'Yet I Ride the Little Horse'

If I bothered to think about it as a kid, I knew a hobby-horse was an already antiquated children’s toy, a rocking chair with a wooden horse replacing the seat. A child with abundant energy and imagination could teeter all day with the Seventh Cavalry. Laurence Sterne taught me otherwise in Tristram Shandy. 

In our psychology-obsessed age, we might call a hobby-horse, in Sterne’s sense, an obsession, a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In Sterne’s novel, Walter Shandy obsesses on his prolific, vacuous theories, utterly unattached to reality – a fine parody of intellectuals. Uncle Toby’s hobbyhorse is military strategy and construction of his bowling-green battlefield. His servant, Corporal Trim, revels in the sound of his own voice. Sterne treats hobby-horses as comedy fodder. In real life, they are more likely to be tedious, especially hobby-horses of the political variety, now a virtual plague upon the land.  Sterne concludes his seventh chapter like this:

 

“Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”

 

And begins Chapter 8 like this: “—De gustibus non est disputandum;—that is, there is no disputing against HOBBY-HORSES; and for my part, I seldom do . . .” In other words, cranks are best left alone. When challenged, some can be dangerous and all certainly are boring.

 

I returned to hobby-horses when reading an 1814 letter Coleridge wrote to John Murray, in which he transforms the noun into an adjective: “a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of Duty.” I poked a little deeper and realized Tristram Shandy had already applied Coleridge’s coinage to his Uncle Toby: “The generous (tho’ hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle.”

 

Start looking and you’ll find hobby-horses everywhere, even in disguise, and most often among English writers – Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Darwin. In his final letter, written in Rome on November 30, 1820, to his friend Charles Brown, Keats makes what scholars take as a muted reference to the pun-loving Sterne, a writer he hobby-horsically read:

 

“I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, – and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life.”