Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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To some the Journal will be most interesting for the light it sheds upon Sterne’s doings for four months in the last year of his life. By it may be determined the dates of letters and the order of Sterne’s movements in London and then in Yorkshire. It is no doubt a fragment of trustworthy autobiography. To others it may appeal as a Shandean essay. Indeed Sterne himself thought the story of his illness—especially in its first stages—as good as any of the accidents that befell Mr. Tristram Shandy. All will see that the Journal is a sentimental document. For just as in the Sentimental Journey, Sterne here lets his fancy play about trivial incidents and trivial things. A cat as well as a donkey may become an emotional theme:

“Eating my fowl,” he records for July 8, “and my trouts & my cream & my strawberries, as melancholly as a Cat; for want of you—by the by, I have got one which sits quietly besides me, purring all day to my sorrows—& looking up gravely from time to time in my face, as if she knew my Situation.—how soothable my heart is Eliza, when such little things sooth it! for in some pathetic sinkings I feel even some support from this poor Cat—I attend to her purrings—& think they harmonize me—they are pianissimo at least, & do not disturb me.—poor Yorick! to be driven, w^th. all his sensibilities, to these resources—all powerful Eliza, that has had this magic^l. authority over him; to bend him thus to the dust.”