The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc

I. LIFE

Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785. His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.

Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal, and she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children, to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there, because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.

In 1800, at the age of fifteen, De Quincey was ready for Oxford; he had not been praised without reason, for his scholarship was far in advance of that of ordinary pupils of his years. "That boy," his master at Bath School had said, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, however, in order that after three years' stay he might secure a scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford. He remained there—strongly protesting against a situation which deprived him "of health, of society, of amusement, of liberty, of congeniality of pursuits"—for nineteen months, and then ran away.

His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this, he made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of seeing a sister; was apprehended by the older members of the family; and through the intercession of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey then led a wayfarer's life. [Footnote: For a most interesting account of this period see the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Athenæum Press Selections from De Quincey, pp. 165-171, and notes.] He soon lost his guinea, however, by ceasing to keep his family informed of his whereabouts, and subsisted for a time with great difficulty. Still apparently fearing pursuit, with a little borrowed money he broke away entirely from his home by exchanging the solitude of Wales for the greater wilderness of London. Failing there to raise money on his expected patrimony, he for some time deliberately clung to a life of degradation and starvation rather than return to his lawful governors.

Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and finally allowed (1803) to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income. Here, we are told, "he came to be looked upon as a strange being who associated with no one." During this time he learned to take opium. He left, apparently about 1807, without a degree. In the same year he made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Wordsworth; Lamb he had sought out in London several years before.

His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settlement in 1809 at Grasmere, in the beautiful English Lake District; his home for ten years was Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied for several years and which is now held in trust as a memorial of the poet. De Quincey was married in 1816, and soon after, his patrimony having been exhausted, he took up literary work in earnest.

In 1821 he went to London to dispose of some translations from German authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his opium experiences, which accordingly appeared in the London Magazine in that year. This new sensation eclipsed Lamb's Essays of Elia, which were appearing in the same periodical. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was forthwith published in book form. De Quincey now made literary acquaintances. Tom Hood found the shrinking author "at home in a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the tables, and the chairs—billows of books." Richard Woodhouse speaks of the "depth and reality of his knowledge. … His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results. … Taylor led him into political economy, into the Greek and Latin accents, into antiquities, Roman roads, old castles, the origin and analogy of languages; upon all these he was informed to considerable minuteness. The same with regard to Shakespeare's sonnets, Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers and characters of Elizabeth's age and those of Cromwell's time."

From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh and its suburb, Lasswade, where the remainder of his life was spent. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and its rival Tatt's Magazine received a large number of contributions. The English Mail-Coach appeared in 1849 in Blackwood. Joan of Arc had already been published (1847) in Tait. De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his life,—twice after 1821 in very great excess. During his last years he nearly completed a collected edition of his works. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of December, 1859.

II. CRITICAL REMARKS

The Opium-Eater had been a weak, lonely, and over-studious child, and he was a solitary and ill-developed man. His character and his work present strange contradictions. He is most precise in statement, yet often very careless of fact; he is most courteous in manner, yet inexcusably inconsiderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high standard of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and inappropriately; and though a great master of style, he is guilty, at times, of digression within digression until all trace of the original subject is lost.

De Quincey divides his writings into three groups: first, that class which "proposes primarily to amuse the reader, but which, in doing so, may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned interest." To this class would belong the Autobiographic Sketches and the Literary Reminiscences. As a second class he groups "those papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily." These essays would include, according to Professor Masson's subdivision, (a) Biographies, such as Shakespeare or Pope—Joan of Arc falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class; (b) Historical essays, like The Cæsars; (c) Speculative and Theological essays; (d) Essays in Political Economy and Politics; (e) Papers of Literary Theory and Criticism, such as the brilliant discussions of Rhetoric, Style, and Conversation, and the famous On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.' As a third and "far higher" class the author ranks the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and also (but more emphatically) the Suspiria de Profundis. "On these," he says, "as modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly character."

Of De Quincey's essays in general it may be said that they bear witness alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of his intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his papers when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series of related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for analysis and speculation, more than once we have to regret the lack of the "saving common-sense" possessed by many far less gifted men. His erudition and insight are always a little in advance of his good judgment.

As to the works of the first class, the Reminiscences are defaced by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and women, and he possessed no little insight into literature and personality. As to the Autobiographic Sketches, the handling of events is hopelessly arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is drawing an idealized picture of childhood,—creating a type rather than re-creating a person; it is a study of a child of talent that we receive from him, and as such these sketches form one of the most satisfactory products of his pen.

The Confessions as a narrative is related to the Autobiography, while its poetical passages range it with the Suspiria and the Mail-Coach. De Quincey seems to have believed that he was creating in such writings a new literary type of prose poetry or prose phantasy; he had, with his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted prose to heights hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style owed much to the seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. He took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the general revival of interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a feature of the Romantic Movement. Still none of his contemporaries wrote as he did; evidently De Quincey has a distinct quality of his own. Ruskin, in our own day, is like him, but never the same.

Yet De Quincey's prose poetry is a very small portion of his work, and it is not in this way only that he excels. Mr. Saintsbury has spoken of the strong appeal that De Quincey makes to boys. [Footnote: "Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by De Quincy than by any other writer whatever."—History of Nineteenth-Century Literature, p.198.] It is not without significance that he mentions as especially attractive to the young only writings with a large narrative element. [Footnote: "To read the Essay on Murder, the English Mail-Coach, The Spanish Nun, The Cæsars, and half a score other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love with them."—Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, p.307.] Few boys read poetry, whether in verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or philosophy; to every normal boy the gate of good literature is the good story. It is the narrative skill of De Quincey that has secured for him, in preference to other writers of his class, the favor of youthful readers.

It would be too much to say that the talent that attracts the young to him must needs be the Opium-Eater's grand talent, though the notion is defensible, seeing that only salient qualities in good writing appeal to inexperienced readers. I believe, however, that this skill in narration is De Quincey's most persistent quality,—the golden thread that unites all his most distinguished and most enduring work. And it is with him a part of his genius for style. Creative power of the kind that goes to the making of plots De Quincey had not; he has proved that forever by the mediocrity of Klosterheim. Give him Bergmann's account of the Tartar Migration, or the story of the Fighting Nun,—give him the matter,—and a brilliant narrative will result. Indeed, De Quincey loved a story for its own sake; he rejoiced to see it extend its winding course before him; he delighted to follow it, touch it, color it, see it grow into body and being under his hand. That this enthusiasm should now and then tend to endanger the integrity of the facts need not surprise us; as I have said elsewhere, accuracy in these matters is hardly to be expected of De Quincey. And we can take our pleasure in the skillful unfolding of the dramatic narrative of the Tartar Flight—we can feel the author's joy in the scenic possibilities of his theme—even if we know that here and there an incident appears that is quite in its proper place—but is unknown to history.

In his Confessions the same constructive power bears its part in the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that narrative,—an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest. What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction, of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it isn't opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category in which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be drawn from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely by the correction of some widespread fallacies as to the effects of the drug; far more it is the result of narrative skill. As we follow with ever-increasing sympathy the lonely and sensitive child, the wandering youth, the neuralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who realizes, amid the gorgeous delights and the awful horrors of the tale, that the writer is after all the victim of the worst of bad habits? We can hardly praise too highly the art which even as we look beneath it throws its glamour over us still.

Nor is it only in this constructive power, in the selection and arrangement of details, that De Quincey excels as a narrator; a score of minor excellences of his style, such as the fine Latin words or the sweeping periodic sentences, contribute to the effective progress of his narrative prose. Mr. Lowell has said that "there are no such vistas and avenues of verse as Milton's." The comparison is somewhat hazardous, still I should like to venture the parallel claim that there are no such streams of prose as De Quincey's. The movement of his discourse is that of the broad river, not in its weight or force perhaps, but in its easy flowing progress, in its serene, unhurried certainty of its end. To be sure, only too often the waters overflow their banks and run far afield in alien channels. Yet, when great power over the instrument of language is joined to so much constructive skill, the result is narrative art of high quality,—an achievement that must be in no small measure the solid basis of De Quincey's fame.

III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

1. The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey. New and enlarged edition by David Masson. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889-1890. [New York: The Macmillan Co. 14 vols., with footnotes, a preface to each volume, and index. Reissued in cheaper form. The standard edition.]

2. The Works of Thomas de Quincey. Riverside Edition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877. [12 vols., with notes and index.]

3. Selections from De Quincey. Edited with an Introduction and Notes, by M. H. Turk. Athenaeum Press Series. Boston, U.S.A., and London: Ginn and Company, 1902. ["The largest body of selections from De Quincey recently published.... The selections are The affliction of Childhood, Introduction to the World of Strife, A Meeting with Lamb, A Meeting with Coleridge, Recollections of Wordsworth, Confessions, A Portion of Suspiria, The English Mail-Coach, Murder as one of the Fine Arts, Second Paper, Joan of Arc, and On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.'"]

4. D. MASSON. Thomas De Quincey. English Men of Letters. London. [New York: Harper. An excellent brief biography. This book, with a good volume of selections, should go far toward supplying the ordinary student's needs.]

5. H. S. SALT. DE QUINCEY. Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers. London: George Bell and Sons. [A good short life.] 6. A. H. JAPP. Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings. London, 1890. [New York: Scribner. First edition by "H. A. Page," 1877. The standard life of De Quincey; it contains valuable communications from De Quincey's daughters, J. Hogg, Rev. F. Jacox, Professor Masson, and others.]

7. A. H. JAPP. De Quincey Memorials. Being Letters and Other Records, here first published. With Communications from Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson, and others. 2 vols. London: W. Heinemann, 1891.

8. J. HOGG. De Quincey and his Friends, Personal Recollections, Souvenirs, and Anecdotes [including Woodhouse's Conversations, Findlay's Personal Recollections, Hodgson's On the Genius of De Quincey, and a mass of personal notes from a host of friends]. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1895.

9. E. T. MASON. Personal Traits of British Authors. New York, 1885. [4 vols. The volume subtitled Scott, Hogg, etc., contains some accounts of De Quincey not included by Japp or Hogg.]

10. L. STEPHEN. Hours in a Library. Vol. I. New York, 1892.

11. W. MINTO. Manual of English Prose Literature. Boston, 1889. [Contains the best general discussion of De Quincey's style.]

12. L. COOPER. The Prose Poetry of Thomas De Quincey. Leipzig, 1902.

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, [Footnote: "The same thing":—Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals, the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother of Constantine) is recorded (and, one might think, with the express consciousness of sarcasm) as the Invention of the Cross.] discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time, but, on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of a duke.

These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented—for they first revealed the glory of motion; 2dly, through grand effects for the eye between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary roads; 3dly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances [Footnote: "Vast distances":—One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total distance.]—of storms, of darkness, of danger—overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation to a national result. For my own feeling, this post-office service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, brain, and lungs in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific beauty, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound battles such as these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural Te Deums to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to ourselves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all western or central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the French domination had prospered.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly all) in early manhood. In most universities there is one single college; in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, all of which were peopled by young men, the élite of their own generation; not boys, but men: none under eighteen. In some of these many colleges the custom permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms"; that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. But, as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his Majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connexion with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember as passing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by my personal patronage—viz., the Worcester, the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn; from which the transition was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all public carriages derived from the reign of Charles II) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tremens rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-à-manger, sang out, "This way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and objects not existing are governed by the same logical construction. [Footnote: De non apparentibus, etc.]