Thomas De Quincey.
A SKETCH FROM CHILDHOOD.
About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, and which only, in the hour of death, or even within the gates of recovered Paradise, could merit a remembrance. "It is finished," was the secret misgiving of my heart, for the heart even of infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom, in relation to any capital wound inflicted on the happiness; "it is finished, and life is exhausted." How? Could it be exhausted so soon? Had I read Milton, had I seen Rome, had I heard Mozart? No. The "Paradise Lost" was yet unread, the Coliseum and St. Peter's were unseen, the melodies of Don Giovanni were yet silent for me. Raptures there might be in arrear. But raptures are modes of troubled pleasure; the peace, the rest, the lulls, the central security, which belong to love, that is past all understanding, those could return no more. Such a love, so unfathomable, subsisting between myself and my eldest sister, under the circumstances of our difference in age (she being above eight years of age, I under six), and of our affinities in nature, together with the sudden foundering of all this blind happiness, I have described elsewhere.[10] I shall not here repeat any part of the narrative. But one extract from the closing sections of the paper I shall make; in order to describe the depth to which a child's heart may be plowed up by one over-mastering storm of grief, and as a proof that grief, in some of its fluctuations, is not uniformly a depressing passion—but also by possibility has its own separate aspirations, and at times is full of cloudy grandeur. The point of time is during the months that immediately succeeded to my sister's funeral.
"The awful stillness of summer noons, when no winds were abroad—the appealing silence of gray or misty afternoons—these were to me, in that state of mind, fascinations, as of witchcraft. Into the woods, or the desert air, I gazed as if some comfort lay in them. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. I tormented the blue depths with obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and searching them forever, after one angelic face, that might perhaps have permission to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in the distance, out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me at this time. And I recall at the present moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty. On Sunday mornings I was always taken to church. It was a church on the old and natural model of England, having aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic. Here, while the congregation knelt through the long Litany, as often as we came to that passage, so beautiful among the many that are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of 'all sick persons and young children,' and that He 'would show His pity upon all prisoners and captives', I wept in secret; and, raising my streaming eyes to the windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The margins of the windows were rich in storied glass; through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination mingling with the earthly emblazonries of what is grandest in man. There were the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial love to man. There were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting faces. There were the saints that, under intolerable pangs, had glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, while this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords of some accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the window, where the glass was uncolored, white fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately, under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into a vision of beds with white lawny curtains; and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but He suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, in order that He and His young children whom in Judea, once and forever, He had blessed, though they must pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The hint from the Litany, the fragment from the clouds, the pictures on the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And often-times in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce, yet melodious, over the voices of the choir—high in arches when it rose, seeming to surmount and over-ride the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm of music into unity—sometimes I also seemed to rise and to walk triumphantly upon those clouds, which so recently I had looked up to as mementoes of prostrate sorrow. Yes; sometimes, under the transfigurations of music, I felt of grief itself, as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief."
The next (which was the second) chapter of my childish experience, formed that sort of fierce and fantastic contradiction to the first, which might seem to move in obedience to some incarnate principle of malicious pantomime. A spirit of love, and a spirit of rest, as if breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had vanished, idiocy and the torpor of despondency were really creeping stealthily over my faculties, and strangling their energies, what better change for me than the necessity (else how miserable!) of fighting, wrangling, struggling, without pause, or promise of pause, from day to day, or even from year to year? "If," as my good angel might have said to me, "thou art moving on a line of utter ruin, from mere palsy of one great vital force, and if that loss is past all restoration, then kindle a new supplementary life by such means as are now possible—by the agitations, for instance, of strife and conflict"—yes, possible, on the wide stage of the world, and for people who should be free agents enough to make enemies, in case they failed to find them; but for a child, not seven years old, to whom his medical advisers should prescribe a course of hatred, or continued hostilities, by way of tonics, in what quarter was he to look out for such luxuries? Who would condescend to officiate as enemy to a child! And yet, as regarded my own particular case, had I breathed out any such querulous demand, that same Harlequin Mephistopheles might have whispered in reply, "Never you trouble yourself about that. Do you furnish the patience that can swallow cheerfully a long course of kicking, and I'll find those that shall furnish the kicks." In fact, at this very moment, when all chance of quarrel, or opening for prolonged enmity, seemed the remotest of chimeras, mischief was already in the wind; and suddenly there was let loose upon me such a storm of belligerent fury as might, under good management, have yielded a life-annuity of feuds.
I had at that time an elder brother, in fact, the eldest of us all, and at least five years senior to myself. He, by original temperament, was a boy of fiery nature, ten times more active than I was inert, loving the element of feuds and stormy conflict more (if that were possible) than I detested it; and these constitutional tendencies had in him been nursed by the training of a public school. This accident in his life was indeed the cause of our now meeting as strangers. Singular, indeed, it seems, but, in fact, had arisen naturally enough, that both this eldest of my brothers, and my father, should be absolute strangers to me in my seventh year; so that, in the case of meeting either, I should not have known him, nor he me. In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived abroad for a space that, measured against my life, was a very long one. First, he lived in Portugal, at Lisbon; and at Cintra; next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St. Kitts, courting the supposed benefit of hot climates in his complaint of pulmonary consumption; and at last, when all had proved unavailing, he was coming home to die among his family, in his thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to wait his arrival at the port (Southampton, probably), to which the West India packet should bring him; and among the deepest recollections which I connect with that period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at Greenhay. It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four of us children—six then survived—were gathered for hours, on the lawn before the house, listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came—nine, ten, eleven o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed—without a warning sound; for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a terminus ad quem, beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages, composing the little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels, heard in the winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme road, carried with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight; and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the traveling party, if, at so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact, to our general surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming at so slow a pace, that the fall of the horses' feet was not audible until we were close upon them. I mention the case for the sake of the undying impressions which connected themselves with the circumstances. The first notice of the approach was the sudden emerging of horses' heads from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the mass of white pillows against which the dying patient was reclining. The hearse-like pace at which the carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle of the funeral which had so lately formed part in the most memorable event of my life. But these elements of awe, that might at any rate have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such light, fitful airs as might be stirring—the peculiar solemnity of the hours succeeding to sunset—the gorgeousness of the dying day—the gorgeousness which, by description, so well I knew of those West Indian islands from which my father was returning—the knowledge that he returned only to die—the almighty pomp in which this great idea of Death appareled itself to my young suffering heart—the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, to the heavens, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries, that seemed even more solemn and more pathetic than, the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality—all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been fitted only to interpose a transitory illumination or red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams. This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's image to me as a personal reality. Otherwise, he would have been for me a bare nominis umbra. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my meditative habits and corresponding repose of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him during his waking hours. I was also present at his bed-side in the closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors. From this brief childish experience of his nature and disposition, the chief conclusion which I drew tended to this—that he was the most benignant person whom I had met, or was likely to meet, in life. What I have since heard from others, who knew him well, tallied with my own childish impression. His life had been too busy to allow him much time for regular study; but he loved literature with a passionate love; had formed a large and well-selected library; had himself published a book, which I have read, and which really is not a bad one; and carried his reverence for distinguished authors to such a height, that (according to the report, of several among his friends) had either Dr. Johnson, or Cowper, the poet—the two contemporary authors whom most he reverenced—happened to visit Greenhay, he might have been tempted to express his homage through the Pagan fashion of raising altars and burning incense, or of sacrificing, if not an ox, yet, at least, a baron of beef. The latter mode of idolatry Dr. Sam, would have approved, provided always that the nidor were irreproachable, and that the condiments of mustard, horse-radish, &c., more Anglico, were placed on the altar; but as to Cowper, who was in the habit of tracing Captain Cooke's death at Owyhee to the fact that the misjudging captain had once suffered himself to be worshiped at one of the Society Islands, in all consistency, he must have fled from such a house with sacred horror. Why I have at all gone back to this little parenthesis in my childhood is, from the singularity that I should remember my father at all, only because I had received all my impressions about him into the very centre of my preconceptions about certain grand objects—about the Tropics, about summer evenings, and about some mysterious glory of the grave. It seems metaphysical to say so, but yet it is true that I knew him, speaking scholastically, through à priori ideas—I remember him transcendenter—and, were it not for the midsummer night's dream which glorified his return, to me he would have remained forever that absolute stranger, which, according to the prosaic interpretation of the case, he really was.
My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen, but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine afflatus which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create them, as νεφεληγερἑτα Ζεὑς a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that he might direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to the grammar school of Louth, in Lincolnshire—one of those many old classic institutions which form the peculiar[11] glory of England. To box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in those days a mere necessity of school-boy life at public schools; and hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control, of those generally who benefited by such discipline—so systematically hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his poem on that subject, is far from doing justice to our great public schools. Himself disqualified, by delicacy of temperament, for reaping the benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet, having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am compelled in mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give all my votes) for the former.
Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time when his additional five or six years availed nearly to make his age the double of mine, my brother very naturally despised me; and, from his exceeding frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. Why should he? Who was it that could have a right to feel aggrieved by his contempt? Who, if not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that I had a perfect craze for being despised. I doated on being despised; and considered contempt the sincerest a sort of luxury, that I was in continual fear of losing. I lived in a panic, lest I should be suspected of shamming contemptibility. But I did not sham it. I trusted that I was really entitled to contempt; and, for this, I had some metaphysical-looking reasons, which there may be occasion to explain further on. At present, it is sufficient to give a colorable rationality to my craze, if I say, that the slightest approach to any favorable construction of my intellectual pretensions, any, the least, shadow of esteem expressed for some thought or some logical distinction that I might incautiously have dropped, alarmed me beyond measure, because it pledged me in a manner with the hearer to support this first attempt by a second, by a third, by a fourth—Oh, heavens! there is no saying how far the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned under the weight of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first round of such a staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering upward to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league; the consequence of which would be, that I should be expected to run up and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, carrying hods of mortar and bricks to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer might choose to build. But I put a stop to this villainy. I nipped the abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could have no pretense, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to the first. Professing the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing in the pound, I never could be made miserable, or kept in hot water, by unknown responsibilities, or by endless anxieties about some bill being presented, which the monster might pretend for one moment that I had indorsed, or in some way had sanctioned his expecting that I would pay.
Still, with all this passion for being despised, which was so essential to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude—a starry altitude—in the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the stair-case of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of his contempt: and, before long, when my superiority in some bookish accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely dissembled, mere foolish human nature forced me on rare occasions into some trifle of exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation of utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from anxiety; and, therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation, gravitated determinately back toward that settled contempt which had been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two—1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy: 2d, he assumed, and even postulated as a datum, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually, he looked upon me as below notice; but, morally, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, though lazy; you would pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not many. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of cases, I really was; and there were more reasons for thinking so than the reader is yet aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied it in toto, and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither did my brother pretend to have any experimental proofs of it. The ground he went upon was a mere à priori one, viz., that I had always been tied to the apron-string of women or girls; which amounted at most to this: that, by training and the natural tendency of circumstances, I ought to be effeminate—that is, there was reason to expect beforehand that I should be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite of such general presumptions, I really were not. In fact, my brother soon learned better than any body, and by a daily experience, how entirely he might depend upon me for carrying out the most audacious of his own warlike plans; such plans, it is true, that I abominated; but that made no difference in the fidelity with which I tried to fulfill them.
This eldest brother of mine, to pass from my own character to his, was in all respects a remarkable boy. Haughty he was, aspiring, immeasurably active; fertile in resources as Robinson Crusoe; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to imagine; and, in default of any other opponent, he would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him when going westward in the morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, like a dutiful child, ought to keep deferentially in the rear of that majestic substance which is the author of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, excepting only those which he happened to write himself. And they were not a few. On all subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English Church, down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white, thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the nursery where I, on his first coming home, lived among my sisters) with his select opinions. On this last subject especially—of necromancy—he was very great; witness his profound work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, long since departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled, "How to raise a ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him down." To which work he assured us, that some most learned and enormous man, whose name was six feet long, had promised him an appendix; which appendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon's signet-ring; with forms of mittimus for ghosts that might be mutinous; and probably a riot act, for any émeute among ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our young hearts by supposing the case (not at all unlikely, he affirmed), that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place among the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth. The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died, viz., "Abiit ad plures" (He has gone over to the majority), my brother explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trod this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts. Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition which, at three o'clock in the afternoon, on the 18th of June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must have assumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man. The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow—how spectral did its slender lines appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it in. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been proved to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work of two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was traced at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling a panic in the heat of the battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing-up of tumbrils, with the miserable purpose of shaking the British firmness. But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother insisted that the presence of sham men, distributed extensively among the human race, and meditating treason against us all, had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make-believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries, but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this upper earth, walked about among us, and were undistinguishable, except by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of illustrating the fact, that the same crazes are everlastingly revolving upon men. Two years ago, during the carnival of universal anarchy equally among doers and thinkers, a closely-printed pamphlet was published with this title: "A New Revelation, or the Communion of the Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by Him." I have not the pleasure of knowing Him; but certainly I must concede to Him, that he writes like a man of education, and also like a man of extreme sobriety, upon his extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for his "absurdities;" but, as to him, there is no chance that he should commit any absurdity, because (p. 6) "he has met with some who have acknowledged the fact of their having come from the dead"—habes confitentem reum. Few, however, are endowed with so much candor; and, in particular, for the honor of literature, it grieves me to find, by p. 10, that the largest number of these shams, and perhaps the most uncandid, are to be looked for among "publishers and printers," of whom, it seems, "the great majority" are mere forgeries; a very few speak frankly about the matter, and say they don't care who knows it, which, to my thinking, is impudence; but by far the larger section doggedly deny it, and call a policeman, if you persist in charging them with being shams. Some differences there are between my brother and Him, but in the great outline of their views, they coincide.