No More Learning

Yet, not in Aldeburgh only;
for this borough might, to some extent, stand for any country
town of moderate size. In a series of letters to á correspondent,
the author gives an account of the town, the church, the religious
bodies, the politics, professions, amusements, the workhouse, the
poor, the prisons, the schools and many other features of the
town's life. As the work is much longer than its predecessors, so
it shows an increase in Crabbe's scope and power. There was no
one now to revise his writings; and The Borough remains a very
uneven work, both in matter and in versification ; yet, Crabbe,
who had spent eight years upon the poem, was not then so in-
different to craftsmanship as he became later. Parts of The
Borough are very dull; excess of detail makes other parts tedious;
and there is much clumsiness and flatness of expression. Never-
theless, The Borough contains some of Crabbe's finest work, and
a
10-2


## p. 148 (#170) ############################################

148
[CH.
George Crabbe
.
shows an advance in his power of divining motive and depicting
character. The portraits of the clergy and the ministers, and of
the inhabitants of the almshouses, show rare penetration and vigour
in description; and, if Crabbe found himself unable to construct
in verse, or in prose, a novel in which the characters should act
and react upon each other, he remains a master of the individual
portrait. For poignancy and poetic beauty, nothing in all his
work, perhaps, equals the description of the condemned felon's
dream of his youth at home?
Little more than two years elapsed before Crabbe published
another volume of poetry, in some ways his best. Tales, issued
in September 1812, shows an advance on The Borough in the art
of revealing character by narrative. Many of the twenty-one stories
are constructed on the same plan-initial happiness converted
gradually into misery by intellectual pride or ill-regulated passion;
but the variety of the treatment and of the characters prevents
monotony. And, if any one were tempted to accuse Crabbe of a
lack of humour, Tales should avert such a charge. In this set of
stories, more than in any other, he exhibits a humour, bitter, no
doubt, but profound, searching and woven into the very stuff of the
tale. The Gentleman Farmer, with its exposition of the daring free-
thinker enslaved in three different kinds of bondage—to a woman,
a quack doctor and an ostler turned preacher; The Patron, with
its picture of the noble family's reception of their poet-protégé's
death; the masterly comedy of the wooing of a worlding and a
puritan in The Frank Courtship—these and several others show
Crabbe in complete control of his material, and exercising upon it
more of the poet's (or, rather, perhaps, of the novelist's) intellec-
tual and emotional labour than he usually bestowed upon the fruits
his observation. Two of the tales have extraneous interests.
Tennyson knew and admired Crabbe's poems, and may have made
use in Enoch Arden of his recollections of The Parting Hour; and
Charles Lamb founded on The Confidant a comedy called The Wife's
Trial, which, in turn, gave Maria Edgeworth an idea for Helen.
After Tales, Crabbe did not publish anything more for seven
years. He was now a poet of wide reputation, and was welcomed
by Rogers, Campbell and others on the visits to London which his
wife's death in 1813 set him free to pay. In the spring of 1814,
he was appointed to the cure of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he
was within reach of William Lisle Bowles, of Lord Bath and of the
1 The Borough, letter XXIII, Prisons, 11. 2894329.
? Printed in Blackwood's Magazine, December 1828.


## p. 149 (#171) ############################################

VII]
Tales of the Hall
149
interesting people who lived in Bath or came there to take the
waters. He appears to have worked meanwhile, with the regu-
larity of an Anthony Trollope, at his poetry; and the results of
this manner of work may be detected in his next volume, Tales
of the Hall, published in July 1819. He had always been a
careless or a wilful workman. Left to himself, and more careless
than ever, now that his fame was established and his age advanced,
he indulged more freely than before in unnecessary detail, in
sentences distorted for the sake of a rime, in flatness approaching
doggerel, in verbosity and antithesis. Some of his critics, among
them Jeffrey, had complained of the lack of connection between
the stories in his earlier volumes. The objection seems trivial;
and, in Tales of the Hall, Crabbe's device of making brothers
who are scarcely acquainted with one another exchange stories
seems futile, when all these stories clearly bear the impress of a
single mind. As usual, Crabbe took most of his material from
people and events he had observed, or from true stories related
to him; and one very interesting passage in Tales of the Hallı
appears to be a portrait of himself. The time had gone by when
Crabbe could justly be accused, as he had been by Jeffrey, of
'disgusting representations. ' Smugglers and Poachers in Tales
of the Hall is a terrible story; but, in most of these poems, as in
Tales, Crabbe is dealing with people of a higher social grade
than his early models. Though most of the stories are sad, there
is less scope for brutality, and more for minute and sympathetic
study of the finer shades of thought and temper. The Widow is
a fine piece of high comedy; the twice-widowed lady's letter to
her third suitor is shrewdly ironical; while a passage in Delay
has Danger3, describing a peevish wife, is, perhaps, the best
example that could be chosen of the sharp and vivid effect to
which Crabbe could attain by his epigrammatic, antithetic manner.
Tales of the Hall was the last volume of poems by Crabbe
published in his lifetime. At Trowbridge, he lived in comfort,
winning, by degrees, the esteem of his parishioners (a tribute
which, in other cures, he had not wholly gained), working hard at
poetry and paying visits to his friends. At the house of the
Hoares in Hampstead, he met Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers,
Joanna Baillie and others; and he paid a memorable visit to Scott
in Edinburgh. He died at Trowbridge, in February 1832. At his
death, many volumes of poetry in manuscript were found in his
1 Book XIV; The Natural Death of Love, 11. 3—42. Book xvii, 11. 407-445.
3 Book xiii, 11. 733—744.
a


## p. 150 (#172) ############################################

150
George Crabbe
[CH.
ord
house, and selections from these were printed in the collected
edition of his works, edited by his son, George Crabbe, which
was published in 1834. They include one delightful tale, Silford
Hall; or, The Happy Day, which describes the visit of a poor boy
to a great house over which he is shown by the housekeeper; and
one shrewd piece of comedy, The Equal Marriage, in which a
male and a female coquette marry to their joint discomfort.
The Farewell and Return is a series of short poems describing
the fortunes of a man's acquaintances before and after his long
absence from his native town. They contain some admirable work,
such as the poem called The Ancient Mansion, which tells how
the local great house had been bought and spoiled by a newcomer.
But, in reading these posthumous tales, it is just to remember
that they had not been finally passed for the press by the author,
whose reputation they do little to enhance. The lyric was not his
best means of expression, and he used it rarely; but the quatrain,
His Mother's Wedding-Ring, shows a beautifully turned thought,
and the short poem on his dead wife, Parham Revisited, is simple
and passionate. The unpublished poems by Crabbe, collected from
manuscripts in the possession of the university of Cambridge and
printed in the Cambridge English Classics edition of his works,
include other examples of his work in lyric poetry.
Between the publication of Crabbe's first work and of his last,
a revolution had come over English poetry. He began to write in
a barren time, when the power of Pope was waning, and nothing
new had yet arisen to take its place. Almost contemporaneously
with The Village, his first characteristic poem, appeared the first
volume of Cowper. During Crabbe's long silence, the influence of
Cowper was to spread; and, by the time of Crabbe's death, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, Campbell, Byron, Shelley and Keats had done
their work for English poetry. It says much for one who, though an
innovator in subject, belonged to the previous age in execution, that
he held his own throughout life and for some time afterward. He
told the plain truth about peasants; yet he called them ‘swains,'
as if Lyrical Ballads had never been published. Poetry took on
a hundred new or revived forms; yet he clung, with very few re-
missions, to his couplets. In spite of all, his work was read and
admired by the very men who were trying to set poetry free
from the shackles in which he continued to labour. Almost alone
among the voices of the new school, Hazlitt's was raised against
him; and Hazlitt's wellknown attack can best be explained by
1 The Spirit of the Age. · Waller and Glover's Hazlitt, vol. iv, pp. 348 ff.
भ


## p. 151 (#173) ############################################

VII]
Crabbe's Couplets
151
a moment of spleen. The admiration of Wordsworth for Crabbe's
work was warm. Lyrical Ballads had not done anything to affect
Crabbe's style, and the two poets, both starting from the same point,
a recognition of sympathetic interest in common life, had followed
widely different paths; but, like Tennyson, at a later date, Words-
worth valued highly the independence and truth of Crabbe's sturdy,
old-fashioned poetry, and saw in it, what Hazlitt failed to see, the
beauty born of poetic passion.
Though Crabbe has paid the penalty of neglect, exacted from
all poets who are careless of form, he was undoubtedly wise to
keep almost exclusively to his couplets. No metre could be better
suited to his close sketches of character or to the level development
of his tales. When at its worst, his work is very bad, and an easy prey
to clever parodists like the authors of Rejected Addresses, who, in
a few trenchant lines, brought all its faults into the light. When at
its best, it is more than good narrative verse. In certain passages,
particularly in passages of description, it rises to an intense and
passionate beauty, all the minute details which Crabbe liked to
record being caught up into the dramatic mood of the moment,
in a manner which, it is sometimes supposed, was unknown before
Maud. A notable example of this dramatic propriety may be
found in The Patron, the fifth of the Tales (ll. 426—433), where
the presumptuous protégé's too happy summer in his patron's
country house is at an end, and his doom is approaching. Save
for the word 'melancholy,' the passage consists of description
which might be termed bald. Crabbe does not make any attempt,
as a 'pastoral' poet would have done, to explain to his readers
the mood inspired by the scene; but the intensity of his observa-
tion and his choice of the most effective among the details bring
the scene itself vividly to the mind's eye. A parallel passage, which
contains also a touch of poetic magic, is that in Delay has Danger,
the thirteenth book of Tales of the Hall (11. 703—724), where
the halfhearted betrothed, already wishing himself free, looks out
of his window. Such economy, and the resulting intensity, are rather
the exception than the rule with Crabbe. Too often, as in the early
part of Amusements, the ninth letter of The Borough, he spoils
the effect of beautiful passages of sympathetic description, like that
of the boat leaving the ship, by dwelling too long on the species
of the medusa (sea-nettle),' or the 'marine vermes,' or other such
things, that interested the man of science rather than the poet. In
spite of this excess, he gave the poetry of nature new worlds to
conquer (rather than conquered them himself) by showing that
9


## p. 152 (#174) ############################################

152
[CH. VII
George Crabbe
the world of plain fact and common detail may be material for
poetry; just as, in dealing with the characters of men and women,
he enlarged the scope of both poetry and fiction. He was not,
like Wordsworth, a lofty and passionate dreamer; so far is he from
possessing the engaging tenderness of Cowper, that often, even at
his finest moments, he repels by his ruthless insistence upon the
truth as he sees it. On the other hand, his keen, if rugged,
.
sympathy widely separates his ' realism ’ from the dreary chronicle
of a Zola; and his not infrequent doggerel comes from his saying
too much, not from saying anything beside the mark. He has left
some vivid and beautiful passages of descriptive poetry, some
admirably told tales and a long gallery of profound and lively
portraits; and, by the intensity of his vision, the force of his mind
and his sturdy sincerity, he ploughed for future workers wide
tracts which, before him, poetry had allowed to lie fallow.


## p. 153 (#175) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
SOUTHEY
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THERE are few English writers who have been the subject of
more controversy in different kinds than Robert Southey. Esti-
mates of his positive worth as a poet have varied from the certainly
rather excessive notions of it entertained by himself and by
Landor, to the mere impertinence of Emerson's 'Who is Southey? '
Very few persons have endeavoured to give full value to that
singular combination of proficiency and performance in the two
harmonies wherein he has, perhaps, only one rival in English
literature. The absence—an absence which, perhaps, is the chief
instance of a scandal that too often affects English, as compared
with foreign, literature—of even an attempt at a complete edition
of at least his bookwork, has complicated the difficulty of dealing
with him. Even though the old odia-political, theological and
other-have, to some extent (by no means wholly), settled down,
he is—it may be admitted partly by his own fault-apt to rouse
them in single cases and passages after a disturbing fashion. And
there is one pervading condition of a dangerous kind attending his
work, from which he was almost the first, if by no means the last,
to suffer.
This condition was the difficulty—which his prudence and self-
denial reduced to some extent, but which weighed on him all his
life and finally killed or helped to kill him-of adjusting the vita
to the vivendi causae. If Southey had had a private fortune or a
lightly burdened office or benefice of any kind ; if he had had the
gift of bachelorhood and the further gift of a college fellowship;
if he had been able to draw profit from professional work which
left time for writing ; if several other ‘ifs and ands' had trans-
formed themselves in the practical fashion of the saying---not
merely would he, probably, have died in perfect mental health, but
he would have left us work (if he had left any at all, which is an
important proviso) including more definite masterpieces than he
actually achieved. But fate would not have it so. He had no
>


## p. 154 (#176) ############################################

154
[CH.
Southey
>
fortune; and, more than once, he rather stood in the way of his
own luck. He was a born ‘family man’; and, what is more, a most
hospitable, charitable and generous person? He not only refused,
after some efforts, all professional work, but was, probably, in a
measure, incapable of any. He would not have been able to live
his own life anywhere except in the depths of the country; but
he could only live that life there by spending what would have
been now enormous, and must, even then, have been considerable,
sums upon a vast library. To supply these necessities, there was
only one way-hackwork for the press. He began this at a very
unfavourable time, when, as he has somewhere said, a whole day's
work would bring him in some ten shillings, and, though he lived
into a more golden age, he never, as had even Coleridge at one
time, had that regular work for daily and weekly periodicals which
alone really makes an income. Even so, there might have been
difficulties ; for he did not like being "edited'; he would not, as
he says himself, 'regard pen-and-inkmanship as a trade'; and the
consequence was that, while he was perpetually interrupting his
more ambitious work to ‘boil the pot,' these interruptions merely
performed that office and seriously interfered with the other.
Thus, being not a mere gutter journalist but a man of letters
of the higher, if not highest, rank, he was ill content with this
hackwork. He wanted to do, and he did, great work in prose and
,
verse ; and, with such work, after a, perhaps, treacherously pros-
perous beginning, he had scarcely any luck—perhaps because, as
Scott thought, he mismanaged bis affairs with his publishers. As
for the pensions which were constantly thrown in his face by his
political decriers, the facts are simply these. He had-and, for
some time, could hardly have lived without it-an allowance of
£160 a year from his rich schoolfellow Charles Wynn; he gave this
up when he received a government pension rather less than more
than it in value (it was nominally £200, but was largely reduced
by fees and taxes); the laureateship added less than £100 (the
whole of which, and a little more, he at once devoted to life in-
surance), and, very late in his life, Sir Robert Peel gave him £300
more. In 1816, he had declined offers from Lord Liverpool which,
1 Literary coincidences are sometimes amusing. It so happens that, as Grosvenor
Bedford, the father, was a frequent agent of Horace Walpole's charities, so was
Grosvenor Bedford, the son, of Southey's, and we have numerous letters, from principal
to agent, on the subject, in both cases. Horace was by no means stingy in this way;
but it is rather curious to compare his scale of benefaction and Southey's, remembering
that the one was a richly endowed sinecurist and bachelor, the other a man with a
rather large family, who lived almost wholly by ill-paid exertions of his own.


## p. 155 (#177) ############################################

VIII]
His Youth
155
though apparently somewhat vague, would certainly have tempted
most men, at a time when he was actually pressed for money. A
little later, he refused the editorship of The Times with, it is said,
£2000 a year attached. It may be taken as certain that, if his
gains, including these pensions, during a lifetime of almost unbroken
work, resulting, occasionally, in firstrate literature, were summed
up and divided yearly, the average income would be found to
be not half of that of some places since created for persons of no
merit who perform services of no value.
Southey's life was what is called uneventful; but its circum-
stances were too intimately connected with the character of his
work to permit complete neglect of them. He was born (1774) in
Bristol, of a Somerset family, old, entitled to bear arms, in one of
its branches possessed of some fortune, but not of any historical
distinction, and, so far as his own immediate connections were con-
cerned, obscure and unfortunate. His father, who was a linendraper,
failed in business, and died early; but Southey received unusual,
if, on one side, fitful, assistance from his mother's relations. His
uncle, a clergyman named Thomas Hill, was almost a father to
him; and his half-aunt, Miss Tyler, made him free of her house till
his own eccentricities, and her wrath at his marriage, drove him
out. From his very earliest childhood, he seems to have been
a devourer of books, especially in English literature, and more
especially in poetry. His uncle sent him to Westminster, where
he made valuable friends. But the 'strong contagion' of the
French revolution caught him there; and he was expelled for his
concern in a school magazine the principles of which are sufficiently
indicated by its title, The Flagellant. He was thus cut off from
proceeding, as usual, to Christ church, but he went to Balliol
(1792), where he stayed for a year and a half 'working,' in the strict
sense, not at all, but reading immensely, advancing in Jacobinism,
making the acquaintance of Coleridge and, with him and others,
starting the famous scheme of 'pantisocracy' or 'aspheterism,
a miniature socialist republic to be carried out anywhere or
nowhere. The vicissitudes of this association are not for us; but
they ended, so far as Southey was concerned, in his relinquishing
the scheme and marrying (1795) Edith Fricker, but starting from
the church door, and alone, for Portugal, to comply with the
demands of his uncle, who was chaplain at Lisbon.
How he there laid the foundation of that knowledge of the
peninsular literatures which formed one of the special studies of
his life and supplied the subjects of more than one of his chief
>


## p. 156 (#178) ############################################

156
[CH.
Southey
emrifauen
.
works; how he returned, lived with his wife at Bristol or London
and elsewhere, dutifully tried the law, but found it as hopelessly
uncongenial as he had previously, in his hotter Jacobin time,
found the church and medicine; how he paid a second visit (1800)
to Lisbon, this time with his wife, and how, after trying various
abodes and giving himself up to the press and various employ-
Betting Fodtments, including a private secretaryship to the -Irish secretary
Corry, he settled, where Coleridge had already established himself
id Barisalire (and, at first, with him), at Greta hall, Keswick, thus becoming
,
a Lake poet,' would take long to tell. But, rolling stone as he
had been for some thirty years, he here found his resting-place
(though that was hardly the term for a home of Southey) for life.
He never left it again, save for short holiday absences; he became,
after being, in a way, Coleridge's guest or, at least, his house
partner, the host and, for a time, the supporter of Coleridge's
family; he collected the great library already mentioned; he
begat sons and daughters, and was passionately fond of them,
suffering intensely from the deaths of some of them, especially
those of his eldest son, Herbert, and his youngest daughter, Isabel
At last, in 1834, his wife's mind gave way, and she soon died. The
shock completed what, if it had not altogether caused, inordinate
brainwork had, beyond all doubt, helped, a mental breakdown in
bis own case. He found a second wife, or, rather, a nurse, in
the poetess Caroline Bowles; but she could only attend upon
his decline, and he died of softening of the brain in 1843.
It is impossible wholly to pass over that question of political
tergiversation which plays a large part in Southey's actual history,
owing, partly, to the time at which he lived, and, partly, to
the rather unscrupulous ability of some of his enemies; but,
partly, also, it must be confessed, to that rather unlucky touch of
selfrighteousness which was almost the only fault in his otherwise
blameless character. The present writer has never seen the
question of the character and duration of Southey's political and
religious unorthodoxy examined at length ; and there is not room
for such an examination here ; but there are ample and final
materials for it in his Letters. It was, undoubtedly, brought on
by that 'prince of the air,' a momentary epidemic of popular
opinion, and by the common, though not universal, opposition of
clever boys to the powers that be; it was hardened by the unwise
한
​1 The manner, as well as the amount, contributed. As he says himself (Letters, vol. 111,
p. 64), 'I am given to works of supererogation, and could do nothing to my own satis-
faction if I did not take twice as much labour as any other person would bestow upon it. '


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

VIII]
His Politics
157
severity of William Vincent at Westminster; it was shaken so
early as the execution of Marie-Antoinette and the downfall of
the Girondists; and, by 1796, the patient had got to writing : 'as
for pigs, they are too like the multitude. ' All was safe after that;
though a few minor relapses follow for a short time. It may be
allowed, even by the most sympathetic judgment, that Southey had
not a political head; in fact, he admitted it himself when choosing
his subjects for The Quarterly. His account of the matter in his
famous reply to William Smith as to the resuscitation of Wat
Tyler-one of the finest things of the kind, for matter and style,
ever written—to the effect that he had always had an ardent desire
for the melioration of mankind,' but that 'as he grew older his
ideas as to the best means of that melioration changed,' is adequate,
accurate and final. But the position which it indicates is, obviously,
an incomplete one. As Coleridge had too much logic, Southey had
too little ; and he was always laying himself open to reproaches of
actual inconsistency, which is important, as well as of retrospective
inconsistency, which is futile. He never had been a thorough
Jacobin, and he never became a thorough tory. To the end of
his life, he had odd semisocialist ideas ; he never could see Pitt's
greatness, not because he detected that statesman's real faults, but
because the old 'nervous impression' of dislike remained ; and he
never forgave the Anti-Jacobin attacks on himself. Not at any
period of his life, for fear or favour, was it possible for Southey to
acquiesce in what he did not think right; but what he thought
right generally depended, not on any coherent theory, not on any
sound historical observation, but on a congeries of personal likings,
dislikings, experiences and impressions generally. This is really
the conclusion of the whole matter respecting his politics, and no
ore need be said about it.
As is probably the case with all great readers and most copious
writers, Southey began both processes, in more than the school
sense of reading and writing, very early. He seems to have had
almost congenital affinity to poetry and romance, and this, or
mere accident, sent him, when almost a child, from Tasso in
translation, of course) to Ariosto, and from Ariosto to Spenser, in
a way which the most critical pedagogue could not have improved.
As a child, also, he filled quires, if not reams, with verse ; and,
though he had too much sense to preserve, or, at least, to print,
any of these plusquam juvenilia, it is probable that we should
not have found in them anything like the striking difference from
his future work which is discernible in those of Milton, of Coleridge,


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################

158
[CH.
Southey
2
of Shelley and of Tennyson. His early letters, too, contain
specimens of the halfdoggerel anapaests, which Ansteyl had
made popular a generation earlier, and which continued, for
at least another, to be written with a familiar and current pen
by persons of good, as well as of indifferent, wits. But (speaking
under correction) the earliest thing that he regularly published and
acknowledged—the Ode to Horror, dated 1791, when the author
was seventeen-is a somewhat better than Della Cruscan (v. inf. )
effort to follow Collins very far off. Some other pieces (of the
same kind, mostly, but including a terribly flat monodrama on, of
all subjects, Sappho) date from the next year or two; and, then,
we come to the notorious Wat Tyler, ‘written in three days at
Oxford' during the year 1794, and surreptitiously and invidiously
published from a stolen copy twenty-three years later. Southey
failed in recourse to the law owing, perhaps, to one of the most
extraordinary 'quillets' of a legal mind? ever recorded. Therefore
he himself included it in his works and very sensibly made not the
slightest correction, merely explaining the date and circumstances
of its composition. Wat Tyler remains most cheerful reading. It is
a short drama in verse of three acts only, and of, perhaps, some eight
or nine hundred lines. If its actual authorship and circumstances
were not known, a good critic might take it for a deliberate and
very happy parody of the cruder and more innocent utterances of
sentimental republicanism. Wat and his fellows clothe these
utterances in the wellknown theatrical lingo of the time; and
arrange them in unexceptionable, if slightly uninspired, blank
verse. For an intelligent and educated audience, the thing might
still make a most laughable 'curtain-raiser' or afterpiece, more
particularly as its fustian fallacies are of a kind constantly revived.
But, as a serious composition, it is not, and could not be, of the
very slightest value. It remained, however, as has been said, un-
known for all but a quarter of a century; but, at the same time,
and, indeed, earlier, the author had been busy on an epic, Joan of
Arc, which appeared in 1795, was received with something like
enthusiasm and, by actually passing through five editions, showed
the nascent taste which was to grow to the advantage of Scott and
Byron. Southey altered it a good deal, and, little as he was
disposed to undervalue his own work, always acknowledged its
TE
2
1 Cf. p. 173, post.
? Lord Eldon held that, as it was a mischievous work and contrary to the public
welfare, there could not be any property in it-and, consequently, no means of stopping
the mischief and the public danger.


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

VIII)
His Blank Verse
159
'great and numerous faults. ' It is doubtful, however, whether he
ever saw, or would have acknowledged if it had been pointed out
to him, the most fatal fault of all-a fault shared by most-
fortunately not by all-of his longer poems that followed. That
fault is the adoption of blank verse for a long narrative poem,
a proceeding which nobody, save Milton and Tennyson, has ever
carried out successfully, while Tennyson himself, and others who
have come near success, have usually broken up the single narra-
tive into a cluster of shorter pieces.
For, to achieve such success, the verse must have qualities of
its own, like those of Milton or Tennyson, which are almost inde-
pendent of the subject, and which reinforce its interest to such an
extent that the reader never thinks of saying 'A good story; but
it would have been better in prose. ' Some readers, certainly, do
say this, not merely in reference to Joan, but to Madoc and
Roderick. Southey's blank verse is, indeed, never bad; but it
also never, or in the rarest possible instances, has this intrinsic
character; and it is a remarkable instance of the almost invari-
able soundness of his general critical principles, however the de
te fabula may have sometimes escaped him, that he expressly
recognised? 'the great difficulties of the measure, and its dis-
advantages in always exposing the weak parts of a long poem.
During the time when he was loyally endeavouring to repay
his uncle's -kindness by adopting some profession, he partly
suspended his 'long-poem’ writing. But, in the last years of
the century, he produced many smaller pieces, generally good,
sometimes all but consummate and really important to history.
There is still rubbish : many of those poems on the slave trade
which have gone some way towards avenging the poor African by
the boredom if not anguish which they have inflicted on the white
brethren of his oppressors; Botany Bay Eclogues (but, indeed,
these were earlier and contemporary with Wat Tyler), the much
ridiculed, and, no doubt, wrongly constructed, sapphics and dac-
tylics, which reflect the same temper. But, especially during his
sojourn at Westbury, near Bristol, he also wrote lyrics and ballads
of very much greater value. Here, in 1798, was composed that
admirable Holly-Tree which softened even Hazlitt, and which,
with My days among the Dead are passed, twenty years later,
shows Southey at his very best both as a poet and as a man.
But the most important productions of this time, if not the
best, were the Ballads. Most of the best of these were written
· Letters, vol. II, p. 354.


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
Southey
[CH.
between 1796 and 1798; and, although none of them possesses
anything like the poetical power of The Ancient Mariner, it is
nearly certain that Southey preceded Coleridge in his appreciation
and practice of the ballad principle of anapaestic equivalence in
mainly iambic measures, though he may have followed others,
from Anstey down to Lewis, in adopting the pure anapaest. From
another point of view, he deserves the credit of blending the spirit
of the then popular terror-novel with touches of humour, so as to
produce the effect for which there is, perhaps, no single word ex-
cept the French macabre. This, which was afterwards pushed still
further by Hood, Praed and Barham, has provided English with a
sort of hybrid style, capable of easy degeneration in various ways,
but, at its best, almost peculiar and quite delectable. Southey
himself was sometimes content with the mere singsong of the
eighteenth century ballad, and sometimes overstepped the
treacherous line which keeps ghastly humour from bad taste.
But, in divers instances, such as The Cross Roads, Bishop Hatto
and the famous Old Woman of Berkeley, he has hit the white;
while, in less mixed modes, The Well of St Keyne, The Inchcape
Rock, the almost famous Battle of Blenheim and, perhaps, Queen
Orraca should be added to his tale of complete successes. From
the point of view of form, they had a most powerful influence in
loosening the bonds of eighteenth century metre; and, from that
of combined form and matter, they exercised the same influence
more widely. It ought never to be forgotten, though it too often
is, that Southey was particularly influential in the days when better
poets of his own age were still forming themselves and when other
better poets, younger as well as better, had not produced anything.
Yet, all this was itself the work of a very young man; in the
earlier cases,
of a mere boy; and, when Southey returned to the
long poem with Thalaba (1801, but very long in hand), he was only
six- or seven-and-twenty. But this was not only by far the most
ambitious, it was, also, though less important and much less well in-
spired than the Ballads, the most audaciously experimental of the
work he had yet tried. Rimeless metres outside the regular blank
verse were, of course, not absolutely novel in English. Campion
had tried them and gone near to beauty two centuries earlier ;
Collins had tried them in the last generation and gone nearer ;
just before Southey himself and Frank Sayers (v. inf. ) had used
them on a larger scale. But nobody had adventured a really
long poem in them. Southey did, and with the same remarkable
appreciation of metrical theory as well as practice which he had
1


## p. 161 (#183) ############################################

VIII]
Thalaba
161
a
shown in the ballad case. The great danger of unrimed verse in
English is that (from that natural tendency of the language which
showed itself as early as Chaucer's prose) it will fall into more or
less complete and continuous iambic decasyllables, unless it is
arranged, either into somewhat un-English line-moulds as it had
been by Campion, or into very definitely marked and identical
stanzas, as it had been by Collins—with the result, in both cases,
of a monotony which would be intolerable in a long poem. Sayers
had notoriously fallen into the trap, as have, since, Matthew Arnold
and W. E. Henley. Southey, with his eyes open to it, determined
that he would avoid it, and he did. Thalaba, though not quickly
admired, was much liked by good wits of his own generation, and
not without reason. The story is by no means uninteresting and,
if not exactly the characters, the situations are good. There are
far finer passages in it than in Joan of Arc; indeed, some of the
incidents, and more of the descriptions, are really poetical. But
the unfamiliarity and aloofness of the whole thing are not carried
off by the diable au corps of Vathek or the sheer story interest of
The Arabian Nights themselves; and the unrimed versification
perpetually harasses and hampers the reader as something, per-
haps, admirable, but, somehow, not enjoyable—in other words, as
a disappointment and a mistake.
Besides Joan of Arc and the Minor Poems written before and
during the Westbury sojourn, Southey, in 1794, had collaborated
with Coleridge in the worthless Fall of Robespierre, and with his
other brother-in-law, Lovell, in a small collection of lesser verse.
He had also issued the first of his many volumes of prose as
Letters from Spain and Portugal (1797). This, without Wat
Tyler, then unpublished, but with Thalaba, made more than half-
a-dozen volumes in hardly more than as many years. But a longer
gap occurred-one, indeed, of four years—till, though he did not
quite know it, he had settled down at Keswick, and started on the
career which was only to close with his death, and to leave plentiful
matter for posthumous publication. In 1805, however, he re-
appeared with two volumes of verse-Metrical Tales and Madoc.
The former contained not a little of the nondescript, but acceptable,
work above described ; the latter, which had been many years on
the stocks, was introduced with a flourish ('Come, for ye know me!
I am he who sung'), warranted by classical precedents rather
than in accordance with the modesty expected from English poets.
Although, like Thalaba, it sold very slowly and disappointed the
hopes which the reception of the far inferior Joan of Arc had
11
a
a
E, L, XL.
CH. VIII.


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162
[ch.
Southey
و ن ): نه
raised in its author, it was very much admired by no common
judges; and there are, I believe, one or two among the now in-
frequent readers of Southey who rank it highly. To others, the
peculiar curse referred to above seems to rest on it. The adven-
tures of the son of Owen Gwyneth in his own land and in Mexico
are neither uninteresting nor ill-told. But some rebellious minds
cannot away with the vehicle of telling-
This is the day when in a foreign grave
King Owen’s relics shall be laid to rest-
and are wholly unable to perceive anything in it to be desired
above ‘This is the day when King Owen’s relics shall be laid to
rest in a foreign grave. '
There can, however, be no doubt that Madoc greatly raised
Southey's position as a poet; for Scott was only beginning, the
world would not have anything of Wordsworth's, Coleridge was
silent and the greater, younger poets had not begun. In the next
seven or eight years before his appointment to the laureateship in
1813, he produced his very best works, in verse and prose re-
spectively, The Curse of Kehama and The Life of Nelson; he
joined (1809) The Quarterly Review, which was almost his main
source of income for the rest of his life (though, for a very few
years, he drew considerable sums from Ballantyne's Annual
Register); he began the mightiest of all his works, The History of
Brazil (1810–19), originally planned as merely a part of a still
huger History of Portugal, and (besides revising the old transla-
tions of Amadis and Palmerin and executing the charming one
of The Chronicle of the Cid) he wrote two popular miscellanies, as
they may be termed, The Letters of Espriella (1807) and Omniana
(1812).
As a historian and reviewer, Southey may be considered here
generally; some remarks on the two lighter books may follow; but
Kehama and the Nelson cannot be left without separate notice.
If almost the widest possible reading, a keen curiosity and interest
in the things both of life and literature, common sense tempered by
humour, unwearying application, a disposition, if with some foibles
and prejudices, on the whole singularly equable and amiable and
an altogether admirable style, could make a good historian and a
good reviewer, Southey ought to have been one of the very best of
both classes. It would, perhaps, be too much to say that he actually
1 His observed knowledge of human nature was extraordinary. The wonderful and
should-be famous letter about Hartley Coleridge as a child is the master document of
this; but there are hundreds of others.
!


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

VIII]
As Historian and Reviewer
163
was.
6
In history, he was apt to attack too large subjects, and to
exhibit, in dealing with them, a certain absence of that indefinable
grasp of his subject which the historian requires in order to grasp his
reader. Episodes, as in the later Expedition of Orsua (1821), or
short statements, as in Nelson itself, he could manage admirably;
and, for this reason, his reviews are much better than his histories,
though it is not easy to judge the former exhaustively, since they
have never been collected and are believed to be, in some cases,
impossible of identification. But the magisterial style which the
early Reviews affected (though he himself sometimes protested
against it) was rather a snare to Southey, and it cannot be said
that his best work is there.
The two productions of a lighter character mentioned above
deserve a place on that shelf or in that case of books for occasional
reading with which the wise man should always provide himself.
Southey's earlier Letters from Spain and Portugal were written
before he had thoroughly mastered his own inimitable style: but
those, two years later, ‘from England,' assigned to an imaginary
young Spaniard Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, are much better.
They belong to a wellknown class, and, no doubt, cannot compete with
the work of such masters in that class as Montesquieu or Goldsmith.
But they contain, perhaps, a more accurate picture of English ways
in the very beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere
else, as well as some curiosities, such as the accounts of Brothers
and Joanna Southcott. Omniana has interest of a different kind
or kinds. It is not (as it has been sometimes pronounced to
be) a mere commonplace-book : it is a commonplace-book made
original. The enormous store of reading which supplied the post-
humous Commonplace Books of the author, and which was more
substantively utilised in The Doctor, does, indeed, supply the
texts; but, for the most part, if not always, these are retold or, at
least, commented on in that author's own words. An additional
piquancy undoubtedly lies in the fact that Coleridge undertook to
be, and, to a small extent, was, a contributor; though, as usual, he
defaulted save to that small extent. To anyone who reads the
book for a first time, or even for a second or a third, at an interval
long enough to allow him to forget the exact whereabouts or subjects
of Coleridge's contributions, it is no small amusement to stumble on
the Estesian 'proofs. ' No prose can be pleasanter to read or more
suitable to its wide range of subjects than Southey's; but, when
you come to such a sentence as ‘A bull consists in a mental juxta-
position of incongruous ideas with the sensation but without the
a
>
11–2


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164
Southey
[CH.
sense of connection' you know that another than Southey has been
there.
It might not be a bad question from the point of view of the
arrest of hasty criticism: 'What rank would you have accorded to
Southey as a poet, if he had left no long poem but the best parts
of Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama, and no short ones but the
half-dozen ballads and lyrics noticed above? ' It is difficult to see how
even the positive verdict could have been anything but a very high
estimate indeed; while nine critics out of ten would probably have
added that “If Southey had been permitted or had cared to pursue
poetry further, there is no knowing, etc. ' In almost all respects but
one, Kehama is invulnerable. The verse stanzas of the Thalaba
kind, but longer, more varied and rimed, are extremely effective.
The story, in itself, is interesting and well managed; the conclusion
is positively dramatic; the characters have at least epic, if not
dramatic, sufficiency. As for pure poetry of execution, anybody who
denies this to the curse itself, to Landor's favourite picture of the
'gem-lighted city' and to a dozen other passages, is either blind by
nature or has made himself so by prejudice. But the one excepted
point remains—the injudicious choice of subject and the attempt
to make it more acceptable by a mass of quasi-learned notes. It
is said by Englishmen who have taught orientals that, to them, if
you can elicit their genuine feeling, western romance, especially of
the supernatural kind, appears simply absurd—the most passionate
passages evoking shouts of laughter. It is certain that, except in
the rarest cases and under the most skilful treatment, Hindu
romance, especially of the supernatural kind, has, to western
readers, an element not so much of absurdity as of extravagance
and boredom which it is possible for very few to get over. That,
and that only, is the weak point of The Curse of Kehama.
It is not easy to say anything new about The Life of Nelson;
in fact, it would be impossible to do so without availing oneself of
mere rhetoric or mere paradox epigram, both of which are absolutely
foreign to the book itself. The Life established itself, if not im-
mediately, very soon, as, perhaps, the best short biography of a plain
and straightforward kind in the English language; it has held that
position almost unchallenged till a very recent period; and it may
be said, without offence, that the charges since brought against it
have certainly not weakened, if they have not even positively
strengthened, its position. For, all that anyone has been able to
make good against Southey is that he was not in possession of all
the documents on the subject; that he was not a professional


## p. 165 (#187) ############################################

VIII]
The Life of Nelson
165
seaman or strategist; and that, on some disputed points of fact or
opinion, it is possible to hold views different from his. What has
not been shown and, it may be said without fear, cannot be shown,
is that the most abundant technical knowledge of naval, or the
most recondite study of military, affairs could have bettered such
a book as this; that the points of disputed opinion cannot possibly be
accepted as Southey accepts them; or that material advantage
could have been obtained for such a book as this from the docu-
ments that could not be consulted. The specification of it might
be put, after Aristotelian fashion, thus : 'A short, clear, well
written narrative displaying Nelson's acts and showing forth his
character, with all necessary accuracy of fact, with sympathy not
too partial or indiscriminate, in such a manner as to make the
thing for ever a record of heroism and patriotism in the past,
and a stimulus to them in the future. ' The great majority
of competent judges, some of them by no means inclining to
Southey's way of thought in political or other senses, has
unhesitatingly declared the material part of this specification
to be amply achieved. As for the formal or literary part, there
never has been even one such judgment which has failed to pro-
nounce The Life of Nelson such a model of the more modern
'middle style,' with capacities of rising to something grander, as
hardly exists elsewhere. The scale saved the writer from his own
fatal fancy for quartos, and from the opportunities of prolixity and
divagation which quartos bring with them ; his own patriotism, in
which he was the equal of Chatham or of Nelson himself, gave the
necessary inspiration ; his unwearied industry made him master of
details even to the extent of avoiding any serious technical blunders;
and those quaint flashes of the old Jacobinism which have been
noticed occur just often enough to prevent the book from having
the air of a mere partisan pamphlet. These things, with Southey’s
own sauce of style, were enough to give us a somewhat larger and
more important Agricola ; and we have it here.
From the time of the publication of Nelson, which was also
that of Southey's laureation, he had thirty years of life allowed
him, and at least five-and-twenty of life in full possession of his
faculties. During the whole of this last-named period, he worked
in the portentous fashion more than once described in his letters,
practically taking up the whole of his time from waking to sleep-
ing, except that allotted to meals (but often encroached upon)
and to a little exercise. This work was by no means, as it has been
absurdly described, 'compiling and translating from the Spanish,'


## p. 166 (#188) ############################################

166
[CH.
Southey
but its results cannot be very fully commented on here. His
Quarterly reviewing was, fortunately (for it provided his main
income), continuous: and, after a time, was very well paid, the
regular 'ten guineas a sheet' passing into comfortable lump sums
of fifties and hundreds. But he never fully reconciled himself to
it; and there were unpleasant misunderstandings about the editor-
ship in the interregnum between Gifford's and Lockhart's. The
taskwork of the laureateship (of which, in accepting it, he had
thought himself relieved, but which continued for, at any rate,
some years) he hated still more, but discharged with almost too great
conscientiousness, the chief results being the unluckily named Lay
of the Laureate on princess Charlotte's wedding, and the unluckily
composed Vision of Judgment on George III's death. As to the
latter, it is enough to caution the unwary against concluding from
the undoubted cleverness of Byron's parody-attack, that Southey's
original is worthless. The English hexameters may be a mistake,
but they are about the best of their special pattern of that
probably hopeless form; and the substance, though displaying,
occasionally, the want of tact which now and then beset the author,
is, sometimes, very far from contemptible. But the occasions
when Pegasus has shown his true form in official harness are, as is
too well known, of the rarest; and Southey's work does not furnish
one of the exceptions.
To complete the notice of his poetry: in 1814, he had published
another long poem which, as was usual with him, had been on
the stocks for a great while, had been much altered and more than
once renamed. It appeared, finally, as Roderick the last of the Goths
and is probably the best of his blank verse epics, but does not quite
escape the curse above mentioned. The Poet's Pilgrimage to
Waterloo is not in blank verse; but here, also, especially after read-
ing his pleasant letters on the journey and the home-coming, the
old question may be asked. He was, even at this time, beginning
two other pieces of some length—A tale of Paraguay, which ap-
peared ten years later, in 1825, and which is of good quality, and
Oliver Newman, which was only posthumously published, and adds
little to his fame. Had he, in fact, produced much great poetry
in the hardly existing intervals of his task-work in prose, he would
have been unlike any poet of whom time leaves record. But
a few of his smaller pieces, especially that admirable one noticed
above and written (1818) in his library, are poetry still. The last
independent volume of verse which he issued was Al for Love
(1829); but he collected the whole of his poems published earlier,


## p. 167 (#189) ############################################

VIII]
Miscellaneous Prose
167
in ten volumes (1837–8), almost at the close of his working
life.
The prose itself gave frequent nourishing and invigorating crops,
if nothing of the rarest fruit. The Life of John Wesley (1821)
is not much inferior to that of Nelson: the differences are chiefly
that it has a less interesting subject and is longer. The History
of the Peninsular War (1823–32)—second of the big histories on
which he spent and, indeed, wasted much time—failed of success,
as was common with him, partly by his own fault, but much more
by his ill-luck. It was his fault that he set himself against
the duke of Wellington's wishes with that supererogatory con-
scientiousness which was one of his main failings, and thus lost an
almost indispensable support; it was his misfortune that, owing
to the pressure of bread-winning work, it was not finished till
after the appearance of Napier's much more brilliant and pro-
fessional, though, perhaps, not altogether trustworthy, book. But
it is much to be regretted that, in place of this, we have not a
Life of George Fox and one of Warren Hastings, on which,
according to his wont, he wasted much time in preparation,
and which would almost certainly have been very good.
The same mixture of fault and fate from the first beset some
more original productions of the same period—The Book of
the Church (1822), Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), Col-
loquies (1828), rather unfairly described in Macaulay's essay, and
Essays Moral and Political (1834), part of which was Rickman's
work. All were quite admirably written, as, indeed, Macaulay
himself confesses, Colloquies especially containing passages of
almost consummate execution; and the caution above given as to
Byron may be repeated in reference to their matter. But Southey's
defects as a political writer have been frankly acknowledged
already, and he suffered from the same defects, or others like
them, in matters ecclesiastical. He had entirely got over his early
unorthodoxy, here, also, on important points ; but, even in his ortho-
doxy, there was a good deal of private misjudgment; and he carried
the disapproval of Roman catholicism, and of all forms of protestant
dissent, which, when held and expressed moderately, is logically
incumbent on an Anglican, to fantastic and extravagant lengths.
Fortunately, these things were succeeded in his last decade, while
it was yet time—not merely by an edition of Cowper, which, though
prevented by insuperable obstacles from being quite complete,
is, in the circumstances, a most remarkable example of combined
industry and judgment, but, also, by two original works: one, The
Lives of the Admirals, which has been almost universally admitted


## p. 168 (#190) ############################################

168
[ch.
Southey
mous.
to contain delightful matter, admirably told, and another, almost
an opus maximum, which has not been so fortunate.
Few books, indeed, have been the subjects of more different
judgments than Southey's last, unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable
work The Doctor, in seven volumes (1837—47), part being posthu-
It has been pronounced by some to be actually delightful
and by others to be intolerably dull. An impartial, experienced and
acute thirdsman, even without knowing the book, would, in such a
case, perceive easily enough that there must be something in it
which appeals strongly to one taste or set of tastes and does not
appeal to, or actually revolts, another. Yet, inasmuch as the tastes
and appreciations to which The Doctor appeals are positive, and those
to which it does not appeal are negative, it seems that the admirers
have the most to say for themselves. The book has been called 'a
novel,' which it certainly is not; "a commonplace-book' pure and
simple, which it, as certainly, is not; and 'a miscellany,' which it,
as certainly, is. But the last description is, perhaps, as inadequate
as the two former are incorrect. To speak with critical accuracy,
materials of the most apparently heterogeneous sort, derived from
the author's vast reading, are in it digested into a series, as it were,
of articles, the succession of which is not without a certain con-
tiguity of subject between each pair or batch, while the whole
is loosely strung on a thread, now thicker now thinner, of personal
narrative. This last history, of Dr Daniel Dove of Doncaster
and his horse Nobs, seems, originally, to have been a sprout of
Coleridge's brain; but, if it ever had, as such, any beginning, middle
or end, they are certainly not recorded or retained in any regular
fashion here. The extraction, early and later homes, marriage,
horse-ownership and other circumstances of the titular hero serve
as starting-points for enormous, though often very ingeniously
connected, divagations which display the author's varied interests,
his quaint humour and his unparalleled reading. To a person
who wants a recognisable specimen of a recognised department of
literature; to one, who, if not averse from humour, altogether
abhors that nonsense-humour which Southey loved, and which his
enemy Hazlitt valiantly championed as specially English; to any-
one who does not take any interest in literary quodlibeta, The
Doctor must be a dull book, and may be a disgusting one. To
readers differently disposed and equipped, it cannot but be de-
lightful. Attempts have sometimes been made at compromise, by
excepting from condemnation, not merely the famous Story of the
Three Bears, but the beautiful descriptions of the Yorkshire dales,
the history of the cats of Greta hall and other things. But the


## p. 169 (#191) ############################################

VIII]
His Letters
169
fact is that, to anybody really qualified to appreciate it, there is
hardly a page of The Doctor which is not delightful.
To understand, not merely this his last book, but Southey
himself, it is expedient and almost necessary that the immense
mass of his letters (even as it is, but partially published) should
be perused; and any reader who is not daunted by mere bulk may
be assured of agreeable, as well as profitable, reading. Neither
his son's collection, in six volumes, nor his son-in-law's, in four,
(somewhat more fully and freely given) is very judiciously edited,
and there is, in the latter especially, considerable duplication; but
those to his second wife were more fortunate, and, from the three
collections, with very little trouble, the man, and a very different
man from some conceptions of him, becomes clear? Coleridge's
ingeniously epigrammatic and rather illnaturedly humble remark
'I think too much to be a poet: he [Southey] too little to be a
great poet' has a certain truth, though one might retort that think-
ing too much neither prevented The Ancient Mariner and Kubla
Khan or Christabel from being great poetry nor, indeed, makes
any particular appearance in them? Except in the moral line,
Southey was not a philosopher: but neither was he the common-
place Philistine that he is often thought to have been. Like
some other men, he obtained the desires of his heart-family life
and a life of letters-only to find that the gods seldom fail to
condition their gifts, if not exactly with curses, with taxes and
fees like those over which he groaned in reference to his earthly
pensions. There are evidences in his letters not merely of deep
sentiment but even of a tendency to imaginative speculation; but
neither was 'in the day's work,' and so he choked the former down
with stoicism, the second with common sense. In such an un-
broken debauch of labour as that to which he subjected himself,
it is marvellous that he should have done such things as he did.
And most marvellous of all is his style, which—not, as has been
said, quite attained at first—was very soon reached, and which,
in all but fifty years of incessant and exorbitant practice, never
became slipshod or tbreadbare or wanting in vitality.
Therefore, whatever may be his shortcomings, or, to put it more
exactly, his want of supremacy, it must be a strangely limited
history of English literature in which a high position is not
1 It is unfortunate that only scraps, though very amusing and acute scraps, from
the letters of his principal correspondent, Grosvenor Bedford, have been published.
Those of another remarkable friend, Rickman, have been very recently drawn upon for
publication.
? It is fair to Coleridge to say that his acknowledgment of Southey's superiority as
a prose-writer was unqualified.


## p. 170 (#192) ############################################

170
Southey
[CH.
allowed to Southey. For, in the first place,'as/ must be once more
repeated, he has actual supremacy in one particular department
and period of English prose style. It is difficult to imagine any
future time, at which his best and most characteristic, though least
mannered, achievements in this way can ever become obsolete-
precisely because of their lack of mannerism. And this must be
credited to him as a pure gift of individual genius, though he
stands in the race and lineage of a perhaps still greater writer of
his own class, as to whom more presently. For this extraordinary
combination of clearness and ease will not come by observation, or
even by reading the fourteen thousand books which constituted
Southey's library. Such a polyhistor, for variety, for excellence of
matter and for excellence of form, it may be doubted whether any
other language possesses.
If not quite such high praise can be given to his verse, it is
not in regard to form that he fails. On the contrary, there are
strong reasons for assigning to him the first clear perception of
the secret of that prosodic language which almost everybody was
to practise in Southey's own time and ever since. Whether, in actual
date, his early ballads preceded The Ancient Mariner and the first
part of Christabel in the use of substitution, it may be difficult to
decide absolutely; though, even here, the precedence seems to be
his. But, what is absolutely certain is that his formulation of the
principle in a letter to Wynn is twenty years earlier in time
than Coleridge's in the preface to the published Christabel and
very much more accurate in statement. There are many other
references to res metrica in his work, and it is a curious addition
to the losses which the subject suffered by the non-completion
of Jonson's and Dryden's promised treatises, that Guest's English
Rhythms, which was actually sent to him for review, reached him
too late for the treatment which he, also, designed. And, in general
criticism, though his estimate of individual work was sometimes
(not often) coloured by prejudice, he was very often extraordinarily
original and sound. For a special instance, his singling out of
Blake's 'Mad Song' may serve; for a general, the fact that, as
early as 1801, he called attention to the fact that
there exists no tale of romance that does not betray gross and unpardonable
ignorance of the habits of feeling and thought prevalent at the time and in
the scene,
thereby hitting the very blot which spoils nearly all the novel-
writing of the time, and which was first avoided by Scott, much later.
To those who have been able to acquire something of what has
· Letters, vol. I, p. 173.
>


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VIII] Southey and Dryden 171
been called 'a horizontal view of literature-a thing even better,
perhaps, than the more famous 'Pisgah sight,' inasmuch as the
slightly deceptive perspective of distance is removed, and the
things pass in procession or panorama before the eye-there are,
with, of course, some striking differences, more striking resem-
blances in the literary character and the literary fates of Southey
and Dryden. The comparison may, at first sight, be exclaimed
against, and some of its most obvious features—such as the charges
of tergiversation brought against both—are not worth dwelling on.
But there are others which will come out and remain out, all the
more clearly the longer they are studied. The polyhistoric or
professional man-of-letters character of both, though equally
obvious, is not equally trivial. Both had a singularly interchange-
able command of the two harmonies of verse and prose; and, in
the case of no third writer is it so difficult to attach any 'ticket'
to the peculiar qualities which have placed the prose style of each
among the most perfect in the plain kind that is known to English.
Their verse, when compared with that of the greater poets of their
own time—Milton in the one case, half a dozen from Coleridge to
Keats in the other has been accused, and can hardly be cleared,
of a certain want of poetical quintessence. Dryden, indeed, was as
much Southey's superior intellectually as, perhaps, he was morally
his inferior: and, neither as poet nor as prose writer, has the later
of the pair any single productions to put forward as rivals to An
Essay of Dramatick Poesie, All for Love, the great satires, the
best parts of the Prefaces, and the best Fables. He will, therefore,
perhaps, never recover, as Dryden, to a great extent, has re-
covered, from the neglect which lay upon him from about 1830
to about 1880. In regard to Southey, this attitude was begun,
not by Byron or Hazlitt or his other contemporary detractors
—who really held him very high as a writer, though they might
dislike him in other ways—but by the more extreme romantics
of a younger generation, and by persons like Emerson. That it
will be wholly removed, or removed to the same extent as the
neglect of Dryden has been, would, perhaps, be too much to expect.
But there is still much that should and can be done in the way
of altering or lessening it; and a sign or two of willingness to
help in the work, has, perhaps, recently been noticeable.
i It is, however, a rather unfortunate revenge of the whirligig of time that, while
Southey's detractors, in his own day, usually made him out to be a very bad man of
genins, some of his rehabilitators seem to see in him a very good man of no genius
at all.


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172
[CH.
Lesser Poets
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
It has been thought proper to group, round or under Southey,
like gunboats under the wings of a 'mother' frigate, certain lesser
poets of the mid- and later eighteenth century, notice of whom may
continue that given to others of their kidney in previous volumes.
It would, indeed, be possible, without very extravagant fanciful-
ness, or wiredrawing, to make out more than an accidental or
arbitrary connection between him and at least some of them.
For, beyond all doubt, he was much indebted to Anstey for patterns
of light anapaestic verse, and more so to Sayers for an example
of rimelessness. Long before he knew Coleridge, he, also, felt that
curious influence of Bowles's Sonnets which supplies one main
historical vindication and reason for existence to minor poetry.
Hayley was his friend and Merry his acquaintance. His connection
with Hanbury Williams is, indeed, a sort of ‘back-handed' one;
for he tells us that he had refused, twenty years before its actual
appearance, to edit the existing collection of Williams's Poems,
disapproving of their contents; and this disapproval would cer-
tainly have extended, perhaps in a stronger form, to Hall Stevenson.
But these are points which need no labouring. Moreover, which
is strictly to the purpose, he was himself all his life distinguished
by a catholic and kindly taste which he showed not only to
minorities of his own time from Kirke White downwards, but in
collecting three agreeable volumes", of seventeenth and eighteenth
century writers to follow Ellis's Specimens. These volumes may
still, in no unpleasant fashion, revive half-forgotten memories of
Amherst and Boyse and Croxall, of Fawkes and Woty and William
Thompson, while they may suggest once more, if, perhaps, in vain,
the removal of more absolute forgetfulness if not original ignorance,
in the cases of Constantia Grierson and Mary Leapor, of Moses
Mendez and Samuel Bellamy.
For such as these last, however, only a chronicle planned on
the scale of L'Histoire Littéraire de la France and destined to
be finished, if ever, in a millennium, could well find room. We may
notice here Anstey, Hanbury Williams and Hall Stevenson among
writers distinctly earlier than Southey; Darwin, Hayley, the Della
Cruscans, Bowles, Sayers and one or two more among his actual
contemporaries, older and younger.
1 To himself, they gave a good deal of trouble—as usual, because he had thought
to spare himself some by devolving part of the work on Grosvenor Bedford. He never
did it again.
ef
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vin]
Anstey
173
The three lighter members of the group, Anstey, Stevenson and
Hanbury Williams, were by far the eldest: if Williams had not died
prematurely, he would have been a man of over sixty at Southey's
birth, and, though Anstey lived to the year of Madoc, he was fifty
when Southey was born. All three, in a manner, were survivals of
the school of sarcastic and social verse which had been founded by
Prior and Swift, and taken up by Gay. Nor did Anstey, though
his verse is somewhat ‘freer' than taste has permitted for nearly
a century, exceed limits quite ordinary in his own day. He is
remarkable as being, in poetry, a 'single-speech' writer, that is to
say as having, like Hamilton himself, by no means confined himself
to a single utterance, but as having never achieved any other that
was of even the slightest value. An Etonian and a Cambridge man
of some scholarship; a squire, a sportsman and a member of
parliament, Anstey, in 1766, produced the famous New Bath
Guide, a series of verse letters, mainly in anapaests of the Prior
type, which at once became popular, and which still stands
preeminent, not merely among the abundant literature which
Bath has produced or instigated, for good humour, vivid painting
of manners, facile and welladapted versification, and fun which
need not be too broad for any but a very narrow mind. Anstey
lived, chiefly in the city of which he had made himself the laureate,
for forty years, and wrote much, but, as has been said, produced
nothing of worth after this history of 'The Bl[u]nd[e]rh[ea]d
Family' and their adventures.
A charitable epigrammatist has divided 'loose’ writers of any
merit at all into those who sometimes follow the amusing across
the border of the indecent and those who, in the quest of the
indecent, sometimes hit upon the amusing. If Anstey deserves
the indulgence of the former class, Hanbury Williams and Hall
Stevenson must, it is feared, be condemned to, and by, the latter.
It is true that, in Williams's case, some doubt has been thrown on
the authorship of the grossest pieces attributed to him, and that
most other things recorded of him-except a suspected showing of
the white feather-are rather favourable. He appears, both in
Horace Walpole's letters and in Chesterfield's, as a man extremely
goodnatured and unwearied in serving his friends. It is certain,
however, that the suicide which terminated his life was preceded,
and probably caused, by a succession of attacks of mental disease;
and, in some of the coarsest work assigned to him in the singularly
uncritical hodgepodge of his Works, a little critical kindness may
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174
[CH.