De Quincey’s second letter to Wordsworth began with an account of the anxiety he had endured during the last two months. Fearing that the poet might have found ‘disgusting’ his expression of ‘languor and despondency’, De Quincey explained that he had ‘given up almost every hope’ of receiving a reply; as for the specific request in his earlier letter: ‘What foolish thing I said of friendship I cannot now recollect.’ He defended his former praise of Lyrical Ballads, claiming that nothing ‘which the world has yet seen can so well claim the title of pure poetry’, that he could ‘rest on no other poems with such permanent and increasing delight’, and ‘from the wreck of all earthly things which belong to me, I should endeavour to save that work by an impulse second to none but that of self-preservation’. Referring to Wordsworth’s invitation to call on him, were he to ever visit Grasmere, De Quincey wrote that ‘I scarcely know how to reply: it did indeed fill up the measure of my joy. . . Henceforward I shall look to that country as to the land of promise: I cannot say how many emotions the land of the lakes raises in my mind of itself: I have always felt a strange love for everything connected with it; and the magic of the Lyrical Ballads has completed and established the charm’ (it was Ann Radcliffe, De Quincey wrote in his Autobiographic Sketches, who initially brought the mountains and ruins of the region into ‘sunny splendour’). He would, De Quincey concluded, ‘bend [his] course to the lakes’ in the summer and have then ‘the happiness of seeing those persons whom above all the world I honour and amidst those scenes too which, delightful as they are in themselves, are much more so on their account’. His final line contains an unmistakable echo of the final line of ‘Tintern Abbey’, in which the poet asks his ‘dear sister’ to not forget that ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs,/ And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!’
Carried away and quite forgetting Wordsworth’s sober warning about friendship, De Quincey added a postscript in which he tried to elbow his way further into the community: ‘You mention Miss Wordsworth (I speak at a venture) and Mr Coleridge; and this emboldens me to use the privilege of a friend and take a liberty which I should not otherwise have done – when I beg you to convey my most sincere and respectful good wishes to them both.’
On 15 August 1803, De Quincey’s eighteenth birthday, the triumvirate of Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge departed for their Scottish tour. He ‘had never yet’, Coleridge told Southey, ‘commenced a journey with such an inauspicious heaviness of heart before’. Meanwhile, 85,000 French soldiers were encamped at Boulogne, and England waited for Napoleon to invade.
Wordsworth, who had been in France during the early days of the Revolution and had an illegitimate French daughter, now grieved for the country he once loved, and on his return from Scotland enrolled in the Grasmere home defence volunteers. ‘Surely there was never a more determined hater of the French,’ Dorothy wrote proudly to her friend, Catherine Clarkson, ‘nor one more willing to do his utmost if they really do come.’
The previous Christmas had been spent by De Quincey on the streets of London. Now, in late December and in the middle of a snowstorm, he arrived at last in Oxford. ‘No longer absorbed into the general unity of a family, I felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the anxieties of a man, and a member of the world.’ Important changes to the general unity of his family had taken place in the weeks before he left home: his younger brother, Richard, had run away from school to work as a cabin boy on a South Sea whaler, and his mother had sold the Priory and moved temporarily to Hinckley in Leicestershire before returning to Bristol. In the domestic upheavals, the finer details of De Quincey’s enrolment at the university had been overlooked and he arrived in the city without arranging entry to a particular college. Had he stayed at Manchester Grammar he would have been eligible for a bursary at Brasenose, but De Quincey was now faced with a bewildering number of options. Wanting a college large enough in which to disappear, and preferably attached to a cathedral and choir, he knocked on the door of Christ Church. Here he was interviewed by the dean who informed him that immediate entry was impossible, there being not so much as a spare dog kennel in which to sleep. De Quincey was recommended the smaller and less distinguished Worcester College, which was ‘Singularly barren of either virtue or talents or knowledge’, and lacked its own chapel.
De Quincey, who did not consider himself among the usual run of roaring undergraduates, found the social life of the university infantile and the intellectual life non-existent. His fellow students – except John Wilson, who he had not then met – ‘knew nothing at all of English Literature’, let alone modern poetry. The reason De Quincey gave for the ‘morbid excess’ of his antisocial behaviour was that his ‘eye had been couched in a secondary power of vision, by misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically escaped’. He had, in other words, been through the journey prescribed for Dorothy in ‘Tintern Abbey’. His small income was spent on acquiring the books which would form the basis of the vast and impressive library which would later be carted around the country; his increasingly threadbare appearance was excused on the grounds of his evident genius. De Quincey spoke not more than ‘one hundred words’ during his first two years, and his sole encounter with his personal tutor consisted of a chance meeting during which three sentences were exchanged, ‘two of which fell to his share, one to mine’. Asked what he had been reading, De Quincey replied ‘Paley’, referring to the utilitarian clergyman philosopher and advocate of natural theology. (He had actually been reading Plato’s Parmenides but imagined his tutor would not know ‘so very unusual’ a book.) ‘Ah! An excellent author,’ was the don’s response to Paley. ‘Excellent for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious there.’ De Quincey’s own understanding, on the contrary, was that while Paley was a ‘master’ of style, as a philosopher he was ‘the disgrace of the age’. His tutor had shown himself ‘a stiff lover of the artificial and the pompous’, and no further meetings took place. For the next five years, De Quincey simply continued with his programme of self-education. His later paean to the university – ‘Oxford, ancient Mother! Hoary with ancestral honours . . . – I owe thee nothing!’ – was not an exaggeration.
When spring came he moved out of his college rooms and took lodgings in the nearby village of Littlemore. By now De Quincey had ‘entered the cave of Trophonius’; the image referred to the Greek architect who was swallowed up by the earth.
Thus it was that six months would pass before he wrote again to Wordsworth. ‘When you gave me permission to write you must have wondered, (when you remembered me) that I made so little use of it,’ De Quincey’s next letter began. His silence was due to being absorbed in ‘little, & then unknown cares’ and only now that he had ‘retired to this little village’ could he ‘marshall [his] thoughts afresh’. Afraid that Wordsworth might think his admiration for Lyrical Ballads had been exaggerated, he described his first ‘acquaintance’ with the poems. Like everything De Quincey said to Wordsworth, the story he now told was tailored to make their friendship seem as inevitable as a breaking wave.
‘Some years ago spending my holidays at Bath I was shewn the poem of We are Seven which was handed about in manuscript. Between this period & that when I afterwards discovered the volume from which it was taken, a long time intervened.’ During this long interval, De Quincey explained, he had become ‘intoxicated’ with the ‘delirious and lawless pleasures’ of literature as low as ‘German drama’. He would have lost himself in a ‘frenzy’ of melodrama had it not been for the ‘purer & more permanent pleasure’ he had, from his ‘infancy’, found in the ‘Love of Nature’. In his attempt to ‘wean’ himself from Gothic turbulence, he ‘looked round for some guide who might assist to develop & tutor to new feelings, & then it was that from a recollection of the deep impression made on me by the short poem I have mentioned I knew where to seek that guidance,
& where I sought, I found it’.
De Quincey’s way of paying homage was to claim complete identification with his idols. Wordsworth had no idea that his pupil was not quite the reflective mirror he presented himself as being, that he quite happily balanced a love of the Gothic alongside the ‘purifying pleasures’ of contemporary poetry. He was now, De Quincey explained to Wordsworth, awaiting the hour when he too could become his ‘own Master’ and ‘live with those Brothers & Sisters who still remain to me, in solitary converse with Nature’. Of De Quincey’s surviving siblings, Richard had run away to sea, Henry was still at school, and Jane and Mary had shown no interest in setting up house with their delinquent brother.
Only after posting the letter did De Quincey discover, to his frustration, that Wordsworth had written to him twice since August. The first of the letters had been forwarded from the Priory to Bristol, and then on to Oxford, and the second had been waiting for him at Worcester College. Amongst the information contained, Wordsworth told De Quincey that he was writing a poem ‘on his own life’, and that Coleridge had become separated from them during the Scottish tour due to illness. De Quincey, now dashing off a supplementary letter, expressed delight in the prospect of the anticipated poem and suggested that should Coleridge try the waters at Bath, he could find him lodgings in the city. He then replied in detail to Wordsworth’s query about his moral virtue. Intemperance, De Quincey explained, was ‘disgusting’ to him; he was immune to the dissolute temptations of college life; he had ‘not much to reproach [himself] with’, and nothing in his conduct could make Wordsworth ‘repent the notice you have taken of me’. His description of himself was, for the moment, true.
That summer, 1804, De Quincey celebrated his nineteenth birthday. On the same day, the newly crowned Napoleon spent his thirty-fifth birthday reviewing his troops stationed in Boulogne. His ancient throne was placed on the top of a hill, surrounded by 200 bullet-riddled and bloodstained banners brought from his victories at Lodi, Marengo and Areola, a piece of theatre reported in detail in the English papers.
In the autumn De Quincey returned to London for reasons unexplained, but which were almost certainly to do with borrowing money against his patrimony. As the interminable negotiations with Mr Dell once more creaked into action, he awoke with rheumatic pains in his face. These he attributed to his morning ritual of immersing his head in cold water. After twenty-one days of agony a fellow student recommended opium and soon afterwards, on a ‘wet and cheerless’ Sunday afternoon, De Quincey found himself back on Oxford Street and entering a druggist’s shop. The druggist was a ‘dull and stupid’ man, but in De Quincey’s mind he became a ‘beautific vision . . . sent down to earth on a special mission to myself’. His first taste of ‘eloquent opium’ produced one of the most celebrated passages in his Confessions:
In an hour, oh! Heavens! What a revulsion! What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: – this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me – in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was the panacea. . . for all human woes, here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked-up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallows to the mail-coach.
Opium was the making of De Quincey. Under the pseudonym of ‘the Opium-Eater’ he would find the ‘character’ he had been searching for in the pages of his diary, and in the drug itself he discovered the ‘master key’ to the ‘diviner part of his nature’. With opium by his side, his ‘moral affections [were] in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all [shone] the great light of the majestic intellect’. He could dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, divest himself of fear and anxiety. He found the peace which had eluded him since that midsummer day in 1792. He could ‘run away’ from his ‘torments’; he was no longer pursued by whispers, footsteps, hysterical rivers, angry mobs or mad dogs. As George Gilfillan put it in his portrait of De Quincey, opium ‘shut him up (like the Genie in the “Arabian Tales”) in a phial filled with dusky fire’.
De Quincey tried to return to the experience of this rainy afternoon for the rest of his life; his future addiction was born of the hope that he might feel once again this initial euphoria. But like everything to do with Oxford Street, it simply evanesced. So too did the druggist himself: ‘I sought him near the stately Pantheon and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have removed in any bodily fashion.’
We have always been in awe of opium. Fossilised poppy seeds found at the remains of a lake village in Zurich suggest that the drug was consumed in the late Stone Age; Egyptian scrolls reveal that Ra recommended it for headaches; Homer relates how Helen, pitying the dejection of Telemachus and his men after Troy, pours an ointment into their wine called ‘no sorrow’; Sibyl sedates Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates of Hades, with an opiate, and Galen prescribed opium as an antidote for ‘confusion’ in the elderly. ‘It is time, poppy, to give up your secrets,’ said Diocles of Carystus in the fourth century AD, and for his next fifty-five years De Quincey remained convinced that the poppy allowed him access to the ‘inner world of secret self-consciousness’ in which ‘each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone’.
While crude opium, the juice of the seed heads, forms a sticky brown cake which can be chewed, smoked or injected, a tincture dissolved in wine or brandy produces laudanum, a bitter-tasting ruby-coloured liquid which, sweetened with nutmeg or another spice, can be served from a wine decanter. Like Coleridge and many of his contemporaries, De Quincey was a laudanum-drinker rather than an opium-eater, which raises a question about the sensational title he gave his Confessions. The effects of laudanum, De Quincey noted, were the opposite of drunkenness. While wine ignited a fast-burning fire, laudanum created a steady gemlike glow; wine aggravated what laudanum sedated; wine disordered the faculties that laudanum focused. What De Quincey discovered that day was that the doors of perception could be cleansed by experiences other than poetry, that opium also offered ‘an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men’.
At first he would plan his indulgences in advance, and take himself to London once every three weeks for a debauch of opium and opera. He felt his world now ‘spiritualised and sublimed’; having swallowed the magic potion, he would purchase a cheap seat high up in the gallery of the King’s Theatre and, shivering with pleasure, absorb the experience of the contralto, Giuseppina Grassini, singing Neapolitan revivals of Andreozzi’s La vergine del sole, Nasolini’s La morte di Cleopatra and Fioravanti’s Camilla. Opium gave De Quincey a form of synaesthesia, allowing him to see in the ‘elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life’.
He then walked, ‘without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages’. Laudanum London bore no relation to the cruel city he had known two years before. ‘Like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys,’ his tonic ‘overruled’ the differences between wealth and poverty. Imagining himself invisible, he walked amongst the crowds, taking in ‘the motion of time’ and the rhythm of talk. ‘Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion.’ His mother had once described herself as his steering map; now, when the city fell silent, De Quincey would ‘steer’ his own way ‘homewards upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage’. Since J
ohn Cabot was sent by Henry VII in 1497, Arctic voyages to discover a north-west passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been plentiful. Navigating back to his lodgings through the labyrinthine streets, De Quincey identified himself with a whole host of ancient mariners feeling their way forwards through the emerald green ice. When the terrible isolation of addiction took hold, these walks amongst the multitude became a happy memory.
As an ‘opium-eater’, De Quincey found not only found a literary identity, but a subject suited to his style. He was never to be, like Dorothy Wordsworth, a miniaturist. He thought in terms of accumulation and he piled his sentences high; he observed distortion rather than detail, crowds rather than individuals. A face, for De Quincey, rarely had features. ‘It was my disease,’ he said, ‘to meditate too much and to observe too little’; he ‘suffered’, said Virginia Woolf, ‘from the gift of seeing everything a size too large, and of reproducing his vision in words which are also a size too large’. But his writing could always support the weight of his reveries, and opium gave voice to De Quincey’s stylistic insatiability.
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