Brave Men and Women Part 26

x.x.xII.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

(BORN 1786--DIED 1859.)

A LIFE OF WONDER AND WARNING.

The "English Opium-eater" himself told publicly, throughout a period of between thirty and forty years, whatever is known about him to any body; and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and "Autobiographic Sketches."

The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do himself--that of a.n.a.lyzing and forming a representation and judgment of his mind, and of his life as molded by his mind. The most intense metaphysician of a time remarkable for the predominance of metaphysical modes of thought, he was as completely unaware, as smaller men of his mental habits, that in his perpetual self-study and a.n.a.lysis he was never approaching the truth, for the simple reason that he was not even within ken of the necessary point of view. "I," he says, "whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little." And the description was a true one, as far as it went. And the completion of the description was one which he could never have himself arrived at. It must, we think, be concluded of De Quincey that he was the most remarkable instance in his time of a more than abnormal, of an artificial, condition of body and mind--a characterization which he must necessarily be the last man to conceive of. To understand this, it is necessary to glance at the events of his life. The briefest notice will suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as related in his own books.

Thomas De Quincey was the son of a merchant engaged in foreign commerce, and was born at Manchester in 1786. He was one of eight children, of whom no more than six were ever living at once, and several of whom died in infancy. The survivors were reared in a country home, the incidents of which, when of a kind to excite emotion, impressed themselves on this singular child's memory from a very early age. We have known only two instances, in a rather wide experience of life, of persons distinctly remembering so far back as a year and a half old. This was De Quincey's age when three deaths happened in the family, which he remembered, not by tradition, but by his own contemporary emotions. A sister of three and a half died, and he was perplexed by her disappearance, and terrified by the household whisper that she had been ill-used just before her death by a servant. A grandmother died about the same time, leaving little impression, because she had been little seen. The other death was of a beloved kingfisher, by a doleful accident. When the boy was five, he lost his playfellow and, as he says, intellectual guide, his sister Elizabeth, eight years old, dying of hydrocephalus, after manifesting an intellectual power which the forlorn brother recalled with admiration and wonder for life. The impression was undoubtedly genuine; but it is impossible to read the "Autobiographical Sketch" in which the death and funeral of the child are described without perceiving that the writer referred back to the period he was describing with emotions and reflex sensations which arose in him and fell from the pen at the moment. His father, meantime, was residing abroad, year after year, as a condition of his living at all; and he died of pulmonary consumption before Thomas was seven years old. The elder brother, then twelve, was obviously too eccentric for home management, if not for all control; and, looking no further than these const.i.tutional cases, we are warranted in concluding that the Opium-eater entered life under peculiar and unfavorable conditions.

He pa.s.sed through a succession of schools, and was distinguished by his eminent knowledge of Greek. At fifteen he was pointed out by his master (himself a ripe scholar) to a stranger in the remarkable words, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." And it was not only the Greek, we imagine, but the eloquence, too, was included in this praise. In this, as in the subtlety of the a.n.a.lytical power (so strangely mistaken for entire intellectual supremacy in our day), De Quincey must have strongly resembled Coleridge. Both were fine Grecians, charming discoursers, eminent opium-takers, magnificent dreamers and seers; large in their promises, and helpless in their failure of performance. De Quincey set his heart upon going to college earlier than his guardians thought proper; and, on his being disappointed in this matter, he ran away from his tutor's house, and was lost for several months, first in Wales and afterward in London. He was then sixteen. His whole life presents no more remarkable evidence of his constant absorption in introspection than the fact that, while tortured with hunger in the streets of London, for many weeks, and sleeping (or rather lying awake with cold and hunger) on the floor of an empty house, it never once occurred to him to earn money. As a cla.s.sical corrector of the press, and in other ways, he might no doubt have obtained employment; but it was not till afterward asked why he did not, that the idea ever entered his mind. How he starved, how he would have died but for a gla.s.s of spiced wine in the middle of the night on some steps in Soho Square, the Opium-eater told all the world above thirty years since; and also of his entering college; of the love of wine generated by the comfort it had yielded in his days of starvation; and again, of the disorder of the functions of the stomach which naturally followed, and the resort to opium as a refuge from the pain. It is to be feared that the description given in those extraordinary "Confessions"

has acted more strongly in tempting young people to seek the eight years' pleasures he derived from laudanum than, that of his subsequent torments in deterring them. There was no one to present to them the consideration that the peculiar organization of De Quincey, and his bitter sufferings, might well make a recourse to opium a different thing to him than to any body else. The quality of his mind and the exhausted state of his body enhanced to him the enjoyments which he called "divine," whereas there is no doubt of the miserable pain by which men of all const.i.tutions have to expiate an habitual indulgence in opium.

Others than De Quincey may or may not procure the pleasures he experienced; but it is certain that every one must expiate his offense against the laws of the human frame. And let it be remembered that De Quincey's excuse is as singular as his excess. Of the many who have emulated his enjoyment, there can hardly have been one whose stomach had been well-nigh destroyed by months of incessant, cruel hunger.

This event of his life, his resort to opium, absorbed all the rest.

There is little more to tell in the way of incident. His existence was thenceforth a series of dreams, undergone in different places, now at college, and now in a Westmoreland cottage, with a gentle, suffering wife, by his side, striving to minister to a need which was beyond the reach of nursing. He could amuse his predominant faculties by reading metaphysical philosophy and a.n.a.lytical reasoning on any subject, and by elaborating endless a.n.a.lyses and reasonings of his own, which he had not energy to embody. Occasionally the torpor encroached even on his predominant faculties, and then he roused himself to overcome the habit; underwent fearful suffering in the weaning; began to enjoy the vital happiness of temperance and health, and then fell back again. The influence upon the moral energies of his nature was, as might be supposed, fatal. Such energy he once had, as his earlier efforts at endurance amply testify. But as years pa.s.sed on, he had not only become a more helpless victim to his prominent vice, but manifested an increasing insensibility to the most ordinary requisitions of honor and courtesy, to say nothing of grat.i.tude and sincerity. In his hungry days, in London, he would not beg nor borrow. Five years later he wrote to Wordsworth, in admiration and sympathy; received an invitation to his Westmoreland Valley; went, more than once, within a few miles, and withdrew and returned to Oxford, unable to conquer his painful shyness; returned at last to live there, in the very cottage which had been Wordsworth's; received for himself, his wife, and a growing family of children, an unintermitting series of friendly and neighborly offices; was necessarily admitted to much household confidence, and favored with substantial aid, which was certainly not given through any strong liking for his manners, conversation, or character. How did he recompense all this exertion and endurance oh his behalf? In after years, when living (we believe) at Edinburgh, and pressed by debt, he did for once exert himself to write, and what he wrote was an exposure of every thing about the Wordsworths which he knew merely by their kindness. He wrote papers, which were eagerly read, and, of course, duly paid for, in which Wordsworth's personal foibles were malignantly exhibited with ingenious aggravations. The infirmities of one member of the family, the personal blemish of another, and the human weaknesses of all, were displayed, and all for the purpose of deepening the dislike against Wordsworth himself, which the receiver of his money, the eater of his dinners, and the dreary provoker of his patience strove to excite. Moreover, he perpetrated an act of treachery scarcely paralleled, we hope, in the history of literature. In the confidence of their most familiar days, Wordsworth had communicated portions of his posthumous poem to his guest, who was perfectly well aware that the work was to rest in darkness and silence till after the poet's death. In these magazine articles DeQuincey, using for this atrocious purpose his fine gift of memory, published a pa.s.sage, which he informed us was of far higher merit than any thing else we had to expect. And what was Wordsworth's conduct under this unequaled experience of bad faith and bad feeling?

While so many anecdotes were going of the poet's fireside, the following ought to be added: An old friend was talking with him by that fireside, and mentioned DeQuincey's magazine articles. Wordsworth begged to be spared any account of them, saying that the man had long pa.s.sed away from the family life and mind, and that he did not wish to ruffle himself in a useless way about a misbehavior which could not be remedied. The friend acquiesced, saying: "Well, I will tell you only one thing that he says, and then we will talk of other things. He says your wife is too good for you." The old poet's dim eyes lighted up instantly, and he started from his seat and flung himself against the mantel-piece, with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud enthusiasm: "And that's _true! There_ he is right!" And his disgust and contempt for the traitor were visibly moderated.

During a long course of years DeQuincey went on dreaming always, sometimes scheming works of high value and great efficacy, which were never to exist; promising largely to booksellers and others, and failing through a weakness so deep-seated that it should have prevented his making any promises. When his three daughters were grown up, and his wife was dead, he lived in a pleasant cottage at La.s.swade, near Edinburgh, well-known by name to those who have never seen its beauties as the scene of Scott's early married life and first great achievements in literature. There, while the family fortunes were expressly made contingent on his abstinence from his drug, DeQuincey did abstain, or observe moderation. His flow of conversation was then the delight of old acquaintance and admiring strangers, who came to hear the charmer and to receive the impression, which could never be lost, of the singular figure and countenance and the finely modulated voice, which were like nothing else in the world. It was a strange thing to look upon the fragile form and features, which might be those of a dying man, and to hear such utterances as his--now the strangest comments and insignificant incidents; now pregnant remarks on great subjects, and then malignant gossip, virulent and base, but delivered with an air and a voice of philosophical calmness and intellectual commentary such as caused the disgust of the listener to be largely qualified with amus.e.m.e.nt and surprise. One good thing was, that n.o.body's name and fame could be really injured by any thing DeQuincey could say. There was such a grotesque air about the mode of his evil speaking, and it was so gratuitous and excessive, that the hearer could not help regarding it as a singular sort of intellectual exercise, or an effort in the speaker to observe, for once, something outside of himself, rather than as any token of actual feeling towards the ostensible object.

Let this strange commentator on individual character meet with more mercy and a wiser interpretation than he was himself capable of. He was not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them.

A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous a.n.a.lytical faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable stand-point of philosophical investigation; but the actual effect of his intemperance was to aggravate to excess his introspective tendencies, and to remove him incessantly further from the needful discipline of true science. His conditions of body and mind were abnormal, and his study of the one thing he knew any thing about--the human mind--was radically imperfect.

His powers, n.o.ble and charming as they might have been, were at once wasted and weakened through their own partial excess. His moral nature relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve nothing but the delivery of some confidences of questionable value and beauty, and to command from us nothing more than a compa.s.sionate sorrow that an intellect so subtle and an eloquence so charming in its pathos, its humor, its insight, and its music, should have left the world in no way the better for such gifts, unless by the warning afforded in "Confessions" first, and then, by example, against the curse which neutralized their influence and corrupted its source.--HARRIET MARTINEAU.

x.x.xIII.

A VISION OF TIME.

NEW-YEAR'S EVE.

O did you not see him that over the snow Came on with a pace so cautious and slow?--

That measured his step to a pendulum-tick, Arriving in town when the darkness was thick?

In the midst of a vision of mind and heart, A drama above all human art,

I saw him last night, with locks so gray, A long way off, as the light died away.

And I knew him at once, so often before Had he silently, mournfully pa.s.sed at my door.

He must be cold and weary, I said, Coming so far, with that measured tread.

I will urge him to linger awhile with me Till his withering chill and weariness flee.

A story--who knows?--he may deign to rehea.r.s.e, And when he is gone I will put it in verse.

I turned to prepare for the coming guest, With curious, troublous thoughts oppressed.

The window I cheered with the taper's glow Which glimmered afar o'er the spectral snow.

My anxious care the hearth-stone knew, And the red flames leaped and beckoned anew.

But chiefly myself, with singular care, Did I for the h.o.a.ry presence prepare.

Yet with little success, as I paced the room, Did I labor to banish a sense of gloom.

My thoughts were going and coming like bees, With store from the year's wide-stretching leas;

Some laden with honey, some laden with gall, And into my heart they dropped it all!

O miserable heart! at once overrun With the honey and gall thou can'st not shun.

O wretched heart! in sadness I cried, Where is thy trust in the Crucified?

And in wrestling prayer did I labor long That the Mighty One would make me strong.

That prayer was more than a useless breath: It brought to my soul G.o.d's saving health.

The hours went by on their drowsy flight, And came the middle watch of the night;

In part unmanned in spite of my care, I beheld my guest in the taper's glare,

A wall of darkness around him thick, As onward he came to a pendulum-tick.

Then quickly I opened wide the door, And bade him pa.s.s my threshold o'er,

And linger awhile away from the cold, And repeat some story or ballad old,--

His weary limbs to strengthen with rest, For his course to the ever-receding West.

Through the vacant door in wonder I glanced, And stood--was it long?--as one entranced.

Silence so awful did fill the room, That the tick of the clock was a cannon's boom.

And my heart it sank to its lowest retreat, And in whelming awe did m.u.f.fle its beat.

For now I beheld, as never before; And heard to forget--ah, nevermore!