Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey

by Robert Southey

  There were (and perhaps more justly I might say there are) two other notions currently received about Southey, one of which is altogether erroneous, and the other true only in a limited sense. The first is the belief that he belonged to what is known as the Lake school in poetry; with respect to which all that I need say in this place is involved in his own declaration frankly made to myself in Easedale, during the summer of 1812: that he considered Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction, and still more his principles as to the selection of subjects, and as to what constituted a poetic treatment, as founded on error. There is certainly some community of phraseology between Southey and the other Lakers, naturally arising out of their joint reverence for Scriptural language: this was a field in which they met in common: else it shows but little discernment and power of valuing the essences of things, to have classed Southey in the same school with Wordsworth and Coleridge. The other popular notion about Southey which I conceive to be expressed with much too little limitation regards his style. He has been praised, and justly, for his plain, manly, unaffected English, until the parrot echoers of other men’s judgments, who adopt all they relish with undistinguishing blindness, have begun to hold him up as a great master of his own language, and a classical model of fine composition. Now, if the error were only in the degree, it would not be worth while to notice it; but the truth is, that Southey’s defects in this particular power are as striking as his characteristic graces. Let a subject arise — and almost in any path there is a ready possibility that it should — in which a higher tone is required, of splendid declamation, or of impassionate fervour, and Southey’s style will immediately betray its want of the loftier qualities as flagrantly as it now asserts its powers in that unpretending form which is best suited to his level character of writing and his humbler choice of themes. It is to mistake the character of Southey’s mind, which is elevated but not sustained by the higher modes of enthusiasm, to think otherwise. Were a magnificent dedication required, moving with a stately and measured solemnity, and putting forward some majestic pretensions, arising out of a long and laborious life; were a pleading required against some capital abuse of the earth — war, slavery, oppression in its thousand forms; were a Defensio pro Populo Anglicano required; Southey’s is not the mind, and, by a necessary consequence, Southey’s is not the style, for carrying such purposes into full and memorable effect. His style is therefore good, because it has been suited to his themes; and those themes have hitherto been either narrative, which usually imposes a modest diction, and a modest structure of sentences, or argumentative in that class which is too overburthened with details, with replies, with interruption, and every mode of discontinuity, to allow a thought of eloquence, or of the periodic style which a perfect eloquence instinctively seeks.

  I here close my separate notice of the Lake Poets — meaning those three who were originally so denominated — three men upon whom posterity, in every age, will look back with interest as profound as, perhaps, belongs to any other names of our era; for it happens, not unfrequently, that the personal interest in the author is not in the direct ratio of that which belongs to his works: and the character of an author better qualified to command a vast popularity for the creations of his pen is oftentimes more of a universal character, less peculiar, less fitted to stimulate the curiosity, or to sustain the sympathy of the intellectual, than the profounder and more ascetic solemnity of a Wordsworth, or the prodigal and magnificent eccentricities of a Coleridge. With respect to both of these gifted men, some interesting notices still remain in arrear; but these will more properly come forward in their natural places, as they happen to arise in after years in connexion with my own memoirs.

  CHAPTER VI. THE SARACEN’S HEAD

  My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807; but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left myself time, I stayed only one week. On the last day, I witnessed a scene, the first and the last of its kind that ever I did witness, almost too trivial to mention, except for the sake of showing what things occur in the realities of experience which a novelist could not venture to imagine. Wordsworth and his sister were under an engagement of some standing to dine on that day with a literary lady about four miles distant; and, as the southern mail, which I was to catch at a distance of eighteen miles, would not pass that point until long after midnight, Miss Wordsworth proposed that, rather than pass my time at an inn, I should join the dinner party; a proposal rather more suitable to her own fervent and hospitable temper than to the habits of our hostess, who must (from what I came to know of her in after years) have looked upon me as an intruder. Something had reached Miss Wordsworth of her penurious ménage, but nothing that approached the truth. I was presented to the lady, whom we found a perfect bas bleu of a very commonplace order, but having some other accomplishments beyond her slender acquaintance with literature. Our party consisted of six — our hostess, who might be about fifty years of age; a pretty timid young woman, who was there in the character of a humble friend; some stranger or other; the Wordsworths, and myself. The dinner was the very humblest and simplest I had ever seen — in that there was nothing to offend — I did not then know that the lady was very rich — but also it was flagrantly insufficient in quantity. Dinner, however, proceeded; when, without any removals, in came a kind of second course, in the shape of a solitary pheasant. This, in a cold manner, she asked me to try; but we, in our humility, declined for the present; and also in mere good-nature, not wishing to expose too palpably the insufficiency of her dinner. May I die the death of a traitor, if she did not proceed, without further question to any one of us (and, as to the poor young companion, no form of even invitation was conceded to her), and, in the eyes of us all, eat up the whole bird, from alpha to omega. Upon my honour, I thought to myself, this is a scene I would not have missed. It is well to know the possibilities of human nature. Could she have a bet depending on the issue, and would she explain all to us as soon as she had won her wager? Alas! no explanation ever came, except, indeed, that afterwards her character, put en evidence upon a score of occasions, too satisfactorily explained everything. No; it was, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, a psychological curiosity — a hollow thing — and only once matched in all the course of my reading, in or out of romances; but that once, I grieve to say it, was by a king, and a sort of hero.

  The Duchess of Marlborough it is who reports the shocking anecdote of William III, that actually Princess Anne, his future wife, durst not take any of the green peas brought to the dinner table, when that vegetable happened to be as yet scarce and premature. There was a gentleman! And such a lady had we for our hostess. However, we all observed a suitable gravity; but afterwards, when we left the house, the remembrance affected us differently. Miss Wordsworth laughed with undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for laughing — he was thoroughly disgusted, and said repeatedly, “A person cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an act.” The lady is dead, and I shall not mention her name: she lived only to gratify her selfish propensities; and two little anecdotes may show the outrageous character of her meanness. I was now on the debtor side of her dinner account, and, therefore, in a future year she readily accepted an invitation to come and dine with me at my cottage. But, on a subsequent occasion, when I was to have a few literary people at dinner, whom I knew that she greatly wished to meet, she positively replied thus:—”No; I have already come with my young lady to dine with you; that puts me on the wrong side by one; now, if I were to come again, as I cannot leave Miss —— behind, I shall then be on the wrong side by three; and that is more than I could find opportunities to repay before I go up to London for the winter.” “Very well,” I said; “give me 3s. and that will settle the account.” She laughed, but positively persisted in not coming until after dinner, notwithstanding she had to drive a distance of ten miles.

  The other anecdote is worse. She was exceedingly careful
of her health; and not thinking it healthy to drive about in a close carriage, — which, besides, could not have suited the narrow mountain tracks, to which her sketching habits attracted her, — she shut up her town carriage for the summer, and jobbed some little open car. Being a very large woman, and, moreover, a masculine woman, with a bronzed complexion, and always choosing to wear, at night, a turban, round hair that was as black as that of the “Moors of Malabar,” she presented an exact likeness of a Saracen’s Head, as painted over inn-doors; whilst the timid and delicate young lady by her side looked like “dejected Pity” at the side of “Revenge” when assuming the war-denouncing trumpet. Some Oxonians and Cantabs, who, at different times, were in the habit of meeting this oddly assorted party in all nooks of the country, used to move the question, whether the poor horse or the young lady had the worst of it? At length the matter was decided: the horse was fast going off this sublunary stage; and the Saracen’s Head was told as much, and with this little addition, — that his death was owing inter alia to starvation. Her answer was remarkable:—”But, my dear madam, that is his master’s fault; I pay so much a-day — he is to keep the horse.” That might be, but still the horse was dying, and dying in the way stated. The Saracen’s Head persisted in using him under those circumstances — such was her “bond” — and in a short time the horse actually died. Yes, the horse died — and died of starvation — or at least of an illness caused originally by starvation: for so said, not merely the whole population of the little neighbouring town, but also the surgeon. Not long after, however, the lady, the Saracen’s Head, died herself; but I fear not of starvation; for, though something like it did prevail at her table, she prudently reserved it all for her guests; in fact, I never heard of such vigilant care, and so much laudable exertion, applied to the promotion of health: yet all failed, and, in a degree which confounded people’s speculations upon the subject — for she did not live much beyond sixty; whereas everybody supposed that the management of her physical system entitled her to outwear a century. Perhaps the prayers of horses might avail to order it otherwise.

  But the singular thing about this lady’s mixed and contradictory character was, that in London and Bath, where her peculiar habits of life were naturally less accurately known, she maintained the reputation of one who united the accomplishments of literature and art with a remarkable depth of sensibility, and a most amiable readiness to enter into the distresses of her friends by sympathy the most cordial and consolation the most delicate. More than once I have seen her name recorded in printed books, and attended with praises that tended to this effect. I have seen letters also from a lady in deep affliction which spoke of the Saracen’s Head as having paid her the first visit from which she drew any effectual consolation. Such are the erroneous impressions conveyed by biographical memoirs; or, which is a more charitable construction of the case, such are the inconsistencies of the human heart! And certainly there was one fact, even in her Westmoreland life, that did lend some countenance to the southern picture of her amiableness: and this lay in the cheerfulness with which she gave up her time (time, but not much of her redundant money) to the promotion of the charitable schemes set on foot by the neighbouring ladies; sometimes for the education of poor children, sometimes for the visiting of the sick, &c., &c. I have heard several of those ladies express their gratitude for her exertions, and declare that she was about their best member. But their horror was undisguised when the weekly committee came, by rotation, to hold its sittings at her little villa; for, as the business occupied them frequently from eleven o’clock in the forenoon to a late dinner hour, and as many of them had a fifteen or twenty miles’ drive, they needed some refreshments: but these were, of course, a “great idea” at the Saracen’s Head; since, according to the epigram which illustrates the maxim of Tacitus that omne ignotum pro magnifico, and, applying it to the case of a miser’s horse, terminates by saying, “What vast ideas must he have of oats!” — upon the same principle these poor ladies, on those fatal committee days, never failed to form most exaggerated ideas of bread, butter, and wine. And at length some, more intrepid than the rest, began to carry biscuits in their muffs, and, with the conscious tremors of school girls (profiting by the absence of the mistress but momentarily expecting detection), they employed some casual absence of their unhostly hostess in distributing and eating their hidden “viaticum.” However, it must be acknowledged, that time and exertion, and the sacrifice of more selfish pleasure during the penance at the school, were, after all, real indications of kindness to her fellow-creatures; and, as I wish to part in peace even with the Saracen’s Head, I have reserved this anecdote to the last: for it is painful to have lived on terms of good nature, and exchanging civilities, with any human being of whom one can report absolutely no good thing; and I sympathize heartily with that indulgent person of whom it is somewhere recorded that, upon an occasion when the death of a man happened to be mentioned who was unanimously pronounced a wretch without one good quality, “monstrum nullâ virtute redemptum,” he ventured, however, at last, in a deprecatory tone to say—”Well, he did whistle beautifully, at any rate.”

  Talking of “whistling” reminds me to return from my digression; for on that night, the 12th of November, 1807, and the last of my visits to the Wordsworths, I took leave of them in the inn at Ambleside about ten at night; and the post-chaise in which I crossed the country to catch the mail was driven by a postilion who whistled so delightfully that, for the first time in my life, I became aware of the prodigious powers which are lodged potentially in so despised a function of the vocal organs. For the whole of the long ascent up Orrest Head, which obliged him to walk his horses for a full half-mile, he made the woods of Windermere ring with the canorous sweetness of his half flute, half clarionet music; but, in fact, the subtle melody of the effect placed it in power far beyond either flute or clarionet. A year or two afterwards, I heard a fellow-servant of this same postilion’s, a black, play with equal superiority of effect upon the jew’s harp; making that, which in most hands is a mere monotonous jarring, a dull reverberating vibration, into a delightful lyre of no inconsiderable compass. We have since heard of, some of us have heard, the chinchopper. Within the last hundred years, we have had the Æolian harp (first mentioned and described in the “Castle of Indolence,” which I think was first published entire about 1738); then the musical glasses; then the celestina, to represent the music of the spheres, introduced by Mr. Walker, or some other lecturing astronomer; and many another fine effect obtained from trivial means. But, at this moment, I recollect a performance perhaps more astonishing than any of them. A Mr. Worgman, who had very good introductions, and very general ones (for he was to be met within a few months in every part of the island), used to accompany himself on the piano, weaving extempore long tissues of impassioned music, that were called his own, but which, in fact, were all the better for not being such, or at least for continually embodying passages from Handel and Pergolesi. To this substratum of the instrumental music he contrived to adapt some unaccountable and indescribable choral accompaniment, a pomp of sound, a tempestuous blare of harmony ascending in clouds not from any one, but apparently from a band of Mr. Worgman’s; for sometimes it was a trumpet, sometimes a kettle-drum, sometimes a cymbal, sometimes a bassoon, and sometimes it was all of these at once.

  “And now ’twas like all instruments; And now it was a flute; And now it was an angel’s voice, That maketh the heavens be mute.”

  In this case I presume that ventriloquism must have had something to do with the effect; but, whatever it were, the power varied greatly with the state of his spirits, or with some other fluctuating causes in the animal economy. However, the result of all these experiences is, that I shall never more be surprised at any musical effects, the very greatest, drawn from whatever inconsiderable or apparently inadequate means; not even if the butcher’s instrument, the marrow-bones and cleaver, or any of those culinary instruments so pleasantly treated by Addison in the “Spectato
r,” such as the kitchen dresser and thumb, the tongs and shovel, the pepper and salt-box, should be exalted, by some immortal butcher or inspired scullion, into a sublime harp, dulcimer, or lute, capable of wooing St. Cecilia to listen, able even

  “To raise a mortal to the skies, Or draw an angel down.”

  That night, as I was passing under the grounds of Elleray, then belonging to a Westmoreland “statesman,” a thought struck me, that I was now traversing a road with which, as yet, I was scarcely at all acquainted, but which, in years to come, might perhaps be as familiar to my eye as the rooms of my own house; and possibly that I might traverse them in company with faces as yet not even seen by me, but in those future years dearer than any which I had yet known. In this prophetic glimpse there was nothing very marvellous; for what could be more natural than that I should come to reside in the neighbourhood of the Wordsworths, and that this might lead to my forming connexions in a country which I should consequently come to know so well? I did not, however, anticipate so definitely and circumstantially as all this; but generally I had a dim presentiment that here, on this very road, I should often pass, and in company that, now not even conjecturally delineated or drawn out of the utter darkness in which they were as yet reposing, would hereafter plant memories in my heart, the last that will fade from it in the hour of death. Here, afterwards, at this very spot, or a little above it, but on this very estate, which from local peculiarities of ground, and of sudden angles, was peculiarly kenspeck, i.e. easy of recognition, and could have been challenged and identified at any distance of years; here afterwards lived Professor Wilson, the only very intimate male friend I have had; here, too, it was, my M., that, in long years afterwards, through many a score of nights — nights often dark as Erebus, and amidst thunders and lightnings the most sublime — we descended at twelve, one, and two o’clock at night, speeding from Kendal to our distant home, twenty miles away. Thou wert at present a child not nine years old, nor had I seen thy face, nor heard thy name. But within nine years from that same night thou wert seated by my side; — and, thenceforwards, through a period of fourteen years, how often did we two descend, hand locked in hand, and thinking of things to come, at a pace of hurricane; whilst all the sleeping woods about us re-echoed the uproar of trampling hoofs and groaning wheels. Duly as we mounted the crest of Orrest Head, mechanically and of themselves almost, and spontaneously, without need of voice or spur, according to Westmoreland usage, the horses flew off into a gallop, like the pace of a swallow. It was a railroad pace that we ever maintained; objects were descried far ahead in one moment, and in the next were crowding into the rear. Three miles and a half did this storm-flight continue, for so long the descent lasted. Then, for many a mile, over undulating ground, did we alternately creep and fly, until again a long precipitous movement, again a storm-gallop, that hardly suffered the feet to touch the ground, gave warning that we drew near to that beloved cottage; warning to us — warning to them: —