William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  William started work on a full-length tragedy which was called The Borderers and was set in thirteenth-century England. This was his only attempt at a play. It doesn’t seem to have been much of a pleasure to write—nor is it much pleasure to read. It would seem that at several stages he suffered severe depressions at Racedown, perhaps even teetering on the verge of a mental breakdown; but Dorothy pulled him through.

  They had only one child with them, little Basil, as the other one had not arrived after all, and they discussed his upbringing endlessly, worrying about how to stop him telling lies (they decided that, because they asked him silly, unsuitable questions, he told lies in return), and how to stop him crying (putting him in a room on his own till he stopped, which they said worked in the end). There was an old caretaker who lived on the premises, a servant of Mr Pinney, who kept a rather suspicious eye on them, though they looked after themselves completely. ‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips,’ wrote William.

  The Pinney boys brought them news of life in the big city of Bristol, especially news of Coleridge, who was also working on a play which Sheridan, at Covent Garden in London, had commissioned. When the Pinneys came, the caretaker unlocked the best glasses and crockery from a cupboard and they had big, jolly meals. After that, the Wordsworths went back to carrots.

  During his stay at Racedown, William wrote his only signed letter to a newspaper (he later wrote some anonymously). It was to the Weekly Entertainer in Sherborne and was in defence of Fletcher Christian, his Cockermouth school contemporary, whose actions during the mutiny on the Bounty were then a source of great public discussion. Christian’s brother, the professor of law, had organized a pamphlet in his support, and it was noticeable that amongst those who signed it were several members of the Wordsworth and Cookson families—old friends sticking together.

  William went to Bristol once or twice on his own, to see Cottle, who was interested in publishing his poems, and to look up ‘those two extraordinary young men, Southey and Coleridge’. He couldn’t have seen Southey on this occasion (20 November 1795), as Southey had by then gone to Portugal, but he saw Coleridge again and Cottle sent him a copy of Southey’s Joan of Arc which Cottle had just published. When William read it, Southey rather went down in his estimation, though he might have been influenced in this by Coleridge: ‘You were right about Southey,’ William wrote to his old friend in London, Matthews. ‘He is certainly a coxcomb, and has proved it completely by the preface to his Joan of Arc, an epic poem which he has just published. This preface is indeed a very conceited performance and the poem, though in some passages of first rate excellence, is on the whole of a very inferior execution.’

  Several visitors came to stay with them during their two years of seclusion at Racedown, such as Basil Montagu—who had run out of money and wasn’t keeping up his payments on the annuity—and Mary Hutchinson, their old Penrith friend, now living in Yorkshire with relations. She stayed several months and provided invaluable company for Dorothy—and for William as well, no doubt, though he went off on one of his Bristol trips just as she arrived. ‘My friend Mary Hutchinson is staying with us,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘She is one of the best girls in the world and we are as happy as human beings can be; that is when William is at home, for you cannot imagine how dull we feel and what a vacuum his loss has occasioned, but this is the first day; tomorrow we shall be better.’

  The two girls weren’t completely unoccupied while William was away. There was Basil to look after, plus a lot of gardening and cooking. Dorothy was also sewing shirts, for relations and friends, to make some money, and both she and Mary worked on William’s poems, copying them out for him. In those days, before the invention of typewriters and copying machines, a writer had to be a writer in every sense, unless he could persuade someone to take dictation, which Dorothy often did, walking with him as he spouted and making notes for him. Once a poem had been taken down to the poet’s satisfaction, it was vital to get as many copies made as possible, before it could be lost or destroyed. A publisher needed at least one copy, and Wordsworth, like Coleridge and Southey, was always sending offhand-written copies of his poems, or chunks of his latest writings, to friends, or likely friends and contacts, for their comments and appreciation.

  William was soon sending samples of his poems to Coleridge, and getting back copious and excellent critical advice. Coleridge was as clear and decisive as Dorothy in his instinctive observations, but, unlike Dorothy, he had an educated mind, a powerful intellect, great knowledge and insight, and, as a writer himself, could creatively help Wordsworth to improve or alter his work. Wordsworth was tremendously impressed. As a young man, he was never verbally very fluent; even on paper, his prose wasn’t as succinct at expressing his reactions and opinions as Coleridge. Most of all, he didn’t have the critical faculty of Coleridge, especially when it came to his own work. Like many writers, he took outside criticism very badly.

  But he could see that Coleridge was his friend, his fan even, who criticized him only for his own good. It was the combination of Dorothy and Coleridge—one settling him down as a person, the other sorting out his creative problems—that was the making of William. This period, when they both came together intimately into his life, two lifeboats upon which he could depend, enabling him to cruise majestically forward, was the most crucial in his whole writing life. Who is to say which was the greater influence? Who is to say exactly what each gave him? But after the turbulence and indecision and wrong turnings, the isolations and depressions, of the previous ten years, his genius now began to flower.

  The great meeting between all three came in June 1797, a momentous day in each of their lives, when Coleridge came out to Racedown to see William at his home and meet Dorothy in the flesh. They’d corresponded for two years and he and William had had occasional meetings, but it was the first time all three came face to face.

  ‘We both have a distinctive remembrance of his arrival,’ William recalled more than forty years later. ‘He did not keep to the high road but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field by which he cut off an angle.’

  Coleridge was living about forty miles away, at Nether Stowey in Somerset, in a cottage provided by Thomas Poole, his wealthy patron, who lived next door. He was in the first flush of marriage, and seemed happy and content with Sara and their first child, Hartley, who’d been born the previous year. His differences with Southey had partly been forgotten. As brothers-in-law, they were in occasional contact once more, especially when Southey, and his Fricker wife, returned from Portugal and moved to London. Southey had decided to read for the bar and get himself a proper profession, not relying on odd pieces of writing in the way Coleridge and Wordsworth were both trying to do.

  Coleridge stayed with the Wordsworths for three weeks, then persuaded them to come back with him to his Nether Stowey cottage. They all somehow managed to cram into the little cottage, with Mrs Coleridge and the baby, and were joined a week later by another visitor, Charles Lamb, Coleridge’s London friend.

  The Wordsworths never moved back to Racedown. Such was the excitement of life with their new friend, that when he found them a house to rent, some four miles away, they decided to take it immediately. This was Alfoxden House, a much larger house than Racedown, standing on the edge of the Quantock Hills (it is now a hotel).

  ‘Here we are,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the neighbourhood of the Lakes.’

  Thomas Poole vouched for their respectability and finances—both of which were in doubt, according to most people who met them—and they got the house for the very low rent of £23 a year.

  The neighbours were indeed suspicious. A young man with his sister, so he said, looking after someone else’s child, so he said, wandering round the countryside at all hours of the night, looking at nature. Well, no
wonder tongues wagged.

  With Coleridge so near, and his constant stream of London and Bristol radicals and writers coming to see him, they tended to live a communal life. It was almost as if Pantisocracy had happened—but at home in England, not in America. The theory that one could get rid of one’s spouse if one wanted to, which had been one of the Pantisocrats’ original ideas, now came true as Coleridge more and more preferred the company of William and Dorothy to that of Sara his wife, leaving her for days and weeks on end, either while he stayed with the Wordsworths in their house or accompanied them on long walking tours round the West Country.

  ‘ He is a wonderful man,’ so Dorothy described Coleridge to Mary Hutchinson, just after the first meeting, saying what a sad loss it had been for Mary to miss meeting him. ‘His conversation teems with soul, mind and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and like William, interests himself so much about every trifle.’

  On first sight, she hadn’t thought Coleridge all that handsome, which is a surprise, judging by a contemporary portrait which makes him look very much the romantic young poet, though his lips are noticeably heavy, as Dorothy was quick to spot:

  I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips and not very good teeth; longish, loose-growing half curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, not dark but grey. It speaks every emotion of his animated mind. It was more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed.

  Coleridge was equally impressed by Dorothy:

  If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion, her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly that who saw her would say, guilt was a thing impossible to her. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature and her taste a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.

  Dorothy had quickly shown Coleridge she had a mind of her own. He had let her see some of his journalism, expecting her instant admiration: ‘Some half a score or more of what I thought clever and epigrammatic and devilishly severe reviews … but a remark made by Miss Wordsworth to whom I had, in full expectation of gaining a laugh of applause, read one of my judgements, occasioned my committing the whole batch to the Fire.’

  As for William, Coleridge’s opinion of him was pure hagiolatry. ‘Wordsworth is a very great man, the only man at all times and in all modes of excellence, I feel myself inferior.… The Giant Wordsworth. God love him! Even when I speak in terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest those terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of manners.’

  This worship of Wordsworth’s genius never faltered. For years, Coleridge did little else but rave about Wordsworth to all his friends, which they thought was very strange. And it was strange. Although they were alike in their radical views, in their undergraduate experiences and in their wandering impecunious life since university, they were in so many ways quite different people. Coleridge was very much a southerner, Devon-born but brought up in the middle of London. He had disliked his school-days, when he had retreated from being bullied and beaten into books and learning, arming himself with know-ledge gained from the Classics, though in later life still imagining in his dreams that masters had returned to thrash him. Coleridge was gregarious and impetuous, loved parties and social activites, was always with a crowd of friends, rushing from one thing to another. He had already dazzled everyone he met by the brilliance of his conversation and he was very much the golden boy, the centre of his own circle, attracting people, young and old, to seek out his company and his friendship. His contemporaries, such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Charles Lloyd, young and talented people themselves, made special journeys to be with him, to bask in his company, enjoy his mind. Cottle the bookseller and Poole the wealthy farmer and tanner were deeply impressed by him, far more than by Southey or Wordsworth. They gave him money, presents and free accommodation, and helped him in any way they could.

  Wordsworth, on the other hand, had many typical northern qualities: he was solid, slow, unpolished, careful, dour, but with hidden depths. His totally happy schooldays, in the rural isolation of Hawkshead, where he lived much of his life in the open air, couldn’t have been more different from Coleridge’s. So far, his main fan had been Dorothy, and he’d had only one real patron: young Raisley Calvert, the dying youth. Yet when this awkward, ungainly northerner, with little sophistication of manner or appearance, arrived in Coleridge’s gilded life, Coleridge immediately subordinated his personality and his talents to Wordsworth’s. Coleridge’s friends couldn’t believe it. They were slightly jealous of Wordsworth’s arrival, resentful of the time and space and attention he was getting. When they tried to see where William’s genius lay, some of them found it very hard. Coleridge’s sudden passion for Wordsworth’s apparently simple rustic poems, made a few of them eager to tease William, to ridicule him when they got a chance. And they got their chances. Like Coleridge, they were the sort of smart, clever young men who were in the set which was asked to write those smart, sharp, clever reviews in the magazines. Wordsworth’s talents and inclinations never lay in that direction. He didn’t care for their cutting observations. They thought this was because he was too self-obsessed, which indeed he was—another reason to tease him, when given the opportunity.

  Lamb had great fun, amongst his London friends, in describing William’s big heavy shoes, displaying them once, when he happened to have them in his possession, as provincial curiosities. Hazlitt, on his first meeting with William, when Coleridge introduced him and read out his poems, could at least sense a new style of poetry, but thought his appearance most strange:

  He answered in some degree his friend’s description of him but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed … in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons.

  There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait.… There was a severe worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance); an intense, high forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of the face.… He talked with a mixture of clear gushing accents, a deep guttural intonation, a strong tincture of the Northern burr.…

  Although Coleridge praised everything about Wordsworth, going on about his genius in letters to his friends, such as William Godwin and the chemist Humphry Davy, Wordsworth hardly ever reciprocated in the same terms, taking all the praise as his due, though he did admire Coleridge’s mind and his learning and his conversation. In his quieter, more restrained way, he was just as devoted to his friend.

  Intellectually, they disagreed on only one minor point. Whereas Coleridge was a Unitarian, Wordsworth professed no formal religious faith; Coleridge took this as being on God’s side, as Wordsworth wasn’t against religion: ‘I have now known him a year and some months and my admiration, I might say my awe, of his intellectual powers has increased even to this hour and, what is more important, he is a tried good man.’

  That reference to him being tried is interesting. Coleridge was not known for his punctuality, his reliability or his sober habits, though Wordsworth, if he was then aware of such failings in Coleridge, dismissed them. They were all three in love with each other—or, as Coleridge remarked to several acquaintances, they were ‘three people, but one soul’. That rather leaves Mrs Coleridge out of account.

  Wordsworth and Coleridge finished their respective dramas about the same time and sent them off to Covent Garden, though of course Coleridge was the only one who’d been offered a commission. However, he heard nothing from the theatre for six weeks, much to his fury, and eve
ntually got a curt reply from Sheridan, rejecting it because of the ‘obscurity of the last three acts’. Wordsworth got better news. One of the principal actors at Covent Garden loved his play and asked William to do some alterations. Both William and Dorothy went up to London in great excitement. ‘If the play is accepted,’ wrote Dorothy to brother Christopher, keeping him abreast of family news, ‘we shall probably stay a fortnight or three weeks longer.’ Alas, it too was rejected and Wordsworth never tried to write another play.

  While in London, they saw a good deal of Southey. Dorothy, who hadn’t met him before, wasn’t very impressed, though no doubt Coleridge had already given her some of his opinions. ‘I know a good deal of his character from our common friends. He is a young man of the most rigidly virtuous habits and is, I believe, exemplary in the discharge of all Domestic Duties, but though his talents are certainly very remarkable for his years, as far as I can judge, I think them much inferior to the talents of Coleridge.’

  The failures of their respective plays left William and Coleridge free to concentrate on their poetry. William was working on ‘The Recluse’ and on the section on the ruined cottage in The Excursion. Coleridge was writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (a work he and William had originally planned to write together), ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. The idea for the last-named poem came to Coleridge in a dream. He’d gone away for a few days on his own, because of ill health, taken some grains of opium ‘to check a dysentery’, and in a dream (unfortunately interrupted by the arrival of a visitor) had a vision which he later wrote down as the unfinished poem ‘Kubla Khan’. It’s interesting to realize how often the use of visions—either natural ones like Wordsworth’s, or drug-induced ones, like Coleridge’s—influenced the writings of the Romantic poets. Research has been done to show the recurrence of certain images in their poetry, such as waves and flying, which occur in hallucinations. Wordsworth of course never took drugs and, after Cambridge, appears never to have indulged in strong drink, apart from the occasional glass of ale. His favourite drink was water. His favourite mental stimulus was nature. All the same, his visions, as on Salisbury Plain, could be just as awesome as those caused by drugs.