'A Cabinet of Minor Pieces'

“Every literature possesses, besides its great national gallery, a cabinet of minor pieces, not less perfect in their polish, possibly more so. In reality, the characteristic of this class is elaborate perfection—the point of inferiority is not in the finishing, but in the compass and power of the original creation, which (however exquisite in its class) moves within a smaller sphere.”

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.”