Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  During his London visits, he introduced himself to Charles Lamb, another of London’s night-walkers and a friend of the poets. A clerk at the East India House on Leadenhall Street, Lamb lived in the Temple with his sister, Mary, who in a fit of lunacy eight years earlier had fatally stabbed their mother at the supper table. The same height as De Quincey, Lamb was gentle and teasing, with a great deal of eclectic learning, a love of puns and a severe stammer. De Quincey professed to admire his writing and so Lamb invited him to supper, only realising when the conversation turned immediately to his knowledge of Coleridge, that he was being used. Irritated by De Quincey’s duplicity and by the reverential manner in which he couched his enquiries, Lamb had fun at his guest’s expense by ridiculing the authors of Lyrical Ballads, ‘their books, their thoughts, their places, their persons’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ – a poem Lamb pretended to dislike – also came into his line of fire, leaving De Quincey to gasp: ‘But, Mr Lamb, good heavens! How is it possible you can allow yourself such opinions? What instance could you bring from the poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?’ ‘Instances!’ said Lamb: ‘oh, I’ll instance you, if you come to that. Instance, indeed! Pray, what do you say to this –

  The many men so beautiful

  And they all dead did lie – ?

  So beautiful, indeed! Beautiful! Just think of such a gang of Wapping vagabonds, all covered with pitch, and chewing tobacco; and the old gentleman himself, – what do you call him? – the bright-eyed fellow?’

  De Quincey placed hands over his ears in ‘horror’. When Lamb had finished, he assumed a ‘sarcastic smile’ and told his guest that had he known they were going to talk ‘in this strain’ they should ‘have said grace before we began our conversation’.

  It was probably Lamb who let him know that Coleridge was currently living in Malta. De Quincey later joked that when he heard this news he ‘began to inquire about the best route’ to the Mediterranean, ‘but, as any route at that time promised an inside place in a French prison, I reconciled myself to waiting’. Introducing himself to Coleridge, however, was never as important as introducing himself to Wordsworth and it was the passage north which still preoccupied De Quincey. It had, inexplicably, been a year since his last letter to the poet: how much longer was he going to wait before taking up the offer to call on the household in Grasmere?

  Eventually, in the spring of 1805, De Quincey screwed his courage to the sticking place. His love for the hills and forest lawns of Westmorland had long been determined, he suggested, by ‘a sense of mysterious pre-existence’, which was De Quincey’s version of Wordsworth’s ‘gleams of past existence’. Not only had he haunted the lakes in the form of ‘a phantom-self’, but as a Lancastrian he felt some ‘fraction of denizenship’ with the ‘mountainous labyrinths’ and silent glens whose names – Scafell Pike, Bowfell, Pillar, Great Gable, Fairfield, Grisdale, Seat Sandal, Blencathra, Glaramara, Borrowdale, Buttermere, Derwent – had cast their spell over him. The journey from London is 300 miles, and his preferred mode of transport was the outside of the mail.

  The English mail-coach was, to De Quincey, a ‘spiritualised object’ which revealed for the first time ‘the glory of motion’. The mail-coach owned the road. Nothing could delay its progress; other vehicles scurried to the side at the blast of its horn. Drawn by horses of great ‘beauty and power’, it covered vast distances at speeds of up to thirteen miles an hour. De Quincey enjoyed the velocity, but also the sense of inviolability and escape. ‘A bedroom in a quiet house’ was vulnerable to robbers, rats and fire, but the box of the mail was the safest place a man could be – ‘nobody can touch you there’. Some travellers called the top the ‘attic’ but to De Quincey the top was ‘the drawing-room’ and ‘the box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing-room’. The interior of the coach, generally considered the most civilised place in which to sit, was the ‘coal cellar in disguise’.

  He was dropped eight miles south of Grasmere in the village of Coniston, between the slender reach of Coniston Water and the vast fell of Coniston Old Man. The thrill of the journey over, De Quincey now faced the ordeal ahead. It had been too long, he feared as the mail thundered away, to appear unannounced on Wordsworth’s doorstep; indeed the very image of Wordsworth, ‘as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye’ crushed his ‘faculties’. What happened next was what De Quincey called ‘foolish panic’ and what we might today call a panic attack; an orchestration of symptoms left him petrified. De Quincey usually signals anxiety with an image of intense motion rushing towards him and stopping him in his tracks; in ‘The English Mail-Coach’ he described the sensation as one in which, ‘when the signal is flying for action’, the ‘guilty weight of dark unfathomed remembrances’ hung upon and stalled his ‘energies’. Here, in Coniston, the signal was flying for action and he found himself weighted to the spot. Consumed by self-loathing, he turned around and returned to Oxford.

  A year later, in the spring of 1806, he set out once again, this time breaking his journey at Mrs Best’s cabin in Everton. He had, in the intervening twelve months, still not written to Wordsworth. The Everton air always buoyed up his confidence, and so he now composed a letter to the poet apologising for his ‘long silence’, explaining that he was on a ‘tour’ of the Lakes, and asking whether ‘it would be agreeable to you that I should call at your cottage’. Between this letter and his last he had suffered, De Quincey explained, a ‘long interval of pain’. He had been ‘struggling with an unconfirmed pulmonary consumption’ – presumably the undiagnosed effects of opium – but the ‘great affliction was the loss of my brother’. Richard had run away to sea at the same time as De Quincey had departed to Oxford, but ‘in losing him I lost a future friend; for, besides what we had of alliance in our minds, we had passed so much of our childhood together (though latterly we had been separated) that we had between us common remembrances of early life’. His reference to Richard was another stab at identification; De Quincey, who followed Wordsworth’s every move, had read in the newspapers the previous February that the poet’s brother John Wordsworth, captain of the East Indiaman The Abergavenny, had drowned when his ship sank off Portland. ‘These things,’ De Quincey continued of Richard’s whereabouts, ‘have shed blight upon my mind and have made the last two years of my life so complete a blank in the account of happiness that I know not whether there be one hour in that whole time which I would willingly recall.’

  Wordsworth sent a warm reply confirming that De Quincey was still welcome to visit, and suggesting that he come in late May. But by June, De Quincey had still not appeared. He wrote again to Wordsworth, providing another jumble of excuses for his change of plan, but he was still in Everton in ‘daily expectation of hearing some final account of the Cambridge, the ship in which my brother sailed’. The Cambridge, which he expected to dock in Liverpool, did not appear either. Giving up on the return of his brother, De Quincey told Wordsworth that it was ‘almost certain’ he would ‘come into Westmorland before the end of this month’. Meanwhile, he spent the long summer nights in his cabin, drinking laudanum and gazing out of ‘an open window’. The sea, a mile below, was ‘brooded over by a dove-like calm’ while the great spread of Liverpool seemed to him to be ‘the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind’. His trances ‘called into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties’ and all those ‘blessed household countenances’ which in the graveyard lay.

  Memories, long buried, streamed to the surface. When he slept, ‘dream form[ed] itself mysteriously within dream’, and ‘the nursery of my childhood expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed. . . I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself.’ Continually he returned to the ‘trance in my sister’s chamber’: vaults, shafts and billows transported him to the realm he had glimpsed through the window on that midsummer day. ‘Again I am in the chamber with my sister’s corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of the summer, the Syrian sunlights, the frost
of death.’

  With this ‘drowsy syrup’, De Quincey said, combining imagery from Othello and Macbeth, a ‘guilty man’ could regain ‘for one night. . . the hopes of his youth and hands washed pure from blood’. But opium became itself a source of guilt: ‘In the one CRIME of OPIUM,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘what crime have I not made myself guilty of!’

  De Quincey eventually left Everton and spent 15 August 1806, his twenty-first birthday, on the road to Grasmere. He was now the recipient of a modest fortune of £2,600, of which £600 was already accounted for in debts accumulated over the last three years, including the costs incurred by his sister, Mary, when she searched these same roads for her brother after he ran away from school. By 18 August he had, once again, reached Coniston. Here, at the Black Bull Inn, De Quincey gathered his thoughts as we do when we arrive at a turning point in our lives. What were his future goals? A new list was drawn up in his diary, titled ‘The Constituents of Happiness’. The ‘Sources of Happiness’ he had listed three years before had begun with ‘Poetry’ and ended with ‘Music’. De Quincey’s requirements were now more specific:

  1.A capacity of thinking – i.e., of abstraction and reverie

  2.The cultivation of an interest in all that concerns human life and human nature

  3.A fixed and not merely temporary residence in some spot of eminent beauty: – I say not merely temporary because frequent change of abode is unfavourable to the growth of local attachment which must of necessity exercise on any (but more especially on the contemplative mind) a most beneficial influence. . .

  4.Such an interchange of solitude and interesting society as that each may give to each an intense glow of pleasure.

  5.Books. . .

  6.Some great intellectual project to which all intellectual pursuits may be made tributary. . .

  7.Health and vigour

  8.The consciousness of a supreme mastery over all unworldly passions (anger – contempt – and fear). . .

  9.A vast predominance of contemplation varied with only so much of action as the feelings may prompt by way of relief. . .

  10.. . . emancipation from worldly cares – anxieties – and connexions – and from all that is comprehended under the term business

  11.The education of a child

  12.. . . a personal appearance tolerably respectable. . .

  Opium would help him in the achievement of numbers 1, 8, 9 and 10, but would work against 7 and 12. Regardless of any effort he made, De Quincey’s clothing would always require improvement. Throughout his life, as Michael Neve puts it, he would continue to ‘look dreadful while keeping up appearances’. Number 3 revealed his exasperation with his mother’s domestic arrangements and his longing for stability; 5 and 6 were within his reach, and 11, a fashionable Romantic hobby, would be realised in the next few years. What is striking is not just the certainty with which De Quincey understood his own needs, but how little his requirements would change from now on. Also remarkable is how near he had already come, through sheer endeavour, to fulfilling the ambitions of a lifetime. Meanwhile his overruling desire, to meet Wordsworth, was within hours of completion.

  Master of his own destiny, with money to spend and no one to answer to, De Quincey pushed forwards to the gorge of Hammerscar where he shuddered to look down into the vale of Grasmere. The ‘loveliest of landscapes’ broke ‘upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise’. He took in the dimensions: here was the lake, ‘with its solemn bend-like island of five acres in size, seemingly afloat on its surface’, and ‘just two bow-shots from the water’ at the foot of ‘a vast and seemingly never-ending series of ascents’, gleamed the ‘little white cottage’ which he knew to belong to the poet. Standing a few miles above the building, he was positioned like Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – and De Quincey was also revisiting the view. Beneath him lay his future. Eight years earlier, in anticipation of such a moment, Coleridge had bounded the forty miles from his home at Nether Stowey to Wordsworth’s home at Racedown, where he leapt over a gate and tore through an unmown field to embrace the man who would become the greatest friend of his life. But De Quincey once again turned around – and ‘retreated like a guilty thing’.

  The image he used to describe his second flight from Wordsworth was the same as the one he used to describe his departure from Elizabeth’s bedroom in Greenhay, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. The phrase was from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, where the poet ‘Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised’, and Wordsworth himself had taken it from Act 1 of Hamlet, where the murdered king’s ghost is described by Horatio as disappearing with the dawn, ‘like a guilty thing/ Upon a fearful summons’. It was Hamlet, indecisive, philosophising, obsessed by another world, whom De Quincey was starting to resemble.

  Within days of De Quincey’s second retreat from Grasmere, and his return to Oxford, Coleridge’s ship was docking on the Medway. After two and a half years, the mariner had come home – except that he no longer knew where in the world such a place might be. His trunk of books got lost in Wapping and after a fruitless search of the warehouses along the Ratcliffe Highway, he took himself to London. Three months of procrastination followed before Coleridge returned to his family at Greta Hall. ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,’ he famously observed.

  Gustave Dore, ‘The Mariner gazes on the serpents in the ocean’, from the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  ‘In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth toward the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move forward.’

  7

  Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind

  . . . so wide appears

  The vacancy between me and those days

  Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

  That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem

  Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

  And of some other Being.

  Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Second

  One reason behind what De Quincey called his ‘mysterious delay’ in meeting Wordsworth was his fear that the poet might prove a disappointment to him. Or – worse – that he, lionised by his school teachers and the self-proclaimed spokesman for Lyrical Ballads in Everton literary society, would prove a disappointment to Wordsworth. Unlike Coleridge, whose talk was famously circumambient, De Quincey was as shy as an ibex. In those days he moved cautiously in conversation as if through a tangled wood, and he found it hard to ‘unravel’ or ‘even make perfectly conscious’ to himself the ‘subsidiary thoughts into which one leading thought often radiates’. This was an area in which De Quincey believed he resembled the young Wordsworth, who had laboured under a similar curse at the same age before finding his spoken voice in his late twenties. Despite luxuriating in the contempt of others, De Quincey drew a line at inviting Wordsworth’s scorn: ‘there was a limit. People there were in this world whose respect I could not dispense with.’

  Coleridge, however, being like ‘some great boy just come from school’, inspired less fear than the parental Wordsworth. Added to which, De Quincey knew that they shared a love of German metaphysics which meant that they would never run out of things to say. And should De Quincey find himself tongue-tied, Coleridge, from what he had heard, would happily continue the conversation alone. De Quincey decided to rethink his tactics, and approach Wordsworth through the conduit of his friend and collaborator.

  In the summer of 1807 Elizabeth Quincey was living in Downy Parade, Bristol, two bowshots from Wrington in Somerset, where Hannah More had her headquarters. De Quincey, who liked this corner of the country a great deal more than he liked Oxford, was a regular visitor to his mother’s house. An added attraction was the presence in the city of Joseph Cottle, publisher of Lyrical Ballads, and it was Cottle who told De Quincey that Coleridge was back in England and staying with Thomas Poole, forty miles away in Nether Stowey. On 26 July, De Quincey mounted his steed and swerved south, arriving
at Poole’s house that evening.

  A loyal friend of Coleridge, Poole was a ‘stout, plain-looking farmer, leading a bachelor life’. De Quincey handed him a letter of introduction from Cottle, only to learn that Coleridge had temporarily left to pay a visit to Lord Egmont. Intrigued by Coleridge’s admirer, Poole invited the young man to stay until his guest returned, which gave De Quincey time to explore the local sights and continue his research into the lives of the poets. First on his agenda was a visit to Wordsworth’s former home at Alfoxden, ‘a place of singular interest to myself’. It was here, he noted, surrounded by the ‘ferny Quantock hills which are so beautifully sketched in the poem of “Ruth”’, that Wordsworth and Dorothy lived before they returned to their native lakes.

  That evening the two men talked over dinner. As his guest was a philosopher, Poole asked whether De Quincey had ever formed an opinion on why Pythagoras forbade his disciples from eating beans. Coleridge, Poole added darkly, had recently proposed an explanation which he suspected ‘to have not been original’. This was the first hint that De Quincey received of there being an ‘infirmity’ in his hero’s ‘mind’: at times Coleridge represented the thoughts of others as his own. De Quincey was able to tell his host that he had read in the pages of a certain ‘German author’ that beans in ancient Greece were used as tokens for voting, and so Pythagoras’s prohibition was not against the eating of beans but against involvement in politics. ‘By Jove,’ spluttered Poole, ‘that was the very explanation [Coleridge] gave us!’

  Who knows if this conversation took place? It was described by De Quincey twenty-seven years later in a series of essays for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine on ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Having died some months before, Coleridge was unavailable for comment. ‘Here was a trait of Coleridge’s mind,’ De Quincey trumpeted, ‘to be first made known to me by his best friend, and first published to the world by me, the foremost of his admirers!’ The whole premise of the anecdote about Pythagoras and the beans is unstable: devoted to Coleridge, Poole was unlikely to spread rumours which would destroy the reputation of his friend and discredit him in the eyes of a young admirer. Added to which, it is hard to imagine the genial Poole wrestling with the fear that something said over supper might not have been freshly coined. Coleridge had a porous intellect; it was assumed by those who enjoyed his company that his conversation was infused with deep reading.