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.
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.