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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne

Chapter 1.XVII.

Though my father travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the best of
moods,--pshawing and pishing all the way down,--yet he had the complaisance
to keep the worst part of the story still to himself;--which was the
resolution he had taken of doing himself the justice, which my uncle Toby's
clause in the marriage-settlement empowered him; nor was it till the very
night in which I was begot, which was thirteen months after, that she had
the least intimation of his design:  when my father, happening, as you
remember, to be a little chagrin'd and out of temper,--took occasion as
they lay chatting gravely in bed afterwards, talking over what was to
come,--to let her know that she must accommodate herself as well as she
could to the bargain made between them in their marriage-deeds; which was
to lye-in of her next child in the country, to balance the last year's
journey.

My father was a gentleman of many virtues,--but he had a strong spice of
that in his temper, which might, or might not, add to the number.--'Tis
known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,--and of obstinacy in a
bad one:  Of this my mother had so much knowledge, that she knew 'twas to
no purpose to make any remonstrance,--so she e'en resolved to sit down
quietly, and make the most of it.



Chapter 1.XVIII.

As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother
should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for
which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child,
she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard
me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the famous Dr.
Manningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her
mind,--notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a
call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five
shillings book upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not
only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,--but had likewise super-added
many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the foetus in cross
births, and some other cases of danger, which belay us in getting into the
world; notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely
determined to trust her life, and mine with it, into no soul's hand but
this old woman's only.--Now this I like;--when we cannot get at the very
thing we wish--never to take up with the next best in degree to it:--no;
that's pitiful beyond description;--it is no more than a week from this
very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the
world;--which is March 9, 1759,--that my dear, dear Jenny, observing I
looked a little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five-and-twenty
shillings a yard,--told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so much
trouble;--and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of ten-
pence a yard.--'Tis the duplication of one and the same greatness of soul;
only what lessened the honour of it, somewhat, in my mother's case, was,
that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as
one in her situation might have wished, because the old midwife had really
some little claim to be depended upon,--as much, at least, as success could
give her; having, in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the
parish, brought every mother's son of them into the world without any one
slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.

These facts, tho' they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy
some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father's spirits in
relation to this choice.--To say nothing of the natural workings of
humanity and justice--or of the yearnings of parental and connubial love,
all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case
of this kind;--he felt himself concerned in a particular manner, that all
should go right in the present case;--from the accumulated sorrow he lay
open to, should any evil betide his wife and child in lying-in at Shandy-
Hall.--He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions
in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it.--'Alas
o'day;--had Mrs. Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to
town just to lye-in and come down again;--which they say, she begged and
prayed for upon her bare knees,--and which, in my opinion, considering the
fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her,--was no such mighty matter to have
complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been alive at
this hour.'

This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable;--and yet, it was not
merely to shelter himself,--nor was it altogether for the care of his
offspring and wife that he seemed so extremely anxious about this point;--
my father had extensive views of things,--and stood moreover, as he
thought, deeply concerned in it for the publick good, from the dread he
entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to.

He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had
unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's
reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the
metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,--set in so strong,--as to
become dangerous to our civil rights,--though, by the bye,--a current was
not the image he took most delight in,--a distemper was here his favourite
metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining
it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural,
where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they
could find their ways down;--a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which
was death in both cases.

There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French
politicks or French invasions;--nor was he so much in pain of a consumption
from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our
constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined;--but he
verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in
a state-apoplexy;--and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.

My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,--without
the remedy along with it.

'Was I an absolute prince,' he would say, pulling up his breeches with both
his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, 'I would appoint able judges, at
every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool's
business who came there;--and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it
appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag
and baggage, with his wife and children, farmer's sons, &c. &c. at his
backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like
vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements.  By this
means I shall take care, that my metropolis totter'd not thro' its own
weight;--that the head be no longer too big for the body;--that the
extremes, now wasted and pinn'd in, be restored to their due share of
nourishment, and regain with it their natural strength and beauty:--I would
effectually provide, That the meadows and corn fields of my dominions,
should laugh and sing;--that good chear and hospitality flourish once
more;--and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of
the Squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my
Nobility are now taking from them.

'Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen's seats,' he would ask, with
some emotion, as he walked across the room, 'throughout so many delicious
provinces in France?  Whence is it that the few remaining Chateaus amongst
them are so dismantled,--so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a
condition?--Because, Sir' (he would say) 'in that kingdom no man has any
country-interest to support;--the little interest of any kind which any man
has any where in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the
Grand Monarch:  by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the clouds which
pass across it, every French man lives or dies.'

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard
against the least evil accident in my mother's lying-in in the country,--
was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of power, too
great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher
stations;--which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the
constitution was hourly establishing,--would, in the end, prove fatal to
the monarchical system of domestick government established in the first
creation of things by God.

In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer's opinion, That the
plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of
the world, were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern and
prototype of this houshold and paternal power;--which, for a century, he
said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a mix'd
government;--the form of which, however desirable in great combinations of
the species,--was very troublesome in small ones,--and seldom produced any
thing, that he saw, but sorrow and confusion.

For all these reasons, private and publick, put together,--my father was
for having the man-midwife by all means,--my mother, by no means.  My
father begg'd and intreated, she would for once recede from her prerogative
in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her;--my mother, on the
contrary, insisted upon her privilege in this matter, to choose for
herself,--and have no mortal's help but the old woman's.--What could my
father do?  He was almost at his wit's end;--talked it over with her in all
moods;--placed his arguments in all lights;--argued the matter with her
like a christian,--like a heathen,--like a husband,--like a father,--like a
patriot,--like a man:--My mother answered every thing only like a woman;
which was a little hard upon her;--for as she could not assume and fight it
out behind such a variety of characters,--'twas no fair match:--'twas seven
to one.--What could my mother do?--She had the advantage (otherwise she had
been certainly overpowered) of a small reinforcement of chagrin personal at
the bottom, which bore her up, and enabled her to dispute the affair with
my father with so equal an advantage,--that both sides sung Te Deum.  In a
word, my mother was to have the old woman,--and the operator was to have
licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father and my uncle Toby Shandy
in the back parlour,--for which he was to be paid five guineas.

I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the
breast of my fair reader;--and it is this,--Not to take it absolutely for
granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropp'd in it,--'That I
am a married man.'--I own, the tender appellation of my dear, dear Jenny,--
with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge, interspersed here and there,
might, naturally enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world
into such a determination against me.--All I plead for, in this case,
Madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as
to yourself,--as not to prejudge, or receive such an impression of me, till
you have better evidence, than, I am positive, at present can be produced
against me.--Not that I can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam, as to desire
you should therefore think, that my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress;--
no,--that would be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving
it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to.  All I
contend for, is the utter impossibility, for some volumes, that you, or the
most penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really
stands.--It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear Jenny! tender as the
appellation is, may be my child.--Consider,--I was born in the year
eighteen.--Nor is there any thing unnatural or extravagant in the
supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend.--Friend!--My friend.--
Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be
supported without--Fy! Mr. Shandy:--Without any thing, Madam, but that
tender and delicious sentiment which ever mixes in friendship, where there
is a difference of sex.  Let me intreat you to study the pure and
sentimental parts of the best French Romances;--it will really, Madam,
astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions this
delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is dress'd out.



Chapter 1.XIX.

I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry, than
pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father's great good
sense,--knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious too in
philosophy,--wise also in political reasoning,--and in polemical (as he
will find) no way ignorant,--could be capable of entertaining a notion in
his head, so out of the common track,--that I fear the reader, when I come
to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will
immediatly throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at
it;--and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight,
absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to
the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great
deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.

His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick
bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed
upon our characters and conduct.

The hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness,--nor had
he more faith,--or more to say on the powers of necromancy in dishonouring
his deeds,--or on Dulcinea's name, in shedding lustre upon them, than my
father had on those of Trismegistus or Archimedes, on the one hand--or of
Nyky and Simkin on the other.  How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say,
by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them?  And
how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in
the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and
Nicodemus'd into nothing?

I see plainly, Sir, by your looks, (or as the case happened) my father
would say--that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine,--
which, to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the
bottom,--I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;--and
yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally
assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in
the dispute,--but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own
good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;--you are a person free
from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men;--and, if I may
presume to penetrate farther into you,--of a liberality of genius above
bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends.  Your son,--your
dear son,--from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect.--
Your Billy, Sir!--would you, for the world, have called him Judas?--Would
you, my dear Sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the
genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice,
which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,--Would
you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and
offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a
desecration of him?--O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your
temper right, Sir,--you are incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon
the offer;--you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with
abhorrence.

Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous
contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction, is really
noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;--the workings
of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis,
namely, That was your son called Judas,--the forbid and treacherous idea,
so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like
his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite,
Sir, of your example.

I never knew a man able to answer this argument.--But, indeed, to speak of
my father as he was;--he was certainly irresistible;--both in his orations
and disputations;--he was born an orator;--(Greek).--Persuasion hung upon
his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in
him,--and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions
of his respondent,--that Nature might have stood up and said,--'This man is
eloquent.'--In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the
question, 'twas hazardous in either case to attack him.--And yet, 'tis
strange, he had never read Cicero, nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor
Isocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus, amongst the antients;--nor Vossius,
nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby, amongst the moderns;--and what is
more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark
of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp
or Burgersdicius or any Dutch logician or commentator;--he knew not so much
as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad
hominem consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me
to enter my name at Jesus College in. . .,--it was a matter of just wonder
with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society,--
that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able
to work after that fashion with them.

To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was,
however, perpetually forced upon;--for he had a thousand little sceptical
notions of the comick kind to defend--most of which notions, I verily
believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and of a vive la
Bagatelle; and as such he would make merry with them for half an hour or
so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them till another day.

I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the
progress and establishment of my father's many odd opinions,--but as a
warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such
guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into
our brains,--at length claim a kind of settlement there,--working sometimes
like yeast;--but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion,
beginning in jest,--but ending in downright earnest.

Whether this was the case of the singularity of my father's notions--or
that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit;--or how far, in
many of his notions, he might, though odd, be absolutely right;--the
reader, as he comes at them, shall decide.  All that I maintain here, is,
that in this one, of the influence of christian names, however it gained
footing, he was serious;--he was all uniformity;--he was systematical, and,
like all systematic reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and
twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis.  In a
word I repeat it over again;--he was serious;--and, in consequence of it,
he would lose all kind of patience whenever he saw people, especially of
condition, who should have known better,--as careless and as indifferent
about the name they imposed upon their child,--or more so, than in the
choice of Ponto or Cupid for their puppy-dog.

This, he would say, look'd ill;--and had, moreover, this particular
aggravation in it, viz. That when once a vile name was wrongfully or
injudiciously given, 'twas not like the case of a man's character, which,
when wrong'd, might hereafter be cleared;--and, possibly, some time or
other, if not in the man's life, at least after his death,--be, somehow or
other, set to rights with the world:  But the injury of this, he would say,
could never be undone;--nay, he doubted even whether an act of parliament
could reach it:--He knew as well as you, that the legislature assumed a
power over surnames;--but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it
had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step farther.

It was observable, that tho' my father, in consequence of this opinion,
had, as I have told you, the strongest likings and dislikings towards
certain names;--that there were still numbers of names which hung so
equally in the balance before him, that they were absolutely indifferent to
him.  Jack, Dick, and Tom were of this class:  These my father called
neutral names;--affirming of them, without a satire, That there had been as
many knaves and fools, at least, as wise and good men, since the world
began, who had indifferently borne them;--so that, like equal forces acting
against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually
destroyed each other's effects; for which reason, he would often declare,
He would not give a cherry-stone to choose amongst them.  Bob, which was my
brother's name, was another of these neutral kinds of christian names,
which operated very little either way; and as my father happen'd to be at
Epsom, when it was given him,--he would oft-times thank Heaven it was no
worse.  Andrew was something like a negative quantity in Algebra with him;-
-'twas worse, he said, than nothing.--William stood pretty high:--Numps
again was low with him:--and Nick, he said, was the Devil.

But of all names in the universe he had the most unconquerable aversion for
Tristram;--he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of any
thing in the world,--thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum
natura, but what was extremely mean and pitiful:  So that in the midst of a
dispute on the subject, in which, by the bye, he was frequently involved,--
he would sometimes break off in a sudden and spirited Epiphonema, or rather
Erotesis, raised a third, and sometimes a full fifth above the key of the
discourse,--and demand it categorically of his antagonist, Whether he would
take upon him to say, he had ever remembered,--whether he had ever read,--
or even whether he had ever heard tell of a man, called Tristram,
performing any thing great or worth recording?--No,--he would say,--
Tristram!--The thing is impossible.

What could be wanting in my father but to have wrote a book to publish this
notion of his to the world?  Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to
stand single in his opinions,--unless he gives them proper vent:--It was
the identical thing which my father did:--for in the year sixteen, which
was two years before I was born, he was at the pains of writing an express
Dissertation simply upon the word Tristram,--shewing the world, with great
candour and modesty, the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name.

When this story is compared with the title-page,--Will not the gentle
reader pity my father from his soul?--to see an orderly and well-disposed
gentleman, who tho' singular,--yet inoffensive in his notions,--so played
upon in them by cross purposes;--to look down upon the stage, and see him
baffled and overthrown in all his little systems and wishes; to behold a
train of events perpetually falling out against him, and in so critical and
cruel a way, as if they had purposedly been plann'd and pointed against
him, merely to insult his speculations.--In a word, to behold such a one,
in his old age, ill-fitted for troubles, ten times in a day suffering
sorrow;--ten times in a day calling the child of his prayers Tristram!--
Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which, to his ears, was unison to
Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.--By his ashes! I
swear it,--if ever malignant spirit took pleasure, or busied itself in
traversing the purposes of mortal man,--it must have been here;--and if it
was not necessary I should be born before I was christened, I would this
moment give the reader an account of it.
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