Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (Romanticism in Perspective)

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Thomas De Quincey Knowledge and Power

Frederick Burwick

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Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University; Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include: Toby R. Benis ROMANTICISM ON THE ROAD The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless Frederick Burwick THOMAS DE QUINCEY Knowledge and Power Richard Cronin (editor) 1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS Péter Dávidházi THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective Charles Donelan ROMANTICISM AND MALE FANTASY IN BYRON’S DON JUAN A Marketable Vice Tim Fulford ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt David Jasper THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM Preserving the Sacred Truths Malcolm Kelsall JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation Mark S. Lussier ROMANTIC DYNAMICS The Poetics of Physicality

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Andrew McCann CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere Ashton Nichols THE REVOLUTIONARY ‘I’ Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation Jeffrey C. Robinson RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS ‘My Ended Poet’ Anya Taylor BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry (editors) 1800: THE NEW LYRICAL BALLADS Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON’S SUBLIME SCIENCE John Wyatt WORDSWORTH’S POEMS OF TRAVEL, 1819–42 ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’

Romanticism in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71490–3 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Thomas De Quincey Knowledge and Power Frederick Burwick

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© Frederick Burwick 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–77403–5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burwick, Frederick. Thomas De Quincey : knowledge and power / Frederick Burwick. p. cm. — (Romanticism in perspective) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–333–77403–5 1. De Quincey, Thomas, 1785–1859—Knowledge—Literature. 2. De Quincey, Thomas, 1785–1859—Knowledge—Psychology. 3. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Criticism– –England—History—19th century. 5. Reader-response criticism. 6. Literature—Psychology. 7. Romanticism—England. 8. Subconsciousness. I. Title. II. Series. PR4537 .B87 2000 828'.809—dc21 00–062698 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Acknowledgments

vi

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

x

1

Knowledge and Power

1

2

Casuistry and Eidoloclasm

24

3

Sir Walter Scott and the Literary Pirates

43

4

Murder and the Aesthetics of Violence

67

5

Shakespearean Involutes

88

6

Miltonic Overtures

112

7

Wordsworthean Associations

142

Notes

161

Bibliography

177

Index

185

v

Acknowledgments For most of his professional life, De Quincey was beleaguered with debts. It is fitting, therefore, that in writing about De Quincey I, too, should find myself overwhelmed with debts. My greatest debts are not of a financial nature. To Grevel Lindop, General Editor of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 volumes (Pickering & Chatto), my debt is as vast as De Quincey’s dream-vision of the infinite. He has guided me to manuscripts and helped me decipher many passages of De Quincey’s “spidery” penmanship. He has provided me with names and dates pertinent to De Quincey’s writings when my own research had reached an impasse. Most important, he has been a source of guidance and support throughout the past decade. To Marilyn Gaull, Editor of The Wordsworth Circle and President of the Wordsworth–Coleridge Association, I owe a debt equally profound. I have been blessed by her generosity and her collegiality, not only at the annual meetings of the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere, England, but in professional engagements at conferences from San Francisco and Seattle to New York and Toronto. Because this book came into being under her encouragement, I wish it were much better than I have been able to make it. She is a distinguished scholar and a true friend. Due in part to the interest aroused by Grevel Lindop’s The OpiumEater: a Life of Thomas De Quincey (1981), the number of scholarly works devoted to De Quincey has been increasing year by year. My own work has been shaped not only by Grevel Lindop’s carefully researched critical biography, but also to some degree by many of the more recent studies: I mention only those to which I owe a larger debt. John Whale, in Thomas De Quincey’s Reluctant Autobiography (1984), called attention to the illusions of confidentiality and strategies of concealment used to obscure intimate and personal details even while the author is engaged in the confessional exposé of putting the self on public display in his periodical publications. The collection of essays edited by Robert Lance Snyder in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies (1985) provided an early indication of an vi

Acknowledgments vii

expanding range of interest. Some of this interest reappraised earlier commentaries on his drug experience. John Barrell, in The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: a Psychopathology of Imperialism (1991), invited readers to attend more closely to De Quincey’s paradigms of mental and physical deviations, personal and cultural. Joel Black, in The Aesthetics of Murder (1991), observed the modernist and postmodernist reverberations of the aestheticized brutality wrought by De Quincey in documenting the serial murders of a vulnerable and crowded London of the nineteenth century. In De Quincey’s Disciplines (1994), Josephine McDonagh examined the wide range of political and historical subjects to which De Quincey devoted his journalistic skills. Alina Clej, in A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (1995), like Black, explored the twentieth-century legacy of De Quincey’s narrative; for her, however, the crucial contribution is found in the construction of the self. Unlike Whale, she is not concerned with the conflicts of public and private, but rather with the self-exposition and publicizing of the private. Margaret Russett, in De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (1997), provided an invaluable study of the ways in which De Quincey, as “minor” writer, both defined and exploited the “major” writers of the period, structuring, interpreting, and insuring his own, albeit secondary, place in the canon of English Romanticism. From these recent works I have gained valuable insights into De Quincey’s prose and its contemporary reception. Through my involvement as an editor of three volumes for The Works of Thomas De Quincey, I have transcribed extensively from the manuscripts and have explored the vast collection of unpublished letters and papers. Because of this work, I have been able to draw from manuscript material that has contributed to a more complex and nuanced understanding of De Quincey’s life and career. I make use, for example, of a previously unpublished supplement to “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” preliminary drafts of his “Suspiria de Profundis” and “The English Mail-Coach,” and manuscript notes on his reading of Wordsworth’s poetry. For the account of piracy in Chapter 3, John Spedding (of Mier House, Cumbria) allowed me to use unpublished materials relating to his controversial ancestor, Captain Gulliver. Additional acknowledgments will be given in the appropriate places to the British Library, the Bodleian, the Dove

viii Acknowledgments

Cottage Museum, the Scottish National Library, the Boston University Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Pforzheimer and the Berg Collections at the New York Public Library. I extend my thanks to numerous other scholars of De Quincey who have helped me in my reading and interpretation of De Quincey’s prose. I thank, especially, Charles Rzepka, Robert Maniquis, Matthew Schneider, and fellow members of the editorial team with whom I have worked under Grevel Lindop’s direction: Edmund Baxter, David Groves, Robert Morrison, Daniel Roberts, Laura Roman, Barry Symonds, and John Whale. Earlier versions of Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 previously appeared in The Wordsworth Circle. I am grateful for the permission to use: “How to Translate a Waverley Novel: Sir Walter Scott, Willibald Alexis, and Thomas De Quincey,” TWC 25, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 93–100; “Motion and Paralysis in The English Mail-Coach,” TWC 26, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 66–77; “De Quincey and the Aesthetics of Violence,” TWC 27, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 78–86; “De Quincey’s Shakespearean Involutes,” TWC 29, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 41–51. Most radically revised for the present study are the discussion of De Quincey’s Waverley Novel and of “The English Mail-Coach.” In claiming that my greatest debts are not of a financial nature, I do not intend to minimize the assistance that was indeed financial. My work on the De Quincey edition commenced with a grant as Distinguished Scholar of the British Academy in 1992. From 1994 to the present, the Research Committee of the UCLA Academic Senate has subsidized travel and other research expenses. What would De Quincey think if he knew that this money was forthcoming in his name, and that not a penny of it must be repaid?

Abbreviations Throughout the text, the following abbreviations are used in citations. (See also the fuller Bibliography at the end of the book.)

BL

CL

CN

Lindop

M

PW W

Wall.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957– . Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; 2nd edn. 1996. Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings, 14 vols., ed. David Masson. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889–90. Thomas De Quincey, Posthumous Works, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Japp. London: Heinemann, 1891. Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols., eds. Grevel Lindop et al. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000 – . Thomas De Quincey, Walladmor, 2 vols. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825.

ix

Introduction Once he had commenced his career as journalist and critic, belatedly and under financial duress, Thomas De Quincey struggled to direct that career to the exposition of his own dreams and reveries and to the study of the great minds that had influenced him. Historically, these were William Shakespeare and John Milton; personally, they were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. What made it a struggle was his own addiction, which incapacitated his intellectual efforts and rendered him incapable of attaining the standard of exquisite prose to which he aspired. Why, then, did he seemingly squander his limited energies on translations from minor German authors and economic conundrums on the meaning of “value,” “rent,” and “profit”? When his powers failed him, he revealed in his Confessions, he still could discipline his mind by turning to economics: Great as was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. (Lindop 65) This early reference to “knowledge” and “power” is fundamental to the habits of De Quincey’s mind which I attempt to trace and elucidate in this book. In 1819, as he goes on to say in this passage, he discovered a “great master” among the “herd of modern economists”: David Ricardo. Thenceforth throughout his career De Quincey nourished his own mental facility in political economy, finding in its methods a rigor by which he could lift himself out of his prostration back into productivity as a writer. Opium exacerbated his efforts to write, to meet the monthly deadlines, to earn a meager living for his family. He was in his early thirties when, in 1818, he began his journalistic career as editor of the Westmorland Gazette, a position that he kept for less than a year.

x

Introduction xi

Even shorter was his initial service to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review, which lasted less than two months and saw the publication of a single work, a translation from Schiller. A happier period followed, from 1821 to 1824, at the London Magazine. Here the publication of his “Confessions,” as two installments in the magazine (1821), established his literary reputation. Yet after this initial success, he succumbed to opiate lethargy for most of year that followed. In 1822 he managed to prepare the publication of the Confessions as a book, and to translate a short tale from German. Throughout the next several years, he often relied on translations from the German to meet his obligations to the press. Essays on political economy, German translations, and book reviews enabled him to survive the rigors of writing for the monthly periodicals. He gradually expanded his repertory, writing on prominent figures, appealing to a popular interest among the rising middle class in topics that had previously been the exclusive domain of the universities. In 1823– 4, his “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,” was his first endeavor in this new genre. He enjoyed hoaxes and paradoxes. When a Waverley novel appeared in Germany that had never been published in the English language, De Quincey recognized a marvelous hoax which prompted first his review of the forgery, and then his translation into English, with a challenge to the German hoaxer that he must translate it back into German so that German readers might have a more accurate account of British history and geography. A reader with De Quincey’s sense of paradox could not but help see Kant’s account of “Paralogisms” and “Antinomies,” in the Critique of Pure Reason, as an intellectual collision waiting to happen. Kant asked, in the Critique of Judgment, how a beautiful sickness, a beautiful rape, a beautiful death were possible, and proceeded to provide an answer in which aesthetic considerations were divorced from moral values. Here was the philosophical ground upon which De Quincey could elaborate his “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827/39). In politics he upheld a conservative vision of empire, yet he also warned the Tory readers of Blackwood’s that rebellion was eminent unless reforms were instituted. In literary criticism, he adopted a personal method of “psychological criticism,” to use his own term for examining a work in terms of its effect on the reader. And as often as he could persuade his editors to give him the opportunity,

xii Introduction

he returned to the autobiographical mode in the “Sketches of Life and Manners” that ran in Tait’s from 1835 to 1838 and the “Lake Reminiscences” for Tait’s in 1839; as well as to the more introspective probings into dreams, as in the “Suspiria de Profundis” for Blackwood’s in 1845, or “The English Mail-Coach” for Blackwood’s in 1849. De Quincey’s 40-year career is far more multifaceted than these few titles indicate. History, wars, classical antiquity, rhetoric and style were also staples in his journalistic repertory. By focusing on a few selected texts in the following seven chapters I intend to examine the interactions of history and autobiographical experience which inform De Quincey’s notion of consciousness and direct his reflections as a critic. I deliberately include what some critics have taken to be the worst aberration of his misguided delight in hoaxes, Walladmor (1825), his English version of the German forgery of Sir Walter Scott. It shares in the same engagement of irony, paradox, and dialectics that pervade all his work, from the “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), to “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827, 1839), “Suspiria de Profundis” (1845), and “The English Mail-Coach” (1849). In the first chapter I endeavor to provide a critical ground for this study by reviewing De Quincey’s reiterated discriminations of “literature of knowledge” and “literature of power” in relation to the many antagonisms and tensions he saw at work in society, in the arts, and in the individual mind. Other commentators on De Quincey have examined and sought to explain De Quincey’s interest in political economy;1 I am concerned, rather, with his appeal to economics not specifically as the science elucidated in such works as “Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy” (1824) or The Logic of Political Economy (1844), but rather as a pervasive metaphor for “power”: “power” of mind no less than the “power” of Empire. “Power,” in De Quincey’s vocabulary, is vast and pervasive. It is the driving force of consciousness and, as he tells us in his “Suspiria de Profundis,” it is at work in the “economy of the dreaming faculty.” Each of the subsequent chapters continues to address aspects of De Quincey’s theory of consciousness and the extensive repertory of contraries which inform his critical and narrative prose. The second chapter examines a negative inversion of those contraries in which knowledge shifts into the speculative mode of casuistry and power is undermined as eidoloclasm. The third chapter is devoted to De

Introduction xiii

Quincey’s attempt to “hoax the hoaxer” in his translation of Walladmor, the Scott forgery. The fourth chapter examines how an aesthetic paradox gave rise to De Quincey’s several installments of “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” The fifth chapter looks at “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” as an example of what De Quincey called “psychological criticism.” The sixth chapter examines the grand echoes of Paradise Lost and the dialectic tensions of motion and paralysis in “The English Mail-Coach.” The seventh and final chapter turns to De Quincey’s essay “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” as case study in associationist analysis and the workings of the subconscious.

1 Knowledge and Power

The distinction between “the literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” is best known as formulated in De Quincey’s “On Languages” (from “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,” No. III, London Magazine, March 1823; M X:46–52) and in his review of “The Works of Alexander Pope” (North British Review, August 1848; M XI:53–9). Because of differences in these two passages, separated by more than 25 years, Sigmund Proctor and John E. Jordan cited them as evidence of an evolution from a psychological ground to an emphasis on “moral capacities” in De Quincey’s critical thinking.1 In fact, the psychological ground persists. De Quincey in 1848, no less than in 1823, was interested in how literature works on consciousness, how it reaches into the subconscious to stir changes in thought, feeling, and perception. The contrast between “knowledge” and “power” recurs more often than previous critics have noticed. De Quincey discusses the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” in the introductory letter to his translation of Voss’s Luisa (1821), in his review of “The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith” (North British Review, May 1848; M IV:308–9), and in “Cause of the Novel’s Decline” (PW I:302–5). As I noted in the Introduction, he calls upon the opposition of “knowledge” and “power” when he describes himself in the “Confessions,” turning to David Ricardo’s economic theory as means of restoring structure to his thoughts and resurrecting himself from the lethargic thrall of opium.2 The opposition of “knowledge” and “power” is integral to De Quincey’s theory of

1

2 Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power

consciousness no less than it is to his theory of economics, his theory of literature, or his theory of theory itself.3 In Chapters 5 and 7, I shall elaborate further on De Quincey’s introspective mode of “psychological criticism” as he applies it to porter’s scene in Macbeth and to Wordsworth’s poetry. But it is crucial to clarify at the outset that De Quincey deliberately implicates “subconscious” and “conscious” in explaining what gives power to the “Literature of Power,” in contradistinction to the “Literature of Knowledge.” In his formulation of 1823, for example, he stressed that “power” passes through the immediate surface of consciousness and reaches into the deeper realms of “unawakened” consciousness as moving impulse for “the dawn of consciousness”: All, that is literature, seeks to communicate power; all, that is not literature, to communicate knowledge. Now, if it be asked what is meant by communicating power, I in my turn would ask by what name a man would designate the case in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain unawakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness – as myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment in every human mind for want of a poet to organize them? – I say, when these inert and sleeping forms are organized – when these possibilities are actualized, – is this conscious and living possession of mine power, or what is it? (M X:48) De Quincey is concerned, that is, with an intense response capable of reaching through the threshold of the subconscious. Nothing is gained from penetrating the subconscious, however, unless some elements of its submerged contents are reanimated within the “vital consciousness.” Literary criticism awaited “a proper mode of awakening” so that the effects of literature upon the mind can be analyzed. “Whilst the finest models of style exist, and subconsciously operate effectively as sources of delight,” De Quincey says of the literature of England, “the conscious valuation of style is least perfectly developed” (“Language”; M X:248). Knowledge, the accumulation of facts and practical data, exists in the conscious mind where it can be readily called upon in responding to the duties of daily life. Power, which is the life force

Knowledge and Power 3

operative in all human endeavors, stimulates impressions deeply buried within the mind, implanted by experience, yet, unless thus aroused, never scrutinized, never organized with conscious deliberation. In “Suspiria de Profundis,” published in Blackwood’s (1845) as a “sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” De Quincey attempts a more probing exploration of the subconscious than he had in any of his previous autobiographical writings. Following his “Introductory Notice,” defining dreams and commerce in terms of the laws of antagonism, he turns in Part I to his major motif, “The Afflictions of Childhood,” which concludes with an examination of “The Palimpsest” as metaphor for the “layers of ideas, images, feelings” that have been impressed upon the brain. “The Palimpsest” is followed by a dream-allegory of “Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow,” a vision of the recalcitrant shadowy self as “The Apparition of the Brocken,” and, as finale, a vision of submerged memories in the shape of the submerged city of “Savannah-la-Mar.” At the close of Part I, three additional parts were promised. Part II, he explains, is an additional autobiographical “interpolation requisite to the effect” of the parts to follow, each of which would elaborate the role of one of the Ladies of Sorrow. Part I explored the presence in De Quincey’s life of “Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears.” Part III, he says, “belongs to the ‘Mater Suspiriorum,’ and will be entitled The Pariah Worlds”; Part IV “which terminates the work, belongs to the ‘Mater Tenebrarum,’ and will be entitled The Kingdom of Darkness” (Blackwood’s, June 1845; Lindop 153). Each of the three Ladies of Sorrow has reigned over a corresponding stage in De Quincey’s addiction. At the close of the “Confessions” of 1821, De Quincey recollects, “the reader was instructed to believe – and truly instructed – that I had mastered the tyranny of opium.” The “Confessions” looked back on the events that led up to the period of severe narcosis in 1818–1819 and his recovery. But the optimistic declaration of recovery was undermined by the relapse during 1822. “The fact is,” he declares in 1845, “that twice I mastered it, and by efforts even more prodigious, in the second of these cases, than in the first.” The dreams or nightmares of these two crises in his addiction correspond the realms of Our Lady of Tears and Our Lady of Sighs. But De Quincey has also evoked Our Lady of Darkness, in whose realm


of lunacy and suicidal despair he found himself during his third opium crisis from which he escaped only at the end of 1844: During this third prostration before the dark idol, and after some years, new and monstrous phenomena began slowly to arise. For a time, these were neglected as accidents, or palliated by such remedies as I knew of. But when I could no longer conceal from myself that these dreadful symptoms were moving forward for ever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, and equably increasing, I endeavoured, with some feeling of panic, for a third time to retrace my steps. But I had not reversed my motions for many weeks, before I became profoundly aware that this was impossible. Or, in the imagery of my dreams, which translated every thing into their own language, I saw through vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape. (Lindop 90) After the publication of Part II, the promised installments on “The Pariah Worlds” and “The Kingdom of Darkness” did not appear. The attempt to reconstruct these unpublished episodes from De Quincey’s manuscripts is complicated by the fact that among the manuscripts are plans for other structures. Although he was still evolving his conception of the uncompleted “Suspiria,”4 evidence enough of De Quincey’s examination of consciousness can be drawn from the sections published in 1845. Did De Quincey in the dream-visions of the “Suspiria de Profundis” actually succeed in retrieving the imagery of the subconscious? The question can be put another way: Are literary dreams “real” dreams? These are not irrelevant questions. Indeed, they are all the more important because they must be placed alongside the parallel questions about the introspective mode of “psychological criticism” through which De Quincey claimed to provide answers about the effects of literature upon the mind. While such questions defy satisfactory answers, it is nevertheless possible to trace De Quincey’s own narrative strategy in persuading his reader of the validity of his spelunking into the subconscious. It was a narrative strategy not unlike that proffered 60 years later as “Traumdeutung” by Sigmund Freud: by grounding a case study on a patient’s recollections from


childhood, evidence was garnered for interpreting the symbols of the dream.5 De Quincey in the “Suspiria,” and more emphatically in “The English-Mail Coach,” has anticipated this technique. Images are introduced in his autobiographical account, then they are elaborated and aggrandized in the dream-vision that follows. In the opening paragraphs of the “Suspiria,” De Quincey claims that dreaming is a necessary counterbalance to the activities of the world of commerce and trade. “Habitually to dream magnificently,” he declares, “a man must have a constitutional determination to reverie.” This “determination to reverie” is pitted against commercial “development of vast physical agencies” from the railroads and shipping lines to cameras and guns: “steam in all its applications, light getting under harness as a slave for man, [ … ] artillery and the forces of destruction.” His metaphors for the opposing influences of “reverie” and “physical agencies” are the centrifugal and centripetal forces: the one force which, because of inertia, makes rotating bodies fly away from the center; and the other force which pulls them into the center. In the Introduction I stated that De Quincey was fond of paradox. Defined as that which counters orthodox expectations,6 paradox is implicated here, for it is not introspective reverie that draws into the center. Quite the opposite: reveries expand the consciousness and propel the mind on its outward quest: it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal pace of advance can be retarded, (a thing not to be expected,) or, which is happily more probable, can be met by counterforces of corresponding magnitude, forces in the direction of religion or profound philosophy, that shall radiate centrifugally against this storm of life so perilously centripetal towards the vortex of the merely human, left to itself the natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil; for some minds to lunacy, for others to a reagency of fleshly torpor. (Lindop 87–8) Those who are caught up in the tumult of industrial and technological change are pulled “towards the vortex of the merely human”; the “counterforces” of subjective meditation, of “religion or profound philosophy” liberate the mind and allow it to range abroad. To prevent “the action of thought and feeling” from being “dissipated and squandered” by engagement in material and practical


occupations, it is necessary “to reconcentrate them into meditative habits.” One must seek solitude: “How much solitude, so much power.” De Quincey has contradicted preconceptions about extrovert and introvert. It is the extrovert who falls into “fleshly torpor,” while the introvert moves freely among the grand revelations of power. The centripetal forces of industry and commerce must be balanced by the centrifugal forces of meditation and dreaming. While “physical agencies” spiral inward into “the vortex of the merely human,” the mind itself asserts a “corresponding magnitude” by radiating outwards. Opium, while it too may induce “fleshly torpor,” may also enhance the capacity to engage power: “not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities.” De Quincey’s paradox involves more than a inversion of center and periphery. As in Blake’s “Crystal Cabinet,” what is outside is also inside. Power drives empires; it also expands dreams. Because consciousness absorbs the exterior world, it has its own political economy. Just as in his economic theory he addresses the impact of foreign import on domestic production and value, De Quincey endeavors to discriminate “foreign” and “domestic” in the economics of the mind. He is especially concerned with how impressions, originally alien, are domesticated simply by the fact of their extended residency within the brain. “Power” is then defined as the capacity to bring about change. The greatest change in mental processes occurs when impressions long buried in the subconscious come welling up into consciousness, when impressions originally alien are so absorbed into consciousness that they begin to define identity and behavior. In 1837, James Frederick Ferrier, nephew and son-in-law of De Quincey’s longtime friend John Wilson, started writing for Blackwood’s. His first major contribution was “The Philosophy of Consciousness” in seven installments published in 1838/9, which he followed a year later with “The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge” (Blackwood’s, March 1840, 287–99), elaborating with impressive documentation the hints that De Quincey had given in the first of his four articles on Coleridge in Tait’s (September, October, November 1834; January 1835). Ferrier must have respected De Quincey as a philosophical thinker, for he addressed to him a lengthy letter


summarizing his conviction that all knowledge had to be a compound of object plus subject: “the mind by its very law and nature must know the thing [ … ] along with itself knowing it.”7 In a review of “The Philosophy of Consciousness,” De Quincey discusses the “power” that transforms “languid” impressions and gives them “preternatural strength.” De Quincey’s review was not published, and it is not even clear why one author of Blackwood’s would be called upon to review another.8 From the opening of the review, it is evident that Ferrier’s series had not attracted a large audience among the readership, a fact which prompts De Quincey to comment on the economics of metaphysical discourse in terms of the “net” and “gross” public response. It is unquestionably owing to the unpopularity amongst members of all speculations called “metaphysical” that we must ascribe the inadequate impression produced at the moment by Mr. Ferrier’s paper. [ … ] papers, as weighty as his, are sure of winning back the eye of multitudes in years to come. The “gross” public [ … ] has neither leisure nor interest to spare for subjects so subtle: and this public passes on for ever “oculo irretorto”:[9] what it fails to see in the month of publication, it never sees. But within this “gross” body slowly forms itself a “net” public – prodigiously smaller, but then continually extending its lines, and more clearsighted. (Pierpont Morgan Library: Knight Collection MA 903) The argument with which he opened the “Suspiria” was that material and practical concerns needed to be balanced by the speculative and meditative. That argument is anticipated in his endorsement of Ferrier’s inquiry into the nature of consciousness: All this is evident: but, as a remark not so evident and perhaps likely to be disputed, I add from myself a firm conviction – that, as all evils in excess tend to cure themselves, for some time back the scandalous idolatry of the Practical (which disfigured for so long a period our English mind) has been retrograde. Religious feuds, which bring so many other benefits in their train, bring this also – that they force, coerce, and violently scourge the lazy intellect back into profound speculations. Even politics, the politics of our personalities and momentary interests or partizanships, being continually felt to be resting on quagmires, oblige


(and have for some years obliged) the journalists of London and Paris to seek for deeper foundations. The political economy of journalism that resulted in Ferrier’s failure to attract a large audience to his inquiry into consciousness was predicted by Ferrier’s own argument that “the history of the individual” no less than “the history of the race” commences with a necessary response to the physical world and only in a few instances may lead to speculations about the mind (Blackwood’s, February 1838, p. 193). Most pertinent to De Quincey’s concerns in the “Suspiria” are his comments in this review of Ferrier on the power that can stimulate ideas dormant in the subconscious into active and organized consciousness. De Quincey writes of the “shaping of vital ideas, and power to create anew and remould the chaos of seething ideas.” When an idea or impression first strikes an individual, it occurs as “an object alien”; and it remains essentially alien unless it somehow begins to alter a person’s way of thinking and acting. Whence does an idea derive the power to alter the mind? “Before it could stamp such deep traces,” De Quincey asserts, the striking idea “must have had a natural difference from other ideas.” Suppose the case that an idea were a sincere one, but only in a languid sense sincere; only in a feeble degree operative upon him who possessed it – it would, therefore, according to the apparent reasonableness of this idea, and according to other collateral encrementations command a certain degree of assent and influence. Now starting from this state of the idea as a datum, that is supposing the idea regularly rated and valued, viz. as neither more nor less : *B, – it is remarkable that without changing its nature at all, simply by changing the degree of its control over the person alleging it, such an idea would change its value and become : B;C, where it is of no consequence at all what C means – suffice it that little or much it is some positive addition to B. As a specific example of this “positive addition” asserting “its control over the person alleging it,” De Quincey cites the case of Thomas Clarkson,10 friend of the Wordsworths, who took up the idea of abolition of the slave-trade and pursued it with dedicated fervor: If, for instance having previously known that a particular man held and possessed the idea, but without much fervor and


anxiety – suddenly you have roused by the striking assurance that this man had paid as much in behalf of this idea [ … ] – notwithstanding that the idea itself remains precisely as it was, an idea that you had come to be careless of by familiarity, – nevertheless on hearing of or witnessing in a strong man like Clarkson this striving as the slaves [ … ], you would be arrested: you would turn round and say – I think more of your idea than I did; and from 2 causes. Subjectively, as an idea thought by you, in the first place, it is evident to me now which before it was not, that you are dreadfully in earnest. Previously you had perhaps a languid persuasion of the trade, which you called believing it. But in fact you only believed that you believed it. Whence now this trembling, and nervous derangement, argues against power, a power to shake and rock is the idea. That impresses me in the 1st place. But 2dly Objectively an idea must be a memorable one that thus leaves its impression on the most wary susceptibility – you must be in earnest that thro’ pure strangers have thus changed. But also – any thought must possess a peculiar and rare configuration actively that can have a power to leave such impressions. You that show such vestigia of an earthquake must have been profoundly affected. De Quincey uses his review of Ferrier’s “Philosophy of Consciousness” as an occasion to elaborate his own notion of the power of ideas to affect and permanently alter the mind. In the “Suspiria,” he returns to the interaction of external and internal experience, and interaction that brings with it an awareness of an alien intrusion. The economy of social position and the parental household in Manchester are rehearsed as bearing upon the economy of his own mind. In the “Introductory Notice” on dreaming, De Quincey affirms that the economy of the mind registers emotional profit and loss: Some of these were of a nature to alter the whole economy of my mind. Great convulsions, from whatever cause, from conscience, from fear, from grief, from struggles of the will, sometimes, in passing away themselves, do not carry off the changes which they have worked. (Lindop 91–2) The economy of mind, however, is not separate from the economy of social circumstances. De Quincey, in the very next section, offers a precise accounting of the family income as a relevant context for

10

Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power

telling of “The Affliction of Childhood.” De Quincey was born in 1785; his sister Jane, age 3, died in 1790; his sister Elizabeth, age 9, died in 1792. When his father died in 1793, he left to his family, then consisting of a wife and six children, an unburthened estate producing exactly £1600 a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date of my narrative, if narrative it can be called, he had an income still larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man who is acquainted with commercial life, but above all, with such life in England, it will readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class – opulent, though not rich in a mercantile estimate – the domestic economy is likely to be upon a scale of liberality altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations. (Lindop 95–6) De Quincey wants to assert these economic facts as crucial to the setting of his tale of the loss of his sisters. At the same time he wants to deny that he and his sisters had any awareness of their meaning: we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring. (Lindop 96) Economic awareness, whether of privation or privilege, he seems to believe, somehow defiles childhood innocence. It is not just that the economic dictates of the real world encroach upon the consciousness; the power is far more pervasive. The mind itself conforms to economic laws. When De Quincey affirms an “economy of the mind” and the “economy of the dreaming faculty,” it is with an awareness that the opium trade influences the mental economy far more profoundly than it did the commercial economy of shipping business with China. Penetrating the brain, opium becomes a stimulus and thus a co-agent of the brain’s own process: He who has really read the preceding parts of these present Confessions, will be aware that a stricter scrutiny of the past, such as was natural after the whole economy of the dreaming faculty had been convulsed beyond all precedents on record, led me to the conviction that not one agency, but two agencies, had cooperated to the tremendous result. The nursery experience had been the ally and the natural coefficient of the opium. For that


reason it was that the nursery experience has been narrated. Logically, it bears the very same relation to the convulsions of the dreaming faculty as the opium. (Lindop 137) As De Quincey tells it, his fall from childhood grace occurs as a tormenting encounter with a commercial world of vast economic complexity. At age 7, his commences his lessons in Latin and is given a generous allowance, which he promptly begins to spend on books. The kindly bookseller extends him credit, and very soon he finds himself in debt, a debt that hung over him for the next three years and kept him, he says, “in constant terror.” The experience taught him a grief different than he felt at the death of his sister Elizabeth. It was a grief “in a more troubled shape, [ … ] associated with something like remorse and deadly anxiety,” a grief tinged with guilt, for he recognized his debt as a “trespass, and perhaps a venial one.” This childhood encounter with the enslaving potential of commercial economy foreshadows De Quincey’s life of debts and dodging creditors. Most frightening in his sense of bondage is that it seems eternal, beyond any possible future reprieve. He has subscribed to a set of books, “a general history of navigation, supported by a vast body of voyages.” How many books? “When I considered to myself what a huge thing the sea was, and that so many thousands of captains, commodores, admirals, were eternally running up and down it, [ … ] I began to fear that such a work tended to infinity.” “Not enduring the uncertainty that now besieged my tranquillity, I resolved to know the worst.” He approaches a young clerk at the bookstore: a handsome, good-natured young man, but full of fun and frolic; and I dare say was amused with what must have seemed to him the absurd anxiety of my features. I described the work to him, and he understood me at once: how many volumes did he think it would extend to? There was a whimsical expression perhaps of drollery about his eyes, but which unhappily, under my preconceptions, I translated into scorn, as he replied, – “How many volumes? Oh! really I can’t say, maybe a matter of 15,000, be the same more or less.” (Lindop 133) A peculiarity of De Quincey’s memory, persistent in its recurrence, is the way in which personal experience is folded inseparably into his

12


reading. This phenomenon, to which I shall return in Chapter 5, De Quincey defines in the “Suspiria” as an “involute.”11 Two literary works here intertwine with and enclose his recollection of guilt and despair: the imagery for the debt is drawn from Arabian Nights, and for the resulting guilt from Paradise Lost. The Arabian Nights provides De Quincey with his nightmare image of being caught in the web of the giant spider. The spider of British commerce spins a web of economic exchange in which the child has been entrapped: here was a ghostly cobweb radiating into all the provinces from the mighty metropolis. I secretly had trodden upon the outer circumference, had damaged or deranged the fine threads and links, – concealment or reparation there could be none. Slowly perhaps, but surely, the vibration would travel back to London. The ancient spider that sat there at the centre, would rush along the network through all longitudes and latitudes, until he found the responsible caitiff, author of so much mischief. (Lindop 134) The nightmare of his debt, De Quincey relates, “connected itself with one of the Arabian nights which had particularly interested myself and my sister.” If the spider does not get him, an evil magician will: It was that tale, where a young porter, having his ropes about his person, had stumbled into the special “preserve” of some old magician. He finds a beautiful lady imprisoned, to whom (and not without prospects of success) he recommends himself as a suitor, more in harmony with her own years than a withered magician. At this crisis the magician returns. The young man bolts, and for that day successfully; but unluckily he leaves his ropes behind. Next morning he hears the magician, too honest by half, enquiring at the front door, with much expression of condolence, for the unfortunate young man who had lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story I used to amuse my sister, by ventriloquizing to the magician from the lips of the trembling young man – “Oh, Mr Magician, these ropes cannot be mine! They are far too good; and one wouldn’t like, you know, to rob some other poor young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so beautiful a set of ropes.” But argument is thrown away upon a magician, and off he sets on his


travels with the young porter – not forgetting to take the ropes along with him. (Lindop 135) The tale from the Arabian Nights12 was no longer a “a mere fiction from a far-distant age and land.” It was, De Quincey insists, “literally reproduced in myself.” He was forced to “repeat within my own inner experience the shadowy panic of the young Bagdat intruder upon the privacy of magicians,” and like that intruder was entrapped in a spell: “what did it matter whether a magician dunned one with old ropes for his engines of torture, or Stationers’ Hall with 15,000 volumes?” In the Arabian Nights, he discovered “a legend concerning myself.” An even more dire mirror of the self was the fallen archangel of Paradise Lost. Guilt over his debts are entangled in grief over his sister’s. His seventh year has brought him double miseries: “At the beginning of that year how radiantly happy! At the end how insupportably alone!” Here he quotes Satan’s greeting to Beelzebub who has with him fallen “from the happy Realms of Light”: Into what depth [Pit] thou see’st, From what height fallen. (Paradise Lost I:91–2; Lindop 136) Wandering these “abysses” of self-torment, he consoles himself with the hope that his suffering might in some way become a “ransom” for buying back the love of his lost sister. Out of one debt, in this scheme of emotional economy, might come credit for another purchase. Passages from Paradise Lost, together with the liturgical readings from Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, echo throughout his account of his sister’s funeral. Although producing effects similar to the involute he described in the nurse’s reading of the passion (Lindop 104), the funeral liturgy works differently because it is re-experienced upon every occasion of death in the family. De Quincey, who often proclaims himself devout in his Anglican faith, describes himself here, at age 7, as scarcely able to suppress his defiance. Attending his sister’s funeral, he is so engulfed by his “own solitary darkness” that he did not attend “consciously” to the liturgy until the priest came to that “sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England is always read at burials.” His response, however, is not to

14


be swept away with its sublimity, but rather to protest against the words which seemed an outrageous condemnation of his sister: When I heard those dreadful words – for dreadful they were to me – “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory” [I Corinthians 15:42–3]; such was the recoil of my feelings, that I could even have shrieked out a protesting – “Oh, no, no!” if I had not been restrained by the publicity of the occasion. In later years, reflecting upon this revolt of my feelings, which, being the voice of nature in a child, must be as true as any mere opinion of a child might probably be false. (Lindop 108–9) The passage from Paul rises to a rhetorical crescendo. “O death, where is thy sting?” But the 7-year-old De Quincey is not persuaded. He knows where the sting is: “here lay the sting of it, viz. in the fatal words – ‘We shall be changed’ ” (I Corinthians 15:51). He struggles against that notion of change: “if she were to be altered, and no longer to reflect in her sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured on my heart” (Lindop 109). De Quincey does not mean to imply that as a child he rebelled against church teachings. He argues, simply, that children have a more immediate access to God than is available through the Bible or the church. Not surprisingly, for De Quincey, that immediate access is through dreams: God speaks to children also in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal by the truths and services of a national church, God holds “communion undisturbed” with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. (Lindop 114) He had recommended solitude in the opening paragraph of the “Suspiria”: “How much solitude, so much power.” Here even the child is said to possess “a dread, whispering consciousness” of entering “God’s presence” in solitude. Inwardly he denounces the words of the priest: “And he had taken her away, cruel priest! of his ‘great mercy?’ I did not presume, child though I was, to think rebelliously against that.” Refusing any “hypocritical or canting submission


where my heart yielded none,” the child, whose “deep musing intellect had perceived a mystery and a labyrinth in the economies of this world” (Lindop 118), perceives that even the priest, as do all God’s creatures, stands before a mystery. Wordsworth’s credo, “The child is father of the man,” is defined and defended by De Quincey as a maturation of consciousness. Adult consciousness has grown out of what already resided within the mind of the child. Are his recollections of childhood accurate? Has not the adult attributed to the child thoughts and feelings essentially alien to the child’s sensibility? In the opening books of The Prelude, Wordsworth, too, reconstructs the experiences within his mind as a child: after I had seen That spectacle, for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts There was a darkness – call it solitude Or blank desertion [ … … ] huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through my mind By day, and were the trouble of my dreams. (Prelude I:417–27) When De Quincey resurrects his childhood consciousness, he says, he neither intrudes nor interpolates; he simply interprets: Whatsoever in a man’s mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life, must have pre-existed in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I the child had the feelings, I the man decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me the interpretation and the comment. (Lindop 113) Although he emphasizes the co-presence of his own adult reasoning, the recollection of childhood impressions, he insists, are accurate. How are they recollected? Lying sleepless at night, De Quincey tells us, “I become a distinguished compositor in the darkness; and

16


with my aerial composing-stick, sometimes I ‘set up’ half a page of verses, that would be found tolerable correct if collated with the volume that I never had in my hand but once” (Lindop 117). Often quoting from memory passages from the yet unpublished Prelude, De Quincey’s account of his memory is not exaggerated. this pertinacious life of memory for things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness, does in fact beset me. Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party. (Lindop 117) De Quincey’s mental composing may sound less like Coleridge’s explanation of the origin of “Kubla Khan,” and more like John Livingstone Lowes’s. Coleridge recalled no “consciousness of effort”; De Quincey, on the other hand, found himself “forced” and the effort “distressing.” “Two to three hundred lines” of “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge said, were composed in a dream state in which “all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions.” Images appeared visually as things, and somehow the words that named or described those things were uttered simultaneously in the language of the dream. For Lowes the road to Xanadu led through a vast tract of texts, from which Coleridge recorded passages in his notebooks or retained in memory, and which finally came together in his poems. Coleridge’s notebooks are for Lowes quite literally “the stuff of consciousness.”13 For Lowes, that is, Coleridge’s consciousness was an immense textual repository which stimulated images. Does the text come first, and then the image? Or vice versa? Although Lowes emphasizes the grand textual repository of Coleridge’s mind, Coleridge’s imagery demonstrates that he visualizes his mental processes in a way which takes him beyond his textual sources.14 While it cannot be resolved, it is not entirely a waste of time to ponder the implications of this chicken-or-egg conundrum in De Quincey’s image of himself reconstructing poems with an “aerial composing-stick” which is, after all, a visual image. Furthermore, De Quincey complicates the verbal/visual dichotomy by adding auditory


perception to the process: “pertinacious life of memory for things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness.” Words that have been heard, but without conscious attention, have passed into the subconscious and are later restored. De Quincey seems to suggest that the system that encodes sensory data, whether auditory or visual, and deposits it in the memory is linguistic. The retrieval is visual; the decoding, if it occurs at all, is linguistic. But not all can be decoded. He may see, without being able to decipher, the “mysterious handwriting.” Of the many symbols rising up in the mind, only some can he interpret. Ideas, images, symbols, as De Quincey noted in his review of Ferrier, are all aliens as they first enter the mind. They may remain aliens, glimpsed from time to time as hostile entities within the subterranean caverns of consciousness, or they may be absorbed into the personality and very identity, so that the host is changed. The 7-yearold De Quincey had protested against the Pauline words, “we shall be changed.” What seemed intolerable to the child was that Elizabeth would be changed from the sister that child knew and loved. But the corollary, that De Quincey himself would be changed by alien ideas and by the unavoidable circumstances of experience and age, is not immediately contemplated. But it is contemplated. The terrible accusations of change are pronounced by the Cynic of his waking world and the Dark Interpreter of his dreams. De Quincey personifies the alien. And the changes themselves, radically evident in his opium-induced swings from euphoria to dark depression, from keen nervous sensitivity to languid bodily torpor, are defined by the images and symbols of his dreams. In Chapter 5, we will examine a sustained example of De Quincey’s metaphors of motion and paralysis in “The English Mail-Coach.” In the “Suspiria,” he describes himself as both the victim and the guide through the insane swings and changes: Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the impulse of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice of lunacy, whilst the victim of those dreams may be all the more certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion and strength from the increasing resistance into which it is forced by increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as

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you reach the lowest point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly and suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations. (Lindop 137) He is the victim, of course, because of his addiction; he becomes the guide, “the ruler of the oscillations,” not because he gains any willful control over the swings and changes, but simply because he is guiding the reader through his narration of their irresistible influence. Recognizing that consciousness is only the tip of an iceberg, and that much occurs within us that is beyond our awareness, gives rise to the notion of interior selves of which we are only dimly aware, or perhaps not aware at all. In Freud’s scheme, the id can keep secrets from the ego.15 De Quincey, in his “constitutional determination to reverie,” becomes dedicated to exposing the selves lurking in the shadows beyond the light of waking consciousness, the keepers of memories that he has ceased consciously to remember, of fears or desires that his conscious mind cannot, or will not, admit. The 7-yearold De Quincey – forever entering the room in which Elizabeth lies dead, forever agonizing about the debt of 15,000 books – is such an alternate self. Another such alternate self is the Cynic who scoffs at his sentimentalism. “‘But you forgot her,’ says the Cynic; ‘you happened one day to forget this sister of yours?’” (Lindop 115). By raising precisely the objections to De Quincey’s sentimental effusions that might well occur to any reader, the Cynic defuses the skeptical resistance and thus performs a useful rhetorical function. But the Cynic is also an interior voice of guilt and self-accusation. De Quincey, who reminds his reader of his adult presence deciphering the impressions of the child, is nowhere more clearly present than in his commentary on Elizabeth’s hydrocephaly.16 Why include the description, and its attendant footnote, on Elizabeth’s skull as the “astonishment of science”? Why raise the question about “the relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestation”? Why inform the reader of the autopsy (Lindop 99–100)? De Quincey, even without the voice of his Cynic, has given his sentimental account an astonishingly anti-sentimental substance of morbid anatomy.


The Cynic asserts himself again to scoff at De Quincey’s pretensions to a heightened sensibility. “ ‘And so, then,’ the Cynic objects, ‘you rank your own mind (and you tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations?’ ” Having challenged De Quincey’s declaration of abiding love to the sister whom he lost in childhood, the Cynic also scorns his claim to special sensitivity of mind. This is the familiar voice of a well-known adversary, and De Quincey deals with him accordingly. “I love to annoy him,” De Quincey says, before he goes on to explain his sensitivity in terms of “the great magnet in our dark planet”: Some minds stand nearer to the type of the original nature in man, are truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations – whether, in other parts of their intellectual system, they had or had not a corresponding compass – will tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of undulations. (Lindop 120) De Quincey here shares in the contemporary assumptions about the phenomena of animal magnetism. The energy of human consciousness and the nervous system, it was supposed by Friedrich Schelling and the Naturphilosophen, worked on wavelengths akin to those of electricity and magnetism. De Quincey echoes the argument of Gotthelf Heinrich Schubert, who explained dreams in terms of the mind’s response to the pull of the sun through the earth’s gravitational field by night.17 The argument that human consciousness responds to the vast physical energies of the solar system may have contributed, as well, to the metaphor of centrifugal, centripetal forces with which De Quincey opened the “Suspiria.” Power moves through all things and makes itself felt in the human mind. More sinister than the Cynic, another of De Quincey’s alternate selves in the “Suspiria” is the Dark Interpreter who appears in his dreams. As his personal Greek chorus in the “guilty drama of life” (to borrow De Quincey’s own inadvertent mistranslation of Jean Paul’s phrase “Schuldrama des Lebens,” M XI:285), the Dark Interpreter steps forth “not to tell you any thing absolutely new, that was done by the actors in the drama; but to recall you to your own

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lurking thoughts – hidden for the moment or imperfectly developed” (Lindop 157). The moral, the mystery, the anguish of experience, suppressed from conscious thought, are revealed in dreams by this insistent alien self. The Dark Interpreter is first introduced in the episode entitled “The Apparition of the Brocken.”18 De Quincey learned of this optical phenomenon from the account in Sir David Brewster’s Natural Magic,19 but also from Coleridge, who had twice climbed the Brocken during his residence in Göttingen in 1799. De Quincey records the date of Coleridge’s ascent as Whitsunday 1799. Because his story of Elizabeth’s death is set on a Palm Sunday, De Quincey has provided a temporal arch that swings from the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles.20 But the Brocken, also known as the Blocksberg, is the site of pagan worship and of the Walpurgis Night orgy of witches (a crucial event in Goethe’s Faust). The apparition is nothing more than the viewer’s own giant shadow cast by the rising sun upon clouds banked against the mountains to the west. Because its appearance and movement are affected by weather, by temperature inversion, and atmospheric refraction, the shadow is distorted and does not move in obedience to the person who casts it. This is precisely the peculiarity that De Quincey exploits as revealing the recalcitrant nature of the alien self. De Quincey’s purpose, of course, is to use the apparition of the Brocken to explain the Dark Interpreter of his dreams, that aspect of the self that lurks below consciousness and is therefore not obedient to the conscious will. He is originally a mere reflex of my inner nature. But as the apparition of the Brocken sometimes is disturbed by storms or driving showers, so as to dissemble his real origin, in like manner the Interpreter sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien natures. I do not know him in these cases as my own parhelion. (Lindop 156) Will the Brocken Spectre, as a creature of a place haunted by pagan lore, conform to De Quincey’s sense of religious observance? When De Quincey makes the sign of the cross, the phantom repeats the gesture, but with “the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively.” Has the shadow, too, suffered in the childhood of its pagan past “an affliction that was ineffable”? Will it join De Quincey in veiling its head in grief? “The trial,” De Quincey declares, “is decisive.” The shadow is


but a “reflex” of the self, and in calling it forth in the rituals of “secret feelings,” the phantom becomes “the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to the daylight what else must be hidden for ever.” De Quincey’s story of “The Palimpsest” also provides an arch or bridge to link together motifs already developed in “The Afflictions of Childhood.” Primarily it provides an elaborate metaphor to explain the layering within the brain of past impressions.21 Science, in De Quincey’s day, had already found a way to retrieve the layers of erased impressions once recorded upon the vellum. The brain, too, is a “natural and mighty palimpsest,” and like the vellum, “each succession has seemed to bury all that went before.” Although “the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness,” the buried impressions can be revived, “by the hour of death, [ … ] by fever, [ … ] by the searching of opium.” Certainly De Quincey makes the most of the palimpsest as metaphor for the subconscious, but he does so only after an extended account of the economics of supply and demand that retarded the development of the printing press and sustained the use and reuse of vellum. The idea of printing, as “an art for multiplying impressions,” was long practiced in minting coins and medals; “the obstacle to an introduction of printed books” was the “want of a cheap material for receiving such impressions.” Vellum was expensive, and the manuscript records inscribed upon vellum, should they lose their value over successive generations, were erased to give place to what held current value: “the Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled its own period” (Lindop 139– 42). “The Palimpsest” is therefore more than a metaphor of the mind, it is a metaphor for the power that moves through history, that defines and shapes political economy. Too, it is metaphor that echoes De Quincey’s passion for books and his childhood debt for 15,000 volumes. Finally, in a recollection of another story he heard as a child, it is an occasion for him to retell a frightening episode from his mother’s childhood. He does not reveal to the reader, however, that it is his mother’s story. “My entire life flashed before me” is a phenomenon often ascribed to near-death experience. De Quincey’s mother, who almost drowned as a small girl, “descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked that had permission to return” (Lindop 144, 249). For her it was the threatening immediacy of death, for

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him it was opium that stimulated the “celestial vision upon the brain.” Consciousness is momentarily freed from the bondage of time so that forgotten events of the past become “omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.” “The Palimpsest,” in the sequence De Quincey gave the “Suspiria” in 1845, is followed by “Levana” who presides over his education and her tutelary “Ladies of Sorrow,” who teach him the agonies of suffering and despair, then the Coleridigean journey to the Brocken introduces the giant shadow-self, and the tale of “Savannah-la-Mar,” city submerged by the flood of divine edict, describes the illusory view into a “cemetery” of drowned memories, a watery mirage “of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air” (Lindop 158). De Quincey borrowed his title from Psalm 130, “Out of the depths, have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (in the Vulgate: “De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine”; Lindop 245). In this sequel to the Confessions, the “sighs” may be sighs of anguish and the “depths” depths of despair, but they are also the irrepressible whisperings of alien selves captive in the abyss of the subconscious. Levana’s lessons of life have brought more than the knowledge of human frailty and loss; she has also exposed the workings of power within the depths. “The brain,” De Quincey writes, “rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within” (Lindop 152). Interaction of the self with the circumstances of family, with the powers of empire, or politics, or social structures define the “tempest from without.” Ferrier, in his “Philosophy of Consciousness,” lacked a vocabulary of symbols or categories adequate to the task of discriminating interior regions of the mind. De Quincey – through his tales of the palimpsest, the Ladies of Sorrow, the mountain-top phantom, the sunken city – provides models for the interaction between the conscious and subconscious. In his narrative of dream symbols, he locates the power of the tempest raging within the innermost recesses of the brain. De Quincey’s mind wrestled with “great antagonisms.” Some of these, to be sure, were engendered by the tides of his own opium addiction, some by his irrepressible casuistry, some by his whimsical cavorting with the mundane and trivial. Amidst the “sighs from the depths” are heard sighs for a dead kitten, a dead dog, and an unpayable debt for 15,000 books. The Cynic scoffs and the antisentimental


disrupts the sentimental.22 De Quincey was convinced that the progress of history as well as the creativity of the individual mind derived from the tensions and leverages of antithetical factors. In his essays on political economy, no less than in his dream visions, or in his interpretation of a passage from Wordsworth or Shakespeare, De Quincey discovers and delineates covert energies and hidden springs of rebellion and repression. Adversarial dynamics inform both the manner and the matter of De Quincey’s prose. His reiterated discrimination of “literature of knowledge” and “literature of power” are a part of his language of contraries: rhetoric and eloquence, identity and alterity, centripetal and centrifugal, systole and diastole, ethics and aesthetics (as in “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”). As the largest and most pervasive of these contraries, knowledge and power are at work within the individual mind and within society as a whole. The province of knowledge is practical and analytic, that of power is abstract, subtle, pervasive, and profound. The categories may be opposite, but they are not mutually exclusive: power may lurk within all that is perceived as merely knowledge.

2 Casuistry and Eidoloclasm

In his essays on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey contributed significantly to the reception of their works and helped shape the contemporary critical appraisal. As literary critic, he is well known for his oft-repeated formulation of “the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.”1 But De Quincey also developed a negative inversion of “Knowledge” and “Power” which he used frequently and insidiously. In the place of factual “Knowledge,” he appealed to “as if” modes of examining ethical and aesthetic cases.2 Instead of the creative “Power” to move and elevate, he examined authors for their telling weaknesses, attributes of their work or character that presumably undermined their merit and value. De Quincey prided himself as “doctor seraphicus, and also inexpugnabilis upon quillets of logic,”3 and his playful command of moral argumentation prompted him to turn Kantian aesthetics4 into “Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.” Because the most elaborate and damaging accounts of Coleridge appeared only after his death, Coleridge never saw the extent to which De Quincey openly jested about Coleridge’s failed marriage, opium addiction, and plagiarism. Wordsworth, however, witnessed in De Quincey’s criticism repeated betrayals of confidence and trust. The often malignant counterparts to “Knowledge” and “Power” De Quincey himself identified as “Casuistry” and “Eidoloclasm.” For his own ease of conscience as critic, the judgment or blame were often attributed to someone else. At the opening of his essay on “Casuistry” (Blackwood’s, October 1839 and February 1840), De Quincey acknowledges that the term 24

Casuistry and Eidoloclasm 25

had fallen into disrepute because of the abuse of its of methods by Catholic priests who, from lubricity of morals or the irritations of sensual curiosity, pushed their investigations into unhallowed paths of speculation. They held aloft a torch for exploring guilty recesses of human life which it is far better for us all to leave in their original darkness. Crimes that were often all but imaginary, extravagancies of erring passion that would never have been known as possibilities to the young and the innocent, were thus published in their most odious details. In spite of its bad reputation, De Quincey defends the methods of casuistry as essential to all considerations of right and wrong, good and evil. The name may have fallen out of favor, but the methods are still practiced: “by whatever title, it is absolutely indispensable to the practical treatment of morals.” What is often called “case law,” where cases establish precedence, is nothing other than casuistry, and the disrepute of casuistry is akin to the suspicion with which its legal practitioners are often regarded by the persuasion, pretty generally diffused, that the plain purpose and drift of this science was a sort of hair-splitting process, by which doubts might be applied to the plainest duties of life, or questions raised as to the extent of their obligations, for the single benefit of those who sought to evade them. A casuist was viewed, in short, as a kind of lawyer or special pleader in morals, such as those who, in London, are known as Old Bailey practitioners, called in to manage desperate cases, to suggest all available advantages, to raise doubt or distinctions where simple morality saw no room for either. To interpret the applicability of law, the lawyer of necessity resorts to casuistry: “Simply because new cases are for ever arising to raise new doubts whether they do or do not fall under the rule of law.” Moreover, De Quincey declares, “as society grows complex, the uses of Casuistry become more urgent.” Present-day deliberations in medical ethics, for example on the issue of sustaining life-support systems for persons with severe brain injury, build upon casuistry. So, too, do the considerations concerning whether derangements of health have impaired the intellect; whether “the judgment is,

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perhaps, too clouded to fix upon a right purpose; the will too enfeebled to pursue it.” As De Quincey declares, whenever it must be determined whether an act that an agent has performed, or wishes to perform, does or does not conform to the laws of church or court, to an existing body of precepts or values, then the methods of casuistry are inevitable.5 In his two-part essay, De Quincey reviews the relevance of these methods in arbitrating the ethical ambiguities of war, suicide, piracy, usury, dueling, mental health, hospitality, veracity, and fraudulence. The importance of casuistry to De Quincey’s endeavor as literary critic is evident whenever he feels called upon to test aesthetic values by standards of conscience. Should an author have depicted morally dubious acts, De Quincey was not averse to holding “aloft a torch for exploring guilty recesses of human life.” In his critical review of Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, De Quincey exercised casuistry as well as eidoloclasm (W 3:167–203). The first installment of the review ridiculed the translator for his Scotticisms and imperfect command of German. The second installment turned to Goethe himself, explaining that his strategy is not to defame a literary idol, but rather to allow the idol to be “his own eidoloclast.” To be an eidoloclast is not a pleasant office, because an invidious one. Whenever that can be effected therefore, it is prudent to decline the odium of such an office upon the idol himself. Let the object of false worship always, if possible, be made his own eidoloclast. As respects Wilhelm Meister, this is possible: and so far, therefore, as Goethe’s pretensions are founded on that novel, Goethe shall be his own eidoloclast. Goethe shall become “his own eidoloclast” when it is revealed that the idol worship has been misdirected, that he should never have been idolized in the first place. Not the baseness of Egyptian superstition, not Titania under enchantment, not Caliban in drunkenness, ever shaped to themselves an idol more weak or hollow than modern Germany has set up for its worship in the person of Goethe. The gods of Germany are too generally false gods; but among false gods some are more false than others: here or there is one who tends upwards, and


shows some aspirations at least towards the divine ideal: but others gravitate to earth and the pollutions of earth with the instincts and necessities of appetite that betray the brutal nature. From Goethe’s own work De Quincey will cite passages that expose the lust, and the reader will be called upon to judge the moral character: In what chamber of the German pantheon [ …] we are to look for the shrine of Goethe, and how long any shrine at all will survive the fleeting fashions of this age, […] we are not very anxious to say; and the rather, because we hope that a few extracts from his works – under the guidance of a few plain comments pointing out their relations, connexion, and tendency – will enable any reader of good sense to say that for himself. Casuistry here comes to the service of eidoloclasm, and De Quincey absolves himself of any responsibility in condemning Goethe’s immorality. Goethe shall reveal his turpitude in his own words, and the reader shall determine the extent of his guilt. “Throughout this paper,” De Quincey insists, “we wish it to be observed that we utter no dogmatisms – no machtsprüche (as the Germans emphatically style them) or autocratic judgments.” To resolve the problems of moral conscience, he shall simply guide the reader through an examination of cases. He shall assert no judgments of his own. For our own parts we shall do no more than suggest a few principles of judgment, and recall the hasty reader to his own more honourable thoughts, for the purpose of giving an occasional impulse and direction to his feelings on the passages which we shall quote – which passages, the very passages of Goethe, will be their own sufficient review and Mr. Goethe’s best exposure. As cases of conscience, De Quincey selects Goethe’s female characters: “there is no better test by which we can try the style and tone of a poet’s feelings than his ideal of the female character as expressed in his heroines.” De Quincey’s point, of course, is that the author has freely indulged his sexual fantasies in describing the rampant sexual exploits of his heroines. While he may have muzzled his “machtsprüche,” he is by no means neutral. In calling forth the “Gallery of

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Female Portraits,” he tells the reader to anticipate “a grand procession to the temple of Paphos” where Goethe resides as “high-priest.” The reader is invited to consider whether youth and ardent passion might excuse Mariana’s unwed pregnancy, whether financial need might justify her selling herself to Norberg, whether she is bereft of the capacity to make moral choices. Such are the justificatory exercises of casuistry when pandering to moral laxity. De Quincey is clearly having fun in his role of casuist questioning the behavior of the characters and their author. Once he has established the wanton and lascivious behaviour, he can suggest that the reader, too, has fallen under the erotic spell: “Oh! fie reader! How can you have such very reprehensible thoughts.” Whereas Mariana had two lovers, the next character, Philina, had two dozen, among whom Wilhelm Meister is again honored as having fathered her child. Might he be excused because he did not know who had crawled into his bed in the darkness? Might she be forgiven because she was “most philanthropic,” a “lover of all mankind”? Mrs. Melina, the Countess, the Baroness, Theresa – all have their foibles, and in each case De Quincey suggests possible grounds to forgive, pardon, or excuse. But a part of that act of exonerating the character, is turned into an accusation of the author. When Theresa, about to commit adultery with Wilhelm, decides to tell him of her mother’s adultery, De Quincey attacks the author who would put such words in her mouth: “Adultery, by way of displaying her virginal modesty: her mother’s adultery, in testimony of her filial piety!” When her mother’s adultery became too indiscreet, her father agreed to finance her “travel for the benefit of her ‘passions.’” Following the tour of the “Gallery,” De Quincey attempts a summary of “Meister’s ‘Affairs of the Heart.’” The novel closes, De Quincey observes, “amid a grand bravura of kissing and catch-match-making.” Has it been mere fanciful indulgence? or perverse obscenity? That casuistic question De Quincey leaves with the reader: we have made Mr. von Goethe’s novel speak for itself. And, whatever impression it may leave on the reader’s mind, let it be charged upon the composer. If that impression is one of entire disgust, let it not be forgotten that it belongs exclusively to Mr. Goethe. The music is his: we have but arranged the concert, and led in the orchestra.


The amusement of putting sexual caprice on display is justified, De Quincey concludes, by the need to challenge the idolization of the author. Eidoloclasm, as a counter to bardolatry, intended, or at least pretended, to correct the errors of hero worship by showing the author with human frailties and fallibilities. As De Quincey knew, the eidoloclastic exposé was also good journalism. Scandal attracts more readers than praise, and De Quincey scarcely leaves any adulation untinged with irreverence. His essay on Herder, entitled “Death of a German Great Man,” might seem to promise a panegyric – until one’s eye moves from the title to the opening sentence: Was Herder a great man? I protest, I cannot say. He is called the German Plato. I will not be so satirical as Mr. Coleridge, who, being told […] that Klopstock was the German Milton, said to himself, “Yes, – a very German Milton.” (W 3:115) As one of the most influential mediators of German thought during the 1820s and 1830s, De Quincey nevertheless took delight in ridiculing the very German authors whom he chose to introduce to English readers. He seldom suppressed his own Tory nationalism. Even in his admiration for Kant, he often jests about the cumbersome structure of Kant’s prose. And when Kant, in his essay on “National Character,” proclaims that Blacks have never “performed any thing great either in art – science – or any other credible path of exertion,” De Quincey adds a footnote pointing out the “absurd” prejudice of the philosopher of Königsberg who never lived among Blacks and knew nothing of their skills or education: “common sense demands that we should receive evidence to the intellectual pretensions of the Blacks from the unprejudiced judges who have lived amongst them, not from those who are absurd enough to look for proofs of negro talent in the shape of books” (W 3:157). De Quincey’s casuistry and eidoloclasm are present even in his essays on those whom he venerates: not just Kant, but also Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coleridge died on July 25, 1834. In his four-part essay, entitled “Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” in Tait’s Magazine in September, October, November 1834, and January 1835, De Quincey set aside the principle of respect for the recently deceased which he had stated at the opening of his essay on Dr. Samuel Parr. On seeing the first installment, Wordsworth expressed his anger at

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De Quincey’s betrayal. De Quincey’s essay was “highly offensive,” Wordsworth said, “and utterly unworthy of a Person holding the rank of a Gentleman in English society.” The eidoloclasm De Quincey had exercised against Goethe was based on passages from the literary works. The eidoloclasm against Coleridge, as Wordsworth saw it, resorted to an attack on Coleridge’s “personal Character” (to Joseph Henry Green, September 1834).6 De Quincey’s comments on Coleridge’s marriage so provoked Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, that he wished to send Hartley Coleridge to Edinburgh for the purpose of cudgeling De Quincey in the streets “as a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.”7 The revelations about Coleridge’s plagiarism, however, drew not from personal relationships, but from the evidence of the works. De Quincey cites several examples: Coleridge’s “The Hymn to Chamouni” was an expansion of a poem by Frederika Brun; in “France: an Ode” Coleridge borrows a few lines from Milton’s “Samson Agonistes”; the account of the mariner and the albatross in Captain George Shelvocke’s Voyage provided the idea for Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “These cases,” De Quincey acknowledges, “amount to nothing at all as cases of plagiarism.” They are simply literary reworkings of sources such as one may find in any author. What, then, constitutes “a case of real and palpable plagiarism” De Quincey need not resort to a casuistic distinction between “circumstantial” and “real and palpable.” Any judge, provided with the evidence, would reach the same verdict. De Quincey is in possession of that evidence. Why divulge it? Because some day the evidence will fall into the hands of an expositor less kindly disposed to Coleridge’s intellectual attainments. De Quincey had come across the evidence in Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophische Schriften, and had recognized the repetition in chapter 12 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge offers a “dissertation upon the reciprocal relations of the Esse and the Cogitare, – that is, of the objective and the subjective; and the attempt is made, by inverting the postulates from which the argument starts, to show each might arise as a product, by an intelligible genesis, from the other.” No casuistic circumvention of the facts was possible: this was “verbatim translation” and “barefaced plagiarism.” Having established the theft, De Quincey goes on to present the act as unmotivated by any need to steal. Coleridge


spun daily, and at all hours, for mere amusement of his own activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images such as neither Schelling – no, nor any other German that ever breathed, not John Paul – could have emulated in his dreams. Why then did Coleridge plagiarize? De Quincey calls it an act of intellectual cleptomania and attributes the compulsion to an infirmity of will. (Again, the casuistry is obvious.) And why did De Quincey publicly reveal the plagiarism? Because, “if frankly avowed by one who knew him best,” De Quincey said in his own justification, “the fact was disarmed of its sting; since it thus became evident that, where the case had been best known and most investigated, it had not operated to his serious disadvantage.” Wordsworth, to be sure, was most probably not upset by De Quincey’s revelations of Coleridge’s plagiarism. On the other hand, De Quincey had exposed the fact that Coleridge’s estrangement from his wife had prompted him to seek refuge in Dove Cottage, and more particularly he had made “a young lady [ … ] a daily companion” of his walks. “Intellectually,” De Quincey goes on to say, “she was very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge.” That comment could not have pleased the household at Greta Hall. De Quincey, pretending to protect the reputation of this unnamed companion, gives his readers another clue to her identity by declaring that “no shadow of suspicion settled upon the moral conduct,” for “the young lady was always attended by her brother.” He does not make the matter any better by declaring that this young lady “had no personal charms.” De Quincey pretends commiseration when he acknowledges that “it is a bitter trial to a young married woman to sustain any sort of competition with a female of her own age for any part of her husband’s regard,” but he seems oblivious to the fact that 30 years later, Sara Fricker Coleridge is not going to be any happier seeing her deceased husband’s former wanderings publicized. This is the peek-a-boo prose of a roman à clef. To Wordsworth it was obvious that many would recognize or guess the unnamed identities. Worried that the revelations in this first installment would be followed by even more damaging details in the continuation, he urged Joseph Henry Green, as Coleridge’s literary executor, to prevent the subsequent installments from appearing in Tait’s Magazine.

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Wordsworth grants that De Quincey, in spite of his revelations about Coleridge’s plagiarism, also “extols his intellectual powers as much as the most ardent of his Admirers, if discreet and judicious, would do.”8 Hartley did not travel to Edinburgh with a cudgel; his sister Sara Coleridge, who must have regretted the embarrassing details about her father’s estrangement from her mother, was inclined to forgive De Quincey: “ ‘the dismal degradation of pecuniary embarrassments,’ as he himself expresses it, has induced him to supply the depraved craving of the public for personality.”9 Six years later, however, she confronted an even more damaging exposé in James Frederick Ferrier’s “The Plagiarism of S. T. Coleridge” (Blackwood’s, March 1840). This essay took De Quincey to task for having inaccurately identified Coleridge’s source in Schelling and for having inadequately represented the extent of the plagiarism. It was Ferrier’s more rigorously documented account of Coleridge’s plagiarism that prompted Sara Coleridge to prepare a new edition of the Biographia Literaria (3 vols., London: William Pickering, 1847), complete with footnotes acknowledging the borrowed passages. In 1839 Wordsworth, who had not forgotten his concerns about De Quincey’s disregard for the feelings of Coleridge’s family, was to experience similar intrusions by the “base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.” The eidoloclasm in the three essays on Wordsworth in Tait’s Magazine (January, February, and April 1839) does not commence on the literary plain but resorts to gossipy insinuations and unflattering comments about personal appearance. John E. Jordan, who has devoted a chapter to these essays in De Quincey to Wordsworth: a Biography of a Relationship, repeats the apology that daughter Sara had proposed for De Quincey essays on Coleridge.10 It was true, as she had asserted, that De Quincey suffered “the dismal degradation of pecuniary embarrassments.” His predicament became even worse during the following years, and, as Jordan states, “he was changing residence constantly to avoid arrest for debt, moving as often as three times within a month [ … ] and would have been jailed had not the publisher Adam Black agreed to pay his debt on condition that he write articles on Pope and Shakespeare for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” As Jordan sees it, De Quincey was driven to scandal-mongering journalism by financial need: “In such straits he could not afford to be nice about the sacredness of intimate revelations.” And if this excuse is not adequate,


Jordan has another: De Quincey nurtured a longstanding resentment of Wordsworth for his disdain of De Quincey’s lower-class wife, Margaret Simpson, daughter of a Grasmere farmer. Psychologically these two motives were not incompatible. It may seem that the more De Quincey was driven by the one, the less relevant the other would become. However the opposite may have occurred. When Margaret died of typhoid fever on August 7, 1837, De Quincey felt the guilty pangs of having been unable to keep his family from the torments of poverty. “Peggy dead,” as Jordan phrases it, “became more of a martyr to the injustices of the Wordsworths than Peggy alive, and the sorrowful and angry husband aimed sharp barbs at Rydal Mount.” Many of his comments on the Wordsworths were the stuff of petty gossip, tinged, when positive, with a familiarity that was too frank, when negative, with cutting remarks about physical appearance and behavior that were rude. He had already, in his essay on Coleridge, said of Dorothy that she “had no personal charms.” But in that context he had not named her. Here he supplied the name and said that there was “even an unsexual character to her appearance.” Mary Wordsworth possessed, he said, a “sunny benignity – a radiant gracefulness,” but there was something wrong with her eyes, “a considerable obliquity of vision.” William, although an intrepid and indefatigable walker, nevertheless had an ungainly stride and ugly legs. He has Dorothy pronounce the final judgement on her brother’s appearance when she beholds him from the rear and declares, “How very mean he looks.” De Quincey not only announces in this essay “the nervous depression” that has afflicted Dorothy and “clouded her latter days,” he goes so far as to attribute the decline to “a defect in Miss Wordsworth’s self-education.” While there was little room for casuistry in describing physical appearance, De Quincey was very much in the realm of casuistry in assessing Wordsworth’s character. Was the poet a generous friend to the common man, or an arrogant, self-centered recluse. In De Quincey’s estimation “the love of nature” had failed to lead the poet “to the love of mankind.” De Quincey, who knew the yet unpublished Prelude, apparently considered the boy of Books I and II to be an egotistic fiction: “I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an amiable boy; he was austere and unsocial, I have reason to think, in his habits; not generous; and, above all, not self-denying.”

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The case of conscience to be weighed is whether Wordsworth ever reciprocated an act of kindness or generosity. De Quincey declares that his own testimony on the matter of Wordsworth’s want of gratitude would be corroborated by John Wilson: that to neither of us, though, at all periods of our lives, treating him with the deep respect which is his due, and, in our earlier years, with a more than filial devotion, – nay, with a blind loyalty of homage, which had in it, at that time, something of the spirit of martyrdom, which, for his sake, courted even reproach and contumely; yet to neither of us has Wordsworth made those returns of friendship and kindness which most firmly I maintain that we were entitled to have challenged. In consequence, while his admiration for the poet continued unabated, his love for the man gradually deteriorated. De Quincey confesses a long-smoldering resentment: More by far in sorrow than in anger – sorrow that points to recollections too deep and too personal for a transient notice – I acknowledge myself to have been long alienated from Wordsworth; sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility – nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindicative hatred. De Quincey’s casuistry becomes most evident when he weighs his own dedication to defending Wordsworth’s literary achievement against Wordsworth’s ingratitude and disregard for his efforts. Margaret Russett, in De Quincey’s Romanticism, argues that in the series of essays for Tait’s Magazine De Quincey achieved his goal of canon-formation by presenting himself, not as obedient devotee, but as abused servant, disaffected disciple, and finally as rebellious renegade.11 That rebellion leads the once dependent critic to cast the poet in a corresponding role of dependency. De Quincey’s Wordsworth is not a poet formally complete and accessible, but rather a poet dependent upon an interpreter. Whether he recognizes it or not, Wordsworth needs De Quincey. Jordan excerpts a few of the many passages in which De Quincey asserts his loyal support. He stood by Wordsworth when “the finger of scorn was pointed at Mr. Wordsworth from every journal in the land.” He opposed Jeffrey for his misreading of “There was a Boy.”12 His operative trope was


that Wordsworth was neglected and calumniated, and that he, De Quincey, was the sole reader to recognize and champion Wordsworth’s genius. In his continuation of the series, “Sketches of Life and Manners: from the Autobiography of an English-Opium Eater,” Tait’s Magazine ( January 1840),13 De Quincey describes the “Society of the Lakes.” His point is that Wordsworth had no place, no fame, no recognition in this society. “It is another and striking proof of the slight hold which Wordsworth, &c. had upon the public esteem” that Elizabeth Hamilton, author and learned lady, spent six months in the area without seeking an introduction. Wordsworth, even in his own sparsely populated community, had no following: “no admiring circle; no applauding coterie ever gathered about him.” The term “Lake School” was a misnomer. The collaboration with Coleridge had dissipated after the Lyrical Ballads. From 1809 to 1820, “The neighbouring people, in every degree ‘gentle and simple,’ literary or half-educated, who had heard of Wordsworth, agreed in despising him.” The “Society of the Lakes” was a society from which Wordsworth had been ostracized. De Quincey, on other hand, hobnobs with such ladies of intellect as Elizabeth Hamilton, Elizabeth Smith, and the two daughters of Dr. William Cullen – Miss Cullen and the widowed Mrs Millar. Through these latter two ladies, De Quincey introduces yet another witness to Wordsworth’s ignominy, Louis Simond, a Frenchman who had immigrated to America and was now traveling through Britain with his wife and her niece.14 Simond’s visit took place in October, 1810, when Wordsworth’s “ill fame was just then in its meridian.” De Quincey has described Simond’s visit to Grasmere “in order to illustrate the abject condition of worldly opinion in which Wordsworth then lived.” That argument, it must be said, is as specious an example of casuistry as De Quincey ever offered. He seeks to prove that Wordsworth had no status in “worldly opinion” because a “French Traveller” has visited Grasmere, met Wordsworth, and then failed to mention him in the Journal of a Tour published five years later. The logic of this post hoc, propter hoc proof of Wordsworth’s unpopularity is all the more specious because it is based on negative evidence. The absent reference to Wordsworth, which De Quincey takes as his evidence, is, in fact, no evidence at all. But the argument is more seriously flawed, because Simond does indeed mention

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meeting with Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey. The one whom Simond does not mention is De Quincey, who claims that he was Simond’s host and guide in Grasmere. In De Quincey’s account of the events at that time in Grasmere, Simond’s presence is disruptive and disturbing, not unlike Coleridge’s “person from Porlock,” yet also akin to the figures who haunted De Quincey’s dreams: the crocodile-liveried coachman of the Bath Road, the Dark Interpreter, or the mysterious Malay. Simond had earlier appeared in De Quincey’s essay, “On Suicide,” for the London Magazine (Nov. 1823; W 3:116). Among the casuistic justifications of suicide, De Quincey considered the victims of prolonged physical abuse, sexual degradation, dehumanizing exploitation, “human creatures” forced to perform “the labours of brutes.” On the principle of Donne’s Biathanatos, De Quincey declares, “it will be the duty of a man to die rather than to suffer his own nature to be dishonoured in that way.” De Quincey may well have been reminded of the passage in The Prelude, in which Michael Beaupuis points to the “ ‘hunger-bitten girl” tethered to a heifer and declares, “ ’Tis against that / Which we are fighting’” (IX:512–20). De Quincey cites not Wordsworth, but Simond, who told him, “That in France before the Revolution, he had repeatedly seen a woman yoked with an ass to the plough; and the brutal ploughman applying his whip indifferently to either.” This Simond, De Quincey explains, was “by adoption an American citizen, yet still French in his heart and in all his prejudices” (W 3:166). In his essay on “Casuistry,” published in Blackwood’s while he was still at work on his series on Wordsworth for Tait’s, De Quincey returns to the moral justifications of suicide, to Donne’s Biathanatos, and to casuistic reasonings on the possibility of “justifiable self-homicide.” What makes Simond a haunting figure is not that he had become for De Quincey a referent for suicide, or for dehumanizing exploitation. Simond was simply, in De Quincey’s memory, a smug Philistine for whom weights, measures, and statistical data were more important than art, history, feelings, or human values. Not burdened with an excess of intellectual baggage, he carried with him only a little case of knowledge, that he had packed up neatly for a makeshift; just what corresponds to the little assortment of razors, tooth-brushes, nail-brushes, hair-brushes, cork-screw, gimlet, &c.


&c., which one carries in one’s trunk, in a red Morocco case, to meet the casualties of a journey. The reason for Simond’s presence in De Quincey’s essays on the “Society of the Lakes” is not, as he states, “to illustrate the abject condition of worldly opinion in which Wordsworth then lived”; but, rather, to represent a prevailing insensitivity from which it became De Quincey’s mission to rescue Wordsworth. Now M. Simond, of all the men in the world, was the last who could have appreciated an English poet. He had, to begin with, a French inaptitude for apprehending poetry at all: any poetry, that is, which transcends manners and the interests of social life. Then, unfortunately, not merely through what he had not, but equally through what he had, this cleverish Frenchman was, by whole diameters of the earth, remote from the station at which he could comprehend Wordsworth. He was a thorough knowing man of the world, keen, sharp as a razor, and valuing nothing but the tangible and ponderable [ … ] he had, besides, at his fingers ends, a huge body of statistical facts – how many people did live, could live, ought to live, in each particular district of each manufacturing county; how many old women of eighty-three there ought to be to so many little children of one; how many murders ought to be committed in a month by each town of five thousand souls; and so on ad infinitum. In this description, Simond bears a degree of similarity to De Quincey, the political economist, alter ego of De Quincey, the literary critic. Would it not have been a breach of hospitality, De Quincey could have done justice on this malefactor, by meeting M. Simond on his own ground, and taking the conceit out of him most thoroughly. I was one of those: for I had the very knowledge, or some of it, that he most paraded. [ … ] I, for my part, in my own house, could not move upon such a service. Not only would a rebuttal of Simond have been ill-treatment of his guest, it would have meant that De Quincey would have shown himself as superior to the poet himself in defending Wordsworth’s

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poetic principles – a presumption which he could not at that time – in 1810 – have allowed. in those days, moreover, when yet I loved Wordsworth not less that I venerated him, a success that would have made him suffer in any man’s opinion by comparison with myself, would have been painful to myself. Simond’s entry into this narrative 30 years later helps De Quincey define the difference between his present and his former regard for Wordsworth. But what were his motives for inviting Simond to Dove Cottage in the first place? Several years earlier, Mrs. Millar had been summoned from Glasgow to Charleston. Her husband, John Millar, son of a Glasgow professor, had immigrated to the Carolinas and had suffered sunstroke. Mrs. Millar arrived to find him near death. She gratefully accepted the services of Louis Simond who made all arrangements for her husband’s funeral. The widowed Mrs. Millar and her sister, Miss Cullen, subsequently moved to Clappersgate, Windermere. On the occasion of Simond’s travels through Britain, she had the opportunity to repay his kindness: “somewhere about the May or June of 1810, I think – they were able, by a long preparatory course of economy, to invite to the English lakes” Simond, his wife, and his wife’s niece. Mark Reed in his Chronology assumes that De Quincey has misremembered the date.15 Perhaps not. It would have been in late May or early June that Mrs. Millar extended her invitation to the Simond family in London. The Simonds traveled through the Lake District, staying at Ambleside for two nights early in August, presumably meeting briefly with Mrs. Millar and Miss Cullen before continuing on to Edinburgh. To De Quincey the sisters had made their literary opinions quite clear, for they would “practice the same courteous and indulgent silence, whenever the names of Coleridge or Wordsworth happened to be mentioned.” Moreover, De Quincey knew that Simond, who had spent the previous month in Edinburgh, would be “double-charged with contempt from The Edinburgh Review, and from the report (I cannot doubt) of his present hostess.” On September 16 the Simond family had returned, via Melrose Abbey to Patterdale, and on October 10, together with the two sisters from Clappersgate, the Simond party arrived as De Quincey’s guests at Dove Cottage. Simond would


have already decided, De Quincey surmised, that Wordsworth was “too abject almost for the trouble of too openly disdaining him.” Nevertheless, Wordsworth must be invited: I had taken care to ask Wordsworth amongst those who were to meet the party. Wordsworth came; but, by instinct, he and Monsieur Simond knew and recoiled from each other. The met, they saw, they inter-despised. Wordsworth, on his side, seemed so heartily to despise M. Simond that he did not stir or make an effort to right himself under any misapprehension of the Frenchman, but coolly acquiesced to any and every inference which he might be pleased to draw. If Wordsworth, as De Quincey describes, was passive and morose in response to Simond’s grand display of statistics, it was not to be wondered. Dorothy, who might otherwise have accompanied him, had gone to visit Catherine Clarkson in Bury St. Edmunds, and was now being escorted about London by Henry Crabb Robinson. Basil Montagu and his wife had arrived at Allen Bank during the last week of September and were staying for the month as guests. Coleridge was now in his second year as resident at Allen Bank. Whooping cough and scarlet fever had invaded the house, and Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine was left seriously ill. Wordsworth, however, was not as ungracious as De Quincey suggests. He accompanied the party on a walking tour, shared his stories, and showed them the visual splendors. “Mr. Wordsworth, who lives on Grasmere,” Simond writes in his Journal of a Tour, “was so obliging as to guide us to some of its beauties; wild spots around its northern extremity” (W 2:338–9). Simond records the tragic tale of the Green family – which De Quincey claims he related. Simond also repeats the story of Gough and his loyal dog at Red Tarn, and, necessary ingredient in all travel journals, the story of the Maid of Buttermere (2:339– 40, 343– 4). On October 15, just three days prior to Coleridge’s departure for London with Basil Montagu, Louis Simond visited Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall, where he picked up some details of the “Pantisocracy” project, in which he also implicates Wordsworth. We had the pleasure of seeing several times the celebrated Mr. Southey, a distinguished favourite of the English muses.

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Mr. Coleridge, whose talents are equally known, although less fruitful, was at Mr. S’s, with whom he has some family connexion. Both of these gentlemen, and I believe, Mr. Wordsworth, another of the poets of the lakes, had in the warmth of their youthful days, some fifteen years ago, taken the spirited resolution of traversing the Atlantic, in order to breathe the pure air of liberty in the United States. (2:345–6) If Klopstock was “a very German Milton,” Milton was, in Simond’s estimation, a very English Ariosto. Both, after all, wrote epic poems on the marvelous and supernatural. And the foremost modern English poet in this tradition, Simond declares, was Southey. Mr. S. has chosen a career in which he does not at present meet with any competitor. He is eminently the poet of chimeras. Milton left a great model of the kind; and he has surpassed it in monstrous creations and events, so totally out of nature, as to exclude not only sympathy, but, in a great degree meaning itself. [ …] The modern poet understands piety and tenderness much better than his predecessor. The love and the theology of Paradise Lost are alike harsh and austere, coarse and material, – while Mr. S. has tenderness and spirituality. (2:347–8) Simond has observed that Milton and Southey “have few readers, although they have many admirers” (2:348). As commentator on the great epic poets of chimeras, Simond clearly belongs to that class who admire without reading. De Quincey could scarcely have found a better agent for his eidoloclasm. Was De Quincey’s eidoloclasm effective? If the measure must be the destruction of the cultural idols upon whom he wrote, then it is clear that his targets – Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth – were still standing after the worst of his salvos. Indeed, it may be that De Quincey’s revelations actually had the opposite effect, and by exposing their frailties he humanized and thus enhanced their reputations. Although Jordan wants to attribute De Quincey’s negative comments on Wordsworth to an abiding resentment over the ill-treatment of Margaret, that explanation overlooks De Quincey’s predilection for slinging a bit of journalistic mud at all of his subjects – not just Wordsworth. David Masson was more comprehensive in his observation that this negative stance was


a peculiarity distinguishing De Quincey from the herd of common eulogists. Not only does he never make a swan out of a demonstrably inferior bird, but he is critically frank, humorously shrewd and clear-sighted, in his exhibition of the swans themselves. (5:4)16 [ … ] in all those celebrated sketches by De Quincey of the contemporaries he admired and honoured most, the presence always of a critical element – the interfusion of qualifying comment or actual banter with the eulogy, hinting or specifying of defects, the relapse from the subject of the eulogy as he might deservedly appear to the public through his public performance to the man himself on [ … ] closer inspection. (5:5) Rather than damning with faint praise, this is the strategy of praising with forthright damnation. De Quincey several times repeats the point that Goethe was a 50-year-old man when he wrote the adventures of Wilhelm Meister and surrounded his semi-autobiographical hero with such a “gallery” of sexually unrestrained females. Intended to expose Goethe as the “dirty old man of Weimar,” De Quincey’s eidoloclasm actually anticipated in its salacious charges the reception of Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (1835), published soon after Goethe’s death, with an English edition translated by Bettina herself and printed by John Murray. Bettina von Arnim’s account of herself, as a young girl nestling into Goethe’s lap, implicated, even more clearly than De Quincey, the erotic proclivities of the older Goethe happily embracing his playmate in the game which both were consciously playing, for Goethe was then (in 1807) 58 and Bettina, not the “child” she pretended to be, was 22. Contemporary reviews tended to mix tongue-clucking disapproval with obvious delight in the subtle titillation of the correspondence17 (for Bettina constructed her “epistolary novel” from an actual exchange of letters). De Quincey’s eidoloclastic portrait of Goethe was confirmed,18 and Goethe’s reputation persisted undiminished though not untarnished. Even after Ferrier had written his more aggressive indictment of Coleridge’s plagiarism, De Quincey reaffirmed that his earlier revelations had made it easier to understand Coleridge’s compulsive appropriations from Schelling and others.19 Stephen Gill acknowledges the

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value of De Quincey’s public intrusion into Wordsworth’s private domestic sphere: “Observant, shrewd, by and large generous, De Quincey’s essays are fascinating, but they broadcast exactly the kind of domestic detail that Wordsworth regarded as sacredly private.”20 Gill’s appraisal is much the same as the contemporary response of Henry Crabb Robinson, who found De Quincey’s Lake Reminiscences “scandalous, but painfully interesting”21 – an achievement as biographer which De Quincey deliberately crafted and executed.

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Two annual Book Fairs have traditionally been held in Germany, one at Frankfurt in the Fall, the other at Leipzig in the Spring. Attended by hundreds of booksellers, these fairs provided an important occasion for publishers to market their new volumes. In the Spring of 1824, Johann Heinrich Bohte, a London bookseller, arrived in Leipsig to look over the new offerings and make his purchases. He was surprised to find among the works being displayed by the Berlin publishing house of Friedrich August Herbig, a novel by Sir Walter Scott that had just been translated in German. The fact of a German translation was not in itself surprising, for Scott’s novels had gained great popularity in Germany and there was a considerable race among the publishing houses to be first on the market with the latest in the series of novels that had been appearing, at least one three-volume novel each year, for the past ten years. During the past four years, the competition had grown so intense that translators were driven to work in teams, literally around the clock. Translations of Kenilworth, The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Quentin Durward appeared in Germany within in two months after Archibald Constable, Scott’s publisher, had sent out the first shipment from Edinburgh. What surprised Bohte was not that another Scott novel was now on sale in Germany, but the fact that this one, Walladmor, was not yet arrived in the book stores of London. Determined to find out why this new novel by the Great Unknown was as yet unknown in England, Bohte brought copies back to London. He quickly confirmed that it was a forgery. Indeed, Scott himself was already aware of the forgery, because a copy of 43

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Walladmor (1824) had been posted to him in February from the ostensible translator. More than the fact of the literary forgery, Scott was upset that this German publication had undermined his effort to keep his name out of the books published “by the author of Waverley.” In a letter to Lady Abercorn (March 4, 1824), Scott denies that “the author of the novels you mention” would have contracted to produce “a certain number of volumes within a given time.” Cautious about his social position as well as his investment at Abbotsford, Scott wanted to maintain anonymity. Thus he objected to “the publication of a German novel professing to be translated from the English, and bearing my name at full length on the title-page.”1 Bohte promptly informed the public of the hoax in the Morning Chronicle, and there the matter of a British response to the German forgery might have come to an end, were it not for the curiosity of Bohte’s friend, who begged to borrow a copy of the novel. That friend, who roomed at Bohte’s lodgings when he came down from Edinburgh to work at the London Magazine, was Thomas De Quincey. Fascinated by the boldness of the hoax, De Quincey wanted to examine more closely the pretensions of the author who had presumed to publish in the name of Sir Walter Scott this romance of piracy and rebellion set in Wales. Bohte, however, had but one copy left, and that was promised to a buyer who expected to receive his purchase in two day’s time. Not wanting to disappoint his friend, Bohte allowed De Quincey to borrow this sole copy, but for 32 hours only and with the proviso that he was not to damage the book’s pristine condition. The proof that a book was not “used,” of course, was that its pages were uncut. The task of reviewing the book, therefore, was made all the more challenging: if the critic is called upon to read three volumes containing 883 pages (each page one-sixth more than the pages of Sir Walter Scott’s) in 32 hours, under terror of having the book reclaimed, – and when that terror is removed, uses his spare time in making translations of the principal scenes and connecting them together by the necessary links of narrative, – we can then understand that, whilst some service is done to the reader, some labour is also incurred by the critic. This is the simple statement of our own case and merits in regard to the reader. We actually read

Sir Walter Scott and the Literary Pirates 45

through, and abstracted, the whole novel within the time specified: and, the copy not being our own but promised to an Edinburgh purchaser, we read – as critics are wont to read – in the uneasy position of looking up a chimney: for, in order to keep a book in a saleable state, the paper-cutter must not lay bare above one-sixth of the uncut leaves – nor let the winds of Heaven visit their hidden charms too roughly. De Quincey’s was accustomed to the race to meet the printer’s deadline, but this 32-hour dash to read and translate passages from a three-volume novel, most of which he could read only by peering up the chimney of the uncut pages, posed insurmountable difficulties. At the end of the 32 hours, by some accident of fortune’s wheel, the copy turned out to be a derelict, and was forfeited to us: upon which we set to work and made the most of this Godsend – by turning “wrecker” and plundering the vessel of some of her best stores. Our trust is – that we have stowed away into the LONDON MAGAZINE some of the choicest scenes of Walladmor. The review, which appeared in the London Magazine, October 1824, aroused more attention than the reviewer had anticipated. In spite of De Quincey’s scoffing at the pseudo-Scott’s lack of familiarity with the Welsh countryside and Welsh customs, his selection of “choicest scenes” stimulated interest in the plot. As result neither Scott nor De Quincey could simply ignore the debate that had arisen over this would-be Waverley novel. One year later, Scott provided his answer to Walladmor with the publication of The Betrothed (1825). The Reverend Dryasdust, whose appearance in the Introduction to previous Waverley novels had established his role as foil to the Great Unknown because of distortions of history foisted on the public in guise of the historical romance, is present once more in the Introduction to The Betrothed. On this occasion, however, Dryasdust is attending a meeting of shareholders who plan to form a “joint-stock company, united for the purpose of writing and publishing the class of works called the Waverley novels.” It is proposed that “some part of the labour of composing these novels might be saved by the use of steam.” Once the “suitable words and phrases” have been placed into a “framework” devised by

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the German author, Dousterswivel, it will produce a narrative text; “by such a mechanical process as that by which weavers of damask alter their patterns, many new and happy combinations cannot fail to occur, while the author tired of pumping his brains, may have agreeable relaxation in the use of his fingers.” At this juncture it is suggested that “the late publication of Walladmor” was apparently “the work of Dousterswivel, by the help of the steam-engine.” While other shareholders defend the merit of Walladmor, “had the writer known anything about the country in which laid the scene,” Dryasdust expresses his doubt whether the Welsh manners expressed in their present project, The Betrothed, will satisfy the experts in Welsh lore. The German author, it is conceded, had a decided advantage, for Walladmor “was got up for the German market, where folks are no better judges of Welsh manners than of Welsh crw [ale].”2 Herr Dousterswivel, aided by a steam-driven word-processing machine, had not secretly authored the German Waverley novel. The feat of bold forgery had been accomplished by Ewald Hering, who was soon to become known to the German reading public as Willibald Alexis, “the Sir Walter Scott of the Mark Brandenburg.” Alexis had, in fact, already served his apprenticeship as a translator of Scott. His forgery was deliberately contrived to advertise his own abilities as a novelist. Even if the hoax were soon discovered, he reasoned, he would nevertheless succeed in calling attention to his skill as a writer. The plan worked well, for it was with this that Alexis launched a successful career as author of historical novels. Alexis gave every effort to make Walladmor look like a Waverley novel, even parodying a Scott-style Dedication and Introduction, and twice using “authorial intrusion” to recollect personal “autobiographical” episodes. Alexis complemented the sham with a Note from the Translator, acknowledging difficulties in rendering Scott’s style properly in German. In spite of the presumptuous charlatanry of his endeavor, Alexis, as De Quincey gleefully observed in his review, was considerably less proficient than Scott in his mastery of British history. The more Alexis strove for Waverley authenticity, the more he betrayed his lack of familiarity with local lore and customs. “Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott,” it was announced on the German titlepage. “‘Freely translated!’” De Quincey had echoed in his review, “Yes, no want of freedom! All free and easy! impossible


to complain on that score. Verily, this is the boldest hoax of our times.” When Taylor and Hessey, his publishers at London Magazine, persuaded De Quincey to translate the entire novel into English, he had to confront the problems that he had already pointed out in his review: it would not suffice simply to translate the novel, he must out-hoax the hoaxer. If this was to be a forgery, then it must be a better one than the German forger had produced. De Quincey’s timing was fortuitous. Right alongside The Betrothed, the Welsh romance also written in response to the German forgery, booksellers now placed the newly published version of Walladmor in English. De Quincey’s task, as he saw it, was to improve the descriptions of Wales and the Welsh that Alexis had bungled. De Quincey corrected the historical and geographical inaccuracies, refurbished the misbegotten scenes of “local color,” and generally spruced up the dialogue. In spite of his lack of familiarity with Wales, Alexis himself was determined to give his forgery as much Waverley authenticity as he could muster. He had competently researched contemporary accounts of smuggling activities along the Welsh Coast. Perhaps his most significant departure from the usual Waverley formula is the fact that this novel is set, not in the distant past but in the years just prior to the publication of the novel. Scott seldom encroached so upon the present. Alexis has chosen the period immediately following the Cato Street Conspiracy of February, 1820. To lend credibility to his ignorance of Wales, he tells the story through the character of a German visitor, Bertram, who is on a picturesque tour. As it turns out, this German visitor is actually an heir to the Walladmor estate. He and his twin brother had been kidnapped as infants. One son, Edward, is raised by sailors engaged in the smuggling trade, the other, Bertram, is given to a woman who accompanies her lover to his native port of Hamburg. Twenty years have passed and the two twins meet in a shipwreck off the coast of Caernarfon (Carnarvon). Bertram saves Edward from drowning, but almost drowns himself Later, as he loses his way at night on a mountain road, Bertram is guided by Edward to the road leading down to the town of Machynlyth. Although still strangers, unaware of their relationship, the brothers feel a bond between them. Before he departs, Edward pledges his friendship to Bertram. At the inn in Machynlyth where he spends the night, Bertram learns of the exploits of Edward, who has gained a reputation as a Robin Hood among smugglers, who

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helps the poor and enables impoverished communities to avoid the heavy taxation on the goods that they must import. Edward is a brilliant leader, capable of escaping the many traps set for him by government agents. But his wild exploits have recently taken a dangerous turn. For his suspected role in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a warrant has been issued charging him with high treason. The plot to murder the ministers at a Cabinet dinner and seize control of the Bank of England and the Tower was foiled when the conspirators at their meeting in Cato Street, Edgware Road, were surprised by officers. The date of that actual event, February 23, 1820, provides a date, as well, for the historical setting Alexis has given to his tale. Another actual event he retold as one of Edward’s most stunning exploits in the novel. With soldiers watching all the roads to apprehend the transport of smugglers and smuggled goods, Edward arranges the funeral of Captain le Harnois (chapter IX), who lies in a coffin pretending to be dead. The coffin itself also contains the smuggled goods, concealed beneath a false bottom. The smuggler and his crew are the mourners who follow the procession to a cemetery, where a false tomb has been prepared for storing the contraband. This episode, as well as other details of the smuggling enterprise, Alexis has taken from an account of the life of Captain Isaac Gulliver.3 Does this real Captain Gulliver bear any relation to Lemuel Gulliver, whose maritime adventures had been narrated by Jonathan Swift? Perhaps; at least insofar as the name “Gulliver” would have been familiar to Swift as a name belonging to a seafaring family of the Bristol Channel. Isaac Gulliver, of course, was born years after Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels first appeared in 1726. But the celebrated smuggler, Isaac Gulliver, had merely followed in his father’s profession, and perhaps that father his father before him. Young Isaac early proved his ingenuity and his leadership, and was soon running a great quantity of goods along the Bristol shore between Poole and Christchurch. The church at Kinson became his headquarters. The grooves worn in the sandstone parapets of the Kinson church tower were said to have been caused by the ropes Gulliver used to haul his contraband up to the roof of the tower for storage. He also concealed his wares in a chest tomb in the Kinson churchyard that was conveniently near the church door.4 One stone slab on the side of the tomb could be swung out like a door to make it more accessible if goods had to be hidden quickly.


The forged Waverley novel accomplished its purpose in Germany. The author himself had revealed the hoax in the final chapter of the third volume. As De Quincey appraised the hoax, A great Hum was inflated at Leipsic, and went floating over the fields of Germany: a ␭, or glittering bubble – blown by the united breath of German Paternoster-Row, – ascended as the true balloon. Bubbled Germany laughed, because it knew not that it was a bubble: and bubbling Germany laughed, because it knew full well that it was. The laugh of welcome was before it: the cachinnus of triumph was behind it. At the beginning of the third volume of Walladmor, the translator prefixed a dedication to Sir Walter Scott in which he complains of the difficulties of translating in haste. In terms of the fiction told here the proofsheets were arriving by post directly from Edinburgh. Perhaps thinking of James Macpherson’s attempts to have a scholar of Gaelic translate his fabrications of the Ossianic poems into their supposedly “original” language, De Quincey sees himself as fulfilling the role of co-conspirator in the literary piracy: Now it was the design of the pirates to put this German translation into another conspirator’s hands who was to translate it into good English: he was ready to swear (and truly) that he had nothing to do with any piratical practices upon English books; for that he had translated from a known and producible German book. The German book was in regard to him the authentic archetype. As to any Scotch book of Mr. Constable’s press, for any thing he knew – that might be a piratical translation from the German copy, obtained probably by some nefarious corruption and bribery of Mr. Constable’s amongst German compositors. De Quincey himself, of course, had invented this plot to present the “original” Walladmor in “good English.” But after he had in fact completed his task as translator and refurbisher of the Waverley forgery, he could not help but issue a challenge to his German co-author to “translate me back again into German.” His German collaborator, however, must be sure to make as many improvements on his English version as he, De Quincey, has made in translating the German. If he should succeed, De Quincey declares, “I give you

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my word of honor that I will again translate you into English.” Fortunately for literary posterity, Willibald Alexis chose to ignore the challenge. De Quincey, for his part, never lost his delight in literary hoaxes. Years later, when he wrote his essay on “Great Forgers: Chatterton and Walpole, and ‘Junius,’ ” he might well have made mention of his own role in unhoaxing and counterhoaxing the great German forgery of a Waverley novel. Scott’s novels of the Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration addressed the faction and rivalry between the power of political authority in London and the counter-currents in the remoter reaches. After the overthrow of Napoleon, the situation in the German provinces provided tensions not unlike those in Old Mortality or Peveril of the Peak. Following the Karlsbad Congress of 1819 and reactionary censorship under Metternich’s influence, German readers could recognize their own strife and conflict in Scott’s account of Puritan vs. Cavalier, Whig vs. Tory, Scotch vs. English. More important, the Waverley novels demonstrated how a dialectic synthesis of opposing factions might bring about historical progress. The hero of a Waverley novel – Edward Waverley, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward (to name a few who were especially popular in Germany) – typically crosses over factional lines, sometimes seeming to betray the cause of his own heritage, but ultimately contributing to a union and understanding between the opposing parties. Crucial to this resolution is the affirmation of the historical past. Because of the abiding and informing relevance of the cultural heritage, according to Scott’s representation of history, progress can be achieved only by building upon, not by demolishing, the past. While it is true that Alexis rode to success by leaping on the bandwagon of Scott’s popularity, it is also true that Alexis was foremost among those who pushed that bandwagon off the boat and got it rolling through Berlin and other German cities. As early as 1818, during his first year as a student of law and history at the University of Berlin, Alexis had already commenced work on his translation of The Lady of the Lake, which he published in 1821. His translation of The Lay of the Last Minstrel followed in 1827. Among his first contributions to the literary periodicals in 1820 and 1821 were critical essays on Scott and reviews of recently translated Waverley novels. Although he was also attentive to the narrative mannerisms of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, his first endeavors in fiction


(Die Schlacht bei Torgau, Der Schatz des Tempelherrn, Iblou, and Der Schleichhändler, 1823) also show the influence of Scott’s particular shaping of historical romance. As Alexis emphasized in his critical essays on Scott, it was the intimate insight into human character and the fidelity to historical events that made the Waverley novels seem real and true. In spite of his recognition of the operative versimilitude, Alexis was too fond of the involutions of self-reflexive irony, as elaborated by Hoffmann and Tieck, not to disrupt the subtle mimicking with interludes of blatant mocking. It was his unwillingness to repress an ironic tampering with the very processes of narrative illusion that ultimately made his Walladmor a Waverley-spoof rather than a Waverley-forgery. De Quincey, although fully aware of the romantic irony in German literature, apparently felt that it was precisely this self-reflexive indulgence that he would have to expunge from his translation of the novel if it were to be rendered at all acceptible as a mock-Waverley. Scott, of course, has his own mode of romantic irony. In the preface to Peveril of the Peak, for example, the Rev. Dryasdust is seated alone before his fireplace, sipping his evening sherry, when an unexpected guest arrives. It is the Author of Waverley. A heated discussion ensues in which the Reverend accuses the Author of Waverley of substituting fiction for fact and misrepresenting history for the sake of romance. The Author of Waverley defends the historical novel as more accurate than historical records which, he argues, are always distorted by factional bias and party zeal. The historical novel he declares to be more true, precisely because it is concerned with enduring human character and the course of history, rather than merely the factional allegiances of the moment. After the guest exits the room, the Rev. Dryasdust rings for the servant and demands to know “what had become of the stranger.” The servant denies that any guest had been admitted. When Dryasdust “pointed to the empty decanters” as proof that a guest had been with him, the servant impudently observes “that such vacancies were sometimes made when I had no better company than my own.” It is one thing for the Great Unknown to make his appearance in a preface, quite another were he to intrude upon the narrative and confront the hero in the midst of action. Such was the quirk that De Quincey felt crucial to delete in his translation of Walladmor. Precisely because of the role of interpreter and mediator of German

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literature which he assumed at the London Magazine and later at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, De Quincey’s reaction effectively underscores how romantic irony, to the extent that one can trace its presence in English literature of the period, differs from its counterpart in Germany. Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots (1797), Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre, and Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot are prime examples of the sort of authorial intrusion which seeks to manipulate illusion by exposing the devices of narrative and challenging the reader’s response. August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his review of Puss-in-Boots, praised Tieck’s self-reflexive ingenuity in creating a play about a play. As Schlegel acknowledged in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, Aristophanes had early exploited the effects of such self-reflexive irony (KSB, V:151–6), and, as in Hamlet’s instructions to the players, Shakespeare, too, had mastered the subtle games of metadramatic self-reference (KSB, VI:169–70). But what gave romantic irony its essential thrust as exploited in the works of Tieck and Hoffmann was the conspiratorial glee at baffling bourgeois matter-of-factness and philistine pomposity. Kant’s insistance on the a priori categories of mind and the inaccessibility of the “I” as Ding-an-sich had established a new concept of self-consciousness which these writers were quick to appropriate. Philosophical arguments on how to discriminate subject and object prompted Friedrich Schlegel to declare that “philosophy is the true home of irony” and is most fully expressed as a “transcendental buffoonery” (Lyceum, §42). With the notable exception of Byron’s Don Juan, very little in the literature of English Romanticism reveals anything like this deliberate preoccupation with the processes of engendering and disrupting illusion. Not that the poets of English Romanticism were less reflective and introspective about the task of creating poetry, or less inclined to write poems about writing poems. Rather, the ways in which they adapted the ironies of involution, as David Simpson demonstrates in Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979) with examples from Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, was evident primarily in the subjectivity and self-referentiality of metaphor. To challenge and expose the limits and deceptions of language, the romantic poets in England adapted the metaphor to ironic strategies of “language about language.” An involution of metaphor which calls attention to the entrapment of language, according to Simpson,


characterizes the romantic irony of the English poets. Anne K. Mellor, in her English Romantic Irony (1980), defines a more elaborate set of philosophical oppositions. The Romantic poets, as she explains it, sought to develop “a literary mode” which would correspond with a particular “mode of consciousness or a way of thinking about the world” (p. 27). She turns first to the “heroic balancing between enthusiastic commitment and sophisticated skepticism” of Byron’s Childe Harold (p. 33), and then goes on to identify a similar balancing of enthusiasm and skepticism in Keats’ poetry of “negative capability” (p. 77). The “Everlasting Yea” and “Everlasting Nay” in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1829–31) provides still another example of the balancing of enthusiasm and skepticism which she holds to be the essential characteristic of romantic irony (pp. 112–13). In order to discuss romantic irony in Coleridge, Mellor moves from these major characteristics to the more subtle modulations that she discusses in the “guilt-ridden ambivalence” of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). Although she does not ignore that “permanent parekbasis” of romantic irony which Schlegel had located in the narrative structure, Mellor finds the romantic irony in English literature more evident in those tensions of enthusiasm and skepticism which are ambiguous and ontologically unstable. The literary texts which she discusses evince little of the self-reflexive acts of concealing and exposing, affirming and denying the authorial manipulation of narrative, which one associates with the Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots or Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Simpson and Mellor discuss an English romantic irony which, although it bears an obvious kinship, nevertheless excludes many of the operative principles of romantic irony in German literature. Indeed, the astute commentaries by Ernst Behler, Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, and Uwe Japp address a larger and more complex set of literary phenomena. With her attentive discrimination of cultural developments in Great Britain, Germany, and France, Lilian Furst provides a valuable service in explaining why romantic irony is a concept that gains utility for the comparativist critic only when it is seen to operate in accord with the modes and fashions peculiar to a given nation at a given historical moment. If there was a romantic irony in Great Britain, it was remarkably unlike the romantic irony practiced in Germany. De Quincey was not the only British critic who found the disruptions of German

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romantic irony repugnant. Scott disapproved of the capricious authorial intrusions which reveal an unrestrained whimsy in Hoffmann’s fiction. Hoffmann’s unwillingness to control the “wildness” of his fancy, as Scott saw it, led him to give free rein to “the grotesque and fantastic.” The resulting tales were unpleasant and even painful, Scott asserted, because “the overstrained feelings” seemed indistinguishable from “fits of lunacy” or, familiar to De Quincey, the delusions of opium addiction (“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” pp. 348, 352). Hazlitt, objecting to the radical juxtapositions in Don Juan, likened the effects of Byron’s poem to an eagle building “its eyry in a common sewer.” “The solem hero of tragedy,” complained Hazlitt, “plays Scrub in the farce” (XI:75). Expressing his disdain for formal impropriety, De Quincey is aghast at the concluding twist which Alexis gives to his narrative. The essential difference which De Quincey imposed upon his English Walladmor lies in his effort to purge the finale of its mocking self-reflexivity. The novels commence, nevertheless, on the same footing; and De Quincey’s version follows the German plot more or less step-for-step through the first half of the narrative. De Quincey, in his “Dedication to W * * *s, the German ‘Translator’ of Walladmor,” explains where the two versions vary and why. Alexis, as De Quincey had gleefully observed in his review, was considerably less proficient than Scott in his mastery of British history. The more Alexis strove for Waverley authenticity, the more he betrayed his lack of familiarity with local lore and customs. In this “Dedication,” De Quincey takes particular pride in his revised account of the St. David festivities, which Alexis had dressed “in an old threadbare coat.” De Quincey, making a metaphor of the popular ritual, goes on to declare that he had not only made St. David “a present of a new coat” he has “also put a little embroidery upon it.” Because of the familiarity with local customs acquired during his earlier wanderings through that region, De Quincey is confident that he “shall astonish the good folks in Merionetshire by my account of that saint’s festival” (Wall. 1:xv–xvi). De Quincey corrected the historical and geographical innaccuracies, refurbished the misbegotten scenes of “local color,” and generally spruced up the dialogue. In the case of Captain le Harnois, the effort to represent seaman’s language was so peculiar that De Quincey suggests that the


‘Translator’ must have “counfounded the words ‘sailor’ and ‘tailor.’ ” “I have therefore,” he says, “slightly retouched the Captain, and curled his whiskers.” Not only was he obliged to correct the oddities of idiom and the ludicrous pretense of imitating Welsh dialect, he also found it necessary to delete vast tracts of dialogue. His principle service to the reader, De Quincey explains in his “Postscript,” was to rid the text of its long speeches. These are so tedious and irrelevant that De Quincey suggests that the hoaxer must have engaged a hack assistant in order to meet the printer’s deadline: two men must do what one could not. But now, as the second man could not possibly know what his leader was talking about, he must be allowed to produce his understratum of Walladmor, without the least earthly reference to the upper stratum: his thorough-bass must go on without any relation to the melodies in the treble. Yet this was awkward: and when all was finished, the most skilful artist might have found it puzzling to harmonize the whole. To meet this dilemma therefore, it seems that the leader said to his second – ‘Write me a heap of long speeches upon astrology and Welch genealogy; write me another heap on English politics: I have some people in my novel (Sir Morgan and Dulberry) upon whom I can hang them: I shall take care to leave hooks in plenty, do you leave eyes; and with these hooks and eyes we can fasten your speeches on my men, when both are finished.’ (Wall. 2:301–2) Declaring that he could neither mend them nor transfuse “any sense into their dry bones,” De Quincey states that by imposing a quarantine on their importation he has prevented a possible pestilence in English literature, for “translated into English, bottled, and corked up, they would furnish virus enough, if distributed by inoculation amongst the next three thousand novels of the English press, to ruin the constitution of them all” (Wall. 2:303). When De Quincey asserts that he has made “a silk purse of a sow’s ear,” and proceeds to lay claim to “my Walladmor” as an independent artistic accomplishment “when compared with the original,” he does so knowing that he has extensively reshaped the novel. He readily admits that “My claim to the production of a ‘silk purse’” may be founded “simply on the negative merits of omission and

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compression” (Wall. 2:297) and that he may be criticized “for not having made larger alterations.” “The truth is,” he nevertheless insists, “I have altered; and altered until I had not the face to alter any more” (Wall. 2:305). How extensive are these alterations? The excision of the long speeches delivered by Sir Morgan and Dulberry necessarily entailed, as well, certain modifications in their character. The speeches on genealogy, mentioned by De Quincey, were intended to reveal Sir Morgan’s pride in lineage and tradition, his sense of noblesse oblige, his despair at losing his only hope for an heir and successor; those on astrology his superstitious awe and his sense that fate has singled him out for retribution. If these were the author’s intentions, the results went awry. Sir Morgan, De Quincey observes, “is really a kind-hearted man to all sorts of people, except to smugglers and the readers of Walladmor; the first of whom he is apt to hang when he can, and the last he takes every opportunity of boring” (London Magazine, Oct. 1824; W 4:350). Fewer long speeches, De Quincey believes, will make him less a bore and more a sympathetic character. Dulberry’s speeches on politics may have been intended, in part, to document the rebellious undercurrents within the artistocratic political structure. As De Quincey recognizes, Dulberry is a literary descendant of Dogberry; that is, he is, or should be, first and foremost a comic character. By trimming their length, De Quincey attempts to make Dulberry’s speeches ludicrous rather than tedious. While Dulberry still cites, in one breath, the Magna Carta and the Manchester Massacres, De Quincey is more playful in exposing the irrationality of Dulberry’s radicalism, and his political diatribes are more obviously matter for ridicule by those whom he opposes as well as by those whose support he might hope to win. Miss Walladmor is not burdened with long speeches, but De Quincey finds that she has been conceived too much on the model of the heroine of German sentimental romance. To provide her with proper dignity, he has dispensed with first-name intimacy. She remains “Miss Walladmor,” not the “Guinevere” who exchanges passionate sighs with the brigand Nicholas. As De Quincey also acknowledges, he has “taken the liberty, in the seventh chapter, of curing Miss Walladmor of an hysterical affection: what purpose it answered, I believe you would find it hard to say: and I am sure she has enough to bear without that” (Wall. 1:xvii–xviii). She does


indeed have much to bear, for De Quincey, though kind enough to cure her hysteria, goes on to have her shot and killed in the “new end” which he composed for the novel (Wall. 2:288–90). Where Alexis has her whisper sweet words of encouragement to her parting lover, De Quincey has her perish in his arms. Also in De Quincey’s “new end,” Nicholas departs for South America and dies there in battle, leading “the decisive engagement of Manchinilla” (Wall. 2: 93). Furthermore, De Quincey has deleted one character, Thomas Malbourne, and added a new one, Jane Griffeth. Whose novel is this? If it is not Sir Walter Scott’s, then De Quincey might well have a right to claim it as “my Walladmor.” Hoaxing the hoaxer, De Quincey confesses, is not an opportunity which he has neglected to consider: “if in addition to a new end, I were to put a new beginning and a new middle, – I should be accused of building a second English hoax upon the primitive German hoax” (Wall. 2:305–6). Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, the libretto for which had been freely adapted by Friedrich Kind from the tale by Johann August Apel, and even more freely adapted for the English performance at Covent Garden that very summer of 1824, might conceivably have borne even further transformation. It was De Quincey’s bold stroke, in his translation of “The Fatal Marksman” published the year before his Walladmor, to restore the death and madness of the original ending. But for a work advertising itself as “Freely translated from the English of Sir Walter Scott,” he might consider himself justly entitled to commensurate liberties. “ ‘Freely translated!’” he exclaims, “Yes, no want of freedom! All free and easy! impossible to complain on that score. Verily, this is the boldest hoax of our times” (LM Oct. 1824; 4:343). De Quincey therefore assumes for himself what he calls the modest license of a librettist: In general I have proceeded as one would in transplanting a foreign opera to our stage: where the author tells the story ill – take it out of his hands, and tell it better: retouch his recitative; bring out and develope his situations: in this place throw in a tender air, in that a passionate chorus. Pretty much in this spirit I have endeavoured to proceed. (Wall. 2:306) This license to “tell it better,” however, he cannot exercise uniformly for the simple reason that “it is impossible to alter every

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thing that one may think amiss.” Which parts, then, should be attributed to De Quincey and which to Alexis? De Quincey proposes the following criteria for discriminating authorship: I would request the reader to consider himself indebted to me for any thing he may find particularly good; and above all things to load my wretched ‘Principal’ with the blame of every thing that is wrong. If he comes to any passage which he is disposed to think superlatively bad, let him be assured that it is not mine. If he changes his opinion about it, I may be disposed to reconsider whether I had not some hand in it. (Wall. 2:306–7) For those who suspect that these criteria may be prejudiced in his own favor, De Quincey offers the reader an alternative: “if he reads German, he can judge for himself.” The German narrative, which critics sympathetic to Alexis’s endeavor have seen to abound in Waverley topoi, has several rather prominent non-Waverley features. Although Scott’s historical range reached from the Middle Ages well into the eighteenth century, and he was adept at touching certain pertinent details that made the past seem to anticipate the concerns of the present, he kept a good distance from immediate historical events. Walladmor, which has as its central historical incident the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, strikes far closer to the present day than Scott had cared to do in any of his own novels. The political circumstances are too immediate; the plot device, twins stolen from their aristocratic home in infancy and brought together in a shipwreck 24 years later, is too much the improbable stuff of romance for Scott’s conscientious delineation of historical causality. The novel recounts the adventures of a young German named Edmund Bertram, who is traveling for the first time from his native country on a visit to Wales. Just off the Welsh coast, the ship explodes. Only two passengers survive – Bertram and another youngman whom he must fight in order to cling for survival to a barrel thrown from the ship. Winning the struggle, Bertam is then able to rescue himself and his opponent. After being washed ashore, he finds himself in the care of a half-crazed woman named Gillie Godber. Recovering his strength, he gains passage on smuggling ship to the Welsh coast. He makes his way along a mountainous road


where he again encounters the young stranger with whom he was shipwrecked and whose life he saved. The stranger, James Nicholas (De Quincey renames him Edward), reveals himself to be a leader of a band of smugglers and calls upon Bertam to join him as friend and companion. Bertam spends the night at a tavern, where he meets the radical Mr. Dulberry and learns from the tavern host a good deal about the Robin Hood-like character of the noble brigand, Nicholas. The next day Bertram joins a funeral procession, actually the smugglers who have concealed their goods in a hearse. In a skirmish with armed custom agents, Bertram is arrested. Nicholas helps him to escape, but after a futile attempt to cross the moors he is recaptured and brought to prison at Walladmor Castle. He is identified by a number of witnesses not simply as a member of the party of smugglers, but as their leader – Nicholas. Nicholas himself breaks into the castle to convince Baron Walladmor that the wrong person was being held prisoner. Nicholas escapes, and Bertram is released. Now treated with the courtesy of a house guest, Bertram learns the tragedy of the Walladmor family. Twenty-four years before, the young son of Gillie Godber had been sentenced to death for killing one of the officers attempting to arrest a party of smugglers. In spite of the Gillie Godber’s fervent appeals to the Baron Walladmor to grant clemency, the young man was executed. After his execution, it was revealed that, although he had earned money to help his aged mother by assisting the sailors in unloading smuggled goods, he was neither a member of the smuggling party nor involved in the shooting. Gillie Godber curses Walladmor and plots revenge. With the assistance of a niece, Jane Griffeths, employed as nurse by Lady Walladmor, Gillie Godber arranges the kidnapping of the two infants sons. Lady Walladmor dies shortly after discovering the loss of her children. This flashback introduces an entirely new character into the novel. De Quincey has invented Jane Griffeths in order to defuse the ironic revelations of Alexis’s conclusion. In Alexis’s version, Gillie Godber herself does the kidnapping at the time of delivery so that neither Sir Morgan nor the reader learns that Lady Walladmor may have given birth to more than one son. The family priest, who tells this tale to Bertram, also tells him how the Baron’s profound grief seemed to be gradually dispelled after the arrival of his niece at Walladmor Castle, and how a new set of troubles were brought about

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when it was discovered that the young Miss Walladmor had fallen in love with the renegade Nicholas. The old Baron, still filled with remorse at the loss his wife and his heir, had granted Gillie Godber free access to the Castle in the hope that she might in a moment of repentance reveal what had become of the lost son whom he hopes might one day be restored. De Quincey’s version plays teasingly with the “comedy of errors” when virtual twins, the very age of his lost sons, appear at his castle. The comedy is especially pronounced in the encounters between Nicholas and Bertam, who seem to accept without question their almost identical features, and are only vaguely puzzled and disturbed by the resemblance which both also recognize in the portraits of ancestral Walladmors in the Castle gallery. Even to this point, De Quincey endeavored as translator to adapt the original plot. His refusal to follow his author any further is acknowledged in the footnotes which accompany his chapters on the trial of Nicholas, who surrendered himself in despair of never again seeing Miss Walladmor. It is at this juncture that De Quincey takes command of the plot, rewrites the trial scene, and provides a very different denoument. Those who are familiar with De Quincey’s perennial difficulty in meeting the printer’s schedule (a difficulty which he tranfers to his “Principal” in proffering his hook-and-eye theory), might assume that it was the lack of time that prompted him to abandon the task of translating and quickly pen his own conclusion. In fact, however, he had already translated sections of the final chapters for his review of Walladmor in the London Magazine. Passages from earlier chapters he transplanted virtually intact from the review into the full translation. Indeed, any reader of De Quincey’s review would realize that the conclusion to his translation was not the conclusion to the book he had reviewed. In revising the story, De Quincey dismisses the sharp young barrister who provides the case for the defense at court. For him, it is more important that Nicholas speak in his own behalf. The practical result, to be sure, is the same: Nicholas is found guilty and is sentenced to hang. But De Quincey gives his Nicholas occasion for stunning rhetorical declamation in behalf of the assault on Harlech (not mentioned by Alexis). While the trial is going on, Gillie Godber, in fiendish anticipation of its outcome, bursts in upon


Baron Walladmor and reveals that the smuggler about to be sentenced to death is Walladmor’s long lost son. Again, the situation is fundamentally the same in both versions, but De Quincey effectively heightens the rhetorical and dramatic effect. The German Walladmor ends with an ironic convolution which De Quincey, in his review, describes as an unacceptable trespass: There is a certain Mr. Thomas Malbourne in this novel, of whom we have taken no notice, because he is really an inert person as to the action – though busy enough in other people’s whenever it becomes clear to his own mind that he ought not to be busy. This Mr. Malbourne, being asked in the latter end of the book – who and what he is, solemnly replies that he is the author of Waverley. “Author of Waverley!” says Bertram, “God bless my soul! is it possible?” “Yes, Sir,” he rejoins, “and also of Guy Mannering, the Antiquary, Tales of my Landlord,” and so he runs on. “Author of Guy Mannering!” says Bertram, “Do I hear you right?” “Yes, Sir, and likewise of Kenilworth, the Abbot, the Pirate,” &c. and away he bowls with a third roll-call. (LM Oct. 1824; W 4:381) Ostensibly, what De Quincey objects to here is not so much the introduction of the “Author of Waverley” into the text, but rather the insinuations that he is a snooping busy-body. Now thus far all is fair, and part of the general hoax. But when we add that this Mr. T Malbourne conducts himself very much like a political decoy or trepanner – makes himself generally disagreeable by his cynical behaviour – and condescends to actions which every man of honour must disdain (such as listening clandestinely to conversations, &c.) – it will be felt that our pleasant friend has here been led astray by his superabundance of animal spirits: this is carrying the joke too far; and he ought to apologize to Sir Walter Scott by expelling the part from his next edition. (LM Oct. 1824; Wall 4:81) De Quincey, of course, expelled the part in his own edition. In spite of declaring himself “extravagantly fond of sport,” doating upon “la bagatelle,” and in this very review willing to “patronize even hoaxing and quizzing,” he will not accept, not even as an ironic portrait, the premise that an author, in order to be privy to the intimate thoughts

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and acts of the persons he describes, must behave as an eavesdropper and skulking voyeur. There is much more to the self-reflexive irony that Malbourne’s “roll-call” of Waverley novels. Dropping a footnote (which De Quincey chose to ignore) to request that reviewers abstain from revealing Malbourne’s identity, Alexis proceeds to turn his Waverley hoax inside out. Bertam, like Alexis himself, has presumed to author an novel in the manner of those attributed to Sir Walter Scott 3:294–5). To be sure, Bertram has already been described in scene after scene with pen and paper in hand, recording his impressions. To his surprise and chagrin, Bertram discovers not just that Malbourne is the “Author of Waverley”, but that Malbourne has already written the very novel for which he, Bertram, has been taking notes. There commences a debate between Bertram and the “Author of Waverley” over which of them has the prior and legitimate claim to the authorship of Walladmor. As evidence in support of his claim, Bertram reads from his manuscript the picturesque passage describing the ruined abbey of Griffeth ap Gauvon by moonlight (2:71/3; 3:298–300; 2:31–4; and LM Oct. 1824; W 4:367–8). The “Author of Waverley” responds by reading the passage of “authorial intrusion,” in which the narrator recounts that, like Bertram, he had once slept in a sheepfold while wandering through the countryside with an old friend, “Thomas Banley, Esq.” “Now, good public,” De Quincey exclaims. “listen to this prince of hoaxers.” And he proceeds to quote this passage as it first occurs in the novel (2:65–7; 2:104–5). “We perfectly doat upon this gay fellow,” he adds, “with his airy impudence and his ‘Thomas Banley, Esq.’” De Quincey not only celebrates the jest in his review, he enters into the game himself. In spite of the awareness that he shares this refuge among the sheep with some other night-wanderer, Bertram is comfortably nestled “between two fleecy lambs” and happily confesses “that after the fatigues of such a day, no bed could have been more grateful or luxurious” (2:68). In translating the events of this night in the sheepfold for his review, De Quincey, too, intervenes to tell of his own personal adventure: on the night of our snowy wanderings about Snowden, except the gallows and Mrs. Godber, we had most of Mr. Bertram’s calamities: but it strikes us that we had a far better bed; bed-fellows as


innocent and no such guilty neighbour as Mr. Bertram will be found to have. Cold and perishing we crept about midnight into a lair where two little human lambs were couching, [ … ]. Think what a heaven of luxury on a winter’s night for a man who had been buffeting for six hours with a snow storm, – to have two such little warm mountaineers nestling about him, that never dreamed what a wolf of a reviewer they had between them. However we had not commenced reviewing at that day; nor can they, we fear, at this day be lambs: for it was twenty-two years ago! [ …] At this same cottage perhaps it was that Mr. Bertam slept: but he slept in the barn: and possibly had as good a night as ourselves. (LM Oct. 1824; W 4:373) De Quincey, indulging a night “at this same cottage,” clearly could play at the literary transgressions of author and text, fact and fiction, when he chose. But he would play such games only in his review, in his Dedication, or in his Postscript; he expunges them entirely from the novel “proper.” In playing the games of romantic irony in the final chapter in his Walladmor, Alexis has given the “Author of Waverley” a trump card. After informing Bertram that his manuscript for the first two volumes have already been sent to Edinburgh to be printed, Malbourne offers to provide Bertram with such honor and position that he will have no need to write fiction and will surrender all claim to authoring the present novel. And how, Bertam wonders, might this be accomplished? Simply by readjusting the fiction. No one newborn son was kidnapped, but two – twins! One the crazed Gillie Godber delivered to the smugglers, the other she threw over a cliff. The second infant miraculously survived by falling upon a mossy ledge where it was retrieved by the sailors. The one son became the smuggler Nicholas, the other, reared in Germany, has returned as the would-be novelist, Bertram. He is thus the legitimate heir to the estate of Walladmor. “Sir! Malbourne!” Bertram exclaims, “do you mean to drive me mad?” The laconic reply is “No! But rather to persuade you to give up writing novels.” Bertram concedes; but in accepting his new prosperity, he must also accept that he is but a character in the novel that he though he was writing. This was the ironic coup utterly rejected by De Quincey in his adaptation of Walladmor. It was one thing to indulge self-reflexive

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irony in his review, his Dedication, and his Postscript, but he could hardly hope to make a “silk purse” of Alexis’s “sow’s ear” by committing such a transgression against the generic substance of a Waverley novel. Citing the episode from the Faerie Queene in which the false Florimel wears the “golden cestus” of the true Florimel (LM Oct. 1824; W 4:388), De Quincey argues the right for his own “snowy Florimel” to represent her German counterpart on the English stage (Postscript, 2:308–10). Both may be false, but his own has the advantage of being properly British. In assuming his role as translator, mediator, interpreter, and popularizer of German literature and philosophy, De Quincey maintained a whimsical distance. Rather than delving deeply into Kantian metaphysics, as did Coleridge, De Quincey was more fond of calling attention, as did Friedrich Schlegel, to the “transcendental buffoonery,” making the pretensions of transcendentalism an occasion for jokes and games. To be sure, Coleridge too indulged his jests at the expense of Kant and Fichte, but he also went on to grapple with the metaphysical problems on their own ground. De Quincey, by contrast, was more ready to reassert a traditional British perspective. His Walladmor well exemplifies such a reassertion of British perspective. What happened to the German romantic irony with which Alexis concluded his Waverley novel? True to Scott’s own practice, documented earlier with the example of Rev. Dryasdust’s encounter with the “Great Unknown,” De Quincey deleted the self-reflexivity from the novel proper and put it where Scott would have it – in the front matter. It is in his “Dedication to W * * * s, the German ‘Translator’ of Walladmor,” that De Quincey elaborates the “philosophic commonplace” concerning Sir John Cutler’s silk stockings. Sir John Cutler had a pair of silk stockings: which stockings his housekeeper Dolly continually darned for the term of three years with worsted: at the end of which term the last faint gleam of silk had finally vanished, and Sir John’s silk stockings were found in their old age to have degenerated into worsted stockings. Now upon this a question arose among the metaphysicians – whether Sir John’s stockings retained (or, if not, at what precise period they lost) their “personal identity.” The moralists also were anxious to know whether Sir John’s stockings could be considered the same “accountable” stockings from first to last. And the


lawyers put the same question in another shape by asking – whether any felony, which Sir John’s stockings could be supposed to have committed in youth, might lawfully be the subject of an indictment against Sir John’s stockings when superannuated: whether a legacy, left to the stockings in the second year, could be claimed by the stockings at the end of the third: and whether the worsted stockings could be sued for the debts of the silk stockings. (1:xii–xiv) De Quincey’s ironic appeal to the familiar “philosophic commonplace” is not mere jest. The philosophic implications of “translation,” be it conducted with the most conscientious principles of literary fidelity, or with the irreverence of parody or hoax, inevitably involve problems of transformation. Add to the matter of substituting an “accountable” language such intercultural factors as appropriation and exploitation, rivalry and disdain, it becomes clear why De Quincey tells “the German ‘Translator’” that the commonplace involves a serious “metaphysical question” and is “pertinent to the case between ourselves” (1:xiii). In his “Postscript” he adds that with every conscious alteration “metaphysical doubts fell upon me” and “the ghost of Sir John Cutler’s stockings began to appear to me” (2:305). “I must not have you interpret the precedent of Sir John and Dolly too strictly,” he tells “the German ‘Translator’”: Sir John’s stockings were originally of silk, and darned with worsted: but don’t conceit that to be the case here. No, no, my good Sir; – I flatter myself the case between us is just the other way: your worsted stockings it is that I have darned with silk: and the relations, which I and Dolly bear to you and Sir John, are precisely inverted. (1:xv) The Germans, De Quincey vows, “shall not have all the hoaxing to yourselves.” But if the hoaxer is not satisfied with being hoaxed, the two of them might commence an exchange, sending the hoax back and forth across the channel: “translate me back again into German, and darn me as I have darned you” (1:xx). If David Simpson, or Anne Mellor, or anyone else needed to muster evidence to discriminate between English and German modes of romantic irony, the two Walladmors would serve the purpose well.

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De Quincey’s playful account of Sir John Cutler’s silk stockings and of the false Florimel in Spenser’s Fairie Queene both serve as metaphors of his own rendition of the German hoax. His is not an irony of manipulating and disrupting illusion, as in Alexis’s narrative, but an irony of “language about language,” held within the frame as in a Scott novel, which examines the pretenses of rhetoric and style rather than the efficacy of fiction.

4 Murder and the Aesthetics of Violence

“Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” was not just a piece of morbid whimsy that Thomas De Quincey had spun out for readers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1827, it was a crucial document in his aesthetic theory. Critics are right in observing that the essay elaborates the grim jest that even the most heinous of crimes can be appreciated as a work of art.1 This observation, however, raises further questions. Even if it is only a jest, what attributes of murder does De Quincey cite to justify its classification alongside poetry, painting, sculpture, music, drama, and dance? De Quincey himself compared his endeavor to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” that the infants of impoverished Irish Catholic families be sold, butchered, and served as meat on English tables. Swift’s grim jest was a satirical indictment of the inhumane neglect of the dire poverty and famine in Ireland. But what was the purpose of De Quincey’s jest? The answer to the second question is inextricably entangled in the first. The answers are to be sought in the peculiar problems De Quincey addressed in German aesthetics. If the joke had rested simply in the incongruity of considering murder as an art form, it would have quickly exhausted itself. De Quincey would have had no need to recount specific cases in minute detail, nor to repeat the same joke in another essay for Blackwood’s in 1839, 13 years later, nor still again, upon editing these essays in Selections Grave and Gay in 1854, when he added the postscript, “With an Account of the Williams and M’Kean Murders.” Among his unpublished papers are drafts for two additional essays on murder as a fine art,2 and a concern with the aesthetics of 67

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violence and death is frequently manifested throughout his critical writing. Although his murder cases are for the most part British, his aesthetics are German. No previous biographer has ever recorded De Quincey’s travels on the Continent. Yet twice in his papers on “Murder” he claims that he was traveling in Germany. Even if this were a mere fictional ruse, to place his narrator in the homeland of Kantian aesthetics, there still remains the problem of explaining how he acquired his detailed information on the two German murder cases that he does include. Evidence that De Quincey may have traveled in Germany on two separate occasions can be derived from his letters. “On coming to London,” De Quincey wrote to J. A. Hessey (Oct. 12, 1823), “I shall stay about 6 weeks or 2 months; shall then accompany a party of friends to Dresden, and perhaps to Vienna [ … ].” The journey, he assures Hessey, would be no interruption of his writing for London Magazine. “At Dresden,” he declares, “I shall hope to be a more energetic correspondent of the Mag. than I have ever been able to be during this year of torment and distraction.” One year later, in a letter to John White (Oct. 26, 1824), he states that he has just made the crossing from France back to England: “I am much concerned to find, on my return to London from Boulogne (whither I had been compelled to go for the purpose of meeting and English friend on business), that two letters of yours have been lying for some time at the house of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey.”3 After the success of his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” which had first appeared in London Magazine (Sep., Oct., 1821) and was then published by Taylor and Hessey as a book (Aug., 1822), there was a sad decline in De Quincey’s productivity. The liberation from the thrall of opium, announced at the end of his “Confessions,” was not long sustained. During the first half of 1823, “this year of torment and distraction,” De Quincey submitted his “Letters to a Young Man Whose Education has been Neglected” (Jan.–July, 1823). In the fifth and final letter, “On the English Notices of Kant,” he surveys previous efforts to introduce Kantian philosophy into English from Nitsch and Willich through Dugald Stewart and Coleridge. He emphasizes the difficulties of coming to terms with Kant’s terminology. This is not, he insists, merely a matter of translation. Kant himself had to forge a new vocabulary and give old terms new meanings. It is not

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enough to give the words, one must also communicate the thought. “No doctrine of importance can be transferred in a matured shape into any man’s understanding from without,” De Quincey concludes, “it must arise by an act of genesis within the understanding itself” (M 10:80). During the latter months of 1823, he turned his efforts almost exclusively to translations from the German. He resolved on making a trip to Germany which would, he hoped, revive his creativity and give him proper access to the German works which he craved. “The library at Dresden,” he told Hessey, “will afford me advantages that I much want at this time.” Although De Quincey was not able to make that trip as promptly as he had planned, he may have made a brief visit, as his use of German sources in describing the murders in Mannheim and Cologne would indicate, sometime in 1825. He also declares that he was in Dresden in 1831. Writing to Thomas Benson (April 5, 1833), De Quincey endeavors to explain the lapse in his rent on Dove Cottage. Benson had engaged the house of Campbell and Traill to handle financial matters. “In the spring of 1831,” De Quincey records, “Mr. Traill [ … ] called on me at my house in Gt. King Street Edinburgh to demand payment of the rent (for one year, I believe) of Grasmere Cottage.” When Traill then returns demanding an additional sum, De Quincey determines that the 10 guineas already paid to Benson’s brother had not been credited. “Meantime,” he says, “before any arrangement was made, I was called over to Germany; and the affair fell with my other law business into the hands of Mr. David Blaikie W. S.,” who “[ … ] finally agreed to the payment of the money. And accordingly, on my return from Dresden, it was paid.”4 In stating that he had been “called over to Germany,” De Quincey implies that he had previously established connections there. Being “called over to Germany” might have been invented, under Traill’s pressing demands, as a convenient delaying tactic. But it seems unlikely that two years later De Quincey would insist upon the trip to Dresden unless he had in fact gone to Dresden. The references in his letters to travels in Germany are pertinent, of course, to the intimate knowledge he professes in his extensive writings on German literature and philosophy. They are also particularly relevant to his essays on murder as a fine art: not simply because they reveal the close attention that he has given Kant’s Critique of Judgment, but also because they delineate the recent murders of a

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baker in Mannheim and an accountant in Cologne. In introducing each of these cases, De Quincey has his narrator declare that he acquired his information while traveling in Germany. The murder of the baker in Mannheim received considerable attention in German newspapers. What was unusual about the case was the evidence of violent struggle as the victim fought against his assailant. De Quincey introduces his account of the case by having his fictive persona, a member of the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, relate his encounter with the murderer, also “a distinguished amateur of our society,” whom he met while riding “in the neighbourhood of Munich.” The reason this Englishman gives for making “his début as a practitioner” in Germany is that he believes “the police in that part of Europe to be more heavy and drowsy than elsewhere.” The amateur takes up lodgings in Mannheim, and soon settles on the baker as his victim: “Opposite my lodging,” said he, “lived a baker: he was somewhat of a miser, and lived quite alone. Whether it was his great expanse of chalky face, or what else, I know not, but the fact was, I ‘fancied’ him, and resolved to commence business upon his throat; which, by the way, he always carried bare – a fashion which is very irritating to my desires. Precisely at eight o’clock in the evening, I observed that he regularly shut up his windows. One night I watched him when thus engaged – bolted in after him – locked the door – and, addressing him with great suavity, acquainted him with the nature of my errand; at the same time advising him to make no resistance, which would be mutually unpleasant.” (M 13:40) Because De Quincey has mingled fact with fiction, the claim of his fictive persona that he was travelling in Germany need not be credited with any autobiographical significance. Still, we might wonder where De Quincey got his hands on the specific details of the case, which are indeed factually accurate. What interested him in the case “aesthetically,” was the peculiar relationship between perpetrator and victim. The perpetrator “fancied” his victim and his “desires” are aroused by the victim’s fashion of dress which leave his throat temptingly exposed and bare. The encounter is thus introduced in terms of erotic attraction. The deed itself is to be a rape in which the victim is advised to “make no


resistance.” As it happens, however, the victim does not want his throat cut. The ensuing scene De Quincey describes as a boxing match. For the first 13 rounds, the baker resists vigorously and valiantly, so valiantly that the situation is almost reversed: this man was a monstrous feather-bed in person, fifty years old, and totally out of condition. Spite of all this, however, and contending against me, who am a master in the art, he made so desperate a defence that many times I feared he might turn the tables upon me, and that I, an amateur, might be murdered by a rascally baker. What a situation! Minds of sensibility will sympathise with my anxiety. (M 13:40–1) As De Quincey emphasizes in several of his commentaries on the aesthetic qualities of the crime, the threat of murder stimulates the innate talents of the victim, who contributes significantly to its appeal as an art form. Indeed, the victim contributes far more to the exaltation of murder as a fine art than a model ever contributes to a painting: no artist can ever be sure of carrying through his own fine preconception. Awkward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait-painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist in our line is generally embarrassed by too much animation. (M 13:39) Because of the “tendency in murder to excite and irritate the subject,” it also prompts “the development of latent talent.” Such was the case of the flabby, overweight baker. He suddenly achieved unanticipated prowess as a pugilist. A pursy, unwieldy, half-cataleptic baker of Mannheim had absolutely fought seven-and-twenty rounds with an accomplished English boxer, merely upon this inspiration; so greatly was natural genius exalted and sublimed by the genial presence of his murderer. (M 13:42) But the murderer is inspired as well. The vehement defense of his victim called forth greater energy from the cutthroat artist than he would otherwise have exercised. Murderer and victim become

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co-agents in the production of what De Quincey recognizes as the highest examples in this genre. Just as De Quincey seems to have had access to local newspaper records in recounting the story of the baker of Mannheim, it is evident that he translated passages verbatim from the ConversationsLexicon (1824) in telling the story of Peter Fonk’s trial for the murder of his business partner, William Coenen of Enfeld.5 His description of Fonk as “the son of a rich merchant still living in 1825,” alters the language of the Lexicon (“Sohn eines noch lebenden reichen Kaufmanns,” p. 294), in only one detail. Indicating the year 1825, De Quincey has added a year to the date of the edition, confident that Fonk’s father had survived a bit longer. But the date also suggests that he gathered his material on the murder of the accountant in Cologne at approximately the same time he collected the particulars on the murder of the baker in Mannheim. The latter was included in the first essay on “Murder” for Blackwood’s Magazine (Feb., 1827). And De Quincey clearly intended the account of Fonk to be included in the sequel he wrote the following year. That sequel was not published as promptly as De Quincey had intended. Indeed, when the second essay on “Murder” finally appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine (Nov., 1839) – 13 years later! – it was radically revised and the case of Peter Fonk was no longer a part of it. Had De Quincey, in accord with the account of the Mannheim murder, been in Germany prior to February 1827? We have the corroborating evidence of his letter to Hessey that such a trip had been planned. Furthermore, the claim is repeated in his account of the Cologne murder, presented in his manuscript draft of the intended sequel. Like the first essay, this one too is addressed as a letter “To the Editor,” Christopher North. The manuscript opens with another assertion of travel in Germany: Several months ago, whilst travelling in Germany, I met with a number of your far-famed journal, in which I was surprised to find published a lecture of my own, delivered sometime back to a Society of Gentlemen Amateurs, on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts. The person, who communicated that article, did so from no good will to me, as he discovers pretty clearly by his very hypocritical preface. He would denounce me, forthwith, to Bow Street! and quotes Lactantius against me. But I despise him, and


defy his innuendoes and threats. And it gratifies me that Christopher North despises him no less. The few words he bestows upon your correspondent are just what I should have anticipated from his known good sense and philosophy: and the whole club are as much pleased as myself; and I have it in command from them to make our united acknowledgements. (NLS MS4789 f 33) While a journey made “Several months ago” would indicate a fairly recent period, a lecture “delivered sometime back” may indeed have been many years previous. Nevertheless, the notion of the February 1827 “number of your far-famed journal” still circulating somewhere in Germany would suggest that considerably less time had elapsed, as would the urgency in which the author comes to the defense of the Society of Connoisseurs in Murders. Although the second essay was published 13 years after the first, there is reason to believe that this manuscript was composed much earlier. Indeed, internal evidence indicates that his transcription of the Cologne murder case was made in 1825, probably at the same time that he had gathered the material on the murder in Mannheim. Internal evidence also reveals that the accompanying essay itself was written in 1828, a year after the first essay had appeared. When the second essay, intended as a sequel, was finally published in Blackwood’s, De Quincey had completely altered his opening paragraph. Too much time had elapsed. Gone is the ploy of the lecturer on murder denouncing the self-righteous correspondent; gone is the urgency of offering prompt rebuttal; gone, too, is the reference to travel in Germany. Doctor North – You are a liberal man: liberal in the true classical sense, not in the slang sense of modern politicians and education-mongers. Being so, I am sure you will sympathise with my case. I am an ill-used man, Dr. North – particularly ill-used; and, with your permission, I will briefly explain how. A black scene of calumny will be laid open; but you, Doctor, you will make things square again. [ … ] A good many years ago, you may remember that I came forward in the character of a dilettante in murder. Perhaps dilettante is too strong a word. Connoisseur is better suited to the scruples and infirmity of public taste. I suppose there is no harm in that, at least. A man is not bound to put his eyes, ears,

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and understanding into his breeches pocket when he meets with murder. If he is not in a downright comatose state, I suppose he must see that one murder is better or worse than another, in point of good taste. Murders have their little differences and shades of merit, as well as statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, or what not. (M 13:52) There are additional alterations in the published version, both in what has been added and what deleted, that indicate revisions made at a much later date. For one thing, the manuscript comments more directly on the content of the first essay; for another it contains no mention of the Thugs of India nor even of the notorious case of Burke and Hare. It was in 1831 that the British authorities in India commenced their campaign to suppress the murderous activities of the Thugs. In the published version, De Quincey describes a Thug dinner held by the Society in 1838. Burke and Hare, who pursued a lucrative business in Edinburgh by supplying Dr. Robert Knox with cadavers for dissection, were tried for murdering 15 prostitutes and vagrants in December, 1828. Their enterprise is made an occasion for Society celebration in the published version, but no mention is made of the notorious murders in the manuscript. In the manuscript version, De Quincey takes up matters in the first essay in a manner which suggests that he is confident that his readers will recollect them readily. This would hardly be the case if much more than a year had elapsed since that essay appeared. Among the calumnies against which the correspondent feels compelled to defend himself in the manuscript version is that he is nationally “biased.” “This notion,” he continues, “must have grown out of that particular lecture published by you, in which it is that I draw my illustrations chiefly from English murders.” He insists that his choice of English cases was merely an “accident”: I never had a thought of insinuating that most meritorious murders have not been committed in the other parts of Great Britain and also upon various regions of the continent. In particular, with respect to the Germans – who are loud in complaining that the only murder I have condescended to notice as coming from their country (viz. the Mannheim baker’s) was due to an Englishman – I protest that this circumstance had no weight on


my selection. I was undoubtedly influenced by the consideration that the author of that murder was a member of our club – a man of refined taste – and a particular friend of my own. But otherwise, as to mere national distinctions, I am above them: Tros, Tyriusque mihi &c.6 And to show that I am sincere, I send you herewith the most eminent German murder that has been produced for the last fifty years, which has kept all the states of the Rhine and the Danube in agitation for 7 years, and even yet, at a distance of 12 years, is the subject of conversation and profound interest. (NLS MS4789 ff 34–5) The year of the crime and the duration of the trial, mentioned in the last sentence, provide a date for the manuscript. William Coenen was murdered on November 10, 1816. The trial lasted 7 years. De Quincey’s declaration of a continuing interest in the murder, “even yet, at a distance of 12 years,” reveals that this sequel was written in 1828. The peculiarity of De Quincey’s aesthetic is his focus on the victim. The compelling genius of the victim is revealed in the very circumstances of the murder. For De Quincey the crime is exalted into an artform through the victim’s response to the actions of the murderer. Thus he delineates with care the victim’s reaction. In spite of his fat and feeble condition, the baker became an boxer of surprising prowess. De Quincey also describes a stunning transformation that takes place when Coenen, the honest book-keeper, sets out to audit Peter Fonk’s records and expose how Fonk has cheated Schröder, his business partner. But Coenen is seduced by the very greed he had intended to expose. Once he accepts Fonk’s bribe as coconspirator in the deception, he renders himself vulnerable to Fonk’s murderous designs. After revealing how the motives of the victim played into the motives of the murderer, De Quincey gives a detailed account of how the murder was carried out. Coenen’s secret tryst with Fonk gives his murderer the occasion he needs to kill Coenen and get rid of his body. Fonk lures Coenen into his cellar much as Montressor lures Fortunato in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: Fonk and Coenen then went up together to the room in which Schröder and the rest had conducted the business of that evening’s conference; and upon coming down, Fonk was talking of a particular brandy of Schröder’s and comparing it with some very old French brandy which he proposed to Coenen that he

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should taste. Coenen at first declined; but upon that Fonk pressed him and said – now, pray do me the favor to try it; do, I beg of you; I am confident you will say, upon trial, that you never tasted anything like it before; and at the same time he desired Hamacher to bring a glass, himself taking the cooper’s knife which lay upon the table, and hiding it under his coat. All three then went into the packing room, which lay directly under the maid-servants’ bed-room; and immediately upon arriving there the tragedy began. The circumstances were these: – Fonk drew out the cooper’s tool, and adjusted his hand as if going to strike the cask open; but all at once, whirling around, he struck Coenen upon the head, exclaiming “There, fellow, take that for your sample!”; thereupon Coenen began to bleed; and, upon receiving another blow from Fonk upon the breast, he fell backwards; striking his head in falling against a large stone weight belonging to a steel-yard. (NLS MS4789 f 57) The next task, of course, is to dispose of the body. Nothing could be simpler. Coenen’s corpse is stuffed into an empty brandy cask. What follows is a peculiar piece of graveyard humor, as the carters, Adam Hamacher and his brother Christian, deliver the cask not to a merchant but to the banks of the Rhine: Monday came, and by 4 o’clock in the morning Adam was with his cart at Mr. Fonk’s door. Mr. Fonk was himself in attendance to see the cask regularly delivered, and everything done correctly. Mr. Fonk opened the door, assisted to back the cart into his courtyard, and saw the cask carted; after which Adam set forward with his load to a place near Mühlheim on the Rhine. Up to the time of his arrival at this place, Adam knew nothing at all of the contents of the cask; and, having unloaded it was on the point of driving off: but, upon that, Christian called out to him in great agitation – “Adam, you must not leave me yet: there is a dead man packed up in the cask.” “A dead man!” said Adam: “had I known that, it should have been long before I would have carted a hogshead for Mr. Fonk.” These were all the words that passed. Christian Hamacher, the cooper, took out his tools, and knocked the cask open; after which he and Adam took out the corpse between them; and Christian, attaching a heavy stone to it by a leathern thong, sank it in the Rhine.


Fonk, of course, is questioned about Coenen’s mysterious disappearance. For De Quincey, this provides a scene in which Fonk displays mawkish and maudlin acting skills in pretending his innocence: nobody could assign any reason for his disappearance; and the suspicion arose powerfully that he had been put out of the way on purpose to get rid of an obstruction to some guilty design; in which case no person stood open to the charge of having any interest of that nature, excepting only Fonk. Whilst these thoughts were gathering strength in the public mind, three friends of Coenen from Enfeld on the 21st of November paid a visit to Fonk; and his behavior on that occasion was powerfully adapted to corroborate the existing suspicion. He read to these persons a letter which he had written upon this melancholy event; wept upon reading it; and formally solicited their attention to the tears which he was shedding. He displayed a note before them, exclaiming at the time – See here the hand-writing of poor Coenen: and upon examination it turned out not to be Coenen’s hand-writing. (NLS MS4789 ff 56–62) In all the details of this story De Quincey has closely followed the Conversations-Lexicon. It was a story that appealed to him because of the occasion that it offered to trace the psychological intricacies of character. In spite of his claim to be free of national bias – quoting from the Aeneid Queen Dido’s response to Ilioneus and the Trojan crew: “Tros, Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur” (“Trojan and Tyrian shall be treated by me with no difference,” Aeneid I:574) – it was also an occasion to ridicule the German police and legal system. The trial dragged on; major witnesses died; incriminating evidence was suppressed; following 7 years of court deliberations, Fonk was acquitted. The letters to Hessey in 1823 and to Benson in 1833 give us substantial reason to assume that De Quincey traveled to Germany during this period. The essays on murder provide further evidence. But even after we have dated the manuscript of the second essay on “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” even after we have identified De Quincey’s German sources for the murders of the accountant of Cologne and the baker of Mannheim, we have not yet confirmed as fact that De Quincey was indeed in Germany. The planned trip announced in 1823 might have been delayed

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indefinitely. The trip he claimed to have made in 1831 cannot be dismissed as a subtrefuge to evade creditors. Perhaps he merely found it “in character,” so to speak, to provide his fictional Connoisseur with the first-hand knowledge of Germany that he wanted for himself but had never managed to acquire. Perhaps his London landlord, the German bookseller J. H. Bohte, who provided him with the copy of Walladmor (as noted in Chapter 3) also made available the newspapers and the Conversations-Lexicon that he used in describing the German murders. To dispel these counter-arguments, to confirm beyond doubt his travels in Germany, a more concrete piece of evidence is needed. To search for De Quincey’s signature in the registries of Saxony, therefore, now becomes a worthwhile enterprise. In the meantime, we can no longer take it for granted that De Quincey’s travels were confined to Britain. Were it not for his attention to Kantian aesthetics, one might anticipate that in his defense of murder as a fine art De Quincey would emphasize the creativity of the murder, the ingenuity with which it is plotted, or the particular finesse with which it is executed. Romantic critics, in Germany as well as in Britain, encouraged the cult of genius, and De Quincey did indeed espouse such claims of artistic creativity for his “professors of murder.” In the actual cases that he describes, however, there is scant attention to creative genius. Neither skill nor cunning are attributes of the several murderers whose performances De Quincey reviews. Their motives are seldom more complex than greed, their crimes ungraced by planning or deliberating, their methods crude, ruthless, brutal. His case for murder as a fine art is grounded not in the perpetrator, nor in the deed, but in a peculiar sympathy with the victim. Just as in such carefully delineated essays as “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” De Quincey focuses attention on the aesthetic response. Not ingenuity but raw violence is the active element in this aesthetic. The victim is the central figure in this artwork of terror: it is an identification with the victim that mediates or directs the response. De Quincey had witnessed in 1811 the mass hysteria that spread through London when the members of the Marr household – husband, wife, shop apprentice, and even an infant in its cradle – were found with their throats slit. That hysteria and the persisting public fascination with violent crime are the basic ingredients from which De Quincey constructs his aesthetic claims for murder as an art form.


That such gory crimes could be judged with aesthetic taste De Quincey had already proposed in his essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” Mr. Williams made his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has since been done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his. Six months later, in “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” he depicts a society of such connoisseurs. Just as the naturalist Henry Baker and the physician William Croone are honored in the annual Bakerian and Croonian lectures presented to the Royal Society of London, the lecture presented to the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder is designated the “Williams Lecture,” honoring John Williams for his brilliant performance of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. In July, 1844, at the time that he was also writing his account of the bloody Siege of Kabul, De Quincey conceived “a new paper on Murd[er] as a Fine Art.” In what would have been, if published, his third essay describing their activities, he imagines the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder proposing “to erect statues to su[ch]ch murderers as sh[oul]d by their next of kin or other person inter[este]d in their glory, make out a claim either of superior atrocity – or in equal atrocity of superior neatness[,] continuity of execution, perfect finish, or [p] felicitous originality (facilitas originale) – smoothness – or curiosa felicitas (elaborate felicity).” Rather than pursue either of these aesthetic categories, De Quincey ponders two further categories, each bearing an inherent irony in the pursuit of retribution: the nemesis of evil who murders murderers; and the zealous criminologist who dedicates his career to revealing the perpetrator of a murder that he has himself committed. “You never hear,” De Quincey declares, “of a fire swallowing up a fire – or a river stopping a deluge.” He cites the case of Fielding as one dedicated “to murder the murderers – to become himself the nemesis of his own atrocity.”7 And in Nottingham, De Quincey tells us, it was Mr. Outis who

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“joined vehemently and sincerely, as it seemed, in the pursuit of a wretch taxed with having murdered, twelve years previously, a wife and two children in Halifax, which wretch (when all the depositions were before the magistrate) turned out to be the aforesaid Mr. Outis.”8 Whether it be “felicitous originality” or “elaborate felicity,” or the irony of becoming nemesis of one’s own atrocity, De Quincey’s unpublished deliberations of 1844 reveal his continuing concern with the presumption of aesthetic categories to override all attention to the actual horror of violence and suffering. De Quincey’s argument, even his way of delineating a crime, reveal how extensively he engages recent controversy in aesthetic theory. Joel Black, in Aesthetics of Murder (1991), summarizes De Quincey’s contribution to this debate. Both Schiller and Coleridge, Black observes, had already “tried to come to terms with Kant’s moral-rational aesthetics,” but De Quincey was more effective than they had been in exposing “the contradictions inherent in this approach.” De Quincey “brought Kant’s concept of the natural sublime,” Black states, “to its ‘logical’ conclusion.” The essay on “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Black asserts, is a “sustained satiric critique of a philosophical tradition epitomized by Kant that consistently assumed a coherent, nonproblematic relation between ethics and aesthetics.”9 As much as I want to endorse Black’s explanation of the Swiftian purpose which informed De Quincey’s modest proposal on the aesthetics of murder, I must also point out that Black has grossly oversimplified the case. Kant certainly did not assume “a coherent, nonproblematic relation between ethics and aesthetics.” In the broad strokes of his explanation, Black is certainly correct in stating that De Quincey has “demonstrated the aesthetic subversion of the beautiful by the sublime, and more generally, the philosophical subversion of ethics by aesthetics.” But the process of subversion was not unanticipated by Kant himself, who persistently acknowledges the forces of emotion and irrationality against which he struggles to erect the barricade of his rationalethical aesthetics. Aesthetics had not become an impregnable fortress of reason during the eighteenth century. Quite to the contrary, the efforts of Baumgarten and Kant were addressed against the rationalist philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff who had relegated aesthetics to the delusory response of the lower faculties – sensations, emotions, fantasy


and the image-engendering processes of the mind most predominant in slumber. These lower faculties, they argued, were also stimulated by the work of art. To the degree that emotion and imagination are excited, to that same degree the control of reason slips into abeyance. The efforts of Baumgarten were to reaffirm the reason in the act of aesthetic judgment. The aesthetic response for Baumgarten was nevertheless still a matter of the unruly lower faculties. In order to redefine the relationship of reason and imagination, Kant attempts to circumvent the lower faculties. Imagination, as Einbildungskraft, has its domain in reason. Reason has, as well, its practical and empirical interests. But the imagination may be engaged purely for the purpose of pleasure. This is a pleasure which is derived from intellectual interest, to be distinguished from that sort of pleasure aroused by sensation and feeling. In all acts of aesthetic judgment, reason acts independently of sensual response. Kant asks, then, how a beautiful murder, rape, sickness, or death might be possible. What in nature would be ugly or displeasing can be contemplated as beautiful in art. Whereas Rubens’ Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1619) or David’s Death of Marat (1793) might succeed in aestheticizing violence, other images may reflect such a strong a sense of the original ugliness, Kant acknowledges, that they would excite disgust and thus destroy any possibility of aesthetic satisfaction.10 De Quincey, following Kant, prescinds reason from emotion, and grounds his aesthetic in intellectual interest: When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense – not done, not even (according to modern purism) being done, but only going to be done – and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it, T⑀⑀´⑀ It is finished, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) E´ , Done it is, it is a fait accompli; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs, to trip the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose – “abiit, evasit, excessit, erupit,” etc. – why, then, what’s the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. (M 13:16)

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In arguing an aesthetic judgment liberated from moral contingencies, De Quincey is careful to eliminate the moral issues that might be supposed to linger in the apprehension of the perpetrator. Punishment and retribution have been obviated in De Quincey’s defining conditions: the murderer is “off like a shot nobody knows whither.” A concern with justice, then, cannot intrude upon aesthetic judgment. For Kant, the concept of erotic art would be a contradiction in terms, as soon as the senses were aroused the experience of art, as art, would cease. Only in his delineation of the sublime does Kant grant that reason interacts with sensation or feeling in the aesthetic experience. The act of aesthetic judgment, Kant recognizes, depends on the capacity of the observer to contemplate the object intellectually rather than emotionally. The sublime, however, remains for Kant aesthetically unstable. The response, he argues, inevitably arouses an opposition between reason and emotion. In describing this opposition, Kant has recourse to sexual metaphor. He describes the response to the sublime as a “Hemmung” which is transformed into an “Ergiessung,” an “inhibition” or “suppression” which gives way to an “overflowing” or “effusion” (Kritik der Urteilskraft, §25). While the sight of the Milky Way commences with a sense of impotent and ineffectual littleness overwhelmed by such incomprehensible vastness, the intellect is gradually aroused to an awareness of its own participation in that vastness. The “Hemmung” of the senses is overcome by the aesthetic “Ergiessung” of the reason. The sublime is an act of mind. Specifically, it is that concept, which merely to think it, proves a capacity of mind far greater than every measure of the senses (KU, §25). The senses are aroused not with pleasure but aversion (“Das Gefühl des Erhabenen ist also ein Gefühl der Unlust,” KU, §27). De Quincey sees such a moment in the predicament of the victim confronting the power and unbridled evil of the murderer. John Williams’ ruthless murders of two families he offers as his prime example of the sublime: “With respect to the Williams murders,” he writes in the first essay on “Murder,” “the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed, I shall not allow myself to speak incidentally. Nothing less than an entire lecture, or even an entire course of lectures, would suffice to expound their merits.” De Quincey’s comment here would indicate that such a lecture was already planned in 1827. But like the second essay, which was delayed 13 years before publication,


this third essay was delayed 27 years, when it appeared in the fourth volume of his collected works, Selections Grave and Gay, as a Postscript to the other two essays (a Postscript, incidentally, that was almost as long as the other two essays combined). After their crimes were exposed in 1828, De Quincey could also cite Burke and Hare as artists of the sublime for having lured in a single year at least 15 victims into their rooms with promise of food or drink. The mask of benevolence which they used to seduce their victims brought about a “Burke-and-Hare revolution in the art” (M 13:60). The year of their prolific success is hailed by one of the connoisseurs of the society as “the sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism!” (13:66). Because it acknowledged the co-presence of the feelings, the Kantian sublime enabled De Quincey to appeal as well to the Aristotelian notion of catharsis. “The final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy in Aristotle’s account of it; viz. ‘to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror’ ” (M 13:47). In his summarizing his aesthetic principles, De Quincey expresses his scorn for “the mob of newspaper readers” who “are pleased with anything provided it is bloody enough.” A “mind of sensibility,” he insists, “requires something more” in the aesthetic appraisal of murder. Regard must be given, just as in drama, to person, place, and time. But most important is the choice of a person properly “adapted to the purposes of the murderer.” The victim ought to be a good person: if not totally innocent, at least free of the murderous impulses which motivate his or her adversary. Otherwise, De Quincey says, the Aristotelian catharsis would be thwarted: “terror there may be, but how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?” (13:67). A body found slumped in a pool of blood after a back-alley brawl is no subject for aesthetic contemplation. But a baby lying in its cradle with its throat cut, as in Williams’ atrocity at No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway, that arouses pity and terror as a proper object of art. It is the victim who mediates the sense of the sublime. In such victims as the baker of Mannheim or the accountant of Cologne, we may behold “natural genius exalted and sublimed by the genial presence of his murderer” (M 13:42). The “rustic inn, some few miles [ … ] from Manchester,” provided a setting of “dreadful picturesqueness” for the murderous intentions of the M’Kean brothers, Alexander and Michael, on the night of May 22, 1826. Their intended

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victims: “1, the landlord, a stoutish farmer [ … ]; 2, the landlord’s wife; 3, a young servant-woman; 4, a boy, twelve or fourteen years old.” The response of these latter two victims transformed the case from picturesque to sublime. The M’Keans had an aesthetically laudable motive, one suited to stir the sensibilities. At this inn a benefit club had been established by neighbours. The fund that they garnered at their weekly meetings often amounted to “fifty or seventy pounds.” To waylay this fund “before it was transferred to the hands of a banker” on the following day, the M’Kean brothers had decided on the expediency of taking rooms at the inn and then murdering the four occupants after other guests had departed. “The danger was that out of four persons, scattered over a house which had two separate exits, one at least might escape.” The plan the M’Kean brothers devised was simple: they would arrive separately, several hours apart, to prevent suspicion that they were co-conspirators; they would drug the landlord, their only muscular antagonist; one brother would attend to the landlord and his wife downstairs, the other would dispatch the boy and the servantgirl in their bedroom upstairs. The victims downstairs both survived: “the landlady, though mangled, escaped with her life [ … ]. The landlord owed his safety to the stupefying potion.” The entire plot was disrupted by the scene upstairs: after slitting the servant-girl’s throat, the elder brother bent over the boy in his bed, who had witnessed the murder but feigned sleep in his fear. Just as the murderer pressed his hand to the boy’s heart to determine whether he was actually asleep, “a dreadful spectacle” occurred: “Solemnly, and in ghastly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the murdered girl; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or two, she bent her legs toward the door.” The boy uses this moment of distraction to escape. With one murderer behind him, another waiting at the bottom of the stairs, “who could believe,” De Quincey asks, “that he would have a chance of escaping?” “In the boy’s horror, he laid his left hand on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair” (M 13:121). In cataloguing this feat among the brilliant examples of “natural genius exalted and sublimed by the genial presence of his murderer” (13:42), De Quincey admiringly declares that “the boy cleared a height such as he will never clear again to his dying day” (13:39).


Let there be no doubt about it. What has elevated this scene of murder to its status as fine art does not derive from the cunning genius of the perpetrators. They botched the job. After the boy’s escape, they flee the inn without even taking the strong box with the benefit fund. Not the murderers but their victims have contributed that sense of the sublime that makes the episode worthy of aesthetic contemplation. De Quincey’s most extended examination of the sublime horror of murder is his account of the episodes in Ratcliffe Highway. Here, too, he focuses his attention not on the perpetrator but on the victims. He conjures, for example, the return of the servant-girl, Mary, to the household in which the fiendish Williams has just finished slitting the throats of Mr. and Mrs. Marr, the apprentice boy, and even the infant in its cradle. Mary, in the scene which De Quincey elaborates with the excruciating detail of slowly passing seconds, enters the darkened house where the murderer awaits. When she pauses at the door of the bedroom corridor, De Quincey stops the action for a full page to ponder the dire predicament: “He, the solitary murderer, is on one side of the door; Mary is on the other side” (M 13:88). Will she open the door? Will he? The door is not opened; Mary survives; but the scene of sustained suspense has given the event a climactic moment of sublimity. If “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” was a satirical indictiment in the manner of Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” against what forces or factions, frailties or failings, foibles or follies was it addressed? To the objection that he has carried his morbid whimsy “too far,” has grazed “on the brink of horror, and of all that would in actual realisation be most repulsive” (M 13:70), De Quincey cites the precedent of Dean Swift. “My own little paper,” he adds, “may plead a privileged excuse for its extravagance, such as is altogether wanting to the Dean’s.” Cannibalism, after all, is an appetite not shared by large numbers of the population. On the other hand, almost everyone is fascinated by the circumstance of a grisly crime. After the first tribute of sorrow to those who have perished, but, at all events, after the personal interests have been tranquillised by time, inevitably the scenical features (what aesthetically may be called the comparative advantages) of the several murders are reviewed and valued. One murder is compared with another; and the circumstances of superiority, – as, for example, in the

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incident and effects of surprise, of mystery, &c. – are collated and appraised. (13:73) In this respect, the consideration of murder as a fine art is no satire at all. It recognizes and analyzes the workings of a morbid curiosity shared by humanity at large. De Quincey’s essay nevertheless has its satirical targets. It is addressed against the sneak-a-peek hypocrisy of those who deny their own curiosity and denounce others who indulge it. More importantly, it is addressed against the futile effort of Kantian aesthetics to champion reason over emotion. Like the murderer and the victim, reason and emotion always interact in the aesthetic experience. De Quincey’s attention to the victim makes the dual response of “pity and horror” crucial to his aesthetics of violence. De Quincey found in Kant, he declares, “a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely any one chapter so much as tending to a philosophy of reconstruction” (M 2:36). For Kant, aesthetic judgment must prevail over the persistent reassertion of the emotions. For De Quincey, however, excitement and compassion were in themselves adequate ends for the arts. In spite of Kant’s endeavor, they were neither to be prescinded nor suppressed. They are always co-present with reason and imagination in the aesthetic experience. Throughout his spoof on Kantian aesthetics, De Quincey relies repeatedly on a depiction of the victim to create precisely the mediating sympathy that Kant would deny in the name of disinterestedness. De Quincey’s advocacy of murder as a fine art, after all, is an advocacy of murder aestheticized, murder “reflected upon in tranquillity.” His first essay on “Murder” is introduced with a series of literary murders: Milton’s depiction of how Cain murdered Abel in Paradise Lost (Book XI); the murder of the child, Hugh of Lincoln, in the tale told by the Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; the murder of Duncan and Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; and “above all,” Shakespeare’s “incomparable miniature,” the murder of Gloucester in Henry VI. His first postulation of murder as a fine art, as I have noted, was in “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” Although this essay is usually cited as an early study of “comic relief” in Shakespearean tragedy, the problem that De Quincey is addressing is much more complex. How close can art bring the viewer or reader to the actual horror of violent crime? What strategies of “distancing” are necessary if murder is to be considered as a fine art?


In recreating in excruciating detail the events of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, or those in the cellar of a brandy merchant in Cologne, De Quincey’s narrative may seem at odds with those conventions of intellectual deliberation that were later to become indispensable to the literary strategy of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. De Quincey draws from the documentary precision of journalism and the new style of reportage being developed in the newspapers of his day. For this reason, his essays on murder are more properly antecedent to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) than to the murder stories of popular fiction. Even Capote’s gory exercise in the “new journalism” of the 1960s used “matter-of-fact” police reports and official accounts of the investigation to buttress the reader against the sheer horror of the slaughter of a family which, in many of its details, closely resembled Williams’s murder of the Marr family.11 Not surprisingly, De Quincey occasionally achieves a “distancing” from violence with a strategy similar to that which he had studied in the scene with the drunken porter in Macbeth. What he develops, however, is not a “comic relief” that interrupts his narrative of the murder; rather it is a kind of “gallows humour” integrated into the account of the murder itself, as, for example, his transforming the murder of the baker in Mannheim into a grotesque boxing match. De Quincey also manipulates the reader’s attention simply by elaborating the psychology of fear. Although he does not omit the gory details, he does not linger over them in his usual effulgent style. Creating his shock effects, rather, with a sparse economy of prose, he then shifts attention from the brutality of the murder to the response of the potential victim: the boy feigning sleep in his bed while the murderer is slitting the throat of his companion; the servant-girl returning to the darkened household in which the fiendish murderer still lurks. De Quincey wrote at a period before detective stories had emerged as a literary genre catering to the very fascination which he had identified. It may be a significant cultural difference that what in English is called a “detective story,” in German is called “Kriminalgeschichte.” If De Quincey in his essay on “Murder” had given a name to the genre, he would have called it neither “detective story” nor “criminal story.” For him it was a “victim story.” From the plight of the victim he extrapolates the mental and emotional stimuli of his aesthetic.

5 Shakespearean Involutes

Much attention has been devoted to the Shakespearean criticism of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Little has been written on Thomas De Quincey’s discussion of Shakespeare. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” among the best-known essays on Shakespeare, is more often anthologized1 than analyzed,2 nor has any recent critic examined the biography of Shakespeare which De Quincey contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reprinted in the eighth and ninth editions. “No paper,” De Quincey said of this encyclopedia article, “ever cost me so much labour.”3 In response to a brief comparison of Shakespeare and Wordsworth in Raymond de Véncour’s Milton, et la Poésie Epique (1838), De Quincey commenced, but apparently never completed, a study in which he emphasized the “painterly” attributes of the two poets.4 De Quincey’s Shakespeare is preeminently a poet rather than a playwright. Lamb, in his essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation” (1811), argued that a Shakespearean play is too rich and multifaceted to be represented adequately in the theater and should therefore be read in solitude. But Lamb nevertheless read the plays with attention to plot, character, and dramatic form. De Quincey’s Shakespeare is a wielder of words who informs his masterly command of rhetoric and eloquence with keen insight into the workings of psychology. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” which De Quincey describes as “psychological criticism,” is an exploration into the subjective mechanism of audience response. The encyclopedia article, too, is a kind of “psychological biography” in which lines from the 88

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plays are cited as Shakespeare’s personal revelations concerning actual experiences in his life. These two essays, plus the posthumously published fragment on “Shakespeare and Wordsworth,” are the only pieces specifically addressed to Shakespeare, but they represent a mere fraction of De Quincey’s extensive preoccupation with Shakespeare’s works. His references to Shakespeare’s language and art are diffused throughout his critical prose. After Milton and Wordsworth, Shakespeare is the author most often quoted by De Quincey. De Quincey’s quotations from Shakespeare are typically folded into some account of psychological turmoil. The quotations seem to well up spontaneously, triggered, by De Quincey’s own account, associationally. De Quincey read with a vicarious impulse, absorbing concepts, identifying with character and situation. Once he had discovered some personal link, the passage was incorporated into a literary “spot of time” which De Quincey called an “involute.”5 “Often I have been struck with the important truth,” he writes in the “Suspiria de Profundis,” “that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes” (Lindop 104). De Quincey’s sense of what constitutes an “involute” has a causal rather than merely a casual similarity to Wordsworth’s “spots of time.” The description of waiting at Hawkshead for his father’s palfreys (1805 Prelude, Book XI, 344–88), has a striking parallel in De Quincey’s account of the “undying impressions which connected themselves with the circumstances” of waiting for the coach that brought his father home from the West Indies, and “the knowledge that he returned only to die” (M 1:57–8). Introducing another episode with the Wordsworthian exclamation that it was “One of those heavenly days which cannot die,” De Quincey describes his childhood play with his brothers and sisters in the garden at Greenhay suddenly turned to a menacing nightmare when a dog maddened with “hydrophobia” (rabies) rushed upon them (M 1:116–18). Even closer to Wordsworth is the acknowledgment that such moments also arise in communion with nature: That mighty silence which infancy is thus privileged by nature and by position to enjoy, co-operated with another source of

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power – almost peculiar to youth and youthful circumstances – which Wordsworth also was the first person to notice. It belongs to a profound experience of the relations subsisting between ourselves and nature – that not always are we called upon to seek; and in childhood above all, we are sought. (M 1:122) With Wordsworth’s declaration that such moments “Are scattered everywhere, taking their date from our first childhood,” De Quincey fully agrees. He differs principally in his tendency to find them also “scattered up and down literature.” Just as when they occur in nature, they are elicited “by a bodily organ (eye or ear) that has been touched with virtue for evoking a spiritual echo lurking in its recesses.” “Something analogous to these spiritual transfigurations,” De Quincey declares, “belongs, perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred result of forcing out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or grandeur, that may happen to lodge (unobserved by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages scattered up and down literature” (M 1:124). This is not simply an endorsement of the credo that it requires a poetic sensibility to read poetry. De Quincey is describing how poetry may arouse the senses vicariously in a way very similar to actual experience, and with equal force lodge within the mind as involute. Following his definition of involutes, De Quincey goes on to illustrate how they may perform an exegetical or hermeneutic function, rendering concrete the vague abstractions of a text. He recollects a childhood situation in which he and his sisters are seated by the fireside, listening to their nurse read from an illustrated Bible: We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight, suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. (Lindop 104) When their comprehension was utterly baffled, De Quincey adds, their nurse, “according to her simple powers, would endeavour to explain what we found obscure.” Among these recollections, the mystery, together with the nurse’s explanation, of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem fixed itself into his mind as involute, so that the glory


of the dawn sunshine, “through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery,” became a prophetic light of impending death, not to be disassociated from that moment, when he crept into the room where his dead sister had been placed upon her bed: “From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure, there the angel face” (Lindop 105). When he again defines the involute, it is once more in the context of a childhood encounter with the mystery of the text, not on this occasion the Bible, but the tale of Aladdin from the Arabian Nights.6 It would “most profitably enlarge the drowsy realms of Psychology,” De Quincey declares, if one could provide “a circumstantial account of those passages in [a child’s] reading which were awakening enough to shock, to startle, and awe-strike, or profound enough to become lifelong remembrances.” He recollects the powerful effect produced on his imagination as a 5-year-old child by the tale of Aladdin, but confesses himself unable to comprehend why it aroused such an effect: I […] was quite unable to explain my own impressions from the passage in Aladdin; but I did not the less obstinately persist in believing a sublimity which I could not understand. It was, in fact, one of those many important cases which elsewhere I have called involutes of human sensibility; combinations in which the materials of future thought or feeling are carried […] imperceptibly into the mind. (M 1:128) Before I proceed with De Quincey’s attempt to reconstruct the causality of that childhood sense of “a sublimity which I could not understand,” let me pause to make explicit the cross-reference which many will already have perceived. This statement of the inexplicable effect of Aladdin is virtually identical to the statement with which he opens “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”: From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account: the effect was – that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity: yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect. (Lindop 81)

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In its concern with “effects,” De Quincey’s “psychological criticism” is a mode of “reader response” criticism.7 The nature of the critical inquiry that he brings to Shakespeare is one grounded in his “boyish days” when literary aporia began to gather in mysterious involutes. Why the porter’s scene should have the power to contribute “a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity” to Duncan’s murder, De Quincey explains, finally became clear to him when he read the account of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. On that occasion, while Williams was still lurking in the Marr’s house, having already slit the throats of Marr, his wife, the apprentice boy, and even the infant in its cradle, the servant-girl returned from an errand and knocked at the door.8 With this actual occurrence of the very incident “which the genius of Shakespeare had invented,” De Quincey gains insight into the mystery of the involute: The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated – cut off by an unmeasurable gulf from the ordinary tides of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done – when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux on the fiendish: the pulses of life are beginning to beat again: the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them. (Lindop 84 –5) But did De Quincey need the actual atrocity of Ratcliffe Highway to interpret the effect of the knocking? His childhood response to the mystery of Aladdin would suggest that he did not. By his own account “my sister and myself, then seven and a half, and five and a half years old,” were already astute literary critics, capable of refuting the authority of Maria Edgeworth, who had pronounced the tales of Aladdin and of Sinbad “the two jewels” of the Arabian Nights.


Now on the contrary, my sister and myself pronounced Sinbad to be very bad, and Aladdin to be pretty nearly the worst, and upon grounds that still strike me as just; for, in fact, after the possession of the lamp has been once secured to Aladdin by a pure accident, the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere record of upholstery; how this saloon was finished to-day, and that saloon on the next day, with no fresh incident whatever, except the single and transient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to the magician by the inconceivable stupidity of Aladdin in regard to the lamp. (M 1:127–8) The opposition of mystery and ordinary life in Aladdin have unfortunately, in the most crucial respect, inverted those of Macbeth. In Aladdin, “the world of darkness passes away” precisely at the point that it should commence, and “the goings-on of the world in which we live” intrude before their time. The genie of the lamp performs only the most mundane sort of magic; his tricks are “a mere record of upholstery,” the work of a carpenter or mason with skills of legerdemain. Although the two children “agreed in despising Aladdin so much as almost to be on the verge of despising the queen of all the bluestockings for so much vaunting it,” De Quincey adds that it was the opening of the tale “which fixed and fascinated my gaze, in a degree which I never afterwards forgot, and for many years did not comprehend.” The mystery which passed into the involute was fostered by the uncanny power not of the genie, but of the magician: a magician living in the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp endowed with supernatural powers available for any man whatever who should get it into his keeping. But there lies the difficulty. The lamp is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must have a special horoscope, or else a peculiar destiny written in his constitution, entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found? Where shall he be sought? The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth, he listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting

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the surface of the globe, and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Baghdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, that the arithmetic of a thousand centuries could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant’s feet are distinctly recognised on the banks of an Asiatic river distant by four hundred days’ march for an army or a caravan. These feet the sorcerer knows and challenges in his whispering heart, as the feet of that innocent boy through whose hands only he could have a chance for reaching the lamp. (M 1:128–9) It is this opening to the tale that so “fixed and fascinated” the child’s imagination that it was folded into an involute: The sublimity which it involved was mysterious and unfathomable as regarded any key which I possessed for unlocking it. Made restless by the blind sense which I had of its grandeur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out why it should be grand. (M 1:128) The evil magician, with his power to penetrate the “mighty labyrinths of sound” reverberating through the entire earth and, across the vastness of 6,000 miles, to peer into the soul of a child, had all the inescapably threatening malignancy of those dark figures who were in later years to haunt his opium nightmares. When the nurse reads of the spreading of the palms on Christ’s way into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:1–11), the vision of Palm Sunday becomes firmly linked to the recollection of Jane on her deathbed. The evil magician of Aladdin, from whose uncanny powers no child could hope to hide, revealed the horror of the “dark sublime” (M 1:130).9 A third case (although the first narrated among the involutes recollected in “A Sketch from Childhood,” Part VI) belonged, De Quincey recalls, “to the march (or boundary) line of my eighth and ninth years.” For his instruction in Latin, Dr. S. has him read from Phaedrus the Aesopian fabulist. This text revealed “the immeasurableness of the morally sublime” in a way that was no longer “clouded with mystery” as were the earlier involutes which were received by the child “with awe and dim misgivings of something


beyond my grasp.” To the sublimity of Phaedrus, however, he responds “with radiant and perfect sympathy.” In the house of Dr. S., De Quincey had observed a domestic tragedy of suffering and degradation far worse than the police reports of the newspapers with their revelations of “colossal guilt” and “colossal misery.” Concealed behind “the thick curtains of domestic life,” he witnessed the cruelty of child abuse. Dr. S. had twin daughters, between 12 and 14, who were mentally retarded and cruelly treated as the basest of menial slaves by their mother, who apparently resented the shame and burden which she felt their idiocy had cast upon her household. Nor did she feel any remorse at her cruelty until the two girls grew ill and died. Dr. S., not daring to object to his wife’s treating the poor “scrofulous idiots” as “pariahs,” succumbed “to a passive acquiescence and a blindness that soothed his constitutional indolence” (M 1:103–8). “A great mistake it was, on the part of my guardian,” De Quincey declares, “that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus – a writer ambitious to invest the simplicity or rather homeliness of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy.” Phaedrus, himself born a slave, tells how the Athenians “raised a mighty statue” to Aesop, also a slave. De Quincey then quotes from Phaedrus the two lines which passed into an involute enshrining “that glory of the sublime, so stirring to my childish sense”: Aesopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici; Servumque collocârunt eternâ in basi. De Quincey translates these lines: A mighty statue did the Athenians raise to Aesop, and a poor Pariah slave they planted upon an everlasting plinth. Having already referred to the two abused daughters as “pariahs,” he goes on to explain that I have not scrupled to introduce the word Pariah, because in that way only could I decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity originated in the awful chasm,

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in the abyss that no eye could bridge, between the pollution of slavery – the being a man, yet without right or lawful power belonging to a man – between this unutterable degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and kettle-drums of kings as drowning the whispers of his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet joining in one choral anthem to the regenerated slave. (M 1:125–6) His sense of the “moral sublime,” De Quincey insists, was not supplied by some later, more mature deliberation, but, in fact, reflected “what I did in reality feel at that time.” How much this passage derived of added effect from its suggestion to my mind of the two poor emancipated sisters, I do not pretend to measure. Yet what was the agreement between their case and that of Aesop? […] Aesop was a slave: they were slaves. Aesop was emancipated: they were emancipated; Aesop by his lord: they by the universal lord – death. De Quincey then proceeds to tell how the sense of the morally sublime was enriched by subsequent readings which replicated that same movement from the “apoggiatura” of the first line, “flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line” (M 1:127). Such, for example, was the grandeur aroused by “the crashing overture to the grand chapter of Daniel – ‘Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords.’ ” A moment that becomes morally sublime with the message, “Mene mene tekel upharsin” (Daniel 5:1–31). Such, too, was the “effect produced in the two opening lines of Macbeth”: “When” (but mind that an emphasis of thunder dwells upon that word “when”) – “When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”


“What an orchestral crash,” exclaims De Quincey, “rises upon the ear in that all-shattering question!” (M 1:126). Through these evocations of sublime power one involute may call forth another, and another. The “dark sublime” of the wizard at the opening of Aladdin has its echo and reverberation in the incantation of the Witches at the opening of Macbeth. Framed by the prophecy of the witches in hailing the thanes of Glamis and Cawdor upon the heath, and the vexed mutterings of the porter as he stumbles toward the gate, a murder has been committed and Macbeth, still bloody from the deed, has heard the voices of his guilt: Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep” – the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care […] Still it cried, “Sleep no more” to all the house, “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.” (II.ii.36– 41) These lines, too, are retained among De Quincey’s involutes. In describing this scene in his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate,” he emphasized how “the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice,” how time is “annihilated,” how the “relation to things without [is] abolished.” Readers of De Quincey will immediately recognize that is also the state that he often ascribed to his opium dreams. Just as he identified himself, from Coleridge’s description of the engraved plates of Il Carceri, with “poor Piranesi” trapped within the architectural vastness of his own visions (Lindop 70 –1), he identified, too, with the guilt-tormented Macbeth. Amidst the “dread contest with phantoms and shadowy enemies” in his opium nightmares, were those “that oftentime bade me ‘sleep no more!’” (Lindop 36). And from another dream of agony, he says, “I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud – ‘I will sleep no more!’” (Lindop 77).10 When the knocking at the gate is heard, he explained, “the world of darkness passes away,” the human makes “its reflux on the fiendish,” “the pulses of life” begin “to beat again,” “the goings-on of the world” are reestablished. So, too, amidst his

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awful wrestlings with “the damned crocodile, and unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams,” I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping); and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing hand-in-hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their coloured shoes, or their frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. (Lindop 74) More than “profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis,” as he says of the “suspended” scene of Macbeth’s crime, the “awful […] transition” from loathsome hallucination to the sight of innocent children brought forth tears and a “mighty and sudden revulsion of mind” (Lindop 75). Sequestered in these involutes, De Quincey’s Shakespeare is an intimately personal Shakespeare. Passages from the plays provide not merely a gloss, but become an integral part of his experience. Like many others, De Quincey, too, when he thinks of jealousy, is reminded of the struggles of Othello. Although Iago endeavors to arouse Othello’s jealousy, even taunting him with the words, “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster” (III.iii.171–2), De Quincey argues that “the passion of Othello is not jealousy” (M 1:174n). Coleridge, he knows from the report of the lectures on Shakespeare,11 had made this point. De Quincey asserts that “jealousy, […] where it argues habitual mistrust, is an ignoble passion.” By contrast, Othello’s state was not that of a degrading, suspicious rivalship, but the state of perfect misery, arising out of this dilemma, the most affecting, perhaps, to contemplate, of any which can exist – viz., the dire necessity of loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be unworthy of that love. (M 1:174) “There are,” he goes on to acknowledge, “but few men and women capable of great passions.” Adapting Hartley’s use of the term vibratiuncles to describe the miniature vibrations by which sensations are propagated through the nervous system from the respective sensory organs to the brain, De Quincey suggests that most people are not “governed by passions, or capable of passions, but of passiuncles” (M 1:174).


Even such miniature passions, however, are capable of instigating dangerous consequences, a fact that he remembers contemplating as a young child, while being chased by a group of factory boys, after he has enjoyed the kisses and caresses of the girls who were supposed to be guarding him as their prisoner. Accompanying his precocious delight in “revelling amongst the lips of that fair girlish bevy, kissing and being kissed, loving and being loved,” is his precocious literary awareness of the peril he risks: from all that I had ever read about jealousy (and I had read a great deal – viz. “Othello,” and Collins’s “Ode to the Passions”), I was satisfied that, if again captured, I had very little chance for my life. That jealousy was a green-eyed monster, nobody could know better than I did. “Oh, my lord, beware of jealousy!” Yes; and my lord couldn’t possibly have more reason for bewaring it than myself. (M 1:82) The mature De Quincey, agreeing with Coleridge, calls attention to the ironic tension that is wrought when Othello, whose nobility of mind resists emotional degradation, is tormented by a villain whose relentless machinations are dedicated to debasing him to jealous torment. The 7-year-old De Quincey, as recollected in this autobiographical tale of the battle with the factory boys, would seem already to have perceived that irony. It is not one of the factory boys that is cast in the role of Othello pursuing young De Quincey as an interloping Cassio. He himself is Othello, acting precisely as Shakespeare’s Othello ought to have acted if were to have preserved himself and his beloved Desdemona: “indeed, well would it have been had his lordship ran away from all the ministers of jealousy – Iago, Cassio, and embroidered handkerchiefs” (M 1:82). No other critic of the Romantic period – not Coleridge, not Hazlitt, not even Lamb with his penchant for nostalgic reveries – carried so persistently and tenaciously into his mature judgments the intuitions of the child. The texts of his childhood – the Arabian Nights, but also the Bible, Paradise Lost, and the plays of Shakespeare – were absorbed into involutes, always and inevitably to be called forth whenever those passages or their emotional contingencies were re-encountered or reinvoked. Precisely because of his reliance on textual involutes, De Quincey thinks of Shakespeare not as playwright,


but as a master expositor of the mysterious workings of the troubled mind, a poet who gives to language the power of rhetoric and eloquence. Supplementing his discrimination between the “literature of knowledge and the literature of power,” De Quincey proposed a parallel distinction of logic, governed by the discursive understanding, rhetoric, the instrument of the intuitive reason, and eloquence, by which the passions are expressed. Logic serves the “literature of knowledge”; through the interplay of rhetoric and eloquence arises the “literature of power.” As De Quincey notes in his essay on “Rhetoric,” Shakespeare, although manifestly a “rhetorician majorum gentium,” is very seldom only a rhetorician: “scarcely an instance is to be found of his rhetoric which does not pass by fits into a higher element of eloquence or poetry.” The first and last acts, for instance, of the Two Noble Kinsmen, – which, in point of composition, is perhaps the most superb work in the language, […] – would have been the most gorgeous rhetoric, had they not happened to be something far better. […] In their first intention they were perhaps merely rhetorical; but the furnace of composition has transmuted their substance. Indeed, specimens of mere rhetoric would be better sought in some of the other great dramatists, who are under a less fatal necessity of turning everything they touch into the pure gold of poetry. (M 10:108n) When De Quincey speaks of the elevation of rhetoric through eloquence into “the pure gold of poetry,” he also insists that the transmutation is a source of power. Whence comes the power that resides in the “literature of power”? From the mind itself. Why then do we need to turn to literature to find it? Because in the mind itself the power is passive and unorganized. “The true antithesis to knowledge,” De Quincey says in his reformulation of the Horatian aut prodesse aut delectare, “is not pleasure, but power.” That power, he goes on to explain, enables the reader “to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness,” the “modes of feeling” which otherwise lie dormant “in every human mind for want of a poet to organize them” (M 10:48). To delineate the psychology of the reader’s response “when these inert and sleeping forms are organized, when these possibilities are


actualized” as the “conscious and living possession” of the mind, De Quincey turns to the storm on the heath in King Lear (III.iv). Here, he declares, the height, and depth, and breadth, of human passion is revealed to us, and, for the purposes of sublime antagonism, is revealed in the weakness of an old man’s nature, and in one night two worlds of storm are brought face to face – the human world, and the world of physical nature – mirrors of each other, semichoral antiphonies, strophe and antistrophe heaving with rival convulsions, and with the double darkness of night and madness, – when I am thus suddenly startled into a feeling of the infinity of the world within me, is this power, or what may I call it? (M 10:49) Once these revelatory moments of power are aroused and awakened within the consciousness, they become a part of personal experience and weld themselves to kindred experiences. Thus it is for De Quincey that scenes from Shakespeare form as crucial a documentation of his “Afflictions of Childhood” or other autobiographical writings as they do in any of his essays of literary criticism. Indeed, even in the latter he habitually draws upon autobiographical episodes. The power of the scene with Lear on the heath is revealed through the “sublime antagonism,” the confrontation between “two worlds of storm.” The porter’s scene in Macbeth is able to reflect “back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity” because it counters the “fiendish” and reaffirms “the goings-on of the world in which we live.” Unlike Macbeth or Lear, Hamlet himself perceives the “sublime antagonism”; unlike Othello, he recognizes and resists the villainy set against him. As in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, the human and the fiendish, reason and madness, life and death are brought into stark opposition. But Hamlet – in his pretense of madness, in his address to the players, and in subverting the plot of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern – is fully conscious of illusion and intrigue. He not only stalks the boundaries, he is prepared to trespass them, as when he confronts the ghost on the parapet, or when he leaps into the grave of Ophelia. As the sententious Polonius observes, “There is method in his madness.” The antagonism and doubleness that merely inform the other tragedies are here taken up as the hero’s “arms against a sea of troubles.”12


To represent the levels or degrees of life and thought, reality and idea, Shakespeare introduces into Hamlet a play within a play. The effect, De Quincey asserts, is similar to what happens with a painting in which the artist represents a chamber “on the walls of which […] hangs a picture.” Indeed, the reflexivity of art within art could be pursued even further: “this picture might again represent a room furnished with pictures, in the mere logical possibility of the case we might imagine this descent into a life below a life going on ad infinitum.” In such a retrocession, De Quincey observes, the concept of reality is subdivided, and once discriminated as “a life below a life,” previously uncontemplated nuances of being are revealed. The original picture is a mimic, an unreal, life. But this unreal life is itself a real life with respect to the secondary picture; which again must be supposed realized with relation to the tertiary picture, if such a thing were attempted. Consequently, at every step of the introvolution (to neologise a little in a case justifying a neologism), something must be done to differentiate the gradations, and to express the subordinations of life; because each term in the descending series, being first of all a non-reality to the spectator, is next to assume the functions of a real life in its relations to the next lower or interior term of the series. (M 10:344) For the painter, the introvolution of unreality within reality is achieved through a successive “modification of appearances” which at each enfolding of art within art will reveal a painting “still more intensely unreal,” yet still capable of being recognized as a reality in the very next phase of interiorization. Such is the problem of the painter. But the poet must create modulations of being, altering relationships between life and art, through language. Shakespeare’s task “was so to differentiate a drama that it might stand within a drama precisely as a painter places a picture within a picture”: the secondary or inner drama should be non-realized upon a scale that would throw, by comparison, a reflex colouring of reality upon the principle drama. […] the secret, the law, of the process by which he accomplishes this is to swell, tumefy, stiffen, not the diction only, but the tenor of the thought, – in fact, to


stilt it, and to give it a prominence and an ambition beyond the scale which he adopted for his ordinary life. It is therefore in rhyme – an artifice which Shakespere employs with great effect on other similar occasions (that is, occasions when he wished to solemnize or in any way differentiate the life); it is condensed and massed as respects the flowing of the thoughts; it is rough and horrent with figures in strong relief, like the embossed gold of an ancient vase; and the movement of the scene is contracted into short gyrations – so unlike the sweep and expansion of his general development. (M 10:345) The immediate purpose of De Quincey’s analysis of the players’ scene in Hamlet is to explain the mythic and heroic dimensions of Greek Tragedy. His major assumption is that “Greek tragic life presupposed another life, the spectator’s, thrown into relief before it.” In the case of Shakespeare, however, he not only implicated the life of the spectator, but his own life, and the life of Shakespeare as well. He seeks to explain, that is, “by comparison with the life of Shakespere, what the inner life of the mimetic play in Hamlet is to the outer life of the Hamlet itself”: It is a life below a life. That is – it is a life treated upon a scale so sensibly different from the proper life of the spectator as to impress him profoundly with the feeling of its idealization. Shakespere’s tragic life is our own life exalted and selected. (M 10:347) The self-reflexive integration of a play within a play commands attention to the mimetic mirroring already operative. Doubling the levels of illusion into contrasting planes of reality and unreality solicits, according to De Quincey, a more profound awareness of the life of Shakespeare, on the one hand, and the spectator’s own life on the other. But these were implicated all along. De Quincey elsewhere observes a similar pattern of doubling in that scene in which Hamlet interprets “the portraits of the two brothers to his besotted mother” (M 10:310). Look here upon this picture and on this, – The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See what a grace was seated upon this brow; […]


This was your husband. – Look you now, what follows: Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear13 Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? (III.iv) De Quincey cites this scene, not as a further example of the reflexivity of art, but as an elucidation of the process of elucidation. Hamlet’s interpretation of the portraits to the Queen, who refuses to recognize what Hamlet holds to be obvious, provides De Quincey with a model for his own task of demonstrating, to those reluctant to see, the differences between the sublime of Homer and Greek tragedy and the sublime of Milton and Shakespeare. “We are talking of the sublime: that is our thesis.” Presuming the introvolutions of “a life below a life,” De Quincey traces the way in which “the tragic life” of the drama comes to exist within “the life of the spectator,” but also the way in which “the life of Shakespeare” is contained within the life represented within his plays. De Quincey was neither the first nor the last biographer to endeavor to find in the plays possible autobiographical evidence to flesh out the paucity of surviving documents of Shakespeare’s life. But many of the passages which De Quincey was, in fact, the first to cite as biographically relevant, or revelant, have been cited again by subsequent biographers who have not bothered to acknowledge the precedent in De Quincey. Thus, for example, in postulating Shakespeare’s apparent regret of his marriage at age 18 to Anne Hathaway, Peter Quennell, in Shakespeare – The Poet and his Background (1963), cites the very passage from The Tempest which De Quincey had first introduced to make this same point (M 4:52–3). It is the passage in which Prospero tells Ferdinand that if he makes love to Miranda before they are married, he will prepare the way for regret and animosity. If thou dost break her virgin knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be minister’d, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall, To make this contract grow, but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew


The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. (IV.i) So often had this, and other quotations assembled by De Quincey in his encyclopedia essay, been used in subsequent biographies, that Peter Quennell repeated it as a commonplace, apparently not even aware of the debt to De Quincey.14 Because De Quincey in his own writings is persistently autobiographical, his tendency is to presume the same degree of self-replication in other writers. In his Shakespeare essay, he occasionally neglects to add the reminders – the “possibly” or “probably,” the “perhaps” or “maybe” – to acknowledge his speculations, as if he were as confident of these autobiographical involutes as he is of those in his own life. When Shakespeare was a 14-year-old school boy, De Quincey argues, the financial reverses suffered by John Shakespeare, his father, exposed him to the psychological distress portrayed years later in Timon of Athens. Those scenes “which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and the impassioned frenzy of misanthropy,” De Quincey considers “most probable,” were drawn “from his personal recollections connected with the case of his own father.” The village baker, Robert Sadler, who demanded security for the paltry debt of 5 pounds, could have as “little apprehended that he should be called over the coals for it in the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’” 270 years later, says De Quincey, as that thirty years later he would be ridiculed in the character of Lucullus, who bears testimony against Timon: Alas, good lord! a noble gentleman ‘tis, if he would not keep so good a house. Many a time and often I have dined with him, and told him on’t; and come again to supper to him, of purpose to have him spend less: and yet he would embrace no counsel, take no warning by my coming. Every man has his fault and honesty is his; I have told him on’t, but I could ne’er get him from it. (III.i) What the servants of Timon’s House said of their ruined master, De Quincey cites as a pertinent recollection of those years in which Shakespeare’s father “moved on in darkness and sorrow” (M 4:43– 4): His familiars from his buried fortunes Slunk all away; left their false vows with him


Like empty purses pick’d: and his poor self A dedicated beggar to the air, With his disease of all-shunn’d poverty Walked, like contempt, alone. (IV.ii) In like manner, the recurrence of passages cautioning against a young man’s relationship with an older woman, or a too hasty acquiescence to the impulses of passion, De Quincey cites as Shakespeare’s latter-day reappraisal of the circumstances of his marriage. Although De Quincey says he will not impute to Anne Hathaway “anything so hateful as a settled plot for ensnaring” the young William Shakespeare, then a stripling of 18 and she 8 years his senior, he goes on to observe that it must have been “easy enough for a mature woman, armed with such inevitable advantages of experience and of self-possession, to draw onward a blushing novice, and, without directly creating opportunities, to place him in the way of turning to account such as naturally offered” (M 4:55). “Young boys,” as Shakespeare apparently realized only in retrospect, “are generally flattered by the condescending notice of grown-up women.” If Shakspeare’s lines in Sonnet 41, addressed “to a young boy adorned with the same natural gifts as himself,” are to be taken as “the key to the result,” the outcome of the seduction is inevitable: Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won; Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed; And when a woman woos, what woman’s son Will sourly leave her till she hath prevailed? De Quincey espouses a cavalier philosophy: “Once […] entangled in such a pursuit, any person of manly feelings would be sensible that he had no retreat.” To reject Anne Hathaway’s advances would be “grievously to wound her sexual pride, and to insure her lasting scorn and hatred.” Yet in acquiescing, “half perhaps in heedlessness, half in desperation,” Shakespeare soon aroused “the clamorous displeasure of her family.” On November 28, 1582 a bond was issued demanding the forfeiture of £40 “if the said Willm. Shagspere do not proceed to solemnization of mariadg with the said Anne Hathwey.” There was reason for the urgency. Less than six months


later, on May 26, 1583, the “baptism of Shakspeare’s eldest child, Susanna, is registered” (M 4:49–50). In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare, “looking back on this part of his youthful history from his maturest years, breathes forth pathetic counsels against the errors into which his own inexperience had been ensnared” (M 4:51). Viola, disguised as Cesario, has fallen in love with Duke Orsino, whom she serves as page, in which role she delivers the Duke’s messages to Olivia, who has fallen in love with her. Amidst this confusion, De Quincey declares, Shakespeare notices “The disparity of years between himself and his wife,” sanctioning the relationship between a man and a younger woman, yet cautioning against the liaison between a woman and younger man: Duke. Viola. Duke. Viola.

What kind of woman is’t? Of your complexion. She is not worth thee then: – What years? I’ faith, About your years, my lord. Duke. Too old, by heaven. Let still the woman take An elder than herself: so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband’s heart. For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and infirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, Than women’s are. Viola. I think it well, my lord. Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, Or thy affection cannot hold the bent; For women are as roses, whose fair flower, Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour. (II.iv) Accustomed to respond to literature in personal terms, De Quincey is confident of the autobiographical revelation: “we may read an earnestness in pressing the point as to the inverted disparity of years, which indicates,” he declares, how Shakespeare has introduced into his play “an appeal to the lessons of his personal experience.” An attraction to an older woman, however, was but one indiscretion; the other was “in having yielded so far to passion and opportunity as to crop by prelibation, and before they were hallowed, those


flowers of paradise which belonged to his marriage-day.” De Quincey has found Shakespeare’s confession, expressed with “solemnity of sorrow” and “moral reproof,” in that passage from The Tempest, also quoted by Peter Quennell, in which “Prospero formally betrothes his daughter to Ferdinand,” but warns the young prince against the consequences, “If thou dost break her virgin knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / […] be ministered” (IV.i). When Miranda “betrays more impassioned ardour than the wise magician altogether approves” and the prince risks a few experimental caresses, Prospero repeats his warning against the trespass: Look thou be true: do not give dalliance Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw To the fire i’ the blood: be more abstemious, Or else – good night your vow. Convinced of the pervasive presence of the author’s own life in all his thought and feelings, De Quincey considers it inconceivable that anyone, once aware of the biographical facts, might read these lines without recognizing in them the “subtile hieroglyphics, the secret record of Shakspeare’s own nuptial disappointments” (M 4:53– 4). First though he was in drawing from the words of Prospero an intimate connection to Shakespeare’s own life, De Quincey was not the first to see Prospero as a persona for the playwright. Campbell, to whom, along with Malone, De Quincey is most indebted for his biographical details, asserted that The Tempest, as the last of Shakespeare’s works, possesses “ ‘a sort of sacredness,’ ” especially when we recognize Shakespeare himself in the character of “the great enchanter Prospero,” as he “solemnly and for ever renounces his mysterious functions, symbolically breaks his enchanter’s wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his science, and his secrets ‘Deeper than did ever plummet sound’” (4:66). De Quincey recognizes in this “most profound ejaculation” the complexity of an introvolution which refers to the circumstances of the play as well as to the poet’s own career. And when Prospero declares We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded by a sleep


his words embrace his own magic, the illusions of the stage, and also, in a still more comprehensive introvolution, “such stuff / As dreams are made of,” De Quincey insists, also gathers “into one pathetic abstraction the total philosophy of life.” In De Quincey’s paraphrase, “our life is a little tract of feverish vigils, surrounded and islanded by a shoreless ocean of sleep, – sleep before birth, sleep after death” (M 4:66). Once again many will have anticipated the cross-reference to De Quincey’s own autobiography lurking in his account of Prospero as Shakespeare’s alter ego. Just as those moral caveats to Ferdinand were pronounced with “ ‘that sad wisdom folly leaves behind,’ ” revealing Shakespeare’s own recollections within the language he gives to Prospero, De Quincey could scarcely have reconstructed the circumstances without recalling events during the fifth and sixth years of his residency at Dove Cottage. On the birth that so soon followed Shakespeare’s marriage, De Quincey exclaims with mock dismay – “O, fie, Miss Susanna! you came rather before you were wanted.” A more earnest and outraged “O, fie” might well have been uttered among De Quincey’s Grasmere neighbors when his eldest son, William Penson, was born – not a few months after, but many months before his marriage to Margaret Simpson. De Quincey, too, knew the thrall of “such stuff / As dreams are made of,” and more than once he had forsworn the magical caducean staff (Lindop 94). Yet if he imagines himself a Prospero, wielder of the spell, he knows himself to be as well an Ariel or Caliban, subject to its power. He is at once the conjuror and the conjuror’s renounced book: I, as usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the wight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. “Deeper than ever plummet sounded,” I lay inactive. (Lindop 77) The encyclopedia essay on Shakespeare was published in 1838, 17 years after De Quincey had already infolded this involute of Prospero drowning his book, together with that of Macbeth murdering sleep, into the final pages of his Confessions. His predilection as a


critic for seeking in poetic texts, a text below a text, a life below a life, was prompted by his own compulsion to absorb literature into life, and life into literature. For De Quincey, Shakespeare was, in his way, as much a poet of mind and memory as was Wordsworth. Thus he claims that Raymond de Véncour, in Milton, et la Poésie Epique (1838), “has made a serious mistake as to Wordsworth in his relation to Shakespeare.”15 Having been swayed by the mere external evidence of the Excursion as “a philosophic poem,” Véncour “is naturally led to speak more pointedly of Milton.” Nevertheless, De Quincey counters, the more profound “affinities are every way more numerous and striking to Shakespeare.” Adapting the distinction that August Wilhelm Schlegel had introduced in contrasting the classical and the modern in terms of painting and sculpture,16 De Quincey argues that Milton shares with Aeschylus “the simplicities and stern sublimities of Sculpture,” while in Wordsworth and Shakespeare “is seen the infinite of Painting.” Sculpture reveals “that sort of death, or of life locked up and frozen into everlasting slumber”; painting, by contrast, expresses attributes “of life, of tumult, of agitation, of tendency to something beyond.” Milton sustains the sedate grandeur of Greek literature; Shakespeare, and Wordsworth with him, provides “the modern tumultuous movement, a grand stream of action” (M 10:315).17 De Quincey’s signal tribute to Shakespeare as one who “has extended the domains of consciousness” is fully in keeping with his critical appraisal of the psychological interiority of Shakespeare’s poetic realm. In conjuring supernatural phantoms, Shakespeare explores the frontiers of desire and fear; in presenting natural human forms, he reveals the dynamics of thought and feeling (M 4:76–9). Because the reader feels within personal experience the echoes and reverberations of their ideas and passions, Shakespeare’s characters attain a “real organic life” independent of their incarnation on the stage (M 4:71). Through this process of mental validation, passages from Shakespeare merge with memories and reside within the involutes of the mind. Coleridge, astute as he was in his Lectures on Shakespeare, thought that the porter’s scene was a clumsy addition made by some actor.18 In his subjective response to the scene, De Quincey found the effects indispensable to the sublime. Introspective and digressive


in his literary reflections, De Quincey completed no other sustained piece of Shakespearean criticism than the short essay “On the Knocking at the Gate” and the article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His autobiographical reminiscences, however, and the personal intrusions throughout his prose, are informed by the aesthetic insights of his Shakespearean involutes.

6 Miltonic Overtures

The dire price to be paid for the magnificent visions he obtained through “The Pleasures of Opium,” De Quincey candidly acknowledged in describing “The Pains of Opium.”1 In “Suspiria de Profundis” the “Ladies of Sorrows” were introduced as the agents of his torments. How his personal crisis also reflected a national state of affairs is evident in his account of “The English Mail-Coach” (1849) as mighty organ of the nation: in its “Glory of Motion” the mail-coach could “trample upon humanity” (Lindop 191) and become the instrument of “Sudden Death.” The architecture of Pandaemonium (Paradise Lost I:700 –92) has the peculiarity that dimensions of time and space are destabilized for Satan and his fallen retinue. So, too, the space and time of the Campo Santo in De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue” are skewed by the motion and paralyis of opiate delusion. De Quincey invokes Milton’s vision of hell’s delusions, but also his vision of temptation as Eve accepts the forbidden fruit: Every one of us, in this dream [repeating “the original temptation in Eden”], has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a snare is made ready for leading him into captivity to a luxury of ruin; again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls from innocence; once again, by infinite iteration, the ancient Earth groans to God, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her child; “Nature from her seat, sighing through all her works,” again “gives signs of woe that all is lost;” [Paradise Lost

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IX:782– 4] and again the counter sign is repeated to the sorrowing heavens of the endless rebellion against God. (Lindop 212) De Quincey, as noted in Chapter 1 above, turned frequently to Paradise Lost to document his own guilt and suffering. Echoes of Milton were retained in the “involutes” of the “Confessions” and the “Suspiria de Profundis.”2 In “The Dream Fugue,” however, De Quincey does not merely grasp a few lines, he absorbs the imagery of the entire passage in which Michael reveals to Adam and Eve the “bevy of fair women” and young men who dance to the “charming Symphonies” (Paradise Lost XI:573–95).3 In the ekphrasis of the culminating “Dream Fugue,” the statue of the Dying Trumpeter winds a stony trumpet (Lindop 231–2). It is the statue who acts, while the helpless opium-eater remains in the bondage of his dream; it is the statue whose dreadful blast proclaims from the field of battle the human sacrifice to the gods of war and empire. The poetic exposé of the conflict, aesthetic and ideological, is neither a skeptical breakdown of the poetic endeavor nor an ironic breaking-out-of the reflexivity of art imitating art imitating art; it is, rather, the painful confession of its deadly entrapment. Ekphrasis for De Quincey was not simply an occasion to display a certain mastery of rhetorical enargia in attempting to conjure a visual work of art;4 he used ekphrasis, rather, for a particular confessional purpose. He readily admitted both deceit and personal agony in his very pretense of bringing language to challenge the representations of art. The poet’s confrontation with artistic entrapment, W. J. T. Mitchell has described as “ekphrastic fear.” Poetic ekphrasis commences in “indifference,” the simple recognition that a painting or sculpture cannot possibly be represented in language. Yet as the poet undertakes that impossible task, there follows an “ekphrastic hope” that the power of metaphor to stimulate the visual imagination might actually succeed in overcoming the differences between verbal and visual modes of representation. This hope, Mitchell argues, quickly gives way to an “ekphrastic fear” born of anticipating the consequences of conjuring visual stasis.5 Should language succeed in generating the “frozen moment” of art, it would lose the power and dynamism of temporal movement. The fear no less than the hope of ekphrastic endeavor attributes to art a permanence. The “frozen moment” endures.6 That it may thus


transcend the transitory condition of mortality makes art much like death. The notion that one can “die into art” soothes the stark opposition in Horace’s phrase, “ars longa, vita brevis.” The mortal doom that casts its shadow even upon the joyous celebration of his marriage, Spenser can claim to transcend in his “Epithalamion” by offering “To short time an endless monument.” While the “endless monument” of art may thus preserve its subject, it is also evident that preservation is achieved only through embalmment. The artifact is forever petrified. Not the embalmment of the artifact but the embalmment of its author is what seemed so terrifying to those romantic writers who perceived their work as somehow identical with the activity of mind. In the works of Coleridge and De Quincey, who experienced something akin to self-embalmment in the thrall of opium, passages recur in which they record the peculiar alterations in their own temporal perception. In its initial effects, the drug exhilarates mental activity even while the body succumbs in torpor; then, in its subsequent phase, consciousness lapses into lethargy, while the muscles begin to suffer nervous agitation. Precisely such alternating acceleration and retardation are among the themes which Alethea Hayter described as characteristic of the effects of opium on the romantic imagination. Opium, De Quincey declares in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” wrought upon his mind and body “mighty antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose” (M 3:395). This statement is directly followed by a grand tribute to opium, a swelling crescendo that commences with the words, “O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium!” The irony of this passage is immediately accessible to readers who recognize that De Quincey has echoed Sir Walter Raleigh’s apostrophe to “O eloquent, just, and mighty Death!”7 Opium, as De Quincey went on to recount in the section of the confessions devoted to its “Pains,” gradually assumed a more debilitating hold on his body so that the drug became a Medusa, and he the hapless witness whom she turns to stone. It is not surprising that in De Quincey’s prose the verbal appropriation of the visual artifact is aligned with the same “mighty antagonisms” which he attributes to opium. The Medusa-moment is the paralysis engendered at its negative pole; at the positive pole is the animating power of the Pygmalion-moment. Although De Quincey,

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as he reveals in his “Confessions,” had recognized by 1821 how this polarity operates in his opium-induced dreams, it is not until 1827, when he left the London Magazine and returned to Edinburgh to work on Blackwood’s Magazine, that he came explicitly to terms with the problem of temporality in art. Among his first contributions were the essay on Lessing and the annotated translation from the Laocoon. Like many a critic who has since explored the temporal and spatial presumptions of the verbal and visual arts, De Quincey was not convinced by Lessing’s discrimination. One of his lengthier notes to Lessing’s text concerns the argument about the sort of temporal movement that might be effectively halted in the “frozen moment” of art. This was intimately relevant to the difficulty, with which he had already grappled in the “Confessions,” of representing how time seemed to accelerate or decelerate as opium rang its changes upon his body and his mind. Lessing, as De Quincey describes him in the essay introductory to his translation of the Laocoon, is not only an accomplished playwright and critic, he has personally brought about that Pygmalionmoment of giving vitality not only to German letters but to the German people. To him goes the credit for “awakening the frozen activities of the German mind” (M 12:157). De Quincey’s annotations to the Laocoon reveal his effort to relate Lessing’s critical thought to his own. In his well-known distinction between the Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, De Quincey revises Horace’s “aut prodesse, aut delectare.” While the purpose of the Literature of Knowledge is to teach, the function of the Literature of Power is not to delight but, as in Quintillian’s definition of rhetoric, to move. De Quincey means “to move” in the manifold sense of arousing the reason as well as the passions. While Lessing commanded such power in “awakening the frozen activities of the German mind,” his declaration that “the object of the fine arts is pleasure” prompted De Quincey to insist that “not pleasure, but the sense of power and the illimitable incarnated as it were in pleasure, is the true object of the Fine Arts” (M 11:172–3). When Lessing goes on to confirm the other half of the Horatian formula, that the function of art is to teach, De Quincey is prompted to append a “Postscript on Didactic Poetry” (M 11:215–21) elaborating his contention that the essential attribute of poetry was the power to move the mind.


The power to move, which De Quincey insists is the object of art, depends in turn on the capacity of art to reveal that power in process. If art is to move it must appear dynamic rather than static. As Lessing seeks to establish the regulative principles which govern the artistic endeavor to express “the acme or transcendent point of action,” De Quincey inserts no contrary notes. Lessing, of course, is also concerned with how mimesis in visual art is to overcome the bondage of its physical condition, “its punctual restriction to a single instant of time” (M 11:177). To resolve this problem of temporal restriction, the artist must show the “arrested movement”; the artist must create, that is, the illusion of a continuity of movement in the single instant which the work of art depicts. Once that continuity is perceived, it can be reanimated in the active mind of the beholder: if it be granted of the artist generally that of all this moving series he can arrest as it were but so much as fills one instant of time, and, with regard to the painter in particular, that even this insulated moment he can exhibit only under one single aspect or phasis, it then become evident that, in the selection of this single aspect, too much care cannot be taken that each shall be in the highest possible degree pregnant in its meaning, – that is, shall yield the utmost range to the activities of the imagination. (M 11:177) The “pregnant” moment is not the ultimate moment of crisis, Lessing argues, but in the movement leading toward that crisis. Thus the artist should represent the moment before the action rises to its extremity of passion: to present the last extremity to the eye is to in effect to put fetters on the fancy, and, by denying it all possibility of rising above the sensible impression of the picture or statue, to throw its activities forcibly upon the weaker images which lie below that impression. (M 11:178) De Quincey is in complete accord with Lessing’s contention that the temporal moment of art must appear continuous, and that the imagination of the beholder must be stimulated to reanimate the action. Crucial to this argument is Lessing’s discrimination of two modes of temporal movement.

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At this point, De Quincey finds it necessary to insert another lengthy note, not to disagree with Lessing but to elucidate further the two modes of temporal movement. One mode involves a homogenous movement, which reveals a continuous, self-repeating, enduring action; the other a heterogenous movement, which, as he translates Lessing’s phrase, is “essentially evanescent.” The artist must represent the former, not the latter. Although De Quincey agrees with Lessing, he explains the problem in terms which are more particularly relevant to his own grappling with temporal perception: it is in the very antagonism between the transitory reality and the non-transitory image of it reproduced by Painting or Sculpture that one main attraction of those arts is concealed. The shows of Nature, which we feel and know to be moving, unstable, and transitory, are by these arts arrested in a single moment of their passage, and frozen as it were into a motionless immortality. (M 11:178) Lessing’s principle of representing events that progress through self-repeating rather than self-effacing action, De Quincey declares, “has been admirably drawn into light, and finely illustrated, by Mr. Wordsworth in a sonnet on the Art of Landscape-Painting.” The sonnet, “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture,”8 in which Wordsworth describes a painting by Sir George Beaumont, provides De Quincey with a specific example of ekphrasis to elucidate the efficacy of enduring rather than evanescent movement in the work of art. The poet in the final couplet identifies “the great secret power” of the painting as its capacity to bestow upon One brief moment caught from fleeting time The appropriate calm of blest Eternity. Has the sonnet justified the claim of these closing lines? Has the poet actually shown how the artist has caught the moment from “fleeting time”? De Quincey acknowledges that the very notion of “fleeting time” might seem at odds with Lessing’s insistence upon durational time; “but all the illustrations of the sonnet,” De Quincey argues, show that Wordsworth has fully grasped the principle of continuous motion.


In the succession of parts which make up any appearance in nature, either these parts simply repeat each other (as in the case of a man walking, a river flowing, &c.), or they unfold themselves through a cycle, in which each step effaces the preceding (as in the case of a gun exploding, where the flash is swallowed up by the smoke, the smoke effaced by its own dispersion, &c.). Now, the illustrations in Mr. Wordsworth’s poem are all of the former class: as the party of travellers just entering the wood, but not permitted, by the good, considerate painter, absolutely to enter the wood, where they must be eternally hidden from us; so again with regard to the little boat, – if allowed to unmoor and go out a-fishing, it might be lying hid for hours under the restless glory of the sun, but now we all see it “For ever anchored in its rocky bed”; and so on; where the continuous self-repeating nature of the impression, together with the indefinite duration, predisposes the mind to contemplate it under a form of unity, one mode of which exists in the eternal Now of the painter and the sculptor. (M 11:178–9) Because Wordsworth explicitly addresses the phenomenon of the “frozen moment,” his sonnet on Beaumont’s landscape provides, for De Quincey’s purpose, a better example of durational time than the description in “Elegiac Stanzas” of Beaumont’s painting of Peele Castle. By contrasting an imagined painting of Peele Castle in a setting of perfect tranquillity with Beaumont’s painting of the Castle lashed by a violent storm, Wordsworth draws attention to the means by which temporal movement is represented. In his own imagined painting, where nothing is allowed to disrupt the tranquillity, there is also nothing to mark the passing of time: all action, all movement have been suspended in utter passivity. His unpainted painting would show the Castle with its reflection “sleeping on a glassy sea”; the sunlight that might suggest passing time would be replaced by “The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.” His vision of “steadfast peace that might not be betrayed,” Wordsworth admits, was mere self-delusion. The death of his brother John, drowned at sea, has forced him to recognize

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human mortality and the ravages of time even in scenes of nature. “A deep distress,” he thus declares, “has humanised my Soul.” To depict such a “humanised” drama Beaumont has painted the impact of “sea in anger” on the mortal struggle of ship and castle: That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, The rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old ptime, The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. (ll. 47–52) Although De Quincey does not elaborate on other instances of ekphrasis in Wordsworth’s poetry (for example, the statue “Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone,” Prelude, III:61– 4), he does in his commentary on Wordsworth’s poetry emphasize the poet’s acute attention to visual detail. On such a passage from “Address to Kilchurn Castle,” De Quincey comments: who does not acknowledge instantaneously the magical strength of truth in his saying of a cataract seen from a station two miles off that it was “frozen by distance”? In all nature there is not an object so essentially at war with the stiffening of frost as the headlong and desperate life of a cataract; and yet notoriously the effect of distance is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most petrific column of stillness. This effect is perceived at once when it is pointed out; but how few are they that ever would have perceived it for themselves! (M 11: 315–16) “Arrested movement” is not simply an artificial convention of painting: it is a commonplace phenomenon of perception. Movement too rapid or too distant for the eye to perceive is blurred into a seemingly stationary object. Wordsworth, as poet preoccupied with optical illusions, transformed an experience of the “frozen moment” into a moment of poetic awareness. Fascinated though he was with how optical illusion revealed the workings of the mind, he had no interest in the altered perception of rapidity and distance which opium might wreak upon the mind. In Wordsworth’s judgment, as


De Quincey well knew, he and Coleridge had revealed only a moral turpitude in their addiction. Lessing explains the “essentially evanescent” as “All appearances in nature which bear the character to our understanding of sudden birth and sudden extinction, and which by their essence are fluxionary.” The “frozen moment” of art must be durational rather than evanescent. This sort of movement is unsuitable for representation in painting and sculpture, because it will inevitably appear “unnatural when fixed and petrified, as it were, into the unchanging forms of art.” If evanescent forms are “frozen,” Lessing asserts, they immediately appear unnatural and, even if “otherwise agreeable or terrific, inevitably become weaker and weaker in the impression the oftener they are contemplated” (M 11:178–80). De Quincey, however, is not willing to consider “arrested movement” a mere peculiarity of the work of art. It may, indeed, be odd, but not for that reason unnatural or unfamiliar. He has himself witnessed such alterations in passing time, experienced the frightening sensation that time has stopped altogether. Depending upon the state of his drug-altered perception, a succession of events may register themselves in De Quincey’s mind at varying rates. The illusions of time rapidly fleeting or slowly creeping make Lessing’s objection to apparent suddenness less significant and merely subsidiary to his discrimination of the opposing modes of movement. De Quincey repeats Lessing’s objection to abrupt events, but he goes on to elaborate the importance of revealing sequential continuity in the “frozen moment.” Inappropriate to the visual arts is that sort of movement, “where the parts are not fluent, as in a line, but angular, as it were, to each other, not homogenous, but heterogenous, not continuous but abrupt.” As evident in his example of the flash and smoke of a gun, De Quincey argues against representing the evanescent event less because of its abruptness than because of the difficulty in revealing a continuity of process: both because each part really has, in general, but a momentary existence, and still more because, all parts being unlike, each is imperfect as a representative of the whole process; whereas in trains which repeat each other the whole exists virtually in each part, and therefore reciprocally each part will be a perfect representation of the whole. (M 11:179)

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Parallel to the problem of representing durational rather than evanescent time in the visual arts, De Quincey notes that a similar problem exists in language when it is used not for the circumstantially ephemeral occasion of discourse but for the purpose of permanent inscription. The language inscribed upon a monument is subject to the same conditions of temporal continuity as govern visual representation of the “frozen moment,” for it, too, becomes visually fixed and permanent. De Quincey again turns to Wordsworth in whose “Essay on Epitaphs” he finds the most thorough exposition of the principles of representation applied to language: first, that all fanciful thoughts, and secondly all thoughts of unsubdued, gloomy, and unhopeful grief, are not less severely excluded from the Epitaph by just taste than by Christian feeling. For the very nature of the material in which such inscriptions are recorded, stone or marble, and the laborious process by which they are chiseled out, both point to a character of duration with which everything slight, frail, or evanescent, is out of harmony. Now, a fanciful thought, however tender, has, by its very definition, this defect. For, being of necessity taken from a partial and oblique station (since, if it coincided with the central or absolute station of the reason, it would cease to be fanciful), such a thought can, at most, include but a side-glimpse of the truth: the mind submits to it for a moment, but immediately hurries on to some other thought, under the feeling that the flash and sudden gleam of colourable truth, being as frail as the resemblances in clouds, would, like them, unmould and “dislimn” itself (to use a Shakespearian word) under too steady and continued attention. (M 11:179) Although he cites Wordsworth’s “Essay on Epitaphs” as resting on the same general principles which Lessing develops in the essay on the Laocoon, De Quincey in fact provides counter-evidence to the major distinction which Lessing attempts to draw between the spatiality of art and the temporal flux of language. How language communicates alters radically when its use is shifted from one medium to another, not just from spoken to written, but from spoken in parliament to spoken in pulpit, from written in a


chronicle to written on a monument. When painting appropriates language, a similar shift takes place. The words must bear the burden of duration, even as they interact within the illusion of transitory time. Thus, in Nicholas Poussin’s painting, the words “ET IN ARCADIA EGO,” which are aptly depicted as inscribed upon a monument, are also being pointed to, read, and interpreted by the figures within the painting, who thus challenge the viewer of the painting to participate in the temporal action.9 “In an Epitaph, from its monumental character,” De Quincey asserts, “we look for a feeling which is fitted to be acquiesced in as final.” Therefore extremities of pain or grief are as ill-suited to the language of epitaphs as to the expression chiseled upon the face of the statue of Laocoon: “upon the general principles of human nature, we know that the turbulence of rebellious grief cannot be a final, or other than a transitory, state of mind; and, if it were otherwise in any particular case, we should be too much shocked to survey it with a pleasurable sympathy” (M 11:180). De Quincey readily grants, however, Lessing’s point that the language of the evanescent moment can be of great use to the dramatic poet, for in the drama such passages “make parts, or steps, in a natural process the whole of which is given, and are effaced either by more tranquil sentiments, or by the catastrophe, so that attempt is there made to give permanence to the evanescent” (M 11:180). In comparing the representation of Medea in painting and in drama, Lessing reasserts the need for the visual arts to select “that point of the action which rather suggested than represented its crisis of extremity.” Thus the praise accorded to Timomachus for his representation of the intense passion of Medea is due to his having captured “that particular form of expression for the situation with which the sense of evanescence was not too powerfully connected to make use revolt from the prolongation of it by art.” Lessing, of course, is relying on verbal accounts of a painting that had long since perished. Timomachus’s rendition may well have been based on a scene from dramatic performance. Whether or not Lessing presumed that the work of art drew specifically upon Euripides’ play, it is evident that his verbal description of that visual moment assumes a dramatic enactment. In giving us his account of the visual imitation of the verbal, he involves us in a verbal imitation of the visual. Indeed, the aesthetic response to the “frozen moment” of the painting is made

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dependent upon an imaginative reenactment of the tragedy. His purpose is to reiterate his criteria for the limits of evanescence: The Medea was exhibited, not in the very act of murdering her children, but a few moments before, whilst the struggle was yet fervent between maternal love and jealousy. The issue is foreseen; already, by anticipation, we shudder at the image of the mother mastered by her murderous fury; and out imagination transports us far beyond any effect that could have been derived from the actual exhibition of this awful moment. (M 11:181) Once again citing as his evidence a work of visual art which survives only in verbal tradition, Lessing tells of the failure of a contemporary of Timomachus who committed the grievous error, in attempting “to exhibit Medea in the very transports of her murderous frenzy; and thus upon a thing as fugitive as a delirious dream had conferred the a monumental duration, – which is shocking and revolting to nature.” Proof of the failure is the scorn expressed by the poet who lays ekphrastic claim to the apparently unabating madness captured in the painting: “Ha! Medea, is then thy thirst after thy children’s blood unquenchable? Doth there rise up for ever another Jason and another Creusa, to sting thee into madness? If so”, he adds in indignation, “cursed be thou, even in the painter’s mimicry!” The aesthetic judgment, endorsed and upheld by Lessing, is more obedient to tradition and cultural conventions than to any deficiency in temporal dynamism which he seeks to grant to language and deny to art. The artists themselves, fortunately, paid little heed to the limits which Lessing argued were insurmountable. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ well-known painting of Sarah Siddons Contemplating the Tragic Muse, for example, depicts the actress seated between two ghostly images of herself acting out the tragic scenes of rage and remorse. With her left hand raised, she summons to the murderous deed an image of herself bearing a poisonous beaker, her face contorted with precisely the impassioned fury to which Lessing strenuously objects; parallel with the angle of the contemplative Sara’s right hand, which declines from the armrest of her chair, is


the bloody knife held by the other image of herself as the murderess who has just recognized the horror of her atrocity. Nor should Reynolds reap undue praise for his originality in overcoming the temporal obstacles of his medium. To introduce into the painting of the contemplative Sara Siddons the very object of her contemplation – herself as tragic heroine before and after she has committed the deadly crime – Reynolds simply adapted the temporal structure of the triptych, much as Bosch used it in depicting The Garden of Earthly Delights flanked to the left with a scene from Paradise and to the right with a scene from Hell. Historically, the visual arts have adapted a wide variety of conventions to express the passing of narrative time. Hogarth, we remember, used a series of plates to narrate the The Rake’s Progress, The Harlot’s Progress, and the moral disaster of a Marriage à la Mode.10 A narrative sequence of visual scenes, of course, is as commonplace in traditional Christian iconography as the Stations of the Cross. Few artists of the late Middle Ages felt that they were obliged to represent but one temporal moment in a painting. As the eye moves about the painting to interpret the visible signs, it becomes involved in the passage of time no less than it does in reading a printed text. Such stories as “Susannah and the Elders” or “David and Bathsheba” were represented in a series of scenes in a single painting. Because the eye is not captive, but free to move from one scene to the next, Lessing’s argument against the repugnance generated by rendering a moment of extreme passion is mitigated by the very sort of narrative movement which he grants to the verbal arts. In another lengthy note to his translation, De Quincey sets forth his oft-reiterated principle of idem in alio. Although he makes repeated use of this principle in later essays (M 1:51; 5:237; 10:368–70), as it is first formulated in this translation of the Laocoon, De Quincey felt compelled to elaborate on “similitude in dissimilitude” as a crucial attribute of the mimetic arts. The immediate occasion for the note is to augment Lessing’s explanation of why Laocoon is depicted nude rather than in his priestly robes. Drapery, although also possessing an appropriate beauty, Lessing explained, detracted from the artistic representation of the human form. De Quincey, here and elsewhere, finds Lessing too preoccupied with the sensuous image. Mimetic desire is fulfilled only in making the drapery reveal rather than conceal. To render transparent the opacity of stone, the sculpted body is

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enveloped yet exposed in diaphanously light and clinging garments.11 Better suited to the representation of the sensuous image is painting, in which shading and coloring render flesh and drapery more excitingly “alive.” Sculpture, even that of “the most perfect master,” reveals not flesh but the human form in stone. While the painter can meet the challenge of idem in alio in representing the scene of Pygmalion with the statue coming to life, the same scene remains problematic for sculpture. “The characteristic aim of painting is reality and life; of sculpture, ideality and duration. Painting is sensuous and concrete; sculpture is abstract and imaginative” (M 11:194 –6).12 De Quincey, to be sure, fully sanctioned Lessing’s distinction between evanescent and durational time. Yet in acknowledging that halting the evanescent moment could produce effects that were revoltingly grotesque, he also knew how to effectively use the horror of freezing a moment of crisis, of stopping the forward thrust of the narrative to rivet the reader’s attention to the moment of violent passion or destruction. In “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” for example, he described the servant-girl, Mary, returning to the household in which Williams has slit the throats of the Marr family. With Mary on one side of the door and the murderer on the other, De Quincey stopped the action and held the reader in suspense as he minutely delineated the predicament. Expansion and contraction of time, as he revealed in his “Confessions,” were symptoms of his opium dreams (W 2:66–7). As if compelled to endure omnipresence, in which all flux and transitory motion cease and all past and all future exist in the eternal moment of divine consciousness, he experienced an enthralled vertigo such as recounted in the “The DreamVision of the Infinite” (M 8:33– 4) and “Savannah-la-Mar” (M 13:361). The extended moment of suspense, a narrative trick often practiced in the tale of terror, may well have its origin, as De Quincey repeatedly testified, in the nightmare experience of being caught in some perilous horror with no power to flee nor even to fend off the danger. To be paralyzed with fear became for De Quincey a recurrent correlative of being physically enervated with opium. Knowing that he would be unable to rouse himself to action, he could not suppress the paranoic fear which arose as demonic companion to his enfeebled condition. Once the opium began to take command of his biochemistry, numbing every muscle, even as it liberated in


reverie his rich store of imagery, each sensation of delight brought with it an associated image of menacing evil. Thus in that moment in which desire has animated the statue and Pygmalion seeks to embrace her, she is transformed into the Medusa who turns him to stone. The ephemeral “roses and Fannies” of the Pygmalionmoment, to use the example in “The Glory of Motion,” are inseparable from the unchanging “crocodiles” of the Medusa-moment. If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things else undeniably do: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a chorus – roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in paradise. (M 11:289) This bliss of paradisiacal images is disrupted by the inevitable demoniacal intrusion: “Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail.” De Quincey’s account of the associational game thus played out repetitively and relentlessly in his dreams involves a contrariety even more disturbing than the fearsome crocodile juxtaposed with the beautiful roses and Fannies. It is the contrariety of the “frozen moment.” The galloping coach is halted, De Quincey declares, “And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours.” The irreality of time in the nightmare void Coleridge had also, in the poem “Limbo,” described as “Mark’d but by Flit of Shades – unmeaning they / As Moonlight on the Dial of Day.”13 What had seemed dynamic are but captive images, caught upon a dial where only shadows move, returning again and again to haunt the dreamer: once again the roses call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and she, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi-legendary animals – griffins, dragons, basilisks,

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sphinxes – till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of earth and her children. This is the ekphrasitic moment which provides the paradoxical climax to De Quincey’s celebration of “The Glory of Motion.” The galloping mail-coach is but a sculptured device to point the passing hours upon a sundial, and the fleeting moments, animating and petrifying, are emblazoned as heraldic emblems upon a shield. In “The English Mail-Coach,” not only is the paralysis he describes in “The Vision of Sudden Death” a direct consequence of the troubled exhilaration he experiences in “The Glory of Motion,” but both alternate in the imagery of shipwreck and marble tombs in the “Dream Fugue.” The sense of exhilarating motion and the helpless paralysis are relocated in the figure of the woman doomed to an inescapable cycle of “infinite activities, infinite repose.” As a case study in ekphrastic paralysis, “The English Mail-Coach” reveals how De Quincey’s experience of heightened perception accompanied by bodily torpor gave rise to images of action and stasis. He describes himself in a helpless stupor, unable to move or act, seated beside the sleeping driver as the speeding mail-coach thunders down upon the young lovers who fail to see in time their impending peril. The frantic gestures of the woman continue to haunt his dreams, which he subsequently narrates in dream-fugue variations on the moment of death. Not only is the experience of thrilling motion overwhelmed by the narrator’s paralysis and thus gradually turned into a tale of terror, he concludes by describing himself turned to stone as he witnesses the marble figures upon the graveyard monuments arise and move. Although Coleridge in “Kubla Khan” and Keats in “The Fall of Hyperion” depict struggles with lifeless paralysis that are thematically similar to De Quincey’s visions of petrifaction, they do not share his peculiar reversal of the ekphrastic polarity. The paradoxical tension of art vs. life has been frequently scrutinized in that prime example of ekphrasis in English romanticism, Keats’s “Ode on a


Grecian Urn.” As other critics have observed, there is something perverse in the poet’s apparent delight over the predicament of the urn as “unravished bride,” the stasis of the “wild ecstasy” of the figures with which the urn is decorated.14 The unconsummated bliss of the lovers may well seem a mixed blessing, in spite of the poet’s argument that they are thus liberated from “all breathing human passion […] / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” The perversity has been located in the peculiar ekphrastic domination which the male poet exercises over the female work of art and the scenes that define its identity as purely ornamental eroticism. The static condition enables the poet to mediate and control the ecstatic energy of his subject. Although he deliberately insists upon its stasis as necessary condition to its permanence as art, the poet nevertheless posits the very temporal movement that he pretends to deny. The evocations of movement must be conjured in order to describe the “mad pursuit” of men and “maidens loth,” the melodist “For ever piping,” the lovers ever about to kiss. Yet in declaring the power of the beautiful “Sylvan historian” to “express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” he promptly exposes its limitations. For all its power to “tease us out of thought / As doth eternity,” its Attic beauty remains a “Cold pastoral!” An exclamation point marks this judgmental declaration of the deathlike coldness which is neither warmed nor vitalized by the reassurance that the urn is a “friend to man” to whom it communicates the sole essential knowledge that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” When the narrator in the “Eve of St. Agnes” chides the Beadsman for ignoring the figures of “The sculptur’d dead” which “seem to freeze, Emprison’d in black purgortorial rails: / Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,” he advocates an aesthetic empathy capable of restoring human feeling to the cold inanimate work of art. By accusing the Beadsman of a “weak spirit” for failing “To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails,” he implicitly invokes the reader to exercise a more sensitive response. An aesthetic of animating empathy rather than willful control is also pronounced in “The Fall of Hyperion.” The poet who declared himself “half in love with easeful death” in “Ode to a Nightingale,” who feared that “I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” commenced “The Fall of Hyperion” with the morbid prophecy that

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“When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave,” posterity will decide whether his visions are those of poet or fanatic. This same movement of “dying into art” is rendered thematic as the poet manipulates his narrative through the labyrinthine recesses of dream within dream within dream. Yet with each recapitulation of the basic opposition between action and stasis, the dreamer is increasingly threatened with the paralysis of vision. The dreamer who awakens belatedly at the site of the edenic banquet of Milton’s Paradise Lost, eats of the abandoned fruit, drinks of the “transparent juice,” and falls into another slumber. In this dream within a dream, he finds himself enclosed within a huge cathedrallike vault. Traversing the vast architectural space, he approaches a lofty altar; standing at the foot of the stairs that ascend its hights, he hears the words of doom: “If thou canst not ascend / These steps, die on that marble where thou art.” As he approaches the altar his entire being is inflicted with cold and numbing pain; he is at the brink of death when his “iced foot touch’d / The lowest stair”; then with each step his vital impulses are restored. Atop the altar he is challenged by Moneta, high priestess of memory and the mythic past, and their dialogue elaborates once more what it means “to die and live again.” Guided by Moneta, the dreamer suddenly emerges in the realm of a third dream, “Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,” where Saturn, great Titan of Time, had fallen “When he had lost his realms.” The frozen immobility of Saturn expresses precisely the conditions of the ekphrastic fear: to enter into the “endless monument” of art is to bear the risk of permanent entombment. While Coleridge, too, inveighs against the paralysis of vision, he blames the mind itself rather than the artistic endeavor for the enervation of the “genial spirits.” Thus in “Dejection: An Ode,” he seeks to dispel the “viper thoughts that coil around the mind.” In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge named his demon “Lifein-Death.” When the curse of slaying the albatross falls upon the mariner, he and the crew are stranded, “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” In the game of dice Death wins the crew, but Life-in-Death, as apotheosis of his guilt and agent of his apostasy, claims the Ancient Mariner. His blessing of the watersnakes may restore his ability to pray, but he is still under her awful shadow as he commences, like the Wandering Jew, his long trial of penance. Although she first pronounced her chilling spell over the Mariner


years before Coleridge suffered the debilitating enthrallment of opium, when she is later invoked, in “The Pains of Sleep” and “Epitaph for S.T.C.,” she is more intimately identified with his addiction. The opium-dream of “Kubla Khan” also describes the antagonism of life and art, torpor and vitality, edenic fertility and lifeless lassitude. The pleasure dome and the River Alph seem to arise twin-born within the “walls and towers” of Xanadu. The River Alph, as the dreamer reveals in opening lines of his vision, is doomed to descend “Through caverns measureless to man, / Down to a sunless sea.” The dreamer, virtually caught up in its current, is compelled along the same plummeting course. Alph surged through the “deep romantic cavern,” spent its last tumultuous energies as a “mighty fountain” erupting in “half-intermittent burst” from its underground channel before it finally “sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” It is only at this juncture that the paradox of the lifeless entrapment is revealed. There amidst the “caves of ice” hovers the image of the pleasure dome. Kubla himself seems to be one with dreamer as he witnesses this “miracle of rare device,” for it is Kubla, standing amidst the tumult as it subsides into helpless passivity, who “heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war.” Not the pleasure dome in the creative moment of the decree,not the surging River Alph in its tumultuous descent, but the paradox of “That sunny dome!” within “those caves of ice!” produces the haunting image of artistic entrapment which the dreamer desires to recreate in song. Yet even if he should succeed, the vision would be met with fear and dread as the conjuration of one who “on honey dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise.” No writer of the romantic period dealt more extensively with artistic entrapment than De Quincey. As in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” he often described processes of powerful energy in opposition to paralyzed immobility; the historical sweep of eons may seem to pass as he struggles to rise from his couch, or mere seconds to swell ponderously and extend into infinity. Among the dream-visions, where the excruciating attenuation of time is a dominant motif, one may cite that glimpse of infinitude in the bravura piece, adapted from Jean Paul,15 which he appends to the essay on Lord Rosse’s Telescope. Weary of the “persecutions of the Infinite,” and seeing no end to the journey, the traveler begs his angelic guide to let him lie down in his grave.

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End there is none? the Angel solemnly demanded. “And is this the sorrow that kills you?” But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the Angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, “End there is none to the Universe of God? Lo! also THERE IS NO BEGINNING.” (M 8:34) Time and space are too vast to be endured by mortal perception. “The spirit of man,” the dreamer cries out, “aches under this infinity.” Associated with the agony of limitless time and space is the agony of absolute confinement in the “frozen moment.” The one evokes the other as inexorably as the image of Fanny of the Bath road calls forth crocodiles and basilisks, as ineluctably as the galloping mail-coach is transfixed upon a sculptured sundial or among prophetic emblems upon a shield. With his description of the shield, De Quincey submits his own entry alongside those examples of ekphrasis, the shield of Achilles as described by Homer (Iliad, XVIII:478–607) and the shield of Aeneas as described by Virgil (Aeneid, VIII:626–728) to which Lessing devoted special attention in his Laocoon. Lessing’s argument is that the ekphrasis in Homer succeeds, because the description does not interrupt the progression of narrative time with an exposition of ornamental details that are confined in the fixed space of the unmoving, unchanging artifact. Homer liberates the “frozen moment,” by describing “the shield not as a thing finished and complete, but in the stages of its growth.” Homer converts spatial “nebeneinander” into temporal “nacheinander,” by showing Vulcan “in the act and process of making it.” Virgil’s description of the shield of Aeneis fails, according to Lessing, because, rather than recounting how the prophetic embellishments were wrought, “prophecy as prophecy,” he has required the action of the poem to stand still while he interprets those emblems upon the shield (M 11:211–12). In his note to this passage in the Laocoon, De Quincey does not attempt to defend Virgil’s ekphrasis. He simply calls attention to the inherent temporal succession of prophecy: when it is delivered, when it is deciphered, when it is fulfilled. “By ‘prophecy as prophecy,’” De Quincey observes, “Lessing means prophecy in the station of the prophet, not as retrospectively contemplated by the interpreter” (M 11:212). Like the shield in Homer’s Iliad, De Quincey’s shield is wrought before our eyes; like the shield in Virgil’s


Aeneid, it is emblazoned with prophetic emblems. But De Quincey’s shield is no palpable artifact, it is an image from a dream; not hammered into being by a divine artisan, but embalmed into memory from out of waking experience; and while it is prophetic, its meaning is manifest in its very appearance. De Quincey need not pause in his narrative to interpret its paradox as self-fulfilling prophecy. Zeno created his paradoxes by confounding the measurement of time with the measurement of space: the arrow in flight does not move, the swift Achilles can never catch the tortoise. De Quincey, too, as may be seen in the exquisite scrutiny he brings to the passing moment as measured by the water drops of a Roman clepsydra, enjoyed the logical subtleties of the temporal-spatial paradox. Although he plays out the elements of seeming infinitesimal division in “The Vision of Sudden Death,” the narrator knows full well that a Zenoan paradox cannot forestall the collision of the mailcoach with the little gig. In an early draft of this section of “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey inserted a parenthetical reminder to himself that he should “notice to the r[eader] the imposs[ibility] of fixing an absol[ute] point in things so varying as a succession of time.”16 This recognition of the impossibility of the task documents what Mitchell called ekphrastic indifference, yet in subsequent drafts De Quincey soon succumbed to the antagonism of ekphrastic hope and fear. In the manuscript for the version first published in Blackwood’s (Dec. 1849), De Quincey altered his strategy: he now sought to overcome that impossibility. More remarkable, his own paralysis in the onrushing succession of time is duplicated, relocated. One young man sits enthralled in an opium trance, awed by his dangerous predicament as the coachman sleeps and the coach races wildly down the wrong side of the dark road. Another young man sits beside a young woman, his head bent close to hers, oblivious to the imminent disaster. In the earlier manuscript draft, De Quincey wrote of that other young man, after he had struggled to wheel the gig out of harm’s way: “that which could be done, [he] had been done.” In the subsequent version, describing how he forced himself to shout a warning in spite of his inability to move, he takes that phrase for himself: “Now then [I had] all had been done [all] that by me could be done: more on my part was not possible.” And in the gig, after it has been struck a splintering blow by the passing coach: “The young

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man sate like a rock. He stirred not at all. But his was the steadiness of [frozen] agitation frozen into rest by horror.”17 The temporal movement in De Quincey’s narrative is carefully counted out in Zenoan measures. As in that scene in “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” where Mary pauses on one side of the door and the murderer waits on the other, time is not halted, but simply attenuated and minutely articulated. According to Lessing’s crucial distinction in Laocoon: “The language of painting consists in lines and colour, which exist in space; the language of poetry in articulate sounds, which exist in time.” For this reason, Lessing asserts, “art is obliged to abstain from all images of which the different parts are in the successional connexion of time” (M 11:207). De Quincey objects that “Lessing is too palpably infected by the error which he combats.” Although Lessing intends to make a case for poetic experience, poetic becomes “too frequently in his meaning nothing more than that which is clothed in a form of sensuous apprehensibility.” Even the purely descriptive, whether represented by painter or poet, becomes picturesque or poetic only “in and through the passion which presides” (M 11:206). A scene, De Quincey argues, must be transferred from its visual or verbal medium to the subjective experience of the perceiver. Temporal experience is subjective experience. Lessing’s case for the temporality of the verbal arts, it should be noted, rests upon the “articulated sounds” of spoken language. What sort of temporality, by this criterion, can be claimed for words printed upon the page? Certainly not that sort of temporality usually referred to as “narrative time.” A narrator can manipulate time forward or backward, fast or slow. Whatever the illusions of temporality in narrative, they are seldom, even in dialogue, regulated by the passing time of “articulated sounds.” Indeed, a narrator may find it easier to recount in a paragraph the passing of a month than the passing of a minute. Yet precisely the slow-motion illusion of witnessing each second as a dramatic event is what De Quincey endeavors to create from the first instant that he explicitly anticipates the impending collision. Explicitly, I say, because implicitly the collision had been anticipated all along. The entire narrative of “The Glory of Motions” prepares for the moment of crisis in “The Vision of Sudden Death.” It is anticipated in the semi-allegorical description of the mail-coach as a


mighty instrument of the state, vehicle of national authority and power. Charged as it is not only with distributing the mail but also with reporting political and military events, “the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo,” the mail-coach seems to operate “through the conscious presence of a central intellect.” Although De Quincey celebrates “the mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events,” (Lindop 184), he makes it clear that its power could be recklessly dangerous. It was privileged with virtual diplomatic immunity, pausing not to assay the damage or make amends when it forced other traffic off the road or crashed and shattered its way through a crowded marketplace: in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses’ hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time from the false echoes of Marengo), “Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?” [ … ] If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in its discharge of its own more peremptory duties. (Lindop 191) De Quincey confesses, here, his role as apologist for the mail, yet even in admitting a degree of hypocrisy (the mock sorrow in repeating “the false echoes of Marengo”), he staunchly upholds the right of the state “to trample on humanity.” Whether De Quincey was ever fully capable of appraising the extent to which he had been exploited in his career as impoverished journalist, surviving on a meager £10 for each essay he could produce in support of the Tory politics of Blackwood’s, he was most certainly capable of tingeing his defense of the establishment with sarcasm or undermining its self-righteous confidence with alarmist prophecies of doom. Although he seems to argue that the mail-coach was above the law and that anyone who dared challenge its authority was guilty of treason, the actual course of his narrative describes the horror that the unguided juggernaut has left in its wake. Nevertheless, De Quincey makes no effort to extricate himself from the charges that

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might be levied against the mail-coach. It may be a mighty instrument of state, but De Quincey is its obedient agent. He excuses the havoc and destruction it causes, and when it brings the news of bloodshed and slaughter of war, he tells the lies of patriotism and valor to postpone a mother’s grief (Lindop 206–8). Although De Quincey’s frank revelation of ideological entrapment seems to be an inadvertent subtext, it is inseparably implicated in the spell-binding tale of his opium paralysis as he sits atop the mailcoach, at the side of the sleeping coachman, watching aghast and helpless as the unguided horses veer to the wrong side of the road and race through the night-time darkness. He hears a sound and is struck “by one flash of horrid simultaneous intuition”: what if another coach should be approaching from the opposite direction? Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which might be gathering ahead, ah! what a sullen mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole upon the air, as again the faroff sound of a wheel was heard! A whisper it was – a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off – secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable; that, being known, was not therefore healed. What could be done – who was it that could do it – to check the storm flight of these maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. (Lindop 220) What is at stake here is not the reader’s power but the narrator’s paralysis. This antagonism of action and stasis is precisely the tension of ekphrasis, and De Quincey aptly conjures it as an ekphrastic image: See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse’s mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with water. Or stay, reader, unhorse me, then, that marble emperor: knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne. (Lindop 220) Powerless to interfere with the headlong rush, De Quincey measures out the units of time and space between the galloping coach and the point of inevitable collision.


At his first calculation, the moment of disaster is 4 miles, or 18 minutes, away. Unchecked by the coachman, the horses are racing at 13 miles an hour. The distance narrows. The coach rounds a bend and, there, 600 yards down “an avenue straight as an arrow,” sheltered by arching trees on either side that “gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle,” idly rolled “a frail reedy gig.” By elaborating in swelling sentences the events of the passing seconds, De Quincey’s prose achieves an effect not unlike that of slow-motion photography. He continues to mark the time. “Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half.” After another 100 words, the wildly racing thoughts of the immobile narrator in search of some heroic escape from his entrapment, happens to find it in the Iliad. “Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the soul resource that remained. Yet so it was.” And that resource? The shout of Achilles. Life must imitate art. “But could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No: but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig horse” (Lindop 221–2). His shout is unheard, yet he manages to shout again. Another 200 words have passed before the driver of the gig at last responds. He has 70 seconds left to save the young lady and himself, or “stand before the judgement seat of God.” For 7 of those 70 seconds he stares upon the onrushing coach, another 5 he spends “with eyes upraised, like one who prayed in sorrow.” Unable to move, the narrator silently, captively pleads for the gig to move, to turn from the road, to wheel away from danger. Another 400 hundred words delineate the desperate actions of the remaining 55 seconds. The horse has reached the crest of the road, but the rear wheels of the gig have yet to be cleared from the “inexorable flight” of the mail-coach: “in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud.” The young man sits, as does the narrator himself, frozen like a rock. “But the lady – ! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams.” The frantic gestures of her horrible fright are described before “the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever” (Lindop 223–5). In the “Dream Fugue,” De Quincey recapitulates in the imagery of dream the circumstances of the collision, of the “agitation frozen

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into rest by horror.” In the first parts of the fugue, the coach and gig have been transformed into ships at sea. In the final movement, the dreamer is again upon a galloping coach, bringing tidings “of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries.” The dark forest road that had seemed, in his earlier description, like a Gothic aisle, now opens before him as the interior of a vast cathedral. Keats’ dreamer too, we may recall, traveled through a vast cathedral and struggled against numbing paralysis as he approached the altar steps (ll. 122–33). The “eternal domed monument” of Keats’ “The Fall of Hyperion,” however, is deliberately contrasted with “The like upon the earth [ … ] / Of grey cathedrals, buttress’d walls, rent towers” (ll. 66–7).18 Poetry is the religion that is worshipped in Keats’ cathedral. The cathedral of De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue” is insistently Christian in its imagery of death and resurrection. Grand sculptured tombs sweep by on either side as the coach gallops league after league down the aisle towards “the aerial galleries of organ and choir.” He recognizes the cathedral graves as that venerable necropolis, the Campo Santo, “a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth.” In a brief outline, perhaps recorded upon waking from one of his recurrent nightmares of the mail coach, De Quincey sketched a dream sequence which seems to have directly informed the movement and some of the imagery of the “Dream Fugue.”19 As in the version which was ultimately published, the coach has been transformed into a ship caught in perilous straits: “The sea running upon the rocks of a port harb[our] – a narrow channel – Light torches.” In this nightmare, however, not the unnamed damsel of the hapless gig is imperiled, but De Quincey’s own children: “all the town stretching yr [their] arms to save – your children are on deck: almost you touch the arms yt [that] are stretched out.” After helplessly witnessing the death of his children, De Quincey is left in his dream, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a self-accursed survivor: “All have perished: but you – hatefully to yourself – why you know not – how you ask not – are again walking in smouldering cities.” He wanders through “burnt out decaying cities of ravage and havock or stretching away thro’ dark roads.” He beholds the devastation but cannot comprehend “what horrifying impulse” has caused it. Just as in the published version, the mail-coach delivers to the


provinces the news of war abroad. But here the mail-coach breaks down, and “all news rep[ort] but ruin.” In the finished “Dream Fugue,” what De Quincey in these notes has but briefly sketched is elaborated in rich imagery. This manuscript gives no suggestion of the abundant use he was to make of the vision in Book XI of Paradise Lost, in which the Archangel Michael reveals to Adam and Eve the grand events from the Fall to the Flood. Nevertheless he had already associated the catastrophe of the mail coach with the Flood, not only as apparent in fatal voyage upon a “sea running with pursuing billows,” but also in the opening episode of his notes in which he refers to “The preaching of Noah – shooting like rockets out of sleep.” Apparently his own opium trance prompted De Quincey to think of the drunkenness of Noah. When Noah awoke from his wine, he pronounced a curse on the descendants of Ham, who had beheld him in his naked stupor, and a blessing on Japheth and Shem, who had covered him. Whatever “The preaching of Noah” may have meant to De Quincey in this early account, he turned instead to Milton for the imagery of the published version. In the published version he also made another equally profound alteration to the dream sequence as originally sketched. After he had witnessed the death of his children and destruction of cities, wandered the dark roads, seen the incomprehensible consequences of some “horrifying impulse,” the mailcoach breaking down as it bears its news of ruin, the dream in its final episode takes him face to face with the grotesque images carved upon the marble mantlepiece in his own room. No less than the augmentation of the shipwreck episode with the imagery of Paradise Lost, Book XI, the transformation of the homely imagery of “The faces of the Marble mantle-piece” into the grand flight through the marble monuments of the Campo Santo provide the profound grandeur of the final version of the “Dream Fugue.” De Quincey may well have absorbed these images of the Campo Santo from conversations with Coleridge. He recorded, we know, that occasion when he and Coleridge were looking through the folio of Piranesi’s engravings of The Antiquities of Rome, and Coleridge described for him the vast architecture of Piranesi’s Il Carceri, which he could immediately visualize, De Quincey said, as the architecture of his own opium dreams (M 3:438). Twice during his stay in Italy in 1805–6, Coleridge had visited the Campo Santo of Pisa. The fresco

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depicting The Triumph of Death impressed him with its stark and powerful images. Describing the fresco in one of his lectures, Coleridge emphasized how it visually dramatized the effect of the appearance of Death on all men – different groups of men – men of business – men of pleasure – huntsmen – all flying in different directions while the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons and the only group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beggars.20 Although the power he attributes to the fresco may well reside in its invitation to the beholder to stand among the “different groups of men” who witness the descent of “the dreadful Goddess,” Coleridge here avoids the implication of ekphrastic entrapment and maintains a position safely out of the reach of the deadly talons. But he has clearly recognized the threat of entrapment, if we trust De Quincey’s “memory of Coleridge’s account,” in his description of Piranesi imprisoned in his own nightmare dungeons: Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little farther, and you perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who should reach the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must now in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. (Lindop 70 –1) Not only the same vast architecture, De Quincey says, but the same “endless growth and self-reproduction” were experienced in his own opium dreams. Unlike Coleridge’s aloof description of the fresco at


Campo Santo, De Quincey reproduces its imagery with himself caught in the very midst. Indeed, entrapment is the explicit and characteristic feature of his ekphrasis: like Piranesi clambering the dungeon walls, De Quincey has entombed himself upon the sculptured sundial, among the heraldic emblems of the shield, and in the final confrontation with the statue of the Dying Trumpeter. In De Quincey’s dream visions, the images of the death and resurrection interact in much the same way as the Pygmalion-moment and Medusa-moment of ekphrastic representation. The Dying Trumpeter rising up from the battlefield is not less ghastly than the talon-winged goddess. The entrance into the necropolis is measured out, just as in the preceding narrative of “Sudden Death,” in passing minutes. Then, as the dream coach thunders down “the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle,” he beholds “a female child, that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers.” She is to be “the ransom for Waterloo.” The tidings of great victory must be paid by her death. At this thought, he declares, he rose in horror, and in that very moment, mirroring his movement and echoing his thought, “rose one that was sculptured on a bas-relief – a Dying Trumpeter”: Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony lips – sounding once, and yet once again; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh baby! spoke from the battlements of death. Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that were so full of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen to a bas-relief. (Lindop 231) This is the moment of crisis, not an evanescent but an enduring crisis. The Pygmalion-moment of the Dying Trumpeter is at once the Medusa-moment of the dreamer. The bearer of the tidings of empire, the rider of mail-coaches become a writer of Tory journalism, is held petrified in bondage. For the readers of Blackwood’s De Quincey has provided a “happy ending.” With one more blast on his horn the Dying Trumpeter

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calls forth the Last Judgment. The dead arise “from the burials of centuries” and within that mighty cathedral they join in singing to God their jubilation. It is an ending much like the ending which Goethe gave to Faust, Part Two. Goethe, like many other poets of that age of rapid and radical change, had thematized the dangerous seduction of stasis and the status quo. The condition of Faust’s damnation was to say to the moment, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” (“Stay, thou art so beautiful”; line 1,700). To halt the dynamic process of flux and change is to surrender to the damnation of entrapment. When Faust utters the fatal words, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”, he addresses not stasis but the reclamation he has begun in returning the salt-swamped flatlands to fertility. A jubilant chorus accompanies the salvation pronounced at the conclusion: “Gerettet ist das edle Glied” (“Saved is the noble part”; line 11,934).21 De Quincey’s concluding jubilation, however, does not grant unconditional salvation. The concluding words are that God “at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, […] might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love!” (Lindop 233). In the meantime, the dreamer is not released from the recurrent nightmares of “dreadful revelations.” In De Quincey’s appropriation of the two modes of time defined in the Laocoon, when the mail-coach galloped past the wreckage of collision, it “carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever” (Lindop 225). The evanescent moment has been captured in the enduring time of memory, and there in dreams the Medusa-moment prevails.

7 Wordsworthean Associations

In September 1845, Thomas De Quincey’s essay “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” appeared in Tait’s Magazine. The 75-year-old William Wordsworth had just brought out a new edition of Poems in one volume; two years earlier he had succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate. Forty-two years had elapsed since an 18-year-old De Quincey had first written to Wordsworth, declaring himself an ardent admirer of the Lyrical Ballads. Those early letters reveal the care that De Quincey took to justify his claims not simply as an admiring reader, but also as an astute and discerning one. This effort to construct his own credentials as reader informed every subsequent account that De Quincey wrote. As part of that narrative, he insisted upon his early familiarity with the poems. Another part, which he began to unfold only when he launched his own literary career with the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), was the validity of relying on the senses, on introspection and even dreams, to ascertain the effects of internal and external stimuli upon the conscious mind. His literary criticism, De Quincey repeatedly insists, is built upon a foundation of psychology. As examined above in Chapter 5, “Shakespearean Involutes,” he approaches Shakespeare as a playwright whose power derived from penetrating psychological insight into character. De Quincey, as we have seen, describes the method of “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” as “psychological criticism,” and he introduces his article on Shakespeare for the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a “psychological biography.” The storm on the heath in King Lear (III.iv), De Quincey further asserts, demonstrates the psychological process that occurs “when these inert and 142

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sleeping forms are organized, when these possibilities are actualized” as the “conscious and living possession” of the mind (M 10:49). De Quincey had already written much on Wordsworth as part of “Lake Reminiscences” and “Autobiography” for Tait’s in 1839 and 1840. At the beginning of his 1845 essay, however, he distinguishes his earlier incidental remarks from the sustained examination he now intends to devote to Wordsworth’s poetry. He concludes this opening paragraph by asserting that a “good psychology” is the prerequisite for a sound “philosophic criticism.” To reestablish what De Quincey meant by defining his efforts as “psychological criticism,” it is necessary to disencumber that rubric of all its Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian accretions, and to reclaim those assumptions pervasive during the very period of history that saw the rise of experimental psychology as a scientific discipline. Among the theoretical developments in the latter half of the eighteenth century, none were more influential than Associationism. The rudiments of the “association of ideas” were put forward in Aristotle’s explanation of how memory functions.1 A discussion of the “association of ideas” was added by John Locke to the fourth edition of An Essay on Human Understanding (1690; 4th edn. 1700) to acknowledge that the mind was indeed capable of linking ideas together in this irrational manner, but that it was necessary to impose logical connections in order to construct an empirically valid understanding. In David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1738) and David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), the “association of ideas” was no longer considered a mere aberrant whimsy of mind: it became, instead, the indispensable ground for all human thought. De Quincey was the first to explicate Wordsworth’s poetry in terms of the “association of ideas.”2 But he was by no means the last. Arthur Beatty, in his monomaniacally brilliant William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in Their Historical Relations (2nd edn., 1927), convinced many scholars of his generation that Hartleyan Associationism was the essential tool for understanding Wordsworth’s poetry. De Quincey was less obsessive, more liberally nuanced, in applying the associationist principles of emotion, perception, and language to the interpretation of Wordsworth’s poems. He was concerned not merely with the functions and patterns of memory in the poetry, but also with Wordsworth’s attention to the data of the senses, and to the interconnection among images and feelings.


Wordsworth himself had invited an associationist reading of his works, and to a large extent De Quincey simply extrapolates his critical strategy from Wordsworth’s own assertions on the nature of poetry. Wordsworth speaks of poetry as gratifying “certain known habits of association,” as tracing “the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement,” and as avoiding those negative instances of bad poetry, those “feelings of disgust,” which “it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower.” In asserting that poetry “takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity,” Wordsworth grounded his poetic endeavor in the act of memory. The power of the memory enables the poet to reconstruct in the mind the object of contemplation; and through language not only in his own mind, but in the mind of the reader. “Whosoever looks searchingly into the characteristic genius of Wordsworth,” De Quincey declares, “will see that he does not willingly deal with a passion in its direct aspect, or presenting an unmodified contour, but in forms more complex and oblique, and when passing under the shadow of some secondary passion.” One image will trigger another through spontaneous habits of association: similitude or difference, spatial or temporal proximity. A remembrance triggered by an awareness of similitude or difference, for example, might occur on revisiting the River Wye and recollecting a previous visit, or an incident of extreme sadness might be recalled in the midst of an experience of pleasure. In “The Two April Mornings,” “The Fountain,” “We are Seven,” “Stray Pleasures,” and “Hart-Leap Well,” Wordsworth develops his poetic structure through the associationist concurrence of contrary emotions. Although the traditional elegy, Milton’s “Lycidas” for example, includes a recollection of happy times in the past, Wordsworth’s intermixes the joy with the grief. He accomplishes this intermixture in “The Two April Mornings” and “The Fountain” by revealing both emotions as embedded in the character and manner of Matthew, the village schoolmaster.3 As an essential trait of his being, joy “wells up from constitutional sources.” This is a joy, De Quincey says, “that is ebullient from youth to age and cannot cease to sparkle.” Wordsworth reveals that the life of this “grey-haired Man of glee” has been “touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.” In “The Two April Mornings,” while visiting the grave of his daughter Emma, he has sight of a young girl “as happy as a wave / That dances on the


sea.” In “The Fountain,” the poet-narrator offers to take the place of “thy Children dead” and “be a son to thee.” The elegiac themes of death and grief do not alternate, but rather co-exist with Matthew’s constitutional will to “sing my idle songs / Upon these happy plains.” Although the grief abides, Matthew does not surrender to it. “ ‘The wiser mind,’ ” Matthew declares, “ ‘Mourns less for what age takes away / Than what it leaves behind.’ ” In the final stanza Matthew’s insistent and irrepressible joy reasserts itself And ere we came to Leonard’s Rock, He sang those witty rhymes About the crazy old church-clock And the bewildered chimes. The elegiac tensions of grief are realized, as it were, within the consciousness of a mind unwilling to be subdued and broken by the tragic circumstances of life. In “We are Seven” De Quincey sees the joy of life as again brought into conjunction with the circumstances of death. Here they are not opposed by a determined will; rather, as De Quincey observes, they remain beyond the consciousness of the blithe interlocutor. Wordsworth, he declares, acknowledged “for the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human nature, namely, that the mind of an infant cannot admit the idea of death, any more than the fountain of light can comprehend the aboriginal darkness.” As corroboration of this psychological truth, De Quincey cites James Frederick Ferrier’s “Philosophy of Consciousness” (Blackwood’s, 1838–9). The child whom the poet/narrator has engaged in dialogue, is one whose innocent “fullness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a grave.” To establish the wanted “effect upon the reader,” the poet must nevertheless bring her “into connexion with the reflex shadows of the grave,” for even “if she herself has not, the reader has” experienced the meaning of death.4 As in the Matthew poems, “Death and its sunny antipole are forced into connexion.” Through the narrator’s persistent questioning, the reader recognizes “the gloom of that contemplation obliquely irradiated, and raised in relief upon his imagination, even by her,” and her stubbornly confident insistence, “Nay, we are seven.” As another example of how Wordsworth “will deal with a passion” obliquely rather than directly, revealing its emotional charge only “under the shadow of some secondary passion,” De Quincey


turns to “Stray Pleasures.” Here the commingling of pleasure and sorrow is more subtle and complex, because the emotions are not clearly embodied. They do not belong to a specific character such as a little cottage girl or an elderly schoolmaster. Rather, and that is the very point of the poem, they are “stray.” Hearing the “stray” music drifting across the Thames, “the Miller with two Dames” commence a dance on their floating wooden platform. Witnessing their merriment, the poet observes how “stray pleasures” are propagated: their music’s a prey which they seize; It plays not for them, – what matter? ’tis theirs […] They dance not for me, Yet mine is their glee! Thus pleasure is spread through the earth In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find; Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind, Moves all nature to gladness and mirth. Where, in this diffusion of disembodied and drifting “stray pleasures,” does De Quincey find an undertone of sadness? Although Wordsworth was strolling between Somerset House and Blackfriar’s Bridge in company with Charles Lamb when he beheld the merry dance,5 he does not attempt to bestow its effects upon his companion, nor does he claim for himself a restorative experience, as he did when he beheld the dance of the daffodils in “I wandered lonely as cloud.” De Quincey is nevertheless certain that sorrow and despair lurk where waves of “stray pleasures” have not yet reached. The scene described in the opening stanza remains “dead and still” until touched by the transforming power in the very last line: By their floating mill, That lies dead and still, Behold yon Prisoners three, The Miller with two Dames, on the breast of the Thames! The platform is small, but gives room for them all; And they are dancing merrily. The music that strays across the river provides for the merry dance that sets the prisoners free. Even in the midst of “the gratuitous


diffusion of joy,” De Quincey reports the intrusion of a secondary passion. Since the poem provides no dialogic companion, De Quincey invents one – another reader. First it is simply an unidentified man who complains about an image in the third stanza that “overpowered him with melancholy”; then the same complaint is said to have been repeated by Coleridge. Coleridge, De Quincey informs his readers, “had a grievous infirmity of mind as regarded pain” and “could not contemplate the shadows of fear, of sorrow, of suffering, with any steadiness of gaze.” Coleridge’s extreme sensitivity included, as well, terrors merely hovering in potentia. The unbearably melancholy image was “the broad open eye of the solitary sky” that appeared, like the moon that seemed to peer down upon the blind man in Coleridge’s “Limbo,” to gaze threateningly upon the oblivious dancers: In sight of the spires And alive with the fires Of the sun going down to his rest, In the broad open eye of the solitary sky, They dance, – there are three, as jocund and free, – While they dance on the calm river’s breast. The fourth line of this stanza becomes not less, but even more “overpoweringly depressing,” according to the complaint attributed to Coleridge, “when modified by the other five.” For De Quincey, however, the entire stanza evokes association by contraries: the setting sun that radiates its last glare before darkness, already sweeping across the scene below, brings the dance to a close: even here, where the spirit of gaiety is professedly invoked, [is] an oblique though evanescent image flashed upon us of a sadness that lies deep behind the laughing figures, and of a solitude that is the real possessor in fee of all things, but is waiting an hour or so for the dispossession of the false dancing tenants. The associations come unbidden. The merriment brings with it a reminder that such pleasures are not only stray, but fleeting. In “Heart-Leap Well,” De Quincey traces an inverse exposition of the same associational pattern. The first half of the two-part poem describes the hunt, the chase, the death of the hart whose last three


desperate leaps brought it to the side of a fountain. At Sir Walter’s behest, a pleasure-house is built to commemorate the place: And the thither, when the summer day’s were long, Sir Walter journey’d with his paramour; And with the dancers and the minstrel’s song Made merriment within that pleasant bower. The first part concludes with the report that Sir Walter was long ago buried “in his paternal vale,” but announces that “there is matter for a second rhyme” and “another tale.” The second part of the poem is the focus of De Quincey’s attention. Many years later the poet chances upon the spot and hears from a local shepherd the tale told in the first part. The structure of the poem, then, is a twice-told tale which allows for a self-reflexive critique of its own narrative. The second telling also attends to memory, passage of time, and decay of human vanities. Here, far more strikingly than in “Stray Pleasures,” De Quincey sees “the dispossession of the false dancing tenants” as embedded in the Wordsworthian countermovement. The first part of the poem was developed from the perspective of Sir Walter, calling for another horse, and yet another as he pursues relentlessly his quarry to that point where the beast finally drops after a 13-hour chase. That was a tale of the hunter who builds a memorial where he may celebrate his victory in “merriment.” The second telling commences when the poet arrives on a scene where the last remains of moldered ruin hint that “Here in old time the hand of man has been.” More doleful place did never eye survey; It seem’d as if the spring-time came not here, And Nature here were willing to decay. In this second telling, told by a Shepherd who explains why “the spot is curs’d,” Sir Walter’s victorious hunt is more an act of cruelty, his pleasure-house an act of vanity and folly. Where the terror-stricken hart made its desperate plunge to death, where the “pleasure-house” has long since rotted away, Wordsworth, De Quincey states, has conjured the presence of another sort of memorial. The place is one “over which the mysterious spirit of the noon-day, Pan, seems to brood.” One emotional movement is made to conspire with another: Out of suffering is there evoked the image of peace. Out of the cruel leap, and the agonising race through thirteen hours; out of


the anguish in the perishing brute, and the headlong courage of his final despair, Not unobserved by sympathy divine, – out of the ruined lodge and the forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a vision of palingenesis; he interposes his solemn images of suffering, of decay, and ruin, only as a visionary haze through which gleams transpire of a trembling dawn far off, but surely on the road. The pleasure-house is dust: behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature in due course of time once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known; But, at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown. The interaction of complex associations has been “a subject too occult,” De Quincey declares, for the usual reductive manner of literary journals; hence “popular criticism” has ignored in Wordsworth’s poetry “This influx of the joyous into the sad, and of the sad into the joyous, this reciprocal entanglement of darkness in light, and of light in darkness.” Another dimension of De Quincey’s associationist criticism is his examination of how Wordsworth transforms perception into revelation by the scrutiny he gives to the senses. A perception will not enter into memory, and therefore will not be recalled by association, unless the mind becomes consciously aware of the perception. The problem, of course, is that one sees far more than one can respond to with alert attention or digest mentally. Thus a vast array of sensory data is simply ignored and will never be remembered. Wordsworth’s great gift as a poet, De Quincey argues, was to pay attention to what the senses reveal, to educate the eye to watch its own watchings. Hartley, in his Observations on Man, had insisted that the associations of memory had a physiological basis in the nervous system.6 Neuro-physiologists in the nineteenth-century – Sir Charles Bell, François Magendie, Johannes Müller – even though they advanced such concepts as “specific energy” and “adequate


stimulus,” continued to describe the stimulus-response connections between the senses and the brain in terms of force and energy, much like the Hartleyan vibrations. But even the subsequent discovery that electrical and chemical impulses are relayed through the nerve network of the body into the 10 billion nerve cells of the cerebral cortex, did not alter the central thesis that, in order for a sense impression to take its place in the memory, it had to be linked to other sense impressions. In other words, association is not simply the means of recalling sensory data, it is the means for recording them in the first place. Only when an image of the senses is seen to possess a special significance, is it stored away for later recollection. I stated earlier that it would be necessary in this discussion of De Quincey’s “psychological criticism” to put aside the later terminology of Freud, Jung, or Lacan. It may seem contradictory, therefore, that I now turn to a discussion of subconscious and conscious perceptions. I want to argue that De Quincey identifies in Wordsworth’s poetry a strategy of metaphorical language through which images previously acquired through experience remain latent in the subconscious until excited by some associational stimulus into conscious activity. It was not until Freud, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), discriminated between the “phi-system” and the “psi-system” of neurons, that the concept of an Unbewutsein acquired more extensive definition. The “phi-system” derives its energy from immediate sensory stimulation, operates on the reflex principle, discharges its energy in motor response, or relays them the second system; the “psi-system” is capable of storing the energy thus relayed as memories which then remain dormant until stimulated by internal causes (hunger, thirst, desire, etc.). When Freud elaborated this fundamental discrimination five years later, in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he persisted in referring to an Unbewutsein rather than to an Unterwutsein. A differentiation among “conscious,” “subconscious,” and “unconscious” had been insisted upon in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1886: “The hypothesis of unconscious mental modifications, as it has unfortunately been termed, – the hypothesis of subconsciousness, as we may style it to avoid this contradiction in terms” (XX:47); “We cannot fix the limit at which the subconscious becomes the absolutely unconscious” (XX:48/1); “Subconscious presentations may tell on conscious life, although lacking either the differences


of intensity or the individual distinctness requisite to make them definite features” (XX:48/1). If the author of this article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica found it necessary to define and set apart the terms “conscious,” “unconscious,” and “subconscious,” then quite obviously they already had some currency in the 1870s and the 1880s. The Oxford English Dictionary notes two references to the “subconscious” in the fourth (posthumous) volume of George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1879), and before that early date it lists three even earlier references to the “subconscious” – 1823, 1834, 1841: all three are from the works of De Quincey.7 When De Quincey in 1823 first used the term “subconscious,” as discriminated from the “conscious,” it was not a casual or incidental reference. It was a term indispensable to his “psychological criticism,” and crucial to his explanation of the transformative action of association. It is surprising that Coleridge, whose criticism is replete with neologisms, had not brought the term into print before De Quincey. He had in fact used it, but, the rarest of hapaxlegomena, he used it only once. Noting the influence on vision of sense impression stored in memory, Coleridge wrote in his notebook that the sight of a substance of specific texture might recall from subconscious memory the corresponding feeling: “i.e. the vision enriched by subconsciousness of palpability by influent recollections of Touch” (CN II:2915; Oct.–Nov. 1806). Having once used it, Coleridge might be expected to repeat the word in his criticism. He does not. Nor does he again mention the “subconscious” even in his notebooks, in spite of the fact that he is repeatedly concerned with the concept of some arena “below,” “beneath,” or “under” conscious awareness. Thus in a letter to Mathilda Bentham (March 14, 1811; Letters III:310), Coleridge writes of the act of repressing an “inward distress” as trying to keep it “out my mind or rather keep down in a state of under-consciousness.” As early as November 1799, Coleridge wrote that man was “not meant to be able to communicate all the greater part of his Being,” for a certain part remains “solitary – even of his Consciousness” (CN I:524). He repeats the idea in October 1804, recording in his notebook that the “subtler parts of one’s nature must be solitary,” known to God but not even revealed to the individual: “how much lies below [ … ] Consciousness” (CN I:1554). That the mind can harbor “felt” but illogical notions, he speculates in 1808, is explained by “the mysterious


gradations of Consciousness” (CN III:3362). Similarly, Coleridge observes that the somnambulist must struggle with the knowledge that actions in sleep may be totally inconsistent with conscious waking habits; it is a struggle “between testimony & his own inward unconsciousness & consciousness” (CN IV:5008). The term “subconscious,” however, is not evoked in any of these notes.8 Nor does he use when he might seem to have occasion in his criticism, as, for example, in lecturing on wit and humour, when he discussed the problem of “bringing forward into distinct consciousness those minutiae of thought and feeling”; or when, in describing Hamlet’s meeting with the Ghost, he referred to “unthought-of consciousness”; or when he called attention to Shakespeare’s “genial Understanding directing self-consciously a power & a wisdom deeper than Consciousness.”9 Kathleen Coburn surmises that Coleridge may have referred to the “conscious” and “subconscious” in conversation with De Quincey, trying to dissuade him from opium-taking.10 Coleridge used the word “subconscious” but once, in a private notebook entry in 1806. De Quincey brought the word into print and made the concept, as well as the word, crucial to his “psychological criticism.” For De Quincey the “subconscious” located that mental region in which latent sensory data had been stored, and from which it was to be awakened into consciousness by the proper stimulus. Although latent, it was not utterly dormant (“unconscious”), for he attributed to it, on occasion, some of the propensities of intuition. His introspective mode of “psychological criticism” required that he implicate “subconsciousness” and “consciousness” in his reiterations of what gives power to the “Literature of Power,” in contradistinction to the “Literature of Knowledge.” Even in his early formulation of the “Literature of Power,”11 in 1823, he stressed the action upon the consciousness: All, that is literature, seeks to communicate power; all, that is not literature, to communicate knowledge. Now, if it be asked what is meant by communicating power, I in my turn would ask by what name a man would designate the case in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain unawakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness – as myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment in every human mind for want of a poet to organize


them? – I say, when these inert and sleeping forms are organized – when these possibilities are actualized, – is this conscious and living possession of mine power, or what is it? (10:48) With references to the “unawakened” consciousness, and “the dawn of consciousness,” De Quincey marks the threshold province of “subconsciousness.” From the time of his formulation, in 1823, of the relationship between the “subconscious” and the “conscious,” between the “literature of power” and the “literature of knowledge,” more than 20 years pass until De Quincey applies them specifically to Wordsworth’s poetry. But the application must have been self-evident to him all along. For he candidly admits that he has developed his critical vocabulary from Wordsworth himself. In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815), Wordsworth declared that a poet “has to call forth and to communicate power.” His medium, language, is “subject to endless fluctuations and arbitrary associations,” which “the poet melts [ … ] down for his purpose” by “exerting, within his own mind, a corresponding energy.”12 As further corroboration of Wordsworth’s idea of “power,” the Owen–Smyser edition of this text provides a cross-reference to Henry Crabb Robinson’s record of a conversation in 1812, in which Wordsworth asserted that he “looked to the powers of the mind his poems call forth, and the energies they presuppose and excite, as the standard by which they are to be studied.”13 De Quincey took this standard seriously. He also reports similar conversations with the poet. For his distinction of the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power,” he says, “as for most of the sound criticism on poetry, or any subject connected with it that I have ever met with, I must acknowledge my obligation to many years’ conversation with Mr. Wordsworth.” De Quincey adds that Wordsworth had also introduced “a rhetorical use of the word ‘power’” (10:48). That use referred to an immediacy achieved between words and thoughts. In his three-part essay on “Style” (Blackwood’s 1840–41), De Quincey explains why Wordsworth considered it “in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction “the dress of thoughts.” The poet’s language must become “the incarnation of thoughts.” De Quincey endorses the concept that poetry must achieve this union of thought and word: “each coexisting not merely with the other, but each in and through the other” (10:230).


In the essay “On Wordsworth’s Poetry,” De Quincey’s “psychological criticism” is to a large extent metacriticism: he turns back upon their author the terms of associationist excitation, of arousing through language thoughts that slumber below the threshold of conscious awareness. In addressing Wordsworth as philosophic poet, De Quincey, who knew and quoted extensively from the yet unpublished Prelude, chose in this essay of 1845 to slight the importance of The Excursion in favor of the shorter poems which he found “generally scintillating with gems of far profounder truth.” De Quincey alters Coleridge’s discrimination of the natural and supernatural, novelty and familiarity, and at the same time endorses Wordsworth’s claim that a poet is “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness,” and “a greater knowledge of human nature” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). Most telling in this account of Wordsworth is De Quincey’s return to the claim that “difference in the strength made the whole difference between consciousness and subconsciousness.” He grants to Wordsworth what Wordsworth had already claimed for himself, a power that “awakens into illuminated consciousness old lineaments of truth long slumbering in the mind”: It is astonishing how large a harvest of new truths would be reaped, simply through the accident of man’s feeling, or being made to feel, more deeply than other men. He sees the same objects, neither more nor fewer, but he sees them engraved in lines far stronger and more determinate: and the difference in the strength made the whole difference between consciousness and subconsciousness. And in questions of the mere understanding, we see the same fact illustrated: the author who rivets notice the most, is not he that perplexes men by truths drawn from fountains of absolute novelty, – truths unsunned as yet, and obscure from that cause; but he that awakens into illuminated consciousness old lineaments of truth long slumbering in the mind, although too faint to have extorted attention. Wordsworth has brought many a truth into life both for the eye and for the understanding, which previously had slumbered indistinctly for all men. From Wordsworth’s “Address to Kilchurn Castle, upon Loch Awe” (1827) De Quincey offers the description of the waterfall as an


example of Wordsworth’s ability to make a commonplace perceptual experience a matter of conscious awareness: Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice; Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye, Frozen by distance De Quincey recognizes two distinct purposes in this description. One, the more obvious, is the aptness of the image: spacial distance has the same effect of seeming to arrest motion, as does temporal distance. “The memorial majesty of Time” has hushed all the past turbulence of Kilchurn Castle in the motionless silence of “calm decay.” The other is the awareness that Wordsworth has provided of an optical illusion, an optical illusion that had not, De Quincey is certain, been previously acknowledged by poets or, for that matter, by the public at large: as respects the eye, who does not acknowledge instantaneously the strength of reality in that saying upon a cataract seen from a station two miles off, that it was “frozen by distance?” In all nature, there is not an object so essentially at war with the stiffening of frost, as the headlong and desperate life of a cataract; and yet notoriously the effect of distance is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most petrific column of stillness. This effect is perceived at once when pointed out; but how few are the eyes that ever would have perceived it for themselves! Typically Wordsworth derives multiple effects by demanding that we give conscious attention to the mere objects of perception. The attention assures them their place in memory. They become a part of a network of associations. Giving them conscious attention also, for Wordsworth, seems to implicate their acquiring a consciousness of their own. The objects of perception reflect, that is, the very dynamism of the mind that beholds them. External nature becomes a mirror in which one may behold the activities of the mind. Thus in the Mount Snowdon passage of The Prelude Wordsworth could declare that under the moonlight on the mountain top he could see “The perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that feeds upon infinity” (XIII:69–70).14


Similarly, in the sonnet “Hail, Twilight” (1815), the poet attributes to the gradually diminishing light the something akin to mental abstraction. In his commentary, De Quincey argues that there is more in Wordsworth’s description of the effects of twilight than Wordsworth’s unique gift of recording how perception is altered: Twilight, again, – who before Wordsworth ever distinctly noticed its abstracting power? – that power of removing, softening, harmonizing, by which a mode of obscurity executes for the eye the same mysterious office which the mind so often within its own shadowy realms executes for itself. In the dim interspace between day and night, all disappears from our earthly scenery, as if touched by an enchanter’s rod, which is either mean or inharmonious, or unquiet, or expressive of temporary things. De Quincey observes that Wordsworth, as he did in “Hart-Leap Well” and “Kilchurn Castle,” again extends the range of perspective from the personal to the historical by imagining how this same scene might have been beheld at the very same moment of twilight “by the legionary Roman from his embattled camp, or by the roving Briton in his ‘wolf-skin vest.’” The achievement of the sonnet, however, lies in its “magnificent [ … ] summary or abstraction of the elementary features in such a scene, as executed by the poet himself, in illustration of this abstraction daily executed by nature, through her handmaid Twilight!” Nowhere in Wordsworth’s poetry did De Quincey see more elaborate proof of the poet’s capacity of transforming random perceptions into the subject-matter of conscious deliberation than in his “cloud poetry.” Here, however, the transformation can scarcely be considered parallel to that of revealing the inherent nature of perceptual illusion: everyone will see, just as did the poet, a waterfall “frozen by distance,” an evening scene “abstracted” by diminishing light. But no perception could be more fickle, more idiosyncratic than the shape seen in a passing cloud. More than other objects in nature, the clouds lend themselves all too easily to the shape-seeking activities of the mind. Wordsworth himself was cautious of the airy deceit, and was convinced that they could not, perhaps even should not, be dignified by a place in memory: “we felt the while,” he says after viewing clouds in the sonnet “Composed after a Journey across the Hambleton Hills, Yorkshire,” on his wedding day,


we felt the while We should forget them; they are of the sky, And from our earthly memory fade away. De Quincey, of course, was of a different mind, a mind very much in the clouds. In his Confessions, we remember, he repeats as an accurate description of his opium-dreams, the passage on cloud-architecture from The Excursion (II:834–51): a mighty city – boldly say A wilderness of building, sinking far And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, Far sinking into splendor – without end! What the poet saw “under a cerulean sky,” De Quincey claims, “might have been copied from my architectural dreams.” These “pomps of nature, which, if Wordsworth did not first notice, he certainly has noticed most circumstantially,” command a unique province in associationist analysis. De Quincey is all the more convinced by the “truth” of Wordsworth’s “cloud scenery” because he, too, sees in them “pageants of sky-built architecture.” Few poets of ages past had turned their eyes toward the aurora borealis or the structure of clouds. He recalls exceptions in Hesiod and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. For observations of nature to mean something, they must have some relevance to human pursuits. Luke Howard established that relevance when he first documented the patterns and recurrences of the aurora borealis, when, in his The Climate of London, deduced from Meteorological Observations (2 vols., 1818–20) and Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1832), he provided the typology of cloud structure necessary to meteorology as a science. But for every centripetal impulse inward, De Quincey wrote at the beginning of his “Suspiria de Profundis,” there must be a corresponding centrifugal drive away from the center. The meteorology of clouds must be counterbalanced by a psychology of clouds. Wordsworth was a poet who could accomplish both. He had the eye, De Quincey says, of a professional naturalist: he first and he last looked at natural objects with the eye that neither will be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconceptions from within. Most men look at nature in the hurry of a confusion


that distinguishes nothing: their error is from without. Pope, again, and many who live in towns, make such blunders as that of supposing the moon to tip with silver the hills behind which she is rising, not by erroneous use of their eyes, (for they use them not at all,) but by inveterate preconceptions. Scarcely has there been a poet with what could be called a learned eye, or an eye extensively learned, before Wordsworth. In his sonnets on clouds, “Dark and more dark” (“Composed after a Journey across the Hambleton Hills, Yorkshire”) and the response in “Those words were uttered as in pensive mood,” Wordsworth “revivified” the literary “chapter [ … ] of sky scenery.” The sublime scene indorsed upon the draperies of the storm in “The Excursion,” – that witnessed upon the passage of the Hamilton Hills in Yorkshire (“Composed after a Journey across the Hambleton Hills, Yorkshire”), – the solemn “sky prospect” from the fields of France, are unrivalled in that order of composition; and in one of these records Wordsworth has given first of all the true key-note of the sentiment belonging to these grand pageants. They are, says the poet, speaking in a case where the appearance had occurred towards night, Meek nature’s evening comment on the shows And all the fuming vanities of earth. [“Sky-Prospect,” ll. 12,14] Yes, that is the secret moral whispered to the mind. These mimicries express the laughter which is in heaven at earthly pomps. Frail and vapoury are the glories of man, even as the parodies of those glories are frail which nature weaves in clouds. The cloud description from The Excursion, especially the “battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars” (II:844), copied the architecture, De Quincey insisted that did not simply occur in his dreams, but “often occurred.” Such cloudscapes were apt equivalents of the mindscapes of the slumbering conscious, the borderland of the subconscious. In a letter to Coleridge (April 16, 1802), Wordsworth described the three-day walk with Dorothy from Rushy-ford to Grasmere which led them across the bridge at Brother’s Water. There Wordsworth penned the lines which Dorothy then labeled as written “between


one and two o’clock at Noon April 16th 1802.” In the Poems in Two Volumes (1807) it was published as “Written in March,” perhaps subtracting a month to emphasize the joy at the earliest release from Winter. De Quincey turns to this poem as additional evidence of Wordsworth’s alert perception of nature. As another of those natural appearances which must have haunted men’s eyes since the Flood, but yet had never forced itself into conscious notice until arrested by Wordsworth, I may notice an effect of iteration daily exhibited in the habits of cattle: The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising; There are forty feeding like one. Did De Quincey identify in these lines Wordsworth’s discovery of the “collective unconscious,” the spontaneous psychic event that compels an entire herd to join in a unified ritual of feeding? No, he failed to anticipate Jung. He emphasized, instead, the simple recognition of the herd acting as a herd. One would witness no such unifying instinct in a crowd of people, of horses, of dogs: Every man, every horse, every dog, glorying in the plenitude of life, is in a different attitude, motion, gesture, action. It is not there the sublime unity which you must seek, where forty are like one; but the sublime infinity, like that of ocean, like that of Flora, like that of nature, where no repetitions are endured, no leaf the copy of another leaf, no absolute identity, and no painful tautologies. De Quincey’s point, and he documents it persuasively, is that a crucial attribute of Wordsworth’s poetic gift lies in this ability to transform the commonplace data of the senses into memorable events of conscious experience. “A volume might be filled,” De Quincey insists, “with such glimpses of novelty as Wordsworth has first laid bare, even to the apprehension of the senses.” Once these revelatory moments of power are aroused and awakened within the consciousness, they become a part of memory and may weld themselves to kindred experiences in the future. De Quincey’s essay “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” is among his most elaborate expositions of “psychological criticism.” Having witnessed Wordsworth’s own concern with the associationist principles of


emotion, language, and perception, De Quincey addresses them as key issues in the poetry. He is the first to elucidate Wordsworth’s poetry in terms of associationism. He did not invent the subconscious. Nor was he even the first to name it. But he was the first to use the term in literary criticism. In his criticism of Wordsworth’s poetry, he identified the subconscious as that arena out of which the conscious mind draws its power.

Notes Introduction 1. Robert Maniquis, Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Josephine McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–65.

1

Knowledge and Power

1. Sigmund K. Proctor, Thomas De Quincey’s Theory of Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1943), pp. 107–22; John E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 38–42. 2. William Hazlitt, “The Indian Jugglers” (Table-Talk, 1821; originally in The Examiner, Feb. 7, 1819), equates the distinction between “power” and “knowledge” with that which exists between “intellectual” and “mechanical excellence”; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. W. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), VIII: 77–89, esp. 83–6. 3. De Quincey did not write a “theory of theory itself.” He did, however, raise the question “What is Theory” (manuscript, Royal Institution of Cornwall MS ENYS 396). This fragment, written 1823 or early 1824, was a response to Kant’s essay, “Über den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (1793; On the Common Expression: that may be true in Theory, but it is useless in Practice); it anticipates De Quincey’s examination of Ricardo’s “theory of value” in the “Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy” (London Magazine IX, March, April, May, 1824). As in the opening to “Suspiria de Profundis,” De Quincey attempts to redress the overwhelming social preoccupation with material and practical concerns by defending the necessity of subjective deliberations. On political economy and power, see Charles J. Rzepka, “The Literature of Power and the Imperial Will: De Quincey’s Opium War Essays,” South Central Review, 8 (1991): 37–45; on the subjective dimensions of political economy, see Josephine McDonagh, ch. 2: “Debt and Desire,” in De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–65. 4. One of De Quincey’s projected plans for the completion of the “Suspiria de Profundis” was published, with commentary, by Japp, PW I:4–5. 5. The extent to which De Quincey anticipates Freud has been persuasively documented: Charles L. Proudfit, “Thomas De Quincey and Sigmund Freud: Sons, Fathers, Dreamers – Precursors of Psychoanalytic Developmental 161

162 Notes

6.

7.

8.

9.

Psychology,” in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 88–108. Augmenting Freud’s study of the unconscious with Lacan’s analysis of the internal conflict with mirrored selves, Robert Maniquis explains De Quincey’s evocation of fear and violence, “The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious,” in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies, pp. 109–39. For the relevant Freudian texts see especially: “Die Methode der Traumdeutung: Die Analyse eines Traummusters” and “Zur Psychologie der Traumvorgänge,” in Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, 10 vols., eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey (Frankfurt/aM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1972), II:117–40, 488–588. See also Lancelot Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), esp. pp. 83–8. On paradoxes as propositions “seeming to be true and turning out false” and “wearing an air of falsehood and turning out true,” M 1:199. In the essay on “Secret Societies” (Tait’s, August and September 1847), De Quincey writes: “Now paradox is a very charming thing; and, since leaving off opium, I take a great deal too much of it for my health. [ … ] Here follows a rigorous definition of paradox in a Greek sense, Not that only is paradoxical which, being really false, puts on a semblance of truth; but, secondly, that, also, which being really true, puts on the semblance of falsehood. For, literally speaking, everything is paradoxical which contradicts the public doxa ( ), that is, contradicts the popular opinion or the public expectation, which may be done by a truth as easily as a falsehood” M 5:205–6. Ferrier, Lectures on Greek Philosophy and other Philosophical Remains, eds. Sir Alexander Grant and Edmund Law Lushington, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1866), I:481–5. Because it opens with reference to “the inadequate impression produced at the moment by Mr. Ferrier’s paper,” and because it also goes on to make specific references to “The Philosophy of Consciousness,” De Quincey’s review could not have been written long after the publication of the seven installments in Blackwood’s (February, April, June, August, October, 1839; February, March, 1839). De Quincey’s review was apparently unpublished; a fragmentary manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Knight Collection MA 903. De Quincey’s review may have been written in 1842, at the time of Ferrier’s application for the chair in Civil History at the University of Edinburgh. In 1852, John Wilson resigned his chair as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. James Frederick Ferrier, who had been Professor of Moral Philosophy and Political Economics at St. Andrews since 1845, became a candidate, but failed to secure the appointment. De Quincey’s testimonial for Ferrier appeared in the Advocate’s Library, 1852 (reprinted in the Manchester Quarterly, 1898). Horace, Carmina, 2.2.23: “quisquis ingentis oculo irretorto spectat aceruous,” literally “eye not turned back”; The Complete Works of Horace, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), p. 183: “solely for not squinting / Sideways for treasure.”

Notes 163

10. Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) wrote numerous antislavery books and pamphlets and was active as an agitator. In 1806, Wordsworth wrote to Mrs. Cookson of Kendal, to inform her that he is “getting up a Petition for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Writing on William Wordsworth in the series of articles, “Lake Reminiscences, from 1807 to 1840,” Tait’s (January, February, April, July, August, 1839), De Quincey refers to “Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson” (M 2:236). He may also have intended an allusion to Thomas Clarkson in the character of Mr. Tempest, defender of Henri Christophe, in the tale “The King of Hayti.” 11. De Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis” (Lindop 104): “Often I have been struck with the important truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes.” 12. Ferrier, “The Philosophy of Consciousness,” Blackwood’s Feb., 1838, pp. 187–9, retells from the Arabian Nights the story of the young man who inherited a magic lamp with twelve branches, which when lighted summoned twelve dervishes, “each of whom, after performing sundry circumvolutions, threw him a small piece of money and vanished.” The tale goes on to relate how the young man consulted a magician to learn how to draw greater wealth from his lamp. Ferrier intends the magic lamp of the tale to represent consciousness, and the magician to represent the philosopher. 13. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: a Study on the Ways of the Imagination (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflan, 1927), p. 23. 14. In discussing the theses plagiarized from Schelling, I have pointed out two significant differences in Coleridge’s presentation: (1) he has logically restructured Schelling’s argument; (2) he has developed it with visual metaphors not found in Schelling at all. Burwick, “Perception and ‘the heaven-descended KNOW-THYSELF,’” Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria”: Text and Meaning (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 127–37. 15. Freud, “Das Unbewußte” (1915), in Psychologie des Unbewußten, vol. II of the Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, 10 vols., eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey (Frankfurt/aM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1972). 16. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: a Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 25–47, argues that De Quincey’s intrusion into the bedroom of his dead sister is a “grotesque version of the primal scene,” in which De Quincey’s subconscious asserts a fantasy of sexual desire which his conscious mind cannot repress, even with his redemptive overtures to Palm Sunday. 17. Friedrich Schelling, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, 2 vols. (Jena: Christian Ernst Gabler, 1800–1; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), I:100–36; II:3–87; Gotthelf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1808; rev. edn., 1818); see also G. H. Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (rev. edn. Bamberg: Carl Friedrich Kunz, 1821).

164 Notes

18. In “The Romantic Concept of Mimesis: Idem in Alio,” in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 207–8, I discuss De Quincey’s revised version of the Brocken episode, entitled “Dream-Echoes Fifty Years Later” (1853), which he introduces as exhibiting the effect of symbols as “dependent upon the great catholic principle of Idem in alio” (M I:51). 19. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1832), pp. 127–30. Brewster translates the report of “M. Haue, who saw it on the 23rd of May, 1797,” as recorded in J. F. Gmelin’s Göttingischen Journal der Wissenschaften, vol. 1, part iii (1798). Grevel Lindop states in his note to “The Apparition of the Brocken” that “De Quincey’s account is based closely on Sir David Brewster’s” (Lindop 250); there are, however, two significant departures from the details provided by Brewster: (1) there is no mention in Brewster’s pages of the distance of the Brocken from Elbingerode, which De Quincey mentions as a station too distant to allow for a convenient ascent to the top by dawn, the only time for viewing the phenomenon; (2) there is nothing in Brewster’s account to justify De Quincey’s claim that “more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day.” 20. While the date might have been invented as a narrative convenience to allow De Quincey again to call forth the symbols of religious ritual, it is accurate – almost. It is inaccurate in De Quincey’s placing Whitsunday 1799 in “bridal June.” Easter, the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox, fell relatively early in 1799 – on March 24. Pentecost Sunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter, came on May 12. Coleridge and his friends left Göttingen on Saturday, May 11, and arrived at the top of the Brocken on May 13, a day late. Although these dates are recorded in his notebook and his letter to Sara, Coleridge may well have remembered witnessing the Pentecost festivities in the villages on the way. For Coleridge’s description of his first ascent of the Brocken on Monday, May 13, 1799, see CN 412 and letter to Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, Friday, May 17, 1799, CL I:504. For his second ascent on Sunday, June 24, 1799, see CN 447. Coleridge mentions having climbed the Brocken in the first issue of The Friend (June 1, 1809), composed at a time when Coleridge and De Quincey were frequently together; see The Friend, 2 vols., ed. Barbara Brooke, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4 (Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), I:350 and II:13.21. 21. See Robert Maniquis, “The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious,” in Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies, pp. 109–39. 22. See De Quincey on “Antagonism” (1823), M 10:436–7; and on “the law of antagonism” (Lindop 75). The whimsical mixture of the maudlin and the sardonic amidst the high drama produced tensions more complex than critics who endeavored to explain De Quincey in terms of an idealized high romanticism were willing to recognize. Robert Maniquis, in Studies in Romanticism, 23(1) (Spring 1984): 140–7, makes this complaint

Notes 165

in his review of Vincent De Luca, Thomas De Quincey: the Prose Vision (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

2

Casuistry and Eidoloclasm

11. The distinction between the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” is best-known as formulated in De Quincey’s “On Languages” (from “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,” no. III, London Magazine, March, 1823) and in his review of “The Works of Alexander Pope” (North British Review, Aug., 1848); he also discusses the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” in the introductory letter to his translation of Voss’s Luisa (1821), in his review of “The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith” (North British Review, May, 1848), and in “Cause of the Novel’s Decline” (PW 1:302–5). 12. Because the “Ding-an-sich” is not directly knowable and all knowledge rests upon the phenomenological construction of sensory data, Kant demonstrated the necessity of “als ob” reasoning. Decisions rest not on absolute facts or truths but on conditional assumptions about experience. The reliance on pragmatically justified fictions was elaborated in Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911). 13. In the essay “Protestantism” (1847), M 8:255. 14. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §48, in Werke, 6 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 5:410–13. 15. Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 16. William Wordsworth [in Mary Wordsworth’s hand] to Joseph Henry Green [mid-Sept., 1834], The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, V, The Later Years, Part 2, 1829–34, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 5:739–40. 17. Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. J. A. Froude (London, 1881), 2:315–16. 18. Wordsworth to Joseph Henry Green [mid-Sept., 1834], Letters, 5:739–40. 19. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge (London, 1873), 1:115–16. 10. John E. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: a Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 336–45. 11. Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 178–222. 12. On “There was a Boy,” in De Quincey’s Collected Works, M 1:219,316; Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, p. 242. 13. Tait’s for January, 1839, carried an essay entitled “Lake Reminiscences: No. I. William Wordsworth.” Wordsworth was also the subject of nos. II and III in Feb. and April; no. IV, in July, was “William Wordsworth and Robert Southey”; and no. V, in August, “Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.” Articles on the lesser celebrities of the Lakes – Lloyd, Wilson,

166 Notes

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

and others – appeared in 1840, often with references to the Wordsworths. The account of Simond’s visit to Grasmere is in: “Sketches of Life and Manners: from the Autobiography of an English-Opium Eater,” Tait’s Magazine (Jan., 1840). Louis Simond (1767–1831), French traveler who married the niece of John Wilkes (1727–97) and settled in the Carolinas; Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the years 1810–1811, by a French Traveller. With remarks on the country, its arts, literature, and politics, and on the manners and customs of its inhabitants, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company; London: Longman, Hust, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: the Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 462. Masson, Introduction to the second volume of Biographies, M 5:5. See Heinz Härtl’s account of the German, English, and American reception in his edition of Bettina von Arnim, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986), pp. 690–719. The subsequent reception of Goethe continued to explore his relationship with women; see for example: Gertud Bäumer, Goethes Freundinnen (3rd ed. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1921); Paul Kühn, Die Frauen um Goethe, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1911-12). In editing his original essay of 1834 for the collected edition of his works in 1854, De Quincey added a note responding to Ferrier’s “The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge” (Blackwood’s Magazine, March 1840). He states again that his own revelation of Coleridge’s plagiarism “had been announced by one who, in the same breath, was professing an unshaken faith in Coleridge’s philosophic power.” Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 387–8. Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and their Authors, 3 vols., ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1:273.

3


1.

Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1894), 2:191–2. Introduction, The Betrothed. The Waverley Novels, 48 vols. (London and New York: Harpers, 1900), 37:30–1. This chapter revises my earlier essay, “How to Translate a Waverley Novel: Sir Walter Scott, Willibald Alexis, and Thomas De Quincey, “ The Wordsworth Circle, 25(2) (Spring 1994): 93–100. That Alexis based certain adventures of his character, Edward Nicholas [Walladmor], on Captain Isaac Gulliver became evident to me from information made available during a visit to Mier House in August, 1994, when John Spedding provided me with an unpublished biography and allowed me to photograph the portrait of his notorious ancestor.

2. 3.

Notes 167

4. Giles Dugdale, “The Life and Times of Isaac Gulliver, “229 page typescript; dedicated to Sir Arthur Bryant of Smedmore, Dorset, and Dr. Philip Gosse, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (private collection of John Spedding, Mier House, Cumbria). Cecil N. Collingwood, “Smuggling in the Poole Area,” in A History of Poole (Chichester, Sussex: Phillmore & Co., 1988), pp. 146–59.

4

Murder and the Aesthetics of Violence

1. Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991), p. 15. 2. National Library of Scotland MS4789 ff 33–6 and ff 56–62; Dove Cottage ms 1988.193, parts of which are transcribed by Japp in Posthumous Works, 1:77–8. 3. Thomas De Quincey to James Augustus Hessey (Oct. 12, 1823); MS Vault file, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. De Quincey to John White (Oct. 26, 1824), Berg Collection, New York Public Library, De Quincey MS (H). De Quincey gives no further hint about the “party of friends” whom he might accompany to Dresden. During his years at Oxford (1803–8), he had engaged a tutor from Dresden to assist him in German. The German bookseller, Johann Heinrich Bohte, at whose premises at No. 4 York Street De Quincey had taken lodgings when he commenced writing for London Magazine, made purchasing trips to Germany and attended the Leipzig Büchermesse. De Quincey may have traveled with him in the Spring of 1824. After Bohte died on September 2, 1824, it is also possible that De Quincey may have made the trip in behalf of Bohte’s widow, Sarah Lloyd Bohte, who had assumed responsibility for her husband’s book trade. An entry in the Dresdener Anzeige, May 29, 1827, announcing the arrival of “Hr. Hofbuchhändler Richter aus London,” indicates that Bohte’s office as “Hofbuchhändler” had now been transferred to another. Six months prior to informing Hessey of his intention to visit the library in Dresden, he had noted, in “Death of a German Great Man” (April, 1823), Herder’s use of that library. A list of travelers arriving in Dresden is printed in each issue of the Dresdener Anzeige; the names of English travelers, apparently copied from the registry, are frequently misspelled (e.g. “Pomeroy” is entered as “Oomerod”; “Harrison” as “Herison”; “Elliotson” as “Eleatson” and “Illuatson”). On August 1, 1828, the Dresdener Anzeige notes that a Mr. “Quinque” arrived in Dresden. Also arriving on this same day was Richard Cleasby (1797–1847), an accomplished scholar of German literature and philosophy, who made several extended visits to Dresden. This Mr. “Quinque” might possibly be De Quincey. 4. MS ACC. 28, Boston Public Library. Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Benson (April 5, 1833). 5. I am grateful to Daniel Fulda, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur, Universität Köln, for identifying the Conversations-Lexicon (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1824) as the source for De Quincey’s account of Peter Fonk.

168 Notes

16. “Tros, Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur,” Virgil, Aeneid I:574. Queen Dido’s response to Ilioneus and the Trojan crew: “Trojan and Tyrian shall be treated by me with no difference.” 17. Dove Cottage ms 1988.193. This manuscript, which begins with notes on “the disastrous Affghan War” and the number of soldiers slain (“at Kabul – 4,500”), is dated on the verso: “3 thoughts of this morng Frid. July 5 [1844].” In one of these “thoughts” (from which Japp has transcribed only the first two lines), De Quincey continues his speculations on aesthetic categories of murder: “Fielding the Murderer of Murderers (in a double sense rhet[orical] and literal) – This is the most [xte] terrific revel[ation] yet known. If a gang of robbers draws 12 murderers together it not yt [that] men at random – der erste der lezte [the first, the last] are all ready for murder: those who come are the murderers by [e]xception whom to for of a gang has found out. But here men hired as sailors –1–2–3–4–5–6– viz. Jones, Heselton, Johnst[on], Anderson, Carr, Galloway [are all] the 1st 6[7] asked (tho’ so far not at random yt [that] some observ[ation] had concurred) are all ready; more ready to [ask] grant yn [than] F[ielding] to ask.” 18. “Murder as a Fine Art (Some Notes for a New Paper),” Posthumous Works, ed. Alexander Japp, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1891), 1:77–8. The passage quoted is not in the Dove Cottage mss. 1988:193. Apparently Japp has compiled this entry from one or more additional manuscripts. 19. Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, pp. 12–16. 10. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §48, in Werke, 6 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 5:410–13. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation KU and section number (§). 11. Martin Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature: the Figure on the Carpet (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), p. 4.

5

Shakespearean Involutes

1.

De Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (1992), pp. 432–5; also in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (1985; 2nd edn. 1996), pp. 81–5; The Collected Writings, ed. David Masson (1889–90), 10:389–94. Timothy Corrigan, “Interpreting the Uncitable Text: the Literary Criticism of Thomas De Quincey,” in Ineffability: Naming the Unnameable from Dante to Beckett (1984), pp. 131–46, provides a useful Lacanian approach to the psychology of desire in De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” See also Mary Jacobus, “ ‘That Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre,” Studies in Romanticism, 22(3) (Fall 1983): 353–87, who discusses the treatment of revolution and regicide in Romantic criticism; and John W. Bilsland, “De Quincey’s Critical Dilations,” University of Toronto

2.

Notes 169

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

10.

Quarterly: a Canadian Journal of the Humanities 52(2) (Fall 1982): 79–83, who examines De Quincey’s approach to Macbeth in the context of his criticism of Greek drama. Letter of July 16, 1838; quoted in M 4:17. “Shakespeare and Wordsworth,” Folger MS Y.d. 543 ff 3a,b,c. This essay has been transcribed and published in PW 2:197–200. Frederick W. Shilstone, “Autobiography as ‘Involute’: De Quincey on the Therapies of Memory,” South Atlantic Review 48(1) ( Jan., 1983): 20–34. De Quincey also recollected the childhood reading of Arabian Nights in “Suspiria de Profundis”; see the discussion in Chapter 1 above. Judith Plotz, “In the Footsteps of Alladin: De Quincey’s Arabian Nights,” The Wordsworth Circle, 29 (1998): 120–30, describes De Quincey’s departures from the text in retelling the tales. De Quincey himself reveals an aspect of his retelling in his account of “ventriloquizing” the role of the young man pleading to the magician (Lindop 135). See: “The Story of Aladdin: Or, The Wonderful Lamp,” Arabian Nights (Dublin: printed for Whitestone; J. Sheppard, B. Corcoran, 1776) III:286–96; “The History of Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp,” Arabian Nights Entertainments, in Novelists Magazine (London: Harrison, 1785), XVIII:483–93. In an examination of rhetorical and semiotic affects that seem especially germane to De Quincey’s criticism, Evelyne Keitel, in Von den Gefühle beim Lesen, pp. 9–51, delineates a cross-fertilization between the cognitive and the emotional (or pre-cognitive) responses to literature. In the 1854 postscript to the 1827 and 1839 essays “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” De Quincey provides a more fully elaborated version of the Williams and the Ratcliffe Highway murders; M 13:9–51, 52–69, 70–124. See Burwick, “De Quincey and the Aesthetics of Violence,” The Wordsworth Circle, 37(2) (Spring 1996): 78–86. De Quincey naturally returns to his childhood memory of Aladdin as an example of sinister magic, or of fantastic “upholstery.” Ridiculing the account of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Divine Legation of Moses by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, De Quincey recalls “Aladdin’s impious order for a roc’s egg, the egg of the very deity whom the slave of the lamp had served, to hang up in his principle saloon. The Bishop found his chandelier, or fancied he had found it, in the old lumber garrets of Eleusis” M 7:198; “Secret Societies,” Tait’s Magazine (Aug. and Oct., 1847). Although he here says of Warburton that, “if he had a just and powerful thought (as sometimes in germ he had), or a wise and beautiful thought, it was soon digested into a crochet” (M 7:195), he elsewhere praised Warburton’s notes on the plays of Shakespeare (M 8:272n); see note 10 below. The voice that tells Macbeth that he shall “Sleep no more” speaks also to the guilty conscious of Caleb Williams in the novel of the same name by William Godwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 p. 138), and William Wordsworth, arriving in Paris a month after the September Massacres of 1792, imagines that same voice crying “To the whole city ‘Sleep no more’” (1805 Prelude, X, 62–77).

170 Notes

11. De Quincey states that, although he did not hear the arguments, he knows Coleridge’s account of Othello “by report, as the result of a lecture which he read at the Royal Institute.” It is unlikely that De Quincey is referring to the lectures on Othello given at the Surrey Institute (Jan. 5 and 12, 1813), for which he would have no contemporary reports. The subsequent lecture series, held at the White Lion in Bristol, were reported in the Bristol Gazette. In the lecture of Nov. 9, 1813, as reported on Nov. 11, 1813, “Mr. Coleridge contrasted [the character of Leontes] with that of Othello, whom Shakespear had portrayed the very opposite to a jealous man; he was noble, generous, open-hearted; unsuspicious and unsuspecting, and who, even after the exhibition of the handkerchief as evidence of his wife’s guilt, blurts out in her praise.” Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 1:554–5. 12. Opposing the argument that “to take arms against a sea of troubles” was a mixed metaphor which ought to be emended, “to take arms against a siege of troubles,” De Quincey upholds “the integrity of the image” and refers to William Warburton’s note to Shakespeare’s text: “Yet, though all arms must be idle against the sea considered literally [ … ], Warburton contended justly that all images much employed evanesce into the ideas which they represent. A sea of troubles comes to mean only a multitude of troubles. No image of the sea is suggested; and arms, incongruous in relation to the literal sea, is not so in relation to a multitude; besides that the image arms itself evanesces for the same reason into resistance. For this one note, which I cite from boyish remembrance, I have always admired the subtlety of Warburton” (viii, 272n); “Protestantism,” Tait’s Magazine (Nov., Dec., 1847; Feb., 1848). 13. As reenacted by the players, the sleeping King is killed by pouring poison into his ear (III.ii). In referring to the image of King Claudius in the painting as the “mildew’d ear” of blighted grain whose ergot poison will infect his brother, Hamlet puns on “ear” and thus links the introvolution of the painting with that of the players. Cf. Pharaoh’s dream of the rank ears of corn, Genesis 41:5–8. On the motif ergotism see “Blake and the Blighted Corn,” in Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996). 14. For his biography, De Quincey relied on Nicholas Rowe, George Steevens, Edmund Malone, and Thomas Campbell. From Rowe, he cited, but rejected (“This tale is fabulous, and rotten to its core”), the claim that Shakespeare was guilty of deer-poaching from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. Rowe documented the incident with the passage from The Merry Wives of Windsor (I.i.1–35, 80–2, 111–12) in which Justice Shallow charges Falstaff with the crime. De Quincey introduced other passages which he found biographically relevant: Robert Sadler’s impatience with his father’s debts informs the ingratitude of Lucullus when Timon falls into debt, Timon of Athens, III.i and IV.ii; Shakespeare’s relationship with Anne Hathaway prompted the cautions against premarital sex in The Tempest, IV.i, and against a man marrying an older woman, Twelfth Night, II.iv; and the man’s submission “when a woman woos,” Sonnet 41. Following publication in the Encylopaedia Britannica, these passages,

Notes 171

15.

16.

17.

18.

and De Quincey’s claims for their biographical significance, became the common staple of subsequent biographers. The passage from The Tempest IV.i, is cited by Elze, p. 83; by Lee, p. 25; by Reese, p. 30; by Quennell, p. 29; by Schoenbaum, pp. 88–9, by Sams, p. 51. The passage from Twelfth Night II.iv (“let still the woman take / An elder than herself”) is repeated by Elze, p. 82; by Lee, p. 25; by Reese, p. 30; by Schoebaum, p. 83; by Sams, p. 51. Elze, the only one of these biographers to acknowledge De Quincey’s encyclopedia article (Elze, pp. 80, 271), also cites Sonnet 41 on the submission of 18-year-old Shakespeare to the seductive wiles of 26–year-old Anne Hathaway (p. 76). “Shakspeare and Wordsworth,” Folger Shakespeare Library MS Y.d. 543 ff 3a–c; transcribed in Japp, Posthumous Works II:197–200. De Quincey comments on Raymond de Véncour, Milton, et la Poésie Epique (1838): “At p. 420 he says: ‘Wordsworth qui (de même que Byron) sympathise peu cordialement avec Shakspeare, se prosterne cependant comme Byron devant le Paradis perdu; Milton est la grande idole de Wordsworth; il ne craint pas quelquefois de se comparer lui-même a son géant’; (never unless in the single accident of praying for a similar audience – ‘fit audience let me find though few’); ‘et en vérité ses sonnets ont souvent le même esprit prophétique, la même élévation sacrée que ceux de l’Homre Anglais.’ There cannot be graver mistakes than are here brought into one focus.” August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1811–13). For his various references to classical poetry as sculpturesque (plastisch) and modern poetry as painterly (malerisch or pittoreske), see A. W. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, II, 86, 101, 104–8; V, 45, 69–71, 79, 99, 209–10; VI, 28, 112–13. In the third autobiographical paper on “Oxford,” Tait’s Magazine (Aug., 1835), De Quincey offered a similar comparison between Shakespeare and Milton: “Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakespeare was; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of his intellect – he moved in solitary grandeur” (2:69). Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, refers to “the disgusting passage of the Porter, which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate an Interpretation of the Actors” (Nov. 2, 1813), I:527.

6

Miltonic Overtures

1.

Lindop 37–49, 62–80. Excerpts transcribed from manuscript drafts of “The English Mail-Coach” (National Library of Scotland: MS4789, ff 61–2; MS21239, ff 1–32; Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Eng. misc, C. 461, f 103) will be given in the notes; all other references to De Quincey will be cited from Lindop’s edition and documented parenthetically in the text. In the notes to his edition of Confession of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Grevel Lindop provides references to the quotations from

2.

172 Notes

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

Milton in “Confessions” and “Suspiria de Profundis”: “Confessions,” p. 10, Paradise Lost II:306–7, p. 11, Paradise Lost XII:647, p. 12, Paradise Lost IV:830, p. 19, Paradise Lost XII:647, p. 30, Paradise Regained II:455–6, p. 39, “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensoroso,” p. 70, “Il Pensoroso,” p. 77, Paradise Lost X:602, p. 80, Paradise Lost XII:644. “Suspiria de Profundis,” p. 100, Paradise Lost IX:991 and 897–9, p. 101, Paradise Lost IX:912–16, p. 107, Paradise Lost IX:784–5, p. 135, “On Shakespeare,” p. 136, Paradise Lost I:91–2, p. 138, “At a Solemn Music,” p. 152, “Arcades.” Laura Roman, “Milton, De Quincey, and the Fugue,” paper presented at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, Aug. 5, 1992. De Quincey shifts between what Murray Krieger has identified as the descriptive and empathic modes of enargia; Ekphrasis: the Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 67–90 and 93–112. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 91 (Summer 1992): 695–719. Krieger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry: Or, Laokoön Revisited.” in The Poet as Critic, ed. Frederick P. W. McDowell (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 3–26. James A. W. Heffernan, in “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History, 22 (Spring 1991): 297–316, argues against the conception of a ekphrasis as a “frozen moment”: “From Homer’s time to our own, ekphrastic literature reveals again and again this narrative response to pictorial stasis, this storytelling impulse that language by its very nature seems to release and stimulate. That is why I must disagree with Krieger when he treats ekphrasis as a way of freezing time in space” (301). See also James Heffernan, Museum of Words: the Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 2–3. Like Heffernan, Grant Scott, in The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (New York: University Press of New England, 1994), insists upon the essentially illusory nature of the presumed “frozen moment” (29–30); Scott also calls attention to the way in which ekphrasis, notably in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” becomes an occasion for the male poet to assert authority and control over a female-gendered artifact (119–50). Raleigh, The History of the World (London: 1652), p. 669: “O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet.” Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 200; subsequent references to this edition of Wordsworth’s poetry are given parenthetically. Nicholas Poussin, ET IN ARCADIA EGO (ca. 1630–5), Louvre; this version was often engraved; the earlier version by Poussin (1626–8) is in Chatsworth, Devonshire. Poussin adapted the theme from the painting by Guercino (1591–1666) which hangs in the Galleria Corsino. See

Notes 173

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1957), pp. 295–320. See Ronald Paulson, The Art of Hogarth (London: Phaidon, 1975), pp. 22–40. Although De Quincey is aware of the precedents in Athenian, Hellenic, and Roman art, he also knows that contemporary sculpture has favored draped representations of the human figure. Yet even in his own time, Canova and Thorwaldsen endeavored to make the robes disappear. In spite of the moral pretense which demands drapery, “reason, conscious of an impotence to satisfy its moral need, has recourse to the parergon”: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §14, in Werke, 6 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), V:306; Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 64. This particular formulation of the difference between the sculpturesque and the picturesque owes more to A. W. Schlegel’s reading of Lessing than to Lessing’s own account. De Quincey most probably heard it expounded by Coleridge as well: see Coleridge Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 2 vols., ed. Reginald A. Foakes, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), I:349, 368; II:349. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 7 vols., ed. Edgar Lohner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962–74), II:86, 101, 104–8; V:45, 69–71, 73, 79, 99, 209–10; VI:28, 112–13. Burwick, “Coleridge’s Limbo and Ne Plus Ultra: The Multeity of Intertextuality,” Romanticism Past and Present, 9 (1985): 35–45. Spitzer, “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar,”in Essays on English and American Literature, ed. A. Hatcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 67–97; Scott, The Sculpted Word, pp. 98–108; in addition to his discussion of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” see also the discrimination between Classical and Romantic ekphrasis in Scott’s Introduction. Jean Paul [Richter], Werke, 6 vols., eds. Walter Höllerer, Gustav Lohmann, Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1959–63), II:268–71; Burwick, “The Dream-Visions of Jean Paul and Thomas De Quincey,” Comparative Literature, 20(1) (Winter, 1968): 1–26. National Library of Scotland: MS21239, f 62: “Suff[er] me, reader to recal [int] bef[ore] your memory. Suffer me to converge the elements of the case. They were these (or These they were). From a [deep] breakless [hush] hush [and from the peace] of this saintly sum[mer] night, – from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight dawn-light, dreamlight – (notice to the r[eader] the imposs[ibility] of fixing an absol[ute] point in things so varying as a succession of time.) – from the tenderness of this manly fluttering – whispering – murmuring love – suddenly as fm the – f[iel]ds and the w[oo]ds sud[den]ly as from the chambers of the air, – sud[denly] as fm the gd opening at sunset – leaped upon her with the flashing of cataracts – Death the crowned phantom, with all the eq[uipage] of his ter[rors], and with the [an] tiger roar of his voice. The young man sat like a rock: that which could be done, [he] had been done.”

174 Notes

17. National Library of Scotland: MS4789, f 19, ff 22–3: “But the Lady – ! Oh heavens will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and [rav] sank upon her seat, sank and rose, [tossed] threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing” – Figure to yourself, reader, the [unpar] elements of the case: suffer me to [recal] recal before your mind the circumstances of the unparalleled situation. From the [peac] silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night, from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight, – from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love, – suddenly as from the woods and fields, – suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelations, – suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crownéd* phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice. The moments were numbered. In the twinkling of an eye our flying horses had carried us to the termination of the umbrageous aisle; at right angles we wheeled into our former direction: the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever.” [* The asterisk above refers to the following note: “It is important to my rhythmus that this word crowned should be read, and therefore should be printed, as a disyllable – crownéd.”] 18. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 478–91. 19. Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Eng. misc, C. 461, f 103: “1. The preaching of Noah – shooting like rockets out of sleep. 2. The sea running with pursuing billows. 3. The sea running upon the rocks of a port harb[our] – a narrow channel – Light torches – all the town stretching yr [their] arms to save – your children are on deck: almost you touch the arms yt [that] are stretched out. 4. All have perished: but you – hatefully to yourself – why you know not – how you ask not – are again walking in smouldering cities -- burnt out decaying cities of ravage and havock or stretching away thro’ dark roads upon what horrifying impulse – you see – but understand you do not. 5. The Mail Coach breakg down – all news rep[ort] but ruin. 6. The faces of the Marble mantle-piece.” 20. Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Pilot Press, 1949), pp. 167–8. 21. Faust: Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1968), pp. 57, 359.

7

Wordsworthean Associations

1.

Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 607–17.

Notes 175

2. Introduction, Selected Essays on Rhetoric by Thomas De Quincey, pp. xxv–xxxv. 3. Composed during the Goslar period, the Matthew poems include: “Matthew,” “The Fountain,” “Two April Mornings,” “Could I the Priest’s Consent Have Gained,” “Remembering How Thou Didst Beguile,” and “Address to the Scholars of the Village School”; see Burwick, “Wordsworth in Goslar,” Anglistik, 9(1) (March, 1998): 81–99. Although the “Matthew” of the Matthew poems was apparently a fictional composite, William Taylor, the headmaster of Hawkshead, would have been very much in the poet’s mind as he recalled the episodes from his school years; see Richard Matlak, “The Men in Wordsworth’s Life,” The Wordsworth Circle, 9 (1978): 391–7, and Matlak, “A Psychobiological Approach to Wordsworth’s Goslar Poetry,” in Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth’s Poetry, pp. 147–52. 4. Margaret Russett, “Wordsworth’s Gothic Interpreter: De Quincey Personifies ‘We are Seven,’ ” Studies in Romanticism, 30 (Fall 1991): 345–65; revised as the opening chapter of De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 14–51. 5. Mark Reed, Wordsworth: the Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815, dates the composition of “Stray Pleasures” between April 4 and November 14, 1806; p. 318. 6. Hartley, Observations on Man, I:6: “The Doctrine of Vibrations may appear at first sight to have no Connection with that of Association; however, if these Doctrines be found to contain the Laws of Bodily and Mental Powers respectively, they must be related to each other, since the Body and Mind are. One may expect that Vibrations should infer Association as their Effect, and Associations point to Vibrations as its cause.” 7. “Language” (London Magazine 1823): “Whilst the finest models of style exist, and sub–consciously operate as sources of delight, the conscious valuation of style is least perfectly developed.” “Caesars: IV. Hadrian” (Blackwood’s 1834): “The Emperor Hadrian had taken one solitary step […] in the elevation of human nature; and not […] without some subconscious influence received directly or indirectly from Christianity.” “Pope” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7th edn., 1838): “How much grander and more faithful to the great theme [Christianity] were the subconscious perceptions of his heart than the explicit commentaries of his understanding.” 8. Katherine Kimball, “Coleridge’s Animant Pendulum: the Waking/Dreaming Imagination” (paper delivered at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, England, Aug. 5, 1998), discussed the concept of the subconscious in Coleridge’s thought. I thank her for providing me with these references from Coleridge’s Notebooks. 9. Lectures on Literature, II:175, 299; I:495. In the third of this passages (I:495), Coleridge seems to recollect Friedrich Schelling’s discussion of how the Bewußtsein draws from the Bewußtlose; System des transzendetalen Idealismus (1800), Werke, III:618.

176 Notes

10. Kathleen Coburn, Self-Conscious Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 21. 11. “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,” No. III. On Languages (1823; in Masson, 10:46–52). De Quincey had first used the terms in an introductory letter to his translation of Voss’s Luisa (1821); subsequent discussions of the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” occur in his review of “The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith” (North British Review, May 1848; Masson 4:308–9), his review of “The Works of Alexander Pope” (North British Review, Aug., 1848; Masson, 11:53–9), and in “Cause of the Novel’s Decline” (PW 1:302–5). See the discussion in Chapter 1 above. 12. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), III:82. 13. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith Morley (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), I:89 (May 31, 1812), quoted in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, III:104. 14. See, too, Wordsworth’s “On the Banks of a Rocky Stream”: Behold an emblem of our human mind Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, Yet, like to eddying balls of foam Within this whirlpool, they each other chase Round and round, and neither find An outlet nor a resting-place!

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Index Abercorn, Anne, Marchioness of 44 Aesop 94–6 Alexis, Willibald (Ewald Hering) viii, 46–8, 50–1, 54, 57–60, 62–4, 66, 166 Apel, Johann August 57 Arabian Nights 12, 13, 91–9, 163, 169 Tales of Aladdin and of Sinbad 92, 93, 97 Ariosto 40 Aristophanes 52 Aristotle 143, 174 Poetics 83 Arnim, Bettina von 41, 166 Associationism 143, l59–60, 175 Baker, Henry 79 Barrell, John vii, 163 Baumgarten Alexander Gottlieb 80 Baxter, Edmund viii Beatty, Arthur 143 Beaumont, Sir George 117, 118, 119 Beaupuis, Michael 36 Behler, Ernst 53 Bell, Sir Charles 149 Benson, Thomas 69, 77, 167 Bentham, Mathilda 151 Bible 90, 91, 99 Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, in Matthew 90, 94 I Corinthians 15 13, 14, 17 Daniel 96 Noah, in Genesis 138, 174 Bilsland, John 168 Black, Adam 32 Black, Joel vii, 80, 167, 168 Blaikie, David 69 Blake, William 52, 170 “Crystal Cabinet” 6

Bohte, Johann Heinrich 43, 44, 78, 167 Bohte, Sarah Lloyd 167 Bonaparte, Napoleon 50 Bosch, Hieronymus: The Garden of Earthly Delights 124 Brain 3, 6, 10, 22, 25, 31, 98, 150 affected by opium 22 palimpsest of 21 Brewster, Sir David 20, 164 Brocken Spectre 3, 20, 164 Brun, Frederika 30 Burke, William, and Willaim Hare (murderers who sold cadavers to Dr. Robert Knox) 74, 83 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 171 Childe Harold 53 Don Juan 52, 54 Campbell and Traill, barristers 69 Campbell, Thomas 108, 170 Canova, Antonio 173 Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood 87 Carlyle, Thomas 26, 53, 165 Cato Street Conspiracy 47, 48, 58 Chatterton, Thomas 50 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 86 Christie, Agatha 87 Clarkson, Catherine 39 Clarkson, Thomas 8, 9, 163 Clej, Alina vii Coburn, Kathleen 152, 176 Coenen, Wilhelm 72, 75–7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor x, 24, 29–30, 36, 38–40, 99, 158, 165, 171 adaptation from Schelling 163, 175

185

186 Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (continued) ascent of the Brocken 20, 164 Biographia Literaria 30 collaboration with Wordsworth

35

“Dejection: an Ode” 129 “Epitaph for S. T. C.” 130 “France: an Ode” 30 “The Hymn to Chamouni” 30 Kantian metaphysics 64, 68, 80 “Kubla Khan” 16, 127, 130 “Life-in-Death” 129 “Limbo” 126, 147, 173 natural and supernatural 154 “Ne Plus Ultra” 173 on Klopstock 29 on Piranesi 97, 138, 139 on the subconscious 151–2, 175 on The Triumph of Death, at Campo Santo of Pisa 138–9 on Wordsworth’s “Stray Pleasures” 147 opium addiction 24, 114, 120 “Pains of Sleep” 130 Philosophical Lectures 174 plagiarism 6, 24, 31, 32, 41, 166 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 30, 53, 129, 137 romantic irony 53 scupturesque and picturesque 173 Shakespearean criticism 88, 98–99, 110, 152, 170 Coleridge, Hartley 30, 32 Coleridge, Sara(daughter): prepares 2nd ed. of Biographia Literaria 32, 165 Coleridge, Sarah Fricker 31, 164 Collingwood, Cecil 167 Collins, William: “Ode to the Passions” 99 Conscious awareness 155, 159 Consciousness xii, 1, 2–9, 14–20, 22, 53, 101, 110, 114, 134, 142, 143, 145, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163 Bewußtlos, Bewußtsein 175 dawn of 2, 153

self-consciousness 52, 152, 176 slumbering 158 threshold of 154 unawakened 2, 153 unthought-of 152 vital 2, 100 Constable, Archibald 43, 49 Cookson, Dorothy 163 Corrigan, Timothy 168 Croone, William 79 Cullen, Miss 35, 38 Cullen, William 35 David, Jacques-Louis: Death of Marat 81 De Luca, Vincent 165 De Quincey, Thomas casuistry and eidoloclasm xii, 24–42 on consciousness xii Dark Interpreter 19, 36 debts vi, 11, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 32, 65, 105, 161, 170 economics of the mind 6, 9, 10 ekphrasis as rhetorical enargia 113 essays on Coleridge 6 in Germany 68–69, 167 idem in alio 124, 125, 164 involute viii, 12, 13, 89–95, 97–99, 105, 109–11, 113, 142, 163, 169 involute, compared to Wordsworth’s “spots of time” 89–90 irony xii jests on Transcendentalism 64 journalistic career x, xii Kantian aesthetics xi law of antagonism 3, 22, 164 Literature of Knowledge, Literature of Power x, xii, 1–24, 100, 115, 152, 153, 165, 176 manuscripts vii, 4 opium addiction 1, 3, 22 paradox xii, 5, 6

Index

De Quincey, Thomas (continued) political and historical journalism vii political economy x, xii psychological criticism xiii, 1, 2 psychological criticism of Shakespeare viii, 88–109 psychological criticism of Wordsworth 2, 142–60, 165 psychopathology vii review of Ferrier’s “Philosophy of Consciousness” 7, 9, 17 rhetoric and eloquence 23, 100 rhetoric and eloquence in Shakespeare 88, 100 rhetoric and style xii, 66, 115 Selections Grave and Gay 83 self-exposition vii sense of paradox xi as shaper and interpreter of English Romanticism vii Wordsworth, defense of 35, 38; resentment of 33, 34, 40; scandalous revelations of 42 “Autobiography” 143 “Casuistry” 24–5, 36 “Cause of the Novel’s Decline” 1 “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” x, xi, xii, 1, 3, 22, 68, 98, 109, 112–15, 125, 142, 157, 168, 172 “Death of a German Great Man” (Herder) 29, 167 “Dialogues of Three Templars” xii, 161 “Great Forgers” 50 “Lake Reminiscences” xii, 42, 143, 163, 165 “Language” 175 “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected” xi, 1, 68, 165, l76 “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” vii, viii, xi–xiii, 23, 24, 67–87, l25, 133, 168, 169

187

“On Suicide” 36 “On the English Notices of Kant” 68 “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” xiii, 2, 78, 79, 86, 88–92, 97, 111, l42, 168 “On Wordsworth’s Poetry” xiii, 2, 142, 154 “Protestantism” 165 “Samuel Taylor Coleridge” 29, 33 “Savannah-la-Mar” 125 “Secret Socieities” 162 “Shakespeare” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) 32, 88, 105–11, 142, 170 “Shakespeare and Wordsworth” 88, 89, 110, 169, 171 “Sketches of Life and Manners” xii, 35, 166 “Society of the Lakes” 35, 37 “Style” 153 “Suspiria de Profundis” vii, xii, 3–5, 8, 9, 11–19, 21, 22, 112, 161, 163 “System of the Heavens” 130 “The Dream-Vision of the Infinite” vi, 125, 130–1 “The English Mail-Coach” vii, viii, xii, xiii, 5, 17, 112–41, 171, 174 “The King of Hayti” 163 “The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith” 1, 165 The Logic of Political Economy xii “The Works of Alexander Pope” 1 translation of Voss’s Luisa 1, 165 Walladmor viii, xi–xiii, 43–66, 78, 166 “What is Theory?” 161 De Quincey, Margaret Simpson (wife) 33, 40, 109 De Quincey, William Penson (son) 109 Derrida, Jacques 173 Donne, John: Biathanatos 36

188 Index

Doyle, Arthur Conan 87 Dreaming faculty: economy of xii, 10 Dugdale, Giles 167 Ekphrasis 113, 117, 119, 123, 127, 135, 140, 172, 173 in Lessing’s Laokoon 131 shield of Achilles, Iliad Book XVIII 131 shield of Aeneis, Aeneid Book VIII 131 Entrapment 52, 113, 130, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141 Euripedes: Medea 81, 122 Ferrier, James Frederick Lectures, on Greek Philosophy 162 “Philosophy of Consciousness” 7–9, 17, 22, 145, 162–3 “The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge” 6, 32, 41, 166 Fichte Johann Gottlieb 64 Fielding: the Murderer of Murderers 79, 168 Fonk, Peter 72, 75–7, 167 “frozen moment” 113, 115, 118–22, 126, 131, 172 Freud, Sigmund 4, 18, 143, 150, 161–3 Fulda, Daniel 167 Furst Lilian 53 Gaull, Marilyn vi Gill, Stephen 41, 42, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27, 28, 30, 40, 41, 166 Faust 20, 141, 174 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 26 Gough, John 39 Greek chorus 19 Greek literature 110 Greek tragedy 21, 103, 104, 169 Green, George and Sarah 39 Green, Joseph Henry 30, 31, 165 Groves, David viii

Gulliver, Isaac

vii, 48, 166, 167

Hall, Rev. Samuel: from 1793 to 1797, De Quincey’s tutor 94–5 Hamilton, Elizabeth 35 Härtl, Heinz 166 Hartley, David 98, 143, 149, 150, 175 Hathaway, Anne 104, 106, 170–1 Hatyter, Alethea 114 Hazlitt, William 54, 88, 99, 161 on Shakespeare 88 Heffernan, James 172 Herbig, Friedrich August 43 Herder, Johann Gottfried 29, 167 Hessey, James Augustus 47, 68, 69, 72, 77, 167 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 50–54 Hogarth, William “The Harlot’s Progress” 124 “Marriage a la Mode” 124 “The Rake’s Progress” 124 Homer 104 Iliad 131 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 100, 114, 115, 162 Howard, Luke 157 Jacobus, Mary 168 Japp, Uwe 53 Jean Paul (Richter) 19, 31, 52, 130, 173 Jeffrey, Francis 34 Jewell, Margaret (Mary) 85, 92, 125, 133 Jordan, John E. 1, 32, 33, 34, 40, 161, 165 Jung, Carl 143, 150 Junius (Sir Philip Francis) 50 Kabul, Siege of 79, 168 Kant, Immanuel 29 a priori categories 52 aesthetics 24, 68, 78, 80–2, 86 Critique of Judgement xi, 69, 82, 165, 168, 173

Index

Kant, Immanuel (continued) Critique of Pure Reason xi Das: Ich denke as Ding-an-sich 52 disinterestedness 86 on National Character 29 necessity of als ob 165 Paralogisms and Antinomies xi reason and imagination 81 the sublime 80, 82, 83 Theory and Practice 161 Keats, John 52, 174 ekphrasis 172 “Eve of St Agnes” 128 “The Fall of Hyperion” 127–9, 137 “negative capability” 53 “Ode to a Nightingale” 128 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 128, 172, 173 Keitel, Evelyne 169 Kimball, Katherine 175 Kind, Friedrich 57 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 29, 40 Knox, Dr. Robert 74 Krieger, Murray 172 Lacan, Jacques 143, 150, 162 Lactantius 72 Lamb, Charles 88, 99, 146 on Shakespeare 88 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 80 Leites, Edmund 165 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laokoon 115–25, 131, 133, 173 time: evanescent and durational, homogenous and heterogenous 117–20, 125 Lewes, George Henry 151 Lindop, Grevel vi, viii, 5, 164, 168, 171 Locke, John 143 Lowes, John Livingston 16, 163 M’Kean, Alexander and Michael 83, 84 Macpherson, James 49

189

Magendie, François 149 Maid of Buttermere (:Mary Robinson), deceived by John Hatfield 39 Malone, Edmund 108, 170 Maniquis, Robert viii, 161, 162, 164 Marr family Timothy Marr, Cilia Marr (wife), Timothy Marr junr (son), James Gowen (apprentice) 78, 85, 87, 92, 125 see also Margaret Jewell (servant to the Marr family) Masson, David 40, 165–8 Matlak, Richard 175 McDonagh, Josephine vii, 161 Medusa-moment 114, 126, 140, 141 Mellor, Anne 53, 65 Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Prince 50 Millar, John 38 Millar, Mrs 35, 38 Milton, John x, 88, 89, 110, 171 and Aeschylus, as sculpturesque 110 and Ariosto 40 De Quincey’s quotations from 172 and Klopstock 29, 40 “Lycidas” 144 Paradise Lost xiii, 12, 13, 40, 86, 99, 112, 113, 129, 138, 172 “Samson Agonistes” 30 and Shakespeare 171 and the sublime 104 and Wordsworth 171 Mind 2, 4–10, 17–19, 22, 90, 91, 99–101, 110, 114, 115, 119, 129, 142–5, 149, 151–8, 163, 171, 175, 176 affected by opium 115, 120 animating action of 116 antagonisms 22 creativity of 23 development from childhood 15 economy of 9, 10

190 Index

Mind (continued) effects of literature upon 2 Kantian categories 52 as palimpsest 21 power of xii, 100, 160 processes in slumber 81 revulsion of 98 sensibility 83 sense of sublimity 82 Mitchell, W. J. T. 113, 132, 172 Montagu, Basil 39 Morrison, Robert viii Motion and paralsis 17 Muller, Johannes 149 Murray, John 41 Nitsch, Friedrich 68 North, Christopher, see John Wilson Outis 79 murdered wife and children

80

Panofsky, Erwin 173 Pantisocracy 39 Paradoxes 162 Parekbasis 53 Parr, Dr. Samuel 29 Paulson, Ronald 173 Phaedrus 95 the Fables 94 Picture within a picture 102 picturesque and sculpturesque 110, 125, 173 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 97, 138–40 play within a play 102 Plotz, Judith 169 Political economy x, xi, xii, 1, 2, 6, 21, 23, 37, 161, 162 Pousin, Nicholas: Et in Arcadia Ego 122, 172 Priestman, Martin 168 Proctor, Sigmund 1, 161 Proudfit, Charles 161 psychological criticism xi, xiii, 2, 4, 88, 92, 142, 143, 150–2, 154, 159

Psychology, drowsy realms of 91 Pygmalion-moment 114, 115, 126, 140 Quennell, Peter 104, 108 Quincey, Elizabeth 13, 14, 18, 20 hydrocephaly 18 Quincey, Elizabeth (sister) 10 Quincey, Elizabeth Penson (mother) 10, 21 Quincey Henry (brother) 10 Quincey, Jane (4th sister) 10, 12 Quincey, Jane (3rd sister) 10 Quincey, John (brother) 10 Quincey, Mary (sister) 10 Quincey, Richard (brother, “Pink”) 10 Quincey, Thomas (father) 10 Quintillian 115 Raleigh, Sir Walter 114, 172 Reed, Mark 38, 166, 175 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 124 Sarah Siddons Contemplating the Tragic Muse 123 Ricardo, David x, 1, 161 Roberts, Daniel viii Robinson, Henry Crabb 39, 42, 153, 166, 176 Roman, Laura viii, 172 Rowe, Nicholas 170 Rubens, Peter Paul: Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus 81 Russett, Margaret vii, 34, 165, 175 Rzepka, Charles viii, 161 S., Dr., see Hall, Rev. Samuel Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 19, 30–2, 41, 163, 175 Schiller, Friedrich 80 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 52, 110, 171, 173 Schlegel, Friedrich 52, 53, 64 Schneider, Matthew viii Schubert, Gotthelf Heinrich 19, 163

Index

Scott, Sir Walter viii, xii, xiii, 43–51, 54, 57–8, 61–2, 64, 66, 164 The Abbot 61 The Antiquary 61 The Betrothed 166 The Fortunes of Nigel 43 Guy Mannering 61 Ivanhoe 50 Kenilworth 43, 61 Lady of the Lake 50 Lay of the Last Minstrel 50 Old Mortality 50 The Pirate 43, 61 Peveril of the Peak 50, 51 Quentin Durward 43, 50 Tales of my Landlord 61 Waverley 50, 61 Scott, Grant 172, 173 Sculpturesque and picturesque 110, 125, 173 Shakespeare, John 105, 170 Shakespeare, Susanna 107 Shakespeare, William x, 23, 88–111 Antony and Cleopatra 157 comic relief 86 De Quincey’s quotations from 89 deer-poaching 170 extends the “domains of consciousness” 110 Hamlet 101–4, 152, 157, 170 Henry VI 86 King Lear 101, 142 Macbeth 86–7, 96–7, 101, 109, 169 The Merry Wives of Windsor 170 Midsummer-Night’s Dream 26 and Mitton 171 Othello 98, 99, 101, 170 play within a play 102–3 psychological insight 142 as rhetorician 100 self-reflective irony 52 Sonnet 41 106, 170, 171 sublime 104 supernatural 110

191

The Tempest 26, 104, 108, 109, 170, 171 Timon of Athens 105, 170 Twelfth Night 107, 170, 171 Two Noble Kinsmen 100 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 52 Shelvocke, George 30 Shilstone, Frederick 169 Simond, Louis 35–40, 166 Simpson, David 52, 53, 65 Smith, Elizabeth 35 Snyder, Robert Lance vi, 162 Southey, Robert 30, 36, 40, 39, 142, 165 Spedding, John vii, 166 Spenser, Edmund 114 Faerie Queene 64, 66 Spitzer, Leo 173 Steevens, George 170 Stewart, Dugald 68 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid 53 Subconscious xiii, 1–4, 6, 8, 17, 21, 22, 150–4, 160, 163, 175 borderland of 158 Sublime 80, 82, 84, 85, 94–7, 104, 158, 159 sublime antagonism 101 Swiff, Jonathan 80 Gulliver’s Travels 48 “A Modest Proposal” 67, 85 Symonds, Barry viii Taylor, John 47, 68 Taylor, William 175 Thorwaldsen, Bertel 173 Tieck, Ludwig 50–3 Timomachus 122, 123 Triumph of Death, fresco 139 Unconsciousness 150–2, 162, 164 collective 159 Unbewußtsein 150, 163 Bewuißtlos, Bewußtsein 175 Under-consciousness 151 Unterbewußtsein 150 Vaihinger, Hans

165

192 Index

Véncour, Raymond de 88, 110, 171 Virgil: Aeneid 77, 131, 132, 168 Voss, Johann Heinrich: Luisa 165 Walpole, Horace 50 Warburton, William, Bishop of Gloucester 169 notes on Shakespeare 169–70 Weber, Carl Maria von: Der Freischütz 57 Whale, John vi, vii, viii White, John 167 Whyte, Lancelot 162 Williams, John 79, 83, 85, 87, 92, 125 Willich, Anthony Florian Madinger 68 Wilson, John (“Christopher North”) 6, 34, 72–3, 162, 165 Wolff, Christian 80 Wordsworth, Catherine 39 Wordsworth, Dorothy 33, 39, 158, 165 Wordsworth, John 118 Wordsworth, Mary 33, 165 Wordsworth William x, 8, 23, 24, 29, 34, 36, 39, 142–61, 165, 169 on Abolition of the Slave Trade 163 association of ideas 143, 144, 150, 155 compared to Shakespeare 88, 89, 110 on De Quincey’s betrayal 29–32 in Goslar 175 irony 52 lack of public recognition 35, 37 meeting with Louis Simond 39–40, 166

as philosophic poet 154 as poet Laureate 142 power 153, 154 “Address to Kilchurn Castle” 119, 154–6 “The child is father of the man” 15 “Composed after a Journey across Hambleton Hills” 156–7 “Elegiac Stanzas” 118–119 “Essay on Epitaphs” 121 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface 153 The Excursion 110, 154, 157, 158 “The Fountain” 144 “Hail, Twilight” 156 “Hart-Leap Well” 144, 156 Lyrical Ballads 142 Poems (1845) 142 Poems in Two Volumes (1807) 159 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 154 The Prelude 15, 16, 33, 36, 89, 119, 154, 155 “On the Banks of a Rocky Stream” 176 “Sky-Prospect” 158 “spots of time” 89 “Stray Pleasures” 144, 146 “There was a Boy” 34, 165 “Those words were uttered” 158 “The Two April Mornings” 144 “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture” 117–18 “We Are Seven” 144, 145, 175 Zeno 133 paradoxes

132

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