Part 9
I noticed a certain resemblance in Meredith’s profile to that of Edward Carpenter (it may be seen in some of the photographs); and this was the more surprising because of the unlikeness of the two men in temperament, Meredith’s cry for “More brain, O Lord, more brain!” being in contrast with Carpenter’s rather slighting references to “the wandering lunatic Mind.” Yet Meredith, too, was an apostle of Nature; his democratic instincts are unmistakable, though the scenes of his novels are mostly laid in aristocratic surroundings, so that his “cry for simplicity” came “from the very camp of the artificial.” This was the view of his philosophy taken by me in an article on “Nature-lessons from George Meredith,” published in the _Free Review_, in reference to which Mr. Meredith wrote: “It is pleasant to be appreciated, but the chief pleasure for me is in seeing the drift of my work rightly apprehended.”
To Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller, whose name is so closely associated with Thomson’s and Traherne’s, I was indebted for much information about books and writers of books, given in that cosy shop of his in the Charing Cross Road, which was a place of pleasant recollections for so many literary men. I had especial reason to be grateful to him for directing me to the writings of Herman Melville, whose extraordinary genius, shown in such masterpieces as _Typee_ and _The Whale_, was so unaccountably ignored or undervalued that his name is still often confused with that of Whyte Melville or of Herman Merivale. Melville was a great admirer of James Thomson; this he made plain in several letters addressed to English correspondents, in which he described _The City of Dreadful Night_ as the “modern Book of Job under an original form, duskily looming with the same aboriginal verities,” and wrote of one of the lighter poems that “_Sunday up the River_, contrasting with the _City of Dreadful Night_, is like a Cuban humming-bird, beautiful in fairy tints, flying against the tropic thunderstorm.”
Mr. Dobell was a man of very active mind, and he had always in view some further literary projects. One of these, of which he told me not long before his death, was to write a book about his friend, James Thomson; and it is much to be regretted that this could not be accomplished. Another plan--surely one of the strangest ever conceived--was to render or re-write Walt Whitman’s poems in the Omar Khayyám stanza: a proposal which reminded me of the beneficent scheme of Fourier, or another of the early communists, to turn the waters of the ocean into lemonade. It is difficult to speak of _Leaves of Grass_ and the _Rubáiyát_ in the same breath; yet I once heard the Omar Khayyám poem referred to in a still stranger connection by a clergyman who was the “autocrat of the breakfast table” in a hotel where I was staying. Suddenly pausing in his table-talk, he did me the honour of consulting me on a small question of authorship. “I am right, am I not,” he said, “in supposing that the translator of Omar Khayyám was--Emerson?”
Mr. Dobell’s experiences in book-lore had been long and varied, and he could tell some excellent stories, one of which especially struck me as showing that he had a rare fund of shrewd sense as well as of professional knowledge. He once missed from his shop a very scarce and valuable book, in circumstances which made it a matter of certainty to him that it had been abstracted by a keen collector who had been talking to him that very day, though no word concerning the book had been spoken. Dobell was greatly troubled, until he hit upon a plan which was at once the simplest and most tactful that could have been imagined. Without any inquiry or explanation, he sent in a bill for the book, as in course of business, and the account was duly paid.
Through _Songs of Freedom_, an anthology edited by me in 1892, I came into correspondence with many democratic writers, several of whom, especially Mr. Gerald Massey and Mr. W. J. Linton, showed much interest in the work and gave me valuable assistance. Dr. John Kells Ingram’s famous verses, “The Men of ‘Ninety-Eight,” were included in the book; and as curiosity has sometimes been expressed as to how far the sentiments of that poem accorded with the later views of its author, it may be worth mentioning that, in giving me permission to reprint the stanzas, he wrote as follows: “You will not suppose that the effusion of the youth exactly represents the convictions of the man. But I have never been ashamed of having written the verses. They were the fruit of genuine feeling.” A request for Joaquin Miller’s spirited lines, “Sophie Perovskaya,” brought me a letter from the veteran author of that very beautiful book, _Life amongst the Modocs_ (a work of art worthy to be classed with Herman Melville’s _Typee_), which was one of the strangest pieces of penmanship I ever received, having the appearance of being written with a piece of wood rather than a pen, but more than compensating by its heartiness for the labour needed in deciphering it: “I thank you cordially; I am abashed at my audacity long ago, in publishing what I did in dear old England. I hope to do something really worth your reading before I die.” But _that_ he had done long before.
The liberality with which writers of verse allow their poems to be used in anthologies is very gratifying to an editor; the more so, as such republication is by no means always a benefit to the authors themselves. Mr. John Addington Symonds was an example of a poet who had suffered much, as he told me, from compilers of anthologies, especially in regard to some lines in his oft-quoted stanzas, “A Vista,” which in the original ran thus:
Nation with nation, land with land, Inarmed shall live as comrades free.
“Inarmed” signified linked fraternity, but the word being a strange one was changed in some collections to “_un_armed,” and in that easier form had quite escaped from Mr. Symonds’s control. This error still continues to be repeated and circulated, and has practically taken the place of the authorized text. Truth, as the saying is, may be great, but it does not always prevail.
Mr. J. A. Symonds, like his friend Mr. Roden Noel, at whose house I met him, was one of those writers who, starting from a purely literary standpoint, came over in the end towards the democratic view of life. His appreciation of Whitman is well known; and he told me that since he wrote his study of Shelley for the “English Men of Letters” series he had changed some of his views in the more advanced Shelleyan direction.
Robert Buchanan was another of Roden Noel’s friends with whom I became acquainted and had a good deal of correspondence. His later writings, owing to their democratic tendencies and extreme outspokenness, received much less public attention than the earlier ones; in _The New Rome_, in particular, there were a number of trenchant poems denouncing the savageries of an aggressive militarism, and pleading the cause of the weak and suffering folk, whether human or sub-human, against the tyrannous and strong. So marked, in his later years, became Buchanan’s humanitarian sympathies, that when his biography was written by Miss Harriett Jay, in 1903, I was asked to contribute a chapter on the subject.
An anthologist, as I have said, meets with much courtesy from poets, yet his path is not altogether a rose-strewn one. When I undertook the work, I was warned by Mr. Bernard Shaw that the only certain result would be that I should draw on myself the concentrated resentment of all the authors concerned: this forecast was far from being verified; but in one or two instances I did become aware of certain irritable symptoms on the part of poetical acquaintances whose own songs of freedom had unluckily escaped my notice. Then the over-anxiety of some authors as to which of their master-pieces should be included, and which withheld, was at times a trial to an editor. One of my contributors, who had moved in high circles, was concerned to think that certain royalties of his acquaintance might feel hurt by his arraignment of tyrants: “but if the Czar,” he wrote, “takes it home to himself, I shall be only too delighted.” Whether any protest from the Czar or other crowned heads was received by the publishers of the Canterbury Poets Series, I never heard.
But if poets are the forerunners of a future society, to “poet-naturalists” also must a like function be assigned. Of Thoreau, to whom that title was first and most fittingly given, I have already spoken; and his was the genius which, to me, next to that of Shelley, was the most astonishing of nineteenth-century portents; a scion of the future, springing up, like some alien wild-flower, unclassed and uncomprehended: like Shelley’s, too, his wisdom is still far ahead of our age, and destined to be increasingly acknowledged.
It was with this thought in mind that I wrote a biography of Thoreau, in which task I received valuable aid from his surviving friends, Mr. Harrison Blake, Mr. Daniel Ricketson, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, Dr. Edward Emerson, and others. With Mr. Sanborn, the last of the Concord group, I corresponded for nearly thirty years, and I had several long talks with him on the occasions of his visiting England: he was a man of great erudition and extraordinary memory, so that his store of information amassed in a long life was almost encyclopedic. I learnt much from him about Concord and its celebrities; and he collaborated with me in editing a collection of Thoreau’s “Poems of Nature,” which was published in 1895. Mr. Daniel Ricketson, the “Mr. D. R.” of Emerson’s edition of Thoreau’s _Letters_, was another friend to whom I was greatly indebted; his correspondence with me was printed in a memorial volume, _Daniel Ricketson and his Friends_, in 1902. By no one was I more helped and encouraged than by that most ardent of Thoreau-students, Dr. Samuel A. Jones, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who, with his fellow-enthusiast, Mr. Alfred W. Hosmer, of Concord, sent me at various times a large amount of _Thoreauana_, and enabled me to make a number of corrections and amplifications in a later edition of the _Life_. It was through our common love of Thoreau that I first became acquainted with Mr. W. Sloane Kennedy, of Belmont, Massachusetts, a true nature-lover with whom I have had much pleasant and friendly intercourse both personally and by letter.
Richard Jefferies, unlike Shelley or Thoreau, was so far a pessimist as to believe that “lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly wasted”; but while convinced that “the whole and the worst the worst pessimist could say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man,” he could yet feel the hope of future amelioration. “Full well aware that all has failed, yet side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there yet lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.” If ever there was an inspired work, a real book of prophecy, such a one is Jefferies’s _Story of my Heart_, in which, with his gaze fixed on a future society, where the term _pauper_ (“inexpressibly wicked word”) shall be unknown, he speaks in scathing condemnation of the present lack of just and equitable distribution, which keeps the bulk of the human race still labouring for bare sustenance and shelter.
In a study of Jefferies’s life and ideals, published in 1894, I drew attention to the marked change that came over his views, during his later years, on social and religious questions, a ripening of thought, accompanied by a corresponding growth of literary style, which can be measured by the great superiority of _The Story_ over such books as _The Gamekeeper at Home_; and in connection with this subject I pointed out that the incident recorded by Sir Walter Besant in his _Eulogy of Richard Jefferies_ of a death-bed return to the Christian faith, at a time when Jefferies was physically and intellectually a wreck, could not be accepted as in any way reversing the authoritative statement of his religious convictions which he had himself published in his _Story_. For this I was taken to task in several papers as having perverted biography in the interest of my own prejudiced opinions; but under this censure, not to mention that my views were shared by those friends and students of Jefferies with whom I was brought in touch, I had one unsuspected source of consolation in the fact that Sir Walter Besant told me in private correspondence that, from what he had learnt since the publication of his _Eulogy_, he was convinced that I was quite right. I did not make this public until many years later, when a new edition of my book appeared: there was then some further outcry in a section of the press; but this was not repeated when Mr. Edward Thomas, in the latest and fullest biography of Jefferies, dismissed the supposed conversion as a wrong interpretation by “narrow sectarians” who ignored the work of Jefferies’s maturity.
I have thought it worth while to refer to these facts, not that they are themselves important, but as illustrating a Christianizing process which is often carried on with boundless effrontery by “religious” writers after the death of free-thinkers. Another instance may be seen in the case of Francis W. Newman, where a similar attempt was made to represent him as having abandoned his own deliberate convictions.
From Jefferies one’s thoughts pass naturally to Mr. W. H. Hudson. It must be over twenty-five years since through the hospitality of Mrs. E. Phillips, of Croydon, an ardent bird-lover and humanitarian, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr. Hudson and to his books. A philosopher and keen observer of all forms of life, he is far from being an ornithologist only; but there are certain sympathies that give rise to a sort of natural freemasonry among those who feel them; and of these one of the pleasantest and most human is the love of birds--not of cooked birds, if you please, associated with dining-room memories of “the pleasures of the table,” nor of caged birds in drawing-rooms, nor of stuffed birds in museums; but of real birds, live birds, wild birds, free to exercise their marvellous faculties of flight and song. From this love has sprung a corresponding bird-literature; and of the notable names among the prophets and interpreters of bird life, the latest, and in my opinion the greatest, is that of Mr. Hudson: his books, in not a few chapters and passages, rise above the level of mere natural history, and affect the imagination of the reader as only great literature can. If he is an unequal writer and somewhat desultory, perhaps, in his manner of work, yet at his best he is the greatest living master of English prose. Such books as _The Naturalist in La Plata_ and _Nature in Downland_ (to name two only) are classics that can never be forgotten. And Mr. Hudson’s influence, it should be noted, has been thrown more and more on the side of that humane study of natural history which Thoreau adopted: his verdict is given in no uncertain language against the barbarous habits of game-keeper and bird-catcher, fashionable milliner, and amateur collector of “specimens.”
If a single title were to be sought for Mr. Hudson’s writings, the name of one of his earlier books, _Birds and Man_, might be the most appropriate; for there seems almost to be a mingling of the avian with the human in his nature: I have sometimes fancied that he must be a descendant of Picus, or of some other prehistoric hero who was changed into a bird. There is a passage in Virgil’s _Æneid_ where Diomede is represented as lamenting, as a “fearful prodigy,” such metamorphosis of his companions.
Lost friends, to birds transfigured, skyward soar, Or fill the rocky wold with wailing cries.
But if such a vicissitude were to befall any of Mr. Hudson’s friends, I feel sure that, far from being dismayed by it, he would be able to continue his acquaintance with them on terms of entire understanding: they would in no sense be “lost” because they were feathered. To him a much more fearful prodigy is the savage fashion of wearing the skins and feathers of slaughtered birds as ornamental head-gear.
One of the most devoted followers of this new school of natural history, and himself a naturalist of distinction, was Dr. Alexander H. Japp, who, under the pen-name of “H. A. Page,” wrote the first account of Thoreau published in this country. I have a recollection of many pleasant chats with him, especially of a visit which he paid me with Mr. Walton Ricketson, the sculptor, a son of that intimate friend of Thoreau’s of whom I have spoken. Walton Ricketson was a boy at the time when Thoreau used to visit his father at New Bedford; but he was present on the occasion when the grave hermit of Walden surprised the company by a sudden hilarious impulse, which prompted him to sing “Tom Bowling” and to perform an improvised dance, in which, it is said, he kept time to the music but executed some steps more like those of the Indians than the usual ballroom figures.
Dr. Japp was also a biographer of De Quincey, and by his sympathetic understanding did much to correct the disparaging judgments passed on “the English opium-eater” by many critics and press-writers. As a result of a study of De Quincey which I published in 1904, I made the acquaintance, three years later, of Miss Emily de Quincey (she spelt her name in that manner), his last surviving daughter. She was a most charming old lady, full of vivacity and humour; and her letters, of which I received a good many, were written with a sprightliness recalling that of her father in his lighter moods; some of her reminiscences, too, were very interesting. She remembered the opium decanter and glass standing on the mantelpiece when she was a child, but she said that De Quincey quite left off the use of the drug for years before his death. She told me that the grudge against her father, which frequently found expression in “grotesque descriptions” of him, was caused in part by his neglect to answer the letters, many of a very flattering kind, addressed to him by readers of his books; a remissness which was due, not to any lack of courtesy or gratitude, but to his inveterate procrastination; he would always be going to write “to-morrow” or “when he had a good pen.” On one occasion an admirer wrote to him from Australia, begging him for “some truths” that he might give to his little son (who had been named after De Quincey) when he should be able to understand them. De Quincey said sadly to his daughter: “My dear, truths are very low with me just now. Do you think, if I sent a couple of lies, they would answer the purpose?” She feared that he never sent either truths or lies. Among the unanswered letters which her father received she recollected that there was one from “three brothers,” accompanied by a volume of poems by “Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.” It was by the poetry of Ellis that the De Quinceys were most struck, but not till years afterwards did they guess that those “brothers” were the Brontë sisters in disguise.
Were it not a common practice of reviewers, in estimating the work of a great writer, to omit, as far as possible, any mention of humane sympathies shown by him, it would be strange that De Quincey should be represented as a mere “dreamer” and visionary; for in truth, in spite of the transcendental Toryism of his politics, he was in several respects a pioneer of advanced humanitarian thought, especially in the question of corporal punishment, on which he spoke, a hundred years ago, with a dignity and foresight which might put to shame many purblind “progressives” of to-day. His profound regard for a suffering humanity is one of the noblest features in his writings; he rejoiced, for instance, at the interference of Parliament to amend the “ruinous social evil” of female labour in mines; and he spoke of the cruelty of that spirit which could look “lightly and indulgently on the affecting spectacle of female prostitution.” “All I have ever had enjoyment of in life,” he said, “seems to rise up to reproach me for my happiness, when I see such misery, and think there is so much of it in the world.” It is amusing to read animadversions on De Quincey’s “lack of moral fibre,” written by critics who lag more than a century behind him in some of the matters that afford an unequivocal test of man’s advance from barbarism to civilization.
IX
A LEAGUE OF HUMANENESS
Hommes, soyez humains. C’est votre premier devoir. Quelle sagesse y a-t-il pour vous, hors de l’humanité.--ROUSSEAU.
From the vaticinations of poets and prophets I now return to the actualities of the present state. Thirty years ago there were already in existence a number of societies which aimed at the humanizing of public opinion, in regard not to war only but to various other savage and uncivilized practices. The Vegetarian Society, founded in 1847, advocated a radical amendment; and the cause of zoophily, represented by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had been strengthened by the establishment of several Anti-Vivisection Societies. In like manner the philanthropic tendencies of the time, with respect to prison management and the punishment or reclamation of offenders, were reflected in the work of the Howard Association.
The purpose of the Humanitarian League, which was formed in 1891, was to proclaim a _general_ principle of humaneness, as underlying the various disconnected efforts, and to show that though the several societies were necessarily working on separate lines, they were nevertheless inspired and united by a single bond of fellowship. The promoters of the League saw clearly that barbarous practices can be philosophically condemned on no other ground than that of the broad democratic sentiment of universal sympathy. Humanity and science between them have exploded the time-honoured idea of a hard-and-fast line between white man and black man, rich man and poor man, educated man and uneducated man, good man and bad man: equally impossible to maintain, in the light of newer knowledge, is the idea that there is any difference in kind, and not in degree only, between human and non-human intelligence. The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone.
We were well aware that a movement of this character would meet with no popular support; on the contrary, that those who took part in it would be regarded as “faddists” and “visionaries”; but we knew also that the direct opposite of this was the truth, and that while we were supposed to be merely building “castles in the air,” we were in fact following Thoreau’s most practical advice, and _putting the foundations under them_. For what is “the basis of morality,” as laid down by so great a thinker as Schopenhauer, except this very doctrine of a comprehensive and reasoned sympathy?