Biographical Essays

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Biographical Essays

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Was this man, so memorably good by life-long sacrifice of himself,
in any profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was
_not_. We, from private communications with him, can undertake
to say that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the
study of Christianity, he _was_. What has injured Lamb on this
point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from the first
were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as
if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he
had few religious persons amongst his friends, which made him
reserved in the expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any
case where he altered opinions for the better, the credit of the
improvement is assigned to Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning
life as a Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian.
Coleridge passed through the same changes in the same order; and,
here, at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the
influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own
knowledge of Lamb's views, we pronounce to be an error. And the
following extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only that he
was religiously disposed on impulses self-derived, but that, so far
from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he ventured, on this one
subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded
the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge.

In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first
great affliction, he says:

"Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my
acquaintance; not one Christian; not one but undervalues
Christianity. Singly, what am I to do? Wesley--[have you read his
life?]--was not he an elevated character? Wesley has said religion
was not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with me, or
next to solitary. 'Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by
letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to
me; and do some good to my mind--already how much 'warped and
relaxed' by the world!"

In a letter written about three months previously, he had not
scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of
religious speculation, which seemed to him at war with the
simplicities of pure religion. He says:

"Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister,
and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please
us two when you talk in a religious strain. Not but we are offended
occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of
mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than
consistent with the humility of genuine piety."

Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:

"Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil; I know I
cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility
which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New
Testament, our best guide, is represented to us in the kind,
condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent; and, in my poor
mind, 'tis best for us so to consider him as our heavenly Father,
and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of his
character."

About a month later, he says:

"Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language
I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to
_them_."

We see by this last quotation _where_ it was that Lamb
originally sought for consolation. We personally can vouch that, at
a maturer period, when he was approaching his fiftieth year, no
change had affected his opinions upon that point; and, on the other
hand, that no changes had occurred in his needs for consolation, we
see, alas! in the records of his life. Whither, indeed, could he
fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? And to whom was the Bible an
indispensable resource, if not to Lamb? We do not undertake to say,
that in his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or
consistent, but he was always earnest in his aspirations after its
spiritualities, and had an apprehensive sense of its power.

Charles Lamb is gone; his life was a continued struggle in the
service of love the purest, and within a sphere visited by little
of contemporary applause. Even his intellectual displays won but a
narrow sympathy at any time, and in his earlier period were saluted
with positive derision and contumely on the few occasions when they
were not oppressed by entire neglect. But slowly all things right
themselves. All merit, which is founded in truth, and is strong
enough, reaches by sweet exhalations in the end a higher sensory;
reaches higher organs of discernment, lodged in a selecter
audience. But the original obtuseness or vulgarity of feeling that
thwarted Lamb's just estimation in life, will continue to thwart
its popular diffusion. There are even some that continue to regard
him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, standing by the side
of Lamb's grave, seemed to hear, on one side, (but in abated tones,
) strains of the ancient malice--"This man, that thought himself to
be somebody, is dead--is buried--is forgotten!" and, on the other
side, seemed to hear ascending, as with the solemnity of an
anthem--"This man, that thought himself to be nobody, is dead--is
buried; his life has been searched; and his memory is hallowed
forever!"

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

"_Scriptural_" we call it, because this element of thought, so
indispensable to a profound philosophy of morals, is not simply
_more_ used in Scripture than elsewhere, but is so exclusively
significant or intelligible amidst the correlative ideas of
Scripture, as to be absolutely insusceptible of translation into
classical Greek or classical Latin. It is disgraceful that more
reflection has not been directed to the vast causes and
consequences of so pregnant a truth.

NOTE 2.

"_Poor S T. C._"-The affecting expression by which Coleridge
indicates himself in the few lines written during his last illness
for an inscription upon his grave, lines ill constructed in point
of diction and compression, but otherwise speaking from the depths
Of his heart.

NOTE 3.

It is right to remind the reader of this, for a reason applying
forcibly to the present moment Michelet has taxed Englishmen with
yielding to national animosities in the case of Joan, having no
plea whatever for that insinuation but the single one drawn from
Shakspeare's Henry VI. To this the answer is, first, that
Shakspeare's share in that trilogy is not nicely ascertained
Secondly, that M Michelet forgot (or, which is far worse,
_not_ forgetting it, he dissembled) the fact, that in
undertaking a series of dramas upon the basis avowedly of national
chronicles, and for the very purpose of profiting by old
traditionary recollections connected with ancestral glories, it was
mere lunacy to recast the circumstances at the bidding of
antiquarian research, so as entirely to disturb these glories.
Besides that, to Shakspeare's age no such spirit of research had
blossomed. Writing for the stage, a man would have risked
lapidation by uttering a whisper in that direction. And, even if
not, what sense could there have been in openly running counter to
the very motive that had originally prompted that particular class
of chronicle plays? Thirdly, if one Englishman had, in a memorable
situation, adopted the popular view of Joan's conduct,
(_popular_ as much in France as in England;) on the other
hand, fifty years before M. Michelet was writing this flagrant
injustice, another Englishman (viz., Southey) had, in an epic poem,
reversed this mis-judgment, and invested the shepherd girl with a
glory nowhere else accorded to her, unless indeed by Schiller.
Fourthly, we are not entitled to view as an _attack_ upon
Joanna, what, in the worst construction, is but an unexamining
adoption of the contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a
dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But
what _is_ an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and
obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human
struggle, viz., the French burlesque poem of _La
Pucelle_--what memorable man was it that wrote _that_? Was
he a Frenchman, or was he not? That M. Michelet should
_pretend_ to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is
more shocking to the general sense of justice than any special
untruth as to Shakspeare _can_ be to the particular
nationality of an Englishman.

NOTE 4.

The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's
Reliques, and to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Lady Abbess.

GOETHE

John Wolfgang von Goethe, a man of commanding influence in the
literature of modern Germany throughout the latter half of his long
life, and possessing two separate claims upon our notice; one in
right of his own unquestionable talents; and another much stronger,
though less direct, arising out of his position, and the
extravagant partisanship put forward on his behalf for the last
forty years. The literary body in all countries, and for reasons
which rest upon a sounder basis than that of private jealousies,
have always been disposed to a republican simplicity in all that
regards the assumption of rank and personal pretensions. _Valeat
quantum valere potest_, is the form of license to every man's
ambition, coupled with its caution. Let his influence and authority
be commensurate with his attested value; and, because no man in the
present infinity of human speculation, and the present multiformity
of human power, can hope for more than a very limited superiority,
there is an end at once to all _absolute_ dictatorship. The
dictatorship in any case could be only _relative_, and in
relation to a single department of art or knowledge; and this for a
reason stronger even than that already noticed, viz., the vast
extent of the field on which the intellect is now summoned to
employ itself. That objection, as it applies only to the
_degree_ of the difficulty, might be met by a corresponding
degree of mental energy; such a thing may be supposed, at least.
But another difficulty there is, of a profounder character, which
cannot be so easily parried. Those who have reflected at all upon
the fine arts, know that power of one kind is often inconsistent,
positively incompatible, with power of another kind. For example,
the _dramatic_ mind is incompatible with the _epic_. And
though we should consent to suppose that some intellect might arise
endowed upon a scale of such angelic comprehensiveness, as to
vibrate equally and indifferently towards either pole, still it is
next to impossible, in the exercise and culture of the two powers,
but some bias must arise which would give that advantage to the one
over the other which the right arm has over the left. But the
supposition, the very case put, is baseless, and countenanced by no
precedent. Yet, under this previous difficulty, and with regard to
a literature convulsed, if any ever was, by an almost total
anarchy, it is a fact notorious to all who take an interest in
Germany and its concerns, that Goethe did in one way or other,
through the length and breadth of that vast country, establish a
supremacy of influence wholly unexampled; a supremacy indeed
perilous in a less honorable man, to those whom he might chance to
hate, and with regard to himself thus far unfortunate, that it
conferred upon every work proceeding from his pen a sort of papal
indulgence, an immunity from criticism, or even from the appeals of
good sense, such as it is not wholesome that any man should enjoy.
Yet we repeat that German literature was and is in a condition of
total anarchy. With this solitary exception, no name, even in the
most narrow section of knowledge or of power, has ever been able in
that country to challenge unconditional reverence; whereas, with us
and in France, name the science, name the art, and we will name the
dominant professor; a difference which partly arises out of the
fact that England and France are governed in their opinions by two
or three capital cities, whilst Germany looks for its leadership to
as many cities as there are _residenzen_ and universities. For
instance, the little territory with which Goethe was connected
presented no less than two such public lights; Weimar, the
_residenz_ or privileged abode of the Grand Duke, and Jena,
the university founded by that house. Partly, however, this
difference may be due to the greater restlessness, and to the
greater energy as respects mere speculation, of the German mind.
But no matter whence arising, or how interpreted, the fact is what
we have described; absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton,
is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet
_there_ it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built
his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and
perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be
supposed. The tenure was uncertain to _him_ as regarded its
duration; to us it is equally uncertain, and in fact mysterious, as
regards its origin. Meantime the mere fact, contrasted with the
general tendencies of the German literary world, is sufficient to
justify a notice, somewhat circumstantial, of the man in whose
favor, whether naturally by force of genius, or by accident
concurring with intrigue, so unexampled a result was effected.

Goethe was born at noonday on the 28th of August, 1749, in his
father's house at Frankfort on the Maine. The circumstances of his
birth were thus far remarkable, that, unless Goethe's vanity
deceived him, they led to a happy revolution hitherto retarded by
female delicacy falsely directed. From some error of the midwife
who attended his mother, the infant Goethe appeared to be
still-born. Sons there were as yet none from this marriage;
everybody was therefore interested in the child's life; and the
panic which arose in consequence, having survived its immediate
occasion, was improved into a public resolution, (for which no
doubt society stood ready at that moment,) to found some course of
public instruction from this time forward for those who undertook
professionally the critical duties of accoucheur.

We have noticed the house in which Goethe was born, as well as the
city. Both were remarkable, and fitted to leave lasting impressions
upon a young person of sensibility. As to the city, its antiquity
is not merely venerable, but almost mysterious; towers were at that
time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences,
which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier;
battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of
feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of
Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a
corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a
short distance from the walls, which had descended from a dateless
antiquity. Every thing which met the eye spoke the language of
elder ages; whilst the river on which the place was seated, its
great fair, which still held the rank of the greatest in
Christendom, and its connection with the throne of Caesar and his
inauguration, by giving to Frankfort an interest and a public
character in the eyes of all Germany, had the effect of
countersigning, as it were, by state authority, the importance
which she otherwise challenged to her ancestral distinctions. Fit
house for such a city, and in due keeping with the general scenery,
was that of Goethe's father. It had in fact been composed out of
two contiguous houses; that accident had made it spacious and
rambling in its plan; whilst a further irregularity had grown out
of the original difference in point of level between the
corresponding stories of the two houses, making it necessary to
connect the rooms of the same _suite_ by short flights of
steps. Some of these features were no doubt removed by the recast
of the house under the name of "repairs," (to evade a city bye-law,
) afterwards executed by his father; but such was the house of
Goethe's infancy, and in all other circumstances of style and
furnishing equally antique.

The spirit of society in Frankfort, without a court, a university,
or a learned body of any extent, or a resident nobility in its
neighborhood, could not be expected to display any very high
standard of polish. Yet, on the other hand, as an independent city,
governed by its own separate laws and tribunals, (that privilege of
_autonomy_ so dearly valued by ancient Greece,) and possessing
besides a resident corps of jurisprudents and of agents in various
ranks for managing the interests of the German emperor and other
princes, Frankfort had the means within herself of giving a liberal
tone to the pursuits of her superior citizens, and of cooperating
in no inconsiderable degree with the general movement of the times,
political or intellectual. The memoirs of Goethe himself, and in
particular the picture there given of his own family, as well as
other contemporary glimpses of German domestic society in those
days, are sufficient to show that much knowledge, much true
cultivation of mind, much sound refinement of taste, were then
distributed through the middle classes of German society; meaning
by that very indeterminate expression those classes which for
Frankfort composed the aristocracy, viz., all who had daily
leisure, and regular funds for employing it to advantage. It is not
necessary to add, because that is a fact applicable to all stages
of society, that Frankfort presented many and various specimens of
original talent, moving upon all directions of human speculation.

Yet, with this general allowance made for the capacities of the
place, it is too evident that, for the most part, they lay inert
and undeveloped. In many respects Frankfort resembled an English
cathedral city, according to the standard of such places seventy
years ago, not, that is to say, like Carlisle in this day, where a
considerable manufacture exists, but like Chester as it is yet. The
chapter of a cathedral, the resident ecclesiastics attached to the
duties of so large an establishment, men always well educated, and
generally having families, compose the original _nucleus_,
around which soon gathers all that part of the local gentry who,
for any purpose, whether of education for their children, or of
social enjoyment for themselves, seek the advantages of a town.
Hither resort all the timid old ladies who wish for conversation,
or other forms of social amusement; hither resort the
valetudinarians, male or female, by way of commanding superior
medical advice at a cost not absolutely ruinous to themselves; and
multitudes besides, with narrow incomes, to whom these quiet
retreats are so many cities of refuge.

Such, in one view, they really are; and yet in another they have a
vicious constitution. Cathedral cities in England, imperial cities
without manufactures in Germany, are all in an improgressive
condition. The public employments of every class in such places
continue the same from generation to generation. The amount of
superior families oscillates rather than changes; that is, it
fluctuates within fixed limits; and, for all inferior families,
being composed either of shopkeepers or of menial servants, they
are determined by the number, or, which, on a large average, is the
same, by the pecuniary power, of their employers. Hence it arises,
that room is made for one man, in whatever line of dependence, only
by the death of another; and the constant increments of the
population are carried off into other cities. Not less is the
difference of such cities as regards the standard of manners. How
striking is the soft and urbane tone of the lower orders in a
cathedral city, or in a watering place dependent upon ladies,
contrasted with the bold, often insolent, demeanor of a
self-dependent artisan or mutinous mechanic of Manchester and
Glasgow.

Children, however, are interested in the state of society around
them, chiefly as it affects their parents. Those of Goethe were
respectable, and perhaps tolerably representative of the general
condition in their own rank. An English authoress of great talent,
in her _Characteristics of Goethe_, has too much countenanced
the notion that he owed his intellectual advantages exclusively to
his mother. Of this there is no proof. His mother wins more esteem
from the reader of this day, because she was a cheerful woman, of
serene temper, brought into advantageous comparison with a husband
much older than herself, whom circumstances had rendered moody,
fitful, sometimes capricious, and confessedly obstinate in that
degree which Pope has taught us to think connected with inveterate
error:

"Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,"

unhappily presents an association too often actually occurring in
nature, to leave much chance for error in presuming either quality
from the other. And, in fact, Goethe's father was so uniformly
obstinate in pressing his own views upon all who belonged to him,
whenever he did come forward in an attitude of activity, that his
family had much reason to be thankful for the rarity of such
displays. Fortunately for them, his indolence neutralized his
obstinacy. And the worst shape in which his troublesome temper
showed itself, was in what concerned the religious reading of the
family. Once begun, the worst book as well as the best, the longest
no less than the shortest, was to be steadfastly read through to
the last word of the last volume; no excess of yawning availed to
obtain a reprieve, not, adds his son, though he were himself the
leader of the yawners. As an illustration, he mentions Bowyer's
_History of the Popes_; which awful series of records, the
catacombs, as it were, in the palace of history, were actually
traversed from one end to the other of the endless suite by the
unfortunate house of Goethe. Allowing, however, for the father's
unamiableness in this one point, upon all intellectual ground both
parents seem to have met very much upon a level. Two illustrations
may suffice, one of which occurred during the infancy of Goethe.
The science of education was at that time making its first rude
motions towards an ampler development; and, amongst other reforms
then floating in the general mind, was one for eradicating the
childish fear of ghosts, &c. The young Goethes, as it happened,
slept not in separate beds only, but in separate rooms; and not
unfrequently the poor children, under the stinging terrors of their
lonely situation, stole away from their "forms," to speak in the
hunter's phrase, and sought to rejoin each other. But in these
attempts they were liable to surprises from the enemy; papa and
mamma were both on the alert, and often intercepted the young
deserter by a cross march or an ambuscade; in which cases each had
a separate policy for enforcing obedience. The father, upon his
general system of "perseverance," compelled the fugitive back to
his quarters, and, in effect, exhorted him to persist in being
frightened out of his wits. To his wife's gentle heart that course
appeared cruel, and she reclaimed the delinquent by bribes; the
peaches which her garden walls produced being the fund from which
she chiefly drew her supplies for this branch of the secret
service. What were her winter bribes, when the long nights would
seem to lie heaviest on the exchequer, is not said. Speaking
seriously, no man of sense can suppose that a course of suffering
from terrors the most awful, under whatever influence supported,
whether under the naked force of compulsion, or of _that_
connected with bribes, could have any final effect in mitigating
the passion of awe, connected, by our very dreams, with the shadowy
and the invisible, or in tranquillizing the infantine imagination.

A second illustration involves a great moral event in the history
of Goethe, as it was, in fact, the first occasion of his receiving
impressions at war with his religious creed. Piety is so beautiful
an ornament of the youthful mind, doubt or distrust so unnatural a
growth from confiding innocence, that an infant freethinker is
heard of not so much with disgust as with perplexity. A sense of
the ludicrous is apt to intermingle; and we lose our natural horror
of the result in wonder at its origin. Yet in this instance there
is no room for doubt; the fact and the occasion are both on record;
there can be no question about the date; and, finally, the accuser
is no other than the accused. Goethe's own pen it is which
proclaims, that already, in the early part of his seventh year, his
reliance upon God as a moral governor had suffered a violent shock,
was shaken, if not undermined. On the 1st of November, 1755,
occurred the great earthquake at Lisbon. Upon a double account,
this event occupied the thoughts of all Europe for an unusual term
of time; both as an expression upon a larger scale than usual of
the mysterious physical agency concerned in earthquakes, and also
for the awful human tragedy [Endnote: 5] Of this no picture can ever
hope to rival that hasty one sketched in the letter of the chaplain
to the Lisbon factory. The plague of Athens as painted by
Thucydides or Lucretius, nay even the fabulous plague of London by
De Foe, contain no scenes or situations equal in effect to some in
this plain historic statement. Nay, it would perhaps be difficult
to produce a passage from Ezekiel, from Aeschylus, or from
Shakspeare, which would so profoundly startle the sense of
sublimity as one or two of his incidents, which attended either
the earthquake itself, or its immediate sequel in the sudden
irruption of the Tagus. Sixty thousand persons, victims to the dark
power in its first or its second _avatar_, attested the
Titanic scale upon which it worked. Here it was that the shallow
piety of the Germans found a stumbling-block. Those who have read
any circumstantial history of the physical signs which preceded
this earthquake, are aware that in England and Northern Germany
many singular phenomena were observed, more or less manifestly
connected with the same dark agency which terminated at Lisbon, and
running before this final catastrophe at times so accurately
varying with the distances, as to furnish something like a scale
for measuring the velocity with which it moved. These German
phenomena, circulated rapidly over all Germany by the journals of
every class, had seemed to give to the Germans a nearer and more
domestic interest in the great event, than belonged to them merely
in their universal character of humanity. It is also well known to
observers of national characteristics, that amongst the Germans the
household charities, the _pieties of the hearth_, as they may
be called, exist, if not really in greater strength, yet with much
less of the usual balances or restraints. A German father, for
example, is like the grandfather of other nations; and thus a
piety, which in its own nature scarcely seems liable to excess,
takes, in its external aspect, too often an air of effeminate
imbecility. These two considerations are necessary to explain the
intensity with which this Lisbon tragedy laid hold of the German
mind, and chiefly under the one single aspect of its
_undistinguishing_ fury. Women, children, old men--these,
doubtless, had been largely involved in the perishing sixty
thousand; and that reflection, it would seem from Goethe's account,
had so far embittered the sympathy of the Germans with their
distant Portuguese brethren, that, in the Frankfort discussions,
sullen murmurs had gradually ripened into bold impeachments of
Providence. There can be no gloomier form of infidelity than that
which questions the moral attributes of the Great Being, in whose
hands are the final destinies of us all. Such, however, was the
form of Goethe's earliest scepticism, such its origin; caught up
from the very echoes which rang through the streets of Frankfort
when the subject occupied all men's minds. And such, for anything
that appears, continued to be its form thenceforwards to the close
of his life, if speculations so crude could be said to have any
form at all. Many are the analogies, some close ones, between
England and Germany with regard to the circle of changes they have
run through, political or social, for a century back. The
challenges are frequent to a comparison; and sometimes the result
would be to the advantage of Germany, more often to ours. But in
religious philosophy, which in reality is the true _popular_
philosophy, how vast is the superiority on the side of this
country. Not a shopkeeper or mechanic, we may venture to say, but
would have felt this obvious truth, that surely the Lisbon
earthquake yielded no fresh lesson, no peculiar moral, beyond what
belonged to every man's experience in every age. A passage in the
New Testament about the fall of the tower of Siloam, and the just
construction of that event, had already anticipated the difficulty,
if such it could be thought. Not to mention, that calamities upon
the same scale in the earliest age of Christianity, the fall of the
amphitheatre at Fidenae, or the destruction of Pompeii, had
presented the same problem at the Lisbon earthquake. Nay, it is
presented daily in the humblest individual case, where wrong is
triumphant over right, or innocence confounded with guilt in one
common disaster. And that the parents of Goethe should have
authorized his error, if only by their silence, argues a degree of
ignorance in them, which could not have co-existed with much
superior knowledge in the public mind.

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