The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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and his characteristic expression of droll amusement. Though nervous and shy, and prone to depression, Lamb had an independent mind, fine critical judgement, a strong sense of the ludicrous and a teasing wit. Like Coleridge, he had been a ‘Grecian’, but circumstances had not enabled him to attend university, and he now supported his parents and his elder sister Mary by working as a clerk in the East India Office. In the evenings he unwound in convivial conversation, smoking and drinking, sometimes heavily. After Coleridge had left London Lamb would cherish the memory of their comfortable evenings together by the fire in the Salutation and Cat, drinking ‘egg-hot’* and smoking Oronoko.† Like Coleridge he was a sincere Christian, and at this time of his life was strongly drawn to Unitarianism. Coleridge particularly admired Lamb’s devotion to his sister Mary, whose mind was ‘elegantly stored’ and her heart ‘feeling’.18
On 16 December Coleridge dined with the two editor-proprietors of the Morning Chronicle. Also present was Thomas Holcroft, known for his dogmatism and fierce argumentativeness. It was immediately obvious that Holcroft had not been impressed when Lovell visited him in Newgate, and he launched into a violent attack on Pantisocracy. Coleridge was not overawed, at least not in the version he relayed to Southey:
I had the honour of working H. a little – and by my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over – /Sir (said he) I never knew so much real wisdom – & so much rank Error meet in one mind before! Which (answered I) means, I suppose – that in some things, Sir! I agree with you and in others I do not.19
Holcroft invited Coleridge to dine at his house four days later. Among the other guests was Godwin himself, then at the zenith of his powers. ‘No one was more talked about, more looked up to, more sought after,’ wrote Hazlitt of this period many years afterwards, ‘and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.’ Though there is no detailed record of their conversation, Godwin noted in his diary afterwards that the talk was of ‘self love & God’. One can be confident that Coleridge – only twenty-two years old – held his own against these two formidable middle-aged men, one an atheist, the other ‘inclined to atheism’. In a letter to Southey some months earlier he had remarked of Godwin, ‘I think not so highly of him as you do – and I have read him with the greatest attention.’20
Coleridge rejected one of Godwin’s essential tenets: of an antithesis between ‘universal benevolence’ and personal or private affections. In support of his argument Godwin cited the example of Brutus* – a cult figure in revolutionary thought – who pro patria sentenced his own sons to death, for plotting to restore the monarchy. Coleridge’s thinking on this subject was the very opposite of Godwin’s: ‘The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the soul. I love my Friend – such as he is, all mankind are or might be!’21
Just at this moment, Coleridge received a belated reply from Mary Evans. It is not clear what she wrote – but he decided that it was a brush-off. He was calm, he told Southey:
To love her Habit has made unalterable…. To lose her! – I can rise above that selfish Pang. But to marry another – O Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all things pure and heavenly like itself: – but to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! … Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.22
For seven weeks or more Southey had been ‘in hourly expectation’ of Coleridge. He renewed the pressure on his friend, who had been promising for at least three weeks to return to Bristol ‘within a day or two’. Coleridge protested that he was ‘all eagerness’ to leave town, and resolved to be in Bath by the following Saturday (3 January 1795).23 But on 2 January he wrote a frantic letter to Southey, full of excuses: the roads were dangerous, the inside of a coach unhealthy, the outside too cold, he had no money, he had a sore throat. Finally he offered to come by wagon, sharing it with four or five calves, wrapped up snugly in the hay. Southey and Lovell walked more than forty miles to Marlborough to meet the wagon – ‘but no S.T. Coleridge was therein!’ Southey wrote irritably to Sara Fricker: ‘Why will he ever fix a day if he cannot abide by it?’24 He decided to fetch Coleridge from London himself.
Mathews wrote to Wordsworth announcing the abandonment of the periodical scheme. He once again encouraged Wordsworth to come to London and earn a living writing for the newspapers. Wordsworth replied that he had decided to come when he could. But he would only feel happy working for an opposition paper, he told Mathews, ‘for really I cannot in conscience and in principle, abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry. They are already so deeply advanced in iniquity that like Macbeth they cannot retreat.’25 Wordsworth’s bitterness against Pitt and his fellow ministers is remarkable, and lasted long after his radicalism had shrivelled – it was obvious even as he wrote The Prelude, a decade later:
Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time
Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law
A tool of murder …
He believed them blind to the lesson of the Terror:
Though with such awful proof before their eyes
That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse,
And can reap nothing better, childlike longed
To imitate – not wise enough to avoid,
Giants in their impiety alone,
But, in their weapons and their warfare base
As vermin working out of reach, they leagued
Their strength perfidiously to undermine
Justice, and make an end of Liberty.26
Wordsworth joined Mathews in rejoicing at the verdicts in the treason trials: ‘The late occurrences in every point of view are interesting to humanity. They will abate the insolence and presumption of the aristocracy by shewing it that neither the violence, nor the art, of power, can crush even an unfriended individual.’ Wordsworth was further cheered by signs of a shift in opinion in favour of a negotiated peace with France.27
‘I begin to wish much to be in town,’ he informed Mathews; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’28 Like Coleridge, he was intrigued by developments in the capital.* While Raisley Calvert lingered on, Wordsworth felt unable to leave him; but he quit Penrith almost immediately after Calvert’s death in early January 1795, and a few weeks later he was in London. Straight away, it seems, he found himself at the centre of radical discussion. On 27 February he took tea at the house of William Frend, who had moved to London after his expulsion from Cambridge and was now teaching pupils privately (among them the future social philosopher Thomas Malthus). Also present were eight others, all radicals, including Holcroft, Dyer and Godwin. This was a high-powered gathering of writers, lawyers and university Fellows. These radicals were closely interconnected through a multitude of personal and institutional links, shared interests and beliefs. A majority of those present were Cambridge men, at least two were Unitarians, and several were members of either the Society for Constitutional