Sir Thomas More

Colloquies on Society, by Robert
Southey,

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Title: Colloquies on Society
Author: Robert Southey
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: May 8, 2007 [eBook #4243]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY***

Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell and Company edition by David
Price, email: [email protected]

COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY.
BY ROBERT SOUTHEY.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK &
MELBOURNE. 1887.

INTRODUCTION.
It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published "Sir
Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society,"
a book in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery.
There were later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there
was an edition in one volume in 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