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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




[2] At the same time it must not be denied, that, if you lose by a
journal in the way here described, you also gain by it. The journal gives
you the benefit of its own separate audience, that might else never have
heard your name. On the other hand, in such a case, the journal secures
to you the special enmity of its own peculiar antagonists. These papers,
for instance, of mine, not being political, were read possibly in a
friendly temper by the regular supporters of the journal that published
them. But some of my own political friends regarded me with displeasure
for connecting myself at all with a reforming journal. And far more, who
would have been liberal enough to disregard that objection, naturally
lost sight of me when under occultation to _them_ in a journal which they
never saw.

[3] The crime of Josephus in relation to Christianity is the same, in
fact, as that of Lauder in respect to Milton. It was easy enough to
detect plagiarisms in the "Paradise Lost" from Latin passages fathered
upon imaginary writers, when these passages had previously been forged by
Lauder himself for the purpose of sustaining such a charge.

[4] It is a significant fact, that Dr. Strauss, whose sceptical spirit,
left to its own disinterested motions, would have looked through and
through this monstrous fable of Essenism, coolly adopted it, no questions
asked, as soon as he perceived the value of it as an argument against
Christianity.

[5] "_Solitary road_."--The reader must remember that, until the seventh
century of our era, when Mahometanism arose, there was no _collateral_
history. Why there was none, why no Gothic, why no Parthian history, it
is for Rome to explain. We tax ourselves, and are taxed by others, with
many an imaginary neglect as regards India; but assuredly we cannot be
taxed with _that_ neglect. No part of our Indian empire, or of its
adjacencies, but has occupied the researches of our Oriental scholars.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD
DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES
DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

CHAPTER II.
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE

CHAPTER III.
INFANT LITERATURE

CHAPTER IV.
THE FEMALE INFIDEL

CHAPTER V.
I AM INTRODUCED TO THE WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL

CHAPTER VI.
I ENTER THE WORLD

CHAPTER VII.
THE NATION OF LONDON

CHAPTER VIII.
DUBLIN

CHAPTER IX.
FIRST REBELLION IN IRELAND

CHAPTER X.
FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND REBELLION

CHAPTER XI.
TRAVELLING

CHAPTER XII.
MY BROTHER

CHAPTER XIII.
PREMATURE MANHOOD




AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.




CHAPTER I.

THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD.


About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my
life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within
the gates of recovered paradise, might merit a remembrance. "_Life is
finished!_" was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of
infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to
any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. "_Life is finished!
Finished it is!_" was the hidden meaning that, half unconsciously to
myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance
on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of
words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so
for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant
continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart--that
"now is the blossoming of life withered forever." Not that such words
formed themselves vocally within my ear, or issued audibly from my
lips; but such a whisper stole silently to my heart. Yet in what sense
could _that_ be true? For an infant not more than six years old, was
it possible that the promises of life had been really blighted, or
its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton?
Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine
melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me,
and not more through the accidents of my position than through the
necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. Raptures there might be
in arrear; but raptures are modes of _troubled_ pleasure. The peace,
the rest, the central security which belong to love that is past all
understanding,--these could return no more. Such a love, so
unfathomable,--such a peace, so unvexed by storms, or the fear of
storms,--had brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, which
brought me into special relations to my elder sister; she being at
this period three years older than myself. The circumstances which
attended the sudden dissolution of this most tender connection I will
here rehearse. And, that I may do so more intelligibly, I will first
describe that serene and sequestered position which we occupied in
life. [1]

Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records,
is fatal to their effect--as being incompatible with that absorption
of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates
or can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to myself be exceedingly
painful that even a shadow, or so much as a _seeming_ expression of
that tendency, should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on the
other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an injurious restraint
upon the natural movement of such a narrative, to prevent oblique
gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or
aristocratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on all accounts
I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of
truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which
this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might happen that,
merely by reporting faithfully the facts of this early experience, I
could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of
some higher rank than did really belong to my family. And this
impression might seem to have been designedly insinuated by myself.

My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means
a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar,
but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he
was a man engaged in _foreign_ commerce, and no other; therefore, in
_wholesale_ commerce, and no other--which last limitation of the idea
is important, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's
condescending distinction [2] as one who ought to be despised certainly,
but not too intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He--this
imperfectly despicable man--died at an early age, and very soon after the
incidents recorded in this chapter, leaving to his family, then
consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing
exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date
of my narrative,--whilst he was still living,--he had an income very much
larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man
who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will
readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class--opulent,
though not emphatically _rich_ in a mercantile estimate--the domestic
economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether
unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations. The
establishment of servants, for instance, in such houses, measured even
_numerically_ against those establishments in other nations, would
somewhat surprise the foreign appraiser, simply as interpreting the
relative station in society occupied by the English merchant. But this
same establishment, when measured by the quality and amount of the
provision made for its comfort and even elegant accommodation, would fill
him with twofold astonishment, as interpreting equally the social
valuation of the English merchant, and also the social valuation of the
English servant; for, in the truest sense, England is the paradise of
household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending itself to
the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty parsimonies, are peculiar
to England. And in this respect the families of English merchants, as a
class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, not only amongst
the corresponding bodies of continental nations, but even amongst the
poorer sections of our own nobility--though confessedly the most
splendid in Europe; a fact which, since the period of my infancy, I
have had many personal opportunities for verifying both in England and
in Ireland. From this peculiar anomaly, affecting the domestic economy
of English merchants, there arises a disturbance upon the usual scale
for measuring the relations of rank. The equation, so to speak, between
rank and the ordinary expressions of rank, which usually runs parallel
to the graduations of expenditure, is here interrupted and confounded,
so that one rank would be collected from the name of the occupation, and
another rank, much higher, from the splendor of the domestic _ménage_.
I warn the reader, therefore, (or, rather, my explanation has already
warned him,) that he is not to infer, from any casual indications of
luxury or elegance, a corresponding elevation of rank.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest
tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
Agur--"Give me neither poverty nor riches"--was realized for us. That
blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we
were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple
dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply
furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means
of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the
other hand, we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed
by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into
restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had
no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this
hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained
to a Spartan simplicity of diet--that we fared, in fact, very much
less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all
the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single
out as worthy of special commemoration--that I lived in a rustic
solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings
were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic
brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of
a pure, holy, and magnificent church.

* * * * *

The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in my memory so
as to be remembered at this day, were two, and both before I could
have completed my second year; namely, 1st, a remarkable dream of
terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to
myself for this reason--that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies
to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum; [3] and,
2dly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the
reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I mention
as inexplicable: for such annual resurrections of plants and flowers
affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of some higher change, and
therefore in connection with the idea of death; yet of death I could,
at that time, have had no experience whatever.

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest sisters--
eldest of three _then_ living, and also elder than myself--were summoned
to an early death. The first who died was Jane, about two years older
than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a half, more or less
by some trifle that I do not recollect. But death was then scarcely
intelligible to me, and I could not so properly be said to suffer
sorrow as a sad perplexity. There was another death in the house about
the same time, namely, of a maternal grandmother; but, as she had come
to us for the express purpose of dying in her daughter's society, and
from illness had lived perfectly secluded, our nursery circle knew her
but little, and were certainly more affected by the death (which I
witnessed) of a beautiful bird, viz., a kingfisher, which had been
injured by an accident. With my sister Jane's death (though otherwise,
as I have said, less sorrowful than perplexing) there was, however,
connected an incident which made a most fearful impression upon myself,
deepening my tendencies to thoughtfulness and abstraction beyond what
would seem credible for my years. If there was one thing in this world
from which, more than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt,
it was brutality and violence. Now, a whisper arose in the family that
a female servant, who by accident was drawn off from her proper duties
to attend my sister Jane for a day or two, had on one occasion treated
her harshly, if not brutally; and as this ill treatment happened within
three or four days of her death, so that the occasion of it must have
been some fretfulness in the poor child caused by her sufferings,
naturally there was a sense of awe and indignation diffused through
the family. I believe the story never reached my mother, and possibly
it was exaggerated; but upon me the effect was terrific. I did not
often see the person charged with this cruelty; but, when I did, my
eyes sought the ground; nor could I have borne to look her in the face;
not, however, in any spirit that could be called anger. The feeling
which fell upon me was a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse
of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife. Though born in
a large town, (the town of Manchester, even then amongst the largest
of the island,) I had passed the whole of my childhood, except for the
few earliest weeks, in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little
sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut up forever
in a silent garden from all knowledge of poverty, or oppression, or
outrage, I had not suspected until this moment the true complexion of
the world in which myself and my sisters were living. Henceforward the
character of my thoughts changed greatly; for so _representative_ are
some acts, that one single case of the class is sufficient to throw
open before you the whole theatre of possibilities in that direction.
I never heard that the woman accused of this cruelty took it at all
to heart, even after the event which so immediately succeeded had
reflected upon it a more painful emphasis. But for myself, that incident
had a lasting revolutionary power in coloring my estimate of life.

So passed away from earth one of those three sisters that made up my
nursery playmates; and so did my acquaintance (if such it could be
called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of
mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but perhaps
she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious
immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was
sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would
come again. Summer and winter came again--crocuses and roses; why not
little Jane?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not
so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample
brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I
fancy a _tiara_ of light or a gleaming aureola [4] in token of thy
premature intellectual grandeur,--thou whose head, for its superb
developments, was the astonishment of science, [5]--thou next, but after
an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our
nursery; and the night, which for me gathered upon that event, ran after
my steps far into life; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for
good or for ill that which else I should have been. Pillar of fire that
didst go before me to guide and to quicken,--pillar of darkness, when
thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to
my dawning fears the secret shadow of death,--by what mysterious
gravitation was it that _my_ heart had been drawn to thine? Could a
child, six years old, place any special value upon intellectual
forwardness? Serene and capacious as my sister's mind appeared to me
upon after review, was _that_ a charm for stealing away the heart of
an infant? O, no! I think of it _now_ with interest, because it lends,
in a stranger's ear, some justification to the excess of my fondness.
But then it was lost upon me; or, if not lost, was perceived only
through its effects. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less
I must have loved thee, having that capacious heart--overflowing, even
as mine overflowed, with tenderness; stung, even as mine was stung,
by the necessity of loving and being loved. This it was which crowned
thee with beauty and power.

"Love, the holy sense,
Best gift of God, in thee was most intense."

That lamp of paradise was, for myself, kindled by reflection from the
living light which burned so steadfastly in thee; and never but to
thee, never again since _thy_ departure, had I power or temptation,
courage or desire, to utter the feelings which possessed me. For I was
the shyest of children; and, at all stages of life, a natural sense
of personal dignity held me back from exposing the least ray of feelings
which I was not encouraged _wholly_ to reveal.

It is needless to pursue, circumstantially, the course of that sickness
which carried off my leader and companion. She (according to my
recollection at this moment) was just as near to nine years as I to
six. And perhaps this natural precedency in authority of years and
judgment, united to the tender humility with which she declined to
assert it, had been amongst the fascinations of her presence. It was
upon a Sunday evening, if such conjectures can be trusted, that the
spark of fatal fire fell upon that train of predispositions to a brain
complaint which had hitherto slumbered within her. She had been
permitted to drink tea at the house of a laboring man, the father of
a favorite female servant. The sun had set when she returned, in the
company of this servant, through meadows reeking with exhalations after
a fervent day. From that time she sickened. In such circumstances,
a child, as young as myself, feels no anxieties. Looking upon medical
men as people privileged, and naturally commissioned, to make war upon
pain and sickness, I never had a misgiving about the result. I grieved,
indeed, that my sister should lie in bed; I grieved still more to hear
her moan. But all this appeared to me no more than as a night of
trouble, on which the dawn would soon arise. O moment of darkness and
delirium, when the elder nurse awakened me from that delusion, and
launched God's thunderbolt at my heart in the assurance that my sister
MUST die! Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it "cannot
be _remembered_." [6] Itself, as a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in
its own chaos. Blank anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me. Deaf and
blind I was, as I reeled under the revelation. I wish not to recall the
circumstances of that time, when _my_ agony was at its height, and
hers, in another sense, was approaching. Enough it is to say that all
was soon over; and, the morning of that day had at last arrived which
looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there
is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no
consolation.

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple of her
brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for
seeing her once more. Not for the world would I have made this known,
nor have suffered a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of
feelings that take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a
possibility. But grief, even in a child, hates the light, and shrinks
from human eyes. The house was large enough to have two staircases;
and by one of these I knew that about midday, when all would be quiet,
(for the servants dined at one o'clock,) I could steal up into her
chamber. I imagine that it was about an hour after high noon when I
reached the chamber door: it was locked, but the key was not taken
away. Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened
upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along
the silent walls. Then, turning round, I sought my sister's face. But
the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself.
Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the
sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor.
The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the
express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold,
or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the
glory of life.

Let me pause in approaching a remembrance so affecting for my own mind,
to mention, that, in the "Opium Confessions," I endeavored to explain
the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more
profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year--so
far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents
of scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the
antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the
frozen sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt
with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us;
and, the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger
relief. But, in my case, there was even a subtler reason why the summer
had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of
death. And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more
of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed
combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as _involutes_ (if I
may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being
disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_, and in their own abstract
shapes. It had happened, that amongst our vast nursery collection of
books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark
evenings, as my three sisters, with myself, sat by the firelight round
the _guard_ [7] of our nursery, no book was so much in request among us.
It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our younger nurse,
whom we all loved, would sometimes, according to her simple powers,
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all
constitutionally touched with pensiveness: the fitful gloom and sudden
lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings;
and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power and mysterious
beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man,--man, and yet
_not_ man, real above all things, and yet shadowy above all things,--who
had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like
early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief
differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it
happens) express themselves, more or less, in varying relations to the
great accidents and powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria--
those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears
of corn--that _must_ be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm
Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem.
"Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which masked another
peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were
they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies,
expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the
pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was
not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest
below all rest and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was
also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time
and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday
came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem.
What then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the _omphalos_ (navel)
or physical centre of the earth? Why should _that_ affect me? Such a
pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian
city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the
planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet of mortality;
for earth's tenant, Jerusalem, had now become the _omphalos_ and
absolute centre. Yet how? There, on the contrary, it was, as we infants
understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but,
for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very
gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on
wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the
divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not
rise before the greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore,
had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism,
but also as a phenomenon brought into intricate relations with death
by scriptual scenery and events.

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