readers of novels. Love, we are told authoritatively, has not that
importance in the actual practice of life--nor that extensive
influence upon human affairs--which novel-writers postulate, and which
the interest of novels presumes. Something to this effect has been
said by an eminent writer; and the law is generally laid down upon
these principles by cynical old men, and envious blue-stockings who
have outlived their personal attractions. The sentiment however is
false even for the present condition of society; and it will become
continually _more_ false as society improves. For what is the great
commanding event, the one sole revolution, in a woman's life?
Marriage. Viewing her course from the cradle to the grave in the light
of a drama, I am entitled to say that her wedding-day is its
catastrophe--or, in technical language, its _peripeteia_: whatever
else is important to her in succeeding years has its origin in that
event. So much for _that_ sex. For the other, it is admitted that Love
is not, in the same exclusive sense, the governing principle under
which their lives move: but what then are the concurrent forces, which
sometimes happen to coöperate with that agency--but more frequently
disturb it? They are two; Ambition, and Avarice. Now for the vast
majority of men--Ambition, or the passion for personal distinction,
has too narrow a stage of action, its grounds of hope are too fugitive
and unsteady, to furnish any durable or domineering influence upon the
course of life. Avarice again is so repulsive to the native nobility
of the human heart, that it rarely obtains the dignity of a passion:
great energy of character is requisite to form a consistent and
accomplished miser: and of the mass of men it may be said--that, if
the beneficence of nature has in some measure raised them _above_
avarice by the necessity of those social instincts which she has
impressed upon their hearts, in some measure also they sink _below_ it
by their deficiencies in that austerity of self-denial and that savage
strength of will which are indispensable qualifications for the _rôle_
of heroic miser. A perfect miser in fact is a great man, and therefore
a very rare one. Take away then the two forces of Ambition and
Avarice,--what remains even to the male sex as a capital and
overruling influence in life, except the much nobler force of Love?
History confirms this view: the self-devotions and the voluntary
martyrdoms of all other passions collectively have been few by
comparison with those which have been offered at the altar of Love. If
society should ever make any great advance, and man as a species grow
conspicuously nobler, Love also will grow nobler; and a passion, which
at present is possible in any elevated form for one perhaps in a
hundred, will then be coëxtensive with the human heart.
[Footnote 68: This was published in _facsimile_ from the Original MS.
in _The Archivist and Autograph Review_, edited by S. Davey,
F.R.S.L.--June, 1888. [H.]]
On this view of the grandeur which belongs to the passion of Sexual
Love in the economy of life, as it is and as it may be, Novels have an
all-sufficient justification; and Novel-readers are obeying a higher
and more philosophic impulse than they are aware of. They seek an
imaginary world where the harsh hindrances, which in the real one too
often fret and disturb the 'course of true love,' may be forced to
bend to the claims of justice and the pleadings of the heart. In
company with the agitations and the dread suspense--the anguish and
the tears, which so often wait upon the uncertainties of earthly love,
they demand at the hands of the Novelist a final event corresponding
to the natural award of celestial wisdom and benignity. What they are
striving after, in short, is--to realize an ideal; and to reproduce
the actual world under more harmonious arrangements. This is the
secret craving of the reader; and Novels are shaped to meet it. With
what success, is a separate and independent question: the execution
cannot prejudice the estimate of their aim and essential purpose.
Fair and unknown Owner of this Album, whom perhaps I have never
seen--whom perhaps I never _shall_ see, pardon me for wasting two
pages of your elegant manual upon this semi-metaphysical disquisition.
Let the subject plead my excuse. And believe that I am, Fair
Incognita!
Your faithful servant,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
_Professor Wilson's--Glocester Place, Edinburgh._
_Friday night, December 3, 1830._
DE QUINCEY'S PORTRAIT.
The only one which can be considered satisfactory is that of which a
copy is prefixed to these Volumes. It is from a steel engraving by
Frank Croll, taken at Edinburgh from a daguerreotype by Howie in 1850.
DE QUINCEY'S own opinion of it is expressed to me in the amusing
letter which was published in _The Instructor_ (New Series, vol. vi.
p. 145).
TO THE EDITOR OF _THE INSTRUCTOR_.
_September 21, 1850._
My Dear Sir,--I am much obliged to you for communicating to us (that
is, to my daughters and myself) the engraved portrait, enlarged from
the daguerreotype original. The engraver, at least, seems to have done
his part ably. As to one of the earlier artists concerned, viz. the
sun of July, I suppose it is not allowable to complain of _him_, else
my daughters are inclined to upbraid him with having made the mouth
too long. But, of old, it was held audacity to suspect the sun's
veracity:--'Solem quis dicere falsum audeat!' And I remember that,
half a century ago, the _Sun_ newspaper, in London, used to fight
under sanction of that motto. But it was at length discovered by the
learned, that Sun _junior_, viz. the newspaper, _did_ sometimes
indulge in fibbing. The ancient prejudice about the solar truth broke
down, therefore, in that instance; and who knows but Sun _senior_ may
be detected, now that our optical glasses are so much improved, in
similar practices? in which case he may have only been 'keeping his
hand in' when operating upon that one feature of the mouth. The rest
of the portrait, we all agree, does credit to his talents, showing
that he is still wide-awake, and not at all the superannuated old
artist that some speculators in philosophy had dreamed of his
becoming.
As an accompaniment to this portrait, your wish is that I should
furnish a few brief chronological memoranda of my own life. _That_
would be hard for me to do, and _when_ done, might not be very
interesting for others to read. Nothing makes such dreary and
monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically
arrayed, of inevitable facts in a man's life. One is so certain of the
man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal
to lie under the necessity of reading it. That the man began by being
a boy--that he went to school--and that, by intense application to his
studies, 'which he took to be _his_ portion in this life,' he rose to
distinction as a robber of orchards, seems so probable, upon the
whole, that I am willing to accept it as a postulate. That he
married--that, in fulness of time, he was hanged, or (being a humble,
unambitious man) that he was content with deserving it--these little
circumstances are so naturally to be looked for, as sown broadcast up
and down the great fields of biography, that any one life becomes, in
this respect, but the echo of thousands. Chronologic successions of
events and dates, such as these, which, belonging to the race,
illustrate nothing in the individual, are as wearisome as they are
useless.
A better plan will be--to detach some single chapter from the
experiences of childhood, which is likely to offer, at least, this
kind of value--either that it will record some of the deep impressions
under which my childish sensibilities expanded, and the ideas which at
that time brooded continually over my mind, or else will expose the
traits of character that slumbered in those around me. This plan will
have the advantage of not being liable to the suspicion of vanity or
egotism; for, I beg the reader to understand distinctly, that I do not
offer this sketch as deriving any part of what interest it may have
from myself, as the person concerned in it. If the particular
experience selected is really interesting, in virtue of its own
circumstances, then it matters not to _whom_ it happened. Suppose that
a man should record a perilous journey, it will be no fair inference
that he records it as a journey performed by himself. Most sincerely
he may be able to say, that he records it not _for_ that relation to
himself, but _in spite of_ that relation. The incidents, being
absolutely independent, in their power to amuse, of all personal
reference, must be equally interesting [he will say] whether they
occurred to A or to B. That is _my_ case. Let the reader abstract from
_me_ as a person that by accident, or in some partial sense, may have
been previously known to himself. Let him read the sketch as
belonging to one who wishes to be profoundly anonymous. I offer it not
as owing anything to its connection with a particular individual, but
as likely to be amusing separately for itself; and if I make any
mistake in _that_, it is not a mistake of vanity exaggerating the
consequence of what relates to my own childhood, but a simple mistake
of the judgment as to the power of amusement that may attach to a
particular succession of reminiscences.
Excuse the imperfect development which in some places of the sketch
may have been given to my meaning. I suffer from a most afflicting
derangement of the nervous system, which at times makes it difficult
for me to write at all, and always makes me impatient, in a degree not
easily understood, of recasting what may seem insufficiently, or even
incoherently, expressed.--Believe me, ever yours,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
This letter was a preface to 'A Sketch from Childhood,' of which the
first and second parts appeared in that Volume.
After this came a blank of six months--a whole Volume containing
nothing. In Volume VIII. (January, 1852), 'A Sketch from Childhood'
was resumed with the following whimsical apology. It then ran for five
months consecutively:--
(_January, 1852._)
I understand that several readers of my _Sketch from Childhood_ have
lodged complaints against me for not having pursued it to what they
can regard as a satisfactory close. Some may have done this in a
gentle tone, as against an irreclaimable procrastinator, amiably
inclined, perhaps, to penitence, though constitutionally incapable of
amendment; but others more clamorously, as against one faithless to
his engagements, and deliberately a defaulter. Themselves they regard
in the light of creditors, and me as a slippery debtor, who, having
been permitted to pay his debts by instalments--three, suppose, or
four:--has paid two, and then absconded in order to evade the rest.
Certainly to this extent I go along with them myself, that, in all
cases of a tale or story moving through the regular stages of a plot,
the writer, by the act of publishing the introductory parts, pledges
himself to unweave the whole tissue to the last. The knot that he has
tied, though it should prove a very Gordian knot, he is bound to
untie. And, if he fails to do so, I doubt whether a reader has not a
right of action against him for having wantonly irritated a curiosity
that was never meant to be gratified--for having trifled with his
feelings--and, possibly, for having distressed and perplexed his moral
sense; as, for instance, by entangling the hero and heroine (two young
people that can be thoroughly recommended for virtue) in an Irish bog
of misfortunes, and there leaving them to their fate--the gentleman up
to his shoulders, and the poor lady, therefore, in all probability up
to her lips. But, in a case like the present, where the whole is
offered as a _sketch_, an action would not lie. A sketch, by its very
name, is understood to be a fragmentary thing: it is a _torso_, which
may want the head, or the feet, or the arms, and still remain a
marketable piece of sculpture. In buying a horse, you may look into
his mouth, but not in buying a _torso_: for, if all his teeth have
been gone for ten centuries, which would certainly operate in the way
of discount upon the price of a horse, very possibly the loss would be
urged as a good ground for an _extra_ premium upon the torso. Besides,
it is hard to see how any proper _end_ could be devised for a paper of
this nature, reciting a few incidents, sad and gay, from the records
of a half-forgotten childhood, unless by putting the child to death;
for which dénouement, unhappily, there was no solid historical
foundation.
Right or wrong, however, my accusers are entitled to my gratitude;
since in the very fact of their anger is involved a compliment. By
proclaiming their indignation against the procrastinating or
absconding sketcher, they proclaim their interest in the sketch; and,
therefore, if any fierce Peter Peebles should hang upon my skirts,
haling me back to work, and denouncing me to the world as a fugitive
from my public duties, I shall not feel myself called upon to
contradict him. As often as he nails me with the charge of being a
skulker from work _in meditatione fugæ_, I shall turn round and nail
_him_ with the charge of harbouring an intense admiration for me, and
putting a most hyperbolical value upon my services; or else why should
he give himself so much trouble, after so many months are gone by, in
pursuing and recapturing me? On this principle, I shall proceed with
others who may have joined the cry of the accusers, obediently
submitting to their pleasure, doing my best, therefore, to supply a
conclusion which in my own eyes had not seemed absolutely required,
and content to bear the utmost severity of their censure as applied to
myself, the workman, in consideration of the approbation which that
censure carries with it by implication to the work itself.
END OF VOLUME I.