VACATIONING WITH DE QUINCEY
I
Having severed our telephone wire and instructed the office boys to tell all callers that we are out at lunch, we look forward to a happy summer. We are going to begin enjoying ourself by systematically exploring the books in the library of the Evening Post. On a top shelf, well sprinkled with dust, we have found the excellent collected edition of De Quincey, in fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson. It is true that the first four volumes seem to have disappeared; but even if we begin at Volume V we calculate we shall find enough to keep us entertained for some time.
After we have finished De Quincey we are going to tackle P. T. Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs, a book that has long tempted us. We think kindly of the Founding Fathers of the Post for having assembled all these interesting volumes for our pleasure.
We have begun De Quincey with Volume V—Biographies and Biographic Sketches. Some of this—particularly the Joan of Arc—has a faintly familiar taste: perhaps we were made to read it at school. But we do not think we ever read before the magnificent essay on Charles Lamb. There is a long interpolated passage about Joan of Arc which does not seem to have anything to do with Lamb. Perhaps the North British Review (in which the essay first appeared in 1848) paid its contributors on a space basis. But, ejecting this parenthesis, it is certainly noble stuff. Moreover, it is interesting to note that at the time De Quincey wrote, Lamb was by no means established on the pinnacle of security as a permanent brightness in our literature. De Quincey writes as though consciously contradicting some opposition. It seems odd to hear him speak of people who “regard him [Lamb] with the old hostility and the old scorn.”
We had intended not to introduce any quotations, for in this very volume De Quincey makes some stinging remarks about people who pad out their copy by interlarding material from stronger fists. But indeed the following passage seems to us so near the top of prose felicity that we lapse from grace:
In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit, viz., to take a great deal during dinner, none after it. Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our principles, the rigour of which we had illustrated by taking rather too much of old port before the cloth was drawn, except talking; amœbean colloquy, or, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, a dialogue of “brisk reciprocation.” But this was impossible; over Lamb, at this period of his life, there passed regularly, after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert or as Thomas Aquinas wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aërial gossamer than of earthly cobweb—more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of sculpture; and, to one who knew his history, a repose affectingly contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of his life.
De Quincey’s essay on Lamb, like so many of the great critiques of the early nineteenth century, was originally written as a book review. We like to imagine what a Blackwood or Edinburgh reviewer would have said if the editor (in the manner of to-day) had told him to deal with a volume in 500 or 1,000 words. The nineteenth century reviewer took a spacious view of his job. Of this particular essay, which purported to be a notice of Talfourd’s Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848), De Quincey said (very nobly):
Liberated from this casual office of throwing light upon a book, raised to its grander station of a solemn deposition to the moral capacities of man in conflict with calamity—viewed as a return made into the chanceries of heaven upon an issue directed from that court to try the amount of power lodged in a poor desolate pair of human creatures for facing the very anarchy of storms—this obscure life of the two Lambs, brother and sister (for the two lives were one life), rises into grandeur that is not paralleled once in a generation.
Of course, De Quincey was a celestial kind of reviewer. Not even opium could make most of us write like that. Also he had the right idea about dealing with correspondence and accumulated papers. He used to live in one set of lodgings until the mass of miscellaneous matter filled the room. Then he would move to other quarters, leaving the pile in charge of the landlady. He always took care not to inform her of the new address.