Sterne among the Philosophes:
Body and Soul in
A Sentimental Journey
Martin C.Battestin
T
o borrow Dr Johnson's epithet, Laurence Steme, no less than his
masterpiece, was decidedly an "odd" case.' On the one hand, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is a funny book-the most inventively impudent
work of bawdy wit in the language. Yet it is the first novel in English
seriously to explore the disturbing implications of the new empiricist
philosophies of Locke and Hartley and Hume--a narrative that, both in
the absurdities of its formlessness and in the solipsism and impotence
of its characters, seems profoundly modem2Leo Spitzer once remarked
that the middle decades of the eighteenth century comprised "the great
caesura" in the history of Western thought=--the moment when a harmonious tradition of classical and Christian thought that began with
Pythagoras came to an end and the Modem age began: the age that
has discarded belief id spiritual realities and providential order in favour
1 J a m s Baswell, Life of J o h m , d.Oenge Bukbeck Hill and L.F. PoweU. 6 vols (Oxfnd:
Clamdon Rrsa. 1934). 2449.
2 For thc argumsnl Ulal ~ m r Shondy,
m
fonnally and thcmatlcally, a the fim "modem" work in
BngPsh IiIemum. s~ Mamn C. Batleson. The Pmv~dcnceof Wc Aspca #Form w AU~YTIM
Lirrmrure and the A m (Oxford: Clarmdoo Rrsa. 1974). .
PP.
. 24149.
3 Leo Spitzer. C h i d Md ChrirtiM Idem of World Harmony: P m I c p m to
~ M lnterpmm'on
of the Word "Stinunnng, * 4. Anna Orimville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Rrsa. 1963). p. 76.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994
18 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
of materialism, subjectivism, and (with respect to the polity) egalitarianism. Steme would have appreciated the aptness of Spitzer's metaphor:
the evidence of his novels, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey
(1768), suggests that, more than any other of his literary contemporaries,
he had pondered the meaning and the consequences of the new philosophy, and that, more than most others, he was aware of the "caesuras" in
the lines of our life, the constant interruption of our felicities. "Pray, my
dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?'"
A "heteroclite ... creature in all his declensions," as Tristram says
of Yorick (p. 27), Sterne in his own life acted out the contradiction of
indecent foolery and troubled contemplation of our mortality that characterizes his greatest work. He was Tristram, shandying it away with
cap and bells astride his hobby horse; and he was Yorick, the thoughtful priest whose memorial in that novel is solid blackness filling the page
to the very margins. Yorick, of course, takes his name from the king's
dead jester in Hamlet, whose griming skull, tossed up by the gravediggers, moves Shakespeare's hero to meditate on our mortality. Thoughts
of mortality would have occupied Sterne ever since that morning when,
as a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, he woke to find the bedclothes
soaked with blood from his hemorrhaging lungs. In Tristram Shandy the
winding down of clocks and the threat of closure are evils to be avoided
at all costs. But in 1767, as he began A Sentimental Journey-his last
work and one he hoped would be, indeed, his "Work of Redemption'"
Sterne resurrected Yorick, whom he had buried in Tristram Shandy, and
sent h i to France on a journey his author had taken more than once in
the vain hope of recovering his health. There Yorick would try to puzzle
out the question of wh-r
what-he is: is he a man whose sympathetic
feelings prove he has a soul worth saving, as Steme's favourite Latitudinarian divines, Tillotson and Clarke, had argued in refuting Hobbes? Or
was he merely a sophisticated piece of machinery controlled by his appetites and reducible at last to dust, as the philosophes so eloquently
reasoned, who befriended Steme in the salons of Paris and whose cleverness he admired? For Steme, as he wrote this work in the last few
months of his life, it was a question of no small moment.
4 Laurence Sterne. The Life ond Opinionr of Trislram Shandy, Gentlemon: The Text, ed. Melvyn
New and loan New, 2 vols, 'Ihe Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Skme (Gainesville:
University Ress of Florida. 1984). p. 2. References a to this edition.
5 L a m c e Sterne, Lenrrs, ed. Lewis Peny Cuds (Oxford: Clamdon Ress, 1935). p. 399n3.
References a to this edition. See dm MaRin C. Battestin. "A Scnrimcnrol Joumry: Sterne's
'Wok of Redemption; " Bulktin de la SoeiLlL #Eludes Anglo-Adn'eoi)~~s
dcs mlf el xvnf
SiLckz 38 (juin 1994, 189-204.
STERNE AMONG THE P H I L O S O P H E S 19
Sterne's friendship with several of the most radical and influential of
the philosophes began soon after he arrived in Paris for the first time
in January 1762.6 Hoping to recover his health in the better climate of
southern France, he had left his wife and daughter behind in England, and
since the frontiers were closed because the two countries were at war,
he joined the diplomatic party of George Pin, who, en route to the Court
of Turin to take up his post as Minister, stopped for a while in Paris,
arriving there about 17 January. Sterne's fame as the author of Tristrm
Shandy had preceded him; indeed, volumes 5 and 6 of the novel had been
published less than a month before his arrival. He no sooner settled into
his lodgings in the Faubourg Saint-Germain than he was taken up by the
beau monde, but most especially by the coterie holbachique-that bright
circle of intellectuals and literary men who gathered two or three times a
week to enjoy the lavish dinners and witty conversation at the house of
Baron d'Holbach (now 8, rue de Moulins)? It was d'Holbach who was
instrumental in securing a passport for Sterne-no simple matter for an
Englishman in those hostile times. This anxious episode Steme would
later fictionalize in A Sentimental Journey, where he discreetly concealed
d'Holbach's part in the affair, it plainly appears, however, in Sterne's
letter to Garrick of 31 January, in which he triumphantly reported that
his application for the passport "goes on swimmingly":
-the Baron d'Holbach, has offered any security for the inoffensiveness of my
behaviour in France-- ... This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here,
the great protector of wits, and the Scavans who are no wits-keeps open house
three days a week-his house, is now, as yours was to me, my own-he lives
at great expence- (Letters,p. 151)
D'Holbach and his circle were the heart of the philosophic radicalism
that was propelling France towards the events of 1789. By the time
Sterne arrived in Paris, there had been a few important defections from
the circle: Rousseau, for one, had stopped attending the Baron's salon in
the 1 7 5 0 ~But
. ~ in 1762 the Baron's coterie included some fifteen regular
members, most of whom, when not actually self-proclaimed atheists,
were certainly vehement in their hostility to institutional religion. This
6 For biographical details I have relied chiefly on Aiihur H. Cash, Lovnnec S t e m : The Enrly
md Middk Lars Bondon: Methuen. 1975); and Lawrence Sremr: The Later Year8 (London end
New Yo* Methuen. 1986); and on Stem's LLmrs.
7 Alan Charles Kors, D'Holboeh's Coterie: An Enlighrenmcnt in Paris (Rinceton: Rinceton University Prcss. 1976). p. 12n7. My account of fhe mmbcrship and intellectual altitudes of
d'Holbach's circle is bared on this excellent study.
8 Kors, p. 12.
20 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
climate of infidelity is vividly depicted by Diderot, in relating to Sophie
Volland a conversation that had taken place during one of David Hume's
visits to d'Holbach's house:
The English philosopher [wrote Diderot] took it upon himself to say to the
Baron that he did not believe in the existence of atheists, that he had never seen
any. The Baron said to him: "Monsieur, count how many of us there are here."
There were eighteen of us. The Baron added: ''I am lucky enough to be able to
show you fifteen atheists at one glance. The other three have not yet made up
their minds.'*
Indeed, as Diderot later put it, one purpose of the conversations at the
Baron's house was to ensure that "Bombs are falling in the House of the
L&,"lO
It is a curious fact about Steme-who was of course a priest, and,
as his published sermons make clear, a sincere one-that the friends
he found most congenial were often notorious infidels. One notable example is the "Eugenius" of his novels: John Hall-Stevenson, a rampant
hedonist and outspoken atheist. Of all the members of the coterie holbachique, the individuals he most admired and whose friendship he cultivated for the rest of his life were the Baron himself and Denis Diderof
the two principal exponents of atheistical materialism in the group. As
set fotth in the S y s t h e de la Nature (1770). Le Bon Sens (1772), and
La Morale universelle (1776)--three works published clandestinely after
Sterne's death-d'Holbachls philosophy codified the doctrines of atheism, materialism, and moral determinism that he had been refining for
years in conversations with the philosophes who frequented his salon.
For the Baron-reasoning from the sensationalist epistemology of Lock
and reducing Descartes's dualism to the single principle of mechanistic materialism-there was neither God nor soul; thought was merely
a mechanical operation of the brain; matter alone was immortal, and
the human will was strictly determined. Diderot, who with d'Alembert
had founded the Encyclopddie, was at first attracted to the benevolism
of Shaftesbury, whose Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit he translated
(1745); this was a doctrine that squared nicely with Sterne's own preference for the amiable moralism of the Latitudinarian divines. But Diderot
had come under the influence of d'Holbach-and of another figure to
whom Sterne explicitly alludes in A Sentimental Journey: namely, La
Mettrie, whose notion of l'homme machine, of the human being as a
9 Kors. p. 41.
10 Kors. D. 46.
S T E R N E A M O N G THE PHILOSOPHES 21
soulless, self-activating automaton, Diderot developed to its logical conclusion. By the time Sterne made his acquaintance Diderot, too, was
a confirmed materialist who considered that the various states of the
"soul" were entirely dependent on changes in the body. For Diderot in
the Reve de d'Alembert (1769). sensibilitk was a function merely of matter, which he, like d'Holbach, endowed with the capacity of motion. Like
d'Holbach, too, he denied the freedom of the will."
Sterne remained in Paris until July, when his wife and daughter joined
him and together they set off for Toulouse. All told, he had consorted
with the convivial atheists of the coterie holbachique for six months.
We may well ask what he thought of the lumihres and their pernicious
(to a priest presumably) doctrines. From a letter to the Reverend Henty
Egerton (recently discovered by Arthur H. Cash),l2 it is clear that he
found these men fascinating:
There is nothing in this place wSh has given me more pleasure than the Connections I have made w" yC Crebillons. D'Allemberg, Bufon, Diderot & the
rest of a large C i l e of men of wit & learning whom I meet twice a week
at Baron de Holbach's, & Pelletiers Tables-what makes these men truly entertaining & desirable, is, that they have the art, notwithstanding their W~ts,
of living together without biting or scratching--an infinitude of gaity & civility reigns among them--& w' is no small art. Every man leaves the Room wh
a better Opinion of his own Talents than when he entered.
It does not seem an exaggeration to say that Sterne's acquaintance
with the philosophes-that "large C i l e " of urbane and amiable infidels
whose company he delighted in-was the single most important experience of his time in France. After he left Paris in July 1762, he would
make a point of seeking out their company on three other occasions-in
the spring of 1764, when, leaving his wife and daughter behind in Montpellier, he made his way back to England; in the autumn of 1765, when,
his health worsening, he retwned to the Continent en mute to Italy; and
again in the spring of 1766 as he made his way home for the last time.
These ties with Baron d'Holbach "and the rest of the joyous sen"
(Letters, p. 258)-among them most particularly Didemt-were never
broken. Sterne's letters to Robert Foley, his banker in Paris and a person close to the Baron, show his desire to keep up a relationship he valued
11 On the development of Didcrot's thought, see A r m Vananinn, Didemf ondDcscane8:A SLvdy of
kimti$cNmmUsm in rhe Enli8hren-r
(Rinam: PrincetonUniversity Plg& 1953; =printed
Wcstpon, Conn.: Gncowood Rm, 1975).
12 Cash h r Years, p. 137.
22 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
highly. Soon after arriving in Toulouse in the summer of 1762, he wrote
Foley exulting over the fine house he had secured, with a "very great salle
a compagnie as large as the Baron D'Holbach's"; in closing, he asked Foley to convey "my best respects to my worthy Baron d'Holbach and all
that society-." From Toulouse in November a postscript admonished Foley: "forget me not to the baron--and all the circle-"; and in March of
the following year he reminded Foley to pay "my kind resp" to Baron
D'Holbach, & all his houshold-" (Letters, pp. 183-84, 189, 193). After stopping that spring in Paris on his way back to England to spend
a few days in the company of his friends there, he was concerned that
they should not forget him once he had crossed the Channel. Indeed,
he wished literally to keep his image fresh in their minds. From Coxwold, the pleasant Yorkshire village where he resided at "Shandy Hall,"
he wrote Foley in October, asking him to "present my most grate[ful]
resp" to the worthy Baron D'Holbach-I want to send him one of the best
Impressions of my Picture from Reynolds" (Leners, p. 231). Almost every one of his extant letters to those in Paris who had any connection
with d'Holbach closes with an affectionate salute to this hospitable autocrat, who, despite his reputation as the most radical, proselytizing atheist
in France, remained for Sterne "the good and worthy Baron D'Holbach"
(Letters, p. 290).
Sterne's friendship with Diderot was no less strong and lasting;
their relationshipboth personal and literary-is the subject of a booklength study by Alice Green Fredman.l3 Sterne's earliest reference to
Didemt, however-x rather to Diderot's sentimental drama Le Fils nururel (1757). which he was reading in an uninspired translation by Mrs
Griffith-was less than enthusiastic. This "lady of talents" having asked
h i to recommend her version for the stage, Sterne wmte to Garrick
in April 1762 denouncing it: "It has too much sentiment in it, (at least
for me) the speeches too long, and savour too much of preaching-this
may be a second reason, it is not to my taste-'lis all love, love, love,
throughout" (Letters, p. 162). Preaching, sentiment, love-one would not
expect these particular objections from a priest who was also in the process of establishing the novel of sensibility; no doubt what Sterne missed
in Diderot's play-or more precisely in Mrs Griffith's version of it-was
a quality he valued above all others: a sense of humour. The friendship between the two men was nevertheless well established by the time
Sterne wrote his publisher a month later to order a present of English
13 Alice Green Fedman, Didcmt nnd S t e m (New York: Columbia University Ress. 1955).
STERNE AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES 23
books for Diderot. At first glance, his choice of authors seems strangely
discrepant:
All The Works of Pope--the neatest & cheapest Edition-+therefore I suppose
not Warburtons)
The Dramatick Works of C i b b e r 4 Cibbers Life-Chaucer
Tillotson's Sermons-the small editionAll Lock's works.
the 6 Vols. of Shandy-NB. These place to my Acc' for they are fw a present
to him- (Letters,p. 166)
A curious selection of authors, perhaps, but one that presumably reflects the subjects these two literary friends had been discussing at the
Baron's salon. Steme surely hoped Diderot would find his present of
books both entertaining and intellectually enlightening. Most interesting
in view of Diderot's atheism, which, as Aram Vartanian has shown, owes
more to the followers of Descartes than to the tradition of British empiricism, are two of Sterne's selections in particular: these are, first, the
sermons of his favourite divine John lillotson, fomerlv Archbisho~of
Canterbury and one of the most effective exponents of thd rationalist, i a t itudinarian religion to which Sterne subscribed; and, second, the complete
works of John k k e , author of An Essay concerning Human ~ n d e r s h d ing (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianiry ( 1 6 9 5 F t o mention
the two works that seem most relevant in this context-and the philosopher whose writings Steme is said to have valued next to the Bible.
It was another member of d'Holbach's coterie, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine
Suard, who listened attentively as Steme spoke of the extraordinary importance he attached to Locke's philosophy. Suard having asked him
how he might account for his genius, Steme replied as follows (I quote
from Cash's helpful summary):
His "originality:' he explained, derived from an organization of personality in
which predominated the principle of creativity, which Steme labelled "sacred"an "immortal flame which nourishes and devours life, which exalts and varies
surprisingly the sensations." The word sensations tips us off that he was thinking
of Locke's epistemology. Sterne did not mean to compliment himself in the
remark; he simply understood from Locke that sensations and the principles
which operated upon them were sawed. This ptinciple, he went on, "is called
imagi~tionor sensibiliry, depending on whether it shows itself in the pen of
the writer, in painting, or in the passions of men." Secondly, Steme attributed
his originality to "the daily reading of the Old and New Testaments, books
to his taste and suited to his position." 7Iudly. he gave credit to the study
24 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
of Locke, "taken up in his youth and continued all of his life." Locke was,
in his opinion, "religious," in fact, "too religious to undertake any explanation
of the miracle of sensation [the very undertaking, we may note, in which the
French materialists had been so confidently engaged for decades], much less
to expect God' to account for it." Locke, founding his philosophy upon this
miracle of sensation, had been able to explain "all the secrets of understanding
and the ways to avoid error, arriving at those truths which are accessiblea holy philosophy, without which there will never be on earth either a true
universal religion or a true morality or a true power of man over nature.""
What Sterne would make of Locke's "holy philosophy" of sensation and
sensibility-by which man could define himself as beiig at once distinct
from, yet in harmony with, nature--will be clear when we come to consider A Sentimental Journey. If he hoped that Diderot would discover
for himself a religious significance in Locke's sensationalist epistemology, he was of course disappointed. Diderot remained faithful to a wholly
secular philosophy, in which, according to his theory of la senribilit6universelle, all nature, whether living or inert, was a unified system of mere
matter. But this fundamental difference between priest and philosophe
never seriously divided them. Didemt received Sterne's present of books
in August, and in October, having read the first six volumes of Tristram Shnndy,the most eccentric novel in the English language, he wrote
Sophie Volland his opinion of Sterne's bizarre masterpiece:
Ce livre si fou, si sage et si gai est le Raklais des Anglois. ... II est impossible
de vous en donner une autre id& que celle d'une satyre universelle. M. Stern
qui en est I'auteur est aussi un pr&tre."
In hi own novel, Jacques le fatalisre (written 1773, published 1796).
Diderot would pay Sterne the compliment of attempting to imitate Tristram S W y . For his part, in his letters to the friends they had in common
in Paris, Sterne continued to remember Diderot, as well as d'Holbach,
singling out these two by name from all the baron's "joyous sen" (Letters, pp. 254, 275). For their part, these two formidable atheists counted
their friendship for Sterne a more compelling cause than their phiiosophies. When, on 25 March 1764, Sterne preached in the chapel at the
British Embassy in Paris, Diderot and d'Holbach (not to mention Hume
and John Wilkes!) were in the congregation.16 And in January 1766,
14 Early Y a m . pp. 2067.
15 Denis DidLcrmsd Sophie W l h d , ed. A&
16 Cash Lorrr Y w , p. 185;Kors. p. 112.
Babelon (Paris: Gallimard. 19M),219695.
26 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
when volumes 3 and 4 of Sterne's Sermons were published, d'Holbach
and Diderot were among the subscribers.17
In A Sentimental Journey the philosophy of materialism that he had
heard these two friends expound many times in the Baron's salon is explicitly associated with another radical French philosopher whom Steme
never met. This was Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who died in 1751, some
ten years before Sterne first set foot in France. A physician by profession,
a philosopher by inclination, La Mettrie had mastered the physiology of
Boerhaave and, by emptying Descartes's dualism of its spiritual dimension, applied to man Descartes's teaching that animals are mere machines.
L'Homme machine (1747). La Mettrie's most famous work, set forth
this doctrine forcefully and earned him, in Vartanian's words, the role of
"prophet and guiding spirit" of the Enlightenment:
The author of L'Homm machine laid down the first and most radical materialist
thesis of the period. His automatist conception, put from 1748 at the philosophes'
disposal, soon found application in a fuller ideological context. It was mainly
through La Memie's efforts that Cartesian mechanistic biology, together with
its consequences for moral determinism, became the basis of a consistently
materialistic view of man.'"
Sterne's friends d'Holbach and Diderot built their own systems of atheistic materialism on this foundation.
By the time he came to write A Sentimental Journey this same radical
philosophy-given impetus by Locke's speculation that God may have
added to matter the power of thought--had become the subject of controversy in England, pitting materialists against immaterialist^.^^ Among
the most brilliant-and therefore (to those who clung to the old beliefs in
God, soul, and freedom of will) among the most pernicious--advocates
of this "hideous hyp~thesis"~~
was David Hume; and during his tenure
as secretary to Lord Hertford, the English ambassador at Paris, Hume
regularly made one of the company of affable atheists at d'Holbach's salon. During his sojourns in Paris in 1764 and 1765, Sterne came to know
Hume-well enough, indeed, despite Hume's philosophy, to call him
17 Cash. LUer Years, p. 234.
18 VaRanian, p. 203.
19 John W. Yolton. Thinking M&c Materidism in Eightecnfh-Cmfury Britnin (Minneapolis: Univusity of Minnesota Press. 1983), p. 14. Yolton has menfly extended the scope of his s ~ d y
of LocWs idusnee in this regard to include fhe French msterialists: see Lock a d F m h
Moteriolism (Oxfnd: C h n d o n Press, 1991).
20 Yolton. T7ti&ng Matvr, chap. 3.
STERNE AMONG THE P H I L O S O P H E S 27
by his Christian name. In A Sentimental Journey he even preserved for
us a snatch of Hume's conversation, overheard at Lord Hertford's table, describing him as "a man of an excellent heattw21In his letters,
Sterne remembered another moment at this same table when he and
Hume engaged in "a little pleasant sparring": "David," Sterne recalled,
"was disposed to make a little merry with the Parson; and, in return,
the Parson was equally disposed to make a Linle mirth with the Infidel ... [I]n my life," Sterne declared, "did I never meet with a beimg of
a more placid and gentle nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character, that has given more consequence and force to his scepticism, than
all the arguments of his sophistry" (Letters, p. 218).
These four lumi2res4'Holbach. Diderot, their late mentor La Methie, and the expatriate Scot, David Hume-comprised Sterne's French
connection with the radical materialism of the Enlightenment. In 1767, as
he struggled to write A Sentimental Journey in the intervals between attacks of consumption that were becoming ever more frequent and severe,
Sterne could hardly help turning his thoughts to the weighty questions
he and his friends had discussed over so many good dinners in Parisquestions now no longer merely of academic interest to him, but as
important as the validity of the religion he professed and the question
of whether or not he had a soul to be saved. A Sentimental Journey-his "Work of Redemption," as he called it-is in a way the continuation of
that "pleasant sparring" between Sterne the parson and the philosophes.
From this perspective, the comic ambiguity of the novel's famous
opening sentence deepens:
-They order, said I, this matter better in France- (p. 65)
What, one has always wondered, is "this matter" that the French have
ordered so impressi~ely?~~
(Steme, we notice, has not written "these matters," the more usual idiom in a context so ill-defined; or "these things,"
21 Laurence Stme, A Sentimental Joumy tkmugk France LYtd Italy, ed. Oardner D. Stout. Ir.
(Berkeley and Lns Angel-: University of California Ress, 1967), p. 122. References arc to lhis
edition.
22 For an interesting yerpMng t k meaning of '2'4,nigmatique p & r e phrape" of A Sentimmtal Journey from a pcrspeaive d i k n t horn but noc inmmpatible with, my own, see
FcOg&. 'This Matter? Betrer in France? Laurence Stem U Ie Yoynge Smtimnml," LL
Continent EumpCcn et k mnde Anglo-Adricain nur XVIF rt xVIII( si2clrs (Reins. 1987), 515. For two cent& Fi-ench translators have strvggled to convey the s%ue of Steme's puzzling
first xnlencs, which has been variously rrnderrd as follows: "Cstte atlaire est mievx dgl& en
France" (by Frenais in 1770); "'En France,' dis-je, 'on entend mieux cela!"' (by Tassel in 1866,
see Wan W. Hamilton. "Steme's Sentimental Jououmev in Fmnch Verse Translatiw:' Du Wrk
28 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
the idiom Tom Paine thought Steme had used when he alluded to the sentence in The Rights of Man,defending the Revolution against Burke.)=
The better ordering (or org~nisation)~
of la matilre-investing it with
life and sensibilite', and making it the sole governing and immortal principle of Nature-was indeed the business Sterne's friends the philosophes
were engaged in. The likely consequences of such a reordering of values are at once humorously suggested by the valet's cheeky reply to
Yorick's pronouncement, and the parson resolves to discover what it is
in France that has so shaken the order of things as he has known it.
-You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with
the most civil triumph in the world.Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with
myself, That one and twenty miles sailing, for 'tis absolutely no further from
Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights-I'll look into them. @. 65)
Critics have puzzled over the opening sections of Sterne's narrative,
in which Yorick is revealed as a hypocritical egoist, who, after congratulating himself on the benevolence of his sentiments, refuses charity to
a poor monk. What I believe Sterne intended in these paragraphs, however, was not to ridicule his parsons (with whom he elsewhere always
identified); he meant rather to dramatize the materialist view of man expounded by the philosophes in order that he might reconcile with the
doctrines of his religion those elements of their system that seemed to
him persuasive.%To La Mettrie, for instance-the state of the soul being
que pouvait avoir le mot 'mamr'" (p. 5). He pmposM instead, "11s font p mieux" or "On fail
Fa mieux en Fmce" (p. 13). But none of these renderings succeeds in conveying the weighty
ambiguity
. . of Seme's English. 'They order ... Ulis DIIlncr" (my emphasis).
Thamas Paine, The Rights of Man, in lbo Classics of the French R~volvlionItoguhcr with
Edmund Burke, Rcficrions on the Revolution in Fmnccl (New Ymk: Doubleday Anchor, 1989),
0. 314. Paioc thus concludrr a oararwoh criI$&hEthe wential for cmDtiw in the E n-a s h
System offaxation: ' m y ads;& kgs
~ - i &m
n e:
Cf, Vananian on the P m c h msfcrialists of this period, who "amibutsd all human fundons,
including life, sensibility. the passions, and in ths end intelligence itself, to the physical wnstiNtion, or, in Didmot's favwrie term, to 'I'wganiwion'" (p. 204).
The view of Yorickas the butt of Seme's pusistent mockery in A Scntintcntd Journey originated
with Rufus Putney. 'The Evolution of A Smtimntd Journey," Philologicd Q w r r r l y 19 (1940).
349-69, and "Laurence Steme, Aposle of LsughW," 77u Age of Johnson: Essays Pnsentcd to
Clvurmey Brewster llnkcr (New Haven: Yale University Ress. 1949). pp. 159-70; and Ernest
N. Dilworth % Umcm'mntal Journey of Loureme Sterne (New Yo*: King's Cmwn Ress,
1948). Wr mv awn.. mare oositive intermmion. see "A Sentimntd Journev and ths Svntax
of 'Ilhgs," in AugUstan k r l d s , ed. 1.6.~ilson;M.M.B. lones, and I.R. wmon (~ci&aer:
LcicesW University Rrrs, 1978). pp. 22M9.
In an crsclknl essay John A Dussmpr reached a srrmlar mncluaton, placlng S m , however, m
the conext om of the Prcnch ma(walms, but of Bnurh n a n d phlosophy See 'Thc Searonum
m the World of 'A Senhmcnlal Jloumsy.'" And 13 (1982). 3-16 Alro mkvanl lo my lnercsts
in mis present essay is lams ~ o d g e k ."Sensibility, Sympathy. Benevolence: Physiology and
~
23
24
25
.
26
~
STERNE AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES 29
entirely dependent on the condition of the body--our generous sentiments are the inevitable consequence of a good dinner." Yorick's first
act upon landing at Calais is to sit down to a meal of fricasseed chicken
and a bottle of burgundy. Having filled his belly, he raises a glass to the
king of France, declares his love for the entire French nation, and affects to despise "this world's goods," which petty men prize more than
friendship:
When man is at peace with man [Yorick opines], how much lighter than a feather
is the heaviest of metals in his hand! he pulls out his purse, and holding it airily
and uncompress'd, looks round him, as if he sought for an object to share it
with-In doing this, I felt every vessel in my frame dilak-the arteries beat
all chearily together, and every power which sustained life, pcrform'd it with
so little friction, that 'twould have confounded the most physical precieuse in
France: with all her materialism, she could not have called me a machine-I'm confident, said I to myself. I should have overset her creed. (pp. 68-69)
Well might La Mettrie exclaim: "Quelle puissance d'un Repas!"z"a
Mettrie and his followers would also have noticed about this passage
Sterne's emphasis on what one might call the mechanics of Yorick's
altruism, its physiological basis. The bodily effects of the meal Yorick
has eaten are recorded with the care of an anatomist: the warm blood
suffuses his cheek, the vessels in his frame dilate, his arteries "beat
all chearily t o g e t h e r " 4 l with the minimum of "friction." Yorick may
believe that his generous feelings confirm the flattering view of man set
forth by the l i e s of Shaftesbury and the Latitudinarian divines. But there
is in fact nothing here, so far, to contradict the materialism of l'homme
machine.
The point is underscored a moment later when Yorick's complacent
sense of his benevolence is put to the test by a Franciscan monk who
begs alms for his convent. The parson's access of generosity is instantly
dispelled by the more fundamental passion of self-love. What Yorick
now seems to confirm is the cynical tradition of Hobbes and Mandeville,
of L'Esprit and La Rochefoucauld-the tradition tracing all our actions
to motives of self-interest. Confronting the gentle monk, Yorick indeed
seems the very allegory of solipsism, an individual centred and shut up
in Self: "I put my purse into my pocket-Autton'd it u p - s e t myself a
M o d Philosophy in Trirrmm Shady? kulgUn8es of Noan: Critical Essays on Science Md
Iiteraun,ed. LJ.Jordanwa (London: Prec Assaeiation Books, 1986).
27 L a Muxi+ Lo Menrie's "L'Homnu M w h i ~ "A: Study in the 0"ginr of on Idea, ed. Arum
VananLyl (Princeton: Rioaton University Rcss, 1%0), p. 154.
28 La Memie, p. 155.
30 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PICTION
little more upon my centre, and advanced up gravely to him: there was
something, I fear, forbidding in my look" (p. 70).
Steme carries his anatomy of egoism still further, glancing next at
the morally debilitating argument for determinism that formed an essential part of the philosophes' materialism. According to their system, the
human animal acts strictly according to the impulse of whichever passion happens to be uppermost. Since therefore the will is not free, but as
La Mettrie and d'Holbach saw it, wholly governed by the laws of physics,
questions of the individual's moral responsibility are meaningless:
No man [Yorick muses ruefully] cares to have his virtues the sport of contingencies ... for there is no regular reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our
humours; they may depend upon the same causes, for ought I know, which influence the tides themselves-'twould be no discredit to us, to suppose it was
so: I'm sure at least for myself, that in many a case I should be more highly satisfied, to have it said by the world, "I had had an affair with the moon, in which
there was neither sin nor shame," than have it pass altogether as my own act
and deed, wherein there was so much of both.
-But be this as it may. The moment I cast my eyes upon him, I was
predetermined not to give h i a single sous. (p. 70)
In these early sections of the novel-and in his emphasis throughout on
the physiology of sentiment, on the innumerable ways in which our bodies serve as inlets to the s o u l S t e m e pays tribute to the philosophes. But
just as he accepted Locke's empiricism--believing it to be a "holy phiiosophy" because sensations, which Suard tells us he considered "sacred,"
were the bases both of the creative imagination and of moral sensibilityso Steme in A Sentimental Journey meant to reconcile body and soul,
the laws of physiology and the freedom of the will. Though he is comical enough in his backsliding and harmless philandering, Yorick is not the
butt of Steme's satire, but his spokesman and alter ego. Though he may
abuse his conscience (a subject on which Steme in his sermon by that title had written, in Voltaire's opinion, "the best Uling perhaps that was
ever said9'B about how readiiy we deceive ourselves by rationalizing our
faults), he nevertheless has a conscience. "My heart smote me the moment [the poor monk] shut the door. I have behaved very ill; said I
within myself; but I have only just set out upon my travels; and shall
learn better manners as I get along" (p. 75).
Of the passions that serve our self-interest there was one, in Steme's
view, that, if properly understood and cultivated, could lead us out of the
...
29 Cash, Eorly Years, p. 234.
STERNE AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES 31
prison of the self: this was sexual desire. Having resisted the temptation
posed by the pretty $Me de chambre, Yorick is understandably a little
vexed with his prudish readers:
Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your
passions-tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them? or how his
spirit stands answerable, to the father of spirits, but for his conduct under them?
If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and
desire ate entangled with the piece-must the whole web be rent in drawing
them out?-Whip me such stoics, great governor of nature! said I to myselfWherever thy providence shall place me for the trials of my virtue-whatever is
my danger-whatever is my situation-let me feel the movements which rise out
of it, and which belong to me as a man-and if I govern them as a good oneI will bust the issues to thy justice, for thou hast made us--and not we ourselves.
(pp. 237-38)
It is Eros, "the God whose empire extendeth from heaven to earth, and
even to the depths of the sea," whose power reforms the vile town of
Abdera: "the whole city, like the heart of one man, open'd itself to
Love" (p. 131). Proving still further the power of the god, the sparrows
outside the window of the grave and learned Bevoriskius make love
"three and twenty times and a half' in the time he needs to finish a note
in his commentary on the generations from Adam: "How merciful, adds
Bevoriskius, is heaven to his creatures!" (pp. 228-29). Indeed, in his
understanding that our sexuality is the common denominator that unifies
men and women and takes possession of our imagination, Steme can be
shown to have anticipated Freud."
By sentimentalizing eroticism, Sterne-manages even to make it the
instrument of his religion. Yorick travels with the picture of his Eliza
hung about his neck because, as he assures the innkeeper at Montreuil,
he has
been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go
on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must
be in some interval betwixt one passion and another: whilst this interregnum
lasts, I always perceive my heart locked u p 4 can scarce find in it, to give
Misery a sixpence; and therefore I always get out of it as fast as I can, and the
moment I am rekindled, I am all generosity and good will again; and would do
any thing in the world either for, or with any one, if they will but satisfy me
there is no sin in it. @p. 128-29)
30 See A.R. Towers's excellent but neglected essay on msrmm Shady, "Stwae's Cock and Bull
Story," ELH 24 (1957). 12-29.
32 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
At Versailles in order to secure a passport, Yorick assures the Count de
Bissy that he has come on his journey not to spy on France, but
to spy the nakedness of [the women's] hearts, and through the different disguises
of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my
own by-and therefore am I come.
It is for this reason, Monsieur le Compte, continued I, that I have not seen the
Palaise royal-nor the Luxembourg-nor the Facade of the Louvre-nor have
attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churchesI conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the
original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the transfiguration of
Raphael itself.
The thirst of this, continued I, as impatient as that which inflames the breast
of the connoisseur, has led me from my own home into France ...'tis a quiet
journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which rise out
of her, which make us love each other-and the world, better than we do. @p.
217-19)
It is not easy to find points of comparison between Sterne and D.H.
Lawrence, but in their different ways they are perhaps alone among
major English novelists in attempting to impart a religious significance
to er~ticism.~'
Nearing the end of his journey through France, Yorick
seeks out Maria, the unfortunate girl who lost her reason when she lost
her lover, and sits down by her side to comfort her. In so doing, he
discovers within himself a capacity for sympathy and selfless affection
beyond what the systems of La Mettrie and d'Holbach can account f o r
I sat down close by hes; and Maria let me wipe [her tears] away as they fell
with my handkerchief.-I then steep'd it in my own-and then in hers--and
then in mine-and then I wip'd hers again-and as I did it. I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any
combinations of matter and motion.
I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists
have pester'd the world ever convince me of the contrary. (p. 271)
By way of preparing us for this pivotal episode, Sterne recreates in the
preceding chapter a sort of synoptic vignette of his experience in the
worldly salons of Paris. Yorick represents himself to us as the clever
champion of his faith among a crowd of foolish infidels:
31 Thus Melinda AUiLcr Rabb hap noticed that for Stcme "sexual smusal beeoms a reminder of
the spirit; it is a psitive good promising redemption." "Enpndcring Amounts in Stcrae's A
SenIiwnrol lourncy:' Johnson ond His Age, ed. J a m s Bnpl. Harvard English Studies w . 12
(Cambridge: Harvard University k s . 1984). pp. 531-58, esp. pp. 555-56.
34 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
There are three epochas in the empire of a French-woman-[he explains] She
is coquette-then
deist-then devote: the empire during these is never lostshe only changes her subjects: when thirty-five years and more have unpeopled
her dominions of the slaves of love, she repeoples it with slaves of infidelityand then with the slaves of the Church.
Madame de V*** was vibrating betwixt the first of these epochas: the colour
of the mse was shading fast away--she ought to have been a deist five years
before I had the honour to pay my first visit.
She placed me upon the same sopha with her, for the sake of disputing the
point of religion more closely.-In short, Madame de V***told me she believed
nothing.
I told Madame de Vg** it might be her principle; but I was sure it could not
be her interest to level the outworks, without which I could not conceive how
such a citadel as hers could be defended-that there was not a more dangerous
thing in the world, than for a beauty to be a deist-that it was a debt I owed
my creed, not to conceal it from hcr-that I had not been five minutes sat upon
the sopha besides her, but I had begun to form designs-and what is it, but the
sentiments of religion, and the persuasion they had existed in her breast, which
could have checlt'd them as they rose up.
We are not adamant, said I, taking hold of her hand-and there is need of all
restraints, till age in her own time steals in and lays them on us--but, my dear
lady, said I, kissing her hand-'tis too-tm soonI declare [Yorick concludes] I had the credit all over Paris of unpewerting
Madame de V***.--She affirmed to Mons. Dtiderot] and the Abbe M[orelletl,
that in one half hour I had said more for revealed religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it-I was l i M directly into Madame de V***'s
Coterie-and she put off the epocha of deism for two years. @p. 263-65)
In one important respect, Steme's sojourn among the materialists of
Paris can be seen to have had a powerful effect on the faith he continued
to profess, for in A Sentimental Journey that faith is scarcely distinguishable from the naturalism of the philosophes. The religion Sterne
recommends has been thoroughly secularized. The symbols, sacraments,
even the scriptures of the Church have been redefined in human terms, in
terms of that "true universal religion" that Locke's "holy philosophy" had
made possible. It is a natural religion in which the sacred elements are instinct, love, and sensibility. What matters here to Sterne is, as it were, the
hwnan face of Christ, not the orthodox doctrines of grace or of the redeeming efficacy of the crucifixion. The snuffbox Yorick receives from
the monk as a token of forgiveness and reconciliation becomes for him
a kind of homely thurible, bearing the incense of sweet charity: "I guard
this box, as I would the instrumental parts of my religion [Yorick declares], to help my mind on to something better
many a time have I
...
STERNE A M O N G THE P H I L O S O P H E S 35
called up by it the courteous spirit of its owner to regulate my own, in
the justlings of the world" (p. 101). Later, in the celebrated apostrophe
to "Dear sensibility" inspired by his feelings of compassion for Maria,
Sterne in effect rewrites several of the most famous passages of scripture in terms of this new religious naturalism-first, by assuring us that
the very hairs of o w heads are numbered and cannot fall to the ground
without God's knowledge and permission,)* then by finding Christ, the
Good Shepherd, in the person of "the roughest peasant who traverses
the bleakest mountains-he finds the lacerated lamb of another's flockThis moment I beheld him leaning with his head against his crook, with
piteous inclination looking down upon it--Oh! had I come one moment
sooner!-it bleeds to death-his gentle heart bleeds with it-" (p. 279).
Indeed, in language not far removed from Diderot's concept of la semibilite' universelle, Yorick addresses God as the "great-great SENSORIUM
of the world!" (p. 278).
But this process of humanizing his faith reaches a climax in the
two following chapters, entitled "The Supper" and "The Grace." In the
first of these, the eucharist (which Sterne usually called "The Lord's
Supper")33-the central sacrament of his Anglican faith-becomes simply
the homely meal Yorick shares with a peasant family:
They were all sitting down together to their lentil-soup; a large wheaten loaf
was in the middle of the table; and a flaggon of wine at each end of it promised
joy t h d the stages of the repast-'twas a feast of love. (p. 281)
And in "The Grace" which follows, the family, properly scrubbed and
dressed out of respect for the occasion, express their gratitude to God by
dancing:
It was not [Yorick says] till the middle of the second dance, when, from some
pauses in the movement wherein they all seemed to look up, I fancied I could
distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which is the cause or the
effect of simple jollity.-In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the
dance-but as I had never seen her so engaged, I should have look'd upon it
now, as one of the illusions of an imagination which is eternally misleading me,
had not the old man,as soon as the dance ended, said, that this was their constant
way; and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to
call out his family to dance and rejoice; believing, he said, that a cheamtl and
32 Stout tiles the followmg biblical texts: Matthew 1099-31. Luke, 127, 1 Samuel 1445.2 Samuel
1411, and 1 Kings 152. Also Steme's Sernonr: 'Without [God's] knowledge and permigsim
we h o w that not a hair of w heads can fall to tk p n d " (ScnfiwnrdJourney, p. 27811).
33 See, for instance, item 10 in S m ' s reply to tk Archbishop of York's Visitation Questio~ah(Letter& p. 217).
36 BIGHTBENTH-CENTURY FICTION
contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant
could pay--Or a l m e d prelate either, said I. (p. 284)
Intellectually, then, it appears that Steme's relationship with the
phibsophes was decidedly ambivalent. As a priest of course he condemned their atheism. His sermons resound with complaints against the
errors of materialism and "the rough usage" our human nature "has met
with from the satirical pens of so many of the French writers." "There
is nothing," he wams in his homily on the Prodigal Son, "in which we
are so much deceived, as in the advantages proposed from our connections and discourse with the literati, kc., in foreign parts; especially if the
experiment is made before we are matured by years of study.'msAnd elsewhere he reproves those men of parts and leaming who choose to mock
revealed religion: their arguments, he declares, have "scarce any other
foundation to rest on but the sinking credit of traditional and secondhand objections against revelation, which, had they leisure to read, they
would find answered and confuted a thousand times over."% One t h i s
in this context of his gift to Didemt of lillotson's sermons and the works
of Locke. Yet there can be no question that he admired the clever men
he met at Baron d'Holbach's house in Paris, or that he found something
at once disturbing and compelling in their system of l'homrne muchinesomething that may help us better understand the "naturalizing" of his
religion in A Sentimental Journey and his attempts there to find a place
for the soul in the body.
University of V~rginia
34 Laurrncc Stwne, Sermons ( 1 7 M ) . Vol. 5 in 2 parts. The Compleu W o k &Life of k n n c c
S t e m , cd. Wilbur L. Cmss (New Yo& and London: Taylor, 1W4, rephod, 1970). 1:114.
35 Sermons, 1:332-33.
36 Sermons, 2151.