Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”
“Old friends and old books,” he says, “are the best things that this world affords (I like old wine also), and in these I am richer than most men (the wine excepted).” In the group of Southey’s friends, what first strikes one is, not that they are men of genius—although the group includes Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor—but that they are good men. No one believed more thoroughly than Southey that goodness is a better thing than genius; yet he required in his associates some high excellence, extraordinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral character, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends in a circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his affections time and distance made no change. An old College friend, Lightfoot, to visit Southey, made the longest journey of his life; it was eight-and-twenty years since they had met. When their hands touched, Lightfoot trembled like an aspen-leaf. “I believe,” says Southey, “no men ever met more cordially after so long a separation, or enjoyed each other’s society more. I shall never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor the tone in which he said ‘that, having now seen me, he should return home and die in peace.’” But of all friends he was most at ease with his dear Dapple, Grosvenor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth and sorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad decay, and the once joyous house was melancholy and silent, Southey turned for comfort to Bedford. Still, some of their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all their warmth of brotherly affection. “My father,” says Cuthbert Southey, “was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford’s trumpet.” And in more joyous days, what noise and nonsense did they not make! “Oh! Grosvenor,” exclaims Southey, “is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so cordially and naturally and bonâfidically as you and I, should be three hundred miles asunder? For my part, I insist upon it that there is no sense so good as your honest, genuine nonsense.”
A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as we read Southey’s correspondence:—Wynn, wherever he was, “always doing something else,” yet able, in the midst of politics and business, to find time to serve an old schoolfellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accurate knowledge and robust benevolence; John May, unfailing in kindness and fidelity; Lamb for play and pathos, and subtle criticism glancing amid the puns; William Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kindred enthusiasms and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and happy memories; Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities, and warm, womanly services; Caroline Bowles for rarer sympathy and sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor for spiritual sonship, as of a son who is also an equal; and Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and small, glad and sad, wise and foolish.
No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any friendship of Southey. Political and religious differences, which in strangers were causes of grave offence, seemed to melt away when the heretic or erring statist was a friend. But if success, fashion, flattery, tested a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold; and an habitual dereliction of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, could not but transform Southey’s feeling of love to one of condemning sorrow. To his great contemporaries, Scott, Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely given. “Scott,” he writes, “is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, but bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity.... God grant that he may recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall not look upon again.” Of Wordsworth:—“A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor ever will be.” “Two or three generations must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium.” With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt that Ebenezer Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had stepped forward as the lyrist of radicalism; but the feeling could not be altogether anger with which he remembered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield inn, its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expression suiting well with Elliott’s frankness of manner and simplicity of character. William Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house; the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried the thrusts good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor, come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”
In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a public attack on Southey, and that friend the gentlest and sweetest-natured of them all. In a Quarterly article Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a book which wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it was original. He had intended to alter the expression in the proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever sent. Lamb, already pained by references to his writings in the Quarterly, some of which he erroneously ascribed to Southey, was deeply wounded. “He might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights that meant no harm to religion.” A long expostulation addressed by Elia to Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in the London Magazine for October, only a portion of which is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of “The Tombs of the Abbey;” for though Lamb had playfully repented Coleridge’s salutation, “my gentle-hearted Charles,” his heart was indeed gentle, and could not endure the pain of its own wrath; among the memorials of the dead in Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey looked awful on his poor friend, and spends his indignation harmless as summer lightning over the heads of a Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement of letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf of friendly pleasantries; with surprise he learnt what pain his words had caused. He hastened to explain; had Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he would have tried, by a passage in the ensuing Quarterly, to efface the impression unhappily created; he ended with a declaration of unchanged affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. “On my part,” Southey said, “there was not even a momentary feeling of anger;” he at once understood the love, the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a being so composed of goodness as Elia. “Dear Southey”—runs the answer of Lamb—“the kindness of your note has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow.... I wish both magazine and review were at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so, for this folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see you, however, any day next week. We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.”
At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This was Walter Savage Landor. Madoc, on which Southey had build his hope of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received; Kehama, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment, when he turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work, he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,” he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talked of Thalaba, and I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer, but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He rose earlier each morning to carry on his Kehama, without abstracting time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section of this poem, and subsequently of his Roderick, came to be written, it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor, liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself, while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art, on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor, aimed at a classical purity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity by sculptured phrase; only the repression of a fiery spirit is more apparent in Landor’s monumental lines than in Southey’s. With certain organic resemblances, and much community of sentiment, there were large differences between the two, so that when they were drawn together in sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new province. Landor rejoiced that the first persons who shared his turret at Llanthony were Southey and his wife; again, in 1817, the two friends were together for three days at Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction—the death of his son:—
“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;
Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty