The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

One of those whom Coleridge met in Bristol was Joseph Cottle, a young Baptist bookseller-publisher and would-be poet who kept a shop on the corner of Corn Street and High Street. Cottle had recently been thrown from a gig, an accident which left him lame for the rest of his life. Lovell had introduced Southey to Cottle, and now introduced Coleridge. Cottle immediately recognised Coleridge’s ‘intellectual character’ – exhibiting, as he did, ‘an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius’ – and subsequent meetings ‘increased the impression of respect’. The friendly manners of the Pantisocrats, Cottle wrote many years later in his Reminiscences, ‘infused into my heart a brotherly feeling, that more than identified their interests with my own’.26 He agreed to publish the joint volume of poetry by Southey and Lovell, and offered a lavish fee of fifty guineas for Southey’s Joan of Arc. As Southey wrote many years afterwards, ‘it can rarely happen that a young author should meet with a publisher as inexperienced and ardent as himself’.

In mid-August Coleridge and Southey set out from Bristol on a walking tour into Somerset, where they were to seek more recruits to Pantisocracy. Both seem to have been in a state of high excitement, relishing each other’s company. They walked first to Bath, to spend the night with Southey’s mother, herself already drafted into the Pantisocratic regiment, as was Southey’s brother Tom. At her house in Westgate Buildings they found Sara Fricker, whom Mrs Southey had invited to stay so that they could ‘talk over the American affair’. Perhaps Southey connived in bringing Sara together with Coleridge again. By the time the two men left the next morning, accompanied by Southey’s dog Rover, some kind of understanding seems to have been reached between Coleridge and the eldest Miss Fricker – though they had known each other little more than a week. (She would still be there when they returned a week later, drunk on the heady wine of Pantisocracy; and after another conversation, Coleridge seems to have committed himself further.)

Their route took them across the Mendip Hills, via Chilcompton and Wells. They spent their first night at Cheddar, sleeping in a garret, where they were locked in by a suspicious landlady who took these wild-looking young men for possible ‘footpads’. There was only one bed. ‘Coleridge is a vile bedfellow and I slept but ill,’ complained Southey.27 The next day they made for Huntspill, down on the Somerset Levels, to call on George Burnett, who was fired with fresh enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, much to the dismay of his father, a prosperous farmer who intended his son for the Church. Then the two missionaries headed for Shurton on the west Somerset coastline, to the home of Henry Poole, one of Coleridge’s fellow undergraduates from Jesus. He proved more resistant to the new religion, but escorted the two visitors to see his cousin Thomas Poole, a known radical who lived not far away in the small town (really no more than a large village) of Nether Stowey, at the base of the Quantock Hills (this was familiar country for Southey, whose grandfather had farmed at nearby Holford). Poole was the son of a successful tanner, a stout, plain, sensible man of twenty-nine with a rubicund complexion and a noticeable West Country burr. Yet his prosaic exterior concealed a mind generous, liberal and well-read. An enlightened employer with a practical concern for the poor and downtrodden,* Poole was liked and admired even by those who detested his principles. His enthusiasm for revolutionary politics had earned him the label ‘the most dangerous person in the county of Somerset’ (perhaps not such a distinction), and some of his letters had been intercepted and opened on government instructions.

Coleridge talked freely, not just about Pantisocracy, but about his own ‘aberrations from prudence’, which he promised were now at an end. Poole was very impressed by this visitor, a ‘shining scholar’ whom he considered ‘the Principal in the undertaking’. He was not so impressed by Southey, who seemed ‘a mere boy’ by comparison, lacking Coleridge’s ‘splendid abilities’, though he was ‘even more violent in his principles’. Poole, who had himself considered emigrating to America, listened sympathetically as they outlined their scheme; but he felt that however perfectible human nature might be, it was ‘not yet perfect enough’ for Pantisocracy.28

In France, Robespierre and his associates tightened their grip on power, eliminating their rivals without qualm. The purge of the Girondins was followed by further purges in the spring of 1794. Death followed death, and more deaths. Everyone was afraid, but no one dared show fear. Now the severed heads being displayed to the Paris crowds were those of prominent revolutionaries, men who themselves had until recently been demanding executions. ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ cried the Girondin Madame Roland from the scaffold – though it was she who had declared that there must be blood to cement the Revolution. A macabre poster displayed a group of heads hanging horridly from a board, the leering faces still recognisable, with the legend, ‘It is dreadful but it is necessary.’ Robespierre himself possessed the certainty of a zealot. He was incorruptible; he spoke for the Republic; anyone who criticised him was an enemy of the people. The ideologue of the Revolution, he articulated the principles of the slaughter. He envisaged a Republic of virtue; he would make man better. The aims of the Revolution were the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, and the reign of eternal justice. He exhorted his listeners to seal their work with blood, so that they might see the dawn of universal happiness. ‘Terror is the only justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue …’29

For those ideologically committed to the young Republic, like Wordsworth, this was a time of torment. A believer could not relinquish his faith without a struggle. As the Revolution progressed, its fellow travellers had accepted one sacrifice after another in the cause of the greater good; accepted them, and then justified them to the world. They had swallowed so much blood already; now they were choking on it. Wordsworth confessed to nightmares that continued for years after the Terror had abated:

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,

Such ghastly visions had I of despair,

And tyranny, and implements of death,

And long orations which in dreams I pleaded

Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

Of treachery and desertion in the place

The holiest that I knew of – my own soul.30

Yet even now, Wordsworth did not lose faith. On the contrary, in the ‘rage and dog-day heat’ of the Revolution, he found ‘something to glory in, as just and fit’. Like so many intellectuals since,

I felt a kind of sympathy with power.31

In the confused period after the September Massacres, Wordsworth shared the general longing for a strong man to impose order, not doubting …’

But that the virtue of one paramount mind

Would have abashed those impious crests, have quelled

Outrage and bloody power, and in despite

Of what people were through ignorance

And immaturity, and, in the teeth

Of desperate opposition from without,

Have cleared a passage for just government

And left a solid birthright to the state,

Redeemed according to example given

By ancient lawgivers … 32

But which ancient lawgivers? There was no question that the one paramount mind’ was Robespierre – but was he a Brutus, or a Caesar? A Cato, or a Tarquin? Was the exemplar of civic virtue becoming a tyrant? Wordsworth’s inner struggle was one of interpretation. Should Robespierre be seen as the apotheosis of the Revolution, to be defended, indeed admired, even though he was drenched in blood? Or was he rather, as Wordsworth began to perceive, an aberration, a perversion of the Revolutionary ideal? Arriving at the latter conclusion came as a huge relief to Wordsworth. All the horrors that had seemed concomitant with the Revolution could be ascribed to this deviation from its true path.

Wordsworth had refused to accept the taunts of scoffers, those who sneered that the chaos of the Terror was the inevitable result of democratic government. On the contrary, this was a legacy of the past:

… it was a reservoir of guilt

And ignorance, filled up from age to age,

That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,

But burst and spread in deluge through the land.33

He detested ‘the execrable measures pursued in France’, but equally insisted on holding up ‘to the approbation of the world such of their regulations and decrees as are dictated by the spirit of Philosophy’.34 For him, Terror was not intrinsic to the Revolution; it was a reaction to the threat from without, aided by the enemy within. As he saw it, the entry of Britain into the coalition against Revolutionary France had prompted the bloodshed:

In France, the men who for their desperate ends

Had pluck’d up mercy by the roots were glad

Of this new enemy. Tyrants, strong before

In devilish pleas, were ten times stronger now,

And thus beset with foes on every side,

The goaded land waxed mad … 35

And when, in an astonishing turnaround, the new conscript army repelled the enemies of France, and once more surged across the borders, Wordsworth rejoiced – even when English troops fled the battlefield in shame and confusion:*

… the invaders fared as they deserved:

The Herculean Commonwealth had put forth her arms,

And throttled with an infant Godhead’s might

The snakes about her cradle; that was well,

And as it should be … 36

The Terror reached a climax in the early summer. In response to a manufactured ‘conspiracy’ a new law was passed, granting the Revolutionary Tribunal absolute powers. Only by the most extreme measures would the enemy within be exterminated. The accused were permitted no defence; there were to be no witnesses; there would be only one sentence: death. Every day there were dozens of executions. A contemporary cartoon showed Robespierre, having ordered the execution of everyone else, guillotining the executioner. In fact, for much of the six-week period known as the Great Terror, Robespierre kept ominously aloof from both the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention. Then, after a month, he returned to the Convention on 26 July, denouncing a new conspiracy and demanding yet another purge. This time his opponents were prepared. When Robespierre tried to address the Convention again the next day, he was shouted down. He was arrested, and after a bungled attempt at suicide he was hastily guillotined, together with Saint-Just and other close associates. It was the 10th of Thermidor, in Year II of the Republic (28 July 1794).

Wordsworth heard of Robespierre’s downfall while he was staying with cousins at Rampside, near Barrow-in-Furness, the southernmost tip of the Lake District. Some months earlier he and Dorothy had left Windy Brow and gone in different directions, promising each other that they would soon be reunited in a more permanent home; since then he had remained in the Lakes, rotating around his relatives in the area. One morning he strolled to Cartmel, a village just across the estuary of the two little rivers that flow out of Windermere and Coniston. There, wandering through the churchyard, he had happened across the grave of his former schoolteacher, William Taylor. Now he was walking back to Rampside, across the miles of sand revealed by the receding tide. It was sunny, with magnificent prospects of the mountains to the north. At low tide it is easy to wade the shallow stream; the sands stretch far out into Morecambe Bay, and on this fine summer day they were spotted with coaches, carts, riders and walkers. While he paused on a rocky outcrop drinking in the view, a passer-by told him that Robespierre was dead. An exultant Wordsworth let forth a shout of triumph: ‘Come now, ye golden times.’

… few happier moments have been mine

Through my whole life than that when first I heard

That this foul tribe of Moloch was o’erthrown

And their chief regent levelled with the dust.37

His wavering faith was renewed.

… In the People was my trust,

And in the virtues which mine eyes had seen,

And to the ultimate repose of things

I looked with unabated confidence.

I knew that wound external could not take

Life from the young Republic, that new foes

Would only follow in the path of shame

Their brethren, and her triumphs be in the end

Great, universal, irresistible.38

Coleridge and Southey heard of Robespierre’s death while they were still with Poole in west Somerset. ‘I had rather have heard of the death of my own father,’ Southey declared solemnly – a declaration that loses some of its force when one reflects that his father had died several years before. But Poole’s cousins in Over Stowey, whom he had taken the visitors to meet, were suitably indignant at such outrageous talk, and even more so when they heard one of the two young men say that Robespierre had been ‘a ministering angel of mercy, sent to slay thousands that he might save millions’.39

There was no doubt in the minds of the Pantisocrats that Robespierre’s fall was a ‘tragedy’. For Southey, Robespierre was ‘this great man’, who had been ‘sacrificed to the despair of fools and cowards’. For Coleridge he was a man ‘whose great bad actions cast a disastrous lustre over his name’. They agreed that he had been ‘the benefactor of mankind, and that we should lament his death as the greatest misfortune Europe could have sustained’.40 To these young idealists, Robespierre’s fanatical zealotry was preferable to Pitt’s opportunistic pragmatism. They admired Robespierre’s ardour, his oratory, his ferocity. He had aimed at human perfection, even if he had stumbled along the route. Like other British radicals, they explained away the Terror as a response to pressures from without. Robespierre and his associates had been provoked into violence. Indeed, the Terror was Pitt’s responsibility.

On the walk back to Bristol the two young men decided to commemorate Robespierre’s fall by writing a verse drama, to be published as quickly as possible. Coleridge was to write the first act, Southey the second, and Lovell the third (in the event Lovell dropped out). The money raised from this instant publication would be used to fund the Pantisocracy scheme. They began immediately, working around the clock. Southey’s talent for speedy composition proved useful, as did taking in large chunks from newspaper reports of speeches in the Convention.

… Never, never,

Shall this regenerated country wear

The despot yoke. Though myriads round assail

And with worse fury urge this new crusade

Than savages have known; though all the leagued despots

Depopulate all Europe, so to pour

The accumulated mass upon our coasts,

Sublime amid the storm shall France arise

And like the rock amid surrounding waves

Repel the rushing ocean. – She shall wield

The thunder-bolt of vengeance – She shall blast

The despot’s pride, and liberate the world.

These sentiments might just as easily have been expressed by Wordsworth. But having lived in France and having witnessed the Revolution at close quarters, Wordsworth was much more committed than either Coleridge or Southey; he struggled to interpret each bewildering development, like a believer trying to cling on to his failing faith. Coleridge, on the other hand, was excited by the Revolution, but not caught up in it, as is shown by his eccentric decision to enlist. Had he remained in the army he might well have found himself fighting against Beaupuy and those young volunteers so admired by Wordsworth. Indeed, had Wordsworth followed his impulse to join the Revolutionary cause, the two might have found themselves fighting on opposite sides.

Within a week The Fall of Robespierre was all but finished. Cottle prudently declined to publish it. Coleridge therefore took the manuscript with him to London, where he hoped to find a publisher while he sought new recruits to Pantisocracy. Before he left, the Pantisocrats finalised their scheme. The party would be made up of twelve men and their families. A total of £2,000 would be needed to fund the expedition, including the cost of their passage and the purchase of the land. Within twelve months (at most) they would be settled on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. During the course of the winter, Coleridge decided, ‘those of us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indolence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient’.41

For Southey, parting from Coleridge was like ‘losing a limb’. But he looked forward to ‘sharing in the toil and in the glory of regenerating mankind … Futurity opens a smiling prospect upon my view and I doubt not of enjoying the purest happiness Man can ever experience.’42

Once again Wordsworth declined Mathews’s invitation to come to London. By chance an opportunity had presented itself to escape from the drudgery he dreaded. Raisley Calvert, younger brother of William, the school friend whom Wordsworth had accompanied to the Isle of Wight, offered Wordsworth a share of his income. This was a gentlemanly formula for helping Wordsworth with his essential expenses at a time when he was obviously struggling, while allowing him a degree of independence. Later, when it became clear that Raisley Calvert was dying of tuberculosis, he converted this into a legacy of £600, eventually increased to £900. Such a bequest was not unknown, but it was unusual enough for Richard Wordsworth to remark on Calvert’s ‘generous intentions towards you’. It was not as if Calvert was an old friend; he and Wordsworth had met only once before, when Calvert was passing through London early the previous year. Clearly this was a potential source of embarrassment, enough so for Wordsworth himself to want to inform William Calvert, who would otherwise have inherited the money along with the remainder of his brother’s estate. ‘It is at my request that this information is communicated to you, and I have no doubt but that you will do both him and myself the justice to hear this mark of his approbation of me without your good opinion of either of us being at all diminished by it.’43 Why Raisley Calvert felt Wordsworth should benefit in this way is not certain. In later years Wordsworth claimed that Calvert had made the bequest entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind’.44 If this is accurate, it is striking evidence of Wordsworth’s sense of mission, and the way in which this could communicate itself to others – especially as his achievements to date were not especially impressive.

As Calvert’s health deteriorated Wordsworth felt obliged to remain close to him, no doubt from a mixture of motives. Provided that his expenses were paid, he was willing to accompany Calvert to Portugal, and stay with him there until his health was re-established. On 9 October they set out from Keswick together, but had only reached Penrith when Calvert’s condition forced them to return. ‘He is so much reduced as to make it probable he cannot be on earth long,’ Wordsworth reported to his brother Richard a week later.

Wordsworth feared that Calvert’s legacy might be claimed by his aunt, as payment for the sums advanced for his education by her late husband. He therefore asked his brother Richard to indemnify him against such a claim. In his anxiety to secure Calvert’s legacy, Wordsworth’s request was made in a peremptory tone; Richard’s reply showed his irritation at being addressed in such a manner by his younger brother:

There is one Circumstance which I will mention to you at this time. I might have retired into the Country and I had almost said enjoyed the sweets of retirement and domestick life if I had only considered my own Interest. However as I have entered the busy scenes of a town life I shall I hope pursue them with comfort and credit. I am happy to inform you that my Business encreases daily and altho’ our affairs have been peculiarly distressing I hope that from the Industry of ourselves at one time we will enjoy more ease and independence than we have yet experienced.45

If Wordsworth was stung by this implied criticism, he did not show it. Perhaps he accepted the rebuke as just. He had nothing to show for his expensive education. And since leaving Cambridge almost four years earlier, his only contribution to the family had been an illegitimate child by a French mistress.

* In 1792 Captain Bligh published his account of the mutiny, and in September of that same year ten prisoners repatriated from Tahiti to England were tried by a naval court.

* In 1795 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that a group of Girondin émigrés had settled at Frenchtown near the Susquehanna.

* Seventy-two times the price of Rights of Man (6d). By comparison, the average weekly income was around ten shillings.

* The previous Easter he had made a three-week walking tour of the Midlands.

* Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) influenced several generations of young men across Europe. ‘Wertherism’ became a recognisable syndrome. The novel’s hero is a melancholic, an artist at odds with society and hopelessly in love with a girl engaged to another man. He eventually commits suicide as a result,

† An added attraction was the potential embarrassment to his conservative Aunt Tyler.

‡ Literally, ‘without knee-breeches’, since coarse long trousers were the habitual dress of the Parisian working class: used as shorthand for those political activists – mainly small shopkeepers, tradesmen and artisans – who constituted the foot-soldiers of the Revolution.

* Coleridge’s spelling was haphazard, as was his grammar and use of capitals; in particular, he always wrote ‘it’s’ when he meant ‘its’.

* From the Greek ‘pant – ’, a root meaning ‘all’; ‘isos’, meaning ‘equal’; and ‘krat’, meaning ‘power’.

* A one-horse hackney carriage, i.e. a taxi.

* These lines were encoded in Latin verse.

* Actually Sarah, but Coleridge almost always spelled it Sara, so I have used this throughout.

* Poole was one of those who refused to allow the use of sugar in his household, insisting that cakes be made with honey instead. The anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson estimated that 300,000 people in England took part in a nationwide boycott of sugar, protesting at Parliament’s failure to pass a Bill abolishing the slave trade.

* The Prelude, X, 258–63. Most Wordsworth scholars follow De Selincourt in taking this passage to refer to the French victory at Hondeschoote on 6 September 1793; but the description seems to fit better the rout of the British army at Tourcoing on 18 May 1794, when their commander the Duke of York (the King’s brother) was hunted across the country and escaped only thanks to the speed of his horse.

4 SEDITION

Arriving in London at the beginning of September, Coleridge was too ashamed of his scruffy clothes to go to the coffee house where he had stayed in the past, so instead he lodged at the Angel Inn, down a lane off disreputable Newgate Street. Southey’s aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford received him politely – even though his appearance was ‘so very anti-genteel’ – and was civil enough not to stare at the address Coleridge gave him. As expected, he was not enthusiastic about Pantisocracy. A couple of days later Coleridge was introduced over breakfast to George Dyer, an eccentric middle-aged Unitarian, author of Complaints of the Poor People of England, who had been a pupil at Christ’s Hospital and an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. By contrast with Bedford, Dyer was ‘enraptured’ with Pantisocracy, and pronounced it impregnable’. Coleridge told Southey complacently that Dyer was ‘intimate with’ Joseph Priestley (already settled on the Susquehanna), ‘and doubts not, that the Doctor will join us’. On being shown part of the verse drama ‘he liked it hugely’ and opined that it was a ‘Nail, that would drive’. Dyer offered to speak to Robinson, his ‘Bookseller’ (publisher), about it, and when Robinson proved to be away in the country, took it to two others, neither of whom seemed keen.1 After this depressing reaction Coleridge decided that he and Southey should publish the drama themselves, printing five hundred copies; ‘it will repay us amply’. It should be published under his name alone, he told Southey, because ‘it would appear ridiculous to put two names to such a Work’, and because his name would sell at least a hundred copies within Cambridge.2 The Fall of Robespierre duly appeared as the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Jesus College at the end of September.