The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, and: Notes to the Sermons (review)

REVIEWS 509 La Princesse de Clèves will provoke further debate as each generation reads its own message into this story where appearance beckons one into a hall of mirrors . Campbell's study is an invaluable guide to realities that lie behind these "jeux de miroirs." Shirley Jones Day University College London Melvyn New, ed. The Sermons ofLaurence Sterne: The Text. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 4. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. 424pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-8130-1385-2. Melvyn New, ed. Notes to the Sermons. The Florida Edition of the Works ofLaurence Sterne, vol. 5. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. 517pp. US$49.95 ISBN 0-8130-1386-6. As if inviting controversy whenever going into print, Laurence Sterne offered his first two volumes of sermons with two title-pages—the first under the name of Yorick, the other under his own name. In his preface, Sterne explains that since "The Abuses of Conscience Considered" has already been presented as a sermon of Yorick's, he decided to publish the collection under this pseudonym because it was possibly better known than his own name. He added the second title-page, however, to "ease the minds of those who see a jest, and the danger which lurks under it, where no jest was meant." In spite of Sterne's disclaimer , this double identity outraged at least one reader, Owen Ruffhead, who complained that Sterne was mounting "the pulpit in a Harlequin's coaf and prostituting religion (Monthly Review 22, May 1760, 422). Yet even Ruffhead, like many other contemporaries, found nothing exceptionable in the content of these sermons. In retrospect, the reason is quite simple. Thanks to his many years of arduous searching, Melvyn New has discovered that Sterne's borrowings from previous Anglican sermon-writers are so extensive that "one risks one's reputation by pointing to any passage in any sermon and insisting on hearing Sterne's unique voice, for tomorrow we may discover, in the vast sea of sermon literature available to him, the particular drop he swallowed" (5:xvi-xvii). Already in the 1790s, commentators were surprised, some even shocked, to find that often the best passages in Sterne's sermons were, depending on one's moral slant, borrowed or stolen. Earlier in this century, in the first major exploration of Sterne's plagiarisms, Laurence Sterne's "Sermons ofMr. Yorick" (1948), Lansing Hammond identified John Tillotson, Samuel Clarke, and Joseph Hall as primary sources. New has emphasized yet another important source—John Norris , the Cambridge Platonist and poet of Bemerton, whose language of mind and body blends easily into Sterne's fiction as well. Besides expanding on 510 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 Hammond's discoveries, among various other recent scholars on sermon literature , New generously acknowledges his debt to James Downey, whose work on Sterne's sermons made valuable corrections to Hammond, quoted at length in the notes. Although readers today as well as those in the 1790s may find Sterne's plagiarisms disconcerting, New argues, first, that cribbing from previous sermonwriters on a given topic "was encouraged rather than frowned on" unless a sermon was to be printed and, second, that this practice means "nothing detrimental to Sterne's commitment to Christianity or the seriousness with which he took his clerical duties" (5:xv). New's ample knowledge of Anglican theology is apparent throughout his preface, introduction, and annotations in this volume. But his evidence for making Sterne into a serious Anglican theologian depends heavily on the sources borrowed. Thus, it is really a circular argument : Sterne copied Tillotson's sermons; therefore, Sterne believed in Tillotson's theology. One of the many benefits provided in this meticulously documented edition is the wealth of information placed before us to enable alternative responses to the one polemically pursued by the editor. As in his copious commentary in the Florida edition of Tristram Shandy, New's principle of plenitude in annotating the sermons in a separate volume of nearly a hundred pages beyond the length of the one for the forty-five sermons themselves may appear bizarre to traditional editors. Despite his often caustic attacks on "modern critics...