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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




My next brother, younger by about four years than myself, (he, in fact,
that caused so much affliction to the Sultan Amurath,) was a boy of
exquisite and delicate beauty--delicate, that is, in respect to its
feminine elegance and bloom; for else (as regards constitution) he
turned out remarkably robust. In such excess did his beauty flourish
during childhood, that those who remember him and myself at the public
school at Bath will also remember the ludicrous molestation in the
streets (for to him it _was_ molestation) which it entailed upon
him--ladies stopping constantly to kiss him. On first coming up to
Bath from Greenhay, my mother occupied the very appartments on the
North Parade just quitted by Edmund Burke, then in a decaying condition,
though he did not die (I believe) till 1797. That state of Burkes's
health, connected with the expectation of finding him still there,
brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the
childish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted upon him
what he viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus began a
persecution which continued as long as his years allowed it. The
most brilliant complexion that could be imagined, the features of an
Antinous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life,
(afterwards he lost it,) made him the subject of never-ending admiration
to the whole female population, gentle and simple, who passed him in
the streets. In after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse
and scornful coyness. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible was
he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle with all his might
to liberate himself from the gentle violence which was continually
offered; and he renewed the scene (so elaborately painted by Shakspeare)
of the conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years this continued
a subject of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of laughter
on the other, between my brother and his plainer school-fellows. Not
that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject--far from it; it
struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an
attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be subjected to the
caresses of women, without leave asked; this was felt to be a badge
of childhood, and a proof that the object of such caressing tenderness,
so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a baby--not to
mention that the very foundation of all this distinction, a beautiful
face, is as a male distinction regarded in a very questionable light
by multitudes, and often by those most who are the possessors of that
distinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. Not one
of us could feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situation;
nor did he cease, when increasing years had liberated him from that
female expression of delight in his beauty, to regard the beauty itself
as a degradation; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it; though,
in reality, it did him service in after distresses, when no other
endowment whatsoever would have been availing. Often, in fact, do
men's natures sternly contradict the promise of their features; for
no person would have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of
a Narcissus, lay shrouded a most heroic nature; not merely an
adventurous courage, but with a capacity of patient submission to
hardship, and of wrestling with calamity, such as is rarely found
amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, to think that
the state of degradation in which he believed himself to have passed
his childish years, from the sort of public petting which I have
described, and his strong recoil from it as an insult, went much deeper
than was supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, and
in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to
resent, as an original insult of nature, the having given him a false
index of character in his feminine beauty, and to take a pleasure in
contradicting it. Had it been in his power, he would have spoiled it.
Certain it is, that, from the time he reached his eleventh birthday,
he had begun already to withdraw himself from the society of all other
boys,--to fall into long fits of abstraction,--and to throw himself
upon his own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary.
Schoolfellows of his own age and standing--those, even, who were the
most amiable--he shunned; and, many years after his disappearance,
I found, in his handwriting, a collection of fragments, couched in a
sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most
extraordinary evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously
concentrating his own hopes in himself, and abjuring the rest of the
world, that can ever have emanated from so young a person; since, upon
the largest allowance, and supposing them to have been written on the
eve of his quitting England, they must have been written at the age
of twelve. I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious
compositions; they were of a nature to have proceeded rather from some
mystical quietist, such as Madame Guyon, if with this rapt devotion
one can suppose the union of a rebellious and murmuring ambition.
Passionate apostrophes there were to nature and the powers of nature;
and what seemed strangest of all was, that, in style, not only were
they free from all tumor and inflation which might have been looked
for in so young a writer, but were even wilfully childish and colloquial
in a pathetic degree--in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the
difference between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they somewhat
resemble that beautiful poem [1] of George Herbert, entitled LOVE
UNKNOWN, in which he describes symbolically to a friend, under the form
of treacherous ill usage he had experienced, the religious processes by
which his soul had been weaned from the world. The most obvious solution
of the mystery would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied
from some obscure author; but, besides that no author could have remained
obscure in this age of elaborate research, who had been capable of sighs
(for such I may call them) drawn up from such well-like depths of
feeling, and expressed with such fervor and simplicity of language, there
was another testimony to their being the productions of him who owned the
penmanship; which was, that some of the papers exhibited the whole
process of creation and growth, such as erasures, substitutions, doubts
expressed as to this and that form of expression, together with
references backwards and forwards. Now, that the handwriting was my
brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I go on with his story. In
1800, my visit to Ireland, and visits to other places subsequently,
separated me from him for above a year. In 1801, we were at very
different schools--I in the highest class of a great public school, he at
a very sequestered parsonage on a wild moor (Horwich Moor) in Lancashire.
This situation, probably, fed and cherished his melancholy habits; for he
had no society except-that of a younger brother, who would give him no
disturbance at all. The development of our national resources had not yet
gone so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map of England
everything like a heath, a breezy down, (such as gave so peculiar a
character to the counties of Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a
village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious,
indeed, as the _landes_ of France, but equally wild and romantic. In such
a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman,
retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. To
that I can speak myself; for in the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and
found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one; since, even to my youngest
brother H., a headstrong child of seven, he used no stronger
remonstrance, in urging him to some essential point of duty, than "_Do be
persuaded, sir._" On another occasion I, accompanied by a friend, slept
at Mr. J.'s: we were accidentally detained there through the greater part
of the following day by snow; and, to the inexpressible surprise of my
companion, a mercantile man from Manchester, for a considerable time
after breakfast the reverend gentleman persisted in pursuing my brother
from room to room, and at last from the ground floor up to the attics,
holding a book open, (which turned out to be a Latin grammar;) each of
them (pursuer and pursued) moving at a tolerably slow pace, my brother H.
silent; but Mr. J., with a voice of adjuration, solemn and even sad, yet
kind and conciliatory, singing out at intervals, "Do be persuaded, sir!"
"It is _your_ welfare I seek!" "Let your own interest, sir, plead in this
matter between us!" And so the chase continued, ascending and descending,
up to the very garrets, down to the very cellars, then steadily revolving
from front to rear of the house; but finally with no result at all. The
spectacle reminded me of a groom attempting to catch a coy pony by
holding out a sieve containing, or pretending to contain, a bribe of
oats. Mrs. J., the reverend gentleman's wife, assured us that the same
process went on at intervals throughout the week; and in any case it was
clearly good as a mode of exercise. Now, such a master, though little
adapted for the headstrong H., was the very person for the thoughtful and
too sensitive R. Search the island through, there could not have been
found another situation so suitable to my brother's wayward and haughty
nature. The clergyman was learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies; humble
and modest beyond the proprieties of his situation, and treating my
brother in all points as a companion; whilst, on the other hand, my
brother was not the person to forget the respect due, by a triple title,
to a clergyman, a scholar, and his own preceptor--one, besides, who so
little thought of exacting it. How happy might all parties have been--
what suffering, what danger, what years of miserable anxiety might have
been spared to all who were interested--had the guardians and executors
of my father's will thought fit to "let _well_ alone"! But, "_per star
meglio_" [2] they chose to remove my brother from this gentle recluse to
an active, bustling man of the world, the very anti-pole in character.
What might be the pretensions of this gentleman to scholarship, I never
had any means of judging; and, considering that he must now, (if living
at all,) at a distance of thirty-six years, be gray headed, I shall
respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He was of a class now
annually declining (and I hope rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God,
in this point at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, amongst
the many, many cases of reform destined eventually to turn out
chimerical, this one, at least, never can be defeated, injured, or
eclipsed. As man grows more intellectual, the power of managing him by
his intellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all appeals to
his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on _pari passu_. And, if a
"_Te Deum_," or an "_O, Jubilate!_" were to be celebrated by all nations
and languages for any one advance and absolute conquest over wrong and
error won by human nature in our times,--yes, not excepting

"The bloody writing by all nations torn"--

the abolition of the commerce in slaves,--to my thinking, that festival
should be for the mighty progress made towards the suppression of
brutal, bestial modes of punishment. Nay, I may call them worse than
bestial; for a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or
needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or with his
hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not be moved or won over
by conciliatory means,--by means that presuppose him a reasonable
creature,--then let him die, confounded in his own vileness; but let
not me, let not the man (that is to say) who has him in his power,
dishonor himself by inflicting punishments, violating that grandeur
of human nature which, not in any vague rhetorical sense, but upon a
religious principle of duty, (viz., the scriptural doctrine that the
human person is "the temple of the Holy Ghost,") ought to be a
consecrated thing in the eyes of all good men; and of this we may be
assured,--this is more sure than day or night,--that, in proportion
as man is honored, exalted, trusted, in that proportion will he become
more worthy of honor, of exaltation, of trust.

This schoolmaster had very different views of man and his nature. He
not only thought that physical coercion was the one sole engine by
which man could be managed, but--on the principle of that common maxim
which declares that, when two schoolboys meet, with powers at all near
to a balance, no peace can be expected between them until it is fairly
settled _which_ is the master--on that same principle he fancied that
no pupil could adequately or proportionably reverence his master until
he had settled the precise proportion of superiority in animal powers
by which his master was in advance of himself. Strength of blows only
could ascertain _that_; and, as he was not very nice about creating
his opportunities, as he plunged at once "_in medias res_," and more
especially when he saw or suspected my rebellious tendencies, he soon
picked a quarrel with my unfortunate brother. Not, be it observed,
that he much cared for a well-looking or respectable quarrel. No. I
have been assured that, even when the most fawning obsequiousness ad
appealed to his clemency, in the person of some timorous new-comer,
appalled by the reports he had heard, even in such cases, (deeming it
wise to impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his Jovian
thunders) he made a practice of doing thus: He would speak loud, utter
some order, not very clearly, perhaps, as respected the sound, but
with _perfect_ perplexity as regarded the sense, to the timid, sensitive
boy upon whom he intended to fix a charge of disobedience. "Sir, if
you please, what was it that you said?" "What was it that I said? What!
playing upon my words? Chopping logic? Strip, sir; strip this instant."
Thenceforward this timid boy became a serviceable instrument in his
equipage. Not only was he a proof, even without coöperation on the
master's part, that extreme cases of submission could not insure
mercy, but also he, this boy, in his own person, breathed forth, at
intervals, a dim sense of awe and worship--the religion of fear--towards
the grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by electrical conductors, was
conveyed throughout every region of the establishment a tremulous
sensibility that vibrated towards the centre. Different, O Rowland
Hill! are the laws of thy establishment; far other are the echoes heard
amid the ancient halls of Bruce. [3] There it is possible for the timid
child to be happy--for the child destined to an early grave to reap his
brief harvest in peace. Wherefore were there no such asylums in those
days? Man flourished then, as now, in beauty and in power. Wherefore did
he not put forth his power upon establishments that might cultivate
happiness as well as knowledge? Wherefore did no man cry aloud, in the
spirit of Wordsworth,--

"Ah, what avails heroic deed?
What liberty? if no defence
Be won for feeble innocence.
Father of all! though wilful manhood read
His punishment in soul distress
Grant to the _morn_ of life its natural blessedness"?

Meantime, my brother R., in an evil hour, having been removed from
that most quiet of human sanctuaries, having forfeited that peace which
possibly he was never to retrieve, fell (as I have said) into the power
of this Moloch. And this Moloch upon him illustrated the laws of his
establishment; him also, the gentle, the beautiful, but, also the
proud, the haughty, the beat, kicked, trampled on!

In two hours from that time, my brother was on the road to Liverpool.
Painfully he made out his way, having not much money, and with a sense
of total abandonment which made him feel that all he might have would
prove little enough for his purposes.

My brother went to an inn, after his long, long journey to Liverpool,
footsore--(for he had walked through four days, and, from ignorance
of the world, combined with excessive shyness,--O, how shy do people
become from pride!--had not profited by those well-known incidents
upon English high roads--return post chaises, stage coaches, led horses,
or wagons)--footsore, and eager for sleep. Sleep, supper, breakfast
in the morning,--all these he had; so far his slender finances reached;
and for these he paid the treacherous landlord; who then proposed to
him that they should take a walk out together, by way of looking at
the public buildings and the docks. It seems the man had noticed my
brother's beauty, some circumstances about his dress inconsistent with
his mode of travelling, and also his style of conversation. Accordingly,
he wiled him along from street to street, until they reached the Town
Hall. "Here _seems_ to be a fine building," said this Jesuitical
guide,--as if it had been some new Pompeii, some Luxor or Palmyra,
that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst the undiscovered parts of
Liverpool,--"here seems to be a fine building; shall we go in and ask
leave to look at it?" My brother, thinking less of the spectacle than
the spectator, whom, in a wilderness of man, naturally he wished to
make his friend, consented readily. In they went; and, by the merest
accident, Mr. Mayor and the town council were then sitting. To them
the insidious landlord communicated privately an account of his
suspicions. He himself conducted my brother, under pretence of
discovering the best station for picturesque purposes, to the particular
box for prisoners at the bar. This was not suspected by the poor boy,
not even when Mr. Mayor began to question him. He still thought it an
accident, though doubtless he blushed excessively on being questioned,
and questioned so impertinently, in public. The object of the mayor
and of other Liverpool gentlemen then present was, to ascertain my
brother's real rank and family; for he persisted in representing himself
as a poor wandering boy. Various means were vainly tried to elicit
this information; until at length--like the wily Ulysses, who mixed
with his peddler's budget of female ornaments and attire a few arms,
by way of tempting Achilles to a self-detection in the court of
Lycomedes--one gentleman counselled the mayor to send for a Greek
Testament. This was done; the Testament was presented open at St.
John's Gospel to my brother, and he was requested to say whether he
knew in what language that book was written; or whether, perhaps, he
could furnish them with a translation from the page before him. R.,
in his confusion, did not read the meaning of this appeal, and fell
into the snare; construed a few verses; and immediately was consigned
to the care of a gentleman, who won from him by kindness what he had
refused to importunities or menaces. His family he confessed at once,
but not his school. An express was therefore forwarded from Liverpool
to our nearest male relative--a military man, then by accident on leave
of absence from India. He came over, took my brother back, (looking
upon the whole as a boyish frolic of no permanent importance,) made
some stipulations in his behalf for indemnity from punishment, and
immediately returned home. Left to himself, the grim tyrant of the
school easily evaded the stipulations, and repeated his brutalities
more fiercely than before--now acting in the double spirit of tyranny
and revenge.

In a few hours, my brother was again on the road to Liverpool. But not
on this occasion did he resort to any inn, or visit any treacherous
hunter of the picturesque. He offered himself to no temptations now,
nor to any risks. Right onwards he went to the docks, addressed himself
to a grave, elderly master of a trading vessel, bound upon a distant
voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The skipper was a good
and sensible man, and (as it turned out) a sailor accomplished in all
parts of his profession. The ship which he commanded was a South Sea
whaler, belonging to Lord Grenville--whether lying at Liverpool or in
the Thames at that moment, I am not sure. However, they soon afterwards
sailed.

For somewhat less than three years my brother continued under the care
of this good man, who was interested by his appearance, and by some
resemblance which he fancied in his features to a son whom he had lost.
Fortunate, indeed, for the poor boy was this interval of fatherly
superintendence; for, under this captain, he was not only preserved
from the perils which afterwards beseiged him, until his years had
made him more capable of confronting them, but also he had thus an
opportunity, which he improved to the utmost, of making himself
acquainted with the two separate branches of his profession--navigation
and seamanship, qualifications which are not very often united.

After the death of his captain, my brother ran through many wild
adventures; until at length, after a severe action, fought off the
coast of Peru, the armed merchant-man in which he then served was
captured by pirates. Most of the crew were massacred. My brother, on
account of the important services he could render, was spared; and
with these pirates, cruising under a black flag, and perpetrating
unnumbered atrocities, he was obliged to sail for the next two years;
nor could he, in all that period, find any opportunity for effecting
his escape.

During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader imagine the
perils of every sort which beseiged one so young, so inexperienced,
so sensitive, and so haughty; perils to his life; (but these it was
the very expression of his unhappy situation, were the perils least
to be mourned for;) perils to his good name, going the length of
absolute infamy--since, if the piratical ship had been captured by a
British man-of-war, he might have found it impossible to clear himself
of a voluntary participation in the bloody actions of his shipmates;
and, on the other hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which
they frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a Spanish
_guarda costa_, he would scarcely have been able, from his ignorance
of the Spanish language, to draw even a momentary attention to the
special circumstances of his own situation; he would have been involved
in the general presumptions of the case, and would have been executed
in a summary way, upon the _prima facie_ evidence against him, that
he did not appear to be in the condition of a prisoner; and, if his
name had ever again reached his country, it would have been in some
sad list of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country; and even
these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by the name
of pirate, which at once includes them all, and surpasses them all.
These were perils sufficiently distressing at any rate; but last of
all came others even more appalling--the perils of moral contamination,
in that excess which might be looked for from such associates; not,
be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless principles adopted
into his creed of practical ethics, but that brutal transfiguration
of the entire character, which occurs, for instance, in the case of
the young gypsy son of Effie Deans; a change making it impossible to
rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consigning
its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself might have lost its
horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle
of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers
enfeebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their
slumbers by the glare of conflagration, reflected from gleaming
cutlasses and from the faces of demons. This fear it was--a fear like
this, as I have often thought--which must, amidst her other woes, have
been the Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie
Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal
heart, the grief paramount, the "crowning" grief--the prospect, namely,
that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty
to peace and humble innocence; but that his fair cheek would be ravaged
by vice as well as sorrow; that he would be tempted into brutal orgies,
and every mode of moral pollution; until, like poor Constance with her
young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that
the royal mother should see her son in "the courts of heaven," she
would not know again one so fearfully transfigured. This prospect for
the royal Constance of revolutionary France was but too painfully
fulfilled, as we are taught to guess even from the faithful records
of the Duchesse d'Angoulême. The young dauphin, (_it has been said_,
1837,) to the infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become
loathsome for coarse brutality, as well as for habits of uncleanliness,
to all who approached him--one purpose of his guilty tutors being to
render royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. And, in
fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this purpose, for the
moment, and to the extent of an individual case, that, upon that account
alone, but still more for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome
news with respect to _him_--him whose birth [4] had drawn anthems of
exultation from twenty-five millions of men--was the news of his death.
And what else can well be expected for children suddenly withdrawn from
parental tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at such an
age as nine or ten, and under the wilful misleading of perfidious guides?
But, in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelming as they
seemed, were turned aside by some good angel; all had failed to harm him;
and from the fiery furnace he came out unsinged.

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