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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches





FOOTNOTES

[1] As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the purposes
of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into notice such
personal distinctions in my family as otherwise might be unimportant, I
here record the entire list of my brothers and sisters, according to
their order of succession; and Miltonically I include myself; having
surely as much logical right to count myself in the series of my own
brothers as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his own
sons. First and last, we counted as eight children, viz., four brothers
and four sisters, though never counting more than six living at once,
viz., 1. _William_, older than myself by more than five years; 2.
_Elizabeth_; 3. _Jane_, who died in her fourth year; 4. _Mary_; 5.
myself, certainly not the goodliest man of men since born my brothers; 6.
_Richard_, known to us all by the household name of _Pink_, who in his
after years tilted up and down what might then be called his Britannic
majesty's oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of
midshipman, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that whole
generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further call for their
services; 7. a second _Jane_; 8. _Henry_, a posthumous child, who
belonged to Brazennose College, Oxford, and died about his twenty-sixth
year.

[2] Cicero, in a well-known passage of his "Ethics", speaks of trade as
irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if
wholesale.

[3] It is true that in those days _paregoric elixir_ was occasionally
given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a small
proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever administered to any
member of our nursery except under medical sanction; and this, assuredly,
would not have been obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such
as mine. For I was then not more that twenty-one months old: at which age
the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous.

[4] "_Aureola_."--The _aureola_ is the name given in the "Legends of the
Christian Saints" to that golden diadem or circlet of supernatural light
(that _glory_, as it is commonly called in English) which, amongst the
great masters of painting in Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of
distinguished saints.

[5] "_The astonishment of science_."--Her medical attendants were Dr.
Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent
of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr. Charles White, the most
distinguished surgeon at that time in the north of England. It was he
who pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any that
he had ever seen--an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in
after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the
subject may be presumed from this, that, at so early a stage of such
inquiries, he had published a work on human craniology, supported by
measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species.
Meantime, as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity
should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died of
hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature
expansion of the intellect in cases of that class is altogether morbid--
forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would,
however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation
between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease
may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but,
inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and
outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the
disease.

[6]
"I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony which cannot be remembered."
_Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse_

[7] "_The guard_."--I know not whether the word is a local one in this
sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which
locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.

[8] "_Memnonian_."--For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go
along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life
has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain--that the
head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon
its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an Aeonian
smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and
pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on
the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon
after as the sun's rays had accumulated heat enough to rarefy the air
within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of
intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this--
that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold
and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and
therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of
heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements
of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained.
Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system
of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing
circumstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon
observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his
daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was
passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying
slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded
a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple
phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly
as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, yields a
stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full volume of sound
corresponding to the full volume of water, on parity of principles,
nobody will doubt that the current of blood pouring through the tubes of
the human frame will utter to the learned ear, when armed with the
stethoscope, an elaborate gamut or compass of music recording the ravages
of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as the
cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this mighty event of
sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and life; or, again, under the
sad passion of the dying day, uttered the sweet requiem that belonged to
its departure.

[9] "_Everlasting Jew_."--_Der ewige Jude_--which is the common German
expression for "The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than our own.

[10] First Epistle to Corinthians, chap. xv., beginning at ver. 20.

[11] This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs.
Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the
backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must
unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a household
separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows of
those mighty forests.

[12] "_Galleries_."--These, though condemned on some grounds by the
restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one
advantage--that, when the _height_ of a church is that dimension which
most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and
interpret that height.

[13] Euripides.

[14] "_Spectre of the Brocken_."--This very striking phenomenon has been
continually described by writers, both German and English, for the last
fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these
descriptions; and on _their_ account I add a few words in explanation,
referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David
Brewster's "Natural Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human
figure, or, if the visitors are more than one, then the spectres
multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the
dark ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps
they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of
some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from
the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the
appearances to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is
surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked, and wakens to
the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself.
This Titan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious,
vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in
coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so
seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only
the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must be near to the horizon,
(which, of itself, implies a time of day inconvenient to a person
starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode;) the spectator must
have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapor, but
_partially_ distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday
of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to
see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the three same
conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the
following lines:--

"Such thou art as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow mist weaves a glistening haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues."

[15] "_On Whitsunday_."--It is singular, and perhaps owing to the
temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer,
that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday
than on any other day.

[16] "_The sorcerer's flower_," and "_The sorcerer's altar_."--These are
names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-
shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt
that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition,
with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the
Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but
perishing idolatry.

[17] On the Roman coins.




CHAPTER II.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE.


So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. Already, before the
completion of my sixth year, this first chapter had run its circle,
had rendered up its music to the final chord--might seem even, like
ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself forever from all the
rest of the arras that was shaping itself within my loom of life. No
Eden of lakes and forest lawns, such as the _mirage_ suddenly evokes
in Arabian sands,--no pageant of air-built battlements and towers,
that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the vapors of summer
sunsets, mocking and repeating with celestial pencil "the fuming
vanities of earth,"--could leave behind it the mixed impression of so
much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. Truest of all
things it seemed by the excess of that happiness which it had sustained:
most fraudulent it seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some
mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, "self-withdrawn into
a wonderous depth," hurrying as if with headlong malice to extinction,
and alienated by _every_ feature from the new aspects of life that
seemed to await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart that
I was called upon to face, I should have carried over to the present
no connecting link whatever from the past. Mere reality in this
fretting it was, and the undeniableness of its too potent remembrances,
that forbade me to regard this burned-out inaugural chapter of my life
as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation of dreams. Misery is a
guaranty of truth too substantial to be refused; else, by its
determinate evanescence, the total experience would have worn the
character of a fantastic illusion.

Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for me to live at
all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced
to wean myself, and suddenly to assume the harness of life. Else under
the morbid languishing of grief, and of what the Romans called
_desiderium_, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable
face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh
was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered
broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than
two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily
strength, the danger had passed over.

In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks for having been
trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, and not under "horrid
pugilistic brothers." Meantime, one such brother I had, senior by much
to myself, and the stormiest of his class: him I will immediately
present to the reader; for up to this point of my narrative he may be
described as a stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at
this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom would have been
able to challenge me as a relative, nor I _him_, had we happened to
meet on the public roads.

In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived
abroad for a space that, measured against _my_ life, was a very long
one. First, he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra;
next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica,
sometimes in St. Kitt's; courting the supposed benefit of hot climates
in his complaint of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, repeatedly
returned to England, and met my mother at watering-places on the south
coast of Devonshire, &c. But I, as a younger child, had not been one
of the party selected for such excursions from home. And now, at last,
when all had proved unavailing, he was coming home to die amongst his
family, in his thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to await his
arrival at the port (whatever port) to which the West India packet
should bring him; and amongst the deepest recollections which I connect
with that period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at
Greenhay.

It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four
of us children, were gathered for hours, on the lawn before the house,
listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came--nine, ten, eleven
o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed--without a warning sound;
for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a _terminus ad quem_,
beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages, composing the
little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels coming from
the winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme Road, carried
with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at
Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight;
and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a
body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the travelling party,
if, at so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact,
to our general surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming at
so slow a pace, that the fall of the horses' feet was not audible until
we were close upon them. I mention the case for the sake of the undying
impressions which connected themselves with the circumstances. The
first notice of the approach was the sudden emerging of horses' heads
from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the mass of white
pillows against which the dying patient was reclining. The hearse-like
pace at which the carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle
of that funeral which had so lately formed part in the most memorable
event of my life. But these elements of awe, that might at any rate
have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my
condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the
antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening
for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising
and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful
airs as might be stirring--the peculiar solemnity of the hours
succeeding to sunset--the glory of the dying day--the gorgeousness
which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian
islands from which my father was returning--the knowledge that he
returned only to die--the almighty pomp in which this great idea of
Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart--the corresponding
pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life,
rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries
that seemed even _more_ solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and
trophies of mortality,--all this chorus of restless images, or of
suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been
fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar
of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams.
This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's
image to me as a personal reality; otherwise he would have been for
me a bare _nominis umbra_. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a
sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose
of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his
waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour
of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious
conversation with some imaginary visitors.

My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen,
but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an
early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His
genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine _afflatus_
which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding
in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create
them, as a _nephelaegereta Zeus_, a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that
he _might_ direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to
the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolnshire--one of those many old
classic institutions which form the peculiar [1] glory of England. To
box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in
those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at _public_ schools; and
hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control of those
generally who had benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile
to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his
"Tyrocinium," is far from doing justice to our great public schools.
Himself disqualified, by a delicacy of temperament, for reaping the
benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own
Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial
station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet
having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am compelled in
mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give
_all_ my votes) for the former.

Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time when his additional
five or six years availed nearly to make _his_ age the double of mine,
my brother very naturally despised me; and, from his exceeding
frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. Why should he? Who
was it that could have a right to feel aggrieved by this contempt?
Who, if not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that I had a
perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt
a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing. Why not?
Wherefore should any rational person shrink from contempt, if it happen
to form the tenure by which he holds his repose in life? The cases
which are cited from comedy of such a yearning after contempt, stand
upon a footing altogether different: _there_ the contempt is wooed as
a serviceable ally and tool of religious hypocrisy. But to me, at that
era of life, it formed the main guaranty of an unmolested repose; and
security there was not, on any lower terms, for the _latentis semita
vitae_. The slightest approach to any favorable construction of my
intellectual pretensions alarmed me beyond measure; because it pledged
me in a manner with the hearer to support this first attempt by a
second, by a third, by a fourth--O Heavens! there is no saying how far
the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned
under the weight of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first
round of such a staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's
ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after
league; and myself running up and down this ladder, like any fatigue
party of Irish hodmen, to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer
might choose to build. But I nipped the abominable system of extortion
in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could
have no pretence, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or
fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to the first. Professing
the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man
no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing in the pound, I
never could be made miserable by unknown responsibilities.

Still, with all this passion for being despised, which was so essential
to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude--a starry
altitude--in the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that
nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried
me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the staircase
of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of
his contempt; and before long, when my superiority in some bookish
accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely
dissembled, mere foolish human nature forced me into some trifle of
exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed
to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation of
utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from
anxiety; and therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind
that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation,
gravitated determinately back towards that settled contempt which had
been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon
which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two--1st, my
physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even
postulated as a _datum_, which I myself could never have the face to
refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually,
he looked upon me as below notice; but, _morally_, he assured me that
he would give me a written character of the very best description,
whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're
willing, though lazy; you _would_ pull, if you had the strength of a
flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own
demurs to these harsh judgments were not so many as they might have
been. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not
uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of
cases, I really _was_; and there were more reasons for thinking so
than the reader is yet aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied
it _in toto_; and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither did my
brother pretend to have any experimental proofs of it. The ground he
went upon was a mere _a priori_ one, viz., that I had always been tied
to the apron string of women or girls; which amounted at most to
this--that, by training and the natural tendency of circumstances, I
_ought_ to be effeminate; that is, there was reason to expect beforehand
that I _should_ be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite
of such reasonable presumptions, I really were _not_. In fact, my
brother soon learned, by a daily experience, how entirely he might
depend upon me for carrying out the most audacious of his own warlike
plans--such plans, it is true, that I abominated; but _that_ made no
difference in the fidelity with which I tried to fulfil them.

This eldest brother of mine was in all respects a remarkable boy. Haughty
he was, aspiring, immeasurably active; fertile in resources as Robinson
Crusoe; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to imagine; and, in
default of any other opponent, he would have fastened a quarrel upon his
own shadow for presuming to run before him when going westwards in the
morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, like a dutiful child, ought to
keep deferentially in the rear of that majestic substance which is the
author of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, excepting only
such as he happened to write himself. And these were not a few. On all
subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English
church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white,
thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the
nursery where I lived amongst my sisters) with his select opinions. On
this last subject especially--of necromancy--he was very great: witness
his profound work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, long since
departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled "How to raise a Ghost; and
when you've got him down, how to keep him down." To which work he assured
us that some most learned and enormous man, whose name was a foot and a
half long, had promised him an appendix, which appendix treated of the
Red Sea and Solomon's signet ring, with forms of _mittimus_ for ghosts
that might be refractory, and probably a riot act, for any _émeute_
amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our
young hearts by supposing the case, (not at all unlikely, he affirmed,)
that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place
amongst the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation
of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth. The Roman phrase
for expressing that a man had died, viz., "_Abiit ad plures_" (He has
gone over to the majority,) my brother explained to us; and we easily
comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if
combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by
comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trot this earth
before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a
miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the
Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing
in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far
enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated
this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly
predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three o'clock in the
afternoon, on the 18th of June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must
have assumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man.
The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was
thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and
contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams,
how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear
at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount
of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom
that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it
seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of
possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it.
And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been
_proved_ to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work of
two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was traced
at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling a panic
in the heat of battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing up of
tumbrils, under the miserable purpose of shaking the British steadiness.
But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother insisted that the
presence of sham men, distributed extensively amongst the human race, and
meditating treason against us all, had been demonstrated to the
satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make-
believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries,
but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this
upper earth, walked about amongst us, and were undistinguishable, except
by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and
blood. I mention this for the sake of illustrating the fact, of which the
reader will find a singular instance in the foot note attached, that the
same crazes are everlastingly revolving upon men. [2]

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