Prose (The Works of Francis Thompson, vol. III)

THE life of Thomas De Quincey is too well known to need much recounting. It is, indeed, the one thing that most people do know of him, even when they have not read his works. Born at Greenhays, in the Manchester neighbourhood; brought up by a widowed mother with little in her of motherhood; shy, small, sensitive, dwelling in corners, with a passion for shunning notice, for books and the reveries stimulated by books; without the boy's love of games and external adlivities; the only break in his dreamy existence was the sometime companionship of a school-boy elder brother. That episode in his childhood he has told a little long-windedly, as is the De Quincey fashion; and with curious out-of-the-way humour, as is also the De Quincey fashion. He has told of the imaginary kingdoms ruled by his brother and himself; and how the brother, assuming suzerainty over De Quincey's realm, was continually issuing proclamations which burdened the younger child's heart. Once, for example, the elder brother, having become a convert to the Monboddo do61:rine in regard to Primitive Man, announced that the Inhabitants of De Quincey's kingdom were still in a state of tail; and ordained that they should sit down, by edift, a certain number of hours fer diem, to work off their ancestral appendages. Also has Thomas told of the mill-youths with whom his brother waged constant battle, impressing the httle boy as an auxihary; and how De Quincey, being captured by the adversary, was saved by the womankind of the hostile race, who did, furthermore, kiss him all round; and how, thereupon, his brother issued a bulletin, cz order of the day, censuring him in terrible language for submitting to the kisses of the enemy.

The Confessions contain the story of De Quincey's youth: his precocity as a Greek scholar, which led one master to remark of him: ' There is a boy who could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I an English one '; his misery at and flight from school, his subsequent drifting to London, his privations in ' stony-hearted ' Oxford Street, which he paced at night with the outcast Ann; and there laid the seeds of the digestive disorder which afterwards drove him to opium. His experiences as an opium-eater have become, through his Confessions, one of the best-known chapters in English literary history. The habit, shaken off once, returned on him, never again entirely to be mastered. But he did, after severest struggle, ultimately reduce it within a limited compass, which left free his power of work; and, unlike Coleridge, passed the closing years of his life in reasonable comfort and freedoms from anxiety. The contrast was deserved. For the shy little creature displayed in his contest vdth the obsessing demon of his life a patient tenacity and purpose to which justice has hardly been done. With half as much ' grit,' Coleridge might have left us a less piteously wasted record. In the midst of this life-anddeath struggle, De Quincey worked for his journalistic bread with an industry the results of which are represented in sixteen volumes of prose, while further gleanings have, in these late years, intermittently made their appearance. It is not a record which supports the charge of sluggishness or wasted life. Never, at any period, has it been easy for a man to support his family solely by articles for reviews and magazines. Yet De Quincey did it honourably; and if he was often in straits, it is doubtful whether this should not be set to the account of his financial incompetence.

His life brought him into contaft with most of the great litterateurs of his time. ' Christopher North ' was his only bosom friend; but in his youth he was an intimate of all the * Lake ' circle; and, finally, he who had known Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Hazlitt, and at least had glimpse of Shelley, lived to be acquainted with later men like Prof. Masson and others. Not all thought well of him: his talk, like his books, could fret as well as charm; and probably the charge of a certain spitefulness was earned. But, like feminine spite, it could be, and was, coexistent with a kind heart, a gentle and even childlike nature. His children loved him; and though he was a genius, an opium-eater, and married beneath him, he defied all rules by being happy in his marriage.

As a writer, De Quincey has been viewed with the complete partiality dear to the EngHsh mind, and hateful to his own. He was nothing if not distinguishing; the Englishman hates distindions and qualifications. He loved to divide A hair 'twixt south and south-west side; the Englishman yearns for his hair one and indivisible. The Englishman says, ' Black's black— fur ieusement black; and white's white —furieusement white.' De Quincey saw many blacks, many whites, multitudinous greys. Consequently to one he is a master of prose; to another — and that other Carlyle — ' wiredrawn.' To one he ranks with the Raleighs, the Brownes, the Jeremy Taylors; to another — and that other Mr Henley — he is ' Thomas de Sawdust.' And, as usual, both have a measure of rightness. Too often is De Quincey wiredrawn, diffuse, ostentatious in many words of distindions which might more summarily be put; tantalizing, exasperating. Also, if you will suffer him with patience, he is never obvious; a challenger of routine views, a perspicuous, if minute and wordy, logician, subtle in balanced appraisal. He was the first to pradise that mode of criticism we call ' appreciation ' — be it a merit or not. Often his rhetorical hravuras (as he himself called them) are of too insistent, too clamorously artificial, a virtuosity. Also, in a valuable remainder, they are wonderful in vaporous and cloud-lifted imagination, magnificently orchestrated in stru6lure of sentence, superb in range and quality of diftion. In a more classified reviev^, he never criticizes without casting some novel light, and often sums up the chara61:eristics of his subje6l in memorably fresh and inclusive sentences. His sketch biographies, marred by charafteristic discursiveness, at their best (as in the Bentley or the Shakespeare) are difficult to supersede, eating to the vitals of what they touch. His historical papers are unsystematic, skimming the subjed: like a sea-mew, and dipping every now and again to bring to the surface some fresh view on this or that point.

To re-tell the old has no interest for him; it is the point of controversy, the angle at which he catches a new Hght, that interests him. But his noble views on insulated aspefts of history have sometimes been quietly adopted by succeeding writers. Thus his \dew of the relations between Csesar and Pompey, and the attitude of Cicero towards both, is substantially that taken in Dean Merivale's History of the Romans. On his prose fantasies we have already touched. In a certain shadowy vastness of vision we say deliberately that they have more of the spirit of Milton than anything else in the language — though, of course, they have no intention of competing with Milton. They are by themselves. The best of the Confessions; that vision of the starry universe w^hich he greatly improved from Richter; parts (only parts) of 'The M ail-Coach (which is strained as a whole); portions of the Suspiria; above all, The Three Ladies of Sorrow — these are marvellous examples of a thing which no other writer, unless it be Ruskin, has succeeded in persuading us to be legitimate. Its admirers will always be few; we have no doubt they will always be enthusiastic.

His humour should have a word to itself. The famous Murder as One of the Fine Arts is the only specimen which we need pause upon. Much of that paper is humour out of date; a little childish and obvious. But of the residue let it be said that it was the first example of the topsy-turvydom which we associate with the name of Gilbert. The passage which describes how murder leads at last to procrastination and incivility — 'Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder which he thought little of at the time ' — might have come out at a Savoy opera. In this, as in other things, De Quincey was an innovator, and, hke other innovators, has been echpsed by his successors. Yet, with all shortcomings, the paper is hkely to leave a more durable residuum than much humour which is now of the highest fashion. \X is not certain that the slang on which a vast deal of new humour is pivoted will any more amuse posterity than the slang on which De Quincev too often and unluckily relied.

A little, wrinkly, high-forcheadcd, drcss-asyou-please man; a meandering, inhumanly intelle(5lual man, shy as a hermit-crab, and as given to shifting his lodgings; much-enduring, inconceivable of way, sweet-hearted, finenatured, small-spited, uncanny as a sprite begotten of libraries; something of a bore to many, by reason of talking like a book in coat and breeches — undeniably clever and wonderful talk none the less; master of a great, unequal, sedu6live, and irritating style; author of sixteen delightful and intolerable volumes, part of which can never die, and much of Vv^hich can never live: that is De Quincey.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was the son of Zachary Macaulay, an ardent abolitionist, the friend of the famous group which gathered round Wilberforce and Clarkson. Early distinguished by omnivorous reading and the old-fashioned hterariness of his speech, he first attempted in letters a couple of fragments which aimed at reproducing the life of dashing young Greek and Roman patricians, having for their heroes such typical ' mashers ' of the antique world as Alcibiades and Caesar.

It was a charadleristic beginning in one whose mental bent was throughout towards resurredting the life of past ages. Then came that connexion v^th the Edinburgh Review which produced the most valuable work of his life; and made, while it lasted, the glory of the Edinhtirgh. He entered Parliament as member for Edinburgh, which he represented for many years; being thrown out on one occasion, and restored on the next opportunity by the repentant city at its own cost. A successful Parliamentary career was interrupted for a time by his experience as an Indian official, which provided the materials for his essays on Clive and Warren Hastings. From the outset of his career he was a member of the brilliant Holland House circle. He lived to pubHsh a History of England, which was regarded, in its day, as ranking with the work of Hume and Gibbon; and died in the full enjoyment of a reputation as tlic most brilliant prose-writer and talker of his time. It is doubtful whether it should be regarded as an addition to or detraction from his good fortune that he remained to the last a bachelor.

It was a varied career; yet brilliantly unromantic, splendidly commonplace, * out of obvious ways ne'er wandering far.' In this, his life — like all men's lives — was typical of the man, and the genius of the man, which lay essentially in making strikingly obvious the obviously striking. The recluse De Quincey, with an infinitely more circumscribed career, wove into it infinitely more arresting romance. Coleridge, leading the petty life of a hackwriter, ' bound in shallows and in miseries,' yet imposed on that life the poetry of his own character. Keats shed the halo of the younger gods around an existence of small parlours, suburban gardens, and Hampstead Heath. But Macaulay in the purple would have been a crowned bourgeois; a-top of Olympus he would have wielded middle-class majesties, and ordered his thunderbolts from Whitworth's; while he would have lightened on the Olympian thrones and principalities in quarterly proclamations, flashing with antitheses, sounding the blessedness of modern Olympian ' progress,' and pointing out how much things had improved since the days when the gods were unbreeched savages, content with a monotonous diet of ambrosia, and drinking doubtful tie£lar in place of Madeira. ' We are better clothed, better fed, better civilized '; — so would have run the proclamation of Zeus- Macaulay. * We no longer quarrel like children, drink like tavern-companions, and cut antiquated witticisms at the delicate jest of a limping cup-bearer black from the forge. The thunderbolts of Whitworth are of more skilled manufa61:ure than the thunderbolts of Hephaestus. Poseidon still rules the waves, but he rules them with a better-made trident. He has his carriage from Bond Street, his horses would not disgrace the Row; he is a well-dressed gentleman, instead of a naked barbarian. Aphrodite has not lost the primacy of beauty, because her fashions are more those of Paris, and less those of Central Africa. The good old times were the bad old times: the very kitchens of Olympus bear witness that there has been such a thing as progress, the very toilet-table of Hera testifies to the march of enlightenment.': He was content to take the goods the gods had provided him; satisfied with himself, his position, and his day. The day returned the compliment, as it always does, by being satisfied with him. ' Thou art a blessed fellow,' it said with Prince Hal, ' to think as every man thinks; never a man's thought in the nation keeps the roadway better than thine.' He was made for great success rather than great achievement. In all he did he was popular — ^honourably and deservedly popular; in all he did he was content to pluck something short of the topmost laurels. He was a successful politician, yet never reached the positions attained by men far more stupid; his speeches, immeasurably superior to the parliamentary eloquence of the present day, filled the House, yet he has left no great name as an orator; he was a great talker in an age of great talkers, yet the tradition of his talk has not impressed itself on hterary history as did the traditional talk of Coleridge, Lamb, De Quincey, or Sydney Smith. He wrote history brilliantly, and no serious historian accepts his history as serious history. He wrote essays which profoundly influenced literary style — yea, even to the style of the newspaper-leader; yet it is not altogether certain whether they will maintain their place among the classical classics of English prose. His genius was so like prodigious talent that it is possible to doubt whether it was not prodigious talent very like genius. He was * cocksure of everything,' in Melbourne's famous epigram, but posterity is by no means cocksure of him.

The most permanent part of his literary baggage is undoubtedly the Essays. It is easy to say what they are not, which Mr George Meredith has declared to be the national mode of criticism; a mode of criticism not without its uses when the universality of a man's fame has made fault-finding an unpopular task, but decid«dly the cheapest and lowest part of a critic's duty. What they are not Is largely' responsible for the readion against Macaulay. Our day has seen the rise and strengthening of a very subtle school of style, marked by dehcate verbal instinft, and extreme attention to the melody of syllables and sentences. It is the day of Stevenson and Mrs Meynell; a day v^rhich is like to underrate Macaulay: for Macaulay is not subtle, is not careful of verbal choiceness. It is a delicate day, in which ' mere rhetoric ' is rather frowned upon; and Macaulay is brusque, off-hand, revelHng in all devices labelled rhetorical: in balance, antithesis, epigram of the cut-and-thrust order. It is fearful of the obvious; Macaulay loves the obvious with impatient middle-class thoroughness. To take the surface-view, and exaggerate its glaring obviousness until to refuse the accepting of it is almost as difhcult as to shut out a Hghtning flash — that is meat and drink to him. On the other hand, he has qualities as well as defeft of quaHties; and the critic should cultivate the habit of regarding a man chiefly for what he is. The man who is always croaking of his friends* shortcomings Is not more hateful than the critic to whom a literary sun is only spots set off by inter-spaces of Hght: for to every true critic the masters of literature should be friends. If he love literature, he should love the makers of literature. The creative artist may be forgiven, or, at least, palhated, if to him literature is largely a vehicle for the display of his own personality; but the critic is unendurable to whom the monuments of literature are what other monuments are to the British tourist — an opportunity for carving his own name on them.

And Macaulay's qualities are such as we should be specially thankful for in our day. If it is a dehcate day, it is also a day given to languor; and Macaulay is always vital with energy — or, as the man in the street would say, ' all there.' It is a day in which there is a penn'orth of refined style to an intolerable deal of uttermost slovenliness; and Macaulay has always a conscience of style. It is a day which shirks the labour of producing unified wholes, which dribbles away in snatches, mumbles and slathers the literary bone in its lazy jaws. Macaulay displays symmetry, proportion, unity, a sense of the balance of parts, in all his essays. Perhaps none of the principal masters of the essay are so exemplarily artistic in this point. De Quincey is apt to be fragmentary, at the best seldom maps out and proportions his work: he overflows on some points, draws in tantalizingly on others, and leaves the reader with a mingled impression of extreme thoroughness and scamped work. Landor is wandering and capricious; HazHtt is a shower of sparks; Addison is by profession a pleasant meanderer; Stevenson's very method is whim. One might prolong the list. But Macaulay's essay is always built up soundly in the stocks. Deep it does not go, but proportion it always keeps; the thing is undeniably a miniature whole. Then, if the stimulant devices are too restlessly stimulant; if they are sometimes cheap; if balance, antithesis, point, artful abruptness, are carried to an extent which gives a savour of the accomplished literary showman calling attention to his wares: yet they are undeniably effeilive, touched in with a deft and rapid hand; the reader is lifted along unflaggingly.

And it is hterature; if he have nothing new to say, old tilings are newly said, with surpassing cunning in the presentment. The flow of instances with which an extraordinary memory enables him to support his points may be excessive, may be inexad: at times (as the argument by parallel and analogy rarely fails to be, except in the most scrupulous hands), but it lends surprising life and pifturesqueness to what with most men would have been dry discussion. For his much-vaunted lucidity we have less praise. He is lucid by taking the obvious road in everything, which is the easy road; and his arrangement is often the reverse of clear from the logical standpoint. But if he is no starter of original views, if he keeps to the surface of things, he must not be denied the merit of presenting that surface with a painter-like animation. Here is his power; it is on this that his fame must rest. As a critic he is naught; as a biographer or historian he is na'ight so far as exa6litude of treatment, novelt)-, or philosophy of view is concerned. But he can revivify a period, a person, or a society with such brilliancy and conciseness as no other Englishman has done.

In one resped alone have we any disposition to quarrel with the routine view of him. We are disposed to put in a good word for his ballads. Mr Henley has truly remarked that 7hc Last Buccaneer curiously anticipates some points in the methods of Mr Kipling. And we do, indeed, think that here Macaulay knew exaftly what he wanted, and did it. The sayings and doings of the personages in these ballads are obvious and garish, it is said. But the ballad is essentially a produft of a time in which people were dreadfully prone to do obvious things, and in no way concerned to be subtle. Fire, dire6lness, energy of handling — these are the main necessities of the martial ballad, rather than any poetic subtlety; and all these were at Macaulay's command. ' Remember thy swashing blow ' is the Shakespearean advice which might be given to the writer of the ballad warlike. And Macaulay always remembers his swashing blow. He has none of the deep poetic quality which informs the best work of Mr Kipling. But he does not aim at it. He keeps within a limit and a kind; and in that kind does very excellent pieces of work; quite honest,, healthy work, which may well be allowed to stand, even though a stronger than he be come upon him.

In spite of modern sesthetic rea6lion, Macaulay, we think, will surely stand. If not an authentic god, he is at least a demigod, the most brilliant of Philistines, elevated to the Pantheon of literature by virtue of a quite supra-Philistine power. Macaulay is the Sauric deity of English letters, the artist of the obvious — but an artist none the less.