Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper - Laurence Sterne - Страница 6

Table of Contents

WHILE Thackeray was preparing his lectures on the English Humourists, Mr. Gibbs sent him the Journal to Eliza in a parcel which seems to have contained also the copy of the Letters from Yorick to Eliza now bound with the Gibbs Manuscripts. Surprise has been expressed by Sterne’s biographers—Mr. Percy Fitzgerald and Mr. Sidney Lee—that Thackeray “made no use” of the Journal, as if he thought it “of slight importance.” The biographers also say that it was lent to Thackeray “while he was lecturing on Sterne.” As a matter of fact, Thackeray must have received the Manuscripts nearly a month before his lecture; and as will be seen, he did make some use of them. But we will let Thackeray first speak for himself. The following letter to Mr. Gibbs is postmarked May 31, 1851 and June 1, 1851.

13 Young St.

Kensington

May 31 [1851.]

Dear Sir

I thank you very much for your obliging offer, and the kind terms in w^h. you make it. If you will send me the MSS I will take great care of them, and gratefully restore them to their owner.

Your very faithful Serv^t.

W M Thackeray

It may be taken for granted that the Manuscripts reached Thackeray in the course of a week. The lecture on Sterne and Goldsmith—the last of the series—was read at Willis’s Rooms on the afternoon of Thursday July 3, 1851.^[6] After a long delay, the Manuscripts were returned to Mr. Gibbs, with a comment on the man Sterne as revealed by the Journal. I give the letter just as Thackeray wrote it, save for erasures and substitutions:

Kensington

12 September [1851.]

Dear Sir

Immediately after my lectures I went abroad and beg your pardon for having forgotten in the hurry of my departure to return the MSS w^h. you were good enough to lend me. I am sorry that reading the Brahmin’s letters to his Brahmine did not increase my respect for the Reverend Laurence Sterne.

In his printed letters there is one XCII^[7] addressed to Lady P. full of love and despair for my Lady & pronouncing that he had got a ticket for Miss xxx benefit that night, which he might use if deprived of the superior delight of seeing Lady P. I looked in the Dramatic Register (I think is the name of the book) to find what lady took a benefit on a Tuesday, & found the names of 2, 1 at Covent Garden, & one at Drury Lane, on the same Tuesday evening, and no other Miss’s benefit on a Tuesday during the Season. Miss Poyntz I think is one of the names, but I’m 5 miles from the book as I write to you, and forget the lady’s name & the day.

However on the day Sterne was writing to Lady P., and going to Miss ——’s benefit, he is dying in his Journal to the Brahmine, can’t eat, has the Doctor, & is in a dreadful way.

He wasn’t dying, but lying I’m afraid—God help him—a falser & wickeder man its difficult to read of. Do you know the accompanying pamphlet.^[8] (My friend M^r. Cooper gave me this copy, w^h he had previously sent to the Reform club, & has since given the club another copy) there is more of Yorick’s love making in these letters, with blasphemy to flavor the compositions, and indications of a scornful unbelief. Of course any man is welcome to believe as he likes for me except a parson, and I can’t help looking upon Swift & Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades (as one does upon Bonneval or poor Bem the other day,) with a scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.

With many thanks for your loan believe me Dear Sir

Very faithfully yours

W. M. Thackeray

It may be that Thackeray left the Journal unread until after the lecture on Sterne and Goldsmith. No positive statement can be made about that. But it is not probable that he would fail to examine at once Sterne manuscripts that he “gratefully” received. True, no quotation is made from the Journal for the lecture—and in that sense Thackeray “made no use of it”—but a careless perusal of the document is precisely what would lead one to the unreasonable view that Thackeray took of Sterne. He was evidently much amused by the account Sterne gives of a fever brought on by the loss of Eliza—the minute circumstances of the blood letting and the wise physicians, the farewell to Eliza and the announcement on an evening that “I am going,” to be corrected the next morning by “So shall not depart as I apprehended.” At this point Thackeray turned to that famous letter written on an afternoon at the Mount Coffee-house to Lady P., which bears no date except “Tuesday, 3 o’clock,” though in the standard editions of Sterne it is among the letters for April 1767. Sterne writes to “my dear lady” that if she will permit him to spend the evening with her, he will gladly stay away from Miss * * * * * * *’s benefit, for which he has purchased a box ticket. On consulting the Dramatic Register, Thackeray discovered that the only actresses to receive benefits on a Tuesday in April 1767 were Miss Pope at Drury Lane and Miss Poitier at Covent Garden. The date for each was the twenty-first. The very day then, that Sterne was dying for Eliza, he was also dining in the Mount Coffee-house and trying to make an assignation with Lady P. Cleverly forged as Thackeray’s chain may seem, it has one weak link. The date of the letter to Lady P. is undetermined. In Mrs. Medalle’s edition of the correspondence, the letter was placed near the end as if it belonged to December 1767 or to January 1768. In the collected edition of Sterne’s works, it first appeared with the letters for April 1767. April 21, 1767 is impossible, for Sterne was surely too ill then to leave his lodgings. On that very day, as Thackeray might have observed, Sterne wrote to Mr. and Mrs. James that he was “almost dead” from the bleeding. It may be supposed, if you like, that Sterne could exaggerate or even sham an illness to awaken Eliza’s pity for him, but he could have had no motive for deceiving his friends in Gerrard street. Without much doubt the correct date for the letter is Tuesday, April 23, 1765. As he sat in the Mount Coffee-house, Sterne was debating within himself whether he should pass the evening with Lady Percy, or attend the benefit to be given at Covent Garden to Miss Wilford, a popular dancer, who was to appear on that evening as Miranda in Mrs. Centlivre’s Busy Body.^[9]

How much Thackeray’s unfortunate mistake may have contributed to the violence of his essay in the Humourists we shall never know. It may have been the very thing which clenched his opinion that Sterne’s word was never to be trusted. At any rate, no one can longer say that Thackeray “made no use of” the Journal to Eliza. Thereafter Thackeray usually assumed a more genial tone when Sterne became the theme. Nobody can object to that letter he wrote in Sterne’s room at Dessein’s Hôtel for Miss Baxter in America. “Sterne’s picture”—to quote a sentence or two from the delightful passage—“Sterne’s picture is looking down on me from the chimney piece at which he warmed his lean old shanks ninety years ago. He seems to say ‘You are right. I was a humbug: and you, my lad, are you not as great?’ Come, come Mr. Sterne none of these tu quoques. Some of the London papers are abusing me as hard as ever I assaulted you.” Then there is this same fancy elaborated into a Roundabout: Thackeray is again in Sterne’s room at midnight, when a lean figure in black-satin breeches appears in the moonlight to call him to account with menacing finger for that mistrust and abuse of ten years back. But there is also another Roundabout in which Sterne figures—Notes of a Week’s Holiday,^[10] wherein Thackeray returns to the old assault with terrific fury. The Journal to Eliza, there mentioned by title, is focussed with an anecdote misread from Dutens’ Memoirs, for a scathing portrait of a “wretched old sinner.” Thackeray seems to have immediately repented of his loss of temper, for the passage—two pages in length—was not allowed to go into the collected Roundabouts. It has, I think, never been reprinted. Hence the biographers may be pardoned for saying that Thackeray made no use of “Sterne’s own Journal to Eliza,” sent him by “a gentleman from Bath.”

INTRODUCTION