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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCI «TY
Atheism
AND
A Reply
SUICIDE.
to
ALFRED TENNYSON, Poet Laureate.
BY
G-. W. FOOTE.
------- ♦-------
Mr. Tennyson has written some fine poetry in his old age,
and he has also written a good deal of trash. Most of the
latter has appeared in the hospitable columns of the Nine
teenth Century. Mr. James Knowles, the editor of that
magazine, is an excellent man of business and knows what
takes with the British public. He is fully aware that Mr.
Tennyson is the popular poet of the day, and with com
mendable sagacity, he not only accepts the poet-laureate’s
verses whenever he can get them, but always prints them in
the largest type. Mr. Tennyson opened the first number
of his magazine with a weak sonnet, in which men like Pro
fessor Clifford were alluded to as seekers of hope “ in sunless
gulfs of doubt.” That little germ has developed into the
longer poem on “Despair” that appears in the current
number of the Nineteenth Century.
The critics have lauded this poem. Nothing else could be
expected of them. Mr. Tennyson is the popular poet, the
household poet, the Christian poet, and scarcely a critic dares
give him aught but unstinted praise. The ordinary gentle
men of the press write to order; they describe Mr. Tenny
son’s poetry as they describe Mr. Irving’s acting; they are
fettered by great, and especially by fashionable reputations ;
and when the publi? has settled who are its favorites they
never resist its verdict but simply flow with the stream. In
the course of time there grows up a sanctified cant of
criticism. If you are rash enough to doubt the favorite’s
greatness, you are looked upon as a common-place person
incapable of appreciating genius. If you object to the
popular poet’s intellectual ideas, you are rebuked for not
seeing that he is divinely inspired. Yet it is surely indis
putable that ideas are large or small, true or false, whether
they are expressed in verse or in prose. When poets con
descend to argue they must be held amenable to the laws of
reason. The right divine of kings to govern wrong is an
exploded idea, and the right divine of poets to reason wrong
should share the same fate.
�2
Mr. Tennyson’s poem is not too intelligible, and with a
proper appreciation of this he has told the gist of the story
in a kind of “ argument.”
“ A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a
life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolved to end
themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man
is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.”
Now Mr. Tennyson has not worked fairly on these lines.
The question “ Does Atheism, as such, incline men to self
destruction ?” is not touched. The Atheist husband of
“ Despair” loses more than belief in God and hope of a life
to come. His wife suffers from a malady only curable, if at
all, by the surgeon’s knife. His eldest son has forged his
name and ruined him, while it is hinted that another son has
sunk to a still worse depth of vice. And he describes him
self as “ a life without sun, without health, without hope,
without any delight.” All this is very inartistic. An
Atheist under such a burden of trouble might commit suicide
just as a Christian might. Dr. Newman well says that by
a judicious selection of facts you may prove anything, and
Mr. Tennyson has judiciously selected his facts. He could
not kill his hero with Atheism, and so he brings in bad
health, a diseased wife, cruel and criminal children, and a
ruined home. Any one of these might prompt to suicide,
without the introduction of Atheism at all.
Mr. Tennyson’s lack of art in this poem goes still farther.
He makes the husband and wife drown themselves theatri
cally. They walk out into the breakers near a lighthouse.
This is mere melodrama. Why did they not take poison
and die in each other’s arms ? The only answer is that Mr.
Tennyson wanted to use that lighthouse, and as he could not
bring the lighthouse to them he took them to the lighthouse.
He wished to make the husband think to himself as he
looked at its rolling eyes—
“Does it matter how many they saved? We are all of us
wreck’d at last.”
This is an old trick of Mr. Tennyson’s. He is always
making his wonderful and vivid perceptions of external
nature compensate for his lack of spiritual insight and
power.
The melodrama of “ Despair ” is continued to the end.
The wife is successfully drowned as she was not required
any further in the poem, but the husband is rescued by (of
all men in the world!) the minister of the chapel he had
�3
forsaken. He loaths and despises this preacher, yet he tells
him all his domestic secrets and reveals to him all his
motives. Nay more, he wastes a great of denunciation on
his rescuer, and vehemently protests his intention to do for
himself despite his watcher’s “lynx-eyes.” Why all this
pother? Earnest suicides are usually reserved and very
rarely make a noise. Why not hold his tongue and quietly
seize the first opportunity ? But Mr. Tennyson’s heroes are
generally infirm of purpose. He can make his characters
talk, but he cannot make them act.
Another defect of Mr. Tennyson’s heroes is their abnormal
self-consciousness. The hero of “ Maud ” rants about him
self until we begin to hope that the Crimea will really
settle him. The hero of “ Locksley Hall” is a selfish cad
who poses through every line of faultless eloquence, until at
last we suspect that “ cousin Amy ” has not met the worst
fate which could befall her. And the hero of “ Despair ”
is little better. After powerfully describing the walk with
his wife to the breaker’s edge of foam, he says that they
kissed and bade each other eternal farewell. There he
should have stopped. But he must go on with—
“ Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began!
Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man ! ”
This little speculation could not be verified or disproved. It
is one which selfish people usually entertain. They nearly
always think their own sorrows the greatest the world ever
saw. Fortunately, although it may be news to Mr. Tenny
son, all Atheists are not of that kind. Some of them, at
least, are capable of the heroic joys of life, and of con
suming their personal sorrows in the fire of enthusiasm for
lofty and unselfish aims.
Mr. Tennyson should remember the sad end of Brutus in
“Julius Caesar.” Perhaps he does, for some of his language
seems borrowed from it. Brutus has lost what he most
values. His country’s liberties, for which he has fought
and sacrificed all, are lost, and his noble wife has killed her
self in a frenzy of grief. He kills himself too rather than
witness the dishonor of Rome and minister to the usurper’s
pride. But he does not pule and whine. He also bids his
dearest left adieu—
“ For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius !
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.”
And Cassius replies in the same magnanimous vein. There
�4
is a large and noble spirit which can face even suicide with
dignity and without repining.
So infected with selfishness is Mr. Tennyson’s Atheist
that he doubts the utility of virtue—
“ Does it matter so much whether crown’d for a virtue, or
hang’d for a crime ? ”
Yes, it does matter; or why does he cry out against his
son’s wickedness ? If the young man’s crime “ killed his
mother almost,” other people’s crime injures mankind, and
that is its condemnation. The real Atheist has his moral
creed founded on fact instead of fancy, and therefore, when
things go wrong with him, he does not rail against virtue.
He knows it to be good in the long run to the human family
whatever may be his own fate.
The hero of “Despair” had evidently been a Calvinist.
He reminds the minister of his having “ bawled the dark
side of his faith, and a God of eternal rage.” And he
exclaims—
“What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us
so well ?
Infinite wickedness rather that made everlasting Hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom’d us, and does what he will
with his own;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan !
Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been
told,
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn
for his gold,
And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you
say,
His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d
away.”
Now Calvinism is certainly not the creed any man could
regret to find untrue. And to our mind a man who could
live for years in the belief that the evils of this life are
ordained by God, and will be followed by an ordained hell
in the next life, is not likely to destroy himself when he finds
that the universe has no jailer and that all the evils of this
life end with it.
The man and his wife turn from the “ dark fatalist
creed ” to the growing dawn
“ When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the
ghosts of the Past,
And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would
vanish at last.”
�5
But when the dawn comes, they find that they have “ past
from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day.”
They are without a real God, for what deity remains is only
a cloud of smoke instead of a pillar of fire. Darwinism
they find to be very cold comfort, and they wail over them
selves as “poor orphans of nothing,” which is a comical
phrase, and one which we defy Mr. Tennyson or anybody
else to explain. If the Poet Laureate thinks that Darwinian
Atheists go about bemoaning themselves as poor orphans, he
is very much mistaken. He had better study them a little
before writing about them again. They are quite content
to remain without a celestial father. Earthly parents are
enough for them, earthly brothers and sisters, earthly wives,
and earthly friends. And most of them deem the grasp of
a father’s hand, and the loving smile on a mother’s face,
worth more than all the heavenly parentage they are satisfied
to lack.
Mr. Tennyson’s husband and wife, being utterly forlorn,
resolve to drown themselves, and the husband gives their
justication:—
“ Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of
pain
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel’d thro’ the
silence of space,
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother
worm will have fled
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth
that is dead ? ”
Now all this will no doubt happen. Many millions of years
hence this world will be used-up like the moon; and there
fore, according to Mr. Tennyson’s argument, we should
commit suicide rather than put up with the toothache. It
will be all the same in the end. True ; but it is a long
while to the end. And people who act on Mr. Tennyson’s
principle must either forget this, or they must resemble the
man who refused to eat his dinner unless he had the
guarantee of a good dinner for ever and ever, with a dessert
by way of Amen.
Elsewhere they express pity for others as well as for them
selves—
“ Pity for all that aches in the grasp of an idiot power,
And pity for our own selves on an earth that bore not a flower;
Pity for all that suffers on land or in air, or the deep,
And pity for our own selves till we long’d for eternal sleep.”
�6
Mr. Tennyson may well make his Atheist husband say “ for
we leaned to the darker side.” This is an earth without a
flower! In every sense it is untrue. There are flowers of
beauty in the natural world, and flowers of greater beauty
in the human garden, despite the weeds. This suicidal pair
are fond of what Mr. Tennyson has himself called “the
falsehood of extremes.”
Sincere pessimists do not advocate suicide. Schopenhauer
himself condemns it as a superlative act of egoism. If here
and there a pessimist destroys himself, how can that make
things better for the masses who are governed by instinct
and not by metaphysics ? Mr. Tennyson does not see that
the most confirmed pessimist may, like George Eliot, believe
in Meliorism ; that is, not in perfection, but in improvement.
Nature, we may be sure, will never produce a race of beings
with a general taste for suicide; and it is therefore the duty
of those who deplore the ineradicable evils of life, to stay
with their brethren and to do their share towards improving
the common lot. If they cannot really make life happier,
they may at least make it less miserable, which is very much
the same thing.
Has Mr. Tennyson been reading that grand and powerful
poem of Mr. James Thomson’s, and is “ Despair ” the result?
If so, it is a poor outcome of such a majestic influence.
Mr. Tennyson has misread that great poem. Its author has
his joyous as well as his sombre moods, and he has himself
indicated that it does not cover the whole truth. Pessimists,
too, are not so stupid as to think that the extinction of a
few philosophers will affect the general life, or that a
universal principle of metaphysics can determine an isolated
case. They know also that philosophy will never resist
Nature or turn her set course. They see that she is enor
mously fecund, and is able to spawn forth life enough to
outlast all opposition, with enough instinct of self-preserva
tion to defy all the hostility of sages. And it is a note
worthy fact that the chief pessimists of our century have
not courted death themselves except in verse. Schopen
hauer lived to seventy-two ; Hartmann is one of the happiest
men in Germany; Leopardi died of disease ; and the author
of “The City of Dreadful Night’’has not yet committed
suicide and probably never will. It is one thing to believe
that, considered universally, life is a mistake, and quite
another thing to cut one’s own throat. The utmost that
even Schopenhauer suggested in the way of carrying out his
principles, was that when the human race had become far
�7
more intellectual and moral, and far less volitional and
egoistic, it would cease to propagate itself and so reaeh.
Nirvana. Whoever expects that to happen has a very farreaching faith. If the sky falls we shall of course catch
larks, but when will it fall ?
Atheists, however, are not necessarily pessimists, and in
fact few of them are so. Most of them believe that a large
portion of the world’s evil is removable, being merely the
result of ignorance and superstition. Mr. Tennyson might
have seen from Shelley’s writings that an Athest may
cherish the noblest hopes of progress. Perhaps he would
reply that Shelley was not an Atheist, but few will agree
with him who have read the original editions of that glorious
poet and the very emphatic statements of his friend Trelawny.
Does Atheism prompt men to suicide ? That is the
question. Mr. Tennyson appears to think that if it does
not it should. We cannot, however, argue against a mere
dictum. The question is one of fact, and the best way to
answer it is to appeal to statistics. Atheists do not seem
prone to suicide. So far as we know no prominent Atheist
has taken his own life during the whole of this century.
But let us go farther. There has recently been published
an erudite work * on “ Suicide, Ancient and Modern,” by
A. Legoyt, of Paris. He has given official tables of the
reasons assigned for suicides in most of the countries of
Europe; and although religious mania is among these
causes, Atheism is not. This dreadful incitement to self
destruction has not yet found its way into the officia
statistics even of Germany or of France, where Atheist
abound I
Suicides have largely increased during the last twenty
years. In England, for instance, while from 1865 to 1876
the population increased 14-6 per cent., suicides increased
27T per cent. In France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Swit
zerland and Belgium the increase is still more alarming.
But during the same period lunacy has wonderfully in
creased ; and the truth is that both are caused by the everincreasing velocity and complexity of modern life, which
makes greater demands on our cerebral power than we are
able to answer. By-and-bye this will rectify itself through
* Ze /Swicicfe, Ancien et Moderne. Etude Historique, Philosophique
Morale et Statistique. Par A. Lïgott. Paris : A. Drouin.
�8
natural selection, but for the present our brains are not
strong enough for their sudden access of work. Hence the
increase of nervous derangement, lunacy, and suicide.
But it may be urged that religion keeps down the number
of suicides which would be still more plentiful without it.
That, however, is a mere matter of opinion, which can
hardly be verified or disproved. Religion does not restrain
those who do commit suicide, and that fact outweighs all
the fine talk about its virtue in other cases.
Some Christian apologists have made much capital out of
George Jacob Holyoake’s meditation on suicide in Gloucester
jail, when he was imprisoned for “ blasphemy,” or in other
words, for having opinions of his own on the subject of
religion. Mr. Holyoake’s mental torture was great. His wife
was in want, and his favorite daughter died while he was in
prison. Fearing that his reason might forsake him, and
being resolved that the Christian bigotry which had made
him suffer should never reduce him to an object of its derision,
he prepared the means of ending his life if the worst should
happen. “ See,” say these charitable Christians, “ what a
feeble support Atheism is in the hour of need! Nothing
but belief in Christ can enable us to bear the troubles of life.”
But our answer is that Mr. Holyoake did not commit suicide
after all; while, on the other hand, if we may judge by our
own notes during the past six months, one parson cuts his
throat, or hangs, or drowns, or poisons himself, on an
average every month.
Recurring finally to Mr. Tennyson, we say that his poem
is a failure. He does not understand Atheism, and he fails
to appreciate either its meaning or its hope. We trust that
he will afflict us with no more poetical abortions like this,
but give us only the proper fruit of his genius, and leave
the task of holding up Atheists as a frightful example to
the small fry of the pulpit and the religious press.
November 14iA, 1881.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London : Fbeethought Publishing Company, 28, Stonecutter Street,
Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
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Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Foote, George W., 1843-1886
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1881
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Freethought Publishing Company
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Atheism
Suicide
Ethics
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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N223
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English
Alfred Tennyson
Atheism
NSS
Suicide