A Discovery?
Second Journal to Eliza. By Laurence Sterne. Edited by Margaret R. B. Shaw. (Bell. 21s.) ELEVEN years after Sterne's death two volumes were published under the title of Letters Supposed to hare been Written by Yorick and Eliza. There was no lack of candour in the editor of these letters. He allowed it to be understood that he had written the volumes himself as a sequel to Sterne's own Letters from Y orick to Eliza. He had written them only for the amusement of himself and his friends ; but a copy had unfortunately got abroad, and he would be sorry to think that readers might be deceived into believing them genuine. This editor was William Combe, a prolific hack-writer, best known as the author of Dr. Syntax. In one instance his candour went too far. He admitted that seven other letters previously published as Sterne's had been composed by himself. One of the letters he claimed was included by Sterne's daughter in her own collection ; but it is possible that she might have made a mistake. In 1925, however, the manuscript of another of the seven letters was discovered in an old letter book, and it was unmistakably in Sterne's own handwriting.
There is plenty of evidence to discredit the general reliability of William Combe. We have his own word for it that under the pressure of a busy life he had often inadvertently passed off the work of other men as his own. In Miss Margaret Shaw's opinion he had again made the same mistake. His acknowledgment of authorship has hitherto condemned the Supposed Letters to oblivion. Miss Shaw argues that they are the genuine work of Sterna; and if her argument holds they make an important addition to our knowledge of Sterne. Yorick was Sterne himself; Eliza was Mrs. Draper. Their love is not fiction but biography. In the troubles of his domestic life, Sterne turned to Mrs. Draper for affection and understanding. In the draft of the letter to Mr. Draper he wrote : " 'Tis a love, you would honour me for-for 'tis so like that I bear my own daughter, who is a good creature, that I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it." If these Supposed _Letters are accepted, they entirely support this pro. nouncement of Sterne's. The correspondence is occupied with professions of affection and "encouragement to tread in the paths of piety." It comes as a shock to our conception of Sterne ; but Miss Shaw reminds us that, besides 74ristrara Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, the Rev. Laurence Sterne published a Collection of Sermons. , There survives another manuscript of Sterne's, the Journal to Eliza, first published in 1904, a work in which Sterne displays far greater warmth, agitation, and passion than we find in the Supposed Letters. Miss Shaw has detected, however, several similarities between the manuscript and the volume she now presents as Sterne's; she regards them, in fact, as different handlings of the same material. So far her only real evidence has been to the discredit of Combe's good faith ; if she is to prove her case, she must persuade her readers by internal evidence that the Supposed Laters bear the marks of Sterne's own style and are congruous with what we know of his life. It is in just these points that her thesis entirely fails to be convincing.
In her introduction Miss Shaw tries to show that Sterne's characteristic cadences, the emphasis and music of his prose style, are present in the work she attributes to him. This is a question for the reader's ear ; Miss Shaw never defines the peculiarities of Sterne's cadences, and the parallels she quotes are the flimsiest of evidence. She makes no examina- tion into Sterne's use of language ; and if we are to believe that he wrote the Supposed Letters we must admit an extra- ordinary degeneration in his fertility of phrase. The letters are full of clichés, composed of clichés; of " poverty's chilling hand," of "boisterous seas," of "bodies mouldering in the grave." From beginning to end there is not the slightest distinction of language ; and it would take a most compre- hensive sympathy to find any distinction of thought.
Since there is no indisputable evidence for Sterne's author- ship, it is on this internal evidence of style that readers must form their opinion. If the letters are genuine, the new know- ledge of Sterne that they give us comes down to this : he was capable of being duller than we imagined ; just before he died he took to moralizing in a surprisingly conventional strain ; and, as Miss Shaw remarks, "those features of his work which successive generations of readers have con- demned as blemishes, his apparent trifling with accepted moral issues and his over-exuberant sentimentality, appear as they really are-accidental characteristics such as every author shares with his age." It should be added that in his foreword Mr. Charles VVhibbley confesses himself convinced by Miss Shaw's arguments and asserts that the attribution "will be readily accepted."
Previous page
