by Colin Wilson
On Friday, April 25, we flew back to London, and I had no more time for long journal entries, for reasons that will become clear.
We had intended to return by sea; but the literary puzzle represented by Esmond Donelly made me impatient to return; I was afraid that some other researcher might get to Ballycahane first. But I wanted to spend a day in the British Museum, finding out anything I could about Donelly. Before we left New Haven (where Diana had been staying with friends), the Donelly manuscript was sent back to Denham Springs by registered mail; Diana had made two typed copies. The plane trip from Kennedy to London was my first opportunity to study the typescript.
It was tantalisingly short. I had not realised, when Colonel Donelly showed it to me, that the manuscript included Esmond’s Refutation of the Theories of Dr Hume, with some reference to the Discours Preliminaire of d’Alembert. I had supposed that Donelly had bought the manuscript already sewn together, but evidently this was not so. The Refutation was thirty or so pages long; Donelly’s journals were less than twenty (of which I have already quoted three).
What most impressed me about Esmond Donelly was the modernness of his mind. The language is the language of Walpole or Gray; the thought was often closer to Goethe, or even William Blake. The central point of his argument against Hume and d’Alembert is very simple: that when man outgrows religious authority, he usually becomes the victim of his own triviality. When does man most frequently experience the sensation of freedom? he asks, and answers: When he is bored. ‘Boredom is to be free, but to experience no particular impulse to make use of the freedom.’ And he invents a Swiftian parable to illustrate his point. In the midst of the high mountains of Tartary, he says, there is a valley in which dwells a race of small but sturdy and healthy people. From the earliest times, it has been part of the religious observance of these people to carry two heavy weights, in the shape of a water-bottle, on either side of the waist. They would no more think of walking abroad without their weights than an Englishman would think of walking naked along Whitehall. They wear them from birth to death, and there are strict penalties for removing them. But the greatest pleasure of this race is the exercise of walking, and a small band of rebels declare that the weights are intended to make walking uncomfortable. Then even bolder spirits declare that man should be able to fly like a bird or float like a balloon, and that the weights are intended to prevent them from enjoying the freedom for which they were created. There is a revolution; the king is executed (a remarkable anticipation of the execution of Louis XVI), and the people tear off their weights. To their amazement, nothing happens, except that they find it hard to maintain balance without them. The more timid spirits resume their weights; the bolder ones practise walking without them, and soon declare that it is merely a matter of habit. They are so delighted with this new accomplishment that at first they walk day and night, striding from one end of the valley to the other, and even attempting to climb the mountains. They soon discover that the mountains are sheer walls of rock that cannot be scaled. And now some of the weightless ones fall into a frenzy and rush frantically from one end of the valley to the other until they collapse with exhaustion. Others attempt to scale the steep walls out of the valley, and either fall down when they are exhausted, or cast themselves down out of terror or despair. But by far the larger number of the weightless ones simply sit at home, utterly bored, since they know every inch of the valley. They jeer at the people who still wear weights, calling them superstitious hogs. But after a few generations these weightless ones are dead, for their lack of exercise makes them grow immensely fat and die at an early age. Finally, only those who wear weights continue to survive; they elect a king, and for many generations the Great Revolt is only a terrifying memory. Until a sect arises that declares that man was created to fly like a bird. . . .
The story sounds utterly pessimistic, an allegory of original sin. But I am inclined to reject this view. For Donelly says: ‘There were some of those climbers who were never seen again; yet certain shepherds whose flocks fed under the shadow of the great walls affirmed that they heard voices hallooing from far above their heads, where the slopes of the mountain vanished into the clouds.’ In other words, perhaps a few of the climbers got beyond the cliffs and over the top of the mountains.
What Donelly is saying—and it is a remarkable perception for a seventeen-year-old boy—is not that ‘Men need weights’, but that the men of the valley need weights. They are healthy, sturdy and adventurous (i.e. love walking), and the only way in which to maintain these qualities in their tiny valley is to wear heavy weights. But a few among them, a very few, are born climbers. . . .
Donelly was a born climber—that was obvious. And this was what baffled me. This man had lived to be eighty-four (according to Colonel Donelly); he was a talented writer, an original thinker, a friend of Rousseau and Wilkes. Why, then, had he left so little mark on history? If the Refutation of Hume and the published travel diary were all I had to go on, I might have concluded that here was a talent that spent itself early, like Rimbaud or Wolf. But the unpublished journal could leave no possible doubt that his talent remained unimpaired. So what had happened?
I should add, in parenthesis, that the purely philosophical part of the Refutation contains some of its most interesting pages, characterised by a psychological subtlety that was at least a century before its time—I could think of nothing like it before F. H. Bradley. He cites Hume’s Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume argues that the notion of cause and effect is derived from our habits, and is not a ‘necessary connection’. Hume says: ‘Supposing a man such as Adam were created in the full vigour of understanding, but without experience’, would it not be impossible for him to see the necessary connection between cause and effect? If, for example, he were watching two billiard balls striking one another, he could not possibly infer, by the use of his intelligence, that they would click and then career off in opposite directions. For all he knows they might coalesce, or leap up into the air, or simply stand still side by side.
Donelly plunges quickly on that phrase ‘in the full vigour of his understanding’ and points out that it is a sleight of hand. ‘Hume implies that Adam’s perception of the billiard balls will be innocent and unprejudiced, when, in fact, a completely innocent perception, like that of a newly born baby, would not perceive the balls at all, or rather, would perceive them without taking them in, as I might peruse a letter written in an unknown tongue. If Adam is to be allowed the full vigour of understanding, enough to watch the balls with interest, then he must also be allowed some knowledge of cause and effect. He may not know whether the balls will spring apart or combine together like two drops of water, but he knows that something will happen, which is to say that he knows an effect must follow the cause.’
No, a man as perceptive as this must make some mark on his age. How, then, is it possible that I had never heard of him? Even if he wrote very little himself, others would mention him—Boswell, for example, or even Crabb Robinson. Total obscurity for such a man is inconceivable.
I had written to a friend in the British Museum from Dallas, asking if he would find me any available material on Donelly; I hurried there promptly at nine o’clock on the Saturday morning after my arrival in London. Tim Morrison—of the Department of Printed Books—invited me down to the staff canteen for coffee. I had told him all about Fleisher—even about the suggestion that I might forge some Donelly manuscript. Tim’s approach to life is grave and cautious—he often gives me the impression of a man peering cautiously over a hedge as he approaches a subject in his precise, hesitant manner.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing. I mean, you don’t want to land in gaol for fraudulent misrepresentation. . . .’
I assured him there was no danger of that, and produced the typescript of the Refutation of Hume. He read it carefully for ten minutes, while I drank my coffee and glanced at the headlines of th
e Guardian. He said:
‘I agree this seems genuine. There’s only one thing that bothers me. Why did he give it to Rousseau? With views like this, he must have thought Rousseau a complete fool.’
‘I’m not sure. There’s an element of optimism in Donelly that probably responded to Rousseau. Besides, Rousseau isn’t as simple-minded as most people seem to think. He never really suggested that people ought to go back to nature.’
‘No. No.’ He seemed abstracted. I asked him if he’d found me any books on Donelly. He frowned into his coffee cup, then said: ‘You’d better come and look.’
We walked back to his office, which is approached through a labyrinth of corridors and spiral stairways. It was immaculately tidy. On the desk there were half a dozen volumes with slips of paper stuck in them. He told me to sit at the desk. Then he sat in the armchair opposite, lit a cigarette, and returned to the Refutation of Hume.
The books were disappointing. There was an edition of the travel diary that I had already seen, printed in London in 1821 by John Murray, Byron’s publisher, with a brief preface (by the publisher) describing Donelly as ‘an Irish gentleman and scholar’, but offering no other biographical information—not even whether Donelly was still alive. (He was, though; he was seventy-two in 1820.) There was a brief reference to him in Gilpin’s English Diaries in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1876), and a quotation from his diary in a book on Venice by an author whose name I have forgotten. The only interesting reference to Donelly occurs in a letter of Byron to Francis Hodgson in June 1811 (Collected Works, edited by Prothero and Coleridge, Vol. 9, p. 420): ‘Sherry [Sheridan] told me that he never knew a wilder character than my father [‘Mad Jack’ Byron], although he had known Wilkes and Donelly in their younger days.’ And in another letter to William Gifford (Vol. 13, p. 193) he remarks: ‘I was much struck by Esmond Donelly’s assertion, that it was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led him to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be overrated.’
While I was making a note of the various items—I had to pad out my Introduction somehow—Tim was looking through some papers in a cupboard. When I had finished, he placed a single sheet in front of me. It was a photostat of a page of manuscript. The handwriting was not difficult to read, although there were a few fs instead of ss. It read:
. . . was satisfied he meant to fulfil his engagement.
The custom of eating dogs at Otaheite being mentioned, Goldsmith observed that this was also a custom in China: that a dog butcher is as common there as any other butcher; and that when he walks abroad, all the dogs fall on him. johnson: ‘That is not owing to his killing dogs, Sir. I remember a butcher at Lichfield, whom a dog that was in the house where I lived, always attacked. It is the smell of carnage which provokes this, let the animals he has killed be what they may.’ goldsmith: ‘Yes, there is a general abhorrence in animals at the sign of massacre. If you put a tub full of blood into a stable, the horses are like to go mad.’ johnson: ‘I doubt that.’ goldsmith: ‘Nay, Sir, it is a fact well authenticated.’
This passage is followed by several lines that have been blacked out very thoroughly. Then it goes on:
thrale: ‘You had better prove it before you put it into your book on natural history. You may . . .’
I looked up at Tim with a feeling of bafflement, suspecting he had given me the wrong page. He placed another photostat in front of me, this time of a typed sheet. It read:
goldsmith (contd): ‘I was told as much by Esmond Donelly, who assured me he had tried the experiment.’ johnson (rising into warmth): ‘Ay, Sir, I don’t doubt that such a man would be capable of that and worse.’ goldsmith: ‘He does not lack convivial qualities.’ johnson: ‘Indeed, I believe he is a phoenix of convivial malice. The same might be said of the Devil.’ goldsmith: ‘Yet he knows horses.’ thrale: ‘You had better prove it . . .’
Tim said:
‘Boswell usually blanked out the passages he wanted to cancel so they couldn’t be read. That’s a page of the manuscript of the Life of Johnson—Yale let us have photostats of most of the Isham collection. They’ve deciphered most of the cancelled passages.’
‘Amazing. How did you find it?’
‘I didn’t. I mentioned your interest in Donelly to the man who’s cataloguing the photostats. By complete chance, he’d seen Donelly’s name the day before.’
‘So there may be other references to Donelly in the manuscript of Boswell?’
‘It’s possible. If we find any, I’ll let you know.’
I spent the rest of the day in the Reading Room, but found nothing else of interest. Back at Kensington Square (where we were staying with Jeremy Worthington, one of the directors of the John Jameson whiskey firm), I discussed my day’s work with Diana and Sue Worthington. We agreed that it was clear that Johnson disliked Donelly, which seemed to indicate that he knew of Donelly’s reputation as a rake. But why should he flare up so quickly at the mention of his name? Boswell was a rake too; so was Wilkes, with whom Johnson came to terms. Why pick on Donelly? What did he mean: ‘he’d be capable of that and worse’?
Sue thought that it probably meant nothing at all except that Johnson was irritated at Goldsmith’s gullibility. I was inclined to agree. Then Sue said:
‘You ought to ask Jeremy about Boswell. He knows someone who discovered some Boswell manuscript.’
This was interesting news. I had spent part of the day reading Boswell’s journals, and the story of their discovery, which is fascinating reading. Since it has some relevance to this narrative, I will outline it briefly. Boswell died in 1795 in his mid-fifties, probably of cirrhosis of the liver. Three of his friends were appointed his literary executors—the Reverend William Temple, Sir William Forbes and Edmund Malone. Boswell’s instructions were that these friends should read his private journals and papers and publish whatever they thought interesting. They read the papers, but apparently decided that the stuff was either too boring or too shocking to be worth publishing. After Macaulay’s murderous essay on Boswell (1843), the latter’s stock sank so low that he was virtually forgotten. The Victorian ladies of his family who occasionally glanced into the papers were so shocked by what they saw that they felt justified in circulating a rumour that the Boswell diaries had been destroyed. One can understand the effect of a passage like the following (for November 25, 1762):
I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [contraceptive]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling and had command of myself to go without touching her.
In the mid-1870s, Birkbeck Hill, editor of Boswell’s Johnson, was practically thrown out when he went to Auchinleck—the seat of the Boswells—and asked to see the Journals.
In 1905, the last of the Boswell line died, and the estate passed to Lord Talbot of Malahide, near Dublin, including the ebony cabinet containing papers that Boswell had mentioned in his will. An American professor, Chauncey Tinker, became interested in Boswell and advertised in the Irish Press for material on him. He received an anonymous letter suggesting that he try Malahide Castle. A letter to Malahide produced no effect, so Tinker finally decided to call there. This time he was in luck. Lord Talbot allowed him to see a small part of the collection of Boswell papers. Subsequently, an American lieutenant-colonel, Ralph Isham, heard of the papers, and succeeded in buying them from Lord Talbot in 1927. Professor Geoffrey Scott, and then Professor Frederick Pottle, set about the task of publishing this vast body of material—more than a million words. And from then on, new Boswell manuscripts continued to turn up. A croquet box at Malahide Castle proved to contain more Boswell letters and the manuscript of the Tour to the Hebrides with Dr Johnson. In 1930, Professor Abbott of Aberdeen was g
oing through the papers of Sir William Forbes—one of Boswell’s executors—and discovered another rich cache of letters and manuscripts. Forbes had obviously borrowed some of the papers to examine them, in accordance with the will, and then forgotten to return them to Auchinleck. And in 1940, still more Boswell papers were found in an old cow barn on the Malahide estate, including the manuscript of the Life of Johnson; the page I had seen in the Museum came from this manuscript. No one has ever explained quite how Boswell’s papers got into a cow barn.
Obviously, the Boswell manuscripts were thoroughly dispersed. In fact, the earliest discovery was made in 1850 by a Major Stone in Boulogne, who bought something in a grocer’s shop and found it wrapped in a letter signed ‘James Boswell’. Stone was able to buy a whole pile of letters written by Boswell to the Reverend William Temple—a clergyman to whom he confessed the filthier episodes of his life—and he later published them, suitably bowdlerised. Those had apparently got to Boulogne through Temple’s daughter, whose clergyman husband moved there in 1825. When they died, their papers were sold—or given—to a pedlar of wrapping paper, who passed them on to the grocer.