Guilty Thing (25 page)

The image he used to describe his second flight from Wordsworth was the same as the one he used to describe his departure from Elizabeth's bedroom in Greenhay, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. The phrase was from Wordsworth's ‘Intimations of Immortality', where the poet ‘Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised', and Wordsworth himself had taken it from Act 1 of
Hamlet
, where the murdered king's ghost is described by Horatio as disappearing with the dawn, ‘like a guilty thing/ Upon a fearful summons'. It was Hamlet, indecisive, philosophising, obsessed by another world, whom De Quincey was starting to resemble.

Within days of De Quincey's second retreat from Grasmere, and his return to Oxford, Coleridge's ship was docking on the Medway. After two and a half years, the mariner had come home – except that he no longer knew where in the world such a place might be. His trunk of books got lost in Wapping and after a fruitless search of the warehouses along the Ratcliffe Highway, he took himself to London. Three months of procrastination followed before Coleridge returned to his family at Greta Hall. ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,' he famously observed.

Gustave Dore, ‘The Mariner gazes on the serpents in the ocean', from the
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

‘In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth toward the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move forward.'

7

Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind

                     . . . so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Second

One reason behind what De Quincey called his ‘mysterious delay' in meeting Wordsworth was his fear that the poet might prove a disappointment to him. Or – worse – that he, lionised by his school teachers and the self-proclaimed spokesman for
Lyrical Ballads
in Everton literary society, would prove a disappointment to Wordsworth. Unlike Coleridge, whose talk was famously circumambient, De Quincey was as shy as an ibex. In those days he moved cautiously in conversation as if through a tangled wood, and he found it hard to ‘unravel' or ‘even make perfectly conscious' to himself the ‘subsidiary thoughts into which one leading thought often radiates'. This was an area in which De Quincey believed he resembled the young Wordsworth, who had laboured under a similar curse at the same age before finding his spoken voice in his late twenties. Despite luxuriating in the contempt of others, De Quincey drew a line at inviting Wordsworth's scorn: ‘
there was a limit
. People there were in this world whose respect I could not dispense with.'

Coleridge, however, being like ‘some great boy just come from school', inspired less fear than the parental Wordsworth. Added to which, De Quincey knew that they shared a love of German metaphysics which meant that they would never run out of things to say. And should De Quincey find himself tongue-tied, Coleridge, from what he had heard, would happily continue the conversation alone. De Quincey decided to rethink his tactics, and approach Wordsworth through the conduit of his friend and collaborator.

In the summer of 1807 Elizabeth Quincey was living in Downy Parade, Bristol, two bowshots from Wrington in Somerset, where Hannah More had her headquarters. De Quincey, who liked this corner of the country a great deal more than he liked Oxford, was a regular visitor to his mother's house. An added attraction was the presence in the city of Joseph Cottle, publisher of
Lyrical Ballads
, and it was Cottle who told De Quincey that Coleridge was back in England and staying with Thomas Poole, forty miles away in Nether Stowey. On 26 July, De Quincey mounted his steed and swerved south, arriving at Poole's house that evening.

A loyal friend of Coleridge, Poole was a ‘stout, plain-looking farmer, leading a bachelor life'. De Quincey handed him a letter of introduction from Cottle, only to learn that Coleridge had temporarily left to pay a visit to Lord Egmont. Intrigued by Coleridge's admirer, Poole invited the young man to stay until his guest returned, which gave De Quincey time to explore the local sights and continue his research into the lives of the poets. First on his agenda was a visit to Wordsworth's former home at Alfoxden, ‘a place of singular interest to myself'. It was here, he noted, surrounded by the ‘ferny Quantock hills which are so beautifully sketched in the poem of “Ruth”', that Wordsworth and Dorothy lived before they returned to their native lakes.

That evening the two men talked over dinner. As his guest was a philosopher, Poole asked whether De Quincey had ever formed an opinion on why Pythagoras forbade his disciples from eating beans. Coleridge, Poole added darkly, had recently proposed an explanation which he suspected ‘
to have not been original
'. This was the first hint that De Quincey received of there being an ‘infirmity' in his hero's ‘mind': at times Coleridge represented the thoughts of others as his own. De Quincey was able to tell his host that he had read in the pages of a certain ‘German author' that beans in ancient Greece were used as tokens for voting, and so Pythagoras's prohibition was not against the eating of beans but against involvement in politics. ‘By Jove,' spluttered Poole, ‘that was the very explanation [Coleridge] gave us!'

Who knows if this conversation took place? It was described by De Quincey twenty-seven years later in a series of essays for
Tait's Edinburgh
Magazine
on ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge'. Having died some months before, Coleridge was unavailable for comment. ‘Here was a trait of Coleridge's mind,' De Quincey trumpeted, ‘to be first made known to me by his best friend, and first published to the world by me, the foremost of his admirers!' The whole premise of the anecdote about Pythagoras and the beans is unstable: devoted to Coleridge, Poole was unlikely to spread rumours which would destroy the reputation of his friend and discredit him in the eyes of a young admirer. Added to which, it is hard to imagine the genial Poole wrestling with the fear that something said over supper might not have been freshly coined. Coleridge had a porous intellect; it was assumed by those who enjoyed his company that his conversation was infused with deep reading.

The day after his dinner with Poole, Lord Egmont paid a visit to Nether Stowey to report that Coleridge had gone for the night to the market town of Bridgwater, eight miles away at the edge of the Somerset Levels. Egmont said this with a laugh at ‘his own simplicity' in assuming the stability of any plan made by Coleridge. The ruling feature of Coleridge's daily life, De Quincey gathered, was his timekeeping. ‘Nobody who. . . knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment he might make. . . those who asked him to dinner or any other party, as a matter of course,
sent a carriage for him
.' Rather than wait indefinitely for his return, De Quincey decided to ambush Coleridge in Bridgwater, where he arrived later that day. Leading his horse down the main street of the town he saw in front of him, standing beneath a gateway, a ‘gazing' figure:

In height
he might be about five feet eight; (he was, in reality, about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence. . . his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. . . I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more; and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie.

De Quincey's writing always resounds like an echo chamber, and his description of Coleridge recalls that of the persecuted dog whose ‘glazed' and ‘dreamy' eyes had met his own on the last morning he saw his brother William alive. Startled back into the material world, Coleridge now ‘repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us' before greeting the young man ‘with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious'. De Quincey handed him the gift of ‘a scarce Latin pamphlet' written by the philosopher David Hartley, after whom Coleridge's eldest son was named. Coleridge pressed him to stay to dinner and then, for three uninterrupted hours, talked philosophy ‘like some great river, the Orellana, or the St Lawrence, that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music. . .' At one point a well-presented woman, whose prettiness was of a ‘commonplace order', briefly entered the room: ‘Mrs Coleridge', announced a frigid Coleridge. The ‘Coleridges' marriage,' De Quincey noted, ‘had
not been a happy one
.'

When he and Wordsworth had first met in 1797, it was Coleridge who was the contented family man while Wordsworth, with a pregnant mistress in revolutionary France, was the more fragile figure. And it was Coleridge with the growing reputation, while Wordsworth was unheard of. The tables had now turned: Wordsworth's name was gathering strength and Coleridge felt his own diminishing; Wordsworth was floating in deep domestic calm while Coleridge, swollen with laudanum and ‘a wretched wrack' of his former self, was ‘
rolling, rudderless
' into the roughest seas of his life. He had returned from Malta, thought Dorothy, ‘
utterly changed
. . . that he is ill I am well assured, and must sink if he does not grow more happy'. Coleridge is often associated, and often associated himself, with water imagery. Wordsworth, he said, had been happy to let him ‘flow' in his own ‘main stream' but had discouraged ‘every attempt of mine to roll forward into a distinct
current of my own
'.

Their friendship had taken a severe blow in the winter of 1806/07 when the Wordsworth party, bursting at the seams of Dove Cottage, had decamped to Sir George Beaumont's estate at Coleorton where Coleridge, still desperately in love with Sara Hutchinson, had joined them. Here Wordsworth read aloud the manuscript of the poem which would later be known as
The Prelude
. When he had finished, ‘hanging still upon the sound' of the poet's deep voice, Coleridge ‘rose' and found himself ‘in prayer'.
The Prelude,
he knew, would ensure Wordsworth's place in ‘the choir of ever-enduring men'. Coleridge described his friend as standing ‘at the helm of a noble bark', sailing ‘right onward' in ‘open ocean and a steady breeze'. Himself a sinking mariner, Coleridge's own poetic silence contrasted sorely with the unstoppable stream of his friend, ‘driven in surges now beneath the stars'. His agony of self-laceration was compounded by a hellish vision on the morning of Saturday 27 December, of Wordsworth and Sara together in a bedroom, her ‘beautiful breasts uncovered'. Coleridge spent the rest of the day in the Queen's Head, drinking ale and frantically writing in his notebook.

Whatever took place in that dreadful ‘phantasm' – and Coleridge himself seemed not to know if the scene was real or imagined – the result was catastrophic. All we have to go on is what he described in his notebooks ten months later – during the time that he was seeing De Quincey on a daily basis – when he described the ‘agony' of ‘the vision of that Saturday Morning – of the bed – O cruel!/ is he not beloved, adored by two [Sara and Mary] & two such Beings! and must I not be beloved
near
him except as a Satellite?' Coleridge followed this lament with a passage decrying Wordsworth's incapacity to love, and resenting his friend's ‘greater, better, manlier' attractions. The entry ends with the plea: ‘Love me,
Sara! Sara! Love me!
'

When De Quincey now approached him on the high street in Bridgwater, Coleridge had lost his compass. He remained convinced that separating from his wife was the answer to his troubles, that the ‘
perpetual struggle
, and endless
heart-wasting
' of his domestic life lay ‘at the bottom of all my irresolution, procrastination, languor, and former detestable habit of poison-taking'. The Wordsworths agreed that ‘poor Coleridge', as they now referred to him, was being destroyed less by opium than by a superficial spouse and felt confident that they could wean their friend off both. For Southey, who shared a house with Sarah Coleridge, it was from ‘
idolatry of that family
' that Coleridge's problems began; the Wordsworths ‘have always humoured him in all his follies, listened to his complaints of his wife, and when he complained of his itch, helped him to scratch, instead of covering him with brimstone ointment, and shutting him up by himself'.