Selections from De Quincey

Front matter

•^0^ rOa 1 A

* A

'S

Preface

This volume contains — besides the Confessions^ several of the Suspiria, and other popular pieces — the most important parts of De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and some of his most interesting Literary Reminiscefices. It is hoped that the selections will serve to illustrate pretty fully De Quincey's varied literary activity, while at the same time they throw light upon his life and character, A portion of the Introduction is devoted to the study of his personality. The text adopted is, except in the case of the Confessions, the latest to which De Quincey gave his approval. For the use of the original Cofifessions in place of the greatly enlarged version of 1856, there appears to be a better excuse than that of brevity. As will be pointed out in the Introduction, it is at least a question whether the earlier form had not the preference of the author himself.

The editor takes pleasure in acknowledging in this place some obligations incurred during the preparation of this volume and not specifically mentioned elsewhere. My debt to the general editors is ve/y considerable. I have to thank for assistance on the Noes Professor F. P. Nash of Hobart College, and Professor J. C. Kirtland, Jr., of The Phillips Academy, Exeter, N.H. Some valuable additions

Vlil PREFACE

to the Bibliography I owe to the

Chew, Esq., of New York, and Professor

Librarian of Hobart College. Finally, Professor Edward

Dowden of Dublin has come to my aid, in one or two

important matters, with a ready kindness that no personal

claim of mine could have increased.

Hobart College, Geneva, N.Y., November 2, 1901.

courtesy of Beverly* issor C. D. Vail, the

Contents

PREFACE

PAGB

vii

Introduction

I. General Remarks ...... xi

II. DeQuincey's Early Life ..... xvi

III. DeQuincey as Author xxvii

IV. DeQuincey's Character xxxvi

V. Classification of De Quincey's Works. His Essays xlii

VI. DeQuincey's Imaginative Prose . . . . li

VII. Some Comments on DeQuincey's Style . . Ixiii

VIII. A Brief Bibliography Ixviii

SELECTIONS

'^ The Affliction of Childhood ....

Introduction to the World of Strife

A Meeting with Lamb ......

A Meeting with Coleridge ....

Recollections of Wordsworth ....

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .

From the '* Suspiria de Profundis "...

yON Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts Second Paper ......

Joan of Arc ........

On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth"

NOTES . .

I

151 265

340 356 395

INTRODUCTION I

In De Quincey's Letters to a Young Man whose Ediicatmi has been Neglected occwxs the following significant statement : " I have passed more of my life in absolute and unmitigated solitude, voluntarily, and for intellectual purposes, than any person of my age whom I have ever either met with, heard of, or read of."^ Thus De Quincey at the age of thirty-seven. Twenty years later Professor Wilson, of whom De Quincey speaks as his "one intimate male friend," gives this account of their relation : "I was very intimate with him, and believe I am now more intimate with him than any other person, and yet I hardly ever see him. . . . I have not seen him above four times in six years (if I remember rightly), and yet his family ask tidings of him from me."^ The last years of De Quincey's life brought him a little circle of admiring acquaintances who, attracted by the fame of his writings, were attached to him still more closely by the brilliancy of his conversation. But, while these incursions of kindly curiosity must have interrupted his periods of solitude, they did not, it appears, diminish the real isolation of De Quincey's existence.

Having thus lived apart from men, after his death it was his fate to be kept apart from them and to be judged

1 De Quincey, Works, Masson's Ed., Vol. X, p. 14; Riverside Ed., Vol. IX, p. 7.

2 Mason, Personal Traits of British Authors : Scott, Hogg, Campbell, Chalmers, Wilson, De Quincey, Jeffrey, p. 248. (Lord Cranbrook in National Revieiv, April, 1884.)

xii INTR OB UC TION

according to other than ordinary human standards. In truth, for a score of years after he died the De Quincey of 1 tradition was hardly a man at all. To the readers of his 1 most popular book it seemed that if he did not drop from the clouds, it was only that he had chosen cloudland as his permanent abode ; and this impression was deepened by many anecdotes, eagerly caught up by the public press, concerning the oddities of the Opium-Eater. Thus it came about that so expert a critic as Mr. Leslie Stephen wrote in 187 1, and thereafter repeatedly republished, the following generalization on De Quincey's life : " For seventythree years De Quincey had been carrying on an operation which for want of a better term we must describe as living, but which would be more fitly described by some mode of speech indicating an existence on the borders of dreamland and reality." The growth of this flourishing De Quincey myth was arrested by the appearance in 1877 of Page's^ (Dr. Japp's) Life; and it may be said to have ceased finally since the publication of such works as Findlay's Recollections^ Woodhouse's Coiiversatio?is, and Japp's Memorials. The growth of interest in De Quincey and the academic study of his style have also conduced to a better knowledge and a more judicious estimate of his personality. At this day we can record the final capitulation of the myth-makers in the withdrawal from the last edition of Hours in a Library of the sentence just quoted.

The men that have wrought this change, inspired by a deep admiration for their subject, have gathered with the assistance of his family and friends the materials for a fairly adequate account of De Quincey's life; the more comprehensive writings have not failed to discuss

1 H. A. Page is the pseudonym used in this case by Dr. Alexander H. Japp, whose later publications concerning De Quincey bear his own name.

INTRO D UC TION XU I

his personality. In this last respect, however, the reader cannot be blind to an inconclusiveness unusual in the treatment of a man of letters so prominent and one by whom and of whom so much has been said. We know very well what he did ; who has told us what he was ? If this latter is the more difficult question of the two, it is also no doubt the more important. In De Quincey's case the difficulty of the investigation can hardly be magnified. The inquiring student finds him entrenched in solitude and provisioned with silence. As the biographer of John Wilson says concerning this author of several volumes of autobiography : " He indeed knew how to analyze the human heart, through all its deep windings, but in return he offered no key of access to his own." De Quincey's writings, however, are no more baffling than was his conversation. Every new volume of personal recollections adds another proof that in this respect his friends and his family were not much more fortunate than the wider public.

I have attributed the prevalence of hazy notions of De Quincey's life to his solitude ; to his silence we may in part ascribe a perhaps more serious perplexity concerning his personality. Dr. Japp, his chief biographer, has\ frankly acknowledged what he terms the "critical puzzle of i De Quincey's character." His words may serve us now as a point of departure : " that in combination with dreamy abstraction, helplessness and over-sensibility amounting to disease" there should exist '< great powers of observation, sympathy, humour, self-possession, dignity and courtesy of manner."^ The first part of this comparison conveys quite adequately the problem which engages the biographer's attention. The dreamy abstraction, helplessness, and over-sensibility argue a mental deficiency which the great powers of observation and analysis deny. On the one side, as

1 Page, Life, Vol. II, p. 184.

xiv INTR OD UC TION less-lj

Dr. Japp shows, Ue Quincey seems marked by powerless ness towards the facts of life ; on the other he seems equally distinguished by ability to grasp and control them.

So much for the question of intellect involved. It is at the words "self-possession, dignity and courtesy of manner" that we pause. Not, however, to deny that the Opium- Eater displayed all these characteristics. We have heard and have been touched by the wonderful tales of his gentleness and his consideration for the feelings of others. Servants were ladies to him, and ladies goddesses. He burnt his poor diseased stomach once with a boiling hot potato rather than keep — not his lady-love — his landlady waiting at his door. Here was a knight, we say, in a greatcoat and one stocking ! ^ But surely there is another side of De Quincey which Dr. Japp — too often his apologist — has not adequately presented to us in his memoir ; surely there are actions recorded of him in which he displays neither self-possession, dignity, nor courtesy of manner. What of his criticisms of Mrs. Wordsworth's brains and of her husband's legs ? - What of the remarks upon Mrs. Coleridge, Bath milliners, and marital unhappiness, for which Southey prescribed a cudgel ? ^ Worse than all these, by reason of their lack of even the meanest excuse, are the animadversions — conversational though they be — upon John Wilson which are recounted for us by Mr. Findlay.*

1 So De Quincey appeared on one occasion. For similar stories, cf. Mrs. Baird Smith in Page, Life, Vol. I, p. 361 ; Burton, Bookhunter, p. 33; Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends, p. 129. See also Hogg, p. 172.

2 See Works, Masson's Ed., Vol. Ill, p. 202 ; Riverside Ed., Vol. Ill, p. 612 ; also below, p. 139.

8 Works, Masson's Ed., Vol. II, p. 157; Riverside Ed., Vol. Ill, p. 176; and Carlyle, Reminisce7tces (ed. Froude), p. 518.

* Findlay, Personal Recollections, p. 47 ; also in Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends, p. 151.

INTRODUCTION XV

Wilson, we remember, was the ''one intimate male friend " ; he had been the embarrassed but patient recipient of many a draft signed "T. Q."; he was the author of the judgment of the Opium-Eater in the Nodes: "He is a man of a million." But De Quincey tells Findlay of Wilson's "love to be surrounded by parasites " ; he ridicules " the sickly, false sentiment of his works and their evidently insincere and vulgar, overwrought religionism"; Wilson's "tales, at least, were a jest among the Wordsworths " ; and much more.

Professor Masson, a just though kindly critic, admits freely the " very considerable fund of prejudice, temper, opinionativeness, animosity, pugnacity, on which De Quincey could draw when he liked." ^ This, or much of it, might be said, no doubt, of many another man. What surprises us most in De Quincey is the sort of person or occasion which calls forth these qualities. If Wordsworth or Coleridge had lost all claims to his consideration, as has been suggested, through a failure to prize highly the acquaintance of Mrs. de Quincey, for what did poor Wilson suffer ? Unwilling as we may be to follow Miss Martineau in making " malignant gossip " a feature of De Quincey's conversation, we are forced to confess that his behavior on these occasions seems as excessive and as causeless as the knightly performances referred to above. Two such extremes of conduct in the same man form a moral contradiction not less marked, it would seem, than the " critical puzzle " that engages Dr. Japp's attention.

Both these questions — the intellectual and the moral — must be settled before we can know De Quincey as nowadays we insist upon knowing our men of letters ; both questions, too, have something of that wider human interest which attaches to all that concerns the Opium-Eater. 1 Masson, De Quincey (English Men of Letters), p. 129.

XVI INTRODUCTION

And, in spite of his habitual isolation and persistent silence, his life, when reviewed as a whole, must still yield up something of his real personality to inquiry so near in time as ours. With this end in view I shall, in relating the life of De Quincey, attempt to trace at the same time the growth and development of his intellect and character.

II

"Our family has been in England since the Conquest," I said the young De Quincey to George III. Of Norman — ultimately of Norse — origin, the De Quinceys had greatly improved their position after their settlement in England, until a certain De Quincey, Earl of Winchester, was beheaded ; whereupon the noble gens " exploded and scattered its ruins all over the central provinces of England."^ The De Quinceys, or Quinceys,"^ as they were now to be called for many centuries, took up commerce, and throve both in England and in America.^ Our author's father, Thomas Quincey, was very successful in trade \vith America and the West Indies. He was a man of sterling worth and withal of some taste for letters. His library was very extensive, " comprising the whole general literature of England and Scotland for the preceding generation"; and he was even an author: A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England^ which was published in 1775, most of it having first appeared in the Gentleman'' s Magazi?ie^

1 De Quincey, Posthumous Works (ed. Japp), Vol. I, p. 201.

2 " Not De Quincey himself, but his mother it was that assumed or resumed the ' De,' and then some time after, when she became deeply evangelical in her religious views, was inclined to drop it as a worldly vanity." — Japp, De Quincey Memorials, Vol. I, p. 52. It is amusing to observe that her most severe letters are sure to be signed " E. Quincey " or " E. Q." Cf. Memorials, Vol. I, pp. 79, 85, 87, 88, 93, with ibid., p. 97.

3 Josiah Quincy, of Boston, belonged to this family.

INTRODUCTION xvii

May to September, 1774, was a thoroughly intelligent piece of work. Unhappily, Thomas Quincey was a consumptive ; he spent a great deal of time in tropical climates, and the younger Thomas did not know him by sight until he came home in 1793 to die. An influence that might have been potent for good in the wayward life of the son was thus represented by a faint and fading memory ; of De Quincey's mother, who was Elizabeth Penson, we shall hear more.

Thomas, the Opium-Eater, was the fifth child ^ and was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785. He was almost immediately taken to "The Farm," a small suburban dwelling, and in 1791 or 1792 to Gree?iha}\^ di larger country place. Here he lived until his eleventh year a life of rustic solitude, disturbed only by the experiences of which he has told in his autobiographic writings." In 1796 his mother removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.

De Quincey was of opinion that he inherited a consumptive tendency, which his opium-eating kept in check. Be that as it may, he was certainly from the beginning a small and rather weak child ; apart from the siege of ague that made him an invalid from his second to his fourth year, lis recollections of early childhood all point to one of those frail existences that arouse in vigorous humanity more pity than real sympathy. Though De Quincey may have heightened somewhat the contrast between himself and his brother, "the son of eternal racket," the "passion for being despised " to which he confesses is a trait that in a boy indicates a refusal on the part of body and mind

1 See note 1 16.

2 Both places are now within the city of Manchester, and the latter has given its name, in the form Greenhcys, to one of the districts of that city.

3 See below, pp. 1-92, and note 3 4.

XVlil INTRODUCTION

to grapple with the world in the struggle which youth islj generally but too glad to enter. In very early years, then, De Quincey sank into himself. His autobiography contains pathetic testimony to his refuge in those days. "God speaks to children in dreams," runs, in part, the well-known passage, " and by the oracles that lurk in darkness, but in solitude . . . God holds with little children communion undisturbed."^ Nourished in this way, the childish sensibility and imaginativeness that are wont to be excessive in frail bodies became in De Quincey extreme.-

Herein lie, no doubt, the beginnings of mental infirmity and disease, and here the efforts of discerning parents afford, perhaps, the one hope of relief. De Quincey says that his life was saved by his "introduction to the world of strife " through his brother. But with his mother lay, in these days, his fate. Mrs. de Quincey was a woman of considerable intellectual power.'^ She was also beyond a doubt deeply and unselfishly devoted to her fatherless children; in later years she reduced herself almost to poverty to meet their loose expenditures. But Mrs. de Quincey was decidedly an austere woman ; we are told that a servant who was advised to appeal on some point from the housekeeper to the mistress exclaimed in horror, " Speak to mistress ! Would I speak to a ghost ? " Mrs. de Quincey was moreover a friend of Hannah More and an ardent believer in the tenets of the ultra-evangelical Clapham sect. She took De Quincey out of Bath School, he affirms, because he was too much praised, and in his earlier days, at least, she seems to have been by no means free from the abominable religionist notion that human

1 See below, pp. 18-19, and note 18 31.

2 See the second selection in this volume, especially pp. 64 et seq.

•■^ See, for example, the interesting letter in Japp's Memorials, Vol. II, PP- 91-95-

INTRODUCTION xix

affections deeply enjoyed must lead astray from the path of duty. A love of formality seems to have been another weakness of this good lady. De Quincey tells us with some humor of the daily regulation according to which the brothers and sisters were carried before their mother for morning parade in her dressing-room ; " when we were pronounced to be in proper trim," he continues, "we were dismissed, but with two ceremonies that were to us mysterious and allegorical, — first, that our hair and faces were sprinkled with lavender-water and milk of roses ; secondly, that we received a kiss on the forehead."

This bearing Mrs. de Quincey consistently maintained ; a few years later we find her corresponding with her son about his general welfare in a tone of logical controversy that is really amazing.^ No one can doubt the sincerity of the earnest protestations of devotion with which she closes these letters ; but she seems to have been utterly unable to apply affection, so to speak, to the practical end of removing differences. Her watchword for all men is Duty ; the duty of children is to love God and obey their parents : these principles she finds laid down clearly in Holy Writ, especially in the Old Testament, to which her sect continually appealed. Disregard of these principles on the part of children, she knows, incurs divine wrath ; failure of parents to insist upon them must therefore be nothing less than a crime. The result of all this is a system of child-rearing as inflexible as a machine. All children are thrown into this moral hopper ; if they can get through, they are ground out good boys and girls ; if not, they are merely ground to pieces.

Now De Quincey, as we have seen, was by physical weakness, as well as by intellectual superiority, an unusual

1 These highly interesting letters are given in Japp's Memorials, Vol. I, pp. 70-85.

XX INTR on UC TION

child ; he was even from the beginning, by reason of his tendency to self-absorption, in some respects abnormal. The result of his mother's policy was therefore certain to be unfortunate ; we should predict with confidence a further mental and moral twist as the outcome of it. Those springs of natural affection that may be said to water the roots of a child's growing moral ideas were in great measure dried up. On the other hand, an almost unparalleled precocity in intellectual pursuits was developed ; in those which remove the student farthest from his immediate surroundings, and which on that account are least enjoyed by most boys, De Quincey excelled at an absurdly early age. "That boy," said his master at Bath School, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one " ; he might have added, ''and better than he could address an English one, too."

But our frail and precocious schoolboy was soon to be transferred to a sterner discipline ; Mrs. de Quincey's system of training was to end in a very commonplace revolt. To return to his days at Bath School, In 1799 an accidental blow on the head kept the young scholar at home ill for a time. Mrs. de Quincey read him such books as Milner's Church History and Johnson's Ramb/e?', and, as he grew stronger, put him under tutors. On his complete recovery, however, she transferred him from Bath School, which he liked, to Winkfield School in Wiltshire, in which he found nothing to commend but "the religious character of the master." After finishing the scholastic year there, he joined a Bath School friend, young Lord Westport, at Eton for a visit to the latter's home in Ireland. After seeing the last of the Irish Parliament, and having made a strong impression on his friend's father. Lord Altamont, one of the prominent Irish peers, our young scholar made his way to Laxton in Northamptonshire to visit a friend of the t

INTR on UC TION xxi

l)e Quinceys, Lady Carbery, and incidentally to teach her to read her New Testament in Greek. De Quincey was now, at the age of fifteen, ready for Oxford, and he begged to be allowed to go there. His duty was otherwise interpreted for him, and that he might secure ultimately a scholarship at Brasenose, he was sent to Manchester Grammar School to mark time intellectually and be "nosed by cotton-bags " (so writes this scion of the prosperous Manchester merchant) for three years. There followed nineteen months of acquiescence tempered by argument. Lady Carbery relieved the tedium of his surroundings for a little while, and, having now progressed greatly in her Bible studies, repaid his early instruction by teaching him Hebrew ; he formed some friendships with thinking men in Manchester and Liverpool ; but there was little or nothing for him to learn in school, and to increase the irksomeness of his position, the hours were very long. In a final appeal to his mother he bursts forth thus, and there is a touch of the older and greater De Quincey in his affluence of phrase :

" I ask whether a person can be happy, or even simply easy, who is in a situation which deprives him of health, of society y of amusement, of liberty, of congeniality of pursuits, and which, to complete the precious picture, admits of no variety. I think you will hardly say he can, and yet this description was taken from my own case."

But the guardians, his mother included, were firm ; he must either stay where he was, or choose a profession at once. So De Quincey, like many other young rogues and heroes, ran away from school.

His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this, he made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of

INTR OD UC TION

I seeing a sister ; was apprehended by the older members of the family; and through the intercession of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey then led a wayfarer's life.^ He soon lost his guinea, however, by ceasing to keep his family informed of his whereabouts, and subsisted for a time with great difficulty. Still apparently fearing pursuit, with a little borrowed money he broke away entirely from his home by exchanging the solitude of Wales for the greater wilderness of London.^ Failing there to raise money on his expected patrimony, he for some time deliberately clung to a life of degradation and starvation rather than return to his lawful governors. This fact, in giving us De Quincey's opinion of the early conduct of his affairs, offers us also an instructive view of the state of mind to which that policy had brought him.

Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home, — by April 22, 1803, he has been for some time with an old friend of the family, Mrs. Best, in Liverpool, — and after much consultation he was permitted to go to Oxford. As only ;i^ioo a year was allowed him for expenses (the income from his own patrimony was ^150), he entered Worcester, one of the less expensive colleges. Our reports of his doings at the University, though both meagre and conflicting, leave on the whole no doubt that he was already a deeply marked man. The best opportunities for association with men of equal age and similar intellectual attainments failed to bring him back to the

1 For all this period see below, pp. 1 65-1 71, and, in the notes to these pages, extracts from the revised Confessions.

2 Cf. below, p. 66, where De Quincey recommends to the fugitive the "frantic publicities of London " in preference to the " quiet privacies of the country."

INTR OD UC no AT xxiii

world. De Quincey speaks of himself in an autobiographical paper as having "sought solitude at that early age in morbid excess." "For the first two years," he says again, " I compute that I did not utter one hundred words." ^ " He came to be looked upon as a strange being who associated with no one," records Woodhouse. He made one important acquaintance at this time, however, — one potent friend and relentless foe, — opium. Out of this chance meeting^ sprang, as everybody knows, De Quincey's first and greatest literary success, and, to no slight extent, the popular notion of his character ; to it also he owed those periods of utter incapacity and misery that remained in his memory as the plague-spots of his life. Yet in the discussion of De Quincey's personality it would seem that opium has played too large a part. He was twenty-eight years old when he first really succumbed to the drug ; he had lived for more than a year a solitary and a stricken man at Oxford before he knew the p/iarmakoji nepeTithes at all. What De Quincey was to be was already determined, and opium entered his life, except for certain not extended periods, only to strengthen habits already well established. Even the faculty of magnificent dreaming was his, as he insists, long before.

De Quincey took no degree. He went through part of the examination, but having been disappointed in the first place at not being allowed to answer in Greek,^ and

1 Cf. The Spectator, No. i. "I had not been long at the University before I distinguished myself by a most profound silence ; for, during the space of eight years, excepting in the public exercises of the college, I scarce uttered the quantity of an hundred words."

- How it happened De Quincey tells below, pp. 198-200. See also pp. 158, 168 ; as to the appalling disease of the stomach, see note 158 l.

3 See Woodhouse's Conversations (Gamett, Confessions of an English Opimn-Eater, p. 226, or Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends^ p. 97) for this story related by De Quincey to Taylor ; for another version, see Masson, De Quincey, p. 39.

XXIV INTRODUCTION

generally displeased at the methods employed, after one day's experience he vanished. Notwithstanding, he had made good use of his time at Oxford in several ways : he had studied Hebrew and German with his tutors and had fairly ransacked both Greek and Latin literature; more than that, and better in his opinion, he had greatly extended his acquaintance with the best writers in his own tongue. And now also his connection begins with the men who make literature. Unable to summon up the courage to visit Wordsworth, in 1803 he wrote to him, and in time received from him several letters of great dignity and very high moral tone. In 1804, through the kindness of a *' literary friend," he met Lamb in London, and in 1807 he found Coleridge at Bridgwater after much seeking. Later in that year an opportunity was afforded him to conduct Mrs. Coleridge and her two children to Southey at Keswick ; they stopped at Grasmere, and at the door of Dove Cottage he at last had the happiness of taking Wordsworth's hand. Three days later he made the acquaintance of Southey.

De Quincey remained on the books of his College until 18 10, and he includes 1808 in the period of his residence at Oxford ; but, although the time when he appeared for his degree is unknown, it w^ould seem that his active connection with the University ends with this visit to the poets. His meeting with them seems to have conduced to their benefit as well as to that of their admirer. Coleridge received in November, 1807, through Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, ;^3oo (it is said to have been 15 per cent of De Quincey's remaining funds) from a "young man of fortune who admired his talents." In the next year De Quincey was much in London ; apparently he was already entered as a "student and member of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple," and was now supposed to be " eating " his