Greta Hall.
Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away to Grasmere—to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained, disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts; he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish appointment—“as if,” he said, “the author of Joan of Arc, and of Thalaba, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Yet for that poem of Thalaba, in a twelve-month after issue, he had only received as his share of profits a matter of £3 15s. Indeed, Southey would have fared hardly money-wise in those times, if he had not won the favor of a great many good and highly placed friends; and it was only four years after his establishment at Keswick, when these friends succeeded in securing to him an annual Government pension of £200. Landor had possibly aided him before this time; he certainly had admired greatly his poems and given praise that would have been worth more, if he had not spoiled it by rating Southey as a poet so much above Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.[4]
In addition to these aids the Quarterly Review was set afoot in those days in London—of which sturdy defender of Church and State, Southey soon became a virtual pensioner. Moreover, with his tastes, small moneys went a long way; he was methodical to the last degree; he loved his old coats and habits; he loved his marches and countermarches among the hills that flank Skiddaw better than he loved horses, or dogs, or guns; a quiet evening in his library with his books, was always more relished than ever so good a place at Drury Lane. New friends and old brighten that retirement for him. He has his vacation runs to Edinboro’—to London—to Bristol; the children are growing (though there is death of one little one—away from home); the books are piling up in his halls in bigger and always broader ranks. He writes of Brazil, of Spanish matters, of new poetry, of Nelson, of Society—showing touches of his early radicalism, and of a Utopian humor, which age and the heavy harness of conventionalism he has learned to wear, do not wholly destroy. He writes of Wesley and of the Church—settled in those maturer years into a comfortable routine-ordered Churchism, which does not let too airy a conscience prick him into unrest. A good, safe monarchist, too, who comes presently, and rightly enough—through a suggestion of George IV., then Regent in place of crazy George III.[5]—by his position as Poet Laureate; and in that capacity writes a few dismally stiff odes, which are his worst work. Even Wordsworth, who walks over those Cumberland hills with reverence, and with a pious fondness traces the “star-shaped shadows on the naked stones”—cannot warm to Southey’s new gush over royalty in his New Year’s Odes. Coleridge chafes; and Landor, we may be sure, sniffs, and swears, with a great roar of voice, at what looks so like to sycophancy.
To this time belongs that ode whose vengeful lines, after the fall of Napoleon, whip round the Emperor’s misdeeds in a fury of Tory Anglicanism, and call on France to avenge her wrongs:—
“By the lives which he hath shed,
By the ruin he hath spread,
By the prayers which rise for curses on his head—
Redeem, O France, thine ancient fame!
Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!
Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!”
This seems to me only the outcry of a tempestuous British scold; and yet a late eulogist has the effrontery to name it in connection with the great prayerful burst of Milton upon the massacre of the Waldenses:—
“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.”
No, no; Southey was no Milton—does not reach to the height of an echo of Milton.
Yet he was a rare and accomplished man of books—of books rather than genius, I think. An excellent type of the very clever and well-trained professional writer, working honestly and steadily in the service to which he has put himself. Very politic, too, in his personal relations. Even Carlyle—for a wonder—speaks of him without lacerating him.
In a certain sense he was not insincere; yet he had none of that out-spoken exuberant sincerity which breaks forth in declaratory speech, before the public time-pieces have told us how to pitch our voices. Landor had this: so had Coleridge. Southey never would have run away from his wife—never; he might dislike her; but Society’s great harness (if nothing more) would hold him in check; there were conditions under which Coleridge might and did. Southey would never over-drink or over-tipple; there were conditions (not rare) under which Coleridge might and did. Yet, for all this, I can imagine a something finer in the poet of the Ancient Mariner—that felt moral chafings far more cruelly; and for real poetic unction you might put Thalaba, and Kehama, and Madoc all in one scale, and only Christabel in the other—and the Southey poems would be bounced out of sight. But how many poets of the century can put a touch to verse like the touch in Christabel?