A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




My own kingdom was an island called Gombroon. But in what parallel of
north or south latitude it lay, I concealed for a time as rigorously
as ancient Rome through every century concealed her real name.
[12] The object in this provisional concealment was, to regulate
the position of my own territory by that of my brother's; for I was
determined to place a monstrous world of waters between us as the only
chance (and a very poor one it proved) for compelling my brother to
keep the peace. At length, for some reason unknown to me, and much to
my astonishment, he located his capital city in the high latitude of
65 deg. N. That fact being once published and settled, instantly I
smacked my little kingdom of Gombroon down into the tropics, 10 deg.,
I think, south of the line. Now, at least, I was on the right side of
the hedge, or so I flattered myself; for it struck me that my brother
never would degrade himself by fitting out a costly nautical expedition
against poor little Gombroon; and how else could he get at me? Surely
the very fiend himself, if he happened to be in a high arctic latitude,
would not indulge his malice so far as to follow its trail into the
tropic of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a freak? There was
no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. If the fiend or my brother fancied _that_,
for once they were in the wrong box; and there was no variety of
vegetable produce, for I never denied that the poor little island was
only 270 miles in circuit. Think, then, of sailing through 75 deg. of
latitude only to crack such a miserable little filbert as that. But
my brother stunned me by explaining, that, although his capital lay
in lat. 65 deg. N., not the less his dominions swept southwards through
a matter of 80 or 90 deg.; and as to the tropic of Capricorn, much of
it was his own private property. I was aghast at hearing _that_. It
seemed that vast horns and promontories ran down from all parts of his
dominions towards any country whatsoever, in either hemisphere,--empire
or republic, monarchy, polyarchy, or anarchy,--that he might have
reasons for assaulting.

Here in one moment vanished all that I had relied on for protection:
distance I had relied on, and suddenly I was found in close neighborhood
to my most formidable enemy. Poverty I had rolled on, and _that_ was
not denied: he granted the poverty, but it was dependent on the
barbarism of the Gombroonians. It seems that in the central forests
of Gombroonia there were diamond mines, which my people, from their
low condition of civilization, did not value, nor had any means of
working. Farewell, therefore, on _my_ side, to all hopes of enduring
peace, for here was established, in legal phrase, _a lien_ forever
upon my island, and not upon its margin, but its very centre, in favor
of any invaders better able than the natives to make its treasures
available. For, of old, it was an article in my brother's code of
morals, that, supposing a contest between any two parties, of which
one possessed an article, whilst the other was better able to use it,
the rightful property vested in the latter. As if you met a man with
a musket, then you might justly challenge him to a trial in the art
of making gunpowder; which if you _could_ make, and he could _not_,
in that case the musket was _de jure_ yours. For what shadow of a right
had the fellow to a noble instrument which he could not "maintain" in
a serviceable condition, and "feed" with its daily rations of powder
and shot? Still, it may be fancied that, since all the relations between
us as independent sovereigns (whether of war, or peace, or treaty)
rested upon our own representations and official reports, it was surely
within my competence to deny or qualify as much as within his to assert.
But, in reality, the _law_ of the contest between us, as suggested by
some instinct of propriety in my own mind, would not allow me to proceed
in such a method. What he said was like a move at chess or draughts,
which it was childish to dispute. The move being made, my business
was--to face it, to parry it, to evade it, and, if I could, to overthrow
it. I proceeded as a lawyer who moves as long as he can, not by blank
denial of facts, (or _coming to an issue_,) but by _demurring_, (_i.e._,
admitting the allegations of fact, but otherwise interpreting their
construction.) It was the understood necessity of the case that I must
passively accept my brother's statements so far as regarded their verbal
expression; and, if _I_ would extricate my poor islanders from their
troubles, it must be by some distinction or evasion lying _within_ this
expression, or not blankly contradicting it.

"How, and to what extent," my brother asked, "did I raise taxes upon
my subjects?" My first impulse was to say, that I did not tax them at
all, for I had a perfect horror of doing so; but prudence would not
allow of my saying _that_; because it was too probable he would demand
to know how, in that case, I maintained a standing army; and if I once
allowed it to be supposed that I had none, there was an end forever
to the independence of my people. Poor things! they would have been
invaded and dragooned in a month. I took some days, therefore, to
consider that point; but at last replied, that my people, being
maritime, supported themselves mainly by a herring fishery, from which
I deducted a part of the produce, and afterwards sold it for manure
to neighboring nations. This last hint I borrowed from the conversation
of a stranger who happened to dine one day at Greenhay, and mentioned
that in Devonshire, or at least on the western coast of that county,
near Ilfracombe, upon any excessive take of herrings, beyond what the
markets could absorb, the surplus was applied to the land as a valuable
dressing. It might be inferred from this account, however, that the
arts must be in a languishing state amongst a people that did not
understand the process of salting fish; and my brother observed
derisively, much to my grief, that a wretched ichthyophagous people
must make shocking soldiers, weak as water, and liable to be knocked
over like ninepins; whereas, in _his_ army, not a man ever ate
herrings, pilchards, mackerels, or, in fact, condescended to any thing
worse than surloins of beef.

At every step I had to contend for the honor and independence of my
islanders; so that early I came to understand the weight of Shakspeare's
sentiment--

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!"

O reader, do not laugh! I lived forever under the terror of two separate
wars in two separate worlds: one against the factory boys, in a real
world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and
pursuit, that were any thing but figurative; the other in a world
purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute
moonshine. And yet the simple truth is, that, for anxiety and distress
of mind, the reality (which almost every morning's light brought round)
was as nothing in comparison of that dream kingdom which rose like a
vapor from my own brain, and which apparently by _fiat_ of my will
could be forever dissolved. Ah! but no; I had contracted obligations
to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret
truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a
shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with
the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs,
these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually
frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material
realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings?
asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer is, The gravedigger. He
builds for corruption; and yet _his_ tenements are incorruptible: "the
houses which _he_ makes last to doomsday." [13] Who is it that seeks for
concealment? Let him hide himself [14] in the unsearchable chambers of
light,--of light which at noonday, more effectually than any gloom,
conceals the very brightest stars,--rather than in labyrinths of darkness
the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes to abscond from public
justice? Let him hurry into the frantic publicities of London, and by no
means into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon the analogy
of these cases, we may understand that, to make a strife overwhelming by
a thousand fold to the feelings, it must not deal with gross material
interests, but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and act
upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments.
Mine, in the present case, rose suddenly, like a rocket, into their
meridian altitude, by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a
Scotch advocate's reveries.

This advocate, who by his writings became the remote cause of so much
affliction to my childhood, and struck a blow at the dignity of
Gombroon, that neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania
(my brother's kingdom) ever could have devised, was the celebrated
James Burnett, better known to the English public by his judicial title
of Lord Monboddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often heard, were
a race distinguished for their intellectual accomplishments through
several successive generations; and the judge in question was eminently
so. It did him no injury that many people regarded him as crazy. In
England, at the beginning of the last century, we had a saying,
[15] in reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally
distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation
there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys;
and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been
said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one
perished by falling from a precipice, (and, as I have heard, through mere
absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her
hand,) still survive in the affection of many friends, through the
interest attached to their intellectual gifts; and Miss Burnett, the
daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the memorials of Burns the
poet, as the most beautiful, and otherwise the most interesting, of his
female aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo himself trod an
eccentric path in literature and philosophy; and our tutor, who spent
his whole life in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the
anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large family, found, no
doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions in Lord M.'s "Dissertations
on the Origin of Language;" but to us he communicated only one section of
the work. It was a long passage, containing some very useful
illustrations of a Greek idiom; useful I call them, because four years
afterwards, when I had made great advances in my knowledge of Greek, they
so appeared to me. [16] But then, being scarcely seven years
old, as soon as our tutor had finished his long extract from the
Scottish judge's prelection, I could express my thankfulness for what
I had received only by composing my features to a deeper solemnity and
sadness than usual--no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise,
I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant.
I knew very well the thing called a _tense_; I knew even then by name
the _Aoristus Primus_, as a respectable tense in the Greek language.
It (or shall we say _he_?) was known to the whole Christian world by
this distinction of _Primus_; clearly, therefore, there must be some
low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending also to the name of
Aorist, but universally scouted as the _Aoristus Secundus_, or
Birmingham counterfeit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to
go along with Lord M.'s appreciation of his pretensions, still, had
it been possible to meet an Aoristus Primus in the flesh, I should
have bowed to him submissively, as to one apparently endowed with the
mysterious rights of primogeniture. Not so my brother.

Aorist, indeed! Primus or Secundus, what mattered it? Paving stones
were something, brickbats were something; but an old superannuated
tense! That any grown man should trouble himself about _that!_ Indeed
there _was_ something extraordinary there. For it is not amongst the
ordinary functions of lawyers to take charge of Greek; far less, one
might suppose, of lawyers of Scotland, where the _general_ system of
education has moved for two centuries upon a principle of slight regard
to classical literature. Latin literature was very much neglected, and
Greek nearly altogether. The more was the astonishment at finding a
rare delicacy of critical instinct, as well as of critical sagacity,
applied to the Greek idiomatic niceties by a Scottish lawyer, viz.,
that the same eccentric judge, first made known to us by our tutor.

To the majority of readers, meantime, at this day, Lord M. is memorable
chiefly for his craze about the degeneracy of us poor moderns, when
compared with the men of pagan antiquity; which craze itself might
possibly not have been generally known, except in connection with the
little skirmish between him and Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell's
account of the doctor's Scottish tour. "Ah, doctor," said Lord M.,
upon some casual suggestion of that topic, "poor creatures are we of
this eighteenth century; our fathers were better men than we!" "O, no,
my lord," was Johnson's reply; "we are quite as strong as our
forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too
widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception
[17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded
itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have
challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning
attached usually to the word _paradox_) have often no falsehood in them,
so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing
paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications of history and
experience, which uniformly had pointed in the very opposite direction;
and so far it ought to have been paradoxical, (that is, revolting to
popular opinion,) but was _not_ so; for it fell in with prevailing
opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human
superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not _seem_
extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never
have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and
atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in
that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of
mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most
morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you
please, of fantastic) but still of most real distress.

How much it would have astonished Lord Monboddo to find himself made
answerable, virtually made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears,
for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. Yet night and day
these silent memorials of suffering were accusing him as the founder
of a wound that could not be healed. It happened that the several
volumes of his work lay for weeks in the study of our tutor. Chance
directed the eye of my brother, one day, upon that part of the work
in which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally the human race
had been a variety of the ape. On which hypothesis, by the way, Dr.
Adam Clarke's substitution of _ape_ for _serpent_, in translating the
word _nachash_, (the brute tempter of Eve,) would have fallen to the
ground, since this would simply have been the case of one human being
tempting another. It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., however
painful it might be to human dignity, that in this, their early stage
of brutality, men must have had tails. My brother mused upon this
revery, and, in a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel's
travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gombroonians had not yet
emerged from this early condition of apedom. They, it seems, were still
_homines caudati_. Overwhelming to me and stunning was the ignominy
of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had not overlooked the natural
question--In what way did men get rid of their tails? To speak the
truth, they never _would_ have got rid of them had they continued to
run wild; but growing civilization introduced arts, and the arts
introduced sedentary habits. By these it was, by the mere necessity
of continually sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails.
Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians from sitting down?
_Their_ tailors and shoemakers would and could, I hope, sit down, as
well as those of Tigrosylvania. Why not? Ay, but my brother had insisted
already that they _had_ no tailors, that they _had_ no shoemakers;
which, _then_, I did not care much about, as it merely put back the
clock of our history--throwing us into an earlier, and therefore,
perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. But, as the case stood
now, this want of tailors, &c., showed clearly that the process of
sitting down, so essential to the ennobling of the race, had not
commenced. My brother, with an air of consolation, suggested that I
might even now, without an hour's delay, compel the whole nation to
sit down for six hours a day, which would always "make a beginning."
But the truth would remain as before, viz., that I was the king of a
people that had tails; and the slow, slow process by which, in a course
of many centuries, their posterity might rub them off,--a hope of
vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations that are yet heaving
in sight,--_that_ was to me the worst form of despair.

Still there was one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state
of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew _that_. I might
abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the
poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the
degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us,
what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, _that_ was
fine talking; but this connection with my poor subjects had grown up
so slowly and so genially, in the midst of struggles so constant against
the encroachments of my brother and his rascally people; we had suffered
so much together; and the filaments connecting them with my heart were
so aerially fine and fantastic, but for that reason so inseverable,
that I abated nothing of my anxiety on their account; making this
difference only in my legislation and administrative cares, that I
pursued them more in a spirit of despondency, and retreated more shyly
from communicating them. It was in vain that my brother counselled me
to dress my people in the Roman toga, as the best means of concealing
their ignominious appendages: if he meant this as comfort, it was none
to me; the disgrace lay in the fact, not in its publication; and in
my heart, though I continued to honor Lord Monboddo (whom I heard my
guardian also daily delighting to honor) as a good Grecian, yet secretly
I cursed the Aoristus Primus, as the indirect occasion of a misery
which was not and could not be comprehended.

From this deep degradation of myself and my people, I was drawn off
at intervals to contemplate a different mode of degradation affecting
two persons, twin sisters, whom I saw intermittingly; sometimes once
a week, sometimes frequently on each separate day. You have heard,
reader, of pariahs. The pathos of that great idea possibly never reached
you. Did it ever strike you how far that idea had extended? Do not
fancy it peculiar to Hindostan. Before Delhi was, before Agra, or
Lahore, might the pariah say, I was. The most interesting, if only as
the most mysterious, race of ancient days, the Pelasgi, that overspread,
in early times of Greece, the total Mediterranean,--a race distinguished
for beauty and for intellect, and sorrowful beyond all power of man
to read the cause that could lie deep enough for so imperishable an
impression,--_they_ were pariahs. The Jews that, in the twenty-eighth
chapter of Deuteronomy, were cursed in a certain contingency with a
sublimer curse than ever rang through the passionate wrath of prophecy,
and that afterwards, in Jerusalem, cursed themselves, voluntarily
taking on their own heads, and on the heads of their children's children
forever and ever, the guilt of innocent blood,--_they_ are pariahs
to this hour. Yet for _them_ there has ever shone a sullen light of
hope. The gypsies, for whom no conscious or acknowledged hope burns
through the mighty darkness that surrounds them,--they are pariahs of
pariahs. Lepers were a race of mediaeval pariahs, rejected of men, that
now have gone to rest. But travel into the forests of the Pyrenees,
and there you will find their modern representatives in the Cagots.
Are these Pyrenean Cagots pagans? Not at all, They are good Christians.
Wherefore, then, that low door in the Pyrenean churches, through which
the Cagots are forced to enter, and which, obliging them to stoop
almost to the ground, is a perpetual memento of their degradation?
Wherefore is it that men of pure Spanish blood will hold no intercourse
with the Cagot? Wherefore is it that even the shadow of a Cagot, if
it falls across a fountain, is held to have polluted that fountain?
All this points to some dreadful taint of guilt, real or imputed, in
ages far remote. [18]

But in ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own generation and
our own land, are many pariahs, sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes
sitting (yet not recognized for what they really are) at good men's
tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the
heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears,
they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand." In the very act
of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its
existence. Men say to me daily, when I ask them, in passing, "Any thing
in this morning's paper?" "O, no; nothing at all." And, as I never had
any other answer, I am bound to suppose that there never _was_ any
thing in a daily newspaper; and, therefore, that the horrible burden
of misery and of change, which a century accumulates as its _facit_
or total result, has not been distributed at all amongst its thirty-six
thousand five hundred and twenty-five days: every day, it seems, was
separately a blank day, yielding absolutely nothing--what children
call a deaf nut, offering no kernel; and yet the total product has
caused angels to weep and tremble. Meantime, when I come to look at
the newspaper with my own eyes, I am astonished at the misreport of
my informants. Were there no other section in it than simply that
allotted to the police reports, oftentimes I stand aghast at the
revelations there made of human life and the human heart; at its
colossal guilt, and its colossal misery; at the suffering which
oftentimes throws its shadow over palaces, and the grandeur of mute
endurance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the
dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains
of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us.
Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people
see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read
the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with
the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, that, in the next
generation after that which is here concerned, had any neighbor of our
tutor been questioned on the subject of a domestic tragedy, which
travelled through its natural stages in a leisurely way, and under the
eyes of good Dr. S----, he would have replied, "Tragedy! O, sir, nothing
of the kind! You have been misled; the gentleman must lie under a
mistake: perhaps it was in the next street." No, it was _not_ in the
next street; and the gentleman does not lie under a mistake, or, in
fact, lie at all. The simple truth is, blind old neighbor, that you,
being rarely in the house, and, _when_ there, only in one particular
room, saw no more of what was hourly going on than if you had been
residing with the Sultan of Bokhara. But I, a child between seven and
eight years old, had access every where. I was privileged, and had the
_entree_ even of the female apartments; one consequence of which was,
that I put _this_ and _that_ together. A number of syllables, that
each for itself separately might have meant nothing at all, did yet,
when put together, through weeks and months, read for _my_ eyes into
sentences, as deadly and significant as _Tekel, upharsin._ And another
consequence was, that, being, on account of my age, nobody at all, or
very near it, I sometimes witnessed things that perhaps it had not
been meant for any body to witness, or perhaps some half-conscious
negligence overlooked my presence. "Saw things! What was it now? Was
it a man at midnight, with a dark lantern and a six-barrel revolver?"
No, _that_ was not in the least like what I saw: it was a great deal
more like what I will endeavor to describe. Imagine two young girls,
of what exact age I really do not know, but apparently from twelve to
fourteen, twins, remarkably plain in person and features, unhealthy,
and obscurely reputed to be idiots. Whether they really were such was
more than I knew, or could devise any plan for learning. Without
dreaming of any thing unkind or uncourteous, my original impulse had
been to say, "If you please, are you idiots?" But I felt that such a
question had an air of coarseness about it, though, for my own part,
I had long reconciled myself to being called an idiot by my brother.
There was, however, a further difficulty: breathed as a gentle murmuring
whisper, the question might possibly be reconciled to an indulgent ear
as confidential and tender. Even to take a liberty with those you love
is to show your trust in their affection; but, alas! these poor girls
were deaf; and to have shouted out, "Are you idiots, if you please?"
in a voice that would have rung down three flights of stairs, promised
(as I felt, without exactly seeing why) a dreadful exaggeration to
whatever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the question; and
some _did_ attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of
Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were _not_
idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension
naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose
from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private
fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though
considerably increased by the allowance made for us, his two pupils,
still, in a great town, and with so large a family, it left him little
room for luxuries. Consequently, he never had more than two servants,
and at times only one. Upon this plea rose the scheme of the mother
for employing these two young girls in menial offices of the household
economy. One reason for that was, that she thus indulged her dislike
for them, which she took no pains to conceal; and thus, also, she
withdrew them from the notice of strangers. In this way, it happened
that I saw them myself but at uncertain intervals. Gradually, however,
I came to be aware of their forlorn condition, to pity them, and to
love them. The poor twins were undoubtedly plain to the degree which
is called, by unfeeling people, ugliness. They were also deaf, as I
have said, and they were scrofulous; one of them was disfigured by the
small pox; they had glimmering eyes, red, like the eyes of ferrets,
and scarcely half open; and they did not walk so much as stumble along.
There, you have the worst of them. Now, hear something on the other
side. What first won my pity was, their affection for each other,
united to their constant sadness; secondly, a notion which had crept
into my head, probably derived from something said in my presence by
elder people, that they were destined to an early death; and, lastly,
the incessant persecutions of their mother. This lady belonged, by
birth, to a more elevated rank than that of her husband, and she was
remarkably well bred as regarded her manners. But she had probably a
weak understanding; she was shrewish in her temper; was a severe
economist; a merciless exactor of what she viewed as duty; and, in
persecuting her two unhappy daughters, though she yielded blindly to
her unconscious dislike of them, as creatures that disgraced her, she
was not aware, perhaps, of ever having put forth more expressions of
anger and severity than were absolutely required to rouse the
constitutional torpor of her daughters' nature; and where disgust has
once rooted itself, and been habitually expressed in tones of harshness,
the mere sight of the hateful object mechanically calls forth the
eternal tones of anger, without distinct consciousness or separate
intention in the speaker. Loud speaking, besides, or even shouting,
was required by the deafness of the two girls. From anger so constantly
discharging its thunders, naturally they did not show open signs of
recoiling; but that they felt it deeply, may be presumed from their
sensibility to kindness. My own experience showed _that_; for, as
often as I met them, we exchanged kisses; and my wish had always been
to beg them, if they really _were_ idiots, not to mind it, since I
should not like them the less on that account. This wish of mine never
came to utterance; but not the less they were aware, by my manner of
salutation, that one person at least, amongst those who might be
considered strangers, did not find any thing repulsive about them; and
the pleasure they felt was expressed broadly upon their kindling faces.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.