CHAPTER L THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859. AMONG the most eminent prose writers of this century is Thomas de Quincey, best known as The English Opium-Eater. The family of De Quincey, as we learn from this its most famous modern representative, was originally Norwegian, played a distinguished part in the Norman Conquest, and flourished through nine or ten generations as one of the houses of nobility, until its head, the Earl of Winchester, was attainted for treason. For more than a century before the birth of the "Opium-Eater," none of his name had borne a title of high rank. His father was an opulent merchant in Manchester, who died young, leaving his widow a fortune of £1600 a-year. We know the particulars of the earlier part of De Quincey's life from his Confessions of an Opium-Eater,' and his 'Autobiographic Sketches.' The fifth son of a family of eight, he was born on the 15th of August 1785, at Greenhay, then an isolated house about a mile from Manchester. He has recorded his earliest recollections; and he was so precocious, that these date from the middle of his second year. His autobiography contains few incidents that depart strikingly from the ordinary course of the world. In his own record, things that are insignificant as objects of general interest assume the proportions that all human beings must assign to the events of their own life. His first great affliction was the death of a favourite sister when 'he was about six years old. Were we to measure him by the standard of ordinary children, we should refuse to believe what he tells us of the profound gloom thrown over him by this bereavement "the night that for him gathered upon that event ran after his steps far into life." "Well it was for me at this period," he says, "if well it were for me to live at all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced to wean myself, and sud. denly to assume the harness of life." From these "sickly reveries" he was suddenly withdrawn, and "introduced to the world of strife." A "horrid pugilistic brother," five or six years older than himself, whose "genius for mischief amounted to inspiration," returned home from a public school. The character of this brother is drawn in the Sketches with exquisite humour and fondness. He was a boy of amazing spirits and volubility. He maintained a constant war with the boys of a neighbouring factory, and compelled little Thomas to bear a part. He kept the nursery in a whirl of excitement and wonder with war bulletins, ghost stories, tragic theatricals, and burlesque lectures "on all subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English Church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magicboth black and white-thaumaturgy, and necromancy." After two years of this excitement, William left Greenhay, and Thomas, then in his eighth year, relapsed into his quiet life, and steadily pursued his studies under one of his guardians, finding in that guardian's family other objects for his precocious sympathy and meditation. When he was eleven years old his mother removed to Bath, and placed him at the grammar-school there. He had made such progress under his guardian's tutorship that at Bath his Latin verses were paraded by the head-master as an incitement to the older boys. This distinction led to his removal from the school. His austere mother was so shocked at the compliments he was receiving, that, after two years, she sent him to a private school in Wiltshire, "of which," he says, "the chief recommendation lay in the religious character of the master." At Winkfield he remained but a year. Then came a pleasant interlude in his school life. He spent the summer travelling in Ireland with Lord Westport, a young friend of his own age, and on his return stayed for three months at Laxton, the seat of Lord Carbery, where he studied Greek and talked theology with the beautiful Lady Carbery. But his pleasures were again interrupted by the higher powers. His guardians decided that he should go for three years to Manchester grammarschool before proceeding to Oxford. Some boys would have hailed the change with pleasure, but young De Quincey, though then but fifteen and a few months more, was premature in the expansion of his mind, and had begun to think boyish society intolerable. went to Manchester in 1800, but he could not bring himself to be content with his situation. In the course of two years his health gave way, and no longer able to endure the restraint, he took his departure one day without warning. His wanderings did not last long. He He walked straight to Chester; and, while hanging about his mother's house trying to get an interview with his sister, was caught by an easy stratagem. He was not, however, sent back to school, but remained at his mother's house till his guardians should decide what was to be done with him. Soon followed the great adventure of his life, the most interesting part of his Confessions. Obtaining some money from his mother for a pedestrian tour in Wales, he tired of the mountain solitudes, and shaped his course to London, in hopes of being able to borrow two hundred pounds on his expectations. Here he went through hard experiences. His errand brought him under the vexatious extortions and delays of a money-lender. He was reduced to the brink of starvation. On one occasion, indeed, he might have perished but for the kindness of a companion in misfortune, the poor outcast Anne, whom in happier days he vainly sought to trace. Fortunately he was discovered and taken home again. He remained at home about a year; but being taunted by his uncle with wasting his time, he undertook to go to Oxford upon £100 of an annual allowance, and proceeded thither in the October of 1803. The Autobiographic Sketches,' as republished, terminate with his sudden resolution to go to Oxford. In their original form, as contributions to 'Tait's Magazine,' three more papers undertake to describe his life at Oxford, but these consist mostly of rambling digressions on the idea of an English University, on the Greek orators, on Paley, and suchlike, and contain very little personal narrative. This much we may glean, that he lived a hermit kind of life, and did not conform in the least to the studies of the place He "sequestered himself" so completely that (to quote his own expression), "for the first two years of my residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words." He had but one conversation with his tutor. "It consisted of three sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine." In all senses he was justified in exclaiming, "Oxford, ancient mother! hoary with ancestral honours, time-honoured, and, haply it may be, time-shattered power, I owe thee nothing! Of thy vast riches I took not a shilling, though living among multitudes who owed to thee their daily bread." In the matter of study, he was a law to himself. He told his tutor in that notable conversation that he was reading Paley; but in point of fact he had been "reading and studying very closely the 'Parmenides.’’ As a schoolboy he had attained to an unusual mastery over the Greek language, "moving through all the obstacles and resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through those of the French and Latin ". and he read Greek daily; "but any slight vanity which he might connect with a power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate C admiration of the author, in him was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of his entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature." In his 'Recollections of Coleridge' he says, "From 1803 to 1808 I was a student at Oxford." This probably means that for those five years he remained formally on the books of Worcester College. How much of this time he spent in actual residence is not recorded, and in all likelihood cannot be ascertained. When we consider his self-determined habits of study, we see that it matters comparatively little to know where he lived. There is a tradition that he once submitted to the written part of the Final Examination, but abruptly left Oxford without offering himself for the oral part. In the intervals of his residence at Oxford, he began to make occasional visits to London, and to get introductions to literary society. He had always been especially anxious to see Coleridge and Wordsworth. When he ran away from school, he would have gone to the Lake district, had he not scrupled to present himself in the character of a fugitive schoolboy. About Christmas 1804-5 he had gone to London with an introduction to Charles Lamb, his final object being to procure through Lamb an introduction to Coleridge. His wishes were not gratified till later than this. He first saw Coleridge at Bristol in the autumn of 1807, and Wordsworth later in the same year, at the poet's cottage in the Vale of Grasmere. In the winter of 1808-9 he took up his residence at the Lakes. Wordsworth had quitted his cottage in Grasmere for the larger house of Allan Bank, and De Quincey succeeded this illustrious tenant. He retained this cottage for seven-and-twenty years, and up to 1829 it was his principal place of residence. "From this era," he says, "through a period of about twenty years in succession, I may describe my domicile as being amongst the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland. It is true, I often made excursions to London, Bath, and its neighbourhood, or northwards to Edinburgh; and perhaps, on an average, passed one-fourth part of each year at a distance from this district; but here only it was that henceforwards I had a house and small establishment." A good many interesting particulars about the society of the Lakes, and his way of passing his time, are given in some papers that have not been republished (Tait's Magazine,' 1840). From the time of his settling at the Lakes, a habit grew upon him which powerfully influenced his life. Some four years after he took up his residence at Grasmere, he became a confirmed and daily opium-eater. The rise and progress of this habit, the pleasures and the pains of the "pernicious drug," and the miseries of his struggle to leave it off, are related in his Opium Confessions. He had first tasted opium in 1804, as a cure for toothache. From that date up to 1812 he took opium as an occasional indulgence, "fixing beforehand how often, within a given time, and when, he would commit a debauch of opium." It was not till 1813 that opium became with him an article of daily diet; in that year he multiplied the laudanum drams to allay "an appalling irritation of the stomach." The large doses once begun, he could not break off. He went on from one degree of indulgence to another, till in 1816 he was taking as much as 8000 drops of laudanum per day. Probably in view of his approaching marriage, he succeeded in reducing his allowance to 1000 drops. He married towards the close of 1816. Up to the midlle of 1817 he "judges himself to have been a happy man; ;" and he draws a beautiful picture of the interior of his cottage in a stormy winter night, with "warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without." Again he seems to have lapsed into over-indulgence-to have succumbed to the "Circean spells" of opium. The next four years he spent in a kind of intellectual torpor, utterly incapable of sustained exertion. "But for misery and suffering," he says, "I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter. An answer of a few words to any that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my writing-table." At length in 1821, with the increasing expenses of his household, his affairs became embarrassed, and he was called upon by the strongest inducements to shake off this dead weight upon his energies. He succeeded. Unable wholly to renounce the use of opium, he yet reduced the amount so far as to be capable of literary exertion.1 His first production was the 'Confessions of an English OpiumEater.' This appeared in the 'London Magazine' in the autumn of 1821, and was reprinted in a separate form in the following ¡year. From 1821 to 1825, though he still spent the greater part of his time at Grasmere, he was often in London, his lodgings being in York Street, Covent Garden. During that time he was a frequent contributor to the London Magazine.' He speaks of his "daily task of writing and producing something for the journals;" calls 1 The Opium Confessions, as they stand in the final edition, convey the impression, though not in specific words, that he had wholly renounced the use of opium, and he is usually accused of having pretended to a self-command that he never absolutely acquired. Had the appendix to the first edition of the Confessions been reprinted, he might have been spared this accusation. He there explains why, in the narrative as originally written in the London Magazine,' he wished to convey the impression that he hat wholly renounced the use of opium; and says that in suffering his readers to think of him as a reformed opium-eater, he left no impression but what he shared himself. |