![miles in the company of Mr. Wordsworth, consequently (for this was
in 1805) during two nights and two days, doubtless you must have
heard many profound remarks that would inevitably fall from his
lips." Nay, Coleridge had also been of the party; and, if Wordsworth
solus could have been dull, was it within human possibilities that
these gemini should have been so? "Was it possible?" I said; and
perhaps my donkey, who looked like one that had been
immoderately threatened, at last took courage; his eye brightened;
and he intimated that he did remember something that Wordsworth
had said—an "observe," as the Scotch call it.
"Ay, indeed; and what was it now? What did the great man say?"
"Why, sir, in fact, and to make a long story short, on coming near to
London, we breakfasted at Baldock—you know Baldock? It's in
Hertfordshire. Well, now, sir, would you believe it, though we were
quite in regular time, the breakfast was precisely good for nothing?"
"And Wordsworth?"
"He observed——"
"What did he observe?"
"That the buttered toast looked, for all the world, as if it had been
soaked in hot water."
Ye heavens! "buttered toast!" And was it this I waited for? Now,
thought I, had Henry Mackenzie been breakfasting with Wordsworth
at Baldock (and, strange enough! in years to come I did breakfast
with Henry Mackenzie, for the solitary time I ever met him, and at
Wordsworth's house in Rydal), he would have carried off one sole
reminiscence from the meeting—namely, a confirmation of his creed,
that we English are all dedicated, from our very cradle, to the
luxuries of the palate, and peculiarly to this.[129]
Proh pudor! Yet, in
sad sincerity, Wordsworth's pencil-notices in books were quite as
disappointing. In "Roderick Random," for example, I found a note
upon a certain luscious description, to the effect that "such things](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-22-320.jpg)
![should be left to the imagination of the reader—not expressed." In
another place, that it was "improper"; and, in a third, that "the
principle laid down was doubtful," or, as Sir Roger de Coverley
observes, "that much might be said on both sides." All this, however,
indicates nothing more than that different men require to be roused
by different stimulants. Wordsworth, in his marginal notes, thought
of nothing but delivering himself of a strong feeling, with which he
wished to challenge the reader's sympathy. Coleridge imagined an
audience before him; and, however doubtful that consummation
might seem, I am satisfied that he never wrote a line for which he
did not feel the momentary inspiration of sympathy and applause,
under the confidence, that, sooner or later, all which he had
committed to the chance margins of books would converge and
assemble in some common reservoir of reception. Bread scattered
upon the water will be gathered after many days. This, perhaps, was
the consolation that supported him; and the prospect that, for a
time, his Arethusa of truth would flow underground, did not,
perhaps, disturb, but rather cheered and elevated, the sublime old
somnambulist.[130]
Meantime, Wordsworth's habits of using books—
which, I am satisfied, would, in those days, alone have kept him at a
distance from most men with fine libraries—were not vulgar; not the
habits of those who turn over the page by means of a wet finger
(though even this abomination I have seen perpetrated by a
Cambridge tutor and fellow of a college; but then he had been bred
up as a ploughman, and the son of a ploughman): no; but his habits
were more properly barbarous and licentious, and in the spirit of
audacity belonging de jure to no man but him who could plead an
income of four or five hundred thousand per annum, and to whom
the Bodleian or the Vatican would be a three years' purchase. Gross,
meantime, was his delusion upon this subject. Himself he regarded
as the golden mean between the too little and the too much of care
for books; and, as it happened that every one of his friends far
exceeded him in this point, curiously felicitous was the explanation
which he gave of this superfluous care, so as to bring it within the
natural operation of some known fact in the man's peculiar situation.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-23-320.jpg)
![everything. It moved the sneers of some people, that even his
poetry was composed according to a predetermined rule; that so
many lines should be produced, by contract, as it were, before
breakfast; so many at such another definite interval. And I
acknowledge that so far I went along with the sneerers as to marvel
exceedingly how that could be possible. But, if a priori one laughed
and expected to see verses corresponding to this mechanic rule of
construction, a posteriori one was bound to judge of the verses as
one found them. Supposing them good, they were entitled to
honour, no matter for the previous reasons which made it possible
that they would not be good. And generally, however undoubtedly
they ought to have been bad, the world has pronounced them good.
In fact, they are good; and the sole objection to them is, that they
are too intensely objective—too much reflect the mind, as spreading
itself out upon external things—too little exhibit the mind as
introverting itself upon its own thoughts and feelings. This, however,
is an objection which only seems to limit the range of the poetry—
and all poetry is limited in its range: none comprehends more than a
section of the human power.
Meantime, the prose of Southey was that by which he lived. The
Quarterly Review it was by which, as he expressed it to myself in
1810, he "made the pot boil."[131]
About the same time, possibly as
early as 1808 (for I think that I remember in that Journal an account
of the Battle of Vimiera), Southey was engaged by an Edinburgh
publisher (Constable, was it not?) to write the entire historical part
of the Edinburgh Annual Register, at a salary of £400 per annum.
Afterwards, the publisher, who was intensely national, and,
doubtless, never from the first cordially relished the notion of
importing English aid into a city teeming with briefless barristers and
variety of talent, threw out a hint that perhaps he might reduce the
salary to £300. Just about this time I happened to see Southey, who
said laughingly—"If the man of Edinburgh does this, I shall strike for
an advance of wages." I presume that he did strike, and, like many
other "operatives," without effect. Those who work for lower wages
during a strike are called snobs,[132]
the men who stand out being](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-26-320.jpg)
![nobs. Southey became a resolute nob; but some snob was found in
Edinburgh, some youthful advocate, who accepted £300 per annum,
and thenceforward Southey lost this part of his income. I once
possessed the whole work: and in one part, viz. the Domestic
Chronicle, I know that it is executed with a most culpable
carelessness—the beginnings of cases being given without the ends,
the ends without the beginnings—a defect but too common in public
journals. The credit of the work, however, was staked upon its
treatment of the current public history of Europe, and the tone of its
politics in times so full of agitation, and teeming with new births in
every year, some fated to prove abortive, but others bearing golden
promises for the human race. Now, whatever might be the talent
with which Southey's successor performed his duty, there was a loss
in one point for which no talent of mere execution could make
amends. The very prejudices of Southey tended to unity of feeling:
they were in harmony with each other, and grew out of a strong
moral feeling, which is the one sole secret for giving interest to an
historical narration, fusing the incoherent details into one body, and
carrying the reader fluently along the else monotonous recurrences
and unmeaning details of military movements.
Well or ill directed, a strong moral feeling, and a profound sympathy
with elementary justice, is that which creates a soul under what else
may well be denominated, Miltonically, "the ribs of death." Now this,
and a mind already made up even to obstinacy upon all public
questions, were the peculiar qualifications which Southey brought to
the task—qualifications not to be bought in any market, not to be
compensated by any amount of mere intellectual talent, and almost
impossible as the qualifications of a much younger man.[133]
As a pecuniary loss, though considerable, Southey was not unable to
support it; for he had a pension from Government before this time,
and under the following circumstances:—Charles Wynne, the brother
of Sir Watkin, the great autocrat of North Wales—that C. W. who is
almost equally well known for his knowledge of Parliamentary usage,
which pointed him out to the notice of the House as an eligible](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-27-320.jpg)
![person to fill the office of Speaker, and for his unfortunately shrill
voice, which chiefly it was that defeated his claim[134]
—(in fact, as is
universally known, his brother and he, for different defects of voice
and utterance, are called Bubble and Squeak)—this C. W. had
believed himself to have been deeply indebted to Southey's high-
toned moral example, and to his wise counsels, during the time
when both were students at Oxford, for the fortunate direction given
to his own wavering impulses. This sense of obligation he
endeavoured to express by settling a pension upon Southey from his
own funds. At length, upon the death of Mr. Pitt, early in 1806, an
opening was made for the Fox and Grenville parties to come into
office. Charles Wynne, as a person connected by marriage with the
house of Grenville, and united with them in political opinions, shared
in the golden shower; he also received a place; and, upon the
strength of his improving prospects, he married: upon which it
occurred to Southey, that it was no longer right to tax the funds of
one who was now called upon to support an establishment
becoming his rank. Under that impression he threw up his pension;
and upon their part, to express their sense of what they considered
a delicate and honourable sacrifice, the Grenvilles placed Southey
upon the national pension list.
What might be the exact colour of Southey's political creed in this
year, 1807, it is difficult to say. The great revolution, in his way of
thinking upon such subjects, with which he has been so often
upbraided as something equal in delinquency to a deliberate
tergiversation or moral apostasy, could not have then taken place;
and of this I am sure, from the following little anecdote connected
with this visit:—On the day after my own arrival at Greta Hall, came
Wordsworth following upon my steps from Penrith. We dined and
passed that evening with Mr. Southey. The next morning, after
breakfast, previously to leaving Keswick, we were sitting in Southey's
library; and he was discussing with Wordsworth the aspect of public
affairs: for my part, I was far too diffident to take any part in such a
conversation, for I had no opinions at all upon politics, nor any
interest in public affairs, further than that I had a keen sympathy](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-28-320.jpg)
![with the national honour, gloried in the name of Englishman, and
had been bred up in a frenzied horror of jacobinism. Not having
been old enough, at the first outbreak of the French Revolution, to
participate (as else, undoubtedly, I should have done) in the golden
hopes of its early dawn, my first youthful introduction to foreign
politics had been in seasons and circumstances that taught me to
approve of all I heard in abhorrence of French excesses, and to
worship the name of Pitt; otherwise my whole heart had been so
steadily fixed on a different world from the world of our daily
experience, that, for some years, I had never looked into a
newspaper; nor, if I cared something for the movement made by
nations from year to year, did I care one iota for their movement
from week to week. Still, careless as I was on these subjects, it
sounded as a novelty to me, and one which I had not dreamed of as
a possibility, to hear men of education and liberal pursuits—men,
besides, whom I regarded as so elevated in mind, and one of them
as a person charmed and consecrated from error—giving utterance
to sentiments which seemed absolutely disloyal. Yet now did I hear—
and I heard with an emotion of sorrow, but a sorrow that instantly
gave way to a conviction that it was myself who lay under a
delusion, and simply because
----"from Abelard it came"—
opinions avowed most hostile to the reigning family; not personally
to them, but generally to a monarchical form of government. And
that I could not be mistaken in my impression, that my memory
cannot have played me false, is evident, from one relic of the
conversation which rested upon my ear, and has survived to this day
[1839]—thirty and two years from the time. It had been agreed, that
no good was to be hoped for, as respected England, until the royal
family should be expatriated; and Southey, jestingly considering to
what country they could be exiled, with mutual benefit for that
country and themselves, had supposed the case—that, with a large
allowance of money, such as might stimulate beneficially the
industry of a rising colony, they should be transported to New South](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-29-320.jpg)
![except for the occasional excursions in summer (extorted from his
sense of kindness and hospitality), as that of a city tailor. And it was
surprising to many people, who did not know by experience the
prodigious effect upon the mere bodily health of regular and
congenial mental labour, that Southey should be able to maintain
health so regular, and cheerfulness so uniformly serene. Cheerful,
however, he was, in those early years of my acquaintance with him;
but it was manifest to a thoughtful observer that his golden
equanimity was bound up in a threefold chain,—in a conscience clear
of all offence, in the recurring enjoyments from his honourable
industry, and in the gratification of his parental affections. If any one
cord should give way, there (it seemed) would be an end to
Southey's tranquillity. He had a son at that time, Herbert[135]
Southey, a child in petticoats when I first knew him, very interesting
even then, but annually putting forth fresh blossoms of unusual
promise, that made even indifferent people fear for the safety of one
so finely organized, so delicate in his sensibilities, and so
prematurely accomplished. As to his father, it became evident that
he lived almost in the light of young Herbert's smiles, and that the
very pulses of his heart played in unison to the sound of his son's
laughter. There was in his manner towards this child, and towards
this only, something that marked an excess of delirious doating,
perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movements of Southey's
affections; and something also which indicated a vague fear about
him; a premature unhappiness, as if already the inaudible tread of
calamity could be perceived, as if already he had lost him; which, for
the latter years of the boy's life, seemed to poison the blessing of his
presence.
A stronger evidence I cannot give of Southey's trembling
apprehensiveness about this child than that the only rude thing I
ever knew him to do, the only discourteous thing, was done on his
account. A party of us, chiefly composed of Southey's family and his
visitors, were in a sailboat upon the lake. Herbert was one of this
party; and at that time not above five or six years old. In landing
upon one of the islands, most of the gentlemen were occupied in](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-37-320.jpg)
![disease gradually developed itself in the heart. It was not a mere
disorder in the functions, it was a disease in the structure of the
organ, and admitted of no permanent relief, consequently of no final
hope. He died[136]
; and with him died for ever the golden hopes, the
radiant felicity, and the internal serenity, of the unhappy father. It
was from Southey himself, speaking without external signs of
agitation, calmly, dispassionately, almost coldly, but with the
coldness of a settled despondency, that I heard, whilst
accompanying him through Grasmere on his road homewards to
Keswick from some visit he had been paying to Wordsworth at Rydal
Mount, his settled feelings and convictions as connected with that
loss. For him, in this world, he said, happiness there could be none;
for his tenderest affections, the very deepest by many degrees which
he had ever known, were now buried in the grave with his youthful
and too brilliant Herbert!
SOUTHEY AND THE EDINBURGH ANNUAL
REGISTER
De Quincey's recollection of the Edinburgh Annual Register in
connexion with Southey is altogether erroneous. Though there had
been a project of some periodical of the kind by the Constable
publishing house as early as 1807, the enterprise was not started till
1809, and then not by Constable at all, but actually in opposition to
Constable by the new Edinburgh publishing house of John
Ballantyne,—or rather, one might say, of Scott and Ballantyne, for
Scott (secretly Ballantyne's partner already for a long while in his
printing business) was Ballantyne's real backer and principal in the
whole of this new concern. In a letter of Scott's to his friend Merritt,
of date 14th January 1809, after announcing the great fact that a
Quarterly Review was forthcoming to counteract the Edinburgh, he
adds:—"Then, sir, to turn the flank of Messrs. Constable and Co., and
to avenge myself of certain impertinences which, in the vehemence
of their Whiggery, they have dared to indulge in towards me, I have](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-39-320.jpg)
![prepared to start against them at Whitsunday first the celebrated
printer Ballantyne, with a long purse ['the purse was, alas! Scott's
own,' Lockhart notes at this point] and a sound political creed, not to
mention an alliance offensive and defensive with young John Murray
of Fleet Street, the most enlightened and active of the London trade.
By this means I hope to counterbalance the predominating influence
of Constable and Co., who at present have it in their power and
inclination to forward or suppress any book as they approve or
dislike its political tendency. Lastly, I have caused the said Ballantyne
to venture upon an Edinburgh Annual Register, of which I send you
a prospectus. I intend to help him myself as far as time will admit,
and hope to procure him many respectable coadjutors." In another
letter, written just a fortnight previously, Scott had broached the
subject of the new Annual Register to his friend Kirkpatrick Sharpe,
intimating that, though Ballantyne would be the managing editor,
with himself for the real editor in the background, all the more
important contributions would be from selected hands, and that, as
the historical department was the most important,—a luminous
picture of the current events of the world from year to year being "a
task for a man of genius,"—they proposed to give their "historian"
£300 a year,—"no deaf nuts," adds Scott, in comment on the sum. A
certain eminent person had already been offered the post, Scott
proceeds; but, should "the great man" decline, would Kirkpatrick
Sharpe himself accept it? The "great man" was Southey; he did
accept; and for some years he had the accredited charge of the
historical department of the Register. From the first, however, the
venture did not pay; and, the loss upon it having gone on for some
time at the rate of £1000 a year, Scott,—who had been tending to a
reconciliation with Constable on other grounds,—was glad when, in
1813, Constable took a portion of the burden of the concern off his
hands. It is possible that this accession of Constable to a share in
the management, and some consequent retrenchment of expenses,
may have had something to do with Southey's resignation of his
connexion with the Register. Not, however, till 1815, if we may trust
Lockhart's dating, did that resignation take place,—for, in Lockhart's
narrative for the following year, 1816, where he notes that Scott had](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-40-320.jpg)
![CHAPTER V
THE LAKE POETS: SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH,
AND COLERIDGE[137]
A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to every eye
the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and
would not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the
insignificant place and consideration allowed to the small book-
collection of the former, contrasted with the splendid library of the
latter. The two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a
little, homely, painted book-case, fixed into one of two shallow
recesses, formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of
the chimney in the little sitting-room up stairs which he had already
described as his half kitchen and half parlour. They were ill bound, or
not bound at all—in boards, sometimes in tatters; many were
imperfect as to the number of volumes, mutilated as to the number
of pages; sometimes, where it seemed worth while, the defects
being supplied by manuscript; sometimes not: in short, everything
showed that the books were for use, and not for show; and their
limited amount showed that their possessor must have independent
sources of enjoyment to fill up the major part of his time. In reality,
when the weather was tolerable, I believe that Wordsworth rarely
resorted to his books (unless, perhaps, to some little pocket edition
of a poet which accompanied him in his rambles) except in the
evenings, or after he had tired himself by walking. On the other](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-42-320.jpg)
![hand, Southey's collection occupied a separate room, the largest,
and every way the most agreeable in the house; and this room was
styled, and not ostentatiously (for it really merited that name), the
Library. The house itself, Greta Hall, stood upon a little eminence (as
I have before mentioned), overhanging the river Greta. There was
nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements. In all respects it
was a very plain, unadorned family dwelling: large enough, by a little
contrivance, to accommodate two, or, in some sense, three families,
viz. Mr. Southey and his family, Mr. Coleridge and his, together with
Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to
compose a third. Mrs. Coleridge, Mrs. Southey, and Mrs. Lovell were
sisters; all having come originally from Bristol; and, as the different
sets of children in this one house had each three several aunts, all
the ladies, by turns, assuming that relation twice over, it was one of
Southey's many amusing jests, to call the hill on which Greta Hall
was placed the ant-hill. Mrs. Lovell was the widow of Mr. Robert
Lovell, who had published a volume of poems, in conjunction with
Southey, somewhere about the year 1797, under the signatures of
Bion and Moschus. This lady, having only one son, did not require
any large suite of rooms; and the less so, as her son quitted her at
an early age, to pursue a professional education. The house had,
therefore, been divided (not by absolute partition into two
distinct[138]
apartments, but by an amicable distribution of rooms)
between the two families of Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey; Mr.
Coleridge had a separate study, which was distinguished by nothing
except by an organ amongst its furniture, and by a magnificent view
from its window (or windows), if that could be considered a
distinction in a situation whose local necessities presented you with
magnificent objects in whatever direction you might happen to turn
your eyes.
In the morning, the two families might live apart; but they met at
dinner, and in a common drawing-room; and Southey's library, in
both senses of the word, was placed at the service of all the ladies
alike. However, they did not intrude upon him, except in cases where
they wished for a larger reception room, or a more interesting place](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-43-320.jpg)
![Catchedicam,"—this congregation of hill and lake, so wide, and yet
so prison-like in its separation from all beyond it, lay for ever under
the eyes of Southey. His position locally, and, in some respects,
intellectually, reminded one of Gibbon: but with great advantage in
the comparison to Southey. The little town of Keswick and its
adjacent lake bore something of the same relation to mighty London
that Geneva and its lake may be thought to bear towards brilliant
Paris. Southey, like Gibbon, was a miscellaneous scholar; he, like
Gibbon, of vast historical research; he, like Gibbon, signally
industrious, and patient, and elaborate in collecting the materials for
his historical works. Like Gibbon, he had dedicated a life of
competent ease, in a pecuniary sense, to literature; like Gibbon, he
had gathered to the shores of a beautiful lake, remote from great
capitals, a large, or, at least, sufficient library (in each case, I
believe, the library ranged, as to numerical amount, between seven
and ten thousand); and, like Gibbon, he was the most accomplished
littérateur amongst the erudite scholars of his time, and the most of
an erudite scholar amongst the accomplished littérateurs. After all
these points of agreement known, it remains as a pure advantage on
the side of Southey—a mere lucro ponatur—that he was a poet; and,
by all men's confession, a respectable poet, brilliant in his descriptive
powers, and fascinating in his narration, however much he might
want of
"The vision and the faculty divine."
It is remarkable amongst the series of parallelisms that have been or
might be pursued between two men, that both had the honour of
retreating from a parliamentary life[139]
; Gibbon, after some silent
and inert experience of that warfare; Southey, with a prudent
foresight of the ruin to his health and literary usefulness, won from
the experience of his nearest friends.
I took leave of Southey in 1807, at the descent into the vale of
Legbesthwaite, as I have already noticed. One year afterwards, I](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-45-320.jpg)
![the world, hardly less familiar, with respect to Southey himself and
his accomplishments. Probably, with respect to the first, before this
paper will be made public, I shall have sufficiently vindicated my
own opinions in these matters by a distinct treatment of some great
questions which lie at the base of all sound political economy; above
all, the radical question of value, upon which no man has ever seen
the full truth except Mr. Ricardo; and, unfortunately, he had but little
of the polemic[140]
skill which is required to meet the errors of his
opponents. For it is noticeable that the most conspicuous of those
opponents, viz. Mr. Malthus, though too much, I fear, actuated by a
spirit of jealousy, and therefore likely enough to have scattered
sophistry and disingenuous quibbling over the subject, had no need
whatever of any further confusion for darkening and perplexing his
themes than what inevitably belonged to his own most chaotic
understanding. He and Say, the Frenchman, were both plagued by
understandings of the same quality—having a clear vision in shallow
waters, and this misleading them into the belief that they saw with
equal clearness through the remote and the obscure; whereas,
universally, their acuteness is like that of Hobbes—the gift of
shallowness, and the result of not being subtle or profound enough
to apprehend the true locus of the difficulty; and the barriers, which
to them limit the view, and give to it, together with the contraction,
all the distinctness and definite outline of limitation, are, in nine
cases out of ten, the product of their own defective and aberrating
vision, and not real barriers at all.
Meantime, until I write fully and deliberately upon this subject, I
shall observe, simply, that all "the Lake Poets," as they are called,
were not only in error, but most presumptuously in error, upon these
subjects. They were ignorant of every principle belonging to every
question alike in political economy, and they were obstinately bent
upon learning nothing; they were all alike too proud to acknowledge
that any man knew better than they, unless it were upon some
purely professional subject, or some art remote from all intellectual
bearings, such as conferred no honour in its possession. Wordsworth
was the least tainted with error upon political economy; and that](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-47-320.jpg)
![him to pay, were it no more important in a public point of view than
as so much deducted from his own unproductive expenditure, and
which may happen to have even a national importance if it should
chance to be deducted from the funds destined to productive
industry. What is Mr. Coleridge's answer to these little objections?
Why, thus: the latter case he evades entirely, apparently not
adverting to it as a case in any respect distinguished from the other;
and this other—how is that answered? Doubtless, says Mr. Coleridge,
it may be inconvenient to John or Samuel that a sum of money,
otherwise disposable for their own separate uses, should be
abstracted for the purchase of bayonets, or grape-shot; but with this
the public, the commonwealth, have nothing to do, any more than
with the losses at a gaming-table, where A's loss is B's gain—the
total funds of the nation remaining exactly the same. It is, in fact,
nothing but the accidental distribution of the funds which is affected
—possibly for the worse (no other "worse," however, is
contemplated than shifting it into hands less deserving), but, also,
by possibility, for the better; and the better and the worse may be
well supposed, in the long run, to balance each other. And that this
is Mr. Coleridge's meaning cannot be doubted, upon looking into his
illustrative image in support of it: he says that money raised by
Government in the shape of taxes is like moisture exhaled from the
earth—doubtless, for the moment injurious to the crops, but reacting
abundantly for their final benefit when returning in the shape of
showers. So natural, so obvious, so inevitable, by the way, is this
conceit (or, to speak less harshly, this hypothesis), and so equally
natural, obvious, and inevitable is the illustration from the
abstraction and restoration of moisture, the exhalations and rains
which affect this earth of ours, like the systole and the diastole of
the heart, the flux and reflux of the ocean, that precisely the same
doctrine, and precisely the same exemplification of the doctrine, is to
be found in a Parliamentary speech[141]
of some orator in the famous
Long Parliament about the year 1642. And to my mind it was a bitter
humiliation to find, about 150 years afterwards, in a shallow French
work, the famous "Compte Rendu" of the French Chancellor of the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-49-320.jpg)
![Exchequer (Comptroller of the Finances) Neckar—in that work, most
humiliating it was to me, on a certain day, that I found this idle
Coleridgian fantasy, not merely repeated, as it had been by scores—
not merely anticipated by full twenty and two years, so that these
French people had been beforehand with him, and had made
Coleridge, to all appearance, their plagiarist, but also (hear it, ye
gods!) answered, satisfactorily refuted, by this very feeble old
sentimentalist, Neckar. Yes; positively Neckar, the slipshod old
system-fancier and political driveller, had been so much above falling
into the shallow snare, that he had, on sound principles, exposed its
specious delusions. Coleridge, the subtlest of men in his proper walk,
had brought forward, as a novel hypothesis of his own, in 1810,
what Neckar, the rickety old charlatan, had scarcely condescended,
in a hurried foot-note, to expose as a vulgar error and the shallowest
of sophisms in 1787-88. There was another enormous blunder which
Coleridge was constantly authorizing, both in his writings and his
conversation. Quoting a passage from Sir James Stuart, in which he
speaks of a vine-dresser as adding nothing to the public wealth,
unless his labour did something more than replace his own
consumption—that is, unless it reproduced it together with a profit;
he asks contemptuously, whether the happiness and moral dignity
that may have been exhibited in the vine-dresser's family are to pass
for nothing? And then he proceeds to abuse the economists,
because they take no account of such important considerations.
Doubtless these are invaluable elements of social grandeur, in a total
estimate of those elements. But what has political economy to do
with them, a science openly professing to insulate, and to treat apart
from all other constituents of national well-being, those which
concern the production and circulation of wealth?[142]
So far from
gaining anything by enlarging its field in the way demanded by
Coleridge's critic, political economy would be as idly travelling out of
the limits indicated and held forth in its very name, as if logic were
to teach ethics, or ethics to teach diplomacy. With respect to the
Malthusian doctrine of population, it is difficult to know who was the
true proprietor of the arguments urged against it sometimes by](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-50-320.jpg)
![CHAPTER VI
THE SARACEN'S HEAD[143]
My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807;
but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas
Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left myself time, I stayed only
one week. On the last day, I witnessed a scene, the first and the last
of its kind that ever I did witness, almost too trivial to mention,
except for the sake of showing what things occur in the realities of
experience which a novelist could not venture to imagine.
Wordsworth and his sister were under an engagement of some
standing to dine on that day with a literary lady about four miles
distant; and, as the southern mail, which I was to catch at a
distance of eighteen miles, would not pass that point until long after
midnight, Miss Wordsworth proposed that, rather than pass my time
at an inn, I should join the dinner party; a proposal rather more
suitable to her own fervent and hospitable temper than to the habits
of our hostess, who must (from what I came to know of her in after
years) have looked upon me as an intruder. Something had reached
Miss Wordsworth of her penurious ménage, but nothing that
approached the truth. I was presented to the lady, whom we found a
perfect bas bleu of a very commonplace order, but having some
other accomplishments beyond her slender acquaintance with
literature. Our party consisted of six—our hostess, who might be
about fifty years of age; a pretty timid young woman, who was there](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1134266-250522164832-75ea487e/85/Equality-And-Diversity-In-Social-Work-Practice-Transforming-Social-Work-Practice-Chris-Gaine-54-320.jpg)
Equality And Diversity In Social Work Practice Transforming Social Work Practice Chris Gaine
- 1. Equality And Diversity In Social Work Practice Transforming Social Work Practice Chris Gaine download https://ebookbell.com/product/equality-and-diversity-in-social- work-practice-transforming-social-work-practice-chris- gaine-2268532 Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com
- 2. Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be interested in. You can click the link to download. Economic Freedom And Social Justice The Classical Ideal Of Equality In Contexts Of Racial Diversity 1st Edition Wanjiru Njoya https://ebookbell.com/product/economic-freedom-and-social-justice-the- classical-ideal-of-equality-in-contexts-of-racial-diversity-1st- edition-wanjiru-njoya-36132508 Handbook Of Social Justice In Loss And Grief Exploring Diversity Equity And Inclusion Darcy L Harris https://ebookbell.com/product/handbook-of-social-justice-in-loss-and- grief-exploring-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-darcy-l-harris-5327202 Inclusion Equity Diversity And Social Justice In Education A Critical Exploration Of The Sustainable Development Goals Sara Weuffen https://ebookbell.com/product/inclusion-equity-diversity-and-social- justice-in-education-a-critical-exploration-of-the-sustainable- development-goals-sara-weuffen-49159288 Gender Equality And Diversity In Indonesia Identifying Progress And Challenges Angie Bexley https://ebookbell.com/product/gender-equality-and-diversity-in- indonesia-identifying-progress-and-challenges-angie-bexley-54476446
- 3. The Claims Of Culture Equality And Diversity In The Global Era Seyla Benhabib https://ebookbell.com/product/the-claims-of-culture-equality-and- diversity-in-the-global-era-seyla-benhabib-2134164 The Claims Of Culture Equality And Diversity In The Global Era Seyla Benhabib https://ebookbell.com/product/the-claims-of-culture-equality-and- diversity-in-the-global-era-seyla-benhabib-34749430 Cultural And Linguistic Minorities In The Russian Federation And The European Union Comparative Studies On Equality And Diversity 1st Edition Heiko F Marten https://ebookbell.com/product/cultural-and-linguistic-minorities-in- the-russian-federation-and-the-european-union-comparative-studies-on- equality-and-diversity-1st-edition-heiko-f-marten-4972770 Gender Equality Intersectionality And Diversity In Europe 1st Edition Lise Rolandsen Agustn Auth https://ebookbell.com/product/gender-equality-intersectionality-and- diversity-in-europe-1st-edition-lise-rolandsen-agustn-auth-5889768 Managing Diversity And Equality In Construction Initiatives And Practice 1st Edition Gale Davidson https://ebookbell.com/product/managing-diversity-and-equality-in- construction-initiatives-and-practice-1st-edition-gale- davidson-2006682
- 6. Equality and Diversity in Social Work Practice
- 7. This page intentionally left blank
- 8. Equality and Diversity in Social Work Practice Edited by CHRIS GAINE Series Editors: Jonathan Parker and Greta Bradley
- 9. First published in 2010 by Learning Matters Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Learning Matters. © 2010 Gill Constable (Chapter 4); Chris Gaine, Introduction (Chapters 1, 3, 9 and 10); David Gaylard (Chapter 1); Colin Goble (Chapter 5); Gianna Knowles (Chapter 7); Vini Lander (Chapter 8); Janet McCray (Chapter 6); Barbara Thompson (Chapter 2) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 84445 593 5 This book is also available in the following ebook formats: Adobe ebook ISBN: 978 184445 757 1 EPUB ebook ISBN: 978 184445 756 4 Kindle ISBN: 978 0857 2501 93 The right of Gill Constable, Chris Gaine, David Gaylard, Colin Goble, Gianna Knowles, Vini Lander, Janet McCray and Barbara Thompson to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Text and cover design by Code 5 Design Associates Ltd Project Management by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock Typeset by Pantek Arts Ltd, Maidstone, Kent Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Learning Matters Ltd 33 Southernhay East Exeter EX1 1NX Tel: 01392 215560 E-mail: [email protected] www.learningmatters.co.uk
- 10. v Contents Introduction vii 1 Equality, difference and diversity 1 Chris Gaine and David Gaylard 2 Gender 17 Barbara Thompson 3 Sexual orientation 29 Chris Gaine 4 Older people 42 Gill Constable 5 Celebrating disability 55 Colin Goble 6 Learning disabilities 66 Janet McCray 7 Class 75 Gianna Knowles 8 Race and ethnicity 88 Vini Lander 9 Faith and religion 102 Chris Gaine Conclusion 116 Chris Gaine Glossary 123 References 127 Index 141
- 11. This page intentionally left blank
- 12. vii Introduction This book is written for student social workers who are beginning to develop their skills and understanding of the requirements for practice. While it is primarily aimed at students in their first year or level of study, it will be useful for subsequent years depending on how your programme is designed, what you are studying and especially as you move into practice learning. The book will also appeal to people considering a career in social work or social care but not yet studying for a social work degree. It will assist students undertaking a range of social and health care courses in further education. Nurses, occu- pational therapists and other health and social care professionals will be able to gain an insight into the new requirements demanded of social workers. Experienced and qualified social workers, especially those contributing to practice learning, will also be able to use this book for consultation, teaching and revision and to gain an insight into the expecta- tions raised by the qualifying degree in social work. Requirements for social work education Social work education has undergone a major transformation to ensure that qualified social workers are educated to honours degree level and develop knowledge, skills and values which are common and shared. A vision for social work operating in complex human situations has been adopted. This is reflected in the following definition from the International Association of Schools of Social Work and International Federation of Social Workers (2001). The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. While there is a great deal packed into this short and pithy definition it encapsulates the notion that social work concerns individual people and wider society. Social workers practise with people who are vulnerable, who are struggling in some way to participate fully in society. Social workers walk that tightrope between the marginalised individual and the social and political environment that may have contributed to their margin- alisation, and they need to be highly skilled and knowledgeable to work effectively in this context. In order to improve the quality of both these aspects of professional social work, it is crucial that you, as a student social worker, develop a rigorous grounding in and under- standing of theories and models for social work. Such knowledge helps social workers to know what to do, when to do it and how to do it, while recognising that social work is a complex activity with no absolute ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of practice for each situation.
- 13. Introduction viii The book aims to meet the learning needs outlined in the Department of Health’s prescribed curriculum for competence in assessment, planning, intervention and review, incorporating the necessary knowledge, skills and development of values. It will also meet subject skills identified in the Quality Assurance Agency academic benchmark criteria for social work. This approach will draw on and rely on you to acquire high-quality communi- cation skills, skills in working with others, and reflective skills in personal and professional development. In essence, the book will concentrate on models that are current in practice and transferable across settings. An action-oriented approach helps to facilitate evaluation and review of your practice. Case studies will be used throughout to enhance this process and to illustrate key points. Book structure Research indicates that social workers vary considerably in the extent to which they make and test hypotheses in practice (Sheppard, et al., 2001). A shift towards understanding ‘knowledge as process’ as opposed to ‘knowledge as product’ is suggested as one way to integrate theory and practice. These changes to social work education and the imple- mentation of new degree courses mean that there is a need for new, practical learning support material to help you achieve the qualification. This book is designed to help you gain knowledge concerning assessment, planning, intervention and review, to reflect on that knowledge and to apply it in practice. The emphasis in this book concerns you achieving the requirements of the curriculum and developing knowledge that will assist you in meeting the Occupational Standards for social work. The book has ten chapters. The opening and concluding chapters offer ways of integrating the insights of individual chapters and seeing parallels and similarities while the rest deal with a specific aspect of diversity or kind of inequality (and the book dwells a good deal on these alternative ways of seeing). In fact the title of this book was subject to some debate. We nearly called it Dealing with inequality and injustice in social work practice, but in the end we didn’t because, although it would have been an accurate title, we wanted a more positive tone. While we discuss much in the way of negative experiences and destructive social processes we also believe it is possible to make a difference, and for social workers to make a difference. This book aims to give an introduction to issues that we know raise difficulties in social work practice and in social work training. In principle the concerns of the book seem simple: people should be treated with justice, and some might wonder how that can be problematic to a profession committed to supporting and enabling people to overcome obstacles in their lives and live to their full potential. The answer is twofold. First, the world we live in is beset with injustices of various kinds and they are embedded in the way systems operate and individuals think, so they are difficult to challenge and often even more difficult to change. Second, we ourselves are embedded in many ways of thinking connected to injustice; to different extents we grow up with them and take some for granted, so a personal engagement with the issues in this book can at times be uncom- fortable, even threatening.
- 14. Introduction ix It can also be liberating. The prejudicial attitudes we all have to some degree towards one group or another limit us from seeing one another’s humanity, and indeed ration and limit our own. We hope you will recognise distortions in your own perceptions as you go through the book and work through them, and we hope you will actively engage both your emotional and your intellectual self. It’s not likely you’ll significantly increase your insight into these matters unless you do both; at times you need empathy to put yourself in another’s place but you also need analytical thought to critique ways of seeing the world. As you will see in chapter after chapter, the social meaning of gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, class, race and religion are not to be taken for granted and are not static. Within the lifetime of anyone reading this book some aspects of this diversity were illegal (gay sex under 21 was only legalised 15 years ago) while job discrimination against disabled people was perfectly legal until around the same time. You only have to be a little older to have seen successive battles to ensure equal pay for equivalent work, irre- spective of gender. Laws can change behaviour and there is some evidence that resistant attitudes will be modified as a result, but it’s never quick, so you live and work in a set of complex and unpredictable currents. You can’t be sure when a service user in her 80s will tell you she’s a lesbian, or a Chinese client will exhibit great antipathy to a learning disabled relative, or a black colleague will refer to council tenants as chavs, or you yourself will find yourself looking at one of your own preconceptions right in the eye. Your professional standards are uncompromising about this. You have to work at providing an equitable service to clients while dealing with or fending off challenges related to diversity. But professional standards say where you have to get to; they are standards against which you will be judged. We hope that reading and reflecting on the information, arguments and activities in the book will help with the journey. Learning features The book is interactive. You are encouraged to work through the book as an active participant, taking responsibility for your learning, in order to increase your knowledge, understanding and ability to apply this learning to practice. You will be expected to reflect creatively on how immediate learning needs can be met in the areas of assessment, planning, intervention and review and how your professional learning can be developed in your future career. Case studies throughout the book will help you to examine theories and models for social work practice. We have devised activities that require you to reflect on experiences, situations and events and help you to review and summarise learning undertaken. In this way your knowledge will become deeply embedded as part of your development. When you come to practise learning in an agency the work and reflection undertaken here will help you to improve and hone your skills and knowledge. Suggestions for further reading will be made at the end of each chapter and at the end is a glossary to help clarify many of the contested terms in this field.
- 15. Introduction x Professional development and reflective practice Great emphasis is placed on developing skills of reflection about, in and on practice. This has developed over many years in social work. It is important also that you reflect prior to practice, if indeed this is your goal. This book will assist you in developing a questioning approach that looks in a critical way at your thoughts, experiences and practice and seeks to heighten your skills in refining your practice as a result of these deliberations. Reflection is central to good social work practice, but only if action results from that reflection. Reflecting about, in and on your practice is not only important during your education to become a social worker; it is considered key to continued professional development. As we move to a profession that acknowledges lifelong learning as a way of keeping up to date, ensuring that research informs practice and in honing skills and values for practice, it is important to begin the process at the outset of your development.
- 16. Chapter 1 Equality, difference and diversity Chris Gaine and David Gaylard 1 1 This chapter will help you meet the following National Occupational Standards. Key Role 1: Prepare for, and work with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to assess their needs and circumstances. ● ● Prepare for social work contact and involvement. ● ● Work with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to help them make informed decisions. Key Role 2: Plan, carry out, review and evaluate social work practice, with individuals, families, carers, groups, communities and other professionals. ● ● Interact with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to achieve change and development and to improve life opportunities. Key Role 3: Support individuals to represent their needs, views and circumstances. ● ● Advocate with, and on behalf of, individuals, families, carers, groups and communities. Key Role 6: Demonstrate professional competence in social work practice. ● ● Research, analyse, evaluate and use current knowledge of best social work practice. It will also introduce you to the following academic standards as set out in the social work subject benchmark statement. 5.1.1 Social work services, service users and carers. ● ● Explanations of the links between definitional processes contributing to social differences (for example, social class, gender, ethnic differences, age, sexuality and religious belief) to the problems of inequality and differential need faced by service users. ● ● The nature of social work services in a diverse society (with particular reference to concepts such as prejudice, interpersonal, institutional and structural discrimination, empowerment and anti- discriminatory practices). 5.1.3 Values and ethics. ● ● The moral concepts of rights, responsibility, freedom, authority and power inherent in the practice of social workers as moral and statutory agents. 5.5.3 Analysis and synthesis. ● ● Assess the merits of contrasting theories, explanations, research, policies and procedures. ● ● Critically analyse and take account of the impact of inequality and discrimination in work with people in particular contexts and problem situations. A C H I E V I N G A S O C I A L W O R K D E G R E E
- 17. Chapter 1 Equality, difference and diversity 2 Introduction Human diversity is a concept with lots of layers. It can just refer to differences, like height, hair colour, whether you have freckles or the kind of food you like, but the kind of diversity that matters to social workers is diversity with social significance, diversity that makes real differences to people’s lives. We don’t know much about whether or not being six feet tall affects someone’s chances of getting a job, but we do know that their gender, age and social class do. In the UK and much of Europe there are six aspects of diversity that are felt to have sufficient social significance to need laws about them: gender, sexual orientation, religion, race and ethnicity, age and disability (and social class may soon join them). The Equality and Human Rights Commission, whose job it is to promote fair treatment, refers to these as seven protected groups. In other words, there is evidence of and official concern about these aspects of diversity potentially leading to injustice and inequality. The view of the law, therefore, and the profession of social work, is that it is morally and legally right, socially desirable and economically sensible to challenge and combat discrim- ination, promote equal opportunity and value difference. It is also worth asserting the positive value of diversity; it can be viewed as a good thing that should be celebrated, something that enriches our lives, introducing us to new ideas or approaches. In this context we prefer the word ‘acceptance’ to ‘tolerance’. There is something about tolerance that implies ‘putting up with’, so you might tolerate noisy neighbours but is the same word appropriate for your approach to disabled neighbours? Feelings and attitudes These issues provoke strong feelings, and indeed a discussion we have sometimes had with students is which of the social inequalities would start the most heated argument in a pub. It’s not that we like arguing in pubs, but it’s a fair test of how controversial a topic is, and for social workers it’s an index of how much they may be countering others’ deep-seated attitudes, or indeed their own. Our feeling is that while all the inequali- ties covered in this book can generate strong opinions when discussed, disability might evoke pity; learning difficulties some embarrassment; gender differences some attempts at humour; age perhaps some wry impatience and indulgence; social class can induce feelings of superiority (or inferiority); religion a degree of intolerance; race scores highly in the argument league as regards anger, while sexual orientation will often be the subject of distaste or even disgust.
- 18. Chapter 1 Equality, difference and diversity 3 Comment Whatever you have written in response to this table, it will be obvious that one cannot engage with social inequalities without encountering your own and others’ emotions. In principle our professional rules are clear; in practice there are minefields to cross. Two key concepts While individual chapters contain some specific definitions and there is also a glossary, we think there are two key concepts that need clarifying early in this book. The first is prejudice, which is best defined as a learned attitude towards a group of people (and hence individuals from that group) that is based upon a stereotype and founded more on emotion than rationality and is therefore relatively resistant to change. Such attitudes are used to pre-judge people. Strictly speaking prejudice can be positive: because of the stereotype you hold about them (a simplified and inflexible idea of what most people in the group are like) you might be positively prejudiced towards other mature students, supporters of your own football team or people who wear anti-war badges. But it’s most commonly meant in the negative sense – prejudice against women drivers, white van men, refugees, Conservatives, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lecturers who ask you to ‘share’, obese people, smokers, 4 × 4 drivers and so on (the list of potential prejudices could go on for several pages). Everyone has prejudices, including the authors of this book; no one is immune. Some Jews have prejudices towards non-Jews, some gay men have prejudices about straight men, some disabled people don’t like Asians, and some blind people have prejudices about sighted people. Social identity theory (sometimes referred to as self-categorisation theory) sheds some light on this general tendency we all share as human beings. The main tenets of the theory are as follows. The previous paragraph is summarised in this table, which you might want to modify or add to. Most common emotional response evoked in discussions Other reactions? Disability Learning difficulties Gender Age Social class Religion Race and ethnicity Sexual orientation ACTIVITY 1.1
- 19. Chapter 1 Equality, difference and diversity 4 ● ● Categorisation A need to put others (and ourselves) into categories. Labelling someone a Muslim, a chav or a football supporter is a way of saying other things about them. This produces an accentuation effect, an apparent conceptual clarity by emphasising dif- ferences or similarities between different groups or categories. ● ● Identification A need to associate with certain groups (in-groups) which serve to bolster our self-esteem. ● ● Stereotypes The categorisation process produces stereotypical perceptions that all members of a social group share some characteristic which distinguishes them from other social groups. These are based upon incorrect subjective beliefs or generalisations. ● ● Comparison Comparing groups with other groups, seeing favourable bias toward the group we belong to. ● ● Psychological distinctiveness We desire our identity to be both distinct and positively compared with other groups. (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) Some prejudices might be thought of as relatively harmless, but a problem for us as professionals arises when they are unexamined, or inflexible, or stubbornly clung to. The second key concept is related but not the same: discrimination. Again there is a strict definition which simply means choosing (I might discriminate between France and Italy in choosing a holiday) but as with prejudice our interest here is with discriminating against, and particularly discrimination on irrelevant or unjust criteria, as discussed in the next section. Discrimination is an action, whereas prejudice is an attitude: one is in your mind; the other is in what you do. It’s possible to be prejudiced without discriminating (an estate agent may not like Pakistanis but nevertheless sell their houses) and it’s possible to discriminate without being prejudiced (by just obeying orders) but they are often linked, and the link is most dangerous and damaging when power is involved. Officials of all kinds, including social workers, have the power to act upon their prejudices, and this is where discrimination translates difference into disadvantage. For people in a minority of some kind, there is a risk of being positioned and limited by the prejudice and related discrimination of those in the majority or those with more power. This is illustrated in Figure 1.1. When is difference relevant? A key thing to bear in mind about the connection between diversity, injustice and inequality is the issue of relevance. We have to make careful judgements (and sometimes we’ll get it wrong) about when some feature of a person’s identity is relevant or not in a particular context. For instance, in employing someone as a community transport driver is it relevant that one applicant is black, Jewish, a lesbian, sixty years old and has dyslexia? Most people would probably say that a person’s skin colour as such has nothing to do with their driving ability; neither has who they go to bed with, nor whether they’re male or female, nor what their religious beliefs may be. However, one could (and people do) think up arguments saying they are relevant, for instance:
- 20. Chapter 1 Equality, difference and diversity 5 ● ● Race ‘Some older people using community transport may be prejudiced against black people, so they’d lose out if they didn’t use the bus (and it’s their country after all, they fought in the war, etc., etc.).’ ● ● Sexual orientation ‘Vulnerable people using community transport might be preyed upon by homosexuals.’ ● ● Religion ‘Some people might need to be picked up or dropped off at churches or church facilities; a Jew wouldn’t like to go into a church.’ ● ● Gender ‘Women don’t drive big vehicles as well as men.’ ● ● Age ‘Maybe an older driver wouldn’t be strong enough to help someone infirm on and off the bus.’ ● ● Disability ‘A dyslexic driver might deliver someone to the wrong address.’ You will have your own reactions to those arguments, and indeed it’s worth considering and rehearsing them since, as a social worker, you will often have to think clearly and logically (and engage creatively and constructively with others) about these issues. What may strike you is that some people will regard the points above as absurd and outrageous, while others will not. Some individuals you know, and some service users, probably think gay people are constantly wanting to seduce anyone of the same sex; others will have patronising attitudes about women drivers; others will think a person’s right not to be upset by contact with black people should take precedence over a black person’s right to a job. The Majority Group Restrict entry Attach labels Make rules Define what’s normal Impose values and traditions Stereotype Exaggerate difference Hold power Figure 1.1 Strategies by which majority groups keep control and hold power Adapted from Clements and Spinks (2008)
- 21. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
- 22. miles in the company of Mr. Wordsworth, consequently (for this was in 1805) during two nights and two days, doubtless you must have heard many profound remarks that would inevitably fall from his lips." Nay, Coleridge had also been of the party; and, if Wordsworth solus could have been dull, was it within human possibilities that these gemini should have been so? "Was it possible?" I said; and perhaps my donkey, who looked like one that had been immoderately threatened, at last took courage; his eye brightened; and he intimated that he did remember something that Wordsworth had said—an "observe," as the Scotch call it. "Ay, indeed; and what was it now? What did the great man say?" "Why, sir, in fact, and to make a long story short, on coming near to London, we breakfasted at Baldock—you know Baldock? It's in Hertfordshire. Well, now, sir, would you believe it, though we were quite in regular time, the breakfast was precisely good for nothing?" "And Wordsworth?" "He observed——" "What did he observe?" "That the buttered toast looked, for all the world, as if it had been soaked in hot water." Ye heavens! "buttered toast!" And was it this I waited for? Now, thought I, had Henry Mackenzie been breakfasting with Wordsworth at Baldock (and, strange enough! in years to come I did breakfast with Henry Mackenzie, for the solitary time I ever met him, and at Wordsworth's house in Rydal), he would have carried off one sole reminiscence from the meeting—namely, a confirmation of his creed, that we English are all dedicated, from our very cradle, to the luxuries of the palate, and peculiarly to this.[129] Proh pudor! Yet, in sad sincerity, Wordsworth's pencil-notices in books were quite as disappointing. In "Roderick Random," for example, I found a note upon a certain luscious description, to the effect that "such things
- 23. should be left to the imagination of the reader—not expressed." In another place, that it was "improper"; and, in a third, that "the principle laid down was doubtful," or, as Sir Roger de Coverley observes, "that much might be said on both sides." All this, however, indicates nothing more than that different men require to be roused by different stimulants. Wordsworth, in his marginal notes, thought of nothing but delivering himself of a strong feeling, with which he wished to challenge the reader's sympathy. Coleridge imagined an audience before him; and, however doubtful that consummation might seem, I am satisfied that he never wrote a line for which he did not feel the momentary inspiration of sympathy and applause, under the confidence, that, sooner or later, all which he had committed to the chance margins of books would converge and assemble in some common reservoir of reception. Bread scattered upon the water will be gathered after many days. This, perhaps, was the consolation that supported him; and the prospect that, for a time, his Arethusa of truth would flow underground, did not, perhaps, disturb, but rather cheered and elevated, the sublime old somnambulist.[130] Meantime, Wordsworth's habits of using books— which, I am satisfied, would, in those days, alone have kept him at a distance from most men with fine libraries—were not vulgar; not the habits of those who turn over the page by means of a wet finger (though even this abomination I have seen perpetrated by a Cambridge tutor and fellow of a college; but then he had been bred up as a ploughman, and the son of a ploughman): no; but his habits were more properly barbarous and licentious, and in the spirit of audacity belonging de jure to no man but him who could plead an income of four or five hundred thousand per annum, and to whom the Bodleian or the Vatican would be a three years' purchase. Gross, meantime, was his delusion upon this subject. Himself he regarded as the golden mean between the too little and the too much of care for books; and, as it happened that every one of his friends far exceeded him in this point, curiously felicitous was the explanation which he gave of this superfluous care, so as to bring it within the natural operation of some known fact in the man's peculiar situation.
- 24. Southey (he was by nature something of an old bachelor) had his house filled with pretty articles—bijouterie, and so forth; and, naturally, he wished his books to be kept up to the same level— burnished and bright for show. Sir George Beaumont—this peculiarly elegant and accomplished man—was an old and most affectionate friend of Wordsworth's. Sir George Beaumont never had any children; if he had been so blessed, they, by familiarizing him with the spectacle of books ill used—stained, torn, mutilated, &c.—would have lowered the standard of his requisitions. The short solution of the whole case was—and it illustrated the nature of his education— he had never lived in a regular family at a time when habits are moulded. From boyhood to manhood he had been sui juris. Returning to Southey and Greta Hall, both the house and the master may deserve a few words more of description. For the master, I have already sketched his person; and his face I profess myself unable to describe accurately. His hair was black, and yet his complexion was fair; his eyes I believe to be hazel and large; but I will not vouch for that fact: his nose aquiline; and he has a remarkable habit of looking up into the air, as if looking at abstractions. The expression of his face was that of a very acute and aspiring man. So far, it was even noble, as it conveyed a feeling of a serene and gentle pride, habitually familiar with elevating subjects of contemplation. And yet it was impossible that this pride could have been offensive to anybody, chastened as it was by the most unaffected modesty; and this modesty made evident and prominent by the constant expression of reverence for the great men of the age (when he happened to esteem them such), and for all the great patriarchs of our literature. The point in which Southey's manner failed the most in conciliating regard was in all which related to the external expressions of friendliness. No man could be more sincerely hospitable—no man more essentially disposed to give up even his time (the possession which he most valued) to the service of his friends. But there was an air of reserve and distance about him—the reserve of a lofty, self-respecting mind, but, perhaps, a little too
- 25. freezing—in his treatment of all persons who were not among the corps of his ancient fireside friends. Still, even towards the veriest strangers, it is but justice to notice his extreme courtesy in sacrificing his literary employments for the day, whatever they might be, to the duty (for such he made it) of doing the honours of the lake and the adjacent mountains. Southey was at that time (1807), and has continued ever since, the most industrious of all literary men on record. A certain task he prescribed to himself every morning before breakfast. This could not be a very long one, for he breakfasted at nine, or soon after, and never rose before eight, though he went to bed duly at half-past ten; but, as I have many times heard him say, less than nine hours' sleep he found insufficient. From breakfast to a latish dinner (about half after five or six) was his main period of literary toil. After dinner, according to the accident of having or not having visitors in the house, he sat over his wine, or he retired to his library again, from which, about eight, he was summoned to tea. But, generally speaking, he closed his literary toils at dinner; the whole of the hours after that meal being dedicated to his correspondence. This, it may be supposed, was unusually large, to occupy so much of his time, for his letters rarely extended to any length. At that period, the post, by way of Penrith, reached Keswick about six or seven in the evening. And so pointedly regular was Southey in all his habits that, short as the time was, all letters were answered on the same evening which brought them. At tea, he read the London papers. It was perfectly astonishing to men of less methodical habits to find how much he got through of elaborate business by his unvarying system of arrangement in the distribution of his time. We often hear it said, in accounts of pattern ladies and gentlemen (what Coleridge used contemptuously to style goody people), that they found time for everything; that business never interrupted pleasure; that labours of love and charity never stood in the way of courtesy and personal enjoyment. This is easy to say—easy to put down as one feature of an imaginary portrait: but I must say that in actual life I have seen few such cases. Southey, however, did find time for
- 26. everything. It moved the sneers of some people, that even his poetry was composed according to a predetermined rule; that so many lines should be produced, by contract, as it were, before breakfast; so many at such another definite interval. And I acknowledge that so far I went along with the sneerers as to marvel exceedingly how that could be possible. But, if a priori one laughed and expected to see verses corresponding to this mechanic rule of construction, a posteriori one was bound to judge of the verses as one found them. Supposing them good, they were entitled to honour, no matter for the previous reasons which made it possible that they would not be good. And generally, however undoubtedly they ought to have been bad, the world has pronounced them good. In fact, they are good; and the sole objection to them is, that they are too intensely objective—too much reflect the mind, as spreading itself out upon external things—too little exhibit the mind as introverting itself upon its own thoughts and feelings. This, however, is an objection which only seems to limit the range of the poetry— and all poetry is limited in its range: none comprehends more than a section of the human power. Meantime, the prose of Southey was that by which he lived. The Quarterly Review it was by which, as he expressed it to myself in 1810, he "made the pot boil."[131] About the same time, possibly as early as 1808 (for I think that I remember in that Journal an account of the Battle of Vimiera), Southey was engaged by an Edinburgh publisher (Constable, was it not?) to write the entire historical part of the Edinburgh Annual Register, at a salary of £400 per annum. Afterwards, the publisher, who was intensely national, and, doubtless, never from the first cordially relished the notion of importing English aid into a city teeming with briefless barristers and variety of talent, threw out a hint that perhaps he might reduce the salary to £300. Just about this time I happened to see Southey, who said laughingly—"If the man of Edinburgh does this, I shall strike for an advance of wages." I presume that he did strike, and, like many other "operatives," without effect. Those who work for lower wages during a strike are called snobs,[132] the men who stand out being
- 27. nobs. Southey became a resolute nob; but some snob was found in Edinburgh, some youthful advocate, who accepted £300 per annum, and thenceforward Southey lost this part of his income. I once possessed the whole work: and in one part, viz. the Domestic Chronicle, I know that it is executed with a most culpable carelessness—the beginnings of cases being given without the ends, the ends without the beginnings—a defect but too common in public journals. The credit of the work, however, was staked upon its treatment of the current public history of Europe, and the tone of its politics in times so full of agitation, and teeming with new births in every year, some fated to prove abortive, but others bearing golden promises for the human race. Now, whatever might be the talent with which Southey's successor performed his duty, there was a loss in one point for which no talent of mere execution could make amends. The very prejudices of Southey tended to unity of feeling: they were in harmony with each other, and grew out of a strong moral feeling, which is the one sole secret for giving interest to an historical narration, fusing the incoherent details into one body, and carrying the reader fluently along the else monotonous recurrences and unmeaning details of military movements. Well or ill directed, a strong moral feeling, and a profound sympathy with elementary justice, is that which creates a soul under what else may well be denominated, Miltonically, "the ribs of death." Now this, and a mind already made up even to obstinacy upon all public questions, were the peculiar qualifications which Southey brought to the task—qualifications not to be bought in any market, not to be compensated by any amount of mere intellectual talent, and almost impossible as the qualifications of a much younger man.[133] As a pecuniary loss, though considerable, Southey was not unable to support it; for he had a pension from Government before this time, and under the following circumstances:—Charles Wynne, the brother of Sir Watkin, the great autocrat of North Wales—that C. W. who is almost equally well known for his knowledge of Parliamentary usage, which pointed him out to the notice of the House as an eligible
- 28. person to fill the office of Speaker, and for his unfortunately shrill voice, which chiefly it was that defeated his claim[134] —(in fact, as is universally known, his brother and he, for different defects of voice and utterance, are called Bubble and Squeak)—this C. W. had believed himself to have been deeply indebted to Southey's high- toned moral example, and to his wise counsels, during the time when both were students at Oxford, for the fortunate direction given to his own wavering impulses. This sense of obligation he endeavoured to express by settling a pension upon Southey from his own funds. At length, upon the death of Mr. Pitt, early in 1806, an opening was made for the Fox and Grenville parties to come into office. Charles Wynne, as a person connected by marriage with the house of Grenville, and united with them in political opinions, shared in the golden shower; he also received a place; and, upon the strength of his improving prospects, he married: upon which it occurred to Southey, that it was no longer right to tax the funds of one who was now called upon to support an establishment becoming his rank. Under that impression he threw up his pension; and upon their part, to express their sense of what they considered a delicate and honourable sacrifice, the Grenvilles placed Southey upon the national pension list. What might be the exact colour of Southey's political creed in this year, 1807, it is difficult to say. The great revolution, in his way of thinking upon such subjects, with which he has been so often upbraided as something equal in delinquency to a deliberate tergiversation or moral apostasy, could not have then taken place; and of this I am sure, from the following little anecdote connected with this visit:—On the day after my own arrival at Greta Hall, came Wordsworth following upon my steps from Penrith. We dined and passed that evening with Mr. Southey. The next morning, after breakfast, previously to leaving Keswick, we were sitting in Southey's library; and he was discussing with Wordsworth the aspect of public affairs: for my part, I was far too diffident to take any part in such a conversation, for I had no opinions at all upon politics, nor any interest in public affairs, further than that I had a keen sympathy
- 29. with the national honour, gloried in the name of Englishman, and had been bred up in a frenzied horror of jacobinism. Not having been old enough, at the first outbreak of the French Revolution, to participate (as else, undoubtedly, I should have done) in the golden hopes of its early dawn, my first youthful introduction to foreign politics had been in seasons and circumstances that taught me to approve of all I heard in abhorrence of French excesses, and to worship the name of Pitt; otherwise my whole heart had been so steadily fixed on a different world from the world of our daily experience, that, for some years, I had never looked into a newspaper; nor, if I cared something for the movement made by nations from year to year, did I care one iota for their movement from week to week. Still, careless as I was on these subjects, it sounded as a novelty to me, and one which I had not dreamed of as a possibility, to hear men of education and liberal pursuits—men, besides, whom I regarded as so elevated in mind, and one of them as a person charmed and consecrated from error—giving utterance to sentiments which seemed absolutely disloyal. Yet now did I hear— and I heard with an emotion of sorrow, but a sorrow that instantly gave way to a conviction that it was myself who lay under a delusion, and simply because ----"from Abelard it came"— opinions avowed most hostile to the reigning family; not personally to them, but generally to a monarchical form of government. And that I could not be mistaken in my impression, that my memory cannot have played me false, is evident, from one relic of the conversation which rested upon my ear, and has survived to this day [1839]—thirty and two years from the time. It had been agreed, that no good was to be hoped for, as respected England, until the royal family should be expatriated; and Southey, jestingly considering to what country they could be exiled, with mutual benefit for that country and themselves, had supposed the case—that, with a large allowance of money, such as might stimulate beneficially the industry of a rising colony, they should be transported to New South
- 30. Wales; which project, amusing his fancy, he had, with the readiness and facility that characterizes his mind, thrown extempore into verse; speaking off, as an improvisatore, about eight or ten lines, of which the three last I perfectly remember, and they were these (by the way I should have mentioned that they took the form of a petition addressed to the King):— "Therefore, old George, by George we pray Of thee forthwith to extend thy sway Over the great Botanic Bay." The sole doubt I have about the exact words regards the second line, which might have been (according to a various reading which equally clings to my ear)— "That thou would'st please to extend thy sway." But about the last I cannot be wrong; for I remember laughing with a sense of something peculiarly droll in the substitution of the stilted phrase—"the great Botanic Bay," for our ordinary week-day name Botany Bay, so redolent of thieves and pickpockets. Southey walked with us that morning for about five miles on our road towards Grasmere, which brought us to the southern side of Shoulthwaite Moss, and into the sweet solitary little vale of Legbesthwaite. And, by the way, he took leave of us at the gate of a house, one amongst the very few (five or six in all) just serving to redeem that valley from absolute solitude, which some years afterwards became, in a slight degree, remarkable to me from two little incidents by which it connected itself with my personal experiences. One was, perhaps, scarcely worth recording. It was simply this—that Wordsworth and myself having, through a long day's rambling, alternately walked and rode with a friend of his who happened to have a travelling carriage with him, and who was on his way to Keswick, agreed to wait hereabouts until Wordsworth's friend, in his abundant kindness, should send back his carriage to take us, on our return to Grasmere, distant about eight miles. It was
- 31. a lovely summer evening; but, as it happened that we ate our breakfast early, and had eaten nothing at all throughout a long summer's day, we agreed to "sorn" upon the goodman of the house, whoever he might happen to be, Catholic or Protestant, Jew, Gentile, or Mahometan, and to take any bone that he would be pleased to toss to such hungry dogs as ourselves. Accordingly we repaired to his gate; we knocked, and, forthwith it was opened to us by a man- mountain, who listened benignantly to our humble request, and ushered us into a comfortable parlour. All sorts of refreshments he continued to shower upon us for a space of two hours: it became evident that our introducer was the master of the house: we adored him in our thoughts as an earthly providence to hungry wayfarers; and we longed to make his acquaintance. But, for some inexplicable reason, that must continue to puzzle all future commentators on Wordsworth and his history, he never made his appearance. Could it be, we thought, that, without the formality of a sign, he, in so solitary a region, more than twentyfive miles distant from Kendal (the only town worthy of the name throughout the adjacent country), exercised the functions of a landlord, and that we ought to pay him for his most liberal hospitality? Never was such a dilemma from the foundation of Legbesthwaite. To err, in either direction, was damnable: to go off without paying, if he were an innkeeper, made us swindlers; to offer payment if he were not, and supposing that he had been inundating us with his hospitable bounties simply in the character of a natural-born gentleman, made us the most unfeeling of mercenary ruffians. In the latter case we might expect a duel; in the former, of course, the treadmill. We were deliberating on this sad alternative, and I, for my part was voting in favour of the treadmill, when the sound of wheels was heard, and, in one minute, the carriage of his friend drew up to the farmer's gate; the crisis had now arrived, and we perspired considerably; when in came the frank Cumberland lass who had been our attendant. To her we propounded our difficulty—and lucky it was we did so, for she assured us that her master was an awful man, and would have "brained" us both if we had insulted him with the offer of money.
- 32. She, however, honoured us by accepting the price of some female ornament. I made a memorandum at the time, to ascertain the peculiar taste of this worthy Cumberland farmer, in order that I might, at some future opportunity, express my thanks to him for his courtesy; but, alas! for human resolutions, I have not done so to this moment; and is it likely that he, perhaps sixty years old at that time (1813), is alive at present, twenty-five years removed? Well, he may be; though I think that exceedingly doubtful, considering the next anecdote relating to the same house:—Two, or, it may be, three years after this time, I was walking to Keswick, from my own cottage in Grasmere. The distance was thirteen miles; the time just nine o'clock; the night a cloudy moonlight, and intensely cold. I took the very greatest delight in these nocturnal walks through the silent valleys of Cumberland and Westmoreland; and often at hours far later than the present. What I liked in this solitary rambling was, to trace the course of the evening through its household hieroglyphics from the windows which I passed or saw: to see the blazing fires shining through the windows of houses, lurking in nooks far apart from neighbours; sometimes, in solitudes that seemed abandoned to the owl, to catch the sounds of household mirth; then, some miles further, to perceive the time of going to bed; then the gradual sinking to silence of the house; then the drowsy reign of the cricket; at intervals, to hear church-clocks or a little solitary chapel-bell, under the brows of mighty hills, proclaiming the hours of the night, and flinging out their sullen knells over the graves where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept"—where the strength and the loveliness of Elizabeth's time, or Cromwell's, and through so many fleeting generations that have succeeded, had long ago sunk to rest. Such was the sort of pleasure which I reaped in my nightly walks—of which, however, considering the suspicions of lunacy which it has sometimes awoke, the less I say, perhaps, the better. Nine o'clock it was—and deadly cold as ever March night was made by the keenest of black frosts, and by the bitterest of north winds—when I drew towards the gate of our huge and hospitable friend. A little garden there was before
- 33. the house; and in the centre of this garden was placed an arm-chair, upon which arm-chair was sitting composedly—but I rubbed my eyes, doubting the very evidence of my own eyesight—a or the huge man in his shirt-sleeves; yes, positively not sunning but mooning himself—apricating himself in the occasional moonbeams; and, as if simple star-gazing from a sedentary station were not sufficient on such a night, absolutely pursuing his astrological studies, I repeat, in his shirt-sleeves! Could this be our hospitable friend, the man- mountain? Secondly, was it any man at all? Might it not be a scarecrow dressed up to frighten the birds? But from what—to frighten them from what at that season of the year? Yet, again, it might be an ancient scarecrow—a superannuated scarecrow, far advanced in years. But, still, why should a scarecrow, young or old, sit in an arm-chair? Suppose I were to ask. Yet, where was the use of asking a scarecrow? And, if not a scarecrow, where was the safety of speaking too inquisitively, on his own premises, to a man- mountain? The old dilemma of the duel or the treadmill, if I should intrude upon his grounds at night, occurred to me; and I watched the anomalous object in silence for some minutes. At length the monster (for such at any rate it was, scarecrow or not scarecrow) solemnly raised his hand to his face, perhaps taking a pinch of snuff, and thereby settled one question. But that settled only irritated my curiosity the more upon a second: what hallucination of the brain was it that could induce a living man to adopt so very absurd a line of conduct? Once I thought of addressing him thus:—Might I presume so far upon your known courtesy to wayfaring strangers as to ask—Is it the Devil who prompts you to sit in your shirt-sleeves, as if meditating a camisade, or to woo al fresco pleasures on such a night as this? But, as Dr. Y., on complaining that, whenever he looked out of the window, he was sure to see Mr. X. lounging about the quadrangle, was effectually parried by Mr. X. retorting that, whenever he lounged in the quadrangle, he was sure to see the Doctor looking out of the window, so did I anticipate a puzzling rejoinder from the former, with regard to my own motives for haunting the roads as a nocturnal tramper, without a rational object that I could make intelligible. I thought, also, of the fate which
- 34. attended the Calendars, and so many other notorious characters in the "Arabian Nights," for unseasonable questions, or curiosity too vivacious. And, upon the whole, I judged it advisable to pursue my journey in silence, considering the time of night, the solitary place, and the fancy of our enormous friend for "braining" those whom he regarded as ugly customers. And thus it came about that this one house has been loaded in my memory with a double mystery, that too probably never can be explained: and another torment had been prepared for the curious of future ages. Of Southey, meantime, I had learned, upon this brief and hurried visit, so much in confirmation or in extension of my tolerably just preconceptions with regard to his character and manners, as left me not a very great deal to add, and nothing at all to alter, through the many years which followed of occasional intercourse with his family, and domestic knowledge of his habits. A man of more serene and even temper could not be imagined; nor more uniformly cheerful in his tone of spirits; nor more unaffectedly polite and courteous in his demeanour to strangers; nor more hospitable in his own wrong—I mean by the painful sacrifices which hospitality entailed upon him of time so exceedingly precious that, during his winter and spring months of solitude, or whenever he was left absolute master of its distribution, every half hour in the day had its peculiar duty. In the still "weightier matters of the law," in cases that involved appeals to conscience and high moral principle, I believe Southey to be as exemplary a man as can ever have lived. Were it to his own instant ruin, I am satisfied that he would do justice and fulfil his duty under any possible difficulties, and through the very strongest temptations to do otherwise. For honour the most delicate, for integrity the firmest, and for generosity within the limits of prudence, Southey cannot well have a superior; and, in the lesser moralities—those which govern the daily habits, and transpire through the manners— he is certainly a better man—that is (with reference to the minor principle concerned), a more amiable man—than Wordsworth. He is less capable, for instance, of usurping an undue share of the conversation; he is more uniformly disposed to be charitable in his
- 35. transient colloquial judgments upon doubtful actions of his neighbours; more gentle and winning in his condescensions to inferior knowledge or powers of mind; more willing to suppose it possible that he himself may have fallen into an error; more tolerant of avowed indifference towards his own writings (though, by the way, I shall have something to offer in justification of Wordsworth, upon this charge); and, finally, if the reader will pardon a violent instance of anti-climax, much more ready to volunteer his assistance in carrying a lady's reticule or parasol. As a more amiable man (taking that word partly in the French sense, partly also in the loftier English sense), it might be imagined that Southey would be a more eligible companion than Wordsworth. But this is not so; and chiefly for three reasons which more than counterbalance Southey's greater amiability: first, because the natural reserve of Southey, which I have mentioned before, makes it peculiarly difficult to place yourself on terms of intimacy with him; secondly, because the range of his conversation is more limited than that of Wordsworth—dealing less with life and the interests of life— more exclusively with books; thirdly, because the style of his conversation is less flowing and diffusive—less expansive—more apt to clothe itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form—consequently much sooner and more frequently coming to an abrupt close. A sententious, epigrammatic form of delivering opinions has a certain effect of clenching a subject, which makes it difficult to pursue it without a corresponding smartness of expression, and something of the same antithetic point and equilibration of clauses. Not that the reader is to suppose in Southey a showy master of rhetoric and colloquial sword-play, seeking to strike and to dazzle by his brilliant hits or adroit evasions. The very opposite is the truth. He seeks, indeed, to be effective, not for the sake of display, but as the readiest means of retreating from display, and the necessity for display: feeling that his station in literature and his laurelled honours make him a mark for the curiosity and interest of the company—that a standing appeal is constantly turning to him for his opinion—a latent call always going on for his voice on the question of the
- 36. moment—he is anxious to comply with this requisition at as slight a cost as may be of thought and time. His heart is continually reverting to his wife, viz. his library; and, that he may waste as little effort as possible upon his conversational exercises—that the little he wishes to say may appear pregnant with much meaning—he finds it advantageous, and, moreover, the style of his mind naturally prompts him, to adopt a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without any locus penitentiæ or privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so; in short, aiming at brevity for the company as well as for himself, by cutting off all opening for discussion and desultory talk through the sudden winding up that belongs to a sententious aphorism. The hearer feels that "the record is closed"; and he has a sense of this result as having been accomplished by something like an oracular laying down of the law ex cathedra: but this is an indirect collateral impression from Southey's manner, and far from the one he meditates or wishes. An oracular manner he does certainly affect in certain dilemmas of a languishing or loitering conversation; not the peremptoriness, meantime, not the imperiousness of the oracle is what he seeks for, but its brevity, its dispatch, its conclusiveness. Finally, as a fourth reason why Southey is less fitted for a genial companion than Wordsworth, his spirits have been, of late years, in a lower key than those of the latter. The tone of Southey's animal spirits was never at any time raised beyond the standard of an ordinary sympathy; there was in him no tumult, no agitation of passion; his organic and constitutional sensibilities were healthy, sound, perhaps strong—but not profound, not excessive. Cheerful he was, and animated at all times; but he levied no tributes on the spirits or the feelings beyond what all people could furnish. One reason why his bodily temperament never, like that of Wordsworth, threw him into a state of tumultuous excitement which required intense and elaborate conversation to work off the excessive fervour, was, that, over and above his far less fervid constitution of mind and body, Southey rarely took any exercise; he led a life as sedentary,
- 37. except for the occasional excursions in summer (extorted from his sense of kindness and hospitality), as that of a city tailor. And it was surprising to many people, who did not know by experience the prodigious effect upon the mere bodily health of regular and congenial mental labour, that Southey should be able to maintain health so regular, and cheerfulness so uniformly serene. Cheerful, however, he was, in those early years of my acquaintance with him; but it was manifest to a thoughtful observer that his golden equanimity was bound up in a threefold chain,—in a conscience clear of all offence, in the recurring enjoyments from his honourable industry, and in the gratification of his parental affections. If any one cord should give way, there (it seemed) would be an end to Southey's tranquillity. He had a son at that time, Herbert[135] Southey, a child in petticoats when I first knew him, very interesting even then, but annually putting forth fresh blossoms of unusual promise, that made even indifferent people fear for the safety of one so finely organized, so delicate in his sensibilities, and so prematurely accomplished. As to his father, it became evident that he lived almost in the light of young Herbert's smiles, and that the very pulses of his heart played in unison to the sound of his son's laughter. There was in his manner towards this child, and towards this only, something that marked an excess of delirious doating, perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movements of Southey's affections; and something also which indicated a vague fear about him; a premature unhappiness, as if already the inaudible tread of calamity could be perceived, as if already he had lost him; which, for the latter years of the boy's life, seemed to poison the blessing of his presence. A stronger evidence I cannot give of Southey's trembling apprehensiveness about this child than that the only rude thing I ever knew him to do, the only discourteous thing, was done on his account. A party of us, chiefly composed of Southey's family and his visitors, were in a sailboat upon the lake. Herbert was one of this party; and at that time not above five or six years old. In landing upon one of the islands, most of the gentlemen were occupied in
- 38. assisting the ladies over the thwarts of the boat; and one gentleman, merely a stranger, observing this, good-naturedly took up Herbert in his arms, and was stepping with him most carefully from thwart to thwart, when Southey, in a perfect frenzy of anxiety for his boy, his "moon" as he used to call him (I suppose from some pun of his own, or some mistake of the child's upon the equivocal word sun), rushed forward, and tore him out of the arms of the stranger without one word of apology; nor, in fact, under the engrossing panic of the moment, lest an unsteady movement along with the rocking and undulating of the boat should throw his little boy overboard into the somewhat stormy waters of the lake, did Southey become aware of his own exceedingly discourteous action: fear for his boy quelled his very power of perception. That the stranger, on reflection, understood; a race of emotions travelled over his countenance. I saw the whole, a silent observer from the shore. First a hasty blush of resentment mingled with astonishment: then a good-natured smile of indulgence to the naïveté of the paternal feeling as displaying itself in the act, and the accompanying gestures of frenzied impatience; finally, a considerate, grave expression of acquiescence in the whole act; but with a pitying look towards father and son, as too probably destined under such agony of affection to trials perhaps insupportable. If I interpreted aright the stranger's feelings, he did not read their destinies amiss. Herbert became, with his growing years, a child of more and more hope; but, therefore, the object of more and more fearful solicitude. He read, and read; and he became at last "A very learned youth"— to borrow a line from his uncle's beautiful poem on the wild boy who fell into a heresy whilst living under the patronage of a Spanish grandee, and finally escaped from a probable martyrdom by sailing up a great American river, wide as any sea, after which he was never heard of again. The learned youth of the river Greta had an earlier and more sorrowful close to his career. Possibly from want of exercise, combined with inordinate exercise of the cerebral organs, a
- 39. disease gradually developed itself in the heart. It was not a mere disorder in the functions, it was a disease in the structure of the organ, and admitted of no permanent relief, consequently of no final hope. He died[136] ; and with him died for ever the golden hopes, the radiant felicity, and the internal serenity, of the unhappy father. It was from Southey himself, speaking without external signs of agitation, calmly, dispassionately, almost coldly, but with the coldness of a settled despondency, that I heard, whilst accompanying him through Grasmere on his road homewards to Keswick from some visit he had been paying to Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, his settled feelings and convictions as connected with that loss. For him, in this world, he said, happiness there could be none; for his tenderest affections, the very deepest by many degrees which he had ever known, were now buried in the grave with his youthful and too brilliant Herbert! SOUTHEY AND THE EDINBURGH ANNUAL REGISTER De Quincey's recollection of the Edinburgh Annual Register in connexion with Southey is altogether erroneous. Though there had been a project of some periodical of the kind by the Constable publishing house as early as 1807, the enterprise was not started till 1809, and then not by Constable at all, but actually in opposition to Constable by the new Edinburgh publishing house of John Ballantyne,—or rather, one might say, of Scott and Ballantyne, for Scott (secretly Ballantyne's partner already for a long while in his printing business) was Ballantyne's real backer and principal in the whole of this new concern. In a letter of Scott's to his friend Merritt, of date 14th January 1809, after announcing the great fact that a Quarterly Review was forthcoming to counteract the Edinburgh, he adds:—"Then, sir, to turn the flank of Messrs. Constable and Co., and to avenge myself of certain impertinences which, in the vehemence of their Whiggery, they have dared to indulge in towards me, I have
- 40. prepared to start against them at Whitsunday first the celebrated printer Ballantyne, with a long purse ['the purse was, alas! Scott's own,' Lockhart notes at this point] and a sound political creed, not to mention an alliance offensive and defensive with young John Murray of Fleet Street, the most enlightened and active of the London trade. By this means I hope to counterbalance the predominating influence of Constable and Co., who at present have it in their power and inclination to forward or suppress any book as they approve or dislike its political tendency. Lastly, I have caused the said Ballantyne to venture upon an Edinburgh Annual Register, of which I send you a prospectus. I intend to help him myself as far as time will admit, and hope to procure him many respectable coadjutors." In another letter, written just a fortnight previously, Scott had broached the subject of the new Annual Register to his friend Kirkpatrick Sharpe, intimating that, though Ballantyne would be the managing editor, with himself for the real editor in the background, all the more important contributions would be from selected hands, and that, as the historical department was the most important,—a luminous picture of the current events of the world from year to year being "a task for a man of genius,"—they proposed to give their "historian" £300 a year,—"no deaf nuts," adds Scott, in comment on the sum. A certain eminent person had already been offered the post, Scott proceeds; but, should "the great man" decline, would Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself accept it? The "great man" was Southey; he did accept; and for some years he had the accredited charge of the historical department of the Register. From the first, however, the venture did not pay; and, the loss upon it having gone on for some time at the rate of £1000 a year, Scott,—who had been tending to a reconciliation with Constable on other grounds,—was glad when, in 1813, Constable took a portion of the burden of the concern off his hands. It is possible that this accession of Constable to a share in the management, and some consequent retrenchment of expenses, may have had something to do with Southey's resignation of his connexion with the Register. Not, however, till 1815, if we may trust Lockhart's dating, did that resignation take place,—for, in Lockhart's narrative for the following year, 1816, where he notes that Scott had
- 41. stepped in for the rescue of the Register by himself undertaking to do its arrears in the historical department, he gives the reasons thus:—"Mr. Southey had, for reasons on which I do not enter, discontinued his services to that work; and it was now doubly necessary, after trying for one year a less eminent hand, that, if the work were not to be dropped altogether, some strenuous exertion should be made to sustain its character."—From all this it will be seen that De Quincey is wrong in his fancy that the proposal to reduce Southey's salary (from £400 to £300, he says, but was it not £300 from the first?) was a mere device for getting rid of him because he was an Englishman, and because a Scottish "snob" of the Parliament House could be got to do the work at a cheaper rate; or, at all events, that he is wrong in attributing the shabbiness to Constable and the Whigs in Edinburgh. Southey's own fellow-Tory Scott was still supreme in the conduct of the Register, though he might take Constable's advice in all matters of its financial administration; and, if Constable advised, among other things, a reduction of Southey's salary in the historical department, that was but natural in the circumstances, and Scott probably acquiesced.—In fact, by this time the contributorship to the Edinburgh Annual Register, always a drudgery, must have been of less consequence to Southey than it had been. In November 1813 he had been appointed to the office of Poet-Laureate, then vacant by the death of Henry James Pye; and the salary attached to that sinecure, though small, was something. On the 13th of that month Scott, who had declined the office for himself and had strongly recommended Southey, and who was then still virtually Southey's paymaster for his services in the Edinburgh Annual Register, had written his congratulations to Southey, with his regrets that the Laureateship was not better worth his while.—D. M.
- 42. CHAPTER V THE LAKE POETS: SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE[137] A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to every eye the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the insignificant place and consideration allowed to the small book- collection of the former, contrasted with the splendid library of the latter. The two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely, painted book-case, fixed into one of two shallow recesses, formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the little sitting-room up stairs which he had already described as his half kitchen and half parlour. They were ill bound, or not bound at all—in boards, sometimes in tatters; many were imperfect as to the number of volumes, mutilated as to the number of pages; sometimes, where it seemed worth while, the defects being supplied by manuscript; sometimes not: in short, everything showed that the books were for use, and not for show; and their limited amount showed that their possessor must have independent sources of enjoyment to fill up the major part of his time. In reality, when the weather was tolerable, I believe that Wordsworth rarely resorted to his books (unless, perhaps, to some little pocket edition of a poet which accompanied him in his rambles) except in the evenings, or after he had tired himself by walking. On the other
- 43. hand, Southey's collection occupied a separate room, the largest, and every way the most agreeable in the house; and this room was styled, and not ostentatiously (for it really merited that name), the Library. The house itself, Greta Hall, stood upon a little eminence (as I have before mentioned), overhanging the river Greta. There was nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements. In all respects it was a very plain, unadorned family dwelling: large enough, by a little contrivance, to accommodate two, or, in some sense, three families, viz. Mr. Southey and his family, Mr. Coleridge and his, together with Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to compose a third. Mrs. Coleridge, Mrs. Southey, and Mrs. Lovell were sisters; all having come originally from Bristol; and, as the different sets of children in this one house had each three several aunts, all the ladies, by turns, assuming that relation twice over, it was one of Southey's many amusing jests, to call the hill on which Greta Hall was placed the ant-hill. Mrs. Lovell was the widow of Mr. Robert Lovell, who had published a volume of poems, in conjunction with Southey, somewhere about the year 1797, under the signatures of Bion and Moschus. This lady, having only one son, did not require any large suite of rooms; and the less so, as her son quitted her at an early age, to pursue a professional education. The house had, therefore, been divided (not by absolute partition into two distinct[138] apartments, but by an amicable distribution of rooms) between the two families of Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey; Mr. Coleridge had a separate study, which was distinguished by nothing except by an organ amongst its furniture, and by a magnificent view from its window (or windows), if that could be considered a distinction in a situation whose local necessities presented you with magnificent objects in whatever direction you might happen to turn your eyes. In the morning, the two families might live apart; but they met at dinner, and in a common drawing-room; and Southey's library, in both senses of the word, was placed at the service of all the ladies alike. However, they did not intrude upon him, except in cases where they wished for a larger reception room, or a more interesting place
- 44. for suggesting the topics of conversation. Interesting this room was, indeed, and in a degree not often rivalled. The library—the collection of books, I mean, which formed the most conspicuous part of its furniture within—was in all senses a good one. The books were chiefly English, Spanish, and Portuguese; well selected, being the great cardinal classics of the three literatures; fine copies, and decorated externally with a reasonable elegance, so as to make them in harmony with the other embellishments of the room. This effect was aided by the horizontal arrangement upon brackets of many rare manuscripts—Spanish or Portuguese. Made thus gay within, this room stood in little need of attractions from without. Yet, even upon the gloomiest day of winter, the landscape from the different windows was too permanently commanding in its grandeur, too essentially independent of the seasons or the pomp of woods, to fail in fascinating the gaze of the coldest and dullest of spectators. The lake of Derwent Water in one direction, with its lovely islands—a lake about ten miles in circuit, and shaped pretty much like a boy's kite; the lake of Bassinthwaite in another; the mountains of Newlands, arranging themselves like pavilions; the gorgeous confusion of Borrowdale just revealing its sublime chaos through the narrow vista of its gorge: all these objects lay in different angles to the front; whilst the sullen rear, not fully visible on this side of the house, was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara—mountains which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers, and chains of hilly ground, cutting the county of Cumberland into great chambers and different climates, than as insulated eminences, so vast is the area which they occupy; though there are also such separate and insulated heights, and nearly amongst the highest in the country. Southey's lot had therefore fallen, locally considered, into a goodly heritage. This grand panorama of mountain scenery, so varied, so expansive, and yet having the delightful feeling about it of a deep seclusion and dell-like sequestration from the world—a feeling which, in the midst of so expansive an area spread out below his windows, could not have been sustained by any barriers less elevated than Glaramara, Skiddaw, or (which could be also descried) "the mighty Helvellyn and
- 45. Catchedicam,"—this congregation of hill and lake, so wide, and yet so prison-like in its separation from all beyond it, lay for ever under the eyes of Southey. His position locally, and, in some respects, intellectually, reminded one of Gibbon: but with great advantage in the comparison to Southey. The little town of Keswick and its adjacent lake bore something of the same relation to mighty London that Geneva and its lake may be thought to bear towards brilliant Paris. Southey, like Gibbon, was a miscellaneous scholar; he, like Gibbon, of vast historical research; he, like Gibbon, signally industrious, and patient, and elaborate in collecting the materials for his historical works. Like Gibbon, he had dedicated a life of competent ease, in a pecuniary sense, to literature; like Gibbon, he had gathered to the shores of a beautiful lake, remote from great capitals, a large, or, at least, sufficient library (in each case, I believe, the library ranged, as to numerical amount, between seven and ten thousand); and, like Gibbon, he was the most accomplished littérateur amongst the erudite scholars of his time, and the most of an erudite scholar amongst the accomplished littérateurs. After all these points of agreement known, it remains as a pure advantage on the side of Southey—a mere lucro ponatur—that he was a poet; and, by all men's confession, a respectable poet, brilliant in his descriptive powers, and fascinating in his narration, however much he might want of "The vision and the faculty divine." It is remarkable amongst the series of parallelisms that have been or might be pursued between two men, that both had the honour of retreating from a parliamentary life[139] ; Gibbon, after some silent and inert experience of that warfare; Southey, with a prudent foresight of the ruin to his health and literary usefulness, won from the experience of his nearest friends. I took leave of Southey in 1807, at the descent into the vale of Legbesthwaite, as I have already noticed. One year afterwards, I
- 46. became a permanent resident in his neighbourhood; and, although, on various accounts, my intercourse with him was at no time very strict, partly from the very uncongenial constitution of my own mind, and the different direction of my studies, partly from my reluctance to levy any tax on time so precious and so fully employed, I was yet on such terms for the next ten or eleven years that I might, in a qualified sense, call myself his friend. Yes! there were long years through which Southey might respect me, I him. But the years came—for I have lived too long, reader, in relation to many things! and the report of me would have been better, or more uniform at least, had I died some twenty years ago— the years came in which circumstances made me an Opium Eater; years through which a shadow as of sad eclipse sate and rested upon my faculties; years through which I was careless of all but those who lived within my inner circle, within "my hearts of hearts"; years—ah! heavenly years!—through which I lived, beloved, with thee, to thee, for thee, by thee! Ah! happy, happy years! in which I was a mere football of reproach, but in which every wind and sounding hurricane of wrath or contempt flew by like chasing enemies past some defying gates of adamant, and left me too blessed in thy smiles—angel of life!—to heed the curses or the mocking which sometimes I heard raving outside of our impregnable Eden. What any man said of me in those days, what he thought, did I ask? did I care? Then it was, or nearly then, that I ceased to see, ceased to hear of Southey; as much abstracted from all which concerned the world outside, and from the Southeys, or even the Coleridges, in its van, as though I had lived with the darlings of my heart in the centre of Canadian forests, and all men else in the centre of Hindostan. But, before I part from Greta Hall and its distinguished master, one word let me say, to protect myself from the imputation of sharing in some peculiar opinions of Southey, with respect to political economy, which have been but too familiar to the world, and some opinions of
- 47. the world, hardly less familiar, with respect to Southey himself and his accomplishments. Probably, with respect to the first, before this paper will be made public, I shall have sufficiently vindicated my own opinions in these matters by a distinct treatment of some great questions which lie at the base of all sound political economy; above all, the radical question of value, upon which no man has ever seen the full truth except Mr. Ricardo; and, unfortunately, he had but little of the polemic[140] skill which is required to meet the errors of his opponents. For it is noticeable that the most conspicuous of those opponents, viz. Mr. Malthus, though too much, I fear, actuated by a spirit of jealousy, and therefore likely enough to have scattered sophistry and disingenuous quibbling over the subject, had no need whatever of any further confusion for darkening and perplexing his themes than what inevitably belonged to his own most chaotic understanding. He and Say, the Frenchman, were both plagued by understandings of the same quality—having a clear vision in shallow waters, and this misleading them into the belief that they saw with equal clearness through the remote and the obscure; whereas, universally, their acuteness is like that of Hobbes—the gift of shallowness, and the result of not being subtle or profound enough to apprehend the true locus of the difficulty; and the barriers, which to them limit the view, and give to it, together with the contraction, all the distinctness and definite outline of limitation, are, in nine cases out of ten, the product of their own defective and aberrating vision, and not real barriers at all. Meantime, until I write fully and deliberately upon this subject, I shall observe, simply, that all "the Lake Poets," as they are called, were not only in error, but most presumptuously in error, upon these subjects. They were ignorant of every principle belonging to every question alike in political economy, and they were obstinately bent upon learning nothing; they were all alike too proud to acknowledge that any man knew better than they, unless it were upon some purely professional subject, or some art remote from all intellectual bearings, such as conferred no honour in its possession. Wordsworth was the least tainted with error upon political economy; and that
- 48. because he rarely applied his thoughts to any question of that nature, and, in fact, despised every study of a moral or political aspect, unless it drew its materials from such revelations of truth as could be won from the prima philosophia of human nature approached with the poet's eye. Coleridge was the one whom Nature and his own multifarious studies had the best qualified for thinking justly on a theme such as this; but he also was shut out from the possibility of knowledge by presumption, and the habit of despising all the analytic studies of his own day—a habit for which he certainly had some warrant in the peculiar feebleness of all that has offered itself for philosophy in modern England. In particular, the religious discussions of the age, which touch inevitably at every point upon the profounder philosophy of man and his constitution, had laid bare the weakness of his own age to Coleridge's eye; and, because all was hollow and trivial in this direction, he chose to think that it was so in every other. And hence he has laid himself open to the just scoffs of persons far inferior to himself. In a foot-note in some late number of the Westminster Review, it is most truly asserted (not in these words, but to this effect) that Coleridge's "Table Talk" exhibits a superannuation of error fit only for two centuries before. And what gave peculiar point to this display of ignorance was, that Coleridge did not, like Wordsworth, dismiss political economy from his notice disdainfully, as a puerile tissue of truisms, or of falsehoods not less obvious, but actually addressed himself to the subject; fancied he had made discoveries in the science; and even promised us a systematic work on its whole compass. To give a sample of this new and reformed political economy, it cannot well be necessary to trouble the reader with more than one chimera culled from those which Mr. Coleridge first brought forward in his early model of "The Friend." He there propounds, as an original hypothesis of his own, that taxation never burthens a people, or, as a mere possibility, can burthen a people simply by its amount. And why? Surely it draws from the purse of him who pays the quota a sum which it may be very difficult or even ruinous for
- 49. him to pay, were it no more important in a public point of view than as so much deducted from his own unproductive expenditure, and which may happen to have even a national importance if it should chance to be deducted from the funds destined to productive industry. What is Mr. Coleridge's answer to these little objections? Why, thus: the latter case he evades entirely, apparently not adverting to it as a case in any respect distinguished from the other; and this other—how is that answered? Doubtless, says Mr. Coleridge, it may be inconvenient to John or Samuel that a sum of money, otherwise disposable for their own separate uses, should be abstracted for the purchase of bayonets, or grape-shot; but with this the public, the commonwealth, have nothing to do, any more than with the losses at a gaming-table, where A's loss is B's gain—the total funds of the nation remaining exactly the same. It is, in fact, nothing but the accidental distribution of the funds which is affected —possibly for the worse (no other "worse," however, is contemplated than shifting it into hands less deserving), but, also, by possibility, for the better; and the better and the worse may be well supposed, in the long run, to balance each other. And that this is Mr. Coleridge's meaning cannot be doubted, upon looking into his illustrative image in support of it: he says that money raised by Government in the shape of taxes is like moisture exhaled from the earth—doubtless, for the moment injurious to the crops, but reacting abundantly for their final benefit when returning in the shape of showers. So natural, so obvious, so inevitable, by the way, is this conceit (or, to speak less harshly, this hypothesis), and so equally natural, obvious, and inevitable is the illustration from the abstraction and restoration of moisture, the exhalations and rains which affect this earth of ours, like the systole and the diastole of the heart, the flux and reflux of the ocean, that precisely the same doctrine, and precisely the same exemplification of the doctrine, is to be found in a Parliamentary speech[141] of some orator in the famous Long Parliament about the year 1642. And to my mind it was a bitter humiliation to find, about 150 years afterwards, in a shallow French work, the famous "Compte Rendu" of the French Chancellor of the
- 50. Exchequer (Comptroller of the Finances) Neckar—in that work, most humiliating it was to me, on a certain day, that I found this idle Coleridgian fantasy, not merely repeated, as it had been by scores— not merely anticipated by full twenty and two years, so that these French people had been beforehand with him, and had made Coleridge, to all appearance, their plagiarist, but also (hear it, ye gods!) answered, satisfactorily refuted, by this very feeble old sentimentalist, Neckar. Yes; positively Neckar, the slipshod old system-fancier and political driveller, had been so much above falling into the shallow snare, that he had, on sound principles, exposed its specious delusions. Coleridge, the subtlest of men in his proper walk, had brought forward, as a novel hypothesis of his own, in 1810, what Neckar, the rickety old charlatan, had scarcely condescended, in a hurried foot-note, to expose as a vulgar error and the shallowest of sophisms in 1787-88. There was another enormous blunder which Coleridge was constantly authorizing, both in his writings and his conversation. Quoting a passage from Sir James Stuart, in which he speaks of a vine-dresser as adding nothing to the public wealth, unless his labour did something more than replace his own consumption—that is, unless it reproduced it together with a profit; he asks contemptuously, whether the happiness and moral dignity that may have been exhibited in the vine-dresser's family are to pass for nothing? And then he proceeds to abuse the economists, because they take no account of such important considerations. Doubtless these are invaluable elements of social grandeur, in a total estimate of those elements. But what has political economy to do with them, a science openly professing to insulate, and to treat apart from all other constituents of national well-being, those which concern the production and circulation of wealth?[142] So far from gaining anything by enlarging its field in the way demanded by Coleridge's critic, political economy would be as idly travelling out of the limits indicated and held forth in its very name, as if logic were to teach ethics, or ethics to teach diplomacy. With respect to the Malthusian doctrine of population, it is difficult to know who was the true proprietor of the arguments urged against it sometimes by
- 51. Southey, sometimes by Coleridge. Those used by Southey are chiefly to be found up and down the Quarterly Review. But a more elaborate attack was published by Hazlitt; and this must be supposed to speak the peculiar objections of Coleridge, for he was in the habit of charging Hazlitt with having pillaged his conversation, and occasionally garbled it throughout the whole of this book. One single argument there was, undoubtedly just, and it was one which others stumbled upon no less than Coleridge, exposing the fallacy of the supposed different laws of increase for vegetable and animal life. But, though this frail prop withdrawn took away from Mr. Malthus's theory all its scientific rigour, the main practical conclusions were still valid as respected any argument from the Lakers; for the strongest of these arguments that ever came to my knowledge was a mere appeal—not ad verecundiam, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, but ad honestatem, as if it were shocking to the honestum of Roman ethics (the honnêteté of French minor ethics) that the check derived from self-restraint should not be supposed amply competent to redress all the dangers from a redundant population under any certain knowledge generally diffused that such dangers existed. But these are topics which it is sufficient in this place to have noticed currente calamo. I was anxious, however, to protest against the probable imputation that I, because generally so intense an admirer of these men, adopted their blind and hasty reveries in political economy. There were (and perhaps more justly I might say there are) two other notions currently received about Southey, one of which is altogether erroneous, and the other true only in a limited sense. The first is the belief that he belonged to what is known as the Lake school in poetry; with respect to which all that I need say in this place is involved in his own declaration frankly made to myself in Easedale, during the summer of 1812: that he considered Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, and still more his principles as to the selection of subjects, and as to what constituted a poetic treatment, as founded on error. There is certainly some community of phraseology between Southey and the other Lakers, naturally
- 52. arising out of their joint reverence for Scriptural language: this was a field in which they met in common: else it shows but little discernment and power of valuing the essences of things, to have classed Southey in the same school with Wordsworth and Coleridge. The other popular notion about Southey which I conceive to be expressed with much too little limitation regards his style. He has been praised, and justly, for his plain, manly, unaffected English, until the parrot echoers of other men's judgments, who adopt all they relish with undistinguishing blindness, have begun to hold him up as a great master of his own language, and a classical model of fine composition. Now, if the error were only in the degree, it would not be worth while to notice it; but the truth is, that Southey's defects in this particular power are as striking as his characteristic graces. Let a subject arise—and almost in any path there is a ready possibility that it should—in which a higher tone is required, of splendid declamation, or of impassionate fervour, and Southey's style will immediately betray its want of the loftier qualities as flagrantly as it now asserts its powers in that unpretending form which is best suited to his level character of writing and his humbler choice of themes. It is to mistake the character of Southey's mind, which is elevated but not sustained by the higher modes of enthusiasm, to think otherwise. Were a magnificent dedication required, moving with a stately and measured solemnity, and putting forward some majestic pretensions, arising out of a long and laborious life; were a pleading required against some capital abuse of the earth—war, slavery, oppression in its thousand forms; were a Defensio pro Populo Anglicano required; Southey's is not the mind, and, by a necessary consequence, Southey's is not the style, for carrying such purposes into full and memorable effect. His style is therefore good, because it has been suited to his themes; and those themes have hitherto been either narrative, which usually imposes a modest diction, and a modest structure of sentences, or argumentative in that class which is too overburthened with details, with replies, with interruption, and every mode of discontinuity, to allow a thought of eloquence, or of the periodic style which a perfect eloquence instinctively seeks.
- 53. I here close my separate notice of the Lake Poets—meaning those three who were originally so denominated—three men upon whom posterity, in every age, will look back with interest as profound as, perhaps, belongs to any other names of our era; for it happens, not unfrequently, that the personal interest in the author is not in the direct ratio of that which belongs to his works: and the character of an author better qualified to command a vast popularity for the creations of his pen is oftentimes more of a universal character, less peculiar, less fitted to stimulate the curiosity, or to sustain the sympathy of the intellectual, than the profounder and more ascetic solemnity of a Wordsworth, or the prodigal and magnificent eccentricities of a Coleridge. With respect to both of these gifted men, some interesting notices still remain in arrear; but these will more properly come forward in their natural places, as they happen to arise in after years in connexion with my own memoirs.
- 54. CHAPTER VI THE SARACEN'S HEAD[143] My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807; but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left myself time, I stayed only one week. On the last day, I witnessed a scene, the first and the last of its kind that ever I did witness, almost too trivial to mention, except for the sake of showing what things occur in the realities of experience which a novelist could not venture to imagine. Wordsworth and his sister were under an engagement of some standing to dine on that day with a literary lady about four miles distant; and, as the southern mail, which I was to catch at a distance of eighteen miles, would not pass that point until long after midnight, Miss Wordsworth proposed that, rather than pass my time at an inn, I should join the dinner party; a proposal rather more suitable to her own fervent and hospitable temper than to the habits of our hostess, who must (from what I came to know of her in after years) have looked upon me as an intruder. Something had reached Miss Wordsworth of her penurious ménage, but nothing that approached the truth. I was presented to the lady, whom we found a perfect bas bleu of a very commonplace order, but having some other accomplishments beyond her slender acquaintance with literature. Our party consisted of six—our hostess, who might be about fifty years of age; a pretty timid young woman, who was there
- 55. in the character of a humble friend; some stranger or other; the Wordsworths, and myself. The dinner was the very humblest and simplest I had ever seen—in that there was nothing to offend—I did not then know that the lady was very rich—but also it was flagrantly insufficient in quantity. Dinner, however, proceeded; when, without any removals, in came a kind of second course, in the shape of a solitary pheasant. This, in a cold manner, she asked me to try; but we, in our humility, declined for the present; and also in mere good- nature, not wishing to expose too palpably the insufficiency of her dinner. May I die the death of a traitor, if she did not proceed, without further question to any one of us (and, as to the poor young companion, no form of even invitation was conceded to her), and, in the eyes of us all, eat up the whole bird, from alpha to omega. Upon my honour, I thought to myself, this is a scene I would not have missed. It is well to know the possibilities of human nature. Could she have a bet depending on the issue, and would she explain all to us as soon as she had won her wager? Alas! no explanation ever came, except, indeed, that afterwards her character, put en evidence upon a score of occasions, too satisfactorily explained everything. No; it was, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, a psychological curiosity—a hollow thing—and only once matched in all the course of my reading, in or out of romances; but that once, I grieve to say it, was by a king, and a sort of hero. The Duchess of Marlborough it is who reports the shocking anecdote of William III, that actually Princess Anne, his future wife, durst not take any of the green peas brought to the dinner table, when that vegetable happened to be as yet scarce and premature. There was a gentleman! And such a lady had we for our hostess. However, we all observed a suitable gravity; but afterwards, when we left the house, the remembrance affected us differently. Miss Wordsworth laughed with undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for laughing—he was thoroughly disgusted, and said repeatedly, "A person cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an act." The lady is dead, and I shall not mention her name: she lived only to gratify her selfish propensities; and two
- 56. little anecdotes may show the outrageous character of her meanness. I was now on the debtor side of her dinner account, and, therefore, in a future year she readily accepted an invitation to come and dine with me at my cottage. But, on a subsequent occasion, when I was to have a few literary people at dinner, whom I knew that she greatly wished to meet, she positively replied thus:—"No; I have already come with my young lady to dine with you; that puts me on the wrong side by one; now, if I were to come again, as I cannot leave Miss—— behind, I shall then be on the wrong side by three; and that is more than I could find opportunities to repay before I go up to London for the winter." "Very well," I said; "give me 3s. and that will settle the account." She laughed, but positively persisted in not coming until after dinner, notwithstanding she had to drive a distance of ten miles. The other anecdote is worse. She was exceedingly careful of her health; and not thinking it healthy to drive about in a close carriage, —which, besides, could not have suited the narrow mountain tracks, to which her sketching habits attracted her,—she shut up her town carriage for the summer, and jobbed some little open car. Being a very large woman, and, moreover, a masculine woman, with a bronzed complexion, and always choosing to wear, at night, a turban, round hair that was as black as that of the "Moors of Malabar," she presented an exact likeness of a Saracen's Head, as painted over inn-doors; whilst the timid and delicate young lady by her side looked like "dejected Pity" at the side of "Revenge" when assuming the war-denouncing trumpet. Some Oxonians and Cantabs, who, at different times, were in the habit of meeting this oddly assorted party in all nooks of the country, used to move the question, whether the poor horse or the young lady had the worst of it? At length the matter was decided: the horse was fast going off this sublunary stage; and the Saracen's Head was told as much, and with this little addition,—that his death was owing inter alia to starvation. Her answer was remarkable:—"But, my dear madam, that is his master's fault; I pay so much a-day—he is to keep the horse." That might be, but still the horse was dying, and dying in the way
- 57. Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world, offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth. That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to self-development guides and children's books. More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading. Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and personal growth every day! ebookbell.com