Renaissance man revived
Philip Hensher
THE WORKS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY, VOLUMES 8,9, 12,13, 14, 17 and 18 edited by Grevel Lindop Pickering & Chatto, £550, pp. 3,024, ISBN 185196519X
ibly simple if only we translate the key terms into Greek, or whatever.
But the fecundity and curiosity of De Quincey is always endearing, even when the final result is chaotic. One has the frequent sense, even in his longest pieces, that at the end he has simply run out of space and has broken off with his thoughts barely begun. This is the case to a frustrating degree with a long series of papers on `Style', a subject on which one would love to hear De Quincey's thoughts, but he spends so long chasing down the by-ways of the literary conventions of the ancients that by the end we have heard hardly anything about what might constitute an admirable literary style in De Quincey's own terms. Similarly, the articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannic(' on various writers are full of fascinating asides of a biographical nature, but so much time is taken up with exuberant quibbling with earlier biographers of Pope or Shakespeare that when he finally gets round to saying anything about their work his time is up and we get nothing more than a quick shrug. There is superb criticism elsewhere in the collected works — the really magnificent essay is the one `On the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth'. In the case of the Britannica articles, however, you have to put them next to one of Johnson's Lives of the Poets to see how chaotic De Quincey could be, as well as to appreciate the extraordinary originality and confidence of his mind.
One of the great surprises of the edition is the discovery of De Quincey as a political commentator. One thinks of him as a solipsist, but a huge proportion of his work turns out to be brisk and speculative treatments of burning public issues. Of particular interest to me are two essays called forth by the disastrous expedition of the First Afghan War. 'Foreign Politics' and 'The Douranee Empire'. Much of the first paper is devoted to an energetic denunciation of what, then, was an all-encompassing mistrust of Russian foreign policy and ambitions towards British India. Sticking up for the Russians must have taken as much nerve and wrong-headedness in the 1830s as it would in the 1980s. Nevertheless, De Quincey must here be given credit of a sort for being, as far as I know, the first person to start suggesting that the Tsar was only pretending an interest in India to mask his real ambitions elsewhere (later conspiracy theorists would specify that we were intended to worry about India rather than the Ottoman Empire, a theory which has never really been disproved).
The commentaries on political life are, as Jeeves said about Nietzsche, fundamentally unsound, but cover a startling amount of territory, from 'the coming Revolution,' inspired by Chartism, through the Corn Laws to (De Quincey's final published periodical essay) the Indian Mutiny. And if some of this now seems very specialised in interest, De Quincey is always very good value on the manners and customs of nations; I particularly recommend an 1850 paper on 'French and English Manners' from the 'Instructor', containing many observations which still ring true, and which, as so often in De Quincey, give one the sense that, if he had had a strict enough editor, he might have made an excellent novelist. This, indeed, might be the first scene of a good novel:
Often have we observed timid or nervous people drawing up into a corner [of a street], and anxiously reviewing the stream of passing faces, in order to select one that might promise patience enough and kindness for enduring the interruption.
The texts seem excellent to me, and probably will not need replacing any time soon. I am slightly surprised by the inaccuracy of some of the notes — a note to the 'Style' essay says that Pope was the patron of Stephen Duck, and the editor of the essay 'Foreign Politics' is thrown at the first hurdle by De Quincey's reference to `Simonovitch and Wilkovitch' (he obviously means Simonich and Vitkevich, which in the context should not have been hard to guess).
But this is turning into a very fascinating and valuable edition, bringing all sorts of things to light which no one has read for over a century. The experience of reading it consecutively is one of appreciating how many more subjects De Quincey was interested in, and how much more energy he brought to his exploration, than almost anyone at the time, or anyone since.
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