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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
1784 – 1859

“De Quincey,” Baudelaire said, “is essentially digressive; the term humorist can be applied to him more appropriately than to anyone else. At one point, he compares his own thought to a thyrsus, a simple rod that derives its entire physiognomy and charm from the complicated foliage entwined around it.” In his two famous memoirs (1827 and 1839), published together as On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, he attempts to lay hold of crime not, as he says, “by its moral handle,” but in an extrasensory, wholly intellectual manner, and to consider it solely in function of the more or less remarkable gifts that it brings into play. Leaving aside the all-too-conventional horror it inspires, murder, according to him, demands to be treated aesthetically and appreciated in terms of its qualities, as one would appreciate a work of art or medical case study. The object of pure speculation that it thus becomes is mainly valuable insofar as it meets certain criteria: mystery, indeterminacy of motives, obstacles overcome, breadth and splendor of its success. Brilliantly filling a single one of these conditions, moreover, can be deemed satisfactory: “There was … an unfinished design of Thurtell’s for the murder of a man with a pair of dumb-bells, which I admired greatly.” One of the book’s heroes, Toad-in-the-hole, an extremely unnerving convulsive character, is identified with the “Old Man of the Mountains,” precursor and master of the art, a “shining light” who later dazzled Alfred Jarry.* In an 1854 postscript to his book on three exemplary murders, the author justifies the willful extravagance of his developments by his desire not to completely abandon levity in such a shocking context, and he lengthily invokes the precedent of Swift.

“The reader,” De Quincey says elsewhere, “will think I am laughing … Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery.”* Few lives were as pathetic as his, few stories as cruel or as marvelous. He wasn’t yet seventeen when he ran away from the provincial school in which his guardians were trying to keep him. Soon out of resources, he wandered through Wales, surviving on blackberries and rosehips. He nonetheless managed to reach London, where he found shelter in a large abandoned house that was occupied at mealtimes by a weasel-faced businessman and, day and night, by a timid ten-year-old girl who acted as this enigmatic fellow’s servant. At breakfast, his host left him some crusts of bread, and the little girl huddled against him to sleep on the floor. In the course of his peregrinations around London, the young De Quincey, who made it a philosophical policy to converse familiarly with anyone—man, woman, or child—that he might meet, fell into a platonic romance with a sixteen-year-old prostitute, Ann, an adorable creature full of tenderness and innocence. Baudelaire dreamed of plucking “a feather from an angel’s wing” with which to describe all the love and desperation that bound those two together. “Poor Ann,” recounted Marcel Schwob, “ran to Thomas De Quincey … as he stumbled in wide Oxford Street under the hefty street lamps. Her eyes brimming with tears, she held a glass of port wine to his lips, kissed and caressed him; then she disappeared once more into the night. She might have died not long afterward. ‘She was coughing,’ said De Quincey, ‘the last time I saw her.’ Perhaps she was still wandering the streets. But although he looked high and low, although he was ridiculed by all he approached, Ann was lost forever. When later he had a warm house to live in, he often thought with tears in his eyes that poor Ann should have been living there, with him, instead of (as he imagined her) being ill, or dying, or desperate, in the central darkness of a London brothel. She had taken with her all the pitiful love that was in his heart.”*

Lost forever? No, for at least she returned seventeen years later to haunt his opium-eater’s dreams (it was only in 1812 that he began using drugs, to overcome the suffering caused by his long earlier experience of hunger). Her luminous apparition again calmed the torments of utter perdition that are, in De Quincey, the terrible underside of “the most astonishing, the most complicated, the most splendid vision.”

No one ever showed a deeper compassion for human misery than De Quincey. His sense of universal brotherhood led him, in 1819, to become a passionate admirer of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and to attempt a contribution to the development of this new science (Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political Economy). By dint of this very compassion, no one ever showed greater disdain for established reputations: “Generally speaking, the few people whom I have disliked in this world were flourishing people, of good repute. Whereas the knaves whom I have known, one and all, and by no means few, I think of with pleasure and kindness.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 1839, etc.

* Cf. Days and Nights (1897).

* Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

* Le Livre de Monelle.

ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS

But it is now time that I should say a few words about the principles of murder, not with a view to regulate your practice, but your judgments. As to old women, and the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more. First, then, let us speak of the kind of person who is adapted to the purpose of the murderer; secondly, of the place where; thirdly, of the time when, and other little circumstances.

As to the person, I suppose it is evident that he ought to be a good man, because, if he were not, he might himself, by possibility, be contemplating murder at the very time; and such “diamond-cut-diamond” tussles, though pleasant enough where nothing better is stirring, are really not what a critic can allow himself to call murders. I could mention some people (I name no names) who have been murdered by other people in a dark lane; and so far all seemed correct enough; but, on looking further into the matter, the public have become aware that the murdered party was himself, at the moment, planning to rob his murderer, at the least, and possibly to murder him, if he had been strong enough. Whenever that is the case, or may be thought to be the case, farewell to all the genuine effects of the art. For the final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy in Aristotle’s account of it; viz. “to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror.” Now, terror there may be, but how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?

It is also evident that the person selected ought not to be a public character. For instance, no judicious artist would have attempted to murder Abraham Newland.^* For the case was this: everybody read so much about Abraham Newland, and so few people ever saw him, that to the general belief he was a mere abstract idea. And I remember that once, when I happened to mention that I had dined at a coffee-house in company with Abraham Newland, everybody looked scornfully at me, as though I had pretended to have played at billiards with Prester John, or to have had an affair of honor with the Pope. And, by the way, the Pope would be a very improper person to murder; for he has such a virtual ubiquity as the father of Christendom, and, like the cuckoo, is so often heard but never seen, that I suspect most people regard him also as an abstract idea. Where, indeed, a public man is in the habit of giving dinners, “with every delicacy of the season,” the case is very different: every person is satisfied that he is no abstract idea; and, therefore, there can be no impropriety in murdering him; only that his murder will fall into the class of assassinations, which I have not yet treated.

Thirdly. The subject chosen ought to be in good health; for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to bear it. On this principle, no tailor ought to be chosen who is above twenty-five, for after that age he is sure to be dyspeptic. Or, at least, if a man will hunt in that warren, he will of course think it his duty, on the old established equation, to murder some multiple of 9—say 18, 27, or 36. And here, in this benign attention to the comfort of sick people, you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine the feelings. The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display in this point is enough for them. But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all the other liberal arts when thoroughly mastered, the result is, to humanize the heart; so true is it that

“Ingenuas didicisse fideoliter artes

Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.”

A philosophic friend, well known for his philanthropy and general benignity, suggests that the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions, by way of deepening the pathos. And, undoubtedly, this is a judicious caution. Yet I would not insist too keenly on such a condition. Severe good taste unquestionably suggests it; but still, where the man was otherwise unobjectionable in point of morals and health, I would not look with too curious a jealousy to a restriction which might have the effect of narrowing the artist’s sphere.

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* Abraham Newland [chief cashier of the Bank of England] is now utterly forgotten. But, when this was written [1827], his name had not ceased to ring in British cars, as the most familiar and most significant that perhaps has ever existed. It was the name which appeared on the face of all Bank of England notes, great or small; and had been, for more than a quarter of a century (especially through the whole career of the French Revolution), a shorthand expression for paper money in its safest form. [De Quincey’s note]