Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  The day after his dinner with Poole, Lord Egmont paid a visit to Nether Stowey to report that Coleridge had gone for the night to the market town of Bridgwater, eight miles away at the edge of the Somerset Levels. Egmont said this with a laugh at ‘his own simplicity’ in assuming the stability of any plan made by Coleridge. The ruling feature of Coleridge’s daily life, De Quincey gathered, was his timekeeping. ‘Nobody who. . . knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment he might make. . . those who asked him to dinner or any other party, as a matter of course, sent a carriage for him.’ Rather than wait indefinitely for his return, De Quincey decided to ambush Coleridge in Bridgwater, where he arrived later that day. Leading his horse down the main street of the town he saw in front of him, standing beneath a gateway, a ‘gazing’ figure:

  In height he might be about five feet eight; (he was, in reality, about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence. . . his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. . . I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more; and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie.

  De Quincey’s writing always resounds like an echo chamber, and his description of Coleridge recalls that of the persecuted dog whose ‘glazed’ and ‘dreamy’ eyes had met his own on the last morning he saw his brother William alive. Startled back into the material world, Coleridge now ‘repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us’ before greeting the young man ‘with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious’. De Quincey handed him the gift of ‘a scarce Latin pamphlet’ written by the philosopher David Hartley, after whom Coleridge’s eldest son was named. Coleridge pressed him to stay to dinner and then, for three uninterrupted hours, talked philosophy ‘like some great river, the Orellana, or the St Lawrence, that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music. . .’ At one point a well-presented woman, whose prettiness was of a ‘commonplace order’, briefly entered the room: ‘Mrs Coleridge’, announced a frigid Coleridge. The ‘Coleridges’ marriage,’ De Quincey noted, ‘had not been a happy one.’

  When he and Wordsworth had first met in 1797, it was Coleridge who was the contented family man while Wordsworth, with a pregnant mistress in revolutionary France, was the more fragile figure. And it was Coleridge with the growing reputation, while Wordsworth was unheard of. The tables had now turned: Wordsworth’s name was gathering strength and Coleridge felt his own diminishing; Wordsworth was floating in deep domestic calm while Coleridge, swollen with laudanum and ‘a wretched wrack’ of his former self, was ‘rolling, rudderless’ into the roughest seas of his life. He had returned from Malta, thought Dorothy, ‘utterly changed. . . that he is ill I am well assured, and must sink if he does not grow more happy’. Coleridge is often associated, and often associated himself, with water imagery. Wordsworth, he said, had been happy to let him ‘flow’ in his own ‘main stream’ but had discouraged ‘every attempt of mine to roll forward into a distinct current of my own’.

  Their friendship had taken a severe blow in the winter of 1806/07 when the Wordsworth party, bursting at the seams of Dove Cottage, had decamped to Sir George Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton where Coleridge, still desperately in love with Sara Hutchinson, had joined them. Here Wordsworth read aloud the manuscript of the poem which would later be known as The Prelude. When he had finished, ‘hanging still upon the sound’ of the poet’s deep voice, Coleridge ‘rose’ and found himself ‘in prayer’. The Prelude, he knew, would ensure Wordsworth’s place in ‘the choir of ever-enduring men’. Coleridge described his friend as standing ‘at the helm of a noble bark’, sailing ‘right onward’ in ‘open ocean and a steady breeze’. Himself a sinking mariner, Coleridge’s own poetic silence contrasted sorely with the unstoppable stream of his friend, ‘driven in surges now beneath the stars’. His agony of self-laceration was compounded by a hellish vision on the morning of Saturday 27 December, of Wordsworth and Sara together in a bedroom, her ‘beautiful breasts uncovered’. Coleridge spent the rest of the day in the Queen’s Head, drinking ale and frantically writing in his notebook.

  Whatever took place in that dreadful ‘phantasm’ – and Coleridge himself seemed not to know if the scene was real or imagined – the result was catastrophic. All we have to go on is what he described in his notebooks ten months later – during the time that he was seeing De Quincey on a daily basis – when he described the ‘agony’ of ‘the vision of that Saturday Morning – of the bed – O cruel!/ is he not beloved, adored by two [Sara and Mary] & two such Beings! and must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite?’ Coleridge followed this lament with a passage decrying Wordsworth’s incapacity to love, and resenting his friend’s ‘greater, better, manlier’ attractions. The entry ends with the plea: ‘Love me, Sara! Sara! Love me!’

  When De Quincey now approached him on the high street in Bridgwater, Coleridge had lost his compass. He remained convinced that separating from his wife was the answer to his troubles, that the ‘perpetual struggle, and endless heart-wasting’ of his domestic life lay ‘at the bottom of all my irresolution, procrastination, languor, and former detestable habit of poison-taking’. The Wordsworths agreed that ‘poor Coleridge’, as they now referred to him, was being destroyed less by opium than by a superficial spouse and felt confident that they could wean their friend off both. For Southey, who shared a house with Sarah Coleridge, it was from ‘idolatry of that family’ that Coleridge’s problems began; the Wordsworths ‘have always humoured him in all his follies, listened to his complaints of his wife, and when he complained of his itch, helped him to scratch, instead of covering him with brimstone ointment, and shutting him up by himself’.

  After dinner, De Quincey and Coleridge took a walk through the town and De Quincey mentioned that he had taken laudanum for a toothache. Coleridge then apparently ‘revealed’, with ‘a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage’, that he was ‘under the full dominion’ of the drug. The biographical consensus is to doubt that Coleridge, who was appalled by his own addiction, would confide such information to a relative stranger, but neither man would have been acting out of character in having such an exchange. De Quincey, a wily operator, was exercising the ‘gossiping taste’, as he called it, of the future biographer while Coleridge’s emotional incontinence, his most beguiling feature, was at its worst when the subject was his own wretched state. Added to which, Coleridge opened up around his acolytes and De Quincey, an earnest and talented Greek scholar with an extensive knowledge of metaphysics, was calculated to arouse his identification and concern.

  If he had not heard from Cottle already about Coleridge’s problems with opium, De Quincey would have recognised the effects of the drug in his host’s dreamy and wandering talk. With the patient help of Poole, Coleridge was currently reducing his daily intake and we know from his notebooks the ‘evil’ effects of his current withdrawal: ‘a cruel sweat on the brow, & on the chest – windy sickness at the Stomach. . . a reprobate Despair’. His physical suffering was only part of the battle; like all addicts he could only break his addiction by addressing it, and Coleridge was thrown into a maelstrom whenever he looked at himself: ‘the habit of Brooding daily makes it harder to confess the Thing I am, to any one – least of all to those, whom I most love & who most love me’. Such a confession would be easier to make to someone he did not love, and extracting a confession was De Quincey’s aim in raising the subject: confessions and opium were for him natural bedfellows.

  De Quincey always liked to describe the journey home following a momentous encounter. His reflections during these times tend to be presented as prophetic, as though he were on the brink of something vast. Tonight he walked back to Bristol guided by t
he ‘Northern constellations’. Coleridge was both more than and less than the man he had imagined him to be: he was, without doubt, an ‘extraordinary person’, but his character contained a fatal flaw, and his ‘majestic powers’ were ‘already besieged by decay’. His golden days were behind him, but it was still more glorious to listen to a sinking Coleridge than to any rising orator. In his essay on ‘Coleridge and Conversation’, De Quincey wrote that ‘To have heard Coleridge has now indeed become so great a distinction, that if it were transferable, and a man could sell it by auction, the biddings for it would run up as fast as for a genuine autograph of Shakespeare.’

  But did Coleridge hear anything of De Quincey’s voice? And what did he see when he looked into the eyes of his elfin visitor? An entry made in his notebook at the time he met De Quincey describes an impression of ‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance: In the eyes of the one, muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the same.’

  Of the two pairs of eyes the first, which belong to De Quincey, reveal nothing of their subject, they muddy the waters, while the second – Coleridge’s eyes – are a window into a fierce and feverish soul. It is the first pair which unnerves him; gazing from an otherwise mild face they suggest trouble, ‘a fear and distress of the mind’. Coleridge saw in De Quincey what the Wordsworths were never able to recognise: that his façade of meekness disguised turbulence and ferocity. De Quincey was a figure of fearful immensity.

  In May 1807, five years after the publication of the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes appeared. Amongst the sonnets, lyrics and odes was Wordsworth’s lament for Coleridge: ‘There is a change – and I am poor.’ The reviewers were unanimous in their weariness of what they considered tedious introspection. ‘I reviewed Wordsworth’s trash of the time,’ Byron later recalled, while another critic exhorted the poet to stop ‘drivelling’ to the ‘common pile-wort’ and to spend less time in the company of the ‘moods of his own mind’. Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review despaired at Wordsworth’s determination ‘to court literary martyrdom’ by ‘connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. For most readers, Jeffrey argued, ‘the sight of a friend’s garden-spade’ is unlikely to engender ‘powerful impressions and interesting reflections’: ‘All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig – a Hymn on Washing-day – Sonnets to one’s grandmother – or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye; and yet, we are afraid, it will not be quite easy to convince Mr. Wordsworth, that the same ridicule must infallibly attach to most of the pathetic pieces in these volumes.’

  In his condemnation of Poems, in Two Volumes, Jeffrey at least conceded that Lyrical Ballads had been a success: ‘If these volumes. . . turn out to be nearly as popular as the lyrical ballads – if they sell nearly to the same extent – or are quoted and imitated among half as many individuals, we shall admit that Mr. Wordsworth has come much nearer the truth in his judgment of what constitutes the charm of poetry, than we had previously imagined.’ Wordsworth considered himself above the criticism of those trapped by the conventions of taste. What, he asked Lady Beaumont, did his poems have to do with the world of ‘routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in Carriage. . . what have they to do. . . with a life without love?’ In a mind where there is no ‘imagination’, he explained, ‘the voice which is the voice of my poetry’ cannot be heard.

  That September, Sarah Coleridge and her three children, Hartley, aged eleven, Derwent, aged seven and a four-year-old daughter also called Sara moved to College Street in Bristol, leaving Coleridge to prepare a lecture series on the fine arts which he was due to deliver in London later in the autumn. De Quincey divided his time between helping Coleridge gather together his thoughts in Nether Stowey, and currying favour with Sarah in Bristol. Always more relaxed with children, he invited Hartley – the ‘faery voyager’ of Wordsworth’s exquisite lyric, ‘To H C, six years old’ – to dinner and took him on a tour of the dells of Leighwood.

  His next move was to send Coleridge, via Cottle, a gift of £300 (the equivalent in today’s money of £10,000) from an ‘anonymous benefactor’. Cottle assured Coleridge that the source was known to him, and that there was ‘not a man in the Kingdom of whom you could rather accept a favour’. Much has been made of the generosity of the gift and little said about its intentions; knowing that Coleridge – despite his annuity of £150 from Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood – was in no position to refuse such a sum, De Quincey found a way of purchasing the friendship and bestowing on him an obligation. Before he became a borrower, De Quincey was a lender: he experienced from both sides the deep moral power of debt. The ‘anonymity’ of the gift – which De Quincey later explained had been a loan – could not be taken seriously; there was only one person in Coleridge’s life determined to make himself indispensible, and Cottle later said that the poet had ‘no doubt of the source whence the money was derived’.

  When Coleridge returned his family to Greta Hall, De Quincey seized the opportunity to propose himself as their escort. Sarah was glad of the company, the children were delighted to have a playfellow, and De Quincey had solved his problem. This was the third time he had tried to make his wish come true: now, when he appeared at the door of Dove Cottage, it would be not as a ragamuffin runaway or a pilgrim devotee but as the official representative of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  Everyone was changing places. De Quincey had replaced Coleridge as protector of his wife and children, and Coleridge moved into the household of his friend, John Morgan, whose wife and sister-in-law quickly replaced Mary Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson: ‘I never knew two pairs of humans so alike,’ Coleridge enthused to Dorothy, ‘as Mrs Morgan & her sister. . . and Mary and Sara. I was reminded afresh of the resemblance every hour – & at times felt a self-reproach, that I could not love two such amiable, pure & affectionate Beings for their own sakes. But there is a time in Life, when the heart stops growing.’

  The Grasmere party left Bristol at the end of October, and once again the children lost sight of their father. De Quincey kept spirits high on the journey by betrothing himself to little Sara, and they stopped for a week in Liverpool where the Coleridges stayed with friends while De Quincey paid a visit to Everton. From here it was ninety miles to their destination; they spent their last night in Lancaster before entering the land of mist and cloud through the gateway at Kendal.

  When their chaise reached Rydal Water it crawled so slowly to the summit of White Moss that De Quincey leapt off and ran down the hill for the final mile, leaving the horses far behind and even losing ‘the sound of the wheels at times’. Spreading out to his left was Lake Grasmere, its sylvan margin feathered with ferns and the surrounding copses burning with autumnal gold. Rearing into view at a turn in the road, he saw, with a ‘sudden shock’, the white cottage he had spied the year before from the gorge of Hammerscar. His panic returned; had the chaise not then rolled up behind him, De Quincey would have fled.

  And so it was that at four o’clock on 4 November 1807, four and a half years after first writing to him, De Quincey was able to say that he bounded down the road to greet Wordsworth.

  According to Coleridge, the man who finds himself facing an ‘apparition’ is sure to die. De Quincey, remembering this theory, felt as though his first ‘face to face’ encounter with Wordsworth was similarly fatal. ‘Never before or since can I reproach myself with having trembled at the approaching presence of any creature,’ he said of the long-anticipated moment. Pushing open the garden gate, De Quincey ‘heard a step’, and then ‘a voice’, after which, like ‘a flash of lightning’, he saw emerging fro
m the house ‘a tallish man, who held out his hand, and saluted me with the most cordial manner’. Coleridge had first appeared to De Quincey in a haze, but Wordsworth came as a flash. De Quincey would always associate the Wordsworths with suddenness.

  Mrs Coleridge, sitting in the coach, required handing down; it was Wordsworth who did the honours while De Quincey, ‘stunned’ at having ‘survived’ what had been ‘so long anticipated and so long postponed’, made his way mechanically through the front door of the cottage and into the parlour which, according to his measurements, ‘was an oblong square, not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet long and twelve broad’. Here two ladies appeared. The first was tall, slender (‘for my taste. . . rather too slender’), and ‘very plain’, with a squint in one eye which went ‘much beyond’ what might be considered ‘an attractive foible’. Constitutionally silent, she wore ‘the most winning expression of benignity’ that De Quincey had ever beheld. This was Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, the ‘perfect woman, nobly planned’, and celebrated in Poems, in Two Volumes. The second figure, her opposite in every way, was Dorothy. Mary had grace, and Dorothy ‘was all fire’: small, ‘Egyptian brown’, with the ‘wild eyes’ so finely noticed in the ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth’s sister blazed with ‘impassioned intellect’. A combination of the ‘unsexual’ and the ‘fervent’, Dorothy stammered when she talked (‘as distressingly as Charles Lamb himself’) and stooped when she walked. She was, De Quincey felt, liable to flare out at any moment, and he found her freedom of expression unfeminine.