THE TORY WHIP
Another poet who was frightened out of his wits by the French revolution
was Robert Southey. But he took to respectability instead of to opium.
He was born in 1774, the son of a linen draper. At the age of nineteen
he was full of Rousseau, Goethe, and the “infidelity” of Gibbon. He was
so keen for France that he wrote an epic about Joan of Arc; also he
planned the “Pantisocracy” with Coleridge. But then he married the other
sister, and was shocked by the Terror; a wealthy man gave him an
annuity, and he settled down to write long and romantic poems about
princes and conquerors, Celtic, Mexican, Arab, Indian--stage properties
from all over the world, combined with standard British moralizing.
In less than ten years we find Southey evolved into a pillar of
reaction; at the age of thirty-three he received a pension from the
government, and two years later he joined Walter Scott and Gifford as
the literary whips of the Tory party. They published the “Quarterly
Review,” and we shall see before long what they did to Byron, Shelley
and Keats. At thirty-nine Southey became the laureate, and delivered the
customary New Year’s ode in support of church and state; a procedure his
biographer defends by explaining that he “was earning a provision for
his girls.” It is of course a pleasant thing for a poet with many
daughters to save up the purchase price of a husband for each; but what
about the cotton spinners, whose ten-year-old daughters were working
fourteen and sixteen hours a day in the mills, with the Tory squirarchy
taxing the bread out of their mouths?
For centuries the literary jackals who served the British ruling classes
had starved in garrets; but now their services were beginning to be
appreciated, and they were admitted to the class they defended. The
diligent Southey wrote a “Naval Biography,” a hymn of praise to
Britain’s sea-lords, and got five hundred pounds per volume for it, and
established himself as England’s leading man of letters.
But alas, there was a skeleton in his literary closet. In his youth he
had written a poem in praise of Watt Tyler, proletarian rebel of old
England; and now someone got hold of the manuscript, and published it
secretly, and Southey’s frantic efforts in the courts failed to stop it.
Sixty thousand copies were sold, and a member of Parliament stood up and
read extracts from it, side by side with the laureate’s latest article
in the “Quarterly Review,” denouncing parliamentary reform. To the
respectability of Southey’s time this reading was an outrage, but for my
part, it is the only reading of Southey I ever enjoyed. Here was a
scholar, standing on his literary dignity--and what was his attitude to
his fellow authors who had not sold out? He clamored for Hunt and
Hazlitt to be deported to a penal settlement; while for Byron he wanted
“the whip and the branding-iron”!
We today know Southey by his “Life of Nelson,” which serves as required
reading in most American high schools. We are told that this is because
it is a great work of literature, but the true reason is because it is a
work of propaganda for the Army and Navy League. If you want to study
the art of hero-making, note the biographer’s deft handling of the Lady
Hamilton episode of Nelson’s career. This regulation movie “vamp” had
married an English nobleman in his dotage; and she got hold of Nelson in
Naples, where she was the favorite of an unspeakably corrupt court.
Southey tells us there was nothing “criminal” in the hero’s relationship
to this lady; which is the English way of stating that Nelson did not
commit adultery. If this be true, it is rather singular that Nelson
should have believed himself the father of Lady Hamilton’s two children!
The queen of this Neapolitan court was a sister of Marie Antoinette, the
French queen who had told the people to eat cake if they could not get
bread; and through Lady Hamilton’s hold on Nelson, he was led to use the
British fleet in furtherance of Neapolitan royalist conspiracies, and in
defiance of orders from home. But you don’t find any of that in Southey!
You are told that when Nelson returned to England, he “separated from”
his wife; the fact being that his wife left him because he insisted on
bringing the “vamp” lady to live in the home with her! In view of these
details, I asked Americans to consider whether it would not be better
for their children to read about the democratic English heroes, such as
John Milton and Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton and John Ruskin and
Keir Hardie?