Guilty Thing (12 page)

Thomas was invited to spend the summer of 1800 in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, at the home of Howe Peter Browne, Viscount Westport. Lord Altamont, Westport's father, had been an associate of Mr Quincey, and Mrs De Quincey now brokered the friendship between the eleven-year-old Westport and her fourteen-year-old son. Thomas seems not to have minded the age gap; his role was to serve as mentor to the younger boy, who had adopted bad habits at Eton, and De Quincey, for the last time in his life, was thought to be a sobering influence. His self-esteem was riding high; his response to his mother's refusal to have his intellect praised was to encourage the adulation of everyone else. His translation of a Horace Ode had won third place in a schoolboy competition, and was published in the
Monthly Preceptor
; in drawing rooms outside his own, De Quincey found himself ‘lionised'.

His display of intellectual superiority was an act of defiance but also compensation for his stature; while his peers were shooting up like weeds, bursting out of shirts and breeches, time stopped around De Quincey who remained locked in his childhood body. He felt himself, however, to be an adult and his summer excursion of 1800 was a rite of passage. From the moment he left Bath he was in pursuit of one thing only: sublimity. He was always invigorated by the risk and romance of travel; the ‘finest men' of the eighteenth century, he said, were the highwaymen who ‘cultivated their profession on the great leading roads' and lived ‘
in an element of danger
and adventurous gallantry'. Intrepid and courteous, highwaymen belonged to the ancient chivalric order. He liked the sensation of speed and deepening distance; as a child standing at the window of his mother's carriage he had watched the view fly past, and as an adult he preferred to sit on the outside of mail-coaches. The improvement of roads, from ‘
mere beds
of torrents and systems of ruts' to the ‘appearance of gravel walks in private parks and shrubberies' pleased him, because smoother surfaces increased velocity. In this he resembled Dr Johnson, who would have happily spent his life, he said, ‘driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman'.

Leaving Bath by coach on 14 July – the eleventh anniversary of the storming of the Bastille – De Quincey called at Eton College in Windsor to collect Westport and his tutor, Reverend Thomas Grace. Finding them both at a royal ball in nearby Frogmore, he was unexpectedly introduced to King George who inquired about his striking name. The ‘De' sounded Gallic; were the De Quinceys of Huguenot origin? ‘
This was a tender point
with me: of all things, I could not endure to be supposed of French descent.' ‘Please your majesty,' Thomas replied with fervour, ‘the family has been in England since the Conquest,' and explained that he had seen ‘many notices of the family in books of heraldry', such as Robert of Gloucester's ‘Metrical Chronicle', which dated from ‘about 1280. . . the Black Letter period'.

With Grace as their charioteer the party trotted the twenty-five miles from Windsor to London by open carriage along the rural lanes, the hedgerows dotted with wild thyme and Queen Anne's lace. Avoiding the main arteries into the metropolis, Thomas later realised, he missed ‘
the sublimity
' of the ‘whirl and the uproar, the tumult and agitation' which thickened ‘like a misgiving' as the city drew near. But on their quiet country route De Quincey, who had never seen London before, picked up ‘the sublime expression' of approaching magnitude in other ways. It seemed as if the ‘vast droves of cattle' were propelled towards the ‘attracting body' by ‘suction' along an immense radius, and he felt the pull of ‘other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea' on which ‘night and day, summer and winter', the same suction operated. De Quincey compared London to ‘some vast, magnetic range of Alps'; he felt himself entering ‘the stream of a Norwegian
maelstrom
'; the distant rumble was the ‘roar of the Niagara'.

The nearer De Quincey came to the city – ‘no! not the city, but the nation' – of London, the less visible he felt; he ceased to be noticeable, he ceased to notice himself; he became ‘but one wave in a total Atlantic'. As they entered the fray, his first impression was of ‘Babylonian confusion', a chaos of ‘agitation' and ‘trepidation'; no man ‘left to himself for the first time' on these streets would fail to despair amongst the hordes with their ‘masks of maniacs'. This was the ‘mighty wilderness' that killed its inhabitants, the ‘colossal emporium' in which both his brother and Chatterton had spent their last days. Locked in an ‘icebound mass' of carriages, De Quincey's party crawled towards the interior, where the traffic melted away in a rapid thaw and they were propelled forwards in a great rush of motion. To either side, chariots flew up long-stretching vistas which reached into still longer-stretching perspectives, the termination of which was wrapped ‘in gloom and uncertainty'.

Arriving mid-afternoon, the boys were given three hours in which to visit the sights before leaving to dine with Westport's grandmother. What were they to do in such an ocean? They headed to Christopher Wren's baroque masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral: the sublime heart of the sublime city. Their ‘
first view
' of the great white sepulchre ‘overwhelmed us with awe'. Beneath their feet the crypt extended the full length of the cathedral; above, raised on a great drum pierced with windows separated by statues in niches, rose the dome, painted with scenes from the life of St Paul set in illusionistic perspective. Circling its base was the famous gallery, and De Quincey and Westport climbed the 259 stone steps to try out its acoustics. Westport, on one side, murmured a secret into the wall and the sound, ‘running along', reached Thomas on the other side ‘as a deafening menace in tempestuous uproars'. The lightest words were made to seem irrevocable; even those only half spoken had thunderous consequences. It was a symbol, De Quincey felt, of the impossibility of escape – from past error, from hidden thoughts – and an encounter with the ‘dark sublime'.

The Whispering Gallery taught him that actions which were now behind him ‘would magnify themselves at every stage of life, in proportion as they were viewed retrospectively from greater and greater distances'. St Paul's Cathedral was a stage-set of De Quincey's mind, and the gallery now took its place amongst the hieroglyphics of his dreams. Years later he wrote some lines of verse, Cyrus of Elam, suggestive of this afternoon excursion, his hexameters being indistinguishable from his prose:

Depths
behind depths were there labyrinthine apartments,

Where golden galleries ran overhead through an endless tire

Of staircases climbing; till sight grew dizzy with effort

Of chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.

A great reader of travel books, De Quincey would compare the effect of the Whispering Gallery to the frozen words ‘
exploding like minute guns
' in
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
.

The route to Holyhead, where they were to pick up the Irish packet, took them through Warwickshire and Stratford-upon-Avon. Here De Quincey visited the house in which Shakespeare was born, and in north Wales they passed through the walled castle town of Conwy, where two of the siblings in ‘We Are Seven' were said to dwell. De Quincey now found himself for the first time amongst mountains. He later compared the Welsh peaks to those in the Lakes, seeing them through Wordsworth's trained eyes (Welsh mountains, Wordsworth said, too often take ‘the basin shape'; Westmorland mountains, on the other hand, present a flat area at the base of a hill, ‘as the floor of a temple'.) In his letters to his mother, however, De Quincey was less critical of the landscape. Their road, he reported, looked ‘
down into
an immensely deep valley surrounded by mountains and rocks which rise in rugged grandeur to the skies'. At sunset, ‘the effect of the glowing light on the woods, the winding river, and the cattle below, and on the distant mountains, and gigantic rocks above, was far more beautiful in the former, and sublime in the latter, than I am able to describe'.

De Quincey had never boarded a ship before but he knew what a huge thing the ocean was. Here was the immensity he had dreamed about, but instead of depths below depths he discovered that the sea, like the Sahara, was monotonous.
Dullness was the downside of sublimity
. Added to which, his crossing contained all the easy chat of an afternoon in the Bath Pump Room. On the same packet, her travelling coach unhinged from its wheels and placed on the apron of the deck like a private apartment, was the luscious Lady Conyngham, future mistress of King George IV. Enchanted by De Quincey's manners, she invited him into her carriage where she kept him hostage for eight hours, afterwards suggesting that they continue their conversation on her Irish estates at Slane Castle. His time already accounted for, De Quincey declined the invitation.

He and Westport stayed for two weeks at Lord Altamont's townhouse in Dublin's Sackville Street. Father and son had not seen one another for three years and De Quincey feared that his presence at their reunion would be like that of a man who had ‘been chased by a Bengal tiger into the very centre of the
Eleusinian mysteries
'. How could he not feel an intruder at such an occasion, or ‘a criminal without a crime?' As it was, Altamont treated him like a second son. He introduced De Quincey to ‘persons of historical names' such as Lord Clare, the Chancellor, Lord Castlereagh, then Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant.

On 1 August 1800 De Quincey climbed the steps to another gallery, where he watched the Irish parliament pass the Act of Union, according to which Britain and Ireland became a single state. It was typical of his Zelig-like qualities that he should arrive in the very week that the Union was ratified. No other ‘public act, or celebration, or solemnity, in my time', he recalled, ‘could so much engage
my profoundest sympathies
'. The Irish parliament was dissolved; the country would now be represented at Westminster by twenty-eight peers, of whom Altamont was one. As for those remaining, ‘
this morning
they rose from their couches Peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm' and ‘tomorrow they will be nobody'. Fascinated by the moment of historical transformation, De Quincey interviewed ‘everybody who had personally participated in the commotions'. These ‘nobodies' had turned into ‘a pack of vagabonds. . . and interlopers, with actually no more right to be here than myself. I am an intruder, so are you.'

Altamont referred to his young companion as a ‘zealous Englishman', which suggests that De Quincey voiced his horror of the revolutionaries. But his politics were uncertain at this point. Not yet the solid Tory he would become, he swung, like Burke, between extremes, backing the cause he found the most romantic.

In early August, the party left the ceremonies, installations, dinners, masked balls, bonfires and celebratory fireworks of the newly colonial Dublin for Altamont's estate in County Mayo. They travelled to Tullamore by canal boat, where De Quincey talked poetry with a beautiful young Irish woman called Miss Blake, whose brother-in-law, Lord Errol, had recently taken his own life. De Quincey's sexuality was now awakened; he shone in the presence of the grieving girl and found himself, to his great delight, the ‘lion' of the company. ‘Never, until this hour, had I thought of women as objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love,' he recalled. Such feelings, clearly excited by Miss Blake's proximity to a self-murderer, were ‘a
revelation
' which ‘fixed a great era of change in my life'. Giving his mother a muted version of his new friendship, he suggested that they call on Miss Blake's widowed sister, Lady Errol, in Bath.

Rattling along in the carriage, he helped Westport with his Greek while Westport regaled him with stories of Eton life. De Quincey was particularly struck by an account of a pack of boys beating an old porter half to death while the masters stood by and watched. The travellers dined and slept in the houses of ‘
old Irish nobility
and gentry'. Built in the style of ‘antique manorial chateaux' with ‘long rambling galleries, and windows innumerable. . . old libraries, old butlers, old customs', no other experience ‘throughout my whole life' had ‘interested' De Quincey as much. He liked the privileges of being both a guest and the older boy: drinking wine, sitting with the gentlemen after dinner, and throwing out his ‘vast command of words, as from a cornucopia'.

The day after De Quincey's fifteenth birthday they arrived at Westport House, one of Ireland's loveliest classical revival buildings, completed by James Wyatt just over a decade earlier in 1788. Set in 300 acres of park and built on the site of an ancient castle whose dungeons were still intact, the house bore the marks of the country's recent history. The French, briefly invading from the nearby shore, had taken possession of the rooms and pillaged the best books from the library, leaving behind, to De Quincey's irritation, only law reports and manuals on drainage. This was as close as he would come to the French Revolution. As for the stillborn Irish revolution, on one occasion he and Westport were pelted with stones by the locals, but the country otherwise felt safer than he had expected. ‘
In England
, I remember,' he reported home, ‘we heard such horrid accounts of murders, and battles, and robberies, and here everybody tells me the country
is
in as quiet a state as England, and
has
been so for some time past.' The English, he concluded, ‘use the
amplifying,
and the Irish the
diminishing hyperbole
; the former view it with a
magnifying glass
, the latter with a
microscope
'. As the Irishman Dean Swift remarked: ‘Elephants are always drawn smaller than life, but a flea always larger.'