And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,
Far sinking into splendour – without end!
Wordsworth, The Excursion
In 1813 De Quincey went to sleep in Dove Cottage, and while he slept ‘a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up’ in his brain ‘which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour’. In his dreams the house ‘swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity’, the walls expanded and the floors dissolved, the dark wainscoting unfolded like a Japanese flower in water and the stone flags crumbled into desert sands: ‘I seemed every night to descend,’ he wrote, ‘not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths.’ Like Milton’s Satan, he was ‘hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie’, to a ‘bottomless perdition’.
Time, too, unfurled itself; he seemed sometimes ‘to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay; sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed’. Childhood episodes, long forgotten and the length of eternity, paraded themselves before him, and the featureless figures of his London walks returned ‘upon the rocking waters of the ocean. . . the sea seemed paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries’. He became the heaving ocean; he found himself in China, a country in which he had often thought he would ‘go mad’. In scenes of ‘unimaginable horror’ he was oppressed by ‘birds, beasts, reptiles’ and every tropical tree and plant.
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
Adopted by cartoonists to symbolise Napoleon, the ‘cursed crocodile’ was the creature that terrified De Quincey the most. In his dreams he escaped from the reptile’s great green jaws to find himself trapped in Chinese houses whose furnishings ‘soon became instinct with life’. He lay under ‘the weight of incubus and nightmare’, cursing ‘the spells which chain[ed] him down from motion’. Powerless as a child, he was imprisoned by sleep.
To have asked De Quincey whether he had taken opium on ‘any particular day’ was the equivalent of asking ‘whether his lungs had performed respiration’. His daily consumption of laudanum rose to 8,000 drops; a considerable amount but still only half of what Coleridge was taking. ‘He can do nothing,’ Dorothy noted of De Quincey. ‘He is eaten up with the spirit of procrastination; but if once in two or three years he actually does make an effort, he is so slow a labourer that no one who knows him would wish to appoint him to it.’ Johnny, to whom De Quincey was once again teaching Latin, he now saw ‘for a nominal hour every day. . . This said nominal hour is generally included in the space of twenty minutes; either the scholar learns with such uncommon rapidity that more time is unnecessary, or the Master tires.’
This was a momentous year for De Quincey’s Lakeland neighbours. John Wilson, now married, lost his fortune and left Elleray for his home town of Edinburgh. Despite being on his uppers, De Quincey gave Wilson £200 (‘Will £200 be enough?’ he asked). Mary Dawson announced that she was pregnant – the fruits of her time in the cottage while the master was away – which left De Quincey without a servant, and Wordsworth was offered the lucrative position of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, which allowed the family to move into a handsome pile called Rydal Mount, on the road to Ambleside. After thirteen years, the Wordsworths were no longer residents of Grasmere. ‘I was the last person who left the house yesterday evening,’ Dorothy wrote to Jane Marshall of their final night in the hamlet. ‘It seemed as quiet as the grave; and the very church-yard where our darlings lie, when I gave a last look upon it seemed to cheer my thoughts. There I could think of life and immortality – the house only reminded me of desolation, gloom, emptiness, and cheerless silence.’
The following year, 1814, The Excursion was published. In the first part a figure known as ‘The Wanderer’ tells the story of Margaret, a Lakeland girl deserted by her husband when he runs away to join the army. Impoverished and depressed, her cottage crumbling around her, Margaret waits for him to return. ‘My spirit clings/ To that poor Woman,’ says the Wanderer:
– so familiarly
Do I perceive her manner, and her look,
And presence; and so deeply do I feel
Her goodness, that, not seldom, in my walks
A momentary trance comes over me. . .
Two miles from Grasmere, on the edge of Rydal Water, there stood, and still stands, an ancient farmhouse called The Nab. Low and white with mullioned windows, the building, in possession of the same family for generations, was the home of a farmer called John Simpson, whose seventeen-year-old daughter was another Margaret. A courtship began between this strapping young woman and the battered incumbent of Dove Cottage, who serenaded her, so a watchful Dorothy informed Mrs Clarkson, ‘at the up-rouzing of the Bats and the Owls’. Wilson, visiting from Edinburgh, reported that he had ‘walked to De Quincey’s, which I reached at half-past one o’clock in the morning: he was at The Nab, and when he returned about three o’clock, found me asleep in his bed’. She will have been nine when De Quincey first arrived in the vale, but he did not encounter Margaret Simpson until now, at which point he described himself as falling in love with her simplicity (she thought The Vicar of Wakefield was a history book). But as we know from his Everton journals, De Quincey was plagued by his sex drive.
In August 1814, his youngest brother, Henry, arrived in Grasmere but found no one at home. After two days of knocking, Henry reported, he ‘gave up the ghost, for I perceived that at least nothing more than your ghost made its appearance’. There were a few telling glimpses of De Quincey that year. Crabb Robinson saw him in London at the house of Charles Lamb, where he talked ‘about Wordsworth with the zeal and intelligence of a well-instructed pupil’. His style was a ‘mixture of pedantry and high-flown sentimentality’, his conversation did not ‘flow readily’, and he was ‘too much of a disciple and admirer to have anything of his own’. ‘Pedantry and high-flown sentimentality’: Crabb Robinson’s observation recalls that of Coleridge, who described De Quincey’s working style as ‘anxious yet dilatory’. His distance from Wordsworth had not improved his confidence; De Quincey was as unsure now as he had been eleven years earlier about what ‘character’ to present to the world. But in Edinburgh, where he visited John Wilson that same year (‘Quince has gone off to Edinburgh at last with Mr Wilson,’ reported Sara Hutchinson), his talk was remembered differently. Here, in the company of James Gibson Lockhart, Regency beau and fledgling biographer of Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Ettrick shepherd and poet, Sir William Hamilton, philosopher, and the Germanist R. P. Gillies, De Quincey was more at his ease. His voice, remembered Gillies, was ‘extraordinary, as if it came from dreamland’, and his talk leapt ‘at will from the beeves to butterflies, and thence to the soul’s immortality, to Plato, and Kant, and Schelling, and Fichte, and Milton’s early years and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Homer and Aeschylus, to St Thomas of Aquin, St Basil and St Chrysostom’. He would ‘recount profound mysteries from his own experiences – visions that had come over him in his loneliest walks among the mountains, and passages within his own personal knowledge, illustrating, if not proving, the doctrines of dreams, of warnings, of second sight and mesmerism. And whatever the subject might be, every one of his sentences (or one of his chapters, I might say) was
woven into the most perfect logical texture, and uttered in a tone of sustained melody.’
Later that year, Wilson, Hogg and De Quincey formed an awkward party at Rydal Mount. On a night of spectacular beauty, when a belt of stars stretched across the sky, Hogg raised his glass. ‘Hout, me’em!’ he said, ‘it is neither mair nor less than joost a triumphal arch in honour of the meeting of the poets.’ Wordsworth, taking De Quincey’s arm and ‘leading the little opium-chewer aside’ muttered in his ear, ‘Poets? Poets? – What does the fellow mean? Where are they?’ De Quincey, pleased to display his intimacy with Wordsworth, mischievously reported the insult to Hogg. Two years later, Hogg avenged himself with a send-up of ‘The Recluse’ called ‘The Stranger’, which appeared in an anonymous collection of parodies called The Poetic Mirror. A traveller arrives at a tarn where his horse ‘breaks propriety’ with a snort ‘like blustering canon’:
The boy was stunned – for on similitude
In dissimilitude, man’s sole delight,
And all the sexual intercourse of things,
Do most supremely hang.
In Grasmere, the sexual intercourse of things was disturbing Wordsworth, who did what he could to prevent the blossoming of his neighbour’s affair with Margaret Simpson. Thus De Quincey now found, when he roused himself with the bats and the owls, that Wordsworth, like Gil-Martin in Hogg’s future novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, appeared by his side. ‘It drove me crazy then, it drives me crazy now,’ he recalled in a passage later removed from his ‘Lake Reminiscences’. The stalker was himself being stalked. ‘I found myself in the same situation almost every night,’ De Quincey railed. Wordsworth was ‘possessed’ by ‘a malicious purpose’, and De Quincey felt ‘almost a hatred’ for him. How, unless he had ‘corresponded with fairies’, had Wordsworth known where De Quincey was going? ‘He could not: it was impossible. I am sure it was.’ De Quincey hid his love life from his family, but in September 1815 Wordsworth wrote to Mrs Quincey to inform her not only that her son was ‘about to marry’ (which was not true) but that his bride was from the lower orders. Margaret may, although De Quincey furiously denied it, have replaced Mary Dawson as his servant; it was whispered that De Quincey’s wife ‘had often made his bed before she ascended it’. This would explain why he stressed, in his Autobiographic Sketches, that the position of housekeeper to the cottage had been competed for by many fine and highly respectable young ladies.
Their courtship caused consternation up at Rydal Mount. Dorothy, who had known ‘Peggy’ Simpson all her life, described her as a ‘stupid heavy girl’ who had been ‘reckoned a Dunce at Grasmere School’, and she and William mocked De Quincey’s lyrical accounts of her ‘beauty’, ‘good sense’ and ‘angelic sweetness’. Clearly jealous, Dorothy spoke of Margaret as a rival and consistently ridiculed De Quincey’s affection for her. The mockery got back to De Quincey who later said that: ‘Nothing causes a greater rankling in the heart, than to find that you have laid open its finer feelings and have got laughed at for your pains.’ De Quincey was in love, but he was also falling apart. Two months later Sara Hutchinson wrote that ‘Quince was often tipsy and in one of his fits had lost his gold watch. . . He doses himself with Opium and drinks like a fish and tries in all other things to be as great a gun as Mr Wilson.’
While De Quincey was dreaming by day and courting by night, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and in June 1815 over twenty years of war came to an end. The emperor was exiled to the island of St Helena, and Charles Lloyd, suffering a mental breakdown, was institutionalised. All the local houses that De Quincey had once loved now lay empty. When he walked in Lloyd’s former garden he could hear the voices of his young family ‘re-echoed’, and lying by the river De Quincey listened once more to the music of the water, rising like ‘choral chanting – distant, solemn, saintly’.
Reality and reverie took on the same texture in De Quincey’s current twilight world. An intruder in his dreams was a wanderer he called the Dark Interpreter, whose role, like that of a Greek chorus, was to recall the dreamer ‘to his own lurking thoughts’. The Dark Interpreter repeated in the cryptonyms of dream language the words that De Quincey had spoken during the day, but it was not only in dreams that the figure made his appearance: at times the Dark Interpreter was ‘outside, and in open sunlight’. De Quincey seemed now to ‘live, and to converse, even when awake, with. . . visionary companions much more than with the realities of life’. One Easter morning he stepped from his cottage and, blinking in the light, saw before him ‘the domes and cupolas of a great city’. Grasmere had become Jerusalem, and sitting in the garden, tears streaming down her face, was Ann. ‘So I have found you at last,’ De Quincey said and suddenly there they were, back in the lamplight of Oxford Street.
‘Mr De Quincey has taken a fit of solitude,’ Wordsworth wrote to R. P. Gillies in April 1816. ‘I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left.’ His remark suggests that Peter Quince now only visited Rydal Mount in the company of that great gun, Mr Wilson. Later that year, Lloyd escaped from his asylum in York and walked to Grasmere where he threw his arms around De Quincey and wept. His pursuers were close at hand; he would be captured and returned; he knew he would be safe in Dove Cottage but refused to stay. ‘I dare say,’ he told De Quincey, ‘you think you know me; but you do not, and you cannot. I am the Author of all Evil; Sir, I am the Devil. . . I know also who you are: you are nobody, a nonentity, you have no being.’ Lloyd revealed to De Quincey that ‘his situation internally was always this: it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him’. He tried to rid his mind of this sound but it returned again and again, ‘still steadily advancing, though still at a great distance’.
At about this time another visitor knocked on the door, also needing sanctuary. ‘There is a sort of demon downstairs,’ De Quincey was informed by his servant, who was probably Margaret Simpson. Standing in the hall in a turban and loose white trousers was a Malayan man with ‘sallow and bilious’ skin, ‘veneered with mahogany by marine air’, and ‘tiger-cat’ eyes which were ‘small, fierce, and restless’. His ‘gestures and adorations’ were ‘slavish’ and he ‘worshipped’ De Quincey ‘in a most devout manner’. The man knew no English and De Quincey knew only the Arabic for barley and the Turkish for opium. Wanting rest, the Malay lay down on the stone floor and slept. He awoke refreshed, and to cheer him on his way De Quincey presented him with a large piece of opium which the stranger ate whole in one mouthful. ‘The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done?’ Did the Malay survive the opium? The man ‘fastened upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran “a-muck”’.
Did this event, recorded in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, really take place? Could De Quincey have even answered that question? The figure came out of the Arabian Nights and De Quincey’s Oriental nightmares, but he was also a version of the Arab on a dromedary in the dream described by Wordsworth in The Prelude – a mysterious personage making his lonely way to an unknown destination.
Visiting Rydal Mount soon after staying with his mother in Westhay, De Quincey was able to pass on to Wordsworth the compliment that Hannah More approved of The Excursion. ‘As usual,’ purred Sara Hutchinson, ‘Peter is very entertaining, now that he is fresh.’ When Crabb Robinson visited Grasmere in the summer of 1816, he reported that the tenant of Dove Cottage was looking ‘very much an invalid’. De Quincey was ‘dirty, and even squalid. I had read a bad account of him from Wordsworth. . . It appears that he has taken to opium, and, like Coleridge, seriously injured his health. I understand, too, though Wordsworth was reserved on the subject, he has entangled himself in an unfortunate acquaintance with a woman.’ Crabb Robinson also understood, as he made his way
between Grasmere and Rydal Mount, that Wordsworth and De Quincey were now avoiding one another. ‘De Quincey still praises Wordsworth’s poetry,’ he noted in his diary, ‘but he speaks with no kindness of the man.’
The year 1816 was known as the year without a summer. A volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island had created enough ash in the atmosphere to block out the sun, and in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley took advantage of the darkness to hold the ghost story competition which resulted in the birth of Frankenstein. In May, at the request of Byron, three fragments by Coleridge were published in a slim volume. The first was ‘Christabel’, the ballad about a Sapphic vampire that Wordsworth had excluded from the Lyrical Ballads; the second was ‘Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream’, an opium reverie heard entirely as music; and the third was ‘The Pains of Sleep’, described by Coleridge as ‘an exact and most faithful portraiture of the state of my mind under influences of. . . Opium’. The movement of the trilogy – from pleasure to pain – went to the heart of the opium experience, and the preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ became mythical.
In the summer of 1797, explained Coleridge, he ‘had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmore confines of Somerset and Devonshire’. To cure ‘a slight indisposition’, opium had been prescribed and he fell asleep while reading the following sentence from ‘Puchas his Pilgrimage’: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’
The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions . . . On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.
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