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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne

Section 17 of 48 - Table of Contents
Chapter 2.XXVII.

It is a singular blessing, that nature has form'd the mind of man with the
same happy backwardness and renitency against conviction, which is observed
in old dogs--'of not learning new tricks.'

What a shuttlecock of a fellow would the greatest philosopher that ever
existed be whisk'd into at once, did he read such books, and observe such
facts, and think such thoughts, as would eternally be making him change
sides!

Now, my father, as I told you last year, detested all this--He pick'd up an
opinion, Sir, as a man in a state of nature picks up an apple.--It becomes
his own--and if he is a man of spirit, he would lose his life rather than
give it up.

I am aware that Didius, the great civilian, will contest this point; and
cry out against me, Whence comes this man's right to this apple? ex
confesso, he will say--things were in a state of nature--The apple, is as
much Frank's apple as John's.  Pray, Mr. Shandy, what patent has he to shew
for it? and how did it begin to be his? was it, when he set his heart upon
it? or when he gathered it? or when he chew'd it? or when he roasted it? or
when he peel'd, or when he brought it home? or when he digested?--or when
he--?--For 'tis plain, Sir, if the first picking up of the apple, made it
not his--that no subsequent act could.

Brother Didius, Tribonius will answer--(now Tribonius the civilian and
church lawyer's beard being three inches and a half and three eighths
longer than Didius his beard--I'm glad he takes up the cudgels for me, so I
give myself no farther trouble about the answer.)--Brother Didius,
Tribonius will say, it is a decreed case, as you may find it in the
fragments of Gregorius and Hermogines's codes, and in all the codes from
Justinian's down to the codes of Louis and Des Eaux--That the sweat of a
man's brows, and the exsudations of a man's brains, are as much a man's own
property as the breeches upon his backside;--which said exsudations, &c.
being dropp'd upon the said apple by the labour of finding it, and picking
it up; and being moreover indissolubly wasted, and as indissolubly annex'd,
by the picker up, to the thing pick'd up, carried home, roasted, peel'd,
eaten, digested, and so on;--'tis evident that the gatherer of the apple,
in so doing, has mix'd up something which was his own, with the apple which
was not his own, by which means he has acquired a property;--or, in other
words, the apple is John's apple.

By the same learned chain of reasoning my father stood up for all his
opinions; he had spared no pains in picking them up, and the more they lay
out of the common way, the better still was his title.--No mortal claimed
them; they had cost him moreover as much labour in cooking and digesting as
in the case above, so that they might well and truly be said to be of his
own goods and chattels.--Accordingly he held fast by 'em, both by teeth and
claws--would fly to whatever he could lay his hands on--and, in a word,
would intrench and fortify them round with as many circumvallations and
breast-works, as my uncle Toby would a citadel.

There was one plaguy rub in the way of this--the scarcity of materials to
make any thing of a defence with, in case of a smart attack; inasmuch as
few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon the
subject of great noses:  by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is
incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am considering
what a treasure of precious time and talents together has been wasted upon
worse subjects--and how many millions of books in all languages and in all
possible types and bindings, have been fabricated upon points not half so
much tending to the unity and peace-making of the world.  What was to be
had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would oft-
times sport with my uncle Toby's library--which, by-the-bye, was ridiculous
enough--yet at the very same time he did it, he collected every book and
treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care
as my honest uncle Toby had done those upon military architecture.--'Tis
true, a much less table would have held them--but that was not thy
transgression, my dear uncle.--

Here--but why here--rather than in any other part of my story--I am not
able to tell:--but here it is--my heart stops me to pay to thee, my dear
uncle Toby, once for all, the tribute I owe thy goodness.--Here let me
thrust my chair aside, and kneel down upon the ground, whilst I am pouring
forth the warmest sentiment of love for thee, and veneration for the
excellency of thy character, that ever virtue and nature kindled in a
nephew's bosom.--Peace and comfort rest for evermore upon thy head!--Thou
enviedst no man's comforts--insultedst no man's opinions--Thou blackenedst
no man's character--devouredst no man's bread:  gently, with faithful Trim
behind thee, didst thou amble round the little circle of thy pleasures,
jostling no creature in thy way:--for each one's sorrows, thou hadst a
tear,--for each man's need, thou hadst a shilling.

Whilst I am worth one, to pay a weeder--thy path from thy door to thy
bowling-green shall never be grown up.--Whilst there is a rood and a half
of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear uncle Toby, shall
never be demolish'd.



Chapter 2.XXVIII.

My father's collection was not great, but to make amends, it was curious;
and consequently he was some time in making it; he had the great good
fortune hewever, to set off well, in getting Bruscambille's prologue upon
long noses, almost for nothing--for he gave no more for Bruscambille than
three half-crowns; owing indeed to the strong fancy which the stall-man saw
my father had for the book the moment he laid his hands upon it.--There are
not three Bruscambilles in Christendom--said the stall-man, except what are
chain'd up in the libraries of the curious.  My father flung down the money
as quick as lightning--took Bruscambille into his bosom--hied home from
Piccadilly to Coleman-street with it, as he would have hied home with a
treasure, without taking his hand once off from Bruscambille all the way.

To those who do not yet know of which gender Bruscambille is--inasmuch as a
prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either--'twill be no
objection against the simile--to say, That when my father got home, he
solaced himself with Bruscambille after the manner in which, 'tis ten to
one, your worship solaced yourself with your first mistress--that is, from
morning even unto night:  which, by-the-bye, how delightful soever it may
prove to the inamorato--is of little or no entertainment at all to by-
standers.--Take notice, I go no farther with the simile--my father's eye
was greater than his appetite--his zeal greater than his knowledge--he
cool'd--his affections became divided--he got hold of Prignitz--purchased
Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus, Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and above all,
the great and learned Hafen Slawkenbergius; of which, as I shall have much
to say by-and-bye--I will say nothing now.



Chapter 2.XXIX.

Of all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in
support of his hypothesis, there was not any one wherein he felt a more
cruel disappointment at first, than in the celebrated dialogue between
Pamphagus and Cocles, written by the chaste pen of the great and venerable
Erasmus, upon the various uses and seasonable applications of long noses.--
Now don't let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any
one spot of rising ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can
any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to slip on--let me beg of you,
like an unback'd filly, to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it,
to bound it--and to kick it, with long kicks and short kicks, till like
Tickletoby's mare, you break a strap or a crupper, and throw his worship
into the dirt.--You need not kill him.--

--And pray who was Tickletoby's mare?--'tis just as discreditable and
unscholar-like a question, Sir, as to have asked what year (ab. urb. con.)
the second Punic war broke out.--Who was Tickletoby's mare!--Read, read,
read, read, my unlearned reader! read--or by the knowledge of the great
saint Paraleipomenon--I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the
book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows I
mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the
next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its
sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and
truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.



(two marble plates)



Chapter 2.XXX.

'Nihil me paenitet hujus nasi,' quoth Pamphagus;--that is--'My nose has
been the making of me.'--'Nec est cur poeniteat,' replies Cocles; that is,
'How the duce should such a nose fail?'

The doctrine, you see, was laid down by Erasmus, as my father wished it,
with the utmost plainness; but my father's disappointment was, in finding
nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself; without any of
that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which
Heaven had bestow'd upon man on purpose to investigate truth, and fight for
her on all sides.--My father pish'd and pugh'd at first most terribly--'tis
worth something to have a good name.  As the dialogue was of Erasmus, my
father soon came to himself, and read it over and over again with great
application, studying every word and every syllable of it thro' and thro'
in its most strict and literal interpretation--he could still make nothing
of it, that way.  Mayhap there is more meant, than is said in it, quoth my
father.--Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses
for nothing.--I'll study the mystick and the allegorick sense--here is some
room to turn a man's self in, brother.

My father read on.--

Now I find it needful to inform your reverences and worships, that besides
the many nautical uses of long noses enumerated by Erasmus, the dialogist
affirmeth that a long nose is not without its domestic conveniences also;
for that in a case of distress--and for want of a pair of bellows, it will
do excellently well, ad ixcitandum focum (to stir up the fire.)

Nature had been prodigal in her gifts to my father beyond measure, and had
sown the seeds of verbal criticism as deep within him, as she had done the
seeds of all other knowledge--so that he had got out his penknife, and was
trying experiments upon the sentence, to see if he could not scratch some
better sense into it.--I've got within a single letter, brother Toby, cried
my father, of Erasmus his mystic meaning.--You are near enough, brother,
replied my uncle, in all conscience.--Pshaw! cried my father, scratching
on--I might as well be seven miles off.--I've done it--said my father,
snapping his fingers--See, my dear brother Toby, how I have mended the
sense.--But you have marr'd a word, replied my uncle Toby.--My father put
on his spectacles--bit his lip--and tore out the leaf in a passion.



Chapter 2.XXXI.

O Slawkenbergius! thou faithful analyzer of my Disgrazias--thou sad
foreteller of so many of the whips and short turns which on one stage or
other of my life have come slap upon me from the shortness of my nose, and
no other cause, that I am conscious of.--Tell me, Slawkenbergius! what
secret impulse was it? what intonation of voice? whence came it? how did it
sound in thy ears?--art thou sure thou heard'st it?--which first cried out
to thee--go--go, Slawkenbergius! dedicate the labours of thy life--neglect
thy pastimes--call forth all the powers and faculties of thy nature--
macerate thyself in the service of mankind, and write a grand Folio for
them, upon the subject of their noses.

How the communication was conveyed into Slawkenbergius's sensorium--so that
Slawkenbergius should know whose finger touch'd the key--and whose hand it
was that blew the bellows--as Hafen Slawkenbergius has been dead and laid
in his grave above fourscore and ten years--we can only raise conjectures.

Slawkenbergius was play'd upon, for aught I know, like one of Whitefield's
disciples--that is, with such a distinct intelligence, Sir, of which of the
two masters it was that had been practising upon his instrument--as to make
all reasoning upon it needless.

--For in the account which Hafen Slawkenbergius gives the world of his
motives and occasions for writing, and spending so many years of his life
upon this one work--towards the end of his prolegomena, which by-the-bye
should have come first--but the bookbinder has most injudiciously placed it
betwixt the analytical contents of the book, and the book itself--he
informs his reader, that ever since he had arrived at the age of
discernment, and was able to sit down cooly, and consider within himself
the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the main end and
design of his being;--or--to shorten my translation, for Slawkenbergius's
book is in Latin, and not a little prolix in this passage--ever since I
understood, quoth Slawkenbergius, any thing--or rather what was what--and
could perceive that the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by
all who had gone before;--have I Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse,
with a mighty and unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this
undertaking.

And to do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered the list with a
stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than any one man who
had ever entered it before him--and indeed, in many respects, deserves to
be en-nich'd as a prototype for all writers, of voluminous works at least,
to model their books by--for he has taken in, Sir, the whole subject--
examined every part of it dialectically--then brought it into full day;
dilucidating it with all the light which either the collision of his own
natural parts could strike--or the profoundest knowledge of the sciences
had impowered him to cast upon it--collating, collecting, and compiling--
begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote
or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticos of the learned:  so that
Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a model--
but as a thorough-stitched Digest and regular institute of noses,
comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known about them.

For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise)
valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either, plump
upon noses--or collaterally touching them;--such for instance as Prignitz,
now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from
the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand
different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia, which he
had rummaged--has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of
the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country,
except Crim Tartary, where they are all crush'd down by the thumb, so that
no judgment can be formed upon them--are much nearer alike, than the world
imagines;--the difference amongst them being, he says, a mere trifle, not
worth taking notice of;--but that the size and jollity of every individual
nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price,
is owing to the cartilaginous and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts
and sinuses the blood and animal spirits being impell'd and driven by the
warmth and force of the imagination, which is but a step from it (bating
the case of idiots, whom Prignitz, who had lived many years in Turky,
supposes under the more immediate tutelage of Heaven)--it so happens, and
ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct
arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer's fancy.

It is for the same reason, that is, because 'tis all comprehended in
Slawkenbergius, that I say nothing likewise of Scroderus (Andrea) who, all
the world knows, set himself to oppugn Prignitz with great violence--
proving it in his own way, first logically, and then by a series of
stubborn facts, 'That so far was Prignitz from the truth, in affirming that
the fancy begat the nose, that on the contrary--the nose begat the fancy.'

--The learned suspected Scroderus of an indecent sophism in this--and
Prignitz cried out aloud in the dispute, that Scroderus had shifted the
idea upon him--but Scroderus went on, maintaining his thesis.

My father was just balancing within himself, which of the two sides he
should take in this affair; when Ambrose Paraeus decided it in a moment,
and by overthrowing the systems, both of Prignitz and Scroderus, drove my
father out of both sides of the controversy at once.

Be witness--

I don't acquaint the learned reader--in saying it, I mention it only to
shew the learned, I know the fact myself--

That this Ambrose Paraeus was chief surgeon and nose-mender to Francis the
ninth of France, and in high credit with him and the two preceding, or
succeeding kings (I know not which)--and that, except in the slip he made
in his story of Taliacotius's noses, and his manner of setting them on--he
was esteemed by the whole college of physicians at that time, as more
knowing in matters of noses, than any one who had ever taken them in hand.

Now Ambrose Paraeus convinced my father, that the true and efficient cause
of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon which
Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much 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 to the firmness and elastic
repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively--which,
tho' happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his
nose was so snubb'd, so rebuff'd, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby,
as never to arrive ad mensuram 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 much butter, the nose was comforted,
nourish'd, plump'd up, refresh'd, refocillated, and set a growing for ever.

I have but two things to observe of Paraeus; first, That he proves and
explains all this with the utmost chastity and decorum of expression:--for
which may his soul for ever rest in peace!

And, secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, which
Ambrose Paraeus his hypothesis effectually overthrew--it overthrew at the
same time the system of peace and harmony of our family; and for three days
together, not only embroiled matters between my father and my mother, but
turn'd likewise the whole house and every thing in it, except my uncle
Toby, quite upside down.

Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife, never
surely in any age or country got vent through the key-hole of a street-
door.

My mother, you must know--but I have fifty things more necessary to let you
know first--I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear
up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding in upon
me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another.  A cow broke in
(tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two
rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced
his horn-work and covered way.--Trim insists upon being tried by a court-
martial--the cow to be shot--Slop to be crucifix'd--myself to be tristram'd
and at my very baptism made a martyr of;--poor unhappy devils that we all
are!--I want swaddling--but there is no time to be lost in exclamations--I
have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old
fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in
half an hour; and five-and-thirty minutes are laps'd already.--Of all the
perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in--this certainly is the
greatest, for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius's folio, Sir, to finish--a
dialogue between my father and my uncle Toby, upon the solution of
Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paraeus, Panocrates, and Grangousier to
relate--a tale out of Slawkenbergius to translate, and all this in five
minutes less than no time at all;--such a head!--would to Heaven my enemies
only saw the inside of it!



Chapter 2.XXXII.

There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family--and to do it
justice in this point;--and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the table
close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world
concerning this one article the more solemn--that I believe in my soul
(unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the hand of
the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things never made or put a
family together (in that period at least of it which I have sat down to
write the story of)--where the characters of it were cast or contrasted
with so dramatick a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the
capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting
them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and intrusted with so
unlimited a confidence, as in the Shandy Family.

Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre
of ours--than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long
noses--especially when my father's imagination was heated with the enquiry,
and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle Toby's too.

My uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt;
and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for whole hours
together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every
accessible avenue to drive Prignitz and Scroderus's solutions into it.

Whether they were above my uncle Toby's reason--or contrary to it--or that
his brain was like damp timber, and no spark could possibly take hold--or
that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military
disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and Scroderus's
doctrines--I say not--let schoolmen--scullions, anatomists, and engineers,
fight for it among themselves--

'Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father had
every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle Toby, and render
out of Slawkenbergius's Latin, of which, as he was no great master, his
translation was not always of the purest--and generally least so where
'twas most wanted.--This naturally open'd a door to a second misfortune;--
that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal to open my uncle Toby's eyes--my
father's ideas ran on as much faster than the translation, as the
translation outmoved my uncle Toby's--neither the one or the other added
much to the perspicuity of my father's lecture.



Chapter 2.XXXIII.

The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms--I mean in man--for in
superior classes of being, such as angels and spirits--'tis all done, may
it please your worships, as they tell me, by Intuition;--and beings
inferior, as your worships all know--syllogize by their noses:  though
there is an island swimming in the sea (though not altogether at its ease)
whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so wonderfully
gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and oft-times to make very
well out too:--but that's neither here nor there--

The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us, or--the great and
principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding
out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the
intervention of a third (called the medius terminus); just as a man, as
Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two mens nine-pin-alleys to be of the
same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their
equality, by juxta-position.

Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems
of noses, and observed my uncle Toby's deportment--what great attention he
gave to every word--and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with
what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it--surveying it
transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb--then fore-
right--then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and
fore-shortenings--he would have concluded my uncle Toby had got hold of the
medius terminus, and was syllogizing and measuring with it the truth of
each hypothesis of long noses, in order, as my father laid them before him.
This, by-the-bye, was more than my father wanted--his aim in all the pains
he was at in these philosophick lectures--was to enable my uncle Toby not
to discuss--but comprehend--to hold the grains and scruples of learning--
not to weigh them.--My uncle Toby, as you will read in the next chapter,
did neither the one or the other.
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