Guilty Thing (33 page)

De Quincey and Wilson stood godfather to the Wordsworths' new baby (born on 12 May), a boy called William and known as Willie; De Quincey and Wilson climbed mountains together, explored the valleys together, and attended
soirées dansantes
hosted by the Lloyds – the tall man and the small man cultivating the relationship that would last for the rest of their lives. Wilson would be, De Quincey later said, ‘
the only very intimate friend
I ever had'.

With Lloyd, De Quincey spent happy hours by the River Brathay listening to the water rising from the rocky bed, like ‘
the sound of pealing anthems
. . . from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral'. When he was alone he read, drank laudanum, night-walked and night-watched. As dusk fell he would leave his fireplace to ‘
trace the course
of the evening through its household hieroglyphics from the windows which I passed or saw'. Gazing into ‘blazing fires shining. . . in nooks far apart from neighbours' and ‘in solitudes that seemed abandoned to the owl', he caught ‘the sounds of household mirth; then, some miles further. . . the gradual sinking to silence of the house, then the drowsy reign of the cricket'. And he was in ‘daily nay hourly intercourse' with Wordsworth, who granted him the privilege of reading
The Prelude
, which he planned to be published only after his death. Then referred to as the ‘Poem to Coleridge', or ‘the poem on the growth of my own mind', De Quincey found here a work whose power went beyond anything he had hitherto read by Wordsworth.

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 the 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.