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.