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FROM end to
end of our long gallery of national portraits of British authors,
ranging through five hundred years from Chaucer to Tennyson, we shall
not pause before a more interesting group than that of the great writers
who lived in the opening of our nineteenth century. Only one other
group is more remarkable—the starry constellation of Elizabeth—by virtue
of the loftier reach, and wider range, and towering majesty of
Shakspeare and Bacon. Here is Wordsworth, little suspected as
greatest amongst many great by his earlier contemporaries, with head
slightly bowed, and look of solemn thought, plodding along his most
cheerless way, smiling at times with a consciousness of the 'all hail
hereafter' that he should yet live to hear: but doing his work dutifully
while it was day, no matter though he should go to sleep without his
fame. Coleridge, the 'noticeable man with large grey eyes,' in
which there glittered the spirit of Eld, and glorious brow, and face as
of an angel. Byron, darkly passionate and miserably peevish, with
the taste of his own life bitter in his mouth: speaking his new decrees
to the world of poetry in the name of a capital 'I,' and fulminating
like a live crater on those who would not bow and believe; eager to
storm the heights of Parnassus, but unwilling to take his seat there,
unless he reigned alone; pursued all his upward way by the gnawing
consciousness that every step which lifted him higher over the heads of
men only served to expose his poor lame foot! Lamb, with that
quick keen face, gleaming eyes, and stammering tongue; with a deep dark
tarn of tears in his heart, for all that sunny sweetness overflowing the
face; hiding his secret skeleton with all sorts of flowers and queerest,
quips of frolic and fun; his Quaker primness giving such piquancy to his
sly jests: his tender insertion of the hook into his victim, as old
Isaac advises respecting the worm, 'as though you loved it.' Sydney
Smith, with his rare, honest, hearty English presence, and ringing mirth
into which he put his whole heart; turning his humour to useful
purposes, with all the jollity of Mark Tapley under difficulties.
Tom Moore, gay and glittering; a very humming-bird of song, fluttering
from flower to flower, sipping their sweetnesses, and repaying them with
a tiny music; all sparkle, and colour, and motion; caught amongst the
strings of Erin's harp, and making melody with the touch of wings rather
than with the cunning fingers of some mighty bard who crowded his life
into his play. Southey, all dignity and distance to strangers,
with an air of lofty regard, and a look as though his spirit had reined
back the head, like a horse thrown on its haunches. Honest Walter
Scott, every inch the Laird, with his strong Border physiognomy; no
nimbus round his brow, but a head and shoulders that can bear a
world of toil and trouble; a healthy stalwart man. Shelley, the
beautiful Damon 'unconditioned;' with eternal youth in his look;
a spirit of good in the presence of suffering humanity; a fair fiend
with a foul tongue in the presence of that holy Saviour whose earthly
form he could not recognise. Godwin, stately and cold as a Greek
bust; 'all was picture' as he passed his eyes over the map of life;
there was nothing real for him but that which is to be.
Christopher North, a man of larger mould, with the head of a hero and
heart of a lion; a form that might have stood first as the live
figure-head of the Norseman's war-ship; moving into the fight chanting
some old runic rhyme, with fire in eye, and foam on lip, and battle-axe
in hand; large in look, ruddy and radiant with life; a commanding spirit
that rode as on wings over the buoyant animal forces, which reared and
plunged 'like proud seas under it,' and bore it on to many victories.
Keats, leaning his chin on hand, and luxuriating in his languorous sense
of beauty; looking on external nature with the large eyes and clinging
love of those who are not long for this life. Talfourd, youthful
and in listening attitude, with looks made radiant by reflected light.
Hazlitt, gloomy and defiant, ever standing on guard ready to defend
Napoleon.
Many other striking faces attract us in this group;
but there is one that just now holds our attention more than all the
rest —the portrait, of a small man with a large brain, oppressive in
brow, and peering out of eyes that have seen much sorrow. The head shows
a want of animal force behind. The mouth is drawn down noticeably
at the corners. The eyes look out of two rings of darkness.
A spirit of singular temper and strange experience! This is
Thomas de Quincey. Let us look at his portrait a little further;
it is that of a man to know more about.
Although De Quincey bas not written one of the
world's great works—not having finished his 'De Emendatione Humani
Intellectus'—he has left us in possession of a vast and delightful body
of writings, unique in character and supreme in kind. He was a man
very aptly and richly endowed for a historical critic, and as a writer
of narrative from personal or national history; one of those writers,
rare in kind, who, like Mr Ruskin, possess the better half of the
complete critic nature, having the creative intellect. If a
hundred of the world's best. authors had to be named by us publicly, De
Quincey should be one. Privately, we place him amongst the first
fifty!
De Quincey was yet a young man in the great dawn of
new life that rose over the world with the French Revolution, touching
with strange glamour the eyes of the young, till they saw apocalyptic
visions; touching the faces of men, till many caught a glimpse of the
coming universal brotherhood, in what seemed a millennial light;
touching the lips of common men with fire, till they too shared in the
general inspiration, and prophesied; touching the old world with such a
gleam of glory, it appeared as though the new heavens were already
beginning to arch over the new earth. Yet in that time, when
humanity seemed marching to a nobler music, towards a splendid future,
and 'triumphant looks' were the 'common language' of all eyes, De
Quincey was not carried away to the same height as the rest of his
contemporaries. He, too, was young and had the heart that could
leap with the new life; but he had also the brooding thought, and the
serene eye that could take a wide survey over the empires of time and
change. He knew that the world was not thus awake and ready when
the real Saviour came in the person of that blessed babe of Bethlehem;
and he waited to know what this new-born babe of liberty should prove,
as it grew in stature and in years, before he went far from his way to
bend the knee or lift up the 'All hail.' So that, when his
contemporaries came back from their jaunt in the land of splendid
phantoms, they found De Quincey standing on the ancient ways, holding
fast by the deeper foundation of things, and silently communing with his
subtle sense. To be sure, it must be admitted that be had been
making a phantom-world of his own to dwell in, with the aid of opium, to
pass some of the time away, being very lonely. Nevertheless, his
nature had a certain firm rootage in all that is most enduring, which
kept it from being swayed by the tricksy tendencies of the time, as many
were; and when the strife and conflict moved over the face of the great
deep of revolution in France and political life at home, his lifeblood
was instantly drawn to the heart of his own country; his first thought
was to wonder what it all boded for her; and thenceforth he stood
sentinel in her cause. Speaking of the way in which the
foundations of his moral being were laid, he says:—
'Were I to return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of
my early situation, I would single out these four as worthy of special
commemoration: That I lived in a rustic solitude; that this solitude was
in England; that, my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of
sisters; finally that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a
pure, holy, and magnificent Church.'
His steadier footing and surer eye
in a time of tumult, were undoubtedly one result of this early life.
He loved England devotedly, and was English, soul and body. His
sense of the gorgeous in sound, which held solemn revel in the
processional pomp of his noblest prose, was fed by the lofty strains of
a grand church music. His dwelling in solitude calmed and enlarged
his mental life, and empowered him to give us the following description
of a child's sense of solitude:—
'God speaks to children also in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in
darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to
the meditative heart by the truths and service of a national church, God
holds with little children 'communion undisturbed.' Solitude, though it
may be silent as light, is like light the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. All Men come into this world alone;
all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into God's
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand; nor
mother to carry him in her arms; nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and
child—all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude,
therefore, which in this world appals or fascinates a child's heart, is
but the echo of a far deeper solitude through which he has already
passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to
pass: reflex of one solitude; prefiguration of another.'
This passage
brings us naturally to the life De Quincey lived, and to that early
portion of which he has written so eloquently. He was born on the 15th
of August 1785, at 'The Farm,' a country house near Manchester. He
came into the world, as he tells us, on the happiest tier in the social
scaffolding for all good influences; his family position being neither
too high nor too low; neither too rich nor too pool; high enough to see
models of good manners, of self-respect and simple dignity, and obscure
enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. A happy state
enough, but one into which sorrow and death would come!
Thomas de Quincey was a small sensitive child, with a
big brain and a nervous system not sufficiently well covered in by the
robuster
physique which ensures so much immunity in the happy
unconsciousness of strong, healthy childhood. He appears to have
been born with a liability to that 'weird seizure' spoken of by Tennyson
in 'The Princess.' Many persons, especially poets, have felt this '
weird seizure,' whereby some echo-life of a world not realized seems to
break in upon this life suddenly and in the midst of men and things, as
well as in solitude. De Quincey lived this echo-life mentally all
through his pilgrimage; but we imagine it must have been very strong on
him during his early years. He symbols this experience for those
who have never felt it, in his way of writing any given subject,
dually,—first the reality, and then the for-off echo in spirit-world.
In him this is connected with a tendency to trance, and we find him in
his sixth year struck down in a trance by the side of his little sister,
who lay all in white; dead in the glorious summer weather; and one of
his many noble prose poems is written as the echo of this experience,
occurring twelve years after the real affliction:—
'Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood
expanded before me; my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning to
be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again, the
elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some
Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea towering
amongst her children in the nursery of Corinth, smote me senseless to
the ground. Again, I am in the chamber with my sister's corpse;
again the pomps of life rise up in silence; the glory of summer, the
Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself
mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds itself
continually, the trance in my sister's chamber, the blue heavens, the
everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the
thought (but not the sight) of "who might sit thereon," the flight, the
pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more,
the funeral procession gathers; the priest in his white surplice stands
waiting with a book by the side of an open grave; the Sacristan is
waiting with his shovel; the coffin has sunk; the dust to dust has
descended. Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning.
The golden sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of His apostles, His
martyrs, His saints; the fragment from the litany, the fragment from the
clouds, awoke again the lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens,
awoke again the shadowy arms that went downward to meet them.
Once again arose the swell of the anthem, the burst of the Hallelujah
chorus, the storm, the trembling movement of the choral passion, the
agitation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the
wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed in the dust, became
he that rose up to the clouds; and now all was bound up into unity; the
first stage and the last were melted into each other as in some sunny
glorifying haze. For high in heaven hovered a gleaming host of
faces, veiled with wings around the pillows of the dying children.
And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow that grovels and with
sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the children that are
languishing in death, and the children that live only to languish in
tears.'
One trait which De Quincey relates of his mother sheds a vivid light on
his own character. He says she thought much less of her own
children than of other people's, and had a shy timidity on the subject,
as though she half apologized to the world for having produced them.
He largely inherited this feeling, and laboured under its influence
right through life; more especially as he came in contact with that
wonderful brother of his who tyrannized over him so naturally, by sheer
force of character. If De Quincey remained a dreamer to the end,
it was not his brother's fault. If his spirit never worked its way
fully into the world of action, through the 'gateways of the senses, to
flash out in dilated eye and nostril, corded sinews, clenched hands, and
great deeds, it was not because this resolute brother spared any effort
to make a man of him, in his way of bringing him up to the mark. A
great contrast to little Thomas was this sturdy cloud-compeller, who
loved to ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm, and who had a
genius for mischief, an absolute inspiration for creating the chariot in
which he was to ride, the storm he was to drive, or say storms, for he
could have driven tempests four-in-hand. He despised the younger
sensitive plant of the family, and was frank enough to show it on all
occasions and in all possible ways. For a time the
younger brother courted his contempt, as his only means of finding
refuge and repose from the storm and strife of the turbulent soul who
would otherwise try to force him into a seat at his side on his
whirlwind journeys.
'O! heavens! there is no saying how far the horrid man might
go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned under the weight of
his expectations; and if I laid but the first round of such a staircase,
why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering upwards to the
clouds, mile after mile, league after league, and myself running up and
down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, to the top of
any Babel which my wretched admirer might, choose to build.'
De Quincey's narrative of life with his brother, and their fights with
the factory boys, is one of the choicest bits of writing in all his
works. Over the surface of a deep, quiet stream of knowledge, and
wise thinking, and kindliest feeling, there run the most delicious
ripples of humour, touched with a rare radiance. The origin of the
quarrel might be thought incommensurate with the length of the war.
It began by a factory boy shouting derisively as the two brothers passed
by, 'Holloa, bucks!' But, as De Quincey remarks, the uninitiated
that think so will be wrong. 'The word "dandies," which was what
the villain meant, had not then been born. "Bucks" was the nearest
word at hand in his Manchester vocabulary; he gave all he could, and let
us dream the rest.' But in the next moment he discovered that the
brothers wore boots, which was unpardonable to his democratic sense, and
so he consummate his crime by saluting them, as 'Boots! boots!'
'My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and
bade him draw near, that he might give his flesh to the fowls of the
air.' The boy declined to accept the invitation. A shower of
stones followed, and war was proclaimed. The younger De Quincey
did not see that they had suffered an unpardonable offence in being
called 'bucks,' while the fact of the 'boots' was patent to everybody.
His brother, however, soon rectified his views, and impressed him with
'a sense of paramount duty to his brother, which was threefold.
First, it seems that I owed military allegiance to him, as my
commander-in-chief, whenever we "took the field." Secondly, by the
law of nations, I being a cadet of my house, owed suit and service to
him, who was its head; and he assured me that twice a year, on
my birthday and on his, he had a right, strictly speaking,
to make me lie down, and to set his foot upon my neck. Lastly, by
a law not so rigorous, but valid amongst gentlemen—viz., "by the
comity of nations "—it seems I owed eternal deference to one so
much older than myself, so much wiser, stronger, braver, more beautiful,
and more swift of foot.' And so the battles raged day by day,
sometimes twice; and Rome's immortal three men never kept the bridge of
old more valiantly than the two brothers kept the bridge at Greenhays,
save on those occasions when they exercised the undoubted right,
guaranteed to every Briton by Magna Charta—to run away. Once the
younger brother was taken prisoner, and seen to the intense disgust of
the elder, in the arms of the female enemy, being kissed breathless.
Upon which he showed clearly, in his orders of the day, that frightful
consequences must inevitably ensue if major-generals (as a general
principle ) should allow themselves to be kissed by the enemy. In
this campaign the elder brother showed his great capacities for command.
If he had lived, there can be little doubt that his qualities would have
given the world assurance of a remarkable man, and made a similar
impression on the minds of others to that which he produced on the mind
of his young admiring, slave. He would have made a great man of
action, being immeasurably active, able, aspiring, confident, and most
fertile in resources. Books he hated, except such as he had
written, himself, and these were on all subjects known, and various
unknown. 'On necromancy,' says De Quincey, 'he was very great;
witness his profound work, though but a fragment, and unfortunately,
long since departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled, "How to raise
a Ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him down." Then
he had a startling and wonderful speculation, with which he would thrill
the hearts of his young auditory, on the possibility (not at all
unlikely, he affirmed) that a federation, or solemn league and
conspiracy, might take place amongst the infinite generations of ghosts
against the single generation of men at any one time composing the
garrison of this earth. He would explain the phrase for expressing
that a man had died, 'he has gone over to the great majority,' until his
hearers easily comprehended the appalling state of the case, and saw
that should the ghosts combine, we should be left in a fearful minority.
He was thoroughly beaten himself, however, on one subject, much to the
joy of the youngsters, though he personally would never own to defeat.
One of the family had been admiring and envying the flies for their
powers of walking on the ceiling. 'Pooh!' he replied, 'they are
impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be
done. Ah! you should see
me standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for
half-an-hour together, meditating profoundly.' Sister Mary
remarked that she would like to see him in that position. 'If that
is the case,' he said, confident as some Norse Skrymner, 'it's very well
that all is ready, except as to a strap or two.' Being a good
skater, he had fancied that something might be done on that principle.
He tried, but finding he could not get sufficient impetus to start, he
gave it up, or came down, explaining that the friction was too retarding
from the plaster of Paris; the case would be different if the ceiling
were coated with ice. So he changed his plan, and made an
apparatus for getting himself launched like a humming-top. He
would then 'spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis—perhaps
he might even dream upon it;' and he laughed at 'those scoundrels the
flies,' that never improved in their pretented art, nor made anything of
it.' The apparatus, however, would not work; a fact evidently
owing to the stupidity of the gardener. There was nothing now, if
he clung to the top principle, save being kept up by incessant whipping;
but that, of course, no gentleman should submit to.
'It was well,' remarks De Quincey, 'that my brother's
path in life diverged from mine, else I should infallibly have broken my
neck in confronting perils which brought neither honour nor profit.'
De Quincey remembered little of his father, who was
an Indian merchant. The one sole memorial which restored his image
to him, was the memory of the night on which he came home to die.
The listening during long hours for the sound of wheels and horses'
feet—the sudden emerging of horses' heads from the gloom of the lane—the
glory of the dying day; followed by the stillness, and white pillows,
and white face of the dying man,—these things made an impression for
life, and created countless shadowy pictures and endless echoes in
dreamland. We shall not be able to follow De Quincey on his
entrance into the world of strife during his early schoolboy years.
His family removed from Manchester to Bath, at the Grammar School of
which town he made enemies by the quality of his Latin verses. At
fifteen years of age, he accompanies a young friend, Lord Westport, with
his tutor, to Ireland. In this chapter of the book of his life,
which he has entitled, 'I enter the world,' he receives his first
revelation of womanly beauty or girlish loveliness, as first seen in the
dawnlight of love, which became another force in what he calls his
premature manhood. This was under peculiar circumstances, in which
a sister of the Countess of Errol had taken his part:—
'Heavens! what a spirit of joy and festal pleasure radiated from
her eyes, her step, her voice, her manner! She was frisk,
and the very impersonation of innocent gaiety. Like Spenser's
Bradamant, with martial scorn she couched her lance on the side of the
party suffering wrong. Never, until this hour, had I thought of
women as objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love.
Now it first struck me that life might owe half its attractions and all
its graces to female companionship. This was, in a proper
sense, a revelation; it fixed a great era of change in my life;
and this new born idea being agreeable to the uniform tendencies of my
own nature—that is, lofty and aspiring—it governed my life with great
power, and with most salutary effects.'
All readers of De Quincey's works will return again and again to this
first volume, with its pathetic or humorous episodes of the beloved
sister so early 'wede awa;' the stalwart brother, who was also doomed to
an early death; and 'poor Pink,' whose bones have lain for many and many
a year at the bottom of the Atlantic: and its account of blind guardians
and stupid pedagogues, who chafed the proud young spirit into a more
morbid sensitiveness.
Next we find him at Laxton teaching Greek to Lady
Carbery, so that they might make their own translation of certain Bible
words, regarding which our precocious commentator was deep in
speculation. This picture of learnèd boy and learning beauty is
pleasant to us, as undoubtedly the task was to the youthful tutor.
He had got into paradise; lighted by the smile of kindness, goodness,
and loveliness. Alas, not for long! Those
persecuting guardians summoned him forth, and stood waving their
infernal fiery sword over the gate of his garden of Eden. Just as
he seemed getting so near to the perfect light they would hurl him into
the outer darkness. They sent him back to school; so much they
could do. But they could not keep him there. His spirit had
become too enlarged for the old bonds, through its late experience; he
could not stand them now, and so he ran away. On the last night,
we find him again overcome by the tendency to trance. The 'weird
seizure' takes him, and the echo-life breaks in, in shape of a memory of
'St Paul's Whispering Gallery. What echo-voices, at the other
end of the life-gallery, would repeat, in eternal thunders, the
consequences of that deed done so silently in the quiet summer, dawn?
He knew not, but prayed, and went on.
It was in 1802 he set out for a walking-tour through
Wales, with very small means of subsistence. Sometimes he slept in
first-class hotels, sometimes in the heather an a hill-side, fearing
lest, 'whilst my sleeping face was upturned to the stars, some one of
the many little Brahminical-looking cows on the Cambrian hills, one or
other, might poach her foot into the centre of my face; sometimes he
dined for sixpence, sometimes for nothing on the berries off the hedge;
sometimes his dinner was earned by writing letters for cottagers, and
love-letters for sweethearts. Gradually he drifts into London, to
suffer that strangest of all written experience of life in the great
city. His sufferings were self-inflicted. He had plenty of
friends, as the world goes, but from these he shrank. He was heir
to a considerable fortune. He had learning which might have been
turned into money. But he was under his 'burden of the
Incommunicable,' and he suffered in silence. He drank to the dregs
of that bitterness which it is to be homeless, friendless, foodless in
that wilderness of life, wealth, and human habitations. The
gnawings of hunger, the torments of the money-lenders, the pangs of a
proud spirit, preyed on him for months of famishing days and shivering
nights. The trial of cold seems to have stuck him more than the
horror of hunger. A more killing curse, he says, does not exist
for man or woman, than the bitter combat between the weariness that
prompts sleep, and the keen searching cold that forces you to wake and
seek warmth in weary weary exercise. However, an asylum from the
open air, even without bed or blankets, was better than a stone
doorstep. And a strange asylum was his, in that, forlorn large
house, whose tenants were chiefly rats. There he lay
down at night with the poor forsaken child; a bundle of law papers for a
pillow; the little one creeping close to him for warmth and protection
against the ghosts which she dreaded so much. Poverty brought him
into companionship with strange bedfellows, and made him acquainted with
the wandering children of night. The account which he gives of
'poor Ann' will make all tender hearts yearn with a prayer that some
ministering spirit of God may have seen her soul's immortal jewel amidst
the mirk and mire of London, and saved it to shine in a heavenly
setting. To the wearing pain of this period, De Quincey attributes
in great part his incentive to opium-eating. The unnatural state
produced morbid desires. The calamity struck root so deeply into
his physical constitution as to grow there, and spring up, overshadowing
his life to the end. What a revelation it seemed, that first
taking of opium! What an immortal and beneficent agent of
exalted pleasure! A panacea for sorrow and suffering,
heartache and brainache—exemption from pain and human woes. You
swallowed a little of the dark drug, and lo, the inner spirit's eyes
were opened—a fairy ministrant had burst into wings, waving a wondrous
wand—a fresh tree of knowledge had yielded its fruit, and it seemed good
as it was beautiful! There was indeed a discovery.
'Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat
pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and
peace of mind sent down by the mail.'
De Quincey is eloquent upon the pleasures of opium,
and is careful to point out the difference between its effects and those
of alcohol. It does not make the spirit of a man drunk, nor
rouse the animal passions. It produces a lull in the action of the
lower human faculties, and leaves the divine part free and paramount;
'the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and high
over all the great light of the majestic intellect.' The spirit
reigns as it were gathered up and suspended from the work of its
ordinary bodily functions, while, the brain in its trance is still left
with sufficient consciousness of what is taking place in spirit-world to
give us a glowing report. But, in consequence of this suspension
of the ordinary intercourse of mind and matter—this partial
disintegration of soul and body—we find that the opium-eater cannot
bring his visions—'brighter than madness or the dreams of wine'—home to
us who are left standing on our earth. The mind was too far
divorced from the executive powers of the brain. The dreaming
brain was not sufficiently conscious to become a perfect mirror
of the waking spirit, and so there can be no full and steady revelation
of the beauty which the spirit may have seen. There only remains
the daze of some unremembered brightness—hauntings of the memory,
shadowy dim, and perplexing. The magnificent imagery of the night,
that rose to music in cloud-towers, and fairy palaces, star-crowned, so
that angel-forms might step down to earth by them, are all gone in the
morning like a mirage of the desert, and the bright creations have left
their beholder all the darker in the shadows which they throw behind
them. De Quincey maintains that his opium-eating arrested the
early workings of pulmonary disease, which we think not at all unlikely.
So far so good—arrested disease means returning health—if opium can do
this on a small scale, as we know it does, why should it not on a large
scale? Let it have full credit. But, for any mental
inspiration, we denounce it not as a gross, but most ethereal, humbug!
That Duke of Norfolk who was the partizan friend of
Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, used to say, 'Next Monday, wind and weather
permitting, I purpose to be drunk.' In like manner, De Quincey
used to appoint his days of festal joy in the opium-eater's paradise.
He has left us one transfixing picture of him self opiatized, and
listening to Grassini singing. 'Shivering with expectation I sat, when
the time drew near for her golden epiphany;
shivering I rose from my seat, incapable of rest, when
that heavenly and harp-like voice sang its own victorious welcome in its
prolusive
threttánelo, threttánelo.' De Quincey's
opium-eating, or rather laudanum-drinking, rose at one time to 8,000
drops a day. He conquered his habit more than once, but found he
could not live without his drug. We get a curious glimpse of the
effect of his constant habit of taking laudanum on the mind of his
little one in later years. She had lifted wondering and longing eyes
many a time as the dose was swallowed, and her inquiries had to be
answered. She was told that her father took it to make him better in
health, over which she pondered in her wise way, until her belief in its
power was worthy of the child of such a father. One day the house was
thrown into a little flutter of excitement about a wounded bird.
No one appeared to know what medical treatment to adopt. Little
M——, on going to bed, flung her arms round her father's neck, and
whispered that he was to 'mend' the bird with 'yoddonum.'
Our author has left as eloquent a record of the pains
of opium as of its pleasures. Troubled by the phantoms of departed
powers to attempt the work that was never to be done,—his visions of the
night thronged with dreadful faces and wrathful terrors—his persistent
old enemy the Malay, and the leering oily eves of that accursed
crocodile, always in full pursuit,—he now found there was hell as well
as heaven in his land of dreams. His description culminates in one
of his most splendid passages of impassioned prose:—
'
Then Suddenly would come a dream of far different
character—a tumultuous dream-commencing with music such as now I often
heard in sleep—music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The
undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the
Coronation Anthem, and like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous
movement of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable
armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and
of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysteries eclipse, and
labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I know not
where—somehow, but I knew not how—by some beings, but I knew not by
whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its
stages—was evolving itself like the catastrophe of some mighty drama,
with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening
confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its
undecipherable issue. I (as isusual in dreams, where, of
necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power,
and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I
could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the
weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable
guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded" I lay inactive.
Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest
was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded,
or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to
and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from
the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces;
and at last with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the
features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment
allowed—and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and
then—everlasting farewells; and, with a sigh such as the cares of hell
sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death,
the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and
yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!'
With this picture—sublime as the Last Judgement of Tintoret—we close our
notice of what the writer calls 'that impassioned paranthesis in my
life.'
De Quincey, who had the gift of a genuine insight
wheresoever he turned his eye, had been one of the earliest to recognise
in Wordsworth's poetry a new dawn of promise. Not one of those
false auroras that mock the world, which thinks a new dawn has streamed
up the east, when it is only some reflected flush of a great sunset of
poetry going down in the west. He felt this was the genuine thing,
quite as much by the cold, bracing breath of a robuster health, as by
the colours that it painted on the clouds. Such was his admiration
of the new poetry, which few people knew or cared anything about, that
on two occasions he went as far as the head of Coniston Lake, on his way
to Grasmere. But such was his awe of meeting, with the new poet,
that once he looked up to the pass of Coniston-head not daring to enter
the mountain-gates; and once he went forward to the gorge of Hammerscar,
where the vale of Grasmere suddenly breaks upon the eye in all its
surprising beauty; saw the little white cottage of Wordsworth gleaming
from amidst the trees; had not heart to proceed; and went back again,
feeling foolish. Years later, however, he gathered courage to make
his way into the poet's presence, and thought his head and face like a
portrait of Milton; his form was not the gainliest, having stooping
shoulders: nor were his legs sightly to look at, but rare good ones to
'go,' if De Quincey's calculation be right, that they had carried their
owner some 175,000 to 180,000 miles. The expression of his face
was winningly sweet when he smiled, and his eyes at times wore a solemn
spiritual radiance. Clarkson said of Wordsworth's wife, that she
could only say, 'God bless you,' and De Quincey found her presence a
silent blessing; her manner simple, frank, gracious; herself a 'perfect
woman nobly planned' to carry out the divine meaning of a wife. He
has also made a striking portrait of Wordsworth's sister, 'impassioned
Dorothy,' with her face of Egyptian brown, 'her wild eyes, glancing
quickness of motion, and the subtle fire of heart and mind burning
within her, and glowing through her! What a wife she might
have made for the chosen man who should have been worthy of her!
It was in the year 1809 that De Quincey first saw
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Learning that Coleridge was in
straitened pecuniary circumstances, he generously presented him with
£500 out of his own patrimiony, which was small. After leaving
Oxford he went to live in the lake country, taking possession of
Wordsworth's cottage in Grasmere. There he dwelt for many years.
He married in 1816, and published his 'Confessions' in the 'London
Magazine ' in 1821. He lived to the age of 74, and died at
Edinburgh, December 8, 1859.
What De Quincey says of Charles Lamb, in respect to
his literary position, applies in a large measure to himself. His
works belong to a class that is doomed to be for ever unpopular, and for
ever interesting. They attract the few by the same means as they
repel the many. They have special charms for the initiated;
special qualities of affinity and claims on kinship. The loud
world does not hear their shyest appeals, and lowest , sweetest voice.
Their wisdom is too profound for the surface-skimmer. Their
inspired self-communion, and nearness to nature, are equally remote from
the life of the world in general. Many readers will set cut with
De Quincey on some subject, who will leave him shortly, very weary and
disgusted. They were in search of the sensational. He does
not keep up with their mental movements. He was born before
railways, and still prefers going afoot. He is not the man to do
their business; he is not a business-man. He does not hurry,
sweating and toiling along the dry and dusty highway, with the view of
reaching the goal in the directest route and shortest space of time, as
though there were not a minute to live. There are such things as
green lanes to turn down, and turf to cool your feet on, and stiles to
mount, and nuts to crack by the way; such things as flowers to catch the
eye, and brooks and birds to fill the ear, and many other things to make
you linger. Railway cuttings may lie in straight lines, his way
does not. He moves and wanders according to the De Quincian line
of beauty. He will go round and round a subject, and loiter from
point to point, making what the hasty reader thinks the most
unseasonable remarks in the most provokingly cool way. And this
will be the crowning charm with those who are en rapport with
the personality and character of the writer. There have been
critics so dull and prosy as to wonder what was the meaning and
intention of the 'English Mail Coach,' and the 'Glory of Motion.'
Men, doubtless, with immortal spirits, but their wings were not yet
grown, or the flesh was too superabundant for them to be exalted to the
proper ethereal height. What to them was the ride of a young man
on the top of a coach, though that coach was the Royal Mail, though its
motion was of the swiftest, and the night memorably solemn?
They could not flap their wings in exultation at the flight, or see a
vision of sudden death in an accident that never happened!
Their nerves were not strain to the point at which we see by
spirit-sight-they could not follow the glorious dreamer into his
enchanted land of dreams, where the thoughts and feelings of day become
the glorified apparitions of the night, and walk in spiritual attire and
splendour. But to De Quincey that mail-coach was alive—alive with
the news it carried, the story of Talavera—he rode on it as borne
between the wings of a mighty victory flying by night through the
sleeping land, that should start to its feet at the words they came to
speak. He tells us that it was worth five years of life to ride on
the coach that bore to the heart of the country such spirit-stirring and
world-shaking news as that of Trafalgar, or Waterloo, and see the face
of England lighted up, rich and poor, with one heart, one pride , one
glory . They bear laurels in token of those that have been so
painfully won; and all eyes dance with new life at the sight, as the
coach rolls along in the calm summer sundown. Heads of all ages at
every window, and lusty cheers of greeting; smiling women wave their
handkerchiefs; men throw up their hats, and lame beggars their sticks;
the boys and the dogs run from end to end of the village. Is it
nothing to sit on that coach and see such a sight, and be the bearer of
such tidings? At one village where the coach stopped , a
poor woman, seeing De Quincey with a paper in his hand, came to him.
It was the news of Talavera. She had a son there in the 23rd
Dragoons. This regiment had made a sublime
charge that day, and come back one in four! De Quincey told
her of the victory, but
'I told her not of the bloody price that had been paid. I showed
her not the funeral banners under which the noble regiment lay sleeping.
But I told her how those dear children of England, officers and
privates, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters
to the morning's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into
the mists of death (saying to myself, but not saying to
her) and laid down their young lives for thee, O mother England!
as willingly—poured out their noble blood as cheerfully—as ever, after a
long day's sport, when infants, they had rested their wearied heads upon
their mother's knees, or sunk to sleep in her arms. Strange it is,
she seemed to have no fear of her son's s safety. Fear was
swallowed up in joy so absolutely, that, in the mere simplicity of her
fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms round my neck, as she
thought of her son, and gave to
me the kiss which secretly was meant for him.'
Such was the passionate heat of the time, such the glamour of eye and
quickness of feeling, when De Quincey rode his famous ride, and had his
'vision of sudden death.' A thousand times did he see the image of
the young girl within the shadow of dreadful and inexorable ruin; now in
a pleasure-boat about to be run down by some tremendous hull at sea; now
sinking in quicksands, with only one fair white arm lifted in vain to
heaven. 'A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, have I
seen thee entering the golden gates of the dawn—with the secret word
riding before thee, with the armies of the grave behind thee; seen thee
sinking, rising, raving, despairing; a thousand times in the worlds of
sleep have seen thee followed by God's angel through storms; through
desert seas; through the darkness of quicksands; through dreams, and the
dreadful revelations that are in dreams—only that at the last, with one
sling of his victorious arm, he might snatch thee back from ruin, and
might emblazon in thy deliverance the endless resurrections of his
love.'
In his Essay on War, De Quincey writes that which is
calculated to startle all devout believers in the peace-at-any-price
principles. His first proposition is, that war cannot be
abolished, and his second, that it ought not to be abolished. We
quote its solemn conclusion:—
'A great truth it was which Wordsworth uttered, whatever might be the
expansion which he allowed to it, when he said that
|
"God's most perfect instrument;
In working out a pure intent,
Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yes, Carnage is His daughter." |
There is a a mystery in approaching this aspect of the case which no man
has read fully. War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to
hidden grandeurs in man, than has yet been deciphered. To execute
judgments of retribution upon outrages offered to human rights or to
human dignity, to vindicate the sanctities of the altar and the
sanctities of the hearth—these are functions of human greatness which
war has many times assumed and many times faithfully discharged.
But behind all these there towers dimly a greater. The great
phenomenon of war it is—this, and this only-which keeps open in man a
spiracle—an organ of respiration—for breathing a transcendent
atmosphere, and dealing with an idea that else would perish—viz., the
idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its
realization in such a battle as that of Waterloo—viz., a battle fought
for interests of the human race, felt even where they are not
understood; so that the tutelary angel of man, when be traverses such a
dreadful field, when he reads the distorted features, counts the ghastly
ruins, sums the hidden anguish; and the harvests
"Of horror breathing from the silent ground,"
nevertheless, speaking as God's messenger, blesses it, and calls it very
good.'
Yet, although he cannot see 'as in a map the end of
all' war, De Quincey recognises signs that the enthusiastic may
interpret, in that direction, dawn-gleams of the day that is to be.
While enlarging the means of war, we have really been narrowing the
ground. We have agreed to put down the coarse brutalities of the
battle-field; war is now carried on with much less degradation of the
moral nature; and thus is likely to make nations less blind to its
horrors, and cause them to shrink from it, unless it be the last resort;
and inspired from outraged righteous feelings. Looking back along
the past, with its battle-fields by the way, we cannot help knowing that
war in our time has a less savage aspect, a quicker conscience, and a
clearer eye. We have amended it. Civilisation has the power
of rendering war less frequent, for it brings more light and skill to
bear upon the untying of national knots such as used to be blindly cut
by the sword, in the dark. It has the power of empannelling a
larger jury than of old, instead of allowing a couple of kings to order
two nations a bath of blood at will. And here we cannot help
remarking how right and natural is the instinct of nations that rises up
in revolt, alarmed at the resurrection of Bonapartism, which means war
at the will or necessities of one man, uncurbed by the checks and
safeguards of constitutional government. It often needs the
arresting hands of many, the wisest and best, to prevent nations rushing
into unrighteous war; human nature cannot afford to leave such momentous
issues to the madness, despair, or wilfulness of one man, whether it be
Bonaparte or Romanoff. So long as there are self-elected Emperors
and Czars crowned with unlimited and irresponsible power, so long will
unrighteous wars he possible and righteous war necessary; because so far
civilisation does not bring into action all its possible means of
restraining war. This is a question of national nature and the
state of society; but we know instinctively that so long as there are
Napoleon dynasties in this world, the only chance for the lamb lying
down peacefully beside the lion will be inside of him after being eaten.
The battle of right and wrong will go on, and take shape on trampled
fields, and the dark cloud of war will blot out of human faces all the
lineaments of common brotherhood. And so long as war will not be
ignored on the side of wrong and despotism, it cannot, must not, be
ignored on the side of progress, freedom, and right.
We spoke of De Quincey as a great master of narrative
art. This is especially manifest in his account of the
'Spanish Military Nun,' and the 'Flight of the Tartars.' The
first, written with his brightest and most felicitous touch, is a
marvellously graphic story of Kate or Kitty, or 'Pussy,' who was the
child of some Spanish hidalgo. Placed in a convent, she grew up
all force, and fire, and fun; ran away; made herself a suit of male
clothing: became a page; slew a man in a sword-encounter, and only
escaped hanging by consenting to marry a lady who had fallen in love
with her; escaped from the marriage, and became a trooper in the
regiment commanded by her own brother, to whom she was unknown; killed
her own brother unwittingly in a duel in the dark; made a long and
ghastly journey over the Andes; killed another man or two in fair fight,
and was again saved from the scaffold by another woman who had fallen in
love with her; came home; was received in the arms, clasped to the heart
of Pope and King; made her peace with the Church, but found no rest for
the sole of her foot; and wandered out into the world once more, to
disappear, no one to this day knowing how. A most singular
narrative of events that occurred two hundred and fifty years ago,
rendered with the true dash of delight, and a great gusto of power.
Here is one scene from the heights of the Andes. Kate had
stood on many a peak of peril, but never on one more appalling.
She and two poor starved deserters are trying to make their way home:—
'Upon the highest rock Kate mounted to look around her, and she saw—oh,
rapture at such an hour!—a man sitting on a shelf of rock, with a gun by
his side. Joyously she shouted to her comrades, and ran down to
communicate the good news. Here was a sportsman, watching,
perhaps, for an eagle; and now they would have relief. One man 's
cheek kindled with the hectic of sudden joy, and he rose eagerly to
march. The other was fast sinking under the fatal sleep that frost
sends before herself as the merciful minister of death; but hearing in
his dreams the tidings of relief, and assisted by his friends, he also
staggeringly arose. It could not be three minutes' walk, Kate
thought, to the station of the sportsman. That thought supported
them all. Under Kate's guidance they soon unthreaded the labyrinth
of rocks so far as to bring the man in view. He had not left his
resting-place; their steps on the soundless snow, naturally, he could
not hear. Kate hailed him; but so keenly was he absorbed in some
speculation, or in the object of his watching, that be took no notice of
them, not even moving his head. Coming close behind him,
Kate touched his shoulder, and said, "My friend, are you sleeping?"
Yes, he was sleeping—sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking;
and the slight touch of Kate having disturbed the equilibrium of the
corpse, down it rolled on the snow: the frozen body rang like a hollow
cylinder; the face uppermost, and blue with mould, mouth open, teeth
ghastly and bleaching in the frost, and a frightful grin upon the lips.
This dreadful spectacle finished the struggles of the weaker man, who
sank and died at once. The other, after one spasm of morbid
strength, also died without further struggle. And Kate stood alone
amidst death and desolation, far above the region of eternal snow.'
De Quincey says there is a portrait of his 'bonny Kate' in existence.
A few years ago one was to be found at Aix-la-Chapelle. If so, the
publishers of his works ought to get a photograph. We should like
to see how the magnificent 'Pussy' looked!
The 'Revolt of the Tartars' is a subject equally
remote and is successfully brought home to us. We know of nothing
in all history more affecting than this flight of a people from Russia
to China, marking every step of the way across the pathless deserts of
Central Asia with wreck and ruin—unrolling for thousands of miles one
vast panorama of calamity—hurrying on with famine in front and a fierce
foe close behind—falling by tens of thousands to the frost and
sword—emerging at last from the dreadful desert of Kobi with staring
eyes and lolling tongues, and rushing altogether, pursuers and pursued,
into the lake of Tengis, the waters of which were soon incarnadined with
blood as the wild Bashkirs took their valedictory vengeance on the poor
fugitives, who had at length reached the shadow and shelter of the Great
Wall. Six hundred thousand had started; but only two hundred and
sixty thousand arrived in the land of promise.
De Quincey's slow, sustained, pursuing,
long-continued method of following a subject attains its climax in his
power of dealing with the feeling of terror. He has the faculty of
skilfully moving a horror with all the success of Webster. He has
learned a strange secret in his world of dreams. The fascination
he exercises belongs to dream-world, and the only resemblance we can
name occurs, to us only in dreams. We suppose that most persons
have some time or other been followed by the fixed deliberate look of
such eyes as can magnetize us in dream-land,—slow, but certain as death;
and knowing we cannot escape, they triumph in our terror, creep along
our blood, and, with their cold glitter, grasp us by the very heart till
life stands still to listen. With such a potency of quiet power
can De Quincey arrest us, body and soul, and make the blood run cold,
the nerves prick, the hair take supernatural life; and the hotter we
get, the more coolly and quietly will he proceed with his story.
Anything more horribly interesting than his description of Williams, and
the murder of the Marrs, never froze the blood or held the spirit
petrified in terror's hell of cold. It was not life-blood, he
tells us, that ran in his veins, such as could kindle into a blush of
shame, but a sort of green sap. His eyes seemed frozen and glazed
as if their light were all converged upon some victim lurking in the
background. Yet the oiliness and snaky insinuation of his
demeanour counteracted the repulsiveness of his ghastly face. If
you had run against him in the crowded street, he would have offered the
most gentlemanly apologies. With his heart full of a hellish
purpose, he would have paused to express a hope that the mallet under
his coat, his hidden implement of murder, had not hurt you!
We know of no romance that can curdle the blood, or quicken the flesh
into goose-pimples, as does this terrible reality in the hands of De
Quincey, whilst he follows him through the crowded street on his way to
kill, decked out in long rich cloth coat with silk linings, nearing his
victims surely and unconscionably as doom; it being Saturday night, and
to-morrow the day of rest—their day of rest! Fearful
is the picture he draws of the happy home of the Marrs—the ruddy husband
bustling about the shop working cheerily for wife and child—the wife
young, lovely and loving—the child asleep in its cosy cradle—and their
murderer watching opposite on the dark side of the street, like the
devil watching Eden with all hell in his heart; for Marr had been
Williams' successful rival. Terrible the picture of life and
death, with the servant breathing hard on the outside of the door; the
murderer, red from his bloody work, breathing hard on the inside—both
listening all they can—she having a presentiment that a murderer is the
only living being then in the house of her master and mistress.
Still more harrowing is the scene of the murderer at work in the parlour
of Williamson's public-house, with his intended victim watching him on
the stairs, the two only thirteen feet apart. Then the horribly
silent race for a life betwixt the murderer, almost jubilant amidst the
blood and gold below, and the journeyman working hard in the bed-room
above to make a rope ladder 'whereby he may save himself and the
child,—'pull journeyman, pull murderer,'—the rope not quite finished
when he hears the murderer creeping up stealthily towards him through
the darkness. And all the little light touches which De Quincey
puts in to show the fiendishness of Williams, as an epicurean of murder,
with a perfect artistic taste and a voluptuous sense of satisfaction
when his work was thoroughly done. It is a page if from a dreadful
book, written in characters that glow frightfully vivid as they are
freshly illuminated by the light which the writer so deliberately and
searchingly throws into the dark places of a most devilish nature.
We are no great admirers of the Essay on Murder
considered as one of the fine arts. Humour only serves to make the
subject too ghastly. Our readers will, however, perceive that
there is plenty of the sensational in De Quincey's narratives;
sensational in subject, though not in style. Indeed, the three we
have dwelt upon beat most of the novelists in thrilling interest.
Without pretending to follow our author over the wide range of his
writings, we must make mention of one or two more of his essays before
closing our account.
As Christians, we owe him our best thanks for his
exposure of the myth of the Essenes as fathered by Josephus, and
adopted, without further inquiry, by Strauss in his 'Life of Jesus.'
De Quincey shows conclusively enough, that if the Essenes were not
Christians in disguise, then there was a Christianity before Christ; and
we all know what that means. But he also shows as
conclusively, that they were Christians who bowed the head while the
fury of the storm passed over, as soldiers may lie down to let the
shower of grape go by; and shut themselves up into a secret society to
nurture the young life of the new faith; and that so successfully as to
blind their contemporaries with a change of name. Josephus is
condemned out of his own mouth; the doctrines which he puts forth as
those of the Essenes are proved to be those of Christ's followers, and
none else. Such a sect as this supposed could not have existed
contemporaneously with Christ and His disciples without the one hearing
of the other, and yet there is not even the mention of their name in the
New Testament. So far as Josephus could obtain his glimpse from
the outside, they were one in doctrine and character. He tells us
they 'have a greater affection for one another than the other sects
have.' 'They are despisers of riches, having one patrimony among
all the brethren.' 'They have no certain city, but many of them
dwell in every city.' They travel without scrip or purse; and when
they come to a strange city, they go in to such as they never knew
before. Their piety towards God is very extraordinary—praying in
the morn while it is yet dark. They are eminent for fidelity, and
are the ministers of peace. They avoid swearing, but
whatever they say is firmer than an oath. And, although tortured,
'yet could they not be made to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a
tear, but they smiled in their very torments.' In all these
traits, and in others, we see the early Christians living their life to
the letter. But where can any other sect be found that we can
identify? The Christians had to baffle, and they did baffle,
even Josephus.
He did not recognise them, but we do, by the very signs
which he gives us. We know better than he the meaning of his
report. We have the key of the lock which he could not pick.
We must give one specimen of De Quincey's subtlety in
criticism. It is from the famous paper on the 'Knocking at the
Gate in Macbeth:—'
'All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made
apprehensible by reaction. Now, apply this to the case of Macbeth.
Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance
of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.
Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the
region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are
transfigured: Lady Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was
born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world
of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and
made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world
must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be
insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and
succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep
recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is
suddenly arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked into a dread armistice;
time must he annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all
must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly
passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of
darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a
pageantry in the clouds; the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes
known audibly that the reaction has commenced, the human has made its
reflux upon the fiendish, the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which
we live first make us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that
has suspended them. O mighty Poet!'
We are tempted to add, 'O great and surprisingly subtle commentator!'
De Quincey was a wonderful talker, as those of our
readers know who ever had the good fortune to sit with the 'old man
eloquent,' by winter fire-light or summer twilight, in his Lasswade
home, and who have seen the grief-worn face grow glorified, the immortal
spirit within the thin, weak mortal form kindling its clay, soaring for
a while triumphant over all the suffering and the pain. Strange
light would stream through the rents of ruin; strange music come from
unknown sources, till the listener felt himself caught up into an
enchanted place, where the touch of transfiguration had fallen on both.
He was not a talker like Coleridge, who, as Hazlitt said, consented at
any time to lose the ear of posterity for the sake of a chance listener.
In his early years he had quite neglected the power of conversation, and
looked upon it, he tells us, as one of the dull necessities of business.
He thought the world talked too much already for him to swell the
hubbub. Yet, as it was vain to try and persuade the world into
adopting his view of the matter, he re-studied the subject on principles
of art. A new feeling dawned on him, of a secret magic lurking in
the life, quickness, and ardour of conversation, quite apart from any
which belonged to books, arming a man with new forces, and not merely
with a new dexterity in wielding old ones. 'I felt that, in the
electric kindling of life between two minds, there sometimes arise
glimpses and shy revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy,
that could not have been approached through any avenues of methodical
study. Great organists find the same effect of inspiration, the
same result of power, creative and revealing, in the mere movement and
velocity of their own voluntaries, like the heavenly wheels of Milton
throwing off fiery flakes and bickering flames.' Having fathomed
the secret capabilities of conversation as an art, he looks round for
the great artist, but does not find the perfect, master. He shows
felicitously enough why Dr Johnson must have been for ever maimed as a
great conversationalist:—
'He had no eye for the social phenomena rising around
him. He had little interest in man; no sympathy with human nature in its
struggles, or faith in the progress of man. And the reason that he
felt thus careless, was the desponding taint in his blood. It is
good to be of a melancholic temperament, as all the ancient
physiologists held; but only it the melancholy is balanced by fiery
aspiring qualities, not when it gravitates essentially to earth.
Hence the drooping, desponding character, and the monotony of the
estimate which Dr Johnson applied to life. We are all in his
view, miserable, scrofulous wretches; the "strumous diathesis"
was developed in our flesh, or soon would be; and but for his piety,
which was the best indication of some greatness latent within him, he
would have suggested to all mankind a nobler use for garters than any
which regarded knees. In fact, I believe that but for his piety he
would not only have counselled hanging in general, but hanged himself in
particular. Now, this gloomy temperament, as a permanent state, is
fatal to the power of brilliant conversation.'
De Quincey could not find his great artist, we say; others will fancy
they found such an one in himself; for he felt the necessary interest in
man, all his hopes as well as fears. He talked from the heart as
well as the head; and his conversation sprang like a fountain of
earnestness. He never talked without having something to say; nor
was he afflicted with what Coleridge called the 'mouth diarrhœa;'
neither was his conversation an apotheosis of self-assertiveness.
In whatsoever direction he turned, whether to speak or write, he had the
power of vitalizing with new life, and enriching all he looked upon.
No matter into what solitude or wilderness he penetrates, there will be
the movement of new life at once visible, and a glow as of dawn in the
desert. He has a shrewd eye for 'keeking' into corners, and the
patience of spirit that can wait long in ambush to pounce on the error
as it passes by. No shepherd ever better knew the face of a
particular sheep that he wanted from the flock, than De Quincey knows
the lie that is trying to pass muster for truth. He has an eye
almost Shakspearian for detecting the true features of a man who may
stand afar off, half-hidden under the veil of distance. He has a
sure grasp of reality, and can estimate at their true value the glitter
and graces, the tinsel and powder, and fluttering affectations of the
'teacup times.' Pope feels hollow in his grip. And although
a genuine Tory, De Quincey could judge between Milton and Johnson, and
assign to each his proper pedestal. He had no favourites merely
because of their politics, nor were his own politics of the kind that
forms a science of expediency. He loved England, and all that was
genuinely English. That was the tap-root of his Toryism. He
was not a Tory through blindness, but because the tendencies of
revolution in his time aroused all conservative instincts. He
belonged to a class of thinkers in politics who dwelt apart from the
tumult of party warfare, and do not contend for its prizes in the arena.
But they silently influence their own circles, each in his own way, and
send forth ripples of power that go to the outermost edge of society.
They are as springs of healing, watering the roots of the national life;
sooner or later they bring the world round to them, and mould its final
thought and feeling. The practical efficiency of their creed
cannot be gauged on the surface of things; down in the deeps we may see
it constitutes just the element that enriches our country beyond all
blessings of a purely democratic form of Government, and is of more
value than the eternal see-saw of Whig and Tory which is popularly
supposed to preserve the balance of power.
De Quincey has been falsely charged with a proneness
to attack old friends when he was only
biting playfully. For example, speaking of Wordsworth's
great good luck and felicitous fortune, he says, 'So true it is, that
just as Wordsworth needed a place and a fortune, the holder of that
place or fortune was immediately served with a notice to surrender it.
So certainly was this impressed upon my belief as one of the blind
necessities, making up the prosperity and fixed destiny of Wordsworth,
that, for myself, had I happened to know of any peculiar adaptation in
an estate or office of mine to an existing need of Wordsworth's,
forthwith, and with the speed of a man running for his life, I would
have laid it down at his feet. 'Take it,' I should have said; '
take it, or in three weeks I shall be a dead man.'
In conclusion, we have done no justice to our
author's learning or humour; to his conjectural audacity and
hypothetical felicities; or to his estimates of antique character.
But we trust that we have written enough to make his works more widely
known. In a time when we have so much sham brilliancy and false
vivacity, deadly-liveliness and forcible-feebleness,—when the
penny-a-liner sits in the high places of literature,—we turn to these
books with a pleasant sense of relief. We are heartily sick of the
smell of Cockneydom; its slang and smartness; its knowingness and
insincerity, and find it delightful to renew acquaintanceship with the
style of a writer who is not smart nor fast but always an English
gentleman, with a stately touch of the school in which manners are a
sort of surface Christianity. He can be playful without losing his
own dignity, and natural without forfeiting our respect. By his
innate nobility of thought and chivalry of feeling, as well as by his
wealth of learning, he is the very man to lead us into the lofty society
of the good and great,—poets and patriots; fit to exalt the deliverer
Joan d'Arc, or abase the pretensions of a Parr. Accordingly, we
welcome him as one of the great leaders in literature, and, instead of
regretting what he has not done, we rejoice in what he has bequeathed to
us, and would have others share in our joy.
We owe the first edition of De Quincey's collected
works to the perseverance and research of Mr Fields, the Boston
publisher. This latest edition—published by the Messrs Black—is
both handsome in appearance and cheap in price. It includes a new
volume of De Quincey's articles from the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,'
together with a paper on Political Parties, not before published; whilst
the label of printed contents at the back of each volume is a handy
improvement.
GERALD MASSEY. |
