The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [94]
Now, Sir, if I conduct you home again into this warmer and more luxuriant island, where you perceive the spring tide of our blood and humours runs high,19—where we have more ambition, and pride, and envy, and lechery, and other whoreson passions upon our hands to govern and subject to reason,—the height of our wit and the depth of our judgment, you see, are exactly proportioned to the length and breadth of our necessities,—and accordingly, we have them sent down amongst us in such a flowing kind of decent and creditable plenty, that no one thinks he has any cause to complain.
It must however be confessed on this head, that, as our air blows hot and cold,——wet and dry, ten times in a day, we have them in no regular and settled way;——so that sometimes for near half a century together, there shall be very little wit or judgment, either to be seen or heard of amongst us:——the small channels of them shall seem quite dried up,—then all of a sudden the sluices shall break out, and take a fit of running again like fury,——you would think they would never stop:——and then it is, that in writing and fighting, and twenty other gallant things, we drive all the world before us.
It is by these observations, and a wary reasoning by analogy in that kind of argumentative process, which Suidas calls dialectick induction,20—that I draw and set up this position as most true and veritable:
That of these two luminaries, so much of their irradiations are suffered from time to time to shine down upon us; as he, whose infinite wisdom which dispenses every thing in exact weight and measure, knows will just serve to light us on our way in this night of our obscurity; so that your reverences and worships now find out, nor is it a moment longer in my power to conceal it from you, That the fervent wish in your behalf with which I set out, was no more than the first insinuating How d’ye21 of a caressing prefacer stifling his reader, as a lover sometimes does a coy mistress22 into silence. For alas! could this effusion of light have been as easily procured, as the exordium wished it—I tremble to think how many thousands for it, of benighted travellers (in the learned sciences at least) must have groped and blundered on in the dark, all the nights of their lives,23—running their heads against posts, and knocking out their brains without ever getting to their journies end;——some falling with their noses perpendicularly into stinks,—others horizontally with their tails into kennels.24 Here one half of a learned profession tilting full butt25 against the other half of it, and then tumbling and rolling one over the other in the dirt like hogs.——Here the brethren, of another profession, who should have run in opposition to each other, flying on the contrary like a flock of wild geese, all in a row the same way.—What confusion!—what mistakes!—fiddlers and painters judging by their eyes and ears,—admirable!—trusting to the passions excited in an air sung, or a story painted to the heart,——instead of measuring them by a quadrant.
In the foreground of this picture, a statesman turning the political wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round—against the stream of corruption,—by heaven!—instead of with it.
In this corner, a son of the divine Esculapius,26 writing a book against predestination; perhaps worse,—feeling his patient’s pulse, instead of his apothecary’s—a brother of the faculty in the back ground upon his knees in tears,—drawing the curtains of a mangled victim to beg his forgiveness;—offering a fee,—instead of taking one.
In that