well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There are _no goings
on_ under a clear sky.... The very snow, which you would perhaps
think must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings
out their recesses and designates all their inequalities, it
impresses a better feeling of their height, and it reflects such
tints of saffron, or fawn, or rose-colour to the evening sun. _O
Maria Santissima!_ Mount Horeb with the glory upon its summit might
have been more glorious, but not more beautiful than Skiddaw in his
pelisse of ermine. I will not quarrel with frost, though the fellow
has the impudence to take me by the nose. The lakeside has such ten
thousand charms; a fleece of snow or of the hoar-frost lies on the
fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points, that just peer above
the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on the margin with
chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of beauty as mock
all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out that
stones thrown upon the lake, when frozen, made a noise like singing
birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the
shivers slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.'--_A
letter of Robert Southey's._
[Illustration: WINE STREET, BRISTOL.
The Birthplace of Robert Southey.]
IX
GEORGE THE FOURTH'S LAUREATE
ROBERT SOUTHEY
'I could say much of Mr. Southey, at this time; of his
constitutional cheerfulness, of the polish of his manners, of his
dignity, and at the same time of his unassuming deportment, as well
as of the general respect which his talent, conduct, and
conversation excited.'--JOSEPH COTTLE, _Southey's first publisher_.
He was the most bookish and the most learned Laureate of them all. As a
poet, he was inferior to Wordsworth and Tennyson, yet superior to Pye or
Austin. He was a native of Bristol, where his father was an unsuccessful
linen-draper in Wine Street. Heredity had little or nothing to do with
the evolution of Robert's genius, except so far as from his mother's
alertness of intellect and happy temperament he received a foundation
upon which he was enabled to build his literary future. Industry, and a
great practical capacity, animated by a sanguine spirit, carried him
through a life of unremitting toil, and conquered difficulties that
would have crushed or disheartened most men.
He first saw the light on August 12, 1774. 'Is it a boy?' asked the
mother. 'Ay,' replied the nurse, 'a great ugly boy'; and the mother,
when she saw the 'great red creature,' feared she should never be able
to love him! However, he soon grew to be a handsome, curly-headed lad,
sensitive, and very much alive. The Southeys being 'under water' most of
their time, their first-born was adopted by a half-sister of the wife.
Aunt Tylor lived in Bath. To Bath, then, he was removed, and the
fashionable, theatre-going spinster, even over-nice and fastidious in
her love of spotless cleanliness, and very imperious in her manner, did
her duty conscientiously by her charge, letting him, however, attend
dramatic entertainments, and read all he could lay hands on, till he was
old enough to be sent to school. The 'Academy' selected was fully as low
as the average of the 'Do-the-boys' Halls of the day. The master was a
broken-down tradesman who had married his drunken servant-maid, and the
school broke up shortly with a free fight between the proprietor and his
son. Two years here had added little to the pupil's knowledge. He gained
most by his private reading. The next four years were spent in attending
as a day-boarder in the classes of a bewigged, irascible little
Welshman, with whom he learned Latin and the Church Catechism. 'Who
taught you to read, boy?' inquired schoolmaster Williams. 'My aunt,
sir.' 'Then tell your aunt that my old horse, dead these twenty years,
could have done it better!' This naturally terminated his attendance at
that school. The aunt left Bath shortly thereafter, and finally settled
at Bristol, Southey going with her, and still poring over Spenser,
Sidney, Pope's Homer and translations of Tasso, Ariosto, and Josephus.
By-and-by he was promoted to Westminster School to continue his Latin,
which he remembered for reading though not for writing, and to learn
Greek, which he afterwards forgot. A bias for history developed itself
here, and he found a good library in the house of a friend in Dean's
Yard, scarcely out of bounds. Here he studied Gibbon, Rousseau, and
Epictetus. Authorship in a school journal was tried, and so successfully
that his criticism on the ways of a stupid, 'flogging' preceptor, whose
name may well pass into oblivion, led to his expulsion, and the expelled
lad, whose name will never be obliterated, returned to his aunt in
Bristol.
Robert Southey had a maternal uncle, a clergyman, and English chaplain
at Lisbon, who became more to him than a father, the real father having
failed in business and died of a broken heart. Mr. Hill sent his nephew
to Oxford, designing to make a clergyman of him. The Dean of Christ
Church, however, hearing that the tall, handsome, enthusiastic young
poet and Radical had been turned out of Westminster for daring to attack
that fine old English institution, flogging in the great public schools,
rejected his application. Balliol received him. Here he made some
lifelong and most valuable friendships, one bringing him a future
pension of £160 a year to aid him in his devotion to literature, an
allowance continued, with unusual generosity, till he had made his mark,
and Government had remunerated him for his eminent services. He owed as
little to Oxford as to lower schools. All he learned, he tells us, was
some swimming and boating. He wrote his epic poem, 'Joan of Arc,' in his
nineteenth year; refused to enter into orders, 'joyfully bade adieu to
Oxford,' tried to learn medicine, but hated the dissecting-room too much
to follow it; had an interview with Coleridge, imbibed 'Pantisocracy,'
returned to Bristol once more, fell in love with Edith Fricker, sister
of Lovell's and Coleridge's wives, and was refused his Aunt Tylor's
house in consequence of his erratic opinions and misdoings. His
Portuguese uncle now stepped in to wean him from those ultra-democratic
views, as they were then considered, though nowadays almost commonplaces
of Toryism, and to relieve his pecuniary necessities. Pantisocracy,
supplemented by a little lecturing and a little publishing, had not
proved profitable, and poor Southey frequently knew the want of a
dinner. Mr. Hill was over in England, and took his relative back with
him. To make all fast, however, Robert and his beloved Edith, his
faithful, loving, and every way admirable wife for many years, got
themselves married in St. Mary de Redcliffe Church on the morning of the
day the former started from Bristol on his travels. They could not raise
the price of the wife's wedding-ring between them, and kind-hearted
Bookseller Cottle lent the requisite guinea. They parted at the
church-door, Southey going first to Madrid, and then to Lisbon and its
environs. In the Spanish peninsula were many valuable libraries hidden
away in monasteries. These he ransacked, learning the tongues in which
they were written, or printed, posting himself up in Portuguese history,
translating the romance of the Cid, and bringing back with him a number
of valuable books and documents. It was one of the pleasantest and most
profitable periods of his life, was this trip to the old medieval,
Catholic world of modern Portugal, though he came home with an intense
dislike of Romanism. But he returned to England and commenced studying
law in London, forgetting all he learned the moment his law books were
closed, and writing his second great poem, 'Madoc,' in the intervals of
reading Blackstone and Littleton and Coke. A holiday near Christchurch
followed during the bright summer weather of 1797 with wife and mother,
brother Tom just released from a French prison, brother-in-law
Coleridge, Bookseller Cottle, Friend Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and John
Rickman; and then a homeless time, sometimes in London, sometimes in
Bristol, and once among the literati of Norwich. Then ensued a residence
at Westbury-on-Trym in a pretty cottage, and an acquaintance with Davy,
afterwards the celebrated Sir Humphrey. Another trip to Portugal, this
time accompanied by his Edith, involved more study, and produced another
poem--'Thalaba.' Coleridge, it will be remembered, had removed to
Keswick, to Greta Hall. He now wrote for the Southeys to join him there,
which they did, and it was their home as long as their lives lasted.
Here Robert toiled at literature for his daily bread, living a strenuous
life not for his own and his growing family's sake alone, but for the
Coleridges during Samuel's sad lapses into the opium habit, and for the
widowed Mrs. Lovell and her child also. There was a time when I could
not like Robert Southey as man or author. His longer poems seemed prosy,
and most of his shorter ones trivial, and his prose lacking in sympathy
with humanity, and his books narrow in their outlook on life. He seemed
to be commonplace and cold, and every way humdrum. Fuller acquaintance
with the author and his works has not greatly changed one's views, about
some of his verses, but it has brought acquaintance with some books of
extraordinary merit wherein prejudice fades into quaintness of thought
and expression not altogether unpleasant, and since one's youthful days
the commonplace virtues of domestic life and home cheerfulness and the
heroism that toils and struggles unseen, and bears its life's burdens
uncomplainingly, have received a spiritual glorification far beyond that
which is due to the showy, romantic, good-for-nothing selfishness of the
plunger who neglects his responsibilities while captivating the
onlookers.
Life at Keswick was apparently a monotonous one. To-day was as
yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day, with the exception of short journeys
away, always leavened by longings to be at home. Each forty-eight hours
was mapped out with as much regularity as social claims would permit.
Reading, writing, walking among the beautiful landscapes of Keswick, and
the hearty enjoyment of relaxation in the midst of his numerous family
circle, had all their allotted times, with the hours of rest and sleep,
for Southey needed sleep and exercise to keep in good order the bodily
functions his very existence as an author depended upon. Yet did he
never refuse to be interviewed by legitimate callers--that is, those who
brought their own literary credentials with them, or introductions from
those he knew. Among the men who sought him for his works' sake was
Shelley during the time of his compulsory retirement at Keswick. He
carried on also a very large private correspondence. His 'selected'
letters alone fill four volumes. He befriended Kirke White, the poet,
with wise counsel and friendly sympathies, and Charlotte Brontë, and not
a few now quite unknown poets, struggling to make names for themselves
among the stars of English poesie. The correspondents to whom he
unbent, and showed the real man behind the books he wrote, included such
geniuses as Bishop Lightfoot, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor
(who was an inspiration to him), Sir Henry Taylor, and, of course, the
Lake Poets so well known to us all by now.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._
SOUTHEY'S MONUMENT IN CROSTHWAITE CHURCH, KESWICK.]
The losses, occurring in every extensive family, came from time to time
to tear the fibres of Southey's loving and sensitive heart. Children
died, or married and left him, and at length his brave, and
dearly-beloved wife's mental faculties decayed, and after some time of
gradual and hopeless failure, she died in 1837. Two years later he
married another excellent woman, though of quite different type from his
deeply-mourned Edith. This was Caroline Bowles, who was a literary lady
and poetess, and had been a correspondent for some time. He never fully
recovered the shock of his first wife's loss, and his own later years
were beclouded with brain disease resulting in something not quite
imbecility, and yet bordering upon it, in which he seemed to live in a
perpetual dream. A fever hastened his end, which came in the month of
March, 1843. His successor in the Laureateship and his son-in-law were
the only strangers present in Crosthwaite Churchyard at the funeral. It
was a cloudy day on which he was buried, but as the service was ending a
ray of sunshine touched the grave, and reminded the mourners of the
better light in the world beyond into which his soul had entered.
Southey was all his life a sincerely religious man. His refusal to enter
the Anglican priesthood in youth, and his championship of liberal views,
and even the narrowness of his later opinions on affairs of State and
Church--in other words, his bigoted Toryism--were all due to the
sincerity of his convictions, and his loyalty to what he thought at the
time to be the truth. The best short life you can have of Southey is
Edward Dowden's in 'English Men of Letters.'
Of his longer poems the world takes small account, though there is
undoubted poetry in them. It preserves chiefly his ballads, things like
the 'Battle of Blenheim,' 'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore,' 'The Old
Woman of Berkley,' and so forth, which can be found in most anthologies.
His prose writings were principally task-work, bread-winners,
painstaking, and mostly reliable. His 'Life of Nelson' has still a
circulation, and is probably the most popular of his books. His 'Life of
John Wesley' is pre-eminently a Churchman's appreciation of one to
whom he tried to be just, but had no kind of sympathy with. The works
which best show us Southey himself are his 'Uneducated Poets,' a
readable group of short biographies of his humbler brethren, to some of
whom he had been personally a benefactor; his 'Book of the Church,' a
volume of biographical sketches of builders and martyrs of the Church of
England; his 'Commonplace Book,' which shows the marvellous industry of
the man in collecting materials for his life-work; and, above all, that
curious assortment of odds and ends of erudition connected by the
thinnest thread of a story, around which the quaint old-world learning
winds and winds endlessly with something of Rabelaisian humour without
its grossness. This, of course, is 'The Doctor,' a book once captured
from an acquaintance of mine by hospital surgeons on the ground that
'medical' works were not permitted to patients! This book, written for
his own delectation and for the justification of his friends, is
particularly suitable for long, wet winter evenings by a cosy fireside,
and one that can be opened anywhere to disclose 'a feast of reason and a
flow of soul' to the reader.
[Illustration: JOSEPH COTTLE, OF BRISTOL.
B. 1770. D. 1853.
Friend and Patron of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and
their first Publisher (see pp. 85, 87, 106).
Portrait (æt. 50) by Branwhite, also of Bristol.]
X
VICTORIA'S FIRST LAUREATE
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
'The Age grew sated with her frail wit,
Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
And craved a living voice, a natural tone.'
From _Wordsworth's Grave_, by WILLIAM WATSON.
Wordsworth is, of course, the greatest poet of the English Lake school.
He is also the only one born in the lake counties, educated and, with
slight exception, resident all his life within them. His birthplace was
Cockermouth, his school the Grammar School of Hawkshead; his
residences--except what time he briefly dwelt among the southern
Quantock Hills--were at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and Rydal Mount; his
burial-place was among his kinsfolk in a quiet corner of Grasmere
Churchyard, beneath the sycamores and yews. Most of his compeers and
friends--Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd, John Wilson, and
even Hartley Coleridge--were born elsewhere, and came to live among
these northern mountains in youth or manhood.
He wrote, also, more about our district, and wrote it better, than any
other. This was partly due to patriotic devotion to his native corner
of our common fatherland, partly because the love of rambling was
ingrained in his being, chiefly because he was intuitively a
Nature-poet, looking below the grand and the lovely into the mystical
heart and core of sights and sounds that conceal and yet reveal their
Creator, Fashioner, and Upholder. He was the inspired interpreter of
things which ordinary men have not spiritual knowledge to
understand--which, indeed, the majority do not so much as behold dimly
until one of God's seers lifts the enshrouding veil.
Born in 1770, he died at noon on April 23, 1850. No one now living was
contemporary with his birth. Middle-aged admirers of his poems,
middle-aged controverters of his claim to pre-eminence, well remember
the shadow of death that fell across the nation's heart when they heard
the laureate had passed away. 'Surely,' writes F. W. H. Myers, 'of him,
if of anyone, we may think as a man who was so in accord with Nature, so
at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no mansion of the
universe which shall not be to him a home, no governor that will not
accept him among his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.'
There are few events to record between his earthly birth and his birth
into the upper kingdom--or shall we say his return to that kingdom?--if
there is anything in his own suggestion that--
'Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.'
His was a domestic life after he left Cambridge, and had done some
Continental travel and some in Scotland. It was spent in cottage homes
with his beloved sister Dorothy, for a short while in Dorsetshire,
another short while at Alfoxden, in Somerset, and then till his marriage
at Grasmere. He was married to Mary Hutchinson at Penrith in 1802. As
his family grew he removed successively into two larger houses, and
eventually settled at Rydal Mount. Here his life was one of attention to
his small Government appointment of stamp distributor, wandering 'lonely
as a cloud,' and muttering to himself so much that the peasants deemed
him half crazy; meditating upon and composing his immortal poems; and,
after he had become famous, receiving literary guests from all the
English-speaking peoples. His biography is a biography of the mind, a
history of mental processes and tendencies, a record of the gradual
creation of his own anthology. There are innumerable lives of him, of
less or greater length, from the old one of Paxton Hood, and the most
full and capable by his own nephew, and by Professor Knight, to the
latest in the 'English Men of Letters Series.' Professor Knight, too,
has given the world excellent editions of his poems, excellent
selections therefrom, and a charming review of his connection with the
lakes. All these are accessible to ordinary readers and
hero-worshippers. It will answer my purpose best in this place to note
only his local Nature-verses. Yet I may, perhaps, remind this generation
that Wordsworth had to win his spurs--the recognition of his right to be
ranked in any degree as a poet--and still more to be considered a
teacher of his race. His earlier effusions passed through a veritable
fire of scornful criticism. 'Primroses,' 'Daffodils,' 'Pet Lambs,' 'Idle
Shepherd Boys,' 'Alice Fells' and 'Lucy Grays,' and 'Lines to a
Friend's Spade,' were altogether too trivial themes for the responsible
and serious muse, while 'Peter Bell' was a special subject of scorn.
'Poems of Sentiment' were merely 'sentimental.' The sonnets and larger
pieces, particularly 'The Excursion,' were too heavy, and too laboured
to be readable. Pantheism was charged upon him as an objectionable
creed. Time justified him largely, and Wordsworth Societies helped to do
so still further, though in some respects the slashing critics may have
had fair ground. No other poet of his calibre is so unequal in the
quality of his output. Wordsworth's poems are by no means, it cannot be
too much insisted upon, all on the same high plane of merit, and many
will never pass into the world's best thought, as nearly all Tennyson's
have, to say nothing of Shakespeare's or Milton's.
He was pre-eminently a revealer of the kingdom of Nature, as seen in the
mountains and lakes, the birds, the flowers, the peasantry of the
counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and the over-sea portion of
Lancashire. Not only did he write an admirable guide for travellers and
tourists in these regions, but there is scarcely a section of this land
that he has not rendered classic ground by connecting with it some
incident, some allusion, some poetical idealizing. Where shall I begin?
With Windermere, of course. You remember this in the Prelude?
'When summer came,
Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,
To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oar; and the selected bourne
Was now an island musical with birds
That sang and ceased not; now a sister isle
Beneath the oak's umbrageous covert--sown
With lilies of the valley like a field;
And now a third small island, where survived
In solitude the ruins of a shrine
Once to Our Lady dedicate, and served
Daily with chanted rites.'
Better still than this is another passage from the same poem:
'There was a boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! Many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,
And there with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him, and they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams and echoes, long
Redoubled, and redoubled--concourse wild
Of jocund din; and when a lengthened pause
Of silence came, and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.'
Perhaps it is merely from old associations--the love one had for skating
on the flooded and frozen Severn-side meadows, when in one's
'teens'--yet I confess I like even better than either of the foregoing
extracts those lines describing the scene when our poet and his
schoolmates, 'all shod with steel,' 'hissed along the polished ice in
games confederate,' over the wintry floor of Windermere Lake, lines
which lead up to
'Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth. Ye visions of the hills!
And souls of lonely places! Can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry. When ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?'