Growth, intellectual and otherwise, was his absorbing preoccupation, and one of the attractions of opium was that it allowed De Quincey to observe the growth of his own mind. To see a thing grow was to catch it in a state of grace: writing, De Quincey observed in his ‘Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected’, is not a ‘piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown, and pass through several stages of growth’. The difference between Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson, was that Burke grew ‘a truth before your eyes’ while Johnson’s truths came fully formed. Burke’s motion was ‘all a going forward’ while in Johnson there was ‘no process, no evolution, no movement of self-conflict or preparation’. Similarly, De Quincey reprimanded Maria Edgeworth for misunderstanding the all-important lines from Book Four of Paradise Lost: ‘And in the lowest deep a lower deep/ Still opens to devour me.’ ‘If it was already the lowest deep,’ Edgeworth wondered, ‘how the deuce. . . could it open into a lower deep?’ ‘In carpentry,’ De Quincey replied, ‘it is clear to my mind that it could not. But, in cases of deep imaginative feeling, no phenomenon is more natural than precisely this never-ending growth of one colossal grandeur chasing and surmounting another, or of abysses that swallowed up abysses.’
The Prelude, reworked over a forty-year period, was a poem which grew before your eyes, a never-ending growth of one colossal grandeur. A two-part version had been written in 1798–9; a five-book version had been given to Coleridge to take to Malta, and by the time Coleridge returned it had expanded to thirteen books. This was the version that Wordsworth had recited at Coleorton in the winter of 1807/08. Each section of the poem was given a title:
Book First – Introduction – Childhood and School-Time
Book Second – School-Time (continued)
Book Third – Residence at Cambridge
Book Fourth – Summer Vacation
Book Fifth – Books
Book Sixth – Cambridge and the Alps
Book Seventh – Residence in London
Book Eighth – Retrospect – Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind
Book Ninth – Residence in France
Book Tenth – Residence in France and French Revolution
Book Eleventh – Imagination – How Impaired or Restored
Book Twelfth – Same Subject (continued)
Book Thirteenth – Conclusion
Continually revised, the poem was eventually published as fourteen books in 1850. It is now possible to read the 1798, 1805 and 1850 versions as different poems sharing a genetic heritage. Even then, as its title suggests, The Prelude had been intended only as a prologue to a larger work. The original plan had been for Wordsworth to compose an extensive ‘Philosophical Poem’ to be called ‘The Recluse’, of which The Prelude would form one part and The Excursion, on which Wordsworth was currently working, another part. The relation between The Excursion and The Prelude was compared by Wordsworth to that of ‘the Ante-chapel’ and the ‘body of a Gothic Church’. Dorothy, adopting the same metaphor, described The Prelude as a ‘sort of portico to “The Recluse”, part of the same building’. Despite, or because of, its mighty foundations, ‘The Recluse’ would never be completed.
In his ‘Lake Reminiscences’ De Quincey claimed to have memorised The Prelude, which he had not seen ‘for more than twenty years’, but in 1848 he confessed that when the manuscript was in his possession he had copied it into five notebooks. This was without the poet’s knowledge. It will have been a slow and absorbing task, and one which allowed him to concentrate his full attention on Wordsworth’s thought. We can imagine that these five notebooks were read again and again by De Quincey before being buried in mountains of further notebooks, which eventually piled up to the point where he was no longer able to get inside the room in which they were stored.
What De Quincey found here was a quest narrative – the quest for times past – in which the poet wrote about himself as though he were inside a dream, seeing only ‘a prospect in my mind’. The poem begins with Wordsworth’s leaving the ‘bondage’ of London and embracing his homelessness:
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home?
Wordsworth recalls his childhood as ‘one long bathing of a summer’s day’; certain views of Westmorland, particularly the sea, gave him such pleasure that he wondered if his soul might have learned to love such sights during a previous existence. De Quincey read about the poet’s night-wanderings as a boy, how he stole a boat and felt the ‘huge cliff’ rise up and stride behind him, how he plundered a nest and heard
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
He read of how the poet found the grave of a man who had murdered his wife, and saw a dead body emerge bolt upright from the bottom of the lake. Wordsworth’s favourite childhood book, De Quincey learned, was ‘a slender abstract of the Arabian Tales’, and when he understood that his ‘little yellow, canvas-covered’ volume contained only a fraction of the stories which had been ‘hewn from a mighty quarry’, he determined to purchase the whole thing. But however much he ‘hoarded up/ And hoarded up’, Wordsworth was never able to complete his infinite task. De Quincey read of how Wordsworth, then a schoolboy, had waited for the horses that would bring him home to his dying father, about his years at Cambridge, his time in revolutionary France, his walking tour of the Alps, and his first experience of London, described as ‘a dream,/ Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound!’ where men live ‘not knowing each other’s names’ and the face of ‘every one/ That passes by me is a mystery!’ The Inns of Court were ‘labyrinths’, individuals were ‘melted and reduced to one identity’. The streets teemed with ‘all specimens of man. . . the hunter Indian; Moors, Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese’, coaches ‘whirled’ across the avenues with ‘rash speed’ and ‘horn loud blowing’. De Quincey read about Wordsworth’s visit to ‘the giddy top’ of ‘the Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s’ and other ‘churches numberless’.
Coleridge would mournfully describe Wordsworth’s achievement in The Prelude as ‘in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy’, and the poem became quite literally the story of De Quincey’s life. As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth moved backwards and forwards from the quiet present to the turbulent past, reflecting not only on his ‘two consciousnesses’ – he was both ‘conscious of myself and of some other being’ – but on the nature of consciousness itself. Visionary moments, in which ‘what I saw/ Appeared like something in myself, a dream,/ A prospect in my mind,’ would interrupt his childhood play. It was from The Prelude that De Quincey learned the use of dual time schemes; he too would describe himself as belonging to both the present and the past; he too would depict his younger self as haunted by an echo of a time which ghosts this one. Wordsworthian memory would become the subject of De Quincey’s own autobiographical writing. ‘Each man,’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘is a memory to himself’, and the line might serve as De Quincey’s epitaph.
He was as much of an insider now as he would ever be. Added to which, nearly all the sources of happiness he had listed in his diary five years before could be ticked off. De Quincey had a ‘fixed and not merely temporary residence in some spot of eminent beauty’ and was in charge of ‘the education of a child’; he enjoyed ‘health and vigour’, the ‘interchange of solitude and society’, and ‘emancipation from worldly cares’ (i.e. enough money to live on); he was able to indulge in ‘abstraction and reverie’, and he had books galore. Over 5,000 volumes now crowded the shelves and the floors, and climbed in pillars up the walls. Still urgently to be achieved were the cultivation of ‘some great intellectual project’ and ‘the consciousness of a supreme mastery over all unworldly passions (anger – contempt – and fear).’
While De Quincey was becoming indispensible to th
e Wordsworths, Coleridge was making himself impossible. He was soldiering on with The Friend, determined not to give it up. With the aid of Sara Hutchinson he worked in manic bursts, and was able to write – or rather dictate – a whole issue in two days. The first edition of the new year carried his attack on the ‘garrulous’ style of ‘Modern Biography’, composed of silly anecdotes, ‘worthless curiosity’ and ‘unprovoked abuse’. The modern biographer, Coleridge argued, was a house-breaker who introduced ‘the spirit of vulgar scandal, and personal inquietude into the Closet and the Library, environing with evil passions the very Sanctuaries, to which we should flee for refuge from them’. It was a pertinent image: Coleridge, currently violating the sanctuary of Allan Bank, had borrowed 500 books from De Quincey’s library, and De Quincey was keeping his own evil passions in check while he inhabited Wordsworth’s former closet.
Coleridge’s routine, Dorothy complained, was out of kilter with the rest of the household. His fire needed lighting when the servant was busy elsewhere, and his bed had always ‘to be made at an unreasonable time’. Not so long ago an unmade bed would not have provoked a crisis in their friendship, and the Wordsworths would have indulged Coleridge’s unconventional hours. Time was, Coleridge had arrived at Dove Cottage in the moonlight and eaten a mutton chop beneath the stars. In those days he had been in love with Dorothy and William; but now he fantasised about himself and Sara cosseted ‘in the cottage style in good earnest’. De Quincey, living Coleridge’s dream, instead wanted what Coleridge had: a great intellectual project, and a woman by his side.
But Sara had had enough of Coleridge, and in February she moved temporarily to Wales to keep house for her brother. Without Sara Hutchinson, The Friend folded and Coleridge ceased to function. ‘A candle in its socket,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘with its alternate fits and dying flashes of lingering Light – O God! O God!’ Dorothy confessed to Catherine Clarkson that Sara’s departure had come as a relief (‘we are all glad that she is gone’) because Coleridge ‘harassed and agitated her mind continually, and we saw that he was doing her health perpetual injury’. As for Coleridge, Dorothy concluded, ‘we have no hope of him’.
If he were not under our Roof, he would be just as much the slave of stimulants as ever; and his whole time and thoughts, (except when he is reading, and he reads a great deal), are employed in deceiving himself, and seeking to deceive others. He will tell me that he has been writing. . . when I know he has not written a single line. This Habit pervades all his words and actions, and you feel perpetually new hollowness and emptiness. . . He lies in bed, always till after 12 o’clock, sometimes much later, and never walks out. Even the finest spring day does not tempt him to seek the fresh air; and this beautiful valley seems a blank to him. He never leaves his own parlour except at dinner and tea, and sometimes supper, and then he always seems impatient to get back to his solitude – he goes the moment his food is swallowed. Sometimes he does not speak a word, and when he does talk it is always very much and upon subjects as far aloof from himself and his friends as possible.
Dorothy, usually so loyal to Coleridge, begged Mrs Clarkson to ‘burn’ this letter. But in such a mood she must also have confided in De Quincey, who was keeping his own laudanum habit quiet and could anyway see for himself the state of things in Allan Bank.
Unaffected by Coleridge’s habits, Wordsworth was enjoying a burst of creativity. He had returned to ‘The Recluse’, abandoned in 1806, and written an introduction to a collection of local views painted by the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson. The paintings were, Wordsworth said, intolerable, but his introduction was tremendous and later republished as Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. Here he laid out his philosophy of landscape, his views on rural architecture, and his famous hatred of larches.
Grasmere was emptied out in the summer of 1810. Dorothy visited friends in Lincolnshire, De Quincey went to stay with his mother and sisters in Westhay, and Wordsworth looked in on Sara in Wales, the thought of which filled Coleridge with misery. Sara had written to the Wordsworths but not to Coleridge and he found himself sloping back to his own family at Greta Hall. Mary was now, for the first time in her marriage, left alone in the house (as alone as you can be with five children under seven years old) and Wordsworth took the opportunity to correspond with her privately. Their letters – only discovered in 1977 – add another dimension to the domestic goings-on in the vale. Wordsworth and Mary had a secret: their marriage was not a workaday partnership for the raising of offspring, and nor was Mary simply her husband’s helpmeet and housekeeper. De Quincey was wrong in seeing Wordsworth as incapable of romance; he and Mary shared what Wordsworth now celebrated as the ‘lively gushing thought-employing spirit-stirring passion of love’, an ardour ‘very rare’ in ‘married life. . . even among good people’. Wordsworth, who described himself as having an ‘almost insurmountable aversion from letter writing’ revealed that he could ‘write on’ to his wife ‘to the end of time’.
The woman he compared in his poetry to ‘a phantom’, an ‘apparition’, a ‘spirit’, and a ‘dancing shape’ was, we now know, seen by him as flesh and blood. Despite sharing every moment of every day, Wordsworth’s desire for Mary had to be held at bay for fear of distressing Dorothy, who believed that her brother’s marriage included her. Dorothy, wrote Wordsworth, would find their letters ‘obnoxious’, and he instructed Mary to hide them away. But ‘fail not to write to me without reserve’, he implored. ‘Never have I been able to receive such a letter from you, let me not be disappointed, but give me your heart that I may kiss the words a thousand times!’ As for Mary, William’s words – so new, so unexpected – had left her ‘whole frame. . . overpowered with Love & longing. Well was it for me that I was stretched upon my bed, for I think I could scarcely have stood upon my feet for excess of happiness and depth of affection.’
That October, Basil Montagu, a friend who was passing through the Lakes, invited Coleridge to return with him to London and consult a doctor. Coleridge, it was agreed, would stay with Montagu until he had recovered his health. So he left Greta Hall in Montagu’s coach, but by the time they arrived in the capital the offer of hospitality had been withdrawn. Wordsworth, it seems, had warned Montagu that Coleridge was an ‘absolute nuisance’ as a houseguest. A version – the Wordsworth version – of what happened was given to Catherine Clarkson by Dorothy:
William used many arguments to persuade M[ontagu] that his purpose of keeping Coleridge comfortable could not be answered by their being in the same house together – but in vain. Montagu was resolved. ‘He would do all that could be done for him and have him at his house.’ After this, William spoke out and told M[ontagu] the nature of C’s habits (nothing in fact which everybody whose house he has been in for two days has not seen for themselves) and Montagu then perceived that it would be better for C to have lodgings near him. William intended giving C advice to the same effect; but he had no opportunity of talking with him when C passed through Grasmere on his way to London. Soon after they got to London Montagu wrote to William that on the road he had seen so much of C’s habits that he was convinced he should be miserable under the same roof with him, and that he had repeated to C what William had said to him and that C had been very angry.
Coleridge’s problem was houses. ‘Being in the same house together’, ‘have him at his house’, ‘everybody whose house he has been in for two days’, ‘under the same roof’. Southey agreed: Coleridge’s habits were ‘so murderous of domestic comfort that I am only surprised that Mrs C is not rejoiced at being rid of him. He besots himself with opium, or with spirits, till his eyes look like a Turk’s who is half reduced to idiocy by the practice – he calls up the servants at all hours of the night to prepare food for him – he does in short all things at all times except the proper time – does nothing that he ought to do, and everything which he ought not.’
Reporting back to Coleridge what Wordsworth had told him in confidence was a peculiarly destructive act on Montagu’s part, and Colerid
ge was destroyed by it. ‘O this is cruel! This is base!’ he cried when Wordsworth’s remarks reached him. In his notebooks he wrote: ‘W authorised M to tell me, he had no hope of me! – O God! What good reason for saying this,’ and he repeated the dreadful words: ‘Sunday Night. No Hope of me! Absolute nuisance! God’s mercy it is a dream.’ Coleridge now found himself ‘whirled about without a centre – as in a nightmair – no gravity – a vortex without a centre’. The catastrophe had ‘forced me to perceive – No one on earth has ever LOVED me.’ It was as though, Coleridge said, he had been hit ‘with the suddenness of a flash of lightning’.
In this state, with the ‘never-closing. . . Wound of Wordsworth and his Family’ still ‘festering’, Coleridge began to prepare for another set of lectures, this time on Shakespeare and Milton, to be given at the Philosophical Society on Fetter Lane during the winter months.
By 1811 De Quincey had exhausted his inheritance. In April he asked if his brother might repay a £2 loan, as ‘my present income is so limited that every shilling is important to me’. In the late summer of that year, his mother and sisters made a much-postponed visit. Always well dressed, their ‘scarlet cloaks and silk pelisses’, noted by Sara Hutchinson, gave the impression that their neighbour was still a wealthy man. The fashionable De Quincey women contrasted sharply with the threadbare Wordsworth women: in one of her recent letters to William, Mary had described being mistaken for a pauper as she carried her newborn son around Grasmere Vale. ‘I have become,’ she said, ‘like nobody in my looks and appearance.’
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