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Mr. Southey and Lord ByronThe CourierSouthey, Robert, 1774-1843London13 December 182410,321
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THE COURIER.
No. 10,321.MONDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 13, 1824. Price 7D.
MR. SOUTHEY AND LORD BYRON. TO THE EDITOR OF THE COURIER.
Sir,—On two former occasions you have allowed me, through the
channel of your Journal, to contradict a calumnious accusation as publicly as it had been
preferred: and though, in these days of slander, such things hardly deserve refutation, there
are reasons which induce me once more to request a similar favour.
Some extracts from Captain Medwin’s
recent publication of Lord
Byron’s Conversations have been transmitted to me by a friend, who,
happening to know what the facts are which are there falsified, is of opinion that it would not
misbecome me to state them at this time. I wish it, however, to be distinctly understood, that
in so doing I am not influenced by any desire of vindicating myself; that would be wholly
unnecessary, considering from what quarter the charges come. I notice them
for the sake of laying before the public one sample more of the practices of the Satanic
School, and shewing what credit is due to Lord
Byron’s assertions. For that his Lordship spoke to this effect, and in
this temper, I have no doubt; Captain Medwin having, I dare say, to
the best of his recollection, faithfully performed the worshipful office of retailing all
the effusions of spleen, slander, and malignity, which were vented in his presence.
Lord Byron is the person who suffers most by this; and, indeed,
what man is there whose character would remain uninjured if every peevish or angry
expression, every sportive or extravagant sally, thrown off in the unsuspicious and
imagined safety of private life, were to be secretly noted down, and published, with no
notice of circumstances to shew how they had arisen, and when no explanation was possible?
One of the offices which has been attributed to the devil, is that of thus registering
every idle word. There is an end of all confidence or comfort, in social intercourse,
if such a practice is to be tolerated by public opinion. When I take these conversations to be
authentic, it is because, as far as I am concerned, they accord, both in matter and spirit,
with what his Lordship himself had written and published, and it is on this account, only, that
I deem them worthy of notice—the last notice that I shall ever bestow upon the subject.
Let there many “More Last Words of Mr. Baxter,” as the “reading
public” may choose to pay for, they will draw forth no further reply from me.
Now then to the point.—The following speech is reported by Captain Medwin, as Lord
Byron’s:—
“I am glad Mr. Southey owns that
article* on ‘Foliage,’ which excited my choler so much. But who else
could have been the author? Who but Southey would have had the baseness,
under pretext of reviewing the work of one man, insidiously to make it a nest-egg for hatching
malicious calumnies against others? I say nothing of the critique itself on ‘Foliage;’ but what was the object of that article? I repeat, to
vilify and scatter his dark and devilish insinuations against me and others. Shame on the man
who could wound an already bleeding heart—be barbarous enough to revive the memory of an
event that Shelley was perfectly innocent of—and
found scandal on falsehood! Shelley taxed him with writing that article
some years ago; and he had the audacity to admit that he had treasured up some opinions of
Shelley, ten years before, when he was on a visit at Keswick, and had
made a note of them at the time.”
The reviewal in question I did not write.—Lord Byron might have known this if he had enquired of
Mr. Murray, who would readily have assured him
that I was not the author: and he might have known it from the reviewal itself, where the
writer declares, in plain words, that he was a contemporary of Shelley’s, at Eton. I had no concern in it, directly or indirectly;
but let it not be inferred that, in thus disclaiming that paper, any disapproval of it is
intended. Papers in the Quarterly
Review have been ascribed to me, (those on Keates’s Poems, for
example), which I have heartily condemned, both for their spirit and manner. But, for the
one in question, its composition would be creditable to the most distinguished writer; nor
is there any thing either in the opinions expressed, or in the manner of expressing them,
which a man of just and honourable principles would have hesitated to advance. I would not
have written that part of it which alludes to Mr. Shelley, because,
having met him on familiar terms, and parted with him in kindness, (a feeling of which
Lord Byron had no conception), would have withheld me from
animadverting in that manner upon his conduct. In other respects, the paper contains
nothing that I would not have avowed if I had written, or subscribed, as entirely assenting
to, and approving, it.
It is not true that Shelley ever inquired
of me whether I was the author of that paper, which, purporting, as it did, to be written by an
Etonian of his own standing, he very well knew I was not. But in this part of Lord Byron’s statement there may be some mistake, mingled
with a great deal of malignant falsehood. Mr. Shelley
addressed a letter to me from Pisa, asking if I were the author of a criticism in the Quarterly Review upon his Revolt of Islam; not exactly, in
Lord Byron’s phrase, taxing me with it, for he declared his own
belief that I was not, but added, that he was induced to ask the question by the positive
declaration of some friends in England that the article was mine. Denying, in my reply, that
either he or any other person was entitled to propose such a question upon such grounds, I,
nevertheless, assured him that I had not written the paper, and that I had never, in any of my
writings, alluded to him in any way.
Now for the assertion that I had the audacity to admit having treasured up some
of Shelley’s opinions, when he resided at Keswick,
and having made notes of them at the time. What truth is mixed up with the slander of this
statement I shall immediately explain; premising only, that, as the opinion there implied,
concerning the practise of noting down familiar conversation, is not applicable to me, I
transfer it to Captain Medwin, for his own especial use.
Mr. Shelley having, in the letter alluded to, thought
proper to make some remarks upon my opinions, I took occasion, in reply, to comment upon his,
and to ask him (as the tree is known by its fruits) whether he had found them conducive to his
own happiness, and the happiness of those with whom he had been most nearly connected. This
produced a second letter from him, written in a tone, partly of justification, partly of
attack. I replied to this also—not by any such absurd admission as Lord Byron has stated—but by recapitulating to him, as a
practical illustration of his principles, the leading circumstances of his own life, from the
commencement of his career at University College. The earlier facts I stated upon his own
authority, as I had heard them from his own lips; the latter were of public notoriety. There
the correspondence ended. On his part it had been conducted with the courtesy which was natural
to him—on mine, in the spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a fellow-creature.
This is the correspondence upon which Lord
Byron’s misrepresentation has been constructed. It is all that ever past
between us, except a note from Shelley, some years
before, accompanying a copy of his Alastor, and one of mine in acknowledgment of it. I have
preserved his letter, together with copies of my own; and, if I had as little consideration for
the feelings of the living as Capt. Medwin has
displayed, it is not any tenderness towards the dead† that would withhold me now from
publishing them.
It is not likely that Shelley should have
communicated my part of this correspondence to Lord Byron,
even if he did his own. Bearing testimony, as his heart did, to the truth of my statements in
every point, and impossible as it was to escape from the conclusion which was there brought
home, I do not think he would have dared produce it. How much, or how little, of the truth was
known to his Lordship, or with which of the party at Pisa the insolent and calumnious
misrepresentation conveyed in his Lordship’s words originated, is of little consequence.
The charge of scattering dark and devilish insinuations is one which, if
Lord Byron were living, I would throw back in his
teeth. Me he had assailed without the slightest provocation, and with that unmanliness too
which was peculiar to him; and in this course he might have gone on without giving me the
slightest uneasiness, or calling forth one animadversion in reply. When I came forward to
attack his Lordship, it was upon public, not upon private, grounds. He is pleased, however,
to suppose that he had “mortally offended” Mr.
Wordsworth and myself many years ago, by a letter which he had written to
the Ettrick Shepherd. “Certain it is,”
he says, “that I did not spare the Lakists in it, and he told me that he could
not resist the temptation, and had shown it to the fraternity. It was too tempting;
and, as I could never keep a secret of my own (as you know), much less that of other
people, I could not blame him. I remember saying, among other things, that the Lake
Poets were such fools as not to fish in their own waters. But this was the least
offensive part of the epistle.” No such epistle was ever shown either to
Mr. Wordsworth or to me: but I remember (and this passage brings
it to my recollection) to have heard that Lord Byron had spoken of us,
in a letter to Hogg, with some contempt, as fellows who could neither
vie with him for skill in angling, not for prowess in swimming—Nothing more than this
came to my hearing; and I must have been more sensitive than his Lordship himself could I
have been offended by it. Lord Byron must have known that I had the
flocci of his eulogium to balance the nauci of his scorn; and that the one would have
nihili-pili-fied the other, even if I had not
well understood the worthlessness of both.
It was because Lord Byron had brought a
stigma upon English literature, that I accused him; because he had perverted great talents to
the worst purposes; because he had set up for pander-general to the youth of Great Britain as
long as his writings should endure; because he had committed a high crime and misdemeanour
against society, by sending forth a work, in which mockery was mingled with horrors, filth with
impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. For these offences I came forward to arraign
him. The accusation was not made darkly, it was not insinuated, nor was it advanced under the
cover of a review. I attacked him openly in my own name, and only not by his, because he had
not then publicly avowed the flagitious production, by which he will be remembered for lasting
infamy. He replied in a manner altogether worthy of himself and his cause. Contention with a generous and honourable opponent leads naturally to
esteem, and probably to friendship; but, next to such an antagonist, an enemy like
Lord Byron is to be desired; one, who by his conduct in the
contest, divests himself of every claim to respect; one, whose baseness is such as to
sanctify the vindictive feeling that it provokes, and upon whom the act of taking
vengeance, is that of administering justice. I answered him as he deserved to he answered,
and the effect which that answer produced upon his Lordship, has been described by his
faithful Chronicler, Capt. Medwin. This is the real
history of what the purveyors of scandal for the public are pleased sometimes to announce
in their advertisements as “Byron’s Controversy with Southey.” What there
was dark and devilish in it belongs to his Lordship; and had I been compelled to resume it
during his life, he, who played the monster in literature, and aimed his blows at women,
should have been treated accordingly. “The Republican Trio,” says
Lord Byron, “when they began to publish in common, were
to have had a community of all things, like the Ancient Britons—to have lived in
a state of nature like savages—and peopled some island of the blest with children
in common like ——. A very pretty Arcadian notion!” I may be
excused for wishing that Lord Byron had published this himself: but
though he is responsible for the atrocious falsehood, he is not for its posthumous
publication. I shall only observe, therefore, that the slander is as worthy of his
Lordship, as the scheme itself would have been. Nor would I have condescended to notice it
even thus, were it not to show how little this calumniator knew concerning the objects of
his uneasy and restless hatred. Mr. Wordsworth and I
were strangers to each other, even by name, when he represents us as engaged in a Satanic
confederacy, and we never published any thing in common.
Here I dismiss the subject. It might have been thought that Lord
Byron had attained the last degree of disgrace when his head was set up for a
sign at one of those preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows; where obscenity,
sedition, and blasphemy, are retailed in drams for the vulgar. There remained one further
shame: there remained this exposure of his Private Conversations, which has compelled his
Lordship’s friends, in their own defence, to compare his oral declarations with his
written words, and thereby demonstrate that he was as regardless of truth as he was incapable
of sustaining those feelings suited to his birth, station, and high endowments, which sometimes
came across his better mind.
Keswick, Dec. 8, 1824. ROBERT SOUTHEY.
* A volume of Poems by Mr. Leigh Hunt.
The reader, who may be desirous of referring to the article, will find it in the 18th vol.
of the Quarterly Review, p. 324.
† In the Preface to his Monody on Keats, Shelley, as I have been
informed, asserts, that I was the author of the criticism in the Quarterly Review, upon that young
man’s poems, and that his death was occasioned by it. There was a degree of meanness
in this, (especially considering the temper and tenour of our correspondence), which I was
not then prepared to expect from Shelley, for that he believed me to
be the author of that paper, I certainly do not believe. He was once, for a short time, my
neighbour. I met him upon terms, not of friendship indeed, but, certainly, of mutual good
will. I admired his talents; thought that he would outgrow his errors (perilous as they
were), and trusted that, meantime, a kind and generous heart would resist the effect of
fatal opinions which he had taken up in ignorance and boyhood. Herein I was mistaken. But
when I ceased to regard him with hope, he became to me an object for sorrow and awful
commiseration, not of any injurious or unkind feeling; and when I expressed myself with
just severity concerning him, it was in direct communication to himself.