THE LAKE POETS: SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE[137]
[137] From _Tait's Magazine_ for August 1839. See explanation in
Preface to this volume.--M.
A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to every eye the
characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would
not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the insignificant
place and consideration allowed to the small book-collection of the
former, contrasted with the splendid library of the latter. The two
or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely,
painted book-case, fixed into one of two shallow recesses, formed on
each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the
little sitting-room up stairs which he had already described as his
half kitchen and half parlour. They were ill bound, or not bound at
all--in boards, sometimes in tatters; many were imperfect as to the
number of volumes, mutilated as to the number of pages; sometimes,
where it seemed worth while, the defects being supplied by manuscript;
sometimes not: in short, everything showed that the books were for use,
and not for show; and their limited amount showed that their possessor
must have independent sources of enjoyment to fill up the major part
of his time. In reality, when the weather was tolerable, I believe
that Wordsworth rarely resorted to his books (unless, perhaps, to some
little pocket edition of a poet which accompanied him in his rambles)
except in the evenings, or after he had tired himself by walking. On
the other hand, Southey's collection occupied a separate room, the
largest, and every way the most agreeable in the house; and this room
was styled, and not ostentatiously (for it really merited that name),
the Library. The house itself, Greta Hall, stood upon a little eminence
(as I have before mentioned), overhanging the river Greta. There was
nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements. In all respects it
was a very plain, unadorned family dwelling: large enough, by a little
contrivance, to accommodate two, or, in some sense, three families,
viz. Mr. Southey and _his_ family, Mr. Coleridge and _his_, together
with Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to
compose a third. Mrs. Coleridge, Mrs. Southey, and Mrs. Lovell were
sisters; all having come originally from Bristol; and, as the different
sets of children in this one house had each three several aunts, all
the ladies, by turns, assuming that relation twice over, it was one
of Southey's many amusing jests, to call the hill on which Greta Hall
was placed the _ant-hill_. Mrs. Lovell was the widow of Mr. Robert
Lovell, who had published a volume of poems, in conjunction with
Southey, somewhere about the year 1797, under the signatures of Bion
and Moschus. This lady, having only one son, did not require any large
suite of rooms; and the less so, as her son quitted her at an early
age, to pursue a professional education. The house had, therefore, been
divided (not by absolute partition into two distinct[138] apartments,
but by an amicable distribution of rooms) between the two families of
Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey; Mr. Coleridge had a separate study,
which was distinguished by nothing except by an organ amongst its
furniture, and by a magnificent view from its window (or windows),
if that could be considered a distinction in a situation whose local
necessities presented you with magnificent objects in whatever
direction you might happen to turn your eyes.
[138] "_Into two distinct apartments_":--The word apartment,
meaning, in effect, a compartment of a house, already includes, in
its proper sense, a suite of rooms; and it is a mere vulgar error,
arising out of the ambitious usage of lodging-house keepers, to
talk of one family or an establishment occupying apartments in the
plural. The Queen's apartment at St. James's or at Versailles--not
the Queen's apartments--is the correct expression.
In the morning, the two families might live apart; but they met
at dinner, and in a common drawing-room; and Southey's library, in
both senses of the word, was placed at the service of all the ladies
alike. However, they did not intrude upon him, except in cases where
they wished for a larger reception room, or a more interesting place
for suggesting the topics of conversation. Interesting this room
was, indeed, and in a degree not often rivalled. The library--the
collection of books, I mean, which formed the most conspicuous part
of its furniture within--was in all senses a good one. The books were
chiefly English, Spanish, and Portuguese; well selected, being the
great cardinal classics of the three literatures; fine copies, and
decorated externally with a reasonable elegance, so as to make them
in harmony with the other embellishments of the room. This effect
was aided by the horizontal arrangement upon brackets of many rare
manuscripts--Spanish or Portuguese. Made thus gay within, this room
stood in little need of attractions from without. Yet, even upon the
gloomiest day of winter, the landscape from the different windows was
too permanently commanding in its grandeur, too essentially independent
of the seasons or the pomp of woods, to fail in fascinating the gaze of
the coldest and dullest of spectators. The lake of Derwent Water in one
direction, with its lovely islands--a lake about ten miles in circuit,
and shaped pretty much like a boy's kite; the lake of Bassinthwaite
in another; the mountains of Newlands, arranging themselves like
pavilions; the gorgeous confusion of Borrowdale just revealing its
sublime chaos through the narrow vista of its gorge: all these objects
lay in different angles to the front; whilst the sullen rear, not
fully visible on this side of the house, was closed for many a league
by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara--mountains
which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers, and chains of
hilly ground, cutting the county of Cumberland into great chambers and
different climates, than as insulated eminences, so vast is the area
which they occupy; though there _are_ also such separate and insulated
heights, and nearly amongst the highest in the country. Southey's lot
had therefore fallen, locally considered, into a goodly heritage.
This grand panorama of mountain scenery, so varied, so expansive,
and yet having the delightful feeling about it of a deep seclusion
and dell-like sequestration from the world--a feeling which, in the
midst of so expansive an area spread out below his windows, could not
have been sustained by any barriers less elevated than Glaramara,
Skiddaw, or (which could be also descried) "the mighty Helvellyn and
Catchedicam,"--this congregation of hill and lake, so wide, and yet so
prison-like in its separation from all beyond it, lay for ever under
the eyes of Southey. His position locally, and, in some respects,
intellectually, reminded one of Gibbon: but with great advantage in
the comparison to Southey. The little town of Keswick and its adjacent
lake bore something of the same relation to mighty London that Geneva
and its lake may be thought to bear towards brilliant Paris. Southey,
like Gibbon, was a miscellaneous scholar; he, like Gibbon, of vast
historical research; he, like Gibbon, signally industrious, and
patient, and elaborate in collecting the materials for his historical
works. Like Gibbon, he had dedicated a life of competent ease, in a
pecuniary sense, to literature; like Gibbon, he had gathered to the
shores of a beautiful lake, remote from great capitals, a large, or, at
least, sufficient library (in each case, I believe, the library ranged,
as to numerical amount, between seven and ten thousand); and, like
Gibbon, he was the most accomplished _littérateur_ amongst the erudite
scholars of his time, and the most of an erudite scholar amongst the
accomplished _littérateurs_. After all these points of agreement
known, it remains as a pure advantage on the side of Southey--a mere
_lucro ponatur_--that he was a poet; and, by all men's confession, a
respectable poet, brilliant in his descriptive powers, and fascinating
in his narration, however much he might want of
"The vision and the faculty divine."
It is remarkable amongst the series of parallelisms that have been
or might be pursued between two men, that both had the honour of
retreating from a parliamentary life[139]; Gibbon, after some silent
and inert experience of that warfare; Southey, with a prudent foresight
of the ruin to his health and literary usefulness, won from the
experience of his nearest friends.
[139] It illustrated the national sense of Southey's comprehensive
talents, and of his political integrity, that Lord Radnor (the
same who, under the courtesy title of Lord Folkestone, had
distinguished himself for very democratic politics in the House of
Commons, and had even courted the technical designation of
_radical_) was the man who offered to bring in Southey for a
borough dependent on _his_ influence. Sir Robert Peel, under the
same sense of Southey's merits, had offered him a baronetcy. Both
honours were declined, on the same prudential considerations, and
with the same perfect disregard of all temptations from personal
vanity.
* * * * *
I took leave of Southey in 1807, at the descent into the vale of
Legbesthwaite, as I have already noticed. One year afterwards, I
became a permanent resident in his neighbourhood; and, although, on
various accounts, my intercourse with him was at no time very strict,
partly from the very uncongenial constitution of my own mind, and the
different direction of my studies, partly from my reluctance to levy
any tax on time so precious and so fully employed, I was yet on such
terms for the next ten or eleven years that I might, in a qualified
sense, call myself his friend.
Yes! there were long years through which Southey might respect me,
I _him_. But the years came--for I have lived too long, reader, in
relation to many things! and the report of me would have been better,
or more uniform at least, had I died some twenty years ago--the years
came in which circumstances made me an Opium Eater; years through
which a shadow as of sad eclipse sate and rested upon my faculties;
years through which I was careless of all but those who lived within
_my_ inner circle, within "my hearts of hearts"; years--ah! heavenly
years!--through which I lived, beloved, _with_ thee, _to_ thee, _for_
thee, _by_ thee! Ah! happy, happy years! in which I was a mere football
of reproach, but in which every wind and sounding hurricane of wrath
or contempt flew by like chasing enemies past some defying gates of
adamant, and left me too blessed in thy smiles--angel of life!--to
heed the curses or the mocking which sometimes I heard raving outside
of our impregnable Eden. What any man said of me in those days, what
he thought, did I ask? did I care? Then it was, or nearly then, that
I ceased to see, ceased to hear of Southey; as much abstracted from
all which concerned the world outside, and from the Southeys, or even
the Coleridges, in its van, as though I had lived with the darlings of
my heart in the centre of Canadian forests, and all men else in the
centre of Hindostan.
* * * * *
But, before I part from Greta Hall and its distinguished master, one
word let me say, to protect myself from the imputation of sharing
in some peculiar opinions of Southey, with respect to political
economy, which have been but too familiar to the world, and some
opinions of the world, hardly less familiar, with respect to Southey
himself and his accomplishments. Probably, with respect to the first,
before this paper will be made public, I shall have sufficiently
vindicated my own opinions in these matters by a distinct treatment
of some great questions which lie at the base of all sound political
economy; above all, the radical question of value, upon which no man
has ever seen the full truth except Mr. Ricardo; and, unfortunately,
he had but little of the _polemic_[140] skill which is required to
meet the errors of his opponents. For it is noticeable that the most
conspicuous of those opponents, viz. Mr. Malthus, though too much, I
fear, actuated by a spirit of jealousy, and therefore likely enough
to have scattered sophistry and disingenuous quibbling over the
subject, had no need whatever of any further confusion for darkening
and perplexing his themes than what inevitably belonged to his own
most chaotic understanding. He and Say, the Frenchman, were both
plagued by understandings of the same quality--having a clear vision
in shallow waters, and this misleading them into the belief that they
saw with equal clearness through the remote and the obscure; whereas,
universally, their acuteness is like that of Hobbes--the gift of
shallowness, and the result of _not_ being subtle or profound enough to
apprehend the true _locus_ of the difficulty; and the barriers, which
to them limit the view, and give to it, together with the contraction,
all the distinctness and definite outline of limitation, are, in nine
cases out of ten, the product of their own defective and aberrating
vision, and not real barriers at all.
[140] "_Polemic_ skill":--The word polemic is falsely interpreted
by the majority of mere English readers. Having seldom seen it
used except in a case of theological controversy, they fancy that
it has some original and etymological appropriation to such a use;
whereas it expresses, with regard to _all_ subjects, without
restriction, the functions of the debater as opposed to those of
the original orator; the functions of him who meets error and
unravels confusion or misrepresentation, opposed to those of him
who lays down the abstract truth: truth absolute and without
relation to the modes of viewing it. As well might the word
_Radical_ be limited to a political use as _Polemic_ to
controversial divinity.
Meantime, until I write fully and deliberately upon this subject, I
shall observe, simply, that all "the Lake Poets," as they are called,
were not only in error, but most presumptuously in error, upon these
subjects. They were ignorant of every principle belonging to every
question alike in political economy, and they were obstinately bent
upon learning nothing; they were all alike too proud to acknowledge
that any man knew better than they, unless it were upon some purely
professional subject, or some art remote from all intellectual
bearings, such as conferred no honour in its possession. Wordsworth was
the least tainted with error upon political economy; and that because
he rarely applied his thoughts to any question of that nature, and, in
fact, despised every study of a moral or political aspect, unless it
drew its materials from such revelations of truth as could be won from
the _prima philosophia_ of human nature approached with the poet's eye.
Coleridge was the one whom Nature and his own multifarious studies had
the best qualified for thinking justly on a theme such as this; but he
also was shut out from the possibility of knowledge by presumption, and
the habit of despising all the analytic studies of his own day--a habit
for which he certainly had some warrant in the peculiar feebleness
of all that has offered itself for _philosophy_ in modern England.
In particular, the religious discussions of the age, which touch
inevitably at every point upon the profounder philosophy of man and his
constitution, had laid bare the weakness of his own age to Coleridge's
eye; and, because all was hollow and trivial in this direction, he
chose to think that it was so in every other. And hence he has laid
himself open to the just scoffs of persons far inferior to himself.
In a foot-note in some late number of the _Westminster Review_, it
is most truly asserted (not in these words, but to this effect) that
Coleridge's "Table Talk" exhibits a superannuation of error fit only
for two centuries before. And what gave peculiar point to this display
of ignorance was, that Coleridge did not, like Wordsworth, dismiss
political economy from his notice disdainfully, as a puerile tissue
of truisms, or of falsehoods not less obvious, but actually addressed
himself to the subject; fancied he had made discoveries in the science;
and even promised us a systematic work on its whole compass.
To give a sample of this new and reformed political economy, it cannot
well be necessary to trouble the reader with more than one chimera
culled from those which Mr. Coleridge first brought forward in his
early model of "The Friend." He there propounds, as an original
hypothesis of his own, that taxation never burthens a people, or, as
a mere possibility, _can_ burthen a people simply by its amount. And
why? Surely it draws from the purse of him who pays the quota a sum
which it may be very difficult or even ruinous for him to pay, were it
no more important in a public point of view than as so much deducted
from his own unproductive expenditure, and which may happen to have
even a national importance if it should chance to be deducted from
the funds destined to productive industry. What is Mr. Coleridge's
answer to these little objections? Why, thus: the latter case he
evades entirely, apparently not adverting to it as a case in any
respect distinguished from the other; and this other--how is _that_
answered? Doubtless, says Mr. Coleridge, it may be inconvenient to
John or Samuel that a sum of money, otherwise disposable for their own
separate uses, should be abstracted for the purchase of bayonets, or
grape-shot; but with this the public, the commonwealth, have nothing
to do, any more than with the losses at a gaming-table, where A's loss
is B's gain--the total funds of the nation remaining exactly the same.
It is, in fact, nothing but the accidental distribution of the funds
which is affected--possibly for the worse (no other "worse," however,
is contemplated than shifting it into hands less deserving), but,
also, by possibility, for the better; and the better and the worse
may be well supposed, in the long run, to balance each other. And
that this is Mr. Coleridge's meaning cannot be doubted, upon looking
into his illustrative image in support of it: he says that money
raised by Government in the shape of taxes is like moisture exhaled
from the earth--doubtless, for the moment injurious to the crops, but
reacting abundantly for their final benefit when returning in the
shape of showers. So natural, so obvious, so inevitable, by the way,
is this conceit (or, to speak less harshly, this hypothesis), and so
equally natural, obvious, and inevitable is the illustration from the
abstraction and restoration of moisture, the exhalations and rains
which affect this earth of ours, like the systole and the diastole of
the heart, the flux and reflux of the ocean, that precisely the same
doctrine, and precisely the same exemplification of the doctrine,
is to be found in a Parliamentary speech[141] of some orator in the
famous Long Parliament about the year 1642. And to my mind it was a
bitter humiliation to find, about 150 years afterwards, in a shallow
French work, the famous "_Compte Rendu_" of the French Chancellor of
the Exchequer (Comptroller of the Finances) Neckar--in that work, most
humiliating it was to me, on a certain day, that I found this idle
Coleridgian fantasy, not merely repeated, as it had been by scores--not
merely anticipated by full twenty and two years, so that these French
people had been beforehand with him, and had made Coleridge, to all
appearance, their plagiarist, but also (hear it, ye gods!) answered,
satisfactorily refuted, by this very feeble old sentimentalist, Neckar.
Yes; positively Neckar, the slipshod old system-fancier and political
driveller, had been so much above falling into the shallow snare, that
he had, on sound principles, exposed its specious delusions. Coleridge,
the subtlest of men in his proper walk, had brought forward, as a
novel hypothesis of his own, in 1810, what Neckar, the rickety old
charlatan, had scarcely condescended, in a hurried foot-note, to expose
as a vulgar error and the shallowest of sophisms in 1787-88. There was
another enormous blunder which Coleridge was constantly authorizing,
both in his writings and his conversation. Quoting a passage from Sir
James Stuart, in which he speaks of a vine-dresser as adding nothing to
the public wealth, unless his labour did something more than replace
his own consumption--that is, unless it reproduced it together with a
profit; he asks contemptuously, whether the happiness and moral dignity
that may have been exhibited in the vine-dresser's family are to pass
for nothing? And then he proceeds to abuse the economists, because
they take no account of such important considerations. Doubtless these
are invaluable elements of social grandeur, in a _total_ estimate
of those elements. But what has political economy to do with them,
a science openly professing to insulate, and to treat apart from
all other constituents of national well-being, those which concern
the production and circulation of wealth?[142] So far from gaining
anything by enlarging its field in the way demanded by Coleridge's
critic, political economy would be as idly travelling out of the limits
indicated and held forth in its very name, as if logic were to teach
ethics, or ethics to teach diplomacy. With respect to the Malthusian
doctrine of population, it is difficult to know who was the true
proprietor of the arguments urged against it sometimes by Southey,
sometimes by Coleridge. Those used by Southey are chiefly to be found
up and down the _Quarterly Review_. But a more elaborate attack was
published by Hazlitt; and this must be supposed to speak the peculiar
objections of Coleridge, for he was in the habit of charging Hazlitt
with having pillaged his conversation, and occasionally garbled it
throughout the whole of this book. One single argument there was,
undoubtedly just, and it was one which others stumbled upon no less
than Coleridge, exposing the fallacy of the supposed different laws
of increase for vegetable and animal life. But, though this frail
prop withdrawn took away from Mr. Malthus's theory all its scientific
rigour, the main _practical_ conclusions were still valid as respected
any argument from the Lakers; for the strongest of these arguments that
ever came to my knowledge was a mere appeal--not _ad verecundiam_, in
the ordinary sense of the phrase, but _ad honestatem_, as if it were
shocking to the _honestum_ of Roman ethics (the _honnêteté_ of French
minor ethics) that the check derived from self-restraint should not be
supposed amply competent to redress all the dangers from a redundant
population under any certain knowledge generally diffused that such
dangers existed. But these are topics which it is sufficient in this
place to have noticed _currente calamo_. I was anxious, however, to
protest against the probable imputation that I, because generally so
intense an admirer of these men, adopted their blind and hasty reveries
in political economy.
[141] Reported at length in a small quarto volume, of the well
known quarto size so much in use for Tracts, Pamphlets, &c.,
throughout the life of Milton--1608-74.
[142] In fact, the exposure is as perfect in the case of an
individual as in that of a nation, and more easily apprehended.
Levy from an individual clothier £1000 in taxes, and afterwards
return to him the whole of this sum in payment for the clothing of
a regiment. Then, supposing profits to be at the rate of 15 per
cent, he will have replaced £150 of his previous loss; even his
gains will simply reinstate him in something that he had lost, and
the remaining £850 will continue to be a dead loss; since the £850
restored to him exactly replaces, by the terms of this case, his
disbursements in wages and materials; if it did more, profits
would not be at 15 per cent, according to the supposition. But
Government may spend _more_ than the £1000 with this clothier;
they may spend £10,000. Doubtless, and in that case, on the same
supposition as to profits, he will receive £1500 as a nominal
gain; and £500 will be a real gain, marked with the positive sign
(+). But such a case would only prove that nine other taxpayers,
to an equal amount, had been left without any reimbursement at
all. Strange that so clear a case for an individual should become
obscure when it regards a nation.
There were (and perhaps more justly I might say there are) two other
notions currently received about Southey, one of which is altogether
erroneous, and the other true only in a limited sense. The first is
the belief that he belonged to what is known as the Lake school in
poetry; with respect to which all that I need say in this place is
involved in his own declaration frankly made to myself in Easedale,
during the summer of 1812: that he considered Wordsworth's theory of
poetic diction, and still more his principles as to the selection of
subjects, and as to what constituted a poetic treatment, as founded on
error. There is certainly some community of phraseology between Southey
and the other Lakers, naturally arising out of their joint reverence
for Scriptural language: this was a field in which they met in common:
else it shows but little discernment and power of valuing the essences
of things, to have classed Southey in the same school with Wordsworth
and Coleridge. The other popular notion about Southey which I conceive
to be expressed with much too little limitation regards his style.
He has been praised, and justly, for his plain, manly, unaffected
English, until the parrot echoers of other men's judgments, who adopt
all they relish with undistinguishing blindness, have begun to hold
him up as a great master of his own language, and a classical model
of fine composition. Now, if the error were only in the degree, it
would not be worth while to notice it; but the truth is, that Southey's
defects in this particular power are as striking as his characteristic
graces. Let a subject arise--and almost in any path there is a ready
possibility that it should--in which a higher tone is required, of
splendid declamation, or of impassionate fervour, and Southey's
style will immediately betray its want of the loftier qualities as
flagrantly as it now asserts its powers in that unpretending form
which is best suited to his level character of writing and his humbler
choice of themes. It is to mistake the character of Southey's mind,
which is elevated but not sustained by the higher modes of enthusiasm,
to think otherwise. Were a magnificent dedication required, moving
with a stately and measured solemnity, and putting forward some
majestic pretensions, arising out of a long and laborious life; were
a pleading required against some capital abuse of the earth--war,
slavery, oppression in its thousand forms; were a _Defensio pro Populo
Anglicano_ required; Southey's is not the mind, and, by a necessary
consequence, Southey's is not the style, for carrying such purposes
into full and memorable effect. His style is _therefore_ good, because
it has been suited to his themes; and those themes have hitherto been
either narrative, which usually imposes a modest diction, and a modest
structure of sentences, or argumentative in that class which is too
overburthened with details, with replies, with interruption, and every
mode of discontinuity, to allow a thought of eloquence, or of the
periodic style which a perfect eloquence instinctively seeks.
* * * * *
I here close my separate notice of the Lake Poets--meaning those
three who were originally so denominated--three men upon whom
posterity, in every age, will look back with interest as profound as,
perhaps, belongs to any other names of our era; for it happens, not
unfrequently, that the _personal_ interest in the author is not in the
direct ratio of that which belongs to his works: and the character
of an author better qualified to command a vast popularity for the
creations of his pen is oftentimes more of a universal character,
less peculiar, less fitted to stimulate the curiosity, or to sustain
the sympathy of the intellectual, than the profounder and more
ascetic solemnity of a Wordsworth, or the prodigal and magnificent
eccentricities of a Coleridge. With respect to both of these gifted
men, some interesting notices still remain in arrear; but these will
more properly come forward in their natural places, as they happen to
arise in after years in connexion with my own memoirs.