711. Paradise Bereft: The Social Elegy of De Quincey
De Quincey on Milton:
It is the key to all that lavish pomp of art and knowledge which is sometimes put forward by Milton in situations of intense solitude, and in the bosom of primitive nature—as for example, in the Eden of his great poem, and in the Wilderness of his Paradise Regained. The shadowy exhibition of a regal banquet in the desert draws out and stimulates the sense of utter solitude and remotion from men or cities. The images of architectural splendour, suddenly raised in the very centre of Paradise, as vanishing shows by the wand of a magician, bring into powerful relief the depth of silence and the unpopulous solitude which possess this sanctuary of man whilst yet happy and innocent.
The solitude De Quincey sketches out here doesn’t sound very happy to me. Vanishing shows of architectural splendour make of paradise the sorrowful solitude of haunted ruins—a solitude bearing the scent of departed glamour rather than a primordial pastoral peace rendered vivid by the contrast with the noise of cities. For a long time now, Milton’s readers have remarked where and how his sense of man’s first seat is haunted by the feeling that there had been others who had occupied it before, aboriginal figures whose displaced presence is still warm—“Faunus haunting the bower, a ghost crying in the cold of Paradise” (Empson).
De Quincey adds a sociological pathos to this habit of recognizing in Eden “the porch of spirits lingering” (Wallace Stevens). First of all, they’re not lingering: they have already vanished, all of them! all of them! “The shadowy exhibition of a regal banquet in the desert draws out and stimulates the sense of utter solitude and remotion from men or cities”: I think what grieves and frightens De Quincey isn’t the fall from Paradise arranged by the evil in and beyond men. I think it is the fall into solitude whether in a doomed Eden, a forlorn desert, or a suddenly silenced city. De Quincey on Macbeth:
If the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man—if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed.
A solitude that clings like the memory of a vanishing, or the sudden resumption of “the goings-on of human life” that work to render its antecedent suspension vivid by the contrast; or the sense of loneliness that flourishes most in the crowd of the city, the sense of loneliness at the heart of the city that makes of it, for all its human density, the most perplexing wilderness.
Notes:
1. Durkheim on the city as the capital of modern loneliness.
2. Simmel and Benjamin on the pleasures of such loneliness.
3. “out on a quiet spree / fighting vainly the old ennui” (Cole Porter).
716. The Silent Correction Continues
at more or less the same pace as the silent erring.