Publisher's Synopsis
From the INTRODUCTION
De Quincey has in our day no reputation as a literary critic. He lives for the world as the English Opium-Eater, for the student as the writer of a rare kind of imaginative prose.
Yet his critical work gives a fuller revelation of his many-sided genius than his more purely imaginative writings, and it has a high intrinsic value in its sincerity, its subtlety, and, to use a word which De Quincey himself applied to the highest function of literature, its power.
He was well equipped at the outset for the business of criticism. His subtle intellect was wedded to an imagination lofty and penetrating in a rare degree, and to this natural endowment he had added, by the time that he started upon his desultory career as a critic, an immense store of learning gathered from books, and a very real and intense, if limited experience of life. With all this, his achievement as a critic is disappointing. Every reader of De Quincey is familiar with the element of caprice that is present in his best work, in his imaginative prose-pieces he is apt to tumble his reader without a moment's warning from the heights of impassioned contemplation to the flats of mere commonplace. A consummate master of stately rhythm, and a reverent and discerning user of words, he will yet, when the whim seizes him, ' have a shy ' at his patient reader (to use his own expression) with a jaunty colloquialism or a raw slang phrase. And the subject fares no better than the style, - at one moment receiving serious attention, at another put at the mercy of an unceremonious jest, or carelessly dropped in favour of some more attractive theme.
De Quincey has left a heterogeneous mass of prose, in which passages of profound reflection alternate with pages of rambling, incoherent argument or trivial reminiscence, and pieces of serious and subtle criticism lie bedded in matter whose interest is long since dead, or whose value belongs to a lower plane. Such a writer lends himself pre-eminently to selection. His was a mind which put the whole of its powers and possessions at the disposal of a given theme, and he scattered his good things with a free hand. His articles have been conveniently classified into autobiographical, political, speculative, critical, and so forth, but speculation and criticism are to be looked for in each and all. The purpose of this volume is to comprise in small compass what is most valuable in his critical writing. Two complete essays are given, those on Pope and on ' The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth ', and a third, that on Rhetoric, is complete except for the abridgement of a tedious and technical argument near the beginning. The second part of the book is given up to passages, disentangled, from their context in the various essays and articles of the sixteen volumes of the Edinburgh edition, and grouped under headings. These fragments of their author's voluminous writings need some kind of introduction.
One of De Quincey's guardians used to say of his refractory young ward that he 'followed his own devil'. He did so in literature no less than in life. He was an eccentric. His genius moved upon an orbit of its own; and he seems as an author to call imperatively for that kind of criticism which Carlyle so warmly advocates. We need to know his merits before we pronounce upon his faults. We need to feel his strength before we deprecate his weakness. We need to understand enough of the elements which went to form his nature, and the influences under which it developed, to be able to see his irregularities and perversities in their right relation to that particular mode of power which he wielded as an author....
