Miscellaneous Essays - Thomas de Quincey
Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before struck the
celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents carried out by our first
embassy to that country was a state-coach. It had been specially selected
as a personal gift by George III.; but the exact mode of using it was a
mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed, (Lord Macartney,) had made some
dim and imperfect explanations upon the point; but as his excellency
communicated these in a diplomatic whisper, at the very moment of his
departure, the celestial mind was very feebly illuminated; and it became
necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state question--"Where was
the emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth happened to be unusually gorgeous;
and partly on that consideration, but partly also because the box offered
the most elevated seat, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by
acclamation that the box was the imperial place, and, _for the scoundrel
who drove, he might sit where he could find a perch_. The horses,
therefore, being harnessed, under a flourish of music and a salute of guns,
solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his new English throne, having the
first lord of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester on his
left. Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people,
constructively present by representation, there was but one discontented
person, which was the coachman. This mutinous individual, looking as
blackhearted as he really was, audaciously shouted, "Where am _I_ to sit?"
But the privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the
door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places
to himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition, that he was still
dissatisfied. "I say," he cried out in an extempore petition, addressed to
the emperor through the window, "how am I to catch hold of the reins?" "Any
how," was the answer; "don't trouble _me_, man, in my glory; through the
windows, through the key-holes--how you please." Finally this contumacious
coachman lengthened the checkstrings into a sort of jury-reins,
communicating with the horses; with these he drove as steadily as may be
supposed. The emperor returned after the briefest of circuits; he descended
in great pomp from his throne, with the severest resolution never to
remount it. A public thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's prosperous
escape from the disease of a broken neck; and the state-coach was dedicated
for ever as a votive offering to the god Fo, Fo--whom the learned more
accurately called Fi, Fi.
A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that era
effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect French
revolution; and we had good reason to say, _Ca ira_. In fact, it soon
became _too_ popular. The "public," a well known character, particularly
disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious for affecting the
chief seats in synagogues, had at first loudly opposed this revolution;
but when the opposition showed itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable
friend went into it with headlong zeal. At first it was a sort of race
between us; and, as the public is usually above thirty, (say generally from
thirty to fifty years old,) naturally we of young Oxford, that averaged
about twenty, had the advantage. Then the public took to bribing, giving
fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons as warming-pans on
the box-seat. _That_, you know, was shocking to our moral sensibilities.
Come to bribery, we observed, and there is an end to all morality,
Aristotle's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, of what use was it?
For _we_ bribed also. And as our bribes to those of the public being
demonstrated out of Euclid to be as five shillings to sixpence, here
again young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to
the principles of the stable establishment about the mails. The whole
corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often sur-rebribed; so
that a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held by the philosophical at
that time to be the most corrupt character in the nation.
There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the
continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that
an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the
contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some
gipsey prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now
approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly, "Whither
can I go for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? Or a lunatic
hospital? Or the British Museum?" I should have replied, "Oh, no; I'll tell
you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the box of his
majesty's mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at ninety
days after date that you are made unhappy--if noters and protesters are the
sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken the house of life--then
note you what I vehemently protest, viz., that no matter though the sheriff
in every county should be running after you with his _posse_, touch a hair
of your head he cannot whilst you keep house, and have your legal domicile
on the box of the mail. It's felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff
cannot do that. And an _extra_ (no great matter if it grazes the sheriff)
touch of the whip to the leaders at any time guarantees your safety." In
fact, a bed-room in a quiet house, seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is
liable to its own notorious nuisances, to robbers by night, to rats, to
fire. But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is
packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss.
Rats again! there _are_ none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in
Van Troil's Iceland; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who
always hides his shame in the "coal cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew
but one in a mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an
obstinate sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the law and the
lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on taking
up a forbidden seat in the rear of the roof, from which he could exchange
his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was then known to
mail-coaches; it was treason, it was _laesa majestas_, it was by tendency
arson; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst the straw of the
hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by the
wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the republic of letters. But
even this left the sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified repose,
the coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our
knowledge--that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside
passengers before it could reach ourselves. With a quotation rather too
trite, I remarked to the coachman,--
----"Jam proximus ardet
Ucalegon."
But recollecting that the Virgilian part of his education might have been
neglected, I interpreted so far as to say, that perhaps at that moment the
flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and next-door neighbor
Ucalegon. The coachman said nothing, but, by his faint sceptical smile, he
seemed to be thinking that he knew better; for that in fact, Ucalegon, as
it happened, was not in the way-bill.
No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the
indeterminate and mysterious. The connection of the mail with the state
and the executive government--a connection obvious, but yet not strictly
defined--gave to the whole mail establishment a grandeur and an official
authority which did us service on the roads, and invested us with
seasonable terrors. But perhaps these terrors were not the less impressive,
because their exact legal limits were imperfectly ascertained. Look at
those turnpike gates; with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient
start, they fly open at our approach! Look at that long line of carts
and carters ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. Ah!
traitors, they do not hear us as yet; but as soon as the dreadful blast of
our horn reaches them with the proclamation of our approach, see with what
frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate our
wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they
feel to be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the
ban of confiscation and attainder: his blood is attainted through six
generations, and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block
and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be
within benefit of clergy to delay the king's message on the high
road?--to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national
intercourse--to endanger the safety of tidings, running day and night
between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst the
weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to their
widows for Christian burial? Now the doubts which were raised as to our
powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty,
than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from
the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,)
did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with
which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave
it a sanction, or upon conscious power, haughtily dispensing with that
sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent in each
particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having
authority.
Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would become frisky: and in
its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would
upset an apple cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction
and dismay, awful was the smash, though, after all, I believe the damage
might be levied upon the hundred. I, as far as possible, endeavored in such
a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail;
and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses' hoofs,
then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too
celebrated in those days from the false[5] echoes of Marengo)--"Ah!
wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" which was quite impossible,
for in fact we had not even time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office
time, with an allowance in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles,
could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and
condolence? Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the
road? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I contended, in
discharge of its own more peremptory duties.
Upholding the morality of the mail, _a fortiori_ I upheld its rights,
I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and
astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking
constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I remember
being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry,
when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some _Tallyho_ or _Highflier_, all
flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to
our royal simplicity of form and color is this plebeian wretch! The single
ornament on our dark ground of chocolate color was the mighty shield of the
imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring
bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel,
whispering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the state; whilst the
beast from Birmingham had as much writing and painting on its sprawling
flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some
time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side--a piece of familiarity
that seemed to us sufficiently jacobinical. But all at once a movement of
the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you
see _that_?" I said to the coachman. "I see," was his short answer. He was
awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our
audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But
his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be
full-blown before he froze it. When _that_ seemed ripe, he unloosed, or, to
speak by a stronger image, he sprang his known resources, he slipped our
royal horses like cheetas, or hunting leopards, after the affrighted game.
How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had
accomplished, seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical
superiority, was a tower of strength, namely, the king's name, "which they
upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without an effort, as it
seemed, we threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval between
us, as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst
our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph, that was really too
painfully full of derision.
I mention this little incident for its connection with what followed. A
Welshman, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn within
me during the continuance of the race? I said--No; because we were not
racing with a mail, so that no glory could be gained. In fact, it was
sufficiently mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to
challenge us. The Welshman replied, that he didn't see _that_; for that a
cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might lawfully race the
Holyhead mail. "_Race_ us perhaps," I replied, "though even _that_ has an
air of sedition, but not _beat_ us. This would have been treason; and for
its own sake I am glad that the Tallyho was disappointed." So dissatisfied
did the Welshman seem with this opinion, that at last I was obliged to tell
him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists, viz.--that once, in
some oriental region, when the prince of all the land, with his splendid
court, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle;
and in defiance of the eagle's prodigious advantages, in sight also of all
the astonished field sportsmen, spectators, and followers, killed him on
the spot. The prince was struck with amazement at the unequal contest, and
with burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He commanded that the
hawk should be brought before him; caressed the bird with enthusiasm, and
ordered that, for the commemoration of his matchless courage, a crown
of gold should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but then that,
immediately after this coronation, the bird should be led off to execution,
as the most valiant indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor that had
dared to rise in rebellion against his liege lord the eagle. "Now," said I
to the Welshman, "How painful it would have been to you and me as men of
refined feelings, that this poor brute, the Tallyho, in the impossible case
of a victory over us, should have been crowned with jewellery, gold, with
Birmingham ware, or paste diamonds, and then led off to instant execution."
The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by law. And when I hinted
at the 10th of Edward III., chap. 15, for regulating the precedency of
coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital punishment
of such offences, he replied drily--that if the attempt to pass a mail was
really treasonable, it was a pity that the Tallyho appeared to have so
imperfect an acquaintance with law.
These were among the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with
mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose
again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my
dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on
the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or
capricious association with images originally gay, yet opening at some
stage of evolution into sudden capacities of horror; sometimes through the
more natural and fixed alliances with the sense of power so various lodged
in the mail system.
The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system
in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not however as
a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon
_alien_ evidence; as, for instance, because somebody _says_ that we have
gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that
actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart
from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace.
But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves
to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was--_Non magna
loquimur_, as upon railways, but _magna vivimus_. The vital experience of
the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our
speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this
speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy
to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his
dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was
incarnated in the _visible_ contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that,
radiating into _their_ natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man.
The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his
eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca
might be the first--but the intervening link that connected them, that
spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was
the heart of man--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then
propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more
or less dim, in his servant the horse.
But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have
disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor
Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle.
The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man's imperial nature no longer
sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the
inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and
his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents
of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated,
or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations,
must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once
announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming
on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village
or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the
pot-wallopings of the boiler.
Thus have perished multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting
personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not
have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of
a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one
centre, and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds attending at
a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many
centres as there are separate carriages in the train.
How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for
the London mail that in summer months entered about dawn into the lawny
thickets of Marlborough Forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road,
have become known to myself? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for
face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited
the station which even _her_ I could not willingly have spared; yet
(thirty-five years later) she holds in my dreams: and though, by an
accident of fanciful caprice, she brought along with her into those dreams
a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that were more
abominable to a human heart than Fanny and the dawn were delightful.
Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance
from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my
frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her name
with the great thoroughfare where I saw her; I do not exactly know, but I
believe with some burthen of commissions to be executed in Bath, her own
residence being probably the centre to which these commissions gathered.
The mail coachman, who wore the royal livery, being one amongst the
privileged few,[6] happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he
was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her wisely, was
vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen
to be concerned. Was I then vain enough to imagine that I myself,
individually, could fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not,
as regarded any physical pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a
chance passenger from her own neighborhood once told me) counted in her
train a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants
to her favor; and probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself
in personal advantages. Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his
accursed bow, could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So
the danger might have seemed slight--only that woman is universally
aristocratic; it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she _is_ so. Now,
the aristocratic distinctions in my favor might easily with Miss Fanny have
compensated my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why,
yes; _mais oui donc_; as much love as one _can_ make whilst the mail is
changing horses, a process which ten years later did not occupy above
eighty seconds; but _then_, viz., about Waterloo, it occupied five times
eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for
whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of truth; and (by way of
parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to
watch me. And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, in
a contest with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have
watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my
belief, would have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions.
But he, as the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities
for such suggestions. Yet he was still active; he was still blooming.
Blooming he was as Fanny herself.
"Say, all our praises why should lords--"
No, that's not the line.
"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"
The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his
granddaughter's,--_his_ being drawn from the ale cask, Fanny's from youth
and innocence, and from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his
blooming face, some infirmities he had; and one particularly (I am very
sure, no _more_ than one,) in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This
lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I presume,
owes that inaptitude to the absurd _length_ of his back; but in our
grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd _breadth_ of his back, combined,
probably, with some growing stiffness in his legs. Now upon this crocodile
infirmity of his I planted an easy opportunity for tendering my homage to
Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honorable vigilance, no sooner had he
presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for displaying to
mankind his royal scarlet!) whilst inspecting professionally the buckles,
the straps, and the silver turrets of his harness, than I raised Miss
Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of
my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it would have made
me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in which case a few casualties
amongst her lovers (and observe--they _hanged_ liberally in those days)
might have promoted me speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other
hand, with how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced in her allotment,
supposing that she had seen reason to plant me in the very rearward of her
favor, as No. 199+1. It must not be supposed that I allowed any trace
of jest, or even of playfulness, to mingle with these expressions of my
admiration; that would have been insulting to her, and would have been
false as regarded my own feelings. In fact, the utter shadowyness of our
relations to each other, even after our meetings through seven or eight
years had been very numerous, but of necessity had been very brief, being
entirely on mail-coach allowance--timid, in reality, by the General
Post-Office--and watched by a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate
generation, left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever _can_
have done--viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be
as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by
overtures that might have been foolish as regarded my own interests,
or misleading as regarded hers. Most truly I loved this beautiful and
ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath and Bristol mail, heaven
only knows what might have come of it. People talk of being over head and
ears in love--now, the mail was the cause that I sank only over ears in
love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole
conduct of the affair. I have mentioned the case at all for the sake of
a dreadful result from it in after years of dreaming. But it seems, _ex
abundanti_, to yield this moral--viz., that as, in England, the idiot and
the half-wit are held to be under the guardianship of chancery, so the man
making love, who is often but a variety of the same imbecile class, ought
to be made a ward of the General Post-Office, whose severe course of
_timing_ and periodical interruption might intercept many a foolish
declaration, such as lays a solid foundation for fifty years' repentance.