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COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY
COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY ROBERT SOUTHEY They are of great interest for they present to us the form and
character of the conservative reaction in a mind that was in youth
impatient for reform. In Southey as in Wordsworth the reaction
followed on experience of failure in the way taken by the
revolutionists of France with whose aims for the regeneration of
Europe they had been in warmest accord. Neither Wordsworth nor
Southey ever lowered the ideal of a higher life for man on earth.
Southey retains it in these Colloquies although he balances his own
hope with the questionings of the ghost and if he does look for a
crowning race regards it with Tennyson as a
"FAR OFF divine event
To which the whole Creation moves."
The conviction brought to men like Wordsworth and Southey by the
failure of the French Revolution to attain its aim in the sudden
elevation of society was not of vanity in the aim but of vanity in
any hope of its immediate attainment by main force. Southey makes
More say to himself upon this question (page 37) "I admit that such
an improved condition of society as you contemplate is possible and
that it ought always to be kept in view; but the error of supposing
it too near of fancying that there is a short road to it is of
all the errors of these times the most pernicious because it
seduces the young and generous and betrays them imperceptibly into
an alliance with whatever is flagitious and detestable." All strong
reaction of mind tends towards excess in the opposite direction.
Southey's detestation of the excesses of vile men that brought shame
upon a revolutionary movement to which some of the purest hopes of
earnest youth had given impulse drove him as it drove Wordsworth
into dread of everything that sought with passionate energy
immediate change of evil into good. But in his own way no man ever
strove more patiently than Southey to make evil good; and in his own
home and his own life he gave good reason to one to whom he was as a
father and who knew his daily thoughts and deeds to speak of him
as "upon the whole the best man I have ever known."
In the days when this book was written Southey lived at Greta Hall
by Keswick and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet
Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List worth less than 200
pounds a year and he was living at peace upon a little income
enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole
private fortune was 400 pounds in consols. In 1821 he had added to
that some savings and gave all to a ruined friend who had been good
to him in former years. Yet in those days he refused an offer of
2000 pounds a year to come to London and write for the Times. He
was happiest in his home by Skiddaw with his books about him and
his wife about him.
Ten years after the publishing of these Colloquies Southey's wife
who had been as Southey said "for forty years the life of his
life" had to be placed in a lunatic asylum. She returned to him to
die and then his gentleness became still gentler as his own mind
failed. He died in 1843. Three years before his death his friend
Wordsworth visited him at Keswick and was not recognised. But when
Southey was told who it was "then" Wordsworth wrote "his eyes
flashed for a moment with their former brightness but he sank into
the state in which I had found him patting with both his hands his
books affectionately like a child."
Sir Thomas More whose ghost communicates with Robert Southey was
born in 1478 and at the age of fifty-seven was beheaded for
fidelity to conscience on the 6th of July 1535. He was like
Southey a man of purest character and in 1516 when his age was
thirty-eight there was published at Louvain his "Utopia" which
sketched wittily an ideal commonwealth that was based on practical
and earnest thought upon what constitutes a state and in what
direction to look for amendment of ills. More also withdrew from
his most advanced post of opinion. When he wrote "Utopia" he
advocated absolute freedom of opinion in matters of religion; in
after years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity. King
Henry VIII. stiff in his own opinions had always believed that;
and because More would not say that he was of one mind with him in
the matter of the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold.
H. M.
COLLOQUY I.--THE INTRODUCTION.
"Posso aver certezza e non paura
Che raccontando quel che m' e accaduto
Il ver diro ne mi sara creduto."
"Orlando Innamorato" c. 5. st. 53.
It was during that melancholy November when the death of the
Princess Charlotte had diffused throughout Great Britain a more
general sorrow than had ever before been known in these kingdoms; I
was sitting alone at evening in my library and my thoughts had
wandered from the book before me to the circumstances which made
this national calamity be felt almost like a private affliction.
While I was thus musing the post-woman arrived. My letters told me
there was nothing exaggerated in the public accounts of the
impression which this sudden loss had produced; that wherever you
went you found the women of the family weeping and that men could
scarcely speak of the event without tears; that in all the better
parts of the metropolis there was a sort of palsied feeling which
seemed to affect the whole current of active life; and that for
several days there prevailed in the streets a stillness like that of
the Sabbath but without its repose. I opened the newspaper; it was
still bordered with broad mourning lines and was filled with
details concerning the deceased Princess. Her coffin and the
ceremonies at her funeral were described as minutely as the order of
her nuptials and her bridal dress had been in the same journal
scarce eighteen months before. "Man" says Sir Thomas Brown "is a
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