ABOUT twenty years ago there might have been seen flitting about the rural lanes in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, Scotland, a strange, diminutive, spectral-looking being, clad in a motley costume, with his hat hung over the back of his head, his neck-cloth twisted like a wisp of straw, and altogether so grotesque-looking, that you could not help stopping to look at him, and wondering to what race, order, or age of human beings he belonged. As you stopped to look at him, you found him also stopping in suspicious alarm, and looking back at you; and then suddenly, like some ticket-of-leave man, hastily moving on, and, as if fearful of being caught, darting round the first turning, and disappearing from view. What was your surprise when it was whispered in your ear that in this fragile and unsubstantial figure, — this dagger of lath, — this ghostly body resting on a pair of immaterial legs, which you could have “trussed with all its apparel into an eelskin” — resided one of the most potent and original spirits that ever dwelt in a tenement of clay! And how was your surprise deepened, when you were further told that this singular being, — this migratory and almost disembodied intellect, — this little wandering anatomy, topped with a brain, whom you had found so shy, as if he had “feared each bush an officer,” — was one of the subtlest thinkers, and the greatest 10 masters of English prose, in this century; in a word, the far-famed “Opium-Eater,” Thomas De Quincey! It is the character and writings of this extraordinary man, and most unique and original genius, that we purpose to consider in this essay.
Among all the charmed names of modern English literature, is there probably any other English author whose works are read and re-read with such feelings of delight, wonder, and admiration as those of De Quincey? Glancing over the books that are books on his shelves, each the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, “the purest efficacy and extraction of that living spirit that bred them,” does the scholar’s eye rest on any with which it would cost him a keener pang to part, than with the writings of this great magister-sentiarum, — this Aquinas-Richter, — this arch-dreamer of dreams, “the Opium-Eater?” Read wherever the English language is spoken, he is by universal acknowledgment the most powerful and versatile master of that tongue in our time, — the acutest, and at the same time the most gorgeous and eloquent writer of English prose in the nineteenth century. Where, in the entire range of our later literature, will you find an intellect at once so solid and so subtle, so enormous learning conjoined with such power of original thinking, so daring, eccentric wit and grotesque fun with such sharpness and severity of style? Whatever the subject he discusses, whether the character of the Cæsars or the Aristocracy of England, — Homer and the Homeridæ, or Nichols’ System of the Heavens, — Lessing’s Laocoon, or the English Corn-Law, — War, or Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts — Casuistry, or Dinner, Real and Reputed, — Miracles, or Secret Societies, — Logic, Political Economy, 11 or the Sphinx’s Riddle, — he treats all in the same fascinating, yet subtle and searching manner, investing them with the charms of learning and scholarship, wit and humor, and combining, as have rarely before been combined, the rarely harmonizing elements of severe logic and exuberant fancy.
Who, that has once read it, will ever forgot that wondrous paper on “The English Mail Coach?” — that coach on which he rode, and on which it was “worth five years of life to ride,” after the battle of Talavera, — rode as if borne on 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?” What marvellous word-painting in the sketch entitled “The Spanish Nun,” and in the essay on “Modern Superstitions,” — particularly in the descriptions of the phantoms which haunt the traveler in trackless deserts, and of the strange voices which are heard by those who sail upon unknown seas! What lover of the horrible will ever forget the weird, snake-like fascination of that masterpiece of powerful writing in which De Quincey’s slow, sustained, long-continued method of following a subject reaches a climax in his art of dealing with the feeling of terror, — we mean the “Three Memorable Murders?” Anything more fearfully thrilling than the description of Williams, the murderer, with his ghastly face, in whose veins ran, not life-blood, that could kindle into a blush of shame, but a sort of green sap, — with his eyes that seemed frozen and glazed, as if their light were all converged upon some victim lurking in the background, and the oiliness and snaky insinuation of his demeanor, that counteracted the repulsiveness of his physiognomy, — who, if you had 12 run against him in the street, would have offered the most gentlemanly apologies, hoping that the mallet under his coat, his hidden instrument of murder, had not hurt you! — anything more horrible than this never froze the blood, or held the spirit petrified in terror’s hell of cold. Compared with the spell worked by this mighty magician, the necromancy of Monk Lewis is tame; the stories with which Ann Radcliffe, Miss Crowe, Schiller, and even the Baron Reichenbach himself, make the blood run cold, the nerves prick, and the hair stand on end, are dull and insipid; and the enchantments of all the other high-priests of the supernatural, cheap and vulgar.
Again, with what a magnetism does De Quincey hold us in the “Retreat of a Tartar Tribe,” a paper recording a section of romantic story “not equalled,” he says, “since the retreat of the fallen angels!” What a fluctus decumanus of rhetoric is his “Vision of a Sudden Death,” — a tale as mystically fearful as “The Ancient Mariner.” With what a climax of painful incident, beginning with an absolute minimum of interest, does he chain our attention in “The Household Wreck!” How he thrills us with the fiery eloquence of the Confessions, and entrances us with the solemn, sustained, and lyrical raptures of the “Suspiria,” and the “Dream Fugue” following his “Vision of a Sudden Death!” What a power he exhibits of seizing the impalpable and air-drawn scenery of dreams, and embodying it in impassioned language, — a faculty which nowhere else, in the whole compass of literature, has been so vividly displayed, as in that piece, so daring in its imaginative sweep, the final climax of his “Joan of Arc!” Dip wherever we will into this author’s writings, we find on every page examples of the same narrative power, the 13 same depth and keenness of philosophic criticism, the same psychological subtlety detecting the most veiled aspects of things, the same “quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles” of fancy, relieving the severity of the profoundest thoughts, the same dazzling fence of rhetoric, the same imperial dominion over the resources of expression, and the same sustained, witching melody of style. In his curious brain the most opposite elements are united; “fire and frost embrace each other.”
At once colossal and keen, De Quincey’s intellect seems capable of taking the profoundest views of men and things, and of darting the most piercing glances into details; it has an eagle’s eye to gaze at the sun, and the eye of a cat to glance at things in the dark; is quick as a hawk to pounce upon a brilliant falsehood, yet as slow as a ferret to pursue a sophism through all its mazes and sinuosities. Now meditative in gentle thought, and anon sharp in analytic criticism; now explaining the subtle charm of Wordsworth’s poetry, and again unravelling a knotty point in Aristotle, or cornering a lie in Josephus; to-day penetrating the bowels of the earth with the geologist, to-morrow soaring through the stellar open spaces with the astronomer; it seems exactly fitted for every subject it discusses, and reminds you of the elephant’s lithe proboscis, which with equal dexterity can uproot an oak or pick up a pin. Of this universality of his genius one who knew him well says, that in theology his knowledge was equal to that of two bishops; in metaphysics he could puzzle any German professor; in astronomy he outshone Professor Nichol; in chemistry he could outdive Samuel Brown; and in Greek, excite to jealousy the shades of Porson and Samuel Parr. In short, to borrow an illustration of Macaulay, it is hardly an exaggeration to say of 14 the Opium-Eater’s intellect, that it resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed, — “Fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful sultans might repose beneath its shade.”
With all this capaciousness and subtlety, however, De Quincey’s is, at the same time, of all intellects the most vagrant and capricious, — scorning above all things the beaten track, doing nothing by square, rule, and compass, and never pursuing any path of inquiry, without digression, for ten minutes together. Whatever the subject he announces to be under discussion, the title of one of his papers affords you no key to its contents. Like Montaigne, who in his chapter on Coaches treats only of Alexander and Julius Cæsar, or like the writer on Iceland, who begins his chapter, “Of the Snakes of Iceland,” by saying “There are no snakes in Iceland,” — De Quincey contents himself often with the barest allusion to his theme, and strays into a thousand tempting bye-paths, leading off whole leagues therefrom, — “winding like a river at its own sweet will,” — shedding “a light as from a painted window” on the most trivial objects, — but profoundly indifferent whether, at the end of his disquisition, he will have made any progress toward the goal for which he started. Like a fisherman, he throws out his capacious net into the ocean of learning, and sweeps in everything, however miscellaneous or motley its character. Hence, in reading his logical papers, you declare him the prince of desperate jokers; reading his jeux d’esprit, you are ready with Archdeacon Hare to pronounce him the great logician of our times. “Oh, Mr. North! Mr. North!” shouts the Ettrick Shepherd in one of the “Noctes,” when De Quincey is about to refute one of his 15 post-prandial propositions, “I’m about to fa’ into Mr. De Quinshy’s hauns, sae come to my assistance, for I canna thole, being pressed up backward, step by step, intell a corner, till an argument that’s ca’d a clincher clashes in your face, and knocks your head in sic force against the wa’, that your crown gets a clour, leaving a dent in the wainscot.”
Fully to estimate an author, we must know the man; and therefore, before entering upon a more critical notice of the Opium-Eater’s genius, let us glance at some of the more notable facts of his life and character. Thomas De Quincey was born at Greenhayes, near Manchester, in 1785. His father, a foreign merchant, who began life with what has been termed “the dangerous fortune of £6,000,” prospered so well in business that, when he died of consumption in his thirty-ninth year, he left to his widow and six young children a fortune of £30,000 and a pleasant seat in the place just named. This “imperfectly despicable man,” as De Quincey calls him in allusion to his commercial position, rarely saw his children; and it was, therefore, the more fortunate that they had so good a mother, a well-educated, pious woman, who spared no pains to promote their welfare and happiness. Thomas, the son, came into the world, as he tells us, upon that tier of the social scaffolding which is the happiest for all good influences. Agur’s prayer was realized for him; he was neither too high, nor too low, — too rich, nor too poor. High enough he was to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes.
He was a singularly small and delicate child, — with a large brain, and a most acute nervous system, ill clad 16 with flesh, — which made him the victim of those ills and miseries of boyhood from which the poet Cowper, in his early years, so keenly suffered. In his infancy he was afflicted for more than two years with ague; an affliction which was compensated by the double share of affection lavished upon him by his mother and sisters, by whom he was made the pet of the family, and regarded as one of the sanctities of home. When, in after years, like Marcus Aurelius, he thanked Providence for the separate blessings of his childhood, he was wont to single out as worthy of special commemoration, that “he lived in a rustic solitude; that this solitude was in England; that his infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; and, finally, that he and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy and magnificent church.”
A life so encompassed and hallowed seems specially adapted to develop his remarkable mental idiosyncrasies, and to intensify his exquisite sensibilities; but he was speedily to learn that there is no earthly seclusion inviolable to the inroad of sorrow; and suddenly, the whole complexion of the world was changed for him by an affliction that remained apparently an abiding grief through life, the death of his “gentlest of sisters,” Elizabeth, the superb development of whose head was the astonishment of science. The marvelous passage in which he tells us how he bewailed the loss of his sister, and describes his feelings when he stole silently and secretly up to the chamber where the body lay, and, softly entering the room, closed the door, and found himself alone with the dead, — when, catching a glimpse from the open window of the scenery outside, he contrasted 17 the glory and the pomp of nature, redolent of life and beauty, with the little body, from which all life had fled, lying so still upon its bed, —” the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish,” — is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose in our language.
“Could these be mistaken for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those lips with tears and never-ending kisses! But so it was not. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow — the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, — namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.”
In the same connection, he says:
“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 services of a national church, God holds with 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 already he has passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to pass; reflex of one solitude — prefiguration of another.”
De Quincey’s grief, too deep for tears, would perhaps have hurried him into an untimely grave, had he not been awakened, somewhat rudely, from his reveries, by the 18 arrival home of his elder brother. This brother was an extraordinary boy, as eccentric in his way as Thomas himself, over whom he tyrannized by the mere force of character. He had a genius for mischief amounting almost to inspiration; “it was a divine afflatus which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create them, in order that he might direct them.” A strong contrast was this active, mischief-loving, bold, and clever boy to the puny Thomas, whom, naturally enough, he thoroughly despised. His martial nature prompted him to deeds too daring for the meek and gentle nature of the younger, from whom, nevertheless, he exacted the most unquestioning obedience. This obedience was based on the assumption that he himself was commander-in-chief; therefore Thomas owed him military allegiance, — while, as cadet of his house, he owed him suit and service as its head.
Having declared war against the “hands” of a Manchester cotton mill, — one of whose number had insulted them by calling them “bucks,” as they passed along Oxford Road home from school, the elder brother made the younger major-general; sometimes directing his movements upon the flank, and sometimes upon the rear of the enemy, — now planting him in ambush, and now as a corps of observation, as the exigencies of the case required. For two entire years, and twice every day of the week, did fearful battle rage between the belligerents with showers of stones and sticks, during which Thomas was thrice a prisoner in the enemy’s hands. Arrived at home, the commander issued a bulletin of the engagement, which was read with much ceremony to the housekeeper. Sometimes this document announced a victory, sometimes a defeat; but the conduct 19 of the major-general was sure to be sharply criticised, whatever the result. Now he was decorated with the Bath, and now he was deprived of his commission. At one time his services merited the highest promotion, — at another, he behaved with a cowardice that was inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery. Once he was drummed out of the army, but “restored at the intercession of a distinguished lady,” — to wit, the housekeeper.
A most wonderful boy was this brother, who absolutely hated all books, except those which he himself wrote; which were not only numerous, but upon every subject under the sun; so that, if not luminous, he could boast of being the most vo-luminous author of his time. He kept the nursery in a perfect whirl of excitement, giving burlesque lectures “on all subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, — both black and white, — thaumaturgy and necromancy.” His most popular treatise was entitled “How to Raise a Ghost; and when you’ve got him, how to keep him down.” He also gave lectures on physics to an audience in the nursery, and tried to construct an apparatus for walking across the ceiling like a fly, first on the principle of skates, and afterward upon that of a humming-top. He was profound on the subject of necromancy, and frequently terrified his young admirers by speculating on the possibility of a general confederation, or solemn league and conspiracy, of the ghosts of all time against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of this earth. He made a balloon; and wrote, and, with his brothers and sisters, performed two acts of a most harrowing tragedy, in which all the personages were beheaded at the end of each act, leaving none to carry on the play, a 20 perplexity which ultimately caused “Sultan Amurath” to be abandoned to the housemaids. “It is well,” observes 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 honor nor profit.”
Thomas De Quincey was scarcely ten years old when he began laying the deep foundations of that wonderful accuracy which he acquired in the Greek and Latin tongues, and storing the cells of his memory with wide and varied information by browsing freely in all the fields of literature. After receiving instruction from a succession of masters, at Bath, at Winkfield, and at Manchester, he began to feel that profound contempt for his tutor which a boy of genius always feels for a pompous pedant; and, indignant because his guardians did not allow him at once to enter himself at the University of Oxford, he ran away at night, — with a small English poet in one pocket, and nine plays of Euripides in the other, — and began wandering about in Wales. Of the ups and downs of his life there, he has given a characteristically vivid account. Sometimes he slept in fine hotels, sometimes on the hillside, with nothing but the heavens to shelter him, fearing lest “while 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 center of my face;” sometimes he dined for the small sum of sixpence; sometimes he wanted a dinner, and was compelled to relieve the cravings of his hunger by plucking and eating the berries from off the hedges; and sometimes he earned a meal and a night’s lodging by writing letters for cottagers and for sweethearts.
Weary of these aimless wanderings, he turned his 21 back on Wales, and next found himself penniless and without a friend, in the solitude of London. And now began that painful, yet marvelous and intensely interesting episode in his history, which he has so vividly portrayed in the “Confessions.” Now began that wearing life, which chills the spirits, saps the morality, and turns the blood to gall, — waiting day after day at a usurer’s office, perpetually listening to fresh excuses for delay, and fresh demands for the preparation of fresh securities. Strangest and most thrilling of written experience, — where, in any autobiography, at least, shall we find its equal? Why, instead of letting these vultures keep him in suspense till he was on the verge of starvation, he did not try to earn a living by his pen, or by teaching, is a mystery. Not only would he receive as heir, in four years more, — for he was now seventeen, — £4,000 or £5,000, an almost fabulous sum for a literary man of that period, but he had abundant resources against want in his teeming imagination and elegant scholarship. So great and accurate were his classical attainments, that his master, more than a year before, had proudly pointed him out to a stranger, with the remark: “That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” Moreover, we find him, soon after this, gravely weighing the propriety of writing a remonstrance in Greek to the Bishop of Bangor, concerning some fancied insult received at the hands of that learned prelate. De Quincy himself tells us that he wielded the Greek language “with preternatural address for varying the forms of expression, and for bringing the most refractory ideas within the harness of Grecian phraseology.”
22Of this accomplishment he was never inclined to vaunt; for any slight vanity which he might connect with a power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so readily transmutes itself into disproportionate admiration of the author, in him, he tells us, was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of his entire sensibilities at that time by our English literature. Already at fifteen he had made himself familiar with the great English poets, and had appreciated the subtle charm of Wordsworth’s poetry, when not fifty persons in England, who had read the sneering criticisms of the Edinburgh Review, knew who the poet that had cautioned men against “growing double,” was. Here we cannot help quoting from his “Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature,” a noble passage in which, in spite of his admiration of the Hellenic genius, he confesses the superiority of the English: “It is,” he says, “a pitiable spectacle to any man of sense and feeling, who happens to be really familiar with the golden treasures of his own ancestral literature, and a spectacle which alternately moves scorn and sorrow, to see young people squandering their time and painful study upon writers not fit to unloose the shoes’ latchets of many amongst their own compatriots; making painful and remote voyages after the drossy refuse, when the pure gold lies neglected at their feet.”
To return to the narrative: — unlike Savage’s or Chatterton’s, De Quincey’s misery at this time seems to have been self-inflicted. What reader of the “Confessions” has forgotten his description of this period, when, friendless and alone, he paced up and down the never-ending streets of London, with their pomp and majesty of life, 23 a prey to the gnawings of hunger, and seeking by constant motion to baffle the piercing cold? What American that has paced those silent thoroughfares after midnight, has not thought of the boy who wandered up and down Oxford street, looking at the long vistas of the lamps, and conversing with the unfortunate creatures who still moved over the cold, hard stones? Who does not remember how, overpowered by the pangs of inanition, he fainted away in Soho Square, and was rescued from the very gates of death by a poor girl, who administered to him a tumbler of spiced wine, bought with money which destitution had compelled her to earn by sin? Whose heart has not been touched by the story of “Poor Anne”? Her wrongs and sorrows, it has been well said, have doubtless caused many prayers to be breathed for others who, like herself, have been the victims of man’s dishonor and sin.
For more than sixteen weeks De Quincey was a prey to hunger, the bitterest that a man can suffer and survive. During all this time he slept in the open air, and subsisted on a precarious charity. At last he found an asylum, better at least than a stone door-step for a night’s lodging, — a large, empty house, peopled chiefly with rats. There at night he would lie down on the bare floor, with a dusty bundle of law-papers for a pillow, and a cloak and an old sofa-covering for bed-clothes; while, for a companion, he had a poor, friendless girl, — a deserted child, about ten years old, — who nestled close to him for warmth and protection against the ghosts which, to her infant imagination, peopled the hours of darkness. But it was to “poor Anne” that he looked for the chief solace of his miserable life. He never knew 24 her surname, and, as he always depended upon finding her, he did not think it necessary to learn more. Parting from her one day with a kiss of brotherly affection, he set out on a business errand to Eton; but when he returned to London, he lost all trace of her. Night after night he returned to the trysting-place, and years after in visits to the city he peered into myriads of faces with the hope of descrying the well-known features; but in vain; poor Ann he never saw more. Again and again would he pace the flags of Oxford street, the “stony-hearted step-mother,” and listen again to the tunes which used to solace himself and her in their dreary wanderings, and with tears would exclaim: “How often have I wished that, as in ancient times, the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and pursue its object with a fatal necessity of fulfilment, even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like prerogative; might have power given it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or, if it were possible, even into the darkness of a grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!”
With the loss of Ann his Greek-street life ended; and becoming reconciled to his guardians by a Providential occurrence, he went home, and soon after entered Oxford University as a student. Of his life there at Worcester College, we know almost nothing. It was so hermit-like, that, for the first two years, he computes that he did not utter one hundred words. He had but one conversation with his tutor. “It consisted of three sentences,” he says, “two of which fell to his share, one to mine. Oxford, 25 ancient mother! hoary with ancestral honors, time-honored, and, haply it may be, time-shattered power, I owe thee nothing! Of thy vast riches I took not a shilling, though living among multitudes who owed thee their daily bread.” When the examinations came, De Quincey went through the first day’s trial so triumphantly that one of the examiners said to a resident of Worcester College: “You have sent us to-day the cleverest man I ever met with; if his vivâ voce examination to-morrow correspond with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before him.” De Quincey, however, did not wait to be questioned further; but for some reason, — whether self-distrust or a depression of spirits following a large dose of opium, — packed his trunk, and walked away from Oxford, never to return. In 1804 he made the acquaintance of Charles Lamb. In 1807 he was introduced to Coleridge, for whose vast intellectual powers he had a profound admiration; and, hearing that he was harassed by pecuniary troubles, contrived to convey to him, through Mr. Cottle’s hand, the sum of £500. In this generous gift De Quincey was actuated by a pure artistic love of genius and literature. From 1808 to 1829, he passed nine months out of twelve among the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland. He took a lease of Wordsworth’s cottage at Grasmere, wedded a gentle and loving wife; and amidst the delights of the lake scenery, a good library of 5,000 volumes, lettered friends, and his darling drug, realized the ideal of earthly bliss for which the Roman poet so often sighed, and drank a sweet oblivion of the cares of anxious life. Speaking at this time of Wordsworth’s good luck, for whose benefit some person became conveniently defunct whenever he 26 wanted money, De Quincey 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, 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.’ ”
It was in 1804, at the age of 19, that De Quincey first began taking opium, to ease rheumatic pains in the face and head. This dangerous remedy having been recommended to him by a fellow-student at Oxford, he entered a druggist’s shop, and, like Thalaba in the witches’ lair, wound about himself the first threads of a coil, which after the most gigantic efforts, he was never able wholly to shake off. Using opium at first to quiet pain, he quickly found that it had mightier and more magical effects, and went on increasing the doses till in 1816 he was taking 320 grains, or 8,000 drops of laudanum a day. What a picture he has given us of the discovery he made! What a revelation the dark but subtle drug made to his spiritual eyes! What an agent of immortal and exalted pleasures! What an apocalypse of the world within him! Here was a panacea for sorrow and suffering, for brain-ache and heart-ache, — immunity from pain, and care, and all human woes. He swallowed a bit of the drug, and lo! the inner spirit’s eyes were opened, — a fairy ministrant had burst into wings, waving a wondrous wand, — a fresh tree 27 of knowledge had yielded its fruit, and is seemed as good as it was beautiful. “Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstasies might now be had, corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind sent down in gallons by mail.” Here we may observe that De Quincey contradicts the statements which are usually made regarding opium. He denies that it intoxicates, and shows that there is such an insidiousness about it, that it scarcely seems to be a gratification of the senses. The pleasure of wine is one that rises to a certain pitch, and then degenerates into stupidity, while that of opium remains stationary for eight or ten hours. Again, the influence of wine tends to disorder the mind, while opium tends to exalt the ideas, and yet to contribute to harmony and order in their arrangement. “The opium-eater feels that the diviner part of his nature is uppermost; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect.”
Up to the middle of 1817 De Quincey judges himself to have been a happy man; and nothing can be more charming than the picture he draws of the interior of his cottage in a stormy winter night, with “warm hearth-rugs, tea from an eternal tea-pot,” — eternal à parte ante and à parte post, for he drank from eight in the evening till four in the morning, — “a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without,
‘As heaven and earth they would together mell.’ ”
Alas! that this blissful state could not continue! But the very drug which had revealed to him such an abyss of divine enjoyment, — which had given to him the keys of 28 Paradise, causing to pass before his spirit’s eyes a never-ending succession of splendid imagery, the gorgeous coloring of sky and cloud, the pomp of woods and forests, the majesty of boundless oceans, and the grandeur of imperial cities, while to the ears, cleansed from their mortal infirmities, were borne the sublime anthem of the winds and waves, and a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies, — this very power became eventually its own avenging Nemesis, and inflicted torments compared with which those of Prometheus were as the bites of a gnat.
Of all the torments which opium inflicts upon its votary, perhaps there is no one more destructive of his peace than the sense of incapacity and feebleness, — of inability to perform duties which conscience tells him he must not neglect. The opium-eater, De Quincey tells us, loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but the springs of his will are all broken, and his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. “He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: — he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.”
Of the cup of horrors which opium finally presents to 29 its devotees, De Quincey drank to the dregs, especially in his dreams at night, when the fearful and shadowy phantoms that flitted by his bedside made his sleep insufferable by the terror and anguish they occasioned. Of these dreams, as portrayed in the “Confessions” and some of his other writings, we doubt if it would be possible to find a parallel in any literature, ancient or modern. Sometimes they are blended with appalling associations, — encompassed with the power of darkness, or shrouded with the mysteries of death and the gloom of the grave. Now they are pervaded with unimaginable horrors of oriental imagery and mythological tortures; the dreamer is oppressed with tropical heat and vertical sunlight, and bring together all the physical prodigies of China and Hindóstan. He runs into pagodas, and is fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; he flees from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hates him; Seeva lays wait for him; he comes suddenly on Isis and Osiris; he has done a deed, they say, at which the ibis and the crocodile tremble; he is buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. He is kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable, slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
“Over every form, and throat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only, it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case, almost, in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese 30 houses with cane tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way; I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside; come to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.”
Anon, there would come suddenly a dream of a far different character, — a tumultuous dream, — commencing with music, and 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 mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity.
“Somewhere, but I knew not where, — somehow, but I knew not how, — by some beings, I knew not by whom, — a battle, a strife, an agony was traveling 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 is usual in dreams, where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement,) had the power, and yet had not 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 caves 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!”
31When did ever man, like this man, realize “the fierce vexation of a dream”? As with Byron’s Manfred, the voice of incantation rang forever in his ears: —
“Though thy slumber may be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep;
There are shades which will not vanish,
There are thoughts thou canst not banish;
— And to thee shall night deny
All the quiet of her sky.”
How fearfully does he make us feel that
“This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering happier things;”
and we would fain say to him:
“Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Here, were it not needless, we might pause to speak of the egregious folly of those persons who fancy that by swallowing opium like De Quincey, they may have De Quincey’s visions and dreams. As well might they expect to produce an explosion by touching a match, not to gunpowder, but to a lump of lead. Opium was, indeed, the teasing irritant of De Quincey’s genius; but the genius was in him, or the visions would not have come. Dryden was most inspired after a dose of salts; but a commonplace man will never be able to dash off an “Alexander’s Feast,” though he take pills till he bankrupt Brandreth. He will have “all the contortions of the Sibyl without the inspiration.” A booby will remain a booby still, though he feed upon the nectar and ambrosia of the gods.
Having yielded to the Circean spells of opium, De Quincey lay from 1817 to 1821 in a kind of intellectual torpor, utterly incapable of sustained exertion. At last, his nightly visions became so insupportable that he determined 32 to abjure the deadly drug; and, after a desperate struggle, the foul fiend was nearly exorcised. But long after its departure, he suffered most keenly; his sleep was still tumultuous; and like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it was still (in the tremendous line of Milton)
“With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.”
It was at this time that he began those literary labors which have made his fame, and which have enabled the world to see what mighty results he might have accomplished, if opium had not enfeebled his powers. Writing the first part of the “Confessions” in 1821, he from that time plied his pen with great, but fitful industry, on various publications, such as “Blackwood’s Magazine,” “Tait’s,” the “North British Review,” “Hogg’s Instructor,” and the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.” Till 1827 he continued to live at Grasmere, with occasional visits to London, when he changed his residence for two years to Edinburgh, — after which he took p his abode again among the Westmoreland hills, in a “rich farm-house, flowing with milk and honey, with mighty barns and spacious pastures,” near his former cottage at Grasmere. To this charming rural retreat he invited Charles Knight and his family to visit him, in a letter such as only the Opium-Eater could write. “And now, my friend,” he urges, “think what a glorious El Dorado of milk and butter, and cream cheeses, and all other dairy products, I can offer you morning, noon, and night. You may absolutely bathe in new milk, or even in cream; and you shall bathe, if you like it. I know that you care not much for luxuries for the dinner-table; else, though our luxuries are few and 33 simple, I could offer you some temptations, — mountain lamb equal to Welsh; char famous to the antipodes; trout and pike from the very lake within twenty-five feet of our door; bread, such as you have never presumed to dream of, made of our own wheat, not doctored and separated by the usual miller’s process into fine insip flour, and coarse, that is, merely dirty-looking white, but all ground down together, which is the sole receipt (experto crede) for having rich, lustrous, red-brown, ambrosial bread; new potatoes, of celestial earthiness and raciness, which, with us, last to October; and finally, milk, milk, milk — cream, cream, cream, (hear it, thou benighted Londoner!) in which you must and shall bathe.” De Quincey’s last years were spent at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, Scotland, where he died December 8, 1859, in his seventy-fifth year. During the last three or four years of his life, he suffered exquisite pain from a constant gnawing in the stomach, which impelled him some days to walk fifteen miles at a time, and which he believed was owing to the presence there of a voracious living parasite. But for his obligations to his wife and daughters, he declared, the temptation to commit suicide would have been greater than he could have resisted; and he repeatedly announced his intention of bequeathing his body to the surgeons for a post mortem examination into his strange disease.
Physically, De Quincey was a frail, slender-looking man, exceedingly diminutive in stature, with small, clearly-chiselled features, as pale almost as alabaster, a large head, and a singularly high, square forehead. The head showed behind a want of animal force. The lips were curiously expressive and subtle in their character; 34 the eyes, that seemed to have seen much sorrow, peered out of two rings of darkness; and there was a peculiarly high and regular arch in the wrinkles of his brow, which was “loaded with thought.” All that met him were struck with the measured, silvery, yet somewhat hollow and unearthly tones of his voice, the more impressive that the flow of his talk was unhesitating and unbroken. Though capable of undergoing a great deal of labor and fatigue, he declares that his body was the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable human system, and that he “should almost have been ashamed to bequeath his wretched structure to any respectable dog.” Of his odd, eccentric character, no adequate account ever has been, or, probably will be given, so removed were his from all the normal conditions of human nature. In his boyhood the shiest of children, “naturally dedicated to despondency,” he was passionately fond of peace, — had a perfect craze for being despised, — considered contempt as the only security for unmolested repose, — and always sought to hide his accomplishments from the curiosity of strangers. He tells us humorously, and no doubt truthfully, how, after he had reached manhood, he was horrified at a party in London when he saw a large number of guests filing in one by one, and guessed from their looks that they had come to “lionize” the Opium-Eater. It has been questioned if he ever knew what it is “to eat a good dinner,” or could ever comprehend the nature of such a felicity. He had an ear most perfectly attuned to the enjoyment of “beauty born of murmuring sound,” and one of his most exquisite pleasures was listening to instrumental, and especially vocal, music; yet a discord, a wrong note, was agony to him; and it 35 is said that, on one occasion, he with ludicrous solemnity apostrophized his unhappy fate as one over whom a cloud of the darkest despair had been drawn, because a peacock had just come to live within hearing distance of him, and not only the terrible yells of the accursed biped pierced him to the soul, but the continued terror of their recurrence kept his nerves in agonizing tension during the intervals of silence. In this sensitiveness to harsh noises he reminds one of the poet Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morning to his own and the neighboring farm-yards, in terms hardly merited by a Nero.
In everything that concerned the happiness of others, De Quincey was the very soul of courtesy. A gentleman who visited him repeatedly at Lasswade, tells us that for every woman, however humble, he seemed to have the profoundest reverence; and when, in walking along the country highway together, they met any person in female attire, however lowly or meanly clad, — were she fine lady or servant girl, — De Quincey would turn aside from the road, back up against the hedge, and pulling off his hat, bow and continue bowing profoundly, till she had passed beyond them. While listening to the mythical and fearfully wearisome recital of an old crone at Melrose Abbey, he continued bowing, with his hat off, to the end, with as much deference as if she had been a duchess. A correspondent of a New York journal, who spent some hours at his Scottish home, gives an additional illustration of his tender regard for the feelings of the lowly: —
“There was a few moments’ pause in the ‘table talk,’ when one of the daughters asked our opinion of Scotland and the Scotch. De Quincey had been in a kind of reverie, from which the question aroused him. Turning to us, he said, in a kindly, half-paternal manner, ‘The servant that waits at 36 my table is a Scotch girl. It may be that you have something severe to say about Scotland. I know that I like the English church and dislike many things about the Puritanical Scotch; but I never utter anything that might wound my servant. Heaven knows that the lot of a poor servant girl is hard enough, and if there is any person in the world of whose feelings I am especially tender, it is those of a female compelled to do for us our drudgery. Speak as freely as you choose, but please reserve your censure, if you have any, for the moments when she is absent from the room.’ Un gentilhomme est toujours un gentilhomme, a man of true sensibility and courtesy will manifest it on all occasions, toward the powerless as toward the strong. When the dinner was ended and the waiting girl had left, his eloquent tongue gave the Ultra-Puritanism of Scotland such castigation, that we looked around us with a shudder, expecting to see the ghost of John Knox stalking into the room, fluid-hot with holy wrath.”
Though the author of a profound, philosophic treatise on political economy, De Quincey was in all money matters a child. Brooding over great intellectual problems he gave no thought to pounds, shillings, and pence, or questions touching the payment of weekly bills. Only the most immediate, craving necessities could extract from him an acknowledgment of the vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilized society; and only while the necessity lasted, did the acknowledgment exist. He would arrive late at a friend’s door, and represent in his usual silvery voice and measured rhetoric, the urgent necessity he had for the immediate and absolute use of a certain sum of money; and if he thought the friend hesitated, or the time seemed long before the required loan was forthcoming, — a loan, perhaps, of seven shillings and sixpence, — he would rummage his waistcoat pocket in search of a document which, he would confidently declare, was an ample security, and which would prove to be, when the crumpled paper was spread out, a bank not for £50! It was the opinion of those who knew him well, that, had the bank note been accepted, his friend would never have heard anything more of the transaction.
37Mr. John Hill Burton, in “The Book-Hunter,” to which we are indebted for these particulars, has related a variety of other incidents, similarly illustrative of De Quincey’s character. Sometimes a visitor of De Quincey, made oblivious of the lapse of time by the charm of his conversation, would discover, at a late hour, that “lang Scots’ miles” lay between his host’s and his own home. Thereupon De Quincey would volunteer to accompany the forlorn traveler, and guide him through the difficulties of the way; for had not his midnight wanderings and musings made him familiar with all the intricacies of the road? Roofed by a huge wide-awake, which makes his tiny figure look like the stalk of some great fungus, with a lantern of more than common dimensions in his hand, away he goes, down the wooded path, up the steep bank, along the brawling stream, and across the waterfall; and ever as he goes, there comes from him a continued stream of talk concerning the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and other kindred themes. Having seen his guest home, he would still continue walking on, until, weariness overtaking him, he would take his rest like some poor mendicant, under a hayrick, or in a wet furrow. No wonder that he used to denounce, with fervent eloquence, the barbarous and brutal provision of the law of England which rendered sleeping in the open air an act of vagrancy, and so punishable, if the sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself; “a thing,” adds Mr. Burton, “which he could never give under any circumstances.” His social habits were as eccentric as everything else pertaining to him. Being detained one evening at Prof. Wilson’s in Edinburgh, when in a great hurry, by a shower, he remained nearly a year. Mrs. Gordon, Prof. Wilson’s daughter, states that at this time his dose of 38 laudanum was an ounce a day, — an amount which, though small compared with what he had formerly taken, was sufficient to prostrate animal life in the morning. “It was no unfrequent night,” she says, “to find him in his room, lying upon the rug in front of the fire, his head resting upon a book, with his arms crossed over his breast, plunged into profound slumber. For several hours he would lie in this state, until the effect of the torpor had passed away.”
When he was invited to a dinner-party, no one ever thought of waiting dinner for him. He came and departed always at his own sweet will, neither burdened with punctualities, nor burdening others by exacting them. “The festivities of the afternoon are far on when a commotion is heard in the hall, as if some dog, or other stray animal has forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival; he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? a street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy’s duffle great coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a parti-colored belcher handkerchief: on his feet are list-shoes, covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers, — some one suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink; but De Quincey never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them. What can be the theory of such a costume? The simplest thing in the world, — it consisted of the fragments of apparel nearest at hand. Had chance thrown to him a court single-breasted coat, with a bishop’s apron, a kilt, and top boots, in these he would have made his entry.” One of his peculiarities was an intense dislike for shirts, — of wearing which he was as innocent as Adam. Unlike Coleridge’s father, who, 39 starting on a journey with six shirts, came home wearing the entire half dozen, De Quincey sloughed off this garment almost as soon as his good wife had persuaded him to put it on.
De Quincey was a prodigious reader, had an anaconda-like digestion, and assimilated his mental food with amazing rapidity. An ardent lover of books, he cared nothing for pet editions, — the niceties and luxuries of paper, printing, and binding. Tree-calf and sheep, Turkey-morocco and muslin, — were all one to him. His pursuit of books was like that of the savage who seeks but to appease the hunger of the moment. Mr. Burton says that if his intellectual appetite craved a passage in the Œdipus, or in the Mediea, or in Plato’s Republic, he would be content with the most tattered fragment of the volume, if it contained what he wanted; but on the other hand, he would not hesitate to seize upon your tall copy in Russia, gilt and tooled. Nor would he hesitate to lay his sacrilegious hands upon an editio princeps, — even to wrench out the twentieth volume of your “Encyclopédie Méthodique” or “Ersch und Gruber,” leaving a vacancy like an extracted front tooth, and carrying it off to his den of Cacus. “Some legend there is,” says the same amusing writer, “of a book-creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outward; while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic Russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady.” In common with the whole tribe of book-borrowers, he rarely returned a book loaned to him, folio or quarto, single or one of a set; though sometimes the book was recognized at large, greatly enhanced in value 40 by a profuse edging of manuscript notes. When short of writing paper, he never hesitated to tear out the leaves of a broad-margined book, whether his own or belonging to another. It is even reported that he once gave in “copy” written “on the edges of a tall octavo Somnium Scipionibus; and as he did not obliterate the original matter, the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble between the letter-press Latin and the manuscript English.” It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of these piratical proceedings, none of his friends ever complained of him. They never said, as did Southey of Wordsworth, that letting him into one’s library was “like letting a bear into a tulip garden.”
De Quincey’s indifference to the fate of his printed writings is a peculiarity not less marked than the other traits of his strange, prismatic genius. Not till the very end of his life, and then, we believe, only at the suggestion of an American publisher, did he set about collected his scattered papers, — a feat which he once declared “that not the archangel Gabriel, nor his multipotent adversary, dare attempt.” It is to the honor of our country that, like the splendid essays of Macaulay, the twenty-four volumes of the Opium-Eater’s writings were first published in Boston; and it would be pleasant to see confirmed a statement we have met with in a New York newspaper, that during the closing years of his life, the broad and brilliant sunrise of his fame in the United States did more than any other single thing to stimulate him to continuous literary labor and to kindle his literary enthusiasm.
Turning from De Quincey the man to De Quincey the author, the first thing that strikes us is the extraordinary depth and compass of his knowledge. He never seems to 41 put forth all his learning on any subject, nor are there any signs of “cram” in his writings. His thought comes from a brimming reservoir, and never shows the mud at the bottom. Indeed, we know of no man who more completely realizes his own wonderful description of a great scholar, as “one endowed not merely with a great memory, but with an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angels of the resurrection, what else were but the dust of dead men’s bones, and breathing into them the unity of life.”
When we consider the number and variety of the themes he has discussed, many of them of the most recondite, out-of-the-way character, and especially when we think of his digressions, quotations, notes, allusions, and extrajudicial opinions, we are astonished at the vast and eccentric range of his reading, and still more at the tenacity of a memory by which such portentous acquisitions could be held. He seems to have been his own encyclopaedia, quoting, wherever he chanced to be, all that he wished to quote, even dates and references, without the aid of a library. Ranging over all the fields of inquiry, he is perpetually surprising you with side glimpses and hints of truths which he cannot at present follow up. Often on a topic seemingly the most remote from abstract philosophy, through a mere allusion or hint, chasms are opened to you in the depths of speculation, and the ghosts of buried mediaeval problems are made to stalk before you. We know of no other memory which is so large as De Quincey’s, and yet so personal; so ample, and yet so accurate; which is at once so objective, and yet so subjective, — giving the vividness of self 42 to outward acquisition, and to the consciousness of self the enlargement of imperial knowledge.
Again, it is rarely that a scholar, especially one who has spent so much time in the nooks and hidden corners of learning, has been so close an observer of character. All of his works, but especially his “Autobiographic Sketches” and “Literary Reminiscences,” are strewn with passages showing that while it was a peculiarity of his intellect to be exquisitely introspective, he was yet marvellously swift in his appreciations of men and things, and noted personal traits with Boswellian minuteness. In discovering motives and feelings by their outward manifestations, — by the most microscopic peculiarities of look, shape, tone, or gesture, — he was as acute as Lavater. Another rare endowment, which he has to a wonderful degree, is the power of detecting resemblances, — hidden analogies, — parallelisms, connecting things otherwise wholly remote. Often, he tells us, he was mortified by compliments to his memory, which, in fact, were due to “the far higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing analogies, and, by means of these aerial pontoons, passing over like lightning from one topic to another.” To this power we may trace much of the excellence of his criticism, the keenness of penetration with which he sees, not only into the genius, but all round the life of an author. Perhaps no literary critic has equalled him in making incidents in a writer’s life, unnoticed by other men, flash light upon his genius; and, again, in making hidden peculiarities of his genius clear up mysteries in his life. Hence he never repeats the old, worn-out commonplaces of criticism, but, breaking away from the traditional views, startles you with opinions as novel as they are acute and ingenious.
43Who can forget his original and admirable distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power? “What,” he asks, “do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power; that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward, — a step ascending, as upon a Jacob’s ladder, from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from the first to the last, carry you farther on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending, into another element, where earth is forgotten.”
Again: how charming to a lover of intellectual subtlety is his reasoning concerning the Essenes! With what a keenness of philosophical criticism, — with what a prodigality of learning, logic, and illustration, — does De Quincey refute the popular dogmas about Pope; that he was a writer of the Gallic school; that he was a second or third rate poet, and that his distinctive merit was correctness; when he was, in fact, a great impassioned, musical thinker of social life, who had in his soul innate germs of grandeur, which did not open into power, or which had but an imperfect growth. Again: how adroitly 44 he unmasks and scalps the superficially omniscient and overrated Brougham, who has “deluged Demosthenes with his wordy admiration!” With how firm a grasp he throttles “Junius”; how keenly he dissects that brilliant mocking-bird, Sheridan; and how hollow the pompous Parr feels in his grip! This exquisite subtlety in discriminating the resemblances and differences of things is one of the most remarkable traits of De Quincey’s genius. In this, as in the wide range of his intellectual sympathies, and in his habit of minutely dissecting his own emotions, he resembled Coleridge; but in other respects they stood in almost polar antithesis. De Quincey, it has been truly said, was a Greek; but Coleridge was essentially a German in his culture, tastes, and habits of mind. De Quincey had a dry, acute, critical intellect, piercing as a sword-blade, and as brilliant and relentless; Coleridge was a poet of “imagination all compact,” with a mind of tropical fruitfulness and splendor, and a sensibility as delicate as a woman’s. In thus differentiating De Quincey from the “noticeable man, with large, gray eyes,” we would not intimate that, with all his intellectual acumen, he had not something far better than this metaphysic, hair-splitting talent. Though he absolutely revels in nice distinctions and scrupulous qualifications, he was not a dry Duns Scotus, a juiceless Thomas Aquinas. While his logic cut like a razor, his imagination burned like a furnace. Though he had a schoolman’s passion for logical forms, and could have beaten the enemies of Reuchlin at their own weapons, his rhetorical aptitudes were profound and varied, and his speculative imagination was little less than wonderful in its range and power.
De Quincey’s humor is of a kind which is not easy to 45 characterize. Like everything belonging to him, it is odd, unique, as original as his genius. Always playful and stingless, it takes at one time the form of banter, at another of mock dignity. Now it speaks with admiration, or with a dry, business tone of things usually regarded with indignation or horror; now it mocks at gravity, cracks jests upon venerable persons or institutions, quizzes the owls of society, and pulls the beards of dignitaries. At one hour it greets us in the grave robe of the critic, and pokes fun at the learned; at another, in the scarlet dress of the satirist, and blasts hypocrisy with its ridicule; and again it comes to us in motley, with cap and bells, and reminds us of Touchstone’s wise fooling and the mingled pathos and bitterness of the poor fool in Lear. One of the commonest forms of De Quincey’s playfulness is exaggeration, — the expenditure of pages of the gravest and most elaborate ratiocination upon a trifle, — the devotion of a senior wrangler’s analytic powers to the dissection of the merest crotchet; reminding one in this, it has been well said, of a great musical composer, who seats himself before a stately organ, and choosing as his theme some street song, “O dear, what can the matter be?” or “Polly, put the kettle on,” pursues it through figures of surpassing pomp and orchestral tumult, — glorifying it into intricate harmonies, and transfiguring its original meanness into bewildering bravura and interminable fantasia. The following passage from “The English Mail Coach,” while it illustrates in some degree De Quincey’s peculiar humor, interveined, as it often is, with grave remark, is also a fine specimen of his measured and stately style:
“The modern modes of traveling cannot compare with the mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not, however, 46 as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was — Non magna loquimur, as upon railways, but magna vivimus. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed: we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first, — but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man, — kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more or less dim, in his servant, the horse.
“But now, on the new system of traveling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man’s imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; interagencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village or solitary home on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.”
The crowning achievement of De Quincey in this department is his “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts.” which all will admit to be a masterpiece of cynicism, without a parallel in our literature. The principle on which this paper is based, is that everything is to be judged, in an æsthetic point of view, by the end it professes to accomplish, and is to be considered good or bad, — that is, for its own purposes, — according to the degree in which 47 it accomplishes that end. As Aristotle would say, “the virtue of a thing is to be judged by its end.” For example, dirt, according to Lord Palmerston’s famous definition, is only “matter in the wrong place.” Put it at the bottom of a fruit-tree, and so far is it from being a nuisance, that the dirtier it is the better. So with murder; leave out of view the ultimate purpose of the thing, and take it simply on its own merits, and the more murderous it is, the more does it come up to its fundamental idea. It follows that there are clever, brilliant, even ideal murders, and that they may be criticised by dilettanti and amateurs, like a painting, or statue, or other work of art. In a similar spirit De Quincey claims that a proper proportion of rogues is essential to the proper mounting of a metropolis, — that is, the idea is not complete without them.
What can be more exquisite than the fooling in the following passage: “Believe me, it is not necessary to a man’s respectability that he should commit a murder. Many a man has passed through life most respectably, without attempting any species of homicide, good, bad, or indifferent. It is your first duty to ask yourself, quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent? — we cannot all be brilliant men in this life. . . . A man came to me as the candidate for the place of my servant, just then vacant. He had the reputation of having dabbled a little in our art, some said, not without merit. What startled me, however, was, that he supposed this art to be part of the regular duties in my service. Now that was a thing I would not allow; so I said at once: ‘ . . . If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to 48 drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. Principiis obsta, — that’s my rule.’ ”
Of pathos, we need only cite “The Confessions,” “The Vision of a Sudden Death,” “Joan of Arc,” and “The Household Wreck,” to show that De Quincey was a consummate master. The fine paper on “The English Mail-coach,” of which we have already spoken, has several passages which show that he had an ear delicately attuned to
“The still sad music of humanity.”
— one of which we cannot forbear quoting. After stating that “the mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo,” he proceeds to describe a ride to London in a coach that bore the tidings of a great victory in Spain. At one village where the coach stopped, a poor woman, seeing De Quincey with a newspaper in his hand, came to him. She had a son there in the 23d Dragoons. “My heart sank within me as she made that answer.” This regiment, originally three hundred and fifty strong, had made a sublime charge that day, paralyzing a French column six thousand strong, and had come back one in four! De Quincey told her all that he had the heart to tell her of that dearly bought 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 49 leaped their horses over all obstacles as gayly 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 heads upon their mother’s knees, or sunk to sleep in her arms. Strange as it is, she seemed to have no fear of her son’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 was secretly meant for him.”
De Quincey is not only a great master of pathos, but his genius for the sublime is equally manifest; it would be hard to name a modern English writer who had a mind more sensitive to emotions of grandeur. One of the most striking peculiarities of his sensuous framework, was his exquisite sensibility to the luxuries and grandeurs of sound. Keenly alive to the pomps and glories of the eye, it was through the ear that he drank in the highest intoxications of sense; and to obtain “a grand debauch” of that nature, there was hardly any sacrifice that he was not willing to make. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that his style is preëminently musical, and that from music he draws many of his aptest and most impressive metaphors.
De Quincey’s dialectic skill and ability in handling practical themes are shown in his “Logic of Political Economy,” a work in which he defends and illustrates the doctrines of Ricardo, and which drew forth the praise of J. S. Mill. In speaking of his motives for writing this treatise, he says of certain others on the same subject: “I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungous heads to powder with a lady’s fan.”
50The great, crowning glory of De Quincey is his style, upon which he bestowed incredible labor, — rewriting some pages of the “Confessions,” as he told a friend of ours, not less than sixty times. His style is an almost perfect vehicle of his ideas, — accommodating itself, as it does, with marvellous flexibility, to the highest flights of imagination, to the minutest subtleties of reasoning, and to the wildest freaks of humor, — in short, to all the exigencies of his thought. In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression, — ideas so subtle, or so vague and elusive, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all. — are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. It is the most passionately eloquent, the most thoroughly poetical prose, our language has produced, the organ-like variety and grandeur of its cadence affecting the mind as only perfect verse affects it. Grave, stately, and sustained, when expressing solemn and imperial thoughts, — light and carelessly graceful when playing with the theme, it is at once sharp and sweet, flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive; now expressing chapters in a sentence, now amplifying a single thought into pages of rich, glowing, and delightful eloquence. Even Milton, in his best prose, is not a greater master of melody and harmony; and in some of the grandest passages, where the thought and feeling go on swelling and deepening from the first note to the last in a lofty climax, the language of De Quincey can be compared only to the swell and crash of an orchestra.
It is true his style bristles with scholasticisms; but how they tell! You feel, as you read, that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he uses; who has 51 analyzed the simples of all his compound phrases. The chief characteristic of his style is elaborate stateliness; his principal figure, personification. Generally his sentences are long; the very opposite of those asthmatic and short-winded ones which he pronounces a defect in French writers; and they are as full of life and joints as a serpent. It was said of Coleridge that no stenographer could do justice to his lectures, because, though he spoke deliberately, yet it was impossible, from the first part of his sentences, even to guess how they would end. Each clause was a new surprise, and the close often as unexpected as a thunderbolt. So with the Opium-Eater: “the great Platonic year,” as Hazlitt says of Sir Thomas Browne, “revolves in one of his periods;” or, as De Quincey himself says of Bishop Berkeley, “he passes with the utmost ease and speed from tar-water to the Trinity, from a moleheap to the thrones of the Godhead.” Of all the great writers, he is one of the easiest we know of to read aloud. So perfect is the construction of his sentences, — so exquisitely articulated are all their vertebræ and joints, — so musical are his longest periods, even when they accomplish a cometary sweep ere he closes, that the most villainous elocutionist, in reading them, cannot help laying the emphases in the right place.
And yet, with all these wondrous gifts as a writer, De Quincey has one glaring defect, which neutralizes in a great degree the force of his splendid genius, — frustrates all adequate success. Among the fairies who dropped gifts into his cradle, there was one whose gift was a curse. She gave him Irresolution, — the want of coördinating power, of central control, of intellectual volition. It is for this reason that De Quincey, with all his transcendent abilities and immense 52 learning, has no commanding position in English literature, — exerts little influence on his age, — is the centre of no circle. Unhappily this weakness of will was still further aggravated by opium; and of the Opium-Eater he himself tells us, half sportively, but too truly, that it is a characteristic never to finish anything. To these two causes may be ascribed the abiding deficiency of his writings, — the fact that, with all his genius and learning, he exerts less positive influence than many a man with a tithe of his ability. To foreigners he is hardly known. The one melancholy reflection which his writings suggest is that they are all provokingly fragmentary; he has produced not one complete and connected whole. As his power of conception is logical, rather than creative, he analyzes wonderfully, but compounds imperfectly, — is a philosopher rather than a poet. Tantalus-like, he stands up to the chin in learning, but is unable, save by a desperate effort of the will, to lure it to the lip. Over his head hang golden fruits, but only the most convulsive, dexterous grasp rescues them from those gales of nervous distraction which would scatter them to the four winds. Hence his writings, with all their marvellous subtlety and exquisite beauty, are chaotic and indeterminate, — tend to no fixed goal, — are as purposeless as dreams. They are reveries, outpourings, improvisations, — not works. He modulates and weaves together fragments of divinest song; but gives us no symphony. Gleams come upon his page from deep central fires; lights flash across it from distant horizons; but the light is that of a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, not the steady throbbing of a star by which men may shape their course. As Carlyle says of John Stirling’s conversation, De Quincey’s writings are “beautifullest sheet-lightning, not to be condensed into 53 thunderbolts.” Hence it is that he has charmed, delighted, astonished his age, but failed to impress it.
De Quincey himself appears sensible of this vagrancy, this peripatetic instinct of his mind, and calls it an intermitting necessity, affecting his particular system like that of moulting in birds, or that of migration which affects swallows. “Nobody,” says he, “ is angry with swallows for vagabondizing periodically, and surely I have a better right to indulge therein than a swallow; I take precedency of a swallow in any company whatever.” Who, after this naïve and ingenious “confession and avoidance,” can have the heart to complain? Prim folks, who cling to the dramatic unities, and all that, and who are shocked by a style that deviates from the reproachless routine of Hugh Blair, D.D., will, no doubt, continue to be scandalized by this dreamer. But those who have drunk inspiration from Richter and deep draughts of wisdom from Montaigne, will forgive De Quincey, too, his vagrancy, for the sake of its erratic pleasantness. As Menzel says of the German rambler: “We would willingly pardon every one his mannerism, if he were but a Jean Paul; and a fault of richness is always better than one of poverty,” — so we may say of the English. Who would have thought to “pull up” Samuel Taylor Coleridge in one of his infinitely parenthetical monologues, because he diverged from the grand trunk line, and hurried you into insulated recesses and sequestered Edens unnoted in the way bill? No man, surely, but a grim utilitarian, reduced to the very lowest denomination.
This very discursiveness and libertinism of intellect, — this tendency to wander from the main channel of his thought, — to steer toward every port but that set down 54 in the bill of lading, — lent, it must be confessed, — an indescribable charm to De Quincey’s conversation as it welled out from those capacious, overflowing cells of thought and memory, which a single word, or hint, or token could agitate. Gilfillan has finely described his small, thin, piercing voice, winding out so distinctly his subtleties of thought and feeling, — his long and strange sentences evolving like a piece of complicated music; and the Ettrick Shepherd, in the “Noctes,” addresses him as one having the “voice of a nicht-wanderin’ man, laigh and lone, pitched on the key o’ a wimblin’ burn speakin’ to itsel’ in the silence, aneath the moon and stars.” A gentleman who visited De Quincey in 1854, thus records his impressions of him, after a half hour’s conversation: “We have listened to Sir William Hamilton at his own fireside, to Carlyle walking in the parks of London, to Lamartine in the midst of a favored few at his own house, to Cousin at the Sorbonne, and to many others; but never have we heard such sweet music of eloquent speech as then flowed from De Quincey’s tongue. Strange light beamed from that grief-worn face, and for a little while that weak body, so long fed upon by pain, seemed to be clothed upon with supernatural youth.”
Eloquent as De Quincey was, his conversational powers were at their full height only when he was under the influence of his favorite drug. The best time to hear the lion roar was at four or five o’clock in the morning; then, when recovering from the stupor into which the opium had plunged him, his tongue seemed touched with an eloquence almost divine. It mattered little what was the theme of his high argument; whether beeves or butterflies, St. Basil or Æschylus; upon the grandest or the 55 most trivial, he would descant in the same lenem susurrum, — never losing a certain mellow earnestness, yet never rising into declamation, — in sentences exquisitely jointed, and with the enthusiasm of a mystic, the subtlety of a schoolman, and the diction of a poet. It is a curious fact that, though he was the soul of courtesy, he never for a moment thought of adapting his language to the understanding of his listener. The most illiterate porter, housemaid, or even prowling beggar, he would address on the most trivial themes, with as much pomp of rhetoric, in language as precise and measured, and abounding in as many “long-tailed words in osity and ation,” — as that in which he would have addressed an Oxford professor on a vexed point of metaphysics, or Porson on a classical emendation. Mrs. Gordon, in her life of Professor Wilson, has given a specimen of the style in which the Opium-Eater was wont to address her father’s housekeeper, when directing her how to prepare his food; and did it come from a less trustworthy source, we should take the order as a burlesque or caricature. Wishing his meat cut with the grain, he would say: “Owing to dyspepsia afflicting my system, and the possibility of any additional derangement of the stomach taking place, consequences incalculably distressing would arise, — so much so, indeed, as to increase nervous irritation, and prevent me from attending to matters of overwhelming importance, — if you do not remember to cut the mutton in a diagonal, rather than in a longitudinal form.” No wonder that the cook, — a simple Scotchwoman, — stood aghast, exclaiming: “Weel, I never heard the like o’ that in a’ my days; the body has an awfu’ sicht o’ words. If it had been my ain master that was wanting his dinner, he would ha’ ordered 56 a hale table-fu wi’ little mair than a waff o’ his haun, and here’s a’ this claver about a bit o’ mutton nae bigger than a prin. Mr. De Quinshey would make a great preacher, — though I’m thinkin’ a hantle o’ the folks wouldna ken what he was drivin’ at.”*
Doubtless the description of Praed’s vicar, applied to De Quincey, would be no exaggeration:
“His talk is like a stream which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses;
It slips from politics to puns,
It glides from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For skinning eels, or shoeing horses.”
In conclusion, we would urge those of our readers, especially our young readers, who are strangers to the Opium-Eater’s twenty-four volumes, to read them at their earliest opportunity. If they would make the acquaintance of one of the greatest scholars and thinkers of our century, — of a piercing and imperial intellect, which, in all the great faculties of analysis, combination, and reception, has had few superiors in modern times, — of one of the subtlest yet most sympathetic critics our literature can boast, whether of art, nature, or life, — of a writer who, in an age of scoffing and skepticism, has never sown the seeds of doubt in any human heart, — of a writer, who, by the magnetism of his genius, the affluence of his knowledge, his logical acumen, his imaginative wealth, his marvellous word-painting, given a charm to every theme he touches; — above all, if they 57 would know the might and majesty, the pomp, the delicacy, and the beauty of our noble English tongue when its winged words are commanded by a master, — we would conjure them to study the writings of De Quincey. Though he has left no great single work to which we can point as a monument of his genius, and his most precious ideas are in the condition of the Sibyl’s leaves after they had been scattered by the wind, we may, nevertheless, say in the words of an English reviewer, “that the exquisite finish of his style, with the scholastic rigor of his logic, form a combination which centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study, as one of the marvels of English literature.
* The account here given of De Quincey’s conversation is necessarily a repetition, with some changes, of that given in the author’s former book, “The Great Conversers, and Other Essays.”