18 March: Boreham on Laurence Sterne

Twinkles and Tears
This is the anniversary of the death of Laurence Sterne, in some respects the most brilliant of all our humorists. It is no wonder that he reached the sober realm of middle life before settling down to his life work. He came of a most extraordinary family. They were incessantly on the move. His father was a soldier, and the regiment was seldom allowed to stay anywhere long. As a consequence, the Sternes lived a kind of gipsy life. They went into a place; stayed there until a child had been born and a child buried; and then jogged on again.

He would be a bold historian who would declare, with any approach to dogmatism, how many babies were cradled and coffined in the course of these nomadic drifts from one garrison town to another. They seem to have lived for a year or so in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, and, with pitiful monotony, we read of their regret at having to leave such-and-such a child sleeping in the churchyard. "My father's children," as Sterne himself laconically observes, "were not made to last long."

Laurence, however, was one of the lucky ones. Entering the world in 1713, he managed to stay here until he was nearly 55. He spent half his life pondering the marvel of his own excursion into maturity. And, since he was destined to live, he was eager to live to some purpose. Whilst he was still wondering how this end could be achieved, his school master solved the problem for him. Laurence become profoundly impressed by the good dominie's immovable conviction that he himself had been born to greatness.

On one occasion, when the little Yorkshire school room was being whitewashed, a ladder was left on the floor. The temptation was too strong. When nobody was near, Laurence set up the ladder, seized the brush and wrote his name in huge capitals high up on the wall. The usher thrashed him within an inch of his life. But the school master rebuked the usher and ordained that the name on the wall should never be erased. "We shall one day look upon that name with intense pride!" he declared. Sterne says that the music of those words drove from his mind all memory of the thrashing. He secretly vowed that the dominie's dream should be realised.

Achievement Inspired By A Teacher's Confidence
Forty years intervened between the schoolmaster's forecast and the pupil's brief blaze of glory; but during those four decades, Sterne was blindly groping his way towards his dazzling goal. He kept his eyes wide open, his memory keen, and every faculty on the alert. His life was a series of ups and downs, of jolts and jars. He lost his father when he was 18; but a relative, glimpsing those exceptional qualities that had infatuated the schoolmaster, sent him to Cambridge.

On leaving the university he entered the Church, and fell in love with a particularly charming girl, Elizabeth Lumley by name, who, immediately after their engagement, lost her health and seemed to be hastening to a consumptive's grave. Sterne actually attended what he believed to be her death bed; but in the last extremity of her distress, she rallied, recovered, and they were married.

In magnifying the sly, fantastic wit of Sterne, Carlyle couples his name with that of Cervantes. The author of "Tristram Shandy" stands with the author of "Don Quixote," Carlyle declares, among the most brilliant humorists that the world has known. And Mr. H. O. Trail maintains that, in the creation of Toby Shandy, English humour reached the loftiest level that it has ever attained.

If, by some fortunate chance, the schoolmaster who welcomed the clumsy little ten-year-old in 1723 lived until 1760, he must have felt that the realisation of his dream, though long delayed, was well worth waiting for. "Tristram Shandy" took England by storm. The country was electrified. The work was chaotic; it was incoherent; it was an audacious defiance of all the conventions; but it was captivating, delicious, irresistible. Its startling originality, its grotesque oddity, its rippling whimsicality, set everybody chuckling. Its clownish eccentricities piqued all types of fancy and intrigued every reader.

Pendulum Betwixt Smiles And Tears
Immediately after the publication of his "Shandy," Sterne went up to London. He was lionised and idolised everywhere. His lodgings in Pall Mall were besieged from morning to night. "My rooms," he writes, "are filling every hour with great people of the first rank who vie with each other in heaping honours upon me." He proudly and justly observes that never before had such homage been paid to any man of letters. When, a few months later he crossed the Channel, a similar reception awaited him. Paris went wild over him. He was instantly enthroned in the charmed circles of the salons. "My head is turned," he writes to Garrick, "with what I see and the unexpected honours I have met with here." From this dizzy pinnacle, however, he was soon forced to descend.

His life is a strange pendulum, swinging perpetually betwixt the smile and the tear. His health began to fail as soon as he reached the climax of his fame. He continued to write, it is true, and in 1768 published "The Sentimental Journey." In that same year a company of celebrated writers and their patrons were dining one evening in London. Sterne's name being mentioned, a servant was despatched to inquire after him. "I went to Mr. Sterne's lodgings," this man reported later to the gentlemen assembled at the feast, "and was told to go up to the nurse. I went upstairs, and, whilst I stood at poor Mr. Sterne's bedside, he died."

Thus, attended only by his own serving woman and the messenger who had just arrived from a dinner party, he passed away; and, a day or two later, only two mourners—one of them his publisher—followed his remains to the tomb. Two days later still the grave was rifled by body snatchers and its contents sold by the thieves to a young surgeon. The literary work of Laurence Sterne is a strange medley of pathos and of humour, but those two antithetical elements are not more oddly mingled in his writings than in his life.

F W Boreham

Image: Laurence Sterne