Sketches of Contemporary Authors. Mr. SoutheyThe Athenaeum[Frederick Denison Maurice] Markup and editing by David Hill Radcliffe Completed August 2008 FrMauri.1828.Southey Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities Virginia Tech
Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
License
Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
Sketches of Contemporary Authors. Mr. SoutheyThe AthenaeumMaurice, Frederick Denison, 1805-1872London29 January 18281565-66
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Obvious and unambiguous compositors’ errors have been silently corrected.
NINES categories for Genre and Material Form at
http://www.performantsoftware.com/nines_wiki/index.php/Submitting_RDF#.3Cnines:genre.3E on
2009-02-26BibliographyBook HistoryCollectionCriticismDramaEphemeraFictionHumorLawLettersLife WritingHistoryManuscriptNonfictionPeriodicalPoliticsReference WorksPoetryReligionReviewTranslationTravel
THE ATHENÆUM.Literary and Critical Journal.
No. 5.LONDON, TUESDAY, January 29, 1828. Price 8d.
SKETCHES OF CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS. No. III.—Mr. Southey.
A poet, a biographer, a writer of literary miscellanies, an
antiquarian, a translator, an historian of campaigns, and churches, and nations, a celebrated
and voluminous reviewer, himself the object of frequent and bitter criticism; in his youth the
framer of ideal republics, in his manhood the advocate of desolating wars and political
monopolies, in his age the chronicler of methodism and martyrs, throughout life, as a member of
private society, the most uniformly amiable and puce, and, at the same time, the fiercest and
most unrelenting follower of a public faction:—Such are the various characters in which
Mr. Southey stands before the public. To speak of
such a person is a task not to be undertaken with levity; for the fame of a good man is a
treasure to his race, no less than to himself, and ought, above all things, to be holy from the
touch of the slightest misrepresentation. In this spirit we trust to write; and if, as we must,
we shall offend some by too much praise of Mr. Southey, and others, by too
much blame; and especially if we shall wound his own vanity, we can only hope that neither the
public nor himself will be so uncandid as to attribute our errors to any thing but a mistaken
judgment, always anxious to be set right.
We have no pretensions to any private knowledge of Mr. Southey’s life, and really can say nothing as to the portions of his
mind which do not display themselves in his works, except that we are acquainted, as is all the
world, with those descriptions of his domestic wisdom and kindness which we owe to more than
one of his eminent contemporaries. In other respects, we judge him from his writings alone. He
brought with him into manhood, if not a peculiar robustness of intellect, yet a singular
healthiness of feeling. He then had, and he happily still preserves, a strong sense of the
presence and goodness of God, whose existence he seems to have found manifested, not amid the
dissections of the anatomist, nor in the crucible of the chemist, nor in any thing appertaining
to the order of this visible world, but as a life and power in the depths of his own heart. He
saw the Deity in every thing around him, because he felt his spirit eternally within him and
his sympathy with man forbade him to believe that religion was a thing of external symbols,
dogmatic creeds, and endowed establishments—an excrescence on our nature, appropriated to
those who happen to have been educated under certain external influences, and to have been born
members of particular sects. He was conscious of the germs of a higher state of being than the
actual, moving and growing in his own mind; and comparing these intimations of possible glory,
with the condition of humanity around him, he was eager to push mankind boldly forward in the
path of regeneration, to pour out before the world appeals against the tyrannies and
corruptions of society, and, if possible, even to realize and substantiate beneath the eyes of
men the phantasm of a more harmonious and pregnant system. But the resolution to accomplish
this great work at a single plunge, instead of labouring soberly and earnestly through life,
and catching at every occasion as it rose, could not support itself except by a violent and
self-exhausting excitement. While, on the other hand, to maintain an unceasing, and often an
obscure and unapplauded warfare, against all the myriad universal evils of our present social
organization, requires more sedateness of enthusiasm than Mr. Southey
seems to have possessed. The ardour of his aspirations declined; and he began to look out for
circumstances in the condition of things around him to which he might attach his
philanthropical longings, and console himself, by a notion of their excellence, for the loss of
his former visions of ideal perfection.
The tendency to his former unsectarian Catholicism of religion still continued,
in some degree, to animate his mind, and has given all that they have of moral value to his
poetical writings. This enabled him to imbue with love, humility, and strength of heart, many
of the personages whom he introduces in his longer poems, and alone lent to his tales any of
that thrilling atmosphere of real existence with which his utter want of mere dramatic power
would otherwise have prevented him from inspiring them. But for this feeling of brotherhood
with all mankind, which teaches him to see in God an essential love breathing into all much a
capacity for higher than earthly things, and not the mere founder of the Church of England, and
a name to be flung in the teeth of modern Atheists,—his poems would be little more than
heaps of passages from old books of travels, diluted into loose and eccentric metre. But his
natural piety has taught him to see in the external world much of what it really embodies of
lovely and delightful, and in the heart of man an inexhaustible fountain of magnificent hopes
and gentle impulses; and from these he has extracted the sweet substance of some of the most
graceful and gorgeous narratives that the present generation of poets have produced. We do not,
indeed, hold him to be a poet of the highest class; and his mind is fundamentally so interior
to those of Spenser and Shakspeare, Milton and Wordsworth, that we scarce remember a better illustration of
the difference between first-rate and second-rate men. The masters of ideal creation have
doubtless given us, in their writings, either a fragment of that universe which, with all its
mysteries and complications, lies so much brighter in the mind of a man of genius, than before
the thoughts of society,—or some mighty truth of our nature, which grew up in their
bosoms with all its pomp of symbol, and allusion, and shadowy story, till it swelled out and
blossomed upon the world,—or some epitome of humanity, such as
Hamlet, or Faust, or the Hero of the Excursion, connected with earth and daily
interests by weaknesses and necessities, but gazing and struggling upward, and in whom the
involved threads of hopes and doubts twist themselves with the vast web of universal being, and
stretch away into its dim abysses; they have always, in short, given its a manifestation of
that genius, the elements of whose power are truth and love, displaying itself through outward
and accidental forms, the lifeless matter which the poet piles or scatters around him at his
will, but never putting these forward as objects of interest in themselves, and unconnected
with the spirit of which they are the conduit, and the laws of which they are the type. Not the
stone on which the commandments were engraved, lent them their importance, nor would, though it
had been jasper or emerald,—neither was it the lightning, or the cloud, or the summit of
the holy mountain quaking with the revelation, but the presence of the Power which sat behind
the flame and the darkness, and which stamped its wisdom on the dead tablets. Mr. Southey seems first to have determined to write a poem,
not with any high and solemn purpose, but connected with some particular age or country, which
would supply him with a splendid phantasmagoria of scenery; then to have brought together, from
books, all the descriptions and incidents that could be introduced; and, lastly, to have
thought of personages, who, as the offspring of an elegant and amiable mind, partake of its
pure and benevolent nature, but so as to appear mere abstractions of virtue, not beings of
mingled character, and mysterious destiny, with a thousand aimless yearnings, and a thousand
haughty hopes, and vague vet delightful sympathies, mingled with degrading propensities and
passionate selfishness, He displays a vast variety of scenic pomp; but, in general, it seems as
if his personages were brought there for the sake of showing the prospect to his readers: just
as in our pantomimes, the jokes, and life, and character, are omitted, and two or three mutes
walk along the stage, while the scene displays to us a moving picture of seas and cities,
triumphs and enchantments.
Our readers then understand, that we consider Mr.
Southey a poet of no higher than the second order—a judgment which we have
come to when estimating him by his best and not by his worst poems, by ‘Roderick’ and ‘Kehama,’ not by the ‘Vision of Judgment,’ or the ‘Tale of Paraguay.’ Yet, though we
think his poetry inferior to that of many other English authors, it seems to its to display his
mind in a more nearly perfect state than we find it in any of his other kinds of writing. As
mere composition, the verse is far from being so faultless as the prose. But the feeling
displayed in Thalaba is incomparably better
than that of the ‘Quarterly Review,’
the ‘Book of the Church,’ or the
‘History of the Peninsular
War.’ There is in his poetry none of the bitterness of the daily bread earned for
themselves by the followers of a faction. In it he does not write with the perpetual
consciousness that he is the gladiator of a sect or a party: we do not see him constantly
spitting gall and venom at every one who differs from himself in religion or politics: he feels
no yoke but the easy one of our common humanity; is moved by no passion but the love of
goodness, and gentleness, and truth; and looks at mankind, not as followers or enemies of a
particular ecclesiastical establishment; not as republicans, or royalists, or aristocrats, but
as heirs of one nature, brethren of one house, and partakers of one blessed hope.
When we consider Mr. Southey in any other
light than as a poet, we confess that we feel a degree of sorrow in which many of our readers
will hardly sympathise. It seems to us that every thing was correct in his mind, at the
beginning of his career, except an excessive vanity, and a want of courage to stand before the
world but as a member of a party,—but for these qualities, we believe that a future, the
most honourable and useful, might well have been predicted to him. But he began to think that
political perfection was confined to our own Constitution, and that Christianity was identical
with the English Church Establishment. From that time, he has daily become more and more of a
partisan,—daily more and more of a sectarian. It is easy to say that he admires the
present form of the British Government, because he thinks it
the best calculated to produce national happiness; and that he lauds endowments and
pluralities, because he believes them most consonant to the apostolical model; but it is
evident from the whole tone of his writings, that the actual objects of his respect and love,
are not good government and true Christianity for themselves, but good government and true
religion, as by law established,—in short, Church and State—the Aristocracy and the
Bench of Bishops.
Thence the habit of the politician, of abusing every one, however sincerely
attached to the interests of mankind, who has attempted to reform the government of his own
country, or thinks that we ought to attempt it in ours. Thence the fondness of the theologian
for swelling the bodies of his sentences with ‘the Church of England,’ while he
puts Providence into a parenthesis. And thence above all, the violence, we had almost said the
malignity, otherwise so utterly inexplicable, displayed by a pious and benevolent man against
all from whom he differs, of every period and denomination: against, that is, nine-tenths of
all sects and parties, and especially against those wiser and better men, who seeing in the
spirit of sectarianism, one of the greatest afflictions of humanity, have sedulously avoided
its enslaving and corrupting influence.
He is, indeed, a mournful example of the ruin which may be wrought upon the
fairest minds, by attaching an universal feeling to particular institutions, and by professing
to find all truth in the creed of one establishment. In this case the whole spiritual nature of
man is narrowed into an almost mechanical clinging to a few valueless sounds, the images,
perhaps, of nothing either in earth or heaven, but of the stupid bigotry that invented them.
The attributes of Deity become the watchwords of intolerance and uncharitableness,—and
Christianity itself, instead of being a scheme for the perfecting our nature into purity and
love, is changed into a volume of dissonant war-cries, while ‘the whole armour of
God’ is employed for the unhallowed strife of worldly passions.
It is obvious also, that in politics, so soon as ceasing to look forward for
improvement, the activity of Mr. Southey’s mind
attached itself to things as they are, he began to look back into the past, to find supports
for his opinion: and because he wished to make out that the present government is a good one,
he perverts the whole aspect of history. Strafford and
Laud were put to death by political reformers; and
therefore, out of hatred to all reform, and as a means of bringing dislike on modern
innovators; Strafford becomes a martyr to his benevolent and unselfish
patriotism; and the sickening blood-thirstiness of Laud is to be buried in
eternal oblivion. We doubt not that Mr. Southey is quite sincere in
thinking that a purely aristocratic constitution is the best possible form of government. But
moved by this conviction, he speaks of all who think otherwise with an abhorrence, which he
probably justifies to himself by the consideration, that they are enemies to the happiness of
mankind, without reflecting that other men may honestly think just as ill of his opinions as he
of theirs, and that neither party would be excusable in slandering and misrepresenting the
other.
In spite of the excesses into which Mr.
Southey has been betrayed, his natural kindness breaks out very frequently
through the fretful load of prejudices and dislikes, wherewith years of partizanship have
encumbered him: while his propensity to vituperation usually displays itself most strongly on
the points, with regard to which he has himself been in the habit of disputing. He hates Roman
Catholics, he hates Calvinists, he hates Unitarians, he hates Frenchmen, who, in his eyes, are
almost all Atheists and Jacobins; he thinks the Whigs a very dangerous set of men, he believes
that the Edinburgh Review is possessed by
Satan, and above all, he abhors every one who dreams of introducing
any reforms into England
Yet with all this, we verily believe few men would take more trouble to confer a
service on the people of Mexico, or Arabia, or even, if an opportunity presented itself, would
seize with more anxiety an opportunity of doing good to his enemies. The Edinburgh Review has uniformly dealt him hard and unjust measure;
and all his political opponents have been eager enough to return the blows which he has shewn
the example of inflicting; and though his attacks on Lord
Byron are very silly, his Lordship disgraced himself, and disgusted the better
portion of his readers, by the brutality with which he carried on the war. It is not very
wonderful therefore that a person, who, however amiable, is by no means remarkable for
humility, should have frequently lost temper against these antagonists. But what we complain of
is, that on all occasions when he happens to have an occasion for wounding the feelings of
those who are at least towards him guiltless, he displays precisely the same malevolence, and
that no man can expect to be treated with ordinary candour who does not agree with him on every
possible subject, repeat the Laureate creed, and bow before the Keswick
idols.
Whatever be his faults, he must, as long as he lives and writes, continue to be
a popular author. As a mere controversialist, (the most melancholy mockery of humanity we know,
except the monkeys of Exeter Change,) his abilities and information can never be despised;
though in this department (the garrets) of literature, he shows to the least advantage. He has
abundant information, and a ready grace in applying it; but he wants the subtlety of
argumentation and bitterness of sarcasm, which are so large ingredients in the finished
polemic. He generally substitutes for reasoning mere assertion and authority, and downright
abuse for satire. The construction of his sentences, the clearness of his arrangement, and the
liveliness of his narrative, are admirably adapted for history. But from the want of all power
of philosophising, he looks at events as naked facts rather than as developements of
principles; or if he ever recurs to general laws, they are of the most common-place
description. As a writer of biographies, and of essays of amusing information, scarcely any
one, we believe, ever excelled him. His Life of
Nelson has been much praised, but not more than it deserves, for unaffected
simplicity and unexaggerated earnestness. His writings probably cover more paper than those of
any one now living, except indeed the gentleman in the farce, who “has written all the
newspapers in Europe for many years.” They contain a wonderful mass of elegant
composition and pleasant research, of lively description and animated narrative; but when we
consider the effect they must have had in rendering popular his narrow system of politics and
religion, we are reluctantly compelled to doubt whether they have not, on the whole,
accomplished more of evil than of good. He has long announced a book on a more fruitful and
difficult subject than any that he has previously treated of, “The Progress and Prospects
of Society;” but though we shall be curious to see him make the experiment, we would
advise him, as he values his reputation, to think well before he publishes such a work. It is
all very well to talk of the balance of the Constitution, and the arm of Providence revealing
itself in our favour in the Peninsular war, when, as in the Quarterly Review, there are facilities for assuming conclusions,
and escaping from proofs; but it will not do in a separate and formal discussion of the powers
and destiny of the human race, a subject which has employed the greatest men the world has ever
known from Plato until our own day. On such a subject it
will not be sufficient to represent irresponsible aristocracies as the saints that shall
inherit the earth, or to clothe the angel of the world in lawn-sleeves and a cassock.
On the whole, Mr. Southey’s chief
talent appears to us to be style. Though sometimes a little affected, and oven that but rarely,
his composition, on the whole, is wonderfully clear, careful, and animated. But here, we are
afraid, the chief part of our praise stops,—for he has no wit and very, little
eloquence,—qualities, by the by, which generally go together. He has none of the
sprightly fancy of Mr. Moore,—none of the
elevating imagination of Wordsworth. He never could have
written half as much as he has, if his books required any great expense of thought; but they
really appear to us to exhibit none at all; and the research they display, though laborious and
astonishingly extensive, yet costs infinitely less of real intellectual toil and weariness,
than the deducing subtle conclusions from vast and complicated premises, and the binding
together and arranging masses of disjointed facts by the application of great general laws. But
Mr. Southey, happily for his present ease, fame, and profit, has no
such troublesome propensity. He seems, in fact, to have a fainter conception of any thing like
abstract speculation than any living author of nearly equal celebrity, except only his sole
competitor in quantity of writing—Sir Walter Scott.
And it must necessarily be so. Great thinkers express wide principles in few words. But
nine-tenths of all the events and personages chronicled by the poet-laurent, do not appear in
his pages such as naturally connect themselves with any universal principle or permanent
consciousness of the human mind, and do not seem to have been the occasion of any feeling in
his breast, but contempt for some rival dogmatist, or exultation over some inaccurate
historian. Few of his works can live among future generations. For the subjects of his
writings, the selfish wars of governments, and the religious systems that narrow themselves
into creeds, except as warnings to be shuddered at, must happily lose their interest for our
children. But we confess we regret that his poetry is not of a more condensed and concentrated
character; for there is a delicacy and sweetness of feeling, and a splendour of descriptive
diction, which, if less diluted and impoverished by verbiage, so as to outlast the fluctuations
of the hour, would give as much delight to all future ages as they have already conferred on
the instructed and gentle of our own day.