Guilty Thing (20 page)

This only thing can I say – that, though you may find minds more congenial with your own. . . and therefore more worthy of your regard than mine, you will never find one more zealously attached to you – more willing to sacrifice every low consideration of this earth to your happiness – one filled with more admiration of your genius and of reverential love for your virtues than the writer of this letter. And I will add that to no man upon earth except yourself and one other (a friend of yours). . . would my pride suffer one thus lowly to prostrate myself.

The ‘friend of yours' was, of course, Coleridge.

De Quincey copied the draft into his diary, beneath the draft of a letter to his mother in which he remained steadfast about his plans to go to Oxford: ‘
I thought it
had been understood between us that my views cannot change; however circumstances may hasten or retard (or, in any ways vary) the means of their accomplishment.'

The next day, 12 May, he read through the latest
Edinburgh Review.
The journal had launched in October the previous year, its debut carrying a critique by Francis Jeffrey of Southey's
Thalaba the Destroyer
. One of the four founding editors, Jeffrey described the role of the
Review
as going beyond the ‘
humble task
of pronouncing on the mere literary merits of the works that came before it'. Its writers were instructed to extend the usual critical boundaries and ‘take large and original views of all the important questions to which those works might relate'. This usually resulted in hatchet jobs, and the
Edinburgh
house style became known as ‘slashing'. Sydney Smith joked that, given the solar system to assess, the
Edinburgh Review
would conclude that it showed ‘bad light – planets too distant – pestered with comets – feeble contrivance – could make a better with great ease'. In his review of
Thalaba
, Jeffrey slashed the ‘new
sect
of poets' associated with Southey, ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism' who ‘constitute. . . the most formidable conspiracy against sound judgment in matters poetical'. The ‘Lake poets', as Jeffrey later baptised them, were distinguished by ‘a splenetic and idle discontent with the existing conditions of society', with Wordsworth's theory of poetry singled out as a betrayal of its ancient function: ‘
Poetry has this much
, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.'

In April 1803 a third edition of
Lyrical Ballads
had appeared. There were no new poems but the preface, which had already built on the initial advertisement, had been expanded by a further 3,000 words. De Quincey followed the growth of Wordsworth's thought. ‘
What is a poet?
' Wordsworth now asked. This was the question that also preoccupied De Quincey, and he cellared the answer as he would a good wine: ‘He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.' Coleridge, addressing the same question in a letter to William Sotheby, answered more poetically: the poet is a man who, ‘for all sounds & forms of human nature. . . must have the
ear
of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert – the
eye
of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps on an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest; the
Touch
of a Blind Man feeling
the face of a darling Child
'.

It was now that De Quincey began to think about the importance of criticism, and to consider the difference between the poet and the critic. What is a critic? So far he had belonged to a class of men, ‘
feeble, fluttering, ingenious
, who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and follow all the caprices of the public mind'. But the
Edinburgh Review
had elevated the critic: today he was, like the poet, a legislator of opinion. The effect on the reading public was ‘
electrical
. . . The old periodical opiates were extinguished at once. The learning of the new Journal, its talent, its spirit, its writing, its independence, were all new.'

In his diary, De Quincey expanded on the points made in Wordsworth's extended preface: ‘A poet never investigates the principles of the sublimities which flow from him,' he wrote, ‘that is the business of the critic. . . it is the business of [the poet's] accidental coolness or the critic's perpetual coldness to point out the springs and principles of those “thoughts that breathe and words that burn” which had spontaneously rushed into his mind.' To illustrate his argument, De Quincey explained that while the sublimities of Milton were spontaneous, it took Burke, in his
Enquiry
, to point out ‘the
causes
of that sublime'. His path as a future voice on the
Edinburgh Review
's rival journal was being forged.

De Quincey followed these thoughts by drafting a cold response to his mother's burning queries about his ‘particular plan for life'. ‘
I was not
,' he wrote, ‘aware that
you
'
–
as opposed to his guardians – ‘considered any positive and final determination on this point as a necessary preliminary to my entering at college. But, allowing that (in my case) it
is
so, still it seems natural that the long uncertainty I have been in as to the chance of my ever going to college (with Mr Hall's consent) would have made it as right and natural for me to keep my thoughts on the subject as wavering hitherto as the certainty of my going there.' This letter to his mother he took to the post office, while the letter to Wordsworth remained unsent. The next day De Quincey lunched with Cragg where the talk was ‘about the
Edinburgh Review
, about Coleridge – Wordsworth – Southey – Cottle', after which he returned home to read Burke. When he woke the following morning, so he recorded in Greek, he masturbated.

Awash with ideas, De Quincey listed the works he intended to write. These included dramas, essays on character and pathos, an ode ‘in which two angels or spirits were to meet in the middle of the Atlantic', and ‘many different travels and voyages'. He sketched the outline of a novel in which a heroine lay ‘
dying on an island
of a lake, her windows (opening on a lawn) set wide open', noting that the setting was located in his childhood home at The Farm. The scene was used not in a novel however, but in his
Autobiographic Sketches
where it was transposed to Greenhay and the dying heroine became his sister. He planned an ‘Essay on Poetry' and revealed that ‘I have besides always intended of course that poems should form the cornerstone of my fame'. But instead of writing poems or posting his letter, De Quincey embarked on an extended reading of Southey, whose poetry he defended with his usual vigour, finding in his 1801 epic
Thalaba
, ‘the most wonderful display' of Gothic sublimity.

Before Wordsworth appeared, Southey had been Coleridge's collaborator and the two had written a poetic drama called
The Fall of Robespierre
which circulated around Bath in 1795. Since then, Southey's reputation as a poet had grown to the point where Coleridge described himself as ‘jealous' of his ‘fame'. He would continue to overshadow his peers; Byron thought of Southey as ‘the ballad-monger', and of Wordsworth as Southey's ‘dull disciple'.

De Quincey would later discover how much he and Southey had in common. Southey was born in Bristol although much of his childhood was spent in Bath; he had lost two sisters, one from hydrocephalus, and his father, who died young, had been a draper. What sort of a poet was Southey? De Quincey noted that while strong poetry did not tend to be humorous, Southey, Burns and Shakespeare – ‘3 of our 12 poets' – ‘possessed' the faculty of humour ‘in a very great degree'. This thought led on to another: there were two kinds of nature. The first was beautiful, and found in the tamer aspects – ‘hedge – lane – rose – hawthorn – violet – cuckoo' and ‘milkmaid', while the second was sublime and found in ‘boundless forest – mighty river – wild wild solitude'. Humour might accompany the beautiful but never the sublime – so how then explain the humour of Southey, whose poems were consistent with ‘the great awful torrid zone'? De Quincey's answer is that Southey did not write what is strictly called ‘
Poetry
'; he fitted into a ‘newly discovered state or sometimes perhaps to the medium Ratcliffian kind [De Quincey's spelling of ‘Radcliffe' was always ‘Ratcliff'] which. . . certainly
admits of humour
'.
Southey
wrote Gothic tales in verse rather than poems. De Quincey's opinion coincided with that of Coleridge, who confided to Cottle his fears that Southey ‘will begin to rely too much on
story
and
event
in his poems, to the neglect of those
lofty imaginings
, that are peculiar to, and definitive of, the poet'. The distinction between the two kinds of nature – beautiful and sublime – and thus the two kinds of poetry, was central to De Quincey's thoughts this spring, and he repeatedly returned to it in his diary.

One evening he was comparing with John Merritt, the publishing partner of James Wright, the poetry of Southey and Matthew ‘Monk' Lewis. ‘Southey,' opined Merritt, ‘is an inferior man to Lewis.' ‘“Take care, take care,” said Mr Wright pointing at me; – “he is a
Southeian.
” “Oh! Sir,” said Mr Merritt, “Southey is greatly inferior.”'

Lewis, asserted De Quincey – determined to disagree – was driven by feeling rather than imagination, and therefore produced not poetry but ‘
metrical pathos
'. A writer of mysteries, Monk Lewis erred by containing no mystery in himself; De Quincey could ‘see' straight ‘through him': he was the type of man one might look for ‘in a ballroom'. Southey, on the other hand, De Quincey argued, addressed not the ‘heart' but the ‘imagination', and the distinction lay at the centre of his developing definition of poetry. ‘The world has more
feeling
than
imagination
,' he patiently explained to Merritt and Wright, ‘and therefore. . .
verses of feeling
were sure to be more popular than
poetry
.' While he contained his irritation at the ‘confusion' shown by his friends, he refused to air in public his doubts about Southey's imaginative powers. De Quincey knew full well that the dramas in Southey's work were all external, while those in Wordsworth and Coleridge took place in the minds of the protagonists; that Southey's readers would look in vain for the numinous, for fresh worlds or encounters with the soul of another living being. Southey was more interested in the ghoulish side of death than the mysterious processes of life. His ‘Ode to Horror', which De Quincey read on 27 May, contains lines such as these:

Black HORROR! speed we to the bed of Death,

Where he whose murderous power afar

Blasts with the myriad plagues of war

Struggles with his last breath,

Then to his wildly starting eyes

The phantoms of the murder'd rise . . .

Southey could never have contributed to the
Lyrical Ballads.
Instead he plundered them, producing his own airless impersonations. In ‘The Idiot', a ghastly marriage of  ‘The Idiot Boy' with ‘We are Seven', we are introduced to Ned, a child who digs up his mother's coffin, removes her corpse and warms it by the fire:

He plac'd his mother in her chair,

And in her wonted place,

And blew the kindling fire, that shone

Reflected on her face;

And pausing now, her hand would feel,

And now her face behold,

‘Why, mother, do you look so pale,

‘And why are you so cold?'

Southey was not a bad poet so much as a counterfeit poet. He could never be the real thing because he found no fear in the act of writing: while the business of wielding a pen made Wordsworth so ill that Dorothy was roped in as his amanuensis, Southey's quill flowed blithely over page after page. Southey, noted Wordsworth, ‘seldom “feels his burthened breast/ Heaving beneath th'incumbent Deity” '. De Quincey later noted how his ‘poetry was composed according to a predetermined rule; that so many lines should be produced, by contract, as it were, before breakfast; so many at such another definite interval'.

On the last day of May, rising three hours after Mrs Best had called him, De Quincey walked along the pier, sheltered under a hedge during a shower, and dined in silence with Cragg. When he returned home, he took a clean sheet of paper and started his letter to Wordsworth again. It took him six hours, but it was now, he hoped, perfect.