Adam Sisman

The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge


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       1 REVOLUTION

      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.)

      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,