1861.]

the task of whitewashing Judas Iscariot and of attacking Plato and Socrates. The former ingenious paradox is adopted from a German writer, and is worked out with De Quincey's usual fulness and temporarily overmastering logic. It embodies the view that Judas had no thoughts of mere social and individual treachery; but that having expected the kingdom of the Messiah to be a temporal one, he betrayed his Master in order that He might be driven to declare himself in the plenitude of his power. De Quincey does not appear to see that the suggestion, even if true, does not much mend the character of the traitor, since his object was in any case a selfish one, only instead of being a mere vulgar turncoat, influenced by the love of gain, he is made out an even more subtle villain, playing a double game, cheating both parties, and exhibiting an utter misconception of all that he must have heard from the Divine Teacher. De Quincey's objections to Plato are such as would not have much weight with any one even moderately acquainted with that philosopher, but they might prejudice those who are not. Nobody requires to be warned against believing in a community of women such as is recommended in the celebrated Fifth Book of Plato's Commonwealth; it is much more requisite to warn a student against believing that Plato would ever have wished to see his doctrines carried into practice. A speculator who takes certain principles, and follows them out into their logical consequences, irrespective of actual life, is not to be judged on the same grounds as one who obviously keeps on all occasions to the limits of what is practicable. Plato was a man of the former, Aristotle of the latter sort. We therefore blame Aristotle that is, we say he was not as superior to the morality of his age as such a man ought to have been-for his notions about slavery; since we find these notions imbedded among others which have a close reference to the exigencies of actual statesmanship. But when Plato spins a theory, not one par

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ticle of which could he have had the smallest hope of seeing reduced to practice, we ought to allow him the licence which in practice such a man would have been the last to take. If Plato had begun to realize his theory, and had got so far that nothing but the Fifth Book remained to carry out, we should have nothing to say. That is not the case; and any one who takes the Republic, and holds up this part of it to detestation, obtains a cheap victory, which in no degree affects the esteem or admiration which we ought to feel for Plato's philosophical character in general.

To estimate Plato by the Republic alone is unfair enough, but it is still more surprising to find that De Quincey has a dislike to Socrates, in whom we should have expected him to find a congenial spirit. The perverse estimate which he forms of the great dialectician may be contrasted with the eloquent and discriminating account which Mr. Grote has given of him in the eighth volume of his History, many sentences of which have been in our minds as applicable to De Quincey himself in a minor degree. To quarrel with the popular notion of Socrates, without having any additional facts to base the objection upon, must be referred to the same love of paradox which has led him on another occasion to say of Dr. Johnson, that he had no interest in man,' a view which it is really not worth while to stop for the purpose of confuting. A wrongheadedness of a somewhat similar kind has led him, in animadverting on Coleridge's tendency to make pets of certain persons (as Bowyer and Sir A. Ball), to attribute this propensity to his indulgence in opium a most singular idea, and one which could not to all appearance have had the slightest warrant in De Quincey's own experience of the effects of the drug. A much truer view of the phenomenon is suggested in the essay On Foster, viz., that Coleridge was attracted by the spectacle of qualities which were constitutionally denied to him, but the possession of which would, he fancied, have

made him a happy and prosperous man. Of De Quincey's treatment of Coleridge as a man we have before spoken, and it is a question of personal ethics rather than of literary merit or opinion.

Only two points in De Quincey's literary character remain to be noticed. One of these is his scholarship. Nobody can read one of his essays without seeing that he is rather vain of it; and in the Confessions, he has stated his pretensions with some distinctness. Unfortunately, he has given us no means of deciding on his powers, such as a bit of original writing, or a translation into Greek or Latin would furnish; nothing, indeed, but two lines of Latin verse, one of which is not bad, but insufficient as a test even of his powers of versification:

Auribus insidet ceratis, auribus etsi Non audituris hybernâ nocte procellam.

We do not doubt that his range of classical reading was wide, and far more at his fingers' ends than with many accurate scholars of our universities; one can see that Greece and Rome, and their literature, were fresh and living subjects of interest to him-whether the minutiæ of scholarship were possessed by him or not.* It is also to be remarked, that whatever may have been his deficiencies in practice, he had a thoroughly sound idea of what the difficulties of classical composition were, and how they were to be overcome; and from the ease and confidence with which he diverges to questions of the kind without raising any suspicion of having read to show off, we may imagine that the copia verborum would not have been wanting. It is also tolerably evident that no mere sciolist could have transplanted the large quantity of German erudition which he has introduced to his readers, without making some slip by the way,

and getting found out; a thing of which no one has accused him.

The other point is his power of writing fiction. Most clever people try fiction at some period or other, and it is a trial to which a man who has won reputation in other fields is often very unwise in exposing himself. He may write gorgeous historic prose-may have a keen eye for character, and a wide knowledge of the world, but the management of a story in novel or play will be utterly beyond him -perhaps because the faculty of mind required is of a lower and more minute order, just as it is much more difficult to swallow a pill than a good-sized piece of food. De Quincey has made only two attempts at fiction, neither of which are preserved in the edition before us. Klosterheim, a short romance of German medieval life, is perhaps as complete a failure as was ever perpetrated by a clever man. We once met with it at a country inn on a rainy day; but neither these highly favourable circumstances nor our interest in the author were sufficient to carry us through. The scenery and architecture were overdescribed; the historic and processional part of the affair completely overlaid the romantic element, and the characters had about as much vitality as the pasteboard 'Miller and his Men' of a child's theatre. Much better, because on a much less ambitious scale, is a sketch called the Household Wreck, which may be read in the American edition. It is the description of a fond husband and tender wife in an ideal home, such as De Quincey often liked to picture to himself, whose felicity is broken up in the course of a few hours by the sudden imprisonment of the wife on a false charge of theft in a shop, brought against her by a tradesman whose designs on her virtue have been baffled. The story is powerfully told, and from the in

tensity with which one's sympathies are kept on the stretch throughout, it is easy to imagine that the author thoroughly felt all he described, and probably was very glad to find that so painful a narrative was nothing but the work of his own imagination. It is such a tale as some miserable man, as he paces round and round his lonely room and broods over real or imaginary wrongs, might weave for himself out of one or two trivial incidents, fancying what might have been, wondering what may have been, and recollecting what has been, till he confounds the deductions of his reason with the facts of his information, and feels strangled in his self-spun web of circumstantial evidence. To such ideas as these, opium would no doubt be a powerful stimulant; and the vagueness of the localities, the fewness of the actors, and the continuity of the impression, combine to suggest that it must have been the product of some such waking vision. No one, we imagine, who takes the story up will fail to read it through; but it is an effort one does not wish to see repeated, and which affords no criterion as to the author's powers of writing fiction in general.*

To cui bono a writer is generally the last refuge of depreciation, and hence those who could not deny the intellectual power of De Quincey's writings, have suggested that his career was 'profitless,' and the world not much the better for anything he wrote. The remark, if just, is a rather formidable one, and must sweep away the pretensions of the greater part of all the literature that has ever existed.

For

how many books of all that have been written is the world really the better? or how many writers can be held on this theory to have spent a profitable career? It is a very narrow conception of literature which confines it to nothing but what is 'purifying,' 'elevating,' 'improving,' and the like. The

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mind wants stimulating and bracing as well, and often it requires relaxing or what are the majority of novelists for? The criticism which thus denounces De Quincey would appear to rank his efforts with the less valuable parts of Hazlitt_or Leigh Hunt-productions fitted to amuse or startle, and having no relation to any of the heights of moral or intellectual excellence. Such an estimate of him even the above imperfect sketch would, we hope, show to be most unfair. It is true, as we have said at the outset, that he treats his subjects in a most unconventional fashion, and that he is not likely to be thoroughly appreciated except by those who bring to the work a certain degree of sympathy and congeniality. If such persons find by the perusal of his writings their love for goodness strengthened, their admiration for intellectual excellence increased, their standards of merit raised or corrected, and their mental vision purified for the contemplation of the new fields he has opened to them, it is in vain to say that the career of such a man is 'profitless.' Profitless to whom? only to such objectors and to those who think as they do. What they really mean is, that he ought to have made more money, and to have employed himself in writing some large and elaborate work. With the former interpretation of profitableness we will not attempt to meddle. The latter suggestion, however, is so often made that it is worth a word of comment. Why should a person be condemned to write a big treatise or an epic poem if he can do other things better? If he has a mind full of information and thought on an immense variety of subjects, and has something new to communicate on each of them, the task of a single work will probably preclude his uttering more than a small amount of what is in him, and which is the natural outcome of his genius. It is much better both for himself and the pub

lic that he should say what he has to say in his own way; the genuineness and sincerity of which this mode of address is susceptible far more than compensates, by the greater depth to which it sinks in the mind, for the imposing attitude which the big-book plan might have gained for him. And it is on his personal contact with the reader and the glow of sympathy thus elicited, that the value of De Quincey's writings, in the 'profitable' point of view, must rest. Though everything he has written bears the stamp of maturity, and if at times puerile, he is never juvenile, yet we always think of him as influencing the young; not because he addresses himself specially to them, but because a large number of his subjects are such as men do not in general pursue with an eager and genial interest except at the outset of life. When we say the young, we do not mean schoolboys, but intellectual young women, and such men as the authors of the letter signed Mathetes,' which appears in the third volume of Coleridge's Friend. De Quincey has written one work, called Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected,* *but some such title might be prefixed to a very large section of his works. Setting aside the autobiographic portions, and the essays in imaginative prose, almost all the rest is philosophic criticism of one sort or another, which may or may not impress those whose views are already formed, but cannot be otherwise than of essential service to those who are forming them. In this respect we should place De Quincey by the side of Coleridge, not as a rival in the latter's peculiar field, but as being calculated to do for literature what Coleridge did for morals and religion, by placing our notions on a true basis and setting an example of original thought and patience of investigation which is of the very highest value.

But, after all, it is as a genial human writer, of quick sensibility,

vivid imagination, and graphic acuteness of style, that we think of him most often; and it is by these qualities that he retains a hold which permits his graver matter to attach itself to the mind, and attracts it for repeated visits to the same vein of metal. We have always fancied that his disquisitions embody the sublimated essence of some of those pleasant social gatherings which occasionally take place-always impromptu, for they can never be repeated if one tries -round a winter afternoon's fire before the candles are brought in; or late at night, when they are burning down in the sockets. Such a conclave requires some feminine ingredients-cultivated, but not 'strong-minded'-to prevent the talk from degenerating into politics or pedantry. Then is evolved the best sort of 'social science,' while the fire smoulders or sparkles, lighting up grave countenances or flashing eyes with a fitful brilliancy, as the conversation takes a higher tone; and that degree of earnest interest is felt in the subject which induces one to pursue it for its own sake, and to express more intimate convictions and secret thoughts than one would bring oneself to utter round a brilliant dinner-table or in a formal discussion. At such times even the most reserved generally find words, and those who have the faculty of being stimulated by conversation say more and better than they could ever have done with pen and paper and unlimited time for thought. Desultory such talk must be, but not therefore superficial nor destitute of an end, and often pregnant with hints which, though the subject may never be resumed between the same speakers, may germinate and bear fruit in individual minds. To such conversations many of us, perhaps, may look back, not only as some of the pleasantest, but as some of the most instructive hours that we have spent; and many often regret that the combination of place, time, circumstance, with

minds of sufficient tact, geniality, and power, can so seldom occur. The resemblance which De Quincey's Essays bear to such conversations is not the less marked for being independent of the form of dialogue. In their shifting lights and shades, in the ease of their transitions from 'grave to gay,' their deep thoughts and solid veins of reasoning, precise and accurate, yet popular and clear, their relieving flashes of humour, and their susceptibility to all degrees of emotional manifestation, they are more like the product of several minds than of one, and seem to contain a variety of attractive elements which a single intellect is seldom capable of bringing into play at once. There is an elasticity about them which a man may perhaps feel as long as the intercourse with other minds is actually going on, but which generally deserts him soon after he has begun to put his thoughts on paper; and this pecu

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liarity is aided in its access to the attention of the reader by the grace of a style which, apparently without effort, unites all the rhetorical attraction of a scholar-like finish to the emphasis of personal communication. In a writer who inspires kindliness of feeling towards him through the mere perusal of his writings, and in the entire absence of any personal bias, there must have been something good, for which due credit should be given him, whatever may be the faults of which we are otherwise informed; and grave as the errors of De Quincey's life may have been, scarcely any, we should think, are likely to be led away by his example, while multitudes may receive benefit from that which he has bequeathed to the world of literature and intellect. Those who have themselves most successfully combated similar temptations will be most ready to make allowance for the one in consideration of the other.