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?

CHAPTER LVI

THE FEAR THAT KILLS

One more, and we are done with the melancholy tale of the poets who ran away from the French revolution. William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time "was very heaven."

But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family. She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a British moralist.

His first book of poems, "Lyrical Ballads," was published in 1798. He had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a year, bequeathed to him by a wellto-do friend. In the course of time the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this naturemystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and a year after that be became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every political reform,

and composed a series of "Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria.

Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English.

But here is the point to get clear: practically all this poetry was written in eight years; you might count on your ten fingers and ten toes all the lines that Wordsworth wrote after the age of thirty-five which are worth anyone's while to read. In my youth, when I was studying poetry, it was my habit to go through a poet, beginning with the first page of volume one and ending with the last page of volume five, or ten, or whatever it might be. In the case of Wordsworth, it was volume twelve, and he was the one poet with whom I fell down. The "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" finished me; I testify that of all the dreary drivel in the world's literature, this carries the prize.

There were two men in Wordsworth: the instinctive man, who experienced overwhelming feelings, and the conscious man, who was terrified by those feelings. This is no guess of mine, but something which Wordsworth himself explained over and over again: "My apprehensions come in crowds. My former thoughts reMe this unchartered

turned: the fear that kills

freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires." So the Wordsworth who believed in the Tory party and the Thirty-nine Articles put the screws on the poet, and not

merely the emotions, but the brains of a great genius withered before the age of forty.

The cases of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth suggest the inquiry: is it possible for a great poet to be a conservative? In old times, yes; for the conservatives then had something to say for themselves. But in the last hundred years the meaning of the class struggle has become so apparent, the consequences of class exploitation have become so obvious, that a man who fails to see them must be deficient in intelligence, a man who fails to care about them must be deficient in heart and conscience; and these are things without which great poetry cannot be made.

CHAPTER LVII

THE FIRST LORD OF LETTERS

Fortunately not all the poets of England let themselves be frightened into reaction by the French revolution.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and blackguard. "Your mother is a fool," said a schoolmate; and Byron answered, "I know it." This, you must admit, was a poor start in life for a boy. He had a club foot, concerning which he was frightfully sensitive; but in other ways he was divinely handsome, and much sought after by the ladies; so he alternated between fits of solitude and melancholy, and other fits of amorous excess. Being a lord, he was a great person all his life. Being a man of genius, he enormously increased his greatness. He lived always before the world, in one sublime pose or another, and composed whole epics about himself and his moods.

He traveled, and became a cosmopolitan figure, and wild tales were spread concerning his adventures in Europe. Then he came back to England, and published a poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," which made such a sensation as Britain had never known before. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous," he said. But he affected to despise this fame; he, a noble lord, must not be confused with vulgar writing fellows. He would toss a manuscript to his publishers with a careless gesturethough the manuscript might be worth one or two thou