amount of work every day, and the quantity he produced is something enormous. His poems alone fill ten large volumes, and in addition he wrote histories, biographies and articles without number for the Quarterly, and other reviews. His enemies accused him of being a mere machine, warranted, if properly wound up and set going, to produce a ready-made article after any pattern required; and the sneer certainly had a groundwork of truth. Southey himself asserted, that between the ages of twenty and twenty-five he burnt more poetry than he published during his whole life, a fact which, some people would say, should not be lost sight of in summing up his meritorious deeds. If he had burnt a little more it would, perhaps, have been better for his reputation, and more gratifying to his critics. Nevertheless, the untiring energy and unflagging industry with which Southey struggled for competence for his family, and glory for himself, compel our admiration. The writings by which he made money were his prose works. As an instance, we may mention, that for a review of Nelson in the Quarterly, subsequently expanded into the famous Life, he received £150. He regarded such work as mere drudgery, and never allowed it to interfere with his incessant toil in the nobler field of poetry. It may be his lot, however, to depend largely for fame upon the works that he despised, and if this be so, his industry and the integrity which inspired it will not have been without their reward. For many years Southey lived a happy, and, except in a literary sense, uneventful life at Keswick. With Wordsworth he maintained a pleasant intercourse, although it was of the calm and equable sort which springs rather from close acquaintanceship than from any strong mutual attraction. Indeed their habits were so dissimilar, that it required many years to bring about anything like intimacy between them. Wordsworth, the peripatetic philosopher, living so much in the open air, seeking no inspiration from books, and happily relieved from the necessity of any uncongenial literary toil, found it hard to sympathize fully with Southey, who rarely stirred outside his library, who was forced to write on any and every subject, if thereby he could earn money, and who had moreover little foibles and prejudices inconceivable to Wordsworth. A jesting remark of Southey's happily illustrates their dissimilarities in taste and character; he said that to allow Wordsworth access to his library was like letting a bear into a tulip garden.' But it is probable that the radical cause which prevented an immediate friendship between the two men, was their intense, overpowering egotism; Wordsworth could brook no one, who claimed equality, near his throne, and Southey had a full share of the same feeling. The saddest event of Southey's life, and one which displays prominently the sweetness of his nature, and the depth of his affections, was the loss of his son Herbert. He said, in speaking of it, that for him earth had henceforth no joys to offer; and it is certain that a shadow was cast over his life which was not dispelled on this side of the grave. Among Southey's published works are some fragmentary thoughts occasioned by his son's death, of no great value in a literary sense, but touching from their simplicity, and from the depth of afflic tion which inspired them. us how his 'Playful thoughts Turn'd now to gall and esel.' He tells Southey's private life. He never sought what is conventionally known associety,' although he gained the reputation among such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey of a brilliant conversationalist, of the incisive, arbitrary kind; a style which must have been peculiarly telling when contrasted with Coleridge's eloquent and mystical verbosity. In 1837 his peaceful, studious life was rudely shaken by the death of his wife, the cherished and faithful companion of forty years, helper in all his struggles and proud sharer in all his prosperity. Her loss was somewhat compensated for, however, by his second marriage with Caroline Bowles, the poetess, who consented to comfort his declining years, and alleviate the distress of a solitary old age. Her affectionate ministrations were soon painfully needed; the inexpressibly sad end was approaching when that intellect, so long the pride of its possessor and the boast of his companions, lapsed into childishness and the oblivion of imbecility. Over such a scene it is better to draw the veil; when a life, upon the whole, noble in aspiration and successful in attainment, closes in a darkness worse than death, we can but bow our heads and, echoing Southey's own words, acknowledge that, in such a case, The Grave is the House of Hope.' It remains now to discuss Southey's merits as a poet, and it is only fair at the outset to point out, that it is not altogether easy for this generation to mete out full justice to a poet who was so unduly eulogized during his lifetime. The revulsion from extreme laudation to utter neglect has been rapid, and perhaps not unnatural, but the violence of the revulsion may well incline us to doubt whether, to its fullest extent, it has been deserved. The causes which combined to render possible the attainment by Southey of great reputation are not far to seek. We may each have our own opinion as to the intellectual superiority or in very feriority of the last generation and this one, but we must all agree that Southey's age was far more indulgent than our own. It was an age of revival, and an age of intellectual giants; as was inevitable in such a case, in the wake of the giants followed innumerable pigmies, each with his or her circle of adorers sounding loud praises. The critical acumen of an age that could endure, much more idolize, Mrs. Hannah More, Miss Seward, Bloomfield, Montgomery, and many still more despicable versifiers, cannot have been very great, and it is not surprising to find that Southey, who was himself by no means one of the pigmies, compelled an adulation out of all proportion to his deserts. When dwarfs were mistaken for giants, it is not wonderful that an honest man of regulation height should have had several inches added to his stature. The association of Southey's name with those of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the position he fortuitously gained among the Lake Poets, had also much to do with the recognition he received as being himself one of the truly great. But above any and all of these reasons must be reckoned the force of his own character, and his firm and invulnerable belief in himself. It is often said that the world appraises a man at the value he sets on himself, and Southey is a remarkable instance of this; he was so thoroughly sincere and singleminded, and possessed, moreover, of talents that so nearly approached genius, that those around him could not help thinking that he must know best, and that if he thought so himself he really must be the greatest poet of his age. It is difficult to read Southey without entering in our minds a silent, sometimes an indignant, protest against the judgment of his contemporaries, but although this of necessity renders us critical, it need not make us unjust, nor blind us to whatever of real merit is to be found in his poetry. It was recognized by unprejudiced critics* even in Southey's lifetime, that the fundamental fault of his poetry lies in what, for want of a better word, must be called its' childishness.' His great epic attempts are based on fables, much more fitted for the nursery than for the delectation of thinking men and women. They are filled with 'bogies,' such as malicious nurses delight to terrify children with; they describe scenes in heaven, and earth, and hell with a gaudy brilliancy, or a murky darkness, which alternately recall to mind the transformation scene, and the demon's haunt in a Christmas pantomine. Such was the framework he chose for his most ambitious attempts; and he displays the same unfortunate predilection for the infantine in all his poetry, either in design or in manner of execution. His ballads are almost all intended to be horrible and if they had a little more humour, would often attain to the grotesquely horrible, but-and herein lies the gist of the matterSouthey wrote them soberly and seriously, without a thought that they could possibly be viewed from a humorous side. Payne Collier once, in all honesty of mind, spoke of the Old Woman of Berkeley,' as a mockballad, and Southey, furiously indignant, replied, that certainly this was never suspected by the author or any of his friends. It obtained a very different character in Russia, where, having been translated and published it was prohibited for this singular reason, that children were said to be frightened by it.' The ballad in question may certainly be well adapted to terrify children, but its effect on any reader who has attained a less sensitive age, would, we think, approach more nearly to the ridiculous than to the horrible. It is a veritable nursery tale, fit to be classed with the black man who comes down the 6 This view is admirably sustained in an article in the Edinburgh Review. Vol. 17. 1810. Preface to Southey's works. Vol. VI., Author's Ed. chimney to carry off naughty children. Nor is it the sole example of Southey's power in this respect. Most of his ballads are of this description, and were it not for his scathing rebuke to Mr. Payne Collier, we should have unhesitatingly classed many of them as mock-ballads.' The childishness which Wordsworth assumed from affectation or from revolt against the worship of Dryden and Pope, was, we think, almost natural to Southey. He never touches in any serious way, upon the vast problem of life; he seems afraid to contaminate his pages with any story of moving passion, or of erring human nature; the affections he delineates are those of parent for child, or of sister for brother; beyond this his simplicity apparently dare not betray him. And if this be universally so in the structure of his poems, what wonder that in the execution he sometimes degenerates into a childishness which outdoes Wordsworth at his worst? The exquisite simplicity of perfect finish and harmony, is one of the rarest, as it is one of the highest attributes of a poet. In our own day Mr. Matthew Arnold has shown us how delightful is the simplicity of perfection, but to compare with such simplicity as his, the following lines taken at random from All for Love,' an important poem of Southey's, seems almost a mockery: And he had heard a waking voice, A holiest eulogy. 'Her shall her husband praise, and her When Southey, in what is meant to be the most impressive passage in a lengthy poem, puts such sad stuff as this into the mouth of an angel from heaven, we feel that the last depth of inanity has been reached, and we are not surprised that he should sometimes cause his merely mortal characters to utter still more pitiable com Southey had, moreover, a childish love for the huge and portentous, to which he gave full scope in The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba. The extraordinary situations and the supernatural agencies of these poems cannot be said to spring from a poetical imagination; they only prove that Southey possessed in an abnormal degree the power of invention which is the essential requisite of a nursery story-teller. Baron Munchausen's veracious history is amusing, and we must confess that the excellent Baron was not deficient in imagination, but it is hardly the kind of imagination upon which a great poet would care to base his reputation. Southey never allowed any of his ideas to suffer from want of elaboration. He is never content to hint anything; all must be explained in minute, laborious detail, so that a a reader is impressed with the belief that the poet attached undue importance to every one of his ideas, and thought nothing which passed through his own mind too trivial to be conveyed to his readers. This of itself challenges criticism; passages whose weakness might, if less obtrusively forced upon us, pass comparatively unnoticed, compel our attention, and force us to take exception to them. Southey has given us a remarkable instance of his proneness to work an idea to death in the elaborate addi tions which he made to 'The Devil's Walk.' This well-known satire was first published in the Morning Post,' and was the joint production of Southey and Coleridge; it originally consisted of seventeen stanzas, and according to Coleridge the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 9th and 16th stanzas only were 'dictated by Mr. Southey.' Southey's account does not openly controvert this, but contradicts it by implication. In the Advertisement' which precedes the poem in the author's edition, Southey presumes that its authorship has been sufficiently authenticated by Coleridge's statement; but in refutatation of Porson's claim, he quotes the Morning Post,' without correction, to the effect that the verses were written by Southey and 'subsequently shown to Mr. Coleridge, who, we believe, pointed some of the stanzas, and perhaps added one or two.' This account hardly tallies with that of Coleridge, but the authorship of the verses they make no pretension to be dignified with the name of poem-is hardly worth disputing; the only line which possesses the merit of having enriched the English language with a proverb was undoubtedly Coleridge's: ་ 'And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin We only allude to this satire as illustrating Southey's unfortunate habit of expanding to the fullest extent any idea which he conceived to be worth anything. In his published works, edited by himself, The Devil's Walk is lengthened to 308 lines, whereas in Coleridge's version (which we believe to be the original form of publication) it consists of only 69 lines. The value of Southey's additions may be guessed from the following stanza : 'Well pleased wilt thou be at no very far day, When the chaldron of mischief boils And I bring them forth in battle array *This quotation is from Coleridge's version. Southey's reads: 'And he own'd with a grin That his favourite sin Is pride that apes humility.' The idea of extending what was originally a short, racy, semi-political squib into a long poem would have occurred to few poets but Southey; the original idea of The Devil's Walk was, however, undoubtedly a striking one; it took the public by storm, and Southey could not resist the temptation of working it threadbare. As Southey apparently never even attempted to impart a dramatic element to his poetry, it is perhaps hardly fair to say that he failed in this respect; its utter absence shows that in one direction at least he correctly gauged his own powers. But a poet may be devoid of the dramatic faculty and yet invest with a vivid human interest the characters he portrays; if he cannot do so, it is obviously rash for him to enter the field of Epic poetry, which should deal with great subjects, great emotions, and great deeds, and deal with them in such a manner that, without being divested of sublimity, they may appeal to the heart as well as to the intellect of mankind. Southey's characters are often so wildly supernatural as to be altogether outside the pale of humanity; and when clothed in mortal flesh and blood they are tedious and dull, always either impossibly wicked or insipidly perfect. It is difficult to believe that Southey ever drew a tear from any human being. That he cannot stir our emotions is partly owing to the frequency and elaboration of the attempts he makes to do so; he had not the 'ars celare crtem,' and many of his finest passages leave us perfectly unmoved, the very laboriousness of the effort defeating the end aimed at. Southey was a great and admirable master of the English language; his diction is pure and scholarly, and his choice of words almost invariably felicitous. His powers of description were undoubtedly very great, and had he but kept a tight rein on his unfortunate verbosity, he might perhaps have stood comparison in this respect with most English poets. The following gorgeous passage is from Thalaba the Destroyer,' and is a good example of Southey at his best : 'Here emerald columns o'er the marble courts Like the blue pavement of the firmament. As its pure substance loathed material touch, Sun of the lofty dome, Darkness hath no dominion o'er its beams; Intense it glows, an even-flowing spring Of radiance like the day-flood in its source. 'Therefore at Shedad's voice Here tower'd the palm, a silver trunk, The fine gold net-work growing out Loose from its rugged boughs. Tall as the cedar of the mountain, here Rose the gold branches, hung with emerald leaves, Blossomed with pearls, and rich with ruby fruit.' In The Curse of Kehama the description of Padalon, the Oriental equivalent of Hell, is impressive, because it is not overburdened with images and epithets, as are so many of Southey's descriptive passages. The following lines approach nearly to absolute greatness : For other light than that of day there shone A glow, as of a fiery furnace light, A thing of comfort, and the sight dismayed, The World of Woe before them, opening wide. Girding the realms of Padalon around. For neither mortal nor immortal sight Keen as the edge of keenest scimitar, |
