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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




Great passions, (do not understand me, reader, as though I meant great
appetites,) passions moving in a great orbit, and transcending little
regards, are always arguments of some latent nobility. There are,
indeed, but few men and few women capable of great passions, or
(properly speaking) of passions at all. Hartley, in his mechanism of
the human mind, propagates the sensations by means of vibrations, and
by miniature vibrations, which, in a Roman form for such miniatures,
he terms _vibratiuncles_. Now, of men and women generally, parodying
that terminology, we ought to say--not that they are governed by
passions, or at all capable of passions, but of _passiuncles_. And
thence it is that few men go, or can go, beyond a little _love-liking_,
as it is called; and hence also, that, in a world where so little
conformity takes place between the ideal speculations of men and the
gross realities of life, where marriages are governed in so vast a
proportion by convenience, prudence, self-interest,--any thing, in
short, rather than deep sympathy between the parties,--and,
consequently, where so many men must be crossed in their inclinations,
we yet hear of so few tragic catastrophes on that account. The king,
however, was certainly among the number of those who are susceptible
of a deep passion, if every thing be true that is reported of him. All
the world has heard that he was passionately devoted to the beautiful
sister of the then Duke of Richmond. That was before his marriage; and
I believe it is certain that he not only wished, but sincerely
meditated, to have married her. So much is matter of notoriety. But
other circumstances of the case have been sometimes reported, which
imply great distraction of mind and a truly profound possession of his
heart by that early passion; which, in a prince whose feelings are
liable so much to the dispersing and dissipating power of endless
interruption from new objects and fresh claims on the attention, coupled
also with the fact that he never, but in this one case, professed any
thing amounting to extravagant or frantic attachment, do seem to argue
that the king was truly and passionately in love with Lady Sarah Lennox.
He had a _demon_ upon him, and was under a real _possession_. If so,
what a lively expression of the mixed condition of human fortunes, and
not less of another truth equally affecting, viz., the dread conflicts
with the will, the mighty agitations which silently and in darkness
are convulsing many a heart, where, to the external eye, all is
tranquil,--that this king, at the very threshold of his public career,
at the very moment when he was binding about his brows the golden
circle of sovereignty, when Europe watched him with interest, and the
kings of the earth with envy, not one of the vulgar titles to happiness
being wanting,--youth, health, a throne the most splendid on this
planet, general popularity amongst a nation of freemen, and the hope
which belongs to powers as yet almost untried,--that, even under these
most flattering auspices, he should be called upon to make a sacrifice
the most bitter of all to which human life is liable! He made it; and
he might then have said to his people, "For you, and to my public
duties, I have made a sacrifice which none of you would have made for
me." In years long ago, I have heard a woman of rank recurring to the
circumstances of Lady Sarah's first appearance at court after the
king's marriage. If I recollect rightly, it occurred after that lady's
own marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury. Many eyes were upon both parties
at that moment,--female eyes, especially,--and the speaker did not
disguise the excessive interest with which she herself observed them.
Lady Sarah was not agitated, but the king _was_. He seemed anxious,
sensibly trembled, changed color, and _shivered_, as Lady S. B. drew
near. But, to quote the one single eloquent sentiment, which I remember
after a lapse of thirty years, in Monk Lewis's Romantic Tales, "In
this world all things pass away; blessed be Heaven, and the bitter
pangs by which sometimes it is pleased to recall its wanderers, even
our passions pass away!" And thus it happened that this storm also was
laid asleep and forgotten, together with so many others of its kind
that have been, and that shall be again, so long as man is man, and
woman woman. Meantime, in justification of a passion so profound, one
would be glad to think highly of the lady that inspired it; and,
therefore, I heartily hope that the insults offered to her memory in
the scandalous "Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun" are mere calumnies, and
records rather of his presumptuous wishes than of any actual successes.
[6]

However, to leave dissertation behind me, and to resume the thread of
my narrative, an incident, which about this period impressed me even
more profoundly than my introduction to a royal presence, was my first
visit to London.


FOOTNOTES

[1] My acquaintance with Lord Westport was of some years' standing. My
father, whose commercial interests led him often to Ireland, had many
friends there. One of these was a country gentleman connected with the
west; and at his house I first met Lord Westport.

[2] "Sir," said the emperor to a soldier who had missed the target in
succession I know not how many times, (suppose we say fifteen,) "allow me
to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown
in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials,
argues the most splendid talents for missing."

[3] _France_ was at that time among the royal titles, the act for
altering the king's style and title not having then passed. As connected
with this subject, I may here mention a project (reported to have been
canvassed in council at the time when that alteration _did_ take place)
for changing the title from king to emperor. What then occurred
strikingly illustrates the general character of the British policy as to
all external demonstrations of pomp and national pretension, and its
strong opposition to that of France under corresponding circumstances.
The principle _of esse quam videri_, and the carelessness about names
when the thing is unaffected, generally speaking, must command praise and
respect. Yet, considering how often the reputation of power becomes, for
international purposes, nothing less than power itself, and that words,
in many relations of human life, are emphatically things, and sometimes
are so to the exclusion of the most absolute things themselves, men of
all qualities being often governed by names, the policy of France seems
the wiser, viz., _se faire valoir_, even at the price of ostentation.
But, at all events, no man is entitled to exercised that extrem candor,
forbearance, and spirit of ready concession _in re aliena_, and, above
all, _in re politica_, which, on its own account, might be altogether
honorable. The council might give away their own honors, but not yours
and mine. On a public (or at least on a foreign) interest, it is the duty
of a good citizen to be lofty, exacting, almost insolent. And, on this
principle, when the ancient style and title of the kingdom fell under
revision, if--as I do not deny--it was advisable to retrench all obsolete
pretensions as so many memorials of a greatness that in that particular
manifestation was now extinct, and therefore, _pro tanto_, rather
presumtions of weakness than of strength as being mementoes of our
losses, yet, on the other hand, all countervailing claims which had since
arisen, and had far more than equiponderated the declension in that one
direction, should have been then adopted into the titular heraldry of the
nation. It was neither wise nor just to insult foreign nations with
assumptions which no longer stood upon any basis of reality. And on that
ground _France_ was, perhaps, rightly omitted. But why, when the crown
was thus remoulded, and its jewelry unset, if this one pearl were to be
surrendered as an ornament no longer ours, why, we may ask, were not the
many and gorgeous jewels, achieved by the national wisdom and power in
later times, adopted into the recomposed tiara? Upon what principle did
the Romans, the wisest among the children of this world, leave so many
inscriptions, as records of their power or their triumphs, upon columns,
arches, temples, _basilicae_, or medals? A national act, a solemn and
deliberate act, delivered to history, is a more imperishable monument
than any made by hands; and the title, as revised, which ought to have
expressed a change in the dominion simply as to the mode and form of its
expansion, now remains as a false, base, abject confession of absolute
contraction: once we had A, B, and C; now we have dwindled into A and B:
true, most unfaithful guardian of the national honors, we had lost C, and
that you were careful to remember. But we happend to have gained D, E,
F,--and so downwards to Z,--all of which duly you forgot.

On this argument, it was urged at the time, in high quarters, that the
new re-cast of the crown and sceptre should come out of the furnace
_equally_ improved; as much for what they were authorized to claim as for
what they were compelled to disclaim. And, as one mode of effecting this,
it was proposed that the king should become an emperor. Some, indeed,
alleged that an emperor, but its very idea, as received in the Chancery
of Europe, presupposes a king paramount over vassal or tributary kings.
But it is a sufficient answer to say that an emperor is a prince, united
in his own person the _thrones_ of several distinct kingdoms; and in
effect we adopt that view of the case in giving the title of imperial to
the parliament, or common assembly of the three kingdoms. However, the
title of the prince was a matter trivial in comparison of the title of
his _ditio_, or extent of jurisdiction. This point admits of a striking
illustration: in the "Paradise Regained," Milton has given us, in close
succession, three matchless pictures of civil grandeur, as exemplified in
three different modes by three different states. Availing himself of the
brief scriptural notice,--"The devil taketh him up into an exceeding high
mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of
them,"--he causes to pass, as in a solemn pageant before us, the two
military empires then coexisting, of Parthia and Rome, and finally (under
another idea of political greatness) the intellectual glories of Athens.
From the picture of the Roman grandeur I extract, and beg the reader to
weigh, the following lines:--

"Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see--at
What conflux issuing forth or entering in;
Pretors, proconsuls, to their provinces
Hasting, or on return in robes of state;
Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
Legions or cohorts, turns of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,
In various habits on the Appian road,
Or on the Emilian; some from farthest south,
Syene, and where the shadow both way falls,
Meroë, Nilotic isle: and, more to west,
The realm of Bocchus to the Blackmoor Sea;
From India and the Golden Chersonese,
And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane,
--Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;
From Gallia, Gades, and the British, west,
Germans, and Scythians, and Sarmatians, north,
Beyond Danubius to the Tauric pool."

With this superb picture, or abstraction of the Roman pomps and power,
when ascending to their utmost altitude, confront the following
representative sketch of a great English levee on some high solemnity,
suppose the king's birthday: "Amongst the presentations to his majesty,
we noticed Lord O. S., the governor general of India, on his departure
for Bengal; Mr. U. Z., with an address from the Upper and Lower Canadas;
Sir L. V., on his appointment as commander of the forces in Nova Scotia;
General Sir ----, on his return from the Burmese war, ["the Golden
Chersonese,"] the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet; Mr. B.
Z., on his appointment to the chief justiceship at Madras; Sir R. G., the
late attorney general at the Cape of Good Hope; General Y. X., on taking
leave for the governorship of Ceylon, ["the utmost Indian isle,
Taprobane;"] Lord F. M., the bearer of the last despatches from head
quarters in Spain; Col. P., on going out as captain general of the forces
in New Holland; Commodore St. L., on his return from a voyage of
discovery towards the north pole; the King of Owhyhee, attended by
chieftains from the other islands of that cluster; Col. M'P., on his
return from the war in Ashantee, upon which occasion the gallant colonel
presented the treaty and tribute from that country; Admiral ----, on his
appointment to the Baltic fleet; Captain O. N., with despatches from the
Red Sea, advising the destruction of the piratical armament and
settlements in that quarter, as also in the Persian Gulf; Sir T. O'N.,
the late resident in Nepaul, to present his report of the war in that
territory, and in adjacent regions--names as yet unknown in Europe; the
governor of the Leeward Islands, on departing for the West Indies;
various deputations with petitions, addresses, &c., from islands in
remote quarters of the globe, amongst which we distinguished those from
Prince Edward Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from, the Mauritius,
from Java, from the British settlement in Terra del Fuego, from the
Christian churches in the Society, Friendly, and Sandwich Islands--as
well as other groups less known in the South Seas; Admiral H. A., on
assuming the command of the Channel fleet; Major Gen. X. L., on resigning
the lieutenant governorship of Gibraltar; Hon. G. F., on going out as
secretary to the governor of Malta," &c.

This sketch, too hastily made up, is founded upon a base of a very few
years; _i.e._, we have, in one or two instances, placed in juxtaposition,
as coexistences, events separated by a few years. But if (like Milton's
picture of the Roman grandeur) the abstraction had been made from a base
of thirty years in extent, and had there been added to the picture
(according to his precedent) the many and remote embassies to and from
independent states, in all quarters of the earth, with how many more
groups might the spectacle have been crowded, and especially of those who
fall within that most picturesque delineation--

"Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed"!

As it is, I have noticed hardly any places but such as lie absolutely
within our jurisdiction. And yet, even under that limitation, how vastly
more comprehensive is the chart of British dominion than of the Roman! To
this gorgeous empire, some corresponding style and title should have been
adapted at the revision of the old title, and should yet be adapted.

_Apropos_ of the proposed change in the king's title: Coleridge, on being
assured that the new title of the king was to be Emperor of the British
Islands and their dependencies, and on the coin _Imperator Britanniarum_,
remarked, that, in this remanufactured form, the title might be said to
be _japanned_; alluding to this fact, that amongst _insular_ sovereigns,
the only one known to Christian diplomacy by the title of emperor is the
Sovereign of Japan.

[4] For the sake of those who are no classical scholars, I explain: Voice
and language are restored to him only to the extent of _replying_.

[5] Accordingly, Coleridge has contended, and I think with truth, that
the passion of Othello is _not_ jealousy. So much I know by report, as
the _result_ of a lecture which he read at the Royal Institution. His
arguments I did not hear. To me it is evident that Othello's state of
feeling was not that of a degrading, suspicious rivalship, but the state
of perfect misery, arising out of this dilemma, the most affecting,
perhaps, to contemplate of any which _can_ exist, viz., the dire
necessity of loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be
unworthy of that love.

[6] That book, I am aware, is generally treated as a forgery; but
internal evidence, drawn from the tone and quality of the revelations
there made, will not allow me to think it altogether such. There is an
_abandon_ and carelessness in parts which mark its sincerity. Its
authenticity I cannot doubt. But _that_ proves nothing for the truth of
the particular stories which it contains. A book of scandalous and
defamatory stories, especially where the writer has had the baseness to
betray the confidence reposed in his honor by women, and to boast of
favors alleged to have been granted him, it is always fair to consider as
_ipso facto_ a tissue of falsehoods: and on the following argument, that
these are exposures which, even if true, none but the basest of men would
have made. Being, therefore, on the hypothesis most favorable to his
veracity, the basest of men, the author is self-denounced as vile enough
to have forged the stories, and cannot complain if he should be roundly
accused of doing that which he has taken pains to prove himself capable
of doing. This way of arguing might be applied with fatal effect to the
Duc de Lauzun's "Memoirs," supposing them written with a view to
publication. But, by possibility, that was not the case. The Duc de L.
terminated his profligate life, as is well known, on the scaffold, during
the storms of the French revolution; and nothing in his whole career won
him so much credit as the way in which he closed it; for he went to his
death with a romantic carelessness, and even gayety of demeanor. His
"Memoirs" were not published by himself: the publication was posthumous;
and by whom authorized, or for what purpose, is not exactly known.
Probably the manuscript fell into mercenary hands, and was published
merely on a speculation of pecuniary gain. From some passages, however, I
cannot but infer that the writer did not mean to bring it before the
public, but wrote it rather as a series of private memoranda, to aid his
own recollection of circumstances and dates. The Duc de Lauzun's account
of his intrigue with Lady Sarah goes so far as to allege, that he rode
down in disguise, from London to Sir Charles B.'s country seat, agreeably
to a previous assignation, and that he was admitted, by that lady's
confidential attendant, through a back staircase, at the time when Sir
Charles (a fox hunter, but a man of the highest breeding and fashion) was
himself at home, and occupied in the duties of hospitality.




CHAPTER VII.

THE NATION OF LONDON.


It was a most heavenly day in May of the year (1800) when I first
beheld and first entered this mighty wilderness, the city--no, not the
city, but the nation--of London. Often since then, at distances of two
and three hundred miles or more from this colossal emporium of men,
wealth, arts, and intellectual power, have I felt the sublime expression
of her enormous magnitude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence,
viz., in the vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads,
all with their heads directed to London, and expounding the size of
the attracting body, together with the force of its attractive power,
by the never-ending succession of these droves, and the remoteness
from the capital of the lines upon which they were moving. A suction
so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness, at the
same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by
sea, the same suction is operating, night and day, summer and winter,
and hurrying forever into one centre the infinite means needed for her
infinite purposes, and the endless tributes to the skill or to the
luxury of her endless population, crowds the imagination with a pomp
to which there is nothing corresponding upon this planet, either amongst
the things that have been or the things that are. Or, if any exception
there is, it must be sought in ancient Rome. [1] We, upon this occasion,
were in an open carriage, and, chiefly (as I imagine) to avoid the dust,
we approached London by rural lanes, where any such could be found, or,
at least, along by-roads, quiet and shady, collateral to the main roads.
In that mode of approach we missed some features of the sublimity
belonging to any of the common approaches upon a main road; we missed the
whirl and the uproar, the tumult and the agitation, which continually
thicken and thicken throughout the last dozen miles before you reach the
suburbs. Already at three stages' distance, (say 40 miles from London,)
upon some of the greatest roads, the dim presentment of some vast capital
reaches you obscurely and like a misgiving. This blind sympathy with a
mighty but unseen object, some vast magnetic range of Alps, in your
neighborhood, continues to increase you know not now. Arrived at the last
station for changing horses, Barnet, suppose, on one of the north roads,
or Hounslow on the western, you no longer think (as in all other places)
of naming the next stage; nobody says, on pulling up, "Horses on to
London"--that would sound ludicrous; one mighty idea broods over all
minds, making it impossible to suppose any other destination. Launched
upon this final stage, you soon begin to feel yourself entering the
stream as it were of a Norwegian _maelstrom_; and the stream at length
becomes the rush of a cataract. What is meant by the Latin word
_trepidatio_? Not any thing peculiarly connected with panic; it belongs
as much to the hurrying to and fro of a coming battle as of a coming
flight; to a marriage festival as much as to a massacre; _agitation_ is
the nearest English word. This _trepidation_ increases both audibly and
visibly at every half mile, pretty much as one may suppose the roar of
Niagara and the thrilling of the ground to grow upon the senses in the
last ten miles of approach, with the wind in its favor, until at length
it would absorb and extinguish all other sounds whatsoever. Finally, for
miles before you reach a suburb of London such as Islington, for
instance, a last great sign and augury of the immensity which belongs
to the coming metropolis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in
the growing sense of his own utter insignificance. Every where else
in England, you yourself, horses, carriage, attendants, (if you travel
with any,) are regarded with attention, perhaps even curiosity; at all
events, you are seen. But after passing the final posthouse on every
avenue to London, for the latter ten or twelve miles, you become aware
that you are no longer noticed: nobody sees you; nobody hears you;
nobody regards you; you do not even regard yourself. In fact, how
should you, at the moment of first ascertaining your own total
unimportance in the sum of things?--a poor shivering unit in the
aggregate of human life. Now, for the first time, whatever manner of
man you were, or seemed to be, at starting, squire or "squireen," lord
or lordling, and however related to that city, hamlet, or solitary
house from which yesterday or to-day you slipped your cable, beyond
disguise you find yourself but one wave in a total Atlantic, one plant
(and a parasitical plant besides, needing alien props) in a forest of
America.

These are feelings which do not belong by preference to thoughtful
people--far less to people merely sentimental. No man ever was left
to himself for the first time in the streets, as yet unknown, of London,
but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by
the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which belong to his
situation. No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart
in the centre of faces never ending, without voice or utterance for
him; eyes innumerable, that have "no speculation" in their orbs which
_he_ can understand; and hurrying figures of men and women weaving to
and fro, with no apparent purposes intelligible to a stranger, seeming
like a mask of maniacs, or, oftentimes, like a pageant of phantoms.
The great length of the streets in many quarters of London; the
continual opening of transient glimpses into other vistas equally far
stretching, going off at right angles to the one which you are
traversing; and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter
end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and
uncertainty,--all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness
and illimitable proportions which forever brood over the aspect of
London in its interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the outside
of London, in its approaches for the last few miles, I had lost, in
consequence of the stealthy route of by-roads, lying near Uxbridge and
Watford, through which we crept into the suburbs. But for that reason,
the more abrupt and startling had been the effect of emerging somewhere
into the Edgeware Road, and soon afterwards into the very streets of
London itself; through _what_ streets, or even what quarter of London,
is now totally obliterated from my mind, having perhaps never been
comprehended. All that I remember is one monotonous awe and blind sense
of mysterious grandeur and Babylonian confusion, which seemed to pursue
and to invest the whole equipage of human life, as we moved for nearly
two [2] hours through streets; sometimes brought to anchor for ten
minutes or more by what is technically called a "lock," that is, a line
of carriages of every description inextricably massed, and obstructing
each other, far as the eye could stretch; and then, as if under an
enchanter's rod, the "lock" seemed to thaw; motion spread with the
fluent race of light or sound through the whole ice-bound mass, until
the subtile influence reached _us_ also, who were again absorbed into
the great rush of flying carriages; or, at times, we turned off into
some less tumultuous street, but of the same mile-long character; and,
finally, drawing up about noon, we alighted at some place, which is
as little within my distinct remembrance as the route by which we
reached it.

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