not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
been surveyed. His "drunken _Noctes_," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
and about scenery. Nor is it questionable that on these subjects he is
seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the _Essays
Critical and Imaginative_, and the _Recreations of Christopher North_.
Speaking generally they fall into three divisions--essays on sport in
general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
and articles redacted in the _Recreations_ under the general title of
"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
collection, also redacted by the author for the _Recreations_, entitled
"The Moors." This last is perhaps the best of all the sporting and
descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when he deals with
Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]
And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_
wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a
night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
personal differences only less curious.
I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
reviewing--the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
being interpreted, consist first in expressing agreement or
disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
better than he actually did, or that he ever could have polished and
sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
accessible.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name the three
very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the famous Fairy's
Funeral in the _Recreations_, the Shepherd's account of his recovery
from illness in the _Noctes_, and, in a lighter vein, the picture of
girls bathing in "Streams."
X
DE QUINCEY[16]
In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
the end of that time. Certainly _The Traditions of the Rabbins_ was very
De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
work that was his own. Three, or nominally four, editions--one in the
decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
main--put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
to De Quincey, Professor Masson.[17] I may say, with hearty
acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
of De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
thoroughly with the subject.
Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
it so hard to strike a critical balance--to get a clear definite opinion
that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading--as on De Quincey. This is
partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
who has some interest in literature. To read the _Essay on Murder_, the
_English Mail Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_, _The Cæsars_, and half a score
other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for _les
âmes bien nées_, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
those whom they do charm. There are others--Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
instances--as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
finest lines. This kind of discovery
Cogit amare _minus_, _nec_ bene velle _magis_.
How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
edition. Many of the details of the _Confessions_ and the
_Autobiography_ have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who would
back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.
Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester--but apparently
not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
parents afterwards inhabited--on 15th August 1785. His father was a
merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
life--emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the
Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
distinction--Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others--who
figure largely in the _Autobiography_, but are never heard of
afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
income of £150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
ashamed of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun _vivâ voce_ (then a
much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
Middle Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life--an
oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
literary associates instead of being outlived by them--is that though we
hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
entirely from the last days of his life.
As for the autobiographic details in his _Confessions_ and elsewhere,
anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
affluence still, it would seem, of a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
as a man of letters by the first part of _The Confessions of an
Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_ for 1821. He began as a
magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
his constant habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
solely, for _Tait's Magazine_ and _Hogg's Instructor_. But his chief
literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.
So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
his impenetrability,--an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
and nothing else was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.
The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing and
re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
fourteen or sixteen.