8 December:Boreham on Thomas de Quincey

Genius in Chains
Names have an extra-ordinary way of associating themselves with certain sets of emotions. There are names in our literary annals that, when pronounced, make us feel as if a bird had just begun to sing or as if the sun had just broken through a bank of heavy cloud. And, on the contrary, there are names that, falling abruptly on our ears, plunge us into sudden gloom. The genius of these men was amazing; but it was weird, grim, almost ghoulish. Mr. G. K. Chesterton declared the other day that, of men of this class, nobody has cast a more gigantic shadow athwart the pleasant fields of English literature than has Thomas De Quincey.[1] There is a good deal to be said for Mr. Chesterton's contention. It is difficult nowadays to realise the morbid influence that De Quincey exercised on sensitive and impressionable spirits a generation or two ago. Francis Thompson is a case in point. Mr. J. L. Garvin describes Francis Thompson as "an argonaut of literature, far-travelled in the realms of gold," and declares that his "Hound of Heaven" is easily the most wonderful lyric in the language. But, on the very threshold of his remarkable career, Francis Thompson was almost shipwrecked by the sinister influence on his mind of De Quincey. To his father's mortification and dismay, Francis, though a brilliant student, failed in one examination after another. At length, when the domestic exchequer was entirely exhausted, a family conclave was convened. Francis was charged with drinking, but the charge was false. The trouble was not alcohol, but opium. His mother, just before she died, had presented her son with De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater." He read it; coveted for himself those gorgeous dreams that De Quincey so vividly describes: took to opium, and, as a consequence, suffered an immediate slackening of all his mental powers. Having, as a result of the charge of drunkenness, quarrelled with his father, Thompson threw all restraint to the winds. During three hideous years he drank the dregs of life. He herded with the lowest of the low and with the vilest of the vile. And, although he himself never became actually immoral, or debased, he endured horrors that cruelly affected his health and that remained like an indelible smudge upon his memory. All this he owed to De Quincey.

Duality and Anomaly
It is very difficult to get to know De Quincey. He was, more than most men, a duality, an anomaly, a self-contradiction. In reality, Professor Masson says, there were two De Quinceys. There was the gentle, timid, shrinking, abnormally sensitive and polite little man in whose society all his companions revelled; and there was a second self whose prejudice, ill-temper, opinionativeness, animosity and pugnacity horrified and repelled all who beheld it. The task of the biographer, the Professor declares, is, from this incongruous tangle, to elucidate the mystery of the real De Quincey. We sometimes appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. These are the two Philips. But, in De Quincey's case, he turn from De Quincey sleeping to De Quincey waking: these are the two De Quinceys. There was the De Quincey with his brain drenched in opium, and the De Quincey emerging from the effects of his debauch. These two De Quinceys stared each other in the face every morning. It is astounding and almost incredible that, for years, De Quincey drank from seven to ten wineglasses of laudanum every day; but the evidence is irrefutable and the result historic. He closed his eyes at night, and it was as if a theatre were suddenly opened, all lighted up within his brain for the performance of the most dazzling extravaganzas and phantasmagories. Once in every twenty-four hours he plunged into another world. That other world was sometimes infernal, sometimes supernal, but never human. "The sense of space, and, latterly, the sense of time, vanished. He moved or hung or sank in measureless chasms, unshored astronomical abysses, or depths without a star: minutes shot out into years and centuries shrivelled into minutes." Into these wild fantasies, all the scenes and incidents of which he had ever heard or read wove themselves in grotesque and solemn grandeur. East and West, ancient and modern, beautiful and horrible; all contributed to the gorgeous fabric of every dream.

Debauchery into Literature
This was one De Quincey. And the other? "To wake each day at noon from such appalling miseries, and be aware that his wife and children were standing beside him, and to know that, when the day waned, it would only be to plunge him again into the hideous tumult of his other, or opium-generated existence; all this became an agony insufferable. He shrank from the approach of sleep and longed to sleep no more.” But during the day the old craving returned, and at night he submitted once more to be tumbled into bottomless abysses and to be chased by furies through inextricable forests or down frozen glaciers that were terrifying in their dizzy altitudes. Like De Quincey with his opium, we turn from the confessions in disgust, and then, hungrily, resort to them again. For the sake of the genius that enabled him to transform debauchery into literature, we forgive De Quincey his ghastly frailty. We remember, too, that behind all that he wrote and all that he suffered, there was a personality of singular winsomeness and beauty. Before he had himself added a line to our literature, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had all fallen under his spell and had implored him to join their charmed circle in the Lake Country; whilst from among the moss-hags of Craigenputtock, Carlyle had written begging De Quincey to come and be his neighbour. "If only you would come and be king over us," Carlyle says, "the Bog school might snap its fingers at the Lake school!" But the Lake school claimed him, and he cuts a stately figure in its story.

Fact Assuming Glamour of Fiction
The republic of English letters is singularly rich in writers whose lives are themselves romances. The biographies of many of our most illustrious authors are as fascinating as any of their works. Indeed, in many cases the books derive the great bulk of their charm from the actual experiences of the men who wrote them. Behind the humour and the pathos of "David Copperfield" and its companion novels lie the humour and the pathos of the varied and eventful life of Dickens. Behind the sadness and the struggle of Jane Eyre lie the sadness and the struggle of Charlotte Bronte. Such illustrations could be multiplied indefinitely; but, among them all, there would be no example quite as striking as the case of Thomas De Quincey. As we read the story of his boyish gipsyings among the Welsh hills, and of the Bohemian adventures of his later days, we have to remind ourselves repeatedly that we are not the victims of a frolic of a novelist's fancy. Fact assumes the glamour of fiction. It is not too much to say that, if the personality and history of De Quincey were transferred, holus-bolus, to the pages of a great romance, most critics would reject the work as being far-fetched, grotesque, and wildly improbable.

Echo of Cowper
In many respects the story of De Quincey is a singular echo of the story of Cowper. In childhood the two were remarkably alike. De Quincey's frailty of physique, his shy, sensitive and dreamy temperament, his odd remarks and his quaint ways are strangely reminiscent of his eminent predecessor. "I had hardships of various kinds," says Cowper, "but my chief affliction consisted in my being singled out by a lad of about fifteen years of age as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper." The words might have been penned by De Quincey. The only difference is that, in De Quincey's case, the bully was his brother. Like Cowper, De Quincey was denied a mother's care. In both cases the fathers failed to understand their strange progeny and fought shy of them. De Quincey tells us that if, at the age of seven, he had met his father in the street, he would not have recognised him. The merchant was much way from home and it was only when he came there to die that it occurred to him that his boy's company was worth cultivating. De Quincey has told us that, all through life, he was haunted by the memory of his father's face as he saw it that summer's evening. The carriage approaching the house at a hearse-like pace; the figure of the invalid propped up by pillows; and the face itself! "It caught my eye," he says, "and struck my imagination with a ghastly effect." During the next week or two, the pair were inseparable; and within that narrow compass, De Quincey's experience of paternal solicitude began and ended. The world at large has treated De Quincey in pretty much the same way; but those who, exercising patience with his oddities, and making allowance for his frailties, have really tried to understand him, have been more than repaid for the pains they have taken.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas de Quincey

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on March 10, 1934.