Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
learned redundantly, that Coleridge’s marriage had not been a happy one.”95
Even more than Hazlitt, De Quincey was to find his whole literary life shaped and directed by the consequences of this memorable first encounter. It led to his introduction into the Lake District circle that autumn (he had previously corresponded with Wordsworth, but had never dared to meet him); it confirmed his lifelong fascination with German philosophy and psychological criticism; and it gave him courage to explore his great autobiographical theme – opium addiction. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater made his name as a writer when published in 1821, and all his subsequent journalism was signed “The English Opium Eater”. De Quincey made the subject fashionable, and his work was translated in France by Alfred de Musset. Thirty years of subsequent commentaries on and additions to the Confessions are inextricably involved with Coleridge’s private experiences and may be taken as a lengthy (and often barbed) tribute to the older man and pioneer addict. Coleridge continuously haunts De Quincey’s pages, as a sort of battered Virgilian guide to the opium Inferno.
At the time of meeting Coleridge in Chubb’s gateway, De Quincey was still an aimless, Romantic young gentleman-vagabond very typical of his post-revolutionary university generation. He had no ambitions in business, science, church or politics. Brought up and spoiled by a widowed mother, educated at Manchester Grammar School (from which he ran away), he had spent his summer vacations living rough in Wales and experimenting with opium in London. Here he had his famous encounter with the teenage prostitute, “Anne of Oxford Street”.
This formative affair, and his sexual fantasies of the embracing exotic woman “Levana” (one of the three “Our Ladies of Sorrows” who dominate the Confessions’ great dream-sequences) he would later assign to the summers of 1802–4. Yet they suggest curious parallels with what De Quincey later learned of Coleridge’s Asra obsession, and they may have been retrospectively shaped and coloured.
That summer of 1807 he had abandoned university, like Coleridge before him, without taking his final degree, and had determined on introducing himself to the authors of the Lyrical Ballads. He regarded them as the intellectual and spiritual authorities of their age. Brilliantly clever, but emotionally damaged and dependent (not least by his tiny size, which painfully recalls Hartley Coleridge), De Quincey was like some darting, changeling child seeking giant parents to worship and quarrel with. Over the next ten years (when he would settle at Grasmere and play almost daily with the children) Wordsworth would be his father and mentor. But Coleridge, the great river-god of words and opium, would be something more dangerous and elemental, a demonic elder brother or doppelgänger, easier to understand and far easier to despise.
De Quincey would claim that at Bridgwater Coleridge almost immediately brought up the subject of addiction: “for already he was under the full dominion of opium, as he himself revealed to me, and with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage, in a private walk of some length which I took with him about sunset.”96
This, like many of De Quincey’s colourful reconstructions (which he first published in Tait’s Magazine in the year of Coleridge’s death), has been largely doubted. But it seems quite possible, given the confessional tone of Coleridge’s Notebooks at Coleorton and Stowey, and the openness with which he increasingly talked to the younger generation, far less censorious than his own contemporaries. Certainly, after his return to Bristol, De Quincey soon put in hand two schemes which were of immense practical aid to Coleridge. The first was to use £500 of his family inheritance as an “anonymous” long-term loan to Coleridge through Joseph Cottle. The second was to offer himself in Coleridge’s stead as an escort to Mrs Coleridge and the children when they eventually returned, as now planned, to Keswick.
In retrospect one might accuse De Quincey of “buying” his way into the Lake District circle. Yet he was only twenty-two, and the awed tone of his letters at this date (especially to Wordsworth) suggest genuine and idealistic hero-worship. He spoke of himself as one “who bends the knee” before them. “And I will add that, to no man on earth except yourself,” he wrote to Wordsworth, “and one other (a friend of yours), would I thus lowly and suppliantly prostrate myself.”97 After that first meeting at Bridgwater, De Quincey rode back the same night to Bristol, forty miles along the turnpike road under the stars, thinking rapturously of “the greatest man that has ever appeared”.98
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By August, Coleridge was blessedly alone with Poole at Stowey, and a note of bucolic and unaccustomed content crept into his difficult convalescence. “The Hayfield in the close hard by the Farm House: babe, and totterer little more; old cat with her eyes blinking in the Sun, & little kittens leaping and frisking over the Hay-lines.”99
Coleridge made long notes on the planting of oak trees for the new generation, on the cultivation of sunflowers, and the predicting of weather. He walked with Poole to see the Cruikshanks at Enmore, to see Brice at Aisholt, and the fishermen at Combwich. He dined with Lord Egremont, and drank mead all night with Brice, explaining that “the second bottle became associated with the idea, & afterwards with the body, of S.T.C. – by necessity of metaphysical Law”.100
He attended the opening of the Female Friendly Society of Stowey (another of Poole’s philanthropic foundations, like the Stowey Bank) and unblushingly supplied the motto for its banner: “Foresight and Union, linked by Christian Love”.101 He wrote comic verses on their “georgo-episcopal Meanderings” (a combination of Virgilian nature-rambling and stately pilgrimage) which were so slow and digressive under Poole’s guidance, stopping at every field-gate and hill-top, that Coleridge claimed they would avoid Purgatory because “the Last Day will have come” before they arrived anywhere. Their circuitous routes would require “a new road Map of the country” between Stowey and the sea.102
Coleridge even imagined settling in some perfect farmhouse in the Quantocks, which would contain among other things “two Staircases” at each end of the building to aid domestic harmony, and a brewhouse, a dairy, a cellar, a pigsty, and a “Palace of meditation” for his poetry.103 “We set Spies and Watches on the Sun,” he wrote thoughtfully. “We make Time give an account of itself, & shall we not give an account of Time?”104
All this while the opium struggle continued. Coleridge listed medical compounds for enema injections, and invented a new dilute laudanum solution using five pounds of quince juice to a quarter of a pound of opium, infused with a spice cocktail of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and saffron to aid digestion. “When in Malta, I might easily have tried it with Lemon Juice, instead of Quinces.”105
There were of course moments of strain, even with Tom Poole: on one occasion a row about Coleridge’s “unreasonable expectation” of being supplied with pen and ink; on another a “warm conversation” about miracles.106 No doubt opium lay behind these. When urged by Poole to “exert himself”, Coleridge replied with his old image of the eagle bidding the “Tortoise sunward soar”, which Poole meticulously noted and filed without comment.107
But in fact Coleridge was secretly writing poetry again. One fragment, “A Dark Sky” (Coeali Ennarant) suggests agonizing religious doubts, as he sat one night in Poole’s garden watching the stars overcome by racing storm-clouds. Those stars, once so friendly and companionable in the days of “Frost at Midnight”, now seemed like a “conven’d conspiracy of spies”