Seldom, perhaps, has an author experienced a stranger bringing up than that which fell to the lot of Sterne. His father, Roger Sterne, was one of those luckless persons who seem to be the especial sport of a malicious destiny, in whose hands nothing prospers, from whose hands thievish Fortune filches all opportunities. Roger Sterne was a gentleman of good family and narrow means, who {300} had adopted arms as his profession and had not prospered therein. He had married a wife who was herself a sutler's widow, and who blessed Ensign Sterne with a swift and steady succession of offspring, of whom Laurence was the second. It was chance, acting through the impulses of the War Office, which caused little Laurence to see the light on Irish soil; but though he was born in the melodiously named Valley of Honey, there was little of honeyed sweetness, and much bitterness as of gall and coloquintida, in his early boyhood. Poverty and the eccentric evolutions of a marching regiment contributed to make his a most unenviable childhood. The record, as we can read it in his own account, is disastrous and dreary enough. The regiment to which Roger Sterne belonged was perpetually on the move; the births and deaths of Mrs. Sterne's children succeeded each other with painful rapidity; again and again was little Laurence in imminent peril of shipwreck on the stormiest seas; he experienced in his earliest years all that was worst and most disagreeable in the life of camp-followers. Some account must necessarily be taken of this by those who review Sterne's writings. A child brought up under such conditions is not likely to have a very keen appreciation of the finer phases of life, and must inevitably have a precocious and most unfortunate familiarity with the seamy side of existence. What is commonly called knowledge of the world, which means knowledge of what is worst in the world, as "seeing life" generally means seeing its dirtiest places, undoubtedly Sterne got in plenty, and the future divine was not improved by the education of the camp.
The misfortunes that had attended so persistently upon the career of Roger Sterne culminated at last most tragically, yet at the same time most ludicrously, as if Destiny had determined to the end to make the luckless ensign her sport. At Gibraltar a quarrel with another officer "about a goose" resulted in a duel. Roger Sterne was run through the body. He never recovered from the wound, and though in this harsh world he drew his breath {301} in pain a little longer, he died in Jamaica of fever, which found his enfeebled frame a ready victim. One of the few pleasing characteristics in Laurence Sterne's nature is his affectionate memory of his father; one of the most pleasing passages of all his writings is that in which he describes him. "My father was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointment, of which it had pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty"—hence, no doubt, the speaking of hot words and the spilling of hot blood over that ill-omened goose—"but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his intentions that he suspected no one, so that you might have cheated him ten times a day if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose."
[Sidenote: 1713-1768—"Tristram Shandy">[
Through Halifax School and Cambridge sizarship Laurence Sterne passed, by the patronage of his pluralist uncle, Jacques Sterne, into holy orders and the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, and so into twenty years of almost complete obscurity. We know that he married, that he preached, played the fiddle, fished, hunted, and read, and that is about all we know. Then quite suddenly, in 1759, the lazy, lounging, most eccentric, and ill-chosen clergyman enraptured London by the publication of the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy."
The author of "Tristram Shandy" came to town, and was received with more than Roman triumph. Wealth, wit, genius, nobility, thronged his door, sought his friendship, proffered favors. Sterne revelled in this new life. London offered him a cup of the most intoxicating quality, and he drank and drank again of its sparkling fountain without ever quenching his thirst for popularity, for flattery, for success. Flattery, popularity, success—all three he had in plenty for eight resplendent years. Volume after volume of "Tristram Shandy" wooed and won public applause. Sterne travelled abroad and found the same adulation in other capitals of Europe that he had enjoyed in London. When the popularity of "Shandy" {302} appeared to be on the wane, and the fame of its author to be dwindling, he whipped it up again with the "Sentimental Journey." We may finish his story by anticipation. He died one of the most tragic deaths recorded in the necrology of genius. He died in London on March 18, 1768, and he died alone. The wish he had expressed of expiring at an inn untroubled by the presence of mourning friends was grimly gratified. In lonely lodgings, beneath the speculative gaze of a memoir-writing footman and the care of hired hands, Sterne gasped out the words, "Now it is come!" and so died. He was buried almost unattended, and his body was stolen from its new-made grave by resurrectionists, and recognized, when half-dissected, on an anatomist's table by a horrified friend. So the story goes—not, indeed, absolutely authentic, but certainly not absolutely without credit—the melancholy conclusion of an ill-spent life and a splendid, ill-used intellect.
For his conduct to his wife his memory has been scourged by Thackeray and by his latest biographer, Mr. H. D. Traill. It cannot be too severely scourged. He took her youth, he took her money, and he tired of her, and was untrue to her, and spoke against her in the dastardly letters he wrote to his friends and in which he has gibbeted himself to all time as a hideous warning, a sort of sentimental scarecrow. "As to the nature of Sterne's love affairs," says Mr. Traill, "I have come, though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, platonic. . . . But as I am not one of those who hold that the conventionally 'innocent' is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration than the thorough-going profligate."
One of the greatest of German writers, Jean Paul Richter, {303} declares more than once that he regards Sterne as his master. The statement is amazing. Jean Paul Richter, Jean Paul the Only One, as he was fondly called, was immeasurably sincerer than his master. All that was sham, tinsel, and tawdry in the writings of Yorick was genuine, heart-felt, and soul-inspiring in Jean Paul. Yorick's sentiment was pinchbeck; Jean Paul's was pure gold. All that Richter ever wrote is animated with the deepest religious feeling, the tenderest sympathy, the gentlest and bravest pity. Yorick, in the black and white of his sacred calling's gown and bands, grins and leers like a disguised satyr. His morality is a mummer's mask; his pathos is pretence; the only thing truly Irish about him is his humor, his ceaseless wit, the unfailing sparkle of his fancy.
[Sidenote: 1760—A levée under difficulties]
Quite suddenly the ghastly tragicomedy of the King's life came to an end. There was, we are told, a strange affectation of an incapacity to be sick that ran through the whole royal family, which they carried so far that few of them were more willing to own any other member of the family ill than to acknowledge themselves to be so. "I have known the King," says Hervey, "get out of his bed choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levée, and in five minutes undress and return to his bed till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour." It must be owned, however, that George made a stout fight against ill-health, and if he shammed being well, he kept up the sham for a good long time. He came into the world more than a dozen years before Lord Hervey was born, and he contrived to keep his place in it for some seventeen years after Lord Hervey had died. Time had nearly come round with George as with Shakespeare's Cassius; his death fell very near to his birthday. George was born on October 30, 1683, and on October 25, 1760, he was on the verge of completing his seventy-seventh year. On October 25, 1760, he woke early, as was his custom, drank his chocolate, inquired as to the quarter whence the wind came, and talked of a walk in the {304} garden. That walk in the garden was never taken. The page who attended on the King had left the room. He heard a groan and the sound of a fall. [Sidenote: 1727-1760—Passed away] He came back, and found the King a helpless heap upon the floor. "Call Amelia," the dying man gasped; but before Amelia could be called he was dead. Amelia, when she came, being a little deaf, did not grasp at once the full extent of what had happened, and bent over her father only to learn in the most startling and shocking manner that her father was dead. The Countess of Walmoden, too, was sent for. It would seem as if the ample charms of the Countess of Walmoden, which had delighted George so much while he lived, might have some power to conjure him back from the common doom of kings. But George the Second was dead beyond the power of all the fat and painted women in the world to help. "Friends," says Thackeray in his Essay, "he was your fathers' king as well as mine; let us drop a respectful tear over his grave." But indeed it is very hard to drop a respectful tear over the grave of George the Second. Seldom has any man been a king with fewer kingly qualities. He had courage, undoubtedly—courage enough to be habitually described by the Jacobites as "the Captain," but his courage was the courage of a captain and not of a king. He was obstinate, he was narrow-minded, he was selfish, he was repulsively and even ridiculously incontinent. The usual quantity of base and servile adulation was poured over the Royal coffin. The same abject creatures—they or their kind—that had rhymed their lying verses over the dead Prince of Wales who had hated his father, now rhymed their lying verses over the dead king who had hated his son. If George the Second had been a more common man, instead of being Elector of Hanover and King of England, one might have said of him frankly enough that he was a person about as little to be admired as a man well could be who was not a coward or in the ordinary sense of the term a criminal. But because he was a crowned king, it was regarded as a patriotic duty then to make much of the {305} departed monarch, and to talk of him in the strain which would have been appropriate if he had been a Marcus Aurelius. The best, perhaps, that can be said of him is that, on the whole, all things considered, he might have been worse. It would be unfair to a George who has, at a long interval, to succeed him, to say that George the Second was actually the worst of his line and name; but he was so little, so very little, worthy, that the fulsome pens must have labored in his praise. If many people rejoiced at his removal, it would be hard to say who grieved with the exception of a few, a select few, of his family and the hangers-on of the Walmoden type, to whom his existence was the essential figure in their own existence. To the vast bulk of the English people the matter was of no moment whatever. All that they knew was that a second George, who was Elector of Hanover, had passed away from the English throne, and that a third George, who was Elector of Hanover, had mounted into the vacant seat.
Never was a king better served than George the Second; never had so ignoble a sovereign such men to make his kingdom strong and his reign famous. He began his time of royalty under the protection of the sturdy figure of Walpole; he closed it under the protection of the stately form of Pitt.