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our literature, and to breathe a breath of life through the worn-out, or, at least, torpid organization of the national mind. He belonged, I thought, to the old literature; and, as a poet, he certainly does. There were in his verses minute scintillations of genius-now and then, even a subtle sense of beauty; and there were shy graces, lurking half-unseen, like violets in the shade. But there was no power on a colossal scale; no breadth; no choice of great subjects; no wrestling with difficulty; no creative energy So I thought then; and so I should think now, if Lamb were viewed chiefly as a poet. Since those days he has estab- 15 lished his right to a seat in any company. But why? and in what character? As "Elia":-the essays of "Elia" are as exquisite a gem amongst the jewelry of literature as any nation can show. They do not, indeed, suggest to the typifying imagination a Last Supper of da Vinci or a Group from the Sistine Chapel, but they suggest some exquisite cabinet painting; such, for instance, as that Carlo Dolce known to all who have visited Lord Exeter's place of Burleigh (by the way, I bar the allusion to Charles Lamb which a shameless punster suggests in the name Carlo Dolce1); and in this also resembling that famous picturethat many critics (Hazlitt amongst others) can see little or nothing in it. Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum !2 Those, therefore, err, in my opinion, who present Lamb to our notice amongst the poets. Very 35 pretty, very elegant, very tender, very beautiful verses he has written; nay, twice he has written verses of extraordinary force, almost demoniac force-viz., The Three Graves, and The Gipsy's Malison.3 But 40 speaking generally, he writes verses as one to whom that function was a secondary and occasional function, not his original and natural vocation-not an ěpyov, but a πάρεργον 4

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For the reasons, therefore, I have given, never thinking of Charles Lamb as a poet, and, at that time, having no means for judging of him in any other character, I had requested the letter of introduction to 50 him rather with a view to some further knowledge of Coleridge (who was then ab

1 Italian for "sweet Charles."

How not at all in accord with your taste, Pa

pinianus. Papinianus (175-212) was a famous Roman lawyer and jurist. De Quincey means Hazlitt. The expression is found on the title page of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, For these poems, see p. 917.

Not a vocation, but an avocation.

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sent from England) than from any special interest about Lamb himself. However, I felt the extreme discourtesy of approaching a man and asking for his time and civility under such an avowal: and the letter, therefore, as I believe, or as I requested, represented me in the light of an admirer. I hope it did; for that character might have some excuse for what followed, and heal the unpleasant impression likely to be left by a sort of fracas which occurred at my first meeting with Lamb. This was so characteristic of Lamb that I have often laughed at it since I came to know what was characteristic of Lamb.

But first let me describe my brief introductory call upon him at the India House. I had been told that he was never to be found at home except in the evenings; and to have called then would have been, in a manner, forcing myself upon his hospitalities, and at a moment when he might have confidential friends about him; besides that, he was sometimes tempted away to the theatres. I went, therefore, to the India House; made inquiries amongst the servants; and, after some trouble (for that was early in his Leadenhall Street career, and possibly he was not much known), I was shown into a small room, or else a small section of a large one (thirty-four years affects one's remembrance of some circumstances), in which was a very lofty writing desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part of the floor on which the profane-the laity, like myself-were allowed to approach the clerus, or clerkly rulers of the room. Within the railing sat, to the best of my remembrance, six quill-driving gentlemen; not gentlemen whose duty or profession it was merely to drive the quill, but who were then driving it-gens de plume,1 such in esse, as well as in posse-in act as well as habit; for, as if they supposed me a spy sent by some superior power to report upon the situation of affairs as surprised by me, they were all too profoundly immersed in their oriental studies to have any sense of my presence. Consequently, I was reduced to a necessity of announcing myself and my errand. I walked, therefore, into one of the two open doorways of the railing, and stood closely by the high stool of him who occupied the first place within the little aisle. I touched his arm, by way of recalling him from his lofty Leadenhall speculation to this sublunary world; and, presenting my letter,

1 men of the pen

asked if that gentleman (pointing to the address) were really a citizen of the present room; for I had been repeatedly mislead, by the directions given me, into wrong rooms. The gentleman smiled; it was a smile not to be forgotten. This was Lamb. And here occurred a very, very little incident-one of those which pass so fugitively that they are gone and hurrying away into Lethe almost before your attention can have arrested them; but it was an incident which, to me, who happened to notice it, served to express the courtesy and delicate consideration of Lamb's manner. The seat upon which he sat was a very high one; so absurdly high, by the way, that I can imagine no possible use or sense in such an altitude, unless it were to restrain the occupant from playing truant at the fire by opposing Alpine difficulties to his descent.

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Whatever might be the original purpose of this aspiring seat, one serious dilemma arose from it, and this it was which gave the occasion to Lamb's act of courtesy. Some- 25 where there is an anecdote, meant to illustrate the ultra-obsequiousness of the man, either I have heard of it in connection with some actual man known to myself, or it is told in a book of some historical coxcomb,that, being on horseback, and meeting some person or other whom it seemed advisable to flatter, he actually dismounted, in order to pay his court by a more ceremonious bow. In Russia, as we all know, this was, at one time, upon meeting any of the Imperial family, an act of legal necessity: and there, accordingly, but there only, it would have worn no ludicrous aspect. Now, in this situation of Lamb's, the act of descending from his throne, a very elaborate process, with steps and stages analogous to those on horseback-of slipping your right foot out of the stirrup, throwing your leg over the crupper, etc.-was, to all intents and purposes, the same thing as dismounting from a great elephant of a horse. Therefore it both was, and was felt to be by Lamb, supremely ludicrous. On the other hand, to have sate still and stately upon this aerial station, to have bowed condescendingly from this altitude, would have been-not ludicrous indeed; performed by a very superb person and supported by a superb bow, it might have been vastly fine, and even terrifying to many young gentlemen under sixteen; but it would have had an air of ungentlemanly assumption. Between these extremes, therefore, Lamb had to choose;

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between appearing ridiculous himself for a moment, by going through a ridiculous evolution which no man could execute with grace; or, on the other hand, appearing lofty and assuming, in a degree which his truly humble nature (for he was the humblest of men in the pretensions which he put forward for himself) must have shrunk from with horror. Nobody who knew Lamb can doubt how the problem was solved: he began to dismount instantly; and, as it happened that the very first round of his descent obliged him to turn his back upon me as if for a sudden purpose of flight, he had an excuse for laughing; which he did heartily -saying, at the same time, something to this effect that I must not judge from first appearances; that he should revolve upon me; that he was not going to fly; and other facetiæ, which challenged a general laugh from the clerical brotherhood.

When he had reached the basis of terra firma on which I was standing, naturally, as a mode of thanking him for his courtesy, I presented my hand; which, in a general case, I should certainly not have done; for I cherished, in an ultra-English degree, the English custom (a wise custom) of bowing in frigid silence on a first introduction to a stranger; but, to a man of literary talent, and one who had just practiced so much kindness in my favor at so probable a hazard to himself of being laughed at for his pains, I could not maintain that frosty reserve. Lamb took my hand; did not absolutely reject it: but rather repelled my advance by his manner. This, however, long afterwards I found, was only a habit derived from his too great sensitiveness to the variety of people's feelings, which run through a gamut so infinite of degrees and modes as to make it unsafe for any man who respects himself to be too hasty in his allowances of familiarity Lamb had, as he was entitled to have, a high self-respect; and me he probably suspected (as a young Oxonian) of some aristocratic tendencies. The letter of introduction, containing (I imagine) no matters of business, was speedily run through; and I instantly received an invitation to spend the evening with him. Lamb was not one of those who catch at the chance of escaping from a bore by fixing some distant day, when accidents (in duplicate proportion, perhaps, to the number of intervening days) may have carried you away from the place: he sought to benefit by no luck of that kind; for he was, with his limited income-and I say it deliberately

positively the most hospitable man I have known in this world. That night, the same night, I was to come and spend the evening with him. I had gone to the India House with the express purpose of accepting whatever invitation he should give me; and, therefore, I accepted this, took my leave, and left Lamb in the act of resuming his aerial position.

I was to come so early as to drink tea with Lamb; and the hour was seven. He lived in the Temple; and I, who was not then, as afterwards I became, a student and member of "the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple," did not know much of the localities. However, I found out his abode, not greatly beyond my time: nobody had been asked to meet me,-which a little surprised me, but I was glad of it; for, besides Lamb, there was present his sister, Miss Lamb, of whom, and whose talents and sweetness of disposition, I had heard. I turned the conversation, upon the first opening which offered, to the subject of Coleridge; and many of my questions were answered satisfactorily, because seriously, by Miss Lamb. But Lamb took a pleasure in baffling me, or in throwing ridicule upon the subject. Out of this grew the matter of our affray. We were speaking of The Ancient Mariner.1 Now, to explain what followed, and a little to excuse myself, I must beg the reader to understand that I was under twenty years of age, and that my admiration for Coleridge (as, in perhaps a still greater degree, for Wordsworth) was literally in no respect short of a religious feeling: it had, indeed, all the sanctity of religion, and all the tenderness of a human veneration. Then, also, to imagine the strength which it would derive from circumstances that do not exist now, but did then, let the reader further suppose a case-not such as he may have known since that era about Sir Walter Scotts and Lord Byrons, where every man you could possibly fall foul of, early or late, night or day, summer or winter, was in perfect readiness to feel and express his sympathy with the admirerbut when no man, beyond one or two in each ten thousand, had so much as heard of either Coleridge or Wordsworth, and that one, or those two, knew them only to scorn them, trample on them, spit upon them. Men so abject in public estimation, I maintain, as that Coleridge and that Wordsworth, had not existed before, have not existed since,

1 See p. 335.

will not exist again. We have heard in old times of donkeys insulting effete or dying. lions by kicking them; but in the case of Coleridge and Wordsworth it was effete donkeys that kicked living lions. They, Coleridge and Wordsworth, were the Pariahs1 of literature in those days: as much scorned wherever they were known; but escaping that scorn only because they were as little known as Pariahs, and even more obscure.

Well, after this bravura,2 by way of conveying my sense of the real position then occupied by these two authors-a position which thirty and odd years have altered, by a revolution more astonishing and total than ever before happened in literature or in life-let the reader figure to himself the sensitive horror with which a young person, carrying his devotion about with him, of necessity, as the profoundest of secrets, like a primitive Christian amongst a nation of Pagans, or a Roman Catholic convert amongst the bloody idolators of Japan3in Oxford, above all places, hoping for no sympathy, and feeling a daily grief, almost a shame, in harboring this devotion to that which, nevertheless, had done more for the expansion and sustenance of his own inner mind than all literature besides-let the reader figure, I say, to himself, the shock with which such a person must recoil from hearing the very friend and associate of these authors utter what seemed at that time a burning ridicule of all which belonged to them their books, their thoughts, their places, their persons. This had gone on for some time before we came upon the ground of The Ancient Mariner; I had been grieved, perplexed, astonished; and how else could I have felt reasonably, knowing nothing of Lamb's propensity to mystify a stranger; he, on the other hand, knowing nothing of the depth of my feelings on these subjects, and that they were not so much mere literary preferences as something that went deeper than life or household affections? At length, when he had given utterance to some ferocious canon of judgment, which seemed to question the entire value of the poem, I said, perspiring (I dare say) in this detestable crisis-"But, Mr. Lamb, good heavens! how is it possible you can allow yourself in such 1 outcasts (A Pariah properly is a member of a very extensive low caste in Southern India, but the name was extended to members of any low Hindu caste, and by Europeans applied to persons of no caste.)

2 Bravura is a brilliant style of music. 3 Japan persecuted Christians until the middle of the 19th century.

opinions? What instance could you bring from the poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?"-"Instances?" said Lamb: "oh, I'll instance you, if you come to that. Instance, indeed! Pray, what do you say to this

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The many men so beautiful, And they all dead did lie?i So beautiful, indeed! Beautiful! think of such a gang of Wapping vagabonds, all covered with pitch, and chewing tobacco; and the old gentleman himselfwhat do you call him?-the bright-eyed fellow?'' What more might follow I never heard; for, at this point, in a perfect rapture of horror, I raised my hands-both hands-to both ears; and, without stopping to think or to apologize, I endeavored to restore equanimity to my disturbed sensibilities by shutting out all further knowledge of Lamb's impieties. At length he seemed to have finished; so I, on my part, thought I might venture to take off the embargo: and in fact he had ceased; but no sooner did he find me restored to my hearing than he said with a most sarcastic smile -which he could assume upon occasion"If you please, sir, we'll say grace before we begin." I know not whether Lamb were really piqued or not at the mode by which I had expressed my disturbance: Miss Lamb certainly was not; her goodness led her to pardon me, and to treat me-in whatever light she might really view my almost involuntary rudeness-as the party who had suffered wrong; and, for the rest of the evening, she was so pointedly kind and conciliatory in her manner that I felt greatly ashamed of my boyish failure in self-command. Yet, after all, Lamb necessarily appeared so much worse, in my eyes, as a traitor is worse than an open enemy.

Lamb, after this one visit-not knowing at that time any particular reason for continuing to seek his acquaintance-I did not trouble with my calls for some years. At length, however, about the year 1808, and for the six or seven following years, in my evening visits to Coleridge, I used to meet him again; not often, but sufficiently to correct the altogether very false impression I had received of his character and manners.

...

1 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 236-7 (p. 338).

The district of Wapping along the Thames in
London, is the favorite haunt of sailors.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 20 (p. 335).

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STYLE

1840-41

From PART I

It is a fault, amongst many faults, of such works as we have on this subject of style, that they collect the list of qualities, good or bad, to which composition is liable, not under any principle from which they might be deduced à priori, so as to be assured that all had been enumerated, but by a tentative groping, a mere conjectural estimate. The word style has with us a twofold meaning: one sense, the narrow one, expressing the mere synthesis onomatōn,1 the syntaxis or combination of words into sentences; the other of far wider extent, and expressing all possible relations that can arise between thoughts and words-the total effect of a writer, as derived from manner. Style may be viewed as an organic thing and as a mechanic thing. By organic, we mean that which, being acted upon, reacts, and which propogates the communicated power without loss; by mechanic, that which, being impressed with motion, cannot throw it back without loss, and therefore soon comes to an end. The human body is an elaborate system of organs; it is sustained by organs. But the human body is exercised as a machine, and, as such, may be viewed in the arts of riding, dancing, leaping, etc., subject to the laws of motion and equilibrium. Now, the use of words is an organic thing, in so far as language is connected with thoughts and modified with thoughts. It is a mechanic thing, in so far as words in combination determine or modify each other. The science of style, as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style. The science of style, considered as a machine, in which words act upon words, and through a particular grammar, might be called the mechanology of style. It is of little importance by what name these two functions of composition are expressed. But it is of great importance not to confound the functions; that function by which style maintains a commerce with thought, and that by which it chiefly communicates with grammar and with words. A pedant only will insist upon the names; but the distinction in the ideas, under some name, can be neglected only by the man who is careless of logic.

We know not how far we may be ever

1 putting together of nouns (See Aristotle's Rhetoric, III, 2, 2, 26.)

called upon to proceed with this discussion: if it should happen that we were, an interesting field of questions would lie before us for the first part, the organology. It would lead us over the ground trodden by the Greek and Roman rhetoricians; and over those particular questions which have arisen by the contrast between the circumstances of the ancients and our own since the origin of printing. Punctuation,1 trivial as such an innovation may seem, was the product of typography; and it is interesting to trace the effects upon style even of that one slight addition to the resources of logic. Previously, a man was driven to depend for his security against misunderstanding upon the pure virtue of his syntax. Miscollocation or dislocation of related words disturbed the whole sense; its least effect was to give no sense; often it gave a dangerous sense. Now, punctuation was an artificial machinery for maintaining the integrity of the sense against all mistakes of the writer; and, as one consequence, it withdrew the energy of men's anxieties from the natural machinery, which lay in just and careful arrangement. Another and still greater machinery of art for the purpose of maintaining the sense, and with the effect of relaxing the care of the writer, lay in the exquisitely artificial structure of the Latin language, which, by means of its terminal forms, indicated the arrangement, and referred the proper predicate to the proper subject, spite of all that affectation or negligence could do to disturb the series of the logic or the succession of the syntax. Greek, of course, had the same advantage in kind, but not in degree; and thence rose some differences which have escaped all notice of rhetoricians. Here also would properly arise the question started by Charles Fox (but probably due originally

to the conversation of some far subtler friend, such as Edmund Burke), how far the practice of footnotes-a practice purely modern in its form-is reconcilable with the laws of just composition; and whether in virtue, though not in form, such footnotes did not exist for the ancients, by an evasion we could point out. The question is clearly one which grows out of style in its relations to thought-how far, viz., such an excrescence as a note argues that the sentence to which it is attached has not received the benefit of a full development for the conception involved; whether if thrown into the furnace again and remelted, it might not be so recast as to absorb the redundancy which had previously flowed over into a note. Under this head would fall not only all the differential questions of style and composition between us and the ancients, but also the questions of merit as fairly distributed amongst the moderns compared with each other. The French, as we recently insisted,2 undoubtedly possess one vast advantage over all other nations in the good taste which governs the arrangement of their sentences; in the simplicity (a strange pretension to make for anything French) of the modulation under which their thoughts flow; in the absence of all cumbrous involution, and in the quick succession of their periods. In reality this invaluable merit tends to an excess; and the style coupé as opposed to the style soutenu, flippancy opposed to gravity, the subsultory to the continuous, these are the two frequent extremities to which the French manner betrays men. Better, however, to be flippant than, by a revolting form of tumor and perplexity, to lead men into habits of intellect such as result from the modern vice of English style. Still, with all its practical value, it is evident that the intellectual merits of the French style are but small.

They

secondly, founded in the accident of their colloquial necessities. The law of conversation has prescribed the model of their sentences; and in that law there is quite as much of self-interest at work as of respect for equity. Hanc veniam petimusque da

1 Probably a reference to the habit of the an cients of incorporating foot-note material in a parenthesis in the text.

In an earlier part of the essay.

3 sentences

concise style as opposed to lofty style leaping; bounding

For a corrective of this unsound view, see F. Brunetière's "The French Mastery of Style," The Atlantic Monthly, 80, 442.