“On a former occasion you have allowed me, through the channel of your journal, to contradict a calumnious accusation as publicly as it had been preferred; and though, in these days of slander, such things hardly deserve refutation, there are reasons which induce me once more to request a similar favour.
“Some extracts from Captain Medwin’s recent publication of
Lord Byron’s
Conversations, have been transmitted to me by a friend, who,
happening to know what the facts are which are there falsified, is of opinion
that it would not misbecome me to state them at this time. I wish it, however,
to be distinctly understood, that in so doing I am not influenced by any desire
of vindicating myself; that would be wholly unnecessary, considering from what
quarter the charges come. I notice them for the sake of laying before the
public one sample more of the practices of the Satanic School, and showing what
credit is due to Lord Byron’s
assertions. For that his lordship spoke to this effect, and in this temper, I
have no doubt: Captain Medwin having, I dare say, to the
best of his recollection, faithfully performed the worshipful office of
retailing all the effusions of spleen, slander,
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 355 |
“Now, then, to the point. The following speech is reported by Captain Medwin as Lord Byron’s:—‘I am glad Mr. Southey owns that article* “Foliage,” which excited my choler so much. But who else could have been the author? Who but Southey would have had the baseness, under pretext of reviewing the work of one man, insidiously to make it a nest-egg for hatching malicious calumnies against others? I say nothing of the critique itself on “Foliage;” but what was the object of that article? I repeat, to vilify and scatter his dark and devilish insinuations against me and others. Shame on
* A volume of poems by Mr. Leigh Hunt. The reader who may be desirous of referring to the article, will find it in vol. xviii. of the Quarterly Review, p. 324.—R. S. |
| 356 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
“The reviewal in question I did not write. Lord Byron might have known this if he had inquired of Mr. Murray, who would readily have assured him that I was not the author; and he might have known it from the reviewal itself, wherein the writer declares in plain words that he was a contemporary of Shelley’s, at Eton. I had no concern in it, directly or indirectly; but let it not be inferred that in thus disclaiming that paper, any disapproval of it is intended. Papers in the Quarterly Review have been ascribed to me (those on Keats’s Poems, for example), which I have heartily condemned both for their spirit and manner. But for the one in question, its composition would be creditable to the most distinguished writer; nor is there anything either in the opinions expressed, or in the manner of expressing them, which a man of just and honourable principles would have hesitated to advance. I would not have written that part of it which alludes to Mr. Shelley, because, having met him on familiar terms, and parted with him in kindness (a feeling of which Lord Byron had no conception), would have withheld me from animadverting in that manner upon his conduct. In other respects, the paper contains nothing that I would not have avowed if I had written, or subscribed, as entirely assenting to, and approving it.
“It is not true that Shelley ever inquired of me whether I was the
author of that paper, which purporting, as it did, to be written by an Etonian
of his own standing, he very well knew I was not. But in this part of Lord
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 357 |
“Now for the assertion, that I had the audacity to admit having treasured up some of Shelley’s opinions, when he had resided at Keswick, and having made notes of them at the time. What truth is mixed up with the slander of this statement, I shall immediately explain, premising only, that, as the opinion there implied concerning the practice of noting down familiar conversation, is not applicable to me, I transfer it to Captain Medwin for his own especial use.
“Mr.
Shelley having, in the letter alluded to, thought proper to make
some remarks upon my opinions, I took occasion, in reply, to comment upon his,
and to ask him (as the tree is known by its fruits) whether he had found them
conducive to his own happiness, and the happiness of those with whom he had
been most nearly connected? This produced a second letter from him, written in
a tone, partly of justification, partly of attack. I replied to this also, not
by any such absurd admission as Lord Byron
has stated, but by recapitulating to him, as a practical illustration of his
principles, the leading circumstances of his own life, from the commencement of
his career at
| 358 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
“This is the correspondence upon which Lord Byron’s misrepresentation has been constructed. It is all that ever passed between us, except a note from Shelley, some years before, accompanying a copy of his Alastor and one of mine in acknowledgment of it. I have preserved his letters, together with copies of my own; and, if I had as little consideration for the feelings of the living as Captain Medwin has displayed, it is not any tenderness towards the dead* that would withhold me now from publishing them.
“It is not likely that Shelley should have communicated my part of this correspondence to Lord Byron, even if he did his own. Bearing testimony, as his heart did, to the truth of my statements in every point, and impossible as it was to escape from the conclusion which was then brought home, I do not think he would have dared produce it. How much or how little of the truth was
* In the preface to his Monody on Keats, Shelley, as I have been informed, asserts that I was the author of the criticism in the Quarterly Review upon that young man’s poems, and that his death was occasioned by it. There was a degree of meanness in this (especially considering the temper and tenour of our correspondence) which I was not then prepared to expect from Shelley, for that he believed me to be the author of that paper, I certainly do not believe. He was once, for a short time, my neighbour. I met him upon terms, not of friendship indeed, but, certainly, of mutual good will. I admired his talents; thought that he would outgrow his errors (perilous as they were); and trusted that, meantime, a kind and generous heart would resist the effect of fatal opinions which he had taken up in ignorance and boyhood. Herein I was mistaken. But when I ceased to regard him with hope, he became to me a subject for sorrow and awful commiseration, not of any injurious or unkind feeling; and when I expressed myself with just severity concerning him, it was in direct communication to himself.—R. S. |
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 359 |
“The charge of scattering dark and
devilish insinuations is one which, if Lord
Byron were living, I would throw back in his teeth. Me he had
assailed without the slightest provocation, and with that unmanliness, too,
which was peculiar to him; and in this course he might have gone on without
giving me the slightest uneasiness, or calling forth one animadversion in
reply. When I came forward to attack his lordship, it was upon public, not upon
private, grounds. He is pleased to suppose that he had mortally offended
Mr. Wordsworth and myself many years
ago, by a letter which he had written to the Ettrick
Shepherd. ‘Certain it is,’ he says,
‘that I did not spare the Lakists in it, and he told me that he
could not resist the temptation, and had shown it to the fraternity. It was
too tempting; and as I could never keep a secret of my own (as you know),
much less that of other people, I could not blame him. I remember saying,
among other things, that the Lake poets were such fools as not to fish in
their own waters. But this was the least offensive part of the
epistle.’ No such epistle was ever shown to Mr.
Wordsworth or to me; but I remember (and this passage brings it
to my recollection) to have heard that Lord Byron had
spoken of us in a letter to Hogg, with some contempt, as
fellows who could neither vie with him for skill in angling nor for prowess in
swimming. Nothing more than this came to my hearing; and I must have been more
sensitive than his lordship himself could I have been offended by it. But if
the contempt which he then expressed had equalled the rancour which he
afterwards displayed, Lord Byron must have known that I
had the flocci of his eulogium to balance the nauci of his scorn, and that the one would
| 360 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
“It was because Lord Byron had brought a stigma upon English literature that I
accused him; because he had perverted great talents to the worst purposes;
because he had set up for pander-general to the youth of Great Britain as long
as his writings should endure; because he had committed a high crime and
misdemeanour against society, by sending forth a work in which mockery was mingled with horrors,
filth with impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. For these offences I
came forward to arraign him. The accusation was not made darkly, it was not
insinuated, nor was it advanced under the cover of a review. I attacked him
openly in my own name, and only not by his, because he had not then publicly
avowed the flagitious production by which he will be remembered for lasting
infamy. He replied in manner altogether worthy of himself and his cause.
Contention with a generous, honourable opponent leads naturally to esteem, and
probably to friendship; but, next to such an antagonist, an enemy like
Lord Byron is to be desired,—one who, by his conduct
in the contest, divests himself of every claim to respect; one whose baseness
is such as to sanctify the vindictive feeling that it provokes, and upon whom
the act of taking vengeance is that of administering justice. I answered him as
he deserved to be answered, and the effect which that answer produced upon his
lordship has been described by his faithful chronicler, Captain Medwin. This is the real history of
what the purveyors of scandal for the public are pleased sometimes to announce
in their advertisements as ‘Byron’s
Controversy with Southey!’ What
there was ‘dark and devilish’ in it belongs to his lordship;
and had I been compelled to resume it during his life, he who played the
monster in literature, and aimed his blows at women, should have been treated
accord-
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 361 |
“Here I dismiss the subject. It might have been thought that Lord Byron had attained the last degree of disgrace when his head was set up for a sign at one of those preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows, where obscenity, sedition, and blasphemy are retailed in drams for the vulgar. There remained one further shame,—there remained this exposure of his private conversations, which has compelled his lordship’s friends, in their own defence, to compare his oral declarations with his written words, and thereby to demonstrate, that he was as regardless of truth, as he was incapable of sustaining those feelings suited to his birth, station, and high endowments, which sometimes came across his better mind.
