Abstract
Laurence Sterne develops his complex approach towards solitude throughout his fictional and non-fictional writings. Ranging between A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Bramine's Journal, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne's sermons, this article explores how Sterne juxtaposes the pleasures of retirement with more painful loneliness, and the opportunities that each opens up for sometimes challenging self-contemplation. Various locations stimulate Sterne's engagement with this relationship in differing ways: simply, the enjoyable solitude of country retreat contrasts with the superficial busyness of city life; but for Sterne the opportunity to attain greater self-knowledge comes through his interactions with others. Alone, he must construct imaginary forms of sociability, especially with his beloved but absent Eliza, whom he brings into a fictive conversation through his writing. In the process, the quixotism of Sterne's sentimental authorial persona leads not to a performance of feeling, but to an embrace of human frailty and hopefulness alike.
Laurence Sterne wrestles with the pleasures and the pains of solitude throughout his writings. While picking up the philosophical notion of solitude as being a positive good – allowing time for temporary retirement and for soul-strengthening reflection – Sterne also, sometimes painfully, presents different facets of its less wholesome companion, loneliness. ‘Alone’, in fact, features more readily in Sterne's lexicon than ‘solitude’. The natural world and human nature are integral to his treatment of aloneness in his fictional and non-fictional writings, and to the navigation between internal and external realities, between the confines of the self and connection with others. A cluster of texts collectively demonstrates Sterne's recurrent preoccupation with the difficult task of ‘knowing oneself’ and ‘knowing others’, when self is brought to circulate with other selves: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Bramine's Journal (written in 1767), the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1773), and Sterne's sermons. The absent other whom Sterne brings into imaginary discourse with himself in the first three of these texts is Eliza Draper, who embodies the debate with aloneness threaded throughout these works: being alone provides a stark, yearning contrast to sociability and the alternative loci for its practice between town and country, but it is also its necessary complement.
Confinement in A Sentimental Journey and the Limits of Self-Knowledge
One short sequence of chapters in A Sentimental Journey, which has received sustained critical attention but is worth revisiting here, encapsulates the awkward contemplation of different states of aloneness. 1 By forcibly encountering the fact and the idea of involuntary isolation, especially imprisonment, as a counterpoise to his own chosen, occasional retirement into the luxury of solitude, Yorick is compelled to examine the contingency of freedom. It often nestles within the idea of the natural world as a site of pure and untrammelled liberty, constrained by artificial constructs (tangible and metaphorical); and yet here, as elsewhere in A Sentimental Journey, nature is not, eventually, posited as an idealised ultimate haven, but as a convenient ideological tool for better realising one's existence within a manmade and person-filled world. For Sterne, the urban and the human environments are far more fascinating and ultimately rewarding, if more challenging, than nature.
In ‘The Passport. The Hotel at Paris’ Yorick hears a cry that he initially assumes to be the voice of a child, but which he soon discovers is that of a caged starling taught to repeat a few words that seem cruelly to reinforce the bird's captive state – ‘“No,” said the starling—“I can’t get out”’ – just as the title of the chapter offers a painfully ironic reminder of the creature's forcible confinement. 2 A passport permits transit between and within national borders and proclaims the traveller's ability to move freely and of their own accord; paradoxically, it also curtails that movement: it is because he has forgotten to secure the proper documentation in his whimsical decision to travel to France that Yorick risks imprisonment in the Bastille, notorious for its inhumane incarceration of prisoners. 3 In the 1760s, the period of Yorick's journey, France and Britain were still engaged in the Seven Years’ War, so travelling without official paperwork could be doubly dangerous. 4
Yorick nevertheless finds it difficult to contemplate his situation with gravity. He dismisses it ‘cavalierly’ and with cheerful nonchalance, romanticising how ‘with nine livres a day, and pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can’t get out, he may do very well within—’ (93–94). Pleased with ‘no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning’, he jauntily elaborates on the idea, convincing himself that to be imprisoned in the Bastille may be no bad thing after all: Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I vauntingly––for I envy not its powers, which paint the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue and she overlooks them—(94)
Distressed animals feature regularly in sentimental fiction, where they straddle a somewhat uneasy boundary between concern for the emotions that a non-human creature might experience, as Glynis Ridley has eloquently argued in discussing animal affect in the starling episode, and their more functional role in triggering or highlighting seemingly superior human affect. 5 The caged bird is supposed to act as a catalyst of compassion, stimulating Yorick to move beyond his bubble of self to contemplate states of captivity affecting other beings, but in the process the reality of one creature's confinement becomes subsumed within the imagined captivity of others, beginning with and centring on Yorick himself. The starling morphs from being an actual bird to a non-natural object – ‘Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile’ (95–96) 6 – and then to an abstract concept, as Yorick physically moves away from the immediate scene: ‘The bird in his cage pursued me into my room’ (97).
The manmade and the natural clash with merciless irony in Yorick's pronouncement against ‘slavery’ and his ensuing encomium on ‘
The struggle between selfish solipsism and empathetic connection with the suffering of others lies at the heart of Sterne's negotiation, through Yorick, of the dilemmas of balancing self and others. In the solitude of his room – in a text where the action of retiring to an enclosed, private space (the desobligeant, the hotel room) is repeated numerous times – and now stimulated by the idea of the bird, Yorick tries to imagine what human captivity might actually be like. At first, he attempts to picture ‘the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery’, only to find ‘that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me––’ (97). Instead, he decides to focus on ‘a single captive’, but rather than just viewing him as might the affected spectator upon sentimental distress, Yorick takes an active role in creating the scene of suffering: ‘having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture’ (97). The artist arranging the mental composition heightens the mournful features of both man (‘his body half wasted away’, ‘pale and feverish’) and setting: ‘in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann’d his blood—he had seen no sun, no moon in all that time’ (97). As Lucy Powell writes, the realities of imprisonment in this period – which the many illustrations and paintings of ‘The Captive’ attempt to convey – were brutal. 7 Like the wired cage imprisoning the bird, this is an entirely manmade environment designed with maximum dehumanisation in mind, where the natural world is shut out, and those elements belonging to it that are imported into the space of the cell (straw, the breeze, sunlight) are rendered hostile rather than comforting, artificial rather than organic.
The failure of Yorick's theory of how to make a terrible thing seem bearable by ‘reduc[ing]’ it to its ‘proper size’ is compounded when even a single captive proves to be too much for his imagination, and for his feelings: ‘––But here my heart began to bleed––and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait’, before ‘––I burst into tears––I could not sustain the picture of confinement that my fancy had drawn’ (97–98). This is not a moment of Yorick being too sensitive to fully capture the suffering of others, as a true man of feeling. Rather, it is a demonstration of the combination of ‘folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity’ (94) which constitutes Yorick's reasoning and eventually leaves him impotent. As Thomas Keymer suggests, A Sentimental Journey explores Sterne's ‘concerns about the complacency associated with the culture of sensibility’, expressed in sermons such as ‘The history of Jacob, considered’, which laments that we behold a scene that should inspire compassion but ‘without carrying the lesson further […] we sigh——we wipe away the tear,—and there ends the story of misery’. 8 Instead of supporting outright contemporary criticisms of the self-indulgent solipsism belonging to intensified sensibility, however, Sterne's point is to warn against the pitfalls of this mechanism for ethical action while also keeping its possible benefits in play, when properly managed. 9
The twisted ethical drive of sensibility found in passages such as ‘The Captive’ does not solely demonstrate a possible ‘failure’ of feeling, or a challenge to its pure commerce with the soul and with the deeds that should put moral principles into action. It also provides an opportunity to explore the cognitive and emotional capacities of the identity Yorick has designated for himself (‘Sentimental Traveller’ [15]), and of human connections in any context, whether in person or in imagination. For New, the starling and captive sequence is integral to A Sentimental Journey's preoccupation with the difficulty of forging connections with others, which New situates in overtly gendered terms in drawing a parallel with Marcel Proust's The Captive: male-female relations propose the most challenging conundrum of navigating between self and others. 10 Yorick's inability to picture captivity, stimulated by the encounter with the starling, is ‘not merely a failure of the imagination’ but of ‘true penetration and connection’. 11 This extends beyond male-female interactions (although they are undoubtedly a Sternean preoccupation) to characterise faultily forged connections throughout the journey, and returns to the essential problem of knowing oneself fully enough in order to bridge self and others with any degree of success. Eventually, these ruptured encounters revolve around the distorted processes whereby Yorick, when confronted with what it means to be alone with himself, finds that his own reasoning or imagination are inadequate, especially when new stimuli from the outside challenge ‘systematic reasonings’.
A Sentimental Journey is filled with such moments of aloneness, despite Yorick's encounters with others. These moments provide a recurrent motif reminding him of both the difficulties of and the reasons for travel outlined in the Preface he writes in the desobligeant. For all that ‘nature has set up […] certain boundaries and fences to circumscribe the discontent of man’ in order to ‘sustain his sufferings at home’, travelling abroad can open the mind beyond the self (13). However, ‘we lie under so many impediments in communicating our sensations out of our own sphere, as often amount to a total impossibility’ (13). Attaining the ‘balance of sentimental commerce’ necessary for human interaction is a particular challenge for any traveller abroad, out of his own culture and language. He must set out equipped with the appropriate tools to make the most of the experience, not just capability with the gestural ‘language’ of true feeling that transcends linguistic barriers, but also (especially) self-honesty. Wherever the traveller may place himself in Yorick's taxonomy – idle, inquisitive, splenetic – it is only through ‘study and reflection’ that ‘he may be able to determine his own place and rank in the catalogue—it will be one step towards knowing himself’ (15).
As Sterne observes in Sermon 14, ‘Self-Examination’, concerning the important task of balancing the ‘causes’ and the ‘consequences’ of our actions, ‘as the world goes, there is no leisure for such enquiries, and so full are our minds of other matters, that we have not time to ask, or a heart to answer the questions we ought to put to ourselves’. 12 Solitude should provide a moment of pause the better to aid such reflection, to attain fuller self-knowledge, to further fruitful ‘commerce’ with others, but the challenge is intensified at moments of aloneness: Yorick often acts rashly and thinks later when he finds himself uncomfortably alone, to discover a gap between an internally perceived reality and an external one. This difficulty in solitary, self-honest reflection is captured in a chapter in A Sentimental Journey simply entitled ‘Paris’. After plagiarising a cavalier letter for a woman met en route, Yorick retires to his room, only to find that ‘I own my first sensations, as soon as I was left solitary and alone in my own chamber in the hotel, were far from being so flattering as I had prefigured them’ (65). He looks ‘through the glass’ of his window, seeking reassurance in the company of others even when he observes them from a detached distance. Yorick is initially bedazzled by the bright colours and whirl of activity, which he likens to a fanciful medieval tournament with ‘the young in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay feather of the east’; he places himself among these ‘fascinated knights’ in an archaic yearning for an idealised past, the ‘glass’ temporarily serving as a mirror reflecting his own self-fashioned image. But its distortions quickly pall, and the fantasy vision dissipates into an uncomfortable reality as Yorick reflects that amid the ‘glittering clatter’ of Paris and its pleasures he is ‘reduced to an atom’ (65).
As New suggests, this chapter is ‘typical of Sterne's most mature writing—a virtuoso mingling of heretofore incompatible intentions, most obviously the pathetic and the bawdy’, but mixed with ‘The sad redundancy of solitary and alone’. 13 The remedy for unhealthy solitude does not lie in the wrong kind of sociability. Yorick determines to seek out what he perceives to be an authentic human experience among humbler citizens, an urban version of the sentimental novel's idealisation of rustic poverty as the closest approximation to ‘nature’, to be found in ‘some winding alley’ (rather than Paris’ brightly coloured streets and squares), where ‘thou mayest solace thy soul in converse sweet with some kind grisset of a barber's wife’ (65). Again, human nature – whether the setting be urban or rural – is of much greater interest than any environment the natural world could provide. He pursues his plan in ‘The Pulse. Paris’, where his flirtation in a glove shop with the ‘grisset’ behind the counter leads to him taking the woman's pulse, a ‘casual act of good nature’ (71). The intrusion of her complaisant husband upon the scene confirms the philosophy Yorick previously pondered when ‘solitary and alone’ in his hotel room, watching the world from its window and recalling Genesis II.18 (307): ‘—Surely—surely man! it is not good for thee to sit alone—thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings, and this improvement of our natures from it, I appeal to, as my evidence’ (73).
Yorick is constantly in search of such proof of his reasoning and of alleviation from the difficulties of solitary confinement, but the ‘evidence’ often thwarts it; or, on the other hand, provides an all too convenient proof of whatever reasoning Yorick evolves in private that he most wishes to believe: here, that the tactile act is just ‘casual’ and ‘good nature’. For all that it pits humble life against fashionable society, ‘The Pulse. Paris’ in fact parallels a later chapter also entitled ‘Paris’ where Yorick plays at salon life. He sickens of its false social ‘commerce’ where the capital he earns is nothing but ‘the gain of a slave’; exercising a freedom neither starling nor captive can enjoy, he hastily decides to ‘set out for Italy’ (148). In both contexts, Sterne probes the difficulties of the sociability necessary to alleviate aloneness, where the private self that performs in public is not always honest. The movement from an urban to an idealised rustic environment is typical of sentimental travel narratives, and yet for Sterne the rural is less about nature in its purest form, than about the human inhabitants that offer an alternative notion of sociability. Just as Tristram Shandy relishes the rustic delights of Burgundy at the vintage, only to reinforce the erotic thrills supposedly left behind him in the corrupting city as he enjoys Nanette's captivating dance, so Yorick's movement from city to country does not spell a release from urban captivity to rural freedom. Instead, it provides an alternative context in which to exercise the interest in humanity that, essentially, Sterne connects with sites of human habitation.
These alternative contexts for exploring oneself through sociability are offset by periods of isolation, which bring an intensified introspection to which self-deception is integral. ‘To know one's self, one would think could be no very difficult lesson’ (31), Sterne observes in Sermon 4 (‘Self Knowledge’). And yet we repeatedly deceive ourselves as to the true nature of our intentions and thoughts; we repeatedly exculpate ourselves from petty acts of meanness, of naughtiness, and even from larger crimes. If we spend time alone to know ourselves more fully, and so to go out better equipped to forge meaningful connections with others, then the difficulties of using that alone time wisely are challenging indeed if we truthfully acknowledge how far self-deceit plays a role in self-contemplation. Not only might ‘reasoning’ be faulty, or tampered with by nonchalant gaiety, but the imagination can interfere to craft all manner of fanciful excuses for oneself, or fantastical alternative realities.
Indeed, the role of ‘our fond imaginations’ (319) in self-contemplation provides a recurrent refrain in Sterne's sermons: it is the imagination that deceives the young man who enters the ‘free enjoyment’ of dangerous ‘pleasures’ and who is ‘caught by every glittering appearance that flatters [his] expectation’ (7) that there lies the route to happiness. And yet Sterne does not castigate the imagination as being a faulty internal mechanism that must be dismantled the better to know oneself and to act accordingly. Instead, it is one among several components of that selfhood, which combine to shape self-understanding through a better understanding of the individual's relation to God. Those components include the body. For, as Sterne asserts in Sermon 43 [‘Efficacy of prayer’] – and as A Sentimental Journey amply demonstrates – it is not enough to contemplate oneself in purely spiritual retirement. It is through the concert of thought and action, body and mind, in one's own space but also in the world beyond, that the true test of virtue can yield the richest results: I cannot help here taking notice of the doctrine of those who would resolve all devotion into the inner man, and think that there is nothing more requisite to express our reverence to God, but purity and integrity of heart,—unaccompanied either with words or actions. (402)
Throughout A Sentimental Journey, Yorick performs the Sermons’ belief in the interconnectedness of self (body and mind, spiritual and sensual) as lying at the core of ‘human nature’: ‘we find such a strong sympathy and union between our souls and bodies, that the one cannot be touched or sensibly affected, without producing some corresponding emotion in the other’ (402). To ‘argue against this strict correspondence […] is disputing against the frame and mechanism of human nature’, Sterne claims, concluding that ‘—We are not angels, but men cloathed with bodies, and, in some measure, governed by our imaginations’ (402). Being ‘all too human’, it is often suggested, characterises A Sentimental Journey's repeated lesson that thought and feeling, piety and carnality operate across porous boundaries, and that while some degree of self-regulation is necessary, to impose strict borders on neighbouring lands creates an unhealthy disunity within the nation of the self. And, in turn, the imagination – as one component part of that faulty self – is an important feature of self-exploration. It allows an often harmless indulgence in fantasy which might lead a person astray, but which can also form a vital lifeline between the self and others, the imaginary and the real, the necessity of which is intensified at moments of enforced rather than voluntary isolation.
Imagining Sociability in Bramine's Journal and Letters from Yorick to Eliza
While A Sentimental Journey is bound up with Sterne's reflections elsewhere on what it means to be alone, and of the challenges it poses to how we relate to ourselves – our ‘reasonings’, imaginations, and feelings alike – it is literally bound up with Bramine's Journal in the Florida edition of the work. This is partly because of chronology: Sterne wrote his journal to his beloved Eliza Draper in the final year or so of his life, just before and almost in tandem with the composition of his novel. 14 New and Day argue that, along with ten letters Sterne wrote to Eliza during their brief acquaintance in London in early 1767, the journal is integral to understanding the novel and the state of mind of its author at the time, then in severe ill health (xxii). These ten letters were first published posthumously as Letters from Yorick to Eliza in 1773, with further editions appearing in 1775; as suggested by the editors of Sterne's correspondence, New and Peter de Voogd, this collection provides an important complement to A Sentimental Journey and the Bramine's Journal, alongside which it ‘should be read’. 15
Sterne died in March 1768, the year following his meeting with Eliza, and shortly after the publication of A Sentimental Journey's first two volumes. Eliza's removal to Bombay to join her husband in March 1767, not long after she and Sterne met, doubtless created a complicated emotional state that directly shaped the composition of A Sentimental Journey, the tone and manner of which contrast notably with his earlier work: ‘There is evidence throughout the Journal that A Sentimental Journey did not flow from an uncontrolled and uncontrollable Shandean pen; Sterne was laboring to find a different voice, and at least part of that labor was associated with Eliza's absence’ (xxvii). Letters from Yorick confirm the shift of tone and of purpose, and the interlinked composition of these texts: ‘I began a new journal this morning: you shall see it, for if I live not till your return to England, I will leave it you as a legacy’. 16 This is a private equivalent, perhaps, of the plea made by the unnamed gentleman in A Sentimental Journey's ‘Fragment’, that ‘I have nothing to bequeath which will pay the expence of bequeathing, except the history of myself, which, I could not die in peace unless I left it as a legacy to the world’ (138).
That these texts, and fictional and real lives, are closely interwoven emerges in Peter Budrin's recent exploration of the absent presence of Eliza as ‘underplot’ in A Sentimental Journey, evident in a couple of fleeting mentions and allusions, and their resonances with Bramine's Journal. 17 The Letters from Yorick to Eliza adds a further strand to the tangled web of quixotism in Sterne's interchangeable role-play as Yorick, Bramin, and himself. In Bramine's Journal, absence correlates with aloneness in those episodes where Yorick exerts his imagination in order to test his reasonings, revealing sometimes painful gaps between the imaginary and the real, and how human nature responds to its condition by building alternative realities for itself. Imaginatively constructing another's presence constantly recurs as Sterne's way of coping with being alone, but also with an essentially isolating fatal disease. With the author often confined to a bedchamber, Sterne's writing becomes not only a method of recording his daily life, tracked through the chicanery of disease – Helen Williams has likened the Journal to the medical patients’ symptom diaries prevalent in this period 18 – but of how he succeeds in fabricating a sense of Eliza's companionship. Illness, in fact, had initially bonded Sterne and Eliza, also in ill health, ‘the sine qua non of sentimental love’, according to Arthur H. Cash. 19 Sterne expresses concerns for Eliza's condition to Anne and William James on 2 August 1767, as she travelled to Bombay, confirming the spiritual link created by shared physical illness: ‘I heartily wish her well, and if Yorick was with her, he would tell her so—but he is cut off from this, by bodily absence—I am present with her in spirit however’ (604). The combination of imagined and real states of body and mind tightens connections jeopardised by physical absence but strengthened through writing.
For some, Bramine's Journal becomes a self-involved literary exercise, whereby Sterne relegates the woman he claims to love to being a mere creative stimulus. That Sterne recycled passages from his letters to his wife from some years earlier seems only to add to this impression. Or, for Carol Watts, it confirms Harriet Guest's conclusion that Eliza embodies an impossible ‘sentimental’ fantasy that turns her into an ‘image’, a fictionalised projection intensified by physical distance: it ‘becomes in Eliza's absence the means of Sterne's self-fashioning. She is a “second self”’. 20 There is undoubtedly an aesthetic appeal for Sterne in the idea or ‘image’ of Eliza, which inevitably posits her as a concept to be embodied in literary expressions as much as, or perhaps more than, as a real woman. However, a potentially cynical biographical reading of Sterne's literary achievement in Bramine's Journal is better balanced by considering that work in tandem with A Sentimental Journey, as suggested, but also with the Sermons. The biographical context that might damn Sterne on the one hand – philandering husband recycles love letters previously written to his wife in addressing another, much younger woman – might qualify what type of text the Journal is on the other. If we see A Sentimental Journey as the ‘mature’ work of philosophical and spiritual reflection of a man nearing death, and Bramine's Journal (and Letters from Yorick) as composed in tandem with it, then it is possible to appraise what role Eliza plays in a different light. Now, the Journal becomes a contemplation not of an idealised woman who is a mere object or trigger for a self-fashioned literary identity, but as an interlocutor who participates in Sterne's dialogue with solitude, with the desire and need for companionship. 21 He is, after all, a Sentimental Traveller from the ‘Necessity’ of communing with others. He confronts how to negotiate the absence of companionship through whatever means possible, including, perhaps especially, those that are both imaginative and written.
By speaking to Eliza through his writing, Sterne brings her into a virtual conversation. He continually mingles the mundane details of his daily life with the fanciful substance of past memories of Eliza's presence and with the rueful hope of her future return: [Ap:16.] 5 in the afternoon––I have just been eating my Chicking, sitting over my repast upon it, with Tears––a bitter Sause––Eliza! but I could eat it with no other … one solitary plate––one knife––one fork––one Glass!––O Eliza! twas painfully distressing,––I gave a thousand pensive penetrating Looks at the Arm chair thou so often graced on these quiet, sentimental Repasts––& sighed & laid down my knife and fork,––& took out my handkerchief, clap’d it across my face, & wept like a child–– (172)
Fact and fictionalities are further enmeshed in the plaintive reiteration of aloneness in this passage resurfaces in a letter Sterne supposedly wrote to his future wife, then Elizabeth Lumley, and which was first published in Lydia Medalle's 1775 edition of her father's correspondence: ‘One solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one glass!’ (664). As the hypothetical original letter is now lost, New and de Voogd speculate – beyond the longstanding assumption that Sterne simply repeated himself – that either the Medalle version was a fabrication of her own, that she somehow had access to Bramine's Journal and recycled this passage from there, or further still that she held a now-lost letter from Sterne to Eliza, ‘that Sterne constructed from his own entries’ (665). Without further evidence we can only conjecture, but the close-knit composition of the Journal with Letters from Yorick pulls their shared threads into closer visible contact when the texts are juxtaposed.
Physical sickness and heartsickness, for instance, combine in the tears that Sterne sheds not only when sighing over solitary ‘sentimental Repasts’, but from the brutalising pain of severe illness: ‘in ten minutes after I dispatch’d my letter’, he writes to Eliza on 30 March 1767, this poor fine-spun frame of Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning—I have fill’d all thy India handkerchiefs with it, it came I think, from the heart—I fell asleep thro’ weakness at six, and awoke with the bosom of my shirt steep’d in tears— (567)
The see-saw of sickness is both raised and dropped by the to-and-fro of Sterne's wishful thinking about Eliza. He signs off on 24 April with the bedtime thought that ‘Every thing convinces me, Eliza, We shall live to meet again—So—Take care of yr health, to add to the comfort of it’ (178). The next day, he writes: Ap: 25. after a tolerable night, I am able, Eliza, to sit up and hold a discourse with the sweet Picture thou hast left behind thee of thyself, & tell it how much I had dreaded the catastrophe, of never seeing its dear Original more in this world—never did that Look of sweet resignation appear so eloquent as now; it has said more to my heart—& cheard it up more effectually above little fears & may be's—Than all the Lectures of philosophy I have strength to apply to it, in my present Debility of mind and body. (178)
Instead, Sterne dwells in the enjoyable fantasy conversation he entertains with himself and Eliza's image through writing, which itself becomes a form of sustenance more sustaining than chicken or wine. The interplay between idealised fantasy and the immediate reality of Sterne's situation allows the mournful solitude of solitary isolation and separation from the object of his affection, compounded by the oscillations of debilitating illness, to become palliated, and even rendered pleasurable. A shift of scene and environment helps, as Sterne travelled from London to Yorkshire, and from the confines of the sickroom and the city to a healthier environment replete with natural bounty. 22 Now, though still alone in his room, he furnishes it with the expectation of its future habitation by Eliza: ‘Tis a neat little simple elegant room’, he tells her, ‘just big enough to hold a Sopha,—for us—a Table, four Chairs, a Bureau—& a Book case’ (196–197). Its domesticated comfort resembles and yet surpasses the London interior, as it has ‘a little elegant fireplace—wth as much room to dine around it, as in Bond street.—But in sweetness & Simplicity, & silence beyond any thing’ (197). The drawbacks of being confined to a room in which to contemplate one's solitude remain but seem alleviated in the rural setting, at a remove from the city's bustle, pageantry, and ‘Masquerade’ (190), and allows more space for the imaginative expansion that brings the missing loved one into the room to attain completeness, even in this fantasised form. However, the enjoyment of the rural is always counterpoised with a longing for the urban, and the sociability it promises – or at least the memory of a social intercourse, no matter how idealised. As Cash suggests, ‘The country air did wonders for his health’, but Sterne in rural Coxwold repeatedly situates this version of himself in retirement with the other self of city life, despite its inconveniences and its disappointments, and no matter how wrapped up in the language of simple pleasures found in his country retreat. 23
Sterne writes to an unidentified correspondent (‘A. L—e, Esq.’) in June 1767 that —I am as happy as a prince, at Coxwould—and I wish you could see in how princely a manner I live—’tis a land of plenty. I sit down alone to venison, fish and wild fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with curds, and strawberries, and cream, and all the simple plenty which a rich valley under (Hambleton Hills) can produce— […] If solitude would cure a love-sick heart, I would give you an invitation—but absence and time lessen no attachment which virtue inspires.— (589)
The move from city to country clearly signals a change in contexts in which to practise different modes of imaginative expansion and of sociability – and the self-honesty they involve – in a manner that parallels Yorick's movements in A Sentimental Journey. Paris, whether among the rich salonnières or with the poor glove-shop grisset, proves to be an unhealthy climate for Yorick's exploration of self through others. But the impulsive departure for the rustic idyll of ‘the Bourbonnois’, where Yorick believes he can achieve the chivalric virtue of the ‘fascinated knights’ he had initially admired in Paris, only results in another opportunity for self-deception through self-conscious performance: now identifying himself as the ‘Knight of the Woeful Countenance’, he meets poor Maria, a child of nature nonetheless brought onto the scene to perform as another literary construct of Yorick's artifice of emotion (149). She is, after all, revived from her previous fictional incarnation in Tristram Shandy. Whimsical self-deception is at work here, too, in Yorick's ‘undescribable emotions’ as he and Maria bathe in each other's tears (151). But to condemn Yorick as simply performing sensibility against a more malleable backdrop of natural scenery is to misjudge the complexity of Sternean sentimentality, as a configuration of both nature and artifice, of sincerity and performativity, the one not necessarily compromising the other. The encounter with Maria is a necessary prelude to the wholesome communality that finally confirms the spiritual apex of the journey in ‘The Grace’, where ‘I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance’ of his simple peasant hosts, pathos now unmixed with bawdry (159).
In the Bramine's Journal, Sterne seeks a similar, knowing sublimation in the rustic sociability he now imagines sharing with Eliza – whom he tells, in Letters from Yorick, that ‘Nature has surely study’d to make thee her peculiar care, for thou art […] the best and fairest of all her works’ (569). Once again, nature and artifice conspire rather than clash. On 12 June, he takes a ‘delicious Walk of Romance’ where ‘I have plucked up a score of Bryars by the roots wch grew near the edge of the footway, that they might not scratch or incommode you’ (BJ, 200). Imaginarily walking with Eliza is made more ‘romantic’ by the rural surroundings, bringing them closer together. And yet nature is both balmy respite and site of retirement, and an inadequate substitute for the contact of human nature: [July 12] […] I walk like a disturbed Spirit abt my Garden—calling upon heaven & thee,—to come to my Succour—couldst thou but write one word to me, it would be worth the world to me—my friends write me millions—& every one invites me to flee my Solitude & come to them— (218–219)
The final journal entry, dated 1 November (although probably fictitiously), concludes: —And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee——But What can I say, of What can I write—But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wishing for thy Return—Return—Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth the Way for thee to send thee safely … to us, & sojourn … for Ever (225)
Actions speak louder than words, we assume, and Sterne's cessation strongly suggests that whatever Eliza wrote to him, it did not contain the excess of devotion for which he had hoped—or, to be fair, for which he had imagined he had hoped. (xxv)
By 11 August, the last page of the fantasy conversation with Eliza now seemingly turned, Sterne writes to his friend Hall that ‘—I long to return to you, but I sit here alone as solitary and sad as a tom cat, which by the bye is all the company I keep’ (610). The imaginary presence of friends is one comfort for the perhaps ultimate ‘Loss of Eliza’ (BJ, 175), but in its real absence – and in the notable gap between the love of friendship and romantic love – it also serves to confirm the sadness of an unrelenting solitude. It renders pathetic ‘Yorick's’ earlier pledge that ‘[I] shall be the last to deplore thy loss, and will be the first to congratulate, and hail thy return—’ (569) in the recognition that Eliza would never return, at least as Sterne had wished she might.
Perhaps the condition of aloneness – both unhealthy loneliness and the isolation of unhealthy sociability with the wrong kind of people – is for Sterne an irremediable condition that neither imagination nor reason can alleviate, but which, perhaps, only spiritual sociability beyond human interactions can remedy. As he suggests in the sermon ‘The Levite and his concubine’ (as in ‘Paris’), despite the ‘good many handsome things said upon the sweets of retirement, &c.’ in learned books, Yet still, ‘it is not good for man to be alone:’ nor can all which the cold-hearted pedant stuns our ears with upon the subject, ever give one answer of satisfaction to the mind; in the midst of the loudest vauntings of philosophy, Nature will have her yearnings for society and friendship;—a good heart wants some object to be kind to— (169–170)
Footnotes
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