Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Sterne

  IT is the custom to draw a distinction between a man and his works and to add that, although the world has a claim to read every line of his writing, it must not ask questions about the author. The distinction has arisen, we may believe, because the art of biography has fallen very low, and people of good taste infer that a ‘life’ will merely gratify a base curiosity, or will set up a respectable figure of sawdust. It is therefore a wise precaution to limit one’s study of a writer to the study of his works; but, like other precautions, it implies some loss. We sacrifice an aesthetic pleasure, possibly of first-rate value — a life of Johnson, for example — and we raise boundaries where there should be none. A writer is a writer from his cradle; in his dealings with the world, in his affections, in his attitude to the thousand small things that happen between dawn and sunset, he shows the same point of view as that which he elaborates afterwards with a pen in his hand. It is more fragmentary and incoherent, but it is also more intense. To this, which one may call the aesthetic interest of his character, there are added the various interests of circumstance — where and how he was born and bred and educated — which all men share, but which are of greater interest as they affect a more original talent. The weakness of modern biographers seems to lie not in their failure to realize that both elements are present in the life of a writer, but in their determination to separate them. It is easier for them to draw distinctions than to see things whole. There is a common formula, in which, having delivered judgment upon his work, they state that ‘a few facts about his life’ may not be inappropriate, or, writing from the opposite standpoint, proclaim that their concern is ‘with the man and not with his works’. A distinction is made in this way which we do not find in the original, and from this reason mainly arises the common complaint against a biography, that it is ‘not like’. We have lives that are all ceremony and work; and lives that are all chatter and scandal. A certain stigma is attached to the biography which deals mainly with a man’s personal history, and the writer who sees him most clearly in that light is driven to represent him under the cover of fiction. The fascination of novel writing lies in its freedom; the dull parts can be skipped, and the excitements intensified; but above all the character can be placed artistically, set, that is, in fitting surroundings and composed so as to give whatever impression you choose. The traditional form is far less definite in the case of novels than in the case of biographies, because (one may guess) the sensibilities of conventional people have much less say in the matter. One of the objects of biography is to make men appear as they ought to be, for they are husbands and brothers; but no one takes a character in fiction quite seriously. It is there, indeed, that the main disadvantage of novel writing lies, for the aesthetic effect of truth is only to be equalled by the imagination of genius. There are a dozen incidents in a second-rate novel which might have happened in a dozen different ways, and the least consciousness of indecision blurs the effect; but the bare statement of facts has an indisputable power, if we have reason to think them true. The knowledge that they are true, it may be, leads us to connect them with other ideas; but if we know that they never happened at all, and doubt that they could have happened in this way, they suggest nothing distinct, because they are not distinct themselves. Again, a real life is wonderfully prolific; it passes through such strange places and draws along with it a train of adventure that no novelist can better them, if only he can deal with them as with his own inventions.

  Certainly, no novelist could wish for finer material than the life of Sterne affords him. His story was ‘like a romance’ and his genius was of the rarest. There is a trace of the usual apology in Professor Cross’s preface,1 to the effect that he is not going to pass judgment on the writings, but merely to give the facts of the life. In his opinion such facts would be dull enough, if it did not ‘turn out’, as he remarks, that the writings are in part autobiographical, so that one may consider his life without irrelevance. But Professor Cross has surely underrated the value of his material, or the use he has made of it, for the book makes excellent reading from start to finish, and persuades us that we know Sterne better than we did before.

  There are certain scenes upon which, were one writing a novel, one would like to dwell. The story of his youth is one; he was dragged about England and Ireland in the train of the regiment which his father served. His mother was a vulgar woman, daughter of a sutler, and his father was a ‘little smart man’ who got the wound that killed him in a quarrel over a goose. The family trailed about, always in straits for money, from one garrison town to another. Sometimes they were taken in by a rich cousin, for the Sternes were of old descent; sometimes in crossing the Channel they were ‘nearly cast away by a leak springing up on board ship’. Little brothers and sisters were born on their wanderings, and died, ‘ being of a fine delicate frame not made to last long’. Sterne, after the death of his father, was taken in charge by his cousin, Richard Sterne of Elvington, and sent to Cambridge. He sat with John Hall-Stevenson under a great walnut tree in the court of Jesus College, reading Rabelais, Rochester, and Aphra Behn, Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus, evil books and good books, so that they called the tree the tree of knowledge. Sterne, further, railed at ‘rhetoric, logic, and metaphysics... amused that intellect should employ itself in that way’.

  But it is at Sutton, eight miles from York, that we should like to pause and draw the portrait of the vicar. ‘ So slovenly was his dress and strange his gait, that the little boys used to flock round him and walk by his side.’ He would stop on his way to church, if his pointer started a covey of partridges, and leave his flock without a sermon while he shot. Once, when his wife was out of her mind for a while and thought herself Queen of Bohemia, Sterne drove her through the stubble fields with bladders fastened to the wheels of her chaise to make a noise ‘and then I told her this is the way they course in Bohemia’. He farmed his own land, played the violin, took lessons in painting and drawing, and drove into York for the races. In addition he was a violent partisan in the ecclesiastical disputes and drew Dr. Slop from the life. Then, when he was tired of parochial life he could drive over to the great stone house with the moat of stagnant water round it where John Hall-Stevenson lived, in retreat from the world, humouring his fancies. If the weathercock which he saw from his bed pointed to the north-east, for example, Mr. Hall-Stevenson would lie all day in bed. If he could be induced to rise, he spent his time in writing indecent rhymes and in reading with his friend among the old and obscene books in the library. Then, in October, the brotherhood of the Demoniacs met at the Hall, in imitation of the monks of Medmenham Abbey; but it was a rustic copy, for they were ‘noisy Yorkshire squires and gentlemen’, who hunted by day, drank deep into the night, and told rude stories over their burgundy. Their spirit and their oddity (for they were the freaks of the countryside) rejoiced Sterne hugely, just as he loved the immense freedom of the old writers. When he was back in his parsonage again he had books all round him to take the place of talk. York was full of books, for the sales of the county took place there. Sterne’s love of books reminds us sometimes of Charles Lamb. He loved the vast forgotten folios, where a lifetime of learning and fancy has been poured into the notes; he loved Burton and Bouchet and Bruscambille; Montaigne, Rabelais, and Cervantes he loved of course; but one may believe that he delighted most in his wild researches into medicine, midwifery, and military engineering. He was only brought to a stop by the difficulty of understanding in what way a cannon ball travels, for the ‘laws of the parabola’ were not to his mind.

  He was forty-five before it occurred to him that these vivid experiences among the parsons, the country peasants, and the wits of Crazy Castle had given him a view of the world which it would be possible to put into shape. The first books of Tristram Shandy were written at fever heat, ‘quaint demons grinning and clawing at his head’, ideas striking him as he walked, and sending him back home at a run to secure them. It is in this way that the first books still impress us;
a wonderful conception, long imprisoned in the brain and delicately formed, seems to leap out, surprising and intoxicating the writer himself. He had found a key to the world. He thought he could go on like this, at the rate of two volumes a year, for ever, for a miracle had happened which turned all his experiences to words; to write about them was to be master of all that was in him and all that was to come. A slight knowledge of his life is enough to identify many of the characters with real people and to trace the humours of Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy to the oddities of Crazy Castle and to the studies of the writer himself. But these are merely marks on the surface, and the source from which they sprang lies very deep. Wilfully strange and whimsical of course Sterne was, but the spirit which inspires his humours and connects them is the spirit of the humourist; the world is an absurd place, and to prove it he invents absurdities which he shows to be as sensible as the views by which the world is governed. The stranger’s nose, it will be remembered, ‘just served as a frigate to launch them into a gulf of school divinity, and then they all sailed before the wind’. Whichever way the story winds it is accompanied by a jibing at ‘great wigs, grave faces, and other implements of deceit’, and thus the innumerable darts and spurts of fancy, in spite of their variety, have a certain likeness.

  Shandy Hall, the home of cranks and eccentricities, nevertheless contrives to make the whole of the outer world appear heavy, and dull and brutal, and teased by innumerable imps. But it is probable that this effect is given quite as much by indirect means as by direct satire and parody. The form of the book, which seems to allow the writer to put down at once the first thought that comes into his head, suggests freedom; and then the thoughts themselves are so informal, so small, private, and far-fetched, that the reader is amazed and delighted to think how easy it must be to write. Even his indecency impresses one as an odd kind of honesty. In comparison other novels seem intolerably portly and platitudinous and remote from life. At the same time, what kind of life is it that Sterne can show us? It is easy to see that it has nothing in common with what, in the shorthand of speech, one calls ‘real life’. Sterne skips immense tracts of living in order to concentrate upon the little whim or the oddity which most delighted him. His people are always at high pressure, with their brains in a state of abnormal activity. Their wills and their affections can make small way against their intellects. Uncle Toby, it will be remembered, picks up a Bible directly he has made his offer of marriage, and becomes so much engrossed by the siege of Jericho that he leaves his proposal ‘to work with her after its own way’. When the news of his son’s death reaches Mr. Shandy, his mind at once fills with the fine sayings of the philosophers, and in spouting them his private sorrow is completely forgotten. Nevertheless, although such reversals of ordinary experience startle us, they do not seem to us unnatural — they do not turn to chill conceits — because Sterne, the first of ‘motive-mongers’, has observed the humours of man with an exquisite subtlety. His sphere is in the most exalted regions, where the thought and not the act is the thing criticized; where the thought, moreover, is almost completely severed from ordinary associations and the support of facts. Uncle Toby, with his simple questionings and avowals—’ You puzzle me to death ‘ — plays a most important part by bringing his brother’s flights to earth and giving them that contrast with normal human thought in which the essence of humour lies.

  Yet there are moments, especially in the later books of Tristram Shandy, where the hobby-horse is ridden to death, and Mr. Shandy’s invariable eccentricity tries our patience. The truth is that we cannot live happily in such fine air for long, and that we begin to become conscious of limitations; moreover, this astonishing vivacity has something a little chill about it. The same qualities that were so exhilarating at first — the malice, the wit, and the irresponsibility — are less pleasing when they seem less spontaneous, like the grin on a weary face; or, it may be, when one has had enough of them. A writer who feels his responsibility to his characters tries to give vent to portentous groans at intervals; he does his best to insist that he is a showman merely, that his judgments are fallible, and that a great mystery lies round us all. But Sterne’s sense of humour will suffer no mystery to settle on his page; he is never sublime like Meredith, but on the other hand he is never ridiculous like Thackeray. When he wished to get some relief from his fantastic brilliancy, he sought it in the portrayal of exquisite instants and pangs of emotion. The famous account of Uncle Toby and the fly—’”Go,” says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; “go, poor devil; get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me’” — is followed by a description of the effect which such words had upon Sterne himself. They ‘instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation’. It is this strange contradiction, as it seems, between feeling pain and joy acutely, and at the same time, observing and admiring his own power to do so, that has thrown so much discredit upon the famous ‘sentimentality’, and has so much perplexed his admirers. The amazing truth of these observations is the best proof that he felt them; but when it becomes obvious that he has now time to think of himself our attention strays also, and we ask irrelevant questions — whether, for instance, Sterne was a good man. Sometimes — the incident of the donkey in Tristram Shandy is a good example — his method is brilliantly successful, for he touches upon the emotion, and passes on to show us how it travels through his mind, and what associations cling to it; different ideas meet and disperse, naturally as it seems; and the whole scene is lit for the moment with air and colour. In The Sentimental Journey, however, Sterne seems anxious to suppress his natural curiosity, and to have a double intention in his sentiment — to convey a feeling to the reader, but with the object of winning admiration for his own simple virtues. It is when his unmixed sentiment falls very flat that we begin to ask ourselves whether we like the writer, and to call him hypocrite. ‘ The pauvre honteux [to whom Sterne had given alms] could say nothing; he pull’d out a little handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned away — and I thought he thanked me more than. them all.’ The last words, with their affectation of simplicity, are like eyes turned unctiously to Heaven.

  There is abundant evidence in the story of his life to show how strange and complicated was the state of mind that produced such works of art. Sterne was a man of many passions, driven ‘according as the fly stings’; but the most serious was said to have been inspired by Mrs. Draper, the Eliza of the letters. Nevertheless, sentiments that had done duty for his wife in 1740 were copied out, with a change of name, and made to serve again for Eliza, in the year 1767; and again if he had turned a phrase happily in writing to Eliza, Lydia, his daughter, was given the benefit of it. Shall we infer from this that Sterne cared nothing for wife or mistress or daughter, or shall we believe that he was, before everything else, and with all the failing of his kind, a great artist? If he had been among the greatest, no doubt these little economies would not have been necessary; but with his exquisite and penetrating but not very exuberant genius it was essential to make shifts and to eke out as best he might. Accordingly, we have, as Professor Cross demonstrates, the strange spectacle of a man who uses his emotions twice over, for different purposes. The Journal to Eliza in which the most secret passions of his heart are laid bare is but the note-book for passages in The Sentimental Journey which all the world may read. Sterne himself, no doubt, scarcely knew at what point his own pain was dissolved in the joy of an artist. We at this distance of time, might speculate indefinitely.

  Indeed, however we may test it, there is no life which is harder to judge; its eccentricities are often genuine, and its impulses are often premeditated. In the same way the final impression is twofold in its nature, for we must combine a life of extraordinary flightiness and oddity with the infinite painstaking and self-consciousness of an artist. This thin, excitable man, who was devoured by consumption, who said of himself that he generally acted on the first impul
se, and was a bundle of sensations scarcely checked by reason, not only kept a record of all that he felt, but could sit close at his table, arranging and rearranging, adding and altering, until every scene was clear, every tone was felt, and each word was fit and in its place. ‘ How do the slight touches of the chisel,’ he exclaimed in Tristram Shandy, ‘ the pencil, the pen, the fiddle stick, et cetera, give the true swell, which gives the true pleasure! O, my fellow countrymen! — be nice; be cautious of your language — and never, O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend.’ His fame depends partly upon that inimitable style, but rests most safely upon the extraordinary zest with which he lived, and upon the joy with which his mind worked ceaselessly upon the world.

  Eliza and Sterne

  OF the many difficulties which afflict the biographer, the moral difficulty must surely be the greatest. By what standard, that is to say, is he to judge the morals of the dead? By that of their day, or that of his own? Or should he, before putting pen to paper, arrive at some absolute standard of right and wrong by which he can try Socrates and Shelley and Byron and Queen Victoria and Mr. Lloyd George? The problem, though it lies at the root of biography and affects it in every fibre, is for the most part solved or shelved by taking it for granted that the truth was revealed about the year 1850 to the fortunate natives of the British Isles, who need only in future take into account circumstances of date, country, and sex in order to come to a satisfactory conclusion upon all cases of moral eccentricity submitted to their judgment. If we write the life of Elizabeth Draper, for instance, we must lay great stress upon the question of the morality or immorality of her relations with Sterne. We must ransack the evidence and profess relief or censure as the balance sways for her or against. We must attach more importance to her conduct in this respect than in any other. Mr. Wright and Mr. Sclater go through the ceremony with rigid consistency. Her ‘ moral culpability ‘ is debated at every point, and we are invited to assist at a trial which, as it proceeds, comes to have less and less reality either for us or for anybody else. But in saying that we admit no levity. We are only saying what every reader of biography knows but few writers care to confess — that times are changed; that in 1850 Eliza would not have been invited to Court, but that in 1922 we should all be delighted to sit next her at dinner.