Essays on style, rhetoric, and language

Front matter

THOMAS \M QUINCEY

Essays on Style Rhetoric, and Language

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Preface

Rhetoric, in spite of the attention which in every age of the world has been earnestly bestowed upon it, is probably to-day the most belated of the sciences. For this the text-books must to some extent be held responsible. They all, good and bad, have a depressing air of fixity and finality. The principles of expression, we are told, were all discovei-ed hundreds of years ago, they are rigid and inalterable, not to say sacred, and the student who lays violent hands upon them is liable to the charge of presumption and want of reverence. Teaching like this, in flat contradiction to the scientific spirit, has done much to check independence of inquiry and restrict the field of research. This state of affairs, however, cannot long endure. There are signs, such as the introduction of the study of literary criticism into the college curriculum, and the investigation of what are properly questions of rhetoric, in the psychological laboratories, which indicate that old prejudices are in process of breaking down and must ultimately be swept away. It is to take advantage of this change of front as well as to help bring it about, that the publication of this little series has been undertaken. As soon as the scientific point of view is assumed, the history of contributions to the subject becomes of great importance. In such a history, the two preceding issues, Lewes's ' Principles of Success in Literature ' and Spencer's ' Philosophy of Style,' will surely find a place, and with them must be ranked the essays of De Quincey which iv Preface.

make up the present volume. Other of De Quincey's essays, as for example those on ' Greek Tragedy ' and ' Conversation,' and the whole series of papers included under the head 'Literary Criticism ' in the American edition of De Quincey's works, might properly have been included ; but on the whole it seemed better to restrict the selection to those essays which deal directly with the theory of literature, and to throw into an appendix such passages from his other writings as will be of most assistance to the student.

The materials for the study of De Quincey's life, style, and ideas, now exist in abundance. The definitive edition of his works is that of Masson, in fourteen volumes, with a good index. The essays on 'Style,' 'Rhetoric,' and ' Language ' will be found in Vol. X., that on ' The English Language,' in Vol. XIV. The introduction in Vol. X. deals briefly with De Quincey's theories, and long footnotes on p. 82-87 discuss special points with regard to -his interpretation of Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' The best biography is that of A. H. Japp (' H. A. Page'), recently reissued in a single volume. Masson has written the volume in the English Men of Letters series, and Leslie Stephen the exhaustive article in the ' Dictionary of English Biography.' A very readable little book is 'Personal Recollections of Thomas De Quiucey,' by J. R. Findlay, who is also author of the article ' De Quincey ' in the last edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' De Quincey's own ' Autobiography ' and ' London Reminiscences,' as well as the more strictly autobiographical passages of the ' Confessions,' should not be overlooked. Much correspondence has recently been edited by Dr. Japp in his ' De Quincey Memorials.' On De Quincey's style and writings, aside from what is to be found in the volumes just cited, may be mentioned Leslie Stephen's article in ' Hours in a Library,' 1st series, p. 349 (reprinted from Fortnightly 15 : 310), Minto's sketch in his ' Manual of English Prose

Literature,' p. 31-76, Shadworth Hodgson's ' Genius of De Quincey ' in ' Outcast Essays,' p. 1-98, and Masson's essay in his ' Essays, chiefly on English Poets.' Less important articles will be found in Macmillan's 62 : 101 by George Saintsbury (reprinted in 'Essays in English Literature'); Fraser's 62: 781, 63: 51, by ' H. W. S. ; ' Atlantic 12: 345, by H. M. Alden; Atlantic 40: 569, by G. P. Lathrop; North American Review 74: 425, by S. G. Brown ; North American Review 88 : 113, by G. S. Phillips; Blackwood's 122: 717; British Quarterly 20: 163, 38: 1; Westminster 61 : 519.

As in the previous issues, the introduction and notes are intended to reinforce, not to forestall, the researches of the student.

FRED N. SCOTT.

Ann Arbok, Feb. 18, 1893.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction ix

ESSAY ON STYLE.

Part I. — Defects of English Style

i. Three Failings of the British Character 1

ii. British Disregard of Style 5

iii. Educated Women the Depositaries of Good English 10

iv. Effect of Newspapers on Style 18

v. English Newspaper Style compared with the Style of the

French and Germans 25

vl Style as Organic and as Mechanic 36

Part II. — Development of Prose

i. Origin of Prose 43

ii. Greek Prose — Herodotus and Thucydides 50

iii. Greek Prose — The Philosophers 58

Part III. — -Epochs of Greek Literature

i. Outline 70

ii. Tendency of Intellectual Power to gather in Clusters 70

iii. The Two Great Periods of Grecian Literature 86

iv. Isocrates the Connecting Link 93

v. Greek Literature before Pericles and after Alexander 97

vii viii Contents.

Part IV. — Style and Publication. PAGE

i. Features of Greek Literature Favorable to the Development

of a Theory of Style 102

ii. Influence of Subjective Pursuits upon the Culture of Style. . 113

iii. The Idea of Publication 121

iv. The Theatre and the Forum as Modes of Publication 125

ESSAY ON RHETORIC.

i. Popular Conceptions of Rhetoric 138

ii. Aristotle's View of Rhetoric 140

iii. Rhetoric Defined 146

iv. Practical Rhetoric amongst the Greeks 148

v. The Rhetoric of the Romans 150

vi. Rhetoric in the Literature of Modern Europe 152

vii. British Rhetoric 157

viii. Rhetoric of the Continent 180

ix. Miscellaneous Criticisms of Whately's ' Rhetoric ' 186

ESSAY ON LANGUAGE.

i. Innovations in Language 195

ii. National Appreciation of Language — the Greeks 198

iii. The Romans 204

iv. The French 206

v. The Germans 209

vi. The English 211

ESSAY ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

i. A History of the English Language needed 216

ii. What constitutes the Value of Language 225

Index 247

Introduction

oX«o

LIFE AND WRITINGS.

Thomas De Quincey was born in or near Manchester, August 15, 1785. He was thus ten years the junior of Charles Lamb, ten years the senior of Carlyle, and almost the exact contemporary of his friend John Wilson, who was born but three months before, and had been in his grave but five years when De Quincey died in 1859. The De Quincey stock, supposed to be of Norse extraction, had many branches, of which the American family, represented by the elder Josiah Quincy, had alone arrived at any great distinction. In England, where also the aristocratic de had been dropped from the original name, the family had mostly gone into trade. De Quincey's father was for many years the senior partner of the firm of Quincey and Duck, linen drapers, of Manchester. At the time of the birth of his son, he had become prosperous, gone into the wholesale business, and, owing to poor health, was beginning to spend the greater part of his time abroad. Mrs. Quincey was the daughter of a Westmoreland farmer. Although neither father nor mother rose above the ordinary level in point of intellect, both were people of culture, and the father was author of a single obscure book entitled ' A Short Tour of the Midland Counties of England.'

De Quincey's early life was spent in a pleasant countryhouse named Greenhay, situated in the outskirts of Manchester. The name of Greenhay occurs frequently in the opening chapters of the ' Autobiography.' It was here that the precocious child received, at the age of six, those x Introduction.

profound impressions, first, from the death of his sister Elizabeth, and then from the death of his father, which furnished the material for two of his most pathetic passages. It was here also, that he found material for the most successful of his humorous sketches, in his pugnacious brother William — William, inventor of methods of skating upon the ceiling, and creator, for purposes of torment, of the degraded kingdom of Gombroon, and the mighty and elastic Empire of Tigrosylvania. While still at Greenhay, and soon after his father's death, De Quincey began the study of Latin and Greek. Having made a fair beginning under a dull but conscientious tutor, he was sent to the Bath Grammar School, where his precocity excited some attention, and then to the Winkfield School in Wiltshire. A few months' vacation in Ireland, in 1800, in company with a young Irish friend, Lord Westport, gave him a taste of the world and social life, and made the Manchester Grammar School, to which he was now sent, seem like a scholastic prison. The tasks of the school-room were, as he has recorded in his ' Confessions of an Opium-Eater,' far below his capabilities. At thirteen he had mastered Greek, writing it with careless ease. At fifteen, when he entered the Manchester School, his command of the language, he tells us, was so great, that he not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but by extemporaneous translation from the newspapers, had acquired the ability to converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment. " That boy," said his teacher to a stranger, "could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." A year and a half under dull though kind-hearted masters, drove the young Grecian to despair. He appealed to his mother and his guardians to be allowed to go to Oxford, and, upon being refused, ran away from school, and returned to his mother's house in Chester. It was part of his plan to visit on his way his favorite poet, Wordsworth, but he had not the courage to do

Life and Writings. xi

so. Arrived at home, his part was taken by a good-natured uncle, who persuaded the boy's guardians to grant their ward a guinea a week, and his freedom. Then followed the adventures which make up the first part of the ' Confessions.' From July to November, 1802, De Quincey tramped about the North of Wales. As long as the weather would permit, he lived in the open air, sleeping at night in a small tent which he carried about with him. Of the many incidents of his outing, the most important was his meeting with one De Haren, of whom we know nothing, save that having a trunkful of German books, he introduced De Quincey to the German language and read with him a good deal of German literature. During this time De Quincey was in constant fear lest his guardians should send him back to the Grammar School. The idea was so hateful to him, that he resolved finally to bury himself in the solitude of London, until, having attained his majority, he should be free to pursue his studies where he chose. With a little money, borrowed from some acquaintances, he undertook to carry out this foolish plan. He went to London, and there began a mode of life which resembled that of a hunted animal. A delicately organized, highly educated young man of seventeen, he attached himself, much as a lost dog would do, to a disreputable lawyer of the name of Brunell. He ate chance fragments from his patron's table, and by night slept in the lawyer's great, empty, rat-haunted house. During the day he walked the street, or sat on the benches in the parks. This Bohemian life endured for some months before he was by accident discovered by his friends, and persuaded to return home.

His guardians now giving their consent to his attending the University, in 1805 he went to Oxford. His life while there, however, was so little less secluded than it had been in London that he afterward declared he owed nothing to the University. If he owed anything it was his acquaintxii Introduction.

ance with a German named Schwartzburg, with whom he studied Hebrew and read German philosophy. When he came up for his examinations his paper aroused great expectations among his examiners; but, with characteristic timidity, for some slight reason he failed to appear at the oral examination, and in consequence did not obtain his degree. <%

Although it was many years before De Quincey called public attention to himself, he began even while yet a resident at Oxford, to form the acquaintance of eminent men of letters. With Wordsworth he had opened correspondence as early as 1803. During a visit to London he called upon Charles Lamb. In 1805, conceiving a violent admiration for Coleridge, who was then in Malta, De Quincey was for starting at once for that island merely to get a glimpse of the poet. This impulse was not followed, but two years later he met Coleridge at Bridgewater and shortly after had the extreme felicity, while escorting Mrs. Coleridge from Bristol to Southey's home at the Lakes, of staying two days at Grasmere with Wordsworth, Mrs. Wordsworth, and Dorothy. A second and longer visit made in the following year, led to De Quincey's writing an appendix of notes to Wordsworth's pamphlet ' The Convention of Cintra.' This appendix, if we except a translation of Horace made at fifteen, was De Quincey's first serious appearance in the world of letters.

Had De Quincey died at any time within the next twelve years, his name would now have but a passing interest as that of an obscure friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. During that time he produced but a single article which his editor has regarded as worthy of preservation.1 In Wordsworth's cottage at Grasmere which he had rented upon the poet's removal to Allen Bank, he spent his time in reading

1 'Danish Origin of the Lake-Country Dialect,' Masson's Ed., Vol. XIII.

Life and Writings. xiii

German philosophy, principally the works of Kant, and planning books which never got themselves written. At one time he meditated coming to America to bury himself in the forest solitudes and there digest the Kantian philosophy. Instead, he married, in 1816, Miss Margaret Simpson, daughter of a neighboring landholder, and cultivated the acquaintance of distinguished neighbors like John Wilson, Chas. Lloyd, and the poet Southey.

It was during this period that the opium habit came upon him. He had begun to take opium as a medicine as early as 1803, using it to relieve a painful stomach disorder which he believed to have been brought on by the privations of his life in London. From 1813, however, he took the drug for its own sake, and took it in large and rapidly increasing quantities, until in 1817-19, to the great distress of his wife and friends, his subjection to its influence was complete. The necessity of providing for his family at length aroused him from his torpor. By a great effort he broke loose from the habit for a time, and looked about him for some kind of literary employment. For a time he did editorial work on the Westmoreland Gazette. He then sought an engagement as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, of which his friend Wilson was the ruling spirit, but for some reason failed to secure it. Negotiations with the newly founded London Magazine had a more fortunate outcome. In that periodical, in September, 1821, appeared the 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,' and immediately upon its appearance De Quincey's reputation as a new force in English prose literature, was solidly established. Other papers, always announced as coming from the pen of the 'Opium-Eater,' followed at brief but irregular intervals. In 1826, through Wilson's influence, he became a regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine. This connection, which brought him frequently to Edinburgh, at length led him to move to that city with his family.

xiv Introduction.

Here, or in this neighborhood, the remainder of his life was spent in active literary labor. Besides the steady flow of articles running through Blackwood's and Taifs Magazines, he produced for the seventh edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' articles on Goethe, Schiller, Pope, and Shakespeare. He was pre-eminently a writer of articles. But two of his works, ' Klosterheim,' a romance of a gloomy type, published in 1832, and the 'Logic of Political Economy' (1844), appeared as separate volumes.

De Quincey's wife died in 1840. Three years later, he rented a small cottage at Lasswade, seven miles distant from Edinburgh, and moved into it with his childreu, though retaining a room in the city in which to do his work and store his innumerable papers. The remainder of his life was almost barren of events. A few visits to Glasgow, a journey to Scotland to see his married daughter and his grandchildren, an occasional struggle with his old enemy opium — these were the sole interruptions in the quiet current of his life. During the last ten years he was closely associated with the publisher James Hogg, wrote much for Hogg's Weekly Instructor, and, at his friend's suggestion began, in 1853, a 'Collective Edition7 of his works. He died at his lodgings in Edinburgh, December 8, 1859, in his seventy-fifth year.

A vivid picture of De Quincey's personal appearance is given by J. R. Eindlay in his ' Personal Recollections ' : " He was a very little man (about five feet three or four inches) • his countenance the most remarkable for its intellectual attractiveness that I have ever seen. His features, though not regular, were aristocratically fine, and an air of delicate breeding pervaded the face. His forehead was unusually high, square, and compact. At first sight his face appeared boyishly fresh and smooth, with a sort of hectic glow upon it, that contrasted remarkably with the evident appearances of age in the grizzled hair and dim-looking

Life and Writings. xv

eyes. The flush or bloom on the cheeks was, I have no doubt, an effect of his constant use of opium; and the apparent smoothness of the face disappeared upon examination. The best description of his peculiar appearance in this respect, is one given by Sir Walter Scott, in reference to General Platoff, whom Scott met at Paris, and from whom, he tells us, he took his portrait of Mr. Touchwood, in St. Ronan's Well. ' His face, which at the distance of a yard or two seemed hale and smooth, appeared, when closely examined, to be seamed with a million of wrinkles, crossing each other in every direction possible, but as fine as the point of a very fine needle.' "

De Quincey's personality was a curious and perplexing compound of timidity, unsophistication, humor, gloominess, sociability, temper, gentleness, and prejudice. He was so shy, that, when passing a London cabstand, " he refrained, with nervous solicitude, from any gesture that might warrant any driver in concluding himself summoned." In money matters his innocence was such, that he once attempted to exchange a fifty-pound note for a handful of shillings. Most of his writings are pervaded by a humorous spirit, but any direct attempt at the humorous generally results in flat failure. It is not too much to say that he had no fund of moral seriousness, nor any views of politics or social matters in which he earnestly believed. His attitude toward most of the important issues of life was intellectual and 'literary.' Books were to him much more real than men and affairs, and it was when he regarded the latter through the medium of the former, as in his observations on the character of the French Revolution in reference to Wordsworth's ' Excursion,' 1 that his vision was keenest and most trustworthy. For two things he will certainly be remembered, and deservedly remembered : first,

11 On Wordsworth's Poetry.'

xvi Introduction.

for his services as a conduit in transferring literary and philosophical ideas from Germany to England ; second, for his addition to our knowledge of the capabilities of English prose. The importance of the first is hard to estimate at the present time, hut probably De Quincey should be ranked with Coleridge, Carlyle, and George Eliot as one of the writers who did most to make German thought, for good or bad, a possession of the English mind. De Quincey did not have the philosophic cast of intellect ; he never succeeded in getting more than a superficial idea of the Kantian philosophy ; but in his time it was something that a man of letters should be able to read Kant at all, and, that he should be able to write about him sympathetically in clear English prose, was, for the future of German ideas in England, an advantage hardly to be overrated.

De Quincey's contributions to the history of English prose are of two kinds : first, his own good example in writing it, and second, his reasoning and theorizing about it. The virtues of English prose will probably remain a kind of superstition, until its history has been written from a scientific point of view. When that has been done, it may be discovered that there is no such thing as absolutely good style, any more than there is absolutely good painting, or music, or architecture. The things of value are the discoveries and the revelations of ways of making expression more effective. .These form the stages in the perpetual evolution of language. To this evolution, De Quincey made in his practice, substantive additions of no small importance. He discovered capacities of prose, which before his time, had not been known to exist ; or, if they existed in isolation, no one had before woven them together and to weave together, is, in art, to make a new thing. The quality which distinguishes De Quincey as a writer of prose, is his ability to conceive, in language, a constructive whole of a musical order. " The more exquisite passages "

Life and Writings. xvii

says Leslie Stephen, "are intended to be musical compositions, in which, words have to play the part of notes." He seems to have composed in much the same way as did Mozart, who said that pieces gradually got finished in his head, even when they were long, so that he could see the whole of them in a single glance in his mind, as if they were beautiful paintings, or handsome human beings. To De Quincey, music, as he himself said, was a necessity of his daily life. He was passionately fond of Beethoven. His essays abound with references to music, and in the first part of the essay on ' Style ' (p. 4), leading the way to a discussion of the British disregard of style, he speaks of musical feeling in terms which may be applied, with little change, to his own feeling for the harmonies, and sequences, and organic structure of a highly developed prose : " The preparation pregnant with the future ; the remote correspondence ; the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense, are asked in one passage, and answered in another ; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving through subtle variations, that sometimes disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the blaze of daylight." These are qualities which we expect to find in poetical compositions ; they were not common in prose before De Quincey's time. "Humbler writers," says Mr. Stephen, "are content if they can get through a single phrase without producing a decided jar. They aim at keeping up a steady jog-trot, which shall not give actual pain to the jaws of the reader. They no more think of weaving whole paragraphs or chapters into complex harmonies, than an ordinary pedestrian of 'going to church in a galliard and coming home in a coranto.' Even our great writers generally settle down to a stately, but monotonous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibbon, or, are content with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as possible."

xviii Introduction.

THE 'ESSAY ON STYLE.'

Had De Quincey's scientific faculty equalled his powers of construction, he might have produced a treatise on style as important for the history of criticism as Aristotle's ' Rhetoric ' or ' Poetics.' But his learning and his methods of investigation were in no sense scientific. His knowledge was made up of a vast number of bits of information, and of quotations from ancient and modern literature, which had remained with him from the 'prodigious circuit of reading' of which he was so proud. He was incapable of long-sustained processes of exact observation and comparison. The slightest suggestion sufficed to set him off upon a long digression. The results of such a mind applied to the complex problems of style was naturally not a well-digested system of criticism but a series of brilliant intuitions and suggestions, mingled with irrelevant remarks upon anything that at the time happened to come into his head. Saying so much, it was impossible that he should not now and then say something very good indeed, though, like his penetrating criticism upon Burke (p. 185), it often came as an afterthought and was thrown into the form of a footnote. The ' Essay on Style ' was published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1840-41, in four papers corresponding to the four parts of the present edition. Like the other essays of this volume, it completes but a part of the originally projected plan. As usual, De Quincey, starting in without any welldefined conception of his subject-matter, allows his ideas to shape themselves as he goes along. Thus what should have formed the basis of this essay is not touched upon until the closing section. It is not until p. 121 that De Quincey asks the question : " Did the reader ever happen to reflect on the great idea of publication?" A great idea indeed ! — certainly the greatest that De Quincey ever enter-

Essay on '■Rhetoric.'' xix

tained, and probably one of the greatest of the century. But De Quincey has no idea of making any scientific use of it. That this social conception of literature (for it amounts to that) might be made the basis of a systematic theory of criticism, does not occur to him. Having announced it as a great idea, he proceeds to play about it in a fanciful way, then uses it to enforce the duty "annually growing in solemnity " of cultivating an unwordy diction, and finally explains by it, in a somewhat loose way, the predominance of dramatic and oratorical composition in Athens and the consequent neglect, among the Greeks, of style as a didactic theory. Style, in the modern sense, he does at times in a way connect with the idea of publication, as when he calls it a tool for the popularization of truth (p. 213). Style (p. 104) is the art of constructing sentences and weaving them into coherent wholes. Regarded in itself it has an absolute value and is able to yield a separate intellectual pleasure quite apart from the interest of the subject treated (p. 212). Regarded as subsidiary to the thought, it has two functions, first to render the subject intelligible, second to render it impressive. There is a third conception which makes style the 'incarnation' (the term is Wordsworth's) of the thought (p. 214), but whether this is true of style generally or only of certain specimens, De Quincey does not make entirely clear.

ESSAY ON 'RHETORIC

The essay on Rhetoric appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for 1829. The conception of rhetoric which De Quincey wishes to establish is the art of "aggrandizing and bringing out into strong relief, by means of various and striking thoughts some aspect of truth which of itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, and therefore rests upon artificial aids." Canning serves as an example of the ideal xx Introduction.

rhetorician. "His station was with the lilies of the field which toil not neither do they spin. He should have thrown himself upon the admiring sympathies of the work as the most dazzling of rhetorical artists, rather than have challenged their angry passions in a vulgar scuffle foi power." Here we have again the idea of a separate intel lectual pleasure which has just been mentioned. "The artifice and machinery of rhetoric furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure as any other ' (p. 157). This difficult and dangerous position De Quincej maintains with airy grace. To enlist the services of Aris totle on his side, he revives a theory first proposed by the Italian philologist Eacciolati, that the Aristotelian enthy meme is not a truncated syllogism but an argument fron probability on a question which admits of no positive decision pro or con. Aristotle is in this way made to sanction s rhetorical process in which serious interests play no part. Whether De Quincey meant this essay to be anything more than a brilliant example of the kind of rhetoric he was describing, is not easy to decide. The best parts of it are those in which he lets go of his thesis for a moment, and attacks more vital questions. Thus in the footnote on p, 185, he expounds, in contrasting Johnson and Burke, the important principle of growth. "Every truth, be it what il may, every thesis of a sentence, grows in the very fact oi unfolding it. . . . Hence while a writer of Dr. Johnson's class seems only to look back upon his thoughts, Burke looks forward, and does in fact advance and change his own station concurrently with the advance of the sentences.'1 This is of more worth than all the rest of the essay taken together.

The Essays on ' Language.'

THE ESSAYS OX 'LANGUAGE.'

Of the two essays on language which are included in this volume, the first appeared in Hogg's Weekly Instructor in 1851,. the second, on ' The English Language,' in Blackwood's Magazine in 1839. De Quincey again stumbles upon two ideas of fundamental importance. The first is, that changes in language are responsive to the wants of society. The second is, that languages should be studied comparatively. Carefully worked out, the first principle would carry us far on the way to the establishment of a norm of good usage. The development of language would be exhibited as an expression of a developing social organism. But of this De Quincey gives us a mere suggestion (pp. 195-7) and then turns aside from it as ' too systematic ' for his purpose.