In his Inscriptions Southey excelled. His earlier master, as has been noted, was Akenside; his later was Chiabrera. The limitation of space in this form served his imagination, for it compelled him to select what was best and most characteristic. He purposed to write a series of inscriptions relating to the Peninsular War, but did not fully carry out his design. Of those which we possess, a few are not inferior to what Landor might have written, and hardly can higher praise be bestowed. They may be read together with Wordsworth's political sonnets and the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, and with Coleridge's letters suggested by the national uprising in Spain. Wordsworth deals, through his imagination, more with the principles which govern a people's life; Southey's historical instinct led him rather to celebrate heroic action and heroic personages. Of Southey's Laureate poems, written for public occasions, some are highly creditable exercises in official verse-making. One, certainly not composed by command, the Ode written during the Negotiations with Buonaparte in January 1814, is perhaps the loftiest chaunt of political invective, inspired by moral indignation, which our literature possesses. sprang from the writer's heart and conscience; it is masterly not only in feeling but in craftsmanship. To Southey the French Emperor was still a “barbarian upstart," the "perfidious Corsican ". It "Bold man and bad, Remorseless, godless, full of fraud and lies, There were Englishmen in 1814 who were dazzled by Napoleon's military genius, and who fell prone in the worship of mere power. Southey stood erect in the presence of power which he believed to be immoral, defied it and execrated it. That he did not perceive how, in driving the ploughshare of Revolution across Europe of the old régime, Napoleon was terribly accomplishing an inevitable and a beneficent work may have been an error; but it was an error to which no blame attaches, and in his fierce indictment he states, with ample support of facts, one entire side of the case. The ode is indeed more than a poem ; it is a historical document expressing the passion which filled many of the highest minds in England, and which, at a later date, was the justification of Saint Helena. The Funeral Song for the Princess Charlotte of Wales is another occasional poem of public interest which in its kind may take high rank; it gives expression at once to the calm of death and the fluctuations of life; the national sorrow for a young life lost is dignified by a historical background of mournful memories; the octosyllabic verse chimes. and tolls like funeral bells. Of Southey's poetical work as a whole I may repeat what I have said elsewhere, that, judged by the highest standards, it takes a midmost place. It does not create many new combinations of feeling; it does render into art a great body of original thought or passion; it rarely gives flawless utterance to lyrical moments. But it deepens the channel in which our best habitual emotions flow; it presents high ideals of character and conduct; it worthily celebrates heroic action; it is (to repeat former words of my own) "the output of a large and vigorous mind, amply stored with knowledge; its breath of life is the moral ardour of a nature strong and generous, and therefore it can never cease to be of worth." EDWARD DOWDEN. |