Colloquies on Society | Page 4

1837, at the beginning of the reign of
Queen Victoria.
These dialogues with a meditative and patriotic ghost form separate
dissertations upon various questions that concern the progress of
society. Omitting a few dissertations that have lost the interest they had
when the subjects they discussed were burning questions of the time,

this volume retains the whole machinery of Southey's book. It gives
unabridged the Colloquies that deal with the main principles of social
life as Southey saw them in his latter days; and it includes, of course,
the pleasant Colloquy that presents to us Southey himself, happy in his
library, descanting on the course of time as illustrated by the bodies and
the souls of books. As this volume does not reproduce all the
Colloquies arranged by Southey under the main title of "Sir Thomas
More," it avoids use of the main title, and ventures only to describe
itself as "Colloquies on Society, by 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 2,000 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