II
Old Bill Barron, up in the composing room, asks us when we are going to take our Vacation. We are taking it now, we reply, reading De Quincey. Certainly we can’t imagine why any one with as pleasing a job as ours should have any right to go off on holiday. There are so many people in this town who have to spend their time reading the new books: we are going to enjoy ourself by dipping into the old ones. With one exception. We have found, in the office of the Literary Review, and immediately made off with, L’Extravagante Personnalité de Jacques Casanova, by Joseph Le Gras (Paris: Bernard Grasset). We read the first sentence—
Emporté dans une berline confortable, dont les coffres sont abondamment pourvus de viandes, de pâtés et de vins; une femme sur les genoux, une autre parfois à ses côtés qui se frotte amoureusement à lui; vêtu de riches vêtements, le jabot et les manchettes enjolivés de fines dentelles, les goussets garnis de montres précieuses, le ventre chatouillé de breloques, les doigts étincelants de bagues, les poches tintant d’or et le mollet caressé dans la soie; réclamant à grand bruit les meilleurs chevaux aux relais, la plus belle chambre dans les auberges, jetant sa bourse à l’hôtelier et repartant au milieu des révérences et des courbettes; tel nous apparaît, en une attitude un peu conventionelle, l’aventurier Casanova au temps de sa splendeur.
That, of course, is one way of taking a Vacation. We remember, with a small behind-the-arras chuckle, one of Pearsall Smith’s Trivia called “Lord Arden,” which deliciously hits off the buried Casanova in all of us. At any rate, we shall read this book about Extravagant Jack.
But we must get back to De Quincey, or you’ll think we are purposely avoiding the topic. We hardly know where to resume our prattle about this glorious creature. Perhaps the first thing to note is an advisable shift in viewpoint. Nowadays we are all introduced to De Quincey at school, so his name comes to us with a peculiar mixture of sublimity and painful awe—for we learn that he was a wicked opium eater. We do not realize that a number of his contemporaries regarded him as a low-down dog of a journalist. Southey, for instance, called him “one of the greatest scoundrels living,” and urged Hartley Coleridge to go to Edinburgh with a strong cudgel and give De Quincey a public drubbing as “a base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.” What was the cause of this peevishness? Why, of course, the Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, a book whose social indiscretion is exceeded only by its magnificently fecund humour; told, like all De Quincey’s waggishness, with a rich sonorous volubility and luxurious plenitude of verbal skill. There is a subtle wickedness of amusement in the apparent solemnity of De Quincey’s polysyllables. The indignation caused latterly by such books as Margot Asquith’s was nothing compared to the anger of the Lake Poets when they found their innocent privacies laid bare by the Opium Eater’s pen. The Lakers took themselves as seriously as groups of humanitarians always do. And they were quite right. Francis Thompson complains that Milton never forgot he was Milton—“but we must admit it was worth remembering.” Yet the domestic affairs of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were indeed irresistibly comic. We have not forgotten that Hartley Coleridge, whose childhood was so charmingly enshrined in a poem by Wordsworth—
Thou fairy voyager, that dost float
In such clear water that thy boat
May rather seem
To brood on air than on an earthly stream—
also floated in liquids more ruddy. He was removed from his fellowship at Oxford on the charge of drinking too much—which must have been a very great deal in the Oxford of those days.
Reminiscences of the Lake Poets is the kind of book (Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides is another) that causes indignation to the victims, but intense delight to posterity. Posterity always has the best of us, anyhow. The anecdote of Coleridge’s father and the protruding shirt has always seemed to us one of the most disgracefully amusing minutiæ in literature—and yet even now, after a hundred years of sanctity, we are not sure whether we ought to reprint it. Well, you can buy Reminiscences of the Lake Poets in the Everyman Series.
The next thing to be said about De Quincey is that he would have been a glorious editor for one of Mr. Hearst’s newspapers. He wrote a good deal better than Mr. Arthur Brisbane; but he had the same acute instinct as to what the public is really interested in. We believe it was James L. Ford who described the Hearstian doctrine of newspaper policy as “Plenty of crime and plenty of underclothes.” De Quincey was a glutton for crime. Did you know that he lost his job as editor of the Westmoreland Gazette because for sixteen months he filled its columns mainly with news of local lawbreaking? His employers did not appreciate genius. His instinct was absolutely sound. In spite of the disclaimers of refined people, crime news, when written not merely vulgarly but with earnestness and art, is one of the most valuable features of any journal. If we were running a newspaper we would begin by scouring the press clubs for a young De Quincey.
He had, we say, the newspaper man’s instinct. Writing of the appalling Williams murders in 1811, he complains that though the outrage was committed shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, nothing reached the papers until Monday. “To have met the public demand for details on the Sunday, which might so easily have been done by cancelling a couple of dull columns and substituting a circumstantial narrative ... would have made a small fortune. By proper handbills dispersed through all quarters of the infinite metropolis, 250,000 extra copies might have been sold.”
This occurs in the postscript to Murder as One of the Fine Arts. In that immortal essay itself the macabre humour and the sledge-hammer impact of irony are probably a bit too grim and a bit (also) too learned and crushing for the gentler sort of reader. But the postscript, dated 1854, is the kind of horrific febrifuge that turns the heart to an Eskimo patty. We suggest that you try reading it aloud to a house party if you want to see blenching and shudders. The ultimate tribute to any writing of the narrative kind is to read it perpetually running ahead, in a horrid tension of eagerness, meanwhile holding one’s proper “place” with a finger until one can force the eye back to pursue a methodical course. We ourself read that postscript thus, late at night in a lonely country house; and, by a noble summation of horror, Gissing began to growl and bristle as we reached the climax. We should hate to admit with what paltry quaverings we went forth into the night, where the trees were smoke-colour in a pallid moonglow, to see what was amiss. It was only a wandering dog prowling about. But for a few moments we had felt certain that our harmless Salamis Estates were thickly ambushed with assassins. It then required a trip to the icebox, and a considerable infare upon a very ammoniac Roquefort cheese, to restore tranquillity.