VOTE WITH YOUR HEART, VOTARY WITH YOUR HEAD:

A Tory Transition: a review of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters
by W.A. Speck (Tim Davis, 2/13/2007, American Spectator)

[I]n Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters -- clearly the best biography of Southey ever written -- highly respected historian W. A. Speck offers an important new portrait of Southey as the "'most powerful literary supporter of the Tories,'" and the "missing link in the development of English Conservatism between Burke and Disraeli." [...]

Speck -- in biographical writing at its best that is thoroughly entertaining and painstakingly researched -- organizes his presentation around three periods of Southey's life: "A morning of ardour and hope" (1774-1803); "A day of clouds and storms" (1803-1834); and "An evening of gloom closed in by premature darkness" (1834-1839). First, Speck covers Southey's years as a directionless student who nevertheless acquired an important lifelong habit as a prolific letter writer. Jack Simmons, Southey's earlier biographer said that Southey, "Beyond dispute and without qualification belongs to the great English letter-writers. . . his letters show all powers in turn at their height. . . . There he stands to the life: independent, irritable, generous, tender, kind-hearted, loyal -- above all, intensely human." In fact, Southey's voluminous correspondence becomes Speck's main evidence in reconstructing his subject's personal and political life. [...]

Southey's life in the final years of the 1790s and during his decades in the nineteenth century is the truly significant part of Speck's presentation. Readers follow along as Southey becomes acquainted with the most remarkable people of the era, a few of which included George Gordon, Lord Byron; Charles Lamb; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Mary Wollstonecraft; and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Readers also trace Southey's development as one of England's most prolific and noteworthy writers of poetry, histories, and book reviews for Edinburgh Annual Register, Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Annual Review.

Quite remarkable in Speck's presentation are the ways in which Southey's political attitudes were undergoing constant readjustments. Southey eventually admitted that "'some years and some observations have modified many of my opinions,'" and by 1809 he "confessed that he had become more conservative. . . . As for his past political attitudes, he admitted they] 'were rather feelings than opinions . . . rather exacted by sympathy or provocation than taken up on enquiry and reflection, and in that state they might have remained if I had not been required to write upon subjects which made it necessary that I should look into them and examine their foundation.'" In 1811, Southey had finally concluded that the "'system of English policy consists of church and state, [ . . .and] they must stand together or fall together; and the fall of either would draw after it the ruin of the finest fabric ever yet created by human wisdom under divine favour.'"

Shelley, another of Southey's contemporaries who repudiated him, said that Southey "was no longer a radical. 'I shall see him soon and reproach him for his tergiversation. [ . . . ] He to whom Bigotry, Tyranny and Law was hateful has become the votary of those Idols in a form the most disgusting.'" Southey, by then a famous writer with important connections to the government, responded simply in 1812: "'When you are as old as I am you will think with me,'" and he said of Shelley, "'[He] is the very ghost of what I was at his age -- poet, philosopher, and Jacobin and moralist and enthusiast . . . His own heart will lead him right at last.'"

To see how the radical liberal became the thoughtful conservative -- a nineteenth century exemplar who is most instructive for observers of the twenty-first century -- spend a few evenings with W. A. Speck's marvelous new biography. You will see why Shelly and Hazlitt were so wrong, and you will see how and why Southey was ultimately so right!