A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq. John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 2s.
‘What word hath passed thy lips, Adam severe?’
May 11, 1817.
Has Mr. Murray turned Quaker, that he styles himself John Murray (‘Mark you his absolute John?‘) in the title-page? Or has Mr. Southey resigned his place and his pretensions, that he omits in the same page his honorary titles of Poet-Laureate and Member of the Royal Spanish Academy? We cannot tell; but we should think it some sign of grace, if, without a hint from the Lord Chamberlain, he had for a while laid by his tattered laurel and spattered birth-day suit: if, as the Commander in Chief retired after the droll affair of Mrs. Clarke (we are not such rigid moralists as Mr. Southey) the Poet-Laureate had thought proper to veil his blushing court favours during the dramatic representation of Wat Tyler, and did not consider it either prudent or becoming to be seen going to or coming from Carlton-house with the mob, ‘the reading rabble,’ at his heels, and with a shower of twopenny pamphlets sticking to the skirts of his turned coat. Poor Morgan, the honest Welchman in Roderic Random, reeking with the fumes of tobacco and garlic, was not more offensive to the sensitive organs of Captain Whiffle, than Mr. Southey must be to the nice feelings of an exalted Personage, reeking with the fumes of Jacobinism, and rolled, as he has been, in the kennel of the newspaper press. A voyage to Italy, a classical quarantine of a year or two, with the Pope’s blessing, seems absolutely necessary to wipe out the stains of his Wat Tyler, ‘as pure as sin with baptism’; and to restore him to the vows of Prince and People as smug as a young novice in a monastery, and sweet as any waiting-gentlewoman.
Mr. Southey says, in continuation of his Defence of Wat Tyler, p. 7, ‘It was written when republicanism was confined to a very small number of the educated classes:’ [Is it more common now among the intended hearers of Mr. Coleridge’s Second and Third Lay-Sermons?]—‘when those who were known to entertain such opinions were exposed to personal danger from the populace‘; [The populace of course were not set on by the higher classes, the clergy or gentry, nor can Mr. S. mean to include the Attorney-General of that day, my Lord Eldon, as one of the populace.] ‘And when a spirit of anti-jacobinism was predominant, which I cannot characterise more truly than by saying that it was as unjust and intolerant, though not quite as ferocious, as the Jacobinism of the present day.’—Why not the anti-jacobinism of the present day? ‘The collusion holds in the exchange.’ The business is carried on to the present hour; and though it has changed hands, the principal of the firm is still the same. Mr. Gifford, the present Editor of the Quarterly Review, where Mr. Southey now writes, was formerly the Editor of the Anti-Jacobin newspaper, where he was written at. The above passage is however a sly passing hit at Mr. Canning’s parodies, who (shame to say it) was as wise and as witty three and twenty years ago as he is now, and has not been making that progressive improvement ever since, on which Mr. Southey compliments himself, congratulates his friends, and insults over his enemies! How nicely this gentleman differences himself from all his contemporaries, Jacobin or anti-Jacobin! No one can come up to him at all points. ‘The lovely Marcia towers above her sex!’
The Letter-writer goes on to say:—‘When therefore Mr. Smith informed the House of Commons that the author of Wat Tyler thinks no longer upon certain points as he did in his youth, he informed that legislative assembly of nothing more than what the author has shown during very many years, in the course of his writings ... that while events have been moving on upon the great theatre of human affairs, his intellect has not been stationary.’—[Mr. S. here confounds a change of opinions with the progress of intellect, a mistake which we shall correct presently.]—‘But when the Member for Norwich asserts that I impute evil motives to men merely for holding the same doctrines’ [No, only a tenth part of the same doctrines] ‘which I myself formerly professed, and when he charges me with the malignity and baseness of a Renegade, the assertion and the charge are as false, as the language in which they are conveyed is coarse and insulting.’ p. 9.
Now we know of no writings of Mr. Southey’s, in the course of which he had shewn for many years the change or progress of his opinions, but in the Quarterly Review and other anonymous publications. We suppose he will hardly say that his Birth-day Odes, the Carmen Nuptiale, &c. have shewn the progress of his intellect. But in the same anonymous writings, in which the public would find, to Mr. Southey’s credit, that his intellect had not been stationary, the Member for Norwich would find what was not so much to his credit, but all that was wanting to make good the charge—that Mr. Southey’s moderation and charity to those whose intellects had been stationary, did not keep pace with the progress of his own—for in the articles in the Quarterly, which he claims or disclaims as he pleases, he, the writer of the Inscription on Old Sarum, describes ‘a Reformer as no better than a housebreaker’: he, the writer of the Inscription at Chepstow Castle, calls all those who do not bow their necks to the doctrine of Divine Right, Rebels and Regicides: he, the author of Wat Tyler, calls those persons who think taxes, wars, the wanton waste of the resources of a country, and the unfeeling profligacy of the rich, likely to aggravate and rouse to madness the intolerable sufferings of the poor, ‘flagitious incendiaries, panders to insurrection, murder, and treason, and the worst of scoundrels’; he, the equalizer of all property and of popular representation, would protect the holders of rotten boroughs and of entailed sinecures, by shutting up all those who write against them in solitary confinement, without pen, ink, or paper, to answer the unanswerable arguments of Mr. Southey—in short, the author of the articles in the Quarterly Review, if he was not always a base and malignant sycophant, shews himself to be a base and malignant Renegade, by defending all the rotten, and undermining all the sound parts of the system to which he professes to be a convert, and by consigning over to a ‘vigour beyond the law’ all those who expose his unprincipled, pragmatical tergiversations, or would maintain the system itself, without maintaining those corruptions and abuses, which were all that Mr. Southey at one time saw to hold up to execration in the English Constitution, and are all that he now sees to admire and revere in it. This is as natural in a Renegado, as it would be unaccountable in any one else.
We must get on a little faster, for to expose the absurdities of this Letter one by one would fill ‘a nice little book.’ In the pages immediately following, Mr. Southey glances at the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, whom he condemns ‘to bear a gore sinister tenné in his escutcheon,’ for saying that Mr. Southey does not form an exception to the irritabile genus vatum. He says, that he has often refrained from exposing the ignorance and inconsistency of his opponents, as well as ‘that moral turpitude,’ which, our readers must by this time perceive, can hardly fail to accompany any difference of opinion with him. He says that ‘he has a talent for satire, but that (good soul!) he has long since subdued the disposition.’ This must be since writing the last Quarterly: we thought there were some shrewd hits there, and we suspect Sir Richard Phillips, whom he laughs at for his dislike of war and of animal food, for pages together, will be of our opinion. He says that ‘he has been lately employed, while among the mountains of Cumberland, upon the Mines of Brazil and the War in the Peninsula.’
‘Why man, he doth bestride the world
Like a Colossus, and we, petty men, peep