The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1

One great class of criminals I am aware of in past times as having specially tormented myself—the class who have left secrets, riddles, behind them. What business has any man to bequeath a conundrum to all posterity, unless he leaves in some separate channel the solution? This must have been done in malice, and for the purpose of annoying us, lest we should have too much proper enjoyment of life when he should have gone. For nobody knows whether the scoundrel could have solved it himself—too like in that respect to some charades which, in my boyish days (but then I had the excuse of youth, which they had not), I not unfrequently propounded to young ladies. Take this as a specimen: My first raises a little hope; my second very little indeed; and my whole is a vast roar of despair. No young lady could ever solve it; neither could I. We all had to give it up. A charade that only needs an answer, which, perhaps, some distant generation may supply, is but a half and half, tentative approach to this. Very much of this nature was the genius or Daimon (don't say Demon) of Socrates. How many thousands of learned writers and printers have gone to sleep over too profound attempts to solve that, which Socrates ought to have been able to solve at sight. I am myself of opinion that it was a dram-bottle, which someone raised a ghost to explain. Then the Entelecheia of Aristotle; did you ever read about that, excellent reader? Most people fancy it to have meant some unutterable crotchet in metaphysics, some horrible idea (lest the police should be after it) without a name; that is, until the Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than his royal pupil's conquests. Upon that Aristotle, keeping her hand, said: 'My love, I'll think of it.' And then it occurred to him, that in the very heavens many lovely ladies, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Ariadne, etc., had been placed as constellations in that map which many chronologists suppose to have been prepared for the use of the ship Argo, a whole generation before the Trojan war. Berenice, though he could not be aware of that, had interest even to procure a place in that map for her ringlets; and of course for herself she might have. Considering which, Aristotle said: 'Hang me! if I don't put her among the ten Categories!' On after thoughts he put her higher, for an Entelecheia is as much above a Category as our Padishah Victoria is above a Turkish sultan. 'But now, Stag,' said the lady (privileged as a sweetheart she called him Stag, though everybody else was obliged to call him Stagyrite), 'how will they know it's meant for me, Stag?' Upon which I am sorry to say the philosopher fell to cursing and swearing, bestowing blessings on his own optics and on posterity's, meaning yours and mine, saying: 'Let them find it out.' Well, now, you see I have found it out. But that is more than I hope for my crypto-criminals, and therefore I take this my only way of giving them celebration and malediction in one breath.

XI. ANECDOTES—JUVENAL

All anecdotes, as I have often remarked in print, are lies. It is painful to use harsh words, and, knowing by my own feelings how much the reader is shocked by this rude word lies, I should really be much gratified if it were possible to supplant it by some gentler or more courteous word, such as falsehoods, or even fibs, which dilutes the atrocity of untruth into something of an amiable weakness, wrong, but still venial, and natural (and so far, therefore, reasonable). Anything for peace: but really in this instance I cannot indulge the reader. The instincts of morality will not allow of it, and still less the passion which made Juvenal a poet,11 viz., the passion of enormous and bloody indignation. From the beginning of this century, with wrath continually growing, I have laid it down as a rule, and if the last year of it, viz., a. d. 1900, should overhear my voice amongst the babblings that will then be troubling the atmosphere—in that case it will hear me still reaffirming, with an indignation still gathering strength, and therefore approaching ever nearer and nearer to a Juvenalian power of versification, so that perhaps I shall then speak in rhymed couplets—that all anecdotes pretending to be smart, but to a dead certainty if they pretend to be epigrammatic, are and must be lies. There is, in fact, no security for the truth of an anecdote, no guarantee whatever, except its intense stupidity. If a man is searched at a police-office, on the ground that he was caught trying the window-shutters of silversmiths; then, if it should happen that in his pockets is found absolutely nothing at all except one solitary paving-stone, in that case Charity, which believeth all things (in fact, is credulous to an anile degree), will be disposed to lock up the paving-stone, and restore it to the man on his liberation as if it were really his own, though philosophy mutters indignantly, being all but certain that the fellow stole it. And really I have been too candid a great deal in admitting that a man may appropriate an anecdote, and establish his claim to it by pleading its awful stupidity. That might be the case, and I believe it was, when anecdotes were many and writers were few. But things are changed now. Fifty years ago, if a man were seen running away with the pace of a lunatic, and you should sing out, 'Stop that fellow; he is running off with the shin-bone of my great-grandmother!' all the people in the street would have cried out in reply, 'Oh, nonsense! What should he want with your great-grandmother's shin-bone?' and that would have seemed reasonable. But now, to see how things are altered, any man of sense would reply, 'What should he want with my great-grandmother's shin-bone? Why, he'll grind it, and then he'll mix it with guano.' This is what he and the like of him have actually done by shiploads of people far more entitled to consideration than any one of my four great-grandmothers (for I had four, with eight shin-bones amongst them). It is well known that the field of Waterloo was made to render up all its bones, British or French, to certain bone-mills in agricultural districts. Borodino and Leipzig, the two bloodiest of modern battlefields, are supposed between them—what by the harvest of battle, what by the harvest of neighbouring hospitals—to be seized or possessed of four hundred thousand shin-bones, and other interesting specimens to match. Negotiations have been proceeding at various times between the leading bone-mills in England and the Jews in Dresden or in Moscow. Hitherto these negotiations have broken down, because the Jews stood out for 37 per shent., calculated upon the costs of exhumation. But of late they show a disposition to do business at 33 per shent.: the contract will therefore move forwards again; it will go ahead; and the dust of the faithful armies, together with the dust of their enemies, will very soon be found, not in the stopper of a bunghole (as Prince Hamlet conceived too prematurely), but in an unprecedented crop of Swedish turnips.

Bones change their value, it seems thus clearly; and anecdotes change their value; and in that proportion honesty, as regards one or the other, changes the value of its chances. But what has all this to do with 'Old Nick'? Stop: let me consider. That title was placed at the head of this article, and I admit that it was placed there by myself. Else, whilst I was wandering from my text, and vainly endeavouring to recollect what it was that I had meant by this text, a random thought came over me (immoral, but natural), that I would charge the heading of Old Nick upon the compositor, asserting that he had placed it there in obstinate defiance of all the orders to the contrary, and supplications to the contrary, that I had addressed to him for a month; by which means I should throw upon him the responsibility of accounting for so portentous an ensign.

Editor's Note.—It is evident that De Quincey meditated a much longer essay on anecdotes as false, in which Niccolo Machiavelli would have come in for notice—hence the playful references in the close.

FOOTNOTES:

XII. ANNA LOUISA

SPECIMEN TRANSLATION FROM VOSS IN HEXAMETERS, WITHLETTER TO PROFESSOR W. ('CHRISTOPHER NORTH')

Dr. North,

Doctor, I say, for I hear that the six Universities of England and Scotland have sent you a doctor's degree, or, if they have not, all the world knows they ought to have done; and the more shame for them if they keep no 'Remembrancer' to put them in mind of what they must allow to be amongst their most sacred duties. But that's all one. I once read in my childhood a pretty book, called 'Wilson's Account of the Pelew Islands,' at which islands, you know, H.M.S. Antelope was wrecked—just about the time, I fancy, when you, Doctor, and myself were in long petticoats and making some noise in the world; the book was not written by Captain Wilson, but by Keates, the sentimentalist. At the very end, however, is an epitaph, and that was written by the captain and ship's company:

'Stop, reader, stop, let nature claim a tear;A prince of mine, Lee Boo, lies buried here.'

This epitaph used often to make me cry, and in commemoration of that effect, which (like that of all cathartics that I know of, no matter how drastic at first) has long been growing weaker and weaker, I propose (upon your allowing me an opportunity) to superscribe you in any churchyard you will appoint:

'Stop, reader, stop, let genius claim a tear;A doct'r of mine, Lee Kit, lies buried here.'

'Doct'r of' you are to read into a dissyllable, and pretty much like Boney's old friend on the road from Moscow, General Doct'roff, who 'doctor'd them off,' as the Laureate observes, and prescribed for the whole French army gratis. But now to business.

For your information, Doctor, it cannot be necessary, but on account of very many readers it will be so, to say that Voss's 'Luise' has long taken its place in the literature of Germany as a classical work—in fact, as a gem or cabinet chef d'œuvre; nay, almost as their unique specimen in any national sense of the lighter and less pretending muse; less pretending, I mean, as to the pomp or gravity of the subject, but on that very account more pretending as respects the minuter graces of its execution. In the comparative estimate of Germans, the 'Luise' holds a station corresponding to that of our 'Rape of the Lock,' or of Gresset's 'Vert-vert'—corresponding, that is, in its degree of relative value. As to its kind of value, some notion may be formed of it even in that respect also from the 'Rape of the Lock,' but with this difference, that the scenes and situations and descriptions are there derived from the daily life and habits of a fashionable belle and the fine gentlemen who surround her, whereas in the 'Luise' they are derived exclusively from the homelier and more patriarchal economy of a rural clergyman's household; and in this respect the 'Luise' comes nearest by much, in comparison of any other work that I know of, to our own 'Vicar of Wakefield.' Like that delightful portrait of rural life in a particular aspect, or idyll as it might be called, the 'Luise' aims at throwing open for our amusement the interior of a village parsonage (Scotice, 'manse'); like that in its earlier half (for the latter half of the 'Vicar' is a sad collapse from the truth and nature of the original conception into the marvellous of a commonplace novel), the 'Luise' exhibits the several members of a rustic clergyman's family according to their differences of sex, age, and standing, in their natural, undisguised features, all unconsciously marked by characteristic foibles, all engaged in the exercise of their daily habits, neither finer nor coarser than circumstances naturally allow, and all indulging in such natural hopes or fictions of romance as grow out of their situation in life. The 'Luise,' in short, and the 'Vicar of Wakefield' are both alike a succession of circumstantial delineations selected from mere rustic life, but rustic life in its most pure and intellectual form; for as to the noble countess in the 'Luise,' or the squire and his uncle, Sir William, in the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' they do not interfere sufficiently to disturb the essential level of the movement as regards the incidents, or to colour the manners and the scenery. Agreeing, however, in this general purpose, the two works differ in two considerable features; one, that the 'Vicar of Wakefield' describes the rural clergyman of England, 'Luise' the rural clergyman of North Germany; the other, that the English idyll is written in prose, the German in verse—both of which differences, and the separate peculiarities growing out of them, will, it may perhaps be thought, require a few words of critical discussion.

There has always existed a question as to the true principles of translation when applied, not to the mere literature of knowledge (because there it is impossible that two opinions can arise, by how much closer the version by so much the better), but to the literature of power, and to such works—above all, to poems—as might fairly be considered works of art in the highest sense. To what extent the principle of compensation might reasonably be carried, the license, that is, of departing from the strict literal forms of the original writer, whether as to expressions, images, or even as to the secondary thoughts, for the sake of reproducing them in some shape less repellent to a modern ear, and therefore virtually sustaining the harmony of the composition by preventing the attention from settling in a disproportionate degree upon what might have a startling effect to a taste trained under modern discipline—this question has always been pending as a question open to revision before the modern courts of criticism; as surely to you, Dr. North, one of the chief 'swells' on that bench, I need not say. But, for the sake of accurate thinking, it is worth while observing that formerly this question was moved almost exclusively with a view to the Latin and Greek classics; and that circumstance gave a great and a very just bias to the whole dispute. For the difference with regard to any capital author of ancient days, as compared with modern authors, is this, that here we have a twofold interest—an interest with work, and a separate interest in the writer. Take the 'Prometheus Desmotes' of Æschylus, and suppose that a translator should offer us an English 'Prometheus,' which he acknowledged to be very free, but at the same time contended that his variations from the Greek were so many downright improvements, so that, if he had not given us the genuine 'Prometheus,' he had given us something better. In such a case we should all reply, but we do not want something better. Our object is not the best possible drama that could be produced on the fable of 'Prometheus'; what we want is the very 'Prometheus' that was written by Æschylus, the very drama that was represented at Athens. The Athenian audience itself, and what pleased its taste, is already one subject of interest. Æschylus on his own account is another. These are collateral and alien subjects of interest quite independent of our interest in the drama, and for the sake of these we wish to see the real original 'Prometheus'—not according to any man's notion of improvement, but such as came from a sublime Grecian poet, such as satisfied a Grecian audience, more than two thousand years ago. We wish, in fact, for the real Æschylus, 'unhousel'd, unaneal'd,' with all his imperfections on his head.

Such was the way, and the just way, of arguing the point when the application was limited to a great authentic classic of the Antique; nor was the case at all different where Ariosto or any other illustrious Italian classic was concerned. But a new sort of casuistry in this question has arisen in our own times, and by accident chiefly in connection with German literature; but it may well be, Dr. North, that you will be more diverted by a careful scrutiny of my metres after Voss in illustration, than by any further dissertation on my part on a subject that you know so well.

Believe me,Always yours admiringly,X. Y. Z.The Parson's DinnerIn the month of leafy June, beneath celestial azureOf skies all cloudless, sate the aged Rector of EsthwaiteDining amidst his household; but not the meridian ardourOf sunbeams fierce he felt; him the shady verandaWith vine-clad trellis defends: beyond a pendulous awningOf boughs self-wreath'd from limes (whose mighty limbs overarchingSpanned the low roof of the house) spreads far effectual umbrageFor young and old alike; noontide awfully breathlessSettled in deepest silence on the woods and valley of Esthwaite.Yet not the less there would rise, after stillest interval often,Low whispering gales that stole, like sobbing murmur of infantDreaming in arms maternal, into the heart o' the youngest:Gales that at most could raise a single ringlet of auburnAs it pencill'd the noble brow of the youthful Anna Louisa—Sole child that survived to thee, oh, aged pastor of Esthwaite.Clad in his morning gown, the reverend priest at a tableOf sculptur'd stone was seated; and his seat was a massy but easySettle of oak, which in youth his ancient servitor, Isaac,Footman, sexton, and steward, butler and gardener also,Carved by the winter fire in nights of gloomy November,And through many a long, long night of many a dark December.The good man's heart was glad, and his eyes were suffus'd with a raptureOf perfect love as they settled on her—that pulse of his heart's blood,The one sole prop of his house, the beautiful Anna Louisa.By the side of himself sate his wife, that ancient tamer of housemaids,12Yet kind of heart as a dove, and with matron graces adorningHer place as she sate dispensing hospitality boundlessTo the strangers within her gates; for, lo! two strangers on one sideSate of the long stone table; yet strangers by manner or actionOne would not suppose them; nor were they, but guests ever honour'd,And dear to each heart in the house of th' ancient Rector of Esthwaite.The elder of them was called Augustus Harry Delancey,And he rode as a cornet of horse in the mighty imperial army.Him had the parents approved (and those were melodious accents,The sweetest he ever had heard) as suitor of Anna Louisa.But from lips more ruby far—far more melodious accentsHad reach'd his ears since then; for she, the daughter, her own self,Had condescended at last to utter sweet ratificationOf all his hopes; low whisp'ring the 'yes'—celestial answerThat raised him to paradise gates on pinion13 of expectation.Over against his beloved he sate—the suitor enamour'd:And God He knows that indeed should it prove an idolatrous errorTo look in the eyes of a lady till you feel a dreamy devotion,I fear for the health of your soul that day, oh, Harry Delancey!Next to Delancey there sate his pupil, Magnus Adolphus,A fair-haired boy of ten, half an orphan, a count of the empire—Magnus Adolphus of Arnstein, that great Bavarian earldom.Him had his widowed mother, the noble Countess of Arnstein,Placed with Delancey betimes, as one in knightly requirementsSkilful and all-accomplished, that he the 'youthful idea'14Might 'teach how to shoot' (with a pistol, videlicet),—horsesTo mount and to manage with boldness, hounds to follow in huntingThe fox, the tusky boar, the stag with his beautiful antlers:Arts, whether graceful or useful, in arms or equestrian usage,Did Augustus impart to his pupil, the youthful earl of the empire.To ride with stirrups or none, to mount from the near-side or off-side(Which still is required in the trooper who rides in the Austrian army),To ride with bridle or none, on a saddle Turkish or English,To force your horse to curvet, pirouette, dance on his haunches,And whilst dancing to lash with his feet, and suggest an effectual hintingTo the enemy's musqueteers to clear the road for the hinter:Or again, if you want a guide by night, in a dangerous highwayBeset with the enemies' marksmen and swarming with murderous ambush,To train your horse in the art of delicate insinuation,Gently raising a hoof to tap at the door o' the woodsman.But, if he persists in snoring, or pretending to snore, or is angryAt your summons to leave his lair in the arms of his wife or his infants,To practise your horse in the duty of stormy recalcitration,Wheeling round to present his heels, and in mid caracolingTo send the emperor's greeting smack through the panel of oakwood15That makes the poor man so hard of hearing imperial orders.Arts such as these and others, the use of the sabre on horseback,All modes of skill gymnastic, modes whether forceful or artful,Of death-grapple if by chance a cannon-shot should un-horse you,All modes of using the limbs with address, with speed, or enormousEffort of brutal strength, all this did Harry DelanceyTeach to his docile pupil: and arts more nobly delightful,Arts of the head or the heart, arts intellectual; empireOver dead men's books, over regions of high meditation,Comparative tactics, warfare as then conducted in agesWhen powder was none, nor cannon, but brute catapultæ,Blind rams, brainless wild asses, the stony slinger of huge stones.16Iron was lord of the world; iron reigned, man was his engine;But now the rule is reversed, man binds and insults over iron.Together did they, young tutor, young pupil, Augustus, Adolphus,Range over history martial, or read strategical authors,Xenophon, Arrian, old Polybius, old Polyænus(Think not these Polys, my boy, were blooming Pollies of our days!),And above all others, they read the laurel'd hero of heroes,Thrice kingly Roman Julius, sun-bright leader of armies,Who planted his god-like foot on the necks of a whole generation.Such studies, such arts were those by which young Harry DelanceySought to discharge the trust which to him the Lady of ArnsteinConfided with hopes maternal; thus trained, he hoped that AdolphusWould shine in his native land, for high was his place in the empire.

Editor's Note.—This was, of course, written for Blackwood's Magazine; but it never appeared there.

XIII. SOME THOUGHTS ON BIOGRAPHY

We have heard from a man who witnessed the failure of Miss Baillie's 'De Montford,' notwithstanding the scenic advantages of a vast London theatre, fine dresses, fine music at intervals, and, above all, the superb acting of John Kemble, supported on that occasion by his incomparable sister, that this unexpected disappointment began with the gallery, who could not comprehend or enter into a hatred so fiendish growing out of causes so slight as any by possibility supposable in the trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him, occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a duodecimo kick—well and good, nothing but right. And the plot manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!—a Macbeth murder!—not the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De Montford, making him ignoble that could be moved so profoundly by an agency so contemptible.

Something of the same disproportion there is, though in a different way, between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking, why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake an edition of his works, 'with a life of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer, who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all his doubles for a day's amusement. It too much resembles that case of undoubted occurrence both in France and Germany, where 'respectable' individuals, simply as amateurs, and not at all with any view to the salary or fees of operating, have come forward as candidates for the post of public executioner. What is every man's duty is no man's duty by preference. And unless where a writer is thrust upon such a duty by an official necessity (as, if he contracts for a 'Biographia Britannica,' in that case he is bound by his contract to go through with the whole series—rogues and all), it is too painful to see a human being courting and wooing the task of doing execution upon his brother in his grave. Nay, even in the case where this executioner's task arises spontaneously out of some duty previously undertaken without a thought of its severer functions, we are still shocked by any exterminating vengeance too rancorously pursued. Every reader must have been disgusted by the unrelenting persecution with which Gifford, a deformed man, with the spiteful nature sometimes too developed in the deformed, had undertaken 'for our fathers in the Row' an edition of Massinger. Probably he had not thought at the time of the criminals who would come before him for judgment. But afterwards it did not embitter the job that these perquisites of office accrued, lucro ponatur, that such offenders as Coxeter, Mr. Monck Mason, and others were to be 'justified' by course of law. Could he not have stated their errors, and displaced their rubbish, without further personalities? However, he does not, but makes the air resound with his knout, until the reader wishes Coxeter in his throat, and Monck Mason, like 'the cursed old fellow' in Sinbad, mounted with patent spurs upon his back.