accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here
in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
conversations attributed to him in the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, which are
said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
the text.
For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
preliminary part of the _Confessions_. The first is the more teasing,
because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
indulged in a kind of double rigmarole about the woman and the "bore"
in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
with some remarks on the relative status of Oxford Colleges. Then he
debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
in his own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."
Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
of his _Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected_; and,
on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
of his own performances. This in the author of the _Essay on Murder_ may
seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
refine a little I should say that there was very frequently, if not
generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
of Swift. The _Tale of a Tub_ is in appearance as daringly discursive as
anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
De Quincey fail to do.
Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
has been already noted, his extraordinary attraction for youth, is a
singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
mannered beauty of his finest style--the style, to quote his own words
once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic
of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.
This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
arrogant." Does anybody--not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
reach of reason--doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
brother in opium-eating against the _Confessions_, told some home truths
against that magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person--that is to say
that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
ought I to give that pain?"--I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
he was in any proper sense spiteful, that is to say that he ever wrote
either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.
The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
blunders--by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style--at
least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar--who declares
that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
than"--Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:--Milton, Wordsworth,
Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
_Wilhelm Meister_ is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in _Wilhelm_
of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
have written the article in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on the author
of _Faust_, of _Egmont_, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
deliberately assents to the opinion that _Werther_ is "superior to
everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
work," dismisses _Faust_ as something that "no two people have ever
agreed about," sentences _Egmont_ as "violating the historic truth of
character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, _ergo_,
let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.
One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of
jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his _punctilio_. That a man of
this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the _Blackwood_ set, together
with not a few writers in the _London Magazine_--the two literary
coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as a writer--had
deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also--as in the passage
about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died--can manage a certain kind of
sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in _The
Spanish Nun_, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
kind. Swift did not put _mollis abuti_ in the _Four last years of Queen
Anne_, nor Thackeray his _Punch_ jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.
And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
frequently unwise, and if his _exemplar_ were not specially _vitiis
imitabile_. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
and approaching new facets of it is so immense. Whether he was in truth
as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
rarest kind--the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
_Cæsars_ is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
_supercherie_ as in _The Tartars_ and _The Spanish Nun_, wonderfully
powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
like his powers in this department. Of these three men, Sir William
Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
and that deprived me of De Quincey."