The finale to the first part of the 'Suspiria,' as we find from a note
of the author's own, was to include 'The Dark Interpreter,' 'The Spectre
of the Brocken,' and 'Savannah-la-Mar.' The references to 'The Dark
Interpreter' in the latter would thus become intelligible, as the reader
is not there in any full sense informed who the 'Dark Interpreter' was;
and the piece, recovered from his MSS. and now printed, may thus be
regarded as having a special value for De Quincey students, and, indeed,
for readers generally. In _Blackwood's Magazine_ he did indeed
interpolate a sentence or two, and these were reproduced in the American
edition of the works (Fields's); but they are so slight and general
compared with the complete 'Suspiria' now presented, that they do not in
any way detract from its originality and value.
The master-idea of the 'Suspiria' is the power which lies in suffering,
in agony unuttered and unutterable, to develop the intellect and the
spirit of man; to open these to the ineffable conceptions of the
infinite, and to some discernment, otherwise impossible, of the
beneficent might that lies in pain and sorrow. De Quincey seeks his
symbols sometimes in natural phenomena, oftener in the creation of
mighty abstractions; and the moral of all must be set forth in the
burden of 'The Daughter of Lebanon,' that 'God may give by seeming to
refuse.' Prose-poems, as they have been called, they are deeply
philosophical, presenting under the guise of phantasy the profoundest
laws of the working of the human spirit in its most terrible
disciplines, and asserting for the darkest phenomena of human life some
compensating elements as awakeners of hope and fear and awe. The sense
of a great pariah world is ever present with him--a world of outcasts
and of innocents bearing the burden of vicarious woes; and thus it is
that his title is justified--_Suspiria de Profundis_: 'Sighs from the
Depths.'
We find De Quincey writing in his prefatory notice to the enlarged
edition of the 'Confessions' in November, 1856:
'All along I had relied upon a crowning grace, which I had reserved for
the final page of this volume, in a succession of some twenty or
twenty-five dreams and noon-day visions, which had arisen under the
latter stage of opium influence. These have disappeared; some under
circumstances which allow me a reasonable prospect of recovering them,
some unaccountably, and some dishonourably. Five or six I believe were
burned in a sudden conflagration which arose from the spark of a candle
falling unobserved amongst a very large pile of papers in a bedroom,
where I was alone and reading. Falling not _on_, but amongst and within
the papers, the fire would soon have been ahead of conflict, and, by
communicating with the slight woodwork and draperies of a bed, it would
have immediately enveloped the laths of the ceiling overhead, and thus
the house, far from fire-engines, would have been burned down in
half-an-hour. My attention was first drawn by a sudden light upon my
book; and the whole difference between a total destruction of the
premises and a trivial loss (from books charred) of five guineas was due
to a large Spanish cloak. This, thrown over and then drawn down tightly,
by the aid of one sole person, somewhat agitated, but retaining her
presence of mind, effectually extinguished the fire. Amongst the papers
burned partially, but not so burned as to be absolutely irretrievable,
was "The Daughter of Lebanon," and this I have printed and have
intentionally placed it at the end, as appropriately closing a record in
which the case of poor "Ann the Outcast" formed not only the most
memorable and the most suggestively pathetic incident, but also _that_
which, more than any other, coloured--or (more truly, I should say)
shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed--the great body
of opium dreams.'
After this loss of the greater portion of the 'Suspiria' copy, De
Quincey seems to have become indifferent in some degree to their
continuity and relation to each other. He drew the 'Affliction of
Childhood' and 'Dream Echoes,' which stood early in the order of the
'Suspiria,' into the 'Autobiographic Sketches,' and also the 'Spectre of
the Brocken,' which was meant to come somewhat later in the series as
originally planned; and, as we have seen, he appended 'The Daughter of
Lebanon' to the 'Opium Confessions,' without any reference, save in the
preface, to its really having formed part of a separate collection of
dreams.
From a list found among his MSS. we are able to give the arrangement of
the whole as it would have appeared had no accident occurred, and all
the papers been at hand. Those followed by a cross are those which are
now recovered, and those with a dagger what were reprinted either as
'Suspiria' or otherwise in Messrs. Black's editions.