written, has removed much of the mystery; and it has also done much to
raise in some respects our estimate of his character. With all his
weaknesses De Quincey undoubtedly was a man who could excite love as
well as pity. Incapable, to a grotesque degree, of anything like
business, he did his best to discharge domestic duties: he had a
punctilious sense of honour, and got himself into difficulties by a
generosity which was certainly not corrected by the virtue of prudence.
But I will not attempt to sum up the facts, for which, as for a higher
estimate than I can subscribe of his intellectual position, I gladly
refer to his biography. I have only to do with the De Quincey of books
which have a singular fascination. De Quincey himself gives thanks for
four circumstances. He rejoices that his lot was cast in a rustic
solitude; that that solitude was in England: that his 'infant feelings
were moulded by the gentlest of sisters,' instead of 'horrid pugilistic
brothers;' and that he and his were members of 'a pure, holy, and' (the
last epithet should be emphasized) 'magnificent Church.' The
thanksgiving is characteristic, for it indicates his naïve conviction
that his admiration was due to the intrinsic merits of the place and
circumstances of his birth, and not to the accident that they were his
own. It would be useless to inquire whether a more bracing atmosphere
and a less retired spot might have been more favourable to his talents;
but we may trace the influence of these conditions of his early life
upon his subsequent career.
* * * * *
De Quincey implicitly puts forward a claim which has been accepted by
all competent critics. They declare, and he tacitly assumes, that he is
a master of the English language. He claims a sort of infallibility in
deciding upon the precise use of words and the merits of various styles.
But he explicitly claims something more. He declares that he has used
language for purposes to which it has hardly been applied by any prose
writers. The 'Confessions of an Opium-eater' and the 'Suspiria de
Profundis' are, he tells us, 'modes of impassioned prose, ranging under
no precedents that I am aware of in any literature.' The only
confessions that have previously made any great impression upon the
world are those of St. Augustine and of Rousseau; but, with one short
exception in St. Augustine, neither of those compositions contains any
passion, and, therefore, De Quincey stands absolutely alone as the
inventor and sole performer on a new musical instrument--for such an
instrument is the English language in his hands. He belongs to a genus
in which he is the only individual. The novelty and the difficulty of
the task must be his apology if he fails, and causes of additional glory
if he succeeds. He alone of all human beings who have written since the
world began, has entered a path, which the absence of rivals proves to
be encumbered with some unusual obstacles. The accuracy and value of so
bold a claim require a short examination. After all, every writer,
however obscure, may contrive by a judicious definition to put himself
into a solitary class. He has some peculiarities which distinguish him
from all other mortals. He is the only journalist who writes at a given
epoch from a particular garret in Grub Street, or the only poet who is
exactly six feet high and measures precisely forty-two inches round the
chest. Any difference whatever may be applied to purposes of
classification, and the question is whether the difference is, or is
not, of much importance. By examining, therefore, the propriety of De
Quincey's view of his own place in literature, we shall be naturally led
to some valuation of his distinctive merits. In deciding whether a bat
should be classed with birds or beasts, we have to determine the nature
of the beast and the true theory of his wings. And De Quincey, if the
comparison be not too quaint, is like the bat, an ambiguous character,
rising on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region.
De Quincey, then, announces himself as an impassioned writer, as a
writer in impassioned prose, and, finally, as applying impassioned prose
to confessions. The first question suggested by this assertion concerns
the sense of the word 'impassioned.' There is very little of what one
ordinarily means by passion in the Confessions or elsewhere. There are
no explosions of political wrath, such as animate the 'Letters on a
Regicide Peace,' or of a deep religious emotion, which breathes through
many of our greatest prose writers. The language is undoubtedly a
vehicle for sentiments of a certain kind, but hardly of that burning and
impetuous order which we generally indicate by impassioned. It is deep,
melancholy reverie, not concentrated essence of emotion; and the epithet
fails to indicate any specific difference between himself and many other
writers. The real peculiarity is not in the passion expressed, but in
the mode of expressing it. De Quincey resembles the story-tellers
mentioned by some Eastern travellers. So extraordinary is their power of
face, and so skilfully modulated are the inflections of their voices,
that even a European, ignorant of the language, can follow the narrative
with absorbing interest. One may fancy that if De Quincey's language
were emptied of all meaning whatever, the mere sound of the words would
move us, as the lovely word Mesopotamia moved Whitefield's hearer. The
sentences are so delicately balanced, and so skilfully constructed, that
his finer passages fix themselves in the memory without the aid of
metre. Humbler writers are content if they can get through a single
phrase without producing a decided jar. They aim at keeping up a steady
jog-trot, which shall not give actual pain to the jaws of the reader.
They no more think of weaving whole paragraphs or chapters into complex
harmonies, than an ordinary pedestrian of 'going to church in a galliard
and coming home in a coranto.' Even our great writers generally settle
down to a stately but monotonous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or
Gibbon, or are content with adopting a style as transparent and
inconspicuous as possible. Language, according to the common phrase, is
the dress of thought; and that dress is the best, according to modern
canons of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. De
Quincey scorns this sneaking maxim of prudence, and boldly challenges
our admiration by indulgence in what he often calls 'bravura.' His
language deserves a commendation sometimes bestowed by ladies upon rich
garments, that it is capable of standing up by itself. The form is so
admirable that, for purposes of criticism, we must consider it as
something apart from the substance. The most exquisite passages in De
Quincey's writings are all more or less attempts to carry out the idea
expressed in the title of the dream fugue. They are intended to be
musical compositions, in which words have to play the part of notes.
They are impassioned, not in the sense of expressing any definite
sentiment, but because, from the structure and combination of the
sentences, they harmonise with certain phases of emotion.
Briefly, De Quincey is doing in prose what every great poet does in
verse. The specific mark thus indicated is still insufficient to give
him a solitary position among writers. All great rhetoricians, as De
Quincey defines and explains the term, rise to the borders of poetry,
and the art which has recently been cultivated among us under the name
of word-painting may be more fitly described as an attempt to produce
poetical effects without the aid of metre. From most of the writers
described under this rather unpleasant phrase he differs by the
circumstance, that his art is more nearly allied to music than to
painting. Or, if compared to any painters, it must be to those who care
comparatively little for distinct portraiture or dramatic interest. He
resembles rather the school which is satisfied by contemplating
gorgeous draperies, and graceful limbs and long processions of imposing
figures, without caring to interpret the meaning of their works, or to
seek for more than the harmonious arrangement of form and colour. In
other words, his prose-poems should be compared to the paintings which
aim at an effect analogous to that of stately pieces of music. Milton is
the poet whom he seems to regard with the sincerest admiration; and he
apparently wishes to emulate the majestic rhythm of the 'God-gifted
organ-voice of England.' Or we may, perhaps, admit some analogy between
his prose and the poetry of Keats, though it is remarkable that he
speaks with very scant appreciation of his contemporary. The 'Ode to a
Nightingale,' with its marvellous beauty of versification and the dim
associations half-consciously suggested by its language, surpasses,
though it resembles, some of De Quincey's finest passages; and the
'Hyperion' might have been translated into prose as a fitting companion
for some of the opium dreams. It is in the success with which he
produces such effects as these that De Quincey may fairly claim to be
unsurpassed in our language. Pompous (if that word may be used in a good
sense) declamation in prose, where the beauty of the thought is lost in
the splendour of the style, is certainly a rare literary product. Of the
great rhetoricians whom De Quincey quotes in the Essay on Rhetoric just
noticed, such men as Burke and Jeremy Taylor lead us to forget the means
in the end. They sound the trumpet as a warning, not for the mere
delight in its volume of sound. Perhaps his affinity to Sir Thomas
Browne is more obvious; and one can understand the admiration which he
bestows upon the opening bar of a passage in the Urn-burial:--'Now since
these bones have rested quietly in the grave under the drums and
tramplings of three conquests,' &c. 'What a melodious ascent,' he
exclaims, 'as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from
the pomps of earth and from the sanctities of the grave! What a _fluctus
decumanus_ of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries,
but by vast periods of conquests and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs
and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides! And these vast successions of
time distinguished and figured by the uproars which revolve at their
inaugurations; by the drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the
chambers of forgotten dead--the trepidations of time and mortality
vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave!'
The commentator is seeking to eclipse the text, and his words are at
once a description and an example of his own most characteristic
rhetoric. Wordsworth once uttered an aphorism which De Quincey repeats
with great admiration: that language is not, as I have just said, the
dress, but 'the incarnation of thought.' But though accepting and
enforcing the doctrine by showing that the 'mixture is too subtle, the
intertexture too ineffable' to admit of expression, he condemns the
style which is the best illustration of its truth. He is very angry with
the admirers of Swift; De Foe and 'many hundreds' of others wrote
something quite as good; it only wanted 'plain good sense, natural
feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting
together the clockwork of sentences, and, above all, the advantage of an
appropriate subject.' Could Swift, he asks, have written a pendant to
passages in Sir W. Raleigh, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor? He
would have cut the same figure as 'a forlorn scullion from a greasy
eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as
seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the King, before a thousand of
his lords.' And what, we may retort, would Taylor, or Browne, or De
Quincey himself, have done, had one of them been wanted to write down
the project of Wood's halfpence in Ireland? He would have resembled a
king in his coronation robes compelled to lead a forlorn hope up the
scaling ladders. The fact is, that Swift required for his style not only
the plain good sense and other rare qualities enumerated, but pungent
humour, quick insight, deep passion, and general power of mind, such as
is given to few men in a century. But, as in his case the thought is
really incarnated in the language we cannot criticise the style
separately from the thoughts, or we can only assign, as its highest
merit, its admirable fitness for producing the desired effect. It would
be wrong to invert De Quincey's censure, and blame him because his
gorgeous robes are not fitted for more practical purposes. To everything
there is a time; for plain English, and for De Quincey's highly-wrought
passages.
It would be difficult or impossible, and certainly it would be
superfluous, to define with any precision the peculiar flavour of De
Quincey's style. A few specimens would do more than any description; and
De Quincey is too well known to justify quotation. It may be enough to
notice that most of his brilliant performances are variations on the
same theme. He appeals to our terror of the infinite, to the shrinking
of the human mind before astronomical distances and geological periods
of time. He paints vast perspectives, opening in long succession, till
we grow dizzy in the contemplation. The cadence of his style suggests
sounds echoing each other, and growing gradually fainter, till they die
away into infinite distance. Two great characteristics, he tells us, of
his opium dreams were a deep-seated melancholy and an exaggeration of
the things of space and time. Nightly he descended 'into chasms and
sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that
he could ever reascend.' He saw buildings and landscapes 'in proportion
so vast as the human eye is not fitted to receive.' He seemed to live
ninety or a hundred years in a night, and even to pass through periods
far beyond the limits of human existence. Melancholy and an awe-stricken
sense of the vast and vague are the emotions which he communicates with
the greatest power; though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the
name of passion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly
connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of
his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his
audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is
justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the
passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated patriotism
leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vulgar bit of
claptrap. If any reader will take the trouble to compare De Quincey's
account of a kind of anticipation of the Balaclava charge at the battle
of Talavera, with Napier's description of the same facts, he will be
amused at the distortion of history; but whatever the accuracy of the
statements, one is a little shocked at finding 'the inspiration of God'
attributed to the gallant dragoons who were cut to pieces on that
occasion, as other gallant men have been before and since. The phrase is
overcharged, and inevitably suggests a cynical reaction of mind. The
ideas of dragoons and inspiration do not coalesce so easily as might be
wished; but, with this exception, I think that his purple patches are
almost irreproachable, and may be read and re-read with increasing
delight. I know of no other modern writer who has soared into the same
regions with so uniform and easy a flight.
The question is often raised how far the attempt to produce by one art
effects specially characteristic of another can be considered as
legitimate; whether, for example, a sculptor, when encroaching upon the
province of the painter, or a prose writer attempting to rival poets,
may not be summarily condemned. The answer probably would be that a
critic who lays down such rules is erecting himself into a legislator,
when he should be a simple observer. Success justifies itself; and when
De Quincey obtains, without the aid of metre, graces which few other
writers have won by the same means, it is all the more creditable to De
Quincey. A certain presumption, however, remains in such cases, that the
failure to adopt the ordinary methods implies a certain deficiency of
power. If we ask why De Quincey, who trenched so boldly upon the
peculiar province of the poet, yet failed to use the poetical form,
there is one very obvious answer. He has one intolerable fault, a fault
which has probably done more than any other to diminish his popularity,
and which is, of all faults, most diametrically opposed to poetical
excellence. He is utterly incapable of concentration. He is, from the
very principles on which his style is constructed, the most diffuse of
writers. Other men will pack half-a-dozen distinct propositions into a
sentence, and care little if they are somewhat crushed and distorted in
the process. De Quincey insists upon putting each of them separately,
smoothing them out elaborately, till not a wrinkle disturbs their
uniform surface, and then presenting each of them for our acceptance
with a placid smile. His commendable desire for lucidity of expression
makes him nervously anxious to avoid any complexity of thought. Each
step of his argument, each shade of meaning, and each fact in his
narrative, must have its own separate embodiment; and every joint and
connecting link must be carefully and accurately defined. The clearness
is won at a price. There is some advantage in this elaborate method of
dissecting out every distinct fibre and ramification of an argument.
But, on the whole, one is apt to remember that life is limited, and that
there are some things in this world which must be taken for granted. If
a man's boyhood fill two volumes, and if one of these (though under
unfavourable circumstances) took six months to revise, it seems probable
that in later years he would have taken longer to record events than to
live them. No autobiography written on such principles could ever reach
even the middle life of the author. Take up, for example, the first
volume of his collected works. Why, on the very first page, having
occasion to mention Christendom in the fifteenth century, should he
provide against some eccentric misconception by telling us that it did
not, at that time, include any part of America? Why should it take
considerably more than a page to explain that when a schoolmaster begins
lessons punctually, and leaves off too late, there will be an
encroachment on the hours of play? Or two pages to describe how a porter
dropped a portmanteau on a flight of stairs, and didn't waken a
schoolmaster? Or two more to account for the fact that he asked a woman
the meaning of the noise produced by the 'bore' in the Dee, instead of
waiting till she spoke to him? Impassioned prose may be a very good
thing; but when its current is arrested by such incessant stoppages, and
the beauty of the English language displayed by showing how many
faultless sentences may be expended on an exhaustive description of
irrelevant trifles, the human mind becomes recalcitrant. A man may
become prolix from the fulness or fervency of his mind; but prolixity
produced by this finical minuteness of language, ends by distressing
one's nerves. It is the same sense of irritation as is produced by
waiting for the tedious completion of an elaborate toilette, and one is
rather tempted to remember Artemus Ward's description of the Fourth of
July oration, which took four hours 'to pass a given point.'
This peculiarity of his style is connected with other qualities upon
which a great deal of eulogy has been bestowed. There are two faculties
in which, so far as my experience goes, no man, woman, or child ever
admits his or her own deficiency. The driest of human beings will boast
of their sense of humour; and the most perplexed, of their logical
acuteness. De Quincey has been highly praised, both as a humorist and as
a logician. He believed in his own powers, and exhibits them rather
ostentatiously. He says, pleasantly enough, but not without a substratum
of real conviction, that he is 'a _doctor seraphicus_, and also
_inexpugnabilis_ upon quillets of logic.' I confess that I am generally
sceptical as to the merits of infallible dialecticians, because I have
observed that a man's reputation for inexorable logic is generally in
proportion to the error of his conclusions. A logician, in popular
estimation, seems to be one who never shrinks from a _reductio ad
absurdum_. His merits are measured, not by the accuracy of his
conclusions, but by the distance which separates them from his
premisses. The explanation doubtless lies in the general impression that
logic is concerned with words and not with things. There is a vague
belief that by skilfully linking syllogisms you can form a chain
sufficiently strong to cross the profoundest abyss, and which will need
no test of observation and verification. A dexterous performer, it is
supposed, might pass from one extremity of the universe to the other
without ever touching ground; and people do not observe that the refusal
to draw an inference may be just as great a proof of logical skill as
ingenuity in drawing it. Now De Quincey's claim to infallibility would
be plausible, if we still believed that to define words accurately is
the same thing as to discover facts, and that binding them skilfully
together is equivalent to reasoning securely. He is a kind of rhetorical
Euclid. He makes such a flourish with his apparatus of axioms and
definitions that you do not suspect any lurking fallacy. He is careful
to show you the minutest details of his argumentative mechanism. Each
step in the process is elaborately and separately set forth; you are not
assumed to know anything, or to be capable of supplying any links for
yourself; it shall not even be taken for granted without due notice that
things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other; and the
consequence is, that few people venture to question processes which seem
to be so plainly set forth, and to advance by such a careful
development.
When, indeed, De Quincey has a safe guide, he can put an argument with
admirable clearness. The expositions of political economy, for example,
are clear and ingenious, though even here I may quote Mr. Mill's remark,
that he should have imagined a certain principle--obvious enough when
once stated--to have been familiar to all economists, 'if the instance
of Mr. De Quincey did not prove that the complete non-recognition and
implied denial of it are compatible with great intellectual ingenuity
and close intimacy with the subject-matter.'[4] Upon this question, Mr.
Shadworth Hodgson has maintained that De Quincey was in the right as
against Mill, and I cannot here argue the point. I think, however, that
all economists would admit that De Quincey's merits were confined to an
admirable exposition of another man's reasoning, and included no
substantial addition to the inquiry. Certainly he does not count as one
of those whose writings marked any epoch in the development of the
science--if it be a science. Admirable skill of expression is, indeed,
no real safeguard against logical blunders; and I will venture to say
that De Quincey rarely indulges in this ostentatious logical precision
without plunging into downright fallacies. I will take two instances.
The first is trifling, but characteristic. Poor Dr. Johnson used to
reproach himself, as De Quincey puts it, 'with lying too long in bed.'
How absurd! is the comment. The doctor got up at eleven because he went
to bed at three. If he had gone to bed at twelve, could he not easily
have got up at eight? The remark would have been sound in form, though a
quibble in substance, if Johnson had complained of lying in bed 'too
late;' but as De Quincey himself speaks of 'too long' instead of 'too
late,' it is an obvious reply that eight hours are of the same length at
every period of the day. The great logician falls into another
characteristic error in the same paragraph. Dr. Johnson, he says, was
not 'indolent;' but he adds that Johnson 'had a morbid predisposition to
decline labour from his scrofulous habit of body,' which was increased
by over-eating and want of exercise. It is a cruel mode of vindication
to say that you are not indolent, but only predisposed by a bad
constitution and bad habits to decline labour; but the advantage of
accurate definition is, that you can knock a man down with one hand, and
pick him up with the other.