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

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How much Thackeray’s unfortunate mistake may have contributed to the violence of his essay in the Humourists we shall never know. It may have been the very thing which clenched his opinion that Sterne’s word was never to be trusted. At any rate, no one can longer say that Thackeray “made no use of” the Journal to Eliza. Thereafter Thackeray usually assumed a more genial tone when Sterne became the theme. Nobody can object to that letter he wrote in Sterne’s room at Dessein’s Hôtel for Miss Baxter in America. “Sterne’s picture”—to quote a sentence or two from the delightful passage—“Sterne’s picture is looking down on me from the chimney piece at which he warmed his lean old shanks ninety years ago. He seems to say ‘You are right. I was a humbug: and you, my lad, are you not as great?’ Come, come Mr. Sterne none of these tu quoques. Some of the London papers are abusing me as hard as ever I assaulted you.” Then there is this same fancy elaborated into a Roundabout: Thackeray is again in Sterne’s room at midnight, when a lean figure in black-satin breeches appears in the moonlight to call him to account with menacing finger for that mistrust and abuse of ten years back. But there is also another Roundabout in which Sterne figures—Notes of a Week’s Holiday,^[10] wherein Thackeray returns to the old assault with terrific fury. The Journal to Eliza, there mentioned by title, is focussed with an anecdote misread from Dutens’ Memoirs, for a scathing portrait of a “wretched old sinner.” Thackeray seems to have immediately repented of his loss of temper, for the passage—two pages in length—was not allowed to go into the collected Roundabouts. It has, I think, never been reprinted. Hence the biographers may be pardoned for saying that Thackeray made no use of “Sterne’s own Journal to Eliza,” sent him by “a gentleman from Bath.”