MR. DOWDEN'S " SOUTHEY."*

IP there is any name which deserves a place among " English Men of Letters," it is that of Robert Southey. Hardly another instance can be mentioned of a man of equal genius who, having given himself to literature from his early youth, de- voted to it all the powers of his manhood, with so lofty a pur- pose, such genuine zeal and such unfailing industry, while those powers lasted. He attempted in his time almost every species of composition, and if in none he reached the highest, yet in many he attained a high point of eminence. And then, with all his talent and genius, he was unusually free, as Cole- ridge remarked, from the defects which too often beset the literary brotherhood. Indeed, his moral health was so complete, that we sometimes feel as if he might have been more interesting if he had not been so absolute in his faultlessness. It can hardly be doubted that Southey's works, both verse and prose, have not maintained for the present genera- tion the hold they had on his contemporaries. Indeed, the few who still know and cherish his writings are wont to main- tain that the comparative neglect into which he has fallen is in itself unjust, and not creditable to the taste of the present age. However this may be, the fact that Southey's is a name which has somewhat declined in public favour, while it is no reason for his being excluded from the present series, must have made the writing of the volume before us a less easy task than to tell the story of those authors about whom all are still eager to hear. Mr. Morley has been fortunate in securing for this work the services of a writer so highly qualified for it

* Southey. By Edward Dowden. ("English Men of Letters." Edited by John Morley.) London: Macmillan and Co.

as Mr. Edward Dowdeu. To wide knowledge of English litera- ture, not confined to favourite authors, but extending over the whole field, Mr. Dowden adds a trained insight into real excellence which enables him to take a just measure of his author, neither unduly exalting him, nor conceding too much to the contem- porary disparagement from which his author suffers. And his narrative is enriched by a calm and mellowed tone of reflection,. which throws a charm over even the commoner incidents. The only exception to this is the account of Southey's two Spanish tours, iu which, perhaps, the incidents and picturesque effects of the journey are somewhat overdone.

Southey's literary work began while he was yet at school. At Westminster, he contributed to two school-boy periodicals,— the 'fryer and the Flagellant. In an article written for the latter, Southey undertook to prove, from the ancients and the Fathers, that flogging was an invention of the Devil. The- head master made haste to prosecute the publisher ; but Southey came forward and avowed himself the writer of the squib, and was by the indignant head master privately expelled for his pains. Ejected from Westminster, he set his face towards Oxford. Christ Church would not receive him, as rumours from Westminster had reached it ; but he found refuge iu Balliol, and rooms in a top garret of the old Grove, a quarter of the college now vanished, but of which many vivid recollections still survive among old Balliol men. At the time of his entrance at Oxford, the French Revolution was in full swing, and the young defier of school authority threw himself into the frenzy of the time with his whole heart. Like Cole- ridge, Wordsworth, and many more of the finest young spirits of the age, be believed that the rising of the French people was the dawn of a new and regenerated world. He afterwards described himself as at that time " in a perilous state,—a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon. Many circum- stances tended to give me a wrong bias, none to lead me right,. except adversity, the wholesomest of all discipline." Oxford did little for him ; college lectures, such as they then were,. nothing. As Wordsworth at Cambridge, so Southey at Oxford,. had,—

" A feeling that he was not for that hour, Nor for that place."

The teacher who at this time did most for him, and helped to steady his will, shaken by the feverish excitements of Rousseau, was Epictetus. He imbibed the spirit and pre- cepts of the great Stoic, till they coloured all his being, and what he thus gained he retained iu mature life, tempered by Christian faith. It was through his moral nature, rather than through his intellect, that Southey was most powerfully affected. Meta- physics he had no turn for. But his fine principles, fortified by Epictetus, kept him wholly free, during his college residence, from moral taint. The chief result of his Oxtord time was one or two friendships, and a redund-- ance of poetic efforts. He had been haunted by dreams

of numerous epics, even in his school-days. At Oxford he speaks of " 10,000 verses burnt and lost, the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless." But to him the most eventful incident of that time was his first meeting with S. T. Cole-- ridge, who, in June, 1794, from Cambridge, came on a visit to Oxford, and was introduced to Southey. Democratic principles and ardent love of poetry were strong bonds of sympathy, and soon the two young enthusiasts were friends. Coleridge had like Southey, been disgusted by the failure of their hopes from France, and had already formed his dream of Pautisocracy, which he communicated to Southey. Perfect equality and brotherhood were to be realised in some chosen spot of America,. by a number of pure, high-minded youths, living in fellowship. and simplicity on the banks of the Susquehanna, where they might lead a pure, unselfish life, and,- " Oft soothed sadly by the passing 'rind,

Muse on the sore ills they had left behind."

Into this project Southey entered with all his heart. An essential part of the plan was that all should be married, and one family in Bristol, of the name of Pricker, supplied Cole- ridge with his wife Sarah, Southey with his Edith, and Lovell,. a Quaker enthusiast and poet, with a third sister. One sister alone refused to enter into the Pantisocratic alliance, and to become the wife of a fourth member of the brotherhood. But the want of money put an end to this, as to many another such scheme. The brotherhood were scattered, and Coleridge for a time was alienated from Southey, because he was one of the first to feel that he must provide for the young wife whom he had just married, before indulging in any Utopian dreams. For eight years Southey and his wife wandered about with no certain dwelling-place, from lodging to lodging, in the neighbourhood of Bristol and elsewhere, making two journeys to Spain and Portugal, in the latter of which only his wife accompanied him. It was not till 1803 that Southey, at the instigation of Coleridge, came to Keswick, and settled in his final home of Greta Hall, just three years after Wordsworth had taken up his abode at the Town End of Grasmere.

There is nothing in literary history more beautiful than the uneventful but noble life which Southey lived at Greta Hall for forty years, and Mr. Dowden has drawn the picture of it with a finely appreciative hand. There he laboured in his library day day, dutifully, but cheerfully, fulfilling the best part of the Pantisocratic dream, and supporting, by the labours of his pen, not only his own wife and childen, but the family -of the vagrant Coleridge, and the widow of his friend and brother-in-law, Lovell. For the rest, he acted out the High precepts of Epictetus, touched only with a finer grace from the Christian faith, to which, after a time, he had returned. While he laboured not for profit only, but for pleasure, and to fulfil the task set to him in the world's economy, he was generous to prodigality "of his time, strength, and sub- stance, to all who had need of such help as a sound heart and a strong arm can give." Many records are preserved of time and pains spent on holding out a helping hand to poor, struggling litterateurs, of whom the world never heard. Once there came to his neighbourhood a man of a different order, a young poet of whom the world has heard much. When Shelley arrived at Keswick, with his first young wife, Southey received him cor- dially, and widely as their views then differed, he seemed to see in the young enthusiast " just what I was in 1794 ; the difference between us is, that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven."

Hartley Coleridge used to tell how Shelley took a house and garden a few miles from Keswick, on the road towards Threlkeld, where Southey used to visit hint. One day Southey asked .Shelley's young wife, Harriet Westbrook, how they employed themselves. " Oh !" said the child-like girl, " we just run about

the garden." Was that the garden alluded to in those gloomy " Stanzas, April, 1814," beginning,— "Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon ?"

Many years later, Charlotte Bronto turned to Southey for advice as to her first efforts in poetry, and found in him, if a stringent critic, also a wise and sympathising friend. His was, with all his method and diligence, eminently a social spirit. But it was the society of friends, old and new, with whom the could hold real converse of the heart, that he relished. For mere casual acquaintances or large, promiscuous companies, he lad little time, and not much relish. Mr. Dowden has expressed this well :—

" How deep and rich Southey's social nature was his published correspondence, some four or five thousand printed pages, tells suffi- ciently. These letters, addressed for the most part to good old friends, are indeed genial, liberal of sympathy, and expecting sym- pathy in return ; pleasantly egoistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with a kind of stringent pathos, showing through checks imposed by the wiser and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the treasures of his affection. To lavish upon casual acquaintance the outward and visible signs of friendship seemed to him a profaning of the mystery of manly love. Your feelings,' he writes to Coleridge, 4 go naked ; I cover mine with a bear-skin ; I will not say that you harden yours by your mode, but I am sure that mine are the warmer for their clothing.' With strangers, a certain neutral courtesy served to protect his inner self, like the low leaves of his own holly-tree,- ' Below, a circling. fence, its leaves are seen,

Wrinkled and keen ; No grazing cattle through their prickly round Can reach to wound.'

But to those of whose goodness and love he was well assured, there were no protecting spines

• Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be, Like the green leaves upon the holly-tree.'

` Old friends and old books,' he says, are the best things that the world affords (I like old wine also), and iu 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 No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any friendship of Southey's. 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, or flatter), tested a man, and found him wanting

Southey's affection grew cold, and an habitual dereliction of social duty could not but transform his feeling of love to

one of condemning sorrow."

Of Mr. Dowden's condensed, but most interesting biography, there is no part more full of interest than the records he gives of Southey's friendships and correspondence, and on this we could willingly longer dwell.

But we must pause, and ask, What is the net result of Southey's vast literary effort,—what portion of his works still lives, or is likely to live ? The answer which Mr. Dowden gives to this question, in his concluding chapter, is a fine example of well-balanced, yet justly appreciative criticism, to which we would refer our readers. The total sum of Southey's authorship divides itself naturally into poetry and prose, the former done mainly in his youth, the latter the work of his riper years. Most of his poems, which in the complete edition fill ten volumes, were composed before he was thirty. Of these, while we cannot allow the depreciative verdict of his old enemy, Jeffrey, when, in one of his latest criticisms, he writes, " The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber ;" yet, taken as a whole it must be admitted that they have passed out of the ken of the living generation. In a lecture delivered by the Dean of Westminster upon Southey, in May last, he says :—

" I can remember, even at this moment, the feeling of delight with which I read, one after another, the poems of Thalaba," Kehama,' Madoc," Roderick.' Not even the novels of Sir Walter Scott had for me a keener attraction."

Yet he goes on to say :-

" Southey is one of those poets who hare now fallen almost into oblivion, in the great, outside world. Here and there you meet indi- viduals, like myself, who still cherish the flame he once enkindled. Here and there you meet families in which the tradition of admira- tion is handed down. I may mention that the present Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, while his venerable father was still living, pre- siding over a whole host of children and grandchildren, pointed out to me with satisfaction that I was looking on three generations of the worshippers of Southey. But these are exceptions."

Even among those well versed in the literature of the last generation only a few passages of Southey's poetry linger in memory, such as the opening lines of " Thalaba," and the passage in " Kehama " beginning,— "They sin, who tell us Love can die ;"

and among the minor poems, the lines on " The Water- fall of Lodore," showing, as hardly any others do, " within the same compass, such an exuberance and such a concentra- tion of the powers of English speech ;" and the well-known lines on the holly-tree, and those upon the hours spent in his library, beginning,—

" My days among the dead are passed."

Why did those long epics on mythological and historical sub- jects, displaying as they did so much poetic power and such mastery of fine English diction, fail to strike root in the mind of Southey's countrymen ? The cause, in the case of them all, is probably that which Mr. Dowden assigns for the comparative failure of " Madoc." " The tale," he says," was out of relation with the time ; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no passion of the dawn of the present century." Though they are al- informed with Southey's " high-souled " feeling and lofty morality, they do not grow out of a deep centre of absorbing interest. We do not see why he might not have adopted other subjects, quite as well as these. When we look at the other great poets of that time—Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth—we feel that the subjects whi4 they chose grew out of their owu natures and circumstances. Each poet has a peculiar and per-

sonal " propriety " in his subject. It is not so with the sub- jects of Southey's greater poems. He might have chosen other subjects, and any other poet might have adopted his. At leas'. they came to him more from his library than from any deeper, 'more inward source. Still, though this be so, we believe that, as in the case of so many other contemporary poets, a de- lightful small volume of " Selections from Southey" might be made, by choosing out some of the best passages from his large poems, and the shorter lyrics "of pensive remembrance and meditative calm," in which last Southey is seen at his best. Of the voluminous prose works which he accomplished, for two of his most important projects remained unachieved, his His- tory of Brazil and that of the Peninsular War are the largest, but not the most successful. Brazil was not a subject whicl- however treated, could ever win for its author a place among

the great historians. As the historian of the Peninsular War, he cannot stand beside Napier. Of Southey's book, the Duke of Wellington, as Dean Stanley tells us, is reported to have said, " Mr. Southey, Sir, may be a very clever man ; but he has not understood the plan of one of my campaigns, nor the object of one of my battles." It is not in the library that such things are learnt. Southey takes a much higher place as a biographer than as a historian. Of his three great biographies—that of Cowper, of Wesley, and of Nelson—the two latter take their place among the best in the English language. , Although the tempered enthusiasm and sobered piety of Southey's later years could scarcely ap- preciate the boundless fervour of John Wesley, yet Southey's genuine devoutness did not fail to do justice to what was best in Wesley's work and character. Coleridge calls this biography -" the favourite of my library, among many favourites," and he has enriched it with many of his most characteristic notes, which, being appended to the later editions, have greatly enhanced the value of the work. The Life of Nelson is a work that never can be forgotten, as long as England cherishes the memory of her greatest heroes. It has a charm alike for the school-boy .and the old man. To this book especially applies what Mr. Dowden has said of all his prose works, " Because his style is natural, it is inimitable, and the only way to write like Southey is to write well."

We cannot conclude without tendering to Mr. Dowden sin- ,cere thanks for his delightful volume, in which he has given so sympathetic a portrait of a noble nature, and so just an esti- mate of a remarkable author, whom this age seems only too ready to forget.