Chapter X: Part 10

When, indeed, De Quincey has a safe guide, he can put an argument with admirable clearness. The expositions of political economy, for example, are clear and ingenious, though even here I may quote Mr. Mill's remark, that he should have imagined a certain principle--obvious enough when once stated--to have been familiar to all economists, 'if the instance of Mr. De Quincey did not prove that the complete non-recognition and implied denial of it are compatible with great intellectual ingenuity and close intimacy with the subject-matter.'[4] Upon this question, Mr. Shadworth Hodgson has maintained that De Quincey was in the right as against Mill, and I cannot here argue the point. I think, however, that all economists would admit that De Quincey's merits were confined to an admirable exposition of another man's reasoning, and included no substantial addition to the inquiry. Certainly he does not count as one of those whose writings marked any epoch in the development of the science--if it be a science. Admirable skill of expression is, indeed, no real safeguard against logical blunders; and I will venture to say that De Quincey rarely indulges in this ostentatious logical precision without plunging into downright fallacies. I will take two instances. The first is trifling, but characteristic. Poor Dr. Johnson used to reproach himself, as De Quincey puts it, 'with lying too long in bed.' How absurd! is the comment. The doctor got up at eleven because he went to bed at three. If he had gone to bed at twelve, could he not easily have got up at eight? The remark would have been sound in form, though a quibble in substance, if Johnson had complained of lying in bed 'too late;' but as De Quincey himself speaks of 'too long' instead of 'too late,' it is an obvious reply that eight hours are of the same length at every period of the day. The great logician falls into another characteristic error in the same paragraph. Dr. Johnson, he says, was not 'indolent;' but he adds that Johnson 'had a morbid predisposition to decline labour from his scrofulous habit of body,' which was increased by over-eating and want of exercise. It is a cruel mode of vindication to say that you are not indolent, but only predisposed by a bad constitution and bad habits to decline labour; but the advantage of accurate definition is, that you can knock a man down with one hand, and pick him up with the other.

To take a more serious case. De Quincey undertakes to refute Hume's memorable argument against miracles. There are few better arenas for intellectual combats, and De Quincey has in it an unusual opportunity for display. He is obviously on his mettle. He comes forward with a whole battery of propositions, carefully marshalled in strategical order, and supported by appropriate 'lemmas.' One of his arguments, whether cogent or not, is that Hume's objection will not apply to the evidence of a multitude of witnesses. Now, a conspicuous miracle, he says, can be produced resting on such evidence, to wit, that of the thousands fed by a few loaves and fishes. The simplest infidel will, of course, reply that as these thousands of witnesses cannot be produced, the evidence open to us reduces itself to that of the Evangelists. De Quincey recollects this, and replies to it in a note. 'Yes,' he says, 'the Evangelists certainly; and, let us add, all those contemporaries to whom the Evangelists silently appealed. These make up the "multitude" contemplated in the case' under consideration. That is, to make up the multitude, you have to reckon as witnesses all those persons who did not contradict the 'silent appeal,' or whose contradiction has not reached us. With such canons of criticism it is hard to say what might not be proved. When a man with a great reputation for learning and logical ability tries to put us off with these wretched quibbles, one is fairly bewildered. He shows an ignorance of the real strength and weakness of the position, which, but for his reputation, one would summarily explain by incapacity for reasoning. As it is, we must suppose that, living apart from the daily battle of life, he had lost that quick instinct possessed by all genuine logicians for recognising the vital points of an argument. A day in a court of justice would have taught him more about evidence than a month spent over Aristotle. He had become fitter for the parade of the fencing-room than for the real thrust and parry of a duel in earnest. The mere rhetorical flourish pleases him as much as a blow at his antagonist's heart. Another glaring instance in the same paper is his apparent failure to perceive that there is a difference between proving that such a prophecy as that announcing the fall of Babylon was fulfilled, and proving that it was supernaturally inspired. Hume, without a tenth part of the logical apparatus, would have exposed the fallacy in a sentence. Paley, whom he never tires of treating to contemptuous abuse, was incapable of such feeble sophistry. De Quincey, in short, was a very able expositor; but he was not, though under better discipline he might probably have become, a sound original thinker. He is an interpreter, not an originator of thought. His skill in setting forth an argument blinds him to its most palpable defects. If language is a powerful weapon in his hands, it is only when the direction of the blow is dictated by some more manly, if less ingenious, understanding.

Let us inquire, and it is a more delicate question, whether he is better qualified to use it as a plaything. He has a reputation as a humorist. The Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts is probably the most popular of his writings. The conception is undoubtedly meritorious, and De Quincey returns to it more than once in his other works. The description of the Williams murders is inimitable, and the execution even in the humorous passages is frequently good. We may praise particular sentences: such as the well-known remark that 'if a man once indulges himself in murder, he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking; and from that to incivility and procrastination.' One laughs at this whimsical inversion; but I don't think one laughs very heartily; and certainly one does not find, as in really deep humour, that the paradox is pregnant with further meaning, and the laugh a prelude to a more melancholy smile. Many of the best things ever said are couched in a similar form: the old remark that the use of language is the concealment of thought; the saying that the half is greater than the whole, and that two and two don't always make four, are familiar instances; but each of them really contains a profound truth expressed in a paradoxical form, which is a sufficient justification of their extraordinary popularity. But if every inversion of a commonplace were humorous, we should be able to make jokes by machinery. There is no humour that I can see in the statement that honesty is the worst policy, or that procrastination saves time; and De Quincey's phrase, though I admit that it is amusing as a kind of summary of his essay, seems to me to rank little higher than an ingenious pun. It is a clever trick of language, but does not lead any further.

Here, too, and elsewhere, the humour gives us a certain impression of thinness. It is pressed too far, and spun out too long. Compare De Quincey's mode of beating out his one joke through pages of laboured facetiousness, with Swift's concentrated and pungent irony, as in the proposal for eating babies, or the argument to prove that the abolition of Christianity may be attended with some inconveniences. It is the difference between the stiffest of nautical grogs and the negus provided by thoughtful parents for a child's evening party. In some parts of the essay De Quincey sinks far lower. I do not believe that in any English author of reputation there is a more feeble piece of forced fun, than in the description of the fight of the amateur in murder with the baker at Munich. One knows by a process of reasoning that the man is joking; but one feels inclined to blush, through sympathy with a very clear man so exposing himself. A blemish of the same kind makes itself unpleasantly obvious at many points of his writings. He seems to fear that we shall find his stately and elaborate style rather too much for our nerves. He is conscious that, as a great master of language, he can play what tricks he pleases, without danger of remonstrance. And therefore, he every now and then plunges into slang, not irreverently, as a vulgar writer might do, but of malice prepense. The shock is almost as great as if an organist performing a solemn tune should suddenly introduce an imitation of the mewing of a cat. Now, he seems to say, you can't accuse me of being dull and pompous. Let me quote an instance or two from his graver writings. He wishes to argue, in defence of Christianity, that the ancients were insensible to ordinary duties of humanity. 'Our wicked friend Kikero, for instance, who _was_ so bad, but _wrote_ so well, who _did_ such naughty things, but _said_ such pretty things, has himself noticed in one of his letters, with petrifying coolness, that he knew of destitute old women in Rome who went without tasting food for one, two, or even three days. After making such a statement, did Kikero not tumble downstairs and break at least three of his legs in his hurry to call a public meeting,' &c., &c. What delicate humour! The grave apologist of Christianity actually calls Cicero, Kikero, and talks about 'three of his legs!' Do we not all explode with laughter? A parallel case occurs in his argument about the Essenes; where he grows so irrepressibly funny as to call Josephus 'Mr. Joe,' and addresses him as follows:--'Wicked Joseph, listen to me: you've been telling us a fairy tale; and for my part, I've no objection to a fairy tale in any situation, because if one can make no use of it oneself, always one knows that a child will be thankful for it. But this tale, Mr. Joseph, happens also to be a lie; secondly, a fraudulent lie; thirdly, a malicious lie.' I have seen this stuff described as 'scholarlike badinage;' but the only effect of such exquisite foolery, within my mind, is to persuade one that a writer assailed by such weapons, and those weapons used by a man who has the whole resources of the English language at his command, must probably have been encountering an inconvenient truth. I will simply refer to the story of Sir Isaac Newton sitting all day with one stocking on and one off, in the Casuistry of Roman Meals, as an illustration of the way in which a story ought not to be told. Its most conspicuous, though not its worst fault, its extreme length, protects it from quotation.

It is strange to find that a writer, pre-eminently endowed with delicacy of ear, and boasting of the complex harmonies of his style, should condescend to such an irritating defect. De Quincey says of one of the greatest masters of the humorous:--'The gyration within which his (Lamb's) sentiment wheels, no matter of what kind it may be, is always the shortest possible. It does not prolong itself, it does not repeat itself, it does not propagate itself.' And he goes on to connect the failing with Lamb's utter insensibility to music, and indifference to 'the rhythmical in prose composition.' The criticism is a fine one in its way, but it may perhaps explain some of De Quincey's shortcomings in Lamb's peculiar sphere. De Quincey's jokes are apt to repeat and prolong and propagate themselves, till they become tiresome; and the delicate touch of the true humorist, just indicating a half-comic, half-pathetic thought, is alien to De Quincey's more elaborate style. Yet he had a true and peculiar sense of humour. That faculty may be predominant or latent; it may form the substance of a whole book, as in the case of Sterne: or it may permeate every sentence, as in Carlyle's writings; or it may simply give a faint tinge, rather perceived by subsequent analysis than consciously felt at the time; and in this lowest degree it frequently gives a certain charm to De Quincey's writing. When he tries overt acts of wit, he becomes simply vulgar; when he directly aims at the humorous, we feel his hand to be rather heavy; but he is occasionally very happy in that ironical method, of which the Essay on Murder is the most notorious specimen. The best example, in my opinion, is the description of his elder brother in the Autobiographical Sketches. The account of the rival kingdoms of Gombroon and Tigrasylvania; of poor De Quincey's troubles in getting rid of his subjects' tails; of his despair at the suggestion that by making them sit down for six hours a day they might rub them off in the course of several centuries; of his ingenious plan of placing his unlucky island at a distance of 75 degrees of latitude from his brother's capital; and of his dismay at hearing of the 'vast horns and promontories' which run down from all parts of the hostile dominions towards his unoffending little territory, are touched with admirable skill. The grave, elaborate detail of the perplexities of his childish imagination is pleasant, and at the same time pathetic. When, in short, by simply applying his usual stateliness of manner to a subject a little beneath it in dignity, he can produce the desired effect, he is eminently successful. The same rhetoric which would be appropriate (to use his favourite illustration) in treating the theme of 'Belshazzar the King giving a great feast to a thousand of his lords,' has a certain piquancy, when for Belshazzar we substitute a schoolboy playing at monarchy. He is indulging in a whimsical masquerade, and the pomp is assumed in sport instead of in earnest. Nobody can do a little mock majesty so well as he who on occasion can be seriously majestic. Yet when he altogether abandons his strong ground, and chooses to tumble and make grimaces before us, like an ordinary clown, he becomes simply offensive. The great tragedian is capable on due occasion of pleasant burlesque; but sheer unadulterated comedy is beyond his powers. De Quincey, in short, can parody his own serious writing better than anybody, and the capacity is a proof that he had the faculty of humour; but for a genuine substantive joke--a joke which, resting on its own merits, instead of being the shadow of his serious writing, is to be independently humorous--he seems, to me at least, to be generally insufferable.

De Quincey's final claim to a unique position rests on the fact that his 'impassioned prose' was applied to confessions. He compares himself, as I have said, to Rousseau and Augustine. The analogy with the last of these two writers would, I should imagine, be rather difficult to carry beyond the first part of resemblance; but it is possible to make out a somewhat closer affinity to Rousseau. In both cases, at least, we have to deal with men of morbid temperament, ruined or seriously injured by their utter incapacity for self-restraint. So far, however, as their confessions derive an interest from the revelation of character, Rousseau is more exciting almost in the same proportion as he confesses greater weaknesses. The record of such errors by their chief actor, and that actor a man of such singular ability, presents us with a strangely attractive problem. De Quincey has less to confess, and is less anxious to lay bare his own morbid propensities. His story excites compassion; and, as in the famous episode of 'Anne,' attracts us by the genuine tenderness and delicacy of feeling. He was free from the errors which make some of Rousseau's confessions loathsome, but he was also not the man to set fire, like Rousseau, to the hearts of a whole generation. His narrative is a delight to literary students; not a volcanic outburst to shake the foundations of society. Nearly all that he has to tell us is that he ran away from school, spent some time in London, for no very assignable reason, in a semi-starving condition, and then, equally without reason, surrendered at discretion to the respectabilities and went to Oxford like an ordinary human being. It is no doubt a proof of extraordinary literary power that the facts told with De Quincey's comment of rich meditative eloquence become so fascinating. Unfortunately, though he managed to write recollections which are, in their way, unique, he never achieved anything at all comparable to his autobiographic revelations. Vague thoughts passed through his mind of composing a great work on Political Economy, or of writing a still more wonderful treatise on the Emendation of the Human Intellect. But he never seems to have made any decided steps towards the fulfilment of such dreams, and remained to the end of his days a melancholy specimen of wasted force. There is nothing, unfortunately, very uncommon in the story, except so far as its hero was a man of genius. The history of Coleridge exemplifies a still higher ambition, resulting, it is true, in a much greater influence upon the thought of the age, but almost equally sad. Their lives might be put into tracts for the use of opium-eaters; and whilst there was still hope of redeeming them, it might have been worth while to condemn them with severity. Indignation is now out of place, and we can only grieve and pass by. When thousands of men are drinking themselves to death every year, there is nothing very strange or dramatic in the history of one ruined by opium instead of by gin.

From De Quincey's writings we get the notion of a man amiable, but with an uncertain temper; with fine emotions, but an utter want of moral strength; and, in short, of a nature of much delicacy and tenderness retreating into opium and the Lake district, from a world which was too rough for him. He uttered in many fragmentary ways his views of philosophy and politics. Whatever their value, De Quincey has of course no claim to be an originator. He not only had not strength to stand alone, but he belonged to a peculiar side-current of English thought. He was the adjective of which Coleridge was the substantive; and if Coleridge himself was an unsatisfactory and imperfect thinker, his imperfections are greatly increased in his friend and disciple. He shared that belief which some people have not yet abandoned, that the answer to all our perplexities is to be found in some of the mysteries of German metaphysics. If we could only be taught to distinguish between the reason and the understanding, the scales would fall from our eyes, and we should see that the Thirty-nine Articles contained the plan on which the universe was framed. He had an acquaintance, which, if his own opinion were correct, was accurate and profound with Kant's writings, and had studied Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. He could talk about concepts and categories and schematisms without losing his head amongst those metaphysical heights. He knew how by the theoretic reason to destroy all proofs of the existence of God, and then, by introducing the practical reason, to set the existence of God beyond a doubt. He fancied that he was able to translate the technicalities of Kant into plain English; and he believed that when so translated, they would prove to have a real and all important meaning. If German metaphysics be a science, and not a mere edifice of moonshine; and if De Quincey had really penetrated the secrets of that science, we have missed a chance of enlightenment. As it is, we have little left except a collection of contemptuous prejudices. De Quincey thought himself entitled to treat Locke as a shallow pretender. The whole eighteenth century was, with one or two exceptions, a barren wilderness to him. He aspersed its reasoners, from Locke to Paley; he scorned its poets with all the bitterness of the school which first broke loose from the rule of Pope; and its prose-writers, with the exception of Burke, were miserable beings in his eyes. He would have seen with little regret a holocaust of all the literature produced in England between the death of Milton and the rise of Wordsworth. Naturally, he hated an infidel with that kind of petulant bitterness which possesses an old lady in a country village, who has just heard that some wicked people dispute the story of Balaam's ass. And, as a corollary, he combined the whole French people in one sweeping censure, and utterly despised their morals, manners, literature, and political principles. He was a John Bull, as far as a man can be who is of weakly, nervous temperament, and believes in Kant.

One or two illustrations may be given of the force of these effeminate prejudices; and it is to be remarked with regret that they are specially injurious in a department where he otherwise had eminent merits, that, namely, of literary criticism. Any man who lived in the eighteenth century was _primâ facie_ a fool; if a free thinker, his case was all but hopeless; but if a French free thinker, it was desperate indeed. He lets us into the secret of his prejudices, which, indeed, is tolerably transparent in his statement that he found it hard to reverence Coleridge when he supposed him to be a Socinian. Now, though a 'liberal man,' he could not hold a Socinian to be a Christian; nor could he 'think that any man, though he make himself a marvellously clever disputant, ever could tower upwards into a very great philosopher, unless he should begin or end with Christianity.' The canon may be sound, but it at once destroys the pretensions of such men as Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, and even, though De Quincey considers him 'a dubious exception,' Kant. Even heterodoxy is enough to alienate his sympathies. 'Think of a man,' he exclaims about poor Whiston, 'who had brilliant preferment within his reach, dragging his poor wife and daughter for half a century through the very mire of despondency and destitution, because he disapproved of Athanasius, or because the "Shepherd of Hermas" was not sufficiently esteemed by the Church of England.' To do him justice, De Quincey admits, in another passage, that this ridicule of a poor man for sacrificing his interests to his principles was not quite fair; but then Whiston was only an Arian. When Priestley, who was a far worse heretic, had his house sacked by a mob and his life endangered, De Quincey can scarcely restrain his exultation. He admits in terms that Priestley ought to be pitied, but adds that the fanaticism of the mob was 'much more reasonable' than the fanaticism of Priestley; and that those who play at bowls must look out for rubbers. Porson is to be detested for his letters to Travis, though De Quincey does not dare to defend the disputed text. He has, however, a pleasant insinuation at command. Porson, he says, stung like a hornet; 'it may chance that on this subject Master Porson will get stung through his coffin, before he is many years deader.' What scholarlike badinage! Political heretics fare little better. Fox's eloquence was 'ditch-water,' with a shrill effervescence of 'imaginary gas.' Burnet was a 'gossiper, slanderer, and notorious falsifier of facts.' That one of his sermons was burnt is 'the most consolatory fact in his whole worldly career;' and he asks, 'would there have been much harm in tying his lordship to the sermon?' Junius was not only a knave who ought to have been transported, but his literary success rested upon an utter delusion. He had neither 'sentiment, imagination, nor generalisation.' Johnson, though the best of Tories, lived in the wrong century, and unluckily criticised Milton with foolish harshness. Therefore 'Johnson, viewed in relation to Milton, was a malicious, mendacious, and dishonest man.'

Let us turn to greater names. Goethe's best work was 'Werther,' and De Quincey is convinced that his reputation 'must decline for the next generation or two, until it reaches its just level.' His merits have been exaggerated for three reasons--first, his great age; secondly, 'the splendour of his official rank at the court of Weimar;' thirdly, 'his enigmatical and unintelligible writing.' But 'in Germany his works are little read, and in this country not at all.' 'Wilhelm Meister' is morally detestable, and, artistically speaking, rubbish. Of the author of the Philosophical Dictionary, of the 'Essai sur les Moeurs,' of 'Candide,' and certain other trifles, his judgment is that Horace Walpole's reputation is the same in kind, as the _genuine_ reputation of Voltaire: 'Both are very splendid memoir writers, and of the two, Lord Orford is the more brilliant.' In the same tone he compares Gibbon to Southey, giving the advantage to the latter on the score of his poetical ability; and his view of another great infidel may be inferred from the following phrase. One of Rousseau's opinions is only known to us through Cowper, 'for in the unventilated pages of its originator it would have lurked undisturbed down to this hour of June, 1819.'

Voltaire and Rousseau have the double title to hatred of being Frenchmen and freethinkers. But even orthodox Frenchmen fare little better. 'The French Bossuets, Bourdaloues, Fénelons, &c., whatever may be thought of their meagre and attenuated rhetoric, are one and all the most commonplace of thinkers.' In fact, the mere mention of France acts upon him like a red rag on a bull. The French, 'in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up, from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings,' are incapable of English earnestness. Their taste is 'anything but good in all that department of wit and humour'--the department, apparently, of anecdotes--'and the ground lies in their natural want of veracity;' whereas England bases upon its truthfulness a well-founded claim to 'a moral pre-eminence among the nations.' Belgians, French, and Italians attract the inconsiderate by 'facile obsequiousness,' which, however, is a pendent of 'impudence and insincerity. Want of principle and want of moral sensibility compose the original _fundus_ of southern manners.' Our faults of style, such as they are, proceed from our manliness. In France there are no unmarried women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity--'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most gormandising races in Europe.' They display a brutal selfishness in satisfying their appetites, whereas Englishmen at all public meals are remarkably conspicuous for 'a spirit of mutual attention and self-sacrifice.' It is enough to show the real degradation of their habits, that they use the 'odious gesture' of shrugging their shoulders, and are fond of the 'vile ejaculation "bah!"' which is as bad as to puff the smoke of a tobacco-pipe into your companion's face. They have neither self-respect nor respect for others. French masters are never dignified, though sometimes tyrannical; French servants are always, even without meaning it, disrespectfully familiar. Many of their manners and usages are 'essentially vulgar, and their apparent affability depends not on kindness of heart, but love of talking.'

The impudence of the assertions is really amusing, though one cannot but regret that the vulgar prejudice of the old-fashioned John Bull should have been embodied in the pages of a master of our language. They are worth notice because they were not special to De Quincey, but characteristic of one very intelligible tendency of his generation. De Quincey's prejudices are chiefly the reflection of those of the Coleridge school in general, though he added to them a few pet aversions of his own. At times his genuine acuteness of mind raises him above the teaching of his masters, or at least enables him to detect their weaknesses. He discovers Coleridge's plagiarisms, though he believes and, indeed, speaks in the most exaggerated terms of his philosophical pretensions; whilst, in treating of Wordsworth, he points out with great skill the fallacy of some of his theories and the inconsistency of his practice. But whilst keenly observant of some of the failings of his friends, he reproduces others in even an exaggerated type. He shows to the full their narrow-minded hatred of the preceding century, of all forms of excellence which did not correspond to their favourite types, and of all speculation which did not lead to, or start from their characteristic doctrines. The error is fully pardonable. We must not look to men who are leading a revolt against established modes of thought for a full appreciation of the doctrines of their antagonists; and if De Quincey could recognise no merit in Voltaire or Rousseau, in Locke, Paley, or Jeremy Bentham, their followers were quite prepared to retaliate in kind. One feels, however, that such prejudices are more respectable when they are the foibles of a strong mind engaged in active warfare. We can pardon the old campaigner, who has become bitter in an internecine contest. It is not quite so pleasant to discover the same bitterness in a gentleman who has looked on from a distance, and never quite made up his mind to buckle on his armour. De Quincey had not earned the right of speaking evil of his enemies. If a man chances to be a Hedonist, he should show the good temper which is the best virtue of the indolent. To lie on a bed of roses, and snarl at everybody who contradicts your theories, seems to imply rather testiness of temper than strength of conviction. De Quincey is a Christian on Epicurean principles. He dislikes an infidel because his repose is disturbed by the arguments of freethinkers. He fears that he will be forced to think conscientiously, and to polish his logical weapons afresh. He mutters that the man is a fool, and could be easily thrashed if it were worth while, and then turns back to his opium and his rhetoric and his beloved Church of England. There is no pleasanter institution for a gentleman who likes magnificent historical associations, and heartily hates the rude revolutionists who would turn the world upside down, and thereby disturb the rest of dreamy metaphysicians.

He is quite pathetic, too, about the British Constitution. 'Destroy the House of Lords,' he exclaims, 'and henceforward, for people like you and me, England will be no habitable land.' Here, he seems to say, is one charming elysium, where no rude hand has swept away the cobwebs or replaced the good old-fashioned machinery; here we may find rest in the 'pure, holy, and magnificent Church,' whose Articles, interpreted by Coleridge, may guide us through the most wondrous of metaphysical labyrinths, and dwell in a grand constitutional edifice, rich in picturesque memories, and blending into one complex harmony elements contributed by a long series of centuries. And you, wretched French revolutionists, with your love of petty precision, and irreverent radicals and utilitarians, with your grovelling material notions, propose to level, and destroy, and break in upon my delicious reveries. No old Hebrew prophet could be more indignant with the enemy who threatened to break down the carved work of his temples with axes and hammers. But his complaint is, after all, the voice of the sluggard. Let me dream a little longer; for much as I love my country and its institutions, I cannot rouse myself to fight for them. It is enough if I call their assailants an ugly name or so, and at times begin to write what might be the opening pages of the preface to some very great work of the future. Alas! the first digression diverts the thread of the discourse; the task becomes troublesome, and the labour is abruptly broken off. And so 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 magazines. It sounds, and many people will say that it is, a harsh and, perhaps they will add, a stupid judgment. If so, they may find plenty of admirers who will supply the eulogistic side here too briefly indicated. I will only say two things: first, that there are very few writers who have revealed new capacities in the language, and in English literature they might almost be counted on the fingers. Secondly, I must confess that I have often consulted De Quincey in regard to biographic and critical questions, and that though I have generally found something to admire, I have always found gross inaccuracies and almost always effeminate prejudices and mere flippancies draped in elaborate rhetoric. I take leave, therefore, to insist upon faults which are passed over too easily by writers of more geniality than I claim to possess.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] It is curious that De Quincey, in his Essay on Style, explains that political economy, and especially the doctrine of value, is one of those subjects which cannot be satisfactorily treated in dialogue--the very form which he chose to adopt for that particular purpose.

_SIR THOMAS BROWNE_

'Let me not injure the felicity of others,' says Sir Thomas Browne in a suppressed passage of the 'Religio Medici,' 'if I say that I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty into riches, adversity into prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.' Perhaps on second thoughts, Sir Thomas felt that the phrase savoured of that presumption which is supposed to provoke the wrath of Nemesis; and at any rate, he, of all men, is the last to be taken too literally at his word. He is a humorist to the core, and is here writing dramatically. There are many things in this book, so he tells us, 'delivered rhetorically, many expressions therein merely tropical,... and therefore also many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.' We shall hardly do wrong in reckoning amongst them this audacious claim to surpassing felicity, as we may certainly include his boast that he 'could lose an arm without a tear, and with few groans be quartered into pieces.' And yet, if Sir Thomas were to be understood in the most downright literal earnest, perhaps he could have made out as good a case for his assertion as almost any of the troubled race of mankind. For, if we set aside external circumstances of life, what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of uncompromising materials: such talents are by themselves enough to provide a man with work for life, and to make all his work delightful. To them, moreover, we must add a disposition absolutely incapable of controversial bitterness; 'a constitution,' as he says of himself, 'so general that it consorts and sympathises with all things;' an absence of all antipathies to loathsome objects in nature--to French 'dishes of snails, frogs, and toadstools,' or to Jewish repasts on 'locusts or grasshoppers;' an equal toleration--which in the first half of the seventeenth century is something astonishing--for all theological systems; an admiration even of our natural enemies, the French, the Spaniards, the Italians, and the Dutch; a love of all climates, of all countries; and, in short, an utter incapacity to 'absolutely detest or hate any essence except the devil.' Indeed, his hatred even for that personage has in it so little of bitterness, that no man, we may be sure, would have joined more heartily in the Scotch minister's petition for 'the puir de'il'--a prayer conceived in the very spirit of his writings. A man so endowed--and it is not only from his explicit assertions, but from his unconscious self-revelation, that we may credit him with closely approaching his own ideal--is admirably qualified to discover one great secret of human happiness. No man was ever better prepared to keep not only one, but a whole stableful of hobbies, nor more certain to ride them so as to amuse himself, without loss of temper or dignity, and without rude collisions against his neighbours. That happy art is given to few, and thanks to his skill in it, Sir Thomas reminds us strongly of the two illustrious brothers Shandy combined in one person. To the exquisite kindliness and simplicity of Uncle Toby he unites the omnivorous intellectual appetite and the humorous pedantry of the head of the family. The resemblance, indeed, may not be quite fortuitous. Though it does not appear that Sterne, amidst his multifarious pilferings, laid hands upon Sir Thomas Browne, one may fancy that he took a general hint or two from so congenial an author.

The best mode of approaching so original a writer is to examine the intellectual food on which his mind was nourished. He dwelt by preference in strange literary pastures; and their nature will let us into some secrets as to his taste and character. We will begin, therefore, by examining the strange furniture of his mind, as described in his longest, though not his most characteristic book--the 'Inquiry into Vulgar Errors.' When we turn over its quaint pages, we feel as though we were entering one of those singular museums of curiosities which existed in the pre-scientific ages. Every corner is filled with a strange, incoherent medley, in which really valuable objects are placed side by side with what is simply grotesque and ludicrous. The modern man of science may find some objects of interest; but they are mixed inextricably with strange rubbish that once delighted the astrologer, the alchemist, or the dealer in apocryphal relics. And the possessor of this miscellaneous collection accompanies us with an unfailing flow of amusing gossip: at one moment pouring forth a torrent of out-of-the-way learning; at another, making a really passable scientific remark; and then lapsing into an elaborate discussion of some inconceivable absurdity; affecting the air of a grave inquirer, and to all appearance fully believing in his own pretensions, and yet somehow indulging himself in a half-suppressed smile, which indicates that the humorous aspect of a question can never be far removed from his mind. Mere curiosity is not yet differentiated from scientific thirst for knowledge; and a quaint apologue is as good a reward for the inquirer as the discovery of a law of nature. The numerous class which insists upon a joke being as unequivocal as a pistol-shot, and a serious statement as grave as a Blue-book, should therefore keep clear of Sir Thomas Browne. His most congenial readers are those who take a simple delight in following out any quaint train of reflections, careless whether it may culminate in a smile or a sigh, or in some thought in which the two elements of the sad and the ludicrous are inextricably blended. Sir Thomas, however, is in the 'Inquiry' content generally with bringing out the strange curiosities of his museum, and does not care to draw any explicit moral. The quaintness of the objects unearthed seems to be a sufficient recompense for the labour of the search. Fortunately for his design, he lived in the time when a poet might have spoken without hyperbole of the 'fairy tales of science.' To us, who have to plod through an arid waste of painful observation, and slow piecing together of cautious inferences before reaching the promised land of wondrous discoveries, the expression sometimes appears to be ironical. Does not science, we may ask with a _primâ facie_ resemblance of right, destroy as much poetry as it generates? To him no such doubts could present themselves, for fairyland was still a province of the empire of science. Strange beings moved through the pages of natural history, which were equally at home in the 'Arabian Nights' or in poetical apologues. The griffin, the phoenix, and the dragon were not yet extinct; the salamander still sported in flames; and the basilisk slew men at a distance with his deadly glance. More commonplace animals indulged in the habits which they had learnt in fables, and of which only some feeble vestiges now remain in the eloquence of strolling showmen. The elephant had no joints, and was caught by felling the tree against which he rested his stiff limbs in sleep; the pelican pierced its breast for the good of its young; ostriches were regularly painted with a horseshoe in their bills, to indicate their ordinary diet; storks refused to live except in republics and free states; the crowing of a cock put lions to flight, and men were struck dumb in good sober earnest by the sight of a wolf. The curiosity-hunter, in short, found his game still plentiful, and, by a few excursions into Aristotle, Pliny, and other more recondite authors, was able still to display a rich bag for the edification of his readers. Sir Thomas Browne sets out on that quest with all imaginable seriousness. He persuaded himself, and he has persuaded some of his editors, that he was a genuine disciple of Bacon, by one of whose suggestions the 'Inquiry' is supposed to have been prompted. Accordingly, as Bacon describes the idols by which the human mind is misled, Sir Thomas sets out with investigating the causes of error; but his introductory remarks immediately diverge into strange paths, from which it is obvious that the discovery of true scientific method was a very subordinate object in his mind. Instead of telling us by what means truth is to be attained, his few perfunctory remarks on logic are lost in an historical narrative given with infinite zest, of the earliest recorded blunders. The period of history in which he most delighted was the antediluvian--probably because it afforded the widest field for speculation. His books are full of references to the early days of the world. He takes a keen personal interest in our first parents. He discusses the unfortunate lapse of Adam and Eve from every possible point of view. It is not without a visible effort that he declines to settle which of the two was the more guilty, and what would have been the result if they had tasted the fruit of the Tree of Life before applying to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then he passes in review every recorded speech before the Flood, shows that in each of them, with one exception, there is a mixture of falsehood and error, and settles to his own satisfaction that Cain showed less 'truth, wisdom, and reverence' than Satan under similar circumstances. Granting all which to be true, it is impossible to see how we are advanced in settling, for example, whether the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system of astronomy is to be adopted, or in extracting the grains of truth that may be overlaid by masses of error in the writings of alchemists. Nor do we really learn much by being told that ancient authorities sometimes lie, for he evidently enjoys accumulating the fables, and cares little for showing how to discriminate their degree of veracity. He tells us, indeed, that Medea was simply a predecessor of certain modern artists, with an excellent 'recipe to make white hair black;' and that Actæon was a spirited master of hounds, who, like too many of his ancestors, went metaphorically, instead of literally, to the dogs. He points out, moreover, that we must not believe on authority that the sea is the sweat of the earth, that the serpent, before the Fall, went erect like man, or that the right eye of a hedgehog, boiled in oil, and preserved in a brazen vessel, will enable us to see in the dark. Such stories, he moderately remarks, being 'neither consonant unto reason nor correspondent unto experiment,' are unto us 'no axioms.' But we may judge of his scepticism by his remarks on 'Oppianus, that famous Cilician poet.' Of this writer he says that 'abating the annual mutation of sexes in the hyæna, the single sex of the rhinoceros, the antipathy between two drums of a lamb's and a wolf's skin, the informity of cubs, the venation of centaurs, and some few others, he may be read with delight and profit.' Obviously we shall find in Sir Thomas Browne no inexorably severe guide to truth! he will not too sternly reject the amusing because it happens to be slightly improbable, or doubt an authority because he sometimes sanctions a mass of absurd fables. Satan, as he argues at great length, is at the bottom of most errors, from false religions down to a belief that there is another world in the moon; but Sir Thomas takes little trouble to provide us with an Ithuriel's spear, and, indeed, we have a faint suspicion that he will overlook at times the diabolic agency in sheer enthusiasm at the marvellous results. The logical design is little more than ostensible; and Sir Thomas, though he knew it not himself, is really satisfied with any line of inquiry that will bring him in sight of some freak of nature or of opinion suitable to his museum of curiosities.

Let us, however, pass from the anteroom, and enter this queer museum. We pause in sheer bewilderment on the threshold, and despair of classifying its contents intelligibly within any moderate space. This much, indeed, is obvious at first sight--that the title 'vulgar errors' is to some extent a misnomer. It is not given to vulgar brains to go wrong by such complex methods. There are errors which require more learning and ingenuity than are necessary for discovering truths; and it is in those queer freaks of philosophical minds that Sir Thomas specially delights. Though far, indeed, from objecting to any absurdity which lies on the common highroad, he rejoices in the true spirit of a collector when he can discover some grotesque fancy by rambling into less frequented paths of inquiry. Perhaps it will be best to take down one or two specimens, pretty much at random, and mark their nature and mode of treatment. Here, for example, is that quaint old wonder, the phoenix, 'which, after many hundred years, burneth itself, and from the ashes thereof ariseth up another.' Sir Thomas carefully discusses the pros and cons of this remarkable legend. In favour of the phoenix, it may be alleged that he is mentioned 'not only by human authors,' but also by such 'holy writers' as Cyril, Epiphanius, and Ambrose. Moreover, allusions are made to him in Job and the Psalms. 'All which notwithstanding,' the following grave reasons may be alleged against his existence: First, nobody has ever seen a phoenix. Secondly, those who mention him speak doubtfully, and even Pliny, after telling a story about a particular phoenix which came to Rome in the censorship of Claudius, unkindly turns round and declares the whole story to be a palpable lie. Thirdly, the name phoenix has been applied to many other birds, and those who speak unequivocally of the genuine phoenix contradict each other in the most flagrant way as to his age and habitat. Fourthly, many writers, such as Ovid, only speak poetically, and others, as Paracelsus, only mystically, whilst the remainder speak rhetorically, emblematically, or hieroglyphically. Fifthly, in the Scriptures, the word translated phoenix means a palm tree. Sixthly, his existence, if we look closely, is implicitly denied in the Scriptures, because all fowls entered the ark in pairs, and animals were commanded to increase and multiply, neither of which statements is compatible with the solitary nature of the phoenix. Seventhly, nobody could have known by experience whether the phoenix actually lived for a thousand years, and, therefore, 'there may be a mistake in the compute.' Eighthly, and finally, no animals really spring, or could spring, from the ashes of their predecessors and it is impossible to believe that they could enter the world in such a fashion. Having carefully summed up this negative evidence--enough, one would have fancied, to blow the poor phoenix into summary annihilation--Sir Thomas finally announces his grave conclusion in these words--'How far to rely on this tradition we refer unto consideration.' And yet he feels impelled to add a quaint reflection on the improbability of a statement made by Plutarch, that 'the brain of a phoenix is a pleasant bit, but that it causeth the headache.' Heliogabalus, he observes, could not have slain the phoenix, for it must of necessity be 'a vain design to destroy any species, or mutilate the great accomplishment of six days.' To which it is added, by way of final corollary, that after Cain had killed Abel, he could not have destroyed Eve, supposing her to have been the only woman in existence; for then there must have been another creation, and a second rib of Adam must have been animated.