Guilty Thing (53 page)

He would write several versions of his autobiography, each one more impassioned than the last. Here, in the pages of
Tait's
, there are no wheels announcing the arrival of his dying father, and no zeniths, vaults, or Sarsar winds accompanying the death of Elizabeth, an event then seen as less important than the loss of the family income.

All of De Quincey's writing grew out of Wordsworth but it was
The Prelude
that provided the seed for his
Autobiographic Sketches
. De Quincey's theme, like that of Wordsworth, was the history of ‘what passed within me'. Wordsworth's revolutionary France became De Quincey's revolutionary Ireland, the ‘blank confusion' of Wordsworth's London defined De Quincey's chaotic city; De Quincey's essays on Oxford rework Wordsworth's ‘Residence at Cambridge'. ‘Writing where I have no books,' De Quincey confessed, ‘I make all my references to forty years' course of reading, by memory'. A relic of English Romanticism imprisoned in Victorian Scotland, De Quincey's memories were in full flow when, in July 1834, he heard that Coleridge, his role model in failure, had died.

Since 1816 Coleridge had been living in the Highgate home of his doctor, James Gillman. Here his opium intake was monitored, he was pampered by Mrs Gillman, and he was whisked off by the family on seaside breaks. His friends had initially complained at his withdrawal from the world, but Coleridge needed a sanctuary. He would never be entirely free of opium, but under the Gillmans' loving care he reduced his intake and, piece by piece, let go of the past. For the last chapter of his life he experienced stability, and his thinking took on renewed energy. In 1819 his reputation was sealed by a review in
Blackwood's
. ‘
The reading public of England
,' wrote Lockhart, ‘. . . have not understood Mr Coleridge's poems as they should have done.' Coleridge was ‘the prince of superstitious Poets. . . he stands absolutely alone among the poets of the most poetical age'.

Visiting Coleridge in 1824, Carlyle had found ‘a
fat flabby incurvated personage
, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange, brown, timid, yet earnest looking eyes, a high-tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair'. From Highgate Hill, Carlyle later wrote, this figure looked ‘down on London and its smoke-tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there'. Seeming twenty years older than he was, Coleridge had become a legend of a bygone age. Admirers made their pilgrimage to Highgate, just as De Quincey had made his own pilgrimage to Bridgwater. ‘To the raising spirits of the young generation,' said Carlyle, Coleridge ‘had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as
a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma
.'

When Lamb, his oldest friend, heard of the death of Coleridge, ‘it was without grief. It seemed to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world – that he had a hunger for eternity.
I grieved then that I could not grieve
.' Did De Quincey grieve, or did he grieve that he could not grieve? He later claimed that he and Coleridge had not been friends, ‘
not in any sense, nor at any time
', but this was untrue. Only two years before his death, Coleridge had described De Quincey to Blackwood as his ‘old friend'. A fragile early friendship had developed into a relationship which was more strange and less easy to define. As Richard Holmes puts it, De Quincey saw in Coleridge something ‘dangerous and elemental, a demonic
elder brother or
doppelgänger
'.

During his Shakespeare lectures at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, Coleridge had described how, at sunset or sunrise on the highest of Germany's Harz Mountains, climbers could see a giant spectre surrounded by a glowing halo. The ‘
apparition of the Brocken
', as the spectre is called, is a vast projection, caused by light and cloud, of the climber's own shadow: his terrifying vision is of himself. The experience, Coleridge concluded, is akin to being in the audience of a Shakespeare play: here too, ‘every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so. . . you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action'. He had also described his own effect on De Quincey: when De Quincey looked at Coleridge, he knew it to be himself by similarity of action.

De Quincey's most immediate reaction on hearing of Coleridge's death must surely have been that the poet owed him money. He, who had once helped Coleridge without waiting to be asked, was now reduced to begging. While De Quincey was on the run from creditors, Coleridge's shirts had been laundered, his dinners cooked, and his health fussed over by devoted friends in a handsome house overlooking Hampstead Heath. However bad things became for Coleridge, there had always been a mattress for him to fall upon. He had enjoyed the patronage of the Wedgwoods, the hospitality of the Morgans, the devotion of the Gillmans. As Coleridge span around Germany and Malta and the British Isles, his wife and children were warm and comfortable at Greta Hall, being tended to by Southey. De Quincey, equally erudite, equally articulate, equally troubled, had never been supported by anyone, and his own wife and children had been snubbed by his friends.

The month after Coleridge's death, De Quincey's eldest son, William – the ‘uncared-for dog' – was taken ill. First he lost his hearing and then he lost his sight; his eyes protruded and were covered by a ‘film of darkness'. The feverish boy had terrible dreams where, De Quincey believed, ‘the
recollection of some family distresses
seemed to prey upon his mind'. He died on 25 November 1834. De Quincey believed that William had hydrocephalus, but the surgeons who opened his skull were unable to diagnose the cause of death. He had only just turned eighteen, dying at the same age as the uncle he was named after. A scholar of Greek and a lover of books, William was the child who most resembled his father. ‘Upon him,' De Quincey said, ‘I had exhausted all that care and hourly companionship could do to the culture of an intellect.' He considered publishing his son's commentary on Suetonius but his ‘heart retreated under the hopelessness' of the scheme. All said and done, William's accomplishments were no greater than those of young men ‘of every generation for the last two centuries', who have had ‘their names murmured over' before sinking ‘into
everlasting silence and forgetfulness
'.

Instead, De Quincey threw himself into work: ‘
I believe that in the course
of any one month since that unhappy day I have put forth more effort in the way of thought, of research, and of composition, than in any five months together selected from my previous life. Thus at least (if no other good end has been attained) I have been able to instruct my surviving children in the knowledge that grief may be supported.' One month before the death of William De Quincey, William Blackwood had also died, and the following year the death of James Hogg would bring to an end the golden age of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae'.

De Quincey's essays on Coleridge, which ran from September 1834 until January 1835, might have diverted from the theme of his
Autobiographic Sketches
but instead they continue the story, describing how the Opium-Eater went from being a maker to a destroyer of icons. It was here that De Quincey described his evening with Thomas Poole in 1807, where Coleridge was unmasked as a man who presented the ideas of others as his own. Having revealed Poole's doubts about the originality of Coleridge's table talk, De Quincey provided his readers with a lengthy list of further ‘borrowings' from German philosophers that he alone had been able to detect in Coleridge's works. He was right about Coleridge's thefts – scholars still grapple with the reasons why an intellect as magnificent as his should lean so extensively on the thoughts of others – but to unmask him in this way was an act of violence on De Quincey's part, born of utter despair. Having desecrated the church, however, he continued to worship: ‘
I will assert finally
, that, after having read for thirty years in the same track as Coleridge, – that track in which few of any age will ever follow us, such as German metaphysicians, Latin schoolmen, thaumaturgic Platonists, religious Mystics, – and having thus discovered a large variety of trivial thefts, I do, nevertheless, most heartily believe him to have been as original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man ever as existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakespeare in modern.'

Moving from scholarly competitiveness to backstairs gossip, De Quincey suggested that Coleridge had always preferred the company of Dorothy Wordsworth to that of his own wife, Sarah. Dorothy, De Quincey conceded, had ‘
no personal charms
' but ‘still, it is a bitter trial to a young married woman to sustain any sort of competition with a female of her own age, for any part of her husband's regard, or any share of his company'. De Quincey himself, meanwhile, owed ‘
no particular civility
' to Mrs Coleridge, who had once ‘insulted. . . a female relative of my own', a woman vastly her ‘superior' in ‘courtesy and kindness'. The relative was Margaret. De Quincey rolled relentlessly forward: ‘I am the
last person in the world
to press harshly or uncandidly against Coleridge, but I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations – for his constitution was strong and excellent – but as a source of luxurious sensations.' Self-indulgence rather than physical suffering was therefore the cause of Coleridge's addiction. As for his lectures on the fine arts, his black-lipped performance at the Royal Academy ‘was a poor reflection of jewels once scattered
on the highway by himself
'.

De Quincey told the truth about Coleridge and in doing so gave us an angel riven by demons, a figure in whom fatal weakness combined with preternatural power. Excepting Hazlitt, no one understood Coleridge's thought so well as De Quincey, who navigated without difficulty through the mists of the mariner's mind. In 1825 Hazlitt had published a collection of twenty-five portraits called
The Spirit of the Age.
Nothing was said, in his sketch of Coleridge, about Hazlitt's own friendship with the poet, which had turned sour over politics. Instead he gave a brilliant account of his subject's intellectual development which reached a devastating conclusion: ‘
What is become of all this mighty heap of hope
, of thought, of learning and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in
The Courier
.' De Quincey, another mighty heap of hope reduced to hackery and the pursuit of oblivion, trumped Hazlitt by creating a likeness of such vibrancy that other portraits appear pallid by comparison. Coleridge had died a ‘ruin', De Quincey concluded, but he was nonetheless irreplaceable: ‘
Worlds of fine thinking
lie buried in that vast abyss. . . Like the sea it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving bell will bring up again.' De Quincey's Coleridge is touching, troubled, haunted; he is a man you want to meet and who, for a moment, you feel that you have met.

The responses of Coleridge's family and friends were various. For Sara Coleridge – to whom De Quincey had betrothed himself when she was a little girl – her father's mind was ‘
too
much in the mirror of [De Quincey's] own'. Refusing to believe that he ‘had any enmity' towards Coleridge, Sara praised De Quincey for characterising his ‘genius and peculiar mode of discourse with great eloquence and discrimination. . . indeed he often
speaks of his kindness of heart
'. For her brother, Hartley, De Quincey was ‘
an anomaly and a contradiction
. . . he steals the aristocratic “de”; he announces for years the most aristocratic tastes, principles and predilections, and then goes and marries the uneducated daughter of a very humble, very coarse, and very poor farmer. He continues to be, in profession and in talk, as violent a Tory and anti-reformer as ever, and yet he writes for Tait. He professed almost an idolatry for Wordsworth and for my father. . . and yet you see how he is treating them!' Thomas Poole himself complained that De Quincey's memory ‘
must be incorrect
' because he, Poole, had ‘never considered Coleridge a plagiarist'. Southey, erupting in what Carlyle described as ‘
Rhadamanthine rage
', denounced De Quincey as ‘one of the greatest scoundrels living'. ‘I have told Hartley Coleridge,' Southey fumed to Carlyle at a dinner party, ‘that he ought to take a strong cudgel, proceed straight to Edinburgh, and give De Quincey, publicly in the streets there, a sound beating – as a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth.' De Quincey's crime, according to Southey, was against hospitality. Wordsworth's response, expressed to Coleridge's literary executor, J. H. Green, was that De Quincey was a stalker: ‘
It is not to be doubted
that [De Quincey] was honoured by Mr C's confidence, whose company he industriously sought, following him into different parts of England: and how he has abused that confidence, and in certain particulars, perverted the communications made to him, is but too apparent from this obnoxious publication.'