Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1De Quincey, Thomas
Religion
Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays -- 19th century
What remains is equally simple: the change required involves as
little violence, and the result from this change will appear equally
natural. But a brief preliminary explanation is requisite, in order
to place It advantageously before the reader. The ancients use
the term _bowels_ with a latitude unknown generally to modern
literature, but especially to English literature. In the midst
of the far profounder passion which distinguishes the English from
all literatures on the modern European continent, it is singular
that a fastidious decorum never sleeps for a moment. It might be
imagined that this fastidiousness would be in the inverse ratio of
the passion: but it is not so. In particular the French, certainly
the literature which ranges at the lowest elevation upon the scale
of passion, nevertheless is often homely, and even gross, in its
recurrences to frank elementary nature. For a lady to describe
herself as laughing _a gorge deployee_, a grossness which with
us, equally on the stage or in real life, would be regarded with
horror, amongst the French attracts no particular attention. Again,
amidst the supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not observe
the coarser tragedy of Corneille, but amidst the more feminine and
polished tragedy of Racine, there is no recoil at all from saying
of such or such a sentiment, '_Il me perce les entrailles'_--it
penetrates my bowels. The Greeks and Romans still more extensively
use the several varieties of expression for _the intestines_,
as a symbolic phraseology for the domestic and social affections.
We English even, fastidious as we are, employ the term bowels as a
natural symbolization for the affections of pity, mercy, or parental
and brotherly affection. At least we do so in recurring to the
simplicities of the scriptural style. But, amongst the Romans, the
word _viscera_ is so naturally representative of the household
affections, that at length it becomes necessary to recall an English
reader to the true meaning of this word. Through some physiological
prejudice, it is true that the bowels have always been regarded
as the seat of the more tender and sorrowing sympathies. But
the _viscera_ comprehended _all_ the intestines, or (as
the French term them) _les entrailles_. The heart even is a
_viscus_; perhaps in a very large acceptation the brain might
be regarded as a co-viscus with the heart. There is very slight
ground for holding the brain to be the organ of thinking, or the
heart of moral sensibilities, more than the stomach, or the bowels,
or the intestines generally. But waive all this: the Romans
designated the seat of the larger and nobler (_i.e._, the moral)
sensibilities indifferently by these three terms: the _pectus_,
_the prœcordia_, and the _viscera_; as to the _cor_, it
seems to me that it denoted the heart in its grosser and more
animal capacities: 'Molle meum levibus _cor_ est violabile relis;'
it was the seat of sexual passion; but nobler and more reflective
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