The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume I Part 1

The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey.

Vol. 1.

by Thomas De Quincey.

PREFACE.

It only needs to be said, by way of Preface, that the articles in the present volume have been selected more with a view to variety and contrast than will be the case with those to follow. And it is right that I should thank Mr. J. R. McIlraith for friendly help in the reading of the proofs.

A. H. J.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext contains letters with macrons, and have been noted as such: =u represents "u" with a macron, and )o represents o with a breve.]

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

These articles recovered from the MSS. of De Quincey will, the Editor believes, be found of substantive value. In some cases they throw fresh light on his opinions and ways of thinking; in other cases they deal with topics which are not touched at all in his collected works: and certainly, when read alongside the writings with which the public is already familiar, will give altogether a new idea of his range both of interests and activities. The 'Brevia,' especially, will probably be regarded as throwing more light on his character and individuality--exhibiting more of the inner life, in fact--than any number of letters or reminiscences from the pens of others would be found to do. It is as though the ordinary reader were asked to sit down at ease with the author, when he is in his most social and communicative mood, when he has donned his dressing-gown and slippers, and is inclined to unbosom himself, and that freely, on matters which usually, and in general society, he would have been inclined to shun, or at all events to pa.s.s over lightly. Here we have him at one moment presenting the results of speculations the loftiest that can engage the mind of man; at another making note of whimsical or surprising points in the man or woman he has met with, or in the books he has read; at another, amusing himself with the most recent anecdote, or _bon-mot_, or reflecting on the latest accident or murder, or good-naturedly noting odd lapses in style in magazine or newspaper.

It must not be supposed that the author himself was inclined to lay such weight on these stray notes, as might be presumed from the form in which they are here presented. That might give the impression of a most methodic worker and thinker, who had before him a carefully-indexed commonplace book, into which he posted at the proper place his rough notes and suggestions. That was not De Quincey's way. If he was not one of the wealthy men who care not how they give, he was one who made the most careless record even of what was likely to be valuable--at all events to himself. His habit was to make notes just as they occurred to him, and on the sheet that he chanced to have at the moment before him.

It might be the 'copy' for an article indeed, and in a little square patch at the corner--separated from the main text by an insulating line of ink drawn round the foreign matter--through this, not seldom, when finished he would lightly draw his pen; meaning probably to return to it when his MS. came back to him from the printer, which accounts, it may be, in some measure for his reluctance to get rid of, or to destroy, 'copy' already printed from. Sometimes we have found on a sheet a dozen or so of lines of a well-known article; and the rest filled up with notes, some written one way of the paper, some another, and now and then entangled in the most surprising fashion. In these cases, where the notes, of course, were meant for his own eye, he wrote in a small spidery handwriting with many contractions--a kind of shorthand of his own, and very different indeed from his ordinary clean, clear, neat penmanship. In many cases these notes demanded no little care and closeness in deciphering--the more that the MSS. had been tumbled about, and were often deeply stained by gla.s.ses other than inkstands having been placed upon them. 'Within that circle none dared walk but he,' said Tom Hood in his genially humorous way; and many of these thoughts were thus partially or wholly encircled. Pages of articles that had already been printed were intermixed with others that had not; and the first piece of work that I entered on was roughly to separate the printed from the unprinted--first having carefully copied out from the former any of the spidery-looking notes interjected there, to which I have already referred. The next process was to arrange the many separate pages and seeming fragments into heaps, by subjects; and finally to examine these carefully and, with a view to 'connections,' to place them together. In not a few cases where the theme was attractive and the prospect promising, utter failure to complete the article or sketch was the result, the opening or ending pa.s.sages, or a page in the middle, having been unfortunately destroyed or lost.

So numerous were these notes, so varied their subjects, that one got quite a new idea of the extreme electrical quality of his mind, as he himself called it; and I shall have greatly failed in my endeavour in the case of these volumes, if I have not succeeded in imparting something of the same impression to the reader. Here we have proof that vast schemes, such as the great history of England, of which Mr. James Hogg, senr., humorously told us in his 'Recollections' ('Memoir,' ch.

ed., pp. 330, 331), were not merely subjects of conversation and jest, but that he had actually proceeded to build up ma.s.ses of notes and figures with a view to these; and various slips and pages remain to show that he had actually commenced to write the history of England. The short article, included in the present volume, on the 'Power of the House of Commons as Custodian of the Purse,' is marked for 'My History of England.' Other portions are marked as intended for 'My book on the Infinite,' and others still 'For my book on the Relations of Christianity to Man.' One can infer, indeed, that several of the articles well-known to us, notably 'Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement,' for one, were originally conceived as portions of a great work on 'Christianity in Relation to Human Development.'

It is thus necessary to be very explicit in stating that, though these notes are as faithfully reproduced as has been possible to me, the cla.s.sification and arrangement of them, under which they a.s.sume the aspect of something of one connected essay on the main subject, I alone am responsible for; though I do not believe, so definite and clear were his ideas on certain subjects and in certain relations, that he himself would have regarded them as losing anything by such arrangement, but rather gaining very much, if they were to be given at all to the public.

Several of the articles in this volume suggest that he also contemplated a great work on 'Paganism and Christianity,' in which he would have demonstrated that Paganism had exhausted all the germs of progress that lay within it; and that all beyond the points reached by Paganism is due to Christianity, and alone to Christianity, which, in opening up a clear view of the infinite through purely experimental mediums in man's heart, touched to new life, science, philosophy, art, invention and every kind of culture.

Respecting the recovered 'Suspiria,' all that it is needful to say will be found in an introduction special to that head, and it does not seem to me that I need to add here anything more. In every other respect the articles must speak for themselves.

DE QUINCEY'S POSTHUMOUS WORKS.

_I. SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS._

INTRODUCTION, WITH COMPLETE LIST OF THE 'SUSPIRIA.'

The finale to the first part of the 'Suspiria,' as we find from a note of the author's own, was to include 'The Dark Interpreter,' 'The Spectre of the Brocken,' and 'Savannah-la-Mar.' The references to 'The Dark Interpreter' in the latter would thus become intelligible, as the reader is not there in any full sense informed who the 'Dark Interpreter' was; and the piece, recovered from his MSS. and now printed, may thus be regarded as having a special value for De Quincey students, and, indeed, for readers generally. In _Blackwood's Magazine_ he did indeed interpolate a sentence or two, and these were reproduced in the American edition of the works (Fields's); but they are so slight and general compared with the complete 'Suspiria' now presented, that they do not in any way detract from its originality and value.

The master-idea of the 'Suspiria' is the power which lies in suffering, in agony unuttered and unutterable, to develop the intellect and the spirit of man; to open these to the ineffable conceptions of the infinite, and to some discernment, otherwise impossible, of the beneficent might that lies in pain and sorrow. De Quincey seeks his symbols sometimes in natural phenomena, oftener in the creation of mighty abstractions; and the moral of all must be set forth in the burden of 'The Daughter of Lebanon,' that 'G.o.d may give by seeming to refuse.' Prose-poems, as they have been called, they are deeply philosophical, presenting under the guise of phantasy the profoundest laws of the working of the human spirit in its most terrible disciplines, and a.s.serting for the darkest phenomena of human life some compensating elements as awakeners of hope and fear and awe. The sense of a great pariah world is ever present with him--a world of outcasts and of innocents bearing the burden of vicarious woes; and thus it is that his t.i.tle is justified--_Suspiria de Profundis_: 'Sighs from the Depths.'

We find De Quincey writing in his prefatory notice to the enlarged edition of the 'Confessions' in November, 1856:

'All along I had relied upon a crowning grace, which I had reserved for the final page of this volume, in a succession of some twenty or twenty-five dreams and noon-day visions, which had arisen under the latter stage of opium influence. These have disappeared; some under circ.u.mstances which allow me a reasonable prospect of recovering them, some unaccountably, and some dishonourably. Five or six I believe were burned in a sudden conflagration which arose from the spark of a candle falling un.o.bserved amongst a very large pile of papers in a bedroom, where I was alone and reading. Falling not _on_, but amongst and within the papers, the fire would soon have been ahead of conflict, and, by communicating with the slight woodwork and draperies of a bed, it would have immediately enveloped the laths of the ceiling overhead, and thus the house, far from fire-engines, would have been burned down in half-an-hour. My attention was first drawn by a sudden light upon my book; and the whole difference between a total destruction of the premises and a trivial loss (from books charred) of five guineas was due to a large Spanish cloak. This, thrown over and then drawn down tightly, by the aid of one sole person, somewhat agitated, but retaining her presence of mind, effectually extinguished the fire. Amongst the papers burned partially, but not so burned as to be absolutely irretrievable, was "The Daughter of Lebanon," and this I have printed and have intentionally placed it at the end, as appropriately closing a record in which the case of poor "Ann the Outcast" formed not only the most memorable and the most suggestively pathetic incident, but also _that_ which, more than any other, coloured--or (more truly, I should say) shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed--the great body of opium dreams.'

After this loss of the greater portion of the 'Suspiria' copy, De Quincey seems to have become indifferent in some degree to their continuity and relation to each other. He drew the 'Affliction of Childhood' and 'Dream Echoes,' which stood early in the order of the 'Suspiria,' into the 'Autobiographic Sketches,' and also the 'Spectre of the Brocken,' which was meant to come somewhat later in the series as originally planned; and, as we have seen, he appended 'The Daughter of Lebanon' to the 'Opium Confessions,' without any reference, save in the preface, to its really having formed part of a separate collection of dreams.

From a list found among his MSS. we are able to give the arrangement of the whole as it would have appeared had no accident occurred, and all the papers been at hand. Those followed by a cross are those which are now recovered, and those with a dagger what were reprinted either as 'Suspiria' or otherwise in Messrs. Black's editions.

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS.

1. Dreaming, [cross]

2. The Affliction of Childhood. [cross]

Dream Echoes. [cross]

3. The English Mail Coach. [cross]

(1) The Glory of Motion.

(2) Vision of Sudden Death.

(3) Dream-fugue.

4. The Palimpsest of the Human Brain. [cross]

5. Vision of Life. [cross]

6. Memorial Suspiria. [cross]

7. Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow.

8. Solitude of Childhood. [big cross]

9. The Dark Interpreter. [big cross]

10. The Apparition of the Brocken. [cross]

11. Savannah-la-Mar.

12. The Dreadful Infant. (There was the glory of innocence made perfect; there was the dreadful beauty of infancy that had seen G.o.d.) 13. Foundering Ships.

14. The Archbishop and the Controller of Fire.

15. G.o.d that didst Promise.

16. Count the Leaves in Vallombrosa.

17. But if I submitted with Resignation, not the less I searched for the Unsearchable--sometimes in Arab Deserts, sometimes in the Sea.

18. That ran before us in Malice.

19. Morning of Execution.

20. Daughter of Lebanon. [cross]

21. Kyrie Eleison.

22. The Princess that lost a Single Seed of a Pomegranate. [big cross]

23. The Nursery in Arabian Deserts.

24. The Halcyon Calm and the Coffin.

25. Faces! Angels' Faces!

26. At that Word.

27. Oh, Apothanate! that hatest Death, and cleansest from the Pollution of Sorrow.

28. Who is this Woman that for some Months has followed me up and down? Her face I cannot see, for she keeps for ever behind me.

29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross]

30. Cagot and Cressida.

31. Lethe and Anapaula.

32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with Curious Eyes to gaze.