In
distinguishing minor from major works, Thomas De Quincey is careful not to make
it a qualitative distinction. Excellence, he suggests, is not a matter of
scale. American writers in particular are nagged by bulk. Witness the lingering
obsession with the mythical Great American Novel. I’ll be happy never to read
another GAN, at least so long as I have the “elaborate perfection” of stories
by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Peter Taylor.
De Quincey
was writing in 1838 about his friend Charles Lamb, who had died less than four
years earlier. Lamb in his letters and Elia essays embodies the ideal of the
superb minor writer, one we wouldn’t sacrifice on the altar of critical purity.
A reader need not equate Lamb and Shakespeare in order to appreciate both. Literature
is not simplistically binary. De Quincey’s examples within this “smaller sphere”
include “The Rape of the Lock,” The Vicar of Wakefield and the Fables
of La Fontaine. I would add the essays of Max Beerbohm and Hubert Butler, and
the poems of Stevie Smith and J.V. Cunningham. De Quincey published another reminiscence of Lamb, in 1848. This time he takes a related idea – assuming “minor”
can be equated with neglected (though no one would equate major with popular)
-- and plays with it:
“It sounds
paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say, that in every literature of
large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which
surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very
reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest
because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means of their
repulsion.”
This is no
Chestertonian paradox fashioned for its own clever sake. The obvious example in
the American tradition is Herman Melville, who moved from bestseller to non-entity
to odds-on candidate for the title Great American Novelist. A similar sequence
of reputation applies to Emily Dickinson. It’s important to avoid another
binary scheme: neglected, good; popular, bad. Most neglected books are
appropriately neglected. Aesthetic quality is rare in every era. De Quincey
writes:
“Charles
Lamb, if any ever was is amongst the class here contemplated; he, if any ever
has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to be forever unpopular,
and yet forever interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of those very
qualities which guarantee their non-popularity.”
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