Amenities of Literature Part 1

Amenities of Literature.

by Isaac Disraeli.

PREFACE.

A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many years. It was my design not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress, and the decline of public opinions, and to ill.u.s.trate, as the objects presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals.

In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves, some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation.

Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy of books where their subjects, their tendency, and their immediate or gradual influence over the people discover their actual condition.

Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion; the great form an epoch, the many reflect their age. With them the transient becomes permanent, the suppressed lies open, and they are the truest representatives of their nation for those very pa.s.sions with which they are themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writer transmits to us the public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncrasy, we are deeply interested in the secret connexion of the incidents of their lives with their intellectual habits. In the development of that predisposition which is ever working in characters of native force, all their felicities and their failures, and the fortunes which such men have shaped for themselves, and often for the world, we discover what is not found in biographical dictionaries, the history of the mind of the individual--and this const.i.tutes the psychology of genius.

In the midst of my studies I was arrested by the loss of sight; the papers in this collection are a portion of my projected history.

The t.i.tle prefixed to this work has been adopted to connect it with its brothers, the "Curiosities of Literature," and "Miscellanies of Literature;" but though the form and manner bear a family resemblance, the subject has more unity of design.

The author of the present work is denied the satisfaction of reading a single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespa.s.s on the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate patience of filial devotion.

AMENITIES OF LITERATURE.

THE DRUIDICAL INSt.i.tUTION.

England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every cla.s.s of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself dest.i.tute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving ages of time is but of yesterday.

How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,"[1] becomes a tale in the history of the human mind.

In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for our ABORIGINES? A Welsh triad, and a Welsh is presumed to be a British, has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a region of impenetrable forests and impa.s.sable mora.s.ses, and their sole tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the first human beings in this lone world?

Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and traditionists expatiated; we discover G.o.ds who seem to have been men, or men who resemble G.o.ds; we read in the form of prose what had once been a poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely allegorised, served as the milky food of the children of society, quieting their vague curiosity, and circ.u.mscribing the illimitable unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called "the mendacious;" credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period when, as our earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability, affirms, "there were but a few giants in the land,"[2] and these the more melancholy Gildas, to familiarise us with h.e.l.l itself, accompanied by "a few devils." Every people however long acknowledged, with national pride, beings as fabulous, in those tutelary heroes who bore their own names.

The landing of Brutus with his fugitive Trojans on "the White Island,"

and here founding a "Troynovant," was one of the results of the immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator Virgil, whose Latin in the mediaeval ages was read when Greek was unknown. The landing of aeneas on the sh.o.r.es of Italy, and the pride of the Romans in their Trojan ancestry, as their flattering Epic sanctioned, every modern people, in their jealousy of antiquity, eagerly adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from some of this spurious progeny of Priam. The idle humour of the learned flattered the imaginations of their countrymen; and each, in his own land, raised up a fict.i.tious personage who was declared to have left his name to the people. The excess of their patriotism exposed their forgeries, while every pretended Trojan betrayed a Gothic name. France had its Francion, Ireland its Iberus, the Danes their Da.n.u.s, and the Saxons their Saxo.

The descent of Brutus into Britain is even tenderly touched by so late a writer as our CAMDEN; for while he abstains from affording us either denial or a.s.sent, he expends his costly erudition in furnis.h.i.+ng every refutation which had been urged against the preposterous existence of these fabulous founders of every European people.

Such is the corruption of the earliest history, either to gratify the idle pride of a people, or to give completeness to inquiries extending beyond human knowledge. Even BUCHANAN, to gratify the ancestral vanity of his countrymen, has recorded the names of three hundred fabulous monarchs, and presents a nomenclature without an event; and in his cla.s.sical latinity we must silently drop a thousand unhistorical years.

Even HENRY and WHITAKER, in the gravity of English history, sketched the manners and the characteristics of an unchronicled generation from the fragmentary romances of Ossian.

Caesar imagined that the inhabitants of the interior of Britain, a fiercer people than the dwellers on the coasts, were an indigenous race.

But the philosophy of Caesar did not exceed that of Horace and Ovid, who conceived no other origin of man than _Mater Terra_. Man indeed was formed out of "the dust of the ground," but the Divine Spirit alone could have dictated the history of primeval man in the solitude of Eden.

To Caesar was not revealed that man was an oriental creature; that a single locality served as the cradle of the human race; and that the generations of man were the offspring of a single pair, when once "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech." "And there is no antiquity but this that can tell _any other beginning_," exclaims our honest VERSTEGAN, exulting in his Teutonic blood, while furnis.h.i.+ng an extraordinary evidence of the retreat of Tuisco and his Teutons from the conspiracy against the skies.[3]

The dispersion of Babel, and, consequently, the diversity of languages, is the mysterious link which connects sacred and profane history. There is but a single point whence human nature begins--the universe has been populated by migrations. Wherever the human being is found, he has been transplanted; however varied in structure and dissimilar in dialect, the first inhabitants of every land were not born there: unlike plants and animals, which seem coeval with the region in which they are found, never removing from the soil they occupy. Thus the miracle of Holy Writ solves the enigmas of philosophical theories; of more than one Adam, of distinct stocks of mankind, and of the mechanism of language--vague conjectures, and contested opinions! which have left us without even a conception how the human being is white, or tawny, or sable; or how the first letters of the alphabet are Aleph and Bet, or Alpha and Beta, or A and B!

In tracing the origin of nations later speculators have therefore more discreetly, though not wanting in hardy conjectures or fanciful affinities, conducted people after people, from the mysterious fount of human existence in the Asian region. Through countless centuries they have followed the myriads who, propelling each other, took the right or the left, as chance led them: vanished nations may have received names which they themselves might not have recognised. Kelt or Kimmerian, Scandinavian or Goth, Phoenician or Iberian, have been hurried to the Isles of Britain. Their tale is older, though less "divine," than the tale of Troy; and the difficulty remains to unravel the reality of the fabulous. The learned have rarely satisfied their consciences in arranging their dates in the confusion of unnoted time; nor in that other confusion of races, often mingling together under one common appellative, have they always agreed in a.s.signing that ancient people who were the progenitors of the modern nation; and the aborigines have been more than once described as "an ancient people whose name is unknown." In the pride of erudition, and the irascibility of confutation, they have involved themselves in interminable discussions, yet one might be seduced to adopt any hypothesis, for more or less each bears some ambiguous evidence, or some startling circ.u.mstance sufficient to rock the dreaming antiquary, and to kindle the bitter blood of pedantic patriots. The origin of the population of Europe and the first inhabitants of our British Isles has produced some antiquarian romances, often ingenious and amusing, till the romances turn out to be mere polemics, and give us angry words amid the most quaint fancies. This theme, still continued, becomes a cavern of antiquity, where many waving their torches, the light has sometimes fallen on an unperceived angle; but the scattered light has shown the depth and the darkness.

Among those shadows of time we grasp at one certainty. Whoever might be the first-comers to this solitary island, when we obtain any knowledge of the inhabitants, we are struck by their close resemblance to those tribes of savage life whom our navigators have discovered, and who are now found in almost a primitive state among that innumerable cl.u.s.ter of what has recently been designated the Polynesian Isles. The aborigines of Britain took the same modes of existence, and fell into similar customs. We discover their rude population divided into jealous tribes, in perpetual battle with one another; they lived in what Hobbes has called the _status belli_, with no notion of the _meum_ and _tuum_; in the same community of their women as was found in Otaheite;[4] and with the same ignorance of property, when its representative in some form was not yet invented. Our aborigines resembled these races even in their personal appearance; a Polynesian chief has been drawn and coloured after the life, and the figure exhibits the perfect picture of an ancient Briton, almost naked, the body painted red; the British savage chose blue, and made deep incisions in the flesh to insert his indelible woad.[5] The fierce eye, and the bearded lip, with the long hair scattered to the waist, exhibit the Briton as he was seen by Caesar, and, a century afterwards, as the British monarch Caractacus appeared before the Emperor Claudius at Rome: his sole ornaments consisted of an iron collar, and an iron girdle; but as his naked majesty had his skin painted with figures of animals, however rudely, this was probably a distinctive dress of British royalty. These Britons lived in thick woods, herding among circular huts of reed, as we find other tribes in this early state of society; and submissive to the absolute dominion of a priesthood of magicians, as we find even among the Esquimaux; and performing sanguinary rites, similar to those of the ancient Mexicans: we are struck with the conviction that men in a parallel condition remain but uniform beings.

It seems a solecism in the intellectual history of man to discover among such a semi-barbarous people a government of sages, who, we are a.s.sured, "invented and taught such philosophy and other learning as were never read of nor heard of by any men before."[6] This paradoxical incident deepens in mystery when we are to be taught that the druidical inst.i.tution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical.

The presumed encyclopedic knowledge which this order possessed, and the singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient a.n.a.logies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of Druidism. Nor has this notion been the mere phantom of modern system-makers. It was a subject of inquiry among the ancients whether the Druids had received their singular art of teaching by secret initiation, and the prohibition of all writing, with their doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, from Pythagoras; or, whether this philosopher in his universal travels had not alighted among the Druids, and had pa.s.sed through their initiation?[7] This discussion is not yet obsolete, and it may still offer all the gust of novelty. A Welsh antiquary, according to the spirit of Welsh antiquity, insists that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales; but the reverse may have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which copiously would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the oriental family.[8] Every point of the Druidical history, from its mysterious antiquity, may terminate with reversing the proposition. A recent writer confidently intimated that the knowledge of Druidism must be searched for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, a.s.serts that the Druids were older than the Jews.

Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone world amid the ocean, bringing with them all the wisdom of far antiquity, to an uncivilized race, is one of those events in the history of man which no historian can write. It is evident that they long preserved what they had brought; since the Druids of Gaul were fain to resort to the Druids of Britain to renovate their instruction.

The Druids have left no record of themselves; they seem to have disdained an immortality separate from the existence of their order; but the shadow of their glory is reflected for ever in the verse of Lucan, and the prose of Caesar. The poet imagined that if the knowledge of the G.o.ds was known to man, it had been alone revealed to these priests of Britain. The narrative of the historian is comprehensive, but, with all the philosophical cast of his mind and the intensity of his curiosity, Caesar was not a Druid;[9] and only a Druid could have written--had he dared!--on DRUIDHEACHT--a sacred, unspeakable word at which the people trembled in their veneration.

The British Druids const.i.tuted a sacred and a secret society, religious, political, and literary. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of pupilage, the first elements of government, however gross, or even puerile, were the levers to lift and to sustain the unhewn ma.s.ses of the barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities, amid that transient omnipotence which man in his first feeble condition can confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those illusions which superst.i.tion so easily forges; but the supernatural dominion lay in the secret thoughts of the people; the marauder had not the daring to touch the open treasure as it lay in the consecrated grove; and a single word from a Druid for ever withered a human being, "cut down like gra.s.s." The loyalty of the land was a religion of wonder and fear, and to dispute with a Druid was a state crime.

They were a secret society, for whatever was taught was forbidden to be written; and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in this sacred obscurity, but the laws which governed the community were also oral. For the people, the laws, probably, were impartially administered; for the Druids were not the people, and without their sympathies, these judges at least sided with no party. But if these sages, amid the conflicting interests of the mult.i.tude, seemed placed above the vicissitudes of humanity, their own more solitary pa.s.sions were the stronger, violently compressed within a higher sphere: ambition, envy, and revenge, those curses of n.o.bler minds, often broke their dreams. The election of an Arch-Druid was sometimes to be decided by a battle. Some have been chronicled by a surname which indicates a criminal. No king could act without a Druid by his side, for peace or war were on his lips; and whenever the order made common cause, woe to the kingdom![10] It was a terrible hierarchy. The golden knife which pruned the mistletoe beneath the mystic oak, immolated the human victim.

The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were the sole educators; but the genius of the order admitted of no inept member. For the acolyte unendowed with the faculty of study all initiation ceased; nature herself had refused this youth the glory of Druidism; but he was taught the love of his country. The Druidical lyre kindled patriotism through the land, and the land was saved--for the Druids!

The Druidical custom of unwritten instruction was ingeniously suggested by Cicero, as designed to prevent their secret doctrines from being divulged to those unworthy or ill fitted to receive them, and to strengthen the memory of their votaries by its continued exercise; but we may suspect, that this barbarous custom of this most ancient sodality began at a period when they themselves neither read nor wrote, dest.i.tute of an alphabet of their own; for when the Druids had learned from the Greeks their characters, they adopted them in all their public and private affairs. We learn that the Druidical sciences were contained in twenty thousand verses, which were to prompt their perpetual memory.

Such traditional science could not be very progressive; what was to be got by rote no disciple would care to consider obsolete, and a century might elapse without furnis.h.i.+ng an additional couplet. The Druids, like some other inst.i.tutions of antiquity, by not perpetuating their doctrines, or their secrets, in this primeval state of theology and philosophy, by writing, have effectually concealed their own puerile simplicity. But the monuments of a people remain to perpetuate their character. We may judge of the genius or state of the Druidical arts and sciences by such objects. We are told that the Druids were so wholly devoted to nature, that they prohibited the use of any tool in the construction of their rude works; all are unhewn ma.s.ses, or heaps of stones; such are their cairns and cromleches and corneddes, and that wild architecture whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on the plains of Salisbury.[11] A circle of stones marked the consecrated limits of the Druidical tribunal; and in the midst a hillock heaped up for the occasion was the judgment-seat. Here, in the open air, in "the eye of light and the face of the sun," to use the bardic style, the decrees were p.r.o.nounced, and the Druids harangued the people. Such a scene was exhibited by the Hebrew patriarchs, from whom some imagined these Druids descended; but whether or not the Celtic be of this origin we must not decide by any a.n.a.logous manners or customs, because these are nearly similar, wherever we trace a primitive race--so uniform is nature, till art, infinitely various, conceals nature herself.

In the depth of antiquity, misty superst.i.tion and pristine tradition gave a false magnitude to the founders of human knowledge; and our own literary historians who have been over-curious about "the Genesis" of their antiquities, have inveigled us into the mystic groves of Druidism in all their cloudy obscurity. The "Antiquities of the University of Oxford" open with "the Originals of Learning in this Nation;" and our antiquary discerns the first shadowings of the University of Oxford in "the universal knowledge" of the Druidical inst.i.tution in "ethics, politics, civil law, divinity, and poetry." Such are the reveries of an antiquary.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ben Jonson.

[2] The existence of these _giants_ was long historical, and their real origin was in the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of Genesis, which no commentator shall ever explain. AYLET SAMMES in his "Britannia Antiqua Ill.u.s.trata, or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain derived from the Phoenicians," has particularly noticed "two teeth of a certain giant, of such a huge bigness, that two hundred such teeth as men now-a-days have might be cut out of them." Beca.n.u.s and Camden had however observed, that "_the bones of sea-fish_ had been taken for _giants' bones_;--but can it be rationally supposed that men ever entombed fishes?" triumphant in his arguments, exclaims Aylet Sammes.

The revelations of geology had not yet been surmised, even by those who had discovered that giants were but sea-fish. So progressive is all human knowledge.

[3] The miraculous event was perpetuated by the whole Teutonic people, "while it was fresh in their memories," as our honest Saxon a.s.serts; hence to this day we in our Saxon _English_, and our Teutonic kinsmen and neighbours in their idiom, describe a confusion of idle talk by the term of _Babel_, now written from our harsh love of supernumerary consonants _Babble_; and any such workmen of Babel are still indicated as _Babblers_.--"A Rest.i.tution of Decayed Intelligence," 138, 4to. Antwerp, 1605.

The erudite Menage offers a memorable evidence of the precarious condition of etymology when it connects things which have no other affinity than that which depends on _sounds_. See his "Dictionnaire Etymologique, ou Origines de la Langue Francoise," ad verb.u.m BABIL.

Not satisfied with the usual authorities deduced from _Babel_, this verbal sage appeals to us English to demonstrate the natural connexion between _Babbling and Childishness_; for thus he has shrewdly opined "The English in this manner have _Babble_ and _Baby_!"

After all the convulsion of lips at Babel, and confusion among the etymologists, the word is Hebrew, which with a few more such are found in many languages.

[4] Julia, the empress of Severus, once in raillery remonstrated with a British female against this singular custom, which annulled every connubial tie. The British woman, whose observation had evidently been enlarged during her visit to Rome, retorted by her disdain of the more polished corruption of the greater nation. "We British women greatly differ from the Roman ladies, for we follow in public the men whom we esteem the most worthy, while the Roman women yield themselves secretly to the vilest of men."

Such was the n.o.ble sentiment which broke forth from a lady of savage education--it was, however, but a savage's view of social life. This female Briton had not felt how much remained of life which she had not taken into her view; when the attractions of her s.e.x had ceased, and the season of flowers had pa.s.sed, she was left without her connubial lord amid a progeny who had no father.

[5] This practice of savage races may have originated in a natural circ.u.mstance. The naked body by this slight covering is protected from the atmosphere, from insects, and other inconveniences to which the unclothed are exposed. But though it may not have been considered merely as personal finery, which seems sometimes to have been the case, it became a refinement of barbarism when they painted their bodies frightfully to look terrible to the enemy.

[6] See Mr. Tate's twelve questions about the Druids, with Mr.

Jones's answers; a learned Welsh scholar who commented on the ancient laws of his nation.--Toland's "History of the Druids."

A later Welsh scholar affirms, "beyond all doubt there has been an era when science diffused a light among the Cymry--in a very early period of the world."--Owen's "Heroic Elegies of Llywarc Hen."

Preface, xxi.