BOOKS.
THE LITERATURE OF POWER.* ENGLisvi critics at the beginning of the nineteenth century,. fresh from the study of German metaphysicians, were mucli concerned with various distinctions such as those between the- reason and the understanding, the fancy and the imagination,: rhetoric and 'eloquence, and the literature of knowledge an the literature of power. Probably these distinctions have not the same value for us as they had for Coleridge, Wordsworth,. and De.Quincey; we suspect a certain artificiality in them,. and we are inclined to think that where. they would be of most value to us, if the distinction were real, is where they invariably break down and reveal their arbitrary nature: To.: us reason is a part of the understanding, fancy is included in: the imagination, and eloquence comprehends rhetoric. The difference does not amount to a distinction; it is simply,, as Pater observed with reference to that concerning the fancy- and the imagination, a difference of intensity; and not only- do the lesser and more superficial qualities seem to melt and' flow into the greater, but the greater themselves seem also to merge in 'each other, to be no more than so many modes, so.: many phases, or different aspects of a single and indivisible. thing. Understanding,- imagination, eloquence, and power' differ very slightly, if at all, from each other. At first sight eloquence may seem to have a separate existence, but eloquence, as De Quincey defines it, is simply "the overflow of powerful' feelings upon occasions fitted to excite them." Or it may be, said that the distinction between the reason and the under-. standing is a purely metaphysical distinction, and belongs to quite a different plane ; but it is upon this metaphysical distinction, with the clean line it pretends to draw betweetv
discursive and intuitive thought, that the others are based; and it is from this that De Quineey, with whom we are more
particularly concerned here, derived his famous distinction between the- literature of knowledge and the literature of, power.
• Do Quince% Edited by Sidney Low, " Mestere of Literature.' Series., London, G. Bell and Sone. Pe. ed. net.]
If we do not accept these distinctions as real, and if we hold that the question is simply one of the intensity with which the imagination bodies forth its vision of things, we shall not fall into the error of assuming that the power of swaying the emotions is opposed to and different from the power of inducing the assent of the mind ; and we shall see that the appeal to the emotions is always most overwhelming and irresistible when the element of reason is strongest in it, in the character of Hamlet, for instance, or in Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus in the twelfth book of the Iliad. Even the two books which Quincey opposed to each other, Newton's Principia and Paradise Lost, have in common organic development; and 'between these two typical examples of the literature of know- ledge and the literature of power there occur a vast number of books, as Do Quincey himself recognized, which cannot be assigned to either class with any oonfidence : books such as the poem of Lucretius, or that little masterpiece, Vegetable Mould and Zarilmornul, or Locke on The Conduct of the Understanding, or Aristotle's Poetics. The mind has its own moments of powerful exultation, as Keats recognized when he .compared his joy at entering upon that vivid, passionate, beautiful world of Homer with the joy of
" some watcher of the skies When a now planet swims into his ken,"
or that of Cortes, the adventurer, gazing on the Pacific.
We ask, then, of great literature an intensity of imagina- tion by which, to borrow a phrase from Peacock, an idea will be presented to us with the force of a sensation; and we ask, further, that these ideas should have an organic development 'of their own, a certain dramatic, or even a logical, consequence; and unless we find this intensity spontaneously developing and propagating new ideas until the whole material is pene- trated by it we deny its greatness. Questions of form and style are to a certain extent secondary questions, because in the greatest works of art the form, the style, and the matter cannot be separated from each other; they cease to exist ; and the words themselves seem to have no separate existence of their own, so perfectly free and liquid is the ideal development which flows through the language.
These and similar reflections have been suggested to up by Mr. Sidney Low's De' Quincey, a volume of select passages in "The Masters of Literature" Series. Mr. Low, though he recognizes the limitations of De Quincey, is inclined to be extravagant in praise of his style. He tells us that "it is :a great error to represent De Quincey as a mere brilliant ,rhetorician," and speaking of the effects created by an orator
or by a poet he says " De Quincey aimed at the same effects, SO far as his medium permitted, by the use of a stately and 'expressive vocabulary, by the flowing. rhythms of his sen- tences, by the exquisite and balanced music of his cadences, by the Miltonic harmony of his long periods, and by bannered pomp of metaphor, illustration, and imagery.' Nor is this all. Mr. Low closes his introduction with the following words: "At least one may suppose that an age like ours, too restless and impatient to find the old relief in poetry and the plastic arts, will turn again to pages which have more of music, in its varied cadences and swelling harmonies, its stormy orchestral effects and melodic sweetness, its passion and its pain, than those of any other master who ,ever played upon the instrument of English prose." We need say no more of this than that it is excessive. It is sufficiently clear, we think, that Mr. Low himself is inclined to praise Quincey for his rhetorical excellence rather than for any .other quality. We do not use the term "rhetoric " in any bad sense. The rhetorical prose of the seventeenth century is intense; the imagination moves and lives in it. "To live .indeed is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope but an evidence ; 'Tie all one to lye in St. Innocents church- yard, as in the sands of ,Egypt: Ready to be anything in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrienne." This sentence of Sir Thomas Browne's, or the famous passage : " the huntsmen are up in America" unay servo us for an example of great rhetoric ; but here the .central idea is continually pushing forward towards itafinal realization ; and it is great not because it is rhetorical, but because it is organic in its development and intense in its imaginathin, The 'vice of De Quincey's rhetoric is a vice of romanticism, which seeks no unity of object but only a variety of detail, precisely as a romance passes from one strange incident to another without any develop- ment of character, or any cumulative effect upon the mind,- Even here his touch is not always sure. Lamb, by his humour, and Coleridge, by his brilliant flashes of intuitive vision, saved themselves from the sentimentalism, a parade of false emotions and pious aspirations, which was characteristic of the age, but De Quincey never wholly escapes from it. It is, after all, with Lamb and Coleridge, his contemporaries, and not with Browne and Jeremy Taylor, that we must compare him, and he does not bear the comparison,
We think, indeed, that any selection would be inadequate to express his peculiar power. He has attained to his position among English men of letters, not by the possession of any particularly great quality, but by the possession of many smaller qualities. It is the diversity of his interest, the in- exhaustible facility of his style, his wide and desultory reading, which most attract us; and to appreciate these as they deserve is impossible in any selection, even in this admirable selection by Mr. Low. He wrote incessantly, and it is amazing that he should have written so well and preserved in all his criticism such a fine standard of sanity. We might contrast what Coleridge thought of the porter's speech in Macbeth. with what De Quincey wrote of the knocking at the gate. It is by such a contrast that we learn something of the respective merits of brilliance and of sanity.
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