WESTMINSTER, OXFORD, PANTISOCRACY, AND MARRIAGE.
Of Southey during his four years at Westminster we know little; his
fragment of autobiography, having brought him to the school, soon comes
to an untimely close; and for this period we possess no letters. But we
know that these were years which contributed much to form his intellect
and character; we know that they were years of ardour and of toil; and
it is certain that now, as heretofore, his advance was less dependent on
what pastors and masters did for him than on what he did for himself.
The highest scholarship—that which unites precision with breadth, and
linguistic science with literary feeling—Southey never attained in
any foreign tongue, except perhaps in the Portuguese and the Spanish.
Whenever the choice lay between pausing to trace out a law of language,
or pushing forward to secure a good armful of miscellaneous facts,
Southey preferred the latter. With so many huge structures of his own
in contemplation, he could not gather too much material, nor gather it
too quickly. Such fortitude as goes to make great scholars he possessed;
his store of patience was inexhaustible; but he could be patient only in
pursuit of his proper objects. He could never learn a language in regular
fashion; the best grammar, he said, was always the shortest. Southey’s
acquaintance with Greek never goes beyond that stage at which Greek,
like fairy gold, is apt to slip away of a sudden unless kept steadfastly
in view, nearly all the Greek he had learnt at Westminster he forgot
at Oxford. A monkish legend in Latin of the Church or a mediæval Latin
chronicle he could follow with the run of the eye; but had he at any
season of his manhood been called on to write a page of Latin prose, it
would probably have resembled the French in which he sometimes sportively
addressed his friends by letter, and in which he uttered himself
valiantly while travelling abroad.
Southey brought to Westminster an imagination stored with the marvels
and the beauty of old romance. He left it skilled in the new sentiment
of the time—a sentiment which found in Werther and Eloisa its dialect,
high-pitched self-conscious, rhapsodical, and not wholly real. His bias
for history was already marked before he entered the school; but his
knowledge consisted of a few clusters of historical facts grouped around
the subjects of various projected epics, and dotting at wide distances
and almost at random the vast expanse of time. Now he made acquaintance
with that book which, more than any other, displays the breadth, the
variety, and the independence of the visible lives of nations. Gibbon’s
_Decline and Fall_ leaves a reader cold who cares only to quicken his own
inmost being by contact with what is most precious in man’s spiritual
history; one chapter of Augustine’s _Confessions_, one sentence of the
_Imitation_—each a live coal from off the altar—will be of more worth to
such an one than all the mass and laboured majesty of Gibbon. But one who
can gaze with a certain impersonal regard on the spectacle of the world
will find the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, more than almost
any other single book, replenish and dilate the mind. In it Southey
viewed for the first time the sweep, the splendour, the coils, the mighty
movement, of the stream of human affairs.
Southey’s ambition on entering Westminster was to have the friendship of
the youths who had acted in the last Westminster play, and whose names
he had seen in the newspaper. Vain hope! for they, already preparing to
tie their hair in tails, were looking onward to the great world, and
had no glance to cast on the unnoted figures of the under-fourth. The
new-comer, according to a custom of the school, was for a time effaced,
ceasing to exist as an individual entity, and being known only as
“shadow” of the senior boy chosen to be “substance” to him during his
noviciate. Southey accepted his effacement the more willingly because
George Strachey, his substance, had a good face and a kindly heart;
unluckily—Strachey boarding at home—they were parted each night. A mild
young aristocrat, joining little with the others, was head of the house;
and Southey, unprotected by his chief, stood exposed to the tyranny of a
fellow-boarder bigger and brawnier than himself, who would souse the ears
of his sleeping victim with water, or on occasions let fly the porter-pot
or the poker at his head. Aspiring beyond these sallies to a larger and
freer style of humour, he attempted one day to hang Southey out of an
upper window by the leg; the pleasantry was taken ill by the smaller boy,
who offered an effectual resistance, and soon obtained his remove to
another chamber. Southey’s mature judgment of boarding-school life was
not, on the whole, favourable; yet to Westminster he owed two of his best
and dearest possessions—the friendship of C. W. W. Wynn, whose generous
loyalty alone made it possible for Southey to pursue literature as his
profession, and the friendship, no less precious, of Grosvenor Bedford,
lasting green and fresh from boyhood until both were white-haired,
venerable men.
Southey’s interest in boyish sports was too slight to beguile him from
the solitude needful for the growth of a poet’s mind. He had thoughts
of continuing Ovid’s Metamorphoses; he planned six books to complete
the Faery Queen, and actually wrote some cantos; already the subject
of _Madoc_ was chosen. And now a gigantic conception, which at a later
time was to bear fruit in such poems as _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_, formed
itself in his mind “When I was a schoolboy at Westminster,” he writes “I
frequented the house of a schoolfellow who has continued till this day
to be one of my most intimate and dearest friends. The house was so near
Dean’s Yard that it was hardly considered as being out of our prescribed
bounds; and I had free access to the library, a well-stored and pleasant
room ... looking over the river. There many of my truant hours were
delightfully spent in reading Picart’s _Religious Ceremonies_. The book
impressed my imagination strongly; and before I left school I had formed
the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of
mythology, which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each
the groundwork of an heroic poem.” Southey’s huge design was begotten
upon his _pia mater_ by a folio in a library. A few years earlier
Wordsworth, a boy of fourteen, walking between Hawkshead and Ambleside,
noticed the boughs and leaves of an oak-tree intensely outlined in black
against a bright western sky. “That moment,” he says, “was important in
my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite
variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of
any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made
a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.” Two remarkable
incidents in the history of English poetry, and each with something in it
of a typical character.
At Westminster Southey obtained his first literary profits—the guerdon
of the silver penny to which Cowper alludes in his _Table-Talk_.
Southey’s penny—exchanged for current coin in the proportion of six
to one by the mistress of the boarding-house—was always awarded for
English composition. But his fame among his schoolfellows was not of an
early or sudden growth. In the year of Southey’s entrance, some of the
senior boys commenced a weekly paper called _The Trifler_. It imitates,
with some skill, the periodical essay of the post-Johnsonian period:
there is the wide-ranging discussion on the Influence of Liberty on
Genius; there is the sprightly sketch of Amelia, a learned Lady; there
is the moral diatribe on Deists, a Sect of Infidels most dangerous to
Mankind; there are the letters from Numa and from Infelix; there is the
Eastern apologue, beginning, “In the city of Bassora lived Zaydor, the
son of Al-Zored.” Southey lost no time in sending to the editor his
latest verses; a baby sister, Margaretta, had just died, and Southey
expressed in elegy a grief which was real and keen. “The Elegy signed
B. is received”—so Mr. Timothy Touchstone announced on the Saturday
after the manuscript had been dropped into the penny post. The following
Saturday—anxiously expected—brought no poem, but another announcement:
“The Elegy by B. must undergo some Alterations; a Liberty I must request
all my Correspondents to permit me to take.” “After this,” says Southey,
“I looked for its appearance anxiously, but in vain.” Happily no one
sought to discover B., or supposed that he was one with the curly-headed
boy of the under-fourth.
If authorship has its hours of disappointment, it has compensating
moments of glory and of joy. _The Trifler_, having lived to the age of
ten months, deceased. In 1792 Southey, now a great boy, with Strachey,
his sometime “substance,” and his friends Wynn and Bedford, planned a
new periodical of ill-omened name, _The Flagellant_. “I well remember
my feelings,” he writes, “when the first number appeared.... It was
Bedford’s writing, but that circumstance did not prevent me from feeling
that I was that day borne into the world as an author; and if ever my
head touched the stars while I walked upon the earth, it was then.... In
all London there was not so vain, so happy, so elated a creature as I
was that day.” From that starry altitude he soon descended. The subject
of an early number of _The Flagellant_ was flogging; the writer was
Robert Southey. He was full of Gibbon at the time, and had caught some of
Voltaire’s manner of poignant irony. Rather for disport of his wits than
in the character of a reformer, the writer of number five undertook to
prove from the ancients and the Fathers that flogging was an invention of
the devil. During Southey’s life the devil received many insults at his
hands; his horns, his hoofs, his teeth, his tail, his moral character,
were painfully referred to; and the devil took it, like a sensible
fiend, in good part. Not so Dr. Vincent; the preceptorial dignity was
impugned by some unmannerly brat; a bulwark of the British Constitution
was at stake. Dr. Vincent made haste to prosecute the publisher for
libel. Matters having taken unexpectedly so serious a turn, Southey
came forward, avowed himself the writer, and, with some sense of shame
in yielding to resentment so unwarranted and so dull, he offered his
apology. The head-master’s wrath still held on its way, and Southey was
privately expelled.
All Southey’s truant hours were not passed among folios adorned with
strange sculptures. In those days even St. Peter’s College, Westminster,
could be no little landlocked bay—silent, secure, and dull. To be in
London was to be among the tides and breakers of the world. Every post
brought news of some startling or significant event. Now it was that
George Washington had been elected first President of the American
Republic; now that the States-General were assembled at Versailles; now
that Paris, delivered from her nightmare towers of the Bastille, breathed
free; now that Brissot was petitioning for dethronement. The main issues
of the time were such as to try the spirits. Southey, who was aspiring,
hopeful, and courageous, did not hesitate in choosing a side; a new dawn
was opening for the world, and should not his heart have its portion in
that dawn?
The love of our own household which surrounds us like the air, and
which seems inevitable as our daily meat and drink, acquires a strange
preciousness when we find that the world can be harsh. The expelled
Westminster boy returned to Bristol, and faithful Aunt Tyler welcomed him
home; Shad did not avert his face, and Phillis looked up at him with her
soft spaniel eyes. But Bristol also had its troubles; the world had been
too strong for the poor linen-draper in Wine Street; he had struggled to
maintain his business, but without success; his fortune was now broken,
and his heart broke with it. In some respects it was well for Southey
that his father’s affairs gave him definite realities to attend to; for,
in the quiet and vacancy of the days in Miss Tyler’s house, his heart
took unusual heats and chills, and even his eager verse-writing could
not allay the excitement nor avert the despondent fit. When Michaelmas
came, Southey went up to Oxford to matriculate; it was intended that he
should enter at Christ Church, but the dean had heard of the escapade at
Westminster; there was a laying of big-wigs together over that adventure,
and the young rebel was rejected; to be received, however, by Balliol
College. But to Southey it mattered little at the time whether he were of
this college or of that; a summons had reached him to hasten to Bristol
that he might follow his father’s body to the grave, and now his thoughts
could not but cling to his mother in her sorrow and her need.
“I left Westminster,” says Southey, “in a perilous state—a heart full of
poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious
principles shaken by Gibbon: many circumstances tended to give me a wrong
bias, none to lead me right, except adversity, the wholesomest of all
discipline.” The young republican went up to chambers in Rat Castle—since
departed—near the head of Balliol Grove, prepared to find in Oxford the
seat of pedantry, prejudice, and aristocracy; an airy sense of his own
enlightenment and emancipation possessed him. He has to learn to pay
respect to men “remarkable only for great wigs and little wisdom.” He
finds it “rather disgraceful at the moment when Europe is on fire with
freedom—when man and monarch are contending—to sit and study Euclid
and Hugo Grotius.” Beside the enthusiasm proper in Southey’s nature,
there was at this time an enthusiasm prepense. He had learnt from his
foreign masters the language of hyper-sensibility; his temperament was
nervous and easily wrought upon; his spirit was generous and ardent.
Like other youths with a facile literary talent before finding his true
self, he created a number of artificial selves, who uttered for him
his moralizings and philosophizings, who declaimed for him on liberty,
who dictated long letters of sentimental platitudes, and who built up
dream-fabrics of social and political reforms, chiefly for the pleasure
of seeing how things might look in “the brilliant colours of fancy,
nature, and Rousseau.” In this there was no insincerity, though there
was some unreality. “For life,” he says, “I have really a very strong
predilection,” and the buoyant energy within him delayed the discovery
of the bare facts of existence; it was so easy and enjoyable to become
in turn sage, reformer, and enthusiast. Or perhaps we ought to say that
all this time there was a real Robert Southey, strong, upright, ardent,
simple; and although this was quite too plain a person to serve the
purposes of epistolary literature, it was he who gave their cues to the
various ideal personages. This, at least, may be affirmed—all Southey’s
unrealities were of a pure and generous cast; never was his life emptied
of truth and meaning, and made in the deepest degree phantasmal by a
secret shame lurking under a fair show. The youth Milton, with his
grave upbringing, was happily not in the way of catching the trick of
sentimental phrases; but even Milton at Cambridge, the lady of his
College, was not more clean from spot or blemish than was Southey amid
the vulgar riot and animalisms of young Oxford.
Two influences came to the aid of Southey’s instinctive modesty, and
confirmed him in all that was good. One was his friendship with Edmund
Seward, too soon taken from him by death. The other was his discipleship
to a great master of conduct. One in our own day has acknowledged the
largeness of his debt to
“That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son
Clear’d Rome of what most shamed him.”
Epictetus came to Southey precisely when such a master was needed; other
writers had affected him through his imagination, through his nervous
sensibility; they had raised around him a luminous haze; they had plunged
him deeper in illusion. Now was heard the voice of a conscience speaking
to a conscience; the manner of speech was grave, unfigured, calm; above
all, it was real, and the words bore in upon the hearer’s soul with
a quiet resistlessness. He had allowed his sensitiveness to set up
what excitements it might please in his whole moral frame; he had been
squandering his emotions; he had been indulging in a luxury and waste of
passion. Here was a tonic and a styptic. Had Southey been declamatory
about freedom? The bondsman Epictetus spoke of freedom also, and of how
it might be obtained. Epictetus, like Rousseau, told of a life according
to nature; he commended simplicity of manners. But Rousseau’s simplicity,
notwithstanding that homage which he paid to the will, seemed to heat the
atmosphere with strange passion, seemed to give rise to new curiosities
and refinements of self-conscious emotion. Epictetus showed how life
could be simplified, indeed, by bringing it into obedience to a perfect
law. Instead of a quietism haunted by feverish dreams—duty, action,
co-operation with God. “Twelve years ago,” wrote Southey in 1806, “I
carried Epictetus in my pocket till my very heart was ingrained with it,
as a pig’s bones become red by feeding him upon madder. And the longer
I live, and the more I learn, the more am I convinced that Stoicism,
properly understood, is the best and noblest of systems.” Much that
Southey gained from Stoicism he kept throughout his whole life, tempered,
indeed, by the influences of a Christian faith, but not lost. He was no
metaphysician, and a master who had placed metaphysics first and morals
after would hardly have won him for a disciple; but a lofty ethical
doctrine spoke to what was deepest and most real in his nature. To trust
in an over-ruling Providence, to accept the disposal of events not in our
own power with a strenuous loyalty to our Supreme Ruler, to hold loose by
all earthly possessions even the dearest, to hold loose by life itself
while putting it to fullest use—these lessons he first learnt from the
Stoic slave, and he forgot none of them. But his chief lesson was the
large one of self-regulation, that it is a man’s prerogative to apply the
reason and the will to the government of conduct and to the formation of
character.
By the routine of lectures and examinations Southey profited little; he
was not driven into active revolt, and that was all. His tutor, half a
democrat, surprised him by praising America, and asserting the right
of every country to model its own forms of government. He added, with
a pleasing frankness which deserves to be imitated, “Mr. Southey, you
won’t learn anything by my lectures, sir; so, if you have any studies of
your own, you had better pursue them.” Of all the months of his life,
those passed at Oxford, Southey declared, were the most unprofitable.
“All I learnt was a little swimming ... and a little boating.... I never
remember to have dreamt of Oxford—a sure proof how little it entered
into my moral being; of school, on the contrary, I dream perpetually.”
The miscellaneous society of workers, idlers, dunces, bucks, men of
muscle and men of money, did not please him; he lacked what Wordsworth
calls “the congregating temper that pervades our unripe years.” One
or two friends he chose, and grappled them to his heart; above all,
Seward, who abridged his hours of sleep for sake of study—whose drink was
water, whose breakfast was dry bread; then, Wynn and Lightfoot. With
Seward he sallied forth, in the Easter vacation, 1793, for a holiday
excursion; passed, with “the stupidity of a democratic philosopher,” the
very walls of Blenheim, without turning from the road to view the ducal
palace; lingered at Evesham, and wandered through its ruined Abbey,
indulging in some passable mediæval romancing; reached Worcester and
Kidderminster. “We returned by Bewdley. There is an old mansion, once
Lord Herbert’s, now mouldering away, in so romantic a situation, that
I soon lost myself in dreams of days of yore: the tapestried room—the
listed fight—the vassal-filled hall—the hospitable fire—the old baron
and his young daughter—these formed a most delightful day-dream.” The
youthful democrat did not suspect that such day-dreams were treasonable—a
hazardous caressing of the wily enchantress of the past; in his pocket he
carried Milton’s _Defence_, which may have been his amulet of salvation.
Many and various elements could mingle in young brains a-seethe with
revolution and romanticism. The fresh air and quickened blood at least
put Southey into excellent spirits. “We must walk over Scotland; it will
be an adventure to delight us all the remainder of our lives: we will
wander over the hills of Morven, and mark the driving blast, perchance
bestrodden by the spirit of Ossian!”
Among visitors to the Wye, in July, 1793, were William Wordsworth,
recently returned from France, and Robert Southey, holiday-making from
Oxford; they were probably unacquainted with each other at that time even
by name. Wordsworth has left an undying memorial of his tour in the poem
written near Tintern Abbey, five years later. Southey was drawing a long
breath before he uttered himself in some thousands of blank verses. The
father of his friend Bedford resided at Brixton Causeway, about four
miles on the Surrey side of London; the smoke of the great city hung
heavily beyond an intervening breadth of country; shady lanes led to the
neighbouring villages; the garden was a sunny solitude where flowers
opened and fruit grew mellow, and bees and birds were happy. Here Southey
visited his friend; his nineteenth birthday came; on the following
morning he planted himself at the desk in the garden summer-house;
morning after morning quickly passed; and by the end of six weeks _Joan
of Arc_, an epic poem in twelve books, was written. To the subject
Southey was attracted primarily by the exalted character of his heroine;
but apart from this it possessed a twofold interest for him: England,
in 1793, was engaged in a war against France—a war hateful to all who
sympathized with the Republic; Southey’s epic was a celebration of the
glories of French patriotism, a narrative of victory over the invader.
It was also chivalric and mediæval; the sentiment which was transforming
the word Gothic, from a term of reproach to a word of vague yet mastering
fascination, found expression in the young poet’s treatment of the story
of Joan of Arc. Knight and hermit, prince and prelate, doctors seraphic
and irrefragable with their pupils, meet in it; the castle and the
cathedral confront one another: windows gleam with many-coloured light
streaming through the rich robes of saint and prophet; a miracle of
carven tracery branches overhead; upon the altar burns the mystic lamp.
The rough draft of _Joan_ was hardly laid aside when Southey’s sympathies
with the revolutionary movement in France, strained already to the utmost
point of tension, were fatally rent. All his faith, all his hope, were
given to the Girondin party; and from the Girondins he had singled out
Brissot as his ideal of political courage, purity and wisdom. Brissot,
like himself, was a disciple of Jean Jacques; his life was austere; he
had suffered on behalf of freedom. On the day when the Bastille was
stormed its keys were placed in Brissot’s hands; it was Brissot who had
determined that war should be declared against the foreign foes of the
Republic. But now the Girondins—following hard upon Marie Antoinette—were
in the death-carts; they chanted their last hymn of liberty, ever growing
fainter while the axe lopped head after head; and Brissot was among the
martyrs (October 31, 1793). Probably no other public event so deeply
affected Southey. “I am sick of the world,” he writes, “and discontented
with every one in it. The murder of Brissot has completely harrowed up
my faculties.... I look round the world, and everywhere find the same
spectacle—the strong tyrannizing over the weak, man and beast.... There
is no place for virtue.”
After this, though Southey did not lose faith in democratic principles,
he averted his eyes for a time from France: how could he look to
butchers who had shed blood which was the very life of liberty, for the
realization of his dreams? And whither should he look? Had he but ten
thousand republicans like himself, they might repeople Greece and expel
the Turk. Being but one, might not Cowley’s fancy, a cottage in America,
be transformed into a fact: “three rooms ... and my only companion some
poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate?” Meanwhile he
occupied a room in Aunt Tyler’s house, and, instead of swinging the axe
in some forest primeval, amused himself with splitting a wedge of oak in
company with Shad, who might, perhaps, serve for the emancipated negro.
Moreover, he was very diligently driving his quill: “I have finished
transcribing _Joan_, and have bound her in marble paper with green
ribbons, and am now copying all my remainables to carry to Oxford. Then
once more a clear field, and then another epic poem, and then another.”
Appalling announcement! “I have accomplished a most arduous task,
transcribing all my verses that appear worth the trouble, except letters.
Of these I took one list—another of my pile of stuff and nonsense—and a
third of what I have burnt and lost; upon an average 10,000 verses are
burnt and lost; the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless.” Such
sad mechanic exercise dulled the ache in Southey’s heart; still “the
visions of futurity,” he finds, “are dark and gloomy, and the only ray
that enlivens the scene beams on America.”
To Balliol Southey returned; and if the future of the world seemed
perplexing, so also did his individual future. His school and college
expenses were borne by Mrs. Southey’s brother, the Rev. Herbert Hill,
chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon. In him the fatherless youth
found one who was both a friend and a father. Holbein’s portrait of Sir
Thomas More in his best years might have passed for that of Mr. Hill;
there was the same benign thoughtfulness in his aspect, the same earnest
calm, the same brightness and quietness, the same serene and cheerful
strength. He was generous and judicious, learned and modest, and his
goodness carried authority with it. Uncle Hill’s plan had been that
Southey, like himself, should become an English clergyman. But though
he might have preached from an Unitarian pulpit, Southey could not take
upon himself the vows of a minister of the Church of England. It would
have instantly relieved his mother had he entered into orders. He longed
that this were possible, and went through many conflicts of mind, and
not a little anguish. “God knows I would exchange every intellectual gift
which He has blessed me with, for implicit faith to have been able to do
this;” but it could not be. To bear the reproaches, gentle yet grave, of
his uncle was hard; to grieve his mother was harder. Southey resolved to
go to the anatomy school, and fit himself to be a doctor. But he could
not overcome his strong repugnance to the dissecting-room; it expelled
him whether he would or no; and all the time literature, with still yet
audible voice, was summoning him. Might he not obtain some official
employment in London, and also pursue his true calling? Beside the desire
of pleasing his uncle and of aiding his mother, the Stoic of twenty had
now a stronger motive for seeking some immediate livelihood. “I shall
joyfully bid adieu to Oxford,” he writes, “ ... and, when I know my
situation, unite myself to a woman whom I have long esteemed as a sister,
and for whom I now indulge a warmer sentiment.” But Southey’s reputation
as a dangerous Jacobin stood in his way; how could his Oxford overseers
answer for the good behaviour of a youth who spoke scornfully of Pitt?
The shuttles of the fates now began to fly faster, and the threads to
twist and twine. It was June of the year 1794. A visitor from Cambridge
was one day introduced to Southey; he seemed to be of an age near his
own; his hair, parted in the middle, fell wavy upon his neck; his face,
when the brooding cloud was not upon him, was bright with an abundant
promise—a promise vaguely told in lines of the sweet full lips, in the
luminous eyes, and the forehead that was like a god’s. This meeting of
Southey and Coleridge was an event which decided much in the careers of
both. In the summer days and in youth, the meeting-time of spirits,
they were drawn close to one another. Both had confessions to make,
with many points in common; both were poets; both were democrats; both
had hoped largely from France, and the hopes of both had been darkened;
both were uncertain what part to take in life. We do not know whether
Coleridge quickly grew so confidential as to tell of his recent adventure
as Silas Titus Comberbatch of the 15th Light Dragoons. But we know that
Coleridge had a lively admiration for the tall Oxford student—a person
of distinction, so dignified, so courteous, so quick of apprehension, so
full of knowledge, with a glance so rapid and piercing, with a smile so
good and kind. And we know that Coleridge lost no time in communicating
to Southey the hopes that were nearest to his heart.
Pantisocracy, word of magic, summed up these hopes. Was it not possible
for a number of men like themselves, whose way of thinking was liberal,
whose characters were tried and incorruptible, to join together and leave
this old world of falling thrones and rival anarchies, for the woods and
wilds of the young republic? One could wield an axe, another could guide
a plough. Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not
be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in
common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would
have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating
stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified.
Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his
wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend
their hardy and beautiful race. So they would bring back the patriarchal
age, and in the sober evening of life they would behold “colonies of
independence in the undivided dale of industry.” All the arguments
in favour of such a scheme could not be set forth in a conversation,
but Coleridge, to silence objectors, would publish a quarto volume on
Pantisocracy and Aspheterism.
Southey heartily assented; his own thoughts had, with a vague
forefeeling, been pointing to America; the unpublished epic would serve
to buy a spade, a plough, a few acres of ground; he could assuredly split
timber; he knew a mild and lovely woman for whom he indulged a warmer
sentiment than that of a brother. Robert Lovell, a Quaker, an enthusiast,
a poet, married to the sister of Southey’s Edith, would surely join them;
so would Burnett, his college friend; so, perhaps, would the admirable
Seward. The long vacation was at hand. Being unable to take orders or to
endure the horrors of the dissecting-room, Southey must no longer remain
a burden upon his uncle; he would quit the university and prepare for the
voyage.
Coleridge departed to tramp it through the romantic valleys and mountains
of Wales. Southey joined his mother, who now lived at Bath, and her he
soon persuaded—as a handsome and eloquent son can persuade a loving
mother—that the plan of emigration was feasible; she even consented to
accompany her boy. But his aunt—an _esprit borné_—was not to hear a
breath of Pantisocracy; still less would it be prudent to confess to
her his engagement to Miss Edith Fricker. His Edith was penniless and
therefore all the dearer to Southey; her father had been an unsuccessful
manufacturer of sugar-pans. What would Miss Tyler, the friend of Lady
Bateman, feel? What words, what gestures, what acts, would give her
feelings relief?
When Coleridge, after his Welsh wanderings, arrived in Bristol, he was
introduced to Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell’s sisters, Edith
and Sarah, and Martha and Elizabeth. Mrs. Lovell was doubtless already
a pantisocrat; Southey had probably not found it difficult to convert
Edith; Sarah, the elder sister, who was wont to look a mild reproof on
over-daring speculations, seriously inclined to hear of pantisocracy from
the lips of Coleridge. All members of the community were to be married.
Coleridge now more than ever saw the propriety of that rule; he was
prepared to yield obedience to it with the least possible delay. Burnett,
also a pantisocrat, must also marry. Would Miss Martha Fricker join the
community as Mrs. George Burnett? The lively little woman refused him
scornfully; if he wanted a wife in a hurry, let him go elsewhere. The
prospects of the reformers, this misadventure notwithstanding, from day
to day grew brighter. “This Pantisocratic scheme,” so writes Southey,
“has given me new life, new hope, new energy; all the faculties of my
mind are dilated.” Coleridge met a friend of Priestley’s. But a few days
since he had toasted the great doctor at Bala, thereby calling forth a
sentiment from the loyal parish apothecary: “I gives a sentiment, gemmen!
May all republicans be gulloteened!” The friend of Priestley’s said
that without doubt the doctor would join them. An American land-agent
told them that for twelve men 2000_l._ would do. “He recommends the
Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its security from hostile
Indians.” The very name—Susquehanna—sounded as if it were the sweetest of
rippling rivers. Money, it is true, as Southey admits, “is a huge evil;”
but now they are twenty-seven, and by resolute men this difficulty can be
overcome.
It was evening of the 17th of October, a dark and gusty evening of
falling rain and miry ways. Within Aunt Tyler’s house in College
Green, Bristol, a storm was bursting; she had heard it all at
last—Pantisocracy, America, Miss Fricker. Out of the house he must march;
there was the door; let her never see his face again. Southey took his
hat, looked for the last time in his life at his aunt then stepped out
into the darkness and the rain. “Why sir, you ben’t going to Bath at
this time of night and in this weather?” remonstrated poor Shadrach.
Even so; and with a friendly whisper master and man parted. Southey had
not a penny in his pocket, and was lightly clad. At Lovell’s he luckily
found his father’s great-coat; he swallowed a glass of brandy and set off
on foot. Misery makes one acquainted with strange road-fellows. On the
way he came upon an old man, drunk, and hardly able to stumble forward
through the night: the young pantisocrat, mindful of his fellow-man,
dragged him along nine miles amid rain and mire. Then, with weary feet,
he reached Bath and there was his mother to greet him with surprise, and
to ask for explanations. “Oh, Patience, Patience, thou hast often helped
poor Robert Southey, but never didst thou stand him in more need than on
Friday, the 17th of October, 1794.”
For a little longer the bow of hope shone in the West somewhere over
the Susquehanna, and then it gradually grew faint and faded. Money,
that huge evil, sneered its cold negations. The chiefs consulted, and
Southey proposed that a house and farm should be taken in Wales where
their principles might be acted out until better days enabled them to
start upon their voyage. One pantisocrat at least, could be happy with
Edith, brown bread, and wild Welsh raspberries. But Coleridge objected;
their principles could not be fairly tested under the disadvantage of an
effete and adverse social state surrounding them; besides, where was the
purchase-money to come from? how were they to live until the gathering
of their first crops? It became clear that the realization of their plan
must be postponed. The immediate problem was, How to raise 150_l._? With
such a sum they might both qualify by marriage for membership in the
pantisocratical community. After that, the rest would somehow follow.
How, then, to raise 150_l._? Might they not start a new magazine and
become joint editors? The _Telegraph_ had offered employment to Southey.
“Hireling writer to a newspaper! ’Sdeath! ’tis an ugly title; but
_n’importe_. I shall write truth, and only truth.” The offer, however,
turned out to be that of a reporter’s place; and his troublesome guest,
honesty, prevented his contributing to _The True Briton_. But he and
Coleridge could at least write poetry, and perhaps publish it with
advantage to themselves; and they could lecture to a Bristol audience.
With some skirmishing lectures on various political subjects of immediate
interest, Coleridge began; many came to hear them, and the applause
was loud. Thus encouraged, he announced and delivered two remarkable
courses of lectures—one, _A Comparative View of the English Rebellion
under Charles I. and the French Revolution_; the other, _On Revealed
Religion: its Corruptions and its Political Views_. Southey did not feel
tempted to discuss the origin of evil or the principles of revolution.
He chose as his subject a view of the course of European history from
Solon and Lycurgus to the American War. His hearers were pleased by the
graceful delivery and unassuming self-possession of the young lecturer,
and were quick to recognize the unusual range of his knowledge, his just
perception of facts, his ardour and energy of conviction. One lecture
Coleridge begged permission to deliver in Southey’s place—that on the
Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire. Southey consented, and
the room was thronged but no lecturer appeared; they waited; still no
lecturer. Southey offered an apology, and the crowd dispersed in no happy
temper. It is likely, adds that good old gossip Cottle, who tells the
story, “that at this very moment Mr. Coleridge might have been found at
No. 48 College Street, composedly smoking his pipe, and lost in profound
musing on his divine Susquehanna.”
The good Cottle—young in 1795, a publisher, and unhappily a poet—rendered
more important service to the two young men than that of smoothing down
their ruffled tempers after this incident. Southey, in conjunction with
Lovell, had already published a slender volume of verse. The pieces by
Southey recall his schoolboy joys and sorrows, and tell of his mother’s
tears, his father’s death, his friendship with “Urban,” his love of
“Ariste,” lovely maid! his delight in old romance, his discipleship
to Rousseau. They are chiefly of interest as exhibiting the diverse
literary influences to which a young writer of genius was exposed in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here the couplet of Pope
reappears, and hard by the irregular ode as practised by Akenside, the
elegy as written by Gray, the unrhymed stanza which Collins’s _Evening_
made a fashion, the sonnet to which Bowles had lent a meditative
grace and the rhymeless measures imitated by Southey from Sayers, and
afterwards made popular by his _Thalaba_. On the last page of this
volume appear “Proposals for publishing by subscription _Joan of Arc_;”
but subscriptions came slowly in. One evening Southey read for Cottle
some books of _Joan_. “It can rarely happen,” he writes “that a young
author should meet with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as
himself.” Cottle offered to publish the poem in quarto, to make it the
handsomest book ever printed in Bristol, to give the author fifty copies
for his subscribers, and fifty pounds to put forthwith into his purse.
Some dramatic attempts had recently been made by Southey, _Wat Tyler_, of
which we shall hear more at a later date, and the _Fall of Robespierre_,
undertaken by Coleridge, Lovell, and Southey, half in sport—each being
pledged to produce an act in twenty-four hours. These were now forgotten,
and all his energies were given to revising and in part recasting _Joan_.
In six weeks his epic had been written; its revision occupied six months.
With summer came a great sorrow, and in the end of autumn a measureless
joy. “He is dead,” Southey writes, “my dear Edmund Seward! after six
weeks’ suffering.... You know not, Grosvenor, how I loved poor Edmund:
he taught me all that I have of good.... There is a strange vacancy
in my heart.... I have lost a friend, and such a one!” And then
characteristically come the words: “I will try, by assiduous employment,
to get rid of very melancholy thoughts.” Another consolation Southey
possessed: during his whole life he steadfastly believed that death is
but the removal of a spirit from earth to heaven; and heaven for him
meant a place where cheerful familiarity was natural, where, perhaps,
he himself would write more epics and purchase more folios. As Baxter
expected to meet among the saints above Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, so
Southey counted upon the pleasure of having long talks with friends,
of obtaining introductions to eminent strangers; above all, he looked
forward to the joy of again embracing his beloved ones:
“Often together have we talked of death;
How sweet it were to see
All doubtful things made clear;
How sweet it were with powers
Such as the Cherubim
To view the depth of Heaven!
O Edmund! thou hast first
Begun the travel of eternity.”
Autumn brought its happiness pure and deep. Mr. Hill had arrived from
Lisbon; once again he urged his nephew to enter the church; but for one
of Southey’s opinions the church-gate “is perjury,” nor does he even find
church-going the best mode of spending his Sunday. He proposed to choose
the law as his profession. But his uncle had heard of Pantisocracy,
Aspheterism, and Miss Fricker, and said the law could wait; he should
go abroad for six months, see Spain and Portugal, learn foreign
languages, read foreign poetry and history, rummage among the books and
manuscripts his uncle had collected in Lisbon, and afterwards return to
his Blackstone. Southey, straightforward in all else, in love became
a Machiavel. To Spain and Portugal he would go; his mother wished it;
Cottle expected from him a volume of travels; his uncle had but to name
the day. Then he sought Edith, and asked her to promise that before he
departed she would become his wife: she wept to think that he was going,
and yet persuaded him to go; consented, finally, to all that he proposed.
But how was he to pay the marriage fees and buy the wedding-ring? Often
this autumn he had walked the streets dinnerless, no pence in his pocket,
no bread and cheese at his lodgings, thinking little, however, of dinner,
for his head was full of poetry and his heart of love. Cottle lent him
money for the ring and the license—and Southey in after-years never
forgot the kindness of his honest friend. He was to accompany his uncle,
but Edith was first to be his own; so she may honourably accept from
him whatever means he can furnish for her support. It was arranged with
Cottle’s sisters that she should live with them, and still call herself
by her maiden name. On the morning of the 14th of November, 1795—a day
sad, yet with happiness underlying all sadness—Robert Southey was married
in Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Edith Fricker. At the church door there
was a pressure of hands, and they parted with full hearts, silently—Mrs.
Southey to take up her abode in Bristol, with the wedding-ring upon her
breast, her husband to cross the sea. Never did woman put her happiness
in more loyal keeping.
So by love and by poetry, by Edith Fricker and by Joan of Arc, Southey’s
life was being shaped. Powers most benign leaned forward to brood over
the coming years and to bless them. It was decreed that his heart should
be no homeless wanderer; that, as seasons went by, children should be in
his arms and upon his knees: it was also decreed that he should become
a strong toiler among books. Now Pantisocracy looked faint and far; the
facts plain and enduring of the actual world took hold of his adult
spirit. And Coleridge complained of this, and did not come to bid his
friend farewell.