The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc - Thomas de Quincey (books to read for self improvement TXT) 📗

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,