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.
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.