Laurence Sterne.
Laurence Sterne can scarcely be ranged in any species of writers. He was not a novelist, though his most humorous and exquisitely finished characters, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Obadiah, Dr. Slop, Yorick, and Mrs. Shandy appear in what professed to be a kind of novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," Gent (1760-1767). These characters are really studies like those of Addison, but they appeared in a long succession of volumes which obtained their great vogue first of all, perhaps, by wild eccentricity—with blank pages, asterisks, erasions, and even pages of marbled paper; next, now by an undercurrent, now by an overflow, of indecent or indecorous story or suggestion; thirdly, by the fact that these were the recreations of a country parson. These allurements, were the first and transient causes of Sterne's popularity, these and a quantity of odd anecdotes, often borrowed wholesale from Burton's then forgotten "Anatomy of Melancholy," as the lewd anecdotes were taken from French collections of the sixteenth century. But while these baits, this "merriment of a parson," allured the town, every reader of taste had the noblest excuse for reading the book. It contained the grave and logical humours and exquisite intellectual caprices of Shandy the father; the patient, kind, dull tolerance of Mrs. Shandy (whose unexpected associations of ideas resemble those of Mrs. Nickleby), the gallantry, simplicity, and noble goodness of Uncle Toby (a person not wholly unlike a Colonel Newcome of the eighteenth century), the similar qualities of his more chivalrous Sancho, Corporal Trim; the wiles of the Widow Wadman; and, what is pleasing to reflective minds, the Curse of Ernulphus, bestowed "on him, Obadiah". "Our men swore terribly in Flanders," said Uncle Toby, but the ancient formulæ of Catholic curses went far beyond our men. For the sentimental there was the death of Lefevre, which, in school reading books, but ineffectually appealed for tears to men now old.
Thus much of "Tristram Shandy" is as good as good can be, and might be collected, with explanatory passages, and exhibited without harm or offence to any reader. But, so presented, it would lose the attraction on which Sterne deliberately counted; the intermixture of insinuation and buffoonery with character and sentiment. Great parts of "Tristram Shandy," once, it seems, essential to its success, are now detrimental to its general diffusion: all the more because the high and low tumbling is that of a clergyman.
The author (born 1713) was English by family and descent, grandson of a Cavalier English clergyman of the Great Rebellion, and Archbishop of the Restoration. We meet his father, Roger Sterne, an ensign in a regiment of foot, in Thackeray's "Esmond," where, in his wild way, he makes a very sensible remark, when the exiled King, fighting for France, rides up to the English lines. For several years, Laurence Sterne followed the drums of his father's regiment, till, at 10 years old, a kinsman sent him to school at Halifax (1723), and the life of a camp where men swore terribly inspires his pictures of soldiers, but was not the most chaste school for a little boy.
In 1733, rather old, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and made the friendship of John Hall (Stevenson) of Skelton Castle. A humorist, a reckless liver, he had a great and unholy influence on Sterne, who took orders and two small livings in Yorkshire, and (1741) married a lady of some property, after a sentimental wooing. Sentiment did not last; Sterne, an accomplished philanderer, became "passing weary of her love," and the pair were only kept together by Sterne's affection for his daughter, Lydia.
Not till 1760 did the first volume of "Tristram Shandy" appear: born of a casual spite against Dr. Slop (Dr. Burton, a Jacobite physician of York), "Tristram" instantly made Sterne a "lion" in London, a friend of the great, and a diner-out. In winter he wrote more "Shandy," and published sermons on the strength of his success; in the summer he worked at home, till a consumptive tendency sent him to the least desirable parts of Southern France (by way of Paris where he met everybody), and, later, to Italy. He died in London, alone (1768) save for the lodging-house keeper, and a footman, a Macdonald of the Keppoch branch, whose father followed Prince Charlie, and whose own childish adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a subject made for the hand of the expiring humorist.
He had kept on publishing, with varying success, new volumes of "Tristram Shandy" almost to the end, when he had the happy thought of beginning his "Sentimental Journey," with its bewildering mixture of the old favourite matter with pretty vignettes of southern scenes and manners, pictures with the prettiness and other qualities of the French painter, Greuze. Here we have both the admired hungry donkey, fed by Sterne with macaroons, and the sentimentalized dead donkey, which provoked the scepticism of Mr. Samuel Weller. Sterne sketched the French as Hogarth did, but with infinitely more sensibility and sympathy, he is a classic in France, no less than in England. Sterne's letters and "Journal to Eliza," a very characteristic piece, are collected in Mr. Lewis Melville's "Life and Letters of Sterne". His biographer (Mr. H. D. Traill, 1882) says that Sterne "undergoes, I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect". If this be so, Sterne himself, with his acrobatic clowning, is to blame, but the loss lies on the readers of mature age who neglect this contemplator of human life, this creator of characters, this painter of manners irrevocably past.[2]
David Hume.
David Hume, a younger son of the laird of Ninewells in Berwickshire, was born in April, 1711. He attended lectures in the University of Edinburgh at a very early age, and, when about 17, devoted himself entirely to solitary study, classical, poetical, and philosophic. The ruling passion of his life was the desire of literary fame, of which, with all his success, he never obtained more than he wanted. Various attempts in other professions ended in his return to his studies; he was only 25 when he wrote his "Treatise of Human Nature," he published it in 1739; was disappointed by its reception; affected to disavow it, but reproduced, in more finished literary form, many of its doctrines in his later essays. The earlier essays, of 1741-1742, were successful: the Philosophical Essays (1748), were attacked by orthodox divines, whom the "Essay on Miracles" (of which the central idea occurred to Hume while arguing with a Jesuit in France) was not apt to conciliate. Some essays he left for posthumous publication; he was in evil odour on account of his opinions, and obtained no better post in Scotland than the keepership of the Advocates' Library. But in Scotland his geniality, good humour, and practical wisdom, made him dear even to those who thought his opinions dangerous. By great frugality he made himself independent of the great, while his "History of England" begun in 1754, though, like most honest histories it at first offended all parties, proved not unprofitable and greatly increased his reputation. In 1765, he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris; later he obtained the post of Under-Secretary for Home Affairs; and finally returned to Edinburgh "in opulence," as he said, with £1000 a year. He had many friends among the preachers of "the Moderate party," and died in 1776, contented, and not without some parade, Dr. Johnson thought, of his philosophic fearlessness. In Paris he was highly popular; but, though England had done much for him, he used to express great dislike of the English. He laboured, none the less, to purge his style of Scotticisms, of which he drew up a list—"allenarly" and "alongst" are to be avoided; and he determined to write "a pretty girl enough" in place of "a pretty enough girl". Hume's philosophical ideas belong to the history, not of literature, but of philosophy. His position, in a continuation of Locke, was sceptical, and had immense influence in causing a reaction and a closer criticism, first in Germany, then in England. Professor Huxley, Hume's biographer, has exposed many of the fallacies in his "Essay on Miracles," and others are glaring. Of "The Natural History of Religion" he wrote unembarrassed by much knowledge of the subject, for early men, as far as we know, often reasoned otherwise than Hume thought that they would necessarily reason. Philosophy and history are always in a state of flux, through the influence of criticism, of new discoveries, and of historical documents, with which Hume had little acquaintance. But a study of modern metaphysics must still begin with the works of Hume, though no one can go to his History for full and accurate information. Unable, or reluctant, to speak his mind quite freely, he adopted the ironical method, without the sometimes elephantine frivolity of Gibbon. Like his fellow-countryman, Dr. Robertson, he was no enthusiastic worshipper of the heroes of the Reformation; and, though nothing less than a Jacobite, he was Tory enough to be tolerant of the Stuart Kings, or rather to study them in the light of the conditions under which they lived. It is in the same light that Hume and his philosophy must be regarded. His letters are among his most interesting works, and his attack on Macpherson's "Ossian," with his defence of the "Epigoniad," the Theban epic of his friend Professor Wilkie, in themselves give a correct and rather amusing view of his tastes and limitations.
Robertson.