Guilty Thing (11 page)

‘William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-Purposes', by Max Beerbohm, 1904.

‘O Master! We are seven.'

3

Schooltime (continued)

        . . . the giddy top

And Whispering Gallery of St Paul's; the Tombs

Of Westminster; the Giants of Guildhall;

Bedlam, and the two figures at its gates,

Streets without end, and churches numberless. . .

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book Seventh

‘We Are Seven', composed during the same summer as Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', appeared in the anonymously published 1798 edition of
Lyrical Ballads.
The volume opened with the mariner's tale: ‘There was a ship – quoth he,' begins the old man, stopping an unsuspecting guest at a wedding. Setting sail from a harbour like the one beneath St  Mary Redcliffe, ‘Below the kirk, below the Hill', the ship blows along like chaff until the mariner does ‘an hellish thing', and shoots the bird that brings the breeze. It is as though he had murdered a man, and the poem elides the difference. The mariner's expression as he reveals his crime is awful to behold. ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,' the horrified wedding guest exclaims, ‘why looks't thou so?' The mariner, horrified by himself, can give no reason for his action. His punishment is severe; with his soul stripped bare he crosses into a world never entered before: ‘We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea.'

Like the wedding guest, De Quincey was held spellbound by this hypnotic confession, which set the tone for the rest of the volume. He found in these poems what he called the ‘absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men'. Here was a landscape on the edge of society, peopled by figures reduced to the naked expression of suffering. Not all of the twenty-two verses are ballads, but many are expressly lyrical. While a traditional ballad rehearses an action, a ‘lyrical' ballad investigates the telling of that action and each of these poems was an exercise in expression: ‘
the feeling therein developed
,' Wordsworth later explained, ‘gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling'. ‘The Ancient Mariner' contained a message that De Quincey understood: consciousness is a guilt-ridden voyage and wisdom comes at the cost of misery, solitude and sympathy with life in all its modes.

Lyrical Ballads
was both a revolt against current definitions of literature and a vision of a deeper, wiser, better life. The initial plan, De Quincey later learned, had been for Wordsworth to write about the natural world and Coleridge to bring in the supernatural, but an air of mysticism pervades the whole. The language is stripped down, the plainness at times resulting in estranging literalism such as Wordsworth's description of the pond in ‘The Thorn': ‘I've measured it from side to side/ 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide'. The traditional heroes of grand narratives are replaced with idiot boys, convicts and vagrants. There are stark images of blasted trees, ruined cottages and devoted mothers. Children are brought forward as the spokesmen of truth and innocence; authority resides not in God or government but in the resilience of nature: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can,' De Quincey now read in ‘The Tables Turned'. Here was the confirmation he needed that school was a waste of time.

In these pages De Quincey found a home for his subjectivity and his own yearning for an out-of-body experience.
Lyrical Ballads
was the book of his life, but the literary style he had yet to develop would be the opposite of the one employed here. Where Wordsworth was spartan, De Quincey would be lush; where Wordsworth was bare, De Quincey would be baroque.

‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey', subtitled ‘on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour' and dated ‘July 13, 1798', is the single rhapsodic poem in the volume and one of only four spoken in the poet's own voice. Wordsworth describes returning, after ‘five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters', to the River Wye on the borders of Wales and England, where he reflects on the distance between ‘what [he] was then' and who he is now. Time is measured according to emotional impact rather than sequential event, and the poet moves back and forth between the present, sitting ‘under the dark sycamore' with his ‘dear, dear sister', and the recent past, spent ‘in lonely rooms, and mid the din/ Of towns and cities'. In his youthful enthusiasm for nature he was ‘more like a man/ Flying from something that he dreads, than one/ Who sought the thing he loved.' Now, as a result of intense inner reflection, he is filled with:

     a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

The diction rises like music, culminating in a crescendo in which the narrator wishes for his sister a future in which her mind, like his, ‘Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms' and her ‘memory be as a dwelling-place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonies.'

The title itself told De Quincey a story: Tintern Abbey is a Gothic ruin on the other side of the Bristol Channel, over the border to Wales. The poem had a local habitation and a name: De Quincey could visit the view above the former monastery and feel what the poet felt. Added to which, the poet also had a sister who reminded him of his former self, who also belonged to an earlier part of his existence.

The two poems framing the first edition of
Lyrical Ballads
were locked in dialogue. The book opened with a tale of homelessness and closed with the celebration of a building; it began with the cadences of a sea shanty and ended on an aria. Architecture not only stimulates the mind, but the mind can aspire to the magnificence of a mansion. Preceding ‘The Ancient Mariner' was an ‘Advertisement' explaining that the poems contained here were ‘experiments' whose meaning would be lost on those looking for the perfume of eighteenth-century verse. Their purpose was to lean into the ‘
language of conversation
in the middle and lower classes', and those readers used to ‘the gaudiness and inane phraseology' of contemporary literature will ‘struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness'.

This was not an apologia but a manifesto: reading, done properly, is dangerous, and the reader of
Lyrical Ballads
should emerge from the strange and awkward encounter a different person. De Quincey followed these instructions to the letter, and immersed himself in the rhythm of the whole. Reading the
Lyrical Ballads
, his overriding preoccupation was that he had now grown up: there was nothing school could teach him, and nothing more to be learned from his mother. He was ready for a voyage of his own.

Writing to his eldest daughter towards the end of his life, De Quincey described the scene of his ‘natal morning'. On one side of the bed was his good fairy, on the other side his bad fairy. The gift bestowed by his good fairy was that ‘
procrastination
shall never dare to come near you', and the gift of the bad fairy was that while he would not procrastinate, he would ‘reap the two grand penalties of procrastination. . . In the midst of
too-soonness
he shall suffer the killing anxieties of
too-lateness
.'

His too-lateness would indeed be the controlling feature of De Quincey's life. As a guest he would arrive not hours, but weeks, months and sometimes years after he was expected and as a writer for the journals he would consistently hold his long-suffering editors to ransom; but in his discovery of Wordsworth he prided himself on having been for once early, and by a ‘
full thirty years
'. No other man ‘in Europe' had encountered the
Lyrical Ballads
as he had, or foreseen, as he did, the effect they would have on poetic tradition. It was fundamental to De Quincey's self-mythology that he was the first to burst into this silent sea; his ‘discovery' of
Lyrical Ballads
is repeatedly presented by him as a mark of his advanced sensibility. For fear of being laughed at, he was forced to keep his transgressive taste hidden from the world and thus he became, in honour of Wordsworth and Coleridge – although he did not then know the identity of the poets – a recluse. On one disastrous occasion he shared his passion with Lady Carbery, a family friend whose judgement he trusted. With ‘a beating heart' he recited ‘The Ancient Mariner', and she began to giggle. The sailor was, she said, ‘
an old quiz
'; her reaction had De Quincey read her ‘We Are Seven' would have been more wounding still. It was a lesson learned: Lady Carbery's response confirmed De Quincey's conviction that if the poet was a solitary genius, then so too was the sympathetic reader.

Wordsworth exaggerated
the originality of the
Lyrical Ballads
, and De Quincey exaggerated its universal rejection. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, De Quincey insisted, ‘
The name of Wordsworth
was trampled under foot' and ‘the finger of scorn pointed at it'; the ‘language' of critics ‘was exhausted' by the effort of finding ‘images and expressions vile enough, insolent enough, to convey [their] unutterable contempt'. Except that the primitive was in fashion; Blake's
Songs of Innocence
had appeared twenty years earlier and Wordsworth's experiments with ‘native language' had been anticipated by Robert Burns in 1786, with his
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
. Individual poems in
Lyrical Ballads
such as ‘The Idiot Boy', in which a mother's simple son goes missing, were mocked by readers, but the reviewers in general expressed interest in the experiment, and those writing for the
Analytical
, the
Monthly
and
The British Critic
largely praised the result. The
Anti-Jacobin
described
Lyrical Ballads
as showing ‘genius, taste, elegance, wit and imagery of the most beautiful kind'. The only negative review, and the first to appear, was in the
Critical
, and this was by the poet's friend, Robert Southey. ‘The Idiot Boy', Southey scoffed, ‘resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution', while ‘The Ancient Mariner' was a ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity'. Despite Southey's equivocation, sales were good enough for
Lyrical Ballads
to require reprinting in 1800 and again in 1802. As evidence of the popularity of their ‘low' style, individual
poems from the first edition appeared in twenty-three separate papers
and journals, including
Lady's Magazine
, the
Star
, and the
Albion and Evening Advertiser
. In April 1799, ‘We Are Seven' was reprinted in the
Derby Mercury
, the
Courier
, the
Morning Chronicle
and the
Whitehall Evening Post
. It is easy, however, to imagine De Quincey nursing his discovery, dreading the possibility that other, less sensitive, souls might intrude upon what, for him, had such potent significance.