“Number One: The air is full of music, traveling half way round the earth. Number Two: Aeroplanes are circling the earth for the first time in history. Number Three: A scientist has given his life in the effort to find a cure for cancer. Number Four: Mars is coming nearer, and we have a chance to learn how the canals are made, and perhaps to get messages from a new race. Number Five: In a physics laboratory, only two or three miles from our home, men are taking the atom to pieces and preparing to extract its energy. Number Six: We are discovering how to take control of our subconscious minds and master our hidden life. Number Seven: A group of scientists in New York are exploring, by means of laboratory tests, the energies we call ‘psychic.’ Number Eight: In every civilized country today the workers are organizing themselves to put an end to parasitism based upon class privilege.

“Here are eight themes for poets, every one of which has the advantage of being real, and not fading away upon analysis. Here are pleasure-domes that are truly “stately,” rivers that are truly “sacred,” caverns that are truly “measureless to man.” These modern themes have only one drawback, from the point of view of the poet; they require him to think as well as to feel!”

CHAPTER LV
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?