Anxiety about his worldly fortunes never cost Southey a sleepless night. His disposition was always hopeful; relying on Providence, he says, I could rely upon myself. When he had little, he lived upon little, never spending when it was necessary to spare; and his means grew with his expenses. Business habits he had none; never in his life did he cast up an account; but in a general way he knew that money comes by honest toil and grows by diligent husbandry. Upon Mrs. Southey, who had an eye to all the household outgoings, the cares of this life fell more heavily. Sara Coleridge calls to mind her aunt as she moved about Greta Hall intent on house affairs, “with her fine figure and quietly commanding air.” Alas! under this gracious dignity of manner the wear and tear of life were doing their work surely. Still, it was honest wear and tear. “I never knew her to do an unkind act,” says Southey, “nor say an unkind word;” but when stroke followed upon stroke of sorrow, they found her without that elastic temper which rises and recovers itself. Until the saddest of afflictions made her helpless, everything was left to her management, and was managed so quietly and well, that, except in times of sickness and bereavement, “I had,” writes her husband, “literally no cares.” Thus free from harass, Southey toiled in his library; he toiled not for bread alone, but also for freedom. There were great designs before him which, he was well aware, if ever realized, would make but a poor return to the household coffer. To gain time and a vantage-ground for these, he was content to yield much of his strength to work of temporary value, always contriving, however, to strike a mean in this journeyman service between what was most and least akin to his proper pursuits. When a parcel of books arrived from the Annual Review, he groaned in spirit over the sacrifice of time; but patience! it is, after all, better, he would reflect, than pleading in a court of law; better than being called up at midnight to a patient; better than calculating profit and loss at a counter; better, in short, than anything but independence. “I am a quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed”—he writes to Grosvenor Bedford—“regular as clock-work in my pace, sure-footed, bearing the burden which is laid on me, and only obstinate in choosing my own path. If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat ‘still more threadbare than his own,’ when he wrote his ‘Imitation,’ working hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy. Grosvenor, there is not a lighter-hearted nor a happier man upon the face of this wide world.” When these words were written, Herbert stood by his father’s side; it was sweet to work that his boy might have his play-time glad and free.
The public estimate of Southey’s works as expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence, was lowest where he held that it ought to have been highest. For the History of Brazil, a work of stupendous toil, which no one in England could have produced save Southey himself, he had not received, after eight years, as much as for a single article in the Quarterly Review. Madoc, the pillar, as he supposed, on which his poetical fame was to rest; Madoc, which he dismissed with an awed feeling, as if in it he were parting with a great fragment of his life, brought its author, after twelve months’ sales, the sum of 3l. 17s. 1d. On the other hand, for his Naval Biography, which interested him less than most of his works, and which was undertaken after hesitation, he was promised five hundred guineas a volume. Notwithstanding his unwearied exertions, his modest scale of expenditure, and his profitable connexion with the Quarterly Review—for an important article he would receive 100l.—he never had a year’s income in advance until that year, late in his life, in which Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky payment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300l. in the Three-per-cents. “I have 100l. already there,” he writes “and shall then be worth 12l. per annum.” By 1821 this sum had grown to 625l., the gatherings of half a life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose acquaintance he had made in Portugal, and to whose kindness he was a debtor, suffered the loss of his fortune. As soon as Southey had heard the state of affairs, his decision was formed. “By this post,” he tells his friend, “I write to Bedford, desiring that he will transfer to you 625l. in the Three-per-cents. I wish it was more, and that I had more at my command in any way. I shall in the spring, if I am paid for the first volume of my History as soon as it is finished. One hundred I should, at all events, have sent you then. It shall be as much more as I receive.” And he goes on in cheery words to invite John May to break away from business and come to Keswick, there to lay in “a pleasant store of recollections which in all moods of mind are wholesome.” One rejoices that Southey, poor of worldly goods, knew the happiness of being so simply and nobly generous.
Blue and white china, mediæval ivories, engravings by the Little Masters, Chippendale cabinets, did not excite pining desire in Southey’s breast; yet in one direction he indulged the passion of a collector. If, with respect to any of “the things independent of the will,” he showed a want of moderation unworthy of his discipleship to Epictetus, it was assuredly with respect to books. Before he possessed a fixed home, he was already moored to his folios; and when once he was fairly settled at Keswick, many a time the carriers on the London road found their riding the larger by a weighty packet on its way to Greta Hall. Never did he run north or south for a holiday, but the inevitable parcel preceded or followed his return. Never did he cross to the Continent but a bulkier bale arrived in its own good time, enclosing precious things. His morality, in all else void of offence, here yielded to the seducer. It is thought that Southey was in the main honest; but if Dirk Hatteraick had run ashore a hundred-weight of the Acta Sanctorum duty-free, the king’s laureate was not the man to set the sharks upon him; and it is to be feared that the pattern of probity, the virtuous Southey himself, might in such circumstances be found, under cover of night, lugging his prize landwards from its retreat beneath the rocks. Unquestionably, at one time certain parcels from Portugal—only of such a size as could be carried under the arm—were silently brought ashore to the defrauding of the revenue, and somehow found their way, by-and-by, to Greta Hall. “We maintain a trade,” says the Governor of the Strangers’ House in Bacon’s philosophical romance, “not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other commodity of matter, but only for God’s first creature, which was light.” Such, too, was Southey’s trade, and he held that God’s first creature is free to travel unchallenged by revenue-cutter.
“Why, Montesinos,” asks the ghostly Sir Thomas More in one of Southey’s Colloquies, “with these books and the delight you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire?” “Nothing,” is the answer, “ ... except more books.” When Southey, in 1805, went to see Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh that, having had neither new coat nor hat since little Edith was born, he must surely be in want of both; and here, in the metropolis of the North, was an opportunity of arraying himself to his desire. “Howbeit,” he says, “on considering the really respectable appearance which my old ones made for a traveller—and considering, moreover, that as learning was better than house or land, it certainly must be much better than fine clothes—I laid out all my money in books, and came home to wear out my old wardrobe in the winter.” De Quincey called Southey’s library his wife, and in a certain sense it was wife and mistress and mother to him. The presence and enjoying of his books was not the sole delight they afforded; there was also the pursuit, the surprisal, the love-making or wooing. And at last, in his hours of weakness, once more a little child, he would walk slowly round his library, looking at his cherished volumes, taking them down mechanically, and when he could no longer read, pressing them to his lips. In happier days the book-stalls of London knew the tall figure, the rapid stride, the quick-seeing eye, the eager fingers. Lisbon, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, contributed to the rich confusion that, from time to time, burdened the floors of library and bedrooms and passages in Greta Hall. Above all, he was remembered at Brussels by that best of bookmen, Verbeyst. What mattered it that Verbeyst was a sloven, now receiving his clients with gaping shirt and now with stockingless feet? Did he not duly honour letters, and had he not 300,000 volumes from which to choose? If in a moment of prudential weakness one failed to carry off such a treasure as the Monumenta Boica or Colgar’s Irish Saints, there was a chance that in Verbeyst’s vast store-house the volume might lurk for a year or two. And Verbeyst loved his books, only less than he loved his handsome, good-natured wife, who for a liberal customer would fetch the bread and burgundy. Henry Taylor dwelt in Robert Southey’s heart of hearts; but let not Henry Taylor treasonably hint that Verbeyst, the prince of booksellers, had not a prince’s politeness of punctuality. If sundry books promised had not arrived, it was because they were not easily procured; moreover, the good-natured wife had died—bien des malheurs, and Verbeyst’s heart was fallen into a lethargy. “Think ill of our fathers which are in the Row, think ill of John Murray, think ill of Colburn, think ill of the whole race of bibliopoles, except Verbeyst, who is always to be thought of with liking and respect.” And when the bill of lading, coming slow but sure, announced that saints and chroniclers and poets were on their way, “by this day month,” wrote Southey, “they will probably be here; then shall I be happier than if his Majesty King George the Fourth were to give orders that I should be clothed in purple, and sleep upon gold, and have a chain upon my neck, and sit next him because of my wisdom, and be called his cousin.”
Thus the four thousand volumes, which lay piled about the library when Southey first gathered his possessions together, grew and grew, year after year, until the grand total mounted up to eight, to ten, to fourteen thousand. Now Kirke White’s brother Neville sends him a gift of Sir William Jones’s works, thirteen volumes, in binding of bewildering loveliness. Now Landor ships from some Italian port a chest containing treasures of less dubious value than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with which he liberally supplied his art-loving friends. Oh, the joy of opening such a chest; of discovering the glorious folios; of glancing with the shy amorousness of first desire at title-page and colophon; of growing familiarity; of tracing out the history suggested by book-plate or autograph; of finding a lover’s excuses for cropped margin, or water-stain, or worm-hole! Then the calmer happiness of arranging his favourites on new shelves; of taking them down again, after supper, in the season of meditation and currant-rum; and of wondering for which among his father’s books Herbert will care most when all of them shall be his own. “It would please you,” Southey writes to his old comrade, Bedford, “to see such a display of literary wealth, which is at once the pride of my eye, and the joy of my heart, and the food of my mind; indeed, more than metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothes for me and mine. I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich before, and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough enjoyment of riches of any kind or in any way.”
Southey’s Spanish and Portuguese collection—if Heber’s great library be set aside—was probably the most remarkable gathering of such books in the possession of any private person in this country. It included several manuscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinction upon brackets. Books in white and gold—vellum or parchment bound, with gilt lettering in the old English type which Southey loved—were arranged in effective positions pyramid-wise. Southey himself had learned the mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters acquired that art; the ragged volumes were decently clothed in coloured cotton prints; these, presenting a strange patch-work of colours, quite filled one room, which was known as the Cottonian Library. “Paul,” a book-room on the ground-floor, had been so called because “Peter,” the organ-room, was robbed to fit it with books. “Paul is a great comfort to us, and being dressed up with Peter’s property, makes a most respectable appearance, and receives that attention which is generally shown to the youngest child. The study has not actually been Petered on Paul’s account, but there has been an exchange negotiated which we think is for their mutual advantage. Twenty gilt volumes, from under the ‘Beauties of England and Wales,’ have been marched down-stairs rank and file, and their place supplied by the long set of Lope de Vega with green backs.”
Southey’s books, as he assures his ghostly monitor in the Colloquies, were not drawn up on his shelves for display, however much the pride of the eye might be gratified in beholding them; they were on actual service. Generations might pass away before some of them would again find a reader; in their mountain home they were prized and known as perhaps they never had been known before. Not a few of the volumes had been cast up from the wreck of family or convent libraries during the Revolution. “Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget’s Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges.... Here are books from Colbert’s library; here others from the Lamoignon one.... Yonder Chronicle History of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes; and yonder General History of Spain, by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors.... This Copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations.... Here is a book with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him in prison in Windsor Castle.... Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of many generations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to the window, there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky.”
Not a few of his books were dead, and to live among these was like living among the tombs; “Behold, this also is vanity,” Southey makes confession. But when Sir Thomas questions, “Has it proved to you ‘vexation of spirit’ also?” the Cumberland mountain-dweller breaks forth: “Oh no! for never can any man’s life have been passed more in accord with his own inclinations, nor more answerably to his desires. Excepting that peace which, through God’s infinite mercy, is derived from a higher source, it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am beholden, not only for the means of subsistence, but for every blessing which I enjoy; health of mind and activity of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual employment, and therefore continual pleasure. Suavissima vita indies sentire se fieri meliorem; and this, as Bacon has said and Clarendon repeated, is the benefit that a studious man enjoys in retirement.” Such a grave gladness underlay all Southey’s frolic moods, and in union with a clear-sighted acceptance of the conditions of human happiness—its inevitable shocks, its transitory nature as far as it belongs to man’s life on earth—made up part of his habitual temper.
Southey coursed from page to page with a greyhound’s speed; a tiny s pencilled in the margin served to indicate what might be required for future use. Neatness he had learnt from Miss Tyler long ago; and by experience he acquired his method. On a slip of paper which served as marker he would note the pages to which he needed to return. In the course of a few hours he had classified and arranged everything in a book which it was likely he would ever want. A reference to the less important passages sufficed; those of special interest were transcribed by his wife, or one of his daughters, or more frequently by Southey himself; finally, these transcripts were brought together in packets under such headings as would make it easy to discover any portion of their contents.
Such was his ordinary manner of eviscerating an author, but it was otherwise with the writers of his affection. On some—such as Jackson and Jeremy Taylor—“he fed,” as he expressed it, “slowly and carefully, dwelling on the page, and taking in its contents, deeply and deliberately, like an epicure with his wine ‘searching the subtle flavour.’” Such chosen writers remained for all times and seasons faithful and cherished friends:—