General characteristics of his Criticism.
That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike sanity which distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the Anti-Jacobin, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his over-valuation of Kirke White,[[436]] which was undoubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly right. In respect of older literature, in particular,[[437]] his catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn[[438]] are quite early, quite original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in the preface to Christabel, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering.
Reviews.
Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the Annual and Quarterly Reviews from the list given by his son at the end of the Life, some notice must be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of belles lettres to which this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the looking up are, in the Annual, those on Gebir, Godwin’s Chaucer, Ritson’s Romances, Hayley, Froissart, Sir Tristram, Ellis’s Specimens, Todd’s Spenser, and Ossian; in the Quarterly, those on Chalmers’s Poets, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not Robert).[[439]]
The Doctor.
The Doctor also must have its special animadversion, for this strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter. Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset jewels. The passages of original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s library[[440]] and of Textor’s dialogues[[441]] are valuable; the passage on “Taste and Pantagruelism”[[442]] much more so. On Sermons,[[443]] on Drayton,[[444]] on the Principles of Criticism,[[445]] on the famous verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,[[446]] on the Reasons for Anonymity,[[447]] on Mason[[448]] (for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser[[449]]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length[[450]] the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles[[451]] is of great value: while the long account[[452]] of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality Everyman, shows how admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have been executed.