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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.

T >> Thomas De Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.




'Come, and I will show you what is beautiful.'

From the days of infancy still lingers in my ears this opening of a
prose hymn by a lady, then very celebrated, viz., the late Mrs.
Barbauld. The hymn began by enticing some solitary infant into some
silent garden, I believe, or some forest lawn; and the opening words
were, 'Come, and I will show you what is beautiful!' Well, and what
beside? There is nothing beside; oh, disappointed and therefore enraged
reader; positively this is the sum-total of what I can recall from the
wreck of years; and certainly it is not much. Even of Sappho, though
time has made mere ducks and drakes of her lyrics, we have rather more
spared to us than this. And yet this trifle, simple as you think it,
this shred of a fragment, if the reader will believe me, still echoes
with luxurious sweetness in my ears, from some unaccountable hide-and-
seek of fugitive childish memories; just as a marine shell, if applied
steadily to the ear, awakens (according to the fine image of Landor
[Footnote: 'Of Landor,' viz., in his 'Gebir;' but also of Wordsworth in
'The Excursion.' And I must tell the reader, that a contest raged at
one time as to the _original property_ in this image, not much
less keen than that between Neptune and Minerva, for the chancellorship
of Athens.]) the great vision of the sea; places the listener

'In the sun's palace-porch,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

Now, on some moonless night, in some fitting condition of the
atmosphere, if Lord Rosse would permit the reader and myself to walk
into the front drawing-room of his telescope, then, in Mrs. Barbauld's
words, slightly varied, I might say to him,--Come, and I will show you
what is sublime! In fact, what I am going to lay before him, from Dr.
Nichol's work, is, or at least _would_ be, (when translated into
Hebrew grandeur by the mighty telescope,) a step above even that object
which some four-and-twenty years ago in the British Museum struck me as
simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen.
It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at
it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which
I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a
symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which
passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds
all faculty of computation; the eternity which _had_ been, the
eternity which _was_ to be. 3. The diffusive love, not such as
rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and
swells by undulations of time, but a procession--an emanation from some
mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated
from the lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in
adumbrations or memorials of flesh.

In _that mode_ of sublimity, perhaps, I still adhere to my first
opinion, that nothing so great was ever beheld. The atmosphere for
_this_, for the Memnon, was the breathlessness which belongs to a
saintly trance; the holy thing seemed to live by silence. But there
_is_ a picture, the pendant of the Memnon, there _is_ a dreadful
cartoon, from the gallery which has begun to open upon Lord Rosse's
telescope, where the appropriate atmosphere for investing it
must be drawn from another silence, from the frost and from the
eternities of death. It is the famous _nebula_ in the constellation
of Orion; famous for the unexampled defiance with which it resisted
all approaches from the most potent of former telescopes; famous
for its frightful magnitude and for the frightful depth to which
it is sunk in the abysses of the heavenly wilderness; famous just now
for the submission with which it has begun to render up its secrets to
the all-conquering telescope; and famous in all time coming for the
horror of the regal phantasma which it has perfected to eyes of flesh.
Had Milton's 'incestuous mother,' with her fleshless son, and with the
warrior angel, his father, that led the rebellions of heaven, been
suddenly unmasked by Lord Rosse's instrument, in these dreadful
distances before which, simply as expressions of resistance, the mind
of man shudders and recoils, there would have been nothing more
appalling in the exposure; in fact, it would have been essentially the
same exposure: the same expression of power in the detestable phantom,
the same rebellion in the attitude, the same pomp of malice in the
features to a universe seasoned for its assaults.

The reader must look to Dr. Nichol's book, at page 51, for the picture
of this abominable apparition. But then, in order to see what _I_
see, the obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him
therefore view the wretch upside down. If he neglects that simple
direction, of course I don't answer for anything that follows: without
any fault of mine, my description will be unintelligible. This
inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature that will
then reveal itself.

_Description of the Nebula in Orion, as forced to show out by Lord
Rosse._--You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes,
if eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown
heavens. What _should_ be its skull wears what _might_ be an
Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating train. This head rests
upon a beautifully developed neck and throat. All power being given to
the awful enemy, he is beautiful where he pleases, in order to point
and envenom his ghostly ugliness. The mouth, in that stage of the
apocalypse which Sir John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen-
inch mirror, is amply developed. Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the
upper lip, which is confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there
are none. Were it not for this one defect of nostrils; and, even in
spite of this defect, (since, in so mysterious a mixture of the angelic
and the brutal, we may suppose the sense of odor to work by some
compensatory organ,) one is reminded by the phantom's attitude of a
passage, ever memorable, in Milton: that passage, I mean, where Death
first becomes aware, soon after the original trespass, of his own
future empire over man. The 'meagre shadow' even smiles (for the first
time and the last) on apprehending his own abominable bliss, by
apprehending from afar the savor 'of mortal change on earth.'

----'Such a scent,' (he says,) 'I draw
Of carnage, prey innumerable.'

As illustrating the attitude of the phantom in Orion, let the reader
allow me to quote the tremendous passage:--

'So saying, with delight he snuff'd the smell
Of mortal change on earth. As when a flock
Of ravenous fowl, though many a league remote,
Against the day of battle, to a field,
Where armies lie encamp'd, come flying, lured
With scent of living carcasses design'd
For death, the following day, in bloody fight;
So scented the grim feature, [Footnote: 'So scented the grim
feature,' [_feature_ is the old word for _form or outline that
is shadowy_; and also for form (shadowy or not) which abstracts from
the _matter_.] By the way, I have never seen it noticed, that
Milton was indebted for the hint of this immortal passage to a superb
line-and-a-half, in Lucan's Pharsalia.] and upturn'd
His nostril wide into the murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry from so far.'

But the lower lip, which is drawn inwards with the curve of a conch
shell,--oh what a convolute of cruelty and revenge is _there_!
Cruelty!--to whom? Revenge!--for what? Ask not, whisper not. Look
upwards to other mysteries. In the very region of his temples, driving
itself downwards into his cruel brain, and breaking the continuity of
his diadem, is a horrid chasm, a ravine, a shaft, that many centuries
would not traverse; and it is serrated on its posterior wall with a
harrow that perhaps is partly hidden. From the anterior wall of this
chasm rise, in vertical directions, two processes; one perpendicular,
and rigid as a horn, the other streaming forward before some portentous
breath. What these could be, seemed doubtful; but now, when further
examinations by Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, have
filled up the scattered outline with a rich umbrageous growth, one is
inclined to regard them as the plumes of a sultan. Dressed he is,
therefore, as well as armed. And finally comes Lord Rosse, that
glorifies him with the jewellery [Footnote: _The jewellery of
Stars_. And one thing is very remarkable, viz., that not only the
stars justify this name of jewellery, as usual, by the life of their
splendor, but also, in this case, by their arrangement. No jeweller
could have set, or disposed with more art, the magnificent quadrille of
stars which is placed immediately below the upright plume. There is
also another, a truncated quadrille, wanting only the left hand star
(or you might call it a bisected lozenge) placed on the diadem, but
obliquely placed as regards the curve of that diadem. Two or three
other arrangements are striking, though not equally so, both from their
regularity and from their repeating each other, as the forms in a
kaleidoscope.] of stars: he is now a vision 'to dream of, not to tell:'
he is ready for the worship of those that are tormented in sleep: and
the stages of his solemn uncovering by astronomy, first by Sir W.
Herschel, secondly, by his son, and finally by Lord Rosse, is like the
reversing of some heavenly doom, like the raising of the seals that had
been sealed by the angel, in the Revelations. But the reader naturally
asks, How does all this concern Lord Rosse's telescope on the one side,
or general astronomy on the other? This _nebula_, he will say,
seems a bad kind of fellow by your account; and of course it will not
break my heart to hear, that he has had the conceit taken out of him.
But in what way can _that_ affect the pretensions of this new
instrument; or, if it did, how can the character of the instrument
affect the general condition of a science? Besides, is not the science
a growth from very ancient times? With great respect for the Earl of
Rosse, is it conceivable that he, or any man, by one hour's working the
tackle of his new instrument, can have carried any stunning
revolutionary effect into the heart of a section so ancient in our
mathematical physics? But the reader is to consider, that the ruins
made by Lord Rosse, are in _sidereal_ astronomy, which is almost
wholly a growth of modern times; and the particular part of it
demolished by the new telescope, is almost exclusively the creation of
the two Herschels, father and son. Laplace, it is true, adopted their
views; and he transferred them to the particular service of our own
planetary system. But he gave to them no new sanction, except what
arises from showing that they would account for the appearances, as
they present themselves to our experience at this day. That was a
_negative_ confirmation; by which I mean, that, had their views
failed in the hands of Laplace, then they were proved to be false; but,
_not_ failing, they were not therefore proved to be true. It was
like proving a gun; if the charge is insufficient, or if, in trying the
strength of cast iron, timber, ropes, &c., the strain is not up to the
rigor of the demand, you go away with perhaps a favorable impression as
to the promises of the article; it has stood a moderate trial; it has
stood all the trial that offered, which is always something; but you
are still obliged to feel that, when the ultimate test is applied,
smash may go the whole concern. Lord Rosse applied an ultimate test;
and smash went the whole concern. Really I must have laughed, though
all the world had been angry, when the shrieks and yells of expiring
systems began to reverberate all the way from the belt of Orion; and
positively at the very first broadside delivered from this huge four-
decker of a telescope.

But what was it then that went to wreck? That is a thing more easy to
ask than to answer. At least, for my own part, I complain that some
vagueness hangs over all the accounts of the nebular hypothesis.
However, in this place a brief sketch will suffice.

Herschel the elder, having greatly improved the telescope, began to
observe with special attention a class of remarkable phenomena in the
starry world hitherto unstudied, viz.: milky spots in various stages of
diffusion. The nature of these appearances soon cleared itself up thus
far, that generally they were found to be starry worlds, separated from
ours by inconceivable distances, and in that way concealing at first
their real nature. The whitish gleam was the mask conferred by the
enormity of their remotion. This being so, it might have been supposed
that, as was the faintness of these cloudy spots or _nebulæ_, such
was the distance. But _that_ did not follow: for in the treasury
of nature it turned out that there were other resources for modifying
the powers of distance, for muffling and unmuffling the voice of stars.
Suppose a world at the distance _x_, which distance is so great as
to make the manifestation of that world weak, milky, nebular. Now let
the secret power that wields these awful orbs, push this world back to
a double distance! _that_ should naturally make it paler and more
dilute than ever: and yet by _compression_, by deeper centralization,
this effect shall be defeated; by forcing into far closer neighborhood
the stars which compose this world, again it shall gleam out brighter
when at 2_x_ than when at _x_. At this point of compression, let the
great moulding power a second time push it back; and a second time it
will grow faint. But once more let this world be tortured into closer
compression, again let the screw be put upon it, and once again it
shall shake off the oppression of distance as the dew-drops are shaken
from a lion's mane. And thus in fact the mysterious architect plays at
hide-and-seek with his worlds. 'I will hide it,' he says, 'and it shall
be found again by man; I will withdraw it into distances that shall
seem fabulous, and again it shall apparel itself in glorious light; a
third time I will plunge it into aboriginal darkness, and upon the
vision of man a third time it shall rise with a new epiphany.'

But, says the objector, there is no such world; there is no world that
has thus been driven back, and depressed from one deep to a lower deep.
Granted: but the same effect, an illustration of the same law, is
produced equally, whether you take four worlds, all of the same
magnitude, and plunge them _simultaneously_ into four different
abysses, sinking by graduated distances one below another, or take one
world and plunge it to the same distances _successively_. So in
Geology, when men talk of substances in different stages, or of
transitional states, they do not mean that they have watched the same
individual _stratum_ or _phenomenon_, exhibiting states removed
from each other by depths of many thousand years; how could they?
but they have seen one stage in the case A, another stage in the
case B. They take, for instance, three objects, the same (to use the
technical language of logic) generically, though numerically different,
under separate circumstances, or in different stages of advance. They
are one object for logic, they are three for human convenience. So
again it might seem impossible to give the history of a rose tree from
infancy to age: how could the same rose tree, at the same time, be
young and old? Yet by taking the different developments of its flowers,
even as they hang on the same tree, from the earliest bud to the full-
blown rose, you may in effect pursue this vegetable growth through all
its stages: you have before you the bony blushing little rose-bud, and
the respectable 'mediæval' full-blown rose.

This point settled, let it now be remarked, that Herschel's resources
enabled him to unmask many of these _nebulæ_: stars they were, and
stars he forced them to own themselves. Why should any decent world
wear an _alias_? There was nothing, you know, to be ashamed of in
being an honest cluster of stars. Indeed, they seemed to be sensible of
this themselves, and they now yielded to the force of Herschel's
arguments so far as to show themselves in the new character of
_nebulæ_ spangled with stars; these are the _stellar nebulæ_;
quite as much as you could expect in so short a time: Rome was not
built in a day: and one must have some respect to stellar feelings. It
was noticed, however, that where a bright haze, and not a weak milk-
and-water haze, had revealed itself to the telescope, this, arising
from a case of _compression_, (as previously explained,) required
very little increase of telescopic power to force him into a fuller
confession. He made a clean breast of it. But at length came a dreadful
anomaly. A 'nebula' in the constellation _Andromeda_ turned
restive: another in _Orion_, I grieve to say it, still more so. I
confine myself to the latter. A very low power sufficed to bring him to
a slight confession, which in fact amounted to nothing; the very
highest would not persuade him to show a star. 'Just one,' said some
coaxing person; 'we'll be satisfied with only one.' But no: he would
_not_. He was hardened, 'he wouldn't _split_.' And Herschel
was thus led, after waiting as long as flesh and blood _could_
wait, to infer two classes of _nebulæ_; one that were stars; and
another that were _not_ stars, nor ever were meant to be stars.
Yet _that_ was premature: he found at last, that, though not raised
to the peerage of stars, finally they would be so: they were the
matter of stars; and by gradual condensation would become suns, whose
atmosphere, by a similar process of condensing, would become planets,
capable of brilliant literati and philosophers, in several volumes
octavo. So stood the case for a long time; it was settled to the
satisfaction of Europe that there were two classes of _nebulæ_,
one that _were_ worlds, one that were _not_, but only the pabulum
of future worlds. Silence arose. A voice was heard, 'Let there
be Lord Rosse!' and immediately his telescope walked into Orion;
destroyed the supposed matter of stars; but, in return, created
immeasurable worlds.

As a hint for apprehending the delicacy and difficulty of the process
in sidereal astronomy, let the inexperienced reader figure to himself
these separate cases of perplexity: 1st, A perplexity where the dilemma
arises from the collision between magnitude and distance:--is the size
less, or the distance greater? 2dly, Where the dilemma arises between
motions, a motion in ourselves doubtfully confounded with a motion in
some external body; or, 3dly, Where it arises between possible
positions of an object: is it a real proximity that we see between two
stars, or simply an apparent proximity from lying in the same visual
line, though in far other depths of space? As regards the first
dilemma, we may suppose two laws, A and B, absolutely in contradiction,
laid down at starting: A, that all fixed stars are precisely at the
same _distance_; in this case every difference in the apparent
magnitude will indicate a corresponding difference in the real
magnitude, and will measure that difference. B, that all the fixed
stars are precisely of the same _magnitude_; in which case, every
variety in the size will indicate a corresponding difference in the
distance, and will measure that difference. Nor could we imagine any
exception to these inferences from A or from B, whichever of the two
were assumed, unless through optical laws that might not equally affect
objects under different circumstances; I mean, for instance, that might
suffer a disturbance as applied under hypoth. B, to different depths in
space, or under hypoth. A, to different arrangements of structure in
the star. But thirdly, it is certain, that neither A nor B is the
abiding law: and next it becomes an object by science and by
instruments to distinguish more readily and more certainly between the
cases where the distance has degraded the size, and the cases where the
size being _really_ less, has caused an exaggeration of the
distance: or again, where the size being really less, yet co-operating
with a distance really greater, may degrade the estimate, (though
travelling in a right direction,) below the truth; or again where the
size being really less, yet counteracted by a distance also less, may
equally disturb the truth of human measurements, and so on.

A second large order of equivocating appearances will arise,--not as to
magnitude, but as to motion. If it could be a safe assumption, that the
system to which our planet is attached were absolutely fixed and
motionless, except as regards its own _internal_ relations of
movement, then every change outside of us, every motion that the
registers of astronomy had established, would be objective and not
subjective. It would be safe to pronounce at once that it was a motion
in the object contemplated, _not_ in the subject contemplating.
Or, reversely, if it were safe to assume as a universal law, that no
motion was possible in the starry heavens, then every change of
relations in space, between ourselves and them, would indicate and
would measure a progress, or regress, on the part of our solar system,
in certain known directions. But now, because it is not safe to rest in
either assumption, the range of possibilities for which science has to
provide, is enlarged; the immediate difficulties are multiplied; but
with the result (as in the former case) of reversionally expanding the
powers, and consequently the facilities, lodged both in the science and
in the arts ministerial to the science. Thus, in the constellation
_Cygnus_, there is a star gradually changing its relation to our
system, whose distance from ourselves (as Dr. Nichol tells us) is
ascertained to be about six hundred and seventy thousand times our own
distance from the sun: that is, neglecting minute accuracy, about six
hundred and seventy thousand stages of one hundred million miles each.
This point being known, it falls within the _arts_ of astronomy to
translate this apparent angular motion into miles; and presuming this
change of relation to be not in the star, but really in ourselves, we
may deduce the velocity of our course, we may enter into our _log_
daily the rate at which our whole solar system is running. Bessel, it
seems, the eminent astronomer who died lately, computed this velocity
to be such (viz., three times that of our own earth in its proper
orbit) as would carry us to the star in forty-one thousand years. But,
in the mean time, the astronomer is to hold in reserve some small share
of his attention, some trifle of a side-glance, now and then, to the
possibility of an error, after all, in the main assumption: he must
watch the indications, if any such should arise, that not ourselves,
but the star in _Cygnus_, is the real party concerned, in drifting
at this shocking rate, with no prospect of coming to an anchorage.
[Footnote: It is worth adding at this point, whilst the reader
remembers without effort the numbers, viz., forty-one thousand
years, for the time, (the space being our own distance from the sun
repeated six hundred and seventy thousand times,) what would be the
time required for reaching, in the _body_, that distance to which
Lord Rosse's six feet mirror has so recently extended our
_vision_. The time would be, as Dr. Nichol computes, about two
hundred and fifty millions of years, supposing that our rate of
travelling was about three times that of our earth in its orbit. Now,
as the velocity is assumed to be the same in both cases, the ratio
between the distance (already so tremendous) of Bessel's 61
_Cygni_, and that of Lord Rosse's farthest frontier, is as forty-
one thousand to two hundred and fifty millions. This is a simple rule-
of-three problem for a child. And the answer to it will, perhaps,
convey the simplest expression of the superhuman power lodged in the
new telescope:--as is the ratio of forty-one thousand to two hundred
and fifty million, so is the ratio of our own distance from the sun
multiplied by six hundred and seventy thousand, to the outermost limit
of Lord Rosse's sidereal vision.]

Another class, and a frequent one, of equivocal phenomena, phenomena
that are reconcilable indifferently with either of two assumptions,
though less plausibly reconciled with the one than with the other,
concerns the position of stars that seem connected with each other by
systematic relations, and which yet _may_ lie in very different
depths of space, being brought into seeming connection only by the
human eye. There have been, and there are, cases where two stars
dissemble an interconnection which they really _have_, and other
cases where they simulate an interconnection which they have not. All
these cases of simulation and dissimulation torment the astronomer by
multiplying his perplexities, and deepening the difficulty of escaping
them. He cannot get at the truth: in many cases, magnitude and distance
are in collusion with each other to deceive him: motion subjective is
in collusion with motion objective; duplex systems are in collusion
with fraudulent stars, having no real partnership whatever, but
mimicking such a partnership by means of the limitations or errors
affecting the human eye, where it can apply no other sense to aid or to
correct itself. So that the business of astronomy, in these days, is no
sinecure, as the reader perceives. And by another evidence, it is
continually becoming less of a sinecure. Formerly, one or two men,--
Tycho, suppose, or, in a later age, Cassini and Horrox, and Bradley,
had observatories: one man, suppose, observed the stars for all
Christendom; and the rest of Europe observed _him_. But now, up
and down Europe, from the deep blue of Italian skies to the cold frosty
atmospheres of St. Petersburg and Glasgow, the stars are conscious of
being watched everywhere; and if all astronomers do not publish their
observations, all use them in their speculations. New and brilliantly
appointed observatories are rising in every latitude, or risen; and
none, by the way, of these new-born observatories, is more interesting
from the circumstances of its position, or more _picturesque_ to a
higher organ than the eye--viz., to the human heart--than the New
Observatory raised by the university of Glasgow.[Footnote: It has been
reported, ever since the autumn of 1845, and the report is now,
(August, 1846,) gathering strength, that some railway potentate, having
taken a fancy for the ancient college of Glasgow, as a bauble to hang
about his wife's neck, (no accounting for tastes,) has offered, (or
_will_ offer,) such a price, that the good old academic lady in
this her moss-grown antiquity, seriously thinks of taking him at his
word, packing up her traps, and being off. When a spirit of galavanting
comes across an aged lady, it is always difficult to know where it will
stop: so, in fact, you know, she may choose to steam for Texas. But the
present impression is, that she will settle down by the side of what
you may call her married or settled daughter--the Observatory; which
one would be glad to have confirmed, as indicating that no purpose of
pleasure-seeking had been working in elderly minds, but the instinct of
religious rest and aspiration. The Observatory would thus remind one of
those early Christian anchorites, and self-exiled visionaries, that
being led by almost a necessity of nature to take up their residence in
deserts, sometimes drew after themselves the whole of their own
neighborhood.]

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