The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume I Part 15

Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she.

I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.

Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet, _per se_, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.

_Music._--I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could.

It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas have endeavoured to pa.s.s themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas (or warrior caste) by a.s.suming the sacred thread, also a.s.sumed by the Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.

I never see a vast crowd of faces--at theatres, races, reviews--but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this mult.i.tude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.

Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.

This is curious:

Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure, When ropes or opium can my ease procure?

This offends n.o.body, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:

When money's gone, and I no debts can pay, _Self-murder_ is an honourable way--

though the same essentially, this shocks all men.

I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.

The _Arrow Ketch_, six guns, is recorded in the _Edinburgh Advertiser_ for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'

Anecdotes from _Edinburgh Advertiser_, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow pa.s.sed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.

To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating, moves.

In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th, 1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness, that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that quotation in the place a.s.signed it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, _Behold, we knew it not_, doth not He that pondereth the heart, consider it?'--consider it, regard it, make account of it.

_Manners._--The making game of a servant before company--a thing impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is ill.u.s.trative of H---- Street.

I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear.

But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not.

As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case as though it required a _real_ phenomenon for its basis. To understand the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of such appearances is in part their evanescence.

To be or _not_ to be. 'Not to be, by G----' said Garrick. This is to be cited in relation to Pope's--

'Man never is, but always to be blessed.'

_Political Economy._--Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost.

But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter in my Logic?

7.--PAGAN LITERATURE.

We must never forget, that it is not _impar_ merely, but also _dispar_.

And such is its value in this light, that I protest five hundred kings'

ransoms, nay, any sum conceivable as a common contribution from all nations would not be too much for the infinite treasure of the Greek tragic drama alone. Is it superior to our own? No, nor (so far as capable of collation) not by many degrees approaching to it. And were the case, therefore, one merely of degrees, there would be no room for the pleasure I express. But it shows us the ultimatum of the human mind mutilated and castrated of its infinities, and (what is worse) of its moral infinities.

You must imagine not only everything which there is dreadful in fact, but everything which there is mysterious to the imagination in the pariah condition, before you can approach the Heracleidae. Yet, even with this pariah, how poorly do most men conceive it as nothing more than a civil, a police, an economic affair!

Valckenaer, an admirable Greek scholar, was not a man of fine understanding; nor, to say the truth, was Porson. Indeed, it is remarkable how mean, vulgar, and uncapacious has been the range of intellect in many first-rate Grecians; though, on the other hand, the reader would deeply deceive himself if he should imagine that Greek is an attainment other than difficult, laborious, and requiring exemplary talents. Greek taken singly is, to use an indispensable Latin word, _instar_, the knowledge of all other languages. But men of the highest talents have often beggarly understandings. Hence, in the case of Valckenaer, we must derive the contradictions in his diatribe. He practises this intolerable artifice; he calls himself [Greek: philenripideios]; bespeaks an unfair confidence from the reader; he takes credit for being once disposed to favour and indulge Euripides. In this way he accredits to the careless reader all the false charges or baseless concessions which he makes on any question between Euripides and his rivals. Such men as Valckenaer it is who are biased and inflected beforehand, without perceiving it, by all the commonplaces of criticism. These, it is true, do not arise out of mere shadows. Usually they have a foundation in some fact or modification. What they fail in is, in the just interpretation of these truths, and in the reading of their higher relations. 'The Correggiosity of Correggio' was precisely meant for Valckenaer. The Sophocleity of Sophocles he is keen to recognise, and the superiority of Sophocles as an artist is undeniable; nor is it an advantage difficult to detect. On the other hand, to be more Homeric than Homer is no praise for a tragic poet. It is far more just, pertinent praise, it is a ground of far more interesting praise, that Euripides is granted by his undervalues to be the most _tragic_ ([Greek: tragichotatos]) of tragic poets. After that he can afford to let Sophocles be '[Greek: Homerichotos], who, after all, is not '[Greek: Homerichotutos], so long as aeschylus survives. But even so far we are valuing Euripides as a poet. In another character, as a philosopher, as a large capacious thinker, as a master of pensive and sorrow-tainted wisdom, as a large reviewer of human life, he is as much beyond all rivals.h.i.+p from his scenic brethren as he is below one of them as a scenic artist.

Is the Nile ancient? So is Homer. Is the Nile remote and hiding its head in fable? So is Homer. Is the Nile the diffusive benefactor of the world? So is Homer.[36]

_The aeneid._--It is not any supposed excellence that has embalmed this poem; but the enshrining of the differential Roman principle (the grand aspiring character of resolution), all referred to the central principle of the aggrandizement of Rome.

The sublime of wrath is nowhere exhibited so well as in Juvenal. Yet in Juvenal pretty glimpses of rural rest--

'... infans c.u.m collusore catello.'[37]

That is pretty! There is another which comes to my mind and suggests his rising up and laying aside, etc., and shows it to be an _occasional_ act, and, _ergo_, his garden is but a relaxation, amus.e.m.e.nt.

Glances which the haughty eyes of Rome threw sometimes gently and relentingly aside on man or woman, children or the flowers.

Herodotus is as sceptical as Plutarch is credulous. How often is _now_ and _at this time_ applied to the fict.i.tious present of the author, whilst a man arguing generally beforehand would say that surely a man could always distinguish between _now_ and _then_.

8.--HISTORICAL, ETC.

_Growth of the House of Commons._--The House of Commons was the power of the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.

One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation), and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue, and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending 100,000 upon a single fete, James I. might reasonably allege that he misapplied, at any rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money _really_ public, the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate, hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing.

There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France--as great powers that touched each other in many points--had ever formed a warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually travelling,--not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,--were not yet developed: false laws of men, _i.e._, laws framed under theories misunderstood of rights and const.i.tutional powers, having as much distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth, therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their '_capacity_,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with their _total_ means of instruction and preparation, including, therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as known to the official depositaries of State secrets, etc., and not, as the modern reader will understand it, simply and exclusively the intellectual power of appreciation. Since, with all her disposition to exalt the qualities of princely persons, she could not be so absurdly haughty as to claim for princes and the counsellors whom interest or birth had suggested to them a precedency in pure natural endowments.