The essays of virginia w.., p.41
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 41
But it was thus that she kept him. Again and again he burst into language of intense affection:
Farewell dear Sirrahs, dearest lives: there is peace and quiet with MD, and nowhere else…. Farewell again, dearest rogues: I am never happy, but when I write or think of MD…. You are as welcome as my blood to every farthing I have in the world: and all that grieves me is, I am not richer, for MD’s sake.fn30
One thing alone dashed the pleasure that such words gave her. It was always in the plural that he spoke of her; it was always ‘dearest Sirrahs, dearest lives’; MD stood for Stella and Mrs Dingley together. Swift and Stella were never alone. Grant that this was for form’s sake merely, grant that the presence of Mrs Dingley, busy with her keys and her lap-dog and never listening to a word that was said to her, was a form too. But why should such forms be necessary? Why impose a strain that wasted her health and half spoilt her pleasure and kept ‘perfect friends’fn31 who were happy only in each other’s company apart? Why indeed? There was a reason; a secret that Stella knew; a secret that Stella did not impart. Divided they had to be. Since, then, no bond bound them, since she was afraid to lay the least claim upon her friend, all the more jealously must she have searched into his words and analysed his conduct to ascertain the temper of his mood and acquaint herself instantly with the least change in it. So long as he told her frankly of his ‘favourites’ and showed himself the bluff tyrant who required every woman to make advances to him, who lectured fine ladies and let them tease him, all was well. There was nothing in that to rouse her suspicions. Lady Berkeley might steal his hat; the Duchess of Hamilton might lay bare her agony; and Stella, who was kind to her sex, laughed with the one and grieved with the other.
But were there traces in the Journal of a different sort of influence – something far more dangerous because more equal and more intimate? Suppose that there were some woman of Swift’s own station, a girl, like the girl that Stella herself had been when Swift first knew her, dissatisfied with the ordinary way of life, eager, as Stella put it, to know right from wrong, gifted, witty, and untaught – she indeed, if she existed, might be a rival to be feared. But was there such a rival? If so, it was plain that there would be no mention of her in the Journal. Instead, there would be hesitations, excuses, an occasional uneasiness and embarrassment when, in the midst of writing freely and fully, Swift was brought to a stop by something that he could not say. Indeed, he had only been a month or two in England when some such silence roused Stella’s suspicions. Who was it, she asked, that boarded near him, that he dined with now and then? ‘I know no such person,’ Swift replied; ‘I do not dine with boarders. What the pox! You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do. What do you mean, Sirrah?’fn32 But he knew what she meant: she meant Mrs Vanhomrigh, the widow who lived near him; she meant her daughter Esther.fn33 ‘The Vans’ kept coming again and again after that in the Journal. Swift was too proud to conceal the fact that he saw them, but he sought nine times out of ten to excuse it. When he was in Suffolk Street the Vanhomrighs were in St James’s Street and thus saved him a walk. When he was in Chelsea they were in London, and it was convenient to keep his best gown and periwig there. Sometimes the heat kept him there and sometimes the rain; now they were playing cards, and young Lady Ashburnham reminded him so much of Stella that he stayed on to help her. Sometimes he stayed out of listlessness; again he stayed because he was very busy and they were simple people who did not stand on ceremony. At the same time Stella had only to hint that these Vanhomrighs were people of no consequence for him to retort, ‘Why, they keep as good female company as I do male … I saw two lady Bettys there this afternoon.’fn34 In short, to tell the whole truth, to write whatever came into his head in the old free way, was no longer easy.
Indeed, the whole situation was full of difficulty. No man detested falsehood more than Swift or loved truth more whole-heartedly. Yet here he was compelled to hedge, to hide, and to prevaricate. Again, it had become essential to him to have some ‘sluttery’fn35 or private chamber where he could relax and unbend and be Presto and not ‘t’other I’. Stella satisfied this need as no one else could. But then Stella was in Ireland; Vanessa was on the spot. She was younger and fresher; she too had her charms. She too could be taught and improved and scolded into maturity as Stella had been. Obviously Swift’s influence upon her was all to the good. And so with Stella in Ireland and Vanessa in London, why should it not be possible to enjoy what each could give him, confer benefits on both and do no serious harm to either? It seemed possible; at any rate he allowed himself to make the experiment. Stella, after all, had contrived for many years to make shift with her portion; Stella had never complained of her lot.
But Vanessa was not Stella. She was younger, more vehement, less disciplined, less wise. She had no Mrs Dingley to restrain her. She had no memories of the past to solace her. She had no journals coming day by day to comfort her. She loved Swift and she knew no reason why she should not say so. Had he not himself taught her ‘to act what was right, and not to mind what the world said’?fn36 Thus when some obstacle impeded her, when some mysterious secret came between them, she had the unwisdom to question him. ‘Pray what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine.’ ‘You have taught me to distinguish,’ she burst out, ‘and then you leave me miserable.’fn37 Finally in her anguish and her bewilderment she had the temerity to force herself upon Stella. She wrote and demanded to be told the truth – what was Stella’s connexion with Swift? But it was Swift himself who enlightened her. And when the full force of those bright blue eyes blazed upon her, when he flung her letter on the table and glared at her and said nothing and rode off, her life was ended.fn38 It was no figure of speech when she said that ‘his killing, killing words’ were worse than the rack to her; when she cried out that there was ‘something in your look so awful that it strikes me dumb’.fn39 Within a few weeks of that interview she was dead; she had vanished, to become one of those uneasy ghosts who haunted the troubled background of Stella’s life, peopling its solitude with fears.
Stella was left to enjoy her intimacy alone. She lived on to practise those sad arts by which she kept her friend at her side until, worn out with the strain and the concealment, with Mrs Dingley and her lap-dogs, with the perpetual fears and frustrations, she too died. As they buried her, Swift sat in a back room away from the lights in the churchyard and wrote an account of the character of ‘the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with’.fn40 Years passed; insanity overcame him; he exploded in violent outbursts of mad rage. Then by degrees he fell silent. Once they caught him murmuring. ‘I am what I am’,fn41 they heard him say.
The ‘Sentimental Journey’fn1
Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne’s first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the long-standing tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the unconventionality of one’s style, and the respectable by the irregularity of one’s morals. But the risk was run and the success was prodigious. All the great, all the fastidious, were enchanted. Sterne became the idol of the town. Only in the roarfna of laughter and applause which greeted the book, the voice of the simple-minded public at large was to be heard protesting that it was a scandal coming from a clergyman and that the Archbishop of York ought to administer, to say the least of it, a scolding. The Archbishop, it seems, did nothing. But Sterne, however little he let it show on the surface, laid the criticism to heart. That heart too had been afflicted since the publication of Tristram Shandy.fn2 Eliza Draper, the object of his passion, hadfnb sailed to join her husband in Bombay.fn3 In his next book Sterne was determined to give effect to the change that had come over him, and to prove, not only the brilliance of his wit, but the depths of his sensibility. In his own words, ‘my design in it was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do’.fn4 It was with such motives animating him that he sat down to write that narrative of a little tour in France which he called A Sentimental Journey.
But if it were possible for Sterne to correct his manners, it was impossible for him to correct his style. That had become as much a part of himself as his largefnc nose or his brilliant eyes. With the first words – They order, said I, this matter better in France – we are in the world of Tristram Shandy. It is a world in which anything may happen. We hardly know what jest, what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly through the gap which this astonishingly agile pen has cut in the thick-set hedge of English prose. Is Sterne himself responsible? Does he know what he is going to say next for all his resolve to be on his best behaviour this time? The jerky, disconnected sentences are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the phrases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker. The very punctuation is that of speech, not writing, and brings the sound and associationsfnd of the speaking voice in with it. The order of the ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more true to life than to literature. There is a privacy in this intercourse which allows things to slip out unreproved thatfne would have been in doubtful taste had they been spoken in public. Under the influence of this extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent. The usual ceremonies and conventions which keep reader and writer at arm’s length disappear. We are as close to life as we can be.
That Sterne achieved this illusion only by the use of extreme art and extraordinary pains is obvious without going to his manuscript to prove it. Forfnf though the writer is always haunted by the belief that somehow it must be possible to brush aside the ceremonies and conventions of writing and to speak to the reader as directly as by word of mouth, anyone who has tried the experiment has either been struck dumb by the difficulty, or waylaid into disorder and diffusity unutterable. Sterne somehow brought off the astonishing combination. No writing seems to flow more exactly into the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its changing moods, to answer its lightest whim and impulse, and yet the result is perfectly precise and composed. The utmost fluidity exists with the utmost permanence. It is as if the tide raced over the beach hither and thither and left every ripple and eddy cut on the sand in marble.
Nobody, of course, stood more in need of the liberty to be himself than Sterne. Forfng while there are writers whose gift is impersonal, so that a Tolstoy, for example, can create a character and leave us alone with it, Sterne must always be there in person to help us in our intercourse. Littlefnh or nothing of A Sentimental Journey would be left if all that we call Sterne himself were extracted from it. He has no valuable information to give, no reasoned philosophy to impart. He left London, he tells us, ‘with so much precipitation that it never enter’d my mind that we were at war with France’.fn5 He has nothing to say of pictures or churches or the misery or well-being of the country-side. He was travelling in France indeed, but the road was often through his own mind, and his chief adventures were not with brigands and precipices but with the emotions of his own heart.
This change in the angle of vision was in itself a daring innovation. Hitherto, the traveller had observed certain laws of proportion and perspective. The Cathedral had always been a vast building in any book of travels and the man a little figure, properly diminutive, by its side. But Sterne was quite capable of omitting the Cathedral altogether. A girl with a green satin purse might be much more important than Notre-Dame. Forfni there is, he seems to hint, no universal scale of values. A girl may be more interesting than a cathedral; a dead donkey more instructivefnj than a living philosopher. It is all a question of one’s point of view. Sterne’s eyes were so adjusted that small things often bulked larger in them than big. The talk of a barber about the buckle of his wig told him more about the character of the French than the grandiloquence of her statesmen.
I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national characters more in these nonsensical minutiae, than in the most important matters of state; where great men of all nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give nine-pence to chuse amongst them.fn6
So too if one wishes to seize the essence of things as a sentimental traveller should, one should seek for it, not at broad noonday in large and open streets, but in an unobserved corner up a dark entry.fn7 One should cultivate a kind of shorthand which renders the several turns of looks and limbs into plain words. It was an art that Sterne had long trained himself to practise.
For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and swore to.fn8
It is thus that Sterne transfers our interest from the outer to the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; wefnk must consult our own minds; only they can tell us whatfnl is the comparative importance of a cathedral, of a donkey, and of a girl with a green satin purse. In this preference for the windings of his own mind to the guide-book and its hammered high road, Sterne is singularly of our own age. In this interest in silence rather than in speech Sterne is the forerunner of the moderns. And for these reasons he is on far more intimate terms with us to-day than his great contemporaries the Richardsons and the Fieldings.fn9fnm
Yet there is a difference. For all his interest in psychology Sterne was far more nimble and less profound thanfnn the masters of this somewhat sedentary school have since become. He is after all telling a story, pursuing a journey, however arbitrary and zigzag his methods. For all our divagations, we do make the distance between Calais and Modanefn10fno within the space of a very few pages. Interested as he was in the wayfnp in which he saw things, the things themselves also interested him acutely. His choice is capricious and individual, but no realist could be more brilliantly successful in rendering the impression of the moment. A Sentimental Journey is a succession of portraits – the Monk, the lady, the Chevalier selling pâtés, the girl in the bookshop, La Fleur in his new breeches; – it is a succession of scenes. And though the flight of this erratic mind is as zigzag as a dragon-fly’s, one cannot deny that this dragon-fly has some method in its flight, and chooses the flowers not at random but for some exquisite harmony or for some brilliant discord.fnq We laugh, cry, sneer, sympathise by turns. We change from one emotion to its opposite in the twinkling of an eye. This light attachment to the accepted reality,fnr this neglect of the orderly sequence of narrative, allows Sterne almost the licence of a poet. He can express ideas which ordinary novelists would have to ignore in language which, even if the ordinary novelist could command it, would look intolerably outlandish upon his page.fns
I walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue, and green, running at the ring of pleasure. – The old with broken lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards – the young in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay feather of the east – all – all tilting at it like fascinated knights in tournaments of yore for fame and love.fn11
There are many passages of such pure poetry in Sterne. One can cut them out and read them apart from the text, and yet – for Sterne was a master of the art of contrast – they lie harmoniously side by side on the printed page. Hisfnt freshness, his buoyancy, his perpetual power to surprise and startle are the result of these contrasts. He leads us to the very brink of some deep precipice of the soul; wefnu snatch one short glance into its depths; next moment, we are whisked round to look at the green pastures glowing on the other side.
If Sterne distresses us, it is for another reason. And here the blame rests partly at least upon the public – the public which had been shocked, which had cried out after the publication of Tristram Shandy that the writer was a cynic who deserved to be unfrocked. Sterne, unfortunately, thought it necessary to reply.
The world has imagined [he told Lord Shelburne] because I wrote Tristram Shandy, that I was myself more Shandean than I really ever was…. If it (A Sentimental Journey) is not thought a chaste book, mercy on them that read it, for they must have warm imaginations, indeed!fn12
Thus in A Sentimental Journey we are never allowed to forget that Sterne is above all things sensitive, sympathetic, humane; that above all things he prizes the decencies, the simplicities of the human heart. And directly a writer sets out to prove himself this or that our suspicions are aroused. For the little extra stress he lays on the quality he desires us to see in him, coarsens it and over-paintsfnv it, so that instead of humour, we get farce, and instead of sentiment, sentimentality. Here, instead of being convinced of the tenderness of Sterne’s heart – which in Tristram Shandy was never in question – we begin to doubt it. For we feel that Sterne is thinking not of the thing itself but of its effect upon our opinion of him. Thefnw beggars gather round him and he gives the pauvre honteux more than he had meant to. But his mind is not solely and simply on the beggars; his mind is partly onfnx us, to see that we appreciate his goodness. Thus his conclusion, ‘and I thought he thank’d me more than them all’,fn13 placed, for more emphasis, at the end of the chapter, sickens us with its sweetness likefny the drop of pure sugar at the bottom of a cup. Indeed, the chief fault of A Sentimental Journey comes from Sterne’s concern for our good opinion of his heart. It has a monotony about it, for all its brilliance, as if the author had reined in the natural variety and vivacity of his tastes, lest they should give offence. The mood is subdued to one that is too uniformly kind, tender, and compassionate to be quite natural. One misses the variety, the vigour, the ribaldry of Tristram Shandy. His concern for his sensibility has blunted his natural sharpness, and we are called upon to gaze rather toofnz long at modesty, simplicity, and virtue standing rather too still to be looked at.
