The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [255]
Now the devil in hell must be in it, if this does not do: for consider, Sir, as every man chuses to be present at the shaving of his own beard (though there is no rule without an exception) and unavoidably sits overagainst himself the whole time it is doing, in case he has a hand in it—the Situation, like all others, has notions of her own to put into the brain.——
——I maintain it, the conceits of a rough-bearded man, are seven years more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity—How Homer could write with so long a beard, I don’t know——and as it makes against my hypothesis, I as little care——But let us return to the Toilet.
Ludovicus Sorbonensis4 makes this entirely an affair of the body () as he calls it——but he is deceived: the soul and body are joint-sharers5 in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath’d at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him—so that he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and write like himself.
For this cause, when your honours and reverences would know whether I writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by looking into my Laundress’s bill, as my book: there was one single month in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abus’d, curs’d, criticis’d and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of that year put together.
——But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills.
CHAP. XIV
As I never had any intention of beginning the Digression, I am making all this preparation for, till I come to the 15th chapter——I have this chapter to put to whatever use I think proper——I have twenty this moment ready for it——I could write my chapter of Button-holes in it——
Or my chapter of Pishes, which should follow them——
Or my chapter of Knots, in case their reverences have done with them——they might lead me into mischief: the safest way is to follow the tract of the learned, and raise objections against what I have been writing, tho’ I declare beforehand, I know no more than my heels how to answer them.
And first, it may be said, there is a pelting kind of thersitical1 satire, as black as the very ink ’tis wrote with——(and by the bye, whoever says so, is indebted to the muster-master general of the Grecian army, for suffering the name of so ugly and foul-mouth’d a man as Thersites to continue upon his roll——for it has furnished him with an epithet)——in these productions he will urge, all the personal washings and scrubbings upon earth do a sinking genius2 no sort of good——but just the contrary, inasmuch as the dirtier the fellow is, the better generally he succeeds in it.
To this, I have no other answer——at least ready——but that the Archbishop of Benevento wrote his nasty Romance of the Galatea,3 as all the world knows, in a purple coat, waistcoat, and purple pair of breeches; and that the penance set him of writing a commentary upon the book of the Revelations, as severe as it was look’d upon by one part of the world, was far from being deem’d so, by the other, upon the single account of that Investment.
Another objection, to all this remedy, is its want of universality; forasmuch as the shaving part of it, upon which so much stress is laid, by an unalterable law of nature excludes one half of the species