The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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are you driving to, you great hulking, good-for-nothing – beautiful fellow, God bless you!’
Allen introduced them to another medical student, Robert Southey of Balliol, who coincidentally had made his own ‘pedestrian scheme’ to Cambridge and back the previous May,* when he had attended Frend’s trial in the university court and admired Frend’s oratory in his own defence. Southey and Coleridge took to each other immediately. Though very different characters, the two had much in common: politics, poetry, philosophy, anxiety about money, enthusiasm for walking. They began ‘disputing on metaphysical subjects’, arguing, debating, laughing in the sheer pleasure of having found a kindred spirit. Coleridge was so delighted with his discovery that he postponed his departure from Oxford by more than a fortnight. Hucks, who had accepted Coleridge’s word that they would be stopping in Oxford no longer than three or four days, was compelled to wait while the two new friends talked incessantly.
Southey, still not quite twenty (two years younger than Coleridge), was the eldest son of a Bristol linen-draper who had fallen on hard times and died, leaving the young undergraduate responsible for his mother and three younger brothers. He had acquired polished manners at the home of his wealthy aunt, where he had spent much of his childhood and where he continued to be a favoured guest. Like Wordsworth and so many others, he was depressed by the looming prospect of a career in the Church – ‘starving in creditable celibacy upon 40 pounds a year’ – not least because he found it impossible to stifle doubts, and disliked the thought of perjuring himself. At Westminster he had started a school magazine, The Flagellant; with such a title, it was inevitable that the publication should vigorously condemn the practice of corporal punishment in schools, the only surprise being that this attack was not launched until the fifth issue; Southey was expelled as a result. He arrived in Oxford with ‘a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther’.* As if in imitation of Werther, he became infatuated with a young woman before discovering that she was already attached – inspiring him to compose an ‘Ode to Grief’. Southey wrote very fast, all the more impressive as poor eyesight prevented him from reading or writing by candlelight. Together with another young Bristol poet, the Quaker Robert Lovell, he was preparing a volume of poems. Furthermore, he was working on a long epic poem, Joan of Arc, and contemplating another, Wat Tyler. These historical epics rang with contemporary resonance. Southey’s Joan addressed the common people as ‘Citizens’ and owed her position to their support. ‘My Joan is a great democrat,’ he wrote; and in his hands Tyler would become a revolutionary martyr, another Marat.† The story of the peasants’ revolt seemed apposite at a time when sans-culottes† were escorting aristocrats to the scaffold, and indeed Southey was convinced that a revolutionary cataclysm was inevitable in Britain.
Southey freely expressed extreme political opinions, often adopting a posture of noble self-sacrifice. In another poem, ‘The Exiled Patriots’, he celebrated the reformers transported to the colonies:
So shall your great examples fire each soul
So in each freeborn heart for ever dwell
‘Till Man shall rise above the unjust controul
Stand where ye stood – & triumph where ye fell.
For Coleridge, this combination of politics and poetry was irresistible. ‘Thy soaring is even unto heaven,’ he wrote to Southey the day after they parted – ‘Or let me add (for my Appetite for Similies is truly canine at this moment) that as the Italian Nobles their new-fashioned Doors, so thou dost make the adamantine Gate of Democracy turn on it’s [sic]* golden Hinges to most sweet Music.’15
Tall and bony, Southey was reckoned handsome; in an attempt at dignity he held his chin high; he refused to let his ‘mane’ of dark curly hair be shorn by the college barber, boldly allowing it to hang free and unpowdered when he went into hall to dine; large, dark eyes framed a prominent, beakish nose, giving him ‘a falcon glance’; long, curving eyebrows suggested a sardonic cast of mind. Generous, suave and stoical, stern, principled and dogmatic, he emanated self-satisfied rectitude. To Coleridge, Southey’s combination of cool decisiveness and violent convictions was compelling. He admired his disciplined working habits, and was excited by his daring republican talk. Southey seemed to him to embody the admirably austere qualities of the ancients. ‘He is truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a down-right upright Republican!’ wrote Coleridge, who could rarely resist a pun, in this case a double entendre; he had discovered that Southey was still a virgin.16
Southey was immediately impressed by Coleridge’s volcanic intellect, hurling out ideas red hot from the bubbling tumult of his brain: ‘He is of most uncommon merit – of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart.’17 Within a day or two of their meeting he was writing of his new friend as ‘one whom I very much esteem and admire tho two thirds of our conversation be spent in disputing on metaphysical subjects’.18 Coleridge’s intellectual interests were encyclopaedic, nourished by voracious reading. In particular he was drawn towards philosophy – not the abstract philosophy of word games, but metaphysics, enquiry into the ultimate nature of reality. His arrival energised Southey, who had been languishing in a melancholic stupor.
It was inevitable that these two young idealists should discuss Southey’s utopian dreams. Into the mixture went Rousseau and Godwin, republicanism and philanthropy, notions of pastoral simplicity and honest toil. Within three weeks they had sketched the outline of a scheme for an ideal community of a dozen young couples, isolated from the rest of the world, in which property should be held in common, labour should be contributed to the common good, and all (even women) should participate in government. Two or three hours’ manual work each day should be enough, they calculated, and the rest of the time could be given up to ‘study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children’. Coleridge, who made a habit of coining new words, came up with a name for this system of complete equality: ‘Pantocracy’, later amended to ‘Pantisocracy’.* Some remote part of America seemed the obvious place to try this experiment; Southey proposed Kentucky, but they settled on the Susquehanna as the best possible destination – because, Coleridge later said, he liked the name. It was agreed that they should seek out others to join them. Another Balliol man, George Burnett, was quickly recruited; he and Southey were to travel to Bristol, where they hoped to persuade Robert Lovell to come too. More in hope than expectation, Southey invited his aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford: ‘When the storm burst[s] on England you may perhaps follow us to America.’ As Pitt’s government tightened the screw in England, the news from France was of more and more executions, and Southey seems to have envisaged Pantisocracy as a refuge from an impending Armageddon. He decided that his mother and siblings should accompany them. ‘The storm is gathering, and must soon break,’ he wrote to Bedford’s brother Horace. He amused himself with the idea of seeing all his aristocratic friends ‘come flying over for shelter’ to America: ‘You must all come when the fire and brimstone descend.’19
At last, on 5 July, Coleridge was ready to continue his interrupted walking tour. To make up for lost time, he and Hucks caught the fly* to Gloucester, from where Coleridge wrote to Southey – whom he had left only the day before – saluting him ‘Health and Republicanism!’ Perhaps remembering Southey’s horrifying story of a fifteen-year-old servant girl who had strangled her newborn baby, he parroted Hucks’s reaction to an episode on the road:
It