The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-29 00:00:00

THE WAR POETRY OF THE LAUREATE.

TO ALFRED TENNYSON, 1),,,Le,i
(From, the Weekly DisTateh.) "
amenable to
iteoi
m literarycriticism. .With
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patriotyoutoare
political
re-
gard to the firsttbheart,,ismnaoutd
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inquire here whether
its beauties add another leaf to
youthe warreeatbthosewwhhicihobynoau
My dealings -
worthily wear. with
torally take place between apolitical criticand a political
writer. Such you are, to a certain extent, in the poem of
" Maud ;" and yet more directly in one or two of the
appended compositions. Your spirit is too manly to
shelter yourself under any plea of poetical privilege. You
know that "song is but the eloquence of truth,' and by
the truth of principles must it be judged. The bard who
sings falsely is as justly censurable as the historian who
records falsely. Perhaps more so; for to misguide the feel-
' lugs of the people may be a more grievous offence than
to mislead their judgments on a matter of fact. I hold,
therefore, that all poets are morally answerable for their
politics, so far, I mean, as they express, and thereby en-
force, a certain phase of political thought in their poetical
compositions. Thus I esteem you eminently praiseworthy
for the many noble songs of progress scattered through your
publications. They combine for you the honours due to
poet, patriot, and philanthropist. They win for you the
civic crown as well as the bays. As Laureate, you have a
yet further and peculiar responsibility. The office is not
exclusively nominal or honorary. It is something more
than merely the excuse for a pension. It is something
besides the Royal adjudication to you of the highest
merit in poetry of which the empire can boast. The
age of Birth-day Odes is happily gone. To that servile
mummery you have never been condemned. With Pye it
departed, and for ever. Illustrious predecessors had raised
and dignified the office before you were nominated to it.
But it has not, therefore, become a mere sinecure. You
are the Laureate of Queen Victoria, the Sovereign of the
British empire. Of you it may reasonably be expected
that when the country sustains a great loss, in the death
say of one of its greatest men, you give articulate sound
to the public sorrow in some noble dirge ; that when the
nation's heart swells high with joyor triumph, you harmo-
nise the tone of exultation; or that when it is needful to
import some heroic impulse to the public mind, you point to
the glory that shines afar, and join your trumpet call to the
inspiring'pursuit. To these claims yon have responded, con-
ceding thereby the justice and fairness of the right which
I would now exercise of criticising what you have
done, and the manner in which you have done it. And
first, I must take exception to your description of the
national cbaracter as affected by the long peace. 'lt is
an egregious and disgraceful caricature. It dishonours
the country, and is most untrue to the facts. It is one-
sided ; and the one side which it presents is inexcusably
darkened. That long peace tends to selfishness, and that
we had by no means altogether escaped that taint, I
know very well. This was part of the theme of my last
letter. In that I depicted the transition, which may be
ascribed to the war, from a species of contented and sor-
did selfishness to one of large and generous sympathies.
But it cannot be conceded to you of the blessings of
peace, that " we have made them a curse." We were not
" pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its
own." There was no such degradation as to justify the
question, " Who but a fool would have faith in a trades-
man's ware or his word ?" Peace had nothing to do with
the poor being " hovelled and hustled together, each sex,
like swine ;" in fact, peace was exploring remedies and
palliations for these social evils. True, while we see
"Peace in her vineyard," "a company forges the wine;"
but the adulteration in our port goes on quite as largely
in time of war. And so the wife-beating under the in-
fluence of drink, the "chalk, alum,' and plaster sold to
the poor for bread," the lying down armed "for the
villainous centre-bit," the poisoned potion of the apothe-
I and the "mammonite mother" that "kills her
babe for a burial fee," why all these have just as much
to do with war as with peace. Nay, it might be shown
of some of them that they are more likely to be promoted
by the privations of war than by the plentifulness of
peace. The "mammonite mother" is a right-down
calumny ; it is not, like the other allegations, a gross
exaggeration ; it was originally only a suspicion, and
it has been so disproved as to demolish all right to
assert it as a fact, unless, perchance, in a rare case of
monomania, which has no business in such a catalogue.
One pauses and asks oneself, wonderingly, what grains
and atoms of truth there are in this detestable picture ?
And if there be some petty fragments of reality, still one
inquires how far they can plausibly be said to affect the
national character—it what way they can be traced
to either peace or war, by any logical connection of
cause and effect—how a people, so sunk and lost, could
ever, by the bare proclamation of war, be roused up into
a high-spirited and generous nation—nay, and how it
could possibly happen that such a people could be not only
capable of honourable transformation, but should itself
be the moving and impelling power that actually goaded
on its reluctant rulers, and with difficulty commanded
and enforced obedience in them to its own warlike spirit.
Perhaps you will disown these foul imputations, and tell
us you write dramatically— that you depict the deeply
embittered feelings of the hero of your poem—that we
are to suppose you in a state of metempsychosis with
the impoverished son of a ruined and perhaps murdered
father. But that will not serve. Your hero goes
mad afterwards, but he is not such a fool as to gene-
ralise in this wholesale way from a private misfortune.
He is quite in his senses a little further on, and that, too,
before requited love has brightened the world to his per-
ceptions. He characterises very justly the broad-brimmed
hawker of holy things, whose ear is " stuft with hie
cotton," and who would " priach our poor little army
down." He joins in the general aversion and contempt
for the Peace-mongering tribe. So your vituperations
on the national character in time of Peace have no more
of dramatic consistency than they have of historical
truth. The nation was ripe fur war in the time of
peace. It was then, as now, just and generous. Half
a century of quietude and commerce, 'and prosperity had
not " so effaced the image of our sires" as to render us
lh-tless on-lookers at Russian aggression. I will not say
that the public responded to the cry to arms ;" the pub-
lic originated the cry. They left response to their rulers
only. It was their determination " that an iron tyranny
now should bend or cease." They would not allow that
" Britain's one sole God" should " be the millionaire."
They never had established or tolerated that idolatry.
It was not their will that " commerce" should be " all
in all." And when the hero of your poem
Stood on a giant deck and mixed his breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry,
he only added his individual mite to 'the popular enthu-
shim. Away, then, with your calumnies on the natio-
nal
character as it stood after those long years of peace.
Blot them out. You have often blotted better things,
as I shall presently have to show. Your national de-
scription is a nauseous compound of disgraceful excep-
tions. It is a picture of the sun as only. a congeries of
spots. Rise,into truth and justice; and, so be our coun-
try's bard and our Sovereign's Laureate.
Your volume closes with the mangled corpse of the
most glorious of martial lyrics in modern times—" The
Charge of the Light Brigade." It is no more like itself.
" than Ito Hercules." For these extraordinary omissions
I must call you to account. They commence with the
second stanza. You first delete the following :--
Into the Valley of Death .
Rode.the six hundred,
For up came an order which
Some one had tdundered.
"Forward, the Light Brigade !
Take the guns," Nolan. said—
Into the valley of Death
• . Rde the six hundred.
You afterwards tell us that
No man was there dismaed
• Not though the soldier knyew
Some one had hlundered-.
All this you have obliterated. And why ? Wherefore
do you suppress the fact 'that the 'command for that
famous Balaklava charge was a blunder I will not
seek to divine your motives ; a misplaced charity for the
dead perhaps ; or a more misplaced leniency towards the
living ; but, vvhateverthe inducement, the omission.falsi.
ties the fact. • The-blunder is abundantly proved. It was
a disgraceful and sanguinary blunder in itself, though the
devoted heroism of the deed eclipsed the mistake in its
blaze of glory. But that there was carelessness and am-
biguity of expression in the original order—that there was
want of- distinct understanding on the part of I.ord
Lucan_.that there was Misinterpretation on the part of
Capt. Nolan--and that there was fatal acquiescence on the
part of Lord Cardigan—all this is in proof, by the letter
of Lord Raglan, and the various facts elicited in the
Parliamentary discussions. It suited the tactics of the
d
ter up ;
patched
dah7uucpseh
aef
os.dri
fy upoi
you,
,wtwTe
rats;
Government and of the party leaders to hush the mat-
odnisßleyouatsstiliat was no prece-
dentwere ormonissuinndPerasrtalianindienngt
between Lords Lucan and Cardigan, and a private inter•
ference of Lord Hardiuge to order the former home, at
the request of Lord Raglan. The responsibility of all of
them for the lives of the brave soldiers thrown away in
utter waste by the blunderingsamongst them was blinked
altogether. All was slurred over, upon the principla
of least said soonest mended. That was no reason why
you should not speak out. You bad spoken out. Your
words had pealed likea trumpet overthe land. And now
you suppress, you recant and shirk, Oh ! this is miserable.
For the blundering, and the cognisance of the blunder,
are no important part of the transaction. They are
essential to a full meed of justice to the soldiery.
They knew that they went to certain destruction. That
admirable and graphic chronicler of the war, Mr..
tßus-
sell, riff the Times, says, "Don Quixotte. in his tilt against
the windmill; was not near so rash or reckless as the
gallant fellows who prepared without a thought to rush
on almost certain death." Yes, " reckless" in one sense
they were ; but not in the sense of not seeing the peril
of the enterprise and the madness of the order. Peace
to their names. ' But for the
to -their souls and glory
sake of no conventional respect for the dead, of no
scrupulosity, as regards the living, let us allow one iota
to be abstracted from the justice due to them in their
heroic self-sacrifice. Let what may become of our Lucans
and Cardigans, of our Nolans and Aireys, of our Rag-
lans and Hardinges, justice to the memory of the de-
voted should be paramount. Its omission would be
discreditable to you, Sir; its retractation by suppres-
sion is what it grieves me to charge you with. The
fault'is fart greater' than that of having enfeebled and
ernaiculated one of the grandest offsprings of your muse,
one of the noblest outpourings of your excited spirit.
It-offends agNinst moral truth and historical justice.
Your besetting sin is that of making alterations and
suppressions after you have published.. I recommend
all who possess them to preserve and prize the earlier
editions of yOur poems. They have treasures of beauty
of which you have since done your best to rob the world.
But this is matter of taste only ; which, were I inditing
na literarY criticism, I should not despair of substantiat-
"g,' but which is beside my present purpose. This ten-
dencyo of yOurs does not and cannot account for the conjs. sign oh whiCh I have been commenting. There is evi-
dently; in this
case, an ulterior reason. You have
marred - the
beauty Of the laurel wreath which you had