Gents Mag 1857 part 2 p.112
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Gentleman's Magazine 1857 part 2 p.112
[Gil]fillan, once said of him,- "the best word always comes up." There seems something of an intuition in this felicity in the choice of words; but it presupposes a vast acquaintance with the vocabulary of all knowledge, which is the storehouse that he chooses from. It is, we suspect, mainly to make use of the one best word, that he affects "a frequent use of scolastic terms, and the forms of logic," - a peculiarity which has been objected to as a fault in his style. It is where these terms and formulae give to the expression of his ideas an exactness not obviously attainable by other means, that he employs them, not else. A merit scarcely less marvellous than his invariable choice of the best word, is the clearness which he maintains amongst the successive clauses of his long sentences, and the accumulated force and fulness with which every period closes. In this respect, as well as in his subtlety of thought and frequent use of parenthetical qualifications and limitations, he will sometimes remind the reader of the late John Foster, although Mr. De Quincey's style has a clearness, ease, and brilliancy, to which that of the profound and powerful Foster never, in his noblest passages, made the least approach. Still less does the style of that writer - or of any other we know of amongst the memorable authors of the age - ever soar into harmonies so glorious as those which sometimes burst on the enraptured reader's ear in Mr. De Quincey's best imaginative works. In one of the volumes now before us there is an article on Joan of Arc, which we remember reading with great delight when it was first published in "Tait's Magazine," not very many years ago, and which we refer to at present as an example of a class of Mr. De Quincey's writings in which moral earnestness - earnestness, in this instance, of admiration of the heroic girl - keeps, as it were, midway between his humorous and his imaginative moods, yet through a path so narrow as hardly to keep clear of either. The passage we are about to quote comes after the specification of a few great intellectual heights which woman has not strength to scale, and it goes on to do eloquent and ample justice to the patient and enduring courage which she can die grandly in a good cause. The passage is as follows:- "Yet, sister, woman, though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us men - a greater thing than even Milton is known to have done, or Michael Angelo - you can die grandly, and as godesses would die, were godesses mortal. If any distinct worlds (which may be the case) are so far ahead of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which we ever treat them? St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas? Oh, no! my friend: suggest something better; these are baubles to them; they see in other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind. These, take my word for it, are nothing. Do you give it up? The finest thing, then, we have to shew them is a scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure you there is a strong muster in those far telescopic worlds, on any such morning, of those who happen to find themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us. How, then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world by those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at out newspapers, whose language they have long since deciphered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is a woman? How, if it be published in that distant world that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, the garlands of martyrdom? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned grey by sorrow, daughter of Caesars, kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that with hommage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned her face to scatter them - homage that followed those smiles as surely as the carols of birds, after showers in spring, follow the reap- |
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