CHAPTER XIV SOUTHEY AND LANDOR I. Robert Southey: career; affinities with other poets. Eclogues, ballads, short pieces. : II. Southey plan and ambition of his long poems: Thalaba and its metre; Curse of Kehama; Madoc; Roderick. III. Southey's prose: discussion of his style; its achromatio' quality; The Doctor. Rough classification of his works. Books of travel, essays, Colloquies on Society. Works on Spanish and Portuguese subjects; Peninsular War, History of Brazil. Biographies: the Nelson and the Wesley; Life of Cowper. Character of his conservatism; position in letters. IV. W. S. Landor: his 'solitariness'; divisions of his career, 1795-1824, 1825-1846, 1847-1864. V. Landor: Poems of 1795; Gebir and Gebirus; manner and source and excellences; 'arrestedness' of imagery; plastic effects. Poems, 1802. VI. 'Dramatic scenes,' or plays: Count Julian, Andrea of Hungary, etc. ; Siege of Ancona. VII. Short lyrics, epigrams, elegies; poems to friends and to old age. Economy of passion; classical manner, affinities with Jonson. VIII. The Hellenics: usage of the term; those translated from the Latin compared with the others; analogies with sculpture. Increase of naturalness; imaginative quality. IX. Imaginary Conversations: variety, range, length, possible models. Grouping under six kinds :-(1) Heroic action and passion depicted; conversations of Greeks and Romans, and modern subjects of like kind. (2) Brutal and ferocious scenes. (3) Idyllic, gracious, and playful scenes. (4) Humorous and ironic. X. Imaginary Conversations:-non-artistic, or non-dramatic: (5) political and constitutional, or ethical, disquisitions in dialogue. (6) Conversations of 'literary men,' and criticisms. XI. Longer prose works, or protracted 'imaginary conversations': Pericles and Aspasia, Pentameron, Citation, etc., of W. Shakespeare. XII. Robert Eyres Landor: Count Arezzi, etc.; prose romances. I It is easy and too true to say that Robert Southey1 (1774-1843) is a dead poet, a bookman, a journeyman in verse; that he has no magic, that he betrays his procedure, and that he sinks under his learning and his ambition. Still the picture of high poetical effort in this age is incomplete without him. VOL. II. A He has some of the qualities and aims which, had he only been a better poet, would have made him more considerable. First and above all, he has in a high degree the instinct for emancipating and purging language. He is a purer writer than many greater ones. We can measure in his average performance the success of the revulsion against the false eighteenth-century styles-the cumbered artificial style in verse, the pompous periodic style in prose. Southey carries out this new ideal in` his verse and his prose alike. Any one can see how in his verse he failed nevertheless, and how well in his best prose he succeeded. He had no conception of the difference of his achievement in the two kinds. he was a poet born to last. lasted; but this is our loss; for he wrote too much. He was as sure as Milton that Even of his prose not much has though it is partly his own fault, . Prose he produced all his life, but the best of it comes after 1810, when he settled down to quarterly reviewing and to professional bookwork. Most of his verse is earlier; his ballads, lays, domestic idylls, and sonnets are in some instances earlier than the Lyrical Ballads, and are part of the same campaign in the interest of simplicity; they aim at using, with due qualifications, the 'real language of men.' Joan of Arc and Wat Tyler (printed later by a pirate) are earlier still; they belong to the Republican period, when Southey was still at Balliol and was vowed to Pantisocracy,' and they may be neglected. The big quasi-epical enterprises begin in 1801 with Tha'aba the Destroyer; then follow Madoc (1805), The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). These appeared alongside of Scott's lays, and represent, however ineffectually, the impatience of the romantic spirit to be off to new continents, to great remote legends, and to capture their grandeur. The Tale of Paraguay, also written in 1814, belongs, like Roderick, to Southey's studies of exotic history and legend. He wrote other verse after this, such as the unlucky Vision of Judgement (1820), accompanied by the attack on Byron which provoked Byron's great satire. But Southey became more and more immersed in prose, and found time, in the midst of a vast mass of journalism and bookseller's jobs, to prove himself a born biographer, and to perfect, as it has been well termed, a style of all work of most remarkable quality. His poetry may be noticed first. A tiny link between noble plain stories like Michael, and Crabbe's or Cowper's work, narrative or reflective, of lower pitch and fainter flame, is found in Southey's four English Eclogues, written between 1797 and 1804. In one, The Old Mansion-House, the blank verse is so near the 'real language of men' that it has no plea left for existing; indeed, few of the Lyrical Ballads are more liable to this reproach. That's all you'll quarrel with; walk in and taste His beer, old friend! and see if your old Lady E'er broach'd a better cask. This might have served a reviewer for a parody of certain passages in Wordsworth. In another idyll, Hannah, Wordsworth's grave transforming touch is only just missed; the subject, the death of a deserted girl, is like a tale in The Excursion. The Ruined Cottage is like the homelier and more playful descriptions of The Prelude, with a not unpleasant stroke added of Cowper-like moralising : Look, its little hatch Fleeced with that gray and wintry moss; the roof Sure conqueror she, reclaiming to herself The Alderman's Funeral, a satire upon a stony-hearted rich local man who dies unregretted except on his tombstone, is just like Crabbe without Crabbe's couplets. Surely, but for those long tyrannous epics, which consumed his life in tasks that were beyond him, Southey might have done more in these low-lying forms of poetry, which have a faint scent of the autumnal earth. The best of his ballads have the heat and fling of his youth in them; they were written before he kept office hours perforce for the production of books. Many were made in 1797-8; one or two, conceived in the German style, date from 1796, not long after Scott's. Few are Lake poems; they were made in Hereford, Bristol, and the west country. The only features common to Scott, Coleridge, and Southey are a dependence, more or less direct, upon the form and style of the English folk-ballad, and the use of the motive of terror, derived from the supernatural and inclining towards the grotesque; spring,' remarks Sir Walter, which is peculiarly apt to lose elasticity by being too much pressed upon.' The three poets, in spite of these affinities, cannot be said to have much influenced one another; but the enterprise of balladry was now active on all hands; and though by 1801 it was slackening, at least in the popular estimation, all three are found contributors, under the editorial crook of Lewis, to the Tales of Wonder in that year; the miscellany which, as Scott tells us, fell somewhat flat upon the public. It remains, however, as we have seen, the most distinctive book produced by the school, if school it can be called, and the differences between Southey and his companions can be fairly judged from it. Southey did not make use of the Scots language, and his fleeting inclination (seen in the early Donica and Rudiger, 1796) to the odd false manner encouraged by the German literary ballad did not last so long as Scott's. This was one of the blind alleys of Romance, but Southey turned his back on it. Nor does he, on the other hand, like Scott, echo, piece out, and directly imitate the vernacular British ballad; not even in Lord William, which is dire downright bogus literary rhyming. Nor does he aim at the poetical effects, the profound art, and the sublimation of the familiar, which Coleridge achieved; he is, when writing at his best, much more frankly popular. These traits are best seen in the descendants of the two poets. Coleridge is the ancestor of La Belle Dame sans Merci and Ravelston; Southey, of Lockhart's Spanish Ballads on the one hand and of the Ingoldsby Legends on the other. One of his pieces, Queen Orraca, is from a Spanish chronicle ; and its direct ringing verse, devoid of subtleties, but excellently fitted for quick narrative, is one of the first examples of the kind. But his real triumphs are in the comic or terrible grotesque, supernaturally induced. Here nothing, unluckily, is left unsaid, but then all is well said; there is not much more atmosphere or poetic suggestion than in the ditties of Lewis, though there is far more style; nor is the work itself, like most of Lewis's, absurd. Here again Southey stands at various distances from the popular ballad. St. Michael's Chair is primitive comedy, and has a true local ring; the shrewish wife climbs to the chair, in order to have the whiphand, as the legend ran, of her spouse, but is thrown out by the shaking of the bells and killed, much to his relief. The Well of St. Keyne, universally known, is a masterpiece of the same sort. Jaspar is an effective little popular tract in rhyme. with a good deal of ballad-language. But The Old Woman of Berkeley, which was first published in 1799 and afterwards adorned the Tales of Wonder, is in rattling anapæsts, which run down to something like doggerel; and here we stand at the source of the Ingoldsby manner. God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop and The Inchcape Rock, again, are in quite a different |