Part 16

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.