Part 8
But the outstanding figure of the Shelley Society was that of its founder, Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the veteran scholar and sculler, a grand old man whose unflagging ardour in his favourite pursuits might have shamed many enthusiasts who were his juniors by half a century. A born fighter, the vehemence of his disputes with certain men of letters (Swinburne, for example), was notorious; but personally he was kindness itself, and I have most pleasant recollections of the many visits which I paid him in his house near Primrose Hill, where, sitting in a big arm-chair, he would talk eagerly, as he took tea, over the men he had known or the Societies he had founded. His tea-tray used to be placed on a sort of small bridge which rested on the arms of the chair, and in his excitement over a thrilling anecdote, I have seen him forget that he was thus restricted, and springing forward send tray and tea flying together across the room. He once told me that, for hygienic reasons, he had been a vegetarian for twenty years, and had done the hardest work of his life without flesh-food: then, happening to be confined to the house with sprained ankles, he got out of health by neglecting to reduce his daily diet. Just at that moment a friend sent him a turkey, and he said to himself: “Now, why should this fine bird be wasted, owing to a mere whim of mine?” Thus had he relapsed into cannibalism as lightly as he relinquished it.
There was an innocence and _naïveté_ about Furnivall which at times was almost boyish; his impetuosity and total lack of discretion made him insensible to other persons’ feelings, so that he gave direful offence, and trod on the toes of many good people, without being in the least conscious of it. He ruined the Browning Society, of which he was both founder and _con_founder, by an ill-advised speech about Jesus Christ, in a discussion on “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”; and in like manner, though with less serious results, he startled his Shelleyan friends, when Prometheus was the subject of debate, by asking in tones of impatience: “_Why_ did the fellow allow himself to be chained to the rock? _Why_ didn’t he show fight, as I should have done?” And certainly, when one thinks of it, there would have been trouble in the Caucasus, if Dr. Furnivall had been bidden to play the martyr’s part.
Knowing of my connection with Eton, Dr. Furnivall once came to me, in high spirits, with the news that in some researches at the British Museum he had by chance unearthed the fact that Nicholas Udall, a headmaster of Eton in the sixteenth century, and one of the recognized “worthies” of the school, had been convicted of a criminal offence--its nature I must leave my readers to surmise. I had heard this before, but I could not spoil the old man’s glee by saying so; I therefore congratulated him warmly, and asked him, in jest, whether he would not write to Dr. Warre and tell him of so interesting a discovery. “I _have_ written to him,” he cried; and then, with a shade of real surprise and disappointment on his face: “But he’s not answered me!”
During the latter part of the Shelley Society’s career, when its fortunes were dimmed, and many of its fashionable members had dropped off, we still continued to hold our monthly meetings at University College, Gower Street, and very quaint little gatherings some of them were. The audience at times numbered no more than five or six, and the “proceedings” might have altogether failed had it not been for two or three devoted enthusiasts who never slackened in their attendance. One of these was Mrs. Simpson, an old lady who became to the Shelley Society what Miss Flite was to the Court of Chancery in _Bleak House_, an ever-present spectator and ally. We all liked and respected her--she was humanitarian as well as Shelleyan--but we were a little embarrassed when her filial piety prompted her to give us copies of her father’s writings, a bulky volume entitled _The Works of Henry Heavisides_. It was a sobering experience to become possessed of that book, the title of which conveyed a true indication of the contents.
The Shelley Centenary (August 4, 1892) marked the climax of the cult which had had so great a vogue in the previous decade. The local meeting held at Horsham in the afternoon, when Sussex squires and literary gentlemen from London united in an attempt to whitewash Shelley’s character--those “shining garments” of his, “so little specked with mire,” as one speaker expressed it--was a very hollow affair which contrasted sharply with the London celebration held in the evening at the Hall of Science, when Mr. G. W. Foote presided, and Mr. Bernard Shaw convulsed the audience by his description of the Horsham apologetics. An account of both these meetings was written by “G.B.S.” in his best vein, and printed in the _Albemarle Review_: it was in this article that he made the suggestion that Shelley should be represented, at Horsham, on a bas-relief, “in a tall hat, Bible in hand, leading his children on Sunday morning to the church of his native parish.”
That piece of sculpture has never been executed; but it would hardly have been more inappropriate than the two chief monuments that have been erected, the one in Christchurch Priory, Hants, the other at University College, Oxford; for what could be less in keeping with the impression left by Shelley’s ethereal genius than to figure him, as is done in both these works, as a dead body, stretched limp and pitiful like some suicide’s corpse at the Morgue? Let us rid our thoughts of all such ghastly and funereal notions of Shelley, and think of him as what he is, the poet not of death but of life,[22] that nobler life to which mankind shall yet attain, when they have learnt, in his own words:
To live as if to love and live were one.
The most human portrait of Shelley, to my thinking, is the one painted by a young American artist, William West, who met him at Byron’s villa near Leghorn, in 1822, and being greatly struck by his personality, made a rough sketch which he afterwards finished and took back to America. There it was preserved after West’s death, and reproduced for the first time in the _Century Magazine_ in October, 1905, with an explanatory article by its present owner, Mrs. John Dunn. By the courtesy of Mrs. Dunn, I was able to use this portrait as a frontispiece to a revised edition of my study of Shelley, published in 1913. Mr. Buxton Forman told me that he did not believe in the genuineness of the picture; but readers of _Letters about Shelley_ (1917) will see that Dr. Richard Garnett held a contrary opinion, and so, as I know, did Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Some account of West’s meeting with Shelley, and of his recollections of Byron, may be found in Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s _Book of the Artists_. His portrait of Byron is well known; and there seems to be no inherent improbability in the account given of the origin and preservation of the other picture, which certainly impresses one as being more in agreement with the verbal descriptions of Shelley in his later years than the almost boyish countenance so familiar in engravings.
Shelley is the greatest of the poet-pioneers of civilization, and his influence is still very far from having reached its zenith: he is “the poet of the young” in the sense that future generations will be better and better able to understand him.
Thy wisdom lacks not years, thy wisdom grows With _our_ growth and the growth of time unborn.[23]
VIII
VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS
I suffer mute and lonely, yet another Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother Travels the same wild paths though out of sight. JAMES THOMSON (B.V.).
Poets, as Shelley said, are “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” The surest solace for the conditions in which men’s lives are still lived is to be found in the utterances of those impassioned writers, poets or poet-naturalists as we may call them, who are the harbingers of a higher social state, and, as such, have power to cheer their fellow-beings with the charm of their speech, though it is only by the few that the full purport of their message can be understood. It is of some of these lights in the darkness, these voices crying in the wilderness, that I would now speak.
There would seem, at first sight, to be a great gulf fixed between Shelley and James Thomson, between optimist and pessimist, between the poet of _Prometheus Unbound_ whose faith in the future was immutable, and him of _The City of Dreadful Night_, who so despaired of progress as to hold that before we can reform the present we must reform the past. Yet it was on Thomson’s shoulders that the mantle of Shelley descended, in so far as they were the singers of free-thought; and he was one of the earliest of all writers of distinction to apprehend the greatness of that “poet of poets and purest of men” to whom his own _Vane’s Story_ was dedicated. Though we do not assent to the pessimistic contention that we are the product of a past which has foredoomed human effort to failure, we may still profit by the _mood_ of pessimism, the genuine vein of sadness that is found in all literatures and felt at times by all thoughtful men; for in its due place and proportion it is as real as the contrary mood of joy. Why, then, should the darker mood be sedulously discountenanced, as if it came from the source of all evil? It stands for something; it is part of us, and it is not to be arbitrarily set aside.
So wonderful a poem as _The City of Dreadful Night_ needs no apology; its justification is in its own grandeur and strength: nor ought such literature to be depressing in its effect on the reader’s mind, but rather (in its right sphere and relation) a means of enlightenment and help. For whatever the subject and moral of a poem may be, there is nothing saddening in Art, provided the form and treatment be adequate; we are not discouraged but cheered by any revelation of feeling that is sincerely and nobly expressed. I hold Thomson, therefore, pessimist though he was, to have been, by virtue of his indomitable courage and love of truth, one of the inspired voices of democracy.
Over thirty years ago I was requested by Mr. Bertram Dobell, Thomson’s friend and literary executor, to write a Life of the poet; and in the preparation of that work, which involved a good deal of search for scattered letters and other biographical material, I was brought into touch not only with many personal friends of Thomson, such as Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, Mr. G. W. Foote, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Wright, Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner, Mr. J. W. Barrs, Mr. Charles Watts, and Mr. Percy Holyoake, but also with some well-known writers, among them Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr. William Sharp. I was impressed by the warm regard in which Thomson’s memory was held by those who had known him, the single exception being a sour old landlady in a gloomy London street, of whose remarks I took note as an instance of the strangely vague views held in some quarters as to the function of a biographer. She could give me no information about her impecunious lodger, except that he had “passed away”; but she added that if I wished to write the Life of a good man, a real Christian, and a total abstainer--here she looked at me dubiously, as if questioning my ability to carry out her suggestion--there was her dear departed husband!
In another case an old friend of Thomson’s, who told me many interesting facts about his early life, detained me just as I was taking my departure, and said in a meditative way, as if anxious to recall even the veriest trifle: “I think I remember that Jimmy once wrote a poem on some subject or other.” What he imagined to be my object in writing a Life of an obscure Army schoolmaster, except that he _had_ written a poem, I did not discover; perhaps the idea was that the biographer goes about, like the lion, seeking whom he may devour.
In literary circles there has always been a strong prejudice against “B.V.,” owing, of course, to his atheistical views and the general lack of “respectability” in his life and surroundings. I was told by Mr. William Sharp that, just after the _Life of James Thomson_ was published, he happened to be travelling to Scotland in company with Mr. Andrew Lang, and having with him a copy of the book, which he was reviewing for the _Academy_, he tried to engage his companion in talk about Thomson, but was met by a marked disinclination to discuss a subject so uncongenial. I was not surprised at hearing this; but I had been puzzled by a refusal which I received from Mr. Swinburne to allow me to publish a letter which he had addressed to Mr. W. M. Rossetti some years before, in high praise of Thomson’s narrative poem “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain,” which he had described as possessing “forthright triumphant power.” That letter, so Mr. Swinburne wrote to me, had been inspired by “a somewhat extravagant and uncritical enthusiasm,” and he now spoke in rather severe reprobation of Thomson, as one who might have left behind him “a respectable and memorable name.” The word “respectable,” coming from the author of _Poems and Ballads_, deserves to be noted.
About two years later, in 1890, the immediate cause of this change of opinion on Mr. Swinburne’s part was explained to me by no less an authority than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who had invited me to pay him a visit in order to have a talk about Thoreau. During a stroll on Putney Heath, shared by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Watts-Dunton told me the story of James Thomson’s overthrow; and as the similar downfall of Whitman, and of some of Swinburne’s other early favourites, was probably brought about in the same manner, the process is worth relating. Mr. Swinburne, as I have said, had written in rapturous praise of one of “B.V.’s” poems. One day Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him: “I wish you would re-read that poem of Thomson’s, as I cannot see that it possesses any great merit.” A few days later Swinburne came to him and said: “You are quite right. I have re-read ‘Weddah and Om-el-Bonain,’ and I find that it has very little value.” Watts-Dunton’s influence over his friend was so complete that there are in fact _two_ Swinburnes: the earlier, democratic poet of the _Songs before Sunrise_, who had not yet been rescued by Mr. Watts-Dunton; and the later, respectable Swinburne, whose bent was for the most part reactionary. A “lost leader” indeed! Contrary to the proverb, the appeal, in this case, must be from Philip sober to Philip drunk.
At the luncheon which followed our walk, Mr. Swinburne was present, and one could not help observing that in personal matters, as in his literary views, he seemed to be almost dependent on Mr. Watts-Dunton: he ran to him with a new book like a poetic child with a plaything. His amiability of manner and courtesy were charming; but his delicate face, quaint chanting voice, and restlessly twitching fingers, gave an impression of weakness. He talked, I remember, of Meredith’s _Sandra Belloni_ and _Diana of the Crossways_, and complained of their obscurity (“Can you construe them?”); then of his reminiscences of Eton, with friendly inquiries about my father-in-law, the Rev. J. L. Joynes, who had been his tutor and house-master; also about one of the French teachers, Mr. Henry Tarver, with whom he had been on very intimate terms. Here a few words on the poet’s adventures at Eton may not be out of place.[24]
It is stated in Gosse’s Life of Swinburne that there is no truth in the legend that he was bullied at Eton; it is, however, a fact that his Eton career was not altogether an untroubled one. Mr. Joynes used to tell how Swinburne once came to him before school and begged to be allowed to “stay out,” because he was afraid to face some bigger boys who were temporarily attached to his Division--“those dreadful boys,” he called them. “Oh, sir, they wear tail coats! Sir, they are men!” The request was not granted; but his tutor soothed the boy by reading a Psalm with him, and thus fortified he underwent the ordeal.
One very characteristic anecdote has unfortunately been told incorrectly. Lady Jane Swinburne had come to Eton to see her son, who was ill, and she read Shakespeare to him as he lay in bed. When she left him for a time, a maid, whom she had brought with her, was requested to continue the reading, and she did so, with the result that a glass of water which stood on a table by the bedside was presently dashed over her by the invalid. In the version quoted by his biographer the glass of water has become “a pot of jam”--quite wrongly, as I can testify, for I heard Mr. Joynes tell the story more than once.
Swinburne was not allowed to read Byron or Shelley while he was at Eton. In Mr. Joynes’s house there was a set of volumes of the old English dramatists, and the young student urgently begged to be permitted to read these. “Might he read Ford?” To settle so difficult a question recourse was had to the advice of Mr. W. G. Cookesley, a master who was reputed “to know about everything”; and Mr. Cookesley’s judgment was that the boy might read all Ford’s plays except one--the one, of course, which has a title calculated to alarm. But this, it transpired, was one that he had specially wished to read!
Mr. Watts-Dunton has been well described by Mr. Coulson Kernahan as “a hero of friendship”; and his personal friendliness was shown not to distinguished writers only, but to any one whom he could encourage or help, nor did he take the least offence, however bluntly his own criticisms were criticized. In reviewing _The City of Dreadful Night_, on its first appearance in book form (1880), he had said that Thomson wrote in his pessimistic style “because now it is the fashion to be dreadful,” a denial of the sincerity of the poet to which I referred in my _Life of James Thomson_ as one of the strangest of misapprehensions. When I met Mr. Watts-Dunton, he alluded to this and other matters concerning Thomson so genially as to make me wonder how he could at times have written in so unsympathetic and unworthy a manner of authors whom he disliked. Admirers of Walt Whitman, in particular, had reason to resent the really disgusting things that were said of him; as when he was likened to a savage befouling the door-step of the civilized man. That Whitman himself must have been indignant at the jibes levelled at him from Putney Heath can hardly be doubted: I was told by a friend of his that he had been heard to speak of Swinburne--the _second_ Swinburne--as “a damned simulacrum.”
Very different from Swinburne’s ungenerous attitude to Thomson was that of George Meredith, as may be seen from several of his letters to me, published in the _Life of James Thomson_, and reprinted in _Letters of George Meredith_. A proposal was made that Mr. Meredith should himself write an appreciation of “B.V.”; this he could not do, but he gave me permission to make use of any opinions he had expressed by letter to me or in conversation; I visited him at Box Hill in 1891, and he talked at great length on that and other subjects. Of Thomson he spoke with feelings akin to affection, exclaiming more than once: “Poor dear fellow! I bitterly reproach myself that I did not help him more, by getting him work on the _Athenæum_.” But he doubted if he could at that date have been reclaimed: earlier in life he might have been saved, he thought, by the companionship of a woman who would have given him sympathy and aid; praise, too, which had been the ruin of many writers (he instanced George Eliot and Dickens, with some trenchant remarks about both) would have been good for “B.V.,” who was so brave and honest. He himself, he said, had often felt what it was to lack all recognition, and sometimes, when he had looked up from his writing and seen a distant field in sunlight, he had thought, “it must be well to be in the warmth.” What above all he admired in Thomson was his resolute clear courage. There had been no mention of pessimism in their talk, except that when he had been speaking of the brightest and the darkest moods of Nature, Thomson answered: “I see no brightest.”
Meredith was evidently repelled by this gospel of despair; he said that the writing of _The City of Dreadful Night_ had done its author no good, inasmuch as he there embodied his gloomier images in a permanent form which in turn reacted on him and made him more despondent. He considered “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain” to be Thomson’s masterpiece, and the finest narrative poem we have: “Where can you find its equal?” I told him of Swinburne’s change of opinion about it, and he said instantly: “You know whose doing _that_ is.” A playful account followed of the way in which his own poems used to be reviewed by Watts-Dunton in the _Athenæum_. “We always receive anything of Mr. Meredith’s with respect.” “You know,” said Meredith, “what that sort of beginning means.” Of late he had ceased to send out review copies of his poems, being sickened by the ineptitude of critics. “There are a good many curates about the country,” he added, “and the fact that many of them do a little reviewing in their spare hours does not tend to elevate literature.”
Of social problems he spoke with freedom; most strongly of the certain change that is coming, when women get their economic independence. Infinite mischief comes to the race from loveless marriages. But he anticipated it would take six or more generations for women to rid themselves of the intellectual follies they now inherit from their grandmothers.
At dinner Mr. Meredith talked of his distaste for flesh food, and his esteem for simplicity in all forms, and stated emphatically that it was quite a mistake to suppose that his own experiments in vegetarianism had injured his health. Yet, if he were to try that diet again, he knew how his friends would explain to him that it is “impossible to live without meat,” or (this in dramatically sarcastic tones) that “if it be possible for _some_ persons, it is not possible for _me_.”[25] I was struck by his great kindliness as host; he was in fact over-solicitous for the welfare of vegetarian guests.
The formality and punctiliousness of Mr. Meredith’s manner, with his somewhat ceremonious gestures and pronunciation, perhaps affected a visitor rather unfavourably at first introduction; but after a few minutes this impression wore off, and one felt only the vivacity and charm of his conversation. It was a continuous flow of epigrams, as incisive in many cases as those in his books; during which I noticed the intense sensitiveness and expressiveness of his mouth, the lips curling with irony, as he flung out his sarcasms about critics, and curates, and sentimentalists of every order. His eyes were remarkably keen and penetrating, and he watched narrowly the effect of his points; so that even to keep up with him as a listener was a considerable mental strain. It was in consequence of my mentioning this to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few days later, that he made his sporting offer that, if he were taken down to Box Hill, he “would start talking the moment he entered the house, and not let Meredith get a word in edgeways.” In Mr. S. M. Ellis’s biography of Meredith, Shaw is quoted as saying that the proposal emanated from Mr. Clement Shorter or myself: this, however, is quite incorrect, for the suggestion was his own, and much too reckless to have had any other source. Such an encounter, had it taken place, would not have been, as Shaw flattered himself, a monologue, but a combat so colossal that one shrinks from speculating on the result: all that seems certain is that it would have lasted till the talk-out blow was given, and that upon the tomb of one or other of the colloquists a _hic tacet_ would have had to be inscribed.