I
Having severed our telephone wire and instructed the office boys to
tell all callers that we are out at lunch, we look forward to a happy
summer. We are going to begin enjoying ourself by systematically
exploring the books in the library of the _Evening Post_. On a top
shelf, well sprinkled with dust, we have found the excellent collected
edition of De Quincey, in fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson. It
is true that the first four volumes seem to have disappeared; but even
if we begin at Volume V we calculate we shall find enough to keep us
entertained for some time.
After we have finished De Quincey we are going to tackle P. T. Barnum’s
_Struggles and Triumphs_, a book that has long tempted us. We think
kindly of the Founding Fathers of the _Post_ for having assembled all
these interesting volumes for our pleasure.
We have begun De Quincey with Volume V--_Biographies and Biographic
Sketches_. Some of this--particularly the Joan of Arc--has a faintly
familiar taste: perhaps we were made to read it at school. But we
do not think we ever read before the magnificent essay on Charles
Lamb. There is a long interpolated passage about Joan of Arc which
does not seem to have anything to do with Lamb. Perhaps the _North
British Review_ (in which the essay first appeared in 1848) paid its
contributors on a space basis. But, ejecting this parenthesis, it is
certainly noble stuff. Moreover, it is interesting to note that at the
time De Quincey wrote, Lamb was by no means established on the pinnacle
of security as a permanent brightness in our literature. De Quincey
writes as though consciously contradicting some opposition. It seems
odd to hear him speak of people who “regard him [Lamb] with the old
hostility and the old scorn.”
We had intended not to introduce any quotations, for in this very
volume De Quincey makes some stinging remarks about people who pad out
their copy by interlarding material from stronger fists. But indeed the
following passage seems to us so near the top of prose felicity that we
lapse from grace:
In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit, viz.,
to take a great deal _during_ dinner, none _after_ it.
Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired
almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our
principles, the rigour of which we had illustrated by taking
rather too much of old port before the cloth was drawn, except
talking; amœbean colloquy, or, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, a
dialogue of “brisk reciprocation.” But this was impossible;
over Lamb, at this period of his life, there passed regularly,
after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended
upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with
superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been
disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and
wiry as an Arab of the desert or as Thomas Aquinas wasted by
scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a
network of aërial gossamer than of earthly cobweb--more like
a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a
cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair
as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly
alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and
death, like the repose of sculpture; and, to one who knew his
history, a repose affectingly contrasting with the calamities
and internal storms of his life.
De Quincey’s essay on Lamb, like so many of the great critiques of the
early nineteenth century, was originally written as a book review. We
like to imagine what a _Blackwood_ or _Edinburgh_ reviewer would have
said if the editor (in the manner of to-day) had told him to deal with
a volume in 500 or 1,000 words. The nineteenth century reviewer took a
spacious view of his job. Of this particular essay, which purported to
be a notice of Talfourd’s _Final Memorials of Charles Lamb_ (1848), De
Quincey said (very nobly):
Liberated from this casual office of throwing light upon a
book, raised to its grander station of a solemn deposition to
the moral capacities of man in conflict with calamity--viewed
as a return made into the chanceries of heaven upon an issue
directed from that court to try the amount of power lodged in
a poor desolate pair of human creatures for facing the very
anarchy of storms--this obscure life of the two Lambs, brother
and sister (for the two lives were one life), rises into
grandeur that is not paralleled once in a generation.
Of course, De Quincey was a celestial kind of reviewer. Not even opium
could make most of us write like that. Also he had the right idea about
dealing with correspondence and accumulated papers. He used to live in
one set of lodgings until the mass of miscellaneous matter filled the
room. Then he would move to other quarters, leaving the pile in charge
of the landlady. He always took care not to inform her of the new
address.
There is a great deal more to be said about this Volume V, but we must
skip along. (There is no reason, you know, why you shouldn’t look up
the book for yourself.) We will just be generous enough to pass on De
Quincey’s anecdote about how Coleridge first became a great reader.
Coleridge, as a child, was going down the Strand in a day dream,
imagining himself swimming the Hellespont. Moving his hands as though
swimming, he happened to touch a gentleman’s pocket. The latter thought
him a young pickpocket. “What! so young and yet so wicked?” The boy,
terrified, sobbed a denial, and explained that he had been imagining
himself as Leander. The gentleman was so pleased that he gave him a
subscription to a circulating library.
The next volume of De Quincey that we intend to study is X, in which we
find _Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected_. We
are rather stricken to note that these were addressed to a young man
who was exactly the same age as ourself.
The first of these letters was evidently in the nature of a Christmas
present to the young gentleman, known to us only as Mr. M. It is dated
December 24, 1824. Whether Mr. M. was an actual person and drew this
letter from his stocking on Christmas morning we are not informed.
Our own conjecture is that he was as mythical as his sister-in-lore
Miss M., of Walter de la Mare’s _Memoirs of a Midget_. Somehow there
is a humorous lack of reality in the way De Quincey introduces him.
Mr. M. is in possession of “great opulence, unclouded reputation, and
freedom from unhappy connexions.” Also he had “the priceless blessing
of unfluctuating health.” And yet he exhibited “a general dejection.”
This, a young lady of seventeen told De Quincey, “was well known to
arise from an unfortunate attachment in early life.” But finally De
Quincey exhumed the truth. Mr. M. had been defrauded of education. And
Mr. M.’s first inquiry is whether at his present age of 32 it would be
worth his while to go to college.
No, indeed, is De Quincey’s unhesitant reply. Mr. M. would be 12
or 14 years older than his fellow-students, which would make their
association “mutually burthensome.” And as for the value of college
lectures--
These whether public or private, are surely the very worst
modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge, and are just
as much inferior to a good book on the same subject as that
book hastily read aloud, and then immediately withdrawn, would
be inferior to the same book left in your possession, and open
at any hour to be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the
fullest sense studied.
It appears that the dejected young man, despite--or perhaps on account
of--his lack of education, nourished a secret desire to be a writer. He
had been reading Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_, particularly the
chapter called _An Affectionate Exhortation to Those Who in Early Life
Feel Themselves Disposed to Become Authors_. According to De Quincey,
Mr. M. asks his opinion on Coleridge’s views of this topic. Alas!
now we are more convinced than ever that Mr. M. is only a phantom:
unquestionably De Quincey, the canny super-journalist, wafted him from
the opium flagon as an ingenious target for some anti-Coleridge banter.
His chaff directed at Coleridge is gorgeous enough. It is double-decked
chaff, too; for he not only affectionately twits his fellow opium-eater
_in propria persona_, but introduces for discussion an anonymous
“eminent living Englishman,” who is plainly also Coleridge. He compares
C. with Leibnitz for his combination of fine mind with a physique of
equine robustness. This passage somehow causes us to chuckle aloud--
They were centaurs--heroic intellects with brutal capacities of
body. What partiality in nature! In general, a man has reason
to think himself well off in the great lottery of this life if
he draws the prize of a healthy stomach without a mind; or the
prize of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach; but that any
man should draw both is truly astonishing.
The first letter concludes with a charmingly humorous discussion of the
problem (valid now as then) how a man of letters may get any creative
work done and at the same time keep his wife and children happy.