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Content THE PARIAH IN THE MARKETPLACE:
THE AUDIENCE-CENTERED RHETORIC OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY
by
Larry Steven Ferrario
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1989
Copyright 1989 Larry Steven Ferrario
UMI Number: D P23140
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, written by
under the direction of h.!ls Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
* 8 9
F375~
DOCTOR Of PHILOSOPHY
Dean Dean of Graduate Studies
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my director, Peter Manning, for his invaluable
help and encouragement. He read many, many drafts of this
dissertation and provided sound advice and careful editing.
I am also indebted to my family--Joan, Jeff, and Stephanie--for
their understanding and patience. At last Stephanie will once again
be able to play loud rock music without disturbing my composing
process.
Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my
maternal grandfather, Howard Stafford; he was one of the first people
to encourage my scholarly inclinations. He always said I would be a
doctor someday: he just didn't realize what kind of a doctor I would
be or that it would take me so long to become one.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1
De Quincey's Inconsistencies ............................ 3
De Quincey and His Audience.................. 7
Endnote................................................. 11
PART I: THOMAS DE QUINCEY AND THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC
CHAPTER ONE: DE QUINCEY AND RHETORIC .................... 12
Publication History of the Articles ........................ 15
Rhetorical Background . ...................................... 19
The Rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey........................... 24
CHAPTER TWO: INFLUENCES ON DE QUINCEY'S
RHETORICAL VIEWS ................................. 26
Classical Influence .......................................... 27
De Quincey's Prejudices.................... 28
Schiller's Concept of Art as Play..................... 29
Psychological-Epistemological Rhetoric ..................... 37
Belletristic Rhetoric ........................................ 39
De Quincey's Unique Views .................................... 42
Chapter Two Endnotes.................................... 46
PART II: THE MARKETPLACE
CHAPTER THREE: THE PROLIFERATION OF PERIODICALS
AND READING AUDIENCES ........................... 47
The Growth of the Periodicals............................... 49
The Literary Periodicals--Reviews and
Magazines.......................................... 51
iii
The Rise of the Middle C l a s s ................................. 55
Audience and the Literary Periodical ........................ 57
De Quincey's Contributions to
the Periodicals.............................................. 62
De Quincey's Appeal to His Middle-Class
Audience..................................................... 65
Chapter Three Endnotes ................................. 78
CHAPTER FOUR: DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH PROSE
AND THE SEARCH FOR AUDIENCES ........... 79
Historical Developments in English Prose .................. 84
Hugh Blair's Passive Reader ....................... 93
De Quincey's Opposition to Blair's Views .................... 95
The Influence of the Newspapers........................ 99
Chapter Four Endnotes.................................... 110
CHAPTER FIVE: DE QUINCEY'S PERSONAE AND HIS
CONCERN FOR HIS READERS........................... Ill
The Gentleman-Scholar and the P a r i a h .........................114
De Quincey and the Reader...................................... 116
Personae and Confessions of an
English Opium Eater ......................................... 119
Chapter Five Endnotes....................................127
PART III: THE STRUGGLE TO INVOLVE READERS IN THE TEXT
CHAPTER SIX: CONVERSATION AS A RHETORICAL MODEL ................. 128
The Value of Conversation ................................130
Conversation's Influence on Writing .......................... 134
Paradox as a Conversational Gambit .......................... 139
The Ideal and the Reality.............................. 142
Essay on Sir William Hamilton...................... 144
Chapter Six Endnote..................................... 152
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PRACTICE OF RHETORIC .......................... 153
Style and the Elevation of P r o s e ............................. 153
iv
The Literature of Knowledge and the
Literature of Power...........................................155
The Nature and the Death of Rhetoric......................... 161
Manifestations of Style ...................................... 165
Bifurcation of Rhetoric ...................................... 172
Rhetorica Utens.............................................. 175
Eloquentia Umbratica and Rhetoric
as Play.................... 175
Corinthian Rhetoric .......................................... 179
The Fugue and De Quincey's Corinthian
Rhetoric...................................................... 181
Chapter Seven Endnote ................................. 188
CONCLUSION............................. 189
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................ 191
FIGURE
FIGURE ONE: DE QUINCEY'S VIEW OF RHETORIC.......................... 177
v
INTRODUCTION
Most historians of British rhetoric agree that current knowledge
of nineteenth-century rhetoric is sketchy at best. Donald Stewart and
others have called for increased research in this area, while scholars
such as William Covino have been working on revisionist histories of
rhetoric for all periods (see Covino's The Art of Wondering 1988). In
an essay in The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and
Contemporary Rhetoric, Stewart maintains that researchers must do the
kind of work on other nineteenth-century rhetorical figures that has
already been done on Richard Whately. Only then, he contends, can
scholars begin to piece together the development of nineteenth-century
rhetoric and its contributions to the present. Until this occurs, the
period will remain a chaotic swirl of forgotten figures and theories.
One such under-appreciated, albeit major, figure is Thomas De
Quincey. Although much has been written on his contributions to
literary criticism and the belles-lettres, little has been said about
his equally important pronouncements concerning rhetoric and
rhetorical theory. This is unfortunate because De Quincey's views,
though often difficult to isolate and interpret, are always
provocative and refreshingly lively. De Quincey's work is unusual
because, unlike most of his predecessors, he wrote neither a textbook
on rhetoric nor a philosophical treatise on the subject. Furthermore,
1
as Nancy Harper has noted, "De Quincey also differs from the other
modern theorists in that he had no advanced degree or established
profession. He was a 'freelance' scholar, a drug addict, and a 'hack*
journalist" (Harper 152). His pronouncements on rhetoric are
contained in the few magazine articles he wrote on the subject and in
scattered references throughout his work. When his rhetoric is
discussed at all, the five articles most frequently referred to are
"Rhetoric," "Style," "Language," "Conversation," and "A Brief
Appraisal of the Greek Literature in Its Foremost Pretensions." Of
these, the most often discussed are "Rhetoric" and "Style." Taken as
a group these essays reveal the thoughts of a major nineteenth-century
stylist writing about rhetoric for a popular audience.
This study will center on the often overlooked rhetoric of Thomas
De Quincey by analyzing these five essays and two others in which De
Quincey discusses his bifurcation of all writing into the literature
of knowledge and the literature of power ("Letters to a Young Man
Whose Education Has Been Neglected" 1823 and "On the Poetry of Pope"
1848). De Quincey's primary concern in his rhetorical writings as
with everything else he wrote was with the pragmatic aspects of
payment for his work and appeal to his audience. Both of these will
be focal points in this discussion of his rhetoric.
The purpose of this study is to look closely at how De Quincey's
rhetorical views inform his connection to his audience. For De
Quincey was above all else a practicing rhetor, and his views and
career as a journalist chronicle some of the changes which had infused
2
British rhetoric by the end of the eighteenth century and continued to
be influential in the nineteenth as well.
Part One of this dissertation will look at De Quincey's life, the
publication history of his works on rhetoric, and influences on his
rhetorical views. Part Two deals with the milieu in which De Quincey
worked--the nineteenth-century literary journal; this section also
traces the development of De Quincey's unique journal persona, the
Scholar-Gentleman who is also a pariah because of his opium-eating.
Part Three takes a close look at De Quincey's rhetorical concepts as
revealed in the articles he wrote on rhetoric. There it is easy to
see that above all else De Quincey is pragmatic. His views inform his
own writing, for he was always concerned with practicing rhetoric
rather than adumbrating esoteric theories with no real applications.
De Quincey1s Inconsistencies
One of the main problems confronting anyone who analyzes De
Quincey's views on rhetoric is his inconsistency. He can be vague and
maddeningly ambiguous. While this is understandable between comments
written many years apart, it is a problem in individual essays as
well. Because he does not always completely clarify his pronounce
ments, his position sometimes seems contradictory. Frederick Burwick
accounts for these inconsistencies by emphasizing, among other things,
the eclecticism of De Quincey's thought (xlviii). Commenting on his
vagueness in her study of nineteenth-century style theory, Marie Secor
maintains that De Quincey only sketched the outline of style theory:
"De Quincey only charts the unexplored territory of style study; it
3
has remained for other writers on the subject to go in, hack out the
underbrush, and bring order to (or at least set up a number of
different camps in) the wilderness" (Secor 81). However one seeks to
explain De Quincey's inconsistencies and seeming laxity, the answers
; are grounded in the milieu in which De Quincey composed.
!
De Quincey's career as a journalist spans an important
transitional period in English letters and culture. Up until this
period education in the British Isles, and particularly in England,
had been dominated by a classical curriculum. During De Quincey's
lifetime, English language and literature increasingly gained stature
while classical studies waned. A magazine writer well-schooled in the
principal texts of classical rhetoric, De Quincey is an anomaly:
trained as a classicist, he practiced popular writing and championed
the superiority of English literature over classical literature.^
Writing during this fluxionary period, De Quincey bridges the gap
between traditional academia and the inchoate world of the popular
literary journals with their emphasis on vernacular literature. De
Quincey has much to teach us because in his life and work he
represents the conflict between gown and town, the academy and the
marketplace, that is still raging in our own era. And at least some
of his inconsistencies are a result of the conflicts between these two
worlds.
Inconsistent as some of his theories may be, they explain, though
just as often they are explicated by, what De Quincey produced. All
writers are rhetoricians in the sense that their writing can be
4
analyzed rhetorically. From their practice theories of rhetoric can
be reconstructed. De Quincey's practice is different, however,
'
because he also wrote discursive essays on rhetoric aimed at the same
audience who read his other essays. In these essays on rhetoric "his
comments on rhetorical history confound oratory with literature"
I
(Burwick xlii) because he believes that while classical rhetoric
emphasized oratory modern rhetoric is concerned solely with writing.
And in these essays on rhetoric, he also stresses how the rhetoric of
practice and the study of it had been ignored by the Greeks and other
cultures. He avers that writing rhetorically about rhetoric or in the
modern era writing well about writing is a great, albeit difficult,
achievement. He believes that the best example of this kind of
rhetoric is the work of Quintilian because it is almost metapractical
in its fusion of theory and practice. It seems a natural step then to
I
look at De Quincey's own practice as a writer in light of his j
rhetorical theories. At their best his essays reveal a consummate
artist at work; according to his own definitions of rhetoric, he
deserves the same compliment that he paid to Quintilian, for he also
writes rhetorically about rhetoric.
Though he privileges practice, he is interested in theory as
well, and in his own work he is very careful to distinguish between
the two. In presenting his views on rhetoric, he provides an
historical survey of rhetorical practitioners because he thinks the
study of the practice of rhetoric has been neglected. He tells his
reader that while practice (rhetorica utens) precedes theory
5
(rhetorica docens) practice or "rhetoric considered as a practising
art" ("Style" Masson 10: 217) was not treated by Aristotle or other
Greeks. De Quincey's aim is to both redress that imbalance and to
serve as a rhetorical model in his own practice. Perhaps he is also
indulging the academy's penchant for theorizing balanced by the
pragmatism of the marketplace.
Another contributory factor to the sometimes obscure nature of De
Quincey's rhetorical views is his lack of structure. He was never a
systematic thinker or writer. He didn't have the time, luxury or
probably the patience that sytematizing requires. Of necessity and by
inclination he wrote magazine articles on different topics at regular
intervals for periodicals that aimed at middle-class readers. This
method of publication also forced him to compose rapidly. Sometimes
he could sustain an article over several issues, but always these
essays were finite in the eyes of his publishers and his readers. The
method of his writing also resists systematization, for De Quincey
neither thought nor composed in a linear fashion. He does not move in
a straight line linking point to point. J. Hillis Miller has
described his process as circular or filling up a space:
When reading De Quincey we have the feeling that all forward
movement has stopped for a time, that De Quincey has entered
into a new space, and has given up all thought of going
beyond it until he has completely filled up the present area
by circling around and around in it until every point has
been traversed .... The effect is rather of a slow moving
river which has overflowed one barrier and now occupies
itself in the remorseless flooding of its new volume,
swelling slowly but surely in all directions until finally
it reaches the top of its bounds, and can spill over and
flow on to another stage in its course. (Miller 40)
6
He wrote about a subject until he had said all he could think of
and had simply suggested possibilities for his reader to interpret.
I
(Then he moved on to the next space to fill up. Just as there is no
I
jsystem, there is also, as Miller has pointed out, no sense of closure
I in a De Quincey essay: "For De Quincey there Jjs no subject with just
limits, a finite goal which may be seen from the beginning, and
pursued through a logical train of thought. The realm of his essays
is, like London itself, a space of infinite wandering" (Miller 29).
The only limitation is imposed from outside by the constraints of
publishing space in the periodical. Curiously enough, this was also
I
the way that De Quincey lived: he stayed in his rented room until he
literally could not move because of the papers and other objects he
had littered about. When this happened he said the place was snowed
up, whereupon, he moved on to another rented room and repeated the
process (Miller).
De Quincey and His Audience
By the time his first comments about rhetoric were published in
his 1828 article "Rhetoric," De Quincey was already an established
periodical writer. Perhaps influenced by his own experiences as a
journalist, De Quincey followed the belletristic movement, to be
discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, away from oral rhetoric. He believed
that modern rhetoric, unlike that of the Greeks and the Romans,
emphasized writing, and although he thought rhetoric was moribund in
his own era because readers refused to work to understand it, he j
wished to revive it. As his articles reveal, he practiced what he '
advocated. Indeed the discursive, periodical essay is the ideal form
for the rhetoric De Quincey championed because it is highly
subjective, making style essential.
The primary motivating forces behind De Quincey's pronouncements
on rhetoric and his rhetorical practice are the money he was paid as a
"trading author" and his keen sense of what would appeal to and be
appropriate for his audience. For above all else De Quincey wrote
audience-centered rhetoric. His audience was mainly middle class and
looked to De Quincey and other periodical writers for cultural
guidance. Many periodicals were purveyors of culture or at least
offered cultural opinions in the same way that The New Yorker does
today. Some of these magazines were of exceptional quality; they
featured the new phenomenon of the literary essay, and since they paid
well, they attracted some of the best writers of the time whose most
famous works first appeared in their pages.
De Quincey had a symbiotic relationship with his middle-class
reading public: he traded them culture for money. Middle-class
readers wanted to be cultivated, but they needed guidance. They
relied on De Quincey and other writers to synthesize knowledge for
them and to give them quick sophistication. In return, De Quincey got
the wherewithal to support his large family. By capitalizing on his
knowledge, De Quincey was able to sell his product to a public eager
to consume what he produced.
De Quincey offered the readers of these magazines the very
antithesis of what they found in the newspapers and in the grind of
8
business life: intellectual stimulation. The reader of De Quincey's
prose is challenged to work hard. De Quincey believed that rhetoric
had died because modern business precluded it, and readers were
unwilling to exert themselves as much as they used to (See "Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 93, 96-97). De Quincey aimed to revive rhetoric,
elaborating a style requiring a difficult, reciprocal activity from a
sensitive reader. De Quincey cannot be read solely for information;
his prose arouses interaction with his readers because, as observed
earlier, it is spiral rather than linear, resisting closure. De
Quincey himself outlines this technique in his original introduction
to Suspiria de Profundis, where he uses the metaphor of the caduceus
to explain that work and the earlier Confessions of an English Opium
Eater; it could easily stand as the central metaphor of all his work:
I tell my critic that the whole course of this narrative
resembles, and was meant to resemble, a caduceus wreathed
about with meandering ornaments, or the shaft of a tree's
stem hung round and surmounted with some vagrant parasitical
plant. The mere medical subject of the opium answers to the
dry withered pole, which shoots all the rings of the
flowering plants, and seems to do so by some dexterity of
its own; whereas, in fact, the plant and its tendrils have
curled round the sullen cylinder by mere luxuriance of
theirs. (Blackwood*s Edinburgh Magazine March 1845 273)
De Quincey's essays combine discursive qualities with digression
and ornamentation to achieve these effects, and one never expects that
an entire essay will deal with what the title indicates. If the
sensitive reader works hard and keeps the caduceus imagery in mind, De
Quincey's essays offer much; however, one must remember that the
digressions are often really the subject:
9
Not the flowers are for the pole, but the pole is for the
flowers. Upon the same analogy view me, as one (in the
words of a true and most impassioned poet) ' viidantem
floribus hastas’--making verdant, and gay with the life of
flowers, .... The true object in my "Opium Confessions"
is not the naked physiological theme . . . but those
wandering musical variations upon the theme--those
parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions, which climb up
with bells and blossoms round about the arid stock; ramble
away from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance.
(Blackwood1s Edinburgh Magazine March 1845 273)
Because they had to have the leisure and sophistication to follow
where De Quincey's meandering pen led, his contemporary readers
demonstrated their cultured outlook in the very act of reading him.
Or at least this is the implication De Quincey leaves as his
ornamentation and digression beget an endless maze of permutations.
ENDNOTE
Of course as Frederick Burwick has pointed out: "It should be
remembered that ancient and pagan Greece suffered a general
disapprobrium in romantic criticism, especially in the criticism
of the influential Schlegels in Germany" (Burwick xliii).
CHAPTER ONE
DE QUINCEY AND RHETORIC
Thomas De Quincey was born the son of a successful wholesale
trader in Manchester, where he also attended grammar school. At
seventeen, after squabbles with his guardians over money matters, De
Quincey ran away from school, first to Wales and subsequently to
London. He later chronicled his adventures during this time in his
most successful work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. This
episode is also the first major example of the erratic and whimsical
behavior which was to plague De Quincey all his life.
By December 1802 De Quincey had been reconciled with his
guardians and entered Worcester College, Oxford, where he was a
student from 1804 to 1808. During this time he received his
inheritance of two thousand-six hundred pounds from his father's
estate. While he was at Oxford he also first took opium for facial
neuralgia. Persuaded to read for a degree with honors, De Quincey
performed brilliantly on the first part of his May 1808 examination.
However, he never showed up for the second part of the examination, to ;
be administered the following day. Instead he disappeared from Oxford
forever, his apparently capricious behavior never to be satisfactorily
explained by either himself or his biographers.
12
By 1809 De Quincey had met both Wordsworth and Coleridge as well
as many of their friends and had leased the recently vacated Dove
Cottage at Grasmere. The next few years were to bring him both great
pain and joy: by 1813 he was a confirmed opium addict, and his fortune
exhausted, he slipped into a deep narcosis in 1816, only to revive and
marry Margaret Simpson, a local farm girl, in 1817.
From the publication of Confessions of an English Opium Eater in
The London Magazine in September and October of 1821 until 1825, De
Quincey wrote many articles for London periodicals. But by 1826 he
had gone to Edinburgh, where he permanently took up residence in 1830
and began writing for Blackwood1s Edinburgh Magazine or "Maga," as it
was affectionately called. In 1832 he began writing articles for
Tait1s Edinburgh Magazine as well.
From 1816 until at least 1846 when his mother died and he
inherited part of her estate, De Quincey was constantly harassed by
his creditors. The torment of these creditors was so severe that from
1833 to 1840 De Quincey escaped to Holyrood, the Abbey precincts of
Edinburgh, where debtors could not be apprehended by their creditors,
and he moved to Glasgow in 1841-1843 at least partly because of his
debts. Only during the last years of his life was De Quincey again
financially comfortable.
For over twenty-five years, De Quincey wrote for the periodicals.
Financial necessity drove him to it and kept him at it: if he hadn't
needed the money the periodicals paid, De Quincey might never have
written anything. He might have enjoyed the comfortable life of the
gentleman-scholar to which his lethargic temperament and narcotic
inertia inclined him. Instead he wrote hundreds of articles for The
London Magazine, Blackwood’s, Tait's, and Hogg1s Weekly Instructor and
spent the last years of his life gathering them together for a
collected edition of his life's work (published by Hogg) entitled
Selections Grave and Gay from Writings Published and Unpublished of
Thomas De Quincey. The first volume of this edition appeared in 1853,
and the fourteenth and last was published in 1860, the year after De
Quincey's death.
Ever since Confessions of an English Opium Eater burst upon the
English literary scene in the new periodical The London Magazine, the
propriety, nature, and quality of De Quincey's work have been hotly
debated. Alternately lionized and reviled during his lifetime, his
literary reputation has weathered similar highs and lows since his
death in 1859. Most of the controversy has swirled around criticism
of De Quincey's imaginative prose, what he called "impassioned prose,"
and evaluation of the substantial body of literary criticism he
produced in his long career. Almost forgotten until recently, or
worse yet dismissed as the work of a hack journalist, are the many
popular articles De Quincey wrote on such subjects as classical and
modern history, political economy, economic theory, rhetoric,
language, and style. Certainly, many of these articles were hastily
and poorly written, but even the worst of them tell a great deal about
the cultural milieu in which De Quincey lived. Consequently,
historians have begun to show renewed interest in De Quincey's work.
14
Up to the present time, the tendency among scholars of the
history of rhetoric has been to dismiss the nineteenth century as a
time when the traditions and accomplishments of classical rhetoric
I
i
| were forgotten and as a period when the discipline of rhetoric was
j demoted and eventually disappeared from the curriculum. (See Corbett
!
|Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student 560, 566.) The articles De
Quincey wrote on rhetoric, language, and style convey the rhetorical
views of a practicing rhetorician responding to his historical
circumstances and suggest an alternate history. What he produced
marks a new chapter in the history of rhetoric, for his works provide
variations on classical rhetoric for the laity.
The fourteen-volume collected edition of De Quincey's works spans
most of his career. Of that voluminous output five articles of
varying length deal directly with rhetoric. De Quincey made many
other references to rhetoric and the nature of language, but often
these were mere digressions in other magazine articles. His five
articles on rhetoric contain all his major pronouncements on and
contributions to the field of rhetoric and language, with one
important exception: the distinction between the literature of
knowledge and the literature of power is made in his "Letters to a
Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected" (1823) and "On the
Poetry of Pope" (1848).
Publication History of the Articles
The five articles on rhetoric and language were first brought
together by David Masson in 1889-1890 in volume 10 (Literary Theory I)
15
of his Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, collected again by
Fred Newton Scott in 1893 in his De Quincey1 s Essays on Style,
Rhetoric, and Language, and used in part by Helen Darbishire in her
1909 work De Quincey' s Literary Criticism. The works did not again
' attract attention until 1967 when Frederick Burwick collected them in
t
j Selected Essays on Rhetoric by Thomas De Quincey for the Southern
Illinois University Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address series.
The publishing history of the works indicates that there wasn’t much
demand for De Quincey's views on rhetoric. Today, however, because of
a rekindled interest in historical rhetoric, De Quincey's essays on
rhetoric hold rich potential for the reconstruction of 19th-century
rhetorical views. For example, Donald Stewart, while noting De
Quincey's importance to an understanding of the belletristic movement,
recognizes that much work needs to be done to "define De Quincey's
contribution to rhetorical theory so that it can be fitted into a
longer, general work about the period" (Stewart 158).
Four out of five of De Quincey's works on rhetoric appeared in
the periodicals he wrote for throughout his career. "Rhetoric" first
appeared as a single article entitled "Elements of Rhetoric" in
Blackwood's Magazine for December, 1828 (Masson 10: 2). Ostensibly,
it was to be a review of Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric, but
I
De Quincey only mentions Whately at the beginning and end of the j
I
essay. "Style" appeared as a four-part essay in Blackwood's for July, I
I
September, and October 1840 and February 1841 (Masson 10: 34). j
"Language," the shortest of the five works, was first reprinted by De
16
1 : _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quincey in 1858 in volume nine of Selections Grave and Gay, from
Writings Published and Unpublished (1853-1860); the source of its
original publication is unknown (Masson 10: 246). "Conversation"
first appeared in Tait1s Magazine for October 1847, but De Quincey
considerably revised it for inclusion in volume fourteen of his
collected works, issued posthumously in 1860 (Masson 10: 264).
Finally, "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature in Its Foremost
Pretensions" was published in Tait1s Magazine for December 1838 and
June 1839 (Masson 10: 289). However, De Quincey did not include it in
the edition of his collected works which he supervised. The
publication of "Style" and "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature
in Its Foremost Pretensions" in installments over a period of months
attests to the popularity and marketability of the "Opium-Eater's"
work during his lifetime.
De Quincey neither planned nor wrote a textbook on rhetoric or a
treatise on the subject. His purpose in his work and the publication
of it are very different from mainstream, academic rhetorical texts
such as those of the Scottish professors George Campbell and Hugh
Blair. De Quincey wrote for the entertainment and enlightenment of
the rising middle class, not for the instruction of Scottish
schoolboys or the edification of an academic community. His essays on
rhetoric, written for popular consumption and published in magazines,
represent a new direction for rhetoric. He wrote about rhetoric in
short bursts--a single article here, a series of articles there--over
a period of years. Like the collection Recollections of the Lakes and
17
the Lake Poets, volumes on rhetoric by De Quincey are artificial,
contrived collections of his magazine works created by his editors.
His rhetorical works never appeared together in his lifetime, although
De Quincey did reprint "Rhetoric" and "Style" in volume 11 of
Selections Grave and Gay, and "Conversation" and Language" appeared
posthumously in volume 14. At the time of his death, he was holding
"A Brief Appraisal" perhaps for revision and inclusion in a later
volume. By gathering together De Quincey's articles devoted to the
Lake poets or to rhetoric, subsequent publishers have created the
illusion that De Quincey intended a single, coherent statement.
In their enthusiasm to identify texts and in their own
celebration of closure, critics have imposed these values on De
Quincey's work. Whatever the reasons, De Quincey's critics today
often overlook the history of his publication. Chaos can result when
diverse magazine articles are treated like a unified treatise on
rhetoric. As Weldon B. Durham has observed, this confusion arises
from
the persistently held assumption that De Quincey's several
essays contain in them a single, coherent, and complete
theory of rhetoric, or at the least an integral theory of
persuasion. I suggest that we need to avoid hastily
attributing coherence to De Quincey's essays. They were
written for different purposes, they appeared in different
magazines, and they were composed at various times over a
twenty-year period. (Durham 240)
This is sound advice for those critics who persist in their efforts to
unify De Quincey and his views. For example, Marie Secor has |
discussed the fragmentary nature of the views on style that are
18
apparent in De Quincey's four-part essay "Style." While she admits
that "Style" is the nineteenth century's seminal work on the subject,
she qualifies this by adding that the article is "a most suggestive,
though highly discursive and unsystematic treatment of the subject,
the one which maps out the territory explored by later theorists"
(Secor 78). The essay is typical of De Quincey's work: he suggests
and then digresses, leaving it to others to work out the details. He
even tells his readers that this is his modus operandi:
We shall leave to some future work of more suitable
dimensions the filling up of our outline. Ourselves we
shall confine to such instant suggestions--practical,
popular, broadly intelligible--as require no extensive
preparation to introduce them on the author's part; no
serious effort to understand them on the reader's. ("Style"
Masson 10: 194)
Anyone approaching his views on rhetoric needs to take their
publishing history into account. To fail to do so, as for example,
does Wilbur Samuel Howell in "De Quincey on Science, Rhetoric, and
Poetry," is to find inconsistencies where unity was never intended.
Frederick Burwick has emphasized that De Quincey's approach should not
be a problem because: "What he sacrificed by not presenting his ideas
in the organized manner of a systematic treatise, he has compensated
by presenting them in the more discursive yet more entertaining medium
of the formal essay" (Burwick xlviii).
Rhetorical Background
By De Quincey's day, rhetoric had already been through many
permutations. As Douglas Ehninger ("On Systems of Rhetoric" 144) and
other scholars have illustrated, there is no "universally acceptable
paradigm" for rhetoric. Rhetoric in theory and practice is culture
bound: each era or culture will produce its own popular and useable
systems. However, for thousands of years the classical model of
rhetoric has influenced the thinking of Western rhetoricians and
determined the nature and structure of rhetoric. The classical
rhetorical model emphasized the primacy of speech; the rules of its
systems were addressed primarily to the orator. Consequently, the
five offices of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and
delivery) were designed to help the orator in his attempts to deliver
persuasively one of three types of speeches: deliberative, forensic,
or epideictic. Perhaps one of the confusing aspects of an historical
view of rhetoric is that though these classical offices have
persisted, the intentions behind them have been different in different
eras.
In the Middle Ages the classical model continued but only in
part. The prescriptive nature of classical rhetoric deteriorated to
simple rote memorization of rules for composing. In addition, the
times mandated that writing in the form of the ars dictaminis or art
of official letter writing assume equal importance with the ars
praedicandi or art of preaching. In these new forms, rhetoric adapted
to its changed environment.
During the Renaissance, rhetoric again changed form in response
to the times. The rediscovery of works by authors such as Quintilian
and Cicero led to a plethora of classical works written in the
vernacular, but the most important development was the Ramistic
20
reform. Peter Ramus hoped to accentuate the distinctions between the
offices of rhetoric by assigning invention and arrangement to logic,
leaving rhetoric with only style, memory, and delivery. Because
delivery and memory had been diminished in importance over the years,
jstyle increasingly became the center of rhetorical studies.
*
Eventually style became, in Samuel Johnson's words, the study of
language as the dress of ideas. Johnson's pronouncement is a
variation of the classical view that ideas are fully formed before
language is used to express them; consequently, authors choose a
grand, a middle or a plain style to express these previously conceived
ideas.
The seventeenth century witnessed a blurring of the line between
the study of poetics and rhetoric; in England the combination of
poetics and rhetoric suggested an increasing preoccupation with style
among rhetoric texts which indicates "how much the Ramistic program
had caught on: the province of rhetoric seemed more and more to be
restricted to style alone" (Corbett 559). The merging of poetics and
rhetoric continued into the eighteenth century as critics and
rhetoricians alike used the newly discovered province of the native
belles-lettres for their examples. At the time, George Saintsbury
summarized this emerging view: "in fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as
Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism"
(Quoted in Corbett 560). Edward P. J. Corbett believes that this
fusion of poetics and rhetoric rekindled interest in rhetoric and
21
"helps to explain why the eighteenth century was the last great age of
a serious academic interest in rhetoric" (Corbett 560).
The eighteenth century in the British Isles, however, also marked
the beginning of another change of direction for rhetoric and
; rhetorical studies. Up until that time variations on classical
rhetoric, even though continually changing to meet the conditions of
the times, had been the only forms of rhetoric available. However,
the latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of three
new rhetorical models in addition to the familiar classical strain.
Elocutionary rhetoric concentrated exclusively on delivery;
psychological-epistomological theories focused on the nature of the
human mind through doctrines such as associationism, faculty
psychology, and common-sense philosophy. Finally, belletristic
rhetoric "held that rhetorical theory, literary theory, and the
science of criticism may be grouped under a single head" (Ehninger "On
Systems of Rhetoric" 131). One of the manifestations of this
belletristic rhetoric was a shift to secondary rhetoric, i.e. writing;
consequently, style continued to be a primary component of the
rhetoric taught in the schools. Ultimately, proponents of this school
believed that "expression rather than substance is made the focal
point in rhetorical theory" (Ehninger "Systems" 131) and elevated the
classical canon of style while diminishing the canon of invention.
In Edinburgh, the self-styled Athens of the North, and other Scottish
cities, professors at the universities began to emphasize this
belletristic approach first advocated in France. Attention to the
22
belles-lettres could enhance the study of rhetoric by providing tyro
writers with models to aid them in mastering various aspects of style
and in sharpening their critical skills. According to this model of
writing, judging, and speaking, rhetoric increasingly focused on
literary exempla. Rhetoric was no longer restricted to argumentative
discourse as classical writers had insisted. Instead rhetorical texts
such as those by Hugh Blair broadened rhetoric's base and began to
include speculation about poetry and all of prose.
The nineteenth century experienced a further separation of
rhetoric from its classical roots. As the belletristic strain gained
influence, "Rhetoric became a science more concerned with criticism
than with production and more centered in written than in oral
discourse" (Ehninger "Preface to Whately" xxiv). Furthermore, the new
subjects introduced under the rubric of rhetoric began to take over,
and rhetoric began to disappear both figuratively and literally. For
example, universities in Britain and America abandoned their emphases
on rhetoric and the belles-lettres and focused instead on one aspect
of these studies--English literature (Howell 714). Rhetorical studies
became more and more diffused. Eventually rhetoric became an empty
term or was dropped altogether because
rhetoric at the height of its popularity in eighteenth-
century Scotland did not succeed in becoming a genuine
theory of poetical literature, as it had aspired to be,
and . . . its other concerns--oratory, didactic writing,
history, and philosophical prose--could not be managed
properly by later academic departments needing to devote all
their efforts to the poetic and imaginative forms of
literary effort. (Howell 714)
23
The Rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey
Writing in 1889-1890, David Masson, De Quincey's editor, assesses
De Quincey primarily in terms of classical and belletristic strains of
rhetoric. As Masson sees it, there are three types of rhetoric: the
first type, classical rhetoric, is the art or science of Oratory
whether it is written or spoken while the second "makes Rhetoric the
Art or Science of Style or Diction for any literary purpose" (Masson
footnote to "Style" Masson 10: 85), and the third "would stretch
Rhetoric into the Science of Literature, or of Literary Theory and
Literary Criticism universally, and make it treat of the principles of
Historical Writing, Poetry, and Expository Writing as well as of
Oratory" (Masson footnote to "Style" Masson 10: 85). Masson suggests
that De Quincey's rhetorical views tend towards a combination of the
second and third of these definitions of rhetoric. Because De Quincey
had a classical education, he was familiar with Greek and Roman
rhetoric, yet in his own pronouncements on the subject, as Masson
points out, he tends to favor the belletristic strain.
Perhaps Bishop Whately best, though inadvertently, described De
Quincey's view of rhetoric when in his Elements of Rhetoric (1828), he
promises to limit his own discussion of rhetoric to "Argumentative
Composition," which he posits midway between the two extreme positions
of his day--"Persuasive Speaking" and "Composition in Prose"
(Whately 4). In the main, Thomas De Quincey's views center on
rhetoric as the composition of prose. Certainly, De Quincey is
inconsistent in his views on rhetoric, ranging from the narrowest
24
possible definition in "Rhetoric," where rhetoric is writing as play,
to the broadest possible view in "Style," where rhetoric is all
English language usage. However, he is steadfast in his opinion that
modern rhetoric’s main concern is with prose construction ("Rhetoric"
and "Style"), manifest most often and most obviously in written form;
De Quincey is not at all concerned with oratory. It is in this
context that De Quincey proposes conversation as a model for writing,
expounds rhetoric as play, reveals a belletristic preoccupation with
style (which he often expands into a discussion of the inseparability
of matter and manner), and stresses the difference between the theory
(ars docens) and the practice (ars utens) of rhetoric.
CHAPTER TWO
INFLUENCES ON DE QUINCEY'S RHETORICAL VIEWS
De Quincey drew on classical writers; his own prejudices, which
often were also those of his audience; German theorists such as
Schiller; and contemporary rhetorical studies, but even when indebted
to popular ideas of his time he applied them in an unusual or
unexpected fashion. He explains his desire to be original in the 1853
"General Preface" to his collected works:
These specimens are sufficient for the purpose of informing
the reader--that I do not write without a thoughtful
consideration of my subject; and also--that to think
reasonably upon any question, has never been allowed by me
as a sufficient ground for writing upon it, unless I
believed myself able to offer some considerable novelty.
(Masson 1: 13-14)
Part of De Quincey's purpose is to entertain and, as we shall see,
part of his purpose is to move while informing. He is absolutely
uninterested in simply informing. To achieve these purposes, he
fashioned a unique amalgam of popular notions and distinctly personal
views. His concept of rhetoric as play, in which he freely mingles
Schiller's views and his own, is one example of such a mixture:
another is his extensive discussion of Aristotle's use of the
enthymeme in "Rhetoric," which so upset David Masson that he provided
an extensive footnote pointing out how De Quincey had misread
26
Aristotle. Often De Quincey does misread his sources, but more often
he does so intentionally to corroborate his argument. Idiosyncratic
and eclectic, De Quincey was not a careful scholar but a journalist
intent on borrowing and manipulating what he needed in order to
provide entertainment for his readers and to prove his contentions.
Classical Influence
De Quincey's use of his classical education is pervasive and
formidable. In all of his articles on rhetoric he refers extensively
to the history, thought, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome as
well as that of Byzantium and the Latin-dominated Europe of the Middle
Ages. In fact he drew upon his education as a classicist throughout
his career as a journalist. He wrote articles which interpreted
classical Greek and Roman history, art, and literature, replete with
quotations in classical Greek and Latin, for his middle-class
audience.'*' Although De Quincey's knowledge of classical languages and
history was extensive, lack of books and hasty composition forced him
to rely on his memory, which though prodigious often led him into
2
errors. He also often resorted to namedropping and simple listing to
carry his argument.
Often De Quincey brags about his knowledge of rhetoric, as when
he introduces Greek orators: "Now remain the Orators; and of these we
have a right to speak, for we have read them; and,believe us, reader,
not above one or two men in a generation have" ("A Brief Appraisal"
Masson 10: 322). These self-aggrandizing references enable De Quincey
to establish the credibility of his persona, the "Gentleman-Scholar."
27
In another such reference in "Rhetoric" De Quincey tells us that he
studied the rhetoric of Aristotle while he was at Oxford ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 85) and then proceeds to analyze the nature of the
enthymeme. De Quincey follows this discussion with a rapid-fire
history of rhetoric through which he reveals his familiarity with the
works of Isocrates, Demosthenes, Quintilian, and St. Augustine, as
well as Campbell and of course Whately whose Elements of Rhetoric he
purports to be reviewing.
In "Style," "Conversation," "Language," and "A Brief Appraisal of
the Greek Language In Its Foremost Pretensions" De Quincey continues
his rhetorical namedropping; however, by this time a pattern has
developed in his preferences: generally, he favors the Latins over the
Greeks and abhors most modern rhetorical tracts because, he believes,
they assume a passive reader. He denigrates Greek rhetoricians
because they created only rhetorics of theory (rhetorica docens) not
practice (rhetorica utens). Aristotle, says De Quincey, "professedly
taught others to be rhetorical" ("Style" Masson 10: 217), but
Aristole's own style of writing is not rhetorical ("Style" Masson 10:
217). For the same reason although De Quincey admires Cicero's
orations, he prefers Quintilian's Institutions and other works not
normally thought of as rhetorical because they provide no handbook to
rhetoric. Instead these rhetors present exercises in the practice of
rhetoric. Fundamental to De Quincey's own views on rhetoric is his
belief that more attention should be paid to rhetorica utens,
"rhetoric considered as a practising art" ("Style Masson 10: 217).
Therefore, he praises Seneca and Sir Thomas Browne "not [for] a
doctrine which they delivered, but [for] a machinery of composition
which they employed ("Style" Masson 10: 217). De Quincey dismisses
most recent European rhetoricians in "Style" because they are too
theoretical and admonishes current writers to follow instead his own
practical suggestions which would change the nature of rhetoric:
Were this done, we should no longer see those incoherent
sketches which are now circulating in the world upon
questions of taste, of science, of practical address, as
applied to the management of style and rhetoric; the public
would no longer be occupied by feeble Frenchmen--Rollin,
Rapin, Batteux, Bouhours, Du Bos . . . nor by the elegant
but desultory Blair; nor by scores of others who bring an
occasional acuteness or casual information to this or that
subsection of their duty, whilst (taken as general guides)
they are universally insufficient. ("Style" Masson 10: 192)
These examples illustrate the extent to which De Quincey drew
upon his knowledge of classical literature; however, he rarely
discussed it in detail or spent much time analyzing it. He primarily
uses classical literature to establish his authority, as if one way of
convincing an audience that one is an expert is to mention the major
practitioners in the field. Also, De Quincey often discusses
classical literature, particularly Greek, in order to unmask it; in "A
Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature In Its Foremost Pretensions" for
example, he tells his audience that Greek literature except for the
drama really isn't very significant; therefore, they aren't missing
much by not knowing Greek. He finds Homer inferior to Chaucer and
Milton and makes his literary chauvinism clear to his readers: "it is
indeed a pitiable spectacle . . . to see young people squandering
29
their time and painful study upon writers not fit to unloose the
shoes' latchets of many amongst their own compatriots; making painful
and remote voyages after the drossy refuse, when the pure gold lies
neglected at their feet" ("A Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature"
Masson 10: 293).
De Quincey as a journalist could debunk the classics because he
had a solid classical education. Until this period the classical
world and classical languages had been the major focal points for
scholarship. As late as 1857 Mathew Arnold shocked Oxford when he
lectured in English instead of Latin "and thus underscored his
conviction that literary studies must be pursued not in aesthetic
isolation but in intimate relation with the largest issues of social
life" (Chew 1412). However ethically ambiguous De Quincey's
simultaneous dismissal and boastfulness of the classics may seem, his
attitude marks a critical transition.
De Quincey's Prejudices
As the last quotation from him illustrates, De Quincey valued
English literature above all other; there is chauvinism in his
judgments about literature as well as about everything else: "And in
the most majestic of the Fine Arts,--in Poetry,--we have a clear and
vast pre-eminence as regards all nations" ("Style" Masson 10: 136).
At its worst this tendency becomes a kind of strident jingoism.
Because De Quincey's primary purpose in his articles on rhetoric, as
with everything he wrote, was to sell copy, it is difficult to be sure
whether De Quincey is offering his own prejudices or pandering to
30
those of his audience. Despite his lack of business acumen, he was
shrewd enough to know that he would lose his livelihood if his
articles lost their appeal. Furthermore, De Quincey, though educated
in the classics at Oxford, was not very far removed from the
I
1 prejudices of the middle-class. His father was a merchant, and the
I
family still shared a great deal with the rest of their class.
Whatever the reasons, De Quincey relies on these prejudices to bolster
his arguments. Andrew A. King has observed of De Quincey's assumption
of the superiority of Europe: "East of Suez, De Quincey's smug Toryism
was less enlightened than Kipling's (King 133). An evident example of
this prejudice can be found in "A Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature
in Its Foremost Pretensions": "Does any man but a foolish Oriental
think that passage sublime where Mahomet describes the divine pen"
(Masson 10: 307)? For De Quincey Europe stands as the most cultured
and sophisticated area of the world. Even amongst the nations of
Europe, De Quincey establishes a hierarchy: only England, Germany,
France, Italy, and Spain are worth mentioning. Of these five in turn
England, France, and Germany are pre-eminent:
As leaders of civilisation, as powers in an intellectual
sense, there are but three nations in Europe--England,
Germany, France. As to Spain and Italy, outlying
extremities, they are not moving bodies; they rest upon the
past. Russia and North America are the two bulwarks of
Christendom east and west. But the three powers at the
centre are in all senses the motive forces of civilisation.
In all things they have the initiation, and they preside.
("Style" Masson 10: 154)
Elsewhere in "Language" he calls the Greeks, the Romans, the French,
the English, and the Germans the "five great intellectual nations of
31
ancient and modern history" (Masson 10: 248). De Quincey tells his
English readers (who must by now be nodding their heads in agreement)
that Arabic nations are not as mature as European nations:
The Koran is held by the devout Mahommedan to be the most
admirable model of composition; but exactly those ornaments
of diction or of imagery which he regards as the jewels of
the whole are most entirely in the childish taste of
imperfect civilisation. That which attracts the Arab critic
or the Persian is most of all repulsive to the masculine
judgment of the European. ("Language" Masson 10: 249)
Moreover, even though England and France walk "in the van of
civilisation" ("Language" Masson 10: 246), De Quincey is biased
against the French as well. Consider his reference to "feeble
Frenchmen" quoted above. Or when he must admit that it is the French
who show most reverence towards their language he does so reluctantly:
"To answer that the French only have been fully awake to these duties
is painful, but too manifestly it is true" ("Language" Masson 10:
256). Finally, when he discourses on the history of rhetoric in
"Rhetoric" he mentions that modern French pulpit orators are the only
widely praised non-English modern rhetoricians, yet when compared to
the English they do not deserve the praise "for it would be a most
unfortunate trial of its pretensions to bring so meagre a style of
composition into a close comparison with the gorgeous opulence of the
English rhetoric of the same century" (Masson 10: 124).
De Quincey is equally sure in his reverence for the "sanctities
of our religion" which produce the "highest eloquence." In short, De
Quincey personifies the insular and provincial views of many English
of his day. Judson Lyon has harshly castigated these prejudices:
32
A John-Bullish cultural snobbery infected much of his
writing on foreign cultures, ancient or modern, that
amounted at times to an almost rabid xenophobia. he was
particularly contemptuous of Oriental cultures, especially
the Persian and the Chinese; but he also habitually
depreciated French and German culture--he was with few
qualifications or intermissions, a lifelong Francophobe.
(Lyon 128)
However, one needs to remember that the first of De Quincey's essays
on rhetoric was published but thirteen years after the battle of
Waterloo, and many people including De Quincey had vivid memories of
the fearful struggles with the French during the Napoleonic wars.
Finally, all the essays were published during the period of England's
most rapid expansion into an empire upon which "the sun never set,"
and many of the prejudices that inform De Quincey's essays are
reflections of the prevailing attitudes of those times.
Schiller's Concept of Art as Play
Many scholars have suggested that De Quincey's greatest
contribution to language studies is the concept of rhetoric as play
which he discusses in "Rhetoric" (1828), his first foray into the
field. In discussing this view Sigmund Proctor champions its
importance: "it is possible to argue that De Quincey's theory of mind
play represents his most substantial specific contribution to critical
theory" (Proctor 259). However, De Quincey never defines rhetoric as
play. It was David Masson, De Quincey's editor, who in a footnote
explaining De Quincey's definition of rhetoric first called it
rhetoric as play:
Is this to be taken as De Quincey's own special conception
of Rhetoric? If so, it may be translated as meaning the art
of intellectual and fantastic play with any subject to its
33
utmost capabilities, or the art of enriching any main truth
or idea by inweaving with it the largest possible amount of
subsidiary and illustrative thought and fancy. (Masson
footnote 2 in "Rhetoric" Masson 10: 92)
Most critics agree with Masson's assessment. Frederick Burwick
*
| in the introductory essay to his edition of De Quincey's essays on
1
rhetoric (Selected Essays on Rhetoric) was the first to explore the
relationship between De Quincey's view and Friederich Schiller's
concept of "art as play" or "playdrive" (Spieltrieb) which Schiller
delineates in his series of letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man
(1795). By the time he wrote "Rhetoric" in 1828, De Quincey was
familiar with all of Schiller's works. In his own essay, De Quincey
never mentions Schiller or the Aesthetic Education. However, we know
Schiller was one of De Quincey's favorite German authors as his 1827
Encyclopedia Britannica article on Schiller reveals:
For us, who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the
representative of the German intellect in its highest form;
and to him, at all events, whether first or second, it is
certainly due that the German intellect has become a known
power, and a power of growing magnitude, for the great
commonwealth of Christendom. (MaSson 10: 423)
As early as 1824 De Quincey must have been acquainted with the
Aesthetic Education because he refers to it in a footnote to a part of
"Notes from the Pocket-Book of a late Opium-Eater" which he wrote for
The London Magazine in July of that year: "The latter part of what is
here said coincides, in a way which is rather remarkable, with a
passage in an interesting work of Schiller's which I have read (on the
i
I Aesthetic Education of Men, in a series of letters: vid. letter the
sixth)" (Masson 10: 452).
34
Schiller maintains in the Aesthetic Education that the
"playdrive" (Spieltrieb) stands "for the imagination when it operates
in an aesthetic context that includes not only art but perception and
the conduct of life" (Engell 231). Schiller is incorporating ideas
from both poetry and philosophy by "combining artistry with
speculative and moral thought" (Engell 231) in an attempt to present a
"study of the education of man's imagination" (Engell 231). This is
an extremely important undertaking because "Schiller sees the
imagination more as the heart of an aesthetic approach to art and,
beyond this, to experience and to the whole of human life and conduct,
an approach that will fulfill and integrate human nature" (Engell
218).
Spieltrieb achieves this integration by mediating between two
other important forces in every human being: the first of these is the
force which governs our apprehension of the real world, the area of
matter and the senses (Stofftrieb) while the second governs the realm
of ideas and form (Formtrieb). Stofftrieb is controlled by the senses
and Formtrieb by reason, but it is
the Spieltrieb [which] is the mediating and unifying drive,
the 'tertium aliquid1 that creates the final harmony ....
[that] unites the permanence and self-sustaining identities
of the ideal world with the individual process and flux of
material existence .... [that] brings sense impressions,
feelings, and passions into harmony with the ideas of
reason. (Engell 232)
Burwick convincingly shows De Quincey's indebtedness to the
aesthetic theories of Schiller in many different areas. In
particular, he demonstrates how De Quincey utilizes Schiller to reach
35
j a "final resolution of form and content through the facility of
j creative play" (Burwick xvii). According to Burwick, De Quincey
i
I incorporated aspects of Schiller's thought into his own prose
j
aesthetics: "The interactions of form and content as conceived by
Schiller and De Quincey are directly linked to the artistic endeavor.
De Quincey's idea of play is an application of Schiller's Formtrieb,
Stofftrieb, and Spieltrieb to the creative process in prose art"
(Burwick xxi) .
Schiller believes it is the function of the "playdrive"
(Spieltrieb) to unify the forces of matter and the senses
(Stofftrieb) with the world of the ideal or form (Formtrieb). De
Quincey has taken the interactions of this trio and directed them to
his conception of rhetoric in general and style in particular. De
Quincey uses aspects of this theory to resolve one of his central
problems of rhetoric--the relationship between style and content. In
fact, Burwick suggests it is play that harmonizes style and content
for De Quincey: "Play, as the manipulation of matter and manner,
brings all the aspects of style into a sensible relation with one
another--the logical qualities of thought in harmony with the sensuous
qualities of rhythm and metaphor" (Burwick xxv). Through aspects of
rhetoric as mind-play De Quincey proves Wordsworth's view that
"language is the incarnation of thought," and as Helen Darbishire
pointed out in 1909 this makes him the first English critic to
champion the inseparability of manner and matter (Darbishire 31).
36
Some of De Quincey's attitudes regarding rhetoric also reflect
contemporary rhetorical views, but De Quincey borrowed haphazardly and
■ erratically. He suggested major ideas and left it to subsequent
i
jwriters to fill in the details. Some of the ideas he suggested came
from current classical, psychological--epistemological, and belletris
tic approaches to the study of rhetoric:
De Quincey is belletristic in the sense that he includes a
broad range of activities in his conception of communica
tion. He is also, however, classical, relying upon
Aristotle as one of his primary sources, and he is heavily
influenced by faculty and associational psychology. (Harper
152)
Of the prevalent rhetorical theories of his day, he ignored only the
elocutionist views because he contended that modern rhetoric was
concerned primarily with the written word.
Although De Quincey refers to classical rhetoric frequently and
borrows terms from the classical rhetorical tradition, his rhetoric
has little in common with that tradition. Even when he carefully
discusses the place of the enthymeme in Aristotle's system, he is
merely interpreting to set up his own position. As he wryly
indicates: "[A]11 parties may possibly fancy a confirmation of their
views in Aristotle ..." ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 83).
Psychological-Epistemological Rhetoric
De Quincey is more clearly indebted to the "new" rhetorical ideas
inherent in both the psychological-epitemological and belletristic
approaches to rhetoric which flourished in the eighteenth century and
!
continued to be influential well into the nineteenth century. Hugh
37
Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), considered the
central work of the belletristic school, and Richard Whately's
Elements of Rhetoric (1828), which treats basic Aristotelian theory in
!
| the light of contemporary advances in epistemology and psychology,
j
were the primary rhetorical texts used in British and American
colleges and universities for much of the nineteenth century. In
addition, George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) was used as
an advanced text to provide a philosophical framework for rhetoric.
De Quincey mentions all three: he lauds the work of Campbell, reviews
and applauds the work of Whately, and dimisses Blair as the "desultory
Blair," yet he borrowed from Blair, too.
Psychological-epistemological rhetoricians such as Campbell and
Whately incorporated some of the teaching of Locke, Hume, and other
British empiricists into their rhetorical systems to stress "the
mental processes underlying human communication" (Harper 142) .
Through faculty psychology, they "attempted to explain human behavior
in terms of five powers or faculties of the mind--understanding,
memory, imagination, passion, and will ..." (Foss, Foss and Trapp
8). Associationism, in turn, revealed how these faculties work
together while common sense philosophy explained associationism
(Harper 142-146). Nancy Harper thinks associationism, faculty
psychology, and common-sense philosophy all contributed to De
Quincey's views on rhetoric (Harper 142). All three of these
approaches focused on the potential audience for any communication:
Most important, instead of approaching their subject as the
ancients had done, through an analysis of what might be said
38
on behalf of a cause, the architects of the "new", rhetoric
approached it through an analysis of the mind of the
listener-reader, inferring their doctrines from current
assumptions concerning the ways in which men come to
understand, to believe, and to feel. Whereas the ancients
had built a strongly subject- or substance-centered
rhetoric, the writers of the Enlightenment built a strongly
audience-centered one. (Ehninger, "On Rhetoric and
Rhetorics," 245)
Though there is no concrete evidence that De Quincey borrowed his
own audience-centered stance from the psychological-epistemological
rhetoricians, he did state that he admired both Campbell and Whately's j
work ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 133). In any case, De Quincey's view of
rhetoric is always audience centered. He is constantly absorbed with
how communication is received and processed by his audience, and he
continually talks to his readers. In fact, he uses conversation as
one of his primary models for written rhetoric. It is his view that
rhetoric should always be driven by a concern for the recipient of the
communication. For example, his conception of rhetoric as play is no
less dependent upon an alert audience mentally willing to exert itself
than upon the rhetor who creates the entertainment; one cannot exist
without the other, as De Quincey makes clear when he declares that
rhetoric is moribund because of the nature of society:
And in a boundless theatre of pleasures, to be had at little
or no cost of intellectual activity, it would be marvelous
indeed if any considerable audience could be found for an
exhibition which presupposes a state of tense exertion on
the part both of auditor and performer. ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 97)3
Belletristic Rhetoric
Although De Quincey used his worst term of opprobrium when he
referred to Hugh Blair as the "desultory Blair” and dismissed his work
39
as insufficient ("Style" Masson 10: 192), nevertheless he borrowed
essential ideas from Blair and other belletristic writers. In fact De
Quincey borrowed so extensively that when his rhetorical views are
mentioned at all, they have most often been linked to the belletristic
rhetoric that dominated the nineteenth century. And the central
concern of this belletristic rhetoric was secondary rhetoric, not the
primary rhetoric of the ancients. As noted in Chapter One, it was
mostly concerned with criticism and written discourse. This movement
to secondary rhetoric George Kennedy cites as a common historical
phenomenon, termed letteraturizzazione in Italian, and further
characterized by "the tendency of rhetoric to shift its focus from
persuasion to narration, from civic to personal contexts, and from
discourse to literature, including poetry" (Kennedy 5). Kennedy,
among others, has even suggested that Blair should have called his
text Lectures on Belles-Lettres and Rhetoric which would have more
accurately reflected his priorities (Kennedy 235). Certainly
eighteenth-century England witnessed such a shift, and soon
belletristic writers incorporated not only criticism but most of the
language arts under the general rubric of rhetoric. Indeed at one
i
point in "Style" De Quincey defines rhetoric as ". . . the management
of our mother-tongue in all offices to which it can be applied ..."
(Masson 10: 192). Furthermore, De Quincey’s own work, including the
articles on rhetoric, is most often personal, tends towards narration,
and is concerned with the literature of power or what today would be
called literature in the broadest application of that term.
40
Belletristic rhetoric in general and Hugh Blair in particular did
not view rhetoric from a classical position:
Instead, Blair devoted most attention to style, viewing
invention as beyond the scope of rhetoric. Blair also
emphasized the importance of developing 'taste' in reading
literary works, particularly poetry. Hence, the province of
rhetoric was both truncated (to a focus on style) and
diffused (to emphasize the aesthetic appreciation of
literature rather than the active production of public
discourse). (Connors, Ede, and Lunsford 2-3)
From the beginning of his lectures Blair clearly acknowledges
that his goal is to teach Scottish schoolboys how to write, judge, and
speak, with the emphasis on the former two. He says the lectures
"were designed for the initiation of Youth into the study of
Belles-Lettres and Composition" (Blair "Preface" iv.). Blair explains
his emphasis on writing by noting the decline of oratory in "Modern
Eloquence" (Lecture XXVI) while in "The Rise of Progress in Writing"
(Lecture VII) he says writing is more extensive and more permanent
than speech.
The principal way in which Blair endeavored to teach youth how to
write was through a close study of style and analyses of the style of
selected authors from English belles-lettres. Students practiced
composition by studying and then writing Spectator-type essays. It is
to this approach that we owe the birth of English departments, a
late-nineteenth-century phenomenon; however, Blair emphasized style
"because it is, in itself, of great importance, and because it is more
capable of being ascertained by precise rule than several other parts
of composition" (Blair Lecture XX 408). Unfortunately, Blair
41
privileges style at the expense of the other offices of classical
rhetoric: he dismisses delivery in one lecture (xxiii), barely
j mentions memory, and completely omits invention and arrangement.
By integrating the study of rhetoric and literary criticism and
elevating writing and through it style, Blair and other belletristic
rhetoricians changed the direction of rhetoric to meet the demands of
their age. Blair was certainly aware of these innovations when he
wrote:
The study of composition, important in itself at all times,
has acquired additional importance from the present age. It
is an age wherein improvements in every part of Science,
have been prosecuted with ardour. To all the liberal arts
much attention has been paid; and to none more than to the
beauty of language, and the grace and eloquence of every
kind of writing. The public ear is become refined. It will
not easily bear what is slovenly and incorrect. Every
author must aspire to some merit in expression, as well as
in sentiment, if he would not incur the danger of being
neglected and despised. (Lecture 17)
De Quincey1s Unique Views
De Quincey has been designated a belletristic rhetorician by a
number of critics (See Stewart, Burwick, Harper, et al.) primarily
because he focuses on prose composition, which for him is centered in
writing; uses examples from the belles-lettres, particularly those
from the vernacular, to support his contentions; and privileges style
in his discussions. In addition, as indicated above, his writing
accentuates elements of the letteraturizzazione of rhetoric apparent
in works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One could even
contend that through his bifurcation of all language into either the
literature of knowledge or the literature of power he has created the
42
broadest possible definition of rhetoric which is yet still in line
with belletristic views: clearly De Quincey was vitally concerned with
literature and in defining the best attributes of prose style.
However, De Quincey's rhetorical views, although informed by the
|
i belles-lettres and indebted to the belletristic school, contain
j
elements which are antithetical to belletristic concern and which led
to his disdain for "the elegant but desultory Blair."
i
To begin with, Blair and others would have been horrified by De
Quincey's concept of rhetoric as play. Blair advocated the plain
style and direct communication with the audience. As William Covino
points out in his discussion of Blair in The Art of Wondering, Blair
taught that the less the reader has to work the better the prose.
This is the exact opposite of what De Quincey advocates in his
"Rhetoric."
Covino contrasts Blair with Byron and De Quincey to illuminate
his central hypothesis: he maintains that Blair and writers like him
represent mainstream views that praise the dissemination of
information and authors who convey information through a unified text
that reaches closure. Conversely, Covino's revisionist history deals
with "The 'forgotten' rhetors [who] are those who elaborate Plato's
conception of rhetoric as (I will argue) an art of wondering, and
writing as a mode of avoiding rather than intending closure" (Covino
9). Covino includes De Quincey amongst this "forgotten" group because
among other things De Quincey's rhetoric is decentralized, i.e. he
adheres to no single thesis consistently. Instead he follows the flow
43
of conversation as he.explores a subject in many different directions
4
almost simultaneously while resisting closure. Covino deems this
pattern to be necessary because "The dialectical pattern of the rhetor
'
does not conform to the neat lines of a thesis-antithesis-synthesis,
much less the linear march through a causal chain, but instead derives
new conclusions from the activity of 'running about'" (Covino 112).
For Blair, good writing is linear, clear, and self-contained and
mainly reflects the hard work of the author, while for De Quincey the
best writing hovers, suggests, and expands and asks the reader to work
as hard as the writer. Risking an anachronism, one is tempted to view
De Quincey's method of writing as transactional. It is true that the
best of De Quincey suggests some of the modern ideas of both
reader-response criticism and deconstruction.
The final area where Blair and De Quincey diverge is over the
importance of style. As indicated above, Blair stresses the
ascendancy of style, and he correspondingly elevates it at the expense
of the other offices of rhetoric, consequently, "as such, his Lectures
focus upon regimented style and form and bypass the importance of
invention and imagination, of writing as a way of creating rather than
merely managing ideas" (Covino 74) . De Quincey, on the other hand,
values invention and imagination equally with style. In fact, De
Quincey believes that they are inseparable, as his proofs of the
efficacy of Wordsworth's definition that "language is the incarnation
of thought" indicate. De Quincey's views have confused some critics
because they do not clearly conceive what he means by "style";
44
consequently, they have erroneously assumed that De Quincey, like
Blair before him, was privileging style. De Quincey does elevate
style, but for him it is not one of the five offices of classical
rhetoric: it is the only office of rhetoric. It represents a
conflation of the classical offices of at least invention and style
and incorporates a great deal of arrangement as well. De Quincey does
not reject either invention or style "rather he rejects their
designation as separate processes, arguing throughout his essays on
language that manner and matter, style and invention, become one in
the act of a 'moving intellect1" (Covino 111).
In his 1961 article on De Quincey's rhetoric, Hoyt Hudson
discusses how invention and style for De Quincey are "two phases--an
inner and an outer phase--of the same process" (Hudson 203). As a
distillation of this view Hudson offers the following which Burwick
also cites (Intro, xxxi) and credits Hudson with discovering:
Time must be given for the intellect to eddy about a truth,
and to appropriate its bearings. There is a sort of
previous lubrication, such as the boa-constrictor applies to
any subject of digestion, which is requisite to familiarize
the mind with a startling or a complex novelty. And this is
obtained for the intellect by varying the modes of
presenting it--now putting it directly before the eye, now
obliquely, now in an abstract shape, now in the concrete;
all which, being the proper technical discipline for dealing
with such cases, ought no longer to be viewed as a
licentious mode of style, but as the just style in respect
of those licentious circumstances. And the true art for
such popular display is to contrive the best forms for
appearing to say something new when in reality you are but
echoing yourself; to break up massy chords into running
variations; and to mask, by slight differences in the
manner, a virtual identity in the substance. ("Style"
Masson 10: 203)
45
CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES
1. The prevalence of classical studies can be gauged in Christopher
I Wordsworth’s 1877 Scholae Academicae, an account of what was
I studied at English universities in the eighteenth century.
According to him rhetorical studies included the appropriate
works of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Aristotle while Rapin, Bossu,
and Longinus were among the others who might be read for the B.A.
2. Grevel Lindop notes that after his first day of examinations for
his bachelor's degree in classics at Oxford, one of the examiners
labeled De Quincey "the cleverest man I ever met with" and added
that if De Quincey's second day equalled his first he would
"carry everything before him" (Lindop 160). De Quincey never
returned for the second day.
3. For a full discussion of De Quincey's indebtedness to Scottish
associationist theories in particular see Burwick's introduction
to De Quincey's essays.
4. J. Hillis Miller beautifully discusses this aspect of De
Quincey's writing at length in his essay on De Quincey in his The
Disappearance of God.
46
CHAPTER THREE
THE PROLIFERATION OF PERIODICALS
AND READING AUDIENCES
Whatever De Quincey wrote was driven by his role as a periodical
writer. Paid by the page and dependent upon the public's continuing
to read what he wrote, De Quincey was subject to his publishers--
primarily the London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and
Tait's Edinburgh Magaz ine--yet he carved out a curious symbiotic
relationship with his mainly middle-class reading public: he gave them
shortcuts to culture, and they responded by reading what he wrote,
thereby keeping his labors in demand. In fact, he became Tait's most
famous and popular author.
Almost all of De Quincey's work was done for the periodicals, and
"when once he began to write for a living, he wrote unceasingly and on
an immense variety of subjects" (Chew 1188). From his 1821 debut tour
de force in the London Magazine (The Confessions) to the articles he
wrote for Tait' s at the end of his career, he wrote for the immediate
marketplace. The constraints of the medium were many, and he dealt
with them constantly: writing articles that would sell, meeting
publishing deadlines, and creating a relationship with his readers
were all problems he faced throughout his career. The form of
publication of his works eventually determined many of his attitudes
47
toward writing in general and rhetoric in particular. Consequently,
this section will focus on the world of the periodicals (the
marketplace) and the audience to whom they catered.
I
The world of the periodicals also marks a watershed moment in the
history of English letters and perhaps of rhetoric as well because for
a period of twenty or thirty years the discursive essay as it appeared
in the periodicals represented the best prose written in Great
Britain. As Hugh Sykes Davies has noted, the periodicals in the
nineteenth century were at their apex:
j
The great periodical magazines which had begun a century
earlier were then at the height of their development, and
enjoyed the support of a fairly large body of intelligent
readers. A generation later, they were already in their
decline, in the process of being supplanted by cheaper
competitors with wider circulations and lower standards. In
that last age of great periodicals, De Quincey with Lamb and
Hazlitt, enjoyed the opportunity of continuing the tradition
of essay-writing which had come down from Addison, Johnson,
and Goldsmith. (Davies 13)
And when De Quincey chose to write about rhetoric in this form and
context, his work brought rhetoric out of academia and into the
marketplace. Rhetoric was no longer a concern only of "the desultory
Blair" teaching Scottish schoolboys how to write; rhetoric was now a
subject about which any reader of De Quincey could be concerned about.
If through their egalitarian approach Scottish universities had made
rhetoric more democratic, De Quincey extended the franchise. His
message is clear: though moribund, rhetoric should be a concern of
every cultured person or any person who would be cultured. To revive
rhetoric and prove one's culture, all one needed to do--according to
48
De Quincey--was to demonstrate that one had the leisure to read De
Quincey's work actively.
i
! The Growth of the Periodicals
The periodical itself was a phenomenon that had steadily grown in
I popularity and influence throughout the previous century. The British
| periodical had originated towards the end of the seventeenth century
| (Sherburn 870) and flourished in the eighteenth century; however, the
first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous
proliferation in the number and kind of periodicals published in Great
Britain. In fact, Jon Klancher has documented that "between 1790 and
1832 over 4,000 journals were published in Britain, some in many
dozens of volumes" (Klancher ix). This unprecedented growth continued
throughout the century and led William Tinsley, who began Tins ley1s
Magazine in 1867, to remark, "There were more magazines in the
wretched field than there were blades of grass to support them"
(quoted by Altick 359). Josephine Bauer has summed up this great
spurt in the periodical's popularity:
The rapid increase of wealth and population made for a
greater circulation; the concentration of workers in the
manufacturing towns that had sprung up as a result of
industrial revolution created new and pressing problems to
engage men's attention; the mastery of steam power to the
service of printing and locomotion soon facilitated the
publishing and distribution of reading matter, bringing it
within the reach of all; and the growing educational
opportunities contributed to the spread of literacy among
the people; creating a new reading public. (Bauer 34-35)
According to Alvin Sullivan in British Literary Magazines, 1798
was important because the invention of the iron printing press in that
I
49
year, coupled with a patent which was taken out for the machine
production of paper, revolutionized printing. This quickly led to a
tremendous increase in book publishing: between 1700 and 1750
i
| approximately 93 books a year were published in England, while between
1790 and 1800 372 were published every year. In the period from
1800-1827 this figure rose to 588 (Sullivan xv). However, these
quantities did not lead to a corresponding reduction in the cost of
books, which remained inordinately high until 1827. Fortunately, this
was not the case with the cost of periodicals "for by their nature
they would, if even reasonably successful, enjoy a larger demand, and
thus produce large editions and consequently lower prices" (Sullivan
xvi) . And because they were unbound, they cost even less. For
example, the average price for a review or a magazine around 1800 was
between one shilling, sixpence and two shillings, sixpence while a
book of the same length cost around ten shillings (Sullivan xvi). In
'
1834 the Monthly, Blackwood's, Tait1s and most other magazines sold
for 2s.6d (Altick 319). Prices might have been lower, but the Stamp
Act of 1819 while specifically directed at the radical press
nevertheless hindered all efforts at cheap publication. The highest
priced of any of the periodicals during the early nineteenth century
was the Edinburgh Review (1802) which, "as high in quality as
anything published at the time, sold for five shillings, half the
price of a comparable book" (Sullivan xvi).
50
The Literary Periodicals --Reviews and Magazines
The literary periodicals published around the turn of the century
| were long established types, but the most popular were the quarterly
i
published reviews and the monthly published magazines. While in
reality both published poems, stories, and essays, theoretically
reviews concentrated on scrutinizing politics, science, art, and
literature in reviews while the magazine "as its name implied, was a
storehouse of literary and antiquarian learning with an infusion of
more fanciful prose and verse" (Chew 1176). Until 1802, however,
these periodicals were colorless, primarily because they paid poorly
and were heavily influenced by booksellers. The writers tended merely
to write favorably about the booksellers' publications.
The creation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 dramatically changed
the nature of subsequent British literary periodicals. In that year,
the Whigs Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Sydney Smith organized
the Edinburgh, which was liberal in its political views and
conservative in its literary judgments. In 1809 the Tories responded
with the publication of the conservative, London-based Quarterly j
Review. Thus, London and Edinburgh became the two poles in the
English publishing world, and politics became closely associated with
the literary journals.
Part of the revolution marked by the Edinburgh Review stemmed
from the anonymity of its essays, which allowed writers great license;
they were encouraged to state their own opinions and were soon paid
well for individual articles. The articles, though they purported to
51
be reviews, used recently published books as springboards for
i
|substantial essays. Because of the policy of anonymity, the journal
spoke with one Whig voice--that compiled by the editor. And because
it paid so well it attracted eminent writers: "it was now an honor to
be discovered as a reviewer hiding behind the often flimsy veil of
anonymity" (Sullivan xvii). The Edinburgh continued until its demise
in 1929, because, said its last editor, there weren't any more Whigs
(Dickie A. Spurgeon in British Literary Magazines 142) .
The Edinburgh Review's novel approach influenced other
periodicals and the literary climate as a whole:
[I]t set a standard of liveliness hitherto unknown; it freed
the critic from the domination of booksellers even while
bending him to the yoke of politics; it made journalism a
self-respecting profession by setting a high scale of
remuneration for contributors; but at the same time it
exacted of the writer submission to the editor's tampering
with his work, subservience to the organ, and a complete
sinking of his identity in that of the journal; it shaped
the mold for future critical essays, using the literature
discussed merely as a sounding board for the critic's own
ideas; and it established a sort of critical despotism,
uttering dogmatic pronouncements on works and censuring
personally the writers of them; it was staffed with men of
wit and discernment. (Bauer 45)
The circulation of the Edinburgh Review rose to fourteen thousand
copies in 1818 (Chew 1177). Such phenomenal success aroused
imitators. In Edinburgh, the Tory counter to this success was a
magazine B1ackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. First published in 1817 by
William Blackwood, who quickly became its editor as well, "Maga"
followed the format established by the Edinburgh Review but was less
responsible and serious. However, "Maga" also drew on other sources
52
because "Blackwood wanted his periodical to be a magazine rather than
a review, that is, to offer humor, a variety of articles, and original
creative works" (Roger P. Wallins in British Literary Magazines 45).
Consequently, in addition to the influence of the Edinburgh, "Maga"
also drew upon one aspect of the British magazine tradition most
notably represented during the time by the Gentleman1s Magazine
(1731-1868). According to this formula, a magazine was
a periodical of from 96 to 120 octavo, double-column pages,
containing various articles, correspondence, and a
chronicle, which would include obituaries, stock reports, an
account of parliamentary proceedings and so on. Many such
magazines would also carry original essays or fiction, and
almost all had original poetry. (Hayden 54)
"Maga" followed this format as did the other two most popular
magazines of the times, the New Monthly Magazine (1814) and,
Blackwood^ great rival, the London Magazine (1821). "Maga"
published original fiction and became one of the two chief publishing
vehicles for Victorian novelists. "Maga" did not cease publication
until December 1980.
The London Magazine (1820-1829) blazed brilliantly if only
briefly across the firmament of British publishing. Though generally
liberal in its politics, its format was modelled after its
conservative rival, "Maga." London1s first editor, John Scott, who
was killed in a duel over a quarrel with Blackwood1 s, wanted "to
present the same mixture of essays, poems, criticism, and general
comment as might be found in Blackwood1s" (Jack 21). The London
Magazine is chiefly remembered for the urbanity of its outlook and the
53
excellence of its contributors, whose works appeared pseudonymously
rather than anonymously (Jack 21). Lamb's Elia letters, Hazlitt's
Table-Talk and De Quincey's Confessions, signed XYZ, all appeared in
the London Magazine.
A latecomer to the Edinburgh literary scene was Tait1s Edinburgh
Magazine, first published in 1832. Liberal in outlook, it sought to
counter Blackwood's Toryism while still following the magazine format
established by Blackwood's. In 1834 its price was reduced from a
half-crown to a shilling, and it soon after became the best-selling
magazine in Scotland and a favorite in England. De Quincey was its
greatest writer, contributing "some forty articles between 1833 and
1841, some thirty between 1845 and 1848, and three as late as 1851"
(Mark A. Weinstein in British Literary Magazines 402) .
Besides "Maga," the New Monthly, the London, Tait1s, and the
Edinburgh Review, the other popular literary journals with the
greatest circulation (estimated at between five and fifteen thousand
by Klancher 50) of the time were the Examiner (1808), the Quarterly
Review (1809), the Westminster Review (1824), the Athenaeum (1828),
Fraser's Magazine (1830), and the Metropolitan (1831). Even this
small list of the most popular journals, each with a circulation of at
least five thousand copies, is daunting because it indicates the
plethora of publications and readers in a small island. As Alvin
Sullivan has remarked, this proliferation of journals indicates the
serious involvement of the reading public:
It is truly remarkable that so many people in the early
nineteenth century read serious literature and patronized so
54
many reviews. And then, too, there were the large numbers
of critics who felt capable of judging contemporary
literature immediately, thus manifesting a well-read and
articulate class. Likewise astonishing is the active body
of contributors of verse and prose to the numerous magazines
and again, of course, the large public that supported them.
It is difficult in fact not to make comparisons with our own
times. (Sullivan xxiv)
The Rise of the Middle Class
The gigantic increase in the number of books and periodicals
published in Great Britain coincided with a dramatic increase in the
numbers and power of the middle class at the same time. Most social
historians date this rapid rise in the wealth and influence of the
middle class from the period of the Napoleonic wars (Bateson 141).
The extension of the franchise through the great reform acts of the
nineteenth century attests to the continued aggrandizing qualities of
the class. Between 1791 and 1832 the population of England and Wales
doubled from eight million to sixteen million whereas the previous two
centuries had witnessed a growth of only a million each one hundred
years. This phenomenal population growth was primarily due to a
lowered death rate, and the middle class was the chief beneficiary of
this improvement (Bateson 141) .
While the population was increasing dramatically, the number of
readers accelerated from Edmund Burke's estimate of 80,000 in 1790 to
Francis Jeffrey's guess of 220,000 in 1812 (Bateson 139-144), and most
of these newly literate were members of the middle class. Jeffrey
noted that there were 200,000 of the total 220,000 reading "forj
amusement or instruction, among the middling classes" (the Edinburgh
Review John Clive Scotch Reviewers 143-144). He revised this
55
statement in 1844 to 300,000 among the "middling classes" and 30,000
"in the higher classes" (discussed in Bateson 141). F. W. Bateson
figures serious working-class readers into the 1844 figure and arrives
at "a grand total of at least 500,000 or about 3 per cent of the
population" (Bateson 140). Seemingly, R. K. Webb disputes these
figures in The British Working Class Reader when he demonstrates that
the literacy rate by county and/or town in England and Scotland from
1832 to 1848 rarely dropped below the fifty per cent level (Webb
21-25); however, he notes that though literate, many people did not
necessarily read regularly, and even if they did, they could not read
much beyond a simple level: "Many of them, even if able to read a
little, did no reading at all, beyond normal daily encounters with
handbills or advertising. Others read only newspapers; still others
read only to escape" (Webb 34).
Many scholars view the growth of the middle class and the surge
in printing production, especially periodical publishing, as
interdependent events because the middle class as it became more
powerful became newly literate as well. In any case, as the above
estimates indicate, they quickly swelled the ranks of the reading
public and created a greater demand for reading material, especially
inexpensive material. Literary periodicals became extremely popular,
especially among the middle class because they were not as costly as
books and were readily available. Furthermore, most promised to
educate their readers as well as entertain them. After all, as
John 0. Hayden has pointed out in Romantic Bards and British
56
Reviewers, these readers were interested in culture: "Through
industrial and commercial expansion the middle class had become larger
and more powerful and desired the polish and taste of their superiors
on the social scale" (Introduction x).
Audience and the Literary Periodical
Coleridge first coined the term "reading public" (The Statesman1s
Manual 1816), and the term quickly caught on; however, it never
referred to a single group. In fact "reading publics" would be a more
accurate term because, as Charles Knight pointed out in 1854: "There
always have been, still are, and always will be, various classes of
readers and purchasers" (Quoted by R. K. Webb in "The Victorian
Reading Public" in the New Pelican Guide to English Literature 6:
210). Readers often crossed class lines in their reading.
Nonetheless, some observations can be made regarding the "reading
public" and its varied taste.
Most of the literary magazines of the early nineteenth century
targeted middle-class readers; however, the scholar must be careful
not to infer too much regarding the nature of this audience and the
relationship between journals and readers. (See Michael Allen on the
dangers inherent in the historical inferential method.) Jon Klancher
cites Jean Paul Sartre's statement in What is Literature? that "all
works of the mind contain within themselves the image of the readers
for whom they are intended" (Sartre 71), but then Klancher in The
Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 qualifies this
pronouncement because "that image is no more than a projection, which
57
in historical practice often misfires" (Klancher 44). Klancher's
point is that the period between 1790 and 1832 was one of intense
audience making and often, as is true of any era, "the audiences that-
writers struggled to make, and those that actually came into being,
were not always the same" (Klancher 44). The following comments on
the magazines De Quincey primarily wrote for, The London Magazine,
Blackwood1s Edinburgh Magazine, and Tait1s Edinburgh Magazine, should
be read with this caveat in mind.
First of all, the price of the popular literary magazines was
designed to appeal to the middle class. While the upper classes,
consisting of "upper civil servants and clergy, the richer merchants
and manufacturers, the gentry, and the professionals, all earning more
than eight hundred pounds a year" (Klancher 50), could afford books at
ten shillings, this price would have been too high for many people in
the "middling class," many of whom could, however, afford the
one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half shillings price of the monthly
magazines. For those who could not afford the periodicals, reading
rooms, where subscribers who paid a guinea or a guinea-and-a-half a
year for the privilege could read books, journals and newspapers, were
a popular alternative. Price was extremely important, and in this
light it is interesting to note that Tait1s only became the number one
magazine in Scotland after its price was lowered to a shilling.
Of course, the upper classes could also afford the journals, but
there were not enough of them to support the many different
periodicals. For example, Jeffrey’s estimate of 20,000 readers in the
58
upper classes could not have kept the journals afloat without
significant help from the middle class. Altick estimates that between
1800 and 1850 most new periodical readers came from the ranks of
middle-class artisans and shopkeepers (Altick 330).
On the other hand, the laboring classes could not afford the
price of the'monthlies because some of them cost as much as a day's
labor (Klancher 50). Richard Altick has pointed out that through the
early decades of the nineteenth century the masses did not read
journals: "So far as periodicals generally were concerned, then, the
situation down to 1832 was only mildly conducive to the spread of
interest among the masses" (Altick 321-322). Instead most workers and
their families, if they read at all, read inexpensive weekly papers
(Altick 342), and sensationalism increasingly became a prime
ingredient of the cheap press. In fact, this sensationalism accounted
to a large extent for the prejudice cultivated, middle-class readers
developed against cheap papers, which only finally began to break down
in the 1850s when Hard Times was serialized in Household Words, at 2d.
a mostly middle-class paper (Altick 347).
As more and more people took up reading among the working class,
penny novels like Ella the Outcast became extremely popular in the
late forties and early fifties. Among periodicals the literary
magazines seemed to occupy the middle ground between the more serious,
higher priced reviews (like the Edinburgh) and the sensationalistic,
often crime-oriented cheap press. In fact R. K. Webb notes how much
more popular the cheap press was than the literary periodical:
59
[T]wo wholesale houses distributed 90,000 copies of six
cheap weeklies (including the Weekly Budget, a miscellany of
tales, selections, puzzles, and so on, and the 'notorious
Police News) to only 22,000 for all the respectable
periodicals put together. (Webb "The Victorian Reading
Public" 210)
Besides price, editorial policy and magazine contents are another
indication that most literary journals were designed to appeal to the
middle-class. The great dilemma facing these magazines was how to
appeal to the "few," consisting of established, influential readers,
and the newly arrived "many" who had recently achieved economic
prosperity. The economic situation of the times led to prosperity for
these many and jealous defense of their position:
The widening of economic opportunity afforded by the
development of industrial capitalism permitted many
thousands to climb in the social scale. They quickly
acquired the social prejudices characteristic of the class
in which they found themselves, among which was a powerful
desire to protect their substance and privileges against the
encroachments of the class they had lately left. Those
above them, in turn, felt all the more strongly the need for
defending their own position against the newly arrived.
(Altick 84-85)
Both groups were located in the upper half of English society (Allen
22). Many publications simply were content to remain low in status by
appealing only to the many. (See Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago by
Margaret Dalziel.) However, the great reviews and later the
prestigious magazines catered to both groups: "The attempts at
popularity, the significant concessions to the 'many,' were made by
prestige writers and publishers, who had already assumed a
relationship with the 'few' and were reluctant to forfeit it"
60
(Allen 21). The essence of their compromise was a continual awareness
of this problem between choosing popularity or quality.
In Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, Michael Allen takes
Blackwood1s as the paradigm for the balancing act of providing quality
'without losing popularity. While maintaining an elitist posture,
Blackwood1s, Allen claims, nonetheless was cognizant of the 'many' and
appealed to their taste as well:
[I]t retained the air of exclusiveness and authority which
had characterised the Reviews; it incoporated the curious
and esoteric learning which was a feature of the more
respectable older miscellanies like the Gentleman1s; but it
fused these elements into a more relaxed, personal, and
intimate ethos which permitted the inclusion of more blatant
sensationalism, literary gossip, and fiction for the less
erudite reader. For all its affected elitism, the magazine
was careful to maintain its relationship with the popular
audience. The Blackwood1s editorial statements usually
claimed the approbation of the highest circles; but they
also involved dedications to the wider public and boasted
about the size of the circulation. (Allen 23)
A look at the contents of Blackwood1s reinforces this judgment:
the magazine contained reviews, satire, articles on politics, literary
criticism, poetry, essays on science and literature, original fiction,
and semi-dramatic topical pieces like "Noctes Ambros ianae." The
appeal of the fiction is attested by the publication of Tales from
Blackwood in twelve volumes, many of which still make interesting
reading today.
Allen goes on to argue that although the London originally
contained some of the popular appeal of Blackwood1 s, it lost its
popularity by failing to "vary the highbrow tone of the magazine by
the introduction of fiction or by sensational jeux d* espirit"
61
(Allen 25). To illustrate that the magazine was "too serious" Allen
cites an 1822 letter from Lamb to Hessey, one of the magazine's
publishers, in which Lamb says, "The London Magazine wants the
personal touch too much. Blackwood owes everything to it" (Allen 25).
Allen also cites The Confessions, which was originally intended for
Blackwood's, as one of the two items in the magazine which created
sensations when they were published, helped to establish the London,
and followed Blackwood1s formula (Allen 26). Certainly, the blend of
the erudite, the sensational, the personal, and the confessional that
De Quincey1s first foray into journalism contained proved to be a
formula he often drew upon in his many subsequent articles. In
addition, The Confessions had a fictitious quality, and many of the
London's readers thought the articles were fictional.
De Quincey1s Contributions to the Periodicals
The London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and Tait's
Edinburgh Magazine, though differing in political outlook, were all
journals numbering Thomas De Quincey among their contributors. And he
was a prolific writer for all three: most of Masson's fourteen-volume
edition of his collected work first appeared in the magazines. De
Quincey began his career in journalism in 1821 when necessity forced
him to become a "trading author" for the London Magazine. Between
that debut and about 1853, Masson estimates that De Quincey wrote more
than two hundred and fifteen articles.
De Quincey published exclusively in the London Magazine from 1821
to 1825 (approximately 48 articles) . In 1826 his work began appearing
62
in Blackwood's, for which he wrote regularly until 1845 and then
sporadically through 1849. During this time his work also appeared in
Tait1s (1833-1851). Masson estimates he wrote one-hundred-and-forty-
four articles for Blackwood's and Tait's combined. In addition, he
wrote some pieces for Encyclopedia Britannica, the North American
Review, and other journals throughout his career. Late in life:
(1850-1853) he began writing short pieces for Hogg's Weekly Instructor
(approximately 23 articles). This association led to the first
British collected edition of his works which Hogg commenced publishing
in 1853 (Masson 14: 376-382).
De Quincey and other writers were well paid for individual
articles. The Edinburgh Review set the standard, and the other
periodicals followed suit. The first contributors to the Edinburgh
were paid ten pounds a sheet, but this beginning stipend was raised to
sixteen pounds fairly quickly. Francis Jeffrey claimed that most of
the contributors were paid at a much higher rate, which brought the
average up to twenty to twenty-two pounds per article (Bauer 41). The
reason for the high payment was to attract the very best writers to
the periodicals and to make journal writing a respectable undertaking,
one that "made it not unworthy the very highest names in English
literature to contribute to magazines" (London Magazine VI, 22 as
quoted in Bauer 41). However, Grevel Lindop has maintained that
"magazine writing would not support a man, unless he could supplement
it with an editorial post. Contributions were paid for by length
usually at about ten guineas for sixteen printed pages" (Lindop 262).
63
Lindop goes on to show that paid at this rate De Quincey would have
had to write the entire London Magazine himself to make ends meet.
Earlier, David Masson made a similar assessment, for although
(
(authors were paid well for individual articles, they couldn't survive
l
through articles alone. In the "Epilogue" to his edition, Masson
declares that in De Quincey's case the payment was inadequate, given
that it was De Quincey's only method of earning his and his family's
livelihood for almost thirty years. Writing in 1890, Masson says that
according to his conspectus De Quincey earned three thousand pounds
between 1821 and 1850 (Masson 14: 393). This amounts to a hundred
pounds a year, and even allowing for other unaccounted-for articles
and the doubtful possibility that De Quincey may have been paid more
for some of his contributions, Masson deduces that at no time could De
Quincey have made more than one-hundred-and-fifty pounds a year.
Economically, this sum would put De Quincey at the low end of the
"middling classes" which consisted of "teachers, lesser clergy, and
civil servants, and shopkeepers, each earning three hundred pounds or
less per year" (Klancher referring to Clive's statistics 50). Even
during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when De Quincey
began his career, this was a small sum. For thirty years of literary
labor, as Masson indicates, it was a paltry sum indeed: "Hence the
phenomenon of thirty years of such rare literary exertion for such
small wages" (Masson 14: 394).
64
De Quincey’s Appeal to His Middle-class Audience
De Quincey was keenly aware of his audience and never lost sight
of its nature and make up. Whether he wrote about ancient Greek
literature, rhetoric, or the Napoleonic Wars, he always wrote with his
readership in mind. To this end most of De Quincey's articles follow
aspects of the Blackwood1s pattern laid out above by Michael Allen: De
Quincey's essays are filled with esoteric knowledge, sensationalism,
literary gossip and storytelling, and personal and intimate references
to his reader, the whole designed to appeal to his middle-class
audience but consisting of a little something for everyone. As John
Whale has also pointed out, this was characteristic of Blackwood' s
"where esoteric learning existed alongside 'blatant sensationalism'"
(Whale "'in A Stranger's Ear'" 38-39). An analysis of De Quincey's
lengthy, four-part essay "Style," which appeared in Blackwood's in
July, September, and October of 1840 and February of 1841 should
illustrate this pattern.
Probably nothing De Quincey did after The Confessions matched its
juxtaposition of esoteric knowledge and titillating sensationalism.
However, many of his articles contain that same blend in a milder
form; it is the approach Allen cites in practice--some arcane
knowledge for the "few" and sensational aspects for the "many," an
attempt to be simultaneously popular and yet write quality material.
The blend is very apparent in "Style." Interspersed with De Quincey's
discussion of the history of prose is an esoteric scholarly digression
on the disappearance of Bactria. The digression itself contains a
65
smattering of sensationalism, as De Quincey conjures up lost worlds
destroyed by "that possible deluge of savage eruption . . [that]
| swallowed it [Bactria] so suddenly and so effectually that merely the
blank fact of its tragical catastrophe has reached posterity" ("Style"
Masson 10: 176).
Later, in the midst of his extended digression on Paterculus'
obscure theory that great genius appears in clusters, De Quincey uses
a dumbbell as a metaphor for the nexus between the two clusters of
genius in Greek literature. This reference leads to a digression in
which he tells the story of Mr. Thurtell, the murderer who "once in a
dark lobby attempted to murder a friend by means of a dumb-bell"
("Style" Masson 10: 210). Besides its obvious sensational content,
this digression may have reminded the original readers of De Quincey's
articles "Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts," which had
appeared as two papers in Blackwood's Magazine. The first, in which
De Quincey mentions Thurtell, was published in February 1827 and the
second in November 1839. At the time even the ironic consideration of
an aesthetics^ of murder was shocking to De Quincey's audience. The
case was an infamous one and even in 1840 would be remembered by many
who would recall Theodore Hook's famous ballad of the event:
They cut his throat from ear to ear;
His brains they battered in:
His name was Mr. William Weare;
He dwelt in Lyon's Inn. (Masson footnote 13: 44)
The above examples are but two of many. Throughout "Style" De
Quincey continually weaves together the most irrelevant learning and
66
sensational material. The article discusses style as an element of
rhetoric, but it incorporates a great deal of extraneous material as
well. This diverse mixture sold magazines for Blackwood1s and is also
evidence that De Quincey, as a master of the digression, could hold
l
I his readers1 interest by including a tremendous variety of material.
I
Ultimately, "Style1 1 has no clearly defined and carefully executed
plan. De Quincey does not even present the thesis of the essay until
the third of four parts (Proctor 187). Throughout De Quincey purports
to discuss style but actually deals with whatever he thinks will
interest his readers. Perhaps De Quincey^ own image of his work as a
caduceus, cited in the introduction to this study, aptly describes
"Style"; the subject simply provides the framework for De Quincey^
unhurried and marvelously spiral "conversation": "Not the flowers are
for the pole, but the pole is for the flowers" (Blackwood^ March
1845: 273). The digressions from the main subject are often the most
interesting and important. Certainly, this characteristic is nowhere
more apparent than in the extended essay on style.
"Style" is also full of the literary anecdotes and storytelling
which Blackwood^ readers must have relished. At one point De Quincey
gossips about current literary figures, describing Madame de Stael in
her broken English disparagingly referring to Coleridge^ style of
address as "De Monologue," a form unacceptable in polite French
conversation because it allows only one person to talk. The vignettes
which De Quincey scatters throughout reveal a captivating storyteller
at work. As an example of how places get their names he tells a tale
67
of the new-world slaughter of the buffalo which resulted in a place
called Big Bone Lick. To prove that nurses have as much influence
over their charges' language as do their parents, he cites the example
of the best-selling novel written by two daughters of a ducal house
who used the slang expression "small beer." (Later on in Part II, De
Quincey ironically uses the term himself when he refers to Xenophon's
presentation of Socrates as a "worthy henpecked philosopher
. . . prattling innocent nothings, more limpid than small beer
["Style" Masson 10:182].) Perhaps his best story in "Style" is that
of the coarse, old woman who showed De Quincey a room and while doing
so used many of the strange coinages current in the newspapers. De
Quincey is discussing how people, unfortunately, have begun to talk in
the manner of newspaper writing. The culmination comes when De
Quincey asks the old woman about a building in her yard, and is
confounded by her bookish 'reply: "'A shed; that's what it is; and
anteriorly to the existing shed there was ---' ; what there was
posterity must consent to have wrapt in darkness, for there came on
our [De Quincey's] nervous seizure, which intercepted further
communication" (Masson 10: 151-152). These vivid anecdotes come
within a few pages in Part I; the other parts of the essay also abound
with stories which De Quincey uses to illustrate his points but to
entertain his readers as well.
In "Style" De Quincey also follows Blackwood's pattern by
creating an intimacy with his reader. He accomplishes this by his
mode of address, through the persona he creates for himself, and much
68
more subtly by blurring the relationship between the signified and its
signifier in his use of personal pronouns. Throughout the essay he
talks to the reader in a variety of ways. For example, he often uses
the term "reader" but in a familiar fashion as though he were talking
to one of his friends or acquaintances: "You, therefore, 0 reader! if
personally cognisant of dumbbells, we will remind,--if not, we will
inform,--" ("Style" Masson 10: 209). Likewise he invites the reader’s
participation through questions addressed to her: "Did the reader
ever happen to reflect on the great idea of publication" ("Style"
Masson 10: 231)? At one point in a digression upon a digression, he
uses this form of address to compliment the reader on her ability to
notice that he is rambling; he asks the reader if he is "travelling a
little out of our proper field." Then he admits the charge but denies
the substance: "True, 0 rigorous reader! Yet digressions and moderate
excursions have a licence. Besides which, on strict consideration,
doubts arise whether we have been digressing" (Masson 10: 185).
Elizabeth Bruss argues that this is one way De Quincey maintains some
distance between himself and his readers; she is speaking of his
Autobiographical Sketches, but the view is applicable to "Style" as
well: "De Quincey becomes familiar with them without becoming familiar
himself. They are 'my readers,’ but he is not 'your author.' It is
they who have created the public mask of periodical polemicist and
humorist he now wears. Knowing that he is responding to their wishes,
he has no need to woo them" (Bruss 125).
69
This mode of addressing the reader through questions leads to
familiar repartee in the opening of Part III. De Quincey is aware
I
j that after publishing two parts of "Style" he still hasn't clearly
indicated what he wants to do or where the essay is going. He
imagines a dialogue with his reader wherein he anticipates the
reader's complaints:
i Reader, you are beginning to suspect us. 'How long do we
i purpose to detain people?' For anything that appears we may
l be designing to write on to the twentieth century,--for
twice thirty years. 'And whither are we going? towards
what object?'--which is as urgent a quaere as how far.
Perhaps we may be leading you into treason, or (which is
pretty much the same thing) we may be paving the way to
'Repeal.' You feel symptoms of doubt and restiveness; and,
like Hamlet with his father's ghost, you will follow us no
further, unless we explain what it is that we are in quest
of. ("Style" Masson 10: 190)
This passage also illustrates De Quincey's application of a
conversational model in his writing: by creating a fictitious reader
who asks questions, he invites his actual reader to participate.
However, if the persona De Quincey adopts for himself often encourages
intimacy with the reader, the character can sometimes be detached.
Clearly De Quincey carved out his own method of relating to his
readers, yet this too resembles Blackwood's approach which sought to
include the reader:
The reader immediately enters as an outsider into a
seemingly private arena; however, from the standpoint of the
magazines the reader is suddenly admitted into an exclusive
coterie .... [In fact], Installments of the 'Noctes
Ambrosianae' promoted this sense of coterie by using
magazine personalities, including that of the Opium-Eater,
in dialogues which served to define the journalistic
identity of Blackwood's. (Whale, "'in A Stranger's Ear'"
37-38)
70
The difference De Quincey employs is that while he admits his
reader to this intimate coterie, he continually reminds her of the
shifting nature of this relationship. De Quincey exploits his persona
alternately to stabilize and destabilize the text. And he
accomplishes this by constantly including his reader in various groups
he creates and then either excluding the reader or abstracting himself
from the group. Approaching and receding, he continues to play with
ideas and his reader as well.
De Quincey changes voice often in "Style.1 1 Although at one point
he refers to himself in the first person--"Great faults,
therefore--such is my inference . . ." ("Style" Masson 10: 135),
generally, he refers to himself through the use of a standard, formal,
authoritative "we." He uses this voice to lecture, and it is most
evident when he assumes the familiar role of the "Gentleman-Scholar"
teaching an audience of novices: "We have been illustrating a twofold
neutralizing effect applied to the advantages otherwise enjoyed by the
English people for appreciating the forms of style" ("Style" Masson
10: 140). Here De Quincey is clearly lecturing his readers whom he
would address as "you" as he does elsewhere in the essay when he tells
them where to find the best English prose currently being written:
"Would you desire at this day to read our noble language in its native
beauty, picturesque from idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology,
delicate yet sinewy in its composition, steal the mail-bags and break
open all the letters in female handwriting" ("Style" Masson 10: 145).
In these two examples, De Quincey and his readers are clearly
71
separate. Yet elsewhere in the essay, De Quincey eliminates this
separation between writer and reader by expanding the authorial "we"
to include the reader, thereby allowing him to speak more familiarly.
When De Quincey uses "we" to include his reader, he creates
different groups into which he draws the reader. The largest of these
groups is nationality: De Quincey plays upon the reader’s patriotic
impulses by appealing to him as a fellow Englishman, e.g. "three
aspects there are of our national character which trouble the
uniformity of our feelings . . ." ("Style" Masson 10: 134),or
"generally and ultimately it is certain that our British disregard or
inadequate appreciation of style, though a very lamentable fault, has
had its origin in the manliness of the British character" ("Style"
Masson 10: 141). De Quincey also appeals to the reader as a member of
a smaller group consisting of the readers of Blackwood's. For
example, when he wishes his readers to notice how insidiously
newspapers have influenced style over the years he concludes, "Every
one of us would have felt, sixty years ago, that the general tone and
coloring of a style was stiff, bookish, pedantic, which, from the
habitation of our organs, we now feel to be natural and within the
privilege of learned art" ("Style" Masson 10: 153). Even though the
observation is an obvious one, the reader is flattered to be included
in this group.
Another of the groups De Quincey draws the reader into is a
conspiratorial one where the members are all "in the know." For
example, when he refers to the first of the three faults of the
72
British, the expatriates who deny their fellow Britons, he encourages
solidarity with his readers: "We all know who they are that have done
this thing: we may know, if we inquire, how many conceited coxcombs
are at this moment acting upon that precedent; in which we scruple not
to avow, are contained funds for everlasting satire more crying than
any which Juvenal found in the worst days of Rome" ("Style Masson 10:
I 135). Here the first "we" definitely includes the reader, and while
the second may as well, the last, "we scruple not to avow," seems to
refer only to De Quincey, who rest assured, will do the satirizing for
the group.
Sometimes De Quincey's pronouns are absolutely unstable and the
point of view shifting. One such ambiguous section occurs when he
discusses the abuses of the periodic style by the newspapers. Here
the reader is never sure exactly whom the "we" and/or the "you" refers
to at any given time. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say the
pronouns signify several things simultaneously. After discussing how
anxiously readers await the the arrival of the newspaper, De Quincey
writes:
Yet, after all, many times we lay aside the journal, and we
acquiesce in the gentler stimulation of the book. Simply
the news we may read; but the discussion, whether direct
from the editor, or reported from the Parliament, we refuse
or delay. And why? It is the subject, perhaps you think; it
is the great political question, too agitating by the
consequences it may happen to involve. No. All this, if
treated in a winning style, we could bear. It is the
effort, the toil, the exertion of mind requisite to follow
the discussion through endless and labyrinthine sentences;
this it is that compels us to forgo the journal or to lay it
aside until the next morning. ("Style" Masson 10: 158)
73
This passage invites reader participation. De Quincey begins by
seemingly referring to himself, as is obvious when he uses "you" to
signify the reader voicing her questions to him. On a simple level,
he has created a dialogue. However, he sees this refusal to read a
serious discussion as a common experience, and the "we" becomes a kind
of "Everyman"; consequently, he draws the reader into the dialogue,
which thus by the end of the passage becomes a conversation between De
Quincey and the reader's questioning mind. The reader can participate
to the extent that her capabilities allow. Those who are obtuse will
be content to be led--the "we" remains De Quincey, the "you" the
reader; however, the analytical reader who has experienced the
difficulties of which De Quincey writes is invited to join the "we"
persona because "we" have all experienced this.
In De Quincey's very next sentence, which opens a new paragraph,
he states as much by allowing the reader to be led or to participate.
Either way the text is destabilized, and on a more sophisticated level
by involving the reader, it resists closure:
Those who are not accustomed to watch the effects of
composition upon the feelings, or have had little experience
in voluminous reading pursued for weeks, would scarcely
imagine how much of downright physical exhaustion is
produced by what is technically called the periodic style of
writing. ("Style" Masson 10: 158)
Indeed most readers probably do not study this vigorously, and
therefore expect De Quincey to describe how this exhaustion is
produced; as the "Gentleman-Scholar" he has both the leisure and the
inclination to read extensively, and appears personally to have
74
suffered the weariness of which he exclaims. However, De Quincey is
also inviting those readers, the "few" who are also conscientious
scholars, to participate in his description of the rigors of reading
periodic sentences. In context, he does this partially by subtly
shifting the meaning of "you" to incorporate these intellectual
readers as well as himself. For himself and these readers periodic
sentences are wearing because
here you cannot dismiss and have done with the ideas as you
go along, for as yet all is hypothetic; all is suspended in
the air. The conditions are not fully to be understood
until you are acquainted with the dependency .... In
fact, under the rude yet also artificial character of
newspaper style, each separate monster period is a vast
arch, which, not receiving its keystone, not being locked
into self-supporting cohesion, until you nearly reach the
close, imposes of necessity upon the unhappy reader all the
onus of its ponderous weight through the main process of its
construction. The continued repetition of so Atlantean an
effort soon overwhelms your patience, and establishes at
length that habitual feeling which causes you to shrink from
the speculations of journalists, or (which is more likely)
to adopt a worse habit than absolute neglect, which we shall
notice immediately. ("Style" Masson 10: 158-159)
Some readers have just joined the smallest and most prestigious group
Thomas De Quincey ever created: an elite coterie of sophisticated
scholars that includes Thomas De Quincey. The reader also feels a
certain smugness in being part of that "you." However, it is also
curious that the combination of intellect and sensitivity necessary to
be part of the circle of understanding scholars is really a burden
because it produces exhaustion. To understand completely is a curse
as much as a gift, as De Quincey demonstrates through frequent
references to his own intellectual suffering.
75
The groups De Quincey creates often overlap and cannot be clearly
delineated, but De Quincey never merges completely with the reader; he
always maintains his own individuality. And by establishing his
clearly individual, authorial "we," who as the Gentleman-Scholar
I
ideserves respect, he heightens the reader's pleasure at being accepted
i
as part of a group containing that distinguished personage. But in
order to be flattered by her inclusion into the Gentleman-Scholar' s
group, the reader must be continually reminded of that persona's
presence. Hence, De Quincey must constantly reiterate his existence.
Often De Quincey uses the "we" to include the reader at moments
when he wants to establish camaraderie. The reference to those sham
cosmopolitan British abroad who proclaim to love everyone except other
British cited earlier is one such example. ("We all know who they
are.") Another example of this rapport is evident when he rails
against the ills of pedantry and then declares, "This would interfere
as effectually with our power of enjoying much that is excellent in
our past literature as it would with our future powers of producing"
("Style" Masson 10: 152). De Quincey establishes an intimacy with his
reader at crucial moments by appealing to her as one of a group to
which both reader and writer belong. However one interprets any of De
Quincey's slippery pronoun references and direct references to the
reader, all are aimed at pulling the reader into the text. De Quincey
encourages active, questioning readers, not a passive audience.
"Style" and many of De Quincey's other essays conform to the
Blackwood's pattern Michael Allen identifies. From the first articles
76
he published in the London to his last works in Hogg1 s Weekly
Instructor, De Quincey effectively appealed to the tastes of his
diverse readers. He knew how to engage his reader's attention. By
consistently exploiting esoteric learning, sensationalism, literary
gossip and storytelling, and intimacy with his readers he achieves the
journalist's ultimate goal of selling copy, and De Quincey sold many
magazines during his long and productive career.
77
CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES
1. Davies says this essay seems to contain the earliest use of this
term in English [24].
2. To avoid sexism and confusion, third-person feminine pronouns
will be used throughout this study. However, it is also
important to note, as Richard Altick points out in The English
Common Reader, that beginning with the success of Pamela in 1740
and 1741 "women played an important part in the history of the
English reading audience" (Altick 45).
78
CHAPTER FOUR
DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH PROSE AND
THE SEARCH FOR AUDIENCE
I The proliferation of literary periodicals generated new practices
necessary to maintain success in an increasingly competitive market.
In this difficult situation, journals had to find a formula that
appealed to the public or cease publication. For every successful
journal like Blackwood1s or Tait1s, there were scores of failed
journals which commenced publication, produced a few issues, and
disappeared from the literary scene. The British Magazine, for
example, began monthly publication in January 1830 and ceased
publishing after its December 1830 issue. Journals constantly
experimented with different content and approaches designed to boost
and/or maintain circulation: sensationalism was exploited as was
combativeness (Lyon 171) . All journals sought to captivate their
readers: "It was widely felt that a magazine article, to be
successful, must 'have a character'; that is, it must take firm and
sometimes novel stances, must be livened with wit or leavened with
humor, and must have a personal flavor" (Lyon 171). Like all his
colleagues, Thomas De Quincey had to solve this publishing dilemma.
Although the new periodical enterprise flourished, editors,
publishers, and writers constantly searched for ways to appeal to an
79
invisible and largely unknown readership. This meant that writers, as
Jon P. Klancher has pointed out (The Making of English Reading
Audiences, 1790-1832), had to create their audiences more than ever
before or since: "The English Romantics, were the first to become
I
Jradically uncertain of their readers, and they faced the task
I
Wordsworth called 1 creating the taste' by which the writer is
comprehended" (Klancher 3). Writers could no longer assume that they
were addressing only one type of reader: "No single, unified 'reading
public' could be addressed in such times, as Coleridge and his
contemporaries well knew. This inchoate cultural moment compelled a
great many writers to shape the interpretive and ideological
frameworks of audiences they would speak to" (Klancher 3).
Many of the periodicals addressed this problem directly. The
great middle-class journals such as Blackwood's recognized the
increasing power of the new members of that class but strove, in their
quest for popularity with quality, to strike a balance by appealing to
these "many" while still also trying to retain the goodwill of the
"few." However, writers and editors alike fretted over the nature of
their readership. Klancher even refers to the middle class as
"amorphous" (47). As distinctions between classes widened so did
differences within classes--the "few" and the "many" might belong to
the same class, but their interests were often inimical.
Another product of the times, which further disrupted the harmony
of writer and audience, was the separation between writers and
readers: prior to the advent of the Edinburgh Review in 1802,
80
periodical writers and readers were interchangeable because every
periodical reader was a potential contributor; they shared the same
language and could presumably exchange roles:
I
J Published at regular intervals, periodicals formed a serial,
continuous relationship between mutually identifiable
I readers and writers over time .... This way of
preserving a more traditional rhetorical contact between
readers and writers constructed a knowable community of
discourse that united its members and distinguished their
social language from that of other audiences. (Klancher 20)
Even the publication interval was calculated to make the periodical
text "the counter in a serious game of symbolic reciprocity" (Klancher
20). This "symbolic reciprocity" is very close to the conversational
strategies De Quincey later sought to establish in his own works.
After the advent of the Edinburgh Review, this reciprocity
between reader and writer was no longer possible because periodicals
became "corporate journal(s)" (Klancher 51) that excluded readers as
contributors:
From the Edinburgh Review on, public knowledge of ample
payments to contributors signalled the distancing of the
audience. No longer a society of readers and writers, the
journal represented itself as an institution blending
writer, editor, and publisher in what could only appear to
be an essentially authorless text .... One can determine
authorship only by the text it [a diverse discursive
landscape] secretes. The importance 'style' itself assumes
in the nineteenth century owes partly to this impersonality
of the text. Style becomes a sign, a marker of the (always
inferred) relation of the audience to the writer hidden
behind the corporate text. (Klancher 51)
The uncertainty regarding audience, the distancing of writer and
reader, of text and audience, left a void that the journals filled by
creating their own ideal reader. Middle-class journals like
81
Blackwood1s created a reader characterized by an "activated
interpretive mind" (Klancher 51) which has the power "to form a
j
1 'philosophy' of one's encounter with the street and the city, with
I
fashion, with social class, with intellectual systems and the mind's
own unpredictable acts" (Klancher 51). Above all Blackwood's and
popular middle-class periodicals like it stressed the intellect and
the untapped power and qualities of the human mind (Klancher 52) .
I
John Nabholtz also recognizes this transformation in
nineteenth-century prose and its relation to its readers. However, he
argues that it was primarily individual writers who reshaped the prose
of the time and not the journals themselves: Wordsworth, Coleridge, De
Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb, and others "sought to counter the prevailing
conditions of prose through dramatic changes in style and
expression ..." (Nabholtz 3-4). Nevertheless, Klancher would
probably agree with Nabholtz's conclusion that the result of these
activities, whether initiated by individual authors or pursued as
editorial policy by the great journals, was "to alter profoundly the
reader's relation to the prose text" (Nabholtz 4). For whatever
combination of social and historical forces had shaped this
uncertainty about audience, journals like Blackwood's and the
individual texts of romantic prose writers sought to more actively
involve their readers:
Whatever the specific subject matter might happen to
be--politics, literary criticism, religion--whatever the
form of the individual discourse--familiar essay or extended
analytic treatise--a main goal of Romantic prose in its most
original manifestations was to oppose the essentially
passive activity that prose reading (and writing) had
become. The prose writer sought to engage the reader as an
active participant, often as the protagonist, in the
expository or argumentative process .... [T]he reader's
heightened awareness of the act of reading is the true
subject of a number of Lamb's most important Elia essays.
Coleridge's mature endeavors in prose depended on inducing
his readers 'to retire into themselves and make their own
minds the objects of their steadfast attention.1
Wordsworth's 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads,' 'Essays upon
Epitaphs,' and Convention of Cintra required a
'participating [of] the truths’ or of the historical facts
being developed. By manipulations of style and a
persistently paradoxical method of argument, Hazlitt left
the reader unbalanced and unsettled in his ordinary
'logical' response to a topic and thus prepared for fresh
confrontation. (Nabholtz 4)
Although Nabholtz does not discuss De Quincey in his study, he
says he could have. Certainly, De Quincey actively challenged
existing distinctions between writers and readers and worked to create
more active reader participation in his writing.
Because both reading and writing prose had become "essentially
passive," romantic writers looked to the seventeenth-century for prose
models: "And the quality which attracts them all is more than just the
charm of the antique; it is a fullness and freedom of language--
freedom from tidy structural conventions and the full capability to
project in style the unintermittent and highly personal activity of
intellectual synthesis itself" (Merritt 11) . What were the romantics
resisting? What were these conventional habits of response that
governed writers and readers alike? How were they formed? Perhaps a
look at some of the highlights of English prose developments will
clarify these habits and also illustrate Thomas De Quincey's often
instinctual and accurate assessment of that prose, for De Quincey and
S3
his romantic peers were in the midst of a revolution which they had
fomented. To a great extent, De Quincey and writers like him rescued
English prose from the grips of Hugh Blair and those who agreed with
Blair that writers should eschew elements of conversation,
ornamentation, and feeling as models for written prose.
Historical Developments in English Prose
Both Blair and De Quincey subscribed to the popular
eighteenth-century view derived from "Lucretian and Viconian
speculations about primitive society . . ." (Merritt 8) that poetry
developed before prose. Unlike De Quincey, however, Blair believed
that people always had a "very humble and scanty prose . . . relating
to the wants and necessities of life" (Blair Lecture XXXVIII 314) .
According to Travis Merritt, this view leads Blair and others to the
belief that while it is natural for poetry to draw attention to itself
through its language, prose composition should refuse to draw
attention to itself both because
we persuade best when our calculation and skill are left to
work unobserved . . . [and] . . . because prose refinement,
a practice of civilization lacking the sanction of primitive
Nature, constitutes when obtrusive mere artifice, which is
morally repugnant as well as aesthetically displeasing.
(Merritt 8-9)
De Quincey held the antithetical view, insisting that prose may
be as ornamental as the subject or occasion necessitates ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 130). He strove to create a prose that invites the reader
to participate in the text. Through devices such as creating gaps in
the work and putting words in the reader's mouth, he invites
84
reciprocity. Much has been written regarding the connections between
speech and writing, particularly between oratory and written prose,
but for De Quincey the obvious model for written prose is
conversation. He contends that prose should be rooted in speech and
should be aimed at moving the reader through whatever means are at the
| rhetor's disposal. Consequently, he thought that the writing of prose
! could be as elevated an art as the writing of poetry.
j Unlike Blair, De Quincey thought people did originally speak
entirely in poetry or at least verse and discovered prose later:
"Prose, therefore, strange as it may be to say so, was something of a
discovery. If not great invention, at least great courage, would be
required for the man who would first swim without the bladders of
metre" ("Style" Masson 10: 173). Furthermore, he believed that prose
signals a culture's maturity: people have to reach a degree of
sophistication before they can recognize the subtle beauties of prose
style. In his essay "Language" he endeavors to show why proponents of
the picturesqueness of certain underdeveloped languages (Welsh, Irish,
Manx, Gaelic, etc.) are wrong in extolling the virtues of those
languages. These languages, he contends, lack sophistication, and
their prose demonstrates this naivete: "These races are precisely in
that state of imperfect expansion, both civilly and intellectually,
under which the separation has not fully taken place between poetry
and prose .... The subdued colouring, therefore, of prose has not
yet been (to speak physiologically) secreted" (Masson 10: 249).
1
85
For De Quincey this "subdued colouring" is the sign of prose's
capacity to express subtle shades of feeling, but it is prevented from
doing so by the current antithetical emphasis on matter over manner;
the legacy of Hugh Blair "is the habit of British taste to reject all
j finery of phrase on the grounds that there should be always a simple,
i
straightforward, and honest projection of thought into words" (Merritt
3-4). By emphasizing the practical functions of prose, many thinkers
denied its capacity for ornamentation and emotion thereby relegating
it to a decidedly minor role. Consequently, De Quincey also worried
that the artificial language of popular newspapers would become the
prevalent style because they gratuitously divorced ornamentation from
feeling.
This controversy between the conventional views of the camp
represented by Blair and the radical views of De Quincey and others is
grounded in the historical development of English prose. De Quincey's
own emphasis on conversation as the font of prose structure conforms
to developments in English prose prior to the 1760s. Throughout its
history, Ian Gordon maintains in The Movement of English Prose,
English prose has usually been closely connected to spoken English; an
early paragraph provides a capsule history:
But it would be a mistake to regard writing which is oral in
conception as only a transcript of the spoken voice. Good
prose of this type preserves the rhythm and shape of speech.
It discards the garrulity, the loose ends, the amorphous
form, the back-tracking and repetitions characteristic of
most speakers. During an important period they [writers]
went even further. They were not content merely to give
shape to the prose of contemporary conversation. They
studied and assimilated the more formal literary prose of
Rome and to a lesser extent of Greece. With Quintilian as
86
textbook, and Cicero and Seneca as models, they elevated
English prose to the grandeur of the late Renaissance. The
baroque magnificence of the mid-seventeenth century was not
j to last. The prose of the last two and a half centuries has
! reverted to a basis of contemporary speech, though the
lessons of the Renaissance were never to be forgotten.
(Gordon 9-10)
; According to Gordon prose writing underwent significant stylistic
changes between the first decades of the seventeenth century and the
last decades of the eighteenth. And these changes explain De
Quincey's, as well as other romantics,' preference for seventeenth-
century prose writers to whom they looked for inspiration. For though
written prose in the period from roughly 1600 until the 1760s can be
characterized as speech-based and often uses conversation as a model,
only seventeenth-century writers sought to move their readers through
elaborate ornamentation and speech rhythms. The baroque prose of John
Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor all contain elements of
strong emotion and psychological exploration to which Lorenzo
Bernini's Cornaro chapel concetto "The Ectasy of Saint Teresa" offers
the visual counterpart. The baroque is a complex theater where the
total ensemble must be experienced because its artists seek to engage
the feelings as well as the intellects of their audience. Baroque
prose is often like a Bach fugue "that combine[s] the composer's
technical skill with imagination, feeling, and exuberant
ornamentation" (Joseph Machlis 404). The romantics of the nineteenth
century looked to this prose for inspiration because baroque writers
involved their readers in ways that had since disappeared from English
prose. In "Rhetoric" De Quincey cites examples of this baroque prose
87
from Jeremy Taylor that combines emotional and intellectual appeals.
The following illustrates "the everlasting strife and fluctuation
between his rhetoric and his eloquence" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 108)
that De Quincey found so captivating in Taylor (and Browne as well)
and that he believes is the cornerstone of Corinthian rhetoric:
His [God's] mercies are more than we can tell, and they are
more than we can feel: for all the world, in the abyss of
the Divine mercies, is like a man diving into the bottom of
the sea, over whose head the waters run insensibly and
unperceived, and yet the weight is vast, and the sum of them
is immeasurable: and the man is not pressed with the burden,
nor confounded with numbers: and no observation is able to
recount, no sense sufficient to perceive, no memory large
enough to apprehend, this infinity. (Quoted by De Quincey
in "Rhetoric" Masson 10: 107)
However, this baroque prose was soon supplanted. Beginning in
the eighteenth century, writers increasingly appealed to the reader's
intellect while ignoring her feelings and sacrificing ornamentation to
clarity. Finally, in the latter part of the eighteenth century this
led to the development of two divergent strains in English prose: one
strain is epitomized in the prose of Edmund Burke, and the other
strain was championed by Samuel Johnson. De Quincey praised the work
of Burke and damned that of Johnson, judgments which need to be
explained in more detail. For now, consider Johnson's careful
appraisal of Addison which illustrates the movement away from feeling
and ornamentation and also pointedly denies the value of conversation
i in writing:
I
His [Addison's] prose is the model of the middle style; on
grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not groveling;
pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent
elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without
glowing words or pointed sentences. Addison never deviates
88
from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious
ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His prose is
always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.
It was apparently his principal endeavor to avoid all
harshness and severity of diction; he is therefore sometimes
verbose in his transitions and connections, and sometimes
descends too much to the language of conversation. (Johnson
From "The Life of Addison" 495)
Stylistic changes in English prose can be traced back at least to
the sixteenth century when Erasmus had begun to denigrate Ciceronian
or Asian style, which was characterized by Latin-based periodic
sentences (Gordon 105-108). These periods in turn are characterized
by abundant lengthy subordinate clauses that delay the appearance of
the main clause until near the end of the sentence. This is the kind
of periodic sentence that De Quincey rails against in "Style" because
it prohibits spontaneity. Seventeenth-century English writers
deplored its use for the same reason that De Quincey did:
The Ciceronian period with its unified and architectural
planning, its end foreseen in its beginning, implies settled
convictions. The exploratory, doubting and increasingly
sceptical mind of seventeenth-century England could not
think in such linguistic structures. The new prose of short
statements, to which fresh ideas could be immediately added
by parataxis or simple coordination, allowed a writer like
Donne or Burton to think in the act of writing.
(Gordon 109)
This "new prose of short statements" was modelled on the prose of
Seneca and Tacitus and was characterized by lack of subordination.
Instead, main statements were linked through accretion. To this
accretion baroque writers added much of the ornamentation of
renaissance rhetoric, and they also infused this new prose with
elements of spoken English (Gordon 116). If Ciceronian prose with its
89
emphasis on Latin had ignored the rich possibilities of spoken
English, baroque prose and other prose of the seventeenth century
jreturned to speech-based roots.* However, this soon led to attacks on
| the ornateness of baroque prose as well to a corresponding emphasis on
*
I plainness. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society championed plainess and
i
rejected all elaboration in language (Gordon 127). Consequently,
prose pieces which emerged in the 1660s were vastly different from
their predecessors. Among other things, the scholar had been replaced
by the gentleman, for now prose was based on the speech of the upper
classes (Gordon 128-129). Gordon believes that this prose was to
remain unchallenged until the 1760s because writers and readers
everywhere agreed that simplicity and clarity were the cornerstones of
good writing (Gordon 133-135). Implicit in most of this writing is
the writer's awareness of the reader's presence: "The periodical essay
of Addison and Steele was the major prose genre of the early
eighteenth century. It was essentially a conversation, or at least
one side of a conversation. The writer never forgets that there is
another person present" (Gordon 137). To illustrate how pervasive
these qualities were, Gordon cites the works of Addison and Steele as
well as Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, Shaftsbury's Characteristics,
various novels, and the philosophical writings of Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume (Gordon 138-139). Of course, while De Quincey may have
appreciated the colloquial qualities of this prose, he abhorred most
of it because it was too direct and lacking in overt feeling.
90
Simple, direct, and lacking in exotic imagery and poetic rhythms,
this prose remained the dominant form until the 1760s when people
began to sense other possibilities. Gordon suggests that the new
style of writing which began to develop in the 1760s may have been due
2
to changes in public taste which was now "ready to welcome what was
almost a new kind of baroque prose; and with the change in taste came
a loss of the previous apparently easy discrimination" (Gordon 134).
Everywhere this change was apparent:
Thomas Gray and the Fellows at Pembroke were impressed by
The Castle of Otranto (1764) and made no objection to the
excited and fustian prose in which it was written. At the
beginning of this decade there was equal enthusiasm, among
both unsophisticated and learned alike, for the emotional
overtones and sinuous sentence-structure of Tristram Shandy
(1759-67) and the bombastic and rhythmical rant of
Macpherson's Ossianic translations (1760-3). Within the
same few years there were the first complaints by academic
grammarians that Swift's style was too lax. Such a
confluence of popular taste and academic opinion is a clear
indication that a well-defined period of prose had come to
an end. (Gordon 134)
Finally, though most were not very influential, a series of grammar
and language books published in the 1760s reflect these changes as
well: "Joseph Priestley's Rudiments of English Grammar, 1761; Robert
Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762; Lord Karnes
Elements of Criticism, 1762; Thomas Sheridan's Course of Lectures on
Elocution, 1763; and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, originally
delivered about 1762 but not published until 1783 (Gordon 141)" all
featured Quintilian as a source and the periodic sentence as a model.
In addition, they all railed against "conversation as the basis of
written prose .... The result is that sentences, even phrases, of
91
Addison and Swift are constantly cited, criticised, and then carefully
'corrected' and rewritten to eliminate the conversational looseness
that had in fact been one of the main sources of their strength"
(Gordon 141-142).
Priestley's grammar, though influential today, was largely
ignored and overshadowed by Lowth's grammatical work (Finnegan 23-31).
Blair's work, however, proved to be immediately successful. He was
paid the unheard of sum of fifteen hundred pounds to publish his
lectures in 1783, which is half of what Masson estimates De Quincey
made in his entire career as a journalist. Once published, Blair's
work went through many editions on both sides of the Atlantic. Though
not a grammar, Blair's work is vitally concerned with sentence
structure. In that work it is Blair who
complains of a sentence of Sir William Temple which
contained eight 'ands,' and corrects sentence after sentence
of speech-based prose by Addison and Swift, removing
conversational idiom, eliminating prepositions at the end of
sentences, removing 'negligences,' and hammering English
prose into a new mold-he uses 'stately' and 'pompous' as
terms of commendation. (Gordon 142)
Blair castigated prose which uses conversation as a model because he
believed that a writer must strive for clarity above all else.
Consequently, in criticism of a particular passage he remonstrated:
"Though this elliptical style be intelligible, and is allowable in
conversation and epistolary writing, yet, in all writings of a serious
or dignified kind, it is ungraceful" (Blair Lectures 1823 ed. i 267
cited in Gordon 141).
92
Hugh Blair1s Passive Reader
The impact of the developments sketched above is that by the
ibeginning of the nineteenth century reading had become conceptualized
as an essentially passive activity. Individual readers will have read
with as much or as little engagement as interest and the moment
I
permitted, but those who shaped, at least implicitely, a theory of
reading left little to the reader. The work of Hugh Blair in
particular was very influential. His emphasis on writing to transmit
information was instrumental in teaching these "desultory habits of
the contemporary reader" (Nabholtz 9). According to this approach,
the reader simply receives information transmitted by a thoughtful and
carefully organized writer. Blair's rhetoric may be audience
centered, but the audience's function is receptive not participatory,
challenging the rhetor to make her text as clear as possible. The
writer is responsible for conveying her thoughts to the reader who is
an empty receptacle waiting to be filled.
Besides creating lazy readers who are encouraged not to think,
Blair's conventional view of reading and writing values coherence and
perspicuity at the expense of ambiguity and digression. In fact,
everything is subordinate to perspicuity: "All other elements of
style--euphony, rhythm, emphasis, ornament--must be sacrificed where
the clarity of the sentence is in jeopardy" (Corbett "Blair as an
Analyzer of English Prose Style" 100). Clarity is paramount for Blair
because he thinks one reads primarily to extract information: "We are
pleased with an author, we consider him as deserving praise, who frees
us from all fatigue of searching for his meaning; who carries us
through his subject without any embarrassment or confusion; whose
style flows always like a limpid stream, where we see to the very
bottom" (Blair Lecture X "Style--Perspicuity and Precision" 186).
Conversely, readers will not tolerate writers who are difficult to
read: "if we are obliged to follow a writer with much care, to pause,
and to read over his sentences a second time, in order to comprehend
them fully, he will never please us long. Mankind is too indolent to
relish so much labour" (Blair Lecture X: 185).
Conceiving of manner as if it were only a shirt covering the
unchanging body of matter, Blair was wary of ornament: "Nothing
derogates more from the weight and dignity of any composition, than
too great attention to ornament" (Blair XVIII, 365). Ultimately,
Blair minimized the importance of the actual writing; it became
subservient to thought: "For all that can possibly be required of
Language, is, to convey our ideas clearly to the minds of others, and,
at the same time, in such a dress, as by pleasing and interesting
them, shall most effectually strengthen the impressions which we seek
to make" (Blair X, 184). It is this managerial view of the function
of writing that William Covino in The Art of Wonder argues against:
Blair's criteria for judging both fiction and nonfiction
represent the conventional Enlightenment view of rhetoric
and literature; as such, his Lectures focus upon regimented
style and form and bypass the importance of invention and
imagination, of writing as a way of creating rather than
j merely managing ideas. (Covino 74)
94
De Quincey1s Opposition to Blair's Views
Blair's influence was pervasive: virtually every literate
Englishman throughout most of the nineteenth century had at least
heard about his essays. His influence on the way people continued to
3
read was equally extensive. De Quincey actively resisted Blair's
view of language, rhetoric, and style because De Quincey insisted that
the goal of all writing is to move the reader and to stimulate her
thinking. It is "a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give
information," De Quincey reiterated: the meanest book of power is
superior to the best book of knowledge ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson
11: 55-60).
To move and to stimulate independent thinking were not part of
the passive models of reading and writing encouraged by the work of
writers like Hugh Blair. De Quincey adopted a dynamic style of
writing based on intellectual exchange demanding an equally creative
method of reading. De Quincey makes his readers work as he attempts
to explore a subject and "make a truth grow before their eyes." He
cannot be read passively because he continually makes demands on his
reader's understanding. Through devices such as conversational ploys
and digressions, he reaches out to actively engage his reader's mind.
Behind De Quincey stands William Wordsworth, who in his "Essay
Supplementary to the Preface (1815)" warned that the lazy reader
cannot share in the power of the writer:
Is it to be supposed that the Reader can make progress of
this kind, like an Indian Prince or General--stretched on
his Palanquin, and borne by his Slaves? No, he is
invigorated and inspired by his Leader, in order that he may
95
exert himself, for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he
cannot be carried like a dead weight. (659-660)
i De Quincey recognized that, in the past, reading had been purely
f
receptive. For example, in one of his essays De Quincey agrees with
Schlosser's view that readers in the Augustan Age (a term he found
I
abhorrent) wished "to be entertained, not roused to think; to be
gently moved, not deeply excited" (De Qunicey quoting Schlosser vol.
I
!
1 11: 19). He felt the same way about many readers in his own era, yet
he strove to alter these conditions: by writing "impassioned" prose,
he hoped to rouse the public. In these endeavors he was not alone;
most of his romantic contemporaries shared his concerns. In 1816
before De Quincey began his own writing career, Wordsworth writing to
John Scott lamented the style of English prose: "(The) field (of
prose) is at present almost uncultivated; we have adroit living prose
writers in abundance; but impassioned, eloquent, and powerful ones not
any, at least that I am acquainted with. Our prose taking it
altogether is a disgrace to the country" (The Letters of William and
Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years 285 quoted in My Reader My Fellow
Labourer 1) . Coleridge and Hazlitt concurred in this castigation of
both eighteenth-century prose and that of their own era. (See
Nabholtz Introduction 1-3.)
Unfortunately De Quincey's own age mostly ignored his, and other
romantic prose writers', iconoclastic approach to reading and writing.
The era's insistence upon a plain, clear style continued to hold sway,
and De Quincey blames it for several severe limitations of language,
96
which he seeks to overcome. However, plain and clear does not
necessarily always equate to simple and concise, for pompous is a
positive attribute for Blair. De Quincey identifies major faults in
language in his own time: speech is bookish, insincere, and unnatural,
while the style of writing is bloated, unwieldy and unintelligible,
and reading is done only for the extraction of information, by
"reading short" ("Style" Masson 10: 163), or skimming. De Quincey
concludes that writers and readers alike are desultory, one of his
worst terms of abuse, in their habits, i.e. random or disorganized.
But how can Blair's emphasis on plain style, which is clear,
lead, in De Quincey's view, to disorganization? The answer to this
question goes much deeper than Blair's proscriptions, which are but
symptoms of a prevalent disease. De Quincey's views of effective
language usage and the role of rhetoric in society are based on the
reciprocal relationship between writer and reader. He believes that
any text is a dialogue between its originator and its audience.
Consequently, the text must engage the reader's mind until the reader
participates in the "dance of discourse." This view is central to De
Quincey's manipulation of persona in his articles and informs his
views on rhetoric as play as well as other views of rhetoric that he
presents in all of the five articles on rhetoric. However, his views
of language usage were virtually ignored by his contemporaries.
In early essays such as "Rhetoric" (1828) and "Style"
(1840-1841), De Quincey discussed at great length the cause of this
neglect of a speculative rhetoric. He believed that secondary
97
rhetoric (written composition) of the sort he advocates languished in
the British Isles in the nineteenth century because of the increasing
complexities of public life. Written rhetoric, he says, had
flourished in England through the seventeenth century because "science
was unborn as a popular interest, and the commercial activities of
aftertimes were yet sleeping in their rudiments" ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 100). Since both science and business highly value clarity and j
t
information processing, they had signalled the death of rhetoric.
Rhetoric based on a conversational model had become moribund because
it required too much effort on the part of both writer and reader, and
no one had the time to spend on an art that requires such careful
ornamentation and planned involvement. De Quincey thought that his
contemporaries were primarily interested in facts, not creative
interaction with the writer.
Rhetoric could not flourish for De Quincey without reciprocity
between writer and reader because it is an art "which presupposes a
state of tense exertion on the part of both auditor and performer"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 97). The tension is created as rhetoric
presents the play of the thoughts of the rhetor acting upon the alert
senses of an attentive reader who can follow the writer through the
"harlequin changes" the play of ideas involves. De Quincey's prose
resists closure and makes demands on the reader, and thereby depends
upon "at least a quiescent state of the public mind, unoccupied with
i
i
daily novelties, and at leisure from the agitations of eternal ]
!
change" (Masson 10: 97). ,
98
The Influence of the Newspapers
The epitome of the factual style and a concomitant passive notion
of reading was the language of the newspapers. In "Style"
(1840-1841), De Quincey attributes many of the excesses of written
English to the advent of the newspapers, which until the end of the
eighteenth century had been a negligible force in everyday life (Webb
48). Because they were De Quincey's journalistic rivals, the
newspapers were a convenient scapegoat; many journals of De Quincey's
day regularly attacked them. However, no matter how wrong De Quincey
may be in blaming the newspapers alone for the faults of his age, he
is historically correct when he emphasizes their influence: "it is in
newspapers that we must look for the main reading of this generation"
("Style," Masson 10: 148). Many people acquired the habit of
newspaper reading during the Napoleonic Wars: "When disastrous or
triumphant dispatches from the Peninsula or the Nile, reports of
political crises in Paris or Westminster, and rumors of invasion were
the stuff of life to the average Englishman, he came to need
newspapers as never before" (Webb 322). The size of these newspapers
had increased so rapidly in a few years that De Quincey could write:
"Every old woman in the nation now reads daily a vast miscellany in
one volume royal octavo" ("Style" Masson 10: 149). The size of this
daily tome, which will "soon be forced . . . into something resembling
j the sail of a frigate" (149), is only a problem because of its lack of
quality: "The evil of this, as regards the quality of knowledge
communicated, admits no remedy. Public business, in its whole J
unwieldy compass, must always form the subject of these chronicles"
("Style" Masson 10: 149). The constraints of the newspaper business,
De Quincey believes, force a substitution of quantity for quality
because the "unpremeditated polemics of daily newspapers . . . force a
man into capricious and desultory transitions ..." ("Political
Parties of Modern England" Masson 9: 360-361) which lead to illogical
thinking.
De Quincey blamed the newspapers for making the language of books
the language of speech instead of vice versa as used to be the case:
Formerly the natural impulse of every man was spontaneously
to use the language of life; the language of books was a
secondary attainment, not made without effort. Now, on the
contrary, the daily composers of newspapers have so long
dealt in the professional idiom of books as to have brought
it home to every reader in the nation who does not violently
resist it by some domestic advantages. ("Style" Masson 10:
149)
Everywhere in the British Isles, De Quincey tells us, people have
given up the natural idioms and rhythms of earlier, inherited speech I
I
patterns for this newly imposed artificial dialect of books. The
French escaped this fault primarily because "they are a nation of
talkers, and the model of their sentences is molded by that fact.
Conversation, which is a luxury for other nations, is for them a
necessity; by the very law of their peculiar intellect and of its I
social training they are colloquial" ("Style" Masson: 155). De
Quincey thinks that only the French still follow the laws of polite
conversation which demand reciprocal participation. He believes that
i these laws are the essential hallmarks of rhetoric, and he laments the
loss of this model in English prose construction. (See "Style”
154-163.)
De Quincey blames newspapers for encouraging a stilted style of
speaking as well as writing that has almost destroyed "the pure racy
idiom of colloquial or household English" ("Style" Masson 10: 148).
Everywhere he observes the deleterious insistence upon this artificial
and insincere style: "a dire monotony of bookish idiom has encrusted
and stiffened all native freedom of expression, like some scaly
leprosy or elephantiasis, barking and hide-binding the fine natural
pulses of the elastic flesh" (Masson 10: 149). Proscriptions, such as
Blair's, have ultimately led to constraints which bind the language
and obstruct communication, making people virtual prisoners of their
language in the same way that the Elephant Man was a prisoner of his
body. Here is De Quincey's answer to the neoclassical view that style
is the dress of thought, for in reality, he observes, this bookish
style cannot be changed at will. Rather it constricts and ultimately
retards any kind of invention or original thought and is the
antithesis of De Quincey’s view that style is the incarnation of
thought.
Newspapers, influenced by the "flying velocities of public
business," ("Style" Masson 10: 150) mandate hurried composition.
However, even more disturbing is the influence on thought because, as
De Quincey observes, "habituation to the hasty thinking of the daily
press ..." leads to a narrowing of the understanding ("Political
Parties of Modern England" Masson 9: 361). Because it is hurried,
101 .
journalism perforce must rely on these "crude undigested masses of
suggestion" ("Style" Masson 10: 150) as the basis for its writing, but
people have begun to speak in this fashion as well. To prove his
point, De Quincey recites his famous story of the artificial, bookish
conversation of a "vulgar, . . . semi-barbarian," a London landlady
who "poured from her cornucopia during the very few minutes . . .1 1
{ ("Style" Masson 10: 151) of her interview with De Quincey a torrent of
i
words befitting this newspaper style. She finally sent De Quincey
screaming into the street when she used the word "anteriorly" in a
sentence ("Style" Masson 10: 152). De Quincey feared that this
barbaric style, offensive to him in talk or writing, would ultimately
destroy our literature, for "[pjedantry, though it were unconscious
I
pedantry, once steadily diffused through a nation as to the very
moulds of its thinking, and the general tendencies of its expression,
could not but stiffen the natural graces of composition, and weave
fetters about the free movement of human thought" (152).
Everywhere, De Quincey felt, this bookish style propagated by the
newspapers paralyzed contemporary thought until finally he believed
that only unmarried women above the age of twenty-five and the
aristocracy continued to write idiomatic, speech-based prose. He
holds this idiosyncratic view because he believed women in general
have more developed feelings than men, and "strength of real feeling
shuts out all temptation to the affectation of false feeling" ("Style"
Masson 10: 145). He thinks unmarried women over twenty-five write the
best English because they are less engaged in the public realm and
"have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by
the post" (145). He thinks that the aristocracy also retained the old
speech-based, idiomatic English because they always resisted "the
stiffness of pedantry or academic rigour, . . . [by] obeying Caesar's
rule of shunning tanquam scopulum any insolens verbum"^ ("Style"
Masson 10: 147). The nobility have always been horrified by
"[bjookish precision and professional peculiarity” ("Style" Masson 10:
147). Their language has remained untouched by the current popularity
of newspaper style because "the language of high life has always
tended to simplicity and the vernacular ideal, recoiling from every
mode of bookishness" ("Style" Masson 10: 147).
De Quincey observes that the time constraints facing newspaper
publication contributed to one of the major elements of this new
artificial style: sentence construction had become thoughtless, long,
and unwieldy until "[n]ow, the plethoric form of period, this monster
model of sentence, bloated with decomplex intercalations, and exactly
repeating the form of syntax which distinguishes an act of Parliament,
is the prevailing model in newspaper eloquence" ("Style" Masson 10:
150). Since De Quincey uses a periodic sentence to condemn these
periodic sentences ("Now, the plethoric form of period . . ."), the
reader can assume he sees nothing inherently wrong with periodic
sentences. He even understands that no one has time to revise these
"monsters," whose construction seems so natural:
Every man who has had any experience in writing knows how
natural it is for hurry and fulness of matter to discharge
itself by vast sentences, involving clause within clause ad
infinitum; how difficult it is, and how much a work of art,
103
to break up this huge fasciculus of cycle and epicycle into
a graceful succession of sentences, long intermingled with
short, each modifying the other, and arising musically by
links of spontaneous connexion. ("Style" Masson 10:
149-150)
However, the problem with the vast majority of contemporary periodic
sentences is that, besides their lack of rhythm, they are predictable,
Ciceronian periods; like Samuel Johnson's "plethoric and tautologic
tympany of sentence, . . ." ("Rhetoric" Masson 10:128) their end is
foreseen in their beginning ("Style" Masson 10:269-270).^ They do not
allow, De Quincey contends, the writer to think while writing. Burke,
however, for whom "progress and motion, everlasting motion, was a mere
necessity of his intellect ..." ("Style" Masson 10: 129) employs
Senecan periodic sentences, which do grow a truth before the reader's
eyes. Newspapers generate stale, mechanic, Johnsonian periods while
Burke's prose is fresh and organic.
There is a seeming contradiction in De Quincey's preferences. He
condemns the newspapers for their hasty composition and bloated,
unedited sentences and castigates Johnson's carefully planned
sentences, yet he lauds Burke for writing spontaneous, developing
prose. However, he is not being inconsistent; the key to De Quincey's
view of powerful prose is the yoking of emotion to the understanding
(intellect), which also is the distinguishing feature of his
transcendent, Corinthian rhetoric. When he tells us that unmarried
women above the age of twenty-five write the best English, his
attitude is based in part on his society's view that women can write
with genuine feelings because they are more in touch with their
104
emotions than men. Likewise he highly values spontaneity because it
can link the feelings and the understanding; consequently, spontaneity
in newspaper prose offers the same potential present in conversation
("Political Parties of Modern England" Masson 9: 360). For De Quincey
any form of spontaneous composition holds potential:
[It] is even an advantage . . . for the eloquent expression
of what a man feels, that he should be driven to express
himself rapidly . . . [because] when thoughts chase each
other as rapidly as words can overtake them, each several
thought comes to modify that which succeeds so intensely as
to carry amongst the whole series a far more burning logic,
a perfect life of cohesion, which is liable to be lost or
frozen in the slow progress of careful composition ....
("Political Parties of Modern England" Masson 9: 360)
Unfortunately, this spontaneity is mostly advantageous to the
feelings, and "to balance this potent advantage as regards the instant
sensibilities, there are evils more than compensatory as regards the
understanding," e.g. no looking back or forward, no evolution of
principles, no elaborate analysis ("Political Parties of Modern
England" Masson 9: 361). These and problems with logical construction
beset the spontaneous composer and, De Quincey tells us, are
particularly evident in contemporary newspaper composition. Only
truly great writers such as Edmund Burke can combine the positive
attributes of spontaneous composition tempered by the understanding,
creating what James T. Boulton calls Burke's "disciplined spontaneity"
(Boulton 60). Furthermore, Boulton corroborates De Quincey's view
that Burke seems to develop his imagery in the very act of writing:
Burke's style maintains a nice balance between what
Professor Sutherland calls 'the foreseen and the
fortuitous'; unlike Johnson, in whose prose 'the foreseen
triumphs continually over the fortuitous,'. . . . He
105
[Burke] seems to allow himself the orator's freedom to
develop individual points at will, but in accordence with
the pattern of thought . . . as a whole. (Boulton 60)
Burke achieved his "disciplined spontaneity," in part by
imaginative language or, as De Quincey implied, thinking in and by his
figures--incarnating his thoughts in imagery ("Rhetoric" Masson 10:
115). Boulton concurs with De Quincey's assessment:
What is distinctive about Burke's use of an apparently
commonplace technique is the way in which imagery becomes
not merely additional ornament but the vehicle for
conducting the argument itself .... [F]or the most part
the imagery cannot be separated from the thesis Burke is
urging: it is the argument in a way beyond Junius or
Johnson. (Boulton 57)
Burke is De Quincey's ideal rhetorician, "the man of the largest
and finest understanding ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 114), and he often
mentions Johnson as Burke's polar opposite: together they provide the
parameters for his discussions of rhetoric. For De Quincey, Johnson
is the supreme exemplar of language abuse while Burke represents the
finest example of rhetoric. It is also interesting that Johnson and
Burke, as indicated earlier, represent two divergent strains in
language development during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Johnson was instrumental in developing the "new classical prose"
because his work is formal, impersonal and heavily latinised. He
seeks to distance himself from his reader and attempts to minimize the
colloquial aspects of writing. For him writing is a formal activity
aimed at a distant impersonal audience whom he often refers to as "the
world." (See "Preface" to the Dictionary 1755--Gordon 144-145.) And
as Gordon observes, he carefully moved away from personal appeals to
106
his readers; in fact, the reader who was the other half of the
conversation in writings of the previous century is no longer there in
Johnson's prose (Gordon 144-145). Furthermore, Johnson relies heavily
on lengthy, periodic sentences in which the main elements come late
|
and which De Quincey finds "mechanic," tedious, and tautological.
Edmund Burke also relied on a classical repertoire; however, he
also created something quite new that directly led to the beginnings
of romantic prose in the late-eighteenth century. Through the "use of
evocative imagery and of a sentence made up of short co-ordinated
elements" (Gordon 148), Burke manipulated the feelings of his reader.
This was a completely new strain of prose which appealed to the
reader's emotions:
In the prose of the previous two centuries it is most
unusual to find an appeal other than to the reader's reason;
even prose of persuasion like Aeropagitica uses metaphor and
simile mainly as illustrative parallels to what is conceived
as a continuous set of reasoned arguments. Burke, too,
argues; but he reinforces his rational arguments with bold,
evocative, imagery that operates on the reader at a
sub-conscious level. 'Seas roll,' 'winged ministers,' 'the
remotest verge of the sea' anticipate the language of
Coleridge and Shelley and Byron. The prose writer is moving
into what had up till now been a linguistic province of the
poet, and the poet's emotionally toned imagery is frequent
in prose after 1760. (Gordon 148-149)
In fact, De Quincey and his contemporaries responded to this new
emotional element that they found in Burke's prose. Burke provided De
Quincey and other romantics with elements they had to return to the
seventeenth century to recover, for they found most eighteenth-century
prose failed to deal with the passions, and so it failed to engage the
reader. De Quincey makes his own view of this clear in his essay
107
"Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" (Tait's 1847)
when he condemns Addison's lack of feeling:
Certain it is that Addison (because everybody) was in that
meanest of conditions which blushes at any expression of
sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or the impassioned.
The wretches were ashamed of their own nature, and perhaps
with reason; for in their own denaturalised hearts they read
only a degraded nature. (Masson 11: 21)
Against telling evidence to the contrary, De Quincey maintains
that most eighteenth-century writers never dealt with any impassioned
subjects. De Quincey, assessing Swift, asserts that anyone could
write in this style:
And what wonder should there be in this, when the main
qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural
feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in
putting together the clockwork of sentences to avoid
mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all the
advantage of a subject such in its nature as instinctively
to reject ornament lest it should draw off attention from
itself? Such subjects are common; but grand impassioned
subjects insist upon a different treatment; and there it is
that the true difficulties of style commence, and there it
is your worshipful Master Jonathan would have broken down
irrecoverably. (Masson 11: 17)
Of course, this is either a good example of De Quincey's stubbornness
in maintaining his side in an argument or he has not read Gulliver' s
Travels very carefully, for it is full of passion. De Quincey often
ignores the opposition, a technique which he advocates in "Rhetoric":
he "exercises a rhetorician's prerogative of withdrawing the mind from
such evidence as is inconsistent with the position he is interested in
building up" (Proctor 234). De Quincey adds that if Swift or any of
his contemporaries had written on subjects addressed by Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, the impression would
108
have been, "About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion
from a greasy-eating house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in
vision to act as senescal to the festival of Belshazzar the king
before a thousand of his lords" (Masson 11: 18). De Quincey feels
t
i that because they didn't deal with grand, passionate subjects, they
were trapped forever in Blair's plain style. In fact, for Blair a
"Florid Style" is "a term commonly used to signify the excess of
ornament," and he harshly condemns it:
But, although the Florid Style may be allowed in youth, in
their first essays, it must not receive the same indulgence
from writers of maturer years. It is to be expected, that
judgment, as it ripens, should chasten imagination, and
reject, as juvenile, all such ornaments as are redundant,
unsuitable to the subject, or not conducive to illustrate
it. Nothing can be more contemptible than that tinsel
splendor of Language, which some writers perpetually affect.
(Blair XVIII, 384)
Conversely, for De Quincey it is appropriate for rhetoric to be
florid; it is its nature to be so because it deals with subjects like
Belshazzar's feast which demand ornamentation and embellishment.
CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES
1. For an example of many of these qualities see the example by
Taylor cited on page 88.
2. Of course, Wordsworth contends that "every Author, as far as he
is great and at the same time original, has had the task of
creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed" (Wordsworth
"Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815)" 657-658.
3. See Covino "Chapter Three--The Psychology of Reading: Blair,
Byron and De Quincey."
4. Roughly--shunning "like ruin any unusual word."
5. As proof of Samuel Johnson's tautological sentences De Quincey
refers to these lines: "Let observation, with extensive
view,/survey mankind from China to Peru." De Quincey translates
these Johnsonian lines as "Let observation with extensive
observation observe mankind extensively" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10:
128) .
110
CHAPTER FIVE
DE QUINCEY'S PERSONAE AND HIS
CONCERN FOR HIS READERS
De Quincey joined the chaotic scramble to create new discourse
communities when he first began publishing magazine articles. His
articles are noteworthy for the many ways in which he converses with
his readers, aiming to establish a dialogue with them. And though the
circumstances that led De Quincey to become a magazine writer at
thirty-six were such that he never could have envisioned, his
experiences up to that time were instrumental in shaping his magazine
persona(e) and his concept of audience.
De Quincey never intended to become a writer for the periodicals.
If he thought about his life at all in his youth, he fancied himself
an independent, leisured scholar. He did think he would be an author
and make contributions but on his terms; he would have the time to
study carefully and issue his works at his own pace. From early in
his youth, he kept lists of important works he planned on writing, and
these included poems, plays, and tales. Perhaps influenced by his
love of Wordsworth's poetry, which he knew as early as 1801, he wrote
in his Diary in 1803, "I have always intended of course that poems
should form the corner-stone of my fame" (Davies 11) . Later when he
lived the life of the independent scholar at Grasmere, his plan was to
111
devote himself to a lengthy work on philosophy requiring many volumes.
None of these projects ever came to fruition, but this protracted
period of esoteric scholarship supplied the background he drew upon in
his articles and provided the basis for his Gentleman-Scholar persona.
When De Quincey finally commenced writing, he wrote mostly short
pieces. Although his collected works reach fourteen volumes, most of
that bulk consists of periodical articles: only his Gothic romance
Klosterheim and his economic treatise Logic of Political Economy
originally appeared as separate volumes. All his great projects came
to nothing, for "when at last he set pen to paper, it was not for the
sake of fame or great ambitions, but for money. The fate that befell
him was one that he both feared and despised" (Davies 11).
Anyone who seriously studies De Quincey's work must constantly
remember what writing for money in popular journals meant for a man of
De Quincey's sensibilities. The aspects that he "feared and despised"
were to become a "trading author," pandering to the public where he
would be subject to the dictates of the "many" and the "few" also.
Consequently, his attitude towards his audience was often paradoxical:
he felt superior to the sens at ion-seeking mass of his readers but
simultaneously sought an empathetic response from the exceptional,
cultured and intellectual reader. On the other hand, the role gave
him the opportunity to become a popularizer and thereby to remake
public taste. And finally, being paid by the page allowed him
occasionally to pad his work. An example of this padding can be found
in "Rhetoric" where, for no conceivable reason, he launches into two
112
solid pages of quoted passages by Jeremy Taylor. He says it is to
allow Taylor to introduce himself: "it will please the reader better
that he should characterize himself [Taylor], however imperfectly, by
a few specimens selected from some of his rarest works" ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 106). It also means that De Quincey doesn't have to write
as much to complete his sheet.
De Quincey keenly felt his dependence on the popular press for
his livelihood and envied Wordsworth his secure economic life. As
Michael Thron has observed, the popularity of his first work enslaved
him: "The publication of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater brought
him fame and chained him to his life's work. Wordsworth's fame
brought a patron, De Quincey's a job" (Thron 216). If penury hadn't
driven him to it, he would never have written for the magazines and,
consequently, probably not at all. In 1818 he wrote his mother a
letter containing the prophetic lines, "Like all persons who believe
themselves in possession of original knowledge not derived from books,
I was indisposed to sell my knowledge for money, and to commence
trading author" (Davies 12). Trade his knowledge he did, and he also
vejry quickly established himself as a premier writer of periodical
articles: "His trademark was the 'Opium-Eater,' his medium was
journalistic writing, and his aim was to amuse or startle his readers,
to impress them with his erudition and overwhelm them with his
polemics" (Jordan De Quincey as Critic 40).
As a "trading author" De Quincey entered "the strife of business"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 93) and became a kind of retailer to his
middle-class readers. In his articles he provided a shortcut to what
they wanted but couldn't afford the time to acquire: culture and
sophistication through education. In fact, it was in this area that
De Quincey made his most significant contribution to journalism by
popularizing the learned article.
The Gentleman-Scholar and the Pariah
De Quincey established his credibility to speak on learned
subjects through his magazine persona of the Gentleman-Scholar, the
embodiment of the qualities of sophistication and culture that the
middle class believed were attainable through education. Even though
he never finished his degree at Oxford, De Quincey presented an
imposing intellectual facade. As a regular contributor to the
periodicals, he offered a distillation of his education and knowledge
for sale on a monthly basis. From explaining Kant to interpreting
Greek literature, De Quincey purported to synthesize culture for many
newly literate readers.
If De Quincey's Gentleman-Scholar offers his readers a short cut
to gentility, there is also a darker side to this exchange. This side
is represented by the Opium-Eater, who through use of opium has become
a pariah. He is an English opium-eater and, therefore, nominally one
of the group--but an outcast nevertheless. De Quincey's readers
always knew that the Gent leman-Scholar was also the Opium-Eater ,
Miserable and outcast for his exotic habit and strange behavior, the
Opium-Eater empathizes with his only friend, another pariah, Ann, the
Oxford Street prostitute. On a symbolic level the Opium-Eater is also
114
a paradigm for the nineteenth-century journalist who must sell his
condensations of books to an anonymous reading public anxious to
devour the trappings of culture. Just as Ann must sell herself in
order to survive but to a public which will destroy her in the
process, the journalist runs the gauntlet of destruction as well. The
journalist becomes the nexus between the culture the original works
represent and the periodical's culture-seeking readers, yet he belongs
to neither world; he is the pariah who always exists on the periphery
of society. De Quincey's own journalistic function often is to read
books and then to trade their ideas to an audience, whom he never
sees. He must somehow remake the books but always in an entertaining
fashion. His many attempts to bridge the gap between these original
books of power and the mere articles of knowledge attest to his
awareness of his own marginal status. He always wanted to write
movingly about books that move their audiences.
De Quincey's life as a journalist selling the appearance of
culture to the middle class alienated him from members of his own
class. If not completely a pariah, he nevertheless held marginal
status and often relished what he perceived as his outcast state.
This border status whether real or imagined did allow him to comment
on society as an outsider looking in. One of his mother's letters to
him in 1825 reveals that this ostracism could be real enough. In it
I
she reminds him of his betrayal by chastising him for pandering to his |
readers: "I cannot expect that your literary productions either as a
Translator or Author will rise in moral tone to my point, for I
I
I
115
1
suppose you must please your Readers, and unfortunately little is
required . . (Japp [1891], II: 131). This and other similar stings
made him keenly sensitive to the "war with the wretched business of
hack-author, with all its horrible degradations (February 1825 letter
to John Wilson quoted in Lindop 277--original source Martha H. Gordon
Christopher North: A Memoir of John Wilson II: 79). His own
experiences sharpened his already unusual sympathy for society's
pariahs: by accentuating his own "horrible degradations" due to his
borderline status and tenuous connection to society, De Quincey came
finally to empathize with all pariahs (cf. "introduction to the World
of Strife" Masson 1: 100-108).
De Quincey and the Reader
The historical situation and De Quincey's own temperament
influenced his choice of subject and the way he treated it. The
articles demonstrate that De Quincey's relationship to his reader is
always complex. He can be very skillful and quite subtle in his use
of persona, point of view, questioning, narrative, humor and
argumentative techniques. However, he seems to have one goal
continually in mind: he works to involve his reader and will flatter
and cajole to achieve this aim. All his efforts in this area are
directed toward pulling his reader into the text, toward actively
involving her in his discussion.
In his own "General Preface" (1853) to his collected works when
discussing the three categories his works comprise, De Quincey
indicates his lifelong concern for his reader. There are, he says,
116
works like the Autobiographic Sketches which were written mostly to
amuse the reader but which may occasionally create an "impassioned
interest" (Masson 1: 9) However, "impassioned prose" like the
Confessions achieves this more consistently, for in these works De
Quincey sought to "argue an impassioned theme" by "breathing a record
of human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the
saintly confessional" (Masson 1: 14). Finally, De Quincey calls his
remaining works essays wherein he seeks, after careful consideration,
I
a novel approach to proclaiming the truth.
The common denominator in all three of these definitions is De
Quincey's concern for his reader. De Quincey seeks to amuse the
reader, or to enable the reader "to pierce the haze which so often
envelops . . . his own [the reader's] secret springs of action and j
reserve ..." (Masson 1: 10), or to write with novelty as an advocate
in articles primarily addressed "to the understanding as an insulated
faculty" (Masson 1: 10). Whatever his purpose, all are aimed at
actively engaging the reader. In fact, De Quincey ends his "Preface"
by pulling his reader into the text. In the last paragraph, after
asking why he highly values his own writing, he appeals to the reader
directly:
Oh, reader, I have been talking idly. I care not for any
valuation that depends upon comparison with others. Place
me where you will, on the scale of comparison: only suffer
me, though standing lowest in your catalogue, to rejoice in
the recollection of letters expressing the most fervid
interest in particular passages or scenes of the
Confessions, and by rebound from them, an interest in the
author: suffer me also to anticipate that, on the
publication of some parts yet in arrear of the Suspiria, you
yourself may possibly write a letter to me protesting that
117
your disapprobation is just where it was, but nevertheless
that you are disposed to shake hands with me--by way of
proof that you like me better than I deserve. (Masson 1:
15)
Encouraged to write letters or to shake hands, the reader finds
it difficult to remain outside an essay by Thomas De Quincey; the
essays are open-ended forums for discussion, resisting closure and
celebrating the dance of the writer's and the reader's intellects. As
William Covino contends, "Such rhetoric finds an audience among those
willing to share the freeplay of the mind that the rhetor exploits"
(Covino 109). Throughout De Quincey's career he encouraged this dance
and aimed at jolting people into thinking because he believed: "Like
boys who are throwing the sun's rays into the eyes of a mob by means
of a mirror, you must shift your lights and vibrate your reflections
at every possible angle, if you would agitate the popular mind
extensively" ("Style" Masson 10: 139).
Almost all De Quincey's articles seek to establish a relationship
with the reader. The writer assumes a persona, most often that of the
Gentleman-Scholar with shades of the outcast about him, and nominally
proceeds to instruct the reader on anything from economics to the
"System of the Heavens." And as Chapter Three's discussion of De
Quincey's ambiguous use of personal pronouns indicates, it is
possible, though unlikely, for one to read De Quincey only to be
instructed, to read as one of the "many."^ However, the reader who
does so will miss what De Quincey is about.
118
Personae and Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Any consideration of Thomas De Quincey's use of personae to
involve the reader must begin with the Confessions because it colored
his entire career. The work became famous as soon as it first
appeared in the London Magazine in two parts in September and October
1821. After its appearance De Quincey often capitalized on its
popularity by signing other works as The Opium-Eater or X.Y.Z., the
pseudonym he used in the Confessions; however, it is also true that >
though he later tried to minimize the role of his addiction, he could
never completely escape from the persona he created in that work. If
people clamored for more articles like the Confessions, they also
branded De Quincey as the Opium-Eater, and it was an epithet
subsequently applied to everything he wrote: like it or not, he was
always the Gentleman-Scholar and Opium-Eater. As late as November
1839 Tait1s was running the "Lake Reminiscences" authored by the
English Opium-Eater. David Masson has indicated that because De
Quincey and the English Opium-Eater were so inseparable: "it may be
impossible ever to desist from the recollection of De Quincey by his
self-chosen name of 'The English Opium-Eater,' but more and more it
will be well to try to remember him simply as Thomas De Quincey"
(Masson 1: xxiv). Therefore, whether he used the epithet or not,
readers often identified the Opium-Eater with the Gentleman-Scholar as
a kind of alter ego. And even when De Quincey is projecting only the
Gentleman-Scholar persona, he still retains some of the pariah
characteristics of the Opium-Eater.
119
Everything about the Confessions was original and calculated to
arouse public interest. For example, the complete title of the work
was Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the
Life of a Scholar. The love of paradox which marks De Quincey's
later work can be seen here, for the acceptable Gentleman-Scholar is
also the pariah Opium-Eater. Of course, De Quincey was an opium
drinker, but he hoped his readers would associate him with "the
Turkish 'Therakis' who ate solid opium and featured in many Eastern
tales and travel books, and called himself an English opium-eater to
imply his kinship with this exotic fraternity" (Lindop 249). But
because the Opium-Eater is English, he can simultaneously be a part of
a group (English everywhere) and yet also an exotic outcast located at
the outskirts of polite society. De Quincey also used the term
Confessions in a calculated fashion: "Echoing the Confessions of St.
Augustine and Rousseau, it hinted at both spiritual purification and
scandalous revelation .... So strongly did the formula catch the
public imagination that titles using De Quincey's phrase 'Confessions
of a . . .' have appeared in a steady stream ever since" (Lindop 249).
In the first section of the first article De Quincey wrote he
talks directly to his readers. In "To the Reader" De Quincey, after
promising an interesting, useful, and instructive record, proceeds to
establish buLli halves of the persona that would haunt him for the rest
of his life:
For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may
affirm, that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a
philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual
creature: and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits
120
and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If
opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and I am bound to
confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet
recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have
struggled against this fascinating enthrallment with a
religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I
never yet heard attributed to any other man--have untwisted,
almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered
me. (1822 Confessions-Penguin Edition 30)
Here and later in the text when he bemoans his poverty after he ran
away from school ("supposing that I, instead of being (as indeed I am)
little better than an Outcast1 Lord of my learning and no land
beside,' were, like my friend Lord Altamont" [Confessions-Penguin
Edition 60]), he establishes the hallmarks of his relationship with
his readers, which will span the next thirty-five years: the
Gentleman-Scholar instructs his readers in an entertaining fashion
while the pariah Opium-Eater provides the exotic and the sensational
or at least, which is more often true, the promise of the latter two
elements. Even when De Quincey speaks only as the Gentleman-Scholar
he does so as an independent scholar not as an established academic;
he is still the outcast looking on and commenting. By insisting on
this outcast position, the narrator can promise an original view, and
implicit in that promise is that what he has to say will titillate the
reader.
Throughout the Confessions De Quincey addresses the reader and
develops his own persona. And by intermittently talking to his reader
he encourages dialogue with her: "But my reader shall not have any
further cause to complain" (Confessions-Penguin Edition 60) and "Here
let me stop for a moment to check my reader from any erroneous
121
conclusions" (61) both illustrate this. De Quincey constantly
addresses questions to the reader or makes demands on her intelligence
and imagination: "Courteous, and I hope, indulgent reader (for all my
readers must be indulgent ones, or else, I fear, I shall shock them
too much to count on their courtesy), having accompanied me thus far,
now let me request you to move onwards, for about eight years" (84).
John Whale demonstrates how De Quincey also appeals to various
particularized readers:
He splits his readers up into various readers, each
characterized by an approach which makes it easy for him to
put down any objections. The logical reader will be catered
to at one point, the courteous at the next, the practical at
another. Such a rhetorical dialogue allows De Quincey to
justify and explain his narrative piece by piece. Precisely
because the reader is split up into various categories, no
actual reader is likely to take offence. On the contrary,
this device is likely to engage the actual reader more
closely with the autobiographer so that by an economical
manoeuvre De Quincey and the actual reader stand together
realising the onesidedness of the fabricated reader’s
objection. (Whale Thomas De Quincey1s Reluctant
Autobiography 166)
Whale concludes that De Quincey's relationship with the reader is an
important part of his autobiographical writings (Whale 197); however,
that contention can be expanded to include most of De Quincey s work.
Two other lengthy examples indicate how De Quincey pulls the
reader into his text. The first illustrates the qualities of De
Quincey's definition of rhetoric as "eddying about' the author s
thoughts in a "flux and reflux of thought, half meditative, half
capricious" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 121). The reader is asked to
participate in the movement of the intellect on the subject De Quincey
contemplates:
122
And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma:--Either, on
the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience, by such
a detail of my malady, and of my struggles with it, as might
suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle any
longer with irritation and constant suffering: or, on the
other hand, by passing lightly over this critical part of my
story, I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression
left on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to
the misconstruction of having slipped by the easy and
gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to
the final stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which
there will be a lurking predisposition in most readers, from
my previous acknowledgments). This is the dilemma: the
first horn of which would be sufficient to toss and gore any
column of patient readers, though drawn up sixteen deep and
constantly relieved by fresh men: consequently that is not
to be thought of. It remains then, that I postulate so much
as is necessary for my purpose. (Confessions 86-87)
This passage is a good example of what infuriates modern critics who
lack patience with De Quincey's meanderings. His own era did not grow
impatient either because there were fewer distractions and,
consequently, people had more time to read, or their expectations of
their reading material were vastly different. Judging from the
popularity of the Confessions, many of De Quincey's readers were
fascinated by sequences such as this in which De Quincey actively
involves his reader who becomes, through De Quincey's efforts, a
character in the piece itself.
Perhaps one of the most curious scenes occurs when De Quincey
requests a painter to paint a picture of the Opium-Eater in his den.
After describing the scene in detail from the cottage's exterior
during winter to the Opium-Eater's immediate vicinity, complete with a
quart decanter of ruby-colored laudanum and a book of German
metaphysics, De Quincey suddenly stops and forces the reader to
123
complete the picture by conjuring up her own vision of the
Opium-Eater:
[B]ut,, as to myself,--there I demur. I admit that,
naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the picture;
that being the hero of the piece, or (if you choose) the
criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court. This
seems reasonable: but why should I confess, on this point,
to a painter? or why confess at all? If the public (into
whose private ear I am confidentially whispering my
confessions, and not into any painter's) should chance to
have framed some agreeable picture itself of the Opium-
eater's exterior,--should have ascribed to him,
romantically, an elegant person, or a handsome face, why
should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing a delusion--
pleasing both to the public and to me? No: paint me, if at
all, according to your own fancy: and, as a painter's fancy
should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that
way, to be a gainer. (Confessions 96)
De Quincey's technique here is fascinating, for as he recedes from the
picture, he forces the reader to take over the text and complete the
piece. At a crucial juncture where De Quincey could be expected to
describe the Opium-Eater physically and psychologically, he disappears
from sight; consequently, each reader must make her own determination
regarding the Opium-Eater, who at this moment becomes a creation of
the public but one engineered by Thomas De Quincey.
This scene serves as a good example of what Tilottama Raj an
argues is "the disappearance of narrative, dramatic, or conceptual
actualization, a phenomenon which results in the absence from Romantic
texts of embodied or achieved meaning as opposed to discarnate
meaning" (Rajan 573). The text embraces no particular meaning; rather
the reader and the reading process assume importance because the
reader must create meanings. This scene and others like it in
124
nineteenth-century texts signal "a shift in Romantic aesthetics from a
concern with the text as a finished product that contains its own
meaning to a concern with the creative process and its mirror image,
the reading process, as loci of meaning" (Rajan 575). The text no
longer is closed, a finite document containing a single meaning for
the reader to discover. This new text resists closure because it
celebrates reading as part of the creative process through which
variable meanings are discerned in a constantly living and renewable
text.
This represents a new way of reading because "reading must be
seen as performative and not as constative" (Rajan 591). In the
example from the Confessions cited above, the reader is forced to
"perform," for in this case if she does not there is no text
whatsoever. De Quincey does not merely invite reader participation;
in this scene he demands it because his text ends at a point where the
meaning cannot exist in the text but must be in the reader's mind. It
is a process that has been negotiated reciprocally between De Quincey
and his reader. But the meaning is now located in the reading process
and no longer in the text itself (Rajan 578). Rajan argues that the
text arouses the reader's creativity: "What we witness in Romanticism
is the development of a literature in which the text is a heuristic
stimulus rather than a finished product" (Rajan 587). Furthermore,
although she provides no examples, she also believes that this
"heuristic concept of discourse is implicit in the work of Blake, De j
Quincey, and some of the later Shelley" (Rajan 591).
125
De Quincey and some of his peers wish to create a new kind of
aesthetics that denies the traditional reliance on product, i.e. the
text as the sole arbiter of meaning, in favor of an approach that
emphasizes process. And this new approach focuses on creativity by
highlighting not only the traditional creative process of the writer
but the newly discovered creative process of the reader as well. By
challenging the reader to conjure up her own picture of the
Opium-Eater, De Quincey provides an example of what Roland Barthes
calls a writer ly text because it is ’’the essay without the
dissertation, writing without style, production without product
(Barthes 5).
126
CHAPTER FIVE ENDNOTES
1. In fact the article "System of the Heavens" makes this
distinction between the "many" and the "few" in the very first
sentences: "Several years ago, some person or other (in fact, I
believe it was myself) [it was] published a paper from the German
of Kant on a very interesting question--viz. the age of our own
little Earth. Those who have never seen that paper--a class of
unfortunate people whom I suspect form the majority in our
present perverse generation--will be likely to misconceive its
object" Masson 8: 7-8.).
2. For some inexplicable reason he deleted the second half of his
title when the work first appeared but reinstated it in his
extended 1856 revision.
127
CHAPTER SIX
CONVERSATION AS A RHETORICAL MODEL
De Quincey's relationship with his readers was a symbiotic one
wherein as a "trading author," disguised as a Gentleman-Scholar, he
retailed erudition to them. However, he also did more than simply
pander to their incipient interest in culture, for ultimately, in the
absence of a "knowable discourse community," he tried to create his
own, marked by reciprocity between the writer and the reader. Like
some of his romantic contemporaries, he was most interested in
discourse where the barrier between writers and readers had been
lowered if not removed entirely and where readers were encouraged to
participate in the flow of the text. Yet one of the problems with
this view is that he could never really be sure who his audience was.
John Nabholtz, whose work was cited in Chapter 4, argues such a view
of romantic prose. In his conclusion to My Reader My Fellow-Labourer:
h Study of English Romantic Prose, he elaborates on the
characteristics of this prose:
In each of the writers surveyed, we are brought into a
relationship with the text requiring an exertion of
'co-operating power' that challenges the conventional
separations between author and text and reader, and--perhaps
most significantly--between prose criticism and the artistic
process itself. It is not accidental that many of the texts
have been concerned with aesthetics or various forms and
examples of art: theater, poetry in its varieties . . .,
painting, and architecture. Whether by Lamb, Hazlitt,
128
Wordsworth, or Coleridge, these texts provide ’genial
criticism'; that is, they find their authenticity in the
same inner source as the artistic products they describe,
the creative capacity of the artist-reader. And even in
writings on politics and morals or in Hazlitt's familiar
essays, the same grounding of argument in the reader's
creative participation prevails. (Nabholtz 128)
All writing of this ilk differs significantly from newspaper
writing in De Quincey's day which sought only to educate through the
transfer of information. By contrast writing that sought to move the
reader, often through engaging her "creative capacities," sometimes
capitalized on the potential De Quincey saw in spontaneous composing.
Appeals to the "creative capacity of the artist-reader" can be found
in De Quincey's own work. De Quincey may provide his readers with the
means to become "cultured," but often he seeks the "creative
participation" of his readers in his writing as well. As the last
chapter illustrates, one way De Quincey invites the reader to
participate is through his manipulation of point of view and shifting
personae. However, conversation provided him with the best model for
the kind of reader participation he sought.
De Quincey found that in speaking as well as in writing, fine
conversation could elicit composition which involves both the rhetor's
and the audience's creative capacities (cf. Harper 155-156 and Covino
116). Conversation, therefore, became his model for the dynamic
tension he soughL between writer and reader, rhetor and audience. He
states these views on conversation primarily in two of his essays on
language--"Conversation" (1847) and "Style" (1840-1841). The other
essays on rhetoric contain occasional references to it, and there are
129
glimmerings of it elsewhere in his writings. In addition, most of De
Quincey's articles show these views in practice, for whether he wrote
about opium or rhetoric, De Quincey always worked to encourage the
reader's own powers, especially her creative ones.
The Value of Conversation
In "Conversation" (1847) De Quincey calls for the development of
the fine art of conversation, an art keenly practiced by the French
but virtually ignored by the English: "Conversation, De Quincey says,
is like Corinthian rhetoric; it is both a fine and useful art and both
pleases and influences" (Harper, 155). Good conversation illustrates
the kind of participatory relationship between the rhetor and his
audience that De Quincey admired. The chief virtue in conversation is
the interplay between two minds that at its finest almost mystically
resembles the current jumping the space between two electrodes
("Conversation" Masson 10: 268-269). By applying the rules of fine
conversation to speaking and writing in English, De Quincey hopes to
capture this creative and spontaneous spark.
De Quincey believes conversation can be extremely educational; in
fact conversation and books are the major educational tools within our
grasp. However, he tells us, it took him a long time to appreciate
the benefits to be derived from fine conversation. In his youth,
being too solitary and of too meditative a mind, De Quincey could not
appreciate the beauties of fine conversation, but he eventually came
to realize them:
A feeling dawned on me of a secret magic lurking in the
peculiar life, velocities, and contagious ardour of
130
conversation, quite separate from any which belonged to
books-arming a man with new forces, and not merely with a
new dexterity in wielding the old ones. I felt (and in this
I could not be mistaken, as too certainly it was a fact of
my own experience) that in the electric kindling of life
between two minds,--and far from the kindling natural to
conflict . . . than from the kindling through sympathy with
the object discussed in its momentary coruscation of
shifting phases,--there sometimes arise glimpses and shy
revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that
could not have been approached through any avenues of
methodical study. ("Conversation" Masson 10: 268-269)
The free exchange of ideas in social intercourse, which closely
resembles spontaneous composition in writing, creates this "electric
kindling" between two minds that leads to a unique kind of knowledge.
In all De Quincey's works, he reserves the highest praise for these
moments when through whatever means creativity suddenly is apparent.
And this creativity is organic, a form De Quincey admires, because * a
truth grows before our eyes" ("Conversation" Masson 10: 270). When he
perceives this happening, he likens it to improvising in music. The
creative energies released during fine conversation warrant such a
comparison:
Great organists find the same effect of inspiration, the
same result of power creative and revealing, in the mere
movement and velocity of their own voluntaries. Like the
heavenly wheels of Milton, throwing off fiery flakes and
bickering flames, these impromptu torrents of music create
rapturous fioriture, beyond all capacity in the artist to
register, or afterwards to imitate. The reader must be well
aware that many philosophic instances exist where a change
in the amount or degree makes a change in the kind.
("Conversation" Masson 10: 269)
Improvising leads to creativity that in turn leads to knowledge
not found in books. For De Quincey these serendipities provide life
with electric moments of insight. In another of his essays, 'Sir
131
William Hamilton," De Quincey discusses one of these creative flashes
brought on by the time constraints of composing for the periodicals:
"[HJurry and severe compression from an instant summons that
brooks no delay have a tendency to often furnish the flint and steel
for eliciting sudden scintillations of originality" ("Sir William
Hamilton" Masson 5: 307). The important thing about this activity
then is that "[t]o autoschediaze, or improvise, is sometimes in effect
to be forced into a consciousness of creative energies that else would
have slumbered through life" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 307).
Here also he compares composing for the journals to improvising on the
organ when for the organist "the magnetic inspiration of the moment
has availed to excite . . . sudden felicities of impassioned
combinations, and those flying arabesques of loveliest melody" (Masson
5: 307). The creative energies released in good conversation stem
partly from the improvisational qualities encouraged by the ebb and
flow of ideas because the participant in a stimulating conversation
sometimes achieves insights through improvisation she couldn't get any
other way. By writing prose which approximates good conversation in
its efforts to draw the reader into the free exchange of ideas between
rhetor and auditor, De Quincey believes that he may keep the reader's
creativity from "slumbering through life."
Application of conversational techniques to writing can inspire
the participants' creativity. The reader's creativity is the chief
I
beneficiary, but the writer in this exchange benefits as well, and De j
Quincey points to the prose of Edmund Burke, whose writings read like
132
conversations, to illustrate this point. Because of "the prodigious
elasticity of his thinking" in conversation as well as prose "the
mere act of movement became the principle or cause of movement"
("Conversation" Masson 10: 270). Consequently, his readers were
inspired, and Burke discovered ideas he never knew he had:
Motion propagated motion, and life threw off life. The very
violence of a projectile as thrown by him caused it to
rebound in fresh forms, fresh angles, splintering,
coruscating, which gave out thoughts as new (and as
startling) to himself as they are to his reader. In this
power, which might be illustrated largely from the writings
of Burke, is seen something allied to the powers of a
prophetic seer, who is compelled oftentimes into seeing
things as unexpected by himself as by others. Now, in
conversation, considered as to its tendencies and
capacities, there sleeps an intermitting spring of such
sudden revelation, showing much of the same general
character,--a power putting on a character essentially
differing from the character worn by the power of books.
("Conversation" Masson 10: 270)
If, De Quincey asserts, conversation and books are our principal ways
of knowing, conversation through its spontaneity can connect us to our
own creativity. De Quincey argued that people do not study primarily
for knowledge but to learn about "the conduct and discipline of the
knowing faculty" (Masson 10: 278). Conversation accomplishes this
through "colloquial intercourse" where each person has a different
view of a subject that contributes to the whole. By exchanging views
the participants can observe this "knowing faculty" in action. The
result of good conversation is knowledge that could not be gained from
books:
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,
133
for instance, might often be rectified at once by the frank
collation of experiences which takes place in miscellaneous
colloquial intercourse. ("Conversation" Masson 10: 277)
De Quincey sees an even greater advantage of conversation:
"Social discussion supplies the natural integration for the
deficiencies of private and sequestered study" ("Conversation" Masson
10: 277). This function of conversation manifests itself most
obviously in teaching:
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 to others. ("Conversation" Masson
10: 277)
Coversation1s Influence on Writing
In his essay "Rhetoric" (1828) De Quincey decries the
shortcomings of modern French prose writers who are sentimental and
sometimes even eloquent but never rhetorical because they are excited
by external objects instead of internal meditations: "There is no
eddying about their own thoughts; no motion of fancy self-sustained
from its own activities; no flux and reflux of thought, half
meditative, half capricious" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 121). Elsewhere
De Quincey defines "flux and reflux" as agitation ("On Wordsworth's
Poetry" Masson 11: 297), and this agitation is produced by external or
internal dialogue. While French prose may be deficient in these
qualities, conversation glories in them especially the movement of
thought as the participants take their rightful turns in the flow of
134
the talk. Successful conversation is predicated on this concept of
allotted time, for talking alternately is what creates the "flux and
reflux." For above all else, the discourse must be colloquial
(talking with) and not alloquial (talking to) like Coleridge's
monologues ("Conversation" Masson 10: 281-282). Nothing is accomp
lished through talking _at people because the communication remains
one-sided: "To be acted upon for ever, but never to react, is fatal to
the very powers by which sympathy must grow, or by which intelligent
admiration can be evoked" ("Conversation" Masson 10: 282). Roland
Barthes also believes that one-sided language can be deadly because
"[t]he reader [of the readerly text] is thereby plunged into a kind of
idleness--he is intransitive" (Barthes 4). De Quincey believes this
to be the problem with much of the writing of his time: people
extrapolate only a single strain of a subject. Therefore, De Quincey
rejects this linear treatment and opts for the circularity of
conversation. For him knowledge is gained, learning acquired rather
through mutual exchange and interchange in the discourse, which is
talk in conversation and the text in writing.
De Quincey believed that conversation as a fine art had not
progressed in England precisely because of a lack of concern for its
reciprocal nature. This lack of concern influenced writing as well,
for De Quincey asserts, "People who write rapidly everywhere write as
they talk ("Style" Masson 10: 156); consequently, "An Englishman," in
speech and in writing, is most concerned with "how best to convey his
meaning" ("Style" Masson 10: 156). The Frenchman, however, influenced
135
by the rules of conversation, which are never far from his mind, must
always watch "the necessity of avoiding des longueurs" (156). Even
when he writes, his mind is always aware of the rights of others in
the dialogue:
Inevitably, therefore, the structure of sentence must for
ever be adapted to this primary function of the French
national intellect, the function of communicativeness, and
to the necessities (for to the French they are necessities)
of social intercourse, and (speaking plainly) of
interminable garrulity. ("Style" Masson 10: 157)
The French may talk or write incessantly, but they take turns either
literally or figuratively. Here De Quincey seems to be advocating
reader-based writing, i.e. prose that takes the reader or "other
speaker" into account by resisting closure.
De Quincey maintains that this concern for the absent "other
speaker" in all language activities leads the French to compose in a
"short, rapid, and unelaborate" ("Style" Masson 10: 157) style that
extends even to their individual sentences. The law for French
sentences, "One rise in every sentence, one gentle descent," may lead
to monotony, but De Quincey believes that using the rule most of the
time will avoid the worst excesses in current English sentences: "Flux
and reflux, swell and cadence, that is the movement for a sentence;
but our modern sentences agitate us by rolling fires after the fashion
of those internal earthquakes that, not content with one throe, run
along spasmodically in a long succession of intermitting convulsions"
("Style" Masson 10: 157). Flux and reflux, the movement of matter and
energy back and forth, are also the hallmarks of conversation and
136
rhetoric at their finest. William Covino even discusses the
relationship of these separate sentences to the entire discourse in
these terms:
The individual sentences of colloquial intercourse stay
short and simple, but interplay among sentences forms the
conversation at large, and we might characterize this larger
discourse as a continual sentence of growing, changing
theses, couched in the rhythm of the communal mind. The
interminable garrulity of 'flux and reflux, swell and
cadence' models the intellectual play of a discourse
resisting closure. (Covino 116)
If the French at least have the rights of conversation constantly
in mind when they compose anything, De Quincey believes that the other
great nation of Europe, the Germans, are worse than the English in
their construction of convoluted, indecipherable prose. De Quincey
says that most German writers believe a sentence can be packed with
material indefinitely. As an example of this way of thinking, De
Quincey cites one sentence of Kant's that is thirty-one lines long
("Style" Masson 10: 160). Unfortunately, according to De Quincey,
English writers tend to write sentences that resemble German ones more
often than they write sentences that resemble French models.
Since De Quincey could never approve of anything French for very
long, he soon dismisses French style as leading to shallow thinking.
But it is clear that in discussing conversation's impact on writing in
general and sentence length in particular he is dealing with style as
a fusion of manner and matter. This he calls the organology of style
and promises to take it up at a later time (he never did) . He also
differentiates the organology of style from the mechanology of style,
137
which has to do with grammar and is of lesser importance ("Style"
Masson 10: 163-167). While he does not advocate blindly following
French conversation and writing as models for English prose
construction, De Quincey challenges the public to pay attention to
style and to make its improvement a matter of national concern:
Of a German book, otherwise entitled to respect, it was
said--er lasst sich nicht lesen--it does not permit itself
to be read, such and so repulsive was the style. Among
ourselves this has long been true of newspapers. They do
not suffer themselves to be read iri extenso; and they are
read short, with what injury of the mind we have noticed.
The same style of reading, once largely practised, is
applied universally. To this special evil an improvement of
style would apply a special redress. ("Style" Masson 10:
167)
De Quincey consciously writes prose that conforms to these ideals of
conversation. His discussion of Burke's writing as conversation
indicates his belief that the kind of participant involvement present
in fine conversation is possible in writing as well: "One remarkable
evidence of a specific power [the ability to grow a truth] hid in
conversation may be seen in such writings as have moved by impulses
most nearly resembling those of conversation,--for instance, in those
of Edmund Burke" ("Conversation" Masson 10: 269). De Quincey defines
some of this internal power found in talk in one of his admonitions to
the symposiarch he would resurrect to watch over conversation:
The natural excursiveness of colloquial intercourse, its
tendency to advance by subtle links of association, is one
of its advantages; but mere vagrancy from positive
acquiescence in the direction given to it by chance or by
any verbal accident is among its worst diseases.
("Conversation" Masson 10: 287)
138
Surely, these are the hallmarks of De Quincey's own prose, for at his
finest his spiral prose utilizes digressions to "advance by subtle
links of association" while at his worst he simply digresses endlessly
to no purpose until sometimes the reader wishes there were a
symposiarch to call De Quincey back to the issue with which he began.
De Quincey's ideal for both conversation and prose construction
requires a sense of community where equals exchange views for their
mutual benefit. There must be a sense of the reciprocity and
importance of communication and reverance for the exploratory power
and function of language. All members of the discourse community must
respect each other and the right of each to participate. William
Covino believes that this is the key to De Quincey's importance as a
rhetorician:
Whatever novelty he achieves stands as an offer that reaches
outside the rhetor's fanciful mind and aims at social
consequences, the activity of novelty within a community of
rhetors who are also citizens and friends. Creating such a
community means eschewing definitions and concepts which
compartmentalize thought and isolate individuals one from
another. (Covino 110)
Paradox as a Conversational Gambit ■
A major device De Quincey employed to generate conversation with
his reader is his use of paradox. For him a paradox is completely
different from most people's understanding of the term; he indicates
that a paradox should conform to the original Greek use of the term:
Not that only is paradoxical which, being really false, puts
on the semblance of truth; but, secondly, that, also, which,
being really true, puts on the semblance of falsehood. For,
literally speaking, everything is paradoxical which
contradicts the public doxa, that is, contradicts the
popular opinion or the public expectation, which may be done
139
by a truth as easily as a falsehood. The very weightiest
truths now received amongst men have nearly all of them, in
turn, in some one stage of their development, been found
strong paradoxes to the popular mind. ("Secret Societies"
Masson 7: 205-206)
De Quincey delights in opening his essays with such a use of
paradox: he wants to shake up his readers by challenging the efficacy
of received wisdom. To do so he presents what he conceives of as a
truth but one that runs contrary to the public's conception and then
proceeds to validate this view. In essence the purpose of the paradox
is to say: "'Here, reader, are some extraordinary truths, looking so
very like falsehoods that you would never take them for anything else
if you were not invited to give them special examination'" ("Secret
Societies" Masson 7: 206). Through this device he can often initiate
conversation with his reader by invoking the reader's anger or
speculative fancy. For example, in "Rhetoric" "we find De Quincey
correcting the popular misconceptions of rhetoric and basing his own
definition on an interpretation of Aristotle that counters much
scholarly opinion" (Burwick xii). Before setting out to prove the
validity of his paradox, De Quincey challenges existing authorities
and invites his reader's engagement in the question when he writes:
Our explanation involves a very remarkable detection, which
will tax many thousands of books with error in a particular
point supposed to be as well established as the hills. We
question, indeed, whether any fulminating powder, descending
upon the schools of Oxford, would cause more consternation
than the explosion of that novelty which we are going to
discharge. (Masson 10: 84-85)
De Quincey's work abounds with examples of paradox used as an
opening conversational or argumentative gambit. For example, in
140
"Philosophy of Herodotus" he begins by arguing that Herodotus should
not be classed as an historian but as a "philosophical polyhistor" or
encyclopedist while in "The Theban Sphinx" he maintains that Oedipus
gave a solution to the Sphinx's riddle but not the solution. He also
argues for an unpopular view of both Cicero and the Caesars, but he is
at the top of his form when he argues in "Philosophy of the Roman
Empire" that the Western Roman Empire became increasingly barbaric
after it completed its foreign conquests:
It would be thought strange indeed if there should exist a
large, a memorable, section of History, traversed by many a
scholar with various objects, reviewed by many a reader in a
spirit of anxious scrutiny, and yet to this hour
misunderstood; erroneously appreciated; its tendencies
mistaken, and its whole meaning, import, value, not so much
inadequately as falsely, ignorantly, perversely, deciphered.
Prima facie, one would pronounce this impossible.
Nevertheless it is a truth; and it is a solemn truth.
("Philosophy of Roman History" Masson 6: 429)
Indeed, Masson notes in his "Preface" to Volume 7 of De Quincey's work
that these paradoxes are especially prevalent in De Quincey's
historical essays, yet, as Masson indicates, even when De Quincey
chooses to defend a seemingly outlandish idea he does so impressively:
De Quincey seems to us . . . to have very fairly made out
his case, and that, where he may not have done so to the
full extent, one must at least admire his learning and
ingenuity, and thank him for real and useful instruction.
In no essay does he leave a question exactly as he found it,
or without some suggestions that will remain in the minds of
his readers as a ferment for future thought. (Masson 7: 7)
The "ferment for future thought" illustrates that De Quincey wishes to
avoid closure and to engage the reader's mind in the give and take of
further conversation. Many of these historical essays "are pervaded
141
by a distinctly speculative element, and some of them are among the
most notable exhibitions of De Quincey's faculty in propounding subtle
problems, questioning old doctrines, and starting paradoxes (Masson,
"Editor's Preface" Masson 6: 3). Consequently, "[t]he essay itself as
De Quincey defines it, is a rhetorical act, based upon paradox and
developed with polemic skill" (Burwick xi) wherein De Quincey writes
"in the manner of 'the good debater' in combat with prevailing error"
I
(Burwick xii) .
The Ideal and the Reality
Many elements of De Quincey's essays demonstrate his desire to
have his reader participate. However, the problem he faced throughout
his career was that, for a variety of reasons, like all writers he
could never really be sure his readers were responding. A major
reason for this was the amorphous nature of the reading public, which
turned out to be many different publics. Neither De Quincey nor
anyone else at this time could accurately determine his audience.
Like other writers of his day, all he could do was to define his
audience carefully and then appeal to it, but he could never be sure
that his portrait conformed to the reality. Therefore, he had two
audiences to deal with--his created one and the real, unknown one.
For example, John Whale suggests that In the Confessions De Quincey
takes the reader into his own hands, yet "ft]he way he does so is
directly related to his having a real, unknown and various audience on
the one hand, and a constructed particularised reader on the other"
(Whale Thomas De Quincey1s Reluctant Autobiography 166). Meanwhile,
142
according to E. Michael Thron, De Quincey's publishing difficulties
compounded:
Over the years the confusions coming upon De Quincey
multiplied. The immediacy of the periodical, the opaqueness
of print, and the progressive speed and wider audiences the
press gained during his lifetime linked with the revulsion
and disgust towards himself brought on by opium. All
combined to produce the Sisyphean labors of Thomas De
Quincey. (Thron 215)
Nevertheless, Thron admits, De Quincey continued to equate composition
with conversation: "But he was pleased, to be sure, with the letters
he received from 'the great mass,1 even though he hated to answer
them. Throughout his life he was desperate for answers from his
readers, as if writing were conversation and demanded dialogue. But
the print, and the machinery it brought with it, intervened" (Thron
214). We have already seen one example in De Quincey's "Preface" of
his endeavors to solicit concrete responses from his readers when he
writes: "you yourself may possibly write a letter to me . . ." ("De
Quincey's General Preface" Masson 1: 15). He was always desperate to
know who was out there; he desired some kind of response from readers,
yet he got very little.
Of necessity, De Quincey's conversations with his readers
remained one-sided. Ultimately, writing must be unilateral because,
if for no other reason, of the writer's isolation from the reader's
response. No matter how much the writer considers her reader, no
matter how audience centered the prose, the writer cannot directly
participate with the reader; she can only anticipate an ideal reader's
responses. The actual conversation the reader has with the writer, if
143
it exists at all, takes place in the reader's head, and the writer is
never privy to it. For Thomas De Quincey this became a great source
of tension, as is apparent in his writing. "Sir William Hamilton," a
late piece De Quincey wrote in 1852 for Hogg1s Instructor, well
illustrates De Quincey!s pent-up frustration with this process.
Essay on Sir William Hamilton
De Quincey begins the paper by discussing with the reader the
difficulties of publishing and never gets much closer to discussing
Hamilton. In fact, as Masson points out in a footnote, the paper is
only "nominally on Sir William Hamilton, but actually [is] one of the
most rambling and discursive of De Quincey's essays--with only a pinch
of Sir William Hamilton in it, flavoring a quantity of amusing matter
about De Quincey himself and about anything else that occurred to
him ..." ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 303). In the opening, De
Quincey begs the reader's indulgence because he is unable to
communicate effectively with his publisher and has no materials to
draw from except his brain. In addition, he is perennially battling
against deadlines; this observation launches him into a silly
discussion of his struggles with time. However, when he recognizes
that he may be straining his reader's patience, he equivocates: "But
this eternal blazon must not be, or the reader will think himself to
have fallen into the company of a madman, and perhaps at the first
convenient turning will abscond" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5:
306). Concerning this Michael Thron observes: "The reader can decide
either to abscond or to turn the next corner in De Quincey's maze,
144
because he is an extension of the press just as De Quincey is its
slave. The author must go on, the reader need not" (Thron 216). Of
course, it is also possible that is precisely what terrifies De
Quincey--the reader might choose to stop reading.
In his endeavors to divine some kind of response, De Quincey next
begins to hector his reader in one of the most bizarre passages in all
of his work. And among other things he blames the reader for the
digressions so far:
But now, reader, do not worry me any more with questions or
calls for explanation. When I do not know, nor how, but not
the less I feel a mesmeric impression that you have been
bothering me with magnetic passes: but for which
interruptions, we should have been by this time a long way
on our journey. I am now going to begin. You will see a
full stop or period a very few inches farther on, lurking
immediately under the word earnest on the off side; and,
from and after that full stop, you are to consider me as
having once for all entered upon business in earnest. ("Sir
William Hamilton" Masson 5: 307-308)
This accusation occurs five pages into his sixteen page opening and
indicates, among other things, how desperate De Quincey has become for
a response. However, it also illustrates just how creative De Quincey
could be in attempting to connect with his reader, for here and
elsewhere in the essay he has invoked the act of publication itself to
make dyadic connections. This creativity or desperation for contact
with his reader, depending upon one's point of view, deepens as De
Quincey continues his essay.
De Quincey has promised a beginning but he does not fulfill that
promise; the first part of his Hamilton essay ends with his
apologizing to the reader for not saying all that he intended. The
145
number of questions he addresses to his audience and the intensity of
his exclamations indicate his desire to converse with his reader:
Ah, what a chaos! In what confusion and hurry, my reader,
shall we part! I had three hundred things, at least, to
say; and, if that arithmetic is correct, it strikes me as a
sad necessity that, for a matter of two hundred and ninety-
nine, I must remain in your debt. In debt? Ay; but for how
long? When do I mean to pay? Thirty days after date would be
almost as good as cash. True, much-injured reader, it would
be so; and my wish, were wishes discountable, would run
exactly in that channel. But that, alas! is impossible.
Hearken to the nature of the fix in which I find myself, and
say if you ever heard of a worse. ("Sir William Hamilton"
Masson 5: 315-316)
The conundrum De Quincey faces is that he is writing in the last
issue of volume fourteen of the Instructor, and reviews and magazines
had a rule that articles could not be continued into the next volume,
or as De Quincey says: "To purchase any one volume of the Instructor
might pledge a man to purchasing onwards into the twentieth century,
under the pain of else having on his hands a weight of unfinished
I
articles" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 316). What can he do? He
discusses his options with the reader and ends by saying that he could
continue in the new volume by pretending to write a new article: "What
is to hinder me from writing a paper next March, for example, with
this title, 'On the Contributions of Sir William Hamilton to
Philosophy'?" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 317).
To achieve his goals, De Quincey is willing to stretch the
boundaries of the publishing milieu and its conventions as far as
necessary, but even the careful reader of De Quincey's work is not j
prepared for the opening of volume fifteen of the Instructor:
I
146 )
Here I am, viz. in vol. xv. Never ruffle your own temper,
reader, or mine, by asking how, and with what right. I am
here. So much is clear, and what you might call a fait
accompli. As to saying that, though I am here 'de facto,'
nevertheless 'de jure' I am not so,--that I have no locus
standi; that I am an usurper, an intruder; and that any
contraband process by which I can have smuggled myself from
vol. xiv to this present vol. xv is not of a kind that will
bear looking into,--too true, I answer: very few things will
bear looking into! ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 318)
De Quincey then proceeds to discuss how the revolution of 1688-1689 in
particular won't bear looking into before returning to the discussion i
of how he got into volume fifteen with a new paper:
It is strange to see what mountains of difficulty sometimes
melt away before the suggestions of a child. Accipe
principium sursus--solved the whole case. What is to hinder
me from beginning afresh upon a new foundation in a new
volume, and utterly ignoring all that has gone before? I now
do so. And what follows is to be viewed as a totally new
article, standing on its own basis. ("Sir William Hamilton"
Masson 5: 319)
In its comic tone and digressive quality, the text begins to
resemble Tristram Shandy. And it could be said of this essay as
Sterne said of his novel:
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the
life, the soul of reading;--take them out of this book for
instance,--you might as well take the book along with
them;--one cold winter would reign in every page of it;
restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a
bridegroom,--bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids
the appetite to fail. (Sterne quoted in Sherburn 1024)
De Quincey may also digress but his purpose remains the same: he must
make connections with his reader. Through interrogating, cajoling,
and badgering, he seeks exchange with his audience. Perhaps his tone
in this essay is more strident because it comes late in his career or
because he knows his subject is a difficult one. In fact Michael
147
Thron suggests the latter is the case: "in 'Sir William Hamilton" the
topic limits the form of the essay so that De Quincey cannot go where
he wishes. He pulls the reader around one corner after another trying
to find significance and value in a subject that is not his" (Thron
216). Whatever his motivations may be, the result is the most
non-sequacious of De Quincey's essays: digression is piled on
digression until the reader begins to lose interest. De Quincey,
however, is not through yet. He even plays free and loose with his
footnoting:^
1 Civilation [sic]! And what may that be?' Look below,
reader, into the foot-note, which will explain it.2 Whilst
you are studying that, i'll be moving on slowly overhead;
and, when you come up from that mine to the upper air,
you'll easily overtake me. ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson
5: 321)
The question "'Civilation! And what may that be?'" is seemingly asked
by the reader, so De Quincey, in his need to be answered, has finally
put words into the mouth of his reader. In most of his other essays,
I
I
De Quincey either asks the questions or indicates these are the
questions the reader might ask. In "Sir William Hamilton" the reader
has become a character in the essay. As John Whale indicates this
"constructed particularised reader" (De Quincey's Reluctant
i
Autobiography 166) does not obviate De Quincey's anxiety over "the |
real unknown and various audience" (Whale 166) reading his work.
Breaking through the conventions and artificiality of the text itself,
De Quincey hopes to converse with this "unknown" reader. The essay is
also a good example of what Whale sees in many of De Quincey's works:
1
148
"they evidence an ambivalent response to their mode of publication,
both crying out against an uncongenial form of presentation and
manipulating the reader through the tactics available in this type of
writing" (Whale "in a Stranger's Ear" 36).
Finally, at the end of the first part of "Sir William Hamilton"
even De Quincey realizes how tedious he is becoming. Twenty-four
pages into the essay, he has discussed everything and nothing. Among
other things, he has dealt with the difficulties of printing, the
learning of Antonio Magliabecchi, his difficulties in writing the
article, "civilation [sic]," the disinterring of the corpse of a young
woman ninety-five years after her death, revolution, and boxing. On
the life and work of Sir William Hamilton he has said very little. He
realizes he must somehow deal with Hamilton and connect with the
reader, tasks he tells his readers he has failed to accomplish thus
far. At this point, he creates a thoughtful reader who admonishes De
Quincey and directs him to discuss Hamilton: "Make us understand in
what direction his studies have moved: towards what capital objects;
with what immediate results; . . . and supported by what evidences or
presumption of having impressed lasting changes upon some great
aspects of intellectual philosophy" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5:
317) .
However, De Quincey still can't deal with the subject at hand.
Instead, he begins part two with more digressions. He eventually
catches himself and declares to his reader: "But stop. This will not
do. I must alter the scale of this paper, or else--something will
149
happen which would vex me" ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 326).
And he then tells the story of the painter who painted a picture too
big for the wall it was to hang on:
One side of the house must have been pulled down to allow of
its introduction; and, as a natural consequence, the picture
was consigned to a barn--which fate will be mine, unless an
instant remedy can be applied to the. desultory and expansive
tendencies which besiege all personal sketches of such men
as, being largely philosophic, and controversially entangled
in the questions of their own generation, stand in a
possible relation to all things. A dangerous subject is a
philosopher. ("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 326)
Here De Quincey pleads that it is the nature of the subject that makes
his labors difficult. For he cannot write entertainingly about a
philosopher:
The embarrassment is this: I must have some amusement for my
reader. Gan I have it? Is it to be looked for from any
region of philosophic speculation? The reader has shown
himself a patient reader--he has waited: and I must reward
him. I must 'take a rise' out of something or other: and
nothing that connects itself with Sir W. H. is so likely to
furnish it as the old-world superannuated manuals of Logic.
("Sir William Hamilton" Masson 5: 326-327)
De Quincey realizes that he may not be connecting with his reader, but
he becomes so preoccupied with this question that his essay on
Hamilton is paralyzed: though he mentions him frequently enough, he
never does discuss Hamilton or his work in any depth. He sacrifices
everything to amuse or entertain his reader. As the above discussion
illustrates, De Quincey employs many devices through which he may
converse with his reader. Even the inclusion of a created reader is
only a ploy to discern that other "real unknown and various audience"
(Whale 166) about which he ultimately knows nothing. All of his
150
devices are illusions because finally there is only silence. The
essay on William Hamilton illustrates some of the tensions inherent in
seeking to converse with his unknown readers. As the above excerpts
illustrate, the essay contains many amusing parts as well as some
strikingly modern aspects, yet its only unifying figure is that of De
Quincey's persona, the Gentleman-Scholar, endeavoring to make contact
with his readers.
151
CHAPTER SIX ENDNOTE
The reader will remember that in "Rhetoric" he includes a
footnote on a footnote.
152
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PRACTICE OF RHETORIC
Style and the Elevation of Prose
In spite of his emphasis on the majesty of the literature of
power, De Quincey often lamented the state of language in the British
Isles, but he fancied himself a reformer nonetheless. In advocating a
return to a prose that moved its readers, he discovered that he needed
to supply an expanded definition of prose, one which elevated prose to
a higher level than it enjoyed in his own era. Contemporary British
views of prose were limiting because the British valued matter over
manner ("Style" Masson 10: 137-140), denying much to prose that they
readily granted to poetry. Poets could be as ornate as they chose
while prose writers needed to be wary of ornamentation because it was
thought to be the enemy of perspicuity. Most thinkers still accepted
Samuel Johnson's view that language was the dress of thought in which
case prose required only a very plain habit indeed. Even as late as
1828, Whately could innocently reveal this disparity by declaring that
"Good poetry is 'elegant and decorated language, in meter, expressing
such and such thoughts,'while good prose is 1 such and such thoughts
expressed in good language" (quoted in Merritt 10) . And one of the
few times De Quincey indicates that he disagrees with Whately in his
153
review of his Principles of Rhetoric is where Whately "very needlessly
enters upon the thorny question of the quiddity, or characteristic
difference, of poetry as distinguished from prose" ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 131).
Although De Quincey recognized the "thorny" nature of the
question, he felt obliged to enter the lists in the cause of
liberating prose style. In fact Hugh Sykes Davies has gone so far as
to say that De Quincey's contribution to the study of prose is one of
his most notable and most original contributions to literary theory:
It was a close concern with the special qualities of prose
and the technique of writing it. This is a subject not
fully treated by most theorists of literature, partly, no
doubt, because they have ranked prose so far below verse as
to make it beneath the dignity of their notice but also
perhaps because the structural aspects of prose are more
fluid and complex than those of verse and more difficult to
discuss. (Davies 18)
In this view and his own practice, it could be argued that De Quincey
was merely extrapolating a view held by some of his contemporaries.
Wordsworth, for example, had stated as much in his 1802 version of the
Preface:
By the foregoing quotation I have shewn that the language of
Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and I have
previously asserted that a large portion of the language of
every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good
Prose. I will go further. I do not doubt that it may be
safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any
essential difference between the language of prose and
metrical composition. (Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads 253)
Coleridge, of course, heartily objected to Wordsworth's view and I
discussed it at length in chapters 17 and 18 of Bioaraphia Literaria.
Ultimately, De Quincey’s views seem more ambiguous; John Jordan has
154
argued that De Quincey both agrees and disagrees with Wordsworth.
However, Jordan believes that De Quincey did subscribe to a view of
appropriateness and effectiveness in language use: prose style should
and must reflect the magnitude of the subject; great subjects demand
an ornate style. The heart of this doctrine De Quincey explains in
"Rhetoric" when he chastises Johnson for criticizing the "artificial
display" in the poetry of Donne as "so much perversion of taste"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 101). Johnson's criticism is false because
"Every species of composition is to be tried by its own laws
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 101). To exemplify this doctrine De Quincey
returns again and again to Belshazzar's feast as an example of an
occasion which demands ornate language because ornate language is the
only appropriate vehicle for describing what the king fed his thousand
lords at that sumptuous feast.
The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power
Besides advocating an expanded view of the potential inherent in
prose, De Quincey explored the hierarchical nature of all language use
in his famous distinction between the literature of knowledge and that
of power. De Quincey first adumbrated these differences in a series
of letters published in the London Magazine in 1823 entitled Letters
to a Young man Whose Education Has Been Neglected." He presented a
more elaborate discussion of the two types of literature in his 1848
essay "The Poetry of Pope." Essentially De Quincey believed that the
literature of knowledge is inferior and will be superseded while the
literature of power "can never transmigrate into new incarnations"
155
("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 57). De Quincey thought that all
verbal works, regardless of their genre, belong either to the
literature of knowledge, whose purpose is to instruct, or to the
literature of power, whose purpose is to move:
The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the
second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher
understanding or reason, but always through affections of
pleasure and sympathy. Remotely, it may travel towards an
object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but,
proximately, it does and must operate,--else it ceases to be
a literature of power,--on and through that humid light
which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of
human passions, desires and genial emotions. ("The Poetry
of Pope" Masson 11: 54-55)
Since Bacon’s "dry light" is inspiration from another, whose
counsel Bacon believes better than the light of our own counsel, De
o
Quincey's humid light is derived from every person's passions, desires
and creativity ("genial emotions"). The literature of power moves us
precisely because it speaks to those inherent, universal feelings of
humankind; employing a favorite image of romantic organicism, De
Quincey tells us these "ideals" need to be developed but never planted
("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 55) for every person is born with the
seed, which will grow if watered with the literature of power.
Consequently, it is the literature of power that nurtures humanity's
latent "human sensibilities":
Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore
to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of
mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of
daily life in its realities) would languish for want of
sufficient illustration. ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11:
56)
156
And if it were not for the literature of power these "ideals" would
dry up amongst us "whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in
literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and germinate into
vital activities" ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 57). This is what
De Quincey means when he tells his readers that Burke could grow a
truth before their eyes; he moves his readers by appealing to the
ideals latent within them: "And hence the pre-eminency over all
authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches,
if at all, indirectly by moving ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 57).
Because of the differences between the two literatures, the gains
we derive from the literature of knowledge are all linear; we advance
on the same plane--every bit of information ^e gather is equal to
every other piece. The value of the literature of power, on the other
hand, is all hierarchical:
What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a
million separate items are still but a million of advancing
steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, - -
that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity
of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each
separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon
a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above
the earth. ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 56)
If this indicates how far above the transfer of information De Quincey
believes the literature of power to be, it also reveals how much De
Quincey is in awe of the magical, mystical powers brought forth by
language in its appeal to the "1 understanding heart,'--making the
heart, i.e. the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the
interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for
157
the infinite" ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 56). Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick compares De Quincey's heightened sense of language to that of
Borges and Wittgenstein and observes that
De Quincey's act is neither quite to demystify the process
of meaning [as Wittgenstein does] nor to heighten and
isolate it [the way Borges does]. Instead, he seems
interested in deepening and thickening our sense of
meaning .... [H]e is attached . . . to a sense of the
uncanny, magical, or dangerous in the relation between the
symbol and the thing symbolized. (Kosofsky Sedgwick 57-58)
Language does not always reach these levels, and the forms of the
literatures of knowledge and power are not always mutually exclusive.
De Quincey observes that often people do not recognize the difference
between the two types of literature, for "a vast proportion of
books,--history, biography, travels, miscellaneous essays, & c.,--
lying in a middle zone, confound these distinctions by interblending
them" ("The Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 59). In fact, the danger in
this "interblending" is that it can dilute the work until neither
aspects of the literature of knowledge nor aspects of the literature
of power are discernible; the work becomes a third and insipid
"neutral" kind of work. Some works which escape this third category
do successfully combine elements of both literatures. The major
criterion for these is simply that they must effectively move the
reader at some point.
While it is true that most of De Quincey's examples of the
literature of power are drawn from poetry, his recognition of the two
types of literature makes no distinction according to genres. Instead
De Quincey's categories grant prose some of the territory heretofore
158
solely occupied by poetry. For example, in the past poetry dealt with
the passions, but now any genre may because each person "owes to the
impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions
than he can consciously trace back to them" ("The Poetry of Pope"
Masson 11: 60). Of course, after De Quincey went to such great
lengths to elevate prose in importance it is particularly noteworthy
that many critics have found his best work to be a combination of
poetry and prose, what John Jordan calls a "melange de genres," a term
that is "prompted by the rich ’poetic' quality of De Quincey's diction
as well as the beautiful orbicularity of his rhythmical periods" ("De
Quincey on Wordsworth's Theory of Diction" Jordan 764). He writes a
prose that invokes many of the devices of poetry.
What cannot belong to the literature of power are "generally all
books in which the matter to be communicated is paramount to the
manner or form of its communication" ("Letters to a Young Man" Masson
10: 47). Since De Quincey teaches that the possibility of the fusion
of matter and manner increases with the subjectivity of the work, it
would appear that De Quincey's own works have the potential to be part
of the literature of power. His "impassioned prose" works such as the
Suspiria de Profundis obviously belong there. However, the case for
his discursive essays is not so obvious. Nevertheless, some of them
contain elements of the literature of power; their concern is
subjective, and at least some of the time De Quincey consciously
attempts to move his readers. For example, when he is writing a
critical essay that contains a discussion of an example of the
159
literature of power ("On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth"), De
Quincey's aim is not to simply transfer information about that work.
Rather he strives to create a new kind of prose midway between the two
types of literature: his essays move and entertain while instructing.
They can simultaneously appeal to the intellect and the feelings.
Writing about the literature of power in a moving manner, he blends
the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. In carving
out new territory by taking some territory from each type, De Quincey
does what he attributes to Herodotus, in his estimation the first
public prose user: "it is pretty clear that Herodotus stood, and meant
to stand, on that isthmus between the regions of poetry and blank
unimpassioned prose which in modern literature is occupied by such
works as Mort d* Arthur" ("Style" Masson 10: 174). The article
"Rhetoric" does this; it is Corinthian rhetoric, which like a baroque
fugue blends knowledge with passion and fancy: poised on the isthmus
between poetry and prose it is a new third type of composition. Of
course, this is only possible because in "Rhetoric" the matter is
highly subjective.
Like "Rhetoric" De Quincey's essays are often hybrids of the
literature of knowledge and the literature of power. As previous
chapters have indicated, one of De Quincey's journalistic goals was to
provide his middle-class readers with access to culture by educating
them but always in an entertaining or moving way. In one essay he
explicitly states his educational aim before he recounts the story of
Oedipus and the Sphinx: "For in a popular journal it is always a duty
160
to assume that perhaps three readers out of four may have had no
opportunity, by the course of their education, for making themselves
acquainted with classical legends" ("The Theban Sphinx" Masson 6:
140-141). Readers wanted knowledge, and he was willing to give it to
them but not always as they expected. De Quincey's successful
magazine article formula in essays such as "Conversation," "On the
Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth," and "The Theban Sphinx," illustrate
the transfer of cultural knowledge in a moving manner.
As Helen Darbishire pointed out as early as 1909, we take De
Quincey's views for granted. Indeed De Quincey's separation of works
into the literature of power and the literature of knowledge may seem
commonplace today: "Yet in De Quincey's day these ideas were by no
means commonly understood or accepted, and it is his distinction to
have set forth with clearness and force a theory which Coleridge only
vaguely implied, and Wordsworth never elaborated in writing"
(Darbishire 31).
The Nature and the Death of Rhetoric
De Quincey's discussions of the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power indicate that while his concerns were always
practical, he could be theoretical as well; in fact he often linked
the pragmatic and theoretical. Therefore, he strove simultaneously
to move his own readers and to deal with a problem theoretically.
Perhaps aware of the tendency in his own mind to balance the
meditative and intellectual with the social and emotional, his ideal
rhetoric, which he dubbed Corinthian rhetoric, fused the intellectual
161
and the emotional and thereby transcended both. De Quincey introduced
this concept in his 1828 essay "Rhetoric." In that essay De Quincey
i
surveys the history of rhetoric and demonstrates that written rhetoric
had achieved its zenith in seventeenth-century English prose and
entered its nadir in the nineteenth century. De Quincey believes that
rhetoric has lost the fusion of intellectual, meditative qualities and
appeals to the reader's affections which seventeenth-century writers
had perfected. Though he believes that rhetoric is dead or at least
moribund in his own era, De Quincey hopes that his own efforts will
aid in its resurrection, and like the Phoenix it will rise again.
In "Rhetoric" and "Style" De Quincey provides his most
comprehensive study of rhetoric. In "Rhetoric" he begins tamely
enough by following Aristotle's view that the province of rhetoric is
only the probable:
Absolute certainty and fixed science transcend the probable.
The province of rhetoric, whether meant for an influence
upon the actions, or simply upon the belief, lies amongst
that vast field of cases where there is a pro and a con,
with the chance of right and wrong, true and false,
distributed in varying proportions between them.
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 91)
He goes on to say that it is the duty of the rhetorician to prove
whichever side she chooses "by withdrawing the mind so steadily from
all thoughts or images which support the other as to leave it
practically under the possession of a one-sided estimate" ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 91). So far De Quincey follows the tenets of classical
rhetoric. However, he diverges fairly quickly, for his view of
rhetoric as play is a wholly original idea. It follows directly from
162
his view that rhetoric has no place in matters that can be proven one
way or another. Rhetoric involves only open issues where the passions
are not at play, and De Quincey carefully differentiates between
eloquence and rhetoric in almost Wordsworthian terms:
By Eloquence we understand the overflow of powerful feelings
upon occasions fitted to excite them. But rhetoric is the
art of aggrandizing and bringing out into strong relief, by
means of various and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth
which of itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, and
therefore rests upon artificial aids. ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 92)
It is this passage that Masson focused on when he coined the term
"rhetoric as play" to describe De Quincey's notion of rhetoric.
Masson observed that it means "the art of intellectual and fantastic
play with any subject to its utmost capabilities, or the art of
enriching any main truth or idea by inweaving with it the largest
possible amount of subsidiary and illustrative thought and fancy"
(Masson 10: 92). However, as De Quincey takes pains to indicate,
rhetoric can not deal with any subject: only those subjects that
contain no certainties are the arena of rhetoric. The more objective
the subject the less it lends itself to a rhetorical treatment, while
the more subjective a subject the more richly it can be treated
rhetorically.
If, as De Quincey contends, modern rhetoric is almost solely
concerned with writing, the discursive magazine essay is a perfect
place for the exercise of rhetoric. The discursive essay tends to be
subjective in its treatment of subjects about which the author and
audience have no fixed view and that do not involve their feelings.
163
On the surface, De Quincey's essay on rhetoric is a perfect example of
rhetoric as play because De Quincey takes such a subject (rhetoric)
and intellectually plays with aspects of it to the delight of himself
and his readers.
Unfortunately, like all of its predecessors De Quincey beleives
that this type of rhetoric, as Chapter 4 indicates,is dying. People
are no longer interested in it perhaps because science and business
have killed it. Science has contributed to its demise because, De
Quincey says, "Whatever is certain, or matter of fixed science, can be
no subject for the rhetorician: where it is possible for the
understanding to be convinced, no field is open for rhetorical
persuasion" ("Rhetoric"Masson 10: 91).
The impact of this "fixed science" on knowledge in modern nations
has also had a deleterious effect on style and, through it, rhetoric:
The excess of external materials has sometimes oppressed
their creative power, and sometimes their meditative power.
The exuberance of objective knowledge--that knowledge which
carries the mind to materials existing out of itself, such
as natural philosophy, chemistry, physiology, astronomy,
geology, where the mind of the student goes for little and
the external for much--has had the effect of weaning men
from subjective speculation, where the mind is all in all
and the alien object next to nothing, and in that degree has
weaned them from the culture of style. ("Style" Masson 10:
220)
I
And governmental business has killed it as well, for the complexities
of modern government mandate large time commitments and make public
officials and the citizenry alike intolerant of the leisurely pace of
rhetoric: "viz. the necessities of public business, its vast extent,
complexity, fulness of details, and consequent vulgarity, as compared
f
I
164
with that of the ancients" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 97). These changes
have destroyed rhetoric because "The political economy of the ancient
republics, and their commerce, were simple and unelaborate ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 98). Therefore, science, commerce, and English popular
assemblies have brought about the demise of rhetoric, which requires
"at least a quiescent state of the public mind, unoccupied with daily
novelties, and at leisure from the agitations of eternal change"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 97). However, De Quincey warns, this modern
state of affairs was not inevitable; "for we must not confound the
perplexity in our modern explanations of these things with a
perplexity in the things themselves" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 98).
The last place rhetoric flourished, as a written rhetoric par
excellence, was in England from the end of the sixteenth century to
the middle of the seventeenth century "at a time when science was
unborn as a popular interest, and the commercial activities of
aftertimes were yet sleeping in their rudiments" ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 100). De Quincey laments the achievement in rhetoric of those
days, which he thinks were less complicated than his own era.
Manifestations of Style
De Quincey defined so many levels and kinds of style that his
critics accuse him of being extremely capricious in his use of the
term; however, he did have a fairly consistent view of style as
hierarchical. Different kinds of style were appropriate for different
kinds of writing. At the apex of this hierarchy was always style as
the incarnation of thought. This concept seems so obvious to us, but
165
it is worth remembering that, as Helen Darbishire pointed out, De ,
Quincey "saw as clearly as either Wordsworth or Coleridge, and
explained, as neither was at pains to explain,the true relation
between form and content .... He is the first of English critics
to support consistently, both in precept and in practice, the theory
that in literature as in all the art, substance and form are
inseparable" (Darbishire 31) . And De Quincey was primarily concerned
with style in writing because among other things it is easier to
j detect there than in oratory.
To understand De Quincey's view of rhetoric and particularly
Corinthian rhetoric, one must consider his views on style. In his
earliest article on rhetoric "Rhetoric," De Quincey begins by
providing two definitions of rhetoric involving the stylistic concerns
of matter and manner. These questions regarding language and thought
infuse all his writing on rhetoric and style. As late as 1858 in
"Language,” he was still discussing manner and matter and their
relationship to style. At first glance, these views on style are as
inconsistent and ambiguous as the rest of his observations, which is
not surprising considering how many years separate the essays on
rhetoric. Nevertheless, he does consistently refer to three different
!
manifestations of style that are vastly different. All three, De j
(
I
Quincey thinks, have been undervalued by the English emphasis on j
matter at the expense of manner: "In no country upon earch . . . is j
I
it a more determinate tendency of the national mind to value the
matter of a book not only as paramount to the manner, but even as
166
distinct from it . . . ("Style" Masson 10: 137). At the end of his
essay "Language" he carefully delineates these three aspects of style,
but he constantly differentiates amongst them throughout his essays on
rhetoric. First, style is the management of language and as such is a
fine art because it provides an intellectual pleasure separate from
the subject it adorns. By analogy, De Quincey indicates the
workmanship of Cellini is equally valued whether he worked in ivory or
gold ("Language" Masson 10: 260). Secondly, style can, as Johnson
said, be the dress of thought in those situations where the manner is
ministerial to the matter. Where facts and objectivity are paramount,
only this aspect of style is present. At its best this style also
provides intellectual pleasure of the highest order. Nevertheless,
the English neglect this appearance of style also:
The vice of that appreciation which we English apply to
style lies in representing it as a mere ornamental accident
of written composition--a trivial embellishment, like the
mouldings of furniture, the cornices of ceilings, or the
arabesques of tea-urns. On the contrary, it is a product of
art the rarest, subtlest, and most intellectual.
("Language" Masson 10: 261)
Finally, De Quincey conceives of occasions when style becomes the
thing itself, "where style cannot be regarded as a dress or alien
covering, but where style becomes the incarnation of the thoughts"
("Language" Masson 10: 262). When the subject is highly subjective,
such as rhetoric, this type of style is important. As the previous
discussion of Burke's work indicates, this type of style becomes
I
ornamentation without ornament, a kind of stylistic sprezzatura. *
All three kinds of style are important. The first emphasizes the
manner and ignores the matter, while the second elevates the matter at
the expense of the manner. Only the third fuses manner and matter
thereby creating something new. Certainly De Quincey is inconsistent
in his discussions of these three kinds of style, but it is apparent
that he thinks that their use often overlaps, which blurs the
boundaries between them. They cannot be equated with the high,
middle, and low styles of classical rhetoric because the subject of a
particular piece of writing seems to dictate which aspect of style
should predominate: De Quincey's belief in the validity of
appropriateness mandates different styles for different kinds of
writing. Finally, it is also obvious that De Quincey does privilege
style that is the incarnation of thought. Indeed, this aspect of
style becomes the lynchpin in his rhetorical observations because
I
through it he consolidates the classical rhetorical canons of |
invention, style, and arrangement.
De Quincey's hierarchical view of style did seem to develop as he
matured. In his early essay "Rhetoric" De Quincey seems to favor the
ministerial view of style, which he relegates to a minor position
anyway, for he says he is using rhetoric in the original sense of the
word "as laying the principal stress upon the management of the
thoughts, and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of style"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 101). In this view he is following Campbell's
work and, to a lesser extent, Whately's, which De Quincey purports to
be reviewing. Both stress rhetoric as the management of ideas which
168
Douglas Ehninger believes reduced rhetoric to a "supervisory science"
devoid of the classical canon of invention (Ehninger "Editor's
Introduction to Whately's Elements of Rhetoric xxvii). In any case,
J the canon of style would appear to play a minor role indeed. In the
1828 essay De Quincey admits style and ornamental composition to a
discussion of rhetoric only "as the ministerial part of rhetoric"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 92) because "they are in many cases
indispensable to the perfect interpretation of the thoughts ..."
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 92).
Even in "Rhetoric," however, there are glimmerings of the esteem
De Quincey has for his third view of style that he developed
later, i.e. where manner and matter cannot be separated. For
example, he tells us that John Foster, a nineteenth-century essayist,
was not a "truly splendid rhetorician . . . ; for the imagery and
ornamental parts of his Essays have evidently not grown up in the
i
loom, and concurrently with the texture of the thoughts, but have been
separately added afterwards, as so much embroidery or fringe"
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 110). Here De Quincey means that in Foster's
case language is not the incarnation of thought but simply
embellishments that have a tacked on appearance.
De Quincey often uses textile and sewing analogies throughout his
essays on rhetoric to demonstrate the power and superiority of style
that is the incarnation of thought. Ministerial style is added on,
"sewn on" after the garment has been completed unlike the best style
which JLs the cloth. Whenever De Quincey compares the best style to
169
weaving on a loom he is always referring to the inseparability of
language and thought, manner and matter, that is similar to the
i
I interlacing of threads by the weft and warp on a loom. For De Quincey
the loom is the great central image for style as the incarnation of
I thought; he never uses the metaphor when he means style as addition or
ornament. The weaver meshes the threads she weaves and out of several
threads creates a new indissoluble texture or cloth; this is the
picture De Quincey wishes to conjure up. He combines the three
offices of rhetoric--invention, style, and arrangement--in his
reference to style as a modern theory of composition which consists of
the "art of constructing sentences and weaving them into coherent
wholes" ("Style" Masson 10: 218). Through this depiction of style at
its loftiest level, De Quincey conflates those classical canons of
rhetoric which apply to writing: style is composition which
encompasses all aspects of writing from initial conception to finished
product. In discussing the beauty of individual sentences and their
relationship to one another, De Quincey reveals this comprehensive
view of style as composition and also echoes some of the mental
activity of the rhetor in "Rhetoric" as well:
But it is in the relation of sentences, in what Horace terms
their 'junctura,' that the true life of composition resides.
The mode of their nexus, the way in which one sentence is
made to arise out of another, and to prepare the opening of
a third: this is the great loom in which the textile process j
of the moving intellect reveals itself and prospers. Here !
the separate clauses of a period become architectural parts,
aiding, relieving, supporting each other. ("Language"
Masson 10: 258-259)
In "Style" De Quincey first discusses in detail style that fuses
matter and manner, and it is here that he credits Wordsworth with the
view that it is "unphilosophic to call language or diction 'the dress
of thoughts . . he [Wordsworth] would call it 'the incarnation of
thoughts" ("Style" Masson 10: 230).'*' In this most important
manifestation of style, it is impossible to separate matter and manner
because they have been transmuted from base metals into gold:
Call the two elements A and B; then it is impossible to
point out A as existing aloof from B, or vice versa. A
exists in and through B; B exists in and through A. No
profound observer can have failed to observe this
illustrated in the capacities of style. Imagery is
sometimes not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, and
of a nature to be detached from the thought, but is the
coefficient of that, being superadded to something else,
absolutely makes the thought as a third and separate
existence. ("Language" Masson 10: 262)
This transformation from base metals to precious only occurs, De j
Quincey postulates, when the subject under discussion is subjective |
i
because when it is objective "the matter transcends and oppresses the
manner. The matter tells without any manner at all" ("Style" Masson
10: 226). Conversely, when the material is subjective, when the
writer deals with "a vague question, such as Cicero calls a quaestio
infinita, where everything is to be finished out of his own peculiar
feelings, or his own way of viewing things . . ., [he] soon finds that
the manner of treating it not only transcends the matter, but very
often, and in a very great proportion _is the matter" ("Style" Masson
10: 226).
171
Of course, this means that objective subjects, such as astronomy
or calculus almost mandate certain words be used to communicate those
ideas; the speaker or writer has very few stylistic choices to make.
As De Quincey illustrates through example, these subjects sometimes
even dictate the order in which the ideas must be presented, so the
forensic speaker finds the points of the case are even numbered; she
knows what point is number eight. Unfortunately, no such happy
foreknowledge of order greets her who would compose on a subjective
theme because everything must be created and ordered from within the
rhetor:
Whatsoever is entirely independent of the mind, and external
to it, is generally equal to its own enunciation.
Ponderable facts and external realities are intelligible in
almost any language: they are self-explained and
self-sustained. But, the more closely any exercise of mind
is connected with what is internal and individual in the
sensibilities,--that is, with what is philosophically termed
subjective,--precisely in that degree, and the more subtly,
does the style or the embodying of the thoughts cease to be
a mere separable ornament, and in fact the more does the
manner, as we expressed it before, become confluent with the
matter. ("Style" Masson 10: 229)
This is what happens in Corinthian rhetoric. It is impossible to
separate the subject from the treatment of the subject in many baroque
essays or essays by De Quincey. Manner confluent with matter is what
i
De Quincey admires most in style, and it is also the distinguishing
feature of modern rhetoric, which for De Quincey is the composition of
written prose.
Bifurcation of Rhetoric
De Quincey's discussions of style reveal another common element
i
of his thinking; he often bifurcates a subject and then examines one
-1 -7 -2-
of the parts in a hierarchical fashion. For example, he divides all
writing into the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.
He then describes the literature of power hierarchically: it exists on
a Jacob's ladder where every rung brings the reader more power and
closer to the heavens ("On the Poetry of Pope" Masson 11: 56-57). De
Quincey also bifurcates rhetoric and conceives of it as hierarchical.
First, however, he denies the accepted canonical works of rhetoric and
supplies his own hierarchy instead. In effect he turns rhetorical
history inside out because the mainstays of his history are, with one
or two exceptions, literary figures not normally associated with
rhetoric. However, he is not confusing literature or the
belles-lettres with oratory. Because he believes modern rhetoric is
solely concerned with writing and theorists have ignored the
practitioners of written composition, De Quincey's rhetorical heroes
are literary. For example, De Quincey believes rhetoric reached its
zenith in the works of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.
De Quincey sets up this alternate view of the history of rhetoric
by first illustrating the truth of his central paradox: "And, in fact,
amongst the greatest orators of Greece there is not a solitary gleam
of rhetoric" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 94). As mentioned in Chapter 6,
De Quincey relied on paradox, i.e. in the original Greek sense of the
word as a truth which at first glance seems to be false, to generate
initial controversy in many of his essays. The essays on rhetoric,
j particularly "Rhetoric" and "Style," are infused with this paradox
j that the Greeks had no rhetoric. This view is obviously false
I 173
according to any preconceived notion of rhetoric the reader may have,
but De Quincey sets out to prove that it is true according to his !
definitions of rhetoric, for as he tells us, "There is in fact a
j complex distinction to which the word [rhetoric] is liable" ("Style"
t
j
Masson 10: 217). He proves the viability of his argument by first
i
bifurcating rhetoric into the "ancient distinctions" of theory
(rhetorica docens) and practice (rhetorica utens) and then focusing
solely on practice as written composition. Since Greek rhetoricians ;
were theorists and modern rhetoric, he claims, is concerned with
practice, De Quincey ignores their theory and evaluates them on their
practice. Consequently, De Quincey is judging Greek rhetoricians by
his notion of the quality of their writing.
De Quincey contends that the rhetoric of practice also has two
parts: first there is the art of persuasion, which is "the dexterous
use of plausible topics for recommending any opinion whatever to the
favour of an audience (this is the Greek sense universally . . . .)"
("Style" Masson 10: 217) and secondly, the art of composition or "the
art of treating any subject ornamentally, gracefully, affectingly"
("Style" Masson 10: 217). De Quincey adds that the Greeks in general
and Aristotle in particular were primarily concerned with the theory
of rhetoric and its applications only to the art of persuasion
("Style" Masson 10: 217-218). In addition, Aristotle's rhetoric is
j
oratorical and intended only for "the whole body of extempore I
speakers . . . , not the body of deliberate writers in any section i
i
i
whatever" ("Style" Masson 10: 218) whereas De Quincey believes the
I
174
modern meaning of rhetoric refers primarily to practice as the
machinery of written composition ("Style" Masson 10: 217);
consequently, he can say, according to his definition, that rhetoric
"was not effectually cultivated amongst the Greeks" ("Style" Masson
10: 218).
Rhetorica Utens
If the Greeks did not pursue the rhetoric of practice, this
rhetoric did flourish with the Romans such as Quintilian and Seneca
and later with seventeenth-century English writers like Taylor and
Browne who deserve praise not for "a doctrine which they delivered,
but a machinery of composition they employed" ("Style" Masson 10:
217). This art is best characterized by a graceful treatment of
subjects, and in this area none surpasses Quintilian, "for elegance
and as a practical model in the art he was expounding . . ."
("Rhetoric" 93). In this regard Quintilian's works resemble
Coleridge's "Metrical Feet"; Quintilian elegantly states rhetoric
should be elegant. Of course, stylistically these works are also
examples of the fusion of manner and matter, the weaving together of
sound and sense because it is difficult to separate what is said from
how it is said. In the realm of rhetoric, Quintilian demonstrates De
Quincey's highest form of style.
Eloquentia Umbratica and Rhetoric as Play
De Quincey thinks modern rhetoric is primarily concerned with the
written rhetoric of practice and particularly that part which he calls
ornamental composition; however, it is also subject to division. As
175
noted, De Quincey is very fond of these hierarchical binary divisions,
which in this case seem endless: the practice is more important than
the theory; ornamental composition is more important than persuasion.
Finally, this practice, usually written, of treating any subject
| ornamentally culminates in what De Quincey calls eloquentia umbratica
j which is best understood as contemplative rhetoric. Idiomatically
"withdrawn eloquence or eloquence which shows publice live,
r
eloquentia umbratica is rhetoric at "its finest and most absolute ;
burnish . . . [which] . . . aims at an elaborate form of beauty which
shrinks from the strife of business, and could neither arise nor make
itself felt in a tumultuous assembly" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 93).
While stylistically this form of rhetoric can utilize the highest
level of style, characterized by the coalescence of form and content,
eloquentia umbratica cannot be part of the literature of power.
Because of its ornamental and artificial nature, this rhetoric is (
I
I
never spontaneous and never deals with the emotions. Rather emotions
are the province of another form of eloquence, "the overflow of
powerful feelings upon occasions fitted to excite them" ("Rhetoric
Masson 10: 92). On the contrary, eloquentia unbratica is elaborately
and painstakingly wrought, a creation of the drawingroom rather than
the public stage. Almost the opposite of popular conceptions of
rhetoric as persuasive oratory, this rhetoric of intellectual play is
usually written because the recursive qualities of writing are more
conducive to its meditative and reclusive nature than speech.
(Figure #1 on the next page graphically illustrates De Quincey's
divisions of rhetoric.) >
I
___________________________________________________________ 176— t
Thomas De Quincey's
View of Rhetoric i
RHETORIC
.. the management of our mother-tongue in
all offices to which it can be applied . . ("Style" 192X
Roman and
English
Greek
Art of Persuasion
"Dexterous use of
plausible topics
for recommending
any opinion whatever"
("Style" 217)
Art of Composition
"Art of treating any
subject ornamentally,
gracefully, affectingly"
("Style" 217)
eloquentia umbratica
Contemplative -
"an elaborate form
of beauty which shrinks
from the strife of business."
("Rhetoric" 93)
I
rhetorica utens rhetorica docens
PRACTICE THEORY
the machinery of composition teaching others to be rhetorica]
writers employ ("Style" 217) ("Style" 217)
Quintilian Taylor MODERN GREEK
Seneca Browne
W ritten Spoken
Aristotle
Hermogenes
Mode of Moral Suasion
"technical system for
obtaining a readiness in giving to the
false a colouring of plausibility" ’
("Style" 218)
Style
"Art of constructing
sentences and weaving
them into coherent wholes"
("Style" 218)
Primarily Oratorical
Utility may
lead to sophistry
Corinthian Rhetoric
"the two opposite forces of eloquent passion
and rhetorical fancy [are] brought into, -
exquisite equilibrium . •..
("Rhetoric" 109)
Impassioned Eloquence ’
"the overflow of powerful feelings
upon occasions fitted to excite them"
>W '("Rhetoric" 92)
177
Since by now it should be apparent that De Quincey was never
interested in the literature of knowledge, rhetoric that culminates in
eloquentia umbratica would not have held his interest for very long.
However, he has something else in mind. After isolating and
explaining eloquentia umbratica or contemplative eloquence, De Quincey
compares it to impassioned eloquence. Although he sometimes gets
t
entangled in his different definitions of eloquence, implicit in this j
. 1
comparison of the two kinds of eloquence is the way in which each (
moves the audience. Contemplative eloquence is the ability to be j
J
convincingly expressive without being emotional; it is meditation that 1
I
is intellectually moving, and its basic attributes .are fancy and
reflection ("Rhetoric*1 Masson 10: 121,123). It is rhetoric as play.
I
The practiced rhetor takes a subject that has many sides to it or a
subject about which most people have a settled opinion but no
spontaneous feelings and intellectually explores some aspects of it in
an original fashion to the delight of both herself and the reader.
Since "all reasoning is carried on discursively," the rhetor appeals
to her audience "discurrendo-- . . . by running about to the right and
the left, laying the separate notices together, and thence mediately
deriving some third apprehension" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 103). On the
other hand, impassioned eloquence, as the province of the feelings,
moves the audience through emotional appeals and is often used in
j
public oratory. Eloquentia umbratica is centered in logos while
impassioned eloquence draws upon pathos; together they appeal to the
complete human being.
178
Corinthian Rhetoric
Continuing his hierarchy of rhetoric, De Quincey locates this
contemplative rhetoric of ornamentation, reflection, and fancy in the
prose works of Donne, Burton, and Milton. However, it reached its
zenith in a "florid or Corinthian order of rhetoric" ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 106) epitomized in the work of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas j
1
Browne which is characterized by impassioned eloquence as well.
According to De Quincey the business of all rhetoric is to dazzle, but
Corinthian rhetoric accomplishes this best. De Quincey illustrates
this function of rhetoric by telling the story of his friend who
lauded the simplicity of a gold coin he possessed; De Quincey
corrected him by observing that it is in the nature of a gold coin to
be lavishly engraved: "'the duty of a gold coin is to be as florid as :
it can, rich with Corinthian ornaments, and as gorgeous as a peacock s
tail.’ So of rhetoric" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 130). This story also
indicates De Quincey's doctrine of appropriateness, cited earlier,
which John Jordan believes central to all De Quincey's work: rhetoric
should be gorgeous because it is its nature to be so. Readers expect
what is appropriate to it.
While De Quincey defends all rhetoric as a legitimate source of
intellectual pleasure, Corinthian rhetoric transcends that pleasure
and is transmuted into something loftier occupying a space somewhere
between rhetoric and pure eloquence. In fact he categorizes Taylor's
style as consisting of "the everlasting strife and fluctuation between
his rhetoric and his eloquence, which maintain their alterations with
179
force and inevitable recurrence, like the systole and diastole, the
contraction and expansion, of some living organ" ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 108). Often, he says, this phenomenon has occurred in English
rhetoric: "[A]nd, though the English rhetoric was less rigorously true
to its own ideal than the Roman, and often modulated into a higher key
of impassioned eloquence, yet unquestionably in some of its qualities
it remains a monument of the very finest rhetorical powers" (Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 100). This transformation occurs when elements of
eloquentia umbratica and impassioned eloquence are fused.
Consequently, Taylor and Browne in particular are at their finest when
their rhetoric resonates into the higher and better strains of
Corinthian rhetoric where "the two opposite forces of eloquent passion
and rhetorical fancy [are] brought into exquisite equilibrium, ..."
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 104). This form can eventually become either
eloquence or poetry both of which go beyond "the conditions of a gay
rhetoric as an art rejoicing in its own energies" ("Rhetoric" Masson
10: 109). "Great passions and high thinking" are the cornerstones in
this transformation of rhetoric ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 109).
For De Quincey, the Corinthian rhetoric of Taylor and Browne is
part of the literature of power: it is highly subjective and fuses
manner and matter; it pleases the intellect and affects the emotions.
To a certain extent the subject matter can hasten the transcendence to
the literature of power, e.g. Taylor and Browne often dealt with
religious matters which resulted in the transmutation of their work j
!
i
noted above. However, De Quincey is very vague about what constitutes i
I
180 t
the differences among these several forms, i.e. rhetoric, the
Corinthian rhetoric of Taylor and Browne, eloquence, and poetry. He
does say in a footnote in "Rhetoric" that he has omitted mentioning
Shakespeare as a rhetorician because "he is so much more that scarcely
an instance is to be found of his rhetoric which does not pass by fits
into a higher element of eloquence or poetry" (Masson 10: 108). Once
again to revert to Marie Secor's image, De Quincey has only charted
unexplored territory which he left to others to carefully detail.
The Fugue and De Quincey1s Corinthian Rhetoric
The practice of Corinthian rhetoric closely resembles a baroque
fugue. In fact when De Quincey describes the work of Taylor and
Browne discussed above, he compares their work to a fugue because they
adroitly balance the opposites of eloquent passion and rhetorical
fancy which they bring into an
exquisite equilibrium,--approaching, receding,--attracting,
repelling,--blending, separating,--chasing and chased, as in
a fugue, and again lost in a delightful interfusion, so as
to create a middle species of composition, more various and
stimulating to the understanding than pure eloquence, more
gratifying to the affections than naked rhetoric.
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 104-105)
De Quincey's own discussion of rhetoric is also analogous to a
fugue because he strives for a sense of organic growth and freedom |
I
within the parameters of the form of the discursive essay. He
achieves both by utilizing the same devices as the composer of a fugue
who combines "technical skill with imagination, feeling, and exuberant
i
„ i
ornamentation (Joseph Machlis The Enjoyment of Music 404). Just as j
in the fugue, the subject, rhetoric, is presented and then explored
through many different permutations all aimed at providing the auditor
with aesthetic pleasure derived in part from the intellectual
apprehension of what the composer is doing. Through these devices De
Quincey creates the "middle species of composition" which mingles
elements of the literature of knowledge with elements of the
literature of power in a dynamic new combination: writing that moves
while it instructs. One of the hallmarks of this hybrid form, and the
reason De Quincey admires Burke so much, is that it appeals both to
the intellect and to the emotions.
The rhetoric De Quincey espouses and practices, like the baroque
fugue, is intended to be intellectually dazzling through its display I
I
of pyrotechnics achieved by artifice and ornamentation. This i
I
ornamentation succeeds because it is inseparable from the matter. ]
i
Through the stylistic fusion of manner and matter De Quincey has j
created a rhetoric of power. De Quincey makes this distinction clear j
when he discusses his perception of Hazlitt's shortcomings:
Hazzlitt was not eloquent, because he was discontinuous. No
man can be eloquent whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated,
capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word from
Coleridge) non-sequacious .... But, if all rhetoric is a
mode of pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics are by necessity
fugitive, yet even in these frail pomps there are many
degrees of frailty. Some fireworks require an hour's
duration for the expansion of their glory; others, as if
formed from fulminating powder, expire in the very act of
birth. Precisely on that scale of duration and of power
stand the glitterings of rhetoric that are not worked into
the texture, but washed on from outside. Hazlitt's thoughts
were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as his
illustrative images--seldom or never self-diffusive.
("Charles Lamb" Masson 5: 231-232)
182
Hazlitt's faults are also those of the Rev. John Foster, whose essays
De Quincey criticized in "Rhetoric" (110); both writers suffer at De
Quincey's hands because he thinks that they add their imagery to their
thoughts unlike De Quincey whose images are part of the idea that he
is advancing.
Unfortunately, as noted earlier, De Quincey believes that the way
rhetoric operates has contributed to its demise because rhetoric
requires too great an effort on both the part of the rhetor and
his/her audience:
To hang upon one's own thoughts as an object of conscious
interest, to play with them, to watch and pursue them
through a maze of inversions, evolutions, and harlequin
changes, implies a condition of society . . . [where the
public mind is] unoccupied with daily novelties, and at
leisure from the agitations of eternal change. ("Rhetoric"
Masson 10: 97) !
De Quincey feels modern life precludes such activity.
Of course, the irony implicit in this view is that De Quincey
demonstrates the continuing viability of this kind of rhetoric:
"Rhetoric" is itself a demonstration of rhetorica umbratica which
occasionally resonates into Corinthian rhetoric. If this kind of
rhetoric is an art of proving the probable through "artificial aids,"
De Quincey has given a virtuoso performance of it. As a practicing
modern rhetor paid by the page, De Quincey has "shunned the
determinate cases of real life" ("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 94) and chosen ■
instead to discuss rhetoric, a subject about which people have no
strong feelings and which has no fixed answer. Through his use of
parodox, startling imagery, a unique historical view, and other
183
devices, he has played with the concept of rhetoric to the delight of
himself and his readers. While mostly an intellectual exercise, his
essay also contains the seeds of feeling he admires in Corinthian
rhetoric. For example, when he describes the rhetoric of Donne he
writes movingly:
Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the
Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions which have the
fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschlus, whilst
a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over
the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.
("Rhetoric" Masson 10: 101)
In this passage De Quincey indicates his own ability to weave his
images from the inside. The selection illustrates the inseparability
of form and content and the equally facile ability to blend intellect
and feeling. De Quincey has, in the process, fulfilled his own I
promise to write with novelty. (See the "General Preface" to his
collected works Masson 1: 13-14.)
De Quincey may lament the disappearance of this practice of
written rhetoric, but his own work marks a revival of it: he
intellectually toys with a probability, rhetoric as play, in a
philosophical fashion by presenting many different views of an old
subject revealed in a new light. In fact, De Quincey's own treatment
of rhetoric and method of composing can be apprehended in his
discussion of Taylor's ability to give each sentence a separate
articulation:
[0]ld thoughts are surveyed from novel stations and under j
various angles; and a field absolutely exhausted throws up j
eternally fresh verdure under the fructifying lava of I
burning imagery .... Variations the most original upon a
184
ground the most universal, and a sense of novelty diffused
over truths coeval with human life! ("Rhetoric" Masson 10:
125)
In this passage and elsewhere, like Quintilian writing elegantly about
elegance, Thomas De Quincey is true to his own vision and writes
ornamentally about ornamentation. His work represents no handbook of
rhetoric. It is not his pronouncements that are important but his own
practice of rhetoric. The essence of his work is the movement of the
prose itself and the intellectual delight he takes in its
manipulation. He serves as a model in the history of rhetoric because
ultimately he achieved what he admonished his readers should strive
for when he wrote:
The true and appropriate expression of reverence to a
language is not by fighting for it as a subject of national
rivalry, but, by taking earnest pains to write it with
accuracy, practically to display its beauty, and to make its
powers available for commensurate ends. ("Language1 Masson
10: 256)
Finally, the proof that Thomas De Quincey sought to move his i
readers intellectually and emotionally in the manner of a baroque
fugue or in the manner of an essay by Jeremy Taylor can be seen in his
mastery of the discursive essay. Because its subject and treatment
were highly subjective, it allowed for the kind of stylistic fusion of
matter and manner to which De Quincey aspired. The discursive essay
also allowed De Quincey to concentrate on reaching his readers by
moving them. Certainly, he writes the literature of knowledge because
he often instructs his readers, but he also often transcends that and
reaches into the literature of power as well. In fact many passages
185
in the middle of quite mundane De Quincey essays suddenly resonate
j into something higher revealing that he has mastered lessons from
i
I Taylor, Browne and Donne. These episodes are worthy of the high
1
Jpraise he bestows on those writers: they are examples of Corinthian
! rhetoric. Consider De Quincey's extensive meditation about how time
slips away from us all:
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 lachete. ("Conversation"
Masson 10: 275)
This lovely conceit is only part of the meditation, which appears
towards the end of an article mostly devoted to instructing the reader
j on attributes of the fine art of conversation. The essay itself is
t
i i
186
discursive according to both definitions of the word--it appeals to
our reason, but it is also digressive. However, in the final analysis
it contains elements of the literature of power because it moves us
through passages such as this one. According to De Quincey's
definition, this makes it infinitely superior to those works that seek
only to instruct. Unfortunately, as De Quincey prophesied all too
well, Corinthian rhetoric of this ilk is indeed dead. People no
longer have time for this kind of prose; they are too impatient to
read such subjective and seemingly aimless writing for very long.
187
CHAPTER SEVEN ENDNOTE
1. Elsewhere Wordsworth indicated how the author bends language to
this purpose:
Remember, also, that the medium through which, in poetry,
the heart is to be affected--is language; a thing subject to
endless fluctuations and arbitrary associations. The genius
of the Poet melts these down for his purpose; but they
retain their shape and quality to him who is not capable of
exerting, within his own mind, a corresponding energy.
("Essay Supplementary to the Preface" [1815] 660)
188
CONCLUSION
Perhaps the final irony implicit in the rhetoric of Thomas De
Quincey is the relationship between his theory and some of his
practices. He always advocated an audience-centered rhetoric of
social intercourse partly because conversation at its finest can lead
to an intuitive knowledge unattainable through any other means. As
this study has indicated, he constantly sought to converse with his
readers, yet he got very little response from them. As the discussion
of the essay on Sir William Hamilton indicates, his attempts at
conversation with his readers could reach absurd levels that sometimes
even surmounted the conventions of periodical publication. Finally,
De Quincey must play with his own ideas because he is paid by the page
and because he can never really know his audience. In a paradoxical
sense he might have appreciated, the very style he formulates to
converse with his audience is created because he cannot really talk
with them and must, therefore, fill up the space himself. This may be
another example of what J. Hillis Miller calls the "Piranesi effect"
in De Quincey's writing. Named for the most famous of these passages
in his works,
[t]his motif appears very often in De Quincey, and is one of
the fundamental habits of his mind. It is the power which
the mind has to sink into its own infinite abyss, not
emptying itself out, but by becoming trapped in some form of
thought or mental experience which is repeated forever.
This produces a vertigo like that caused by the endless
189
multiplications of a single face in a hall of mirrors.
Versions of the Piranesi effect have been noted at crucial
moments of De Quincey's experience, . . . in the logical
conundrums in which his mind can circle endlessly [e.g. the
race between the tortoise and Achilles], or even in his
habit of writing footnotes to his footnotes. (Miller 67)
Though Miller describes the situation De Quincey often found himself
in accurately enough, perhaps he paints too bleak a picture of De
Quincey and his habits of mind. De Quincey sometimes grows impatient
with a process which finds him constantly questioning and endlessly
seeking some kind of a response, yet he rarely despairs. Far more
often he is the Gentleman-Scholar and Opium-Eater always concerned
about his audience and constantly working to draw her into his works.
190
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