The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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of Arc. As Southey wrote many years afterwards, ‘it can rarely happen that a young author should meet with a publisher as inexperienced and ardent as himself’.
In mid-August Coleridge and Southey set out from Bristol on a walking tour into Somerset, where they were to seek more recruits to Pantisocracy. Both seem to have been in a state of high excitement, relishing each other’s company. They walked first to Bath, to spend the night with Southey’s mother, herself already drafted into the Pantisocratic regiment, as was Southey’s brother Tom. At her house in Westgate Buildings they found Sara Fricker, whom Mrs Southey had invited to stay so that they could ‘talk over the American affair’. Perhaps Southey connived in bringing Sara together with Coleridge again. By the time the two men left the next morning, accompanied by Southey’s dog Rover, some kind of understanding seems to have been reached between Coleridge and the eldest Miss Fricker – though they had known each other little more than a week. (She would still be there when they returned a week later, drunk on the heady wine of Pantisocracy; and after another conversation, Coleridge seems to have committed himself further.)
Their route took them across the Mendip Hills, via Chilcompton and Wells. They spent their first night at Cheddar, sleeping in a garret, where they were locked in by a suspicious landlady who took these wild-looking young men for possible ‘footpads’. There was only one bed. ‘Coleridge is a vile bedfellow and I slept but ill,’ complained Southey.27 The next day they made for Huntspill, down on the Somerset Levels, to call on George Burnett, who was fired with fresh enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, much to the dismay of his father, a prosperous farmer who intended his son for the Church. Then the two missionaries headed for Shurton on the west Somerset coastline, to the home of Henry Poole, one of Coleridge’s fellow undergraduates from Jesus. He proved more resistant to the new religion, but escorted the two visitors to see his cousin Thomas Poole, a known radical who lived not far away in the small town (really no more than a large village) of Nether Stowey, at the base of the Quantock Hills (this was familiar country for Southey, whose grandfather had farmed at nearby Holford). Poole was the son of a successful tanner, a stout, plain, sensible man of twenty-nine with a rubicund complexion and a noticeable West Country burr. Yet his prosaic exterior concealed a mind generous, liberal and well-read. An enlightened employer with a practical concern for the poor and downtrodden,* Poole was liked and admired even by those who detested his principles. His enthusiasm for revolutionary politics had earned him the label ‘the most dangerous person in the county of Somerset’ (perhaps not such a distinction), and some of his letters had been intercepted and opened on government instructions.
Coleridge talked freely, not just about Pantisocracy, but about his own ‘aberrations from prudence’, which he promised were now at an end. Poole was very impressed by this visitor, a ‘shining scholar’ whom he considered ‘the Principal in the undertaking’. He was not so impressed by Southey, who seemed ‘a mere boy’ by comparison, lacking Coleridge’s ‘splendid abilities’, though he was ‘even more violent in his principles’. Poole, who had himself considered emigrating to America, listened sympathetically as they outlined their scheme; but he felt that however perfectible human nature might be, it was ‘not yet perfect enough’ for Pantisocracy.28
In France, Robespierre and his associates tightened their grip on power, eliminating their rivals without qualm. The purge of the Girondins was followed by further purges in the spring of 1794. Death followed death, and more deaths. Everyone was afraid, but no one dared show fear. Now the severed heads being displayed to the Paris crowds were those of prominent revolutionaries, men who themselves had until recently been demanding executions. ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ cried the Girondin Madame Roland from the scaffold – though it was she who had declared that there must be blood to cement the Revolution. A macabre poster displayed a group of heads hanging horridly from a board, the leering faces still recognisable, with the legend, ‘It is dreadful but it is necessary.’ Robespierre himself possessed the certainty of a zealot. He was incorruptible; he spoke for the Republic; anyone who criticised him was an enemy of the people. The ideologue of the Revolution, he articulated the principles of the slaughter. He envisaged a Republic of virtue; he would make man better. The aims of the Revolution were the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, and the reign of eternal justice. He exhorted his listeners to seal their work with blood, so that they might see the dawn of universal happiness. ‘Terror is the only justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue …’29
For those ideologically committed to the young Republic, like Wordsworth, this was a time of torment. A believer could not relinquish his faith without a struggle. As the Revolution progressed, its fellow travellers had accepted one sacrifice after another in the cause of the greater good; accepted them, and then justified them to the world. They had swallowed so much blood already; now they were choking on it. Wordsworth confessed to nightmares that continued for years after the Terror had abated:
I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,
Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense
Of treachery and desertion in the place
The holiest that I knew of – my own soul.30
Yet even now, Wordsworth did not lose faith. On the contrary, in the ‘rage and dog-day heat’ of the Revolution, he found ‘something to glory in, as just and fit’. Like so many intellectuals since,
I felt a kind of sympathy with power.31
In the confused period after the September Massacres, Wordsworth shared the general longing for a strong man to impose order, not doubting …’
But that the virtue of one paramount mind
Would have abashed those impious crests, have quelled
Outrage and bloody power, and in despite
Of what people were through ignorance
And immaturity, and, in the teeth
Of desperate opposition from without,
Have cleared a passage for just government
And left a solid birthright to the state,
Redeemed according to example given
By ancient lawgivers … 32
But which ancient lawgivers? There was no question that the one paramount mind’ was Robespierre – but was he a Brutus, or a Caesar? A Cato, or a Tarquin? Was the exemplar of civic virtue becoming a tyrant? Wordsworth’s inner struggle was one of interpretation. Should Robespierre be seen as the apotheosis of the Revolution, to be defended, indeed admired, even though he was drenched in blood? Or was he rather, as Wordsworth began to perceive, an aberration, a perversion of the Revolutionary ideal? Arriving at the latter conclusion came as a huge relief to Wordsworth. All the horrors that had seemed concomitant with the Revolution could be ascribed to this deviation from its true path.
Wordsworth had refused to accept the taunts of scoffers, those who sneered that the chaos of the Terror was the inevitable result of democratic government. On the contrary, this was a legacy of the past:
… it was a reservoir of guilt
And ignorance, filled up from age to age,
That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,
But burst and spread in deluge through the land.33