Telling Stories: Southey and Romantic Narrative

Abstract

In Francis Jeffrey's piece on Thalaba Destroyer for Edinburgh Review (October. 1802), he infamously designated Southey as belonging to sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years. The practices of this sect show, in Jeffrey's words, that they are dissenters from established systems in poetry and criticism (Madden 68). is not difficult to convert Jeffrey's via media put-down into spirited, anti-Establishment praise for Southeyan non-conformism, even if one should think of 1790s Southey as being with Coleridge what Daniel E. White calls kind of dissenter from Dissent (White 155). But implications of dissent aesthetically, what it implies for handling of genre and conduct of narrative, deserve attention, too, during current revival of Southey's fortunes. Hostile critics are often most involuntarily perceptive. Leavis notes that is certainly a sense in which Shelley's poetry is peculiarly emotional, and when we try to define this sense we find ourselves invoking an absence of something (Leavis 194), scarcely aware that in doing so he has offered a key to explaining poetry's elusive, haunting power. Southey's own gibe at The Rime of She Ancyent Marinere as Dutch attempt at German sublimity turns out, as Seamus Perry has argued, to be a mean-spirited and unintentionally illuminating expression of tension ... between diversitarian attention to minute particulars and unifying ambitions of gathering consciousness (Perry 290) typical of Coleridge's self-divided, doubling genius. Jeffrey himself takes us close to centre of Southey's peculiar but real distinction as a poet of narrative and romance when he writes of poet and his tribe: is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought ... all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit. He goes on to generalize that It is delightful, now and then, to meet with a rugged mountain, or a roaring stream; but where there is no sunny slope, nor shaded plain, to relieve them--where all is beetling cliff and yawning abyss, and landscape presents nothing on every side but prodigies and terrors--the head is apt to grow giddy, and heart to languish for repose and security of a less elevated region (Madden 75). Jeffrey aligns Southey's narrative landscapes with scenes from Hamlet and Gothic novel, thus exposing fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in reviewer's philosophy and involuntarily demonstrating Southey's narrative commerce with realities in which fantastical has its reasons that reason cannot know. Jeffrey contrives, too, to bring out controlled, driving relentlessness of verse. Thalaba obeys, as Herbert Tucker has shown, the operation of a plot that has been looped all along in gyres of self-fulfilling prophecy (Tucker 88), a plot obedient to moral spelled out at start of Book 11: O fool to think thy human hand Could check chariot-wheels of Destiny! To dream of weakness in all-knowing Mind That his decrees should change! To hope that united Powers Of Earth, and Air, and Hell, Might blot one letter from Book of Fate ... (Thalaba, book 11, lines 1-7) Thalaba Destroyer--of evil--is pure will and pure passivity; he has become his avenging function. And yet steely white light of his progress through poem continually plays against variety of seeming accidents. Spenser is a forerunner here. But Spenser's poetry of encounter--the Red-Crosse Knight's encounter with Despair, for example--dallies, dwells, delves, and deepens. Despair finds a language for promptings in Knight himself. What seems like an external enemy turns out to be a powerful inward impulse. Allegory finds its spiritual and psychological voice and entwines itself with existential reality. …