Guilty Thing (21 page)

‘Sir,' he began. ‘
I suppose that most men
would think what I am going to say strange at least or rude: but I am bold enough to imagine that, as you are not yourself “in the roll of common men”, you may be willing to excuse anything uncommon in the liberty I am now taking.' The line about ‘common men' is from
Henry IV, Part I
, the scene set in the archdeacon's house in Bangor; six months earlier in another house in Bangor, De Quincey's honesty had been slighted by the bishop. Writing to Wordsworth, his moral beacon, De Quincey was protesting his authenticity to everyone who had ever dismissed him as ‘in the roll of common men'. The object of his revised letter was to try more effectively to win the poet's friendship and explain that
Lyrical Ballads
had provided more than the ‘whole aggregate of pleasure' he had received from the ‘nine' other poets he had ‘been able to find'. Added to which, De Quincey confessed that he too was a poet with ‘a spark' of ‘heavenly fire', and his own life had also been ‘passed chiefly in the contemplation and altogether in the worship of nature'. Neither of these facts was strictly true, but he was able to say, hand on heart, that he had experienced suffering.

As he came to the end, De Quincey reconsidered the passage deleted in his draft, in which he paid tribute to Wordsworth's ‘friend', expressed his ‘reverential love', and offered to ‘sacrifice even his life whenever it could have a chance of promoting your interest and happiness'. His ‘oriental homage', as he later described it, went in unchanged. De Quincey addressed the letter to Wordsworth's publishers in London, delivered it to the post office, and then quarrelled over dinner with Cragg. Throughout that day two phrases had been stuck in his head: ‘flashing brief splendour', and ‘labouring
to get away.
' Both define his life, but the second one De Quincey found ‘exquisitely touching'. All he could now do was to wait for the poet to reply.

The following evening, visiting friends in Liverpool, De Quincey picked up some vital information about his favourite subject from a fellow guest, who lived in Keswick:

These particulars I gathered
from Miss Bearcroft concerning the Poets! Coleridge is very absent – frequently walks half a mile (to her
uncles
, I think she said) without being sensible that he has no hat on; – has married the sister of
Southey's
wife, lives (I believe she said this
of Coleridge
) in a house where he has lodgings; – when she first saw him in church she took him for some great boy just come from school; –
Wordsworth
is rather handsome – has a beautiful little cottage; (NB, both he and C live near Keswick) – has a sister about 29 years old.

He also learned that ‘Coleridge intends to astonish the world with a
Metaphysical
work. . . on which he intends to found his fame; – Mrs
Coleridge
. . . speaks in the high terms of it; – his conversation is even more wonderful. . . than his works; – he is so intellectual as to be quite oppressive'. Added to which, Miss Bearcroft ‘has seen little Charles Lamb or Charles Lloyd or both' at the home of either Wordsworth or Coleridge. Charles Lloyd was a novelist and poet who had collaborated on a collection of verses with Lamb, and been published by Cottle in a volume together with Southey and Coleridge. The enchanting community was increasing in size, and so too was De Quincey's regard for Coleridge, another dreamer with literary ambitions beyond those of poetry.

De Quincey walked home that night in a daze, filled with thoughts ‘of Coleridge; – am in transports of love and admiration for him. . . go to bed. . . still thinking of Coleridge who strikes me (as I believe he always did) with a resemblance to my mysterious character (a compound of ancient mariner and Bath concert room traveller with bushy hair) – I begin to think him the greatest man that has ever appeared and go to sleep.' The bushy-haired traveller was an eccentric known as Walking Stewart, whom De Quincey had seen in the Bath Assembly Rooms walking ‘up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher'.

The next morning he masturbated, an act he again recorded in Greek, before spending the day reading Southey, whom he now knew to be Coleridge's brother-in-law. He then discussed with Wright the revelations of the night before.

Midsummer had arrived with its army of banners. De Quincey killed the days by drinking, walking, disputing, filling his diary, working through copies of the
Edinburgh Review
, and playing with a child called William K. Williams, who was the son of neighbours. Elizabeth Quincey, hearing reports of her son's activities from Cragg, complained that he was ‘idling his life away'. After two weeks of waiting for a reply to his letter, De Quincey described how, ‘
My imagination flies
, like Noah's Dove, from the ark of my mind. . . and finds no place on which to rest the sole of her foot except Coleridge – Wordsworth and Southey.' It was Coleridge who now came first in the hierarchy, but each man would occupy a distinct place in De Quincey's imaginative life.

His final diary entry was made on the night of 24 June 1803: ‘Last night, in walking out, I invented this metaphor. . . “he was obliged to run the gauntlet through all the
reviews
”.' De Quincey followed this with another thought: ‘I have frequently said to myself – “Englishmen wear daggers; – not
literally
but
figuratively
”.' The world of reviewing was beginning to look like a bloodbath.

He was due to return to the Priory on 3 August. Having despaired of hearing from Wordsworth, he devised ‘other plans for compassing my point', which included sending the poet some of his own verses. But on De Quincey's final evening in Everton, all his ‘
fears and schemes were put to flight
' when a letter arrived from Grasmere.

6

Residence at Oxford

I was the Dreamer, they the Dream.

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Third

There are many descriptions of the cottage where De Quincey's letter arrived after a six-week delay in London, but the one in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
is the finest. It comes from the passage where De Quincey defines his idea of happiness:

Let there be a cottage
, standing in a valley, 18 miles from a town – no spacious valley, but about two miles long, by three quarters of a mile in average width. . . Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3 and 4,000 feet high; and the cottage a real cottage. . . Let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows, through all the months of spring, summer and autumn – beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with Jasmine.

The cottage was then known as the house at Town End, because it was the last dwelling on the road that led out of Grasmere and up towards the village of Ambleside, three miles away. The name Dove Cottage, bestowed in 1890 when the building was bought for the nation, harked back to the previous century when it had been a roadside inn called the Dove and Olive Bough. It amused Wordsworth that a ‘simple water-drinking Bard' should inhabit a former tavern, and De Quincey would always associate the house with doves.

De Quincey's letter had created a flurry in the household; it was, Dorothy exclaimed, ‘
A remarkable instance
of the power of my brother's poems over a lonely and contemplative mind, unwarped by any established laws of taste'. Less excitable than his sister, Wordsworth penned a polite reply on 29 July, saying that ‘
it would be out of nature
were I not to have kind feelings towards one who expresses sentiments of such profound esteem and admiration of my writings as you have done'. He added that ‘you are young and ingenuous, and I wrote with a hope of pleasing the young, the ingenuous and the unworldly above all others'.

Wordsworth was happy to accept his role as De Quincey's teacher, but in requesting friendship the boy had touched on one of the poet's sacred subjects. The man who described himself to Coleridge as ‘naturally slow to love, and to cease loving', cautioned De Quincey that ‘
My friendship is not
in my power to give. . . this is a gift which no man can make. . . a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive, like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it'. A further caution warned De Quincey that a poet lived another life separate from that of his poetry, and he must not expect to find in Wordsworth an incarnation of his words: ‘How many things are there in a man's character of which his writings however miscellaneous and voluminous will give no idea.' Admitting that he ‘was the most lazy and impatient letter writer in the world', Wordsworth then explained that he was imminently ‘going with my friend Coleridge and my sister upon a tour of Scotland for six weeks or two months', adding that if De Quincey replied ‘immediately, I may have the pleasure of receiving your letter before our departure'. Beneath his signature he penned, probably at the request of Dorothy, a quick postscript apologising for any impression he may have given of ‘coldness', and stressed that should De Quincey ever find himself in Grasmere, Wordsworth would be ‘very happy' to see him.

The arrival of De Quincey's letter coincided with the beginnings of two important new friendships in Wordsworth's life. The first was with Sir George Beaumont, a landowner and amateur painter who was currently renting part of Greta Hall in Keswick, where Coleridge was also now living. Sir George and his wife had come in June, said Coleridge, ‘half-mad to see Wordsworth'; not only were they admirers of
Lyrical Ballads
but Beaumont, as Walter Scott put it, ‘understood Wordsworth's poetry, which is
a rare thing
'. Coleridge, whose politics the Beaumonts were not disposed to like, soon charmed the couple; ‘as far as I can judge,' Sir George conceded, ‘a more amiable man with a more affectionate & kind heart does not exist'. Lady Beaumont, so Coleridge told Wordsworth, could not ‘keep the tears in her eye' when his poetry was read aloud, and when she ‘was reading your Poem on Cape RASH JUDGEMENT [‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags'] had you entered the room, she believes she should have fallen
at your feet
'.

In tribute to Wordsworth, Sir George presented him with the deeds to a plot of land at the head of Bassenthwaite, between Grasmere and Keswick: ‘
Plant it
delve it', Beaumont told him, ‘– & build upon it or not, as it suits your convenience, but let me live & die with the idea of the sweet place with its rocks, its banks, & mountain streams in possession of such a mind as yours'. De Quincey's offer of a bended knee had been trumped. Wordsworth did not build a house on the land, but it was through the influence and example of gentle Sir George that the poet found himself, as Byron put it, ‘a Tory at last'. ‘There can be no valuable friendship,' Wordsworth wrote to Beaumont, ‘where the parties are not mutually capable of instructing and delighting one another.'

The second valuable friendship to spring up like a wildflower was with Walter Scott himself, whom Wordsworth would meet on his tour of Scotland. So immediate was the sympathy between the two writers that Wordsworth signed himself, in a letter written to Scott on his return, ‘
Your sincere friend
', stressing that he was ‘slow to use a word of such solemn meaning to any one'.

De Quincey's timing was unfortunate. Had he written to Wordsworth a few months earlier he might have gained more attention; had he written a few years earlier, he would have caught the poet in his hot youth rather than his staid middle age. Nor was De Quincey's letter the first from an admirer to arrive at the cottage; the previous summer Wordsworth had begun a correspondence with John Wilson, a robust, hearty and back-slappingly confident student at Oxford University. ‘
The Beau
', as Dorothy proudly called him, was ‘a very amiable young man. . . a friend and
adorer
of William and his verses'. Under the pseudonym ‘Christopher North', Wilson would become famous as a merciless reviewer for
Blackwood's
Magazine
, and he approached Wordsworth now as both critic and ‘adorer'. ‘
In your poems
,' Wilson wrote, ‘I discovered such marks of delicate feeling, such benevolence of disposition, and such knowledge of human nature as made an impression on my mind that nothing will ever efface.' His tribute paid, Wilson then assumed the fact of Wordsworth's friendship – ‘I may, perhaps, never have the happiness of seeing you, yet I will always consider you as a friend.' He addressed the poet as a man speaking to men, and as a man to whom it was possible to point out what Wilson felt were ‘errors' in his work: ‘no feeling, no state of mind ought, in my opinion', he wrote, ‘to become the subject of poetry, that does not please. . . you have described feelings with which I cannot sympathise, and situations in which I take no interest'. The offensive poem was ‘The Idiot Boy', and everyone he knew, John Wilson claimed, hated it as much as he did. De Quincey later described himself and John Wilson as the only ‘two persons' ‘intrepid' enough to ‘attach themselves to a banner not yet raised and planted'.