One of the best known of De Quincey's critical maxims is his distinction, after Wordsworth, between the Literature of Knowledge, which he would call Literature only by courtesy, and the Literature of Power, which alone he regarded as Literature proper. My belief is that the distinction has been overworked in the form in which De Quincey put it forth, and that it would require a great deal of reëxplication and modification to bring it into defensible and permanent shape. As it would be unpardonable, however, to omit this De Quinceyism in a sketch of De Quincey's opinions, here is one of the passages in which he expounds it:

THE LITERATURE oF KNOWLEDGE AND THE LITERATURE Of Power

In that great social organ which, collectively, we call Literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move: the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. 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, in and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honourable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated and continually called out into exercise by the great phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, &c., it is certain that, like any animal power or muscular energy falling into disuse, all such sensibilities would gradually drop and dwindle. It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal, by suggestion or coöperation, with the mere discursive understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scrip

tures speak not of the understanding, but of "the 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 the infinite. 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. Hence the preeminency over all authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of knowledge is but a provisional work, a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, nay, let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence, — first, as regards absolute truth; secondly, when that combat was over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And, as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons even from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra,2 but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the Iliad, the Prometheus of Eschylus, the Othello or King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, or the Paradise Lost, are not militant, but triumphant forever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce them in new forms or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo. Works, viii. 5-9.

I. HUMOROUS EXTRAVAGANZAS: The paragon in this kind is, of course, Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts. There are, however, occasional passages of frolicsome invention through the other papers; and the entire paper Sortilege and Astrology may be taken as a jeu d'esprit of the same sort.

II. INCIDENTS OF REAL LIFE AND PASSAGES OF HISTORY TREATED IMAGINATIVELY:- In addition to the poetic versions of incidents from real life that are interwrought with the expressly autobiographic writings, there ought to be mentioned specially the paper entitled Early Memorials of Grasmere. It is the story of the loss of two peasants, a husband and his wife, among the hills, during a snowstorm in the Lake District, in the year 1807. In the same group, on grounds of literary principle, may be reckoned the 1 [During good behaviour, as long as it shall conduct itself well.]

2 [The shadow of a name.]

D

story called The Spanish Military Nun and the paper entitled Joan of Arc. As has been already hinted, The Revolt of the Tartars might rank in the same high company.

III. NOVELETTES AND ROMANCES: Chief among these is De Quincey's one-volume novel or romance, Klosterheim, published in 1832, and unfortunately not included in the edition of his collected works, nor accessible at present in any form, to any of her Majesty's subjects, except by importation of an American reprint. In connection with this independent attempt in prose-fiction, we may remember the short story or novelette called The Avenger (reprinted in Vol. XVI. from Blackwood's Magazine of 1838) and Walladmor, the pseudo-Waverley Novel of 1824, which De Quincey translated from the German. There are, besides, some novelettes from the German, reprinted in the collective edition.

IV. PROSE PHANTASIES AND LYRICS: — Although De Quincey ranked the whole of his Confessions as properly an example of that "mode of impassioned prose" in which he thought there had been few or no precedents in English, it is enough here to remember those parts of the Confessions which may be distinguished as dream phantasies." To be added, under our present heading (besides passages in the Autobiographic Sketches), are The Daughter of Lebanon, the extraordinary paper in three parts called The English Mail Coach, and the little cluster of fragments called Suspiria de Profundis (i.e. "Sighs from the Depths"), being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In fact, however, only three of the six fragments there gathered under the common name of "Suspiria" are either "lyrics" or 'phantasies," the rest being critical or psychological. The three entitled to a place here are those entitled Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, Savannahla-Mar, and Memorial Suspiria.

The celebrity of the essay On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts is not surprising. The ghastly originality of the conception, the humorous irony with which it is sustained by stroke after stroke, and the mad frenzy of the closing scene, where the assembled club of amateurs in murder, with Toad-in-the-hole leading them, drink their toasts, and sing their chorus in honour of certain superlative specimens of their favourite art, leave an impression altogether exceptional, as of pleasure mixed illegitimately with the forbidden and horrible. For a lighter and more genial specimen of De Quincey in his whimsical vein, Sortilege and Astrology may be cordially recommended. To pass from such papers to Early Memorials of Grasmere, The Spanish Military Nun, and Joan of Arc, gives one a fresh idea of the versatility of his powers. The first, describing winter among the English Lakes, and telling the tragic story of George and Sarah Green, and of the bravery of their little girl left in charge of the cottage to which they were never to return alive, has all the mournful beauty of a commemorative prose-poem. The second, which

is a narrative, from historical materials, of the adventures of a daring Spanish girl, in man's disguise, first in Spain and then in the Spanish parts of the new world, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, is in De Quincey's most characteristic style of mingled humour and earnestness, and has all the fascination of one of the best of the Spanish picaresque romances. The paper on Joan of Arc, though brief, is nobly perfect. "What is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that, like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea, rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings?" Opening in this strain of poetic solemnity, the paper maintains the same high tone throughout; and, if it does not leave the question answered by enshrining the image of the Maid of Orleans in a sufficient vision of glory, there is no such answer in the English language.

De Quincey included in his collected works two short tales of clever humour, called The Incognito, or Count Fitzhum, and The King of Hayti, and a third, called The Dice, a short story of devilry and black art, describing the first as "translated from the German of Dr. Schultze," and the other two merely as "from the German." Passing these and a fourth tale, called The Fatal Marksman, which is somewhat in the style of the third, and seems also to be from the German (though that is not stated), we have, as the single original novelette of De Quincey among the collected works, the strange piece called The Avenger. It is a story, wholly fantastic and sensational, but quite in De Quincey's vein, of a series of appalling and mysterious murders supposed to happen in a German town in the year 1816, and of the astounding discovery at last that they have all been the work of a certain magnificent youth, Maximilian Wyndham, of mixed English and Jewish descent, and of immense wealth, who had come to reside in the town, in the house of one of the University professors, with high Russian credentials and universal acceptance among the citizens. He had come thither nominally to complete his studies but really in pursuit of a secret scheme of vengeance upon those of the inhabitants who had been concerned in certain deadly injuries and dishonours done to his family, and especially to his Jewish mother. The story does not appear to have been much

read; and admirers of De Quincey may judge from this description of it whether it is worth looking up. It may be even more necessary to give some account of Klosterheim, or the Masque.

As originally published by Blackwood in 1832, it was a small prettily-printed volume of 305 pages, without De Quincey's name after the title, but only the words "By the English Opium-Eater." It would make about half a volume in the collective edition of the works, were it included there.

The scene of the story is an imaginary German city, Klosterheim, with its forest-neighbourhood; and the time is the winter of 1633, with part of the year 1634, or just at that point of the great Thirty Years' War when, after the death of GustavusAdolphus, his Swedish generals are maintaining the war against the Imperialists, and all Germany is in confusion and misery with the marchings and counter-marchings, the ravagings and counterravagings, of the opposed armies. The Klosterheimers, as good Catholics, are mainly in sympathy with the Imperialists, but are in the peculiar predicament of being subject to a gloomy and tyrannical Landgrave, who, though a bigoted Roman Catholic, has reasons of his own for cultivating the Swedish alliance, and is in fact in correspondence with the Swedes. A leading spirit among them, and especially among the University students, is a certain splendid soldier-youth, Maximilian, a stranger from a distance. So, when the Klosterheimers are in excitement over the approach to their city, through the forest, of a travelling mass of pilgrims, under Imperialist convoy, all the way from Vienna, and over the chances that the poor pilgrims may be attacked and cut to pieces by a certain brutal Holkerstein, the head of a host of marauders who prowl through the forest, who but this Maximilian is the man to execute the general desire of Klosterheim by evading the orders of the cruel Landgrave and carrying armed aid to the pilgrims? Well that he has done so; for in the midst of the pilgrim-cavalcade, and the chief personage in it, is his own lady-love, the noble Paulina, a relative of the Emperor, and intrusted by him with despatches. The lovers meet; and, save for a night-alarm, in the course of which the portmanteau of secret despatches is abstracted by robbers from Lady Paulina's carriage, there is no accident till the pilgrims are close to Kloster

There, in the night-time, Holkerstein and his host of marauders do fall upon them. There is a dreadful night-battle; and, though the marauding host is beaten off, chiefly by the heroic