The Vagabond in Literature Part 3

II THOMAS DE QUINCEY

"In thoughts from the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth on men."-JOB.

I

Although a pa.s.sion for the Earth is a prevalent note in the character of the literary Vagabond, yet while harking to the call of the country, he is by no means deaf to the call of the town. With the exception of Th.o.r.eau, who seemed to have been insensible to any magic save that of the road and woodland, our literary Vagabonds have all felt and confessed to the spell of the city. It was not, as in the case of Lamb and d.i.c.kens, the one compelling influence, but it was an influence of no small potency.

The first important event in De Quincey's life was the roaming life on the hillside of North Wales; the second, the wanderings in "stony-hearted Oxford Street." Later on the spell of London faded away, and a longing for the country possessed him once more. But the spell of London was important in shaping his literary life, and must not be under-estimated.

Mention has been made of Lamb and d.i.c.kens, to whom the life of the town meant so much, and whose inspiration they could not forgo without a pang.

But these men were not attracted in the same way as De Quincey. What drew De Quincey to London was its mystery; whereas it was the stir and colour of the crowded streets that stirred the imagination of the two Charles's. We scarcely realize as we read of those harsh experiences, those bitter struggles with poverty and loneliness, that the man is writing of his life in London, is speaking of some well-known thoroughfares. It is like viewing a familiar scene in the moonlight, when all looks strange and weird. A faint but palpable veil of phantasy seemed to shut off De Quincey from the outside world. In his most poignant pa.s.sages the voice has a ghostly ring; in his most realistic descriptions there is a dreamlike unreality. A tender and sensitive soul in his dealings with others, there are no tears in his writings. One has only to compare the early recorded struggles of d.i.c.kens with those of De Quincey to feel the difference between the two temperaments. The one pa.s.sionately concrete, the other dispa.s.sionately abstract. De Quincey will take some heartfelt episode and deck it out in so elaborate a panoply of rhetoric that the human element seems to have vanished.

Beautiful as are many of the pa.s.sages describing the pathetic outcast Ann, the reader is too conscious of the stylist and the full-dress stylist.

That he feels what he is writing of, one does not doubt; but he does not suit his manner to his matter. For expressing subtle emotions, half shades of thought, no writer is more wonderfully adept than De Quincey.

But when the episode demands simple and direct treatment his elaborate cadences feel out of place.

When he pauses in his description to apostrophize, then the disparity affects one far less; as, for instance, in this apostrophe to "n.o.ble-minded" Ann after recalling how on one occasion she had saved his life.

[Picture: Thomas de Quincey]

"O youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love-how often have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with grat.i.tude might have a like prerogative; might have power given it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) even into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!"

Perhaps the pa.s.sage describing how he befriended the small servant girl in the half-deserted house in Greek Street is among the happiest, despite a note of artificiality towards the close:-

"Towards nightfall I went down to Greek Street, and found, on taking possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one single inmate-a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten; and sufferings of that sort often make children look older than they are. From this forlorn child I learned that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came; and great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was in future to be her companion through the hours of darkness. The house could hardly be called large-that is, it was not large on each separate storey; but, having four storeys in all, it was large enough to impress vividly the sense of its echoing loneliness; and, from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious uproar on the staircase and hall; so that, amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more from the self-created one of ghosts. Against these enemies I could promise her protection; human companions.h.i.+p was in itself protection; but of other and more needful aid I had, alas! little to offer. We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of law papers for a pillow, but with no other covering than a large horseman's cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments of other articles, which added a little to our comfort. The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for security against her ghostly enemies. . . . Apart from her situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child.

She was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank G.o.d! even in those years I needed not the embellishments of elegant accessories to conciliate my affections. Plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me; and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness."

II

I cannot agree with Mr. H. S. Salt when, in the course of a clever and interesting biographical study of De Quincey, {40} he says: "It (in _re_ style) conveys precisely the sense that is intended, and attains its effect far less by rhetorical artifice than by an almost faultless instinct in the choice and use of words."

In the delineation of certain moods he is supremely excellent. But surely the style is not a plastic style; and its appeal to the ear rather than to the pictorial faculty limits its emotional effect upon the reader. Images pa.s.s before his eyes, and he tries to depict them by cunningly devised phrases; but the veil of phantasy through which he sees those images has blurred their outline and dimmed their colouring. The phrase arrests by its musical cadences, by its solemn, mournful music.

Even some of his most admirable pieces-the dream fugues, leave the reader dissatisfied, when they touch poignant realities like sorrow. Despite its many beauties, that dream fugue, "Our Ladies of Sorrow," seems too misty, too ethereal in texture for the intense actuality of the subject.

Compare some of its pa.s.sages with pa.s.sages from another prose-poet, Oscar Wilde, where no veil of phantasy comes between the percipient and the thing perceived, and it will be strange if the reader does not feel that the later writer has a finer instinct for the choice and use of words.

It would be untrue to say that Wilde's instinct was faultless. A garish artificiality spoils much of his work; but this was through wilful perversity. Even in his earlier work-in that wonderful book, _Dorian Gray_, he realized the compelling charm of simplicity in style. His fairy stories, _The Happy Prince_, for instance, are little masterpieces of simple, restrained writing, and in the last things that came from his pen there is a growing appreciation of the value of simplicity.

De Quincey never realized this; he recognized one form of art-the decorative. And although he became a master of that form, it was inevitable that at times this mode of art should fail in its effect.

Here is a pa.s.sage from _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_:-

"The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation-Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever which were heard at times as they trotted along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle; wild and sleepy by turns; often times rising to the clouds, often times challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds."

And here is Oscar Wilde in _De Profundis_:-

"Prosperity, pleasure, and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. . . .

It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament coa.r.s.e, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in Art is . . . no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon, and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in Art is the unity of a thing with itself-the soul made incarnate, the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appet.i.te made to blind the one and clog the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain."

I have not quoted these pa.s.sages in order to pit one style against another; for each writer sets himself about a different task. A "dream fugue" demands a treatment other than the simpler, more direct treatment essential for Wilde's purpose. It is not because De Quincey the artist chose this especial form for once in order to portray a mood that the pa.s.sage merits consideration; but because De Quincey always treated his emotional experiences as "dream fugues." Of suffering and privation, of pain and anguish bodily and mental, he had experiences more than the common lot. But when he tries to show this bleeding reality to us a mist invariably arises, and we see things "as in a gla.s.s darkly."

There is a certain pa.s.sage in his Autobiography which affords a key to this characteristic of his work.

When quite a boy he had const.i.tuted himself imaginary king of an imaginary kingdom of Gombrom. Speaking of this fancy he writes: "O reader! do not laugh! I lived for ever under the terror of two separate wars and two separate worlds; one against the factory boys in a real world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit, that were anything but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute moons.h.i.+ne. And yet the simple truth is that for anxiety and distress of mind the reality (which almost every morning's light brought round) was as nothing in comparison of that Dream Kingdom which rose like a vapour from my own brain, and which apparently by the fiat of my will could be for ever dissolved. Ah, but no! I had contracted obligations to Gombrom; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under acc.u.mulated wrongs; these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a region of reality far denser than the material realities of bra.s.s or granite."

This confession is a remarkable testimony to the reality of De Quincey's imaginative life. "I had contracted obligations to Gombrom." Yes, despite his practical experiences with the world, it was Gombrom, "the moonlight" side of things, that appealed to him. The boys might fling stones and brickbats, just as the world did later-but though he felt the onslaught, it moved him far less than did the phantasies of his imagination.

There is no necessity to weigh Wilde's experiences of "Our Ladies of Sorrow" beside those of De Quincey. All we need ask is which impresses us the more keenly with the actuality of sorrow. And I think there can be no doubt that it is not De Quincey.

"The Dream Kingdom that rose like a vapour" from his brain, this it was-this Vagabond imagination of his-that was the one great reality in life. It is a mistake to a.s.sume, as some have done, that this faculty for daydreaming was a legacy of the opium-eating. The opium gave an added brilliance to the dream-life, but it did not create it. He was a dreamer from his birth-a far more thorough-going dreamer than was ever Coleridge. There was a strain of insanity about him undoubtedly, and it says much for his intellectual activity and moral power that the Dream Kingdom did not disturb his mental life more than it did. Had he never touched opium to relieve his gastric complaint, he would have been eccentric-that is, if he had lived. Without some narcotic it is doubtful whether his highly sensitive organization would have survived the attacks of disease. As it was, the opium not only eased the pain, but lifted his imagination above the ugly realities of life, and afforded a solace in times of loneliness and misery.

III

Intellectually he was a man of a conservative turn of mind, with an ingrained respect for the conventions of life, but temperamentally he was a restless Vagabond, with a total disregard for the amenities of civilization, asking for nothing except to live out his own dream-life.

Dealing with him as a writer, you found a shrewd, if wayward critic, with no little of "John Bull" in his composition. Deal with him as a man, you found a bright, kindly, nervous little man in a chronic state of shabbiness, eluding the attention of friends so far as possible, and wandering about town and country as if he had nothing in common with the rest of mankind. His Vagabondage is shown best in his purely imaginative work, and in the autobiographical sketches.

Small and insignificant in appearance to the casual observer, there was something arresting, fascinating about the man that touched even the irascible Carlyle. Much of his work, one can well understand, seemed to this lover of facts "full of wire-drawn ingenuities." But with all his contempt for phantasy, there was a touch of the dreamer in Carlyle, and the imaginative beauty, apart from the fanciful prettiness in De Quincey's work, would have appealed to him. For there was power, intellectual grip, behind the s.h.i.+fting fancies, and both as a critic and historian he has left behind him memorable work. As critic he has been taken severely to task for his judgments on French writers and on many lights of eighteenth-century thought. Certainly De Quincey's was not the type of mind we should go to for an interpretative criticism of the eighteenth century. Yet we must not forget his admirable appreciation of Goldsmith. At his best, as in his criticism of Milton and Wordsworth, he shows a fine, delicate, a.n.a.lytical power, which it is hard to overpraise.

"Obligations to Gombrom" do not afford the best qualification for the historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the late Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down seriously to write history.

Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side of great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked.

Especially striking is his _Revolt of the Tartars_-the flight eastward of a Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to Chinese territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes rather than a continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he had the power of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic episodes in a nation's history.

A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be interesting, not so much with the scholar's patient investigation as with the pedestrian's delight in "fresh woods and pastures new."

A prolific writer for the magazines, it is inevitable that there should be a measure that is ephemeral in De Quincey's voluminous writings. But it is impossible not to be struck by the wide range of his intellectual interests. A mind that is equally at home in the economics of Ricardo and the transcendentalism of Wordsworth; that can turn with undiminished zest from Malthus to Kant; that could deal lucidly with the "Logic of Political Economy," despite the dream-world that finds expression in the "impa.s.sioned prose"; that could delight in such broadly farcical absurdities as "_Sortilege and Astrology_," and such delicately suggestive studies as "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," a mind of this adventurous and varied type is a.s.suredly a very remarkable one.

That he should touch every subject with equal power was not to be expected, but the a.n.a.lytic brilliance that characterizes even his mystical writings enabled him to treat such subjects as political economy with a sureness of touch and a logical grasp that has astonished those who had regarded him as merely an inconsequential dreamer of dreams.

IV

I cannot agree with Dr. j.a.pp {48} when, in the course of some laudatory remarks on De Quincey's humour, he says: "It is precisely here that De Quincey parts company, alike from Coleridge and from Wordsworth; neither of them had humour."

In the first place De Quincey's humour never seems to me very genuine.

He could play with ideas occasionally in a queer fantastic way, as in his elaborate gibe on Dr. Andrew Bell.