The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II
by Thomas De Quincey · English · Gutenberg #42909 · 1,055,203 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II
Author: Thomas De Quincey
Editor: David Masson
Release date: June 10, 2013 [eBook #42909]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42909
Credits: Produced by Les Galloway, Jason Isbell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WRITING OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY, VOL. II ***
Transcriber's Note
Variations in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained
except in obvious cases of typographical errors. Italics are shown
thus _italic_ and bold thus =bold=
The letter o written with a macron (straight line) above is marked
[=o].
DE QUINCEY'S COLLECTED WRITINGS
VOL. II
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY REMINISCENCES
THE
COLLECTED WRITINGS
OF
THOMAS
DE QUINCEY
BY
DAVID MASSON
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
VOL. II
LONDON
A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE
1896
[Illustration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
From a picture by Peter Vandyke in the National Portrait Gallery]
CONTENTS OF VOL. II
PAGE
EDITOR'S PREFACE 1
AUTOBIOGRAPHY CONTINUED FROM 1803 TO 1808--
CHAP.
I. OXFORD 9
II. GERMAN STUDIES AND KANT IN PARTICULAR 81
LITERARY AND LAKE REMINISCENCES--
CHAP.
I. A MANCHESTER SWEDENBORGIAN AND A LIVERPOOL
LITERARY COTERIE 113
II. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 138
III. THE LAKE POETS: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 229
IV. THE LAKE POETS: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND
ROBERT SOUTHEY 303
V. THE LAKE POETS: SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND
COLERIDGE 335
VI. THE SARACEN'S HEAD 348
VII. WESTMORELAND AND THE DALESMEN: SOCIETY OF
THE LAKES 360
VIII. SOCIETY OF THE LAKES: CHARLES LLOYD 381
IX. SOCIETY OF THE LAKES: MISS ELIZABETH SMITH,
THE SYMPSONS, AND THE K---- FAMILY 403
X. SOCIETY OF THE LAKES: PROFESSOR WILSON: DEATH
OF LITTLE KATE WORDSWORTH 432
XI. RAMBLES FROM THE LAKES: MRS. SIDDONS AND
HANNAH MORE 446
EDITOR'S PREFACE
The matter of this volume breaks itself into two main divisions, as
follows:--
I.--AUTOBIOGRAPHY CONTINUED FROM 1803 TO 1808
Although De Quincey's Autobiography, so far as it was revised by
himself in 1853 for the Edinburgh Collective Edition of his writings,
stopped at 1803, when he went to Oxford, he left a continuation of that
Autobiography, accessible to those that might be curious about it, in
two old papers of his in _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_. One of these,
bearing the continued general title "Sketches of Life and Manners from
the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater," but with the sub-title
"Oxford," had appeared, in three successive parts, in the numbers of
the magazine for February, June, and August 1835; the other, forming
but a single article, had appeared in the number for June 1836, with
the simple title, "Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater continued,"
but without any sub-title, or any indication of its nature except what
might be conveyed by the head-lines,--"The German Language," "The
German Philosophic Literature," and "The Philosophy of Kant,"--at the
tops of the right-hand pages. As the two papers together carry on the
Autobiography from 1803 to 1808, they are reproduced in this volume
from the columns of the magazine as two chapters of De Quincey's
Autobiography additional to the Revised Autobiography contained in
the preceding volume. The first, and much the larger, is sufficiently
described by the title "Oxford," used as a sub-title for it in _Tait's
Magazine_. It is a careful and very readable account of the system
of Oxford life and education during the five years of De Quincey's
connexion with the University, with glimpses of himself, though not
so numerous or continuous as might be wished, as he moved obscurely
through the academic medium. The other chapter will take most readers
aback. Beginning in a popular vein, and even humorously, it turns
itself, through two-thirds of its extent, into a dissertation on Kant's
philosophy which is one of the toughest things that De Quincey ever
wrote. It is probably on this account that the American Collective
Edition of De Quincey, while gladly reprinting his Oxford paper, omits
this one altogether. That, however, is scarcely allowable. Nor is
it allowable to yield to the natural temptation which would suggest
the omission of the paper in the place where De Quincey put it, and
the reservation of it for some other place in the collection of his
writings where it might be in the company of other demons as abstruse
as itself. It belongs vitally to the autobiographic series, and to
that part of the autobiographic series which deals with De Quincey's
Oxford life from 1803 to 1808. It is as if De Quincey had said to his
readers--as, in fact, he does virtually say in the paper--"It was
during those five years that I betook myself to German studies, and
especially to studies in German Philosophy; they had an immense effect
upon me at the time, and a permanent influence afterwards; and, if
you would understand my subsequent life and mind, you must, at the
risk of a headache yourselves, listen at this point to a description
of the exact nature and symptoms of the headache they caused _me_." To
indicate as precisely as possible this autobiographic purport of the
paper, I have ventured, in the absence of any title to it by De Quincey
himself, to entitle it "German Studies and Kant in particular." It will
be of much interest to some readers; and others can skip it if they
choose.
II.--LITERARY AND LAKE REMINISCENCES.
Concurrently with the series of the expressly autobiographic papers
in _Tait's Magazine_, there had appeared in the same magazine another
series of papers by De Quincey, also autobiographic in a general sense,
but in a more indirect fashion.
Having known a number of remarkable persons in the course of his life,
some of them of great literary celebrity, it had occurred to him that a
series of sketches of these, from his own recollections and impressions
of them, partly in their relations to himself, but not exclusively
so, would be welcome, and might at all events be made instructively
De Quincey-like. He had begun with Coleridge, and had contributed
four papers of Reminiscences of Coleridge to the numbers of _Tait's
Magazine_ for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835.
These, though necessarily autobiographic to a pretty large extent,
had been interjected into the series of his expressly autobiographic
articles in the magazine. Then, that expressly autobiographic series
having been finished in 1836 in the above-mentioned papers on his
Oxford life and his first German studies, he had ranged back, in an
article in the magazine for February 1837, for a recollection of
certain literary notabilities of Manchester and Liverpool whom he had
known or seen in his schoolboy days. After that, zig-zagging in his
memory for suitable additions, he had brought in,--sometimes under
cover of the standing general magazine title of "Sketches of Life
and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater," but
sometimes under independent titles,--accounts of other acquaintances of
his, either famous to all the world already, or about whom the world
might be inquisitive. Of these our concern in the present volume, for
chronological reasons, is with Wordsworth and his fellow-celebrities
of the Lake district, whether those that were resident there when De
Quincey first visited it in Coleridge's company in 1807, or those that
were resident there from 1809 onwards, when De Quincey had become a
Lakist too, and was domiciled permanently, as it seemed, close to
Wordsworth at Grasmere. To Wordsworth himself,--always De Quincey's
man of men, or at least poet of poets, of his generation,--there were
devoted three articles in _Tait's Magazine_ for January, February, and
April 1839, entitled "Lake Reminiscences: No. I. William Wordsworth,
No. II. William Wordsworth, No. III. William Wordsworth." These were
followed in July of the same year by a No. IV, entitled "William
Wordsworth and Robert Southey," and in August by a No. V, in which
Coleridge came back for some notice, and which was therefore entitled
"Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge." For the minor celebrities of
the Lakes, after these three _dii majorum gentium_, and for sketches
of Lake scenery and society generally, there was a relapse into the
older magazine title "Sketches of Life and Manners" etc.; and the seven
additional articles required for these straggled through the numbers of
_Tait's Magazine_ from September 1839 to August 1840.
Save that one of the articles so inventoried goes back beyond the Lake
period of De Quincey's life altogether, and that the main set of the
Coleridge articles treats Coleridge generally and apart from his Lakist
connexion, one might designate them collectively by that title of LAKE
REMINISCENCES which De Quincey did use for some of them. As it is,
however, the title LITERARY AND LAKE REMINISCENCES seems, on the whole,
the fittest.
One question remains. Whence are we to take the text of these LITERARY
AND LAKE REMINISCENCES left by De Quincey? For the largest number of
the included articles there is no option. They were not reprinted by
De Quincey in the Collective Edition of 1853-60, though he must have
contemplated reprinting them some time; and the text of them must
therefore be taken from the pages of _Tait's Magazine_, in which
they originally appeared. But for a portion of the Reminiscences, and
a very important portion, there is an option. De Quincey did reprint
in his Collective Edition the whole of his special set of Coleridge
Recollections, with the exception of the last article of the four,
throwing all the reprinted articles into one block, after somewhat
careful revision; and he reprinted also in the same way the whole set
of the special articles on Wordsworth, without any omission. These
main Coleridge and Wordsworth papers are therefore reproduced in our
present volume from De Quincey's own revised text of them,--with the
restoration, however, in the case of the Coleridge chapter, of that
fourth of the magazine articles on Coleridge which De Quincey omitted.
The omission was unnecessary; and, as the American Collective Edition
contains the omitted article, the present edition is entitled to the
same benefit. What, however, about the two minor papers of the Lake
Reminiscences which appeared as Nos. IV and V in _Tait's Magazine_
for July and August 1839, under the titles of "William Wordsworth
and Robert Southey," and "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge,"
respectively? These also De Quincey reprinted in his Collective
Edition, after a fashion; but it was after a fashion which greatly
impaired their interest. He threw them, or rather parts of them, into
one, under the single title "Robert Southey," omitting a great deal of
what was liveliest and best in the original articles. This may have
been caused merely by his hurry at the time, in consequence of the
pressure of the printers for copy in any form; but possibly it had
another cause. De Quincey's Reminiscences of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and
Southey, on their first appearance in _Tait's Magazine_ between 1834
and 1840, had provoked a good deal of resentment among those concerned.
Coleridge was then dead; but Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth were
still living; as was also Southey. Little wonder that the surviving
relatives of Coleridge felt aggrieved by the extreme frankness of some
of De Quincey's personal recollections of the dead sage, or that the
Wordsworth and Southey families were annoyed and offended on similar
grounds. Wordsworth, with his massive serenity, seems, indeed, to have
tossed the matter aside easily enough; but not so Southey. Carlyle
tells us that, when he first met Southey in London, Southey was full
of the subject of De Quincey's delinquencies in publishing so many
anecdotes of a confidential kind respecting Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and himself, and spoke on the subject in terms which Carlyle, who had
read the articles, thought needlessly angry and vehement. Something
of all this may have been in De Quincey's mind when, in reproducing
his Lake Reminiscences in 1853 for his Collective Edition, he came
to the two _Tait_ articles in which Southey had principally figured.
Hence, perhaps, though Southey had died in 1843, De Quincey's large
excisions from those articles, and his consolidation of them into one
paper, pleasant enough in the main, but comparatively insipid. It was
an editorial mistake on De Quincey's part, and must not bind us now.
The articles in their original livelier and more extensive magazine
form being irrevocable at any rate, and forming part and parcel of the
American Collective Edition, we have acted accordingly. We revert in
the present edition to the text of _Tait's Magazine_ for the particular
articles in question, and print them as they stood there, with their
separate titles.
* * * * *
Respecting the present volume as a whole, it will now be understood
that, while a portion of its contents consists of matter derived from
De Quincey's revised edition of 1853-60, considerably the larger
proportion consists of recovered magazine articles that have been
practically inaccessible hitherto to British readers. So composed, the
volume is certainly one of the richest specimens that could be offered
of De Quincey's general characteristics. There are ups and downs in it,
portions inferior to others in literary merit, and occasional lapses
into what may seem spiteful or in bad taste. All in all, however, it
illustrates most variously and most amusingly the shrewdness of De
Quincey's observations of men and things, the range and readiness
of his erudition, the subtlety and originality of his speculative
intellect, his faculty of poetic imagination, his power of mournful
pathos on the one hand and the most whimsical humour on the other, and
the marvellous versatility and flexibility of his style.
D. M.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(_continued_)
FROM 1803 TO 1808
CHAPTER I
OXFORD
I[1]
[1] From _Tait's Magazine_ for February 1835.--M.
It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of the year 1803, that I
first entered Oxford with a view to its vast means of education, or
rather with a view to its vast advantages for study. A ludicrous story
is told of a young candidate for clerical orders--that, being asked by
the bishop's chaplain if he had ever "been to Oxford," as a colloquial
expression for having had an academic education, he replied, "No:
but he had twice been to Abingdon": Abingdon being only seven miles
distant. In the same sense I might say that once before I had been
at Oxford: but _that_ was as a transient visitor with Lord W----,[2]
when we were both children. Now, on the contrary, I approached these
venerable towers in the character of a student, and with the purpose
of a long connexion; personally interested in the constitution of the
University, and obscurely anticipating that in this city, or at least
during the period of my nominal attachment to this academic body, the
remoter parts of my future life would unfold before me. All hearts were
at this time occupied with the public interests of the country. The
"sorrow of the time" was ripening to a second harvest. Napoleon had
commenced his Vandal, or rather Hunnish war with Britain, in the spring
of this year, about eight months before; and profound public interest
it was, into which the very coldest hearts entered, that a little
divided with me the else monopolizing awe attached to the solemn act of
launching myself upon the world. That expression may seem too strong
as applied to one who had already been for many months a houseless
wanderer in Wales, and a solitary roamer in the streets of London.
But in those situations, it must be remembered, I was an unknown,
unacknowledged vagrant; and without money I could hardly run much risk,
except of breaking my neck. The perils, the pains, the pleasures, or
the obligations, of the world, scarcely exist in a proper sense for him
who has no funds. Perfect weakness is often secure: it is by imperfect
power, turned against its master, that men are snared and decoyed. Here
in Oxford I should be called upon to commence a sort of establishment
upon the splendid English scale; here I should share in many duties
and responsibilities, and should become henceforth an object of notice
to a large society. Now first becoming separately and individually
answerable for my conduct, and no longer absorbed into the general unit
of a family, I felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the
anxieties of a man, and a member of the world.
[2] _I.e._ Lord Westport. Sec vol. i. pp. 161-2 _et seq._--M.
Oxford, ancient Mother! hoary with ancestral honours, time-honoured,
and, haply, it may be, time-shattered power--I owe thee nothing! Of thy
vast riches I took not a shilling, though living amongst multitudes who
owed to thee their daily bread. Not the less I owe thee justice; for
that is a universal debt. And at this moment, when I see thee called
to thy audit by unjust and malicious accusers--men with the hearts of
inquisitors and the purposes of robbers--I feel towards thee something
of filial reverence and duty. However, I mean not to speak as an
advocate, but as a conscientious witness in the simplicity of truth;
feeling neither hope nor fear of a personal nature, without fee, and
without favour.
I have been assured from many quarters that the great body of the
public are quite in the dark about the whole manner of living in
our English Universities; and that a considerable portion of that
public, misled by the totally different constitution of Universities
in Scotland, Ireland, and generally on the Continent, as well as by
the different arrangements of collegiate life in those institutions,
are in a state worse than ignorant (that is, more unfavourable to
the truth)--starting, in fact, from prejudices, and absolute errors
of fact, which operate most uncharitably upon their construction
of those insulated statements, which are continually put forward
by designing men. Hence, I can well believe that it will be an
acceptable service, at this particular moment [1835], when the very
constitution of the two English Universities is under the unfriendly
revision of Parliament, when some roving commission may be annually
looked for, under a contingency which I will not utter in words (for
I reverence the doctrine of _[Greek: euphêmismos]_), far worse than
Cromwellian, that is, merely personal, and to winnow the existing
corporation from disaffection to the state--a Henry the Eighth
commission of sequestration, and levelled at the very integrity of
the institution--under such prospects, I can well believe that a true
account of Oxford _as it is_ (which will be valid also for Cambridge)
must be welcome both to friend and foe. And instead of giving this
account didactically, or according to a logical classification of the
various items in the survey, I will give it historically, or according
to the order in which the most important facts of the case opened
themselves before myself, under the accidents of my own personal
inquiry. No situation could be better adapted than my own for eliciting
information; for, whereas most young men come to the University under
circumstances of absolute determination as to the choice of their
particular college, and have, therefore, no cause for search or
inquiry, I, on the contrary, came thither in solitary self-dependence,
and in the loosest state of indetermination.
Every single point of my future position and connection, to what
college I would attach myself, and in which of the two orders open
to my admission I would enrol myself, was left absolutely to my own
election. My coming at all, in this year, arose out of an accident of
conversation. In the latter half of 1803, I was living with my mother
at the Priory of St. J----, a beautiful place which she had in part
planned, and built, but chiefly repaired out of a very ancient Gothic
monastery; when my uncle, a military man, on a visit to England, after
twenty-five years' absence in India, suddenly remarked, that in my case
he should feel it shameful to be "tied to my mother's apron-string,"
for was I not eighteen years old? I answered that certainly I was: but
what could I do? My guardians had the power to control my expenditure
until I should be twenty-one; and they, it was certain, would never
aid my purpose of going to Oxford, having quarrelled with me on
that very point. My uncle, a man of restless activity, spoke to my
mother immediately, I presume, for within one hour I was summoned to
her presence. Among other questions, she put this to me, which is
importantly connected with my future experience at Oxford, and my
coming account of it:--"Your guardians," she prefaced, "still continue
to me your school allowance of £100. To this, for the present, when
your sisters cost me such heavy deductions from my own income, I
cannot undertake to make any addition--that is, you are not to count
upon any. But, of course, you will be free to spend your entire Oxford
vacations, and as much time besides as the rules of your college will
dispense with your attendance, at my house, wherever that may be. On
this understanding, are you willing to undertake an Oxford life, upon
so small an allowance as £100 per annum?" My answer was by a cheerful
and prompt assent. For I felt satisfied, and said as much to my mother,
that, although this might sound, and might really prove, on a common
system of expenditure, ludicrously below the demands of the place,
yet in Oxford, no less than in other cities, it must be possible for
a young man of firm mind to live on a hundred pounds annually, if he
pleased to do so, and to live respectably. I guessed even then how the
matter stood; and so in my own experience I found it. If a young man
were known to be of trivial pursuits, with slight habits of study, and
"strong book-mindedness," naturally enough his college peers who should
happen to be idlers would question his right to court solitude. They
would demand a sight of his warrant of exemption from ordinary usages;
and, finding none, they would see a plain argument of his poverty.
And, doubtless, when this happens to be the sole characteristic point
about a man, and is balanced by no form of personal respectability, it
does so far lead to contempt as to make a man's situation mortifying
and painful; but not more so, I affirm, in Oxford than anywhere else.
Mere defect of power, _as_ such, and where circumstances force it into
violent relief, cannot well be other than a degrading feature in any
man's position. Now, in other cities, the man of £100 a-year never can
be forced into such an invidious insulation--he finds many to keep
him in countenance; but in Oxford he is a sort of monster--he stands
alone in the only class with which he can be compared. So that the
pressure upon Oxford predispositions to contempt is far stronger than
elsewhere; and, consequently, there would be more allowance due, if the
actual contempt were also stronger--which I deny. But, no doubt, in
every climate, and under all meridians, it must be humiliating to be
distinguished by pure defect. Now and for ever, to be weak is in some
sense to be miserable; and simple poverty, without other qualification
or adjunct, is merely defect of power. But, on the other hand, in
Oxford, at least, as much as in any other place I ever knew, talents
and severe habits of study are their own justification. And upon the
strongest possible warrant, viz., my own experience in a college then
recently emerging from habits of riotous dissipation, I can affirm that
a man who pleads known habits of study as his reason for secluding
himself, and for declining the ordinary amusements and wine parties,
will meet with neither molestation nor contempt.[3]
[3] This paragraph is omitted in the American reprint of the
_Tait_ paper, probably because it repeats information given
already. See the chapter entitled "The Priory, Chester," in Vol.
I, and especially the concluding pages of that chapter. As,
however, the paragraph contains some new particulars, and explains
what follows, I have retained it, the rather because it ought to
be the rule not to tamper with De Quincey's text on any such
occasion.--M.
For my part, though neither giving nor accepting invitations for
the first two years of my residence, never but once had I reason to
complain of a sneer, or indeed any allusion whatever to habits which
might be understood to express poverty. Perhaps even then I had no
reason to complain, for my own conduct in that instance was unwise; and
the allusion, though a personality, and so far ill-bred, might be meant
in real kindness. The case was this: I neglected my dress in one point
habitually; that is, I wore clothes until they were threadbare--partly
in the belief that my gown would conceal their main defects, but much
more from carelessness and indisposition to spend upon a tailor what
I had destined for a bookseller. At length, an official person, of
some weight in the college, sent me a message on the subject through
a friend. It was couched in these terms: That, let a man possess what
talents or accomplishments he might, it was not possible for him to
maintain his proper station in the public respect, amongst so many
servants and people servile to external impressions, without some
regard to the elegance of his dress. A reproof so courteously prefaced
I could not take offence at; and at that time I resolved to spend some
cost upon decorating my person. But always it happened that some book,
or set of books,--that passion being absolutely endless, and inexorable
as the grave,--stepped between me and my intentions; until one day,
upon arranging my toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the
discovery that I had no waistcoat (or _vest_, as it is now called,
through conceit or provincialism) which was not torn or otherwise
dilapidated; whereupon, buttoning up my coat to the throat, and drawing
my gown as close about me as possible, I went into the public "hall"
(so is called in Oxford the public eating-room) with no misgiving.
However, I was detected; for a grave man, with a superlatively grave
countenance, who happened on that day to sit next me, but whom I did
not personally know, addressing his friend sitting opposite, begged to
know if he had seen the last Gazette, because he understood that it
contained an Order in Council laying an interdict upon the future use
of waistcoats. His friend replied, with the same perfect gravity, that
it was a great satisfaction to his mind that his Majesty's Government
should have issued so sensible an order; which he trusted would be
soon followed up by an interdict on breeches, they being still more
disagreeable to pay for. This said, without the movement on either side
of a single muscle, the two gentlemen passed to other subjects; and
I inferred, upon the whole, that, having detected my manoeuvre, they
wished to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At any rate,
this was the sole personality, or equivocal allusion of any sort,
which ever met my ear during the years that I asserted my right to be
as poor as chose. And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were
the temper in which they spoke, kind or unkind; for a little extra
care in the use of clothes will always, under almost any extremity of
poverty, pay for so much extra cost as is essential to neatness and
decorum, if not even to elegance. They were right, and I was wrong, in
a point which cannot be neglected with impunity.
But, to enter upon my own history, and my sketch of Oxford life.--Late
on a winter's night, in the latter half of December, 1803, when a
snow-storm, and a heavy one, was already gathering in the air, a lazy
Birmingham coach, moving at four and a half miles an hour, brought me
through the long northern suburb of Oxford, to a shabby coach-inn,
situated in the Corn Market. Business was out of the question at that
hour. But the next day I assembled all the acquaintances I had in
the University, or had to my own knowledge; and to them, in council
assembled, propounded my first question: What college would they,
in their superior state of information, recommend to my choice?
This question leads to the first great characteristic of Oxford, as
distinguished from most other Universities. Before me at this moment
lie several newspapers, reporting, at length, the installation in
office (as Chancellor) of the Duke of Wellington. The original Oxford
report, having occasion to mention the particular college from which
the official procession moved, had said, no doubt, that the gates
of University, the halls of University, &c., were at such a point
of time thrown open. But most of the provincial editors, not at all
comprehending that the reference was to an individual college, known by
the name of University College, one of twenty-five such establishments
in Oxford, had regularly corrected it into "gates of _the_ University,"
&c. Here is the first misconception of all strangers. And this feature
of Oxford it is which has drawn such exclamations of astonishment from
foreigners. Lipsius, for example, protested with fervour, on first
seeing this vast establishment of Oxford, that one college of this
University was greater in its power and splendour, that it glorified
and illustrated the honours of literature more conspicuously by the
pomps with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education,
than any entire University of the Continent.
What is a University almost everywhere else? It announces little more,
as respects the academic buildings, than that here is to be found the
place of rendezvous--the exchange, as it were, or, under a different
figure, the _palæstra_ of the various parties connected with the
prosecution of liberal studies. This is their "House of Call," their
general place of muster and parade. Here it is that the professors
and the students converge, with the certainty of meeting each other.
Here, in short, are the lecture-rooms in all the faculties. Well: thus
far we see an arrangement of convenience--that is, of convenience for
one of the parties, namely, the professors. To them it spares the
disagreeable circumstances connected with a private reception of their
students at their own rooms. But to the students it is a pure matter
of indifference. In all this there is certainly no service done to the
cause of good learning which merits a state sanction, or the aid of
national funds. Next, however, comes an academic library, sometimes a
good one; and here commences a real use in giving a national station
to such institutions, because their durable and monumental existence,
liable to no flux or decay from individual caprice, or accidents of
life, and their authentic station, as expressions of the national
grandeur, point them out to the bequests of patriotic citizens. They
fall also under the benefit of another principle--the conservative
feeling of amateurship. Several great collections have been bequeathed
to the British Museum, for instance--not chiefly _as_ a national
institution, and under feelings of nationality, but because, being
such, it was also permanent; and thus the painful labours of collecting
were guaranteed from perishing. Independently of all this, I, for
my part, willingly behold the surplus of national funds dedicated
to the consecration, as it were, of learning, by raising temples to
its honour, even where they answer no purpose of direct use. Next
after the service of religion, I would have the service of learning
externally embellished, recommended to the affections of men, and
hallowed by the votive sculptures, as I may say, of that affection,
gathering in amount from age to age. _Magnificabo apostolatum meum_
is a language almost as becoming to the missionaries and ministers of
knowledge, as to the ambassadors of religion. It is fit that by pompous
architectural monuments a voice may for ever be sounding audibly in
human ears of homage to these powers, and that even alien feelings may
be compelled into secret submission to their influence. Therefore,
amongst the number of those who value such things upon the scale of
direct proximate utility rank not me: that _arithmetica officina_ is
in my ears abominable. But still I affirm that, in our analysis of an
ordinary university, or "college," as it is provincially called, we
have not yet arrived at any element of service rendered to knowledge or
education, large enough to call for very extensive national aid. Honour
has thus far been rendered to the good cause by a public attestation,
and that is well: but no direct promotion has been given to that cause,
no impulse communicated to its progress, such that it can be held out
as a result commensurate to the name and pretensions of a University.
As yet there is nothing accomplished which is beyond the strength of
any little commercial town. And, as to the library in particular,
besides that in all essential departments it might be bought, to order,
by one day's common subscription of Liverpool or Glasgow merchants,
students very rarely indeed have admission to its free use.
What other functions remain to a University? For those which I have
mentioned of furnishing a point of rendezvous to the great body of
professors and students, and a point of concentration to the different
establishments of implements and machinery for elaborate researches
(as, for instance, of books and MSS., in the first place; secondly, of
maps, charts, and globes; and, thirdly, perhaps of the costly apparatus
required for such studies as sideral astronomy, galvanic chemistry
or physiology, &c.); all these are uses which cannot be regarded in
a higher light than as conveniences merely incidental and collateral
to the main views of the founders. There are, then, two much loftier
and more commanding ends met by the idea and constitution of such
institutions, and which first rise to a rank of dignity sufficient to
occupy the views of a legislator, or to warrant a national interest.
These ends are involved: 1st, in the practice of conferring _degrees_,
that is, formal attestations and guarantees of competence to give
advice, instruction, or aid, in the three great branches of liberal
knowledge applicable to human life; 2d, in that appropriation of fixed
funds to fixed professorships, by means of which the uninterrupted
succession of public and authorised teachers is sustained in all the
higher branches of knowledge, from generation to generation, and from
century to century. By the latter result it is secured that the great
well-heads of liberal knowledge and of severe science shall never
grow dry. By the former it is secured that this unfailing fountain
shall be continually applied to the production and to the _tasting_ of
fresh labours in endless succession for the public service, and thus,
in effect, that the great national fountain shall not be a stagnant
reservoir, but, by an endless _derivation_ (to speak in a Roman
metaphor), applied to a system of national irrigation. These are the
two great functions and qualifications of a collegiate incorporation:
one providing to each separate generation its own separate rights of
heirship to all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors, and
converting a mere casual life-annuity into an estate of inheritance--a
mere fleeting [Greek: agônisma] into a [Greek: ktêma es aei]; the other
securing for this eternal dowry as wide a distribution as possible: the
one function regarding the dimension of _length_ in the endless series
of ages through which it propagates its gifts; the other regarding
the dimension of _breadth_ in the large application throughout any
one generation of these gifts to the public service. Here are grand
functions, high purposes; but neither one nor the other demands any
edifices of stone and marble; neither one nor the other presupposes any
edifice at all built with human hands. A collegiate incorporation, the
church militant of knowledge, in its everlasting struggle with darkness
and error, is, in this respect, like the Church of Christ--that is, it
is always and essentially invisible to the fleshly eye. The pillars
of this church are human champions; its weapons are great truths so
shaped as to meet the shifting forms of error; its armouries are
piled and marshalled in human memories; its cohesion lies in human
zeal, in discipline, in childlike docility; and all its triumphs,
its pomps, and glories, must for ever depend upon talent, upon the
energies of the will, and upon the harmonious co-operation of its
several divisions. Thus far, I say, there is no call made out for _any_
intervention of the architect.
Let me apply all this to Oxford. Among the four functions commonly
recognised by the founders of Universities are--1st, to find a set of
halls or places of meeting; 2d, to find the implements and accessaries
of study; 3d, to secure the succession of teachers and learners; 4th,
to secure the profitable application of their attainments to the
public service. Of these four, the two highest need no buildings; and
the other two, which are mere collateral functions of convenience,
need only a small one. Wherefore, then, and to what end, are the
vast systems of building, the palaces and towers of Oxford? These
are either altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and
luxurious wealth, or they point to some fifth function not so much
as contemplated by other Universities, and, at present, absolutely
and chimerically beyond their means of attainment. Formerly we used
to hear attacks upon the Oxford discipline as fitted to the true
_intellectual_ purposes of a modern education. Those attacks, weak
and most uninstructed in facts, false as to all that they challenged,
and puerile as to what implicitly they propounded for homage, are
silent. But, of late, the battery has been pointed against the Oxford
discipline in its _moral_ aspects, as fitted for the government and
restraint of young men, or even as at all contemplating any such
control. The Beverleys would have us suppose, not only that the great
body of the students are a licentious crew, acknowledging no discipline
or restraints, but that the grave elders of the University, and those
who wield the nominal authority of the place, passively resign the
very shows of power, and connive at general excesses, even when they
do not absolutely authorize them in their personal examples. Now, when
such representations are made, to what standard of a just discipline
is it that these writers would be understood as appealing? Is it to
some ideal, or to some existing and known reality? Would they have
England suppose that they are here comparing the actual Oxford with
some possible hypothetic or imaginable Oxford,--with some ideal case,
that is to say, about which great discussions would arise as to its
feasibility,--or that they are comparing it with some known standard
of discipline actually realized and sustained for generations, in
Leipsic, suppose, or Edinburgh, or Leyden, or Salamanca? This is the
question of questions, to which we may demand an answer; and, according
to that answer, observe the dilemma into which these furciferous
knaves must drop. If they are comparing Oxford simply with some ideal
and better Oxford, in some ideal and better world, in that case all
they have said--waiving its falsehoods of fact--is no more than a
flourish of rhetoric, and the whole discussion may be referred to
the shadowy combats of scholastic declamation-mongers--those mock
gladiators, and _umbratiles doctores_. But if, on the other hand, they
pretend to take their station upon the known basis of some existing
institution,--if they will pretend that, in this impeachment of
Oxford, they are proceeding upon a silent comparison with Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Jena, Leipsic, Padua, &c.,--then are they self-exposed, as
men not only without truth, but without shame. For now comes in, as
a sudden revelation, and as a sort of _deus ex machina_, for the
vindication of the truth, the simple answer to that question proposed
above, Wherefore, and to what end, are the vast edifices of Oxford? A
University, as Universities are in general, needs not, I have shown, to
be a visible body--a building raised with hands. Wherefore, then, is
the _visible_ Oxford? To what _fifth_ end, refining upon the ordinary
ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching system of Oxford
_hospitia_, or monastic hotels, directed by their founders, or applied
by their present possessors? Hearken, reader, to the answer:--
These vast piles are applied to an end absolutely indispensable to any
even tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattainable
upon any commensurate scale in any other University of Europe. They are
applied to the personal settlement and domestication of the students
within the gates and walls of that college to whose discipline they are
amenable. Everywhere else the young men live _where_ they please and
_as_ they please; necessarily distributed amongst the towns-people;
in any case, therefore, liable to no control or supervision whatever;
and, in those cases where the University forms but a small part of
a vast capital city, as it does in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna,
Berlin, and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive temptation
and distraction which besiege human life in high-viced and luxurious
communities. Here, therefore, it is a mockery to talk of discipline;
of a nonentity there can be no qualities; and we need not ask for the
description of the discipline in situations where discipline there can
be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as varying _pro tanto_
the uniform features of this picture. In Glasgow I have heard of an
arrangement by which young academicians are placed in the family of a
professor. Here, as members of a private household, and that household
under the presiding eye of a conscientious, paternal, and judicious
scholar, doubtless they would enjoy as absolute a shelter from peril
and worldly contagion as parents could wish; but not _more_ absolute,
I affirm, than belongs, unavoidably, to the monastic seclusion of an
Oxford college--the gates of which open to no egress after nine o'clock
at night, nor after eleven to any ingress which is not regularly
reported to a proper officer of the establishment. The two forms of
restraint are, as respects the effectual amount of control, equal; and
were they equally diffused, Glasgow and Oxford would, in this point,
stand upon the same level of discipline. But it happens that the
Glasgow case was a personal accident; personal, both as regarded him
who volunteered the exercise of this control, and those who volunteered
to appropriate its benefits; whereas the Oxford case belongs to the
very system, is coextensive with the body of undergraduates, and,
from the very arrangement of Oxford life, is liable to no decay or
intermission.
Here, then, the reader apprehends the first great characteristic
distinction of Oxford--that distinction which extorted the rapturous
admiration of Lipsius as an exponent of enormous wealth, but which I
now mention as applying, with ruinous effect, to the late calumnies
upon Oxford, as an inseparable exponent of her meritorious discipline.
She, most truly and severely an "Alma Mater," gathers all the juvenile
part of her flock within her own fold, and beneath her own vigilant
supervision. In Cambridge there is, so far, a laxer administration of
this rule, that, when any college overflows undergraduates are allowed
to lodge at large in the town. But in Oxford this increase of peril and
discretionary power is thrown by preference upon the senior graduates,
who are seldom below the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and the
college accommodations are reserved, in almost their whole extent, for
the most youthful part of the society. This extent is prodigious. Even
in my time, upwards of two thousand persons were lodged within the
colleges; none having fewer than two rooms, very many having three, and
men of rank, or luxurious habits, having often large suites of rooms.
But that was a time of war, which Oxford experience has shown to have
operated most disproportionably as a drain upon the numbers disposable
for liberal studies; and the total capacity of the University was far
from being exhausted. There are now, I believe, between five and six
thousand names upon the Oxford books; and more than four thousand,
I understand, of constant residents. So that Oxford is well able to
lodge, and on a very sumptuous scale, a small army of men; which
expression of her great splendour I now mention (as I repeat) purely
as applying to the question of her machinery for enforcing discipline.
This part of her machinery, it will be seen, is unique, and absolutely
peculiar to herself. Other Universities, boasting no such enormous
wealth, cannot be expected to act upon her system of seclusion.
Certainly, I make it no reproach to other Universities, that, not
possessing the means of sequestering their young men from worldly
communion, they must abide by the evils of a laxer discipline. It is
their misfortune, and not their criminal neglect, which consents to
so dismal a relaxation of academic habits. But let them not urge this
misfortune in excuse at one time, and at another virtually disavow it.
Never let _them_ take up a stone to throw at Oxford, upon this element
of a wise education; since in them, through that original vice in their
constitution, the defect of all means for secluding and insulating
their society, discipline is abolished by anticipation--being, in fact,
an impossible thing; for the walls of the college are subservient to no
purpose of life, but only to a purpose of convenience; they converge
the students for the hour or two of what is called lecture; which over,
each undergraduate again becomes _sui juris_, is again absorbed into
the crowds of the world, resorts to whatsoever haunts he chooses, and
finally closes his day at ---- if, in any sense, at home--at a home
which is not merely removed from the supervision and control, but
altogether from the bare knowledge, of his academic superiors. How
far this discipline is well administered in other points at Oxford,
will appear from the rest of my account. But, thus far, at least, it
must be conceded, that Oxford, by and through this one unexampled
distinction--her vast disposable fund of accommodations for junior
members within her own private cloisters--possesses an advantage which
she could not forfeit, if she would, towards an effectual knowledge
of each man's daily habits, and a control over him which is all but
absolute.
This knowledge and this control is much assisted and concentrated by
the division of the University into separate colleges. Here comes
another feature of the Oxford system. Elsewhere the University is a
single college; and this college is the University. But in Oxford the
University expresses, as it were, the army, and the colleges express
the several brigades, or regiments.
To resume, therefore, my own thread of personal narration. On the
next morning after my arrival in Oxford, I assembled a small council
of friends to assist me in determining at which of the various
separate societies I should enter, and whether as a "commoner," or
as a "gentleman commoner." Under the first question was couched the
following latitude of choice: I give the names of the colleges, and
the numerical account of their numbers, as it stood in January 1832;
for this will express, as well as the list of that day (which I do not
accurately know), the _proportions_ of importance amongst them.
Mem.
1. University College 207
2. Balliol " 257
3. Merton " 124
4. Exeter " 299
5. Oriel " 293
6. Queen's " 351
7. New " 157
8. Lincoln " 141
9. All Souls' " 98
10. Magdalene " 165
11. Brasenose " 418
12. Corpus Christi " 127
13. Christ Church " 949
14. Trinity " 259
15. St. John's " 218
16. Jesus " 167
17. Wadham " 217
18. Pembroke " 189
19. Worcester " 231
Then, besides these colleges, five _Halls_, as they are technically
called (the term _Hall_ implying chiefly that they are societies not
endowed, or not endowed with fellowships as the colleges are), namely:
Mem.
1. St. Mary Hall 83
2. Magdalen " 178
3. New Inn " 10
4. St. Alban " 41
5. St. Edmund " 96
Such being the names, and general proportions on the scale of local
importance, attached to the different communities, next comes the very
natural question, What are the chief determining motives for guiding
the selection amongst them? These I shall state. First of all, a man
not otherwise interested in the several advantages of the colleges
has, however, in all probability, some choice between a small society
and a large one; and thus far a mere ocular inspection of the list
will serve to fix his preference. For my part, supposing other things
equal, I greatly preferred the most populous college, as being that
in which any single member, who might have reasons for standing aloof
from the general habits of expense, of intervisiting, &c., would have
the best chance of escaping a jealous notice. However, amongst those
"other things" which I presumed equal, one held a high place in my
estimation, which a little inquiry showed to be very far from equal.
All the colleges have chapels, but all have not organs; nor, amongst
those which have, is the same large use made of the organ. Some
preserve the full cathedral service; others do not. Christ Church,
meantime, fulfilled _all_ conditions: for the chapel here happens
to be the cathedral of the diocese; the service, therefore, is full
and ceremonial; the college, also, is far the most splendid, both in
numbers, rank, wealth, and influence. Hither I resolved to go; and
immediately I prepared to call on the head.
The "head," as he is called generically, of an Oxford college (his
_specific_ appellation varies almost with every college--principal,
provost, master, rector, warden, etc.), is a greater man than the
uninitiated suppose. His situation is generally felt as conferring a
degree of rank not much less than episcopal; and, in fact, the head
of Brasenose at that time, who happened to be the Bishop of Bangor,
was not held to rank much above his brothers in office. Such being the
rank of heads generally, _à fortiori_, that of Christ Church was to be
had in reverence; and this I knew. He is always, _ex officio_, dean
of the diocese; and, in his quality of college head, he only, of all
deans that ever were heard of, is uniformly considered a greater man
than his own diocesan. But it happened that the present dean had even
higher titles to consideration. Dr. Cyril Jackson had been tutor to the
Prince of Wales (George IV); he had repeatedly refused a bishopric;
and _that_, perhaps, is entitled to place a man one degree above him
who has accepted one. He was also supposed to have made a bishop, and
afterwards, at least, it is certain that he made his own brother a
bishop. All things weighed, Dr. Cyril Jackson seemed so very great a
personage that I now felt the value of my long intercourse with great
dons in giving me confidence to face a lion of this magnitude.
Those who know Oxford are aware of the peculiar feelings which have
gathered about the name and pretensions of Christ Church; feelings of
superiority and leadership in the members of that college, and often
enough of defiance and jealousy on the part of other colleges. Hence
it happens that you rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place
of public resort, with a Christ-Church man, but he takes occasion,
if young and frivolous, to talk loudly of the Dean, as an indirect
expression of his own connection with this splendid college; the title
of _Dean_ being exclusively attached to the headship of Christ Church.
The Dean, as maybe supposed, partakes in this superior dignity of his
"House"; he is officially brought into connection with all orders
of the British aristocracy--often with royal personages; and with
the younger branches of the aristocracy his office places him in a
relation of authority and guardianship--exercised, however, through
inferior ministry, and seldom by direct personal interference. The
reader must understand that, with rare exceptions, all the princes
and nobles of Great Britain who choose to benefit by an academic
education resort either to Christ Church College in Oxford, or to
Trinity College in Cambridge: these are the alternatives. Naturally
enough, my young friends were somewhat startled at my determination to
call upon so great a man; a letter, they fancied, would be a better
mode of application. I, however, who did not adopt the doctrine that
no man is a hero to his valet, was of opinion that very few men indeed
are heroes to themselves. The cloud of external pomp, which invests
them to the eyes of the _attoniti_, cannot exist to their own; they do
not, like Kehama entering the eight gates of Padalon at once, meet and
contemplate their own grandeurs; but, more or less, are conscious of
acting a part. I did not, therefore, feel the tremor which was expected
of a novice, on being ushered into so solemn a presence.
II[4]
[4] From _Tait's Magazine_ for June 1835.
The Dean was sitting in a spacious library or study, elegantly,
if not luxuriously, furnished. Footmen, stationed as repeaters,
as if at some fashionable rout, gave a momentary importance to my
unimportant self, by the thundering tone of their annunciations. All
the machinery of aristocratic life seemed indeed to intrench this
great Don's approaches; and I was really surprised that so very great
a man should condescend to rise on my entrance. But I soon found that,
if the Dean's station and relation to the higher orders had made
him lofty, those same relations had given a peculiar suavity to his
manners. Here, indeed, as on other occasions, I noticed the essential
misconception, as to the demeanour of men of rank, which prevails
amongst those who have no personal access to their presence. In the
fabulous pictures of novels (such novels as once abounded), and in
newspaper reports of conversations, real or pretended, between the King
and inferior persons, we often find the writer expressing _his_ sense
of aristocratic assumption, by making the King address people without
their titles. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, or Lord Liverpool,
figures usually, in such scenes, as "Wellington," or "Arthur," and as
"Liverpool." Now, as to the private talk of George IV in such cases, I
do not pretend to depose; but, speaking generally, I may say that the
practice of the highest classes takes the very opposite course. Nowhere
is a man so sure of his titles or official distinctions as amongst
_them_; for it is upon giving to every man the very extreme punctilio
of his known or supposed claims that they rely for the due observance
of their own. Neglecting no form of courtesy suited to the case, they
seek, in this way, to remind men unceasingly of what they expect; and
the result is what I represent--that people in the highest stations,
and such as bring them continually into contact with inferiors, are,
of all people, the least addicted to insolence or defect of courtesy.
Uniform suavity of manner is indeed rarely found _except_ in men of
high rank. Doubtless this may arise upon a motive of self-interest,
jealous of giving the least opening or invitation to the retorts of
ill-temper or low breeding. But, whatever be its origin, such I believe
to be the fact. In a very long conversation of a general nature upon
the course of my studies, and the present direction of my reading,
Dr. Cyril Jackson treated me just as he would have done his equal in
station and in age. Coming, at length, to the particular purpose of my
visit at this time to himself, he assumed a little more of his official
stateliness. He condescended to say that it would have given him
pleasure to reckon me amongst his flock; "But, sir," he said, in a tone
of some sharpness, "your guardians have acted improperly. It was their
duty to have given me at least one year's notice of their intention to
place you at Christ Church. At present I have not a dog-kennel in my
college untenanted." Upon this, I observed that nothing remained for me
to do but to apologize for having occupied so much of his time; that,
for myself, I now first heard of this preliminary application; and
that, as to my guardians, I was bound to acquit them of all oversight
in this instance, they being no parties to my present scheme. The
Dean expressed his astonishment at this statement. I, on my part,
was just then making my parting bows, and had reached the door, when
a gesture of the Dean's, courteously waving me back to the sofa I had
quitted, invited me to resume my explanations; and I had a conviction
at the moment that the interview would have terminated in the Dean's
suspending his standing rule in my favour. But, just at that moment,
the thundering heralds of the Dean's hall announced some man of high
rank: the sovereign of Christ Church seemed distressed for a moment;
but then, recollecting himself, bowed in a way to indicate that I was
dismissed. And thus it happened that I did not become a member of
Christ Church.[5]
[5] Among the students in Christ Church at this time was Charles
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, afterwards so well known as a fellow-resident
with De Quincey in Edinburgh. He was De Quincey's senior by four
years, and had entered Christ Church in 1798. Among his
acquaintances and fellow-students were Lord Gower, afterwards Duke
of Sutherland, Lord Newtown, Elijah Impey (son of the famous
Indian judge of that name), and others of high name and rank. In
the _Memoirs and Correspondence of Kirkpatrick Sharpe_ (published
1888) there are descriptions of the society of the college, with
sketches of Dean Cyril Jackson, &c., from Sharpe's cynical
pen.--M.
A few days passed in thoughtless indecision. At the end of that time,
a trivial difficulty arose to settle my determination. I had brought
about fifty guineas to Oxford; but the expenses of an Oxford inn, with
almost daily entertainments to young friends, had made such inroads
upon this sum, that, after allowing for the contingencies incident to
a college initiation, enough would not remain to meet the usual demand
for what is called "caution money." This is a small sum, properly
enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for
meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or
his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon
his college. By releasing the college, therefore, from all necessity
for degrading vigilance or persecution, this demand does, in effect,
operate beneficially to the feelings of all parties. In most colleges
it amounts to twenty-five pounds: in one only it was considerably less.
And this trifling consideration it was, concurring with a reputation
_at that time_ for relaxed discipline, which finally determined me
in preferring W---- College[6] to all others. This college had the
capital disadvantage, in my eyes, that its chapel possessed no organ,
and no musical service. But any other choice would have driven me to
an instant call for more money--a measure which, as too flagrantly
in contradiction to the whole terms on which I had volunteered to
undertake an Oxford life, I could not find nerves to face.
[6] It was Worcester College; and we shall use the full name,
instead of the blank W., in the sequel.--M.
At Worcester College, therefore, I entered: and here arises the proper
occasion for stating the true costs of an Oxford education. First
comes the question of _lodging_. This item varies, as may be supposed;
but my own case will place on record the two extremes of cost in one
particular college, nowadays differing, I believe, from the general
standard. The first rooms assigned me, being small and ill-lighted,
as part of an old Gothic building, were charged at four guineas a
year. These I soon exchanged for others a little better, and for them
I paid six guineas. Finally, by privilege of seniority, I obtained a
handsome set of well-proportioned rooms, in a modern section of the
college, charged at ten guineas a year. This set was composed of three
rooms; namely, an airy bed-room, a study, and a spacious room for
receiving visitors. This range of accommodation is pretty general in
Oxford, and, upon the whole, may be taken perhaps as representing the
average amount of luxury in this respect, and at the average amount
of cost. The furniture and the fittings up of these rooms cost me
about twenty-five guineas; for the Oxford rule is, that if you take
the rooms (which is at your own option), in that case, you _third_ the
furniture and the embellishments--that is, you succeed to the total
cost diminished by one third. You pay, therefore, two guineas out of
each three to your _immediate_ predecessor. But, as he also may have
succeeded to the furniture upon the same terms, whenever there happens
to have been a rapid succession of occupants, the original cost to
a remote predecessor is sometimes brought down, by this process of
diminution, to a mere fraction of the true value; and yet no individual
occupant can complain of any heavy loss. Whilst upon this subject, I
may observe that, in the seventeenth century, in Milton's time, for
example (about 1624), and for more than sixty years after that era, the
practice of _chumship_ prevailed: every set of chambers was possessed
by two co-occupants; they had generally the same bed-room, and a common
study; and they were called _chums_. This practice, once all but
universal, is now entirely extinct; and the extinction serves to mark
the advance of the country, not so much in luxury as in refinement.
The next item which I shall notice is that which in college bills is
expressed by the word _Tutorage_. This is the same in all colleges,
I believe: viz., ten guineas per annum. And this head suggests an
explanation which is most important to the reputation of Oxford, and
fitted to clear up a very extensive delusion. Some years ago, a most
elaborate statement was circulated of the number and costly endowment
of the Oxford Professorships. Some thirty or more there were, it
was alleged, and five or six only which were not held as absolute
sinecures. Now, this is a charge which I am not here meaning to
discuss. Whether defensible or not, I do not now inquire. It is the
practical interpretation and construction of this charge which I here
wish to rectify. In most Universities, except those of England, the
Professors are the body on whom devolves the whole duty and burthen of
teaching; they compose the sole fountains of instruction; and if these
fountains fail, the fair inference is, that the one great purpose of
the institution is defeated. But this inference, valid for all other
places, is not so for Oxford and Cambridge. And here, again, the
difference arises out of the peculiar distribution of these bodies
into separate and independent colleges. Each college takes upon itself
the regular instruction of its separate inmates--of these and of no
others; and for this office it appoints, after careful selection,
trial, and probation, the best qualified amongst those of its senior
members who choose to undertake a trust of such heavy responsibility.
These officers are called Tutors; and they are connected by duties
and by accountability, not with the University at all, but with their
own private colleges. The Professors, on the other hand, are _public_
functionaries, not connected (as respects the exercise of their
duties) with any college whatsoever--not even with their own--but
altogether and exclusively with the whole University. Besides the
public tutors appointed in each college, on the scale of one to each
dozen or score of students, there are also tutors strictly private,
who attend any students in search of special and extraordinary aid,
on terms settled privately by themselves. Of these persons, or their
existence, the college takes no cognisance; but between the two classes
of tutors, the most studious young men--those who would be most likely
to avail themselves of the lectures read by the professors--have their
whole time pretty severely occupied: and the inference from all this
is, not only that the course of Oxford education would suffer little if
no Professors at all existed, but also that, if the existing Professors
were _ex abundanti_ to volunteer the most exemplary spirit of exertion,
however much this spectacle of conscientious dealing might edify the
University, it would contribute but little to the promotion of academic
purposes. The establishment of Professors is, in fact, a thing of
ornament and pomp. Elsewhere, they are the working servants; but, in
Oxford, the ministers corresponding to them bear another name,--they
are called _Tutors_. These are the working agents in the Oxford system;
and the Professors, with salaries in many cases merely nominal,
are persons sequestered, and properly sequestered, to the solitary
cultivation and advancement of knowledge which a different order of men
is appointed to communicate.
Here let us pause for one moment, to notice another peculiarity in
the Oxford system, upon the tendency of which I shall confidently
make my appeal to the good sense of all unprejudiced readers. I have
said that the _Tutors_ of Oxford correspond to the _Professors_ of
other Universities. But this correspondence, which is absolute and
unquestionable as regards the point then at issue,--viz., where we
are to look for that limb of the establishment on which rests the
main teaching agency,--is liable to considerable qualification,
when we examine the mode of their teaching. In both cases, this is
conveyed by what is termed "lecturing";--but what is the meaning
of a lecture in Oxford and elsewhere? Elsewhere, it means a solemn
dissertation, read, or sometimes histrionically declaimed, by the
Professor. In Oxford, it means an exercise performed orally by the
students, occasionally assisted by the tutor, and subject, in its
whole course, to his corrections, and what may be called his scholia,
or collateral suggestions and improvements. Now, differ as men may as
to other features of the Oxford, compared with the hostile system,
here I conceive that there is no room for doubt or demur. An Oxford
lecture imposes a real _bona fide_ task upon the student; it will not
suffer him to fall asleep, either literally or in the energies of his
understanding; it is a real drill, under the excitement, perhaps, of
personal competition, and under the review of a superior scholar. But,
in Germany, under the declamations of the Professor, the young men are
often literally sleeping; nor is it easy to see how the attention can
be kept from wandering, on this plan, which subjects the auditor to
no risk of sudden question or personal appeal. As to the prizes given
for essays, etc., by the Professors, these have the effect of drawing
forth latent talent, but they can yield no criterion of the attention
paid to the Professor; not to say that the competition for these prizes
is a matter of choice. Sometimes it is true that examinations take
place; but the Oxford lecture is a daily examination; and, waiving
_that_, what chance is there (I would ask) for searching examinations,
for examinations conducted with the requisite _auctoritas_ (or weight
of influence derived from personal qualities), if--which may Heaven
prevent!--the German tenure of Professorships were substituted for
our British one: that is, if for independent and liberal teachers
were substituted poor mercenary haberdashers of knowledge--cap in
hand to opulent students--servile to their caprices--and, at one
blow, degrading the science they profess, the teacher, and the pupil?
Yet I hear that such advice was given to a Royal Commission, sent to
investigate one or more of the Scottish Universities. In the German
Universities, every Professor holds his situation, not on his good
behaviour, but on the capricious pleasure of the young men who resort
to his market. He opens a shop, in fact: others, without limit,
generally men of no credit or known respectability, are allowed to
open rival shops; and the result is, sometimes, that the whole kennel
of scoundrel Professors ruin one another; each standing with his
mouth open, to leap at any bone thrown amongst them from the table of
the "Burschen"; all hating, fighting, calumniating each other, until
the land is sick of its base knowledge-mongers, and would vomit the
loathsome crew, were any natural channel open to their instincts of
abhorrence. The most important of the Scottish Professorships--those
which are fundamentally morticed to the moral institutions of the
land--are upon the footing of Oxford tutorships, as regards emoluments;
that is, they are not suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant
existence, upon the alms of the students, or upon their fickle
admirations. It is made imperative upon a candidate for admission into
the ministry of the Scottish Kirk, that he shall show a certificate of
attendance through a given number of seasons at given lectures.
The next item in the quarterly (or, technically, the _term_) bills of
Oxford is for servants. This, in my college, and, I believe, in all
others, amounted, nominally, to two guineas a year. That sum, however,
was paid to a principal servant, whom, perhaps, you seldom or never
saw; the actual attendance upon yourself being performed by one of
his deputies; and to this deputy--who is, in effect, a _factotum_,
combining in his single person all the functions of chamber-maid,
valet, waiter at meals, and porter or errand-boy--by the custom of the
place and your own sense of propriety, you cannot but give something
or other in the shape of perquisites. I was told, on entering, that
half a guinea a quarter was the customary allowance,--the same sum, in
fact, as was levied by the college for his principal; but I gave mine a
guinea a quarter, thinking that little enough for the many services he
performed; and others, who were richer than myself, I dare say, often
gave much more. Yet, sometimes, it struck me, from the gratitude which
his looks testified, on my punctual payment of this guinea,--for it
was the only bill with regard to which I troubled myself to practise
any severe punctuality,--that perhaps some thoughtless young man
might give him less, or might even forget to give anything; and, at
all events, I have reason to believe that half that sum would have
contented him. These minutiæ I record purposely; my immediate object
being to give a rigorous statement of the real expenses incident to
an English university education, partly as a guide to the calculations
of parents, and partly as an answer to the somewhat libellous
exaggerations which are current on this subject, in times like these,
when even the truth itself, and received in a spirit of candour the
most indulgent, may be all too little to defend these venerable seats
of learning from the ruin which seems brooding over them. Yet, no!
Abominable is the language of despair even in a desperate situation.
And, therefore, Oxford, ancient mother! and thou, Cambridge, twin-light
of England! be vigilant and erect, for the enemy stands at all your
gates! Two centuries almost have passed since the boar was within
your vineyards, laying waste and desolating your heritage. Yet that
storm was not final, nor that eclipse total. May this also prove but
a trial and a shadow of affliction! which affliction, may it prove to
you, mighty incorporations, what, sometimes, it is to us, poor, frail
_homunculi_--a process of purification, a solemn and oracular warning!
And, when that cloud is overpast, then, rise, ancient powers, wiser and
better--ready, like the [Greek: lampadêphoroi] of old, to enter upon
a second _stadium_, and to transmit the sacred torch through a second
period of twice[7] five hundred years. So prays a loyal _alumnus_,
whose presumption, if any be, in taking upon himself a monitory tone,
is privileged by zeal and filial anxiety.
[7] Oxford may confessedly claim a duration of that extent; and
the pretensions of Cambridge, in that respect, if less aspiring,
are, however, as I believe, less accurately determined.
To return, however, into the track from which I have digressed. The
reader will understand that any student is at liberty to have private
servants of his own, as many and of what denomination he pleases.
This point, as many others of a merely personal bearing, when they
happen to stand in no relation to public discipline, neither the
University nor the particular college of the student feels summoned
or even authorized to deal with. Neither, in fact, does any other
University in Europe; and why, then, notice the case? Simply thus: if
the Oxford discipline, in this particular chapter, has nothing special
or peculiar about it, yet the case to which it applies _has_, and
is almost exclusively found in our Universities. On the Continent
it happens most rarely that a student has any funds disposable for
luxuries so eminently such as grooms or footmen; but at Oxford and
Cambridge the case occurs often enough to attract notice from the
least vigilant eye. And thus we find set down to the credit account of
other Universities the non-existence of luxury in this or other modes,
whilst, meantime, it is well known to the fair inquirer that each or
all are indulgences not at all or so much as in idea proscribed by
the sumptuary edicts of those Universities, but, simply, by the lower
scale of their general revenues. And this lower scale, it will be
said--how do you account for that? I answer, not so much by the general
inferiority of Continental Europe to Great Britain in _diffusive_
wealth (though that argument goes for something, it being notorious
that, whilst immoderate wealth, concentrated in a small number of
hands, exists in various continental states upon a larger scale than
with us, moderately large estates, on the other hand, are, with them,
as one to two hundred, or even two hundred and fifty, in comparison
with ours), but chiefly upon this fact, which is too much overlooked,
that the foreign Universities are not peopled from the wealthiest
classes, which are the classes either already noble, or wishing to
become such. And why is that? Purely from the vicious constitution of
society on the Continent, where all the fountains of honour lie in
the military profession or in the diplomatic. We English, haters and
revilers of ourselves beyond all precedent, disparagers of our own
eminent advantages beyond all sufferance of honour or good sense, and
daily playing into the hands of foreign enemies, who hate us out of
mere envy or shame, have amongst us some hundreds of writers who will
die or suffer martyrdom upon this proposition--that aristocracy, and
the spirit and prejudices of aristocracy, are more operative (more
effectually and more extensively operative) amongst ourselves than in
any other known society of men. Now, I, who believe all errors to arise
in some narrow, partial, or angular view of truth, am seldom disposed
to meet any sincere affirmation by a blank, unmodified denial. Knowing,
therefore, that some acute observers do really believe this doctrine as
to the aristocratic forces, and the way in which they mould English
society, I cannot but suppose that some symptoms do really exist of
such a phenomenon; and the only remark I shall here make on the case
is this, that, very often, where any force or influence reposes upon
deep realities, and upon undisturbed foundations, _there_ will be the
least heard of loquacious and noisy expressions of its power; which
expressions arise most, not where the current is most violent, but
where (being possibly the weakest) it is most fretted with resistance.
In England, the very reason why the aristocratic feeling makes
itself so sensibly felt and so distinctly an object of notice to the
censorious observer is, because it maintains a troubled existence
amongst counter and adverse influences, so many and so potent. This
might be illustrated abundantly. But, as respects the particular
question before me, it will be sufficient to say this: With us the
profession and exercise of knowledge, as a means of livelihood, is
honourable; on the Continent it is not so. The knowledge, for instance,
which is embodied in the three learned professions, does, with us, lead
to distinction and civil importance; no man can pretend to deny this;
nor, by consequence, that the Professors personally take rank with the
highest order of gentlemen. Are they not, I demand, everywhere with us
on the same footing, in point of rank and consideration, as those who
bear the king's commission in the army and navy? Can this be affirmed
of the Continent, either generally, or, indeed, partially? I say,
_no_. Let us take Germany as an illustration. Many towns (for anything
I know, all) present us with a regular bisection of the resident
_notables_, or wealthier class, into two distinct (often hostile)
coteries: one being composed of those who are "_noble_"; the other,
of families equally well educated and accomplished, but _not_, in the
continental sense, "noble." The meaning and value of the word is so
entirely misapprehended by the best English writers,--being, in fact,
derived from our own way of applying it,--that it becomes important to
ascertain its true value. A "nobility" which is numerous enough to fill
a separate ball-room in every sixth-rate town, it needs no argument to
show, cannot be a nobility in any English sense. In fact, an _edelmann_
or nobleman, in the German sense, is strictly what we mean by a _born
gentleman_; with this one only difference, that, whereas, with us, the
rank which denominates a man such passes off by shades so insensible,
and almost infinite, into the ranks below, that it becomes impossible
to assign it any strict demarkation or lines of separation, on the
contrary, the Continental noble points to certain fixed barriers, in
the shape of privileges, which divide him, _per saltum_, from those who
are below his own order. But, were it not for this one legal benefit
of accurate circumscription and slight favour, the Continental noble,
whether Baron of Germany, Count of France, or Prince of Sicily and
of Russia, is simply on a level with the common landed _esquire_ of
Britain, and _not_ on a level in very numerous cases. Such being the
case, how paramount must be the spirit of aristocracy in Continental
society! Our _haute noblesse_--our genuine nobility, who are such
in the general feeling of their compatriots--will do _that_ which
the phantom of nobility of the Continent will not: the spurious
nobles of Germany will not mix, on equal terms, with their untitled
fellow-citizens living in the same city and in the same style as
themselves; they will not meet them in the same ball or concert-room.
Our great territorial nobility, though sometimes forming exclusive
circles (but not, however, upon any principle of high birth), do
so daily. They mix as equal partakers in the same amusements of
races, balls, musical assemblies, with the baronets (or _élite_ of
the gentry); with the landed esquires (or middle gentry); with the
superior order of tradesmen (who, in Germany, are absolute ciphers, for
political weight, or social consideration, but, with us, constitute
the lower and broader stratum of the _nobilitas_,[8] or gentry). The
obscure baronage of Germany, it is undeniable, insist upon having
"an atmosphere of their own"; whilst the Howards, the Stanleys, the
Talbots, of England, the Hamiltons, the Douglases, the Gordons, of
Scotland, are content to acknowledge a sympathy with the liberal part
of their untitled countrymen, in that point which most searchingly
tries the principle of aristocratic pride, viz., in their pleasures.
To have the same pursuits of business with another may be a result of
accident or position; to have the same pleasures, being a matter of
choice, argues a community of nature in the _moral_ sensibilities, in
that part of our constitution which differences one man from another in
the capacities of greatness and elevation.
[8] It may be necessary to inform some readers that the word
_noble_, by which so large a system of imposition and fraud, as to
the composition of foreign society, has long been practised upon
the credulity of the British, corresponds to our word
_gentlemanly_ (or, rather, to the vulgar word _genteel_, if that
word were ever used legally, or _extra gradum_), not merely upon
the argument of its _virtual_ and operative value in the general
estimate of men (that is, upon the argument that a count, baron,
&c., does not, _qua_ such, command any deeper feeling of respect
or homage than a British esquire), but also upon the fact, that,
originally, in all English registers, as, for instance, in the
Oxford matriculation registers, all the upper gentry (knights,
esquires, &c.) are technically designated by the word
_nobiles_.--_See Chamberlayne, &c._
As with their amusements, so with their graver employments; the same
mutual repulsion continues to divide the two orders through life.
The nobles either live in gloomy seclusion upon their private funds,
wherever the privilege of primogeniture has enabled them to do so;
or, having no funds at all (the case of ninety-nine in one hundred),
they go into the army; that profession, the profession of arms, being
regarded as the only one compatible with an _edelmann's_ pretensions.
Such was once the feeling in England; such is still the feeling on the
Continent. It is a prejudice naturally clinging to a semi-barbarous
(because growing out of a barbarous) state, and, in its degree,
clinging to every stage of imperfect civilization; and, were there no
other argument, this would be a sufficient one, that England, under
free institutions, has outrun the Continent, in real civilization, by a
century; a fact which is concealed by the forms of luxurious refinement
in a few exclusive classes, too often usurping the name and honours of
radical civilization.
From the super-appreciation of the military profession arises a
corresponding contempt of all other professions whatsoever _paid by
fellow-citizens_, and not by the King or the State. The clerical
profession is in the most abject degradation throughout Southern
Germany; and the reason why this forces itself less imperiously upon
the public notice is, that, in rural situations, from the absence of a
resident gentry (speaking generally), the pastor is brought into rare
collision with those who style themselves _noble_; whilst, in towns,
the clergy find people enough to countenance those who, being in the
same circumstances as to comfort and liberal education, are also
under the same ban of rejection from the "nobility," or born gentry.
The legal profession is equally degraded; even a barrister or advocate
holds a place in the public esteem little differing from that of an
Old Bailey attorney of the worst class. And this result is the less
liable to modification from personal qualities, inasmuch as there is no
great theatre (as with us) for individual display. Forensic eloquence
is unknown in Germany, as it is too generally on the Continent, from
the defect of all popular or open judicatures. A similar defect of
deliberative assemblies--such, at least, as represent any popular
influences and debate with open doors--intercepts the very possibility
of senatorial eloquence.[9] That of the pulpit only remains. But even
of this--whether it be from want of the excitement and contagious
emulation from the other fields of oratory, or from the peculiar genius
of Lutheranism--no models have yet arisen that could, for one moment,
sustain a comparison with those of England or France. The highest names
in this department would not, to a foreign ear, carry with them any
of that significance or promise which surrounds the names of Jeremy
Taylor or Barrow, Bossuet or Bourdaloue, to those even who have no
personal acquaintance with their works. This absence of all fields for
gathering public distinctions co-operates, in a very powerful way,
with the contempt of the born gentry, to degrade these professions;
and this double agency is, a third time, reinforced by those political
arrangements which deny every form of state honour or conspicuous
promotion to the very highest description of excellence, whether of
the bar, the pulpit, or the civic council. Not "the fluent Murray,"
or the accomplished Erskine, from the English bar--not Pericles or
Demosthenes, from the fierce democracies of Greece--not Paul preaching
at Athens--could snatch a wreath from public homage, nor a distinction
from the state, nor found an influence, nor leave behind them an
operative model, in Germany, as now constituted. Other walks of
emolument are still more despised. Alfieri, a Continental "noble," that
is, a born gentleman, speaks of bankers as we in England should of a
Jewish usurer, or tricking money-changer. The liberal trades, such as
those which minister to literature or the fine arts, which, with us,
confer the station of gentleman upon those who exercise them, are, in
the estimate of a Continental "noble," fitted to assign a certain rank
or place in the train and equipage of a gentleman, but not to entitle
their most eminent professors to sit down, except by sufferance, in
his presence. And, upon this point, let not the reader derive his
notions from the German books: the vast majority of German authors are
not "noble"; and, of those who are, nine tenths are liberal in this
respect, and speak the language of liberality, not by sympathy with
their own order, or as representing _their_ feelings, but in virtue of
democratic or revolutionary politics.
[9] The subject is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe,
recorded by himself in his autobiography. Some physiognomist, or
phrenologist, had found out, in Goethe's structure of head, the
sure promise of a great orator. "Strange infatuation of nature!"
observes Goethe, on this assurance, "to endow me so richly and
liberally for that particular destination which only the
institutions of my country render impossible. Music for the deaf!
Eloquence without an audience!"
Such as the rank is, and the public estimation of the leading
professions, such is the natural condition of the Universities which
rear them. The "nobles" going generally into the army, or leading lives
of indolence, the majority by far of those who resort to Universities
do so as a means of future livelihood. Few seek an academic life in
Germany who have either money to throw away on superfluities and
external show, or who have such a rank to support as might stimulate
their pride to expenses beyond their means. Parsimony is, therefore, in
these places, the governing law; and pleasure, not less fervently wooed
than at Oxford or at Cambridge, putting off her robes of elegance and
ceremony, descends to grossness, and not seldom to abject brutality.
The sum of my argument is--that, because, in comparison of the army, no
other civil profession is, in itself, held of sufficient dignity, and
not less, perhaps, because, under governments essentially unpopular,
none of these professions has been so dignified artificially by the
state, or so attached to any ulterior promotion, either through the
state or in the state, as to meet the demands of aristocratic pride,
none of them is cultivated as a means of distinction, but originally
as a means of livelihood; that the Universities, as the nurseries of
these unhonoured professions, share naturally in _their_ degradation,
and that, from this double depreciation of the place and its final
objects, few or none resort thither who can be supposed to bring
any extra funds for supporting a system of luxury; that the general
temperance, or sobriety of demeanour, is far enough, however, from
keeping pace with the absence of costly show; and that, for this
absence even, we are to thank their poverty rather than their will.
It is to the great honour, in my opinion, of our own country, that
those often resort to her fountains who have no motive but that of
disinterested reverence for knowledge; seeking, as all men perceive,
neither emolument directly from University funds, nor knowledge as the
means of emolument. Doubtless, it is neither dishonourable, nor, on
a large scale, possible to be otherwise, that students should pursue
their academic career chiefly as ministerial to their capital object of
a future livelihood. But still I contend that it is for the interest
of science and good letters that a considerable body of volunteers
should gather about their banners without pay or hopes of preferment.
This takes place on a larger scale at Oxford and Cambridge than
elsewhere; and it is but a trivial concession in return, on the part
of the University, that she should allow, even if she had the right
to withhold, the privilege of living within her walls as they would
have lived at their fathers' seats; with one only reserve, applied to
all modes of expense that are, in themselves, immoral excesses, or
occasions of scandal, or of a nature to interfere too much with the
natural hours of study, or specially fitted to tempt others of narrower
means to ruinous emulation.
Upon these principles, as it seems to me, the discipline of the
University is founded. The keeping of hunters, for example, is
unstatutable. Yet, on the other hand, it is felt to be inevitable that
young men of high spirit, familiar with this amusement, will find
means to pursue it in defiance of all the powers, however exerted,
that can properly be lodged in the hands of academic officers. The
range of the proctor's jurisdiction is limited by positive law; and
what should hinder a young man, bent upon his pleasure, from fixing
the station of his hunter a few miles out of Oxford, and riding to
cover on a hack, unamenable to any censure? For, surely, in this age,
no man could propose so absurd a thing as a general interdiction of
riding. How, in fact, does the University proceed? She discountenances
the practice; and, if forced upon her notice, she visits it with
censure, and that sort of punishment which lies within her means. But
she takes no pains to search out a trespass, which, by the mere act
of seeking to evade public display in the streets of the University,
already tends to limit itself; and which, besides, from its costliness,
can never become a prominent nuisance. This I mention as illustrating
the spirit of her legislation; and, even in this case, the reader
must carry along with him the peculiar distinction which I have
pressed with regard to English Universities, in the existence of a
large volunteer order of students seeking only the liberalization,
and not the profits, of academic life. In arguing upon their case,
it is not the fair logic to say, These pursuits taint the decorum of
the studious character; it is not fair to calculate how much is lost
to the man of letters by such addiction to fox-hunting, but, on the
contrary, what is gained to the fox-hunter, who would, at any rate, be
such, by so considerable a homage paid to letters, and so inevitable
a commerce with men of learning. Anything whatsoever attained in this
direction is probably so much more than would have been attained under
a system of less toleration. _Lucro ponamus_, we say, of the very least
success in such a case. But, in speaking of toleration as applied to
acts or habits positively against the statutes, I limit my meaning
to those which, in their own nature, are morally indifferent, and
are discountenanced simply as indirectly injurious, or as peculiarly
open to excess. Because, on graver offences (as gambling, &c.), the
malicious impeachers of Oxford must well have known that no toleration
whatsoever is practised or thought of. Once brought under the eye of
the University in a clear case and on clear evidence, it would be
punished in the most exemplary way open to a limited authority; by
_rustication_, at least--that is, banishment for a certain number
of terms, and consequent loss of these terms--supposing the utmost
palliation of circumstances; and, in an aggravated case, or on a second
offence, most certainly by final expulsion. But it is no part of duty
to serve the cause even of good morals by impure means; and it is as
difficult beforehand to prevent the existence of vicious practices so
long as men have, and ought to have, the means of seclusion liable to
no violation, as it is afterwards difficult, without breach of honour,
to obtain proof of their existence. Gambling has been known to exist
in some dissenting institutions; and, in my opinion, with no blame to
the presiding authorities. As to Oxford in particular, no such habit
was generally prevalent in my time; it is not an English vice; nor did
I ever hear of any great losses sustained in this way. But, were it
otherwise, I must hold, that, considering the numbers, rank, and great
opulence, of the students, such a habit would impeach the spirit and
temper of the age rather than the vigilance or magisterial fidelity
of the Oxford authorities. They are limited, like other magistrates,
by honour and circumstances, in a thousand ways; and if a knot of
students will choose to meet for purposes of gaming, they must always
have it in their power to baffle every honourable or becoming attempt
at detecting them. But upon this subject I shall make two statements,
which may have some effect in moderating the uncharitable judgments
upon Oxford discipline. The first respects the age of those who are
the objects of this discipline; on which point a very grave error
prevails. In the last Parliament, not once, but many times over, Lord
Brougham and others assumed that the students of Oxford were chiefly
_boys_; and this, not idly or casually, but pointedly, and with a
view to an ulterior argument; for instance, by way of proving how
little they were entitled to judge of those thirty-nine articles to
which their assent was demanded. Now, this argued a very extraordinary
ignorance; and the origin of the error showed the levity in which their
legislation was conducted. These noble lords had drawn their ideas of
a University exclusively from Glasgow. Here, it is well known, and I
mention it neither for praise nor blame, that students are in the habit
of coming at the early age of fourteen. These may allowably be styled
_boys_. But, with regard to Oxford, eighteen is about the _earliest_
age at which young men begin their residence: twenty and upwards is,
therefore, the age of the majority; that is, twenty is the _minimum_
of age for the vast majority, as there must always be more men of
three years' standing than of two or of one. Apply this fact to the
question of discipline: young men beyond twenty, generally,--that
is to say, of the age which qualifies men for seats in the national
council,--can hardly, with decency, either be called or treated as
boys; and many things become impossible as applied to _them_, which
might be of easy imposition upon an assemblage _really_ childish. In
mere justice, therefore, when speculating upon this whole subject of
Oxford discipline, the reader must carry along with him, at every
step, the recollection of that signal difference as to age which I
have now stated between Oxonians and those students whom the hostile
party contemplate in their arguments.[10] Meantime, to show that,
even under every obstacle presented by this difference of age, the
Oxford authorities do, nevertheless, administer their discipline with
fidelity, with intrepidity, and with indifference as respects the high
and the low, I shall select from a crowd of similar recollections two
anecdotes, which are but trifles in themselves, and yet are not such to
him who recognizes them as expressions of a uniform system of dealing.
[10] Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present Parliament,
reported on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a
determinate repetition of the error which I have been exposing;
and, again, as in the last Parliament, this error is not _inert_,
but is used for a hostile (apparently a malicious) purpose; nay,
which is remarkable, it is the _sole_ basis upon which the
following argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes that the
students of Oxford are "boys"; he is again supported in this
misrepresentation by Lord Brougham; and again the
misrepresentation is applied to a purpose of assault upon the
English Universities, but especially upon Oxford. And the nature
of the assault does not allow any latitude in construing the word
_boys_, nor any room for evasion as respects the total charge,
except what goes the length of a total retraction. The charge is,
that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of academic
life, upon the understanding and the honour of the students, the
University burdens their consciences to an extent which, in after
life, when reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their
engagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their
engagements, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For
the inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential
that the party taking them should be in a childish condition of
the moral sense, and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst
the Oxonian _under_-graduates, I will venture to say that the
number is larger of those who rise above than of those who fall
below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the representative
age by Lord Radnor), in my time, I heard of only one student,
amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was so young. I grieve to
see that the learned prelate who replied to the assailants was so
much taken by surprise; the defence might have been made
triumphant. With regard to oaths incompatible with the spirit of
modern manners, and yet formally unrepealed--_that_ is a case of
neglect and indolent oversight. But the _gravamen_ of that
reproach does not press exclusively upon Oxford; all the ancient
institutions of Europe are tainted in the same way, more
especially the monastic orders of the Romish church.
A great Whig Lord (Earl C----) happened (it may be ten years ago) to
present himself one day at Trinity (the leading college of Cambridge),
for the purpose of introducing Lord F----ch, his son, as a future
member of that splendid society. Possibly it mortified his aristocratic
feelings to hear the head of the college, even whilst welcoming the
young nobleman in courteous terms, yet suggesting, with some solemnity,
that, before taking any final resolution in the matter, his lordship
would do well to consider whether he were fully prepared to submit
himself to college discipline; for that, otherwise, it became his
own duty frankly to declare that the college would not look upon his
accession to their society as any advantage. This language arose out
of some recent experience of refractory and turbulent conduct upon
the part of various young men of rank; but it is very possible that
the noble Earl, in his surprise at a salutation so uncourtly, might
regard it, in a Tory mouth, as having some lurking reference to his
own Whig politics. If so, he must have been still more surprised to
hear of another case, which would meet him before he left Cambridge,
and which involved some frank dealing as well as frank speaking, when
a privilege of exception might have been presumed, if Tory politics,
or services the most memorable, could ever create such a privilege.
The Duke of W---- had two sons at Oxford. The affair is now long past;
and it cannot injure either of them to say, that one of the brothers
trespassed against the college discipline, in some way which compelled
(or was thought to compel) the presiding authorities into a solemn
notice of his conduct. Expulsion appeared to be the appropriate penalty
of his offences: but, at this point, a just hesitation arose. Not in
any servile spirit, but under a proper feeling of consideration for
so eminent a public benefactor as this young nobleman's father. The
rulers paused--and at length signified to him that he was at liberty
to withdraw himself privately from the college, but also, and at the
same time, from the University. He did so, and his brother, conceiving
him to have been harshly treated, withdrew also; and both transferred
themselves to Cambridge. That could not be prevented: but there they
were received with marked reserve. One was _not_ received, I believe,
in a technical sense; and the other was received conditionally; and
such restrictions were imposed upon his future conduct as served most
amply, and in a case of great notoriety, to vindicate the claims of
discipline, and, in an extreme case, a case so eminently an extreme one
that none like it is ever likely to recur, to proclaim the footing upon
which the very highest rank is received at the English Universities.
Is that footing peculiar _to them_? I willingly believe that it is
not; and, with respect to Edinburgh and Glasgow, I am persuaded that
their weight of dignity is quite sufficient, and would be exerted to
secure the same subordination from men of rank, if circumstances should
ever bring as large a number of that class within their gates, and if
their discipline were equally applicable to the habits of students not
domiciled within their walls. But, as to the smaller institutions for
education within the pale of dissent, I feel warranted in asserting,
from the spirit of the anecdotes which have reached me, that they have
not the _auctoritas_ requisite for adequately maintaining their dignity.
So much for the aristocracy of our English Universities: their glory
is, and the happiest application of their vast influence, that they
have the power to be republican, as respects their internal condition.
Literature, by substituting a different standard of rank, tends to
republican equality; and, as one instance of this, properly belonging
to the chapter of _servants_, which originally led to this discussion,
it ought to be known that the class of "servitors," once a large
body in Oxford, have gradually become practically extinct under the
growing liberality of the age. They carried in their academic dress a
mark of their inferiority; they waited at dinner on those of higher
rank, and performed other menial services, humiliating to themselves,
and latterly felt as no less humiliating to the general name and
interests of learning. The better taste, or rather the relaxing
pressure of aristocratic prejudice, arising from the vast diffusion
of trade and the higher branches of mechanic art, have gradually
caused these functions of the order (even where the law would not
permit the extinction of the order) to become obsolete. In my time,
I was acquainted with two servitors: but one of them was rapidly
pushed forward into a higher station; and the other complained of no
degradation, beyond the grievous one of exposing himself to the notice
of young women in the streets with an untasselled cap; but this he
contrived to evade, by generally going abroad without his academic
dress. The _servitors_ of Oxford are the _sizars_ of Cambridge; and I
believe the same changes[11] have taken place in both.
[11] These changes have been accomplished, according to my
imperfect knowledge of the case, in two ways: first, by dispensing
with the services whenever that could be done; and, secondly, by a
wise discontinuance of the order itself in those colleges which
were left to their own choice in this matter.
One only account with the college remains to be noticed; but this is
the main one. It is expressed in the bills by the word _battels_,
derived from the old monkish word _patella_ (or batella), a plate;
and it comprehends whatsoever is furnished for dinner and for supper,
including malt liquor, but not wine, as well as the materials for
breakfast, or for any casual refreshment to country visitors, excepting
only groceries. These, together with coals and faggots, candles,
wine, fruit, and other more trifling _extras_, which are matters of
personal choice, form so many private accounts against your name, and
are usually furnished by tradesmen living near to the college, and
sending their servants daily to receive orders. Supper, as a meal
not universally taken, in many colleges is served privately in the
student's own room; though some colleges still retain the ancient
custom of a public supper. But dinner is, in all colleges, a public
meal, taken in the refectory or "hall" of the society; which, with the
chapel and library, compose the essential public _suite_ belonging to
every college alike. No absence is allowed, except to the sick, or to
those who have formally applied for permission to give a dinner-party.
A fine is imposed on all other cases of absence. Wine is not generally
allowed in the public hall, except to the "high table," that is,
the table at which the fellows and some other privileged persons are
entitled to dine. The head of the college rarely dines in public.
The other tables, and, after dinner, the high table, usually adjourn
to their wine, either upon invitations to private parties, or to
what are called the "common rooms" of the several orders--graduates
and undergraduates, &c. The dinners are always plain, and without
pretensions--those, I mean, in the public hall; indeed, nothing _can_
be plainer in most colleges--a simple choice between two or three sorts
of animal food, and the common vegetables. No fish, even as a regular
part of the fare; no soups, no game; nor, except on some very rare
festivity, did I ever see a variation from this plain fare at Oxford.
This, indeed, is proved sufficiently by the average amount of the
_battels_. Many men "battel" at the rate of a guinea a week: I did so
for years: that is, at the rate of three shillings a day for everything
connected with meals, excepting only tea, sugar, milk, and wine. It is
true that wealthier men, more expensive men, and more careless men,
often "battelled" much higher; but, if they persisted in this excess,
they incurred censures, more and more urgent, from the head of the
college.
Now, let us sum up; promising that the extreme duration of residence
in any college at Oxford amounts to something under thirty weeks. It
is possible to keep "short terms," as the phrase is, by a residence of
thirteen weeks, or ninety-one days; but, as this abridged residence is
not allowed, except in here and there a college, I shall assume--as
something beyond the strict _maximum_ of residence--thirty weeks as my
basis. The account will then stand thus:
1. Rooms £10 10 0
2. Tutorage 10 10 0
3. Servants (subject to the explanations made above),
say 5 5 0
4. Battels (allowing one shilling a day beyond what
I and others spent in much dearer times; that
is, allowing twenty-eight shillings weekly), for
thirty weeks 40 4 0
---------
£66 9 0
This will be a liberal calculation for the college bill. What remains?
1. Candles, which the reader will best calculate upon the standard
of his own general usage in this particular. 2. Coals, which are
remarkably dear at Oxford--dearer, perhaps, than anywhere else in
the island; say, three times as dear as at Edinburgh. 3. Groceries.
4. Wine. 5. Washing. This last article was, in my time, regulated by
the college, as there were certain privileged washerwomen, between
whom and the students it was but fair that some proper authority
should interfere to prevent extortion, in return for the monopoly
granted. Six guineas was the regulated sum; but this paid for
everything,--table-linen, &c., as well as for wearing apparel; and
it was understood to cover the whole twenty-eight or thirty weeks.
However, it was open to every man to make his own arrangements,
by insisting on a separate charge for each separate article. All
other expenses of a merely personal nature, such as postage, public
amusements, books, clothes, &c., as they have no special connection
with Oxford, but would, probably, be balanced by corresponding, if
not the very same, expenses in any other place or situation, I do not
calculate. What I have specified are the expenses which would accrue
to a student in consequence of leaving his father's house. The rest
would, in these days, be the same, perhaps, everywhere. How much, then,
shall we assume as the total charge on account of Oxford? Candles,
considering the quantity of long days amongst the thirty weeks, may
be had for one shilling and sixpence a week; for few students--unless
they have lived in India, after which a physical change occurs in the
sensibility of the nostrils--are finical enough to burn wax-lights.
This will amount to two pounds five shillings. Coals, say sixpence a
day; for three-pence a day will amply feed one grate in Edinburgh; and
there are many weeks in the thirty which will demand no fire at all.
Groceries and wine, which are all that remain, I cannot calculate. But
suppose we allow for the first a shilling a day, which will be exactly
ten guineas for thirty weeks; and for the second, nothing at all. Then
the extras, in addition to the college bills, will stand thus:
Washing for thirty weeks, at the privileged rate £6 6 0
Candles 2 5 0
Fire 5 5 0
Groceries 10 10 0
-----------
£24 6 0
The college bills, therefore, will be £66: 9s.; the extras, not
furnished by the college, will be about £24: 6s.,--making a total
amount of £90: 15s. And for this sum, annually, a man may defray
_every_ expense incident to an Oxford life, through a period of weeks
(viz., thirty) something more than he will be permitted to reside. It
is true, that, for the _first_ year, there will be, in addition to
this, his outfit: and for _every_ year there will be his journeys.
There will also be twenty-two weeks uncovered by this estimate; but for
these it is not my business to provide, who deal only with Oxford.
That this estimate is true, I know too feelingly. Would that it were
_not_! would that it were false! Were it so, I might the better justify
to myself that commerce with fraudulent Jews which led me so early
to commence the dilapidation of my small fortune. It _is_ true; and
true for a period (1804-8) far dearer than this. And to any man who
questions its accuracy I address this particular request--that he will
lay his hand upon the special item which he disputes. I anticipate that
he will answer thus: "I dispute none: it is not by positive things
that your estimate errs, but by negations. It is the absence of all
allowance for indispensable items that vitiates the calculation." Very
well: but to this, as to other things, we may apply the words of Dr.
Johnson--"Sir, the reason I drink no wine, is because I can practise
abstinence, but not temperance." Yes: in all things, abstinence is
easier than temperance; for a little enjoyment has invariably the
effect of awaking the sense of enjoyment, irritating it, and setting
it on edge. I, therefore, recollecting my own case, have allowed for
_no_ wine-parties. Let our friend, the abstraction we are speaking
of, give breakfast-parties, if he chooses to give any; and certainly
to give none at all, unless he were dedicated to study, would seem
very churlish. Nobody can be less a friend than myself to monkish and
ascetic seclusion, unless it were for twenty-three hours out of the
twenty-four.
But, however this be settled, let no mistake be made; nor let that be
charged against the system which is due to the habits of individuals.
Early in the last century, Dr. Newton, the head of a college in Oxford,
wrote a large book against the Oxford system, as ruinously expensive.
But then, as now, the real expense was due to no cause over which the
colleges could exercise any effectual control. It is due exclusively to
the habits of social intercourse amongst the young men; from which _he_
may abstain who chooses. But, for any academic authorities to interfere
by sumptuary laws with the private expenditure of grown men, many of
them, in a legal sense, _of age_, and all near it, must appear romantic
and extravagant, for this (or, indeed, any) stage of society. A tutor
being required, about 1810, to fix the amount of allowance for a young
man of small fortune, nearly related to myself, pronounced three
hundred and twenty pounds little enough. He had this allowance, and was
ruined in consequence of the credit which it procured for him, and the
society it connected him with. The majority have two hundred pounds a
year: but my estimate stands good, for all that.
Having stated, generally, the expenses of the Oxford system, I am
bound, in candour, to mention one variety in the mode of carrying
this system into effect, open to every man's adoption, which confers
certain privileges, but, at the same time (by what exact mode, I know
not), considerably increases the cost, and in that degree disturbs
my calculation. The great body of undergraduates, or students, are
divided into two classes--_Commoners_, and _Gentlemen Commoners_.
Perhaps nineteen out of twenty belong to the former class; and it is
for that class, as having been my own, that I have made my estimate.
The other class of _Gentlemen Commoners_ (who, at Cambridge, bear
the name of _Fellow Commoners_) wear a peculiar dress, and have some
privileges which naturally imply some corresponding increase of cost;
but why this increase should go to the extent of doubling the total
expense, as it is generally thought to do, or how it _can_ go to
that extent, I am unable to explain. The differences which attach
to the rank of "Gentlemen Commoners" are these: At his entrance he
pays double "caution money"; that is, whilst Commoners in general
pay about twenty-five guineas, he pays fifty; but this can occur
only once; and, besides, in strict point of right, this sum is only
a deposit, and is liable to be withdrawn on leaving the University,
though it is commonly enough finally presented to the college in the
shape of plate. The next difference is, that, by comparison with the
Commoner, he wears a much more costly dress. The Commoner's gown is
made of what is called _prince's stuff_, and, together with the cap,
costs about five guineas. But the Gentleman Commoner has two gowns--an
undress for the morning, and a full dress-gown for the evening; both
are made of silk, and the latter is very elaborately ornamented. The
cap also is more costly, being covered with velvet instead of cloth.
At Cambridge, again, the tassel is made of gold fringe or bullion,
which, in Oxford, is peculiar to the caps of noblemen; and there
are many other varieties in that University, where the dress for
"pensioners" (that is, the Oxford "Commoners") is specially varied in
almost every college; the object being, perhaps, to give a ready means
to the academic officers for ascertaining, at a glance, not merely the
general fact that such or such a delinquent is a gownsman (which is all
that can be ascertained at Oxford), but also the particular college
to which he belongs. Allowance being made for these two items of
"dress" and "caution-money," both of which apply only to the original
outfit, I know of no others in which the expenditure of a Gentleman
Commoner ought to exceed, or could with propriety exceed, that of a
Commoner. He has, indeed, a privilege as regards the choice of rooms;
he chooses first, and probably chooses those rooms which, being best,
are dearest; that is, they are on a level with the best; but usually
there are many sets almost equally good; and of these the majority
will be occupied by Commoners. So far, there is little opening for
a difference. More often, again, it will happen that a man of this
aristocratic class keeps a private servant; yet this happens also to
Commoners, and is, besides, no properly college expense. Tutorage is
charged double to a Gentleman Commoner--namely, twenty guineas a year:
this is done upon a fiction (as it sometimes turns out) of separate
attention, or aid given in a private way to his scholastic pursuits.
Finally, there arises naturally another and peculiar source of expense
to the "Gentleman Commoner," from a fact implied in his Cambridge
designation of "_Fellow_ Commoner," _commensalis_--viz., that he
associates at meals with the "fellows" and other authorities of the
college. Yet this again expresses rather the particular shape which
his expenditure assumes than any absolute increase in its amount. He
subscribes to a regular mess, and pays, therefore, whether present or
not; but so, in a partial sense, does the Commoner, by his forfeits
for "absent commons." He subscribes also to a regular fund for wine;
and, therefore, he does not enjoy that immunity from wine-drinking
which is open to the Commoner. Yet, again, as the Commoner does but
rarely avail himself of this immunity, as he drinks no less wine than
the Gentleman Commoner, and, generally speaking, wine not worse in
quality, it is difficult to see any ground for a regular assumption
of higher expenditure in the one class than the other. However, the
universal impression favours that assumption. All people believe that
the rank of Gentleman Commoner imposes an expensive burden, though
few people ever ask why. As a matter of fact, I believe it to be true
that Gentlemen Commoners spend more by a third, or a half, than any
equal number of Commoners, taken without selection. And the reason is
obvious: those who become Gentlemen Commoners are usually determined
to that course by the accident of having very large funds; they are
eldest sons, or only sons, or men already in possession of estates, or
else (which is as common a case as all the rest put together) they are
the heirs of newly-acquired wealth--sons of the _nouveaux riches_--a
class which often requires a generation or two to rub off the insolence
of a too conscious superiority. I have called them an "aristocratic"
class; but, in strictness, they are not such; they form a privileged
class, indeed, but their privileges are few and trifling, not to add
that these very privileges are connected with one or two burdens, more
than outweighing them in the estimate of many; and, upon the whole, the
chief distinction they enjoy is that of advertising themselves to the
public as men of great wealth, or great expectations, and, therefore,
as subjects peculiarly adapted to fraudulent attempts. Accordingly, it
is not found that the sons of the nobility are much inclined to enter
this order: these, if they happen to be the eldest sons of earls,
or of any peers above the rank of viscount, so as to enjoy a title
themselves by the courtesy of England, have special privileges in both
Universities as to length of residence, degrees, &c.; and their rank
is ascertained by a special dress. These privileges it is not usual to
forgo; though sometimes that happens, as, in my time, in the instance
of Lord George Grenville (now Lord Nugent); he neither entered at the
aristocratic college (Christ Church), nor wore the dress of a nobleman.
Generally, however, an elder son appears in his true character of
nobleman; but the younger sons rarely enter the class of Gentlemen
Commoners. They enter either as "Commoners," or under some of those
various designations ("_scholars_," "_demies_," "_students_," "_junior
fellows_") which imply that they stand upon the foundation of the
college to which they belong, and are aspirants for academic emoluments.
Upon the whole, I am disposed to regard this order of Gentlemen
Commoners as a standing temptation held out by authority to expensive
habits, and a very unbecoming proclamation of honour paid to the
aristocracy of wealth. And I know that many thoughtful men regard
it in the same light with myself, and regret deeply that any such
distribution of ranks should be authorized, as a stain upon the
simplicity and general manliness of the English academic laws. It is
an open profession of homage and indulgence to wealth, _as_ wealth--to
wealth disconnected from everything that might ally it to the ancestral
honours and heraldries of the land. It is also an invitation, or rather
a challenge, to profuse expenditure. Regularly, and by law, a Gentleman
Commoner is liable to little heavier burdens than a Commoner; but, to
meet the expectations of those around him, and to act up to the part
he has assumed, he must spend more, and he must be more careless in
controlling his expenditure, than a moderate and prudent Commoner. In
every light, therefore, I condemn the institution, and give it up to
the censures of the judicious. So much in candour I concede. But, to
show equal candour on the other side, it must be remembered that this
institution descends to us from ancient times, when wealth was not so
often divided from territorial or civic honours, conferring a real
precedency.
III[12]
[12] From _Tait's Magazine_ for August 1835
There was one reason why I sought solitude at that early age, and
sought it in a morbid excess, which must naturally have conferred
upon my character some degree of that interest which belongs to all
extremes. My eye had been couched into a secondary power of vision,
by misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by
experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically
escaped. Suppose the case of a man suspended by some colossal arm over
an unfathomed abyss,--suspended, but finally and slowly withdrawn,--it
is probable that he would not smile for years. That was my case: for
I have not mentioned in the "Opium Confessions" a thousandth part of
the sufferings I underwent in London and in Wales; partly because
the misery was too monotonous, and, in that respect, unfitted for
description; but still more because there is a mysterious sensibility
connected with real suffering, which recoils from circumstantial
rehearsal or delineation, as from violation offered to something
sacred, and which is, or should be, dedicated to privacy. Grief does
not parade its pangs, nor the anguish of despairing hunger willingly
count again its groans or its humiliations. Hence it was that Ledyard,
the traveller, speaking of his Russian experiences, used to say that
some of his miseries were such that he never _would_ reveal them.
Besides all which, I really was not at liberty to speak, without many
reserves, on this chapter of my life, at a period (1821) not twenty
years removed from the actual occurrences, unless I desired to court
the risk of crossing at every step the existing law of libel, so full
of snares and man-traps, to the careless equally with the conscientious
writer. This is a consideration which some of my critics have lost
sight of in a degree which surprises me. One, for example, puts it to
his readers whether any house such as I describe as the abode of my
money-lending friend could exist "_in_ Oxford-street"; and, at the
same time, he states, as circumstances drawn from my description, but,
in fact, pure coinages of his own, certain romantic impossibilities,
which, doubtless, could as little attach to a house in Oxford-street
as they could to a house in any other quarter of London. Meantime, I
had sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street _was_ concerned in
that affair, Oxford-street was _not_: and it is remarkable enough, as
illustrating this amiable reviewer's veracity, that no one street in
London was absolutely excluded _but_ one, and that one, Oxford-street.
For I happened to mention that, on such a day (my birth-day), I had
turned aside _from_ Oxford-street to look at the house in question. I
will now add that this house was in Greek-street: so much it may be
safe to say. But every candid reader will see that both prudential
restraints, and also disinterested regard to the feelings of possibly
amiable descendants from a vicious man, would operate with any
thoughtful writer, in such a case, to impose reserve upon his pen.
Had my guardians, had my money-lending friend of Jewry, and others
concerned in my memoirs, been so many shadows, bodiless abstractions,
and without earthly connections, I might readily have given my own
names to my own creations, and have treated them as unceremoniously as
I pleased. Not so under the real circumstances of the case. My chief
guardian, for instance, though obstinate to a degree which risked the
happiness and the life of his ward, was an upright man otherwise; and
his children are entitled to value his memory. Again, my Greek-street
[Greek: trapezitês], the "_foenerator Alpheus_," who delighted to
reap where he had not sown, and too often (I fear) allowed himself in
practices which not impossibly have long since been found to qualify
him for distant climates and "Botanic" regions,--even he, though I
might truly describe him as a mere highwayman whenever he happened
to be aware that I had received a friendly loan, yet, like other
highwaymen of repute, and "gentle thieves," was not inexorable to the
petitions of his victim: he would sometimes toss back what was required
for some instant necessity of the road; and at _his_ breakfast-table
it was, after all, as elsewhere recorded, that I contrived to support
life; barely, indeed, and most slenderly, but still with the final
result of escaping absolute starvation. With that recollection before
me, I could not allow myself to probe his frailties too severely,
had it even been certainly safe to do so. But enough; the reader
will understand that a year spent either in the valleys of Wales,
or upon the streets of London, by a wanderer too often houseless
in both situations, might naturally have peopled the mind of one
constitutionally disposed to solemn contemplations with memorials of
human sorrow and strife too profound to pass away for years.
Thus, then, it was. Past experience of a very peculiar kind, the
agitations of many lives crowded into the compass of a year or two, in
combination with a peculiar structure of mind, offered one explanation
of the very remarkable and unsocial habits which I adopted at college;
but there was another not less powerful, and not less unusual. In
stating this, I shall seem, to some persons, covertly designing an
affront to Oxford. But that is far from my intention. It is noways
peculiar to Oxford, but will, doubtless, be found in every University
throughout the world, that the younger part of the members--the
undergraduates, I mean, generally, whose chief business must have
lain amongst the great writers of Greece and Rome--cannot have found
leisure to cultivate extensively their own domestic literature.
Not so much that time will have been wanting; but that the whole
energy of the mind, and the main course of the subsidiary studies
and researches, will naturally have been directed to those difficult
languages amongst which lie their daily tasks. I make it no subject
of complaint or scorn, therefore, but simply state it as a fact, that
few or none of the Oxford undergraduates, with whom parity of standing
threw me into collision at my first outset, knew anything at all of
English Literature. The _Spectator_ seemed to me the only English
book of a classical rank which they had read; and even this less for
its inimitable delicacy, humour, and refined pleasantry in dealing
with manners and characters, than for its insipid and meagre essays,
ethical or critical. This was no fault of theirs: they had been sent
to the book chiefly as a subject for Latin translations, or of other
exercises; and, in such a view, the vague generalities of superficial
morality were more useful and more manageable than sketches of manner
or character, steeped in national peculiarities. To translate the
terms of Whig politics into classical Latin would be as difficult as
it might be for a Whig himself to give a consistent account of those
politics from the year 1688. Natural, however, and excusable, as this
ignorance might be, to myself it was intolerable and incomprehensible.
Already, at fifteen, I had made myself familiar with the great English
poets. About sixteen, or not long after, my interest in the story
of Chatterton had carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley
controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so
familiarised me with the "Black Letter" that I had begun to find an
unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in
Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had
perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities which, even
at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen.
With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic knowledge of the elder
poets--of those most remote from easy access--I could not well be a
stranger in other walks of our literature, more on a level with the
general taste, and nearer to modern diction, and, therefore, more
extensively multiplied by the press. Yet, after all--as one proof how
much more commanding is that part of a literature which speaks to the
elementary affections of men than that which is founded on the mutable
aspects of manners--it is a fact that, even in our elaborate system
of society, where an undue value is unavoidably given to the whole
science of social intercourse, and a continual irritation applied to
the sensibilities which point in that direction, still, under all these
advantages, Pope himself is less read, less quoted, less thought of,
than the elder and graver section of our literature. It is a great
calamity for an author such as Pope, that, generally speaking, it
requires so much experience of life to enjoy his peculiar felicities
as must argue an age likely to have impaired the general capacity for
enjoyment. For my part, I had myself a very slender acquaintance with
this chapter of our literature; and what little I had was generally,
at that period of my life, as with most men it continues to be to
the end of life, a reflex knowledge, acquired through those pleasant
miscellanies, half gossip, half criticism--such as Warton's _Essay on
Pope_, Boswell's _Johnson_, Mathias's _Pursuits of Literature_, and
many scores besides of the same indeterminate class: a class, however,
which do a real service to literature, by diffusing an indirect
knowledge of fine writers in their most effective passages, where
else, in a direct shape, it would often never extend.
In some parts, then, having even a profound knowledge of our
literature, in all parts having some, I felt it to be impossible that I
should familiarly associate with those who had none at all; not so much
as a mere historical knowledge of the literature in its capital names
and their chronological succession. Do I mention this in disparagement
of Oxford? By no means. Among the undergraduates of higher standing,
and occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many
might have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But
seniors do not seek after juniors; they must be sought; and, with my
previous bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and
motives, I had no disposition to take trouble in seeking any man for
any purpose.
But, on this subject, a fact still remains to be told, of which I
am justly proud; and it will serve, beyond anything else that I can
say, to measure the degree of my intellectual development. On coming
to Oxford, I had taken up one position in advance of my age by full
thirty years: that appreciation of Wordsworth, which it has taken full
thirty years to establish amongst the public, I had already made, and
had made operative to my own intellectual culture, in the same year
when I clandestinely quitted school. Already, in 1802, I had addressed
a letter of fervent admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send it
until the spring of 1803; and, from misdirection, it did not come into
his hands for some months. But I had an answer from Mr. Wordsworth
before I was eighteen; and that my letter was thought to express the
homage of an enlightened admirer may be inferred from the fact that his
answer was long and full. On this anecdote I do not mean to dwell; but
I cannot allow the reader to overlook the circumstances of the case.
At this day [1835] it is true, no journal can be taken up which does
not habitually speak of Mr. Wordsworth as of _a_ great, if not _the_
great, poet of the age. Mr. Bulwer, living in the intensest pressure of
the world, and though recoiling continually from the judgments of the
world, yet never in any violent degree ascribes to Mr. Wordsworth (in
his _England and the English_, p. 308) "an influence of a more noble
and purely intellectual character than _any_ writer of our age or
nation has exercised." Such is the opinion held of this great poet in
1835; but what were those of 1805-15,--nay, of 1825? For twenty years
after the date of that letter to Mr. Wordsworth above referred to,
language was exhausted, ingenuity was put on the rack, in the search
after images and expressions vile enough, insolent enough, to convey
the unutterable contempt avowed for all that he had written by the
fashionable critics. One critic--who still, I believe, edits a rather
popular journal, and who belongs to that class, feeble, fluttering,
ingenious, who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with
a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices of the
public mind--described Mr. Wordsworth as resembling, in the quality
of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her paralytic dotage to sucking
babies. If this insult was peculiarly felt by Mr. Wordsworth, it was on
a consideration of the unusual imbecility of him who offered it, and
not because in itself it was baser or more insolent than the language
held by the majority of journalists who then echoed the public voice.
_Blackwood's Magazine_ (1817) first accustomed the public ear to the
language of admiration coupled with the name of Wordsworth. This began
with Professor Wilson; and well I remember--nay, the proofs are still
easy to hunt up--that, for eight or ten years, this singularity of
opinion, having no countenance from other journals, was treated as a
whim, a paradox, a bold extravagance, of the _Blackwood_ critics. Mr.
Wordsworth's neighbours in Westmoreland, who had (generally speaking) a
profound contempt for him, used to rebut the testimony of _Blackwood_
by one constant reply--"Ay, _Blackwood_ praises Wordsworth, but who
else praises him?" In short, up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was
trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830, it was militant; from 1830 to
1835, it has been triumphant. In 1803, when I entered at Oxford, that
name was absolutely unknown; and the finger of scorn, pointed at it in
1802 by the first or second number of the _Edinburgh Review_, failed to
reach its mark from absolute defect of knowledge in the public mind.
Some fifty besides myself knew who was meant by "that poet who had
cautioned his friend against growing double," etc.; to all others it
was a profound secret.
These things must be known and understood properly to value the
prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, like Professor Wilson
and myself, who, in 1802-3, attached themselves to a banner not yet
raised and planted; who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one
entire generation, and did _that_ about 1802 which the rest of the
world are doing in chorus about 1832.
Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided with my own; yet,
in that large world, we never met. I know, therefore, but little of his
policy in regard to such opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate
him from the mass of his coëvals. This only I know, that he lived as
it were in public, and must, therefore, I presume, have practised a
studied reserve as to his deepest admirations; and, perhaps, at that
day (1803-8) the occasions would be rare in which much dissimulation
would be needed. Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth
and to abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not frequent in
conversations; and it was chiefly on occasions of some question
arising about poetry in general, or about the poets of the day, that
it became difficult to dissemble. For my part, hating the necessity
for dissimulation as much as the dissimulation itself, I drew from
this peculiarity also of my own mind a fresh reinforcement of my other
motives for sequestering myself; and, for the first two years of my
residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words.
I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to be the last)
conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted of three
sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine. On a fine
morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and, having then no guess of the
nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them.
Accordingly, he asked me, "What I had been lately reading?" Now, the
fact was that I, at that time immersed in metaphysics, had really been
reading and studying very closely the _Parmenides_, of which obscure
work some Oxford man, early in the last century, published a separate
edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of my nature that, in
those days, I could not bear to witness, far less to cause, the least
pain or mortification to any human being. I recoiled, indeed, from
the society of most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On the
contrary, in order that I _might_ like all men, I wished to associate
with none. Now, then, to have mentioned the _Parmenides_ to one who,
fifty thousand to one, was a perfect stranger to its whole drift and
purpose, looked too _méchant_, too like a trick of malice, in an age
when such reading was so very unusual. I felt that it would be taken
for an express stratagem for stopping my tutor's mouth. All this
passing rapidly through my mind, I replied, without hesitation, that I
had been reading Paley. My tutor's rejoinder I have never forgotten:
"Ah! an excellent author; excellent for his matter; only you must be
on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious _there_." Such was
the colloquy; we bowed, parted, and never more (I apprehend) exchanged
one word. Now, trivial and trite as this comment on Paley may appear
to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more
absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could
not, by any artifice or ingenuity, have been crowded into one short
sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the disgrace of the age;
and, as regards the two Universities, and the enormous responsibility
they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official
examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium.
But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy,
vernacular English, the rustic vigour of a style which intentionally
forgoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic
precision on the other--that quality of merit has never been attained
in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a
topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous disposition
to retreat into solitude; a solitude, however, which at no time was
tainted with either the moroseness or the pride of a cynic.
Neither must the reader suppose that, even in that day, I belonged
to the party who disparage the classical writers, or the classical
training of the great English schools. The Greek drama I loved and
revered. But, to deal frankly, because it is a subject which I shall
hereafter bring before the public, I made great distinctions. I was
not that indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman literature which
those too generally are who admire it at all. This protesting spirit
against a false and blind idolatry was with me, at that time, a matter
of enthusiasm--almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let
us take the Greek oratory, for example:--What section of the Greek
literature is more fanatically exalted, and studiously in depreciation
of our own? Let us judge of the sincerity at the base of these hollow
affectations, by the downright facts and the producible records.
To admire, in any sense which can give weight and value to your
admiration, pre-supposes, I presume, some acquaintance with its object.
As the earliest title to an opinion, one way or other, of the Greek
eloquence, we ought to have studied some of its most distinguished
artists; or, say _one_, at least; and this one, we may be sure, will
be, as it ought to be, Demosthenes. Now, it is a fact, that all the
copies of Demosthenes sold within the last hundred years would not
meet the demand of one considerable town, were that orator a subject
of study amongst even classical scholars. I doubt whether, at this
day, there exist twenty men in Europe who can be said to have even
once read Demosthenes; and, therefore, it was that, when Mr. Mitford,
in his "History of Greece," took a new view of this orator's political
administration--a view which lowered his character for integrity--he
found an unresisting acceder to his doctrines in a public having no
previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open to any casual
impression of malice or rash judgment. Had there been any acquaintance
with the large remains which we still possess of this famous orator,
no such wrong could have been done. I, from my childhood, had been a
reader, nay, a student, of Demosthenes; and simply for this reason,
that, having meditated profoundly on the true laws and philosophy
of diction, and of what is vaguely denominated style, and finding
nothing of any value in modern writers upon this subject, and not much
as regards the grounds and ultimate principles even in the ancient
rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions from the great
artists and practitioners, rather than from the theorists; and, among
those artists, in the most plastic of languages, I hold Demosthenes to
have been the greatest.
The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It
was a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond
the material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger
compass of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of
an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose
diction. One step further in passion, and the orator would become a
poet. An orator can exhaust the capacities of a language--an historian,
never. Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age
of highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement.
That generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas
the previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a
transitional period: the language was still moving, and tending to
a meridian not yet attained; and the public eye had been directed
consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of
intellectual delight, for too short a time to have mastered the whole
art of managing its resources. All these were reasons for studying
Demosthenes, as the one great model and standard of Attic prose; and
studied him I _had_, more than any other prose writer whatever. _Pari
passu_, I had become sensible that others had _not_ studied him. One
monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side; something
about being "like a torrent, that carries everything before it." This
original image is all we get in the shape of criticism, and never any
attempt even at illustrating what is greatest in him, or characterising
what is most peculiar. The same persons who discovered that Lord
Brougham was the modern Bacon have also complimented him with the title
of the English Demosthenes. Upon this hint, Lord Brougham, in his
address to the Glasgow students, has deluged the great Athenian with
wordy admiration. There is an obvious prudence in lodging your praise
upon an object from which you count upon a rebound to yourself. But
here, as everywhere else, you look in vain for any marks or indications
of a personal and _direct_ acquaintance with the original orations.
The praise is built rather upon the popular idea of Demosthenes than
upon the real Demosthenes. And not only so, but even upon style itself,
and upon the art of composition _in abstracto_, Lord Brougham does not
seem to have formed any clear conceptions,--principles he has none.
Now, it is useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles
on the art. The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition
are these: 1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, or the
art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise
out of another: all fluent and effective composition depends on the
_connections_;--2dly, The way in which sentences are made to modify
each other; for the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise
out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid
succession of sentences; and, because some limitation is necessary
to the length and complexity of sentences, in order to make this
interdependency felt: hence it is that the Germans have no eloquence.
The construction of German prose tends to such immoderate length of
sentences that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent.
Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable clauses of restriction, and
other parenthetical circumstances, becomes a separate section--an
independent whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's
oversights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one
positive caution of his, which will measure the value of his philosophy
on this subject. He lays it down for a rule of indefinite application
that the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favoured at the
expense of that part which has so happily coalesced with the language
from the Latin or Greek. This fancy, often patronized by other writers,
and even acted upon, resembles that restraint which some metrical
writers have imposed upon themselves--of writing a long copy of verses
from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some
different letter, should be carefully excluded. What followed? Was the
reader sensible, in the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty
attained? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in
the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had
been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists
in Germany; and so much further is it carried that one great puritan
in this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of
Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin
and composition out of the language, by assigning some equivalent term
spun out from pure native Teutonic materials. _Bayonet_, for example,
is patriotically rejected, because a word may be readily compounded
tantamount to _musket-dirk_; and this sort of composition thrives
showily in the German, as a language running into composition with
a fusibility only surpassed by the Greek. But what good purpose is
attained by such caprices? In three sentences the sum of the philosophy
may be stated. It has been computed (see _Duclos_) that the Italian
opera has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary: so
narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are these emotions
disposed to expand themselves into any variety of thinking. The same
remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely passion,
which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their passion is of a quality
more venerable, it is true, and deeper than that of the opera, because
more permanent and coextensive with human life; but it is not much
wider in its sphere, nor more apt to coalesce with contemplative or
philosophic thinking. Pass from these narrow fields of the intellect,
where the relations of the objects are so few and simple, and the
whole prospect so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like arena
upon which Shakspeare careers--co-infinite with life itself--yes, and
with something more than life. Here is the other pole, the opposite
extreme. And what is the choice of diction? What is the _lexis_? Is
it Saxon exclusively, or is it Saxon by preference? So far from that,
the Latinity is intense--not, indeed, in his construction, but in his
choice of words; and so continually are these Latin words used with a
critical respect to their earliest (and, where _that_ happens to have
existed, to their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument I
would rely for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as
to Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this regard
to the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be absolutely explained
the Shakspearian meaning of certain words which has hitherto baffled
all his critics. For instance, the word _modern_, of which Dr. Johnson
professes himself unable to explain the _rationale_ or principle
regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, it is to
be deduced thus: First of all, change the pronunciation a little, by
substituting for the short o, as we pronounce it in _modern_, the long
_o_, as heard in _modish_, and you will then, perhaps, perceive the
process of analogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use. The
_matter_ or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more important
than its fashion or _manner_, that we have hence adopted, as one way
for expressing what is important as opposed to what is trivial, the
word _material_. Now, by parity of reason, we are entitled to invert
this order, and to express what is unimportant by some word indicating
the mere fashion or external manner of an object as opposed to its
substance. This is effected by the word _modal_ or _m[=o]dern_, as
the adjective from _modus_, a fashion or manner; and in that sense
Shakspeare employs the word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Cæsar's
agent the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, and which
her treacherous steward had betrayed, describes them as mere trifles--
"Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal";
where all commentators have _felt_ that modern must from the position
mean slight and inconsiderable, though perplexed to say how it came
by such a meaning. A _modern_ friend is, in the Shakspearian sense,
with relation to a real and serviceable friend, that which the fashion
of a thing is by comparison with its substance. But a still better
illustration may be taken from a common line, quoted every day, and
ludicrously misinterpreted. In the famous picture of life--"All the
world's a stage"--the justice of the peace is described as
"Full of wise saws and modern instances";
which (_horrendum dictu!_) has been explained, and, I verily believe,
is generally understood to mean, _full of wise sayings and modern
illustrations_. The true meaning is--full of proverbial maxims of
conduct and of trivial arguments; that is, of petty distinctions, or
verbal disputes, such as never touch the point at issue. The word
_modern_ I have already deduced; the word _instances_ is equally Latin,
and equally used by Shakspeare in its Latin sense. It is originally
the word _instantia_, which, by the monkish and scholastic writers,
is uniformly used in the sense of an argument, and originally of an
argument urged in objection to some previous argument.[13]
[13] I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most
eloquent critic in _Blackwood_ is himself the dupe of an argument
which he has alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred
of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction to common
sense, by representing _all_ human beings of such an age as
school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another
as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is
this,--that, whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate
temper, that profession or employment is selected for the
exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody
the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because
impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are
qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what
profession those qualities find their most unlimited range; and,
because that is obviously the military profession, therefore it is
that the soldier is selected as the representative of young men.
For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar temper of
garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting the
part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers; but that
the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and
tempers the characteristic temper of old age.
I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow
students is not only bad counsel,--and bad counsel for the result, as
well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory,--but
also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought
expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel--a
counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the mind in
fetters, where even its utmost freedom and its largest resources will
be found all too little for the growing necessities of the intellect.
"Long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_!" What does _that_ describe?
Exactly the Latin part of our language. Now, those very terminations
speak for themselves:--All high abstractions end in _ation_; that
is, they are Latin; and, just in proportion as the abstracting power
extends and widens, do the circles of thought widen, and the horizon or
boundary (contradicting its own Grecian name) melts into the infinite.
On this account it was that Coleridge (_Biographia Literaria_) remarks
on Wordsworth's philosophical poetry, that, in proportion as it goes
into the profound of passion and of thought, do the words increase
which are vulgarly called "_dictionary_ words." Now, these words,
these "dictionary" words, what are they? Simply words of Latin or
Greek origin: no other words, no Saxon words, are ever called by
illiterate persons dictionary words. And these dictionary words are
indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by which he
transcends other writers as to extent and as to subtlety of thinking,
but also as to elevation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive
or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his mind
were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile
and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not
multiform: repulsion was the law of his intellect--he moved in solitary
grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur, unapproachable
grandeur, his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity into his
diction. For the same reason (and without such aids he would have had
no proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction
with Hellenisms and with Hebraisms[14]; but never, as could be easy to
show, without a full justification in the result. Two things may be
asserted of all his exotic idioms--1st, That they express what could
not have been expressed by any native idiom; 2d, That they harmonize
with the English language, and give a colouring of the antique, but not
any sense of strangeness, to the diction. Thus, in the double negative,
"Nor did they not perceive," &c., which is classed as a Hebraism--if
any man fancy that it expresses no more than the simple affirmative,
he shows that he does not understand its force; and, at the same time,
it is a form of thought so natural and universal that I have heard
English people, under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously
fall into it. In short, whether a man differ from others by greater
profundity or by greater sublimity, and whether he write as a poet
or as a philosopher, in any case, he feels, in due proportion to the
necessities of his intellect, an increasing dependence upon the Latin
section of the English language; and the true reason why Lord Brougham
failed to perceive this, or found the Saxon equal to his wants, is one
which I shall not scruple to assign, inasmuch as it does not reflect
personally on Lord Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively, but
on the whole body to which he belongs. That thing which he and they
call by the pompous name of statesmanship, but which is, in fact,
_statescraft_--the art of political intrigue--deals (like the opera)
with ideas so few in number, and so little adapted to associate
themselves with other ideas, that, possibly, in the one case equally
as in the other, six hundred words are sufficient to meet all their
demands.
[14] The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in
literature: of many writers it has been said, but of him only
with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The value must be
tried by the result, not by inferences from _a priori_ principles;
such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate result;
whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other
could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The final
result is a _transcendent_ answer to all adverse criticism; but
still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has
undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate
problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He,
speaking on this subject, asserts (_England and the English_, p.
329) that "_there is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has
not violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed_." Now,
in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say
that the two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom
throughout Milton:--1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove";
and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which
Aristotle urges in another argument, namely, that [Greek: anônumon
to pathos], the case is unprovided with _any_ suitable expression.
How would it be possible to convey in good English the
circumstances here indicated: viz. that Ceres was yet in those
days of maiden innocence, when she had borne no daughter to Jove?
2d, I will cite a case which, so far as I remember, has been
noticed by no commentator; and, probably, because they have failed
to understand it. The case occurs in the "Paradise Regained"; but
where I do not at this moment remember. "Will they _transact_ with
God?" [The only case of the use of the word _transact_ by Milton
registered in the Verbal Indexes is in _Par. Lost_, vi. 286, where
Satan says, "Easier to transact with me."--M.] This is the
passage; and a most flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism.
_Transigere_, in the language of the civil law, means to make a
compromise; and the word _transact_ is here used in that sense--a
sense utterly unknown to the English language. This is the worst
case in Milton; and I do not know that it has been ever noticed.
Yet even here it may be doubted whether Milton is not defensible;
asking if they proposed to terminate their difference with God
after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he points properly
enough to these worldly settlements by the technical term which
designated them. Thus might a divine say: Will he arrest the
judgments of God by a _demurrer_? Thus, again, Hamlet
apostrophises the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in
actions for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in
English for expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much
older authors, express the idea by the word _temperament_; but
that word, though a good one, was at one time considered an exotic
term--equally a Gallicism and a Latinism.
I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from
Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise connected with the
Attic orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects
to rhetoric; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly
discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper which (though now forgotten)
obtained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is one of the
infirmities of the public mind with us, that whatever is said or done
by a public man,--any opinion given by a member of Parliament, however
much out of his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry,--commands
an attention not conceded even to those who speak under the known
privilege of professional knowledge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered
to be a poet worthy of any general notice until Charles Fox, a most
slender critic, had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and that not so
much with a view to the poetry as to its party application. But now,
returning to Demosthenes, I affirm that his case is the case of nearly
all the classical writers,--at least, of all the prose writers. It is,
I admit, an extreme one; that is, it is the general case in a more
intense degree. Raised almost to divine honours, never mentioned but
with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read,
most of them never; are they, indeed, the closet companions of any man?
Surely it is time that these follies were at an end; that our practice
were made to square a little better with our professions, and that our
pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend
that they lie.
The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest
of all accomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the
most difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To
be an accomplished Grecian demands a very peculiar quality of talent;
and it is almost inevitable that one who is such should be vain of a
distinction which represents so much labour and difficulty overcome.
For myself, having, as a school-boy, attained to a very unusual mastery
over this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the
elaborate science of Greek metre) moving through all the obstacles and
resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through
those of the French and Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties
of the language, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I
read Greek daily; but any slight vanity which I might connect with a
power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so
readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate admiration of the
author, in me was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken
of my entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature. With
what fury would I often exclaim: He who loveth not his brother whom he
hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L,
M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities
which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how
can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful
sublimities of the classical poetry--with the nod of the Olympian
Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the
most prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that
is justly held to be a great merit; but it is hardly a qualification
for a Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache--that is tender,
doubtless; but how many passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness,
are to be found in Chaucer! Yet in these cases we give our antagonist
the benefit of an appeal to what is really best and most effective in
the ancient literature. For, if we should go to Pindar, and some other
great names, what a revelation of hypocrisy as respects the _fade_
enthusiasts for the Greek poetry!
Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embittered against
ancient literature by the dismal affectations current in the scenical
poetry, at least I felt the presence of a great and original power.
It might be a power inferior, upon the whole, to that which presides
in the English tragedy; I believed that it was; but it was equal and
appealed equally to real and deep sensibilities in our nature. Yet,
also, I felt that the two powers at work in the two forms of the
drama were essentially different; and, without having read a line of
German at that time, or knowing of any such controversy, I began to
meditate on the elementary grounds of difference between the Pagan
and the Christian forms of poetry. The dispute has since been carried
on extensively in France, not less than in Germany, as between the
_classical_ and the _romantic_. But I will venture to assert that not
one step in advance has been made, up to this day. The shape into which
I threw the question it may be well to state; because I am persuaded
that out of that one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved the whole
separate characteristics of the Christian and the Antique. Why is it,
I asked, that the Christian idea of _sin_ is an idea utterly unknown
to the Pagan mind? The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a
moral ideal, as we have; but this they estimated by a reference to the
will; and they called it virtue, and the antithesis they called vice.
The _lacheté_ or relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to
the seductions of sensual pleasure, that was vice; and the braced-up
tone by which it resisted these seductions was virtue. But the idea
of holiness, and the antithetic idea of sin, as a violation of this
awful and unimaginable sanctity, was so utterly undeveloped in the
Pagan mind, that no word exists in classical Greek or classical Latin
which approaches either pole of this synthesis; neither the idea of
_holiness_, nor of its correlate, _sin_, could be so expressed in Latin
as at once to satisfy Cicero and a scientific Christian. Again (but
this was some years after), I found Schiller and Goethe applauding
the better taste of the ancients, in symbolizing the idea of death by
a beautiful youth, with a torch inverted, &c., as compared with the
Christian types of a skeleton and hourglasses, &c. And much surprised
I was to hear Mr. Coleridge approving of this German sentiment. Yet,
here again, I felt, the peculiar genius of Christianity was covertly
at work moving upon a different road, and under opposite ideas, to a
just result, in which the harsh and austere expression yet pointed to
a dark reality, whilst the beautiful Greek adumbration was, in fact,
a veil and a disguise. The corruptions and the other "dishonours" of
the grave, and whatsoever composes the sting of death in the Christian
view, is traced up to sin as its ultimate cause. Hence, besides the
expression of Christian humility, in thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks
and ruins made by sin, there is also a latent profession indicated
of Christian hope. For the Christian contemplates steadfastly, though
with trembling awe, the lowest point of his descent; since, for him,
that point, the last of his fall, is also the first of his re-ascent,
and serves, besides, as an exponent of its infinity; the infinite
depth becoming, in the rebound, a measure of the infinite re-ascent.
Whereas, on the contrary, with the gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan
on the question of his final restoration, and also (which must not
be overlooked) with his utter perplexity as to the nature of his
restoration, if any were by accident in reserve, whether in a condition
tending downwards or upwards, it was the natural resource to consult
the general feeling of anxiety and distrust, by throwing a thick
curtain and a veil of beauty over the whole too painful subject. To
place the horrors in high relief could here have answered no purpose
but that of wanton cruelty; whereas, with the Christian hopes, the
very saddest memorials of the havocks made by death are antagonist
prefigurations of great victories in the rear.
These speculations, at that time, I pursued earnestly; and I then
believed myself, as I yet do, to have ascertained the two great and
opposite laws under which the Grecian and the English tragedy has each
separately developed itself. Whether wrong or right in that belief,
sure I am that those in Germany who have treated the case of Classical
and Romantic are not entitled to credit for any discovery at all. The
Schlegels, who were the hollowest of men, the windiest and wordiest (at
least, Frederick was so), pointed to the distinction; barely indicated
it; and that was already some service done, because a presumption
arose that the antique and the modern literatures, having clearly some
essential differences, might, perhaps, rest on foundations originally
distinct, and obey different laws. And hence it occurred that many
disputes, as about the unities, &c., might originate in a confusion
of these laws. This checks the presumption of the shallow criticism,
and points to deeper investigations. Beyond this, neither the German
nor the French disputers on the subject have talked to any profitable
purpose.
I have mentioned Paley as accidentally connected with my _début_ in
literary conversation; and I have taken occasion to say how much I
admired his style and its unstudied graces, how profoundly I despised
his philosophy. I shall here say a word or two more on that subject. As
respects his style, though secretly despising the opinion avowed by my
tutor (which was, however, a natural opinion for a stiff lover of the
artificial and the pompous), I would just as unwillingly be supposed
to adopt the extravagant opinions, in the other extreme, of Dr. Parr
and Mr. Coleridge. These two gentlemen, who privately hated Paley,
and, perhaps, traduced him, have hung like bees over one particular
paragraph in his Evidences, as though it were a flower transplanted
from Hymettus. Dr. Parr pronounced it the finest sentence in the
English language. It is a period (that is, a cluster of sentences)
moderately well, but not _too_ well, constructed, as the German
nurses are accustomed to say. Its felicity depends on a trick easily
imitated--on a balance happily placed (namely, "_in which the wisest
of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts and rest to
their inquiries_)." As a _bravura_, or _tour de force_, in the dazzling
fence of rhetoric, it is surpassed by many hundreds of passages which
might be produced from rhetoricians; or, to confine myself to Paley's
contemporaries, it is very far surpassed by a particular passage in
Burke's letter upon the Duke of Bedford's base attack upon him in
the House of Lords; which passage I shall elsewhere produce, because
I happen to know, on the authority of Burke's executors, that Burke
himself considered it the finest period which he had ever written.
At present, I will only make one remark, viz. that it is always
injudicious, in the highest degree, to cite for admiration that which
is not a _representative_ specimen of the author's manner. In reading
Lucian, I once stumbled on a passage of German pathos, and of German
effect. Would it have been wise, or would it have been intellectually
just, to quote this as the text of an eulogium on Lucian? What
false criticism it would have suggested to every reader! what false
anticipations! To quote a formal and periodic pile of sentences was to
give the feeling that Paley was what the regular rhetorical artists
designate as a periodic writer, when, in fact, no one conceivable
character of style more pointedly contradicted the true description of
his merits.
But, leaving the style of Paley, I must confess that I agree with Mr.
Bulwer (_England and the English_) in thinking it shocking and almost
damnatory to an English University, the great well-heads of creeds,
moral and evangelical, that authors such in respect of doctrine as
Paley and Locke should hold that high and influential station as
teachers, or rather oracles of truth, which has been conceded to them.
As to Locke, I, when a boy, had made a discovery of one blunder full
of laughter and of fun, which, had it been published and explained
in Locke's lifetime, would have tainted his whole philosophy with
suspicion. It relates to the Aristotelian doctrine of syllogism,
which Locke undertook to ridicule. Now, a flaw, a hideous flaw, in
the _soi-disant_ detecter of flaws, a ridicule in the exposer of the
ridiculous--_that_ is fatal; and I am surprised that Lee, who wrote a
folio against Locke in his lifetime, and other examiners, should have
failed in detecting this. I shall expose it elsewhere; and, perhaps,
one or two other exposures of the same kind will give an impetus to
the descent of this falling philosophy. With respect to Paley, and
the naked _prudentialism_ of his system, it is true that in a longish
note Paley disclaims that consequence. But to this we may reply, with
Cicero, _Non quæro quid neget Epicurus, sed quid congruenter neget_.
Meantime, waiving all this as too notorious, and too frequently
denounced, I wish to recur to this trite subject, by way of stating
an objection made to the Paleyan morality in my seventeenth year, and
which I have never since seen reason to withdraw. It is this:--I affirm
that the whole work, from first to last, proceeds upon that sort of
error which the logicians call _ignoratio elenchi_, that is, ignorance
of the very question concerned--of the point at issue. For, mark, in
the very vestibule of ethics, two questions arise--two different and
disconnected questions, A and B; and Paley has answered the wrong one.
Thinking that he was answering A, and meaning to answer A, he has,
in fact, answered B. One question arises thus: Justice is a virtue;
temperance is a virtue; and so forth. Now, what is the common principle
which ranks these several species under the same genus? What, in the
language of logicians, is the common differential principle which
determines these various aspects of moral obligation to a common
genus? Another question, and a more interesting question to men in
general, is this,--What is the motive to virtue? By what impulse, law,
or motive, am I impelled to be virtuous rather than vicious? Whence
is the motive derived which should impel me to one line of conduct in
preference to the other? This, which is a practical question, and,
therefore, more interesting than the other, which is a pure question
of speculation, was that which Paley believed himself to be answering.
And his answer was,--that utility, a perception of the resulting
benefit, was the true determining motive. Meantime, it was objected
that often the most obvious results from a virtuous action were far
otherwise than beneficial. Upon which, Paley, in the long note referred
to above, distinguished thus: that, whereas actions have many results,
some proximate, some remote, just as a stone thrown into the water
produces many concentric circles, be it known that he, Dr. Paley, in
what he says of utility, contemplates only the final result, the very
outermost circle; inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that the
first, second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all happen
to clash with utility; but then, says he, the outermost circle of all
will never fail to coincide with the absolute maximum of utility.
Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply this test
of utility in a practical sense; you cannot say, This is useful,
_ergo_, it is virtuous; but, in the inverse order, you must say, This
is virtuous, _ergo_, it is useful. You do not rely on its usefulness
to satisfy yourself of its being virtuous; but, on the contrary, you
rely on its virtuousness, previously ascertained, in order to satisfy
yourself of its usefulness. And thus the whole practical value of this
test disappears, though in that view it was first introduced; and a
vicious circle arises in the argument; as you must have ascertained
the virtuousness of an act, in order to apply the test of its being
virtuous. But, _secondly_, it now comes out that Paley was answering a
very different question from that which he supposed himself answering.
Not any practical question as to the motive or impelling force in
being virtuous, rather than vicious,--that is, to the _sanctions_
of virtue,--but a purely speculative question, as to the essence of
virtue, or the common _vinculum_ amongst the several modes or species
of virtue (justice, temperance, &c.)--this was the real question
which he was answering. I have often remarked that the largest and
most subtle source of error in philosophic speculations has been the
confounding of the two great principles so much insisted on by the
Leibnitzians, viz., the _ratio cognoscendi_ and the _ratio essendi_.
Paley believed himself to be assigning--it was his full purpose to
assign--the _ratio cognoscendi_; but, instead of that, unconsciously
and surreptitiously, he has actually assigned the _ratio essendi_, and,
after all, a false and imaginary _ratio essendi_.
APPENDED NOTE
As De Quincey's long and interesting Chapter on Oxford from 1803 to
1808 leaves the incidents of his own passage through the University
rather hazy, the following condensation of particulars on the subject
may not be unwelcome. They are partly from one of his own conversations
in 1821 with Richard Woodhouse (the notes of which conversations are
appended to Mr. Garnett's edition in 1885 of the _Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater_), partly from an article in the _Quarterly
Review_ for July 1861 containing information supplied by Dr. Cotton of
Worcester College, and partly from information collected by Mr. Page
for his _Life of De Quincey_:--Admitted into Worcester College on the
17th of December 1803, he did for the first two years of his residence
lead, as he tells us, a very solitary life, withdrawing himself from
wine-parties, and frequenting chiefly the society of a German named
Schwartzburg. Even then, however, he had the reputation with some in
the college of being, though of shy and quaint ways, a man of uncommon
genius and erudition; and, latterly, as this reputation spread in the
college, and some inevitable appearances of his in college declamations
and the like confirmed it, he became the object of more general
attention, and was urged to go up for honours in taking his degree. He
did attend the first examination for B.A. honours at Michaelmas in the
year 1808, with the result that Dr. Goodenough of Christ Church, who
was one of the examiners, is said to have told one of the Worcester
College dons, "You have sent us to-day the cleverest man I ever met
with; if his _vivâ voce_ examination to-morrow correspond with what he
has done in writing, he will carry everything before him." De Quincey's
own account to Mr. Woodhouse was that the examination was an oral one
and in Latin; which agrees more with the possibility of such a report
from Dr. Goodenough on the same day. De Quincey further adds that this
examination was on a Saturday, and that the remaining examination,
which was to follow on Monday, was to be in Greek. He had been looking
forward to this examination with much interest, his Greek readings
having been of wide range and in many directions out of the ordinary
academic track; and his interest had been increased by the regulation
that the answers to the questions were to be wholly or largely in the
Greek tongue itself. The fact that this rule had been altered at the
last moment had, however, disgusted him; and this, together with "his
contempt for his examiners" and the thought that the examination would
be of a kind that would leave his real resources untested, had such
an effect upon him that, "when the time came, he was _non inventus_."
Mr. Woodhouse's report from himself is that "on the Sunday morning
he left Oxford"; the Worcester College tradition, which is equally
precise as to the main fact that he "packed up his things and walked
away from Oxford," makes the flight occur in the night following the
first examination. Whatever other causes there may have been for the
break-down, the opium-eating habit must have been chiefly responsible.
That habit had been formed by De Quincey in 1804 in one of those
visits of his to London which, with visits to other places, are to be
understood as having varied the monotony of his Oxford residence. The
habit had grown upon him in his solitude in his college rooms; and part
of the college tradition respecting his break-down is that, having
taken a large dose of the drug to stimulate him sufficiently for the
first day's examination, he was wrecked by the reaction. He took no
University degree; and, though his name remained on the college books
to as late as 15th December 1810, his real connexion with Oxford ceased
in 1808.--D. M.
CHAPTER II
GERMAN STUDIES AND KANT IN PARTICULAR[15]
[15] From _Tait's Magazine_ for June 1836. See _ante_, Preface,
pp. 1, 2.--M.
Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least)
any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately
consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the
first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of
hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the inevitable
suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac vice_. And
afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to
forgo such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already
in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession,
exception, inference--in short, of all the forms by which transition
or connexion is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_, _therefore_, _however_,
_notwithstanding_), together with all those adverbs for modifying
or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all
languages alike compose the essential frame-work or _extra-linear_
machinery of human thought. The filling-up--the _matter_ (in a
scholastic sense)--may differ infinitely; but the _form_, the
periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused--all
this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is
this frame-work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of
connexions among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book
suffice to exhaust all the [Greek: epea pteroenta][16] which express
them. To have mastered these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to
have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the
benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old
Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus
made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard
Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or
other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in "_muggy_"
weather, and in the inside of some venerable "old heavy"--such as used
to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty
or forty years ago--he had more than once turned to so valuable an
account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that,
whereas he had "booked" himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek:
analphabêtos], unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given
language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly
returning thanks to them for their stupidity) in a condition for
grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old
or New Testaments published by Bagster would be a perfect Encyclopædia,
or _Panorganon_, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads
and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I
shall give one caution from my own experience to the self-instructor:
it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or
to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it
is meant to meet grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of
the German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a
beginner, resort to _prose_ authors, since the license and audacity of
poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot
fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general
difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every
other case, is _not_ good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties
there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion,
from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are
overbalanced in the result by the single advantage of being limited
in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular
stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit.
Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not
so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea
to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what the
Greeks called [Greek: Synthesis onomatôn]--_i.e._, the construction
of sentences--I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a
Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and,
in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two
enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the
rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he has actually
been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederick Schlegel, who is now
in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. "Original"
Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was as follows:--We have
all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and the process of packing
it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and
day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the
butler, the gentleman's gentlemen, &c., packing the huge ark in all
its recesses, its "imperials," its "wells," its "Salisbury boots,"
its "sword-cases," its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its
"hammer-cloth cellars" (which a lady explains to me as a corruption
from _hamper-cloth_, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper, stored
with _viaticum_), until all the uses and needs of man, and of human
life, savage or civilized, were met with separate provision by the
infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family
coach packing did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of
one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in
the way of explanation, illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause,
or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German
philosopher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear
pockets, of the one original sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will
last in reading whilst a man
"Might reap an acre of his neighbour's corn."
Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole family
of prose-writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have studied
French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution,
therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in German
prose-writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two classes
of composition--ballad poetry, or comedy--as their earliest school
of exercise: ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza (usually
a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences; comedy,
because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life in its
ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy, naturally
suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short sentences.
These rules I soon drew from my own experience and observation. And
the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or wished for aid
respected the pronunciation; not so much for attaining a just one
(which I was satisfied could not be realized out of Germany, or, at
least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for preventing
the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The guttural and
palatine sounds of the _ch_, and some other German peculiarities,
cannot be acquired without constant practice. But the false Westphalian
or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs, &c., may easily
be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen should happen to
be missed. Thus much guidance I purchased, with a very few guineas,
from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious for permission to
extend his assistance; but this I would not hear of: and, in the spirit
of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which governed most of my
actions at that time of life, I did all the rest for myself.
"It was a banner broad unfurl'd,
The picture of that western world."
These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden
apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising
spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an
exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and
its pomp of solitary waters--well and truly might I have applied to my
first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature.
As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition, the
German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none comparable to
those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also, it resembled
America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia, Europe, and
North Africa.[17] But, if its inheritance were nothing, its prospects,
and the scale of its present development, were in the amplest style of
American grandeur. _Ten thousand_ new books, we are assured by Menzel,
an author of high reputation--a _literal myriad_--is considerably below
the number annually poured from all quarters of Germany into the vast
reservoir of Leipsic: spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of
dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of
Babylonian confusion; yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the
instincts of truth--of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight,
or of truth groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it
displays its cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly,
and in promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics,
not the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite
forms, or of creative power, as the German literature in its recent
motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a
fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was,
indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed,
in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently
inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable wilderness
of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure--the very tree of
knowledge in the midst of this Eden--was the new or transcendental
philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
[16] 2 [Greek: Epea pteroenta] literally _winged words_. To
explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical
readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by
Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which
conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any
sudden occasion or emergency: _e.g._ "To him flying from the field
the hero addressed these winged words--'Stop, coward, or I will
transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Horne Tooke the phrase was
adopted on the title-page of his _Diversions of Purley_, as a
pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant
particles, the _articuli_ or joints of language, which in his
well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious
forms (and therefore rapid, flying, _winged_ forms), substituted
for significant forms of greater length. Thus, _if_ is a
non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an
imperative in the second person--substituted for gif, or give, or
grant the case--put the case that. All other particles are shewn
by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (or _winged_)
substitutions.
[17] It has been rather too much forgotten that Africa, from the
northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert,
southwards--everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the
modern Barbary States--belongs, as much as America, to the New
World, the world unknown to the ancients.
I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early
days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a
little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to
the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to
shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the
hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe, were
the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either "_ejus ductu_," or
"_ejus auspiciis_"--that is, either directly under his guidance, or
indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his principles--I
looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues of truth laid
open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream. Six weeks'
study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The
philosophy of Kant--so famous, so commanding in Germany from about
the period of the French Revolution--already, in 1805, I had found to
be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely in any one chapter so
much as _tending_ to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by
wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the whole history of
man, it is an unexampled case that such a scheme of speculation--which
offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the
human imagination, nothing even positive and affirmative to the human
understanding--should have been able to found an interest so broad and
deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated men. The English reader
who supposes this interest to have been confined to academic bowers,
or the halls of philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to
the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, have arisen out of
this philosophy; many thousands of books have been written by way of
teaching it, discussing it, extending it, opposing it. And yet it is a
fact that all its doctrines are negative--teaching, in no case, what
we _are_, but simply what we are _not_, to believe--and that all its
truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I cannot but
imagine that the German people have received it with so much ardour
from profound incomprehension of its meaning, and utter blindness to
its drift: a solution which may seem extravagant, but is not so; for,
even amongst those who have expressly commented on this philosophy,
not one of the many hundreds whom I have myself read but has retracted
from every attempt to explain its dark places. In these dark places
lies, indeed, the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into
them, it would be seen that they are _culs-de-sac_, passages that
lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is not known
whither they lead, how far, in what direction, and whether, in fact,
they may not issue into paths connected directly with the positive
and the infinite. Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces
you insurmountable to human steps--like the barriers which fence in
the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas--the popularity of this philosophy
would expire at once; for no popular interest can long be sustained
by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially
negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity
within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects.
We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased
to be of any authority in Germany--that it is defunct, in fact--and
that we have first begun to import it into England after its root
had withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer
is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot
even be said that its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated:
accidents of taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of
fashion, have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form
of Kantianism--an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some
respects, conflicting modifications of the transcendental system; but
all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons,
even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but
that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all
the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics are trained
and made to move either _ejus ductu_ or _ejus auspiciis_. Not one of
the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the
Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the
purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding
even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question
of Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old
adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions,
and the objects of the philosophic understanding must be presumed
to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with
most precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology
continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that
his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederick Schlegel, it is true,
twenty years ago, in his lectures upon Literature, assures us that
even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his
philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since
that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and,
without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to
revise his sente
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/42909