It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published "Sir
Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society," a
book in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery. There
were later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there was an
edition in one volume in 1837, at the beginning of the reign of Queen
Victoria.
These dialogues with a meditative and patriotic ghost form separate
dissertations upon various questions that concern the progress of
society. Omitting a few dissertations that have lost the interest they
had when the subjects they discussed were burning questions of the time,
this volume retains the whole machinery of Southey's book. It gives
unabridged the Colloquies that deal with the main principles of social
life as Southey saw them in his latter days; and it includes, of course,
the pleasant Colloquy that presents to us Southey himself, happy in his
library, descanting on the course of time as illustrated by the bodies
and the souls of books. As this volume does not reproduce all the
Colloquies arranged by Southey under the main title of "Sir Thomas More,"
it avoids use of the main title, and ventures only to describe itself as
"Colloquies on Society, by Robert Southey."
They are of great interest, for they present to us the form and character
of the conservative reaction in a mind that was in youth impatient for
reform. In Southey, as in Wordsworth, the reaction followed on
experience of failure in the way taken by the revolutionists of France,
with whose aims for the regeneration of Europe they had been in warmest
accord. Neither Wordsworth nor Southey ever lowered the ideal of a
higher life for man on earth. Southey retains it in these Colloquies,
although he balances his own hope with the questionings of the ghost, and
if he does look for a crowning race, regards it, with Tennyson, as a
"_far off_ divine event
To which the whole Creation moves."
The conviction brought to men like Wordsworth and Southey by the failure
of the French Revolution to attain its aim in the sudden elevation of
society was not of vanity in the aim, but of vanity in any hope of its
immediate attainment by main force. Southey makes More say to himself
upon this question (page 37), "I admit that such an improved condition of
society as you contemplate is possible, and that it ought always to be
kept in view; but the error of supposing it too near, of fancying that
there is a short road to it, is, of all the errors of these times, the
most pernicious, because it seduces the young and generous, and betrays
them imperceptibly into an alliance with whatever is flagitious and
detestable." All strong reaction of mind tends towards excess in the
opposite direction. Southey's detestation of the excesses of vile men
that brought shame upon a revolutionary movement to which some of the
purest hopes of earnest youth had given impulse, drove him, as it drove
Wordsworth, into dread of everything that sought with passionate energy
immediate change of evil into good. But in his own way no man ever
strove more patiently than Southey to make evil good; and in his own home
and his own life he gave good reason to one to whom he was as a father,
and who knew his daily thoughts and deeds, to speak of him as "upon the
whole the best man I have ever known."
In the days when this book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by
Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet
Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200
pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged
by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortune
was 400 pounds in consols. In 1821 he had added to that some savings,
and gave all to a ruined friend who had been good to him in former years.
Yet in those days he refused an offer of 2,000 pounds a year to come to
London and write for the _Times_. He was happiest in his home by
Skiddaw, with his books about him and his wife about him.
Ten years after the publishing of these Colloquies, Southey's wife, who
had been, as Southey said, "for forty years the life of his life," had to
be placed in a lunatic asylum. She returned to him to die, and then his
gentleness became still gentler as his own mind failed. He died in 1843.
Three years before his death his friend Wordsworth visited him at
Keswick, and was not recognised. But when Southey was told who it was,
"then," Wordsworth wrote, "his eyes flashed for a moment with their
former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him,
patting with both his hands his books affectionately, like a child."
Sir Thomas More, whose ghost communicates with Robert Southey, was born
in 1478, and at the age of fifty-seven was beheaded for fidelity to
conscience, on the 6th of July, 1535. He was, like Southey, a man of
purest character, and in 1516, when his age was thirty-eight, there was
published at Louvain his "Utopia," which sketched wittily an ideal
commonwealth that was based on practical and earnest thought upon what
constitutes a state, and in what direction to look for amendment of ills.
More also withdrew from his most advanced post of opinion. When he wrote
"Utopia" he advocated absolute freedom of opinion in matters of religion;
in after years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity. King
Henry VIII., stiff in his own opinions, had always believed that; and
because More would not say that he was of one mind with him in the matter
of the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold.