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.
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.
But we were talking about De Quincey. Yesterday was by no means a day wasted, for we got our amiable friend Franklin Abbott into our clutches, made him take a note of Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets (in the Everyman Series, we repeat) and insisted to him that for a man of genteel tastes this is one of the most entertaining works ever printed. And also by mere chance, which so often disposes the bright fragments of life into a ruddy and high-spirited pattern, we stopped in at a bookshop on Church Street just to say howdy to the eccentric Raymond Halsey. Happening to remark that it is now just a hundred years since the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was published, Raymond disappeared with a rabbit-like scuttling motion; was heard digging among shelves at the rear, and returned with the smile of one who thinks he foresees a sale. It was a first edition of the Opium Eater with the magical imprint of Taylor & Hessey. Was there ever a more sacred name among publishers? We don’t need to remind you they were Keats’s publishers, too. “Only fifty dollars,” said Raymond, but it was lunch time and we had to leave.
In the dark rear chamber of a Cedar Street tavern, in that corner underneath the photographs of the “Cheshire Cheese,” something happened that seemed to us almost as pretty as anything published by the vanished Taylor & Hessey. Frank spied an old friend of his, a fellow Pittsburger, and the latter halted at our table on his way out. We complimented him upon the fine bronze patina of his countenance, to which he replied that he had been salmon fishing. “You know,” he said, “there are only three salmon-flies that I care a continental for,” and from his pocket he drew a small pink envelope. With a tender hand he slid its contents onto the board. “There they are,” he said. His voice seemed to change. “Dusty Miller, Durham Ranger, and Jock Scott.” The little feathery trinkets, glowing with dainty treacheries, lay there on the ale-bleached wood. Certainly it seemed to us there was poetry in that moment. “I go to Bingham, Maine,” he said, “and drive eighteen miles up the Kennebec.” (A small postern door opened gently upon another world.) “Old So-and-so is waiting at the station. He’s always there. I could leave to-night; he’d be sure to be there when the train got in.”
We had a perfectly vivid picture of old So-and-so waiting at the Bingham station. Yes, we could see him. Then the postern door closed, gently but definitely, with that strong pneumatic piston that is attached to all our doors.
We were saying, however, that De Quincey’s Reminiscences of the Lake Poets caused great indignation among the Grasmere coterie. This was due not to any malice in De Quincey’s manner of writing, which was affectionate and admiring throughout. It was due to something far more painful than malice—the calm, detailed, candid, and minute dissection of their lives. There was truly something astoundingly clinical in this microscopy. For instance, to take the case of Wordsworth’s household, these are some of the comments De Quincey makes:
(1) That Mrs. Wordsworth—whose charm and simplicity he adores—was cross-eyed.
(2) That Dorothy—Wordsworth’s sister—was a fervid and noble character, but stammered and was ungraceful.
(3) That Wordsworth’s appearance grew less attractive with advancing age.
(4) That his legs were very ill-shapen and “were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs.” And that his shoulders were drooping and narrow.
(5) “The mouth, and the whole circumjacencies of the mouth, composed the strongest feature in Wordsworth’s face.” In fact, they reminded De Quincey of Milton.
(6) That he aged very rapidly—when thirty-nine he was taken to be over sixty.
(7) That his brother John, a sea captain, had lost his ship while drunk.
(8) That Wordsworth cannot have been amiable as a child.
(9) That the only time Wordsworth was drunk was as an undergraduate at Cambridge on visiting the rooms once occupied by Milton.
(10) That he had not the temperament ever to be an attractive wooer, and that it was “perplexing” that he had ever married.
(11) That he had had astonishing good luck in financial matters.
(12) That the Wordsworth menage was excessively plain and severe in simplicity.
(13) That Wordsworth and Southey did not really like each other.
(14) That Wordsworth treated books very barbarously, and used to cut the pages with a butter-smeared knife.
(15) That Wordsworth’s library was meagre and insignificant compared to Southey’s.
These are only a few of De Quincey’s remarks, digested to their naked gist; by which they lose all the amusing complexity of comment wherein they are folded. But the précis will suffice to show that, whether consciously or not, they were exactly calculated to wound, with very deep incision, the most delicate sensibilities of an austere, somewhat humourless and extremely self-regarding man.
On the 13th of February, 1848, De Quincey received a letter asking him to contribute a writing of some sort for an “album,” to be sold at a Ladies’ Bazaar. This was to be held in March of that year, for the benefit of the Library of the Glasgow Athenæum, and the ladies begged him to reply by “return of post.” This incident in itself sounds contemporary enough to give us a fellow feeling with De Quincey.
He had nothing available to send to the bazaar, but there was one unfailing resource—his bathtub. Let him describe it:
In my study I have a bath, large enough to swim in, provided the swimmer, not being an ambitious man, is content with going ahead to the extent of three inches at the utmost. This bath, having been superseded (as regards its original purpose) by a better, has yielded a secondary service to me as a reservoir for my MSS. Filled to the brim it is by papers of all sorts and sizes. Every paper written by me, to me, for me, of or concerning me, and, finally, against me, is to be found, after an impossible search, in this capacious repertory. Those papers, by the way, that come under the last (or hostile) subdivision are chiefly composed by shoemakers and tailors—an affectionate class of men, who stick by one to the last like pitch-plasters.
De Quincey decided that the only thing to do was to draw something at random from the bathtub for the ladies’ album. Accordingly, he made a little ceremony of it. “Three young ladies, haters of everything unfair,” were called in as referees; and a young man to do the actual dipping. There were to be four dips into the tub, and, for some reason not quite clear to us, the young man was made to attire himself in a new potato-sack, with holes cut for his legs and only his right arm free. It would have been more to the purpose, we should have thought, to blindfold him; but he was instructed to dip at random, holding his face “at right angles to the bath.” He was to be allowed one minute to rummage at random among “the billowy ocean of papers,” and at the command Haul Up! was to come forth with whatever his fingers approved. Before the ceremony began a glass of wine was brought. De Quincey proposed the health of the ladies of the Athenæum, and pledged his honour that whatever MS. should be dredged up would be sent off to the bazaar. And this, he protested, though somewhere buried in the bath there lay a paper which he valued as equal to the half of his possessions.
But he was compelled to depart from the strict rigour of his scheme. For let us see what the young man discovered in the bathtub. The first dip brought up a letter still unopened. It proved to be a dinner invitation for the 15th of February. De Quincey was congratulating himself on the success of his raffle, which had thus enabled him to answer this letter without irreparable breach of manners, when the young lady referees discovered that the letter was four years old.
Number 2 was a “dun.” The young man was, to De Quincey’s dismay, dredging in a portion of the tub rich in overdue bills. “It is true,” he says, “that I had myself long remarked that part of the channel to be dangerously infested with duns. In searching for literary or philosophic paper, it would often happen for an hour together that I brought up little else than variegated specimens of the dun.” And so Number 3 was also a dun.
Number 4 turned out “a lecture addressed to myself by an ultra-moral friend—a lecture on procrastination, and not badly written.” And this also De Quincey refused to allow to be sent to the Athenæum. So everything hinged on the fifth and extra dip, which was committed to one of the young ladies. She blushed rosily (De Quincey assures us) at the responsibility, and earnestly “ploitered” among the papers for full five minutes. “She contended that she knew, by intuition, the sort of paper on which duns were written: and, whatever else might come up, she was resolved it should not be a dun.” “Don’t be too sure,” said De Quincey; but when the paper was finally drawn out it was a blank sheet.
This, the referees maintained, was a judgment on De Quincey, and meant that he should use the empty page to begin a new and original contribution for the ladies of Glasgow. Which he did, and turned out a little essay, suggested by their recent sport, on Sortilege and Astrology. We have tried to read it, but so far without success.
We are interested to note that others besides ourself have been turning back to De Quincey. In a recent Fortnightly Review there is an article by H. M. Paull, sound enough in its observations, but grievously lacking in style. Mr. Paull, moreover, seems to us to shoot too far when he says that “to modern readers De Quincey’s efforts to be sprightly only cause annoyance.” It is true that sometimes his astonishing verbosity and his passion for footnotes outrun a hasty temper; but for our part we find something notably odd and agreeable in his queer, preposterous humour. His habit of calling great men familiarly by their first names—Dr. Johnson is “Sam,” and even the learned and ancient Josephus becomes “Joe,” and Thomas à Kempis “Tom”—is deplored by Mr. Paull; but this habit, we fear, has been inherited by columnists, and we had better not defend it too vigorously. The bathtub anecdote, which we have pared down until it loses most of its gusto, is, in the original, not devoid of humour. (Volume XIII of the collected works.)
And De Quincey’s ramified and rambling way of narrative offers surprising delights in unexpected parentheses. For instance, in the Opium Eater he happens to mention a murder that had been committed on Hounslow Heath. “The name of the murdered person was Steele, and he was the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighbourhood.” A lavender plantation! There is a fragrant circumstance for the mind of a poet to dwell on. Think of the chance immortality of the unlucky Steele—deathless now, because (poor devil) he was murdered and had a lavender plantation.
