The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Part III vol 16

Grevel Lindop, Barry Symonds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000749786
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is considered one of the most important English prose writers of the early-19th century. This is the final part of a 21-volume set presenting De Quincey's work, also including previously unpublished material.

Articles from
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine,
1847–8

NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR^* [Part I]

* The Works of Savage Landor. 2 vols. London: Moxon. 1846.

First published in Tait’s, XIV, January 1847, pp. 18–23. The essay was printed as ‘BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY’. in a centred line following the title and immediately preceding the text.

Reprinted in F, IX, Essays on the Poets, and Other English Writers (1853), pp. 242–62, 291–3.

Revised text, carrying many accidentals but only four substantive variants from F, in SGG, IX, Leaders in Literature, With a Notice of Traditional Errors Affecting Them (1858), pp. 284–304.

There is one manuscript, as follows:

MS A: Huntington Library, HM 36039. The manuscript is a complete set of SGG page proofs. It contains nine significant variants, and these are listed in the textual notes.

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864; DNB), poet and essayist, was the foremost neoclassicist of his age. He was born in Warwick, and as a child was tutored by the famous Whig cleric and controversialist Samuel Parr, who instilled in him a fervent love of liberal politics and Latin literature. Landor attended Rugby and Oxford, but was removed from both schools because of the inflammable temper that caused him throughout his life to quarrel with his father, wife, neighbours, and any form of authority that offended him. His first publication, The Poems of Walter Savage Landor (1795), was followed by the exotic poem Gebir (1798) and then a collection of verse entitled Simonidea (1806), which featured two of his most famous lyrics, ‘Rose Aylmer’ and ‘Mother, I can not mind my wheel’. Like William Wordsworth, Landor journeyed to Paris in 1802 during the Peace of Amiens, and in 1808 he travelled to Corunna to aid the Spanish revolt against Napoleon. That same year he bought an estate, Llanthony Abbey, in Monmouthshire, and began his long friendship with Robert Southey. Landor married Julia Thuillier in 1811, and his best-known tragedy, Count Julian, appeared a year later. He left Britain in 1815 and settled in Italy, where he began to produce his famous Imaginary Conversations, the first of which, ‘Southey and Porson’, appeared in the London Magazine in 1823. In the years that followed Landor met Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1835, he separated from his wife and returned to England, where he drew the attention of a new generation of literary figures, including Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens, who produced a genial caricature of him as Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House (1852–3). In 1858, Landor went again to live in Italy, where Browning attempted to protect and care for him. Landor died in Florence at the age of eighty-nine. Algernon Swinburne’s ‘In Memory of Walter Savage Landor’ is the most famous tribute.

De Quincey and Landor never met, though each, with qualifications, thought highly of the other. Landor found De Quincey’s 1831 Blackwood’s review of Samuel Parr ‘insolent and flippant’, but he read a great deal of De Quincey, including his 1834–5 Tait’s series on Coleridge and several essays in Selections Grave and Gay. In 1847, he sent De Quincey an inscribed and ‘very prettily bound’ copy of his recently published Poemata et Inscriptiones, in acknowledgement of the present review and, undoubtedly, of their shared love of classical literature. For his part, De Quincey had admired Landor since 1803, when as a newly arrived eighteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate he bought a copy of Gebir and Lamb’s tragedy John Woodvil on the same December morning, and placed them on his bookshelf beside ‘the joint poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge as then associated in the “Lyrical Ballads”’. What especially impressed the young De Quincey about Gebir was ‘the splendour of its descriptions’, for he had ‘opened accidentally upon the sea-nymphs marriage with Tamor, the youthful brother of Gebir’. In the Westmorland Gazette in 1819 De Quincey described Landor as ‘a man of transcendent genius’, and in 1823, when he and Landor were fellow contributors to the London Magazine, De Quincey told James Hessey that he thought Landor ‘one of the most extraordinary men of the Age’, and promised to write for the London ‘a Paper upon Landor’s Poetry, with extracts of his finest Passages, and a Character of his Genius &c’. Three years later in Blackwood’s De Quincey cited Landor as a writer of ‘eminent genius’ (Vol. 8, pp. 5–6; Super, pp. 251, 422, 378; Vol. 1, p. 189; The Keats Circle, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) vol. II, pp. 433–4; Vol. 6, p. 62).

In 1846, Landor published a two-volume edition of his Works. To mark the occasion De Quincey published four essays in Tait’s over the first four months of 1847: ‘Notes on Walter Savage Landor’ (January and February), ‘Orthographic Mutineers’ (March), and ‘Milton versus Southey and Landor’ (April). The Tait’s set was broken, however, when in both F and SGG the four essays were separated and published in three different volumes. Masson restored the unity of the original, four-part assesment (vol. XI, pp. 394–474), though he published it in its revised form. The present edition reprints the four essays in chronological order, and in the original versions.

De Quincey was hard at work on the series well before the first essay appeared in January 1847. ‘The Landor is all but ready’, he told William Tait on 10 August 1846, though within a month the project had grown, for he reported on 8 September that he now had ‘a long Art. on Landor: which however might be divided. But it needs some alterations that wd. take the rest of the day’. Yet two months later the process was still not complete, and on 6 November De Quincey wrote again to Tait: ‘I have just sent a note declining a dinner party for this evening on account of the art. on Landor’, he explained: ‘so I did last night. And ever since I saw you I have been altering – connecting – &c. without ceasing. – I sent you the opening part, and will send the rest in the morning’ (National Library of Scotland MS 1670, f. 101, f. 104, f. 106).

In the four essays themselves, De Quincey mixes some praise with a good deal of censure, calling Landor ‘a man of great genius’, but criticizing him for his education, orthography, degrading religious notions, faulty ‘sense of discrimination’, ‘blameable coarseness’, and ‘Landorian perverseness’ (pp. 6, 25, 48). De Quincey partially explains the reasons behind this divided opinion when he confesses that

I was and am a Tory; and in some remote geological aera, my bones may be dug up…as a specimen of the fossil Tory. Yet, for all that, I loved audacity; and I gazed with some indefinite shade of approbation upon a poet [Landor] whom the attorney-general might have occasion to speak with. (p. 11)

In private correspondence, however, De Quincey was much more forthright in his praise, for when in the autumn of 1847 Landor sent him the inscribed copy of Poemata et Inscripttones, he told his daughter Margaret that there was ‘no author from whom I could have been more gratified by such a mark of attention’ (Japp, p. 262).

NOBODY in this generation reads The Spectator.¹ There are, however, several people still surviving who have read No.1. In which No.1. a strange mistake is made. It is there asserted as a general affection of human nature, that it is impossible to read a book with satisfaction until one has ascertained whether the author of it be tall or short, corpulent or thin, and as to complexion, whether he be a ‘black’ man (which, in the Spectator’s time, was the absurd expression for a swarthy man), or a fair man, or a sallow man, or perhaps a green man,² which Southey affirmed^* to be the proper description of many stout artificers in Birmingham, too much given to work in metallic fumes;⁴ on which account the name of Southey is an abomination to this day in certain furnaces of Warwickshire. But can anything be more untrue than this Spectatorial doctrine? Did ever the youngest of female novel-readers, on a sultry day, decline to eat a bunch of grapes until she knew whether the fruiterer were a good-looking man? Which of us ever heard a stranger inquiring for a ‘Guide to the Trosachs,’⁵ but saying, ‘I scruple, however, to pay for this book, until I know whether the author is heather-legged?’ On this principle, if any such principle prevailed, we authors should be liable to as strict a revision of our physics before having any right to be read, as we all are before having our lives insured from the medical advisers of insurance offices;⁶ fellows that examine one with stethescopes, that pinch one, that actually punch one in the ribs, until a man becomes savage, and – in case the insurance should miss fire in consequence of the medical report – speculates on the propriety of prosecuting the medical ruffian for an assault, for a most unprovoked assault and battery, and, if possible, including in the indictment the now odious insurance office as an accomplice before the fact. Meantime the odd thing is, not that Addison should have made a mistake, but that he and his readers should in this mistake have recognised a hidden truth, the sudden illumination of a propensity latent in all people, but now first exposed; for it happens that there really is a propensity in all of us very like what Addison describes, very different, and yet, after one correction, the very same. No reader cares about an author’s person before reading his book: it is after reading it, and supposing the book to reveal something of the writer’s moral nature, as modifying his intellect, it is for his fun, his fancy, his sadness, possibly his craziness, that any reader cares about seeing the author in person. Afflicted with the very satyriasis of curiosity, no man ever wished to see the author of a Ready Reckoner, or of a treatise on the Agistment Tithe,⁷ or on the Present deplorable Dry-rot in Potatoes. ‘Bundle off, sir, as fast as you can,’ the most diligent reader would say to such an author in case he insisted on submitting his charms to inspection. ‘I have had quite enough distress of mind from reading your works, without needing the additional dry-rot of your bodily presence.’ Neither does any man, on descending from a railway train, turn to look whether the carriage in which he has ridden happens to be a good-looking carriage, or wish for an introduction to the coach-maker. Satisfied that the one has not broken his bones, and that the other has no writ against his person, he dismisses with the same frigid scowl both the carriage and the author of its existence.

* ‘Southey affirmed:’ – viz. in the ‘Letters of Espriella,’ an imaginary Spaniard on a visit to England, about the year 1810.³

But, with respect to Mr Landor, as at all connected with this reformed doctrine of the Spectator, a difficulty arises. He is a man of great genius, and, as such, he ought to interest the public. More than enough appears of his strong, eccentric nature, through every page of his now extensive writings, to win, amongst those who have read him, a corresponding interest in all that concerns him personally: in his social relations, in his biography, in his manners, in his appearance. Out of two conditions for attracting a personal interest, he has powerfully realised one. His moral nature, shining with coloured light through the crystal shrine of his thoughts, will not allow of your forgetting it. A sunset of Claude, or a dying dolphin,⁸ can be forgotten, and generally is forgotten; but not the fiery radiations of a human spirit, built by nature to animate a leader in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, an arch-rebel, as circumstances might dictate, but whom too much wealth,^* and the accidents of education, have turned aside into a contemplative recluse. Had Mr Landor, therefore, been read in any extent answering to his merits, he must have become, for the English public, an object of prodigious personal interest. We should have had novels upon him,¹¹ lampoons upon him, libels upon him; he would have been shown up dramatically on the stage; he would, according to the old joke, have been ‘traduced’ in French, and also ‘overset’ in Dutch.¹² Meantime he has not been read. It would be an affectation to think it. Many a writer is, by the sycophancy of literature, reputed to be read, whom in all Europe not six eyes settle upon through the revolving year. Literature, with its cowardly falsehoods, exhibits the largest field of conscious Phrygian adulation that human life has ever exposed to the derision of the heavens. Demosthenes, for instance, or Plato,¹³ is not read to the extent of twenty pages annually by ten people in Europe. The sale of their works would not account for three readers; the six or seven are generously conceded as possibilities furnished by the great public libraries. But, then, Walter Savage Landor, though writing a little in Latin, and a very little in Italian, does not write at all in Greek. So far he has some advantage over Plato; and, if he writes chiefly in dialogue, which few people love to read any more than novels in the shape of letters, that is a crime common to both. So that he has the d—l’s luck and his own, all Plato’s chances, and one of his own beside – viz. his English. Still it is no use counting chances; facts are the thing. And printing-presses, whether of Europe or of England, bear witness that neither Plato nor Landor is a marketable commodity. In fact, these two men resemble each other in more particulars than it is at present necessary to say. Especially they were both inclined to be luxurious: both had a hankering after purple and fine linen; both hated ‘filthy dowlas’ with the hatred of Falstaff,¹⁴ whether in appareling themselves or their diction; and both bestowed pains as elaborately u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Conventions for Manuscript Transcription
• Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1847–8
• Article from Macphail’s Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal, 1848
• Article from the Glasgow Athenaeum Album, 1848
• Articles from the North British Review, 1848
• Articles from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1849
• Manuscript Transcripts
• Explanatory Notes
• Textual Notes