3776. Robert Southey to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822

MS: MS has not survived; text taken from Courier, 11 January 1822.
Previously published: Courier, 11 January 1822; Robert Southey, Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols (London, 1832), II, pp. 191–196; and Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850), V, pp. 349–354. In addition to these versions authorised by either Southey or his estate, the letter was widely reprinted in Southey’s lifetime without his permission. For example, George Clinton, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron (London, 1828), pp. 479–482; The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, complete in one volume (Paris, 1829), pp. xv–xvii; The Complete Works of Lord Byron, including his supressed poems (Paris, 1833), IV, pp. 507–508 [in part].
Note on MS: Three autograph drafts of this letter survive: one, dated 5 January 1822, in the National Library of Scotland, MS 42552; and two, both undated, in the Huntington Library, HM6655. Their texts are reproduced in Appendix 3.

Sir, –

Having seen in the newspapers a note relating to myself, extracted from a recent publication of Lord Byron’s, I request permission to reply, through the medium of your Journal.

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I come at once to his Lordship’s charge against me, blowing away the abuse with which it is frothed, and evaporating a strong acid in which it is suspended. The residuum then appears to be, that “Mr. Southey, on his return from Switzerland, (in 1817,) scattered abroad calumnies, knowing them to be such, against Lord Byron and others.” To this I reply with a direct and positive denial.

If I had been told in that country that Lord Byron had turned Turk,

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or Monk of La Trappe

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—that he had furnished a harem, or endowed a hospital, I might have thought the account, whichever it had been, possible, and repeated it accordingly; passing it, as it had been taken, in the small change of conversation, for no more than it was worth. In this manner I might have spoken of him, as of Baron Gerambe, the Green Man, the Indian Jugglers,

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or any other figurante

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of the time being. There was no reason for any particular delicacy on my part, in speaking of his Lordship: and, indeed, I should have thought anything which might be reported of him, would have injured his character as little as the story which so greatly annoyed Lord Keeper Guilford, that he had ridden a rhinoceros.

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He may ride a rhinoceros, and though everybody would stare, no one would wonder. But, making no enquiry concerning him when I was abroad, because I felt no curiosity, I heard nothing, and had nothing to repeat. When I spoke of wonders to my friends and acquaintances on my return, it was of the flying-tree at Alpuacht,

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and the eleven thousand virgins at Cologne

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—not of Lord Byron. I sought for no staler subject than St. Ursula.

Once, and once only, in connection with Switzerland, I have alluded to his Lordship; and, as the passage was curtailed in the press, I take this opportunity of restoring it. In the Quarterly Review, speaking incidentally of the Jungfrau, I said “it was the scene where Lord Byron’s Manfred met the devil and bullied him – though the devil must have won his cause before any tribunal in this world, or the next, if he had not pleaded more feebly for himself, than his advocate, in a cause of canonization, ever pleaded for him.”

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With regard to the “others,” whom his Lordship accuses me of calumniating, I suppose he alludes to a party of his friends,

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whose names I found written in the Album, at Mont-Auvert, with an avowal of Atheism annexed, in Greek, and an indignant comment, in the same language, underneath it.

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Those names, with that avowal and the comment, I transcribed in my note-book, and spoke of the circumstance on my return.

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If I had published it, the gentleman in question would not have thought himself slandered, by having that recorded of him which he has so often recorded of himself.

The many opprobrious appellations which Lord Byron has bestowed upon me, I leave, as I find them, with the praises which he has bestowed upon himself.

How easily is a noble spirit discern’d

From harsh and sulphurous matter, that flies out

In contumelies, makes a noise, and stinks!

B. JONSON.

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But I am accustomed to such things; and, so far from irritating me are the enemies who use such weapons, that, when I hear of their attacks, it is some satisfaction to think they have thus employed the malignity which must have been employed somewhere, and could not have been directed against any person whom it could possibly molest or injure less. The viper, however venomous in purpose, is harmless in effect, while it is biting at the file.

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It is seldom, indeed, that I waste a word, or a thought, upon those who are perpetually assailing me. But abhorring, as I do, the personalities which disgrace our current literature, and averse from controversy as I am, both by principle and inclination, I make no profession of non-resistance. When the offence, and the offender, are such as to call for the whip and the branding-iron, it has been both seen and felt that I can inflict them.

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Lord Byron’s present exacerbation is evidently produced by an infliction of this kind – not by hearsay reports of my conversation, four years ago, transmitted him from England. The cause may be found in certain remarks upon the Satanic school of poetry, contained in my preface to the Vision of Judgment.

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Well would it be for Lord Byron if he could look back upon any of his writings, with as much satisfaction as I shall always do upon what is there said of that flagitious school. Many persons, and parents especially, have expressed their gratitude to me for having applied the branding-iron where it was so richly deserved. The Edinburgh Reviewer, indeed, with that honourable feeling by which his criticisms are so peculiarly distinguished, suppressing the remarks themselves, has imputed them wholly to envy on my part.

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I give him, in this instance, full credit for sincerity: I believe he was equally incapable of comprehending a worthier motive, or of inventing a worse; and, as I have never condescended to expose, in any instance, his pitiful malevolence, I thank him for having, in this, stript it bare himself, and exhibited it in its bald, naked, and undisguised deformity.

Lord Byron, like his encomiast, has not ventured to bring the matter of those animadversions into view. He conceals the fact, that they are directed against the authors of blasphemous and lascivious books; against men who, not content with indulging their own vices, labour to make others the slaves of sensuality, like themselves – against public panders, who, mingling impiety with lewdness, seek at once to destroy the cement of social order, and to carry profanation and pollution into private families, and into the hearts of individuals.

His Lordship has thought it not unbecoming in him to call me a scribbler of all work.

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Let the word scribbler pass; it is not an appellation which will stick, like that of the Satanic School. But, if a scribbler, how am I one of all work? I will tell Lord Byron what I have not scribbled – what kind of work I have not done. I have never published libels upon my friends and acquaintance, expressed my sorrow for those libels, and called them in during a mood of better mind – and then re-issued them,

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when the evil spirit, which for a time has been cast out, had returned and taken possession, with seven others, more wicked than himself.

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– I have never abused the power, of which every author is in some degree possessed, to wound the character of a man, or the heart of a woman. – I have never sent into the world a book to which I did not dare affix my name; or which I feared to claim in a Court of Justice, if it were pirated by a knavish bookseller.

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– I have never manufactured furniture for the brothel. None of these things have I done; none of the foul work by which literature is perverted to the injury of mankind. My hands are clean; there is no “damned spot” upon them – no taint, which “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.”

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Of the work which I have done, it becomes me not here to speak, save only as relates to the Satanic School, and its Coryphæus,

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the author of Don Juan. I have held up that school to public detestation, as enemies to the religion, the institutions, and the domestic morals of their country. I have given them a designation to which their founder and leader ANSWERS. I have sent a stone from my sling which has smitten their Goliah in the forehead.

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I have fastened his name upon the gibbet, for reproach and ignominy, as long as it shall endure. – Take it down who can!

One word of advice to Lord Byron, before I conclude. – When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme.

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For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should be obliged to keep tune. And while he may still indulge in the same rankness and virulence of insult, the metre will, in some degree, seem to lessen its vulgarity.

Keswick, 5th Jan. 1822.

Robert Southey.

Notes

1. The Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle, 29 December 1821, had printed extracts from the ‘Appendix’ to ‘The Two Foscari’, Sardanapulus, A Tragedy. The Two Foscari, A Tragedy. Cain, A Mystery (London, 1821), p. 328. These included Byron’s warning: ‘I am not ignorant of Mr. Southey’s calumnies on a different occasion, knowing them to be such, which he scattered abroad on his return from Switzerland against me and others.’ Southey had visited Switzerland in his continental tour of May–August 1817. The ‘calumnies’ Byron believed Southey to have later spread were rumours that Byron and Shelley had engaged in a ‘League of Incest’ during their residence in Switzerland in 1816. [back]

2. i.e. that Byron had converted to Islam. [back]

3. The monastery of La Trappe in Normandy where a particularly severe reform of the Cistercian Order had begun in 1664, prescribing hard manual labour, silence and a meagre diet. [back]

4. Ferdinand de Geramb (1772–1848), Austrian adventurer and soldier, prolific writer, figure in London high society, prisoner in France 1812–14 and, from 1817, Trappist monk, rising to be procurator-general of the monastery in 1833; Henry Cope (d. 1806), an eccentric who dressed only in green and committed suicide in Brighton on 25 October 1806; the ‘Indian Jugglers’ were a sensation in London in 1813, The Times, 27 July 1813, reporting ‘The exhibition of the Indian Jugglers at No. 87 Pall Mall, has been attended by nearly all the Families of distinction in town; and is becoming extremely popular. The swallowing of the sword, and the novelty of the other performances, have attracted the public attention beyond anything that has appeared in the metropolis for many years past.’ The lead performer was probably Ramo Samee [Ramaswamy] (d. 1850) from Madras, who performed on the British and American stage into the 1840s. [back]

5. An extra in a theatrical performance. [back]

6. Roger North (1651–1734; DNB), The Life of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron of Guildford, 2 vols (London, 1808), II, pp. 240–241, describing the reaction of Francis North, 1st Baron Guildford (1637–1685; DNB), lawyer, judge and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal 1682–1685. [back]

7. In his continental journey of 1817, Southey reached Alpnach in Switzerland on 11 July 1817. There he saw the eight-miles-long ‘Slide of Alpnach’, erected to convey logged spruces from the mountainside to the lake below. The trough, a feat of engineering supported on a timber frame over several ravines, was so angled as to transport the tree trunks from forest to shore in no more than six minutes. [back]

8. The Church of St Ursula at Cologne contains an enormous reliquary in which supposedly lie the bones of this fourth-century British saint who, according to legend, was killed, with her eleven thousand virginal handmaids, on a pilgrimage to Cologne by the Huns besieging the city. Southey visited Cologne on the return leg of his journey in 1817. For a letter in which he mentioned both the ‘Slide of Alpnach’ and St Ursula, see Southey to Herbert Hill, 16 November 1817, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Five, Letter 3037. [back]

9. This passage appeared as ‘and the Jungfrau where Lord Byron’s Manfred met the devil and bullied him’, the rest being omitted, in Southey’s ‘Cemeteries and Catacombs of Paris’, Quarterly Review, 21 (April 1819), 359–398 (366). The reference is to Lord Byron’s Manfred: a Dramatic Poem (1817), Act 2, scene 3, where Manfred resists a pact with the Devil. Southey suggests the Devil must have argued as feebly as the Devil’s Advocate (promotor fidei), a canon lawyer in the Catholic Church whose role it was to make the case against a candidate’s canonisation. [back]

10. The other members of the party were: Percy Shelley; Mary Godwin Shelley (1797–1851; DNB), for whom Shelley had abandoned his marriage; and her step-sister Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (1798–1879; DNB). [back]

11. Mont Auvert is a summit near the Mer de Glace and a popular tourist destination. At its top was a small building in which travellers could take shelter. It contained an album in which visitors could write their names and comments. The Shelley party had visited in July 1816, and had written their names in the album and against them the phrase, in Greek, ‘Atheists one and all.’ Underneath, in Greek, someone, possibly Edward Copleston, had responded ‘If that is true they are all fools and unfortunates, believing it in their stupidity. But if it is not true, they are all liars.’ [back]

12. Southey had recorded this information in his travel journal on 26 June 1817, and had shared it in a letter to John May, written at Brussels on 1 August 1817; see The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Five, Letter 3005. [back]

13. Ben Jonson (1572–1637; DNB), Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), Act 4, scene 1, lines 51–53. [back]

14. A reference to Phaedrus (fl. 1st century), Fabulae Aesopiae, a Latin collection of fables, which included the story of how a viper is wounded by a file on the floor of a workshop and fruitlessly bites it in return. [back]

15. Probably a reference to Southey’s A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. (London, 1817), p. 28, which had claimed to brand Smith on the forehead ‘with the name of SLANDERER.’ [back]

16. A Vision of Judgement (London, 1821), ‘Preface’, pp. xvii–xxii, where Southey denounced ‘the Satanic School’ of modern poetry without naming any one poet. However, this was clearly a riposte to Byron’s Don Juan (1819), whose suppressed ‘Dedication’, mocking Southey, had circulated widely. [back]

17. Edinburgh Review, 35 (July 1821), 422–436 (422). Southey (correctly) believed the article to be by Francis Jeffrey, his long-term bête noire. [back]

18. In the ‘Appendix’ to ‘The Two Foscari’, Sardanapulus, A Tragedy. The Two Foscari, A Tragedy. Cain, A Mystery (London, 1821), p. 329, Byron had called Southey ‘an arrogant scribbler of all works sitting down to deal damnation and destruction upon his fellow creatures.’ [back]

19. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) was suppressed by him in 1812, but many subsequent editions appeared without his authority. [back]

20. Matthew 12: 45 and Luke 11: 26. [back]

21. The first two cantos of Byron’s Don Juan (1819) were published anonymously. Murray’s concern about them was signaled by his refusal to have his name (as publisher) on the title page. He also did not take any action against those who issued pirated, cheaper versions, ironically enough because the Wat Tyler case brought by Southey in 1817 had shown that copyright could not be enforced unless a work was proved not to be seditious or blasphemous. [back]

22. Macbeth, Act 5, scene 1, lines 35, 50–51. [back]

23. In Greek drama, the leader of the chorus. [back]

24. 1 Samuel 17: 49. [back]

25. Unfortunately for Southey, Byron responded with a parody of Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (1821). Byron’s poem – The Vision of Judgment – was published in The Liberal, 1 (October 1822), 3–39. [back]

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The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven