Adam Sisman - The Friendship - Wordsworth and Coleridge

Of course there were differences between these radicals: while some harked back to 1688, to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, others looked back further, to 1649, and the foundation of a republic. Another strand of radical opinion daringly discarded historical precedent, and asserted instead the natural and inalienable rights of man. Such differences, not always obvious at first, would become more distinct as the Revolution developed.

Even those John Bulls (and there were plenty of them) who believed that the British constitution could not be bettered had cause to welcome the news from France. For the century that preceded the Revolution, France had been Britain’s principal enemy in wartime and chief rival for empire. With a population almost three times that of Britain and a comparable overseas trade, plus revenues twenty-five times those of the new United States, France possessed resources unmatched by any country in the world. She had been contained only by heroic effort; she remained a dangerous Catholic power, a permanent menace to British security and Protestant freedoms. Now, perhaps, the long struggle was over. Until 1789, French strength had been concentrated in the hands of the French king. Within a matter of months, the French monarchy had been weakened; French despotism overthrown; the French threat seemingly diminished.

To the young, the tumultuous events in Paris – the gathering of the Estates-General, the tennis court oath, the formation of the National Assembly, the jostling crowds in the streets, the passionate rhetoric, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the sweeping reforms, the sudden collapse of the ancien régime – seemed irresistibly dramatic. The solemn ceremonies that took place throughout France promised an end to the abuses of the past. Above all, the storming of the Bastille, and the release of prisoners arbitrarily detained there, symbolised the liberation of the people as a whole. This inspiring moment was commemorated by the teenage Samuel Taylor Coleridge in one his earliest poems, ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’:

I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With

every patriot *Virtue in her train!

For him, as for so many Britons, the French were simply following where Englishmen had gone before:

And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be

First ever of the first and freest of the free!

*He was sixty-six, and died two years later.

*In the eighteenth century, a ‘patriot’ was one prepared to put duty to ones country above personal or sectional interest. During the Revolution, the term came to have a more specific meaning: one willing to defend the Republic against foreign invasion.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! 1

In the summer of 1790, William Wordsworth, then twenty years old and a commoner at St John’s College, Cambridge, together with Robert Jones, another Cambridge undergraduate, made a vacation walking tour across Europe. They set out from Calais on 14 July, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. This was the climax of the week-long Fête de la Fédération , culminating in a tremendous spectacle in the capital, attended by 400,000 delegates from all over the country, and celebrated throughout France. The two undergraduates walked through towns and villages decorated with triumphal arcs and window-garlands; the whole nation seemed ‘mad with joy’. 1 Wordsworth was a self-confessedly stiff young man, proud and prickly, but even he found it hard to resist the intoxicating mood:

…’twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,

France standing on the top of golden hours,

And human nature seeming born again. 2

The thoroughfares of France were crowded with fédérés returning home from the festivities in Paris. Wordsworth and his companion fell in with a ‘merry crowd’ of these; after supper on a riverbank they danced around the table, hand in hand with the celebrants:

All hearts were open, every tongue was loud

With amity and glee. We bore a name

Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen,

And hospitably did they give us hail

As their forerunners in a glorious course;

And round and round the Board they danced again. 3

At such a moment it was easy to assume that the Revolution had run its course, that a healthy France had purged itself, that monarch and people were united in a delightful new equilibrium. Had not the King sworn to uphold the decrees of the Assembly in front of a vast crowd at the Champ de Mars? Had he and his family not decamped from the magnificent Palace of Versailles to the Tuileries, in the very heart of Paris (albeit under duress)? Had he not appeared in public to greet the Mayor at the Hôtel de Ville, his hat adorned with the Revolutionary red-and-blue cockade?

‘It was a most interesting period to be in France,’ Wordsworth wrote to his sister from the shores of Lake Constance. 4 But not that interesting: he and his friend Jones bypassed Paris, even though their route took them close to the capital, where all the most interesting events were happening. The Revolution was not their affair; they were headed for the Alps, then a sacred destination in the cult of the sublime. The young Englishmen joined in the Revolutionary festivities as guests, rather than participants. In his great autobiographical poem The Prelude , most of which was written a decade or more after the events described, Wordsworth admitted that

… I looked upon these things

As from a distance – heard, and saw, and felt,

Was touched, but with no intimate concern – 5

(At this point a cautionary note is appropriate. On the one hand, The Prelude dramatises what Wordsworth called ‘spots in time’ – moments of special significance from his inner life. It is the principal source for the biography of his youth, particularly some obscure years of his young manhood for which the poem provides almost the only illumination. On the other hand, it cannot be wholly relied upon, and in at least some aspects is misleading. The emotional and psychological aspects of the poem may be more trustworthy than the merely factual and chronological – though perhaps not entirely so. In The Prelude , Wordsworth plots the growth of a poet’s mind’, from his infancy until he came into contact with Coleridge in his late twenties. But Wordsworth was writing in retrospect, trying to make sense of his past from the perspective of his mid-thirties. He had become a different man from the youth he was writing about. Not only was his memory fallible; there was a tendency in him, as in all of us, to manipulate the past in order to explain the present. Wordsworth’s biographers cannot avoid using The Prelude , but they need to do so cautiously, and to seek for confirmatory evidence elsewhere.)

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