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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
A work by Laurence Sterne
(two lines in Greek)
To the Right Honourable Mr. Pitt.
Sir,
Never poor Wight of a Dedicator had less hopes from his Dedication,
than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye corner of
the kingdom, and in a retir'd thatch'd house, where I live in a
constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and
other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time
a man smiles,--but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to
this Fragment of Life.
I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this book, by taking it--(not
under your Protection,--it must protect itself, but)--into the country
with you; where, if I am ever told, it has made you smile; or can
conceive it has beguiled you of one moment's pain--I shall think
myself as happy as a minister of state;--perhaps much happier than any
one (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.
I am, Great Sir, (and, what is more to your Honour) I am, Good Sir,
Your Well-wisher, and most humble Fellow-subject,
The Author.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Chapter 1.I.
I wish either my father or my 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 much depended upon
what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational
Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation 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
considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded
I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in
which the reader is likely to see me.--Believe me, good folks, this is
not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;--you have
all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are
transfused from father to son, &c. &c.--and a great deal to that
purpose:--Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a
man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this
world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks
and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going,
whether right or wrong, 'tis not a half- penny matter,--away they go
cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and
over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth
as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself
sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.
Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the
clock?-- Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking
care to moderate his voice at the same time,--Did ever woman, since
the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
Pray, what was your father saying?--Nothing.
Chapter 1.II.
--Then, positively, there is nothing in the question that I can see,
either good or bad.--Then, let me tell you, Sir, it was a very
unseasonable question at least,--because it scattered and dispersed
the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone
hand in hand with the Homunculus, and conducted him safe to the place
destined for his reception.
The Homunculus, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may
appear, in this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice;--to
the eye of reason in scientific research, he stands confess'd--a Being
guarded and circumscribed with rights.--The minutest philosophers, who
by the bye, have the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being
inversely as their enquiries) shew us incontestably, that the
Homunculus is created by the same hand,--engender'd in the same course
of nature,--endow'd with the same loco-motive powers and faculties
with us:--That he consists as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins,
arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains,
glands, genitals, humours, and articulations;--is a Being of as much
activity,--and in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our
fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of England.--He may be
benefitted,--he may be injured,--he may obtain redress; in a word, he
has all the claims and rights of humanity, which Tully, Puffendorf, or
the best ethick writers allow to arise out of that state and relation.
Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his way
alone!--or that through terror of it, natural to so young a traveller,
my little Gentleman had got to his journey's end miserably spent;--his
muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread;--his own animal
spirits ruffled beyond description,--and that in this sad disorder'd
state of nerves, he had lain down a prey to sudden starts, or a series
of melancholy dreams and fancies, for nine long, long months
together.--I tremble to think what a foundation had been laid for a
thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the
physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly
to rights.
Chapter 1.III.
To my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I stand indebted for the preceding
anecdote, to whom my father, who was an excellent natural philosopher,
and much given to close reasoning upon the smallest matters, had oft,
and heavily complained of the injury; but once more particularly, as
my uncle Toby well remember'd, upon his observing a most unaccountable
obliquity, (as he call'd it) in my manner of setting up my top, and
justifying the principles upon which I had done it,--the old gentleman
shook his head, and in a tone more expressive by half of sorrow than
reproach,--he said his heart all along foreboded, and he saw it
verified in this, and from a thousand other observations he had made
upon me, That I should neither think nor act like any other man's
child:--But alas! continued he, shaking his head a second time, and
wiping away a tear which was trickling down his cheeks, My Tristram's
misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world.
--My mother, who was sitting by, look'd up, but she knew no more than
her backside what my father meant,--but my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who
had been often informed of the affair,--understood him very well.
Chapter 1.IV.
I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good
people in it, who are no readers at all,--who find themselves ill at
ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of
every thing which concerns you.
It is in pure compliance with this humour of theirs, and from a
backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I
have been so very particular already. As my life and opinions are
likely to make some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right,
will take in all ranks, professions, and denominations of men
whatever,--be no less read than the Pilgrim's Progress itself--and in
the end, prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his Essays
should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour-window;--I find it
necessary to consult every one a little in his turn; and therefore
must beg pardon for going on a little farther in the same way: For
which cause, right glad I am, that I have begun the history of myself
in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on, tracing every
thing in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo.
Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that
gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;--(I forget
which,) besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's
pardon;--for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself
neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.
To such however as do not choose to go so far back into these things,
I can give no better advice than that they skip over the remaining
part of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, 'tis wrote only for
the curious and inquisitive.
--Shut the door.--
I was begot in the night betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday
in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was.--But how I came to be so
very particular in my account of a thing which happened before I was
born, is owing to another small anecdote known only in our own family,
but now made publick for the better clearing up this point.
My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but
had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die
upon, his paternal estate in the county of ----, was, I believe, one
of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether 'twas matter of
business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small
specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a
slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life,--on the first
Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year,--as certain as
ever the Sunday-night came,--to wind up a large house-clock, which we
had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands:--And being
somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been
speaking of,--he had likewise gradually brought some other little
family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often
say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and
be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.
It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure,
fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with
me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas,
which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my
poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,--but the
thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head--& vice
versa:--Which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who
certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men,
affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of
prejudice whatsoever.
But this by the bye.
Now it appears by a memorandum in my father's pocket-book, which now
lies upon the table, 'That on Lady-day, which was on the 25th of the
same month in which I date my geniture,--my father set upon his
journey to London, with my eldest brother Bobby, to fix him at
Westminster school;' and, as it appears from the same authority, 'That
he did not get down to his wife and family till the second week in May
following,'--it brings the thing almost to a certainty. However, what
follows in the beginning of the next chapter, puts it beyond all
possibility of a doubt.
--But pray, Sir, What was your father doing all December, January, and
February?--Why, Madam,--he was all that time afflicted with a
Sciatica.
Chapter 1.V.
On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the aera fixed on, was as
near nine kalendar months as any husband could in reason have
expected,--was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this
scurvy and disastrous world of ours.--I 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 (though I will not answer for Venus) than it
has in this vile, dirty planet of ours,--which, o' my 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
man could be born in it to a great title or to a great estate; or
could any how contrive to be called up to public charges, and
employments of dignity or power;--but that is not my case;--and
therefore every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone
in it;--for which cause I affirm 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 my breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw it at
all, for an asthma I got in scating against the wind in Flanders;--I
have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune; and
though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me 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 my 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 pitiful misadventures and cross
accidents as ever small Hero sustained.
Chapter 1.VI.
In the beginning of the last chapter, I informed you exactly when I
was born; but I did not inform you how. No, that particular was
reserved entirely for a chapter by itself;--besides, Sir, as you and I
are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have
been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to
myself all at once.
--You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to
write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting
that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I
am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you
proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now
beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that unless one
of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.--O diem
praeclarum!--then nothing which has touched me will be thought
trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear
friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my
narrative on my first setting out--bear with me,--and let me go on,
and tell my 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 moment or two as we pass along,--don't fly off,--but
rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than
appears upon my outside;--and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or
at me, or in short do any thing,-- only keep your temper.
Chapter 1.VII.
In the same village where my father and my mother dwelt, dwelt also a
thin, upright, motherly, notable, good old body of a midwife, who with
the help of a little plain good sense, and some years full employment
in her business, in which she had all along trusted little to her own
efforts, and a great deal to those of dame Nature,--had acquired, in
her way, no small degree of reputation in the world:--by which word
world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be
understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon
the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or
thereabouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived is
supposed to be the centre?--She had been left it seems a widow in
great distress, with three or four small children, in her
forty-seventh year; and as she was at that time a person of decent
carriage,--grave deportment,--a woman moreover of few words and withal
an object of compassion, whose distress, and silence under it, called
out the louder for a friendly lift: the wife of the parson of the
parish was touched with pity; and having often lamented an
inconvenience to which her husband's flock had for many years been
exposed, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a midwife, of any kind
or degree, to be got at, let the case have been never so urgent,
within less than six or seven long miles riding; which said seven long
miles in dark nights and dismal roads, the country thereabouts being
nothing but a deep clay, was almost equal to fourteen; and that in
effect was sometimes next to having no midwife at all; it came into
her head, that it would be doing as seasonable a kindness to the whole
parish, as to the poor creature herself, to get her a little
instructed in some of the plain principles of the business, in order
to set her up in it. As no woman thereabouts was better qualified to
execute the plan she had formed than herself, the gentlewoman very
charitably undertook it; and having great influence over the female
part of the parish, she found no difficulty in effecting it to the
utmost of her wishes. In truth, the parson join'd his interest with
his wife's in the whole affair, and in order to do things as they
should be, and give the poor soul as good a title by law to practise,
as his wife had given by institution,--he cheerfully paid the fees for
the ordinary's licence himself, amounting in the whole, to the sum of
eighteen shillings and four pence; so that betwixt them both, the good
woman was fully invested in the real and corporal possession of her
office, together with all its rights, members, and appurtenances
whatsoever.
These last words, you must know, were not according to the old form in
which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like
cases had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was
according to a neat Formula of Didius his own devising, who having a
particular turn for taking to pieces, and new framing over again all
kind of instruments in that way, not only hit upon this dainty
amendment, but coaxed many of the old licensed matrons in the
neighbourhood, to open their faculties afresh, in order to have this
wham-wham of his inserted.
I own I never could envy Didius in these kinds of fancies of his:--But
every man to his own taste.--Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man,
at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing
of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though
he had tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that, Sir,
have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon
himself,--have they not had their Hobby-Horses;--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 man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and
quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get
up behind him,--pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
Chapter 1.VIII.
--De gustibus non est disputandum;--that is, there is no disputing
against Hobby-Horses; and for my 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
fidler and painter, according as the fly stings:--Be it known to you,
that I keep a couple of pads myself, upon which, in their turns, (nor
do I care who knows it) I frequently ride out and take the
air;--though sometimes, to my shame be it spoken, I take somewhat
longer journies than what a wise man would think altogether
right.--But the truth is,--I am not a wise man;--and besides am a
mortal of so little consequence in the world, it is not much matter
what I do: so I seldom fret or fume at all about it: Nor does it
much disturb my rest, when I see such great Lords and tall Personages
as hereafter follow;--such, for instance, as my Lord A, B, C, D, E, F,
G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, and so on, all of a row, mounted upon
their several horses,-- some with large stirrups, getting on in a more
grave and sober pace;-- others on the contrary, tucked up to their
very chins, with whips across their mouths, scouring and scampering it
away like so many little party- coloured devils astride a
mortgage,--and as if some of them were resolved to break their
necks.--So much the better--say I to myself;--for in case the worst
should happen, the world will make a shift to do excellently well
without them; and for the rest,--why--God speed them--e'en let them
ride on without opposition from me; for were their lordships unhorsed
this very night--'tis ten to one but that many of them would be worse
mounted by one half before tomorrow morning.
Not one of these instances therefore can be said to break in upon my
rest.- -But there is an instance, which I own puts me off my guard,
and that is, when I see one born for great actions, and what is still
more for his honour, whose nature ever inclines him to good
ones;--when I behold such a one, my Lord, like yourself, whose
principles and conduct are as generous and noble as his blood, and
whom, for that reason, a corrupt world cannot spare one moment;--when
I see such a one, my Lord, mounted, though it is but for a minute
beyond the time which my love to my country has prescribed to him, and
my zeal for his glory wishes,--then, my Lord, I cease to be a
philosopher, and in the first transport of an honest impatience, I
wish the Hobby-Horse, with all his fraternity, at the Devil.
'My Lord, I maintain this to be a dedication, notwithstanding its
singularity in the three great essentials of matter, form and place:
I beg, therefore, you will accept it as such, and that you will permit
me to lay it, with the most respectful humility, at your Lordship's
feet--when you are upon them,- -which you can be when you please;--and
that is, my Lord, whenever there is occasion for it, and I will add,
to the best purposes too. I have the honour to be, My Lord, Your
Lordship's most obedient, and most devoted, and most humble servant,
Tristram Shandy.'