"'But when a soldier,' said I, 'an' please your Reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water, or engaged for months together in long and dangerous marches—detached here—countermanded there; benumbed in his joints;—perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, he must say his prayers how and when he can.' 'I believe', said I, for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, 'for the reputation of the army—I believe, an't please your Reverence—that when a soldier gets time to pray he prays as heartily as a Parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy."
"'Thou should'st not have said that, Trim,' said my uncle Toby; 'for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.'
"'I hope we shall,' said Trim.
"'It is the Scripture,' said my uncle Toby, 'and I will show it thee in the morning.'"
Now this beautiful naturalness, this delightful, artistic abstention from all rant or extravagance, makes us wish overmuch that the whole guileless character of my uncle Toby had been as charmingly and as decently set in the text; but unfortunately, there is a continuous embroidery of it all with ribald blotches, and far-fetched foulness of speech; nor is his coarseness—like that of Fielding—half excused by the coarseness of the age; it is inherent and vital: Fielding, indeed, is vulgar and coarse, and obstreperous—with the scent of bad spirits and bad company on him;[[14]] but this other, though a parson, and perfumed, and wearing may-be, satin small-clothes, has vile and grovelling tastes that overflow in double-meanings of lewdness: even Goldsmith, who was not squeamish, calls him "the blackguard parson." It is not probable that Goldsmith ever encountered him; nor did Dr. Johnson. Beauclerk, Garrick, and Walpole would have been more in his line; for he loved the glint, and the capital letters, and the showy tag-rags of fashion. And on the strength of his literary reputation, which had sudden and brilliant burst, and of his good family—since a not far-off ancestor had been Archbishop of York—he conquered and enjoyed, for his little day, all that London fashion had to offer. I suspect he took a solid comfort in dying in so respectable a quarter as Old Bond Street. He was buried over Bayswater way, not far from the Marble Arch, in the graveyard then pertaining to St. George's (Hanover Square) church. And there was a story, supported by a good deal of circumstantial evidence, that his body was spirited away and recognized a few days afterward by a medical student among the spoils of a dissecting-room. This story would horrify more than it did, had it attached to an author whose humor had kindled love;—as if this man did somehow deserve a more effective "cutting-up" after death than he ever received before it.
The Rev. Laurence Sterne had—I should have told you—a church-living down in Yorkshire, to which was afterward added, by adroit diplomacy of his friends, an official position in connection with York Cathedral. I do not think the people of his parish missed him much when he was away; and I am very sure they missed him a good deal, whenever he was—nominally—there: painting, fiddling, shooting, and dining-out, took very much of his parochial time; and Tristram Shandy and its success, literary and pecuniary, introduced him to a career in London, and in Paris afterward—for he was always an immense favorite with the French (instance Tony Johannot's illustrations)—to which he yielded himself with a graceful acquiescence that, I am afraid, put his parishioners more out of mind than the fiddling and the shooting had done.
I believe that he loved his daughter Lydia with an honest love; with respect to his wife, one cannot be so sure; some of the most tender letters he left, are addressed to a Mrs. Draper, who was his "dear Eliza"—through a great many quires of paper. He was a Cambridge man and well taught;—of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller;[[15]] he stole from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; not a stealing of ideas only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the strings and lappets of his own abounding humor and drollery, as to give to the whole—thieving and Shandyism combined—a stamp of individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.
But I linger longer on this name than the man deserves. Pathos there is in his stories, to be sure, that makes you wilt in spite of yourself; but a mile away from those Bond Street chambers where this pale, thin, silk-stockinged clergyman lives, and has his dinner invitations ten deep, is that old scar-faced Dr. Johnson about whom the beggars crowd; who can put no such pathos into his cumbrous sentences indeed; but the presence of that old, blind, petulant woman in his house—who had waited on his lost wife—is itself a bit of pathos that I think will outlast the story of Maria—and that should do so forty times over. I wish I could blot out the silk stockings, the rustling cassock, the simper, the pestilent love letters, the pretences, the artificialities of the man; they are oppressive; they rob his words of weight. Wit—to be sure, and humor—truculent, sparkling—more than enough; for the rest, there is hypocrisy, pretension—beastliness—untruth—all pinned under a satinquilted cloak of vague and unreal piety.
[[1]] Charles James Fox, b. 1749; d. 1806. Elected to club membership in 1774. His great great-grandmother was the Duchess of Portsmouth; and the Lord Holland so well known for his entertainments at Holland House, early in this century, was a nephew of Charles James Fox. Life by George Otto Trevelyan.
[[2]] Instance, speech on French affairs and the question of making peace with Napoleon—just then elected First Consul. Date of February, 1800.