You know perhaps, masculine reader, better than I can tell you, what is
a _Palimpsest_. Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet, for
the sake of others who may _not_ know, or may have forgotten, suffer me
to explain it here: lest any female reader, who honours these papers
with her notice, should tax me with explaining it once too seldom; which
would be worse to bear than a simultaneous complaint from twelve proud
men, that I had explained it three times too often. You therefore, fair
reader, understand that for _your_ accommodation exclusively, I explain
the meaning of this word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the office and
privilege of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We
are, under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So that
if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by courtesy
to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you will always seem _not_
to know it.
A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by
reiterated successions.
What was the reason that the Greeks and the Romans had not the advantage
of printed books? The answer will be, on ninety-nine persons in a
hundred--Because the mystery of printing was not then discovered. But
this is altogether a mistake. The secret of printing must have been
discovered many thousands of times before it was used, or _could_ be
used. The inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stupidity is
divine--as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the slow development of
the _sofa_ through successive generations of immortal dulness. It took
centuries of blockheads to raise a joint stool into a chair; and it
required something like a miracle of genius, in the estimate of elder
generations, to reveal the possibility of lengthening a chair into a
_chaise-longue_, or a sofa. Yes, these were inventions that cost mighty
throes of intellectual power. But still, as respects printing, and
admirable as is the stupidity of man, it was really not quite equal to
the task of evading an object which stared him in the face with so broad
a gaze. It did not require an Athenian intellect to read the main secret
of printing in many scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life
were _daily_ repeating. To say nothing of analogous artifices amongst
various mechanic artisans, all that is essential in printing must have
been known to every nation that struck coins and medals. Not, therefore,
any want of a printing art--that is, of an art for multiplying
impressions--but the want of a cheap material for _receiving_ such
impressions, was the obstacle to an introduction of printed books even
as early as Pisistratus. The ancients _did_ apply printing to records of
silver and gold; to marble and many other substances cheaper than gold
and silver, they did _not_, since each monument required a _separate_
effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a cheap material for
receiving impresses, which froze in its very fountains the early
resources of printing.
Some twenty years ago, this view of the case was luminously expounded by
Dr Whately, the present archbishop of Dublin, and with the merit, I
believe, of having first suggested it. Since then, this theory has
received indirect confirmation. Now, out of that original scarcity
affecting all materials proper for durable books, which continued up to
times comparatively modern, grew the opening for palimpsests. Naturally,
when once a roll of parchment or of vellum had done its office, by
propagating through a series of generations what once had possessed an
interest for _them_, but which, under changes of opinion or of taste,
had faded to their feelings or had become obsolete for their
understandings, the whole _membrana_ or vellum skin, the twofold product
of human skill, costly material, and costly freight of thought, which it
carried, drooped in value concurrently--supposing that each were
inalienably associated to the other. Once it had been the impress of a
human mind which stamped its value upon the vellum; the vellum, though
costly, had contributed but a secondary element of value to the total
result. At length, however, this relation between the vehicle and its
freight has gradually been undermined. The vellum, from having been the
setting of the jewel, has risen at length to be the jewel itself; and
the burden of thought, from having given the chief value to the vellum,
has now become the chief obstacle to its value; nay, has totally
extinguished its value, unless it can be dissociated from the connexion.
Yet, if this unlinking _can_ be effected, then--fast as the inscription
upon the membrane is sinking into rubbish--the membrane itself is
reviving in its separate importance; and, from bearing a ministerial
value, the vellum has come at last to absorb the whole value.
Hence the importance for our ancestors that the separation _should_ be
effected. Hence it arose in the middle ages, as a considerable object
for chemistry, to discharge the writing from the roll, and thus to make
it available for a new succession of thoughts. The soil, if cleansed
from what once had been hot-house plants, but now were held to be weeds,
would be ready to receive a fresh and more appropriate crop. In that
object the monkish chemists succeeded; but after fashion which seems
almost incredible; incredible not as regards the extent of their
success, but as regards the delicacy of restraints under which it moved;
so equally adjusted was their success to the immediate interests of that
period, and to the reversionary interests of our own. They did the
thing; but not so radically as to prevent us, their posterity, from
_un_doing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field
for the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of
the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. Could magic, could Hermes
Trismegistus, have done more? What would you think, fair reader, of a
problem such as this--to write a book which should be sense for your own
generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next
after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by
alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the
Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole--or like the
undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the
breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface,
sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a
long vista of alternations? Such a problem, you say, is impossible. But
really it is a problem not harder apparently than--to bid a generation
kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back into life; bury,
but so that posterity may command to rise again. Yet _that_ was what the
rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming into combination with
the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our own. Had _they_ been
better chemists, had _we_ been worse--the mixed result, viz. that, dying
for _them_, the flower should revive for _us_, could not have been
effected: They did the thing proposed to them: they did it effectually;
for they founded upon it all that was wanted: and yet ineffectually,
since we unravelled their work; effacing all above which they had
superscribed; restoring all below which they had effaced.
Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained some Grecian tragedy,
the Agamemnon of AEschylus, or the Phoenissae of Euripides. This had
possessed a value almost inappreciable in the eyes of accomplished
scholars, continually growing rarer through generations. But four
centuries are gone by since the destruction of the Western Empire.
Christianity, with towering grandeurs of another class, has founded a
different empire; and some bigoted yet perhaps holy monk has washed away
(as he persuades himself) the heathen's tragedy, replacing it with a
monastic legend; which legend is disfigured with fables in its
incidents, and yet, in a higher sense, is true, because interwoven with
Christian morals and with the sublimest of Christian revelations. Three,
four, five, centuries more find man still devout as ever; but the
language has become obsolete, and even for Christian devotion a new era
has arisen, throwing it into the channel of crusading zeal or of
chivalrous enthusiasm. The _membrana_ is wanted now for a knightly
romance--for "my Cid," or Coeur de Lion; for Sir Tristrem, or Lybaeus
Disconus. In this way, by means of the imperfect chemistry known to the
mediaeval period, the same roll has served as a conservatory for three
separate generations of flowers and fruits, all perfectly different, and
yet all specially adapted to the wants of the successive possessors. The
Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled
its own period. One harvest after another has been gathered into the
garners of man through ages far apart. And the same hydraulic machinery
has distributed, through the same marble fountains, water, milk, or
wine, according to the habits and training of the generations that came
to quench their thirst.
Such were the achievements of rude monastic chemistry. But the more
elaborate chemistry of our own days has reversed all these motions of
our simple ancestors, with results in every stage that to _them_ would
have realized the most fantastic amongst the promises of thaumaturgy.
Insolent vaunt of Paracelsus, that he would restore the original rose or
violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion--_that_ is now
rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each successive
handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the
inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game
pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and
hunted back through all their doubles; and, as the chorus of the
Athenian stage unwove through the antistrophe every step that had been
mystically woven through the strophe, so, by our modern conjurations of
science, secrets of ages remote from each other have been exorcised[9]
from the accumulated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, a witch as potent
as the Erictho of Lucan, (_Pharsalia_, lib. vi. or vii.,) has extorted
by her torments, from the dust and ashes of forgotten centuries, the
secrets of a life extinct for the general eye, but still glowing in the
embers. Even the fable of the Phoenix--that secular bird, who
propagated his solitary existence, and his solitary births, along the
line of centuries, through eternal relays of funeral mists--is but a
type of what we have done with Palimpsests. We have backed upon each
Phoenix in the long _regressus_, and forced him to expose his ancestral
Phoenix, sleeping in the ashes below his own ashes. Our good old
forefathers would have been aghast at our sorceries; and, if they
speculated on the propriety of burning Dr Faustus, _us_ they would have
burned by acclamation. Trial there would have been none; and they could
no otherwise have satisfied their horror of the brazen profligacy
marking our modern magic, than by ploughing up the houses of all who had
been parties to it, and sowing the ground with salt.
Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, illustrative or allusive,
moves under any impulse or purpose of mirth. It is but the coruscation
of a restless understanding, often made ten times more so by irritation
of the nerves, such as you will first learn to comprehend (its _how_ and
its _why_) some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record,
which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our
human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent
of laughter; or, even if laughter _had_ been possible, it would have
been such laughter as often times is thrown off from the fields of
ocean[10]--laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering
tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one
moment round the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born
flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gaiety, as oftentimes for the
ear they raise echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and
choir-voices of an angry sea.
What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such
a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours.
Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your
brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went
before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. And if, in the
vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other _diplomata_ of human archives
or libraries, there is any thing fantastic or which moves to laughter,
as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive
themes, having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have
consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created
palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and
cannot be such incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man's life,
and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the
organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed
predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have
accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity
greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled in the
retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.
Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in
drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I mentioned a case of
that nature communicated to me by a lady from her own childish
experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age;
and I may mention--that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity
of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but, on
the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh perhaps,
and gloomy--indulgent neither to others nor herself. And, at the time of
relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious
to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her
ninth year, when playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into
one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time
nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in
some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she
had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as
far, perhaps, as ever human eye _can_ have looked that had permission to
return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike
her--phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eye-balls; and
immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in
the twinkling of an eye, every act--every design of her past life lived
again--arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a
coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards
into the shades of infancy, as the light perhaps which wrapt the
destined apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a
season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her
consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the
infinite review.
This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time by some critics. But
besides that it has since been confirmed by other experiences
essentially the same, reported by other parties in the same
circumstances who had never heard of each other; the true point for
astonishment is not the _simultaneity_ of arrangement under which the
past events of life--though in fact successive--had formed their dread
line of revelation. This was but a secondary phenomenon; the deeper lay
in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for
what had so long slept in the dust. A pall, deep as oblivion, had been
thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly,
at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the
brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are
exposed. Here was the greater mystery: now this mystery is liable to no
doubt; for it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated by opium, for
those who are its martyrs.
Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy
which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your
brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the
undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the
endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the
hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these
can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping. In the
illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some individual
palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was
_not_ displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had
seemed to be displaced, but was _not_ displaced, by the knightly
romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into
its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished
with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with
human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The
romance has perished that the young man adored. The legend has gone that
deluded the boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the
child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips
for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and
these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that
can scorch away these immortal impresses. And the dream which closed the
preceding section, together with the succeeding dreams of this, (which
may be viewed as in the nature of choruses winding up the overture
contained in Part I.,) are but illustrations of this truth, such as
every man probably will meet experimentally who passes through similar
convulsions of dreaming or delirium from any similar or equal
disturbance in his nature.[11]