Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

  ‘A Devil ’tis – and mischief such doth work

  As never yet did Pagan, Jew, or Turk.’

  In short, when in love, my father was all abuse and foul language, cursing this and that and everything under heaven which aided or abetted his love – yet he cursed himself into the bargain, as one of the most egregious fools that ever was let loose in the world.

  My uncle Toby, on the contrary, took it like a lamb – sat still and let the poison work in his veins without resistance. In the sharpest pains of the wound (like that on his groin) he never dropped one fretful word – he blamed neither heaven nor earth, or spoke ill of any body. He sat solitary and pensive with his pipe – looking at his lame leg – then whiffing out a sentimental heigh ho! mixed with the smoke.

  He took it like a lamb, I say.

  In truth he had mistook it at first; for having taken a ride with my father that morning, to save if possible a beautiful wood which the dean and chapter were hewing down to give to the poor; and which was in full view of my uncle Toby’s house, and of singular service to him in his description of the battle of Wynnendale – by trotting on too hastily to save it, upon an uneasy saddle – it so happened, that a blister formed in the nethermost part of my uncle Toby – the first shootings of which (as he had no experience of love) he had taken for a part of the passion – till the blister breaking in the one case – and the other remaining – my uncle Toby was convinced that his wound was not skin-deep, but that it had gone to his heart.

  CHAPTER 27

  My uncle Toby knew little of the world; and therefore when he felt he was in love with widow Wadman, he had no idea that the thing was to be made a mystery of. Even had it been otherwise, as he looked upon Trim as a humble friend, it would have made no difference to the manner in which he informed him of it.

  ‘I am in love, corporal!’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘In love!’ said the corporal. ‘Your honour was very well the day before yesterday, when I was telling you the story of the King of Bohemia.’

  ‘Bohemia!’ said my uncle Toby, musing. ‘What became of that story, Trim?’

  ‘We lost it, your honour, somehow – but your honour was as free from love then, as I am.’

  ‘’Twas whilst thou went’st off with the wheel-barrow. Mrs. Wadman has left a ball here,’ quoth my uncle Toby, pointing to his breast.

  ‘She can no more withstand a siege, than she can fly,’ cried the corporal.

  ‘But as we are neighbours, Trim, I think it best to let her know it civilly first,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘If I might presume to differ from your honour – I would begin with making a good thundering attack upon her, in return – and telling her civilly afterwards. For if she knows anything of your honour’s being in love, beforehand–’

  ‘L__d help her! she knows no more of it,’ said my uncle Toby, ‘than the child unborn.’

  Precious souls!

  Mrs. Wadman had told it, with all its circumstances, to Bridget twenty-four hours before; and was at that very moment consulting her about some slight misgivings which the Devil, who never lies dead in a ditch, had put into her head.

  ‘I am terribly afraid,’ said widow Wadman, ‘that if I should marry him, Bridget, the poor captain will not enjoy good health, with the monstrous wound upon his groin.’

  ‘It may not be so very large,’ replied Bridget, ‘as you think, Madam. I believe, besides, that ’tis dried up.’

  ‘I would like to know – merely for his sake,’ said Mrs. Wadman.

  ‘We’ll know the long and the broad of it in ten days,’ answered Bridget; ‘for whilst the captain is paying his addresses to you, I’m confident Mr. Trim will be for making love to me – and I’ll let him, to get it all out of him.’

  These measures were taken. Meanwhile, my uncle Toby and the corporal went on with theirs.

  ‘Now,’ quoth the corporal, one arm a-kimbo, ‘if your honour will give me leave to lay down the plan of this attack–’

  ‘That will please me exceedingly,’ said my uncle Toby, ‘and as thou must act as my aid de camp, here’s a crown for thy commission.’

  ‘Then, your honour,’ said the corporal, making a bow, ‘we will begin with getting your honour’s laced clothes out of the campaign-trunk, and have the blue and gold taken up at the sleeves – and I’ll put your white wig fresh into pipes – and send for a tailor, to have your honour’s thin scarlet breeches turned–’

  ‘I had better take the red plush ones,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘They will be too clumsy,’ said the corporal.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘Thou wilt get a brush and a little chalk to my sword.’

  ‘’Twill only be in your honour’s way,’ replied Trim.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‘– But your honour’s two razors shall be new set – and I will get my Montero-cap furbished, and put on poor lieutenant Le Fever’s regimental coat, which your honour gave me to wear for his sake; and as soon as your honour is clean shaved, and has got your clean shirt on, and everything is ready for the attack – we’ll march up boldly. Whilst your honour engages Mrs. Wadman in the parlour, to the right – I’ll attack Mrs. Bridget in the kitchen, to the left; and I’ll answer for it,’ said the corporal, snapping his fingers, ‘that the day is our own.’

  ‘I wish I may manage it right;’ said my uncle Toby, ‘but I declare, corporal, I had rather march up to the very edge of a trench.’

  ‘A woman is quite a different thing,’ said the corporal.

  ‘I suppose so,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 31

  If anything which my father said could have provoked my uncle Toby while he was in love, it was the perverse use my father was always making of an expression of Hilarion the hermit; who, in speaking of his abstinence, his flagellations, and other parts of his religion, would say – though with more facetiousness than became a hermit – ‘That they were the means he used, to make his ass (meaning his body) leave off kicking.’

  It pleased my father well; it was a laconic way of expressing and libelling, at the same time, the desires and appetites of the lower part of us; so that for many years of my father’s life, he never used the word passions – but always ass instead.

  I must here observe to you the difference betwixt

  My father’s ass

  and my hobby-horse.

  For my hobby-horse, if you recollect, is in no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair of the ass about him. – ’Tis the little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour – a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick – uncle Toby’s siege – or anything, which a man can get astride on, to canter away from the cares of life. ’Tis as useful a beast as exists in the whole of creation.

  But as for my father’s ass – oh! mount him not: ’tis a lustful beast – and foul befall the man who does not stop him from kicking.

  CHAPTER 32

  ‘Well! dear brother Toby,’ said my father, upon first seeing him after he fell in love – ‘and how goes it with your Ass?’

  Now my uncle Toby, thinking more of the part where he had the blister than of the hermit’s metaphor, imagined that my father, who was not very ceremonious in his choice of words, had enquired after the part by its proper name. So although my mother, doctor Slop and Mr. Yorick were sitting in the parlour, he thought it civil to reply using the same term as my father.

  ‘My A__e,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘is much better, brother Shandy.’

  My father had formed great expectations from his Ass in this onset; and would have said more, but doctor Slop setting up an intemperate laugh – and my mother crying out, ‘L__d bless us!’ – it drove my father’s Ass off the field – and the laugh then becoming general, there was no bringing him back to the charge for some time.

  And so the discourse went on without him.

  ‘Everybody,’ said my mother, ‘says you are in love, brother Toby, and we hope it is true.’

&nb
sp; ‘I am as much in love, I believe,’ replied he, ‘as any man usually is.’

  ‘Humph!’ said my father.

  ‘And when did you know it?’ asked my mother.

  ‘When the blister broke,’ replied my uncle Toby.

  My uncle Toby’s reply put my father into good temper – so he charged on foot.

  CHAPTER 33

  ‘As the ancients agree, brother Toby,’ said my father, ‘that there are two distinct kinds of love, according to the different parts which are affected by it – the Brain or Liver – when a man is in love, he needs to consider which of the two he is fallen into.’

  ‘What does it matter which it is,’ replied my uncle Toby, ‘provided it will make a man marry, and love his wife, and get a few children?’

  ‘A few children!’ cried my father, rising out of his chair, and looking full in my mother’s face. ‘A few children!’ he repeated as he walked to and fro.

  ‘Not, my dear brother Toby,’ he cried, recovering himself, ‘not that I should be sorry if thou hadst – on the contrary, I should rejoice – and be as kind to every one of them as a father–’

  My uncle Toby stole his hand into my father’s to give it a squeeze.

  ‘Nay, moreover,’ continued he, ‘so full art thou, my dear Toby, of the milk of human nature, ’tis a pity the world is not peopled by creatures like thee; and was I an Asiatic monarch, I would oblige thee, provided it would not impair thy strength – or weaken thy mind, brother Toby, which these gymnics are apt to do – otherwise, dear Toby, I would procure thee the most beautiful women in my empire, and I would oblige thee, willy nilly, to beget one subject every month.’

  ‘Now I would not,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘get a child, willy nilly, that is, whether I wished or no, to please the greatest prince upon earth.’

  ‘And ’twould be cruel in me, brother, to compel thee;’ said my father; ‘but ’tis a case put to show thee, that it is not thy begetting a child, but the system of Love and Marriage, which I would set thee right in.’

  ‘There is a great deal of plain sense in captain Shandy’s opinion of love,’ said Yorick. ‘Amongst the ill-spent hours of my life, I have read many flourishing poets, from whom I never could extract so much–’

  ‘I wish, Yorick,’ said my father, ‘you had read Plato; for there you would have learnt that there are two Loves.’

  ‘I know there were two Religions among the ancients,’ replied Yorick, ‘one for the vulgar, and another for the learned; but I think one Love might have served both of them very well.’

  ‘It could not,’ replied my father, ‘because according to Ficinus, one of these loves is rational – the other is natural. The first is ancient – without mother: the second, begotten of Jupiter and Dione.’

  ‘Pray, brother,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘what has a man who believes in God to do with this?’

  My father could not stop to answer, for fear of breaking his thread.

  ‘The latter,’ continued he, ‘is wholly of the nature of Venus. The first excites to heroic love, and the desire of philosophy and truth – the second excites to desire, simply–’

  ‘I think the procreation of children as beneficial to the world,’ said Yorick, ‘as the finding out of the longitude.’

  ‘To be sure,’ said my mother, ‘love keeps peace in the world.’

  ‘In the house, my dear, I own–’

  ‘It replenishes the earth,’ said my mother.

  ‘But it keeps heaven empty – my dear,’ replied my father.

  ‘’Tis Virginity,’ cried Slop triumphantly, ‘which fills paradise.’

  ‘Well said, nun!’ quoth my father.

  CHAPTER 34

  My father had such a skirmishing, slashing way with him, in his arguments – thrusting and ripping, and giving everyone a stroke to remember him by – that if there were twenty people in company, in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of ’em against him.

  Moreover, if there was any position more untenable than the rest, he would be sure to throw himself into it; and once there, he would defend it so gallantly, that ’twould have been difficult for a brave man to drive him out.

  Yorick, for this reason, though he would often attack him, could never bear to do it with all his force.

  Doctor Slop’s Virginity, in the close of the last chapter, had got him on the right side of the rampart; and he was beginning to blow up all the convents in Christendom about Slop’s ears, when corporal Trim came into the parlour to inform my uncle Toby that his thin scarlet breeches, in which the attack was to be made upon Mrs. Wadman, would not do; for the tailor, about to turn them, had found they had been turned before.

  ‘Then turn them again, brother,’ said my father, ‘for there will be many a turning of ’em yet before all’s done.’

  ‘They are as rotten as dirt,’ said the corporal.

  ‘Then order a new pair,’ said my father; ‘for though I know,’ he continued, turning to the company, ‘that widow Wadman has been deeply in love with my brother Toby for many years, and has used every art of woman to outwit him into the same passion – yet now that she has caught him, her fever will be past its height – she has gained her point.

  ‘In this case,’ he continued, ‘Love is not so much a Sentiment as a Situation, into which a man enters as my brother Toby would enter a battalion. No matter whether he loves the service or no, once in it, he acts as if he did; and takes every step to show himself a man of prowess.’

  The hypothesis was plausible enough, and my uncle Toby had only one objection to it – but my father had not finished.

  ‘For this reason,’ he continued, ‘although all the world knows that Mrs. Wadman loves my brother Toby, and my brother Toby loves Mrs. Wadman, and no obstacle can forbid the music striking up this very night, yet I will answer for it that the same tune will not be played in a year.’

  ‘We have taken our measures badly,’ quoth my uncle Toby to Trim.

  ‘I would lay my Montero-cap,’ said Trim – now Trim’s Montero-cap, as I once told you, was his constant wager; and having furbished it up for the attack, it made the odds look better – ‘I would lay my Montero-cap to a shilling – if it was proper to offer a wager before your honours–’

  ‘There is nothing improper in it,’ said my father, ‘’tis a mode of expression. All it means is that thou believest – now, what dost thou believe?’

  ‘That widow Wadman cannot hold out ten days.’

  ‘And whence,’ cried Slop jeeringly, ‘hast thou all this knowledge of woman, friend?’

  ‘By falling in love with a popish clergywoman,’ said Trim.

  ‘’Twas a Beguine,’ said my uncle Toby.

  Doctor Slop was too angry to listen to the distinction; and my father taking that chance to fall helter-skelter upon the whole order of Nuns and Beguines, as a set of silly, fusty, baggages – Slop could not stand it – and my uncle Toby having some measures to take about his breeches – the company broke up.

  My father being left alone, and having half an hour upon his hands before bed-time, called for pen and paper, and wrote my uncle Toby the following letter of instructions:

  MY DEAR BROTHER TOBY,

  What I am going to say to thee is upon the nature of women, and of love-making to them; and it is good that thou hast occasion for a letter of instructions upon that head, and that I am able to write it to thee.

  Mrs. Shandy being now nearby, preparing for bed – I have thrown together, just as they have come into my mind, such hints as I judge may be of use; intending, in this, to give thee a token of my love.

  Firstly, with regard to religion in this affair – though I know how few of its offices thou neglectest – yet I would remind thee of one thing during thy courtship; and that is, never to go forth upon the enterprise, without first recommending thyself to the protection of Almighty God, that he may defend thee from the evil one.

  Shave the whole top of thy head clean every four or five days, but oftener if conveni
ent; lest in taking off thy wig before her, she should discover how much has been cut away by Time.

  ’Twere better to keep ideas of baldness out of her fancy.

  Always remember, Toby,

  ‘That women are timid.’ And ’tis well they are – or else there would be no dealing with them.

  Let not thy breeches be too tight, or hang too loose about thy thighs, like the trunk-hose of our ancestors.

  Whatever thou hast to say, utter it in a low, soft tone of voice. Silence weaves dreams of midnight secrecy into the brain.

  Avoid all kinds of pleasantry and facetiousness in thy discourse with her, and do all thou canst to keep from her books which tend thereto: there are some devotional tracts, which she may read over – but do not allow her to look into Rabelais, or Don Quixote.

  They are books which excite laughter; and thou knowest, dear Toby, that there is no passion so serious as lust.

  If thou art permitted to sit upon the same sofa with her, and to lay thy hand upon hers – beware: – thou canst not lay thy hand on hers, without her feeling the temper of thine. Leave that undetermined; so that thou wilt have her curiosity on thy side. If she is not conquered by that, and thy Ass continues kicking – thou must begin by losing a few ounces of blood below the ears, according to the practice of the ancient Scythians, who cured the most intemperate fits of appetite by that means.

  Avicenna is for having the part anointed with the syrup of hellebore, using proper purges – and I believe rightly. Thou must eat little or no goat’s flesh, nor red deer; and carefully abstain from peacocks, cranes, coots and water-hens.

  As for thy drink – I need not tell thee, it must be the infusion of Vervain and the herb Hanea, of which Aelian relates such effects – but if thy stomach palls, take cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, woodbine, and lettuce instead.

  There is nothing further which occurs to me at present–

  So wishing everything, dear Toby, for the best,