Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  The Sources of Happiness.

  1.Poetry; –

  2.Pathos; –

  3.Glory; –

  4.Love; –

  5.Benevolence; –

  6.Music.

  The presence of poetry as the antidote to his current apathy is so resounding that he must have struggled to find the following five items. There are moments in the diary when we recognise the Opium-Eater of his later writings: ‘I image myself looking through a glass. “What do you see?” I see a man in the dim and shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream. He passes along in silence, and the hues of sorrow appear on his countenance. Who is he? A man darkly wonderful above the beings of the world; but whether that shadow of him, which you saw, be ye shadow of a man long since passed away or of one yet hid in futurity, I may not tell you.’

  Long before opium enhanced his visions, De Quincey recognised what he called his ‘constitutional determination to reverie’. From an early age he would ‘view’ himself as preceded by a ‘second identity projected from my own consciousness’, akin to the shadowy perspective in the back of the glass. The German novelist, Jean Paul Richter (known as Jean Paul) put it differently: ‘there are two forms of you present in the room at any one time’. It was Jean Paul who coined, in his 1796 novella Siebenkäs, the term ‘doppelgänger’.

  De Quincey’s sense of being accompanied by a duplicate is one of the reasons why he was such an effective autobiographer. His Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches present two selves: the man of experience who holds the reader in the palm of his hand, and the child of innocence who is the subject of the story. The two figures move back and forth in the narrative, anticipating and reflecting on one another. What makes De Quincey’s writing so unnerving is that he felt rivalrous with this other self; his mind was ‘haunted’ by jealousy of the ‘ghostly being’ who walked before him.

  There is nothing in De Quincey’s adolescent diary so far, however, that the reader would not expect to find. Apart from being pedantic, other-worldly, dramatic and self-absorbed, he is acutely self-aware. Noting his encounters with prostitutes there is none of the eulogising over angels and noble defenders that we find in the Confessions: he is mired in self-disgust. ‘Seized with the delicious thought the [sic] of the girl give her two shillings’; ‘enjoy a girl in the fields for 1s and 6d’; ‘go home with a whore to Everton where I give all the change I have; is 2d’; ‘go to the same fat whore’s as I was at the last time; – give her 1s and a cambrick pocket handkerchief; – go home miserable’. The unexpected occurs in his encounter with a vagrant: ‘walked into the lanes ; – met a fellow who counterfeited drunkenness or lunacy or idiocy; – I say counterfeited, because I am well convinced he was some vile outcast of society – a pest and disgrace to humanity. I was just on the point of hitting him a dab on his disgusting face when a gentleman (coming up) alarmed him and saved me trouble.’

  Reading this passage, you think there must be some mistake. Is this the young Romantic so transformed by the social sympathies of the Lyrical Ballads that he too became a ‘vile outcast’? When he wrote for publication, De Quincey presented himself as elevated by his identification with the marginalised and the dispossessed, as a figure who straddled boundaries, who conversed alike with lords and leech-gatherers, Etonians and street-walkers. Here he gives us a Wordsworthian encounter – one that Wordsworth himself would have turned to advantage – but instead of seeing the vagrant as a visionary, De Quincey sees him as ‘vile’ and wants to punch him.

  His bourgeois reflexes appear to be as deeply rooted as his childhood reading and his grief for his sister, but De Quincey’s response has nothing to do with class antagonism. What makes him angry is that the outcast is ‘counterfeiting’ his ‘drunkenness or lunacy’; he is a fake and therefore perhaps too close for comfort. Currently concerned with what ‘character’ he might adopt himself, De Quincey had also recently posed as a vagrant while Chatterton, who he is going about impersonating, masterminded the most notorious counterfeit identity of the previous century.

  All the time, he was moving closer and closer to his goal. The eleventh of May was spent in preparation, visiting James Wright and drinking coffee, before going back to Mrs Best’s to ‘write a rough copy of [a] letter to Wordsworth’.

  ‘Sir,’ De Quincey nervously began. ‘I take this method of requesting–’ This was clouding into heavy weather and so he crossed the sentence out, replacing it with, ‘What I am going to say would seem strange to most men; and to most men therefore I would not say it; but to you I will, because your feelings do not follow the current of the world.’ As an opening line it could hardly be better; his letter to Wordsworth was De Quincey’s first masterpiece. The poet was described in his own terms as a singular figure, and the use of the word ‘strange’, which Wordsworth himself employed in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, was a stroke of genius. De Quincey went hesitantly forward, and after several more crossings-out he came up with the next paragraph:

  From the time when I first saw the Lyrical Ballads I made a resolution to obtain (if I could) the friendship of their author. In taking this resolution I was influenced (I believe) by my reverence for the astonishing genius displayed in those delightful poems, and in an inferior degree, for the dignity of moral character which I persuaded myself their author possessed. Since then I have sought every opportunity. . . and resolved many a scheme of gaining an introduction into your society. But all have failed; and I am compelled either to take this method of soliciting your friendship (which, I am afraid, you will think a liberty), or of giving up almost every chance for obtaining that without which what good can my life do one?

  In ‘painful circumstances’ and amidst ‘gnawing anxieties’, he continued, thoughts of Wordsworth’s friendship had provided his ‘only solace’. Not that De Quincey would impose on his ‘hallowed solitude’ or detract his attention from the ‘sweet retreats of poetry’. He was, De Quincey stressed, ‘but a boy’, and as such came accompanied by neither ‘friends’ nor worldly ‘connections’. And nor was it only Wordsworth he held in high esteem; De Quincey revered ‘each dear soul in that enchanting community of yours’, all of whom ‘to me . . . are dearer than the sun’. The line, from ‘Ruth’, describes a father’s love for his children. Despite his hallowed solitude, Wordsworth was not a lone figure but part of an ‘enchanting community’, a ‘fellowship’ of genius, a magic circle a world away from the Everton coterie.

  De Quincey then reached his climax: ‘What allurements can my friendship, unknown and unhonoured as I am, hold out to you?’ What indeed?

  This only thing can I say – that, though you may find minds more congenial with your own. . . and therefore more worthy of your regard than mine, you will never find one more zealously attached to you – more willing to sacrifice every low consideration of this earth to your happiness – one filled with more admiration of your genius and of reverential love for your virtues than the writer of this letter. And I will add that to no man upon earth except yourself and one other (a friend of yours). . . would my pride suffer one thus lowly to prostrate myself.

  The ‘friend of yours’ was, of course, Coleridge.

  De Quincey copied the draft into his diary, beneath the draft of a letter to his mother in which he remained steadfast about his plans to go to Oxford: ‘I thought it had been understood between us that my views cannot change; however circumstances may hasten or retard (or, in any ways vary) the means of their accomplishment.’

  The next day, 12 May, he read through the latest Edinburgh Review. The journal had launched in October the previous year, its debut carrying a critique by Francis Jeffrey of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer. One of the four founding editors, Jeffrey described the role of the Review as going beyond the ‘humble task of pronouncing on the mere literary merits of the works that came before it’. Its writers were instructed to extend the usual critical boundaries and ‘take large and original views of all the important questions to which those works might relate�
�. This usually resulted in hatchet jobs, and the Edinburgh house style became known as ‘slashing’. Sydney Smith joked that, given the solar system to assess, the Edinburgh Review would conclude that it showed ‘bad light – planets too distant – pestered with comets – feeble contrivance – could make a better with great ease’. In his review of Thalaba, Jeffrey slashed the ‘new sect of poets’ associated with Southey, ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism’ who ‘constitute. . . the most formidable conspiracy against sound judgment in matters poetical’. The ‘Lake poets’, as Jeffrey later baptised them, were distinguished by ‘a splenetic and idle discontent with the existing conditions of society’, with Wordsworth’s theory of poetry singled out as a betrayal of its ancient function: ‘Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.’

  In April 1803 a third edition of Lyrical Ballads had appeared. There were no new poems but the preface, which had already built on the initial advertisement, had been expanded by a further 3,000 words. De Quincey followed the growth of Wordsworth’s thought. ‘What is a poet?’ Wordsworth now asked. This was the question that also preoccupied De Quincey, and he cellared the answer as he would a good wine: ‘He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.’ Coleridge, addressing the same question in a letter to William Sotheby, answered more poetically: the poet is a man who, ‘for all sounds & forms of human nature. . . must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert – the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps on an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child’.

  It was now that De Quincey began to think about the importance of criticism, and to consider the difference between the poet and the critic. What is a critic? So far he had belonged to a class of men, ‘feeble, fluttering, ingenious, who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with a slave’s adulation, to obey and follow all the caprices of the public mind’. But the Edinburgh Review had elevated the critic: today he was, like the poet, a legislator of opinion. The effect on the reading public was ‘electrical. . . The old periodical opiates were extinguished at once. The learning of the new Journal, its talent, its spirit, its writing, its independence, were all new.’

  In his diary, De Quincey expanded on the points made in Wordsworth’s extended preface: ‘A poet never investigates the principles of the sublimities which flow from him,’ he wrote, ‘that is the business of the critic. . . it is the business of [the poet’s] accidental coolness or the critic’s perpetual coldness to point out the springs and principles of those “thoughts that breathe and words that burn” which had spontaneously rushed into his mind.’ To illustrate his argument, De Quincey explained that while the sublimities of Milton were spontaneous, it took Burke, in his Enquiry, to point out ‘the causes of that sublime’. His path as a future voice on the Edinburgh Review’s rival journal was being forged.

  De Quincey followed these thoughts by drafting a cold response to his mother’s burning queries about his ‘particular plan for life’. ‘I was not,’ he wrote, ‘aware that you’ – as opposed to his guardians – ‘considered any positive and final determination on this point as a necessary preliminary to my entering at college. But, allowing that (in my case) it is so, still it seems natural that the long uncertainty I have been in as to the chance of my ever going to college (with Mr Hall’s consent) would have made it as right and natural for me to keep my thoughts on the subject as wavering hitherto as the certainty of my going there.’ This letter to his mother he took to the post office, while the letter to Wordsworth remained unsent. The next day De Quincey lunched with Cragg where the talk was ‘about the Edinburgh Review, about Coleridge – Wordsworth – Southey – Cottle’, after which he returned home to read Burke. When he woke the following morning, so he recorded in Greek, he masturbated.

  Awash with ideas, De Quincey listed the works he intended to write. These included dramas, essays on character and pathos, an ode ‘in which two angels or spirits were to meet in the middle of the Atlantic’, and ‘many different travels and voyages’. He sketched the outline of a novel in which a heroine lay ‘dying on an island of a lake, her windows (opening on a lawn) set wide open’, noting that the setting was located in his childhood home at The Farm. The scene was used not in a novel however, but in his Autobiographic Sketches where it was transposed to Greenhay and the dying heroine became his sister. He planned an ‘Essay on Poetry’ and revealed that ‘I have besides always intended of course that poems should form the cornerstone of my fame’. But instead of writing poems or posting his letter, De Quincey embarked on an extended reading of Southey, whose poetry he defended with his usual vigour, finding in his 1801 epic Thalaba, ‘the most wonderful display’ of Gothic sublimity.

  Before Wordsworth appeared, Southey had been Coleridge’s collaborator and the two had written a poetic drama called The Fall of Robespierre which circulated around Bath in 1795. Since then, Southey’s reputation as a poet had grown to the point where Coleridge described himself as ‘jealous’ of his ‘fame’. He would continue to overshadow his peers; Byron thought of Southey as ‘the ballad-monger’, and of Wordsworth as Southey’s ‘dull disciple’.

  De Quincey would later discover how much he and Southey had in common. Southey was born in Bristol although much of his childhood was spent in Bath; he had lost two sisters, one from hydrocephalus, and his father, who died young, had been a draper. What sort of a poet was Southey? De Quincey noted that while strong poetry did not tend to be humorous, Southey, Burns and Shakespeare – ‘3 of our 12 poets’ – ‘possessed’ the faculty of humour ‘in a very great degree’. This thought led on to another: there were two kinds of nature. The first was beautiful, and found in the tamer aspects – ‘hedge – lane – rose – hawthorn – violet – cuckoo’ and ‘milkmaid’, while the second was sublime and found in ‘boundless forest – mighty river – wild wild solitude’. Humour might accompany the beautiful but never the sublime – so how then explain the humour of Southey, whose poems were consistent with ‘the great awful torrid zone’? De Quincey’s answer is that Southey did not write what is strictly called ‘Poetry’; he fitted into a ‘newly discovered state or sometimes perhaps to the medium Ratcliffian kind [De Quincey’s spelling of ‘Radcliffe’ was always ‘Ratcliff’] which. . . certainly admits of humour’. Southey wrote Gothic tales in verse rather than poems. De Quincey’s opinion coincided with that of Coleridge, who confided to Cottle his fears that Southey ‘will begin to rely too much on story and event in his poems, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings, that are peculiar to, and definitive of, the poet’. The distinction between the two kinds of nature – beautiful and sublime – and thus the two kinds of poetry, was central to De Quincey’s thoughts this spring, and he repeatedly returned to it in his diary.

  One evening he was comparing with John Merritt, the publishing partner of James Wright, the poetry of Southey and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. ‘Southey,’ opined Merritt, ‘is an inferior man to Lewis.’ ‘“Take care, take care,” said Mr Wright pointing at me; – “he is a Southeian.” “Oh! Sir,” said Mr Merritt, “Southey is greatly inferior.”’

  Lewis, asserted De Quincey – determined to disagree – was driven by feeling rather than imagination, and therefore produced not poetry but ‘metrical pathos’. A writer of mysteries, Monk Lewis erred by containing no mystery in himself; De Quincey could ‘see’ straight ‘through him’: he was the type of man one might look for ‘in a ballroom’. Southey, on the other hand, De Quincey argued, addressed not the ‘heart’ but the ‘imagination’, and th
e distinction lay at the centre of his developing definition of poetry. ‘The world has more feeling than imagination,’ he patiently explained to Merritt and Wright, ‘and therefore. . . verses of feeling were sure to be more popular than poetry.’ While he contained his irritation at the ‘confusion’ shown by his friends, he refused to air in public his doubts about Southey’s imaginative powers. De Quincey knew full well that the dramas in Southey’s work were all external, while those in Wordsworth and Coleridge took place in the minds of the protagonists; that Southey’s readers would look in vain for the numinous, for fresh worlds or encounters with the soul of another living being. Southey was more interested in the ghoulish side of death than the mysterious processes of life. His ‘Ode to Horror’, which De Quincey read on 27 May, contains lines such as these:

  Black HORROR! speed we to the bed of Death,

  Where he whose murderous power afar

  Blasts with the myriad plagues of war

  Struggles with his last breath,

  Then to his wildly starting eyes

  The phantoms of the murder’d rise . . .

  Southey could never have contributed to the Lyrical Ballads. Instead he plundered them, producing his own airless impersonations. In ‘The Idiot’, a ghastly marriage of ‘The Idiot Boy’ with ‘We are Seven’, we are introduced to Ned, a child who digs up his mother’s coffin, removes her corpse and warms it by the fire:

  He plac’d his mother in her chair,

  And in her wonted place,

  And blew the kindling fire, that shone

  Reflected on her face;

  And pausing now, her hand would feel,

  And now her face behold,