De Quincey: his anomalies
Wilson’s neighbour, friend, contributor, and, in a kindly fashion, half-butt, De Quincey[[909]] is, like Southey, though in different measure, condition, and degree, rather puzzling as a critic. He, too, had enormous reading, a keen interest in literature, and a distinctly critical temperament. Moreover, during great part of his long life, he never had any motive for writing on subjects that did not please him: and, even when such a motive existed, he seems to have paid sublimely little attention to it. The critical “places” in his works are in fact very numerous; they meet the reader almost passim, and often seem to promise substantive and important contributions to criticism. Nor, as a matter of fact, are they ever quite negligible or often unimportant. They constantly have that stimulating and attractive property which is so valuable, and which seems so often to have been acquired by “the Companions” from contact with the loadstone-rock of Coleridge. Every now and then, as in the well-known “Note on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” De Quincey will display evidence (whether original or suggested) of almost dæmonic subtlety. Very often, indeed, he will display evidence, if not of dæmonic yet of impish and almost fiendish acuteness, as in his grim and (for a fellow artificial-Paradise seeker) rather callous suggestion[[910]] that Coleridge and Lamb should have put down their loss of cheerfulness in later years not to opium or to gin but to the later years themselves. “Ah, dear Lamb,” says the little monster,[[911]] “but note that the drunkard was fifty-six years old and the songster twenty-three!”
and perversities as a critic,
Yet De Quincey is scarcely—on the whole, and as a whole—to be ranked among the greatest critics. To begin with, his unconquerable habit of “rigmarole” is constantly leading him astray: and the taste for jaunty personality which he had most unluckily imbibed from Wilson leads him astray still further, and still more gravely and damagingly. In the volume on The Lake Poets I do not suppose that there are twenty pages of pure criticism, putting all orts and scraps together. The main really critical part of the essay on Lamb—then a fresh and most tempting subject—is a criticism of—--Hazlitt! The extremely interesting subject of “Milton v. Southey and Landor” (though the paper does contain good things, and, in particular, some excellent remarks on Metre) is all frittered and whittled off into shavings of quip, and crank, and gibe, and personality. The same is the case with what should have been, and in part is, one of his best critical things, the article on Schlosser’s Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. The present writer will not be suspected, by friend or foe, of insisting ruthlessly on a too grave and chaste critical manner: but De Quincey here is too much for anything and anybody. “For Heaven’s sake, my good man,” one may say almost in his own words, “do leave off fooling and come to business.” In the very long essay on Bentley he has little or no criticism at all; and here, as well as in the “Cicero,” he is too much stung and tormented by his hatred of the drab style of Conyers Middleton to see anything else when he gets near to that curious person, as he must in both. On Keats, without any reason for hostility, he has almost the full inadequacy of his generation, with not much less on Shelley; and when he comes to talk even of Wordsworth’s poetry, though there was no one living whom he honoured more, he is not very much less unsatisfactory.
in regard to all literatures.
Nor are these inadequacies and perversities limited to English. There was a good excuse (more than at one time people used to think under the influence of the fervent Goethe-worship of the mid-nineteenth century) for his famous and furious attack on Wilhelm Meister; but what are we to think of a man (admitting that much has been said and thought of it) coolly “dismisses,”[[912]] without so much as an unfavourable opinion, the lyric and miscellaneous poetry of one of the greatest lyric poets of Europe, or the world? He persistently belittles French literature: and he had, of course, a right to give his judgment. But, unfortunately, he not only does not give evidence of knowledge to support his condemnation, but does give negative evidence of ignorance. That ignorance, as far as contemporary literature went, seems to have been almost absolute. Even Chateaubriand (a rhetorician after his own heart) he never names in his dealing with French rhetoric, and never at all, so far as I remember, except as a praiser of Milton; while the subject before the seventeenth century seems to have been equally a blank to him. But he is most wayward and most uncritical about the classics. He gives himself all the airs of a profound scholar, and seems really to have been a very fair one. Yet that “Appraisal of Greek Literature” which Professor Masson has ruthlessly resuscitated[[913]] might almost have been written by the most ignorant of the “Moderns,” two hundred years ago, for its omissions and commissions. He seems to have been in his most Puckish frame of mind if he was not serious; if he was, actum est (or almost so) with him as a critic.
Their causes.