visionary, the craziest that has ever existed, or of pursuing them to
his descriptions of the state after death. I am checked also by other
considerations. For, although in forming a medical museum it is right
to collect specimens not only of natural but also of unnatural
productions and abortions, yet it is necessary to be cautious before
whom you show them: and amongst my readers there may happen to be some
in a crazy condition of nerves; and it would give me pain to think
that I had been the occasion of any mischief to them. Having warned
them however from the beginning, I am not responsible for anything
that may happen; and must desire that no person will lay at my door
the moon-calves which may chance to arise from any teeming fancy
impregnated by Mr. Swedenborg's revelations.
In conclusion I have to say that I have not interpolated my author's
dreams with any surreptitious ones of my own; but have laid a faithful
abstract before the economic reader, who might not be well pleased to
pay seven pounds sterling for a body of raving. I have indeed omitted
many circumstantial pictures of his intuitions, because they could
only have served to disturb the reader's slumber; and the confused
sense of his revelations I have now and then clothed in a more current
diction. But all the important features of the sketch I have preserved
in their native integrity.--And thus I return with some little shame
from my foolish labours, from which I shall draw this moral: That it
is often a very easy thing to act prudentially; but alas! too often
only after we have toiled to our prudence through a forest of
delusions.
SKETCH OF PROFESSOR WILSON.[43]
[_In a Letter to an American Gentleman._]
My dear L,--Among the _lions_ whom you missed by one accident or
another on your late travels in Europe, I observe that you recur to
none with so much regret as Professor Wilson; you dwell upon this one
disappointment as a personal misfortune; and perhaps with reason; for,
in the course of my life, I have met with no man of equally varied
accomplishments, or, upon the whole, so well entitled to be ranked
with that order of men distinguished by brilliant versatility and
ambidexterity--of which order we find such eminent models in
Alcibiades, in Cæsar, in Crichton, in that of Servan recorded by
Sully, and in one or two Italians. Pity that you had not earlier
communicated to me the exact route you were bound to, and the
particular succession of your engagements when you visited the English
Lakes; since, in that case, my interest with Professor Wilson
(supposing always that you had declined to rely upon the better
passport of your own merits as a naturalist) would have availed for a
greater thing than at that time stood between you and the introduction
which you coveted. On the day, or the night rather, when you were at
Bowness and Ambleside, I happen to know that Professor Wilson's
business was one which might have been executed by proxy, though it
could not be delayed; and I also know that, apart from the _general_
courtesy of his nature, he would, at all times, have an especial
pleasure in waiving a claim of business for one of science or letters,
in the person of a foreigner coming from a great distance; and that in
no other instance would he make such a sacrifice so cordially as on
behalf of an able naturalist. Perhaps you already know from your
countryman, Audubon, that the Professor is himself a naturalist, and
of original merit; in fact, worth a score of such meagre bookish
naturalists as are formed in museums and by second-hand acts of
memory; having (like Audubon) built much of his knowledge upon
personal observation. Hence he has two great advantages: one, that his
knowledge is accurate in a very unusual degree; and another, that this
knowledge, having grown up under the inspiration of a real interest
and an unaffected love for its objects,--commencing, indeed, at an age
when no affectation in matters of that nature could exist,--has
settled upon those facts and circumstances which have a true
philosophical value: habits, predominant affections, the direction of
instincts, and the compensatory processes where these happen to be
thwarted,--on all such topics he is learned and full; whilst, on the
science of measurements and proportions, applied to dorsal-fins and
tail-feathers, and on the exact arrangement of colours, &c.--that
petty upholstery of nature, on which books are so tedious and
elaborate,--not uncommonly he is negligent or forgetful. What may have
served in later years to quicken and stimulate his knowledge in this
field, and, at any rate, greatly to extend it, is the conversation of
his youngest brother, Mr. James Wilson, who (as _you_ know much better
than I) is a naturalist _majorum gentium_. He, indeed, whilst a boy of
not more than sixteen or seventeen, was in correspondence (I believe)
with Montague the Ornithologist; and about the same time had skill
enough to pick holes in the coat of Mr. Hüber, the German reformer of
our then erroneous science of bees.
[Footnote 43: This was written for _The Edinburgh Literary Gazette_,
of which sixty-one numbers appear to have been issued in 1829-30. The
paper is now so scarce, that the American publishers of DE QUINCEY'S
works photographed their 'copy' from that contained in the Advocates'
Library, Edinburgh. There is a file in the British Museum. I have not
been able to authenticate any other contribution from the pen of DE
QUINCEY. This letter deserves attention in various ways, but
particularly for the passage on Elleray--CHRISTOPHER NORTH'S home on
the banks of Windermere. MRS. GORDON in the life of her Father,
PROFESSOR WILSON, remarks:--'For a description of this beautiful spot
I gladly avail myself of the striking picture by Mr. DE QUINCEY.'--H.]
You see, therefore, that no possible introduction could have stood you
more in stead than your own extensive knowledge of transatlantic
ornithology. Swammerdam passed his life, it is said, in a ditch.
_That_ was a base, earthy solitude,--and a prison. But you and Audubon
have passed _your_ lives in the heavenly solitudes of forests and
savannahs; and such solitude as this is no prison, but infinite
liberty. The knowledge which you have gathered has been answerable to
the character of your school: and no sort of knowledge could have
secured you a better welcome with Professor Wilson. Yet, had it been
otherwise, I repeat that my interest (as I flatter myself) would have
opened the gates of Elleray to you even at midnight; for I am so old
a friend of Mr. Wilson that I take a pride in supposing myself the
oldest; and, barring relations by blood, arrogate the rights of dean
in the chapter of his associates: or at least I know of but one person
whose title can probably date earlier than mine. About this very month
when I am writing, I have known Professor Wilson for a cycle of twenty
years and more, which is just half of his life--and also half of mine;
for we are almost _ad apicem_ of the same age; Wilson being born in
May, and I in August, of the same memorable year.
My introduction to him--setting apart the introduc_ee_ himself--was
memorable from one sole circumstance, viz. the person of the
introducer. _William Wordsworth_ it was, who in the vale of Grasmere,
if it can interest you to know the place, and in the latter end of
1808, if you can be supposed to care about the time, did me the favour
of making me known to John Wilson, or as I might say (upon the
Scottish fashion of designating men from their territorial
pretensions) to Elleray. I remember the whole scene as circumstantially
as if it belonged to but yesterday. In the vale of Grasmere,--that
peerless little vale which you and Gray the poet and so many others have
joined in admiring as the very Eden of English beauty, peace, and
pastoral solitude,--you may possibly recall, even from that flying
glimpse you had of it, a modern house called Allan Bank, standing under
a low screen of woody rocks which descend from the hill of Silver How,
on the western side of the lake. This house had been then recently built
by a worthy merchant of Liverpool; but for some reason of no importance
to you and me, not being immediately wanted for the family of the
owner, had been let for a term of three years to Mr. Wordsworth. At the
time I speak of, both Mr. Coleridge and myself were on a visit to Mr.
Wordsworth; and one room on the ground floor, designed for a
breakfasting-room, which commands a sublime view of the three
mountains,--Fairfield, Arthur's Chair, and Seat Sandal (the first of
them within about four hundred feet of the highest mountains in Great
Britain), was then occupied by Mr. Coleridge as a study. On this
particular day, the sun having only just set, it naturally happened that
Mr. Coleridge--whose nightly vigils were long--had not yet come down to
breakfast: meantime, and until the epoch of the Coleridgian breakfast
should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to profaner uses. Here,
therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastily in quest of a book, I
found seated, and in earnest conversation, two gentlemen--one of them my
host, Mr. Wordsworth, at that time about thirty-seven or thirty-eight
years old; the other was a younger man by good sixteen or seventeen
years, in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health--_fervidus
juventâ_, and wearing upon his countenance a powerful expression of
ardour and animated intelligence, mixed with much good nature. _'Mr.
Wilson of Elleray'_--delivered, as the formula of introduction, in the
deep tones of Mr. Wordsworth--at once banished the momentary surprise I
felt on finding an unknown stranger where I had expected nobody, and
substituted a surprise of another kind: I now well understood who it was
that I saw; and there was no wonder in his being at Allan Bank, Elleray
standing within nine miles; but (as usually happens in such cases) I
felt a shock of surprise on seeing a person so little corresponding to
the one I had half unconsciously prefigured.
And here comes the place naturally, if anywhere, for a description of
Mr. Wilson's person and general appearance in carriage, manner, and
deportment; and a word or two I shall certainly say on these points,
simply because I know that I _must_, else my American friends will
complain that I have left out that precise section in my whole account
which it is most impossible for them to supply for themselves by any
acquaintance with his printed works. Yet suffer me, before I comply
with this demand, to enter one word of private protest against the
childish (nay, worse than childish--the _missy_) spirit in which such
demands originate. From my very earliest years,--that is the earliest
years in which I had any sense of what belongs to true dignity of
mind,--I declare to you that I have considered the interest which men,
grown men, take in the personal appearance of each other as one of the
meanest aspects under which human curiosity commonly presents itself.
Certainly I have the same intellectual perception of differences in
such things that other men have; but I connect none of the feelings,
whether of admiration or contempt, liking or disliking, which are
obviously connected with these perceptions by human beings generally.
Such words as 'commanding appearance,' 'prepossessing countenance,'
applied to the figures or faces of the males of the human species,
have no meaning in my ears: no man commands me, no man prepossesses
me, by anything in, on, or about his carcass. What care I for any
man's legs? I laugh at his ridiculous presumption in conceiting that
I shall trouble myself to admire or to respect anything that he can
produce in his _physics_. What! shall I honour Milo for the very
qualities which he has in common with the beastly ox he carries--his
thews and sinews, his ponderous strength and weight, and the quantity
of thumping that his hide will carry? I disclaim and disdain any
participation in such green-girl feelings. I admit that the baby
feelings I am here condemning are found in connection with the highest
intellects: in particular, Mr. Coleridge for instance once said to me,
as a justifying reason for his dislike of a certain celebrated
Scotsman, with an air of infinite disgust,--'that ugh!' (making a
guttural sound as if of execration) 'he (viz. the said Scotsman) was
so chicken-breasted.' I have been assured by the way, that Mr.
Coleridge was mistaken in the mere matter of fact: but supposing that
he were not, what a reason for a philosopher to build a disgust upon!
And Mr. Wordsworth, in or about the year 1820, in expressing the
extremity of his _Nil admirari_ spirit, declared that he would not go
ten yards out of his road to see the finest specimen of man
(intellectually speaking) that Europe had to show: and so far indeed I
do not quarrel with his opinion; but Mr. Wordsworth went on to say
that this indifference did _not_ extend itself to man considered
physically; and that he would still exert himself to a small extent
(suppose a mile or so) for the sake of seeing Belzoni. _That_ was the
case he instanced: and, as I understood him, not by way of a general
illustration for his meaning, but that he really felt an exclusive
interest in this particular man's _physics_. Now Belzoni was certainly
a good tumbler, as I have heard; and hopped well upon one leg, when
surmounted and crested by a pyramid of men and boys; and jumped
capitally through a hoop; and did all sorts of tricks in all sorts of
styles, not at all worse than any monkey, bear, or learned pig, that
ever exhibited in Great Britain. And I would myself have given a
shilling to have seen him fight with that cursed Turk that assaulted
him in the streets of Cairo; and would have given him a crown for
catching the circumcised dog by the throat and effectually taking the
conceit out of his Mahometan carcass: but then _that_ would have been
for the spectacle of the passions, which, in such a case, would have
been let loose: as to the mere animal Belzoni,--who after all was not
to be compared to Topham the Warwickshire man, that drew back by main
force a cart, and its driver, and a strong horse,--as to the mere
animal Belzoni, I say, and his bull neck, I would have much preferred
to see a real bull or the Darlington ox. The sum of the matter is
this: all men, even those who are most manly in their style of
thinking and feeling, in many things retain the childishness of their
childish years: no man thoroughly weeds himself of all. And this
particular mode of childishness is one of the commonest, into which
they fall the more readily from the force of sympathy, and because
they apprehend no reason for directing any vigilance against it. But I
contend that reasonably no feelings of deep interest are justifiable
as applied to any point of external form or feature in human beings,
unless under two reservations: first, that they shall have reference
to women; because women, being lawfully the objects of passions and
tender affections, which can have no existence as applied to men, are
objects also, rationally and consistently, of all other secondary
feelings (such as those derived from their personal appearance) which
have any tendency to promote and support the first. Whereas between
men the highest mode of intercourse is merely intellectual, which is
not of a nature to receive support or strength from any feelings of
pleasure or disgust connected with the accidents of external
appearance: but exactly in the degree in which these have any
influence at all they must warp and disturb by improper biases; and
the single case of exception, where such feelings can be honourable
and laudable amongst the males of the human species, is where they
regard such deformities as are the known products and expressions of
criminal or degrading propensities. All beyond this, I care not by
whom countenanced, is infirmity of mind, and would be baseness if it
were not excused by imbecility.
Excuse this digression, for which I have a double reason: chiefly I
was anxious to put on record my own opinions, and my contempt for men
generally in this particular; and here I seemed to have a conspicuous
situation for that purpose. Secondly, apart from this purpose of
offence, I was at any rate anxious, merely on a defensive principle,
to screen myself from the obvious misinterpretation incident to the
case: saying anything minute or in detail upon a man's person, I
should necessarily be supposed to do so under the ordinary blind
feelings of interest in that subject which govern most people;
feelings which I disdain. Now, having said all this, and made my
formal protest, _liberavi animam meam_; and I revert to my subject,
and shall say that word or two which I was obliged to promise you on
Professor Wilson's personal appearance.
Figure to yourself, then, a tall man, about six feet high, within half
an inch or so, built with tolerable appearance of strength; but at the
date of my description (that is, in the very spring-tide and blossom
of youth) wearing, for the predominant character of his person,
lightness and agility, or (in our Westmoreland phrase), _lishness_: he
seemed framed with an express view to gymnastic exercises of every
sort--
"[Greek: Alma, podôkeiên, diskon, akonta, palên]"
In the first of these exercises, indeed, and possibly (but of that I
am not equally certain) in the second, I afterwards came to know that
he was absolutely unrivalled: and the best leapers at that time in the
ring, Richmond the Black and others, on getting 'a taste of his
quality,' under circumstances of considerable disadvantage [viz. after
a walk from Oxford to Moulsey Hurst, which I believe is fifty miles],
declined to undertake him. For this exercise he had two remarkable
advantages: it is recorded of Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, that,
though otherwise a handsome man, he offended the connoisseurs in
statuesque proportions by one eminent defect--perhaps the most
obtrusive to which the human figure is liable--viz. a body of length
disproportioned to his legs. In Mr. Wilson the proportions were
fortunately reversed: a short trunk, and remarkably long legs, gave
him one half of his advantages in the noble science of leaping; the
other half was afterwards pointed out to me by an accurate critic in
these matters as lying in the particular conformation of his foot,
the instep of which is arched, and the back of the heel strengthened
in so remarkable a way that it would be worth paying a penny or so for
a sight of them. It is really laughable to think of the coxcombry
which eminent men of letters have displayed in connection with their
powers--real or fancied--in this art. Cardinal du Perron vapoured to
the end of his life upon some remarkable leap that he either _had_
accomplished, or conceived himself to have accomplished (not, I
presume, in red stockings). Every tenth page of the _Perroniana_ rings
with the echo of this stupendous leap--the length of which, if I
remember rightly, is as obviously fabulous as any feat of Don Belianis
of Greece. Des Cartes also had a lurking conceit that, in some unknown
place, he had perpetrated a leap that ought to immortalise him; and in
one of his letters he repeats and accredits a story of some obscure
person's leap, which
'At one light bound high overleaped all bound'
of reasonable credulity. Many other eminent leapers might be cited,
Pagan and Christian: but the Cardinal, by his own account, appears to
have been the flower of Popish leapers; and, with all deference to his
Eminence, upon a better assurance than that, Professor Wilson may be
rated, at the time I speak of, as the flower of all Protestant
leapers. Not having the Cardinal's foible of connecting any vanity
with this little accomplishment, knowing exactly what could and what
could _not_ be effected in this department of gymnastics, and speaking
with the utmost simplicity and candour of his failures and his
successes alike, he might always be relied upon, and his statements
were constantly in harmony with any collateral testimony that chance
happened to turn up.
Viewed, therefore, by an eye learned in gymnastic proportions, Mr.
Wilson presented a somewhat striking figure: and by some people he was
pronounced with emphasis a fine looking young man; but others, who
less understood, or less valued these advantages, spoke of him as
nothing extraordinary. Still greater division of voices I have heard
on his pretensions to be thought handsome. In my opinion, and most
certainly in his own, these pretensions were but slender. His
complexion was too florid; hair of a hue quite unsuited to that
complexion; eyes not good, having no apparent depth, but seeming mere
surfaces; and in fine, no one feature that could be called fine,
except the lower region of his face, mouth, chin, and the parts
adjacent, which were then (and perhaps are now) truly elegant and
Ciceronian. Ask in one of your public libraries for that little 4to
edition of the _Rhetorical Works of Cicero_, edited by Schütz (the
same who edited _Æschylus_), and you will there see (as a frontispiece
to the 1st vol.) a reduced whole length of Cicero from the antique;
which in the mouth and chin, and indeed generally, if I do not greatly
forget, will give you a lively representation of the contour and
expression of Professor Wilson's face. Taken as a whole, though not
handsome (as I have already said), when viewed in a quiescent state,
the head and countenance are massy, dignified, and expressive of
tranquil sagacity.
Thus far of Professor Wilson in his outward man, whom (to gratify you
and yours, and upon the consideration that my letter is to cross the
Atlantic), I have described with an effort and a circumstantiation
that are truly terrific to look back upon. And now, returning to the
course of my narrative, such in personal appearance was the young man
upon whom my eyes suddenly rested, for the first time, upwards of
twenty years ago, in the study of S. T. Coleridge--looking, as I said
before, light as a Mercury to eyes familiar with the British build;
but, with reference to the lengthy model of you Yankees, who spindle
up so tall and narrow, already rather bulky and columnar. Note,
however, that of all this array of personal features, as I have here
described them, I then saw nothing at all, my attention being
altogether occupied with Mr. Wilson's conversation and demeanour,
which were in the highest degree agreeable: the points which chiefly
struck me being the humility and gravity with which he spoke of
himself, his large expansion of heart, and a certain air of noble
frankness which overspread everything he said; he seemed to have an
intense enjoyment of life; indeed, being young, rich, healthy, and
full of intellectual activity, it could not be very wonderful that he
should feel happy and pleased with himself and others; but it was
somewhat unusual to find that so rare an assemblage of endowments had
communicated no tinge of arrogance to his manner, or at all disturbed
the general temperance of his mind.