Memorials and Other Papers V1 by Thomas de Quincey
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Thomas de Quincey >> Memorials and Other Papers V1
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22 Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY
FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS.
These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so
far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view
to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which
you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together
so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by
too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be
absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator
in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation
or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim
that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely
and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers,
I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have
taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or
bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual
house, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of
any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law
or custom in America.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest
trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my
sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your
honorable house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.
EXPLANATORY NOTICES
THE ORPHAN HEIRESS.
VISIT TO LAXTON
THE PRIORY
OXFORD
THE PAGAN ORACLES
THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE
EXPLANATORY NOTICES.
Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written under
one set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They were
written generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch
the critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a
distance from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction);
and always written at a distance from libraries, so that very many
statements, references, and citations, were made on the authority of my
unassisted memory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers
composed; and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even
partially recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which
embarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by
words. Such, indeed, is the distress produced by this malady, that, if
the present act of republication had in any respect worn the character
of an experiment, I should have shrunk from it in despondency. But the
experiment, so far as there was any, had been already tried for me
vicariously amongst the Americans; a people so nearly repeating our own
in style of intellect, and in the composition of their reading class,
that a success amongst them counts for a success amongst ourselves. For
some few of the separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of
a higher cast. These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest
I resign to the reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect
to four of them, a few prefatory words--not of propitiation or
deprecation, but simply in explanation as to points that would
otherwise be open to misconstruction.
1. The paper on "Murder as one of the Fine Arts" [Footnote: Published
in the "Miscellaneous Essays."] seemed to exact from me some account of
Williams, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation; not
only because the amateurs had so much insisted on his merit as the
supreme of artists for grandeur of design and breadth of style; and
because, apart from this momentary connection with my paper, the man
himself merited a record for his matchless audacity, combined with so
much of snaky subtlety, and even insinuating amiableness, in his
demeanor; but also because, apart from the man himself, the works of
the man (those two of them especially which so profoundly impressed the
nation in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most
impressive on record. Southey pronounced their preeminence when he said
to me that they ranked amongst the few domestic events which, by the
depth and the expansion of horror attending them, had risen to the
dignity of a _national_ interest. I may add that this interest
benefited also by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to
various points but especially as respected one important question, Had
the murderer any accomplice? [Footnote: Upon a large overbalance of
probabilities, it was, however, definitively agreed amongst amateurs
that Williams must have been alone in these atrocities. Meantime,
amongst the colorable presumptions on the other side was this:--Some
hours after the last murder, a man was apprehended at Barnet (the first
stage from London on a principal north road), encumbered with a
quantity of plate. How he came by it, or whither he was going, he
steadfastly refused to say. In the daily journals, which he was allowed
to see, he read with eagerness the police examinations of Williams; and
on the same day which announced the catastrophe of Williams, he also
committed suicide in his cell.] There was, therefore, reason enough,
both in the man's hellish character, and in the mystery which
surrounded him, for a Postscript [Footnote: Published in the "Note
Book."] to the original paper; since, in a lapse of forty-two years,
both the man and his deeds had faded away from the knowledge of the
present generation; but still I am sensible that my record is far too
diffuse. Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to
correct it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the
afflicting agitations and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous
malady.
2. "War." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and Miscellaneous
Essays."]--In this paper, from having faultily adjusted its proportions
in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too
feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to
some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because
trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to
suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of
progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and
inevitably, were it only through its connection with science ever more
and more exquisite, and through its augmented costliness,--all this may
have its use in offering some restraint upon the levity of action or of
declamation in Peace Societies. But all this is below the occasion. I
feel that far grander interests are at stake in this contest. The Peace
Societies are falsely appreciated, when they are described as merely
deaf to the lessons of experience, and as too "_romantic_" in
their expectations. The very opposite is, to _my_ thinking, their
criminal reproach. He that is romantic errs usually by too much
elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation, by
drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the
contrary, the Peace Societies would, if their power kept pace with
their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his
most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. Most heartily, and
with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his
grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is
mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful, namely, that
amongst God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is
"mutual slaughter" amongst men; yes, that "Carnage is God's daughter."
Not deriving my own views in this matter from Wordsworth,--not knowing
even whether I hold them on the same grounds, since Wordsworth has left
_his_ grounds unexplained,--nevertheless I cite them in honor, as
capable of the holiest justification. The instruments rise in grandeur,
carnage and mutual slaughter rise in holiness, exactly as the motives
and the interests rise on behalf of which such awful powers are
invoked. Fighting for truth in its last recesses of sanctity, for human
dignity systematically outraged, or for human rights mercilessly
trodden under foot--champions of such interests, men first of all
descry, as from a summit suddenly revealed, the possible grandeur of
bloodshed suffered or inflicted. Judas and Simon Maccabeus in days of
old, Gustavus Adolphus [Footnote: The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was notoriously the last and the
decisive conflict between Popery and Protestantism; the result of that
war it was which finally enlightened all the Popish princes of
Christendom as to the impossibility of ever suppressing the antagonist
party by mere force of arms. I am not meaning, however, to utter any
opinion whatever on the religious position of the two great parties. It
is sufficient for entire sympathy with the royal Swede, that he fought
for the freedom of conscience. Many an enlightened Roman Catholic,
supposing only that he were not a Papist, would have given his hopes
and his confidence to the Protestant king.] in modern days, fighting
for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and
murdering oppressors, exhibit to us the incarnations of Wordsworth's
principle. Such wars are of rare occurrence. Fortunately they are so;
since, under the possible contingencies of human strength and weakness,
it might else happen that the grandeur of the principle should suffer
dishonor through the incommensurate means for maintaining it. But such
cases, though emerging rarely, are always to be reserved in men's minds
as ultimate appeals to what is most divine in man. Happy it is for
human welfare that the blind heart of man is a thousand times wiser
than his understanding. An _arriere pensee_ should lie hidden in
all minds--a holy reserve as to cases which _may_ arise similar to
such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "_Merciful
bloodshed_"--In reading either the later religious wars of the
Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every
philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of
mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of
God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as
indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality
through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read
one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he
will destroy a wisdom working from afar, but, as regards the immediate
present, he will be apt to adopt the ordinary view, namely, that in the
Old Testament severity prevails approaching to cruelty. Yet, on
consideration, he will be disposed to qualify this opinion. He will
have observed many indications of a relenting kindness and a tenderness
of love in the Mosaical ordinances. And recently there has been
suggested another argument tending to the same conclusion. In the last
work of Mr. Layard ('Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon,
1853') are published some atrocious monuments of the Assyrian cruelty
in the treatment of military captives. In one of the plates of Chap
xx., at page 456, is exhibited some unknown torture applied to the
head, and in another, at page 458, is exhibited the abominable process,
applied to two captives, of flaying them alive. One such case had been
previously recorded in human literature, and illustrated by a plate. It
occurs in a Dutch voyage to the islands of the East. The subject of the
torment in that case as a woman who had been charged with some act of
infidelity to her husband. And the local government, being indignantly
summoned to interfere by some Christian strangers, had declined to do
so, on the plea that the man was master within his own house. But the
Assyrian case was worse. This torture was there applied, not upon a
sudden vindictive impulse, but in cold blood, to a simple case
apparently of civil disobedience or revolt. Now, when we consider how
intimate, and how ancient, was the connection between Assyria and
Palestine, how many things (in war especially) were transferred
mediately through the intervening tribes (all habitually cruel), from
the people on the Tigris to those on the Jordan, I feel convinced that
Moses must have interfered most peremptorily and determinately, and not
merely by verbal ordinances, but by establishing counter usages against
this spirit of barbarity, otherwise it would have increased
contagiously, whereas we meet with no such hellish atrocities amongst
the children of Israel. In the case of one memorable outrage by a
Hebrew tribe, the national vengeance which overtook it was complete and
tearful beyond all that history has recorded] has been authorized by
the express voice of God. Such a reserve cannot be dispensed with. It
belongs to the principle of progress in man that he should forever keep
open a secret commerce in the last resort with the spirit of martyrdom
on behalf of man's most saintly interests. In proportion as the
instruments for upholding or retrieving such saintly interests should
come to be dishonored or less honored, would the inference be valid
that those interests were shaking in their foundations. And any
confederation or compact of nations for abolishing war would be the
inauguration of a downward path for man.
A battle is by possibility the grandest, and also the meanest, of human
exploits. It is the grandest when it is fought for godlike truth, for
human dignity, or for human rights; it is the meanest when it is fought
for petty advantages (as, by way of example, for accession of territory
which adds nothing to the security of a frontier), and still more when
it is fought simply as a gladiator's trial of national prowess. This is
the principle upon which, very naturally, our British school-boys value
a battle. Painful it is to add, that this is the principle upon which
our adult neighbors the French seem to value a battle.
To any man who, like myself, admires the high-toned, martial gallantry
of the French, and pays a cheerful tribute of respect to their many
intellectual triumphs, it is painful to witness the childish state of
feeling which the French people manifest on every possible question
that connects itself at any point with martial pretensions. A battle is
valued by them on the same principles, not better and not worse, as
govern our own schoolboys. Every battle is viewed by the boys as a test
applied to the personal prowess of each individual soldier; and,
naturally amongst boys, it would be the merest hypocrisy to take any
higher ground. But amongst adults, arrived at the power of reflecting
and comparing, we look for something nobler. We English estimate
Waterloo, not by its amount of killed and wounded, but as the battle
which terminated a series of battles, having one common object, namely,
the overthrow of a frightful tyranny. A great sepulchral shadow rolled
away from the face of Christendom as that day's sun went down to his
rest; for, had the success been less absolute, an opportunity would
have offered for negotiation, and consequently for an infinity of
intrigues through the feuds always gathering upon national jealousies
amongst allied armies. The dragon would soon have healed his wounds;
after which the prosperity of the despotism would have been greater
than before. But, without reference to Waterloo in particular,
_we_, on _our_ part, find it impossible to contemplate any memorable
battle otherwise than according to its tendency towards some
commensurate object. To the French this must be impossible, seeing that
no lofty (that is, no disinterested) purpose has ever been so much as
counterfeited for a French war, nor therefore for a French battle.
Aggression, cloaked at the very utmost in the garb of retaliation for
counter aggressions on the part of the enemy, stands forward uniformly
in the van of such motives as it is thought worth while to plead. But
in French casuistry it is not held necessary to plead _any_thing;
war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying
the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the
purpose of publishing and renewing to Europe the proclamation of French
superiority--_that_ is the object of French wars. Like the Spartan
of old, the Frenchman would hold that a state of peace, and not a state
of war, is the state which calls for apology; and that already from the
first such an apology must wear a very suspicious aspect of paradox.
3. "The English Mail-Coach." [Footnote: Published in the "Miscellaneous
Essays."]--This little paper, according to my original intention,
formed part of the "Suspiria de Profundis," from which, for a momentary
purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as
sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a
larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not
carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their
inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links
of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able
to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking
obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic.
Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case.
I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according
to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far
this design is kept in sight through the actual execution.
Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead
of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an
appalling scene, which threatened instant death, in a shape the most
terrific, to two young people, whom I had no means of assisting, except
in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their
danger; but even _that_ not until they stood within the very
shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of
deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.
Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this
paper radiates as a natural expansion. The scene is circumstantially
narrated in Section the Second, entitled, "The Vision of Sudden Death."
But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful
scene naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised,
into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The
actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was
transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical
fugue. This troubled Dream is circumstantially reported in Section the
Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I
had beheld from my seat upon the mail,--the scenical strife of action
and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving
in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself
to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,--all
these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with
the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail
itself, which features at that time lay--1st, in velocity
unprecedented; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses: 3dly, in
the official connection with the government of a great nation; and,
4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing
and diffusing through the land the great political events, and
especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled
grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described
circumstantially in the FIRST or introductory section ("The Glory of
Motion"). The three first were distinctions maintained at all times;
but the fourth and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with
Napoleon; and this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into
the dream. Waterloo, I understood, was the particular feature of the
"Dream-Fugue" which my censors were least able to account for. Yet
surely Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had
been our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally
entered the Dream under the license of our privilege. If not--if there
be anything amiss--let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to
itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for
_not_ showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element
in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily
from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features
associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived
itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves
together at the point of approaching collision, namely, an arrow-like
section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights
described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's
horn, again--a humble instrument in itself--was yet glorified as the
organ of publication for so many great national events. And the
incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief,
and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of
warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own
imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning
blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the
responsible party.
4. "The Spanish Nun." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and
Miscellaneous Essays."]--There are some narratives, which, though pure
fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave
realities, that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a
time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other
narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and
scenes so remote from our ordinary experience, and through, a state of
society so favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they
would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which
attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable
novels of De Foe; and, on a lower range, within the same category, the
inimitable "Vicar of Wakefield;" upon which last novel, without at all
designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive
experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl
of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman in Westmoreland, not
designing any deception (nor so much as any concealment) with respect
to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that
famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those
explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this
case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the
exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute
inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them.
This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I
saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I _had_ forgotten it.
Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the unfaltering gravity with
which my fair young friend spoke of Dr. Primrose, of Sophia and her
sister, of Squire Thornhill, &c., as real and probably living
personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that this artless
young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare
possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had
read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly
life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving sympathy to
the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses in which
they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by so much as
a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure gospel truth
of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a kind of
breathless stupor, to my frank explanation--that not part only, but the
whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation
flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed
and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the
end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded
of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised
upon her youthful credulity.
In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer
itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on
the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every
detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated,
stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless
of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural
result from the bold, adventurous character of the heroine, and from
the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America, that
a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon
what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on
the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most
obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite
direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a
romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking,
tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems
evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction,
the writer would have used his privilege more freely for his own
advantage. Whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the
coercion and restraint of a _notorious reality_, that would not
suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the
objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such
uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that
the experience in this case is _not_ uniform; and so far otherwise,
that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is
confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground whatever than that
this long parenthesis is _not_ adventurous, not essentially
differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.
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