The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume I Part 2

Oftentimes an echo goes as it were to sleep: the series of reverberations has died away. Suddenly a second series awakens: this subsides, then a third wakens up. So of actions done in youth. After great tumults all is quieted. You dream that they are over. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, on some fatal morning in middle-life the far-off consequences come back upon you. And you say to yourself, 'Oh, Heaven, if I had fifty lives this crime would reappear, as Pelion upon Ossa!' So was it with my affection. Left to natural peace, I might have conquered it: _Verschmerzeon_. To charm it down by the mere suffering of grief, to hush it by endurance, that was the natural policy--that was the natural process. But behold! A new form of sorrow arises, and the two multiply together. And the worm which was beginning to fall asleep is roused again to pestilential fierceness.

5.--NOTES FOR 'SUSPIRIA.'

Mystery unfathomable of Death! Mystery unapproachable of G.o.d! Destined it was, from the foundations of the world, that each mystery should make war upon the other: once that the lesser mystery should swallow up for a moment a _limbus_ of the greater; and that woe is past: once that the greater mystery should swallow up for ever the whole vortex of the lesser; and that glory is yet to come. After which man, that is the son of G.o.d, shall lift up his eyes for ever, saying, 'Behold! these were two mysteries; and one is not; and there is but one mystery that survives for ever!'

If an eternity (Death supposed) is as vast as a star, yet the most miserable of earthly blocks not four feet square will eclipse, masque, hide it from centre to circ.u.mference. And so it really is. Incredible as it might seem apart from experience, the dreadful reality of death is utterly withdrawn from us because itself dwindles to an apparent mote, and the perishing non-reality thickens into a darkness as ma.s.sy as a rock.

Great changes summon to great meditations. Daily we see the most joyous of events take a colouring of solemnity from the mere relation in which they stand to an uncertain future: the birth of a child, heir to the greatest expectations, and welcomed clamorously by the sympathy of myriads, speaks to the more reflecting in an undertone of monitory sadness, were it only as a tribute to the frailty of human expectations: and a marriage-day, of all human events the most lawfully festal, yet needs something of effort to chase away the boding sadness which settles unavoidably upon any new career; the promise is vague, but new hopes have created new dangers, and responsibilities contracted perhaps with rapture are charged with menace.

For every one of us, male or female, there is a year of crisis--a year of solemn and conscious transition, a year in which the light-hearted sense of the _irresponsible_ ceases to gild the heavenly dawn. A year there is, settled by no law or usage, for me perhaps the eighteenth, for you the seventeenth, for another the nineteenth, within the gates of which, underneath the gloomy archway of which, sits a phantom of yourself.

Turn a screw, tighten a linch-pin--which is not to disease, but perhaps to exalt, the mighty machinery of the brain--and the Infinities appear, before which the tranquillity of man unsettles, the gracious forms of life depart, and the ghostly enters. So profoundly is this true, that oftentimes I have said of my own tremendous experience in this region--destined too certainly, I fear, finally to swallow up intellect and the life of life in the heart, unless G.o.d of His mercy fetches me away by some sudden death--that death, considered as an entrance to this ghostly world, is but a postern-gate by comparison with the heaven-aspiring vestibule through which this world of the Infinite introduces the ghostly world.

Time, if it does not diminish grief, alters its character. At first we stretch out our hands in very blindness of heart, as if trying to draw back again those whom we have lost. But, after a season, when the impotence of such efforts has become too sensibly felt, finding that they will not come back to us, a strange fascination arises which yearns after some mode of going to _them_. There is a gulf fixed which childhood rarely can pa.s.s. But we link our wishes with whatsoever would gently waft us over. We stretch out our hands, and say, 'Sister, lend us thy help, and plead for us with G.o.d, that we may pa.s.s over without much agony.'

The joy of an infant, or joy-generation, without significance to an unprofound and common mind--how strange to see the excess of pathos in that; yet men of any (or at least of much) sensibility see in this a transpicuous masque for another form, viz., the eternal ground of sorrow in all human hearts. This, by the way, in an essay on William Wordsworth, should be noticed as the charm of his poetry; and the note differential, in fact. At least, I know not of any former poet who has so systematically sought his sadness in the very luxury of joy. Thus, in the 'Two April Mornings,' 'what a mortal freshness of dewy radiance!

what an attraction of early summer! what a vision of roses in June! Yet it is all trans.m.u.ted to a purpose of sadness.'

Ah, reader, scorn not that which--whether you refuse it or not as the reality of realities--is a.s.suredly the reality of dreams, linking us to a far vaster cycle, in which the love and the languishing, the ruin and the horror, of this world are but moments--but elements in an eternal circle. The cycle stretches from an East that is forgotten to a West that is but conjectured. The mere fact of your own individual calamity is a life; the tragedy is a nature; the hope is but as a dim augury written on a flower.[5]

If the things that have fretted us had not some art for retiring into secret oblivion, what a h.e.l.l would life become! Now, understand how in some nervous derangements this horror really takes place. Some things that had sunk into utter forgetfulness, others that had faded into visionary power, all rise as gray phantoms from the dust; the field of our earthly combats that should by rights have settled into peace, is all alive with hosts of resurrections--cavalries that sweep in gusty charges--columns that thunder from afar--arms gleaming through clouds of sulphur.

G.o.d takes care for the religion of little children wheresoever His Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national Church established, to which a child sees all his protectors resort; wheresoever he beholds amongst earthly creatures whom most he honours prostrate in devotion before these illimitable heavens, which fill to overflowing the total capacities of his young adoring heart; wheresoever at intervals he beholds the sleep of death, falling upon the men or women whom he has seen--a depth stretching as far below his power to fathom as those persons ascend beyond his powers to pursue--G.o.d speaks to their hearts by dreams and their tumultuous grandeurs. Even by solitude does G.o.d speak to little children, when made vocal by the services of Christianity, as also he does by darkness wheresoever it is peopled with visions of His almighty power. For a pagan child, for a Greek child, solitude was nothing; for a Christian child it is made the power of G.o.d, and the hieroglyphic of His most distant truth. The solitude in life is deep for the millions who have none to love them, and deep for those who suffer by secret and incommunicable woe and have none to pity them. Thus, be you a.s.sured that though infancy talks least of that which slumbers deepest, it yet rests in its own transcendent solitude. But infancy, you say, talks surely most of that which is uppermost in its heart. Yes, doubtless of that which is uppermost, but not at all of that which slumbers below the foundations of its heart.

[And then follows a suggestion to put in a note:]

I except one case, the case of any child who is marked for death by organic disease, and knows it. In such cases the creature is changed--that which would have been unchildlike ceases to offend, for a new character is forming.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the story of the young soldier who told his officer, on having been struck by him, that 'he would make him repent it.' (Close of autobiographic sketch, 'Infant Literature.')

[2] Three thousand children are annually burnt to death in the nations of England and Scotland, chiefly through the carelessness of parents. I shudder to add another and darker cause, which is a deep disgrace to the present age.

[3] Count Ma.s.sigli (an Austrian officer in the imperial service) about sixty years ago fathomed and attempted to fathom many parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. If I remember rightly, he found the bottom within less than an English mile.

[4] The story and the verses are, or used to be, well known. A schoolboy, forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must not fancy any flaw in the Latin t.i.tle. It is elliptic; _revisere_ being understood, or some similar word.

[5] I allude to the _signatures_ of nature.

_II. THE LOVELIEST SIGHT FOR WOMAN'S EYES._

The loveliest sight that a woman's eye opens upon in this world is her first-born child; and the holiest sight upon which the eyes of G.o.d settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon kindles between the mother and her infant: mute and speechless on the one side, with no language but tears and kisses and looks. Beautiful is the philosophy ... which arises out of that reflection or pa.s.sion connected with the transition that has produced it. First comes the whole mighty drama of love, purified[6] ever more and more, how often from grosser feelings, yet of necessity through its very elements, oscillating between the finite and the infinite: the haughtiness of womanly pride, so dignified, yet not always free from the near contagion of error; the romance so enn.o.bling, yet not always entirely reasonable; the tender dawn of opening sentiments, pointing to an idea in all this which it neither can reach nor could long sustain. Think of the great storm of agitation, and fear and hope, through which, in her earliest days of womanhood, every woman must naturally pa.s.s, fulfilling a law of her Creator, yet a law which rests upon her mixed const.i.tution; animal, though indefinitely ascending to what is non-animal--as a daughter of man, frail ... and imperfect, yet also as a daughter of G.o.d, standing erect, with eyes to the heavens. Next, when the great vernal pa.s.sover of s.e.xual tenderness and romance has fulfilled its purpose, we see, rising as a Phoenix from this great mystery of enn.o.bled instincts, another mystery, much more profound, more affecting, more divine--not so much a rapture as a blissful repose of a Sabbath, which swallows up the more perishing story of the first; forcing the vast heart of female nature through stages of ascent, forcing it to pursue the transmigrations of the Psyche from the aurelic condition, so glowing in its colour, into the winged creature which mixes with the mystery of the dawn, and ascends to the altar of the infinite heavens, rising by a ladder of light from that sympathy which G.o.d surveys with approbation; and even more so as He beholds it self-purifying under His Christianity to that sympathy which needs no purification, but is the holiest of things on this earth, and that in which G.o.d most reveals Himself through the nature of humanity.

Well is it for the glorification of human nature that through these the vast majority of women must for ever pa.s.s; well also that, by placing its sublime germs near to female youth, G.o.d thus turns away by antic.i.p.ation the divinest of disciplines from the rapacious absorption of the grave. Time is found--how often--for those who are early summoned into rendering back their glorious privilege, who yet have tasted in its first-fruits the paradise of maternal love.

And pertaining also to this part of the subject, I will tell you a result of my own observations of no light importance to women.

It is this: Nineteen times out of twenty I have remarked that the true paradise of a female life in all ranks, not too elevated for constant intercourse with the children, is by no means the years of courtship, nor the earliest period of marriage, but that sequestered chamber of her experience, in which a mother is left alone through the day, with servants perhaps in a distant part of the house, and (G.o.d be thanked!) chiefly where there are no servants at all, she is attended by one sole companion, her little first-born angel, as yet clinging to her robe, imperfectly able to walk, still more imperfect in its prattling and innocent thoughts, clinging to her, haunting her wherever she goes as her shadow, catching from her eye the total inspiration of its little palpitating heart, and sending to hers a thrill of secret pleasure so often as its little fingers fasten on her own. Left alone from morning to night with this one companion, or even with three, still wearing the graces of infancy; buds of various stages upon the self-same tree, a woman, if she has the great blessing of approaching such a luxury of paradise, is moving--too often not aware that she is moving--through the divinest section of her life. As evening sets in, the husband, through all walks of life, from the highest professional down to that of common labour, returns home to vary her modes of conversation by such thoughts and interests as are more consonant with his more extensive capacities of intellect. But by that time her child (or her children) will be reposing on the little couch, and in the morning, duly as the sun ascends in power, she sees before her a long, long day of perfect pleasure in this society which evening will bring to her, but which is interwoven with every fibre of her sensibilities. This condition of noiseless, quiet love is that, above all, which G.o.d blesses and smiles upon.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] How purified? And if it should be answered, through and under Christianity, the fool in his heart would scoff and say: 'What woman thinks of religion in her youthful courtship?' No; but it is not what she thinks of, but what thinks of her; not what she contemplates in consciousness, but what contemplates her, and reaches her by a necessity of social (? ideal) action. Romance is the product of Christianity, but so is sentiment.

_III. WHY THE PAGANS COULD NOT INVEST THEIR G.o.dS WITH ANY IOTA OF GRANDEUR._

It is not for so idle a purpose as that of showing the Pagan backsliding--that is too evident--but for a far subtler purpose, and one which no man has touched, viz., the incapacity of creating grandeur for the Pagans, even with _carte blanche_ in their favour, that I write this paper. Nothing is more incomprehensible than the following fact--nothing than this when mastered and understood is more thoroughly instructive--the fact that having a wide, a limitless field open before them, free to give and to take away at their own pleasure, the Pagans could not invest their G.o.ds with any iota of grandeur. Diana, when you translate her into the Moon, then indeed partakes in all the _natural_ grandeur of a planet a.s.sociated with a dreamy light, with forests, forest lawns, etc., or the wild accidents of a huntress. But the Moon and the Huntress are surely not the creations of Pagans, nor indebted to them for anything but the murderous depluming which Pagan mythology has operated upon all that is in earth or in the waters that are under the earth. Now, why could not the ancients raise one little scintillating glory in behalf of their monstrous deities? So far are they from thus raising Jupiter, that he is sometimes made the ground of nature (not, observe, for any positive reason that they had for any relation that Jupiter had to Creation, but simply for the negative reason that they had n.o.body else)--never does Jupiter seem more disgusting than when as just now in a translation of the 'Batrachia' I read that Jupiter had given to frogs an amphibious nature, making the awful, ancient, first-born secrets of Chaos to be his, and thus forcing into contrast and remembrance his odious personality.

Why, why, why could not the Romans, etc., make a grandeur for their G.o.ds? Not being able to make them grand, they daubed them with finery.

All that people imagine in the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias--_they_ themselves confer. But an apostle is beyond their reach.

When, be it well observed, the cruel and dark religions are far more successful than those of Greece and Rome, for Osiris, etc., by the might of the devil, of darkness, are truly terrific. Cybele stands as a middle term half-way between these dark forms and the Greek or Roman. Pluto is the very model of a puny attempt at darkness utterly failing. He looks big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his face; he has a masterful dog, nothing half so fearful as a wolf-dog or bloodhound; and he raises his own _manes_, poor, stridulous Struldbrugs.

Vainly did the ancient Pagans fight against this fatal weakness.

They may confer upon their G.o.ds glittering t.i.tles of 'ambrosial,'

'immortal'; but the human mind is careless of positive a.s.sertion, and of clamorous iteration in however angry a tone, when silently it observes stealing out of facts already conceded some fatal consequence at war with all these empty pretensions--mortal even in _the virtual_ conceptions of the Pagans. If the Pagan G.o.ds were really immortal, if essentially they repelled the touch of mortality, and not through the adulatory homage of their worshipers causing their true aspects to unsettle or altogether to disappear in clouds of incense, then how came whole dynasties of G.o.ds to pa.s.s away, and no man could tell whither? If really they defied the grave, then how was it that age and the infirmities of age pa.s.sed upon them like the shadow of eclipse upon the golden faces of the planets? If Apollo were a beardless young man, his father was not such--_he_ was in the vigour of maturity; maturity is a flattering term for expressing it, but it means _past youth_--and his grandfather was superannuated. But even this grandfather, who _had_ been once what Apollo was now, could not pretend to more than a transitory station in the long succession of G.o.ds. Other dynasties, known even to man, there had been before his; and elder dynasties before _that_, of whom only rumours and suspicions survived. Even this taint, however, this _direct_ access of mortality, was less shocking to my mind in after-years than the abominable fact of its reflex or indirect access in the shape of grief for others who had died. I need not multiply instances; they are without end. The reader has but to throw his memory back upon the anguish of Jupiter, in the 'Iliad,' for the approaching death of his son Sarpedon, and his vain struggles to deliver himself from this ghastly net; or upon Thetis, fighting against the vision of her matchless Pelides caught in the same vortex; or upon the Muse in Euripides, hovering in the air and wailing over her young Rhesus, her brave, her beautiful one, of whom she trusted that he had been destined to confound the Grecian host. What! a G.o.d, and liable to the pollution of grief! A G.o.ddess, and standing every hour within the peril of that dismal shadow!

Here in one moment mark the recoil, the intolerable recoil, upon the Pagan mind, of that sting which vainly they pretended to have conquered on behalf of their Pantheon. Did the reader fancy that I was fatiguing myself with any task so superfluous as that of proving the G.o.ds of the heathen to be no G.o.ds? In that case he has not understood me. My object is to show that the ancients, that even the Greeks, could not support the idea of immortality. The idea crumbled to pieces under their touch.

In realizing that idea unconsciously, they suffered elements to slip in which defeated its very essence in the result; and not by accident: other elements they could not have found. Doubtless an insolent Grecian philosopher would say, 'Surely, I knew that immortality meant the being liberated from mortality.' Yes, but this is no more than the negative idea, and the demand is to give the affirmative idea. Or perhaps I shall better explain my meaning by subst.i.tuting other terms with my own ill.u.s.tration of their value. I say, then, that the Greek idea of immortality involves only the nominal idea, not the real idea. Now, the nominal idea (or, which is the same thing, the nominal definition) is that which simply sketches the outline of an object in the shape of a problem; whereas the real definition fills up that outline and solves that problem. The nominal definition states the conditions under which an object would be realized for the mind; the real definition executes those conditions. The nominal definition, that I may express it most briefly and pointedly, puts a _question_; the real definition _answers_ that question. Thus, to give our ill.u.s.tration, the insoluble problem of squaring the circle presents us with a good nominal idea. There is no vagueness at all in the idea of such a square; it is that square which, when a given circle is laid before you, would present the same superficial contents in such exquisite truth of repet.i.tion that the eye of G.o.d could detect no shadow of more or of less. Nothing can be plainer than the demand--than the question. But as to the answer, as to the _real_ conditions under which this demand can be realized, all the wit of man has not been able to do more than approach it. Or, again, the idea of a _perfect commonwealth_, clear enough as a nominal idea, is in its infancy as a real idea. Or, perhaps, a still more lively ill.u.s.tration to some readers may be the idea of _perpetual motion_.

Nominally--that is, as an idea sketched problem-wise--what is plainer?

You are required to a.s.sign some principle of motion such that it shall revolve through the parts of a mechanism self-sustained. Suppose those parts to be called by the names of our English alphabet, and to stand in the order of our alphabet, then A is through B C D, etc., to pa.s.s down with its total power upon Z, which reciprocally is to come round undiminished upon A B C, etc., for ever. Never was a _nominal_ definition of what you want more simple and luminous. But coming to the _real_ definition, and finding that every letter in succession must still give something less than is received--that O, for instance, cannot give to P all which it received from N--then no matter for the triviality of the loss in each separate case, always it is gathering and acc.u.mulating; your hands drop down in despair; you feel that a principle of death pervades the machinery; r.e.t.a.r.d it you may, but come it will at last. And a proof remains behind, as your only result, that whilst the nominal definition may sometimes run before the real definition for ages, and yet finally be overtaken by it, in other cases the one flies hopelessly before the pursuit of the other, defies it, and never _will_ be overtaken to the end of time.

That fate, that necessity, besieged the Grecian idea of immortality.