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.
III
But we were talking about De Quincey. Yesterday was by no means a day wasted, for we got our amiable friend Franklin Abbott into our clutches, made him take a note of Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets (in the Everyman Series, we repeat) and insisted to him that for a man of genteel tastes this is one of the most entertaining works ever printed. And also by mere chance, which so often disposes the bright fragments of life into a ruddy and high-spirited pattern, we stopped in at a bookshop on Church Street just to say howdy to the eccentric Raymond Halsey. Happening to remark that it is now just a hundred years since the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was published, Raymond disappeared with a rabbit-like scuttling motion; was heard digging among shelves at the rear, and returned with the smile of one who thinks he foresees a sale. It was a first edition of the Opium Eater with the magical imprint of Taylor & Hessey. Was there ever a more sacred name among publishers? We don’t need to remind you they were Keats’s publishers, too. “Only fifty dollars,” said Raymond, but it was lunch time and we had to leave.
In the dark rear chamber of a Cedar Street tavern, in that corner underneath the photographs of the “Cheshire Cheese,” something happened that seemed to us almost as pretty as anything published by the vanished Taylor & Hessey. Frank spied an old friend of his, a fellow Pittsburger, and the latter halted at our table on his way out. We complimented him upon the fine bronze patina of his countenance, to which he replied that he had been salmon fishing. “You know,” he said, “there are only three salmon-flies that I care a continental for,” and from his pocket he drew a small pink envelope. With a tender hand he slid its contents onto the board. “There they are,” he said. His voice seemed to change. “Dusty Miller, Durham Ranger, and Jock Scott.” The little feathery trinkets, glowing with dainty treacheries, lay there on the ale-bleached wood. Certainly it seemed to us there was poetry in that moment. “I go to Bingham, Maine,” he said, “and drive eighteen miles up the Kennebec.” (A small postern door opened gently upon another world.) “Old So-and-so is waiting at the station. He’s always there. I could leave to-night; he’d be sure to be there when the train got in.”
We had a perfectly vivid picture of old So-and-so waiting at the Bingham station. Yes, we could see him. Then the postern door closed, gently but definitely, with that strong pneumatic piston that is attached to all our doors.
We were saying, however, that De Quincey’s Reminiscences of the Lake Poets caused great indignation among the Grasmere coterie. This was due not to any malice in De Quincey’s manner of writing, which was affectionate and admiring throughout. It was due to something far more painful than malice—the calm, detailed, candid, and minute dissection of their lives. There was truly something astoundingly clinical in this microscopy. For instance, to take the case of Wordsworth’s household, these are some of the comments De Quincey makes:
(1) That Mrs. Wordsworth—whose charm and simplicity he adores—was cross-eyed.
(2) That Dorothy—Wordsworth’s sister—was a fervid and noble character, but stammered and was ungraceful.
(3) That Wordsworth’s appearance grew less attractive with advancing age.