Guilty Thing (22 page)

Coleridge had discovered Greta Hall in May 1800, during a visit to Grasmere. A large bay-windowed, three-storey house on the outskirts of Keswick, it gleamed through the trees at the foot of monumental Skiddaw, one of the highest mountains in the country. The River Greta flowed behind, while Derwentwater lay in front. The mountains beyond the lake had the effect, said De Quincey, of cutting the county into ‘great chambers'. By the end of June, Coleridge, his pregnant wife Sarah, his young son Hartley, and an endless trail of book chests, were settling in. Sarah, who had never before left Bristol, felt cautious about inhabiting this strange new landscape with the Wordsworths – who considered her shallow and vain – as her only friends. Coleridge, who had married Sarah to please Southey, rejected her to please William and Dorothy. Sarah was the elder sister of Southey's own wife, Edith, and Coleridge was now in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's wife; his sister complex was one of the many things he would have in common with De Quincey. Increasingly in thrall to opium, Coleridge's next three years saw the disintegration of his marriage, his health, his relationship with Wordsworth, and his belief in his powers as a poet.

In August 1803, after their first child had died from hydrocephalus, Southey and Edith also made the journey from Bristol to Greta Hall. ‘
Nothing in England
can be more beautiful than the site of this house,' Southey exclaimed, and having come for a visit they stayed for the rest of their lives. No sooner were the Southeys ensconced than Coleridge took off, first to Scotland with the Wordsworths, then to Malta by himself, and after that to London. Southey's punishment for pushing Coleridge into an unhappy marriage was to become
pater familias
to his young family. He was sanguine about his brother-in-law's revenge: no man, Southey conceded, was less suited to domestic life than Coleridge. And few men were more suited to its responsibilities and routines than Southey himself.

Also at Greta Hall that summer was the young William Hazlitt, who had met Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, when Coleridge was living in Nether Stowey, and Dorothy and William had moved to nearby Alfoxden. Like John Wilson, Hazlitt was to be always one step ahead of De Quincey. He had seen
Lyrical Ballads
in manuscript form on Wordsworth's kitchen table, and heard Coleridge recite both ‘The Ancient Mariner' and ‘Kubla Khan', the poem ‘composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium'. Now a twenty-five-year-old art student, Hazlitt accepted a commission from Beaumont to paint portraits of the poets in their respective homes. Wordsworth's features, Hazlitt noted, were ‘as a book where men might read strange matters'; he had ‘
a convulsive inclination
to laugh around the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face'. Neither likeness has survived; instead we have his pen portraits of the poets in
Spirit of the Age.
Hazlitt made a tempestuous guest that summer; Wordsworth dismissed him as an upstart, too quick to have his own opinions, but the vivid description left by Coleridge shows remarkable prescience. It also shows how, despite his verbosity and psychological abstraction, Coleridge was acutely attuned to those in his company:

William Hazlitt
is a thinking, observant, original man, of great power as a Painter of Character Portraits. . . his manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive– : brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative,
strange . . .
he is jealous, gloomy, & of an irritable pride – & addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence. With all this, there is much good in him – he is disinterested, an enthusiastic Lover of the great men, who have been before us – he says things that are his own in a way of his own – & tho' from habitual Shyness & the Outside & bearskin at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused & dark in his conversation, & delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a Forceps, yet he says more than any man, I ever knew. . . He sends well-headed & well-feathered Thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a Twang of the Bow-string.

Both Romantic essayists and satellites of the Wordsworth circle, De Quincey and Hazlitt would write on the same subjects for the same editions of the same journals, but neither sought out the other's company. While De Quincey acknowledged Hazlitt's genius, Hazlitt would act as though De Quincey were invisible.

With Wordsworth's letter tucked safely in his pocket, De Quincey returned as scheduled to the Priory on 3 August, where his mother, feeling the force of her son's conviction and increasingly irritated by his company, at last caved in to the ‘Oxford scheme'. His guardians also conceded: De Quincey could go to the university provided that he live within his school allowance of £100 a year; no further money from his father's legacy would be released until he came of age. When, on 6 August, he penned his reply to Wordsworth, De Quincey put the situation rather differently: ‘Unfortunately. . . I am not yet my own master,' he explained, ‘and (in compliance with the wishes of my mother and my guardians) I am going, in a month or two, to enter myself at Oxford.' By coincidence, De Quincey added, he too had ‘an intention of making a tour of the Highlands this autumn; but now, just at the time when I find that I should have a chance of meeting you there, my plans (I fear) will be traversed'.

De Quincey's second letter to Wordsworth began with an account of the anxiety he had endured during the last two months. Fearing that the poet might have found ‘disgusting' his expression of ‘languor and despondency', De Quincey explained that he had ‘given up almost every hope' of receiving a reply; as for the specific request in his earlier letter: ‘
What foolish thing
I said of friendship I cannot now recollect.' He defended his former praise of
Lyrical Ballads
, claiming that nothing ‘which the world has yet seen can so well claim the title of pure poetry', that he could ‘rest on no other poems with such permanent and increasing delight', and ‘from the wreck of all earthly things which belong to me, I should endeavour to save that work by an impulse second to none but that of self-preservation'. Referring to Wordsworth's invitation to call on him, were he to ever visit Grasmere, De Quincey wrote that ‘I scarcely know how to reply: it did indeed fill up the measure of my joy. . . Henceforward I shall look to that country as to the land of promise: I cannot say how many emotions the land of the lakes raises in my mind of itself: I have always felt a strange love for everything connected with it; and the magic of the
Lyrical Ballads
has completed and established the charm' (
it was Ann Radcliffe
, De Quincey wrote in his
Autobiographic Sketches
, who initially brought the mountains and ruins of the region into ‘sunny splendour'). He would, De Quincey concluded, ‘bend [his] course to the lakes' in the summer and have then ‘the happiness of seeing those persons whom above all the world I honour and amidst those scenes too which, delightful as they are in themselves, are much more so on their account'. His final line contains an unmistakable echo of the final line of ‘Tintern Abbey', in which the poet asks his ‘dear sister' to not forget that ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs,/ And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!'

Carried away and quite forgetting Wordsworth's sober warning about friendship, De Quincey added a postscript in which he tried to elbow his way further into the community: ‘You mention Miss Wordsworth (I speak at a venture) and Mr Coleridge; and this emboldens me to use the privilege of a friend and take a liberty which I should not otherwise have done – when I beg you to convey my most sincere and respectful good wishes to them both.'

On 15 August 1803, De Quincey's eighteenth birthday, the triumvirate of Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge departed for their Scottish tour. He ‘had never yet', Coleridge told Southey, ‘commenced a journey with such an inauspicious
heaviness of heart
before'. Meanwhile, 85,000 French soldiers were encamped at Boulogne, and England waited for Napoleon to invade.

Wordsworth, who had been in France during the early days of the Revolution and had an illegitimate French daughter, now grieved for the country he once loved, and on his return from Scotland enrolled in the Grasmere home defence volunteers. ‘Surely there was never a more
determined hater of the French
,' Dorothy wrote proudly to her friend, Catherine Clarkson, ‘nor one more willing to do his utmost if they really do come.'

The previous Christmas had been spent by De Quincey on the streets of London. Now, in late December and in the middle of a snowstorm, he arrived at last in Oxford. ‘
No longer
absorbed into the general unity of a family, I felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the anxieties of a man, and a member of the world.' Important changes to the general unity of his family had taken place in the weeks before he left home: his younger brother, Richard, had run away from school to work as a cabin boy on a South Sea whaler, and his mother had sold the Priory and moved temporarily to Hinckley in Leicestershire before returning to Bristol. In the domestic upheavals, the finer details of De Quincey's enrolment at the university had been overlooked and he arrived in the city without arranging entry to a particular college. Had he stayed at Manchester Grammar he would have been eligible for a bursary at Brasenose, but De Quincey was now faced with a bewildering number of options. Wanting a college large enough in which to disappear, and preferably attached to a cathedral and choir, he knocked on the door of Christ Church. Here he was interviewed by the dean who informed him that immediate entry was impossible, there being not so much as a spare dog kennel in which to sleep. De Quincey was recommended the smaller and less distinguished Worcester College, which was ‘
Singularly barren
of either virtue or talents or knowledge', and lacked its own chapel.

De Quincey, who did not consider himself among the usual run of roaring undergraduates, found the social life of the university infantile and the intellectual life non-existent. His fellow students – except John Wilson, who he had not then met – ‘
knew nothing
at all of English Literature', let alone modern poetry. The reason De Quincey gave for the ‘morbid excess' of his antisocial behaviour was that his ‘eye had been couched in a secondary power of vision, by misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically escaped'. He had, in other words, been through the journey prescribed for Dorothy in ‘Tintern Abbey'. His small income was spent on acquiring the books which would form the basis of the vast and impressive library which would later be carted around the country; his increasingly threadbare appearance was excused on the grounds of his evident genius. De Quincey spoke not more than ‘
one hundred words
' during his first two years, and his sole encounter with his personal tutor consisted of a chance meeting during which three sentences were exchanged, ‘two of which fell to his share, one to mine'. Asked what he had been reading, De Quincey replied ‘Paley', referring to the utilitarian clergyman philosopher and advocate of natural theology. (He had actually been reading Plato's
Parmenides
but imagined his tutor would not know ‘so very unusual' a book.) ‘Ah! An excellent author,' was the don's response to Paley. ‘Excellent for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious
there
.' De Quincey's own understanding, on the contrary, was that while Paley was a ‘master' of style, as a philosopher he was ‘the disgrace of the age'. His tutor had shown himself ‘a stiff lover of the artificial and the pompous', and no further meetings took place. For the next five years, De Quincey simply continued with his programme of self-education. His later paean to the university – ‘Oxford, ancient Mother! Hoary with ancestral honours . . . – I owe thee nothing!' – was not an exaggeration.