Their first stop in the Lakes had been at Dove Cottage. The three Coleridge children—Hartley (nine), Derwent (seven) and Sara (five)—were all very excited, and Hartley ran ahead as they approached the gate. De Quincey could hardly contain himself. ‘This little cottage was tenanted by the man whom, of all men from the beginning of time, I most fervently desired to meet—that in less than a minute I should meet Wordsworth face to face. I did tremble.’
De Quincey’s account of the great meeting, in his Recollections of the Lake Poets, is perhaps the most readable description ever written of Wordsworth, if rather waspish:
He was, upon the whole, not a well made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice—there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles—a mode of exercise which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and other stimulants; to which indeed he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is excellent in his writings. But, useful as they have proved themselves, Wordsworth’s legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening dress parties—when no boots lend their friendly aid to mask our imperfections from the eyes of female rigorists.
De Quincey was excellent with the Wordsworth children, inventing games and amusements for them. He was also very good with the womenfolk—chatting to them, accompanying them on little trips, squiring them on social occasions when William wouldn’t go. On his first visit he stayed for a week.
Eventually, when the Wordsworths moved out of Dove Cottage, De Quincey took it over and held the tenancy for the next twenty-eight years. Dorothy made him curtains, and his moving-in was remembered for the never-ending books that continued to arrive in packing cases for several months in succession. He was very proud to be a resident of Grasmere—one of the literary Lakers at last—and thrilled by the beauty of Dove Cottage and by life in Grasmere.
When the lake froze over in winter, he watched the Wordsworths skating. De Quincey, ever observant of William’s physical appearance, wasn’t as enchanted by William’s skating as he himself was: ‘He sprawled upon the ice like a cow dancing a cotillion.’ De Quincey was fascinated by William’s marriage and by his whole attitude to women. He just couldn’t imagine William ever being head over heels in love with a woman:
I could not conceive of Wordsworth as submitting his faculties to the humilities and devotion of courtship. That self surrender seemed a mere impossibility. Wordsworth, I take it upon myself to say, had not the feelings within him which makes this total devotion to a woman possible. There never lived a woman whom he would not have lectured and admonished under circumstances that should have seemed to require it; nor would he have conversed with her in any mood whatever without wearing an air of mild condescension. Wordsworth, being so, never could in any emphatic sense, have been a lover.
If only De Quincey had known about Annette, what a surprise he would have had! He surely didn’t know, because in his Recollections he mentions William’s stay in Orleans, but gives no hint of the affair. And De Quincey, who repeated and enlarged on every piece of gossip, would certainly have used it in his book, as he spared nobody’s feelings. But this was how he now found William—a prematurely aged and rather stiff, self-centred man, surrounded by doting women.
Whatever De Quincey may have thought of William’s personality, he always had a very high estimation of his work and rejoiced in all his success and good strokes of fortune: ‘A more fortunate man, I believe, does not exist than Wordsworth.’
Dorothy was particularly fond of De Quincey, though William tended to treat him rather more formally. In letters to him, for example, he would refer to his wife as ‘Mrs Wordsworth’, whereas he called her Mary in writing to his old friends, like Coleridge. He used De Quincey very much as an extra secretary, finding him very helpful, for example, in seeing his Cintra pamphlet through the press in London.
De Quincey often stayed at Allan Bank, while Coleridge was there, for weeks at a time, either because work was being done on Dove Cottage, or because it was too crowded with his latest purchase of books, or because they all wanted him to stay in the family, playing with the children and helping with the latest literary project.
‘We feel often as if he were one of the Family,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘He is loving, gentle, and happy—a very good scholar and an acute Logician—so much for his mind and manners. His person is unfortunately diminutive, but there is a sweetness in his looks, especially about the eyes which soon overcomes the oddness of your first feeling at the sight of so very little a man. John sleeps with him and is passionately fond of him …’
De Quincey was devoted to all four Wordsworth children—even to Catherine, the baby of the family. Dorothy wrote: ‘Mr De Quincey has made us promise that he is to be her sole Tutor; so we shall not dare to show her a letter in a book when she is old enough; and you may expect that she will be a very learned lady, for Mr De Q is an excellent scholar. If however he fails in inspiring her with a love of learning, I am sure he cannot fail in one thing. His gentle sweet manners must lead her to sweetness and gentle thoughts.’
The fifth and final Wordsworth child was born in May 1810. He was another son, and they decided they would after all use the name William, despite their previous hesitations, though he was always known as Willy, which stopped any possible confusion with his father. The depth of love and affection for their young learned friend Mr De Quincey is shown by the fact that he was made one of the godfathers, the other being John Wilson, the fellow fan. It must have been great comfort to the Wordsworths, in their problems with Coleridge, to have had the charming Mr De Quincey so constantly in attendance.
During that coach trip to London in October 1810, Montagu started to tell Coleridge a few of the personal words of wisdom and warnings that William had imparted to him before they’d left Grasmere. Perhaps on their overnight stops Coleridge had already displayed some of his more annoying personal habits and Montagu was just trying to warn him, to make him sober up and mend his ways, and it was out of temporary exasperation that he repeated what William had told him in confidence. Montagu had always been a rather idle gossip, thoughtlessly repeating things—not really out of malice, more out of amusement. Whatever the provocation, it was on this journey, so Coleridge maintained, that Montagu told him some of the awful things William had said: Coleridge had become an ‘absolute nuisance in the family’; he was now a ‘rotted drunkard’ who had ‘rotted his entrails out by intemperance’.
This was the beginning of one of the best-known literary rows of the nineteenth century. There were many to come—Dickens and Thackeray were embroiled in equally juicy rows—but the London wits and witlings got particular pleasure out of this one, watching the two leaders of the new school, whom they didn’t like anyway, coming to verbal blows.
William, alas for him, didn’t know anything at all about Coleridge’s grievance for months. All winter, he dined out in London on the terrible indignities he’d been forced to suffer, telling everyone about his utter mortification that the friend whom he’d dearly loved—had, in fact, given his whole life and being to for so many years—had secretly hated him and had wanted him out of his house, after he, Coleridge, had given William years of ‘consummate friendship’ and had been ever ‘enthusiastically watchful’ over his literary fame. ‘Yet the events of the last year have now forced me to perceive—no one on earth has ever LOVED ME … So deep and rankling is the wound which Wordsworth has wantonly and without the slightest provocation inflicted in return for 15 years self injuring Friendship … that I cannot return to Grasmere or its vicinity.…’
The Wordsworths didn’t hear any of this from Coleridge—which wasn
’t unusual, as Coleridge in the past had often not written or replied to them for months. It wasn’t until the following spring that they heard some of the allegations from the Charles Lambs, but they didn’t take much notice at first, Dorothy assuring Lamb that there was certainly no coolness towards Coleridge on William’s part. But in May, Mrs Coleridge let them see a letter she’d received from her husband, in which he inferred that William had caused the disarrangement of his mind. ‘Coleridge has been driven to madness by Wordsworth’s cruel or unjust conduct towards him,’ Dorothy said, reporting the allegations.
William wrote to Mrs Coleridge, explaining that all he’d done was warn Montagu that Coleridge had one or two habits which might spoil his tranquillity. He asked her to pass the message on to Coleridge. He didn’t want to write directly to Coleridge, who hadn’t conveyed his displeasure directly to him. Mrs Coleridge said she was too frightened to do what he asked, and she shouldn’t have shown her letter to the Wordsworths in the first place.… And so it went on, with the row building up through third persons, Coleridge becoming more manic and William gradually realizing the whole matter had got out of hand and was doing serious damage to his reputation.
In February 1812, Coleridge came up to the Lakes on a brief visit, to clear up the business side of the closure of the Friend. He picked up the boys from their school at Ambleside, and then drove right past the Wordsworths’ house in Grasmere on his way to Keswick, with little Hartley pointing and shouting and wanting to go and see his friends; but Coleridge refused to stop or even look. News of that incident was soon all over London.
Dorothy felt very sorry for William, the butt of all Coleridge’s slanders, after all the things William had had to put up with throughout the years, such as going down to London that time when Coleridge was supposed to be very ill. ‘Poor William went off, in consequence of his having solemnly assured Mrs Coleridge that he could not live three months more, and when William arrived, he had to wait daily for admittance to him, till 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and saw no appearance of disease which could not have been cured.’
In the end, William went down to London once again, in April 1812, ‘with a determination to confront Coleridge and Montagu upon this vile business’. At first, Coleridge refused to see him. There were yet more letters, and much to-ing and fro-ing, as Lamb and others tried to act as mediators. Finally, it was Henry Crabb Robinson, a new friend of Wordsworth’s, a minor literary figure trusted by both sides, who brought about a reconciliation of a sort.
William had, indeed, said some pretty tough things about Coleridge, but he denied having said the exact words which Montagu was supposed to have relayed and, anyway, what he did say had been said in confidence, not to be repeated. It was really all Montagu’s fault. Wordsworth and Coleridge shook hands and went for a long walk to Hampstead in May 1812, talking peacefully and amicably, two rather worn-looking gentlemen, now more worldly-wise and a little more cynical than in those first heady days of their passionate friendship. William was now forty-two and looked it, having for a long time appeared much older than his years; while Coleridge was just a few months away from his fortieth birthday, but looked at least fifty, sickness and intemperance having prematurely aged him.
In many senses, they had failed each other. Coleridge’s genuine love and admiration for William’s genius had turned to bitterness as he abused his own genius and his own body, becoming jealous of his friend’s success, energy and, most of all, domestic happiness. Coleridge failed William because he’d failed himself. William had loved his friend equally and those years of separation had been agony for him, wishing desperately that Coleridge would return, convinced that all would be well again, that Coleridge would once again stimulate and inspire him, and that their life together, wherever it might be, would blossom and flourish as it had done in the past. Whether he also admired Coleridge is more in doubt. There’s no record of any lavish praise by William of Coleridge’s talent—nothing like the praise Coleridge poured forth on William. And as for Coleridge’s character, William had doubts and worries about his friend’s moral fibre from the earliest days, and was aware of his weaknesses and his vices.
Coleridge also saw clearly, from the earliest days, that there were differences between them. In 1803, a rather bitter and malicious literary friend from London had spent a depressing evening with them at Dove Cottage, and Coleridge wrote afterwards about how the evening affected him: ‘This had produced a very unpleasant effect on my Spirits. Wordsworth’s mind and body are both of a stronger texture than mine; and he was amused with the envy, the jealousy, and the other miserable passions that had made their Pandaemonium in the crazy Hovel of that poor Man’s heart-but I was downright melancholy at the sight.’ One of the most remarkable features of Wordsworth, throughout his life, was his soundness of mind and body. His stability was an enormous strength.
When Coleridge could no longer give anything to William, because of his own mental and physical state, it was then, even though he had brought a great deal of his troubles on himself, that he needed William most. But William couldn’t help. He did try, and, for nearly four years after Coleridge’s return from Malta, did his best to restore him to health, helping with his magazine, creating a working environment for him, organizing the household around him; but it didn’t work. Even today, with our superior knowledge of drug addicition and our increased medical facilities, rehabilitation is not an easy task.
Wordsworth was essentially moral and moralistic, strong and determined in mind and body. Coleridge was sinful and suffering, weak in almost every way. De Quincey considered that Coleridge probably had the greater mind and the more abundant talents, but that he squandered them. Wordsworth had the ‘profounder and more ascetic solemnity’, while Coleridge had ‘prodigal and magnificent eccentricities’.
As poets, no-one can really evaluate what they gave each other. Coleridge’s greatest poetic work was done quickly and magnificently, during that first incredible year when they met, when he produced ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. After about 1802, he became inhibited as a poet, giving up very quickly, declaring that he was leaving the creative work to Wordsworth. Wordsworth too had enjoyed an inspired burst of activity, and though Lyrical Ballads was originally a joint creation, most of the content was Wordsworth’s. His genius continued to grow for the next ten years, despite long absences from Coleridge’s company and supposed inspiration. Might they have done just as well without each other? The consensus of critical opinion over the last hundred and fifty years is that their early work was a joint explosion. They needed each other.
After reading the relevant letters and the reviews carefully, I think that it could be argued that in fact they harmed each other, just as much as they helped each other. Coleridge very quickly disintegrated as a poet, and Wordsworth never really gave him much critical advice or inspiration.
Coleridge did give Wordsworth much help, seeing in him what others had missed, drawing attention to his greatness, explaining him to his friends and then to a confused public—especially in Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge published in 1817. But perhaps Coleridge overdid it. He embarrassed Wordsworth by his praise, which rebounded some what. Calling him a genius at every opportunity, and saying he was so ahead of everyone else that he was out of sight, naturally caused resentment, creating expectations which couldn’t be met, especially as Coleridge was well aware that in Wordsworth’s greatness there was always the possibility of banality, the possibility that he could be ridiculous instead of revelatory.
Many of those savage critics talked in their reviews about Wordsworth’s ‘injudicious friends and flatterers’. Who could they have had in mind but Coleridge, the social butterfly, who went round the London salons, gave public lectures, wrote in the public prints, and took every opportunity, always for the best of motives, to praise his friend?
Like so many partnerships in history, it ended in a silly squabble, a sad spectacle which did credit to neither side. Coleridge never ca
me back to the Lakes and was never part of the Wordsworth household again.
The year of the so-called reconciliation, 1812, turned out to be a sad one for the Wordsworths in several ways. They’d moved to another house in Grasmere, the Parsonage, in the summer of 1811, and this was the home which Coleridge passed that time, without stopping. They hoped they would be free at last from smoking fires, but their short stay at the Parsonage proved just as uncomfortable as life at Allan Bank.
‘Now I must tell you that we like our new house very much,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘There are only three important objects to it. First, that it fronts the East and has no sitting rooms looking westward therefore we lose the sun very soon; secondly that it is too public; and thirdly that the field in which the house stands is very wet and cannot be drained. It is no playing place for the children and leads them into continual temptation to dirty and wet themselves.’
They got used to the lack of direct sun and planted a few shrubs to hide themselves from the road, though, being right in the centre of Grasmere village, right beside the church, they were always in public view; but it was the damp in the end which got them down. They hadn’t realized till they’d been in residence for some time that when the field flooded, their house became waterlogged. Ever afterwards, they thought the dampness in the Parsonage was one of the reasons for the ill health of their children.
Little Catherine, aged three, had been weak for some time, ever since a convulsion a year earlier after she’d eaten some raw carrots. De Quincey, in his Recollections, unfairly put the blame for this on Sally Green, the orphan girl, then only eleven, who was supposedly looking after little Catherine at the time; but there’s no reason to think Sally had been negligent. However, Catherine was left with a limp and, despite various treatments, never regained good health. William and Mary took her, and Thomas who was two years older but also a sickly child, to the seaside, down the Cumbrian coast, which was a great success, and for a while her health did seem to improve.
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