Guilty Thing (58 page)

For years Margaret Thomasina was plagued by creditors who, hearing that the family were no longer in sanctuary, beat a path to the door of Mavis Bush cottage, and as a result of these ‘persecutors' though still in her twenties she suffered two haemorrhages. De Quincey feared his daughter would die, as he put it, from ‘
the misery of her situation
. She is entirely guiltless of wrong; and I, unless I can do something effectual and sudden, shall feel myself in part the cause.' Margaret lived on, but at the end of 1842 he heard that Horace had died of sickness in Hong Kong. De Quincey's own opium wars now began.

Returning to Midlothian, he based himself at Mavis Bush where, for the third time in his life, he fell prostrate before his dark idol. Descending to a daily dose of 5,000 drops of laudanum, he could sink no further. ‘Through that ruin, and by help of that ruin,' he afterwards wrote in a series of extraordinary letters to Lushington, ‘I looked into and read the latter states of Coleridge. His chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own, and both were the work of laudanum. It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins.' It is a memorable image of the destruction of a delicate and finely cast mind. He was increasingly preoccupied by Coleridge; the poet had often ‘spoken to me of the dying away from him of all hope. . .
Then I partly understood him, now perfectly
.' De Quincey imagined escaping from a ‘maelstrom roaring for him in the distance'; in his dreams he saw through ‘
vast avenues of gloom
those towering gates of ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape'. The Dark Interpreter returned to his side, a ‘
symbolic mirror
' reflecting the dreamer back to himself.

Reducing his daily drops, he fell ‘from purgatory into the shades of a deeper abyss', but still he persisted. By November 1844 he was describing to Lushington ‘the tremendous arrears of wrath still volleying and whirling round me from the retreating opium. Its flight is Parthian;
flying it pursues
.' On Christmas Day he recorded in his diary how, at ‘about 7 p.m.,' it ‘first solemnly revealed itself to me that I am and have long been under a curse. . . Oh dreadful! By degrees infinitely worse than leprosy.' His revelation echoes the belated discovery ten years earlier, on giving up the lease of Dove Cottage, that he had been ‘under a possession'. Admitting that opium was ‘
at the root of all this unimaginable hell
', he took the first steps towards recovery.

‘Conquer it I must by exercise unheard of,' he told himself, ‘or it will conquer me.' Addicts often use exercise as an aid to recovery, but De Quincey's feet gave way beneath him. Unable to walk as far as Edinburgh, he instead staggered round and round the garden, measuring his circuits; after ninety days he had completed, he estimated, one thousand miles. It has been convincingly suggested that De Quincey suffered from a neurological condition known as
restless legs syndrome
, characterised by a creeping sensation in the feet and calves and an urgent need for the legs to ‘yawn', particularly at night. Today it is treated with gentle exercise, lifestyle changes and the drugs used for Parkinson's disease; De Quincey suppressed the symptoms with opium.

After eight months of steady reduction he discovered, he told Lushington, ‘in the twinkling of an eye, such a rectification of the compass as I had not known for years'. Two days later he relapsed, ‘but that no way alarmed me – I drew hope from the omen'. He returned to the image of the whirlpool; no longer ‘carried violently by a headlong current', he was ‘riding as if at anchor, once more dull and untroubled,
as in days of infancy
'. ‘Silently, surely,' De Quincey ‘descended the ladder'. He had in his hand the ‘true key' to recovery, and ‘even though a blast of wind has blown the door to again, no jot of spirits was gone away from me. I shall rise
as one risen from the dead
.'

In late 1844, De Quincey, now aged fifty-nine, jotted down preparatory notes for ‘A New Paper on Murder as a Fine Art'. His murder essays always take us to the seabed of his psyche, and he now proposed that our most glorious murderers – like John Williams ‘who murdered the baby' – should be commemorated as public statues. This thought flowed into another, aimed at Wilson: ‘
Note the power of murderers as fine-art professors
to make a new start, to turn the corner, to retreat upon the road they have come.' De Quincey's concern in this paper was less with murder or plagiarism than poverty and the camouflage of the crowd. Obscurity, he continued, ‘
throws a power about a man
, clothes him with attributes of ubiquity. . . The privilege of safe criminality, not liable to exposure, is limited to classes crowded together like leaves in Vallombrosa' – the image is from Milton – ‘for
them
to run away into some mighty city, Manchester or Glasgow, is to commence life anew.' Concealment was an art he had learned in 1802, as a grubby Romantic on the streets of London. In a riff about authorship as a criminal activity, he now imagined two writers – doubtless himself and Wilson – who were so prolific that ‘at fifty they had forgotten much of their own literary villainies, and at sixty they commenced with murderous ferocity a series of answers to arguments which it was proved upon them afterwards that they themselves had emitted at thirty'. The lives of these ‘self-replying authors' had come full circle: it was as though, he said, they had found themselves in ‘the Whispering Gallery at St Paul's', where secrets committed to the walls were ‘retaliated . . . in echoing thunders'.

In another terrifying idea, De Quincey suggested that there were, ‘
living at this moment
', men who had ‘figured in so many characters, illustrated so many villages, run away from so many towns, and performed the central part in so many careers, that were the character, the village, the town, the career, brought back with all its circumstances to their memories, positively they would fail to recognise their own presence or incarnation in their own acts and bodies'. He himself was one such man, Wilson was another.

De Quincey's line, or cycle, of thought was becoming clear: we cannot escape the past, but nor are we identical with the selves we once were.

In the most poignant of his notes for the ‘New Paper on Murder', De Quincey tells the story of a sultan who dips his head into a basin of enchanted water and finds himself transposed to another world. Born into poverty, he marries for love, sires seven children, struggles to bring them up, goes through ‘many persecutions', and eventually, walking on the beach, ‘meditating some escape from his miseries' he bathes in the sea. ‘
Lifting up his head from the waves
,' he finds himself ‘lifting up his head from the basin'. The life he had just lived lasted for thirty-three seconds.

Leaving the paper unfinished (‘opium-eaters', De Quincey once explained, ‘though good fellows upon the whole, never finish anything'), he sent Robert Blackwood a review of the
Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, by the poet's former doctor and landlord, James Gillman. ‘There is a thing
deader than a door-nail
,' he began. ‘Dead, more dead, most dead is Gillman's Coleridge – dead, deader, deadest, is volume the first.' Nowhere in these pages could De Quincey find the unequalled figure who had ‘cruised over the broad Atlantic of Kant and Schelling, of Fitch and Oken'. Nor could he find a satisfying account of the effect of opium on the ‘faculty of self-revelation'. Coleridge, De Quincey mocked, spoke of his opium-eating as both ‘a thing to be laid aside easily and forever in seven days', but also as ‘the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which had desolated his life'. It was neither so easily discarded nor so powerful a foe: ‘Opium gives and it takes away. It defeats the
steady
habit of exertion; but creates spasms of irregular exertion.' Opium killed the poet in Coleridge, but it fuelled the philosopher. There was a great deal to say about the poppy's power in ‘dealing with the shadowy and the dark', but neither Coleridge nor his biographer would say it. The task was left for De Quincey to complete.

For
Tait's
, he now wrote a critical assessment of Wordsworth. Next to ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in
Macbeth
', ‘On Wordsworth's Poetry' was to be De Quincey's finest piece of literary criticism. He began by warning against confusing the poetry and the poet: ‘
Put not your trust
in the intellectual princes of your age', he intoned; it is ‘safer to scrutinise the words of eminent poets than long to connect yourself with themselves'. The difference between Wordsworth's personal limitations and the boundless splendours of his writing would never cease to shock him. It was De Quincey's first disillusionment and would be his last; it was also his greatest critical insight. ‘Form no connections too close,' he continued,

with those who live only in the atmosphere of admiration and praise. The love or friendship of such people rarely contracts itself into the narrow circle of individuals. You, if you are brilliant like themselves, or in any degree standing upon intellectual pretensions, such men will hate; you, if you are dull, they will despise. Gaze, therefore, on the splendour of such idols as a passing stranger. . . but pass before the splendour has been sullied by human frailty, or before your own generous admiration has been confounded with offerings of weeds, or with the homage of the sycophantic.

Follow one thread in this knot of resentments and De Quincey suggests that it was not he who hated Wordsworth for being less than his poetry, but Wordsworth who hated De Quincey for being too brilliant. Follow another, and De Quincey implies that Wordsworth despised him for not being brilliant enough; a third thread leads to the proposal that it is Wordsworth's frailty, rather than any frailty on his own part, which was the cause of De Quincey's disappointment.

Putting aside his own passions, De Quincey now assessed Wordsworth's treatment of such things. The poet's genius, he argued, lay in approaching passion indirectly, in ‘
forms more complex and oblique
, when passing under the shadow of some secondary passion'. For example, ‘We Are Seven' is a poem ‘which brings into day for the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human nature – viz. that the mind of an infant cannot admit the idea of death, cannot comprehend it, any more than a fountain of light can comprehend the aboriginal darkness'. Wordsworth ‘flashes upon' the girl who has lost two siblings, and ‘whose fullness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a grave', the ‘tenderest of images of death'. He thus forces a connection between ‘death and its sunny antipole'. The effect, De Quincey said, was the ‘influx of the joyous into the sad, and of the sad into the joyous'.

He now moved on to the first part of
The Excursion
, in which Margaret's husband, due to what De Quincey described as ‘mere stress of poverty', deserts his family. If ‘We Are Seven' mirrored his childhood grief, here, laid out accusingly, was his married life, and De Quincey duly went to his own defence. Wordsworth's treatment of the abandoned Margaret is, he argued, ‘in the wrong key' and rests ‘upon a false basis'. In his excessive loftiness, the Wanderer managed to overlook the practical side of human sympathy. Rather than philosophising over her poverty, he might more usefully have given Margaret a guinea. And could he not have done something for her dying baby? The child lay crying, De Quincey drily noted, ‘whilst the philosopher was listening at the door'.

De Quincey ends by rehearsing Wordsworth's former ignominy (‘Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of those years he was the scoff of the world. . .' etc.) and anticipating his death: ‘
He has entered upon his seventy-sixth year
. . . he cannot be far from his setting; but his poetry is only now clearing the clouds that gathered about its rising.' As a ‘meditative poet', De Quincey concluded, William Wordsworth has only one equal: William Shakespeare.