WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 (_continued_).
The texture of Southey’s life was so uniform, the round from morning
till night repeated itself with so much regularity, that one day may
stand as representative of a thousand. We possess his record of how the
waking hours went by when he was about thirty years old, and a similar
record written when he was twice that age. His surroundings had changed
in the mean time, and he himself had changed; the great bare room which
he used from the first as a study, fresh plastered in 1804, with the
trowel-lines on the ceiling pierced by the flaws of winter, containing
two chairs and a little table—“God help me!” he exclaims, “I look in
it like a cock-robin in a church”—this room had received, long before
1834, its lining of comely books, its white and gold pyramids, its
brackets, its cherished portraits. The occupant of the study had the
same spare frame, the same aspect of lightness and of strength, the
same full eyebrows shadowing the dark-brown eyes, the same variously
expressive muscular mouth; the youthful wildness in his countenance had
given place to a thoughtful expression, and the abundant hair still
clustering over his great brow was snowy white. Whatever had changed,
his habits—though never his tyrants—remained, with some variations in
detail, the same. “My actions,” he writes to a friend not very long
after his arrival in Keswick, “are as regular as those of St. Dunstan’s
quarter-boys. Three pages of history after breakfast (equivalent to five
in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or
to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humour till
dinner-time; from dinner to tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper,
and very often indulge in a siesta—for sleep agrees with me.... After tea
I go to poetry, and correct, and rewrite, and copy till I am tired, and
then turn to anything else till supper; and this is my life—which, if it
be not a very merry one, is yet as happy as heart could wish.” “See how
the day is disposed of!” begins the later record; “I get out of bed as
the clock strikes six, and shut the house-door after me as it strikes
seven.[8] After two hours with Davies, home to breakfast, after which
Cuthbert engages me till about half-past ten, and when the post brings
no letters that either interest or trouble me (for of the latter I have
many), by eleven I have done with the newspaper, and can then set about
what is properly the business of the day. But letters are often to be
written, and I am liable to frequent interruptions; so that there are not
many mornings in which I can command from two to three unbroken hours at
the desk. At two I take my daily walk, be the weather what it may, and
when the weather permits, with a book in my hand; dinner at four, read
about half an hour; then take to the sofa with a different book, and
after a few pages get my soundest sleep, till summoned to tea at six.
My best time during the winter is by candle-light; twilight interferes
with it a little; and in the season of company I can never count upon an
evening’s work. Supper at half-past nine, after which I read an hour, and
then to bed. The greatest part of my miscellaneous work is done in the
odds and ends of time.”
It was part of Southey’s regimen to carry on several works at once;
this he found to be economy of time, and he believed it necessary for
the preservation of his health. Whenever one object entirely occupied
his attention, it haunted him, oppressed him, troubled his dreams. The
remedy was simple—to do one thing in the morning, another in the evening.
To lay down poetry and presently to attack history seems feasible, and
no ill policy for one who is forced to take all he can out of himself;
but Southey would turn from one poetical theme to another, and could
day by day advance with a pair of epics. This was a source of unfailing
wonder to Landor. “When I write a poem,” he says, “my heart and all my
feelings are upon it.... High poems will not admit flirtation.” Little
by little was Southey’s way, and so he got on with many things. “Last
night,” he writes to Bedford, “I began the Preface [to _Specimens of
English Poets_]—huzza! And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to
do. I am writing—1. _The History of Portugal_; 2. _The Chronicle of the
Cid_; 3. _The Curse of Kehama_; 4. _Espriella’s Letters_. Look you, all
these _I am_ writing.... By way of interlude comes in this preface. Don’t
swear, and bid me do one thing at a time. I tell you I can’t afford to
do one thing at a time—no, nor two neither; and it is only by doing many
things that I contrive to do so much: for I cannot work long together
at anything without hurting myself, and so I do everything by heats;
then, by the time I am tired of one, my inclination for another is come
round.” A strong, deliberate energy, accordingly, is at the back of all
Southey’s work; but not that blind creative rapture which will have its
own way, and leaves its subject weak but appeased. “In the day-time
I laboured,” says Landor, “and at night unburdened my soul, shedding
many tears. My _Tiberius_ has so shaken me at last that the least thing
affects me violently.” Southey shrank back from such agitations. A great
Elizabethan poet is described by one of his contemporaries as one standing
“Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”
Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly until the smooth
waters touched his waist; dipped seven times, and returned to the bank.
It was a beautiful and an elevating rite; but the waves sing with lyric
lips only in the midmost stream; and he who sings with them, and is swift
as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, faint, breathless,
delighted.
Authorship, it must be remembered, was Southey’s trade, the business
of his life, and this, at least, he knew how to conduct well. To be a
prophet and call down flame from heaven, and disappear in a whirlwind
and a chariot of fire, is sublime; but prophets can go in the strength
of a single meal for more days and nights than one would choose to name
in this incredulous age, and, if they eat, there are ravens to bring
them food. No ravens brought loaves to Greta Hall; and Southey had an
unprophet-like craving for the creature comforts of beef and bread, for
wine if it might be had, and at supper for one meditative tumbler of
punch or black-currant rum. Besides, what ravens were ever pledged to
feed a prophet’s sisters-in-law, or his nephews and nieces? Let it be
praise enough for much of Southey’s performance that he did good work in
workmanlike fashion. To shift knowledge into more convenient positions
is to render no unimportant service to mankind. In the gathering of
facts, Southey was both swift and patient in an extraordinary degree;
he went often alone, and he went far; in the art of exposition he was
unsurpassed; and his fine moral feeling and profound sympathy with
elementary justice created, as De Quincey has observed, a soul under what
else might well be denominated, Miltonically, “the ribs of death.” From
the mending of his pens to the second reading aloud of his proof-sheets,
attending as he read to the fall of each word upon the ear, Southey
had a diligent care for everything that served to make his work right.
He wrote at a moderate pace; re-wrote; wrote a third time if it seemed
desirable; corrected with minute supervision. He accomplished so much,
not because he produced with unexampled rapidity, but because he worked
regularly, and never fell into a mood of apathy or ennui. No periods of
tempestuous vacancy lay between his periods of patient labour. One work
always overlapped another—thus, that first idle day, the begetter of so
many idle descendants, never came. But let us hear the craftsman giving a
lesson in the knack of authorship to his brother, Dr. Henry Southey, who
has a notion of writing something on the Crusades:
“Now then, supposing that you will seriously set about the
_Crusades_, I will give you such directions in the art of
historical book-keeping as may save time and facilitate labour.
“Make your writing-books in foolscap quarto, and write on
only one side of a leaf; draw a line down the margin, marking
off space enough for your references, which should be given
at the end of every paragraph; noting page, book, or chapter
of the author referred to. This minuteness is now demanded,
and you will yourself find it useful; for, in transcribing or
in correcting proofs, it is often requisite to turn to the
original authorities. Take the best author; that is to say,
the one that has written most at length of all the _original_
authors, upon the particular point of time on which you are
employed, and draw up your account from him; then, on the
opposite page, correct and amplify this from every other who
has written on the same subject. This page should be divided
into two columns, one of about two-thirds of its breadth, the
other the remaining one. You are thus enabled to _add_ to your
_additions_.
“One of these books you should have for your geography; that
is to say, for collecting descriptions of all the principal
scenes of action (which must be done from books of travels),
their situation, their strength, their previous history, and
in the notes, their present state. [Another book—he adds in a
subsequent letter—you must keep for the bibliography of your
subject.]
“These descriptions you can insert in their proper places when
you transcribe. Thus, also, you should collect accounts of
the different tribes and dynasties which you have occasion to
mention. In this manner the information which is only to be got
at piecemeal, and oftentimes incidentally, when you are looking
for something else, is brought together with least trouble, and
almost imperceptibly.
“All relative matter not absolutely essential to the subject
should go in the form of supplementary notes, and these you
may make as amusing as you please, the more so, and the more
curious, the better. Much trouble is saved by writing them
on separate bits of paper, each the half of a quarter of a
foolscap sheet—numbering them, and making an index of them; in
this manner they are ready for use when they are wanted.
“It was some time before I fell unto this system of
book-keeping, and I believe no better can be desired. A Welsh
triad might comprehend all the rules of style. Say what you
have to say as _perspicuously_ as possible, as _briefly_ as
possible, and as _rememberably_ as possible, and take no other
thought about it. Omit none of those little circumstances which
give life to narration, and bring old manners, old feelings,
and old times before your eyes.”
Winter was Southey’s harvest season. Then for weeks no visitor knocked at
Greta Hall, except perhaps Mr. Wordsworth, who had plodded all the way
from Rydal on his indefatigable legs. But in summer interruptions were
frequent, and Southey, who had time for everything, had time to spare not
only for friends but for strangers. The swarm of lakers was, indeed, not
what it is now-a-days, but to a studious man it was, perhaps, not less
formidable. By Gray’s time the secret of the lakes had been found out;
and if the visitors were fewer, they were less swift upon the wing, and
their rank or fame often entitled them to particular attention. Coroneted
coaches rolled into Keswick, luggage-laden; the American arrived
sometimes to make sure that Derwentwater would not be missed out of Lake
Michigan, sometimes to see King George’s laureate; and cultured Americans
were particularly welcome to Southey. Long-vacation reading-parties
from Oxford and Cambridge—known among the good Cumberland folk as the
“cathedrals”—made Keswick a resort. Well for them if, provided with an
introduction, they were invited to dine at Greta Hall, were permitted to
gaze on the choice old Spaniards, and to converse with the laureate’s
stately Edith and her learned cousin. Woe to them if, after the
entanglements of a Greek chorus or descriptions of the temperate man and
the magnanimous man, they sought to restore their tone by a cat-worrying
expedition among the cottages of Keswick. Southey’s cheek glowed, his
eye darkened and flashed, if he chanced to witness cruelty; some of the
Cambridge “cathedrals” who received a letter concerning cats in July,
1834, may still bear the mark of its leaded thong in their moral fibre,
and be the better for possessing Southey’s sign-manual.
A young step-child of Oxford visited Keswick in the winter of 1811-12,
and sought the acquaintance of the author of _Thalaba_. Had Southey
been as intolerant or as unsympathetic as some have represented him,
he could not have endured the society of one so alien in opinion and
so outspoken as Shelley. But courtesy, if it were nothing more, was at
least part of Southey’s self-respect; his intolerance towards persons
was, in truth, towards a certain ideal, a certain group of opinions;
when hand touched hand and eye met eye, all intolerance vanished, and
he was open to every gracious attraction of character and manner. There
was much in Shelley that could not fail to interest Southey; both loved
poetry, and both felt the proud, secluded grandeur of Landor’s verse;
both loved men, and thought the world wants mending, though their plans
of reform might differ. That Shelley was a rebel expelled from Oxford did
not shock Southey, who himself had been expelled from Westminster and
rejected at Christ Church. Shelley’s opinions were crude and violent,
but their spirit was generous, and such opinions held by a youth in his
teens generally mean no more than that his brain is working and his heart
ardent. Shelley’s rash marriage reminded Southey of another marriage,
celebrated at Bristol some fifteen years ago, which proved that rashness
is not always folly. The young man’s admiration of _Thalaba_ spoke well
for him; and certainly during the earlier weeks of their intercourse
there was on Shelley’s part a becoming deference to one so much his
superior in years and in learning, deference to one who had achieved
much while Shelley still only dreamed of achievement. Southey thought
he saw in the revolutionary enthusiast an image of his former self.
“Here,” he says, “is a man at Keswick who acts upon me as my own ghost
would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the
member for Shoreham.... At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of
philosophy, and in the course of a week I expect he will be a Berkeleyan,
for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good
deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly
understands him and does him full justice. I tell him that all the
difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and
I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing
him that he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good with
6000_l._ a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at
present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want)
did me.” There were other differences between Robert Southey and the
inconstant star that passed by Greta Hall than that of years. Southey had
quickly learned to put a bound to his desires, and within that bound to
work out for himself a possession of measureless worth. It seemed to him
part of a man’s virtue to adhere loyally to the bond signed for each of
us when we enter life. Is our knowledge limited—then let us strive within
those limits. Can we never lay hands on the absolute good—then let us
cherish the good things that are ours. Do we hold our dearest possessions
on a limited tenure—that is hard, but is it not in the bond? How faint a
loyalty is his who merely yields obedience perforce! let us rather cast
in our will, unadulterated and whole, with that of our divine Leader;
_sursum corda_—there is a heaven above. But Shelley—the nympholept of
some radiant ante-natal sphere—fled through his brief years ever in
pursuit of his lost lady of light; and for him loyalty to the bond of
life seemed to mean a readiness to forget all things, however cherished,
so soon as they had fulfilled their service of speeding him on towards
the unattainable. It could not but be that men living under rules so
diverse should before long find themselves far asunder. But they parted
in 1812 in no spirit of ill-will. Southey was already a state-pensioner
and a champion of the party of order in the _Quarterly Review_; this did
not prevent the young apostle of liberty and fraternity from entering
his doors, and enjoying Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes. Irish affairs were
earnestly discussed; but Southey, who had written generously of Emmett
both in his verse and in the _Quarterly_, could not be hostile to one
whose illusions were only over-sanguine; and while the veritable Southey
was before Shelley’s eyes, he could not discern the dull hireling, the
venomous apostate, the cold-blooded assassin, of freedom conjured up by
Byron and others to bear Southey’s name.
Three years later Shelley presented his _Alastor_ to the laureate,
and Southey duly acknowledged the gift. The elder poet was never slow
to recognize genius in young men, but conduct was to him of higher
importance than genius; he deplored some acts in Shelley’s life which
seemed to result directly from opinions professed at Keswick in
1811—opinions then interpreted as no more than the disdain of checks
felt by every spirited boy. Southey heard no more from him until a
letter came from Pisa inquiring whether Shelley’s former entertainer at
Keswick were his recent critic of the _Quarterly Review_, with added
comments, courteous but severe, on Southey’s opinions. The reply was
that Southey had not written the paper, and had never in any of his
writings alluded to Shelley in any way. A second letter followed on each
side, the elder man pleading, exhorting, warning; the younger justifying
himself, and returning to the attack. “There the correspondence ended.
On Shelley’s part it was conducted with the courtesy which was natural
to him; on mine, in the spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a
fellow-creature.”
Much of Southey’s time—his most valued possession—was given to his
correspondents. Napoleon’s plan of answering letters, according to
Bourrienne, was to let them lie unopened for six weeks, by which time
nine out of ten had answered themselves, or had been answered by
history. Coleridge’s plan—says De Quincey—was shorter; he opened none,
and answered none. To answer all forthwith was the habit of Southey.
Thinking doubtless of their differences in such minor moralities of life,
Coleridge writes of his brother-in-law:—“Always employed, his friends
find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles than steadfast in
the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains
which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so
often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while,
on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures and inspires all that ease
of mind on those around or connected with him, which perfect consistency
and (if such a word might be framed) absolute _reliability_, equally in
small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this,
too, is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness.”
Odd indeed wore some of the communications for which the poet-laureate,
the Tory reformer, and the loyal son of the Church was the mark. Now
a clergyman writes to furnish him with Scriptural illustrations of
_Thalaba_; now another clergyman favours him with an ingenious parallel
between Kehama and Nebuchadnezzar; now some anonymous person seriously
urges on Southey his duty of making a new version of the Psalms, and
laying it before the King to be approved and appointed to be sung in
churches; now a lunatic poet desires his brother to procure for his
title-page the names of Messrs. Longman and Rees; now a poor woman,
wife to a blind Homer, would have him led carefully to the summit of
Parnassus; now a poor French devil volunteers to translate _Roderick_ if
the author will have the goodness to send him a copy—even a defective
copy—which he pledges himself religiously to return; now a Yankee, who
keeps an exhibition at Philadelphia, modestly asks for Southey’s painted
portrait, “which is very worthy a place in my collection;” now a herdsman
in the vale of Clwyd requests permission to send specimens of prose and
verse—his highest ambition is the acquaintance of learned men; now the
Rev. Peter Hall begs to inform Southey that he has done more harm to
the cause of religion than any writer of the age; now a lover requests
him to make an acrostic on the name of a young lady—the lover’s rival
has beaten him in writing verses; enclosed is the honorarium. Southey’s
amiability at this point gave way; he did not write the acrostic, and
the money he spent on blankets for poor women in Keswick. A society for
the suppression of albums was proposed by Southey; yet sometimes he was
captured in the gracious mood. Samuel Simpson, of Liverpool, begs for
a few lines in his handwriting “to fill a vacancy in his collection
of autographs, without which his series must remain for ever most
incomplete.” The laureate replies:
“Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim,
For collecting handwritings have taken a whim,
And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made,
In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid—
That I to your album so gracious would be
As to fill up a page there appointed for me,
Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine—
They will cost you in postage a penny a line:
At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done,
One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.”
Some of Southey’s distractions were of his own inviting. Soon after his
arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems entitled _Clifton Grove_,
attracted his attention; its author was an undergraduate of Cambridge.
The _Monthly Review_ having made the discovery that it rhymed in one
place _boy_ and _sky_, dismissed the book contemptuously. Southey could
not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of promise should be blasted,
and he wrote to Henry Kirke White, encouraging him, and offering him help
towards a future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heavily
on the poor boy’s spirits, and these unexpected words of cheer came with
most grateful effect. It soon appeared, however, that Southey’s services
must be slight, for his new acquaintance was taken out of his hands by
Mr. Simeon, the nursing-father of Evangelicalism. At no time had Southey
any leanings towards the Clapham Sect; and so, while he tried to be of
use to Kirke White indirectly, their correspondence ceased. When the
lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely
in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing that
he should be altogether forgotten; he wrote offering to look over
whatever papers there might be, and to give an opinion on them. “Down
came a box-full,” he tells Duppa, “the sight of which literally made
my heart ache and my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs
of human industry. To make short, I took the matter up with interest,
collected his letters, and have, at the expense of more time than such
a poor fellow as myself can very well afford, done what his family are
very grateful for, and what I think the world will thank me for too. Of
course I have done it gratuitously.... That I should become, and that
voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvinistic letters,
is a thing which, when I think of, excites the same sort of smile that
the thought of my pension does.” A brief statement that his own views
on religion differed widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save
Southey’s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated; it was an
error which the world has since found time to correct.
This was but one of a series of many instances in which Southey, stemming
the pressure of his own engagements, asserted the right to be generous of
his time and strength and substance to those who had need of such help
as a sound heart and a strong arm can give. William Roberts, a Bristol
bank-clerk, dying of consumption at nineteen, left his only possession,
some manuscript poems, in trust to be published for the benefit of a
sister whom he passionately loved. Southey was consulted, and at once
bestirred himself on behalf of the projected volume. Herbert Knowles,
an orphan lad at school in Yorkshire, had hoped to go as a sizar to St.
John’s; his relations were unable to send him; could he help himself by
publishing a poem? might he dedicate it to the laureate? The poem came to
Southey, who found it “brimful of power and of promise;” he represented
to Herbert the folly of publishing, promised ten pounds himself, and
procured from Rogers and Earl Spencer twenty more. Herbert Knowles, in
a wise and manly letter, begged that great things might not be expected
of him; he would not be idle, his University career should be at least
respectable:—“Suffice it, then, to say, _I thank you from my heart_;
let time and my future conduct tell the rest.” Death came to arbitrate
between his hopes and fears. James Dusautoy, another schoolboy, one of
ten children of a retired officer, sent specimens of his verse, asking
Southey’s opinion on certain poetical plans. His friends thought the
law the best profession for him; how could he make literature help him
forward in his profession? Southey again advised against publication,
but by a well-timed effort enabled him to enter Emanuel College.
Dusautoy, after a brilliant promise, took fever, died, and was buried, in
acknowledgment of his character and talents, in the college cloisters.
When at Harrogate in the summer of 1827, Southey received a letter,
written with much modesty and good feeling, from John Jones, an old
serving-man; he enclosed a poem on “The Redbreast,” and would take the
liberty, if permitted, to offer other manuscripts for inspection. Touches
of true observation and natural feeling in the verses on the little
bird with “look oblique and prying head and gentle affability” pleased
Southey, and he told his humble applicant to send his manuscript book,
warning him, however, not to expect that such poems would please the
public—“the time for them was gone by, and whether the public had grown
wiser in these matters or not, it had certainly become less tolerant
and less charitable.” By procuring subscribers and himself contributing
an Introductory Essay on the lives and works of our Uneducated Poets,
Southey secured a slender fortune for the worthy old man, who laid the
table none the less punctually because he loved Shakespeare and the
Psalter, or carried in his head some simple rhymes of his own. It pleased
Southey to show how much intellectual pleasure and moral improvement
connected with such pleasure are within reach of the humblest; thus a
lesson was afforded to those who would have the March of Intellect beaten
only to the tune of _Ça ira_. “Before I conclude”—so the Introduction
draws to an end—“I must, in my own behalf, give notice to all whom it may
concern that I, Robert Southey, Poet-laureate, being somewhat advanced
in years, and having business enough of my own fully to occupy as much
time as can be devoted to it, consistently with a due regard to health,
do hereby decline perusing or inspecting any manuscript from any person
whatsoever, and desire that no application on that score may be made
to me from this time forth; this resolution, which for most just cause
is taken and here notified, being, like the laws of the Medes and the
Persians, not to be changed.”
It was some time after this public announcement that a hand, which may
have trembled while yet it was very brave and resolute, dropped into
the little post-office at Haworth, in Yorkshire, a packet for Robert
Southey. His bold truthfulness, his masculine self-control, his strong
heart, his domestic temper sweet and venerable, his purity of manners, a
certain sweet austerity, attracted to him women of fine sensibility and
genius who would fain escape from their own falterings and temerities
under the authority of a faithful director. Already Maria del Occidente,
“the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” had
poured into his ear the tale of her slighted love. Newly come from
Paris, and full of enthusiasm for the Poles, she hastened to Keswick
to see in person her sympathetic adviser; she proved, says Southey, a
most interesting person of the mildest and gentlest manners. With him
she left, on returning to America, her _Zophiel_ in manuscript, the
publication of which he superintended. “_Zophiel_, Southey says, is by
some Yankee woman”—Charles Lamb breaks forth—“as if there ever had been
a woman capable of anything so great!” Now, in 1837, a woman of finer
spirit, and capable of higher things than _Zophiel_, addressed a letter
to Robert Southey, asking his judgment of her powers as disclosed in
the poems which she forwarded. For some weeks Charlotte Brontë waited,
until almost all hope of a reply was lost. At length the verdict came.
Charlotte Brontë’s verse was assuredly written with her left hand; her
passionate impulses, crossed and checked by fiery fiats of the will,
would not mould themselves into little stanzas; the little stanzas must
be correct, therefore they must reject such irregular heavings and swift
repressions of the heart. Southey’s delay in replying had been caused
by absence from home. A little personal knowledge of a poet in the
decline of life might have tempered her enthusiasm; yet he is neither a
disappointed nor a discontented man; she will never hear from him any
chilling sermons on the text. All is vanity; the faculty of verse she
possesses in no inconsiderable degree; but this, since the beginning of
the century, has grown to be no rare possession; let her beware of making
literature her profession, check day-dreams, and find her chief happiness
in her womanly duties; then she may write poetry for its own sake, not
in a spirit of emulation, not through a passion for celebrity; the
less celebrity is aimed at, the more it is likely to be deserved. “Mr.
Southey’s letter,” said Charlotte Brontë, many years later, “was kind
and admirable, a little stringent, but it did me good.” She wrote again,
striving to repress a palpitating joy and pride in the submission to her
director’s counsel, and the sacrifice of her cherished hopes; telling him
more of her daily life, of her obedience to the day’s duty, her efforts
to be sensible and sober: “I had not ventured,” she says, “to hope for
such a reply—so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.” Once
more Southey wrote, hoping that she would let him see her at the Lakes:
“You would then think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because
you would perceive that there is neither severity nor moroseness in the
state of mind to which years and observation have brought me.... And now,
madam, God bless you. Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend,
Robert Southey.” It was during a visit to the Lakes that Charlotte
Brontë told her biographer of these letters. But Southey lay at rest in
Crosthwaite churchyard.
“My days among the dead are past”—Southey wrote, but it is evident
that the living, and not those of his own household alone, claimed no
inconsiderable portion of his time. Indeed, it would not be untrue to
assert that few men have been more genuinely and consistently social,
that few men ever yielded themselves more constantly to the pleasures of
companionship. But the society he loved best was that of old and chosen
friends, or if new friends, one at a time, and only one. Next to romping
with my children, he said, I enjoy a _tête-à-tête_ conversation with
an _old_ friend or a _new_. “With one I can talk of familiar subjects
which we have discussed in former years, and with the other, if he have
any brains, I open what to me is a new mine of thought.” Miscellaneous
company to a certain extent disordered and intoxicated him. He felt no
temptation to say a great deal, but he would often say things strongly
and emphatically, which were better left unsaid. “In my hearty hatred of
assentation I commit faults of the opposite kind. Now I am sure to find
this out myself, and to get out of humour with myself; what prudence I
have is not ready on demand; and so it is that the society of any except
my friends, though it may be sweet in the mouth, is bitter in the belly.”
When Coleridge, in their arguments, allowed him a word, Southey made up
in weight for what was wanting in measure; he saw one fact quickly, and
darted at it like a greyhound. De Quincey has described his conversation
as less flowing and expansive than that of Wordsworth—more apt to clothe
itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form; consequently sooner coming
to an abrupt close; “the style of his mind naturally prompts him to adopt
a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic
sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without any
_locus penitentiæ_ or privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so.”
The same manner, tempered and chastened by years, can be recognized in
the picture of Southey drawn by his friend Sir Henry Taylor:—
“The characteristics of his manner, as of his appearance,
were lightness and strength, an easy and happy composure as
the accustomed mood, and much mobility at the same time, so
that he could be readily excited into any degree of animation
in discourse, speaking, if the subject moved him much, with
extraordinary fire and force, though always in light, laconic
sentences. When so moved, the fingers of his right hand
often rested against his mouth and quivered through nervous
susceptibility. But excitable as he was in conversation, he
was never angry or irritable; nor can there be any greater
mistake concerning him than that into which some persons have
fallen when they have inferred, from the fiery vehemence with
which he could give utterance to moral anger in verse or prose,
that he was personally ill-tempered or irascible. He was, in
truth, a man whom it was hardly possible to quarrel with or
offend personally, and face to face.... He was averse from
argumentation, and would commonly quit a subject, when it
was passing into that shape, with a quiet and good-humoured
indication of the view in which he rested. He talked most,
and with most interest, about books and about public affairs;
less, indeed hardly at all, about the characters and qualities
of men in private life, In the society of strangers or of
acquaintances, he seemed to take more interest in the subjects
spoken of than in the persons present, his manner being that of
natural courtesy and general benevolence without distinction of
individuals. Had there been some tincture of social vanity in
him, perhaps he would have been brought into closer relations
with those whom he met in society; but though invariably kind
and careful of their feelings, he was indifferent to the
manner in which they regarded him, or (as the phrase is) to
his _effect_ in society; and they might, perhaps, be conscious
that the kindness they received was what flowed naturally and
inevitably to all, that they had nothing to give in return
which was of value to him, and that no individual relations
were established.”
How deep and rich Southey’s social nature was, his published
correspondence, some four or five thousand printed pages, tells
sufficiently. These letters, addressed, for the most part, to good old
friends, are indeed genial, liberal of sympathy, and expecting sympathy
in return; pleasantly egotistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with
a kind of stringent pathos showing through checks imposed by the wiser
and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the treasures of his
affection. To lavish upon casual acquaintance the outward and visible
signs of friendship seemed to him a profaning of the mystery of manly
love. “Your feelings,” he writes to Coleridge, “go naked; I cover mine
with a bear-skin; I will not say that you harden yours by your mode, but
I am sure that mine are the warmer for their clothing.” With strangers a
certain neutral courtesy served to protect his inner self like the low
leaves of his own holly-tree:
“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;”
but to those of whose goodness and love he was well assured, there were
no protecting spines:
“Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”
“Old friends and old books,” he says, “are the best things that this
world affords (I like old wine also), and in these I am richer than
most men (the wine excepted).” In the group of Southey’s friends, what
first strikes one is, not that they are men of genius—although the group
includes Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor—but that they are good
men. No one believed more thoroughly than Southey that goodness is a
better thing than genius; yet he required in his associates some high
excellence, extraordinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral
character, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends in a
circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his affections time
and distance made no change. An old College friend, Lightfoot, to visit
Southey, made the longest journey of his life; it was eight-and-twenty
years since they had met. When their hands touched, Lightfoot trembled
like an aspen-leaf. “I believe,” says Southey, “no men ever met more
cordially after so long a separation, or enjoyed each other’s society
more. I shall never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor
the tone in which he said ‘that, having now seen me, he should return
home and die in peace.’” But of all friends he was most at ease with
his dear Dapple, Grosvenor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth
and sorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad decay, and the
once joyous house was melancholy and silent, Southey turned for comfort
to Bedford. Still, some of their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all
their warmth of brotherly affection. “My father,” says Cuthbert Southey,
“was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford’s trumpet.” And in more
joyous days, what noise and nonsense did they not make! “Oh! Grosvenor,”
exclaims Southey, “is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so
cordially and naturally and _bonâfidically_ as you and I, should be three
hundred miles asunder? For my part, I insist upon it that there is no
sense so good as your honest, genuine nonsense.”
A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as we read Southey’s
correspondence:—Wynn, wherever he was, “always doing something else,” yet
able, in the midst of politics and business, to find time to serve an
old schoolfellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accurate
knowledge and robust benevolence; John May, unfailing in kindness and
fidelity; Lamb for play and pathos, and subtle criticism glancing amid
the puns; William Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and
polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kindred enthusiasms
and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and
happy memories; Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities,
and warm, womanly services; Caroline Bowles for rarer sympathy and
sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor for spiritual sonship, as of a
son who is also an equal; and Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and
small, glad and sad, wise and foolish.
No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any
friendship of Southey. Political and religious differences, which
in strangers were causes of grave offence, seemed to melt away when
the heretic or erring statist was a friend. But if success, fashion,
flattery, tested a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case
with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold; and an habitual dereliction
of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, could not but transform
Southey’s feeling of love to one of condemning sorrow. To his great
contemporaries, Scott, Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely
given. “Scott,” he writes, “is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, but
bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity.... God grant that he may
recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall
not look upon again.” Of Wordsworth:—“A greater poet than Wordsworth
there never has been, nor ever will be.” “Two or three generations
must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and
Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium.”
With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt that Ebenezer
Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had stepped forward as the lyrist
of radicalism; but the feeling could not be altogether anger with which
he remembered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield inn,
its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expression suiting well
with Elliott’s frankness of manner and simplicity of character. William
Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad
whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither
his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange
Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house;
the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and
wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried the thrusts
good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor,
come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have
you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”
In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a public attack on
Southey, and that friend the gentlest and sweetest-natured of them all.
In a _Quarterly_ article Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a
book which wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful
as it was original. He had intended to alter the expression in the
proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever sent. Lamb, already pained
by references to his writings in the _Quarterly_, some of which he
erroneously ascribed to Southey, was deeply wounded. “He might have
spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights that
meant no harm to religion.” A long expostulation addressed by Elia to
Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in the _London Magazine_ for October, only
a portion of which is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of “The
Tombs of the Abbey;” for though Lamb had playfully repented Coleridge’s
salutation, “my gentle-hearted Charles,” his heart was indeed gentle,
and could not endure the pain of its own wrath; among the memorials of
the dead in Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once
more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey looked awful on his
poor friend, and spends his indignation harmless as summer lightning
over the heads of a Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement
of letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf of friendly
pleasantries; with surprise he learnt what pain his words had caused.
He hastened to explain; had Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he
would have tried, by a passage in the ensuing _Quarterly_, to efface the
impression unhappily created; he ended with a declaration of unchanged
affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. “On my part,” Southey said,
“there was not even a momentary feeling of anger;” he at once understood
the love, the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a being so
composed of goodness as Elia. “Dear Southey”—runs the answer of Lamb—“the
kindness of your note has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have
been fighting against a shadow.... I wish both magazine and review were
at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister
(though innocent) will be still more so, for this folly was done without
her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel
was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see you, however, any
day next week. We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That
will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and
heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being
my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my
Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.”
At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others
whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose
praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This
was Walter Savage Landor. _Madoc_, on which Southey had build his hope
of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received;
_Kehama_, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their
author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with
posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous
bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ
if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment,
when he turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work,
he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,”
he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one
who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the
most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would
walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk
fourscore to see him again. He talked of _Thalaba_, and I told him of
the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told
him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I
could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them,
and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as
many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he
says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer,
but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He
rose earlier each morning to carry on his _Kehama_, without abstracting
time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section
of this poem, and subsequently of his _Roderick_, came to be written,
it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a
golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor,
liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both
friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself,
while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a
vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on
the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art,
on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised
dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor,
aimed at a classical purity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a
shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the
virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity
by sculptured phrase; only the repression of a fiery spirit is more
apparent in Landor’s monumental lines than in Southey’s. With certain
organic resemblances, and much community of sentiment, there were large
differences between the two, so that when they were drawn together in
sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new province. Landor rejoiced
that the first persons who shared his turret at Llanthony were Southey
and his wife; again, in 1817, the two friends were together for three
days at Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction—the death of
his son:—
“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;
Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty
Above the glittering crests of giant sons
Station’d around ... in vain too! all in vain.”
Two years later the warm-hearted friend writes from Pistoia, rejoicing
in Southey’s joy: “Thank God! Tears came into my eyes on seeing that you
were blessed with a son.” To watch the happiness of children was Landor’s
highest delight; to share in such happiness was Southey’s; and Arnold
and Cuthbert formed a new bond between their fathers. In 1836, when
Southey, in his sixty-third year, guided his son through the scenes of
his boyhood, several delightful days were spent at Clifton with Landor.
I never knew a man of brighter genius or of kinder heart, said Southey;
and of Landor in earlier years:—“He does more than any of the gods of all
my mythologies, for his very words are thunder and lightning—such is the
power and splendour with which they burst out.” Landor responded with a
majestic enthusiasm about his friend, who seemed to him no less noble a
man than admirable a writer:
“No firmer breast than thine hath Heaven
To poet, sage, or hero given:
No heart more tender, none more just,
To that He largely placed in trust:
Therefore shalt thou, whatever date
Of years be thine, with soul elate
Rise up before the Eternal throne,
And hear, in God’s own voice, ‘Well done!’”
That “Well done” greeted Southey many years before Landor’s imperial
head was laid low. In the last letter from his friend received by
Southey—already the darkness was fast closing in—he writes, “If any man
living is ardent for your welfare, I am; whose few and almost worthless
merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite
and great faults it has been too ready to overlook. I will write to you
often, now I learn that I may do it inoffensively; well remembering that
among the names you have exalted is Walter Landor.” Alas! to reply was
now beyond the power of Southey; still, he held _Gebir_ in his hands
oftener than any other volume of poetry, and, while thought and feeling
lived, fed upon its beauty. “It is very seldom now,” Caroline Southey
wrote at a later date, “that he ever names any person: but this morning,
before he left his bed, I heard him repeating softly to himself, _Landor,
ay, Landor_.”
“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all”—this was ever
present to Southey during the happy days of labour and rest in Greta
Hall. While he was disposing his books so as to make the comeliest show,
and delighting in their goodly ranks; while he looked into the radiant
faces of his children, and loved their innocent brightness, he yet knew
that the day of detachment was approaching. There was nothing in such a
thought which stirred Southey to a rebellious mood; had he not set his
seal to the bond of life? How his heart rested in his home, only his
own words can tell; even a journey to London seemed too long:—“Oh dear;
oh dear! there is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s
own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library—with
a little girl climbing up to my neck, and saying, ‘Don’t go to London,
papa—you must stay with Edith;’ and a little boy, whom I have taught to
speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he
can articulate a word of his own;—there is such a comfort in all these
things, that _transportation_ to London for four or five weeks seems a
heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve.” Nor did his spirit of
boyish merriment abate until overwhelming sorrow weighed him down:—“I
am quite as noisy as I ever was,” he writes to Lightfoot, “and should
take as much delight as ever in showering stones through the hole of
the staircase against your room door, and hearing with what hearty good
earnest ‘you fool’ was vociferated in indignation against me in return.
Oh, dear Lightfoot, what a blessing it is to have a boy’s heart! it
is as great a blessing in carrying one through this world, as to have
a child’s spirit will be in fitting us for the next.” But Southey’s
light-heartedness was rounded by a circle of earnest acquiescence in
the law of mortal life; a clear-obscure of faith as pure and calm and
grave as the heavens of a midsummer night. At thirty he writes:—“No
man was ever more contented with his lot than I am, for few have ever
had more enjoyments, and none had ever better or worthier hopes. Life,
therefore, is sufficiently dear to me, and long life desirable, that I
may accomplish all which I design. But yet I could be well content that
the next century were over, and my part fairly at an end, having been
gone well through. Just as at school one wished the school-days over,
though we were happy enough there, because we expected more happiness and
more liberty when we were to be our own masters, might lie as much later
in the morning as we pleased, have no bounds and do no exercise—just so
do I wish that my exercises were over.” At thirty-five:—“Almost the only
wish I ever give utterance to is that the next hundred years were over.
It is not that the uses of this world seem to me weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable—God knows far otherwise! No man can be better contented with
his lot. My paths are paths of pleasantness.... Still, the instability of
human happiness is ever before my eyes; I long for the certain and the
permanent.” “My notions about life are much the same as they are about
travelling—there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after
all, one wants to be at rest.” At forty:—“My disposition is invincibly
cheerful, and this alone would make me a cheerful man if I were not so
from the tenor of my life; yet I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian
has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.”
Such was Southey’s constant temper: to some persons it may seem an
unfortunate one; to some it may be practically unintelligible. But
those who accept of the feast of life freely, who enter with a bounding
foot its measures of beauty and of joy—glad to feel all the while
the serviceable sackcloth next the skin—will recognize in Southey an
instructed brother of the Renunciauts’ rule.