WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839.
The best of life with Southey was yet to come; but in what remains there
are few outstanding events to chronicle; there is nowhere any splendour
of circumstance. Of some lives the virtue is distilled, as it were, into
a few exquisite moments—moments of rapture, of vision, of sudden and
shining achievement; all the days and years seem to exist only for the
sake of such faultless moments, and it matters little whether such a
life, of whose very essence it is to break the bounds of time and space,
be long or short as measured by the falling of sandgrains or the creeping
of a shadow. Southey’s life was not one of these; its excellence was
constant, uniform, perhaps somewhat too evenly distributed. He wrought in
his place day after day, season after season. He submitted to the good
laws of use and wont. He grew stronger, calmer, more full-fraught with
stores of knowledge, richer in treasure of the heart. Time laid its hand
upon him gently and unfalteringly: the bounding step became less light
and swift; the ringing voice lapsed into sadder fits of silence; the
raven hair changed to a snowy white; only still the indefatigable eye ran
down the long folio columns, and the indefatigable hand still held the
pen—until all true life had ceased. When it has been said that Southey
was appointed Pye’s successor in the laureateship, that he received an
honorary degree from his university, that now and again he visited the
Continent, that children were born to him from among whom death made
choice of the dearest; and then we add that he wrote and published books,
the leading facts of Southey’s life have been told. Had he been worse
or a weaker man, we might look to find mysteries, picturesque vices,
or engaging follies; as it is, everything is plain, straightforward,
substantial. What makes the life of Southey eminent and singular is
its unity of purpose, its persistent devotion to a chosen object, its
simplicity, purity, loyalty, fortitude, kindliness, truth.
The river Greta, before passing under the bridge at the end of Main
Street, Keswick, winds about the little hill on which stands Greta Hall;
its murmur may be heard when all is still beyond the garden and orchard;
to the west it catches the evening light. “In front,” Coleridge wrote
when first inviting his friend to settle with him, “we have a giants’
camp—an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch
gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the
wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and
Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Behind us
the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tent-like
ridge in the larger.” Southey’s house belongs in a peculiar degree to
his life: in it were stored the treasures upon which his intellect drew
for sustenance; in it his affections found their earthly abiding-place;
all the most mirthful, all the most mournful, recollections of Southey
hang about it; to it in every little wandering his heart reverted like
an exile’s; it was at once his workshop and his playground; and for a
time, while he endured a living death, it became his antechamber to the
tomb. The rambling tenement consisted of two houses under one roof, the
larger part being occupied by the Coleridges and Southeys, the smaller
for a time by Mr. Jackson, their landlord. On the ground-floor was the
parlour which served as dining-room and general sitting-room, a pleasant
chamber looking upon the green in front; here also were Aunt Lovell’s
sitting-room, and the mangling-room, in which stood ranged in a row the
long array of clogs, from the greatest even unto the least, figuring in a
symbol the various stages of human life. The stairs to the right of the
kitchen led to a landing-place filled with bookcases; a few steps more
led to the little bedroom occupied by Mrs. Coleridge and her daughter.
“A few steps farther,” writes Sara Coleridge, whose description is here
given in abridgment, “was a little wing bedroom—then the study, where
my uncle sat all day occupied with literary labours and researches, but
which was used as a drawing-room for company. Here all the tea-visiting
guests were received. The room had three windows, a large one looking
down upon the green with the wide flower-border, and over to Keswick Lake
and mountains beyond. There were two smaller windows looking towards
the lower part of the town seen beyond the nursery-garden. The room was
lined with books in fine bindings; there were books also in brackets,
elegantly lettered vellum-covered volumes lying on their sides in a heap.
The walls were hung with pictures, mostly portraits.... At the back of
the room was a comfortable sofa, and there were sundry tables, beside
my uncle’s library table, his screen, desk, etc. Altogether, with its
internal fittings up, its noble outlook, and something pleasing in its
proportions, this was a charming room.” Hard by the study was Southey’s
bedroom. We need not ramble farther through passages lined with books,
and up and down flights of stairs to Mr. Jackson’s organ-room, and Mrs.
Lovell’s room, and Hartley’s parlour, and the nurseries, and one dark
apple-room supposed to be the abode of a bogle. Without, greensward,
flowers, shrubs, strawberry-beds, fruit-trees, encircled the house;
to the back, beyond the orchard, a little wood stretched down to the
river-side. A rough path ran along the bottom of the wood; here, on a
covered seat, Southey often read or planned future work, and here his
little niece loved to play in sight of the dimpling water. “Dear Greta
Hall!” she exclaims; “and oh, that rough path beside the Greta! How much
of my childhood, of my girlhood, of my youth, were spent there!”
Southey’s attachment to his mountain town and its lakes was of no sudden
growth. He came to them as one not born under their influence; that
power of hills to which Wordsworth owed fealty, had not brooded upon
Southey during boyhood; the rich southern meadows, the wooded cliffs of
Avon, the breezy downs, had nurtured his imagination, and to these he
was still bound by pieties of the heart. In the churchyard at Ashton,
where lay his father and his kinsfolk, the beneficent cloud of mingled
love and sorrow most overshadowed his spirit. His imagination did not
soar, as did Wordsworth’s, in naked solitudes; he did not commune with
a Presence immanent in external nature: the world, as he viewed it, was
an admirable habitation for mankind—a habitation with a history. Even
after he had grown a mountaineer, he loved a humanized landscape, one
in which the gains of man’s courage, toil, and endurance are apparent.
Flanders, where the spade has wrought its miracles of diligence, where
the slow canal-boat glides, where the _carillons_ ripple from old spires,
where sturdy burghers fought for freedom, and where vellum-bound quartos
might be sought and found, Flanders, on the whole gave Southey deeper
and stronger feelings than did Switzerland. The ideal land of his dreams
was always Spain: the earthly paradise for him was Cintra, with its
glory of sun, and a glow even in its depths of shadow. But as the years
went by, Spain became more and more a memory, less and less a hope; and
the realities of life in his home were of more worth every day. When,
in 1807, it grew clear that Greta Hall was to be his life-long place of
abode, Southey’s heart closed upon it with a tenacious grasp. He set
the plasterer and carpenter to work; he planted shrubs; he enclosed the
garden; he gathered his books about him, and thought that here were
materials for the industry of many years; he held in his arms children
who were born in this new home; and he looked to Crosthwaite Churchyard,
expecting, with quiet satisfaction, that when toil was ended he should
there take his rest.
“I don’t talk much about these things,” Southey writes; “but these lakes
and mountains give me a deep joy for which I suspect nothing elsewhere
can compensate, and this is a feeling which time strengthens instead
of weakening.” Some of the delights of southern counties he missed;
his earliest and deepest recollections were connected with flowers;
both flowers and fruits were now too few; there was not a cowslip to
be found near Keswick. “Here in Cumberland I miss the nightingale and
the violet—the most delightful bird and the sweetest flower.” But for
such losses there were compensations. A pastoral land will give amiable
pledges for the seasons and the months, and will perform its engagements
with a punctual observance; to this the mountains hardly condescend, but
they shower at their will a sudden largess of unimagined beauty. Southey
would sally out for a constitutional at his three-mile pace, the peaked
cap slightly shadowing his eyes, which were coursing over the pages of a
book held open as he walked; he had left his study to obtain exercise,
and so to preserve health; he was not a laker engaged in view-hunting;
he did not affect the contemplative mood which at the time was not and
could not be his. But when he raised his eyes, or when, quickening his
three-mile to a four-mile pace, he closed the book, the beauty which lay
around him liberated and soothed his spirit. This it did unfailingly;
and it might do more, for incalculable splendours, visionary glories,
exaltations, terrors, are momentarily possible where mountain, and
cloud, and wind, and sunshine meet. Southey, as he says, did not talk
much of these things, but they made life for him immeasurably better
than it would have been in city confinement; there were spaces, vistas,
an atmosphere around his sphere of work, which lightened and relieved
it. The engagements in his study were always so numerous and so full of
interest that it needed an effort to leave the table piled with books and
papers. But a May morning would draw him forth into the sun in spite of
himself. Once abroad, Southey had a vigorous joy in the quickened blood,
and the muscles impatient with energy long pent up. The streams were his
especial delight; he never tired of their deep retirement, their shy
loveliness, and their melody; they could often beguile him into an hour
of idle meditation; their beauty has in an especial degree passed into
his verse. When his sailor brother Thomas came and settled in the Vale
of Newlands, Southey would quickly cover the ground from Keswick at his
four-mile pace, and in the beck at the bottom of Tom’s fields, on summer
days, he would plunge and re-plunge and act the river-god in the natural
seats of mossy stone. Or he would be overpowered some autumn morning by
the clamour of childish voices voting a holiday by acclamation. Their
father must accompany them; it would do him good, they knew it would;
they knew he did not take sufficient exercise, for they had heard him
say so. Where should the scramble be? To Skiddaw Dod, or Causey Pike, or
Watenlath, or, as a compromise between their exuberant activity and his
inclination for the chair and the fireside, to Walla Crag? And there,
while his young companions opened their baskets and took their noonday
meal, Southey would seat himself—as Westall has drawn him—upon the
bough of an ash-tree, the water flowing smooth and green at his feet,
but a little higher up broken, flashing, and whitening in its fall; and
there in the still autumn noon he would muse happily, placidly, not now
remembering with overkeen desire the gurgling tanks and fountains of
Cintra, his Paradise of early manhood.[7]
On summer days, when the visits of friends, or strangers bearing letters
of introduction, compelled him to idleness, Southey’s more ambitious
excursions were taken. But he was well aware that those who form
acquaintance with a mountain region during a summer all blue and gold,
know little of its finer power. It is October that brings most often
those days faultless, pearl-pure, of affecting influence,
“In the long year set
Like captain jewels in the carcanet.”
Then, as Wordsworth has said, the atmosphere seems refined, and the sky
rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates;
the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and
more finely harmonized; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being
unoccupied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision becomes more
susceptible of its appropriate enjoyments. Even December is a better
month than July for perceiving the special greatness of a mountainous
country. When the snow lies on the fells soft and smooth, Grisedale Pike
and Skiddaw drink in tints at morning and evening marvellous as those
seen upon Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau for purity and richness.
“Summer,” writes Southey, “is not the season for this country. Coleridge
says, and says well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There are
no _goings on_ under a clear sky; but at other seasons there is such
shifting of shades, such islands of light, such columns and buttresses
of sunshine, as might almost make a painter burn his brushes, as the
sorcerers did their books of magic when they saw the divinity which
rested upon the apostles. The very snow, which you would perhaps think
must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings out their
recesses and designates all their inequalities; it impresses a better
feeling of their height; and it reflects such tints of saffron, or fawn,
or rose-colour to the evening sun. _O Maria Santissima!_ Mount Horeb,
with the glory upon its summit, might have been more glorious, but not
more beautiful than old Skiddaw in his winter pelisse. I will not quarrel
with frost, though the fellow has the impudence to take me by the nose.
The lake-side has such ten thousand charms: a fleece of snow or of the
hoar-frost lies on the fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points,
that just peer above the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on
the margin with chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of
beauty as mock all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out
that stones thrown upon the lake when frozen make a noise like singing
birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the shivers
slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.” This tells of
a February at Keswick; the following describes the _goings on_ under
an autumn sky:—“The mountains on Thursday evening, before the sun was
quite down or the moon bright, were all of one dead-blue colour; their
rifts and rocks and swells and scars had all disappeared—the surface
was perfectly uniform, nothing but the outline distinct; and this even
surface of dead blue, from its unnatural uniformity, made them, though
not transparent, appear transvious—as though they were of some soft or
cloudy texture through which you could have passed. I never saw any
appearance so perfectly unreal. Sometimes a blazing sunset seems to steep
them through and through with red light; or it is a cloudy morning, and
the sunshine slants down through a rift in the clouds, and the pillar of
light makes the spot whereon it falls so emerald green, that it looks
like a little field of Paradise. At night you lose the mountains, and the
wind so stirs up the lake that it looks like the sea by moonlight.”
If Southey had not a companion by his side, the solitude of his ramble
was unbroken; he never had the knack of forgathering with chance
acquaintance. With intellectual and moral boldness, and with high
spirits, he united a constitutional bashfulness and reserve. His retired
life, his habits of constant study, and, in later years, his shortness of
sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not patronize his humbler
neighbours; he had a kind of imaginative jealousy on behalf of their
rights as independent persons; and he could not be sure of straightway
discovering, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that common
ground whereon strangers are at home with one another. Hence—and Southey
himself wished that it had been otherwise—long as he resided at Keswick,
there were perhaps not twenty persons of the lower ranks whom he knew
by sight. “After slightly returning the salutation of some passer-by,”
says his son, “he would again mechanically lift his cap as he heard some
well-known name in reply to his inquiries, and look back with regret that
the greeting had not been more cordial.”
If the ice were fairly broken, he found it natural to be easy and
familiar, and by those whom he employed he was regarded with affectionate
reverence. Mrs. Wilson—kind and generous creature—remained in Greta
Hall tending the children as they grew up, until she died, grieved
for by the whole household. Joseph Glover, who created the scarecrow
“Statues” for the garden—male and female created he them, as the reader
may see them figured toward the close of _The Doctor_—Glover, the artist
who set up Edith’s fantastic chimney-piece (“Well, Miss Southey,”
cried honest Joseph, “I’ve done my Devils”), was employed by Southey
during five-and-twenty years, ever since he was a ’prentice-boy. If
any warm-hearted neighbour, known or unknown to him, came forward with
a demand on Southey’s sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly
response. When the miller, who had never spoken to him before, invited
the laureate to rejoice with him over the pig he had killed—the finest
ever fattened—and when Southey was led to the place where that which had
ceased to be pig and was not yet bacon, was hung up by the hind feet, he
filled up the measure of the good man’s joy by hearty appreciation of a
porker’s points. But Cumberland enthusiasm seldom flames abroad with so
prodigal a blaze as that of the worthy miller’s heart.
Within the charmed circle of home, Southey’s temper and manners were
full of a strong and sweet hilarity; and the home circle was in itself a
considerable group of persons. The Pantisocratic scheme of a community
was, after all, near finding a fulfilment, only that the Greta ran by in
place of the Susquehanna, and that Southey took upon his own shoulders
the work of the dead Lovell, and of Coleridge, who lay in weakness
and dejection, whelmed under the tide of dreams. For some little time
Coleridge continued to reside at Keswick, an admirable companion in
almost all moods of mind, for all kinds of wisdom, and all kinds of
nonsense. When he was driven abroad in search of health, it seemed as if
a brightness were gone out of the air, and the horizon of life had grown
definite and contracted. “It is now almost ten years,” Southey writes,
“since he and I first met in my rooms at Oxford, which meeting decided
the destiny of both.... I am perpetually pained at thinking what he ought
to be, ... but the tidings of his death would come upon me more like a
stroke of lightning than any evil I have ever yet endured.”
Mrs. Coleridge, with her children, remained at Greta Hall. That quaint
little metaphysician, Hartley—now answering to the name of Moses, now to
that of Job, the oddest of all God’s creatures—was an unceasing wonder
and delight to his uncle: “a strange, strange boy, ‘exquisitely wild,’ an
utter visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle
of his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings
I never saw one so utterly naked of self.” When his father expressed
surprise that Hartley should take his pleasure of wheel-barrow-riding so
sadly, “The pity is”—explained little Job—“the pity is, _I’se_ always
thinking of my thoughts.” “‘I’m a boy of a very religious turn,’ he says;
for he always talks of himself and examines his own character, just as
if he were speaking of another person, and as impartially. Every night
he makes an extempore prayer aloud; but it is always in bed, and not
till he is comfortable there and got into the mood. When he is ready, he
touches Mrs. Wilson, who sleeps with him, and says, ‘Now listen!’ and off
he sets like a preacher.” Younger than Hartley was Derwent Coleridge, a
fair, broad-chested boy, with merry eye and roguish lips, now grown out
of that yellow frock in which he had earned his name of Stumpy Canary.
Sara Coleridge, when her uncle came to Keswick after the death of his own
Margery, was a little grand-lama at that worshipful age of seven months.
A fall into the Greta, a year and a half later, helped to change her to
the delicate creature whose large blue eyes would look up timidly from
under her lace border and mufflings of muslin. No feeling towards their
father save a reverent loyalty did the Coleridge children ever learn
under Southey’s roof. But when the pale-faced wanderer returned from
Italy, he surprised and froze his daughter by a sudden revelation of that
jealousy which is the fond injustice of an unsatisfied heart, and which a
child who has freely given and taken love finds it hard to comprehend. “I
think my dear father,” writes Sara Coleridge, “was anxious that I should
learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling
so exclusively to my mother and all around me at home.” Love him and
revere his memory she did; to Wordsworth she was conscious of owing more
than to any other teacher or inspirer in matters of the intellect and
imagination. But in matters of the heart and conscience the daily life of
Southey was the book in which she read; he was, she would emphatically
declare, “upon the whole, the best man she had ever known.”
But the nepotism of the most “nepotious” uncle is not a perfect
substitute for fatherhood with its hopes and fears. May-morning of the
year 1804 saw “an Edithling very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a
young dodo,” nestling by Edith Southey’s side. A trembling thankfulness
possessed the little one’s father; but when the Arctic weather changed
suddenly to days of genial sunshine, and groves and gardens burst into
living greenery, and rang with song, his heart was caught into the
general joy. Southey was not without a presentiment that his young dodo
would improve. Soon her premature activity of eye and spirits troubled
him, and he tried, while cherishing her, to put a guard upon his heart.
“I did not mean to trust my affections again on so frail a foundation—and
yet the young one takes me from my desk and makes me talk nonsense as
fluently as you perhaps can imagine.” When Sara Coleridge—not yet five
years old, but already, as she half believed, promised in marriage to
Mr. De Quincey—returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw her
baby cousin, sixteen months younger, and therefore not yet marriageable,
grown into a little girl very fair, with thick golden hair, and round,
rosy cheeks. Edith Southey inherited something of her father’s looks and
of his swift intelligence; with her growing beauty of face and limbs a
growing excellence of inward nature kept pace. At twenty she was the
“elegant cygnet” of Amelia Opie’s album verses,
“’Twas pleasant to meet
And see thee, famed Swan of the Derwent’s fair tide,
With that elegant cygnet that floats by thy side”—
a compliment her father mischievously would not let her Elegancy forget.
Those who would know her in the loveliness of youthful womanhood may turn
to Wordsworth’s poem, _The Triad_, where she appears first of the three
“sister nymphs” of Keswick and Rydal; or, Hartley Coleridge’s exquisite
sonnet, _To a lofty beauty, from her poor kinsman_:
“Methinks thy scornful mood,
And bearing high of stately womanhood—
Thy brow where Beauty sits to tyrannize
O’er humble love, had made me sadly fear thee:
For never sure was seen a royal bride,
Whose gentleness gave grace to so much pride—
My very thoughts would tremble to be near thee,
But when I see thee by thy father’s side
Old times unqueen thee, and old loves endear thee.”
But it is best of all to remember Southey’s daughter in connexion with
one letter of her father’s. In 1805 he visited Scotland alone; he had
looked forward to carrying on the most cherished purpose of his life—the
_History of Portugal_—among the libraries of Lisbon. But it would be
difficult to induce Mrs. Southey to travel with the Edithling. Could he
go alone? The short absence in Scotland served to test his heart, and so
to make his future clear:—
“I need not tell you, my own dear Edith, not to read my letters
aloud till you have first of all seen what is written only
for yourself. What I have now to say to you is, that having
been eight days from home, with as little discomfort, and as
little reason for discomfort, as a man can reasonably expect,
I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great sense of
solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly I
will not go to Lisbon without you; a resolution which, if your
feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you. If, on
mature consideration, you think the inconvenience of a voyage
more than you ought to submit to, I must be content to stay
in England, as on my part it certainly is not worth while to
sacrifice a year’s happiness; for though not unhappy (my mind
is too active and too well disciplined to yield to any such
criminal weakness), still, without you I am not happy. But
for your sake as well as my own, and for little Edith’s sake,
I will not consent to any separation; the growth of a year’s
love between her and me, if it please God that she should live,
is a thing too delightful in itself, and too valuable in its
consequences, both to her and me, to be given up for any light
inconvenience either on your part or mine. An absence of a year
would make her effectually forget me.... But of these things we
will talk at leisure; only, dear, dear Edith, we must not part.”
Such wisdom of the heart was justified; the year of growing love bore
precious fruit. When Edith May was ten years old her father dedicated to
her, in verses laden with a father’s tenderest thoughts and feelings, his
_Tale of Paraguay_. He recalls the day of her birth, the preceding sorrow
for his first child, whose infant features have faded from him like a
passing cloud; the gladness of that singing month of May; the seasons
that followed during which he observed the dawning of the divine light in
her eyes; the playful guiles by which he won from her repeated kisses:
to him these ten years seem like yesterday; but to her they have brought
discourse of reason, with the sense of time and change:—
“And I have seen thine eyes suffused in grief
When I have said that with autumnal grey
The touch of old hath mark’d thy father’s head;
That even the longest day of life is brief,
And mine is falling fast into the yellow leaf.”
Other children followed, until a happy stir of life filled the house.
Emma, the quietest of infants, whose voice was seldom heard, and whose
dark-grey eyes too seldom shone in her father’s study, slipped quietly
out of the world after a hand’s-breadth of existence; but to Southey she
was no more really lost than the buried brother and sister were to the
cottage girl of Wordsworth’s _We are seven_. “I have five children,” he
says in 1809; “three of them at home, and two under my mother’s care
in heaven.” Of all, the most radiantly beautiful was Isabel; the most
passionately loved was Herbert. “My other two are the most perfect
contrast you ever saw. Bertha, whom I call Queen Henry the Eighth, from
her likeness to King Bluebeard, grows like Jonah’s gourd, and is the very
picture of robust health; and little Kate hardly seems to grow at all,
though perfectly well—she is round as a mushroom-button. Bertha, the
bluff queen, is just as grave as Kate is garrulous; they are inseparable
playfellows, and go about the house hand in hand.”
Among the inmates of Greta Hall, to overlook Lord Nelson and Bona
Marietta, with their numerous successors, would be a grave delinquency.
To be a cat, was to be a privileged member of the little republic to
which Southey gave laws. Among the fragments at the end of _The Doctor_
will be found a Chronicle History of the Cattery of Cat’s Eden; and some
of Southey’s frolic letters are written as if his whole business in
life were that of secretary for feline affairs in Greta Hall. A house,
he declared, is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there
is in it a child rising three years old and a kitten rising six weeks;
“kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud is in the garden.” Lord
Nelson, an ugly specimen of the streaked-carroty or Judas-coloured
kind, yet withal a good cat, affectionate, vigilant, and brave, was
succeeded by Madame Bianchi, a beautiful and singular creature, white,
with a fine tabby tail; “her wild eyes were bright, and green as the
Duchess de Cadaval’s emerald necklace.” She fled away with her niece
Pulcheria on the day when good old Mrs. Wilson died; nor could any
allurements induce the pair to domesticate themselves again. For some
time a cloud of doom seemed to hang over Cat’s Eden. Ovid and Virgil,
Othello the Moor, and Pope Joan perished miserably. At last Fortune,
as if to make amends for her unkindness, sent to Greta Hall almost
together the never-to-be-enough-praised Rumpelstilzchen (afterwards
raised for services against rats to be His Serene Highness the Archduke
Rumpelstilzchen), and the equally-to-be-praised Hurly-burlybuss. With
whom too soon we must close the catalogue.
The revenue to maintain this household was in the main won by Southey’s
pen. “It is a difficult as well as a delicate task,” he wrote in the
_Quarterly Review_, “to advise a youth of ardent mind and aspiring
thoughts in the choice of a profession; but a wise man will have no
hesitation in exhorting him to choose anything rather than literature.
Better that he should seek his fortune before the mast, or with a musket
on his shoulder and a knapsack on his back; better that he should follow
the plough, or work at the loom or the lathe, or sweat over the anvil,
than trust to literature as the only means of his support.” Southey’s
own bent towards literature was too strong to be altered. But, while
he accepted loyally the burdens of his profession as a man of letters,
he knew how stout a back is needed to bear them month after month and
year after year. Absolutely dependent on his pen he was at no time. His
generous friend Wynn, upon coming of age, allowed him annually 160_l._,
until, in 1807, he was able to procure for Southey a Government pension
for literary services amounting, clear of taxes, to nearly the same
sum. Southey had as truly as any man the pride of independence, but he
had none of its vanity; there was no humiliation in accepting a service
from one whom friendship had made as close as a brother. Men, he says,
are as much better for the good offices which they receive as for those
they bestow; and his own was no niggard hand. Knowing both to give and
to take, with him the remembrance that he owed much to others was among
the precious possessions of life which bind us to our kind with bonds
of sonship, not of slavery. Of the many kindnesses which he received he
never forgot one. “Had it not been for your aid,” he writes to Wynn,
forty years after their first meeting in Dean’s Yard, “I should have
been irretrievably wrecked when I ran upon the shoals, with all sail
set, in the very outset of my voyage.” And to another good old friend,
who from his own modest station applauded while Southey ran forward in
the race:—“Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and
most essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most
in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very
money with which I bought my wedding-ring and paid my marriage-fees was
supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left Edith during my six
months’ absence, and for the six months after my return it was from
you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till
I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of a cash
account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of
preserving your letters, and if you were not, I would entreat you to
preserve _this_, that it might be seen hereafter.... My head throbs and
my eyes burn with these recollections. Good-night! my dear old friend and
benefactor.”
Anxiety about his worldly fortunes never cost Southey a sleepless night.
His disposition was always hopeful; relying on Providence, he says, I
could rely upon myself. When he had little, he lived upon little, never
spending when it was necessary to spare; and his means grew with his
expenses. Business habits he had none; never in his life did he cast up
an account; but in a general way he knew that money comes by honest toil
and grows by diligent husbandry. Upon Mrs. Southey, who had an eye to all
the household outgoings, the cares of this life fell more heavily. Sara
Coleridge calls to mind her aunt as she moved about Greta Hall intent on
house affairs, “with her fine figure and quietly commanding air.” Alas!
under this gracious dignity of manner the wear and tear of life were
doing their work surely. Still, it was honest wear and tear. “I never
knew her to do an unkind act,” says Southey, “nor say an unkind word;”
but when stroke followed upon stroke of sorrow, they found her without
that elastic temper which rises and recovers itself. Until the saddest
of afflictions made her helpless, everything was left to her management,
and was managed so quietly and well, that, except in times of sickness
and bereavement, “I had,” writes her husband, “literally no cares.” Thus
free from harass, Southey toiled in his library; he toiled not for bread
alone, but also for freedom. There were great designs before him which,
he was well aware, if ever realized, would make but a poor return to
the household coffer. To gain time and a vantage-ground for these, he
was content to yield much of his strength to work of temporary value,
always contriving, however, to strike a mean in this journeyman service
between what was most and least akin to his proper pursuits. When a
parcel of books arrived from the _Annual Review_, he groaned in spirit
over the sacrifice of time; but patience! it is, after all, better, he
would reflect, than pleading in a court of law; better than being called
up at midnight to a patient; better than calculating profit and loss at
a counter; better, in short, than anything but independence. “I am a
quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed”—he writes to Grosvenor
Bedford—“regular as clock-work in my pace, sure-footed, bearing the
burden which is laid on me, and only obstinate in choosing my own path.
If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one
candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat ‘still
more threadbare than his own,’ when he wrote his ‘Imitation,’ working
hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing
poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily
progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as
proud, not so proud as happy. Grosvenor, there is not a lighter-hearted
nor a happier man upon the face of this wide world.” When these words
were written, Herbert stood by his father’s side; it was sweet to work
that his boy might have his play-time glad and free.
The public estimate of Southey’s works as expressed in pounds, shillings,
and pence, was lowest where he held that it ought to have been highest.
For the _History of Brazil_, a work of stupendous toil, which no one in
England could have produced save Southey himself, he had not received,
after eight years, as much as for a single article in the _Quarterly
Review_. _Madoc_, the pillar, as he supposed, on which his poetical fame
was to rest; _Madoc_, which he dismissed with an awed feeling, as if in
it he were parting with a great fragment of his life, brought its author,
after twelve months’ sales, the sum of 3_l._ 17_s._ 1_d._ On the other
hand, for his _Naval Biography_, which interested him less than most of
his works, and which was undertaken after hesitation, he was promised
five hundred guineas a volume. Notwithstanding his unwearied exertions,
his modest scale of expenditure, and his profitable connexion with the
_Quarterly Review_—for an important article he would receive 100_l._—he
never had a year’s income in advance until that year, late in his life,
in which Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky
payment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300_l._ in the Three-per-cents.
“I have 100_l._ already there,” he writes “and shall then be worth 12_l._
per annum.” By 1821 this sum had grown to 625_l._, the gatherings of
half a life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose acquaintance
he had made in Portugal, and to whose kindness he was a debtor, suffered
the loss of his fortune. As soon as Southey had heard the state of
affairs, his decision was formed. “By this post,” he tells his friend, “I
write to Bedford, desiring that he will transfer to you 625_l._ in the
Three-per-cents. I wish it was more, and that I had more at my command in
any way. I shall in the spring, if I am paid for the first volume of my
History as soon as it is finished. One hundred I should, at all events,
have sent you then. It shall be as much more as I receive.” And he goes
on in cheery words to invite John May to break away from business and
come to Keswick, there to lay in “a pleasant store of recollections which
in all moods of mind are wholesome.” One rejoices that Southey, poor of
worldly goods, knew the happiness of being so simply and nobly generous.
Blue and white china, mediæval ivories, engravings by the Little Masters,
Chippendale cabinets, did not excite pining desire in Southey’s breast;
yet in one direction he indulged the passion of a collector. If, with
respect to any of “the things independent of the will,” he showed a want
of moderation unworthy of his discipleship to Epictetus, it was assuredly
with respect to books. Before he possessed a fixed home, he was already
moored to his folios; and when once he was fairly settled at Keswick,
many a time the carriers on the London road found their riding the larger
by a weighty packet on its way to Greta Hall. Never did he run north or
south for a holiday, but the inevitable parcel preceded or followed his
return. Never did he cross to the Continent but a bulkier bale arrived
in its own good time, enclosing precious things. His morality, in all
else void of offence, here yielded to the seducer. It is thought that
Southey was in the main honest; but if Dirk Hatteraick had run ashore
a hundred-weight of the Acta Sanctorum duty-free, the king’s laureate
was not the man to set the sharks upon him; and it is to be feared that
the pattern of probity, the virtuous Southey himself, might in such
circumstances be found, under cover of night, lugging his prize landwards
from its retreat beneath the rocks. Unquestionably, at one time certain
parcels from Portugal—only of such a size as could be carried under the
arm—were silently brought ashore to the defrauding of the revenue, and
somehow found their way, by-and-by, to Greta Hall. “We maintain a trade,”
says the Governor of the Strangers’ House in Bacon’s philosophical
romance, “not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices,
nor any other commodity of matter, but only for God’s first creature,
which was _light_.” Such, too, was Southey’s trade, and he held that
God’s first creature is free to travel unchallenged by revenue-cutter.
“Why, Montesinos,” asks the ghostly Sir Thomas More in one of Southey’s
_Colloquies_, “with these books and the delight you take in their
constant society, what have you to covet or desire?” “Nothing,” is the
answer, “ ... except more books.” When Southey, in 1805, went to see
Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh that, having had neither
new coat nor hat since little Edith was born, he must surely be in want
of both; and here, in the metropolis of the North, was an opportunity of
arraying himself to his desire. “Howbeit,” he says, “on considering the
really respectable appearance which my old ones made for a traveller—and
considering, moreover, that as learning was better than house or land,
it certainly must be much better than fine clothes—I laid out all my
money in books, and came home to wear out my old wardrobe in the winter.”
De Quincey called Southey’s library his wife, and in a certain sense
it was wife and mistress and mother to him. The presence and enjoying
of his books was not the sole delight they afforded; there was also
the pursuit, the surprisal, the love-making or wooing. And at last, in
his hours of weakness, once more a little child, he would walk slowly
round his library, looking at his cherished volumes, taking them down
mechanically, and when he could no longer read, pressing them to his
lips. In happier days the book-stalls of London knew the tall figure, the
rapid stride, the quick-seeing eye, the eager fingers. Lisbon, Paris,
Milan, Amsterdam, contributed to the rich confusion that, from time to
time, burdened the floors of library and bedrooms and passages in Greta
Hall. Above all, he was remembered at Brussels by that best of bookmen,
Verbeyst. What mattered it that Verbeyst was a sloven, now receiving his
clients with gaping shirt and now with stockingless feet? Did he not duly
honour letters, and had he not 300,000 volumes from which to choose?
If in a moment of prudential weakness one failed to carry off such a
treasure as the _Monumenta Boica_ or Colgar’s _Irish Saints_, there was
a chance that in Verbeyst’s vast store-house the volume might lurk for
a year or two. And Verbeyst loved his books, only less than he loved
his handsome, good-natured wife, who for a liberal customer would fetch
the bread and burgundy. Henry Taylor dwelt in Robert Southey’s heart of
hearts; but let not Henry Taylor treasonably hint that Verbeyst, the
prince of booksellers, had not a prince’s politeness of punctuality.
If sundry books promised had not arrived, it was because they were not
easily procured; moreover, the good-natured wife had died—_bien des
malheurs_, and Verbeyst’s heart was fallen into a lethargy. “Think ill of
our fathers which are in the Row, think ill of John Murray, think ill of
Colburn, think ill of the whole race of bibliopoles, except Verbeyst, who
is always to be thought of with liking and respect.” And when the bill of
lading, coming slow but sure, announced that saints and chroniclers and
poets were on their way, “by this day month,” wrote Southey, “they will
probably be here; then shall I be happier than if his Majesty King George
the Fourth were to give orders that I should be clothed in purple, and
sleep upon gold, and have a chain upon my neck, and sit next him because
of my wisdom, and be called his cousin.”
Thus the four thousand volumes, which lay piled about the library when
Southey first gathered his possessions together, grew and grew, year
after year, until the grand total mounted up to eight, to ten, to
fourteen thousand. Now Kirke White’s brother Neville sends him a gift of
Sir William Jones’s works, thirteen volumes, in binding of bewildering
loveliness. Now Landor ships from some Italian port a chest containing
treasures of less dubious value than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with
which he liberally supplied his art-loving friends. Oh, the joy of
opening such a chest; of discovering the glorious folios; of glancing
with the shy amorousness of first desire at title-page and colophon; of
growing familiarity; of tracing out the history suggested by book-plate
or autograph; of finding a lover’s excuses for cropped margin, or
water-stain, or worm-hole! Then the calmer happiness of arranging his
favourites on new shelves; of taking them down again, after supper, in
the season of meditation and currant-rum; and of wondering for which
among his father’s books Herbert will care most when all of them shall
be his own. “It would please you,” Southey writes to his old comrade,
Bedford, “to see such a display of literary wealth, which is at once
the pride of my eye, and the joy of my heart, and the food of my mind;
indeed, more than metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothes for me and
mine. I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich before,
and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough
enjoyment of riches of any kind or in any way.”
Southey’s Spanish and Portuguese collection—if Heber’s great library
be set aside—was probably the most remarkable gathering of such books
in the possession of any private person in this country. It included
several manuscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinction
upon brackets. Books in white and gold—vellum or parchment bound, with
gilt lettering in the old English type which Southey loved—were arranged
in effective positions pyramid-wise. Southey himself had learned the
mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters acquired that art;
the ragged volumes were decently clothed in coloured cotton prints;
these, presenting a strange patch-work of colours, quite filled one room,
which was known as the Cottonian Library. “Paul,” a book-room on the
ground-floor, had been so called because “Peter,” the organ-room, was
robbed to fit it with books. “Paul is a great comfort to us, and being
dressed up with Peter’s property, makes a most respectable appearance,
and receives that attention which is generally shown to the youngest
child. The study has not actually been Petered on Paul’s account, but
there has been an exchange negotiated which we think is for their mutual
advantage. Twenty gilt volumes, from under the ‘Beauties of England and
Wales,’ have been marched down-stairs rank and file, and their place
supplied by the long set of Lope de Vega with green backs.”
Southey’s books, as he assures his ghostly monitor in the _Colloquies_,
were not drawn up on his shelves for display, however much the pride
of the eye might be gratified in beholding them; they were on actual
service. Generations might pass away before some of them would again find
a reader; in their mountain home they were prized and known as perhaps
they never had been known before. Not a few of the volumes had been cast
up from the wreck of family or convent libraries during the Revolution.
“Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines at Ghent. This book of
St. Bridget’s Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are
illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came
from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges.... Here are books from Colbert’s
library; here others from the Lamoignon one.... Yonder Chronicle History
of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes; and yonder General History of
Spain, by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors....
This Copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter
Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted
for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations.... Here is a book
with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him in prison
in Windsor Castle.... Here I possess these gathered treasures of time,
the harvest of many generations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to
the window, there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the
illimitable sky.”
Not a few of his books were dead, and to live among these was like living
among the tombs; “Behold, this also is vanity,” Southey makes confession.
But when Sir Thomas questions, “Has it proved to you ‘vexation of
spirit’ also?” the Cumberland mountain-dweller breaks forth: “Oh no! for
never can any man’s life have been passed more in accord with his own
inclinations, nor more answerably to his desires. Excepting that peace
which, through God’s infinite mercy, is derived from a higher source,
it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am beholden, not only for
the means of subsistence, but for every blessing which I enjoy; health
of mind and activity of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual
employment, and therefore continual pleasure. _Suavissima vita indies
sentire se fieri meliorem_; and this, as Bacon has said and Clarendon
repeated, is the benefit that a studious man enjoys in retirement.” Such
a grave gladness underlay all Southey’s frolic moods, and in union with
a clear-sighted acceptance of the conditions of human happiness—its
inevitable shocks, its transitory nature as far as it belongs to man’s
life on earth—made up part of his habitual temper.
Southey coursed from page to page with a greyhound’s speed; a tiny _s_
pencilled in the margin served to indicate what might be required for
future use. Neatness he had learnt from Miss Tyler long ago; and by
experience he acquired his method. On a slip of paper which served as
marker he would note the pages to which he needed to return. In the
course of a few hours he had classified and arranged everything in a book
which it was likely he would ever want. A reference to the less important
passages sufficed; those of special interest were transcribed by his
wife, or one of his daughters, or more frequently by Southey himself;
finally, these transcripts were brought together in packets under such
headings as would make it easy to discover any portion of their contents.
Such was his ordinary manner of eviscerating an author, but it was
otherwise with the writers of his affection. On some—such as Jackson
and Jeremy Taylor—“he _fed_,” as he expressed it, “slowly and
carefully, dwelling on the page, and taking in its contents, deeply
and deliberately, like an epicure with his wine ‘searching the subtle
flavour.’” Such chosen writers remained for all times and seasons
faithful and cherished friends:—
“With them I take delight in weal,
And seek relief in woe;
And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of thankful gratitude.”
“If I were confined to a score of English books,” says Southey, “Sir
Thomas Browne would, I think, be one of them; nay, probably it would be
one if the selection were cut down to twelve. My library, if reduced
to those bounds, would consist of Shakspeare, Chaucer, Spenser, and
Milton; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and South; Isaac Walton, Sidney’s
Arcadia, Fuller’s Church History, and Sir Thomas Browne; and what a
wealthy and well-stored mind would that man have, what an inexhaustible
reservoir, what a Bank of England to draw upon for profitable thoughts
and delightful associations, who should have fed upon them!” It must
have gone hard with Southey, in making out this list, to exclude
Clarendon, and doubtless if the choice were not limited to books written
in English, the Utopia would have urged its claim to admission. With
less difficulty he could skip the whole of the eighteenth century. From
_Samson Agonistes_ to _The Task_, there was no English poem which held
a foremost place in his esteem. Berkeley and Butler he valued highly;
but Robert South seemed to him the last of the race of the giants. An
ancestral connection with Locke was not a source of pride to Southey; he
respected neither the philosopher’s politics nor his metaphysics; still,
it is pleasant, he says, to hear of somebody between one’s self and Adam
who has left a name.
Four volumes of what are called Southey’s _Commonplace Books_ have been
published, containing some three thousand double-column pages; and
these are but a selection from the total mass of his transcripts. It is
impossible to give a notion of a miscellany drawn from so wide-ranging
a survey of poetry, biography, history, travels, topography, divinity,
not in English alone, but also in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese. Yet certain main lines can be traced which give some
meaning to this huge accumulation. It is easy to perceive that the
collector wrought under an historical bias, and that social, literary,
and ecclesiastical history were the directions in which the historical
tendency found its play. Such work of transcribing, though it did not
rest Southey’s hand, was a relief to his mind after the excitement of
composition, and some of it may pass for a kind of busy idleness; but
most of his transcripts were made with a definite purpose—that of
furnishing materials for work either actually accomplished or still in
prospect, when at last the brain grew dull and the fingers slack. “I
am for ever making collections,” he writes, “and storing up materials
which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been
doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my
hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to
be working up those materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.”
When Ticknor visited him in 1819, Southey opened for the young American
his great bundles of manuscript materials for the _History of Portugal_,
and the _History of the Portuguese East Indies_. Southey had charmed him
by the kindness of his reception; by the air of culture and of goodness
in his home; by his talk, bright and eager, “for the quickness of his
mind expresses itself in the fluency of his utterance; and yet he is
ready upon almost any subject that can be proposed to him, from the
extent of his knowledge.” And now, when Ticknor saw spread before him
the evidence of such unexampled industry, a kind of bewilderment took
possession of him. “Southey,” he writes in his diary, “is certainly an
extraordinary man, one of those whose characters I find it difficult
to comprehend, because I hardly know how such elements can be brought
together, such rapidity of mind with such patient labour and wearisome
exactness, so mild a disposition with so much nervous excitability, and
a poetical talent so elevated with such an immense mass of minute, dull
learning.”
If Ticknor had been told that this was due to Epictetus, it might have
puzzled him still more; but it is certain that only through the strenuous
appliance of will to the formation of character could Southey have
grown to be what he was. He had early been possessed by the belief
that he must not permit himself to become the slave or the victim of
sensibility, but that in the little world of man there are two powers
ruling by a Divine right—reason and conscience, in loyal obedience to
which lies our highest freedom. Then, too, the circumstances of his life
prompted him to self-mastery and self-management. That he should every
day overtake a vast amount of work, was not left to his choosing or
declining—it was a matter of necessity; to accomplish this, he must get
all possible advantage out of his rapidity of intellect and his energy
of feeling, and at the same time he must never put an injurious strain
on these. It would not do for Southey to burn away to-day in some white
flame of excitement the nerve which he needed for use to-morrow. He
could not afford to pass a sleepless night. If his face glowed or his
brain throbbed, it was a warning that he had gone far enough. His very
susceptibility to nervous excitement rendered caution the more requisite.
William Taylor had compared him to the mimosa. Hazlitt remembered him
with a quivering lip, a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in
his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. Crabb
Robinson found in him a likeness to Shelley. Humphry Davy had proved
the fineness of his sensibility by that odd neurometer, the nitrous
oxide. “The truth is,” writes Southey, “that though some persons, whose
knowledge of me is scarcely skin-deep, suppose I have no nerves, because
I have great self-control as far as regards the surface, if it were not
for great self-management, and what may be called a strict intellectual
regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called
nervous disease, and this would have been the case any time during the
last twenty years.” And again: “A man had better break a bone, or even
lose a limb, than shake his nervous system. I, who never talk about my
nerves (and am supposed to have none by persons who see as far into me as
they do into a stone wall), know this.” Southey could not afford to play
away his health at hazard, and then win it back in the lounge of some
foreign watering-place. His plan, on the contrary, was to keep it, and to
think about it as little as possible. A single prescription sufficed for
a life-time—_In labore quies._ “I think I may lay claim,” he says, “to
the praise of self-management both in body and mind without paying too
much attention to either—exercising a diseased watchfulness, or playing
any tricks with either.” It would not have been difficult for Southey,
with such a temperament as his, to have wrecked himself at the outset
of his career. With beautiful foiled lives of young men Southey had a
peculiar sympathy. But the gods sometimes give white hairs as an aureole
to their favoured ones. Perhaps, on the whole, for him it was not only
more prudent but also more chivalrous to study to be quiet; to create a
home for those who looked to him for security; to guard the happiness of
tender women; to make smooth ways for the feet of little children; to
hold hands in old age with the friends of his youth; to store his mind
with treasures of knowledge; to strengthen and chasten his own heart;
to grow yearly in love for his country and her venerable heritage of
manners, virtue, laws; to add to her literature the outcome of an adult
intellect and character; and having fought a strenuous and skilful fight,
to fall as one whose sword an untimely stroke has shattered in his hand.