Adam Sisman - The Friendship - Wordsworth and Coleridge

… ‘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

It seems likely that he was thinking of the officers when he wrote these words.

Wordsworth could not refrain from contrasting such disillusioned and resentful reactionaries with the gallant volunteers for the citizen army. Once again, as in 1790, he saw the roads of France crowded, this time not with fédérés returning from Paris, but with ‘the bravest Youth of France’ flocking to the frontier, in response to urgent appeals to defend the motherland from invasion. He witnessed many poignant scenes of farewell, the memory of which would move him to tears more than a decade afterwards. News from the front that summer was of disaster after disaster: the patriot army seemed unable to match the superior discipline of their opponents, all professional soldiers. To Wordsworth, the volunteers appeared as martyrs, going willingly to their certain doom.

… they seem’d

Like arguments from Heaven that ’twas a cause

Good, and which no one could stand up against

Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud,

Mean, miserable, wilfully depraved,

Hater perverse of equity and truth. 26

Such idealism could scarcely fail to move an open-hearted young man. The fine principles for which the volunteers fought, dressed in heady rhetoric, were universal. The French were fighting to defend their country, but they were fighting in the name of all Mankind. The fire had been kindled in France, but it seemed possible, indeed likely, that the blaze would spread across Europe, perhaps even to England. In such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Wordsworth should have come to see himself as ‘a Patriot’: