The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

The immediate need was to earn some money. While in London Southey had tried to interest publishers in his Wat Tyler, but all had declined for fear of prosecution. Coleridge toyed with a number of alternatives, including returning to London to work as a reporter for the Telegraph, and going to Scotland to act as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan. But both of these meant abandoning Sara, and now that they were together again Coleridge found that he did not want to leave her – indeed, very much the opposite. He discovered, too, that she had attracted the attentions of two other men, one of them of large Fortune’, and that she was being pressed by her relatives to accept this suitor if Coleridge would not marry her first. Naturally this discovery increased Coleridge’s interest.

Very quickly it was decided that Coleridge should give a series of public lectures in Bristol’s Corn Market, capitalising on his qualities as an orator by charging a shilling a head in attendance money. The idea may have been inspired by the example of John Thelwall, who since his acquittal had been drawing large audiences – as many as eight hundred at a time – for his political lectures (though even so he found it hard to find a venue that would take him). Coleridge’s first lecture was written at a single sitting, under Southey’s supervision, between midnight and breakfast time of the day on which it was to be delivered. The lectures blasted Pitt’s repressive government and condemned its war against Revolutionary France, earning Coleridge a local reputation as a dangerous radical. He revelled in the notoriety: ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible Conspiracy against me.’ Soon after delivering the first lecture he published this as a pamphlet, claiming he felt ‘obliged’ to do so, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’. He triumphed over hecklers, and proudly announced to Dyer that he had succeeded in provoking ‘furious and determined’ opposition from ‘the Aristocrats’, to the extent of hiring thugs – ‘uncouth and unbrained Automata’ – who threatened to attack him. After the second lecture it was felt necessary to move the third to a private address – and even then a crowd gathered outside could scarcely be restrained from attacking the house on Castle Green where the ‘damn’d Jacobine was jawing away’.30

Coleridge was an amusing lecturer, and his talks were both well attended and enthusiastically received. He dealt cleverly with hecklers. On one occasion ‘some gentlemen of the opposite party’, disliking what they heard, began to hiss. Coleridge responded instantly: ‘I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!’ His witty riposte was greeted with ‘immense applause’. There was no more hissing after that.

The lectures were crafted to appeal to the sentiments of the dissenters who formed the majority of Bristol’s radical population. Coleridge likened the People to the blinded Samson, standing between ‘those two massy Pillars of Oppression’s Temple, Monarchy and Aristocracy’; they needed guidance. While deploring revolutionary violence, he insisted on the need for reform to prevent such violence occurring. The ‘great object in which we are anxiously engaged’ was ‘to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands’. All this was meat and drink to Bristol’s radicals, who were further cheered by his second lecture, ‘On the Present War’, which referred to ‘the distressful stagnation of Trade and Commerce’, and its woeful effect on the poor in particular:

War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve; they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures … If they chuse … the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of our Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of New Holland to be starved back again into Virtue.

Soon afterwards, Southey began delivering a course of twelve historical lectures on the background to the French Revolution. Each lecturer helped the other; it was a joint endeavour in suitably Pantisocratic style. ‘We live together and write together,’ Southey reported happily. ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page.’31

In London Coleridge had tried to place a volume of his poems, but most of the booksellers would not even look at them, and the only offer he received was a derisory six guineas. Here in Bristol, Cottle generously offered him thirty guineas, to be paid in advance as required. ‘The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy.’32 Coleridge began collecting his poems and composing new ones for a volume to appear later in the year. Southey was still completing his long historical epic Joan of Arc, to which Coleridge contributed 255 lines and ‘corrected’ the rest. Cottle commissioned handsome portraits of both young authors by Peter Vandyke, a supposed descendant of the Flemish master.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of Coleridge’s lectures, he was ‘soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue them’.33 Undeterred, a group of prominent Bristol dissenters commissioned him to deliver a fresh course of six lectures on revealed religion at the Assembly coffee house on the Quay.34 Drawing on the ideas of Unitarian thinkers such as Frend and Priestley, Coleridge denounced the corruption of the Church of England. He ridiculed the dogma of the Trinity, and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption. For Coleridge, the teaching of Jesus Christ called for the complete abolition of private property – a measure too extreme for even the wildest Jacobins.* Indeed, passages from his sixth and final lecture sound like a manifesto for Pantisocracy:

The necessaries of twenty men are raised by one man, who works ten hours a day exclusive of his meals. How then are the other nineteen employed? Some of them are mechanics and merchants who collect and prepare those things which urge this field Labourer to unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries – others are Princes and Nobles and Gentlemen who stimulate his exertions by exciting his envy, and others are Lawyers and Priests and Hangmen who seduce or terrify him into passive submission. Now if instead of this one man the whole twenty were to divide the labor and dismiss all unnecessary wants it is evident that none of us would work more than two hours a day of necessity, and that all of us might be learned from the advantages of opportunities, and innocent from the absence of Temptation.

The lectures demonstrate the central importance to Coleridge of Christian revelation, an emphasis that distinguished him from radicals such as Thelwall. Indeed, Coleridge was repelled by the atheism and apparent immorality of many of the most prominent radicals, and appalled that such men might capture the leadership of the people. He was particularly concerned at the ubiquity of Godwin’s ideas in the minds of radicals. In the process of writing these lectures Coleridge sought to develop a Christian alternative to Godwin’s atheistic radicalism.35 Much of his opposition to Godwin stemmed from his (brief) personal experience of the man, and of Godwin’s close associate Holcroft. There is a pugnacious tone to his criticism of Godwin, which suggests rivalry: ‘I set him at Defiance.’

Coleridge also delivered two stand-alone lectures, one, ‘by particular desire’, devoted to a subject particularly controversial in Bristol: a condemnation of the slave trade. Coleridge’s final lecture was on Pitt’s recently introduced hair-powder tax, a fine subject for his satirical wit, as democrats chose to wear their hair unpowdered anyway. Only ‘aristocrats’ would pay the guinea necessary for a licence to wear hair powder.

Meanwhile, all was not well in the Pantisocratic household. Coleridge exasperated Southey by his erratic working habits. Southey was by nature disciplined and organised, Coleridge wayward and chaotic. Even Coleridge’s appearance irritated Southey: untidy, unkempt and sometimes not entirely clean.36 The strain began to show. Coleridge had agreed to give the fourth of Southey’s historical lectures – ‘On the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire’ – as it was a subject which he had particularly studied. At the end of Southey’s third lecture, therefore, it was announced that Coleridge would be giving the next. When the time came, ‘the room was thronged’ – but the lecturer failed to appear. After waiting half an hour, the disgruntled crowd dispersed. Coleridge was eventually found in his lodgings, smoking a pipe, deep in thought.

The next day, on a ramble up the Wye Valley with Cottle and the two Fricker sisters, Southey remonstrated with Coleridge. The two friends quarrelled, embarrassing Cottle, especially when each of the sisters entered the argument in support of her suitor. Afterwards, in the woods above Tintern, they lost their way as darkness descended, with Coleridge riding ahead on Cottle’s horse and shouting back encouragement, while Southey advanced supporting a sister on each arm, and the lame Cottle hobbled along behind, until at last they reached the inn.

Southey’s zeal for Pantisocracy was cooling. His priorities had changed; marriage to Edith was now in the forefront of his mind, and other considerations subsidiary. He began to express reservations about aspects of the scheme. Coleridge perceived his diminishing enthusiasm, and strove to keep him true to the principles to which they had devoted themselves. Southey was caught in a trap of his own making. Having advertised his own integrity so freely, having laid such stress on principle, having insisted to Coleridge that Pantisocracy was a duty, he found it difficult to withdraw. A succession of impassioned arguments ensued, followed by partial reconciliations. Each man accused the other of behaving coldly towards him. Strong words were exchanged, and tears shed. One night, just before they went to bed, Southey confessed that he had acted wrongly. But soon his manners became cold and gloomy again. It was like the break-up of a marriage. Poor George Burnett was a spectator of this contest; he watched aghast.

Then a wealthy friend offered Southey an annuity of £160, to begin the following autumn. Now that he had the prospect of some property, Southey found himself less inclined to share it. He put forward a new proposal: everything in Wales should be owned separately, except five or six acres. Coleridge reacted with indignation and contempt; Southey’s scheme amounted to rank apostasy: ‘In short, we were to commence Partners in a petty Farming Trade. This was the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!’ From this time on, Coleridge kept up the appearance of a friendship with Southey – ‘but I locked up my heart from you’.

In August, Southey’s clergyman uncle Herbert Hill returned to England from Portugal. He had funded Southey’s education at Westminster and Oxford in the expectation that his nephew would follow his example, and he now wrote urging Southey to take Holy Orders. Apparently Hill was intimate with a bishop, and a post worth £300 a year was Southey’s for the asking. Southey informed his fellow lodgers of the offer one evening. ‘What answer have you returned?’ asked Coleridge. ‘None – Nor do I know what Answer I shall return,’ replied Southey, and retired to bed. Coleridge was incredulous; Southey had been as scathing as he was on the iniquity of the Church – indeed, had been so before they met (in December 1793, for example, Southey had written that to enter the Church ‘I must become contemptible infamous and perjured’37). Burnett sat gaping, half-petrified at the possibility that his idol might abandon them. Coleridge wrote a letter to Southey that same night, frantically urging him not to ‘perjure himself’. The next morning he walked with Southey to Bath, insisting on the ‘criminality’ of such an action. Southey wavered, tempted by the prospect of a regular income that would at last allow him to marry Edith. After a struggle, he decided against the Church; but his uncle was determined to lure him away from Pantisocracy. Further inducements were placed in front of Southey to return to Oxford and study law – a course that Coleridge described as ‘more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church’. The temptations were proving too great for Southey, whose scruples disappeared one by one. He was now talking of ‘rejoining Pantisocracy in about 14 years’, citing Coleridge’s ‘indolence’* as a reason for his quitting. On 22 August 1795 Coleridge wrote bitterly to Cottle that Southey ‘leaves our Party’. On 1 September Southey quitted their shared lodgings in College Street. Their landlady was reduced to tears at his departure.

A week or two later Coleridge made his way back to west Somerset. On 19 September Poole’s cousin Charlotte noted in her journal that Tom had with him a friend by the name of ‘Coldridge: a young man of brilliant understanding, great eloquence, desperate fortune, democratick principle, and entirely led away by the feelings of the moment’. A poem by Poole (not known as a poet) addressed to ‘Coldridge’ – ‘Hail to thee, Coldridge, youth of various powers!’ – is dated seven days earlier. Presumably Coleridge stayed the intervening week with Poole at Nether Stowey. He may have visited Henry Poole at Shurton Court as well, because some time during September he composed a poem nearby, at Shurton Bars, where a murky, gently shelving sea recedes with the tide to reveal a shingle beach, broken by bars of exposed rock. ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ was a response to a letter from Sara, in which she seems to have referred to chilly treatment from Southey and Edith. The growing estrangement from Southey was obviously prominent in Coleridge’s thoughts at the time. Poole’s poem refers to the same subject. On his return from Shurton to Bristol, Coleridge encountered Southey, who offered his usual handshake. Coleridge took Southey’s outstretched hand, and shook it ‘mechanically’. The significance of this handshake, or lack of it, subsequently became a point of contention between them.

In ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ Coleridge quoted an expression borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening Walk’. Such borrowing was a form of acknowledgement much practised at the time, and in fact Coleridge had already used another phrase of Wordsworth’s elsewhere.38 A note to the published version of Coleridge’s poem would refer to ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ as ‘a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh, and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring’.39 Obviously Coleridge had read and admired Wordsworth’s otherwise neglected poems published in 1793. What is striking about this note is that he should have rated Wordsworth so highly, on the evidence of so little.

Coleridge had decided to marry Sara. Though his addresses to her had at first been paid ‘from Principle not Feeling’, now his heart was engaged: ‘I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!’ He had found a cottage for them at Clevedon, a dozen or so miles west of the city, overlooking the Bristol Channel, for the modest rent of £5 per year. There they would live with George Burnett, the object of the Susquehanna delayed but not yet wholly abandoned. There Coleridge set ‘The Eolian Harp’, the first of what have since become known as his ‘conversation poems’, written in blank verse and usually addressed to an intimate companion, in which contemplation of nature evokes associated feelings, and leads to the resolution of an emotional or psychological problem. It would be hard to overstate the influence of these poems on Wordsworth and the later Romantic poets, and indeed on lyric poets ever since.40 Some critics have argued that they are not so original as has sometimes been claimed; that Coleridge drew on earlier poets such as Cowper and Thomson. But many great writers have plundered the past. And even if this new style of poetry did have its antecedents, it was Coleridge’s conversation poems that shaped the future.

‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with Coleridge seated, Sara’s cheek resting on his arm, outside the cottage which will be theirs when they are married, gazing up at the evening sky. The scent of flowering plants fills the air, while the sea murmurs in the distance. Sensuousness permeates the poem, suffusing it with tender eroticism. Everything is in harmony, and Coleridge meditates on the conceit of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that plays as the wind blows though it. Coleridge was fascinated by Hartley’s* belief that all sensation in the body takes place by means of vibrations along the nerves, like the strings of a musical instrument, and that each vibration leaves a trace that can be detected by the memory. Coleridge imagines ‘all of animated Nature’ as ‘organic harps’ that ‘tremble into thought’ as a divine ‘intellectual breeze’ blows through them. In the conclusion of the poem, Sara gently bursts the philosophical bubbles that arise within his ‘unregenerate mind’, and in doing so, lovingly leads this ‘sinful and most miserable man’ back to his maker. Thus erotic fulfilment is linked with redemption; the conflict between sacred and profane love is resolved.

On 4 October† they were married in Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe, the vast church where Chatterton had claimed to have found Rowley’s manuscripts. Southey was not present at the wedding. He was still in an agony of indecision. He could not face Coleridge; they passed each other in the street without acknowledgement. In a letter he accused Coleridge of having withdrawn his friendship – though to others he maintained that Coleridge was more his friend than ever. Tongues were wagging in Bristol; Southey charged Coleridge with gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods’. He complained to Grosvenor Charles Bedford that Coleridge had ‘behaved wickedly towards me’.41 Cottle attempted to reconcile them, without success. Southey’s uncle suggested an escape from his quandary: six months’ stay in Lisbon while he pondered his future. He hoped to prise his nephew away from an unfortunate attachment. Edith nobly pressed him to go, as did Southey’s mother. But he did not want it to be thought that he had abandoned Edith. Without telling his uncle, he married her ‘with the utmost privacy’ and left for Portugal a few days later.

Coleridge learned of this plan only a couple of days before. Wounded and angry, he sat down to denounce his former friend in a long, indignant, devastating letter:

O Selfish, money-loving Man! what Principle have you not given up? – Tho’ Death had been the consequence, I would have spit in that man’s Face and called him Liar, who should have spoken the last sentence concerning you, 9 months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! That such a mind should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing Trull, WORLDLY PRUDENCE!!

To Robert Lovell, Southey had cited Coleridge’s indolence as his reason for quitting Pantisocracy, a thrust against a vulnerable part. ‘I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable,’ protested Coleridge – not just on his own behalf, but on Southey’s too. He instanced his contribution to Joan of Arc and his exertions to improve the remainder: ‘I corrected that and other Poems with greater interest, than I should have felt for my own.’ He had devoted his ‘whole mind and heart’ to Southey’s lectures: ‘you must be conscious, that all the Tug of Brain was mine: and that your Share was little more than Transcription’. He conceded that Southey wrote more easily:

The Truth is – You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not by the particular mode of it: By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.

He retraced the history of their ‘connection’: ‘I did not only venerate you for your own Virtues, I prized you as the Sheet Anchor of mine!’ He detailed the ‘constant Nibblings’ that had ‘sloped your descent from Virtue’. Again and again, he said, he had been willing to give Southey the benefit of the doubt: ‘My Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and Heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.’

Once Southey had allowed himself to be tempted by the Church, Coleridge had ceased to confide in him: ‘I studiously avoided all particular Subjects, I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself … I considered you as one who had fallen back into the Ranks … FRIEND is a very sacred appellation – You were become an Acquaintance, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness.’ But now everything between them was at an end: ‘This will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you.’ He never expected to meet another whom he would love and admire so much. ‘You have left a large Void in my Heart – I know no man big enough to fill it.’42

Perhaps through Godwin, Wordsworth met Basil Montagu, a young lawyer who was reading for the Bar. Though near contemporaries at Cambridge, they seem not to have known each other then. Now they rapidly became friends. Montagu was the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his mistress, the singer Martha Ray; in 1779 she had been shot outside a theatre where she had been performing by a disappointed suitor, the Reverend James Hackman, vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, who had been hanged as a result. The story of Montagu’s mother’s murder had been a sensational scandal, recently revived by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). Poor Montagu was dogged by tragedy; his wife, whom he married soon after quitting Cambridge – against the wishes of his father, who never spoke to him again* – had died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, also called Basil. In the wreck of his happiness Montagu was ‘misled by passions wild and strong’; but his careful new friend gently but firmly led him away from these. ‘I consider my having met Wm Wordsworth the most fortunate event of my life,’ Montagu wrote in a memoir.

Montagu introduced Wordsworth to another recent Cambridge graduate, Francis Wrangham, who like Montagu was taking pupils in order to make ends meet. In 1793 – the year of Frend’s trial – Wrangham had failed to obtain an expected Cambridge Fellowship because he was rumoured to be friendly to the French Revolution. Since then he had been ‘vegetating on a curacy’ in Cobham, Surrey, where Wordsworth and Montagu often visited him. Wrangham was another radical, and a would-be poet; he had been in correspondence about his poetry with Coleridge, whom he had known at Cambridge. Now he and Wordsworth began collaborating on a verse satire based on Juvenal – a scholarly form of protest, which Wordsworth later abandoned.

By the summer of 1795, shortage of funds was becoming acute. After almost six months in London, nothing had come of Wordsworth’s plans to write for the newspapers, and none of the money from Raisley Calvert’s legacy had yet materialised. Four and a half years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth still had no career, no income and no home of his own. Perhaps worst of all, he was not writing. As Dorothy put it, ‘the unsettled way in which he has hitherto lived in London is altogether unfavourable to mental exertion’.43 Meanwhile they still hoped to make a home together. Dorothy had not returned to Forncett, and was staying with friends in the north. There was an idea that she might come to London, and live by translating – a proposal which her Aunt Rawson dismissed as mad’.

Montagu and Wrangham had two young pupils, Azariah and John Frederick Pinney, whose father John Pretor Pinney was a wealthy ‘West Indian’, a Bristol merchant with extensive plantations on Nevis, a sugar-producing island in the Caribbean. As well as a handsome townhouse in Bristol, Pinney Senior owned Racedown Lodge, a large country house in north Dorset. This was not much used by the family, and had been advertised to let (at £42 per annum) as early as 1793, without finding a taker. The younger Pinney now suggested that Wordsworth might like to have it, rent free, with the proviso that he and his brother might come down for the occasional stay, principally to shoot.