SOURCE: “The Art of Prose,” in De Quincey, Wordsworth and the Art of Prose, Macmillan Press, 1983, pp. 101-21.

[In the following essay, Devlin examines De Quincey's claims regarding “the hidden capacities of prose” to express passion and “grandeur.”]

‘To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing.’

I

In the ‘General Preface’ of 1853 to James Hogg's Edinburgh edition of his collected works, De Quincey drew attention to the variety of his prose and to the originality of his prose-poems or impassioned prose. He made three divisions of what he had written; the largest section of his work was made up of what he called ‘essays’, which he defined as writings ‘which address themselves to the understanding as an insulated faculty’. Essays present a problem and try to solve it, and the only questions to be asked are ‘what is the success obtained?’ and (as a separate question) ‘What is the executive ability displayed in the solution of the problem?’ Even today nearly all these essays are entertaining, informative and lively; but there was nothing new in De Quincey's way of treating such external subjects, and the only originality is to be found in De Quincey's use of paradox for polemical purposes. The second division of his work consisted of what he called ‘Autobiographic Sketches’, and for these he claimed little ‘beyond that sort of amusement which attaches to any real story, thoughtfully and faithfully related’. At times, however, the narrative rose ‘into a far higher key’; for these moments he asked from the reader ‘a higher consideration’, and, in fact, they occurred when the narrative ceased for a while; when no story carried the reader forward, when nothing of external interest could appeal to him, when simply there was ‘nothing on the stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief—a mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice’. Such moments, claims De Quincey, have far more than mere amusement to offer; in them he has tried ‘to see and measure these mystical forces which palsy him’, and has attempted ‘to pierce the haze which so often envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve’. Such passages are scarcely to be distinguished (another example in De Quincey of distinction without difference?) from the third division of his prose; ‘a far higher class of compositions’ in which he ranks the Confessions ‘and also (but more emphatically) the Suspiria de Profundis’. And here De Quincey lays claim to originality; both works are ‘modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature’. The only confessions of the past that have interested men are those of St. Augustine and Rousseau. ‘The very idea of breathing a record of human passion … argues an impassioned theme’ and ‘impassioned, therefore, should be the tenor of the composition’. But in St. Augustine's Confessions there is only one ‘impassioned passage’ (on the death of his young friend in the fourth Book); in Rousseau's Confessions ‘there is not even so much. In the whole work there is nothing grandly affecting but the character and the inexplicable misery of the writer.’¹

De Quincey makes ‘haughtier pretensions’ for originality in the conception of these writings than for their execution; but the new areas of experience which he explored could not be separated from the prose which revealed them. No one, indeed, insisted more than De Quincey that ‘manner blends inseparably with substance’ and that matter and style, mind and style, even character and style, were indissolubly bonded or, to use one of his own favourite words, ‘coadunated’. ‘Were a magnificent dedication required,’ he writes, ‘were a Defensio pro Populo Anglicano required, Southey's is not the mind, and, by a necessary consequence, Southey's is not the style, for carrying such purposes into full and memorable effect.’ Style, he claims elsewhere, is an indirect expression of a writer's ‘nature and moral feelings’. The prevailing tone of Charles Lamb's style ‘was in part influenced (or at least sustained) by his disgust for all which transcended the naked simplicity of truth’. Above all, in any writing where the thoughts are subjective, ‘in that same proportion does the very essence become identical with the expression, and the style become confluent with the matter’.²

Even as a child De Quincey had been aware of how difficult it was in the ordinary language of men to communicate, for example, his ‘solitary combat with grief’:

My mother was predisposed to think ill of all causes that required many words: I, predisposed to subtleties of all sorts and degrees, had naturally become acquainted with cases that could not unrobe their apparellings down to that degree of simplicity. If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incommunicable. And, if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man—saying, What burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once—It is the burden of the Incommunicable.

(Masson, III, 315)

At that time nothing which offered itself to his rhetoric ‘gave any but the feeblest and most childish reflection of my past sufferings’. Later his impassioned prose would communicate all that he now found incommunicable; not simply the sufferings of childhood, but its dreams, sudden intuitions, forebodings, its inexplicable sorrows and sudden memories, its half hints of connections between past and present and future. De Quincey makes it clear that his ‘dreaming tendencies’ were ‘constitutional and not dependent on laudanum’. When he tells of his childhood dreams of ‘terrific grandeur’ it is because he believes that ‘psychological experiences of deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression when they are reverberated from dreams’.³

De Quincey's dreams, and the word includes waking visionary moments, are the best known things about his childhood, but he communicated more than these. Two incidents in his life before he reached his second birthday left ‘stings in my memory so as to be remembered at this day’; that is, sixty years later. One was, indeed, a remarkable dream; but the other was ‘the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance very early in the spring of some crocuses’. Childhood, says De Quincey, enjoys ‘a limited privilege of strength’:

The heart in this season of life is apprehensive; and where its sensibilities are profound, is endowed with a special power of listening for the tones of truth—hidden, struggling or remote.

(Masson, I, 121-2)

Infancy is a separate and distinct period of a man's life, but it is also ‘part of a larger world that waits for its final complement in old age’. In the second chapter of his Autobiography, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, he tells of the death of his much loved elder sister Elizabeth at the age of nine, when De Quincey himself was six years old; but the chapter has a preliminary paragraph before he begins to describe his sister and his deep love for her:

About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within the gates of recovered Paradise, might merit a remembrance. ‘Life is Finished!’ was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. ‘Life is Finished! Finished it is!’ was the hidden meaning that, half-unconsciously to myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart—that ‘now is the blossoming of life withered for ever’. Not that such words formed themselves vocally within my ear, or issued audibly from my lips: but such a whisper stole silently to my heart.

(Masson, I, 28)

The chapter ends with two short passages entitled ‘Dream-Echoes of these Infant Experiences’ and ‘Dream-Echoes Fifty Years Later’; the afflictions of childhood becomes the afflictions of manhood. The first passage describes an episode twelve years after the death of his sister, when De Quincey was at Oxford and had tasted opium and experienced the extra power of opium dreams: ‘And now first the agitation of my childhood reopened in strength; now first they swept in upon the brain with power and the grandeur of recovered life’⁴

                                                            So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attend us, if but once we have been strong.

In the second passage he refers to ‘the transfigurings worked upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as those of fifty years’.

To describe the hidden meanings that half-consciously lurked within his sighs, or explain the pathos of the crocuses, or describe ‘the tones of truth’ and the eruptions of memory and the transfigurings wrought by dreams upon the apprehensions and scarcely understood experiences of childhood, needed a very different kind of prose that could accommodate ‘subtleties of all sorts and degrees’; a prose which by the very nature of the subject could not (as his mother wished) be brief or be expressive in a small compass. One of many extended musical metaphors describes what De Quincey wished to do in prose, and shows him doing it:

A song, an air, a tune,—that is, a short succession of notes revolving rapidly upon itself,—how could that, by possibility, offer a field of compass sufficient for the development of great musical effects! The preparation pregnant with the future; the remote correspondence; the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense are asked in one passage and answered in another; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving through subtle variations that sometimes disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the blaze of daylight: these and ten thousand forms of self-conflicting musical passion,—what room could they find, what opening, what utterance, in so limited a field as an air or song?

(Masson, X, 136)

A ‘remote correspondence’ or the ‘ingemination of a given effect’ could not be achieved either by an automatically antithetic prose where in no sentence is there ‘any dependency on what goes before’, or by the ‘lifeless mechanism’ of eighteenth-century prose. Dr. Johnson's prose never ‘GROWS a truth before your eyes whilst in the act of delivering it. His prose offers no process, no evolution, no movement of self-conflict or preparation’; only distinctions, ‘a definite outline of limitation’, antitheses and the dissipating of some ‘casual perplexity’.⁵ The capitalised ‘GROWS’ suggests that De Quincey will need to create a prose that is (he uses the word) organic and exploratory.

De Quincey needed first of all to insist that prose was an art and the equal of poetry. There had been great prose-writers in the past, but on the subject of prose style De Quincey had found ‘nothing of any value in modern writers’ and ‘not much as regards the grounds and ultimate principles’ in the Greek and Roman rhetoricians. For too long readers and critics had assumed that there could never be rules or a theory of prose since prose was considered to be merely ‘the negation of verse’; and that to be a writer of prose meant only ‘the privilege of being inartificial’, and a dispensation from ‘the restraints of metre’.

But this is ignorance, though a pretty common ignorance. To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing. Walking has rules of its own the more difficult to perceive or to practise as they are less broadly prononcés. To forbear singing is not, therefore, to speak well or to read well: each of which offices rests upon a separate art of its own. Numerous laws of transition, connexion, preparation, are different for a writer in verse and a writer in prose. Each mode of composition is a great art; well executed, is the highest and most difficult of arts.

(Masson, VI, 100)

It is the fluency and plasticity of prose, its slow preparation of great effects, its ability to follow the subtlest contours of experience, its power to be ‘dark with Cassandra meanings’, which De Quincey wants to establish. To achieve these ends the writer will have to observe ‘the two capital secrets in the art of prose composition’. The first of these is ‘the philosophy of transition and connection, or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another: all fluent and effective composition depends on the connections’. The second follows from this and is ‘the way in which sentences are made to modify each other; for the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation’. No sentence must be an independent whole. And length of sentence is no security, for ‘German prose tends to such immoderate length of sentences that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent’: the Germans have ‘no eloquence’.⁶ The art of prose is the art of being eloquent. Eloquence is poetry and power; it is the literature of powerfully moved feelings of any sort. The art of prose depends on that art of ‘connexions’ (De Quincey never tires of the word) which will recreate for the reader the unity imposed by dreams or memory on the randomness of experience.

Most of what De Quincey has to say about prose-style or the art of prose is description of his own impassioned prose or the eloquent prose of other writers. He is so anxious to insist on the hidden capacities of prose, its ability as great as poetry's to describe the most complex feelings and to move the reader, that he can sometimes seem to reject all other kinds of prose; ‘for, unless on a question which admits some action of the feelings’, he claims that ‘style, properly defined, is impossible’. All prose, says De Quincey, must be judged by its appropriateness, and therefore its effectiveness. In the house of prose there are many mansions; some are bigger and more beautiful than others, but all are fit and useful for some purpose. Addison has an apt grace in a certain line of composition, ‘but it is only one line among many, and it is far from being among the highest’.

Governing everything De Quincey says about prose is the traditional notion of decorum. No prose style is ‘absolutely good—good unconditionally, no matter what the subject’. For too long readers have assumed that a simple prose was the best prose and was adequate for any subject; Swift, Defoe and Addison are therefore selected as models. But simple, good prose of this kind was very common in the eighteenth century. The fact that hundreds of religious writers managed effective simple prose should surprise no one, since all that the subject required was ‘plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness’ and some skill in ‘putting together the clockwork of sentences’. Their subject rightly rejected all ornament. ‘All depends upon the subject.’ The ‘unelevated and unrhythmical’ style of Addison or Swift can manage many things; the prose of Gulliver's Travels, for example, is ‘purposely touched slightly with that dulness of circumstantiality which besets the excellent, but somewhat dull, race of men,—old sea-captains’. But ‘grand impassioned subjects insist upon a different treatment; and there it is that the true difficulties of style commence’, and there it is that ‘Master Jonathan would have broke down irrecoverably’.⁷ The simple style is right for simple things;

[but] there is a style transcending these and all other modes of simplicity by infinite degrees, and in the same proportion impossible to most men: the rhythmical—the continuous—what in French is called the soutenu; which to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its subject; and the subject which can justify it must be of a corresponding quality—loftier, and, therefore, rare.

(Masson, III, 51)

Everything is subject to the laws of decorum; but a writer of any talent and sense will consciously and inevitably obey such laws, because (style and subject being one) having ‘no grand impassioned subject’ he could neither wish nor need nor be able to deal with such a subject. Southey's mind, for example, was ‘not sustained by the higher modes of enthusiasm’, and therefore he had not the style to plead passionately against oppression. ‘His style is therefore good, because it has been suited to his themes,’ and his themes were not of a kind ‘to allow a thought of eloquence, or of the periodic style which a perfect eloquence instinctively seeks’. The direct style of Charles James Fox is good and is justified by its subject; he was ‘simple in his manners, simple in his style, simple in his thought’. Addison was incapable of ‘impassioned grandeur’ and of ‘any expression of sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or the impassioned.⁸ In every case De Quincey finds that the limits of the writer's style are the limits of his world.

II

But De Quincey had new and larger worlds to explore and conquer. His own experiences and dreams in childhood his deep, deep memories and the later pains of his opium dreams had convinced him of the ‘one uninterrupted bond of unity running through the entire succession of experiences, first and last’; his profoundest conviction was of ‘the dark sympathy, which runs underground, connecting remote events like a ground-swell in the ocean’; and his wish was to reveal in his prose the else ‘undiscoverable web of dependency of one thing on another’.⁹ This conviction of remote correspondences, of ‘filaments fine but inseverable’ which gave a unity and coherence where to the eye of vulgar logic none existed, showed itself in many other ways than in his own impassioned prose. It led him, appropriately, to a richly sympathetic account of Coleridge's conversation. What most impressed De Quincey was the way in which Coleridge could traverse ‘the most spacious fields of thought by transitions the most just and logical’:

What I mean by saying that his transitions were ‘just’ is by way of contradistinction to that mode of conversation which courts variety through links of verbal connexions. Coleridge, to many people … seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest—viz., when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme.

(Masson, II, 152-3)

What De Quincey admires here is that poetic logic which Coleridge had said was ‘as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes’.¹⁰ De Quincey, using the word as Coleridge had used it, declared that he had ‘a logical instinct for feeling in a moment the secret analogies or parallelisms that connected things else apparently remote’; and in his autobiography said that he neglected ‘harsher logic’, and connected the separate sections of his sketches ‘not by ropes and cables, but by threads of aerial gossamer’. The same concern for connections, for the ‘filaments’ which create unity, explains his reluctance to comment much on individual lines of verse; a certain line is ‘not a good line when insulated’ but is better ‘in its connexion with the entire succession of which it forms part’.¹¹ And the same passion for the unity born of connections explains De Quincey's surprising enthusiasm for Ricardo and political economy; ‘it is eminently an organic science’ for every part ‘acts on the whole as the whole again reacts on and through each part’.¹²

De Quincey, then, wished to explore new worlds of experience and needed a new prose for the purpose. He had found no help, he said, in either modern writers on prose or in the ancient rhetoricians, and was therefore obliged ‘to collect my opinions from the great artists and practitioners’ rather than from the theorists. He found the examples he needed in three places: in Greek prose-writers, especially Herodotus and Demosthenes; in some English seventeenth-century writers such as Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor; and in Burke.

Herodotus and Demosthenes had one great advantage: they wrote in Greek; and

the Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet.

(Masson, III, 63-4)

De Quincey believed that in his own prose he had, indeed, taken that ‘one step further in passion’; he wanted above all to make English prose ‘an instrument for a larger compass of modulations’, a language ‘plastic’ enough to follow the very contours of his own subtle, complex, barely communicable experiences.

Herodotus was his favourite. De Quincey seems to be thinking of his own digressive method in dozens of magazine articles and biographical sketches when he says of Herodotus that he was ‘a writer whose works do actually, in their major proportion, not essentially concern that subject to which by their translated title they are exclusively referred; or even that part which is historical often moves by mere anecdotes or personal sketches’.¹³ But, of course, De Quincey sees Herodotus as the ‘Father of Prose’, as ‘the leader of prose composition’. ‘And if it is objected that Herodotus was not the eldest of prose writers, doubtless, in an absolute sense, no man was.’ But ‘Herodotus was to prose composition what Homer, six hundred years earlier, had been to Verse’. He was ‘a great liberal artist’ in prose, ‘an intellectual potentate’¹⁴ who established prose as an art with separate laws of its own, ‘laws of transition, connexion, preparation’. Herodotus was a power in literature. Isocrates is condemned; his style is not organic; he ‘cultivated the rhythmus of his periods’ and to this end sacrificed ‘the freedom and natural movement of his thoughts’. Demosthenes, in spite of his many gifts, rarely pursued a theme with ‘the requisite fulness of development or illustration’. His faults can be blamed on his audience who, ‘being always on the fret,—kept the orator on the fret’. He could not, dared not, be eloquent; ‘hence arose short sentences; hence the impossibility of the long, voluminous sweeps of beautiful rhythmus’. His style is spirited and animated but not full of ‘continuous grandeur’. He had to keep ‘the immediate—the instant’ before his eye and could not quit ‘the direct path of the question’ even for any purpose of ‘ultimate effect’.

‘Continuous grandeur’ was to be found in certain prose writers of the seventeenth century. De Quincey found that ‘Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow form a pleïad, a constellation of seven golden stars such as no literature can match in their own class’. They provide the ‘highest efforts of eloquence in all English literature’.¹⁵ It is not simply the grandeur or musicality of their prose which appeals to De Quincey, but its continuity. The innumerable musical images which he uses to describe its effect are not attempts to praise the mere sound and sonority of seventeenth-century periods, but to suggest the complex, organic, musical structure which organises separate items into a rich unity. Every single separate sentence is, indeed, ‘a subject for complex art’; but ‘it is in the relation of sentences that the true life of composition resides’. Sentences, he says, must have ‘logic and sensuous qualities—rhythm, for instance, or the continuity of metaphor’;¹⁶ as a piece of music has a theme which recurs in a dozen different ways enriched, elaborated, extended, disguised, but through it all ‘lurks to the last’. De Quincey argued that very often, and especially when the matter is the very feelings of the writer, the manner is the matter. His own matter was very often the continuity of experience, the slow preparation of effects, the transubstantiation through memory of childhood incidents, the revelation of connections. Seventeenth-century prose provided examples of the art of preparation and connections; of an eloquence which ‘prolongs itself, repeats itself, propagates itself’. Jeremy Taylor's prose is ‘all alive with the subtlety of distinctions’; but this is happily matched and balanced by ‘the commanding passion and intensity’ of his theme, which gives ‘a final unity to the tumultuous motions of his intellect’.

Human life, for example, is short; human happiness is frail; how trite, how obvious a thesis? Yet, in the beginning of the Holy Dying, upon that simplest of themes how magnificent a descant! Variations the most original upon a ground the most universal …

(Masson, X, 125)

Where but in Sir Thomas Browne, exclaims De Quincey, is it possible to find ‘music so Miltonic, an intonation of such solemn chords’ as are struck in Urn-Burial; but these chords are simply the beginning of ‘a melodious ascent as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem’.¹⁷

Burke had much in common with these earlier prose-writers, but was an even more congenial revelation of the resources of prose since he moved ‘among moving things and uncertainties, as compared with the more stationary aspects of moral philosophy’. In his writings there is process, evolution, preparation, and always some ‘oblique glance’ at ‘remote affinities’. At the very moment of writing, ‘every truth, be it what it may, every thesis of a sentence, grows in the very act of unfolding it’. Whatever he begins with receives ‘a new determination or inflexion at every clause’. His prose is perpetually creative; and, as with Jeremy Taylor, the connections, coherence and unity of his writing are provided by continuity of metaphor. In both writers ‘the fancy’ (by which De Quincey means the imagination) ‘is the express organ of the judgment’. In some writers the metaphors are ‘mere embellishments’:

Now, on the contrary, in Taylor and Burke, everything figurative is part and parcel of the process of thinking, and incarnated with the thought; it is not a separate descant on what they think, but a part of the organ, by which they think … no passage can be produced from either of them, in which the imagery does no more than repeat and reflect the naked unillustrated thought, but that there is some latent feature, or relation of the truth revealed by the imagery, which could not have been revealed without it.

Burke was ‘overmastered by the weight of the truth he was communicating’; and so it was ‘the necessity of his understanding, dealing with subtle truths, that required a perpetual light of analogy, (the idem in altero) for making them apprehensible’.¹⁸

Not all prose-writers of the seventeenth century merit the same praise as De Quincey gives to his pleïad. Bacon suffers from ‘the shorthand style of his composition, in which the connexions are seldom fully developed’. Burton is too ‘disjointed’; he is ‘not so much fanciful as capricious; his motion is not the motion of freedom, but of lawlessness; he does not dance but caper’.¹⁹ For De Quincey, who insists strongly that a writer's mind and style are inseparable, a ‘disjointed’ style would make it impossible for him to communicate his sense of the connectedness of things, his instinct for secret analogies. A disjointed or simple style can communicate only disjointed or simple things. De Quincey himself is seldom (in the modern sense of the word) a witty writer; a book that is ‘aphoristic’, he says, is a book ‘without a plan’. (He applies the same criticism to long poems. Pope's Essay on Criticism is ‘a collection of independent maxims … having no natural order or logical dependence’, and therefore no power of connections in the thought.) A simple style, ‘the style coupé as opposed to the style soutenu’ prefers ‘the subsultory to the continuous’ and therefore cannot explore the subtleties of a subject.

In order to be brief a man must take a short sweep of view; his range of thought cannot be extensive; and such a rule, applied to a general method of thinking, is fitted rather to aphorisms and maxims, as upon a known subject, than to any process of investigation as upon a subject yet to be fathomed.

(Masson, X, 166)

Fox's style was simple because there were ‘no waters in him turbid with new crystallizations; everywhere the eye could see to the bottom’.²⁰ The ‘general terseness’ of Junius and his short sentences would have been impossible if he had been forced into ‘a wider compass of thought’ or into a ‘higher subject’. The simplicity and clarity of maxim or aphorism are easy ‘where new growths are not germinating’, but they can be purchased at too high a rate. Without that elaborate prose which is necessary to growth and full expression, ‘much truth and beauty must perish in germ’. (Bacon, says De Quincey, was merely an acorn; Jeremy Taylor was an oak.) Its music may, indeed, be ‘dark with Cassandra meaning’; but ‘who complains of a prophet for being a little darker in speech than a post-office directory’.²¹

It is not only written prose that De Quincey considers, but the prose of conversation. In ‘the velocities and contagious ardour’ of conversation, there was likely to be even less distinction between a man's mind and interests and their necessary reflection in his language. Conversation, too, was an art; but by conversation De Quincey means something closer to the Platonic dialectic than the negative energy (as he saw it) of even so mighty a talker as Dr. Johnson. And conversation could make creative thinking perhaps more possible than written prose; it was certainly congenial to De Quincey and his purpose:

I felt (and in this I could not be mistaken, as too certainly it was a fact of my own experience) that in the electric kindling of life between two minds … there sometimes arise glimpses and shy revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that could not have been approached through any avenues of methodical study.

And again he used his favourite musical imagery:

Great organists find the same effect of inspiration, the same result of power creative and revealing, in the mere movement and velocity of their own voluntaries … these impromptu torrents of music create rapturous fioriture, beyond all capacity in the artist to register, or afterwards to imitate.

(Masson, X, 268-9)

De Quincey praises the best conversation for being organic, for being an example of what he calls ‘organology’. The great (though rare) gift of conversation, and the reason why he valued it, was that in it ‘approximations are more obvious and easily effected between things too remote for a steadier contemplation’. I have already quoted De Quincey's description of Coleridge's conversation; elsewhere he writes that the distinguishing feature of his talk was its ‘power of vast combination’: he ‘gathered into focal concentration the largest body of objects apparently disconnected’.²² On the other hand Southey's ‘epigrammatic form of delivering opinions has a certain effect of clenching a subject’; it is ‘the style of his mind’ which leads him to adapt ‘a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sentences’, ending with a ‘contentious aphorism’ which informs the reader that ‘the record is closed’.²³

A description by Thomas Hood of De Quincey's own talk makes him sound like Coleridge and shows how close for De Quincey the connection was between writing and talking:

I have found him at home, quite at home in the midst of a German Ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs—billows of books, tossing, tumbling, surging open—on such occasions I have willingly listened by the hour, whilst the philosopher, standing with his eyes fixed on one side of the room, seemed to be less speaking than reading from ‘a handwriting on the wall’. Now and then he would diverge for a Scotch mile or two, to the right or left … but he always came safely back to the point where he had left, not lost the scent, and thence hunted his topic to the end.²⁴

Disjointed, discontinuous, aphoristic prose or talk was not suitable for noting the ‘links uniting remote incidents which else seemed casual and disconnected’; a simple prose would not wait for De Quincey's truths to unfold themselves. It could not treat of a moment in childhood that ‘reproduces itself in some future perplexity’ and which years later would ‘come back in some reversionary shape’. It could not show how the child was father of the man, or follow the movement of dreams or the eruptions of memory through involutes, ‘the almost infinite intricacy of their movements’. And again De Quincey uses the analogy of music to describe the ‘organic’ prose which his subjects demanded:

A curve is long in showing its elements of fluxion; we must watch long in order to compute them; we must wait in order to know the law of their relations and the music of the deep mathematical principles which they obey. A piece of music, again, from the great hand of Mozart or Beethoven, which seems a mere anarchy to the dull, material mind, to the ear which is instructed by a deep sensibility reveals a law of controlling power, determining its movements, its actions and reactions, such as cannot be altogether hidden, even when as yet it is but dimly perceived.²⁵

De Quincey's search is always for the law that explains and gives coherence to the richness and seeming randomness of separate experiences and ‘connects the scattered phenomena into their rigorous unity’.

Nothing can be creatively understood in a limited prose. When De Quincey comments on prose-writers he finds that the inadequacy of their prose reflects the limits of their imaginative intelligence. It is in comments on Lamb and Hazlitt that De Quincey makes most clear his belief in the inseparability of manner and matter in prose, and in the capacity and resourcefulness of prose to do what his great contemporaries were doing in verse. Hazlitt was neither an eloquent writer nor a comprehensive thinker, and his failures could be seen in his prose:

Hazlitt was not eloquent, because he was discontinuous. No man can be eloquent whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word from Coleridge) non-sequacious. Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent; the main condition lies in the key of the evolution, in the law of the succession. The elements are nothing without the atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine.

(Masson, V, 231)

All De Quincey's favourite pejorative adjectives are here and all his favourite terms of praise; and the reference to Coleridge reminds us of the very different subjects and different prose which De Quincey has in mind. The ‘key of the evolution’ and ‘the law of the succession’ are the necessary subtle logic of poetry which Coleridge discovered from his schoolmaster at Christ's Hospital and which is the necessary condition of all eloquent writing in verse or prose. De Quincey wants a prose that ‘moulds’ and ‘combines’ all the fragments into a unity. Subtle truths require ‘a perpetual light of analogy’; but Hazlitt does not provide the continuity of metaphor which might provide this light, since ‘his brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image’ which ‘spread no deep suffusions of colour’. It could not be otherwise, because his thoughts ‘were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative images—seldom or never self-diffusive’. Hazlitt had no principles upon any subject. He viewed all things ‘under the angle which chance circumstances presented, never from a central station’; he was at the mercy of every random impulse, and so his ‘eternal paradoxes’ have not even ‘a momentary consistency amongst each other’, but are always ‘shifting, collapsing, moulding and unmoulding themselves like the dancing pillars of sand of the deserts’.²⁶ Lamb, it is true, did not agree with de Quincey's comments on Hazlitt; but, then, Lamb's prose suffered in the same way. His mind, like Hazlitt's in its ‘movement and style of feeling’, was ‘discontinuous and abrupt’. He necessarily confined himself to ‘short flights’ since his own ‘constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of discontinuity’. He shrank from ‘the continuous, from the sustained, from the elaborate’; when he writes, his sentiment does not ‘propagate itself’. De Quincey finds that other features of Lamb's mind would have argued this weakness in his prose by analogy; he was totally insensible to music, to the complex structure of music and therefore of prose composition.

‘The English Mail-Coach’²⁷ is an example of the new areas of experience which De Quincey made fit subjects for prose, and of the prose ‘without precedent in any literature’ that could encompass and express them. The article, in two parts, had originally appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, four years after the Suspiria de Profundis with which it naturally belongs. When De Quincey prepared the article for the Collective Edition of his writings in 1854 he divided it into its present three sections and De Quincey's editor notes that ‘great care was bestowed in the revision. Passages that had appeared in the magazine articles were omitted; new sentences were inserted; and the language was retouched throughout’.²⁸ In spite of this care, De Quincey mentions in a ‘Postscript’ added in 1854 (but not usually included in modern editions) that not all readers had understood the article:

To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connexion between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic.

(Masson, XIII, 328)

He then goes on to make clear the ‘logic’ and ‘links of connexion’ which will establish (to use phrases from elsewhere in his work) ‘the close convergement of the several parts’ and will demonstrate how the whole essay is ‘a coherent work of art’.

The three sections of ‘The English Mail-Coach’ are ‘The Glory of Motion’, ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ and ‘Dream-Fugue’, to which De Quincey appended the explanatory sub-title, ‘Founded on the Preceding Theme of Sudden Death’. The several titles hint already at the ‘logic’ and ‘connexions’ of the parts; the words ‘glory’, ‘vision’ and ‘dream’ make clear that De Quincey is dealing with heightened states of awareness. (Wordsworth in ‘Strange Fits of Passion’ had dared to tell his story only in ‘the Lover's ear’ who alone would understand the interconnections and associations of things under the influence of deep feeling.) He explains that the whole paper had its origin in the second section, ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’:

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness of an appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most terrific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.

(Masson, XIII, 328-9)

From this scene, he says, ‘the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expansion’; and in the two final pages of ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ De Quincey makes clear how and why this radiating will occur.

De Quincey had been helpless to avert the threatening collision of the two coaches and when it happened he was sure that the woman had been killed. As the coaches collided and then separated he looked back on the scene which ‘wrote all its records on my heart for ever’. A few lines later he is sure that the sight of the woman throwing her arms ‘wildly to heaven will never depart from my dreams’; in the closing lines of the section a curve in the road removed the scene from his eyes and ‘swept it into my dreams for ever’. In his ‘Postscript’ De Quincey adds that it was swept into ‘a rolling succession of dreams, each one as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue’. It is natural, therefore, that the final section should recount these dreams or nightmares.

If this had been all, every reader could have unravelled the logic and followed the thread of transition and connection; for in his dreams all the ‘elements of the scene blended, under the law of association’. But there were other elements in the dream which readers failed to understand because by no associations could they be connected with ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’: ‘Waterloo, I understand, was the particular feature of the “Dream-Fugue” which my censors were least able to account for’. The explanation does not lie, as De Quincey might have pleaded, in the thought that for thousands of men Waterloo offered visions of sudden and violent death: De Quincey's law of association is tauter and its logic more subtle than this. It is found in that phrase in the ‘Postscript’ where he says that it was from the second section that ‘the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expansion’. The ‘whole’ of his paper includes the relaxed, even chatty, first section in which De Quincey explains that it was via the regular mail-coach services from London that news of great national victories such as Waterloo was carried to the provinces. His imagination had already been seized by this in the first section: ‘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.’ Such excited imaginings had already done something to heighten the state of consciousness which, in the second section, the beauty of the night and dawn and the sudden threatening danger raised still further.

The general title of the article, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, is an accurate one; the elements in the dreams are to be traced back to happenings and feelings in section one which preceded by at least several hours the vision and near disaster of the second section. Even on the very first page of the opening section De Quincey had already hinted at how the article would end:

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.

(Masson, XIII, 272)

The disparate elements in the first two sections are picked up again in the ‘Dream-Fugue’, and, in De Quincey's excellent phrase, ‘the whole is gathered into unity by a reflex act of meditation’.

De Quincey explains two other apocalyptic elements in his dreams, two other examples of separate experiences which, when recurring in dreams, because ‘symbolically significant’. In his dreams the mail-coach galloped through a vast cathedral; and a sculpture of a dying trumpeter suddenly rose to his feet and ‘unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony lips’. De Quincey explains these by association: the vision of the cathedral derived from a section of the road on which the mail-coach was travelling when the collision happened, where the trees met overhead in arches to suggest a vast nave; and the incident of the dying trumpeter was ‘secretly suggested by my own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn and to blow a warning blast’.

The three parts of ‘The English Mail-Coach’ make an extended, subtle, elaborate ‘spot of time’ or ‘involute’. The whole is ‘organic—i.e. … each acts upon all, and all react upon each’, and its art is in the connections of the several parts. To catch and make real for us the shades and shapes, the hints and ‘hieroglyphic suggestion’ of dreams, De Quincey fashioned a fluid prose that was accurate but, of necessity, not precise; a prose of ‘atmosphere’ (his word) that could mould and communicate with power his own ‘gleams of original feeling, [his] startling suggestions of novel thought’.

Notes

1. [David Masson (ed.), The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (14 vols.) (London, 1896)], I, 9-15.

2. Ibid. II, 346; III, 51; X, 230.

3. Ibid. I, 49.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid. X, 270-2.

6. Ibid. II, 65.

7. Ibid. V, 91; III, 51; XI, 17.

8. Ibid. II, 346; XI, 36; XI, 21.

9. Ibid. III, 413; [A. H. Japp (ed.), The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1893)], II, 134-5.

10. Biographia Literaria, ch. 1.

11. Masson, XI, 469.

12. Ibid. III, 431.

13. Ibid. VI, 100.

14. Ibid. VI, 101-2.

15. Ibid. III, 266.

16. Ibid. X, 258-9.

17. Ibid. V, 234; X, 108; X, 105.

18. Stuart M. Tave (ed.), New Essays by De Quincey (Princeton, 1966) pp. 202-3.

19. Masson, X, 109 n.; 102.

20. Ibid. XI, 36.

21. Ibid. XI, 37.

22. Ibid. V, 204.

23. Ibid. II, 328-9.

24. [James Hogg, De Quincey and His Friends (London, 1895)], pp. 53-4.

25. Japp, Posthumous Works, II. 108.

26. Tave, New Essays by De Quincey, 203, 193; Masson, III, 83.

27. Masson, XIII, 270-330.

28. Ibid. XIII, 270 n.