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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne

Section 19 of 48 - Table of Contents
The nuns of saint Ursula acted the wisest--they never attempted to go to
bed at all.

The dean of Strasburg, the prebendaries, the capitulars and domiciliars
(capitularly assembled in the morning to consider the case of butter'd
buns) all wished they had followed the nuns of saint Ursula's example.--

In the hurry and confusion every thing had been in the night before, the
bakers had all forgot to lay their leaven--there were no butter'd buns to
be had for breakfast in all Strasburg--the whole close of the cathedral was
in one eternal commotion--such a cause of restlessness and disquietude, and
such a zealous inquiry into that cause of the restlessness, had never
happened in Strasburg, since Martin Luther, with his doctrines, had turned
the city upside down.

If the stranger's nose took this liberty of thrusting himself thus into the
dishes (Mr. Shandy's compliments to orators--is very sensible that
Slawkenbergius has here changed his metaphor--which he is very guilty of:--
that as a translator, Mr. Shandy has all along done what he could to make
him stick to it--but that here 'twas impossible.) of religious orders, &c.
what a carnival did his nose make of it, in those of the laity!--'tis more
than my pen, worn to the stump as it is, has power to describe; tho', I
acknowledge, (cries Slawkenbergius with more gaiety of thought than I could
have expected from him) that there is many a good simile now subsisting in
the world which might give my countrymen some idea of it; but at the close
of such a folio as this, wrote for their sakes, and in which I have spent
the greatest part of my life--tho' I own to them the simile is in being,
yet would it not be unreasonable in them to expect I should have either
time or inclination to search for it?  Let it suffice to say, that the riot
and disorder it occasioned in the Strasburgers fantasies was so general--
such an overpowering mastership had it got of all the faculties of the
Strasburgers minds--so many strange things, with equal confidence on all
sides, and with equal eloquence in all places, were spoken and sworn to
concerning it, that turned the whole stream of all discourse and wonder
towards it--every soul, good and bad--rich and poor--learned and unlearned-
-doctor and student--mistress and maid--gentle and simple--nun's flesh and
woman's flesh, in Strasburg spent their time in hearing tidings about it--
every eye in Strasburg languished to see it--every finger--every thumb in
Strasburg burned to touch it.

Now what might add, if any thing may be thought necessary to add, to so
vehement a desire--was this, that the centinel, the bandy-legg'd drummer,
the trumpeter, the trumpeter's wife, the burgomaster's widow, the master of
the inn, and the master of the inn's wife, how widely soever they all
differed every one from another in their testimonies and description of the
stranger's nose--they all agreed together in two points--namely, that he
was gone to Frankfort, and would not return to Strasburg till that day
month; and secondly, whether his nose was true or false, that the stranger
himself was one of the most perfect paragons of beauty--the finest-made
man--the most genteel!--the most generous of his purse--the most courteous
in his carriage, that had ever entered the gates of Strasburg--that as he
rode, with scymetar slung loosely to his wrist, thro' the streets--and
walked with his crimson-sattin breeches across the parade--'twas with so
sweet an air of careless modesty, and so manly withal--as would have put
the heart in jeopardy (had his nose not stood in his way) of every virgin
who had cast her eyes upon him.

I call not upon that heart which is a stranger to the throbs and yearnings
of curiosity, so excited, to justify the abbess of Quedlingberg, the
prioress, the deaness, and sub-chantress, for sending at noon-day for the
trumpeter's wife:  she went through the streets of Strasburg with her
husband's trumpet in her hand,--the best apparatus the straitness of the
time would allow her, for the illustration of her theory--she staid no
longer than three days.

The centinel and bandy-legg'd drummer!--nothing on this side of old Athens
could equal them! they read their lectures under the city-gates to comers
and goers, with all the pomp of a Chrysippus and a Crantor in their
porticos.

The master of the inn, with his ostler on his left-hand, read his also in
the same stile--under the portico or gateway of his stable-yard--his wife,
hers more privately in a back room:  all flocked to their lectures; not
promiscuously--but to this or that, as is ever the way, as faith and
credulity marshal'd them--in a word, each Strasburger came crouding for
intelligence--and every Strasburger had the intelligence he wanted.

'Tis worth remarking, for the benefit of all demonstrators in natural
philosophy, &c. that as soon as the trumpeter's wife had finished the
abbess of Quedlingberg's private lecture, and had begun to read in public,
which she did upon a stool in the middle of the great parade,--she
incommoded the other demonstrators mainly, by gaining incontinently the
most fashionable part of the city of Strasburg for her auditory--But when a
demonstrator in philosophy (cries Slawkenbergius) has a trumpet for an
apparatus, pray what rival in science can pretend to be heard besides him?

Whilst the unlearned, thro' these conduits of intelligence, were all busied
in getting down to the bottom of the well, where Truth keeps her little
court--were the learned in their way as busy in pumping her up thro' the
conduits of dialect induction--they concerned themselves not with facts--
they reasoned--

Not one profession had thrown more light upon this subject than the
Faculty--had not all their disputes about it run into the affair of Wens
and oedematous swellings, they could not keep clear of them for their
bloods and souls--the stranger's nose had nothing to do either with wens or
oedematous swellings.

It was demonstrated however very satisfactorily, that such a ponderous mass
of heterogenous matter could not be congested and conglomerated to the
nose, whilst the infant was in Utera, without destroying the statical
balance of the foetus, and throwing it plump upon its head nine months
before the time.--

--The opponents granted the theory--they denied the consequences.

And if a suitable provision of veins, arteries, &c. said they, was not laid
in, for the due nourishment of such a nose, in the very first stamina and
rudiments of its formation, before it came into the world (bating the case
of Wens) it could not regularly grow and be sustained afterwards.

This was all answered by a dissertation upon nutriment, and the effect
which nutriment had in extending the vessels, and in the increase and
prolongation of the muscular parts to the greatest growth and expansion
imaginable--In the triumph of which theory, they went so far as to affirm,
that there was no cause in nature, why a nose might not grow to the size of
the man himself.

The respondents satisfied the world this event could never happen to them
so long as a man had but one stomach and one pair of lungs--For the
stomach, said they, being the only organ destined for the reception of
food, and turning it into chyle--and the lungs the only engine of
sanguification--it could possibly work off no more, than what the appetite
brought it:  or admitting the possibility of a man's overloading his
stomach, nature had set bounds however to his lungs--the engine was of a
determined size and strength, and could elaborate but a certain quantity in
a given time--that is, it could produce just as much blood as was
sufficient for one single man, and no more; so that, if there was as much
nose as man--they proved a mortification must necessarily ensue; and
forasmuch as there could not be a support for both, that the nose must
either fall off from the man, or the man inevitably fall off from his nose.

Nature accommodates herself to these emergencies, cried the opponents--else
what do you say to the case of a whole stomach--a whole pair of lungs, and
but half a man, when both his legs have been unfortunately shot off?

He dies of a plethora, said they--or must spit blood, and in a fortnight or
three weeks go off in a consumption.--

--It happens otherwise--replied the opponents.--

It ought not, said they.

The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though
they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the
nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself

They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical
arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its
several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be
transgressed but within certain limits--that nature, though she sported--
she sported within a certain circle;--and they could not agree about the
diameter of it.

The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the
classes of the literati;--they began and ended with the word Nose; and had
it not been for a petitio principii, which one of the ablest of them ran
his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy had
been settled at once.

A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood--and not only
blood--but blood circulating in it to supply the phaenomenon with a
succession of drops--(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops,
that is included, said he.)--Now death, continued the logician, being
nothing but the stagnation of the blood--

I deny the definition--Death is the separation of the soul from the body,
said his antagonist--Then we don't agree about our weapons, said the
logician--Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist.

The civilians were still more concise:  what they offered being more in the
nature of a decree--than a dispute.

Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not
possibly have been suffered in civil society--and if false--to impose upon
society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of
its rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it.

The only objection to this was, that if it proved any thing, it proved the
stranger's nose was neither true nor false.

This left room for the controversy to go on.  It was maintained by the
advocates of the ecclesiastic court, that there was nothing to inhibit a
decree, since the stranger ex mero motu had confessed he had been at the
Promontory of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, &c. &c.--To this it
was answered, it was impossible there should be such a place as the
Promontory of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it lay.  The
commissary of the bishop of Strasburg undertook the advocates, explained
this matter in a treatise upon proverbial phrases, shewing them, that the
Promontory of Noses was a mere allegorick expression, importing no more
than that nature had given him a long nose:  in proof of which, with great
learning, he cited the underwritten authorities, (Nonnulli ex nostratibus
eadem loquendi formula utun.  Quinimo & Logistae & Canonistae--Vid. Parce
Barne Jas in d. L. Provincial.  Constitut. de conjec. vid. Vol. Lib. 4.
Titul. I. n. 7 qua etiam in re conspir.  Om de Promontorio Nas. Tichmak.
ff. d. tit. 3. fol. 189. passim. Vid. Glos. de contrahend. empt. &c. necnon
J. Scrudr. in cap. para refut. per totum.  Cum his cons. Rever. J. Tubal,
Sentent. & Prov. cap. 9. ff. 11, 12. obiter.  V. & Librum, cui Tit. de
Terris & Phras. Belg. ad finem, cum comment.  N. Bardy Belg. Vid. Scrip.
Argentotarens. de Antiq. Ecc. in Episc Archiv. fid coll. per Von Jacobum
Koinshoven Folio Argent. 1583. praecip. ad finem.  Quibus add. Rebuff in L.
obvenire de Signif. Nom. ff. fol. & de jure Gent. & Civil. de protib.
aliena feud. per federa, test. Joha. Luxius in prolegom. quem velim videas,
de Analy. Cap. 1, 2, 3.  Vid. Idea.) which had decided the point
incontestably, had it not appeared that a dispute about some franchises of
dean and chapter-lands had been determined by it nineteen years before.

It happened--I must say unluckily for Truth, because they were giving her a
lift another way in so doing; that the two universities of Strasburg--the
Lutheran, founded in the year 1538 by Jacobus Surmis, counsellor of the
senate,--and the Popish, founded by Leopold, arch-duke of Austria, were,
during all this time, employing the whole depth of their knowledge (except
just what the affair of the abbess of Quedlingberg's placket-holes
required)--in determining the point of Martin Luther's damnation.

The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate a priori, that from the
necessary influence of the planets on the twenty-second day of October
1483--when the moon was in the twelfth house, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus in
the third, the Sun, Saturn, and Mercury, all got together in the fourth--
that he must in course, and unavoidably, be a damn'd man--and that his
doctrines, by a direct corollary, must be damn'd doctrines too.

By inspection into his horoscope, where five planets were in coition all at
once with Scorpio (Haec mira, satisque horrenda.  Planetarum coitio sub
Scorpio Asterismo in nona coeli statione, quam Arabes religioni deputabant
efficit Martinum Lutherum sacrilegum hereticum, Christianae religionis
hostem acerrimum atque prophanum, ex horoscopi directione ad Martis coitum,
religiosissimus obiit, ejus Anima scelestissima ad infernos navigavit--ab
Alecto, Tisiphone & Megara flagellis igneis cruciata perenniter.--Lucas
Gaurieus in Tractatu astrologico de praeteritis multorum hominum
accidentibus per genituras examinatis.) (in reading this my father would
always shake his head) in the ninth house, with the Arabians allotted to
religion--it appeared that Martin Luther did not care one stiver about the
matter--and that from the horoscope directed to the conjunction of Mars--
they made it plain likewise he must die cursing and blaspheming--with the
blast of which his soul (being steep'd in guilt) sailed before the wind, in
the lake of hell-fire.

The little objection of the Lutheran doctors to this, was, that it must
certainly be the soul of another man, born Oct. 22, 83. which was forced to
sail down before the wind in that manner--inasmuch as it appeared from the
register of Islaben in the county of Mansfelt, that Luther was not born in
the year 1483, but in 84; and not on the 22d day of October, but on the
10th of November, the eve of Martinmas day, from whence he had the name of
Martin.

(--I must break off my translation for a moment; for if I did not, I know I
should no more be able to shut my eyes in bed, than the abbess of
Quedlingberg--It is to tell the reader; that my father never read this
passage of Slawkenbergius to my uncle Toby, but with triumph--not over my
uncle Toby, for he never opposed him in it--but over the whole world.

--Now you see, brother Toby, he would say, looking up, 'that christian
names are not such indifferent things;'--had Luther here been called by any
other name but Martin, he would have been damn'd to all eternity--Not that
I look upon Martin, he would add, as a good name--far from it--'tis
something better than a neutral, and but a little--yet little as it is you
see it was of some service to him.

My father knew the weakness of this prop to his hypothesis, as well as the
best logician could shew him--yet so strange is the weakness of man at the
same time, as it fell in his way, he could not for his life but make use of
it; and it was certainly for this reason, that though there are many
stories in Hafen Slawkenbergius's Decades full as entertaining as this I am
translating, yet there is not one amongst them which my father read over
with half the delight--it flattered two of his strangest hypotheses
together--his Names and his Noses.--I will be bold to say, he might have
read all the books in the Alexandrian Library, had not fate taken other
care of them, and not have met with a book or passage in one, which hit two
such nails as these upon the head at one stroke.)

The two universities of Strasburg were hard tugging at this affair of
Luther's navigation.  The Protestant doctors had demonstrated, that he had
not sailed right before the wind, as the Popish doctors had pretended; and
as every one knew there was no sailing full in the teeth of it--they were
going to settle, in case he had sailed, how many points he was off; whether
Martin had doubled the cape, or had fallen upon a lee-shore; and no doubt,
as it was an enquiry of much edification, at least to those who understood
this sort of Navigation, they had gone on with it in spite of the size of
the stranger's nose, had not the size of the stranger's nose drawn off the
attention of the world from what they were about--it was their business to
follow.

The abbess of Quedlingberg and her four dignitaries was no stop; for the
enormity of the stranger's nose running full as much in their fancies as
their case of conscience--the affair of their placket-holes kept cold--in a
word, the printers were ordered to distribute their types--all
controversies dropp'd.

'Twas a square cap with a silver tassel upon the crown of it--to a nut-
shell--to have guessed on which side of the nose the two universities would
split.

'Tis above reason, cried the doctors on one side.

'Tis below reason, cried the others.

'Tis faith, cried one.

'Tis a fiddle-stick, said the other.

'Tis possible, cried the one.

'Tis impossible, said the other.

God's power is infinite, cried the Nosarians, he can do any thing.

He can do nothing, replied the Anti-nosarians, which implies
contradictions.

He can make matter think, said the Nosarians.

As certainly as you can make a velvet cap out of a sow's ear, replied the
Anti-nosarians.

He cannot make two and two five, replied the Popish doctors.--'Tis false,
said their other opponents.--

Infinite power is infinite power, said the doctors who maintained the
reality of the nose.--It extends only to all possible things, replied the
Lutherans.

By God in heaven, cried the Popish doctors, he can make a nose, if he
thinks fit, as big as the steeple of Strasburg.

Now the steeple of Strasburg being the biggest and the tallest church-
steeple to be seen in the whole world, the Anti-nosarians denied that a
nose of 575 geometrical feet in length could be worn, at least by a middle-
siz'd man--The Popish doctors swore it could--The Lutheran doctors said
No;--it could not.

This at once started a new dispute, which they pursued a great way, upon
the extent and limitation of the moral and natural attributes of God--That
controversy led them naturally into Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Aquinas to
the devil.

The stranger's nose was no more heard of in the dispute--it just served as
a frigate to launch them into the gulph of school-divinity--and then they
all sailed before the wind.

Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge.

The controversy about the attributes, &c. instead of cooling, on the
contrary had inflamed the Strasburgers imaginations to a most inordinate
degree--The less they understood of the matter the greater was their wonder
about it--they were left in all the distresses of desire unsatisfied--saw
their doctors, the Parchmentarians, the Brassarians, the Turpentarians, on
one side--the Popish doctors on the other, like Pantagruel and his
companions in quest of the oracle of the bottle, all embarked out of sight.

--The poor Strasburgers left upon the beach!

--What was to be done?--No delay--the uproar increased--every one in
disorder--the city gates set open.--

Unfortunate Strasbergers! was there in the store-house of nature--was there
in the lumber-rooms of learning--was there in the great arsenal of chance,
one single engine left undrawn forth to torture your curiosities, and
stretch your desires, which was not pointed by the hand of Fate to play
upon your hearts?--I dip not my pen into my ink to excuse the surrender of
yourselves--'tis to write your panegyrick.  Shew me a city so macerated
with expectation--who neither eat, or drank, or slept, or prayed, or
hearkened to the calls either of religion or nature, for seven-and-twenty
days together, who could have held out one day longer.

On the twenty-eighth the courteous stranger had promised to return to
Strasburg.

Seven thousand coaches (Slawkenbergius must certainly have made some
mistake in his numeral characters) 7000 coaches--15000 single-horse chairs-
-20000 waggons, crowded as full as they could all hold with senators,
counsellors, syndicks--beguines, widows, wives, virgins, canons,
concubines, all in their coaches--The abbess of Quedlingberg, with the
prioress, the deaness and sub-chantress, leading the procession in one
coach, and the dean of Strasburg, with the four great dignitaries of his
chapter, on her left-hand--the rest following higglety-pigglety as they
could; some on horseback--some on foot--some led--some driven--some down
the Rhine--some this way--some that--all set out at sun-rise to meet the
courteous stranger on the road.

Haste we now towards the catastrophe of my tale--I say Catastrophe (cries
Slawkenbergius) inasmuch as a tale, with parts rightly disposed, not only
rejoiceth (gaudet) in the Catastrophe and Peripeitia of a Drama, but
rejoiceth moreover in all the essential and integrant parts of it--it has
its Protasis, Epitasis, Catastasis, its Catastrophe or Peripeitia growing
one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle first planted them--
without which a tale had better never be told at all, says Slawkenbergius,
but be kept to a man's self.

In all my ten tales, in all my ten decades, have I Slawkenbergius tied down
every tale of them as tightly to this rule, as I have done this of the
stranger and his nose.

--From his first parley with the centinel, to his leaving the city of
Strasburg, after pulling off his crimson-sattin pair of breeches, is the
Protasis or first entrance--where the characters of the Personae Dramatis
are just touched in, and the subject slightly begun.

The Epitasis, wherein the action is more fully entered upon and heightened,
till it arrives at its state or height called the Catastasis, and which
usually takes up the 2d and 3d act, is included within that busy period of
my tale, betwixt the first night's uproar about the nose, to the conclusion
of the trumpeter's wife's lectures upon it in the middle of the grand
parade:  and from the first embarking of the learned in the dispute--to the
doctors finally sailing away, and leaving the Strasburgers upon the  beach
in distress, is the Catastasis or the ripening of the incidents and
passions for their bursting forth in the fifth act.

This commences with the setting out of the Strasburgers in the Frankfort
road, and terminates in unwinding the labyrinth and bringing the hero out
of a state of agitation (as Aristotle calls it) to a state of rest and
quietness.

This, says Hafen Slawkenbergius, constitutes the Catastrophe or Peripeitia
of my tale--and that is the part of it I am going to relate.

We left the stranger behind the curtain asleep--he enters now upon the
stage.
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