The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

Knoll, the fiscal, was screwing up, twisting, and distorting his
features pretty much in the style of a poor artisan on Saturday night,
whom some fellow-workman is bar_ber_ously razoring and scraping by the
light of a cobbler's candle: furious was his wrath at this abuse and
profanation of the title _Last Will and Testament_: and at one time,
poor soul! he was near enough to tears--of vexation.

The wily bookseller, Pasvogel, without loss of time, sate down quietly
to business: he ran through a cursory retrospect of all the works any
ways moving or affecting that he had himself either published or sold on
commission;--took a flying survey of the pathetic in general: and in
this way of going to work, he had fair expectations that in the end he
should brew something or other: as yet, however, he looked very much
like a dog who is slowly licking off an emetic which the Parisian
surgeon Demet has administered by smearing it on his nose:
time--gentlemen, time was required for the operation.

Monsieur Flitte, from Alsace, fairly danced up and down the sessions
chamber; with bursts of laughter he surveyed the rueful faces around
him: he confessed that he was not the richest among them, but for the
whole city of Strasburg, and Alsace to boot, he was not the man that
could or would weep on such a merry occasion. He went on with his
unseasonable laughter and indecent mirth, until Harprecht, the police
inspector, looked at him very significantly, and said--that perhaps
Monsieur flattered himself that he might by means of laughter squeeze or
express the tears required from the well-known meibomian glands, the
caruncula, &c., and might thus piratically provide himself with
surreptitious rain;[18] but in that case, he must remind him that he
would no more win the day with any such secretions than he could carry
to account a course of sneezes or wilfully blowing his nose; a channel
into which it was well known that very many tears, far more than were
now wanted, flowed out of the eyes through the nasal duct; more indeed
by a good deal than were ever known to flow downwards to the bottom of
most pews at a funeral sermon. Monsieur Flitte of Alsace, however,
protested that he was laughing out of pure fun, for his own amusement;
and, upon his honour, with no _ulterior views_.

[18] In the original, the word is Fenster schweiss, window-sweat, _i.
e._ (as the translator understands the passage) Monsieur Flitte was
suspected of a design to swindle the company by exhibiting his two
windows streaming with spurious moisture, such as hoar frost produces on
the windows when melted by the heat of the room, rather than with the
genuine and unadulterated rain which Mr Kabel demanded.

The inspector on his side, being pretty well acquainted with the
hopeless condition of his own dephlegmatised heart, endeavoured to force
into his eyes something that might meet the occasion by staring with
them wide open and in a state of rigid expansion.

The morning-lecturer, Flacks, looked like a Jew beggar mounted on a
stallion which is running away with him: meantime, what by domestic
tribulations, what by those he witnessed at his own lecture, his heart
was furnished with such a promising bank of heavy-laden clouds, that he
could easily have delivered upon the spot the main quantity of water
required had it not been for the house which floated on the top of the
storm; and which, just as all was ready, came driving in with the tide,
too gay and gladsome a spectacle not to banish his gloom, and thus
fairly dammed up the waters.

The ecclesiastical councillor--who had become acquainted with his own
nature by long experience in preaching funeral sermons, and sermons on
the New Year, and knew full well that he was himself always the first
person and frequently the last, to be affected by the pathos of his own
eloquence--now rose with dignified solemnity, on seeing himself and the
others hanging so long by the dry rope, and addressed the chamber:--No
man, he said, who had read his printed works, could fail to know that he
carried a heart about him as well as other people; and a heart, he would
add, that had occasion to repress such holy testimonies of its
tenderness as tears, lest he should thereby draw too heavily on the
sympathies and the purses of his fellow-men, rather than elaborately to
provoke them by stimulants for any secondary views, or to serve an
indirect purpose of his own: 'This heart,' said he, 'has already shed
tears (but they were already shed secretly), for Kabel was my friend;'
and, so saying, he paused for a moment and looked about him.

With pleasure he observed that all were sitting as dry as corks: indeed,
at this particular moment, when he himself, by interrupting their
several water-works, had made them furiously angry, it might as well
have been expected that crocodiles, fallow-deer, elephants, witches, or
ravens should weep for Van der Kabel, as his presumptive heirs. Among
them all, Flacks was the only one who continued to make way: he kept
steadily before his mind the following little extempore assortment of
objects:--Van der Kabel's good and beneficent acts; the old petticoats
so worn and tattered, and the gray hair of his female congregation at
morning service; Lazarus with his dogs; his own long coffin; innumerable
decapitations; the Sorrows of Werther; a miniature field of battle; and
finally, himself and his own melancholy condition at this moment, itself
enough to melt any heart, condemned as he was in the bloom of youth by
the second clause of Van der Kabel's will to tribulation, and tears, and
struggles:--Well done, Flacks! Three strokes more with the pump-handle,
and the water is pumped up and the house along with it.

Meantime Glantz, the ecclesiastical councillor, proceeded in his
pathetic harangue--'Oh, Kabel, my Kabel!' he ejaculated, and almost wept
with joy at the near approach of his tears, 'the time shall come that by
the side of thy loving breast, covered with earth, mine also shall lie
mouldering and in cor----' _ruption_ he would have said; but Flacks,
starting up in trouble, and with eyes overflowing, threw a hasty glance
around him, and said, 'With submission, gentlemen, to the best of my
belief I am weeping.' Then sitting down, with great satisfaction he
allowed the tears to stream down his face; that done, he soon recovered
his cheerfulness and his _aridity_. Glantz the councillor thus saw the
prize fished away before his eyes--those very eyes which he had already
brought into an _Accessit_,[19] or inchoate state of humidity; this
vexed him: and his mortification was the greater on thinking of his own
pathetic exertions, and the abortive appetite for the prize which he had
thus uttered in words as ineffectual as his own sermons; and at this
moment he was ready to weep for spite--and 'to weep the more because he
wept in vain.' As to Flacks, a protocol was immediately drawn up of his
watery compliance with the will of Van der Kabel: and the messuage in
Dog-street was knocked down to him for ever. The Mayor adjudged it to
the poor devil with all his heart: indeed, this was the first occasion
ever known in Haslau, on which the tears of a schoolmaster and a curate
had converted themselves--not into mere amber that incloses only a
worthless insect, like the tears of Heliodes, but like those of the
goddess Freia, into heavy gold. Glantz congratulated Flacks very
warmly; and observed with a smiling air, that possibly he had himself
lent him a helping hand by his pathetic address. As to the others, the
separation between them and Flacks was too palpable, in the mortifying
distinction of _wet_ and _dry_, to allow of any cordiality between them;
and they stood aloof therefore: but they stayed to hear the rest of the
will, which they now awaited in a state of anxious agitation.

[19] To the English reader it may be necessary to explain, that in the
continental universities, etc., when a succession of prizes is offered,
graduated according to the degrees of merit, the illiptical formula of
'_Accessit_' denotes the second prize; and hence, where only a single
prize is offered, the second degree of merit may properly be expressed
by the term here used.

THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.

'_To be weak_,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, '_is
to be miserable_.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter
for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and
by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable in
all, that capital weakness of man which regards the _tenure_ of his
enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of
flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!--which sometimes
settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be an
end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious
heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the
everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by
his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the
hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye
which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy
_present_--the hollowness--the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which
all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but
unwearying theme, this impassioned commonplace of humanity, is the
subject in every age of variation without end, from the Poet, the
Rhetorician, the Fabulist, the Moralist, the Divine, and the
Philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans,
labour to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint,
which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and
groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or
something beyond all beginning--then next a dim lotos of human
consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a
shore--then a few sunny smiles and many tears--a little love and
infinite strife--whisperings from paradise and fierce mockeries from the
anarchy of chaos--dust and ashes--and once more darkness circling round,
as if from the beginning, and in this way rounding or making an island
of our fantastic existence,--_that_ is human life; _that_ the inevitable
amount of man's laughter and his tears--of what he suffers and he
does--of his motions this way and that way--to the right or to the
left--backwards or forwards--of all his seeming realities and all his
absolute negations--his shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows--of
whatsoever he thinks, finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves,
hates, or in dread hope anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it
will be, for ever and ever.

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty there are separate and more gloomy chambers of a
frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence,
and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his power have
fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty, by
comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have
a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a single
week--a day--an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of a
memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying
showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician scatters
sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the self-same
tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at noon beheld
all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour looks out upon a
total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive
memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked, or a wreck to
be obliterated.

These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily
occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the
infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be
reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a whole
nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their
heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course turned
out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and nightly
conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some nations,
wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the
pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation.
Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent
scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the
sickness of the brain--lunacy--which, visiting nearly one thousand in
every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each
particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad
a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder
even than _that_,--the sight of a family-ruin wrought by crime is even
more appalling. Forgery, breaches of trust, embezzlement, of private or
public funds--(a crime sadly on the increase since the example of
Fauntleroy, and the suggestion of its great feasibility first made by
him)--these enormities, followed too often, and countersigned for their
final result to the future happiness of families, by the appalling
catastrophe of suicide, must naturally, in every wealthy nation, or
wherever property and the modes of property are much developed,
constitute the vast majority of all that come under the review of public
justice. Any of these is sufficient to make shipwreck of all peace and
comfort for a family; and often, indeed, it happens that the desolation
is accomplished within the course of one revolving sun; often the whole
dire catastrophe, together with its total consequences, is both
accomplished and made known to those whom it chiefly concerns within one
and the same hour. The mighty Juggernaut of social life, moving onwards
with its everlasting thunders, pauses not for a moment to spare--to
pity--to look aside, but rushes forward for ever, impassive as the
marble in the quarry--caring not for whom it destroys, for the how many,
or for the results, direct and indirect, whether many or few. The
increasing grandeur and magnitude of the social system, the more it
multiplies and extends its victims, the more it conceals them; and for
the very same reason: just as in the Roman amphitheatres, when they grew
to the magnitude of mighty cities (in some instances accommodating
400,000 spectators, in many a fifth part of that amount), births and
deaths became ordinary events, which, in a small modern theatre, are
rare and memorable; and exactly as these prodigious accidents
multiplied, _pari passu_, they were disregarded and easily concealed:
for curiosity was no longer excited; the sensation attached to them was
little or none.

From these terrific tragedies, which, like monsoons or tornadoes,
accomplish the work of years in an hour, not merely an impressive lesson
is derived, sometimes, perhaps, a warning, but also (and this is of
universal application) some consolation. Whatever may have been the
misfortunes or the sorrows of a man's life, he is still privileged to
regard himself and his friends as amongst the fortunate by comparison,
in so far as he has escaped these wholesale storms, either as an actor
in producing them, or a contributor to their violence--or even more
innocently (though oftentimes not less miserably)--as a participator in
the instant ruin, or in the long arrears of suffering which they
entail.

* * * * *

The following story falls within the class of hasty tragedies, and sudden
desolations here described. The reader is assured that every incident is
strictly true: nothing, in that respect, has been altered; nor, indeed,
anywhere except in the conversations, of which, though the results and
general outline are known, the separate details have necessarily been lost
under the agitating circumstances which produced them. It has been judged
right and delicate to conceal the name of the great city, and therefore of
the nation in which these events occurred, chiefly out of consideration for
the descendants of one person concerned in the narrative: otherwise, it
might not have been requisite: for it is proper to mention, that every
person directly a party to the case has been long laid in the grave: all of
them, with one solitary exception, upwards of fifty years.

* * * * *

It was early spring in the year 17--; the day was the 6th of April; and the
weather, which had been of a wintry fierceness for the preceding six or
seven weeks--cold indeed beyond anything known for many years, gloomy for
ever, and broken by continual storms--was now by a Swedish transformation
all at once bright--genial--heavenly. So sudden and so early a prelusion of
summer, it was generally feared, could not last. But that only made
everybody the more eager to lose no hour of an enjoyment that might prove so
fleeting. It seemed as if the whole population of the place, a population
among the most numerous in Christendom, had been composed of hybernating
animals suddenly awakened by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's
torpor. Through every hour of the golden morning the streets were resonant
with female parties of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay even of
the most delicate valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their
wintry clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural
environs of our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows began
daily to re-echo the glad voices of the young and jovial awaking once again,
like the birds and the flowers, and universal nature, to the luxurious
happiness of this most delightful season.

Happiness do I say? Yes, happiness; happiness to me above all others. For I
also in those days was among the young and the gay; I was healthy; I was
strong; I was prosperous in a worldly sense! I owed no man a shilling;
feared no man's face; shunned no man's presence. I held a respectable
station in society; I was myself, let me venture to say it, respected
generally for my personal qualities, apart from any advantages I might draw
from fortune or inheritance; I had reason to think myself popular amongst
the very slender circle of my acquaintance; and finally, which perhaps was
the crowning grace to all these elements of happiness, I suffered not from
the presence of _ennui_; nor ever feared to suffer: for my temperament was
constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the
one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz. by powerful daily
exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or (if I should not be
suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say)--in one eternal
solstice, of unclouded hope.

These, you will say, were blessings; these were golden elements of felicity.
They were so; and yet, with the single exception of my healthy frame and
firm animal organisation, I feel that I have mentioned hitherto nothing but
what by comparison might be thought of a vulgar quality. All the other
advantages that I have enumerated, had they been yet wanting, might have
been acquired; had they been forfeited, might have been reconquered; had
they been even irretrievably lost, might, by a philosophic effort, have
been dispensed with; compensations might have been found for any of them,
many equivalents, or if not, consolations at least, for their absence. But
now it remains to speak of other blessings too mighty to be valued, not
merely as transcending in rank and dignity all other constituents of
happiness, but for a reason far sadder than that--because, once lost, they
were incapable of restoration, and because not to be dispensed with;
blessings in which 'either we must live or have no life:' lights to the
darkness of our paths and to the infirmity of our steps--which, once
extinguished, never more on this side the gates of Paradise can any man hope
to see re-illumined for himself. Amongst these I may mention an intellect,
whether powerful or not in itself, at any rate most elaborately cultivated;
and, to say the truth, I had little other business before me in this life
than to pursue this lofty and delightful task. I may add, as a blessing, not
in the same _positive_ sense as that which I have just mentioned, because
not of a nature to contribute so hourly to the employment of the thoughts,
but yet in this sense equal, that the absence of either would have been an
equal affliction,--namely, a conscience void of all offence. It was little
indeed that I, drawn by no necessities of situation into temptations of that
nature, had done no injury to any man. That was fortunate; but I could not
much value myself upon what was so much an accident of my situation.
Something, however, I might pretend to beyond this _negative_ merit; for I
had originally a benign nature; and, as I advanced in years and
thoughtfulness, the gratitude which possessed me for my own exceeding
happiness led me to do that by principle and system which I had already
done upon blind impulse; and thus upon a double argument I was incapable of
turning away from the prayer of the afflicted, whatever had been the
sacrifice to myself. Hardly, perhaps, could it have been said in a
sufficient sense at that time that I was a religious man: yet undoubtedly I
had all the foundations within me upon which religion might hereafter have
grown. My heart overflowed with thankfulness to Providence: I had a natural
tone of unaffected piety; and thus far at least I might have been called a
religious man, that in the simplicity of truth I could have exclaimed,

'O, Abner, I fear God, and I fear none beside.'

But wherefore seek to delay ascending by a natural climax to that final
consummation and perfect crown of my felicity--that almighty blessing which
ratified their value to all the rest? Wherefore, oh! wherefore do I shrink
in miserable weakness from----what? Is it from reviving, from calling up
again into fierce and insufferable light the images and features of a
long-buried happiness? That would be a natural shrinking and a reasonable
weakness. But how escape from reviving, whether I give it utterance or not,
that which is for ever vividly before me? What need to call into artificial
light that which, whether sleeping or waking--by night or by day--for
eight-and-thirty years has seemed by its miserable splendour to scorch my
brain? Wherefore shrink from giving language, simple vocal utterance, to
that burden of anguish which by so long an endurance has lost no atom of its
weight, nor can gain any most surely by the loudest publication? Need there
can be none, after this, to say that the priceless blessing, which I have
left to the final place in this ascending review, was the companion of my
life--my darling and youthful wife. Oh! dovelike woman! fated in an hour the
most defenceless to meet with the ravening vulture,--lamb fallen amongst
wolves,--trembling--fluttering fawn, whose path was inevitably to be crossed
by the bloody tiger;--angel, whose most innocent heart fitted thee for too
early a flight from this impure planet; if indeed it were a necessity that
thou shouldst find no rest for thy footing except amidst thy native heavens,
if indeed to leave what was not worthy of thee were a destiny not to be
evaded--a summons not to be put by,--yet why, why, again and again I
demand--why was it also necessary that this thy departure, so full of wo to
me, should also to thyself be heralded by the pangs of martyrdom? Sainted
love, if, like the ancient children of the Hebrews, like Meshech and
Abednego, thou wert called by divine command, whilst yet almost a child, to
walk, and to walk alone, through the fiery furnace,--wherefore then couldst
not thou, like that Meshech and that Abednego, walk unsinged by the dreadful
torment, and come forth unharmed? Why, if the sacrifice were to be total,
was it necessary to reach it by so dire a struggle? and if the cup, the
bitter cup, of final separation from those that were the light of thy eyes
and the pulse of thy heart might not be put aside,--yet wherefore was it
that thou mightst not drink it up in the natural peace which belongs to a
sinless heart?

But these are murmurings, you will say, rebellious murmurings against
the proclamations of God. Not so: I have long since submitted myself,
resigned myself, nay even reconciled myself, perhaps, to the great wreck
of my life, in so far as it was the will of God, and according to the
weakness of my imperfect nature. But my wrath still rises, like a
towering flame, against all the earthly instruments of this ruin; I am
still at times as unresigned as ever to this tragedy, in so far as it
was the work of human malice. Vengeance, as a mission for _me_, as a
task for _my_ hands in particular, is no longer possible; the
thunder-bolts of retribution have been long since launched by other
hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do--I must--I shall
perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very
impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of
heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my
heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or
two upon what she was--and how far worthy of a love more honourable to
her (that was possible) and deeper (but that was not possible) than
mine. When first I saw her, she--my Agnes--was merely a child, not much
(if anything) above sixteen. But, as in perfect womanhood she retained a
most childlike expression of countenance, so even then in absolute
childhood she put forward the blossoms and the dignity of a woman.
Never yet did my eye light upon creature that was born of woman, nor
could it enter my heart to conceive one, possessing a figure more
matchless in its proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and
advisedly to be characterised by no adequate word but the word
_magnificent_ (a word too often and lightly abused). In reality,
speaking of women, I have seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one
except Agnes that could without hyperbole be styled truly and memorably
magnificent. Though in the first order of tall women, yet, being full in
person, and with a symmetry that was absolutely faultless, she seemed to
the random sight as little above the ordinary height. Possibly from the
dignity of her person, assisted by the dignity of her movements, a
stranger would have been disposed to call her at a distance a woman of
_commanding_ presence; but never after he had approached near enough to
behold her face. Every thought of artifice--of practised effect--or of
haughty pretension, fled before the childlike innocence--the sweet
feminine timidity--and the more than cherub loveliness of that
countenance, which yet in its lineaments was noble, whilst its
expression was purely gentle and confiding. A shade of pensiveness there
was about her; but _that_ was in her manners, scarcely ever in her
features; and the exquisite fairness of her complexion, enriched by the
very sweetest and most delicate bloom that ever I have beheld, should
rather have allied it to a tone of cheerfulness. Looking at this noble
creature, as I first looked at her, when yet upon the early threshold of
womanhood--

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21