in all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 1802. His friendship with Wordsworth decreased within a few years, and when in 1834 De Quincey published in Tait’s Magazine his reminiscences of the Grasmere circle, the indiscreet references to the Wordsworths contained in the article led to a complete cessation of intercourse. Here also he enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Southey and especially of Professor Wilson, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his circle. He continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the at that time almost unknown region of German literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 1816, he married Margaret Simpson, the “dear M——” of whom a charming glimpse is accorded to the reader of the Confessions; his family came to be five sons and three daughters.
For about a year and a half he edited the Westmoreland Gazette. He left Grasmere for London in the early part of 1820. The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of the London Magazine. It was in this journal in 1821 that the Confessions appeared. De Quincey also contributed to Blackwood, to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, and later to Tait’s Magazine. His connexion with Blackwood took him to Edinburgh in 1828, and he lived there for twelve years, contributing from time to time to the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. His wife died in 1837, and the family eventually settled at Lasswade, but from this time De Quincey spent his time in lodgings in various places, staying at one place until the accumulation of papers filled the rooms, when he left them in charge of the landlady and wandered elsewhere. After his wife’s death he gave way for the fourth time in his life to the opium habit, but in 1844 he reduced his daily quantity by a tremendous effort to six grains, and never again yielded. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of December 1859, and is buried in the West Churchyard.
During nearly fifty years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been entirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive; but he was reckless in the use of money, and had debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts. There was, indeed, his associates affirm, an element of romance even in his impecuniosity, as there was in everything about him; and the diplomatic and other devices by which he contrived to keep clear of clamant creditors, while scrupulously fulfilling many obligations, often disarmed animosity, and converted annoyance into amusement. The famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in a small volume in 1822, and attracted a very remarkable degree of attention, not simply by its personal disclosures, but by the extraordinary power of its dream-painting. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. The only works published separately (not in periodicals) were a novel, Klosterheim (1832), and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). After his works were brought together, De Quincey’s reputation was not merely maintained, but extended. For range of thought and topic, within the limits of pure literature, no like amount of material of such equality of merit proceeded from any eminent writer of the day. However profuse and discursive, De Quincey is always polished, and generally exact—a scholar, a wit, a man of the world and a philosopher, as well as a genius. He looked upon letters as a noble and responsible calling; in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith he claims for literature the rank not only of a fine art, but of the highest and most potent of fine arts; and as such he himself regarded and practised it. He drew a broad distinction between “the literature of knowledge and the literature of power,” asserting that the function of the first is to teach, the function of the second to move,—maintaining that the meanest of authors who moves has pre-eminence over all who merely teach, that the literature of knowledge must perish by supersession, while the literature of power is “triumphant for ever as long as the language exists in which it speaks.” It is to this class of motive literature that De Quincey’s own works essentially belong; it is by virtue of that vital element of power that they have emerged from the rapid oblivion of periodicalism, and live in the minds of later generations. But their power is weakened by their volume.
De Quincey fully defined his own position and claim to distinction in the preface to his collected works. These he divides into three classes:—“first, that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader,” such as the Narratives, Autobiographic Sketches, &c.; “second, papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily,” such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, Cicero, &c.; and finally, as a third class, “and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions,” he ranks those “modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature,” such as the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis. The high claim here asserted has been questioned; and short and isolated examples of eloquent apostrophe, and highly wrought imaginative description, have been cited from Rousseau and other masters of style; but De Quincey’s power of sustaining a fascinating and elevated strain of “impassioned prose” is allowed to be entirely his own. Nor, in regard to his writings as a whole, will a minor general claim which he makes be disallowed, namely, that he “does not write without a thoughtful consideration of his subject,” and also with novelty and freshness of view. “Generally,” he says, “I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth.” Another obvious quality of all his genius is its overflowing fulness of allusion and illustration, recalling his own description of a great philosopher or scholar—“Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones into the unity of breathing life.” It is useless to complain of his having lavished and diffused his talents and acquirements over so vast a variety of often comparatively trivial and passing topics. The world must accept gifts from men of genius as they offer them; circumstance and the hour often rule their form. Those influences, no less than the idiosyncrasy of the man, determined De Quincey to the illumination of such matter for speculation as seemed to lie before him; he was not careful to search out recondite or occult themes, though these he did not neglect,—a student, a scholar and a recluse, he was yet at the same time a man of the world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of things new, as readily as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive and ready memory, which dispensed with reference to printed pages, he brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his vast and varied erudition, and that large infusion of common sense which preserved him from becoming at any time a mere doctrinaire, or visionary. If he did not throw himself into any of the great popular controversies or agitations of the day, it was not from any want of sympathy with the struggles of humanity or the progress of the race, but rather because his vocation was to apply to such incidents of his own time, as to like incidents of all history, great philosophical principles and tests of truth and power. In politics, in the party sense of that term, he would probably have been classed as a Liberal Conservative or Conservative Liberal—at one period of his life perhaps the former, and at a later the latter. Originally, as we have seen, his surroundings were aristocratic, in his middle life his associates, notably Wordsworth, Southey and Wilson, were all Tories; but he seems never to have held the extreme and narrow views of that circle. Though a flavour of high breeding runs through his writings, he has no vulgar sneers at the vulgar. As he advanced in years his views became more and more decidedly liberal, but he was always as far removed from Radicalism as from Toryism, and may be described as a philosophical politician, capable of classification under no definite party name or colour. Of political economy he had been an early and earnest student, and projected, if he did not so far proceed with, an elaborate and systematic treatise on the science, of which all that appears, however, are his fragmentary Dialogues on the system of Ricardo, published in the London Magazine in 1824, and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). But political
