Томас де Квинси
Autobiographic Sketches
CHAPTER III.
INFANT LITERATURE
"The child," says Wordsworth, "is father of the man;" thus calling into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing fruit, must have preëxisted by way of germ in the infant. Yes; all that is now broadly emblazoned in the man once was latent—seen or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child. But not, therefore, is it true inversely, that all which preëxists in the child finds its development in the man. Rudiments and tendencies, which might have found, sometimes by accidental, do not find, sometimes under the killing frost of counter forces, cannot find, their natural evolution. Infancy, therefore, is to be viewed, not only as part of a larger world that waits for its final complement in old age, but also as a separate world itself; part of a continent, but also a distinct peninsula. Most of what he has, the grown-up man inherits from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance.
Childhood, therefore, in the midst of its intellectual weakness, and sometimes even by means of this weakness, enjoys a limited privilege of strength. The heart in this season of life is apprehensive, and, where its sensibilities are profound, is endowed with a special power of listening for the tones of truth—hidden, struggling, or remote; for the knowledge being then narrow, the interest is narrow in the objects of knowledge; consequently the sensibilities are not scattered, are not multiplied, are not crushed and confounded (as afterwards they are) under the burden of that distraction which lurks in the infinite littleness of details.
That mighty silence which infancy is thus privileged by nature and by position to enjoy coöperates with another source of power,—almost peculiar to youth and youthful circumstances,—which Wordsworth also was the first person to notice. It belongs to a profound experience of the relations subsisting between ourselves and nature—that not always are we called upon to seek; sometimes, and in childhood above all, we are sought.
"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That noting of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?"
And again:—
"Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
And we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness."
These cases of infancy, reached at intervals by special revelations, or creating for itself, through it privileged silence of heart, authentic whispers of truth, or beauty, or power, have some analogy to those other cases, more directly supernatural, in which (according to the old traditional faith of our ancestors) deep messages of admonition reached an individual through sudden angular deflexions of words, uttered or written, that had not been originally addressed to himself. Of these there were two distinct classes—those where the person concerned had been purely passive; and, secondly, those in which he himself had to some extent coöperated. The first class have been noticed by Cowper, the poet, and by George Herbert, the well-known pious brother of the still better-known infidel, Lord Herbert, (of Cherbury,) in a memorable sonnet; scintillations they are of what seems nothing less than providential lights oftentimes arresting our attention, from the very centre of what else seems the blank darkness of chance and blind accident. "Books lying open, millions of surprises,"—these are among the cases to which Herbert (and to which Cowper) alludes,—books, that is to say, left casually open without design or consciousness, from which some careless passer-by, when throwing the most negligent of glances upon the page, has been startled by a solitary word lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting and lurking for him, and looking at him steadily as an eye searching the haunted places of his conscience. These cases are in principle identical with those of the second class, where the inquirer himself coöperated, or was not entirely passive; cases such as those which the Jews called Bath-col, or daughter of a voice, (the echo 44 augury,) viz., where a man, perplexed in judgment and sighing for some determining counsel, suddenly heard from a stranger in some unlooked-for quarter words not meant for himself, but clamorously applying to the difficulty besetting him. In these instances, the mystical word, that carried a secret meaning and message to one sole ear in the world, was unsought for: that constituted its virtue and its divinity; and to arrange means wilfully for catching at such casual words, would have defeated the purpose. A well-known variety of augury, conducted upon this principle, lay in the "Sortes Biblicae," where the Bible was the oracular book consulted, and far more extensively at a later period in the "Sortes Virgilianae," 45 where the Aeneid was the oracle consulted.
Something analogous to these spiritual transfigurations of a word or a sentence, by a bodily organ (eye or ear) that has been touched with virtue for evoking the spiritual echo lurking in its recesses, belongs, perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred result of forcing out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or grandeur that may happen to lodge (unobserved by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages scattered up and down literature. Meantime, I wish the reader to understand that, in putting forward the peculiar power with which my childish eye detected a grandeur or a pomp of beauty not seen by others in some special instances, I am not arrogating more than it is lawful for every man the very humblest to arrogate, viz., an individuality of mental constitution so far applicable to special and exceptionable cases as to reveal in them a life and power of beauty which others (and sometimes which all others) had missed.
The first case belongs to the march (or boundary) line between my eighth and ninth years; the others to a period earlier by two and a half years. But I notice the latest case before the others, as it connected itself with a great epoch in the movement of my intellect. There is a dignity to every man in the mere historical assigning, if accurately he can assign, the first dawning upon his mind of any godlike faculty or apprehension, and more especially if that first dawning happened to connect itself with circumstances of individual or incommunicable splendor. The passage which I am going to cite first of all revealed to me the immeasurableness of the morally sublime. What was it, and where was it? Strange the reader will think it, and strange 46 it is, that a case of colossal sublimity should first emerge from such a writer as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus—a writer ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a social sense as himself, viz., the class of slaves, and rose above that class by the same intellectual power applying itself to the same object, viz., the moral apologue. These were the two lines in which that glory of the sublime, so stirring to my childish sense, seemed to burn as in some mighty pharos:—
"Aesopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici;
Servumque collocârunt eternâ in basi:"
A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to Aesop; and a poor pariah slave they planted upon an everlasting pedestal. I have not scrupled to introduce the word pariah, because in that way only could I decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity originated in the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge, between the pollution of slavery,—the being a man, yet without right or lawful power belonging to a man,—between this unutterable degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and kettledrums of kings as drowning the whispers of his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave. I assign the elements of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to the reader may seem extravagant, and by no means of what it was reasonable to feel. But, in order that full justice may be done to my childish self, I must point out to the reader another source of what strikes me as real grandeur. Horace, that exquisite master of the lyre, and that most shallow of critics, it is needless to say that in those days I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of his idle canon, that the opening of poems must be humble and subdued. But my own sensibility told me how much of additional grandeur accrued to these two lines as being the immediate and all-pompous opening of the poem. The same feeling I had received from the crashing overture to the grand chapter of Daniel—"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords." But, above all, I felt this effect produced in the two opening lines of "Macbeth:"—
"WHEN—(but watch that an emphasis of thunder dwells upon that word 'when')—
WHEN shall we three meet again—
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
What an orchestral crash bursts upon the ear in that all-shattering question! And one syllable of apologetic preparation, so as to meet the suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word ingentem, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided,—Aesop the slave and the Athenians,—must be read as an appoggiatura, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line—"Servumque collocârunt ETERNA IN BASI." This passage from Phaedrus, which might be briefly designated The Apotheosis of the Slave, gave to me my first grand and jubilant sense of the moral sublime.
Two other experiences of mine of the same class had been earlier, and these I had shared with my sister Elizabeth. The first was derived from the "Arabian Nights." Mrs. Barbauld, a lady now very nearly forgotten, 47 then filled a large space in the public eye; in fact, as a writer for children, she occupied the place from about 1780 to 1805 which, from 1805 to 1835, was occupied by Miss Edgeworth. Only, as unhappily Miss Edgeworth is also now very nearly forgotten, this is to explain ignotum per ingnotius, or at least one ignotum by another ignotum. However, since it cannot be helped, this unknown and also most well-known woman, having occassion, in the days of her glory, to speak of the "Arabian Nights," insisted on Aladdin, and secondly, on Sinbad, as the two jewels of the collection. Now, on the contrary, my sister and myself pronounced Sinbad to be very bad, and Aladdin to be pretty nearly the worst, and upon grounds that still strike me as just. For, as to Sinbad, it is not a story at all, but a mere succession of adventures, having no unity of interest whatsoever; and in Aladdin, after the possession of the lamp has been once secured by a pure accident, the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere record of upholstery: how this saloon was finished to-day, and that window on the next day, with no fresh incident whatever, except the single and transient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to the magician by the unpardonable stupidity of Aladdin in regard to the lamp. But, whilst my sister and I agreed in despising Aladdin so much as almost to be on the verge of despising the queen of all the bluestockings for so ill-directed a preference, one solitary section there was of that tale which was fixed and fascinated my gaze, in a degree that I never afterwards forgot, and did not at that time comprehend. The sublimity which it involved was mysterious and unfathomable as regarded any key which I possessed for deciphering its law or origin. Made restless by the blind sense which I had of its grandeur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out why it should be grand. Unable to explain my own impressions in "Aladdin," I did not the less obstinately persist in believing a sublimity which I could not understand. It was, in fact, one of those many important cases which elsewhere I have called involutes of human sensibility; combinations in which the materials of future thought or feeling are carried as imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried variously combined through the atmosphere, or by means of rivers, by birds, by winds, by waters, into remote countries. But the reader shall judge for himself. At the opening of the tale, a magician living in the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp endowed with supernatural powers available for the service of any man whatever who should get it into his keeping. But there lies the difficulty. The lamp is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must have a special horoscope written in the stars, or else a peculiar destiny written in his constitution, entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found? Where shall he be sought? The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth; he listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by his arenarius, could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant's feet are distinctly recognized on the banks of the Tigris, distant by four hundred and forty days' march of an army or a caravan. These feet, these steps, the sorcerer knows, and challenges in his heart as the feet, as the steps of that innocent boy, through whose hands only he could have a chance for reaching the lamp.
It follows, therefore, that the wicked magician exercises two demoniac gifts. First, he has the power to disarm Babel itself of its confusion. Secondly, after having laid aside as useless many billions of earthly sounds, and after having fastened his murderous 48 attention upon one insulated tread, he has the power, still more unsearchable, of reading in that hasty movement an alphabet of new and infinite symbols; for, in order that the sound of the child's feet should be significant and intelligible, that sound must open into a gamut of infinite compass. The pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the phantoms of the brain must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. All this, by rude efforts at explanation that mocked my feeble command of words, I communicated to my sister; and she, whose sympathy with my meaning was always so quick and true, often outrunning electrically my imperfect expressions, felt the passage in the same way as myself, 49 but not, perhaps, in the same degree. She was much beyond me in velocity of apprehension and many other qualities of intellect. Here only, viz., on cases of the dark sublime, where it rested upon dim abstractions, and when no particular trait of moral grandeur came forward, we differed—differed, that is to say, as by more or by less. Else, even as to the sublime, and numbers of other intellectual questions which rose up to us from our immense reading, we drew together with a perfect fidelity of sympathy; and therefore I pass willingly from a case which exemplified one of our rare differences to another, not less interesting for itself, which illustrated (what occurred so continually) the intensity of our agreement.
No instance of noble revenge that ever I heard of seems so effective, if considered as applied to a noble-minded wrong doer, or in any case as so pathetic. From what quarter the story comes originally, was unknown to us at the time, and I have never met it since; so that possibly it may be new to the reader. We found it in a book written for the use of his own children by Dr. Percival, the physician who attended at Greenhay. Dr. P. was a literary man, of elegant tastes and philosophic habits. Some of his papers may be found in the "Manchester Philosophic Transactions;" and these I have heard mentioned with respect, though, for myself, I have no personal knowledge of them. Some presumption meantime arises in their favor from the fact that he had been a favored correspondent of the most eminent Frenchmen at that time who cultivated literature jointly with philosophy. Voltaire, Diderot, Maupertuis, Condorcet, and D'Alembert had all treated him with distinction; and I have heard my mother say that, in days before I or my sister could have known him, he attempted vainly to interest her in these French luminaries by reading extracts from their frequent letters; which, however, so far from reconciling her to the letters, or to the writers of the letters, had the unhappy effect of riveting her dislike (previously budding) to the doctor, as their reciever, and the proneur of their authors. The tone of the letters—hollow, insincere, and full of courtly civilities to Dr. P., as a known friend of "the tolerance" (meaning, of toleration)—certainly was not adapted to the English taste; and in this respect was specially offensive to my mother, as always assuming of the doctor, that, by mere necessity, as being a philosopher, he must be an infidel. Dr. P. left that question, I believe, "in medio," neither assenting nor denying; and undoubtedly there was no particular call upon him to publish his confession of Faith before one who, in the midst of her rigourous politeness, suffered it to be too transparent that she did not like him. It is always a pity to see any thing lost and wasted, especially love; and, therefore, it was no subject for lamentation, that too probably the philosophic doctor did not enthusiastically like her. But, if really so, that made no difference in his feelings towards my sister and myself. Us he did like; and, as one proof of his regard, he presented us jointly with such of his works as could be supposed interesting to two young literati, whos combined ages made no more at this period than a baker's dozen. These presentation copies amount to two at the lest, both octavoes, and one of them entitled The Father's—something or other; what was it?—Assistant, perhaps. How much assistance the doctor might furnish to the fathers upon this wicked little planet, I cannot say. But fathers are a stubborn race; it is very little use trying to assist them. Better always to prescribe for the rising generation. And certainly the impression which he made upon us—my sister and myself—by the story in question was deep and memorable: my sister wept over it, and wept over the remembrance of it; and, not long after, carried its sweet aroma off with her to heaven; whilst I, for my part, have never forgotten it. Yet, perhaps, it is injudicious to have too much excited the reader's expectations; therefore, reader, understand what it is that you are invited to hear—not much of a story, but simply a noble sentiment, such as that of Louis XII, when he refused, as King of France, to avenge his own injuries as Duke of Orleans—such as that of Hadrian, when he said that a Roman imperator ought to die standing, meaning that Caesar, as the man who represented almighty Rome, should face the last enemy as the first in an attitude of unconquerable defiance. Here is Dr. Percival's story, which (again I warn you) will collapse into nothing at all, unless you yourself are able to dilate it by expansive sympathy with its sentiment.
A young officer (in what army, no matter) had so far forgotten himself, in a moment of irritation, as to strike a private soldier, full of personal dignity, (as sometimes happens in all ranks,) and distinguished for his courage. The inexorable laws of military discipline forbade to the injured soldier any practical redress—he could look for no retaliation by acts. Words only were at his command; and, in a tumult of indignation, as he turned away, the soldier said to his officer that he would "make him repent it." This, wearing the shape of a menace, naturally rekindled the officer's anger, and intercepted any disposition which might be rising within him towards a sentiment of remorse; and thus the irritation between the two young men grew hotter than before. Some weeks after this a partial action took place with the enemy. Suppose yourself a spectator, and looking down into a valley occupied by the two armies. They are facing each other, you see, in martial array. But it is no more than a skirmish which is going on; in the course of which, however, an occasion suddenly arises for a desperate service. A redoubt, which has fallen into the enemy's hands, must be recaptured at any price, and under circumstances of all but hopeless difficulty. A strong party has volunteered for the service; there is a cry for somebody to head them; you see a soldier step out from the ranks to assume this dangerous leadership; the party moves rapidly forward; in a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes in clouds of smoke; for one half hour, from behind these clouds, you receive hieroglyphic reports of bloody strife—fierce repeating signals, flashes from the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs advancing or receding, slackening or redoubling. At length all is over; the redoubt has been recovered; that which was lost is found again; the jewel which had been made captive is ransomed with blood. Crimsoned with glorious gore, the wreck of the conquering party is relieved, and at liberty to return. From the river you see it ascending. The plume-crested officer in command rushes forward, with his left hand raising his hat in homage to the blackened fragments of what once was a flag, whilst, with his right hand, he seizes that of the leader, though no more than a private from the ranks. That perplexes you not; mystery you see none in that. For distinctions of order perish, ranks are confounded, "high and low" are words without a meaning, and to wreck goes every notion or feeling that divides the noble from the noble, or the brave man from the brave. But wherefore is it that now, when suddenly they wheel into mutual recognition, suddenly they pause? This soldier, this officer—who are they? O reader! once before they had stood face to face—the soldier it is that was struck; the officer it is that struck him. Once again they are meeting; and the gaze of armies is upon them. If for a moment a doubt divides them, in a moment the doubt has perished. One glance exchanged between them publishes the forgiveness that is sealed forever. As one who recovers a brother whom he had accounted dead, the officer sprang forward, threw his arms around the neck of the soldier, and kissed him, as if he were some martyr glorified by that shadow of death from which he was returning; whilst, on his part, the soldier, stepping back, and carrying his open hand through the beautiful motions of the military salute to a superior, makes this immortal answer—that answer which shut up forever the memory of the indignity offered to him, even whilst for the last time alluding to it: "Sir," he said, "I told you before that I would make you repent it."
