DE QUINCEY'S REMAINS.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 7, Issue 433, 31 October 1863, Page 6

DE QUINCEY'S REMAINS.

„ .(From "The Reader," May 89.) .". DB Quincey'S writings hardly belong to what ; can be called '• current literature." Theyare now rather a portiou of that past English literature of , which we ere proud as a national inheritance." ! Hence tlie completion of the collected edition of | Pis'Qiiincey'rs works in, fifteen volumes by Messrs. 'A. and p. Black of Edinburgh is a topic rather for our 'leading' article than forotie of our reviews. But it is an "event that ought not to go by unchronicled. A few years ago, while De Qufncey was yet alive, the only collected edition of his writings was an American edition, which' had been very' creditably undertaken by an American publisher in order to meet the ' demand in the United States caused by De Quincey's fame. Based on this edition there at last came forth a British, edition, superintended by De Qaincey himself, and all but finished when he died. The present is a re-issue of that edition, witlriinprovernents and additions. The fifteen volumes ought to be in every library that; aims at containing what is most excellent in English literature. For De Quincey is one of our classics, one of our real immortals, and his remains are one of the richest and most -peculiar bequests that have recently fallen in to the great accumulation of our standard English' prose. Whoever knows- not De Quincey has his.education in our higher ISuglish. literature still to complete. What a strange i life was De Quincey's ! A dream rather than a life, a passive flitting to and fro, almost a disembodied existence, unbound, unregulated by any of the ties and punctualities that bind and regulate "ordinary lives 1 The end of it is within recent recollection. You were walking-, perhaps, with a friend in one of the quiet country-lanes near 'Edinburgh ; and jthere passed you timidly a strange diminutive creature, with his 'hat hung on the back of his head, at whom, when you did look back, you found also stopping, as if in suspicious alarm, and looking back at you. '• That is De Quiucey," your frieud would whisper: and the diminutive creature would hastily move on, as if fearful of being caught, aud disappear round the first turu- , ing, the run of his hatstill slopiug back over his shabby coat-collar. And so, in wahdeiiug about in the lanes and country-roads near Edinburgh, in the vicinity of which he then had his home, varied by occasional disappearances, during which he could not be traced — were passed the last years of a man who, some fifty years before, had beeu the companion of Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge in the Lake-district, who had thereafter started out from that illustrious group as an intellectual notability sui qenerix, and who, for thirty years or more, had been famous in London aud everywhere as the English Opium-eater, aud one of the lines r writers in the English language. Quietly aud furtively, with all this retrospect of notoriety behind him, like some small and enfeebled ticket-of-ieave man, amazingly afraid of the police, and dimly conscious that, they might still have a right to him, did Dtf Quiucey tiit auout laves and country-roads in his last obscure retreat— occasionally clutched and. borne away in. a cab (which was the only way of securing him) to be the lion of an Edinburgh evening-party , when, after he had discoursed most beautiful talk for hours, the problem would arise how on earth to get him away again. At last, on impulse or on suasion, " out into the Night," as the German novelists have it, he would go ; and what became of him no one knew, and no one cared. And yet this strange life must, from first to last, have been a life of singular industry and . labour. This singular being, this migratory and almost disembodied intellect, this little wandering anatomy, topped with a brain, whom a habit of opium-eating, contracted in its early youth, had loosened, as it seemed, from all the sense of worldly responsibility, had been leading an indefatigable life of its own — all observation, all memory, all reverie, all speculation. Howsoever and whensoever he had acquired his scholarship, there were few such learned and accomplished men in his day as Do Quincey. He had read enormously, 'without ever seeming to have books by him, much less a library. He had made himself his' own -encyclopaedia, and, wherever he was, could quote all that he wanted to quote, dates and references included, from memory. Then, not belouging to the world, but only as some intellectual spirit moving about in the world, he had taken note of everything in it, serious or humorous, and had forgotten nothing that he had once noted. With a memory thus full aud ever becoming fuller, and with a tendency at the same time to investigation, reasoning, and fantastic constructions of his own ideas, he had. nearly all his life, and in the main for the mere purpose of earning the necessary .sustenance of bread or opium, been in the habit of throwing oft" — ?nay, not throwing off for they were carefully written, with corrections and interlineations —articles . for. magazines and other periodicals.. Eau'd article, when written, seenis to have be«n thrown over his shoulder, unregistered, unfiled, unoai'ed-fOr ; andyef, iucessautly and laboriously, lie .was writing fresh articles. Of books, or; things originally shaped as books, he gave but oho or' two to the world ;'hia whole literary life, was a succession of articles for periodicals. It seemed to be the same :to him where his articles went, provided' they .brought him the small im.mediate payment he wanted — whether vto periodicals of note or to obscure periodicals.; and it is one of the oddest things, we, know that 'this English . literary celebrity,., thia veteran. .man. of. genius, whose services -tlte- greatest periodicals in! the land' might have been gi ad to command at any price, should have 'spent some of his last* ■years in composing articles for Wai periodicals;; -posting the packets of manuscript at the Laaswade poßt-onice, and fearing leat, from being too late, they should be rejected ti& together." f'NottiJr the very eudof liis life, and then profs'bably'less on bis own motion than on the urging ; o£ frit-ads, did he set nl>out collecting hie scat* itered papers, or indicating, from the lists in his -meriiory, fi-bmUvhat miscellaneous quarters they "might be collected. :•. And yet these scattered ar* ticlesin all sorts of periodicals for some thirty or forty years were what De Quincey was and *ii6w | is to the world ; and from fifteen volums id which they are now collected are, with the exception of a book or two, and some articles left out as scarcely worth reprinting De Quiiiwy'a'tolairtjlnaliia.

It is seldom that an author. attempts a-classifi-cation of his own writings, and inore-seldo'iri -still that a classification which an author does propose of his own writings is satisfactory to otlfers. De Quincey, however,-. in the preface to the collected edition of his writings which he himself superintended, proposed , a classification of these writings which cannot be improved upon. Neither iv that edition ,nor in the present is the classification followed in the actual arrangement of the volumes — probably, for the practical reason, that the classes of writings theoretically discriminated shade into each other ; but, theoretically, the classification is perfect ; and. hud it been possible, we should have preferred an arrangement of the writings according to it to any other arrangement except. the strictly chronological. la a collected edition o,f an author's writings, and especially in a posthumous edition; 'the chronological'arrangement, .where possible.- is always the very best. Leaving that matter, however, let us attend to De Quiucey's theoretical distribution of thecontentsof tbese'fif teen volumes. They might, he said, be distributed into three clashes : — I. Writing,* of fact, , reminiscence, and historical narration. Under such a head, though not precisely so named, Do"Quincey included a large and very interesting portion of the contents of* these fifteen volumes. He cited the "Autobiographic Sketches" as example. These '• Autobiographic .Sketches "-contain- recollections of his own life, and of his acquaintance with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Soutbey and others ; but there are. in tbe fifteen volumes, many, papers of the same order, not. autobiographic, but more generally historical or biographic, which are extremely substantial and valuable. All De Quincey's literary biographies are worth reading ; and we recollect his sketch of Bentloy's life as especially interesting and thVrough. Oii die whole, we will., make but one remark on this portion of De Quiucey's writings ; and that is that, whereas wo have :found that the statements of all opium-eaters of : facts relating to themselves are to be received ; \vith caution, or even, where they are very picturesque, are to be punctuaUy disbelieved, we have. ! found, on the other hand, that, in general matters of history, opium-eaters are not necessarily inventive, but. may, be extraordinarily exact and ; accurate. 11. Speculative writings, ar writings addressed, to tJie purely ratwnal faculty. A large . proportion of De Quiuce3 r 's writings are of this ' kind ; and,, in our opinion, these — or those others in which criticism and speculation are' blended with biography and history — are among his best. His was. indeed, a singularly subtle and, as the Germans say, spitz fitulig intellect; and, out of the class of expressly systematic thinkers, we do not know a ree©ai writer whose investigations oE vexed problems are finer and more ingenious, or, what is more, whose conclusions are more distinct and trustworthy than De Quincey 's. He reminds us here, both in matter and in manner, of Coleridge—whom, indeed, in the main, be resembled more than he resembled any other of his predecessors ; and we would say of him, as we would say of Coleridge, that whoever is investigating any question ought to make a point of seeing whether this thinker has said anything about it — confident that, if he has, he has gone into the very crevices of the subject, and made deep and exquisite incisions in the right direction. In all matters relating, in particular, to literary criticism, and the philosophy of style and literature, De Quincey. like Coleridge, is masterly : and his essays on such subjects are worth a score of the older English treatises on Rhetoric. Nor, though De Quincey'a method is subtle, are his conclusions unsound or merely ingenious. His " Letters to a young man whose education has been neglected" are replete with good sense, and are about the wisest advices on the subject of literary culture we have ever read. 111. Imaginative Prose- Writings. De Quincey claimed to be a practitioner of a style of imaginative and rhythmical or highly impassioned prose, of which, in universal literature, there had been few precedents ; and, as examples of sucii prose-poetry, he pointed to passages in. his " Confessions of an Opium-Eater," and still more confidently to his " Suspiria de Profuiidis" There is no doubt that he is right, and that from these and other writings of De Quincey, specimens may be cited of what may be called prose-rhap-sody or rich and weirdly prose-phantasy, such, as can be cited from no other Euglish prose-writer. Nor. whatever may be the intrinsic value of this style of writing, is that value abated by the fact that De Quincey, as a critic of his own writings, was aware of the peculiarity of this portion of them. All in all, since Coleridge's death, we know of no English writer, speculative in the cast of his genius, without being expressly systematic, whose remains are a more valuable bequest to British Literature than those of De Quincey. He died in the same year with Lord Mauaulay ; and, while all Britain was ringing with proclamations of the national loss sustained by Lord Macaulay's death, the sole tribute to poor old De Quincey was the tribute of a few short and scattered obituary notices in the newspapers. The difference was proper as regarded the relative social importance of the two lives. And yet, perhaps, the worth of Lord Macaulay's literary rei mains, as compared with those of De Quincey, | is as the worth of some highly burnished mass of I a metal of gold and copper mixed, compared with the worth of an equal mass of pure white leiiver worked into foliage and frosted filagree. .