Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

  – ‘I wish,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.’

  CHAPTER 19

  I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, to remind you of one thing, and to inform you of another.

  What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course; – for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but I foresaw that ’twould come in pat, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere. Writers need to look ahead, to keep up the spirit and connection of what they have in hand.

  When these two things are done, the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop shall go on with their discourse without any more interruption.

  First, then, I have to remind you of this; – that from the example of my father’s unusual notions about Christian names, you were led into assuming that he was just as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from his begetting to the lean and slippered pantaloon, that he did not have some favourite notion of, far out of the highway of thinking.

  My father, Sir, saw nothing in the light in which others placed it; he placed things in his own light.

  Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible into grains and scruples ad infinitum. Error was error; no matter where it fell, ’twas fatal to truth, who was kept down at the bottom of her well as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly’s wings, as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars put together.

  He would often lament that it was due to neglect of this truth, that so many things in this world were out of joint; – and that the foundations of our church and state were weakened.

  He would say, ‘We are a ruined people. Why?’ he would ask, using the syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus, without knowing it belonged to them. – ‘Why are we ruined? Because we are corrupted. Why are we corrupted? Because we are needy. And why are we needy? From the neglect of our pence: our bank notes, Sir, take care of themselves.

  ‘’Tis the same,’ he would say, ‘throughout all the sciences; the great points are not to be broke in upon – the laws of nature will defend themselves – but error’ (he would add, looking earnestly at my mother) – ‘error creeps in through the minute holes and crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.’

  This style of thinking in my father, is what I had to remind you of.

  – The point you are to be informed of, and which I have reserved for this place, is as follows.

  Amongst the many and excellent reasons, with which my father had urged my mother to accept Dr. Slop’s assistance rather than the old woman’s, there was one particular reason which he put his whole strength to. – It failed because he could not make her comprehend its drift.

  ‘Cursed luck!’ said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out of the room after arguing it for an hour and a half with her, to no purpose; ‘Cursed luck!’ said he, biting his lip, ‘for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, and have a wife with such a head that he cannot make an impression on it, to save his soul.’

  This argument, though it was entirely lost upon my mother, had more weight with him than all his other arguments together: I will therefore try to do it justice.

  My father began with these two axioms:

  First, that an ounce of a man’s own wit was worth a ton of other people’s.

  Secondly (which by the bye, was the basis of the first axiom, though it comes after), that every man’s wit must come from his own soul, and no one else’s.

  Now, it was plain to my father that all souls were equal, and that the difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding came not from any original sharpness or bluntness of one mind above or below another, but arose merely from the organisation of the body, in that part where the soul took up her residence. He had therefore researched exactly where that was.

  From the best accounts he could find, he believed it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain; though, to speak the truth, as so many nerves terminated in that place, ’twas no bad guess; and my father would have certainly agreed with that great philosopher, had it not been for my uncle Toby telling him a story of an officer at the battle of Landen, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball, and another part of it taken out by a French surgeon; and afterwards recovered, and did his duty very well without it.

  If death, said my father, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body; and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains, then certainly the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D.

  As for that thin, subtle and fragrant juice which Borri, the great Milanese physician, claims to have discovered in the cerebellum, and which he affirms to be the seat of the soul, my father could not subscribe to this theory by any means. The very idea of so noble and exalted a being as the soul residing there and sitting dabbling like a tadpole all day long, in a puddle, shocked him.

  What, therefore, seemed the most likely head-quarters of the soul, was somewhere about the medulla oblongata, where, it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, all the minute nerves from the organs converged, like streets and winding alleys into a square.

  So far there was nothing singular in my father’s opinion. – But here he took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these corner-stones.

  He maintained that next to the due care to be taken in the act of begetting each individual, and in naming him, the third aim of a parent was the preservation of this delicate and fine-spun web from the havoc which was generally made by the violent compression which the head was forced to undergo, by the nonsensical method of bringing us into the world head foremost.

  – This requires explanation.

  My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon looking into Smelvgot’s Lithopædus Senonesis de Partu difficili had found out that the pliable state of a child’s head at birth was such, that by force of the woman’s efforts, which, in strong labour-pains, was equal, upon average, to the weight of 470 pounds acting perpendicularly upon it, – so it happened that in 49 cases out of 50, the child’s head was compressed and moulded into the shape of a conical piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook rolls up to make a pie of.

  ‘Good God!’ cried my father, ‘what havoc and destruction must this cause in the fine and tender texture of the cerebellum!’

  But how great was his apprehension, when he farther understood that this force squeezed and propelled the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the seat of understanding!

  ‘Angels defend us!’ cried my father, – ‘can any soul withstand this shock? No wonder the intellectual web is so tattered; and that so many of our best heads are all perplexity and confusion within.’

  But my father read on, and learned that when a child was turned topsy-turvy, which was easy for an operator to do, and was extracted by the feet; – that then the cerebellum was propelled simply towards the cerebrum, where it could do no harm.

  ‘By heavens!’ cried he, ‘the world is in conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us. What is it to me which end of my son comes foremost into the world, provided his cerebellum escapes uncrushed?’

  It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has created it, that it generally grows stronger with everything he hears or reads.

  When my father had held this hypothesis about a month, there was scarce a phenomenon of stupidity or genius which he could not readily solve by it; it accounted for his eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family.

  ‘Poor devil,’ he would say, ‘he made way for the capacity of his younger brothers.’ It wonderfully explained the acumen of the Asiatic genius, and that sprightlier turn of minds in warmer climates; not from the common-place solution of a clearer sky, and more sunshine, &c; but he affirmed that in warmer climates, nature had laid a lighter tax upon the fairer s
ex, so that the pressure upon the head in childbirth was slight, the cerebellum was preserved, and the soul might act as it liked.

  When my father had got so far, what a blaze of light did the accounts of the Caesarean section, and of the towering geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast upon this hypothesis?

  ‘Here you see,’ he would say, ‘there was no injury done; no pressure of the head against the pelvis; no propulsion of the cerebrum – and pray, what were the happy consequences? Why, Sir, Julius Caesar, who gave the operation a name; and Hermes Trismegistus, Scipio Africanus, and our Edward the Sixth, who, had he lived, would have done honour to the hypothesis. These, and many more famous men, all came sideways, Sir, into the world.’

  The incision of the uterus ran for six weeks in my father’s head; he had read that wounds in the abdomen were not mortal, so that the belly of the mother might be opened extremely well to give a passage to the child.

  He mentioned this one afternoon to my mother, – merely as a matter of fact; but seeing her turn as pale as ashes at the very mention of it, he thought it as well to say no more, contenting himself with admiring it in silence.

  This was my father Mr. Shandy’s hypothesis; concerning which I have only to add, that my brother Bobby did as much honour to it as any one of the great heroes we spoke of. For happening to be born when my father was at Epsom, – being moreover my mother’s first child, coming into the world head foremost, and turning out afterwards a lad of wonderful slowness, – my father was confirmed in his opinion: and as he had failed at one end, he was determined to try the other.

  This was not to be expected from the midwife, – and was therefore one of my father’s reasons in favour of a man of science, whom he could better deal with.

  Of all men in the world, Dr. Slop was the fittest for my father’s purpose; for though this new-invented forceps was, he maintained, the safest instrument of deliverance, yet, it seems, he had scattered a word or two in his book, in favour of extracting the baby by its feet; though not for the soul’s good, but for reasons merely obstetrical.

  This will account for the coalition betwixt my father and Dr. Slop in the ensuing discourse, which went a little hard against my uncle Toby. How a plain man could bear up against two such allies in science, is hard to conceive.

  You may conjecture upon it, if you please, – and whilst your imagination is in motion, you may encourage it to discover how my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound upon his groin. You may try to account for the loss of my nose by marriage-articles, and show the world how I could have the misfortune to be called Tristram, in opposition to my father’s hypothesis, and the wishes of the whole family.

  These, with fifty other points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve; but I tell you now it will be in vain, for you will not come within a league of the truth.

  The reader must wait for a full explanation of these matters till next year, when a series of events will be laid open which he little expects.

  BOOK 3

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘I wish, Dr. Slop,’ quoth my uncle Toby earnestly, – ‘I wish you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.’

  My uncle Toby’s wish did a thing he never intended; – it confounded Dr. Slop – putting his ideas to flight, so that he could not rally them again for the soul of him.

  In all disputes, nothing is more dangerous, Madam, than a wish coming sideways in this unexpected manner upon a man. The safest way to take off the force of the wish, is for the party wished at, instantly to stand up and wish the wisher something in return of pretty near the same value, so balancing the account upon the spot.

  This will be fully illustrated in my chapter of wishes.

  Dr. Slop did not understand the nature of this defence; he was puzzled, and it put an entire stop to the dispute for four minutes and a half. Five would have been fatal to it: my father saw the danger. The dispute was most interesting to him – ‘Whether the child of his prayers should be born without a head or with one.’ He waited till the last moment, to allow Dr. Slop to return the wish; but perceiving that he was confounded, and was looking with that perplexed vacuity of eye which puzzled souls generally stare with – first up – then down – then east – then west, and so on; – and seeing that he had actually begun to count the brass nails upon the arm of his chair, my father thought there was no time to be lost, so took up the discourse as follows.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘– What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!’ replied my father, taking his wig off his head with his right hand, and with his left hand pulling out a striped handkerchief from his right coat pocket, in order to rub his head.

  Now, in this I think my father was much to blame; and I will tell you why.

  Matters of no more seeming consequence than ‘Whether my father should have taken off his wig with his right hand or his left,’ have divided the greatest kingdoms, and made their monarchs’ crowns totter upon their heads.

  As my father’s handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he should not have taken off his wig with his right hand, but with his left; and then, when the rubbing of his head called for his handkerchief, he could have put his right hand into his right coat pocket to take it out without the least violent or ungraceful twist of his body.

  In this case, (unless my father had been resolved to make a fool of himself by bending his elbow at some nonsensical angle) – his whole attitude would have been easy – natural – unforced: Reynolds himself might have painted him as he sat.

  Now, consider what a devil of a figure my father made of himself.

  In the latter end of Queen Anne’s reign, and in the beginning of King George’s, coat pockets were cut very low down in the skirt. I need say no more – the devil himself could not have contrived a worse fashion for one in my father’s situation.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was not an easy matter in any king’s reign to force your hand diagonally across your whole body to reach the bottom of your opposite coat pocket. – In the year 1718, when this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle Toby discovered the zig-zaggery of my father’s approaches, it instantly brought into his mind those moves he had made before the gate of St. Nicolas; the idea of which distracted him so much, that he was about to ring the bell for Trim to go and fetch his map of Namur, in order to measure the angles of that attack – particularly the one where he received his wound upon his groin.

  My father knit his brows, and all the blood in his body rushed up into his face. – My uncle Toby dismounted immediately.

  – I did not realise your uncle Toby was on horseback.–

  CHAPTER 4

  A man’s body and his mind are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining; rumple the one, – you rumple the other. There is one exception, however, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow as to have your jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and its lining of sarcenet.

  Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes, Antipater amongst the Greeks; Cato, Varro and Seneca amongst the Romans; Pantaeonus, Clemens Alexandrinus and Montaigne amongst the Christians; and a score of good, honest, unthinking Shandean people, whose names I can’t recollect, – all pretended that their jerkins were made this way; – you might have rumpled and crumpled the outside of them all to pieces; you might have played the very devil with them, yet not one of the insides would have been one button the worse.

  I believe that mine is of this type: for never has my poor jerkin been tickled off at such a rate as it has been these last nine months, – and yet I declare, its lining is intact. Pell-mell, helter-skelter, ding-dong, cut and thrust, they have been trimming it for me: and had there been the least gumminess in my lining, – by heaven! it would have been frayed and fretted to a thread.

  You Monthly reviewers! how could you slash my jerkin as you did? – how did you know you would not cut my lining too?

  I most heartily say, God bless you; – if any of you should storm and rag
e at me, as some of you did last May – I am determined to react with good temper; and as long as I live or write (which in my case means the same thing,) never to give an honest gentleman a worse word than my uncle Toby gave the fly which buzzed about his nose all dinner-time.

  – ‘Go, poor devil,’ quoth he; ‘Why should I hurt thee? This world is wide enough to hold both thee and me.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Any man, Madam, observing the rush of blood to my father’s face, so that he reddened six whole tints and a half: – any man but my uncle Toby, who had observed this, together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the contortion of his body, would have concluded my father was in a rage; and he would then have screwed himself up to the same pitch; – and then the devil would have broke loose.

  Any man, I say, but my uncle Toby, whose benign heart interpreted every motion in the kindest sense possible, would have concluded my father was angry, and blamed him too. My uncle Toby blamed no one but the tailor who cut the pocket; so sitting still while my father got his handkerchief out, he looked at him with inexpressible good-will – until my father went on as follows.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘What prodigious armies you had in Flanders! – Brother Toby,’ quoth my father, ‘I do believe thee to be an honest, upright man; nor is it thy fault, if children come with their heads foremost into the world: – but believe me, dear Toby, the dangers our children meet, after they enter the world, are enough – there is no need to expose them to unnecessary dangers in their passage to it.’

  ‘Are these dangers greater nowadays,’ asked my uncle seriously, – ‘than in times past?’

  ‘Brother Toby,’ answered my father, ‘if a child was fairly begot, and born healthy, and the mother did well, our forefathers never looked further.’

  My uncle Toby reclined gently back in his chair, and then directing the buccinatory muscles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty – he whistled Lillabullero.