I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immovable, or affecting some faint emotion till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept us, with none of the enjoyment; or like that Party in a parlour All silent, and all damned.1 Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. - Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops,2 and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime3 - these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable: - afterwards followeth the languor and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches: "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania,5 and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go 1 From a suppressed stanza of Wordsworth's Peter Bell. punctuation marks 3a pantomimist 4 Cf. Revelation, x:10 5 pleasant lunacy 6 most delightful mental delusion smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done. So delightsome these toys1 at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them - winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at the last the scene turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor,3 discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." Something like this "scene turning" I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov; 3 who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens. When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five-andthirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings or that other which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time 3 I loved a love once, fairest among women; Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. I have a friend,' a kinder friend has no man; Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, Friend of my bosom,2 thou more than a brother, Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly," - still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean,' above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end; - clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me priests, altars, censers dazzle before me --- the genius of his religion hath me in her toils - a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous he is Pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, tri-coroneted like himself! — I am converted, and yet a Protestant; - at once malleus hereticorum,1 and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person : I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus Gog and MagogĜ . what not?till the coming in of the friendly THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777-1844) supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. So might we talk of the old familiar faces 18 How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND A NAVAL ODE Ye mariners of England Whose flag has braved a thousand years The battle and the breeze! Your glorious standard launch again And sweep through the deep, While the stormy winds do blow; While the battle rages loud and long, THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852) THE TIME I'VE LOST IN WOOING The time I've lost in wooing, In woman's eyes, Has been my heart's undoing. Tho' Wisdom oft has sought me, I scorn'd the lore she brought me, My only books Were woman's looks, And folly's all they've taught me. Her smile when Beauty granted, I hung with gaze enchanted, Like him the Sprite, Whom maids by night Oft meet in glen that's haunted. Like him, too, Beauty won me, But while her eyes were on me; If once their ray Was turned away, Oh, winds could not outrun me. ΙΟ 20 30 ΙΟ THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) FROM CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM This If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had been the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose that we should all cry out, Hear him! hear him! As to the happiest day, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name; because any event, that could occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one day, ought to be of such an enduring character, as that (accidents apart) it should have continued to shed the same felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on many years together. To the happiest lustrum, however, or even to the happiest year, it may be allowed to any man to point without discountenance from wisdom. year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set, as it were, and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and without any considerable effort, from three hundred and twenty grains of opium (that is, eight thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black vapours that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day; passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide, That moveth altogether, if it move at all.1 Now, then, I was again happy; I now took only one thousand drops of laudanum per day, and what was that? A latter spring had come to close up the season of youth: 1 Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence, 1. 77; altogether should be all together |