The English Mail Coach and Joan of Arc by Thomas de Quincey

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The English Mail Coach and Joan of Arc

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH AND JOAN OF ARC

BY
THOMAS DE QUINCEY

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
MILTON HAIGHT TURK, PH.D.

TO CHARLES DEACON CREE
THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
_Glencairn, Kilmacolm, Scotland June 27, 1905_

PREFACE

Some portions of this Introduction have been taken from the Athenaeum
Press _Selections from De Quincey_; many of the notes have also
been transferred from that volume. A number of the new notes I owe to a
review of the _Selections_ by Dr. Lane Cooper, of Cornell University. I
wish also to thank for many favors the Committee and officers of the
Glasgow University Library.

If a word by way of suggestion to teachers be pertinent, I would
venture to remark that the object of the teacher of literature is, of
course, only to fulfill the desire of the author--to make clear his
facts and to bring home his ideas in all their power and beauty.
Introductions and notes are only means to this end. Teachers, I think,
sometimes lose sight of this fact; I know it is fatally easy for
students to forget it. That teacher will have rendered a great service
who has kept his pupils alive to the real aim of their studies,--to
know the author, not to know of him.

M.H.T

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
I. LIFE
II. CRITICAL REMARKS
III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

SELECTIONS
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
JOAN OF ARC

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I. LIFE

Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785.
His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature
as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately,
when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the
family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country
place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years
a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.

Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first
years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a
real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with
terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal
racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and
emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal,
and she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children,
to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in
general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took
Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there,
because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior
school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.

In 1800, at the age of fifteen, De Quincey was ready for Oxford; he had
not been praised without reason, for his scholarship was far in advance
of that of ordinary pupils of his years. "That boy," his master at Bath
School had said, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than
you or I could address an English one." He was sent to Manchester
Grammar School, however, in order that after three years' stay he might
secure a scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford. He remained there--
strongly protesting against a situation which deprived him "of
_health_, of _society_, of _amusement_, of _liberty_, of _congeniality
of pursuits_"--for nineteen months, and then ran away.

His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose _Lyrical Ballads_
(1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a
deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this, he
made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of
seeing a sister; was apprehended by the older members of the family;
and through the intercession of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the
promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary
tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey then led a
wayfarer's life. [Footnote: For a most interesting account of this
period see the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, Athenaeum Press
_Selections from De Quincey_, pp. 165-171, and notes.] He soon lost his
guinea, however, by ceasing to keep his family informed of his
whereabouts, and subsisted for a time with great difficulty. Still
apparently fearing pursuit, with a little borrowed money he broke away
entirely from his home by exchanging the solitude of Wales for the
greater wilderness of London. Failing there to raise money on his
expected patrimony, he for some time deliberately clung to a life of
degradation and starvation rather than return to his lawful governors.

Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and
finally allowed (1803) to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced
income. Here, we are told, "he came to be looked upon as a strange
being who associated with no one." During this time he learned to take
opium. He left, apparently about 1807, without a degree. In the same
year he made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Wordsworth; Lamb he had
sought out in London several years before.

His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settlement in 1809 at
Grasmere, in the beautiful English Lake District; his home for ten
years was Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied for several years
and which is now held in trust as a memorial of the poet. De Quincey
was married in 1816, and soon after, his patrimony having been
exhausted, he took up literary work in earnest.

In 1821 he went to London to dispose of some translations from German
authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his
opium experiences, which accordingly appeared in the _London
Magazine_ in that year. This new sensation eclipsed Lamb's _Essays
of Elia_, which were appearing in the same periodical. The
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ was forthwith published in
book form. De Quincey now made literary acquaintances. Tom Hood found
the shrinking author "at home in a German ocean of literature, in a
storm, flooding all the floor, the tables, and the chairs--billows of
books." Richard Woodhouse speaks of the "depth and reality of his
knowledge. ... His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine
of results. ... Taylor led him into political economy, into the Greek
and Latin accents, into antiquities, Roman roads, old castles, the
origin and analogy of languages; upon all these he was informed to
considerable minuteness. The same with regard to Shakespeare's sonnets,
Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers and characters of
Elizabeth's age and those of Cromwell's time."

From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to
various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh
and its suburb, Lasswade, where the remainder of his life was spent.
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ and its rival _Tatt's Magazine_
received a large number of contributions. _The English Mail-Coach_
appeared in 1849 in Blackwood. _Joan of Arc_ had already been published
(1847) in _Tait_. De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his
life,--twice after 1821 in very great excess. During his last years he
nearly completed a collected edition of his works. He died in Edinburgh
on the 8th of December, 1859.

II. CRITICAL REMARKS

The Opium-Eater had been a weak, lonely, and over-studious child, and
he was a solitary and ill-developed man. His character and his work
present strange contradictions. He is most precise in statement, yet
often very careless of fact; he is most courteous in manner, yet
inexcusably inconsiderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high
standard of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and
inappropriately; and though a great master of style, he is guilty, at
times, of digression within digression until all trace of the original
subject is lost.

De Quincey divides his writings into three groups: first, that class
which "proposes primarily to amuse the reader, but which, in doing so,
may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which
the amusement passes into an impassioned interest." To this class would
belong the _Autobiographic Sketches_ and the _Literary Reminiscences_.
As a second class he groups "those papers which address themselves
purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so
primarily." These essays would include, according to Professor Masson's
subdivision, (a) Biographies, such as _Shakespeare_ or _Pope_--_Joan of
Arc_ falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class; (b)
Historical essays, like The _Caesars_; (c) Speculative and Theological
essays; (d) Essays in Political Economy and Politics; (e) Papers of
Literary Theory and Criticism, such as the brilliant discussions of
_Rhetoric, Style_, and _Conversation_, and the famous _On the Knocking
at the Gate in 'Macbeth_.' As a third and "far higher" class the author
ranks the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and also (but more
emphatically) the _Suspiria de Profundis_. "On these," he says, "as
modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware
of in any literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly,
whether in a hostile or a friendly character."

Of De Quincey's essays in general it may be said that they bear witness
alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of
his intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his
papers when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series
of related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for
analysis and speculation, more than once we have to regret the lack of
the "saving common-sense" possessed by many far less gifted men. His
erudition and insight are always a little in advance of his good
judgment.

As to the works of the first class, the _Reminiscences_ are defaced
by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other
friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author
had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and
women, and he possessed no little insight into literature and
personality. As to the _Autobiographic Sketches_, the handling of
events is hopelessly arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is
drawing an idealized picture of childhood,--creating a type rather than
re-creating a person; it is a study of a child of talent that we
receive from him, and as such these sketches form one of the most
satisfactory products of his pen.

The _Confessions_ as a narrative is related to the Autobiography,
while its poetical passages range it with the _Suspiria_ and the
_Mail-Coach_. De Quincey seems to have believed that he was
creating in such writings a new literary type of prose poetry or prose
phantasy; he had, with his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted
prose to heights hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style
owed much to the seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir
Thomas Browne. He took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the
general revival of interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a
feature of the Romantic Movement. Still none of his contemporaries
wrote as he did; evidently De Quincey has a distinct quality of his
own. Ruskin, in our own day, is like him, but never the same.

Yet De Quincey's prose poetry is a very small portion of his work, and
it is not in this way only that he excels. Mr. Saintsbury has spoken of
the strong appeal that De Quincey makes to boys. [Footnote: "Probably
more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of
literature proper by De Quincy than by any other writer whatever."--
_History of Nineteenth-Century Literature_, p.198.] It is not
without significance that he mentions as especially attractive to the
young only writings with a large narrative element. [Footnote: "To read
the _Essay on Murder_, the _English Mail-Coach_, _The Spanish
Nun_, _The Caesars_, and half a score other things at the age of
about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love with
them."--_Essays in English Literature_, 1780-1860, p.307.] Few boys
read poetry, whether in verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or
philosophy; to every normal boy the gate of good literature is the good
story. It is the narrative skill of De Quincey that has secured for
him, in preference to other writers of his class, the favor of youthful
readers.

It would be too much to say that the talent that attracts the young to
him must needs be the Opium-Eater's grand talent, though the notion is
defensible, seeing that only salient qualities in good writing appeal
to inexperienced readers. I believe, however, that this skill in
narration is De Quincey's most persistent quality,--the golden thread
that unites all his most distinguished and most enduring work. And it
is with him a part of his genius for style. Creative power of the kind
that goes to the making of plots De Quincey had not; he has proved that
forever by the mediocrity of _Klosterheim_. Give him Bergmann's
account of the Tartar Migration, or the story of the Fighting Nun,--
give him the matter,--and a brilliant narrative will result. Indeed, De
Quincey loved a story for its own sake; he rejoiced to see it extend
its winding course before him; he delighted to follow it, touch it,
color it, see it grow into body and being under his hand. That this
enthusiasm should now and then tend to endanger the integrity of the
facts need not surprise us; as I have said elsewhere, accuracy in these
matters is hardly to be expected of De Quincey. And we can take our
pleasure in the skillful unfolding of the dramatic narrative of the
Tartar Flight--we can feel the author's joy in the scenic possibilities
of his theme--even if we know that here and there an incident appears
that is quite in its proper place--but is unknown to history.

In his _Confessions_ the same constructive power bears its part in
the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that
narrative,--an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest.
What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction,
of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it
isn't opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category
in which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be
drawn from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely by
the correction of some widespread fallacies as to the effects of the
drug; far more it is the result of narrative skill. As we follow with
ever-increasing sympathy the lonely and sensitive child, the wandering
youth, the neuralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who
realizes, amid the gorgeous delights and the awful horrors of the tale,
that the writer is after all the victim of the worst of bad habits? We
can hardly praise too highly the art which even as we look beneath it
throws its glamour over us still.

Nor is it only in this constructive power, in the selection and
arrangement of details, that De Quincey excels as a narrator; a score
of minor excellences of his style, such as the fine Latin words or the
sweeping periodic sentences, contribute to the effective progress of
his narrative prose. Mr. Lowell has said that "there are no such vistas
and avenues of verse as Milton's." The comparison is somewhat
hazardous, still I should like to venture the parallel claim that there
are no such streams of prose as De Quincey's. The movement of his
discourse is that of the broad river, not in its weight or force
perhaps, but in its easy flowing progress, in its serene, unhurried
certainty of its end. To be sure, only too often the waters overflow
their banks and run far afield in alien channels. Yet, when great power
over the instrument of language is joined to so much constructive
skill, the result is narrative art of high quality,--an achievement
that must be in no small measure the solid basis of De Quincey's fame.

III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I. WORKS

1. _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_. New and enlarged
edition by David Masson. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889-1890. [New
York: The Macmillan Co. 14 vols., with footnotes, a preface to each
volume, and index. Reissued in cheaper form. The standard edition.]

2. _The Works of Thomas de Quincey_. Riverside Edition. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877. [12 vols., with notes and index.]

3. _Selections from De Quincey._ Edited with an Introduction and
Notes, by M. H. Turk. Athenaeum Press Series. Boston, U.S.A., and
London: Ginn and Company, 1902. ["The largest body of selections from
De Quincey recently published.... The selections are _The affliction
of Childhood, Introduction to the World of Strife, A Meeting with Lamb,
A Meeting with Coleridge, Recollections of Wordsworth, Confessions, A
Portion of Suspiria, The English Mail-Coach, Murder as one of the Fine
Arts, Second Paper, Joan of Arc,_ and _On the Knocking at the Gate
in 'Macbeth.'_"]

II. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

4. D. MASSON. _Thomas De Quincey._ English Men of Letters. London.
[New York: Harper. An excellent brief biography. This book, with a
good volume of selections, should go far toward supplying the ordinary
student's needs.]

5. H. S. SALT. DE QUINCEY. Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers.
London: George Bell and Sons. [A good short life.] 6. A. H. JAPP.
_Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings._ London, 1890. [New
York: Scribner. First edition by "H. A. Page," 1877. The standard life
of De Quincey; it contains valuable communications from De Quincey's
daughters, J. Hogg, Rev. F. Jacox, Professor Masson, and others.]

7. A. H. JAPP. _De Quincey Memorials. Being Letters and Other
Records, here first published. With Communications from Coleridge, the
Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson, and others._ 2 vols.
London: W. Heinemann, 1891.

8. J. HOGG. _De Quincey and his Friends, Personal Recollections,
Souvenirs, and Anecdotes_ [including Woodhouse's _Conversations_,
Findlay's _Personal Recollections_, Hodgson's _On the Genius of
De Quincey_, and a mass of personal notes from a host of friends].
London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1895.

9. E. T. MASON. _Personal Traits of British Authors_. New York,
1885. [4 vols. The volume subtitled _Scott, Hogg,_ etc., contains
some accounts of De Quincey not included by Japp or Hogg.]

10. L. STEPHEN. _Hours in a Library_. Vol. I. New York, 1892.

11. W. MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature_. Boston, 1889.
[Contains the best general discussion of De Quincey's style.]

12. L. COOPER. _The Prose Poetry of Thomas De Quincey_. Leipzig,
1902.

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH

SECTION I--THE GLORY OF MOTION

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer,
at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to
do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by
eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had
married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great
a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same
thing, [Footnote: "_The same thing_":--Thus, in the calendar of the
Church Festivals, the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother
of Constantine) is recorded (and, one might think, with the express
consciousness of sarcasm) as the _Invention_ of the Cross.]
discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to
mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time,
but, on the other hand, who did _not_ marry the daughter of a duke.

These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, are entitled to a
circumstantial notice from myself, having had so large a share in
developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they
accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented--for
they first revealed the glory of motion; 2dly, through grand effects
for the eye between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary roads;
3dly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class
of horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious
presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances
[Footnote: "Vast distances":--One case was familiar to mail-coach
travellers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south,
starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met
almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total
distance.]--of storms, of darkness, of danger--overruled all obstacles
into one steady co-operation to a national result. For my own feeling,
this post-office service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a
thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger
of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme _baton_ of
some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of
heart, brain, and lungs in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally,
that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed
myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-
coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific beauty,
lay in the awful _political_ mission which at that time it fulfilled.
The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like
the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar,
of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that,
in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which
they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the
grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound battles such as
these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with
the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more than
gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in
this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural _Te Deums_ to
heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such
a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to ourselves
than finally to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all western or
central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the French
domination had prospered.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty
events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and
glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford
of that day, _all_ hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly
all) in _early_ manhood. In most universities there is one single
college; in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, all of which were
peopled by young men, the _elite_ of their own generation; not
boys, but men: none under eighteen. In some of these many colleges the
custom permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms";
that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept
by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen
weeks. Under this interrupted residence, it was possible that a student
might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year.
This made eight journeys to and fro. But, as these homes lay dispersed
through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all
coaches except his Majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend
to so extensive a connexion with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford.
Three mails, at the least, I remember as passing every day through
Oxford, and benefiting by my personal patronage--viz., the Worcester,
the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it became
a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six
weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the
system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon
bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon
other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the
illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last were of a
nature to rouse our scorn; from which the transition was not very long
to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of
Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people
(as an old tradition of all public carriages derived from the reign of
Charles II) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a
porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been
compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable
delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been
held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that, perhaps,
it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of
blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of
treason, in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three
outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at
the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I
myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old
gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by
suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal
attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of
lunacy or _delirium tremens_ rather than of treason. England owes
much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her
social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I am not
the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself
in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the
particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning
them away from the privileged _salle-a-manger_, sang out, "This
way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen.
But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases
occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more
vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried
their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a
corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found
ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or
_dais_, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that
the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be
ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not
appearing and objects not existing are governed by the same logical
construction. [Footnote: _De non apparentibus_, etc.]

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10