HE WROTE "CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER"--DREAMED
DREAMS AND SAW VISIONS AND PICTURED THEM IN POETIC PROSE.
Of all the English writers Thomas De Quincey must be given the palm
for rhythmical prose. He is as stately as Milton, with more than
Milton's command of rhythm. If you read aloud his best passages, which
are written in what he calls his bravura style, you have a near
approach to the music of the organ. De Quincey was so nice a judge of
words, he knew so well how to balance his periods, that one of his
sentences gives to the appreciative ear the same delight as a stanza
of perfect verse.
Ruskin had much of De Quincey's command of impassioned prose, but he
never rose to the same sustained heights as the older author. In
fact, De Quincey stands alone in these traits: the mass and accuracy
of his accumulated knowledge; the power of making the finest
distinctions clear to any reader, and the gorgeous style, thick with
the embroidery of poetical figures, yet never giving the impression of
over-adornment. And above all these merits is the supreme charm of
melodious, rhythmical sentences, which give the same enjoyment as fine
music.
[Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING]
Forty years ago De Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_
was read by everyone who professed any knowledge of the masters of
English literature. To-day it is voted old-fashioned, and few are
familiar with its splendid imagery. His other works, which fill over a
dozen volumes, are practically forgotten, mainly because his style is
very diffuse and his constant digressions weary the reader who has
small leisure for books.
No one, however, should miss reading the _Confessions_, the
_Autobiography_ and some one essay, such, for instance, as "Murder as
One of the Fine Arts," or "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," or "The
Vision of Sudden Death" in _An English Mail Coach_. All these contain
passages of the greatest beauty buried in prolix descriptions. The
reader must be warned not to drop De Quincey because of his
digressions. With a little practice you may skip those which do not
appeal to you, and there is ample sweetness at the heart of his work
to repay one for removing a large amount of husk.
De Quincey has always impressed me as a fine example of the defects of
the English school and college training. Although he could write and
speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect
command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of
his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of
college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid
scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources
in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of
disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the use of opium.
All his training was purely theoretical; in the practical affairs of
life he remained to the day of his death a mere child. As he says in
his _Confessions_, he could have earned a good living as a corrector
of Greek proofs in any big London publishing house, but it never
occurred to his schoolboy mind that his mastery of this difficult
classical language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
so little effort.
De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
his _Autobiography_ and his _Confessions_ he disclosed its details
with the frankness of a child. These works are surcharged with some
exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
better than you or I could address an English one."
He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.
In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book. Finally, he
was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental
independence prevented him from taking a degree, and chronic
neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking
opium, which clung to him for life.
[Illustration: DE QUINCEY WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND GRANDCHILD--FROM
A CHALK DRAWING BY JAMES ARCHER, R.S.A. MADE IN 1855.]
De Quincey was a close associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey,
Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated
with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence
all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were
then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American
publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that
his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.
Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with
political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an
expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he
has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in
the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay
he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment,
and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's
essay on the origin of roast pig.
De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon _The Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater_. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
such visions as De Quincey records.
His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
terrible passages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures;
read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble passages that
picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
Quincey's style:
Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that
ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon
summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have
remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow,
solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the
one great audible symbol of eternity.
It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine passages,
but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most
eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De
Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug
intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an
equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid
imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the
materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the
spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all
literature.