise. [3] Lay down the book, and I will allow you half a day to give a probable guess at the grounds of this procedure.

The closing paragraphs return to the problem in, it will be noted, re­ verse order:

[243 But this is not the moral of m y story: The thing I had in mind was to shew the temper of the world in the whole of this affair. [25] For you must know, that so long as this explanation would have done the parson credit, the devil a soul could find it out . . . [26] But no soon­ er did he bestir himself in behalf of the midwife . . . but the whole secret came out; every horse he had lost, and two horses more than ever he had lost, with all the cir­ cumstances of their destruction, were known and distinct­ ly remembered. [27] The story ran like wildfire.-- [28] "The par son had a returning fit of pride which had just seized him; and he was going to be well mounted once again in his life; and if it was so, 'twas plain as the sun at noon-day, he would pocket the expence of the licence, ten times told the very first year:---so that everybody was left to judge what were his views in this act of charity. " [29] What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life, or rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other people concerning it, was a thought which too mu c h floated in his own, and too often broke in upon his rest when he should have been sound asleep. 0>°] About ten years ago this gentleman had the good fortune to be made entirely easy upon that score, it be­ ing just so long since he left his parish, and the whole world at the same time behind him, and stands account­ able to a judge of wh o m he will have no cause to complain. [3 i ] But there is a fatality attends the actions of some men: Order them as they will, they pass thro' a certain m e d i u m which so twists and refracts them from their true directions --that, with all the titles to praise which a rec­ titude’ of~heart can give, the doers of them are nevertheless forced to live and die without it. 85

£32^ Of the truth of which this gentleman was a painful example. know by what means this came to pass . . . I insist upon it that you read the two following chapters, which contain such a sketch of his life and con­ versation, as will carry its moral along with it.-- [34] W h e n this is done, if nothing stops us in our way, w e will go on with the midwife.

The problem of Yorick's degree of merit, it is clear, is not to be solved on this earth; Yorick is confused and sleepless, the people are confused and wrong-headed, Tristram is unsure of the precise quantity of merit,

1 the reader is instructed to wait two chapters (at which point he is con­ fronted with the mystery of the black page), and only God, Whose views are not expressed, emerges as a judge of wh o m there is no cause for complaint. Once again, the discrepancy between Ideal perfection of judg­ ment, in terms of abstracts, and sublunary chaos, in terms of old horses, faces us. The style more than adequately conveys the problem of moral judgment. CO i- a loose period in which the terms of reference shift rapidly and which is held together primarily by the repetition of the key words "claim, " used both as verb and noun, and "whatever merit, " which in the variations of "whatever degree" and "whatever honour" of the open­ ing phrase and final clause frame the sentence. Too, the repetition of such qualifiers as "however, " "yet, " "tho, ' " and "otherwise" enforces the problematic tone. Within this loose unity one notes both the positive and negative effects - "seems not very material" and "certain however it was"; "did run away at that time" and "yet . . . I cannot help thinking";

"he had not the good fortune" and "yet, as he heartily concurred . . . 86 and as heartily parted"; "had a claim to some share" and "if not to a full half. " The balance is quite loose, however, for the positives and negatives do not necessarily refer to the same thing; for example, "cer­ tain however it was" leads the reader to expect a refutation of "seems not very material to this history" but leads instead to Yorick's wife's

assumption of the whole of the merit. The two notions are connected because the sentence structure connects them; we feel that Yorick's wife

is material to the story but we know not exactly how. The moods and

tenses of the verbs indicate too a complication in judgment, as we shift

from the problematic ("might justly claim, " "truly rested") to the defi­

nite ("certain it was, " "did run away, " "heartily concurred, " "heartily

parted"); from the past tense of the narrative to the present tense of

Tristram's opinion of the facts. As the sentence turns and twists, we

feel that a little universe emerges, with merit at the center, Yorick

and his wife circling merit, Tristram in another time and place cir- ' cling yet again. The central question of merit is moot in the first para­

graphs, still moot in the last, but the terms of the problem have been

expanded, since "people, " the reader and God are involved in judgment

and the temporal references include not only the indefinite past and the

present, but also definite past ("ten years ago"), future ("two follow­

ing chapters"), and the unchanging present implied by God and fate.

Although the question of Yorick's merit is at the last still undecided,

it is in a sense determined by the just judge. Objectively, Yorick is 87

dead and his story is complete; it is simply not for "people" for the

reader or even Tristram to be certain of the final terms of the judg­

ment.

Stylistically, [29] - [34] form a single unit, balancing PLOT

"What were his view" and "what were the opinions" echo "whatever de­

gree of small merit" in their interrogative tone, and one notes that the

sentence openers of [^31] - [^33^] , two co-ordinating conjunctions and a

prepositional phrase which tie them closely to the preceding sentences,

give the effect of a single intricate unit. Indeed, one might notice a

certain echoing within the final sentences simply in terms of the openers,

as we go from adverbial phrase ("About ten years") to conjunction ("But")

to prepositional phrase ("Of the truth") to conjunction ("But") to adverbi­

al phrase ("When this is done").

The method then is one of working inward from the broadest

terms of the problem to its heart. A second set of sentences creates

another echo, [jlj - [V] introduce Yorick's horse, "a full brother to

Rosinante, " and further areas of judgment, "Let that be as it may, as

m y purpose is to do exact justice to every creature brought upon the

stage of this dramatic work, 1 could not stifle this distinction in fa­

vour of Don Quixote's horse. " [^23^] rounds out our view of the Don:

"I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this

reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which

I think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight 88 of La Mancha, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more, and would actually have gone further to have paid a visit to, than the great­ est hero of antiquity. "

The general effects of the technique seem clear: Sterne starts his hare, loses it, and captures it - more or less - later, and a cer­ tain balance emerges. For example, five sentences are devoted to al­ lusions to Don Quixote, B 3 -P 3 and [23] , and five sentences are devoted to the expansion of the general terms and participants in the act of judgment, 2 [ 5 3 -[ 29] expanding P I-C33 The heart of the chapter, falls neatly into three groups of five sentences:

O G -DzD deal with Yorick and the horse as dramatic objects in the village; [13] - [17] deal with one aspect of Yorick's character : P 81 -

[223 deal with the horse again as indicative of another aspect of Yo­

rick's character. It is also amusing to note that the pivotal point of the narrative, one of Sterne's negative-positive combinations, occurs precisely at the arithmetical center of the chapter:

--- [17] In short, the parson upon such encounters would assign any cause, but the true cause, and he with-held the true one only out of a nicety of temper, because he thought it did honour to him. [l8] But the truth of the story was as follows . . .

One would not wish to place much emphasis on any mystical quality of

numbers, but the neat division here does seem strongly suggestive in

broad terms of the kind of order within disorder that we have seen in

terms of isolated passages, and of the kind of effect Sterne often creates

in his progressive-digressive, parenthetical, circular structure. In general the chapter moves thus: the problem of judgment, the judges,

Don Quixote, the parson's horse, the parson's character, the horse, the Don, judges, and judgment. And as we mov e through characters, narrator, reader, literary allusion and Divinity, we mov e through time, for Sterne continues to use the variety of moods and tenses of verbs indicated in the opening sentences of the chapter. A legal imperative

("Be it known") leads to narrative past but Tristram returns quickly to the present in discussing Rosinante, both to express his own views

("I do not remember, " "I know very well, " " M y purpose is") and to ad­ monish the reader who evidently, like the ma n in the rhyme, "knows two things about the horse, and one of them is rather coarse" and is told, with a Shandean leer, "let me tell you, M a d a m , there is a great deal of very good chastity in the world. " There is the mode of possi­ bility ("you could not say more, " "I could not stifle, " "Humility her­

self could have bestrided") and futurity ("you will easily comprehend").

There is in fact not one paragraph which does not remind us of the tem­ poral complications of the narrative, shuttle us backward and forward until our sense of distance from the events is quite destroyed and a multidimensional effect created.

At the heart of the chapter is the portrait of Yorick, the as yet unnamed amiable humorist figure central to the novel and Sterne's work

as a whole, for the Yorick who does not care to banter his beast appears

in the Toby who would not ha r m a fly and the later Yorick who responds 90 feelingly to the mule in The Sentimental Journey. The Yorick who loved a jest appears in Tristram who incessantly teases himself and everyone else and in Sterne who often presents himself in his letters in cheerfully ludicrous postures. The portrait of Yorick ma y serve as the best final example of Sterne's structure. "His character was, he loved a jest in his heart and as he saw himself in the true point of ridicule, he would say, he could not be angry with others for seeing him in a light, in which he so strongly saw himself, " Tristram tells us; and he continues to explain this jester's character in terms of his reaction to the mockery lavished upon him as he cuts a sorry figure on his Rosinante.

[l 5] At different times he would give fifty humourous and opposite reasons for riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse, preferably to one of mettle;-- for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and meditate as delightfully de vanitate mundi et fug^ saeculi, as with the advantage of a death's head before him; that, in all other exercitations, he could spend his time, as he rode slowly along, to as mu c h account as in his study; that he could draw up an argument in his sermon, or a hole in his breeches, as steadily on the one as in the other;-- that brisk trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements. 0-&3 But that upon his steed he could unite and reconcile every­ thing, he could compose his sermon, he could c o m ­ pose his cough, and, in case nature gave a call that way, he could likewise compose himself to sleep. [17]In short, the parson upon such encounters would assign any cause, but the true cause, and he with-held the true one only out of a nicety of temper, because he thought it did honour to him.

The three sentences form a single unit, with direction clearly marked.

"At different times he would give" is balanced by "In short, the parson 91

. . . would assign"; "he could" is repeated, always preceded by "that" or "for" in the sense of "because"; the tendency towards doublets and triplets is strong, even to redundancy, as in "meek-spirited jade" and

"broken-winded horse. " Notable, too, are the puns, both syllepsis ("he could draw up an argument . . . or a hole") and antanclasis ("he could compose his sermon . . . compose his cough . . . compose himself to sleep"), which suggest the vagaries of language, Sterne's chief cause for errors of judgment. Also notable are the little runs of alliteration

(e.g., the "s's" and "o's" of [15], the "c's" of [l6] and onomatopoeic effect (e. g. , "brisk trotting and slow argumentation").

Such careful articulation is, of course, not rare in Sterne, nor is the fact that the careful structure presents any but the true cause.

The true cause follows at once:

[jL8j But the truth of the story was as follows: In the first years of this gentleman's life, and about the time when the superb saddle and bridle were purchased by him, it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it what you will, to run into the opposite extream. [19] In the language of the county where he lived, he was said to have loved a good horse, and generally had one of the best in the whole parish standing in his stable always ready for saddling; and as the nearest midwife, as I told you, did not live nearer to the village than seven miles, and in a vile country, it so fell out that the poor gentleman was scarce a whole week together without some piteous appli­ cation for his beast; and as he was not an unkindhearted man, and every case was mor e pressing and mor e dis­ tressful than the last, as mu c h as he loved his beast, he had never a heart to refuse him; the upshot of which was generally this, that his horse was either clapp'd, or spavin'd, or greaz'd; or he was twitter-bon'd, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had be­ fallen him which would let him carry no flesh; so that 92

he had every nine or ten months a bad horse to get rid of, and a good horse to purchase in his stead.

The truth of the story is lost in a maz e of qualifications in which time and space and even the peculiar nature of language are considered. B e ­ cause of his idiosyncracy or his vice (as you will), he loved a good horse

(so to speak), and because he kept one and was kind-hearted, he per­ mitted people to borrow it, and because he lent it and because the mi d ­ wife lived at a distance of bad roads, it was quickly worn out, and thus he had to buy a new one. All the causes do sort themselves out, but it is notable that the first question - did he love a good horse through quid­ dity (neutral) or vanity (evil)? - is not answered but remains "what you will. " W e arrive more nearly at true cause at the end of the next para­ graph:

Besides this he considered, that with half the su m thus galloped away, he could do ten times as m u c h good . . . [the expense] confined all his charity into one particular channel . . . namely to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving nothing for the impotent,-- nothing for the aged, nothing for the ma n y comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where poverty, and sickness, and affliction dwelt together.

The impulse of true charity produces a further series of links in the elab­ orate. chain of causes. Because the mo n e y devoted to the horse could be better used, Yorick rides the ruined horse and because the horse can no longer be used to fetch the midwife, he procures a midwife for the village, and because he is modest, he never reveals the true cause for riding so comical a horse. The true cause, therefore, of the midwife's presence in the parish is the humility of Yorick, a virtue more striking since it is probable that the good horses were in the first place the re­ sult of Yorick's one vanity. Thus, Yorick is comparable to the peerless

Don Quixote who is, in turn, more lovable than the greatest ancient hero.

It has taken us, however, six lengthy sentences, filled with qualifications and points left to our discretion, to explain this. The final step is typi­ cally Shandean - yet another reversal, for "this is not the moral of my story. " The moral, to show the temper of the world, is that the temper of the world is to misjudge and to attribute charity to pride.

In {^1. 10J we have, then, a paradigm of Tristram Shandy as a whole, a little world in its implications for character and its display of technique. Sterne's concern with the multiple demands of his task - the presentation of action, its motivation and its interpretation - with the multiple physical, intellectual, and spiritual implications of any event, is apparent. W e are aware of movement in space, as Yorick jogs through the village or expectant fathers gallop through the county, and even more aware of movement through time, as past and pluperfect, present and future, conditional and subjunctive combine and as life, from birth to death to eternity, emerges in terms of charity and horses.

In terms of character we see the amiable humorist in Yorick and the puzzled narrator in Tristram; we suspect that both combine in the author. Similarly, the characters merge throughout the novel.

W e are prepared, too, for the labor we shall be expected to do throughout the novel, laying down the book to guess, reflecting on equine 94 and human chastity, assigning degrees of merit and deciding between vanity and oddity, and at last still waiting a chapter or two to return to the midwife.

Sterne does draw his circle of relationships, but it is in truth

a circle that stops nowhere. His geometry here encompasses the past

of literary allusion and the future of divine judgment, just as the novel

in its entirety points backward to Rabelais and Burton, forward to Woolf

and Proust. The style of the chapter prepares us for the style of the whole. There is the careful ordering, nearly mathematical in its ex­

actitude, of the chapter; the echo effects create a unity from a variety

of sensory, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experiences. Within

this broad unity, both the "full" and "fasting" methods appear. The

impulse to rhetorical order occurs in small units, such as the doublet

and triplet parallels, and in large units comprising several separate

sentences. The inability of formal rhetoric to order experience occurs

as qualifiers pile on qualifiers or a long structure collapses into "But

this is not the moral" or "read the following chapters. "

Finally, at the heart of the matter is the character of Yorick, the

amiable humorist, who is not only a touchstone for the figure of the lov­

able eccentric in the novel and literary tradition but also in his puzzle­

ment over his own actions and opinions concerning them, an indicator

of the final confusion of experience. After we return to Tristram's

birth, in [2.17], Yorick's sermon on conscience is read by Trim; as 95 the lovable eccentric is at the center of Sterne's characterization, con­

science would appear to be at the heart of the lovable eccentric. The thrice-published sermon is typical of Sterne's ethics. ^ Conscience is a guide, but a guide muc h prone to error and beset with difficulty. To judge the authority of conscience, a ma n "must be privy to his own thoughts and desires; he must remember his past pursuits, and know

certainly the true springs and motives, which, in general, have governed the actions of his life" (jl. 17. 125-26^] . Though we m a y be deceived by

appearance in other matters, in our conscience we should be aware of

the delicacy and balance of vice and virtue - and this in spite of the ease with which conscience is corrupted. In the figure of Yorick and the dif­

ficulty of judging the morality of his actions, we see the endless impli­

cations and final irresolution of a moral problem. Thus, early in the

novel, we are prepared for the ever widening circles of the ethical di­

mensions of human relations as well as for the technical effects which

m a y be used to draw the circles.

In Sterne's larger structures, then, we notice two opposed but

complementary forces at work: the desire for order, which produces

the ordered Ciceronian periods, and the recognition of disorder, which

produces either the curt Senecan periods or often a morass of clauses

13cf. Arthur Hill Cash, "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy, " English Literary History, X X X I (1961), 395-417. 96 and phrases. There is the recognition of the real and the possible worlds in the conditional and volitive modes and in the inclusion of the separate worlds of the fictive action, narrator, author and reader in the single world of the novel. The various worlds merge in the style, sometimes ironically, if the neat period mirrors confusion, sometimes not, if the loose structure quite properly embodies the wandering associations of the mind. And, if the worlds presented appear to conflict in "reality" they do not in style, for Sterne's structures link all facets of experience in a loose but binding web, so that we are conscious of an indefinable co­ herence and harmony. The structures, winding sinuously or marching briskly, force the reader to be aware of narrative and exposition, of truth, irony and satire, of fictive and real time; in short, they put him in a peculiar state of detachment - for we are often reminded that Tris­ tram Shandy is a novel - and participation - for we are also reminded that we are in the novel - in which we try to guess at every turn what

Tristram is doing, what he is giving and what he is hiding from us. Ill

"There are so ma n y sides from which any page that shows his stamp ma y be looked at that a handful of re­ flections can hope for no coherency, in the chain of as­ sociation immediately formed, unless they happen to bear upon some single truth. " Henry James, on "The Tempest"

In spite of his protestation that he never knew what it was to speak or write one premeditated word, Sterne often contrives extremely elaborate effects in his major units of composition and is often specif­ ically concerned with stylistic matters and conscious of rhetorical ef­ fects. His general remarks on his method are well known, and we have already seen the generally dual approach. Particular aspects of his composition - his use of classical rhetoric and of definition, his motifs of the journey, painting and music - provide further bases for an ex­ ploration of his use of the longer patterns and further clarify his atti­ tude toward language and verbal structures.

Sterne's consciousness of structural and stylistic problems is at least as strong as Henry Fielding's or Henry James' although he gives only scattered comments and asides to "Sir Critick" instead of a neat block of introductory chapters or detachable prefaces. Indeed, the detachable chapter or preface, a rather ponderous approach, might

97 98 tend to hypocrisy or pretentiousness, which Sterne hates. As he says of the parson, "Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity; not to gravity as such . . . but he was an enemy to the af­

fectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a

cloak for ignorance and folly " [l. 11.26] Tristram connects this false

gravity with style: "Yorick had no impression but one, and that was what

arose from the nature of the deed spoken of; which impression he would

usually translate into plain English without any periphrasis, and too

oft without mu c h distinction of either person, time, or place" ["l. 11. 26-

27]. In this brisk attitude toward language, Yorick is rather more for­

tunate than Tristram; since he has but one impression, he has less dif­

ficulty than the narrator in saying what he means, either in characterizing

an anecdote - or a novel - as a cock-and-bull story or in composing a

sermon on so involved a subject as human conscience. Although Yorick

is constantly misunderstood in spite of his forthrightness, he at least

dies with a certain consciousness of rectitude, with a Cervantic tone

and flashing eye [1.12.31].

Tristram's confusing ability to receive a dozen impressions at

once allows him no such comfort; at any rate, since we do not see him

on his death-bed, we cannot presume so. Rather, Tristram's openness

to a variety of impressions leads to constant problems of expression

and struggles to achieve form. 99

He is, for example, conscious of his neglect of formal plot and aware of its double effect:

this self-same vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things, has got so strongly into our habits and humours, and so wholly intent are we upon satisfying the impa­ tience of our concupiscence that way, that nothing but the gross and mo r e carnal parts of a composition will go down:---The subtle hints and sly communications of science fly off, like spirits upwards; the heavy moral escapes downwards; and both the one and the other are as much lost to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the ink-horn. [1.20.573

A neat technical dilemma, indeed. If Tristram does not provide fresh adventures, he thwarts the reader's expectations and the reader skims in search of action (at this point, M a d a m has just missed for the second time the proof of Mrs. Shandy's Protestantism); if he provides fresh ad­ ventures, the reader attends only to them. In either case the moral is lost and the novel suffers.

One of Tristram's chief formal concerns follows from this desire to cure the reader of a lust for action and to make him aware of the multi­ dimensional quality of experience, of the intimate relation between ac­ tion and opinion concerning action. As we have just seen, the section on Yorick presents at least five approaches to the moral problem of the horse; the technique of suggesting multiple judgments appears in ma n y less striking passages. Speaking of the Shandy family's reactions to

Aunt Dinah's misalliance, Tristram remarks, "Observe, I determine nothing on this, M y way is ever to point out to the curious, different 100 tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell;

not with a pedantic Fescue, or in the decisive manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader; but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive; to them

I write, and by them I shall be read" [l. 21.66]]. Neither the pointer nor the apothegm, but the diverse roads leading to true cause interest

Tristram; clearly the mapping of such roads requires an involved style as well as an inquisitive and well-trained reader.

Tristram is aware that the reader ma y be lost in the maze; thus he reminds him of his place by returning him to it formally or through repetition or echo. He remarks, too, on the theory of the maze: "For in this long digression which I was accidently led into . . . there is a masterstroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader, not for want of penetration in him, but because 'tis an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression. " He then announces that his "work is digres­ sive, and it is progressive too, and at the same time" Ql. 22. 72-73"] .

Tristram obviously intends a connection between progression and di­ gression and expects the reader to take an active part in making it.

On the whole, the reader is to Tristram as Margarita is to the Abbess of Andouillets, always adding the "ger" and the "ter" to the "Bou" and the "Fou. " But, though the mules progress not at all, the story, in its way, does. Tristram insists again and again on the reader's role: "Writing, when properly managed (as you ma y be sure I think mine is)

is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he

is about in good company, would venture to talk all; so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to

the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself" [2.11 . 108-109]

True, "Writers had need look before them to keep up the spirit and con­

nection of what they have in hand, " but the reader must be trained to

connect, too. The result is, as Tristram admits, most peculiar: "It

must follow, an1 please your worships, that the mor e I write, the more

I shall have to write and consequently, the mo r e your worships read,

the mo r e your worships will have to read" [4.13. 2 85-86^] . Again,

"when a ma n is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is ob­

liged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight

together in the reader's fancy" [6. 33. 462^ . But, if peculiar, the m e ­

thod is effective, for before the novel closes Tristram is confident enough

to say that "Matter grows under our hands" - not m y hands.

It is all rather wearing in a way, this re-reading of chapters and

looking forward to chapters which as often as not never appear; it is

even rather frightening to contemplate a work that "shall be kept a-going

these forty years" Ql. 22. 74^ and of having more to read the more we

read. W e m a y well turn into Uncle Tobys, all. If we have been properly 102

responsive to Tristram's hints, however, we will be neither weary nor

disgusted but alert to his hints of completion. Sterne once said "I a m now fabricating for the laughing part of the world for the melancholy part of it, I have nothing but m y prayers so God help them. He might have added that he fabricated for a fairly industrious part of the world, too, for his novel is not only a zany Bildungsroman concerning the growth and development of his poor hero, but also an odd Kunstler-

roman encouraging the literary growth of the reader. In 1910, E. M.

Forster begged us, "Only connect"; a century and a half earlier, Sterne

forced us to connect, and ma n y of his stylistic devices are designed to

force authorial experience upon us.

(i) Rhetorical schemes of aposiopesis and de­ finition; the gesture

One m a y note the transfer of authorial duty in Sterne's use of

classical rhetoric, especially in his uses of aposiopesis and formal de­

finition. His use of classical rhetoric is extensive, but he does not sim­

ply use it. He discusses its effects and, thus, leads us to question it

and its effects. As in ma n y of the discussions of his method in general,

which emphasize the role of the reader as participant in the action, m u c h

of his discussion of particular effects concentrates on devices which

leave mu c h to the audience.

^ Letters, p. 189. 103

Most notable of his classical devices is aposiopesis, the break­ ing off in the midst of a sentence, a device related to the use of paren­ thesis and anacoluthia, a lack of grammatical sequence or change amid- sentence to a new construction. W e have already seen several examples of the latter, as Tristram in a lengthy structure abruptly shifts topic, time, or tone. His use of the pattern in shorter runs is equally striking.

The first example occurs in the section on Yorick, when Tristram says that Yorick once decided to be more sedate in demeanor, "but, alas too late:-- a grand confederacy, with ***** and ***** at the head of it, was form'd before the first prediction of it " [l. 12.30] The use of as­ terisks for the proper name is not strictly speaking aposiopestic, but the effect - to suggest that names are withheld to protect the guilty - is, in that it leads us to suppose the presence of actual persons in the fictive work. Such confusion of the real with the imaginary, and the imaginary with the imaginary, characters is constant in the novel. The implica­ tions of this first aposiopesis are dismal; those of the second are cheer­ ful, when Toby remarks, " M y sister, I dare say . . . does not care to let a ma n so near her ****" £2. 6. lOcf] . Tristram then gleefully calls

Toby's silence a neat example of aposiopesis and details the advantages of the small effects upon which eloquence depends and the precise line of beauty is determined. Later in the novel, Dr. Slop, parodying Toby's

"hobby-horsical reflection, " uses aposiopesis - "in the mutiny and con­ fusion I find all things are in at present, but for the subordination of 104 fingers and thumbs to - and Tristram uses the figure as a spring­ board for his discussion of the use of such singular strokes of eloquence in the forensics of Athens and Ro m e [3.13-14. 184-85]. Then Toby in­ terrupts Walter just as he is warming to a disquisition on temporality, and Tristram comments on the loss:

What a conjuncture was here lost! M y father in one of his best explanatory moods, in eager pursuit of a meta­ physic point into the very regions where clouds and thick darkness would soon have encompassed it about; m y un- cle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world; his head like a smoak-jack; the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfus­ cated and darkened over with fuliginous matter! B y the tomb stone of Lucian if it is in being, if not, why then, by his ashes! by the ashes of my dear Rabelais, and dearer Cervantes, my father and my uncle Toby's dis­ course upon TIME and ETERNITY, was a discourse de­ voutly to be wished for! and the petulancy of my father's humour in putting a stop to it, as he did, was a robbery of the Ontologic treasury of such a jewel, as no coalition of great occasions and great men, are ever likely to re­ store to it again. [3. 19. 19l]

The aposiopesis has metaphysical as well as rhetorical implications; it m a y suggest the richest variety of possibilities of ideas or the darkest

ontological confusion. It may, in fact, do both at once, refine expres­

sion and negate expression at the same time, as when the reading of the

letter announcing Bobby's death, given in a series of dashes, allows

Sterne to combine the comedy of Toby's and Walter's cross-talk with

the suggestion of the inadequacy of words in dramatizing death.

In this particular complex, we see the spectrum of Sterne's uses

of aposiopesis. Toby's which ma y b e bawdry or metaphor as well 105 as aposiopesis, is eventually connected with forensic rhetoric and meta­ physical speculation; less elegantly, the **** ma y be used to express the inexpressible of human sexuality. The implications, if unstated, are equally broad.

Wh e n Tristram is delivered, we are told that "if the hip is m i s ­ taken for the head, there is a possibility (if it is a boy) that the for­ ceps [double row of asterisks]] " [3. 17. 188]] , and this remark, which introduces the happy confusion between the nose and the ****, contrib-

utes m u c h to a major theme of the novel. W h e n Tristram is twelve, there is another aposiopesis for a similar reason:

The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed: cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping m e up into the window seat with the other, cannot you ma n ­ age, m y dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ****** [5.17.376]

The informal circumcision expressed by this aposiopesis leads Walter to pursue research on the subject in the relevant section of "de sede vel subjecto circumsisionis11 in six rows of asterisks [5.28.385], and the entire incident is closed with a dramatization of public opinion in the same terms: "it was in every body's mouth, that poor Master Shandy

[two rows of asterisks]] entirely" and "all the world, as usual, gave cred­

it to her evidence 'That the nursery window had not only triple row but that [triple row] also' " [6- 14. 433]. Since impotence of various

kinds is one of the central themes of Tristram Shandy, it would appear

that the implications of this particular use of aposiopesis are nearly as 106 expansive as those of Toby's aposiopesis defined for us by the author.

In fact, the inability to communicate physically is apparently one of the causes of the inability to connect intellectually; thus Sterne comically antedates the modern world with its penchant for seeing sexual congress as a substitute for, or a higher form of, conversation. Toby, the least articulate character in the novel, has a love affair rich in aposiopesis.

The reader is asked to paint Mrs. W a d m a n in his own mind and given two blank pages to draw on [6.3 8. 470] ; Mrs. Wadman's person is des­ cribed particularly in much the same way when we suppose " to be the sun in the meridian" [8. 11. 5483 . W e m a y note, too, another echo effect, for the asterisks in this passage describing Mrs. W a d m a n in bed and those describing Mrs. Shandy in child-bed have suspiciously similar referents. Walter reacts to the news of the liaison with five rows of asterisks [6. 14. 473^ , and the whole affair terminates in a lengthy aposiopesis of two blank chapters and two paragraphs of aste­ risks C9.18 -20. 621-233 . At this point, T ristram draws his moral of the mystery of Nature's errors in the making of a married man.

Within the broad context of the half of the novel devoted to Toby's amours and the narrower context of the passages dealing with Tristram's accident, there are ofher isolated incidents. Phutatorius' mishap with the chestnut opens with a triple row of dashes, dramatizing the "Zounds" which is spoken just loud enough to be heard [4. 27. 318] as the nut rolls

"hot into his ❖****. " Like Tristram's accident, Phutatorius' 107 occasions a number of mistaken interpretations in the assembled c o m ­ pany. Trim's affair with the beguine, like Toby's with Mrs. Wadman, ends in aposiopesis: "I seized her hand And then, thou clapped'st it to thy lips, Trim, said m y uncle Toby and madest a speech. Whether the corporal's amour terminated precisely in the way my uncle Toby des­ cribed it, is not material" [8. 22. 575] . Trim's affair with Bridget ends the same way [8. 31. 64l] .

Of course, it is some little mental distance between the effort required to fill in the blanks of in the context of breeches and several rows of asterisks in the context of speculations on time and eter­ nity, but the fact that the same device m a y be used with a smirk or a serious moral indicates the essential nature of the device. A hiatus is formed; the reader puzzles over it momentarily or reflects some little time on the suggested problem. Once the reader is made aware of the figure, Sterne tends to accumulate effects, as for example, in the pas­ sage on nature's difficulty in making a married man, which is both the

"moral" drawn from aposiopesis and a good example of a more complex rhetorical effect. The aposiopesis which Dr. Slop opens has extensive connections, too. First, it is connected with the classical method of re­ serving arguments "in petto. " Then argument in its various forms, both classical and Shandean, appears: argumentum ad Verecundiam, ex Absurdo, and ex Fortiori are joined to Argumentum Fitulatorium and Tripodium £l. 21. 7l]] . Sterne thus joins a rather arcane joke, de­ pendent on some knowledge of classical rhetoric (or a footnote) to his 108 principal concerns - in this case, to Walter's characteristic "itch of

reasoning upon everything that happened" and to Tristram's attack on

eloquence as Walter's methods define it.

W e are conscious of other sorts of rhetoric besides aposiopesis,

of course. For example, we reflect on forensics when we find that Wa l ­

ter is responsible for a "sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus"

[2.19. 146] , that interesting sort of circular argument which Tristram himself uses in his complaint about this vile planet, earth. W e consider

apostrophe when Tristram, after his apostrophe to Toby, remarks "That

the best plain narrative in the world, tack'd very close to the last spiri­

ted apostrophe to m y uncle Toby, would have felt both cold and vapid

upon the reader's palate; therefore I forthwith put an end to the chap­

ter, though I was in the middle of my story. " The use of the apos­

trophe is explained in a simile: "This is to be understood cu m grano

salis; but be it as it will, as the parallel is made mo r e for the sake

of letting the apostrophe cool, than any thing else, 'tis not very m a ­

terial whether upon any other score the reader approves of it or not"

[2. 4. 9l] . The progression is significant; as we have seen, the pas­

sage concerning Toby's researches is an excellent example of Sterne's

technique of contrasting structures and themes; then the exaggeration

of the apostrophe to Toby is enforced by the brief note on the use of the

apostrophe to add spirit and the explanation of the effect is questioned.

In short, Sterne entangles us first in rhetoric, then in the explanation 109 of the rhetoric, then in the explanation of the explanation.

The most elaborate use of rhetorical terminology occurs in a section near the end of Slawkenbergius' Tale:

Haste we now towards the catastrophe of m y tale 1 say Catastrophe . . . inasmuch as a tale, with parts rightly disposed, not only rejoiceth (gaudet) in the Catastrophe and Peripetia of a DR A M A , but rejoiceth moreover in all the essential and integrant parts of it it has its Pro­ tasis , Epitasis, Catatasis, its Catastrophe or Peripetia growing one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle first planted them without which a tale had better never be told at all . . . but be kept to a man's self. [4. 266^]

Slawkenbergius then indicates precisely which incidents constitute each

section. The use of the terminology is clearly ironic and indicates the

consistent distrust of rhetoric; essentially, the Tale, with its neatly dis­ posed and definable parts, is as unfinished as Tristram's novel. There

is quite definitely a catastrophe, for the city of Strasburgh declines o w ­

ing to the communal obsession with noses, but the basis of the obses­

sion - the stranger's nose - is never satisfactorily explained. Too, the

connection between the nose and the phallus is not likely to be ignored.

W e have a long tale springing from a double-entendre, not unlike Tris­

tram Shandy itself which springs, at least in part, from another double­

entendre - "nothing was ever well-hung in our family. " W e come to

the Tale innocently, perhaps expecting it to be a moral touchstone, like

the man-on-the-hill episode in T o m Jones, and we find an elaborately

risque joke. Yet, the Tale does point a literary moral, for the little

passage of practical criticism near the end suggests the basic foolish­

ness of demanding "parts rightly disposed. " W e see a tale with beginning, 110 middle and end which makes nonsense; we wonder if a tale without be­

ginning, middle and end ma y make sense. The function of the Tale is

suggested by Sterne's definition of the two sorts of eloquence:

There are two sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-cautious and artificial ar­ rangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embel­ lishment of words, which glitter, but convey little or no light to the under standing .... The other sort of elo­ quence is quite the reverse to this, and which ma y be said to be the true characteristic of the holy scriptures, where the eloquence does not arise from a laboured and farfetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty, which is a double character, so difficult to be united, that it is seldom to be met with in compositions merely human. 2

One would hesitate to call Sterne scriptural, yet one must admit the sur­

prising mixture of simplicity and majesty, even the fusion of the two in

parodic effects. And, if one admits the peculiarly entrancing qualities

of his style, one ma y relish the peculiarities of diction which contribute

to the mixed effect of simplicity and sublimity, or mock-sublimity, of

his larger structures.

Connected with the use of classical rhetoric and aposiopesis is

definition, consciously a forensic device, a first step in logic and the

first of the c o m m o n topics. Tristram is as wary of definition as he is

of any other scheme. After Walter receives the news of Bobby's death

^Sermon XLII, quoted in Herbert Read, English Prose Style, pp. 167-68. Ill and collapses, Tristram returns to the topic of noses in connection with his great-grandfather's organic lack and his great-grandmother's c o m ­ plaint about it. Tristram hastens to say, "Now, before I venture to make use of the word Nose a second time, to avoid all confusion in what will be said upon it, in this interesting part of my story, it ma y not be amiss to explain m y own meaning, and define, with all possible

exactness and precision, what I would willingly be understood to me a n by the term" [3.31.217]. A conversation with Eugenius follows:

Here are two senses, cried Eugenius, as we walk'd along, pointing with the fore finger of his right hand to the word Crevice . . . here are two senses, quoth he. And here are two roads, replied I, turning short upon him, a dirty and a clean one, which shall we take? The clean, by all means, replied Eugenius. E u ­ genius , said I, stopping before him, and laying m y hand upon his breast, to define is to distrust. Q. 31. 218]

The urge to define suggests mistrust of the reader's intelligence or m e n ­

tal purity; the definition that follows is no better in effect than aposiope­

sis: "For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses,

and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, 1

declare, by that word I me a n a Nose, and nothing more, or less. " The

reader, however, sharing Madam's unfortunate propensity for taking

the wrong road, remains convinced that something more is meant - or,

considering the results of the accident with the window, something less.

O n the whole, it seems only proper that Tristram's discussion of defini­

tion center on his chief physical problem. A similar effect occurs in 112 the discussion of "whiskers, " which appear in a "gallant pair" but which do not imply what the lewd reader suspects: "as surely as noses are noses . . . whiskers are whiskers still; (let the world say what it will to the contrary), " Tristram insists, and he adds, "The best word, in the best language of the best world, must have suffered under such c o m ­ binations" £5. 1. 344, 247^ . The world is obviously eager to choose the dirty road. Apparently the Dunces have finally fulfilled Pope's prophecy and utterly contaminated the language.

The sexual m otif developed by the references to noses and whis­ kers, among other things, acquires more serious overtones in the dis­ cussions of love in the latter part of the novel. Tristram sees that Toby's amours could produce a complete system of love and love-making, but he asks, "are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set out with a des­ cription of what love is? whether part God and part Devil, as Plotinus w ill have it, " or "whether a disease, " or whether seated "in the brain or liver" £6.36.466-683- T ristram refuses to consider these topics - after, of course, considering them at length - but leaves the definition to the world:

All I contend for is, that I a m not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is; and so long as I can go on with m y story intelligibly, with the help of the word it­ self, without any other idea to it, than what I have in c o m ­ m o n with the rest of the world, why should I differ from it a mo m e n t before the time? W h e n I can get on no fur­ ther, and find myself entangled on all sides of this mys- tick labyrinth, m y Opinion will then come in, of course, and lead me out. [6. 37. 469] 113

The c o m m o n definition of love is not necessarily lewd, and the refusal to define love allows the reader to consider a variety of interpretations.

Tristram's definition, when he finally gives it, is not really his own opinion; rather, it is extrapolated from a conversation between the elder

Shandys and Yorick. In reply to Walter's positing two distinct kinds of love, Toby states his distaste for a purely sexual interpretation and, in­ deed, for Walter's distinctions: "What signifies it, brother Shandy . . . which of the two it is, provided it will but make a ma n marry and love his wife, and get a few children. " Walter, not unnaturally startled by

"few, " replies with an eugenic argument, in terms echoing Tristram's earlier apostrophe:

'tis piteous the world is not peopled by creatures which resemble thee; and was I an Asiatick monarch . . . I would oblige thee, provided it would not impair thy strength or dry up thy radical moisture too fast or weaken thy me m o r y or fancy, brother Toby, which these gymnicks inordinately taken, are apt to do else, dear Toby, I would procure thee the most beautiful wo m e n in m y empire, and I would oblige thee, nolens, volens, to beget for m e one subject every month.

Toby replies that he would not beget a child a month to please the great­ est monarch on earth, Walter settles down to argument, but Yorick sup­ ports Toby: "There is at least . . . a great deal of reason and plain sense in captain Shandy's opinion of love; and 'tis amongst the ill spent hours of my life which I have to answer for, that I have read so ma n y flourishing poets and rhetoricians in m y time, from w h o m I never could extract so much" |]8. 33. 585-87J . The conversation turns to Walter's 114 arguments, and the final note is Walter's letter of practical advice on the hiding of baldness, the tightness of breeches, diet and reading. In

spite of the comic denouement, however, a web of implication has been formed. The true definition of love is left unstated, but then it hardly matters, for the reader is well aware of the number of points to be con­

sidered as he constructs his own definition. He is equally aware of the danger of definition, for he adds the note that Toby ma y well kill hi m ­

self in such "gymnicks" to the previous note that Toby's life was put in jeopardy by words, and he reflects that he, himself, has often put hi m ­

self in danger of misinterpreting the author. In one set of definitions,

Tristram combines his positive and negative notes, suggests the prob­

l e m s of author and reader, expands Shandean confusion with the verbal

echoes and allusions to space and time (for the conversation covers Plato,

Ficinus, Valesius, Rabelais, Scarron, and Don Quixote as well as Asia),

and finally leaves us to sort out the whole muddle for ourselves.

Most of Sterne's definitions recall, though in briefer span, simi­

lar complex associations, and in style they range from the proverbial or

epigrammatic to the parodic and the serious. There is, for example,

definition by allusion: "Fifty thousand pannier loads of devils (not of

the Archbishop of Benevento's, 1 me a n of Rabelais's devils) "[5. 26. 383],

Definition by metaphor: "Digressions . . . are the sunshine; they are

the life, the soul of reading" Q . 22. 73 ]; "For what is passion but a wild

beast" j j b . 3. 413^) . Definition by antonym, recalling the positive-negative 115 structures: "In the case of knots, by which, in the first place, I would not be understood to me a n slip-knots . . . nor, secondly, in this place, do I me a n that particular species of knots called bow-knots .... I mea n good, honest, devilish tight, hard knots" [[3.10.167-68^]; "In mention­ ing the word gay . . . it puts one . . . in mind of the word spleen . . . not that by any analysis or that from any table of interest or genealogy, there appear much more ground of alliance betwixt them, than betwixt light and darkness, or any two of the most unfriendly opposites in nature

only 'tis an undercraft of authors to keep up a good understanding

amongst words, as politicians do amongst men" [7- 19. 501-502[] . Defini­ tion by example: "To those who call vexations, VEXATIONS, as knowing what they are, there could not be a greater, than to be the best part of a

day in Lyons . . . and not be able to see it. To be withheld upon any ac-

count, must be a vexation; but to be withheld by a vexation must cer­ tainly be, what philosophy justly calls VEXATION upon VEXATION" [7. 30.518] .

Closer to essential definition in that the method seems mo r e logi­

cal than definition by contrast or allusion is the pattern of definition by

cause. Definition by final cause: " M y father was a gentleman of ma n y

virtues, but he had a strong spice of that in his temper which might,

or might not, add to the number 'Tis known by the name of persever­

ance e in a good cause, and by obstinacy in a bad one " [l. 17. 43] ; "I

hate set dissertations . . . to darken your hypothesis by placing a number 116 of tall opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your reader's conception" [3. 20. 200] . Definition by efficient cause:

"Accident [the chestnut incident] I call it, in compliance to a received mo d e of speaking, but in no opposition to the opinion . . . That there was nothing of accident in the whole event" [4. 27. 321] ; " [Locke's E s ­ say] is a history-book . . . of what passes in a man's own mind . . .

And if you say so mu c h of the book, and no more, believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle" [2. 2. 85] . Definition by etymology: "Is this a baptism? No . . . inasmuch as the radix of each word is hereby torn up, and the sense and meaning of them removed and changed quite to another object .... But in the case cited . . . as it is a fault only in the declension, and the roots of the words continue untouch'd, the inflexions of their branches, either this wa y or that, does not in any sort hinder the baptism, inasmuch as the same sense con­ tinues in the words as before" [4. 29. 327] .

Tristram's fondness for definition of all kinds, like that for auxi­ liaries, is an inherited trait; Walter is most explicit on the subject:

"Everything in this world . . . has two handles, ” he begins, but he is never able to consider "Woman" for a rap on the door creates an apotheo­ sis, and snaps the definition [2. 7. 102]] . Walter takes a stricter view of definition than Tristram, as might be expected; he tends to force words as he forces logic: "I have got within a single letter . . . of Erasmus his mystic meaning .... See, m y dear brother Toby, how I have mended 117 the sense. But you have marr'd the word, replied m y uncle Toby"

{^3. 37. 23cf] . To Walter, too, do we owe a double-entendre. Walter,

Toby, and Trim discuss Toby's bridge, unfortunately broken during the night. Walter asks the cause of the accident; Trim explains that he was showing Bridget the fortifications, went too near the edge, and slipped in. Walter uses the incident as a springboard for innuendo: "At other times, but especially when m y uncle Toby was so unfortunate as to say a syllable about cannons, bombs, or petards, m y father would exhaust all the stores of his eloquence . . . in a panegyric upon the BA T T E R I N G -

R A M S of the ancients, the VINE A which Alexander made use of at the siege of Tyre. He would tell m y uncle Toby of the C A T A P U L T A E of the Syrians" and so on and on [3. 24. 210- 11] . What with "bridge" and

"Bridget," "cuvette" and "battering-ram," "sally-port" and "artillery," we find that no word, no matter how innocent, how technical and limited in its sense, is incapable of leading us up the wrong road.

Finally, the novel closes with two striking definitions. Mrs. Wad- m a n asks Dr. Slop, "But what do you mea n by a recovery? " Receiving no satisfaction, she turns to Toby, begging for a causal and descriptive

definition of the wound £9. 26. 637^] . Toby cannot answer either, and

the amour is over, finished by a lack of proper definition for "recovery. "

And, at the end, there is the phrase which defines Obadiah's anecdote

and Tristram's novel - a C O C K and a B U L L story, "one of the best of

its kind, I ever heard" [9. 33. 647H. 118

Tristram's definitions form a unifying scheme, with implications ranging from the serious to the obscene, and like his use of aposiopesis, often combining both possibilities, as when noses suggest both smoking- car jests and the theme of impotence in the novel. Attempts to define lead to the same difficulties as refusals to define, as words suffer in myriad ways from the various circumstances surrounding them.

If, then, either adjuring or attempting definition leads to misin­ terpretation, what is left? Tristram frequently shows that the best re­ sponse to the dangers of the word is the speaking silence, the meaning­ ful gesture to which all the characters resort at some time or other and which is always presented as the best form of communication. The i m ­ portance of gesture is early defined during an attack upon the critics:

And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night? Oh, against all rule, m y Lord . . . he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, three seconds and three fifths by a stop-watch, m y Lord, each time. A d ­ mirable grammarian! But in suspending his voice-- was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the c h a s m ? W a s the eye silent? Did you narrowly look? 1 look1 d only at the stop-watch, m y Lord. Excellent observer. Q3. 12. 180]

Sterne's interest in contemporary drama and his friendship for Garrick, noted for the combined ease and force of his acting, suggest one aspect of the novel's style, the conversational yet forceful as opposed to the labored and declamatory. Further, an interesting combination of Sterne's stylistic concerns is suggested in his letters from Paris in 1762. Writ­ ing to Mrs. Sterne, he mentions the techniques of a popular preacher. 119

I have been three mornings together to hear a celebrated pulpit orator near me, one Pere Clement, who delights m e much; the parish pays him 600 livres for a dozen sermons this Lent; he is K. Stanislaus's preacher most excellent indeed! his matter solid, and to the purpose; his manner, m o r e than theatrical, and greater, both in his action and delivery, than Ma d a m e Clairon, who, you must know, is the Garrick of the stage here.

The praise is perhaps curious; one would not expect the priest who in­

veighed against eloquence to admire another priest's theatricality, but

Sterne particularly admires the dramatic action involved:

he has infinite variety, and keeps up the attention by it wo n ­ derfully; his pulpit, oblong, with three seats in it, into which he occasionally casts himself; goes on, then rises, by a grada­ tion of four steps, each of wh o m he profits by, as his dis­ course inclines him; in short ’tis a stage, and the variety of his tones would ma k e you imagine there were no less than five or six actors on it together.

Setting, gesture, above all, variety. Fr. Clement's is not the pompous

eloquence of a stuffy Walter, declaiming for the sheer joy of hearing his

own voice, but the persuasive eloquence of the natural actor, full of ma t ­

ter and variety of expression, both verbal and non-verbal, and calculated

to entrance the congregation. A little later, writing to Garrick, Sterne

speaks of the corruption of language:

here every thing is hyperbolized and if a wo m a n is but simply pleased 'tis Je suis charmee and if she is charmed 'tis nothing less, than that she is ravish'd-- and when ravi-sh'd (which ma y happen) there is nothing left for her but to fly to the other world for a metaphor, and swear, qu'elle etoit toute extasiee which mo d e of speaking, is, by the bye, here creeping into use, and

3 Letters, pp. 154-55. 120

there is scarce a wo m a n who understands bon ton, but is seven times in a day in a downright extasy that is, the devil's in her by a small mistake of one world for the other Now, where a m I got? 4

He is got into one of those typically Shandean muddles where language points in two different directions at once; small wonder, then, that the gesture should be seen as necessary to clarify or to substitute for the word. "There are a thousand unnoticed openings, " says Walter, "which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it . . . that a ma n of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,-- or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him" \j>. 5. 414- 15^] . In this observation, he echoes Tristram's remark on Garrick and his further observation that "Attitudes are nothing, m a ­ dam, 'tis the transition from one attitude to another like the prep- a r a.tion and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all" [4.6 .276 - 77*].

Such resolution of discord into harmony is ma d e through gesture at ma n y memorable points in the novel. Tristram puts his cap on the table to render a declaration mo r e solemn {j3. 39- 236^3 or sits dishev­ eled, without wig or cap, in purple jerkin and yellow slippers, to make another declaration Q9. 1. 60(f]. Yorick, on his deathbed, clasps E u ­ genius' hand with his right hand and awkwardly removes his nightcap with his left to display the scars left by the arrows of fortune D - 12- 311;

^ Ibid. , pp. 161-62. and he is excessively careful of the placing of nota on her sermons, in a sort of posthumous explanatory gesture ^6. 11.427-293. In these cases, there is a kind of conscious stylization of gesture, for though inspired by nature or sincere emotion, the gesticulators are aware of their effects. The greater number of gestures are unpremeditated and even mor e effective. Toby, for example, uses the Stoic method of ar- gument:

But as the Philosopher would use no other argument to the sceptic, who disputed with him against the reality of m o ­ tion, save that of rising up upon his legs, and walking a- cross the room; so would my uncle Toby use no other argument to prove his HOBBY-HORSE was a HO B B Y ­ H O R S E indeed, but by getting upon his back and riding him about.

Charming as is this bond between Uncle Toby and Dr. Johnson in their concision of argument, it must be admitted that Toby's striking effect, unlike Johnson's, is unplanned. In fact, one of the immediate circum­ stances of the birth of his hobby-horse is an abortive, spontaneous ges­ ture. In the first stirrings of his mania, Toby had ordered books and contented himself with reading; then, at his table,

he had the accident, in reaching over for his tobacco-box, to throw down his compasses, and in stooping to take the compasses up, with his sleeve he threw down his case of instruments and snuffers; and as the dice took a run against him, in his endeavouring to catch the snuffers in falling, he thrust Monsieur Blondel off the table and Count de Pagan o'top of him. [2. 5. 94]

The next day Toby departs for the larger spaces of Shandy Hall, thus initiating the series of events which comprise half the novel. As Toby's 122 amours begin with gesture, they end in gesture, for M rs. Wadman is finally routed in a scene extending over seven chapters and ending when

Toby, triumphant, "struck his large map of the town and citadel of Na­ mur" £9.28.6383- M rs. Wadman then knows exactly where Toby was wounded and dares ask no further.

W alter's gestures, too, m aybe both pleasant or unpleasant in their implications. W alter early finds him self in the same difficulties as Yorick and Toby; when he tries to extract his handkerchief from his right pocket with his left hand, he is simply awkward. When he holds his forefinger between his finger and thumb, snaps it free, strikes one hand with the other and then repeats the gesture 7 £4.- 8 . 278-793 , h e is not particularly awkward, but he is pompous and ludicrous, since his au­ dience is the ever placid Toby, serenely unimpressed by the motions.

W alter, however, has one significant, truly eloquent gesture in the scenes following Bobby's death:

he threw him self prostrate across his bed in the wildest dis­ order imaginable, but at the same time, in the most lament­ able attitude of a man borne down with sorrows, that ever the eye of pity dropp'd a tear fo r. The palm of his right hand, as he fell upon the bed, receiving his forehead, and covering the greatest part of both his eyes, gently sunk down with his head (his elbow giving way backwards) till his nose touch'd the quilt; his left arm hung insensible over the side of the bed, his knuckles reclining upon the handle of the chamber pot, which peep'd out beyond the valance,----- his right leg (his left being drawn up towards his body) hung half over the side of the bed, the edge of it pressing upon his shin-bone. £3.29.215-163 123

Walter uncharacteristically says not a word, and this silence, together with the little touch of the chamber-pot, appears to mak e the sorrow un­

selfconscious, spontaneous - real. Sterne returns to the scene several

and Walter recovers himself by plunging in- to research on names; he moves rapidly back to words and a stylization of emotion so rigid as to seem insincere. For a time, however, Walter has felt and shown spontaneous emotion, and he does it through gesture.

Walter's collapse, affecting though it is, is not the most profound

comment on Bobby's death; the most striking response is that of Trim,

"extending his right arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read the sermon .... (striking the end of his stick perpendicu­ larly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability) . . .

(dropping his hat upon the ground). " Tristram in a long apostrophe begs the reader to consider that the preservation of church and state, the bal­

ance of power and property in the world, and the understanding of elo­

quence depend upon the correct understanding of Trim's gesture: "medi­

tate I beseech you, upon Trim's hat" £5.7.361-62^. It is, one feels,

overdone, but one still agrees with Alan McKillop that Trim's gestures

"acquire by incremental repetition and elaborate commentary a signifi­

cance that Walter's learning never attains. In both cases, however,

gesture expresses the emotional truth of the matter, and it is arguable

5 The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956), pp. 199-200. 124 that Walter1 s audience, the silently sympathetic Toby, responds more properly than Trim's, composed of Susannah bewitched by dreams of

Mrs. Shandy's wardrobe, Obadiah fretted by thoughts of stubbing the ox-moor, and the foolish scullion complacent in the thought of her own deferred death. Trim has less significant gestures, too, as when he sweeps off his cap and bows while squatting on the ground Q h 19. 559^ , in which untoward position he is still not as awkward as Yorick or Wa l ­ ter when embroiled with their headgear. Trim is not exactly graceful, perhaps, but he gestures "in a better manner than the posture of his af­ fairs promised. " Later, near the climax of Toby's amour, Trim flou­

rishes his stick, and a "thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said mo r e for celibacy" . 4. 604^. Effective though

Tristram proclaims them, Trim's gestures do give rise to a certain

suspicion; he seems so well equipped with stick, hat, or cap for signi­ ficant gesture, that one m a y feel that such props have a certain premedi­ tation about them. The awkwardness of Yorick or Tristram, Walter or

Toby, m a y seem more sincere because more natural. Tristram is at pains to counteract such an impression early in the novel when he des­

cribes Trim's reading of the sermon on conscience:

H o w the duce Corporal Trim, who knew not so mu c h as an acute angle from an obtuse one, came to hit it so exactly;-- or whether it was chance or nature, or good sense or imi­ tation, ike. shall be commented upon in that part of this cyclopaedia of arts and sciences, where the instrumental parts of the eloquence of the senate, the pulpit, the bar, the coffee-house, the bed-chamber, and fire-side, fall under consideration. [2.17.122j 125

He then describes the stance: the right leg sustaining most of the weight, the left leg advanced with knee slightly bent. The posture is rather puz­ zling. Tristram says it is effective and, echoing Hogarth's theory, "with­ in the limits of the line of beauty. 11 According to Hogarth, however, the true line of beauty and the proper method of painting it involve a few strokes, not the full details that Tristram gives. The painterly implica­ tions of Trim's stance will be noted presently; at the moment, one might only note the implications of gesture in connection with rhetoric. Trim is, after all, a comic character not unlike the narrator, given to postur­ ing and verbosity. His gestures seem to be semi-conscious, at a point somewhere between spontaneous awkwardness and mannered gesticula­ tion; and they have, so to speak, semi-formed art or spontaneous m a n ­ nerism. In this respect they strike a stylistic balance analogous to Tris­ tram's, or Sterne's, own. There is a kind of mannerism so inbred or practiced over so long a period that it becomes the real thing; at this point the barrier between art and life weakens and finally breaks. Trim's apparently spontaneous but possibly mannered gestures resemble Sterne's own apparently conversational but obviously careful style. Possibly, doubts concerning Trim's sincerity might raise doubts concerning the point of the sermon, but presumably the inquiring reader will not be misled; Sterne did not lose Fr. Clement's moral point. W e know the matter of the sermon to be Yorick's and we know Yorick to be sincere and trustworthy beneath his humorous facade; we feel that the theatricality 126 of Trim's gesture will only increase the effect of the sermon. Sterne is here, as usual, having it both ways. If we feel that his protestations of the effect of Trim's stance and natural oratorical talents are ironic, we simply see another layer in the onion of ironies that he accretes around any given subject; if we take the protestations at face value, we read the sermon with happy conviction. In either case the point of the sermon is amply made - look into thyself, know thyself, and then mistrust thyself.

Language is clearly not the answer to life's little and large prob­ lems, but the ends of silence are not especially clear either. The uses of aposiopesis, definition, and gesture so illustrate. Definitions in Tris­ tram Shandy generally present at least two and possibly more choices; the aposiopesis opens a multitude of choices, sometimes limited, s o m e ­ times not; gesture seems but a further step in the expansion of possibil­ ities of meaning. W h e n simple verbal structures fail, as they do almost at once, Sterne produces ever more complex structures. W h e n these fail, as they do eventually, Sterne turns to gesture and to his black, checkered and marbled pages and his diagrams.

The "sounds of silence" which are the last resort in the battle to communicate are, on the whole, impressive, ranging as they do from the Donnesque communion of eyes through the various forms of aposi­ opesis to the paratactic dash. Even the punctuation contributes to the

/ unity of vision suggested by the larger rhetorical devices. 127

These rhetorical devices have as their primary purpose the forc­ ing of creative experience upon the reader, who weighs alternatives and considers implications mu c h as he balances opposing directions in the larger compositional units. They have, too, a secondary function in that they impose momentary stasis on the frenzied kinetics of the novel.

Action freezes into tableau vivant or a word is lifted from the narrative stream and examined, and we are aware suddenly of the still point where human and divine creativity ma y merge in a total, still, and timeless vision.

George Steiner, speaking of less cheerful subjects than Tristram

Shandy, makes the point well: "But it is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of state­ ment - light, music, and silence - which gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no fur­ ther, because speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. The

6 Cf. M. Flue lie re op. cit. , p. 625 , who finds that "tout cela contribue de fa^on non n/gligeable a l'agrement que la variete, l'in- solite et l'elegance ne manquent pas de produire en cette matiere" and that the dash in particular "s'adapte si intimement a la respiration m e m e de sa pensee. " With rather more precision, Prof. Watt notes that the dash is "an essential means of expressing multiplicity: multi­ plicity in the sense that somehow the past and the present, the fictional actors and their audience and their author, the narrative events and everyone's theories about them, all had to be subtly intermeshed, as in real life, and not segregated in separate sentences, chapters, or modes of writing" [["Introduction," p. xxvii[]. 128 failures of Tristram's language are mor e playful than marvelous, of course, but I do not think that one presses too heavily on the light, even frivolous, texture of the novel if one feels that these various devices suggest, in their own comic way, the highly serious, quasi-mystical vision of infinity that Steiner implies. Final consideration of three fur­ ther patterns in the novel supports the view that Sterne's work is rich in serious implications.

(ii) Tropes of the journey, music, and painting

Of Sterne's patterns of imagery, that of the journey is the most important and rich in associations. Paul Fussel, in his fascinating work on the humanistic implications of Augustan rhetoric, points out that there is "something about both the actual experience of travel and the literary experience of the travel report, whether straight, ironic, or 'sentimen­ tal, 1 that comes very near the heart of the dominant eighteenth-century idea of knowledge, " and that the Augustans used a motif derived from

H o m e r to promote an empiric view of knowledge. But, though the eight­ eenth-century writer often used the motif as an occasion for Lockean discovery, an Augustan such as Johnson exploited the motif as an occa-

O sion for moral irony. Sterne's journies show aspects of both uses. On

7 "Silence and the Poet, " in Language and Silence: Essays on Lan­ guage, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 39.

g The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethic s and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 263. 129 the one hand, w e have real enough journies which lead to experience be­ yond the self and which presumably enrich the self (even Toby's mean- deririgs in his miniature Flanders, for example, contribute to his edu­ cation, for he subscribes to the gazettes in order to follow the battles); by contrast, the journies also suggest a kind of total circularity, rather than progress (the principal journey in the novel, like Rasselas’ in gene­ ral movement though not so glum in effect, leads us back to its starting point and is strongly elegaic in tone). The implications, then, range far.

The first trip in the novel, that of the homunculus to the womb, is an account of a c o m m o n theory of geniture and a parody of science; it is also a comic explanation of Tristram's difficulties and, to a post-

Freudian age at least, a fairly serious account of a cause for Tristram's psychological oddity. There is also a suggestion of the microcosm- m a c r o c o s m connection, for this confined journey is joined to the great world when the homunculus is said to be "as m u c h and as truly our fel- low-creature as m y Lord Chancellor of England" [1.2.51. Shortly af­ ter the beginning of life is described.in terms of the journey, the process of authorship is so described;

Therefore, m y dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on m y first setting out, bear with me , and let me go on, and tell m y story my own way:---or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,. or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a mo m e n t or two as we pass along, don't fly off, but rather courteously give m e credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon m y out­ side; and as we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing, only keep your temper. jjL. 6. 11] 130

Immediately after this mor e complex and expansive journey is announced, space is circumscribed and the area of the trip defined: "by which word world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to me a n no mo r e of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter " [1.7. Ill ■ A page fur­ ther, and human idiosyncrasy is seen in terms of travel and in connection with the planets:

Have not the wisest of me n in all ages . . . have they not had their H O B B Y - H O R S E S ; their running horses,-- their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, their maggots and their butterflies? and so long as a ma n rides his H O B B Y - H O R S E peacably and quietly along the King's high­ way, and neither compels you or m e to get up behind him, pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it? [l. 7. 13]

. . . there is no disputing against HO B B Y - H O R S E S ; and, for m y part, I seldom do; nor could I with any sort of grace, had I been an enemy to them at the bottom; for happening, at certain intervals and changes of the Moon, to be both fiddler and painter, according as the fly stings. [l. 8. 13-14]

A most complex set of associations is thus established in the open­ ing chapters; the space of the human body, the English countryside, and the universe, the metaphoric space of the human mind and the literary process. Sterne teases these associations throughout the novel, c o m ­ bining them in myriad permutations and testing their implications for

such favorite contemporary notions as macrocosm-microcosm, ut pic- tura poesis, and Lockean psychology.

Basic to the metaphor is the suggestion that the mind does not work in a physical, material fashion, "that the chief sensorium, or 131 headquarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were refer­ red, and from whence all her mandates were issued, was in, or near, the cerebellum or rather some-where about the medulla oblongata, wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, that all the minute nerves from, all the organs of the seven senses concentered, like streets and winding alleys into a square " [2.19. 149*1 • T he geography of the mind here seems a miniature of a mappable world; it ma y also be a track­ less waste: "the thought floated only in Dr. Slop1 s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding" (^3.9. 167U . At least once, just the right route is followed, when the thought of the ma p "struck instantly upon my uncle

Toby1 s sensorium" £9. 26. 63 8 J, and he in turn strikes the ma p and saves himself from Mrs. Wadman. To decide whether or not the thoughts come inward from beyond, from some divinely inhabited region beyond the spheres, or whether they float helter-skelter in a purely sub-lunary universe, is a nice question which need not concern us here; mor e often than not, the mind is a maze. The chief product of the mind, the novel before us, is frequently seen in spatial terms.

The first reference to the trip that author and reader are

taking is apologetic in tone, but Tristram quickly gains confidence and

assumes mutual delight in the bustle and surprise of the journey.

I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards . . . 132

which, shews plainly, that when a ma n sits down to write a history . . . he knows no mo r e than his heels what lets and confounded hinderances he is to meet with in his way, or what a dance he ma y be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,-- straight forward . . . he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. . . [l.14.36]

W e are thus made aware of the temporal as well as the spatial implica­ tions of our journey; the temporal point is expanded;

I would remind Qthe hypercritic] , that the idea of duration and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas . . . I would, therefore, desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the ma n mid-wife's house; and that whilst Obadiah has been go­ ing those said miles and back, I have brought m y uncle Toby from Na m u r . . . That I have had him ill upon m y hands near four years; and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim . . . a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire; all which put together, must have prepared the reader's imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage, as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts. [2.8.103-104]

At another point, Tristram begs the Powers to guide him: "Wherever

. . . three several roads meet in one point, as they have done just here,

that at least you set up a guide-post, in the center of them, in mere charity to direct an uncertain devil, which of the three he is to take"

[[3.23.207 ]. As the novel progresses, Tristram views the trip with ever increasing satisfaction: "What a rate have I gone on at, curvetting and frisking it away, two up and two down for four volumes together"

[4. 20. 298] ; "let us just look back upon the country we have pass'd 133 through. What a wilderness has it been! and what a mercy that we have not both of us been lost" £6. 1. 408^; "What a tract of country have I run!

how ma n y degrees nearer to the w a r m sun a m I advanced, and how m a n y fair and goodly cities have I seen, during the time you have been reading, and reflecting, Mad a m , upon this story!" |]7. 26. 51(T} . A note of worry does creep in, when Tristram alludes to the strange wa y he tells his story, but he comforts himself by thinking of the "little stars" he hangs up to guide our way - a nice explanation of the asterisks, to be sure! -.and by reflecting that the disorder is Walter's fault. Further­ more, "so mu c h of motion is so m u c h of life, and so mu c h of joy" (^7. 13.

493]] , at least for thin people.

Motion is not, however, the all in all. In the Dedication, Tris­ tram contrasts the frantic hurry of the Lords and Personages with his own restful motion [l. 8. 14] . The admirable Yorick jogs slowly on his nag. Toby "ambles" [^3. 34. 224~] and even climbs down from his hobby­ horse, in the midst of pressing the siege of Dendermond, to get his din­ ner and attend to the story of Le Fever £6.8. 423] . Walter is more in­ clined to fret at a slow journey, as in the return from London, and he concentrates so fixedly on a straight-forward progress across his ma p that he is at first indifferent to the news of Bobby's death. After he re­ covers from the initial shock, he embarks on an extended trip in rhetori­ cal allusion ^5.2.348-49, 5.3.354-55^] to the theme of ou sont les neiges:

"The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more: the 134 names only are left, and those (for ma n y of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piece-meals to decay, and in length of time will be forgotten, and involved with every thing in a perpetual night. " Tris­ tram comments wryly on this little trip - "no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occa­ sion, as m y father was" h - 12.368] - and remarks that the metaphor it­ self had quite a journey from India through the near East and Europe to

England. That is the route if the metaphor travelled by land; by water, it ma y have come round by the Indian sea and the Nile. Such a colloca­ tion of Walter's most irritating bombast, the notion of thoughts floating and metaphor by water-carriage leads one to mistrust metaphor. On the other hand, Walter himself doesn't care mu c h for metaphor ^5. 42. 405*] , and the contrary minded reader ma y find mu c h to be said for it. At any rate, whether we approve or not, we see that both the general form and the particular effects of the novel are described in terms of a metaphoric journey.

In addition to references to journies through fairly limited space, which provide mu c h of the action of the novel, there are dream-like jour­ nies during which space suddenly expands or contracts in its implications

The greatest expansion of which Shandean space is capable is interstellar

W e learn, for example, that-as-the backslidings of Venus in its orbit en­ forced the Copernican system, so the backslidings of Aunt Dinah in her orbit enforced the Shandean fl. 21. 6 8] . Too, the little vortex of mu d 135 around Obadiah's horse should be as frightening to Dr. Slop as the apoca­ lyptic vortic es^&f Whiston's comets [2. 9. 105 ]• The broadest reach of the planetary aspect of space occurs in the long and important passage on techniques of characterization. Tristram couches his metaphor in negative terms. First he notes that his progressive-digressive approach

"is a very different story from that of the earth's moving round her axis"

[1.22.73], thus suggesting a certain variant kind of order outside the novel. In the next chapter, he expands the notion; the passage is another fine example of Sterne's longer dual structures:

If the fixture of Mo m u s 1 s glass, in the human breast, ac­ cording to the proposed emendation of that arch-critick, had taken place, first, This foolish consequence would certainly have followed, That the very wisest and the very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid window-money every day of our lives. And, secondly, That had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in, viewed the soul stark naked; observed all her m o ­ tions, her machinations; traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth; watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment, conse­ quent upon such frisks, &:c. then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn to . . . ,[l.23. 74]

It is a nice combination of Shandean motifs - the effects springing from conditions contrary to fact, the mixture of motion, machinery, and ma g ­ gots, the whole conditional approach suggesting the ideal world for the author. The passage recalls, too, Tristram's wish to be on the moon, and the combination of planets and maggots is extremely suggestive. 9 136

Of course, the happy results o f M o m u s 1 glass are non-existent - "this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet - but this de­ feat leads to a further fantasia:

in the planet Mercury (belike) it ma y be so, if not better still for him; for here the intense heat of the country . . . must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to suit them for the climate (which is the final cause); so that, betwixt them both, all the tenements of their soul, from top to bottom, m a y be nothing else, for aught the soundest philo­ sophy can shew to the contrary, but one fine transparent body of clear glass . . . so, that till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted, or return reflected from their surfaces in such trans­ verse lines to the eye, that a ma n cannot be seen thro'; his soul might as well, unless, for more ceremony, or the trifling advantage which the umbilical point gave her, might, upon all other accounts, I say, as well play the fool out o'doors as in her own house. Q. 23. 74-75J

W e so thoroughly know the impossible method of characterization that we are in danger of forgetting that it is impossible. Tristram brings us back again sharply - "this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants

9 William Powell Jones The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 160-68 cites strikingly similar lines from Smart's Jubilate Agn o : "For AD O R A T I O N , in the skies, / The Lord's philosopher espies / The Dog, the Ram, and Rose;/ The planet's ring, Orion's sword; / Nor is his greatness less ador'd / In the vile w o r m that glows. " Jones finds that these lines indicate the mid-century shift in sensibility; Smart's w o r m is quite a different in­ sect from Pope's fly in amber. The w o r m - like Sterne's maggot or fly - is reductive but unifying; we are all one in the mid-eighteenth cen­ tury, rather than hierarchially arranged. Other of Sterne's images, of course, show this tension between the old and the new sensibility. 137 of this earth" - but not yet for a positive method. First he disposes, in an equally long period, of previous methods - Virgil's wind instruments, the use of evaculations or the non-naturals, the use of mechanical copy­ ing devices or camera obscura. Then he arrives at his conclusion:

To avoid all and every one of these errors, in giving you m y uncle Toby's character, I a m determin'd to draw it by no mechanical help whatever . . . in a word, I will draw m y uncle Toby's character from his H O B B Y - H O R S E . [l. 24. 77]

In this circuitous passage, we are aware of Sterne's view of the universe as "a great multiple system, in which sense and spirit, m a c r o c o s m and microcosm are linked by analogies and correspondences, ’but we are most struck by the preference for the microcosm. Tristram settles for the little circuits of the human mind; but even if the planets are dismissed as useless for literary purposes, they are still present as a possibility - for wonder and hope, if nothing more.

The preference for the microcosm is seen in the smallest con­ traction to which Shandean space is compressed, the map. W e are gen­ erally led to expect mor e from a ma p than from the universe. Immedi­ ately after the Yorick overture, Tristram promises a ma p which will serve as "commentary, scholium, illustration, and key" to all matters of "private interpretation, or of dark or doubtful meaning" £l. 13. 36^),

fOMcKillop, Early Masters, p. 198 138 and we are misled into thinking we have the promised ma p at a number of points in the novel; when, for example, Toby's m a p of Na m u r is put before us \jZ. 1. 83, 8. 17. 556, 8. 23. 575] or when Walter attacks the m a p

of Europe in preparation for Bobby's grand tour [5 .2.348-49]. These maps, however, lead only to confusion, and like the maps in Gulliver's

Travels seem the perfect symbol to convey contempt for detail - the de­

sire to plot and then follow a straight line. The m a p which provides the

key is that drawn verbally in Volume VII, which brings together author,

reader, and theme in a climactic series of spatial metaphors which merge with the motifs of silence and gesture, music and painting.

Tristram prepares us for his "map" of France with the "outline"

of his novel [6. 40. 473-74] , an image which he expands at the beginning

of Volume VII with an echo:

speaking of my book as a machine, and laying m y pen and ruler down cross-wise upon the table, in order to gain the greater credit to it 1 swore it should be kept a going at that rate these forty years if it pleased but the fountain of life to bless m e so long with health and good spirits. [7. 1. 479]

Doubtless our knowledge, unshared by contemporary readers, that Sterne

is nearing the end of Tristram Shandy contributes to it, but the sense that

the "Ave" of the original promise now receives its "Vale" is strong. The

impression of closing parentheses is enforced in the next paragraph: .

N o w as for m y spirits, little have I to lay to their charge nay so very little . . . that on the contrary, I have mu c h m u c h to thank 'em for: cheerily have ye made m e tread the path of life with all the burdens of it (except its cares) upon m y back .... Q. 1. 479J 139

The pack of this odd pilgrim on his odd progress (Tristram once co m ­ pares his book to the Pilgrim's Progress [1.4. 7]), appears ready to drop from his back. The sense of rounding off the motif continues strong throughout the volume. W e are reminded once again of varieties of roads:

It is a great inconvenience to a ma n in a haste, that there are three distinct roads between Calais and Paris, in be­ half of which there is so mu c h to be said by the several depu­ ties from the towns which lie along them, that half a day is easily lost in settling which you'll take. [7.3. 482]

F r o m Calais we proceed to Moulogne and Montreil, at which point a metic- ulous account of distance to Abbeville is given [7. 10.49l] . After a large jump (nearly a hundred-mile aposiopesis, so to speak) to Paris, geography is even more meticulous; "Paris doth contain nine hundred streets" [7. 18. 500], Tristram announces before he lists the streets by quarter. Thence we move south, from Fontainbleau to Lyons, in a fairly straight diagonal line across France. The straight line which leads to Lyons is supposed to lead to the tomb of the lovers; however, "there was no tomb" [7. 40. 532] . So mu c h for straight lines. Another hun­ dred-mile leap, and Avignon, where death is lost:

for I had left Death, the lord knows and He only how far behind me . . . Still he followed, and still I fled him but I fled him chearfully still he pursued but like one who pursued his prey without hope as he lag'd, every step he lost, softened his looks why should I fly him at this rate? 42. 534]

Tristram has escaped death in a very real way, of course, since the good spirits of the flight recall the spirits which have contributed to the 140 composition of the novel; in art, immortality. Tristram even hints that his novel, packed as it is with minutiae of existence and nearly empty of great events, is like the landscape of southern France which he surveys with great satisfaction:

There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller or more terrible to travel writers, than a large rich plain; especial­ ly if it is without great rivers or bridges; and presents noth­ ing to the eye, but one unvaried picture of plenty .... judge if I don't manage m y plains better. £7. 42. 534-35^]

There is one final resonant note struck when Tristram ends his trajec­ tory of France between Nimes and Lunel, where he flings himself into a little pastoral tableau:

The sun was set they had done their work; the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh and the swains were pre­ paring for a carousal .... A sun-burnt daughter of Labour rose up from the groupe to meet me as I advanced towards them; her hair, which was a dark chestnut, approaching rather to black, was tied up in a knot, all but a single tress. W e want a cavalier, said she, holding out both her hands, as if to offer them And a cavalier ye shall have; said I, taking hold of both of them. . . . A lame youth, w h o m Apollo had recompenced with a pipe, and to which he had added a tabourin of his own accord, ran sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank . . . The youth struck the note upon the tabourin his pipe followed, and off we bounded-- The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven, sung alternately with her brother 'twas a Gas­ coigne roundelay. VIVA LA JOIA! FIDON LA TRISTESSA! .... Then 1 tis time to dance off, quoth I; so changing only partners and tunes, I danced it away from Lunel to Montpellier . . . till at last I dance myself into Perdillo's pavillion, where pulling a paper of black lines, that I might go straight forwards, without digression or parenthesis, in m y uncle Toby's amours-- I begun thus £7. 43. 537-38^ 141

The image of the journey reaches its climax in this pastoral dance, which is in effect a dance of life, strongly contrasted to the headlong flight from death which precedes it. The general motif of the journey subsumes images of physical and intellectual movement, incorporates a recogni­ tion (even if back-handed) of the macrocosm, and eventually involves characters, narrator, author, and readers. The final image of the dance may, indeed, be viewed with specifically spiritual implications. Vernon

Watkins, quoting a letter written from Toulouse, finds that "Sterne's

charming idyll of the peasants dancing their thanks to God, so charac­ teristic of the eighteenth century and yet so individually Sternian, too, has beneath its surface idealization and elegance his deep conviction -

'in a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance. ' The image

of the journey, culminating in the dance, does for space what the profu­

sion of verb forms does for time, creates a unity and harmony of vision.

This effect is one to which we have become accustomed in the of­

ten spatial form of the modern novel, but it is still striking in Sterne.

Herbert Read, one of Sterne's most enthusiastic admirers, sees his

handling of space as the truest ma r k of his genius: "Tristram Shandy

is a book wholly rooted . . . in the ethos of a particular countryside,

and yet it is universal, " he says; "Sterne's characters are, like Bottom

and that other Toby, or Sir John Falstaff himself, larger than their local

^ ^ Perilous Balance: The Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson, & Sterne (Cambridge: Walker de Berry, I960), p. 119. 142 life - they pluck at the heart-strings wherever in this harsh world the human breast is still equipped with such things. " Later he asserts that

Sterne's characters "have not changed, and never change, because they are essentially human, and they are essentially human because they are native. " He concludes: "Nothing is invented by the imagination; the imagination discovers what has been created intensively by the ethos of a small circl^ described upon the circle of the great world. " 1 2 It is, I suppose, possible to demur to such enthusiasm - Bottom or Sir

Toby Belch, very well, but Sir John? - but the main point concerning

Sterne's universality is valid.

Alan McKillop suggests the same idea in a mu c h broader context of history of ideas. According to Professor McKillop, a rigid cosmo­ politanism, advocated by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke and enforced by critical or satirical attacks on excessive local attachment, prevailed

in the first half of the century. The two attitudes of cosmopolitanism

and local attachment merge, however, in such works as The Traveller,

and in the latter half of the century, identification of local attachment with simple virtue was widely accepted. Furthermore, Lockean as-

sociationism combined with an already complex development of atti­

tudes towards place to produce a most intricate pre-Romantic mixture

of classical cosmopolitanism and sentimental regionalism. Finally

^ "The Writer and His Region, " in The Tenth Mu s e (New York: Grove Press, 1957), pp. 69, 73. 143

McKillop suggests Sterne's importance to this shift in sensibility: "... the growing acceptance of the associationist psychology and approval of associationist diversity gave more and more scope for local attachment.

Addison's recognition of the association of ideas among the pleasures of the imagination is particularly important. The general importance of the theme from Sterne to Proust cannot be touched on here - the evocative power of a single image or object in the intricate emotional and imagina- tive life of man. " 1 ^ Sterne, of course, will have both the Grand Tour and the few miles around Shandy Hall. His motif of the journey, as he juggles combinations of English roads with a poor addled homunculus and a poor persecuted author and then with a most eccentric view of the planets, contributes greatly to our sense of the constant movement of life - the dance which circles cheerfully through time and space. As his larger structural units create little complicated patterns, a kind of mental chore­ ography through which we dance or stagger, as the case m a y be, his i m ­ age of the journey provides a richly suggestive series of analogies for the movement. It gives, too, an interesting contrast to the problems of the word. Language leads to aposiopesis, pun, double-entendre - in short, confusion; motion leads to expressive gesture, to dance to harmony.

■*■3 "Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism, " in F r o m Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Freder­ ick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 196-97j 204-205. It is worth noting that McKillop specifically cites the popularity of the peasant dance - particularly the Swiss Kohreinen - as a motif during the transitional period and later. 144

The sense of harmonious movement arises in gesture, either studied or unstudied; in either case the movement is emotionally ef­ fective. Spontaneous gesture is not, of course, always graceful or ar­ tistic; on the other hand, choreographed gesture is not truly emotive or spontaneous; but the function of the author is to turn even the most awk­ ward spontaneous gesture into formalized dance gesture, so that we ma y have both spontaneity and art. At the end of Volume VII, the peasant dance is most interesting because it suggests an intermediate step, at which gesture is formalized at a point somewhere between the sponta­ neous gesticulation of Shandy Hall and the high stylization of Tristram's prose. It seems, too, a correlative of the circular passage, such as the

Yorick section, in which contrary movements are harmonized and vari­ ous discrete phenomena of existence (here, life and death) are reconciled.

The effects of the journey motif with its climax in the metaphor of the dance are directly related to the metaphoric patterns of painting and music. It has long been impossible to think of eighteenth-century literature without concurrently examining its painting; with the current revival of enthusiasm for Baroque and Rococo music, it would appear difficult to ignore that parallel as well. Certainly Sterne forces both upon our attention.

References to music are frequent, often occurring at key points in the novel, and are rather confusing in intent. Tristram tells us that he is "both fiddler and painter" £l. 8. 14]) and reminds us frequently of 145 his musical talents - such as they are. He fiddles, for instance, during his flight from death and provides us with the melodic line: "Fa-ra did­

dle di / and a fa-ri diddle d / and a High-dum dye d u m / fiddle - - -

dumb c" 26.511] . This follows a cacophonous musical interlude:

Ptr. . r. . r. . ing twing twang prut trut 'tis a cursed bad fiddle. Do you know whether m y fiddle's in tune or no ? trut. . prut. . They should be fifths.-- 'Tis wickedly strung--tr. . . a. e. i. o. u. -twang. The bridge is a mile too high, and the sound-post absolutely down, else trut . . prut hark! 'tis not so bad a tone.---Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, dum. There is nothing in playing before good judges .... [5. 15. 371]

Is he, one wonders, assigning sounds to the vowels, as colors were once

assigned? The twanging goes on for quite a while, but the "good judges"

are drawn into the act, as performers as well as audience: " Your

worships and your reverences love musick and God has made you all

with good ears and some of you play delightfully yourselves trut-prut,

prut-trut " £5.15.371-72 ]• We, as musically inclined good judges,

will presumably make something of this onomatopoeia, as we do with

Walter's "pshs's" or the Abbess"s " W h ysh ysh, sh a shu. "

W e become accustomed to half-hear melodies in the novel. The most

constant example, besides Tristram's fiddling, is Toby's whistling or

humming of "Lullibulero, " which he does in and out of season, but sel­

d o m more effectively than when he whistles it as loud as possible as a

pleasing counterpoint to Dr. Slop's reading of Ernulf's curse [3.10.17o]. W e not only listen to music but also interpret speech in musical terms. Walter, disputing over names, "would sometimes break off in a sudden and spirited EP I P H O N E M A , or rather EROTESIS, raised a third, and sometimes a full fifth, above the key of the discourse" [[l. 19.

553. Dr. Slop, "who had an ear," understands Toby's startled "Humph" as well as if Toby had written a volume on the sacraments [2. 17. 129] •

Later, Toby ignores one of Walter's rages, and it is well he does, for

had he been a lover of such kind of concord as arises from two such instruments being put into exact tune, he would instantly have skrew'd up his, to the same pitch; and then the devil and all had broke loose the whole piece, madam, must have been played off like the sixth of Avison Scarlatti con furia, like m a d . Grant me patience!-- What has con furia, con strepito, or any other hurly- burly word whatever to do with harmony? [3. 5.163]

Evidently, a great deal. As the novel continues, m a n y events are con­ nected with music. Obadiah suffers from his inability to hear himself whistle - a misfortune in some incomprehensible way connected with ob­ stetrics, theology, Catholicism, and the hat-band with which he binds the instrument bag and which is an immediate cause of the disasters of

Tristram's nativity ([3.8.165-66]. Tristram is puzzled by Slawken- bergius1 musical notations; "What can he me a n by the lambent pupila- bility of slow, low, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone" [[4. 1.

273] - and the company at dinner, hearing Phutatorius1 exclamation, wonder too - "One or two who had very nice ears, and could distinguish the expression and mixture of two tones as plainly as a third or a fifth, or any cord in music" are perplexed by the tone [[4.27.318]. Finally, 147 there is Yorick's interesting funeral sermon and text, whose chief ex­ cellence is that the text will fit any sermon and the sermon any text, a kind of ecclesiastic palindrome which introduces an elaborate passage of musical notation. The exact terms of the nota again puzzle Tristram, who dares not guess what Yorick intends by moderato, or lentemente and tenute, by con l'arco and senza l'arco. He does, however, interpret a critical note, but he glosses it by place rather than tone. A "Bravo! " appears at the very bottom of the last page of the sermon, just where the thumb might cover it; thus, "from the manner of it, it stands half ex­ cused; and being wrote moreover with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing, 'tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of vanity, than of VA N I ­

T Y herself" [6.11.427-29].

The reader, too, m a y well be puzzled by the musical notations.

W e know that Sterne was an able violinist and cellist, and we feel that music must be important to our understanding of the novel since it is drawn to our attention so frequently. But, for every passage in which musical terminology occurs seriously, there is one in which it is clearly comic. A reference to the "harmony" of the work, for example, balances a comment of "Fiddlestick. " Again, Sterne is having it both ways. His references to music seem to me to do two things: their implications are similar to those of gesture or definition, and they suggest another way in which Sterne is an important figure in the first turn of the novel form.

The relation between music and rhetoric is fairly obvious. As letters, syllables, and words (grammar) are to scales and keys, so larger 148 structures and devices (rhetoric) are to harmony and musical prosody; the harmonization of the musical, as of the verbal, structures is left to us, and we are expected to reconcile cacophony into harmony. The broader formal implications of music are most suggestive in the con­ text of the music of the period.

Edward Lowinsky, in a detailed s u m m a r y of the music of the eighteenth-century, points out the great change of taste that took place with the advent of the Beggar's Ope^a. whose popularity caused an im ­ mediate decline in the popularity of Handelian opera, the loser in "a contest between pretense on a high level of artistry and truth on the level of popular simplicity, between an art twice removed from reality - in tongue and time - and a native art holding up a mirror to present-day times, characters, and mores; it was a contest between solemnity and

irony, indeed, impudence. " Shandean parallels are here; we m a y think

of Sterne's concentration on his native Yorkshire locality, his apparent naivete, and certainly of his impudence. Lowinsky shifts his attention

to the more prolonged battle of musical styles in France, but his general

remarks on the transition from Baroque to Rococo musical forms hold

true for both countries. There is, for example, a shift from Baroque

polyphony to Rococo homophony; in both several voices are employed,

but in polyphony each has a melodic line of its own, while in homophony

the highest voice carries the melody and the other voices accompany.

Here one m a y suggest an analogue between Sterne's use of the narrator

and the homophonic style; Tristram's voice clearly carries the story

and subsumes everything to itself. Contrasting Pergolesi and Handel, 149

Lowinsky notes that the rococo musician avoids full harmony and usually employs no mor e than two voices; one might compare Sterne's fondness for dialogues and his avoidance of "crowd" scenes. There is, too, the utter simplicity of the basic rhythmic pattern in rococo music; to this basic simplicity, regularity and symmetry are added variety, surprise and increased rhythmic motion. One ma y compare the basic symmetry of the dual plot of Tristram Shandy and the wildly various methods with which it is presented. Finally, Lowinsky relates Bach's music to Leib­ niz' theory of monads; a comparison between these two and the Shandean hobby-horsical character is irresistible, for Lowinsky's is just the kind of ingenious, extravagant parallel that delights Sterne:

Bach's music m a y be viewed as a perfect symbol of the uni­ verse as seen by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . . . a universe formed by Monads, which are defined as simple, individu­ ated, energetic substances in a constant flux of activity and change, related to other Monads through a pre-established harmony. In this picture of the universe the Monad stands for the motif, the pre-established harmony for the vision of the whole. A Bach motif can indeed be defined in terms of a Leibniz Monad, whose main attribute is force and ener­ gy; it is constantly active and variable, but in the nature of its action and change it follows its own inner principle; the Monad is a mirror of the whole, even as the whole consists of Monads. Yet, each Monad mirrors the whole, the uni­ verse, in its own individual fashion, so that the immense order and harmony of the universe is accompanied by in­ finite variety.

It would be difficult to find a better philosophical rationale, were one really wanted, for the eccentricity of the hobby-horsical character, as well as its peculiar resemblance to its fellow eccentrics, or for the constant 150 sense of movement, the sense of universal order, and the musical motif.

There is even a possible explanation for the balance between kinesis and stasis in the novel, in a quotation from Rousseau: "All fine arts have some unity of subject matter, the source of the pleasure which they af­ ford the spirit, for a divided attention cannot come to rest, and when our attention is occupied by two subjects, that is proof that neither of them satisfies us. There exists in music a successive unity with regard to the subject, by which all voices well linked together form a single whole, which can be grasped in its ensemble and in all its relations.

All this ferment in the musical world must have formed part of the mental baggage of the cultivated in the eighteenth century, just as to­ day it is impossible to remain ignorant of the revolutionary aspects of

"rock, " no matter how hard one tries. Sterne was not only a musician, but also a contemporary of Bach's son, Johann Christian, and ma y have 15 been acquainted with him through the concerts at Carlisle House. He is obviously aware of prominent Baroque and Rococo musicians, to wh o m he alludes often by name. All of these correspondences and hints sug­ gest that he intends a basically musical form for his novel. Twice, Tris­ tram refers to his work as a "rhapsody" Q . 13. 35, 7. 28. 516] - a "string

14 "Taste, Style, and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Music, " in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. W asserman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), pp. 163-205. Specific refer­ ences, in order: pp. 164, 171, 173, 179-80.

15 Cf. Letters, pp. 296-97, 339-40. 151 of melodies arranged with a view to effective performance in public, but without regular dependence of one part upon another. The thought of

Tristram as a singer of epic seems too ironic to be borne, but there is

still a certain seriousness in the characterization, for I feel that there

is a musical analogue for Sterne's form. The symphonic form was in its first stages of development in the eighteenth century, and its organi­

zation is very similar to that of Tristram Shandy. The basic symphonic

form is that of the first and fourth movements, the sonata allegro with

its statement of theme or themes, development of themes and recapitu­

lation in slightly different form. ^ In Tristram Shandy we have Tris­ tram's infancy and childhood, Toby's wound and amours introduced and

developed contrapuntally in I-VI and recapitulated in VII-IX. Within this

broad symphonic development, there are the little echoing notes: the

doctors of the Sorbonne discuss foetal baptism, the ecclesiastics of York­

shire consider re-baptism; Toby's military operations at the beginning

are paralleled by Mrs. Wadman's attack at the end; blank pages and chap­

ters echo a black and a marbled page; Yorick's sermon is tied round with

yarn just as Dr. Slop's bag is knotted in Obadiah's hat-band. The list of

verbal parentheses or musical codae continues almost indefinitely.

Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musician's, ed. Eric Bl o m (9 vols. ; London: Macmillan & Co. , 1954), VII, 144.

1 "^Horner Ulrich, Symphonic Music (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1952), Chap. I, passim. 152

The form of the novel, then, is musical, insofar as literature m a y be said with any certainty to approach the condition of music. One

feels stubbornly that words m e a n in a wa y that musical sounds do not.

The distinction between musical and verbal meaning was not, however,

as sharply drawn in the eighteenth century as m a y be today, when a taste

for programmatic music has long seemed rather uncultivated. The con­

nection between the two kinds of expression during the Enlightenment has

been interestingly traced by Paul Henry Lang. Quoting Leibniz' defini­

tion of music as "a hidden mathematical exercise of the spirit unaware

of its counting while making music, "Professor Lang remarks that the

"notable new element in this definition is the reference to the human spir­

it, to the subject ma n rather than the object music. " He states his view

of the principal musical postulate of the period: "Music is an art of m o ­

tion in time, and as such it is akin to the motions of the human soul, from

which it follows that music is able to apprehend and convey the impulses

and moods of the hum a n soul. In a word it is an imitative art. " Fur­

ther, music and words, music and logic were seen as closely related.

Monteverdi stated that "the words shall be master of the music, " and

the Enlightenment accepted the idea, applying it, for instance, in the

popular oratorios. Lang concludes with the assertion that the "Enlight­

enment gave us all our modern theories and concepts of music; it codi­

fied tonality, it created the system of harmony by recognizing the dual­

ism of major and minor, and, above all, it created musical logic. 153

The fine discriminations between musical and verbal logic are irrele­ vant here; what is important is that Sterne could think of a musical form as intimately connected with verbal logic and possessed of a positive log­ ic of its own. Thus, when verbal logic fails, it ma y be replaced, with­ out complete loss of reason, by musical logic. W h e n Sterne uses s y m ­ phonic form, then, it has a certain positive logic which gives a total ef­ fect of unity and harmony - even a Cecilian heavenly harmony - to the various intricacies and discords of its parts. The effect is rather dif­ ferent from that of a similar use of musical form in Virginia Woolf's

To the Lighthouse, in which the form seems a purely aesthetic device, a method whereby Woolf can achieve artistic coherence, but which im ­ presses us mor e with its verbal coherence and the mythic implications

of its symbols than with its musical overtones (which are not, in any

case, suggested by a pattern of musical references in the novel). Sterne,

on the other hand, suggests through his musical references a broad musi­

cal form in his work; and, in his era, a connection between verbal and

musical forms might have seemed mor e clearly rational than it does today.

It would not do, of course, to become too solemn about the musi­

cal motif; Tristram Shandy is not Dr . Faustus. But, then, the music to

which Sterne often refers was often less than solemn. One disgruntled

"The Enlightenment and Music, " Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1967), 93-108. Specific references, in order: pp. 95, 96, 101, 108. 154 critic of the current popularity of Baroque and Rococo music said that m u c h of it (referring, if me m o r y serves, to Vivaldi) was nothing but the

Musak of its day, a tinkling accompaniment for chatter and chocolate.

Perhaps so; but even at that, at the worst, Sterne's music does provide a consistent background for his chat with the reader. Even if, in all high seriousness, w e reject a close correspondence between verbal and musi­ cal form or view Rococo music as dreadfully frivolous, we m a y still ap­ preciate the unifying effects of the bagatelle, the diddle-dum-de.

The metaphors drawn from painting are less puzzling in their i m ­ plications than the musical motif. The pattern opens in the same phrase as that of music, in a line that combines the motifs of the journey, m u ­ sic, and painting - "for happening, at certain intervals and changes of the Moon, to be both fiddler and painter, according as the Fly stings"

[l.8. 13-14], Tristram explains his dedication in terms of its painter­ ly qualities:

M y Lord, if you examine it over again, it is far from being a gross piece of daubing, as some dedications are. The de­ sign, you Lordship sees, is good, the colouring transparent, the drawing not amiss; or to speak more like a ma n of science, and to measure m y piece on the painter's scale, divided into 20,--1 believe, m y Lord, the out-lines will turn out as 12, the composition as 9,---the colouring as 6, the expression 13 and a half, and the design, if I ma y be allowed, m y Lord, to understand m y own design, and supposing absolute perfection in designing, to be as 20, 1 think it cannot well fall short of 19. £l. 9. 16]

Tristram here prefigures the pedantic critic who attacks Garrick Q3. 12.

180] , and there is indeed reason to believe that he does mistrust so 155 scientific an approach to painting, but at least the analogy suggests ut pictura poesis and gives the reader yet another little problem to con­ sider as he reads. As Jean Hagstrum remarks, to the eighteenth-cen­ tury reader, "a hint of painterly structure, or a central iconic reference can wake a train of controlled pictorial sensations. "19 Tristram con­ tinues his theory when he speaks of the poco piu and poco men o of the

Italian artist determining the precise line of beauty in the sentence and the statue. He evokes moral qualities in spatial, vaguely artistic terms, when he combines the English landscape with native morality: "If you hold your hand over your eyes, and look very attentively, you ma y per­

ceive some small glimmerings of wit . . . with a comfortable provision

of good plain household judgment, " and then he generalizes, "the height

of our wit and the depth of our judgement, you see, are exactly propor­ tioned to the length and breadth of our necessities" [3- 20.197]. Theo­

ries of both painting and music are applied to authorship:

But the painting of this journey, upon reviewing it, appears to be so mu c h above the stile and manner of any-thing else I have been able to paint in this book, that it could not have remained in it, without depreciating every other scene; and destroying at the same time that necessary equipoise and balance, (whether good or bad) betwixt chapter and chapter, from whence the just proportions and harmony of the whole work results. For m y own part, I a m but just set up in the business, so know little about it but, in m y opinion, to

■*•9 The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 140. 156

write a book is for all the world like humming a song be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it. [4. 25. 315]

Characters are consistently described in terms of the suggested painterly theory. Dr. Slop's figure is given only in outline, so that we m a y apply Hogarth's rules and see him adequately "caracatur'd and con­ vey'd to the mind by three strokes as three hundred" ^2. 9. 105] ; the compression resulting from resting his chin on his crutch shortens Toby's face "into a more pleasurable oval" [4- 2.274]; Mrs. Shandy, while eavesdropping, is a veritable model for the Goddess of Silence in intag­ lio £5. 5. 357]; the Tristrapoedia is seen in terms of a carving, too, its

essential form waiting to burst forth after Walter is finally able to chip the dross away .[5. 42. 403] .

Walter's person as well as his tract is seen in painterly terms,

Had he not doffed his wig and groped for his handkerchief with his hands

at cross purposes, "his whole attitude had been easy natural un­

forced: Reynolds himself, as great and gracefully as he paints, might

have painted him as he sat ",-£3. 2. 159]. Of course Walter did not sit

in so elegant a posture, but the possibilities suggested are disconcerting.

W e do not, I imagine, see Walter, like Dr. Johnson, as quite the sub­

ject for a Reynolds' portrait, and, to be sure, some control of the image

is provided by a later allusion. W h e n Walter gestures with his thumb

and forefinger, Tristram remarks, " M y father instantly exchanged the

attitude he was in, for that in which Socrates is so finely painted by 157

Raffael in his school of Athens; which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of

Socrates is expressed by it" ^4. 7. 278]. Our connois seur ships m a y well recall Raphael's "School of Athens, " but we might better remem b e r Re y ­ nolds' "English Connoisseurs in Rome, " a parody of Raphael filled with

English virtuosi caricatured in the poses of the ancients and painted a decade before the publication of Volumes III and IV. Both images are possible, however, and if the latter seems the more probable, we must still admit the possibility of both.

The implications of the allusions to Reynolds in connection with

Walter seem less satirical than those of the allusions to Hogarth in the presentation of Trim. Trim is first introduced with a good deal of de­ tail, and Tristram remarks that Tr i m had little of chiaroscuro - "I have but one mor e stroke to give . . . the only dark line " [2.5.95] - the one dark stroke being his verbosity. Aside from reflecting that there are considerably more than three strokes to the portrait (a critical notion to which we have not, at this point, been introduced), we pay little at­ tention. Further explanation comes later, after the warning that we should not draw Trim's gesture incorrectly. Trim stands within the limits of the line of beauty and his stance is recommended to painters and orators [2.17. 122-23], The Hogarth print which accompanies the

? u0 The two paintings are conveniently reproduced together in Nikolaus Pvesner's The Englishness of English Art (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books Ltd. , 1964), p. 69 158 description suggests a strong Hogarthian influence, but one should not concentrate too heavily on mental images drawn from Hogarth at the ex­ pense of rather more dignified possibilities, for the schools of both Ho ­ garth and Reynolds are relevant to Sterne's great scheme.

Reynolds, like Sterne, inclined to a strongly dialectical approach.

In his Discourses, he begins by opposing the two extreme notions of art as divine gift and art as mechanical trade, and he is consistently aware of the dichotomy of his art, as when, for example, he is aware of the op­ position between the painterly form and the concrete image, the confusion of the objective world and the emptiness of me r e notional subjectivity.

One m a y compare Tristram's two methods, the burst of inspiration op­ posed to the work of research and of the great machine. More important to Sterne's method is Reynolds' recognition of the weakness of the audi­ ence and the function of art in encouraging a properly responsive state of mind:

In this state [responsivenessJ, our mind and sensibility apparently possess a fullness and coherence which they do not have in the normal intercourse of co m m o n life when our humanity is fragmented by interest, inattention, anal­ ysis, self-conceit - all the various modes of particularity in the world of things. But in this artificial state, man's faculties are meaningfully and emotionally connected with themselves, with other minds, with perceptual objects, and with the historically (humanly) objective reality of the art itself. "Here we transcend the prejudices of our limited personalities, and rise to something like compre­ hension of life in the totality of its connections. "21

2lQuoted in Harvey Goldstein, "Ut Poesis Pictura: Reynolds on Imitation and Imagination, " Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1(1968), 213-35. M y comments on Reynolds are drawn from Professor Goldstein's discussion. 159

Sterne's constant emphasis on his book as book, drawing our attention to all the artifice of writing and printing a novel, is very close to the

state suggested by Reynolds' paradox; the more we are conscious of art

the more we are aware of the whole of life. Sterne appears to draw upon

Reynolds, too, in certain references which indicate that he took a c o m ­

plex view of Hogarth's theories and practice. As I said, w e note a dis­

crepancy between Hogarth's theory and Sterne's practice in drawing the

figure of Trim; according to William Holtz, the portrait is intended to

reveal a fundamental inadequacy in the theory, particularly its lopsided

resolution of the competing demands of formal and representational val­

ues. Sterne feels that detail often must be given and he is, furthermore,

suspicious of the touches of pedantry in Hogarth's theory. 22 Sterne

shared Hogarth's talent, however, for the creation of comic scenes and

his artistic independence - a trait not strong in Reynolds - and cosmo­

politanism.

22 "Pictures for Parson Yorick: Laurence Sterne's London Visit of 1760," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1967), 169-184. Professor Holtz adduces a great ma n y parallels between Reynolds and Sterne, subverting the generally Hogarthian view of Sterne's pictures. For example, c o m ­ pare Reynolds - "the grace of Raffaelle, the purity of Domenichino, the learning of Poussin" - with Sterne - "the grace of Raphael, the purity of Dominichino, the corregiescity of Corregio. " Biographical evidence suggests that Sterne was charmed with Reynolds and cool towards Hogarth; and it was at Hogarth that Reynolds directed his attack on the "cant of criticism" - an attack, as well as a phrase, in which Sterne delights. One cannot, however, overemphasize Sterne's debt to Hogarth for the serpentine or zig-zag line in composition - a quality which Hogarth shared with Continental artists and which is analogous both to Sterne's composi­ tion and his cosmopolitanism (see Pevsner, _op. cit. , p. 513). 160

The attitudes towards and the uses of Reynolds' and Hogarth's theories, involved as they ma y be, are but part of a larger pattern of vision. Mrs. Wadman, we know, had an eye which spoke in soft and mystic accents (]8.25. 578]], and the eye is capable of receiving as well as sending messages. Following Locke, Tristram says, "Let it suffice to affirm, that of all senses, the eye . . . has the quickest commerce with the soul, gives a smarter stroke, and leaves something more inexpressible upon the fancy, than words can either convey or s o m e ­ times get rid of" []5. 7. 36l] . Thus do we pierce that phalanx of tall, opaque words.

The emphasis on the picture, and on the kinds of awkward or parodic pictures that Sterne draws, suggests more strongly than any other of his devices his position at the first turning point in the novel, for ma n y of his strokes are picturesque. The picturesque m a y be viewed simply as an interregnum between classic and romantic art, necessary in or­ der to allow the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eyes, but Martin Price finds this view too limited. In the picturesque, as in

Tristram Shandy, there is interest in surface variation and calculated surprise; there is the moral and religious implication of the picturesque, looking back to the controversy over wit and forward to new conceptions of imagination; there is the assumption of an easy and playful manner, the emphasis on artifice, the engagement of the spectator in the ener-

..... * * I . : gies of the visible object, and on the beauty of spontaneity in the object. 161

Lastly, there is the picturesque delight in the arbitrary and accidental

and its willingness to learn from and exploit accident. W e see in Sterne's prose all these aspects of the picturesque; we ma y see his central formal problem in one more aspect:

The picturesque in general recommends the rough or rugged, the crumbling form, the complex or difficult harmony. It seeks a tension between the disorderly or irrelevant and the perfected form. Its favorite scenes are those in which form emerges only with study or is at the point of dissolu­ tion. It turns to the sketch, which precedes formal per­ fection, and the ruin, which succeeds. Where it concen­ trates upon a particular object, the aesthetic interest lies in the emergence of formal interest from an unlikely source . . . or in the internal conflict between the centrifugal forces of dissolution and the centripetal pull of form .... Clear­ ly this is a dramatic emphasis. The center of attention is displaced from the work of art as we traditionally conceive it to the larger sphere in which it plays its role, and the drama is readily cast into the form of the energies of art wrestling with resistant materials or the alternative form of the genius of nature or time overcoming the upstart a- chievements of a fragile but self-assertive art. The drama of the picturesque achieves neither the full tragedy of the sublime nor the serene comedy of the beautiful. 23

Like the picturesque, Sterne's novel has an unaccountable form, achieved

through tension and perceived only with difficulty; it leads us outward

from art to life, from the novel to the novel writing, from book to self;

and, I suppose one must admit, that the drama of Tristram Shandy, es­

sentially unresolved, is essentially light rather than serious, cheerful

rather than exalting in its effects.

23 "The Picturesque Moment, " in Fr o m Sensibility to Romanticism, p. 277. 162

In sum, then, Sterne's shorter patterns enforce his larger units in their emphasis on dual movements and their insistence on active, creative participation by the reader. The rhetoric of definition and gesture and the metaphor of painting, tend to freeze action, holding us quiet for a mor e or less extended consideration of the object. The aposiopesis, the metaphors of music and the journey collaborate to expand possibilities, leading us to consider as m a n y or as few inter­ connections of a sound, word, or action as we can. In song and dance the spatial and temporal considerations, the spoken word and the un­

spoken but pregnant sound and gesture merge, creating a spontaneous yet formal vision of unity, a picturesque harmony of opposites, a tem­ porary resolution of tension. True Shandeism does, indeed, ma k e the wheel of life run long and cheerfully around. IV

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. " William Butler Yeats

One ends as one began, with a question; "How does one tell a story? " Especially, how does one ma k e coherent an account of the style of a story such as Tristram Shandy, an intricate mixture of nar­ rative, biography, and essay in which muc h seems purposely left to the wh i m and caprice of the reader by an apparently whimsical and capricious author?

In any discussion of style there is the danger, as George Wil­ liamson sees it, that the "critic finds what the Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking all his life. "■*■ This melancholy conclusion is reached if he treats of the plain, normal elements of a style. If he chooses the bizarre special effects or rare occurrences, he must defend himself

against charges of special pleading, as W. K. Wimsatt does: "The

same recognition of meaning that leads us to choose certain charac­ teristics for attention leads us to choose the places where they ma y be

1 The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose F o r m from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 339.

163 164 found. One risks the Scylla of the insignificant and the Charybdis of the picayune. Even if one feels that the happy balance has been struck, that one's specimens are both c o m m o n enough to be representative and idiosyncratic enough to be significant, there remains the perpetually nagging question of the real impact of style on the reader. Are we ac­ tually affected, except in indefinable subliminal ways, by stylistic de­ vices when we read, or, as Tristram plaintively repeats, do we permit the subtle hints to escape totally unregarded? As even the most cur­ sory reading of Tristram Shandy teaches, however, the danger of say­ ing anything at all is immense; one need not be appalled by a danger thus common. Sterne's style, to which he assiduously directs our attention, points to tentative conclusions in two general areas, the aesthetic and the ethical.

The aesthetic question ma y be isolated first: Sterne's treatment of the word, sentence, chapter; the whole form of the novel. W e are

immediately struck by the queer way in which he tells his story and we naturally question the meaning of the odd form. There are two chief possibilities; first, that the peculiar form of Tristram Shandy is in­ tended as a mockery and parody of novelistic convention; second, that the form is supposed to be a more accurate imitation of reality than

conventional form.

^Wimsatt, p. 25. 165

Satiric implications are of course most probable, but at the same time, if Tristram Shandy is a satire, it is a most peculiar form of sa­ tire. It is, in Ronald Paulson's words, satire subverted. Professor

Paulson remarks that the novel "pretends to be a novel to end all novels, but it is actually a satire on novels and all examples of the unbridled mind. " But he eventually finds that satire of the novel form is an in­

sufficient account of the form of Tristram Shandy: "Sterne consciously takes up the old satiric object, lets one see that it is a satiric object,

and then modifies it into a good .... His particular effect is, as I have said, the romantic irony of complicating the reader's reaction

through satire followed by acceptance. It must also be concluded that

. . . he has picked up one strand of the anti-romance tradition and written the ultimate expression of a-literature in the eighteenth century.

He accomplishes this feat by subverting the conventions not only of

Richardson but of Swift and Fielding as well. On the whole, it is

not a very satisfactory answer to the problem of form, this recogni­

tion that the novel is a satire and not a satire at the same time. Sterne

is clearly not to be stuffed into a convenient literary pigeon-hole, even

one as capacious as that marked "satire. "

3 Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 250. 166

But let us consider satire as a possible formal principle and apply it to particular aspects of the novel. That first chapter, for ex­ ample, which ends in the middle of a dialogue: why end in the middle and begin the next chapter with the end of the dialogue? Certainly, the method satirizes the novelistic technique of dividing a work into chap­ ters and thus falsifying experience, which does not occur in neat blocks but in an endless, often incoherent stream. But is the attack really necessary? There is no need to divide a work into chapters; Defoe dis­ pensed with them at the inception of the novel form.

The treatment of the sentence raises the same problems. Sterne obviously parodies and satirizes conventional attitudes towards sentence structure; indeed, he attacks the whole basis of Western language in his confusion of tenses and his insistence on the importance of tone. (Would he have had less pleasure, one wonders, with a language that permitted the creation of a new word for a change in the temporal position of an object? or one in which meaning depended upon pitch?) But an attack on tall, opaque words seems hardly necessary in the middle of a cen­ tury which devoted mu c h of its energy to simplifying and clarifying prose.

W e first begin to suspect the meticulously articulated sentence on the first page of the novel, with the long and elegantly ordered period based on conditions contrary to fact. Later, when we come to mistrust thor­ oughly Walter and his itch for reasoning, we m a y be led to believe that since Walter is often wjrong, anything said the way Walter would say 167 it must be wrong, too. But this is not true, for Walter often says quite sensible things. His sermon on death, if emotionally misplaced, is in­ tellectually and structurally excellent; his theory of auxiliaries and his dual method of judgment are effective, at least insofar as the methods are shared by his son. In ma n y ways Walter is reliable, and so, too, is his favored form of discourse.

In the smallest unit, the word, the difficulties of satiric view arise again. W e know that words are slippery objects; is it quite neces­ sary to tease us into applying a dirty meaning and then scold us for so doing? W e become most uneasy: is it possible that "nose" does m e a n

"nose" and nothing more? And "world": does it me a n the area around

Shandy Hall, from which little plot of ground we associate the ma c r o ­ cosm? or does it me a n a rural Bedlam dissociated from anything but itself? The definitions are sometimes accurate, sometimes not; we can never be sure that any one definition is to be rejected simply because others have been. The relationship between words and things is a dif­ ficult one, of course. The eighteenth-century mind, at least partially formed by Swift and Pope, would have been most aware of the dangers inherent in the relation; the twentieth-century reader, product of an age of mas s communication, public images, and propaganda, will have even less difficulty in accepting the Humpty-Dumpty view of words and sub­ stituting the word for the reality - Walters, all of us. 168

Indeed, when we consider the parody and satire lavished on ten­

dencies of human speech already roundly attacked, we m a y wonder if

Sterne is not beating a very dead horse. W e realize that any formali­

zation of experience - from the word to the novel - involves some falsi­

fication, but surely it is only the most benighted adolescents - the

Catherine Morlands of the world - who really run the risk of confusing

the one for the other, art for life. On the whole, it is probably more

helpful in other than a satiric light, as a more accurate representation

of life than conventional form.

The point is, I think, that Sterne tests the form of the novel and

strains it to its limits, teases the function of the sentence and the defi­

nition of the wprd, not in order to subvert their functions but to lead us

to reflect upon their functions. He does not wish us to reject Ciceronian

rhetoric or stable definition or coherent narrative as valueless, but

wants us to consider for ourselves what that value is.

To return to the definition of the novel as the imitation of a sin­

gle action, we ma y view Tristram Shandy as informed by the single ac­

tion, "to consider. " The form of the novel, its structures, schemes,

and tropes, enforce not decision but reflection. The final work is left

to the reader, and thus we ma y have numerous and opposing interpre­

tations, all of which seem perfectly valid, depending on the point of view.

Take for example, the popular question of the "sentimental. " One school

of critics feels that Sterne would have approved of sentimental reactions 169 in his readers; another shows that we wear the sentimental ma s k at our own risk; a third decides on something between the lascivious jester and the tearful sentimentalist. Or Locke. One critic asserts that the novel is based on Lockean doctrine; another challenges the view; and a small library of reconsiderations, revaluations and reviews results.

The confusion would have delighted Sterne, who loves to keep us guess­ ing and who will not be pinned down.

It is good to be kept guessing, of course, for guessing stimu­ lates the mind and nourishes the soul.

Mentally we have a great deal to do, for we have mu c h of the novel to compose ourselves. I suggested earlier that the musical form, rather than a specifically literary form such as comedy or tragedy, seems valid for the novel. Now, musical form is the most difficult of all aesthetic forms to perceive, for it compounds the disadvantages of temporal forms such as the novel. Like the novel, the symphony moves forward in time, and we have forgotten the beginning long be­ fore we reach the end; sounds are mor e difficult than words to r e m e m ­ ber and, in addition, even the most elusive word has but finite limits

of meaning, while a musical note would appear to have limitless pos­

sibilities, if indeed it can be said to have "meaning" at all except as

a transition from or to some other note. Like the notes of music,

Sterne's words are often pure sound; like notes, too, one must make

an effort to hold them in the mind and blend them as the piece moves 170 forward. Even the silences are musical in this sense; the dashes or the gestures serve as part of the orchestration. The transition is every­ thing; the hurly-burly words have mu c h to do with the novel.

There are further implications of the "musical" approach as

Sterne uses it - the dream and the film. Sterne often induces a dream­ like state in the reader who follows his directions. W e move through such a confusion of times and are aware of so ma n y temporal processes at once - time of action, time of writing, time of reading - that time ceases to have any stable meaning. Space tends to behave as in a dream, too, subjected to sudden expansions and contractions - the author's study, the reader's drawing-room, Shandy Hall, France, the universe - until all sense of distance is lost.- All of this creates a new kind of ex­ perience. Susanne Langer characterizes the sensation as typically cinematic, the creation of a "virtual present" as opposed to the "vir­ tual past" of the novel, a sense which both dream and cinema share. ^

The shimmering of time and place before us in reverie or montage, the sharing of characteristics by the persons in the novel, the import­ ance of gesture either frozen or presented in slow motion, all tend to ma k e us aware of an eternal No w rather than a definite Then.

Certainly, no such form - music, dream, or cinema - is going to be stabilized. The sounds we hear, even though we are good judges

4 Feeling and F o r m : A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scrib­ ner's Sons, 1953), 411-15. 171 with good ears, and the dreams we dream are peculiarly our own. This is not to say, of course, that in producing a proto-anti-novel, Sterne wishes to suggest by his form that experience is meaningless or that communication is completely impossible. W e do see ma n y failures of communication and we see the human mind in a rather absurd light as it clutches at things - Walter's books or Toby's miniature cities, for instance - but we also see successful efforts at communication and, in

Tristram's novel, we see a successful ordering of experience. Tris­ tram wants us to be aware of both aspects of existence, both the experi­ ential flow which cannot be formalized without falsification and the human need to formalize. Thus, we have chapters and don't have chapters; we are struck by the climactic image of the country dance which combines both the spontaneity of the experiential stream with the set form, so that we have both intellect ordering experience and emotion reacting to experience.

The desire to view experience in contrary ways at once suggests a Byzantine sort of mind; we are asked, in effect, to assent to mutually contradictory propositions simultaneously. Thus, we have parodic fic­ tional and musical form; we have a virtual past and a virtual present; w e have the nose as olfactory and generative organ; all at once. The resolution of the formal tensions in harmony is a clue to the resolution of the ethical tensions. " The most important of the ethical problems is that of causality, the most obtrusive problem in the book, and a difficulty not only for the fabulist interested in structure but also for the moralist interested in ethics. The reasons for things are given at such length and in such de­ tail that they cease, paradoxically, to be reasons at all. If we consider seriously the "causes" for-the behavior of the Shandys, w e find ourselves moving backward to the creation of the world; if we consider effects, the chain is infinite unto eternity. The problem is a most pressing one.

W e ma y think of the philosophers whose names occur in discussion of

Sterne: Bacon distressed by an attempt to reconcile Medieval and mo d ­ ern concepts of formal cause; Locke reducing all cause to efficient cause

Bishop Berkeley disposing of the whole problem in favor of the Infinite

Spirit; Leibniz (no me a n Shandean himself) drawing endless implications from the causal principle and viewing time and space as superficial, ul­ timately meaningless categories imposed by finite mind on infinite in­ telligibility. It is small wonder that Tristram complains of the "pudder and racket" in the schools and proceeds to reduce all causal problems to nonsense.

The chief practical effect of questioning causality is to throw even the possibility of ethical and moral action into doubt. A chain of causes and effects as tightly linked as that in Tristram Shandy and a view of human character as hobby-horsical would seem to preclude the possibility of moral action and to suggest a deterministic world, 173 ruled by forces outside the self and by psychological determinism. Yet we are asked constantly to judge actions from a specifically moral point of view, and surely we would not exert the effort if we believed moral action impossible.

Yorick's sermon on Conscience is the key to both the aesthetic and the ethical problem. The "good" conscience is formed and main­ tained through intellectual activity: the mind is "conscious" of its in­ tricacies and "knows" its balance of the passions [2.7.126] ; conscience is "knowledge" and a good conscience is a matter of "certainty and fact" while the bad conscience is one which has lost its "nice sense and per­ ception" |]l27] and which has but "imperfect cognizance" of evil be­ cause of "an unhappy train of causes and impediments" ^132] . The moral character is the judicial character:

And, in your own case, reme m b e r this plain distinction . . . that your conscience is not a law:-- No, God and reason mad e the law and_ have placed conscience within you to determine . . . like a British judge in this land of liberty and good sense, who makes no new law, but faithfully declares the law which he knows to be already written.

The emphasis on intellection, on the need "to consider, " is here over­ whelming, and I do not think we should read the sermon ironically.

True, the circumstances of its delivery are little short of ludicrous, but Sterne is the last to object to a combination of the frivolous and the

serious, and the point of the sermon is too broadly applicable to the novel to be ignored. W e must know our own minds. W e can "know" 174 outward reality only with difficulty, since appearances are deceiving

(as in the key case of Yorick himself) and the means for communicating experience are uncertain at best, for words often deceive and gestures are open to interpretation. But, even though the task is not an easy one, we can know our own minds, our own consciences. In his discussion of

Sterne's sermons, Arthur Hill Cash summarizes his view of psycho­ moral attitudes: "Left to nature alone, man, as Sterne understood him, would be impelled first one wa y and then another. At one moment, he might be me a n and selfish, at the next generous and kind. Indeed,

Sterne's most simple form of sentimental comedy consists of a mere presentation of this natural capriciousness. W e are, then, caprici­ ous, but despite this natural failing, we must mak e the effort to inter­ pret experience and our own actions; we must attempt to separate the

"unhappy train of causes and impediments" from the "true springs and motives. " It would not do at all to present this effort in too simple a form. One might compare Henry Fielding's grappling with similar pro­ blems. In T o m Jones, the heartiness of the novel compels belief. W e

feel complacently that if one will just add prudence to good nature, all will be well. The difficulty arises, of course, if one considers the

source of good nature. Prudence can be learned, as T o m learns it,

but what if one is not born with good nature, like Blifil? One reaches

^Sterne 1 s C o m e d y of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966), p. 4-2. 175 a moral impasse which is resolved, in a way, by the comedy - Blifil is not punished too severely, and a good thing, too, since his crime ma y not be his fault. In Amelia, Fielding does not allow himself to rely on comedy to solve his moral problem and he quickly finds himself and his reader emmes h e d in excessively knotty discussions of free will and fate, from which we emerge very weary but little enlightened about the exact workings of Fortune. Sterne copes with the problem by reducing it to an absurdity; oddly enough, he leads us to ignore the causal chains through the very insistence on causal chains. W e laugh at the endless knots rather than attempt to untie them (after all, we shall only cut our thumbs) and are led to decide in favor of another method of establishing intelligibi­ lity. The method is the harmonic one, and here the aesthetic and ethical implications of the style coincide.

Ethically, we are thrown back upon ourselves in the sermon on

conscience - only we can decide its state; we cannot, like such contempti­ ble Papists as Dr. Slop, allow our priests to do it for us. W e must not,

either, be too concerned with extra-personal chains of cause and effect.

The novel clearly shows that that way lies madness, and we ma y well be ten years covering the relationships of the events of a few hours. Ethi­

cally, then, the novel is a prolonged examen of conscience in its attempt

to sort out true springs and motives.

Aesthetically, the insistence on the reader's doing mu c h of the work is a moral guide. Any moral act is an aesthetic act in that we 176 must take an experience from the experiential stream and consider it with its causes and effects as a coherently formed object. B y forcing

M a d a m to examine her own mind when she reads a word or by forcing

Sir to decide whether he will paint Mrs. W a d m a n as his wife or his mi s ­ tress, Sterne not only forces an authorial activity on the reader but also implies a connection between this and ethical activity. Do we have nasty minds? Do we keep mistresses who would be worthy subjects for the painting? The hum a n mind being what it is, we cannot pretend that it will not choose the dirty road at intervals. The chief moral point, h o w ­ ever, is that we become aware of the vagaries of our minds - the various impediments that corrupt conscience.

Naturally Sterne does not answer our ethical questions for us; he can only indicate the route we should follow in answering them for ourselves. The effect is far from glum determinism. W e are fully a- ware of the fact that we shall never be able to sort out all the implica­ tions of an action, but we are also aware of the supernatural order which subsumes our addled existence. Sterne relies on the judge of wh o m there is not cause for complaint, the Infinite Spirit or the First Principle of

Intelligibility to sort the matter out for us in eternity. On this earth, we can only make the effort, and Sterne is of that kindly school of moral - i s t who will take the will for the deed.

The consideration of the problem is, therefore, an end in itself.

The inward colloquy, the dialectic with the self, is both a moral and an 177 artistic action. W e constantly relate, oppose, expand meanings; we are constantly aware of the fundamental opposition between the ultimate, bet­ ter form of things manifest in the universe and the immediate, limited, confused state of things on this earth. The method of the moral is the method of the art. The Earl of Shaftesbury, for one, saw the two as closely connected, and he saw it in terms amusingly similar to Sterne's:

"They who enter the public lists must come duly trained and exercised, like well-appointed cavaliers expert in arms, and well instructed in the use of their weapon and management of their steed. For to be well ac­ coutred and well mounted is not sufficient. The horse alone can never ma k e the horseman, nor limbs the wrestler or the dancer. No more can a genius alone ma k e a poet, or good parts a writer in any consider­ able kind. The skill and grace of writing is founded, as our wise poet

/ tells us, in knowledge and good sense.

It is remarkable how that horse keeps appearing as we trace the difficult cartography of the human soul and the double curves of the true line of beauty.

The style, then, is all. It is in the way that Sterne opposes or­ derly with disorderly progress, silence with speech, movement with

6 Quoted in Robert Marsh, Four Dialectical Theories of Poetry: A n Aspect of English Neoclassical Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 37. I a m indebted to Professor Marsh's c o m ­ ments on Shaftesbury (pp. 18-47) for mu c h of the material in the paragraph. 178 rest in every facet of his novel, from his sentence structure to his schemes and tropes, that the moral lies. The style he creates is the verbal counterpart of the necessary action of the mind - moving back­ ward and forward, busily researching or restfully contemplating. In the very nature of the universe with its constant flux, I doubt that we shall ever be able to still the flow long enough to decide if Sterne is really sentimental or really Lockean. He does not intend us to know; he intends us to consider. If we reach stasis, we are immediately plunged into movement; when we become embroiled in movement, we are brought to a sudden halt.

If one must come to a conclusion, to give at least that illusion of meaning that is necessary to ma k e the universe bearable, I would say that Sterne views stasis - the final stillness of the heart as, pre­ sumably, it rests in God - as the ultimate good. One would then con­ centrate heavily on such facets of his style as the basic order which informs ma n y of his most addled sentences, on the beauty and e m o ­ tional significance of the gesture, the importance of the eye and paint­ ing and the importance of the dance and music in creating harmony.

All of these reflect the ineffable order of the universe. On the other hand, there are the sentences organized according to no discernible principle, the promises which are never fulfilled, the frantic mud-,, splashed journies along the highway and the awkwardness of the hu­ m a n body. Perhaps one chooses order above disorder, reflected in 179 a style as indicative of order as of caprice, only after an act of faith.

The act would not have been unacceptable to a minister. 180

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