till the time of Rousseau and the revolutionary epoch that it acquired
its full significance, when the connection between simple living and a
juster social state became obvious and unmistakable, and it was seen
that luxury on the part of one man must involve drudgery on the part of
another. Thoreau’s _Walden_, published in America in 1854, was beginning
to be known in England some thirty years later; and Edward Carpenter’s
essays, afterwards collected in his _England’s Ideal_ (1887), were
pointing the way to a wiser and healthier mode of life. I read some of
those essays while still at Eton; and amid such surroundings they had a
peculiarly vivid interest, as revealing, what was there quite
overlooked, that it was possible to dispense with the greater part of
the trappings with which we were encumbered, and to live far more simply
and cheaply than was dreamed of in polite society.
The removal from a public school to a cottage among the Surrey hills was
something more than a change of residence: it was an emigration, a
romance, a strange new life in some remote antipodes, where the emblems
of the old servitude, such as cap and gown, found new and better uses,
like swords beaten into ploughshares. My gown was cut into strips for
fastening creepers to walls: my top-hat, the last time I remember seeing
it, was shading a young vegetable-marrow. Servants there were none; and
with the loss of them we learnt two things: first that servants do a
great deal more than their employers give them credit for; secondly,
that much of what they do may be lessened or rendered needless by a
little judicious forethought in the arrangement of a house.
One ungrateful office that servants perform is that of protecting their
employers from personal interviews with beggars and tramps; they act as
plenipotentiaries in the business of saying No. In country districts
this certainly saves a good deal of a householder’s time, but whether it
is altogether a benefit to him may be doubted, for tramps are sometimes
an amusing folk, and by no means devoid of humour in their mode of
levying taxes upon the well-to-do. One old mendicant, I remember, who
called at my back door to solicit a small sum for a very special
purpose, and told his tale so skilfully that from admiration, not
conviction, I relieved him, as he himself expressed it, of his immediate
difficulty. Two minutes later there was a gentle knock at my _front_
door, and behold the same old rascal commencing the same old tale! He
had made the mistake of supposing that a single cottage was two
semi-detached ones, and when the door was opened by his late benefactor,
I saw him shaken by a momentary spasm of laughter, so human as to disarm
wrath.
Then there were the “tramps” in the metaphorical sense, the friends and
bidden or unbidden guests whose visits were welcomed in that secluded
region of bare heaths and hills. Edward Carpenter, as the writer of the
books which had shown such life to be possible, was, of course, the
tutelary deity of the place: Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, was the
_advocatus diaboli_, whose professed hatred of the country gave an
additional zest to his appearances there, and culminated in a
characteristic article, “A Sunday on the Surrey Hills,” in which he
described a wet walk on Hindhead and the extremity of his sufferings
until he was restored to London by “the blessed rescuing train.”[16] But
it is dangerous to jest on such subjects; and I regret to say that a
local paper, some years afterwards, in reprinting “G.B.S.’s” jeremiad,
added some scathing editorial comments, which showed a resentment
unmitigated by time, on “a cockney gentleman possessing a very fine
liver, but no soul above his stomach.”[17] In the simplification of
household life, Shaw easily held his own; he was most conscientious and
exemplary in “washing up,” and to see the methodical precision with
which he made his bed was itself a lesson in domestic orderliness. Thus
was realized the truth of what Clough had written in his _Bothie_:
How even churning and washing, the dairy, the scullery duties,
Wait but a touch to redeem and convert them to charms and attractions;
Scrubbing requires for true grace but frank and artistical handling,
And the removal of slops to be ornamentally treated.
In dealing with tramps, however, even Shaw could be at fault. We once
had a visit from a very undesirable vagrant who held forth at great
length about a fearful wound which he bore on his person; and when his
lecture was ended, Shaw, in the approved Fabian fashion, proceeded to
ask a Question or two. But in such company to question is to suspect;
and the tramp, deeply hurt at any reflection on his veracity, at once
commenced to divest himself of his clothing, so as to offer ocular
proof. “A sight to dream of, not to tell.” We were just saved from it by
an earnest disavowal of any fragment of unbelief.
Among the most welcome of our visitors was “the Wayfarer,” Mr. W. J.
Jupp, author in after years of one of the wisest and most gracious of
books, a real spiritual autobiography, a true story of the heart.[18]
Himself a devoted nature-lover, he brought us tidings of the greatest of
poet-naturalists, Henry David Thoreau, and thus laid me under the first
of the many obligations which I owe to a friendship of old date.
But refreshing though it was thus to throw off the signs and symbols of
Respectability, it is not so easy to drop “the gentleman” as one could
wish, for the tattoo-marks of gentility are almost as ineffaceable as
those of the barbarous ritual in which the islanders of the Pacific
delight. Once a gentleman, always a gentleman: the imputation, like that
of criminality, is hard to live down. I once met the author of _Towards
Democracy_ walking and talking with a very ragged tramp whom he had
overtaken on the high road. The tramp accosted me, as if wishing to
explain matters: “This gentleman----” he began, indicating Mr.
Carpenter. “I’m _not_ a gentleman,” sharply interjected the philosopher;
whereupon the tatterdemalion, with a puzzled look, and a shake of the
head that showed entire bewilderment, forsook us and went shambling on
his way.
As an organized movement, Simplification has not been so successful as
the importance of the subject might have warranted. The Fellowship of
the New Life, a society established in 1883, had the services of many
thoughtful men, among them Mr. Maurice Adams, Mr. W. J. Jupp, Mr.
Herbert Rix, Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, and Mr. Percival Chubb; but
though its protagonist, Mr. Adams, brought to the cause an exceptional
knowledge and ability, the Fellowship, after lasting a good many years,
gradually flagged and expired. This was the more to be regretted,
because simplification of life is peculiarly liable to misunderstanding
and cheap ridicule, and therefore needed to be set permanently before
the public in a rational form; whereas now it is largely associated in
people’s minds with Pastor Wagner’s book, _The Simple Life_, and similar
banalities. For it is stupid, nothing less, to represent Simplification
as merely a personal matter, and as amounting to little more than
moderation and sincerity in the various departments of life: there is a
_social_ aspect of the question which cannot thus be ignored. As Thoreau
says: “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must
first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another
man’s shoulders.” Simplicity is not only “a state of mind”: it implies
action as well as taste.
It is not very surprising, perhaps, that this doctrine has been
ridiculed by critics, in view of the unwise manner in which some of its
adherents have preached and practised it. The attractions of Rousseau’s
“return to nature” have been too powerful for the weaker enthusiasts,
who, in their desire to be “natural,” have missed the qualities in which
true naturalness consists. I remember the case of a clever young man,
fresh from the University, who, bitten by the creed of simplicity,
rented a large tract in a sandy wilderness where crops could hardly be
made to grow, and induced an experienced labourer, of the old school, to
bring his family to reside upon this model farm in the hope of there
realizing the ideal. He would be “natural”; that was his constant cry. A
Hardy would have been needed to portray the agricultural tragedies that
ensued. In the fierce heat of a fiery summer the crops withered one by
one, until the heart of the old husbandman was sick within him with a
savage despair. I recall a Sunday stroll, with the party from the farm,
to a hill which overlooked that Sahara where their hopes were buried,
and the deep fervour of the veteran’s ejaculations as he gazed across
the desolate scene. “Well, I _am_--” was his repeated remark; and the
language was quite unfitted for the mixed company at his side.
Against fiascos of this sort stood the fact that the writings of the
true exponents of Simplicity were increasingly read and pondered. In
Thoreau’s genius there was a magnetism which could influence not only
those who knew him, but a later generation of readers, among whom a
common love for the “poet-naturalist” of Concord has often been a link
of friendship (as I have reason to remember with gratitude) between
lives that were otherwise far apart. A first reading of _Walden_ was in
my own case an epoch, a revelation; and I know that in this respect my
experience was not a singular one; nor has the impression which I then
formed of Thoreau’s greatness been in any way lessened, but on the
contrary much strengthened, by my correspondence or personal intercourse
with those who were numbered among his friends.
One of the most remarkable chapters in _Walden_ is that on “Higher
Laws,” in which the ideal of humaneness is insisted on as an essential
part of Simplification. How often, from the lack of such principle, in
the efforts to lead the simple life, has simplicity itself become little
more than sentimentality! Who but a savage, for example, would include
the keeping and killing of pigs as a feature of a model homestead? Yet
in that establishment of which I have spoken, where the avowed aim was
to be “natural,” the pig-killing was a festive event. “Father sticks
’em, brother cleans ’em,” was the description vouchsafed by a charming
young “land-girl” (to use a later-invented term), who dwelt with delight
upon these unsavoury divisions of labour in her Blithedale Romance.
Well might Tolstoy use this pig-killing process in illustration of his
argument that, in any advance toward civilization, a disuse of butchery
must be “the first step.”
Socialism was at that time in its early and romantic stage, when the
menace of the Social Democratic Federation was becoming a terror to the
well-to-do, and when many a dignitary of Church and State shared Dr.
Warre’s belief that to “blow us up” was the diabolical desire of the
incendiaries who denounced Capitalism. Doubtless it was the novelty of
the attack that made it seem so terrible; for Chartism had been largely
forgotten, and Secularism had been filling up the interval as the
national bogey. Certainly in that period of the ’eighties the leading
socialist figures seemed more ominous and sinister than do any in the
Labour movement of to-day. To William Morris, indeed, as being a poet of
wide renown, a sort of licence was accorded to speak as bluntly as he
chose; but Hyndman, Burns, Bax and H. H. Champion were names of dark
import to the “bourgeois” of that date. Mr. Hyndman’s repeated
prophecies of a Revolution were none the less disturbing because they
were always unfulfilled; Mr. Burns was dreaded as a demagogue who had
been imprisoned owing to his defiance of law and order, Mr. Champion, as
a retired army officer, who might possibly turn his military knowledge
to deadly account. To one who knew those reformers personally, and their
fearless labours in an unpopular cause, it is strange to recall the
storm of obloquy which they then had to face; to them and others of like
mettle is due in large measure such progress as has since been made in
the betterment of the conditions of Labour. Their weakness was that they
could not agree among themselves (reformers seldom can); hence the
internal ruptures that wrecked the influence of the S.D.F. Round
Champion in particular the discord raged, until he was ostracized by his
former colleagues; yet no juster word was ever said of him than a
remark made to me, years afterwards, by Mr. John Burns--that if he were
ever in a tight place at a tiger-hunt there was no one whom he would so
gladly have at his side as H. H. C.
With William Morris it was impossible, even for a “comrade,” to have any
quarrel; his utter sincerity and great-heartedness forbad it. But broad
as his geniality was, he used to seem rather nonplussed by such new
ideas as vegetarianism in conjunction with teetotalism. “I’d like to ask
you to have a drink,” he would say, after a meeting or lecture; and then
would add, as in despair: “But you _won’t_ drink.”
One of the memories of those years is the great meeting held in
February, 1888, to welcome John Burns and Cunninghame Graham on their
release from prison. Apart from my admiration for the heroes of the
evening, I had some cause to remember the occasion, because, like many
others who were present, I lost a valuable watch. This placed us in an
embarrassing position; for having assembled to protest against the
conduct of the police in the Square, we could not with dignity invoke
their aid against the pickpockets.
Quite the strangest personality among the socialists of that time was
Dr. Edward Aveling. It is easy to set him down as a scoundrel, but in
truth he was an odd mixture of fine qualities and bad; a double-dealer,
yet his duplicities were the result less of a calculated dishonesty than
of a nature in which there was an excess of the emotional and artistic
element, with an almost complete lack of the moral. The character of
Dubedat in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, _The Doctor’s Dilemma_, in some ways
recalls that of Aveling, for nearly every one who had dealings with him,
even those who were on the friendliest of terms, found themselves
victimized, sooner or later, by his fraudulence in money matters. One’s
feelings towards him might, perhaps, have been summed up in the remark
made by one of the characters in _The Doctor’s Dilemma_: “I can’t help
rather liking you, Dubedat. But you certainly are a thorough-going
specimen.”
Yet Aveling’s services to the socialist cause were perfectly sincere;
and so, too, was his love of good literature, though it sometimes
manifested itself in rather too sentimental a strain. He was a skilled
reciter of poetry, and on one occasion when, with Eleanor Marx, he
visited our Surrey cottage, he undertook to read aloud the last Act of
Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_. As he gave effect to chorus and
semi-chorus, and to the wonderful succession of spirit voices in that
greatest of lyrical dramas, he trembled and shook in his passionate
excitement, and when he had delivered himself of the solemn words of
Demogorgon with which the poem concludes, he burst into a storm of sobs
and tears. I used to regret that I had never heard his recitation, said
to be his most effective performance, of Poe’s “The Bells”; for there
was something rather uncanny and impish in his nature which doubtless
made him a good interpreter of the weird.
There was real tragedy, however, in Aveling’s alliance with Karl Marx’s
daughter; for Eleanor Marx was a splendid woman, strong both in brain
and in heart, and true as steel to the man who was greatly her inferior
in both, and who treated her at the end with a treachery and ingratitude
which led directly to her death.
As a corrective of the romantic socialism of the S.D.F. arose the
soberer doctrine of Fabianism, a name derived, we are told, from the
celebrated Fabius, who won his victories on the principle of “more
haste, less speed”; else one would have been disposed to trace it to a
derivative of the Latin _fari_, “to talk,” as seen in the word
“con_fab_ulation.” In the early and most interesting days of Fabianism,
its chief champions, known as “the four,” were Sidney Webb, Bernard
Shaw, Sydney Olivier, and Graham Wallas; and assuredly no Roman three
ever “kept the bridge so well” as the Fabian four kept the planks of
their platform in all the assaults that were made on it. Rarely have
better debates been heard than at those fortnightly meetings in Willis’s
Rooms. The trouble indeed with Fabianism was that it became almost _too_
brainy; it used to remind me of Sydney Smith’s remark about some one who
was all mind--that “his intellect was indecently exposed.” Humaneness
found little place in the Fabian philosophy. Once, when visiting a
suburban villa that had just been occupied by a refined Fabian family, I
learned that the ladies of the household, highly intellectual and
accomplished women, had themselves been staining the floors of their new
and charming residence with bullock’s blood brought in a bucket from the
shambles.
Shaw was, of course, the outstanding figure of Fabianism, as he was
bound to be of any movement in which he took permanent part; but he was
a great deal more than Fabian, he was humanitarian as well; and it gives
cause for reflection, as showing how much easier it is to change men’s
theories than their habits, that, while his influence on social and
economic thought has been very marked, his followers in the practice of
the Humanities have been few. It has been noticeable, too, how, in the
many appreciations that have been written of Shaw, his humanitarianism
has been almost entirely ignored, or passed over as an amiable
eccentricity of a man of genius. Yet it is clear that if “G.B.S.,” who,
during the past forty years, has done enough disinterested work to make
the reputation of a score of philanthropists, is “not to be taken quite
seriously,” there is no sense in taking any one seriously. A man is not
less in earnest because he has a rich gift of humour or veils his truths
in paradoxes. Shaw, in fact, is one of the most serious and painstaking
of thinkers: his frivolity is all in the manner, his seriousness in the
intent; whereas, unhappily, in most persons it is the intent that is so
deadly frivolous, and the manner that is so deadly dull.
Perhaps the dulness of our age shows itself most clearly in its humour;
the professional jester of the dinner-table or comic journal is of all
men the most saddening. It is related that when Emerson took his little
boy to see a circus clown, the child looked up with troubled eyes and
said: “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Many of us must
have felt that sensation when we have heard or read some of the
banalities that pass for humorous. It is here that “G.B.S.” stands out
in refreshing contrast; his wit is as genuine and spontaneous as that of
Sydney Smith; but whereas Sydney Smith was constrained in his old age to
calculate how many cartloads of flesh-meat he consumed in his lifetime,
Bernard Shaw has been able to tell the world that his funeral will be
followed “not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine,
flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live
fish”--representatives of grateful fellow-beings whom he has _not_
eaten.[19]
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.