English Lands Letters and Kings 5

English Lands Letters and Kings 5

In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to

the little elfin child--Catharine Wordsworth--of whom the poet-father

wrote:--

 

“Solitude to her

Was blithe society, who filled the air

With gladness and involuntary songs.

Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,

Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;

Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”

 

Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that

father’s heart, says, “She was no favorite with Wordsworth;” but he

“himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated” by this child of three. And

of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London,

he says, with crazy exaggeration:

 

“Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was

there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on

receiving that heart-shattering news.… I had always viewed her as an

impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy.… I returned

hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two

months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon

her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after

neighborhood to the darling of my heart.”[11]

 

This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his

speech--tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are

too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, “his eye

glares;” if disturbed, he has a “tumult of the brain;” if he doubles his

fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a

neighbor Dalesman are the images of “Coriolanus and Valeria.”

 

 

_Marriage and other Flights._

 

At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an

honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage

invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very

human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the

islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the

roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled

pair,--some of them still living and most worthy.

 

It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and

always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens--I

say--that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great

works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize

opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized.

He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes

even his vices, and a chapter of the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, in

the _London Magazine_, draws swift attention to one whose language is as

vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering

sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London,

away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the

Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is

once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence

there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford

Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and

Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and

finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding

dreams and stupefaction.

 

We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is

speaking of a dream.

 

“The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening

suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and

which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite

cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The

morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope

for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and

laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not

where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a

battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great

drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the

power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me

as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet

sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened;

there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of

innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the

bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with

the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that

were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and

clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting

farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the

incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was

reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again

reverberated--everlasting farewells!”

 

Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root

and branch that home with wife and children,--so wonted now to the

pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains--and to

transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has

promise of work which had begun to fail him in London.

 

There,--though he has the introduction which a place at the tavern table

of Father Ambrose gives--he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in

the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses

of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never

without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was in _Blackwood_

(1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine

Art,”--perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to

paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchy _Reminiscences_ of

his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press

without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random,

such as _novel-ish erector_ (for builder), _lambencies_, _apricating_,

_aculeated_; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some

recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle

and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he

had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the

scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page;

and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a

seamstress or a monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any

newspaper you may name.

 

But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see,

quivering--some gleams of his old strange power--a thrust of keen thought

that bewilders you by its penetration--a glowing fancy that translates one

to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over,

shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the

most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a

snap and a sting.

 

Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only

amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that

fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.

 

De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II.

 

 

In our last chapter we took a breezy morning walk amid the Lake scenery of

England--more particularly that portion of it which lies between the old

homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of

road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights--beside mountains

and mountain tarns--with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at

the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey--so brave at his work--so generous

in his home charities--so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day

Toryism--with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems--stately and

masterful--which long ago went to the top-shelves, and stay there.

 

We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of “War

Correspondents”--Henry Crabb Robinson--who knew all the prominent men of

this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we

all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that

strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey--he living a long

while in the Lake Country--and in his more inspired moments seeming to

carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the

borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them,

or fed them.

 

 

_Christopher North._

 

We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden

gateway--adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel--upon the “Elleray

woods,” amid which lived--eighty years ago--that stalwart friend of De

Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like

himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at

the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty

John Wilson--brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful, too,

of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12] was a native of

Paisley--his father having been a rich manufacturer there--and had come to

spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between

Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts

and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk--every

height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an

oarsman--making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through

the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his

wake--who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve

and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning;

and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.

 

This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson--not so well-known now

as he was sixty years ago--we collegians greatly admired in that far-off

day. He had written the _Isle of Palms_, and was responsible for much of

the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of

_Blackwood’s Magazine_--in the chapters of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ and in

many a paper besides:--he had his first university training at Glasgow;

had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance

on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs.

Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit

of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed

him:--

 

“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere

we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial

tears--having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the

blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and

kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls,

their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas--we were all

at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter

of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell

upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our

youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called the

Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar

the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that

our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred--of the

country where we were born, and that had received the continued

blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then,

sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting

love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”