Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  ‘With all my heart, Obadiah,’ said my father (pursuing his journey).

  ‘But the coach-horse needs a shoe, poor creature!’ said Obadiah.

  ‘Poor creature!’ said my uncle Toby, like a string vibrating in unison.

  ‘Then ride the Scotch horse,’ quoth my father.

  ‘He cannot bear a saddle upon his back,’ quoth Obadiah.

  ‘The devil’s in that horse; then take Patriot,’ cried my father.

  ‘Patriot is sold,’ said Obadiah.

  ‘Sold!’ cried my father, as if the thing had not been a matter of fact.

  ‘Your worship ordered me to sell him last April,’ said Obadiah.

  ‘Then go on foot,’ cried my father.

  ‘I had much rather walk than ride,’ said Obadiah, shutting the door.

  ‘What plagues,’ cried my father, going on with his calculation.

  ‘But the roads are flooded,’ said Obadiah, opening the door again.

  Till that moment, my father, who had a map and a book of the post-roads before him, had kept one foot of his compasses fixed upon Nevers, the next stage in his journey and his calculation: but this second attack of Obadiah’s, in opening the door and laying the whole country under water, was too much.

  He let go his compasses – or rather, in a mixture of accident and anger, he threw them upon the table; and then he had to return all the way back to Calais.

  He had got forward again with his journey to within a stride of Nevers, when the letter was brought in, which contained the news of my brother’s death.

  ‘By your leave, Monsieur,’ cried my father, stabbing his compasses through Nevers into the table – and nodding to my uncle Toby to see what was in the letter. Holding his compasses with one hand, and his book of post-roads in the other – half calculating and half listening – he leaned upon the table with both elbows, as my uncle Toby hummed over the letter.

  ‘---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- – he’s gone!’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘Where? Who?’ cried my father.

  ‘My nephew,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘What – without leave – without money?’ cried my father in amazement.

  ‘No: he is dead, my dear brother,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘Without being ill?’ cried my father.

  ‘I dare say not,’ said my uncle Toby, in a low voice, and sighing deeply. ‘Poor lad! He is dead.’

  When Agrippina was told of her son’s death, Tacitus informs us that she abruptly broke off her work. – My father stuck his compasses into Nevers yet more firmly.

  How my father went on, in my opinion, deserves a chapter to itself.

  CHAPTER 3

  And a chapter it shall have, and a devil of a one too – so look out.

  ’Tis either Plato, or Plutarch, or Seneca, or Xenophon – or perhaps Cardan or Petrarch or Stella – or possibly it may be some church father, St. Austin or St. Cyprian, who affirms that it is an irresistible and natural passion to weep for the loss of our friends or children. And so we find that David wept for his son Absalom, Adrian for his Antinous, Niobe for her children, and Apollodorus shed tears for Socrates.

  My father managed his affliction differently from most men; for he neither wept it away, or slept it off, as the Laplanders do, or hanged it, like the English; nor did he curse it, or damn it, or rhyme it, or lillabullero it.

  He got rid of it, however.

  Will your worships allow me to squeeze in a story?

  When Tully was bereft of his dear daughter Tullia, at first he took it to heart, grieving, ‘O my Tullia! my child! Methinks I see her, I hear her, I talk with my Tullia.’

  But when he began to look into the stores of philosophy, and realise how many excellent things might be said upon the occasion – ‘nobody can conceive,’ says the great orator, ‘how happy and joyful it made me.’

  My father was proud of his eloquence, and with reason: it was indeed his strength – and his weakness too, for if an occasion would permit him to say either a wise thing, a witty, or a shrewd one – he had all he wanted. A blessing which tied up my father’s tongue, and a misfortune which let it loose, were pretty equal: sometimes, indeed, the misfortune was the better. For instance, if the pleasure of the harangue was 10 and the pain of the misfortune only 5, my father gained from it.

  This clue will unravel what otherwise would seem very inconsistent in my father’s character; that when provoked by the blunders of servants and other family mishaps, his anger, or rather the duration of it, ran contrary to all conjecture.

  My father had a favourite little mare, which he had bred with a most beautiful Arabian horse, in order to have a foal out of her for his own riding: he talked about this foal every day as if it had already been reared, broke, and saddled. By some neglect or other in Obadiah, it so fell out that my father’s expectations were answered with nothing better than a mule, and as ugly a beast as ever was produced.

  My mother and my uncle Toby expected my father would be the death of Obadiah – and that there would never be an end of it.

  ‘See here! you rascal,’ cried my father, pointing to the mule, ‘what you have done!’

  ‘It was not me,’ said Obadiah.

  ‘How do I know that?’ replied my father.

  Triumph swam in my father’s eyes at this repartee – and so Obadiah heard no more about it.

  Now let us go back to my brother’s death.

  Philosophy has a fine saying for everything. – For Death it has an entire set; the trouble was, they all rushed at once into my father’s head, so that ’twas difficult to set them in order. – He took them as they came.

  ‘’Tis inevitable – the first statute in Magna Carta – it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother. All must die.

  ‘If my son could not have died, that would have been a matter of wonder.

  ‘Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us.

  ‘To die is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments pay it; the proudest pyramid of all has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller’s horizon.’ (My father found he got great ease, and went on.)

  ‘Kingdoms, towns and cities, have they not their ends? and when those powers, which at first cemented them together, have performed their evolutions, they fall back.’

  ‘Brother Shandy,’ said my uncle Toby, laying down his pipe.

  ‘Revolutions, I meant,’ quoth my father, ‘evolutions is nonsense.’

  ‘’Tis not nonsense,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse upon such an occasion?’ cried my father. ‘–Do not, dear Toby, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis.’

  My uncle put his pipe into his mouth.

  ‘Where is Troy and Mycenae, and Thebes and Delos?’ continued my father. ‘What is become of Nineveh and Babylon? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more; the names only are left, and those in time will be forgotten, and lost in a perpetual night: the world itself, brother Toby, must come to an end.

  ‘Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Aegina towards Megara,’ (‘when can this have been?’ thought my uncle Toby) ‘I began to view the country round about. Aegina was behind me, Megara was before, Piraeus on the right hand, Corinth on the left. What flourishing towns, now prostrate upon the earth! Alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child, when all this lies buried – remember, said I – remember thou art a man.’

  Now my uncle Toby did not know that this last paragraph was an extract of Sulpicius’s letter to Tully. And as my father, when he did business in the Turkey trade, had been three or four times in the Levant, and had once stayed a whole year and an half, my uncle Toby naturally concluded that, in one of these visits, he had taken a trip into Asia; and that all this sailing affair with Aegina behind, and Megar
a before, &c., &c., was nothing more than the course of my father’s voyage.

  ‘Pray, brother,’ quoth my uncle in a kindly way, ‘what year of our Lord was this?’

  ‘’Twas no year of our Lord,’ replied my father.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ cried my uncle Toby.

  ‘Simpleton!’ said my father, ‘’twas forty years before Christ was born.’

  My uncle Toby had only two things for it; either to suppose his brother to be the wandering Jew, or that his misfortunes had disordered his brain.

  ‘May the Lord God protect and restore him,’ said he silently, with tears in his eyes.

  My father placed the tears to a proper account, and went on with spirit.

  ‘There is not such great odds, brother Toby, betwixt good and evil, as the world imagines.’ (This, by the bye, was not likely to cure my uncle Toby’s suspicions.) ‘Labour, sorrow, grief, sickness and woe, are the sauces of life.

  ‘My son is dead! – so much the better; ’tis a shame in such a tempest to have but one anchor.

  ‘But he is gone for ever from us! – be it so. He is got from under the hands of his barber before he was bald – he is but risen from a feast before he was surfeited. The Thracians wept when a child was born’ (‘and we were very near it,’ quoth my uncle Toby) ‘–and feasted and made merry when a man died. For death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy; it unlooses the captive’s chain.

  ‘Show me the man who dreads death, and I’ll show thee a prisoner who dreads liberty.

  ‘Is it not better, my dear brother Toby, not to hunger at all, than to eat?

  ‘Is it not better to be freed from cares and melancholy, than be like a traveller, who comes weary to his inn, only to have to start his journey afresh?

  ‘There is no terror, brother Toby, in death’s looks, except what it borrows from groans and convulsions, and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains, in a dying man’s room. Strip it of these, and what is it?’

  ‘’Tis better in battle than in bed,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘Better in battle!’ continued my father, smiling, for he had absolutely forgot my brother Bobby. ‘’Tis not terrible – for when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.’

  My uncle Toby laid down his pipe to consider this.

  ‘For this reason,’ continued my father, ‘’tis worthy to recollect how little change, in great men, the approaches of death have made. Vespasian died in a jest; Galba with a sentence – Tiberius in concealment, and Augustus in a compliment.’

  ‘I hope ’twas a sincere one,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘’Twas to his wife,’ said my father.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘And lastly, of all the choice anecdotes which history gives us on this matter,’ continued my father, ‘this, like a gilded dome, crowns all. ’Tis the story of Cornelius Gallus, which, I dare say, brother Toby, you have read.’

  ‘I dare say I have not,’ replied my uncle.

  ‘He died,’ said my father, ‘while **********.’

  ‘If it was with his wife,’ said my uncle Toby, ‘there could be no hurt in it.’

  ‘That’s more than I know,’ replied my father.

  CHAPTER 5

  My mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife.

  Obadiah had left the door a little ajar, so that my mother heard enough to imagine herself the subject of the conversation. Laying her finger across her lips, and holding her breath, she put her ear to the chink in the door and listened with all her powers.

  In this attitude I am determined to let her stand for five minutes: till I bring the affairs of the kitchen up to date.

  CHAPTER 6

  Though in one sense, our family was a simple machine, consisting of only a few wheels; yet these wheels were set in motion by so many different springs, and such a variety of strange principles and impulses – that although it was a simple machine, it had all the appearance of a complex one, with as many odd movements within it as ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-mill.

  Amongst them was this effect: that whatever debate or dialogue was going on in the parlour, there was generally another at the same time, and upon the same subject, running parallel along with it in the kitchen.

  Now to bring this about, whenever an extraordinary message or letter was delivered in the parlour – or my mother or father were observed by the servants to be arguing or discontented – in short, when there was anything worth knowing or listening to, ’twas the rule to leave the door not absolutely shut, but somewhat ajar – as it stands just now – which, under cover of the bad hinge (and that might be one of the many reasons why it was never mended) was not difficult to manage.

  My mother at this moment stands profiting by this gap. – Obadiah did the same thing, as soon as he had left the letter with the news of my brother’s death; so that before my father had got over his surprise, and begun his speech, Trim in the kitchen had stood up to speak his sentiments on the subject.

  A curious observer would have given a great deal to have heard Corporal Trim and my father, two orators so contrasted by nature and education, haranguing over the same bier.

  My father – a man of deep reading and prompt memory – with Cato and Seneca at his fingers’ ends.

  The corporal – with no deeper reading than his muster-roll.

  The one proceeding from metaphor to allusion, and striking the fancy as he went along with the pleasantry of his images.

  The other, without wit or antithesis, leaving the images aside, and going straight to the heart. O Trim! would to heaven thou had’st a better historian! – O ye critics! will nothing melt you?

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘My young master in London is dead!’ said Obadiah.

  A green satin night-gown of my mother’s, which had been twice cleaned, was the first idea which Obadiah’s exclamation brought into Susannah’s head. – Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfection of words.

  ‘Then,’ quoth Susannah, ‘we must all go into mourning.’

  But note: the word mourning excited in Susannah’s mind not one single idea tinged with grey or black. – All was the green of a green satin night-gown.

  ‘O! ’twill be the death of my poor mistress,’ cried Susannah. – My mother’s whole wardrobe followed. What a procession! her red damask, her yellow lutestrings, her brown taffeta, her laced caps and bed-gowns and under-petticoats. Not a rag was left behind. ‘No, she will never look up again,’ said Susannah.

  We had a fat, foolish scullery-maid who had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy.

  ‘He is dead!’ said Obadiah.

  ‘So am not I,’ said the foolish scullery-maid.

  ‘Here is sad news, Trim,’ cried Susannah, wiping her eyes as Trim entered the kitchen. ‘Master Bobby is dead and buried’ – the funeral was an invention of Susannah’s – ‘and we shall all have to go into mourning.’

  ‘I hope that the news is not true,’ said Trim.

  ‘I heard the letter read with my own ears,’ answered Obadiah.

  ‘Oh! he’s dead,’ said Susannah.

  ‘As sure,’ said the scullery-maid, ‘as I’m alive.’

  ‘I lament for him from my heart and soul,’ said Trim, with a sigh. ‘Poor boy!’

  ‘He was alive last Whitsuntide!’ said Jonathan the coachman.

  ‘Whitsuntide! alas!’ cried Trim, extending his right arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read the sermon. ‘What is Whitsuntide, Jonathan, or any tide or time, to this? Are we not here now,’ he continued (striking his stick upon the floor) – ‘and are we not’ (dropping his hat upon the ground) ‘gone! in a moment!’

  Susannah burst into a flood of tears.

  ‘We are not stocks and stones,’ said Trim.

  Jonathan, Obadiah and the cook-maid all melted. Even the foolish scullery-maid, who was scouring a fish-kettle, was
roused. The whole kitchen crowded about the corporal.

  Now, as I see that the preservation of our church and state – and possibly the distribution of property and power in the whole world – may in future depend upon the right understanding of the corporal’s eloquence – I demand your attention, your worships.

  I said, ‘we were not stocks and stones.’ I should have added, nor are we angels, but men clothed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations; and what a junketing piece of work there is between these and our seven senses, especially some of my own, I am ashamed to confess. Let it suffice to say the eye has the quickest commerce with the soul, – gives a smarter stroke, and leaves more upon the fancy than words can convey.

  –I’ve gone a little astray – no matter, let us now go back to the mortality of Trim’s hat. ‘Are we not here now, and gone in a moment?’

  There was nothing in the sentence that we do not hear every day; and without the hat, Trim would have made nothing of it.

  ‘Are we not here now;’ said he, ‘and are we not’ (dropping his hat plump upon the ground) ‘gone! in a moment?’

  The hat descended as if it held a lump of clay. Nothing could have expressed the sentiment of mortality like it; – it fell dead. The corporal’s eye fixed upon it, as upon a corpse, and Susannah burst into tears.

  Now – a hat may be dropped in ten thousand ways, without any effect. Had he flung it, or thrown it, or skimmed it, or had he dropped it like a goose – like a nincompoop – it would have failed, and its effect have been lost.

  Ye who govern this mighty world with the engines of eloquence – who heat it, and cool it, and melt it, and mollify it–

  Ye who wind and turn the passions with this great windlass–

  Ye who drive – and why not Ye also who are driven, like turkeys to market with a stick – meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim’s hat.

  CHAPTER 8

  Stay – I have a small account to settle with the reader before Trim can go on with his speech. It shall be done in two minutes.

  Amongst many other book-debts, I owe the world a chapter upon chamber-maids and button-holes, which I promised earlier: but since some of your worships tell me that these two subjects, especially connected, might endanger the world’s morals, – I pray that the chapter upon chamber-maids and button-holes may be forgiven me, and that they will accept the last chapter instead; which is nothing but a chapter of chamber-maids, green gowns, and old hats.