"Conceive a little, pale-faced, woe-begone, and attenuated man,
with short indescribables, no coat, check shirt, and a neck-cloth
twisted like a wisp of straw, opening his door, and advancing
toward you with hurried movement and half-recognizing glance,
saluting you in low and hesitating tones, and without looking at
you, beginning to pour into your willing ear a stream of learning
and wisdom, as long as you are content to listen. . . . His head is
small; how can it carry all he knows? His brow is singular in
shape, but not particularly large or prominent; where has nature
expressed his majestic intellect? His eyes--they sparkle not, they
shine not, they are lustreless; there is not even the glare which
lights up sometimes dull eyes into eloquence; and yet, even at
first, the _tout ensemble,_ strikes you as that of no common man,
and you say, ere he has opened his lips, 'He is either mad or
inspired.'"
In all literary history there is scarcely a man about whose life and
character hang so peculiar an interest and fascination as about De
Quincey. He has himself given a most vivid account of his childhood, in
his "Autobiographic Sketches," and in the "Opium Eater." From these we
learn that he was born in Manchester, August 15, 1785. His father was a
very wealthy merchant of that city, who was inclined to pulmonary
consumption, and lived mostly abroad, in the West Indies and other warm
climates. Thomas had several brothers and sisters, all of whom seem to
have been rather peculiar and remarkable children. He was a very
precocious child himself, sensitive, excitable, and given to dreams and
visions,--living largely in a world of imagination, and for many years
ruled over with absolute despotism by an older brother. The loss of a
favorite sister in very early childhood seems to have been a blow from
which it took him years to recover. He writes of it thus:--
"Inevitable sometimes it is, in solitude, that this should happen
to minds morbidly meditative,--that when we stretch out our arms in
darkness, vainly striving to draw back the sweet faces that have
vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, and we say, 'Be
it that they no more come back to us, yet what hinders but we
should go to _them_?' Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its
effect perfectly the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor
African _Obeah_, his sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left to
follow its own natural course, terminate in the same catastrophe of
death. Poetry, which neglects no phenomena that are interesting to
the heart of man, has sometimes touched a little
'On the sublime attractions of the grave.'
But you think that these attractions, existing at times for the
adult, could not exist for the child. Understand that you are
wrong. Understand that these attractions do exist for the child;
and perhaps as much more strongly than they _can_ exist for the
adult by the whole difference between the concentration of a
childish love and the inevitable distraction upon multiplied
objects of any love that can affect any adult. . . . Could the
Erl-king's Daughter have revealed herself to me, and promised to
lead me where my sister was, she might have wiled me by the hand
into the dimmest forests upon earth."
But a beatific vision rose before him, one day in church, and he saw the
beautiful sister borne away in the clouds of heaven on a bed of filmy
whiteness, surrounded by a celestial throng; and he was somewhat
comforted. After twelve years, while he was a student at Oxford, the
vision returned to him, and he writes of it:--
"Once again, the nursery of my childhood expanded before me; my
sister was moaning in bed; I was beginning to be restless with
fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but now
dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage
with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea towering amongst
her children in the nursery at Corinth, smote me senseless to the
ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's corpse, again
the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer, the
Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself
mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds
itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,--the blue
heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne
steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of _'Who_ might sit
thereon;' the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my
return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathers; the
priest, in his white surplice, stands waiting with a book by the
side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his shovel;
the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has descended. Again I was
in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of
God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his
saints; the fragment from the litany, the fragment from the clouds,
awoke again the lawny beds that went up to scale the
heavens,--awoke again the shadowy arms that moved downward to meet
them. Once again arose the swell of the anthem, the burst of the
Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling movement of the choral
passion, the agitation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of
the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed in
the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now all was
bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted into
each other as in some sunny, glorifying haze. For high in heaven
hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the
pillows of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally
with sorrow that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings
pity alike the children that are languishing in death, and the
children that live only to languish in tears."
This extract is important as showing that when a mere child, knowing
nothing of the fatal drug, he had visions similar to those which filled
his after years. At Oxford he had begun the use of opium--but his first
vision was a repetition of one of his childish years, and it leads us to
infer that his own vivid imagination bore an important part in the
brilliant dreams which followed his taking of opium. No person of
ordinary mind could induce those gorgeous and bewildering dreams by its
use. In his case the drug acted upon a mind fitted to see visions and
dream dreams even without its use; and the result was that gorgeous and
bewildering phantasmagoria which he so eloquently describes.
The causes of his first indulging in opium may be briefly glanced at
here. At seventeen, he ran away from the school at which he had been
placed by his guardians, his father now being dead. He wished to enter
college at once, and it appears was well prepared to do so, and had made
earnest representations to his guardians upon the subject, as he was
unhappy where he was, and under a very unsuitable master. But they would
not consent, and, like one of his brothers who ran away from school and
went to sea, he borrowed a little money and stole quietly away to
Wales.
The brother had left school, it appears, with good reason, being
brutally treated; but in the case of Thomas there seems to have been no
complaint of real ill-usage. It was simply one of the wilful freaks of a
precocious and fantastic boy. He wandered in Wales for a few weeks,
until his money was nearly spent, and then contrived to get to London,
where he suffered the cruellest pangs of poverty, although he was a
young gentleman of independent fortune. It is difficult for a
matter-of-fact and well-balanced mind to conceive of an experience just
like that of De Quincey. Why he should have allowed himself to starve
rather than communicate with his friends, we are not told,--it could
scarcely have been pride, for he accepted help even from strangers when
it was offered,--and why he did not seek some of the friends of his
family in the city we are not informed, but such was the fact.