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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
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.