BOOKS.

PROFESSOR MASSON ON DE QUINCEY.* IT is a pleasant duty to begin a notice of Professor Massou's latest work with a cordial eulogium. We have him here, not certainly at his best, but at his ripest, at his freest, in his arm- chair. There is something, after all, in the mischievous rather than ill-natured conception of Mr. Masson, which appeared some- where some years ago, as " a sort of Carlyle with a wooden leg, stumping painfully, but with Aberdonian resolution, through the Miltonic period." Few men of letters in the present day have had such serviceable legs given them by Nature as Mr. Masson, or used them to such honourable purpose. But the reverence he owes to his master in morals and literature seems to have made him think it his duty on occasions to buckle on a leg fashioned after Mr. Carlyle's, and stump about on it, to break out into a style that recalled the author of Sartor &mitts, and even to give vent to sentiments that had a suspicious resem-

Da By David Masson. English Mon of Letters. Edited by John

Morley. London; Macmillan and Co. an. blance to those of the Latter-Day Pamphleteer. Such essays iu amateur lameness had never such success as that of the pro- fessional rogues whom Victor Hugo has done such justice to in his Notre Dame, and latterly Mr. Masson has kept his Carlylese within bounds. In his "study" of De Quincey, there is no trace of the master's style, except, perhaps, in such Carlylean, but at the same time rather wooden, outbursts of kindliness as, " Oh, that Ann of Oxford Street ; oh, poor Ann of Oxford Street !"

Altogether, this is by far the best representation of Do Quincey that has lately been given to the British public. There was a deal of fresh information in the Life which was published some years ago, by the writer who occasionally styles himself H. A. Page, as well as moral discrimination and intellectual in- sight. But, as we said at the time, it was rather a book about De Quincey than on him, and no doubt the author suffered much from the disadvantage of dealing, under a nom, de plume, with biographical information supplied to him personally. The article on De Quincey, which has appeared in the new edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica, though well-intentioned, is very disappointing. The writer—a Mr. Findlay, an Edinburgh gen- tleman—seems to have been chosen—so we gather from Mr.

Masson's narrative—because he was one of the few in Edinburgh to whom De Quincey showed himself during his later years.

But Mr. Findlay supplies no biographical details in addition to those which had before been made known by Mr. Hill Burton and by Mr. Masson himself, and his article is marked by common-places of sentiment and indiscriminate eulogy worthy only of a hasty obituary notice in a provincial news- paper. Could " pernickity " prudishness (it is to be hoped by the way, that Mr. Annandale and other of our latter-day lexicographers will not forget this expressive Edinburgh word " peruickity," go farther than declining to detail the "Ann of Oxford Street" incident—so pathetic and so innocent—in Dc

Quincey's career? How De Quincey, himself would have shuddered to be told that " Sums things in his utvn, Mo.: he has

done velfectly ; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour, and eloquence, which, for sus- tained brilliancy, richness, subtle grace, and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels ; and ho is without peer the prince of dreamers !" There is no more careful or correct esti- mate of the characteristics of De Quincey's style than Mr.

Minto's, in his Manuel of English Prose Literature; aud, besides,

Mr. Minto has done genuine biographical service by exploding the notion that De Quincey was a weakly vain man. There is

also keen insight into De Quincey's character in the essays of. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, as the realisation of him as the " little Druid wight " of Thomson's Castle of Indolence is suffi- cient to prove. But neither Mr. Minto nor Mr. Hodgson professes to give a full-length portrait of De Quiueey. Mr. Masson has, therefore, had a field altogether open to him, and we are bound to say that not only has he occupied it creditably, but he has occupied it completely. Most of the volumes belonging to the English Men of Letters series arc of necessity condensations, alike in biography and in criticism. But a volume of the size of this, if written in the right spirit, is really all that need be written about Do Quincey. Except to the eye of his own imagination, his life was singularly unevent- ful. As for his works, it is practically impossible to give a homo- geneous criticism of them. To De Quincey himself they were arranged upon a method, but even to his warmest admirers,— those who look upon him as the subtlest of writers, us a poly- histor,—they are truly a mighty maze, and altogether without a plan. De Quincey is at the best a " study " classic, the supreme English magazinist. Time is well spent in dipping into him, but to attempt " criticism from the centre " would iu truth be love's labour lost.

"If written in the right spirit," we say. But there is no " if " in the matter. It is impossible to forget what Mr. Masson's master says of De Quincey in the Reminiscences. The "wire-drawn " little man fares almost as badly at Carlyle's hands as Charles Lamb. He tells how Southey wished that some one would "thrash the little wretch" for his tattle about the personal characteristics of the Lakists ; and readers of the Reminiscences are not likely to forget that lightning-flash of char- acterisation, " Eccovi ! look at him ; this child has been in Hell." Yet it is hardly possible not to come to the conclusion that in the Reminiscences Carlyle " paid off "—to use an expressive Scotch phrase—the sharp critic of Goethe and Goethe's translator ; and besides, against the contempt of the Reminiscences must be placed the cordiality and friendship of his letters from Craigenputtoch,

with their " would you come hither and be king over us, then in- deed we had made a fair beginning, and the Bog School might snap its fingers at the Lake School." Besides, it was hardly possible

for Carlyle, a Puritan, a peasant, a worshipper of action, pro- perly to appraise De Quincey, who was a Hedonist to the core, a gently, even luxuriously nurtured scion of the middle class, and

who but for the res angusta dom., would have read and dreamed

his life away, without doing or producing anything. Happily, Mr. Masson's Carlyleanism has been unable altogether to freeze the genial current of his soul. So he is able to " gently scan " this weird, shrinking, timorous, yet inquisitive, all-observant creature, and we think the conclusion his examination leads him to thoroughly sound :-

" No one could have said of De Quincey, at any time of his life, that his strength lay in any predominance of the moral element in his nature. On the contrary, though severe enough in some of his criticisms on conduct, and owning a distinct esthetic preference for whatever is lovely and of good report, he was defective in original moral impetus or vehemence to a degree beyond the average. It is no mere figure from grammar to say that few men have come into the world, or have gone through it, with a more meagre outfit of the imperative mood. It was because he was so weak in this mood, that we may call him so specifically, in his own language, ' an intellectual creature.' His main interest in life was that of universal curiosity, sheer in- quisitiveness and meditativeness about all things whatsoever."

It is in this spirit that we should look at all the actions of De Quincey's life, and particularly that which has been most un- favourably criticised, his public revelation of what he came privately to know of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. This has been called "mean ;" and at the time of the publica- tion of the papers, the whole Lake connection were most in- dignant. Undeniably, they belong to the literature of "moral vivisection." But it ought at least now to be evident that De Qaincey was unaware that in telling what he saw and heard in the Lakes he was guilty of anything like a breach of confidence.

From first to last he was a wide-awake child, and his unreserve is neither better nor worse than that of the enfant terrible. Besides, he had been free and complete in confessions of his own weak-

nesses; why should he not—so he may have thought—be as frank about Wordsworth's ? Nor should the positive and positively good

morality of De Quincey be left out of consideration in estimating him. His life was pure. He was an affectionate son, a singu- larly affectionate brother. His wife and children loved him, and well they might, in spite of his wanderings, his absence of mind, and his habit of letting his hair and his papers get on fire.

Nor did he sink into mere opium dreams and dependence on others like Coleridge ; although almost incredibly simple and ignorant where money matters were concerned, he was morbidly desirous to fufill his obligations, and he died in the harness of the struggler. Even the fact, which Mr. Masson properly em- phasizes, that to the last he kept the real, central De Quincey to himself, ought to be placed to his credit rather than otherwise.

It reminds one of Burns's fierce outburst, that he did not wish to be independent that he might sin, but that he wished to be independent in his sinning. De Quincey shrank all his life from facing his social obligations. But he also desired to be independent in his shrinking. He succeeded. He died without the real De Quincey making a sign.

Mr. Masson's observations on the De Quincey literature are few. But they are eminently sensible. We are not quite sure that he is altogether right in his attacks on the magazine writing of the present day, and in his echo of the sigh which so frequently results from a first reading of De Quincey, " Ah ! there is no such writing now-a-days." Much of that writing, no doubt, deserves what Mr. Masson—buckling on his Carlylean leg for a little vigorous exercise—says, such as that " anything

does—any compost of rough proximate ideas on a subject, or any string of platitudes, repeating whatnobody ever did not know, [sic] if tinselled sufficiently into pretty sentences." But Mr. Masson should remember that we live in a period of action, and that

our literature, particularly our magazine literature, is much more a literature of action than of speculation, or even sugges- tion. It is intended to move the masses, and as they are slow to move, these magazine efforts to rouse them must seem to the eye of the thoroughly informed critic to be of the nature of " damnable iteration " and " strings of platitudes." But it is precisely at a time like the present, characterised by a literature like the present, that De Quincey, with his sixteen volumes of supreme magazine writing, on all subjects, in all moods, is of value as what we have already styled a " study " classic. Mr.

Masson recommends to young men a course of De Quincey at the rate of half a volume a day. The prescription is not a bad

one, provided the patient has really " the good natural intel- ligence " of which Mr. Masson speaks—for De Quincey, like quinine, does not suit all constitutions. But it is to the man actively engaged in what we have styled " the literature of action," that De Quincey is of the greatest service, and as a tonic. When such a man thinks he has exhausted all available knowledge on a particular subject, above all, when on the point of being overridden by a particular theory, let him turn to the sixteen volumes of De Quincey, before he commits himself in print. It will be strange indeed if he does not find in one or other of these volumes something to interest him, something altogether new, either in the form of information or of argu- ment,—something which will help to give his writing the strength that comes, not only of knowing all sides, but of penetrating all recesses, of a question.