534
PARTISAN REVIEW
and their overwhelming psychological wisdom. However, they
art
not much like the Goncourts because of their unique tenderness and
their striking innocence of worldliness. Grasmere is one thing,
Pam
another; in Paris you dine with Gautier at the Princess Mathilde's,
here you walk twenty miles in the rain with Dorothy and
William
Wordsworth. The lonely hills nourish eccentricity, not scandal. Noble
and loving as they are, De Quincey's impressions provoked resent–
ment
in
Wordsworth, Southey, and those of Coleridge's relatives
living at the time of publication. They do indeed have their tragic
moments: that horrible lodging in London where Coleridge lay
in
the pain and confusion of laudanum, wretchedly facing his series of
lectures at the Royal Institute. They do not lack comedy, either.
De Quincey adored Wordsworth, still, "useful as they proved them–
selves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental." And
then this distinguished poet also had a remarkable narrowness and
droop about the shoulders which caused Dorothy, walking behind
him, to exclaim, "Is it possible- can that be William? How very
mean he looks!" Southey may have felt his calm, regular habit of
life,
his
immense energy, his library of beautifully bound books were
a bit too faithfully described by De Quincey; one senses in them
an overgrowth of secondary literary powers which crowd out the
more messy ones of the first magnitude. Nevertheless the genius
of everyone, and most of all of De Quincey himself, is brilliantly
served by these essays. We would not for anything be without
that
picture of Wordsworth cutting the pages of one of Southey's lovely
books with a greasy butter knife.
In De Quincey and Boswell's
Johnson
there is hardly a hint of
"sex"-the subjects are
all
extremely eccentric in their lack of con–
centration on this instinct. Our own age is even more prudish
in
this respect; conversational and fictional freedom has increased,
in
memoirs and living portraits the license has been nearly revoked
so
that one gets round-about psychoanalytical hints based upon facts
which are not revealed. It would be very difficult for us to write,
without somehow turning it into an ambiguity or a joke, "At last
I have met Andre Gide," but we can hardly imagine the malice of
writing, "I have met Gide, but he was distracted by the sight of a
beautiful young boy on the beach ..."
An
interesting scene of this
sort occurs in Roger Martin du Gard. He says that he showed
his
