The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Part 33

Chapter 3.XIII.

-Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there ever was such a man-if not, there's an end of the matter.-

Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise aera in which so great a man lived;-whether, for instance, before or after the patriarchs, &c.-to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all, is a little cruel,-'tis not doing as they would be done by,-happen that as it may)-My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally of his impatience,-of wondering why he was begot,-wis.h.i.+ng himself dead;-sometimes worse:-And when the provocation ran high, and grief touched his lips with more than ordinary powers-Sir, you scarce could have distinguished him from Socrates himself.-Every word would breathe the sentiments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its issues; for which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep reading, yet the abstract of Socrates's oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby, was not altogether new to her.-She listened to it with composed intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged (which he had no occasion to have done) into that part of the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his connections, his alliances, and children; but renounces a security to be so won by working upon the pa.s.sions of his judges.-'I have friends-I have relations,-I have three desolate children,'-says Socrates.-

-Then, cried my mother, opening the door,-you have one more, Mr. Shandy, than I know of.

By heaven! I have one less,-said my father, getting up and walking out of the room.

Chapter 3.XIV.

-They are Socrates's children, said my uncle Toby. He has been dead a hundred years ago, replied my mother.

My uncle Toby was no chronologer-so not caring to advance one step but upon safe ground, he laid down his pipe deliberately upon the table, and rising up, and taking my mother most kindly by the hand, without saying another word, either good or bad, to her, he led her out after my father, that he might finish the ecclairciss.e.m.e.nt himself.

Chapter 3.XV.

Had this volume been a farce, which, unless every one's life and opinions are to be looked upon as a farce as well as mine, I see no reason to suppose-the last chapter, Sir, had finished the first act of it, and then this chapter must have set off thus.

Ptr...r...r...ing-twing-tw.a.n.g-prut-trut-'tis a cursed bad fiddle.-Do you know whether my fiddle's in tune or no?-trut...prut.. .-They should be fifths.-'Tis wickedly strung-tr...a.e.i.o.u.-tw.a.n.g.-The bridge is a mile too high, and the sound post absolutely down,-else-trut...prut-hark! tis not so bad a tone.-Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, dum. There is nothing in playing before good judges,-but there's a man there-no-not him with the bundle under his arm-the grave man in black.-'Sdeath! not the gentleman with the sword on.-Sir, I had rather play a Caprichio to Calliope herself, than draw my bow across my fiddle before that very man; and yet I'll stake my Cremona to a Jew's trump, which is the greatest musical odds that ever were laid, that I will this moment stop three hundred and fifty leagues out of tune upon my fiddle, without punis.h.i.+ng one single nerve that belongs to him-Twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle,-twiddle diddle,-twoddle diddle,-twuddle diddle,-prut trut-krish-krash-krush.-I've undone you, Sir,-but you see he's no worse,-and was Apollo to take his fiddle after me, he can make him no better.

Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle-hum-dum-drum.

-Your wors.h.i.+ps and your reverences love music-and G.o.d has made you all with good ears-and some of you play delightfully yourselves-trut-prut,-prut-trut.

O! there is-whom I could sit and hear whole days,-whose talents lie in making what he fiddles to be felt,-who inspires me with his joys and hopes, and puts the most hidden springs of my heart into motion.-If you would borrow five guineas of me, Sir,-which is generally ten guineas more than I have to spare-or you Messrs. Apothecary and Taylor, want your bills paying,-that's your time.

Chapter 3.XVI.

The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs were a little settled in the family, and Susanna had got possession of my mother's green sattin night-gown,-was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a Tristra-paedia, or system of education for me; collecting first for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions; and binding them together, so as to form an Inst.i.tute for the government of my childhood and adolescence. I was my father's last stake-he had lost my brother Bobby entirely,-he had lost, by his own computation, full three-fourths of me-that is, he had been unfortunate in his three first great casts for me-my geniture, nose, and name,-there was but this one left; and accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion as ever my uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of projectils.-The difference between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia-My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain,-or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture to him.

In about three years, or something more, my father had got advanced almost into the middle of his work.-Like all other writers, he met with disappointments.-He imagined he should be able to bring whatever he had to say, into so small a compa.s.s, that when it was finished and bound, it might be rolled up in my mother's hussive.-Matter grows under our hands.-Let no man say,-'Come-I'll write a duodecimo.'

My father gave himself up to it, however, with the most painful diligence, proceeding step by step in every line, with the same kind of caution and circ.u.mspection (though I cannot say upon quite so religious a principle) as was used by John de la Ca.s.se, the lord archbishop of Benevento, in compa.s.sing his Galatea; in which his Grace of Benevento spent near forty years of his life; and when the thing came out, it was not of above half the size or the thickness of a Rider's Almanack.-How the holy man managed the affair, unless he spent the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers, or playing at primero with his chaplain,-would pose any mortal not let into the true secret;-and therefore 'tis worth explaining to the world, was it only for the encouragement of those few in it, who write not so much to be fed-as to be famous.

I own had John de la Ca.s.se, the archbishop of Benevento, for whose memory (notwithstanding his Galatea,) I retain the highest veneration,-had he been, Sir, a slender clerk-of dull wit-slow parts-costive head, and so forth,-he and his Galatea might have jogged on together to the age of Methuselah for me,-the phaenomenon had not been worth a parenthesis.-

But the reverse of this was the truth: John de la Ca.s.se was a genius of fine parts and fertile fancy; and yet with all these great advantages of nature, which should have p.r.i.c.ked him forwards with his Galatea, he lay under an impuissance at the same time of advancing above a line and a half in the compa.s.s of a whole summer's day: this disability in his Grace arose from an opinion he was afflicted with,-which opinion was this,-viz. that whenever a Christian was writing a book (not for his private amus.e.m.e.nt, but) where his intent and purpose was, bona fide, to print and publish it to the world, his first thoughts were always the temptations of the evil one.-This was the state of ordinary writers: but when a personage of venerable character and high station, either in church or state, once turned author,-he maintained, that from the very moment he took pen in hand-all the devils in h.e.l.l broke out of their holes to cajole him.-'Twas Term-time with them,-every thought, first and last, was captious;-how specious and good soever,-'twas all one;-in whatever form or colour it presented itself to the imagination,-'twas still a stroke of one or other of 'em levell'd at him, and was to be fenced off.-So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,-both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his wit-as his Resistance.

My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Ca.s.se, archbishop of Benevento; and (had it not cramped him a little in his creed) I believe would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy estate, to have been the broacher of it.-How far my father actually believed in the devil, will be seen, when I come to speak of my father's religious notions, in the progress of this work: 'tis enough to say here, as he could not have the honour of it, in the literal sense of the doctrine-he took up with the allegory of it; and would often say, especially when his pen was a little retrograde, there was as much good meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of John de la Ca.s.se's parabolical representation,-as was to be found in any one poetic fiction or mystic record of antiquity.-Prejudice of education, he would say, is the devil,-and the mult.i.tudes of them which we suck in with our mother's milk-are the devil and all.-We are haunted with them, brother Toby, in all our lucubrations and researches; and was a man fool enough to submit tamely to what they obtruded upon him,-what would his book be? Nothing,-he would add, throwing his pen away with a vengeance,-nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both s.e.xes) throughout the kingdom.

This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress my father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said) he was three years, and something more, indefatigably at work, and, at last, had scarce completed, by this own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,-every day a page or two became of no consequence.-

-Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

In short my father was so long in all his acts of resistance,-or in other words,-he advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to live and get forwards at such a rate, that if an event had not happened,-which, when we get to it, if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment from the reader-I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sundial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground.

Chapter 3.XVII.

-'Twas nothing,-I did not lose two drops of blood by it-'twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us-thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident.-Doctor Slop made ten times more of it, than there was occasion:-some men rise, by the art of hanging great weights upon small wires,-and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761) paying part of the price of this man's reputation.-O 'twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this world!-The chamber-maid had left no .......... under the bed:-Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window-seat with the other,-cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time, to..................?

I was five years old.-Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family,-so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us;-Nothing is left,-cried Susannah,-nothing is left-for me, but to run my country.-My uncle Toby's house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so Susannah fled to it.

Chapter 3.XVIII.

When Susannah told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, with all the circ.u.mstances which attended the murder of me,-(as she called it,)-the blood forsook his cheeks,-all accessaries in murder being princ.i.p.als,-Trim's conscience told him he was as much to blame as Susannah,-and if the doctrine had been true, my uncle Toby had as much of the bloodshed to answer for to heaven, as either of 'em;-so that neither reason or instinct, separate or together, could possibly have guided Susannah's steps to so proper an asylum. It is in vain to leave this to the Reader's imagination:-to form any kind of hypothesis that will render these propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains sore,-and to do it without,-he must have such brains as no reader ever had before him.-Why should I put them either to trial or to torture? 'Tis my own affair: I'll explain it myself.

Chapter 3.XIX.

'Tis a pity, Trim, said my uncle Toby, resting with his hand upon the corporal's shoulder, as they both stood surveying their works,-that we have not a couple of field-pieces to mount in the gorge of that new redoubt;-'twould secure the lines all along there, and make the attack on that side quite complete:-get me a couple cast, Trim.

Your honour shall have them, replied Trim, before tomorrow morning.

It was the joy of Trim's heart, nor was his fertile head ever at a loss for expedients in doing it, to supply my uncle Toby in his campaigns, with whatever his fancy called for; had it been his last crown, he would have sate down and hammered it into a paderero, to have prevented a single wish in his master. The corporal had already,-what with cutting off the ends of my uncle Toby's spouts-hacking and chiseling up the sides of his leaden gutters,-melting down his pewter shaving-bason,-and going at last, like Lewis the Fourteenth, on to the top of the church, for spare ends, &c.-he had that very campaign brought no less than eight new battering cannons, besides three demi-culverins, into the field; my uncle Toby's demand for two more pieces for the redoubt, had set the corporal at work again; and no better resource offering, he had taken the two leaden weights from the nursery window: and as the sash pullies, when the lead was gone, were of no kind of use, he had taken them away also, to make a couple of wheels for one of their carriages.

He had dismantled every sash-window in my uncle Toby's house long before, in the very same way,-though not always in the same order; for sometimes the pullies have been wanted, and not the lead,-so then he began with the pullies,-and the pullies being picked out, then the lead became useless,-and so the lead went to pot too.

-A great Moral might be picked handsomely out of this, but I have not time-'tis enough to say, wherever the demolition began, 'twas equally fatal to the sash window.