‘Why, mother, do you look so pale,
‘And why are you so cold?’
Southey was not a bad poet so much as a counterfeit poet. He could never be the real thing because he found no fear in the act of writing: while the business of wielding a pen made Wordsworth so ill that Dorothy was roped in as his amanuensis, Southey’s quill flowed blithely over page after page. Southey, noted Wordsworth, ‘seldom “feels his burthened breast/ Heaving beneath th’incumbent Deity” ’. De Quincey later noted how his ‘poetry was composed according to a predetermined rule; that so many lines should be produced, by contract, as it were, before breakfast; so many at such another definite interval’.
On the last day of May, rising three hours after Mrs Best had called him, De Quincey walked along the pier, sheltered under a hedge during a shower, and dined in silence with Cragg. When he returned home, he took a clean sheet of paper and started his letter to Wordsworth again. It took him six hours, but it was now, he hoped, perfect.
‘Sir,’ he began. ‘I suppose that most men would think what I am going to say strange at least or rude: but I am bold enough to imagine that, as you are not yourself “in the roll of common men”, you may be willing to excuse anything uncommon in the liberty I am now taking.’ The line about ‘common men’ is from Henry IV, Part I, the scene set in the archdeacon’s house in Bangor; six months earlier in another house in Bangor, De Quincey’s honesty had been slighted by the bishop. Writing to Wordsworth, his moral beacon, De Quincey was protesting his authenticity to everyone who had ever dismissed him as ‘in the roll of common men’. The object of his revised letter was to try more effectively to win the poet’s friendship and explain that Lyrical Ballads had provided more than the ‘whole aggregate of pleasure’ he had received from the ‘nine’ other poets he had ‘been able to find’. Added to which, De Quincey confessed that he too was a poet with ‘a spark’ of ‘heavenly fire’, and his own life had also been ‘passed chiefly in the contemplation and altogether in the worship of nature’. Neither of these facts was strictly true, but he was able to say, hand on heart, that he had experienced suffering.
As he came to the end, De Quincey reconsidered the passage deleted in his draft, in which he paid tribute to Wordsworth’s ‘friend’, expressed his ‘reverential love’, and offered to ‘sacrifice even his life whenever it could have a chance of promoting your interest and happiness’. His ‘oriental homage’, as he later described it, went in unchanged. De Quincey addressed the letter to Wordsworth’s publishers in London, delivered it to the post office, and then quarrelled over dinner with Cragg. Throughout that day two phrases had been stuck in his head: ‘flashing brief splendour’, and ‘labouring to get away.’ Both define his life, but the second one De Quincey found ‘exquisitely touching’. All he could now do was to wait for the poet to reply.
The following evening, visiting friends in Liverpool, De Quincey picked up some vital information about his favourite subject from a fellow guest, who lived in Keswick:
These particulars I gathered from Miss Bearcroft concerning the Poets! Coleridge is very absent – frequently walks half a mile (to her uncles, I think she said) without being sensible that he has no hat on; – has married the sister of Southey’s wife, lives (I believe she said this of Coleridge) in a house where he has lodgings; – when she first saw him in church she took him for some great boy just come from school; – Wordsworth is rather handsome – has a beautiful little cottage; (NB, both he and C live near Keswick) – has a sister about 29 years old.
He also learned that ‘Coleridge intends to astonish the world with a Metaphysical work. . . on which he intends to found his fame; – Mrs Coleridge. . . speaks in the high terms of it; – his conversation is even more wonderful. . . than his works; – he is so intellectual as to be quite oppressive’. Added to which, Miss Bearcroft ‘has seen little Charles Lamb or Charles Lloyd or both’ at the home of either Wordsworth or Coleridge. Charles Lloyd was a novelist and poet who had collaborated on a collection of verses with Lamb, and been published by Cottle in a volume together with Southey and Coleridge. The enchanting community was increasing in size, and so too was De Quincey’s regard for Coleridge, another dreamer with literary ambitions beyond those of poetry.
De Quincey walked home that night in a daze, filled with thoughts ‘of Coleridge; – am in transports of love and admiration for him. . . go to bed. . . still thinking of Coleridge who strikes me (as I believe he always did) with a resemblance to my mysterious character (a compound of ancient mariner and Bath concert room traveller with bushy hair) – I begin to think him the greatest man that has ever appeared and go to sleep.’ The bushy-haired traveller was an eccentric known as Walking Stewart, whom De Quincey had seen in the Bath Assembly Rooms walking ‘up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher’.
The next morning he masturbated, an act he again recorded in Greek, before spending the day reading Southey, whom he now knew to be Coleridge’s brother-in-law. He then discussed with Wright the revelations of the night before.
Midsummer had arrived with its army of banners. De Quincey killed the days by drinking, walking, disputing, filling his diary, working through copies of the Edinburgh Review, and playing with a child called William K. Williams, who was the son of neighbours. Elizabeth Quincey, hearing reports of her son’s activities from Cragg, complained that he was ‘idling his life away’. After two weeks of waiting for a reply to his letter, De Quincey described how, ‘My imagination flies, like Noah’s Dove, from the ark of my mind. . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge – Wordsworth and Southey.’ It was Coleridge who now came first in the hierarchy, but each man would occupy a distinct place in De Quincey’s imaginative life.
His final diary entry was made on the night of 24 June 1803: ‘Last night, in walking out, I invented this metaphor. . . “he was obliged to run the gauntlet through all the reviews”.’ De Quincey followed this with another thought: ‘I have frequently said to myself – “Englishmen wear daggers; – not literally but figuratively”.’ The world of reviewing was beginning to look like a bloodbath.
He was due to return to the Priory on 3 August. Having despaired of hearing from Wordsworth, he devised ‘other plans for compassing my point’, which included sending the poet some of his own verses. But on De Quincey’s final evening in Everton, all his ‘fears and schemes were put to flight’ when a letter arrived from Grasmere.
6
Residence at Oxford
I was the Dreamer, they the Dream.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third
There are many descriptions of the cottage where De Quincey’s letter arrived after a six-week delay in London, but the one in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is the finest. It comes from the passage where De Quincey defines his idea of happiness:
Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from a town – no spacious valley, but about two miles long, by three quarters of a mile in average width. . . Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3 and 4,000 feet high; and the cottage a real cottage. . . Let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows, through all the months of spring, summer and autumn – beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with Jasmine.
The cottage was then known as the house at Town End, because it was the last dwelling on the road that led out of Grasmere and up towards the village of Ambleside, three miles away. The name Dove Cottage, bestowed in 1890 when the building was bought for the nation, harked back to the previous century when it had been a roadside inn called the Dove and Olive Bough. It amused Wordsworth that a ‘simple water-drinking Bard’ should inhabit a former tavern, and De Quincey would always associate the house with doves.
De Quincey’s letter had created a flurry in the household; it was, Dorothy e
xclaimed, ‘A remarkable instance of the power of my brother’s poems over a lonely and contemplative mind, unwarped by any established laws of taste’. Less excitable than his sister, Wordsworth penned a polite reply on 29 July, saying that ‘it would be out of nature were I not to have kind feelings towards one who expresses sentiments of such profound esteem and admiration of my writings as you have done’. He added that ‘you are young and ingenuous, and I wrote with a hope of pleasing the young, the ingenuous and the unworldly above all others’.
Wordsworth was happy to accept his role as De Quincey’s teacher, but in requesting friendship the boy had touched on one of the poet’s sacred subjects. The man who described himself to Coleridge as ‘naturally slow to love, and to cease loving’, cautioned De Quincey that ‘My friendship is not in my power to give. . . this is a gift which no man can make. . . a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive, like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it’. A further caution warned De Quincey that a poet lived another life separate from that of his poetry, and he must not expect to find in Wordsworth an incarnation of his words: ‘How many things are there in a man’s character of which his writings however miscellaneous and voluminous will give no idea.’ Admitting that he ‘was the most lazy and impatient letter writer in the world’, Wordsworth then explained that he was imminently ‘going with my friend Coleridge and my sister upon a tour of Scotland for six weeks or two months’, adding that if De Quincey replied ‘immediately, I may have the pleasure of receiving your letter before our departure’. Beneath his signature he penned, probably at the request of Dorothy, a quick postscript apologising for any impression he may have given of ‘coldness’, and stressed that should De Quincey ever find himself in Grasmere, Wordsworth would be ‘very happy’ to see him.
The arrival of De Quincey’s letter coincided with the beginnings of two important new friendships in Wordsworth’s life. The first was with Sir George Beaumont, a landowner and amateur painter who was currently renting part of Greta Hall in Keswick, where Coleridge was also now living. Sir George and his wife had come in June, said Coleridge, ‘half-mad to see Wordsworth’; not only were they admirers of Lyrical Ballads but Beaumont, as Walter Scott put it, ‘understood Wordsworth’s poetry, which is a rare thing’. Coleridge, whose politics the Beaumonts were not disposed to like, soon charmed the couple; ‘as far as I can judge,’ Sir George conceded, ‘a more amiable man with a more affectionate & kind heart does not exist’. Lady Beaumont, so Coleridge told Wordsworth, could not ‘keep the tears in her eye’ when his poetry was read aloud, and when she ‘was reading your Poem on Cape RASH JUDGEMENT [‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags’] had you entered the room, she believes she should have fallen at your feet’.
In tribute to Wordsworth, Sir George presented him with the deeds to a plot of land at the head of Bassenthwaite, between Grasmere and Keswick: ‘Plant it delve it’, Beaumont told him, ‘– & build upon it or not, as it suits your convenience, but let me live & die with the idea of the sweet place with its rocks, its banks, & mountain streams in possession of such a mind as yours’. De Quincey’s offer of a bended knee had been trumped. Wordsworth did not build a house on the land, but it was through the influence and example of gentle Sir George that the poet found himself, as Byron put it, ‘a Tory at last’. ‘There can be no valuable friendship,’ Wordsworth wrote to Beaumont, ‘where the parties are not mutually capable of instructing and delighting one another.’
The second valuable friendship to spring up like a wildflower was with Walter Scott himself, whom Wordsworth would meet on his tour of Scotland. So immediate was the sympathy between the two writers that Wordsworth signed himself, in a letter written to Scott on his return, ‘Your sincere friend’, stressing that he was ‘slow to use a word of such solemn meaning to any one’.
De Quincey’s timing was unfortunate. Had he written to Wordsworth a few months earlier he might have gained more attention; had he written a few years earlier, he would have caught the poet in his hot youth rather than his staid middle age. Nor was De Quincey’s letter the first from an admirer to arrive at the cottage; the previous summer Wordsworth had begun a correspondence with John Wilson, a robust, hearty and back-slappingly confident student at Oxford University. ‘The Beau’, as Dorothy proudly called him, was ‘a very amiable young man. . . a friend and adorer of William and his verses’. Under the pseudonym ‘Christopher North’, Wilson would become famous as a merciless reviewer for Blackwood’s Magazine, and he approached Wordsworth now as both critic and ‘adorer’. ‘In your poems,’ Wilson wrote, ‘I discovered such marks of delicate feeling, such benevolence of disposition, and such knowledge of human nature as made an impression on my mind that nothing will ever efface.’ His tribute paid, Wilson then assumed the fact of Wordsworth’s friendship – ‘I may, perhaps, never have the happiness of seeing you, yet I will always consider you as a friend.’ He addressed the poet as a man speaking to men, and as a man to whom it was possible to point out what Wilson felt were ‘errors’ in his work: ‘no feeling, no state of mind ought, in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘to become the subject of poetry, that does not please. . . you have described feelings with which I cannot sympathise, and situations in which I take no interest’. The offensive poem was ‘The Idiot Boy’, and everyone he knew, John Wilson claimed, hated it as much as he did. De Quincey later described himself and John Wilson as the only ‘two persons’ ‘intrepid’ enough to ‘attach themselves to a banner not yet raised and planted’.
Coleridge had discovered Greta Hall in May 1800, during a visit to Grasmere. A large bay-windowed, three-storey house on the outskirts of Keswick, it gleamed through the trees at the foot of monumental Skiddaw, one of the highest mountains in the country. The River Greta flowed behind, while Derwentwater lay in front. The mountains beyond the lake had the effect, said De Quincey, of cutting the county into ‘great chambers’. By the end of June, Coleridge, his pregnant wife Sarah, his young son Hartley, and an endless trail of book chests, were settling in. Sarah, who had never before left Bristol, felt cautious about inhabiting this strange new landscape with the Wordsworths – who considered her shallow and vain – as her only friends. Coleridge, who had married Sarah to please Southey, rejected her to please William and Dorothy. Sarah was the elder sister of Southey’s own wife, Edith, and Coleridge was now in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s wife; his sister complex was one of the many things he would have in common with De Quincey. Increasingly in thrall to opium, Coleridge’s next three years saw the disintegration of his marriage, his health, his relationship with Wordsworth, and his belief in his powers as a poet.
In August 1803, after their first child had died from hydrocephalus, Southey and Edith also made the journey from Bristol to Greta Hall. ‘Nothing in England can be more beautiful than the site of this house,’ Southey exclaimed, and having come for a visit they stayed for the rest of their lives. No sooner were the Southeys ensconced than Coleridge took off, first to Scotland with the Wordsworths, then to Malta by himself, and after that to London. Southey’s punishment for pushing Coleridge into an unhappy marriage was to become pater familias to his young family. He was sanguine about his brother-in-law’s revenge: no man, Southey conceded, was less suited to domestic life than Coleridge. And few men were more suited to its responsibilities and routines than Southey himself.
Also at Greta Hall that summer was the young William Hazlitt, who had met Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, when Coleridge was living in Nether Stowey, and Dorothy and William had moved to nearby Alfoxden. Like John Wilson, Hazlitt was to be always one step ahead of De Quincey. He had seen Lyrical Ballads in manuscript form on Wordsworth’s kitchen table, and heard Coleridge recite both ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, the poem ‘composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium’. Now a twenty-five-year-old art student, Hazlitt accepted a commission from Beaumont to
paint portraits of the poets in their respective homes. Wordsworth’s features, Hazlitt noted, were ‘as a book where men might read strange matters’; he had ‘a convulsive inclination to laugh around the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face’. Neither likeness has survived; instead we have his pen portraits of the poets in Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt made a tempestuous guest that summer; Wordsworth dismissed him as an upstart, too quick to have his own opinions, but the vivid description left by Coleridge shows remarkable prescience. It also shows how, despite his verbosity and psychological abstraction, Coleridge was acutely attuned to those in his company:
William Hazlitt is a thinking, observant, original man, of great power as a Painter of Character Portraits. . . his manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive– : brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange . . . he is jealous, gloomy, & of an irritable pride – & addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence. With all this, there is much good in him – he is disinterested, an enthusiastic Lover of the great men, who have been before us – he says things that are his own in a way of his own – & tho’ from habitual Shyness & the Outside & bearskin at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused & dark in his conversation, & delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a Forceps, yet he says more than any man, I ever knew. . . He sends well-headed & well-feathered Thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a Twang of the Bow-string.
Both Romantic essayists and satellites of the Wordsworth circle, De Quincey and Hazlitt would write on the same subjects for the same editions of the same journals, but neither sought out the other’s company. While De Quincey acknowledged Hazlitt’s genius, Hazlitt would act as though De Quincey were invisible.
With Wordsworth’s letter tucked safely in his pocket, De Quincey returned as scheduled to the Priory on 3 August, where his mother, feeling the force of her son’s conviction and increasingly irritated by his company, at last caved in to the ‘Oxford scheme’. His guardians also conceded: De Quincey could go to the university provided that he live within his school allowance of £100 a year; no further money from his father’s legacy would be released until he came of age. When, on 6 August, he penned his reply to Wordsworth, De Quincey put the situation rather differently: ‘Unfortunately. . . I am not yet my own master,’ he explained, ‘and (in compliance with the wishes of my mother and my guardians) I am going, in a month or two, to enter myself at Oxford.’ By coincidence, De Quincey added, he too had ‘an intention of making a tour of the Highlands this autumn; but now, just at the time when I find that I should have a chance of meeting you there, my plans (I fear) will be traversed’.
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