DE QUINCEY.f

WE have risen from a perusal of this book with a somewhat pain- ful feeling,—that uncomfortableness which yet cannot be called dissatisfaction. Mr. Page, who does whatever work he takes in hand carefully, is an excellent biographer ; yet, somehow, this cannot be called-a satisfactory biography. He has done his duty by De Quincey, but the duty that has to be done to De Quincey has yet to be performed. Mr. Page has, in fact, been over- weighted by the title of his work. Thomas de Quincey, his Life and Writings, raises the expectation that we are to have De Quincey:revettied in his works, or at least that we are to have a study like Mr. Morley's Burke. Instead of this, we have a care- ful and temperately-written and, if anything, too long biography, with tags and interjections of criticism. Mr. Page gives a few judicious sentences of his own on the character and writings of his hero, and also a great many sentences from the criticisms of others,—Dr. Hill Burton, Mr. Minto, Professor Masson, and the like. But more than this must be done, before De Quineey is placed in the position which is his of right in the hierarchy of British literature, and which has long ago been accorded him by American and German critics. No careful reader of De Quincey will fail to see, or at all events to believe that he sees, the man hi: alky, by the way, has not Mr. Arnold hero restored the much bettor word of better t edition, " the soul of their mule snows," which not only describes much 1, it If conveying 0,11 solemn effect caused by the dumbness of the glacier,—the word . suOW " ground-tone" quite adequately the colour —but prepares us butter for the

of agony in the later verse ?

R. . t Thomas de Quisrey: his Life and Writings, with Unpublished Correspondence. By Page 2 vols. London: nogg and Qo. 1877.

reflected in his works, just as he can see Byron in his poems, although in a very different way, because De Quincey.and Byron were at the opposite poles of Eudaarnonism. To show what we mean, we quote this from his paper on Herder :—

" Ho [Herder] was never intoxicated in his whole life, a fact of very equivocal construction. His nerves would not allow him to drink tea, and of coffee, though very agreeable to him, he allowed himself hut little. All this temperance, however, led to nothing, for he died when he was but four months advanced in his sixtieth year. Surely if be had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have contrived to weather the point of sixty years,—in fact, opium would, perhaps' hare been of service to him. For all his sufferings were derived from a most exquisite and morbid delicacy of nervous temperament, and of that he died."

This is of biographical interest, because the name of De Quincey still suggests opium above everything else, and because it is still a matter of doubt what it was that really made De Quincey take- to opium, notwithstanding his declaration as to his own wretched stomach, and the opinion given in the appendix to Mr. Page's book by Dr. Eatwell, opium-examiner to the Benares Opium Agency, to the effect that De Quincey suffered from gustrodynia, and that opium "had, in reality, been the means of preserving and prolonging life." A recent writer has said that, in truth, what drove De Quincey to opium was, "not stomach-pains, not even, perhaps, toothache—a sufficiently terrible affliction, no doubt, to be prayed against by St. Augustine, and described by Burns as the hell of all diseases,'—but temperament ; just as temperament drove S. T. Coleridge to it ; just as temperament drove Hartley Coleridge to spirits ; just as temperament drove Robert Greene, Edgar Poe, and other lost children' to wine; and just as tem- perament drove Hazlitt to tea." May it not, after all, be the case that it was his "exquisite and morbid delicacy of nervous temperament" that drove him to take what he thinks Herder should have taken, and what perhaps, in his opinion, enabled him to live fifteen years longer than Herder ?

A hundred passages, much more interesting and valuable than this, might be taken from De Quineey's papers to prove that what he aimed at in life was a Spinozistio calm,—without the Spinozistic creed. He wished, like Samuel Johnson, to get rid of the burden of existence, but he went a different way about it. Johnson, half-mad, yet strong, and above all, resolutely moral, sought to escape from himself, and from the agony caused by the "disease of thinking," by being always in the company of others. De Quincey, more timorous and retiring, tried opium, and it is yet unsettled whether, if moderately tried,—a most difficult "if,"—the medical experi- ment might not have been one in the right direction.

Mr. Page's Lift should remove De Quincey from the range of that ethical criticism which has been poured upon him without stint even by such writers as Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. Hutchison Stirling, and which has been one of the chief reasons why a moral people like the English have not taken kindly to his inimitable prose. Mr. Page says, "Ho had faults, many faults, some frailties even ; but we take it, he who sees- furthest will be inclined to censure least." More than this, the defence which Charles Lamb set up for the comic drama- tists of the Restoration, that they lived in a moral world of their own, can most assuredly be urged for De Quincey.

He would, if he could, have lived in a kind of Bohemia, but it would have been a very harmless Bohemia, in which cathedral music would have taken the place of Baechie orgies, in which the senses would have been weak, and the more refined and tender emotions strong. He was simply the most un- selfish, most unworldly of men, and his great aim in his later days was to become anonymous. A man who, as the affectionate reminis- cences of the surviving members of his family and his playful letters show, was full of anxious solicitude about them while he was leading a kind of wandering life between his lodging in Edinburgh and his cottage in the not far-distant Lasswade ; who,. with a Li note in his pocket, would humbly borrow sixpence to buy laudanum, and then change the note to get rid of beggars ; who had to be dragged into a cab to ensure his presence at a dinner, which, after all, he did not eat,—such a man may have been weak, but to call him bad,—except, indeed, as a not involuntary weakness is sometimes the essential principle of evil,--would be an abuse of language. Of course there remains the charge against him that he violated, by putting in print, the confidences of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Mr. Page cannot defend this from the ordinary ethical point of view, and no one can. But it is extremely likely that he literally knew not what he did. Besides, it ought to be remembered that those most concerned with defending the memory of Coleridge have pardoned

him, and that as Mr. Page conclusively shows, he in early life offered Coleridge £500, and gave him £300, to indicate his respect for a great philosopher in straits. Moreover, if he told tales of others, he was singularly good at telling them of himself,— perhaps no man but De Quincey could have told such a story in his " Confessions " as that relating his connection with poor "Ann of Oxford Street" without odious imputations being made against him. Besides, no two men understood De Quincey better than John Wilson and Mr. Carlyle, who differing from each other In most things, agreed in bolding by a healthy morality. Yet none admired him more heartily or loved him more warmly, and perhaps the most interesting of the hitherto unpublished letters in these volumes is that in which (Vol. I., p. 278) Mr. Carlyle, then musing on the Eternities and the Immensities in his retirement at Craigenputtock, wrote to De Quincey asking him to come over to his Macedonia, and help him to form a "Misanthropic Society" or "Bog School" which was to rail at the misdoinga in the universe from comfortable cottages, and in the most exquisite English that the world had heard since the seventeenth century.

In truth, De Quincey lived in two worlds, the world of fact and the world of phantasy, and he has received rather hard treatment from those who live only in the one. Thus he was a great pedestrian, and spent much time in the open air, but the Nature he worshipped was not that which met his senses ; indeed, never is he so subjective as when he treats of the objective. Then, again, he was exquisitely sympathetic, and it has been hinted that his tenderness was almost as genuine as Rousseau's. But be had-in truth two worlds of sympathy, and he had, fortunately for his own balance of soul, although not always peace of mind, the power of passing from the one into the other. As a proof of this, take the exquisitely spiritual pas- sage in which he relates his feelings at the death of his sister, when he was in his sixth year :—

"Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow,—the saddest that oar ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the field of mortality

for a thousand centuries Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Momnonian, but saintly swell : it is in this world the one great and audible

symbol of eternity Instantly, when my oar caught this vast lEolian intonation, when my eyo filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps of the heaven above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turn- ing when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon mo. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for over ; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for over and ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me ; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them ; ehadowy meanings oven yet continue to exereiee and torment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me."

And so, as we have already said, he had two worlds in ethics. 'Occasionally he himself rode the high-horse of morality ; but even here his Pegasus is a creature of clouds and dreamland. One rises from his famous onslaught on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in which, for once, his peculiar humour descends to something like a comic 44break-down," with the impression that after all the writer was more concerned with the literary form into which he threw his de- nunciation of Goethe's offences against decency and virtue than with the denunciation itself. There are few sharper attacks in his literary essays than that on Pope. Speaking of the possibility of Pope going into a well in search of truth, he says, "Truth was not liable to 'wet feet, but Pope was. And he had no such ardour for truth as would ever lead him to forget that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his constitution." This is striking, but the force of the sarcasm is lost in the conceit of the expression. Com- pare Macaulay on Barrer° with De Quincey on Pope, and the difference becomes obvious between the trenchant moralist who aa but one world and prances through it, to the meditative -moralist who has a second world to fall back upon, which is to the other what the Kriegspiel is to the Franco-German war.

Mr. Page's Life possesses the one great value therefore of pre- paring the way for a true conception of Do Quincey. Perhaps we may seem to have too many details of a comparatively uneventful life, and in the end too many letters of secondary interest, -especially upon public questions, of which De Quincey lived in that ignorance which is bliss ; yet if it leads us to turn to and study -the writer and thinker, rather than the man, it will not have been written in vain. At present, it is beyond our province to dwell upon the characteristics of De Quincey's style, but we may fer- vently hope that Englishmen, following the example of our Trans- atlantic relatives, may seek and find in it nineteenth-century English at its best and in all its moods. We make one quotation • from the work, giving the account of the death of De Quincey, by one of his daughters. The death was a fit conclusion to such a life. He was in the world of dreams, and to him death may

have been the gate into the third heaven :— •

"I saw he was anxious about something, and I wont and sat down beside him to listen. He then treated me to one of those curious turns that his passing attacks of delirium would take. 'I am grieved,' he said, • at the coarse manners that some rough follows displayed,' I said, ' Why ? What have they done ?'—' Well, you know, I and the children were invited to the great supper. Do you know what supper I mean ?'—' No,' I said. Well, I was invited to come and to bring the children to the great supper of Jesus Christ, So, wishing the children to have suitable dresses for such cm occasion, I had them all dressed in white. They were dressed from head to foot in white. But some rough men in the streets of Edinburgh, as we passed on our way to the supper, Fleeing the little things in complete white, laughed and jeered at us, and made the children much ashamed.' We had rarely heard him mention his father's name during his life, he having died early. But one clay he said, There is a thing I much regret, that is, that I did not know more of my dear father, for I am sure that a juster, kinder man never breathed.' Ho then went on to tell me many traits of his father's character vOtielc he had learned from clinks and servants, and which he had treasured up for years in his memory. At length his illness became so serious that we thought it better to telegraph to his

only daughter within reach, viz., Mrs. Craig. She came over from Ireland the day before his death. Groat was his pleasure at seeing her, though, for some time, we fancied that be did not know her. Such was his constant thought of children, that ho viewed her simply as con- nected with his grandchildren. 'How is mama ?' he said, when he saw her ; nor did he address her as anything else but mama again. Towards the evening his weakness became extreme, and he said to my sister, Mama, I cannot bear the weight of clothes upon my feet.' My sister at once pulled off the heavy blankets, and wrapped a light shawl round his foot. 'Is that bettor ?' she asked. Yes, my love, much better ; I am better in every way,—I feel much better. You know these are the feet that Jesus washed.' As the night wore on, our kind friend Dr. Warburton Bogbie came and sat with us, as my father's life slowly ebbed away. Twice only was the heavy breathing interrupted by words. Ho had for hours ceased to recognise any of us, but we heard him murmur, though quite distinctly, 'My dear, dear mother. Then I was greatly mistaken. Then as the waves of death rolled faster and faster over him, suddenly out of the abyss we saw him throw up his arms, which to the last retained their strength, and say distinctly, and as if in groat surprise,' Sister ! sister I sister!' The loud breathing be- came slower and slower, and as the world of Edinburgh awoke to busy work and life, all that was mortal of my father fell asleep for ever."