CHAPTER LXIX

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.

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