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Title: My days and dreams
Author: Edward Carpenter
Release date: May 5, 2026 [eBook #78612]
Language: English
Original publication: London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1916
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY DAYS AND DREAMS ***
MY DAYS AND DREAMS
[Illustration:
E. C. (1857), AGE THIRTEEN.
]
MY DAYS AND DREAMS
BEING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
BY
EDWARD CARPENTER
_Author of “Towards Democracy” “Civilization: its Cause and Cure,” &c._
WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET W.C.
_First published June 1916_
_Second Edition October 1916_
(_All rights reserved_)
PREFACE
Old St. Pancras Churchyard even now, though dominated by the huge
gasometers of Wharf Road and backed against the roaring traffic of the
Midland Railway, preserves something of the sylvan beauty which a
hundred years ago made it the frequent trysting-place of Percy Shelley
and Mary Godwin. As it happened, in the summer of 1890, when staying in
London, I used to make the garden my resort for writing purposes; and
one day in July of that year I started some autobiographical notes. In a
very casual way, and with long intervals between, the notes have been
continued down to the present time. The volume therefore to which this
is the Preface has been composed in somewhat disjointed fashion; and the
discerning reader will probably perceive slight differences of style and
outlook in its different portions, and perhaps also experience some
uncertainty as to the proper chronology of the events which it records.
In order to mitigate the latter trouble I have from time to time
inserted in square brackets the date of the year in which the
corresponding portion was written.
[Illustration: Edward Carpenter signature]
_May 1916_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE 7
I. BRIGHTON 13
II. MY PARENTS 36
III. CAMBRIDGE 45
IV. UNIVERSITY EXTENSION AND NORTHERN TOWNS 79
V. BRADWAY AND “TOWARDS DEMOCRACY” 99
VI. MANUAL WORK AND MARKET-GARDENING 109
VII. SHEFFIELD AND SOCIALISM 124
VIII. TRADE AND PHILOSOPHY 137
IX. MILLTHORPE AND HOUSEHOLD LIFE 147
X. MILLTHORPIANA 167
XI. THE STORY OF MY BOOKS 190
XII. PERSONALITIES—I. 210
XIII. PERSONALITIES—II. 234
XIV. LONDON AND LECTURES 254
XV. TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSLATORS 269
XVI. RURAL CONDITIONS 282
XVII. HOW THE WORLD LOOKS AT SEVENTY 301
APPENDIX I. CONGRATULATORY LETTER AND REPLY 318
APPENDIX II. BIBLIOGRAPHY 323
INDEX 333
ILLUSTRATIONS
E. C. (1857), AGE THIRTEEN _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
MY FATHER, CHARLES CARPENTER 36
MY MOTHER, SOPHIA WILSON CARPENTER 44
MY SISTER LIZZIE 71
SELF, IN ABOUT 1875 79
ALBERT FEARNEHOUGH AND “BRUNO” 103
E. C. (1887), AGE FORTY-THREE 109
G. E. H.—ONE OF THE FIRST “SHEFFIELD SOCIALISTS” 131
THE HUT AND THE BROOK 146
GEORGE MERRILL 161
MILLTHORPE COTTAGE AND ORCHARD 168
G. M. FEEDING THE FOWLS 176
SELF IN PORCH (1905). (_Photogravure_) 208
CARTOON, “SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE” 257
LILLY NADLER-NUELLENS WITH HER DAUGHTER 272
MARCELLE SENARD 280
E. C. (1910), AGE SIXTY-SIX 304
MY DAYS AND DREAMS
I
BRIGHTON
My life hitherto [7th July 1890] divides into four pretty distinct
periods—first, my early life up to the age of twenty, during which time
I lived mainly at Brighton, embedded in a would-be fashionable world
which I hated; secondly, the period from ’64 to about ’74, during which
time I was mostly at Cambridge, in a more or less intellectual
atmosphere; thirdly, from ’74 to ’81, when I carried on the Extension
lectures and made acquaintance with the manufacturing centres and
commercial society of the North of England; and fourthly, for the ten
years from ’80 and ’81 down to the present time, when I have lived
almost entirely among the working masses, and been largely engaged in
manual labour.
It may seem ungrateful to say so, but my abiding recollection of early
days is one of discomfort. Not but that I had on the whole good times at
school, in the classes and in the games; not but that at home I was
lapped in the ease and attentive service of a well-to-do household, and
had a hundred advantages denied to an ordinary child of the people; but
that after all at home I never felt really at home. Perhaps I was unduly
sensitive; anyhow I felt myself an alien, an outcast, a failure, and an
object of ridicule.
The social life which encircled us at Brighton was artificial enough;
but it was the standard which we children had to live to. My parents
were the best people in the world, but they could not fly out of the
conditions in which they belonged. I hated the life, was miserable in
it—the heartless conventionalities, silly proprieties—but I never
imagined, it never occurred to me, that there _was_ any other life. To
be pursued by the dread of appearances—what people would say about one’s
clothes or one’s speech—to be always in fear of committing unconscious
trespasses of invisible rules—this seemed in my childhood the normal
condition of existence; so much so that I never dreamed of escaping from
it. I only prayed for a time when grace might be given me to pass by
without reproach. I was never a daring or rumbustious child. Timid and
sensitive, my spirit was sadly lacking in the inestimable virtue of
revolt. I suffered and was stupid enough to think myself in the wrong.
There was a curate at one of the churches to which we used to go—a
smooth-haired, carefully shaven, meek young man, probably of feeble
mind; but all I knew was that people praised him: such a good-looking,
well-mannered fellow he was, and preached such nice sermons! “Happy Mr.
Cass,” I used to think, for even now I remember his name—“Oh, happy Mr.
Cass, if only I could be like _you_ when I grow up.” I was then about
fourteen, and I fancy that the mere sight of Cass in his spotless
surplice must have worked upon me, for it was about that time or a
little later that I began to make up my mind to take Orders. No doubt
from the first there was a fatal bias towards religion. I remember
distinctly—and it must have been about the same period—thinking as I lay
awake in bed at night that if the house were on fire I would save my
_prayer-book_! I saw myself in my mind’s eye in heroic attitude rushing
into my mother’s room where the sacred volume lay, and bearing it out
through flames and smoke into the street. It was not my mother or
sisters that I was going to save ... but my prayer-book! Alas! what a
defect of nature, or of teaching, must have been there!
Curious, the covered underground life that some children lead! I never
remember, all those years at Brighton, till I was nineteen or twenty, a
single person older than myself who was my confidant. I do not remember
a single occasion on which in any trouble or perplexity I was able to go
to any one for help or consolation. My mother, firm, just, and
courageous as she was, and setting her children an heroic example,
belonged to the old school, which thought any manifestation of feeling
unbecoming. We early learned to suppress and control emotion, and to
fight our own battles alone: in some ways a good training, but liable in
the long run to starve the emotional nature. Masters at school in those
days did not “draw boys out”; education was mainly a nipping of buds;
older friends outside the family, who may so often play a useful part in
the development of boy or girl life, never came—that I remember—to the
rescue; and so my abiding recollection of all that time is one of silent
concealment and loneliness.
Nevertheless of course there were joys. Though a town-house is not a
congenial nursery for a child, yet we were comparatively fortunate.
There was a large space at the back, where we kept, in succession,
endless pets—pigeons, seagulls with clipped wings, rabbits, tortoises,
guinea-pigs, and smaller fry (I was especially fond of an aquarium);
while in front was the large garden of Brunswick Square, overrun,
despite the efforts of the gardener and other authorities, by all the
children of the surrounding houses. A fearfully active family, boys and
girls, we kept a sort of proud superiority over the other children in
running races, prisoners’ base, etc.; while inside the house, and for
wet weather, we had a sport entirely our own, and which consisted in one
pursuing the others up the front stairs and down the back stairs, or
_vice versa_, with endless shrieks and uproar—a terrible affair, which
nothing but the noblest self-sacrifice could have ever nerved our
parents to endure! Also there was hide-and-seek in the dark, a grisly
game, dangerous both to limbs and to furniture; and occasionally a
battle of the giants—as when, on one occasion, an elder sister having
with the greatest care built up a beautiful dummy man round a long
smooth pole, my eldest brother came on the sly and drew the backbone
out! Then there was earth-shaking conflict, which I, quite a small boy,
witnessed from a distance, and with quaking limbs.
As to school life, I suppose it is a general experience that what one
learns at school does not count for much. At the age of ten I began at
the Brighton College. My eldest sister had taught me a little Latin
grammar before that. My eldest brother Charlie was already at the
College. He was a kind of hero there. At that time (or possibly a year
or two later) he was easily first in _everything_. In mathematics,
classics, foreign languages, in cricket, football, athletics—no matter
what it was—he took all the prizes. Withal he was so friendly, so
sociable, that he was a universal favorite; so generous and so
humorous—so naturally full of fun and comedy—that I really think he
disarmed all jealousy in others—nor felt a spark of jealousy or vanity
in himself. Seldom I should think has there been such a boy; and when at
the age of nineteen or twenty he took his final leave in order to join
the Indian Civil Service, his memory lingered long and long behind him
in the school.[1]
My reception under those circumstances was naturally favorable. One day,
shortly after my arrival, I was playing by myself in a corner of the
entrance hall, when a big boy with a pleasant face came up to me and,
making a suitable gesture, said, “Sweep up the Chips, sweep up the
Chips.” Then I knew that my nickname was Chips—a family nickname indeed,
since my father and my brothers at different times bore it.
The College was a large school of 150 or 200 boys—on public school
lines. I went through the classes in due order from the lowest upwards;
and the personality of each master in turn impressed its unconscious
weight upon me. I remember distinctly the agonized effort and the
triumph of passing the “Asses’ Bridge” in Euclid. The name of the master
who got me over was Newton, and for some years I firmly believed that he
was no other than the celebrated Sir Isaac. I joined in the games and
athletics—and not without success, though I was never very partial to
cricket; I climbed slowly up through the classes; I rubbed shoulders
with all the queer, red-haired, pock-marked, fat, lean, mean, generous,
handsome, clever, tyrannical, cross-eyed, gentle, good-natured,
specimens of fellow humanity—the other boys—whose influence on one at
that age is so strange and incalculable, and whose characters and deeds
appear at the time so mysterious and inexplicable; though when one looks
back upon them at a later date, they seem transparently clear and
simple. I cannot remember anything very heroic that I did, though I can
remember some mean things. I remember joining with the others in teasing
the French master—that ever defenceless quarry; and I remember what was
much worse, taking a kind of delight in privately tormenting an idiot
boy. That was indeed a strange experience. I don’t know why the boy was
allowed in the school; he was certainly quite weak-minded and incapable;
and besides there exhaled from him an odd and fearsome odour. That boy
convulsed me with alternate rage and pity. At one moment I was seized
with the greatest sympathy for his weakness, and the next I was filled
with wrath at his odour and his idiocy, and found or invented excuses
for slapping him! Then after that I would sometimes lie awake at night
remorseful over my conduct, and planning little schemes of reparation;
but in the morning the sight of him would launch me on the waves of
irritation again. It was quite a little tragedy to me—and I mention it
because this savage and instinctive dislike of anything malformed, which
is so very marked in boys, no doubt accounts for much of their cruelty.
It remains in the mind of course to a much later age, but is gradually
covered over by the growth of sympathy and understanding. As a rule my
better deeds were done in defence of the weak. Timid for the most part,
I regained my courage on these occasions—as in delivering a small boy
from a big bully; or once in sticking up for two brothers, the dirtiest
and most stupid boys in the class, against the gibes of the master; or
another time in helping a poor man in the street with his bundle—on
which last occasion the said Sir Isaac Newton passing by, instead of
scolding me as I expected, actually said, “That’s right, my boy”—a
remark for which I felt ever so grateful to him—for indeed I was feeling
rather ashamed of myself.
I think that was about the only occasion on which a master exercised any
directly helpful influence. Schools were odd places in those days. The
idea of really reaching the boy and drawing out his interest seems never
to have occurred to the masters. When I arrived in the Sixth Form, the
Headmaster was a certain Dr. Griffith—a burly, headstrong,
muddle-headed, perhaps rather good-natured man. As often as not he would
arrive in the class-room late, with his hair a-tumble, and looking as if
he had not slept all night, would complain that some naughty boy in the
Fourth Form was preoccupying his mind, and would leave us again alone
with our books. Then presently his study door would open, and he would
push the said boy into the room, saying, “I wish one of you gentlemen
would _cane_ this boy,” and throwing a cane in over the boy’s head would
close the door again. Once, drawing a handful of silver and gold out of
his pocket, he asked me to cane a boy for him—and afterwards I felt
sorry I had not accepted the bargain. I think he must have been a little
touched in the head. It is certainly aggravating to think that we used
to read Homer and Virgil and the Greek plays, and _never_ that I
remember was any attempt made to make us understand the subject or the
plot or the literary interest of these works—nothing but grammar and
syntax. As to mathematics the neglect was worse—and I left school at
eighteen or nineteen having done nothing beyond Euclid and Algebra.
My record in the classes was on the whole, I suppose, good—though
nothing remarkable. I gained the usual number of prizes, and kept about
an equal interest in classics and mathematics. With regard to the
former, my father—who had progressive ideas on such subjects—gave me a
word for word _crib_ to Horace, saying that the best way to learn a
language was to use such a crib. Naturally after that I rejoiced in it
freely in my preparation-work at home of an evening. But one day I could
not resist taking it to school and showing it to some of my class-mates.
Of course we were pounced upon, and the crib confiscated. The
form-master at that time was E. C. Hawkins—a really fine type of man,
father of Anthony Hope Hawkins the novelist. But when he asked me where
I got the crib from, and I replied quite truthfully and simply “My
father gave it me,” he was struck dumb! He certainly thought I was
lying, but could make no reply. And for a long time after that would
hardly speak to me.
Cricket I never took to much. Being a bad player I voted it ‘slow.’
Probably it gave too much rope to my dreamy tendencies, and I got into
trouble missing unexpected catches. But hockey and football I was fond
of, and fives, as being more lively.
When I was about thirteen an event important to us children happened,
which I must not pass by. My parents determined to spend a year in
France, and they actually transported the whole household, nine children
(i.e. all except my brother Charlie) and two servants, to Versailles. I
remember only too well that awful night journey by Newhaven and Dieppe,
the raging sea, the arrival drenched, the dim lights of the Customhouse,
the cries of lost children, the journey by train to Paris and onwards.
How my mother survived it I do not know. We settled in a house in the
Avenue de Sceaux, amid barracks, and continual fanfaronades and
trampings of military, near the great Palace with its endless galleries,
and the Park with its fountains and music. All very exciting and
delightful. And we found some good and friendly French neighbours. At
first they did not the least understand our household. It never occurred
to them for a moment that it was all one family, and for some time it
was supposed that my father and mother kept a school! But when the truth
at last dawned upon them, their delight and amazement knew no bounds,
and we became the centre of the greatest interest. I and my younger
brother, Alfred, went as day-boys to school at the Lycée Hoche (then
Imperiale)—a great place of five hundred boys—where we learned French by
sheer necessity. I do not think we learned much else. In the matter of
lessons the instruction was much on a par with that at the Brighton
school, and the playground life and social organization of the boys were
far less pregnant of good influences.
I don’t know how the Lycées are now, but at that time the school methods
were only poor. The boys sat an outrageously long time at their
desks—ten hours a day or more—either construing or preparing lessons;
but got through very little work, spending most of their time in furtive
games or conversations with each other. Everything was done in set and
military style—marchings along corridors from class-room to class-room,
or from class-room to refectory, or from refectory to playground. In the
latter a master (always called ‘pion’) was present to see that there was
no bullying, or to disperse knots of boys (who might of course be
talking sedition) or to prevent individuals approaching the playground
wall within a set distance (lest they should escape). The games were
limited and regulated. Everything was regulated. It was said that the
Minister of Education at Paris could at any hour of the day place his
finger on the line of Virgil that was being translated, or the
proposition of Geometry that was being proved at that moment in all the
Lycées alike over the face of the land. One very curious custom
prevailed, which has probably now gone out of date, but which had a
strong suggestion about it of the Church system of Indulgences. At the
end of the week the marks gained by each boy during the week were added
up and announced by the master. Then those boys who were credited with
more than a certain number of marks were told they might write out for
themselves a certificate of satisfaction, good for exemption from one,
two, or even three hours’ punishment, according to circumstances! Great
excitement prevailed. You cut yourself a neat square of paper, adorned
it with lines and flourishes, and inscribed on it “Témoignage de
Satisfaction—Elève Carpenter—bonne à une heure”—and left a space at foot
for the signature of the master. When signed you treasured this up in
your desk—and at some later date when the hour of punishment came,
produced it, and unless your crime was very heinous were duly let off!
It was a curious arrangement, but one which had perhaps the advantage of
discouraging a boy from being _too_ good—since obviously it would be a
mistake to collect a greater number of such tickets than you were likely
to make use of.
My brother and I, as day-boys, escaped a good deal of the general school
routine and regulation, and on the whole had not a bad time. The boys
received us decently, and as we could play leap-frog or prisoners’ base
(Les Barres) as well as any of them, paid us due respect; and one of the
masters, Llandais by name, was quite kind and thoughtful towards me. Out
of hours we careered through the woods of Satory, watched military
evolutions on the plain above, or at dusk chased and caught the great
stag-beetles—a thrilling joy. We wandered through the huge
statue-adorned Park and the shady Bosquets of diamond-necklace
celebrity, and learned swimming—as did also my sisters—in the fine
open-air swimming bath, which used to be the bath of the pages of Louis
XIV’s Court. After a year thus spent, the family returned to England,
and we boys to the Brighton College.
As I say, it is probably a common experience that mere school teaching
does not leave a very deep impression. Probably a good deal really _is_
learned—but these are the more indirect things which slip into the
background or foundation of the mind and character and so pass
comparatively unobserved. Only three or four subjects of interest stand
out in my memory as belonging to my school-days, and these all lay
outside school proper. The earliest of these was music. At the age of
ten I desired mightily to learn the piano; but music was not considered
appropriate for a boy—besides there were six sisters who had to be
taught, poor things, whether they liked it or not—and so my appearance
on the music stool was treated rather as an intrusion, and I was
generally hustled off again forthwith. However I got my way by playing
late of an evening, when they were all upstairs in the drawing-room; I
never had any regular teaching, but my mother took pity on me and taught
me my notes; and from that time I stumbled through the “Marche des
Croates” and the “Nun’s Prayer” till at last I emerged on the far
borderland of Beethoven’s Sonatas. This hour of piano practice to myself
was for a long time one of the chief events of my day. Indeed, it is
curious, but I took to composing, or attempting to compose, music before
ever I thought of composing or attempting to compose poetry. Of course
with a juvenile mind, and no musical training, nor even a particularly
keen ear, my compositions were of no value, and I hardly ever troubled
to write them out; still the habit of making up pianoforte pieces, and
the love of doing so, continued all my life, and forced its way out from
time to time. It is only in quite late years that, with more technical
knowledge, I have written some of these down—perhaps twelve or twenty in
all—and even occasionally thought of printing them.
I was also fortunate enough, when I was about fifteen, to come in for
the reversion of a cupboard full of chemical apparatus, which had
belonged to my eldest brother, and here in a little room with retorts
and test-tubes I spent many a half-holiday, carrying out important
experiments and prosecuting valuable inventions, which ended almost
invariably in bad smells and worse headaches. Perpetual motion, as usual
in such cases, was one of my chief objects; and I could not for the life
of me tell why a solid cylinder of wood, placed with its axis horizontal
in the side of a box containing water, and so carefully fitted that it
would turn on its axis without allowing the water to run out, would not
revolve perpetually—seeing indeed that the one half of it which was in
the water, being lighter than water, would continually tend to rise, and
the other half of it which was in the air would continually tend to
fall. I invented an arrangement for the pianoforte after the Morse
telegraphic system, by which extemporaneous effusions could be written
down in the act of playing—an invention which luckily has not been
generally adopted; and was engaged on various other little patents at
different times. Sometimes I gave a lecture—though it must be confessed
that it was with difficulty that any of the household could be induced
to attend! The lecture was small, but the danger from explosions and
horrible smells was great. My remarks were not very lucid or
explanatory, but consisted mainly of expressions like “Now I will show
you something else” or “You needn’t be frightened, there is no danger.”
These investigations were however very absorbing and excited far more
interest in my mind than anything I learned at school; and I remember
that they led me to think quite seriously about being a doctor (I
suppose from some vague notion about the connection between chemicals
and medicine)—a profession which my father was inclined to recommend to
me, and which I have sometimes regretted that I did not adopt.
Towards the later part of my time at Brighton the natural _épanchement_
of youth led me often to seek consolation and an escape from the wounds
of daily life in intercourse with Nature. The Brighton social life—with
its greetings where no kindness is—was to me chilly in the extreme, and
I often used in later years to feel that I “caught cold” (morally
speaking) whenever I returned to it. The scenery and surroundings of
Brighton are also bare and chilly enough; and trees, whose friendly
covert I have always loved, do not exist there; but the place has two
Nature-elements in it—and these two singularly wild and untampered—the
Sea and the Downs. We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its
voice was in our ears night and day. On terrific stormy nights it was a
“grisly joy” to go down to the water’s edge at 10 or 11 p.m.—pitchy
darkness—feeling one’s way with feet or hands, over the stony beach,
hardly able to stand for the wind—and to watch the white breakers
suddenly leap out of the gulf close upon one—the “scream of the madden’d
beach dragged down by the wave,” the booming of the wind, like distant
guns, and the occasional light of some vessel laboring for its life in
the surge.
But the Downs were my favorite refuge. On sunny days I would wander on
over them for miles, not knowing very clearly where I was going—in a
strange broody moony state—glad to find some hollow (like that described
in Jefferies’ _Story of my Heart_) where one could lie secluded for any
length of time and see only the clouds and the grasses and an occasional
butterfly, or hear the distant bark of a dog or the far rumble of a
railway train. The Downs twined themselves with all my thought and
speculations of that time. Their chaste subdued gracious outlines and
quiet colour have a peculiar charm. Their strongest line is generally
some white edge of cliffs or curve of the shore itself, their deepest
tint the blue of the sea or occasionally a field of red clover or one
overgrown with charlock. For the rest they wear the faint blue-green
colour of thin turf through which the chalk almost shows. Over the
velvety sward and among the fine herbage cropped by plentiful sheep run
innumerable tiny flowers dwarfed by salt wind and scanty soil—thistles,
whose chins rest on the ground out of which they grow; patches of sweet
thyme which the wild bees love, of pink centaury and thrift and madder
and dwarf-broom, and that sweet yellow lotus or bird’s-foot trefoil,
which runs all over the world, in Siberia and Alps and Himalayas the
same, one of the commonest and friendliest of all the flowers that grow.
Overhead the lark sings, the clouds drift through the untampered blue,
the bee and the butterfly sweep past on the breeze. Three or four miles
from Brighton, and one is in a world remote from man. Except an
occasional shepherd there is hardly a human to be seen. Here and there
in a hollow nestles the tiniest hamlet—an old farmhouse, one or two
cottages, a dwarf church faced with rough work of flints, a few trees
and a well. Taking its character from the sky—as all chalk and limestone
countries largely do—this land has an ethereal beauty in summer weather;
but on wintry and gray days it is monotonous and sad. The shepherd then
huddles himself in his cloak in the lee of the gorse-bush, the cloudy
rack drives over the backs of his sheep, line behind line the Downs
stretch, colorless, unbroken by any hint of tree or habitation; the wind
whistles among the thin grass stems with a peculiar shrill and mournful
pipe, and in its pauses the sullen and distant roar of the sea is heard.
How can I describe, how shall I not recall, the thoughts which came to
me as I wandered, towards the close of my school time, over these same
hills—the brooding ill-defined, half-shapen thoughts? The Downs were my
escape; even in their most chill and lonely moods they were my escape
from a worse coldness and loneliness, which, except for a few boyfriends
at school, I somehow experienced during all that time. Nature was more
to me, I believe, than any human attachment, and the Downs were my
Nature. It was among them at a later time that I first began to write a
few verses. But at the time I mention, and till quite the end of my
school days, I never wrote anything at all. If the thought of writing
had occurred to me I should have deemed it, in my then state of mind,
monstrous presumption—but I doubt whether the thought ever did occur to
me. I did not even read poetry. Mozart and Beethoven were familiar to
me, but I must have been eighteen years old before I was roused to any
interest in Tennyson (the poet of the day) by a lecture at school on “In
Memoriam.” After that I read “In Memoriam” and loved it well. This was
followed (at Cambridge) by Wordsworth; and then by Shelley, who excited
in me the same passionate attachment that he has excited in so many
others. After that Whitman dominated me. I do not think any others of
the poets—unless Plato should bear that name—have deeply influenced me.
As to friends—that absorbing subject—I can trace the desire for a
passionate attachment in my earliest boyhood. But the desire had no
expression, no chance of expression. Such things as affection were never
spoken about either at home or at school, and I naturally concluded that
there was no room for them in the scheme of creation! The glutinous
boyfriendships that one formed in class-room or playground were of the
usual type: they staved off a greater hunger, but they did not satisfy.
On the other hand I worshipped the very ground on which some, generally
elder, boys stood; they were heroes for whom I would have done anything.
I dreamed about them at night, absorbed them with my eyes in the day,
watched them at cricket, loved to press against them unnoticed in a
football melly, or even to get accidentally hurt by one of them at
hockey, was glad if they just spoke to me or smiled; but never got a
word farther with it all. What could I say? Even to one of the masters,
I remember, who was a little kind to me, I felt this unworded devotion;
but he never helped me over the stile, and so I remained on the farther
side.
I often think what a fund of romance, and of intense feeling, there is
in this direction latent in so many boys and capable even of heroic
expression—and how much will have to be done some day in the matter of
directing and giving a constructive outlet to it. Already however there
is a great difference in the tone of the public schools themselves on
this subject, from what there was twenty-five or thirty years ago. The
trouble in schools from bad sexual habits and frivolities arises
greatly—though of course not altogether—from the suppression and
misdirection of the natural emotions of boy-attachment. I, as a day boy,
and one who happened to be rather pure-minded than otherwise, grew up
quite free from these evils: though possibly it would have been a good
thing if I had had a little more experience of them than I had. As it
was, no elder person _ever_ spoke to me about sexual matters—no mother,
father, brother, monitor or master ever said a word. I picked up the
usual information from the talk of my companions, and made up my own
mind unbiased by any person or book. I suppose it was in consequence of
this that I never saw anything repellent or shameful in sexual acts
themselves. From the earliest time when I thought about these things
they seemed to me natural—like digestion or any other function—and I
remember wondering why people made such a fuss about the mention of
them—why they told lies rather than speak the truth, why they were
shocked, or why they giggled and stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths.
It was not till (at the age of twenty-five) I read Whitman—and then with
a great leap of joy—that I met with the treatment of sex which accorded
with my own sentiments.
Nevertheless though these desires were never to me unclean, yet during
all that time of later boyhood and early university life they were
strangely discounted by that other desire of the heart. I could not
think much of sex while the hunger of the heart was unsatisfied—and
_that_ for the time being occupied all the foreground of my life. Indeed
at times it threatened to paralyse my mental and physical faculties. It
was like an open wound continually bleeding. I felt starved and unfed,
and unable to rest in the chilling contacts of ordinary life. As to the
usual attractions set before the eyes of middle-class youth, the
hopeless, helpless young ladyisms, or the bolder beauties of the gutter,
they were both a detestable boredom to me.
For indeed the life, and with it the character, of the ordinary “young
lady” of that period, and of the sixties generally, was tragic in its
emptiness. The little household duties for women, encouraged in an
earlier and simpler age, had now gone out of date, while the modern idea
of work in the great world was not so much as thought of. In a place
like Brighton there were hundreds, perhaps, of households, in which
girls were growing up with but one idea in life, that of taking their
“proper place in society.” A few meagre accomplishments—plentiful balls
and dinner-parties, theatres and concerts—and to loaf up and down the
parade, criticizing each other, were the means to bring about this
desirable result! There was absolutely nothing else to do or live for.
It is curious—but it shows the state of public opinion of that time—to
think that my father, who was certainly quite advanced in his ideas,
never for a moment contemplated that any of his daughters should learn
professional work with a view to their living—and that in consequence he
more than once drove himself quite ill with worry. Occasionally it
happened that, after a restless night of anxiety over some failure among
his investments, and of dread lest he should not be able at his death to
leave the girls a competent income, he would come down to breakfast
looking a picture of misery. After a time he would break out. “Ruin
impended over the family,” securities were falling, dividends
disappearing; there was only one conclusion—“the girls would have to go
out as governesses.” Then silence and gloom would descend on the
household. It was true; that was the only resource. There was only one
profession possible for a middle-class woman—to be a governess—and to
adopt that was to become a _pariah_. But in a little time affairs would
brighten up again. Stocks went up, the domestic panic subsided; and
dinner-parties and balls were resumed as usual.
As time went by, and I gradually got to know what life really meant, and
to realize the situation, it used to make me intensely miserable to
return home and see what was going on there. My parents of course were
fully occupied, but for the rest there were six or seven servants in the
house, and my six sisters had absolutely nothing to do except dabble in
paints and music as aforesaid, and wander aimlessly from room to room to
see if by any chance “anything was going on.” Dusting, cooking, sewing,
darning—all light household duties were already forestalled; there was
no private garden, and if there had been it would have been “unladylike”
to do anything in it; _every_ girl could not find an absorbing interest
in sol-fa or water-colours; athletics were not invented; every
aspiration and outlet, except in the direction of dress and dancing, was
blocked; and marriage, with the growing scarcity of men, was becoming
every day less likely, or easy to compass. More than once girls of whom
I least expected it told me that their lives were miserable “with
nothing on earth to do.” Multiply this picture by thousands and hundreds
of thousands all over the country, and it is easy to see how, when the
causes of the misery were understood, it led to the powerful growth of
the modern “Women’s Movement.”
During my school-days, however, this tragedy had, so far as our
household was concerned, hardly developed itself, or at any rate become
at all serious; and a charming recollection of that period is that of my
companionship with two of my elder sisters. With one of these—my sister
Ellen, afterwards Mrs. Hyett—I used to go long country walks. She had an
eye for landscape and animal painting, and sometimes brought her
sketch-book with her. Occasionally on hired hacks we rode together over
the Downs. Her mind had an adventurous outdoor quality about it; and our
conversation turned mainly on what we saw on our explorations, and on
speculations about foreign lands. The other sister (Lizzie, afterwards
Lady Daubeney) was never much of a walker; but she stayed at home and
played Beethoven’s Sonatas, and these were a continual delight to me. I
stood quietly by and turned over the pages by the hour. The “Sonata
Appassionata” was a dream of wonder. This sister had a highly poetic,
sensitive temperament. When the younger ones of the family were children
she told us absorbing fairy-tales. At the time I speak of she was the
one in the household who gave to the atmosphere a touch of sympathy,
tenderness and romance; which was of priceless value. As my mind
expanded we even talked a little poetic philosophy together, and
discussed Tennyson and Shakespeare.
My younger brother, Alfred, who was my schoolfellow at the Lycée at
Versailles, went to the Brighton College with me (I joining for the
second time) when the family returned to Brighton in 1858. But at an
early age (fourteen) he joined the Navy, and after a preliminary year on
board the _Britannia_ training-ship, went away to sea. Consequently he
was not so much at home during those early years. The sea-life suited
him, I think. With a rather dare-devil temperament as a boy he was
always getting into scrapes at school. [Once, I remember, he had the
brilliant idea of lighting a fire in his locker in the schoolroom, and
then sitting, all innocence, on the seat—until the crackling of sticks
and the curling smoke drew all eyes that way, and he was discovered like
the phœnix in apparent peril of being consumed!] In the Navy, at an
early period, he distinguished himself by saving life under risky
circumstances. In one case a man had fallen overboard at night in the
Tagus from another ship, and in the darkness was being swept by the
current seawards past the _Warrior_, on which ship my brother was—when
the latter, who was on deck at the time, jumped in to the rescue, at the
same time calling to some of the bluejackets to man a boat and follow.
Of course he and the drowning man were immediately lost to sight in the
gloom, and when the boat did get under weigh it was only by his distant
shouts that its crew could be guided. The two men had drifted half a
mile or more before they were picked up; but it was not too late, and
their rescue was safely effected. In another case off the Falkland Isles
he swam to the rescue of an ordinary seaman under even more perilous
conditions, and for this act gained the Albert medal—which may be called
the V.C. of life-saving medals.
At a later period [1875–76] my brother Alfred was lieutenant on board
H.M.S. _Challenger_, and it was under his management that the deepest
sounding effected up to that period was taken. He obtained 4,475
fathoms, or nearly 27,000 feet in the vicinity of the Ladrone Islands.
After the _Challenger_ he had several commands in China and elsewhere,
including charge of the Marine Survey of India; and as commander of the
_Investigator_ he spent several years surveying and making charts of the
coasts of India and the Andaman Islands. In 1885, in connection with the
Burmese expedition against King Thebaw, the important duty was assigned
to him of leading the War Flotilla up the river Irrawaddy. As an officer
he was well liked, being considerate of the men under him, but firm in
their management, and in moments of danger plucky and reliable.[2]
In later years he published not a few papers on nautical and
astronomical matters, and in 1915 a more popular illustrated handbook
for travellers, entitled _Nature Notes for Ocean Voyagers_ (Griffin,
5s.).
Such, roughly summed together, are the main outlines of my early
days—full after all of tenderest recollections. A large family is a
roughish training school, but it is a valuable one. Over-sensitive and
of a clinging disposition by nature, I early learned the profound
lessons of suffering and of self-dependence. My spirit concentrated
itself, and partially overcame its inherent vagueness and weakness in
years of silence. The tension of those early days, the unexpressed
hatred which I felt, though I did not understand it, for the social
conditions in which I was born, was destined, when its meaning gradually
realized itself in my consciousness, to become one of the great
directing forces of my after life.
II
MY PARENTS
My father (born in 1797) had a curious early life. He came of a family
which had lived in Cornwall (Launceston) for some generations. He was
the eldest son—though he had three sisters—of an Admiral in the Navy,
and appears to have taken to his father’s profession, when a boy, as a
matter of course. He was not, however, at all suited to it, for he was
of a rather studious temperament, and the rough life of the Navy of
those days was probably very distasteful to him. He was in one or two
skirmishes with the French off the American coast, and I remember his
telling me of the painful feeling which he experienced once when being
in a small boat and coming across some French sailors in another small
boat he had to take aim and fire at them. To his relief, however, no one
was hurt!
[Illustration:
MY FATHER: CHARLES CARPENTER.
]
When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German
and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he
were destined to remain long on board ship! As a matter of fact he left
the Navy when he was about twenty-five. The bad climate of Trincomalee,
where he was stationed for two years, damaged his health. He came to
London and set about reading for the Chancery Bar. In due course he was
called and for some years practised with success—so much so indeed that
on his retirement he was greatly complimented by the presiding judge. In
1833 he married; and this it was which, curiously enough, led to his
retirement from the Bar. For his father-in-law—Thomas Wilson—who had
also been in the Navy, and who was then a widower, only consented to the
marriage on condition that his daughter should remain at home, and that
the married couple should therefore take up their abode at his house at
Walthamstow. This they did, and the distance from London, a considerable
matter in those days, combined perhaps with a little anxiety about my
father’s health, which still remained unsatisfactory, brought about the
abandonment of his profession—a great mistake as it appeared, for of
course as soon as he lost his regular occupation he began to worry
badly. Then, when Mr. Wilson died, in 1843, a move to Brighton (which
just then was growing into importance, and yet retained some of its
old-world character) was thought advisable, both for my father’s sake
and for that of the little family which now had to be considered. But as
far as my father was concerned this did not mend matters, and my mother
has often told me that this was the worst period of their married life.
He got more and more anxious and restless—to a degree which seemed
almost a danger to his mind—till at last my mother induced him to let
himself be appointed magistrate and take his seat on the Brighton bench;
after which his serenity returned, and he remained one of the most
active and probably the most public spirited of the members of the
Brighton and afterwards of the Hove magistracy till a year or two before
his death. The death of his own father in 1846 freed him from any real
cause for pecuniary anxiety—though from time to time all through his
later life he was liable to fits of considerable depression and
nervousness about his monetary concerns. He settled down permanently at
Brighton (No. 45 Brunswick Square) into the life of the respectable
_rentier_, with its usual aims and ideals as far as his family was
concerned, though for himself his aims were very different from those of
the society round him, and his conception of life was as broad as it
could well be upon the foundation of that particular social status to
which he belonged.
His early life in the Navy had given my father that honest, somewhat
simple, cast of mind which belongs to sea-faring folk. He was always
ready to be impressed by a tale of distress—especially if it came from
the lips of one of the fair sex. At the same time his active brain had
carried him far in most fields of thought. Though having a strong
religious feeling, he soon emancipated himself from current orthodoxies
in religion, and seldom in later life went to church—a fact which to the
mild respectabilities around us was a sufficient justification for
calling him an Atheist. For Frederick W. Robertson, who was then
preaching at Brighton, and who not unfrequently came to our house, and
for Frederick D. Maurice, however, he had a great admiration; and his
own views were—as far as I remember what he said when I was a boy—a kind
of Broad Church mysticism, derived at first from reading S. T. Coleridge
(whom he had met occasionally in former years in London), and gradually
broadening out under the influence of Eckhardt, Tauler, Kant, Fichte,
Hegel and others into a religious and philosophic mysticism without much
admixture of the Broad Church at all.
In politics he was a strong Liberal—indeed in his most active period a
philosophic Radical of the Mill school, and gave strong support to Henry
Fawcett during the time when the latter represented Brighton. Though
occasionally asked to stand himself he never as far as I know felt
inclined to do so, and indeed a certain lack of glibness and difficulty
of expression which he experienced always made him disinclined from
taking part in any kind of public speechifying. In his quite latest
years he veered round to the support of Beaconsfield’s Government; but
this, if partly due to the reactionary tendency of old age, was also
caused by his keen perception of the hypocrisy (unconscious or
otherwise) of Gladstone, whom in the last few years of his life he never
ceased to vilify.
Almost all general literature interested my father—especially works on
natural history, travels, and science of any kind; but art and music
were never much in his line. Any tale of heroism, or prodigy of science
would bring ready tears to his eyes; and his love of reading—as in the
case of his own father—lasted to the latest years of his life; for when
he was over eighty years of age he would not unfrequently sit up till
one or two in the morning, conning the last new book or running over
favorite passages of his philosophical authors.
In a letter of his (written in ’73) I find the following passage:
“Circumstances have been leading me to think a good deal lately about
Instinct. I do not see how any distinction can be drawn between what we
call Instinct in the lower animals—such as the insect when she deposits
eggs and then brings to the place of deposit the food needful for the
support of her offspring grub, and covering them up (eggs and food)
together, flies away to perish—and that power in Plants that causes them
to send forth their roots often to a great distance and in a special
direction, in search of the material needful for their nutriment, the
mineral perhaps without which they could not live. This can only be
understood, as it seems to me, upon the assumption of there being a
Life, an intelligent Life, in the Plant or Insect, of which they are
unconscious. Think of the Swallow going to Egypt perhaps, and then at
proper season returning to its old nest under the eaves of some cottage
in England. The possession of sense-organs, therefore, does not expel
from the Bird or Fish this Intelligent Life within them, which orders
their migrations, etc., but of which they are unconscious. And why
should it be otherwise with man? That he should be conscious of this
life will one day be his highest blessing.”
And in another letter (of 1876): “Surely the true meaning of Nirvana is
that at some future stage of our being man will be so conscious of the
indwelling and inworking of Deity, that he will ascribe every movement,
whether of his body or mind, to the One Will, the One _Vernunft_, the
One Life, and thus think of himself as swallowed up by and absorbed, as
it were, in that Being.”
These extracts will show what a priceless debt I owe to the early
contact with his mind.
How strange and far-back all that early life seems now—and yet so
vivid—I can see it all in brightest detail! Of an evening, after dinner
or supper, how we sat round the drawing-room table, or in scattered
chairs, reading. My father would get out his Fichte or his Hartmann and
soon become lost in their perusal. Occasionally he would, when he came
to a striking passage, play a sort of devil’s tattoo with his fingers on
the table, or, getting up, would walk to and fro quarter-deck fashion,
with creaky boots, and reciting his authors to himself. Then my mother
or perhaps my eldest sister would remonstrate, and after a time he would
settle down again. Sometimes if he was very quiet one might look up from
one’s book and see from his upturned eyes and half-open lips that he had
lapsed into inner communion and meditation.
His was a very religious nature, and it was his habit to think of the
divinity as clearly present—as he would say: “When I am taking my bath
or even when I am breathing I say to myself, ‘This is God working within
and around me.’” In later years, however, his liability to extreme worry
and anxiety would return; and there were times when even his books
failed to save him from the sleepless nights and despondent days
occasioned by the failure or possible failure of some Stock Exchange
speculation. At such times reports of railway companies, maps,
gazetteers, newspaper cuttings, etc., were got out and studied and
restudied; I was called in to take part in the investigations (“put in
the stocks” as I used to call it), and had to sit up till the small
hours of the morning in attitudes of painful suspense and tension. The
troubles, however, would pass away in due time, and on the whole my
father was (owing chiefly to the care and thought he gave to them) very
successful over his “investments.”
The rest of the family spent the evening, as a rule, in reading—of which
we were all fond. My sisters would play or sing a little; and when they
ceased, the sound of the near sea would reassert itself, or the roaring
of the wind in the chimney. My mother sat on a low chair, with a book on
her knee and some knitting in her hands, but occasionally, tired with
the work of the day, would drop asleep; at ten o’clock the servant
brought up wine and biscuits, and shortly afterwards we would all—except
my father—retire.
Of my mother’s life how can I say anything? That which is so vital to
one, so intimate, how can one disengage it from oneself? There was an
unspoken tragedy in those beautiful gazelle-like eyes—the tragedy as of
dumbness itself. The tender loving spirit which beamed forth from them
never found direct utterance in this world. It was the look of a
prisoner. Her mother was a Scotchwoman. A baneful parental
influence—Scottish pride and puritanism—had rested on my mother’s young
life, making all expression of tender feeling little short of a sin; and
this reserve, inculcated in youth, became in later days involuntary and
inevitable. My mother had a sister to whom she was much attached, but
who had offended my grandmother by marrying a man who was considered
undesirable. The sister was never forgiven, nor even acknowledged again.
She died soon after her marriage; and her death, with all the
accompanying circumstances, was a great blow to my mother; but of it—as
of other things which touched her nearly—she would never speak.
Her nature was not so much intellectual or imaginative as practical and
prompt to act, with a kingly sense of duty and courage. Her life was one
long self-sacrifice—first to her parents, then to her husband and
children. All day and much of the night, without haste and without rest,
she went about the house attending to our young wants, to my father’s
comfort, and to the organization of a large household—wearing herself
daily to a thinner and slighter frame, which even in age seemed by this
means to maintain its activity—till at last when her children were grown
up, and her husband’s growing infirmities demanded the services of a
trained nurse, there came upon her the grievous sense—not the less
grievous because wholly unwarranted—that she was “no longer of any use
in the world.” Twice, I remember, she repeated these fatal words; and
then, not long after, a brief attack of bronchitis parted easily the
thread of life, already worn so fine. The manner of her death was as
heroic as that of her life, with thought in lucid intervals for all
around her, servants, and everybody in the house; and with closing
smile, and words of calm, “All is as it should be.”
When my mother died (in January 1881) my father—who had been for the
most part absorbed in business or philosophic speculations, and who had
given indeed too little time to personal matters—suddenly became aware
of the greatness of the loss he had sustained. He woke up from dreamland
when it was too late. My mother’s silent and untiring forethought had
unconsciously to himself been the great support and directing power of
his life; and now he ceased not to say, “The mainspring is broken, the
mainspring is broken.” His infirmities, which at eighty-three years of
age were the natural ills of senile decay, rapidly gained upon him, and
a year afterwards, in April 1882, he died and was laid in the same grave
with her—in Hove cemetery, between the sea and the Downs, close to the
little church to which, years before, we as children had trudged with
these our parents every Sunday by the fields and footpaths which then
separated the village of Hove from the growing West of Brighton.
My mother had very gracious manners, of gently-smiling dignity, yet her
inflexible sense of truth and justice—inflexible especially as regards
her own life and conduct—was easily apparent beneath the gentle
exterior. Her ideas of social demarcation, etc., were of course of the
old school; and she looked upon it quite as a duty to keep up a certain
position in society—as the phrase is. Indeed, though much of the social
life of Brighton was in reality irksome to her, I think that she never
questioned the duty of conforming to it. But then—unlike many modern
mistresses—she never questioned the duty of attending to the wants of
dependents; and her care for the interests of the household servants,
and others whom misfortune might bring to her door, was most unfailing
and most sincere. The servants in fact were as a rule much devoted to
her—though she was by no means lax in matters of discipline and daily
superintendence.
A great feature of my mother’s character was her love of animals,
especially dogs and horses. Outdoor and garden occupations she was also
fond of—and I believe her natural inclination would have led her to a
rural life. But Brighton offered nothing in this direction—and here
again the promptings of her nature were destined only to be thwarted.
[Illustration:
MY MOTHER: SOPHIA WILSON CARPENTER (ABOUT 1864).
]
III
CAMBRIDGE
Between school and College days I went to Germany for some months. I was
already nineteen when I left school, full old enough to go to College,
but it did not seem to be decided what was to become of me. I inclined
to go into Orders. Possibly my father, dreading this, thought Heidelberg
would be an antidote! At any rate I could learn German there. So off I
went, lodged with a professor and his Frau for five months, wandered
through the woods and over the hills of Heidelberg, heard Bunsen and
Kirchhoff lecture on Physics and Chemistry, attended the English church
on Sundays, and ate sausages with the Professor and his friends on
weekdays. An odd secluded life, seeing but little of the Germans and
less of the English, what I chiefly remember of it is those long moony
rambles through the woods—not very clearly thinking about anything that
I can make out, but wondering, and just waiting—and every now and then
chancing in some secluded glade or gorgeous sunset scene upon something
that caught my breath and held me still. Indeed on one occasion I
perpetrated some rhymes in German about the Neckar—the first verses that
I ever wrote. The Professor and his wife chaffed me about my odd ways. I
even wore a tall hat to the English church on Sundays! He argued with me
about the Bible and about the idiotic habits of my countrymen and women.
I resisted his arguments, but secretly they touched me. Ultimately I
gave up attending the church, and became so disgusted with my tall hat
that when I returned to England I placed it in my carpet-bag! So I
learned something besides German at Heidelberg.
Then came Cambridge. When my father after some hesitation consented to
let me go to Cambridge, and asked me which College I would prefer, I
said “Trinity Hall,” and for my reason that it was a _gentlemanly_
college. My father laughed, as he certainly was justified in doing—and I
can only wonder now what sort of animal I was then. At any rate the
answer shows that notwithstanding all my sufferings at Brighton I had
not yet realized what was the true cause of them. There were however
other reasons for my choice. One was that Romer, the last Senior
Wrangler, was a “Hall” man; the other was that the same College was now
Head of the River. Both events had brought Trinity Hall into notice.
So thither I went, and found myself immediately in the thick of a
boating set. The whole College was given up to boating. Not to row or
help in the rowing in some way or other was rank apostasy. A few might
read besides, and a few—a dozen or two at most—did so. I boated and
talked boating slang; was made stroke of the second boat, and it went
down several places; became Secretary of the Boat Club; and for two
years wore out the seat of my breeches and the cuticle beneath with
incessant aquatic service. At the end of that time I got sadly bored
with the business, and gave it up. Indeed I was obliged to give it up;
for reading pretty hard for my degree, as I was later on, the two
strains together were too much, and my health was breaking down. But so
far perhaps boating had not been a bad thing. It was healthy exercise,
and brought me in with healthy muscular companions who bothered their
heads about no abstruse problems, and for the most part rarely read a
book. Fives and rackets too occupied some of my time; but in athletic
sports I was not so successful as I had been at school. At Brighton I
had been a good high-jumper, having cleared 5 ft. 3 or 4, a good height
in those days—but at Cambridge, probably owing to the relaxing quality
of the air, I failed to make any mark. Thus, with games and wine parties
and boat suppers, life slid easily onward.
Certainly nothing could be more unlike what I had expected. I had
imagined a university where folk would talk Latin naturally and where I,
lamely taught at school and late coming from loafing in Germany, would
be an outcast and an object of contumely. I found myself at the end of
the first term easily head of my year in the College examinations.
Myself and another. He, Yate, was the son of a country doctor—keen on
boating, but a fellow of some originality and thought as well and of
singular gentleness and candour. A friendship sprang up between us; and
for the next year or two we were always together. In examination honours
(such as they were) we were quits, and it was sincerely I believe a
matter of indifference to both of us which might win the prize. Then he
fell ill of rheumatic fever, and ultimately died without taking his
degree—my first experience of loss of this kind.
Other friends of this period were Ernest Gray—a very dear and
affectionate creature who afterwards became the Vicar and very fatherly
pastor of a country parish; Harry Spedding, son of Anthony Spedding of
Bassenthwaite, and nephew of James Spedding of Baconian fame; and
Francis Hyett of Painswick, who afterwards became my brother-in-law.
Harry Spedding was one of those extraordinary beings who though quite
unable to row himself cherished an immense enthusiasm for boating. Long
and thin and weak-chested, hard work in the boats would probably have
been fatal to him, but on the banks, running beside the boats and
cheering the crews in the races, his pluck and lively humour never
failed. Hyett did not take to the river, but kept to racquets and his
law-studies, and was really one of the few undergraduates who took any
interest in political affairs. In later years he has done much
administrative and literary work in connection with his own county.
In coming up to Cambridge it had never occurred to me at the outset to
go in for an honour degree; my opinion of the university was too high
for that. But after a term or two the tutor to my surprise seriously
recommended me to read for the mathematical tripos. I was of course
frightfully behindhand in my subjects, but I took a private ‘coach,’
went through the routine of cram, and ultimately obtained a fellowship.
Mathematics interested me and I read them with a good deal of
pleasure—but I have sometimes regretted that three years of my life
should have been—as far as study was concerned—nearly entirely absorbed
by so special and on the whole so unfruitful a subject. I think every
boy (and girl) ought to learn some Geometry and Mechanics; without these
the mind lacks form and definiteness, and its grip on the external world
is not as strong as it should be; but the higher mathematics (certainly
as they are read at Cambridge) are for the most part a mere gymnastic
exercise unapplied to actual life and facts, and easily liable to become
unhealthy, as all such exercises are.
After my degree, though retaining a certain general interest in the
subject, I never again opened a mathematical book with the intention of
seriously pursuing its study. I worked however at one time on “Taylor’s
theorem” in the Differential Calculus, with the object of finding a
simpler and more direct proof than Homersham Cox’s (the one usually
adopted). But not being able to complete the proof, I handed it over to
my friend Robert Muirhead, who has adopted and worked it to its
conclusion in a contribution to the Proceedings of the Edinburgh
Mathematical Society (Vol. 12, Session 1893–4).
It was just about this time of my degree (and curiously late) that my
attention began to be turned towards literary production. I had won as
an undergraduate—and to my surprise—two College prizes for English
Essays (one, by the way, on Civilization); and shortly after my degree,
in 1870, I was awarded a university prize (the Burney), £100, for an
essay on “The Religious Influence of Art.” Meanwhile I kept scribbling,
just for my own satisfaction, quantities of verse, very formless and
incoherent—but which formed an outlet for my own feelings in the absence
of any more tangible way of expressing them.
How well I remember going down, as I so frequently did, alone to the
riverside at night, amid the hushed reserve and quiet grace of the old
College gardens, and pouring my little soul out to the silent trees and
clouds and waters! I don’t know what kind of longing it was—something
partly sexual, partly religious, and both, owing to my strangely
slow-growing temperament, still very obscure and undefined; but anyhow
it was something that brooded about and enveloped my life, and makes
those hours still stand out for me as the most pregnant of my then
existence.
Here are some verses (written in ’68) which I give as a specimen of the
kind of thought and the half-formed emotional atmosphere in which I
brooded, as well as of their juvenile style.
O pale and wan with watching, starless night!
Far, far beyond thy cloudy banks
Pass and repass in serried ranks
The flaming watchfires of the infinite—
Gliding and streaming through the realm of space
In breathless adoration round
The burning throne whose base profound
Knoweth no resting-place.
To thy deep silence through the moving years
Cometh no cry of misery,
No sound of all the things that be,
Upborne from this dark field of feverish tears;
But all the myriad worlds thou dost enfold
Move on before their Monarch hushed,
And, looking forth, my soul is crushed
Beneath a weight untold.
O great Humanity, that liest spread
Beneath the gaze of the sleepless night,
Who is there who will dare to fight
To raise the tresses of thy drooping head?
Who cares through the immensity of suns?
Which of the angels shall arise?
Oh! heavy and dark the burden lies
On all thy noblest ones.
Far off the morning stars may shout and sing,
For there is Love and Joy and Peace,
And Life—true life that cannot cease—
But here the ghastly shuddering of Death’s wing.
And here faint whispers only come to die
Upon the threshold of our hearts,
Voices at which the sad soul starts
With a half-uttered sigh.
O hanging cloud, O scarcely stirring trees,
O velvet waters moved to sound
By the gliding fishes’ bound,
O Willow, whispering to the fitful breeze,
O gentle touch of the sweet summer air,
O solitary owl, alone,
Nursing thy joy in low weird tone
Within thy leafy lair!
O one and all, unveil! and let us see
The flaming soul of world-wide Love
Burning behind you, far above,
Beneath, deep-fountained life, strange mystery!
Unveil! O night that washest Earth’s dark shore,
O suns, through space that ever roll,
O Love, clasping us body and soul
For evermore!
Curiously enough, as it happened, I was practically offered a Fellowship
before I took my degree. The College was in want of an assistant
Lecturer. There were three clerical Fellowships (the others being
connected with the Bar as a profession), and one of these clerical
Fellowships had lately become vacant by Leslie Stephen, who held it,
relinquishing his Orders. It was understood that I was going into the
Church; it seemed probable that I should take a fair degree; and for the
rest, who could be found so suitable—so mild, so docile, so decently
mannered and generally unaggressive—as the young man in question!
Accordingly one day the tutor (Henry Latham) sounded me on the subject.
I conveyed to him that I had not changed my intention of being ordained,
and that I rather liked the prospect of staying on at Cambridge in
connection with the College; and it became practically understood that
if things turned out favorably that should be my destiny.
And things turned out accordingly. In the Mathematical Tripos of 1868 I
came out tenth wrangler, which was a sufficiently high degree to justify
a Fellowship at a small College; and in the autumn of that year I came
into residence at Trinity Hall as a Lecturer; shortly afterwards I was
elected to a clerical Fellowship; and in June ’69 I was ordained Deacon
by the Bishop of Ely.
The story of my connection with the Church may be soon told. Brought up
in the philosophical Broad Churchism of my father, with an
ever-expanding horizon, my mind had at no time undergone any revulsion
of feeling such as could be called a religious crisis; no sense of
antagonism to the Church and its teachings had been developed. Though
quite aware that my opinions were vastly different from those of the
ordinary Churchman, I perhaps hardly appreciated _how_ far I had
drifted; and with an easy faith in progress, such as I had, it seemed to
me that anyhow in a few years the Church, widening and growing from
within, would become adapted to the times, and be a perfectly habitable
and a useful institution.
As soon as I was ordained I had services in the College Chapel to read,
and sermons to preach—with the usual accompaniment of winks and grins
from the fellow-students, shufflings of hassocks, racings half-dressed
through the prayers on winter mornings, with clicks of watches timing
the performance, and all the gaping signs of unconcealed boredom; but I
thought I would like to see something more satisfactory and more
definite in the way of Church work than that, and accordingly took a
curacy at St. Edward’s under a dry evangelical of the steel-knife and
lemon-juice type, named Pearson.
If I had nursed in my mind any sentiment of romance in connection with
ecclesiastical affairs, it was soon expelled by these experiences. A
peep behind the scenes was enough. The deadly Philistinism of a little
provincial congregation; the tradesmen and shopkeepers in their sleek
Sunday best; the petty vulgarities and hypocrisies; the discordant music
of the choir; the ignoble scenes in the vestry and the resumed saintly
expression on returning into the church; the hollow ring and the sour
edge of the incumbent’s voice; and the fatuous faces upturned to receive
the communion at the altar steps—all these were worse, considerably
worse, than the undisguised heathenism of the chapel performance.
It was not long before I began to have serious misgivings about the step
I had taken. Still I did not torment myself; and when in the following
June (1870) the time arrived for my ordination as a priest, I prepared
myself quite philosophically to go through the ceremony.
But here an interesting hitch occurred. In the Bishop’s examination
preparatory to the ordination, the candidates had among other things to
write a Life of Abraham; and such was my optimistic confidence in the
breadth of the episcopal mind that I quite candidly and without any
particular misgiving committed to paper the view which I had picked up,
I think from Bunsen the historian, and which is also adopted by Dean
Stanley in his _Jewish Church_—that Abraham’s intended immolation of
Isaac was a relic of Moloch-worship, and of the old practice of human
sacrifices, and that the “voice of God” which bade him substitute the
ram did indeed figure the evolution of the human conscience to a higher
ideal of worship than that in vogue among savage nations. This paper,
containing so dreadful a heresy, I sent up without a qualm! But on
arriving myself some days later at the Palace at Ely, the Bishop (Harold
Browne) soon after the first greetings called me into his study and
confronted me with the offending passage. At first I had some difficulty
in understanding what the trouble was, but when the Bishop in grave
tones began to remind me that the sacrifice of Isaac was a type—a type
and a prefigurement of that greater sacrifice of Jesus, and that the
whole Biblical scheme of salvation rested four-square upon this incident
(not forgetting the ram), I immediately saw that the fat was in the
fire, and that there was now no escaping a solemn discussion on the
Atonement.
And to that it came. Our conversation, interrupted by dinner, was
resumed again late in the evening; and when all the other clerics and
candidates had gone to bed the reverend Father-in-God and I sat up till
past twelve discussing all the main and side issues of Theology! On the
latter he was easy enough. I told him plainly that I did not believe in
the historical accuracy of the Old Testament; and he admitted that there
were gaps! Even the Thirty-nine Articles were to be swallowed in the
lump, and not in detail, so to speak. But on the Atonement the
discussion narrowed. Here was a vital point. My views were woolly in
outline, sadly blurred by the Broad Church mysticism of F. D. Maurice,
and I confess I had some difficulty in formulating them. The Bishop
merely shook his head, asked me to “say that again,” and declared that
he could not understand. It ended by his requesting me to _write out_ my
doctrine; and going to bed himself he left me sitting up for a couple of
hours more for this purpose! In the morning I handed him, before
breakfast, my mystic script. After breakfast he once more called me into
his study, said he had read the paper, that it was thoughtful and all
that, but that he could not say that he really followed it, and that he
was sure it was _not_ the doctrine of the Church of England.
We were then within a few minutes of the commencement of the service. I
took for granted that he would not ordain me; but after a pause he said
“I cannot refuse to ordain you; but I do not think your views are those
of the Church.” I think he hoped that _I_ should then retire of my own
accord. However I said nothing but took it all as settled in my favour,
and in less than an hour the apostolic hands were on my head.
After luncheon the good old man, not without a certain anxiety and
_épanchement_, put his arm in mine and walked with me round the garden.
I remember there was a chaffinch hopping about, and a longish discourse
followed on creation and suffering and vicarious sacrifice, which I
listened to with due deference; but it did not seem to me to lead to any
conclusion; and soon the time came for us to leave the palace, and I saw
him no more.
It may be imagined that I did not find my profession any more
satisfactory after being made priest than before. He of the sour
knife-edge, my superincumbent, left St. Edward’s, being translated into
a canon of Carlisle, and was succeeded, curiously enough, by Maurice
himself. That was I think early in 1871.
Of this transaction, by which F. D. Maurice became incumbent of St.
Edward’s, it may be worth while to say a few words. Maurice had lately
come to Cambridge as Professor of Moral Philosophy. As far as his moral
worth was concerned, the choice was a good one. There was an ineffable
personal charm about him, of moral earnestness and deep feeling,
connecting itself somehow with his lofty venerable head and
extraordinary modesty. But of his philosophy perhaps the less said the
better. He saw facts which doubtless it is impossible adequately to
translate into language. Certainly it was impossible for him. To see him
struggling with the root-ideas which he was always trying, and vainly,
to express, to see him perspiring with effort, tapping his forehead with
his fingers, shutting his eyes, and still only framing broken sentences,
was really touching. The net result among the students was, as I have
hinted, one of personal devotion to him, but of utter bafflement as to
his teaching. It is said that one student hearing that the great man was
giving a course of lectures on the “I” (as he was), made his way down to
the _Physiological_ schools and after many inquiries finding that no
lectures were being given on the _Eye_, came back again with the
conclusion that the whole affair was a myth!
Well, Maurice having expressed a wish to take some practical “duty” in
Cambridge, and the living of St. Edward’s falling vacant at that time, a
movement was got up in the College to offer the living to him. The
living was in the gift of the Fellows of Trinity Hall, and most of the
Fellows were favorable to the proposal. But an unexpected difficulty
arose in the person of the Master (Dr. Geldart). Not that the Master
himself (who was an old sporting man, more than anything else) cared a
button about the matter, but because his wife, Mrs. Geldart, was
accustomed to attend St. Edward’s and fuss round the parson there, and
_she_ strongly disapproved of any one so heretical as Maurice occupying
the pulpit!
I was a Fellow of the College at the time, and the scenes round the
table as we discussed the knotty question were most amusing. The obvious
embarrassment of the old Master when the question arose as to _why_ he
thought Maurice so dangerous; his mysterious references to the opinions
of other people (his wife) and his candid disavowal of any knowledge on
these subjects himself; the guffaws of Henry Fawcett (then Professor of
Political Economy and afterwards Postmaster-General) as he called for
his chop and settled himself down to enjoy a scene to which his
blindness was little drawback; the quips of H. D. Warr, one of the
Fellows; the muttered blasphemies of our Dean (Hopkins), who couldn’t
think why we wasted time “over such blasted nonsense”; the ingenious
surmises of the barrister fellows generally as to what Maurice’s
opinions might conceivably be; and the politic expediencies of the Tutor
(Latham) who at last silenced the Master and his Missus by producing a
letter from the Bishop of Carlisle (Goodwin) endorsing Maurice with a
friendly pat on the back: all this was as good as a play.
Maurice was installed in the living early in 1871, and thenceforth read
the services and prayed and preached, with that profundity of earnest
innocence which was so characteristic of him, and which contrasted
strangely with the manner of his election, and more strangely still with
the cheap commercialism of his congregation.
Maurice had no great ear for music. The organist and choir of
flat-singing shop-girls revelled in florid hymns about the
“blood-of-the-Lamb.” Maurice besought me to alter this and induce them
to sing again those fine old hymns like the “Old Hundredth.” A nice task
for an amiable curate!
It was curious that after having been brought up in and adopted
Maurice’s views, I should now, having become his curate, feel so
uncomfortable as I did. But so it was. I had had experience in the short
space of a year and a half, of three spiritual superiors—each in a sense
more favorable than the last; and yet my sense of aggravation
continually increased. I saw a good deal of Maurice. He was kindness
itself. I opened out my difficulties to him; and he was I think troubled
to find I could not reconcile myself to the position which _he_ occupied
apparently without difficulty. But to me his attitude was a growing
wonder. I could quite understand his historical-philosophical view of
the Creeds and the Old Testament, and that he could read into them a
deep and necessary meaning, satisfactory to his own mind; I had in fact
been already, long before, initiated into this Broad Church attitude by
my father. But when it came to standing up oneself in church and
reciting these documents to a congregation who (as one knew perfectly
well) did not understand a word of them, and practically received them
in their grossest sense and in a spirit of mere superstition, then I
felt it _was_ necessary to draw the line somewhere! It was not that I
then, or at any time, made a trouble of the conformity of my own _views_
with those of the Church; for I thought and I think now, that if a man
feels he can do useful work, and congenial to himself, in that
connection, he had better remain where he is until he is kicked out; and
that seeing the variety of interpretations that Church doctrines are
capable of, it is rather for the Church to decide whether _his_
interpretations are within its pale, or not, than for him to do so. But
the trouble to me was a practical one—namely the insuperable _feeling_
of falsity and dislocation which I experienced, and which accompanied
all my professional work from the reading of the services to the
visiting of old women in their almshouses—who were, one could see,
goaded on to hypocrisy by the position in which they were placed—and who
would hastily shuffle a Bible or prayer-book on to the table, when they
saw the parson coming. This sense of falsity grew on me more and more
till I felt the situation to be intolerable.
It is remarkable—certainly I have found it so in my own life—how little
its greater changes are one’s own choice, and in a sense, how much they
are forced upon one by necessity—sometimes by an outward necessity,
sometimes by an inner and necessary, though perhaps unconscious
evolution of one’s own nature. No doubt I _thought_ about this matter a
great deal, argued to myself the question of my conformity to the
Church, and the pros and cons of remaining in it—worried myself, passed
sleepless nights—and felt generally unhinged over it; but all this
conscious argument brought me no nearer to a decision. Deep below I felt
that some sort of sheer necessity was driving me on. Sometimes when I
was occupied with, and thinking about, quite other things, a kind of
shiver would run down my back: “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” and
I felt as if I was being pushed to the edge of a steep place.
For it was not altogether easy to face the situation. I was doing very
well, in a pecuniary sense, at Cambridge, making with my Fellowship and
small offices as lecturer, librarian, etc., £500 or £600 a year, and
prospects good for the future; the abandonment of my Orders would
probably mean the loss of my Fellowship, and possibly also that I should
have to leave Cambridge altogether. And it did not seem quite reasonable
to risk all this for what might after all be only a Quixotic fancy.
But blessed is Necessity which cuts all arguments short! By the middle
of May 1871 I felt so ill and wretched that I _could_ not stay on even a
few weeks to the end of the term. I begged off my lectures, left Maurice
to find another curate, and ran away!
Meanwhile other threads and clues of life were developing. Up to my
degree (January ’68) I had lived singularly apart from any intellectual
or literary circles. As an undergraduate my companions had mostly been
boating men. After my degree however I came naturally into a more
literary society, consisting partly of the younger Fellows of Colleges
and partly of the more go-ahead students who had not yet taken their
degrees. One or two of the more thoughtful undergrads of my own College
also leaned towards me. I belonged to one or two little societies which
used to meet and discuss literary or other topics. To one of these,
which W. K. Clifford organized, I used, after I became a curate, to rush
round on Sunday evenings after church—in time to take part in the
reading of Mazzini’s _Duty of Man_; illustrated by a plentiful
accompaniment of claret-cup and smoke! Clifford was a kind of Socratic
presiding genius at these meetings—with his Satyr-like face, tender
heart, wonderfully suggestive, paradoxical manner of conversation, and
blasphemous treatment of the existing gods. He invented just at that
time a kind of inverted Doxology which ran:—
O Father, Son and Holy Ghost—
We wonder which we hate the most.
Be Hell, which they prepared before,
Their dwelling now and evermore!
and his influence, combined with that of Mazzini, was certainly part of
my education at that period. If it had by any chance come to the
Bishop’s ears that I attended these meetings there is little wonder
about his hesitation to ordain me!
There was another Cambridge heretic with whom I not unfrequently
consorted—Lock of King’s—who certainly by his attainments and ability
ought to have been made a Fellow of his College, but his views and the
audacity with which he ventilated them proved a fatal obstacle. Having
to write a ’Varsity prize-poem he sat up all the preceding night to do
it, worked himself up into a kind of prophetic frenzy and managed under
cover of a forecast of republican utopianism to introduce the lines:—
Since they traded in holy things, and treated the people like beasts,
The priests shall be slain and the kings shall be drowned in the blood
of the priests.
I don’t feel so certain of the exact words of the first line as I do of
the second, but I hope the author of both (who was then, of course, an
undergraduate) will forgive my quotation of them. It is hardly to be
wondered at that in those days he was _not_ made a Fellow!
One of the undergraduates of my own College with whom I made quite a
friendship at this time was Edward Anthony Beck. He came up to
Cambridge, a poor student from the country district of Castle Rising in
Norfolk, on the shores of the Wash—he also with his head full of rhymes
and verses, which he had written since he was a boy of eight or ten, to
the wonderment and delight of his widower father, who prophesied in no
uncertain tone, a nook in Westminster Abbey for his poet son. Beck was a
bright, capable fellow, with a slight stoop, and a stammer, and a
good-humoured way of laughing at his own oddities. He took the
University by surprise by carrying off, in his first year, the prize
poem on Dante—having been fain, it is said, to work up the subject by
reading Cary’s translation (which he could not afford to buy) on the
bookstalls. Then he wrote another prize poem on Runnymede, which
delighted him chiefly I think on account of a misprint which occurred in
the printed copy. There was an eloquent passage in the poem, describing
the sunrise of freedom in England, and something about the clouds
heralding the approach of morning:—
Streaks rosy-tinted vanward of the sun—
which the printer, in a materialistic mood, altered into:—
_Steaks_ rosy-tinted vanward of the sun.
These rosy-tinted steaks gave Beck, I believe, as much pleasure as he
got from all the _kudos_ of his poetic success. He worked away at
Classics, took a good first-class, and ultimately became a fellow and
tutor of the College. But his vein of poetic feeling and romance,
possibly too soon ripe, ran itself out, and he never carried on this
line of production or published anything. His mind, perhaps from the
same cause, took on a slightly cynical cast; he lapsed into the ordinary
channels of lecturing and coaching, then married and had a large family,
and so gave himself up to the work-a-day routine of College life.
At the time I mention he and I chummed together a good deal—indeed there
was a touch of romance in our attachment—we compared literary notes,
went abroad together once or twice, and after he was made a Fellow, had
rooms adjoining each other, and spent many and many an evening in
common. He became a favorite in the general society of the younger dons
and B.A.’s, on account of his brightness, naturalness and frankly avowed
enjoyment of the good things of life.
As for myself, for a couple of years or so after my degree I entered
with great zest into this academically intellectual existence—these
chit-chat societies, these little supper parties, these lingerings over
the wine in combination-room after dinner—where every subject in Heaven
and Earth was discussed, with the university man’s perfect freedom of
thought and utterance, but also with his perfect absence of practical
knowledge or of intention to apply his theories to any practical issue.
It was helpful no doubt especially as a solvent of old ideas and
prejudices; but after a time it began to pall upon me and bore me. There
was a vein of what might be called painful earnestness in my character.
These talking machines were, many of them, very obnoxious to me. And
then of what avail was the brain, when the heart demanded so much, and
demanding was still unsatisfied?
Looking back, I think with regard to this last-mentioned matter, that
the fault was probably a good deal on my own side. Strong as had been
two or three attachments of this and my earlier undergraduate period,
and deeply as they had moved me (to a degree indeed which I should be
almost ashamed to confess); yet for the most part, owing to my reserved
habits, and the self-repressive education I had received—combined with
the fatuities of public opinion—I consumed my own smoke, and did not
give myself the utterance I ought to have given. By concealing myself I
was unfair to my friends, and at the same time suffered torments which I
need not have suffered.
As I have already said, during the time shortly after my degree I
scribbled a great deal in verse form merely as an outlet to my own
feelings, and without much attention to conventionalities of style and
rhythms—though of course along the ordinary lines of versification. But
now came my introduction to the poet who was destined so deeply to
influence my life. It was in the summer of ’68, I believe (though it may
have been ’69), that one day H. D. Warr—one of the Fellows of Trinity
Hall, and a very brilliant and amusing man—came into my room with a
blue-covered book in his hands (William Rossetti’s edition of Whitman’s
poems) only lately published, and said:—
“Carpenter, what do you think of this?”
I took it from him, looked at it, was puzzled, and asked him what he
thought of it.
“Well,” he said, “I thought a good deal of it at first, but I don’t
think I can stand any more of it.”
With those words he left me; and I remember lying down then and there on
the floor and for half an hour poring, pausing, wondering. I could not
make the book out, but I knew at the end of that time that I intended to
go on reading it. In a short time I bought a copy for myself, then I got
_Democratic Vistas_, and later on (after three or four years) _Leaves of
Grass_ complete.
From that time forward a profound change set in within me. I remember
the long and beautiful summer nights, sometimes in the College garden by
the riverside, sometimes sitting at my own window which itself
overlooked a little old-fashioned garden enclosed by grey and crumbling
walls; sometimes watching the silent and untroubled dawn; and feeling
all the time that my life deep down was flowing out and away from the
surroundings and traditions amid which I lived—a current of sympathy
carrying it westward, across the Atlantic. I wrote to Whitman, obtained
his books from him, and occasional postcardial responses. But outwardly,
and on the surface, my life went on as usual.
What made me cling to the little blue book from the beginning was
largely the poems which celebrate comradeship. That thought, so near and
personal to me, I had never before seen or heard fairly expressed; even
in Plato and the Greek authors there had been something wanting (so I
thought). If there had only been those few poems they would have been
sufficient to hold me; but there were other pieces: there was “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Rocked Cradle,” “President Lincoln’s
Funeral Hymn,” and the prose Preface[3]—and then afterwards _Democratic
Vistas_.
On the whole at that time I thought most, I believe, of the prose
writings. _Democratic Vistas_ was a mine of new thought. Both this and
the little blue book I read over and over again, and still they were
new. I had read a great deal of Wordsworth about the time of my degree;
then Shelley captivated and held me for a long time; portions of Plato
and of Shakespeare I had read repeatedly; but never had I found anything
approaching these writings of Whitman’s for their inexhaustible quality
and power of making one return to them.
Yet all this time, or for three or four years, I believe my interest in
them was mainly intellectual—that is, they were producing an
intellectual ferment in me, but I had not distinctly come into touch
with the dominant individuality behind them, nor felt that they were
reshaping my moral and artistic ideals. This is partly shown by the fact
that I continued all these years, and up to ’74 or so, writing verse
along the usual lines and upon the usual subjects. Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey” and Shelley’s “Adonais” and “Prometheus” still ruled my artistic
and emotional conceptions; and withal, living as I was in an atmosphere
of literary criticism and finesse, mere academic technique seemed to me
a great matter, and I made great struggles to attain to it.
Though I was not particularly successful in these efforts towards the
conventional in literature, yet I have no doubt they were very helpful
in giving me some sort of training in the power of handling words and
rhythmical forms—and it was a true instinct which led me through this
instead of urging me to leap at once into the ocean of metrical freedom,
so difficult to navigate with success. Anyhow so it was that while (in
other things as well as in literature) my inner scarcely conscious
nature was setting outwards in a swift current from the shores of
conventionality, under the influence of its new genius, into deeps it
little divined, my external self was still busy in a kind of backwater,
and working hard if by any means it might attain to a creditable or even
a possible existence in these channels!
But by ’71 and ’72 I began to feel that continued existence in my
surroundings was becoming impossible to me. The tension and dislocation
of my life was increasing, and I became aware that a crisis was
approaching. In May of the former year I had taken a holiday and got
away from Cambridge. In October I returned to my lecturing and College
work, but not to the church duties; and all ’72 I continued on, going
through the daily round—but in a torpid, perfunctory manner—feeling
probably that I ought to throw it all up, yet without the pluck to do so
till I was fairly forced. By the end of ’72 I was obviously ill and
incapacitated, and when I asked for leave of absence for a couple of
terms it was readily granted—my own object in asking (so I put it to
myself) being to get quite away and for long enough to be able to
estimate my position and future action fairly and deliberately.
The year ’73 was an important one for me. Feeling shattered and
exhausted, and with a big holiday before me, I determined to go to
Italy. It was a new life and I may almost say inspiration. I spent two
months in Rome, a month in the Bay of Naples, and a month at Florence. I
was alone, still alone; but the healing influences of the air and the
sunshine were upon me. Amid the bright external life of the day, and the
rich records and suggestions of the past, all the questions which had
been tormenting me faded away. I _thought_ about them no more; but new
elements came into my life which decided them for me.
The Greek sculpture had a deep effect. The other things, pictures,
architecture, etc., interested me much from an historical or æsthetic
point of view; but this had something more, a germinative influence on
my mind, which adding itself to and corroborating the effect of
Whitman’s poetry, left with me as it were the seed of new conceptions of
life. The marvellous beauty and cleanliness of the human body as
presented by the Greek mind, the way in which the noblest passions of
the soul—the tender pitying love of Diana for Endymion, the haughty
inspiration of Juno, the heroic endurance of the fallen warrior, the
childlike gladness of the faun—were united and blended with the
corporeal form—or rather scarcely conceived of as separated from it; the
emotional atmosphere which went with this, the Greek ideal of the free
and gracious life of man at one with nature and the cosmos—so remote
from the current ideals of commercialism and Christianity!—to become
aware of all this in the midst of that “delicate air” and delightful
landscape and climate of Italy, was indeed a new departure for me.
There are magnificent fragments of Greek sculpture in the British
Museum, not forgetting the priceless frieze of the Parthenon—things
which to a skilled artistic eye are as suggestive as any that can be
found—but to me the great range and completeness of the Italian
galleries, the almost perfect Cupids, fauns, Venuses, athletes,
warriors, youths, maidens, sages, gods, in unending procession under
that southern sky, gave a poetic impulse which I could not, at any rate
at that time, have surmised from a broken marble seen in a London fog!
Nor must I omit, as part of the Greek impression, a visit to the Temples
of Pæstum—which helped to give a habitation in the mind’s eye to those
strings of sculptured figures, exiles in alien Rome, and to intensify
the sense of harmonious life and divine proportion which they had
excited.
I stayed in Italy long enough to see, at Florence, the fireflies skim
and flicker over the blossoming wheat-fields of May and June, and then
returned home, to find that without worrying about it a change had taken
place in my mental attitude which would make my return to the Cambridge
life impossible.
And here I must not omit to mention another influence which played a
large part in the shaping of my life at this time. Most men own a deep
debt to women’s influence in the ordering and guidance of their lives. I
cannot say that I have felt this. With the exception of my mother and
one other person, I cannot remember a single case in which a woman came
to me as a strong motive-force or inspiration, or as a help or a guide
in doubt or difficulty. Perhaps on the emotional side women did not
supply what I needed; while on the intellectual side a woman with
decisive, originative, authentic mind is certainly not often to be met
with. Such a woman, however, of the latter type, was the person to whom
I allude, and whom I may call Olivia (which indeed was one of her
Christian names).
She was a connection by marriage with one of my sisters, a woman about
fifty, still retaining traces of an exceedingly handsome youth. Married,
but separated from her husband; artistic to the finger-tips; brought up
in Italy, and loving the South; hating everything British and Philistine
and commercial; detesting the Bible and religion; she had fought her way
through social odium and disability, and then through severe illness and
suffering, till she was but the wreck (she used to say) of her former
self. Nevertheless a remarkable fire and enthusiasm still survived in
her, and though one of those natures who see everything rather violently
black or white, yet the decisive artistic quality of her mind was most
refreshing and inspiring. I have given some general account founded on
her life and character in a separate sketch.[4] Sufficient to say here
that her conversations on literature and art, her criticisms of art work
(and of my own efforts), her views on marriage, on religion—though we
disagreed a thousand times and often saw things from opposite
points—were most helpful to me. They served to liberate my mind,
corrected in many respects the native vagueness of my thought, and
certainly helped me greatly on the road to choose my own way in life. I
find a scrap of a letter from her, written during this period of my
suffering and doubt as to my continuance at Cambridge and in the Church:
“I ought not to write this morning, _caro mio_, I am too depressed. It
is terrible to me to know how you suffer. Your letter last night made me
cold to the finger-ends. One thing is clear anyhow, your present life is
intolerable, _change it you must_.... When you get away from the
depressing influence of your present life with all its worries you will
breathe and clap your hands and thank God!” It is needless to say that
my move to Italy and my preparations for abandoning Orders were things
truly after her own heart.
And now for the first time I seriously entertained the idea of taking to
literature as a profession. I saw that my Cambridge career was at an
end, and that I must do something else; and for a time (though only for
a short time) it appeared to me that I might make a living by writing.
I believe I felt that I really had something to write, that I must
write, though certainly my mind and purpose was only vague as yet; and
as to the professional side of the question, though I realized, I only
partly realized, how difficult it would be to make writing of any kind
‘pay.’ There were plenty of ‘candid friends’ however to impress _that_
upon me, and I well remember the derisive chorus of the other Fellows
which greeted (at some College meeting or other) the announcement of my
intention! I stayed at home, at Brighton, during the summer and autumn
and gathered my verses—those more careful and academic productions which
I had perpetrated in the late years—together in a volume for
publication. Of course no publisher would take the volume at his risk,
and I was content, after a few efforts, to pay the piper myself for the
pleasure of seeing the work in print, and on the chance of its leaping
to a world-wide success! The book, under the title _Narcissus, and other
Poems_, was published in November 1873, and needless to say fell
practically dead—a few notices, mostly depreciatory, in the papers, a
few copies bought by friends, and then it ceased to stir.
[Illustration:
MY SISTER LIZZIE.
]
Nor was there any reason why it should stir. There was nothing of any
moment in the book; only a vague sentiment of Nature and humanity
running through, not definite enough at any point to carry weight; and
really not so much of the author’s own self in it, as of his effort to
reach a certain literary standard. Perhaps one of the best of the
pieces, both in form and intention, was “The Artist to his Lady”: which
I remember expressed in its indefinite way the dominant feeling which I
had those last years, of being drawn away from my surroundings by
another ideal than that which I could realize at Cambridge. Of the other
pieces, “The Carpenter and the King”—an extract from an unfinished
revolutionary drama of which the scene was laid in Austria and Italy in
1848—indicates a certain advance in political ideas and the germ of
future developments; while “The Angel of Death and Life” contains in
embryo some of the dominant conceptions of _Towards Democracy_.
It so happened that at the time of publication of _Narcissus_, in
November ’73, I was at Cannes, in the South of France, whither I had
gone with my sister Lizzie (to whom I was much attached) on account of
her illness. I stayed two or three weeks, and then it became necessary
for me to return home, in order to make preparations for and be present
at our College Fellows’ meeting at Christmas. It had of course become
quite imperative that I should make some distinct announcement of my
intentions with regard to the future; and for my part I had now quite
decided that I would relinquish my Orders, and go through the legal
formalities of unfrocking myself. Sincerely I hoped that this would lead
to my disappearance from Cambridge. If, before, I had recoiled from such
a thought, the torpor and misery I had experienced since then had quite
altered my point of view.
And in all this matter it was not by any means only the clerical
difficulty that troubled me. As I have hinted before I had come to feel
that the so-called intellectual life of the University was (to me at any
rate) a fraud and a weariness. These everlasting discussions of theories
which never came anywhere near actual life, this cheap philosophizing
and ornamental cleverness, this endless book-learning, and the queer
cynicism and boredom underlying—all impressed me with a sense of utter
emptiness. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in that
atmosphere terrified me; and as I had seemed to see already the vacuity
and falsity of society life at Brighton, so in another form I seemed to
see the same thing here.
And now it dawned upon me that my abandonment of Orders, instead of
being a thing to be dreaded, would be my veritable deliverance, and
would provide just that valid excuse for breaking with my old life,
which otherwise might prove hard to find. When friends, relations,
Fellows of the College, and others, were all urging upon me the folly of
committing professional suicide, I felt that the argument of
_conscience_—though not really to myself the final and convincing thing
(since that was Necessity)—was one which I could make use of, and which
I should _have_ to make use of, since every one, whether I liked it or
not, would credit me with it!
I therefore, to avoid all possible lapses or failures that might ensue
if I left the matter over to a personal explanation at the College
meeting, _wrote_ beforehand to the Master of Trinity Hall, explaining
that I had entirely made up my mind to formally relinquish my Orders,
and placing my Fellowship in his hands, in accordance with what I
supposed would be necessary under the circumstances. Then two or three
weeks afterwards I followed in person to join in the Christmas
festivities.
At that time, every year at the Christmas season, not only did all the
Fellows assemble for the transaction of College business at our
meetings, but there was a week of dinner-parties, with often fifty or
sixty guests each evening (no women) and very serious junketings! This
was, of course, in Commemoration of the Founder of the College—and with
money partly left for the purpose. We sat down to dinner, a most
extensive one, at six o’clock, which lasted, with the passing of the
loving-cup and the serving of wine and dessert, till about eight; then
we adjourned to the combination-room to take coffee and to chat for an
hour; after which the elder men generally resolved themselves into whist
parties, while the younger would retire in batches to college rooms in
order to smoke and drink brandies and soda. Soon after ten _supper_ was
served; and returning to the combination-room one found a table spread
with the traditional boar’s head, supplemented by oysters, game-pie, and
other little delicacies. In order to stimulate the exhausted powers,
bottled stout was found useful at this period. Some of the old hands did
no scant justice to the supper; others remained at the whist tables.
Finally and as the _coup de grâce_, about 11.30 hot milk punch and roast
apples appeared!
It was generally the duty of the younger Fellows to look after the
ceremonies a little, to arrange the whist parties, invite the guests to
supper, and ply them with meat and drink. I remember one evening,
somewhat past midnight, finding the Mayor of Cambridge (who had been
invited) by himself in a remote corner discussing a roast apple. I went
and got a good big glass of milk-punch, and brought it him, saying,
“Now, Mr. Mayor, I’m sure this will do you good”—but he waived it away,
with a comical gesture, replying: “No, no more—I _can’t_ drink any more,
thank you; but this apple is delicious!” Shortly afterwards, leaning on
my arm, he was to be seen carefully descending the stairs to his
carriage.
My feelings at this particular Christmas were of rather a mixed kind. As
to the Fellows they were berating me of one accord for my madness in
writing to the Master and practically resigning my Fellowship before it
was proved needful to do so; also for my supposed Quixotism in troubling
about my Orders. As to the Dean, being of course in Orders himself he
made short work of the difficulty: “It is all such tomfoolery,” he said,
“that it doesn’t matter whether you say you believe in it, or whether
you say you don’t. Look at my sermons in chapel now—are they not models
of unaffected piety! You let the matter drop, and it will all blow
over.”
Among the Fellows and members of my own and other colleges with whom at
that time I was often in contact were Henry Fawcett (afterwards
Postmaster-General), Henry Latham (Tutor of Trinity Hall), Charles
Wentworth Dilke, W. K. Clifford, George Darwin, Robert Romer (afterwards
Lord Justice), Lumley Smith, Henry Fielding Dickens, Augustine Birrell,
Edward Beck (present Master of Trinity Hall), and others of course. Most
of these—though not all—did their best from their different points of
view to dissuade me from the course I had embarked on; but I was not
going to be dissuaded it was obvious to me that half-measures would be
no good, and that if I wanted to make my escape from Cambridge I must
throw the whole thing overboard; so underneath all the unpleasantness
there was the secret satisfaction of feeling that unknown to everybody I
was really going to gain a point instead of lose one!
What kind of debates they had in College meeting over my case I don’t
know, for of course I was not present, but it was conveyed to me that
though there was a general wish that I should stay on as before, yet if
I persisted in relinquishing my Orders, it would be doubtful if I could
be asked to remain in the College—owing to the scandal of the thing! As
to the question whether my relinquishment of Orders should involve the
loss of my fellowship, that was adjourned for the present.
So again next term I did not rejoin; but remained at home, at Brighton,
occupied with another important literary project! _Moses_: a drama.
Early one morning I had woken from sleep in the midst of a heavy
thunderstorm, with an extraordinarily vivid conception (I don’t know how
it came to be there) of Moses on the top of Sinai. Then and there I
wrote out a long soliloquy (Act II. Sc. 1), which now insisted on
expanding itself into a considerable poem in dramatic form—the ruling
idea being to take the Bible story, treat it in a rationalistic way, as
an obscure tradition of an actual event, and to show Moses as a noble
but entirely human reformer, embarrassed in his great enterprise more by
the apathy, stupidity and superstition of the people he desired to save
than by anything else.[5]
Meanwhile through solicitors I set the ecclesiastical law in operation
with a view to my unfrockment. The process takes six months for its
completion. It was not necessary for me to see my Bishop again; but I
had one or two gravely regretful letters from him. I spent the ‘Long’ at
Cambridge—July and August—the last ‘Long’ that I spent there; and during
that time received the legal document which rendered me once again a
layman.
These summer vacations spent at Cambridge were the part of my university
life that—even from my undergraduate days—I had most enjoyed. Chapels
and lectures were in abeyance, the monotonous tyranny of
boating-practice and training was unknown; a few students only were up,
perhaps twenty or so at our College—but these would be the more
intelligent and congenial spirits. During the long morning from nine to
two one got through a lot of reading unhindered by lectures and other
interruptions; then came afternoons canoeing up the river, two or three
together, in the dreamy sheen of the water and the overhanging willows,
or through beds of iris; or bathing; or playing fives or rackets; or
walking the country lanes, or sitting long on some turfy bank with a
friend. Sometimes we would make quite a party and go, a fleet of canoes,
with provisions, far up the river and not return till dark. Then as a
rule there were two or three hours more work in the evening, though
sometimes this was broken through by some little entertainment.
What a curious romance ran through all that life—and yet on the whole,
with few exceptions, how strangely unspoken it was and unexpressed! This
succession of athletic and even beautiful faces and figures, what a
strange magnetism they had for me, and yet all the while how
insurmountable for the most part was the barrier between! It was as if a
magic flame dwelt within one, burning, burning, which one could not put
out, and yet whose existence one might on no account reveal.[6] How the
walks under the avenues of trees at night, and by the riversides, were
haunted full of visionary forms for which in the actual daylight world
there seemed no place!
Yet as time went on I think it must have become clearer to me that
Cambridge never would afford in this direction the actual that I wanted.
Expectation grew dry at the fount, and torpor and distress in the last
year or two took the place of the romance of the years before. Somehow I
think I must have dimly understood that the trouble arose partly from a
deep want of sympathy between myself and the whole mental attitude, mode
of life, and ideals of the university, and of the gilded or silvered
youth who lived and moved within it; for I remember that on the
memorable journey from Cannes homewards, when I was revolving the whole
situation—the abandonment of my Orders and Fellowship, the failure (as
it already appeared) of my first literary venture, and the doubt of what
I should or _could_ do in the future, it suddenly flashed upon me, with
a vibration through my whole body, that I would and must somehow go and
make my life with the mass of the people and the manual workers.
It was in pursuance of this last idea that shortly after the eventful
College meeting above mentioned I went to see James Stuart at Trinity,
who was just then organizing the first outlines of the University
Extension Lecturing Scheme, and asked him if he could find me a place on
it. He agreed to do so; and suggested that I should take the subject of
Astronomy. I consented, and shortly after was appointed to begin a
course of Lectures (in October 1874) at Leeds, Halifax and Skipton.
[Illustration:
SELF, IN ABOUT 1875
]
IV
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION AND NORTHERN TOWNS
I sometimes think myself singularly fortunate in the way in which my
dreams of life (the wildest and most unlikely) have from time to time
been realized; but in this connection I have noticed two things that
have generally happened—one is that the new life-purpose would come, to
begin with, with great force, making me believe it was going to be
realized at once, and that then it would seem to fail and almost be
abandoned, and then again, some years after, it _would_ be realized. The
second thing is (and this is in accordance with the general law of the
“cussedness of things”) that just in the moment of the realization of
the first endeavour, _another_ ideal would make itself felt, which would
in some degree supersede the former.
It had come on me with great force that I would go and throw in my lot
with the mass-people and the manual workers. I took up the University
Extension work perhaps chiefly because it seemed to promise this result.
As a matter of fact it merely brought me into the life of the commercial
classes; and for seven years I served—instead of the Rachel of my
heart’s desire—a Leah to whom I was not greatly attached. Nevertheless
this period was of interest and useful to me. I had never been in the
Northern Towns. I was profoundly ignorant of commercial life. The
manners, customs, ideas, ideals, the types of people, the trades,
manufactures, the dominance of Dissent, the comparative weakness of the
Established Church, the absence of art, literature and science, the dirt
of the towns, the rough heartiness and hospitality—all formed a strange
contrast to Cambridge and Brighton.
I spent the two winters ’74–’75 and ’75–’76 at Leeds—lecturing there,
and at Halifax and Skipton—living in Leeds, in lodgings—and seeing a
good deal of the people (mostly ladies) who were actively engaged in
promoting the Extension lectures. My subject was Astronomy. It was a
curious subject for these towns where seldom a star could be seen. As
far as the heavens were witness I might have told any fables. My own
knowledge was derived almost entirely from books, and my pupils’
knowledge was practically limited to books. Occasionally I used to drag
an evening class onto Woodhouse Moor, at Leeds, to look at the actual
subjects of our discussions, but the latter generally withdrew
themselves from observation! I don’t know whether this kind of learning
was of much use; but it was on the same lines as most modern learning. I
think the study of books educates the constructive imagination—and
teaches people to figure to themselves things and situations they have
never seen. That is perhaps the chief use of it. The bulk of the pupils
at this time and during my later connection with the University
Extension were of the “young lady” class. These were the main support of
the movement, and they might be said to fall into three groups—namely,
the best scholars from girls’ schools, especially some very intelligent
ones from the Friends’ Schools; girls living at home and having nothing
particular to do; and elder women in the same plight. These formed the
great majority of the afternoon classes, and a considerable fraction of
the evening classes; the remainder being elderly clerks and a few
extra-intelligent young men, and a very small sprinkling of manual
workers.
Though for the most part incapable of any mathematical processes, I
found my students open to simple geometrical reasoning and consequently
able to follow a great deal of formal Astronomy. They took a real
interest in the work, which carried them on and which made the teaching
a pleasure—a great pleasure in comparison with my experience of the
tuition of “poll” men at Cambridge, whose dulness and distaste for their
work were crushing.
The modern Women’s Movement was just beginning to take shape at that
time. And there was at Leeds three women—all remarkable characters in
their way—who were very much in evidence in connection with the
University Extension. They were Miss Lucy Wilson, Miss Heaton, and Miss
Theodosia Marshall. Miss Wilson was Local Secretary to the University
Extension; Miss Heaton and Miss Marshall both aspired after the dignity
and influence of the position. As may be imagined there was no love lost
between the three, and the cabals and conflicts were unending and most
amusing. At one time there were two other lecturers from Cambridge
living in Leeds besides myself, namely H. S. Foxwell (of St. John’s,
Cambridge) and E. S. Thompson (of Christ’s). We used to meet every day
for dinner at each other’s lodgings and had no end of fun comparing
notes of local scandal. Coming from a distance and being in the position
in which we were, we were naturally the recipients of confidences from
all sides. The three ladies were constantly asking one or other of us
out to _tête-à-tête_ breakfasts, lunches, or afternoon teas—pouring out
their grievances against one another, and drawing us into deadly plots.
These we duly compared—not without hatching comical counterplots of our
own.
But Miss Wilson was not to be dislodged; she was firm in her seat.
Extremely good-looking and capable, and a good organizer, she yet had
two defects. Like many “advanced” women she was very _doctrinaire_; and
having swallowed a principle (like a poker) would remain absolutely
unbending and unyielding; and, in the second place, she hated men. On
one occasion she got up a “Women’s Rights” Meeting in Leeds. It was one
of the first of these meetings—certainly the first I had been to. It was
well attended—by women; Miss Wilson made a clever speech, full of keen
thrusts at the male portion of mankind. I dare say it was well deserved.
It was very slashing. There were a few of us “lower animals” huddled
near the door. At some final witticism there was a yell of applause. We
shut our eyes, assured that our last hour had come—but were ultimately
spared for another day.
On another occasion a rather amusing thing happened. One of the
lecturers—not either of those already mentioned, but one living at
Halifax though also lecturing in Leeds—got himself engaged to be
married. This in itself was perhaps an offence to Miss Wilson. But what
was worse—and certainly foolish of the young man—he went and fixed his
wedding (in the South of England) for a date in the middle of the term,
and then asked leave to miss a lecture in order to attend it! Of course
Miss Wilson refused. Then in a day or two he wrote again. The affair was
very pressing, he said, and he must go. Miss Wilson called her committee
together. They were inclined to yield to the over-hasty marriage
arrangement—foreseeing no doubt that it was inevitable. But Miss Wilson
was absolute. _She_ would not yield—a great principle was at stake.
“What if all lecturers,” etc. Of course her word prevailed, and a
refusal was sent. Then the inevitable happened. The fellow went off
without leave, only leaving _me_, poor unfortunate! to _read_ his
lecture to his gently smiling class. After that there was a scene
between me and Miss Wilson on which the curtain had better be drawn!
“What business had I to give my services and help to the rebellious
lecturer?” etc. Sufficient to say that we both survived it, and were
quite good friends afterwards.
On the whole it was an interesting time. It was at Leeds that I came to
know the three sisters Ford of Adel Grange, whose friendship I have
valued ever since; and it was at Leeds that I resumed acquaintance, to
deepen into intimacy, with C. G. Oates, of Meanwood Side—a companion of
Cambridge days. But my health was not of the best—a certain overstrain
and tension of the nerves, dating from Cambridge worries, and carried on
and increased by other causes, was continually pulling me down, and
rendering my life at times quite painful. It was at this time too that
my brother Charlie died in India (March 1876) quite suddenly, as I have
already explained, through a fall from his horse. He was just, as it
happened, on his way home on furlough after a long absence, and the
shock to my mother and those at home was very great. And even I—though I
had seen comparatively little of him—felt it a good deal.
In September 1876 my lecturing beat was changed from the Leeds district
to Nottingham, York and Hull. I lodged at Nottingham (with a fatuous
landlady) for that term and rather enjoyed the brighter air of
Nottingham and brighter spirits of the people, after Leeds. The Casey
family with their simple rather foreign habits (Mrs. Casey half-English,
half-German, Mr. Casey half-Irish, half-French) were my chief refuge
during that and later visits to Nottingham. To my Astronomy course, I
added Light and Sound. The limelight lantern became my companion, and
experiments—though they increased the labour of preparation—made the
lectures easier and more successful. By nature an abominably bad
speaker, I had at first found lecturing extremely difficult and a great
strain. My nervous disorganization increased the difficulty. Words would
not come. I suffered; and if possible my audiences suffered more! But by
degrees, by very slow degrees, I improved; practice and hard work over
my notes in preparation made a vocabulary more ready to my tongue; and
at last, by about the end of my seven years, I could get through an
hour’s talk without absolutely disgracing myself!
In this connection I may tell a story. One term (a little later on, I
think) I was lecturing at Barnsley. The place was a little local
theatre, unused at the time; but about the middle of the term it was
taken by a traveling company, and we had to move into another building.
The last evening of our occupation, some scenery was already up, and I,
having affixed my star diagrams to the shifts and side-scenes, was
lecturing from the stage when a belated stranger, a rough navvy or
collier—no doubt attracted by the theatrical bills already out—came
stumping down the middle gangway and ultimately dropped into a seat. He
remained quiet for a good time; and then—his patience fairly giving
out—he rose up and spoke. “Look ‘ere,” he said, “I’ve been sittin’ ‘ere
’alf an hour—and I haven’t understood a _word_ of what you’ve been
saying, _and I don’t believe you do neither_.”
I felt for the poor man—I deeply sympathized. He had come in no doubt on
the expectation of a theatrical treat—got in too without paying at the
door, which was _nuts_, as they say—and now—what had he come to?
There was a scene. Everybody jumped round on their seats. The local
Secretary—a tiny little man, a Frenchman, a dentist—approached the bold
stranger.
“You must sit down,” he said.
“_Shan’t_ sit down!”
“Den you must go out of de room.”
“_Shan’t_ go out of the room.”
“Den I shall have to _make_ you.”
The situation was too ludicrous—this tiny Gallic David and this huge and
beery Goliath! What might have happened we know not. Fortunately the
stranger took the better part, and said—
“I’m sure I don’t want to stay ’ere any longer”—and left us with
contempt to our Astronomy.
In the Spring term, January to April, 1877, I lodged at York—again an
improvement in climate. The lectures there were largely supported by
Unitarian, Quaker, and other dissenting groups flourishing in the very
shadow of the Cathedral. There were the Spences, the Smithsons, the
Wilkinsons, and the excellent ‘Mount’ school (‘Friends’) managed by Miss
Rous—whose girls were good pupils and great chums of mine.
In the end of April that year I went out to America. This was the
accomplishment of a long-slumbering intention. Ever since, in my rooms
at Cambridge, I had read that little blue book of Whitman, his writings
had been my companions, and had been working a revolution within me—at
first an intellectual revolution merely—but by degrees the wonderful
personality behind them, glowing through here and there, became more and
more real and living, and suffusing itself throughout rendered them
transparent to my understanding.
I began in fact to realize that, above all else, I had come in contact
with a great Man; not great thoughts, theories, views of life, but a
great Individuality, a great Life. I began to see and realize
correspondingly that ‘views’ and intellectual furniture generally were
not the important thing I had before imagined; that character and the
statement of Self, persistently, under diverse conditions were
all-important; that the body in Man (and this the Greek statuary had
helped me to realize), and the quality corresponding to body in all art
and behaviour, was radiant in meaning and beautiful beyond words; and
that the production of splendid men and women was the aim and only true
aim of State-policy. By day and night the presence of this Friend,
exhaled from his own book, had been with me—thus working, transforming,
drawing me wonderfully to seek him. America too, the United States,
began of necessity to compel my interest, and to form an additional
attraction across the Atlantic. I wrote to Whitman more than once, and
in 1876 obtained from him the complete (Centennial) Edition of his works
published in that year. Indeed I made every preparation to go out to the
States that summer, but circumstances rendered the voyage impossible.
This year, however, 1877, gave me the long-desired opportunity. I have
recorded in another place[7] the main outlines of my visit to Whitman on
this occasion, so on that subject I need not say anything further here,
except that Whitman as a concrete personality entirely filled out and
corroborated the conception of him which one had derived from reading
_Leaves of Grass_. The Rev. W. H. Channing, who was then acting as
Unitarian Minister at Leeds, insisted on giving me letters of
introduction to various friends of his on that side—Emerson, O. W.
Holmes, Russell Lowell, Charles Norton of Harvard and others—of which I
made use. Emerson was very charming and friendly. I stayed one night at
his house and dined with him and his wife and his daughter Ellen. His
failure of memory for names was considerable, and at times painful, and
there was the fixed look of age often in his eye; but otherwise he was
active in body and full of fun and enjoyment of intellectual life. His
eyes greyish-blue, the corners of his lips often drawn upward—altogether
a wonderful bird-like look about his face, enhanced by his way of
jerking his head forward—the look sometimes very straight and intense,
then followed by a charming placid smile like moonlight on the sea. His
domestic life seemed admirable. I took a turn in the garden with him in
the afternoon and a drive afterwards—saw the ‘Minute Man’ and the ‘old
Manse’ where his grandfather lived. Then in his library he talked much
about books and authors—handling his books in a caressing loving way—and
showed me his Upanishad translations, and his verses “If the red slayer
thinks he slays,” etc. He expressed his admiration for Carlyle and
Tennyson; his want of the same for Matthew Arnold; and his plain
contempt of Lewes’ Life of Goethe. His conversation generally seemed
very _literary_ in character and I could not get him to express any
views or ideas about America’s place and progress. When I spoke of Walt
Whitman he made an odd whinnying sound: “Well, I thought he had some
merit at one time: there was a good deal of promise in the first
edition—_burt_ he is a wayward fanciful man. I saw him in New York and
asked him to dine at my Hotel. He shouted for a ‘tin mug’ for his beer.
Then he had a _noisy_ fire engine society. And he took me there and was
like a boy over it, as if there had never been such a thing before.”
Emerson also took exception to Whitman’s metre.
O. W. Holmes did not please me so well—a good-natured little spiteful
creature, one might say, with shovel underlip and bright grey-blue eyes
under a low brow, a dapper active man of seventy—his vanity qualified by
geniality and humour. No ideas whatever about America. “As to Whitman,
well, Lord Napier said _He_ was the one thing that interested him in the
States. And then Lord Houghton at dinner one day came plump out in his
favour—but Willie Everett made such a fierce attack in reply that
conversation was silenced.” And he knew that Rossetti and others in
England thought much of him; but he could only say that in America he
was not known. Then he told the story about him and Lowell and
Longfellow sitting in judgment on Walt Whitman![8]
One of the men who interested me most in Boston neighborhood was
Professor Benjamin Pierce—Astronomical Professor at Harvard—a fine
capable man. We had a long talk on Astronomy, very helpful, and he gave
me a fine set of drawings published by the Observatory.
One day at New York I met Bryant the poet. It was at his editorial
office. Though eighty-four years old he was walking down there daily and
getting through much work. He was infirm and aged-looking of course, but
still wonderfully active; forehead narrowing above, and high like a sort
of promontory, straight brow, and eyes sunken but opening out on you
occasionally, straight nose inclining to a hook, and high bridge, white
hair like a thin fall of spray over neck, ears and mouth. A very
literary person—and manners extremely undemonstrative, even
unsympathetic.
But it was Whitman I came out to see, and he in interest and grandeur of
personality out-towered them all.
The other thing that fascinated me in America was Niagara. I stayed
there four days all alone, looking at the Falls all the time, _feeling_
their earth-shaking roar under my feet by day and in bed at night, and
watching that strange calm sentinel, that column of white spray which,
like a great spirit, exhales itself into the immense height of the sky
over the roaring gulf, and which, rainbow-tinted in the sun, or
glistening mysterious in the moon by night, seems to overlook the land
for far and wide around. It was the only thing I saw which seemed quite
to match Whitman in spirit.
For the rest the broad, free life—Washington, New York, Philadelphia,
Boston, Albany, and the rivers and steamboats—the rough freedom and ease
and independence—rougher and better a good deal than exists now—the
hearty welcomes and general friendliness were pleasant and inspiring.
On my way down the Hudson I stopped at Esopus and stayed with John
Burroughs a night or two. We took a long walk in the primitive woods
back of his house, while he talked of Whitman and bird-lore—a tough
reserved farmer-like exterior, some old root out of the woods one might
say—obdurate to wind and weather—but a keen quick observer close to
Nature and the human heart, and worth a good many Holmes and Lowells.
I was alone all this time, and felt lonely, among all these people; but
as it was the same in England there was nothing remarkable about it! I
returned in July to my life of lodgings and lectures; and in September
was put on another lecturing round—to Sheffield, Chesterfield, and part
of the time York and Barnsley.
This itinerant life in lodgings was a little dull and unfruitful it must
be confessed; the only relief from the importunities of
lodging-landladies being the futile hospitalities of commercial
villa-dom. Both experiences however had their comic side. At Nottingham
my landlady—a widow of course—used to aggravate me much, when I first
came downstairs of a morning, by jumping out upon me from a side-door
with “What’ll you have for dinner to-day?” This query, unannounced by
any morning greeting or salutation, and flung at me _every day_ even
before I had had breakfast, was a complete poser. If I suggested
anything, the suggestion was met by insuperable difficulties. _She_ made
no suggestions. And there we used to stand staring at each other in a
kind of dismay which at that early hour in the morning was sadly
demoralizing! On one occasion I wanted a box made—for some of my
books—and I asked this foolish widow to recommend me a joiner for the
purpose. She mentioned some man’s name; and I, to make sure, queried:
“Is he a good workman? would he make a strong and serviceable article?”
“He made my husband’s coffin, Sir,” she replied with an air of triumph!
And once more I was completely silenced—for I really could not ask
whether it had lasted well or otherwise.
My first experiences of lodging in Sheffield were about equally bad. I
took a lodging at the top end of Glossop Road. It was a good part of the
town; but the weather was awful. For three successive days it rained
blacks mingled with water! The sky was dark. Lamps had to be lighted
indoors. Then my lodging-place people were most doleful—three timid
little old maids, like bunnie-rabbits. No. 1, the youngest and most
presentable, waited on me; No. 3 I never saw, she lived in the kitchen
below; No. 2 haunted in the passage or on the stairs half-way between.
No. 1 would come in and ask me what I would have for dinner. “Chop and
potatoes,” I would say. Then she would put her head out of the door and
say to the one in the passage “The gentleman says he will have chop and
potatoes.” Then I could hear the one in the passage say to No. 3 in the
kitchen “The gentleman says he will have chop and potatoes.” Then a sort
of echo came up from below in a deep tone “Chop and potatoes.” Then No.
1 would begin again with the second course. “Rice pudding.” “The
gentleman says he will have rice pudding.” And so it went on, also for
three days, everything that I said was circulated round the house and
echoed back again from below! It was too much. If this was Sheffield I
could stand it no longer—and I fled away and took rooms at
Chesterfield—dullest alas! of earthly places, but with a rather better
climate.
Perhaps I rather liked the quietude of Chesterfield—where it was hardly
necessary to know anybody. There were good country walks out towards the
moors, and once or twice I got as far as Barlow, half-way to
Millthorpe—of which place, needless to say, I had then never heard. I
penetrated, during my stay in Chesterfield, into the cottage of a
plasterer, a dear old man, S. Ashmore, and became familiar in his
household—the only permanent alliance I made in Chesterfield.
The next winter—1878–9—I really did manage to settle in Sheffield, in
Holland Terrace, Highfields—three old maids again for landladies!—but
rather better conditions generally. I lectured at Nottingham and Hull
and Chesterfield, so had a good deal of traveling, and added a new
course of lectures—“Pioneers of Science”—which was popular on account of
its more discursive character: a brief history of scientific progress
illustrated by biographies of the great men. The courses on “Sound” and
“Light” went on as well; also that on “Astronomy”—which last was a
popular subject in Sheffield. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico._ The evening
students were very enthusiastic. Many of them bought telescopes, and we
had outdoor meetings at night, with all sorts of optical gear, for the
purpose of observing the heavenly bodies. One elderly enthusiast was
quite sure he had discovered a comet, and was not satisfied till he had
written to Greenwich Observatory, and even then (seeing that they could
not find it) he was not satisfied. The Sheffield students too formed a
Students’ Association, and discussed subjects among themselves,
organized excursions, and hunted up fresh pupils—all very good. From the
first I was taken with the Sheffield people. Rough in the extreme,
twenty or thirty years in date behind other towns, and very uneducated,
there was yet a heartiness about them, not without shrewdness, which
attracted me. I felt more inclined to take root here than in any of the
Northern towns where I had been.
But during all this lecturing period my health had been bad, and getting
worse instead of better; and now I was approaching a crisis in regard to
it. The state of my nerves was awful; they were really in a quite
shattered condition. My eyes, which even in Cambridge days had been
weak, kept getting worse. There was no disease or defect—I had been to
three first-rate oculists and they all agreed about that. It was simply
extreme sensitiveness—probably the optic nerve itself. A strong light
from a lamp or candle was quite painful. I could hardly read more than
an hour a day—certainly not two hours. It caused a pain in the nerve,
which seemed to mount to and disorganize the brain. I was conscious that
the refusal of my eyes to read was in all probability a kindly
indication that I would be much better without reading—but this would
mean giving up the lectures—so here I was again!
As long as the lectures went on I was in perpetual suffering with my
eyes, and anxiety—sometimes being really unable to prepare the work
before me. Then on this came the strain of lecturing—traveling to a
place with a great box of apparatus, arriving there three or four hours
before the time of the meeting, getting all one’s apparatus and
experiments ready (in some wretched schoolroom with _no_ assistance),
having often in those days to make my oxygen gas myself for the lantern;
to rush out when all was ready for a cup of tea, to return in time to
take an hour’s preliminary _class_, and then to give the lecture; all
this was terribly exhausting. But it by no means ended there. After the
lecture some local manufacturer and patron would carry one off to his
residence for the night, there to meet a few friends at supper, and to
talk and be talked to till the small hours of the morning. When one got
to bed—a vibrating mass of nerves—sleep was out of the question. There
were all the pupils and their faces, and their needs and their
personalities; there were the tiresome patrons and committee people, in
endless dance on my brain. Often and often I never slept a wink—only to
get up the next day and go through a similar round. Often and often when
I got back to my lodgings I had to lie on my back on the sofa for
hours—not even then to sleep—but simply to rest and soothe the
nerve-pain throughout my body. I felt my life was becoming wrecked and I
remember at last swearing a great oath to myself that somehow or other I
would get out of it and find my health again.
And behind it all there was that other need—which I have already
mentioned more than once—that of my affectional nature, that hunger
which had indeed hunted me down since I was a child. I can hardly bear
even now to think of my early life, and of the idiotic social reserve
and Britannic pretence which prevailed over all that period, and still
indeed to a large extent prevails—especially among the so-called
well-to-do classes of this country—the denial and systematic ignoring of
the obvious facts of the heart and of sex, and the consequent desolation
and nerve-ruin of thousands and thousands of women, and even of a
considerable number of men. I came home in the summer to Brighton to
find my sisters, for the most part unmarried, wearing out their lives
and their affectional capacities with nothing to do, and nothing to care
for: a little music, a little painting, a walk up and down the
Promenade; but the primal needs of life unspoken and unallowed;
suffering (as one can now see all this commercial age has been doomed to
suffer) from a state of society which has set up gold and gain in the
high place of the human heart, and to make more room for these has
disowned and dishonoured love. It is curious—and interesting in its
queer way—to think that almost the central figure of the drawing-room in
that later Victorian age (and one may see it illustrated in the pages of
_Punch_ of that period) was a young or middle-aged woman lying supine on
a couch—while round her, amiably conveying or consuming tea and coffee,
stood a group of quasi-artistic or intellectual men. The conversation
ranged, of course, over artistic and literary topics, and the lady did
her best to rise to it; but the effort probably did her no good. For the
real trouble lay far away. It was of the nature of _hysteria_—and its
meaning is best understood by considering the derivation of that word. I
had two sisters—who each of them for some twenty years led that supine,
and one may say tragic, life; so I had good occasion—beside what may
have lain within my own experience—to understand it pretty thoroughly.
Certainly the disparity of the sexes and the absolute non-recognition of
sexual needs—non-recognition either in life or in thought—weighed
terribly hard upon the women of that period.[9]
Another cause, increasing the hardship of disparity, was the growing
disinclination of men (of the upper classes) to get married. Partly this
arose, no doubt, from their growing realization of the perils and
complications of matrimony; but partly also it arose from an increase in
the number of men of what may be called an intermediate type, whose
temperament did not lead them very decisively in the direction of
marriage—or even led them away from it; men who did not feel the romance
in that direction which alone can make marriage attractive, and perhaps
justifiable. There have of course been, in all ages, thousands and
thousands of women who have not felt that particular sort of romance and
attraction towards men, but only to their own kind; and in all ages
there have been thousands and thousands of men similarly constituted in
the reverse way; but they have been, by the majority, little understood
and recognized. Now however it is coming to be seen that they also—both
classes—have their part to play in the world.
For my part I have always had excellent and enduring alliances among
women, and life would indeed be sadly wanting and impoverished without
their friendship and society; but since the days when I sat a boy of
nine or ten under the table, apparently playing with my marbles, while
my elder sisters and their girl friends were talking freely and
unconsciously with each other about some ball of the night before, and
their partners in the dances, and their conversations—the workings of
the feminine mind and nature have always been perfectly open and clear
to me. By a sort of intuition (partly no doubt inborn) I never had any
difficulty in following these workings. They enshrined no mystery for
me. This fact has always caused me to find women’s society interesting;
but naturally it did not conduce to headlong adorations and marriage!
The romance of my life went elsewhere.
Whether such a state of affairs may be desirable or undesirable, whether
it may indicate a high moral nature or a low moral nature, and so forth,
are questions which (in a land where _everything_ is either moral or
immoral) are sure to be asked. But in a sense they are quite beside the
mark. They do not alter the fact; and that has always been the same
since my earliest days.[10] But it will be evident enough—to any one who
takes the trouble to think what these things mean—that to a person of my
emotional nature the conditions which brought about—to a comparatively
late age—the absence of marriage, or its equivalent, were a fruitful
source of trouble and nervous prostration. I realized in my own person
some of the sufferings which are endured by an immense number of modern
women, especially of the well-to-do classes, as well as by that large
class of men of whom I have just spoken, and to whom the name of
Uranians is often given.
Certainly my isolation was in a sense my own fault—due partly to reserve
and partly to ignorance. When at a later time I broke through this
double veil, I soon discovered that others of like temperament to myself
were abundant in all directions, and to be found in every class of
society; and I need not say that from that time forward life was changed
for me. I found sympathy, understanding, love, in a hundred unexpected
forms, and my world of the heart became as rich in that which it needed
as before it had seemed fruitless and barren.
The Uranian temperament in Man closely resembles the normal temperament
of Women in this respect, that in both Love—in some form or other—is the
main object of life. In the normal Man, ambition, moneymaking, business,
adventure, etc., play their part—love is as a rule a secondary matter.
The majority of men (for whom the physical side of sex, if needed, is
easily accessible) do not for a moment realize the griefs endured by
thousands of girls and women—in the drying up of the well-springs of
affection as well as in the crucifixion of their physical needs. But as
these sufferings of women, of one kind or another, have been the great
inspiring cause and impetus of the Women’s Movement—a movement which is
already having a great influence in the reorganization of society; so I
do not practically doubt that the similar sufferings of the Uranian
class of men are destined in their turn to lead to another wide-reaching
social organization and forward movement in the direction of Art and
Human Compassion.
V
BRADWAY AND _TOWARDS DEMOCRACY_
Everything, one sometimes thinks, has its Compensation. The soul of man
is so vast, so endless, that no matter on what side or sides it be
hemmed in or thwarted, it will find its outlet in some fresh
direction—all the more powerfully perhaps for its temporary and local
obstruction. This is true of bodies of people, and it is true also of
individuals.
The sufferings of these years, the emotional distress and tension which
I had experienced, poured themselves out in poetical effusions,
outbursts, ejaculations—I know not what to call them. Sometimes lying
full length in the train coming home at midnight from some lecture
engagement, hardly able to move; sometimes in the morning with a sense
of restoration, flying over the fields in the sunlight; sometimes in my
little lodging; sometimes on a long country walk—I wrote just what the
necessity of my feelings compelled—formless scraps, cries, prophetic
assurances—in no available metre, or shape, just as they came. In no
shape that they could be given to the world; but they were a relief to
me, and a consolation.
Afterwards, when I found as it were the keynote which harmonized these
disjointed utterances, I made use of them; and they were mostly embodied
and embedded and adapted into the structure of _Towards Democracy_.
I say my nerves had come to such a pass of dislocation, that I was
nearly breaking down; and I had sworn a great oath to myself to mend
matters somehow. The year 1879 was in many ways the dim dawn or
beginning of a new life to me.
Early in that year I made my first valid essays in the direction of a
reform in diet. I may have tentatively experimented in vegetarianism
before that, but ineffectually and in ignorance. Once I remember boldly
dining off nothing but a vegetable marrow. Of course, disastrous defeat
and dismay immediately followed! Practically I had always lived along
the usual régime, of plentiful meat, washed down with beer or wine; and
probably the sick headaches and nervous tension of my early years were
to a considerable extent due to this excess of stimulation. Now, the
vegetarian ideal, for many reasons, began to commend itself to me; and
though I did not abandon meat at once, I gradually pushed along this
line—slowly as my way is, but steadily—so that after four or five years,
that is, by ’83 or ’84, I practically was able to dispense with meat
(and alcoholics) altogether—and did so dispense, often for months at a
time.
A word here about my vegetarian practice generally. I find now [1899]
that though I have lived, as said, for months at a time without meat or
fish of _any kind_, and have enjoyed in so doing infinitely better
health than ever before—and though I feel as if I could continue in this
diet indefinitely and much prefer it—I have yet never made any absolute
rule against flesh-eating, and have as a matter of fact eaten a very
little every now and then—just, as it were, to see how it tasted, or to
avoid giving trouble in Philistine households, and so forth. Having a
strong (perhaps a too strong) objection to _principles_ generally, I
have disliked the idea of making any absolute rule in the matter.
Briefly I find the vegetarian diet—fruit and grains and vegetables,
nuts, eggs, and milk—pleasant, clean, healthful in every way, and
grateful to one’s sense of decency and humanity. It is a real pleasure
to live among those who adopt it. But having spent my time for the most
part embedded among folk who favour meat, I have not always kept to my
own choice, but have given in at times to a supposed convenience or
necessity. Perhaps I should have done better, for myself and others, if
I had been more resolute, but such are the facts.
In the year 1879 also the absolute necessity for a more open-air life
began to make itself felt. I had always lived in towns, and though fond
of the country I looked on the town as my natural home. Now I began to
long for a country home. I took long walks round Sheffield, and bitterly
regretted having to come _back_ in the evening, instead of staying
permanently outside. I began to revolve how a change might be possible.
Manual work, too, in contradistinction to the mere ‘exercise’ (riding or
cricket or athletics) which takes the place of work among the well-to-do
classes, began to have a fascination for me. I think it was in this
summer [1879] that being at Brighton, I worked for a couple of months in
a joiner’s shop, regularly, from 6.30 to 8.30 every morning; I used to
make panel doors, and got a good experience, so far, of the trade.
Also as I continued to make Sheffield the headquarters of my lectures, I
was taking definite root there, and reaching down partly through my
classes, partly through explorations of my own, into the actual society
of the manual workers; and beginning to knit up alliances more
satisfactory to me than any I had before known. Railway men, porters,
clerks, signalmen, ironworkers, coach-builders, Sheffield cutlers, and
others came within my ken, and from the first I got on excellently and
felt fully at home with them—and I believe, in most cases, they with me.
I felt I had come into, or at least in sight of, the world to which I
belonged, and to my natural _habitat_.
It was about this time that I made the acquaintance of a man who for
some years after was a good deal associated with me—Albert Fearnehough.
He came up one evening after a lecture, and gave me his name (I remember
thinking how strange it was) and address; and asked me if I would come
and see him some time. Later, meeting me in the street, he renewed the
request, telling me that his friend who came with him to the lectures
was a young farmer who was well up in ‘book-learning’ (which he himself
was not)—that they both lived in the country, he in a cottage on the
farm of which Fox, his friend, was owner; and that they would both
gladly entertain me any time that I cared for a country walk. Here was
exactly my opportunity. I accepted the invitation, and not long
afterwards went to visit the two friends at the little hamlet of
Bradway, four or five miles from Sheffield, on the charming outskirts of
Beauchief Abbey.
[Illustration:
ALBERT FEARNEHOUGH AND “BRUNO.”
]
Fearnehough was a scythe-maker, a riveter, a muscular, powerful man of
about my age, quite ‘uneducated’ in the ordinary sense (since indeed at
the age of nine he had pushed a handcart about the streets of Sheffield)
but well-grown and finely built, with a good practical capacity though
slow brain, and something of the latent fire and indomitableness of the
iron-worker—a man whose ideal was the rude life of the backwoods, and
who hated the shams of commercialism. Indeed he was always getting into
coils with his employers because he would not scamp and hurry over his
work, as occasion demanded; and with his workmates because he would not
countenance their doing so. In many ways he was delightful to me, as the
one ‘powerful uneducated’ and natural person I had as yet, in all my
life, met with. Moreover there was a touch of pathos in his inarticulate
ways and in his own sense of inability to compete with the cheapjack
commercialism of the day. He lived in a tiny little cottage, on Fox’s
farm as I have said, with his wife, a good patient worker, and two
children. And many a Saturday or Sunday afternoon I came up there and
had tea with them, or roamed about the fields.
Charles Fox was a very singular character—a bachelor, with a good brain,
curiously fond of mathematics in his boyhood, quite an original thinker
in his way—yet to look at, a mere clodhopping farmer with inexpressive
face, humped shoulders, and beetle-like gait. He was not ill-looking,
but decidedly quaint, with his florid, shaven face, and only the sharp
gleam of his eye to show you his shrewdness. Most of the country-folk
thought him a little touched in the head, for his odd Socratic humour;
and never fathomed in the least his real ability. He lived on the farm
left him by his father, with an unmarried cousin of his, Miss Fox, for
housekeeper, and with _her_ son Teddie for his farm-lad and helper; and
with a brother, Owen, who certainly _was_ weak in the head and feeble,
and of no practical use in the establishment. Between Teddie and his
uncle quite an affection existed; but of the household, and especially
of Charles Fox I have given some account in a separate paper, under the
title of _Martin Turner_[11]; and what I have there said I need not
repeat.
My acquaintance with these two men had its inevitable effect on me. I
saw at last my way of escape out of that dingy wilderness, that _selva
oscura_, in which I had wandered lost, from childhood even down to the
very middle of life’s journey. They represented at any rate for me a
deliverance from the idiotic fatuous life I had been submerged in all my
boyhood at Brighton, and more or less ever since. They represented, if
nothing more, a life close to Nature and actual materials, shrewd,
strong, manly, independent, not the least polite or proper, thoroughly
human and kindly, and spent for the most part in the fields and under
the open sky.
My visits to little Bradway and the farm became more and more frequent.
I was accepted cordially by both households. I joined in the farm work,
and spent long evenings with the boy and his uncle in the cowhouse or
with the two families round their kitchen fire—quaint scenes of fun and
merriment which are graven on my mind, but which it would take too long
to recount here. I soon formed a plan of coming to live if possible with
these good people, and carrying on my lectures even from this distance
out in the country.
It took a little time to arrange anything, but after some months it was
agreed that Fearnehough should move into another cottage a little
distance off (since the one he occupied was so small) and that I should
lodge with him for a time. Accordingly (in May 1880) he migrated with
his family to the neighboring parish of Totley, and I joined them there;
but in March of the following year, the adjacent cottage to the old one
on Fox’s land having become vacant, and Fox having thrown the two into
one, we returned to Bradway and resumed our old relations on the farm.
I had managed to carry on my lectures from Totley—indeed I had added a
new course, on the “History of Music,” and one that interested me much,
to my former ones; but it was certainly inconvenient, carrying on the
work from such a distance in the country; and new interests and forces
were growing within me.
The life, especially since our return to Bradway, was so different from
anything to which I had before been accustomed, it was so congenial in
many respects, so native, so unrestrained, it seemed to liberate the
pent-up emotionality of years. All the feelings which had sought, in
suffering and in distress, their stifled expression within me during the
last seven or eight years, gathered themselves together to a new and
more joyous utterance. My physical health was every day becoming better.
There was a new beauty over the world. Everywhere I paused, in the lanes
or the fields, or on my way to or from the station, to catch some magic
sound, some intimation of a perpetual freedom and gladness such as earth
and its inhabitants (it seemed to me) had hardly yet dreamed of. I
remember that, all that time, I was haunted by an image, a vision within
me, of something like the bulb and bud, with short green blades, of a
huge hyacinth just appearing above the ground. I knew that it
represented vigour and abounding life. But now I seem to see that, in
the strange emblematic way in which the soul sometimes speaks, this
image may have been a sign of the fact that my life had really at last
taken root, and was beginning rapidly to grow.
Another thing happened about this time. On the 25th January 1881 my
mother died. Her death affected me profoundly. Though there had been (as
I have explained elsewhere) so little in the way of spoken confidences
between us, we were united by a strong invisible tie. For months, even
years, after her death, I seemed to feel her, even see her, close to
me—always figuring as a semi-luminous presence, very real, but faint in
outline, larger than mortal. It was an inexpressibly tender and
consoling relation. Gradually, in the course of years, the presence, or
the sense of it, faded away, becoming less and less objective, into the
background of my mind, where it remains now, more as it were an actual
part of myself than it was then.
Her death at this moment exercised perhaps a great etherealizing
influence on my mind, exhaling the great mass of feelings, intuitions,
conceptions, and views of life and the world which had formed within
me, into another sphere. The _Bhagavat Gita_ about the same time
falling into my hands gave me a keynote. And all at once I found
myself in touch with a mood of exaltation and inspiration—a kind of
super-consciousness—which passed all that I had experienced before,
and which immediately harmonized all these other feelings, giving to
them their place, their meaning and their outlet in expression.
And so it was that _Towards Democracy_ came to birth. I was in fact
completely taken captive by this new growth within me, and could hardly
finish my course of lectures for the preoccupation. Already I was
speculating how I could cut myself free. No sooner were the lectures
over (about the end of April 1881) than I began writing _Towards
Democracy_. It seemed all ready there. I never hesitated for a moment.
Day by day it came along from point to point. I did not hurry: I
expressed everything with slow care and to my best; I utilized former
material which I had by me; but the one illuminating mood remained and
everything fell into place under it; and rarely did I find it necessary
to remodel, or rearrange to any great extent, anything that I had once
written.
I soon saw that the whole utterance would take a long time. I decided to
give up my lecturing work so as to be quite unhampered. And I did so.
What with my savings from Cambridge days, and a small income of fifty or
sixty pounds a year springing from them, I knew I could live well enough
for a few years—and so I felt supremely happy. It became necessary also
to have some place in which to sit many hours a day writing—and so I
knocked together a kind of wooden sentinel-box, placed it in a quiet
corner of the garden, overlooking far fields, and thither resorted all
through the summer, and into the autumn, and far away through the
winter.
What sweet times were those! all the summer to the hum of the bees in
the leafage, the robins and chaffinches hopping around, an occasional
large bird flying by, the men away at work in the fields, the consuming
pressure of the work within me, the wonderment how it would turn out;
the days there in the rain, or in the snow; nights sometimes, with
moonlight or a little lamp to write by; far far away from anything
polite or respectable, or any sign or symbol of my hated old life. Then
the afternoons at work with my friends in the fields, hoeing and
singling turnips or getting potatoes, or down in Sheffield on into the
evenings with new companions among new modes of life and work—everything
turning and shaping itself into material for my poem. There was a sense
to me of inevitableness in it all, and of being borne along, which gave
me good courage, notwithstanding occasional natural doubts; and a sense
too of unspeakable relief and deliverance, after all those long years of
gestation, as of a woman with her child.
In about a year, that is, by early in 1882, _Towards Democracy_—that is
the long first poem which bears that name—was completed except for some
technical revisions. The child, conceived and carried in pain and
anguish, was at last brought into the world.
Some further details with regard to the genesis of _Towards Democracy_
were given in a short paper in the _Labour Prophet_ for May 1894, and
are now reprinted as a Note to the editions of _Towards Democracy_; and
the history of its publication is given in Chapter XI below.
[Illustration:
E. C. (1887), AGE 43.
]
VI
MANUAL WORK AND MARKET-GARDENING
In April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land
of dreams into a very different sphere. It became necessary for me to
return home, to Brighton, and handle, as executor, a considerable
estate—divisible among ten children. The investments were chiefly in
American securities—and they gave a lot of trouble! I stayed at Brighton
four or five months, dealing with solicitors, brokers, officials,
relatives—selling, negotiating, dividing, transferring without end—doing
the work of a lawyer’s clerk in fact. Indeed our solicitor remarked one
day, perhaps rather plaintively, that it was lucky I had had the time to
spare, as it had saved the family no doubt some hundreds of pounds! Of
course the work was not really finished for three or four years, but the
thick of it was got through that summer, and after that I returned to my
beloved Bradway.
My forced stay at Brighton brought out into strong relief the contrast
between the old life and the new. I felt more than ever the futility and
irksomeness of the old order. I missed my companions of the North, I
grieved more than ever over the wasted lives around me in the South—but
it was with a new sense, the knowledge that there was something better.
I employed my spare time in writing shorter pieces in the style of
_Towards Democracy_ and revising what I had already written, using my
new surroundings again as a point of view under the great light of my
main inspiration. My unmarried sisters remained on for a few years at
Brighton after my father’s death, keeping the house together much as of
old. Then they removed to London, and at last (in 1886) the old house
and furniture were sold and its doors closed on the family who had
occupied it for forty years.
At the end of the summer of which I am speaking—about September 1882—I
returned to my home at Bradway. My father’s death had left me (more or
less prospectively) possessor of about £6,000—which with my little
savings of earlier years, seemed quite a large fortune—too large
indeed—it rather weighed on my mind![12] My lectures were over and done
with; some years of literary work were before me, but obviously not of a
paying sort, either in the way of wages or fame. The question was What
should I do?
I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I
really don’t know exactly why I didn’t. But the fancy for manual work
had seized me, and for some reason or other, nothing but a life of that
kind would satisfy me—only it must be in the open air. No sooner had my
father died than I made up my mind to buy a piece of land and work on it
as a market-gardener.
No doubt it was a healthy instinct. The motive was in the main a purely
personal one. I felt (and rightly) the need of physical work, of
open-air life and labour—something primitive to restore my overworn
constitution. I felt the need directly and instinctively, not as a thing
argued out and intellectually concluded. I have sometimes been credited
with making this move onto the land in pursuance of some great theory or
scheme of social salvation! But it was not so. There was no idea of this
kind in it, or if there was, it was of a very secondary character. My
thought was my own need. But I may have had some feeling that a life of
this kind was more honest than the alternative, and I think also that I
felt it would bring me more decisively into touch with the great body of
the people (a strong motive at the time)—and so far I believe these two
motives had some secondary play.
At any rate I never felt much doubt about the move. I persuaded
Fearnehough, after a little time, to join me if I should settle
anywhere; and then I set looking out for a bit of land. But that was not
easy to find. At intervals for many months I scoured the country in the
neighborhood of Sheffield, but could find nothing there except the small
holding at Millthorpe, which though good land and in a lovely situation,
with water, etc., seemed too far from town to be available for market
purposes. Then I went down into Worcestershire; but in truth the
difficulty of finding a small freehold anywhere in England—especially
with good soil and near a market—is great; and being no more successful
in Worcestershire I returned to Sheffield. Ultimately and being (as
usual in such things) more compelled by necessity than of my own choice,
I fell back on the seven acres at Millthorpe which I now occupy. Of
course I could not help rejoicing in the lovely necessity of living in
such a place—the charming brook running at the foot of my three fields,
the beautiful wooded valley, and the close proximity, a mile or so off,
of the open moors. But I had some misgiving, not only about the market
side of the question, but about living so completely gulfed in the
country—eight or nine miles from a town centre—for I had never tried
anything of the kind before.
I spent the winter of ’82 and ’83 mostly at Bradway, continuing my
writing and other life there, in the intervals of the search for land.
About Easter ’83 I came to terms for the purchase of the three fields at
Millthorpe, and soon after that I set to house-building. The house was
finished by the end of the summer, and in October ’83 the Fearnehoughs
and I moved in. About the same time I published through John Heywood of
Manchester, my first poem _Towards Democracy_.
It was a small thin volume of 110 pages, meant for the pocket. It was
sent out to the Press, but excited very little comment, except as the
ravings of some anonymous author. Yet after a time, faithful to its
charge, it came back to me, bringing dear and true friends from all
sorts of unlikely places and distant parts of the world; and has not
ceased to do so since. Not long after its publication Havelock Ellis
picked it up on a second-hand bookstall in London, and wrote to me; and
he again brought me into communication with Olive Schreiner, whose
_African Farm_ was then beginning to attract attention.
That winter, of ’83–’84, was spent in hard work, getting the house and
the yard and out-buildings in order, laying out the garden ground,
digging up the grass-land, planting fruit and other trees, etc. And so
were the summers and winters following, for four or five years.
That strange œstrum of hard manual work, and digging down to the very
roots of things, spurred me on. I hardly know how to account for it. It
possessed me. Every habit, every custom or practice of daily
life—house-arrangement, diet, dress, medicine, etc., was overhauled and
rigorously scrutinized. I worked for hours and for whole days together
out in the open field, or garden, or digging drains with pick and
shovel, or carting along the roads; going into Chesterfield and loading
and fetching manure, or to the coalpit for coal, grooming and bedding
down the horse, or getting off to market at 6 a.m. with vegetables and
fruit, and standing in the market behind a stall till 1 or 2 p.m.; I was
not satisfied but I must do everything that was necessary to be done,
myself.
It was a considerable strain. With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to
be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often
irksome. Yet a consuming passion drove me on—a desire to know, to do
something real, an evil conscience perhaps of the past unreality of my
existence. I was compelled to eat it all out.
I carried on, for those first three or four years, the superintendence
(of course with the help of my friend and his wife) of house and garden,
with their manifold points of detail. I went on with my writing—adding
essays on social subjects (“England’s Ideal” and others) to my poems;
and I started lecturing on similar topics.
It was too much. I remember that period as a time of great strain. I
felt indeed the isolation of the country—gulfed as I was among a
perfectly illiterate unprogressive country population (much more so than
at Bradway), with my friend and his family, who though good and true
people were also quite limited to material interests. There was no one
to whom I could talk, who could give me any help. My Sheffield friends
were far away, only to be seen once a week or so, and (in the early
years at any rate) visitors at Millthorpe were rare. It was too much,
and my health suffered a little; and yet (as I have said) I was driven
to it. It is strange how unaccounted impulses and instincts underlie the
evolution of one’s life. Certainly during those years I (in some ways
the most unlikely person to do so) bottomed out the whole of the
material and mechanical ways of life—from the details of household life
to the processes of agriculture and of a great number of other trades
and industries. It was a training such as no university could give. And
if my health suffered now and then from the strain, _on the whole_ it
improved immensely during this period; so that after five or six years I
threw off completely my nerve troubles, and became stronger than I had
ever been before in my life.
Two other things happened in 1883 besides my migration to Millthorpe,
and publication of _Towards Democracy_—namely, my first acquaintance
with the Socialist movement, and my reading of Thoreau’s _Walden_.
Of course, in a vague form, my ideas had been taking a socialistic shape
for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline—that
definition which is so necessary for all action. That outline as regards
the industrial situation was given me by reading Hyndman’s _England for
All_. However open to criticism the Marxian theory of surplus-value may
be (and _every_ theory must ultimately succumb to criticism), it
certainly fulfilled a want for the time by giving a definite text for
the social argument. The instant I read that chapter in _England for
All_—the mass of floating impressions, sentiments, ideals, etc., in my
mind fell into shape—and I had a clear line of social reconstruction
before me.
I gave my first semi-socialistic lecture (though I think this was before
reading the above book)—on “Co-operative Production”—in that year; and
later on in the same year I one evening looked in at a committee meeting
of the Social Democratic Federation in Westminster Bridge Road. It was
in the basement of one of those big buildings facing the Houses of
Parliament that I found a group of conspirators sitting. There was
Hyndman, occupying the chair, and with him round the table, William
Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion, J. L. Joynes, Herbert Burrows (I
think) and others. After that, though I did not actually join the
S.D.F., I kept in touch with them, and was able at a later time to
render material help in the establishment of _Justice_ as their organ.
From that time forward I worked definitely along the Socialist line:
with a drift, as was natural, towards Anarchism. I do not know that at
any time I looked upon the Socialist programme or doctrines as final,
and it is certain that I never anticipated a cast-iron regulation of
industry, but I saw that the current Socialism afforded an excellent
text for an attack upon the existing competitive system, and a good
means of rousing the slumbering consciences—especially of the rich; and
in that view I have worked for it and the Anarchist ideal consistently.
The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau’s
_Walden_. Just about the very day that I got into my new house and onto
my plot of land—the realization of the plotting and scheming of some
years—that book fell into my hands, which took the bottom completely out
of my little bucket! Having just committed myself to all the
exasperations of carrying on a house and market-garden and the petty but
innumerable bothers of ‘trade,’ the charming ideal of a simplification
of life below the level of all such things was opened out before me—and
for the time I felt almost paralyzed.
Whatever the practical value of the Walden experiment may be, there is
no question that the book is one of the most vital and pithy ever
written. Its ideal of life spent with Nature on the very ground-plane of
simplicity (though probably only permanently realizable by a highly
cultured humanity, having access to all the results of art and science,
as Thoreau had at Concord) has yet shattered the conventional views of
thousands of people. It helped, I must confess, to make me uncomfortable
for some years. I felt that I had aimed at a natural life and completely
failed—that I might somehow have escaped from this blessed civilization
altogether—and now I was tied up worse than ever, on its commercial
side.
What sort of line my life would have taken if Thoreau had come to me a
year earlier, I cannot tell. It is certain that there would have been a
considerable difference. Perhaps it is lucky I was not drifted away by
him and stranded, too far from the currents of ordinary life. At any
rate I do not regret now that things happened as they did. Instead of
escaping into solitude and the wilds of nature—which would have
satisfied one side—but perhaps not the most persistent—of my character,
I was tied to the traffic of ordinary life, and thrown inevitably into
touch with all sorts of people.
Early in 1883, as I have said, I gave my first lecture on social
questions, and from that time forward I spoke on these subjects. In the
summer of ’84 I went again to the United States, my chief object again
being to see Whitman—though I had also friends to visit. I crossed the
Atlantic as a steerage passenger—in a big Inman boat, the _City of
Berlin_—with seven or eight hundred other steerage passengers. It was a
great experience. I have described it in my poem “On an Atlantic
Steamship.” The fact of my venturing it shows the determination with
which I was working down into a knowledge of the life of the people.
Besides, I had crossed as a _saloon_ passenger before, and I felt that
_that_ was intolerable! The experience was not nearly so rude as I had
expected. We had good weather, which of course is everything, and were
on deck all day; the nationalities, Swedes, German, Irish, English,
etc., were kept apart from each other below; I secured a cabin with a
very decent set of young English fellows, and we got on first-rate. The
food was quite clean and good. So well satisfied was I that I actually
_returned_ (from Quebec) in the steerage section!
I spent three or four days in Philadelphia and saw Whitman each day (of
which I have given an account elsewhere[13]); and then went on to
Massachusetts. The visit to Whitman did not help me so much as the first
time. He was very friendly; he gave me introductions to Dr. Bucke in
Canada, and to W. Sloane Kennedy, and was generally kind; but his
self-centredness (arising no doubt largely from physical causes) had
increased, and seemed difficult to overcome.
In Massachusetts I stayed with my friends the Rileys, who had at one
time been on St. George’s farm (Ruskin’s) near Sheffield. They were now
on a farm near Townsend Centre, and I remained with them about three
weeks, joining in the life, doing a bit on the farm with them, and
seeing something of the neighbours. George Riley, the son, and I were
chums, and spent some of the time walking together—on one occasion a two
days ‘out’ to Wachusett, mountain and lake, a charming neighborhood.
During the time I also visited Sloane Kennedy, at Belmont, and together
we went to Walden pond, bathed in it, and added a stone to Thoreau’s
cairn. Thence to Pennsylvania, beyond Pittsburg, to stay with Mrs. Hardy
and her three daughters—also people I had known in Sheffield—who
together were ‘running’ a big farm and making it pay well, an excellent
example of female management. Thence, after a pleasant stay of four or
five days, across Lake Erie to Toronto and so to London, to see Dr.
Bucke. Dr. Bucke was acting as head and superintendent of a large Asylum
for Insane folk—over a thousand patients—which he managed excellently. I
found him very interesting. We had long talks about Whitman; he showed
me his Whitman books, pictures, etc., and then after another four or
five days I got the steamer at Toronto, and went down the St. Lawrence
to Quebec. The Lake itself, the passages of the thousand islands and of
the successive rapids, were a great delight. I had only an hour or two
at Quebec, unfortunately—not time to see much of the town; and then I
embarked on the _Parisian_ for home. Here again the lower reaches of
this magnificent river, the coast of Gaspé, and of Labrador, the
hundreds of icebergs we saw that day, becalmed in a glassy blue sea, and
in blazing sunlight, were most interesting. We slipped through the
straits of Belle-Isle and had an enjoyable passage to Liverpool.
It was, I think, some little time before the events recorded in the
first part of this chapter—though I cannot be quite sure about the
date—that I had the signal experience of meeting with Edward J.
Trelawny, the devoted friend of Shelley and the companion of Byron. For
years and years—until indeed the star of Whitman rose in the
West—Shelley had been my own ideal. To grasp Trelawny’s hand was to gain
an unexpected link with a far remote past.
Trelawny’s life had been one of extraordinary adventure. To understand
even a part of it one must read his _Adventures of a Younger Son_
(largely his own story), and his book _Records of Shelley, Byron, and
the Author_ (1858 and 1878). Born in 1792 of a well-known Cornish family
he joined the Navy as a mere boy, and then at an early age _deserted_
and took up, according to his own account, with a pirate gang among the
seas of Java and Borneo. After some amazing adventures, he returned in
about 1813 to Europe; and soon after married an English lady. Of this
period however, between 1813 and 1820, very little seems to be known,
except that he himself says: “I became a shackled, careworn and
spirit-broken married man of the civilized West!” It was in 1820 at
Lausanne that a German bookseller chanced to show him _Queen Mab_; and a
little later, at Geneva, that he met Thomas Medwin, Shelley’s cousin.
The reading of the book and the conversations with Medwin convinced
Trelawny that here was a man worth knowing; and he did not rest till a
year or two later he went to Pisa and actually made Shelley’s
acquaintance (early in 1822). The two were about the same age; and it
shows something of what manner of man Trelawny was, that he so quickly
recognized the quality of Shelley; and something of what Shelley was
that he so soon commanded the admiration of this buccaneer and man of
adventure. After Shelley’s death Trelawny was with Byron a great deal,
both as Captain of Byron’s yacht and companion in his expedition to
Greece; but he never expressed a great regard for Byron—perhaps indeed
he hardly did the latter justice. Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824; but
Trelawny stayed on in Greece, joined the Greek cause against the Turks,
took to wife the sister of Ulysses, or Odysseus, a Greek chieftain,
lived for some time with him and his guerilla band in a cave on Mount
Parnassus, and was nearly killed there by a bullet from a spy. These and
many other things are written in the _Records_ above mentioned.
Later, after his return to England, and somewhere about 1840, Trelawny
fell in love with a certain Lady Goring, and finally induced her to
leave her husband and live with him. And it was this, curiously enough,
which at a later period led to my acquaintance with him. Lady Goring’s
son, by the old Sir Harry, married a cousin of mine, and when a boy of
sixteen or seventeen I used occasionally to go and stay with the young
pair at Highden near Worthing where they lived, and where I was
initiated in the mysteries of coursing, ferreting, etc., which were very
much in the order of the day there. Charles Goring, my cousin’s husband,
was the very type of the “bold bad baronet” of the shilling novels—a
type fairly common then, though almost extinct now—a rather handsome man
with fierce twirlable moustache, and thoroughly bearish manners, given
to swearing and drinking, and devoted to his dogs and guns. Whatever
induced my cousin—who was the sweetest and gentlest of girls—to marry
him I do not know. But that is always the way: the mild and forgiving
women marry the wicked men, and of course make the latter all the
wickeder by doing so! In course of time he grew a little tired of his
wife (there were no children) and behaved badly towards her. Then his
mother died—whom he had not seen since she ran away with Trelawny, some
twenty-five or more years before; and so, seized with some sort of
compunction after all this time, Charles Goring went on a pilgrimage to
his mother’s adopted home; found there Trelawny _and_ his mother’s
daughter by Trelawny—his own stepsister, by that time a rather beautiful
girl or young woman.
From all this complications arose, which I need not go into, but which
ultimately in an indirect way led to a somewhat celebrated affair in the
Divorce Courts—the Goring Case of the year 1878. Suffice it to say that
soon after these unfortunate squabbles were over, Charles Goring had the
grace to die, and my cousin (who had obtained a separation order) was
left quite free. It was then that I asked her one day to give me an
introduction to Edward Trelawny, which she willingly did.
I found him at the house which he was then occupying in Pelham Crescent,
S.W.—No. 7 I think—a quite old man of about eighty-seven or
eighty-eight, rugged to a degree, with sunken eyes and projecting
cheek-bones, but with a strange gleam of fire about him even at that
age—not unlike some semi-extinct volcano—and the appearance of what had
once been a rather massive and powerful frame. He was sitting in a high
chair near the fire with a pile of books on the floor beside him. “You
are interested in Shelley,” he said. And then without waiting for a
reply: “He was our greatest poet since Shakespeare.” And then: “He
couldn’t have been the poet he was if he had not been an Atheist.” That
was a pretty good beginning; he rolled out the “Atheist” with evident
satisfaction. He went on to express his contempt for the contemporary
poets, like Tennyson and Browning; then returned to Shelley: “I am not
sure he wasn’t the greatest man we have ever had: all these others just
tinker with the surface; Shelley goes down to the roots.” We talked a
little about individual poems, but I forget what. Then he took up one of
the books beside him—a Godwin’s _Political Justice_, and read extracts
from it—always with a choice which showed his hatred of modern
Civilization. (And this was interesting from one who had seen so much of
the world outside the bounds of our civilization.) Indeed there was
something astonishing in this old man’s intensity of rebelliousness,
which extreme age had apparently done nothing to reduce. He directed my
attention to an oil-portrait over the mantelpiece: “Do you know who that
is?” I guessed. It was a portrait—apparently not a very good one—of
Mary, Percy Shelley’s wife[14]: the face rather milk-and-watery in
expression. “She did him no good,” he said—“was always a drag on
him—shackling him with jealousies and the conventions of social life.”
[Trelawny was never quite fair to any one he did not like, and it was
evident he did not like Mary—though in the earlier days of their
acquaintance he had certainly been fond of her.] “Poets,” he continued,
“ought never to marry. It’s the greatest mistake. A poet ought to be
free as air—free to say and do what he pleases—and he cannot be free if
he is married.” This was pretty good from a man who had been so very
_much_ married as Trelawny!
He had had four wives at least—no one knew how many more. His first wife
(as appears also from _The Younger Son_) was a girl of Borneo. The
second was the lady who filled somehow the gap between 1813 and 1820.
The third, as we have seen, was a Greek, the sister of Odysseus; the
fourth was the former Lady Goring. There were many stories about him in
the family, mostly no doubt somewhat embellished. His second wife, it
was said, was only a small woman, and when she was “naughty” he would
dangle her by the scruff of her neck _out of the window_, until she was
good again. He had various dried heads, of pirates and others, among his
treasures; and swords and daggers stained with the blood of enemies! Our
conversation rambled on, but at this distance of time I forget details.
As I say, it gave me a strange thrill on leaving (and he died soon
after) to grasp the hand of one who had been so near to Shelley, and
whose character undoubtedly had a great fascination for the poet. In
Shelley’s _Fragments of an Unfinished Drama_ (in which the Pirate on the
Enchanted Isle is generally supposed to represent Trelawny), the poet
says—
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest.
On the other hand Trelawny in the Preface to his _Records_ says of
Shelley: “After glancing one day at an old Italian romance, in which a
knight of Malta throws down the gauntlet defying all infidels, Shelley
remarked: ‘_I_ should have picked it up. All our knowledge is derived
from infidels.’” These two quotations give a good idea of the relation
between the two men.
VII
SHEFFIELD AND SOCIALISM
During my absence in the United States, my friend Harold Cox, who had
just left Cambridge, came down to Millthorpe and spent a good part of
the summer there—remaining a bit after my return home. He wanted to get
manual and farm and garden experience, and that same autumn he plunged
into farming—took a farm at Tilford in Surrey, and inducted a little
colony into it. But the land was mere sand, and the experience of one
winter and spring was enough! In less than a year he gave the place up,
and went out, by way of a change, to India, to the Anglo-Mohammedan
College at Futtehgur. While in India he went in ’85 or ’86 for a tour in
Cashmere, and from Cashmere he sent me a pair of Indian sandals. I had
asked him, before he went out, to send some likely pattern of sandals,
as I felt anxious to try some myself. I soon found the joy of wearing
them. And after a little time I set about making them. I got two or
three lessons from W. Lill, a bootmaker friend in Sheffield, and soon
succeeded in making a good many pairs for myself and various friends.
Since then the trade has grown into quite a substantial one. G. Adams
took it up at Millthorpe in 1889; making, I suppose, about a hundred or
more pairs a year; and since his death it has been carried on at the
Garden City, Letchworth.
In 1885 I published the second edition of _Towards Democracy_—still
through John Heywood; and early in ’86 quite an important local event
occurred in the establishment of our Sheffield Socialist Society. One or
two of us beat round the town and got together a few Socialists and
advanced Radicals; we persuaded William Morris to come down (early in
March)—and the result of that was the formation of the Society.
At that time, William Morris, having with a few others parted from
Hyndman and the S.D.F., had founded the Socialist League—branches of
which were springing up merrily all over the country. And it was William
Morris’s great hope, often expressed in the _Commonweal_ and elsewhere,
that these branches growing and spreading, would before long “reach
hands” to each other and form a network over the land—would constitute
in fact “the New Society” within the framework of the old, and destined
ere long to replace the old. No doubt the forces of reaction—the immense
apathy of the masses, the immense resistance of the official and
privileged classes, entrenched behind the Law and the State, and the
immense and growing power of Money—were things not then fully realized
and understood. There seemed a good hope for the realization of Morris’
dream—and we most of us shared in it. But History is a difficult horse
to drive. In this matter of the Socialist movement, as in other matters,
it has always been liable to take the most unexpected turns; and the
little League societies after flourishing gaily for a few years—suddenly
began to wane and die out; I believe indeed that at this moment there is
not one of them left. Morris saw with some sadness that his hope was not
going to be fulfilled—and though I do not think that he altogether lost
heart he was fain in his last years to bury his disappointment in a
return to his art work, and even to favour as a forlorn hope the
Parliamentary side in revolutionary politics! It is curious indeed in
this matter to see how, of all the innumerable little societies—of the
S.D.F., the League, the Fabians, the Christian Socialists, the
Anarchists, the Freedom groups, the I.L.P., the Clarion societies, and
local groups of various names—all supporting one side or another of the
general Socialist movement—not one of them has grown to any great
volume, or to commanding and permanent influence; and how yet, and at
the same time, the general teaching and ideals of the movement have
permeated society in the most remarkable way, and have deeply infected
the views of all classes, as well as general literature and even
municipal and imperial politics. Perhaps it is a matter for much
congratulation that things have turned out so. If the movement had been
pocketed by any one man or section it would have been inevitably
narrowed down. As it is, it has taken on something of an oceanic
character; and if by its very lack of narrowness it has lost a little in
immediate results, its ultimate success we may think is all the more
assured.
The real value of the modern Socialist movement—it has always seemed to
me—has not lain so much in its actual constructive programme as (1) in
the fact that it has provided a text for a searching criticism of the
old society and of the lives of the rich, and (2) the fact that it has
enshrined a most glowing and vital enthusiasm towards the realization of
a new society. It is these two points which have always drawn and
attached me to it. The constructive details of the future are things
about which there may and indeed must be different opinions. The
necessity of organization in society, and of united action, the
avoidance of officialism and bureaucracy, the handling of the land so as
to afford the most general access to it, the barring of monopolies and
of all industrial parasitism, the liberation of labour to dignity and
self-reliance, the conduct of public ownership, the questions of
taxation, representation, education, etc.—these are all most complex
affairs whose united and detailed solution can only proceed step by
step, by slow trial and experience. We must expect mistakes and
differences of opinion here. Nevertheless I think we may say that in the
broad lines of its constructive policy Socialism has taken the right
course and the one which time will justify. It has laid down in fact
once for all the principles that parasitism and monopoly must cease, and
it has set before itself the ideal of a society which while it accords
to every individual as full scope as possible for the exercise of his
faculties and enjoyment of the fruits of his own labour, will in return
expect from the individual his hearty contribution to the general
well-being, and at least to claim nothing for his own which (or the
value of which) he has not by his own effort produced. Towards the
fulfilment of these aims Socialism has proposed a guarded public
ownership of land and of some of the more important industries (guarded,
that is, against the dangers of officialism), and it seems likely that
this general programme is the one along which western society will work
in the near future; that is, till such time as the State, quâ State, and
all efficient Government, are superseded by the voluntary and
instinctive consent and mutual helpfulness of the people—when of course
the more especially Anarchist ideal would be realized.
As I say, while there is practically no dissent about the future form of
society as one which shall embody to the fullest extent the two opposite
poles of Communism and Individualism in one vital unity, there may and
naturally must be differences on the question of the detailed working
out of the problem, and indeed it may well be that the solution will
take somewhat different forms in different places and among different
peoples.
It has not been, I repeat, the belief in special constructive details as
panaceas which has led me into the Socialist camp, so much as the fact
that the movement has been a distinct challenge to the old order and a
call to the rich and those in power to remodel society and their own
lives; and that other fact that within the Socialist camp has burned
that wonderful enthusiasm and belief in a new ideal of fraternity—which
however crude and inexperienced it may at times appear is surely
destined to conquer and rule the world at last.
It is this latter side of the movement which by the outsider is so
little known and understood. Those who stand outside a revolutionary
agitation, or who look down on it from above, necessarily only see the
defiant subversive elements of it, they do not guess the glowing heart
within. To me, passing from time to time from one stratum of life to
quite another, it was a strange experience and not without its comic
side, to see the wildly different features which one and the same
movement wore to those within and those without; to hear Socialism
spoken of from above, as nothing but an envious shriek and a threat, a
gospel of bread and butter, a grab, a “divide up all round”—the work of
unscrupulous demagogues and tinsel politicians; and then the next moment
to pass into the heart of the thing and to find oneself in an atmosphere
of the most simple fraternity and idealism, where the coming of the
kingdom of Heaven, a kingdom of social order and decency, was
entertained with a childlike faith that might almost make one smile;
where it seemed only necessary to go out into the streets and preach the
better ideals for crowds to flock to the standard; and where, if a
betterment of conditions was the main thing sought for, it was a
betterment of social life and a satisfaction of the needs of the heart
fully as much as an increased allowance of bread and butter. It was a
strange experience to pass from cold to hot, and from hot to cold, as it
were, and to realize how little those in the one current could
understand what was going on in the other.
Certainly from what experience I have had of a movement at one time
thought very revolutionary, I am inclined to think that most revolutions
must have been pretty well justified before they took place. One hears
of dangerous mobs led by demagogues and fed on fancied wrongs; and of
course there are such things in every movement as self-seeking
blusterers, or designing misleaders; there is ignorance and
non-reasoning exasperation; but my experience of the (British) masses is
that instead of being too inflammable, they are surely only too _slow_
to move, too slow to perceive the burdens which they bear, or to point
out the cause of their own suffering; and—in the Socialist agitation—the
number and influence of the blusterers and self-seekers compared with
the genuine leaders has always been very small. No, revolutions do not
take place without cause; and I doubt whether in any case the excesses
accompanying a rising have exceeded the cruelties and injuries of the
preceding tyranny. There is such a heart of tenderness and patient
common sense in the mass of the people—everywhere I believe—as to
convince one that, notwithstanding the slanders that have been heaped up
by the armchair historian, they are really more inclined to endure than
to accuse, more ready to forgive than retaliate. No—the general
Socialist movement (including therein the Anarchist) has done and is
still doing a great and necessary work—and I am proud to have belonged
to it. It has defined a dream and an ideal, that of the common life
conjoined to the free individuality, which somewhere and somewhen must
be realized, because it springs from and is the expression of the very
root-nature of Man.
Our “Sheffield Socialists,” though common working men and women,
understood well enough the broad outlines of this ideal. They hailed
William Morris and his work with the most sincere appreciation. I found
among them the most interesting personalities, saturated for the most
part, as I have said, with the thought of fraternity and fellowship; and
I made one or two lifelong friends.
[Illustration:
G. E. H.
(One of the first “Sheffield Socialists.”)
]
We organized lectures, addresses, pamphlets, with a street-corner
propaganda which soon brought us in amusing and exciting incidents in
the way of wrangles with the police and the town-crowds. At first an
atmosphere of considerable suspicion rested upon the movement, and
dynamite and daggers were assumed by outsiders to be indispensable parts
of our equipment; but as time went on, and after a few years, this died
away—and where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds came
to listen with serious and sympathetic mien. A dozen or twenty at most
formed the moving and active element of our society—though its
membership may have been a hundred or more; and these disposed
themselves to their various functions. Mrs. Usher, large-bosomed and
large-hearted, would move on the outskirts of our open-air meetings,
armed with a bundle of literature. She was an excellent saleswoman and
few could resist her hearty appeal “Buy this pamphlet, love, it will do
you good!” Even in the streets or the tramcars the most solemn and
substantial old gentlemen fell a prey to her. Her brothers, the two
Binghams, were among our two speakers, and both of them pretty
effective, the one in a logical, the other in a more oratorical way.
They were provision merchants in the town; and their business suffered
at first, but afterwards gained, by the connection. Then there was
Shortland, handsome, fiery and athletic, an engine fitter, always ready
for a row and to act as ‘chucker out’ if required. Or J. M. Brown, who
took quite an opposite part. He (tailor by trade) the very picture of
kindness and broad good-nature would move among the crowd as if he
hardly belonged to us, and engaging persuasively in conversation, first
with one and then with another, would draw many a doubter into the fold;
or George E. Hukin, with his Dutch-featured face and Dutch build—no
speaker, nor prominent in public—but though young an excellent help at
our committee meetings, where his shrewd strong brain and tactful nature
gave his counsels much weight; and always from the beginning a special
ally of mine; or George Adams, afterwards associated with me at
Millthorpe, with his amusing quips and sallies, and plucky antagonisms,
a good friend and a good hater, and always ready for an adventurous
bout; or Raymond Unwin, who would come over from Chesterfield to help
us, a young man of cultured antecedents, of first-rate ability and good
sense, healthy, democratic, vegetarian, and now I need not say a
well-known architect and promoter of Garden Cities.
Then at one time there was Fred Charles—who was afterwards accused of an
anarchist plot and sentenced, most unfairly, to ten years’ hard labour.
He was already leaning to the Anarchist side of the movement, but was
ready to work with us; and certainly was one of the most devoted of
workers. No surrender or sacrifice for the ‘cause’ was too great for
him; and as to his own earnings (as clerk) or possessions, he
practically gave them all away to tramps or the unemployed. The case was
tried at Stafford in March ’92 by Justice Hawkins, and though the
incriminating evidence was quite slender yet, there being a panic on at
the time with regard to Anarchism, there was an obvious determination to
convict. I appeared in the box to testify to Charles’ excellent
character and public spirit, but needless to say without success. Or
there was Burton, enginetenter, rather a type of the stout, somewhat
self-satisfied and ignorant street-speaker, who would get us into
trouble shouting “The land for the people!” or other cant phrases of the
period, with really no clear idea of what they meant, and would have to
be rescued when attacked or challenged by some keener critic among the
audience; or again, Jonathan Taylor, the very opposite in type to these,
tall, lean, logical and conclusive to the last degree; who with a kind
of homely unconquerable humour, compelled his hearers from finger to
finger, and from point to point, of his argument, and somehow always
succeeded in holding the most restive crowd, and for any period. He had
been on the school-board at one time, and was useful to us also by his
knowledge of local and municipal expediencies. Or again, John Furniss:
he was a remarkable man, and perhaps the very first to preach the modern
Socialism in the streets of Sheffield. A quarryman by trade, keen and
wiry both in body and in mind, a thorough-going _Christian_ Socialist,
and originally I believe a bit of a local preacher; he had somehow at an
early date got hold of the main ideas of the movement; and in the early
’eighties used to stride in—he and his companion George Pearson—five or
six miles over the Moors, to Sheffield in order to speak at the Pump or
the Monolith; and then stride out again in the middle of the night. And
this he kept up for years and years, and when later he migrated to
another quarry about the same distance from Chesterfield did exactly the
same thing there; for perhaps twenty years, with marvellous energy and
perseverance, he must have kept up this propaganda; and the amount of
effective influence he must have exercised would be hard to reckon.
Such were some of the characters with whom I found myself associated,
and for five or six years we carried on the Society with the utmost
friendliness, accord and enthusiasm. It was a most interesting time. I
knew all those mentioned and many others, very intimately, was familiar
in their houses, stayed with them, knew all their goings-out and
comings-in, and something of the details of their various trades.
In 1887 we took a large house and shop in Scotland Street, a poor
district of the town; and opened a café, using the large room above for
a meeting and lecture room, and the house for a joint residence for some
of us who were more immediately concerned in carrying on the business.
We had all sorts of social gatherings, lectures, teas, entertainments in
the Hall—the wives and sisters of the “comrades” helping, especially in
the social work; we had Annie Besant, Charlotte Wilson, Kropotkin,
Hyndman, and other notables down to speak for us; we gave teas to the
slum-children who dwelt in the neighboring crofts and alleys (but these
had at first to be given up on account of the poor little things tearing
themselves and each other to pieces, perfect mobs of them, in their
frantic attempts to gain admittance—a difficulty which no arrangement of
tickets or of personal supervision seemed to obviate); and we organized
excursions into municipal politics; and country propaganda. This last
was often amusing as well as interesting. While, in the towns, as time
went on, audiences grew in numbers and attentiveness, it still remained
very difficult to capture the country districts. The miners would really
not be uninterested, but in their sullen combative way they would take
care not to show it. Many a time we have gone down to some mining
village and taken up our stand on some heap of slag or broken wall, and
the miners would come round and stand about or sit down deliberately
_with their backs to the speaker_, and spit, and converse, as if quite
heedless of the oration going on. But after a time, and as speaker
succeeded speaker, one by one they would turn round—their lower jaws
dropping—fairly captivated by the argument. It was much the same with
the country rustics—but as a rule less successful. I remember on one
occasion seven or eight of us, armed with literature, going for a long
country walk to Hathersage in the Derbyshire dales. We had Tom Maguire
with us, from Leeds, an excellent speaker, full of Irish wit and
persuasiveness. We set him upon a stoneheap in the middle of the village
and standing round him ourselves while he spoke, acted as decoy ducks to
bring the villagers together. The latter full of curiosity came, in
moderate numbers, but not one of them would approach nearer than a
distance of twenty or thirty yards—just far enough to make the speaker
despair of really reaching them. In vain we separated and going round
tried to coax them to come nearer. In vain the speaker shouted himself
hoarse and fired off his best jokes. Not a bit of it—they weren’t going
to be fooled by us! and at last red in the face and out of breath and
with a string of curses, Tom descended from his cairn, and we all,
shaking the dust of the village off our feet, departed!
I meanwhile and during these years, not only took part in our local
work, but spoke and lectured in the Socialist connection all round the
country—at Bradford, Halifax, Leeds, Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh, Hull,
Liverpool, Nottingham and other places—my subjects the failures of the
present Commercial system, and the possible reorganization of the
future. As to the Café, we were only able to hold to it for a year.
Though quite a success from the propagandist point of view, financially
it was a failure. The refreshment department was not patronized nearly
enough to make it pay. The neighborhood was an exceedingly poor one. And
so we were obliged to surrender the place, and retire to smaller
quarters. During that year however I really lived most of the time at
the Scotland Street place. I occupied a large attic at the top of the
house, _almost_ high enough to escape the smells of the street below,
but exposed to showers of blacks which fell from the innumerable
chimneys around. In the early morning at 5 a.m. there was the strident
sound of the ‘hummers’ and the clattering of innumerable clogs of men
and girls going to their work, and on till late at night there were
drunken cries and shouting. Far around stretched nothing but factory
chimneys and foul courts inhabited by the wretched workers. It was, I
must say, frightfully depressing; and all the more so because of tragic
elements in my personal life at the time. Only the enthusiasm of our
social work, and the abiding thoughts which had inspired _Towards
Democracy_ kept me going. I spent my spare time during the year in
arranging and editing the collection of songs and music called _Chants
of Labour_—a thing which might have been much better done by some one
else, but I could find no one to do it. And it was a queer experience,
collecting these songs of hope and enthusiasm, and composing such
answering tunes and harmonies as I could, in the midst of these gloomy
and discordant conditions.
As I say, we only stayed a year here, and as far as my health was
concerned I don’t think I could have endured it much longer. I realized
the terrible drawback to health and vitality consequent on living in
these slums of manufacturing towns, and the way these conditions are
inevitably sapping the strength of our populations.
VIII
TRADE AND PHILOSOPHY
In 1887 or 1888 I turned over the organization and commercial side of
the garden at Millthorpe to my friend Albert Fearnehough. During the
first four years or so I had taken the responsibility, and by many
mistakes bought some valuable experience—but now I found that my
literary and social work demanded so much time that I wanted my brain
free from agricultural cares. So after this, while still contributing a
fair amount of manual labour I left the organization alone.
I cannot say that, adopting the commercial standard, the experiment at
Millthorpe could at any time be called _paying_. At the same time it was
never (to me) disheartening. Taking strawberries as our main crop, we
found, with several years’ experience, that £40 per acre was a fair
estimate of the gross produce. (And I do not think that this is
excessive since I know that £60 or £70 is a not uncommon estimate.) If
we had put, say, 5 acres out of our 7½ under strawberries, this would
have yielded £200 a year, which, allowing for extra labour, manure,
etc., would still have maintained a man and his family; 100 fowls would
probably have paid the rent (if it had not been a freehold); and the 2½
acres would have gone far to keep a horse or pony. But I had not the
time to give to a complete organization, nor perhaps felt the necessary
interest in it; and my friend had hardly the required energy; so we just
paddled along, keeping two or three acres only under spade cultivation,
and making a small sum, but not sufficient to meet expenses. I think, as
I say, that the thing might have been made to pay in the commercial
sense—but there is no doubt that under prevailing conditions and prices
in England, agriculture of any kind requires pretty hard work and long
hours to make it fairly successful. One of the reasons of this is the
want of a prosperous country population and the local markets which this
would afford. With industrial villages scattered over the land, eggs,
fruits, vegetables would be in great demand—even in country
districts—prices would be fair, the middleman would be dispensed with;
even the horse and cart might not be needed. But it is quite a different
matter when the stuff has to be sent to a distant market, there to be
bought by hucksters, and to feed middlemen and railway shareholders,
before it feeds either the producer or consumer. This trouble is really
one of the great troubles of modern civilization—and while there is no
doubt a certain advantage gained by division of labour among nations and
provinces, and by the raising of products in the most suitable
localities, it is a matter quite open to question whether the enormous
expenses of the present world-wide exchange and the maintenance of these
swarms of merchants, traders, shipping and railroad companies, with
their innumerable shareholders and employees, does not quite obliterate
or absorb the advantage so gained. Indeed when one thinks of the immense
numbers of people in this way withdrawn from any direct service in
production and made systematically dependent on the others, one may
question whether the gain does not at times come very near a loss; and
one ceases to wonder that the condition of the actual producers,
agricultural and others, remains so poor and unimproved.
In ’86 and ’87 I prepared for the Press and published the volume called
_England’s Ideal_. The papers composing it had been written at different
times during the two or three years preceding—some of them at Brighton,
during intervals when family affairs had taken me back there for a time.
Especially I remember writing _Desirable Mansions_ in this way in an
interval when I was tangled in family business and the idiotic life of
the place—and with a kind of savage glee as I sought to tear the whole
sickly web to pieces. Descended from the transcendental generative
thought of _Towards Democracy_ on the one hand, and my new-found
acquaintance with intensely practical life on the other, these papers,
though crude in some respects, bear I believe a certain impetus about
them. Once or twice, by the violent opposition they have excited (always
a reassuring thing for an author), I have had evidence of this. When
_Desirable Mansions_ was first issued, as a separate pamphlet, I
received a copy, anonymously sent and written all over with the most
furious and scurrilous denials, challenges, abuse, etc.; and after the
publication of _England’s Ideal_ as a volume, a friend of mine had a
letter from a lady, in which she said that her husband had been reading
the book, and that she had got hold of it and “poked it into the fire,
as she found it was unsettling him so!” I have always regretted that I
did not get hold of that letter, with leave to publish it. It would have
made such a splendid advertisement.
The influences of Ruskin, in style and moral bias, and of Marx in
economics, are very apparent in the volume; and though I do not think
that I ever gave myself ‘hand and foot’ to Marx in his views; yet I was
very willing to adopt his theory of surplus value as a working
hypothesis. The truth is that though no exact measure of ‘surplus value’
or of the amount of which the workman is ‘defrauded’ by the capitalist,
is possible—and though any theory which attempts to exactly define this
amount is sure to be open to criticism[15]; yet, the general fact of
surplus value, namely that the workman does _not_ get the full value of
his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist is
obvious—and serious—enough. And it is on this general position that
_England’s Ideal_—like the whole Socialist movement—is founded. The
seriousness of the matter may be seen from the fact that from this
original falsity (of the appropriation of other folks’ labour) are
flowing to-day by a perfectly logical evolution two other great
falsities or failures—Commercial Crises and shopkeeping
Imperialism—which are now threatening ruin to all the Western
Civilizations.
Commercial Crises, as has been often explained (see _England’s Ideal_,
pp. 42, 43) flow primarily from the fact that the working masses for
their wages only receive a fraction of the value of the goods produced,
and therefore can only _buy back_ a fractional part of the same, while
the capitalist classes (though with their share of the swag they _could_
buy back the remainder) do not want more than a part of the remainder.
Consequently there occurs every year on the one hand an accumulation of
goods unused and on the other an accumulation of capital waiting for
reinvestment; and these two things from time to time clog the Commercial
Machine so as to render it hardly workable, and will probably in the end
bring it to a standstill. As to modern Imperialism it is a logical
outcome of the last-mentioned item, the accumulation of capital waiting
for reinvestment. For all the openings for capital in the mother country
having been filled up there remains nothing but to invest it in
manufactures abroad. And since other Western countries are similarly
filled up, there further remains nothing but to go to savage and
outlying nations and force _them_ to become our employees and our
customers. But to do this with safety requires military occupation and
the country’s flag. Hence in a nutshell the flag-waving and Imperialism
of the day.
In 1889 I got off _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_—another series of
reprints. And here too the philosophical position, though often crudely
expressed, and with more attempt at _suggestion_ than finish, is I think
in the main well-founded and valuable. The attacks on Civilization and
on Modern Science were both wrung from me, as it were by some inner
evolution or conviction and against my will; but in both cases the
position once taken became to me fully justified. In neither case did I
take any great precautions to guard against misunderstanding, and in
consequence I have been freely accused of blinding myself—in respect of
Civilization—to modern progress, and of desiring to return to the state
of primitive man; and in respect to Science—of preferring ignorance to
intelligence. But no careful reader would make these mistakes. The
monumental, patient, one may almost say heroic, work which has been done
by Science during the nineteenth century, in the way of exact
observation, classification, and detailed practical application, can
never be ignored and can hardly be over-estimated. None the less the
very decided criticism in _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_, of the
limits of scientific theorizing and authority has been quite necessary;
as well as the forcible insistence on the fact that Science only deals
with the surface of life and not with its substance. As to Civilization
the advances of Humanity during the Civilization period have been
largely bound up with the advance of Science and have chiefly consisted
perhaps in increase of technical mastery over Nature and materials. Like
every increase of power this has led to greater opportunity of good and
greater opportunity of evil. On the moral side however, we may believe
that men’s sympathies _have_ broadened and widened during the
civilization period—so that there is a larger and more general sense of
Humanity. On the other hand during this period something of the
intensity of the old tribal kinship and community of life has been lost,
as well as something of the instinctive kinship of each individual to
Nature. It is obvious enough that there can be no _return_ to
pre-scientific or pre-civilization conditions—though it may be hoped
that a later age may combine some of the virtues of the more primitive
man with the powers that have been gained during civilization.
In the year following [1890] something happened which in a curious vague
way I had been expecting to happen for some time. It almost amounted to
my making the acquaintance of a pre-civilization man of a very high
type. I have mentioned how the _Bhagavat Gita_ falling into my hands at
a certain date, gave the clue to and precipitated the crystallization of
_Towards Democracy_. From that time of course I was intensely interested
in the wise men of the East, and that germinal thought which in various
ages of the world has become the nucleus and impulse of new movements.
During the years ’80 to ’90 there was a great deal of Theosophy and
Oriental philosophy of various sorts current in England, and much talk
and speculation, sometimes very ill-founded, about ‘adepts,’ ‘mahatmas,’
and ‘gurus.’ I too felt a great desire to see for myself one of these
representatives of the ancient wisdom. But it did not seem very clear
how the thing would come about. However at last there came a very
pressing letter from my friend Arunáchalam in Ceylon (the very friend
who had given me the _Bhagavat Gita_ at an earlier date), asking me to
come out and meet a certain Gñani to whose discourses and teaching he
was himself already deeply indebted, and who was willing to give some
time to me if I should come. So the way was made plain, and I
immediately made arrangements to go.
I have given a careful account of this Gñani, his personality and
teaching, in my book _Adam’s Peak to Elephanta_—and I need not repeat
the material here. As I say, he was in some respects a high type of
pre-civilization man. For, like most men of this class in India, he
identified himself so closely with the ancient religious tradition that
one could almost feel him to be one of the old Vedic race of two
thousand or three thousand years back. His modes of thought, appearance,
personality, all suggested this. And here in this man it was of
absorbing interest to feel one came in contact with the root-thought of
all existence—the intense _consciousness_ (not conviction merely) of the
oneness of all life—the germinal idea which in one form or another has
spread from nation to nation, and become the soul and impulse of
religion after religion. However one might differ from him in points of
detail, in matters of modern science or of politics, one felt that he,
and his predecessors three thousand years ago, had seized the central
stronghold, and were possessors of an outlook and of intuitions which
the modern might truly envy. After seeing Whitman, the amazing
representative of the same spirit in all its voluminous modern
unfoldment—seven years before—this visit to the Eastern sage was like
going back to the pure lucid intensely transparent source of some mighty
and turbulent stream. It was a returning from West to East, and a
completing of the circle of the Earth.
It is curious that _his_ teacher (Tilleinathan Swamy) seems to have told
this Gñani many years before that an Englishman or Englishmen would come
to him. Probably he foresaw, from the growth of the English mind, that
the time was not very far distant when the English would rise to an
understanding of the great Indian tradition and would come over to study
it.
Looking back now [1901] after ten years, on my personal experiences of
the Eastern teachings, I seem to realize more and more that the true
line is that (first adequately pointed out by Whitman) which consists in
combining and harmonizing _both_ body and soul, the outer and the inner.
They are the eternal and needful complements of each other. The Eastern
teaching has or has had a tendency to err on one side, the Western on
the other. The Indian methods and attitude cause an ingathering and
quiescence of the mind, accompanied often by great illumination; but if
carried to excess they result in over-quiescence, and even torpor. The
Western habits tend towards an over-activity and external distraction of
the mind, which may result in disintegration. The true line (as in other
cases) is not in mediocrity, but in a bold and sane acceptance of both
sides, so as to make them offset and balance each other, and indeed so
that each shall make the extension of the other more and more possible.
Growth is the method and the solution. The soul goes out and returns,
goes out and returns; and this is its daily, almost hourly, action—just
as it is an epitome of the æonian life-history of every individual.
This visit to the East in some sense completed the circle of my
experiences. It took two or three years for its results to soak and
settle into my mind; but by that time I felt that my general attitude
towards the world was not likely to change much, and that it only
remained to secure and define what I had got hold of, and to get it
decently built out if possible into actual life and utterance.
With regard to this process of “building out” into the actual world I
should feel very ungrateful if I did not acknowledge my indebtedness to
the Nature-conditions around me. For any sustained and more or less
original work it seems almost necessary that one should have the
quietude and strength of Nature at hand, like a great reservoir from
which to draw. The open air, and the physical and mental health that
goes with it, the sense of space and freedom in the Sky, the vitality
and amplitude of the Earth—these are real things from which one can only
cut oneself off at serious peril and risk to one’s immortal soul. And
there is somewhat of the same potency and vitality in the very life of
the mass-peoples who are in touch with these foundation-facts and
outdoor occupations. It was a true instinct or a gracious Fate—and I
realized this more and more—which had compelled me to locate myself in
the midst of such surroundings.
I should feel ungrateful too if I did not express my indebtedness to the
lovely little stream which like a live thing ran night and day, winter
and summer, full of grace and music at the foot of my garden. It entered
into my life and became part of it.[16] The hut, which I had built at
Bradway to write the earlier part of _Towards Democracy_ in, I
transported with me to Millthorpe, and planked it down on the edge of
the brook, facing the sun and the south; and thenceforth it served a
double purpose—that of a study in which, a hundred yards away from the
house, I could write in comparative safety from interruption; and that
of a bathing shelter with its feet almost in the water. Here through
uncounted hours I continued the production of _Towards Democracy_ and my
other books, avoiding always the act of writing within the house except
when absolutely forced to retire by stress of weather or other causes,
and rejoicing always to get the sentiment of the open free world into my
pages; and here I came, either alone or with friends, to rest from
labour in the garden, or to bathe and be refreshed after the heat of the
day.
[Illustration:
THE HUT AND THE BROOK.
]
IX
MILLTHORPE AND HOUSEHOLD LIFE
It must be admitted, however, that the acclimatization to the new and
somewhat limited and strenuous life at Millthorpe did not take place all
at once; and perhaps the fact of my having burnt my boats, as it were,
and committed myself as I had done, was after all a good thing. For some
little time I felt restive and unsettled at the enchainment—partly, as I
have said, because the Thoreau ideal, opening out _underneath_, took the
bottom out of the commercial and rather materialistic life in the way of
Trade in which I was embarking; and partly because anyhow the latter
sort of life—though valuable as an experience—was not by its nature
likely to hold my interest for long. The rustics too and farmfolk around
me were on my first arrival a little strange, and inclined, as often
happens in such cases, to hold off and be suspicious of a newcomer; my
reputation as a Socialist alarmed them; there was none of the cordiality
of little Bradway; the climate was damp and the winters were long; and I
had occasional relapses of feeling about it all.
Yet if I _had_ cut the painter and floated my little boat away onto the
great deep I doubt whether the result would have been favorable. After
all, all life means a denial of _part_ of oneself. It is obviously
impossible to find a situation or conditions which will satisfy _all the
demands_ of one’s nature—millionfold complex as they are. Some must be
sacrificed. To moan over that necessity or to pose as a martyr is
absurd. All one can reasonably do is to find a situation which will
satisfy the _root_-demands, and the _rooting_ demands—those that have
the power of growth in them. Then the seed, though it seem to die in its
prison-house, will assuredly find its outlet and quicken into a new
life.
I could not complain in this case that the root-needs of my temperament
were unsatisfied. Quite the contrary. I was plunged in the very heart of
Nature—that Nature which for many years I had felt the need of—in a
singularly beautiful Derbyshire valley with plentiful woods, streams and
moors; I had already become familiar with the mass-folk of Sheffield,
and found friends among the workers in many trades; and was beginning to
know the rustics of my own neighborhood. I was leading an outdoor life,
and my health was every day becoming firmer and more consolidated. I had
escaped from the domination of Civilization in its two most fatal and
much-detested forms, respectability and cheap intellectualism. In my
happy valley there was no resident squire of any kind, nor even a single
“villa,” while the church, more than a mile distant, was quite amiably
remote! We were just a little population of manual workers, sincerely
engrossed in our several occupations. And finally, and perhaps more than
all, I had found a firm basis and secure vantage-ground for my literary
and productive work.
People have often asked me if I did not miss the life I had left behind.
I cannot truly say that I ever did. At Brighton and at Cambridge and
partly in London I had had my fill of balls and dinner-parties and the
usual entertainments, and when at the close of those two dispensations
(somewhere in the early ’eighties) _I gave my dress clothes away_, I did
so without any misgiving and without any fear that I should need them
again. The fact is that though it is perfectly true that by steadily and
persistently going to evening parties and social functions one may come
into touch with interesting or remarkable people of sorts, yet the game
is hardly worth the candle. Through leagues of boredom, platitudes and
general futility one occasionally has the satisfaction of exchanging a
wink of recognition, so to speak, with some really congenial and
original woman or man; but at all such functions the severe flow of
amiable nonsense soon cuts any real conversation short, and if one wants
to continue the latter the only way is to arrange a meeting quite
outside and apart—which after all one might have done in other and
simpler ways. As to the matter of dress, the adoption of a pleasant yet
not strictly conventional evening garb of one’s own has the useful
effect of automatically closing doors which are not “worth while” and
opening those that _are_—so in that way it is much to be recommended!
On the whole, though just the first few years at Millthorpe were
somewhat isolated I believe my independent life there has really enabled
me to see more of the great world than I should otherwise have done.
Visitors from a distance have often many and intimate things to tell
one, and questions can be discussed in a more leisurely way than in a
great centre where every one stands watch in hand, counting the minutes.
And on the other hand, by going myself to London for a fortnight or so
three or four times a year, I found I could get into touch with all
sorts of cliques and circles—such as I perhaps should not have cared to
be involved in if I had been permanently living there! The country
became a splendid basis for literary work, with the opportunity it
afforded (so priceless to me) of writing in the open air and in close
contact with the ordinary realities of life; it supplied a good basis
for my lecturing and other excursions into the Northern Towns; and with
its market-gardening and sandal trades kept my hands busy when my head
required a rest.
Of the many years mainly spent here at Millthorpe, the first
fifteen—from 1883 to 1898—were somewhat handicapped for me by the
presence of a small working-family in the house; first, for ten years,
the Fearnehoughs of whom I have already spoken; and afterwards, for five
years, the Adams’. No other arrangement was at that time possible. Both
families were charming and interesting in their different ways; but
necessarily they hampered my freedom a good deal. With children in the
house (in both cases) the domestic arrangements had largely to be suited
to their necessities and convenience, and my interests had to come very
decidedly second. This did not so much matter at the beginning of the
time, but later with the expansion of my own sphere of operations a
different household arrangement became imperative.
Fearnehough, as I have said, was of a “powerful uneducated” type—a good
specimen of the British worker—a bit slow in brain, but exceedingly
thorough and downright in all his dealings. His wife possessed the
infinite patience and kindliness of the household guardian—going always
about her work with untiring forethought and industry—even when, as
often happened, she was silently suffering from bad headaches. There was
a certain native grace about her, and dignity about him, which well
became them. The two children, boy and girl of about nine and ten when
they first arrived, were sensible and natural too. To have this family
living with me—though it may have been hampering in some ways—was for
some years very helpful. Whether at meals, or working in the fields, or
sitting round the fire of an evening, to be in close touch with so sane
and simple an outlook on life, and one so entirely different from that
to which I had generally been accustomed, was in itself an education.
The very downrightness of daily existence among those who live close
upon absolute necessity is a thing hardly realized even by the most
well-meaning of the well-to-do, unless they positively share that
existence. Of course it cuts away a vast deal of sentimentalism,
æstheticism, and all that. But on the whole it is rather healthy.
I remember one day—in later years when Annie, the daughter, had gone
away to work in Sheffield—speaking to her mother about the girl (whose
absence I knew she felt) and saying rather sentimentally, “I expect you
miss Annie a good deal nowadays.” The answer was characteristic, and in
its way quite lovely: “_Yes, I do miss her—especially on washing days!_”
It was not that Mrs. Fearnehough cared one whit less for her daughter
than many a very cultured mother might, but simply that her answer
allowed the bed-rock of human nature to be seen. At any rate it took the
wind out of my sentimentality! Not long ago I was asking a neighboring
farmer—whose son had just got married and migrated on to a little farm
of his own—how the son “liked his new place.” “Like it?” said the old
man with a dryish sort of laugh—“well, I guess he’ll like it if he can
any way make a living out of it—and if he can’t he won’t; he’ll be
better able to say in a year or two.” It is from answers like these that
one perceives how close on the rocks the lives of the mass peoples are
thrust—too close indeed to allow much scope for expression of their real
life or liking.
Fearnehough and I stumbled away at our market-gardening for a good many
years. Being both to begin with quite ignorant of the trade we made our
full complement of mistakes and purchased our experience sometimes
dearly. Yet by degrees we got the land into good order. We dug it over,
made drains to carry off the water, planted a hundred or two of fruit
and forest trees, built bits of walls and fences, kept a horse, and
fowls, and grew our crops, and took our produce into market—a strenuous
time, but greatly interesting in its way. My commercial instinct was
weak, but Albert’s was perhaps even weaker! With his real love of good
work he would spend as much time preparing an onion-bed as could only be
paid for by ten times the value of the crop; and at one period he
insisted on rooting every bit of rock and stone out of the subsoil so
persistently that I began to think the garden would be turned into a
quarry! It was characteristic of him when I remonstrated, to say: “I
can’t help it—if I didn’t do my work thorough when I’m at it, I should
only keep awake at night thinking about it.” I have already given some
of the general results and conclusions of our labours of that time. When
the period of our experiment came to an end, Fearnehough returned again
to his scythe-making trade in Sheffield, which he still carries on, hale
and hearty, down to this day [1915].
I cannot pass this period by without dwelling for a moment on another
friend at that time a member of the household. I mean my dog
Bruno[17]—so called not from his colour, for he was a very handsome
black spaniel, but from some fanciful association with Giordano Bruno
the Italian. That dog—like so many black animals, black horses, black
cats, black poodles, black-plumaged birds, rooks, jackdaws, starlings,
and so forth—had something _demonic_ about him. The tenderness and
gentleness of his spirit, combined with a penetrative vision which
searched one’s very soul, was almost superhuman. I came first to know
him when he was merely a puppy at a friend’s house. We almost fell in
love with each other then and there, and I was not altogether surprised
when a few weeks afterwards he arrived at my door, sent on as a present
from the said friends. He never doubted for a moment that he had come to
his true home, and he settled down at once, a most loving member of the
household. The Fearnehoughs took to him right cordially, and Albert
himself a year or so later had the great satisfaction of saving him from
a horrible death.
I had been out somewhere on foot with Bruno and arriving back within a
couple of hundred yards of my gate I perceived the local pack of
foxhounds (the pests of this as of all countrysides!) scattered about
the road between me and home—the huntsmen having gone into the
public-house for a moment to have a drink. But that moment was more than
sufficient—for hounds are dangerous things unless under severe control.
Something occurred—I know not what. A hound gave cry; the others joined
in; and in an instant, to my horror and despair, the whole pack was
yelling in pursuit, and Bruno flying for his life—in the only direction
he _could_ at the moment fly, away from home! The dog was swift and
active, but what chance had he? I gave him up for lost. With
extraordinary agility however and much presence of mind he doubled and,
clearing ever so many garden walls and gates, dashed through the little
hamlet back again, finally racing across one of my fields with the whole
pack close behind and of course gaining on him. Most luckily Albert was
in our yard at the moment, and hearing the hullabaloo rushed out with a
pitchfork in his hand, just in time to check the ravening horde while
Bruno rushed past him to safety. A moment more and the dog would have
been torn to fragments.
Bruno showed in high degree that curious quality resembling _conscience_
in man, by which dogs, having contracted and adopted a new standard of
life from their masters, betray an emotional conflict going on within
them. Sometimes—as is often the case where fowls are kept—we would have
a nest of newly-hatched chicks being kept warm and dry in a basket on
the hearth. On such occasions Bruno was torn by conflicting passions.
The very sight and smell of the chicks roused the old primitive hunting
instinct, and he would creep nearer and nearer to the basket in a very
ecstasy of excitement—his limbs trembling and his nose quivering as he
sniffed the prey. Yet he knew perfectly well that he must not touch; and
his fidelity was so absolute that I firmly believe he harboured no
intention of doing so. But who can tell? We felt that possibly a sudden
frenzy of the animal nature might overtake him; and we could not do
otherwise than keep on the watch. As a matter of fact he never did do
anything rash; but the tension on him, poor dog, was so great that
sometimes for two or three days he would hardly touch his food, and he
positively grew quite thin under the strain. It was really a relief for
all of us when the hatching days were over.
There is something strangely touching in the fact that dogs not only
thus develop a conscience and a morality foreign to their canine nature,
but that also from their intense devotion to their so-called ‘masters’
they are severed and alienated to some degree from the natural loves of
their race—at any rate on the affectional side. I think Bruno nourished
in his heart a strange susceptibility to beauty. His amours with other
dogs were only of the ordinary kind; but he cherished for a certain
white kitten a positive adoration. The kitten was certainly
beautiful—snow-white and graceful to a degree—and to Bruno obviously a
goddess; but alas! like other goddesses only too fickle and even cruel.
When Bruno arrived on the scene, the kitten would skip on to the
vantage-ground of a chair-seat; and from thence torment the pathetic and
pleading nose of the dog with naughty scratches. Again and again would
Bruno—wounded in his heart as well as in his head—return to his
ineffectual suit, only to have his advances rejected as before. At last
he had to abandon this quest, but it was curious that a year or two
later he fell in love with _another_ white kitten in much the same way
and with much the same result.
“Everything however comes to him who waits”; and the most curious and
pathetic part of this story is its ending. For, a good many years
afterwards when Bruno had become quite an old dog and had lost much of
his activity, a _cat_ came and fell in love with him! This cat used to
come from a neighboring farm and spend much of its time with the dog,
and frequently at night would stay with him in the little outhouse which
he used as a kennel, sleeping between the dog’s paws. Ultimately the cat
was there when Bruno died.
Fearnehough’s place, when he returned to Sheffield, was taken by George
Adams, who (also with wife and two children) came to share the
Millthorpe Cottage with me. Adams was in most ways the very reverse of
Albert Fearnehough. Town bred, rather slight and thin, with a forward
stoop and a shock of black hair, he was of an impetuous humorous and
rather artistic temperament—not too exact or precise about details, but
one who could cover a good deal of ground in a day. Born in the poorest
slums of Sheffield he told me more than once how, after his mother died,
he was left alone a mere urchin in a tiny lodging with his father. His
father was a cobbler by trade rather given to drink, and in the habit of
going out early of a morning to work as a wage-slave in some shop, and
returning late. When he went out he left a _halfpenny_ on the table for
the boy to find his food with during the day! Not a very good start in
life. The boy roamed about, half-starved, cadging or ‘snaking’ what he
could—but developed, perhaps in consequence, a singular resourcefulness.
When about thirteen his father died, and he was left absolutely alone in
the world. The neighbours may have been kind in their way, but he was
alone and without refuge to flee to. Then something pathetic happened.
An orphanage for little _girls_ had lately been opened in the
neighborhood, and the boy knew one or two of these girls. One evening,
at closing time, the matron discovered among her little flock this
large-eyed, thin-legged almost rickety ragamuffin sitting! Asked what he
was doing there he replied that he wanted to be taken in. “But the
orphanage is for girls only,” said the matron, “and you are not a girl.”
It was no use, he would not go; tears ran down his face; he told his
plight; and they were fain to find him a bed in an attic for the night.
Needless to say he remained a second and a third night. The pale mobile
face made friends; and the end of it was that a boys’ _side_ was created
in the orphanage and added to that of the girls!
After remaining in the orphanage for a year or two a place was found for
George Adams in the villa-residence of a Sheffield manufacturer, where
he went first as knife and boot boy and afterwards as under-gardener.
The good people of the villa discovered his taste for drawing and
painting, and sent him to a School of Art for lessons; and so when at
the age of twenty or so he left ‘service’ and started for himself as an
insurance-collector (most depressing of occupations) he had a fair
knowledge of gardening and a fair artistic ability at his command. He
married, and joining the Socialist movement became one of our most
lively and adventurous spirits. The departure of the Fearnehoughs gave
me the opportunity of offering their place at Millthorpe to him (and his
family)—which he accepted as a joyful exchange from the dismal trade of
eternally dunning the needy denizens of mean streets for their funeral
and coffin monies.
With his arrival at Millthorpe things took on a more lively air there.
His knowledge of gardening was a decided help, and the financial side of
the venture—if not exactly a success from the purely commercial point of
view—did certainly under the circumstances (absence of any rent, etc.)
yield a small profit to the good. He took up cordially with the
sandal-making, which I had at first carried on alone, and which came in
useful in winter when the outdoor work was slack; and he added
bee-keeping to our activities. My literary work and connections were
increasing, and the place became more social, and more especially
socialistic, than it had been before—so much so indeed that the country
folk (or some of them at any rate) became a little alarmed!
A year or two after George Adams’ arrival the Parish Councils Act came
into operation, and the first election was the cause of much excitement
in the villages. Adams and I—though knowing perfectly well that we had
no chance of success—decided—chiefly for the fun of the thing—to come
forward as candidates; and almost a panic ensued among the larger
farmers and the parson as to what we might possibly do or propose.
Strange stories were circulated of the Socialist programme, and of the
expenses into which the community would certainly be plunged if it were
adopted. But the finishing touch to our chances was given by an election
address printed and circulated by one candidate of decidedly
Conservative type, in which he did not hesitate to say that “it is
reported publicly in Holmesfield that one of our opponents advocates the
burning of the Bible, and also working on the Sabbath Day.” After that
we had no prospect of success! _Which_ of us two was really pointed at
in this accusation we never quite knew, though we entered into a sort of
friendly rivalry for the honour. But the printed card containing the
address I retain to this day, and it is a treasured possession.
Adams was certainly not mealy-mouthed, and I am afraid he made very
blasphemous remarks at times, but his intense sense of fun and his
twinkling delight over ‘good stories’ quite redeemed any such
deficiencies. His courageous humour was all the more remarkable because,
poor thing, he was always suffering from ill-health. Dating from the
early life which I have described, his internal arrangements, as can
easily be imagined, never worked really properly; and at times he would
suffer a lot of pain, and become seriously emaciated. How he managed to
keep up his gardening and other activities in spite of frequent illness
was always a wonder; but his vivid imagination carried him on, and if he
were downcast at times, new plans and enterprises were sure to come in
and disperse the pessimistic mood.
The gardening work, however, at Millthorpe _was_ too much for his slight
frame; and after some five years’ stay there he elected to retire with
his family into a cottage not far off in the same parish and devote
himself to the sandal-trade and to the occasional sale of his
water-colour drawings. This he did; and after remaining for four or five
years moved on to the Letchworth Garden City where his labours and his
personality were much appreciated, and where he occupied a little home
of his own until his death in 1910.
The Adams’ left Millthorpe early in February ’98; and the next
day—trundling with the help of two boys all his worldly goods in a
handcart over the hills, and through a disheartening blizzard of
snow—George Merrill arrived. This extraordinary being, in many ways so
kindred a spirit to my own, had now been known to me for some years. I
had met him first on the outskirts of Sheffield immediately after my
return from India, and had recognized at once a peculiar intimacy and
mutual understanding. Bred in the slums quite below civilization, but of
healthy parentage of comparatively rustic origin, he had grown so to
speak entirely out of his own roots; and a singularly affectionate,
humorous, and swiftly intuitive nature had expanded along its own
lines—subject of course to some of the surrounding conditions, but
utterly untouched by the prevailing conventions and proprieties of the
upper world. Always—even in utmost poverty—clean and sweet in person and
neat in attire, he was attractive to most people; and children (of whom
he was especially fond) would congregate round him. Yet being by
temperament loving and even passionate—to a degree indeed which
sometimes scandalized the “unco’ guid”—he was, it may safely be said,
never ‘respectable.’ Fortunately he was either too careless or too
unconscious of public opinion to trouble much about that; and despite
the shafts of occasional criticism he remained always fairly assured of
himself—with the same sort of unconscious assurance that a plant or an
animal may have in its own nature. What struck me most, however, on my
first meeting with him, was the pathetic look of wistfulness in his
face. Whatever his experiences up to then may have been, it assured me
that the desire of his _heart_ was still unsatisfied.
To George Merrill the arrival at Millthorpe was the fulfilment of a
dream; and a blizzard ten times as bad as the actual one would not I
believe have daunted him. The departure of the Adams’ had left the house
largely denuded of furniture, and for some days we bivouacked with a
trestle table for meals and a sanded floor. By degrees we got things
into order, acquired the necessaries of life and comfort; and started
housekeeping on a new footing. For seven years the possibility of this
arrangement had I believe wavered before George’s eyes, and it had
certainly been considered by me. But we had hardly spoken about it. It
was too remote. On my side other arrangements and engagements precluded
the plan; on his, the various situations he had found—once in a
newspaper office, once in an hotel, and lastly in an ironworks—were not
to be lightly thrown aside. It was only now, when the Adams’ were
leaving and George at the same time was out of work, that the Fates
pointed favorably and the thing was done.
[Illustration:
GEORGE MERRILL.
(_Photo: Lena Connell._)
]
If the Fates pointed favorably I need hardly say that my friends (with a
few exceptions) pointed the other way! I knew of course that George had
an instinctive genius for housework, and that in all probability he
would keep house better than most women would. But most of my friends
thought otherwise. They drew sad pictures of the walls of my cottage
hanging with cobwebs, and of the master unfed and neglected while his
assistant amused himself elsewhere. They neither knew nor understood the
facts of the case. Moreover they had sad misgivings about the moral
situation. A youth who had spent much of his early time in the purlieus
of public-houses and in society not too reputable would do me no credit,
and would only by my adoption be confirmed in his own errant ways. Such
was their verdict. For myself if I entertained any of these misgivings
it was but very faintly. Of the fellow’s essential goodness I felt no
doubt. What rather troubled me was the question whether _he_ would be
able to endure the dulness and quiet of a country life.
With a remarkably good ear for music, and a sympathetic baritone voice,
he had a ready talent which would have taken him far on the music-hall
stage. In fact I hardly know how it was that he did not find a vocation
on that stage. Anyhow he was known in not a few circles for his musical
quips and his comic or sentimental songs; and was pretty familiar with
the doings and _personnel_ of the theatres. To take such an one away
into the depths of rustic life might have been a great mistake. Probably
if this had been the prevailing side of his character it _would_ have
been a mistake. As it was the move proved a complete success. In a few
months or a year my friend was quite acclimatized, and while enjoying
(like myself) a day or two in town was always genuinely glad to get back
again to our little home in Cordwell Valley.
As I have said, the families I had with me before were both kindly and
good sorts, and in their different ways helpful and useful. But a time
had come with the growing expansion of my work when it became quite
impossible to continue running things on the old footing, and quite
necessary for me to have the house really at my own command. The arrival
of George Merrill rendered this possible. And immediately a new order of
things began. Merrill from the first developed quite a talent for
housework. He soon picked up the necessary elements of cookery,
vegetarian or otherwise; he carried on the arts of washing, baking and
so forth with address and dispatch; he took pride in making the place
look neat and clean, and insisted on decorating every room that was in
use with flowers. I, for my part, finally gave up the market garden
business and contracted the garden ground into merely sufficient to
supply the needs of the house. This I cultivated partly myself and
partly with the occasional help of an outsider; and in addition I made
it a rule to dust my own study and light the fire in it every morning.
These little garden and household works—if not amounting to much—I have
still always found very helpful and rather pleasant—as giving the bodily
side of life some decent expression, and at the same time rendering the
mental perspective more just.
Thus we settled down, two bachelors: keeping the mornings intact for
pretty close and rigorous work; and the afternoons and evenings for more
social recreation. As a rule I find the housekeeper who is a little
particular and ‘house-proud’ is inclined, not unnaturally, to be
somewhat set against visitors—especially those who may bring some amount
of dirt and dishevelment with them. But George—though occasionally
disposed that way—was so genuinely sociable and affectionate by nature
that the latter tendency overcame the former. The only people he could
not put up with were those whom he suspected (sometimes unjustly) of
being pious or puritanical. For these he had as keen a _flair_ as the
orthodox witch-finder used to have for heretics; and I am afraid he was
sometimes rude to them. On one occasion he was standing at the door of
our cottage, looking down the garden brilliant in the sun, when a
missionary sort of man arrived with a tract and wanted to put it in his
hand. “Keep your tract,” said George. “I don’t want it.” “But don’t you
wish to know the way to heaven?” said the man. “No, I don’t,” was the
reply, “can’t you see that _we’re in heaven here_—we don’t _want_ any
better than this, so go away!” And the man turned and fled. Like the
archdeacon in Eden Phillpotts’ _Human Boy_ “he flew and was never heard
of again.”
No doubt his objection to the pious and puritanical was returned with
interest by their objection to him. Whatever faults or indiscretions he
may have been guilty of, they were occasionally (in true provincial
style) fastened on and magnified and circulated about as grave scandals.
It was on such occasions however that the real affection of the country
people for us showed itself, and they breathed slaughter against our
assailants. George in fact was accepted and one may say beloved by both
my manual worker friends and my more aristocratic friends. It was only
the middling people who stumbled over him; and they did not so much
matter! Anyhow our lives had become necessary to each other, so that
what any one said was of little importance.
It thus became possible to realize in some degree a dream which I had
had in mind for some time—that of making Millthorpe a _rendezvous_ for
all classes and conditions of society. I had by this time made
acquaintances and friends among all the tribes and trades of manual
workers, as well as among learned and warlike professions. Architects,
railway clerks, engine-drivers, signalmen, naval and military officers,
Cambridge and Oxford dons, students, advanced women, suffragettes,
professors and provision-merchants, came into touch in my little house
and garden; parsons and positivists, printers and authors, scythesmiths
and surgeons, bank managers and quarrymen, met with each other. Young
colliers from the neighboring mines put on the boxing-gloves with sprigs
of aristocracy; learned professors sat down to table with farm-lads.
Not, thank heaven! that this happened all in the lump; but little by
little and year by year my friends of various degrees and shades got to
know each other—and this was a real satisfaction to me. Many lady
friends also came to stay with us—some of them unmarried (which may, who
knows? have been a cause for scandal); and not a few married couples who
liked our way of life and enjoyed talking over questions of household
arrangement and simplification.
Of course, after reading Thoreau’s _Walden_, whatever simplifications I
may have effected in my own household management seemed very negligible
and unimportant. Still I felt that some move in that direction, and some
propaganda on the subject, was really needed. I tried hard to get some
lady friend or other—who would probably understand household affairs
much better than I—to write about the subject; but tried in vain. None
would take it up. And so ultimately I was reduced to writing on the
question myself—in _England’s Ideal_ and elsewhere.
To-day I feel the importance of the subject as much as—perhaps more
than—I did then. I certainly often wish that our household life, plain
as it is, was even more plain. But I find that Time—mere Time—has a
sinister effect in complicating life. Things arrive, and cannot so
easily be got rid of again. Presents are made by well-meaning people,
and cannot very well be returned to the donors; new habitudes of life
are grafted on the old ones without actually displacing the latter; the
wheel of life turns one way, like a ratchet, but will not turn back
again; and so the complications grow and the embarrassments
multiply—often to such a degree that they become almost unendurable; and
one realizes at last why Death came into the world, and how necessary as
a Deliverer of souls and a loosener of mortal knots he is. For myself I
can truly say that the Waste Paper Basket stands as a signal of one of
my greatest pleasures; and that when I feel depressed (which is not very
often) I go about the house and hunt up things to destroy or give
away—after which ritual act I feel ever so much better and happier.
Simplicity and plainness of life are necessary, on account of the
frightful waste of time and strength which the opposite policy entails—a
waste which is obviously becoming daily worse and worse. Nor is it
necessary to point out that if you employ _servants_ to keep all these
beggarly elements of life in order for you, instead of looking after
them yourself, you still only waste your time and strength in securing
(or appropriating in some way) the money with which you pay those
servants, as well as in the extra labour and anxiety of looking after
the said servants—a state of affairs probably worse than the first.
Plainness again is necessary from foundation considerations of humanity
and democracy. To live in opulent and luxurious surroundings is to erect
a fence between yourself and the mass-world which no selfrespecting
manual worker will pass. It is consequently to stultify yourself and to
lose some of the best that the world can give.
Thirdly, from mere considerations of health the thing is necessary. My
Japanese friend, Sanshiro Ishikawa, calls our houses _prisons_. Plain
food, the open air, the hardiness of sun and wind, are things
practically unobtainable in a complex ménage.
And lastly, and most important, the complexity of material possessions
and demands all around one almost inevitably has the effect of stifling
the life of the heart and of the spirit. “The thorns sprang up and
choked them.” The endless distraction of material cares, the endless
temptation of material pleasures, inevitably has the effect of
paralysing the great free life of the affections and of the soul. One
loses the most precious thing the world can give—the great freedom and
romance of finding expression and utterance for one’s most intimate self
in the glorious presence of Nature and one’s fellows.
X
MILLTHORPIANA
What I have just said might seem to suggest a sort of perpetual
garden-party going on at Millthorpe. But this of course was by no means
the case, and for weeks at a time we would often be quiet enough. A
distance of four miles from the nearest railway-station is a good
defence; especially in winter with snow on the ground; also the general
rule of not seeing visitors till the afternoon. Still we were liable to
incursions. To Job are ascribed the pregnant words (xxxi. 35) “O that
mine adversary had written a book!” And I am afraid that I had in some
such way laid myself open to attack. The ubiquitous American who (to
adopt the style of Bernard Shaw) only stayed in England to visit
Millthorpe and Stratford-on-Avon, was much in evidence. And faddists of
all sorts and kinds considered me their special prey. I don’t know what
I had done to deserve this—but so it was. Vegetarians, dress reformers,
temperance orators, spiritualists, secularists, anti-vivisectionists,
socialists, anarchists—and others of very serious mien and
character—would call and insist in the most determined way on my joining
their crusades—so that sometimes I had almost to barricade myself
against them. A friend suggested (and the idea was not a bad one) that I
should put up at the gate a board bearing the legend “To the Asylum” on
it. Then the real lunatics would probably avoid the neighborhood.
Nevertheless on the whole we got a good deal of fun out of these
incursions, and occasionally some real and solid advance.
On one occasion—it was when the Fearnehoughs were living with me—we were
sitting quietly at our humble dinner of carrots or what-not, in the
middle of the day, when I saw two young ladies pass the window. There
came a knock at the door, and I opened it. There stood a very
good-looking elegantly dressed girl of twenty-three or twenty-four, with
terracotta frock and gainsborough hat, rather Londony in style; with a
less showy companion beside her. Said number one: “Does Mr. Carp——” and
then breaking off, “Oh! I see you are Mr. Carpenter. You know, I heard
you once speak at the Fabian Society. I belong to the Fabian Society.
And my cousin and I were near here, and thought perhaps we might call.”
“Very glad to see you, I’m sure.”
“And is this _really_ where you carry on your Simplification of Life?
Oh! Madge! isn’t it interesting” (this last thrown in as an
interjection).
“I don’t know about that; but won’t you come in and sit down?”
“Thank you so much, I should be glad of a rest.”
“Will you have a bit of cake and a glass of milk?”
“Oh no! but I _should_ like a piece of dry bread.”
“Well, you need not ‘simplify’ so much as that.”
“Oh! but I am so _fond_ of dry bread!”
Then it came out that the Uncle and Aunt were waiting outside, so they
had to be got in, and ultimately the party were all safely landed in my
study—where after the simplification trouble had been got over, we made
a reasonable acquaintance with each other.
[Illustration:
MILLTHORPE COTTAGE AND ORCHARD.
(Holmesfield on the hill above.)
]
But I never afterwards quite forgot that expression “Is this where you
_carry on_ your?” etc.—as if one hung a flag out of the window.
On another occasion, it being summer-time, a party of forty
Spiritualists came over from Manchester to spend Sunday at a neighboring
farmhouse, and with the intention of digging me out in the course of the
afternoon. Providence however interposed and sent _pelting_ rain all
day, and the poor things having to walk several miles from the station
arrived at their farmhouse simply drenched; and when they had had their
dinner, and partially dried their clothes, were naturally in no mood or
condition to turn out again—with the exception of ten or twelve of the
more heroic, who came on and called on me. What I had done to merit this
honour I do not know, as I had had very little experience of
Spiritualism; but they sat round and told me all sorts of wonderful
stories. In the middle of it all, a plashing was heard outside in the
rain, a knock at the door, and a young lady _sandal_-enthusiast arrived.
She was a neatlooking well-made girl, in sandals, with bare,
unstockinged feet, and she wore a simple navy blue serge dress; but of
course she was wringing wet. We had not seen her before; her name was
Swanhilda Something (somehow it sounded appropriate); she had set out to
walk all the way from Sheffield (nine miles). On the way the rain had
come on, and the sandals had nearly come off. She had no umbrella or
waterproof; and she was decidedly more than damp. Mrs. Adams, who was
then in charge of our ménage, took her upstairs and gave her a change,
and she presently joined the Spiritualist party, looking it must be
confessed somewhat like a ghost; but full of spirit and pluck. Her pluck
(as I found afterwards) as a dress-reformer was really splendid. On this
occasion, after tea, she refused all offers of a bed for the night,
donned her still damp clothes and her sandals, and joining the forty
Spiritualists, they all splashed back across the hills to the station.
One of the pathetic things of the Socialist movement is the way in which
it has caused not a few people of upper class birth and training to try
and leave their own ranks and join those of the workers, when—by their
very birth and training being unable to bridge the gulf—the result has
been that they, belonging neither to one class nor the other, outcasts
from one, and more or less pitied or ridiculed by the other, have fallen
into a kind of limbo between. I have known several cases of young men of
this kind. One of them I may describe under the name of ‘Bryan.’ His
father, being a country squire, wanted Bryan to go into the army. The
boy had ideas of his own about the matter, and simply refused.
Differences ensued, and ultimately the father offered him £100 a year
for three years, and told him to find his _own_ way into life. The youth
drifted to London, fell in with the Socialists at a street corner,
became inspired with their ‘cause,’ and sought to identify himself
thenceforth with the working class. He came and spent a year or more in
our neighborhood at Millthorpe. He was a good fellow—his heart, as they
say, in the right place; but whether owing to the wretched character of
his training, or to native want of skill or perseverance, he never could
or would shape himself to do any solid work. He would dabble a little at
the joiner’s bench, or in the garden, or with the woodmen in the
woods—but only a little. When we urged him to learn some one trade
thoroughly—if only cobbling or cabinet-making—he would always say “Ah!
but things will be different when the Revolution comes—we shall all go
barefoot, or these things will be done by machinery”; and so one got no
nearer any practical result. On one occasion being in the neighborhood
of his family home, I went and called on his father, thinking I might be
of some use, but found him in a state of despair.
“Oh, Bryan,” he said, “I don’t know what has taken the boy. Why the
other day he came to see us in our London house, and the first thing he
said was ‘Father, all these houses ought to be burnt down.’
“‘Burnt down,’ I replied; ‘are you mad?’
“‘Well, they _ought_ to be,’ he said, ‘and the people made to do some
honest work instead of idling their lives away on other folk’s labour.’
“‘And pray what sort of work would you set them to, young man?’
“‘Oh, anything,’ he said, ‘any straightforward work like mending the
roads or breaking stones.’
“‘Then I suppose you Socialists would take an old man like me, seventy
years of age, and turn me out of house and home, and set me to break
stones on the roads—nice “saviours of society” you are!’
“‘Well,’ he replied, ‘of course there would be exceptions—I daresay we
should allow you a pension, say £100 a year, on account of your age and
infirmity!’
“Think of that, Mr. Carpenter, think of your own son offering you £100 a
year, and in the name of these rascally Socialists!”
Needless to say I deeply sympathized—(I don’t think in fact he suspected
me of being a Socialist)—but I saw that nothing useful could be done,
and at an early opportunity I retired.
Bryan drifted out to Topolobampo, a socialist colony on the Gulf of
California; and when that broke up he floated about the borders of
Mexico and California, living on chance luck and occasional remittances
until family changes brought him finally home.
Another case of a somewhat similar kind was that of a young R.E.
captain, Captain Peterson, let us call him, who had read Tolstoy and
convinced himself that a military life was wrong, and that he must leave
the Army. Being at the time Adjutant of Volunteers in a neighboring
town, he used to come up to Millthorpe to discuss these questions and as
to how he should ordain his life when once free. I admired his
enthusiasm, but felt obliged to warn him not to be in too great a hurry;
for it was easy to see that in practical matters he was a mere babe.
Certainly the Army was not the place for him. Anything but ‘correct’ in
dress, with generally a large gap between his waistcoat and his
trousers, and again another between his trousers and his boots, with
projecting schoolboy ears and red nose, he was just the man who would be
unmercifully chaffed or even ‘ragged’ by his fellow-officers. But on the
other hand his capacity for battling his way in the world, or for
earning his own living, was evidently of the smallest; and his schemes
for the future were of the most wild-cat kind. He was going to build a
house—but as he would have no money to pay for it, he should get
together a little group of workmen (who desired to improve their minds)
on the condition that he should teach them elementary mathematics,
surveying, etc., during one half of the day, while they should set
bricks and mortar for him during the other half! (A charming scheme! but
I think I see the British workman agreeing to it!) His house, according
to the plan which he drew out of his pocket, was more like a greenhouse
than anything else—with walls and roof largely glass; and when I
suggested that it might prove rather hot in summer (!) he seemed to have
no difficulty in imagining plentiful vines trailing overhead, with
foliage and hanging bunches of grapes, to ward off the sun’s rays. For
the floor of his room he had a device of which he was quite proud. “It
is often convenient,” he said, “to have _two_ carpets—a rough one for
ordinary use, and a better one for special occasions.”
I assented to this rather dubious premise, for the sake of seeing what
would follow!
“Well” he continued “my idea is to sew these two carpets together like a
roller towel, and have them passing over rollers at the two opposite
ends of the room, so that one carpet should be _on_ the floor, and the
other _underneath_. Then, you know, when you saw visitors coming, all
you would have to do would be to turn the crank (suiting the action to
the word), and you would have your best carpet on in a jiffey!”
Too amazed and speechless to make any objection, I could only see with
my mind’s eye, a cottage piano and a table and an armchair or two gaily
sailing across the room, as the crank was being turned.
“Meanwhile” he went on “as carpets are always wanting brushing I intend
to have brushes _fixed_ underneath the floor, so that every time the
carpet is changed it will be automatically brushed. Nothing could be
simpler.”
It would have been cruel to make further objections to schemes so indeed
transparently simple. But they will give the reader an idea of the
difficulties and dangers attending the metamorphosis from the condition
of an army officer to that of a private in the peaceful regiments of
humanity. What has become now of our friend Peterson I cannot certainly
say. That he nobly and consistently abandoned his life in the army I
know; but whether he succeeded in getting a house built on the
Principles of Euclid is doubtful.
Peterson was also connected with an occurrence which at the time was
rather mysterious, and caused us some puzzlement. My friend George
Merrill had come to live with me, and we two were occupying the house
alone. One evening, late in the summer, we had just returned from
Sheffield, and tired had thrown ourselves for a moment into chairs, when
almost at once a knock came at the door—so soon indeed that we wondered
how the visitor could have been so close behind. George went to the door
and then turning to me said “A lady wants to see you.” At once a voice
from outside said very distinctly, “A _woman_, if you please.” Roused to
a sense of serious events impending, I went forward, and saw, as well as
the falling dusk would allow, what appeared to be a fairly
pleasant-looking woman of about thirty-five, but somewhat dishevelled
and untidy in dress; and said—
“Can I do anything for you?”
“You can,” she replied, “I’m lost, I’m an outcast from the world, will
you befriend me?”
“I will if I can,” I said, “but tell me first about yourself—what is
your name? do you come from Sheffield?”
“You,” she exclaimed, “Mr. Carpenter, the author of _Towards
Democracy_—and you won’t help me, till you know my name and all about
me!”
I looked at George with a wild surmise. “Certainly,” I said, “I can’t
very well help you till I know what is the matter.”
“I tell you,” she rejoined with increasing emphasis, “I’m lost, I’m an
outcast, I can never go back to the world again. Ah!” (pointing to the
garden and the rising moon) “if I could only live here in this beautiful
scene, with you, far away from the town and all its belongings. Mr.
Carpenter, will you befriend me?”
What an appeal to a lone bachelor! Luckily I resisted the temptation to
a too ready sympathy, and leaning forward said again, “But still you
have not told me anything about yourself and your troubles.”
As I did so I caught a distinct and strong waft of liquor.
“Is it not enough that I am lost?” she replied.
The situation was really embarrassing. At last I said:—
“Well, you know, I and my friend have only just come back from
Sheffield, and are very tired; will you come again to-morrow, or any day
you like to name, when we shall have more time, and tell me your whole
story.”
At this she threw up her head with a kind of snort, and said: “And you
are Mr. Carpenter! and you say come to-morrow—and to-morrow perhaps I
shall be _dead_!” And thus saying she strode off to the gate with the
air of a tragedy queen.
Nevertheless for some days we could not help feeling a little
uncomfortable. The people at the neighboring inn told us that she had
come from the Sheffield direction during the afternoon, and had been
hanging about waiting for our return for some hours, doubtless had been
in the garden on our arrival—which accounted for her sudden
appearance—but no one knew who she was; nor did tidings of her, or of
any mischance to her, reach us for some weeks—till at last the memory of
the incident died out.
Then one afternoon, the said Captain Peterson having turned up and being
engaged in expounding his theories over a cup of tea—my attention (which
had quite wandered from his conversation) was suddenly caught by the
words “and there’s that woman, she gets drunk, and then comes to my
house, and won’t go away—it’s very awkward!—and she has read your
_Towards Democracy_ too.”
“That’s the woman,” I exclaimed, “tell me about her!” and a few
explanations soon disclosed the fact that my mysterious visitor was the
wife of Peterson’s colour-sergeant—a decent sort of body apparently, and
all right except for occasional drinking-bouts, when she became liable
to these vespertinal excursions!
During the first year or so after Merrill’s arrival, and for a year or
two before that, we had a young Russian, or Russian Jew, staying in the
house. Invalided with consumption he had somehow taken refuge with us.
He went by the name of Max Flint. He was of that fine and delicate type
of Jew (somewhat perhaps like Mordecai in George Eliot’s _Daniel
Deronda_) which one associates with Polish origin—a sensitive face with
slender nose (not the Jewish proboscis), arched fine eyebrows and brown
pensive eyes, well-formed features on the whole, and hands the
same—something refined and almost womanly about him. He was handy in a
house, and skilful with a needle; for indeed he was a tailor by trade.
His history is worth relating if only because typical of hundreds and
thousands of similar cases.
[Illustration:
G. M. FEEDING THE FOWLS.
]
His father, who was a Jewish butcher by trade, “very religious”
according to Max “and always lending money and always losing it,” lived
at Slobodka across the river from Kovno, and not far from the German
frontier. Slobodka was the Jewish quarter and consisted of small wooden
houses, two stories at most, but even so not unfrequently each occupied
by more than one family. Noah Flynck however and his wife and the eight
children were proud to have a house all to themselves. The mother died
early but Max remembered her telling stories in which she recalled the
subjugation of Poland. How Polish ‘gentlemen,’ landowners, took refuge
in Slobodka, were hunted down by the Russian soldiers and _hanged_, and
their lands appropriated—especially one well-known old story of a Polish
noble who concealed himself in the interior of a haystack. The troops
surrounded and searched his house and farmyard, but could not find him,
till at last his little dog (who had smelt him out) was seen scratching
and routing on the top of the stack, and he was betrayed!
When Max was about sixteen or seventeen the terror of the Russian
conscription came upon him. Few people realize what this nightmare is to
the Russian peasantry. Even in the late Japanese war, villages were
surrounded at midnight by Cossacks and police, houses if not opened
immediately were broken into, men roused from sleep, and all between the
ages of twenty-one and forty-three taken away, in most cases never to be
heard of again! In Max’s time it was as bad, if not worse. The same
thing went on. At any moment, at dead of night, the home might be broken
into and plundered—the young men snatched away for ever. Bribes might
defer your fate for a time—but only for a time. As to passports, you
could not move without a passport—even to go from one village to
another.
Max determined—even against old Noah’s wish—to get away to England; and
he managed to effect the escape. There are of course professional
smugglers who undertake this business for you; and Max often told the
story of how he paid three roubles to one of these for the job. He was
instructed to be at a certain village close to the river Memel on a
certain evening. He gave his family the slip, and arrived there to time;
met the agent all right, and with twenty others bound on the same errand
was packed in a stable for the night. Half of the company went off in
the small hours of the morning, but Max and the remaining half had to
remain there all the next day and night till 2 a.m., when the man came
and gave them the signal to follow. They crept through the deserted
street and along the road till they came to the bridge which alone
divided them from Germany. But how to cross this in face of the Russian
sentinel keeping watch at the near end? Needless to say it was a
question of bribes. Of the three roubles the soldier was to have one.
And Max with a kind of glee used to describe how he saw the man sitting
there in his box as they crept by, and pretending to be asleep, yet
visibly peeping with one eye through his fingers to see that _only the
bargained number got through_. Once on the German side they were all
right, and could breathe again freely. They met at an inn, counted up
their remaining monies, and went on in parties together.
Max came to Leeds. Of the hundreds of Russian Jews there he knew a
little about some. He changed his name from Flynck to Flint, to suit the
English ear, and soon settled down into sweated work in a Jewish
tailors’ den.
One must hope and suppose that the move was for the better; but what a
long crucifixion is the life of the people! You escape from the horrors
of the Russian army—from being preyed upon by human and insect vermin,
as well as becoming food for powder—only to sit cross-legged for the
rest of your life in a dirty, evil-smelling workshop, with gas flaring,
stoves superheated (for making the irons hot), and windows all tightly
shut—and that, in the heart of a sad-eyed smoke-ridden manufacturing
town in the North of England. The wages I believe, in Max’s case, were
not so bad as in some such dens, but the ‘drive’ and the pressure were
incessant, the machine-work was exhausting, and the hours amounted to
ten and a half per day. Little wonder that in a few years he developed
the seeds of phthisis, and was practically marked down as its victim.
Turning into a rebel and a hater of the present order (or disorder) of
things, he joined the Socialist club in Leeds and became a worker in the
cause. That led to his abandoning his own religion, lodging with
Christians, and doing such outrageous things as poking the fire or
preparing his own meals on the Sabbath Day—which in turn led to the
Jewish community slandering and persecuting _him_! They threw mud and
stones at him in the streets; and he became an outcast among his own
people. The Jewish girl he was courting refused to consort with him any
more and went off with another man, driving him so mad that (as Max told
me himself) he on one occasion nearly killed her.
It was somewhere about this time that, in connection with the said
Socialist club, I happened to meet him. It was at the deathbed of
another Socialist; and perceiving his distress and evident need of a
change I asked him for a short holiday to Millthorpe. After that he came
again, and again. There was something so gentle and helpful about him
that he was always gratefully received by my friends; and the stories of
his life and times were always interesting. Once or twice I wrote—in my
best German—to his father[18]; and the innocent joy of the old man (in
his replies) was touching. But naturally Max did not get stronger—and a
time came when after being here a week or two he obviously could not go
to work again and had to stay on rather indefinitely. The Adams’ and he
became great friends, and he even helped a little in the sandalwork.
Then later, when this was too laborious for him, he took up
basket-making, and turned out quite a number of useful baskets; and as
many of these were “waste-paper baskets,” one must feel that in this
alone—in the providing receptacles for the printed rubbish of the day—he
performed a useful service! Gradually however he got weaker, and had to
give up all work. Then it became necessary for him to go to a
convalescent Home at Bournemouth; and there after some months he died.
It is often the case that invalids and old people feel themselves a
burden on the household in which they live, think they are no good in
the world, and wish themselves out of the way; and yet all the time the
opposite may be the fact. Often they form a point of real interest in
the house, they call out people’s sympathy and helpfulness, and their
own pluck and sociability under failing health gives courage to others
who are stronger. Something of this was true of Max. Though depressed at
times his quaint and delicate humour was a joy to his friends and
acquaintances. One event, which might have proved prematurely fatal to
him, he would frequently recount with pleasure. It was one Christmas; a
time when the Village Band is in the habit of coming round to each house
in turn and playing its rather fearsome tunes! As it happened Max’s
bedroom, being at one end of the house, was over a more or less open
shed. It was evening and he was composing himself to sleep; when the
band arrived. But, snow being on the ground, their footsteps were not
heard; and the bandmen very naturally disposed themselves, for more
shelter, inside the shed, quite unconscious of course that they were
exactly underneath the bed on which an invalid was sleeping. All of a
sudden they struck up with a tremendous blare “Christians, Awake!” or
some such tune. It was like St. Jerome hearing the last Trump. Poor Max
was nearly lifted out of bed by the shock. For a moment he did not know
whether he was in this world or the next. When he concluded in favour of
this one he found himself lying there in the old bedroom, but his heart
palpitating so violently that, combined with the fit of laughter which
also seized him, he was quite a wreck for some days after.
There was something ironical in the idea of a Christian hymn proving so
nearly fatal to a Jew; but a similar irony, curiously enough, pursued
him to his end at Bournemouth. At the Home there—in order to avoid
unpleasant questionings, and also because to him the matter was of no
importance—he had said nothing about his Jewish connection but had
declared himself a Christian, and had received in a friendly way the
visits of the chaplain. When he died the Home made the usual
arrangements for his interment in the Protestant Cemetery. But—and the
story shows how the Jewish community hangs together—the Jews at Leeds
and Manchester got to know somehow about it all, and telegraphed to the
synagogue at Southampton to stop the infamy of Christian burial. A
deputation came over from Southampton and arrived at the Bournemouth
home only an hour or two before the funeral—to claim the body for
removal to Southampton and burial with Jewish rites. I of course was on
the spot; and a nice position I was in! The matron of the Home and the
Chaplain on the one hand had “always understood” that he was a
Christian; the Chief Rabbi and his friends insisted absolutely that he
was a Jew; the funeral car was already waiting in the yard; and Max
himself lay there in the mortuary chapel with his features in death
finer and paler than ever, and wearing such an expression of high calm
and indifference as might well represent his own actual feeling in the
matter. I, of course, to all the parties concerned was obviously the
“guilty” person—guilty of having got them into such a coil—and they
looked at me with eyes of blame. But—though really just as indifferent
as Max himself—I thought it best to ‘play the game’; and insisted that
as he had openly declared himself a Christian he _was_ a Christian and
should be buried as such. The Jewish party on its side brought arguments
to show that a mere declaration on such a matter counted for nothing;
and soon we plunged into a long discussion which I kept up for some time
in order (partly) to hear what they would say. When I perceived however
how tremendously seriously the Jews took the whole matter, and reflected
also that Max’s father would be broken-hearted if he heard that his son
had been put in a Christian grave, I thought it best to give way. The
Chaplain and the matron agreed, and were indeed quite sensible about it
all—and finally poor Max’s mortal remains were carried off in triumph by
his own people.
In conclusion of this chapter I may relate a curious story which perhaps
helps to show how the elements of real inspiration and of mental
aberration may sometimes get mixed up in the same person.
I had received a letter from London from a man who described himself as
a gold-miner from the Sierra Nevada, saying that he had just arrived in
England, and was wishful to see me, as he had a message to deliver, and
proposing to come on immediately to Millthorpe. As it happened I was
just starting for Glasgow and Edinburgh on a lecturing tour. So I wrote
at once telling him to wait a week for my return, and to employ his time
meanwhile in sight-seeing. But on my return I found to my surprise that
he had already been in the village some days, that he had taken a
lodging, and was awaiting my arrival. The next day, November 21, 1910,
he walked into my yard—obviously an American of a manual worker type,
thin, sandy-haired and tall, with dark clothes and black slouch hat,
somewhat horny-handed, but with a certain refinement of figure and
physiognomy. Also there was a slightly “fallen in” and tired look about
him which puzzled me at the moment, but was soon explained. He began
almost immediately—as soon as we were sat down—telling me a long
story—of which I can only give the outlines.
It seemed that he had been working for a good many years in a gold-mine
(probably as part-owner of it)—a mine up 10,000 feet in the Sierra
Nevada. One day—six years before the events which he was about to
narrate—a strange vision came to him. He had lost his way on the Nevada
sandhills, and was searching about in some anxiety, when a sudden
transformation of the landscape occurred, and he was transported into a
new world, which he could only describe as ‘heaven.’ On several
succeeding occasions the same vision came to him. Meanwhile, he said, he
had been fighting hard against the three great temptations of a miner’s
life—drink, tobacco, and an irascible temper. Each of these troubles in
turn disappeared finally with a sudden deliverance and certain assurance
of success. Then, only a couple of months before coming to England, more
frequent visions came to him, accompanied by voices; and the affair
culminated in his getting hold of Dr. Bucke’s book on _Cosmic
Consciousness_ when he read the chapters about Buddha and Jesus. Then
followed what he described as “seven days of ecstasy, agonizing
ecstasy—tears of peace and joy streaming down my face—in which I saw
_everything, everything_.” After that he read one day in the same book
the chapter on E. C.
Then one morning—as he was going up the mountain to his work from the
camp below (Victor, Colorado), he heard the voices again shouting: “They
came surging up close to my ears, and then faded away into the far
distance, and then came close again—and two of the voices were God’s,
and one was my own [!], and they were shouting _Edward Carpenter, Edward
Carpenter, go and see E. C., go and see_, etc., etc. And I at the same
time was shouting _Brother E. C.—God’s beloved Son, I am coming to
you_.”
[George and I looked at each other again with a wild surmise! Another
case for the Asylum!]
“And all this,” he continued, “kept being repeated as I walked up the
hill, over and over again, till at last it faded away in the distance.
And all the morning over my work I was in tears—tears of joy and
pain—and had to conceal my face from my mates. But as I turned the
crusher I felt enormous strength, and was quite unconscious of effort.”
Then followed all sorts of stories about God telling him to do this and
that, and the Devil telling him to do this and that, and of temptations
and _tests_ to which he had been subjected. But in the end, he said, he
had been impelled to come and see me, and he had come. One day he just
threw down his tools and left them lying there, went and said good-bye
to his mother (and she evidently did not want him to go) and set sail
for England. And now we two (he and I) were to lead a mission round the
world—he had some idea about a new Messiah—and to preach and convert the
nations together.
Things were evidently getting serious! Yet I hardly knew what to do. He
was such a very decent fellow, quiet and kindly and essentially
reasonable, and by no means a fanatic; and most obviously genuine and
spontaneous. I hardly knew how to attack him.
Then George Merrill saved the situation. He asked Grogan (C. E. Grogan
was his name) to have some tea; and the answer gave the needed clue.
“Tea? No, thank you, I haven’t taken tea or any food for three weeks.”
[Afterwards on inquiry at his village-lodgings I found his landlady had
been dreadfully disturbed at his not touching a crumb of anything all
the time he was there.]
“But if you won’t eat, you’ll have a cup of tea, or something to drink?”
“No, nothing—except a glass of water—I haven’t eaten anything for three
weeks, and I don’t think I shall ever eat again.”
The cat was out; and the line of action was clear.
“Look here!” I said, “I quite understand you, and sympathize with your
experiences—and I think indeed you have had some very real experiences,
and some realizations of another kind of consciousness; but you must be
careful, and have some idea of what you are doing. There is no doubt
that sometimes abstinence from food will help to develop internal
faculties. On the other hand to go too far and to weaken the body,
perhaps permanently, may be most foolish, and dangerous. The body is
there to give expression to the soul, and if you have any important
spiritual revelation to express you want all the faculties of your body
in good order for the purpose. Starvation, it is well known, engenders
visions and voices, often of a very delusive character. You must not
give yourself away to all that. How do you know that what you say is of
God is not of the Devil; and _vice versâ_? And how do _I_ know?”
So I went on at him; making him plainly understand that I was not going
to join in his crusade—whatever it was. “Besides,” I said, “I still do
not see what made you come here. You say you have not read any of my
writing—except what was contained in Dr. Bucke’s book. _What do you know
about me?_”
Then he leaped out again. “Oh, I know all about you. _I know that you
will never die!_”
“That is not a very cheerful prospect,” said I, gently laughing.
“Oh, well,” he replied, “you will at any rate live four hundred years.
It is like this: The earth and all that are in it, are from this day
passing gradually into a new and higher plane of existence. That process
will complete itself in four hundred years, and at the end of that time
the earth will be absorbed into the Sun and the ethereal life. A
wonderful period of new life will arrive; and all those who are living
then will be transformed without passing through Death.”
He spoke earnestly and with conviction. I did not oppose him; but warned
him again about going too far with his abstinence, and advised
deliberation in his conclusions. He did not seem inclined to give way
about food—said he thought he should never require it again, and
maintained that the internal breathing (_prana_) came to him with a
wonderful sense of fragrance and refreshment.
He was extraordinarily good; for though I had refused, almost rudely, to
join in his schemes, he took no offence—simply said that he was
satisfied now, that he had given the message he had been told to give,
and would return to America “to-morrow.”
Having then made my negative attitude quite clear, so that there should
be no misunderstanding, I now adopted a positive line; and talked to him
for some little time about experiences of the kind he had described.
Then I went and fetched some books—the _Bhagavat Gita_, some of the
Upanishads, and other works. He had never even heard their names. I
opened the _Bhagavat Gita_, almost at random, and pointed him out a
passage. He almost clapped his hands for joy. “Oh yes, that is exactly
what I feel.” He seized the book, and turned over the pages, pouncing on
passage after passage with delight. “Yes, yes, that is just it!” There
was no doubt about his sincere and instant appreciation. Then I showed
him the passage in the _Bhagavat Gita_ about moderation in eating and
moderation in abstinence; but he did not seem inclined to agree. “I just
do what God tells me.”
Finally I _gave_ him the _Gita_, and some other books of similar
character. And he on his side decided to return to America
“to-morrow”—and insisted on my writing at once for a cab. I did not
attempt to dissuade him—feeling that perhaps he was right—also that his
friends in America would be more satisfied if he returned.
Meanwhile he _looked_ ever so much better than when he came into the
house—and evidently was so—“glad to have carried out what he had to do,”
he said. I told him that on board ship his mind would settle itself; and
he went off.
He wrote from Liverpool next day, saying he was very happy; and a month
or so later from Colorado—in which letter he said, “The _unseen force_
which caused me to quit eating caused me to begin again (as suddenly as
I quit). My fast was merely a part of the _lesson_ which is continually
before me.” Since then I have heard from him from time to time. In one
letter he says: “I am feeling fine, and slowly but surely am I (as a
child) permitted to learn the _a, b, c_ of _real life_. It is my belief
that we are all permitted to pierce the veil that conceals _real Life_
from our view, only accordingly as our minds are ready to absorb the
knowledge gained thereby. From a point of view of Cosmic Consciousness I
am beginning my life all over again, and am only beginning in a small
way to see and understand some of the simpler truths of the same; but I
have lost much of that feeling of haste, and learning with the idea in
mind that I have all eternity to learn in. My folk and relatives all
glad that I am home and quit my wanderings for the present. I think I
shall engage in mining again in a small way. This mining camp is about
10,000 feet altitude, and the weather is beautiful, plenty sunshine, and
not cold winter weather.”
In his latest to me he says: “You will remember when I visited you I
said you would never die. I still feel same way and see no chance of my
dying, personally it is a matter of indifference whether I live or die.
If I must die in order to live again, so be it, but may we not be
permitted to enjoy eternal life here and now? I think so. I think the
Harvest of the world is ripe, but such great changes are slow and almost
unnoticeable and I think overlap each other, so that _harvest_ or death
of one thing is the Birth of another, that is consciousness of Eternal
Life becoming more general. Well, I think that I have written enough
that you may see the drift of my mind, and I think that is what you
want. Love to Mr. Merrill and yourself, yours truly, C. E. GROGAN.”
To which words of Grogan’s I would only add: “No doubt we _are_
permitted to enjoy eternal life here and now—even in this tiniest
corner, wherever it may be, of space and time.”
XI
THE STORY OF MY BOOKS
The fate of my books has been interesting—at any rate to myself! Leaving
aside _Narcissus and Other Poems_, and _Moses: a Drama_—which were
written in early days at Cambridge, and were only, so to speak,
exercises in literature and efforts to vie with then-accepted
models—_Towards Democracy_, of course, has been the start-point and
kernel of all my later work, the centre from which the other books have
radiated. Whatever obvious weaknesses and defects it may present, I have
still always been aware that it was written from a different _plane_
from the other works, from some predominant mood or consciousness
superseding the purely intellectual. Indeed, so strong has been this
feeling that, though tempted once or twice to make alterations from the
latter point of view, I have never really ventured to do so; and now,
after more than thirty years since the inception of the book, I am
entirely glad to think that I have not.
It is a curious question—and one which literary criticism has never yet
tackled—why it is that certain books, or certain passages in books, will
bear reading over and over again without becoming stale; that you can
return to them after months or years and find entirely new meanings in
them which had escaped you on the first occasion; and that this can even
go on happening time after time, while other books and passages are
exhausted at the first reading and need never be looked at again. How is
it possible that the same phrase or concatenation of words should bear
within itself meaning behind meaning, horizon after horizon of
significance and suggestion? Yet such undoubtedly is the case. Portions
of the poetic and religious literature of most countries, and large
portions of books like _Leaves of Grass_, the _Bhagavat Gita_, Plato’s
_Banquet_, Dante’s _Divina Commedia_, have this inexhaustible
germinative quality. One returns to them again and again, and
continually finds fresh interpretations lurking beneath the old and
familiar words.
I imagine that the explanation is somewhat on this wise: That in the
case of passages that are exhausted at a first reading (like statements
say of Church doctrine or political or scientific theory) we are simply
being presented with an intellectual ‘view’ of some fact; but that in
the other cases in some mysterious way the words succeed in conveying
the fact itself. It is like the difference between the actual solid
shape of a mountain and the different views of the mountain obtainable
from different sides. They are two things of a different order and
dimension. It almost seems as if some mountain-facts of our experience
_can_ be imaged forth by words in such a way that the phrases themselves
retain this quality of solidity, and consequently their outlines of
meaning vary according to the angle at which the reader approaches them
and the variation of the reader’s mind. None of the outlines are final,
and the solid content of the phrase remains behind and eludes them all.
Anyhow the matter is a most mysterious one; but as a fact it remains,
and demands explanation.
I have felt somehow with regard to _Towards Democracy_ that—while my
other books were merely subsidiary and mainly represented ‘views’ and
‘aspects’—this one (with all its imperfections) had that central quality
and kind of other-dimensional solidity to which I have been alluding.
And my experiences in writing it have corroborated that feeling.
I have spoken elsewhere about the considerable period of gestation and
suffering which preceded the birth of this book; nor were its troubles
over when it made its first appearance in the world. The first edition,
printed and published by John Heywood of Manchester, at my own expense,
fell quite flat. The infant showed hardly any signs of life. The Press
ignored the book or jeered at it. I can only find one notice by a London
paper of the first year of its publication, and that is by the old
sixpenny _Graphic_ (of August 11, 1883), saying—not without a sort of
pleasant humour—that the phrases are “suggestive of a lunatic Ollendorf,
with stage directions,” and ending up with the admission that “the book
is truly mystic, wonderful—like nothing so much as a nightmare after too
earnest a study of the Koran!” The _Saturday Review_ got hold of the
_second_ edition, and devoted a long article (March 27, 1886) to slating
it and my socialist pamphlets (_Desirable Mansions_, etc.) as instances
of “the kind of teaching which is now commonly set before the more
ignorant classes, and which is probably accepted in good faith by not a
few among them. A haphazard collection of fallacies, to which the
semblance of a basis is given by half a dozen truisms, flavored by a
little Carlylese, or by diluted extracts of Walt Whitman ... such is the
compound which ‘cultivated’ Socialism offers as a new and saving faith
to the working classes, and of which the works before us offer a good
example.” Then follow severe comments on my absurd views about Usury and
the manners and customs of the Rich, and finally a long quotation from
_Towards Democracy_; of which book the writer says: “And this sort of
thing goes on through two hundred and fifty pages, the blank monotony of
which is only relieved here and there by a few passages which it would
be undesirable to quote, and which it is not wholesome to read.”
The London Press—when it did deign to notice my work—followed the same
sort of lead; and it was left (as usual) to comparative outsiders to
make any real discovery in the matter. Curiously enough, a very young
man (George Moore-Smith) in a long article in the _Cambridge Review_ of
November 14, 1883, led the way in drawing serious attention to the first
edition. The _Indian Review_ (Wm. Digby) of May 1885 had a remarkably
sympathetic and intelligent notice of the second edition, and I owe much
to my friend W. P. Byles’ introduction of the book to Northern readers
through the _Bradford Observer_ (of March 19, 1886); also to an article
by H. Rowlandson in _The Dublin University Review_ for April, 1886.
With the third edition (1892) a certain amount of timid acknowledgment
set in. Notices in a few more or less well-known papers were friendly
though brief and cautious, as with a scent of danger. The fourth and
complete edition did not appear till ten years later (1902), and by that
time the book had established itself. It had ceased to demand
Press-appreciations, favorable or otherwise; and so the critics—_very
luckily for themselves_—escaped, and have escaped, without ever having
had to give any sort of full pronouncement or verdict on the book!
To return to the first edition. I had only five hundred copies printed;
but at the end of two years when I had gathered material enough for a
second edition, there was still a hundred or so of these on hand. All
the same I did not feel any serious misgiving. I caused a thousand
copies to be printed of the second edition (260 pp.), sent them round to
the Press again, and waited. This was in 1885. If anything the reception
accorded was worse than before—in a sense worse—because there was more
of it! By 1892—when I needed to print a third edition—only some seven
hundred copies of the second edition had gone. Seven hundred in seven
years! The prospects were not good, yet I did not feel depressed. I had
certainly not expected any great sale; and there were even signs of
improvement. My _other_ books were beginning to attract a little
attention. It was obviously also hard on this book to have it published
in Manchester. So I determined to go to London. There was no possible
chance of getting a publisher there to take it as his own speculation;
so I went to Mr. Fisher Unwin and asked him to print at my expense and
sell it on commission—which he naturally was quite willing to do! The
book had now grown to 368 pp., and its price had to be raised from 2s.
6d. to 3s. 6d.; but its sales actually improved, and for two or three
years ranged at about two hundred copies a year. I began to think it was
just possible that my little bark would navigate itself, that it would
float out on deeper waters and into the world-current; when something
disastrous happened which left it in the shallows for quite a few years
longer.
That something was the Oscar Wilde trial or trials, which took place in
the spring of 1895; but to understand how they affected _Towards
Democracy_ I must go back a little. Early in 1894 I started writing a
series of pamphlets on sex-questions—those questions which at that time
were generally tabooed and practically not discussed at all, though they
now have become almost an obsession of the public mind. As pamphlets of
that kind would have no chance with the ordinary publishers, I got them
printed and issued by the Manchester Labour Press—a little association
for the spread of Socialist literature, on the committee of which I was.
The pamphlets were _Sex-love_, _Woman_, and _Marriage_; and they sold
pretty well—three or four thousand copies each. Encouraged by their
success I began early in ’95 to put them together, and add fresh matter
to them, till I had a book ready for publication—which I afterwards
entitled _Love’s Coming-of-Age_. This book I offered to Fisher Unwin (as
he was already selling _Towards Democracy_) and he accepted
it—undertaking to produce the book himself and give me a fair Royalty.
His Agreement was signed in June 1895.
Meanwhile, in January 1895 (though dated 1894) I issued from the Labour
Press, and in the same connection as the other pamphlets, a fourth one,
entitled _Homogenic Love_—which I suppose was among the first attempts
in this country to deal at all publicly with the problems of the
Intermediate Sex. I placed “printed for private circulation only” on the
Title-page, and had only a comparatively small number of copies struck
off—which were not sold but sent round pretty freely to those who I
thought would be interested in the subject or able to contribute views
or information upon it. My object in fact was to get in touch with
others and to obtain material for future study or publication. Even in
this quiet way the pamphlet created some alarm—and in the dove-cotes of
Fleet Street (as I heard) caused no little fluttering and agitation; but
it is quite possible the matter would have ended there, if it had not
been for the Oscar Wilde troubles. Wilde was arrested in April 1895 and
from that moment a sheer panic prevailed over _all_ questions of sex,
and especially of course questions of the Intermediate Sex.
I did not include _Homogenic Love_ in my proposed new book, nor had I
any intention of including it; but when the mere existence of the thing
came to the knowledge of Fisher Unwin he was so perturbed that he
actually cancelled his Agreement with me, with regard to the book
_Love’s Coming-of-Age_, and broke loose from it. It was in vain that I
tried to restrain him. He had got his leg over the trace, as it were,
and was ‘off.’ Indeed, he was quite willing to sacrifice the expense he
had already incurred (for the book was now partly set up) rather than go
on with it. Under the circumstances I could not, of course, very well
compel him to publish. Moreover I felt sorry for his perturbation, and
quite understood some of its causes. The extent of it was finally shown
by his going so far as to turn _Towards Democracy_ out of his shop, and
refuse to publish _that_ any longer!
Thus my two books _Love’s Coming-of-Age_ and _Towards Democracy_—like
two poor little orphans—were both out on the wide world again.
For the moment I will go on with _Love’s Coming-of-Age_. Being routed by
Fisher Unwin, I went to Sonnenschein, Bertram Dobell, and
others—altogether five or six publishers—but they all shook their heads.
The Wilde trial had done its work; and silence must henceforth reign on
sex-subjects.[19] There was nothing left for me but to return to my
little Labour Press at Manchester, and get the book printed and
published from there—which I did, the first edition being issued in
1896.
It is curious to think that that was not twenty years ago, and what a
landslide has occurred since then! In ’96 no ‘respectable’ publisher
would touch the volume, and yet to-day [1915] the tide of such
literature has flowed so full and fast that my book has already become
quite a little old-fashioned and demure! But the severe resistance and
rigidity of public opinion at the time made the volume very difficult to
write. The readiness, the absolute determination of people to
_misunderstand_ if they possibly could, rendered it very difficult to
guard against misunderstandings, and as a matter of fact nearly every
chapter in the book was written four or five times over before I was
satisfied with it.
_Love’s Coming-of-Age_ ought of course (like some parts of _England’s
Ideal_) to have been written by a woman; but, though I tried, I could
not get any of my women-friends to take the subject up, and so had to
deal with it myself. Ellen Key, in Sweden, began—I fancy about the same
period—writing that fine series of books on _Love_, _Marriage_,
_Childhood_, and so forth, which have done so much to illuminate the
Western World; but at that time I knew nothing of her and her work.
My book circulated almost immediately to some extent in the Socialistic
world, where my name was fairly well known; but some time elapsed before
it penetrated into more literary and more ‘respectable’ circles. One of
the first signs of its succeeding in the latter direction took a rather
amusing shape. I had, one day, to call upon a well-known London
publisher (who was already publishing some of my books, though he had
refused this particular one) on business, and having discussed the
matters immediately in hand, he presently turned to me and inquired how
my _Love’s Coming-of-Age_ was selling. I of course gave a fairly
favorable account. “I think,” said he in a somewhat chastened tone “that
perhaps we made rather a mistake in refusing some little time back to
take it up. A Sunday or two ago I was at church [probably a
Congregational or Unitarian Chapel], and the minister quoted a page or
two from your book, and spoke very highly of it, and actually gave the
published address and price, and all; and I saw quite a lot of people
noting the references down.” He paused, and then added, “Quite a good
advertisement—worth thirty or forty copies I daresay.” I could not help
smiling. No wonder he was sorry! But the story gave promise of better
things to come.
In 1902 the said publishing firm was glad to tale the book up and
publish it on commission for me—which they (and their successors) have
done ever since. And its sale in England (though not phenomenal like
that of the German translation) has, I must say, been very good.
To return to _Towards Democracy_. Considering its expulsion from Mr.
Fisher Unwin’s shop and the generally panicky condition of the book
market in London, there seemed nothing to do but to return to Manchester
and place it also in the hands of the little Labour Press for
publication. The two thousand or so copies remaining in Unwin’s hands
were my property, and I had only to remove them to Manchester, get a new
title-page printed, and have them issued from there. This I accordingly
did, and in ’96 the Labour Press edition appeared—368 pp., the same as
Fisher Unwin’s. Naturally the Labour Press connection was not very
favorable as regards circulation, and the price (3s. 6d.) was high for
Socialist and Labour circles. The spread of the book remained
slow—slower of course than it had been with Unwin, and hardly amounted
to a hundred copies a year.
This was bad; but worse remained behind. Somewhere early in 1901 the
Labour Press—whose financial affairs had never been very
satisfactory—went bankrupt! I knew of course what was pending; and as
the stock of _Towards Democracy_ belonged to _me_, and I knew that if
left at the Press it would be in danger of falling into the creditors’
hands, there was nothing left but to smuggle it away as soon as I could
into some place of safe keeping. Mr. James Johnston, City Councillor,
always a good friend, came to the rescue and offered me storage room in
his office. I hired a dray. And so one foggy day, with a good part of a
ton of _Towards Democracy_ on board—which I helped to load and unload—I
jogged with the drayman through the streets of Manchester amid the huge
turmoil of the cotton goods and other traffic. A strange load—and I
never before realized how heavy the book was!
It lay there for some months, and then about July of the same year I
made arrangements with Sonnenschein & Co. for them to sell the book on
commission, and the stock was transferred into their hands. From that
time its sales slowly went forward—from a hundred or a hundred and fifty
per annum in 1902, to eight hundred or nine hundred in 1910, when the
Sonnenschein business, and with it my book, passed into the hands of
George Allen & Co. In 1902 the fourth part of _Towards Democracy_, i.e.
“Who shall command the Heart” was published; and in 1905 this was
incorporated with the three former parts in one complete volume. Later
in the same year I succeeded (a long cherished project) in producing a
pocket edition of the whole on India paper, which has ever since sold
alongside and _pari passu_ with the Library edition. Thus after
twenty-one years (in 1902) these writings (begun in 1881) came to an
end; and three years later the book took its definite and permanent form
in print and binding, and some sort of rather indefinite place in the
world of letters.
Talking about their place in the world of letters, some of my books
have, I fear, puzzled the public by their titles. _Ioläus_ has been much
of an offender in this way. The uncertainty as to who or what Ioläus
might be, the difficulty of knowing how to spell the word, and the
impossibility of pronouncing it, proved at one time such obstacles that
they quite adversely affected the sales. On one occasion I received a
telegram from a firm asking me to send at once two hundred Oil-cans. My
puzzlement was great, as I had indeed never embarked in the oil trade,
nor in my wildest dreams thought of doing so—till suddenly it flashed
upon me that the message, having had to pass through a rustic
post-office, had been transformed on the way, and that the romantic
friend and companion of Hercules had been turned into a paraffin tin!
After that I modified the title so as to avoid any such sacrilege in the
future.
Coming back to _Towards Democracy_ again, I do not know that I have ever
seen a very serious estimate or criticism of that book in any well-known
literary paper. Like others of my works it has come into the literary
sheep-fold not through the accepted gate but “some other way, like a
thief or a robber.” It has been generally ignored—as already
explained—by the guardians of the gate, yet it has quietly and
decisively established itself, and the ‘sheep’ somehow have taken kindly
to the ‘robber.’ And perhaps the matter is best so. A book of that kind
is not easy to criticize; it cannot be dispatched by a snap phrase; it
does not belong to any distinct class or school; its form is open to
question; its message is at once too simple and too intricate for public
elucidation—even if really understood by the interpreter. That it should
go its own way quietly, neither applauded by the crowd, nor barked at by
the dogs, but knocking softly here and there at a door and finding
friendly hospitality—is surely its most gracious and satisfying destiny.
But though the ignoring by the critics of _Towards Democracy_ has seemed
natural and proper, I confess I have been somewhat surprised by their
non-recognition or non-discussion of the questions dealt with in the
other books; because, as I have said these books are on a different
plane from _Towards Democracy_. They deal with theories or views which
flow (as I think) perfectly logically from the central idea of _Towards
Democracy_—just as the different views or aspects of a mountain flow
perfectly logically from the mountain-fact itself. We cannot discuss the
central idea, but we can discuss the aspects, because they come within
the range of intellectual apprehension and definition. If the world—it
seems to me—should ever seize the central fact of such books as _Leaves
of Grass_ and _Towards Democracy_, it must inevitably formulate new
views of life on almost every conceivable subject: the aspects of all
life will be changed. And the discussion and definition of these views
ought to be extraordinarily interesting. It is therefore surprising I
say that no serious discussion of the underlying or implicit assumptions
of these two books has yet taken place. It is true, of course, that
to-day the world is witnessing a strange change of attitude on almost
all questions, and a vague feeling after the new aspects to which I am
alluding; but it does not concatenate these views on to any central
fact, and therefore cannot deal with them adequately or effectively. It
is as if people, having taken drawings of a hitherto undiscovered
mountain from many different sides, and comparing them together, should
not realize that it is the _same_ mountain which they have been
observing all the time, and that there _is_ a unity and a reality there
which will explain and concatenate all the outlines. I say it is a
little disappointing that this point has not yet been reached, because
it would make the discussion and definition of the new views so
wonderfully interesting. On the other hand it is obvious that in the
midst of the enormous output and rush of modern literature, critics
generally have thrown up the sponge, and are content to get through
their work perfunctorily or as best they can, without the added labour
of tackling, or attempting to tackle, a great new synthesis.
The attempt made a quarter of a century ago—in _Civilization: its Cause
and Cure_—to define the characteristics of (modern) civilization, and to
show the civilization-period as a distinct stage in social evolution,
destined to pass away and to be succeeded by a later stage—of which
later stage even now some of the features may be indicated—has never as
far as I know been seriously taken up and worked out. The Socialists of
course have certain views on the subject, but they are limited to the
economic field, and do not by any means cover the whole ground; and
various doctrinaire sets and sects are nibbling at the problem from
different sides; but a real statement and investigation of the whole
question, and a linking of it up to deepest spiritual facts, would
obviously be absorbingly interesting. I first read the paper which bears
the above name at the Fabian Society (? in 1888), and, needless to say,
it was jeered at on all sides; but since then, somehow, a change has
come, and even Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, who most attacked me at the
time, have ceased to use the word ‘Civilization’ in its old optimistic
and mid-Victorian sense. What we want now is a real summing-up and
settling of what the word connotes—both from the historical point of
view, and with regard to the future.
Another paper in the same book, which shocked a good many of my
Cambridge friends, was my “Criticism of Modern Science.” The Victorian
age glorified modern Science—not only in respect of its patient and
assiduous observation of facts, which every one allows, but also on
account of the supposed Laws of Nature which it had discovered, and
which were accounted immutable and everlasting. A light arising from
some quite other source convinced me that this infallibility of the
scientific “Laws” was an entire illusion. I had been brought up on
mathematics and physical science. I had lectured for years on the
latter. But now the reaction set in; and—rather rudely and crudely it
must be confessed—I turned on my old teacher to rend her! I published in
1885, and in Manchester, a shilling pamphlet called _Modern Science: A
Criticism_, and sent it round to my mathematical and scientific friends.
I think most of them thought I had gone daft! But, after all, the
whirligig of Time has brought its revenge, and the inevitable evolution
of human thought has done its work; and now, one may ask, where _are_
the airy fairy laws and theories of the Science of the last century? The
great stores of observations and facts are certainly there, and so are
the marvellous applications of these things to practical life—but where
are the immutable Laws?—where are the clean-cut systems of the families
and species of plants and animals? where is Boyle’s law of gases? where
the stability of the planetary orbits? where the permanence and
indestructibility of the atom? where is the theory of gravitation, where
the theory of light, the theory of electricity? the law of supply and
demand in Political Economy, of Natural Selection in Biology? of the
fixity of the Elements in Chemistry, or the succession of the strata in
Geology? All gone into the melting-pot—and quickly losing their
outlines!
It is true that in the great brew which is being thus formed, rags and
chunks of the old “Laws of Nature” are still discernible; but no one
supposes they are there for long, and on all sides it is obvious that
the scientific world is giving up the search for them, and the
expectation (in the face of such things as radium, Hertzian waves,
Karyokinesis and so forth) of ever reconstituting Science again on the
old Victorian basis. These fixed ‘Laws,’ it is pretty evident, and their
remaining débris, will melt away, till out of the seething brew
something entirely different and unexpected emerges. And that will
be?... Yes, what indeed out of such a Cauldron _might_ be expected to
emerge—a strange and wonderful Figure, a living Form!
Yet the curious thing is that while this process of the dissolution of
scientific theory is going on before our eyes, and on all sides, no one
seems to be aware of it—at any rate no one sums it up, gives it outline
and definition, or tackles its meaning and result. Tolstoy was pleased
with the attacks on Modern Science contained in _Civilization: its Cause
and Cure_, wrote to me about it, and had the chapter printed in Russian,
with a preface by himself. But his point of view was that Science being
a serious enemy to Religion anything which bombarded and crippled
Science would help to free Religion. That was not my point of view. I do
not regard Science—or rather Intellectualism—as the foe of Religion, but
more as a stage which _has to be passed through_ on the way to a higher
order of perception or consciousness—which might possibly be termed
Religion—only the word religion is too vague to be very applicable here.
Another airy castle which is obviously fading away before our eyes
is that of the “Laws” of Morality. The whole structure of
civilization-morality is being rapidly undermined. The moral
aspects of Property, Commerce, Class-relations, Sex-relations,
Marriage, Patriotism, and so forth, are shifting like dissolving
views. Nietzsche has scorched up the old Christian altruism;
Bernard Shaw has burned the Decalogue. Yet (in this country and
according to our custom) we jog along and pretend not to see what
is happening. No body of people faces out the situation, or
attempts to foretell its future. The Ethical society professes to
substitute Ethics for Religion, as a basis of social life; yet
never once has it informed us what it means by Ethics! The Law
courts go mumbling on over ancient measures of right and wrong
which the man in the street has long ago discarded. Much less has
any group attempted to foreshadow the new Morality, and
concatenate it on to the great root-fact of existence. In my
“Defence of Criminals: a Criticism of Morality,”[20] I gave an
outline and an indication of what was happening, and of the way
out into the future; but that paper, as far as I know, has never
been seriously discussed.
Nevertheless under the surface new ideas are forming, the lines of the
coming life are spreading. The book _Civilization_—first published by
Sonnenschein, in 1889—has had a good circulation, and been translated
into many languages. Though somewhat hastily and crudely put together,
yet owing to a certain _élan_ about it, and probably largely owing to
the fact that it gives expression to the main issues above-mentioned, it
has been well received.
One idea, which runs all through the book—namely, that of there being
three great stages of Consciousness: the simple consciousness (of the
animal or of primitive man), the self-consciousness (of the civilized or
intellectual man), and the mass-consciousness or cosmic consciousness of
the coming man, is only roughly sketched there, but is developed more
fully in _The Art of Creation_. It is of course deeply germane to
_Towards Democracy_. And though we may not yet be in a position to
define the conception very exactly, still it is quite evident, I think,
that some such evolution into a further order of consciousness is the
key to the future, and that many æons to come (of human progress) will
be ruled by it. Dr. Richard Bucke, by the publication (in 1901) of his
book _Cosmic Consciousness_ made a great contribution to the cause of
humanity. The book was a bit casual, hurried, doctrinaire, un-literary,
and so forth, but it brought together a mass of material, and did the
inestimable service of being the first to systematically consider and
analyse the subject. Strangely here again we find that his book—though
always spreading and circulating about the world, beneath the
surface—has elicited no serious recognition or response from the
accredited authorities, philosophers, psychologists, and so forth; and
the subject with which it deals is in such circles practically
ignored—though in comparatively unknown coteries it may be warmly
discussed. So the world goes on—the real expanding vital forces being
always beneath the surface and hidden, as in a bud, while the accepted
forms and conclusions are little more than a vari-coloured husk, waiting
to be thrown off.
Relating itself closely and logically with the idea (1) of the three
stages of Consciousness is that (2) of the Berkeleyan view of matter—the
idea that matter in itself is an illusion, being only a film between
soul and soul: _called_ matter when the film is opaque to the perceiving
soul, but called mind when the latter sees through to the intelligence
behind it. And these stages again relate logically to the idea (3) of
the Universal or Omnipresent Self. The _Art of Creation_ was written to
give expression to these three ideas and the natural deductions from
them.
The doctrine of the Universal Self is obviously fundamental; and it is
clear that once taken hold of and adopted it must inevitably
revolutionize all our views of Morality—since current morality is
founded on the separation of self from self; and must revolutionize too
all our views of Science. Such matters as the Transmutation of Chemical
Elements, the variation of biological Species, the unity of Health, the
unity of Disease, our views of Political Economy and Psychology;
Production for Use instead of for Profit, Communism, Telepathy; the
relation between Psychology and Physiology, and so forth, must take on
quite a new complexion when the idea which lies at the root of them is
seized. This idea must enable us to understand the continuity of Man
with the Protozoa, the relation of the physiological centres, on the one
hand to the individual Man and on the other to the Race from which he
springs, the meaning of Reincarnation, and the physical conditions of
its occurrence. It must have eminently practical applications; as in the
bringing of the Races of the world together, the gradual evolution of a
Non-governmental form of Society, the Communalization of Land and
Capital, the freeing of Woman to equality with Man, the extension of the
monogamic Marriage into some kind of group-alliance, the restoration and
full recognition of the heroic friendships of Greek and primitive times;
and again in the sturdy Simplification and debarrassment of daily life
by the removal of those things which stand between us and Nature,
between ourselves and our fellows—by plain living, friendship with the
Animals, open-air habits, fruitarian food, and such degree of Nudity as
we can reasonably attain to.
These mental and social changes and movements and many others which are
all around us waiting for recognition, will clearly, when they ripen,
constitute a revolution in human life deeper and more far-reaching than
any which we know of belonging to historical times. Even any _one_ of
them, worked out practically, would be fatal to most of our existing
institutions. Together they would form a revolution so great that to
call it a mere extension or outgrowth of Civilization would be quite
inadequate. Rather we must look upon them as the preparation for a stage
entirely different from and beyond Civilization. To tackle these things
in advance, to prepare for them, study them, understand them is clearly
absolutely necessary. It is a duty which—however burked or ignored for a
time—will soon be forced upon us by the march of events. And it is a
duty which cannot effectively be fulfilled piecemeal, but only by
regarding all these separate movements of the human mind, and of
society, as part and parcel of one great underlying movement—one great
new disclosure of the human Soul.
[Illustration:
Self in Porch
1905
]
My little covey of books, dating from _Towards Democracy_, has been
hatched mainly for the purpose of giving expression to these and other
various questions which—raised in my mind by the writing of _Towards
Democracy_—demanded clearer statement than they could find there.
_Towards Democracy_ came first, as a Vision, so to speak, and a
revelation—as a great body of feeling and intuition which I _had_ to put
into words as best I could. It carried with it—as a flood carries trees
and rocks from the mountains where it originates—all sorts of
assumptions and conclusions. Afterwards—for my own satisfaction as much
as for the sake of others—I had to examine and define these assumptions
and conclusions.
That was the origin of my prose writings—most of them—of _England’s
Ideal_, _Civilization_, _The Art of Creation_, _Love’s Coming-of-Age_,
_The Intermediate Sex_, _The Drama of Love and Death_, _Angels’ Wings_,
_Non-governmental Society_,[21] _A Visit to a Gñani_,[22] and so forth.
They, like the questions they deal with, have led a curious underground
life in the literary world, spreading widely as a matter of fact, yet
not on the surface. Like old moles they have worked away unseen and
unobserved, yet in such a manner as to throw up heaps here and there and
in the most unlikely places, and bring back friends to me on all
sides—lovely and beautiful friends for whom I cannot sufficiently thank
them.
XII
PERSONALITIES—I
It is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should
have gone to Trinity Hall—which was, and is, before all a Law
College—and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the
_legal_ element in life. As an undergraduate, whose days were consumed
in boating and mathematics, this was not noticeable; but it was not
entirely after my heart when I became a Fellow, to find myself in a
society which was almost wholly composed of barristers; and in after
life to discover that my friends of early days had nearly all become
eminent K.C.’s and Judges!
Just before my entering Trinity Hall, an undergraduate of that College,
Robert Romer, had become Senior Wrangler—and I really believe this had
something to do with my selecting the College for myself. The ‘Hall’ men
were hugely delighted, as this distinction in the Tripos had never come
to the College before—the more so, because Romer was a boating man and
rowed in the First Boat; and a myth grew up (possibly encouraged by the
subject himself, and in order to show how easily a real boating man can
do anything he turns himself to!) that he passed his examinations by the
light of nature, and never needed to ‘swot’ like an ordinary mortal.
Others however said—and this was a more likely explanation—that he used
to sit at his study table with a pot of beer and a sporting journal
before him, while in the open drawer of the table lay his mathematical
books and papers. When a knock came at the door it was the simplest
thing in the world to close the drawer, and be found consuming his ale!
After his degree he remained at Cambridge for a time as mathematical
coach, but was by no means a success in that line. He could not
sympathize with a learner’s difficulties; and when a pupil came to him
with a problem which he could not understand, Romer would say “What? You
can’t understand that? You can’t understand that?—then God help you, I
can’t!” Naturally he soon gave up teaching and took to the Bar. After
_my_ degree—when we were Fellows of the College together—I saw quite a
little of him: a rough, muscular-brained, “damn-your-eyes” type of man,
and as may be imagined quite ignorant of art and literature, but
good-natured and healthy. Later however the sheer physical force of his
mentality took him to the highest reaches of the legal profession (Lord
Justice of Appeal) and he passed out of my sphere.
Another Senior Wrangler whom I knew fairly well, as he headed the Tripos
in my own year (1868), and who afterwards became Lord Justice (in the
Court of Patents) was J. Fletcher Moulton. He was one of those people
who without any great depth of intellect or even of character possessed
an extraordinary rapidity of mind. His information was encyclopædic, and
in examinations he threw off his papers with the airy ease of a tree
throwing off its dead leaves in autumn; to the wonderment indeed both of
examiners and fellow-students. Yet I am not aware that he ever
contributed anything very original in the study of mathematics or law—or
in any other department of human thought.
Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with
originality of thought. W. K. Clifford who had undoubtedly one of the
finest mathematical, scientific, and philosophical minds of the period
of which I am speaking was only Second Wrangler; and my friend Robert F.
Muirhead who, as Smith’s Prizeman and later, has contributed important
papers on mathematical subjects, was nowhere to speak of in his Tripos.
One could hardly of course expect that originality and the pigeon-hole
mind should go together.
To return to our Judges. That men like Romer and Moulton should attain
the highest places in their profession is natural; but I confess I have
been surprised (having known them so well in boating days) at the kind
of men who are commonly made High Court or County Court Judges. I will
not mention names (!)—but here is one, for instance, who was Captain of
the boat-club in my time—a physically powerful, but mentally quite
muddle-headed person; here is another, whose _forte_ was _boxing_ (no
harm in that, but one might have wished that he had other interests
besides)—a rather brutish and decidedly illiterate type; a third, whose
constitution, both physical and mental, was feeble, but who had powerful
relatives in the legal profession. All these were of the kind that have
considerable difficulty in passing their elementary examinations. And
there were many more of the same kind. Nevertheless, having once got
their feet on the ladder, they have slowly and gradually—by family
influence or sheer physical health (an important thing)—climbed nearly
to the top. No blame to them, certainly; but one cannot help asking—and
I put the question especially to Labour M.P.’s: Are these the sort of
men we really require for such posts? Let alone their want of bookish
culture—which perhaps does not so much matter—we cannot but ask: What do
men of this class—who have been brought up at a public school, who have
worked hard at boating or cricket at the University, who afterwards have
buried themselves in law-chambers and the purlieus of the Courts—and
whose acquaintance with manual workers is pretty well confined to
‘scouts’ and ‘gyps’ and an occasional gamekeeper in the country—what do
they know about the great mass-people on whom they have to sit in
judgment, about the habits and temperament and customs of life of the
latter? and how on earth are they qualified to bring order and good
sense and real sympathy and understanding into that most important
branch of public life—the administration of the law? These are indeed
questions to which serious answers will have to be given ere long.
I have already mentioned Henry Fawcett (afterwards Postmaster-General)
who was a Fellow of Trinity Hall at the time of which I am speaking. The
story of his blindness is well known. It was only just after his degree
that he was out pheasant-shooting with his father. In a rather thick
covert the father fired at a bird, unknowing that his son was standing
in the line of fire. Two small shot struck the latter—one entering into
each eye—a strange and fatal chance. It was the father, I think, who
told me that as soon as Henry knew that he was permanently blinded he
said “Well, it shan’t make any difference in my plans of life!” And
certainly it made very little. As may be guessed from that, Fawcett was
a man of astounding pluck and vitality—a vitality which would have been
almost overbearing if it had not been tempered by extreme good
nature—and his force of character, combined with very democratic
sympathies, enabled him despite his blindness to do valuable work in
Parliament and in connection with the Post Office. The adoring gratitude
of the father at the public success of the son whom he had so badly
crippled was most touching, and he would follow his son about the
country and attend his public meetings for the mere pleasure of
witnessing his success. As Fawcett was member for Brighton—and my father
lent his support to his candidature—he, and Mrs. Fawcett, used
frequently to dine with us at Brunswick Square, and I saw a good deal of
them both at Brighton and at Cambridge. Fawcett’s pluck and vitality
were however sometimes a trial to his friends. I have a rather _too_
vivid recollection of riding with him, over the Brighton Downs or along
the green lanes of Cambridgeshire. “Carpenter,” he would say, “this is a
nice piece of grass, isn’t it? Let’s have a canter.” Then he would set
off at an amazing rate, and I would have to keep close alongside of him,
with a sharp look-out and warning for unexpected ditches and stoneheaps,
and in momentary fear of a headlong fall—which for a man of his weight
would have been a terrible thing! Or he would insist on my coming to
skate with him, in winter, on the Cam. We would go five or six miles
down the river, and back—he holding one end of a stick and I the other.
That was all very well if the ice was sound, but every one knows what
river ice is; and I have often skated with him when I, being a light
weight, passed over easily, while he, holding on to the stick and a pace
or two behind, was cracking through at every other step. The prospect of
having to fish a public man, weighty in every sense, out of a flowing
river was certainly not pleasant. However I am happy to say that I was
not present with him at any disaster. Except once. That was at a public
meeting when he was speaking, at Brighton. I was on the platform. A
stone was thrown by some one at the back of the hall, which struck him
on the forehead, causing blood to flow. Great sensation ensued. For the
moment he felt a little faint and relapsed into a chair. Ladies rushed
up on all sides with smelling salts. However in a few minutes he was all
right, and resumed his speech. Afterwards he said to me “I didn’t mind
the stone; but those scent-bottles made me sick!” So it will be seen
that he and I had points in common! Since his death Mrs. Fawcett and I
have still met not unfrequently—generally perhaps as joint speakers on
some Women’s Suffrage platform.
Charles Wentworth Dilke was a ‘Hall’ man. He had just taken his degree
when I arrived as a ‘freshman’; but he stayed up in College for a year
or so more on account of some law-examination or other. He never became
a Fellow, but was an enthusiastic lover of his College; and was always
very good to us undergraduates. I remember breakfasting with him at his
rooms, and his showing me, pencilled on his door-jamb, the record of his
hours of work, day by day, for the last year or so—_seventy hours per
week_, as regular as clockwork! He was, then and afterwards, always an
amazing worker—his room even in those youthful days pigeon-holed all
over with notes and documents. He was also a man with a high sense of
chivalry and honour, and I have no doubt that the _contretemps_ which
threw him for a time out of public life—and which his chivalry forbade
him to explain—weighed pretty heavily on him. His love of facts and
statistics, so conspicuous throughout his political life, was shared by
his brother Assheton; and it used to be said that the two brothers never
enjoyed themselves more thoroughly than when sitting knee to knee they
spent an hour or so in ‘imparting facts to each other’!
Another politician of my time, though a little younger than myself, was
Augustine Birrell. Even in those days he was chiefly known for his
quaint humours and jokes—though the term ‘birrelling’ had not then been
adopted. But being, as an undergraduate, somewhat interested in politics
and not at all interested in rowing, he did not bulk largely in the eyes
of his contemporaries, and I fear was a little neglected. In a late
letter to me he chaffs me in his own native style on my academic and
clerical past, saying “I have the most vivid recollection of you as
Junior Tutor. The marvellous neatness of your now discarded _white tie_
lives especially in my untidy mind!”
Socialism and Millthorpe, I need hardly say, swept me out of these
academic and semi-political surroundings into a different world—the
world of a new society which was arising and forming within the
structure of the old. William Morris represented this new society more
effectively and vitally than any one else of that period; because away
and beyond the scientific forecast he gave expression to the emotional
presentment and ideal of a sensible free human brotherhood—as in _John
Ball_, or _News from Nowhere_. His sturdy, brusque, sea-captain-like
figure, with his fine-outlined face and tossing hair, his forcible
unpolished speech, yet all so direct, sincere, enthusiastic—brought
inspiration and confidence wherever he went; and for a time, as I have
already said, there was a widespread belief that the Socialist League
was going to knit up all the United Kingdom in one bond of new life.[23]
Having set the “Sheffield Socialists” going in ’86, he came one day not
long after to speak at Chesterfield, and stayed at Millthorpe a night or
two. I remember his arriving from the train with Jefferies’ book _After
London_ in his hands—which had just come out. The book delighted him
with its prophecy of an utterly ruined and deserted London, gone down in
swamps and malaria, with brambles and weeds spreading through slum
streets and fashionable squares, and pet dogs reverting to wolfish and
carrion-hunting lives. And he read page after page of it to us with glee
that evening as we sat round the fire. He hated modern civilization, and
London as its representative, with a fierce hatred—its shams, its
hypocrisies, its stuffy indoor life, its cheapjack style, its mean and
mongrel ideals; with a hatred indeed which, I cannot but think,
thousands and hundreds of thousands following him will one day share.
Once he said to me, talking about his own life: “I have spent, I know, a
vast amount of time designing furniture and wall-papers, carpets and
curtains; but after all I am inclined to think that sort of thing is
mostly rubbish, and I would prefer for my part to live with the plainest
whitewashed walls and wooden chairs and tables.” He certainly was no
drawing-room sort of man. His immense energy did not run to small talk.
As a rule in conversation, seized by his subject, and oblivious of the
arguments of others, he would jump from his chair and stride up and down
the room in ardent monologue—condemning the present or picturing the
future or the past. I once asked his daughter, May, what he did in the
way of recreation. “My father never takes any recreation,” she said, “he
_merely changes his work_.” And so it was. When he had been toiling at
Merton Abbey all day, and preaching Socialism at a street corner all the
evening, then at night—sick of the ugly life around him—he would come
home and dream himself away into the fourteenth century, and for his
recreation produce a masterpiece like _John Ball_. Be it said,
nevertheless, that he did sometimes relax, and that when in the humour,
no one enjoyed a pipe and a glass and the jovial company of friends and
the telling of good stories, more than William Morris.
He certainly did not like anything resembling sentimentality. A friend
tells me that he used to recite the following stanza, apparently
delighting in its quaintness—but whether Morris composed it himself or
had found it elsewhere he does not know:—
I sits with my feet in a brook,
And if any one asks me for why,
I hits him a crack with my crock,
For it’s sentiment kills me, says I.
Among those who came from time to time to speak for our Socialist group
in Sheffield or to stay at our “Commonwealth” Café were, besides William
Morris, two notable personalities—Peter Kropotkin and Annie Besant.
Their work and influence, both world-wide—the one in the Anarchist, and
the other in the Theosophist, field—have been really important. Though
never myself strictly identified with either of these movements I have
been in touch with them, and consequently in more or less friendly
relation with their two leading spirits during a long period—now nearly
thirty years. Both characters are certainly remarkable for their vigour,
their sincerity, their ability and devotion. Kropotkin at the age of
seventy and after fifty years of passionate conflict with ‘government’
and ‘authority’ still retains his sunny and almost childlike temperament
and still believes in the speedy oncoming of an age of perfectly
voluntary and harmonious co-operation in the human race. Indeed it is
mainly due to him that this magnificent dream has spread so far and wide
over the world, and has done so much as it has towards its own
realization. The dramatic circumstances too of Kropotkin’s own life have
greatly helped—his early escapes from prison and from death, his
abandonment of a princely inheritance to become the companion and
fellow-prisoner of criminals and outcasts, his later life spent in
poverty and among obscure circles of enthusiasts—these things combined
with encyclopædic knowledge and a high scientific reputation have
compelled attention and respect. As in the case of many ardent social
reformers, and certainly in the case of most notorious Anarchists, there
is a charming naïveté about Kropotkin. It is so easy—if you believe that
all human evil is summed up in the one fatal word ‘government’ (or it
may be that the word is ‘white-slave-traffic,’ or ‘war,’ or ‘drink,’ or
anything else)—to order your life and your theories accordingly.
Everything is explained by its relation to one thing. It is easy, but it
is misleading. And Kropotkin’s writings, despite their erudition, suffer
from this naïveté. Whether it be History (his _French Revolution_), or
Natural History (his _Mutual Aid_) or economic theory (his _Paroles d’un
Revolté_) the reader finds one solution for everything, and the
countervailing facts and principles consistently—though certainly not
intentionally—ignored. This detracts from the value of the writings;
though in justice it should be said that the principles on which
Kropotkin so vigorously insists—i.e. individual liberty and free
association—_are_ of foundational importance. In a country like
Russia—obsessed by authority and officialism—it is not unnatural that
its reformers, such as Tolstoy and Kropotkin, should be almost
over-conscious of the governmental evil; and this fact rather encourages
the hope that Russia may one day after all be the leader in the great
European reaction towards a freer and more voluntary state of society.
The naïveté of the social reformer explains too the common fact that the
Anarchist who is in theory “thirsting for the blood of kings” and
occasionally perhaps capable of perpetrating a deed of violence himself,
is generally (like Kropotkin) the gentlest and mildest of men, who
“would not hurt a fly.” It is only such men—having the love of humanity
in their hearts—who are able to believe in the speedy realization of an
era of universal goodwill; and again it is only such men—being innocent
enough to believe that the only impediment to the realization of this
era is a certain wicked person in ‘authority’—who can spur themselves on
to the bloody dispatch of such person.
If the career of Kropotkin has been romantically varied in one way, that
of Mrs. Besant has been equally so in another. To begin as a curate’s
wife, with a vivid strain of religious devotion; to break away into
Broad Churchism and then into boundless disbelief; to become an ardent
Secularist, companion of Bradlaugh and propagandist of antipopulation
doctrines; to suffer imprisonment, persecution, and embitterment of
spirit; to espouse the cause of Socialism and do battle in the ranks of
Labour; to float into the haven of Theosophy and be made the mouthpiece
of invisible Mahatmas and of the by no means invisible Mme. Blavatsky;
and finally to complete this quaint circle by becoming the
high-priestess of a religious movement and the guardian of the herald of
the coming Christ—such a career ought to satisfy the most picturesque
ambition. Yet it would be unfair to doubt Annie Besant’s sincerity.
Having known her so long as I have I feel sure that she has been urged
onward from point to point by a perfectly genuine mental evolution,
largely directed no doubt at each turn of the road by some dominant mind
whom she has met, and largely coloured by that naïveté of which we have
already spoken—a naïveté indeed which has made it possible for her to
take herself very seriously and to fulfil her adopted rôle always with a
strong sense of duty and a comparatively weak perception of the humour
of the situation.
From the hour when, alone in the pulpit of her husband’s church, Annie
Besant discovered her own great oratorical gift, her future career, one
may say, was decided. With an excellent capacity for logical and clear
statement she became the exponent in succession of large and important
blocks of modern thought. She helped to batter down the ruins and
remains of the stupefied old Anglican Church; she gave the general mind
a wholesome shock on the Malthusian question; she dotted out clearly the
main lines of the Socialist movement; she formed a new channel for
religious thought by making the words ‘Karma’ and ‘re-incarnation’
familiar; and she sought to bring the Western public into touch with the
great age-long ideas and inspirations of the old Indian sages. In all
these ways she has done splendid work, and helped vastly in the
construction of that great twentieth century bridge which will in its
due time lead us into another world. Only in the last item—her touch
upon the ideas and inspirations of the ancient East—does she seem to me,
curiously enough, to have failed. With all her enthusiasm for the
subject, Mrs. Besant does not appear to have the intuitive perception,
the mystic quality of mind, which should enable her to reach the very
heart of the old Vedantic teaching. Her intellect, clear and systematic
in its structure, has little of the poetic or original or inspirational
in its composition, and it may be doubted whether it has ever quite
fathomed the religious writings with which it has been so much occupied.
Anyhow Mrs. Besant’s own writings on these subjects are—unlike her
general lectures—dull to a degree. She analyses the composition of the
human personality, or the order of general creation, or the various
life-rounds of our mortal race; but in all she seems to be repeating or
corroborating some pre-established formula, never to be describing
something which she has herself perceived; system and formula prevail,
unseen ‘authorities’ are hinted at, the pages bristle with sanskrit
jargon, but no living or creative _idea_ moves among them, and the
reader rises from their perusal void of inspiration or of any really
vital impulse towards new fields of thought and life. Nevertheless,
taking it all in all, and especially in her expositions of Socialism and
Theosophy, Mrs. Besant has done, as I have said, a great work; and one
cannot sufficiently admire the courage with which she has carried it
through, as well as her kindliness and helpfulness towards others,
and—in later years—her own inner mental calm, contrasting with the
somewhat restless bitterness of an earlier time.
In 1884 or so the founding of the _New Fellowship_ in London (from which
afterwards the Fabian Society sprang) brought me into touch with
Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner. As I think I have already said,
Ellis discovered in the proverbial penny box of a second-hand publisher,
and soon after its publication, the little first edition of my _Towards
Democracy_; and rescuing it wrote to me. Thus began my friendship with
him, and afterwards with the authoress of _The Story of An African
Farm_. A prophet is seldom acclaimed in his own country; and the work
which Ellis has done in that most important field of Sexual Psychology
is even yet by no means recognized in England as it ought to be—even
though the subject is becoming extremely ‘actual’ here in the present
day, and though elsewhere over the world his pioneer work is most
honorably received and respected. The six massive volumes of his
_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_ form a masterpiece of large-minded
and yet extremely detailed observation and generalization, and provide a
survey of the most impartial character over this vast realm, and such as
can be obtained nowhere else. For though the Germans have written
extensively in this field their books—_more Teutonico_—are generally
overladen with detail, huge jungles through which it is difficult to
find one’s way. Ellis combines with the Englishman’s perspicacity and
love of order a remarkable erudition and command of particulars. And at
the present juncture when the world is waking up to the absolute
necessity of a reasonable understanding and frank recognition of
sex-things, the appearance of his book may almost be characterized as
‘providential.’ This quality may indeed be suspected in the fact that
the author began making notes for his _magnum opus_ at a very early age,
driven thereto by some sort of instinct, nor finished his work till he
was about fifty. I know of few things in literature more touching than
the postscript to his last volume—the _Nunc Dimittis_ after some thirty
years of toil: “It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at
the outset to foresee all the perils that beset my path. I knew indeed
that those who investigate sincerely and intimately any subject which
men are accustomed to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to
misunderstanding and even obloquy. But I supposed that a secluded
student who approached vital social problems with precaution, making no
direct appeal to the general public, but only to the public’s teachers,
and who wrapped up the results of his inquiries in technically written
volumes open to few—I supposed that such a student was at all events
secure from any gross form of attack on the part of the police or the
government under whose protection he imagined that he lived. That proved
to be a mistake. When only one volume of these _Studies_ had been
written and published in England, a prosecution instigated by the
Government put an end to the sale of that volume in England, and led me
to resolve that the subsequent volumes should not be published in my own
country.[24] I do not complain. I am grateful for the early and generous
sympathy with which my work was received in Germany and the United
States, and I recognize that it has had a wider circulation, both in
English and the other chief languages of the world, than would have been
possible by the modest method of issue which the government of my own
country induced me to abandon. Nor has the effort to crush my work
resulted in any change in that work by so much as a single word. With
help, or without it, I have followed my own path to the end.... He who
follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was not made by man, and
is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity on his side, and
can afford to be both patient and fearless. Men die, but the ideas they
seek to kill _live_. Our books may be thrown to the flames, but in the
next generation those flames become human souls.”
The personality of Havelock Ellis is that of a student, thoughtful,
preoccupied, bookish, deliberate; yet unlike most students he has a sort
of grand air of Nature about him—a fine free head and figure as of some
great god Pan, with distant relations among the Satyrs.
Those early meetings of the New Fellowship were full of hopeful
enthusiasms—life simplified, a humane diet and a rational dress, manual
labour, democratic ideals, communal institutions. Indeed one or two
little practical efforts towards colony groups were at that time
made.[25] Herbert Rix, W. J. Jupp, Percival Chubb, Edith Lees
(afterwards Mrs. Ellis), Mrs. Hinton, widow of James Hinton, Caroline
Haddon, Ernest Rhys were among the early members.
Edith Lees was one of the most active and vigorous of this group. She
helped to organize and to carry on for some time a joint dwelling or
co-operative boarding-house near Mecklenburgh Square, where eight or ten
members of the Fellowship dwelt in a kind of communistic Utopia.
Naturally the arrangement gave rise to some rather amusing and some
almost tragic episodes, which she has recorded for us in a little story
entitled _Attainment_. After her marriage she took a farm near St. Ives
in Cornwall, which became a helpful retreat for her husband as well as
herself from the strenuousness of London life. With her extraordinary
energy and directness she plunged into and soon mastered all the details
of cattle and pig breeding and farming; and I shall never forget the
impression she produced on one occasion when staying with me at
Millthorpe, when we took her round to the public-house in the evening.
The delight and amazement of the farm men at finding some one more or
less resembling a lady who really understood and would talk freely about
such things, and her at-home-ness among that company were most
refreshing. They were fascinated by the directness of her intense blue
eyes, her sturdy figure, her vigorous gestures, and the evident equality
of her comradeship with them. And to this day they not unfrequently ask
us, “When is that little lady coming again, with that curly hair, like a
lad’s, and them blue eyes, what talked about pigs and cows? I shall
never forget her.”
Edith Ellis not only became a help to her husband in his literary work,
but herself spoke and wrote on subjects of Eugenics and Sex-psychology.
Of late years she has made a considerable study of James Hinton, and has
done me the honour to associate my name with his and with Nietzsche’s in
a little book entitled _Three Modern Seers_.
One evening as we sat round a table (in Rix’s rooms at Burlington House)
I saw a charming girl-face, of _riant_ Italian type, smiling across to
me. It was Olive Schreiner. She had arrived from South Africa only a few
months before, had published her _African Farm_, and though only
twenty-one or twenty-two years of age was already famous as its
authoress. Juvenile in some ways as that book was, somewhat incoherent
and disjointed in structure, written by a mere girl of eighteen or
nineteen, and with a title which gave no idea of its real content, yet
its intensity was such that it seized almost at once on the public mind.
The African sun was in its veins—fire and sweetness, intense love of
beauty, fierce rebellion against the things that be, passion and pity
and the pride of Lucifer combined. These things too Olive Schreiner’s
face and figure revealed—a wonderful beauty and vivacity, a
lightning-quick mind, fine eyes, a resolute yet mobile mouth, a
determined little square-set body. It was right—since alliances are so
often knit by contrast—that she and Havelock Ellis should have become
friends and maintained a close correspondence with each other for over
thirty years; and it was a privilege to me to share in the friendship of
them both.
Naturally, with such gifts of body and mind the arrival of the authoress
of the _African Farm_ excited almost a _furore_ of interest. Quite a
procession of the young literary men of the day arrived in hansom-cabs
at the door of her Bloomsbury lodgings to pay their homage to the new
genius, and Olive herself often told me with considerable amusement of
the dismay and severe disapproval of more than one of her landladies,
who certainly were not inclined to believe that mere literary talent
could cause so much attraction! Anyhow, at that time of day, before the
suffragette had arrived, and when ‘ladies’ took the greatest care to
bridle in their chins and speak in mincing accents, a young and pretty
woman of apparently lady-like origin who did not wear a veil and seldom
wore gloves, and who talked and laughed even in the streets quite
naturally and unaffectedly, was an unclassifiable phenomenon, and laid
herself open to the gravest suspicions! We may congratulate ourselves
that the pioneer women of to-day have made a return to some of these
inhumanities of the Victorian era impossible.
During that Bloomsbury period and afterwards I saw Olive Schreiner
fairly frequently—that is, when she was in England (or Europe). I saw
her in Paris early in ’87, and at Todmorden and Whitby later in the same
year; also at Alassio where she stayed for two or three months in ’88.
Those two years ’87 and ’88 were a period of considerable suffering for
her. In 1893 she was in England again, and spent three months during the
summer in a little cottage in my valley. After ’93, what with her
marriage to S. C. Cronwright, and what with the outbreak of the Boer War
and all the tragedies attendant upon that, she did not come to England
for a long period, and it was on the last day of 1913 that I saw her
again, after a twenty years’ absence.
Her father was a German Free Church Missionary—of the most tender
self-forgetful type—the original doubtless of the German overseer in
_The African Farm_. Olive herself has often told me how he would give
away his last coin to any one he deemed to be in need. His wife would
say to him:—
“John, where is that best Sunday coat of yours?” And he would say:—
“Is it not upstairs in the chest, as usual?”
“No, John, I have been looking for it everywhere.”
“How very strange” was the reply.
“Now, John, I believe you have given it away!”
“No, surely, my dear, I could not have given _that_ away—at least I
think not.”
“John! now tell me true, did you not give it to that _tramp_ that came
yesterday?”
“Well, my dear, now you mention it I think I _may_ have done so; it is
just possible you are right, but I am sure I hardly remember.”
“Oh John! John! you are indeed incorrigible.”
That was the picture of the father—soft, pitiful and dreamy. The mother,
Rebecca Lyndall by her maiden name, was of English descent, keen,
intellectual, fine featured and somewhat self-willed. The two types were
combined in their daughter; and she again in writing her novel divided
them up. ‘Waldo’ represented one side of her own character, ‘Lyndall’
the other.
Perhaps there was a tragic element in the combination of two such
different hereditary strains in the one person; perhaps there were other
causes. Certain it is that beneath the mobile and almost merry-seeming
exterior of Olive Schreiner there ran a vein of intense determination,
and that this again was crossed and countered by an ineradicable
pessimism. _The Story of an African Farm_, despite its magical and
beautiful pictures, is painful to read; and the same may be said of her
other books. They realize and force the reader to realize almost _too_
keenly the pain and evil of the world—too keenly I mean for truth and
fact. Yet what is fact but what we feel; and if Olive Schreiner _feels_
things so, so far her presentment is true. I have seen her shake her
little fist at the Lord in heaven, and curse him down from his throne,
with a vibrating force and intensity which surely must have been felt
(and surely also with healthy result) in the Highest Circles.
A lady who had spent forty years of her life working in the Mission
Schools of South Africa once said to me—and this was quite in her old
age, when she was nearing eighty—“Ah!” she said, “the Kaffirs are the
finest people on earth. You English think a lot about yourselves, but I
tell you, you are not to be compared with the Kaffirs.” Olive Schreiner
was born in Basuto Land. She grew up and spent her early life among the
natives, and in many ways her verdict was the same as that just quoted.
She loved the dark folk and their land, and she has never ceased to love
them. It has been one of the tragedies of her life that she has been
compelled to stand by and witness the crushing of this free and
fine-souled people beneath the sordid heel of Western Commercialism—or
let us say “the attempted crushing,” for indeed (thank heaven!) the
process is not yet complete. It has been her agony to see them at every
moment cajoled and betrayed of their lands, broken with labour in the
mines, deceived with drink, and mowed down with machine-guns—and all
this by the very Christian race that ought to have lent them a helping
hand; and to have been able to do so little (as it would seem to her)
for their salvation. But even though it would seem little, the fact that
one woman in South Africa has thus prophet-like stood up and (much of
the time) singly opposed Rhodes and the shoddy Imperialism of which he
was the mouthpiece, _has_ had an influence deep and wide reaching and
such as will be felt far down the years.
Another thing that has formed almost a tragedy in Olive Schreiner’s life
has been her dedication to the Cause of Women. No one can read her
_Three Dreams in a Desert_ or her _Woman and Labour_ without feeling how
in the consciousness of the sufferings of Woman the iron has entered
into her soul. If she had only been content—like some of the wilder
spirits of the movement—to unload on _men_ the vials of her wrath, and
to saddle on _man_kind alone the responsibility for these sufferings,
her strain in the cause would have had more of the delight of battle in
it. But she was too large-minded not to see that if there is to be any
blame in such a matter, the blame must be accepted by Woman herself just
as much as by Man. The two sexes are joined together, and if Man has
been unworthy has it not been because Woman his mother has made him so?
If Woman has played the parasite has that not resulted in her injuring
Man? Olive Schreiner’s perception of the slow inevitable strain and
suffering inseparable from Evolution itself in this matter of the
emancipation of women, has had a complexion of tragedy in it. She has
seen her dearest friends, like Constance Lytton and others, crippled and
broken for life by their heroic struggles and undaunted resolution in
face of prison-horrors; and yet she has felt that the evil lay deeper
than any accusation against men (taken by itself) could explain, or any
mere reform of the suffrage could mend.
It is curious how South Africa, to those who know the country well,
carries with it a fascination and an attraction which time and again
draws them back to its soil. A friend of mine who lived for some years
around Lake Nyassa told me that after his return to England he
frequently dreamt at night of all that wild region and its primitive
animal life. On more than one occasion he dreamed that he was wrecked at
sea, and swam desperately to the African coast, if only he might die as
it were in the arms of his beloved; or he would make an imaginary
pilgrimage from London to the very shores of the Lake, and there in a
kind of ecstasy would take the water up in his palms and wash it over
his face and head—only to wake up and find his features wet with his own
tears.
This was Henry B. Cotterill—a schoolfellow of mine at the Brighton
College—where indeed his father was headmaster. About the time (1875 or
so) when I was lecturing Astronomy at Leeds, Livingstone’s book came out
exposing the horrors of the black slave traffic around Lakes Tanganyika
and Nyassa—a region at that time entirely, except by Livingstone
himself, unexplored by white men. The book bit deeply into Cotterill’s
heart and soul. It said that the only cure for the Mahomedan or Arabian
trade in slaves would be the introduction of a trade by white men in the
legitimate articles of commerce; and from that moment Cotterill could
not rest, goaded on by the thought that _he_ must undertake this work.
At the time he was acting as an assistant master at Harrow School. He
started lecturing there and at other places round the country on the
subject. He collected a fund; the Harrow boys and masters gave him a
steel launch or cutter which could be taken up country in sections and
screwed together; he came to Leeds and spoke there, as well as at places
like Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool; the fund grew; and I remember
going with him to some African warehouse in London City, where he bought
bales of cotton cloth, and hundredweights of beads, and quantities of
scarlet shell-jackets (especially coveted by African chieftains as their
sole garment) for purposes of barter up country. Thus off his own bat,
as it were, he got up this strange mission, and leaving Harrow and
pedagogy behind, embarked on a career of considerable adventure and
danger. The mission succeeded, ordinary traders followed in his
footsteps, and within a few years the slave-trade engineered by Moors
and Arabs died out in the land. It was followed, it is true, by the
almost equal horrors of that commercial civilization which has since
been introduced by Europeans; but I suppose one must be thankful in the
slow and age-long evolution of human affairs for even one small step
towards better things.
At a later time Cotterill returned to England, but unable, like many
another traveler and lover of the wild, to endure the smug Philistinism
of British life, he ultimately settled on the Continent—or rather led a
somewhat roving life there, chiefly in France, Germany and
Italy—supporting himself and a small family by the not too lucrative
pursuits of literature and the teaching of languages. He has written and
edited many books, to which his encyclopædic knowledge and command of
six or seven languages have contributed; but undoubtedly his great and
monumental work has been the translation of the Odyssey of Homer
complete into English hexameters.[26] Daring is the man who ventures on
that exceedingly boggy ground of the English hexameter, and many are
those who have gone under and been gulfed in the attempt. By lightness
and speed of movement only can one keep going; but in those qualities—so
characteristic of the Greek—this translation is supremely successful;
its verbal fidelity is amazing; its presentation of the old warrior and
tribal life (made possible as he himself says by his intimate knowledge
of African customs) is such as no armchair scholar could attain to; and
the result is a gift to the whole English-speaking world—a rendering of
the immortal classic that one may read with unflagging joy and zest from
cover to cover.
XIII
PERSONALITIES—II
The part that Olive Schreiner played in trying to avert the Boer War,
and to expose the scoundrelly commercial machinations which led to it,
is well known. Curiously enough, while England was being worked up by a
lying Press into a fury of indignation against President Krüger I knew
already early in 1899 about the real state of affairs and the plot of
the financiers to force on a reckless and selfish war—not only from
Olive Schreiner herself but from a man who came at that time to
Millthorpe from Johannesburg.
This was Lisle March-Phillipps—who afterwards wrote _With Rimington_ and
other books about the war. He was a young man of about thirty, who after
an upper-class education on the usual lines had had the good sense to go
abroad and see a little of the world for himself; had drifted out to
South Africa, and had actually worked in the mines and shared the life
of the miners. Disgusted with what he saw of the Beit and Joel and
Rhodes and Barney Barnato gang—their meanness to their employees, their
slanders against Krüger, their nonsense lies about British “women and
children,” and foreseeing the inevitable conflict, he hurried
home—thinking doubtless also that he might do something to make the
actual truth known in England. For some reason, not very clear to me as
we had had no previous communication, he came straight to Millthorpe,
and walking in one afternoon sat a long time telling me all about the
affair. I saw at once that his errand was authentic and that he knew
what he was talking about, and from that time did my best in my small
way, at public meetings and lectures, to get the matter seen in its true
light, and to check the rising war-tide. All of no use of course. The
gulled sentimental sloppy British public poured itself out in a torrent
of rubbish—as a broken reservoir might pour through the slums and alleys
of a manufacturing town; and it was hopeless even to protest. It is one
of the saddest things to find how easily the great majority of a nation
may be caught and swept away by some trumped-up catchword, often of the
most flimsy character. I wrote a warning leaflet entitled _Boer and
Briton_ and circulated some twenty thousand copies of it. I spoke with
L. H. Courtney (now Lord Courtney) and others at a public meeting at
Bradford, and at various other meetings. Mr. W. T. Stead did his best to
warn the nation as to what was happening; Cronwright-Schreiner came over
from the Cape, and later H. W. Nevinson also, in a crusade through
England and Scotland. To no purpose: they only got mobbed and insulted
for their pains. Finally March-Phillipps, anxious to see at close
quarters all that was going on and unable to get a billet as
war-correspondent, went out again and joined Rimington’s Scouts; and
after the war was over—returning to Millthorpe and taking a cottage
there—remained near us a good part of the summer and wrote his very
graphic and interesting account of the campaign as witnessed and taken
part in by him.[27]
It was at an early period of the Socialist movement—in 1884 I think—that
I first came across Henry Salt and his gifted life-companion and wife,
and it is to their initiative that I owe the gain of a close and
long-enduring friendship. Salt and his brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes,
were two young Eton masters who had in their time been collegers and
scholars of Eton and afterwards graduates of King’s College, Cambridge.
Carried along on the rising tide of Socialism they both (much to their
credit) broke away from the highly respectable traditions of these
foundations. Henry George of Land Tax fame was in the country, and
Joynes actually associated himself with George, and went with him in
1881 or ’82 on a propagandist campaign to Ireland. This might well have
passed unobserved at Eton, had it not happened that at some obscure
place he and George were both temporarily arrested and had to spend the
night under lock and key. The notoriety this gave to Joynes was fatal to
his career, and he had to resign his mastership. Henry Salt and his wife
about the same time gave almost worse offence. They adopted
vegetarianism—a thing almost unheard of at Eton except in the dubious
connection of Shelley; they revolted in their personal habits from the
luxury and indulgence of the life there; and they protested against the
coursing of hares, and other inhumanities favored by both boys and
masters. It soon became clear to them that they could not remain in
surroundings so uncongenial, and that they too would have to sacrifice a
professional career and comparative affluence for the greater blessings
of liberty and a simple living; and it was at the time when they were
revolving their schemes of liberation and of migration into other
spheres of life that I came—through Jim Joynes—to know them.
Joynes and his sister were singularly unlike externally, yet singularly
alike in the depths of their hearts and in their devotion to each other.
Both were tall and long-limbed: she dark, raven-haired, with large eyes
and sensitive, somewhat sad, Dante-like profile; he red-haired, with
high complexion, small bluish eyes, heavy features. She was intensely
emotional, too emotional, but—as such people often are—highly musical;
and her literary gift was certainly one of the most remarkable I have
known—though unfortunately, except in her letters, rarely utilized. He
was intensely logical, concentrated, determined—though underneath ran a
strong current of poetic feeling—as witness his little book of excellent
verses _On Lonely Shores_ (1892). Both of them did good work in
connection with the Socialist and Labour movement, he more especially by
lecturing and writing for the Social Democratic Federation and other
such organizations; and she rather more by personal sympathy and helpful
friendship towards the rank and file of the workers; both of them were
devoted lovers of Nature, and of a natural plain way of life; and their
devotion to each other only ended with his too early death in 1893.
These two and Henry Salt were among the pioneers in the early eighties
of the great Socialist and Humanitarian and Nature movements which are
destined to play such an important part in the new Democracy. Henry
Salt’s work in founding the Humanitarian League (in 1891) and presiding
over its very various activities has been so really extensive and
far-reaching that it is difficult to estimate—the more so because unlike
so many leaders of movements he has always kept his own name
consistently in the background. As a matter of fact he has not only been
the main originator of the important work done, but has been the guiding
hand and inspirer of the many committees which have had to be formed in
order to deal with the various subjects—with Vivisection, Blood Sports,
‘Murderous Millinery,’ Reform of the Prisons, the Game Laws,
Slaughter-house Reform, Corporal Punishment, Diet Reform, Rights of
Native Races, and so forth. Besides this the long list of his
publications—on Shelley, on James Thomson (B.V.), on H. D. Thoreau,
Richard Jefferies, Lucretius, etc., shows the trend of his mind and his
liberating influence in the matters of religion and social freedom and a
large-minded Nature-study.
At one time he and I composed jointly “A Church Service for the use of
the Respectable Classes”—which I am afraid however has never yet been
properly published. It consisted of a Preface, in the manner of our
Prayer-book Preface of 1661, of a sort of Athanasian Creed (on the
Trinity of Land, Capital and Interest) called the creed of St.
Avaritius, of a Litany (on the lines of salvation through dividends and
social advancement), and a final Processional Hymn. Of this last, as it
has already been printed among some of Salt’s verses, the two first
stanzas may here be given:—
Respectables are we
And you presently will see
Why we confidently claim to be respected:
In well-ordered homes we dwell
And discharge our duties well—
Well dressed, well fed, well mannered, well connected.
We have heard the common cant
About poverty and want
And all that is distressing and unhealthy;
Some cases may be sad,
But the system can’t be bad
Which affords such satisfaction to the Wealthy.
And so on.
On one occasion a boy brought to Mrs. Salt a young rook which had been
hurt (so he said) by falling out of its nest, and as she and her husband
had been staying with us, the bird became for some time an inmate of our
establishment. But though it became familiar, as was natural, with us,
and would fly in and out of the door or window, and perch on hand or
head quite freely, its devotion to Mrs. Salt was something almost
uncanny. Indoors or outdoors it _would_ be with her; and if she went
into town for a few hours, or anywhere that she could not take the bird,
she had to escape by ruse, or by simply caging the creature first. When
she sat on the lawn it would delight to play and dance around, and to
pick daisies with its beak and place them in her lap, or bright and
shining pebbles from the gravel walk. Anything more like an engaging
human child it would be hard to imagine. And it certainly seemed to know
by some intuition of her return after absence along the road, and if
caged would become very restless, or if free would fly to meet her. Once
after a long absence, when she appeared once more—in the midst, as it
happened, of a small crowd of people—the bird with a loud cry suddenly
flew down from a tall tree and alighted forthwith upon her shoulder—much
to the astonishment of the onlookers. Later, and after some months of
this kind of life, the bird one day disappeared; nor could we ever find
out what had happened to it—whether an accident or the mere “call of the
wild” back to rook-land. It was seen no more, alive or dead; and one
human heart at any rate felt the loss very deeply.
I have mentioned 1881 as the year in which _Towards Democracy_ ‘came to
me,’ and insisted on being given form and expression. It is curious that
the same year (or 1882) saw the inception of a number of new movements
or enterprises tending towards the establishment of mystical ideas and a
new social order. Mother Shipton’s prophecy with its strange
prognostication of mechanically propelled cars and flying machines ended
up with the words:—
And the world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-one.
The world did not come to an end, but in a certain sense a new one
began; and just in those two years quite a number of societies were
started with objects of the kind indicated. Hyndman’s Democratic
Federation, Edmund Gurney’s Society for Psychical Research, Mme.
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, the Vegetarian Society, the
Anti-vivisection movement, and many other associations of the same kind
marked the coming of a great reaction from the smug commercialism and
materialism of the mid-Victorian epoch, and a preparation for the new
universe of the twentieth century. Amongst these was one which
especially claimed to fulfil the prophecies of Mother Shipton and to be
the herald of a New Age. This was the Hermetic Society. It consisted
practically of two people—Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford; for though
there was a nominal membership I think it may be said that the other
members had little or no voice in it. And its idea was to read into the
stories of Jesus, and of Moses and Abraham and so forth, their inner
significations, to interpret in fact much of the New and Old Testaments
not as historical matter but rather as eternal truths, allegories and
emblems of the drama of each human soul. Thus the miraculous birth of
Jesus, his exile in Egypt, his temptation in the wilderness, his toils
and sufferings, his Betrayal, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension
were not external histories of a certain man, but inner histories of you
and me and all mankind.
This method of interpreting the myths of past days, which we now in the
twentieth century so well understand, and which explains for us the
origin of a vast number of legends and at the same time accounts for
their popularity, was in 1881—except for some few previous hints by
Swedenborg and others—quite unrecognized. And we owe much to Edward
Maitland and Anna Kingsford that they gave it, as well as some valuable
collateral matter, to the world. Of course they did not fully
recognize—though they did in part—how much of the story of Jesus, for
instance, _is_ purely legendary and mythical. But even if they had known
it to be entirely legendary, that would not probably have greatly
altered their views—though it would certainly have deprived their gospel
of the supernatural halo with which they delighted to invest it.
It was this affectation, if I may use the term, of a supernatural
mission which rather spoilt the work of these two well-meaning people—as
it has spoiled alas! the work of so many ‘prophets’ and teachers in the
past. To the egotism of the human being there is no end; and if such an
one can only persuade others that he has some supernatural source of
knowledge and power, or persuade himself (or herself) of the same, there
is no limit to the devilry or folly into which he will plunge—as witness
the history of the priesthood all down the centuries. In the case of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland it was not devilry which was the
trouble, but the other thing! Having reached a certain insight or
intuition, or whatever you may call it, into the inner meanings of life,
they both became so inflated with heavenly conceit over their discovery
that they really grew quite foolish and intolerable. As it happened I
had known Maitland since I was a boy. When I was eighteen or twenty
years of age he a grown man, and known in the literary world as the
author of _The Pilgrim and the Shrine_, used sometimes to come to my
father’s house at Brighton. He was an interesting talker, well up in
literature and science, and always keen on some new idea or discovery;
but even then somewhat egotistically absorbed in his own thoughts and
conversation. When he met the lady, however, who became his great
life-inspiration, it must be said that he submerged all his own claims
to prophetic gifts in a whole-hearted recognition of hers. He laid his
soul at her feet.
Anna Kingsford was certainly a remarkable woman. As a young girl she had
had strange visions. When Maitland met her (she being twenty-seven) she
must from all descriptions have been singularly beautiful. He describes
her as “tall, slender and graceful in form; fair and exquisite in
complexion; bright and sunny in expression. The hair long and golden,
but the brows and lashes dark, and the eyes deep-set and hazel, and by
turns dreamy and penetrating. The mouth rich, full, and exquisitely
formed.” While Mrs. Fenwick Miller says: “I thought her the most
faultlessly beautiful woman I ever beheld; her hair is like the
sunlight, her features are exquisite, and her complexion—I can use no
other term than faultless—not a spot, not a flaw, not a shade.”
Add to these natural gifts a good medical training in the Schools of
Paris, a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin, considerable literary
ability and a generous and undisguised use of cosmetics, and you have a
strange but powerful combination. Edward Maitland met her in 1874 (he
was then fifty and she twenty-eight), and practically thenceforward
dedicated his life to her. (It must however be remembered that the
intimacy caused no estrangement from Mr. Kingsford, the husband, who
remained a close friend to them both.) The reinforcement of Anna
Kingsford’s intuitive and prophetic gift by Maitland’s incisive and
logical mentality certainly had a valuable result, and their combined
work left a notable mark on the time. Jointly from 1881 (to 1888 when
Anna Kingsford died) they carried on a strong Crusade against
Vivisection—one of the earliest protests made; and they published
besides a series of works—_The Perfect Way_, _Clothed with the Sun_,
_The Virgin of the World_, etc.—bearing the esoteric and theosophic
message to which I have already alluded. Of these _The Perfect Way_,
which shows both the systematic clearness of the one mind and the
inspiration of the other, is perhaps the most important. It embodies in
fairly clear outline those ideas of Indian and Gnostic origin which were
at that time curiously descending upon the Western world, and which no
doubt quite independently began about the same time to be spread abroad
by Mme. Blavatsky and the Theosophic Society. Portions of this book, and
large portions of _Clothed with the Sun_ were apparently spoken by Mrs.
Kingsford under trance conditions, and have a certain fine quality and
atmosphere about them. They seem to indicate things actually seen in the
inner world of being; but they suffer, as such communications must do,
from the medium through which they come. Large portions of _The Perfect
Way_ degenerate into mere drivel, and large portions of _Clothed with
the Sun_ are offensive (as their authoress herself often personally was)
with a kind of spiritual arrogance. It is curious that those two
prophetesses Anna Kingsford and Sophie Blavatsky—though so very
different in personal exterior—should have been so like each other in
many respects. Both undoubtedly had access to trance-conditions and to
some region of astral intelligence or earth memory; both (as happens in
such cases) dug out for us some shining jewels of truth, but mixed at
the same time with a huge mass of rubbish. (No words can describe the
general rot and confusion of Blavatsky’s _Secret Doctrine_.) Both were
emotional in their different ways to an abnormal degree; and both were,
fortunately for themselves, associated with coadjutors of cool and
intellectual temperament—Mrs. Kingsford with Maitland, and Blavatsky
with Mrs. Besant. Both had really great and remarkable gifts; and both,
notwithstanding their high calling, descended to strange and unworthy
subterfuges—Blavatsky to common juggleries and Anna Kingsford to a most
deliberate and disagreeable ‘pose.’ At the Hermetic Society’s meetings
the latter would take the chair in state—after the style of the Great
Panjandrum—and if any humble member of the audience asked a simple
question like “Do you think, Mrs. Kingsford, that the soul survives
after death?”—she would draw herself up, close her eyes, and say “_I
know_,” and sit down again! On one celebrated occasion I remember that
at the close of the meeting, Edward Maitland rose and referring to the
epoch-making speech of the Lady-president on “The finding of the
Christ,” pointed out that that very meeting was indeed a world-event.
For just as the _Kings_ of the East came across the _ford_ of the Jordan
to lay their treasures at the feet of the infant Saviour, so now the
treasures of Eastern thought were being brought across the world for the
birth of a new Redeemer in the West, and by one whose name was most
appropriately and prophetically none other than _Kingsford_!! After that
we could naturally do nothing but dissolve along our different lines—in
tears, or laughter, or through the doorways and passages, as the case
might be. We poor little mortals must be grateful for what illuminations
we can get, however quaint or queer the mediating personalities may be.
The years from 1881 onward were certainly a new era for me. They not
only brought me _Towards Democracy_, but they marked the oncoming of a
great new tide of human life over the Western World, and so—partly
through the book itself—brought me into touch with a number of people
and movements. It was a fascinating and enthusiastic period—preparatory,
as we now see, to even greater developments in the twentieth century.
The Socialist and Anarchist propaganda, the Feminist and Suffragist
upheaval, the huge Trade-union growth, the Theosophic movement, the new
currents in the Theatrical, Musical and Artistic worlds, the torrent
even of change in the Religious world—all constituted so many streams
and headwaters converging, as it were, to a great river. To be in fairly
close touch, as time went on, with these movements and their (English)
representatives—with men and women like John Burns, Cunninghame Graham,
Mrs. Despard, H. M. Hyndman, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, the Bruce
Glasiers, Pete Curran, Ramsay Macdonald, Walter Crane, Sydney Olivier,
H. W. Nevinson, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, F. R. Benson, Granville
Barker, Iden Payne, Mona Limerick, Isadora Duncan, Margaret Macmillan,
Lowes Dickinson, G. P. Gooch, G. M. Trevelyan, Roger Fry, Rutland
Boughton, Granville Bantock, Laurence Housman, William Rothenstein, R.
J. Campbell, E. W. Lewis, the Sidney Webbs, Olive Schreiner, Isabel
Margesson, Edith Ellis, Alfred Russel Wallace, Oliver Lodge, George
Barnes of the A.S.E., C. T. Cramp of the A.S.R.S., Stephen Reynolds of
the Fisheries, Raymond Unwin of Garden Suburbs, Cecil Reddie of
Abbotsholme, James Devon of the Prisons Commission, Edward Westermarck,
Havelock Ellis, and so forth—was indeed an extraordinary inspiration and
encouragement. Practically all these (and I have not mentioned the
foreign friends and coadjutors) were giving their lives to the
furtherance of some tributary of the great movement, and each of them
represented hundreds or perhaps thousands of others who were doing the
same. One felt that something massive must surely emerge from it all.
It was no wonder that Hyndman—whose name I have put near the beginning
of this list—becoming conscious as early as 1881 of the new forces all
around in the social world was filled with a kind of fervour of
revolutionary anticipation. We used to chaff him because at every crisis
in the industrial situation he was confident that the Millennium was at
hand—that the S.D.F. would resolve itself into a Committee of Public
Safety, and that it would be for him as Chairman of that body to guide
the ship of the State into the calm haven of Socialism! The S.F.D. was
constituted in the early eighties; when 1889 was impending it was
obvious that that year, as centenary of the first outbreak of the French
Revolution would be the fateful date. I remember his telling me, not
without gleeful rubbing of hands, that the whole Society of London
Stevedores (whom he had been addressing at the Docks) was behind him to
a man, and would come without fail to his support. 1889 however passed,
with nothing more effectual than the Socialist Congress at Paris—at
which a great deal of dissension and difference of opinion was
manifested. Then came ’99, the last year of the century and clearly big
with destiny; and he piled his hopes upon that. But it alas! only gave
birth to the Boer War—which put things back for many a year. And after
that 1909 and other dates did but provide further material for
disappointment. And yet all the time the Socialist clock was really
going forward, and though there was no sudden revolution or conversion,
the nation steadily and almost unconsciously became saturated with the
new ideas. Hyndman—though no doubt disappointed from time to time—stuck
gamely to his ‘cause’—and it was largely through his personal exertions
that the educational work begun by him in ’81 was carried to such
fruition that in 1914 with the German War the Government and the country
suddenly adopted large sections of the Socialist programme (without
calling them Socialist of course) as the most natural thing in the
world!
That neither Hyndman in his time, nor Morris in his, nor the Fabian
Society in theirs, nor Keir Hardie, nor Kropotkin, nor Blatchford, nor
any other individual or body, succeeded in capturing the social movement
during these years and moulding it to his or their hearts’ desire, must
always be matter for congratulation. For once pocketed by any clique it
would have pined and dwindled into an insignificant thing; but, as I
have just tried to show, the real movement of this period has been far
too great for such a destiny. It is like a great river, fed by currents
and streams flowing into it from the most various directions and
gathering a force which no man can now control and a volume too great to
be confined.
One regrets that Hyndman’s efforts to get into Parliament have never
been crowned with success. Not that he would have been any use in the
House as a party-leader (Labour or Socialist). Much the reverse; for
though personally the most good-natured man in the world he had an
extraordinary gift for falling foul of all his friends in the political
arena. But because it would have been a satisfaction—and there would
have been a certain poetical justice in it—to see Hyndman face to face
with the bogeys of his own propaganda, the representatives of the
established order, and trouncing them to his heart’s content. With an
excellent command of statistics and finance, a good knowledge of
political conditions and the diplomatic _personnel_ over Europe, two
great causes close to his heart in the championship of our colored
subjects in India and our white wage-slaves at home, and with a vigorous
and ready tongue, he would surely, off his own bat, have made the House
sit up, and compelled its attention to some neglected things.
Nevertheless he would never I think under any circumstances have been a
great force in politics; for curiously enough notwithstanding his mental
vigour and energy there was a certain want of _weight_ about his
personality which prevented his influence carrying very far. On the
platform, with his waving beard and flowing frock-coat, his high and
spacious forehead and head somewhat low and weak behind, he gave one
rather the impression of a shop whose goods are all in the front window;
and though a good and incisive speaker his frequent gusts of invective
seemed out of keeping with the obvious natural kindliness of the man and
rather suggested the idea that he was lashing himself up with his own
tail.
The frock-coat and tall hat were always of course _de rigueur_ with
him—not I imagine that they were particularly congenial to his Socialist
ideals, but because they were a necessary part of his outfit and
‘make-up’ on the stage of the Stock Exchange; for no doubt the Stock
Exchange as the centre of our Commercial system will cling to these old
symbols of the industrial capitalist era to the very last.
A young friend of mine, who was at one time clerk to Albert Grant of
City fame, told me the following story. One day while he was sitting in
Grant’s office H. M. Hyndman was announced, and walked in, frock-coat
and all. My friend left the room while the two conferred—the well-known
Socialist with the even more well-known German Jew and Company-promoter.
Grant’s reputation was not of the highest—or if it could be called
“high” at all it was only in the sense in which game is sometimes so
called. When the visitor was gone and my young friend returned to the
room, Grant said, rubbing his hands “Do you know who that is? Do you
know who that is? That is Mr. Hyndman, the great Socialist. You see, you
see, with all their talk, even _they_ cannot get on without _me_.”
I do not for a moment suppose that Hyndman’s dealings on this occasion
were anything to be ashamed of; but Albert Grant’s transactions were
commonly thought to be of a shady character. Perhaps to make up for
that, he bought with some of his gains the site of Leicester Square,
converted it into a public garden, and presented it to the public. In
consideration of this, and possibly other things, he was made a
Baron—Baron Grant. Whereupon some wag wrote the following distich:—
Princes can Rank confer, but Honour can’t;
Rank without honour is a barren (Baron) grant.
I have mentioned Walt Whitman more than once in the foregoing pages, and
I think I ought not to let this chapter pass without referring to the
ardent little coterie at Bolton in Lancashire who for many years
celebrated his birthday with songs and speeches and recitations, with
decorations of lilac-boughs and blossoms and the passing of loving cups
to his memory. J. W. Wallace was the president, and Dr. Johnston, Fred.
Wild, J. W. Dixon, Charles F. Sixsmith, were some of the earlier members
of this little club, which met quite frequently from 1885 onward for
twenty years or more. If there was a somewhat Pickwickian note about its
revels still no one could doubt the sincerity of its enthusiasm. It
helped largely to spread the study and appreciation of Whitman’s work in
the North of England; it welcomed Dr. Bucke on his arrival from Canada
with congratulatory addresses and hymns of its own composing; some of
its members (the two first-mentioned) crossed the Atlantic on a
pilgrimage to the good grey poet; and Dr. Johnston wrote a quite
excellent little book _A Visit to Walt Whitman_ descriptive of Whitman’s
personality and surroundings, which I believe is now being reissued from
the Press in conjunction with some Notes on the same subject by Wallace.
In later years I have been able to count Dr. Johnston and Charlie
Sixsmith among my own constant friends.
I will conclude this chapter with a few brief notes on my almost
lifelong friend Arunáchalam. I feel that I owe a great debt to him
because long ago, in ’80 perhaps or ’81 he gave me a translation of a
book, then little known in England, the _Bhagavat Gita_—the reading of
which as I think I have said before, curiously liberated and set in
movement the mass of material which had already formed within me, and
which was then waiting to take shape as _Towards Democracy_. As when a
ship is ready to launch, a very little thing, the mere knocking away of
a prop, will set her going; so—though it was something more than
that—did the push of the _Bhagavat Gita_ act on _Towards Democracy_. It
gave me the needed cue, and concatenated my work to the Eastern
tradition.
I first came across Arunáchalam at a meeting of the _Chitchat_ or some
such society at Cambridge, when he was an undergraduate of Christ’s and
I a newly made Fellow of Trinity Hall. As in the case of other Hindus
his extraordinary quickness and receptiveness of mind had very quickly
rendered him _au fait_ in all our British ways and institutions. With
engagingly good and natural manners, humorous and with some of the Tamil
archness and bedevilment about him, he was already a favorite in his own
college—and at that time these early comers to the Universities from
India were certainly received by our students with more friendliness and
sense of equality than they are to-day. His father having been a wealthy
man and occupying a good position in Ceylon, Arunáchalam had received a
good education and was fairly well up in Greek and Latin, French and
German, and their literatures, besides his own Eastern languages, like
Tamil and Sanskrit. Altogether he was a very taking, all-round sort of
fellow, capable of talking on most subjects, and full of interested
inquiry about all. Many were the afternoons or evenings we spent
together—walking or boating or sitting by the fireside in College
rooms—and I learned much from him about the literature of India and the
manners and customs of the mainland and Ceylon. When he left Cambridge
he went to London and studied Law for some years, and then going out to
Ceylon joined the Civil Service there, and in due time became Judge,
Registrar-General, and finally Member of the Legislative Council. In
1890 he wrote to me about the Gñani Ramaswamy whose acquaintance he had
made, and asked me to come out and meet him; and I gladly went—for it
just chimed in with my wishes at the time; and, as I have told in my
_Visit to a Gñani_ and elsewhere, for six weeks or so we called on the
Guru every day and absorbed all he had to say on the traditional
esoteric philosophy of India in general and of the Tamils in particular.
After settling in Ceylon, Arunáchalam paid from time to time various
visits to England, at one time to bring his wife over, at another to put
his sons to College, and so on. The last occasion was in 1913 when he
received a tardy recognition of his really important services to the
Crown in the form of a knighthood.
On these occasions, whether he was conversing with the humblest of my
friends at Millthorpe or at Sheffield, or with high officials and “great
ladies” in London his manners had always just the same charming
frankness and grace about them, which established at once the _human_
relation as the paramount thing. And yet this man, whose artistic
culture and practical knowledge of the world was miles above most people
he met, had often to suffer from the boorish rudeness of Anglo-Indians
in his own land, or of belated Britishers on board ship. Alas, for the
vulgarity of my countrymen!
I cannot leave him without one little anecdote. Being a guest on some
occasion at a Mansion House dinner he was duly of course introduced to
the various bigwigs present, and took his seat with the rest; but
immediately caused consternation (being a vegetarian) by refusing
turtle-soup and other carnivorous dishes in favour of spinach, potatoes
and the like, and finally nearly wrecked the whole show by asking for a
glass of water! Such a thing had never been heard of before. Waiters
hurried to and fro, but water could not be found; and at last, with many
apologies, he was asked to put up with a bottle of Apollinaris
(“Whiskey, sir, with it?” “No, thank you”)!
XIV
LONDON AND LECTURES
Having many friends in London, and a good many relations, I naturally,
during all the years of my sojourn at Millthorpe, have been in the habit
of paying fairly frequent visits to the big city. It is good to have
one’s roots in the country, but it is also necessary to have one’s
branches in the great towns where one can come into contact with the
winds and storms of human life.
A considerable social storm at which I was present was that of the
so-called “Bloody Sunday” in November ’87. A socialist meeting had been
announced for 3 p.m. in Trafalgar Square, to protest against the Irish
policy of the Government, and the authorities (for conscience doth make
cowards of us all) probably thinking Socialism a much greater ‘terror’
than it really was, had vetoed the meeting and drawn a ring of police,
two deep, all round the interior part of the Square. Of course the
Socialists had to make an active protest, if only in order to bring the
case into court; and three leading members of the S.D.F.—Hyndman, John
Burns and Cunninghame Graham—agreed to march up arm-in-arm and force
their way if possible into the charmed circle. Somehow Hyndman was lost
in the crowd on the way to the battle, but Graham and Burns pushed their
way through, challenged the forces of ‘Law and Order,’ came to blows,
and were duly mauled by the police, arrested, and locked up.
I was in the Square at the time, and like most of the crowd there more
as a sightseer than anything else. Indeed, though a large crowd it was
of a most good-humored and peaceable kind; but the way in which it was
‘worked up,’ provoked and irritated by the authorities, was a caution;
and gave me the strongest impression that this was done purposely, with
the intention of leading to a collision. If this was not so the only
explanation must be that abject _fear_, on the part of the authorities,
was the moving cause. As I say, the crowd was a most good-humored,
easy-going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment
of mounted police came cantering up. The order had gone forth that we
were to be ‘kept moving.’ To keep a crowd moving is I believe a
technical term for the process of riding roughshod in all directions,
scattering, frightening and batoning the people—the idea no doubt being
to prevent the formation of knots or the consolidation of organized
bodies among the crowd. In this case there was really no sign of any
organized movement on the part of the people against the police, nor had
I heard of any plan to that effect, further than the march-up of the
three leaders already mentioned. I was standing—with my friend Robert
Muirhead, Cambridge mathematician and Smith’s Prizeman, two peaceable
enough members of society as may be supposed—on an island-refuge just
where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square, when we found
ourselves violently pushed about by mounted and foot police and told to
‘move on.’ Whether Muirhead did not move on fast enough, or what the
trouble was, was never explained; but the next moment I saw him seized
by the collar by a mounted man and dragged along, apparently towards a
police-station, while a bobby on foot aided in the arrest. I jumped to
the rescue and slanged the two constables, for which I got a whack on
the cheekbone from a baton (which distressed the more respectable
members of my family for some weeks after), but Muirhead was released,
and we soon regained our footing on the refuge, from which for some time
we watched the police continuing, at considerable risk to life and limb,
to circle round and insult the ‘mob.’ I mention these little details
just to show the kind of thing that happens. Purely as the result of
this ill-timed action there were one or two ugly rushes I believe and a
few broken heads; but the damage of ‘Bloody Sunday’ did not after all
amount to much.
The case came into Court afterwards, and Burns and Graham were sentenced
to six weeks’ imprisonment each for “unlawful assembly.” I was asked to
give evidence in favour of the defendants, and gladly consented—though I
had not much to say, except to testify to the peaceable character of the
crowd and the high-handed action of the police. In cross-examination I
was asked whether I had not seen any rioting; and when I replied in a
very pointed way “Not on the part of the _people_!” a large smile went
round the Court, and I was not plied with any more questions.
[Illustration:
_MORNING LEADER_ CARTOON, 13 MARCH, 1906.
“If Society people had to make their own clothes there would be some
curious scenes in
the streets, and many would go about attired in simply an Indian
blanket.”—Mr. EDWD.
CARPENTER at the meeting of the Humanitarian League at Essex Hall.
(By courtesy of the _Daily News_.)
]
At an early period of my Millthorpe days (about 1885 I think) two young
Cambridge men who had only just taken their degrees, Lowes Dickinson and
Roger Fry, came down to see me—two gentle, humorous and charming
creatures, who have since made their mark in Literature and Art, and
whose friendship has remained with me, I am happy to say, all these
years. Dickinson as a writer of pure English is I should say far ahead
of any of his contemporaries. In contrast with the Meredithian, Henry
Jamesian, Chestertonian, and other literary gymnastics of the day, his
style flows along, pellucid with pure grace and purpose, saying exactly
what is needed, no more and no less. It has the quality of ‘the absolute
in style’—which is very different from, though sometimes mistaken for,
absence of style. Nothing could be more charming and to the point than
his _Letters of John Chinaman_ (or _From a Chinese Official_) and his
_Greek View of Life_. With regard to the former he told me an amusing
story about W. J. Bryan, candidate more than once for the Presidency of
the United States. Being an American Mr. Bryan, perhaps naturally, did
not perceive (the English being so perfect) that no Chinaman could
possibly have written the book, and being also somewhat shocked at some
of the remarks in it about the common infidelities of matrimonial life
in England and America, he quite innocently published an article
rebutting these charges and explaining that if the author (the supposed
Chinese official) had had the advantage of being brought up in an
Anglo-Saxon household he would never have made such mistakes! Dickinson
had consequently to write to Mr. Bryan, and, breaking his incognito, to
inform him that the author _had_ had the said advantage, and really knew
what he was talking about!
From 1885 onwards I lectured pretty frequently in London, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham, Bradford, and so forth—chiefly at
first in connection with the various Socialist societies and groups in
those places. The subjects treated of were those which are now so well
recognized and understood everywhere that there is no need to insist on
them, though at that time they were only beginning to appear on the
social horizon—the evils of Competition, Adulteration, Falsification of
goods, Waste, the scramble for Dividends, the iron Law of Wages, and so
forth. Afterwards the lectures branched out a little more widely into
literary and philosophical subjects, and with more general audiences.
In 1891, as I have already said, the Humanitarian League was founded.
And later on I gave addresses on various occasions in connection with
the League’s meetings; one at an early date (about ’92 or ’93) on
Vivisection—in conjunction with Edward Maitland; another on the same
subject some years later; one in ’97 on the Prisons; one in ’98 on what
might be called “Humane Science”; and one in 1906 on “Simplification of
Life,” and others. In the last-mentioned lecture I referred to the
complexity of life among our well-to-do classes which arises from the
fact of their being able to _pay_ servants for doing things for them,
and pointed out (supposing the bottom ever fell out of the bucket of
modern society, and these people really had to produce their own food,
clothing, etc.) how _simple_ their lives would probably become—and how
interesting it would be to see them going about barefoot and clothed in
flour-sacks, rather than do the hard work of cobbling and tailoring for
themselves.
The _Morning Leader_ took the idea up, and brought out a Cartoon
illustration of the lecture, showing the London Club men promenading in
Hyde Park with only Indian blankets and flour-bags for covering, though
still clinging religiously to their old umbrellas and tall hats!
For the Theosophist societies I spoke occasionally, in Birmingham,
Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and elsewhere—weaving in some amount
of Indian philosophy (the Upanishads, etc.) with talk on social
subjects; also for the Ethical societies in much the same way; and for
Charles Rowley’s Sunday afternoons at Ancoats, Manchester. In 1905 I
took up the question of Small Holdings and the Co-operative Colonization
of the Land—a question which had by that time become actual through the
Small Holdings Acts of 1892 and 1907, and which will have to be still
more seriously considered in the future; and spoke on the subject in
Holmesfield and other villages in my neighborhood, as well as in Oxford,
Glasgow and other large centres. Joseph Fels was very keen at that time
on the subject; and I went with him to view his group of a dozen or so
five-acre holdings at Maylands in Essex. Unfortunately the experiment
did not turn out a success. He had bought some very heavy clay land at
an absurdly low price, £7 an acre, and had spent £20 per acre on it in
breaking up and burning the clay and heavily manuring, thus making the
real initial cost of the land £27 per acre; and had then planted the
ground with fruit-trees and had suitable cottages built on it. Reckoning
up the total cost of each holding he offered them at a low rental, some
3 per cent. or 4 per cent. on the capital invested, and took some care
besides in the choice of tenants, feeling confident that with proper
handling the places would prove remunerative. Unfortunately they did not
do so. Probably it had been a mistake to speculate on such extremely
poor land as this was to begin with. Anyhow it never yielded the crops
expected; and one by one the tenants disheartened abandoned their
holdings, and the whole scheme fell to the ground.
Having always a good many friends among the Railway-men I was not
unfrequently asked to speak at their clubs and branch meetings. On one
occasion in November 1907, in conjunction with George Barnes, C. T.
Cramp, Pete Curran and Victor Grayson, I addressed an A.S.R.S. meeting
of over three thousand in the Sheffield Corn-Exchange. George Barnes
always strikes me as a fine, solid and sensible man; Charlie Cramp the
same; and indeed the railway-men generally—perhaps from their close and
constant contact with the flow of humanity—have a discernment and
reasonableness of outlook which is quite peculiar. Victor Grayson, the
course of whose political career was so brief and so meteoric, was a
most humorous creature. His fund of anecdotes was inexhaustible, and
rarely could a supper party of which he was a member get to bed before
three in the morning. On the platform for detailed or constructive
argument he was no good, but for criticism of the enemy he was
inimitable—the shafts of his wit played like lightning round him, and
with his big mouth and flexible upper lip he seemed to be simply
browsing off his opponents and eating them up. His disappearance from
public life has been quite a loss.
In some ways these large audiences are easier to speak to than small
ones. Consciousness of personalities—either one’s own or of members of
the audience—disappears; the great broad human interests come forward;
finesse and detailed argument are of little account; the reverberation
of emotion is great, and that carries the speaker on; but of course much
depends on conditions. To hold a large audience in the open air is
difficult work, but it is good practice. Concatenation and logical
continuity are of no great importance, but every word must be distinct,
every phrase must tell, every point be made clear and attractive, else
the congregation will evaporate even while you talk to it, and condense
again round the nearest coster’s barrow.
In a closed room or hall you have your hearers more at command. They
cannot easily escape, and you may become dull without knowing it! But
here again much depends on circumstances. I find a room (of the common
type) with level floor and high raised platform at one end rather
trying. It is difficult to get _at_ an audience so much below you, and
as the voice tends to rise the more _distant_ listeners seem
unreachable. Worse still is a flat room where you stand on the floor
without _any_ platform; for then you cannot see your flock, and you lose
all command over it. Personally I like an amphitheatre lecture-hall with
rising tiers of seats one behind the other; or best of all an ordinary
theatre with pit and galleries, so that from the stage one is nearly on
a level with the great bulk of those present. I have spoken (on _The
Larger Socialism_ or cognate subjects) to audiences of two thousand or
more at various theatres—the ‘Grand,’ Manchester (November 1908 and
November 1909), the ‘Prince’s,’ Blackburn (October 1910), the
‘Metropole,’ Glasgow (November 1910), and others, and with a
satisfactory sense in general of being able to reach my hearers.
On November 11, 1910, I gave an address to the Literary and
Philosophical Society at Greenock on _State-Interference with Industry_,
which was repeated afterwards at Cambridge, Oxford, and elsewhere. The
subject was much to the fore at that time, and from opposite points of
view, owing to prevalent strikes and lock-outs. The Clyde shipping
strike was on, and there was a good deal of indignation expressed up and
down the country at the conduct of the men in the shipyards, who had
refused to take up their tools and go to work again, even after their
leaders had counselled and urged them to do so. I was as much in the
dark as most others about the cause of this strange refusal—until I
reached Greenock; and then I soon heard from various quarters, both of
men and masters, the real reason. It was not a question of wages or of
hours. Those matters had so far been settled satisfactorily. The real
grievance was a personal one. The men had been affronted by the
overbearing conduct of the Chairman of the Employers’ Association, the
insulting manner in which he had behaved to their representatives, and
so forth; and they were not going to put up with this without a protest.
They wanted to be treated in a gentlemanly way. It was encouraging and
refreshing to find that this was so; and the fact that it was so lets a
good deal of light into a frequent cause of labour troubles and
dissensions. But of course in this case at Greenock, as in so many
others, the Press all over the country had got on the wrong tack, and
the public never knew the real rights of the matter.
On October 24, 1908, the Women’s Suffrage party held a great
demonstration in Manchester, which like others of their functions was a
miracle of organization. There were to be ten platforms, and the mere
getting together of ten distinct bodies of processionists at their
respective starting-stations in the neighborhood of the Town Hall, and
marching them off to the appointed time, was no light matter. However it
was done; and with Mrs. Despard walking gallantly at the head, supported
by Margaret Ashton, Miss Abadam, Dr. Helen Wilson, Isabella Ford, Mrs.
Swanwick, Mrs. K. D. Courtney, Mrs. Billington Greig, Councillor James
Johnston, Professor Chapman, Canon Hicks and myself, a solid phalanx
nearly a mile long, with bands and banners complete, walked all the way
to Alexandra Park, three miles out! The immense crowd which came forth
to witness the demonstration, and which lined both sides of the road,
did not say much; it did not cheer to any great extent, nor did it
scoff; it was simply deeply impressed. A large part of it followed on
the route and collected round the ten platforms—about a thousand
listeners to each. Each platform dealt with a separate subject—mine, in
conjunction with Mrs. Greig and Miss Margaret Robertson, took _Prison
Reform_. A cornet finally gave the signal for a joint resolution to be
proposed in favour of the Suffrage, which was of course carried by
acclamation, and the crowd dispersed.
Mrs. Despard’s work in the two related causes of Women and Labour has
been splendid. Her ardour and indomitable resolution, despite the
drawback of advancing years, have been almost miraculous, and I always
see her in my mind’s eye marching gloriously to some encounter, and
resembling the horse (in the words of the book of Job) “who saith among
the trumpets Ha! ha! and sniffeth the battle from afar!” It has been an
honour and a pleasure to me to speak on many a platform with Mrs.
Despard—in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere. In October 1912 I took the
chair at a meeting of the Sheffield Women’s Freedom League, when she
lectured on the subject of Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_. It is
characteristic of her that this poem was a favorite of hers from
earliest girlhood; and in a sustained address that evening she quoted
very large portions of it by heart, holding her audience for nearly two
hours in rapt accord and attention. Mrs. Despard was, I need hardly say,
like Shelley himself, an ardent vegetarian—though Shelley, owing to
circumstances and conditions, often probably found it difficult to live
quite up to the mark of his wishes in this respect.
In October 1909 I was honoured by being made President of the Vegetarian
Congress at Manchester for that year—notwithstanding my own occasional
derelictions from the ideal standard—and I found myself in the chair at
an interesting meeting supported by well-known pillars of the movement
like Professor J. E. Mayor of Cambridge, Dr. E. A. Axon of Manchester,
Dr. Lybeck of Helsingfors, and others. The thing that struck me most
about the meeting was the extraordinary number of extremely ancient
looking patriarchs present with long white hair and beards; and I very
nearly disgraced myself in my opening speech by expressing a doubt
whether in view of this result Vegetarianism was a thing really to be
desired or recommended! Some kind presiding spirit however saved me from
this ineptitude, and I reached the end of my discourse safely and
without succumbing to the temptation.
A subject on which I have often spoken—though always with the sense of
only touching the fringe of it—is that of the connection between Sun
worship and Christianity. The existing books on the subject are quite
unsatisfactory, being very limited in their outlook. Some day it will
have to be worked out more thoroughly. It is a most interesting subject,
but as it involves a good deal of historical and antiquarian information
and some technical knowledge of Astronomy besides reference to early
sexual rites, it is not a very easy one to put before a general
audience. I gave a lecture on it for the Sheffield Ethical Society in
December 1908 and for J. R. Campbell’s “Progressive League” at the City
Temple in November 1909, as well as in other places; but it really would
require a series of lectures for anything like adequate presentment. The
_continuity_ of Christianity with the religions of the old world and its
ordered evolution from them is the idea which we now require to realize.
We have had enough of its portrayal as a miraculous and exceptional
stage in human development; and now that the world is coming round again
to a concrete appreciation of the value and beauty of actual life, and
to a sort of neo-Pagan point of view, it is above all important that we
should understand the sources from which Christianity sprang in the
past, and what germs of a world-religion it may bear within itself for
the future, when it shall have cast off the crude and gothic elements of
its mediæval development.
My friend Edward Lewis, himself a writer on The New Paganism, was in
1912 and 1913 minister of the King’s Weigh House Church, Duke Street,
W., and he and R. J. Campbell not unfrequently interchanged pulpits at
that time. Lewis persuaded me to speak at his church; and on two
occasions (November 1912 and October 1913) I did so. His congregation,
largely trained no doubt and educated by his discourses, was an
intelligent and sympathetic one, and though I had some misgivings on my
first visit in speaking on so abstruse a subject as “The Nature of the
Self”—illustrated as it was by numerous quotations from the Upanishads
and from _Towards Democracy_—I felt no misgiving on the second occasion,
when my subject (similarly illustrated) was “Rest.” These lectures were
repeated at the Lyceum (women’s) Club, Piccadilly, at Croydon,
Eastbourne and elsewhere; and the fact that audiences like these, of a
rather popular character, could listen with deep understanding and
sympathy to the unfolding of innermost psychological teachings has
convinced me that the germs of a new and democratic religion are only
waiting among our mass-peoples for the day and the stimulus which will
bring them to birth and development.
Edward Lewis, being vigorous in heart and brain, and a real man,
naturally could not continue very long in a profession like “the
ministry” which entailed his ascending the pulpit three or four times a
week and not only giving ‘edifying’ counsel to his congregation but
confining his own life within a corresponding circle of inanity. Such a
career would inevitably have sapped and ruined his manhood; and with
true instinct he threw up his five or six hundred a year and retired
into the wilderness. The members of his congregation were duly shocked
and grieved in their different ways, according to the views they took of
his lapse or lapses from holiness; but if, as is likely, the quondam
Christian minister should become the missionary and apostle of a new and
vital Paganism, the world will be very much the gainer.
The War, now going on [1915] is not only acting already very directly on
the industrial life of the nations concerned but is pointing pretty
clearly towards a remodelling of our general conception of Industry for
the future. It is fairly certain that somehow or other the gloomy and
depressing wage-slavery of the present day—so intimately bound up with
the Commercial régime—will have to give way; and productive work will
have to regain the characters of spontaneity and gladness which surely
are of the essence of its nature, and which are the necessary roots of
all Art and of all Beauty and Joy in life. With that transformation of
industry all life will be transformed, and the neo-Pagan ideal will
become a thing possible of realization.
For some years, from 1910 onwards I have spoken on this idea—entitling
my lectures “Freedom in Industry,” “Beauty in Civic Life” and so forth,
and delivering them before various bodies and in various places—as at
Caxton Hall, London, for the Humanitarian League; at Crosby Hall,
Chelsea, for the University Settlement there; for the Fabian Society at
Oxford; for the Arts Club at Leeds; for the Progressive and
Town-planning League at Bolton; for the N.U.T. Association at
Chesterfield; and for many Adult Schools, I.L.P. Clubs and Ethical and
Theosophist societies in different parts of the country.
To produce for Use; that production should really take place for the
benefit of the Consumer; to concentrate not on Profit to individuals,
but on advantage and gain to the Community; to drop in one inspired
moment the whole mad sequence of cut-throat Rivalry, insane Waste,
disgusting Fraud, and inane Uselessness, which constitute modern
Industry; all this would mean such an enormous liberation of Power, such
an incalculable increase in general Wealth, that the spectre of poverty
would be exorcised for ever, and the numbing anxiety which weighs so
heavily now on the lives of millions would be lifted away like an evil
cloud. Joy would descend upon life, and the ordinary occupations would
become free, spontaneous and beautiful.
Our powers of production to-day are so immense that even in the midst of
the present frightful War we (on this little island) can spare millions
of our best men for fighting, and millions more for the work of
providing those fighters with engines of death and destruction, and
_yet_ with the residue can calmly and easily keep the nation going. What
our powers and our achievement might be if once those eight millions or
so—whose work is now only destructive—were turned on to the great
positive task of social reconstruction and sensible human emancipation,
it really passes imagination to conceive. The age-long world-dream of
Paradise Regained would at last be within our reach. We can see that the
War is even now forcing the modern peoples to take stock of their
boasted Civilization, to reckon up the gains to Humanity which it
represents—and the losses; to find out and decide in what direction they
are really moving, and in what direction they want to move. If an event
so great, so colossal, as this does not shatter the old order of
profit-grinding and wage-slavery and wake a new ideal of life in the
heart of the nations, one would say there is little hope for the world.
But surely it will do so.
XV
TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSLATORS
Among the many good things in my life which I owe to my books by no
means the least has been my introduction through them to dear and valued
foreign friends.
One day in March 1901 there called upon me a young Hungarian—Ervin
Batthyány by name—a modest, sturdy and almost rustic-looking youth of
about twenty-three. He proved to be a member of the well-known Batthyány
family, whose influence in Hungarian politics, on the Liberal as well as
on the Conservative side, has always been considerable; but he was by no
means conservative in his outlook or ultra-aristocratic in his leanings.
It happened at the moment of his appearance that I was doing some
gardening and trundling about a wheelbarrow. “Oh,” he said at once, “do
let me wheel that barrow for you; I do like so much to do that sort of
work, but I have no chance at home—I am so _civilized_ you know.” For a
moment I thought he was chaffing; then the next moment I saw he was
quite sincere. I believe I let him trundle the barrow for a bit; then we
sat down and talked.
It turned out that he was expecting in the following year to come into
large landed estates in Hungary; that he had studied and thought about
Socialism to some extent; and that among other things he wanted to
consult me about the administration of his property when he should have
the management of it. It appeared that with the almost feudal system
still prevailing in that part, the cottagers and labourers working on
such estates were practically attached to the soil and frequently
transferred with it from owner to owner; that they were employed by the
farm-bailiffs in gangs for the benefit of the estate; that they received
next to no monetary wages, but were paid in pork or flour or the poor
tenements they inhabited—that is, they were paid by a small share of the
wealth they had themselves created; that they had no means of earning
anything independently; and that they had little or no education—the
schools being all under the thumb of the Catholic priests.
We talked over possible reforms—of a mild kind of course, as anything
drastic would be out of the question; and when he went away he said with
the same charming simplicity as before “The next time I see you I hope I
shall not be so _civilized_.” The next time proved to be some three
years later.
He returned to Buda-Pesth shortly after his visit to Millthorpe; and
took as it happened a copy of _Towards Democracy_ with him, which he
gave to a lady friend there—a certain Madame Nadler—knowing that she was
interested and indeed accomplished in English literature. Madame Nadler
took warmly to the book, and before long it came about that she and the
young Count, who was a frequent visitor at her house, spent a large part
of their time together in reading and discussing it—with the not
unnatural result that they became warmly interested in each other.
Meanwhile he, the young man, plunged into the administration of his
newly acquired estate, and in the course of two or three years made
useful changes. He founded an undenominational school, with a workshop
for instructing the peasants in various crafts, and a reading-room
provided with more or less socialistic literature—an innocent enough
proceeding as we should think, but it turned the whole Clerical party
against him, and terrified the aristocratic landowners of the
neighborhood out of their wits, as with the shadow of a coming
revolution! All this, together with his journalistic work in connection
with various anti-militarist and Anarchist papers brought him into
conflict with his family and the authorities, with the result that a
sequestration of his property took place, and for a couple of years he
was subject to a good deal of annoyance. During that period, curiously
enough, little Millthorpe became the chief means of communication
between the two friends—for I was in touch with them both, while their
local and more direct letters were liable to be intercepted. They were
thus able to concert plans to frustrate the enemy, which they did with
such success that at the end of the period mentioned Ervin resumed work
on his estates—though not without some risk, as may be imagined, of
renewed attacks.
After these events _Towards Democracy_ became more than ever a link
between the two friends. They determined to translate the book—not into
Hungarian but into German (as being a more widely received language),
and they set to work upon it in real earnest. Mme. Nadler’s competence
for this labour was quite exceptional. With a great enthusiasm for the
book and a quick appreciation of its meanings, she combined a very fine
literary sense and aptness of phrase; while Ervin with his rather
encyclopædic brain was able to interpret all sorts of references to
trades and Nature-processes. In 1906 the translation of Part I was
published in Berlin; and Parts II, III and IV followed in separate
editions in the three following years, 1907, 1908, and 1909.
But meanwhile (early I think in 1904) Mme. Nadler having decided to give
her children the advantage of an English education, and at the same time
to save them from the hatefulness of enforced military service, migrated
to this country; and so it came to pass that I made the personal
acquaintance of this remarkable and beautiful woman—an acquaintance
which, I need not say, soon ripened into friendship. Ervin, too, finding
his native land not very congenial came over to England; and thus it
happened that after the lapse of three years he and I resumed the
conversations which we had first begun over the wheelbarrow. I did not
notice that he was notably less ‘civilized’ than before, but his
experiences had very obviously altered his political and social outlook,
and his general views were decidedly more anti-governmental than they
had been at the earlier date.
These translations by Madame Nadler were, however, by no means the first
to be made into German. In 1901 or so Herr Karl Federn had come over
from Vienna and spent a day or two at Millthorpe. In 1902 he placed his
translation of _Love’s Coming-of-Age_ with a Leipzig publisher, and the
book almost immediately had a good reception. It passed through several
editions, and when a few years later, in 1912, the first German Women’s
Congress was held in Berlin the book curiously enough became a sort of
bone of contention, dividing the advanced party who took it as their
text-book, from the more conservative party who anathematized it. In
proportion as controversy raged around it the work became more
notorious, a cheap edition was printed, and before the Great War broke
out some fifty thousand copies had been sold.
[Illustration:
LILLY NADLER-NUELLENS WITH HER DAUGHTER.
]
Herr Federn was not very fortunate in his choice of a title. _Wenn die
Menschen reif zur Liebe werden_ is only a rather heavy paraphrase of
_Love’s Coming-of-Age_, and the text of the book itself suffers from a
certain heaviness and diffuseness. Still to Herr Federn himself I feel I
owe a considerable debt, not only for introducing my work to the German
public, but for the general fidelity of his translations and the loyalty
of his dealings on my account with the German publishers. In 1903 he
published also in Leipzig his translation of _Civilization: its Cause
and Cure_; and in 1905, in Jena, the translation of _The Art of
Creation_ (_Die Schöpfung als Kunstwerk_). This last was issued in
rather elaborate _format_ by the well-known firm, Eugen Diederichs, but
has never reached the circulation of the other two.
In the Spring of 1909 I was at Florence for some weeks; and
there—largely through my friend Professor Herron—I came into touch with
an interesting circle of young Italian _literati_ and artists;
especially interesting to me because they represented a strong reaction
away from the very bourgeois and commercialized Italian art-ideals of
the later nineteenth century, and towards the ideals of John Ruskin and
William Morris—ideals founded on the socialization of human activities
and the intimate relationship of all true literary and artistic work to
the actual life of the mass-peoples.
The group included such men as Riccardo Nobili, probably the best living
exponent of Fourteenth Century Italian art, whose charming little story
_A Modern Antique_ delightfully exposes the fakes of Florentine
art-dealers and the gorgeous gullibility of American globe-trotters;
Roberto Assagioli, the young philosopher, editor of _Psiche_—a
psychological Review—and author of an illuminating tract on the Talking
Horses of Elberfeldt[28]; Guido Ferrando, author of a couple of tracts
on _La Coscienza Universale_ and _La Nuova Psicologia_ (Florence
1908)—who has done me the honour to translate my _Love’s Coming-of-Age_
and my _Art of Creation_ into Italian; Count Auteri, the Sicilian
architect and sculptor; Giuseppe Rambelli, the artist, and others.
More or less associated with this group—and on a second visit—I made the
acquaintance of Teresina Bagnoli, a gifted young woman who had already
been in correspondence with me with regard to a translation of _T. D._
(of which she sent me batches from time to time for criticism and
revision). I found her swift and penetrating and original, and verging
on Anarchism in her political and philosophic outlook; and I have to
thank her for her excellent little volume _Verso la Democrazia_[29]
which has brought me into touch with Italian readers in that intimate
field.
It is curious, but perhaps not unexpected, that my best translators have
been women. To a third lady friend, Mademoiselle Senard, I owe a very
excellent version of _Towards Democracy_ into French (Parts III and IV
only). After some little preliminary correspondence Mlle. Senard came
over from Paris in the summer of 1913 and spent a couple of months in
the country in my neighborhood. Sprung from an old-fashioned and rather
aristocratic family in Burgundy she had managed at a comparatively early
age to emancipate herself from a convent school and education, and by
her resolution had almost compelled her parents to find for her a way
out into the great world. She had become a perfect linguist in English,
German and Italian; and I found her a fine-looking and attractive person
of thirty-five or so, always, like a true Frenchwoman, perfectly dressed
and _chic_, yet simply dressed and absolutely natural in her
conversation and movements. It was a pleasure to spend many a morning or
afternoon with her, looking over her translation work or rambling
through the garden and the fields.
However well one may know a foreign language it is rarely possible to
follow every _nuance_ of meaning or to succeed entirely in avoiding
errors; and a foreigner dealing with English has perhaps all the more
difficulty in that way on account of the idiomatic and irregular
character of our language. I have not always cared so much about the
other books, but with _Towards Democracy_ I have been very anxious that
the renderings should be faithful; and it has been fortunate for me that
in these three cases I have had such very competent translators, and
been sufficiently versed myself in the languages concerned to be able to
assist them in doubtful places.
Marcelle Senard wrote also a little brochure of her own on _Edward
Carpenter et sa Philosophie_,[30] which shows the clearness and
penetration of a well-balanced French mind. Then, on the outbreak of the
War in 1914 she took up Nursing work, and with extraordinary energy and
devotion organized and helped to equip a new Hospital for the Wounded at
Nevers, south of Paris, where she remained for a year as Manageress and
Secretary, till exhausted with the incessant labour she was at last
compelled to relinquish the post.
In connection with French translations I must not forget to mention my
friend Paul Le Rouge who is now assistant judge in French Morocco, and
who translated and published my _Prisons, Police and Punishment_ in
Paris some ten years ago. I am sorry to say I have not found an English
judge or police-magistrate who has taken an equal interest in the
original book!
Early in 1910 I received one or two letters from a young Japanese
illustrating the sad state of commercial slavery and militarism into
which Japan had fallen since the Russo-Japanese War. Women and children
as well as men were being worked twelve hours or more a day in the
factories which were springing up on all sides, and for a miserable
pittance; there were no regulations to curb the greed of employers; and
any public protest was treated as anti-governmental Socialism, with the
result that papers were suppressed in the most arbitrary way, and
speakers committed to prison. A Japanese lady, Mme. Fukuda, had been
imprisoned for five years for thus voicing the wrongs of the workers;
and my correspondent, Sanshiro Ishikawa, was awaiting trial on a similar
charge. He had, being a fair English scholar, been interested in my work
for some time; and told me (what I had heard before) that a translation
of my Civilization book had circulated pretty widely in his country at a
quite early date. That translation, however, had gone out of print, and
he, Ishikawa, was preparing a new one for the press, when—the Japanese
Censor interfered and forbade its publication!
This shows up pretty clearly the state of darkness which had descended
on the land of the Rising Sun! It was not of course on account of his
interest in my book that he had been arrested, but on account of his
general work in the cause of Labour.
The result of his trial was that he was sent to prison for three months,
and that on his emergence he had to keep rather quiet on account of the
attentions of the Police. He retained however his interest in my
writings, made translations of portions of them, and embodied these
together with some biographical matter in a book of some three hundred
pages beautifully printed in Japanese characters and published in Tokyo
in 1912; but of course for the most part a sealed book to me. Some small
portions, however, are printed in our language and characters, including
a letter from myself written to him while he was in prison—which I may
as well reproduce here as it serves to throw light on the situation:—
DEAR FRIEND ISHIKAWA SANSHIRO,
Just a line to cheer you in prison—though you will be nearly coming
out when this reaches you. I received your letter of March 27 with
much pleasure. You were to go to prison next day. They seem to be very
severe and despotic in Japan, when one cannot even publish
_Civilization: its Cause and Cure_ there. But your countrymen are too
sensible to bear this sort of treatment for very long. I suppose it is
_patriotism_ which is so very strong in the nation just now, and which
forms an excuse for anti-socialism. King Edward VII’s death is causing
a great wave of patriotism here; yet the future of mankind is leading
us beyond patriotism to _humanity_.
I cannot write much now, but thought I would send you a few lines. I
believe I did send you my photograph. If it did not reach you let me
know, and I will send another.
With hearty greetings and thanks to you for what you have done in the
great Cause.
Yours very truly,
EDWD. CARPENTER.
_21 May, 1910._
After a time—I hardly know whether on account of troubles in Japan or of
attractions towards Europe—Sanshiro determined to come to these Western
lands; and one day in the autumn of 1913, as I happened to be in London,
he came to call on me there. Anything less dangerous-looking as a
revolutionary it would be hard to imagine. Small in stature, timid in
manner, and with a very gentle voice, he seemed the embodiment of
quietude and sympathy. It was not difficult however in his case, as in
that of many Japanese, to discern, beneath that composed exterior, a
strong undercurrent of resolution and courage.
He read English with ease, but spoke it rather slowly and with
difficulty, was intelligent, and like many Orientals skilful with his
fingers and apt at housework. We tried to find him employment and a
means of living in our neighborhood or in Sheffield or Manchester, but
without success, and after similar efforts in London he migrated to
Brussels where he knew of a friend in Paul Reclus, son of Elie and
nephew of Elisée Reclus, and where he obtained occupation in decorative
painting. This was early in 1914. In August, of course, the War broke
out, and a few weeks later the Germans entered Brussels. The Reclus
family—before their entry I imagine—retired to Paris; but Sanshiro
remained in Brussels—I believe as caretaker of their apartments. It was
a somewhat risky position. The Germans drew a cordon round the city, and
ruled severely within it. Once or twice only he got messages through to
me.
But as the weeks went by he began to feel that he must escape at all
costs; and in the end he succeeded in doing so—by representations I
believe to the Japanese Government, which led to his liberty being
granted in exchange for a German prisoner taken at Kiao-chow; but of
this I am not certain. I have not seen him since, but anyhow he got to
Liancourt (near Paris) where he now is [1915].
Another Japanese friend, Mr. Saikwa Tomita, the youthful author of _The
Matanjitenshô_ or _Psalm of the Last Day_, has translated and published
large portions of _Towards Democracy_ in current Japanese magazines, and
intends apparently to bring the whole out in book form—as well as
versions of _The Art of Creation_ and some of my other works. Speaking
(in a letter) of the present War, he says: “Japan is at her crisis as
well as Europe is. Here in this country, as you well know, he who is for
the lower classes and vagabonds, or who is for [the] cosmopolitanism, is
treated by the authorities under the name of ill-fame and has to suffer
from a bitter experience.” And Sanshiro Ishikawa above-mentioned speaks
likewise: “Is not this a terrible epoch, that the violent force only
holds the supreme power in this world, and humanity has no influence, at
least in [the] international affairs. The present situation of Japan is
in most dangerous step [stage]; many peoples are becoming admirers of
militarism. Commercialism is already too powerful; and I feel a duty
that I must fight with full-hearted spirit against them.”
Let us pray that these true-hearted fighters for Internationalism may
prevail—all over the world, and among all nations!
I am proud to find that among the Bulgarians—who are supposed just now
to be our enemies—I have many friends. Messrs. Vaptzaroff and Dosseff,
editors of the magazine called _Renaissans_ at Burgas and Tchirpan,
published in it shortly before the War various chapters of
_Civilization_, including “The Defence of Criminals,” “Custom,” “Modern
Science,” etc., and later the whole of that book, and of _England’s
Ideal_. With the outbreak of the war however they retired to Maikop in
the Kuban Territory (east of the Black Sea), being in touch there with
another friend of mine, the Russian novelist and mystic, Ivan Najívin.
M. Najívin, who makes his home apparently in the country near
Novorossisk on the shores of the Euxine—working there among his bees,
and in his vineyard and vegetable garden—has written to me for some
years, chiefly about Cosmic Consciousness and Sandals! He is, as may be
imagined, particularly interested in the Indian Sannyasis and mystics,
and was lately much surprised to find that some of the Russian peasant
sects (notably the _Stranniks_) among whom he had lived so long were all
the time unbeknown to him holding views and favouring practices very
similar to those of the Hindu mystics. “Bientôt je vous écrirai des
choses extraordinaires à propos du _gñanam_ et _samadhi_, etc. Tout cela
existe parmi le bas peuple et les moines Russes!” (letter of May 1913).
He has translated my _Visit to a Gñani_ into Russian under the title _I
Am_, also large portions of _Towards Democracy_ and the whole of
_Civilization_. Besides M. Najívin I am indebted to M. Sergius Orlovski
and M. G. Rapoport and others for introductions to the Russian public.
[Illustration:
MARCELLE SENARD.
(_Photo: L. Fréon, Neuilly, Paris._)
]
To my young friend Illit Gröndahl of Kloften, Norway, I owe the
circulation of my works in Norway, especially in Bergen. In Amsterdam a
translation of _Civilization_ (_De Beschaving: hare oorzaak en hare
Genesing_) was issued as long ago as 1899—with Preface by Leo Tolstoy
(the same preface which Tolstoy wrote to the chapter on Modern
Science[31]); and in the same city a translation of _Love’s
Coming-of-Age_ (_Liefde’s Meerderjarigheid_) was issued in 1904.
XVI
RURAL CONDITIONS
In contrast with the Artisans and Town-workers whom I had got to know so
well, the farm-populations and rustics among whom I found myself
embedded when I settled at Millthorpe were decidedly interesting. In the
working masses of the towns—at any rate of the Northern towns—what
attracted one was the ferment of the New Life coming on: the social
dreams of a better future; the efforts to realize such dreams, even in a
small way; the push towards independence; the greater alertness and
education; the busy hum and activity of Trades Unions and all manner of
Labour Associations. What interested me in the country was something
quite different. It was in fact the Old Life—the old immemorial rustic
existence still going on, still there though giving signs of passing of
course. As it happened, I could hardly have found a more old-world,
purely agricultural parish, if I had searched for it—certainly not in
the North of England—than Holmesfield when I first came there. (Now—oh,
irony!—it is already beginning to be civilized!) It was all in the old
rural style—the leisurely long day with its varied occupations and
interests, the life of the open air and the fields, the cattle and the
crops, the barn and the public-house; the absolute acceptance of things
as they are, complete non-interest in reform, positive indifference to
anything not patently visible to the eye, or to abstractions of any
kind. The good folk would talk about a particular field—and really with
amazing detail about its history, its climate, its soil, its suitability
for such and such crops, and so forth; but if you broached any phase of
the Land Question (however really important to them)—their eyes would
soon glaze and their conversation revert to their pigs or potatoes.
A few years after my arrival at Millthorpe, having found out some facts
about the Commons Enclosures in the neighborhood, I wrote a four-page
tract entitled _Our Parish and our Duke_—giving some account of the
circumstances under which our common lands were eaten up by our local
landlords early last century—and circulated it around. It was printed in
the London _Star_ (July 8, 1889) and quoted and commented on in other
papers; and it sold and circulated in leaflet form some twenty thousand
or more copies; but in the Parish itself it elicited no response! One
old farmer whom I knew pretty well said “It’s very well put together,
Mister, and it’s just exactly true”—and that was all the backing I got.
Probably if there were others that approved they did not dare to say so.
The fact that it challenged a Duke gave them pause! The tract, somewhat
enlarged and altered and under the title _The Village and the Landlord_,
is now published by the Fabian Society (Tract No. 136, 1d.).[32]
Thus, as I think I have said before, on first coming to Millthorpe I
experienced a certain sense of isolation among the people there. Whereas
in Sheffield and even at little Bradway I was received as a friend and
commonly called by my christian name, at Millthorpe I was a stranger—and
like all strangers an object of suspicion—and was addressed as “Mister.”
It was a curious situation, and I found myself leading a double and
divided life. How I came in the end to bridge the gulf and (so far) to
overpass it I hardly know; but Time does wonders, and by slow degrees
the rustics have accepted me almost as one of themselves and given me,
some of them, their warm friendship. I am indeed bound to say that
despite the great differences between them and the town-workers, and the
greater general intelligence and alertness of the latter, I admire the
character of the country-folk most—their extraordinary serenity and good
humour, their tenacity, sincerity, and real affectionateness. Even their
silent ways—though irritating at times—are a relief from the eternal
gabble of the cities. Said a farmer youth to me one day—after we had
been listening for some time to the rather cheap talk of an elderly and
radical “citizen”—“They do talk, those townsfolk,” he said; and then
after a pause—“them as talks so much _they must tell a lot o’ lies_.”
And I entirely agreed with him.
Talking about the gulf fixed between the Old and the New, and especially
between the mentality of the downright manual worker and that of the
artist—at one time we had an artist friend staying with us who was
rather down on his luck and making only a poor living. He was working on
a landscape picture, and every morning used to sit in one of my fields
and close to the wall which divided it from the high-road. An old
road-mender (the same who had told me years before how he remembered the
Commons “going in” i.e. being enclosed)—a good old man but bowed with
age and labour—used to come that way every morning to his work; and
every morning, as sure as Fate, made some patronizing remark to the
painter, which at last enraged the latter beyond endurance. “That’s a
nice pastime for you, young man.” And then the next morning, “I see
you’re amusin’ yoursen again, young man”; and so on. (“Pastime, indeed!
amusing myself! I wish the old fool had to do it instead of me. But I’ll
be even with him yet!”) So the next morning the artist inveigled the old
man into conversation, and after submitting meekly to more patronage,
said: “Well you see I have to do this for my living.”
“Do it for your livin’, do ye?”
“Yes.”
“Do you sell them paintin’s, then?”
“Of course I do.”
_Old Man_ (a little taken aback): “And how much might you get for a
thing like that?”
_Artist_ (stretching a point): “Well I might get ten pounds.”
_Old Man_ (astonished): “Ten pun! well I never!”
_Artist_ (following up): “Or I might get more of course.”
_Old Man_ (thoughtfully and with deep respect): “Ten pun! Well, I
never—_and sittin’ down to it too_!”
But Hodge is passing away. The old agricultural population (farmer and
labourer) is changing under the pressure of modern life; and soon—for
good or evil—will be a thing of the past. The motor-car and the cycle,
the telephone and the daily paper, are ploughing up the country
districts, torrents of townsfolk pour over the land on holidays, and the
seeds of new ideas are being sown. Already I can see, even in this
little corner of the land, a new type of native arising.
The great drawback of the country folk in England (worse here no doubt
than in Ireland) is their want of initiative. Centuries of smothered
life under the incubus of the Landlord and the Parson have had their
inevitable effect. They never _will_ speak their minds, or commit
themselves to any action which is not entirely customary and approved by
the powers that be. It may be different in other parts of the country,
but here the one answer to any question of importance (especially if put
by a stranger) is “I don’t know—I don’t know.” So fearful have they been
for generations lest their words should be by chance reported in ruling
quarters that the habit of concealment has at last got into their blood.
One sees from this how paralysing our land system is towards all manhood
and resourceful initiative in the country.
Nor is the matter much different in many other lands. When in Sicily (in
1909) we found that among the peasants the children were systematically
taught to _lie_, and punished by their parents for truth-speaking. And
for a very simple reason. For if a stranger came along and asked
questions of a child—“How much land has your father?”—“How many goats
does he keep?”—ten to one that stranger was an emissary of the Church
(the chief landlord of the old days), or a taxgatherer, and so an
emissary of the State; and the truth would mean more rent or more taxes.
Thus deceit was the only salvation, and lying the chief foundation of
“Morality.” Here in England the parson and the landlord have a similar
paralysing influence; and whether they actively and consciously are
conspiring against the people, or whether their questionings (as
sometimes may happen) are inspired by pure kindness, the result is the
same—namely the corruption of the people; and perhaps a worse corruption
in the second case than in the first.
Still the new life must come, and has to come, and is coming. Small
Holdings—either freehold or with a secure tenancy under a public
body—give perhaps the best chance of breeding a spirit of independence
in the people. Co-operation trains them in adaptability and resource.
At one time—seeing the waste of energy resulting from the twenty or so
small farmers in our valley each making their separate few pats of
butter weekly (and bad butter at that!) I got a dozen or more of them
together and put the case for co-operative milk-selling before them.
They all agreed that it was the right thing to do, that milk-selling
paid much better than butter-making and that the cost of transit to town
(by motor-car or country cart) could be recouped with profit. We went
into the figures and were satisfied. But when it came to actual
operations the paralysis of lack of initiative was on them, and no one
would stir a finger! If _I_ had arranged a whole scheme and set it in
operation I have no doubt they would have fallen in with it. But, as I
said, I had my own work to do, and had no intention of giving up a large
part of the day to their affairs. The only one who volunteered to do
anything practically—and this illustrates the difference between the
agricultural and the other workers—was curiously enough a _navvy_. He
had only a very small farm which he carried on side by side with his
navvy work, but he immediately took practical steps and would I believe
have carried a scheme through but for an illness which just then
overtook him.
A supply of Small Holdings (holdings say up to thirty acres in size[33])
on a really secure basis would do an immense work in liberating the
social life of the rural workers. For the first time in his history one
of the most important types of man in the country would be able to hold
up his head, face his ‘superiors,’ and give some kind of utterance and
expression to his own ideals. At present agricultural life is hugely
dull from its mere uniformity and want of variety under the
all-pervading foot-rule of the landowner and his faithful servant the
parson. A greater supply of small holdings would also, I need hardly
say, be valuable from the economic point of view, and the greater
variety it would encourage in the culture of the soil.
Of course what we now especially want, and what happily people are
beginning to _feel_ the want of, is the establishment of large
co-operative farms over the face of the land—somewhat on the model of
the Danish farms. When it is remembered what the Danes have done, with
an originally quite poor soil, by their organized co-operative
methods—how they have renewed the prosperity of their own country and
created a new invasion of Britain by their agricultural products—it
seems astonishing that we over here still remain in the muddy ruts of
our old ways. Supposing for example that by co-operative or governmental
purchase, or even (if it can be imagined) by gift from a large
landowner, an extensive farm of some two thousand acres were acquired;
supposing that suitable portions of the farm were broken up into twenty
small holdings of ten or twenty acres each; and that the remaining body
of the land were farmed in thorough style under a skilled manager—the
workers on the central farm being the small holders themselves, who
would thus work partly for themselves on an individualistic basis and
partly collectively for wages; supposing that the manager was given by
the co-operators a certain amount of authority for the purposes of work
and organization, and that on the other hand he was there to _advise_
the small holders to a certain extent as to their work and crops;
supposing that he organized co-operative arrangements for the members of
the society, both for the purchase of necessary materials and the sale
of their products; suppose that a joint council arranged the matters of
wages and dividends, and the establishment of creameries, cheese and
butter-making apparatus, egg-collecting systems, and so forth; surely it
is not very difficult to see that in some such roughly indicated way a
great new departure might be made in the agricultural development of the
United Kingdom. If a thousandth, if a twenty thousandth part of what is
spent in the mad destruction of a great war were spent on some such
constructive work, ten times the number of people now employed in
agriculture might be placed productively on the land, and the output of
wealth and home-grown food (so important to our island) might be
enormously increased.
About nine years ago—in 1906—I began to pull the farm lads and men
together to form a little Club at Millthorpe. For some years we had a
difficulty in finding a place for it, and had to be content with a very
small room in a cottage. But here came in the advantage of the small
holder. A silversmith who lives in the locality—the only man beside
myself who has two or three acres of freehold and who is not tied to a
landlord—having joined the Club, and seeing our difficulty, offered a
fine and large barn belonging to him for our use. If it had not been for
him we should have had to go, cap in hand, to some local owner or cleric
and could never have developed freely. As it is, the place has been a
great success. Managed in an easy-going sort of way by the men
themselves (and I am happy to say that my share now of the management is
very small) the Club has taken its own lines quite naturally. In order
to avoid ill-feeling and competition with the public-house—which is
close at hand—we have no drink, except tea and coffee. Whist, lectures,
readings, whist drives, dances, socials, billiards, are the chief
amusements, and the place serves occasionally for discussion of local
affairs. Theatricals, in a small way, now and then. And the balance of
our weekly subscriptions goes in winter to a Christmas supper, and in
summer to an excursion by rail or brake.
With small people secure in their tenure, such Clubs would grow up
pretty abundantly and would become the start-points of co-operative
movements, creameries, agricultural Banks, and so forth. The great thing
is that they should _not_ be managed by benevolent superiors, for the
management of their own concerns is after all the chief and most
important item of a people’s education. There is however a place in our
countrysides—and a need—for people of a rather wider knowledge and
outlook than the general rustics to come and live among them simply as
friends (and not as benefactors). People of this kind can certainly
contribute _something_—even though their ‘wider knowledge’ be as a rule
rather vague and bookish. They have information about what is going on
elsewhere, and they often are good at organizing. A new _kind_ of
parson, democratic-minded and really in touch with the people, and not
attached to any ‘church,’ and a man with a _little_ leisure at his
command, might be greatly helpful. Why do not the thousands of young men
(or women) who are thus qualified rush in to fill this void?
At one time, as I think I have already mentioned, I was a member of the
Parish Council, but the hopelessness of getting any result therefrom,
combined with the waste of time connected with it, caused me after a few
years to abandon the position. The four or five farmers, all in terror
of their landlords, and the parson (bound by golden chains to the Lord
of the Manor) formed a solid phalanx against any progressive proposal.
Perhaps I ought to have fought things out a little more, but wrangling
is an occupation which I detest, and to fight questions to a practical
finish always means the expenditure of much time—time which I with my
agricultural, literary and other labours could ill afford. The one
prevailing idea with the Council was not to spend _any_ money if
possible; and even the few shillings necessary for the repair of a small
length of public footpath would be debated over with a tenacity and
miserliness of outlook which made one despair; while the Vicar (not
without laudable presence of mind) would resign himself to slumber in
the Chair!
About the only thing of use I was able to do was to save from loss or
destruction the Award Book—that is the book which records the enclosure,
early last century, of the Common Lands of Holmesfield Parish, and
specifies the details of their assignment to the various proprietors
then holding land in the parish. And this I only did with difficulty and
after the labours of many months. When the Award was completed (in 1820)
the said Award Book naturally and rightly was handed over, not to the
Church or the Squire, but to one of the Trustees who represented the
Parish generally—a farmer, who of course kept the book at his farm under
lock and key, but with permission to the parishioners to inspect it at
convenient seasons. In course of time the farmer died, and his son
following in the same farm, became custodian of the book. Later on and
after many years, the son died, and the son’s widow became custodian. By
that time most people in the parish had forgotten, or were utterly
ignorant of the existence of such a book. It might easily have happened
that the widow or _her_ son, migrating to another part of the country,
should have taken the book with them among their household goods—in
which case it might have been lost for ever to our Parish. Such or
something similar _has_ happened frequently of course. It happened to
the Minute Book of the Courts Baron of Holmesfield—a manuscript record
of the meetings of the said Court all the way from 1588 to 1800, and a
most valuable and interesting document. In some unknown way the book
disappeared; but by a piece of good luck, it has now come into the
possession of the Free Library at Sheffield, where it can easily be
inspected, and where it is safer perhaps than it would have been in the
village to which it refers.
To return to our Award Book, the Parish Councils Acts very wisely gave
all such documents into the custody of the Parish Council to be kept in
a Parish room or Chest. But the difficulty was to make our Council take
any active interest in the fate of the book. Moreover it possessed no
Parish Room or Parish chest, and when the question came before it of
having a chest made, even that appeared to some of the members a serious
and unnecessary expense. Questions of the dimensions of the chest, the
material of which it should be constructed, the number of locks it
should carry, the selection of the joiner who should be entrusted with
the precious work and so forth, were endlessly debated; the Council
meetings took place only at long intervals and it seemed at last as if
the chest never _would_ get made. I mention these details merely to show
the kind of thing that happens in country villages. Meanwhile the Vicar
went to the said widow and (not without remonstrance from her) succeeded
in obtaining the Award Book; and placed it in the _Vestry_. A faction
then arose in the Council who maintained that the book was quite secure
in the Vestry safe; and that no Parish Chest was needed! It had then to
be pointed out that the Act did not _allow_ such books to be kept in the
Vestry, and that the Council would be responsible if it did not keep the
thing in its own custody. And so the game went on. Ultimately after a
full year of similar imbecility, the chest really got itself made; the
Award Book and some other documents were placed within, and now repose
there in waiting for the Day of Judgment. Exhausted by the labours
connected with the affair, and hopeless of ever getting any useful
activity out of the P.C., I shortly afterwards retired from it.
Of course these conditions are not the same in all parishes. Where there
are mining or artisan populations there is often a good deal of
briskness and movement; but in the agricultural regions and the South of
England affairs are somewhat as I have described. The District Councils
are a shade better than the Parish Councils; but the membership of them
falls largely into the hands of small shopkeepers and a middling class
of folk who are very philistine and wanting in æsthetic perception, and
as a rule rather ignorant except in matters of business. They make hard
and fast rules and regulations—often suggested by the conditions
existing in the jerry-built slum-areas of the smaller towns—and by
enforcing these regulations in country districts where they are not
needed do seriously hamper the expansion of rural life. Such are some of
the regulations about the height and cubic space of rooms, which
desirable though they be in slum-tenements are quite out of place and
the cause of needlessly high rents in country cottages; such also the
barring of wooden dwellings, on account of fire, in many rural and even
isolated regions where there is no public danger from this cause; and
again the vexatious restrictions set upon the use of vans and tents. In
these respects the work of the District Councils is really helping
towards the increase of an existing evil, the depopulation of the
countrysides.
On the other hand the composition of these Councils makes them absurdly
deferent to big commercial and aristocratic interests, and the money of
the ratepayers gets poured out like water on schemes in which under
cover of public works private interests are largely concerned. As I have
had occasion to explain in the Fabian Tract above-mentioned—_The Village
and the Landlord_—our local District Council, having decided that a
reservoir was needed, applied to the then Duke of Rutland for the
purchase of a suitable area on the moors above us. The land in question
had before 1820 been part of the Common Lands of the parish, and was
now, as the ducal private property, paying rates on an _estimated
rental_ of less than 2s. 6d. per acre. It could not therefore be
supposed to be worth much more than £3 per acre, capital value; and it
might _almost_ have been expected that in consideration of the history
of the Enclosure transactions, and of the additional fact that the land
was wanted for an important public purpose (water supply), the area
necessary for the reservoir would have been granted free. Far from that
happening, as a matter of fact the amount actually charged was at a rate
of about £150 per acre! The sad thing about such a levy on the public
purse is not only that the ducal people should have charged it, but that
the District Council should have paid it! If the latter had had the
gumption to offer a bold resistance, to decide for themselves what was a
reasonable payment, and to bring the whole matter before the public, the
case for the former would probably have collapsed. But there’s the
rub—the want of spirit and pluck in these public bodies; and considering
these and similar things one seems to see very plainly that what really
matters in the life of a nation is not so much the exact form of its
institutions as the general level of education, alertness, and public
spirit among its people. With these latter advantages defective
institutions may still be made to serve; without them the best will soon
become corrupt. It may however be said that some institutions are
naturally more favorable than others to the growth of public spirit, and
that is a consideration worth remembering.
One of the few native institutions of long standing in this locality is
the Well-dressing—which takes place in some of the neighboring villages
once a year, during the feast-week of the village, and is accompanied
with dancing and other festivities. The village fountain or spring is
decorated with flowers—sometimes in quite elaborate and ornamental
designs—and the festival evidently dates from very early or
pre-Christian times when the divinities of the streams and water-sources
were recognized and worshipped. When I first came, in 1883, into these
parts, there were along all the lane sides numbers of the most charming
stone cisterns and water-troughs bubbling with clean water and overhung
with maiden-hair ferns; and it was part of the habits of the
country-folk to keep these places in order—a joy to human beings and to
animals. Now we have a reservoir as above-mentioned. The Well-dressings
truly remain as a yearly function; but the divinities whom they used to
celebrate have fled. The cisterns and troughs all over the country are
neglected. They are cracked and dried up and full of potsherds and
salmon-tins; wayfaring men and animals go thirsty; and the public spirit
and service of the water-gods has vanished. We are told that water
conducted through miles of iron tubes and lengths of lead piping is much
more ‘sanitary’ than the water from field springs and wells. It may be.
But I prefer the latter. At one time there were so many cases of
lead-poisoning in the Sheffield district, traceable to lead connections,
that the matter excited serious attention. It was decided that the
trouble was due to a certain acid in the moor water, which dissolved the
lead, and consequently large filter-beds charged with chalk and lime
were made in connection with the reservoirs, which neutralized the acid.
The water was freed from this danger, but it became saturated with lime;
and the people died from stone in the bladder instead of lead-poisoning!
Personally I would prefer to take my risk of a microbe in a flowing
cistern. And with an alert country-population, assisted by an occasional
inspector, such a risk would certainly be small.
But we are told that public spirit ought to make us join these reservoir
schemes; and pressure is put on us by the ‘authorities’ to do so. I do
not by any means agree. Though no doubt there are cases in which local
storage is advisable or necessary, the unbridled transfer of water over
immense distances is attended by serious evils. The beautiful Thirlmere
is turned into a mere water-tank in order to supply Manchester; the
lovely dales of Derbyshire are disfigured beyond recognition so that
they may quench the thirst of Birmingham. In other words, in order to
encourage the growth of a hideous and dirty city with an unclean and
poverty-stricken population a tract of clean and gracious land a hundred
miles off is cleared of _its_ population and also rendered hideous! And
all this at a huge and incalculable expense. We do not want these great
congested and unhealthy centres, and we do want our streams and springs
and the gods who dwell among them. Let the people come out for the water
if they want it; but let them come with forethought and reverence.
Another native institution managed, like the well-dressing, by the
people themselves is the Ploughing Match. There _is_ a Farmers’
Association which of course ought to be a kind of Trade-union for the
promotion and protection of farming interests. Perhaps once it was
alive; but now and ever since I have known anything about the matter it
has become hopelessly futile and decadent. It has a dinner at some
public-house once a year and gets thoroughly drunk—and that is about all
it does! But the Ploughing-Match Association, which was originally I
suppose an offshoot of the Farmers’ Association, _is_ alive—possibly
because it has nothing whatever to do with politics. The farmers and
their sons and the small holders (such as there are) join in and
organize the affair; and it is a pretty sight to see in two adjacent
fields perhaps twenty teams of men or boys with their shining ploughs
and their beribboned horses going to and fro each on their appointed
strip of land; the turning of the animals at the extremities; the clicks
and calls; the marvellous accuracy of the furrows; the groups of critics
and the judges. Going among them all one perceives what splendid
material there is here among the English countrysides; and also one
grieves to think how it is paralysed from development and expansion by
our absurd land-system and generally apathetic way of conducting
ourselves towards the most important of all industries. We have at
Holmesfield the champion ploughman of the neighborhood, who takes the
prizes at the village matches for many miles round. He is a great friend
of mine. And I am also proud to say that at our Association Committee
meetings my professional opinion is sometimes consulted, and I may
occasionally be seen amid the fumes of smoke and beer occupying the
Chair and keeping a dozen or twenty farmers in order, or bringing them
back to the practical point of discussion when (as they generally do)
they wander afar from it—a sufficiently humorous situation for a
so-called “poet and prophet”!
But the most important village institution after all—and more important
perhaps than the Church—is the Public-house. Here is the natural centre
of the Village life, and here the village Opinion—if there is any—is
collected and consolidated. It is a great pleasure to me to sit
occasionally in our “Royal Oak” among the rustics whom I know so well.
Their quaint humour, their shrewd judgments, their shy silences, their
naughty stories, are a continual recreation. Unfortunately, like so much
else in rural life, the Pub. has in general been allowed to go to decay;
and instead of being the village meeting-place and centre of sociability
it has too often become a mere resort of drink and imbecility. “Tied” to
a Brewery, and at an exorbitant rent, the Publican has no alternative
but to sell as much as he can of the vile decoction supplied to him. He
encourages booze but does not encourage sociable converse. The Brewer
rises to wealth and obtains a seat in the House of Lords; the villager
sinks slowly but surely poisoned in body and atrophied in mind, and dies
in a ditch.
One of the very first things to be done for the restoration of the rural
life is the reorganization of the Public-house—or rather its liberation.
The clutch of the Brewers upon the drink trade should be cut off
decisively and finally. The manufacture of beer ought either to be a
State monopoly or it ought to be absolutely free, without licence, and
subject only to a severe inspection. There has been a great deal of talk
lately about the intemperance of the workers, and the abolition or
serious restriction of the drink traffic; but the real root of the evil
(certainly as regards beer) is the badness and poisonous character of
the liquor supplied. See to it that that is clean and wholesome—that the
lager-beers, small beers, teas and temperance drinks are not
sophisticated with harmful chemicals—and for the rest leave the houses
free. Leave the publican to use his good sense and authority, and make
him responsible for not keeping order. If that policy is carried out
there will not be much to complain of. The sale of actual _spirits_ in
drinking shops is another question, and that might well be restricted or
abolished.
The village pub. ought to be a place where pleasant and decent
refreshment of various kinds is provided—especially of drink which is a
first necessity for tired workers. It ought to be clean and fairly
comfortable and provided with games, papers, and similar means of
recreation. On the other hand it should have no suspicion of genteel or
missionary purpose about it. If the manual worker cannot talk freely and
feel himself at home in the place he decidedly will not come to it; and
it is certainly better that he should be a bit rough and rowdy than that
he should feel that he is being ‘improved.’ What the rural worker wants
above all—and what it is very necessary that he should have—is a place
where he can be at ease, converse freely, exchange ideas, and _develop
out of his own roots_. The town worker has now, in his trade unions, his
various clubs and societies, got something of the kind. The rural worker
is a poor lost thing; he has no centre of growth. The Church is
absolutely of no use to him in that respect; for the Parson practically
paralyses his flock. The Chapel is better, for there the Chapel-folk
organize themselves and carry out in an authentic way many a little
scheme for their own satisfaction or entertainment. The Village Club and
the Village Co-operative society are just beginning in many places to
show an independent and progressive life; but after all the Village Pub.
strikes its roots deepest and widest, and if on a healthy basis is the
natural meeting-place where all these other movements germinate and from
whence they spring.
XVII
HOW THE WORLD LOOKS AT SEVENTY
I remember having often wondered, in earlier days, what would be the
answer to this question. And now I have the privilege of myself standing
on the pinnacle of age—and of being in the position where some kind of
verdict may be given.
There are two verses about David and Solomon—whose origin I have not
been able to trace, but which run as follows:—
King David and King Solomon
Led very merry lives
With many many concubines
And many many wives.
But when old age came on them
With many many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And David wrote the Psalms.
Perhaps this gives the most general and accepted view on the subject—a
view of old age as something a little dull, a little ineffectual,
consoling itself with verses and good advice and other second-hand joys.
On the whole perhaps a fairly correct view; and yet I cannot but think
that it misses something very important, something which in earlier days
one does not associate with old age—the sense of adventure. Youth is
full of acknowledged adventure; the campaigns of Love and of War are
thrilling and absorbing; but youth does not know—or at any rate only
faintly surmises—how absorbing may be the great adventure of Death.
On the whole I am struck by the singularly _little_ difference I feel in
myself, as I realize it now, from what I was when a boy—say of eighteen
or twenty. In the deeps of course. Superficially there are plenty of
differences, but they relate mostly to superficial things like success
in games, examinations and so forth. I used to go and sit on the beach
at Brighton and dream, and now I sit on the shore of human life and
dream practically the same dreams. I remember about the time that I
mention—or it may have been a trifle later—coming to the distinct
conclusion that there were only two things really worth living for—the
glory and beauty of Nature, and the glory and beauty of human love and
friendship. And to-day I still feel the same. What else indeed _is_
there? All the nonsense about riches, fame, distinction, ease, luxury
and so forth—how little does it amount to! It really is not worth
wasting time over. These things are so obviously second-hand affairs,
useful only and in so far as they may lead to the first two, and short
of their doing that liable to become odious and harmful. To become
united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature (but, Lord
help us! we are far enough off from that at present), and to become
united with those we love—what other ultimate object in life _is_ there?
Surely all these other things—these games and examinations, these
churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these
top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one’s
living—if they are not ultimately for that, _what are they for_?
At any rate that is how I feel about it now. I feel that the object of
life at seventy is practically the same as it was at twenty. Only one
thing has been added. One thing. Beneath the surface waves and storms of
youth, beneath the backward and forward fluctuations, deep down, there
has been added the calm of inner realization and union. I know now that
these two primordial and foundational things (or perhaps they are one)
_are_ there. Our union with Nature and humanity is a _fact_,
which—whether we recognize it or not—is at the base of our lives;
slumbering, yet ready to wake in our consciousness when the due time
arrives.
With this assurance one certainly discovers that life—even in old
age—may be delightful. What one loses in the keenness and passion of
sensual and external things one gains in the inward world—in calm and
strength and the deep certainties of life. One can hardly expect to have
it both ways. We may concentrate mainly (though not exclusively) on the
outer life, or we may concentrate mainly on the inner life, but hardly
on both at the same time. And the latter alternative has its advantages.
Socrates, in reply to a friend who condoled with him on the waning of
his sexual passion, asked whether he would not consider a man happy who
had escaped from the clutches of a fierce tiger. “Certainly I should,”
answered the friend. “Then why,” retorted Socrates, “do you not
congratulate instead of commiserating _me_?”
I find there are compensations and consolations in old age. People feel
kindly towards you—partly because they consider you harmless and not
likely to injure them, partly because they are not envious of your
condition. They pity you a little in fact—which pleases them and does no
harm to you. I find I am a little hard of hearing, and people are good
enough—in fact they are compelled—to speak up and speak distinctly. They
have the pleasure of helping me over my deafness, and I have the
satisfaction of getting them out of their mumbling habits of
conversation—a satisfaction so great that were I really not a bit deaf I
feel that I should have to pretend to be! As I think I have said
before[34] old people and infirm folk and chronic invalids and the like
often get needlessly depressed over the impression that they are a
burden and an affliction to their friends, whereas in very truth by
calling out the sympathies, the energy, the resource and the
consideration of those around them they are really conferring the
greatest of benefits; and many a household is really supported and held
together by the one who to all outward appearance seems to be the most
frail and useless member of it. As Lâo-tsze says “The thirty spokes of a
carriage-wheel uniting at the nave are made useful by the hole in the
centre,[35] where nothing exists,” and “To teach without words and to be
useful without action, few among men are capable of this.”
After the fuss and flurry of all the good folk who go about “doing
good,” to find that you can perhaps be most useful by being a “hole in
the centre” is very refreshing.
Unfortunately the world is very unwilling to allow this privilege, and
as a rule in a quite automatic way accords to the aged a good deal of
respect and influence, pushing them up into positions of power and
notoriety. This is all right if you are quite worthy of it, but
dangerous if you are not. And naturally if you _desire_ power (and
notoriety) you are not likely to be worthy of it.
[Illustration:
E. C. (1910), AGE 66.
(_Photo: Elliott & Fry._)
]
On August 29, 1914, being my seventieth birthday, some of my friends
were good enough to present me with a congratulatory Address couched in
very friendly and affectionate terms. Though I cannot say that I desired
the thing beforehand—seeing that there is always something painful in
the very idea of being singled out in any such way—yet I must confess
that, being done, it was a consolation and a pleasure to me.[36]
There is one thing however that I think I have not sufficiently dwelt on
as a valid and permanent object of Life—though perhaps in some subtle
way it may be implied in what I have said before. I mean
Self-Expression. Constructive expression of oneself is one of the
greatest joys, and one of the greatest _needs_ of life; and as long as
one’s Life exists—in this or any other sphere—so long I imagine will
that need be present, and the joy in its fulfilment. It is a
foundation-urge of all Creation. At first sight this seems contrary, and
indeed hostile, to the hole-in-the-centre theory; but probably it will
be found not to be so. Probably it is only a question of the _depth_ at
which the Self is functioning. Near the surface the self is very
definite and constructive in _this_ or _that_ direction; it is limited
in its aims and operations, and so far its activity seems to be at
variance with other aims and operations. At the centre it is neither
this nor that, because it is All. It vanishes from sight because it has
become the Whole.
Most healthy work is generated from a desire for, or an effort towards,
self-expression. If one’s feet suffer from cold and exposure to injury
one makes boots to protect and cover them. If boots prove painful and
confining one designs sandals in order to free them. Having made these
for oneself first, other people desire them and adopt the same devices.
One’s work, begun for a private purpose and to satisfy one’s own wants,
is continued for public ends and becomes a kind of extended selfishness.
It is the same with the institutions of society. Finding that they maim
and confine you personally, the best thing you can do is to liberate
yourself by reshaping them. In reshaping them you liberate others, and
are accounted a reformer and general benefactor. But I imagine that no
one is really a useful reformer who does not begin the work from his own
private need, since that is the only way in which he can understand the
true inwardness of the work to be done. And the accusation of
selfishness, which may be preferred against him, saves him from the
awful danger of becoming, or posing as, a public benefactor.
It is truly wonderful to see what activity, what enthusiasm, vast
numbers of people throw into public work of one kind or another. Let us
hope they all do so from the underlying ground of some personal need
which makes them unhappy in the existing conditions and impels them for
their own personal satisfaction to alter those conditions. If so their
work will probably be healthful and successful. It will not wait on
results but will bring its own results with it. Still there is a paradox
in all such action. I cannot personally be comfortable in a society
which makes a fetish, say, of what H. G. Wells calls The Misery of
Boots. Therefore I work for a future society where people shall go
barefoot or freely wear such footgear as suits them. But by the time
such state of society arrives, where shall “I” be? That is the question.
What is the good of my working for a state of things which will
certainly not come in my lifetime? What is the impelling force which
_causes_ me so to work when it would be so much easier not to work, and
merely to let things slide? If, as one must suppose, it is something
organic in Nature, it must be that I “myself” _will_ be there. I, the
superficial one, am working now for the other “I,” the deeper one—who is
also really present even at this moment (although he lies low and says
nothing about it) and who in due time will consume the fruits which he
is now preparing.
I find at the age of seventy that I am getting nearer to that place in
the centre where nothing exists and yet all is done—and _that_ I suppose
is satisfactory. A very simple round of life contents me. As long as I
can have my friend (or friends) and my little corner of Nature, and my
little pastime of constructive work, I really do not know what to wish
for more. (And surely every one ought to be able to command these.)
We are up—my friend and I—at about 7 a.m. in summer, about 8.0 in
winter. In summer a wash and a sunbath on the lawn, for half an hour,
are very much in the order of the day. Then, for me, there is my study
to tidy up and dust and (in winter) my fire to light; there is the front
of the house to sweep, wood to chop, and so forth. George has his
kitchen to attend to, coals to get in, the chickens to feed, and
preparations to make for the work of the day—baking or washing or
whatever it may be. I remember the time when I used to think that to get
up early, perhaps by candlelight, go down into a dishevelled
sitting-room, clean out the grate and light up the fire would surely be
the most dismal of occupations; as a matter of fact I find these little
preliminary duties quite interesting. They stir one’s limbs and one’s
interest in the world, and help to peel off the thin but clinging veil
of sleep.
By 8.30 I find I can settle down to work, either in my study or, if the
weather allows, outside in my little veranda or porch. I thus get a
couple of hours fairly undisturbed. At 10.30 we have breakfast—or what
is called ‘brunch,’ a combination of breakfast and lunch—a good meal of
coffee and milk, oatmeal porridge, an omelet, stewed fruit, or similar
provender, and which one enjoys all the more for its being the first in
the day. Brunch and reading the daily paper occupy an hour; and at 11.30
I am able to start work again and go on to 1.30 or 2.0. I thus get a
good four hours or more in the morning for solid literary work, to some
extent broken into at times by mere business matters and correspondence,
but generally the most satisfactory period of work in the day.
At two or so one goes easy. By the ruse of ‘brunch’ one has avoided that
deadly snare, the midday meal. Is it not Thoreau who says that one
should pass by the one o’clock dinner “tied to the mast, like Ulysses,
and deaf to the voice of the Siren”? Certainly George and I never cease
to congratulate ourselves on this arrangement by which the painful
density and lethargy of that period is escaped. It seems to place the
day in its proper order and perspective; and we only regret that most
people owing to professional hours and public duties are not able to
conform to it. From 2.0 or 2.30 to 5.0 one can make a change. There are
oddments of work to do in the garden, there are little outdoor renewals
and repairs round the house, there are visitors and casual guests; at
4.0 or so there is the sociability of afternoon tea. At 5.0 there are
letters to get ready for the post, which goes at 6.30. At 7.0 there is
supper, which is generally a rather more substantial meal than brunch.
Sometimes tea and supper are combined in one intermediate meal, which of
course goes by the name of ‘tupper.’ In the evening there are friends to
see, books to read, notes to make; there is the public-house, which is
an unfailing joy, and the farm-lads’ Club, which is always homely and
cheering. What can one wish for more? It is hard to say.
Yet I ought to say—and it would be less than candid not to say—that
there have been times all through my life when the necessity of escaping
into an altogether bigger world than that provided by my native land has
come upon me with a kind of Berserker rage. As I think I have said, I
come of Cornish ancestry—and my private opinion is that I was left on
the coast of Cornwall some three thousand years ago by a Phœnician
trader. At any rate the leaden skies of England, and something (if I may
say so) rather grey and leaden about the _people_, have since early days
had the effect of making me feel not quite at home in my own country. I
longed for more sunshine, and for something corresponding to sunshine in
human nature—more gaiety, vivacity of heart and openness to ideas. But
everything has its compensation, and the result of being pinned down so
much to a limited and local life on the land has been that every three
or four years I have been able to ‘stick it’ no longer, and have been
compelled in the intervals of my work to make a dash for some warmer and
brighter climate. In this way it has come about that I have seen quite a
little of other lands—not only of the usual resorts in Switzerland and
Italy, but of places like Morocco, Sicily, Corsica, Spain, besides (as
already mentioned) the United States and Ceylon and India. Having a
talent for economical travel I have been able to do this at singularly
small expense. And my knowledge of agriculture and of the working life
of the people at home has in such cases opened up a world of interest in
the comparison of these with the corresponding things abroad—a world
which as a rule is a sealed book to the ordinary tourist. In many cases
my companions have themselves been manual workers, and I have found the
vivacity of their interest in foreign fields and crops or in town-trades
and workshops both encouraging and amazing.
At the age of seventy one does not bother so much about the exceptional
feats, about great exploits, the climbing of the highest mountains. The
ordinary levels of life seem sufficient. I confess that excessive
cleverness and all that sort of thing bores me rather than otherwise. I
seem to see in the general average of human life, in the ordinary daily
needs, a steady force pushing mankind onwards, or rather, gradually
unfolding through mankind—the liberation of a core of goodness and worth
which is undeniable, impossible to ignore, and daily coming more and
more into evidence. I say this deliberately and with full recognition
all the time of the vast masses of cheap and nasty people as well as of
cheap and nasty things which are washed up in the ordinary current of
this our modern life, and with recognition also of the huge whirlpools
of popular madness which occasionally arise, and which accompany crises
like that from which we are now suffering [1915]. Perhaps the madness
and the blind passion—the loosening of the torrents of hate and revenge,
and of the pent-up waters of prejudice and ignorance—are, after all,
better than the dreary stagnation of the cheap and nasty. The whole
commercial period through which we, here in the West, have been passing
for the last hundred years has undoubtedly bred, both in men and goods,
a lamentable commonplaceness and cheapness—a low level and a paltry
standard of human value. Perhaps even the madness of warfare is better
than that.
It is curious that for the last twenty years or more there has been a
general feeling—especially among the Socialists and Internationalists of
the various countries—that society was approaching a critical period of
transformation. It had become obvious that the existing order of
things—in Government, Law, Finance, Industry, Commerce, Morality,
Religion, the Capitalist Wage system, the Rivalry of nation with nation,
the administration and cultivation of the Land, and so forth—could not
continue much longer. In each one and all of these matters we have been
heading towards an _impasse_, a block, a point at which further progress
in the old direction must cease, and a new departure begin. We have seen
this; and yet we have been unable to say, for the most part, or even
surmise, _how_ the change would come, what catastrophe would upset the
balance of our highly artificial Commercial Civilization, or in what way
a new order of life, and a more human and rational order, might begin to
establish itself. The Catastrophe has come. We are already in the welter
of a World-war which in magnitude exceeds anything that has ever
occurred in the past, or even been imagined. The nations are in the
melting-pot; the institutions of society are threatened in every
direction. But at present we are still unable to see the outcome, or
even to guess what it will be. The lineaments of the new world are
hidden from us. That the outcome will be far, far greater and grander
than we now suppose, I do not doubt—also that it will take far longer
than we generally think to define itself.
Beneath all the madness of the present conflict—the raging passions, the
insane folly, the frantic delusions, the devilish concentration of all
the wit and ingenuity of man towards purposes of death and torture,
there is, I firmly believe, a method and a meaning. A new life is
preparing to show itself—coming to the surface of society, as it were,
out of the deeps, showing indeed the strangest and most violent
agitation of that surface just before its appearance. Having lived so
long as I have done among the downright manual workers of our towns and
the agricultural rustics—primitives as they are in many ways and
belonging to a period “before civilization”—I do not feel at all
alarmed. I know that the lives of these good solid folk, founded as they
are upon the primal facts of Nature, will not in any case suffer a very
great change. If the whole of our Banking and Financial system collapsed
and fell in, if world-wide Commerce came to a standstill, if the Capital
necessary for huge armaments and general ironworks was not forthcoming,
if Law and Government were paralysed, old-age insurances ceased to be
paid, and Landlords were unable to collect their rents—if all this and
much more happened, my friend who ploughs the fields near my cottage
would go out next morning with his team to his usual work, and scarcely
know the difference. _If anything he would decidedly feel more cheerful
and hopeful._ Some other friend who forges and tempers table-knives by
the score would continue to forge and temper them. The knives would
still be wanted, the power to make them would still be there. And if at
any point combined labour were needed, as to build a workshop or carry
through a steel-making process, the men who do these things now in
forced and servile toil under the Capitalist system would do them ten
times better and more heartily in free co-operation.
No, if all this jerry-built cheapjack Commercial Civilization collapsed
it would not much matter. The longer I live the more I am convinced of
its essential pettiness and unimportance. The great foundational types,
the real workers of the world—whether in England or Germany or France,
or Turkey or Bulgaria or Egypt—will remain, and indeed must remain
because the primal facts of Nature, the sun and the earth and the needs
of human life, continually generate them. They will remain and, once
freed (as one may hope) from the burden of the futile and idiotic
superstructure which they have to support, will rise to a far finer
standard of being than they can now realize. The cheap and aimless types
belonging to the mercantile and middle classes will disappear with the
world to which they belong.
Let me say however, for the consolation of some, that it is not
necessary to suppose that the transformation of Civilization of which I
speak—and which is even now preparing—must necessarily mean that all Law
and Government, and world-wide Commerce and Finance and huge
organization of Industry, and even present-day Art and Morality and
Religion, will collapse and become non-existent. In a sense they will do
so, and in a sense they will not. “In the twinkling of an eye they will
be changed.” In some sense the outer forms of these things will remain;
but the Spirit will be changed; and so greatly changed that their shapes
also will be profoundly modified. When Industry exists really for the
supply of good and useful things and not for the manufacture of profit;
when High Finance is not for gambling, but for the insurance and
security of everybody; when Courts of Law are for the uplifting and not
for the downcasting of criminals, and so on; then the forms of these
institutions will be as different from what they are now as the organs
of a Dragonfly are different from those of the Waterbeetle from which it
sprang.
But before this great and wonderful Transformation takes place, there
must—it is abundantly evident—be great sacrifices. No such huge change
could happen without. Some of the functions and activities of the
present Society must perish; and with them must perish those who are
engaged in these functions. Thousands and millions of individuals must
die in the mere effort to create and establish a new collective order.
Heroisms, exceeding those of the past, will be needed and will be
supplied. We need not fear. We know the great heart of humanity.
It is amazing to see, in the present war, the high spirits, the courage,
the devotion, the loyalty to each other of the combatants in each
nation; and these things would be utterly unintelligible were it not for
the fact that each people (and we need make no exception) thinks and
believes in some obscure way that the cause for which it is fighting is
a noble and an honorable one. Terrible as war is, and terrible the
apparent folly of mankind which allows it to continue, still it is to my
mind obvious that those engaged in it could not give their lives, as
they so constantly do, not only with conscious devotion to some high
purpose, but even with an instinctive exultation and savage joy in the
very act of death, if they were not impelled to do so by the insurgence
of a greater life within—a life within each one more vivid and even more
tremendous than that which he throws away. The willing sacrifice of
life, and the ecstasy of it, would be unintelligible if Death did not
indeed mean Transformation.
In my little individual way I experience something of the same kind. I
feel a curious sense of joy in observing—as at my age one is sometimes
compelled to do—the natural and inevitable decadence of some portion of
the bodily organism, the failures of sight and hearing, the weakening of
muscles, the aberrations even of memory—a curious sense of liberation
and of obstacles removed. I acknowledge that the experience—the
satisfaction and the queer sense of elation—seems utterly unreasonable,
and not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories of life; but it
is there, and it may, after all, have some meaning.
APPENDICES
CONGRATULATORY LETTER
(_August 29, 1914_).
In offering you our congratulations on the completion of your seventieth
year, we would express to you (and we speak, we are sure, the thoughts
of a very large number of other readers and friends) the feelings of
admiration and gratitude with which we regard your life-work.
Your books, with no aid but that of their own originality and power,
have found their way among all classes of people in our own and many
other lands, and they have everywhere brought with them a message of
fellowship and gladness. At a time when society is confused and
overburdened by its own restlessness and artificiality, your writings
have called us back to the vital facts of Nature, to the need of
simplicity and calmness; of just dealing between man and man; of free
and equal citizenship; of love, beauty, and humanity in our daily life.
We thank you for the genius with which you have interpreted great
spiritual truths; for the deep conviction underlying all your teaching
that wisdom must be sought not only in the study of external nature, but
also in a fuller knowledge of the human heart; for your insistence upon
the truth that there can be no real wealth or happiness for the
individual apart from the welfare of his fellows; for your fidelity and
countless services to the cause of the poor and friendless; for the
light you have thrown on so many social problems; and for the equal
courage, delicacy, and directness with which you have discussed various
questions of sex, the study of which is essential to a right
understanding of human nature.
We have spoken of your many readers and friends, but in your case, to a
degree seldom attained by writers, your readers are your friends, for
your works have that rare quality which reveals “the man behind the
book,” and that personal attraction which results only from the widest
sympathy and fellow-feeling. For this, most of all, we thank you—the
spirit of comradeship which has endeared your name to all who know you,
and to many who to yourself are unknown.
REPLY
MILLTHORPE, HOLMESFIELD,
DERBYSHIRE,
_1st September, 1914_.
In thanking my friends on the occasion of my seventieth birthday (29th
August) for the many hearty letters of congratulation I have received,
and in particular for the widely signed and very friendly Address which
on the same occasion has been presented to me, I should like to say a
few words.
At a moment like this when Europe is plunged in a monstrous war one
naturally does not wish to dwell on one’s own affairs. Yet some of us
who have worked for thirty years or more in connection with the great
Labour Movement at home and abroad may perhaps be excused if we cannot
help looking on the strange events of the last few weeks in a somewhat
personal light. For those events surely connect themselves by a kind of
logical fatality with that very Labour Movement. They seem to point to
the break-up all over Europe of the old framework of society, and (like
the Napoleonic wars of a century ago) to bear within themselves the
seeds of a new order of things.
Insane commercial and capitalistic rivalry, the piling up of power in
the hands of mere speculators and financiers, and the actual trading for
dividends in the engines of death—all these inevitable results of our
present industrial system—have now for years been leading up to this
war; and in that sense indeed all the nations concerned are responsible
for it—England no less than the others. But the mad vanity of the
Prussian military clique, and its brutal eagerness for imperial
expansion at all costs, have precipitated the fatal move. The German
Government is now involved in a conflict which the more socialistic
section of its population absolutely detests, and for which its masses
have little desire or enthusiasm; it is alienating from itself the
loyalty of the warm-hearted and very human and brotherly folk whom it
professes to represent; and is sowing the seed of its own destruction.
Curiously enough too, by supplying the Russian Autocracy with an excuse
for gratifying _its_ lust of conquest (an excuse which is welcome no
doubt as a means of discounting the revolutionary movement at home) this
action of Germany is destined to lead to a disorganization of Russia
similar to that which awaits herself.
On the other hand, the same action has already caused an extraordinary
and astounding development of solidarity and enthusiasm among the more
pacific peoples of Western Europe—this partly no doubt in sheer
self-defence, but even more, I think, as an expression of their hatred
of militarism and bullying Imperialism. The enormous growth during the
past few years of democratic and communal thought and organization on
the Continent generally is well known; and the events of which we are
speaking have suddenly crystallized that into definite consciousness and
into a fresh resolve for the future—the resolve that never again shall
the peoples be plunged in the senseless bloodshed of war to suit the
ambition or the private interests of ruling classes. Furthermore, in
Britain, where, for so long, the forward movement has seemed to hang
fire and fail to define itself, we have developed—most swiftly and in
almost miraculous fashion—a whole programme of socialist institutions,
and (what is more important) a powerful and democratic sentiment of
public honour and duty.
In view of all this it is impossible, as I have said, not to hope for a
great move forward—when this present nightmare madness is over—among the
Western States of Europe towards the consolidation of their respective
democracies and the establishment of a great Federation on a Labour
basis among them; as well as to expect a sturdy reaction, perhaps
amounting to revolution, among the Central and Eastern peoples against
the military despotism and bureaucracy from which they have so long
suffered. In both these directions, in aiding the Federation of the
democracies of the West and in hastening the disruption of the military
bureaucracies of the East, England—if she rises to her true genius, and
to a far grander conception of foreign policy than she has of late years
favoured—will have a great work to do. Nor is it possible to doubt that
the new order thus arriving will largely be the outcome of those years
of work all over Europe in which the ideal of a generous Common Life has
been preached and propagated as against the sordid and self-seeking
Commercialism of the era that is passing away.
If in my small way I have done anything towards the social evolution of
which I speak, it is I think chiefly due to the fact that I was born in
the midst of that Commercial Era, and that consequently my early days
were days of considerable suffering. The iron of it, I suppose, entered
into my soul. Coming to my first consciousness, as it were, of the world
at the age of sixteen (at Brighton in 1860) I found myself—and without
knowing where I was—in the middle of that strange period of human
evolution the Victorian Age, which in some respects, one now thinks,
marked the lowest ebb of modern civilized society: a period in which not
only commercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure
materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of
stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the
human body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in
clothes, the “impure hush” on matters of sex, class-division, contempt
of manual labour, and the cruel barring of women from every natural and
useful expression of their lives, were carried to an extremity of folly
difficult for us now to realize.
As I say, I did not know where I was. I had no certain tidings of any
other feasible state of society than that which loafed along the
Brighton parade or tittle-tattled in drawing-rooms. I only knew I hated
my surroundings. I even sometimes, out of the midst of that absurd life,
looked with envy I remember on the men with pick and shovel in the
roadway and wished to join in their labour; but between of course was a
great and impassable gulf fixed, and before I could cross that I had to
pass through many stages. I only remember how the tension and pressure
of those years grew and increased—as it might do in an old boiler when
the steamports are closed and the safety-valve shut down; till at last,
and when the time came that I could bear it no longer, I was propelled
with a kind of explosive force, and with considerable velocity, right
out of the middle of the nineteenth century and far on into the
twentieth!
My friends speak of gratitude, and I am touched by these expressions,
because I do indeed think the genuine feeling of gratitude is a very
human and lovable thing—blessing in a sense both him that gives and him
that takes. Yet I confess that somehow, when directed towards myself, I
find the feeling difficult to realize. After all, what a man does he
does out of the necessity of his nature: one can claim no credit for it,
for one could hardly do otherwise. I have sometimes, for instance, been
accused of taking to a rather plain and Bohemian kind of life, of
associating with manual workers, of speaking at street corners, of
growing fruit, making sandals, writing verses, or what not, as at great
cost to my own comfort, and with some ulterior or artificial purpose—as
of reforming the world. But I can safely say that in any such case I
have done the thing primarily and simply because of the joy I had in
doing it, and to please myself. If the world or any part of it should in
consequence insist on being reformed, that is not my fault. And this
perhaps after all is a good general rule: namely that people should
endeavour (more than they do) to express or liberate their _own_ real
and deep-rooted needs and feelings. Then in doing so they will probably
liberate and aid the expression of the lives of thousands of others; and
so will have the pleasure of helping, without the unpleasant sense of
laying any one under an obligation.
And here I think I ought to say (lest by concealing the fact I should
seem to be laying my friends under an obligation and obtaining their
seventieth-birthday congratulations under false pretences) that only two
or three years ago a horny-handed son of toil—a gold-miner from the
wilds of South Nevada—came all the way direct to Millthorpe on purpose
to tell me that I should yet live for four hundred years! He stayed,
curiously enough, but a very few days in this country, and having
delivered his message set sail again the next morning but one for his
gold-mines and his quartz-crushing. The prophecy I confess was one of
rather doubtful comfort either to myself or my friends, but in order to
avoid disappointment in case of its fulfilment I think perhaps I ought
to mention it.
Anyhow, referring back to those early Victorian days, I now seem plainly
to see that if what was working then in my little soul could have been
realized in society at large there would have been no need for you to
address me the special letter or letters which I have just
received—pleasant though they are to me—because you would have
understood that in all reason letters equally grateful and full of
recognition ought to be addressed to the joiner, the farm-labourer, the
dairy-maid, and the washerwoman of your village, or to the soldier
fighting now in the ranks. You would have realized that the lives of all
of us are so built and founded one on the work of another that it is
impossible to assign any credit to one whose name happens to be known,
which is not equally due to the thousands or millions of nameless and
unknown ones who really have contributed to his work. We literary folk,
I need hardly say, think a great deal too much about ourselves and our
importance.
This is of course so very obvious that I am persuaded that most of the
signatories on this occasion will understand the matter so. And on that
understanding I may say to my friends: I accept your expressions with
the greatest pleasure. I appreciate the extraordinarily tender and
gracious wording of the Address, and I thank you from my heart.
EDWARD CARPENTER.
APPENDIX II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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THE SAME. Thirteenth Thousand. Published by George Allen and Unwin,
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THE SAME. Second edition, enlarged, 1903.
THE SAME. Third edition, revised, 1910.
=A Visit to a Gn̄ani=: being four chapters from the above, in separate
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THE SAME. Authorized American edition. Published by A. B. Stockham &
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THE SAME. Pirated and mutilated. Published by the Yogi Publication
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=Love’s Coming-of-Age=: a Series of Papers on the Relations of the
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THE SAME. Note on Preventive Checks omitted. London, Methuen.
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THE SAME. Published by Mitchell Kennerley, New York, 1911.
=Forecasts of the Coming Century=: by Alfred Russel Wallace, Tom Mann,
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Manchester, 1897.
=The Story of Eros and Psyche from Apuleius=, and the first book of
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THE SAME. Second edition, 1899.
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=Ioläus=: an Anthology of Friendship, in old Caslon type, with red
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THE SAME. Author’s edition, 1902, bound in white and blue calf; 150
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THE SAME. Second edition, enlarged. Forty pages added; black
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THE SAME. Third edition. Title changed to =Anthology of Friendship
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=The Art of Creation=: Essays on the Self and its Powers. First
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THE SAME. Second edition, enlarged, 1907.
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=Prisons, Police, and Punishment=: an Inquiry into the Causes and
Treatment of Crime and Criminals. London, Fifield, 1905.
[_Out of print._
=The Simplification of Life=: being selections from the writings of E.
C. by Harry Roberts. Published by Anthony Treherne, London,
1905.
Second edition. George Allen & Unwin, January 1915.
=Days with Walt Whitman=: with some Notes on his Life and Work, and
three Portraits. London, George Allen, 1906.
THE SAME. Second edition, 1906.
=Sketches from Life in Town and Country=: Some Verses, and a Portrait
of the Author. London, George Allen, 1908. [_Out of print._
=The Intermediate Sex=: a Study of some Transitional Types of Men and
Women. First edition. London, Sonnenschein; Manchester, Clarke,
1908.
THE SAME. Second edition, 1909.
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THE SAME. American edition. Published by Mitchell Kennerley, New
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=The Drama of Love and Death=: a Study of Human Evolution and
Transfiguration. London, George Allen & Co., April 1912.
THE SAME. Second edition, August 1912.
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=Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk=: a Study in Social
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THE SAME. American edition. New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1914.
=The Healing of Nations=: and the Hidden Sources of their Strife.
First edition. London, George Allen & Unwin, March 1915.
Reprinted April and October 1915.
=The Story of My Books.= London, George Allen & Unwin, March 1916.
=My Days and Dreams=: being Autobiographical Notes by Edward
Carpenter. With Seventeen Portraits and Illustrations. George
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PAMPHLETS.
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=Co-operative Production=: with reference to the experiment of
Leclaire. A lecture given at the Hall of Science, Sheffield,
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[_o. p._
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=England’s Ideal.= A Tract reprinted from _To-day_, May 1884. Pp. 22.
John Heywood, Manchester and London, 1885. [_o. p._
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Pp. 16, John Heywood, 1883.
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=The Enchanted Thicket=: an Appeal to the “Well-to-do,” by Edward
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=Civilization, Exfoliation, and Custom.= Published by Humboldt Library
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=The Great Kinship.= Translated from the French of Elisée Reclus (“La
Grande Famille”) by E. C. The _Humane Review_, January 1906.
=Sport and Agriculture.= In the _Humanitarian_, November 1913.
=Conscription and National Service.= Letter to the _Daily Chronicle_,
London, August 12, 1915.
Two articles on =The Music Drama of the Future=. The _New Age_, August
15 and 22, 1908.
Two articles on =The New South African Union=. The _New Age_, August
27 and September 3, 1909.
Two articles on =The Minimum Wage=. The _New Age_, December 21 and 23,
1907.
=Drawing-room Table Literature.= Article in the _New Age_, March 17,
1910.
=Le Philosophe Meh-ti.= Book-review in the _New Age_, February 1,
1908.
=Beauty in Civic Life=: report of a lecture. The _Humanitarian_,
January 1912.
TRANSLATIONS.
GERMAN.
=Wenn die Menschen reif zur Liebe Werden= (_Love’s Coming-of-Age_).
Translated by Karl Federn; published by Hermann Seemann,
Leipzig, 1902.
=Die Civilisation: ihre Ursachen und ihre Heilung.= Translated by K.
Federn; published by H. Seemann, Leipzig, 1903.
=Towards Democracy.= Translated by Lilly Nadler-Nuellens and Ervin
Batthyány.
(Part I), “Demokratie,” published by H. Seemann, Leipzig, 1903;
Berlin, 1906.
(Part II), “Freiheit,” same publishers, 1907.
(Part III), “Der Freiheit Entgegen,” published by Freier
Literarischer Verlag, Berlin, Tempelhof, 1908.
(Part IV), same title and publishers, 1909.
=Die Schöpfung als Kunstwerk= (_The Art of Creation_). Translated by
K. Federn, published by Eugen Diederichs, Jena, 1905.
=Das Mittelgeschlecht= (_The Intermediate Sex_). Translated by L.
Bergfeld, published by Seitz und Schauer, München, 1907;
afterwards, Reinhard, München.
=England’s Ideal.= Translated by Sophie von Harbon; published by
Wilhelm Borngräber, Berlin, 1912.
_Articles and Pamphlets._
=Die Homogene Liebe.= Pamphlet. Translated by H. B. Fischer, published
by Max Spohr, Leipzig, 1894.
Three separate pamphlets, “Die Geschlechstliebe,” “Das Weib,” and “Die
Ehe,” all published in 1895. Same translator and publisher as
above.
Article “Ueber die Beziehungen zwischen Homosexualität und
Prophetentum” in the _Vierteljahrs-berichts des
Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees_, July 1911, published by
Hirschfeld, Berlin.
Pamphlet =Die Gesellschaft ohne Regierung= (_Non-governmental
Society_). Translated by Pierre Ramus, published by W.
Schouteten, Brüssel, 1910.
ITALIAN.
=L’amore diventa maggiorenne= (_Love’s Coming-of-Age_). Translated by
Guido Ferrando; published by frat. Bocca, Torino, Roma, etc.,
1909.
=L’Arte della Creazione.= Translated by G. Ferrando; published by
Enrico Voghera, Roma, 1909.
=Verso la Democrazia= (Part I). With biographical notice and note from
_Labour Prophet_. Translated by Teresina Campani-Bagnoli;
published by R. Carabba, Lanciano, 1912.
FRENCH.
=Prisons, Police, et Châtiments.= Traduit et annoté par Paul Le Rouge
et Alain Garnier, avocats à la Cour d’Appel de Paris. Published
by Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1907.
=Vivisection.= Par E. C. Traduit de l’anglais par E. F. Satchell;
published by St. Catherine’s Press, Bruges, 1910.
=L’Amour Homogénique et sa Place dans une Société libre.= Published in
_La Société Nouvelle_, Brussels and Paris, September 1896.
=Vers l’Affranchissement= (being Parts III and IV of _Towards
Democracy_). Translated by Marcelle Senard. Published by the
Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 81 rue Dareau, Paris, 1914.
_Also_ =E. C. et sa Philosophie=. Par M. Senard. Published same year
and place.
=La Régénération des Peuples= (_The Healing of Nations_). Translated
by M. Senard; published by....
DUTCH.
=Liefde’s Meerderjarigheid= (_Love’s Coming-of-Age_). Translated by
Meezenbrock; published by Holkema, Amsterdam, 1904.
=Die Beschaving: hare Oorzaak en hare Genezing= (_Civilization: its
Cause and Cure_). Translated by P. H.; published by Elsevier,
Amsterdam, 1899.
RUSSIAN.
=Civilization: its Cause and Cure.= Translated by Ivan Najívin, with
biographical Note, and Portrait, Moscow, 1906.
=Modern Science: a Criticism.= With Introductory Note by Leo Tolstoy,
1904.
=Prisons, Police, and Punishment.= Translated by A. M. (without
Appendix). Large 8vo, light green cover. Moscow, 1907.
=A Visit to a Gn̄ani= (four chapters) entitled _I Am_. Translated by
Ivan Najívin, Moscow, 1907.
=Towards Democracy= (_I arise out of the Night_). Being selections
from T. D., with Note on E. C. by Sergius Orlovski. Moscow.
=Love and Death.= Translated by P. D. Ouspenski. With Introduction.
Petrograd, 1915.
=The Intermediate Sex.= Translated by P. D. Ouspenski. Petrograd,
1915.
_See also_ article on E. C. by S. E. Rapoport in _Russian Thought_ for
January or February 1914. Petrograd.
BULGARIAN.
=Modern Science: a Criticism.= With Introduction by Leo Tolstoy.
Translated from the Russian by D. Jethkoff and Chr. Dossieff.
Burgas, 1908.
_Also_ =Civilization= and =England’s Ideal=. Translated by D.
Vaptzaroff, Burgas, 1908.
Articles in _Renaissans_ (Burgas):—
=On Rational and Humane Science.= 1909.
=England’s Ideal.= 1910.
=Defence of Criminals.= (2 numbers.) 1914.
SPANISH.
=Defensa de los Criminales.= Critica de la Moralidad. Translated by
Julio Molina y Vedia; published by P. Tonini, Buenos Aires,
1901.
=El Matorral Encantado= (_The Enchanted Thicket_). Translated by Peter
Godoi Perez, por el Grupo “Los Precursores.” Santiago, 1911.
JAPANESE.
Sections I to XIX of =Towards Democracy= by Saikwa Tomita in _Tokyo
Magazine_ of July 1915.
_Also_ =After Long Ages= and many shorter poems.
_See also_ =E. C.: Poet and Prophet=. By Ishikawa Sanshiro: being a
series of chapters on E. C. with long quotations from his works,
also portrait and letter from E. C. Yokohama, 1912.
MUSIC.
_See_ =Chants of Labour=. Edited by E. C. First edition 1888.
_Also_ =Three Songs= (“Men of England,” by Shelley, “The People to
their Land,” and “England, Arise”). Set to music by E. C.
Published by the Labour Press, Manchester, 1896.
=England, Arise.= Arranged by John Curwen as four-part song for male
voices. Staff and sol-fa notation. Published by J. Curwen and
Sons, Berners St. London, W., 1906.
=The City of the Sun.= Words and music by E. C. Published by the
Labour Press, Manchester, (?) 1908.
=Die Stadt der Sonne.= Worte und Musik von E. C., “dem Kämpfenden
Proletariat gewidmet.” Verlag “Wohlstand für Alle.” Vienna XII.
Herthorgasse, 12, (?) 1909.
SOME BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, ARTICLES, ETC.
=E. C.: The Man and his Message.= Pp. 40. With two portraits. By Tom
Swan. Manchester, 1901. Second edition, 1902.
THE SAME. Third Edition. London, Fifield, 1905. Fourth edition,
1910.
=E. C.: Poet and Prophet.= By Ernest Crosby. 50 pp. Second edition,
Fifield, 1905.
=The Gospel according to E. C.= By G. H. Perris. In two chapters.
Article in the _New Age_, April 23 and 30, 1896.
=Three Modern Seers= (Hinton, Nietzsche, and E. C.). With Portraits.
Pp. 228. By Mrs. Havelock Ellis. London, Stanley Paul, 1910.
=E. C.: Poet and Prophet.= Expositions of and quotations from his
works. Pp. 300. In Japanese script. By Ishikawa Sanshiro.
Yokohama, 1912.
=E. C.: an Exposition and an Appreciation.= By Edward Lewis. Pp. 310.
With Portrait. London, Methuen, 1915.
=Modern Science.= A reprint in English of Leo Tolstoy’s Introduction
to that Essay. Published by Wm. Reeves, Charing Cross Road,
London.
=E. C. and his Message.= By Leonard D. Abbott in the _International
Socialist Review_, Chicago, November 1, 1900.
=E. C. ein Sänger der Freiheit und des Volkes.= Von Pierre Ramus,
verlag Schouteten. Brussels, 1910.
=E. C. et sa Philosophie.= Par M. Senard. Libr. de l’Art Indépendant,
Paris, 1914.
Chapter on E. C. in _All Manner of Folk_. By Holbrook Jackson. London,
Grant Richards, 1912.
And various articles:—
See the _Dublin University Review_, April, 1886; _Seed-time_,
London, April, 1893; the _Friend_, January 4, 1895; the _Twentieth
Century_, New York, June 25, 1898; the _Inquirer_, London, May 13,
1899; the _Westminster Review_, December, 1901; the _Pioneer_,
London, January, 1901; the _Humane Review_, July, 1903; the
_Literary Digest_, New York, February 25, 1905; the _Craftsman_, New
York, October, 1906; the _Millgate Monthly_, Manchester, April 1907;
the _Forum_, New York, August 1910; the _Christian Commonwealth_,
London, December 11, 1912; _Bibby’s Annual_, 1913; the _Bystander_,
March 18, 1914; the _Epoch_, November 1915; the _Herald of the
Star_, August 11, 1915; etc.
INDEX
Adams, George, 124, 131, 150;
story of his life, 156 ff.;
at Millthorpe, 157–159
_Adam’s Peak to Elephanta_, 143
Africa, South, fascination of, 231
_African Farm, Story of_, 112, 226
After Civilization, 208
Age, its compensations, 304
Alfred, my brother, at school and in the Navy, 33, 34;
his son, 34 (note)
Anarchism, 115, 127, 130, 132, 219
Ancestry, my, Cornish, Scotch (? and Phœnician), 42, 309
Anecdotes of Millthorpe, ch. x.
_Angels’ Wings_, 209
_Anthology of Friendship_, 200
Anti-vivisection, 240
_Art of Creation, The_, 206, 207, 209;
translations of, 273, 274
Arunáchalam, P., of Colombo, Ceylon, 143;
his career, 250–253
Ashton, Margaret, 263
Assagioli, Roberto, 274
_Astronomy_, lectures, 78, 80, 92
Audiences, indoors and open-air, etc., 260, 261
Auteri, Count, 274
Bagnoli, Teresina, 274
Bantock, Granville, 246
Barker, Granville, 245
Barnes, George N., of the A.S.E., 246, 260
Batthyány, Ervin, at Millthorpe, 269;
life at Buda-Pesth, 270 ff.
Beck, E, A., of Trinity Hall, 61, 74
Benson, F. R., 245
Berkeleyan view of Matter, 207
Besant, Annie, 134, 218, 220–222, 245
_Bhagavat Gita_, 106, 142, 187
Bingham, brothers, of Sheffield, 131
Birrell, Augustine, 75, 216
Blavatsky, Mme., 240, 243, 244
“Bloody Sunday” in Trafalgar Square, 254
Boating life at Cambridge, 46, 210
_Boer and Briton_, a leaflet, 235
Boer War, the, 234, 235
Bolton, Whitman Club at, 250
Boughton, Rutland, 246
Boyhood and Age, little difference, 302
Bradway, life at, 102 ff., 110, 112
Brighton, futile life of, 31, 32, 94, 95;
work at, 101, 109;
the family leaves, 110
Brighton College, 17 ff.
Brown, J. M., 131
“Bruno,” the story of, 153–155
“Bryan,” story of, 170–172
Bryant, W., the poet, 88
Bucke, Dr. Richard, of Canada, 117, 118, 186, 206
Bulgarian translations, 280
Burney Prize, the, 49
Burns, John, 115, 254, 256
Burroughs, John, the friend of Whitman, 89
Burrows, Herbert, 115
Byron, 120
Cambridge, 46 ff.
Campbell, R. J., 246, 265
Ceylon, visit to, 143
Champion, H. H., early member of the S.D.F., 115
Channing, Rev. W. H., 87
_Chants of Labour_, 136
Charles, my brother, 16, 17, 83
Charles, Fredk., anarchist, 132
“Cheap and nasty” things and people, 310
Chemistry, 25
Chesterfield, life at, 91, 113
Christian legend, the, allegorical, 241
Civilization, modern, its meaning and future, 142, 311–315;
escape from, 148;
its paltriness, 311;
and unimportance, 312, 313;
after-stage to follow, 208, 314
_Civilization: its Cause and Cure_, 141, 205, 209;
translations of, 273, 280, etc.;
subject never seriously tackled by critics, 202
Clifford, W. K., 60, 74, 212
College Feasts at Cambridge, 73, 74
Commercial crises, 140
_Commonweal, The_, organ of the Socialist League, 125
“Commonwealth” Café opened in Sheffield, 133, 135
Commons Award Book of Holmesfield, 291–293
Compensations in Age and Infirmity, 180, 304
Consciousness, three stages of, 206
Co-operation, lectures on, 115;
agricultural, 287–289
Cosmic Consciousness, 143–145, 188, 201
Cotterill, Henry B., his work in S. Africa, 232;
his translation of Homer’s _Odyssey_, 233
Court Baron of Holmesfield, 292
Cox, Harold, 124
Cramp, C. T., of the A.S.R.S., 246, 260
Crane, Walter, 245
_Crib_, use of, at school, 20
Cronwright-Schreiner, 235
Curate, life as, 52 ff.
Curran, Pete, 245, 260
Danish agriculture, 289
Darwin, George, 74
David and Solomon, 301
Death, the adventure of, 302
_Defence of Criminals_, 205
_Desirable Mansions_, 139, 192
Despard, Mrs., 245, 263
Devon, James, Prisons Commissioner, 246
Dickens, H. F., 74
Dickinson, Lowes, 245, 256;
his books, 257
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 74, 215
District Councils, their character, 294, 295
Downs, the Sussex, 26
_Drama of Love and Death, The_, 209
Duncan, Isadora, 245
Early days, 13–16
Early verses, 28, 45, 50, 63, 71
Ellis, Edith (_née_ Lees), 225, 226
Ellis, Havelock, 97, 112;
his great work on _Psychology of Sex_, 223, 224;
his personality, 225
Emerson, R. W., 87, 88
Enclosure of Commons, 283
_England’s Ideal_, 113, 139, 209
Ethical Societies, the, 205;
lectures for, 259, 264, 267
Executor, work as, 109
Expression, one of the great objects of Life, 305–307;
ever-unfolding, 310
Fabian Societies, lectures for, 267
Faddists invade Millthorpe, 167 ff.
Father, my, 36 ff.;
his death, 109
Fawcett, Henry, 38, 57, 74;
story of his blindness, 213–215
Fearnehough, Albert, 102–104, 111, 137, 150 ff.
Federn, Karl, translates _Love’s Coming-of-Age_, etc., 272, 273
Fellowship, elected to, 51, 52;
relinquished, 72, 73
Feminist Movement, The, 245, 262, 263
Ferrando, Guido, 274
Finance, 110
Florence, 46, 67, 68;
Italian literary circle at, 273
Ford, the sisters, of Leeds, 83, 263
Foreign travel, 310
Fox, Charles, of Bradway, 103
Foxwell, H. S., of St. John’s, Cambridge, 81
Friendships, early, 28
Fry, Roger, 246, 256
Furniss, John, quarryman and Socialist, 133
Geldart, Dr., Master of Trin. Hall, 56
George, Henry, Land Tax campaign, 236
Glasier, Bruce and Katharine, 245
Gn̄aniani, or Wise Man of the East, 143, 144;
visit to, 209
Gold-miner from Nevada, 183, 322;
his visions, 184–187;
and intuitions, 187–189
Gooch, G. P., 245
Goring, Sir Charles, 120
Graham, Cunninghame, 245, 254, 256
Grant, Albert, financier, 249;
made Baron, 250
Gray, Ernest A., 47
Grayson, Victor, 260
Greek sculpture, 67, 68
Greenock, shipping strike at, in 1910, 262
Greig, Mrs. Billington, 263
Griffith, Dr., Headmaster of Brighton College, 19
Gröndahl, Illit, translations into Norwegian, 280
Hardie, Keir, 245
Hardy, Mrs., visit to, near Pittsburg, 118
Hawkins, E. C., Form Master at Brighton College, 20
Health, my, 93, 100, 114
Heidelberg, life at, 45
“Hole in the Centre,” the, 304, 305
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 87, 88
Hopkins, F. L., Dean of Trin. Hall, 57
Housman, Laurence, 246
Hukin, G. E., 131
Humanitarian League, the, 237;
lectures for, 267
Hut, or garden-shelter, 107, 146
Hyacinth, vision of, 105
Hyett, F. A., 46
Hyndman, his _England for All_, 114;
chairman of S.D.F., 115, 134, 245;
his career, 246–249, 254
_Impasse_ of the old order of Society, 311
Imperialism, shopkeeping, 140, 230
“Indulgences” at French school, 22
_Intermediate Sex, The_, 209
Invalid woman, the, of the Victorian drawing-rooms, 95
_Ioläus_, Anthology of Friendship, 200
Ishikawa, Sanshiro, Japanese friend, calls our houses “prisons,” 166;
himself imprisoned in Japan, 277;
comes to England, Belgium, France, 278, 279
Japan, Labour troubles in, 276;
translations of _Civilization_, _Toward Democracy_, etc., 276–278
Japanese verdicts on the War, 279
Johnston, Councillor James, of Manchester, 263
Johnston, Dr. J., of Bolton, his _Visit to Walt Whitman_, 250
Joynes, James L., 236, 237
Judges, High Court and others, their fitness for the post, 212, 213
_Justice_, organ of the S.D.F., 115
Kaffirs, the, 229
Key, Ellen, her works, 197
Kingsford, Anna, and the Hermetic Society, 240–245
Kropotkin, Peter, 134, 218–220
_Labour, Chants of_, 136
Labour Press, Manchester, publishes my books, 195, 198;
goes bankrupt, 199
_Labour Prophet, The_, 108
Landladies, joys of, 90, 91
Latham, Henry, Tutor of Trin. Hall, 51, 57, 74
“Laws of Morality,” 205
“Laws of Nature,” 204
_Leaves of Grass_, 64, 201
Lectures, University Extension, Leeds, Halifax, Skipton, 78 ff.;
Nottingham, York, Hull, Barnsley, 83 ff.;
Sheffield and Chesterfield, 90 ff.;
on Astronomy, 78, 80, 92;
on Light and Sound, 84;
on Pioneers of Science, 92;
on Music, 105;
on Socialism, etc., 115, 257, 258 ff.;
at Greenock, 262;
in London and elsewhere, ch. xiv.
Le Rouge, Paul, translation of _Prisons_ book, 276
Lewis, Edward, 97, 246, 265, 266
Life, uses of, 302–307;
daily life at seventy, 307–309
_Light and Sound_, lectures on, 84
Limerick, Mona, 245
Literary beginnings, 28, 49
Lock, Fossett, 61
Lodge, Oliver, 246
_Love’s Coming-of-Age_, 195 ff., 209;
translations of, 272
Lowell, Russell, 87
Lytton, Constance, 231
Macdonald, Ramsay, 245
Macmillan, Margaret, 245
Maguire, Tom, 134
Maitland, Edward, and the Hermetic Society, 240–245
Manual work, need of, 101, 110, 112, 114;
manual workers, solidity of their lives, 312;
friends among, 102, 112
March-Phillipps, Lisle, and the Boer War, 234;
_With Rimington_, 235
Margesson, Lady Isabel, 246
Market-gardening, 110, 137, 138
Marriage, decline of, 96
Marx, his theory of _Surplus-value_, 114, 140
Mathematics, reading for Tripos, 48;
proof of _Taylor’s Theorem_, 49;
place in Tripos, 52
Maurice, Fredk. D., 38;
incumbent of St. Edward’s, 55–58
Max Flint, 176;
story of his life, 176–182;
at Millthorpe, 180, 181;
Christian or Jew? 182
Merrill, George, arrival at Millthorpe, 159 ff.;
early life, 160;
talent for housework, etc., 162
Millthorpe, 91, 111;
migration to, 112, 113;
life at, 137, 147, 149, 157, 167, 282;
_rendezvous_ of all classes, 164
Morris, William, 115, 125;
his temperament, 216;
visit to Millthorpe, 217
_Moses: a drama_, 75, 190
Mother, my, 41 ff.;
death of, 106
Moulton, Fletcher, Senior Wrangler, 211
Muirhead, Robert F., 49, 212, 255
Music, piano and composition, 24;
Beethoven, 33;
lectures on, 105
Nadler-Nuellens, Lilly, 270–272;
translates _Towards Democracy_, 272;
comes to England, 272
Najívin, Ivan, novelist and mystic; translations into Russian, 280
_Narcissus and other Poems_, 71, 190
Neo-Paganism, 265;
lectures on, 267, 268
Nevinson, H. W., 235, 245
“New Fellowship, The,” 222;
its early members, 225
New Movements in 1881, 240, 245
Newton, “Sir Isaac,” 18
Niagara, 89
Nietzsche, 205
Nobili, Riccardo, art-critic, 273
_Non-governmental Society_, 209
Northern Towns, 80, ch. iv.
Norton, Charles, of Harvard, 87
Oates, C. G., of Leeds, 83
“Olivia,” 69
Olivier, Sydney, 245
Open-air life, 101, 145
Ordination, 52;
difficulties with the Bishop, 53–55;
abandonment of Orders, 58 ff., 72 ff.
Pamphlets on Sex and Marriage, 195
Parish Council, contest, 158;
work on, 291–293
Parson, a new kind of, wanted, 291
Payne, Iden, 245
_Perfect Way, The_, 241
Personal reform first, 321
Peterson, Captain R. E., Tolstoyan, 172;
Utopian, 173 ff.;
his colour-sergeant’s wife, 174–176
Pierce, Prof. Benjamin, of Harvard, 88
_Pioneers of Science_, lectures, 92
Ploughing matches, 297, 298
Prize-poems, 61
_Promised Land, The_, 76
Psychical Research Society, 240
Public-house, the, natural centre of village life, 298;
necessity of reorganization, 299, 300
Publishers, timidity of, 196, 198
Rambelli, Giuseppe, artist, 274
Reclus, Elie, Elisée, and Paul, 278
Reddie, Cecil, of Abbotsholme School, 246
Reservoir schemes, 297
Reynolds, Stephen, of the Fisheries, 246
Rileys, the, in Massachusetts, 117
Robertson, F. W., of Brighton, 38
Rome, liberating influence of stay in, 67, 68
Romer, Robert, Senior Wrangler, 46, 74, 210, 211
Rossetti, William, his edition of _Leaves of Grass_, 64
Rothenstein, William, 246
Rustics, their character, and anecdotes, 284–287
St. Lawrence, the river, 118
Salt, Catherine L., 237, 239
Salt, Henry, 218, 236–238;
work in Humanitarian and Nature movements, 237;
writings, 238
Sandals, making of, 124, 157, 159, 321;
wearing of, 169
“Sanitary” pipes _versus_ natural water-courses and springs, 296
School-life, 16 ff.
Schreiner, Olive, 112, 222, 226–231
_Science, Modern_, 141, 142;
_Criticism_ of, 203;
never seriously tackled, 204;
Tolstoy on, 205
_Seed-time_, 225 (note)
Senard, Marcelle, 274–276;
translation of _Towards Democracy_, 274;
brochure on E. C., 275;
hospital work, 276
Senior Wranglers, 210, 211
Sex-troubles at schools, 29
Shaw, Bernard, 167, 205, 245
Sheffield, beauties of, 91, 92;
the people, 92
Sheffield Socialist Society, 125, 130 ff.
Shelley, Mary, 122
Shelley, Percy, 28, 66, 119, 121, 122
Shortland, J. W., 131
Sicily, lying encouraged among the peasant children, 286
Simplification of Life, story of, 168;
lecture on, 258
Sisters, my, 32, 71, 110
Sixsmith, Charles F., 250
Sloane Kennedy, 117, 118
Small Holdings, lectures on, 259;
visit to Maylands, Essex, 259;
need of, 287–289
Smith, George Moore-, 193
Social Democratic Federation, the, 115, 240
Socialism, its value, 115, 126, 127;
its inner meaning, 128–130;
propaganda of, 135;
humours of, 134
“Society” not worth while, 149
Socrates and the tiger, 303
Solidarity of human life, 322
Spedding, Harry, 47
Spiritualists, forty! 169
Steerage passenger, experiences as, 117
Stuart, James, of Trinity College, 78
_Sun-worship and Christianity_, lectures on, 264, 265
_Surplus-value_, theory of, 114, 140
Taylor, Jonathan, of Sheffield, 132
Theosophical Societies, 240;
lectures for, 259, 267
Thompson, E. S., of Christ’s College, 81
Thoreau, H. D., 114, 308;
his _Walden_, 115, 116;
his ideal, 147, 165, 166
Tolstoy on my _Civilization_ and _Modern Science_, 205, 281
Tomita, Saikwa, translates portions of _Towards Democracy_ and _The Art
of Creation_ into Japanese, 279
_Towards Democracy_, 71, 99;
its inception, 106, and birth, 108;
continuation, 109, 146;
publication, 112, 125, 142, 190 ff.;
early criticisms of, 192, 193;
early editions, 194 ff.;
wanders from publisher to publisher, 198–200;
pocket edition, 200;
ignored by the Press, 201;
its meanings, 201;
relation to the other books, 209;
translations of, into German, 272;
Italian, 274;
French, 274;
Japanese, 279;
Russian, 280
Transformation, of “Civilization,” impending, 311–314;
of the Individual, 315
Trelawny, Edward J., his life, 119–121;
visit to, 121–123;
his four wives, 123
Trevelyan, G. M., 246
Trinity Hall, 46, 210
United States, first visit to, 85 ff.;
second visit, 116
Universal Self, the, key to all morality and science, 207, 208
Unwin, Raymond, 131, 246
_Upanishads, The_, lectures on, 266
Uranian temperament, the, 97, 98
Usher, Mrs., of the “Sheffield Socialists,” 131
Vacation, the Long, at Cambridge, 76
Vegetarian habits, 100;
Society, 240;
Congress at Manchester, 204;
at Mansion House dinner, 253
Versailles, life at, 21
Verses, early, 28, 45, 50, 63, 71
Victorian Age, the, 95, 321
_Village and Landlord, The_, a Fabian Tract, 283, 294
Village clubs, 289, 290, 300;
Chapel and Co-operative Society, 300
_Visit to a Gñani_, 209, 280
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 246
Wallace, J. W., of Bolton, 250
War, the Great, 266, 267, 311, 314, 319, 320
Warr, H. D., Fellow of Trinity Hall, 64
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 246
“Well-dressing,” a village institution, 295, 296
Wells, H. G., 245, 306
Westermarck, Prof. Edward, 246
Whitman, Walt, 28, 30;
first introduction to, 64;
visit to, 86, 87;
Emerson’s opinion of, 88;
second visit to, 117;
contrast to Eastern Sage, 144;
Whitman Club at Bolton, 250
_Who shall command the Heart_, Part IV of _Towards Democracy_, 199
Wilde, Oscar, troubles, 196
Wilson, Charlotte, 134
Wilson, Dr. Helen, of Sheffield, 263
Wilson, Miss Lucy, of Leeds, 81, 82
Women’s Movement, its beginning, 32;
Suffrage Demonstration, Manchester, 262
Wordsworth, 28, 66
Yate, C. F., of Trinity Hall, 47
“Young Ladies,” the, of 1860, 30
_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED THE GRESHAM PRESS WOKING AND LONDON
-----
Footnote 1:
In India he rose rapidly through the early grades of the Service. The
Mutiny of 1857 was just over, and administration was being reorganized
in various directions. He was stationed at Futtehpore, Saharanpore and
various places in the N.W. Provinces; and then at Allahabad, where he
became Settlement Officer and something of an authority on Land and
Irrigation questions. Afterwards he was transferred to the Central
Provinces and made full Commissioner first at Jubbulpore and then at
Nagpore. It was at the last-named place that a fatal accident overtook
him while riding in a steeple-chase; and a career of great promise was
cut short. This was in March 1876. The _Pioneer_ of the 7th of March
said: “His public career, though now but commencing, was full of the
highest promise. Sound, cool, and cautious in deliberation, he carried
into action the promptness and decision which are born of
self-reliance and of a healthy vigorous _physique_. His was
emphatically _mens sana in corpore sano_; and he himself an officer of
rare judgment and of most sterling merit.”
See _A Memoir of C. W. C._: a little brochure (privately printed)
written by my eldest sister after his death.
Footnote 2:
His son, Francis, followed my brother into the Navy, thus representing
a fourth generation of Carpenters in a direct line in the same
profession, He is now [1915], though still young, occupying a high
position in the North Sea Fleet, and has distinguished himself not
only like his father by saving life, but also by bringing out
important inventions which have been taken up by the Admiralty.
Footnote 3:
It is curious how æsthetic in style this Preface is, though written in
1855, rather before the English æsthetic movement, and how, perhaps on
account of its slight affectation of manner, it was abandoned by
Whitman afterwards.
Footnote 4:
“Francesca,” in _Sketches from Life_.
Footnote 5:
The drama is now [1911] republished under the title _The Promised
Land_, and the soliloquy in question is given in the first part of Act
II. Sc. 1. As a reflection of the thoughts which were, I suppose,
occupying my mind at that time, it may have some slight interest.
Footnote 6:
This of course would all be very different now [1915].
Footnote 7:
_Days with Walt Whitman_ (George Allen and Unwin, 1906).
Footnote 8:
See _Days with Walt Whitman_, by E. Carpenter, p. 30.
Footnote 9:
This is a subject which through the Freudian psycho-analysis has come
now [1915] to be much better understood.
Footnote 10:
Many examples of this kind of temperament are given in Vol. II of Dr.
Havelock Ellis’ classical work _Studies in the Psychology of
Sex_—Philadelphia, 1901 and 1915. (See history VII, beginning “My
parentage is very sound”, history XVII, etc.) And I will say that in
my case the temperament has always been quite natural and associated
with perfect healthiness of habit and general freedom from morbidity;
and that it has been absolutely inborn, and not induced by any outside
example or teaching. It is therefore a part of my nature, and a most
intimate and organic part. And I have to thank Mr. Edward Lewis that
in his _Exposition and Appreciation of E. C._ (Methuen, 1915, pp. 200,
299, etc.) he has so clearly and firmly indicated this.
Footnote 11:
See _Sketches from Life in Town and Country_ (George Allen and Unwin),
by E. Carpenter.
Footnote 12:
However, I happily managed in the next few years to get rid of a good
portion of this!
Footnote 13:
See _Days with Walt Whitman_ (George Allen and Unwin, 1906), by E.
Carpenter.
Footnote 14:
Perhaps the portrait by Edward Williams, but I cannot say.
Footnote 15:
See “The Value of the Value-theory,” an article by myself in the
little magazine _To-day_ for June 1889 (published by W. Reeves).
Footnote 16:
See the last poem but one in _Towards Democracy_, p. 502.
Footnote 17:
Shown in the illustration facing page 103.
Footnote 18:
At Kovno or Slobodka, now alas! ravaged by the German invasion [1915].
Footnote 19:
I may say here that I never happened to meet Oscar Wilde personally.
Footnote 20:
One of the chapters in _Civilization: its Cause and Cure_.
Footnote 21:
A chapter in _Prisons, Police, and Punishment_.
Footnote 22:
In _Adam’s Peak to Elephanta_.
Footnote 23:
See p. 125, _supra_ (Ch. VII).
Footnote 24:
They are published now in Philadelphia by the F. A. Davis Company
there.
Footnote 25:
See _Seed-time_, a quarterly journal issued by the Fellowship; which
however was not started till 1890 and ceased publication in 1898.
Editor, Maurice Adams, one of the earliest members.
Footnote 26:
Published by George Harrap, 1912.
Footnote 27:
_With Rimington_, by L. March-Phillipps (Arnold, 1901).
Footnote 28:
Entitled _I Cavalli pensanti di Elberfeldt_ (Florence, 1912).
Footnote 29:
Part I only, published by Lanciani, 1912.
Footnote 30:
Published by the _Libr. de l’Art indépendant_, 81 rue Dareau, Paris.
Footnote 31:
But not of course to _Civilization_ itself. M. Najívin, writing to me,
says: “A propos de la ‘Civilization’ Tolstoy n’a pas écrit un
préface—seulement il a beaucoup loué ce livre dans deux lettres à moi,
et j’ai fait des extraits de ces lettres et je les ai publiés maintes
fois.... L’exemplaire de la ‘Civilization’ _avec des notes de Tolstoy_
est envoyé au Musée de Tolstoy à St. Petersbourg.”
Footnote 32:
There is also a little book called _Some Forgotten Facts in the
History of Sheffield_ (Independent Press, Sheffield, 2s. 6d.) which
gives valuable information about the enclosures in that district.
Footnote 33:
The Small Holdings Act of 1907 defines anything up to fifty acres as a
small holding.
Footnote 34:
Chap. X, p. 180.
Footnote 35:
By means of which, of course, the wheel turns on its axle.
Footnote 36:
The Address together with my Reply is printed in an Appendix at the
end of this book.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward Carpenter’s Works
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY. Library Edition. _4s. 6d. net._ Pocket Edition,
_3s. 6d. net_.
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Third Edition.
ADAM’S PEAK TO ELEPHANTA: Sketches in Ceylon and India. New Edition.
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IOLÄUS: An Anthology of Friendship. _2s. 6d. net._ New and Enlarged
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DAYS WITH WALT WHITMAN. _3s. 6d. net._
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net_. Third Edition.
THE SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE. From the Writings of EDWARD CARPENTER.
Crown 8vo. New Edition. _2s. net._
Social Science Series
Cloth, 2_s._ 6_d._ Double Volumes 3_s._
6_d._
* Also in Limp Cloth 1_s._ _net_.
** Paper Covers 1_s._
*2. =CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.= EDWARD CARPENTER.
*3. =QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIALISM.= Dr. SCHÄFFLE.
4. =DARWINISM AND POLITICS.= D. G. RITCHIE, M.A.
(Oxon.).
New Edition, with two additional Essays on HUMAN EVOLUTION.
*5. =RELIGION OF SOCIALISM.= E. BELFORT BAX.
*6. =ETHICS OF SOCIALISM.= E. BELFORT BAX.
7. =THE DRINK QUESTION.= Dr. KATE MITCHELL.
8. =PROMOTION OF GENERAL HAPPINESS.= Prof. M. MACMILLAN.
*9. =ENGLAND’S IDEAL, &c.= EDWARD CARPENTER.
10. =SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.= SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
11. _Out of print._
12. _Out of print._
**13. =THE STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.= E. BELFORT BAX.
14. =THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH.= LAURENCE GRONLUND.
15. =ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES.= BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A.
(Oxon.).
16. =CHARITY ORGANISATION.= C. S. LOCH, Secretary to
Charity Organisation
Society.
17. =THOREAU’S ANTI-SLAVERY AND REFORM Edited by H. S. SALT.
PAPERS.=
18. =SELF-HELP A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.= G. J. HOLYOAKE.
19, 20. _Out of print._
21. =THE UNEARNED INCREMENT.= W. H. DAWSON.
22, 23. _Out of print._
*24. =LUXURY.= EMILE DE LAVELEYE.
**25. =THE LAND AND THE LABOURERS.= Dean STUBBS.
26. =THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY.= PAUL LAFARGUE.
27. =CRIME AND ITS CAUSES.= W. DOUGLAS MORRISON.
*28. =PRINCIPLES OF STATE INTERFERENCE.= D. G. RITCHIE, M.A.
29, 30. _Out of print._
31. =ORIGIN OF PROPERTY IN LAND.= FUSTEL DE COULANGES.
Edited, with an Introductory Chapter on the English Manor, by Prof. W.
J. ASHLEY, M.A.
32. _Out of print._
33. =THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT.= BEATRICE POTTER.
34. _Out of print._
35. =MODERN HUMANISTS.= J. M. ROBERTSON.
**36. =OUTLOOKS FROM THE NEW STANDPOINT.= E. BELFORT BAX.
37. =DISTRIBUTING CO-OPERATIVE Dr. LUIGI PIZZAMIGLIO.
SOCIETIES.= Edited by F. J. SNELL.
38. _Out of print._
39. =THE LONDON PROGRAMME.= SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
40. _Out of print._
42. _Out of print._
*43. =THE STUDENT’S MARX.= EDWARD AVELING, D.Sc.
44. _Out of print._
45. =POVERTY: ITS GENESIS AND EXODUS.= J. G. GODARD.
46. _Out of print._
47. =THE DAWN OF RADICALISM.= J. B. DALY, LL.D.
48. =THE DESTITUTE ALIEN IN GREAT ARNOLD WHITE; MONTAGUE
BRITAIN.= CRACKANTHORPE, Q.C.; W.
A. M‘ARTHUR, M.P., &c.
49. =ILLEGITIMACY AND THE INFLUENCE OF ALBERT LEFFINGWELL, M.D.
SEASONS ON CONDUCT.=
50. =COMMERCIAL CRISES OF THE NINETEENTH H. M. HYNDMAN.
CENTURY.=
51. =THE STATE AND PENSIONS IN OLD AGE.= J. A. SPENDER and ARTHUR
ACLAND, M.P.
52. =THE FALLACY OF SAVING.= JOHN M. ROBERTSON.
53. =THE IRISH PEASANT.= ANON.
*54. =THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY ON WAGES.= Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON,
D.Sc.
**55. =THE SOCIAL HORIZON.= ANON.
56. =SOCIALISM, UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC.= FREDERICK ENGELS.
**57. =LAND NATIONALISATION.= A. R. WALLACE.
58. =THE ETHIC OF USURY AND INTEREST.= Rev. W. BLISSARD.
*59. =THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN.= ADELE CREPAZ.
60. =THE EIGHT HOURS’ QUESTION.= JOHN M. ROBERTSON.
61. =DRUNKENNESS.= GEORGE R. WILSON, M.B.
62. =THE NEW REFORMATION.= RAMSDEN BALMFORTH.
*63. =THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.= T. E. KEBBEL.
64. _Out of print._
65. =ENGLAND’S FOREIGN TRADE IN XIXTH A. L. BOWLEY.
CENTURY.=
66. =THEORY AND POLICY OF LABOUR DR. SCHÄFFLE.
PROTECTION.=
67. =HISTORY OF ROCHDALE PIONEERS.= G. J. HOLYOAKE.
68. =RIGHTS OF WOMEN.= M. OSTRAGORSKI.
69. =DWELLINGS OF THE PEOPLE.= LOCKE WORTHINGTON.
70–75. _Out of print._
76. =BRITISH FREEWOMEN.= C. M. STOPES.
77, 78. _Out of print._
79. =THREE MONTHS IN A WORKSHOP.= P. GÖHRE, with Preface by
Prof. ELY.
80. =DARWINISM AND RACE PROGRESS.= Prof. J. B. HAYCRAFT.
81. =LOCAL TAXATION AND FINANCE.= G. H. BLUNDEN.
82. =PERILS TO BRITISH TRADE.= E. BURGIS.
83. =THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.= J. J. ROUSSEAU. Edited by
H. J. TOZER.
84. =LABOUR UPON THE LAND.= Edited by J. A. HOBSON,
M.A.
85. =MORAL PATHOLOGY.= ARTHUR E. GILES, M.D.,
B.Sc.
86. =PARASITISM, ORGANIC AND SOCIAL.= MASSART and VANDERVELDE.
*87. =ALLOTMENTS AND SMALL HOLDINGS.= J. L. GREEN.
*88. =MONEY AND ITS RELATIONS TO PRICES.= L. L. PRICE.
89. =SOBER BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.= F. A. MACKENZIE.
90. =WORKERS ON THEIR INDUSTRIES.= F. W. GALTON.
91. =REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION.= KARL MARX.
92. =OVER-PRODUCTION AND CRISES.= K. RODBERTUS.
93. =LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND STATE AID.= S. J. CHAPMAN.
94. =VILLAGE COMMUNITIES IN INDIA.= B. H. BADEN-POWELL, M.A.,
C.I.E.
95. =ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADE.= S. J. CHAPMAN.
96. _Out of print._
97. =COMMERCIAL FEDERATION & COLONIAL J. DAVIDSON, M.A.,
TRADE POLICY.= Phil.D.
98. =SELECTIONS FROM FOURIER.= C. GIDE and J. FRANKLIN.
99. =PUBLIC-HOUSE REFORM.= A. N. CUMMING.
100. =THE VILLAGE PROBLEM.= G. F. MILLIN.
101. =TOWARD THE LIGHT.= L. H. BERENS.
102. =CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.= A. V. WOODWORTH.
103. _Out of print._
104. =THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH CORN Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON,
LAWS.= M.A.
105. =THE BIOLOGY OF BRITISH POLITICS.= CHARLES H. HARVEY.
*106. =RATES AND TAXES AS AFFECTING Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON,
AGRICULTURE.= M.A.
107. =A PRACTICAL PROGRAMME FOR WORKING ANON.
MEN.=
108. =JOHN THELWALL.= CHAS. CESTRE, Litt.D.
*109. =RENT, WAGES AND PROFITS IN Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON.
AGRICULTURE.=
110. =ECONOMIC PREJUDICES.= YVES GUYOT.
111. =CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PROBLEMS.= ACHILLE LORIA.
*112. =WHO PAYS? THE REAL INCIDENCE OF ROBERT HENRY.
TAXATION.=
DOUBLE VOLUMES, 3s. 6d.
1. =LIFE OF ROBERT OWEN.= LLOYD JONES.
2. =THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SOCIAL Dr. A. SCHÄFFLE.
DEMOCRACY=: a Second Part of
“The Quintessence of Socialism.”
3. =CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN FREDERICK ENGELS.
ENGLAND IN 1844.=
4. =THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL ECONOMY.= YVES GUYOT.
5. =SOCIAL PEACE.= G. VON
SCHULTZE-GARVERNITZ.
6. =A HANDBOOK OF SOCIALISM.= W. D. P. BLISS.
7. =SOCIALISM: ITS GROWTH AND OUTCOME.= W. MORRIS and E. B. BAX.
8. =ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY.= A. LORIA.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Renumbered footnotes and moved them all to the end of the final
chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
● Enclosed bold or blackletter font in =equals=.
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