Moral philosophers who see benevolence as the heart of the moral life commonly relegate duties other than that of general benevolence to a lower and secondary status. Mill’s observation in Utilitarianism that “objectively the dictates of Justice coincide with a part of the field of General Expediency”1 sets the tone for this general type of outlook. Conversely, moralists like Kant, who put duty above benevolence, are apt to classify the duties of benevolence as “imperfect” ones. Those who read Sterne through philosophical spectacles, noting Sterne’s rather marked keenness on benevolence, are therefore inclined, by their lights not unreasonably, after all, to leap to the conclusion that he must be as hopelessly weak-kneed about justice, or any of the more demanding kinds of duty, as Mill, at any rate while writing in defence of a theory more, perhaps, his father’s than his own, found it expedient to appear to be.
In so concluding we forget that the ways of dividing up the philosophical issues to which we thus subordinate our reading of Sterne have for the most part developed since 1767. If Tristram Shandy devalues duty in favour of the pleasures of sentimental benevolence, what are we to make of the little disquisition on parental duty which constitutes the opening sentence of the book?
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;–and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made quite a different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.2
How far does the failure of Tristram’s parents to do their duty, to “[mind] what they were about when they begot me”, extend? The initial temptation, fostered by Sterne’s joke about the animal spirits, is to confine Walter and Mrs Shandy’s disregard for their duty to the episode of the clock. But surely there is more to it than this? The clock episode merely sets the scene for the epic frivolity with which the elder Shandys approach the serious business of bringing a child into the world. The terms on which Tristram is to enter upon the stage of life are set by the quarrel about the terms of Mrs. Shandy’s marriage-settlement. One might expect a father solicitous for the welfare of his wife and child to think nothing of sending his wife to London a second time in one year, even at the cost of one hundred and twenty pounds, since the purpose of the visit is ostensibly to obtain proper obstetrical assistance. Walter’s main concern throughout the acutely rendered quarrel in the coach in v.I. Chapter 16, and the continuing argument in bed in the succeeding chapter, however, is merely to make sure that he is not mulcted and made a fool of twice. My Mother, no less innocent of any sentiment so weak as regard for the welfare of the child and her own duty towards it, retaliates in the following chapter by setting herself up as a tragic heroine:
…when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard me mention; and…as the famous Dr Manningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination…,—notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a call as eight miles of us,…[that she] was absolutely determined to trust her life and mine with it, into no soul’s hand but this old woman’s only.3
Albeit that she “could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as one in her situation might have wished, because the old midwife had really some little claim to be depended on…having in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought every mother’s son of them into the world without any one slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.”4 Walter’s counter-move is to demand that Slop, the ‘scientific operator’,be summoned. In bringing My Father to this position, “the natural workings of humanity and justice…the yearnings of parental love…which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind” are greatly strengthened by thoughts of
the accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child in lying in at Shandy Hall.—He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it.—-‘Alas o’ day;–had Mrs Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to lie-in and come down again;—which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees,—and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr Shandy got with her—was no such mighty matter to be complied with, the lady and her babe might both of ’em have been alive at this hour.’5
Sterne has further fun making Walter invoke anti-metropolitan political reasonings of the type later patented by Cobbett as a still more manifestly morally irrelevant set of grounds for keeping his wife in the country for her confinement; but the point is already clear. Neither Shandy shows the slightest concern for the welfare of the child who is to be born. Both are entirely self-absorbed, though their self-absorption take different forms: in Mrs Shandy the gestures of the tragic heroine, in Walter, sober calculation of advantage.
“The yearnings of parental love”, if either of them felt anything of the sort, would indeed prompt both Shandys to “leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind”. Given the actual disposition of the feelings and concerns with which the Shandys approach the duties of parenthood, everything about the coming birth stands exposed to hazard. The opening sentence of the novel takes on a new set of implications and the topic of Accident, one of the central themes of the book, is introduced. Most critics of Sterne have identified as central to the book a certain vision of human beings as creatures of accident, of Lockeian association: creatures, like Yorick, “heteroclite in all their declensions.” Less often noticed is the ambiguity of the valuation the book puts on accident. On the one hand accident is the source of the individuality and engaging oddity of the characters. On the other hand accident is the pervasive enemy of all the characters, from Tristram, crushed, as it were, at both ends by the equally blind juggernauts of Reason in the shape of Slop’s forceps and Nature in the shape of the falling sash, (which incidentally repeats in its fall that of the stone from the battlements of Namur which crushes Toby’s groin); to Le Fever dying in the inn leaving his little son destitute, to Trim’s brother betrayed by the accident of his marriage to the Jew’s widow into the dungeons of the Inquisition in Lisbon; to My Father, “baffled and overthrown in all his little systems and wishes…[by] a train of events perpetually falling out against him, and in so critical and cruel a way, as if they had purposely been planned and pointed against him, merely to insult his speculations.”6
“I can truly say,” Sterne has Tristram say, “that from the first hour I drew my breath in it, to this, that I can scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders;—I have been the continual sport of what the world calls fortune.” So have we all. And yet, if “my father or my mother…had minded what they were about when they begot me”, might not some of the more appalling effects of chance disasters upon Tristram’s life (the thrust of Slop’s forceps in a hand still shaking with fury from the quarrel accidentally engendered out of the improbable materials of the green baize bag and Ernulphus’ Curse, for instance) have been averted? It is difficult to answer anything but “yes” to this. Had My Father and My Mother conducted themselves as prospective parents, that is, instead of like characters in an Alan Ayckbourne farce, they would have formed, for the as yet unborn Tristram, a kind of corporate bulwark against the malignity of the accidents attending the child’s entrance into “this scurvy and disastrous world.” But they were otherwise occupied. And as a result, the protective relationship which should link parents to one another and to the unborn child falls apart, in their case, allowing the dessicating winds of “hazard” – of accident – to blow through the resulting gaps.
Walter and Mrs Shandy are otherwise occupied because their feelings – their instinctive responses – as Sterne depicts then are not those of prospective parents but those of the ideally self-interested agents postulated by the moral and political theory of deliberative individualism. Each sees life as a game – Self against World – which it is the business of Self to win. What constitutes winning is differently defined for each. For Mrs. Shandy the goals seem to be ones of Principle, according to the perennially popular usage in which that term equates in practice more or less with “theatrical”: the presentation of herself to the world as Injured Virtue and of her husband as Grasping Masculine Brutality. For Walter, as befits a retired Turkey merchant, self-interest takes more sober and practical forms: the preservation of pecuniary interest and public reputation. For each, however, the pursuit of victory in the game of life engrosses the player-self to a degree which absolutely excludes the interests of second parties, Tristram’s included.
What is the butt of Sterne’s satire? We are just not dealing here, it seems to me, either with a Hume-inspired polemic against moral rationalism, or, more generally, with the kind of sub-Humian ‘sentimentalism’ which has been so relentlessly attributed to Sterne since the 1770’s. Sterne is satirising a theory-inspired outlook much older and more deeply-rooted in English thought than Hume; and I doubt if it is even very important to the issues as Sterne sees them that the stance in question is one with which Hume’s moral philosophy is deeply complicit. He is satirising ideas older than Hume’s; namely, the deliberative individualism which originates with Hobbes and finds characteristic expression in Butler’s thought that the actions of the self-interested agent will in the long term be indistinguishable from those of the virtuous agent. Walter and Mrs Shandy offer, at the very least, a hideously plausible pair of counter-examples to Butler’s complacent doctrine. Beyond that, though, Sterne has hold, it seems to me, of a deeper and more general point. Relationship is the main bulwark which stands between human beings and the unrestricted power of accident over human lives. Relationship in turn depends on the subjection of separate human hearts, in correlative and coordinated ways, to ‘instinctive’ feelings and impulses which do not originate in self-interest and whose commands are not always consonant with self-interest. If, impatient with our subjection to what appear to be rationally unjustifiable and thus ‘merely intuitive’ feelings, we cast off their restraint, and attempt to direct our lives instead by the light of a ‘rational’, because calculating, self-interest; we shall find to our intense astonishment that our ascent into ‘rationality’ seems to have rendered us endemically at cross-purposes with one another, and more, rather than less, exposed to the adversities of chance.
Such is the state of things at Shandy Hall. Many readers have supposed Sterne, in so depicting the domestic economy presided over by Walter and Mrs Shandy, to be offering us his ‘vision’ of human life in general. Stanley Cavell, in one of the most insightful early discussions of the Philosophical Investigations, says of another commentator’s account, “As a description of Wittgenstein it is ironically blind; it is not merely wrong, but misses the fact that Wittgenstein’s ideas form a sustained and radical criticism of such views — so of course it is ‘like’ them.”7 The same might be said of Sterne. If you wish to satirise the idea that self-interest is in practice equivalent to virtue, and the correlative notion that the functions of our ‘instinctive’ moral feelings would be better supplied by some form of ‘rational’ calculation, what you must do is to invent a man like Walter Shandy – an indefatiguably self-absorbed reasoner whose idea of bringing up his own son is to write a book laying out a general theory of education of his own invention, the Tristrapaedia — and give him a household over which to preside. In that household relationship will, not unnaturally, fray constantly into mutual incomprehension and discord, and the walls that Reason erects against Accident will totter the more ineluctably the higher they rise. But that all this is satire and not a ‘vision of reality’ is evident from the fact that Sterne has not allowed Walter’s way of looking at things to hold unopposed sway over his little realm. Over against Walter stand Toby and Yorick.
Toby is commonly regarded as a prototype Man of Feeling. It would allow us to ignore less of the text of Tristram Shandy, were we to think of him as Sterne’s attempt to depict a man in whom the claims of relationship are uppermost. His activities in the book, that is, are to be contrasted primarily with Walter and Mrs Shandy’s failure to “mind what they were about when they begot me”. That failure dissolved the normal power of the parent-child relationship to act as a bulwark against the power of Accident. Toby, on the contrary, spends most of his time in the book rescuing and restoring relationships; and so in restoring the power of relationship to remedy and assuage the damage wrought by Accident to the fabric of human life. When Le Fever’s death dissolves the relationship between father and son, Toby steps in as a surrogate father, rescuing the boy, having him educated at his own expense, and eventually purchasing him a commission. When Trim’s brother is imprisoned by the Inquisition, Toby becomes less a master than a surrogate brother to him. And it is Toby whose responses constantly draw Walter back to a recognition of Toby as his brother, usually with the anguished, if belated, sense of his own un-brotherliness which so frequently causes him to burst out “Oh, my brother!—my dear brother Toby!—how have I wronged thee!”8
If Toby represents, centrally, openness to the demands of personal relationship, Yorick represents openness to the demands of Christian fellowship and civic responsibility, as evidenced in his decision to maintain a broken-down horse in order to preserve the power to direct his acts of charity, and in his wife’s setting up of the midwife who might, but for Slop’s intervention, have eased Tristram’s entrance into the world. Both Toby and Yorick, of course, feel a lot. But what they are to be praised for in Sterne’s view, I take it, is not for simply being emotional, but for having their emotions rightly directed. The central polarity in the book is not, in other words, as many critics have supposed, the polarity of Feeling versus Reason, but the polarity of rightly-directed versus deranged feeling. I call deranged the feelings of a prospective parent who, like Walter, is more agitated by the fact that his actions may give rise to adverse gossip than by the thought that his wife and child may not get the best possible medical attention. They are not the feelings proper to a prospective parent. By contrast the natural flow of Toby’s feelings is always eminently proper to whatever role he happens to be called to occupy: The Friend, the Brother, The Regimental Comrade, and so on. It might be argued that the naturalness, the flow, of his feelings ought to disqualify him from receiving moral credit for them. On the contrary, the naturalness with which they arise in him is precisely what qualifies them for moral credit. For they are not just private caprices of Toby’s, but manifest the genuineness, the irretrievableness, of his commitment to the life of relationship, to the business of remedying the ravages wrought by Accident in human life; instead of facilitating and compounding those ravages by emotional self-isolation and perverse rationalising, as Walter does. That is what it means to say that Toby is a good man, and that Walter is, when it comes down to it, not a very good one.
This leads me in conclusion to some thoughts about two aspects of Tristram Shandy which seem to sit rather uncomfortably with the kinds of moral seriousness which we have been finding in the book, and which led historically, as we noted in 1, to the transmogrification of Sterne into a Humian sentimentalist: its relentless frivolity and its equally relentless scatology. Can anything be done to soften the force of two such evidently textually well-grounded accusations? Try this, for a start. Yorick, we are told, was a foe not of gravity as such, but of the affectation of gravity. Given Sterne’s public adoption of the Yorick persona, we can take him to be speaking also of himself. What is so very wrong with the affectation of gravity? Well, as Sterne tells us, in the sermons that so many critics have assumed to have no bearing on Sterne’s secular writings, it can, certainly, both serve and cloak self-interest. “Look into the world—how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose strait heart is open to no man’s affliction, taking shelter behind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have the right to wear.”9 Then again, obsessive concern with the mechanics of getting up one’s crumb and making one’s way in the world tends observably in practice to make people rather glum: conversely, the adoption of a less exclusive concern for themselves and their prospects often has the result of making people markedly cheerier; sometimes, indeed, irritatingly cheery. When Eugenius attempts to get him to consider his interests, “Yorick, with his usual carelessness of heart, would as often answer with a pshaw! —and if the subject was started in the fields,—with a hop, skip and a jump…”10 Yorick’s, and Tristram’s “carelessness of heart” in the face of the incessant depredations of Accident is the mark, in other words, of an achieved or sought freedom (achieved in Yorick as in Toby; admired if not always achieved by the authorial personas of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey) from the cares of the “strait-hearted man”: of the right direction of their feelings and impulses, towards relationship rather than towards self. ‘Shandean’ frivolity, “True Shandyism”, in other words, is to be valued as a sign — of what? — of moral seriousness.
Why the scatology, though? I want to suggest tentatively that the theme of sex in Tristram Shandy connects rather directly with what is perhaps the central theme of the book: the question of how people respond, and how one should respond, to the fact that our lives are at the mercy of accident. The goal of self-interested calculation is, manifestly, to secure for the self the power to secure itself against accident in all its forms. What is sought is self-contained power. The role of the male organ in Tristram Shandy, it seems to me, is largely to serve as a symbol of power of that kind. Viewed from that angle the book appears strikingly anti-phallocentric. From the coitus interruptus occasioned by Mrs Shandy’s innocent enquiry to the fall of the window-sash and the fragment of the battlements of Namur, from the descent of the hot chestnut into Phutatorius’ breech to the terminal inadequacies of the Shandy bull, the book records the humbling of phallocentric power at the hands of Accident. The moral of these reverses, it seems to me, is that phallic power and the larger self-sufficiency of which it is the emblem will not secure us fron the power of Accident. Only the turn away from phallic self-sufficiency towards feeling, relationship, play and laughter so triumphantly accomplished by Toby can begin to do that. That turn is impeded, among other things, by the familiar twist of phallocentric self-sufficiency which consists in wishing to make oneself, and even at times persuading oneself that one is, the master of one’s own body and its urges. This is exactly what differentiates Toby and Walter in their attitudes to love.
There is nothing shews the characters of my father and my uncle Toby in a more entertaining light, than their different manner of deportment, under the same accident—for I cannot call love a misfortune, from a persuasion, that a man’s heart is ever the better for it—Great God! what must my uncle Toby’s have been, when ’twas all benignity without it.
My father, as appears from many of his papers, was very subject to this passion, before he married—but from a little subacid kind of drollish impatience in his nature, whenever it befell him, he would never submit to it like a Christian; but would pish, and huff, and bounce, and kick, and play the Devil, and write the bitterest Philippics against the eye that ever man wrote…yet never concluded his chapter of curses upon it, without cursing himself into the bargain, as one of the most egregious fools and coxcombs, he would say, that ever was let loose in the world.11
My uncle Toby, on the contrary, took it like a lamb… .12
The sense of this is plain enough. Walter is angry because love threatens his rational self-sufficiency. Toby takes it like a lamb because rational self-sufficiency is not, for him, what life is about. Walter would like to carry such self-sufficiency even to the extreme of dissociating himself from his own body, with its inconvenient power to betray its owner into interests which mock and threaten self-interest; later in life he persuades himself that he has done so, to the point of adopting Hilarion the hermit’s way of speaking of his body as his ass. Sterne’s mock-serious distinction between accidents and misfortunes points the moral. We have here yet another collision between phallocentric self-sufficiency and Accident: a benign one, and one which the phallocentric consciousness should not be allowed to evade by a pretended ignorance of, and insensibility to, the voices of the body. The scatology of Tristram Shandy, with its tendency, which we remarked on at the outset, to involve the reader in ways which force him to admit his understanding of and complicity with it, is in one of its aspects, it seems to me, Sterne’s device for combatting the reader’s desire to take Walter’s way of evading the ‘accidents’ of bodily impulse which break in upon self-sufficiency and link us, whether we will or no, to one another. Of course, it sold copies as well. But, after all, so what? There is still rather a deep gulf here, it seems to me, dividing Sterne from, say, Cleland.
One final thought. Despite my resistance to the historicism of Mullan’s reading, I should be shaken in the reading I have defended here if it required me to represent Sterne as anything but a man of his age. Indeed, my whole effort has been to locate Sterne with respect to just the disputes in moral philosophy which agitated English minds in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. But at the same time I have been arguing that Sterne’s writing is not merely the literary precipitate of what was thought and said by philosophers in his age. On the contrary the Sterne I take myself to have uncovered here comes across as in many respects a rather staunch critic of some of the most popular intellectual shibboleths of his age. The shibboleths in question are ones from which we ourselves have by no means freed ourselves. That is one reason why Sterne is a writer who can speak to us, and from whom we have, perhaps, something to learn; rather than the extinct volcano, of use only for quarrying the pumice out of which dissertations are constructed, that some historicising critics would make of him.
- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, &c, ed. A.D. Lindsay, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910, 39 ↩︎
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1967), 35 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit., 71-2 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit.,72 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit., 73 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit., 82 ↩︎
- Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1969), 47-48 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit., 40 ↩︎
- Sterne, Sermons, op.cit., 29 ↩︎
- Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1967), 57 ↩︎
- Sterne, op.cit., 552-3 ↩︎
- op.cit., 557 ↩︎