BOOKS.
DE QUINCEY.* AIR. FOWLER'S address stimulates interest in a figure which it is easy to forget and which, when recalled, vexes the mind with speculations upon mortality. He looks at the fourteen volumes of De Quincey's collected works, reproaching himself for neglecting them, and then concludes that neglect is inevitable and that all that may be remembered of these inordinately-prolonged prose-weavings can be comprised in two or three small volumes.
Few readers will demur. Eager young men, to whom the English language is as startling a discovery as that of Cortez, have been fascinated by De Quincey, savouring his phrases with a lover's fondness, listening to his music as to a symphony of Beethoven, quickening with his exaltation, enduring his elaborateness, and smiling responsively at his complacent facetiousness. But youth passes, and its eagerness ; other years need other provocation ; and save for admired passages, De Quincey stays dustily unread not because he is a poor writer but because he no longer enchants men with developed instincts and a consciousness of the ultimate delight and value of letters.
There is something pathetic in this tardy and reluctant apos- tasy. De Quincey was profoundly interested in himself, as Lamb was, and Montaigne, and Sir Thomas Browne. But we are no longer profoundly interested in him, while in these others, and in a dozen more of scarcely superior achievement, our interest is sustained in all its original brightness. Mr. Fowler considers him as a literary critic, but he is a literary critic strangled. He is always talking of himself, but except for those early autobiographical chapters which it is hard to overpraise no one listens ; the eyes close, the head falls, and a faint universal snore steals up from the audience even while the unobservant rhetorician goes on and on, self- delighted. Had he practised scientific criticism, such as is practised to-day, this decay of interest would be merely natural, for science is always leaving science behind ; but he employed that far more seductive form of criticism, the subjective form, in which all our literary criticism hitherto— though slight enough, maybe — has excelled. But De Quincey does not excel in criticism, unless, for example, he is writing that famous passage " On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," which Mr. Fowler so unstintingly and so justly admires.
"He cannot view the question of Wordsworth's recognition by the world objectively ; he must place himself at the critical point in the situation. In this manner of approaching literary criticism Ile Quincey has many descendants at the present day. The manner has indeed become conscious of itself and pleased with itself ; we have critics who seriously maintain that the sole business of criticism is to put before us a personal impression, a personal point of view."
In the vulgarest sense, De Quincey is the most personal of critics. Thus, when he writes of Coleridge out of " the sudden and profound impulse communicated to the writer's feelings by the unexpected news of this great man's death," he writes in a way that must needs startle resentment into fury, saying redundantly how he learned that Coleridge was unfortunate in his marriage ; how the poet was easily led to the use of stimulants ; how sordidly he lived in the Strand, and how often he failed, thanks to the stimulants, to deliver the lectures he had engaged to deliver. Denigration so complete has seldom been prompted by the death of an old friend, and it is but an example of De Quincey's subjective
criticism in its freest play. So, also, with Wordsworth and his family. He discusses the physical characters of the poet's -wife and sister, telling us how badly the former squinted • De Quince,' as Literary Critic. By S H. Fowler. London: The English Association, 4 Buckingham (late, S.W. Lla.1
through all her charm, and how ungraceful and unsexual in appearance was the latter. His method is seen at its happiest in the account of Wordsworth's fortunes—in that delightfully malicious passage wherein he recites the successive timely benefactions poured down by tender-hearted fate upon a needy household.
" So true it is that still, as Wordsworth needed a place or a fortune, the holder of that place or fortune was immediately served with a summons to surrender it : so certainly was this impressed upon my belief, as one of the blind necessities making up the pros- perity and fixed destiny of Wordsworth, that, for myself, had I happened to know of any peculiar adaptation in an estate of mine to an existing need of Wordsworth's, forthwith, and with the speed of a man running for his life, I would have laid it down at his feet. ' Take it,' I should have said; `take it, or in three weeks I shall be a dead man.' " Other passages remind us that it is easy to be unfair to De Quincey and to overlook the exquisite prose which lies about his essays like green acres between arid wastes and cold fells. The pages devoted to Southey, for example, are lightened by lovely airs, in which you hear something of magic in the tones of the voice that describes evening falling upon the lakeland roads ; and the pages devoted to Charles Lloyd become moving and powerful with a characteristic drum-piece played by the nervous master-hand.
It is this magical power over language that, for all Isis delinquencies, makes him a great writer and tempts one to say falsely that it matters not what he is writing about. Mr. Fowler, perhaps, over-esteems his critical work ; certainly it was no divinely equipped judge that spoke in the Reminiscences, though in the current tone, of Donne's genius for discord, abominable sound, and intolerable defect of ear. He describes himself as an intellectual creature, his understanding as active and restless as a panther, and his life on the whole as the life of a philosopher. But his intellect did not control his writings and his interest in philosophy betrayed his pen into hopeless mazes. His faults are as enormous as his excellences : he is verbose, jocular, pedantic, extravagant ; he divagates insensibly, loses his theme and his reader, is effusive and elaborate. But, at times, his rhetoric reaches the purity of natural eloquence ; discursive- ness passes into largeness of comprehension, facetiousness disappears, and extravagance is redeemed by imagination, He hears -rather than sees, and his prose takes on the great English characteristic—rhythmic domination, being written from the ear and not from the eye, and relating him to the earlier masters, Browne, Donne and the Milton he so directly admired. It is prose inspired by what is unseen but powerfully apprehended. Thus, in the essay on Macbeth there is the magnificent passage :-
" The murderers and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess ; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested—laid asleep—tranced—racked into a dread armistice ; time must be annihilated ; relation to things without abolished ; and all mustpass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion."
And, best of all, there is that great orchestral reverberation of " The Pains of Opium," beginning, " The undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation Anthem ; and, like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous moment, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies " ;—and ending on that still-echoing cry of farewells. It is evoked again in " The Revolt of the Tartars " and " The English Mail Coach " ; the drums begin, the strings, a piercing wail rises up out of the muttering dark, and there is heard the quick intolerable plucking of the strings of memory and sorrow. He subjugates the reason and exalts the imagination until, as you listen, you see before you, gigantic and wild-sweeping,
" Like clouds that rake the mountain summit,"
shapes of dreams, strange, irregular shapes of mystery, obscure forms that brush you with their skirts as they rise, darken the sky with sinister motions, and pass uncomprehended away. For such moments everything else may be forgiven, and by such moments De Quincey lives now, when thoughts that were not his thoughts, cares that were not within his ken, ideals that were not within his aesthetic, press upon, tease and delight us,
JOHN FREEMAN,
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