DE QIIINCEY'S LAST TOLITME..
THE fourteenth and last volume of De Quincey's collected works contains nine papers, several of which, as the publishers inform us, were revised by the author. Two of them would have been considerably extended, had he lived to fulfil a long-cherished in- tention; but these and others are reproduced in their original form, unaccompanied even by such bibliographical information as the pub- lishers themselvesmighthave been fairly expected to supply. We are neither told where the several papers originally appeared, nor the dates of their first publication, though the latter often becomes an important consideration for the reader ; as, for instance, when De Quincey pronounces an opinion upon the actual state of literature in England, Germany, or elsewhere, at the moment in which he is writing. Another subject of complaint, which touches the pub- lishers alone, is the rather numerous errors of the press to be found in the present volume, and in this one alone of the whole series. The preceding thirteen, which underwent the author's careful scrutiny in their progress through the press, are as immaculate as the celebrated Foulis edition of Homer—a fact deserving of special note, as exemplifying in one of the lowest grades of lite- rary labour the operation of the same quality of mind as is mani- fested in the exquisite finish of De Quincey's style.
• Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected ; and other Papers. By Thomas de Quincey. Published by Hogg and Sons.
The first and longest set of papers in the present volume is a series of five " Letters " to a young man of great opulence and fair capacity, whose education had been neglected, and who, at the age of thirty-two, was deeply dejected by the failure of his heroic efforts to repair that great loss. How far the advice given in these: letters was adapted to the special ease which called them forth we have no means of judging, but it strikes us that their value for the present generation will be found to lie rather in some of their discursive details than in any general programme of education sketched out in them. De Quincey ex- presses his dissent from the eleventh chapter of Coleridge's Bio- graphic Literaria, the substance of which is a dissuasion from "the trade of authorship," and which lays down this doctrine, that, for the sake of his own happiness and respectability, every man should adopt some trade or profession, and should make lite- rature a subordinate pursuit. De Quincey fully admits the evil tendency of making hterature a means of livelihood, and would not have any man adopt it as a profession who would have to rely on it for his current income. He agrees with Coleridge that litera- ture, in the proper acceptation of the term, as denoting the most eminent of the fine arts to the exclusion of all science whatsoever, is not self-sufficing as an occupation of the intellect, because our power to exercise the faculties upon it is not independent of the state of our spirits ; and, therefore, he would have the cultivation
of literature combined with severer studies, in which the mind may find healthy exercise at times when otherwise the man would be driven by its unsatisfied cravings, and not by passion or incli- nation, upon some vulgar excitement of business or pleasure. As to the interests of literature itself, "one point," says De Quincey, " is clear to myjudgment : that literature must decay unless we have a class wholly dedicated to that service,—not pursuing it as an amusement only, with wearied and preoccupied minds. The reproach of being a nation boutiquiere,' now so eminently in- applicable to the English, would become indeed just if, from all our overstocked trades and professions, we could not spare men enough to compose a garrison on permanent duty for the service of the highest purposes which grace and dignify our nature." Passing over an amusing paper on " Orthographic Mutineers," in which Landor's crotchets are playfully handled, and another on John Paul Frederick Richter—one of De Quincefs three fa- vourites among the Germans, the other two being Kant and Schlegel—we come to an essay on Conversation. Among the latent powers he attributes to it is " an absolute birth of new insight into the truth itself, as inseparable from the finer and more scien- tific exercise of the talking art." As he pondered this subject, he says— "A feeling dawned on me of a secret magic lurking in the peculiar life, velocities, and contagious ardour of conversation, quite separate from any which belonged to books ; arming a man with new forces, and not merely with a new dexterity in wielding the old ones. I felt, and in this I could not be mistaken, as too certainly it was a fact of my own experience, that in the electric kindling of life between two minds—and far less from the kind- ling natural to conflict (though that also is something), than from the kind- ling through sympathy with the object discussed, in its momentary corusca- tion of shifting phases—there sometimes arise glimpses, and shy revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that could not have been approach- ed through any avenues of methodical study. Great organists find the same effect of inspiration, the-same result of power creative and revealing, in the mere movement and velocity of their own voluntaries' like the heavenly wheels of Milton, throwing off fiery flakes and bickering flames ; these im- promptu torrents of music create rapturous fioriture, beyond all capacity in the artist to register, or afterwards to imitate."
A comparison between Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke affords another illustration of the principle under consideration :-
" Dr. Johnson never, in any instance GROWS a truth before your eyes, whilst in the act of delivering it, or moving towards it. All that he offers up to the end of the chapter he had when he began. But to Burke, such was the prodigious elasticity of his thinking, equally in his conversation and in his writings, the mere act of movement became the principle or cause of movement. Motion propagated motion, and life threw off life. The very violence of a projectile, as thrown by him, caused it to rebound in fresh forms, fresh angles, splintering, coruscating, which gave out thoughts as new and as startling) to himself as they are to his reader. In this power, which might be illustrated largely from the writings of Burke, is seen something allied to the powers of; a prophetic seer, who is compelled oftentimes into seeing things, as unexpected by himself as by others. Now in conversation, considered as to its tendencies and capacities, there sleeps an intermitting spring of such sudden revelation, showing much of the same general character ; a power putting on a character essentially differing from the character worn by the power of books.
Dr. Johnson's renown as a talker is lightly regarded by the es- sayist. The doctor's conversational powers he declares to have been narrow in compass, however strong within their own essen- tial limits, and the opinion he pronounces at some length upon the intellectual capacity of the "great moralist" may be summed up in the same formula. " There is no man," he says, " that can cite any single error which Dr. Johnson unmasked, or any important truth which he expanded." He had neither eye nor interest for the social phenomena rising around him, no sympathy with hu- man nature in his struggles, no faith in the progress of man. His learning even has been grossly overrated ; he had read much in a desultory way, but had studied nothing, and " it may be doubted whether Dr. Johnson understood any one thing thoroughly except Latin."
In the fragment on " Presence of Mind," the Roman intellect, greatly limited as it was in some directions, is contemplated in those situations in which it showed itself preternaturally strong, and its powers are illustrated in the person of Julius Ctesar, the noblest representative of the national type. The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby made a pet of Pompey ; De Quincey, with immea- surably more reason, does homage to the greatness of Comer, and combats the attempts of some modern writers to disturb the tra- ditional characters of the mightiest of Romans and his feeble com- petitor.
The short paper " On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth," is one of the two which the author had intended to enlarge. We may have lost some brilliant writing by the failure of his pur- pose, but we may be well content with this exquisite piece of psychological criticism as it now stands. The problem which it
solves is thus stated— •
" From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this : the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity ; yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such iureffeet."
Here De Quincey makes a short digression for the purpose of exhorting the reader " never to pay any attention to his under- standing, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of the mind." Paradoxical as the advice may appear it is perfectly Sound ; it is sanctioned by the authority of Bacon, and its wisdom has been confirmed by the whole history of science from his day to this. But to the question : De Quincey tells us how it came to pass that his long perplexity was at last resolved, and what is his explanation of the fact that the knocking at the gate is felt to reflect back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity.
" If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommence- ment of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man—if all at once he should hear the death- like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and makfng known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary haman concerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in ; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured : Lady Macbeth is unsexed; ' Mac- beth has forgot that he was born of woman ; both are conformed to the image of devils ; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable ? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordi- nary tide and succession in human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess ; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary Met! suddenly arrested—laid asleep—traneed—racked into a dread armis- tice; time must be annihilated ; relation to things without abolished! .and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of dark- ness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds : the knocking at the gate is heard ; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced ; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish ; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again ; and the reestablia- ment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us pro- foundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."
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