The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical, critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical; but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of 'Joan of Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the 'Flight of the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" literature in our American schools; but of other essays than these we have as a rule only a dim impression or a faint memory. There are obvious reasons why De Quincey's historical and philosophical writings, in an age which devotes itself so largely to similar pursuits, no longer recommend themselves to the popular taste. His method is too discursive and leisurely; his subjects as a rule too remote from current interest; his line of thought too intricate. These failings, from our point of view, are the more to be regretted because there has never been an English essayist more entertaining or suggestive than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide range of subject-matter,—from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to the 'Casuistry of Roman Meals' and the 'Toilet of a Hebrew Lady.' His topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to German authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only that he possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe, but that he was the master of great stores of learned information. We are never wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his conclusions, but we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem fresh and strange, and we are dazzled by the constantly changing material. Nothing can be more delightful than the constant influx of new objects of thought, the unexpected incidents, the seemingly inexpugnable logic that ends in paradox, the play of human interest in a topic to which all living interest seems alien. There is scarcely a page in all De Quincey's writings that taken by itself is actually dull. In each, one receives a vivid impression of the same lithe and active mind, examining with lively curiosity even a recondite subject: cracking a joke here and dropping a tear there, and never intermitting the smooth flow of acute but often irrelevant observation. The generation that habitually neglects De Quincey has lost little important historical and philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly deprived itself of a constant source of entertainment.
As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,—prose which deliberately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was really as an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was to have its recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly handled parts of ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented matter was, however, but preparative to the lyric outburst,—the strophe and antistrophe of modulated song. In this conception of style others had preceded him,—Milton notably,—but only half consciously and not with sustained success. There could be no great English prose until the eighteenth century had trimmed the tangled periods of the seventeenth, and the romantic movement of the nineteenth added fire and enthusiasm to the clear but conventional style of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have both the same element of bravura, as will be seen if one tries to analyze their best passages as music. But in De Quincey this lyric arrangement is at once more delicate and more obvious, as the reader may assure himself if he re-read his favorite passages, noticing how many of them are in essence exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In this ideal of impassioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the latter part of the century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally impassioned or unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal, rather than the picturesque river in which rapids follow the long reaches of even water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of style as music,—as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily dependent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,—that is De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.
De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those who speak his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him rough and rude, sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his reputation has been high, though he has not been without stern critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen insists that his logic is more apparent than real: that his humor is spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed and ill-made. His claim that his 'Confessions' created a new genre is futile; they confess nothing epoch-making,—no real crises of soul, merely the adventures of a truant schoolboy, the recollections of a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous and effeminate British prejudices against agnosticism and Continental geniuses. "And so," Mr. Stephen continues, "in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding for the magazines."
Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis De Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture. Rough jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on details, a lack of philosophy.—these are faults, but they are British faults, Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly diminish respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant talker. There are men of that sort in every club, in every community. We forgive their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the most rigid logic, or the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply to them. It is enough if the stream of discourse flows gently on from their lips. A rich and well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned phrases, amusing quips and conceits of fancy, acute observations, a rich store of recondite learning, these charm and hold us. Such a talker, such a writer, was De Quincey. Such was his task, to amuse, to interest, and at times to instruct us. One deeper note he struck rarely, but always with the master's hand, the vibrating note felt in passages characteristic of immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to that note that De Quincey owes the individuality of his style and his fame.
There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly on the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a well-to-do and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfortunately died too early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and unpractical boy, who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from school, and neglected his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he married and settled down. The necessity of providing for his family at last aroused him from his life of meditation and indulgence in opium, and brought him into connection with the periodicals of the day. After the death of his wife in 1840 he moved with his children to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where in somewhat eccentric solitude he spent the last twenty years of his uneventful life.
CHARLES LAMB
From 'Biographical Essays'
It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Prima facie, it must suggest some presumption against a book that it has failed to gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left a reader unimpressed is in itself a neutral result, from which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from positive powers in a writer, from special originalities such as rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the great Scriptural idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does, in the realities of life.