Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

I can say, or have time to say, the reader must | instinct with life: the abominable head of the enter into before he can comprehend the un- crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at imaginable horror which these dreams of orien- me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and tal imagery, and mythological tortures, im- I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often pressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that of tropical heat and vertical sun-lights, I many times the very same dream was broken brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appear speaking to me (I hear everything when I am ances, that are found in all tropical regions, sleeping); and instantly I awoke: it was broad and assembled them together in China or Indo- noon; and my children were standing, hand in stan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their Egypt and all her gods under the same law. coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chat- them dressed for going out. I protest that so tered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cocka- awful was the transition from the damned crocotoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for dile, and the other unutterable monsters and centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innoI was the idol; I was the priest; I was wor-cent human natures and of infancy, that, in shipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wrath of Brama through all the forests of wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for faces. me.11 I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried. for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

FROM SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS* LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholarship, you I thus give the reader some slight abstraction will not be angry with me for telling you. of my oriental dreams, which always filled me Levana was the Roman goddess that performed with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, for the new-born infant the earliest office of that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in ennobling kindness,-typical, by its mode, of sheer astonishment. Sooner or later, came a that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, reflux of feeling that swallowed up the aston- and of that benignity in powers invisible which ishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just every form, and threat, and punishment, and as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosdim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of phere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the eternity and infinity that drove me into an ground. That might bear different interpretaoppression as of madness. Into these dreams tions. But immediately, lest so grand a creaonly, it was, with one or two slight exceptions, ture should grovel there for more than one that any circumstances of physical horror en-instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for tered. All before had been moral and spiritual the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, etc. the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became

All

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors]

Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths) is the title under which De Quincey began in 1845 to publish a series of articles which were to have closed with a crowning succession of "some twenty or twenty-five dreams and noonday visions.' Most of the articles were either never written or were destroyed. Of Levana, one of the earliest. Professor Masson has said that "it is a permanent addition to the mythology of the human race," typifying as it does "the varieties and degrees of misery that there are in the world." As for De Quincey's own education through initiation into these several degrees of sorrow, it is to be remembered that in childhood he lost by death his father and two sisters. in youth he ran away from an uncongenial school and wandered like an outcast in Wales and London, and in manhood his body. intellect, and will became enslaved to opium.

proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it | more than ever have been counted amongst its look erect as the king of all this world, and pre-martyrs.

66

sented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, Therefore it is that Levana often communes in his heart, "Behold what is greater than with the powers that shake man's heart: thereyourselves!'' This symbolic act represented fore it is that she dotes upon grief. "These the function of Levana. And that mysterious ladies,'' said I softly to myself, on seeing the lady, who never revealed her face (except to ministers with whom Levana was conversing, me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, these are the Sorrows; and they are three in had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is number, as the Graces are three, who dress the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft. man's life with beauty; the Parca2 are three, This is the explanation of Levana, and hence who weave the dark arras of man's life in their it has arisen that some people have understood mysterious loom, always with colours sad in by Levana the tutelary power that controls the part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and education of the nursery. She, that would not black; the Furies are three, who visit with suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic retributions called from the other side of the degradation for her awful ward, far less could grave offences that walk upon this; and once be supposed to suffer the real degradation at even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, taching to the non-development of his powers. the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens She therefore watches over human education. of man's impassioned creations. These are the Now the word educo, with the penultimate Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last short, was derived (by a process often exempli- words I say now; but in Oxford I said, “One fied in the crystallisation of languages) from of whom I know, and the others too surely I the word educo, with the penultimate long. shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, Whatsoever educes, or develops, educates. By I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background the education of Levana, therefore, is meant,- of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the not the poor machinery that moves by spelling awful sisters. These sisters-by what name books and grammars, but that mighty system of shall we call them? If I say simply, "The central forces hidden in the deep bosom of Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking human life, which by passion, by strife, by the term; it might be understood of individual temptation, by the energies of resistance, works sorrow,-separate cases of sorrow,—whereas I for ever upon children,-resting not day or want a term expressing the mighty abstractions night, any more than the mighty wheel of day that incarnate themselves in all individual sufand night themselves, whose moments, like rest-ferings of man's heart; and I wish to have less spokes, are glimmering for ever as they these abstractions presented as impersonations, revolve. that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, If, then, these are the ministries by which and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us Levana works, how profoundly must she rever-call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. ence the agencies of grief! But you, reader, I know them thoroughly, and have walked in think that children generally are not liable to grief such as mine. There are two senses in the word generally, the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of this word, where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation1 should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed

1 holding a scholarship provided by the foundation, or endowment

all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk. then? O, no! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have sung: for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that perish. or by words that go astray, but by signs in

2 Fates

heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret winter of 1844-5 within the bed-chamber of the rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hiero- | Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not glyphics written on the tablets of the brain. less pious) that vanished to God not less sudThey wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraphed3 from afar; I read the sig nals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.

denly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of

What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their presence: if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it were that for everMadonna!'' advanced to the front, or for ever receded The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum amongst shades.

-Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lach-clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She rymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation,-Rachel weep ing for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nur series of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with | wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever, for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister. Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to Hers is the meekness that be

Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears abjectness. a diadem round her head. And I knew by child-longs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it ish memories that she could go abroad upon the is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at the thundering of organs, and when she beheld times, but it is in solitary places that are desothe mustering of summer clouds. This sister, late as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the eldest, it is that carries keys more than the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister papal at her girdle, which open every cottage is the visitor of the Pariah,7 of the Jew, of the and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sat bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galall last summer by the bedside of the blind beg-leys; and of the English criminal in Norfolk gar, him that so often and so gladly I talked Island,s blotted out from the books of rememwith, whose pious daughter, eight years old, brance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled with the sunny countenance, resisted the temp-penitent reverting his eyes for ever upon a solitations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, He recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this

[blocks in formation]

tary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother, as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered;-every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shel

6 Nicholas I., whose daughter Alexandra had lately died.

7 social outcast (Hindu term)

i8 A penal colony in the south Pacific, 1825-1845.

ter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, cious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shudbecause the heaven-born instincts kindling in dering propitiation), of my Oxford dreams. her nature germs of holy affections which God Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious implanted in her womanly bosom, having been hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to Our stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly | Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, translated to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the an- out of the signs which (except in dreams) no cients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning man reads, was this:May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed and all that are rejected; out casts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace,-all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads.

But the third sister, who is also the youngest -! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele,10 rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hid den by distance; but, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggest ress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central con

vulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebra rum-Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides,11 or Gra

9 Son of Noah, reputed ancestor of the Semitic
races-the Hebrews, Arabs, etc. For the
phrase, see Genesis, ix, 27.

10 See note on Childe Harold, IV. 2.
11 A euphemistic name for the Furies.

"Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou,'-turning to the Mater Tenebrarum, she said,-wicked sister. that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished12 in the furnace, so shall he see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies, and so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had,—to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit.”

SAVANNAH-LA-MAR*

God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night,

by earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God said,-"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my myste rious anger, set in azure light through generations to come; for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths

12 perfected.

* "Plain (of) the Sea"-a fanciful name adopted by De Quincey for this vision of a sunken city. The "Dark Interpreter" mentioned here gives name to another of the Suspiria papers.

of ocean;

and oftentimes in glassy calms, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the through the translucid atmosphere of water actual present which you arrest measures now that now stretches like an air-woven awning but the thirty-sixth-millionth of an hour; and above the silent encampment, mariners from so by infinite declensions the true and very every clime look down into her courts and ter- present, in which only we live and enjoy, will races, count her gates, and number the spires of vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and nly by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, has been for many a year; but, in the mighty which only man possesses, offers less capacity calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes, for his footing than the slenderest film that she fascinates the eye with a Fata-Morgana† ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore, revelation, as of human life still subsisting in also, even this incalculable shadow from the narsubmarine asylums sacred from the storms that rowest pencil of moonlight is more transitory torment our upper air. than geometry can measure, or thought of angel Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean can overtake. The time which is contracts into depths, by the peace of human dwellings privi- a mathematic point; and even that point perleged from molestation, by the gleam of marble ishes a thousand times before we can utter its altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, often- birth. All is finite in the present; and even times in dreams did I and the Dark Interpreter that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight cleave the watery veil that divided us from her towards death. But in God there is nothing streets. We looked into the belfries, where the finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; pendulous bells were waiting in vain for the but in God there can be nothing that tends to summons which should awaken their marriage death. Therefore, it follows, that for God there peals; together we touched the mighty organ- can be no present. The future is the present of keys, that sang no jubilates1 for the ear of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of the human present. Therefore it is that he human sorrow; together we searched the silent | works by earthquake. Therefore it is that he nurseries, where the children were all asleep, works by grief. O, deep is the ploughing of and had been asleep through five generations. earthquake! O, deep''-(and his voice swelled "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn, like a sanctus3 rising from the choir of a cathewhispered the Interpreter to himself: "and, | dral)—“O, deep is the ploughing of grief. But when that comes, the bells and organs will utter | oftentimes less would not suffice for the agricula jubilate repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then, turning to me, he said,-"This is sad, this is piteous; but less would not have sufficed for the purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra2 one hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass, every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part dwelling-place of man; but the other is needed of an hour. Now, count the drops as they race along; and, when the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they have perished, and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see, therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false. For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent the present, 1 hymns of rejoicing (specifically the 100th Psalm) 2 water-clock

Here "mirage-like": from the fata morgana of the Sicilian coast-a phenomenon attributed to Morgan le Fay, or Morgana the Fairy.

ture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce ploughshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is needed for Earth, our planet,-for Earth itself as the

yet oftener for God's mightiest instrument,— yes" (and he looked solemnly at myself), “is needed for the mysterious children of the Earth!''

FROM JOAN OF ARC*

What is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that—like the Hebrew

3 The anthem "Holy, Holy, Holy."
De Quincey's venture into this particular field
of history, which is so obscure and so acri-
moniously debated, was inspired by Michelet's
Histoire de France, then (1847) appearing,
and his avowed object was to do justice to
the maligned Mald, defending her even against
her own countrymen. The body of his arti-
cle, which is narrative and argumentative, is
here omitted, only the introduction and con-
clusion being given. See Eng. Lit., p. 274.

« AnteriorContinuar »