English Lands Letters and Kings 4

English Lands Letters and Kings 4

But sorrows of a more grievous sort were dawning on him. On the very year

before the publication of the first volumes of _The Doctor_, he writes to

his old friend, Bedford: “I have been parted from my wife by something

worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I have

left her this day in a lunatic asylum.”

 

But she comes back within a year--quiet, but all beclouded; looking

vacantly upon the faces of the household, saddened, and much thinned now.

For the oldest boy Herbert is dead years since; and the daughter, Isabel,

“the most radiant creature (he says) that I ever beheld, or shall

behold”--dead too; his favorite niece, Sara Coleridge, married and gone;

his daughter Edith, married and gone; and now that other Edith--his

wife--looking with an idle stare around the almost empty house. It was at

this juncture, when all but courage seemed taken from him, that Sir Robert

Peel wrote, offering the poet a Baronetcy; but he was beyond taking heart

from any such toy as this. He must have felt a grim complacency--now that

his hair was white and his shoulders bowed by weight of years and toil,

and his home so nearly desolate--in refusing the empty bauble which

Royalty offered, and in staying--plain Robert Southey.

 

Presently thereafter his wife died; and he, whose life had been such a

domestic one, strayed round the house purposeless, like a wheel spinning

blindly--off from its axle. Friends, however, took him away with them to

Paris; among these friends--that always buoyant and companionable Crabb

Robinson, whose diary is so rich in reminiscences of the literary men of

these times. Southey’s son Cuthbert went with him, and the poet made a

good mock of enjoying the new scenes; plotted great work again--did labor

heartily on his return, and two years thereafter committed the

indiscretion of marrying again: the loneliness at Keswick was so great.

The new mistress he had long known and esteemed; and she (Miss Caroline

Bowles) was an excellent, kindly, judicious woman--although a poetess.

 

But it was never a festive house again. All the high lights in that home

picture which was set between Skiddaw and the Derwent-water were blurred.

Wordsworth, striding across the hills by Dunmail Rise, on one of his rare

visits, reports that Southey is all distraught; can talk of nothing but

his books; and presently--counting only by months--it appears that he will

not even talk of these--will talk of nothing. His handwriting, which had

been neat--of which he had been proud--went all awry in a great scrawl

obliquely athwart the page. For a year or two he is in this lost trail;

mumbling, but not talking; seeing things--yet as one who sees not;

clinging to those loved books of his--fondling them; passing up and down

the library to find this or the other volume that had been carefully

cherished--taking them from their shelves; putting his lips to them--then

replacing them;--a year or more of this automatic life--the light in him

all quenched.

 

He died in 1843, and was buried in the pretty church-yard of Crosthwaite,

a short mile away from his old home. Within the church is a beautiful

recumbent figure of the poet, which every traveller should see.

 

 

_Crabb Robinson._

 

I had occasion to name Crabb Robinson[7] as one of the party accompanying

Southey on his last visit to the Continent. Robinson was a man whom it is

well to know something of, by reason of his Boswellian _Reminiscences_,

and because--though of comparatively humble origin--he grew to be an

excellent type of the well-bred, well-read club-man of his day--knowing

everybody who was worth knowing, from Mrs. Siddons to Walter Scott, and

talking about everybody who was worth talking of, from Louis Phillippe to

Mrs. Barbauld.

 

He was quick, of keen perception--always making the most of his

opportunities; had fair schooling; gets launched somehow upon an

attorney’s career, to which he never took with great enthusiasm. He was an

apt French scholar--passed four or five years, too, studying in Germany;

his assurance and intelligence, aptitude, and good-nature bringing him to

know almost everybody of consequence. He is familiar with Madame de

Staël--hob-nobs with many of the great German writers of the early part of

this century--is for a time correspondent of the _Times_ from the Baltic

and Stockholm; and from Spain also, in the days when Bonaparte is raging

over the Continent. He returns to London, revives old acquaintances, and

makes new ones; knows Landor and Dyer and Campbell; is hail fellow--as

would seem--with Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Lady Blessington; falls

into some helpful legacies; keeps lazily by his legal practice; husbands

his resources, but never marries; pounces upon every new lion of the day;

hears Coleridge lecture; hears Hazlitt lecture; hears Erskine plead, and

goes to play whist and drink punch with the Lambs. He was full of

anecdote, and could talk by the hour. Rogers once said to his guests who

were prompt at breakfast: “If you’ve anything to say, you’d better say it;

Crabb Robinson is coming.” He talked on all subjects with average

acuteness, and more than average command of language, and little graceful

subtleties of social speech--but with no special or penetrative analysis

of his subject-matter. The very type of a current, popular, well-received

man of the town--good at cards--good at a club dinner--good at

supper--good in travel--good for a picnic--good for a lady’s tea-fight.

 

He must have written reams on reams of letters. The big books of his

_Diary and Reminiscences_[8] which I commend to you for their amusing and

most entertaining gossip, contained only a most inconsiderable part of his

written leavings.

 

He took admirable care of himself; did not permit exposure to draughts--to

indigestions, or to bad company of any sort. Withal he was charitable--was

particular and fastidious; always knew the best rulings of society about

ceremony, and always obeyed; never wore a dress-coat counter to good form.

He was an excellent listener--especially to people of title; was a

judicious flatterer--a good friend and a good fellow; dining out five days

in the week, and living thus till ninety: and if he had lived till now, I

think he would have died--dining out.

 

Mr. Robinson was not very strong in literary criticism. I quote a bit from

his _Diary_, that will show, perhaps as well as any, his method and range.

It is dated _June 6, 1812_:

 

“Sent _Peter Bell_ to Chas. Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like

it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative--as if that were

not the _art_ of the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts,

but has left them out here. [And then continues in his own person.]

In the perplexity arising from the diverse judgments of those to

whom I am accustomed to look up, I have no resource but in the

determination to disregard all opinions, and trust to the simple

impression made on my own mind. When Lady Mackintosh was once

stating to Coleridge her disregard of the beauties of nature, which

men commonly affect to admire, he said his friend Wordsworth had

described her feeling, and quoted three lines from ‘_Peter Bell_:’

 

‘A primrose by a river brim

‘A yellow primrose was to him,

‘And it was nothing more.’

 

“‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh--‘that is precisely my case.’”

 

 

_Thomas De Quincey._

 

On the same page of that _Diary_--where I go to verify this quotation--is

this entry:

 

“At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9] who

was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage

in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His

person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are

those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10]

 

Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly

looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do

merchant there--whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and

whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew

him;--remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country

house--pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage--came

to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was

of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color

here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with

her about the Bath school--where he is taught--she having moved into

Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to

know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his

mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of

George III.--gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)--and is

again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much

at odds here, that he takes the bit fairly in his mouth, and runs away

with _Euripides_ in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in

Wales--gypsy-like--and from there strikes across country blindly to

London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance

money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a

depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which

in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those

depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in

Oxford.

 

Quiet and studious here at first--he is represented as a rare talker, a

little given to wine--writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others,

who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug

which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford

career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London

streets again--evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to

Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer

worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Always shy, but earnest; most

interesting to strangers--with his pale face, high brow and lightning

glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that

somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by

good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed

the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!

 

So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere--in the

cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter--once occupied by

Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of

the hills--scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books--studies

the mountains--provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s

daughters--lives there a bachelor, eight years or more--ranging round and

round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the _Noctes

Ambrosianæ_)--cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived

nearby)--studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and

finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his

sensibilities are kept wrought to fever heat by the opiate drinks--always

flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish

drafts, that--on some occasions--he actually consumes within the

twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum!

No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in

those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the

pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.