1Admirers of Laurence Sterne have always been aware of the symbiotic relationship of his second masterpiece, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick (1768), to Tobias Smollett's controversial Travels through France and Italy, published just two years before in 1766. The parodic echo established on the title page of Sterne's work is evident throughout the text of Sentimental Journey in which it will be recalled that the cantankerous Smollett is immortalized, however unhappily for him, as “the learned SMELFUNGUS,” “the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—.” Yet, despite the welter of connections, it is strange that very few critics have endeavoured close contextual comparison of the two works. Among those who have, two come to mind immediately.

2In 1956, Professor Louis Milic of Columbia University contributed a brief piece to Notes and Queries, succinctly entitled “Sterne and Smollett’s Travels”, in which he claimed that because Smollett's “Travels is unread today and topical satire loses its punch with time,” modem readers of Sterne “have failed to note the extent of his satire of Smollett.” Milic’s article presents a number of intriguing parallel passages which are juxtaposed as evidence of what he calls Sterne’s “twitting Smollett for his dyspeptic concerns.” A Sentimental Journey, says Milic, is satirical of Smollett as a “self-conscious tourist… incapable of enjoying new experience and constantly carp[ing] because things were not as in England.” According to Milic, Smollett as Smelfungus is for Sterne "the typical British traveller of the mid-eighteenth century…, a conspicuous exemplar of the irascible Britisher.”1 In the forty years since Milic’s important recognition of Sterne’s textual and parodic indebtedness to Smollett, travel literature, for so long a kind of terra incognita among critics has once again become fashionable as an exponential source of study. Literary taste has evolved in such a way that the Travels through France and Italy is no longer “unread” and, as a consequence, it is now far easier for us to savour the relationship of the two works. In addition, postmodern critics have turned their attention (sometimes, it has to be said, with more alacrity than common sense) to addressing issues of national self-identity and what constitutes “Englishness” and “Britishness,” so that Milic’s notion of the Scot Smollett as “a conspicuous exemplar of the irascible Britisher” can strike a particular resonance within such discourse. It is a point that I shall return to much later in my discussion.

3A second — and considerably more discursive — comparative piece, entitled “Channelling Emotions: Travel and Literary Creation in Smollett and Sterne” by the French critic Frédéric Ogée (Paris VII), appeared as recently as 1991 in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Ogée contextualizes the two Works by seeing them within a larger tradition of eighteenth-century travel writing. If I am not oversimplifying. the main points of his argument are twofold:

1. that the traditional “structure of a journey is circular” with the traveller (or “hero,” as Ogée calls him) returning home to normality after “a series of trying adventures” which constitute a kind of learning experience. But, where Smollett adopts such an “Homeric pattern” (36), Sterne opens up this “viciously circular” (41) design and translates it into a larger “metaphor of artistic creation” (42), so that A Sentimental Journey “is not so much a book of fiction as a book on fiction, in which travelling becomes a synonym of reading, a conversational journey of the reader’s heart” (41).
2. that as a consequence, Travels through France and Italy with its relentless “pseudo-scientific” (42) preoccupation with factual detail may be interpreted as a work that may be said to epitomize “the Augustan Age of Reason” (29), whereas A Sentimental Journey should be read as a harbinger of the new Age of Sensibility. “…written only a few years later, [it] is the prefiguration of a later era whose anguish and interrogations momentarily find refuge in transient bursts of sensibility, in sentimental epiphanies” (42).2

4While Frédéric Ogée’s argument commends itself as in many ways an attractive one, it also seems to me that it falls short in a number of respects. First of all, it assumes a teleological perspective that would have been unfamiliar to both Smollett and Sterne whose works are made to fit a historical blueprint that too readily and too simplistically periodizes literature. Unquestionably, we all (or most of us?) tend to use labels such as the Augustan Age, the Age of Sensibility, the Romantic Age, etc., but we do so with an increasing degree of circumspection. Postmodern criticism has helped us recognise that these labels are largely of our own construction. They are our own somewhat inadequate means to try to make sense of literary history by interpreting it as something that is “ongoing.” Perhaps it is. But I doubt that our two authors either intended or would have been able to decode it in this way. Hindsight gives us a perspective that too easily distorts or deracinates a literary work from the context in which it was written. Ogée’s account, for all its pious reference to literary epochs, fails to give us sufficient sense of Smollett and Sterne as writers in and of their own time.3

5Equally serious, it seems to me, is Ogée’s assumption that both Smollett’s Travels and Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey should be treated as Works of fiction. In visibly favouring Sterne over Smollett, he describes the former as capable of converting the experience of the journey into imaginative fiction, whereas Smollett is castigated for never managing “to see beyond the reality he abhorred and to transmute mere facts into genuine fictional creation” (38). I have no quarrel with Ogée over his belief that A Sentimental Journey, though bearing some essential relation to Sterne's actual experience of travelling, is intrinsically fictive. But, it is a totally mistaken assumption to suggest that Smollett too intended his Travels through France and Italy to be read as fiction, a work that he pragmatically claimed prior to its publication “may be usefull to other valetudinarians who travel for the Recovery of their Health.”4 If we were to borrow for our purposes the oxymoronic concept of “factual fictions,” popularized several years ago by the American critic Lennard Davis in his examination of “the confusion [in the early novel] between the factual and fictive role of narrative,” then at least here it seems clear that the impulse of Sterne’s work is primarily fictive, that of Smollett factual.5 Even to attempt to interpret the Travels as fiction is to introduce a false criterion by which to judge what is essentially an autobiographical work of travel.

6If Ogée errs here in failing to recognize Smollett's composition as a bona fide travel book, the mistake may perhaps be explained as a genuine response to the kind of narratological interpretation of the Travels favoured by a clutch of critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These critics argued that for the purpose of narration within the Travels Smollett deliberately created a splenetic or melancholic “persona which, although closely resembling the author, has an existence separate from and independent of its creator.”6 According to this narratological viewpoint, it is not Smollett but his splenetic or melancholic “persona” who wages war with sundry innkeepers from London to Nice and from Nice to Rome, castigates the French as a nation of fashion-mad and conniving petits maïtres, and dismisses the Italians as a people “villainously rapacious” (294) and full of pride. But why the extravagant views expressed in the Travels should be those of his “persona” and not those of Smollett himself, these critics singularly fail to explain. Are we to assume perhaps that the real Smollett stayed at home but sent out his “persona” to undertake the part of traveller? Ogée is not, I think, being too harsh in dismissing such critics reading of the Travels as being “often beside the point” (36)! What his own viewpoint and that of the narratological critics does expose, however, is an uncertainty as to how to interpret the authorial voice of the Travels. Why does Smollett appear deliberately to set himself up as a kind of guardian of no-nonsense British values pitted against and seemingly under constant threat from contamination by things foreign? Is this merely a kind of divertissement, an entertaining way by which the British can once again bash the French (at least rhetorically) so soon after the cessation of actual hostilities, or may we dismiss it as little more than crude xenophobia? And how are we to interpret Sterne or Mr. Yorick’s far more conciliatory position announced as if upon the instant as the opening gambit of A Sentimental Journey, “—They order, said I, this matter better in France—.”7

7The theme of the present international colloquium, guerre et paix, opens up a vista by which to review several of these questions from a fresh perspective. It obliges us to consider Smollett and Sterne’s respective positions vis-à-vis the war of 1756 to 1763 (the Seven Years’ War) insofar as these may have coloured their published accounts of travel in France at the very end of hostilities. I wish to propose that notions of guerre and paix infuse the two texts. I want to suggest that the Travels resonates a recurrent gallophobia in English (though not necessarily British) popular thought brought to the fore here by the terms of the Peace of Paris of 1763. commonly represented in opposition newspapers and prints as an “inglorious” peace engineered by an unpatriotic and self-seeking administration, headed (not by an Englishman but) by the Scot, Lord Bute. A Sentimental Journey, on the other hand, polarizes such notions of paix and guerre in its compelling recognition that the stereotypical dismissal of an enemy nation is ultimately an implicit admission of a fundamental failure to grasp its essential character. Paradoxically, rather than rejecting the conventional English view of the French as a nation of petits maîtres, it seems to me that Sterne (through the persona and actions of Yorick) endeavours to replicate or copy those very characteristics which are, at least for the seeker after “sentiment and fine feelings,”8 deemed admirable and more than worthy of imitation. What is castigated in the character of the French in Travels through France and Italy becomes the object of emulation in A Sentimental Journey.

8But in turning specifically to the two works, it would seem valuable to attempt to recreate the respective attitudes of Smollett and Sterne towards the recent war and even more recent peace. Fresh scholarship by Byron Gassman, who edited (1993) the Georgia text of The Briton, has helped to highlight the extent to which Smollett became identified particularly in the final year of the war with the policies of his fellow Scot, Lord Bute, whose ministry was instrumental in negotiating the Peace of Paris of 1763.9 But, it is also apparent from a reading of Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England, published in five volumes from 1760 to 1765, that Smollett’s disposition towards the war underwent a dramatic turnaround during this period. The Continuation was written to supplement Smollett’s immensely popular History of England that had chronicled events up to 1748, the year that had seen the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. The Continuation seems to have been devised to bring forward events to 1760, the year in which George II died, but in its final two volumes proceeds as far as the beginning of 1765.10 When we turn to his preface “To the Public” at the beginning of the first volume of the Continuation, it is evident that Smollett wishes to distinguish between the earlier war, which in 1748 had left England with “at home, an administration without vigour; abroad, a war without success,” and the new situation in 1760 when:

Our military operations are now planned with so much wisdom and sagacity, and executed with such spirit, as revive the lustre of past ages; and the glory of our late conquests even rivals the renown of those heroic atchievements which dignify and adorn the ancient annals of Great Britain. We behold valour tutored by conduct, sentiment United with courage, and the godlike virtues of humanity shining in the midst of slaughter and desolation. What is still more extraordinary, and above all other circumstances redounds to the honour of our national councils, we feel none of those rude tempests that are raised by the furious breath of war. Notwithstanding all the hostile efforts of the most formidable enemy, which Discord could have armed against this island, we enjoy the blessings of security and repose, as if we were hedged around by some Divinity; and our commerce flourishes undisturbed as in the bosom of peace.

Themes like these cannot fail to warm the heart, and animate the pen of the historian, who glows with the love of his country. Yet he will carefully avoid the imputation of enthusiasm. In the midst of his transports he hopes to remember his duty, and check the exuberance of zeal with the rigid severity of historical truth.11

9The passage, written perhaps with recent military successes overseas at Quebec, Quiberon Bay, Milicien, etc. in mind, reverberates with patriotic fervour. It enlists into the ranks of our armies and navies powers that are almost God-like. It extols the ancient heroism not just of the English but noticeably (as far as a Scot like Smollett is concerned) of the whole people of Great Britain. It exploits the powerful myth of a united kingdom enjoying within itself “the blessings of security and repose” as against foreign mayhem ignited by “all the hostile efforts of the most formidable enemy [i.e. the French], which Discord could have armed against this island.”

10The same myth has been explored in far more breadth than I can give it here by Linda Colley in her influential book, Britons (1992), where she has argued that the “Seven Years’ War was the most dramatically successful war the British ever fought” and also the war in which for “the first time ever, the British army had been able to recruit men on a massive scale from the Scottish Highlands.” The sub-title of Dr. Colley’s book is Forging the Nation 1707-1837, and part of her argument depends upon a recognition that, as a result of the Seven Years’ War, not just England and Wales but also “Scotland as a whole… had [now] invested in British patriotism.”12 The passage from Smollett can be said to exemplify just that. Colley examines in chapter 3 of her book (entitled “Peripheries”) the extraordinary and in terms of their numbers disproportionate success of the Scots from about the time of the Seven Years’ War through the remainder of the eighteenth century in securing positions of eminence in politics. the law, the army, the world of learning and letters, science and medicine, and so on. For many such Scots who moved south to England, Colley contends, it was possible “to reconcile their Scottish past with their English present by the expedient of regarding themselves as British.”13

11In responding in 1762 to the petition of his fellow Scot, Lord Bute, that he might edit a political journal in support of the ministry and its efforts to secure an end to the war, it is far from accidental that Smollett chose The Briton for its title. The title doffs a deferential tribute in the direction of King George III, who shortly after his accession to the throne in 1760 had extolled his own Britishness (“I glory in the name of Briton” he told Parliament in his first address) and called for an end to that “bloody war” with France.14 The masthead of The Briton shows the English lion and Scottish unicorn supporting the royal insignia containing the three lions passant gardant of England, the Welsh pendragon, the Irish harp, the rampant lion of Scotland and (anachronistically you may argue in the context of forging the nation of Britain) the fleurs-de-lis of France.15 A factotum of the figure of Britannia appears at the head of the text in thirty-five of the paper’s thirty-eight weekly numbers, a further iconographic statement of its propagandist intentions (see fig.).16

12As is well known, the success of The Briton was extremely shortlived and its function as a bolster to an unpopular ministry totally abrogated through the immediate counter-publication by John Wilkes, Smollett’s one-time friend, of The North Briton, a paper specifically created to embarrass and slight Lord Bute and his (supposed crew of) Scottish acolytes. Wilkes achieved an unprecedented popularity by the agility and opportunism with which he stirred English resentment against the Scots, appealing to latent fears of encroachment and xenophobic distrust of things foreign. Such fears may have had the conviction of authority at the time of the Jacobite revolt of 1745, but by 1762, as Samuel Johnson was famously to remark (no doubt with Wilkes in mind) false patriotism of the kind could be considered as no more than “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”17 Wilkes’s appeal was a reactionary throwback to a phony ideal of an England of old unencumbered by the union with Scotland and baying for English “liberty” from foreign encroachment. Linda Colley describes it well as a “swaggering and intolerantly Little English patriotism… an important and emotive part of the English national memory.”18

13As a Scot who had spent most of his adult life in England. Tobias Smollett will have been particularly aware of and sensitive to the perverse effects of the worst forms of English xenophobia. There is a marvellous story told by his lifelong friend and fellow Scot, Alexander Carlyle, of having been in the company of Smollett at a coffeehouse in 1746 when news of the English victory over the Scots at Culloden reached the city:

London all over was in a perfect uproar of joy…. About 9 o’clock I wished to go home…. I asked Smollett if he was ready to go…: he said he was, and would conduct me. The mob was so riotous, and the squibs so numerous and incessant that we were glad to go into a narrow entry to put our wigs in our pockets, and to take our swords from our belts and walk with them in our hands…; and, after cautioning me against speaking a word, lest the mob should discover my country and become insolent, “for John Bull,” says he, “is as haughty and valiant tonight as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when the Highlanders were at Derby.” After we got to the head of the Haymarket through incessant fire, the Doctor [Smollett] led me by narrow lanes, where we met nobody but a few boys at a pitiful bonfire…19

14Even as early as 1746, in the aftermath of the Jacobite revolt, Smollett shows himself as instinctively street-wise to the anti-Scots mood of the mob. For me, the most telling part of the description is Smollett’s caution to Carlyle to utter not a word lest his brogue might give him away, “lest the mob should discover my country [Scotland] and become insolent.” Its effect is almost metonymic, the dialect of a Scot becoming perhaps the most acute cultural marker of his non-Englishness or Otherness. Language and accent in the eighteenth century (only less so then than now because fewer people travelled) are specified as primary means of pigeonholing a person’s particular social and national identity. For a Lowlands Scot of good family like Smollett, who after 1746 came increasingly to earn his living by his pen, the non-verbal employment of written English was one means of asserting his “Britishness” in a language that in print was almost indistinguishable from and as readily understood as that of a highly literate and cultivated Englishman. The ubiquity by the middle of the eighteenth century of what Alvin Kernan has helpfully dubbed “print culture” should not be underestimated in any discussion of the sometimes almost intangible progression towards a recognizable or distinct British national identity.20

15Smollett’s uncomfortable editorship of The Briton (as well as his shoddy treatment by Lord Bute who appears to have dropped him once it became apparent that the propagandist element of the paper had failed) means that his earlier support for the kind of euphoric Britishness advocated by George III may have emerged somewhat bruised. He registers on several occasions an acute awareness of the difficulty of coping with English hostility towards the Scots. Some evidence for this may be found in no. 34 (15 January 1763) of The Briton in which he satirically invents a letter from “a true-born Englishman” who, though rabid in his hatred of the Scots, derives some crumbs of comfort from the fact that “above thirty thousand of these vagabonds have perished in the land-service of this kingdom since the beginning of the war…. and that every one of those, filled up the place of an English subject, so we may fairly infer, that the valuable lives of threescore thousand Englishmen have been saved by the use of these vermin.” The strongest argument that the fictitious correspondent puts forward in favour of the war is that a continuation of hostilities may prove “the means of extirpating this pernicious race” of Scotsmen, a variant of ethnic cleansing endorsed by Smollett with increasingly heavy irony.21

16But, of far more interest for our purposes as evidence of Smollett’s frustration at the treatment of the Scots by the English is the final volume (vol. 5) of the Continuation of the Complete History of England, covering the period from 1762 to the beginning of 1765 and published in October 1765, which he almost certainly compiled while in Nice during 1763-65. His sojourn in Nice, amply described in the Travels through France and Italy, gave Smollett the opportunity to review at a distance the events that had left him so utterly disillusioned with the process of politics. His commentary on the political treatment of Lord Bute gives us his most ample excoriation of English attitudes that threatened the very fabric of the union:

The jealousy of the English nation, towards their fellow-subjects on the other side of the Tweed, had discovered itself occasionally ever since the union of the crowns; and ancient animosities had been kept alive by two successive rebellions which began in Scotland: but the common grudge was founded upon the success of the Scots, who had established themselves in different parts of England, and risen from very small beginnings to wealth and consideration. They had prospered in many different provinces of life, and made no contemptible figure in the cultivation of the arts and sciences. In a word, the English people looked upon them with an evil eye, as interlopers in commerce and competitors for reputation…22

17Smollett shows himself here as hyper-conscious of the still anomalous position accorded to the Scots by the English and, putting a shoe on the other foot, points out that “Had the natives of North Britain proved equally combustible, the flames of civil war would have certainly been kindled; and in that case, the ruin of a mighty nation might have been effected.”23 Ultimately, though, he concludes that “England and Scotland are now too intimately connected in point of interest and communication, to be disjointed without such violent convulsions as would endanger the safety of either, and even the existence of both.”24 Smollett shows himself to be a strong advocate of the union of the two nations while also recognizing how easily faction and political interest can undo the best efforts of those who subsumed their local identity under the umbrella of Britishness.

18Given Smollett’s acute sensitivity on the subject of his nationality, it is noticeable that in the Travels through France and Italy, written over the same period as volume five of the Continuation, there is almost no direct reference to Scotland or to the author’s Scottishness. In the first Letter of the Travels, he writes as follows to his anonymous correspondent:

You knew, and pitied my situation, traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons….

You know with what eagerness I fled from my country as a scene of illiberal dispute, and incredible infatuation, where a few worthless incendiaries had, by dint of perfidious calumnies and atrocious abuse, kindled up a flame which threatened all the horrors of civil dissension.25

19The orotund latinisms here provide hardly the most auspicious opening to his book of travels, yet they appear to disguise almost over-conspicuously the pain and private suffering, both physical and mental, that impelled Smollett into self-imposed exile.26 Concealment of such deeply felt personal feelings seems almost a deliberate strategy throughout the book. The Travels cannot be read as a kind of inner journey or revelatory work in the way in which we might approach, say, the Confessions of Rousseau.

20Yet, there is a sense in which we can read the Travels through France and Italy as a work in which, through the experience of foreign climes, the author is seeking to authenticate his Britishness. It is interesting that when, in the passage I have just quoted, he refers to “my country” the allusion is unquestionably to Great Britain just as (in the earlier anecdote) for Alexander Carlyle—as also for Smollett himself—a few years before in 1746 "my country” had been Scotland. In the final letter of the Travels (Letter 41), he is also alluding to Britain when he remarks that “I am attached to my country, because it is the land of liberty, cleanliness and convenience,”27 qualities that he finds singularly lacking in the France of the Ancien Régime. Paradoxically, however, Smollett, the Scot translated to England and now further translated abroad, finds it particularly difficult to validate his Britishness without resorting to a similar jingoism that he had found abhorrent in the English treatment of the Scots. In assuming the patriotic voice of a “true” Briton, defending no-nonsense British values against the frivolities of French fashion, Smollett often appears almost as a caricature of an English John Bull. The French cultural critic, Jeanine Surel, has shown that a necessary characteristic of John Bull in English iconography is its inveterate gallophobia and that the figure often also contains inherent contradictions, appearing both as “malcontent” and “loyalist.”28 When we consider that France and Scotland (partners in the Auld Alliance) have no significant tradition of animosity against each other, it begins to become understandable why Smollett appropriates for his purposes many traditional English attitudes towards the French in writing about them so soon after the war. Rather than creating a specific persona (in the way once advocated by critics), Smollett in the Travels is merely subsuming certain English attitudes within his larger representation of “Britishness.” If the conjunction of Scottish values and English attitudes often appears to be on the verge of deconstructing itself, this seems to me to be a reflection of the uneasiness still present in the 1760s in the definition of what constitutes a British national identity. That Smollett took the question pretty seriously, even after the Travels, is apparent from the fact that in his final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), he depicts a gallimaufry of national characters—Welsh, English, Scottish, Irish—on a journey across Great Britain that serves to define the essence as well as the shortcomings of their Britishness. Before then, however, Laurence Sterne had taken exception with Smollett as traveller cruelly immortalizing him as Smelfungus which has entered our vocabulary to mean “a discontented person; a grumbler, a faultfinder” (OED).29

21Finally, a few remarks on attitudes in Sterne to war and peace insofar as they may affect a reading of A Sentimental Journey. Sterne’s general interest in the progress of the war is apparent from a letter from London to his Yorkshire friend, Stephen Croft, sent on Christmas day 1760, in which (like Smollett in the Continuation)30 he expresses his horror (“never was known such havock amongst troops”) at the carnage caused by the land war in Germany, and several weeks later, he writes to the same correspondent that he has spent the day in the visitors’ gallery witnessing “a pitched battle in the H[ouse] of C[ommons]” over the conduct of the German war: “the cry for peace,” concludes Sterne, “is so general, that it will certainly end in one.”31 Like many others, including Smollett, Sterne seems to have turned against the war as a whole because of the expense in money and sheer loss of life caused by the war in Germany. I am not aware of (though may have missed) any specific statement by Sterne that could be examined as an expression of enthusiasm or patriotic fervour for the global expansion of the theatre of war into North America, the West Indies, India, etc. Questions of Britishness and patriotism are of diminished interest in Sterne by comparison with Smollett.

22However, war and the military are metaphorically at the centre of Tristram Shandy, in which Uncle Toby has Corporal Trim dig up the bowling-green at Shandy Hall in a hobbyhorsical attempt to recreate the moment of his wounding in a certain uncomfortable place at the siege of Namur of 1695. The precise location of his wound obsesses among others the widow Wadman who lays siege to Uncle Toby’s heart, but needs to be assured that his ammunition has not been shot away. It will be recollected how (with blushing glances “towards the waistband of my uncle Toby’s red plush breeches.” Book 9, ch. 26) she bombards the poor old soldier with questions as to the exact place in which he had been wounded, only to be answered — “Namur.” In A Sentimental Journey, sexual innuendo is no less important, but its function is essentially different. In typical parodic fashion, Sterne recalls Smollett’s remonstrations in the Travels through France and Italy against the extraordinary attentions of the French petits maîtres who will try

to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one, but in one shape or another, he will find means to ruin the peace of a family….32

23But, rather than criticize the French for their excessive amorous proclivities, Sterne (or rather Yorick) deems such behaviour entirely worthy of imitation. He is full of admiration at the gallantries in the Street at Calais of “a little French debonaire captain, who came dancing down the Street” to reward the bashful Yorick with a French lesson in how to make love to the fair sex:

popping in betwixt us, just as the lady was returning back to the door of the Remise, he introduced himself to my acquaintance, and before he had well got announced, begg’d I would do him the honour to present him to the lady —I had not been presented myself— so turning about to her, he did it just as well by asking her, if she had come from Paris? —No: she was going that rout, she said.— Vous n’etez pas de Londre? —She was not, she replied. — Then Madame must have come thro’ Flanders.— Apparamment vous etez Flammande? said the French captain. —The lady answered, she was.— Peutetre, de Lisle? added he —She said, she was not of Lisle.— Nor Arras? —nor Cambray?— nor Ghent? —nor Brussels? She answered, she was of Brussels.

He had had the honour, he said, to be at the bombardment of it last war—that it was finely situated, pour cela —and full of noblesse when the Imperialists were driven out by the French (the lady made a slight curtsy)— so giving her an account of the affair, and of the share he had had in it —he begg’d the honour to know her name— so made his bow.

Et Madame a son Mari? —said he, looking back when he had made two steps— and without staying for an answer—danced down the Street.

Had I served seven years apprenticeship to good breeding, I could not have done as much.33

24Sterne employs here the language of besiegement by which the taking of Brussels by the French (during the War of the Austrian Succession) becomes metonymic for the “conquest” of the lady, the little French debonaire captain having elicited of the lady all the “intelligence” that Yorick desired but was too delicate to ask. Where Smollett would have complained of the pertness of the petit maître, Sterne revels in the French way of doing things, of ordering this matter better in France. In creating in Yorick an Englishman who is to all intents and purposes thoroughly “frenchified,” Sterne inverts traditional ridicule of such figures, who were prominent in English cultural representation, most memorably on stage from the time of the Restoration. One thinks of Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode (1676) or of Monsieur de Paris in Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1671), described in the dramatis personae to the play as “a vain Coxcomb,… newly returned from France, and mightily affected with the French Language and Fashions.” About Monsieur de Paris, one of the characters asks, “is he no man?” “No faith,” comes the reply, “he's but a monsieur.” (1.1.). In the Travels through France and Italy, Smollett had appropriated the effeminized French fop as a ubiquitous figure of ridicule and as a counter to British values and manners. The clash of values between things British and matters French in the Travels often verges on cultural warfare between the two nations. Sterne, writing far more in the spirit of reconciliation following the Peace of Paris, endeavours to strike a balance between what the “old French officer” at the opera comique (yet another military man from whom Yorick learns) calls “Le POUR” and “Le CONTRE”:

Le POUR, et le CONTRE se trouvent en chaque nation; there is a balance, said he, of good and bad every where; and nothing but the knowing it is so can emancipate one half of the world from the prepossessions it holds against the other — that the advantage of travel, as it regarded the sçavoir vivre, was by seeing a great deal both of men and manners; it taught us mutual toleration; and mutual toleration, concluded he, making a bow, taught us mutual love.34

25Sterne’s view here, for all its good intentions, may strike us today as rather too sententious. It is ultimately a question of taste. Nevertheless, the notion of peace and peace-making provides a central motif running through the whole of A Sentimental Journey, which needed the Seven Years’ War to be well and truly over before it could have been written. Sterne appears to set Yorick’s visit in the year 1762 at the time when negotiations towards the Peace of Paris were already well underway, and he loses no opportunity to remind us that “the Bourbon is by no means a cruel race” and “When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand!”35 Even in “The Case of Delicacy,” the final episode in the book when Yorick is deliciously obliged to share his bedchamber with the Piedmontese lady, the consequence of the “two hours negociation” is that “at the end… the articles were settled finally betwixt us, and stipulated for in form and manner of a treaty of peace?”36

26Before he died, Sterne only completed two out of a projected four volumes, so that it is impossible to do more than speculate the extent to which our conference theme of guerre et paix might have been reflected in A Sentimental Journey had he finished it. Like Smollett, the purpose of his travel was valetudinarian but, unlike in the Travels through France and Italy, this aspect is minimized in A Sentimental Journey. It is, however, a recurrent and obsessive topic in his Personal correspondence. In an important letter written from Toulouse in May 1763 to Robert Hay Drummond, Archbishop of York, Sterne writes as follows about his physical condition:

…I have been fixed here with my family these ten months,… having since the first day of my arrival here been in a continual warfare with agues, fevers, and physicians —the 1^st brought my blood to so poor a State, that the physicians found it necessary to enrich it with strong bouillons, and strong bouillons and soup a santé threw me into fevers, and fevers brought on loss of blood, and loss of blood agues —so that as war begets poverty, poverty peace, &c. &c. —has this miserable constitution made all its revolutions; how many more it may sustain, before its last and great one, God knows—like the rest of my species, I shall fence it off as long as I can… I have preached too much, my Lord, already; and was my age to be computed either by the number of sermons I have preached, or the infirmities they have brought upon me, I might be truly said to have the claim of a Miles emeritus, and was there a Hotel des Invalides for the reception of such established upon any salutary plan betwixt here and Arabia Felix, I w^d beg your Grace’s interest to help me into it…,37

27Where paix was to become such a recurrent motif of A Sentimental Journey, guerre infuses his thoughts in his description of the “agues, fevers, and physicians” that appeared in combat for his life. The macabre jingle, “war begets poverty, poverty peace,” providing an eighteenth-century snatch to our theme of guerre et paix, is also cited by Sterne in Tristram Shandy (Bk. I, ch. 21), though not in A Sentimental Journey. Verse antecedents of this traditional snatch can be traced back possibly as far as the sixth century. In its fuller version, sometimes known as “The World’s Whirligig,” which was frequently set to music in eighteenth-century songbooks (and was still quoted as an “old saw” during the Great War of 1914-18), it reads as a kind of fatalistic roundel:

War begets Poverty,

Poverty Peace:
Peace maketh Riches flow,
Fate ne’er doth cease:
Riches produceth Pride,
Pride is War’s ground,
War begets Poverty, &c.
[And so] the World goes round.38

28When we think of the profusion of references to poverty and riches, peace and war, humility and pride, in A Sentimental Journey, is it possible that Sterne may have had in mind this English danse macabre when he set loose Yorick among the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War?