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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




[19] "_Strulbrugs_."--Hardly _strulbrugs_, will be the thought of the
learned reader, who knows that _young_ women could not be strulbrugs;
since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had
lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse.
The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to
understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been
burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork
was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum
continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so
abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT! However, the use of
this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to
have become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a suffering existence
may compensate the want of extension; and a boundless depth of misery may
be a transformed expression for a boundless duration of misery. The most
aged person, to all appearance, that ever came under my eyes, was an
infant--hardly eight months old. He was the illegitimate son of a poor
idiot girl, who had herself been shamefully ill treated; and the poor
infant, falling under the care of an enraged grandmother, who felt
herself at once burdened and disgraced, was certainly not better treated.
He was dying, when I saw him, of a lingering malady, with features
expressive of frantic misery; and it seemed to me that he looked at the
least three centuries old. One might have fancied him one of Swift's
strulbrugs, that, through long attenuation and decay, had dwindled back
into infancy, with one organ only left perfect--the organ of fear and
misery.

[20] This was a manoeuvre regularly taught to the Austrian cavalry in the
middle of the last century; as a ready way of opening the doors of
cottages.




CHAPTER III.

INFANT LITERATURE.


"_The child_," says Wordsworth, "_is father of the man;_" thus calling
into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived,
that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing
fruit, must have preëxisted by way of germ in the infant. Yes; all
that is now broadly emblazoned in the man once was latent--seen or not
seen--as a vernal bud in the child. But not, therefore, is it true
inversely, that all which preëxists in the child finds its development
in the man. Rudiments and tendencies, which _might_ have found,
sometimes by accidental, _do_ not find, sometimes under the killing
frost of counter forces, _cannot_ find, their natural evolution.
Infancy, therefore, is to be viewed, not only as part of a larger world
that waits for its final complement in old age, but also as a separate
world itself; part of a continent, but also a distinct peninsula. Most
of what he has, the grown-up man inherits from his infant self; but
it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural
inheritance.

Childhood, therefore, in the midst of its intellectual weakness, and
sometimes even by means of this weakness, enjoys a limited privilege
of strength. The heart in this season of life is apprehensive, and,
where its sensibilities are profound, is endowed with a special power
of listening for the tones of truth--hidden, struggling, or remote;
for the knowledge being then narrow, the interest is narrow in the
objects of knowledge; consequently the sensibilities are not scattered,
are not multiplied, are not crushed and confounded (as afterwards they
are) under the burden of that distraction which lurks in the infinite
littleness of details.

That mighty silence which infancy is thus privileged by nature and by
position to enjoy coöperates with another source of power,--almost
peculiar to youth and youthful circumstances,--which Wordsworth also
was the first person to notice. It belongs to a profound experience
of the relations subsisting between ourselves and nature--that not
always are we called upon to seek; sometimes, and in childhood above
all, we are sought.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That noting _of itself_ will come,
But we must still be seeking?"

And again:--

"Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which _of themselves_ our minds impress;
And we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness."

These cases of infancy, reached at intervals by special revelations,
or creating for itself, through it privileged silence of heart,
authentic whispers of truth, or beauty, or power, have some analogy
to those other cases, more directly supernatural, in which (according
to the old traditional faith of our ancestors) deep messages of
admonition reached an individual through sudden angular deflexions of
words, uttered or written, that had not been originally addressed to
himself. Of these there were two distinct classes--those where the
person concerned had been purely passive; and, secondly, those in which
he himself had to some extent coöperated. The first class have been
noticed by Cowper, the poet, and by George Herbert, the well-known
pious brother of the still better-known infidel, Lord Herbert, (of
Cherbury,) in a memorable sonnet; scintillations they are of what seems
nothing less than providential lights oftentimes arresting our
attention, from the very centre of what else seems the blank darkness
of chance and blind accident. "Books lying open, millions of
surprises,"--these are among the cases to which Herbert (and to which
Cowper) alludes,--books, that is to say, left casually open without
design or consciousness, from which some careless passer-by, when
throwing the most negligent of glances upon the page, has been startled
by a solitary word lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting and lurking
for _him_, and looking at him steadily as an eye searching the haunted
places of his conscience. These cases are in principle identical with
those of the _second_ class, where the inquirer himself coöperated,
or was not entirely passive; cases such as those which the Jews called
Bath-col, or daughter of a voice, (the echo [1] augury,) viz., where a
man, perplexed in judgment and sighing for some determining counsel,
suddenly heard from a stranger in some unlooked-for quarter words not
meant for himself, but clamorously applying to the difficulty besetting
him. In these instances, the mystical word, that carried a secret meaning
and message to one sole ear in the world, was unsought for: _that_
constituted its virtue and its divinity; and to arrange means wilfully
for catching at such casual words, would have defeated the purpose.
A well-known variety of augury, conducted upon this principle, lay in
the "Sortes Biblicae," where the Bible was the oracular book consulted,
and far more extensively at a later period in the "Sortes Virgilianae,"
[2] where the Aeneid was the oracle consulted.

Something analogous to these spiritual transfigurations of a word or
a sentence, by a bodily organ (eye or ear) that has been touched with
virtue for evoking the spiritual echo lurking in its recesses, belongs,
perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred result of forcing
out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or grandeur that may happen to lodge
(unobserved by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages scattered
up and down literature. Meantime, I wish the reader to understand that,
in putting forward the peculiar power with which my childish eye
detected a grandeur or a pomp of beauty not seen by others in some
special instances, I am not arrogating more than it is lawful for every
man the very humblest to arrogate, viz., an individuality of mental
constitution so far applicable to special and exceptionable cases as
to reveal in _them_ a life and power of beauty which others (and
sometimes which _all_ others) had missed.

The first case belongs to the march (or boundary) line between my eighth
and ninth years; the others to a period earlier by two and a half
years. But I notice the latest case before the others, as it connected
itself with a great epoch in the movement of my intellect. There is
a dignity to every man in the mere historical assigning, if accurately
he can assign, the first dawning upon his mind of any godlike faculty
or apprehension, and more especially if that first dawning happened
to connect itself with circumstances of individual or incommunicable
splendor. The passage which I am going to cite first of all revealed
to me the immeasurableness of the morally sublime. What was it, and
where was it? Strange the reader will think it, and strange [3] it is,
that a case of colossal sublimity should first emerge from such a writer
as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part
of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was
summoned to study should have been Phaedrus--a writer ambitious of
investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic
graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally
towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most
intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised
a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a social sense
as himself, viz., the class of slaves, and rose above that class by
the same intellectual power applying itself to the same object, viz.,
the moral apologue. These were the two lines in which that glory of
the sublime, so stirring to my childish sense, seemed to burn as in
some mighty pharos:--

"Aesopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici;
Servumque collocârunt eternâ in basi:"

_A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to Aesop; and a poor pariah
slave they planted upon an everlasting pedestal._ I have not scrupled
to introduce the word _pariah_, because in that way only could I
decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the
sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity
originated in the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge,
between the pollution of slavery,--the being a man, yet without right
or lawful power belonging to a man,--between this unutterable
degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when,
upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the
earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man,
the cymbals and kettledrums of kings as drowning the whispers of his
ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet
joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave. I assign
the elements of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to the
reader may seem extravagant, and by no means of what it was reasonable
to feel. But, in order that full justice may be done to my childish
self, I must point out to the reader another source of what strikes
me as real grandeur. Horace, that exquisite master of the lyre, and
that most shallow of critics, it is needless to say that in those days
I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of his idle canon, that
the opening of poems must be humble and subdued. But my own sensibility
told me how much of additional grandeur accrued to these two lines as
being the immediate and all-pompous _opening_ of the poem. The same
feeling I had received from the crashing overture to the grand chapter
of Daniel--"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of
his lords." But, above all, I felt this effect produced in the two
opening lines of "Macbeth:"--

"WHEN--(but watch that an emphasis of thunder dwells upon that word
'when')--

WHEN shall we three meet again--
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"

What an orchestral crash bursts upon the ear in that all-shattering
question! And one syllable of apologetic preparation, so as to meet
the suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the
whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from
that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of
fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word _ingentem_,
and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously
divided,--Aesop the slave and the Athenians,--must be read as an
_appoggiatura_, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if
on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras
upon the immortal passion of the second line--"Servumque collocârunt
ETERNA IN BASI." This passage from Phaedrus, which might be briefly
designated _The Apotheosis of the Slave_, gave to me my first grand
and jubilant sense of the moral sublime.

Two other experiences of mine of the same class had been earlier, and
these I had shared with my sister Elizabeth. The first was derived
from the "Arabian Nights." Mrs. Barbauld, a lady now very nearly
forgotten, [4] then filled a large space in the public eye; in fact,
as a writer for children, she occupied the place from about 1780 to
1805 which, from 1805 to 1835, was occupied by Miss Edgeworth. Only,
as unhappily Miss Edgeworth is also now very nearly forgotten, this
is to explain _ignotum per ingnotius_, or at least one _ignotum_ by
another _ignotum_. However, since it cannot be helped, this unknown
and also most well-known woman, having occassion, in the days of her
glory, to speak of the "Arabian Nights," insisted on Aladdin, and
secondly, on Sinbad, as the two jewels of the collection. Now, on the
contrary, my sister and myself pronounced Sinbad to be very bad, and
Aladdin to be pretty nearly the worst, and upon grounds that still
strike me as just. For, as to Sinbad, it is not a story at all, but
a mere succession of adventures, having no unity of interest whatsoever;
and in Aladdin, after the possession of the lamp has been once secured
by a pure accident, the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere
record of upholstery: how this saloon was finished to-day, and that
window on the next day, with no fresh incident whatever, except the
single and transient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to
the magician by the unpardonable stupidity of Aladdin in regard to the
lamp. But, whilst my sister and I agreed in despising Aladdin so much
as almost to be on the verge of despising the queen of all the
bluestockings for so ill-directed a preference, one solitary section
there was of that tale which was fixed and fascinated my gaze, in a
degree that I never afterwards forgot, and did not at that time
comprehend. The sublimity which it involved was mysterious and
unfathomable as regarded any key which I possessed for deciphering
its law or origin. Made restless by the blind sense which I had of its
grandeur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out _why_ it
should be grand. Unable to explain my own impressions in "Aladdin,"
I did not the less obstinately persist in believing a sublimity which
I could not understand. It was, in fact, one of those many important
cases which elsewhere I have called _involutes_ of human sensibility;
combinations in which the materials of future thought or feeling are
carried as imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried
variously combined through the atmosphere, or by means of rivers, by
birds, by winds, by waters, into remote countries. But the reader shall
judge for himself. At the opening of the tale, a magician living in
the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by
his secret art of an enchanted lamp endowed with supernatural powers
available for the service of any man whatever who should get it into
his keeping. But _there_ lies the difficulty. The lamp is imprisoned
in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by
the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must
have a special horoscope written in the stars, or else a peculiar
destiny written in his constitution, entitling him to take possession
of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found? Where shall he be
sought? The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth; he listens
to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his
experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them
all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of
Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin.
Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by
his _arenarius_, could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant's
feet are distinctly recognized on the banks of the Tigris, distant
by four hundred and forty days' march of an army or a caravan. These
feet, these steps, the sorcerer knows, and challenges in his heart as
the feet, as the steps of that innocent boy, through whose hands only
he could have a chance for reaching the lamp.

It follows, therefore, that the wicked magician exercises two demoniac
gifts. First, he has the power to disarm Babel itself of its confusion.
Secondly, after having laid aside as useless many billions of earthly
sounds, and after having fastened his murderous [5] attention upon one
insulated tread, he has the power, still more unsearchable, of reading in
that hasty movement an alphabet of new and infinite symbols; for, in
order that the sound of the child's feet should be significant and
intelligible, that sound must open into a gamut of infinite compass. The
pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the phantoms of the brain
must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying
footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must
be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their
corresponding keys--have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the
least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.
Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. All this, by rude
efforts at explanation that mocked my feeble command of words, I
communicated to my sister; and she, whose sympathy with my meaning was
always so quick and true, often outrunning electrically my imperfect
expressions, felt the passage in the same way as myself, [6] but not,
perhaps, in the same degree. She was much beyond me in velocity of
apprehension and many other qualities of intellect. Here only, viz.,
on cases of the _dark_ sublime, where it rested upon dim abstractions,
and when no particular trait of _moral_ grandeur came forward, we
differed--differed, that is to say, as by more or by less. Else, even
as to the sublime, and numbers of other intellectual questions which
rose up to us from our immense reading, we drew together with a perfect
fidelity of sympathy; and therefore I pass willingly from a case which
exemplified one of our rare differences to another, not less interesting
for itself, which illustrated (what occurred so continually) the
intensity of our agreement.

No instance of noble revenge that ever I heard of seems so effective,
if considered as applied to a noble-minded wrong doer, or in any case
as so pathetic. From what quarter the story comes originally, was
unknown to us at the time, and I have never met it since; so that
possibly it may be new to the reader. We found it in a book written
for the use of his own children by Dr. Percival, the physician who
attended at Greenhay. Dr. P. was a literary man, of elegant tastes and
philosophic habits. Some of his papers may be found in the "Manchester
Philosophic Transactions;" and these I have heard mentioned with
respect, though, for myself, I have no personal knowledge of them.
Some presumption meantime arises in their favor from the fact that he
had been a favored correspondent of the most eminent Frenchmen at that
time who cultivated literature jointly with philosophy. Voltaire,
Diderot, Maupertuis, Condorcet, and D'Alembert had all treated him
with distinction; and I have heard my mother say that, in days before
I or my sister could have known him, he attempted vainly to interest
her in these French luminaries by reading extracts from their frequent
letters; which, however, so far from reconciling her to the letters,
or to the writers of the letters, had the unhappy effect of riveting
her dislike (previously budding) to the doctor, as their reciever, and
the _proneur_ of their authors. The tone of the letters--hollow,
insincere, and full of courtly civilities to Dr. P., as a known friend
of "_the tolerance_" (meaning, of toleration)--certainly was not adapted
to the English taste; and in this respect was specially offensive to
my mother, as always assuming of the doctor, that, by mere necessity,
as being a philosopher, he must be an infidel. Dr. P. left that
question, I believe, "_in medio_," neither assenting nor denying; and
undoubtedly there was no particular call upon him to publish his
confession of Faith before one who, in the midst of her rigourous
politeness, suffered it to be too transparent that she did not like
him. It is always a pity to see any thing lost and wasted, especially
love; and, therefore, it was no subject for lamentation, that too
probably the philosophic doctor did not enthusiastically like _her_.
But, if really so, that made no difference in his feelings towards my
sister and myself. Us he _did_ like; and, as one proof of his regard,
he presented us jointly with such of his works as could be supposed
interesting to two young literati, whos combined ages made no more at
this period than a baker's dozen. These presentation copies amount to
two at the lest, both _octavoes_, and one of them entitled _The
Father's_--something or other; what was it?--_Assistant_, perhaps. How
much assistance the doctor might furnish to the fathers upon this
wicked little planet, I cannot say. But fathers are a stubborn race;
it is very little use trying to assist _them_. Better always to
prescribe for the rising generation. And certainly the impression which
he made upon us--my sister and myself--by the story in question was
deep and memorable: my sister wept over it, and wept over the
remembrance of it; and, not long after, carried its sweet aroma off
with her to heaven; whilst I, for _my_ part, have never forgotten it.
Yet, perhaps, it is injudicious to have too much excited the reader's
expectations; therefore, reader, understand what it is that you are
invited to hear--not much of a story, but simply a noble sentiment,
such as that of Louis XII, when he refused, as King of France, to
avenge his own injuries as Duke of Orleans--such as that of Hadrian,
when he said that a Roman imperator ought to die standing, meaning
that Caesar, as the man who represented almighty Rome, should face the
last enemy as the first in an attitude of unconquerable defiance. Here
is Dr. Percival's story, which (again I warn you) will collapse into
nothing at all, unless you yourself are able to dilate it by expansive
sympathy with its sentiment.

A young officer (in what army, no matter) had so far forgotten himself,
in a moment of irritation, as to strike a private soldier, full of
personal dignity, (as sometimes happens in all ranks,) and distinguished
for his courage. The inexorable laws of military discipline forbade
to the injured soldier any practical redress--he could look for no
retaliation by acts. Words only were at his command; and, in a tumult
of indignation, as he turned away, the soldier said to his officer
that he would "make him repent it." This, wearing the shape of a menace,
naturally rekindled the officer's anger, and intercepted any disposition
which might be rising within him towards a sentiment of remorse; and
thus the irritation between the two young men grew hotter than before.
Some weeks after this a partial action took place with the enemy.
Suppose yourself a spectator, and looking down into a valley occupied
by the two armies. They are facing each other, you see, in martial
array. But it is no more than a skirmish which is going on; in the
course of which, however, an occasion suddenly arises for a desperate
service. A redoubt, which has fallen into the enemy's hands, must be
recaptured at any price, and under circumstances of all but hopeless
difficulty. A strong party has volunteered for the service; there is
a cry for somebody to head them; you see a soldier step out from the
ranks to assume this dangerous leadership; the party moves rapidly
forward; in a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes in clouds
of smoke; for one half hour, from behind these clouds, you receive
hieroglyphic reports of bloody strife--fierce repeating signals, flashes
from the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs advancing or
receding, slackening or redoubling. At length all is over; the redoubt
has been recovered; that which was lost is found again; the jewel which
had been made captive is ransomed with blood. Crimsoned with glorious
gore, the wreck of the conquering party is relieved, and at liberty
to return. From the river you see it ascending. The plume-crested
officer in command rushes forward, with his left hand raising his hat
in homage to the blackened fragments of what once was a flag, whilst,
with his right hand, he seizes that of the leader, though no more than
a private from the ranks. _That_ perplexes you not; mystery you see
none in _that_. For distinctions of order perish, ranks are confounded,
"high and low" are words without a meaning, and to wreck goes every
notion or feeling that divides the noble from the noble, or the brave
man from the brave. But wherefore is it that now, when suddenly they
wheel into mutual recognition, suddenly they pause? This soldier, this
officer--who are they? O reader! once before they had stood face to
face--the soldier it is that was struck; the officer it is that struck
him. Once again they are meeting; and the gaze of armies is upon them.
If for a moment a doubt divides them, in a moment the doubt has
perished. One glance exchanged between them publishes the forgiveness
that is sealed forever. As one who recovers a brother whom he had
accounted dead, the officer sprang forward, threw his arms around the
neck of the soldier, and kissed him, as if he were some martyr glorified
by that shadow of death from which he was returning; whilst, on _his_
part, the soldier, stepping back, and carrying his open hand through
the beautiful motions of the military salute to a superior, makes this
immortal answer--that answer which shut up forever the memory of the
indignity offered to him, even whilst for the last time alluding to
it: "Sir," he said, "I told you before that I would _make you repent
it._"

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