English Literature
while possessing more or less of both these qualities, are characterized
chiefly by their brilliant style. Life, as seen through De Quincey's eyes,
is nebulous and chaotic, and there is a suspicion of the fabulous in all
that he wrote. Even in _The Revolt of the Tartars_ the romantic element is
uppermost, and in much of De Quincey's prose the element of unreality is
more noticeable than in Shelley's poetry. Of his subject-matter, his facts,
ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style,
sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an Oriental
dream, now musical as Keats's _Endymion_, and always, even in the most
violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression
such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has
ever rivaled,--say what you will of the marvelous brilliancy of De
Quincey's style, you have still only half expressed the truth. It is the
style alone which makes these essays immortal.
LIFE. De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who
was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic
woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a
child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful
than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the
grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek
and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors. At fifteen he
not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded
teachers remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you
or I could address an English one." From the grammar school at Manchester,
whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far
below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his
sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy
lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance
of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of
Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal
burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the
Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without
money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy
wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, where we meet not simply the facts
of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of
which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under
his feet hiding the familiar earth. After a year of vagrancy and starvation
he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career
was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship. When ready for a
degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a
sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from
the university, never to return.
It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the
pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless
slave to the drug. Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break
away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery. Some peculiarity of
his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of
opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium,
working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams,
broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression. For twenty years
he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here,
led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of
supporting his family. In 1821 he published his first famous work, the
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and for nearly forty years
afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an
astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects. Without
thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but
fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of
fourteen volumes was published just after his death.
In 1830, led by his connection with _Blackwood's Magazine_, to which he was
the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh,
where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough
amusing anecdotes to fill a volume. He would take a room in some place
unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until
he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic
manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when
the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take
another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance. He
died in Edinburgh in 1859. Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure,
gentle, and elaborately courteous. Though excessively shy, and escaping as
often as possible to solitude, he was nevertheless fond of society, and his
wide knowledge and vivid imagination made his conversations almost as
prized as those of his friend Coleridge.
WORKS. De Quincey's works may be divided into two general classes. The
first includes his numerous critical articles, and the second his
autobiographical sketches. All his works, it must be remembered, were
contributed to various magazines, and were hastily collected just before
his death. Hence the general impression of chaos which we get from reading
them.
From a literary view point the most illuminating of De Quincey's critical
works is his. _Literary Reminiscences_. This contains brilliant
appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, and
Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of the
age preceding. Among the best of his brilliant critical essays are _On the
Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_ (1823), which is admirably suited to show
the man's critical genius, and _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_
(1827), which reveals his grotesque humor Other suggestive critical works,
if one must choose among such a multitude, are his _Letters to a Young Man_
(1823), _Joan of Arc_ (1847), _The Revolt of the Tartars_ (1840), and _The
English Mail-Coach_ (1849). In the last-named essay the "Dream Fugue" is
one of the most imaginative of all his curious works.
Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821). This is only partly a
record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us
of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by
_Suspiria de Profundis_ (1845), which is chiefly a record of gloomy and
terrible dreams produced by opiates. The most interesting parts of his
_Suspiria_, showing De Quincey's marvelous insight into dreams, are those
in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations
"Levana," "Madonna," "Our Lady of Sighs," and "Our Lady of Darkness." A
series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called
_Autobiographic Sketches_, completes the revelation of the author's own
life. Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his
wide range of subjects, _Klosterheim_, a novel, _Logic of Political
Economy_, the _Essays on Style and Rhetoric, Philosophy of Herodotus_, and
his articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare which he
contributed to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.
De Quincey's style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language,
and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the
Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,--diffuseness, which continually
leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes
him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or
witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these
faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style
in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-
century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should
combine the best elements of prose and poetry. In consequence, his prose
works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than
much of our poetry. He has been well called "the psychologist of style,"
and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can
appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing. One has
a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.
SECONDARY WRITERS OF ROMANTICISM. One has only to glance back over the
authors we have been studying--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey--to realize the great change which
swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century,
under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history
and the Romantic Movement in literature. In life men had rebelled against
the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled
even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly
repressed a writer's ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them
in his own way. Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially
poetic,--only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,--and it
produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely
the example of its great leaders. Among novelists we have Jane Austen,
Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,--all
women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick
Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and "Ingoldsby" (Richard
Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, "Christopher North"
(John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor.
Here is an astonishing variety of writers, and to consider all their claims
to remembrance would of itself require a volume. Though these are generally
classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity,
and some of it to permanence. Moore's _Irish Melodies_, Campbell's lyrics,
Keble's _Christian Year_, and Jane Porter's _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and
_Scottish Chiefs_ have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and
De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam's historical and
critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who
nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature. Among all these
writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose
works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian
Age.
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)
We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young
woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers
realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets
did for English poetry,--she refined and simplified it, making it a true
reflection of English life. Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty
encouragement in her own generation. Her greatest novel, _Pride and
Prejudice_, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the
famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter
book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of
this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a
publisher. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry
natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the