[In the following essay, Raimond argues that Southey's early poems were more important than current critics believe in initiating the era of Romanticism in poetry, discussing how Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc reflect the young poet's republican idealism and sympathies for the French Revolution.]

Robert Southey's attitude towards the French Revolution is an instructive case. A staunch supporter of the Revolutionary ideals in his early years, the author of Joan of Arc and Wat Tyler was horrified by the excesses of the Terror, which, together with several other factors, led the former Radical to become strongly conservative. Even more than Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose political development was very similar, Southey was branded by his enemies as a contemptible shallow ‘turncoat’. When the hitherto unpublished anti-royal three-act play Wat Tyler was unexpectedly brought to light in February 1817, only two days after the publication in the Quarterly Review of a Tory article on ‘Parliamentary Reform’ in which Southey vilified those journalists, pamphleteers and lampooners who specialized in abusing official authorities and preaching rebellion against the Establishment, Southey (who had accepted the office of Poet Laureate four years earlier) was not undeservedly stigmatized as an arch apostate and renegade. On 14 March 1817, in the House of Commons, William Smith, MP for Norwich, after reading aloud a few lines from Southey's article in the latest issue of the Quarterly Review and excerpts from Wat Tyler, was at no great pains to brand the Laureate as a shameless renegade.¹ Southey's counter-attack in A Letter to William Smith, Esq., MP, vigorous though it was, did not convince Lord Byron, who wrote at the time:

It is no disgrace to Mr. Southey to have written Wat Tyler, and afterwards to have written his birthday or victory odes (I speak only of their politics) but it is something, for which I have no words, for this man to have endeavoured to bring to the stake (for such would he do) men who think as he thought, and for no reason but because they think so still, when he has found it convenient to think otherwise.²

Although Southey never became popular in the sense that Walter Scott, both as poet and novelist, was popular, he was recognized, after the publication of his Joan of Arc in 1796, as a power to be reckoned with in the literary world. By the end of the eighteenth century, Southey, not Coleridge or Wordsworth, was regarded as the leading champion of a new spirit in English poetry. The historical importance of Southey's early writings as a momentous factor in the emergence of Romantic poetry is unduly underrated. Significantly, the young poet of Joan of Arc, a crude epic quivering with revolutionary zeal, was hailed by The Anti-Jacobin as the typical Jacobin poet. ‘Jacobinical’ Southey remained until Francis Jeffrey in 1802 saw in him one of the ‘chief champions and apostles’ of a new school of poetry known as the ‘Lake School’. In a review of Southey's Poems of 1795 and 1797, in which the expression of humanitarian feelings was not a little related to the young poet's Revolutionary views, George Canning stigmatized Southey's anti-militarism as it prevailed in ‘The Soldier's Wife’ and ‘The Soldier's Funeral’: ‘The Old Poet was a Warrior, at least in imagination … Our Poet (the Jacobin Poet) points the thunder of his blank verse at the head of the Recruiting Serjeant, or roars in dithyrambics against the Lieutenants of Press-gangs.’³ A study of Southey's early writings throws an interesting light on his early Radicalism and devotion to Revolutionary ideals which he consistently recanted in later years. Indeed Southey's early writings cannot be dissociated from the biographical context, which should therefore be taken into account.

On 4 January 1812, Southey wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘Here is a man at Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham.’⁴ Indeed it looks as if rebellion against restraint, authority, and oppression was a basic impulse in the young Southey as in the young Shelley (both, incidentally, were born under the same sign of the Zodiac, Leo). Early evidence of Southey's rebellious attitude can be traced in his precocious rejection of the authority of his first schoolmistress, ‘Ma'am Powell’: ‘When the old woman, therefore, led me to a seat on the form, I rebelled as manfully as a boy in his third year could do, crying out, Take me to Pat! I don't like ye! You've got ugly eyes! Take me to Pat, I say!’⁵ At Westminster School, where he was admitted in 1788, the young Robert Southey rapidly identified tyranny with the persecution or bullying he suffered from older boys like Brice or William Forrester, ‘a great brute, as great a one as ever went upon two legs’.⁶ The aggressiveness which Southey was later to display as a committed writer possibly arose from an unconscious defence reaction against such tyranny as embodied by Brice and William Forrester, to say nothing of the headmaster's authority. The young Robert all the more developed into a rebel against all forms of authority while at Westminster because he spent most of his spare time reading Gibbon, Voltaire and Rousseau, whose books could not but appeal to a teenager in whom the outbreak of the Revolution in France instantly awakened great expectations. Southey rapidly became an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution from which he expected no less than a complete regeneration of mankind. Like Wordsworth, he could have exclaimed rapturously: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’.

The young Southey's revolutionary ideal pervades his first prose work, Harold, an unpublished romance written in three weeks, from 13 July to 6 August 1791. The two main protagonists of this early work, whose manuscript is in the Bodleian Library,⁷ are Robin Hood and Richard the Lionheart. King Richard is a monarch with democratic views who actually approves of the rebellion led against Church and State by the Sherwood Forest outlaw and his companions. One episode in book 22 of Harold highlights the political conceptions of this seventeen-year-old author. Constantine the Great is presented as a despicable, cruel despot by Richard the Lionheart, who once unhesitatingly exclaims: ‘I wish that Villain Constantine was now living. I would proclaim a Crusade against him’.⁸ Clearly the young Southey did not care a fig for historical plausibility in having Richard the Lionheart utter such words. The crusader who dreams of fighting ‘that Villain Constantine’ is not so much Richard the Lionheart as Southey himself. The Westminster schoolboy found it all the more difficult to bear the weight of orthodoxy and tradition as represented by his headmaster, Dr Vincent, because he was fascinated by the French Revolution and, in Hazlitt's words, ‘its tumultuous glow of rebellion’.⁹ With his friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford, he started a school weekly, called The Flagellant, that was intended to rival The Microcosm, the Eton paper. Southey's fate was sealed by the publication of the fifth issue of The Flagellant, on 29 March 1792, which contained a virulent article on corporal punishment signed ‘Gualbertus’: ‘Flogging was esteemed by Heathens as an act of piety and the Deity of all Pagan nations was the Devil … Now … whosoever floggeth, that is, performeth the will of Satan, committeth an abomination: to him therefore (and) to all the consumers of birch as to priests of Lucifer, Anathema, Anathema.’¹⁰ Dr Vincent was not long in identifying Southey as the author of this seditious scathing libel. In early April 1792 the young rebel was expelled from Westminster, exactly as ‘Shelley the Atheist’ was to be summarily expelled from University College, Oxford, in March 1811, for circulating an anonymous pamphlet of his entitled The Necessity of Atheism.

Southey's expulsion from Westminster School was not enough to stifle his rebelliousness. The undergraduate who entered Balliol College, Oxford, in January 1793 was the very opposite of a tamed young gentleman. ‘Once a rebel, always a rebel …’ He realized that he had better ‘learn to break a rebellious spirit, which neither authority nor oppression could ever bow’, but he was equally aware that ‘it would be easier to break his neck’.¹¹ No sooner had he settled in Oxford than he proclaimed his independence by refusing, like his fellow Radicals, to powder his hair. When, after the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, England had declared war against France, Southey instantly sided with the young Republic. In a letter of March 1793, he very characteristically wrote: ‘My brother is on board the Venus Frigate. … He is going to fight for England. I wish I could wish him success’.¹²

In the same year Wordsworth expressed the mood of many English democrats through lines which could very well be applied to Southey's own attitude at that time:

                                                                                          I rejoiced,
Yea, afterwards—truth most painful to record!—
Exulted, in the triumph of my soul
When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
Left without glory on the fields, or driven,
Brave hearts! to shameful flight.(13)

While in Oxford Southey wrote a tremendous amount of verse. In a letter to Bedford dated 22 December 1793, he reckoned he had already composed some 35,000 lines! Probably included in that figure was the first version of an epic poem, Joan of Arc, which was completed by the end of September 1793. During the autumn of 1793 Southey was a prey to a moral crisis not unlike the one he had gone through the year before. His uncle, the Reverend Herbert Hill, wanted him to take orders, a prospect from which he could not help shrinking in horror. The young Radical undergraduate had conceived a loathing for the Established Church which, according to him, had definitely betrayed the spirit of the New Testament. ‘How very little have the doctrines of Christ been understood’! he remarked. ‘We find neither bishops of 10,000 a year—jugged Jews or roasted heretics—or church and state—or test act in the whole gospel … Those damned monks who smuggled and monopolized the scriptures for so many years—pieced them and patched them … till we read of persecution—metaphysics—scarlet whore and eating books—in the book of life, of benevolence and simple truth’.¹⁴ Southey felt like finding the Deity in nature rather than in the Scriptures: ‘To me, he said, ‘every blade of grass and every atom of matter is worth all the Fathers’.¹⁵ Such a statement, testifying to Southey's deistic inclination, did echo a passage in Rousseau which, as Southey wrote to Bedford on 4 August 1793, expressed some of his religious opinions better than he could do himself:

I do not find a sweeter reverence for the Divinity than the mute admiration which the contemplation of His works excites. I cannot understand how rustics and especially hermits are unable to have faith: how is it that their souls are not raised a hundred times a day with ecstasy to the author of the wonders which strike them? In my room I pray very seldom and unfeelingly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape deeply moves me. An old woman only knew as her whole prayer how to say ‘Oh’. The bishop said to her: ‘Good woman, continue to pray thus; your prayer is worth more than ours—this is also a better prayer than my own.’¹⁶

William Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), in which the philosopher of anarchic view denounced pell-mell kings, aristocrats and churchmen, could not but bring grist to Southey's mill. Thanks to Godwin, whose doctrine immediately appealed to Southey as it did to Wordsworth, the revolutionary author of Joan of Arc realized that the man of letters' main duty was to preach against tyranny. Southey found a complete justification of his literary ambitions in the following passage from Political Justice:

Truth is omnipotent … If it have ever failed to produce gradual conviction, it is because it had been told in a meagre, an obscure or a pusillanimous manner. Ten pages that should contain an absolute demonstration of the true interests of mankind in society could not otherwise be prevented from changing the face of the globe, than by the literal destruction of the paper on which they were written.

(1, 211)

The autumn of 1793 was a period of mental distress for Southey who was worried about the choice of his future career as well as by the latest occurrences of the French Revolution. He was upset by the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette and by the ‘murder’ of Brissot, the leader of the Girondists. That Southey was then in a state of utter confusion is evidenced by what he wrote to Bedford on 11 November 1793: ‘I am sick of this world, and discontented with every one in it. The murder of Brissot has completely harrowed up my faculties … I look round the world and everywhere find the same mournful spectacle—the strong tyrannising over the weak, man and beast, the same depravity pervades the whole creation; oppression is triumphant everywhere.’¹⁷ Even though Southey's mind was fed on Godwin's philosophy which proclaimed the ultimate triumph of reason, the young Radical, faced with the latest political developments in France, was assailed by doubts concerning the very notion of perfectibility: ‘There is no place for virtue. Seneca was a visionary philosopher; even in the deserts of Arabia, the strongest will be the happiest, and the same rule holds good in Europe and in Abyssinia. Here are you and I theorising upon principles we can never practise, and wasting our time and youth.’¹⁸ Two days later, on 13 November 1793, he explained in a letter to Bedford that he would ‘be pleased to reside in a country where men's abilities would ensure respect; where society was upon a proper footing, and man was considered as more valuable than money’.¹⁹ The dream of emigration to America contained the seeds of the Utopian scheme of Pantisocracy which Coleridge and Southey were to invent within the few weeks following their first meeting in Oxford on 11 June 1794. During July and August of 1794 Southey wrote a dramatic poem, Wat Tyler, together with acts II and III of a play (whose first act was composed by Coleridge), The Fall of Robespierre. This play was inspired by the news of the execution of ‘the Incorruptible’, who had been guillotined on 28 July 1794.

That the excesses of the Reign of Terror greatly helped to cool Southey's enthusiasm for the French Revolution cannot be questioned. In the year 1795 the former disciple of Godwin detached himself from his former master's philosophy which he now considered as far too Utopian.²⁰ Southey's six-month visit to Portugal in 1796 also helped to tone down his former revolutionary ardour: ‘I have learnt to thank God that I am an Englishman’, he wrote on 26 January 1796, ‘for though things are not quite so well there as in El Dorado, they are better than anywhere else’.²¹ No sooner had he returned from Lisbon to Bristol than he exclaimed in a letter to Bedford dated 27 May 1796: ‘How does time mellow down our opinions! Little of that ardent enthusiasm which so lately fevered my whole character remains’.²² After those few months spent abroad, Southey felt sick of politics and mainly craved for domestic tranquillity, ‘with Edith by the fireside’.²³ Indeed one may consider the year 1797 as a landmark in Southey's political development in so far as it corresponds to the end of what Jack Simmons in Southey (London, 1945) called the ‘Communist phase’ of Southey's thought (p. 72). The following sentence from a letter to Bedford dated 11 June 1797, seemed to toll the knell of Southey's old theoretical republicanism: ‘France has disappointed me in her internal conduct, and if it be true that Babeuf be put to death—she has now no man left whom we may compare with the Gracchi’.²⁴

The corpus of Southey's early revolutionary writings is made up of Joan of Arc, the first version of which was completed, as we have seen, by the end of September 1793, and of several poetical works which Southey wrote during the year 1794 (his annus mirabilis for revolutionary inspiration), namely the Botany Bay Eclogues, acts II and III of The Fall of Robespierre, and Wat Tyler. To these should be added Southey's Poems of 1795 and 1797, which are imbued with a kind of humanitarianism indissolubly linked to the young poet's early evolutionary ideology.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century the very name of Botany Bay inevitably conjured up the notion of moral corruption because of the many convicts that had been transported to that distant Australian settlement since 1788. Southey's Botany Bay Eclogues were intended to call the contemporary reader's attention to the outcasts and the down-trodden who were depicted by the young Radical poet not as pariahs but as victims of the oppressive justice of the State. Such a revolutionary view of prisoners and convicts was largely due to the joint influence of Rousseau, who considered that man's primal innocence was spoilt by civilization, and of Godwin, who held that crime was caused by social oppression. No wonder that Anna Seward, ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, deemed the Botany Bay Eclogues ‘execrable as to moral’, though she thought them ‘poetically good’.²⁵ There is no doubt that at least two poems in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth's ‘The Convict’ and Coleridge's ‘The Dungeon’, were closely associated with Southey's Botany Bay Eclogues. Also Wordsworth's ‘The Female Vagrant’ recalls ‘Elinor’, the first of the four Botany Bay Eclogues. ‘Elinor’, reprinted in 1790 as ‘The Female Convict’, is a dramatic monologue spoken by an outcast wearing ‘the livery of shame’ on the ‘savage shore’ of New South Wales. The heroine explains how she was formerly driven to prostitution by misery in her native England from which she is now separated by thousands of sea miles. In her case, as well as in the case of Frederic, the eponymous hero of Southey's eclogue so entitled, purity lost is partly regained through trust in God's mercy. The theme of purification is treated in almost the same terms in Southey's two blank verse monologues, ‘Elinor’ and ‘Frederic’. While Elinor exclaims:

‘On these wild shores the saving hand of Grace
Will probe my secret soul, and cleanse its wounds,
And fit the faithful penitent for Heaven’

Frederic's final prayer is as follows:

                                                                      ‘O strengthen me,
Eternal One, in this serener state!
Cleanse thou mine heart, so Penitence and Faith
Shall heal my soul, and my last days be peace’.

It is not irrelevant to relate the antimilitarism perceptible in ‘The Female Vagrant’ and in some other poems of the Lyrical Ballads, like ‘Old Man Travelling’, to two of the four Botany Bay Eclogues, ‘Humphrey and William’ and ‘John Samuel and Richard’. In ‘Humphrey and William’, the first of these two dialogues written in heroic couplets, Humphrey tells William, a former peasant, about the circumstances under which he had been selected by the recruiting sergeant and sent into the army where he had led a miserable life. The heavy duties of soldiers and sailors, not even counter-balanced by the slightest touch of glory, form the subject of ‘John, Samuel and Richard’: the protagonists of this eclogue, another dialogue written in heroic couplets, remember their former lives as sailors and soldiers and compare the sufferings they endured in the navy and in the army. In Southey's Botany Bay Eclogues as in some of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, antimilitarism was mainly an extension of humanitarian feelings arising from the French revolutionary ideal.

Such humanitarian concerns as had presided over the composition of the 1794 Botany Bay Eclogues can also be traced in several short poems written by Southey in 1795. ‘The Soldier's Wife’, for instance, stressed the pitiful lot of a woman whose husband was never to come back from the war. The futility and cruelty of wars were exposed in ‘The Soldier's Funeral’, a piece of verse whose antimilitarism foreshadowed Southey's much anthologized ballad ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, first published in The Morning Post on 9 August 1798: a soldier, far from being depicted as a figure of glory, was stigmatized as ‘a mere machine of murder’ wearing ‘the livery of blood’. Naturally the recruiting sergeant was a choice target for the Jacobin poet: in ‘Humphrey and William’, for example, the recruiting sergeant was portrayed with a vigour not unlike Burns's:

A sergeant to the fair recruiting came,
Skill'd in man-catching, to beat up for game;
Our booth he enter'd and sat down by me;
Methinks even now the very scene I see!
The canvas roof, the hogshead's running store,
The old blind fiddler seated next the door,
The frothy tankard passing to and fro,
And the rude rabble round the puppet-show.
The sergeant eyed me well; the punch bowl comes,
And as we laugh'd and drank, up struck the drums.
And now he gives a bumper to his wench,
Then tells the story of his last campaign,
How many wounded and how many slain,
Flags flying, canons roaring, drums a-beating,
The English marching on, the French retreating …

Southey's ‘The Widow’, a poem in Sapphics composed in 1795, tells the story of a woman ‘now by all forsaken’ who dies by the wayside in utter destitution:

Fast o'er the heath a chariot rattled by her,
‘Pity me!’ feebly cried the lonely wanderer;
Pity me, strangers! lest with cold and hunger
                    Here I should perish.
Once I had friends, though now by all foresaken!
Once I had parents, they are now in Heaven!
I had a home once—I had once a husband.
                    Pity me, strangers!
I had a home once—I had once a husband—
I am a widow, poor and broken-hearted!
Loud blew the wind, unheard was her complaining,
                    On drove the chariot.
Then on the snow she laid her down to rest her;
She heard a horseman, ‘Pity me!’ she groan'd out;
Loud was the wind, unheard was her complaining,
                    On went the horseman.
Worn out with anguish, toil and cold and hunger,
Down sunk the Wanderer, sleep had seized her senses;
There did the traveller find her in the morning;
                    God had released her.

Unquestionably the lament of Southey's widow somehow anticipated Wordsworth's ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ in the Lyrical Ballads. The Southey of the Botany Bay Eclogues, of the English Eclogues, of the 1794 slave trade sonnets, and of Joan of Arc did take a prominent part in the movement of poetic renewal which crystallized in, but was not limited to, Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1798 volume of verse.

The humanitarian concerns of Southey's early writings should not be isolated from the political and ideological context of the French Revolution, which had it that every individual ought to recover, within a regenerated society, a form of personal dignity. The revolutionary concept of liberty, so dear to the young Southey, underlies his two Radical ‘dramas’, The Fall of Robespierre and Wat Tyler. The impression derived from The Fall of Robespierre, a crude three-act play no producer had ever dreamt of staging, is a mixed one. Robespierre, presented in act II as ‘an isolated patriot’ and a tragic victim ‘hemmed around / By faction's noisy pack’ (ll. 61-63), more often resembles a blood-thirsty tiger that seems to be sorry for not being even more ruthless. And the fall of ‘the foul arch-tyrant Robespierre’, as Barère puts it, will remain the symbol of an endangered liberty suddenly rescued from the tyranny of a despot. The 9th Thermidor will therefore be remembered as a great date in the history of nations:

For ever hallowed be this glorious day,
When Freedom, bursting her oppressive chain,
Tramples on the oppressor. When the tyrant
Hurl'd from his blood cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann'd for thousands …

(III, 160-65)

Wat Tyler, a play in blank verse like The Fall of Robespierre, which was, in Southey's own words, ‘the work, or rather the sport, of a week in the summer of 1794’,²⁶ deals with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. This ‘dramatic poem’ in three acts is made up of a series of fiery speeches in which the young Radical gave vent to his revolutionary views. Reading Thomas Paine probably led Southey to devote a ‘play’ to the man whom he facetiously called ‘uncle Wat’ because he fancied he was one of his ancestors. Paine, in the second part of The Rights of Man, (edited by H. B. Bonner, London, 1949), stated that Wat Tyler, despite the failure of his rebellion, had put a stop to the gross injustice of taxation in those days: ‘Notwithstanding the sycophancy of historians and men like Mr Burke who seek to gloss over a base action of the court by traducing Tyler, his fame will outlive their falsehood’ (pp. 209-10). Wat Tyler, here quoted from The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London, 1866) is full of invectives against kings, nobles, the high dignitaries of the Church:

What matters me who wears the crown of France?
Whether a Richard or a Charles possess it?
They reap the glory—they enjoy the spoil—
We pay—we bleed! The sun would shine as cheerly,
The rains of Heaven as seasonably fall,
Though neither of these royal pests existed.

(p. 91)

The dramatis personae in Wat Tyler fall into two categories: to the great men of the day (King Richard, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir John Tresilian, Walworth, Philpot) are opposed the rebels (Alice, Piers, Hob Carter, Tom Miller, Jack Straw, and, above all, John Ball and Wat Tyler). Wat Tyler is, from first to last, a straightforward vindication of the threefold revolutionary ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Right from the outset Wat Tyler urges his friends to win by force the liberty they have been dispossessed of by regal tyranny. His declaring ‘Ye are all equal: nature made ye so. / Equality is your birthright’ (p. 94) is clearly an echo of the famous statement ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ in the ‘Declaration of Rights of Man and of Citizen’, the manifesto issued in 1789 by the constituent assembly in the French Revolution, which proclaimed political equality and liberty in its various manifestations. The wording of this major document stating the fundamental principles which inspired the French Revolution is also to be traced in Piers's ‘Equality is the sacred right of man, / Inalienable, though by force withheld’ (p. 97). Alice does not understand that John Ball may have been sent to jail for preaching an ideal of fraternity which she deems highly respectable. ‘I have heard him say that all mankind are brethren, / And that like brethren they should love each other’ (p. 92). The very notion of ‘the people's sovereignty’, which Southey's John Ball takes for granted, obviously has its origin in Rousseau's political philosophy.

I am John Ball, but I am not a rebel.
Take ye the name, who, arrogant in strength,
Rebel against the people's sovereignty.

(p. 98)

Thus the young author of Wat Tyler was caught in the act of ascribing to the leaders of a fourteenth-century peasants' revolt decidedly anachronistic aspirations which were those of the 1789 French Revolutionists. The mediaeval atmosphere is totally lacking in the eight hundred lines or so of Southey's crude poetic drama which is no more than a mere reflection of the French revolutionary ideas and rhetoric that prevailed in the 1790s. One cannot but agree with Edward Dowden who held it that ‘Wat Tyler may serve to warn any young poet of the dangers of making his art a direct vehicle for political doctrine’.²⁷ John Ball's last words recall the concluding lines of Barère's speech at the end of The Fall of Robespierre: ‘The rays of truth shall emanate around, / And the whole world be lighted’ (p. 98). This was the very voice of Southey himself proclaiming to an incredulous world the immense hopes he still set on the French Revolution in 1794. No passage in Wat Tyler is more characteristic than the following dialogue between John Ball and his accuser in act III:

Sir John Tresilian

John Ball, you are accused of stirring up
The poor deluded people to rebellion;
Not having the fear of God and of the King
Before your eyes; of preaching up strange notions,
Heretical and treasonous; such as saying
That kings have not a right from Heaven to govern;
That all mankind are equal; and that rank,
And the distinctions of society,
Ay, and the sacred right of property,
Are evil and oppressive; plead you guilty
To this most heavy charge?

John Ball

                                                                                                              If it be guilt,
To preach what you are pleased to call strange
          notions,
That all mankind as brethren must be equal;
That privileged orders of society
Are evil and oppressive; that the right
Of property is a juggle to deceive
The poor whom you oppress; I plead me guilty.

Southey's dramatic sketch was a hasty, almost spontaneous product of the youthful revolutionary zeal of a propagandist anxious to propagate the new gospel of the Rights of Man. But Coleridge's estimate of Wat Tyler has remained valid: ‘Take four-fifths of the Wat Tyler …,’ Coleridge wrote to T. J. Street on 22 March 1817, ‘—'tis a wretched mess of pig's meat I grant—but yet take it—and reduce it to single assertions. How many of them, think you, would bear denying as truths?’²⁸

The Revolutionary sentiments and rhetoric forming the substance of Wat Tyler are even more conspicuous in Southey's Joan of Arc, a long epic poem whose historical frame is but an excuse for conveying the political ideal of the French Revolution. Joan of Arc, on its first publication in 1796, two years before the appearance of the Lyrical Ballads, had caused a sensation not only at Bristol, where Southey's early poetical productions had been favourably received, but also in London. As Southey himself later explained in the preface to the 1837 edition of Joan of Arc,

the chief cause of its favourable reception was, that it was written in a republican spirit, such as may be easily accounted for in a youth whose notions of liberty were taken from the Greek and Roman writers, and who was ignorant enough of history and of human nature to believe, that a happier order of things had commenced with the independence of the United States, and would be accelerated by the French Revolution. Such opinions were then as unpopular in England as they deserved to be; but they were cherished by most of the critical journals, and conciliated for me the goodwill of some of the most influential writers who were at that time engaged in periodical literature, though I was personally unknown to them. They bestowed upon the poem abundant praise, passed over most of its manifold faults and noticed others with indulgence.²⁹

Indeed laudatory reviews of that crude revolutionary poem, remarkable for its decidedly romantic ardour and the real vigour of its inspiration, had appeared in several radical periodicals such as The Analytical Review, The Critical, or The Monthly. Conversely, Southey's championing of the French Revolution through a would-be historical epic called down on him the wrath of The Anti-Jacobin. That was probably the reason why Southey, in the second version of Joan of Arc published in 1798, endeavoured somehow to tone down the political significance of his epic by adding to the text a great many historical notes likely, so Southey thought, to blur the revolutionary ardour of the 1796 edition. This is not to say that Southey's radical enthusiasm had disappeared from the text of the 1798 version. In the revised version of Joan of Arc, published in 1837 in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected by Himself, the Revolutionary proselytism that had presided over the composition of the poem was considerably muffled. Therefore only the first two editions of Joan of Arc, published respectively in 1796 and 1798, will be considered here.

Southey's Joan of Arc closes with the coronation of Charles VII in Rheims. Such an episode corresponds to the human triumph of the Maid of Orleans. The young poet did not exploit the heroine's final martyrdom in Rouen.³⁰ De Quincey deplored this shortcoming of Joan of Arc:

The heroine of Southey is made to close her career precisely at the point when its grandeur commences. With [the] coronation her triumph, in the plain historical sense, ended. And there ends Southey's poem. But exactly at this point the grander stage of her mission commences, viz, the ransom which she, a solitary girl, paid in her own person for the national deliverance. The grander half of the story was thus sacrificed, as being irrelevant to Southey's political object.³¹

As a matter of fact the Radical author of Joan of Arc was far less interested in the individual destiny of Joan than in the political connotations of her military adventure. Southey was not much concerned with Joan's personal fate. The French heroine mainly appealed to him in so far as she embodied in his eyes an ideal of liberty which was precisely that of the 1790s. So long as Joan of Arc fights to help her country recover its liberty, Southey narrates her career. But once the English have been driven out of France Joan's mission is over. The coronation of King Charles VII in Rheims is presented by Southey as the symbol of a whole people's regeneration. The last three lines of Joan of Arc, suppressed from the 1837 edition, illuminate the author's intentions:

                                                                                                    Thus the Maid
Redeemed her country. Ever may the All-Just
Give to the arms of Freedom such success.(32)

In Southey's first epic the past is little more than an excuse for illustrating the present. The narrative of Joan's life is a structural device through which a young Radical poet voices his republicanism inherited from the French Revolutionists. Southey's Joan of Arc should be paralleled with an American poem, The Columbiad by Joel Barlow. A first draft of The Columbiad, whose final version was published in Philadelphia in 1807, had appeared in 1787 under the title The Vision of Columbus. Although Columbus is the eponymous hero, Barlow's poem is filled with the events of the American War of Independence and the republican sentiments of the author, who lived in Paris in the days of the Revolution. In a vision revealed to him by a radiant seraph, Columbus sees the glorious future of America, where good morals, political harmony, and peace are founded on republican principles. Similarly Book III of Joan of Arc contains a straightforward reference to Brissot and Mme Roland, regarded by Southey as blameless martyrs of the Revolution. Mentioning Paris, the poet exclaims:

                                                                      Ill-fated scene!
Thro' many a dark age drenched with innocent blood,
And one day doom'd to know the damning guilt
Of Brissot murder'd and the blameless wife
Of Roland! Martyr'd patriots, spirits pure,
Wept by the good ye fell! Yet still survives,
Sown by your toil, and by your blood manur'd
The imperishable seed; and now its roots
Spread and strike deep, and soon shall it become
That Tree beneath whose shade the Sons of Men
Shall pitch their tents in peace.(33)

In Joan of Arc, as in The Columbiad, the political theories in vogue encroach upon the historical theme. The Genii that reveal to Columbus the vision of the future are fully acquainted with the doctrine of the Rights of Man. Joan of Arc and Conrade are clearly Southey's mouthpieces in denouncing social injustice and oppression:

                                                                                O groves and woodland shades
How blest indeed were you, if the iron rod
Should one day from Oppression's hand be wrenched
By everlasting Justice! come that hour
When in the Sun the Angel of the Lord
Shall stand and cry to all the fowls of Heaven,
‘Gather ye to the supper of your God,
That ye may eat the flesh of mighty men,
Of Captains and of Kings!’ Then shall be peace
When … author of all ills that flesh endures,
Oppression, in the bottomless abyss
Shall fall to rise no more!(34)

The virulent tone of the author of Wat Tyler is perceptible in Conrade's or Theodore's diatribes against kings, courtiers, and bishops:

The train of courtiers, summer-flies that sport
In the sun-beam of favour, insects sprung
From the court dunghill, greedy blood-suckers,
The foul corruption-gender'd swarm of state.(35)

When the young Shelley, in Queen Mab (1813), holds up kings, statesmen and priests to public obloquy, he does no more than echo, if not literally, at least in spirit, the invectives directed against the mighty men of this world in Southey's Joan of Arc. A tirade like the following is too reminiscent of Southey's radicalism in Joan of Arc for the resemblance to be merely accidental:

War is the stateman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade,
And, to those royal murderers, whose mean thrones
Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore,
They bread they eat, the staff on which they lean.(36)

It was as a political manifesto that Joan of Arc, a romantic, sentimental, and revolutionary epic, made a splash on its first publication. The very fact that an English poet could with impunity adopt as the heroine of an English epic a foreign girl formerly portrayed by Shakespeare as a sorceress was most significant and clearly showed where Southey's sympathies lay. No wonder that Anna Seward complained that Joan of Arc ‘seeks to brand, with deepest stains of injustice and cruelty, the memory of our gallant Henry V and turn to deadliest aconite the laurels of Agincourt! It defames the English character in general, stigmatizes our constitution, and deifies the Moloch spirit of that of France.’³⁷ Undoubtedly Joan of Arc was intended by its author as a provocative work. Southey, yielding to his enthusiasm for the republicanism of the French Revolution, did not fear to repudiate his own country for the sake of a foreign nation that boasted of heralding an era of liberty, equality and fraternity. So he presented the Maid of Orelans as the embodiment of France proclaiming to the world her right to national independence. A more thorough rehabilitation of Joan could hardly be imagined. It was in the somewhat naive audacity of a young Radical writing under the guise of mediaeval history a poem extolling Revolutionary France that the most plausible explanation for the contemporary success of Joan of Arc was to be looked for. The trouble is that Southey's Joan is less a character than a rhetorical symbol conveying the author's current political views. Coleridge was right to remark in the margin of his copy of the first edition of Joan of Arc ‘How grossly unnatural an anachronism thus to transmogrify the fanatic votary of the Virgin into a Tom Paine in petticoats, a novel-palming proselyte of the Age of Reason.’³⁸ Although her feats of arms result in the coronation of a king, Joan is indeed a republican heroine. On 14 July 1793 Southey wrote to Grosvenor Charles Beford: ‘Vive la République! my Joan is a great democrat or rather will be.’³⁹

By 1796, the year when Joan of Arc was first published, Southey, matured by a six-month visit to Portugal, had already lost much of his former revolutionary ardour. Southey's poems composed after 1796 testify to a renewal of poetic inspiration: political concerns no longer stood in the foreground and were being superseded by moral or purely literary purposes In his Inscriptions, as in his English Eclogues or his Ballads and Metrical Tales Southey aimed at being more of a poet than a proselyte. The Inscriptions some of which were composed in 1796, fairly well illustrated Southey's switch from revolutionary extremism to moderate political opinions: the twenty-two-year-old poet had not renounced his ideal of justice and liberty but was now reconciled with his own country. In ‘Epitaph on King John’ Southey exhorted his fellow contrymen not to blame the father of Magna Carta too hastily:

                                                                                Englishman,
Curse not his memory. Murderer as he was,
Coward and slave, yet he it was who sign'd
That Charter which should make thee morn and night
Be thankful for thy birth-place …(40)

Thus the pro-French democrat had been changed into an English patriot. From his former revolutionary ardour there remained in him only an indestructible love of liberty. This, however, should not obliterate the historical importance of Southey's early writings as a factor in the emergence of English Romantic poetry. Literary historians too often forget that Joan of Arc, two years before the Lyrical Ballads, heralded the dawn of the Romantic ‘school’ of poetry.

Notes

1. See F. T. Hoadley, ‘The Controversy over Southey's Wat Tyler’, Studies in Philology, 38 (1941), 81-96. Hoadley is right in asserting that ‘had [Wat Tyler] been published at the time of its composition in 1794, it would have been lost in a mass of other revolutionary literature. In1817, however, the cycle of years had reached that point where few men—least of all, Southey himself—tolerated new ideas and unconventional thinking. Thus a ridiculously juvenile work, which in an earlier day, would have been laughed at, became a storm centre in 1817.’

2. Byron, Letters and Journals, edited by Prothero, 6 vols (London, 1922), IV, 117-18.

3. Selections from the Anti-Jacobin, edited by L. Sanders (London, 1904), p. 4. George Canning made himself famous through his well-known parody of Southey's poem ‘The Widow’ entitled ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’.

4. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, edited by C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849-50), III, 325 (cited hereafter as Life and Correspondence).

5. Life and Correspondence, I, 27.

6. G. Carnall, Robert Southey and his Age (Oxford, 1960), p. 14.

7. Bodleian MS. Eng. misc. e 114 (41386).

8. Bodleian MS Eng. misc. e 114, f. 180.

9. W. Hazlitt, Works, edited by A. R. Waller and A. Glover, 8 vols (1902-06), IV, 237.

10. See J. Simmons, Southey (London, 1945), p. 27.

11. Life and Correspondence, I, 170.

12. Bodleian MS English Letters, c. 22, f. 49.

13. The Prelude, X, (1850 edition), 283.

14. Bodleian MS English Letters, c. 22, f. 72.

15. Life and Correspondence, I, 198.

16. New Letters of Robert Southey, edited by Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London, 1965) I, 33 (cited hereafter as New Letters). Southey quotes from Rousseau's French in his letter to Bedford. The English translation is Curry's.

17. Life and Correspondence, I, 189.

18. Life and Correspondence, I, 189-190.

19. Life and Correspondence, I, 194.

20. ‘The frequent and careful study of Godwin was of essential service. I read and all but worshipped. I have since seen his fundamental error,—that he theorises for another state, not for the rule of conduct in the present’ (Life and Correspondence, I, 247).

21. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, edited by J. W. Warter, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, 23 (cited hereafter as Selections).

22. Life and Correspondence, I, 275.

23. Life and Correspondence, I, 271.

24. Bodleian MSS. English Letters, c. 22, f. 194.

25. Letters of Anna Seward: written between the years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1811), IV, 330 (cited hereafter as Letters).

26. Life and Correspondence, IV, 241.

27. E. Dowden, The French Revolution and English Literature (London, 1897), pp. 162-63.

28. Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E. L. Griggs, 2 vols (London, 1932), II, 194.

29. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London, 1837-38), I, xxix-xxx.

30. Southey actually thought of writing a sequel to his epic Joan of Arc in the form of a tragedy which would have been entitled The Martyrdom of Joan of Arc. In a letter to C. W. W. Wynn dated 19 July 1797, Southey wrote: ‘The Maids martyrdom seems almost a necessary supplement to the poem, and the subject suits me’ (New Letters, I, 137). But the contemplated tragedy, though actually begun, was rapidly given up.

31. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, edited by D. Masson, 10 vols (Edinburgh, 1890), V, 241-42.

32. Joan of Arc, an Epic poem, 2 vols (Bristol, 1798), II, 271.

33. Ibid., I, 181-82.

34. Joan of Arc, an Epic Poem (Bristol, 1796), book V, 469-80. The fall of Oppression ‘in the bottomless abyss’ (Southey's Joan of Arc) somehow anticipates Jupiter's fall through ‘the bottomless void’ in act III, scene I of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The image in either poem is probably of Miltonic origin. But Shelley's reading and liking Southey's Joan of Arc is an ascertained fact (see The Letters of P. B. Shelley, edited by R. Ingpen (London, 1909), p. 120).

35. Book IV, 89-92.

36. Queen Mab, IV, 168-72. On the possible influence of Southey's Joan of Arc on Queen Mab see Jean Raimond, Robert Southey. L'homme et son temps. L'oeuvre. Le rôle. (Paris, 1968), pp. 547-48.

37. Anna Seward to Miss Arden, 17 December, 1796, in Letters, IV, 290.

38. Quoted in The North British Review, 40 (1864), p. 83. Coleridge's remark, written with a red pencil, found at p. 110 of the copy of Joan of Arc in the maiden's speech, beginning—

                                                                                    ‘Father,
    In forest shade my infant years trained up,
    Knew not devotion's forms’, etc.

39. New Letters, I, 29.

40. Inscriptions, X, 4-8. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London, 1866), p. 171.