and economic problems largely exercised his thoughts, and his historical sketches show that he is constantly alive to their interpenetrating influence. The same may be said of his biographies, notably of his remarkable sketch of Dr Parr. Neither politics nor economics, however, exercised an absorbing influence on his mind,—they were simply provinces in the vast domain of universal speculation through which he ranged “with unconfined wings.” How wide and varied was the region he traversed a glance at the titles of the papers which make up his collected—or more properly, selected—works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting forms of that “cloudland, gorgeous land,” which opens to the sleep-closed eye.
To the appreciation of De Quincey the reader must bring an imaginative faculty somewhat akin to his own—a certain general culture, and large knowledge of books, and men and things. Otherwise much of that slight and delicate allusion that gives point and colour and charm to his writings will be missed; and on this account the full enjoyment and comprehension of De Quincey must always remain a luxury of the literary and intellectual. But his skill in narration, his rare pathos, his wide sympathies, the pomp of his dream-descriptions, the exquisite playfulness of his lighter dissertations, and his abounding though delicate and subtle humour, commend him to a larger class. Though far from being a professed humorist—a character he would have shrunk from—there is no more expert worker in a sort of half-veiled and elaborate humour and irony than De Quincey; but he employs those resources for the most part secondarily. Only in one instance has he given himself up to them unreservedly and of set purpose, namely, in the famous “Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” published in Blackwood,—an effort which, admired and admirable though it be, is also, it must be allowed, somewhat strained. His style, full and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own; yet it is not the style of a mannerist,—its charm is, so to speak, latent; the form never obtrudes; the secret is only discoverable by analysis and study. It consists simply in the reader’s assurance of the writer’s complete mastery over all the infinite applicability and resources of the English language. Hence involutions and parentheses, “cycle on epicycle,” evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloying—rather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring.
It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of the Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speaking, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes himself “as framed for love and all gentle affections,” and in another confesses to the “besetting infirmity” of being “too much of an eudaemonist.” “I hanker,” he says, “too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit.” His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort,—the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, perhaps at some simple meal with a favoured friend, or in later years in his own small but refined domestic circle, he was the most charming of guests, hosts or companions. A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely and compact head; a face beaming with intellectual light, with rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion; a fascinating courtesy of manner; and a fulness, swiftness and elegance of silvery speech,—such was the irresistible “mortal mixture of earth’s mould” that men named De Quincey. He possessed in a high degree what James Russell Lowell called “the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive, and nowhere emphatic”; and his whole aspect and manner exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or simple, who came within its influence; for shy as he was, he was never rudely shy, making good his boast that he had always made it his “pride to converse familiarly more socratico with all human beings—man, woman and child”—looking on himself as a catholic creature standing in an equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated. He would converse with a peasant lad or a servant girl in phrase as choice, and sentences as sweetly turned, as if his interlocutor were his equal both in position and intelligence; yet without a suspicion of pedantry, and with such complete adaptation of style and topic that his talk charmed the humblest as it did the highest that listened to it. His conversation was not a monologue; if he had the larger share, it was simply because his hearers were only too glad that it should be so; he would listen with something like deference to very ordinary talk, as if the mere fact of the speaker being one of the same company entitled him to all consideration and respect. The natural bent of his mind and disposition, and his lifelong devotion to letters, to say nothing of his opium eating, rendered him, it must be allowed, regardless of ordinary obligations in life—domestic and pecuniary—to a degree that would have been culpable in any less singularly constituted mind. It was impossible to deal with or judge De Quincey by ordinary standards—not even his publishers did so. Much no doubt was forgiven him, but all that needed forgiveness is covered by the kindly veil of time, while his merits as a master in English literature are still gratefully acknowledged.[1]
[Bibliography.—In 1853 De Quincey began to prepare an edition of his works, Selections Grave and Gay. Writings Published and Unpublished (14 vols., Edinburgh, 1853–1860), followed by a second edition (1863–1871) with notes by James Hogg and two additional volumes; a further supplementary volume appeared in 1878. The first comprehensive edition, however, was printed in America (Boston, 20 vols., 1850–1855); and the “Riverside” edition (Boston and New York, 12 vols., 1877) is still fuller. The standard English edition is The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (14 vols., Edinburgh, 1889–1890), edited by David Masson, who also wrote his biography (1881) for the “English Men of Letters” series. The Uncollected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (London, 2 vols., 1890) contains a preface and annotations by James Hogg; The Posthumous Writings of Thomas De Quincey (2 vols., 1891–1893) were edited by A. H. Japp (“H. A. Page”), who wrote the standard biography, Thomas De Quincey: his Life and Writings (London, 2 vols., 2nd ed., 1879), and De Quincey Memorials (2 vols., 1891). See also Arvède Barine, Neurosés (Paris, 1898); Sir L. Stephen, Hours in a Library; H. S. Salt, De Quincey (1904); and De Quincey and his Friends (1895), a collection edited by James Hogg, which includes essays by Dr Hill Burton and Shadworth Hodgson.] (J. R. F.)
- ↑ The above account has been corrected and amplified in some statements of fact for this edition. Its original author, John Ritchie Findlay (1824–1898), proprietor of The Scotsman newspaper, and the donor of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, had been intimate with De Quincey, and in 1886 published his Personal Recollections of him.
