BOOKS.
DE QUINCEY ON SELF-EDUCATION, STYLE, AND RHETORIC.*
THIS book was advertized as intended for the use of candidates preparing for the civil service examinations, and unless it has this or some similar object in view, it is difficult to understand why it is reprinted, as the papers it contains are already accessible in a very excellent edition of De Quincey's works. It would not, however, be easy to point out a book containing matter of equal intrinsic merit, which m its present form is less adapted for educational purposes of the kind to which we have supposed it to refer. The volume is very badly edited, or rather it is not edited at all. But every one who is conversant with its author's writings willthat scarcely any books of the present day are more in need of editorial help, when they are addressed to readers who are not expected to bring_ with them a great amount of thought or reading of their own. De Quincey's thought was as systematic as his knowledge was copious, and we do not imagine that he ever sat down to write upon a theme without having in his own mind brought his reasoning to a definite conclusion. On the other hand, he was so entirely master of his subject that it is probable he never sketched its divisions out on paper, and had no very clear idea of how much room it would take to develop them. His habits, as is well known, were desultory and procrastinating to the last degree, and as he wrote almost entirely for magazines and re- views it is not surprising to find that the point for the sake of which the essay was written is sometimes not reached at all, or is only vaguely indicated in order to get the paper brought to some kind of an end. This is most conspicuously the case in the long and in many respects valuable essay on " Style," which occupies about a third part of the volume before us. De Quincey begins by observations on the value of style, on the slight degree to which it is cultivated in England, on the difference of France in this respect, and interweaves with these a number of acute and ingenious remarks on the pecu- liarities of Greek and Latin prose composition, combined with some on the vices of newspaper style among ourselves, which may have been true at the time at which they were written, but which we are surprised that he should not have considerably modified in republish- ing them in the collected edition. It is not till we are halfway through the disquisition that we find any plan laid down, and here a promise is made of revealing the difficulties which beset the theory of the question, and of making the attempt to solve them. Not a hint, however, is given at this point of what the supposed difficulty consists in, or of the possible solution; and a long discussion is at once commenced on Greek and Latin literature, with a view to dis- cover the ideas of those nations on the subject. This is a fertile topic, and of course leads to digression upon -digression, among which we quite lose sight of the original issue. The essay, finally, comes to an abrupt end without disclosing anything more of the theory which it was written to expound. The " Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neg- lected"—an attractive title to competitive examinees—which was published twenty or thirty years ago, was republished in the last and posthumous volume of the collected edition, and was, therefore, never revised by the author. Had he had the opportunity, we feel satisfied that he would have introduced considerable alterations, especially in a passage apparently relating to Coleridge, and which (if it does so refer) is less creditable to De Quineey than anything else he wrote on the subject. These letters, too, are unfinished, and do not contain much valuable matter. No hint, however, is given to the reader of the date of the orginal publication, or of the fact that they did not undergo the same revision at their author's hands as most of his other works. The old references are all preserved, and are calculated. to occasion some confusion. At p. 17, De Quincey speaks of " a German work, published about two years ago." That is, about 1820 ! At p. 75, he speaks of " the arguments lately urged in the Quarterly Review, for bastardizing and degrading the early history of Rome." It would not have been a very laborious task to add a reference to the article in question. At p. 96, De Quincey speaks of " Mr. W.," the reputecKanthor of an article on Kant (the most elaborate I am told which at present exists in the English language) in the Encyclopaedia Londinensis." The article—which, by the way, is still the best introduction to the German philosopher's writings—was by Mr. Wirgman: a not very recondite piece of in- formation. At p. 85, De Quineey mentions " a little memoir" on the traces of the Danish language in the northern counties, which, he says, he inserted " about four years ago," in a provincial news- paper, and which he " shall reprint whenever" his "opera oninta" are collected. This ought to have been at least searched for. A much graver fault of editorship is the putting forward the remarks in Letter V., on Kant, as if they were the best that De Quincey had written on the subject. They are very well as far as they go, but relate miller to the aids for studying Kant, and the expectations with which he should be approached, than to the philosophy itself. That was very ably discussed, in its main problem, by De Quincey in Tait's Magazine, for 1836 ; a paper which it would have been of service to reproduce here, seeing that is not in the collected edition. The same magazine, about the same time, contained an article on Paley, the criticism of which is better expressed than in the "Glance at the Works of Mackintosh," in the " Selections." Criticism on Kant and Paley, being criticism directed to a definite point, would have been more really useful to students than anything contained in the very • Letters on Self-Education ; with HMIs on Style,. and Dialogues on Political Economy. By Thomas de Quincey. Hogg.
desultory and imperfect " Letters." The carelessness with which the book has been edited is sfiown in many trifling points. The misprints which figured in the collected edition, still remain uncor- rected, and at the end of the "Dialogues on Political Economy," the reader "is referred to the preface" for an explanation of the " fragmentary character" of the paper. The volume has no pre- face, and the reference has been left as it stood in the former edition. Where such carelessness is shown, it would of course be too much to expect that a mistake in Latin, like "quern nocuisset" (p. 473) should have been corrected, or that we should be told what novel it was that De Quincey referred to at p. 173, when he says that in "a juvenile effort from two very young ladies, daughters of a decal house one of the characters expressed her self-esteem by de popular phrase that she did not think small
beer of herself.' But, if we are to have De Quincey as an instructor on Political Economy—and we do not for a moment deny his eminent qualifications for the task—why. should not his " Logic of Political Economy" have been reprinted as well as the Templars' Dialogues" Economy"
as the former work
is not included in the collected edition. It is from the "Logic" and not from the "Dialogues," that Mr. Mill, in his chapter on Demand and Supply, quotes the excellent illustration of the musical snuff-box, and from -which he has adopted the term of "exchange value," in his account of that subject. A. student's attention, too, might have been drawn to the fact that in the Essay on Style, De Qiuncey is dead against dialogue as a mode of style for conveying truth, though he has used it himself in setting forth Ricardo's theory, which he deems most true. In speaking of Xenophon and Plato he says, that, considering their inexplicable discord, it is re- markable that both should have adopted "the same disagreeable form of composition ;" some man of straw, or good-humoured nine-pin, is set up to be bowled down by Socrates as a matter of course. He thinks the latter's antagonists " obsequious," and wishes he had had the oppor- tunity of standing up for some of the assailed opinions. The following is still more remarkable. After saying that the process of dialogue necessarily takes up each point of truth in an isolated position, and audits them separately like items in a disputed account, there is, he continues, a large class of cases, where we have to deal with a body of truths only to be understood in their mutual connexion and simul- taneous aspect. As an instance of the latter he takes political economy, in political economy he takes the system of Ricardo, in the system of Ricardo he takes the doctrine of Value, and asks, " Could you under- stand that taken apart ?" Yet it is in the case of this very science, this very writer, and this very doctrine, that De Quincey employed dialogue as a method of exposition. Such a discrepancy ought to be accounted for in any book which addresses itself to students, otherwise it is likely either hopelessly to puzzle them or to lead them to distrust a writer so self-contradictory. Our own view of the matter is, that De Quincey was right in his practice and wrong in his theory. He never did justice to Plato, and that he never did so is perhaps the most unaccountable thing in his intellectual history, for the Socratic method and the Socratic purpose are precisely those with which one would have expected him to feel the most entire sympathy. Plato's method did not, after all, differ much from his own. In some of the dialogues—in the "Republic," for example—he simply wishes to develop a system, and the "nine-pins" are put up to embody the doubts which probably occurred to his own mind in working it out, and which he is anxious to show he has been alive to, in case of their occurring to any one else. They are the rocks which form the ripple of the argument, and give it life and freshness. Nor is there any pretence for saying that, even in these dialogues, truth offers itself m "separate moments, or units." Propositions must succeed one another, in any case, and Plato always refers to what has gone before and tests its agreement with what he is at the instant bringing forward. In other dialogues he has an unequivocal, though often a tacit reference to controversies of the day and opinions of other philosophers, and is, of course, in our eyes, at a disadvantage whenever these have not been preserved. Moreover, when De Quincey asks for "the body of doctrines" as essential to the Socratic or Platonic philosophy, and intimates his disbelief in its existence, he entirely overlooks the practical objects which Plato and still more, probably, Socrates, had in view, and takes much too intellectual a stand-point for the treatment of the whole question. The Essay on Rhetoric requires many notes, especially in the remarks relating to Aristotle, which though not otherwise than correct, are calculated to confuse non-Aristotelian readers. De Quincey has also a long note on the proper meaning of the rhetorical en- thymeme, containing views which he says " will surprise our Oxford friends." It is curious that when he republished this Essay in his "Selections" he should have retained these passages in their original form, without a reference to the later works of Sir William Hamilton, by whose conversation he says he was first directed to the true view of the question. De Quincey, or his Editor, should also have known that though the Oxford logicians, down to and including Whately, were in error on this point, they have long since corrected their views, and that for many years past the explanation given in the said note from Eaceiolati has been no novelty in that university.
In making these remarks, we have not the slightest wish to detract from the reputation of De Quincey himself, for whom we yield in admiration to none. We have simply wished to warn those for whose use the book seems intended, that it is not to be swallowed whole like a Catechism, but requires careful reading and comparison with other authorities. Of the value of its author's writings as means of intellectual training, no one can have a higher opinion than ourselves ; but we doubt whether their best specimens, even in this
point of view, are those which have been selected for the volume before us. Our objections have, however, been chiefly directed to the way in which they have been presented to the public, which we think calculated to do justice neither to those for whom they are intended, nor to the fame of their author. The defects of his writings are, to many minds, of a kind which is really beneficial to them, by com- pelling increased attention to the thread of the argument, and a clear perception of what it does not include. Those who will analyze any of them will be easily convinced of this, and few better exercises in lo 'c could be devised than analysis of his reasoning in its more elaborate specimens. We have not, therefore, said, as we had thought of saying, that something in the nature of a synopsis should have been prefixed to this volume; for such things are not very useful except to those who make them for themselves. Bat difficulties of this sort are one thing; difficulties arising from want of editorial super- intendence are another. In the latter respect we think the volume falls far short of what it might and ought to have been.
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