Part 7
If socialists had cared for the poetical literature of their cause one half so well as the Chartists did, the names of Francis Adams and John Barlas would have been far more widely known. It was Mr. W. M. Rossetti who drew my attention to Adams’s fiery volume of verse, the _Songs of the Army of the Night_, first published in Australia in 1887; and as I was then preparing an anthology of _Songs of Freedom_ I got into communication with the writer, and our acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship. Francis Adams was a poet of Socialism in a much truer sense than William Morris; for, while Morris was a poet who became a socialist, Adams, like Barlas, was less a convert to Socialism than a scion of Socialism, a veritable _Child of the Age_, to quote the title of his own autobiographical romance, in the storm and stress of his career. He had received a classical education at Shrewsbury School (the “Glastonbury” of his novel), and after a brief spell of schoolmastering, had became a journalist and wanderer. He was connected for a short time, in 1883 or thereabouts, with the Social Democratic Federation, and enrolled himself a member under the Regent’s Park trees one Sunday afternoon at a meeting addressed by his friend, Frank Harris. In Australia, for a time, where he took an active part in the Labour movement, and wrote frequently for the _Sydney Bulletin_ and other journals, he had many friends and admirers; but just as a Parliamentary career was opening for him he was crippled by illness, and returned to England, a consumptive, in 1890, to die three years later by his own hand.
Of Adams’s prose works the most remarkable is _A Child of the Age_, written when he was only eighteen, and first printed under the title of _Leicester, an Autobiography_, an extraordinarily fascinating, if somewhat morbid story, which deserves to be ranked with _Wuthering Heights_ and _The Story of an African Farm_, among notable works of immature imagination. He told me that it was written almost spontaneously: it just “came to him” to write it, and he himself felt that it was an abnormal book. Of the _Songs of the Army of the Night_, he said that they were intended to do what had never before been done--to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working classes as he found out the hollowness, to him, of our culture and learning; hence the pitiless invective which shows itself in many of the poems. As surely as Elliott’s “Corn Law Rhymes” spoke the troubled spirit of their age, so do these fierce keen lyrics, on fire alike with love and with hate, express the passionate sympathies and deep resentments of the socialist movement in its revolt from a sham philanthropy and patriotism. No rebel poet has ever “arraigned his country and his day” in more burning words than Adams in his stanzas “To England.”
I, whom you fed with shame and starved with woe, I wheel above you, Your fatal Vulture, for I hate you so, I almost love you.
But the _Songs_ are not only denunciatory; they have a closer and more personal aspect, as in the infinitely compassionate “One among so Many,” which endears them to the heart of the reader as only a few choice books are ever endeared. In their strange mixture of sweetness and bitterness, they are very typical of Francis Adams himself: he was at one moment, and in one aspect, the most simple and lovable of beings; at another, the most aggressively critical and fastidious.[20]
But if Francis Adams has not received his just meed of recognition, what shall be said of John Barlas, whose seven small volumes of richest and most melodious verse were printed (they can hardly be said to have been published) under the _nom de plume_ of “Evelyn Douglas,” and mostly in places remote from the world of books? When full allowance is made for such drawbacks, it is strange that literary critics, ever on the look-out for new genius, failed to discover Barlas; for though the number of modern poets is considerable, the born singers are still as few and far between as before; yet it was to that small and select class that Barlas unmistakably belonged. His _Poems Lyrical and Dramatic_ (1884) contained, with much that was faulty and immature, many exquisitely beautiful lyrics, the expression of a genuine gift of song. A Greek in spirit, he also possessed in a high degree the sense of brotherhood with all that breathes, and was ever aspiring in his poetry not only to the enjoyment of what is best and most beautiful on earth, but to a fairer and happier state of society among mankind. Nor was he a dreamer only, intent on some far horizon of the future; he was an ardent lover of liberty and progress in the present; and this hope, too, found worthy utterance in his verse. It would be difficult to say where Freedom has been more nobly presented than in his poem to “Le Jeune Barbaroux”:
Freedom, her arm outstretched, but lips firm set, Freedom, her eyes with tears of pity wet, But her robe splashed with drops of bloody dew, Freedom, thy goddess, is our goddess yet, Young Barbaroux.
Of Barlas’s _Love Sonnets_ (1889) it may be said without exaggeration that, unknown though they are to the reading public and to any but a mere handful of students, they are not undeserving to be classed among the best sonnet-sequences. It was Meredith’s opinion that as sonnet-writer Barlas took “high rank among the poets of his time”; and that the concluding sonnet was “unmatched for nobility of sentiment.” Nobility was indeed a trait of all Barlas’s poetry, and of his character. Sprung from the line of the famous Kate Douglas who won the name of Bar-lass, he was noted even in his school-days for magnanimity and courage; and in no way did those qualities show themselves more clearly than in the dignity with which he bore long years of failure and misfortune, darkened at times by insanity.
The winter of 1891-1892 had brought the one occasion on which Barlas’s name came before the public. He was charged with firing a revolver at the House of Commons, which he did to mark his contempt for Parliamentary rule; but when H. H. Champion and Oscar Wilde offered themselves as sureties, he was discharged in the care of his friends. I first heard from him, through Champion, soon after that event, in a letter in which he spoke of his poetry as having been “three parts of my religion”; but it was not till ten or twelve years later that I became closely acquainted with him, and then he wrote to me regularly till his death in 1914. His letters, written mostly from an asylum in Scotland, are among the most interesting I have ever received; for in spite of his ill health he was an untiring student, a great classical scholar, and deeply read in many Greek and Latin authors whose works lie outside the narrow range of school and University curriculum. But his genius was in his poems; and it is to be hoped that a selection from these may yet see the light.
Thus it was that these two poets, Adams and Barlas, though true-born children of Socialism, were precluded, owing to the misfortunes which beset their lives, from taking active part in its advocacy. Edward Carpenter, on the other hand, if unattached to any one section of reformers, has been one of the most influential writers and speakers in the socialist cause; and his name is deservedly honoured not only for his many direct services to the movement, but for the personal friendship which he has extended to fellow-workers, and indeed to all who have sought his aid--giving freely where, in the nature of the case, there could be little or no return. His cottage at Millthorpe had already become, in the ’nineties, a place of pilgrimage, the resort of “comrades” who dropped down on him from the surrounding hills, or swarmed up the valley from Chesterfield like a tidal wave, or “bore,” as he aptly described it. His friend George Adams and family were then living with him at Millthorpe; and those who had the good fortune to be intimate with that delightful household will always remember their visits with pleasure. George Adams, the sandal-maker, was as charming a companion as the heart could desire, full of artistic feeling (witness his beautiful watercolours), of quaint humorous fancies, and of unfailing kindliness. His memory is very dear to his friends.
One of the strangest things said about Edward Carpenter, and by one of his most admiring critics, is that he has no faculty for organization. I used often to be struck by the great patience and adroitness with which he marshalled and managed his numerous uninvited guests. He might fairly have exclaimed, with Emerson:
Askest “how long thou shalt stay”? Devastator of the day!
But though the pilgrims often showed but little consideration for their host, in the manner and duration of their visits, he seemed to be always master of the emergency, receiving the new-comers, however untimely their arrival, with imperturbable urbanity, and gently detaching the limpets with a skill that made them seem to be taking a voluntary and intended departure. It was hospitality brought to a fine art.
For many years there was a quaint division of Carpenter’s writings in the British Museum catalogue, his earlier works being attributed to one Edward Carpenter, “Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,” and the later to another Edward Carpenter, placed on the lower grade of “Social Reformer.” There was, perhaps, some propriety, as well as unconscious humour in this dual arrangement; for Carpenter, like Morris, was not a socialist born, but one who, by force of natural bias, had gravitated from Respectability to Freedom; and his writings bore obvious tokens of the change.
Another and more audacious classification was once propounded to me by Bernard Shaw, viz. that future commentators would divide Carpenter’s works into two periods; first, that of the comparatively trivial books written before he came in contact with “G.B.S.”; secondly, that of the really important contributions to literature, where the Shavian influence is discernible. I mentioned this scheme to Carpenter; and he smilingly suggested that if there were any indebtedness, the names of the debtor and the creditor must be reversed. But it would have been as reasonable for an elephant to claim to have influenced a whale, or a whale an elephant, as for either the thinker or the seer, each moving in quite a different province, to suppose that he had affected the other’s course. One common influence they felt--the desire to humanize the barbarous age in which they lived--and it is strange that Carpenter, in his book on “Civilization,” should have bestowed so fair and unmerited a name on a state of society which, in spite of all its boasted sciences and mechanical inventions, is at heart little else than an ancient Savagery in a more complex and cumbrous form.
VII
THE POET-PIONEER
I know not the internal constitution of other men.... I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land.--SHELLEY.
The words quoted above would savour of self-righteousness, if put into the mouth of any one but the poet who wrote them. Coming from Shelley, they do not give that impression; for we feel of him that, as Leigh Hunt used to say, he was “a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world ... he had come from the planet Mercury.” Or, rather, he was a prophet and forerunner of a yet distant state of society upon this planet Earth, when the savagery of our past and present shall have been replaced by a civilization that is to be.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century Shelley’s influence was very powerful, not only upon the canons of poetry, but upon ideals of various kinds--upon free-thought, socialism, sex-questions, food-reform, and not a few other problems of intellectual and ethical import. The Chartist movement set the example. In a letter which I received from Eleanor Marx in 1892 she spoke of the “enormous influence” exercised by Shelley’s writings upon leading Chartists: “I have heard my father and Engels again and again speak of this; and I have heard the same from the many Chartists it has been my good fortune to know--Ernest Jones, Richard Moore, the Watsons, G. J. Harvey, and others.” What was true of Chartism held equally good of other movements; as indeed was admitted by Shelley’s detractors as well as claimed by his friends: witness Sir Leslie Stephen’s complaint that “the devotees of some of Shelley’s pet theories” had become “much noisier.” In the ’eighties, the interest aroused by the controversies that raged about Shelley, both as poet and as pioneer, was especially strong, as was proved by the renewed output of Shelleyan literature, such as Mr. Forman’s and Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s editions of the works, the biography of Dr. Dowden, and the numerous publications of the Shelley Society, dating from 1886 to 1892. It was a time when the old abusive view of Shelley, as a fiend incarnate, was giving way to the equally irrational apologetic view--the “poor, poor Shelley” period--of which Dowden was the spokesman; yet a good deal of the old bitterness still remained, and Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson’s lurid fiction, entitled “The Real Shelley,” was published as late as 1885.
It is difficult for a humble student of such a genius as Shelley to speak frankly of the debt that he owes to him, without seeming to forget his own personal unimportance; but I prefer to risk the misunderstanding than to leave the tribute unsaid. From the day when at a preparatory school I was first introduced to Shelley’s lyrics by having some stanzas of “The Cloud” set for translation into Latin, I never doubted that he stood apart from all other poets in the enchantment of his verse; and I soon learnt that there was an equal distinction in the beauty and wisdom of his thoughts; so that he became to me, as to others, what Lucretius found in Epicurus, a guide and solace in all the vicissitudes of life:
Thou art the father of our faith, and thine Our holiest precepts; from thy songs divine, As bees sip honey in some flowery dell, Cull we the glories of each golden line, Golden, and graced with life imperishable.[21]
At Eton there was little knowledge of Shelley, and still less understanding. When it was first proposed to place a bust of the poet in the Upper School, Dr. Hornby is said to have replied: “No: he was a bad man,” and to have expressed a humorous regret that he had not been educated at Harrow. I once read a paper on Shelley before the Ascham Society, and was amazed at the ignorance that prevailed about him among Eton masters: only one or two of them had any acquaintance with the longer poems; the rest had read the lines “To a Skylark”; one told us with a certain amount of pride that he had read “Adonais”; many thought the poet a libertine; and though they did not say that he was a disgrace to Eton, it was evident that that was the underlying sentiment. Several years after I had left Eton, William Cory wrote a paper for the Shelley Society on “Shelley’s Classics” (viz. his knowledge of Greek and Latin), which, in his absence, I read at one of the Society’s meetings; and I remember being surprised to find that even he regarded Shelley as a verbose and tedious writer.
From Mr. Kegan Paul, who was a friend of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, I had heard all that was known of the inner history of Shelley’s life; and as, after the publication of Dowden’s biography in 1886, the main facts were no longer in dispute, it seemed to me that the best service that could then be rendered to his memory was to show how, far from being a “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” he was a beautiful but very efficient prophet of reform. This I did, or tried to do, in various essays published about the time when the Shelley Society was beginning its work; and I was thus brought into close touch with it during the seven years of its existence. As illustrating how the old animosities still smouldered, more than sixty years after Shelley’s death, I am tempted to quote a testimonial received by me from a critic in the _Westminster Review_, where I found myself described as one of the writers who grubbed amongst “the offensive matter” of Shelley’s life “with gross minds and grunts of satisfaction,” and as having made “an impudent endeavour to gain the notoriety of an iconoclast amongst social heretics with immoral tendencies and depraved desires.” There was the old genuine ring about this, and I felt that I must be on the right track as a Shelley student. I knew, too, from letters which I had received from Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law, whose _Shelley Memorials_ was the starting-point of all the later appreciations, that I was not writing without credentials. “For the last thirty-five years,” she wrote to me in 1888, speaking for Sir Percy Shelley and herself, “we have suffered so much from what has been written on Shelley by those who had not the capacity of understanding his character, and were utterly ignorant of the circumstances which shaped his life, that I cannot refrain from expressing our heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the comfort and pleasure we have had in reading your paper.” And later: “It is a great happiness to me to know, in my old age, that when I am gone there will be some one left to do battle for the truth against those whose nature prevents them from seeing in Shelley’s beautiful unselfish love and kindness anything but evil.”
The Shelley Society, founded by Dr. F. J. Furnivall in 1886, had the support of a large number of the poet’s admirers, among whom were Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Mr. Buxton Forman, Mr. Hermann Vezin, Dr. John Todhunter, Mr. F. S. Ellis, Mr. Stanley Little, and Mr. Bernard Shaw; and much useful work was done in the way of meetings and discussions, the publication of essays on Shelley, and facsimile reprints of some of his rarer volumes, thus throwing new light, biographical or bibliographical, on many doubtful questions. I will refer only to one of these, in which I was myself concerned, a study of “Julian and Maddalo,” which I read at a meeting in 1888, and which was subsequently printed in the _Shelley Society’s Papers_ and reissued as a pamphlet. Its object was to make clear what had been overlooked by Dowden, Rossetti, and the chief authorities, though hinted at by one or two writers, viz. that the story of “the maniac” (in “Julian and Maddalo”) was not, as generally supposed, a mere fanciful interpolation, but a piece of poetical autobiography, a veiled record of Shelley’s own feelings at the time of his separation from Harriet. On this point Dr. Furnivall wrote to me (April 16, 1888): “Robert Browning says he has always held the main part of your view, from the first publication of ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ but you must not push it into detail. I had a long talk with him last night.”
The greatest single achievement of the Shelley Society was the staging of _The Cenci_ at the Islington Theatre, in 1886. The performance was technically a private one, as the Licenser of Plays had refused his sanction; but great public interest was aroused, and the acting of Mr. Hermann Vezin as Count Cenci, and of Miss Alma Murray as Beatrice--“the poetic actress without a rival” was Browning’s description of her--made the event one which no lover of Shelley could forget. If the Society had done nothing else than this, its existence would still have been justified.
Every literary association, like every social movement, is sure to have a humorous aspect as well as a serious one, and the Shelley Society was very far from being an exception to this beneficent rule; indeed, on looking back over its career, one has to check the impulse to be absorbed in the laughable features of the proceedings, to the exclusion of its really valuable work. The situation was rich in delightful incongruities; for the bulk of the Committee, while admiring Shelley’s poetical genius, seemed quite unaware of the conclusions to which his principles inevitably led, and of the live questions which any genuine study of Shelley was certain to awake. Accordingly, when Mr. G. W. Foote, the President of the National Secular Society, gave an address before a very large audience on Shelley’s religion, the Committee, with a few exceptions, marked their disgust for the lecturer’s views, which happened also to be Shelley’s, by the expedient of staying away. I think it was on an earlier occasion that Bernard Shaw appalled the company by commencing a speech with the words: “I, as a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian....” I remember how the honorary secretary, speaking to me afterwards, as to a sympathetic colleague, said that he had always understood that if a man avowed himself an atheist it was the proper thing “to go for him”; but when I pointed out that, whatever might be thought of such a course as a general rule, it would be a little difficult to act on it in a Shelley Society, he seemed struck by my suggestion. Anyhow, we did not go for Shaw; perhaps we knew that he had studied the noble art of self-defence.
Then there was sad trouble on the Committee when Dr. Aveling applied for membership, for the majority decided to refuse it--his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s--and it was only by the determined action of the chairman, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who threatened to resign if the resolution were not cancelled, that the difficulty was surmounted. This was by no means the only occasion on which William Rossetti’s sound sense rescued the Society from an absurd and impossible position; but sane as were his judgments in all practical matters, he was himself somewhat lacking in humour, as was made evident by a certain lecture which he gave us on “Shelley and Water”; a title, by the way, which might have been applied, not inaptly, to the sentiments of several of our colleagues. There are, as all Shelley students know, some curious references, in the poems, to death by drowning; and we thought that the lecturer intended to comment on these, and on any passages which might illustrate the love which Shelley felt for sailing on river or sea; we were therefore rather taken aback when we found that the lecture, which was divided into two parts, viz. “Shelley and Salt Water” and “Shelley and Fresh Water,” consisted of little more than the quotation of a number of passages. We heard the first part (I forget whether it was the salt or the fresh), and then, at Dr. Furnivall’s suggestion, the second was withdrawn. There was comedy in this; but none the less all lovers of Shelley owe gratitude to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, for he was one of the first critics to understand the real greatness of Shelley’s genius, and to appreciate not the poetry alone, but the conceptions by which it was inspired. He likewise did good service in introducing to the public some original writers, Walt Whitman among them, whose recognition might otherwise have been delayed.