Part 15

and again:--

"Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved, Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving having removed Antipathies"?

This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all antipathies! But even these

"recur erelong, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong: And circumstance--that unspiritual god And miscreator--makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."

De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for the purposes of scorn.

Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives, each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert _mirage_, teeming with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other--also into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels, and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their overmastering seductions to

"Allure, or terrify, or undermine."

Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine the main temper and disposition of our lives. For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason, and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point, seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our destiny. And in the very word _disposition_ is indicated the finality of its arbitraments as contrasted with all _proposition_.

Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood,--to shelter or imprison,--which, more than all else, gives it its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its opposite,--porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain,--yet will the tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that preside over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial temperament,--one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of strife; secondly, profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence, which, although of all three it is the most negative, the most material condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents' hearts, check the free play of domestic love!--and in all cases where such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be sensibly felt the absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections of home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the soul.

As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came,--mighty changes capable of affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his, which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer's day,--for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of "Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:--

"From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve-- _A summer's day_."

And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that, receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary, a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin, teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of their material substance.

"We,--the children of the house,--" says De Quincey, in his "Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur--'Give me neither poverty nor riches'--was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of diet,--that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."

Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of seven, and having now at least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age, (and many such could be found,) among those with whom daily the military predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves. Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. The Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,--if we may believe the Pindaric odes,--set over them a divine watch, and fed them with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.

And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect _leisure_. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure, which is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_ been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace.

In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,--but with what marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs

"Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea."

Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--

"There he slept, And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet. Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood, And saw the ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing even and morn, Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought: He saw the prophet also, how he fled Into the desert, and how there he slept Under a juniper, then how, awaked, He found his supper on the coals prepared, And by the angel was bid rise and eat, And eat the second time after repose, The strength whereof sufficed him forty days; Sometimes that with Elijah he partook, Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."

[Footnote A: _Paradise Regained_, Book II.]

If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus solicited and baffled even in dreams,--if, by the lowest of mortal appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the shadowy visions of merely human plenty,--then by how much more must the human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands, be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy, flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!

The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral antiphonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this _papaverian_ mask it is likely to be best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater" that he is most generally recognized. It was through his Opium-Confessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first conciliated and charmed the reading public,--and to such a degree that great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the public, without its being aware of the nauseating potion, or experiencing any uncomfortable consequences. The flood of popularity produced by the Opium-Confessions among that large intellectual class of readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet insist upon the graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of heavier freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.

The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey _personally_ is also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of his situation and its hidden mysteries, or "_suspiria de profundis_." This interest is partly of that vulgar sort which connects itself with all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in the human mind, with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied with a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a philosophical order, inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal development. It is rarely the case that human vision is especially or deliberately directed to the sun or the moon, except at the marvellous season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty of the appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual nature of the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the people inhabiting this globe are excited by something which calls off their attention from terrestrial trifles to that which connects them with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos, we should, at such times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best, through horrid yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a tremendous counter-irritation upon the earth that should tell mightily on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the heavens. But since we are neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any sort, we take defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of courtesy, to foreign worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come within the circle of human knowledge or notice, which is it that may be said to enjoy the most continuous round of attentions, and to live in excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It is the comet, which no sooner gets out of reach of _our_ flying compliments than she becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth deprecating murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder brother, who, from all such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible under the paternal wings of the Sun. No one of these erratic visitors can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere in the universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would not have been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict _prima donnas_.

Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that which we manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or the eccentric comet that bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this interest, considered in its vulgar aspects, De Quincey would suffer gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I am certain that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his long sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever description, no tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been able to vie with him in the picturesque _déshabillé_ of the whole "turnout." Picture to yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and patches"--for, to the outward sense, he seems that now--has been "at large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain impressive recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a trifle too uncanny even for them. As to his subsistence during these rambles, it would be very difficult to say how he managed that affair, at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be that the prophetic limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of his return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,--that he has made plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his waistcoat-pocket. Like Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering purposely and at his own sweet will, or rather where his feet have taken him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever sleep may have chanced to find him.

The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an Æson-like rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that anxiously await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this transformation is effected, let us suppose the case of his being set down in the streets of London, somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside. What an eddying of stragglers about this new-found focus of attraction! what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if, indeed, he be find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests, some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian or not, neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster such a rabble at his heels, supposing _him_ to appear on Cheapside!

In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar notice as from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of him in such situations, except for the purpose of showing that he had very much in his outward habit that would readily attract such a notice. In the same light we are to regard some illustrations which J. Hill Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features in his character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for, although they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a book-form, they are still unpublished to many of my readers.

Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained novel and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius. The festivities of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion is heard in the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival; he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers,--some one suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey, led on by the current of his own thoughts,--though he was always too courteous to absorb the entire conversation,--talks on "till it is far into the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilization, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the specials, he could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme unpleasantness of such a couch?"