| 78 | THOMAS DE QUINCEY | [CHAP. VIII |
I have been reading two volumes of autobiographical sketches, published in 1854, by this strange and more than half-crazed writer. I can hardly see anything that is plainly or naturally told, nor can I find a single fact but requires confirmation.
I would not accuse the “Opium-Eater”—at least, not often—of intentional, deliberate falsehood. As his friends have long known, the man is incapable of even seeing the truth, and to his diseased brain and morbid imagination all the stories he has invented of himself at various times, within these last thirty or forty years, no doubt assumed the character of the most perfect and unquestionable truths. He has lied so long to himself that he believes in his own falsehoods or visions. The grandeur of his father, the English merchant, the style in which his mother and the family lived after his father’s death, and all the incidents of familiar friendship with the great and noble of the land, are exaggerated beyond all discretion.
This was always, and still is, one of his greatest weaknesses. He would
impress the world with the belief that his family and family connections were highly
aristocratic people. To further this delusion, and to gratify his own eye and ear, he
affixed the aristocratic De to his name. His father called himself
Quincey, and old Mrs. C. of
Clifton-by-Bristol, and a good many other old gentlewomen of that part, had been intimate
for many years with his
| CHAP. VIII] | HIS BIRTH AT WRINGTON | 79 |
I passed a day at Wrington in the autumn of 1840, and conversed with a good many people who had known the Quinceys. To hear the Opium-Eater talk of his mother, while she was yet alive, one could hardly help, while carried away by his eloquence or verbosity, and the deep, solemn tones of his voice, fancying her a duchess or something still greater. As Dr. Johnson said of Queen Anne, by whom in his childhood he had been touched for the King’s Evil, I could hardly avoid having a vision of a lady in black velvet and diamonds, as one night, after supper at John Wilson the poet’s, he held forth on the subject of the maternal genius, virtues, and dignity. Now Mrs. Quincey was a gentlewomanly English gentlewoman enough, and nothing more; and as for her fortune or income, it was hardly more than a tithe of what her son chose to represent it. Many and many were the pulls he made upon the poor old lady’s purse, for he could never live within his own limited allowance, and could very seldom make up his mind to earn money by literary labour or any other kind of work.
It is rather annoying to see this confirmed swiller of laudanum, this man so
dilatory, so procrastinating, so infirm of purpose, dwelling with critical severity on the
infirmities of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He alleges
that while he himself was forced by a painful malady to have recourse to opium, and to
continue
| 80 | THOMAS DE QUINCEY | [CHAP. VIII |
“Hang you, De Quincey!” he would say. “Can’t you take your whisky toddy like a Christian man, and leave your d——d opium slops to infidel Turks, Persians, and Chinamen?”
Whenever he had engaged to write a magazine article or to do any other work
for the booksellers, those gentlemen were almost certain to receive from
| CHAP. VIII] | HARTLEY COLERIDGE | 81 |
If he could and would have worked like other men, he might, through John Wilson, have made a good annual income by Blackwood’s Magazine alone. After many trials the poet was obliged to give him up. And what did the Opium-Eater do then? Why, he, a Tory of the deepest dye, a would-be aristocrat of the first water, went and connected himself, for a considerable time, with an ultra-Liberal Whig Radical publication, Tait’s Magazine, in which he vented a good deal of spite, malice, and calumny, on Wordsworth, Mrs. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others of his early associates and close friends.
One beautiful morning, as we were walking along the banks of the Grasmere
Lake, Hartley Coleridge said, in his quick, emphatic
way, “I will tell you what De Quincey is;
he is an anomaly and a contradiction—a contradiction to himself, a contradiction
throughout! He steals the aristocratic ‘de’; he announces for years the
most aristocratic tastes, principles, and predilections, and then he goes and marries
the uneducated daughter of a very humble, very coarse, and very poor farmer. He
continues to be, in profession and in talk, as violent a Tory and anti-reformer as
ever, and yet he writes for Tait. He
professed almost an idolatry for Wordsworth and
for my father, and quite a filial affection for
Mrs. Wordsworth, and yet you see how he is
treat-
| 82 | THOMAS DE QUINCEY | [CHAP. VIII |
It must be said that De Quincey, who
elaborated everything he did, was always a very slow writer. Had he been firm of purpose,
persevering and steadily industrious, instead of being the very reverse of all this, he
could, to all appearance, not have produced very much, but he might have produced enough to
keep himself and his family above dependency and a wretched mendicancy. When Charles Knight was publishing his “Gallery of Portraits,” a book of
engravings with biographies attached to them, he engaged De Quincey to write for it, as
G. L. Craik, Professor De Morgan, Professor George
Long, and I and others were doing. He allowed him the choice of his
subjects. For a beginning, the Opium-Eater chose Milton. Knowing his man, C. K. took
him into his own house, a comfortable residence in Pall Mall East, gave him a bedroom and
study, and supplied him with all the books he required for his task. He spent the far
greater part of his time in bed, or in talking, or in very desultory reading. At the end of
three months, and not before, the Memoir of Milton was finished. It
would not make more than sixteen ordinary octavo pages. It was well thought out, it was
ably written; but no more than this for three mortal months! When he had been nearly a week
in the house, Mrs. K. could not but observe that his
clothes were almost ragged, and that he was wearing a very dirty shirt. She spoke to her
husband; and he, with as much delicacy as he could muster for the occasion, spoke to his
guest. “Why, to tell you the truth,” said Quincey
in his slow, solemn manner and with his deep, hoarse
| CHAP. VIII] | HIS FAMILY AT LASSWADE | 83 |
For some time before Knight found him out and took him in tow, he had been lying out in the suburban fields, or sleeping in retired doorways, or upon bulkheads, after the fashion of poor Savage the poet.
It was a dangerous thing to offer him a dinner and bed, for if he found himself at all comfortable he would never think of moving for a month or two. John Wilson told me one evening that his family were literally half starving, and that he was very much afraid the children had found their way to papa’s laudanum bottle. When I returned to Edinburgh, in the spring of 1847, I inquired after this strange, unaccountable being. “Oh,” said Wilson, “a Glasgow friend invited him to his house about six months ago, and there he has been ever since, and there he is now, taking no heed of his poor children, and in all probability never giving them a thought.” For all that he did, they might have died of starvation. He left them in a little cottage at that pretty little village of Lasswade, one of Sir Walter Scott’s pet places. When he had been gone some time, the minister of the parish observed some children begging about the village for food, and looking both sickly and hungry. On inquiry, he found that they were the luckless progeny of the Opium-Eater! The minister and his wife supplied their immediate wants, and then we raised a small fund for them—in Edinburgh, where their father has had his hand in nearly every man’s pocket. And yet, when he returns—if he ever should return—he will come spinning eternal sentences about the strength, depth, and unimaginable vivacity of his paternal affections. I have now lost all patience with him. I can no longer tolerate his solemn cant.
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