Adam Sisman

The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge


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href="#litres_trial_promo">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.

      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

      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’:

       … my heart was all

      Given to the People, and my love was theirs.27

      Wordsworth was then a child of Rousseau; he was inclined to believe that men are naturally good, that the existing institutions of society are artificial, tending to perpetuate idleness, luxury and flattery: a rotten carapace that could be peeled back to reveal the healthy flesh underneath. The violence that accompanied the Revolution was not characteristic; it was simply necessary to correct the unnatural abuses of the past. A new social contract would be founded on Justice, Equality and Reason. Government would be by the ‘general will’, for the common good, and by consent of the citizenry. In making a new constitution, free from any encumbrances of the past, the Convention would be making a new kind of Man. For the young Wordsworth, the Revolution promised heaven on earth:

      O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

      For great were the auxiliars which then stood

      Upon our side, we who were strong in love.

      Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

      But to be young was very heaven! O times,

      In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

      Of custom, law, and statute took at once

      The attraction of a country in romance –

      When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights

      When most intent of making of herself

      A prime enchanter to