STERNE, TRISTRAM, YORICK, BIRDS, AND BEASTS

How far can Laurence Sterne be identified with Tristram or Yorick? Is Tristram Shandy a satire of which the narrator is the butt, as in Swift’s A Tale ofa Tub , or is it a bold assertion of the superiority of wit and imagination to Augustan gravity and judgement? Does Sterne share Yorick’s sentimental philosophy in A Sentimental Journey? Is Yorick an exemplum to follow or a fool who remains unaware of his excesses and errors? Does he learn to recognize and overcome his faults, and is there an ironic distance between Yorick the narrator and Yorick the traveller? Such are the questions to which criticism of Sterne seems inevitably to return with as many permutations as Walter Shandy’s discourse on the white bear.’ Like Walter, we are unlikely ever to reach any conclusions, and yet the exercise is not completely futile, since, as Sterne is always at pains to point out, argument and the formulation of an individual opinion (however hobby-horsical) is a pleasurable activity in which all men like to indulge. Indeed, if there is one thing that we can be certain Tristram intended to teach his readers, it is that we ourselves must contribute our half of the entertainment, and learn ‘to think as well as read’

As the questions above suggest, this is equally applicable to the reader of A Sentimental Journey. In both works we never feel quite at ease reading the sentimental episodes, because we are always uncertain how Sterne expects us to react - with tears, or laughter, or perhaps both. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the majority of eighteenth-century readers were easily per- suaded of the superior merits of the expurgated and emasculated Beauties of Sterne, which, like Uncle Toby’s wargames, combined maximum pleasure with minimum discomfort .3 In Tristram Shandy , Sterne’s piecemeal and episodic approach, using short chapter-units, forces us to make judgements about the way we are meant to respond to a particular portion of the text, and then, more often than not, at the very end of the episode, or in the next chapter, our judgement is derided, and we suddenly find ourselves belittled and humiliated, like Dr Slop thrown into the mud. The abruptness with which Le Fever’s life-thread is cut introduces a disturbing note into our indulgence in the sentimental prolongation of the preceding scene, and Tristram’s moralizing speech to Jenny on the passing of time and approaching death is swept aside in the following chapter, as though it were merely a demonstration of his ability to imitate a particularly gloomy vein of writing (Tristram Shandy, VI,

In A Sentimental Journey the method is somewhat different. Here the elements that undermine the confidence with which we respond to the text are woven into the fabric of the episodes themselves, so that we are disconcerted to find sexual overtones in Yorick‘s account of his meeting with Maria and his exchange of snuff-boxes with Father Lorenzo (pp.273, 99-101). The same technique is present to a lesser degree in Tristram Shandy, notably in a scene

(I, 20, p.47).2

10, p.426; IX, 8 & 9, pp.610-11).

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that looks forward to A Sentimental Journey, where Tristram meets Maria, and apparently unintentionally spoils the melancholy mood by drawing a comparison between himself and Maria’s goat (Tristram Shandy, IX, 24, p.63 1):

MARIA look’d wistfully for some time at me, and then at her goat - and then at me - and then at her goat again, and so on alternately - -Well, Maria, said I softly -What resemblance do you find?

Far from being intended as an ‘unseasonable pleasantry’, Tristram’s question arose, he says, ‘from the humblest conviction of what a Beast man is’.

Of course, this theme of the relative merits of man and beast is important in both of Sterne’s works. Walter Shandy, on the one hand, sees it as a diminution of man that he must propagate himself after the manner of ‘satyrs and four-footed beasts’, while Uncle Toby’s humanity, on the other, is displayed in his merciful treatment of the fly (Tristram Shandy, IX, 33, pp.644- 45; 11, 12, pp.113-14). Once again we are uncertain whether to approve of Toby’s action, as Tristram seems to do, or to dig slightly deeper, and notice the humorous incongruity of Toby’s inflated biblical language, and the ridicu- lousness of a benevolence that makes no distinction between humans and flies (see Dilworth, pp.27-28). We inevitably return to those questions of the relation between Sterne and his narrator with which we began. Similarly, we cannot be sure whether Yorick’s sympathy (as often based on a sentimental commerce with animals as with humans) is commendable or ridiculous, moral or mechanical, selfless or selfish. A close reading of some of these animal episodes will reveal further ironies and complexities. Like Walter Shandy, rather than seeking to answer these questions, my aim is to display the richness of the context from which they spring, and also to suggest something of the contemporary background to Yorick’s problematical sympathy for the lower links in the chain of being.

The most arresting confrontation between man and animal in A Sentimental Journey is between Yorick and the caged starling. Responding sympathetically to the bird’s pathetic lament, “‘I can’t get out - I can’t get out”’, but unable to free the bird then and there with his bare hands, Yorick redeems it from slavery for the price of ‘a bottle of Burgundy’, and brings it back to England, where, instead of being released, it is passed around like some curiosity or executive toy of which each owner rapidly tires (pp.204-205). Arthur Cash sees Yorick’s failure to free the starling as a sign of the instability of his mechanical and impulsive benevolence. This instability, according to Cash, marks Yorick off from Sterne’s ideal of benevolence, the Good Samaritan of the Sermons (Cash, pp.78-82). Certainly, there is much in this episode to support this view. Yorick first hears the bird’s cry when he has just convinced himself that it would not be so terrible to be incarcerated in the Bastille for failing to carry a passport, and he supposes the voice to be that of ‘a child’. Far from running to this imprisoned child’s relief, he merely takes a look up and down the passage, ‘and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention’ (p.197). So content is he with his own cheering thoughts on imprisonment, that he is unwilling to involve himself in anyone

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick 45

else’s affairs, even out of curiosity. It is only on returning through the passage and hearing the voice again that Yorick discovers the birdcage above his head, and even then he merely stands ‘looking at the bird’, as if he were at a zoo watching a creature perform an entertaining trick, while several people pass through the passage, provoking the starling to repeat its antics. It is, of course, splendidly ironic that the bird really is performing a routine taught to it by the groom who originally found it on the cliffs at Dover, caring for it out of sympathy at first, and then turning it into his personal captive (p.204). Yorick’s response follows the same pattern. Eventually moved by the sight, he attempts to free the bird, but when his passion has cooled, he likewise treats it simply as a piece of property to be begged for, or given as a gift or bribe. Yorick creates his own captive too, in the form of the imaginary prisoner in the Bastille. The transfer from the animal level to the human makes the veiled sado-masochism of Yorick’s meditation even clearer (pp.201-202):

- I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture.

I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr’d. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann’d his blood - he had seen no sun, no moon in all that time - nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice -his children - - But here my heart began to bleed - and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait.

As soon as the meditation becomes too realistic for comfort, then Yorick changes the subject, just as each of the Lords A, B, C, D , E , etc. pass on the caged starling when its plaintive cry becomes a strain on their nerves. Yorick’s sympathy for the bird is mechanical and shallow, and has more to do with his own frame of mind than the appeal of the starling’s voice. His concern for the horrors of slavery, which the starling seems to re-awaken, is merely a concern for his own freedom, and his meditation concludes with a decision to make good his lack of a passport first thing in the morning (p.203). Yorick’s behaviour in this episode is in accordance with Addison’s reasoning in Spec- tator 418 as to why sorrow and pain are pleasurable in art, but unpleasant in real life. Following Dacier’s comments on tragedy, Addison says that the ‘Pleasure’ we derive ‘when we read of Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal Accidents’ results ‘from the secret Comparison which we make betwixt our selves and the Person who suffer^'.^ As long as Yorick feels safe, he can enjoy hearing the bird’s melancholy cry and observing the prisoner in his cell, but because he himself is in danger of imprisonment, the ‘secret Comparison’ between his position and the prisoner’s finally produces unbeara- ble feelings, which find vent in tears of self-pity: ‘- I burst into tears - I could not sustain [i.e. bear or continue] the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.’

The whole episode seems to imply that just as the groom amused himself with the starling, so Yorick has a tendency to toy with the emotional. However, it would be wrong to conclude that Yorick is unaware of this weakness. He recognizes (as he narrates, if not before) that the starling’s words are only

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‘Mechanical’, and yet they seem ‘so true in tune to nature’ that they immedi- ately overthrow his former cheerful mood. Here as always, Sterne supplies us with all the contemporary philosophical terms that we need to explain Yorick’s reaction, but gives us only part of the answer. Does Yorick realize how mechanical his own reaction is, and where should one draw the line between an instinct which is commendable because it is true to nature and a mechanical response which has no moral value? In shutting himself up in his room to indulge in melancholy emotions Yorick is following an approved form for moral meditation. Steele, for instance, in the Tatler sees the private imagina- tive revival of grief as a necessary moral r e ~ t r a i n t . ~ There is, however, a certain ambiguity in Steele’s phrasing that suggests a similar toying with emotion to Yorick’s. Having admitted that meditation on dead friends is a ‘pleasing entertainment’, Steele’s conscious indulgence in sorrow is underlined by the way he deliberately shuts himself in his closet and resolves ‘to be sorrowful’. His feeling, therefore, is not so much mechanical as artificially generated, and the same can be said of Yorick’s response to what he knows to be only a mechanical trick in the case of the starling, and a product of his own imagination in the case of the prisoner. Steele addresses many of the same moral problems as Sterne, and leaves them equally unresolved. Speaking of the influence upon him as a child of his mother’s grief for his father’s death, he sees this as the source of his own good nature, just as Tristram at the age of ten finds ‘the lesson of universal good-will [. . .] imprinted’ on his mind by Toby’s merciful treatment of the fly (Tristrarn Shandy, 11, 12, pp.113-14). But Steele then goes on to deny that his good nature is of any moral worth because it is merely mechanical (pp.350-51): Hence it is, that good nature in me is no merit; but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction, or could draw defences from my own judgement, I imbibed commiseration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities, and from whence I can reap no advantage, except it be, that in such a humour as I am now in, I can the better indulge myself in the softnesses of humanity, and enjoy that sweet anxiety which arises from the memory of past afflictions.

Yorick’s sentimental adventures seem to result in a similar balance of indulgent pleasure and embarrassment. Moreover, Steele’s meditation also ends in a Shandean fashion, interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of a hamper of wine. His dead sweetheart, like Yorick’s prisoner, is soon forgotten as he and his friends put these free samples through some rigorous testing. The melancholy mood is suddenly destroyed, as in the account of Le Fever’s death, and the episode in A Sentimental Journey where the postillion ruins Yorick’s meditation on the dead ass and its owner (pp.138-42).

Once again, how we should judge Yorick’s attitude to the owner and the ass in this last example is extremely problematical. Loveridge sees this as the only unequivocally sentimental scene in the work, since Yorick is merely an observer recounting the sentimental reactions of the crowd.6 It should be noted, however, that Yorick does address the man directly at the end of the episode, and the fact that he remains outside the circle of spectators in his post-chaise, listening and watching ‘over their heads’, may indicate his

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick 47

unwillingness to become involved on a deeper level, rather than a valid critical detachment. Yorick enjoys the scene vicariously from his superior position, just as he enjoys watching the starling perform in its cage and the prisoner in his cell. He maintains just the right distance between himself and the afflicted man so that his emotional involvement is pleasurable but not painful, and his annoyance and disappointment at the postillion’s galloping departure shows us that he is an indulgent rather than a dispassionate observer.

The owner’s lament for his dead ass contributes further to the ambivalence of the scene. At first Yorick takes the peasant’s speech to be ‘an apostrophe to his child’, confusing the animal with the human in exactly the same way as we have already noted in his first response to the starling’s cry. In fact the man does mourn as if the ass were a human being. He is ‘assured’ the ass ‘loved him’, and certain that during their unfortunate separation while crossing the Pyrenees ‘the ass had sought him as much as he had sought the ass, and that they had neither scarce eat or drank till they met’. Not only does the man ascribe feelings to his beast, but he even expresses guilt that he shortened the creature’s days by making him bear ‘the weight of myself and my afflictions together’. The syllepsis reveals the somewhat ridiculous combination of roles that the man assigns to the animal as both beast of burden and sympathetic friend. It is no accident that the scene reminds Yorick of Sancho Panza’s lament for the loss of Dapple in Don Quixofe, where the overblown tragic rhetoric and treatment of the ass as his own child is unreservedly comic.’ Yorick remarks that the ass’s owner weeps ‘with more true touches of nature’ than Sancho, but as well as indicating Yorick’s approval of the man’s greater sincerity, this comparison also highlights the incongruity of such excessive grief for the death of an animal. There is perhaps also a hint of a grin on Yorick’s face as he describes the man’s attempts to feed the precious crust of bread to the dead ass’s bridle: ‘He then took his crust of bread out of his wallet again, as if to eat it; held it some time in his hand - then laid it upon the bit of his ass’s bridle - looked wistfully at the little arrangement he had made - and then gave a sigh.’ That the man’s only momento of the beast should be its bridle (an inanimate, man-made object, by means of which man imposes his will upon his dumb slave) increases our feeling that the man’s grief is ridiculous and excessive, a feeling that is not necessarily dispelled by the moral that Yorick draws at the end of the section: ‘Shame on the world! said I to myself - Did we love each other, as this poor soul but loved his ass - ’twould be something.’ Clearly Yorick approves of the sincerity of the man’s grief, and wishes we were all equally loving, but it is also possible to see an implied criticism here of the way the man has misdirected his love, and a suggestion that we are not so much unfeeling, as apt to direct our feelings towards the wrong objects, be they animals, or sexually attractive women in distress. Our sympathy for these special cases is suspect if we do not respond in the same way to all men. Uncle Toby’s benevolence, therefore, is less open to criticism because he feels for the lowest of creatures and for humans alike. Thus the fly incident is merely a further illustration of Toby’s pacific, non- retaliatory nature, which is revealed immediately before this when Walter fails to provoke him to anger by attacking his military hobby-horse. Similarly,

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during Dr Slop’s excommunication of Obadiah, Toby is led to remark, ‘For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog SO’ (111, 11, p.175).

Both Toby and the owner of the ass ascribe human feelings to all levels of creatures. Yorick, on the other hand, seems certain that the starling has no understanding of the sounds it has learnt to imitate, and hence he is far more culpable for knowingly indulging his feelings. There is, of course, a complex background of heated controversy behind these two opposed views of animals, dealing with such questions as whether man is above beasts because he has an immortal soul, or because he can think rationally. These questions form the basis for Swift’s most challenging attack on mankind in Gulliver’s Travels, where the orthodox distinction between man and beast is reversed in the Yahoos, who are irrational men, and the Houyhnhnms, who are rational beasts. If, like Locke, one allows a degree of reason to animals (thereby opposing the Cartesian view that they have neither rational faculties nor souls), then one inevitably weakens the argument for man’s superiority in creation.* Sterne delights in playing variations on these philosophical prob- lems, but it is difficult to say whether he finally comes down on either side of the argument. In popular literature of the first half of the eighteenth century, the depiction of excessive, affected grief for animals became a cliche, the affectation usually being shown in the mourner’s lack of feeling for dead or dying relatives. For example, in Steele’s comedy, The Funeral, Lady Brumpton mourns more for her pet squirrel than for her husband.’ Only occasionally in works of this period is grief for an animal commendable and genuine, as in the cruel slaughter of the Wilsons’ dog in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.” Here the creature’s suffering is really being used to highlight the wicked squire’s cruelty to man, rather as the torture of animals in Hogarth’s series of pictures, The Four Stages of Cruelty, shows us that men can be lower than beasts in their savagery and lack of feeling. Appropriately, in the last picture, The Reward of Cruelty, the torturer himself ends up as a specimen on the dissecting table.” But this is more than a neat scene of poetic justice, for it implies that all men are cruel, including those that punish the cruel. The conclusion is thus disturbing rather than comforting. Similarly, Sterne’s comparisons between man and animal leave us in considerable doubt as to man’s status. If animals have feelings, souls, and the power of thought, then who are we to give ourselves a privileged position in the universe? If, on the other hand, animals do not possess any of these things, then our sympathy for them is stupid, and we are equally at fault for giving attention to them rather than to our fellow men. In fact this second argument is as often used in the latter part of the century as a basis for attacking excessive sensibility, as it is in the first half of the century in the attack on insincere mourners like Lady Brumpton. Vicesi- mus Knox, writing ‘On the Affectation of Excessive Sensibility’, satirizes this in the character of Belinda, whose concern for animal life, while it makes her a vegetarian opposed to all blood-sports, leaves her indifferent to real human suffering: ‘She was ready to faint if her coachman whipt his horses when they would not draw up hill; and she actually fell down in a fit on a gentleman’s treading on her favourite cat’s tail as he eagerly stopped to save her child from falling into the fire’.I2 It is somewhat ironic that Knox traces the cause

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick 49

of this behaviour to her reading of ‘pathetic novels, tragedies and elegies’, and in particular Sterne’s ‘sentimental beauties’. Such was the unjust view that many held of Sterne’s sentimental episodes after reading them out of context. Those who professed to imitate his ‘pathetic’ style compounded the error. Of these imitators, Knox says, ‘a goat is a personage of as great sensibility and sentiment as most of them’, neatly turning their cultivation of fellow feeling for animals against them (Knox, 11, 159). His Belinda actually quotes from Toby’s speech to the fly, when she writes a lamentation for an ‘animalcule’ which she has crushed in an unmerciful moment. To Knox, her belief that animals have souls, and that a grub she has accidentally trodden on will sprout wings and become an angel in heaven is patently absurd, and reveals itself to be so through her lack of charity, her short temper, and her avid reading of a sentimental novel throughout her husband’s dangerous illness. Sterne’s criticism of Yorick is far more subtle and less clear-cut. As we have seen, the man mourning for his ass may be an appeal for sympathy between all creatures, or an attack on misdirected, indulgent emotion of the kind popular at the time, and exploited, for instance, in sentimental paintings and prints, such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Une jeune $Ue qui pleure la mort de son oiseau (first shown in 1765, and eulogized by D i d e r ~ t ) . ’ ~ Set in this context, Sterne’s treatment of man and animal themes appears to have a calculated ambivalence. While Yorick opposes Locke, and denies the starling rationality, the ass’s owner gives his beast human feelings. A passage from Sterne’s other great source-book, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is instruc- tive here: Put a bird in a cage, he will dye for sullennesse, or a beast in a pen, or take his yong ones or companions from him, and see what effect it will cause. But who perceives not these common passions of sensible creatures, fear, sorrow, &c. Of all other, dogs are most subject to this maladie, in so much some hold they dream as men do, and through violence of melancholy, run mad; I could relate many stories of dogs, that have dyed for rief, and pined away for loss of their Masters, but they are common in every Author.

Burton, like the owner of the ass, sees animals as sharing the same passions and sorrows as man. Yorick, despite the starling, seems inclined to adopt a similar view at the end of his journey, when he refuses to continue his ascent of Mount Taurira out of consideration for the horse that has lost two shoes (p.280). Note also that Obadiah and Toby show a similar, if somewhat automatic sympathy for Walter’s coach-horse when it wants a shoe (Tristram Shandy, V, 2, p.348). Yorick’s generosity in this case seems to be rewarded, since his decision to stop leads to his participation in ‘The Supper’ and then ‘The Grace’, the climax of his sentimental journey. Sympathy for animals also colours his climatic speech on ‘the great SENSORIUM of the world’, and the man and animal theme is further complicated here by the use of the traditional Christian imagery for the relationship between God and fallen man, the shepherd and the sheep. God, who feels for his creation, and senses a single hair falling from our heads, imparts to the shepherd a similar sympathy for an injured sheep which does not even belong to his flock: ‘- This moment I beheld him leaning with his head against his crook, with piteous inclination

F4

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looking down upon it - Oh! had I come one moment sooner! - it bleeds to death - his gentle heart bleeds with it -’ (p.279). Such sympathy for all creation, Yorick concludes, makes us susceptible, like Steele, to all kinds of distresses, but this disadvantage is balanced by the joys in which we are able to share.

However, Yorick’s philosophy is not free from ambiguity. Maria is the inspiration of this present mood, and apart from the problem of the sexual element in Yorick’s sympathy for her, there is also the uncomfortable fact that he puts her out of his mind rather swiftly. That he should be surprised that he cannot forget her until he reaches Lyons merely draws our attention to this problem (p.277). Furthermore, his imaginary shepherd is suspiciously like the prisoner in the Bastille, a character in an artificial meditation which treats Yorick’s sympathetic heart to a dose of imaginary anguish, and then another of compensatory

One further scene from Tristram Shundy sheds some light on Yorick’s position. Tristram, in his conversation with the ass, gives the animal human feelings and even the ability to speak through translatable gestures (VII, 32,

Now, ’tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike - there is a patient endurance of sufferings, wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him, that it always disarms me [. . .] - I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance.

Already we are uncertain whether to laugh at or with Tristram. Is he aware of the ridiculousness of the idea of ‘flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think - as well as a man, upon the occasion’? There is further complication to come, as Tristram goes on to admit that the ass is (p.523):

the only creature of all the classes of beings below me, with whom I can do this: for parrots, jackdaws, &c. - I never exchange a word with them - nor with the apes, dic. for pretty near the same reason; they act by rote, as the others speak by it, and equally make me silent: nay my dog and my cat, though I value them both - (and for my dog he would speak if he could) - yet some how or other, they neither of them possess the talents for conversation.

Tristram, like Yorick, knows that starlings cannot speak with feeling or sense, yet he makes an exception in the case of the ass, so that he also can indulge his imagination. Just as Yorick enjoys watching the starling’s performance, so Tristram enjoys interpreting the ass’s various movements. His sympathetic generosity leads him to offer the beast a macaroon, but he realizes as he writes ‘that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit, of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon - than of benevolence in giving him one’ (p.524). At the time, Tristram seems to have been unaware of this mixed motivation, but now he sees it with shame. With Yorick, however, we cannot be certain whether he was aware of his folly, since we cannot tell whether he understood the mechanical nature of the starling’s cry at the time, or only afterwards as he came to narrate the episode. Did he ignore his reason in order to indulge his

pp.522-23):

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick 51

feelings, or was he simply taken in by his own automatic response to the cry for help? Earlier in the journey, he sees it as his particular good fortune that he has the propensity to indulge in emotion on the slightest pretext (pp.115- 16):

was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections - If I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to - [. . .] I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desert: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn, and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them.

As Piper has pointed out, Yorick seems to be unaware of the Quixotic stupidity of attaching one’s emotions to unimportant objects, such as old coaches, trees, and starlings.16 As for the dead ass, Cash draws attention to the fact that Yorick only feels for such animals when it suits him to do so. When the progress of his post-chaise is impeded by the ass’s carcass, he shows no concern either for the ass, or for the shying horse, upon which La Fleur lavishes his whip and the several French variants of Ernulphus’s curse (pp. 135-36).17 Sterne has deliberately made it difficult for us to decide whether to condemn or commend Yorick. We would like to think that Yorick is wiser for his experiences, and that ‘The Grace’ is some kind of revelatory experience, but if it is, then what are we to make of ‘The Case of Delicacy’ that follows it?

The fact that we are never allowed to forget that Yorick is an anglican clergyman adds further complexity to the man and animal theme. Locke and Burton may have argued that beasts can think and feel, but the Christian tradition teaches that man is the cultivator of the earth with ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1.28). Kindness to animals is essentially a feature of pagan belief, and is not infrequently associated with notions of the transmigration of souls. In seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century works describing the religious customs of heathen peoples, this sympathy for the lower orders of creation was invariably seen as ridiculous. Paul Rycaut’s comments on the Turkish treatment of animals in The Present State of the Ottoman Empire is typically incredulous:

Those who would appear of a compassionate and tender nature, hold it a pious work to buy a Bird from a cage to give him his liberty; and hold it a merciful action to buy bread and feed the Dogs [.. .I And this care of Dogs is accounted so charitable, that there are certain Laws made for the protection and maintenance of them: and it is a lighter offence to deny Bread to a poor Christian who is famished in his chains, than to the Dogs of their street, which are fit for nothing but to breed infection.”

Like Swift’s Gulliver and Knox’s Belinda, they believe beasts are superior to Christians, and reverence their camels with a religious devotion that Rycaut sees as farcical (Rycaut, pp.167-68). Like Yorick, they would rather redeem a bird than a real prisoner. Seen in this light, Yorick’s pagan sympathy for animals contrasted with his initial lack of Christian charity for figures like the monk (who is a fellow man, but of a different religion, like the chained Christian in Rycaut), makes him appear rather unworthy of his priestly calling.

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Appropriately enough, Yorick makes a reference to eastern religions himself as he describes the monk (p.71):

It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted [. . .] - it look’d forwards; but it look‘d as if it look’d at something beyond this world. How one of his order came by it, heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk’s shoulders, best knows: but it would have suited a Bramin, and had I met it upon the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it.

Just as the Turks are prejudiced against Christians, so Yorick shows an irrational disdain for this Roman Catholic monk.

The similarity between Sterne and Rycaut in their treatment of excessive love for animals and birds ransomed from cages while human prisoners are left to languish in chains may even tempt us to postulate that Sterne was actually drawing on Rycaut in A Sentimental Journey. Here we are on uncertain ground, but suffice it to say that the sale catalogue of books which includes Sterne’s library contains a copy of Richard Knolles’s The Turkish History, in which Rycaut’s work is reprinted as part of the second ~ o l u m e . ’ ~ Add to this the fact that Rycaut attacks the muslim religion’s appeal to the senses, and the Yorick-like manner in which the youths in the seraglio hide their sexual desires under a cover of virtue, using ‘a certain Language with the motion of their Eyes, their Gestures, and their Fingers, to express their Amours’, and the temptation to see Rycaut as a source for A Sentimental Journey becomes almost irresistible.”

While we cannot be certain that Sterne had read Rycaut’s particular account of pagan sympathy for animals, we can be fairly confident that he intended the reader to recognize this element in Yorick’s character. Most of his readers would almost certainly have come across Rycaut’s passage about the bird in Spectator 343, where Will Honeycomb expatiates on the ‘Transmigration of Souls’ and those ‘well-disposed Mohametans that purchase the Freedom of any little Bird they see confined to a Cage, and think they merit as much by it, as we shou’d do here by ransoming any of our Countrymen from their Captivity at Algiers’ (111, 273). This pagan religious context enriches our appreciation of Sterne’s treatment of these themes, but still leaves us uncertain as to Sterne’s position relative to Yorick. How far can we take Tristram’s comments on asses, parrots, dogs and cats as representing Sterne’s own views? There is one important clue to this question in The Journal to Eliza. The love- sick writer declares he is ‘as melancholly & sad as a Cat’, and then goes on to describe the creature that

sits quietly besides me, purring all day to my sorrows - & looking up gravely from time to time in my face, as if she knew my Situation. - how soothable my heart is Eliza, when such little things sooth it! for in some pathetic sinkings I feel (a small) even some support from this poor Cat - I attend to her purrings - & think they harmonize me [. . .I - poor Yorick! to be driven, wth all his sensibilities, to these resources - [. ..] - But I’ll have my revenge, H~ssy! ’~

Setting aside the question of whether the Journal represents Sterne’s real feelings, this passage reveals a surprising degree of humorous detachment. He sees the ridiculousness as well as the pathos of a situation that reduced

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick 53

him to the necessity of seeking comfort in a cat. Like Yorick’s shepherd who feels for the sheep, he is subject to great anguish, but such is his sensibility that his heart is also easily soothed, even with such a little thing as imagining that his cat sympathizes with him. Sterne’s flirtations with various women, including Eliza Draper, seem largely to have been similarly imaginary forms of comfort. Sterne was very familiar, it would appear, with the mental processes that lead a young girl like Maria (separated from her lover by cruel circumstances) to seek consolation in the companionship of a goat, and later a dog.

If, then, we must decide about Yorick and the starling, perhaps it is best to assume that Sterne sees his traveller as being both ridiculous and commendable in the same way as he sees both pathos and humour in his own dealings with the cat. However, having seen the skill with which Sterne wields these man and animal themes, we should be even more wary of making judgements, for, to return to Walter’s white bear, ‘every thesis and hypothesis [...I leads the mind on again, into fresh tracks of enquiries and doubtings’ (VI, 2, p.409). It is the impenetrability of Sterne’s argument, whose ‘motly emblem’ is the marbled page, that contributes to our continuing interest in his works. We return to them even more determined to follow Tristram’s injunction: ‘- Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader!’ (111, 36, p.226).

Paul Moore Balliol College, Oxford

1. Some of the most important studies dealing with these questions are Rufus D . Putney. ‘The Evolution of A Sentimental Journey’, P Q , 19 (1940), 349-69, and ‘Laurence Sterne, Apostle of Laughter’ in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to C. B. Tinker, edited by F. W. Hilles (New Haven, Connecticut, 1949), pp.159-70; Earnest N. Dilworth, The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York, 1948); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, Illinois, 1961); John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley, California, 1954); Arthur H. Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Senti- ments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 1966); Overton P. James, The Relation of Tristram Shandy to the Life of Sterne (The Hague, 1966); Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of Tristram Shandy (Gainsville, 1969); and W. C. Dowling, ‘Tristram Shandy’s Phantom Audience’, Novel, 13 (1980), 284-95. All references to Tristram Shandy refer to James A. Work’s edition (New York, 1940), volume and chapter number preceding the page reference; references to A Sentimental Journey are to Gardner D. Stout’s edition (Berkeley, California, 1967) and are similarly given in parentheses in the text. The Beauties of Sterne appeared in 1782, and reached a twelfth edition by 1790; the tenth edition of 1787 introduced some of the milder comic passages by way of balancing the utile and duke , see the ‘Preface’, pp.v-vi. The Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), 111, 568-69. The Tatler, edited by George A. Aitken (London, 1899), 181 (111, 348-53). Mark Loveridge, Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design (London, 1982), p.180. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Motteux-Ozell translation, Modern Library edition (London, 1930), Part 1, Bk 3, ch.9, pp.163-64. For the background to this controversy, see Kenneth Maclean, John Locke and English

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4. 5 . 6. 7.

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54 Paul Moore

9. 10. 11.

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1936), pp.69-81. Richard Steele, The Funeral or Grief A-la-Mode (London, 1702), V, i, p.65. Henry Fielding, Joseph A n d r e w , edited by Martin C. Battestin (Oxford, 19671, p.228. See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 11, plates 228-31c. Vicesirnus Knox, ‘On the Affectation of Excessive Sensibility’ in Winter Evenings or Lucubrations on Life and Letters, second edition, 2 vols (London, 1790), I, 469-77. It seems likely that prints of Greuze’s works were circulating in England during the second half of the century, see Anita Brookner, Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (London, 1972), pp.64, 150-53 and plate 111. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, sixth edition (Oxford, 1651), ‘Democritus to the Reader’, p.46. Loveridge comments further on the contradictions of Yorick’s speech, pp. 190-93. William B. Piper, Laurence Sterne (New York, 1965), pp.103-107. Cash, p.44; see also Paul D. McGlynn, ‘Orthodoxy Versus Anarchy in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey’, Papers on Language and Literature, 7 (1971), 242-51. (Unlike Cash, McGlynn thinks Yorick remains unaware of his faults, and learns nothing). Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668) [hereafter Rycaut], Bk 11, ch.26, p.167. Richard Knolles, The Turkish History, sixth edition, 2 vols (London, 1687) is item 273 in A Facsimile Reproduction of a Unique Catalogue of Laurence Sterne’s Library (London, 1930), where it is still referred to as Rycaut’s History ofthe Turks. Rycaut, Bk 11, ch.3 and Bk I, ch.7, pp.52 and 16 in the 1687 edition. Letters of Laurence Sterne, edited by Lewis P. Curtis (Oxford, 1935), pp.376-77.