“Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”
“Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”
“Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”
Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly until the smooth waters touched his waist; dipped seven times, and returned to the bank. It was a beautiful and an elevating rite; but the waves sing with lyric lips only in the midmost stream; and he who sings with them, and is swift as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, faint, breathless, delighted.
Authorship, it must be remembered, was Southey’s trade, the business of his life, and this, at least, he knew how to conduct well. To be a prophet and call down flame from heaven, and disappear in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire, is sublime; but prophets can go in the strength of a single meal for more days and nights than one would choose to name in this incredulous age, and, if they eat, there are ravens to bring them food. No ravens brought loaves to Greta Hall; and Southey had an unprophet-like craving for the creature comforts of beef and bread, for wine if it might be had, and at supper for one meditative tumbler of punch or black-currant rum. Besides, what ravens were ever pledged to feed a prophet’s sisters-in-law, or his nephews and nieces? Let it be praise enough for muchof Southey’s performance that he did good work in workmanlike fashion. To shift knowledge into more convenient positions is to render no unimportant service to mankind. In the gathering of facts, Southey was both swift and patient in an extraordinary degree; he went often alone, and he went far; in the art of exposition he was unsurpassed; and his fine moral feeling and profound sympathy with elementary justice created, as De Quincey has observed, a soul under what else might well be denominated, Miltonically, “the ribs of death.” From the mending of his pens to the second reading aloud of his proof-sheets, attending as he read to the fall of each word upon the ear, Southey had a diligent care for everything that served to make his work right. He wrote at a moderate pace; re-wrote; wrote a third time if it seemed desirable; corrected with minute supervision. He accomplished so much, not because he produced with unexampled rapidity, but because he worked regularly, and never fell into a mood of apathy or ennui. No periods of tempestuous vacancy lay between his periods of patient labour. One work always overlapped another—thus, that first idle day, the begetter of so many idle descendants, never came. But let us hear the craftsman giving a lesson in the knack of authorship to his brother, Dr. Henry Southey, who has a notion of writing something on the Crusades:
“Now then, supposing that you will seriously set about theCrusades, I will give you such directions in the art of historical book-keeping as may save time and facilitate labour.“Make your writing-books in foolscap quarto, and write on only one side of a leaf; draw a line down the margin, marking off space enough for your references, which should be given at the end of every paragraph; noting page, book, or chapter of the author referred to. This minuteness is nowdemanded, and you will yourself find it useful; for, in transcribing or in correcting proofs, it is often requisite to turn to the original authorities. Take the best author; that is to say, the one that has written most at length of all theoriginalauthors, upon the particular point of time on which you are employed, and draw up your account from him; then, on the opposite page, correct and amplify this from every other who has written on the same subject. This page should be divided into two columns, one of about two-thirds of its breadth, the other the remaining one. You are thus enabled toaddto youradditions.“One of these books you should have for your geography; that is to say, for collecting descriptions of all the principal scenes of action (which must be done from books of travels), their situation, their strength, their previous history, and in the notes, their present state. [Another book—he adds in a subsequent letter—you must keep for the bibliography of your subject.]“These descriptions you can insert in their proper places when you transcribe. Thus, also, you should collect accounts of the different tribes and dynasties which you have occasion to mention. In this manner the information which is only to be got at piecemeal, and oftentimes incidentally, when you are looking for something else, is brought together with least trouble, and almost imperceptibly.“All relative matter not absolutely essential to the subject should go in the form of supplementary notes, and these you may make as amusing as you please, the more so, and the more curious, the better. Much trouble is saved by writing them on separate bits of paper, each the half of a quarter of a foolscap sheet—numbering them, and making an index of them; in this manner they are ready for use when they are wanted.“It was some time before I fell unto this system of book-keeping, and I believe no better can be desired. A Welsh triad might comprehend all the rules of style. Say what youhave to say asperspicuouslyas possible, asbrieflyas possible, and asrememberablyas possible, and take no other thought about it. Omit none of those little circumstances which give life to narration, and bring old manners, old feelings, and old times before your eyes.”
“Now then, supposing that you will seriously set about theCrusades, I will give you such directions in the art of historical book-keeping as may save time and facilitate labour.
“Make your writing-books in foolscap quarto, and write on only one side of a leaf; draw a line down the margin, marking off space enough for your references, which should be given at the end of every paragraph; noting page, book, or chapter of the author referred to. This minuteness is nowdemanded, and you will yourself find it useful; for, in transcribing or in correcting proofs, it is often requisite to turn to the original authorities. Take the best author; that is to say, the one that has written most at length of all theoriginalauthors, upon the particular point of time on which you are employed, and draw up your account from him; then, on the opposite page, correct and amplify this from every other who has written on the same subject. This page should be divided into two columns, one of about two-thirds of its breadth, the other the remaining one. You are thus enabled toaddto youradditions.
“One of these books you should have for your geography; that is to say, for collecting descriptions of all the principal scenes of action (which must be done from books of travels), their situation, their strength, their previous history, and in the notes, their present state. [Another book—he adds in a subsequent letter—you must keep for the bibliography of your subject.]
“These descriptions you can insert in their proper places when you transcribe. Thus, also, you should collect accounts of the different tribes and dynasties which you have occasion to mention. In this manner the information which is only to be got at piecemeal, and oftentimes incidentally, when you are looking for something else, is brought together with least trouble, and almost imperceptibly.
“All relative matter not absolutely essential to the subject should go in the form of supplementary notes, and these you may make as amusing as you please, the more so, and the more curious, the better. Much trouble is saved by writing them on separate bits of paper, each the half of a quarter of a foolscap sheet—numbering them, and making an index of them; in this manner they are ready for use when they are wanted.
“It was some time before I fell unto this system of book-keeping, and I believe no better can be desired. A Welsh triad might comprehend all the rules of style. Say what youhave to say asperspicuouslyas possible, asbrieflyas possible, and asrememberablyas possible, and take no other thought about it. Omit none of those little circumstances which give life to narration, and bring old manners, old feelings, and old times before your eyes.”
Winter was Southey’s harvest season. Then for weeks no visitor knocked at Greta Hall, except perhaps Mr. Wordsworth, who had plodded all the way from Rydal on his indefatigable legs. But in summer interruptions were frequent, and Southey, who had time for everything, had time to spare not only for friends but for strangers. The swarm of lakers was, indeed, not what it is now-a-days, but to a studious man it was, perhaps, not less formidable. By Gray’s time the secret of the lakes had been found out; and if the visitors were fewer, they were less swift upon the wing, and their rank or fame often entitled them to particular attention. Coroneted coaches rolled into Keswick, luggage-laden; the American arrived sometimes to make sure that Derwentwater would not be missed out of Lake Michigan, sometimes to see King George’s laureate; and cultured Americans were particularly welcome to Southey. Long-vacation reading-parties from Oxford and Cambridge—known among the good Cumberland folk as the “cathedrals”—made Keswick a resort. Well for them if, provided with an introduction, they were invited to dine at Greta Hall, were permitted to gaze on the choice old Spaniards, and to converse with the laureate’s stately Edith and her learned cousin. Woe to them if, after the entanglements of a Greek chorus or descriptions of the temperate man and the magnanimous man, they sought to restore their tone by a cat-worrying expedition among the cottages of Keswick. Southey’s cheek glowed, his eye darkened and flashed, if he chanced to witness cruelty;some of the Cambridge “cathedrals” who received a letter concerning cats in July, 1834, may still bear the mark of its leaded thong in their moral fibre, and be the better for possessing Southey’s sign-manual.
A young step-child of Oxford visited Keswick in the winter of 1811-12, and sought the acquaintance of the author ofThalaba. Had Southey been as intolerant or as unsympathetic as some have represented him, he could not have endured the society of one so alien in opinion and so outspoken as Shelley. But courtesy, if it were nothing more, was at least part of Southey’s self-respect; his intolerance towards persons was, in truth, towards a certain ideal, a certain group of opinions; when hand touched hand and eye met eye, all intolerance vanished, and he was open to every gracious attraction of character and manner. There was much in Shelley that could not fail to interest Southey; both loved poetry, and both felt the proud, secluded grandeur of Landor’s verse; both loved men, and thought the world wants mending, though their plans of reform might differ. That Shelley was a rebel expelled from Oxford did not shock Southey, who himself had been expelled from Westminster and rejected at Christ Church. Shelley’s opinions were crude and violent, but their spirit was generous, and such opinions held by a youth in his teens generally mean no more than that his brain is working and his heart ardent. Shelley’s rash marriage reminded Southey of another marriage, celebrated at Bristol some fifteen years ago, which proved that rashness is not always folly. The young man’s admiration ofThalabaspoke well for him; and certainly during the earlier weeks of their intercourse there was on Shelley’s part a becoming deference to one so much his superior in years and in learning, deference to one who had achievedmuch while Shelley still only dreamed of achievement. Southey thought he saw in the revolutionary enthusiast an image of his former self. “Here,” he says, “is a man at Keswick who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham.... At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and in the course of a week I expect he will be a Berkeleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good with 6000l.a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me.” There were other differences between Robert Southey and the inconstant star that passed by Greta Hall than that of years. Southey had quickly learned to put a bound to his desires, and within that bound to work out for himself a possession of measureless worth. It seemed to him part of a man’s virtue to adhere loyally to the bond signed for each of us when we enter life. Is our knowledge limited—then let us strive within those limits. Can we never lay hands on the absolute good—then let us cherish the good things that are ours. Do we hold our dearest possessions on a limited tenure—that is hard, but is it not in the bond? How faint a loyalty is his who merely yields obedience perforce! let us rather cast in our will, unadulterated and whole, with that of our divine Leader;sursum corda—there is a heaven above. But Shelley—the nympholeptof some radiant ante-natal sphere—fled through his brief years ever in pursuit of his lost lady of light; and for him loyalty to the bond of life seemed to mean a readiness to forget all things, however cherished, so soon as they had fulfilled their service of speeding him on towards the unattainable. It could not but be that men living under rules so diverse should before long find themselves far asunder. But they parted in 1812 in no spirit of ill-will. Southey was already a state-pensioner and a champion of the party of order in theQuarterly Review; this did not prevent the young apostle of liberty and fraternity from entering his doors, and enjoying Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes. Irish affairs were earnestly discussed; but Southey, who had written generously of Emmett both in his verse and in theQuarterly, could not be hostile to one whose illusions were only over-sanguine; and while the veritable Southey was before Shelley’s eyes, he could not discern the dull hireling, the venomous apostate, the cold-blooded assassin, of freedom conjured up by Byron and others to bear Southey’s name.
Three years later Shelley presented hisAlastorto the laureate, and Southey duly acknowledged the gift. The elder poet was never slow to recognize genius in young men, but conduct was to him of higher importance than genius; he deplored some acts in Shelley’s life which seemed to result directly from opinions professed at Keswick in 1811—opinions then interpreted as no more than the disdain of checks felt by every spirited boy. Southey heard no more from him until a letter came from Pisa inquiring whether Shelley’s former entertainer at Keswick were his recent critic of theQuarterly Review, with added comments, courteous but severe, on Southey’s opinions. The reply was that Southey had not written the paper, andhad never in any of his writings alluded to Shelley in any way. A second letter followed on each side, the elder man pleading, exhorting, warning; the younger justifying himself, and returning to the attack. “There the correspondence ended. On Shelley’s part it was conducted with the courtesy which was natural to him; on mine, in the spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a fellow-creature.”
Much of Southey’s time—his most valued possession—was given to his correspondents. Napoleon’s plan of answering letters, according to Bourrienne, was to let them lie unopened for six weeks, by which time nine out of ten had answered themselves, or had been answered by history. Coleridge’s plan—says De Quincey—was shorter; he opened none, and answered none. To answer all forthwith was the habit of Southey. Thinking doubtless of their differences in such minor moralities of life, Coleridge writes of his brother-in-law:—“Always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while, on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures and inspires all that ease of mind on those around or connected with him, which perfect consistency and (if such a word might be framed) absolutereliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this, too, is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness.” Odd indeed wore some of the communications for which the poet-laureate, the Tory reformer, and the loyal son of the Church was the mark. Now a clergyman writes to furnish him with Scriptural illustrations ofThalaba; now another clergyman favours him with an ingenious parallel between Kehama and Nebuchadnezzar; now some anonymous person seriously urges on Southey his duty of making a new version of the Psalms, and laying it before the King to be approved and appointed to be sung in churches; now a lunatic poet desires his brother to procure for his title-page the names of Messrs. Longman and Rees; now a poor woman, wife to a blind Homer, would have him led carefully to the summit of Parnassus; now a poor French devil volunteers to translateRoderickif the author will have the goodness to send him a copy—even a defective copy—which he pledges himself religiously to return; now a Yankee, who keeps an exhibition at Philadelphia, modestly asks for Southey’s painted portrait, “which is very worthy a place in my collection;” now a herdsman in the vale of Clwyd requests permission to send specimens of prose and verse—his highest ambition is the acquaintance of learned men; now the Rev. Peter Hall begs to inform Southey that he has done more harm to the cause of religion than any writer of the age; now a lover requests him to make an acrostic on the name of a young lady—the lover’s rival has beaten him in writing verses; enclosed is the honorarium. Southey’s amiability at this point gave way; he did not write the acrostic, and the money he spent on blankets for poor women in Keswick. A society for the suppression of albums was proposed by Southey; yet sometimes he was captured in the gracious mood. Samuel Simpson, of Liverpool, begs for a few lines in his handwriting “to fill a vacancy in his collection of autographs, without which his series must remain for ever most incomplete.” The laureate replies:
“Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim,For collecting handwritings have taken a whim,And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made,In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid—That I to your album so gracious would beAs to fill up a page there appointed for me,Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine—They will cost you in postage a penny a line:At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done,One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.”
“Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim,For collecting handwritings have taken a whim,And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made,In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid—That I to your album so gracious would beAs to fill up a page there appointed for me,Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine—They will cost you in postage a penny a line:At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done,One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.”
“Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim,
For collecting handwritings have taken a whim,
And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made,
In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid—
That I to your album so gracious would be
As to fill up a page there appointed for me,
Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine—
They will cost you in postage a penny a line:
At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done,
One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.”
Some of Southey’s distractions were of his own inviting. Soon after his arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems entitledClifton Grove, attracted his attention; its author was an undergraduate of Cambridge. TheMonthly Reviewhaving made the discovery that it rhymed in one placeboyandsky, dismissed the book contemptuously. Southey could not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of promise should be blasted, and he wrote to Henry Kirke White, encouraging him, and offering him help towards a future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heavily on the poor boy’s spirits, and these unexpected words of cheer came with most grateful effect. It soon appeared, however, that Southey’s services must be slight, for his new acquaintance was taken out of his hands by Mr. Simeon, the nursing-father of Evangelicalism. At no time had Southey any leanings towards the Clapham Sect; and so, while he tried to be of use to Kirke White indirectly, their correspondence ceased. When the lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing that he should be altogether forgotten; he wrote offering to look over whatever papers there might be, and to give an opinion on them. “Down came a box-full,” he tells Duppa, “the sight of which literally made my heart ache and my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs of humanindustry. To make short, I took the matter up with interest, collected his letters, and have, at the expense of more time than such a poor fellow as myself can very well afford, done what his family are very grateful for, and what I think the world will thank me for too. Of course I have done it gratuitously.... That I should become, and that voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvinistic letters, is a thing which, when I think of, excites the same sort of smile that the thought of my pension does.” A brief statement that his own views on religion differed widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save Southey’s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated; it was an error which the world has since found time to correct.
This was but one of a series of many instances in which Southey, stemming the pressure of his own engagements, asserted the right to be generous of his time and strength and substance to those who had need of such help as a sound heart and a strong arm can give. William Roberts, a Bristol bank-clerk, dying of consumption at nineteen, left his only possession, some manuscript poems, in trust to be published for the benefit of a sister whom he passionately loved. Southey was consulted, and at once bestirred himself on behalf of the projected volume. Herbert Knowles, an orphan lad at school in Yorkshire, had hoped to go as a sizar to St. John’s; his relations were unable to send him; could he help himself by publishing a poem? might he dedicate it to the laureate? The poem came to Southey, who found it “brimful of power and of promise;” he represented to Herbert the folly of publishing, promised ten pounds himself, and procured from Rogers and Earl Spencer twenty more. Herbert Knowles, in a wise and manly letter, begged that great things might not be expected ofhim; he would not be idle, his University career should be at least respectable:—“Suffice it, then, to say,I thank you from my heart; let time and my future conduct tell the rest.” Death came to arbitrate between his hopes and fears. James Dusautoy, another schoolboy, one of ten children of a retired officer, sent specimens of his verse, asking Southey’s opinion on certain poetical plans. His friends thought the law the best profession for him; how could he make literature help him forward in his profession? Southey again advised against publication, but by a well-timed effort enabled him to enter Emanuel College. Dusautoy, after a brilliant promise, took fever, died, and was buried, in acknowledgment of his character and talents, in the college cloisters. When at Harrogate in the summer of 1827, Southey received a letter, written with much modesty and good feeling, from John Jones, an old serving-man; he enclosed a poem on “The Redbreast,” and would take the liberty, if permitted, to offer other manuscripts for inspection. Touches of true observation and natural feeling in the verses on the little bird with “look oblique and prying head and gentle affability” pleased Southey, and he told his humble applicant to send his manuscript book, warning him, however, not to expect that such poems would please the public—“the time for them was gone by, and whether the public had grown wiser in these matters or not, it had certainly become less tolerant and less charitable.” By procuring subscribers and himself contributing an Introductory Essay on the lives and works of our Uneducated Poets, Southey secured a slender fortune for the worthy old man, who laid the table none the less punctually because he loved Shakespeare and the Psalter, or carried in his head some simple rhymes of his own. It pleased Southey to show how much intellectual pleasure and moralimprovement connected with such pleasure are within reach of the humblest; thus a lesson was afforded to those who would have the March of Intellect beaten only to the tune ofÇa ira. “Before I conclude”—so the Introduction draws to an end—“I must, in my own behalf, give notice to all whom it may concern that I, Robert Southey, Poet-laureate, being somewhat advanced in years, and having business enough of my own fully to occupy as much time as can be devoted to it, consistently with a due regard to health, do hereby decline perusing or inspecting any manuscript from any person whatsoever, and desire that no application on that score may be made to me from this time forth; this resolution, which for most just cause is taken and here notified, being, like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, not to be changed.”
It was some time after this public announcement that a hand, which may have trembled while yet it was very brave and resolute, dropped into the little post-office at Haworth, in Yorkshire, a packet for Robert Southey. His bold truthfulness, his masculine self-control, his strong heart, his domestic temper sweet and venerable, his purity of manners, a certain sweet austerity, attracted to him women of fine sensibility and genius who would fain escape from their own falterings and temerities under the authority of a faithful director. Already Maria del Occidente, “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” had poured into his ear the tale of her slighted love. Newly come from Paris, and full of enthusiasm for the Poles, she hastened to Keswick to see in person her sympathetic adviser; she proved, says Southey, a most interesting person of the mildest and gentlest manners. With him she left, on returning to America, herZophielin manuscript, the publication of which he superintended.“Zophiel, Southey says, is by some Yankee woman”—Charles Lamb breaks forth—“as if there ever had been a woman capable of anything so great!” Now, in 1837, a woman of finer spirit, and capable of higher things thanZophiel, addressed a letter to Robert Southey, asking his judgment of her powers as disclosed in the poems which she forwarded. For some weeks Charlotte Brontë waited, until almost all hope of a reply was lost. At length the verdict came. Charlotte Brontë’s verse was assuredly written with her left hand; her passionate impulses, crossed and checked by fiery fiats of the will, would not mould themselves into little stanzas; the little stanzas must be correct, therefore they must reject such irregular heavings and swift repressions of the heart. Southey’s delay in replying had been caused by absence from home. A little personal knowledge of a poet in the decline of life might have tempered her enthusiasm; yet he is neither a disappointed nor a discontented man; she will never hear from him any chilling sermons on the text. All is vanity; the faculty of verse she possesses in no inconsiderable degree; but this, since the beginning of the century, has grown to be no rare possession; let her beware of making literature her profession, check day-dreams, and find her chief happiness in her womanly duties; then she may write poetry for its own sake, not in a spirit of emulation, not through a passion for celebrity; the less celebrity is aimed at, the more it is likely to be deserved. “Mr. Southey’s letter,” said Charlotte Brontë, many years later, “was kind and admirable, a little stringent, but it did me good.” She wrote again, striving to repress a palpitating joy and pride in the submission to her director’s counsel, and the sacrifice of her cherished hopes; telling him more of her daily life, of her obedience to the day’s duty, her efforts to besensible and sober: “I had not ventured,” she says, “to hope for such a reply—so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.” Once more Southey wrote, hoping that she would let him see her at the Lakes: “You would then think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because you would perceive that there is neither severity nor moroseness in the state of mind to which years and observation have brought me.... And now, madam, God bless you. Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend, Robert Southey.” It was during a visit to the Lakes that Charlotte Brontë told her biographer of these letters. But Southey lay at rest in Crosthwaite churchyard.
“My days among the dead are past”—Southey wrote, but it is evident that the living, and not those of his own household alone, claimed no inconsiderable portion of his time. Indeed, it would not be untrue to assert that few men have been more genuinely and consistently social, that few men ever yielded themselves more constantly to the pleasures of companionship. But the society he loved best was that of old and chosen friends, or if new friends, one at a time, and only one. Next to romping with my children, he said, I enjoy atête-à-têteconversation with anoldfriend or anew. “With one I can talk of familiar subjects which we have discussed in former years, and with the other, if he have any brains, I open what to me is a new mine of thought.” Miscellaneous company to a certain extent disordered and intoxicated him. He felt no temptation to say a great deal, but he would often say things strongly and emphatically, which were better left unsaid. “In my hearty hatred of assentation I commit faults of the opposite kind. Now I am sure to find this out myself, and to get out of humour with myself; what prudence I have is not ready on demand; and so it is thatthe society of any except my friends, though it may be sweet in the mouth, is bitter in the belly.” When Coleridge, in their arguments, allowed him a word, Southey made up in weight for what was wanting in measure; he saw one fact quickly, and darted at it like a greyhound. De Quincey has described his conversation as less flowing and expansive than that of Wordsworth—more apt to clothe itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form; consequently sooner coming to an abrupt close; “the style of his mind naturally prompts him to adopt a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without anylocus penitentiæor privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so.” The same manner, tempered and chastened by years, can be recognized in the picture of Southey drawn by his friend Sir Henry Taylor:—
“The characteristics of his manner, as of his appearance, were lightness and strength, an easy and happy composure as the accustomed mood, and much mobility at the same time, so that he could be readily excited into any degree of animation in discourse, speaking, if the subject moved him much, with extraordinary fire and force, though always in light, laconic sentences. When so moved, the fingers of his right hand often rested against his mouth and quivered through nervous susceptibility. But excitable as he was in conversation, he was never angry or irritable; nor can there be any greater mistake concerning him than that into which some persons have fallen when they have inferred, from the fiery vehemence with which he could give utterance to moral anger in verse or prose, that he was personally ill-tempered or irascible. He was, in truth, a man whom it was hardly possible to quarrel with or offend personally, and face to face.... He was averse from argumentation, and would commonly quit a subject, when it was passing into that shape,with a quiet and good-humoured indication of the view in which he rested. He talked most, and with most interest, about books and about public affairs; less, indeed hardly at all, about the characters and qualities of men in private life, In the society of strangers or of acquaintances, he seemed to take more interest in the subjects spoken of than in the persons present, his manner being that of natural courtesy and general benevolence without distinction of individuals. Had there been some tincture of social vanity in him, perhaps he would have been brought into closer relations with those whom he met in society; but though invariably kind and careful of their feelings, he was indifferent to the manner in which they regarded him, or (as the phrase is) to hiseffectin society; and they might, perhaps, be conscious that the kindness they received was what flowed naturally and inevitably to all, that they had nothing to give in return which was of value to him, and that no individual relations were established.”
“The characteristics of his manner, as of his appearance, were lightness and strength, an easy and happy composure as the accustomed mood, and much mobility at the same time, so that he could be readily excited into any degree of animation in discourse, speaking, if the subject moved him much, with extraordinary fire and force, though always in light, laconic sentences. When so moved, the fingers of his right hand often rested against his mouth and quivered through nervous susceptibility. But excitable as he was in conversation, he was never angry or irritable; nor can there be any greater mistake concerning him than that into which some persons have fallen when they have inferred, from the fiery vehemence with which he could give utterance to moral anger in verse or prose, that he was personally ill-tempered or irascible. He was, in truth, a man whom it was hardly possible to quarrel with or offend personally, and face to face.... He was averse from argumentation, and would commonly quit a subject, when it was passing into that shape,with a quiet and good-humoured indication of the view in which he rested. He talked most, and with most interest, about books and about public affairs; less, indeed hardly at all, about the characters and qualities of men in private life, In the society of strangers or of acquaintances, he seemed to take more interest in the subjects spoken of than in the persons present, his manner being that of natural courtesy and general benevolence without distinction of individuals. Had there been some tincture of social vanity in him, perhaps he would have been brought into closer relations with those whom he met in society; but though invariably kind and careful of their feelings, he was indifferent to the manner in which they regarded him, or (as the phrase is) to hiseffectin society; and they might, perhaps, be conscious that the kindness they received was what flowed naturally and inevitably to all, that they had nothing to give in return which was of value to him, and that no individual relations were established.”
How deep and rich Southey’s social nature was, his published correspondence, some four or five thousand printed pages, tells sufficiently. These letters, addressed, for the most part, to good old friends, are indeed genial, liberal of sympathy, and expecting sympathy in return; pleasantly egotistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with a kind of stringent pathos showing through checks imposed by the wiser and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the treasures of his affection. To lavish upon casual acquaintance the outward and visible signs of friendship seemed to him a profaning of the mystery of manly love. “Your feelings,” he writes to Coleridge, “go naked; I cover mine with a bear-skin; I will not say that you harden yours by your mode, but I am sure that mine are the warmer for their clothing.” With strangers a certain neutral courtesy served to protect his inner self like the low leaves of his own holly-tree:
“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seenWrinkled and keen;No grazing cattle through their prickly roundCan reach to wound;”
“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seenWrinkled and keen;No grazing cattle through their prickly roundCan reach to wound;”
“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;”
but to those of whose goodness and love he was well assured, there were no protecting spines:
“Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”
“Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”
“Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”
“Old friends and old books,” he says, “are the best things that this world affords (I like old wine also), and in these I am richer than most men (the wine excepted).” In the group of Southey’s friends, what first strikes one is, not that they are men of genius—although the group includes Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor—but that they are good men. No one believed more thoroughly than Southey that goodness is a better thing than genius; yet he required in his associates some high excellence, extraordinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral character, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends in a circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his affections time and distance made no change. An old College friend, Lightfoot, to visit Southey, made the longest journey of his life; it was eight-and-twenty years since they had met. When their hands touched, Lightfoot trembled like an aspen-leaf. “I believe,” says Southey, “no men ever met more cordially after so long a separation, or enjoyed each other’s society more. I shall never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor the tone in which he said ‘that, having now seen me, he should return home and die in peace.’” But of all friends he was most at ease with his dear Dapple, Grosvenor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth andsorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad decay, and the once joyous house was melancholy and silent, Southey turned for comfort to Bedford. Still, some of their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all their warmth of brotherly affection. “My father,” says Cuthbert Southey, “was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford’s trumpet.” And in more joyous days, what noise and nonsense did they not make! “Oh! Grosvenor,” exclaims Southey, “is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so cordially and naturally andbonâfidicallyas you and I, should be three hundred miles asunder? For my part, I insist upon it that there is no sense so good as your honest, genuine nonsense.”
A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as we read Southey’s correspondence:—Wynn, wherever he was, “always doing something else,” yet able, in the midst of politics and business, to find time to serve an old schoolfellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accurate knowledge and robust benevolence; John May, unfailing in kindness and fidelity; Lamb for play and pathos, and subtle criticism glancing amid the puns; William Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kindred enthusiasms and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and happy memories; Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities, and warm, womanly services; Caroline Bowles for rarer sympathy and sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor for spiritual sonship, as of a son who is also an equal; and Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and small, glad and sad, wise and foolish.
No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any friendship of Southey. Political and religiousdifferences, which in strangers were causes of grave offence, seemed to melt away when the heretic or erring statist was a friend. But if success, fashion, flattery, tested a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold; and an habitual dereliction of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, could not but transform Southey’s feeling of love to one of condemning sorrow. To his great contemporaries, Scott, Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely given. “Scott,” he writes, “is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, but bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity.... God grant that he may recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall not look upon again.” Of Wordsworth:—“A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor ever will be.” “Two or three generations must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium.” With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt that Ebenezer Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had stepped forward as the lyrist of radicalism; but the feeling could not be altogether anger with which he remembered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield inn, its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expression suiting well with Elliott’s frankness of manner and simplicity of character. William Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house; the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried thethrusts good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor, come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”
In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a public attack on Southey, and that friend the gentlest and sweetest-natured of them all. In aQuarterlyarticle Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a book which wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it was original. He had intended to alter the expression in the proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever sent. Lamb, already pained by references to his writings in theQuarterly, some of which he erroneously ascribed to Southey, was deeply wounded. “He might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights that meant no harm to religion.” A long expostulation addressed by Elia to Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in theLondon Magazinefor October, only a portion of which is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of “The Tombs of the Abbey;” for though Lamb had playfully repented Coleridge’s salutation, “my gentle-hearted Charles,” his heart was indeed gentle, and could not endure the pain of its own wrath; among the memorials of the dead in Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey looked awful on his poor friend, and spends his indignation harmless as summer lightning over the heads of a Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement of letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf of friendly pleasantries; with surprise he learnt what pain his words had caused. He hastened to explain; had Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he would have tried, by a passage in the ensuingQuarterly, to efface theimpression unhappily created; he ended with a declaration of unchanged affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. “On my part,” Southey said, “there was not even a momentary feeling of anger;” he at once understood the love, the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a being so composed of goodness as Elia. “Dear Southey”—runs the answer of Lamb—“the kindness of your note has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow.... I wish both magazine and review were at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so, for this folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see you, however, any day next week. We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.”
At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This was Walter Savage Landor.Madoc, on which Southey had build his hope of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received;Kehama, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment, when heturned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work, he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,” he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talked ofThalaba, and I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer, but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He rose earlier each morning to carry on hisKehama, without abstracting time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section of this poem, and subsequently of hisRoderick, came to be written, it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor, liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself, while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art, on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor, aimed at a classicalpurity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity by sculptured phrase; only the repression of a fiery spirit is more apparent in Landor’s monumental lines than in Southey’s. With certain organic resemblances, and much community of sentiment, there were large differences between the two, so that when they were drawn together in sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new province. Landor rejoiced that the first persons who shared his turret at Llanthony were Southey and his wife; again, in 1817, the two friends were together for three days at Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction—the death of his son:—
“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,And Monte Rosa from Helvetia farAdvanced to meet us, wild in majestyAbove the glittering crests of giant sonsStation’d around ... in vain too! all in vain.”
“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,And Monte Rosa from Helvetia farAdvanced to meet us, wild in majestyAbove the glittering crests of giant sonsStation’d around ... in vain too! all in vain.”
“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;
Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty
Above the glittering crests of giant sons
Station’d around ... in vain too! all in vain.”
Two years later the warm-hearted friend writes from Pistoia, rejoicing in Southey’s joy: “Thank God! Tears came into my eyes on seeing that you were blessed with a son.” To watch the happiness of children was Landor’s highest delight; to share in such happiness was Southey’s; and Arnold and Cuthbert formed a new bond between their fathers. In 1836, when Southey, in his sixty-third year, guided his son through the scenes of his boyhood, several delightful days were spent at Clifton with Landor. I never knew a man of brighter genius or of kinder heart, said Southey; and of Landor in earlier years:—“He does more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for hisvery words are thunder and lightning—such is the power and splendour with which they burst out.” Landor responded with a majestic enthusiasm about his friend, who seemed to him no less noble a man than admirable a writer:
“No firmer breast than thine hath HeavenTo poet, sage, or hero given:No heart more tender, none more just,To that He largely placed in trust:Therefore shalt thou, whatever dateOf years be thine, with soul elateRise up before the Eternal throne,And hear, in God’s own voice, ‘Well done!’”
“No firmer breast than thine hath HeavenTo poet, sage, or hero given:No heart more tender, none more just,To that He largely placed in trust:Therefore shalt thou, whatever dateOf years be thine, with soul elateRise up before the Eternal throne,And hear, in God’s own voice, ‘Well done!’”
“No firmer breast than thine hath Heaven
To poet, sage, or hero given:
No heart more tender, none more just,
To that He largely placed in trust:
Therefore shalt thou, whatever date
Of years be thine, with soul elate
Rise up before the Eternal throne,
And hear, in God’s own voice, ‘Well done!’”
That “Well done” greeted Southey many years before Landor’s imperial head was laid low. In the last letter from his friend received by Southey—already the darkness was fast closing in—he writes, “If any man living is ardent for your welfare, I am; whose few and almost worthless merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite and great faults it has been too ready to overlook. I will write to you often, now I learn that I may do it inoffensively; well remembering that among the names you have exalted is Walter Landor.” Alas! to reply was now beyond the power of Southey; still, he heldGebirin his hands oftener than any other volume of poetry, and, while thought and feeling lived, fed upon its beauty. “It is very seldom now,” Caroline Southey wrote at a later date, “that he ever names any person: but this morning, before he left his bed, I heard him repeating softly to himself,Landor, ay, Landor.”
“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all”—this was ever present to Southey during the happy days of labour and rest in Greta Hall. While he was disposinghis books so as to make the comeliest show, and delighting in their goodly ranks; while he looked into the radiant faces of his children, and loved their innocent brightness, he yet knew that the day of detachment was approaching. There was nothing in such a thought which stirred Southey to a rebellious mood; had he not set his seal to the bond of life? How his heart rested in his home, only his own words can tell; even a journey to London seemed too long:—“Oh dear; oh dear! there is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library—with a little girl climbing up to my neck, and saying, ‘Don’t go to London, papa—you must stay with Edith;’ and a little boy, whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word of his own;—there is such a comfort in all these things, thattransportationto London for four or five weeks seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve.” Nor did his spirit of boyish merriment abate until overwhelming sorrow weighed him down:—“I am quite as noisy as I ever was,” he writes to Lightfoot, “and should take as much delight as ever in showering stones through the hole of the staircase against your room door, and hearing with what hearty good earnest ‘you fool’ was vociferated in indignation against me in return. Oh, dear Lightfoot, what a blessing it is to have a boy’s heart! it is as great a blessing in carrying one through this world, as to have a child’s spirit will be in fitting us for the next.” But Southey’s light-heartedness was rounded by a circle of earnest acquiescence in the law of mortal life; a clear-obscure of faith as pure and calm and grave as the heavens of a midsummer night. At thirty he writes:—“No man was ever more contented with his lot than I am, for fewhave ever had more enjoyments, and none had ever better or worthier hopes. Life, therefore, is sufficiently dear to me, and long life desirable, that I may accomplish all which I design. But yet I could be well content that the next century were over, and my part fairly at an end, having been gone well through. Just as at school one wished the school-days over, though we were happy enough there, because we expected more happiness and more liberty when we were to be our own masters, might lie as much later in the morning as we pleased, have no bounds and do no exercise—just so do I wish that my exercises were over.” At thirty-five:—“Almost the only wish I ever give utterance to is that the next hundred years were over. It is not that the uses of this world seem to me weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable—God knows far otherwise! No man can be better contented with his lot. My paths are paths of pleasantness.... Still, the instability of human happiness is ever before my eyes; I long for the certain and the permanent.” “My notions about life are much the same as they are about travelling—there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after all, one wants to be at rest.” At forty:—“My disposition is invincibly cheerful, and this alone would make me a cheerful man if I were not so from the tenor of my life; yet I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.”
Such was Southey’s constant temper: to some persons it may seem an unfortunate one; to some it may be practically unintelligible. But those who accept of the feast of life freely, who enter with a bounding foot its measures of beauty and of joy—glad to feel all the while the serviceable sackcloth next the skin—will recognize in Southey an instructed brother of the Renunciauts’ rule.
In October, 1805, Southey started with his friend Elmsley for a short tour in Scotland. On their way northward they stopped three days at Ashestiel. There, in a small house, rising amid its old-fashioned garden, with pastoral hills all around, and the Tweed winding at the meadow’s end, lived Walter Scott. It was the year in which old Border song had waked up, with ampler echoings, in theLay of the Last Minstrel, and Scott was already famous. Earlier in the year he had visited Grasmere, and had stood upon the summit of Helvellyn, with Wordsworth and Davy by his side. The three October days, with their still, misty brightness, went by in full enjoyment. Southey had brought with him a manuscript containing sundry metrical romances of the fifteenth century, on which his host pored, as far as courtesy and the hours allowed, with much delight; and the guests saw Melrose, that old romance in stone so dear to Scott, went salmon-spearing on the Tweed, dined on a hare snapped up before their eyes by Percy and Douglas, and visited Yarrow. From Ashestiel they proceeded to Edinburgh. Southey looked coldly on the grey metropolis; its new city seemed a kind of Puritan Bath, which worshipped propriety instead of pleasure; but the old town, seen amid the slant light of a wildred sunset, impressed him much, its vast irregular outline of roofs and chimneys rising against tumultuous clouds like the dismantled fragments of a giant’s palace. Southey was prepared to find himself and his friends of the Lakes persons of higher stature than the Scotchliteratuli. Before accepting an invitation to meet him at supper, Jeffrey politely forwarded the proof of an unpublished review ofMadoc; if the poet preferred that his reviewer should not present himself, Mr. Jeffrey would deny himself the pleasure of Mr. Southey’s acquaintance. Southey was not to be daunted, and, as he tells it himself, felt nothing but good-humour on beholding a bright-faced homunculus of five-foot-one, the centre of an attentive circle, ëënunciating with North-British ëëlocution his doctrines on taste. The lively little gentleman, who thought to crushThe Excursion—he could as easily crush Skiddaw, said Southey—received from the author ofMadoca courtesyde haut en basintended to bring home to his consciousness the fact that he was—but five-foot-one. The bland lips of the gods who looked down on Auld Reekie that evening smiled at the magnanimity alike of poet and critic.
Two years later (1807), differences having arisen between the proprietors and the editor of theEdinburgh Review, it was in contemplation to alter the management, and Longman wrote requesting Southey to review him two or three articles “in his best manner.” Southey did not keep firkins of criticism of first and second brand, but he was not unwilling to receive ten guineas a sheet instead of seven pounds. When, however, six months later, Scott urged his friend to contribute, Judge Jeffrey still sat on the bench of theEdinburgh Review, hanging, drawing, and quartering luckless poets with undiminished vivacity. Itwas of no use for Scott to assure Southey that the homunculus, notwithstanding his flippant attacks onMadocandThalaba, had the most sincere respect for their author and his talents. Setting all personal feelings aside, an irreconcilable difference, Southey declared, between Jeffrey and himself upon every great principle of taste, morality, and policy, occasioned a difficulty which could not be removed. Within less than twelve months Scott, alienated by the deepening Whiggery of theReview, and by more personal causes, had ceased to contribute, and opposite his name in the list of subscribers Constable had written, with indignant notes of exclamation, “Stopt!!!” John Murray, the young bookseller in Fleet Street, had been to Ashestiel; in “dern privacie” a bold complot was laid; why should the Edinburgh clique carry it before them? The spirit of England was still sound, and would respond to loyalty, patriotism, the good traditions of Church and State, the temper of gentlemen, courage, scholarship; Gifford, of the Anti-Jacobin, had surely a sturdier arm than Jeffrey; George Ellis would remember his swashing-blow; there were the Roses, and Matthias, and Heber; a rivalReviewshould see the light, and that speedily; “a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation—an excellent plot, very good friends.”
Southey was invited to write on Spanish affairs for the first number of theQuarterly(February, 1809). His political opinions had undergone a considerable alteration since the days of Pantisocracy andJoan of Arc. The Reign of Terror had not caused a violent reaction against the doctrine of a Republic, nor did he soon cease to sympathize with France. But his hopes were dashed; it was plain that “the millennium would not come this bout.” Man as he is appeared more greedy, ignorant, and dangerousthan he had appeared before, though man as he may be was still a being composed of knowledge, virtue, and love. The ideal republic receded into the dimness of unborn time; no doubt—so Southey maintained to the end—a republic is the best form of government in itself, as a sundial is simpler and surer than a time-piece; but the sun of reason does not always shine, and therefore complicated systems of government, containing checks and counter-checks, are needful in old countries for the present; better systems are no doubt conceivable—for better men. “Mr. Southey’s mind,” wrote Hazlitt, “is essentially sanguine, even to overweeningness. It is prophetic of good; it cordially embraces it; it casts a longing, lingering look after it, even when it is gone for ever. He cannot bear to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his fellow-men, when all else despair. It is the very element where he must live or have no life at all.’” This is true; we sacrifice too much to prudence—Southey said, when not far from sixty—and in fear of incurring the danger or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulses of the understanding and the heart. Still, at sixty he believed in a state of society actually to be realized as superior to English society in the nineteenth century, as that itself is superior to the condition of the tattooed Britons, or of the Northern Pirates from whom we have descended. But the error of supposing such a state of society too near, of fancying that there is a short road to it, seemed to him a pernicious error, seducing the young and generous into an alliance with whatever is flagitious and detestable.
It was not until the Peace of Amiens (1802) that Southey was restored in feeling to his own country. From that hour the new departure in his politics may besaid to date. The honour of England became as dear to him as to her most patriotic son; and in the man who had subjugated the Swiss Republic, and thrown into a dungeon the champion of Negro independence, and slaughtered his prisoners at Jaffa, he indignantly refused to recognize the representative of the generous principles of 1789. To him, as to Wordsworth, the very life of virtue in mankind seemed to dwell in the struggle against the military despotism which threatened to overwhelm the whole civilized world. Whatever went along with a spirited war-policy Southey could accept. It appeared to himself that his views and hopes had changed precisely because the heart and soul of his wishes had continued the same. To remove the obstacles which retard the improvement of mankind was the one object to which, first and last, he gave his most earnest vows. “This has been the pole-star of my course; the needle has shifted according to the movements of the state vessel wherein I am embarked, but the direction to which it points has always been the same. I did not fall into the error of those who, having been the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the Republic to the Military Tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the progress of oppression because France was the oppressor. ‘They had turned their face toward the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking eastward, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there.’ I, on the contrary altered my position as the world went round.”[9]
Wordsworth has described in memorable words the sudden exaltation of the spirit of resistance to Napoleon,its change from the temper of fortitude to enthusiasm, animated by hope, when the Spanish people rose against their oppressors. “From that moment,” he says, “this corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” Southey had learned to love the people of the Peninsula; he had almost naturalized himself among them by his studies of Spanish and Portuguese history and literature. Now there was in him a new birth of passion at a period of life when ordinarily the crust of custom begins to encase our free spirits. All his moral ardour flowed in the same current with his political enthusiasm; in this war there was as direct a contest between the principles of evil and good as the elder Persians or the Manicheans imagined in their fables. “Since the stirring day of the French Revolution,” he writes to John May, “I have never felt half so much excitement in political events as the present state of Spain has given me.” Little as he liked to leave home, if the Spaniards would bury their crown and sceptre, he would gird up his loins and assist at the ceremony, devout as ever pilgrim at Compostella. A federal republic which should unite the Peninsula, and allow the internal governments to remain distinct, was what Southey ardently desired. When news came of the Convention of Cintra (1808), the poet, ordinarily so punctual a sleeper, lay awake all night; since the execution of the Brissotines no public event distressed him so deeply. “How gravely and earnestly used Samuel Taylor Coleridge”—so writes Coleridge’s daughter—“and William Wordsworth and my uncle Southey also, to discuss the affairs of the nation, as if it all came home to their business and bosoms, as if it were their private concern! Men do not canvass these matters now-a-days, I think, quite in the same tone.”
That faith in the ultimate triumph of good which sustains Southey’s heroine against the persecution of the Almighty Rajah, sustained Southey himself during the long struggle with Napoleon. A military despotism youthful and full of vigour, he said, must beat down corrupt establishments and worn-out governments; but how can it beat down for ever a true love of liberty and a true spirit of patriotism? When at last tidings reached Keswick that the Allies were in Paris, Southey’s feelings were such as he had never experienced before. “The curtain had fallen after a tragedy of five-and-twenty years.” The hopes, and the ardours, and the errors, and the struggles of his early life crowded upon his mind; all things seemed to have worked together for good. He rejoiced that the whirlwind of revolution had cleared away the pestilence of the old governments; he rejoiced that right had conquered might. He did not wish to see the bad Bourbon race restored, except to complete Bonaparte’s overthrow. And he feared lest an evil peace should be made. Paris taken, a commanding intellect might have cast Europe into whatever mould it pleased. “The first business,” says Southey, with remarkable prevision, “should have been to have reduced France to what she was before Louis XIV.’s time; the second, to have created a great power in the North of Germany, with Prussia at its head; the third, to have consolidated Italy into one kingdom or commonwealth.”
The politicians of theEdinburgh Reviewhad predicted ruin for all who dared to oppose the Corsican; they ridiculed the romantic hopes of the English nation; the fate of Spain, they declared in 1810, was decided; it would be cruel, they said, to foment petty insurrections; France had conquered Europe. It was this policy of despair which roused Scott and Southey. “We shall hoist the bloodyflag,” writes the latter, “down alongside that Scotch ship, and engage her yard-arm to yard-arm.” But at first Southey, by his own request, was put upon other work than that of firing off the heavyQuarterlyguns. Probably no man in England had read so many books of travel; these he could review better, he believed, than anything else; biography and history were also within his reach; with English poetry, from Spenser onwards, his acquaintance was wide and minute, but he took no pleasure in sitting in judgment on his contemporaries; his knowledge of the literary history of Spain and Portugal was a speciality, which, as often as the readers of theReviewcould bear with it, might be brought into use. Two things he could promise without fail—perfect sincerity in what he might write, without the slightest pretension of knowledge which he did not possess, and a punctuality not to be exceeded by Mr. Murray’s opposite neighbour, the clock of St. Dunstan’s.
Southey’s essays—literary, biographical, historical, and miscellaneous—would probably now exist in a collected form, and constitute a store-house of information—information often obtained with difficulty, and always conveyed in a lucid and happy style—were it not that he chose, on the eve of the Reform Bill, to earn whatever unpopularity he could by collecting his essays on political and social subjects. Affairs had hurried forward with eager strides; theseQuarterlyarticles seemed already far behind, and might safely be left to take a quiet corner in Time’s wallet among the alms for oblivion. Yet Southey’s political articles had been effective in their day, and have still a value by no means wholly antiquarian. His home politics had been, in the main, determined by his convictions on the great European questions. There was a party of revolution in this country eager to break with the past,ready to venture every experiment for a future of mere surmise. Southey believed that the moral sense of the English people, their regard for conduct, would do much to preserve them from lawless excess; still, the lesson read by recent history was that order once overthrown, anarchy follows, to be itself quelled by the lordship of the sword. Rights, however, were pleaded—shall we refuse to any man the rights of a man? “Therapeutics,” says Southey, “were in a miserable state as long as practitioners proceeded upon the gratuitous theory of elementary complexions; ... natural philosophy was no better, being a mere farrago of romance, founded upon idle tales or fanciful conjectures, not upon observation and experiment. The science of politics is just now in the same stage; it has been erected by shallow sophists upon abstract rights and imaginary compacts, without the slightest reference to habits and history.” “Order and improvement” were the words inscribed on Southey’s banner. Order, that England might not fall, as France had fallen, into the hands of a military saviour of society; order, that she might be in a condition to wage her great feud on behalf of freedom with undivided energy. Order, therefore, first; not by repression alone—though there were a time and a place for repression also—but order with improvement as a portion of its very life and being. Southey was a poet and a moralist, and judged of the well-being of a people by other than material standards; the wealth of nations seemed to him something other and higher than can be ascertained by wages and prices, rent and revenue, exports and imports. “True it is,” he writes, “the ground is more highly cultivated, the crooked hedge-rows have been thrown down, the fields are in better shape and of handsomer dimensions, the plough makes longer furrows, there is more cornand fewer weeds; but look at the noblest produce of the earth—look at the children of the soil, look at the seeds which are sown here for immortality!” “The system which produces the happiest moral effects will be found the most beneficial to the interest of the individual and the general weal; upon this basis the science of political economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes with which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their own weight into the dead sea of oblivion.” Looking about him, he asked, What do the English people chiefly need? More wealth? It may be so; but rather wisdom to use the wealth they have. More votes? Yes, hereafter; but first the light of knowledge, that men may see how to use a vote. Even the visible beauty and grace of life seemed to Southey a precious thing, the loss of which might be set over against some gain in pounds, shillings, and pence. The bleak walls and barrack-like windows of a manufactory, the long, unlovely row of operatives’ dwellings, struck a chill into his heart. He contrasts the old cottages substantially built of native stone, mellowed by time, taken by nature to herself with a mother’s fondness, the rose-bushes beside the door, the little patch of flower-garden—he contrasts these with the bald deformities in which the hands of a great mill are stalled.
Before all else, national education appeared to Southey to be the need of England. He saw a great population growing up with eager appetites, and consciousness of augmented power. Whence were moral thoughtfulness and self-restraint to come? Not, surely, from the triumph of liberal opinions; not from the power to read every incentive to vice and sedition; nor from Religious Tract societies; nor from the portentous bibliolatry of the Evangelical party. But there is an education which atonce enlightens the understanding and trains the conscience and the will. And there is that great association for making men good—the Church of England. Connect the two—education and the Church; the progress of enlightenment, virtue, and piety, however gradual, will be sure. Subordinate to this primary measure of reform, national education, many other measures were advocated by Southey. He looked forward to a time when, the great struggle respecting property over—for this struggle he saw looming not far off—public opinion will no more tolerate the extreme of poverty in a large class of the people than it now tolerates slavery in Europe; when the aggregation of land in the hands of great owners must cease, when that community of lands, which Owen of Lanark would too soon anticipate, might actually be realized. But these things were, perhaps, far off. Meanwhile how to bring nearer the golden age? Southey’s son has made out a long list of the measures urged upon the English people in theQuarterly Review, or elsewhere, by his father. Bearing in mind that the proposer of these measures resisted the Reform Bill, Free Trade, and Catholic Emancipation, any one curious in such things may determine with what political label he should be designated:—National education; the diffusion of cheap and good literature; a well-organized system of colonization, and especially of female emigration;[10]a wholesome training for the children of misery and vice in great cities; the establishment of Protestant sisters of charity, and a better order of hospitalnurses; the establishment of savings-banks in all small towns; the abolition of flogging in the army and navy, except in extreme cases; improvements in the poor-laws; alterations in the game-laws; alterations in the criminal laws, as inflicting the punishment of death in far too many cases; execution of criminals within prison walls; alterations in the factory system for the benefit of the operative, and especially as to the employment of children; national works—reproductive if possible—to be undertaken in times of peculiar distress; the necessity of doing away with interments in crowded cities; the system of giving allotments of ground to labourers; the employment of paupers in cultivating waste lands; the commutation of tithes; and last, the need for more clergymen, more colleges, more courts of law.
“Mr. Southey,” said Hazlitt, “missed his way in Utopia; he has found it at old Sarum.” To one of Southey’s temper old Sarum seemed good, with its ordered freedom, its serious aspiration, its habitual pieties, its reasonable service, its reverent history, its beauty of holiness, its close where priests who are husbands and fathers live out their calm, benignant lives—its amiable home for those whose toil is ended, and who now sleep well. But how Southey found his way from his early deism to Anglican orthodoxy cannot be precisely determined. Certainly not for many years could he have made that subscription to the Articles of the Church of England, which at the first barred his way to taking orders. The superstition, which seemed to be the chief spiritual food of Spain, had left Southey, for the rest of his life, a resolute opponent of Catholicism; and as he read lives of the Saints and histories of the Orders, the exclamation, “I do well to be angry,” was often on his lips. For the wisdom, learning,and devotion of the Jesuits he had, however, a just respect. Geneva, with its grim logic and stark spirituality, suited nerves of a different temper from his. For a time Southey thought himself half a Quaker, but he desired more visible beauty and more historical charm than he could find in Quakerism. Needing a comely home for his spiritual affections, he found precisely what pleased him built in the pleasant Anglican close. With growing loyalty to the State, his loyalty to the Church could not but keep pace. He loved her tolerance, her culture; he fed upon her judicious and learned writers—Taylor, with his bright fancies like the little rings of the vine; South, hitting out straight from the shoulder at anarchy, fanaticism, and licentiousness, as Southey himself would have liked to hit; Jackson, whose weight of character made his pages precious as with golden bullion. After all, old Sarum had some advantages over Utopia.
The English Constitution consisting of Church and State, it seemed to Southey an absurdity in politics to give those persons power in the State whose duty it is to subvert the Church. Admit Catholics, he said, to every office of trust, emolument, or honour; only never admit them into Parliament. “The arguments about equal rights are fit only for a schoolboy’s declamation; it may as well be said that the Jew has a right to be a bishop, or the Quaker an admiral, as that the Roman Catholic has a right to a seat in the British Legislature; his opinions disqualify him.” To call this a question of toleration was impudence; Catholics were free to practise the rites of their religion; they had the full and free use of the press; perfect toleration was granted to the members of that church which, wherever dominant, tolerates no other. Catholic Emancipation would not conciliate Ireland; the greatsource of Irish misery had been, not England’s power, but her weakness, and those violences to which weakness resorts in self-defence; old sores were not to be healed by the admission of Catholic demagogues into Parliament. The measure styled Emancipation would assuredly be followed by the downfall of the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and by the spread of Catholicism in English society. To Pyrrhonists one form of faith might seem as good or as bad as the other; but the great mass of the English people had not advanced so far in the march of intellect as to perceive no important difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, or between Catholic and Protestant morality. By every possible means, better the condition of the Irish peasantry; give them employment in public works; facilitate, for those who desire it, the means of emigration; extend the poor-laws to Ireland, and lay that impost on absentees in such a proportion as may compensate, in some degree, for their non-residence; educate the people; execute justice and maintain peace, and the cry of Catholic Emancipation may be safely disregarded.