Spenser has Britomart on guard in the enchanter’s house
Reading over every iron door ‘Be bold’,
And on and on ‘Be bold’, until over the last door
‘Be not too bold.’
One might vary it: ‘Be plain,
Be sad, true, deep’—see with the addition how they do.
But for the bundle we have here (including
Not only the diary and letters found in a loft
Among lumber and waste paper by a boy
Who played and rummaged) the only right word is ‘Be late.’
Which is, even with ‘Be not too late’, I daresay
No famous old device, but vows to serve Eliza
And Yorick and the Journal to Eliza,
And will fit it down to the opening, out of things unknown
And just as he left it, the first pages gone,
Sent after her; when Sterne, worn by so many fevers
But most that of his heart, sits with her picture
Alone, pale and bereft, in Bond Street:
‘O my Bramine,
my friend, my helpmate!’
The Lord Chatham her ship,
East Indiaman waiting in the Downs, the first fair wind
Proceeding, had now borne off, stood off with her
And his letters of two weeks, farewells each tenderer
And wilder than the last, and the last telling
How ‘the blood broke from his heart’ and ‘this poor fine-spun frame
gave way … I fell asleep at last through weakness,
and dreamt thou camest into the Room where I was sitting,
carrying a shawl. My spirit had flown to thee
with tidings of my fate—you came to bid me comfort,
folded the shawl about my Waist and kneeling
supplicated my blessing …
I awoke but Oh my God,
how broken, sobbing—the bosom of my shirt
brine-wet, steep’d in my tears!’
‘A month has pass’d, in two months
you will have doubled the Cape—I’ll trace thy track.’
So he scrawls, quivering: ‘loose touches of an honest heart’
‘projecting happiness’ ‘the Ache of doubt—doubt,
did I say? but have none; cross it out …’
Poor fool, poor wit,
So caught by La Belle Indian, the unhappy
Eliza Draper—young, ‘handsome genteel engaging’,
But unhappy above all. What else had given her
‘that bewitching sort of nameless excellence’—had left
‘a something in the voice and eyes’ traced faintly
By obscure misgiving pains, feeling herself unloved
By the hard husband in Bombay—who pays for all,
And now recalls her?
But now—‘I will live on for thee and for
my Lydia—gain Fame, gain wisdom in old age,
be rich for the dear children of my heart—to share it all.’
And ‘surely—surely thou art mine, Eliza,
for I have bought thee dear! Remember what I suffer—
‘But no, I’ll live for thee, live on—count me immortal,
and do thou press for the ends we have propos’d.’
They were, first, that Draper be convinced that for her health
She must come back to England, to friends, children
And Yorick—Yorick would meet her on the shore and then—
Then!
‘I am fitting up a sweet Apartment
here at Coxwold in my thatch’d palace—a neat simple
Room overlook’d only by the sun; four chairs,
table and Sopha, book-case and bureau—to be all yours:
I shall see thee the goddess of this temple …’
And ‘now you are stretching out over in the Trade winds,
you will arrive at Bombay in October,
by February I shall surely hear—and that you come
in person, by September!’
He is persuaded
She would feel ‘a monitory sympathetic Shock’,
Were his life threatened; thinks nobody on earth
So like him, his turn of mind, and knows she is writing
At that moment as he writes:
‘My Wife elect,
child of my heart! blessèd and dear to all who know you—
to me most, only because I know you best;
by that love-philtre thou hast charm’d me and wilt ever,
And for the Journey he ‘has her picture off by heart’;
O Cupid, prince of God and men—the fragment
Chants it, her absent presence; he points it with her name,
‘the pure flame of Eliza.’ To have and have not
Throbs in remembered France, and Abdera as in Yorkshire:
‘O delicious country air, at peace with all things—
one day I hope you’ll like it …’
‘I hope and hope each week,
each day and hour of it—hunger for some word,
tidings of comfort; we taste not of it now but will—
full Meals, hereafter!’
And if he prophesied
A commentator on ‘the lady Yorick speaks of’
(‘Her name was Draper’) he would smile, not wonder
If he could see his own Smelfungus and Mundungus
As they lay hands on this reliquary; peer,
Prod and finger it and sniff, compress their lips and cry:
‘He wrote to practise sentiment’
‘Cheat, poseur’
‘Tells downright lies of being ill’
‘Fibs to her about dates,
his wife’s arrival—to break it off’
‘Not Sterne
but Yorick plays the fool, sighs, laughs and cries and even
bleeds and dies, but it is art and effigy …’
Or else more kindly: ‘Well, he was ill, he lost control,
Unreal. There is a thought, there you did well, Mundungus!
So much for the lost haunted and sick-hearted,
Sick-thoughted Yorick; tired of dining out and yearning
For ‘Cox’ and books and solitude—‘retiring
to my Room to tell my dear this—count the hours of joy
pass’d with her, and Meditate those in reserve.
Dear Enthusiasm! that brings things forward in a trice
Time keeps for ages back …’
Not a year later
He died, but in another solitude than Coxwold:
‘A very great favourite of the gentlemen’s,
who were all very sorry and much lamented him’,
Said Crawfurd’s footman who was sent to inquire
From a full-flowing dinner of dukes, earls and nabobs
To those good lodgings over the silk-bag shop
In Bond Street, and saw him die.
‘Now it is come’ said Sterne,
And put up his hand as if to stop a blow.
And was buried in Bayswater, not the hollow shell
Of Byland Abbey nearby Cordelia’s tomb,
Where he would sit ‘quite Alone, deep in that sweet recess
which brightens at the thought of you, and you here!
According to La Rochefoucauld
A man in his old age becomes both wiser
And more foolish—fou et sage.
And Sterne at fifty-three
(But he says ‘ninety-five in constitution’)
Might see it, as he showed her picture, ran through her virtues,
Sorrows and charms—half see it as his auditors
Did, as a folly of the King of Denmark’s jester;
And yet be wed to it as final wisdom.
And granting the foolishness, we also must see more,
And take it all, sad tender and laughing; take
Those too pointed details of his illness used to amuse,
Confide and disavow; take that too easy tone
For the unwelcome ‘restless unreasonable Wife’
Who must be sped back to France
(And why may she
And Draper then in a joint rapid demise, not free
Their loving selves?)
For his pen running after
These and less impudent vanities—like Scarborough,
York Races, dining well with the Archbishop,
And the public prints that rumour him among the wits
At Crazy Hall—turns all to grace and flattery:
‘This is a year of presents: from Lord Spencer a grand
new Ecritoire—from Paris a gold snuff-box;
but a portrait worth them both. Sculptures from Ovid’s tomb
Oh and last of all a Heart—so finely set!
If I keep it I’ll be rich—but lose it, poor indeed.
‘Poor Yorick!’
But why poor, to end in wit, love, music? Why but because
The ending was to so much that had ended?
‘Jesus, grant me but this’ he cries ‘I will deserve it’,
Of a young woman, a young half-injured life
He will bid for as a last best pearl, ‘that friendly balm
All-heal of my past evils’; and there in her,
Strangely we see concentred, living, that ‘Be late—Be
not too late’ of his brief headlong art and fame.
Both came when youth had gone with all its nonsense, tooling
And fooling and even the one perfect thing—
If he had that—yet leaving hope, dream, desire alive
But caught fast.
‘I can’t get out’ the starling said.
And his gambol of wit, from star-crazed innuendo
To the blank or marbled page, was born of that:
Would try, cry for a way out, fling, tumble out a way,
Dance, babble it, tease, pray.
But there is no way,
Then or now, none. The way is only what he has done
And does, counting it ‘one, a singular blessing
of his life to have been almost every hour of it
miserably in love.’
And so how can—how
‘Time goes on slowly, hours like days,
days like weeks—years! while distance grows between us.
But soon it will be shortening, I shall be on the rack—
Come—come! …’
The loving fool hopes on in prison,
Lives and dies, dying, living and bidding on—for what?
‘The Lady for whose company he languish’d’?
Well, that of course. Yet he says ‘Our passions ebb and flow.
The truth is thou hast but turn’d them all one way—
they flow to thee.’
And there, there is the lucidity
That seeks an old delight, but new in sadness—
Late and yet late, the better.
And what if prophecy
And tongues of old gods witness with the Journal
And the Journey and Spenser’s fair-haired girl in armour
To the paradise in sadness, and that one
Smiling mock-true blessing he clung to?
Nothing in the end
Could have been easier for Sterne than others.
What we dread for ourselves may be more real to us.
But we see he had to bid, buy with his heart’s blood
A hope that looks either a little mad or quite mad;
And then to burn out that ‘weak taper of life’
With added flame, and through a body like old paper
That tears easily—to look, love and work on.