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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne

Section 27 of 48 - Table of Contents
Chapter 3.XII.

--But to return to my mother.

My uncle Toby's opinion, Madam, 'that there could be no harm in Cornelius
Gallus, the Roman praetor's lying with his wife;'--or rather the last word
of that opinion,--(for it was all my mother heard of it) caught hold of her
by the weak part of the whole sex:--You shall not mistake me,--I mean her
curiosity,--she instantly concluded herself the subject of the
conversation, and with that prepossession upon her fancy, you will readily
conceive every word my father said, was accommodated either to herself, or
her family concerns.

--Pray, Madam, in what street does the lady live, who would not have done
the same?

From the strange mode of Cornelius's death, my father had made a transition
to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract of his
pleading before his judges;--'twas irresistible:--not the oration of
Socrates,--but my father's temptation to it.--He had wrote the Life of
Socrates (This book my father would never consent to publish; 'tis in
manuscript, with some other tracts of his, in the family, all, or most of
which will be printed in due time.) himself the year before he left off
trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it;--so that no
one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of
heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was.  Not a period in
Socrates's oration, which closed with a shorter word than transmigration,
or annihilation,--or a worse thought in the middle of it than to be--or not
to be,--the entering upon a new and untried state of things,--or, upon a
long, a profound and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without disturbance?--
That we and our children were born to die,--but neither of us born to be
slaves.--No--there I mistake; that was part of Eleazer's oration, as
recorded by Josephus (de Bell. Judaic)--Eleazer owns he had it from the
philosophers of India; in all likelihood Alexander the Great, in his
irruption into India, after he had over-run Persia, amongst the many things
he stole,--stole that sentiment also; by which means it was carried, if not
all the way by himself (for we all know he died at Babylon), at least by
some of his maroders, into Greece,--from Greece it got to Rome,--from Rome
to France,--and from France to England:--So things come round.--

By land carriage, I can conceive no other way.--

By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the
Sinus Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and
following the course of trade (the way from India by the Cape of Good Hope
being then unknown), might be carried with other drugs and spices up the
Red Sea to Joddah, the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues, towns at the
bottom of the gulf; and from thence by karrawans to Coptos, but three days
journey distant, so down the Nile directly to Alexandria, where the
Sentiment would be landed at the very foot of the great stair-case of the
Alexandrian library,--and from that store-house it would be fetched.--Bless
me! what a trade was driven by the learned in those days!



Chapter 3.XIII.

--Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there ever
was such a man--if not, there's an end of the matter.--

Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing
the precise aera in which so great a man lived;--whether, for instance,
before or after the patriarchs, &c.--to vote, therefore, that he never
lived at all, is a little cruel,--'tis not doing as they would be done by,-
-happen that as it may)--My father, I say, had a way, when things went
extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally of his
impatience,--of wondering why he was begot,--wishing himself dead;--
sometimes worse:--And when the provocation ran high, and grief touched his
lips with more than ordinary powers--Sir, you scarce could have
distinguished him from Socrates himself.--Every word would breathe the
sentiments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its issues;
for which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep reading, yet the
abstract of Socrates's oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby,
was not altogether new to her.--She listened to it with composed
intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my
father plunged (which he had no occasion to have done) into that part of
the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his connections, his
alliances, and children; but renounces a security to be so won by working
upon the passions of his judges.--'I have friends--I have relations,--I
have three desolate children,'--says Socrates.--

--Then, cried my mother, opening the door,--you have one more, Mr. Shandy,
than I know of.

By heaven! I have one less,--said my father, getting up and walking out of
the room.



Chapter 3.XIV.

--They are Socrates's children, said my uncle Toby.  He has been dead a
hundred years ago, replied my mother.

My uncle Toby was no chronologer--so not caring to advance one step but
upon safe ground, he laid down his pipe deliberately upon the table, and
rising up, and taking my mother most kindly by the hand, without saying
another word, either good or bad, to her, he led her out after my father,
that he might finish the ecclaircissement himself.



Chapter 3.XV.

Had this volume been a farce, which, unless every one's life and opinions
are to be looked upon as a farce as well as mine, I see no reason to
suppose--the last chapter, Sir, had finished the first act of it, and then
this chapter must have set off thus.

Ptr. . .r. . .r. . .ing--twing--twang--prut--trut--'tis a cursed bad
fiddle.--Do you know whether my fiddle's in tune or no?--trut. . .prut. .
.--They should be fifths.--'Tis wickedly strung--tr. . .a.e.i.o.u.-twang.--
The bridge is a mile too high, and the sound post absolutely down,--else--
trut. . .prut--hark! tis not so bad a tone.--Diddle diddle, diddle diddle,
diddle diddle, dum.  There is nothing in playing before good judges,--but
there's a man there--no--not him with the bundle under his arm--the grave
man in black.--'Sdeath! not the gentleman with the sword on.--Sir, I had
rather play a Caprichio to Calliope herself, than draw my bow across my
fiddle before that very man; and yet I'll stake my Cremona to a Jew's
trump, which is the greatest musical odds that ever were laid, that I will
this moment stop three hundred and fifty leagues out of tune upon my
fiddle, without punishing one single nerve that belongs to him--Twaddle
diddle, tweddle diddle,--twiddle diddle,--twoddle diddle,--twuddle diddle,-
-prut trut--krish--krash--krush.--I've undone you, Sir,--but you see he's
no worse,--and was Apollo to take his fiddle after me, he can make him no
better.

Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle--hum--dum--drum.

--Your worships and your reverences love music--and God has made you all
with good ears--and some of you play delightfully yourselves--trut-prut,--
prut-trut.

O! there is--whom I could sit and hear whole days,--whose talents lie in
making what he fiddles to be felt,--who inspires me with his joys and
hopes, and puts the most hidden springs of my heart into motion.--If you
would borrow five guineas of me, Sir,--which is generally ten guineas more
than I have to spare--or you Messrs. Apothecary and Taylor, want your bills
paying,--that's your time.



Chapter 3.XVI.

The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs were a little
settled in the family, and Susanna had got possession of my mother's green
sattin night-gown,--was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon,
and write a Tristra-paedia, or system of education for me; collecting first
for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions; and
binding them together, so as to form an Institute for the government of my
childhood and adolescence.  I was my father's last stake--he had lost my
brother Bobby entirely,--he had lost, by his own computation, full three-
fourths of me--that is, he had been unfortunate in his three first great
casts for me--my geniture, nose, and name,--there was but this one left;
and accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion as
ever my uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of projectils.--The difference
between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils
from Nicholas Tartaglia--My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his
own brain,--or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and
spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture to
him.

In about three years, or something more, my father had got advanced almost
into the middle of his work.--Like all other writers, he met with
disappointments.--He imagined he should be able to bring whatever he had to
say, into so small a compass, that when it was finished and bound, it might
be rolled up in my mother's hussive.--Matter grows under our hands.--Let no
man say,--'Come--I'll write a duodecimo.'

My father gave himself up to it, however, with the most painful diligence,
proceeding step by step in every line, with the same kind of caution and
circumspection (though I cannot say upon quite so religious a principle) as
was used by John de la Casse, the lord archbishop of Benevento, in
compassing his Galatea; in which his Grace of Benevento spent near forty
years of his life; and when the thing came out, it was not of above half
the size or the thickness of a Rider's Almanack.--How the holy man managed
the affair, unless he spent the greatest part of his time in combing his
whiskers, or playing at primero with his chaplain,--would pose any mortal
not let into the true secret;--and therefore 'tis worth explaining to the
world, was it only for the encouragement of those few in it, who write not
so much to be fed--as to be famous.

I own had John de la Casse, the archbishop of Benevento, for whose memory
(notwithstanding his Galatea,) I retain the highest veneration,--had he
been, Sir, a slender clerk--of dull wit--slow parts--costive head, and so
forth,--he and his Galatea might have jogged on together to the age of
Methuselah for me,--the phaenomenon had not been worth a parenthesis.--

But the reverse of this was the truth:  John de la Casse was a genius of
fine parts and fertile fancy; and yet with all these great advantages of
nature, which should have pricked him forwards with his Galatea, he lay
under an impuissance at the same time of advancing above a line and a half
in the compass of a whole summer's day:  this disability in his Grace arose
from an opinion he was afflicted with,--which opinion was this,--viz. that
whenever a Christian was writing a book (not for his private amusement,
but) where his intent and purpose was, bona fide, to print and publish it
to the world, his first thoughts were always the temptations of the evil
one.--This was the state of ordinary writers:  but when a personage of
venerable character and high station, either in church or state, once
turned author,--he maintained, that from the very moment he took pen in
hand--all the devils in hell broke out of their holes to cajole him.--'Twas
Term-time with them,--every thought, first and last, was captious;--how
specious and good soever,--'twas all one;--in whatever form or colour it
presented itself to the imagination,--'twas still a stroke of one or other
of 'em levell'd at him, and was to be fenced off.--So that the life of a
writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of
composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that
of any other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so
much upon the degrees of his wit--as his Resistance.

My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse,
archbishop of Benevento; and (had it not cramped him a little in his creed)
I believe would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy estate, to
have been the broacher of it.--How far my father actually believed in the
devil, will be seen, when I come to speak of my father's religious notions,
in the progress of this work:  'tis enough to say here, as he could not
have the honour of it, in the literal sense of the doctrine--he took up
with the allegory of it; and would often say, especially when his pen was a
little retrograde, there was as much good meaning, truth, and knowledge,
couched under the veil of John de la Casse's parabolical representation,--
as was to be found in any one poetic fiction or mystic record of
antiquity.--Prejudice of education, he would say, is the devil,--and the
multitudes of them which we suck in with our mother's milk--are the devil
and all.--We are haunted with them, brother Toby, in all our lucubrations
and researches; and was a man fool enough to submit tamely to what they
obtruded upon him,--what would his book be?  Nothing,--he would add,
throwing his pen away with a vengeance,--nothing but a farrago of the clack
of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both sexes) throughout
the kingdom.

This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress my
father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said) he was three years,
and something more, indefatigably at work, and, at last, had scarce
completed, by this own reckoning, one half of his undertaking:  the
misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to
my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of
the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was
rendered entirely useless,--every day a page or two became of no
consequence.--

--Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom,
That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally
forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

In short my father was so long in all his acts of resistance,--or in other
words,--he advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to live and get
forwards at such a rate, that if an event had not happened,--which, when we
get to it, if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment
from the reader--I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him
drawing a sundial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground.



Chapter 3.XVII.

--'Twas nothing,--I did not lose two drops of blood by it--'twas not worth
calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us--thousands suffer by
choice, what I did by accident.--Doctor Slop made ten times more of it,
than there was occasion:--some men rise, by the art of hanging great
weights upon small wires,--and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761) paying
part of the price of this man's reputation.--O 'twould provoke a stone, to
see how things are carried on in this world!--The chamber-maid had left no
....... ... under the bed:--Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah,
lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the
window-seat with the other,--cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time,
to .... ... .. ... ......?

I was five years old.--Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung
in our family,--so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us;--Nothing
is left,--cried Susannah,--nothing is left--for me, but to run my country.-
-

My uncle Toby's house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so Susannah fled to
it.



Chapter 3.XVIII.

When Susannah told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, with all the
circumstances which attended the murder of me,--(as she called it,)--the
blood forsook his cheeks,--all accessaries in murder being principals,--
Trim's conscience told him he was as much to blame as Susannah,--and if the
doctrine had been true, my uncle Toby had as much of the bloodshed to
answer for to heaven, as either of 'em;--so that neither reason or
instinct, separate or together, could possibly have guided Susannah's steps
to so proper an asylum.  It is in vain to leave this to the Reader's
imagination:--to form any kind of hypothesis that will render these
propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains sore,--and to do it
without,--he must have such brains as no reader ever had before him.--Why
should I put them either to trial or to torture?  'Tis my own affair:  I'll
explain it myself.



Chapter 3.XIX.

'Tis a pity, Trim, said my uncle Toby, resting with his hand upon the
corporal's shoulder, as they both stood surveying their works,--that we
have not a couple of field-pieces to mount in the gorge of that new
redoubt;--'twould secure the lines all along there, and make the attack on
that side quite complete:--get me a couple cast, Trim.

Your honour shall have them, replied Trim, before tomorrow morning.

It was the joy of Trim's heart, nor was his fertile head ever at a loss for
expedients in doing it, to supply my uncle Toby in his campaigns, with
whatever his fancy called for; had it been his last crown, he would have
sate down and hammered it into a paderero, to have prevented a single wish
in his master.  The corporal had already,--what with cutting off the ends
of my uncle Toby's spouts--hacking and chiseling up the sides of his leaden
gutters,--melting down his pewter shaving-bason,--and going at last, like
Lewis the Fourteenth, on to the top of the church, for spare ends, &c.--he
had that very campaign brought no less than eight new battering cannons,
besides three demi-culverins, into the field; my uncle Toby's demand for
two more pieces for the redoubt, had set the corporal at work again; and no
better resource offering, he had taken the two leaden weights from the
nursery window:  and as the sash pullies, when the lead was gone, were of
no kind of use, he had taken them away also, to make a couple of wheels for
one of their carriages.

He had dismantled every sash-window in my uncle Toby's house long before,
in the very same way,--though not always in the same order; for sometimes
the pullies have been wanted, and not the lead,--so then he began with the
pullies,--and the pullies being picked out, then the lead became useless,--
and so the lead went to pot too.

--A great Moral might be picked handsomely out of this, but I have not
time--'tis enough to say, wherever the demolition began, 'twas equally
fatal to the sash window.



Chapter 3.XX.

The corporal had not taken his measures so badly in this stroke of
artilleryship, but that he might have kept the matter entirely to himself,
and left Susannah to have sustained the whole weight of the attack, as she
could;--true courage is not content with coming off so.--The corporal,
whether as general or comptroller of the train,--'twas no matter,--had done
that, without which, as he imagined, the misfortune could never have
happened,--at least in Susannah's hands;--How would your honours have
behaved?--He determined at once, not to take shelter behind Susannah,--but
to give it; and with this resolution upon his mind, he marched upright into
the parlour, to lay the whole manoeuvre before my uncle Toby.

My uncle Toby had just then been giving Yorick an account of the Battle of
Steenkirk, and of the strange conduct of count Solmes in ordering the foot
to halt, and the horse to march where it could not act; which was directly
contrary to the king's commands, and proved the loss of the day.

There are incidents in some families so pat to the purpose of what is going
to follow,--they are scarce exceeded by the invention of a dramatic
writer;--I mean of ancient days.--

Trim, by the help of his fore-finger, laid flat upon the table, and the
edge of his hand striking across it at right angles, made a shift to tell
his story so, that priests and virgins might have listened to it;--and the
story being told,--the dialogue went on as follows.



Chapter 3.XXI.

--I would be picquetted to death, cried the corporal, as he concluded
Susannah's story, before I would suffer the woman to come to any harm,--
'twas my fault, an' please your honour,--not her's.

Corporal Trim, replied my uncle Toby, putting on his hat which lay upon the
table,--if any thing can be said to be a fault, when the service absolutely
requires it should be done,--'tis I certainly who deserve the blame,--you
obeyed your orders.

Had count Solmes, Trim, done the same at the battle of Steenkirk, said
Yorick, drolling a little upon the corporal, who had been run over by a
dragoon in the retreat,--he had saved thee;--Saved! cried Trim,
interrupting Yorick, and finishing the sentence for him after his own
fashion,--he had saved five battalions, an' please your reverence, every
soul of them:--there was Cutt's,--continued the corporal, clapping the
forefinger of his right hand upon the thumb of his left, and counting round
his hand,--there was Cutt's,--Mackay's,--Angus's,--Graham's,--and Leven's,
all cut to pieces;--and so had the English life-guards too, had it not been
for some regiments upon the right, who marched up boldly to their relief,
and received the enemy's fire in their faces, before any one of their own
platoons discharged a musket,--they'll go to heaven for it,--added Trim.--
Trim is right, said my uncle Toby, nodding to Yorick,--he's perfectly
right.  What signified his marching the horse, continued the corporal,
where the ground was so strait, that the French had such a nation of
hedges, and copses, and ditches, and fell'd trees laid this way and that to
cover them (as they always have).--Count Solmes should have sent us,--we
would have fired muzzle to muzzle with them for their lives.--There was
nothing to be done for the horse:--he had his foot shot off however for his
pains, continued the corporal, the very next campaign at Landen.--Poor Trim
got his wound there, quoth my uncle Toby.--'Twas owing, an' please your
honour, entirely to count Solmes,--had he drubbed them soundly at
Steenkirk, they would not have fought us at Landen.--Possibly not,--Trim,
said my uncle Toby;--though if they have the advantage of a wood, or you
give them a moment's time to intrench themselves, they are a nation which
will pop and pop for ever at you.--There is no way but to march coolly up
to them,--receive their fire, and fall in upon them, pell-mell--Ding dong,
added Trim.--Horse and foot, said my uncle Toby.--Helter Skelter, said
Trim.--Right and left, cried my uncle Toby.--Blood an' ounds, shouted the
corporal;--the battle raged,--Yorick drew his chair a little to one side
for safety, and after a moment's pause, my uncle Toby sinking his voice a
note,--resumed the discourse as follows.
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