Note: Images of the original pages are available through
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Project Gutenberg has the other three volumes of this work.
I: Fom Celt to Tudor
see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54168
II: From Elizabeth to Anne
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III: Queen Anne and the Georges
see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37226
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
The Later Georges to Victoria
* * * * * *
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
_By Donald G. Mitchell_
I. From Celt to Tudor
II. From Elizabeth to Anne
III. Queen Anne and the Georges
IV. The Later Georges to Victoria
_Each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50_
AMERICAN LANDS AND LETTERS
From the Mayflower to Rip Van Winkle
_1 vol., square 12mo, Illustrated, $2.50_
* * * * * *
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
The Later Georges to Victoria
by
DONALD G. MITCHELL
[Illustration]
New York
Charles Scribner’S Sons
MDCCCXCVII
Copyright, 1897, by
Charles Scribner’S Sons
Trow Directory
Printing and Bookbinding Company
New York
_FORECAST._
The printers ask if there is to be prefatory matter.
There shall be no excuses, nor any defensive explanations: and I shall
only give here such forecast of this little book as may serve as a
reminder, and appetizer, for the kindly acquaintances I meet once more;
and further serve as an illustrative _menu_, for the benefit of those
newer and more critical friends who browse tentatively at the tables of
the booksellers.
This volume--the fourth in its series of English Lands and Letters--opens
upon that always delightful country of hills and waters, which is known as
the Lake District of England;--where we found Wordsworth, stalking over
the fells--and where we now find the maker of those heavy poems of
_Thalaba_ and _Madoc_, and of the charming little biography of Nelson.
There, too, we find that strange creature, De Quincey, full of a tumult of
thoughts and language--out of which comes ever and anon some penetrating
utterance, whose barb of words fixes it in the mind, and makes it rankle.
Professor Wilson is his fellow, among the hills by Elleray--as strenuous,
and weightier with his great bulk of Scottish manhood; the _Isle of Palms_
is forgotten; but not “Christopher in his Shooting Jacket”--stained, and
bespattered with Highland libations.
A Londoner we encounter--Crabb Robinson, full of gossip and
conventionalities; and also that cautious, yet sometimes impassioned
Scottish bard who sang of _Hohenlinden_, and of _Gertrude of Wyoming_.
Next, we have asked readers to share our regalement, in wandering along
the Tweed banks, and in rekindling the memories of the verse, the home,
and the chivalric stories of the benign master of Abbotsford, for
whom--whatever newer literary fashions may now claim allegiance and
whatever historic _quid-nuncs_ may say in derogation--I think there are
great multitudes who will keep a warm place in their hearts and easily
pardon a kindred warmth in our words.
After Dryburgh, and its pall, we have in these pages found our way to
Edinboro’, and have sketched the beginners, and the beginnings of that
great northern quarterly, which so long dominated the realm of British
book-craft, and which rallied to its ranks such men as Jeffrey and the
witty Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh and the pervasive and petulant
Brougham--full of power and of pyrotechnics. These great names and their
quarterly organ call up comparison with that other, southern and
distinctive Quarterly of Albemarle Street, which was dressed for literary
battle by writers like Gifford, Croker, Southey, and Lockhart.
The Prince Regent puts in an appearance in startling waistcoats and
finery--vibrating between Windsor and London; so does the bluff
Sailor-King William IV. Next, Walter Savage Landor leads the drifting
paragraphs of our story--a great, strong man; master of classicism, and
master of language; now tender, and now virulent; never quite master of
himself.
Of Leigh Hunt, and of his graceful, light-weighted, gossipy literary
utterance, there is indulgent mention, with some delightful passages of
verse foregathered from his many books. Of Thomas Moore, too, there is
respectful and grateful--if not over-exultant--talk; yet in these swift
days there be few who are tempted to tarry long in the “rosy bowers by
Bendemeer.”
From Moore and the brilliant fopperies of “The First Gentleman of Europe,”
we slip to the disorderly, but pungent and vivid essays of Hazlitt--to the
orderly and stately historic labors of Hallam, closing up our chapter with
the gay company who used to frequent the brilliant salon of the Lady
Blessington--first in Seamore Place, and later at Gore House. There we
find Bulwer, Disraeli (in his flamboyant youth-time), the elegant Count
d’Orsay, and others of that train-band.
Following quickly upon these, we have asked our readers to fare with us
along the old and vivid memories of Newstead Abbey--to track the
master-poet of his time, through his early days of romance and
marriage--through his journeyings athwart Europe, from the orange groves
of Lisbon to the olives of Thessaly--from his friendship with Shelley, and
life at Meillerie with its loud joys and stains--through his wild revels
of Venice--his masterly verse-making--his quietudes of Ravenna (where the
Guiccioli shone)--through his passionate zeal for Greece, and his last
days at Missolonghi, with one brief glimpse of his final resting-place,
beside his passionate Gordon mother, under the grim, old tower of
Hucknall-Torkard. So long indeed do we dwell upon this Byronic episode, as
to make of it the virtual _pièce de résistance_ in the literary _menu_ of
these pages.
After the brusque and noisy King William there trails royally into view
that Sovereign Victoria, over whose blanched head--in these very June days
in which I write--the bells are all ringing a joyous Jubilee for her
sixtieth year of reign. But to our eye, and to these pages, she comes as a
girl in her teens--modest, yet resolute and calm; and among her advisers
we see the suave and courtly Melbourne; and among those who make
parliamentary battle, in the Queen’s young years, that famed historian
who has pictured the lives of her kinsfolk--William and Mary--in a way
which will make them familiar in the ages to come.
We have a glimpse, too, of the jolly Captain Marryat cracking his
for’castle jokes, and of the somewhat tedious, though kindly, G. P. R.
James, lifting his chivalric notes about men-at-arms and knightly
adventures--a belated hunter in the fields of ancient feudal gramarye.
And with this pennant of the old times of tourney flung to the sharp winds
of these days, and shivering in the rude blasts--where anarchic threats
lurk and murmur--we close our preface, and bid our readers all welcome to
the spread of--what our old friend Dugald Dalgetty would call--the
_Vivers_.
D. G. M.
EDGEWOOD, June 24, 1897.
_CONTENTS._
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE LAKE COUNTRY, 2
ROBERT SOUTHEY, 5
HIS EARLY LIFE, 11
GRETA HALL, 15
THE DOCTOR AND LAST SHADOWS, 20
CRABB ROBINSON, 24
THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 28
MARRIAGE AND OTHER FLIGHTS, 34
CHAPTER II.
CHRISTOPHER NORTH, 40
WILSON IN SCOTLAND, 45
THOMAS CAMPBELL, 52
A MINSTREL OF THE BORDER, 59
THE WAVERLEY DISPENSATION, 65
GLINTS OF ROYALTY, 77
CHAPTER III.
A START IN LIFE, 83
HENRY BROUGHAM, 87
FRANCIS JEFFREY, 92
SYDNEY SMITH, 96
A HIGHLANDER, 103
REST AT CANNES, 107
CHAPTER IV.
GIFFORD AND HIS QUARTERLY, 113
A PRINCE REGENT, 118
A SCHOLAR AND POET, 125
LANDOR IN ITALY, 132
LANDOR’S DOMESTICITIES, 136
FINAL EXILE AND DEATH, 138
PROSE OF LEIGH HUNT, 142
HUNT’S VERSE, 147
AN IRISH POET, 152
LALLA ROOKH, 157
CHAPTER V.
THE “FIRST GENTLEMAN,” 165
HAZLITT AND HALLAM, 168
QUEEN OF A SALON, 173
YOUNG BULWER AND DISRAELI, 178
THE POET OF NEWSTEAD, 187
EARLY VERSE AND MARRIAGE, 193
CHAPTER VI.
LORD BYRON A HUSBAND, 201
A STAY IN LONDON, 206
EXILE, 212
SHELLEY AND GODWIN, 216
BYRON IN ITALY, 223
SHELLEY AGAIN, 225
JOHN KEATS, 229
BURIED IN ROME, 233
PISA AND DON JUAN, 237
MISSOLONGHI, 241
CHAPTER VII.
KING WILLIAM’S TIME, 252
HER MAJESTY VICTORIA, 255
MACAULAY, 259
IN POLITICS AND VERSE, 265
PARLIAMENTARIAN AND HISTORIAN, 270
SOME TORY CRITICS, 277
TWO GONE-BY STORY TELLERS, 281
_ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS._
CHAPTER I.
The reader will, perhaps, remember that we brought our last year’s ramble
amongst British Lands and Letters to an end--in the charming Lake District
of England. There, we found Coleridge, before he was yet besotted by his
opium-hunger; there, too, we had Church-interview with the stately,
silver-haired poet of Rydal Mount--making ready for his last Excursion
into the deepest of Nature’s mysteries.
The reader will recall, further, how this poet and seer, signalized some
of the later years of his life by indignant protests against the
schemes--which were then afoot--for pushing railways among the rural
serenities of Westmoreland.
_The Lake Country._
It is no wonder; for those Lake counties are very beautiful,--as if, some
day, all the tamer features of English landscape had been sifted out, and
the residue of picturesqueness and salient objects of flood and mountain
had been bunched together in those twin regions of the Derwent and of
Windermere. Every American traveller is familiar, of course, with the
charming glimpses of Lake Saltonstall from the Shore-line high-road
between New York and Boston; let them imagine these multiplied by a score,
at frequently recurring intervals of walk or drive; not bald duplications;
for sometimes the waters have longer stretch, and the hills have higher
reach, and fields have richer culture and more abounding verdure;
moreover, occasional gray church towers lift above the trees, and specks
of villages whiten spots in the valleys; and the smoothest and hardest of
roads run along the margin of the lakes; and masses of ivy cover walls,
and go rioting all over the fronts of wayside inns. Then, mountains as
high as Graylock, in Berkshire, pile suddenly out of the quieter
undulations of surface, with high-lying ponds in their gulches; there are
deep swales of heather, and bald rocks, and gray stone cairns that mark
the site of ancient Cumbrian battles.
No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did
love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have
shuddered--as does Ruskin now--at the whistling of the demon of
civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding,
and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the
charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk
to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is
true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the
thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence--twirling
hither and yon, and up and down--in a northwesterly direction to the town
of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain now in very much the same
condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years
ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes
near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that
strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say);
it skirts the very margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your
left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the
famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere
church-yard--in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a
modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William
Wordsworth,--as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one
passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up
Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right--no miniature
mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser
ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White
Mountains.
Twirling and winding along the flank of Helvellyn, the road comes
presently upon the long Dunmail Rise, where a Cumbrian battle was fought,
and where, some six hundred feet above the level of Rydal water, one
plunges into mountain savagery. All the while Helvellyn is rising like a
giant on the right, and on the left is the lake of Thirlmere, with its
shores of precipice. An hour more of easy walking brings one to another
crest of hill from which the slope is northward and westward, and from
this point you catch sight of the great mass of Skiddaw; while a little
hitherward is the white speckle of Keswick town; and stretching away from
it to your left lies all the valley of Derwent Water--with a cleft in the
hills at its head, down which the brooklet of Lodore comes--“splashing and
flashing.”
_Robert Southey._
I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country
of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old home at
Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River,
which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house
has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little
patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees--but never so many as to
forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters
shall tell us something of this view:
“I stood at the window beholding
Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure;
Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection
Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror,
Under the woods reposed; the hills that calm and majestic
Lifted their heads into the silent sky, from far Glaramara,
Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr to Grisedal and westernmost Wython,
Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gathered above them
High in the middle air, huge purple pillowy masses,
While in the West beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight,
Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters
Flow o’er a schistous bed.”
This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an
absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the
assonance, the spondees and the alliteration--to say nothing of the
mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights,
of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about
Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains--I
think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical
rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon
such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate
our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such
stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.
Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake
country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He
was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his
walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap
and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books--double-deep in his library, and
running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the
children’s voices that were around him there--not his own only, but those
always next, and almost his own--those of the young Coleridges. These were
stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the
rueful neglect of their father--the bard and metaphysician. I do not think
this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from
his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,--where he
knew care was good--afraid to encounter her clear, honest,
discerning--though unsympathetic--eyes, while he was putting all resources
and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened
its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.
And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded
children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young
Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:
“Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left
him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like a young giantess, and has
a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish
trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog,
is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the
last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a
letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the
post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your
Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a _purr_ from
Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the
baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all
arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.”
And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment,
runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats;
and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war--which young people
know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”--wherein old Kaspar
says,--
“it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun.
But things like that, you know, must be,
After a famous Victory.
Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won
And our good Prince Eugene;
‘Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!’
Said little Wilhelmine.
‘Nay--nay--my little girl,’ quoth he,
‘It was a famous Victory.’”
Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other,
about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many
“collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not,
some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson,
which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the
romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not
know, but--with most people--a surer and more lasting memory of Southey
would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named,
and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes
of Cumberland--tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household
committed to his care--than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the
louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.
_His Early Life._
To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born
down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember,
Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)--he was the son of a
broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt--a
starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp--could and did befriend him,
until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting
emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl
of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.
An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to
Oxford--would have had him take orders--in which case we should have had,
of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one.
But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by
intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every atom
of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however,
accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions
there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of
Portugal--which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls
in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his
notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to
think “has some merit.”
Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and
thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other
such. He is described at that day as tall--a most presentable man--with
dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said;
looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he
has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan
of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully
dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of _Thalaba_,
the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the
others being the _Curse of Kehama_ and _Madoc_). They are rarely heard of
now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from _Kehama_, beginning
“They sin who tell us Love can die,”
hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into
those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet
no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems
of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright
fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and
Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special
knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is
utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold--however it may
attract by its glitter--as the dead hand
“Shrivelled, and dry, and black,”
which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of _Thalaba_.
A fourth long poem--written much later in life--_Roderick the Goth_, has a
more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to
popular interest; but it had never a marked success.
Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been
peregrinations, and huntings for a home--for children and books must have
a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good
political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and
blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron’s
boys--which also comes into the scale of his duties--so gives up that
chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his
wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining
leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales
of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went
out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to
settlement, somewhere about 1803--in that Keswick home, where we found him
at the opening of our chapter.
_Greta Hall._
Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away
to Grasmere--to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained,
disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey
does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much
brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts;
he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish
appointment--“as if,” he said, “the author of _Joan of Arc_, and of
_Thalaba_, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the
Exchequer.”
Yet for that poem of _Thalaba_, in a twelve-month after issue, he had only
received as his share of profits a matter of £3 15s. Indeed, Southey would
have fared hardly money-wise in those times, if he had not won the favor
of a great many good and highly placed friends; and it was only four years
after his establishment at Keswick, when these friends succeeded in
securing to him an annual Government pension of £200. Landor had possibly
aided him before this time; he certainly had admired greatly his poems and
given praise that would have been worth more, if he had not spoiled it by
rating Southey as a poet so much above Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.[4]
In addition to these aids the _Quarterly Review_ was set afoot in those
days in London--of which sturdy defender of Church and State, Southey soon
became a virtual pensioner. Moreover, with his tastes, small moneys went a
long way; he was methodical to the last degree; he loved his old coats and
habits; he loved his marches and countermarches among the hills that
flank Skiddaw better than he loved horses, or dogs, or guns; a quiet
evening in his library with his books, was always more relished than ever
so good a place at Drury Lane. New friends and old brighten that
retirement for him. He has his vacation runs to Edinboro’--to London--to
Bristol; the children are growing (though there is death of one little
one--away from home); the books are piling up in his halls in bigger and
always broader ranks. He writes of Brazil, of Spanish matters, of new
poetry, of Nelson, of Society--showing touches of his early radicalism,
and of a Utopian humor, which age and the heavy harness of conventionalism
he has learned to wear, do not wholly destroy. He writes of Wesley and of
the Church--settled in those maturer years into a comfortable
routine-ordered Churchism, which does not let too airy a conscience prick
him into unrest. A good, safe monarchist, too, who comes presently, and
rightly enough--through a suggestion of George IV., then Regent in place
of crazy George III.[5]--by his position as Poet Laureate; and in that
capacity writes a few dismally stiff odes, which are his worst work. Even
Wordsworth, who walks over those Cumberland hills with reverence, and with
a pious fondness traces the “star-shaped shadows on the naked
stones”--cannot warm to Southey’s new gush over royalty in his New Year’s
Odes. Coleridge chafes; and Landor, we may be sure, sniffs, and swears,
with a great roar of voice, at what looks so like to sycophancy.
To this time belongs that ode whose vengeful lines, after the fall of
Napoleon, whip round the Emperor’s misdeeds in a fury of Tory Anglicanism,
and call on France to avenge her wrongs:--
“By the lives which he hath shed,
By the ruin he hath spread,
By the prayers which rise for curses on his head--
Redeem, O France, thine ancient fame!
Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!
Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!”
This seems to me only the outcry of a tempestuous British scold; and yet a
late eulogist has the effrontery to name it in connection with the great
prayerful burst of Milton upon the massacre of the Waldenses:--
“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.”
No, no; Southey was no Milton--does not reach to the height of an echo of
Milton.
Yet he was a rare and accomplished man of books--of books rather than
genius, I think. An excellent type of the very clever and well-trained
professional writer, working honestly and steadily in the service to which
he has put himself. Very politic, too, in his personal relations. Even
Carlyle--for a wonder--speaks of him without lacerating him.
In a certain sense he was not insincere; yet he had none of that
out-spoken exuberant sincerity which breaks forth in declaratory speech,
before the public time-pieces have told us how to pitch our voices.
Landor had this: so had Coleridge. Southey never would have run away from
his wife--never; he might dislike her; but Society’s great harness (if
nothing more) would hold him in check; there were conditions under which
Coleridge might and did. Southey would never over-drink or over-tipple;
there were conditions (not rare) under which Coleridge might and did. Yet,
for all this, I can imagine a something finer in the poet of the _Ancient
Mariner_--that felt moral chafings far more cruelly; and for real poetic
unction you might put _Thalaba_, and _Kehama_, and _Madoc_ all in one
scale, and only _Christabel_ in the other--and the Southey poems would be
bounced out of sight. But how many poets of the century can put a touch to
verse like the touch in _Christabel_?
_The Doctor and Last Shadows._
I cannot forbear allusion to that curious book--little read now--which was
published by Southey anonymously, called _The Doctor_:[6] a book showing
vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning--full of quips, and
conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais;
but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle;
and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You
may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom;
wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any
effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power. Yet he had
great pride in this book; believed it would be read admiringly long after
him; enjoyed vastly a boyish dalliance--if not a lying by-play--with the
secret of its authorship; but he was, I think, greatly aggrieved by its
want of the brilliant success he had hoped for.
But sorrows of a more grievous sort were dawning on him. On the very year
before the publication of the first volumes of _The Doctor_, he writes to
his old friend, Bedford: “I have been parted from my wife by something
worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I have
left her this day in a lunatic asylum.”
But she comes back within a year--quiet, but all beclouded; looking
vacantly upon the faces of the household, saddened, and much thinned now.
For the oldest boy Herbert is dead years since; and the daughter, Isabel,
“the most radiant creature (he says) that I ever beheld, or shall
behold”--dead too; his favorite niece, Sara Coleridge, married and gone;
his daughter Edith, married and gone; and now that other Edith--his
wife--looking with an idle stare around the almost empty house. It was at
this juncture, when all but courage seemed taken from him, that Sir Robert
Peel wrote, offering the poet a Baronetcy; but he was beyond taking heart
from any such toy as this. He must have felt a grim complacency--now that
his hair was white and his shoulders bowed by weight of years and toil,
and his home so nearly desolate--in refusing the empty bauble which
Royalty offered, and in staying--plain Robert Southey.
Presently thereafter his wife died; and he, whose life had been such a
domestic one, strayed round the house purposeless, like a wheel spinning
blindly--off from its axle. Friends, however, took him away with them to
Paris; among these friends--that always buoyant and companionable Crabb
Robinson, whose diary is so rich in reminiscences of the literary men of
these times. Southey’s son Cuthbert went with him, and the poet made a
good mock of enjoying the new scenes; plotted great work again--did labor
heartily on his return, and two years thereafter committed the
indiscretion of marrying again: the loneliness at Keswick was so great.
The new mistress he had long known and esteemed; and she (Miss Caroline
Bowles) was an excellent, kindly, judicious woman--although a poetess.
But it was never a festive house again. All the high lights in that home
picture which was set between Skiddaw and the Derwent-water were blurred.
Wordsworth, striding across the hills by Dunmail Rise, on one of his rare
visits, reports that Southey is all distraught; can talk of nothing but
his books; and presently--counting only by months--it appears that he will
not even talk of these--will talk of nothing. His handwriting, which had
been neat--of which he had been proud--went all awry in a great scrawl
obliquely athwart the page. For a year or two he is in this lost trail;
mumbling, but not talking; seeing things--yet as one who sees not;
clinging to those loved books of his--fondling them; passing up and down
the library to find this or the other volume that had been carefully
cherished--taking them from their shelves; putting his lips to them--then
replacing them;--a year or more of this automatic life--the light in him
all quenched.
He died in 1843, and was buried in the pretty church-yard of Crosthwaite,
a short mile away from his old home. Within the church is a beautiful
recumbent figure of the poet, which every traveller should see.
_Crabb Robinson._
I had occasion to name Crabb Robinson[7] as one of the party accompanying
Southey on his last visit to the Continent. Robinson was a man whom it is
well to know something of, by reason of his Boswellian _Reminiscences_,
and because--though of comparatively humble origin--he grew to be an
excellent type of the well-bred, well-read club-man of his day--knowing
everybody who was worth knowing, from Mrs. Siddons to Walter Scott, and
talking about everybody who was worth talking of, from Louis Phillippe to
Mrs. Barbauld.
He was quick, of keen perception--always making the most of his
opportunities; had fair schooling; gets launched somehow upon an
attorney’s career, to which he never took with great enthusiasm. He was an
apt French scholar--passed four or five years, too, studying in Germany;
his assurance and intelligence, aptitude, and good-nature bringing him to
know almost everybody of consequence. He is familiar with Madame de
Staël--hob-nobs with many of the great German writers of the early part of
this century--is for a time correspondent of the _Times_ from the Baltic
and Stockholm; and from Spain also, in the days when Bonaparte is raging
over the Continent. He returns to London, revives old acquaintances, and
makes new ones; knows Landor and Dyer and Campbell; is hail fellow--as
would seem--with Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Lady Blessington; falls
into some helpful legacies; keeps lazily by his legal practice; husbands
his resources, but never marries; pounces upon every new lion of the day;
hears Coleridge lecture; hears Hazlitt lecture; hears Erskine plead, and
goes to play whist and drink punch with the Lambs. He was full of
anecdote, and could talk by the hour. Rogers once said to his guests who
were prompt at breakfast: “If you’ve anything to say, you’d better say it;
Crabb Robinson is coming.” He talked on all subjects with average
acuteness, and more than average command of language, and little graceful
subtleties of social speech--but with no special or penetrative analysis
of his subject-matter. The very type of a current, popular, well-received
man of the town--good at cards--good at a club dinner--good at
supper--good in travel--good for a picnic--good for a lady’s tea-fight.
He must have written reams on reams of letters. The big books of his
_Diary and Reminiscences_[8] which I commend to you for their amusing and
most entertaining gossip, contained only a most inconsiderable part of his
written leavings.
He took admirable care of himself; did not permit exposure to draughts--to
indigestions, or to bad company of any sort. Withal he was charitable--was
particular and fastidious; always knew the best rulings of society about
ceremony, and always obeyed; never wore a dress-coat counter to good form.
He was an excellent listener--especially to people of title; was a
judicious flatterer--a good friend and a good fellow; dining out five days
in the week, and living thus till ninety: and if he had lived till now, I
think he would have died--dining out.
Mr. Robinson was not very strong in literary criticism. I quote a bit from
his _Diary_, that will show, perhaps as well as any, his method and range.
It is dated _June 6, 1812_:
“Sent _Peter Bell_ to Chas. Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like
it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative--as if that were
not the _art_ of the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts,
but has left them out here. [And then continues in his own person.]
In the perplexity arising from the diverse judgments of those to
whom I am accustomed to look up, I have no resource but in the
determination to disregard all opinions, and trust to the simple
impression made on my own mind. When Lady Mackintosh was once
stating to Coleridge her disregard of the beauties of nature, which
men commonly affect to admire, he said his friend Wordsworth had
described her feeling, and quoted three lines from ‘_Peter Bell_:’
‘A primrose by a river brim
‘A yellow primrose was to him,
‘And it was nothing more.’
“‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh--‘that is precisely my case.’”
_Thomas De Quincey._
On the same page of that _Diary_--where I go to verify this quotation--is
this entry:
“At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9] who
was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage
in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His
person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are
those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10]
Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly
looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do
merchant there--whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and
whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew
him;--remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country
house--pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage--came
to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was
of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color
here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with
her about the Bath school--where he is taught--she having moved into
Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to
know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his
mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of
George III.--gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)--and is
again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much
at odds here, that he takes the bit fairly in his mouth, and runs away
with _Euripides_ in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in
Wales--gypsy-like--and from there strikes across country blindly to
London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance
money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a
depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which
in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those
depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in
Oxford.
Quiet and studious here at first--he is represented as a rare talker, a
little given to wine--writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others,
who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug
which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford
career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London
streets again--evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to
Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer
worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Always shy, but earnest; most
interesting to strangers--with his pale face, high brow and lightning
glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that
somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by
good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed
the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!
So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere--in the
cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter--once occupied by
Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of
the hills--scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books--studies
the mountains--provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s
daughters--lives there a bachelor, eight years or more--ranging round and
round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the _Noctes
Ambrosianæ_)--cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived
nearby)--studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and
finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his
sensibilities are kept wrought to fever heat by the opiate drinks--always
flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish
drafts, that--on some occasions--he actually consumes within the
twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum!
No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in
those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the
pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.
In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to
the little elfin child--Catharine Wordsworth--of whom the poet-father
wrote:--
“Solitude to her
Was blithe society, who filled the air
With gladness and involuntary songs.
Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,
Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;
Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir
Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”
Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that
father’s heart, says, “She was no favorite with Wordsworth;” but he
“himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated” by this child of three. And
of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London,
he says, with crazy exaggeration:
“Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was
there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on
receiving that heart-shattering news.… I had always viewed her as an
impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy.… I returned
hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two
months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon
her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after
neighborhood to the darling of my heart.”[11]
This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his
speech--tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are
too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, “his eye
glares;” if disturbed, he has a “tumult of the brain;” if he doubles his
fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a
neighbor Dalesman are the images of “Coriolanus and Valeria.”
_Marriage and other Flights._
At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an
honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage
invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very
human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the
islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the
roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled
pair,--some of them still living and most worthy.
It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and
always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens--I
say--that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great
works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize
opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized.
He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes
even his vices, and a chapter of the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, in
the _London Magazine_, draws swift attention to one whose language is as
vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering
sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London,
away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the
Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is
once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence
there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford
Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and
Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and
finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding
dreams and stupefaction.
We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is
speaking of a dream.
“The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening
suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and
which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite
cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The
morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope
for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and
laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not
where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a
battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great
drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the
power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me
as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet
sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened;
there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of
innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the
bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with
the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that
were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and
clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting
farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the
incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was
reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again
reverberated--everlasting farewells!”
Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root
and branch that home with wife and children,--so wonted now to the
pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains--and to
transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has
promise of work which had begun to fail him in London.
There,--though he has the introduction which a place at the tavern table
of Father Ambrose gives--he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in
the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses
of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never
without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was in _Blackwood_
(1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine
Art,”--perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to
paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchy _Reminiscences_ of
his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press
without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random,
such as _novel-ish erector_ (for builder), _lambencies_, _apricating_,
_aculeated_; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some
recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle
and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he
had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the
scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page;
and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a
seamstress or a monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any
newspaper you may name.
But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see,
quivering--some gleams of his old strange power--a thrust of keen thought
that bewilders you by its penetration--a glowing fancy that translates one
to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over,
shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the
most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a
snap and a sting.
Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only
amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that
fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.
De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.