A Portrait of De Quincey

Among the large company of eccentric persons responsible for so much of England’s greatest literature there is none with a personality more charming, more appealing, than the diminutive, golden-voiced, opium-eating De Quincey. He is first presented in John Calvin Metcalf’s “De Quincey: A Portrait” as a child of seven on the eve of his earliest journey in a post chaise—a situation symbolic of a man whose zest for wandering never left him and whose love of rapid motion was so strikingly reflected in his essay, “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion,” written when he was sixty-four. The rapid narrative pace which is set in the first pages of the biography is not slackened until the concluding expository chapter is arrived at, and the reader is propelled along the amazing panorama of De Quincey’s varied life and complex personality much as De Quincey himself was propelled through England and Scotland, occupying like De Quincey the “place of high privilege” on the box beside the biographical driver. There is much of interest to be seen: De Quincey as a rebellious lad of sixteen, relinquishing for the sake of liberty the security of a socially and financially well padded home to wander, a penniless vagabond, among the mountains of North Wales, often with the open sky his only roof and the earth his bed; De Quincey, still penniless, strolling the streets of London and being rescued from starvation by the kind discursive, too sophisticated in matters of art to speak com-pellingly to the layman. On a master such as Ingres Walter Pach writes con amove. This book, though it never may be vastly popular, is the best thing he has written.

Among the large company of eccentric persons responsible for so much of England’s greatest literature there is none with a personality more charming, more appealing, than the diminutive, golden-voiced, opium-eating De Quincey. He is first presented in John Calvin Metcalf’s “De Quincey: A Portrait” as a child of seven on the eve of his earliest journey in a post chaise—a situation symbolic of a man whose zest for wandering never left him and whose love of rapid motion was so strikingly reflected in his essay, “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion,” written when he was sixty-four. The rapid narrative pace which is set in the first pages of the biography is not slackened until the concluding expository chapter is arrived at, and the reader is propelled along the amazing panorama of De Quincey’s varied life and complex personality much as De Quincey himself was propelled through England and Scotland, occupying like De Quincey the “place of high privilege” on the box beside the biographical driver.

hearted prostitute whom he later immortalized as “Ann of Oxford Street”; De Quincey, the inspired conversationalist, seated at the table after dinner, imbibing his favorite drug from the pitcher beside him as his fellow guests imbibed their wine; De Quincey, the famed and distinguished journalist in flight from the bailiffs who pursued him from lodging-house to lodging-house, and, on one occasion, into the bath-tub of a resourceful host, where he remained successfully concealed; De Quincey, a kind, companionable father and dutiful husband despite his vagaries, struggling to maintain a growing family by feeding more and ever more closely scribbled sheets of manuscript to a press forever hungry for his essays; and finally, De Quincey at seventy-four, near the end of a life harassed by debt and his one unbroken vicious habit, taking his grandparental ease among his daughter’s children in Tipperary.

The broken and scattered facts about him have been collected and painstakingly put together in this book until the restoration of the man and his life was as complete as scholarship could make it. Using this restored figure as his model, the author of the present work has, as it were, painted him in an oblique but brilliant light, with the shadows and accents so disposed as to make of the portrait an interpretation as well as a likeness. It is a treacherous method by which to write biography, being at once the most difficult to do well and by far the most effective when it is well done. It is a method which requires on the part of the biographical artist a knowledge that is complete and profound, a mastery of all the details and an understanding of the importance of their relationship to each other. Only when the informed reader is convinced that such omniscience as this has been achieved will he unprotestingly permit that selection of certain details and rejection of others which is essential to this biographical method. There can be no question of Dr. Metcalf’s firsthand familiarity with his material; this is evident, although unobstrusively so, in every paragraph which he has written.

Nor can there be much variation of opinion as to his skill as an artist; few readers will deny, I think, that we have here the fascinating picture of a fascinating man, painted by a deft, experienced hand, with sympathy restrained by irony: a distinguished literary achievement.

And in an age when so many “berries harsh and crude” are plucked prematurely from the bushes of scholarship it is all the more pleasant to be offered for once the ripened, mellow fruit.