has ignored me--me, that in some measure may be described as having
broken ground originally in this interesting field of research. Me,
the undoubted parent of such studies--_i. e._ the person who first
solemnly proclaimed the Danish language to be the master-key for
unlocking the peculiarities of the Lake dialect--me, has this
undutiful son never noticed, except incidentally, and then only with
some reserve, or even with a distinct scruple, as regards the
particular point of information for which I am cited. Seriously,
however, this very passage, which offers me the affront of utter
exclusion from what I had regarded as my own peculiar territory, my
own Danish ring-fence, shows clearly that no affront had been
designed. Mr. Ferguson had found occasion, at p. 80, to mention that
_Fairfield_, the most distinguished[50] of the Grasmere boundaries,
and 'next neighbour to Helvellyn' (next also in magnitude, being
above three thousand feet high), had, as regarded its name, 'been
derived from the Scandinavian _faar_, sheep, in allusion to the
peculiar fertility of its pastures.' He goes on thus--'This mountain'
(says De Quincey) 'has large, smooth pastoral savannahs, to which the
sheep resort when all its rocky or barren neighbours are left
desolate.' In thus referring to myself for the character of the
mountain, he does not at all suppose that he is referring to the
author of the etymology. On the contrary, the very next sentence
says--'I do not know who is the author of this etymology, which has
been quoted by several writers; but it appears to me to be open to
considerable doubt'; and this for two separate reasons, which he
assigns, and which I will notice a little further on.
[Footnote 50:
'And mighty Fairfield, with its chime
Of echoes, still was keeping time.'
WORDSWORTH--_The Waggoner_.]
Meantime I pause, for the sake of saying that the derivation is mine.
Thirty-seven, or it may be thirty-eight, years ago, I first brought
forward my Danish views in a local newspaper--namely, _The Kendal
Gazette_, published every Saturday. The rival (I may truly say--the
hostile) newspaper, published also on Saturday, was called _The
Westmoreland Chronicle_. The exact date of my own communication upon
the dialect of the Lake district I cannot at this moment assign.
Earlier than 1818 it could not have been, nor later than 1820. What
first threw me upon this vein of exploring industry was, the
accidental stumbling suddenly upon an interesting little incident of
Westmoreland rustic life. From a roadside cottage, just as I came
nearly abreast of its door, issued a little child; not old enough to
walk with particular firmness, but old enough for mischief; a laughing
expression of which it bore upon its features. It was clearly in the
act of absconding from home, and was hurrying earnestly to a turn of
the road which it counted upon making available for concealment. But,
before it could reach this point, a young woman, of remarkable beauty,
perhaps twenty years old, ran out in some alarm, which was not
diminished by hearing the sound of carriage-wheels rapidly coming up
from a distance of probably two furlongs. The little rosy thing
stopped and turned on hearing its mother's voice, but hesitated a
little, until she made a gesture of withdrawing her handkerchief from
her bosom, and said, coaxingly, 'Come its ways, then, and get its
_patten_.' Until that reconciling word was uttered, there had been a
shadow of distrust on the baby's face, as if treachery might be in the
wind. But the magic of that one word _patten_ wrought an instant
revolution. Back the little truant ran, and the young mother's manner
made it evident that she would not on _her_ part forget what had
passed between the high contracting parties.[51] What, then, could be
the meaning of this talismanic word _patten_? Accidentally, having
had a naval brother confined amongst the Danes, as a prisoner of war,
for eighteen months, I knew that it meant the female bosom. Soon after
I stumbled upon the meaning of the Danish word _Skyandren_--namely,
what in street phrase amongst ourselves is called giving to any person
a _blowing-up_. This was too remarkable a word, too bristling with
harsh blustering consonants, to baffle the detecting ear, as it might
have done under any masquerading _aura-textilis_, or woven air of
vowels and diphthongs.
[Footnote 51: It might seem odd to many people that a child able to
run alone should not have been already weaned, a process of early
misery that, in modern improved practice, takes place amongst opulent
families at the age of six months; and, secondly, it might seem
equally odd that, until weaned, any infant could be truly described as
'rosy.' I wish, however, always to be punctiliously accurate; and I
can assure my readers that, generally speaking, the wives of labouring
men (for more reasons than one) suckle their infants for three years,
to the great indignation of medical practitioners, who denounce the
practice as six times too long. Secondly, although unweaned infants
are ordinarily pale, yet, amongst those approaching their eighteenth
or twentieth month, there are often found children as rosy as any one
can meet with.]
Many scores of times I had heard men threatening to _skiander_ this
person or that when next they should meet. Not by possibility could it
indicate any mode of personal violence; for no race of men could be
more mild and honourably forbearing in their intercourse with each
other than the manly dalesmen of the Lakes. From the context, it had
long been evident that it implied expostulation and _verbal_ reproach.
And now at length I learned that this was its Danish import. The very
mountain at the foot of which my Grasmere cottage stood, and the
little orchard attached to which formed 'the lowest step in that
magnificent staircase' (such was Wordsworth's description of it),
leading upwards to the summits of Helvellyn, reminded me daily of that
Danish language which all around me suggested as being the secret
writing--the seal--the lock that imprisoned ancient records as to
thing or person, and yet again as being the key that should open this
lock; as that which had hidden through many centuries, and yet also as
that which should finally reveal.
I have thus come round to the name of Fairfield, which seemed to me
some forty years ago as beyond all reasonable doubt the Danish mask
for _Sheep-fell_. But, in using the phrase '_reasonable_ doubt,' I am
far from insinuating that Mr. Ferguson's deliberate doubt is _not_
reasonable. I will state both sides of the question, for neither is
without some show of argument. To me it seemed next to impossible that
the early Danish settlers could, under the natural pressure of
prominent differences among that circuit of hills which formed the
barriers of Grasmere, have failed to distinguish as the sheep mountain
that sole eminence which offered a pasture ground to their sheep all
the year round. In summer and autumn _all_ the neighbouring fells,
that were not mere rocks, yielded pasture more or less scanty. But
Fairfield showed herself the _alma mater_ of their flocks even in
winter and early spring. So, at least, my local informants asserted.
Mr. Ferguson, however, objects, as an unaccountable singularity, that
on this hypothesis we shall have one mountain, and one only, classed
under the _modern_ Scandinavian term of _field_; all others being
known by the elder name of _fell_. I acknowledge that this anomaly is
perplexing. But, on the other hand, what Mr. Ferguson suggests is
still more perplexing. He supposes that, 'because' the summit of this
mountain is such a peculiarly green and level plain, it might not
inappropriately be called _a fair field_.' Certainly it might; but by
Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the
ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint
_soupçon_ of anachronism--namely, the _apparent_ anticipation of the
modern Norse word _field_, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a
headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no
other instance. Even the little swells of ground, that hardly rise to
the dignity of hills, which might be expected to submit readily to
changing appellations, under the changing accidents of ownership, yet
still retain their primitive Scandinavian names--as _Butterlip Howe_,
for example. Nor do I recollect any exceptions to this tendency,
unless in the case of jocose names, such as _Skiddaw's Cub_, for
Lattrig; and into this class, perhaps, falls even the dignified
mountain of _The Old Man_, at the head of Coniston. Mr. Ferguson will
allow that it would be as startling to the dense old Danes of King
Alfred's time, if they had found a mountain of extra pretensions
wearing a modern English name, as it would to the Macedonian
_argyraspides_, if suspecting that, in some coming century, their
mighty leader, 'the great Emathian conqueror,' could by any possible
Dean of St. Patrick, and by any conceivable audacity of legerdemain,
be traced back to _All-eggs-under-the-grate_. If the name really _is_
good English, in that case a separate and _extra_ labour arises for us
all; there must have been some old Danish name for this most
serviceable of fells; and then we have not merely to explain the
present English name, but also to account for the disappearance of
this archæological Danish name. What I would throw out conjecturally
as a bare possibility is this:--When an ancient dialect (A) is
gradually superseded by a more modern one (E), the flood of innovation
which steals over the old reign, and gradually dispossesses it, does
not rush in simultaneously as a torrent, but supervenes stealthily and
unequally, according to the humouring or thwarting of local
circumstances. Nobody, I am sure, is better aware of this accident, as
besetting the transit of dialects, than Mr. Ferguson. For instance,
many of those words which are imported to us from the American United
States, and often amuse us by their picturesqueness, have originally
been carried to America by our own people; in England they lurked for
ages as provincialisms, localised within some narrow circuit, and to
which some trifling barrier (as a river--rivulet--or even a brook)
offered a retarding force. In supercivilised England, a river, it may
be thought, cannot offer much obstruction to the free current of
words; ages ago it must have been bridged over. Sometimes, however, a
bridge is impossible under the transcendent importance of a free
navigation. For instance, at the Bristol Hotwells, the ready and
fluent intercourse with Long Ashton, and a long line of adjacencies,
is effectually obstructed by the necessity of an open water
communication with the Bristol Channel. At one period (_i. e._ when as
yet Liverpool and Glasgow were fifth-rate ports), all the wealth of
the West Indies flowed into England through this little muddy ditch of
the Bristol Avon, and Rownham Ferry became the exponent and measure of
English intercourse with the northern nook of Somersetshire. A river
is bad; but when a mountain of very toilsome ascent happens to be
interposed, the interruption offered to the popular intercourse, and
the results of this interruption, become much more memorable. An
illustration which I can offer on this point, and which, in fact, I
_did_ offer (as, upon inquiry, Mr. Ferguson will find), thirty-eight
years ago, happens to bear with peculiar force upon our immediate
difficulty of Fairfield. The valleys on the northern side of
Kirkstone--namely, in particular, the three valleys of Patterdale,
Matterdale, and Martindale--are as effectually cut off from
intercourse with the valleys on the southern side--namely, the
Windermere valley, Ryedale, and Grasmere, with all their tributary
nooks and attachments--as though an arm of the sea had rolled between
them. It costs a foot traveller half of a summer's day to effect the
passage to and fro over Kirkstone (what the Greeks so tersely
expressed in the case of a race-course[52] by the one word _diaulos_).
And in _my_ time no innkeeper from the Windermere side of Kirkstone
would carry even a solitary individual across with fewer than four
horses. What has been the result? Why, that the dialect on the
northern side of Kirkstone bears the impress of a more ultra-Danish
influence than that upon the Windermere side. In particular this
remarkable difference occurs: not the nouns and verbs merely are
Danish amongst the trans-Kirkstonians (I speak as a Grasmerian), but
even the particles--the very joints and articulations of language. The
Danish _at_, for instance, is used for _to_; I do not mean for _to_
the preposition: they do not say, 'Carry this letter at Mr. 'W.'; but
as the sign of the infinitive mood. 'Tell him _at_ put his spurs on,
and _at_ ride off for a surgeon?' Now this illustration carries along
with it a proof that a stronger and a weaker infusion of the Danish
element, possibly an older and a younger infusion, may prevail even in
close adjacencies, provided they are powerfully divided by walls of
rock that happen to be eight miles thick.
[Footnote 52: I mean that they included the progressive or
outward-bound course, and equally the regressive or homeward-bound
course, within the compass of this one word [Greek: diaulos]. We in
England have a phrase which conventionally has been made to supply the
want of such an idea, but unfortunately with a limitation to the
service of the Post-office. It is the phrase _course of post_. When a
Newcastle man is asked, 'What is the course of post between you and
Liverpool?' he understands, and by a legal decision it has been
settled that he is under an obligation to understand--What is the
_diaulos_, what is the flux and reflux--the to and the fro--the
systole and diastole of the respiration--between you and Liverpool.
What is the number of hours and minutes required for the transit of a
letter from Newcastle to Liverpool, but coupled with the return
transit of the answer? This forward and backward movement constitutes
the _diaulos_: less than this will not satisfy the law as the complex
process understood by the _course of post_. Less than this is only the
half section of a _diaulos_.]
But the inexorable Press, that waits for few men under the rank of a
king, and not always for _him_ (as I happen to know, by having once
seen a proof-sheet corrected by the royal hand of George IV., which
proof exhibited some disloyal signs of impatience), forces me to
adjourn all the rest to next month.--Yours ever,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
STORMS IN ENGLISH HISTORY:
A GLANCE AT THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII.[53]
What two works are those for which at this moment our national
intellect (or, more rigorously speaking, our _popular_ intellect) is
beginning clamorously to call? They are these: first, a
_Conversations-Lexicon_, obeying (as regards plan and purpose) the
general outline of the German work bearing that title; ministering to
the same elementary necessities; implying, therefore, a somewhat
corresponding stage of progress in our own populace and that of
Germany; but otherwise (as regards the executive details in adapting
such a work to the special service of an English public) moving under
moral restraints sterner by much, and more faithfully upheld, than
could rationally be looked for in any great literary enterprise
resigned to purely German impulses. For over the atmosphere of thought
and feeling in Germany there broods no _public_ conscience. Such a
_Conversations-Lexicon_ is one of the two great works for which the
popular mind of England is waiting and watching in silence. The other
(and not less important) work is--a faithful _History of England_. We
will offer, at some future time, a few words upon the first; but upon
the second--here brought before us so advantageously in the earnest,
thoughtful, and oftentimes eloquent volumes of Mr. Froude--we will
venture to offer three or four pages of critical comment.
[Footnote 53: _History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death
of Elizabeth._ By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter
College, Oxford. Vols. I. and II. London: Parker & Son, West Strand.
1856.]
Could the England of the sixteenth century have escaped that great
convulsion which accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries? It is
barely possible that a gentle system of periodic decimations,
distributing this inevitable ruin over an entire century, might have
blunted the edge of the fierce ploughshare: but there were
difficulties in the way of such arrangements, that would too probably
have thwarted the benign purpose.
Meantime, what was it that had stolen like a canker-worm into the
machinery of these monastic bodies, and insensibly had corroded a
principle originally of admitted purity? The malice of Protestantism
has too readily assumed that Popery was answerable for this corrosion.
But it would be hard to show that Popery in any one of its features,
good or bad, manifested itself conspicuously and operatively: nay, to
say the simple truth, it was through the very opposite agency that the
monastic institutions came to ruin: it was because Popery, that
supreme control to which these monasteries had been confided, shrank
from its responsibilities--weakly, lazily, or even perfidiously,
abandoned that supervisorship in default of which neither right of
inspection, nor duty of inspection, nor power of inspection, was found
to be lodged in any quarter--_there_ it was, precisely in that
dereliction of censorial authority, that all went to ruin. All
corporations grow corrupt, unless habitually kept under the eye of
public inspection, or else officially liable to searching visitations.
Now, who were the regular and official visitors of the English
monasteries? Not the local bishops; for in that case the public
clamour, the very notoriety of the scandals (as we see them reported
by Wicliffe and Chaucer), would have guided the general wrath to some
effectual surgery for the wounds and ulcers of the institutions.
Unhappily the official visitors were the heads of the monastic orders;
these, and these only. A Franciscan body, for example, owed no
obedience except to the representative of St. Francis; and this
representative too uniformly resided somewhere on the Continent. And
thus it was that effectually and virtually English monasteries were
subject to no control. Nay, the very corrections of old abuses by
English parliamentary statutes had greatly strengthened the evil.
Formerly, the monastic funds were drawn upon to excess in defraying
the costs of a transmarine visitation. But that evil, rising into
enormous proportions, was at length radically extirpated by
parliamentary statutes that cut down the costs; so that continental
devotees, finding their visitations no longer profitable in a
pecuniary sense, sometimes even costly to themselves, and costly upon
a scale but dimly intelligible to any continental experience, rapidly
cooled down in their pious enthusiasm against monastic delinquencies.
Hatred, at any rate, and malignant anger the visitor had to face, not
impossibly some risk of assassination, in prosecuting his inquiries
into the secret crimes of monks that were often confederated in a
common interest of resistance to all honest or searching inquiry.
But, if to these evils were superadded others of a pecuniary class, it
was easy to anticipate, under this failure of all regular
inspectorship, a period of plenary indulgence to the excesses of these
potent corporations. Such a period came: no man being charged with the
duty of inspection, no man inspected; but never was the danger more
surely at hand, than when it seemed by all ordinary signs to have
absolutely died out. Already, in the days of Richard II., the doom of
the monasteries might be heard muttering in the chambers of the upper
air. In the angry denunciations of Wicliffe, in the popular merriment
of Chaucer, might be read the same sentence of condemnation awarded
against them. Fierce warnings were given to them at intervals. A
petition against them was addressed by the House of Commons to Henry
IV. The son of this prince, the man of Agincourt, though superstitious
enough, if superstition could have availed them, had in _his_ short
reign (so occupied, one might have thought, with war and foreign
affairs) found time to read them a dreadful warning: more than five
scores of these offending bodies (Priories Alien) were suppressed by
that single monarch, the laughing _Hal_ of Jack Falstaff. One whole
century slipped away between this penal suppression and the ministry
of Wolsey. What effect can we ascribe to this admonitory chastisement
upon the general temper and conduct of the monastic interest? It would
be difficult beyond measure at this day to draw up any adequate report
of the foul abuses prevailing in the majority of religious houses, for
the three following reasons:--First, because the main record of such
abuses, after it had been elaborately compiled under the commission of
Henry VIII., was (at the instigation of his eldest daughter Mary) most
industriously destroyed by Bishop Bonner; secondly, because too
generally the original oath of religious fidelity and secrecy, in
matters interesting to the founder and the foundation, was held to
interfere with frank disclosures; thirdly, because, as to much of the
most crying licentiousness, its full and satisfactory detection too
often depended upon a surprise. Steal upon the delinquents suddenly,
and ten to one they were caught _flagrante delicto_: but upon any
notice transpiring of the hostile approach, all was arranged so as to
evade for the moment--or in the end to baffle finally--search alike
and suspicion.
The following report, which Mr. Froude views as the liveliest of all
that Bishop Bonner's zeal has spared, offers a picturesque sketch of
such cases, according to the shape which they often assumed. In
Chaucer's tale, told with such unrivalled _vis comica_, of the
_Trompington Miller and the Two Cambridge Scholars_, we have a most
life-like picture of the miller with his 'big bones,' as a 'dangerous'
man for the nonce. Just such a man, just as dangerous, and just as
big-boned, we find in the person of an abbot--defending his abbey, not
by any reputation for sanctity or learning, but solely by his
_dangerousness_ as the wielder of quarter-staff and cudgel. With no
bull-dog or mastiff, and taken by surprise, such an abbot naturally
lost the stakes for which he played. The letter is addressed to the
Secretary of State:--'Please it your goodness to understand, that on
Friday the 22nd of October (1535), I rode back with speed to take an
inventory of Folkstone; and thence I went to Langden. Whereat
immediately descending from my horse, I sent Bartlett, your servant,
with all _my_ servants, to circumsept the abbey [_i. e._ to form a
hedge round about], and surely to keep [guard] all back-doors and
starting holes. I myself went alone to the abbot's lodging--joining
upon the fields and wood.' [This position, the reporter goes on to
insinuate, was no matter of chance: but, like a rabbit-warren, had
been so placed with a view to the advantages for retreat and for cover
in the adjacent woodlands.] 'I was a good space knocking at the
abbot's door; neither did any sound or sensible manifestation of life
betray itself, saving the abbot's little dog, that within his door,
fast locked, bayed and barked. I found a short pole-axe standing
behind the door; and with it I dashed the abbot's door in pieces _ictu
oculi_ [in the twinkling of an eye]; and set one of my men to keep
that door; and about the house I go with that pole-axe in my hand--_ne
forte_ ["_lest by any chance_"[54]--holding in suspense such words as
"_some violence should be offered_"]--for the abbot is a dangerous,
desperate knave, and a hardy. But, for a conclusion, his gentlewoman
bestirred her stumps towards her starting holes; and then Bartlett,
watching the pursuit, took the tender _demoisel_; and, after I had
examined her, to Dover--to the mayor, to set her in some cage or
prison for eight days. And I brought holy father abbot to Canterbury;
and here, in Christ Church, I will leave him in prison.'
[Footnote 54: '_Ne forte_' is a case of what is learnedly called
_aposiopesis_ or _reticentia_; that is, where (for the sake of effect)
some emphatic words are left to be guessed at: as Virgil's _Quos
ego_----(Whom if I catch, I'll----)]
This little interlude, offering its several figures in such life-like
attitudes--its big-boned abbot prowling up and down the precincts of
the abbey for the chance of a 'shy' at the intruding commissioner--the
little faithful bow-wow doing its _petit possible_ to warn big-bones
of his danger, thus ending his faithful services by an act of farewell
loyalty--and the unlucky _demoisel_ scuttling away to her
rabbit-warren, only to find all the spiracles and peeping-holes
preoccupied or stopped, and her own 'apparel' unhappily locked up '_in
the abbot his coffer_,' so as to render hopeless all evasion or
subsequent denial of the fact, that ten big-boned 'indusia' (or
shirts) lay interleaved in one and the same 'coffer,' _inter totidem
niveas camisas_[55] (or chemises)--all this framed itself as a little
amusing parenthesis, a sort of family picture amongst the dreadful
reports of ecclesiastical commissioners.