Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
However, it is probable that all the misstatements of Dr. Johnson, the invidious impressions, and the ludicrous or injurious anecdotes fastened ad libitum upon men previously open to particular attacks, never will be exposed; and for this, amongst other reasons, that sometimes the facts of the case are irrecoverable, though falsehood may be apparent; and still more because few men will be disposed to degrade themselves by assuming a secondary and ministerial office in hanging upon the errors of any man. Pope was a great favourite with Dr. Johnson, both as an unreflecting Tory, who travelled the whole road to Jacobitism—thus far resembling the Doctor himself; secondly, as one who complimented himself whilst yet a young man, and even whilst wearing a masque—complimented him under circumstances which make compliments doubly useful, and make them trebly sincere. If any man, therefore, he would have treated indulgently Pope: yet his life it is which has mainly fixed upon Pope that false impression which predominates at this day—that doubtless intellectually he was a very brilliant little man; but morally a spiteful, peevish, waspish, narrow-hearted cynic. Whereas no imputation can be more unfounded. Pope, unless in cases when he had been maddened by lampoons, was a most benignant creature; and, with the slightest acknowledgment of his own merit, there never lived a literary man who was so generously eager to associate others in his own honours—those even who had no adequate pretensions. If you, reader, should, like ourselves, have had occasion to investigate Pope's life, under an intention of recording it more accurately or more comprehensively than has yet been done, you will feel the truth of what we are saying. And especially we would recommend to every man, who wishes to think justly of Pope in this respect, that he should compare his conduct towards literary competitors with that of Addison. Dr. Johnson, having partially examined the lives of both, must have been so far qualified to do justice between them. But justice he has not done; and to him chiefly we repeat that at this day are owing the false impressions of Pope's selfish, ungenial, or misanthropic nature; and the humiliating associations connected with Pope's petty manœuvring in trivial domestic affairs, chiefly through Dr. Johnson's means, will never be obliterated. Let us turn, however, from Dr. Johnson, whom, with our general respect for his upright nature, it is painful to follow through circumstances where either jealousy (as sometimes) or credulity and the love of gossip (as very often) has misled him into gratifying the taste of the envious at a great sacrifice of dignity to the main upholders of our literature. These men ought not to have been 'shown up' for a comic or malicious effect. A nation who value their literature as we have reason to value ours ought to show their sense of this value by forgetting the degrading infirmities (not the venial and human infirmities) of those to whose admirable endowments they owe its excellence.
Turning away, therefore, from those modes of biography which have hitherto pursued any vicious extreme, let us now briefly explain our own ideal of a happier, sounder, and more ennobling biographical art, having the same general objects as heretofore, but with a more express view to the benefit of the reader. Looking even at those memoirs which, like Hayley's of Cowper, have been checked by pathetic circumstances from fixing any slur or irreverential scandal upon their subject, we still see a great fault in the mass of biographic records; and what is it? It is—that, even where no disposition is manifested to copy either the éloge or the libellous pasquinade, too generally the author appears ex officio as the constant 'patronus' or legal advocate for the person recorded. And so he ought, if we understand that sort of advocacy which in English courts the judge was formerly presumed to exercise on behalf of the defendant in criminal trials. Before that remarkable change by which a prisoner was invested with the privilege of employing separate counsel, the judge was his counsel. The judge took care that no wrong was done to him; that no false impression was left with the jury; that the witnesses against him should not be suffered to run on without a sufficient rigour of cross-examination. But certainly the judge thought it no part of his duty to make 'the worse appear the better reason'; to throw dust into the eyes of the jury; or to labour any point of equivocation for the sake of giving the prisoner an extra chance of escaping. And, if it is really right that the prisoner, when obviously guilty, should be aided in evading his probable conviction, then certainly in past times he had less than justice. For most undoubtedly no judge would have attempted what we all saw an advocate attempting about a year ago, that, when every person in court was satisfied of the prisoner's guilt, from the proof suddenly brought to light of his having clandestinely left the plate of his murdered victim in a particular party's safe keeping, at that moment the advocate (though secretly prostrated by this overwhelming discovery) struggled vainly to fix upon the honourable witness a foul stigma of self-contradiction and perjury for the single purpose of turning loose a savage murderer upon society. If this were not more than justice, then assuredly in all times past the prisoner had far less. Now, precisely the difference between the advocacy of the judge, and the advocacy of a special counsel retained by the prisoner, expresses the difference which we contemplate between the biographer as he has hitherto protected his hero and that biographer whom we would substitute. Is he not to show a partiality for his subject? Doubtless; but hitherto, in those lives which have been farthest from éloges, the author has thought it his duty to uphold the general system, polity, or principles upon which his subject has acted. Thus Middleton and all other biographers of Cicero, whilst never meditating any panegyrical account of that statesman, and oftentimes regretting his vanity, for instance, have quite as little thought it allowable to condemn the main political views, theories, and consequently actions, of Cicero. But why not? Why should a biographer be fettered in his choice of subjects by any imaginary duty of adopting the views held by him whose life he records? To make war upon the man, to quarrel with him in every page, that is quite as little in accordance with our notions; and we have already explained above our sense of its hatefulness. For then the question recurs for ever: What necessity forced you upon a subject whose conduct you thoroughly disapprove? But let him show the tenderness which is due to a great man even when he errs. Let him expose the total aberrations of the man, and make this exposure salutary to the pathetic wisdom of his readers, not alimentary to their self-conceit, by keeping constantly before their eyes the excellence and splendour of the man's powers in contrast with his continued failures. Let him show such patronage to the hero of his memoir as the English judge showed to the poor prisoner at his bar, taking care that he should suffer no shadow of injustice from the witnesses; that the prisoner's own self-defence should in no part be defeated of its effect by want of proper words or want of proper skill in pressing the forcible points on the attention of the jury; but otherwise leaving him to his own real merits in the facts of his case, and allowing him no relief from the pressure of the hostile evidence but such as he could find either in counter-evidence or in the intrinsic weight of his own general character. On the scheme of biography there would be few persons in any department of life who would be accompanied to the close by a bowing and obsequious reporter; there would be far less of uniform approbation presumable in memoirs; but, on the other hand, there would be exhibited pretty generally a tender spirit of dealing with human infirmities; a large application of human errors to the benefit of succeeding generations; and, lastly, there would be an opening made for the free examination of many lives which are now in a manner closed against criticism; whilst to each separate life there would be an access and an invitation laid bare for minds hitherto feeling themselves excluded from approaching the subject by imperfect sympathy with the principles and doctrines which those lives were supposed to illustrate.
But our reformed view of biography would be better explained by a sketch applied to Cicero's life or to Milton's. In either case we might easily show, consistently with the exposure of enormous errors, that each was the wisest man of his own day. And with regard to Cicero in particular, out of his own letters to Atticus, we might show that every capital opinion which he held on the politics of Rome in his own day was false, groundless, contradictory. Yet for all that, we would engage to leave the reader in a state of far deeper admiration for the man than the hollow and hypocritical Middleton ever felt himself, or could therefore have communicated to his readers.
Editor's Note.—The reference on p. 122 is to the famous case of Courvoisier, in 1840, and this fixes 1841 as the date of the essay. Courvoisier was a valet who murdered and robbed his master, putting the plate into the care of an old woman, and making it appear a burglary. He was defended by a barrister named Philips, who received from the prisoner a confession of his guilt, and afterwards, in court, took Heaven to witness that he believed him innocent, though the woman, by accident almost, had been found, and given evidence. Philips was disbarred.
XIV. GREAT FORGERS: CHATTERTON AND WALPOLE, AND 'JUNIUS.'
I have ever been disposed to regard as the most venial of deceptions such impositions as Chatterton had practised on the public credulity. Whom did he deceive? Nobody but those who well deserved to be deceived, viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which they had not so much as tasted. And it always struck me as a judicial infatuation in Horace Walpole, that he, who had so brutally pronounced the death of this marvellous boy to be a matter of little consequence, since otherwise he would have come to be hanged for forgery, should himself, not as a boy under eighteen (and I think under seventeen at the first issuing of the Rowley fraud), slaving for a few guineas that he might procure the simplest food for himself, and then buy presents for the dear mother and sister whom he had left in Bristol, but as an elderly man, with a clear six thousand per annum,18 commit a far more deliberate and audacious forgery than that imputed (if even accurately imputed) to Chatterton. I know of no published document, or none published under Chatterton's sanction, in which he formally declared the Rowley poems to have been the compositions of a priest living in the days of Henry IV., viz., in or about the year 1400. Undoubtedly he suffered people to understand that he had found MSS. of that period in the tower of St. Mary Redcliff at Bristol, which he really had done; and whether he simply tolerated them in running off with the idea that these particular poems, written on discoloured parchments by way of colouring the hoax, were amongst the St. Mary treasures, or positively said so, in either view, considering the circumstances of the case, no man of kind feelings will much condemn him.
But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first sentence of his preface to the poor romance of 'Otranto,' that it had been translated from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, and that the MS. was still preserved in the library of an English Catholic family; circumstantiating his needless falsehood by other most superfluous details. Needless, I say, because a book with the Walpole name on the title-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton's obscure name was at that time sure of not selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his incognito. But this he might have preserved without telling a circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved themselves for him (I speak of things which have since come to my knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been buried in a pauper's coffin), lay in bribing public attention by some extrinsic attraction. Macpherson had recently engaged the public gaze by his 'Ossian'—an abortion fathered upon the fourth century after Christ. What so natural as to attempt other abortions—ideas and refinements of the eighteenth century—referring themselves to the fifteenth? Had this harmless hoax succeeded, he would have delivered those from poverty who delivered him from ignorance; he would have raised those from the dust who raised him to an aerial height—yes, to a height from which (but it was after his death), like Ate or Eris, come to cause another Trojan war, he threw down an apple of discord amongst the leading scholars of England, and seemed to say: 'There, Dean of Exeter! there, Laureate! there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you would not have hired as a shoeblack. My blood be upon you!' Rise up, martyred blood! rise to heaven for a testimony against these men and this generation, or else burrow in the earth, and from that spring up like the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha into harvests of feud, into armies of self-exterminating foes. Poor child! immortal child! Slight were thy trespasses on this earth, heavy was thy punishment, and it is to be hoped, nay, it is certain, that this disproportion did not escape the eye which, in the algebra of human actions, estimates both sides of the equation.
Lord Byron was of opinion that people abused Horace Walpole for several sinister reasons, of which the first is represented to be that he was a gentleman. Now, I, on the contrary, am of opinion that he was not always a gentleman, as particularly seen in his correspondence with Chatterton. On the other hand, it is but just to recollect that in retaining Chatterton's MSS. (otherwise an unfeeling act, yet chiefly imputable to indolence), the worst aggravation of the case under the poor boy's construction, viz., that if Walpole had not known his low rank 'he would not have dared to treat him in that way,' though a very natural feeling, was really an unfounded one. Horace Walpole (I call him so, because he was not then Lord Orford) certainly had not been aware that Chatterton was other than a gentleman by birth and station. The natural dignity of the boy, which had not condescended to any degrading applications, misled this practised man of the world. But recurring to Lord Byron's insinuations as to a systematic design of running Lord Orford down, I beg to say that I am no party to any such design. It is not likely that a furious Conservative like myself, who have the misfortune also to be the most bigoted of Tories, would be so. I disclaim all participation in any clamour against Lord Orford which may have arisen on democratic feeling. Feeling the profoundest pity for the 'marvellous boy' of Bristol, and even love, if it be possible to feel love for one who was in his unhonoured grave before I was born, I resent the conduct of Lord Orford, in this one instance, as universally the English public has resented it. But generally, as a writer, I admire Lord Orford in a very high degree. As a letter-writer, and as a brilliant sketcher of social aspects and situations, he is far superior to any French author who could possibly be named as a competitor. And as a writer of personal or anecdotic history, let the reader turn to Voltaire's 'Siècle de Louis Quatorze,' in order to appreciate his extraordinary merit.
Next will occur to the reader the forgery of 'Junius.' Who did that? Oh, villains that have ever doubted since '"Junius" Identified'! Oh, scamps—oh, pitiful scamps! You, reader, perhaps belong to this wretched corps. But, if so, understand that you belong to it under false information. I have heard myriads talk upon this subject. One man said to me, 'My dear friend, I sympathize with your fury. You are right. Righter a man cannot be. Rightest of all men you are.' I was right—righter—rightest! That had happened to few men. But again this flattering man went on, 'Yes, my excellent friend, right you are, and evidently Sir Philip Francis was the man. His backer proved it. The day after his book appeared, if any man had offered me exactly two thousand to one in guineas, that Sir Philip was not the man, by Jupiter! I would have declined the bet. So divine, so exquisite, so Grecian in its perfection, was the demonstration, the apodeixis (or what do you call it in Greek?), that this brilliant Sir Philip—who, by the way, wore his order of the Bath as universally as ever he taxed Sir William Draper with doing—had been the author of "Junius." But here lay the perplexity of the matter. At the least five-and-twenty excellent men proved by posthumous friends that they, every mother's son of them, had also perpetrated "Junius."' 'Then they were liars,' I answered. 'Oh no, my right friend,' he interrupted, 'not liars at all; amiable men, some of whom confessed on their death-beds (three to my certain knowledge) that, alas! they had erred against the law of charity. "But how?" said the clergyman. "Why, by that infernal magazine of sneers and all uncharitableness, the 'Letters of Junius.'" "Let me understand you," said the clergyman: "you wrote 'Junius'?" "Alas! I did," replied A. Two years after another clergyman said to another penitent, "And so you wrote 'Junius'?" "Too true, my dear sir. Alas! I did," replied B. One year later a third penitent was going off, and upon the clergyman saying, "Bless me, is it possible? Did you write 'Junius'?" he replied, "Ah, worshipful sir, you touch a painful chord in my remembrances—I now wish I had not. Alas! reverend sir, I did." Now, you see,' went on my friend, 'so many men at the New Drop, as you may say, having with tears and groans taxed themselves with "Junius" as the climax of their offences, one begins to think that perhaps all men wrote "Junius."' Well, so far there was reason. But when my friend contended also that the proofs arrayed in pamphlets proved the whole alphabet to have written 'Junius,' I could not stand his absurdities. Death-bed confessions, I admitted, were strong. But as to these wretched pamphlets, some time or other I will muster them all for a field-day; I will brigade them, as if the general of the district were coming to review them; and then, if I do not mow them down to the last man by opening a treacherous battery of grape-shot, may all my household die under a fiercer Junius! The true reasons why any man fancies that 'Junius' is an open question must be these three:
First, that they have never read the proofs arrayed against Sir Philip Francis; this is the general case.
Secondly, that, according to Sancho's proverb, they want better bread than is made of wheat. They are not content with proofs or absolute demonstrations. They require you, like the witch of Endor, to raise Sir Philip from the grave, that they may cross-examine him.
Thirdly (and this is the fault of the able writer who unmasked Sir Philip), there happened to be the strongest argument that ever picked a Bramah-lock against the unknown writer of 'Junius'; apply this, and if it fits the wards, oh, Gemini! my dear friend, but you are right—righter—rightest; you have caught 'Junius' in a rabbit-snare.
Editor's Note.—De Quincey is guilty of a slight lapse of memory in reference to 'The Castle of Otranto' and Onuphrio Muralto. It was not in the first sentence of the preface, but on the title-page, that Walpole so plainly attributed the work to another. The original title-page, which, of course, was dropped out when it became known to all the world that Walpole was the author, read thus: 'The Castle of Otranto: a Story. Translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto. London: printed for Thomas Lownds, in Fleet Street. 1765.'
