IV
On the 13th of February, 1848, De Quincey received a letter asking him to contribute a writing of some sort for an “album,” to be sold at a Ladies’ Bazaar. This was to be held in March of that year, for the benefit of the Library of the Glasgow Athenæum, and the ladies begged him to reply by “return of post.” This incident in itself sounds contemporary enough to give us a fellow feeling with De Quincey.
He had nothing available to send to the bazaar, but there was one unfailing resource—his bathtub. Let him describe it:
In my study I have a bath, large enough to swim in, provided the swimmer, not being an ambitious man, is content with going ahead to the extent of three inches at the utmost. This bath, having been superseded (as regards its original purpose) by a better, has yielded a secondary service to me as a reservoir for my MSS. Filled to the brim it is by papers of all sorts and sizes. Every paper written by me, to me, for me, of or concerning me, and, finally, against me, is to be found, after an impossible search, in this capacious repertory. Those papers, by the way, that come under the last (or hostile) subdivision are chiefly composed by shoemakers and tailors—an affectionate class of men, who stick by one to the last like pitch-plasters.
De Quincey decided that the only thing to do was to draw something at random from the bathtub for the ladies’ album. Accordingly, he made a little ceremony of it. “Three young ladies, haters of everything unfair,” were called in as referees; and a young man to do the actual dipping. There were to be four dips into the tub, and, for some reason not quite clear to us, the young man was made to attire himself in a new potato-sack, with holes cut for his legs and only his right arm free. It would have been more to the purpose, we should have thought, to blindfold him; but he was instructed to dip at random, holding his face “at right angles to the bath.” He was to be allowed one minute to rummage at random among “the billowy ocean of papers,” and at the command Haul Up! was to come forth with whatever his fingers approved. Before the ceremony began a glass of wine was brought. De Quincey proposed the health of the ladies of the Athenæum, and pledged his honour that whatever MS. should be dredged up would be sent off to the bazaar. And this, he protested, though somewhere buried in the bath there lay a paper which he valued as equal to the half of his possessions.
But he was compelled to depart from the strict rigour of his scheme. For let us see what the young man discovered in the bathtub. The first dip brought up a letter still unopened. It proved to be a dinner invitation for the 15th of February. De Quincey was congratulating himself on the success of his raffle, which had thus enabled him to answer this letter without irreparable breach of manners, when the young lady referees discovered that the letter was four years old.
Number 2 was a “dun.” The young man was, to De Quincey’s dismay, dredging in a portion of the tub rich in overdue bills. “It is true,” he says, “that I had myself long remarked that part of the channel to be dangerously infested with duns. In searching for literary or philosophic paper, it would often happen for an hour together that I brought up little else than variegated specimens of the dun.” And so Number 3 was also a dun.
Number 4 turned out “a lecture addressed to myself by an ultra-moral friend—a lecture on procrastination, and not badly written.” And this also De Quincey refused to allow to be sent to the Athenæum. So everything hinged on the fifth and extra dip, which was committed to one of the young ladies. She blushed rosily (De Quincey assures us) at the responsibility, and earnestly “ploitered” among the papers for full five minutes. “She contended that she knew, by intuition, the sort of paper on which duns were written: and, whatever else might come up, she was resolved it should not be a dun.” “Don’t be too sure,” said De Quincey; but when the paper was finally drawn out it was a blank sheet.
This, the referees maintained, was a judgment on De Quincey, and meant that he should use the empty page to begin a new and original contribution for the ladies of Glasgow. Which he did, and turned out a little essay, suggested by their recent sport, on Sortilege and Astrology. We have tried to read it, but so far without success.
We are interested to note that others besides ourself have been turning back to De Quincey. In a recent Fortnightly Review there is an article by H. M. Paull, sound enough in its observations, but grievously lacking in style. Mr. Paull, moreover, seems to us to shoot too far when he says that “to modern readers De Quincey’s efforts to be sprightly only cause annoyance.” It is true that sometimes his astonishing verbosity and his passion for footnotes outrun a hasty temper; but for our part we find something notably odd and agreeable in his queer, preposterous humour. His habit of calling great men familiarly by their first names—Dr. Johnson is “Sam,” and even the learned and ancient Josephus becomes “Joe,” and Thomas à Kempis “Tom”—is deplored by Mr. Paull; but this habit, we fear, has been inherited by columnists, and we had better not defend it too vigorously. The bathtub anecdote, which we have pared down until it loses most of its gusto, is, in the original, not devoid of humour. (Volume XIII of the collected works.)
And De Quincey’s ramified and rambling way of narrative offers surprising delights in unexpected parentheses. For instance, in the Opium Eater he happens to mention a murder that had been committed on Hounslow Heath. “The name of the murdered person was Steele, and he was the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighbourhood.” A lavender plantation! There is a fragrant circumstance for the mind of a poet to dwell on. Think of the chance immortality of the unlucky Steele—deathless now, because (poor devil) he was murdered and had a lavender plantation.
