English Lands Letters and Kings 3

English Lands Letters and Kings 3

And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment,

runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats;

and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war--which young people

know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”--wherein old Kaspar

says,--

 

“it was a shocking sight

After the field was won;

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun.

But things like that, you know, must be,

After a famous Victory.

 

Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won

And our good Prince Eugene;

‘Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!’

Said little Wilhelmine.

‘Nay--nay--my little girl,’ quoth he,

‘It was a famous Victory.’”

 

Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other,

about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many

“collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not,

some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson,

which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the

romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not

know, but--with most people--a surer and more lasting memory of Southey

would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named,

and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes

of Cumberland--tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household

committed to his care--than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the

louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.

 

 

_His Early Life._

 

To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born

down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember,

Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)--he was the son of a

broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt--a

starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp--could and did befriend him,

until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting

emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl

of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.

 

An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to

Oxford--would have had him take orders--in which case we should have had,

of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one.

But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by

intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every atom

of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however,

accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions

there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of

Portugal--which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls

in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his

notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to

think “has some merit.”

 

Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and

thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other

such. He is described at that day as tall--a most presentable man--with

dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said;

looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he

has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan

of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully

dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of _Thalaba_,

the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the

others being the _Curse of Kehama_ and _Madoc_). They are rarely heard of

now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from _Kehama_, beginning

 

“They sin who tell us Love can die,”

 

hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into

those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet

no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems

of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright

fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and

Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special

knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is

utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold--however it may

attract by its glitter--as the dead hand

 

“Shrivelled, and dry, and black,”

 

which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of _Thalaba_.

 

A fourth long poem--written much later in life--_Roderick the Goth_, has a

more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to

popular interest; but it had never a marked success.

 

Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been

peregrinations, and huntings for a home--for children and books must have

a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good

political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and

blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron’s

boys--which also comes into the scale of his duties--so gives up that

chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his

wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining

leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales

of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went

out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to

settlement, somewhere about 1803--in that Keswick home, where we found him

at the opening of our chapter.

 

 

_Greta Hall._

 

Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away

to Grasmere--to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained,

disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey

does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much

brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts;

he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish

appointment--“as if,” he said, “the author of _Joan of Arc_, and of

_Thalaba_, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the

Exchequer.”

 

Yet for that poem of _Thalaba_, in a twelve-month after issue, he had only

received as his share of profits a matter of £3 15s. Indeed, Southey would

have fared hardly money-wise in those times, if he had not won the favor

of a great many good and highly placed friends; and it was only four years

after his establishment at Keswick, when these friends succeeded in

securing to him an annual Government pension of £200. Landor had possibly

aided him before this time; he certainly had admired greatly his poems and

given praise that would have been worth more, if he had not spoiled it by

rating Southey as a poet so much above Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.[4]

 

In addition to these aids the _Quarterly Review_ was set afoot in those

days in London--of which sturdy defender of Church and State, Southey soon

became a virtual pensioner. Moreover, with his tastes, small moneys went a

long way; he was methodical to the last degree; he loved his old coats and

habits; he loved his marches and countermarches among the hills that

flank Skiddaw better than he loved horses, or dogs, or guns; a quiet

evening in his library with his books, was always more relished than ever

so good a place at Drury Lane. New friends and old brighten that

retirement for him. He has his vacation runs to Edinboro’--to London--to

Bristol; the children are growing (though there is death of one little

one--away from home); the books are piling up in his halls in bigger and

always broader ranks. He writes of Brazil, of Spanish matters, of new

poetry, of Nelson, of Society--showing touches of his early radicalism,

and of a Utopian humor, which age and the heavy harness of conventionalism

he has learned to wear, do not wholly destroy. He writes of Wesley and of

the Church--settled in those maturer years into a comfortable

routine-ordered Churchism, which does not let too airy a conscience prick

him into unrest. A good, safe monarchist, too, who comes presently, and

rightly enough--through a suggestion of George IV., then Regent in place

of crazy George III.[5]--by his position as Poet Laureate; and in that

capacity writes a few dismally stiff odes, which are his worst work. Even

Wordsworth, who walks over those Cumberland hills with reverence, and with

a pious fondness traces the “star-shaped shadows on the naked

stones”--cannot warm to Southey’s new gush over royalty in his New Year’s

Odes. Coleridge chafes; and Landor, we may be sure, sniffs, and swears,

with a great roar of voice, at what looks so like to sycophancy.

 

To this time belongs that ode whose vengeful lines, after the fall of

Napoleon, whip round the Emperor’s misdeeds in a fury of Tory Anglicanism,

and call on France to avenge her wrongs:--

 

“By the lives which he hath shed,

By the ruin he hath spread,

By the prayers which rise for curses on his head--

Redeem, O France, thine ancient fame!

Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!

Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!

Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!”

 

This seems to me only the outcry of a tempestuous British scold; and yet a

late eulogist has the effrontery to name it in connection with the great

prayerful burst of Milton upon the massacre of the Waldenses:--

 

“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.”

 

No, no; Southey was no Milton--does not reach to the height of an echo of

Milton.

 

Yet he was a rare and accomplished man of books--of books rather than

genius, I think. An excellent type of the very clever and well-trained

professional writer, working honestly and steadily in the service to which

he has put himself. Very politic, too, in his personal relations. Even

Carlyle--for a wonder--speaks of him without lacerating him.

 

In a certain sense he was not insincere; yet he had none of that

out-spoken exuberant sincerity which breaks forth in declaratory speech,

before the public time-pieces have told us how to pitch our voices.

Landor had this: so had Coleridge. Southey never would have run away from

his wife--never; he might dislike her; but Society’s great harness (if

nothing more) would hold him in check; there were conditions under which

Coleridge might and did. Southey would never over-drink or over-tipple;

there were conditions (not rare) under which Coleridge might and did. Yet,

for all this, I can imagine a something finer in the poet of the _Ancient

Mariner_--that felt moral chafings far more cruelly; and for real poetic

unction you might put _Thalaba_, and _Kehama_, and _Madoc_ all in one

scale, and only _Christabel_ in the other--and the Southey poems would be

bounced out of sight. But how many poets of the century can put a touch to

verse like the touch in _Christabel_?

 

 

_The Doctor and Last Shadows._

 

I cannot forbear allusion to that curious book--little read now--which was

published by Southey anonymously, called _The Doctor_:[6] a book showing

vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning--full of quips, and

conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais;

but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle;

and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You

may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom;

wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any

effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power. Yet he had

great pride in this book; believed it would be read admiringly long after

him; enjoyed vastly a boyish dalliance--if not a lying by-play--with the

secret of its authorship; but he was, I think, greatly aggrieved by its

want of the brilliant success he had hoped for.