The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Part III vol 17

Grevel Lindop, Barry Symonds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138764989
• eBook ISBN: 9781000749793
• 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 This is the final part of a 21-volume set presenting De Quincey's work, also including previously unpublished material.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 Hogg's Instructor 1850-2

CONVERSATION

First published in Instructor, IV, 1850, pp. 65–8. Revised text in SGG, XIV, Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected, and other Papers (1860), pp. 162–79. There is no known manuscript.

When he revised it for SGG, De Quincey appended this article to an earlier essay with the same title (‘Conversation’, Tait’s, XVIII o.s., XIV n.s., 1847, pp. 678–81: see Vol. 16), without adding new material or connecting the articles.

In 1850 De Quincey introduced himself to James Hogg, an Edinburgh bookseller who edited and published Hogg’s Instructor. De Quincey was evidently dissatisfied with his relations with both Blackwood’s and Tait’s, and with the exception of a single three-part essay for Tait’s (‘Lord Carlisle on Pope’), the remainder of De Quincey’s periodical work was published by Hogg. It was Hogg too who in 1852 instigated, oversaw and published Selections Grave and Gay, the first British collected edition of De Quincey’s works. Hogg proposed that De Quincey take the Boston, Massachusetts edition of his Writings, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1850, as the basis for this new, extensively revised collection. This project was to occupy most of De Quincey’s time from 1852 to late 1859, but he still wrote on a wide variety of topics for Instructor, working from his home in Lasswade and sometimes in lodgings at 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh. As well as the autobiographical A Sketch From Childhood, his contributions to the magazine included speculative essays, book reviews and political commentaries. Hogg also published as a pamphlet an expanded version of De Quincey’s commentary on the war with China in 1857. Comparatively little of the material published in Instructor was included in Selections Grave and Gay.

Instructor was a relatively obscure magazine, comprising humorous, popularist, informative and topical essays, reviews and new fiction. Printed in Edinburgh and London, it came out on Saturdays and cost 1½d. Its circulation was 5,000–6,000, among a middle-class readership. It went monthly in 1849, and in 1856 changed its name to Titan. In the inaugural issue of Instructor, Hogg explained the ideas that lay behind his new title: the magazine ‘though not strictly religious in its character, had its origins, we are not ashamed to confess, in religious feelings and motives. It can scarcely have escaped the notice of any discerning person that a very large proportion of the periodical literature of the day is characterized, if not by a decided enmity to the Christian faith, at least by a cold and obstinate silence respecting it, – a silence which, when maintained in contributions upon a certain clan of subjects, we cannot but regard as indicating a suspicion of the divinity of its claims – may we not say, a sullen contempt for them?’

Hogg promised scientific papers, literature ancient and modern, and a series of biographical sketches which would ‘embrace exclusively those whose writings have influenced to a considerable degree the sentiments and tastes either of their contemporaries or of posterity.’ He offered his readers poetry, ‘notices of new and useful publications’ and ‘some useful hints to our fair friends, whose good graces we shall endeavour by all means to win.’ Hogg also declared the political neutrality of Instructor: ‘We have only to add, that all politics shall be kept in abeyance. There may surely be some quiet spots in the region of periodical literature which the storms of faction shall not disturb, and where men of common candour and charity may meet without the asperities of party feelings.’ Finally he underlined the fundamental purpose of his magazine, drawing attention to ‘the object it is meant to promote – the increase of knowledge, virtue, and happiness’ (‘Thoughts at Starting,’ Instructor, I, 1845, pp. 1–3).

Among the other contributors to Instructor were Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith. De Quincey’s connection with the magazine constituted something of a coup for Hogg. From the little manuscript material that has survived, it seems that Hogg and his son, James Hogg junior, only lightly edited the work of his new, valued – and loyal – contributor. James Hogg junior’s reminiscences of De Quincey survive in De Quincey and His Friends, where he describes his first meeting with the writer in the spring of 1850 (pp. 169–71).

THE flight of our human hours, not really more rapid at any one moment than another, yet oftentimes to our feelings seems more rapid, and this flight startles us like guilty things with a more affecting sense of its rapidity, when a distant church-clock strikes in the night-time, or when, upon some solemn summer evening, the sun’s disk, after settling for a minute with farewell horizontal rays, suddenly drops out of sight. The record of our loss in such a case seems to us the first intimation of its possibility; as if we could not be made sensible that the hours were perishable until it is announced to us that already they have perished. We feel a perplexity of distress when that which seems to us the cruellest of injuries, a robbery committed upon our dearest possession by the conspiracy of the world outside, seems also as in part a robbery sanctioned by our own collusion. The world, and the customs of the world, never cease to levy taxes upon our time: that is true, and so far the blame is not ours; but the particular degree in which we suffer by this robbery depends much upon the weakness with which we ourselves become parties to the wrong, or the energy with which we resist it. Resisting or not, however, we are doomed to suffer a bitter pang as often as the irrecoverable flight of our time is brought home with keenness to our hearts. The spectacle of a lady floating over the sea in a boat, and waking suddenly from sleep to find her magnificent ropes of pearl-necklace, by some accident detached at one end from its fastenings, the loose string hanging down into the water, and pearl after pearl slipping off for ever into the abyss, brings before us the sadness of the case. That particular pearl, which at the very moment is rolling off into the unsearchable deeps, carries its own separate reproach to the lady’s heart. But it is more deeply reproachful as the representative of so many others, uncounted pearls, that have already been swallowed up irrecoverably whilst she was yet sleeping, and of many beside that must follow, before any remedy can be applied to what we may call this jewelly haemorrhage. A constant haemorrhage of the same kind is wasting our jewelly hours. A day has perished from our brief calendar of days: and that we could endure; but this day is no more than the reiteration of many other days, days counted by thousands, that have perished to the same extent and by the same unhappy means, viz., the evil usages of the world made effectual and ratified by our own lacheté. Bitter is the upbraiding which we seem to hear from a secret monitor – ‘My friend, you make very free with your days: pray, how many do you expect to have? What is your rental, as regards the total harvest of days which this life is likely to yield?’ Let us consider. Threescore years and ten produce a total sum of 25,550 days; to say nothing of some seventeen or eighteen more that will be payable to you as a bonus on account of leap years. Now, out of this total, one-third must be deducted at a blow for a single item, viz., sleep. Next, on account of illness, of recreation, and the serious occupations spread over the surface of life, it will be little enough to deduct another third. Recollect also that twenty years will have gone from the earlier end of your life (viz., above 7000 days) before you can have attained any skill or system, or any definite purpose in the distribution of your time. Lastly, for that single item which, amongst the Roman armies, was indicated by the technical phrase ‘corpus curare,’¹ tendance on the animal necessities, viz., eating, drinking, washing, bathing, and exercise, deduct the smallest allowance consistent with propriety, and, upon summing up all these appropriations, you will not find so much as four thousand days left disposable for direct intellectual culture. Four thousand, or forty hundreds, will be a hundred forties; that is, according to the lax Hebrew method of indicating six weeks by the phrase of ‘forty days,’ you will have a hundred bills or drafts on Father Time, value six weeks each, as the whole period available for intellectual labour. A solid block of about eleven and a half continuous years is all that a long life will furnish for the development of what is most august in man’s nature. After that, the night comes when no man can work; brain and arm will be alike unserviceable; or, if the life should be unusually extended, the vital powers will be drooping as regards all motions in advance.

Limited thus severely in his direct approaches to knowledge, and in his approaches to that which is a thousand times more important than knowledge, viz., the conduct and discipline of the knowing faculty, the more clamorous is the necessity that a wise man should turn to account any INDIRECT and supplementary means towards the same ends; and amongst these means a chief one by right and potentially is CONVERSATION. Even the primary means, books, study, and meditation, through errors from without and errors from within, are not that which they might be made. Too constantly, when reviewing his own efforts for improvement, a man has reason to say (indignantly, as one injured by others; penitentially, as contributing to this injury himself), ‘Much of my studies have been thrown away; many books which were useless, or worse than useless, I have read; many books which ought to have been read, I have left unread; such is the sad necessity under the absence of all preconceived plan; and the proper road is first ascertained when the journey is drawing to its close.’ In a wilderness so vast as that of books, to go astray often and widely is pardonable, because it is inevitable; and in proportion as the errors on this primary field of study have been great, it is important to have reaped some compensatory benefits on the secondary field of conversation. Books teach by one machinery, conversation by another; and, if these resources were trained into correspondence to their own separate ideals, they might become reciprocally the complements of each other. The false selection of books, for instance, might often be rectified at once by the frank collation of experiences which takes place in miscellaneous colloquial intercourse. But other and greater advantages belong to conversation for the effectual promotion of intellectual culture. Social discussion supplies the natural integration for the deficiencies of private and sequestered study. Simply to rehearse, simply to express in words amongst familiar friends, one’s own intellectual perplexities, is oftentimes to clear them up. It is well known that the best means of learning is by teaching; the effort that is made for others is made eventually for ourselves; and the readiest method of illuminating obscure conceptions, or maturing such as are crude, lies in an earnest effort to make them apprehensible by others. Even this is but one amongst the functions fulfilled by conversation. Each separate individual in a company is likely to see any problem or idea under some difference of angle. Each may have some difference of views to contribute, derived either from a different course of reading, or a different tenor of reflection, or perhaps a different train of experience. The advantages of colloquial discussion are not only often commensurate in degree to those of study, but they recommend themselves also as being different in kind; they are special and sui generis. It must, therefore, be important that so great an organ of intellectual development should not be neutralised by mismanagement, as generally it is, or neglected through insensibility to its latent capacities. The importance of the subject should be measured by its relation to the interests of the intellect; and on this principle we do not scruple to think that, in reviewing our own experience of the causes most commonly at war with the free movement of conversation as it ought to be, we are in effect contributing hints for a new chapter in any future ‘Essay on the Improvement of the Mind.’ Watt’s book under that title² is really of little practical use, nor would it ever have been thought so had it not been patronised, in a spirit of partisanship, by a particular section of religious dissenters. Wherever that happens, the fortune of a book is made; for the sectarian impulse creates a sensible current in favour of the book; and the general or neutral reader yields passively to the motion of the current, without knowing or caring to know whence it is derived.

Our remarks must of necessity be cursory here, so that they will not need or permit much preparation; but one distinction, which is likely to strike on some minds, as to the two different purposes of conversation, ought to be noticed, since otherwise it will seem doubtful whether we have not confounded them; or, secondly, if we have not confounded them, which of the two it is that our remarks contemplate. In speaking above of conversation, we have fixed our view on those uses of conversation which are ministerial to intellectual culture; but, in relation to the majority of men, conversation is far less valuable as an organ of intellectual culture than of social enjoyment. For one man interested in conversation as a means of advancing his studies, there are fifty men whose interest in conversation points exclusively to convivial pleasure. This, as being a more extensive function of conversation, is so far the more dignified function; whilst, on the other hand, such a purpose as direct mental improvement seems by its superior gravity to challenge the higher rank. Yet, in fact, even here the more general purpose of conversation takes precedency; for when dedicated to the objects of festal delight, conversation rises by its tendency to the rank of a fine art. It is true that not one man in a million rises to any distinction in this art; nor, whatever France may conceit of herself, has any one nation, amongst other nations, a real precedency in this art. The artists are rare indeed; but still the art, as distinguished from the artist, may, by its difficulties, by the quality of its graces, and by the range of its possible brilliances, take rank as a fine art; or, at all events, according to its powers of execution, it tends to that rank; whereas the best order of conversation that is simply ministerial to a purpose of use, cannot pretend to a higher name than that of a mechanic art. But these distinctions, though they would form the grounds of a separate treatment in a regular treatise on conversation, may be practically neglected on this occasion, because the hints offered, by the generality of the terms in which they express themselves, may be applied indifferently to either class of conversation. The main diseases, indeed, which obstruct the healthy movement of conversation, recur everywhere; and alike whether the object be pleasure or profit in the free interchange of thought, almost universally that free interchange is obstructed in the very same way, by the very same defect of any controlling principle for sustaining the general rights and interests of the company, and by the same vices of self-indulgent indolence, or of callous selfishness, or of insolent vanity, in the individual talkers.

Let us fall back on the recollections of our own experience. In the course of our life we have heard much of what was reputed to be the select conversation of the day, and we have heard many of those who figured at the moment as effective talkers; yet in mere sincerity, and without a vestige of misanthropic retrospect, we must say, that never once has it happened to us to come away from any display of that nature without intense disappointment; and it always appeared to us that this failure (which soon ceased to be a disappointment) was inevitable by a necessity of the case. For here lay the stress of the difficulty: almost all depends, in most trials of skill, upon the parity of those who are matched against each other. An ignorant person supposes that, to an able disputant, it must be an advantage to have a feeble opponent; whereas, on the contrary, it is ruin to him; for he cannot display his own powers but through something of a corresponding power in the resistance of his antagonist. A brilliant fencer is lost and confounded in playing with a novice; and the same thing takes place in playing at ball, or battledore, or in dancing, where a powerless partner does not enable you to shine the more, but reduces you to mere helplessness, and takes the wind altogether out of your sails. Now, if by some rare good luck the great talker – the protagonist – of the evening has been provided with a commensurate second, it is just possible that something like a brilliant ‘passage of arms’ may be the result, though much, even in that case, will depend on the chances of the moment fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Conventions for Manuscript Transcription
• Articles from Hogg's Instructor, 1850—2:
• Articles from Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 1851:
• Manuscript Transcripts:
• Explanatory Notes
• Textual Notes