Part 8

They were centaurs--heroic intellects with brutal capacities of body. What partiality in nature! In general, a man has reason to think himself well off in the great lottery of this life if he draws the prize of a healthy stomach without a mind; or the prize of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach; but that any man should draw both is truly astonishing.

The first letter concludes with a charmingly humorous discussion of the problem (valid now as then) how a man of letters may get any creative work done and at the same time keep his wife and children happy.

II

Old Bill Barron, up in the composing room, asks us when we are going to take our Vacation. We are taking it now, we reply, reading De Quincey. Certainly we can’t imagine why any one with as pleasing a job as ours should have any right to go off on holiday. There are so many people in this town who have to spend their time reading the new books: we are going to enjoy ourself by dipping into the old ones. With one exception. We have found, in the office of the _Literary Review_, and immediately made off with, _L’Extravagante Personnalité de Jacques Casanova_, by Joseph Le Gras (Paris: Bernard Grasset). We read the first sentence--

Emporté dans une berline confortable, dont les coffres sont abondamment pourvus de viandes, de pâtés et de vins; une femme sur les genoux, une autre parfois à ses côtés qui se frotte amoureusement à lui; vêtu de riches vêtements, le jabot et les manchettes enjolivés de fines dentelles, les goussets garnis de montres précieuses, le ventre chatouillé de breloques, les doigts étincelants de bagues, les poches tintant d’or et le mollet caressé dans la soie; réclamant à grand bruit les meilleurs chevaux aux relais, la plus belle chambre dans les auberges, jetant sa bourse à l’hôtelier et repartant au milieu des révérences et des courbettes; tel nous apparaît, en une attitude un peu conventionelle, l’aventurier Casanova au temps de sa splendeur.

That, of course, is one way of taking a Vacation. We remember, with a small behind-the-arras chuckle, one of Pearsall Smith’s _Trivia_ called “Lord Arden,” which deliciously hits off the buried Casanova in all of us. At any rate, we shall read this book about Extravagant Jack.

But we must get back to De Quincey, or you’ll think we are purposely avoiding the topic. We hardly know where to resume our prattle about this glorious creature. Perhaps the first thing to note is an advisable shift in viewpoint. Nowadays we are all introduced to De Quincey at school, so his name comes to us with a peculiar mixture of sublimity and painful awe--for we learn that he was a wicked opium eater. We do not realize that a number of his contemporaries regarded him as a low-down dog of a journalist. Southey, for instance, called him “one of the greatest scoundrels living,” and urged Hartley Coleridge to go to Edinburgh with a strong cudgel and give De Quincey a public drubbing as “a base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.” What was the cause of this peevishness? Why, of course, the _Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets_, a book whose social indiscretion is exceeded only by its magnificently fecund humour; told, like all De Quincey’s waggishness, with a rich sonorous volubility and luxurious plenitude of verbal skill. There is a subtle wickedness of amusement in the apparent solemnity of De Quincey’s polysyllables. The indignation caused latterly by such books as Margot Asquith’s was nothing compared to the anger of the Lake Poets when they found their innocent privacies laid bare by the Opium Eater’s pen. The Lakers took themselves as seriously as groups of humanitarians always do. And they were quite right. Francis Thompson complains that Milton never forgot he was Milton--“but we must admit it was worth remembering.” Yet the domestic affairs of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were indeed irresistibly comic. We have not forgotten that Hartley Coleridge, whose childhood was so charmingly enshrined in a poem by Wordsworth--

Thou fairy voyager, that dost float In such clear water that thy boat May rather seem To brood on air than on an earthly stream--

also floated in liquids more ruddy. He was removed from his fellowship at Oxford on the charge of drinking too much--which must have been a very great deal in the Oxford of those days.

_Reminiscences of the Lake Poets_ is the kind of book (Boswell’s _Tour to the Hebrides_ is another) that causes indignation to the victims, but intense delight to posterity. Posterity always has the best of us, anyhow. The anecdote of Coleridge’s father and the protruding shirt has always seemed to us one of the most disgracefully amusing minutiæ in literature--and yet even now, after a hundred years of sanctity, we are not sure whether we ought to reprint it. Well, you can buy _Reminiscences of the Lake Poets_ in the Everyman Series.

The next thing to be said about De Quincey is that he would have been a glorious editor for one of Mr. Hearst’s newspapers. He wrote a good deal better than Mr. Arthur Brisbane; but he had the same acute instinct as to what the public is really interested in. We believe it was James L. Ford who described the Hearstian doctrine of newspaper policy as “Plenty of crime and plenty of underclothes.” De Quincey was a glutton for crime. Did you know that he lost his job as editor of the _Westmoreland Gazette_ because for sixteen months he filled its columns mainly with news of local lawbreaking? His employers did not appreciate genius. His instinct was absolutely sound. In spite of the disclaimers of refined people, crime news, when written not merely vulgarly but with earnestness and art, is one of the most valuable features of any journal. If we were running a newspaper we would begin by scouring the press clubs for a young De Quincey.

He had, we say, the newspaper man’s instinct. Writing of the appalling Williams murders in 1811, he complains that though the outrage was committed shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, nothing reached the papers until Monday. “To have met the public demand for details on the Sunday, which might so easily have been done by cancelling a couple of dull columns and substituting a circumstantial narrative ... would have made a small fortune. By proper handbills dispersed through all quarters of the infinite metropolis, 250,000 extra copies might have been sold.”

This occurs in the postscript to _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_. In that immortal essay itself the macabre humour and the sledge-hammer impact of irony are probably a bit too grim and a bit (also) too learned and crushing for the gentler sort of reader. But the postscript, dated 1854, is the kind of horrific febrifuge that turns the heart to an Eskimo patty. We suggest that you try reading it aloud to a house party if you want to see blenching and shudders. The ultimate tribute to any writing of the narrative kind is to read it perpetually running ahead, in a horrid tension of eagerness, meanwhile holding one’s proper “place” with a finger until one can force the eye back to pursue a methodical course. We ourself read that postscript thus, late at night in a lonely country house; and, by a noble summation of horror, Gissing began to growl and bristle as we reached the climax. We should hate to admit with what paltry quaverings we went forth into the night, where the trees were smoke-colour in a pallid moonglow, to see what was amiss. It was only a wandering dog prowling about. But for a few moments we had felt certain that our harmless Salamis Estates were thickly ambushed with assassins. It then required a trip to the icebox, and a considerable infare upon a very ammoniac Roquefort cheese, to restore tranquillity.

III

But we were talking about De Quincey. Yesterday was by no means a day wasted, for we got our amiable friend Franklin Abbott into our clutches, made him take a note of _Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets_ (in the Everyman Series, we repeat) and insisted to him that for a man of genteel tastes this is one of the most entertaining works ever printed. And also by mere chance, which so often disposes the bright fragments of life into a ruddy and high-spirited pattern, we stopped in at a bookshop on Church Street just to say howdy to the eccentric Raymond Halsey. Happening to remark that it is now just a hundred years since the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ was published, Raymond disappeared with a rabbit-like scuttling motion; was heard digging among shelves at the rear, and returned with the smile of one who thinks he foresees a sale. It was a first edition of the _Opium Eater_ with the magical imprint of Taylor & Hessey. Was there ever a more sacred name among publishers? We don’t need to remind you they were Keats’s publishers, too. “Only fifty dollars,” said Raymond, but it was lunch time and we had to leave.

In the dark rear chamber of a Cedar Street tavern, in that corner underneath the photographs of the “Cheshire Cheese,” something happened that seemed to us almost as pretty as anything published by the vanished Taylor & Hessey. Frank spied an old friend of his, a fellow Pittsburger, and the latter halted at our table on his way out. We complimented him upon the fine bronze patina of his countenance, to which he replied that he had been salmon fishing. “You know,” he said, “there are only three salmon-flies that I care a continental for,” and from his pocket he drew a small pink envelope. With a tender hand he slid its contents onto the board. “There they are,” he said. His voice seemed to change. “Dusty Miller, Durham Ranger, and Jock Scott.” The little feathery trinkets, glowing with dainty treacheries, lay there on the ale-bleached wood. Certainly it seemed to us there was poetry in that moment. “I go to Bingham, Maine,” he said, “and drive eighteen miles up the Kennebec.” (A small postern door opened gently upon another world.) “Old So-and-so is waiting at the station. He’s always there. I could leave to-night; he’d be sure to be there when the train got in.”

We had a perfectly vivid picture of old So-and-so waiting at the Bingham station. Yes, we could see him. Then the postern door closed, gently but definitely, with that strong pneumatic piston that is attached to all our doors.

We were saying, however, that De Quincey’s _Reminiscences of the Lake Poets_ caused great indignation among the Grasmere coterie. This was due not to any malice in De Quincey’s manner of writing, which was affectionate and admiring throughout. It was due to something far more painful than malice--the calm, detailed, candid, and minute dissection of their lives. There was truly something astoundingly clinical in this microscopy. For instance, to take the case of Wordsworth’s household, these are some of the comments De Quincey makes:

(1) That Mrs. Wordsworth--whose charm and simplicity he adores--was cross-eyed.

(2) That Dorothy--Wordsworth’s sister--was a fervid and noble character, but stammered and was ungraceful.

(3) That Wordsworth’s appearance grew less attractive with advancing age.

(4) That his legs were very ill-shapen and “were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs.” And that his shoulders were drooping and narrow.

(5) “The mouth, and the whole circumjacencies of the mouth, composed the strongest feature in Wordsworth’s face.” In fact, they reminded De Quincey of Milton.

(6) That he aged very rapidly--when thirty-nine he was taken to be over sixty.

(7) That his brother John, a sea captain, had lost his ship while drunk.

(8) That Wordsworth cannot have been amiable as a child.

(9) That the only time Wordsworth was drunk was as an undergraduate at Cambridge on visiting the rooms once occupied by Milton.

(10) That he had not the temperament ever to be an attractive wooer, and that it was “perplexing” that he had ever married.

(11) That he had had astonishing good luck in financial matters.

(12) That the Wordsworth menage was excessively plain and severe in simplicity.

(13) That Wordsworth and Southey did not really like each other.

(14) That Wordsworth treated books very barbarously, and used to cut the pages with a butter-smeared knife.

(15) That Wordsworth’s library was meagre and insignificant compared to Southey’s.

These are only a few of De Quincey’s remarks, digested to their naked gist; by which they lose all the amusing complexity of comment wherein they are folded. But the précis will suffice to show that, whether consciously or not, they were exactly calculated to wound, with very deep incision, the most delicate sensibilities of an austere, somewhat humourless and extremely self-regarding man.

IV

On the 13th of February, 1848, De Quincey received a letter asking him to contribute a writing of some sort for an “album,” to be sold at a Ladies’ Bazaar. This was to be held in March of that year, for the benefit of the Library of the Glasgow Athenæum, and the ladies begged him to reply by “return of post.” This incident in itself sounds contemporary enough to give us a fellow feeling with De Quincey.

He had nothing available to send to the bazaar, but there was one unfailing resource--his bathtub. Let him describe it:

In my study I have a bath, large enough to swim in, provided the swimmer, not being an ambitious man, is content with going ahead to the extent of three inches at the utmost. This bath, having been superseded (as regards its original purpose) by a better, has yielded a secondary service to me as a reservoir for my MSS. Filled to the brim it is by papers of all sorts and sizes. Every paper written _by_ me, _to_ me, _for_ me, _of_ or _concerning_ me, and, finally, _against_ me, is to be found, after an impossible search, in this capacious repertory. Those papers, by the way, that come under the last (or hostile) subdivision are chiefly composed by shoemakers and tailors--an affectionate class of men, who stick by one to the last like pitch-plasters.

De Quincey decided that the only thing to do was to draw something at random from the bathtub for the ladies’ album. Accordingly, he made a little ceremony of it. “Three young ladies, haters of everything unfair,” were called in as referees; and a young man to do the actual dipping. There were to be four dips into the tub, and, for some reason not quite clear to us, the young man was made to attire himself in a new potato-sack, with holes cut for his legs and only his right arm free. It would have been more to the purpose, we should have thought, to blindfold him; but he was instructed to dip at random, holding his face “at right angles to the bath.” He was to be allowed one minute to rummage at random among “the billowy ocean of papers,” and at the command _Haul Up!_ was to come forth with whatever his fingers approved. Before the ceremony began a glass of wine was brought. De Quincey proposed the health of the ladies of the Athenæum, and pledged his honour that whatever MS. should be dredged up would be sent off to the bazaar. And this, he protested, though somewhere buried in the bath there lay a paper which he valued as equal to the half of his possessions.

But he was compelled to depart from the strict rigour of his scheme. For let us see what the young man discovered in the bathtub. The first dip brought up a letter still unopened. It proved to be a dinner invitation for the 15th of February. De Quincey was congratulating himself on the success of his raffle, which had thus enabled him to answer this letter without irreparable breach of manners, when the young lady referees discovered that the letter was four years old.

Number 2 was a “dun.” The young man was, to De Quincey’s dismay, dredging in a portion of the tub rich in overdue bills. “It is true,” he says, “that I had myself long remarked that part of the channel to be dangerously infested with duns. In searching for literary or philosophic paper, it would often happen for an hour together that I brought up little else than variegated specimens of the dun.” And so Number 3 was also a dun.

Number 4 turned out “a lecture addressed to myself by an ultra-moral friend--a lecture on procrastination, and not badly written.” And this also De Quincey refused to allow to be sent to the Athenæum. So everything hinged on the fifth and extra dip, which was committed to one of the young ladies. She blushed rosily (De Quincey assures us) at the responsibility, and earnestly “ploitered” among the papers for full five minutes. “She contended that she knew, by intuition, the sort of paper on which duns were written: and, whatever else might come up, she was resolved it should not be a dun.” “Don’t be too sure,” said De Quincey; but when the paper was finally drawn out it was a blank sheet.

This, the referees maintained, was a judgment on De Quincey, and meant that he should use the empty page to begin a new and original contribution for the ladies of Glasgow. Which he did, and turned out a little essay, suggested by their recent sport, on _Sortilege and Astrology_. We have tried to read it, but so far without success.

We are interested to note that others besides ourself have been turning back to De Quincey. In a recent _Fortnightly Review_ there is an article by H. M. Paull, sound enough in its observations, but grievously lacking in style. Mr. Paull, moreover, seems to us to shoot too far when he says that “to modern readers De Quincey’s efforts to be sprightly only cause annoyance.” It is true that sometimes his astonishing verbosity and his passion for footnotes outrun a hasty temper; but for our part we find something notably odd and agreeable in his queer, preposterous humour. His habit of calling great men familiarly by their first names--Dr. Johnson is “Sam,” and even the learned and ancient Josephus becomes “Joe,” and Thomas à Kempis “Tom”--is deplored by Mr. Paull; but this habit, we fear, has been inherited by columnists, and we had better not defend it too vigorously. The bathtub anecdote, which we have pared down until it loses most of its gusto, is, in the original, not devoid of humour. (Volume XIII of the collected works.)

And De Quincey’s ramified and rambling way of narrative offers surprising delights in unexpected parentheses. For instance, in the _Opium Eater_ he happens to mention a murder that had been committed on Hounslow Heath. “The name of the murdered person was Steele, and he was the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighbourhood.” A lavender plantation! There is a fragrant circumstance for the mind of a poet to dwell on. Think of the chance immortality of the unlucky Steele--deathless now, because (poor devil) he was murdered and had a lavender plantation.

THE SPANISH SULTRY

Turning up masterpieces of unintentional humour is a pleasant diversion of most writers. Everyone has his own favourites--on this side Atlantic many students vouch for _The Balsam Groves of Grandfather Mountain_ (by Shepherd M. Dugger) as the most amusing book written in America; in Britain a few diligent explorers beat the drum for _Irene Iddesleigh_, a novel written by Mrs. Amanda McKittrick Ros (of Belfast). Neither of these books, unhappily, is easy to lay hand upon. But as a possible competitor, how do you like _The Spanish Sultry_, by Ambrose Dargason (Harrisburg, 1905)? We have no copy, but once we took down some extracts.

Mr. Dargason’s hero was a window-glass merchant “whose nature was as transparent and reflective as the goods he throve in.” This merchant’s name was Wilbert Vocks; after his retirement from merchandise he spent his time in travelling about looking for a suitable wife to inherit his fortune. Unhappily, his inherent caution always caused him to sheer off just when the reader was expecting the happy nuptials. The scene on the park bench in Harrisburg, one moony evening, is a favourite of ours:

In the anæmic brightness of the crescendo moon Frederica’s eyes were gilded with the splendor of her sex’s softest charms. They were frosted bulbs of allure, and Wilbert trenched delicately upon her French-shod toes as a symbol of hardy waxing tenderness.

“Oh, Mr. Vocks,” said she, the beautiful coamings of her orbs brimming over with cheer, “how many equinoxes will hereafter wax and wane, search through this garden, but for one in vain.”

“You are quoting the Rubaiyat,” said he, “but with indifferent adhesion to the text.”

“Adhesion,” she replied, “was never one of my frailties,” and a trifle peaked [sic] withdrew to the distant angle of the iron settee.

Wilbert’s momentary harshness had already dissipated and he regretted this intrusion of pedantic nicety upon the moonlit promise of their double entente. “I bespeak a rapproachment,” he gallantly murmured and, sliding deftly along the parallel rods of metal subforming the trysting bench, found himself chilled by coming en rapport with a section of the seat not warmed by humane contact.

“But you must not reproach me,” she taunted shyly. “It is too plain that you were not brought up in Harrisburg, where men speak chivalrously to women and good breeding is a native filament of the tender air.”

“Probably you are cold on that hitherto unfrequented segment of iron slatting,” he said, shrivelling his inward tremolo by an affection of stern brusque. “Why not slide over this way a little, and chivalry commends my sheltering you from the sharp fidgetings of frost which, however commendable to coal dealers, betray the softer passions to gooseflesh and eventual snivel.”

Womanly, without further quibble, she responded, and the beauty of that unsophisticated face was shielded soon from external examination by the protective polygon of his arm and elbow. It was a generous moment, and in harmony with all the higher laws of human sentiment.

The delighted reader might be pardoned for thinking that in this idyllic scene the restless affections of Mr. Vocks had found satisfaction. But Frederica, after several evenings of intellectual interchange, proved too shallow for his deep-laden mind. As Mr. Dargason put it (his taste for oddly mixed nautical metaphors was rather extreme):

He grounded upon the shoals of her mentality and, after striving vainly to warp off into deeper areas of thought and sentiment, was forced to broach his cargo of affection upon the outgoing tides. Only thus, by careening and jettisoning his rich hatches of emotional freight, and scudding forth under bare poles and jury rigging, was he able to win clear to the open sea of freedom, escaping the lee shores of an uncongenial union. The bright occulting lamps of her eyes shone like desperate beacons, but he remembered that lighthouses are intended not to allure the cautious mariner, but to warn him away. He reefed his binnacle gravely, and with only an aching heart throbbing in the empty hatches of his personality determined henceforward to steer by the unquestionable stars of intuition. Her soundings were too easily fathomed. In a word, she was not deep enough.

To quiet his melancholy, Mr. Vocks returns into the busy world of trade. We have not space for very full quotation, but his discussion with his business associates is worth a brief extract: