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THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

He

He has been charged with an open depreciation of Keats and Shelley. But this we cannot reconcile with his papers on these poets. Without even giving him the benefit of his plea, that the papers were "slight impromptus, peremptorily excluding a comprehensive view of the subject," and disregarding his statement when they were reprinted that "in the case of Keats there is something which (after a lapse of several years) I could wish unsaid, or said more gently," we may take them as they stand. charges Keats with "trampling upon his mother-tongue as with the hoofs of a buffalo," and says of "Endymion" that it exhibits "the very midsummer madness of affectation, of false vapoury sentiment, and of fantastic effeminacy." But this judgment of the earlier poem did not prevent him from calling the "Hyperion' "imperishable," and ascribing to it "the majesty, the austere beauty, and the simplicity of a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture." As for any depreciation of Shelley, that I have been unable to find. He makes fun, in a kindly spirit, of Shelley's youthful confidence in waging war against the ruling powers, but at the same time he praises the youth's sincerity, pronounces him "the least false of human creatures," and speaks of "the profound respect due to his exalted powers." The truth is, that the charges made against De Quincey's criticisms are due to his unusual comprehensiveness of view and his sensibility to diversities of gifts. He was, to borrow his own words, "a large estimator of things as they are-of natural gifts, and their infinite distribution through an infinite scale of degrees, and the compensating accomplishments which take place in so vast a variety Hence came numerous misapprehensions. Too many of forms." critics, in his day no less than now, credited their idols with every excellence of composition, every excellence of head and heart, every propriety of conduct in their several relations as superiors, When De Quincey, who was never blind inferiors, and equals. to a man's genuine claims to superiority, drew these claims into stronger relief by recording attendant defects, outcries arose on every hand that he was stealthily undermining established repu tations. People refused to understand that a writer "hopelessly inferior in one talent" could yet be "vastly superior in another."

A word on his estimates of foreign writers. His exposure of weak points in such universally established names as Homer, Plato, Of this every reader Cicero, and Goethe, is set down to no higher motive than a love of paradox, a passion for inspiring wonder. must judge for himself. Only when we criticise the criticisms of De Quincey, we must bear in mind the unparalleled extent of his reading. This unique preparation for valuing literary powers entitles him to be criticised with reverence and modesty.

In his "Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature in its foremost

"It

pretensions" (which has not been reprinted), he is an unqaalified assertor of the superiority of modern to ancient literature. is," he said, "a pitiable spectacle to any man of sense and feeling, who happens to be really familiar with the golden treasures of his own ancestral literature, and a spectacle which moves alternately scorn and sorrow, to see young people squandering their time and painful study upon writers not fit to unloose the shoes' latchets of many amongst their own compatriots; making painful and remote voyages after the drossy refuse, when the pure gold lies neglecte at their feet." "We engage to produce many scores of passages from Chaucer, not exceeding 50 to 80 lines, which contain more of picturesque simplicity, more tenderness, more fidelity to nature, more felicity of sentiment, more animation of narrative, and more truth of character, than can be matched in all the Iliad or the Odyssey." Again,-"To our Jeremy Taylor, to our Sir Thomas Browne, there is no approach made in the Greek elequence. The inaugural chapter of the Holy Dying,' to say nothing of many another golden passage; or the famous passage in the Urn Buriall,' beginning, 'Now, since these bones have rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,'-have no parallel in literature." Finally, "For the intellectual qualities of eloquence, in fineness of understanding, in depth and in large compass of thought, Burke far surpasses any orator, ancient or modern."

In another paper, also excluded from his collected works, he exposes the "dire affectation" of many enthusiastic admirers of Greek and Latin writers :

"Raised almost to divine honours, never mentioned but with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read-most of them never; are they indeed the closet-companions of any man? Surely it is me that these follies were at an end; that our practice were made to square a little better with our professions; and that our pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend that they lie."

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.

De Quincey ranges with great freedom over the accumulated wealth of the language, his capacious memory giving him a prodigious command of words. His range is perhaps wider than either Macaulay's or Carlyle's, as he is more versatile in the "pitch" of his style, and does not disdain to use the "slang" of all classes, from Cockney to Oxonian.

In his diction, taken as a whole, there is a great preponderance of words derived from the Latin. Lord Brougham's opinion that "the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favoured at the expense of that part which has so happily coalesced from the Latin

or Greek," he puts aside as "resembling that restraint which some metrical writers have imposel upon themselves-of writing a long copy of verses from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some different letter, should be carefully excluded." From various causes, he himself makes an excessive use of Latinised phraseology. First, his ear was deeply enamoured of a dignified rhythm; none but long words of Latin origin were equal to the lofty march of his periods. Secondly, by the use of Latinised and quasi technical terms, he gained greater precision than by the use of homely words of looser signification. And thirdly, it was part of his peculiar humour to write concerning common objects in unfamiliar language.

The strong point in his diction is his acquaintance with the language of the thoughts and feelings, with the subjective side of the English vocabulary. A writer naturally accumulates words in the line of his strongest interest; and De Quincey had a paramount interest in the characters, thoughts, and affections of man-human nature may be said to have been his constant study.

A systematic student in none of the sciences, except perhaps metaphysics and political economy, he nevertheless had gleaned technical terms from every science. He was indeed ever on the watch for a good word; sciences, arts, and even trades, all alike he laid under greater or less occasional contributions.

Sentences.

Although De Quincey complained of the "weariness and repulsion" of the periodic style, he carried it to excess in his own composition. His sentences are stately, elaborate, crowded with qualifying clauses and parenthetical allusions, to a degree unparalleled among modern writers.

In reviewing Whately's Rhetoric, he naturally objected to the dogma that "elaborate stateliness is always to be regarded as a worse fault than the slovenliness and languor which accompany a very loose style." He maintained, and justly, that "stateliness the most elaborate, in an absolute sense, is no fault at all, though it may be so in relation to a given subject, or to any subject under given circumstances." Whether in his own practice he always conforms to circumstances, is a question that must be left to individual taste. There is a certain stateliness in his sentences under almost all circumstances. a stateliness arising from his habitual use of periodic suspensions. To take two examples from his Sketches::

"Never in any equal number of months had my understanding so much expanded as during this visit to Laxton."

When we throw this out of the elaborately periodic form, we, as it were, relax the tension of the mind, and destroy the stately effect.

Thus

"My understanding expanded more during this visit to Laxton than during any three months of my life."

Again

Equally, in fact, as regarded my physics and my metaphysics; in short, upon all lines of advance that interested my ambition, I was going rapidly ahead."

The statement has a very different effect when the periodic arrange

ment is reversed.

Criticism of single sentences cannot easily be made convincing, and the critic is apt to forget the paramount principle that regard must be had to the context, to the nature of the subject, to the effect intended by the writer. When a single sentence is put upon its trial, there are many casuistical considerations that may legitimately be pleaded by the counsel for the defence. Still, if we try De Quincey by his own rule against "unwieldy comprehensiveness, we must convict him of many violations. In almost every page we find periods that cannot be easily comprehended except by a mind of more than ordinary grasp; and in many cases where, viewed with reference to the average capacity, he cannot be said to overcrowd, he is yet upon the verge of overcrowding. The following sentence may be quoted as one that stands upon the verge. It calls for a considerable effort of attention, and a long succession of such sentences would be exasperating. He is speaking of his youthful habit of scrupulously making sure of the meaning of an order :—

"So far from seeking to 'pettifogulise'-i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction-exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations.'

In this case the familiarity and the close connection of the ideas makes the effort of comprehension considerably less. When the subject-matter is so easy, the interspersion of such periods here and there cannot be called a fault. It is, on the contrary, to most ears an agreeable relief to the monotony of ordinary forms of sentence. But for the general reader, for the average capacity of easy understanding, such sentence-forms are multiplied to an intolerable degree in De Quincey's writing. And he does not always escape the besetting fault of long and crowded sentences-intricacy.

As regards the length and elaboration of De Quincey's sentences,

it is interesting to compare the first edition of the Opium Confes sions with the final revision. Many alterations consist in filling out the sentences; an 1, in a good many cases, two sentences are amalgamated into one. Take the following example, the first few sentences of the section entitled, "The Pleasures of Opium." In the original edition this stands

"It is so long since I first took opium, that if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date; but cardinal events are not to be forgotten, and from circumstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my head in water at least once a-day," &c.

"It is very long since I first took opium; so long, that if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date; but cardinal events are not to be forgotten, and from circumstances connected with it, I remember that this inauguration into the use of opium must be referred to the spring or to the autumn of 1804, during which seasons I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at Oxford. And this event arose in the following way: From an early age I had been accustomed," &c.

The four sentences of the original are amalgamated into two, without any condensation of the original bulk. On the contrary, additions are made, one for the sake of emphasis, another for the sake of a more formal connection.

Unity of Sentence.-A casuist would find no difficulty in arguing that De Quincey's sentences are not over-crowded. None of the qualifications or parenthetic allusions could be said to be altogether irrelevant; and the difficulty of grasping the meaning being set on one side, it might be pleaded that, as regards the main purpose of the sentence, and its place among the other sentences of the composition, they are all of them indispensable.

De Quincey, however, often offends beyond the possibility of justification, overloading his sentences in a gossiping kind of way with particulars that have no relevance whatsoever to the main statement. Of this habit I quote two examples, italicising the irrelevant clauses, and placing one of them in small capitals as being an offence of double magnitude, a second irrelevance foisted in upon the back of the first. The first sentence relates to the exposure of infants in ancient Greece; the second explains itself.

"And because the ancients had a scruple (no scruple of mercy or of relenting conscience, but of selfish superstition) as to taking life by violence from any creature not condemned under some law, the mode of death must be by exposure on the open hills, where either the night air, or the fangs of a wolf, oftentimes of the great dogs-still preserved in most parts