The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2

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[_Ibid._

'His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so _convince_.'

COR. is not happy at this point in his suggestion: tinkers are accused
(often calumniously, for tinkers have enemies as well as other people) of
insidiously enlarging holes, making simple into compound fractures, and
sometimes of planting two holes where they find one. But I have it on the
best authority--namely, the authority of three tinkers who were
unanimous--that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind
amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason'
by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look
for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an
unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came
nearest to the seraphic character in one century _was_ a tinker--namely,
John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions _do_
cheat at uncertain times, _are_ traitors in a small proportion, _must be_
perfidious, unless they make an odious hypocritical pretension to the
character of angels. That tinkers are not alone in their practice of
multiplying the blemishes on which their healing art is invoked, seems
broadly illustrated by the practice of verbal critics. Those who have
applied themselves to the ancient classics, are notorious for their corrupt
dealings in this way. And Coleridge founded an argument against the whole
body upon the confessedly dreadful failure of Bentley, prince of all the
order, when applied to a case where most of us could appreciate the
result--namely, to the _Paradise Lost_. If, said Coleridge, this Bentley
could err so extravagantly in a case of mother-English, what must we presume
him often to have done in Greek? Here we may see to this day that practice
carried to a ruinous extent, which, when charged upon tinkers, I have seen
cause to restrict. In the present case from _Macbeth_, I fear that COR. is
slightly indulging in this tinkering practice. As I view the case, there
really is no hole to mend. The old meaning of the word _convince_ is well
brought out in the celebrated couplet--

'He, that's convinc'd against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.

How can _that_ be? I have often heard objectors say. Being convinced by his
opponent--_i. e._, convinced that his opponent's view is the right one--how
can he retain his own original opinion, which by the supposition is in polar
opposition. But this argument rests on a false notion of the sense attached
originally to the word _convinced_. That word was used in the sense of
_refuted; redargued_, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The
case supposed was that of a man who is reduced to an absurdity; he cannot
deny that, from his own view, an absurdity _seems_ to follow; and, until he
has shown that this absurdity is only apparent, he is bound to hold himself
_provisionally_ answered. Yet that does not reconcile him to his adversary's
opinion; he retains his own, and is satisfied that somewhere an answer to it
exists, if only he could discover it.

Here the meaning is, 'I will convince his chamberlains with wine'--_i. e._,
will refute by means of the confusion belonging to the tragedy itself, when
aided by intoxication, all the arguments (otherwise plausible) which they
might urge in self-defence.

['_Thrice_ and once the hedge-pig whined:'--

This our friend COR. alters to _twice_; but for the very reason which
should have checked him--namely, on Theobald's suggestion that '_odd_
numbers are used in enchantments and magical operations;' and here he
fancies himself to obtain an odd number by the arithmetical
summation--_twice_ added to _once_ makes thrice. Meantime the odd number is
already secured by viewing the _whines_ separately, and not as a sum. The
hedge-pig whined thrice--that was an odd number. Again he whined, and this
time only once--this also was an odd number. Otherwise COR. is perfectly
right in his general doctrine, that

'Numero Deus _impare_ gaudet.'

Nobody ever heard of _even_ numbers in any case of divination. A dog, for
instance, howling under a sick person's window, is traditionally ominous of
evil--but not if he howls twice, or four times.

['I _pull_ in resolution.'--_Act V. Scene 5._

COR. had very probably not seen Dr Johnson's edition of _Shakspere_, but in
common with the Doctor, under the simple coercion of good sense, he proposes
'I _pall_;' a restitution which is so self-attested, that it ought
fearlessly to be introduced into the text of all editions whatever, let them
be as superstitiously scrupulous as in all reason they ought to be.

[HAMLET. _Act II. Scene in the Speech of Polonius._

'Good sir, or so, or friend, or gentleman,'

is altered by COR., and in this case with an effect of solemn humour which
justifies itself, into

'Good sir, or sir, or friend, or gentleman;'

meaning good sir, or sir simply without the epithet _good_, which implies
something of familiarity. Polonius, in his superstitious respect for ranks
and degrees, provides four forms of address applying to four separate cases:
such is the ponderous casuistry which the solemn courtier brings to bear
upon the most trivial of cases.

* * * * *

At this point, all at once, we find our sheaf of arrows exhausted: trivial
as are the new resources offered for deciphering the hidden meanings of
Shakspere, their quality is even less a ground of complaint than their
limitation in quantity. In an able paper published by this journal, during
the autumn of 1855, upon the new readings offered by Mr Collier's work, I
find the writer expressing generally a satisfaction with the condition of
Shakspere's text. I feel sorry that I cannot agree with him. To me the text,
though improved, and gradually moving round to a higher and more hopeful
state of promise, is yet far indeed from the settled state which is
desirable. I wish, therefore, as bearing upon all such hopes and prospects,
to mention a singular and interesting case of sudden conquest over a
difficulty that once had seemed insuperable. For a period of three centuries
there had existed an enigma, dark and insoluble as that of the Sphinx, in
the text of Suetonius. Isaac Casaubon had vainly besieged it; then, in a
mood of revolting arrogance, Joseph Scaliger; Ernesti; Gronovius; many
others; and all without a gleam of success.

The passage in Suetonius which so excruciatingly (but so unprofitably) has
tormented the wits of such scholars as have sat in judgment upon it through
a period of three hundred and fifty years, arises in the tenth section of
his Domitian. That prince, it seems, had displayed in his outset
considerable promise of moral excellence: in particular, neither rapacity
nor cruelty was apparently any feature in his character. Both qualities,
however, found a pretty early development in his advancing career, but
cruelty the earliest. By way of illustration, Suetonius rehearses a list of
distinguished men, clothed with senatorian or even consular rank, whom he
had put to death upon allegations the most frivolous: amongst them Aelius
Lamia, a nobleman whose wife he had torn from him by open and insulting
violence. It may be as well to cite the exact words of Suetonius: 'Aelium
Lamiam (interemit) ob suspiciosos quidem, verum et veteres et innoxios
jocos; quod post abductam uxorem laudanti vocem suam--dixerat, _Heu taceo_;
quodque Tito hortanti se ad alterum matrimonium, responderat [Greek: me kai
su gamesai theleis];'--that is, Aelius Lamia he put to death on account of
certain jests; jests liable to some jealousy, but, on the other hand, of old
standing, and that had in fact proved harmless as regarded practical
consequences--namely, that to one who praised his voice as a singer he had
replied, _Heu taceo_; and that on another occasion, in reply to the Emperor
Titus, when urging him to a second marriage, he had said, 'What now, I
suppose _you_ are looking out for a wife?'

The latter jest is intelligible enough, stinging, and witty. As if the young
men of the Flavian family could fancy no wives but such as they had won by
violence from other men, he affects in a bitter sarcasm to take for granted
that Titus, as the first step towards marrying, counselled his friends to
marry as the natural means for creating a fund of eligible wives. The
primal qualification of any lady as a consort being, in _their_ eyes, that
she had been torn away violently from a friend, it became evident that the
preliminary step towards a Flavian wedding was, to persuade some incautious
friend into marrying, and thus putting himself into a capacity of being
robbed. How many ladies that it was infamous for this family to appropriate
as wives, so many ladies that in their estimate were eligible in that
character. Such, at least in the stinging jest of Lamia, was the Flavian
rule of conduct. And his friend Titus, therefore, simply as the brother of
Domitian, simply as a Flavian, he affected to regard as indirectly providing
a wife, when he urged his friend by marrying to enrol himself as a
_pillagee_ elect.

The latter jest, therefore, when once apprehended, speaks broadly and
bitingly for itself. But the other--what can it possibly mean? For centuries
has that question been reiterated; and hitherto without advancing by one
step nearer to solution. Isaac Casaubon, who about 230 years since was the
leading oracle in this field of literature, writing an elaborate and
continuous commentary upon Suetonius, found himself unable to suggest any
real aids for dispersing the thick darkness overhanging the passage. What he
says is this:--'Parum satisfaciunt mihi interpretes in explicatione hujus
Lamiae dicti. Nam quod putant _Heu taceo_ suspirium esse ejus--indicem
doloris ob abductam uxorem magni sed latentis, nobis non ita videtur; sed
notatam potius fuisse tyrannidem principis, qui omnia in suo genere pulchra
et excellentia possessoribus eriperet, unde necessitas incumbebat sua bona
dissimulandi celandique.' Not at all satisfactory to me are the
commentators in the explanation of the _dictum_ (which is here equivalent to
_dicterium_) of Lamia. For, whereas they imagine _Heu taceo_ to be a sigh of
his--the record and indication of a sorrow, great though concealed, on
behalf of the wife that had been violently torn away from him--me, I
confess, that the case does not strike in that light; but rather that a
satiric blow was aimed at the despotism of the sovereign prince, who tore
away from their possessors all objects whatsoever marked by beauty or
distinguished merit in their own peculiar class: whence arose a pressure of
necessity for dissembling and hiding their own advantages. '_Sic esse
exponendum_,' that such is the true interpretation (continues Casaubon),
'_docent illa verba_ [LAUDANTI VOCEM SUAM],' (we are instructed by those
words), [to one who praised his singing voice, &c.].

This commentary was obscure enough, and did no honour to the native good
sense of Isaac Casaubon, usually so conspicuous. For, whilst proclaiming a
settlement, in reality it settled nothing. Naturally, it made but a feeble
impression upon the scholars of the day; and not long after the publication
of the book, Casaubon received from Joseph Scaliger a friendly but
gasconading letter, in which that great scholar brought forward a new
reading--namely, [Greek: entakto], to which he assigned a profound technical
value as a musical term. No person even affected to understand Scaliger.
Casaubon himself, while treating so celebrated a man with kind and
considerate deference, yet frankly owned that, in all his vast reading, he
had never met with this strange Greek word. But, without entering into any
dispute upon that verbal question, and conceding to Scaliger the word and
his own interpretation of the word, no man could understand in what way this
new resource was meant to affect the ultimate question at issue--namely, the
extrication of the passage from that thick darkness which overshadowed it.

'_As you were_' (to speak in the phraseology of military drill), was in
effect the word of command. All things reverted to their original condition.
And two centuries of darkness again enveloped this famous perplexity of
Roman literature. The darkness had for a few moments seemed to be unsettling
itself in preparation for flight: but immediately it rolled back again; and
through seven generations of men this darkness was heavier, because less
hopeful than before.

Now then, I believe, all things are ready for the explosion of the
catastrophe; 'which catastrophe,' I hear some malicious reader whispering,
'is doubtless destined to glorify himself' (meaning the unworthy writer of
this little paper). I cannot deny it. A truth _is_ a truth. And, since no
medal, nor riband, nor cross, of any known order, is disposable for the most
brilliant successes in dealing with desperate (or what may be called
_condemned_) passages in Pagan literature, mere sloughs of despond that yawn
across the pages of many a heathen dog, poet and orator, that I could
mention, the more reasonable it is that a large allowance should be served
out of boasting and self-glorification to all those whose merits upon this
field national governments have neglected to proclaim. The Scaligers, both
father and son, I believe, acted upon this doctrine; and drew largely by
anticipation upon that reversionary bank which they conceived to be
answerable for such drafts. Joseph Scaliger, it strikes me, was drunk when
he wrote his letter on the present occasion, and in that way failed to see
(what Casaubon saw clearly enough) that he had commenced shouting before he
was out of the wood. For my own part, if I go so far as to say that the
result promises, in the Frenchman's phrase, to 'cover me with glory,' I beg
the reader to remember that the idea of 'covering' is of most variable
extent: the glory may envelope one in a voluminous robe--a princely mantle
that may require a long suite of train-bearers, or may pinch and vice one's
arms into that succinct garment (now superannuated) which some eighty years
ago drew its name from the distinguished Whig family in England of Spencer.
Anticipating, therefore, that I _shall_--nay, insisting, and mutinously, if
needful, that I _will_--be covered with glory by the approaching result, I
do not contemplate anything beyond that truncated tunic, once known as a
'spencer,' and which is understood to cover only the shoulders and the
chest.

Now, then, all being ready, and the arena being cleared of competitors
(for I suppose it is fully understood that everybody but myself has
retired from the contest), thrice, in fact, has the trumpet sounded, 'Do
you give it up?' Some preparations there are to be made in all cases of
contest. Meantime, let it be clearly understood what it is that the
contest turns upon. Supposing that one had been called, like OEdipus
of old, to a turn-up with that venerable girl the Sphinx, most
essential it would have been that the clerk of the course (or however
you designate the judge, the umpire, &c.) should have read the riddle
propounded to Greece: how else judge of the solution? At present the
elements of the case to be decided stand thus:--

A Roman noble, a man, in fact, of senatorial rank, has been robbed,
robbed with violence, and with cruel scorn, of a lovely young wife, to
whom he was most tenderly attached. But by whom? the indignant reader
demands. By a younger son[8] of the Roman emperor Vespasian.

[8] But holding what rank, and what precise station, at the time of the
outrage? At this point I acknowledge a difficulty. The criminal was in
this case Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, the tenth Caesar,
younger Brother of Titus, the eleventh Caesar, and himself, under the
name of Domitian, the twelfth of the Caesars, consequently the closing
prince in that series of the initial twelve Caesars whom Suetonius had
undertaken to record. Now the difficulty lies here, which yet I have
never seen noticed in any book: was this violence perpetrated before or
after Domitian's assumption of the purple? If _after_, how, then, could
the injured husband have received that advice from Titus (as to
repairing his loss by a second marriage), which forms part of an
anecdote and a _bon-mot_ between Titus and Lamia? Yet again, if not
after but before, how was it Lamia had not invoked the protection of
Vespasian, or of Titus--the latter of whom enjoyed a theatrically fine
reputation for equity and moderation?

For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew
himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show
symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his
own head. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. _Patience_ had
been the word; _silence_, and below all the deep, deep word--_wait_; and
if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word _wait_ would
have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that
also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is
hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite
might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the
black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and
fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the
foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance,
violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of
such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the
later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian.
Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up
into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part
of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage
for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony
might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through
which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole,
therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been
resolved that he should die. But previously that he should drink off a
final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady
herself, again--that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so
total a stranger to man and his generations--had she also suffered in
sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a
certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profoundly on
what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning
torments, it may have been that the dreadful Caesar might have found the
'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellowship in exalting the
furnace of misery. The lady herself--may we not suppose her at the last
to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist
indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no
benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural
interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be
worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There
is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that
the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to
the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in
proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to
live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or
in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so nobly
released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this
followed--that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native
nobility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly
under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay,
inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously
impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of
Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such _public_
manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one
motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry
along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of
heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society
exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the
existence of other and nobler agencies in human affairs? Not at all.
Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not
known, or imperfectly known to _them_, these they ignore. What it was
circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and
swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives--namely,
that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that
his death followed. But what was it that he _did_ say? That is precisely
the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present
we know, and we do _not_ know, what it was that he said. We have
bequeathed to us by history two words--involving eight letters--which in
their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic
literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as
the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are
required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the
following five conditions:--First, it must allude to his wife, as one
that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy
tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the
compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice;
fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not
only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant
enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its
own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless
words--'_Heu taceo._'

Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any
possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish
a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it
in less than nine letters--namely, _Oh lord, sir_. I, for my part,
satisfied that the existing form of _Heu taceo_ was mere indictable and
punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief
element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how
many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a
fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram
that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost
through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I
landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:--Let
me premise, however, what _at any rate_ the existing darkness attests,
that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether
from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at
this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that
the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had
replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is
it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case
would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every
school-boy knows that this means a _wife-revoking voice_. But first let
me remark that there is such a legitimate word as _Orpheutaceam_: and in
that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus--_Suavem dixisti?
Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam_. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to
recognise in this form our old friend _Heu taceo_. But here he is to a
certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the
compositor will show him, up to you as--_vellem et Orp_. [HEU TACEAM].
Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the
seemingly surreptitious AM, though believing the real word to be
_taceo_. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives
_taceam_. Here, then, shines out at once--(1) Eurydice the lovely wife;
(2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced
into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever
known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4)
the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of
recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the
restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous
form.

[9] In _All's Well that Ends Well_.

HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH.[10]

Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity
of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more
than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. Why
particularly at this time? Simply, because the interest in that language
rests upon two separate foundations: there are two separate principles
concerned in its pretensions; and by accident in part, but in part also
through the silent and inevitable march of human progress, there has
been steadily gathering for many years an interest of something like
sceptical and hostile curiosity about each of these principles,
considered as problems open to variable solutions, as problems already
viewed from different national centres, and as problems also that press
forward to some solution or other with more and more of a clamorous
emphasis, in proportion as they tend to consequences no longer merely
speculative and scholastic, but which more and more reveal features
largely practical and political. The two principles upon which the
English language rests the burden of its paramount interest, are
these:--first, its powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its
apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of
opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages
which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their
structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly
for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain
peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of
interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet
on which we live might be said to have assembled and opened her first
parliament for representing the grandeur of the human intellect. That
particular assembly, I mean, for celebrating the Olympic Games about
four centuries and a half before the era of Christ, when Herodotus
opened the gates of morning for the undying career of history, by
reading to the congregated children of Hellas, to the whole
representative family of civilisation, that loveliest of earthly
narratives, which, in nine musical cantos, unfolded the whole luxury of
human romance as at the bar of some austere historic Areopagus, and,
inversely again, which crowded the total abstract of human records,
sealed[11] as with the seal of Delphi in the luxurious pavilions of
human romance.

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