THE LULLABY LAUREATE
The story of my own soul is the story of Alfred Tennyson’s reputation
for the last thirty or forty years; so that is the easiest way for me to
tell about it.
I was one of Tennyson’s cultural products. I cannot recall the age when
I did not know “Call me early, mother dear,” and “What does little
birdie say?” As soon as I had the idea of being anything, I had the idea
of being Sir Galahad. I attended very devoutly a church, which differed
from that of Alfred Tennyson in one fact--that it had a prayer for the
President of the United States in place of a prayer for the Queen. I
doubt if it ever occurred to me to think that Tennyson might be wrong in
anything--until the age of fifteen, when suddenly there dawned upon my
horrified mind the idea that Christianity was merely another mythology.
I wrestled with this idea for a couple of years, and part of the
struggle consisted of a study of “In Memoriam,” recommended by my
spiritual adviser. The poem suggested a great many new reasons for
doubting the immortality of the soul; but it suggested no certainty that
the Creator of the universe, having given me one life, was under
obligation to give me two. Which meant that I was through with
Tennyson, whose whole product, on its religious side, is an agonized cry
that immortality must be.
In politics and economics I experienced a similar revulsion from my
one-time idol. He seemed to me a victim of all the delusions, a
celebrator of all the shams of civilization. Even his poetical charms
now annoyed me, serving as trimming and decoration for second-rate
ideas. In my reaction I went too far, as have all the young people of
our time; for Tennyson was really a great poet, and a man of fine and
generous spirit.
He was the son of a Church of England clergyman, and that is a fact
which must never be forgotten; he grew up in a rectory, and wrote Sunday
poetry. He was the elder brother of a big family, and took the position
of elder brother to all mankind. He was tall and imposing, dark and
romantic looking, cultivating long wavy black locks and a Spanish cloak
and a poet’s pipe. When he did not know anything to say, he puffed at
his pipe and looked magnificent, and everybody was awed.
Culture came naturally in his family. He had written five thousand
octosyllabic rhymes at the age of twelve. His first verses were
published when he was young, and because one or two critics made fun of
them, he took refuge in his dignity and waited nine years to publish
again. “Ulysses” made his fame when he was thirty-three, and two years
later he received a pension from the Tory government. Two years after
that came “The Princess,” a dramatic composition in ridicule of the
higher education of women; it suited the lower-educated Victorian ladies
so perfectly that it ran into five editions. In 1850, at the age of
forty-one, Tennyson became the laureate; when he was seventy-four he was
raised to the peerage. No other English poet has earned this honor,
which is reserved to wholesale slaughterers of animals and men, to
brewers, whiskey distillers, diamond merchants, and publishers of
capitalist dope.
Concerning Lord Tennyson as an artist in words, there is little that
needs to be said. He received his “ten talents” and put them to use;
everywhere he went he carefully collected poetical impressions, words,
phrases and ideas, and jotted them down. No one ever spent more time
filing and perfecting, and no one was more completely master of
beautiful utterance.
He had an inquiring mind, and picked up ideas on all subjects and put
them into his poetry; but unfortunately he found consecutive thinking
very difficult, and you can find as many contradictory thoughts in him
as in the Bible. He has an invincible repugnance to the drawing of
uncomfortable conclusions; whenever his thinking leads to such, he
evaporates in a cloud of comforting words. His verse contains more
platitudes and cheap cheer-up stuff than any other poet known to me; and
so he was the darling of the antimacassar age.
England had put down Napoleon and taken possession of the trade of the
world. There were revolutions on the continent, but at home nothing
worse than a few rioters to be clubbed by the police. The foggy islands
were a safe haven, administered by landlords and merchants. Everything
was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the function of
a poet was to tell it to the people, in such beautiful language that
they would accept it as a revelation.
Tennyson in his early days had shown traces of liberalism, but the
Chartist movement frightened him into reaction, and there he stayed.
“Shout for England!” says the chorus of one of his poems, and the
function of the shout in suppressing thought is understood by all
students of mob psychology. “Riflemen, form!” exhorted another poem,
published in the “Times”--
Let your reforms for a moment go;
Look to your butts, and take good aim.
That was, so to speak, a “Timesly” sentiment; the riflemen hastened to
form, and the young aristocrats led them to slaughter, and the poet
laureate had to come forward again to glorify the British national habit
of blundering. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was so popular in its
day that it was printed on picture post cards; every school child
learned the duty of the lower classes under the Tory system--
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to question why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Bear in mind that the factory system was now in full flower, and little
children ten and twelve years old were slaving all night in cotton
mills, or dragging heavy cars in the depths of coal mines. English
manufacturers and landlords were taxing the lower classes to such a
condition that today, when you see them pouring out for their holidays
upon Hampstead Heath, they seem not human beings, but some lower
species, shambling and deformed. Once in a while a gleam of this horror
breaks into Tennyson’s verse; but even then the message is
reactionary--an English gentleman is scolding at commercialism because
it destroys the good old country life.
But for the most part the Victorian way of dealing with uncomfortable
things was to hush them up. Poetry must select pure and sweet subjects;
poetry must be polite, it must use big words and preserve the home
comforts. It is our duty to believe what is proper, even when it is
obviously not true.
I have referred to Tennyson’s long agony on the subject of immortality.
The deepest experience of his life was the death of his friend, Arthur
Hallam, a man who apparently knew how to think, and to drive the dreamy
poet to work. It is puzzling to us that a grown man should be so taken
aback by death; it would seem to be a common enough phenomenon to be
noted and prepared for. But Tennyson was struck down mentally and
spiritually, and his sufferings make clear to us that he did not really
believe his creed. Men who are seriously convinced of heaven don’t mind
waiting a few years to join their loved ones; but Tennyson was never
really sure that he would see Arthur Hallam again, and he spent
seventeen years brooding over this problem, and putting his broodings
into “In Memoriam.”
The poet early fell in love with a young English lady, but could not
afford to marry her; so he waited twenty years, and she waited also. Now
there have been poets who married when they fell in love, and went off
and kept house in a garret or a cottage, and made out the best they
could. But Tennyson had to have his poet’s robe and his poet’s chair in
front of the fireplace; he had to be an English gentleman, and to keep
his wife like an English lady in the days of Victorian propriety. The
lady, when they were finally united, put an end to fretting over
immortality; she explained to her husband that “doubt is
devil-born”--and what gentleman wants a devil in his home? It is better
to become an oracle: to preach about peace in a far future, and meantime
wield a sword in the Crimea; to sing about justice, and vote the Tory
ticket; to have all the comforts that fine phrases can bring, without
sacrificing those other comforts of popularity and prosperity.
Tennyson went back to the old days of Britain, and falsified the story
of King Arthur so as to make it sweetly sentimental. “Obedience is the
bond of rule,” he wrote; and so Queen Victoria’s husband came to call on
him. He preached submission to womanhood: “Lay thy sweet hands in mine
and trust to me”--and so he was summoned to Windsor Castle to kiss the
sweet hand of his queen. One thinks of the sweet hands of those English
ladies who took up hatchets and chopped the pictures in the National
Gallery!
Victoria’s beloved husband died, and Tennyson wrote an ode to him; so he
became the dear pudgy old lady’s intimate friend, and she confided to
him the troubles of royalty. “How I wish you could suggest means of
crushing those horrible publications, whose object is to promulgate
scandal and calumny, which they invent themselves!” The poet did his
best; his most popular sentimental and patriotic stuff was published in
pamphlets which sold for thrippence; but in spite of everything the
labor movement continued to take root, and likewise Socialism--or
“Utopian idiocy,” to use the Tennysonian phrase.
He sits upon his throne, eighty years of age and more, and hardly anyone
questions his supremacy; he is the greatest English poet since
Shakespeare, there is no living writer to be compared to him. We pity
him, for after all, he is a great man, and has written great
verse--“Ulysses,” for example, of which no one could ever wish to change
a line. He has written lyrics of beauty and real eloquence. But now he
sees the younger generation traveling another road from his, and he
wonders and fears and storms and scolds. He is too clear-sighted not to
see the wreck of his dreams--
Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!
He looks about and sees modern capitalism--
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
It was no common Victorian who saw that at the age of eighty; and no
fair critic will deny him credit for such lines. But the elderly
poet-lord had no idea what to do about it, and capitalist society
continued to nourish its secret disease, which twenty-two years after
Tennyson’s death was to cover the whole earth with vomit.