CHAPTER VII.

SOUTHEY’S WORK IN LITERATURE.

Southey’s career of authorship falls into two chief periods—a period during which poetry occupied the higher place and prose the lower, and a period during which this order was reversed. His translations of romantic fiction—_Amadis of Gaul_, _Palmerin of England_, and _The Cid_—connect the work of the earlier with that of the latter period, and serve to mark the progress of his mind from legend to history, and from the fantastic to the real. The poet in Southey died young, or, if he did not die, fell into a numbness and old age like that of which an earlier singer writes:—

“Elde that in my spirit dulleth me, Hath of endyting all the subtilité Welnyghe bereft out of my remembraunce.”

After thirty Southey seldom cared to utter himself in occasional verse. The uniformity of his life, the equable cheerfulness maintained by habits of regular work, his calm religious faith, his amiable Stoicism, left him without the material for lyrical poetry; and one so honest and healthy had no care to feign experiences of the heart which were not his. Still, he could apply himself to the treatment of large subjects with a calm, continuous energy; but as time went on his hand grew slack, and wrought with less ease. Scarcely had he overcome the narrative poet’s chief difficulty, that of subduing varied materials to an unity of design, when he put aside verse, and found it more natural to be historian than poet.

The poetry of sober feeling is rare in lyrical verse. This may be found admirably rendered in some of Southey’s shorter pieces. Although his temper was ardent and hopeful, his poems of pensive remembrance, of meditative calm, are perhaps the most characteristic. Among these his _Inscriptions_ rank high. Some of those in memory of the dead are remarkable for their fine poise of feeling, all that is excessive and transitory having been subdued; for the tranquil depths of sorrow and of hope which lie beneath their clear, melodious words.

Southey’s larger poetical works are fashioned of two materials which do not always entirely harmonize. First, material brought from his own moral nature; his admiration of something elevated in the character of man or woman—generosity, gentleness, loyalty, fortitude, faith. And, secondly, material gathered from abroad; mediæval pomps of religion and circumstance of war; Arabian marvels, the work of the enchanters and the genii; the wild beauties and adventure of life amid New-World tribes; the monstrous mythology of the Brahman. With such material the poet’s inventive talent deals freely, rearranges details or adds to them; still Southey is here rather a _finder_ than a _maker_. His diligence in collecting and his skill in arranging were so great that it was well if the central theme did not disappear among manifold accessories. One who knows Southey, however, can recognize his ethical spirit in every poem. Thalaba, as he himself confessed, is a male Joan of Arc. Destiny or Providence has marked alike the hero and the heroine from mankind; the sheepfold of Domremi, and the palm-grove by old Moath’s tent, alike nurture virgin purity and lofty aspiration. Thalaba, like Joan, goes forth a delegated servant of the Highest to war against the powers of evil; Thalaba, like Joan, is sustained under the trials of the way by the sole talisman of faith. We are not left in doubt as to where Southey found his ideal. Mr. Barbauld thought _Joan of Arc_ was modelled on the Socinian Christ. He was mistaken; Southey’s ideal was native to his soul. “Early admiration, almost adoration of Leonidas; early principles of Stoicism derived from the habitual study of Epictetus, and the French Revolution at its height when I was just eighteen—by these my mind was moulded.” And from these, absorbed into Southey’s very being, came Thalaba and Joan.

The word _high-souled_ takes possession of the mind as we think of Southey’s heroic personages. Poetry, he held, ought rather to elevate than to affect—a Stoical doctrine transferred to art, which meant that his own poetry was derived more from admiration of great qualities than from sympathy with individual men or women. Neither the quick and passionate tenderness of Burns nor the stringent pathos of Wordsworth can be found in Southey’s verse. No eye probably ever shed a tear over the misery of Ladurlad and his persecuted daughter. She, like the lady in _Comus_, is set above our pity and perhaps our love. In _Kehama_, a work of Southey’s mature years, the chivalric ardour of his earlier heroes is transformed into the sterner virtues of fortitude and an almost despairing constancy. The power of evil, as conceived by the poet, has grown more despotic; little can be achieved by the light-winged Glendoveer—a more radiant Thalaba—against the Rajah; only the lidless eye of Seeva can destroy that tyranny of lust and pride. _Roderick_ marks a higher stage in the development of Southey’s ethical ideal. Roderick, too, is a delegated champion of right against force and fraud; he too endures mighty pains. But he is neither such a combatant, pure and intrepid, as goes forth from the Arab tent, nor such a blameless martyr as Ladurlad. He is first a sinner enduring just punishment; then a stricken penitent; and from his shame and remorse he is at last uplifted by enthusiasm, on behalf of his God and his people, into a warrior saint, the Gothic Maccabee.

_Madoc_ stands somewhat away from the line of Southey’s other narrative poems. Though, as Scott objected, the personages in _Madoc_ are too nearly abstract types, Southey’s ethical spirit dominates this poem less than any of the others. The narrative flows on more simply. The New-World portion tells a story full of picturesque incident, with the same skill and grace that belong to Southey’s best prose writings. Landor highly esteemed _Madoc_. Scott declared that he had read it three times since his first cursory perusal, and each time with increased admiration of the poetry. Fox was in the habit of reading aloud after supper to eleven o’clock, when it was the rule at St. Ann’s Hill to retire; but while _Madoc_ was in his hand, he read until after midnight. Those, however, who opened the bulky quarto were few: the tale was out of relation with the time; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no passion of the dawn of the present century. And the mind of the time was not enough disengaged to concern itself deeply with the supposed adventures of a Welsh prince of the twelfth century among the natives of America.

At heart, then, Southey’s poems are in the main the outcome of his moral nature; this we recognize through all disguises—Mohammedan, Hindoo, or Catholic. He planned and partly wrote a poem—_Oliver Newman_—which should associate his characteristic ideal with Puritan principles and ways of life. The foreign material through which his ethical idea was set forth went far, with each poem, to determine its reception by the public. Coleridge has spoken of “the pastoral charm and wild, streaming lights of the _Thalaba_.” Dewy night moon-mellowed, and the desert-circle girdled by the sky, the mystic palace of Shedad, the vernal brook, Oneiza’s favourite kidling, the lamp-light shining rosy through the damsel’s delicate fingers, the aged Arab in the tent-door—these came with a fresh charm into English narrative poetry eighty years ago. The landscape and the manners of Spain, as pictured in _Roderick_, are of marked grandeur and simplicity. In _Kehama_, Southey attempted a bolder experiment; and although the poem became popular, even a well-disposed reader may be allowed to sympathize with the dismay of Charles Lamb among the monstrous gods: “I never read books of travels, at least not farther than Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connexion as foes with Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that tribe I hate. I believe I fear them in some manner. A Mohammedan turban on the stage, though enveloping some well-known face, ... does not give me unalloyed pleasure. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar. God help me when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get abroad into the world to come.”

Though his materials are often exotic, in style Southey aimed at the simplicity and strength of undefiled English. If to these melody was added, he had attained all he desired. To conversations with William Taylor about German poetry—certainly not to Taylor’s example—he ascribes his faith in the power of plain words to express in poetry the highest thoughts and strongest feelings. He perceived, in his own day, the rise of the ornate style, which has since been perfected by Tennyson, and he regarded it as a vice in art. In early years Akenside had been his instructor; afterwards he owed more to Landor than to any other master of style. From _Madoc_ and _Roderick_—both in blank-verse—fragments could be severed which might pass for the work of Landor; but Southey’s free and facile manner, fostered by early reading of Ariosto, and by constant study of Spenser, soon reasserts itself; from under the fragment of monumental marble, white almost as Landor’s, a stream wells out smooth and clear, and lapses away, never dangerously swift nor mysteriously deep. On the whole, judged by the highest standards, Southey’s poetry takes a midmost rank; it neither renders into art a great body of thought and passion, nor does it give faultless expression to lyrical moments. But it is the output of a large and vigorous mind, amply stored with knowledge; its breath of life is the moral ardour of a nature strong and generous, and therefore it can never cease to be of worth.

Southey is at his best in prose. And here it must be borne in mind that, though so voluminous a writer, he did not achieve his most important work, the _History of Portugal_, for which he had gathered vast collections. It cannot be doubted that this, if completed, would have taken a place among our chief histories. The splendour of story and the heroic personages would have lifted Southey into his highest mood. We cannot speak with equal confidence of his projected work of second magnitude, the _History of the Monastic Orders_. Learned and sensible it could not fail to be, and Southey would have recognized the more substantial services of the founders and the brotherhoods; but he would have dealt by methods too simple with the psychology of religious emotions; the words enthusiasm and fraud might have risen too often to his lips; and at the grotesque humours of the devout, which he would have exhibited with delight, he might have been too prone to smile.

As it is, Southey’s largest works are not his most admirable. _The History of Brazil_, indeed, gives evidence of amazing patience, industry, and skill; but its subject necessarily excludes it from the first rank. At no time from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was Brazil a leader or a banner-bearer among lands. The life of the people crept on from point to point, and that is all; there are few passages in which the chronicle can gather itself up, and transform itself into a historic drama. Southey has done all that was possible; his pages are rich in facts, and are more entertaining than perhaps any other writer could have made them. His extraordinary acquaintance with travel gave him many advantages in narrating the adventures of early explorers; and his studies in ecclesiastical history led him to treat with peculiar interest the history of the Jesuit Reductions.

_The History of the Peninsular War_ suffers by comparison with the great work of Sir William Napier. That heroic man had himself been a portion of the strife; his senses, singularly keen, were attuned to battle; as he wrote, the wild bugle-calls, the measured tramp, the peals of musketry, the dismal clamour, sounded in his ears; he abandoned himself again to the swiftness and “incredible fury” of the charge. And with his falcon eye he could discern amid the shock or formless dispersion, wherever hidden, the fiery heart of victory. Southey wrought in his library as a man of letters; consulted sources, turned over manuscripts, corresponded with witnesses, set his material in order. The passion of justice and an enthusiasm on behalf of Spain give unity to his work. If he estimated too highly the disinterestedness and courage of the people of the Peninsula, the illusion was generous. And it may be that enduring spiritual forces become apparent to a distant observer, which are masked by accidents of the day and hour from one who is in their midst.

History as written by Southey is narrative rendered spiritual by moral ardour. There are no new political truths, he said. If there be laws of a nation’s life other than those connected with elementary principles of morality, Southey did not discover these. What he has written may go only a little way towards attaining the ultimate ends of historical study, but so far as it goes it keeps the direct line. It is not led astray by will-o’-the-wisp, vague-shining theories that beguile night wanderers. Its method is an honest method as wholesome as sweet; and simple narrative, if ripe and sound at first, is none the less so at the end of a century.

In biography, at least, one may be well pleased with clear and charming narrative. Here Southey has not been surpassed, and even in this single province he is versatile; he has written the life of a warrior, of a poet, and of a saint. His industry was that of a German; his lucidity and perfect exposition were such as we rarely find outside a French memoir. There is no style fitter for continuous narrative than the pedestrian style of Southey. It does not beat upon the ear with hard, metallic vibration. The sentences are not cast by the thousand in one mould of cheap rhetoric, nor made brilliant with one cheap colour. Never dithyrambic, he is never dull; he affects neither the trick of stateliness nor that of careless ease; he does not seek out curiosities of refinement, nor caress delicate affectations. Because his style is natural, it is inimitable, and the only way to write like Southey is to write well.

“The favourite of my library, among many favourites;” so Coleridge speaks of the _Life of Wesley_—“the book I can read for the twentieth time, when I can read nothing else at all.” And yet the schoolboy’s favourite—the _Life of Nelson_—is of happier inspiration. The simple and chivalric hero, his splendid achievements, his pride in duty, his patriotism, roused in Southey all that was most strong and high; but his enthusiasm does not escape in lyrical speech. “The best eulogy of Nelson,” he says, “is the faithful history of his actions; the best history that which shall relate them most perspicuously.” Only when all is over, and the captain of Trafalgar lies dead, his passion and pride find utterance:—“If the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson’s translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.” From Nelson on the quarter-deck of the _Victory_, to Cowper caressing his tame hares, the interval is wide; but Southey, the man of letters, lover of the fireside, and patron of cats, found it natural to sympathize with his brother poet. His sketches of literary history in the _Life of Cowper_ are characteristic. The writer’s range is wide, his judgment sound, his enjoyment of almost everything literary is lively; as critic he is kindly yet equitable. But the highest criticism is not his. Southey’s vision was not sufficiently penetrative; he culls beauties, but he cannot pluck out the heart of a mystery.

His translations of romantic fiction, while faithful to their sources, aim less at literal exactitude than at giving the English reader the same pleasure which the Spaniard receives from the originals. From the destruction of Don Quixote’s library Master Nicholas and the curate spared _Amadis of Gaul_ and _Palmerin of England_. Second to Malory’s grouping of the Arthur cycle _Amadis_ may well take its place. Its chivalric spirit, its wildness, its tenderness and beauty, are carefully preserved by the translator. But Southey’s chief gift in this kind to English readers is _The Cid_. The poem he supposed, indeed, to be a metrical chronicle instead of a metrical romance—no fatal error; weaving together the best of the poem, the ballads and the chronicle, he produced more than a mere compilation. “I know no work of the kind in our language,” wrote Coleridge, “none which, uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after-reflection.”

Of Southey’s political writings something has been said in a former chapter. Among works which can be brought under no general head, one that pleased the public was _Espriella’s Letters_, sketches of English landscape, life, and manners, by a supposed Spanish traveller. The letters, giving as they do a lively view of England at the beginning of the present century, still possess an interest. Apart from Southey’s other works stands _The Doctor_; nowhere else can one find so much of his varied erudition, his genial spirits, his meditative wisdom. It asks for a leisurely reader content to ramble everywhere and no whither, and still pleased to take another turn because his companion has not yet come to an end of learning, mirth, or meditation. That the author of a book so characteristic was not instantly recognized, is strange. “The wit and humour of _The Doctor_,” says Edgar Poe, a keen critic, “have seldom been equalled. We cannot think Southey wrote it.” Gratitude is due to Dr. Daniel Dove from innumerable “good little women and men,” who have been delighted with his story of _The Three Bears_. To know that he had added a classic to the nursery would have been the pride of Southey’s heart. Wide eyes entranced and peals of young laughter still make a triumph for one whose spirit, grave with a man’s wisdom, was pure as the spirit of a little child.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Recollections of Corston, somewhat in the manner of Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_, will be found in Southey’s early poem, _The Retrospect_.

[2] Carmen Nuptiale: Proem, 18.

[3] I find in a Catalogue of English Poetry, 1862, the following passage from an autograph letter of S. T. Coleridge, dated Bristol, July 16, 1814, then in Mr. Pickering’s possession: “I looked over the first five books of the first (quarto) edition of _Joan of Arc_ yesterday, at Hood’s request, in order to mark the lines written by me. I was really astonished—1, at the schoolboy, wretched allegoric machinery; 2, at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern Novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason, a Tom Paine in petticoats, but so lovely! and in love more dear! ‘_On her rubied cheek hung pity’s crystal gem_;’ 3, at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and the dead plumb down of the pauses, and of the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines.”

[4] See Southey’s article on “Dr. Sayers’s Works,” _Quarterly Review_, January, 1827.

[5] Harriet Martineau: Autobiography, i. p. 300.

[6] See her “History of the Peace,” B. vi. chap. xvi.

[7] For Westall’s drawing, and the description of Walla Crag, see “Sir Thomas More:” Colloquy VI.

[8] _I. e._, to go to Davies’ lodgings; Davies, Dr. Bell’s Secretary, was engaged in arranging a vast accumulation of papers with a view to forwarding Southey in his _Life of Bell_.

[9] The words quoted by Southey are his own, written in 1809.

[10] “With the Cape and New Holland I would proceed thus:—‘Govern yourselves, and we will protect you as long as you need protection; when that is no longer necessary, remember that though we be different countries, each independent, we are one people.’”—R. S. to W. S. Landor. Letters, vol. ii. p. 263.

[11] Sara Coleridge.

[12] Mrs. Wilson—then aged seventy-two.

[13] To certain false allegations of fact made by Byron, Southey replied in _The Courier_, and reprinted his letters in _Essays, Moral and Political_, vol. ii. pp. 183-205.

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