At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled pair,—some of them still living and most worthy.
It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens—I say—that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized. He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes even his vices, and a chapter of the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the London Magazine, draws swift attention to one whose language is as vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London, away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding dreams and stupefaction.
We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is speaking of a dream.
“The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened; there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!”
Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root and branch that home with wife and children,—so wonted now to the pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains—and to transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has promise of work which had begun to fail him in London.
There,—though he has the introduction which a place at the tavern table of Father Ambrose gives—he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was in Blackwood (1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine Art,”—perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchy Reminiscences of his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random, such as novel-ish erector (for builder), lambencies, apricating, aculeated; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page; and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a seamstress or a monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any newspaper you may name.
But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see, quivering—some gleams of his old strange power—a thrust of keen thought that bewilders you by its penetration—a glowing fancy that translates one to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over, shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a snap and a sting.
Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.
De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.