BOOKS

If thou wilt, remember

Paul Jarmin

ROBERT SOUTHEY: A LIFE by Mark Storey OUP, f25, pp.383 If the name Robert Southey (1774-1843) means anything to the present generation of poetry readers, then it is probably as 'the friend of Coleridge' or 'the butt of Byron'. As for that generation privileged enough to have read poetry at school, Southey's fame probably rests on a few recitable poems such as 'The Inchcape Rock' and 'The Battle of Blenheim'. Even the latter, thanks to the original Golden Treasury editor, has become erroneously known as 'After Blenheim', a trap into which one reviewer of Mark Storey's new biography of Southey has already fallen. But is a new biography — the first for over half a century — of this minor Romantic poet at all needed?

To anyone with even a remote interest in either the Romantic Movement or the origins of modern socio-political history, the answer to this must be an emphatic yes. Not only is Storey's Southey the most important Romantic biography to have appeared since Stephen Gill's Wordsworth (1989), but it also helps to plug a gaping hole in both literary and historical studies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This fact is vehemently borne out in the views expressed by Southey's contempo- raries, among whom, be they friends or enemies, the very idea that the name Southey could be all but forgotten would have been inconceivable. On reading Southey's first major poetic composition, published when he was still only 21, Charles Lamb was convinced that he must one day 'rival Milton', and we should remember that if writers such as Byron and Hazlitt made a special point of attacking Southey, then this in itself is a good yard- stick by which to measure his stature. Small fish never make a large splash.

As Storey points out, Southey's life spanned a particularly turbulent age. The French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, Catholic emancipation, the Great Reform Bill and the first railways: Southey, one of the most prolific writers of any era, had something to say about them all. At his death, he could number among his writings a 10-volume Poetical Works (which includ- ed five epics), a three-volume history of Brazil and a history of the Peninsula War, biographies of Nelson and Wesley, two substantial treatises on the Anglican Church, five volumes of essays, editions of the complete works of William Cowper and Thomas Malory, and a seven-volume novel which incorporated the fairytale of the three bears. (As Storey says: 'There is some irony in the fact that this slight tale should be, for many people, their only acquain- tance with the works of Robert Southey.') So how could such a figure have become so easily forgotten? The answer to this is rooted partly, though significantly, in the life which posterity has perceived Southey to have led, rather than in the life which he genuinely did lead. The task of the modern biographer, therefore, ought to involve as much strenuous hoeing as replanting, and if I have one particular reservation about Storey's diligent work, then it is that some of those spurious weeds still remain.

The son of a Bristol draper, Southey was educated at Westminster and Balliol College, Oxford, in both of which he expe- rienced microcosmic worlds heavily loaded in favour of the aristocracy. When the Bastille fell on 14 July, 1789, Southey was almost 15 and already displaying signs of rebellious behaviour as well as scribbling profusely. These two traits were to lead to his first costly venture into print: an essay in a school magazine, which denounced all use of corporal punishment as satanic, all schoolmasters who thus made use of the rod as 'priests of Lucifer', and for which he was expelled.

By 1794, like so many English protago- nists of the embryonic revolution in France, he had become disturbed and con- fused by the course it was now taking, while closer to home — though not close enough to the bachelor confines of Oxford — his friendship with a Bristol girl, Edith Fricker, `On second thoughts, perhaps we should try and get sponsorship first.' whose family Southey had known since he was 12, was clearly blooming into some- thing more. Then, in June, came the most important and notorious event of Southey's life: his first meeting with Coleridge. With- in a fortnight, the two young radicals and would-be poets had planted the seeds of the scheme which became known as `panti- socracy', by which they were to set up a Utopian, communistic society on the banks of the Susquehanna river in Pennsylvania, and set about the 'toil and the glory of regenerating mankind'. As Storey astutely puts it:

Coleridge had enabled what seemed at the time like the fulfilment of Southey's dream, not just of escape, but of a new republic based on a principled rejection of all the old, royalist ways.

Like the idyllic French republic, however, it was another dream from which Southey was to be rudely awakened, and, as the decade drew to a close, we find him increasingly desirous of retreating from the public world into his domestic life with Edith, whom he had married in November 1795. In later life he could write: That I am a very happy man I owe to my early marriage ... I had done with hope & fear upon the most agitating & most important action of life — & my heart was at rest.

But it was not until well into the new century, when he first began to make ends meet purely through his writing, and when installed at Greta Hall in Keswick, his home for 40 years, that he could truly begin `burning ... a sacrifice to the Household Gods', as he put it in 1796. That he had buried three children by the age of 42, however, is a stark reminder that these were not always to be appeased.

Southey's commencement as regular contributor to the newly-formed Tory jour- nal, The Quarterly Review (1809), together with his appointment to the post of Poet Laureate in 1813, inevitably brought with it the first accusations of opportunism and political apostasy. More than any other poet in the 1790s, Southey had spoken out boldly against the war with France, the inhumanity of the slave trade, the oppres- sion of the poor and even cruelty to animals. The task of helping Southey to `emerge from the shadow of his detractors' is not an easy one, therefore, since no one could seriously contend that there were no inconsistencies between his earlier and later political tenets. It is nevertheless pos- sible to identify certain ideological threads running throughout Southey's life. His pro- posed methods of dealing with the question of poverty may have changed for example, but his moral reaction to it did not. The latter is illustrated by a choice quotation from a letter of June 1797:

The rich are strangely ignorant of the mis- eries to which the lowest and largest part of mankind are abandoned — and even of those who see and pity and relieve their distresses, you will scarcely find one who has ever felt shocked at the reflection that God has given to the poor mental capabilities that might have infinitely benefited mankind and given them in vain, — only to be stifled by society. There is not upon the earth one spot where man enjoys 'the unfettered use of all the powers which God has given'. The savage and civilised states are alike unnatural, alike unworthy of the origin and end of man. Hence the prevalence of scepticism and atheism, which from being the effect become the cause of vice.

(I have quoted from the original here, as there are some transcription errors in Storey's version.) It might have been useful at this point to ask whether Southey ever abandoned such stringent views. Here, for instance, is the government-hired, pro-establishment Southey, writing on Sadler's report into the iniquities of the factory system as late as 1833:

The whole cruelty of the factory system has been at last fully brought to light by Sadler's Committee, and ministers who never gave him the slightest aid or encouragement, never gave him one cheer from their bench- es, are prepared to interfere with that hellish system. I cannot characterise it by any milder term. My voice had been raised against it five and twenty years ago, but bad as I knew it to be, I knew not half its barbarity till his Report has published it to the world .. . . Compunction one does not expect in the children of Mammon: but I really won- der that none of our worsted, or Flax, or Cot- ton-Kings have hung themselves since the publication of this Report, for shame.

The pervading impression is often that Storey, while being sympathetic to his sub- ject, never quite summons up enough courage entirely to kick over the apple-cart of established criticism. This is a pity, since, at the outset, Storey admits the very obvi- ous though long-ignored fact that Southey has always been unjustly regarded as 'the arch apostate of the Romantic period' and that 'Wordsworth and Coleridge — even Blake — [who] traced similar arcs across the political firmament' have come off rela- tively unscathed. Even though there are quotations from Southey's poetry running throughout the biography, I am not entirely convinced that Storey has sufficiently recognised the central Romantic sine qua non that 'the poet is an indissoluble part of his poem' (A. S. Byatt). Southey would certainly have agreed with the young Shelley that the world would have been morally the poorer had Dante and Shakespeare never lived, and that 'time [should] be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable. to that of a poet'. To somewhat counter- balance my criticism, however, there are some strikingly empathic and innovative passages of critique, notably the evaluation of Southey's epic The Curse of Kehama and its influences.

Finally, there are two particularly strong factors to recommend this biography. From the purely academic perspective, one can- not fail to be impressed by Storey's research. From personal experience of working on Southey I can certainly corrob- orate that there is a 'mass of evidence' to be sifted, a task made especially difficult by the fact that no one institution has made a particular point of collecting Southeyana. Secondly, Storey's' method of presenting this evidence will be found to be immense- ly readable. In this respect he is greatly helped by Southey himself, who, even in his private correspondence, certainly justi- fied Hazlitt's judgment that: 'He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day'. With this in mind, Storey follows the sensible policies of Southey's other two 20th-century biographers in allowing him to relate considerable por- tions of his life in his own words. It is to be hoped that such an approach will simulta- neously win readers fot Storey and pro- duce a resurgence of interest in this unjustly-forgotten poet.