III
Intellectually he was a man of a conservative turn of mind, with an ingrained respect for the conventions of
life, but temperamentally he was a restless Vagabond, with a total disregard for the amenities of civilization, asking for nothing except to live out his own dream-life. Dealing with him as a writer, you found a shrewd, if wayward critic, with no little of “John Bull” in his composition. Deal with him as a man, you found a bright, kindly, nervous little man in a chronic state of shabbiness, eluding the attention of friends so far as possible, and wandering about town and country as if he had nothing in common with the rest of mankind. His Vagabondage is shown best in his purely imaginative work, and in the autobiographical sketches.
Small and insignificant in appearance to the casual observer, there was something arresting, fascinating about the man that touched even the irascible Carlyle. Much of his work, one can well understand, seemed to this lover of facts “full of wire-drawn ingenuities.” But with all his contempt for phantasy, there was a touch of the dreamer in Carlyle, and the imaginative beauty, apart from the fanciful prettiness in De Quincey’s work, would have appealed to him. For there was power, intellectual grip, behind the shifting fancies, and both as a critic and historian he has left behind him memorable work. As critic he has been taken severely to task for his judgments on French writers and on many lights of eighteenth-century thought. Certainly De Quincey’s was not the type of mind we should go to for an interpretative criticism of the eighteenth century. Yet we must not forget his admirable appreciation of Goldsmith. At his best, as in his criticism of Milton and
Wordsworth, he shows a fine, delicate, analytical power, which it is hard to overpraise.
“Obligations to Gombrom” do not afford the best qualification for the historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the late Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down seriously to write history.
Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side of great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked. Especially striking is his Revolt of the Tartars—the flight eastward of a Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to Chinese territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes rather than a continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he had the power of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic episodes in a nation’s history.
A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be interesting, not so much with the scholar’s patient investigation as with the pedestrian’s delight in “fresh woods and pastures new.”
A prolific writer for the magazines, it is inevitable that there should be a measure that is ephemeral in De Quincey’s voluminous writings. But it is impossible not to be struck by the wide range of his intellectual interests. A mind that is equally at home in the economics of Ricardo and the transcendentalism of Wordsworth; that can turn with undiminished zest from Malthus to Kant; that could deal lucidly with the “Logic of Political Economy,” despite the dream-world that finds expression
in the “impassioned prose”; that could delight in such broadly farcical absurdities as “Sortilege and Astrology,” and such delicately suggestive studies as “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” a mind of this adventurous and varied type is assuredly a very remarkable one. That he should touch every subject with equal power was not to be expected, but the analytic brilliance that characterizes even his mystical writings enabled him to treat such subjects as political economy with a sureness of touch and a logical grasp that has astonished those who had regarded him as merely an inconsequential dreamer of dreams.