The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

The two undergraduates returned home in October for their final term at Cambridge, after trudging more than a thousand miles* through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Belgium in just under three months (Wordsworth’s admiring sister Dorothy traced his path on the map). This was a poor man’s Grand Tour, directed towards natural rather than cultural wonders, and undertaken on foot rather than by coach. Walking holidays were then coming into vogue, particularly for undergraduates and young clergymen – though few undertook a journey as ambitious as this one. Many of Wordsworth’s Cambridge friends had thought the scheme mad and impractical, with so many difficulties as to render it impossible. Nevertheless, such tours were not completely unknown: two years before, William Frend and his old schoolmate Richard Tylden had trodden a similar route. Frend was a Cambridge Fellow, and it is possible that his example inspired Wordsworth. The poet William Lisle Bowles was another who had made a recent walking tour of the Continent. Wordsworth’s school friend Joshua Wilkinson would undertake two walking tours in Europe in the following three years, and in 1798 would publish The Wanderer, a book based on his experiences. But walking tours were still something new; indeed the Oxford English Dictionary credits Wordsworth, in speaking of this tour, as the first to use the word ‘pedestrian’ in its literal rather than its metaphorical sense. A few years later an anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Magazine noted approvingly the ‘increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours’. By 1815 the editor of the Bristol Journal could refer to ‘this age of Pedestrianism’.6

Most of these new walkers did not venture abroad. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1785, had helped to popularise the notion of internal tourism, exploring the wild and remote corners of the British Isles, until then generally assumed to be not worth going to see. Even before this, back in 1769, Thomas Gray had made a tour of the Lake District, and by the end of the century the Lakes had begun to attract tourists.* A succession of guidebooks to the regions of Britain appeared. Young men clad in sturdy boots and heavy coats strode up hills and along valleys, admiring landscapes previously unconsidered. Walking provided access to picturesque vistas otherwise inaccessible. Moreover, it was a form of escapism, disapproved of by the respectable. There was something intrinsically egalitarian – almost democratic – about this new habit. While the Grand Tour was available only to the very wealthy, walking tours, especially tours in Britain, could be made by anyone with the necessary leisure and modest funds to cover essential expenses. Such tours brought the middle-class walker into contact with the common people who shared the roads, while the rich rattled past in their coaches.† Dressed like tramps, the new walkers endured the same hardships and privations.

There was camaraderie on the road, as Wordsworth and Jones had discovered. Towards the end of their journey they passed through another country in revolt; the Belgians, inspired by their French neighbours, had risen against their ruler, the Austrian Emperor.

… a glorious time,

A happy time that was. Triumphant looks

Were then the common language of all eyes:

As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed

Their great expectancy; the fife of war

Was then a spirit-stirring sound indeed,

A blackbird’s whistle in a vernal grove.7

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in print within weeks of Wordsworth’s return to England. (This was a response to Richard Price’s address to the London Revolution Society, now published as a pamphlet.) Burke was then in his sixtieth year; his Reflections were delivered with the authority of an elder statesman, the most intellectual of the Whigs, an exponent of principle in politics, a champion of liberty, and a philosopher of the sublime. Assessing what had happened in France, he argued that nothing good could come from a complete break with the past: on the contrary, such an upheaval must inevitably lead to bloodshed, war and tyranny. He did not oppose change of any kind; but he believed it must be gradual rather than sudden, and rooted in the traditions of the people. His book became a bestseller, and his ideas were much discussed, but by no means generally accepted; the Prince of Wales, for example, then a young radical, scorned it as a jeremiad, ‘a farrago of nonsense’. In the House of Commons, the Prince’s mentor Fox could not resist describing the new government of France as ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country’. Fox and Burke had long been political allies, and when an indignant Burke voiced his opposition to ‘all systems built on abstract rights’ in the debate, Fox whispered his hope that though they disagreed, they might still remain friends. Burke spurned his appeal, declaring aloud that their friendship was at an end. Fox rose to reply, but was so hurt that he could not speak for some minutes, while tears trickled down his cheeks.

Burke’s Reflections infuriated radicals, all the more so because Burke had been such an eloquent critic of the British government at the time of the American Revolution, fifteen years earlier. It provoked any number of hostile responses – including an essay written by Robert Southey, then a Westminster schoolboy – the most famous being Tom Paine’s colossally successful Rights of Man. These in turn inspired further ripostes, one delivered by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who had initially lauded the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary rule, but who had come, like Burke, to deplore the results when the passions of human nature were ‘not regulated by religion, or controlled by law’.

Meanwhile Wordsworth had left Cambridge with a mere pass degree, a disappointment to his relatives who had hoped that he might have done well enough to be elected to the Fellowship reserved for men from Cumberland, succeeding his uncle William Cookson. They castigated him for having undertaken such an arduous walking tour in his final long vacation, when he should have been studying. Wordsworth’s future was not a matter for him alone; a successful career would bring influence that could be used for the benefit of the whole family. But he was stubborn. The more his seniors tried to guide him, the more he resisted. An orphan from the age of thirteen, he had since been dependent on his grandfather and two uncles who acted as guardians; with no home of their own, he and his siblings had suffered slights from tactless relatives and insolent servants. Pride and restraint were at war within him. Open rebellion was not an option for Wordsworth; he could not afford to defy his uncles while he remained reliant on them. The most that he could do was to thwart their plans for him.

After quitting Cambridge, Wordsworth spent some months in London, where ‘Free as a colt at pasture on the hills/I ranged at large’.8 He feasted greedily on the spectacle offered by what was then the greatest city in the world: the bustle, the theatres, the shops, the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the prostitutes and the fashionable ladies, the destitute and the wealthy, the extraordinary variety of sights and sounds and smells, all the more extraordinary to one who had grown up in the remote Lakes. As a spectator he attended the law courts, and watched the debates in Parliament, where he marvelled at Pitt’s sustained oratory and was inspired by Burke’s evergreen eloquence.9 His reactions suggest that on the great issues of the moment he was not yet parti pris, even though he was mixing with radicals sympathetic to the French revolutionaries. On Sundays he would often dine with Samuel Nicholson, a Unitarian and a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, afterwards going on with him to hear the popular sermons preached by the minister Joseph Fawcett at the dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry. It was probably at this time too that he met another radical dissenter, the bookseller-publisher Joseph Johnson, who lived above his shop in St Paul’s Churchyard.10 Johnson, who would be Wordsworth’s first publisher, combined business acumen with good taste; among the eminent writers he published were Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. He was also publisher of the liberal monthly the Analytical Review, and was then in the process of publishing the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man.

In the late spring of 1791 Wordsworth left London for Wales, to stay with his walking companion Robert Jones and his sisters. ‘He seems so happy that it is probable he will remain there all the summer,’ observed his sister Dorothy. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewyd [sic] and without a rival?’11 Despite these attractions, Wordsworth was able to tear himself away; he and Jones went on a walking tour of north Wales, and made a memorable night ascent of Snowdon to see the sunrise from the summit.*

To his friends at this time, Wordsworth affected a devil-may-care nonchalance. ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life,’ he boasted to another Cambridge friend, William Mathews, after a year in which he cheerfully admitted to doing very little. His family was now trying to steer him towards the Church, but Wordsworth did not relish the prospect of ‘vegetating on a paltry curacy’. Fortunately he was still, at the age of twenty-one, too young to take holy orders; he could afford to look about him a while yet. He appeared to be thinking as much of his own prospects when he urged Mathews to find ‘some method of obtaining an Independence’, which would ‘enable you to get your bread unshackled by the necessity of professing a particular system of opinions… The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner, which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts, of life.’12

Wordsworth counted himself a ‘philosopher’, in the original sense of a lover of wisdom, one devoted to the search for fundamental truth. In the parlance of the time, the term might equally be applied to a scientist or a naturalist as to a student of political or moral philosophy, or metaphysics. At this stage Wordsworth was far from certain what kind of life lay ahead of him. While at Cambridge he had become increasingly aware of his poetic gifts. The ‘instinctive humbleness’ he felt at the very thought of publication began to ‘melt away’; his ‘dread awe of mighty names’ softened; increasingly he felt a ‘fellowship’ with the authors he revered, and he was filled with ‘a thousand hopes’, ‘a thousand tender dreams’, as ‘a morning gladness’ settled on his mind. He had already completed one long poem, ‘An Evening Walk’; this achievement encouraged the ‘daring thought’ that he

… might leave

Some monument behind me which pure hearts

Should reverence … 13

Yet his feeling of fellowship with the great poets of the past was accompanied by a sense of alienation in the present. At Cambridge he had often been melancholy, conscious that he did not belong. There was ‘a strangeness in my mind’, a solitariness, an impression that he was different. Sometimes he would leave his university friends and walk out into the surrounding country, ‘turning the mind in upon itself’. Then again he would feel

The strength and consolation which were mine.

The swelling appreciation of the powers latent within him strengthened his conviction that he was ‘a chosen son’ of Nature.14

Towards the end of the year Wordsworth returned to France, to pass the year in Orléans, which until the Revolution had been a fashionable destination for young Englishmen, but where now (as he would discover) only a handful remained. It seems that he had no particular plan beyond that of improving his French, in the vague hope that this would qualify him for the post of travelling companion to some young gentleman. His uncles would have preferred him to return to Cambridge, to study oriental literature. ‘William has a great attachment to poetry,’ remarked his sister Dorothy to her friend Jane Pollard, ‘which is not the most likely thing to produce his advancement in the world.’15

The country to which he returned in November 1791 was very different from the one he had left the year before. France was in a state of turbulence; the apparent equilibrium had proved illusory. The National Assembly was supplanted by a Legislative Assembly, which would be replaced while Wordsworth was still in France by a National Convention. Each new body proved more susceptible than its predecessor to Revolutionary rhetoric, and each member tried to outdo his peers in crowd-pleasing Revolutionary zeal. The debate was increasingly histrionic. Publications such as Jean-Paul Marat’s L’Ami du peuple set a tone of vituperative abuse. Factions began to form: the most radical grouping found a permanent place on the left side – the ‘left wing’ – of the Manège (the converted riding school where the Assembly met), the most conservative on the right. The King had displayed his commitment to constitutional monarchy by attempting to flee the country, only to be escorted back from Varennes (not far from the border) under restraint; National Guardsmen had opened fire on their fellow citizens in suppressing a demonstration at the Champ de Mars. Frenchman had fired on Frenchman; brother had killed brother. It became clear that the Revolution was not yet complete.

This time Wordsworth travelled through France by coach rather than on foot. His route to Orléans took him through Paris, where he spent a few days exploring, hastening to the Champ de Mars to sniff the grapeshot, listening to the debates in the Jacobin Club* and the Assembly, pocketing a stone as a relic from the ruins of the Bastille. There he sat in the sunshine, ‘affecting more emotion than I felt’. He admitted to being more moved by a painting, the baroque Magdalene de Le Brun, displayed in a Carmelite convent while religious music played in the background for the benefit of visitors – now almost forgotten, but then one of the must-see sights of Paris.16

At this moment the young Wordsworth appears to have had no more than a vague sympathy for the Revolution. By the time he left France a year later he was ready to take up service for the cause, however dangerous – even, if necessary, to sacrifice his life.17 Such a change could not have occurred overnight; it seems more plausible that Wordsworth’s loyalties were won gradually during his stay in France. As he became more familiar with the language, so he was better able to comprehend what was being said and written all around him. And as a result he was better able to form his own judgements about the behaviour and character of those he encountered. It was natural that the longer he stayed in France, the more he should identify with French concerns. At first he felt as if he had arrived at a theatre when the play was already far advanced. By the end of his stay he felt ready to act a part himself.

The Revolution reached its crisis while Wordsworth was in France. Since his flight to Varennes the King was no longer trusted; there were persistent rumours that he was conspiring with émigrés and foreign powers to usurp the new constitution. In April the nation declared war on ‘the King of Bohemia and Hungary’ (the Austrian Emperor Leopold, brother of the hated Marie Antoinette); by the summer the French were at war with the Emperor’s allies, the Prussians, as well. Shouting demonstrators burst into the Tuileries, forcing Louis to don a red bonnet and drink a glass of wine with them, which he did with courage and good humour. The Prussians issued a manifesto calling on the French to rise up against their Revolutionary ‘oppressors’, and threatening an ‘exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance’ against the capital in the event of further outrages against the royal family. Morale in the old royal army was as low as could be; two-thirds of the officer corps had abandoned their commands, many to avoid a compulsory oath of allegiance to the new constitution, others in despair of disciplining the new patriot’ recruits.* Generals and their staffs defected en masse to the enemy. The Prussian army marched towards the border, crossing into France in mid-July. The Assembly formally decreed a state of emergency, ‘La Patrie en Danger’, and appealed for volunteers. These flocked to Paris from the provinces, aflame with Revolutionary ardour. A further decree allowed all citizens to enrol in the National Guard, creating ‘a nation in arms’. Excitement crackled in the streets, and on the morning of 10 August an angry crowd gathered in front of the Tuileries. The King’s Swiss Guards retreated inside the palace. The royal family fled to the Assembly, where the King appealed for shelter. After a flurry of shots, Louis sent an order to his Guards to stand down. The crowd stormed the palace, pursuing the Guards and courtiers out into the streets, where they were hunted down and slaughtered.

Now that his authority had collapsed, Louis XVI was no longer relevant; the monarchy was suspended, and soon abolished. The royal family was imprisoned in the Temple, the gloomy medieval home of the Knights Templar. The Assembly accepted Robespierre’s proposal to summon a National Convention, elected by universal (male) suffrage, for the purpose of framing a new constitution. Meanwhile the Prussians advanced steadily. First one fortress, then another fell to them. The mood in Paris became jittery. More than a thousand suspected counter-revolutionaries’ were taken into custody. A guillotine was erected outside the Tuileries.

It was difficult for Wordsworth to follow the changing situation in Paris and the fighting on the borders. In a letter home he confessed that, ‘in London you have perhaps a better opportunity of being informed of the general concerns of France, than in a petty provincial town in the heart of the kingdom itself’.18 Nevertheless, it was impossible for any resident of France not to be aware of the upsurge in patriotic feeling at this time. Every town saw parades and ceremonies, introduced by speeches of lofty rhetoric; Revolutionary clubs like the ubiquitous Jacobins began to usurp the powers of local government:

… ‘Twas in truth an hour Of

universal ferment; mildest men

Were agitated; and commotions, strife

Of passion and opinion, filled the walls

Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.19

This was a cultural revolution. The young men in its vanguard aimed to introduce a sterner moral code into public life, in place of the lax cynicism of the ancien régime. These zealots were steeped in the classics, whose authors presented an ideal of civic virtue, of loyalty to the Republic triumphing over selfish attachments. Their values were those of self-sacrifice, purity, duty, integrity, patriotism, stoicism and austerity; their model the Roman Republic; their heroes unimpeachable citizens like Cato or Cicero, whose oratory echoed down the centuries. Indeed, the revolutionaries identified themselves with the Roman Republic to what now seems a ludicrous extent. Had they not cast off a line of tyrannical kings, as the Romans had done? Had they not established a Senate? Had they not sworn solemn oaths, like the Horatii? Had they not defeated conspiracy after conspiracy to undermine the Republic?

The changes taking place extended into every area of life. A severe neoclassicism became the predominant style in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in fashion. The artificiality of the eighteenth century was replaced by an emphasis on naturalness. Wigs began to disappear. Men wore their own hair, often short and straight, perhaps brushed forward in the Roman style, without powder or curls. (While at Cambridge Wordsworth had powdered his hair, but now he too cut it short.) Women wore loose, flowing, high-waisted dresses, in contrast to the ornate and cumbersome constructions favoured by fashionable ladies in pre-Revolutionary France. It became de rigueur to address everyone as ‘tu’, no matter how distant the relationship; while the titles ‘monsieur’ and ‘madame’ made way for the more democratic ‘citoyen’ and ‘citoyenne’.20 These usages, though offensive or embarrassing to many, were enforced by the new authorities. Even the calendar would be replaced while Wordsworth was in France: Sunday was abolished and a ten-day week introduced. Year 1 began with the founding of the Republic, on 22 September 1792.

In Orléans Wordsworth lodged above a shop in the rue Royale owned by M. Gellet-Duvivier, a vociferous opponent of the Revolution. The other lodgers, three Cavalry officers and ‘a gentleman from Paris’, were of like mind. After a fortnight in Orleans, an apparently surprised Wordsworth reported that he had not met a single person ‘of wealth and circumstance’ favourable to the Revolution. ‘All the people of any opulence are aristocrates* [sic] and all the others democrats,’ he informed his brother Richard.21 His fellow lodgers introduced Wordsworth to the society of other officers stationed in the city. All were well-born, all ‘were bent upon undoing what was done’, and some spoke openly to this young foreigner of leaving to join the émigrés mustering with the enemy armies on the borders.

If the officers assumed that the Englishman (being an Englishman) would share their contempt for the lower orders, they were mistaken. Wordsworth was not one for whom rank and wealth commanded automatic respect, having grown up in the Lake District,

… which yet

Retaineth more of ancient homeliness,

Manners erect, and frank simplicity,

Than any other nook of English land.22

Moreover, he and his siblings had a long-standing grievance against one of the ‘great’: the notoriously mean Earl of Lonsdale, the most powerful landowner in the north-west of England, who used his enormous wealth to exert absolute control over nine seats in Parliament, † enough in the chaotic politics of the eighteenth century to give him considerable political leverage. As an attorney, Wordsworth’s father John, a widower, had been Lonsdale’s* man of business, and in this capacity he had freely disbursed his own money on his employer’s behalf. After John Wordsworth’s sudden death in 1783 Lonsdale had refused to honour the outstanding sum, amounting to several thousand pounds. The Wordsworth orphans were left impoverished, dependent on relatives. Having been raised with certain expectations, they had been disappointed; a sense of injustice coloured their lives. Wordsworth had therefore the strongest personal reasons for resenting the power and the privileges of the wealthy, and his formative experience of the ruling class was of an especially odious specimen. This was an upbringing that might have been devised for the raising of a revolutionary. Many of the leading deputies in the Assembly were young men like Wordsworth: from the middle ranks of society, alienated from their families, well educated but carrying some form of grievance.

Cambridge had encouraged Wordsworth’s democratic inclinations, being ‘something …

Of a Republic, where all stood thus far

Upon equal ground, that they were brothers all

In honour, as in one community –

Scholars and Gentlemen – where, furthermore,

Distinction lay open to all that came,

And wealth and titles were in less esteem

Than talents and successful industry.23

Nothing in Wordsworth’s background led him to share the officers’ assumptions about the innate superiority of the landowning classes. On the contrary, their disdain for the uncouth masses rankled with him.24

But anyway, Wordsworth felt that it would be impossible to ‘undo what was done’, whatever the outcome of the war. The Revolutionary reforms were belated and inevitable. As he wrote to Mathews:

… suppose that the German army is at the gates of Paris, what will be the consequence? It will be impossible to make any material alteration in the constitution, impossible to reinstate the clergy in its ancient guilty splendor, impossible to give an existence to the noblesse similar to that it before enjoyed, impossible to add much to the authority of the King: Yet there are in France some [?millions – this word is indecipherable] – I speak without exaggeration – who expect that this will take place.25