'Provided That He Gives Us What We Can Enjoy'

A reader is enjoying Tristram Shandy and passing along choice selections from Sterne’s novel. This she gleaned from Book V, Chap. 32, spoken by Tristram’s father: 

“—Here is the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors, governors, gerund-grinders, and bear-leaders, to view themselves in, in their true dimensions.--”

 

Let’s keep in mind what Sterne writes two paragraphs earlier: “Everything in this world, said my father, is big with jest,—and has wit in it, and instruction too,--if we can but find it out.”

 

Gerund-grinders I love. See the entry for it in Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “a schoolteacher, esp. a pedant; thus gerund-grinding, instruction in Latin grammar, pedantic instruction generally.” It’s unfair to single out Latin teachers. No subject is immune to dull instructors. I had two Latin teachers, both women, both demanding, both excellent. The subject was difficult but they were not.

 

My reader may be Sterne’s ideal reader. She’s blessed with brains, a sense of humor and “negative capability.” In Keats’ words, she is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason— . . .” She’s lapping up Sterne’s eccentricities without complaint. In this she reminds me of another reader, George Eliot, who read Tristram Shandy aloud to George Henry Lewes as she was preparing to write her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). In “Story-Telling,” a brief essay posthumously published in Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (1884), she writes:

 

“Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author’s idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy? The objections to Sterne’s wild way of telling ‘Tristram Shandy’ lie more solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the fact of interruption. The dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in their own minds. They are like the topers of ‘one liquor.’”