Intellectually he was a man of a conservative turn of mind, with an
ingrained respect for the conventions of life, but temperamentally he was
a restless Vagabond, with a total disregard for the amenities of
civilization, asking for nothing except to live out his own dream-life.
Dealing with him as a writer, you found a shrewd, if wayward critic, with
no little of "John Bull" in his composition. Deal with him as a man, you
found a bright, kindly, nervous little man in a chronic state of
shabbiness, eluding the attention of friends so far as possible, and
wandering about town and country as if he had nothing in common with the
rest of mankind. His Vagabondage is shown best in his purely imaginative
work, and in the autobiographical sketches.
Small and insignificant in appearance to the casual observer, there was
something arresting, fascinating about the man that touched even the
irascible Carlyle. Much of his work, one can well understand, seemed to
this lover of facts "full of wire-drawn ingenuities." But with all his
contempt for phantasy, there was a touch of the dreamer in Carlyle, and
the imaginative beauty, apart from the fanciful prettiness in De
Quincey's work, would have appealed to him. For there was power,
intellectual grip, behind the shifting fancies, and both as a critic and
historian he has left behind him memorable work. As critic he has been
taken severely to task for his judgments on French writers and on many
lights of eighteenth-century thought. Certainly De Quincey's was not the
type of mind we should go to for an interpretative criticism of the
eighteenth century. Yet we must not forget his admirable appreciation of
Goldsmith. At his best, as in his criticism of Milton and Wordsworth, he
shows a fine, delicate, analytical power, which it is hard to overpraise.
"Obligations to Gombrom" do not afford the best qualification for the
historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the
late Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down
seriously to write history.
Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side
of great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked.
Especially striking is his _Revolt of the Tartars_--the flight eastward
of a Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to
Chinese territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes
rather than a continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he
had the power of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic
episodes in a nation's history.
A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his
intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be
interesting, not so much with the scholar's patient investigation as with
the pedestrian's delight in "fresh woods and pastures new."
A prolific writer for the magazines, it is inevitable that there should
be a measure that is ephemeral in De Quincey's voluminous writings. But
it is impossible not to be struck by the wide range of his intellectual
interests. A mind that is equally at home in the economics of Ricardo
and the transcendentalism of Wordsworth; that can turn with undiminished
zest from Malthus to Kant; that could deal lucidly with the "Logic of
Political Economy," despite the dream-world that finds expression in the
"impassioned prose"; that could delight in such broadly farcical
absurdities as "_Sortilege and Astrology_," and such delicately
suggestive studies as "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," a mind of
this adventurous and varied type is assuredly a very remarkable one.
That he should touch every subject with equal power was not to be
expected, but the analytic brilliance that characterizes even his
mystical writings enabled him to treat such subjects as political economy
with a sureness of touch and a logical grasp that has astonished those
who had regarded him as merely an inconsequential dreamer of dreams.