[9] Notwithstanding what he had written in the essay on the 'Essenes,'
no doubt De Quincey, if he had completed this paper, could not have
escaped characteristic, and perhaps grimly humorous, references of his
own to the Sicarii, of whom Josephus has a good deal to tell in his
'Jewish War'; for it seems to us his thoughts were bearing directly that
way. Josephus says of the Sicarii: 'In these days there arose another
sort of robbers in Jerusalem, who were named Sicarii, who slew men in
the day-time and in the middle of the city, more especially at the
festivals. There they mixed with the multitude, and having concealed
little daggers under their garments, with these they stabbed those that
were their enemies; and when any fell down dead, the murderers joined
the bystanders in expressing their indignation; so that from their
plausibilities they could by no means be discovered. The first man that
was slain by them was Jonathan the high-priest, after which many were
slain every day.'--ED.
[10] 'Postern-gate.' See the legend of Sir Eustace the Crusader, and the
good Sir Hubert, who 'sounded the horn which he alone could sound,' as
told by Wordsworth.
_XI. ANECDOTES--JUVENAL._
All anecdotes, as I have often remarked in print, are lies. It is
painful to use harsh words, and, knowing by my own feelings how much the
reader is shocked by this rude word _lies_, I should really be much
gratified if it were possible to supplant it by some gentler or more
courteous word, such as _falsehoods_, or even _fibs_, which dilutes the
atrocity of untruth into something of an amiable weakness, wrong, but
still venial, and natural (and so far, therefore, reasonable). Anything
for peace: but really in this instance I cannot indulge the reader. The
instincts of morality will not allow of it, and still less the passion
which made Juvenal a poet,[11] viz., the passion of enormous and bloody
indignation. From the beginning of this century, with wrath continually
growing, I have laid it down as a rule, and if the last year of it,
viz., A. D. 1900, should overhear _my_ voice amongst the babblings that
will then be troubling the atmosphere--in that case it will hear me
still reaffirming, with an indignation still gathering strength, and
therefore approaching ever nearer and nearer to a Juvenalian power of
versification, so that perhaps I shall then speak in rhymed
couplets--that all anecdotes pretending to be _smart_, but to a dead
certainty if they pretend to be _epigrammatic_, are and must be lies.
There is, in fact, no security for the truth of an anecdote, no
guarantee whatever, except its intense stupidity. If a man is searched
at a police-office, on the ground that he was caught trying the
window-shutters of silversmiths; then, if it should happen that in his
pockets is found absolutely nothing at all except one solitary
paving-stone, in that case Charity, which believeth all things (in fact,
is credulous to an anile degree), will be disposed to lock up the
paving-stone, and restore it to the man on his liberation as if it were
really his own, though philosophy mutters indignantly, being all but
certain that the fellow stole it. And really I have been too candid a
great deal in admitting that a man may appropriate an anecdote, and
establish his claim to it by pleading its awful stupidity. That might be
the case, and I believe it _was_, when anecdotes were many and writers
were few. But things are changed now. Fifty years ago, if a man were
seen running away with the pace of a lunatic, and you should sing out,
'Stop that fellow; he is running off with the shin-bone of my
great-grandmother!' all the people in the street would have cried out in
reply, 'Oh, nonsense! What should he want with your great-grandmother's
shin-bone?' and that would have seemed reasonable. But now, to see how
things are altered, any man of sense would reply, 'What should he want
with my great-grandmother's shin-bone? Why, he'll grind it, and then
he'll mix it with guano.' This is what he and the like of him have
actually done by shiploads of people far more entitled to consideration
than any one of my four great-grandmothers (for I had _four_, with eight
shin-bones amongst them). It is well known that the field of Waterloo
was made to render up all its bones, British or French, to certain
bone-mills in agricultural districts. Borodino and Leipzig, the two
bloodiest of modern battlefields, are supposed between them--what by the
harvest of battle, what by the harvest of neighbouring hospitals--to be
seized or possessed of four hundred thousand shin-bones, and other
interesting specimens to match. Negotiations have been proceeding at
various times between the leading bone-mills in England and the Jews in
Dresden or in Moscow. Hitherto these negotiations have broken down,
because the Jews stood out for 37 per shent., calculated upon the costs
of exhumation. But of late they show a disposition to do business at 33
per shent.: the contract will therefore move forwards again; it will go
ahead; and the dust of the faithful armies, together with the dust of
their enemies, will very soon be found, not in the stopper of a bunghole
(as Prince Hamlet conceived too prematurely), but in an unprecedented
crop of Swedish turnips.
Bones change their value, it seems thus clearly; and anecdotes change
their value; and in that proportion honesty, as regards one or the
other, changes the value of its chances. But what has all this to do
with 'Old Nick'? Stop: let me consider. That title was placed at the
head of this article, and I admit that it was placed there by myself.
Else, whilst I was wandering from my text, and vainly endeavouring to
recollect what it was that I had meant by this text, a random thought
came over me (immoral, but natural), that I would charge the heading of
_Old Nick_ upon the compositor, asserting that he had placed it there in
obstinate defiance of all the orders to the contrary, and supplications
to the contrary, that I had addressed to him for a month; by which means
I should throw upon _him_ the responsibility of accounting for so
portentous an ensign.
* * * * *
EDITOR'S NOTE.--It is evident that De Quincey meditated a much
longer essay on anecdotes as false, in which Niccolo Machiavelli
would have come in for notice--hence the playful references in the
close.