Old Bill Barron, up in the composing room, asks us when we are going to
take our Vacation. We are taking it now, we reply, reading De Quincey.
Certainly we can’t imagine why any one with as pleasing a job as ours
should have any right to go off on holiday. There are so many people
in this town who have to spend their time reading the new books: we
are going to enjoy ourself by dipping into the old ones. With one
exception. We have found, in the office of the _Literary Review_, and
immediately made off with, _L’Extravagante Personnalité de Jacques
Casanova_, by Joseph Le Gras (Paris: Bernard Grasset). We read the
first sentence--
Emporté dans une berline confortable, dont les coffres sont
abondamment pourvus de viandes, de pâtés et de vins; une femme
sur les genoux, une autre parfois à ses côtés qui se frotte
amoureusement à lui; vêtu de riches vêtements, le jabot et les
manchettes enjolivés de fines dentelles, les goussets garnis
de montres précieuses, le ventre chatouillé de breloques,
les doigts étincelants de bagues, les poches tintant d’or et
le mollet caressé dans la soie; réclamant à grand bruit les
meilleurs chevaux aux relais, la plus belle chambre dans les
auberges, jetant sa bourse à l’hôtelier et repartant au milieu
des révérences et des courbettes; tel nous apparaît, en une
attitude un peu conventionelle, l’aventurier Casanova au temps
de sa splendeur.
That, of course, is one way of taking a Vacation. We remember, with a
small behind-the-arras chuckle, one of Pearsall Smith’s _Trivia_ called
“Lord Arden,” which deliciously hits off the buried Casanova in all of
us. At any rate, we shall read this book about Extravagant Jack.
But we must get back to De Quincey, or you’ll think we are purposely
avoiding the topic. We hardly know where to resume our prattle about
this glorious creature. Perhaps the first thing to note is an advisable
shift in viewpoint. Nowadays we are all introduced to De Quincey at
school, so his name comes to us with a peculiar mixture of sublimity
and painful awe--for we learn that he was a wicked opium eater. We
do not realize that a number of his contemporaries regarded him as a
low-down dog of a journalist. Southey, for instance, called him “one of
the greatest scoundrels living,” and urged Hartley Coleridge to go to
Edinburgh with a strong cudgel and give De Quincey a public drubbing
as “a base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.” What was the
cause of this peevishness? Why, of course, the _Reminiscences of the
English Lake Poets_, a book whose social indiscretion is exceeded
only by its magnificently fecund humour; told, like all De Quincey’s
waggishness, with a rich sonorous volubility and luxurious plenitude of
verbal skill. There is a subtle wickedness of amusement in the apparent
solemnity of De Quincey’s polysyllables. The indignation caused
latterly by such books as Margot Asquith’s was nothing compared to the
anger of the Lake Poets when they found their innocent privacies laid
bare by the Opium Eater’s pen. The Lakers took themselves as seriously
as groups of humanitarians always do. And they were quite right.
Francis Thompson complains that Milton never forgot he was Milton--“but
we must admit it was worth remembering.” Yet the domestic affairs of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were indeed irresistibly comic.
We have not forgotten that Hartley Coleridge, whose childhood was so
charmingly enshrined in a poem by Wordsworth--
Thou fairy voyager, that dost float
In such clear water that thy boat
May rather seem
To brood on air than on an earthly stream--
also floated in liquids more ruddy. He was removed from his fellowship
at Oxford on the charge of drinking too much--which must have been a
very great deal in the Oxford of those days.
_Reminiscences of the Lake Poets_ is the kind of book (Boswell’s _Tour
to the Hebrides_ is another) that causes indignation to the victims,
but intense delight to posterity. Posterity always has the best of us,
anyhow. The anecdote of Coleridge’s father and the protruding shirt
has always seemed to us one of the most disgracefully amusing minutiæ
in literature--and yet even now, after a hundred years of sanctity,
we are not sure whether we ought to reprint it. Well, you can buy
_Reminiscences of the Lake Poets_ in the Everyman Series.
The next thing to be said about De Quincey is that he would have been
a glorious editor for one of Mr. Hearst’s newspapers. He wrote a
good deal better than Mr. Arthur Brisbane; but he had the same acute
instinct as to what the public is really interested in. We believe it
was James L. Ford who described the Hearstian doctrine of newspaper
policy as “Plenty of crime and plenty of underclothes.” De Quincey was
a glutton for crime. Did you know that he lost his job as editor of the
_Westmoreland Gazette_ because for sixteen months he filled its columns
mainly with news of local lawbreaking? His employers did not appreciate
genius. His instinct was absolutely sound. In spite of the disclaimers
of refined people, crime news, when written not merely vulgarly but
with earnestness and art, is one of the most valuable features of any
journal. If we were running a newspaper we would begin by scouring the
press clubs for a young De Quincey.
He had, we say, the newspaper man’s instinct. Writing of the appalling
Williams murders in 1811, he complains that though the outrage was
committed shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, nothing reached the
papers until Monday. “To have met the public demand for details on the
Sunday, which might so easily have been done by cancelling a couple
of dull columns and substituting a circumstantial narrative ... would
have made a small fortune. By proper handbills dispersed through all
quarters of the infinite metropolis, 250,000 extra copies might have
been sold.”
This occurs in the postscript to _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_. In
that immortal essay itself the macabre humour and the sledge-hammer
impact of irony are probably a bit too grim and a bit (also)
too learned and crushing for the gentler sort of reader. But the
postscript, dated 1854, is the kind of horrific febrifuge that turns
the heart to an Eskimo patty. We suggest that you try reading it
aloud to a house party if you want to see blenching and shudders. The
ultimate tribute to any writing of the narrative kind is to read it
perpetually running ahead, in a horrid tension of eagerness, meanwhile
holding one’s proper “place” with a finger until one can force the eye
back to pursue a methodical course. We ourself read that postscript
thus, late at night in a lonely country house; and, by a noble
summation of horror, Gissing began to growl and bristle as we reached
the climax. We should hate to admit with what paltry quaverings we went
forth into the night, where the trees were smoke-colour in a pallid
moonglow, to see what was amiss. It was only a wandering dog prowling
about. But for a few moments we had felt certain that our harmless
Salamis Estates were thickly ambushed with assassins. It then required
a trip to the icebox, and a considerable infare upon a very ammoniac
Roquefort cheese, to restore tranquillity.