DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS.
It is the intention of the publishers to issue, at intervals, a complete
collection of Mr. De Quincey's Writings, uniform with this volume. The
first four volumes of the series will contain,--
I. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria De Profundis.
II. Biographical Essays.
III. Miscellaneous Essays.
IV. The Cæsars.
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
BY
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
CONTENTS.
ON THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE, IN MACBETH
MURDER, CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS
SECOND PAPER ON MURDER
JOAN OF ARC
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH
DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED
ON
THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE,
IN MACBETH.
From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in
Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the
murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could
account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar
awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored
with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see
_why_ it should produce such an effect.
Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any
attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any
other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and
indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to
be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else;
which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this
out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one. Ask of
any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by
a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest
appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as for instance, to
represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other,
or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a
person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless
the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists
produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest
approximation to it. Yet why? For he has actually seen the effect every day
of his life. The reason is--that he allows his understanding to overrule
his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the
laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known
and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not _appear_ a horizontal
line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right
angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down
together. Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line,
and fails of course to produce the effect demanded. Here then is one
instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to
overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to
obliterate the eyes as it were, for not only does the man believe the
evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but,
(what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such
evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore _quoad_ his
consciousness has _not_ seen) that which he _has_ seen every day of his
life. But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no
reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect,
direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it
could _not_ produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and
I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me
to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his _début_ on the stage
of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have
procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders,
by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill
effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste,
and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All
other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once
said to me in a querulous tone, "There has been absolutely nothing _doing_
since his time, or nothing that's worth speaking of." But this is wrong;
for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with
the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered that in the first of
these murders, (that of the Marrs,) the same incident (of a knocking at the
door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur,
which the genius of Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and
the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's
suggestion as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh
proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my
understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length
I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in
ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the
murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this
reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but
ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being
indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind,
(though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct
therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the
greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on,"
exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an
attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he
do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with
_him_; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which
we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,--not a
sympathy[1] of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of
thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific
mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to,
there must be raging some great storm of passion,--jealousy, ambition,
vengeance, hatred,--which will create a hell within him; and into this hell
we are to look.
[Footnote 1: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a
word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has
become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the
word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in
its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of
another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it
is made a mere synonyme of the word _pity_; and hence, instead of saying
"sympathy _with_ another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of
"sympathy _for_ another."]
In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty
of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his
hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife
of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his
feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,--yet, as both were finally
involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally
to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account,
as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending
nature of their victim, "the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound
"the deep damnation of his taking off," this was to be expressed with
peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, _i.e._,
the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all
creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,--was gone, vanished,
extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this
effect is marvellously accomplished in the _dialogues_ and _soliloquies_
themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under
consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention.
If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting
fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in
such a spectacle, is _that_ in which a sigh and a stirring announce the
recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present
in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried
in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through
which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the
streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which
at that moment was possessing the heart of man,--if all at once he should
hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling
away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was
dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete
suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as
at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human
life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded,
measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case
in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the
entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.
Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region
of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady
Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both
are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly
revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a
new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers,
and the murder, must be insulated--cut off by an immeasurable gulph
from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs--locked up and
sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world
of ordinary life is suddenly arrested--laid asleep--tranced--racked into
a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without
abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and
suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes
away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and
it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made
its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we
live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.
O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely
great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun
and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and snow, rain and dew,
hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of
our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no
too much or too little, nothing useless or inert--but that, the further
we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and
self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but
accident!
ON MURDER,
CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.
TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
SIR,--We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of the
Hell-Fire Club, &c. At Brighton, I think it was, that a Society was formed
for the Suppression of Virtue. That society was itself suppressed--but I
am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a character still
more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a Society for the
Encouragement of Murder; but, according to their own delicate [Greek:
euphaemismos], it is styled--The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder. They
profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various
modes of bloodshed; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity
of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and
criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art. But I
need not trouble myself with any attempt to describe the spirit of their
proceedings, as you will collect _that_ much better from one of the Monthly
Lectures read before the society last year. This has fallen into my hands
accidentally, in spite of all the vigilance exercised to keep their
transactions from the public eye. The publication of it will alarm them;
and my purpose is that it should. For I would much rather put them down
quietly, by an appeal to public opinion through you, than by such an
exposure of names as would follow an appeal to Bow Street; which last
appeal, however, if this should fail, I must positively resort to. For it
is scandalous that such things should go on in a Christian land. Even in a
heathen land, the toleration of murder was felt by a Christian writer to be
the most crying reproach of the public morals. This writer was Lactantius;
and with his words, as singularly applicable to the present occasion, I
shall conclude: "Quid tam horribile," says he, "tam tetrum, quam hominis
trucidatio? Ideo severissimis legibus vita nostra munitur; ideo bella
execrabilia sunt. Invenit tamen consuetudo quatenus homicidium sine bello
ac sine legibus faciat: et hoc sibi voluptas quod scelus vindicavit.
Quod si interesse homicidio sceleris conscientia est,--et eidem facinori
spectator obstrictus est cui et admissor; ergo et in his gladiatorum
cædibus non minus cruore profunditur qui spectat, quam ille qui facit:
nec potest esse immunis à sanguine qui voluit effundi; aut videri non
interfecisse, qui interfectori et favit et proemium postulavit." "Human
life," says he, "is guarded by laws of the uttermost rigor, yet custom has
devised a mode of evading them in behalf of murder; and the demands of
taste (voluptas) are now become the same as those of abandoned guilt." Let
the Society of Gentlemen Amateurs consider this; and let me call their
especial attention to the last sentence, which is so weighty, that I shall
attempt to convey it in English: "Now, if merely to be present at a
murder fastens on a man the character of an accomplice; if barely to be a
spectator involves us in one common guilt with the perpetrator; it follows
of necessity, that, in these murders of the amphitheatre, the hand which
inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who
sits and looks on: neither can _he_ be clear of blood who has countenanced
its shedding; nor that man seem other than a participator in murder who
gives his applause to the murderer, and calls for prizes in his behalf."
The "_præmia postulavit_" I have not yet heard charged upon the Gentlemen
Amateurs of London, though undoubtedly their proceedings tend to that;
but the "_interfectori favil_" is implied in the very title of this
association, and expressed in every line of the lecture which I send you.
I am, &c. X. Y. Z.
* * * * *
LECTURE.
GENTLEMEN,--I have had the honor to be appointed by your committee to the
trying task of reading the Williams' Lecture on Murder, considered as one
of the Fine Arts; a task which might be easy enough three or four centuries
ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models had been
exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been
executed by professional men, it must be evident, that in the style
of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something of a
corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance _pari passu_.
People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine
murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed--a knife--a purse--and a
dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment,
are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams
has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in
particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Æschylus or
Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art
to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in
a manner "created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." To sketch the
history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains
as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from
his Majesty's Judges of Assize.
Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to
speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency.
Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am
for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do
affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an
improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not stick to assert,
that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of
thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and
abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great
moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I
would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is
more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for
that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles.
Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it
generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and _that_, I confess,
is its weak side; or it may also be treated _æsthetically_, as the Germans
call it, that is, in relation to good taste.
[Footnote 1: Kant--who carried his demands of unconditional veracity to so
extravagant a length as to affirm, that, if a man were to see an innocent
person escape from a murderer, it would be his duty, on being questioned
by the murderer, to tell the truth, and to point out the retreat of the
innocent person, under any certainty of causing murder. Lest this doctrine
should be supposed to have escaped him in any heat of dispute, on being
taxed with it by a celebrated French writer, he solemnly reaffirmed it,
with his reasons.]
To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons,
viz., S.T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon. To begin with
S.T.C. One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with him in Berners'
Street, (which, by the way, for a short street, has been uncommonly
fruitful in men of genius.) Others were there besides myself; and amidst
some carnal considerations of tea and toast, we were all imbibing a
dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of S.T.C. Suddenly a cry arose
of "_Fire--fire_!" upon which all of us, master and disciples, Plato and
[Greek: hoi peri ton Platona], rushed out, eager for the spectacle. The
fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker's; and, as it promised to
be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my engagements forced me away
from Mr. Coleridge's party before matters were come to a crisis. Some days
after, meeting with my Platonic host, I reminded him of the case, and
begged to know how that very promising exhibition had terminated. "Oh,
sir," said he, "it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously." Now,
does any man suppose that Mr. Coleridge,--who, for all he is too fat to be
a person of active virtue, is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,--that this
good S. T. C., I say, was an incendiary, or capable of wishing any ill
to the poor man and his piano-fortes (many of them, doubtless, with the
additional keys)? On the contrary, I know him to be that sort of man, that
I durst stake my life upon it he would have worked an engine in a case of
necessity, although rather of the fattest for such fiery trials of his
virtue. But how stood the case? Virtue was in no request. On the arrival
of the fire-engines, morality had devolved wholly on the insurance office.
This being the case, he had a right to gratify his taste. He had left his
tea. Was he to have nothing in return?
I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was
entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any
other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which
afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority,
what says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his
Metaphysics) describes what he calls [Greek: kleptaen teleion], i.e., _a
perfect thief_; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion, he
makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he had
seen, and which he styles "a beautiful ulcer." Now will any man pretend,
that, abstractedly considered, a thief could appear to Aristotle a perfect
character, or that Mr. Howship could be enamored of an ulcer? Aristotle,
it is well known, was himself so very moral a character, that, not content
with writing his Nichomachean Ethics, in one volume octavo, he also
wrote another system, called _Magna Moralia_, or Big Ethics. Now, it is
impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all, big or little, should
admire a thief _per se_, and, as to Mr. Howship, it is well known that he
makes war upon all ulcers; and, without suffering himself to be seduced by
their charms, endeavors to banish them from the county of Middlesex. But
the truth is, that, however objectionable _per se_, yet, relatively to
others of their class, both a thief and an ulcer may have infinite degrees
of merit. They are both imperfections, it is true; but to be imperfect
being their essence, the very greatness of their imperfection becomes their
perfection. _Spartam nactus es, hunc exorna_. A thief like Autolycus or
Mr. Barrington, and a grim phagedænic ulcer, superbly defined, and running
regularly through all its natural stages, may no less justly be regarded
as ideals after _their_ kind, than the most faultless moss-rose amongst
flowers, in its progress from bud to "bright consummate flower;" or,
amongst human flowers, the most magnificent young female, apparelled in
the pomp of womanhood. And thus not only the ideal of an inkstand may be
imagined, (as Mr. Coleridge demonstrated in his celebrated correspondence
with Mr. Blackwood,) in which, by the way, there is not so much, because an
inkstand is a laudable sort of thing, and a valuable member of society; but
even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
Really, gentlemen, I beg pardon for so much philosophy at one time, and now
let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense, and a
rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But
suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it,[Greek: Tetelesai],
or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) [Greek: eirzasai]; suppose the
poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off
like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our
best, by putting out our legs to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all
to no purpose--"abiit, evasit," &c.--why, then, I say, what's the use of
any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of
Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but _we_
can't mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it
is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us treat
it æsthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is
the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and
have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which,
morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon,
when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious
performance. Thus all the world is pleased; the old proverb is justified,
that it is an ill wind which blows nobody good; the amateur, from looking
bilious and sulky, by too close an attention to virtue, begins to pick up
his crumbs, and general hilarity prevails. Virtue has had her day; and
henceforward, _Vertu_ and Connoisseurship have leave to provide for
themselves. Upon this principle, gentlemen, I propose to guide your
studies, from Cain to Mr. Thurtell. Through this great gallery of murder,
therefore, together let us wander hand in hand, in delighted admiration,
while I endeavor to point your attention to the objects of profitable
criticism.
* * * * *
The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder, and the
father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. All the
Cains were men of genius. Tubal Cain invented tubes, I think, or some such
thing. But, whatever were the originality and genius of the artist, every
art was then in its infancy, and the works must be criticised with a
recollection of that fact. Even Tubal's work would probably be little
approved at this day in Sheffield; and therefore of Cain (Cain senior, I
mean,) it is no disparagement to say, that his performance was but so so.
Milton, however, is supposed to have thought differently. By his way of
relating the case, it should seem to have been rather a pet murder with
him, for he retouches it with an apparent anxiety for its picturesque
effect:
Whereat he inly raged; and, as they talk'd,
Smote him into the midriff with a stone
That beat out life: he fell; and, deadly pale,
Groan'd out his soul _with gushing blood effus'd_.
_Par. Lost, B. XI_.
Upon this, Richardson, the painter, who had an eye for effect, remarks as
follows, in his Notes on Paradise Lost, p. 497: "It has been thought,"
says he, "that Cain beat (as the common saying is) the breath out of his
brother's body with a great stone; Milton gives in to this, with the
addition, however, of a large wound." In this place it was a judicious
addition; for the rudeness of the weapon, unless raised and enriched by
a warm, sanguinary coloring, has too much of the naked air of the savage
school; as if the deed were perpetrated by a Polypheme without science,
premeditation, or anything but a mutton bone. However, I am chiefly pleased
with the improvement, as it implies that Milton was an amateur. As to
Shakspeare, there never was a better; as his description of the murdered
Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI., of Duncan's, Banquo's, &c., sufficiently
proves.
The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to see how
it slumbered without improvement for ages. In fact, I shall now be obliged
to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly unworthy of
notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in the age of
Pericles, produced no murder of the slightest merit; and Rome had too
little originality of genius in any of the arts to succeed, where her
model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks under the very idea of
murder. "The man was murdered;"--how will this sound in Latin? _Interfectus
est, interemptus est_--which simply expresses a homicide; and hence the
Christian Latinity of the middle ages was obliged to introduce a new word,
such as the feebleness of classic conceptions never ascended to. _Murdratus
est_, says the sublimer dialect of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish,
school of murder kept alive whatever was yet known in the art, and
gradually transferred it to the Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was
always respectable, even in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln
shows, which was honored with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of
another performance from the same school, which he puts into the mouth of
the Lady Abbess.
Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot but
think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie, would have made
first-rate artists; and it is on all accounts to be regretted, that the
priggism of Cicero robbed his country of the only chance she had for
distinction in this line. As the _subject_ of a murder, no person could
have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have howled with
panic, if he had heard Cethegus under his bed. It would have been truly
diverting to have listened to him; and satisfied I am, gentlemen, that he
would have preferred the _utile_ of creeping into a closet, or even into a
_cloaca_, to the _honestum_ of facing the bold artist.
To come now to the dark ages--(by which we, that speak with precision,
mean, _par excellence_, the tenth century, and the times immediately before
and after)--these ages ought naturally to be favorable to the art of
murder, as they were to church architecture, to stained glass, &c.; and,
accordingly, about the latter end of this period, there arose a great
character in our art, I mean the Old Man of the Mountains. He was a shining
light, indeed, and I need not tell you, that the very word "assassin" is
deduced from him. So keen an amateur was he, that on one occasion, when his
own life was attempted by a favorite assassin, he was so much pleased
with the talent shown, that notwithstanding the failure of the artist, he
created him a duke upon the spot, with remainder to the female line, and
settled a pension on him for three lives. Assassination is a branch of the
art which demands a separate notice; and I shall devote an entire lecture
to it. Meantime, I shall only observe how odd it is, that this branch of
the art has flourished by fits. It never rains, but it pours. Our own age
can boast of some fine specimens; and, about two centuries ago, there was a
most brilliant constellation of murders in this class. I need hardly say,
that I allude especially to those five splendid works,--the assassinations
of William I, of Orange, of Henry IV., of France, of the Duke of
Buckingham, (which you will find excellently described in the letters
published by Mr. Ellis, of the British Museum,) of Gustavus Adolphus, and
of Wallenstein. The King of Sweden's assassination, by the by, is doubted
by many writers, Harte amongst others; but they are wrong. He was murdered;
and I consider his murder unique in its excellence; for he was murdered at
noon-day, and on the field of battle,--a feature of original conception,
which occurs in no other work of art that I remember. Indeed, all of these
assassinations may be studied with profit by the advanced connoisseur. They
are all of them _exemplaria_, of which one may say,--
Nociurnâ versatâ manu, versate diurne;
Especially _nocturnâ_.
In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to
excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths; and,
from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed to the
aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving for scenical
effect. But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed
from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really _does_
surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it
is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries
has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch,
that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life
attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's
philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we
needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this
world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these
cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well
composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that
subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.
The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except
Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was all
_but_ murdered--murdered within an inch--one must say it of him. The case
was this, as reported by Baillet in his _Vie De M. Des Cartes_, tom. I. p.
102-3. In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might be about twenty-six years
old, he was touring about as usual, (for he was as restless as a hyæna,)
and, coming to the Elbe, either at Gluckstadt or at Hamburgh, he took
shipping for East Friezland: what he could want in East Friezland no man
has ever discovered; and perhaps he took this into consideration himself;
for, on reaching Embden, he resolved to sail instantly for _West_
Friezland; and being very impatient of delay, he hired a bark, with a few
mariners to navigate it. No sooner had he got out to sea than he made a
pleasing discovery, viz. that he had shut himself up in a den of murderers.
His crew, says M. Baillet, he soon found out to be "des scélérats,"--not
_amateurs_, gentlemen, as we are, but professional men--the height of
whose ambition at that moment was to cut his throat. But the story is too
pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from the
French of his biographer: "M. Des Cartes had no company but that of his
servant, with whom he was conversing in French. The sailors, who took him
for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must
have money about him. Accordingly they came to a resolution by no means
advantageous to his purse. There is this difference, however, between
sea-robbers and the robbers in forests, that the latter may, without
hazard, spare the lives of their victims; whereas the other cannot put
a passenger on shore in such a case without running the risk of being
apprehended. The crew of M. Des Cartes arranged their measures with a view
to evade any danger of that sort. They observed that he was a stranger from
a distance, without acquaintance in the country, and that nobody would take
any trouble to inquire about him, in case he should never come to hand,
(_quand il viendroit à manquer_.") Think, gentlemen, of these Friezland
dogs discussing a philosopher as if he were a puncheon of rum. "His temper,
they remarked, was very mild and patient; and, judging from the gentleness
of his deportment, and the courtesy with which he treated themselves, that
he could be nothing more than some green young man, they concluded that
they should have all the easier task in disposing of his life. They made no
scruple to discuss the whole matter in his presence, as not supposing that
he understood any other language than that in which he conversed with his
servant; and the amount of their deliberation was--to murder him, then to
throw him into the sea, and to divide his spoils."
Excuse my laughing, gentlemen, but the fact is, I always _do_ laugh when I
think of this case--two things about it seem so droll. One, is, the horrid
panic or "funk," (as the men of Eton call it,) in which Des Cartes must
have found himself upon hearing this regular drama sketched for his own
death--funeral--succession and administration to his effects. But another
thing, which seems to me still more funny about this affair is, that
if these Friezland hounds had been "game," we should have no Cartesian
philosophy; and how we could have done without _that_, considering the
worlds of books it has produced, I leave to any respectable trunk-maker to
declare.
However, to go on; spite of his enormous funk, Des Cartes showed fight,
and by that means awed these Anti-Cartesian rascals. "Finding," says M.
Baillet, "that the matter was no joke, M. Des Cartes leaped upon his feet
in a trice, assumed a stern countenance that these cravens had never looked
for, and addressing them in their own language, threatened to run them
through on the spot if they dared to offer him any insult." Certainly,
gentlemen, this would have been an honor far above the merits of such
inconsiderable rascals--to be spitted like larks upon a Cartesian sword;
and therefore I am glad M. Des Cartes did not rob the gallows by executing
his threat, especially as he could not possibly have brought his vessel to
port, after he had murdered his crew; so that he must have continued to
cruise for ever in the Zuyder Zee, and would probably have been mistaken by
sailors for the _Flying Dutchman_, homeward bound. "The spirit which M. Des
Cartes manifested," says his biographer, "had the effect of magic on these
wretches. The suddenness of their consternation struck their minds with a
confusion which blinded them to their advantage, and they conveyed him to
his destination as peaceably as he could desire."
Possibly, gentlemen, you may fancy that, on the model of Cæsar's address
to his poor ferryman,--"_Cæsarem vehis et fortunas ejus_"--M. Des Cartes
needed only to have said,--"Dogs, you cannot cut my throat, for you carry
Des Cartes and his philosophy," and might safely have defied them to do
their worst. A German emperor had the same notion, when, being cautioned to
keep out of the way of a cannonading, he replied, "Tut! man. Did you ever
hear of a cannon-ball that killed an emperor?" As to an emperor I cannot
say, but a less thing has sufficed to smash a philosoper; and the next
great philosopher of Europe undoubtedly _was_ murdered. This was Spinosa.
I know very well the common opinion about him is, that he died in his bed.
Perhaps he did, but he was murdered for all that; and this I shall prove
by a book published at Brussels, in the year 1731, entitled, _La Via de
Spinosa; Par M. Jean Colerus_, with many additions, from a MS. life, by one
of his friends. Spinosa died on the 21st February, 1677, being then little
more than forty-four years old. This of itself looks suspicious; and M.
Jean admits, that a certain expression in the MS. life of him would warrant
the conclusion, "que sa mort n'a pas été tout-à-fait naturelle." Living in
a damp country, and a sailor's country, like Holland, he may be thought to
have indulged a good deal in grog, especially in punch,[1] which was then
newly discovered. Undoubtedly he might have done so; but the fact is that
he did not. M. Jean calls him "extrêmement sobre en son boire et en son
manger." And though some wild stories were afloat about his using the juice
of mandragora (p. 140,) and opium, (p. 144,) yet neither of these articles
appeared in his druggist's bill. Living, therefore, with such sobriety, how
was it possible that he should die a natural death at forty-four? Hear his
biographer's account:--"Sunday morning the 21st of February, before it was
church time, Spinosa came down stairs and conversed with the master and
mistress of the house." At this time, therefore, perhaps ten o'clock on
Sunday morning, you see that Spinosa was alive, and pretty well. But it
seems "he had summoned from Amsterdam a certain physician, whom," says the
biographer, "I shall not otherwise point out to notice than by these two
letters, L.M. This L.M. had directed the people of the house to purchase an
ancient cock, and to have him boiled forthwith, in order that Spinosa might
take some broth about noon, which in fact he did, and ate some of the _old
cock_ with a good appetite, after the landlord and his wife had returned
from church.
[Footnote 1: "June 1, 1675.--Drinke part of 3 boules of punch, (a liquor
very strainge to me,)" says the Rev. Mr. Henry Teonge, in his Diary lately
published. In a note on this passage, a reference is made to Fryer's
Travels to the East Indies, 1672, who speaks of "that enervating liquor
called _Paunch_, (which is Indostan for five,) from five ingredients."
Made thus, it seems the medical men called it Diapente; if with four only,
Diatessaron. No doubt, it was its Evangelical name that recommended it to
the Rev. Mr. Teonge.]
"In the afternoon, L.M. staid alone with Spinosa, the people of the house
having returned to church; on coming out from which they learnt, with much
surprise, that Spinosa had died about three o'clock, in the presence
of L.M., who took his departure for Amsterdam the same evening, by the
night-boat, without paying the least attention to the deceased. No doubt he
was the readier to dispense with these duties, as he had possessed himself
of a ducatoon and a small quantity of silver, together with a silver-hafted
knife, and had absconded with his pillage." Here you see, gentlemen, the
murder is plain, and the manner of it. It was L.M. who murdered Spinosa
for his money. Poor S. was an invalid, meagre, and weak: as no blood
was observed, L.M., no doubt, threw him down and smothered him with
pillows,--the poor man being already half suffocated by his infernal
dinner. But who was L.M.? It surely never could be Lindley Murray; for I
saw him at York in 1825; and besides, I do not think he Would do such a
thing; at least, not to a brother grammarian: for you know, gentlemen, that
Spinosa wrote a very respectable Hebrew grammar.
Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not
murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the
seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for
murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can prove that
he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least
resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very
highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest die
to refuse to be murdered, when a competent force appears to murder you.
However, gentlemen, though he was not murdered, I am happy to assure you
that (by his own account) he was three times very near being murdered. The
first time was in the spring of 1640, when he pretends to have circulated
a little MS. on the king's behalf, against the Parliament; he never could
produce this MS., by the by; but he says that, "Had not his Majesty
dissolved the Parliament," (in May,) "it had brought him into danger of his
life." Dissolving the Parliament, however, was of no use; for, in November
of the same year, the Long Parliament assembled, and Hobbes, a second time,
fearing he should be murdered, ran away to France. This looks like the
madness of John Dennis, who thought that Louis XIV. would never make peace
with Queen Anne, unless he were given up to his vengeance; and actually ran
away from the sea-coast in that belief. In France, Hobbes managed to take
care of his throat pretty well for ten years; but at the end of that time,
by way of paying court to Cromwell, he published his Leviathan. The old
coward now began to "funk" horribly for the third time; he fancied the
swords of the cavaliers were constantly at his throat, recollecting how
they had served the Parliament ambassadors at the Hague and Madrid. "Turn,"
says he, in his dog-Latin life of himself,
"Tum venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham;
Tanquam proscripto terror ubique aderat."
And accordingly he ran home to England. Now, certainly, it is very true
that a man deserved a cudgelling for writing Leviathan; and two or three
cudgellings for writing a pentameter ending so villanously as--"terror
ubique aderat!" But no man ever thought him worthy of anything beyond
cudgelling. And, in fact, the whole story is a bounce of his own. For, in a
most abusive letter which he wrote "to a learned person," (meaning Wallis
the mathematician,) he gives quite another account of the matter, and says
(p. 8,) he ran home "because he would not trust his safety with the French
clergy;" insinuating that he was likely to be murdered for his religion,
which would have been a high joke indeed--Tom's being brought to the stake
for religion.
Bounce or not bounce, however, certain it is, that Hobbes, to the end of
his life, feared that somebody would murder him. This is proved by the
story I am going to tell you: it is not from a manuscript, but, (as Mr.
Coleridge says,) it is as good as manuscript; for it comes from a book
now entirely forgotten, viz., "The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined; in a
Conference between him and a Student in Divinity," (published about ten
years before Hobbes's death.) The book is anonymous, but it was written by
Tennison, the same who, about thirty years after, succeeded Tillotson as
Archbishop of Canterbury. The introductory anecdote is as follows: "A
certain divine, it seems, (no doubt Tennison himself,) took an annual tour
of one month to different parts of the island. In one of these excursions
(1670) he visited the Peak in Derbyshire, partly in consequence of Hobbes's
description of it. Being in that neighborhood, he could not but pay a visit
to Buxton; and at the very moment of his arrival, he was fortunate enough
to find a party of gentlemen dismounting at the inn door, amongst whom was
a long thin fellow, who turned out to be no less a person than Mr. Hobbes,
who probably had ridden over from Chattsworth. Meeting so great a lion,--a
tourist, in search of the picturesque, could do no less than present
himself in the character of bore. And luckily for this scheme, two of Mr.
Hobbes's companions were suddenly summoned away by express; so that, for
the rest of his stay at Buxton, he had Leviathan entirely to himself, and
had the honor of bowsing with him in the evening. Hobbes, it seems, at
first showed a good deal of stiffness, for he was shy of divines; but this
wore off, and he became very sociable and funny, and they agreed to go into
the bath together. How Tennison could venture to gambol in the same water
with Leviathan, I cannot explain; but so it was: they frolicked about like
two dolphins, though Hobbes must have been as old as the hills; and
"in those intervals wherein they abstained from swimming and plunging
themselves," [i.e., diving,] "they discoursed of many things relating to
the Baths of the Ancients, and the Origine of Springs. When they had in
this manner passed away an hour, they stepped out of the bath; and, having
dried and cloathed themselves, they sate down in expectation of such a
supper as the place afforded; designing to refresh themselves like the
_Deipnosophilæ_, and rather to reason than to drink profoundly. But in this
innocent intention they were interrupted by the disturbance arising from a
little quarrel, in which some of the ruder people in the house were for a
short time engaged. At this Mr. Hobbes seemed much concerned, though he was
at some distance from the persons." And why was he concerned, gentlemen?
No doubt you fancy, from, some benign and disinterested love of peace and
harmony, worthy of an old man and a philosopher. But listen--"For a while
he was not composed, but related it once or twice as to himself, with a
low and careful tone, how Sextus Roscius was murthered after supper by
the Balneæ Palatinæ. Of such general extent is that remark of Cicero, in
relation to Epicurus the Atheist, of whom he observed that he of all men
dreaded most those things which he contemned--Death and the Gods." Merely
because it was supper time, and in the neighborhood of a bath, Mr. Hobbes
must have the fate of Sextus Roscius. What logic was there in this, unless
to a man who was always dreaming of murder? Here was Leviathan, no
longer afraid of the daggers of English cavaliers or French clergy, but
"frightened from his propriety" by a row in an ale-house between some
honest clod-hoppers of Derbyshire, whom his own gaunt scare-crow of a
person that belonged to quite another century, would have frightened out of
their wits.