Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
Cause of the Novel's Decline.—No man, it may be safely laid down as a general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers feel a power, and acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for alcohol, he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious on the largest scale, arises first upon the quality of the power. Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations, but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order, enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.
Novels are the one sole class of books that ever interest the public, that reach its heart, or even catch its eye. And the reason why novels are becoming much more licentious, and much grosser in the arts by which they court public favour, lies undoubtedly in the quality of that new reading public which the extension of education has added to the old one. An education miserably shallow, whilst unavailing for any purpose of real elevation, lets in upon the theatre of what is called by courtesy literature a vast additional audience that once would have been excluded altogether. This audience, changed in no respect from its former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers to impress a new character upon literature in so far as literature has a motive for applying itself to their wants. The consequences are showing themselves, and will show themselves more broadly. It is difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to enter on the task.
It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a known generation.
It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no man can be characteristic, no man can geometrize or chemically analyze after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new road, and in that meaning it may be called his road; but his it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an incommunicable excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever led his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits not transferable. Consequently the τὁ characteristic, of which in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may be defined in the severest manner as that which is generally characteristic; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It cannot be characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.
Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on geological stratifications, in any collection of his national literature. He would be lunatic to do so. A Birmingham or Glasgow Directory has an equal title to take its station in the national literature. But he will hesitate on the same question arising with regard to a history. Where upon examination the history turns out to be a mere chronicle, or register of events chronologically arranged, with no principle of combination pervading it, nor colouring from peculiar views of policy, nor sympathy with the noble and impassioned in human action, the decision will be universal and peremptory to cashier it from the literature. Yet this case, being one of degree, ranges through a large and doubtful gamut. A history like that of Froissart, or of Herodotus, where the subjective from the writer blends so powerfully with the gross objective, where the moral picturesque is so predominant, together with freshness of sensation which belongs to 'blissful infancy' in human life, or to a stage of society in correspondence to it, cannot suffer a demur of jealousy as to its privilege of entering the select fold of literature. But such advantages are of limited distribution. And, to say the truth, in its own nature neither history nor biography, unless treated with peculiar grace, and architecturally moulded, has any high pretension to rank as an organic limb of literature. The very noblest history, in much of its substance, is but by a special indulgence within the privilege of that classification. Biography stands on the same footing. Of the many memorials dedicated to the life of Milton, how few are entitled to take their station in the literature! And why? Not merely that they are disqualified by their defective execution, but often that they necessarily record what has become common property.
XXV. OMITTED PASSAGES AND VARIATIONS
1.—The Rhapsodoi
The following on the 'Rhapsodoi' is a variation on that which appeared in 'Homer and the Homeridæ,' with some quite additional and new thoughts on the subject.
About these people, who they were, what relation they bore to Homer, and why they were called 'Rhapsodoi,' we have seen debated in Germany through the last half century with as much rabid ferocity as was ever applied to the books of a fraudulent bankrupt. Such is the natural impertinence of man. If he suspects any secret, or any base attempt to hide and conceal things from himself, he is miserable until he finds out the mystery, and especially where all the parties to it have been defunct for 2,500 years. Great indignation seems reasonably to have been felt by all German scholars that any man should presume to have called himself a rhapsodos at any period of Grecian history without sending down a sealed letter to posterity stating all the reasons which induced him to take so unaccountable a step. No possible solution, given to any conceivable question bearing upon the 'Rhapsodoi,' seems by any tendency to affect any question outstanding about Homer. And we do not therefore understand the propriety of intermingling this dispute with the general Homeric litigation. However, to comply with the practice of Germany, we shall throw away a few sentences upon this, as a pure ad libitum digression.
The courteous reader, whom we beg also to suppose the most ignorant of readers, by way of thus founding a necessity and a case of philosophic reasonableness for the circumstantiality of our own explanations, will be pleased to understand that by ancient traditionary usage the word rhapsodia is the designation technically applied to the several books or cantos of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' So the word fytte has gained a technical appropriation to our narrative poetry when it takes the ballad form. Now, the Greek word rhapsody is derived from a tense of the verb rhapto, to sew as with a needle, to connect, and ode, a song, chant, or course of singing. If, therefore, you conceive of a rhapsodia, not as the opera, but as the opus of a singer, not as the form, but as the result of his official ministration, viz., as that section of a narrative poem which forms an intelligible whole in itself, whilst in a subordinate relation it is one part of a larger whole—this idea represents accurately enough the use of the word rhapsodia in the latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word canto to be taken in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the complexity of the idea in the word rhapsodia is that both its separate elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential; neither is a casual, neither a subordinate, element.
Now, the 'Rhapsodoi,' as may be supposed, are the personal correlates of the rhapsodia. This being the poem adapted to chanting, those were the chanters. And the only important question which we can imagine to arise is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung or accompanied instrumentally could bear to the naked-speaking rehearsal of the same poem or to the original text of that poem, ever can affect the main question of Homer's integrity. The 'Rhapsodoi' come to be mentioned at all simply as being one link in the transmission of the Homeric poems. They are found existing before Pisistratus, they are found existing after Pisistratus. And they declined exactly as the art of reading became general. We can approximate pretty closely to the time when the 'Rhapsodoi' ceased; but at what time they began we defy any man to say. Plato (Rep. x.) represents them as going back into the days of Homer; nay, according to Plato, Homer himself was a rhapsodos, and itinerated in that character. So was Hesiod. And two remarkable lines, ascribed to Hesiod by one of the Scholiasts upon Pindar, if we could be sure that they were genuine, settle that question:
Εν Δελο τοτε πρωτον εγο ξαι Ὁμερος αοιδοι
Μελπομεν, εν νεαροις ὑμνοις ραψαντες αοιδη
'Then, first of all,' says Hesiod, 'did I and Homer chant as bards in Delos, laying the nexus of our poetic composition in proæmial hymns.' We understand him to mean this: There were many singers and harpers who sang or accompanied the words of others; perhaps ancient words—at all events, not their own. Naturally he was anxious to have it understood that he and Homer had higher pretensions. They killed their own mutton. They composed the words as well as sang them. Where both functions were so often united in one man's person, it became difficult to distinguish them. Our own word bard or minstrel stood in the same ambiguity. You could not tell in many cases whether the word pointed to the man's poetic or musical faculty. Anticipating that doubt, Hesiod says that they sang as original poets. For it is a remark of Suidas, which he deduces laboriously, that poetry, being uniformly sung in the elder Greece, acquired the name of αοιδη. This term became technically appropriated to the poetry, or substance of whatever was sung, in contradistinction to the musical accompaniment. And the poet was called αοιδος So far Hesiod twice over secures the dignity of their office from misinterpretation. And there, by the word ραφαντες he indicates the sort of poetry which they cultivated, viz., that which was expanded into long heroic narratives, and naturally connected itself both internally amongst its own parts, and externally with other poems of the same class. Thus, having separated Homer and himself from the mere musicians, next he separates them even as poets from those who simply composed hymns to the Gods. These heroic legends were known to require much more elaborate study and art. Yet, because a critical reviewer might take occasion to tax his piety in thus composing human legends in neglect of the Gods, Hesiod, forestalling him, replies: 'You're out there, my friend; we were both pious, and we put our piety into hymns addressed to the Gods, which, with cabinetmakers' skill, we used also as interludes of transition from one legend to another.' For it is noticed frequently and especially by a Scholiast on Aristophanes (Pac. 826), that generally speaking the proæmia to the different parts of narrative-poems were entirely detached, και ουδεν προς το πραγμα δηλον, and explain nothing at all that concerns the business.
2.—Mrs. Evans and the 'Gazette.'
In his autobiographic sketch, 'Introduction to the World of Strife,' he tells of his brother's enterprise in establishing the Gazette, which was to record their doings, and also of Mrs. Evans's place on the Gazette. The following is evidently a passage which was prepared for that part of the article, but was from some cause or other omitted:
I suppose no creature ever led such a life as I led on the Gazette; sometimes running up, like Wallenstein, to the giddiest pinnacles of honour, then down again without notice or warning to the dust; cashiered—rendered incapable of ever serving H. M. again; nay, actually drummed out of the army, my uniform stripped off, and the 'rogue's march' played after me. And all for what? I protest, to this hour, I have no guess. If any person knows, that person is not myself; and the reader is quite as well able to furnish guesses to me as I to him—to enlighten me upon the subject as I him.
Mrs. Evans was a very important person in the play; I don't suppose that things could have gone on without her. For, as there was no writer in the Gazette but my brother, so there was no reader of it except Mrs. Evans. And here came in a shocking annoyance to me that, as often as any necessity occurred (which was every third day) for restoring me to my rank, since my brother would not have it supposed that he could be weak enough to initiate such an indulgence, the Gazette threw the onus of this amiable weakness, and consequently of my gratitude, upon Mrs. Evans, affirming that the major-general had received a pardon and an amnesty for all his past atrocities at the request of 'a distinguished lady,' who was obscurely indicated in a parenthesis as 'the truly honourable Mrs. Evans.' To listen to the Gazette one would have supposed that this woman, who so cordially detested me, spent her whole time in going down on her knees and making earnest supplications to the throne on my behalf. But what signified the representations of the Gazette if I knew them to be false? Aye, but I did not know that they were false. It is true that my obligations to her were quite aerial, and might, as the reader will think, have been supported without any preternatural effort. But exactly these aerial burdens, whether of gratitude or of honour, most oppressed me as being least tangible and incapable of pecuniary or other satisfaction. No sinking fund could meet them. And even the dull unimaginative woman herself, eternally held up to admiration as my resolute benefactress, got the habit (I am sure) of looking upon me as under nameless obligations to her. This raised my wrath. It was not that to my feelings the obligations were really a mere figment of pretence. On the contrary, according to my pains endured, they towered up to the clouds. But I felt that nobody had any right to load me with favours that I had never asked for, and without leave even asked from me; and the more real were the favours, the deeper the wrong done to me. I sought, therefore, for some means of retaliation. And it is odd that it was not till thirty years after that I perceived one. It then struck me that the eternal intercession might have been equally odious to her. To find herself prostrate for ever, weeping like Niobe, and, if the Gazette was to be believed, refusing to raise herself from the mud or the flinty pavement till I had been forgiven, and reinstated in my rank—ah, how loathsome that must have been to her! Ah, how loathsome the whole cycle of favours were to me, considering from whom they came! Then we had effectually plagued each other. And it was not without loud laughter, as of malice unexpectedly triumphant, that I found one night thirty years after, on regretting my powerlessness of vengeance, that, in fact, I had amply triumphed thirty years before. So, undaunted Mrs. Evans, if you live anywhere within call, listen to the assurance that all accounts are squared between us, and that we balanced our mutual debts by mutual disgust; and that, if you plagued me perversely, I plagued you unconsciously.
And though shot and bullets were forbidden fruit, yet something might be done with hard wadding. A good deal of classical literature disappeared in this way, which by one who valued no classics very highly might be called the way of all flesh. The best of authors, he contended, had better perish by this warlike consummation than by the inglorious enmity of bookworms and moths—honeycombed, as most of the books had been which had gone out to India with our two uncles. Even wadding, however, was declared to be inadmissible as too dangerous, after wounds had been inflicted more than once.
