Robert Southey's Life of Nelson

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Introduction :

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I. Robert Southey ix

Introduction

I. Egbert Southey.

Robert Southey ^ came into this world a little less than one month before the first Continental Congress met at Philadelphia. Nelson was then a boy of six and Napoleon had not reached the age of five. Before Southey was ten, the Independence of America had been won; before he was sixteen, France was struggling to throw off the yoke of her ancient kings and laws. At the age of thirty-one he had witnessed the perversion of the principles of that inspiring struggle into a justification of all that is low, bloody, and barbarous; had beheld the conversion of the French Eepublic into a military despotism; had stood aghast at the amazing conquests of Napoleon; and had rejoiced in the brilliant victories of Nelson, while sorrowing at his untimely fall. Ten years later he was filled with a fierce exultation at the news of Waterloo. In common with all the literary men of his day he was deeply influenced by these stupendous events. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the brilliant summer time of literature which in England followed the close of Napoleon's career was in large measure due to the sense of national security and national supremacy which the downfall of Napoleon had produced. If to the battle of Trafalgar and the battle of Waterloo we owe the present conformation of the map of Europe, we owe to them no less the writings of Coleridge and A¥ordsworth, Byron and Shelley, Macaulay, Scott, and Carlyle. In an especial degree do we owe to them also the writings of Robert Southey.

Southey was the son of a dreamy and impecunious linen-draper of Bristol, in which city he was born August

^ Pronounced Sowth-ey or SWi-ey.

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12, 1774. Through the kindness and generosity of an ancient aunt of the Betsey Trotwood type, he was sent, at the age of six, to a school the master of which compensated in some measure for his unorthodoxy as to the doctrine of the Trinity by sound traditional views as to the uses of the cane. At this and other schools he imbibed much miscellaneous information, much French radicalism dangerous for an English boy to possess, a startling liberality of theological opinion, and a superficial knowledge of the foreign languages in the curriculum; moreover, he wrote prose and verse with great industry and little apparent success. He found Oxford, whither he went to finish his education, infested with men remarkable only for big wigs and little wisdom. The vulgar riot of college life had no charms for him; he was bored by lectures and nearly driven into rebellion by examinations; all, he said, that he learned was a little swimming and a little boating. He did, indeed, make a few valued friends at Oxford, but he entered the place without enthusiasm and left it without regret. His college years, however, were not fruitless ones. In his independent groping for intellectual food he chanced upon the works of Epictetus, and the stoical philosophy of the Greek slave entered into the fibre of his being and colored all the aims and ideals of his after career. Nor was his |)en idle. During his residence at Oxford he wrote a socialistic drama called "Wat Tyler," and shortly after bidding adieu to his Alma Mater he had an epic poem called "Joan of Arc," in twelve books, ready for the publisher.

Neither of these productions, both of which had been inspired by the French Eevolution, was given at once to the world. Already Sou they 's radicalism was beginning to evaporate. The executions of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Eoland, and of Brissot, followed hard as they were by a carnival of butchery, gave fatal shocks to his enthusiasm. For awhile he thought of organizing a band of republicans to liberate Greece; for awhile he had dreams of a cottage in America, Financial reasons prevented the realization of either plan. Though hard pressed for money, the strength of his conscience would not, as Emerson's would not, permit him to obtain the relief which he could have secured at once by taking

INTRODUCTION xi

orders; and the weakness of his nerves prevented him from seeking it in a profession which makes familiarity with the dissecting room imperative. While he was in this frame of mind there came to visit him one day in 1794 a young man with a spirit as radical, a mind as fiery, and a temperament as unpractical as his own. .This was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He too had already suffered adversity and written poetry. Between him and Southey a warm friendship sprang up. Inspired by common aspirations and common disappointments, they resolved to leave the old world of rotten thrones and corrupt manners, seek the young republic beyond the sea, and found on the banks of the Susquehanna a community which was to rest on the two fundamental principles that all property should be held in common and that each member should take unto himself a wife. The second of these requirements was promptly complied with by both of the projectors of Pantisocracy, by which fine word they designated their scheme, Coleridge shortly afterward marrying an estimable young woman called Sara Fricker, and Southey becoming the husband of her sister Edith; but the first, inasmuch as there was no property to hold in common or otherwise, caused at first the postponement, and, finally, the abandonment of the plan. After various ineffectual efforts to raise funds, it was laid aside; Southey, with a confidence in his own powers that is half heroic, in spite of the foolishness of the transaction, borrowed money to defray the expenses of his wedding; and directly after the ceremony, at the invitation of an uncle who was chaplain of the English colony at Lisbon, sailed, without his wife, for Portugal, his intention being to spend a year among strange people in the study of new customs and foreign idioms.

He was always slow, however, to make new acquaintances, either of men or places; he was naturally impatient to be at the side of his young wife; and though he luxuriated in the indolent glory of the southern clime, and went eagerly to work to make himself familiar with Portuguese books and babble, as he himself said, his departure from the South was marked by no feeling of regret.

In 1796, shortly after his return to England, his poem '* Joan of Arc " was published at Bristol, in an ambitious xii IN TROD UCTION

quarto, by his friend Cottle,^ the same who had lent him money to buy his wedding ring. It was praised in the reviews and bought by the people, the effect on the author being that he began to have a sort of " Helicon dropsy," as he said, and would rather leave off eating than poetizing — certainly an alarming result. Poetizing, however, did not produce pence, and the Penates being exacting in their demands for ' ' dues of fire and salt, for the firstlings of fruits, and for offerings of fine flour," the bard made a heroic effort to study law. To his own intense delight his attempt ended in complete failure. Only one means of support was left — the pen, and to the pen he betook himself with an energy and an industry that remain unparalleled to this day. From this time on literature was his sole financial resource.

For forty years he toiled at his desk, and his pen fell at last from his wearied hand only when his tired brain had ceased to think. His punctuality, his precision, and his energy in the labor of his chosen profession, indeed, have become proverbial. He himself has left us the record of it all in a letter to a friend. " Three pages of history after breakfast (equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press or to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humor till dinner-time; from dinner till tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper. . . . After tea I go to poetry, and correct, and rewrite, and copy till I am tired." Fearful, indeed, is the tribute of nerves and brain tissue which Apollo exacts from those who seek to win bread by the pen; unremitting in a unique degree the slavish toil; and ever imminent the danger of collapse physical or mental. Of all this Southey was acutely conscious. As he could not afford to rest, his method of guarding against breakdown was to have a variety of work always on hand. ''You wonder," he wrote to Landor, "that I can think of two poems at once. It proceeds from weakness, not

' Byron paid his respects to this estimable gentleman, who sometimes wooed the Muses himself, immortalizing him by one line in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers :

" O Amos Cottle ! Phoebus, what a name I "

Once, he said, Cottle was a seller of books he did not write, and now a writer of books he does not sell.

INTRODUCTION . xiii

from strength. I could not stand the continuous excitement which you have gone through in your tragedy." In spite of all his precautions, however, he found himself threatened, after three years of this life, with complete prostration. Change seemed absolutely necessary; his uncle invited him again to Lisbon; a friend gave him £100; and in April, 1800, he was once more on his way to Portugal.

Complete restoration to health, a more thorough knowledge of Portuguese books, and a vast collection of materials for a history of that country were the immediate results of this vacation. On his return to England in 1801, a letter from Coleridge enticed him to Greta Hall, Keswick (pronounced "Kessick"); and there, two years later, among the misty hills, the picturesque little lakes, and the foaming waterfalls of the charming region that James Russell Lowell in later years rechristened " Wordsworth - shire," he took up an abode, which he never quitted till his death in 1843,

During all that period he led a quiet, virtuous, and, in the main, uneventful life of literary toil. Here his children were born, and here, also, some of them died. Here his books were written and here corrected. Hither, too, came distinguished friends — Wordsworth, Shelley with his mystical skepticism, William Taylor, full of Germany and the Germans, Lamb and his puns, and Landor on fire with enthusiastic admiration for the sterling manhood of the host. Honors were not denied to him. He was made poet-laureate; he was elected a member of Parliament ; a baronetcy was offered to him; pensions, liberal if not munificent, rewarded his industrious toil. But it was chiefly in his family and in his books that Southey sought for happiness and found it. His devotion to the former is perhaps the most engaging trait of his character. When a daughter, " an Edithling," as he called her, '' very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a young dodo, ' ' was born to him in 1804, he was beside himself with joy. A few years later he resolved to abandon a journey to Spain which he had planned, for the reason that it meant that he must forego a year's love of his wife and child. With the sentiment of Wordsworth's " We Are Seven," he seems to have been quite in sympathy. Writing in 1809, he said.

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" I have five cliildren, three of them at home^ and two under my mother's care in heaven." His fine lines on love^ in tlie "Curse of Kehama/'^ are well known, and nobody who has read his biography can doubt that every word was written from his heart.

His other passion, a passion equally mastering, was centred upon his books. Books alone were able to betray him into imprudent expenditure of hard-earned coins; books alone, when the custom-house fees loomed large before him, tempted him to evade the laws of the realm. His collection gradually reached the grand total of fourteen thousand volumes. Their preservation and arrangement were a source of constant joy and constant care to him. He learned the mysteries of the binder's art and taught them to his daughters. One room was called Paul, because Peter, the organ-room, had been robbed to furnish it with books. He read, made excerpts, and classified the knowledge thus acquired with incredible speed. If reduced to twelve books, he declared that he w^ould elect to retain Shakespeare, Chaucer, S^Dcnser, and Milton ; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and South; Isaac A¥al ton, Sidney's "Arcadia," Fuller's " Church History," and Sir Thomas Browne. He was perpetually afraid that somebody would injure his beloved volumes ; especially did he tremble at the approach of Wordsworth. " Letting him into one's library is," he said, "like letting a bear into a tulip garden." Rogers said that Southey Avas never happy except when reading a book or making one. Coleridge declared that he could not think of Southey without seeing him either using or mending a pen. He himself, in some lines of touching and singular beauty,^ has left us a record of how completely his

^ Beginning,

" They sin who tell lis Love can die, With life all other passions fly, All others are but vanity."

Beginning,

My days among the Dead are passed,

Around me I behold Where'er these casual eyes are cast,

The mighty minds of old ; My never failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day."

INTRODUCTION XV

daily thoughts and hopes and fears were bound up with his books.

This unstinted devotion to books was not without its drawbacks. It was said that he gave so much time to the minds of other men that he never had time to look into his own. The charge is, in part, well founded. While he left one hundred printed volumes and one hundred and fifty book reviews, he bequeathed little that after generations have not willingly let die. Most of his prose is little more than a sublimated sort of compilation ; most of his poetry is far easier to admire than to enjoy.

From this defect one section of his verse may be pronounced comparatively free. Many of his short poems are models of clear and graceful narration and easy versification. Some of them overflow with rollicking good humor; others are imbued with a pathos that is irresistibly touching. He himself despised and condemned these waifs and satyrs. A candid critic must insist, however, that his longer poems are not his happiest efforts. The inscription which he wrote for his wife's coifee-pot, for instance, is a bit of humorous pleasantry that will never lose its point or its fun. Macaulay said that in all Southey's attempts to be witty, he never succeeded in being anything except quaintly and flippantly dull, certainly a cruel charge, and a charge which may be refuted by the laureate's lines on his serene highness, Auld Cloots, or by the "March to Moscow." Sou they, indeed, issued his first volume of short poems with the motto, " ^N'os haec novimus nihil," but posterity has reversed his decision. Who does not know ' ' Mary the Maid of the Inn, " " Bishop Bruno," "Bishop Hatto," who was eaten by the rats, "Blenheim," and that admirable waterfall "Lodore," where the waters still come down as of yore, in full view of Southey's Keswick home, in the same charmingly jumbled eagerness which they exhibit in his verse ? On the other hand, who now reads " Thalaba," that wild and wondrous song, or " Kehama," or " Madoc," or " Eoderick, the Last of the Goths," which Byron thought the first poem of the time ? The simple truth is, that, while Southey's longer poems do mark the new birth of English narrative verse, while they contain splendid description, noble and effective versification, abundant vigor and abundant fire, they

XYi INTRODUCTION

are fatally defective in one of the two fundamental requisites of literature. It is tlie purpose of literature^ to unite into an organic unity a spiritual conception and a material form^ to solemnize the nuptials of the finite and the infinite^ to embody what may be in terms of what is. Unless literature does this, there is no justification for its existence. In " Thalaba " and *^ Madoc/' and the " Curse of Kehama " there is an abundance of the spiritual, the infinite, the may-be; but the is, the finite, the material are wanting. They are like the giant whose strength vanished when his feet were lifted from the earth. One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin; unfortunately, in Southey's longer poems, that touch is too often absent.

Of the verses which his official duties as laureate led him to write, the less that is said perhaps the better. He himself described the yearly process of manufacturing stanzas for New Year's as an ode-ous job. Two of his most fortunate poems, however, were written in his official capacity — the tender lines on the " Death of the Princess Charlotte," and the noble burst of righteous wrath composed during the negotiations with Napoleon in 1814. These, however, were more than counterbalanced by the enormous failure of the '' Vision of Judgment," a sort of apotheosis of the poor old crazy King, George III., which was greeted from all quarters with derisive comment, and parodied, with most admirable success, by the wicked and witty Byron.

Southey's relations with Byron form, indeed, one of the most readable chapters in his history. In " English Bards and Scotch Eeviewers," Byron had mischievously remarked that "Thalaba" would be read when Homer and Virgil were forgotten, but — not till then ; had declared that startled metre had fled before " Thalaba's " face; and had ended his tirade against Southey with the pious ejaculation, '^ God help thee, Southey, and thy readers, too! " Later, however, they met amicably in London, through the intervention of Eogers. Byron was much pleased Avith what he called Southey's "epic appearance." " To have his head and shoulders, I would," he said, "almost have written his ' Sapphics. ' " He wrote in his diary: " Southey's talents are of the first order. His prose is perfect. He has probably written too much of poetry for the present

INTRODUCTION xvii

generation; posterity will probably select; but he has passages equal to anything." However^ when he was about to give " Don Juan/' a strange compound of ribaldry and beauty^ of wit and blasphemy, to the world, Byron, who dearly loved to shock people, saw and took the opportunity to do so by dedicating the offspring of his disreputable Pegasus to Southey, who was the very personification of propriety. The lines are familiar and droll ; they begin :

"Bob Southey! You're a poet — Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race, Although 't is true that you turn'd out a Tory at Last, — yours has lately been a common case ;"

and they angered Southey, who, in the preface to the '^Vision of Judgment," written shortly after, said that the writings of the noble lord savored of Moloch and Belial — most of all, of Satan; and referred to him as one of those " men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society; and, hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labor to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul." Byron's revenge was, as has been hinted, an ample one; contemporaries are generally ready to laugh with a wit, especially when he is laughing at a saint, and they laughed immoderately with Byron at Southey; posterity may still smile, but it is forced to acknowledge that Southey, in spite of his vehemence, was mainly in the right, and Byron, in spite of his wit, mainly in the wrong.

The change in Southey's religion and politics alluded to in the dedication to "Don Juan" laid him o]oen to many bitter attacks as long as he lived, and has puzzled his later critics not a little. In reality, there is nothing either dishonourable or surprising in the transformation which his opinions underwent. Hundreds of cases might be cited of hot-headed and warm-hearted boys who have held opinions which in their after years they completely disavowed; and Southey in his iconoclastic Oxford days was only a boy. Praed turned Tory. Macaulay turned xviii INTRODUCTION-

Whig. Mr. Gladstone changed from Toryism to Liberalism. A man is not bound by any moral obligation to believe in a thing after it is proved false. South ey himself put the matter succinctly. Speaking in 1809 of the steadfast friends of France^ he said: "They had turned their faces toward the east in the morning to worship the rising sun^ and in the evening they were looking eastward, obstinately affirming that the sun was still there." He, on the contrary, altered his position as the world went round.

To the last, however, he was the champion of grand schemes for reform, and a dreamer of socialistic visions which show that the fire which ins|)ired " Wat Tyler " still smouldered in his breast. Those visions, or such of them as are embodied in the ' ' Colloquies on Society, ' ' Macaulay dissected with much acumen and justice in one of his brilliant reviews, which is to be found in the first volume of his collected essays, and which thoroughly deserves a perusal by every student of Sou they. His other prose works, excepting always the " Life of J^elson," may be briefly dismissed. Their manner is, as Byron said, perfect. "We find," wrote Macaulay, "so great a charm in Mr. Southey's style that, even when he writes nonsense, we generally read it with pleasure. " " The only way to write like him is to write well," is the verdict of a recent critic. But he was unfortunate in his choice of subjects. Brazil and Portugal did not interest the public. His "History of the Peninsular War ' ' was overshadowed by that of the eye-witness Napier. Success in handling such a subject as he undertook to treat in his " Book of the Church " required great critical powers, and great critical powers he did not possess. With the lives of Cowper and Wesley, however, he succeeded passably; with that of ISTelson, transcendently.

Though it was not till 1834 that Southey was provided with a year's expenditure ahead, his ceaseless industry brought its reward at last, and it is pleasant to record the fact that, beside his books, he was able to leave an estate of £12,000. Competence would have come sooner to one whose heart was less kindly than his; but he seldom resisted or cared to resist the call of a fellow-mortal for aid. Among others who bore grateful testimony to his kindly efforts in their behalf were Chatterton's sister, Kirke White, Herbert Knowles, and Charlotte Bronte.

INTRODUCTION xix

Of Sonthey's personal appearance Carlyle has left us some interesting memories. Speaking of one of his interviews with him^, he says: " I recollect nothing more of it, except my astonishment when Southey at last completely rose from his chair to shake hands. He had only half risen and nodded on my coming in ; and all along I had counted him a lean little man; but now he shot suddenly aloft into a lean tall one, in shape and stature like a pair of tongs." He records also the blush of the laureate — an " amiable red blush, beautiful like a young girl's, when you touched genially the pleasant theme, and serpent-like flash of blue or black blush (this far, very far, the rarer kind, though it did recur too) when you struck upon the opposite. ' '

The sensibility which caused the blush thus noticed by Carlyle ultimately led to the complete extinction of Southey's faculties. In 1834 his wife became insane. In 1835 she died. From the moment that she ceased to breathe, Southey's mind began to fail. The first evidence of this which he gave publicly was the contraction of a marriage with a certain Miss Bowles, '^ given," as Carlyle grimly tells us, "to scribbling, with its affectations, its sentimentalities, and perhaps twenty years younger than he," who "had heroically volunteered to marry him, for the purpose of consoling, etc., to which he heroically had assented. " The dismal expedient succeeded no better than was to be expected; quarrels arose between wife and daughters; the poet's mind grew daily weaker; and, in 1840, when Wordsworth went over to G-reta Hall, his old friend did not recognize him till he was told. " Then," his visitor tells us, "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 hands his books affectionately like a child." In this state he lingered for three years, his mind growing gradually darker, until his death, in March, 1843.

It would be easy to pick little flaws in Southey's character. He was womanish, quick to anger, keen rather than deej), and as eager and egotistical as a child about his own productions. But when these deductions have been made, there is nothing more to be said against him. The study of his life is really more inspiring than the study of his works. Piety; gentle, deep affection; reverence for

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God and man; a kind, sincere, and courteous manner; absolute ' ' reliability ; ' ' — these are the words which the severest of critics — Coleridge and Oarlyle — use to characterize him. Sara Coleridge, who was intimately acquainted with Wordsworth, was wont to declare emphatically that Southey was, upon the whole, the best man she ever knew. Nobody, it was said, could quarrel with him face to face. All of his friends were in a pre-eminent degree good men. A conscience clear of offence, the constantly recurring enjoyments from his honorable industry, and the gratification of his parental affection secured for him, said De Quincey, a golden equanimity. Coleridge compared him to Marcus Cato. But he was Marcus Cato without the grimness. *'Take him for all in all," Henry Taylor writes, — "his ardent and genial piety, his moral strength, the magnitude and variety of his powers, the field which he covered in literature, and the beauty of his life, — it may be said of him justly, and with no straining of the truth, that of all his contemporaries he was the greatest m ak. ' '

11. The "Life of Nelsok."

How the " Life of Nelson " came to be written is told in the eighteenth chapter of Southey 's " Life and Correspondence ' ' :

" This, which was perhaps upon the whole the most popular of any of my father's works, originated in an article in the fifth number of the (Quarterly Review (February, 1810), which was enlarged at Murray's request. My father received altogether £300 for it — £100 for the Review ; £100 when the Life was enlarged ; and £100 when it was published in the Family Library."

On February 1, 1813, Southey made the following entry in his diary :

''The 'Life of Nelson' was completed this morning. This is a subject which I should never have dreamt of touching, if it had not been thrust upon me. I have walked among sea-terms as carefully as a cat does among crockery ; but if I have succeeded in making the narrative continuous and clear — the very reverse of what it is in the lives before me — the materials are in themselves

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so full of character, so picturesque and so sublime, that it cannot fail of being a good book." ^

Of the narratives thus referred to, the chief was the ''Life of Nelson" by Clarke and M' Arthur, from which Southey drew most of his materials, even going so far in many instances as to copy whole passages almost word for word. From the desire on Southey's part to finish the work quickly, to which this wholesale appropriation of material points, arose doubtless the only serious defects of the book — an occasional ambiguity and an occasional use of technical terms which is out of place in a narrative intended primarily for the general reader.

The general reader, however, was pleased with Southey's little book, and bought up edition after edition with avidity. It became equally the darling of the sailor and of the schoolboy. A special edition was published by the American government, and a copy issued to every seaman and every officer in the American navy. The greatest of British reviewers summed up its merits in enthusiastic

^ The book was dedicated to John Wilson Croker (1780-1850), who was a warm personal friend of Southey's, and famous for his connection with the Quarterly Review. He was one of the best haters that English literature has produced. Political and literary reformers were his pet aversion. He wrote the article which was long believed to have killed Keats, whom he called a copyist of Leigh Hunt, "more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype. " To this Byron refers in. the familiar epigram :

" Who kiird John Keats ? ' I,' says the Quarterly, So savage and tartarly, ' 'Twas one of my feats,' "

Croker's favorite pastime consisted in exposing minute inaccuracies in the statements of his contemporaries; but he was treated to a taste of his own dish when he published his edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which was reviewed by Macaulay in his most slashing style. He endeavored to revenge himself on the great essayist when the latter's History of England appeared, but, as Rogers said, " attempted murder, but only committed suicide." Macaulay is said to have remarked that he hated Croker worse than cold boiled veal. Among Croker's other literary enmities were Madame d'Arblay (see Macaulay's essay), Moore, and Disraeli. The last satirized him as Rigby in his novel of Coningsby. Croker wrote a volume of poems called Songs of Trafalgar, and served as Secretary to the Admiralty for twenty-two years.