Chapter 23

Voltaire and Rousseau have the double title to hatred of being Frenchmen and freethinkers. But even orthodox Frenchmen fare little better. 'The French Bossuets, Bourdaloues, Fénelons, &c., whatever may be thought of their meagre and attenuated rhetoric, are one and all the most commonplace of thinkers.' In fact, the mere mention of France acts upon him like a red rag on a bull. The French, 'in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up, from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings,' are incapable of English earnestness. Their taste is 'anything but good in all that department of wit and humour'--the department, apparently, of anecdotes--'and the ground lies in their natural want of veracity;' whereas England bases upon its truthfulness a well-founded claim to 'a moral pre-eminence among the nations.' Belgians, French, and Italians attract the inconsiderate by 'facile obsequiousness,' which, however, is a pendent of 'impudence and insincerity. Want of principle and want of moral sensibility compose the original _fundus_ of southern manners.' Our faults of style, such as they are, proceed from our manliness. In France there are no unmarried women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity--'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most gormandising races in Europe.' They display a brutal selfishness in satisfying their appetites, whereas Englishmen at all public meals are remarkably conspicuous for 'a spirit of mutual attention and self-sacrifice.' It is enough to show the real degradation of their habits, that they use the 'odious gesture' of shrugging their shoulders, and are fond of the 'vile ejaculation "bah!"' which is as bad as to puff the smoke of a tobacco-pipe into your companion's face. They have neither self-respect nor respect for others. French masters are never dignified, though sometimes tyrannical; French servants are always, even without meaning it, disrespectfully familiar. Many of their manners and usages are 'essentially vulgar, and their apparent affability depends not on kindness of heart, but love of talking.'

The impudence of the assertions is really amusing, though one cannot but regret that the vulgar prejudice of the old-fashioned John Bull should have been embodied in the pages of a master of our language. They are worth notice because they were not special to De Quincey, but characteristic of one very intelligible tendency of his generation. De Quincey's prejudices are chiefly the reflection of those of the Coleridge school in general, though he added to them a few pet aversions of his own. At times his genuine acuteness of mind raises him above the teaching of his masters, or at least enables him to detect their weaknesses. He discovers Coleridge's plagiarisms, though he believes and, indeed, speaks in the most exaggerated terms of his philosophical pretensions; whilst, in treating of Wordsworth, he points out with great skill the fallacy of some of his theories and the inconsistency of his practice. But whilst keenly observant of some of the failings of his friends, he reproduces others in even an exaggerated type. He shows to the full their narrow-minded hatred of the preceding century, of all forms of excellence which did not correspond to their favourite types, and of all speculation which did not lead to, or start from their characteristic doctrines. The error is fully pardonable. We must not look to men who are leading a revolt against established modes of thought for a full appreciation of the doctrines of their antagonists; and if De Quincey could recognise no merit in Voltaire or Rousseau, in Locke, Paley, or Jeremy Bentham, their followers were quite prepared to retaliate in kind. One feels, however, that such prejudices are more respectable when they are the foibles of a strong mind engaged in active warfare. We can pardon the old campaigner, who has become bitter in an internecine contest. It is not quite so pleasant to discover the same bitterness in a gentleman who has looked on from a distance, and never quite made up his mind to buckle on his armour. De Quincey had not earned the right of speaking evil of his enemies. If a man chances to be a Hedonist, he should show the good temper which is the best virtue of the indolent. To lie on a bed of roses, and snarl at everybody who contradicts your theories, seems to imply rather testiness of temper than strength of conviction. De Quincey is a Christian on Epicurean principles. He dislikes an infidel because his repose is disturbed by the arguments of freethinkers. He fears that he will be forced to think conscientiously, and to polish his logical weapons afresh. He mutters that the man is a fool, and could be easily thrashed if it were worth while, and then turns back to his opium and his rhetoric and his beloved Church of England. There is no pleasanter institution for a gentleman who likes magnificent historical associations, and heartily hates the rude revolutionists who would turn the world upside down, and thereby disturb the rest of dreamy metaphysicians.

He is quite pathetic, too, about the British Constitution. 'Destroy the House of Lords,' he exclaims, 'and henceforward, for people like you and me, England will be no habitable land.' Here, he seems to say, is one charming elysium, where no rude hand has swept away the cobwebs or replaced the good old-fashioned machinery; here we may find rest in the 'pure, holy, and magnificent Church,' whose Articles, interpreted by Coleridge, may guide us through the most wondrous of metaphysical labyrinths, and dwell in a grand constitutional edifice, rich in picturesque memories, and blending into one complex harmony elements contributed by a long series of centuries. And you, wretched French revolutionists, with your love of petty precision, and irreverent radicals and utilitarians, with your grovelling material notions, propose to level, and destroy, and break in upon my delicious reveries. No old Hebrew prophet could be more indignant with the enemy who threatened to break down the carved work of his temples with axes and hammers. But his complaint is, after all, the voice of the sluggard. Let me dream a little longer; for much as I love my country and its institutions, I cannot rouse myself to fight for them. It is enough if I call their assailants an ugly name or so, and at times begin to write what might be the opening pages of the preface to some very great work of the future. Alas! the first digression diverts the thread of the discourse; the task becomes troublesome, and the labour is abruptly broken off. And so in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding for magazines. It sounds, and many people will say that it is, a harsh and, perhaps they will add, a stupid judgment. If so, they may find plenty of admirers who will supply the eulogistic side here too briefly indicated. I will only say two things: first, that there are very few writers who have revealed new capacities in the language, and in English literature they might almost be counted on the fingers. Secondly, I must confess that I have often consulted De Quincey in regard to biographic and critical questions, and that though I have generally found something to admire, I have always found gross inaccuracies and almost always effeminate prejudices and mere flippancies draped in elaborate rhetoric. I take leave, therefore, to insist upon faults which are passed over too easily by writers of more geniality than I claim to possess.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] It is curious that De Quincey, in his Essay on Style, explains that political economy, and especially the doctrine of value, is one of those subjects which cannot be satisfactorily treated in dialogue--the very form which he chose to adopt for that particular purpose.

_SIR THOMAS BROWNE_

'Let me not injure the felicity of others,' says Sir Thomas Browne in a suppressed passage of the 'Religio Medici,' 'if I say that I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty into riches, adversity into prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.' Perhaps on second thoughts, Sir Thomas felt that the phrase savoured of that presumption which is supposed to provoke the wrath of Nemesis; and at any rate, he, of all men, is the last to be taken too literally at his word. He is a humorist to the core, and is here writing dramatically. There are many things in this book, so he tells us, 'delivered rhetorically, many expressions therein merely tropical,... and therefore also many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.' We shall hardly do wrong in reckoning amongst them this audacious claim to surpassing felicity, as we may certainly include his boast that he 'could lose an arm without a tear, and with few groans be quartered into pieces.' And yet, if Sir Thomas were to be understood in the most downright literal earnest, perhaps he could have made out as good a case for his assertion as almost any of the troubled race of mankind. For, if we set aside external circumstances of life, what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of uncompromising materials: such talents are by themselves enough to provide a man with work for life, and to make all his work delightful. To them, moreover, we must add a disposition absolutely incapable of controversial bitterness; 'a constitution,' as he says of himself, 'so general that it consorts and sympathises with all things;' an absence of all antipathies to loathsome objects in nature--to French 'dishes of snails, frogs, and toadstools,' or to Jewish repasts on 'locusts or grasshoppers;' an equal toleration--which in the first half of the seventeenth century is something astonishing--for all theological systems; an admiration even of our natural enemies, the French, the Spaniards, the Italians, and the Dutch; a love of all climates, of all countries; and, in short, an utter incapacity to 'absolutely detest or hate any essence except the devil.' Indeed, his hatred even for that personage has in it so little of bitterness, that no man, we may be sure, would have joined more heartily in the Scotch minister's petition for 'the puir de'il'--a prayer conceived in the very spirit of his writings. A man so endowed--and it is not only from his explicit assertions, but from his unconscious self-revelation, that we may credit him with closely approaching his own ideal--is admirably qualified to discover one great secret of human happiness. No man was ever better prepared to keep not only one, but a whole stableful of hobbies, nor more certain to ride them so as to amuse himself, without loss of temper or dignity, and without rude collisions against his neighbours. That happy art is given to few, and thanks to his skill in it, Sir Thomas reminds us strongly of the two illustrious brothers Shandy combined in one person. To the exquisite kindliness and simplicity of Uncle Toby he unites the omnivorous intellectual appetite and the humorous pedantry of the head of the family. The resemblance, indeed, may not be quite fortuitous. Though it does not appear that Sterne, amidst his multifarious pilferings, laid hands upon Sir Thomas Browne, one may fancy that he took a general hint or two from so congenial an author.

The best mode of approaching so original a writer is to examine the intellectual food on which his mind was nourished. He dwelt by preference in strange literary pastures; and their nature will let us into some secrets as to his taste and character. We will begin, therefore, by examining the strange furniture of his mind, as described in his longest, though not his most characteristic book--the 'Inquiry into Vulgar Errors.' When we turn over its quaint pages, we feel as though we were entering one of those singular museums of curiosities which existed in the pre-scientific ages. Every corner is filled with a strange, incoherent medley, in which really valuable objects are placed side by side with what is simply grotesque and ludicrous. The modern man of science may find some objects of interest; but they are mixed inextricably with strange rubbish that once delighted the astrologer, the alchemist, or the dealer in apocryphal relics. And the possessor of this miscellaneous collection accompanies us with an unfailing flow of amusing gossip: at one moment pouring forth a torrent of out-of-the-way learning; at another, making a really passable scientific remark; and then lapsing into an elaborate discussion of some inconceivable absurdity; affecting the air of a grave inquirer, and to all appearance fully believing in his own pretensions, and yet somehow indulging himself in a half-suppressed smile, which indicates that the humorous aspect of a question can never be far removed from his mind. Mere curiosity is not yet differentiated from scientific thirst for knowledge; and a quaint apologue is as good a reward for the inquirer as the discovery of a law of nature. The numerous class which insists upon a joke being as unequivocal as a pistol-shot, and a serious statement as grave as a Blue-book, should therefore keep clear of Sir Thomas Browne. His most congenial readers are those who take a simple delight in following out any quaint train of reflections, careless whether it may culminate in a smile or a sigh, or in some thought in which the two elements of the sad and the ludicrous are inextricably blended. Sir Thomas, however, is in the 'Inquiry' content generally with bringing out the strange curiosities of his museum, and does not care to draw any explicit moral. The quaintness of the objects unearthed seems to be a sufficient recompense for the labour of the search. Fortunately for his design, he lived in the time when a poet might have spoken without hyperbole of the 'fairy tales of science.' To us, who have to plod through an arid waste of painful observation, and slow piecing together of cautious inferences before reaching the promised land of wondrous discoveries, the expression sometimes appears to be ironical. Does not science, we may ask with a _primâ facie_ resemblance of right, destroy as much poetry as it generates? To him no such doubts could present themselves, for fairyland was still a province of the empire of science. Strange beings moved through the pages of natural history, which were equally at home in the 'Arabian Nights' or in poetical apologues. The griffin, the phoenix, and the dragon were not yet extinct; the salamander still sported in flames; and the basilisk slew men at a distance with his deadly glance. More commonplace animals indulged in the habits which they had learnt in fables, and of which only some feeble vestiges now remain in the eloquence of strolling showmen. The elephant had no joints, and was caught by felling the tree against which he rested his stiff limbs in sleep; the pelican pierced its breast for the good of its young; ostriches were regularly painted with a horseshoe in their bills, to indicate their ordinary diet; storks refused to live except in republics and free states; the crowing of a cock put lions to flight, and men were struck dumb in good sober earnest by the sight of a wolf. The curiosity-hunter, in short, found his game still plentiful, and, by a few excursions into Aristotle, Pliny, and other more recondite authors, was able still to display a rich bag for the edification of his readers. Sir Thomas Browne sets out on that quest with all imaginable seriousness. He persuaded himself, and he has persuaded some of his editors, that he was a genuine disciple of Bacon, by one of whose suggestions the 'Inquiry' is supposed to have been prompted. Accordingly, as Bacon describes the idols by which the human mind is misled, Sir Thomas sets out with investigating the causes of error; but his introductory remarks immediately diverge into strange paths, from which it is obvious that the discovery of true scientific method was a very subordinate object in his mind. Instead of telling us by what means truth is to be attained, his few perfunctory remarks on logic are lost in an historical narrative given with infinite zest, of the earliest recorded blunders. The period of history in which he most delighted was the antediluvian--probably because it afforded the widest field for speculation. His books are full of references to the early days of the world. He takes a keen personal interest in our first parents. He discusses the unfortunate lapse of Adam and Eve from every possible point of view. It is not without a visible effort that he declines to settle which of the two was the more guilty, and what would have been the result if they had tasted the fruit of the Tree of Life before applying to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then he passes in review every recorded speech before the Flood, shows that in each of them, with one exception, there is a mixture of falsehood and error, and settles to his own satisfaction that Cain showed less 'truth, wisdom, and reverence' than Satan under similar circumstances. Granting all which to be true, it is impossible to see how we are advanced in settling, for example, whether the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system of astronomy is to be adopted, or in extracting the grains of truth that may be overlaid by masses of error in the writings of alchemists. Nor do we really learn much by being told that ancient authorities sometimes lie, for he evidently enjoys accumulating the fables, and cares little for showing how to discriminate their degree of veracity. He tells us, indeed, that Medea was simply a predecessor of certain modern artists, with an excellent 'recipe to make white hair black;' and that Actæon was a spirited master of hounds, who, like too many of his ancestors, went metaphorically, instead of literally, to the dogs. He points out, moreover, that we must not believe on authority that the sea is the sweat of the earth, that the serpent, before the Fall, went erect like man, or that the right eye of a hedgehog, boiled in oil, and preserved in a brazen vessel, will enable us to see in the dark. Such stories, he moderately remarks, being 'neither consonant unto reason nor correspondent unto experiment,' are unto us 'no axioms.' But we may judge of his scepticism by his remarks on 'Oppianus, that famous Cilician poet.' Of this writer he says that 'abating the annual mutation of sexes in the hyæna, the single sex of the rhinoceros, the antipathy between two drums of a lamb's and a wolf's skin, the informity of cubs, the venation of centaurs, and some few others, he may be read with delight and profit.' Obviously we shall find in Sir Thomas Browne no inexorably severe guide to truth! he will not too sternly reject the amusing because it happens to be slightly improbable, or doubt an authority because he sometimes sanctions a mass of absurd fables. Satan, as he argues at great length, is at the bottom of most errors, from false religions down to a belief that there is another world in the moon; but Sir Thomas takes little trouble to provide us with an Ithuriel's spear, and, indeed, we have a faint suspicion that he will overlook at times the diabolic agency in sheer enthusiasm at the marvellous results. The logical design is little more than ostensible; and Sir Thomas, though he knew it not himself, is really satisfied with any line of inquiry that will bring him in sight of some freak of nature or of opinion suitable to his museum of curiosities.