MY DAYS AND DREAMS
[Illustration:
E. C. (1857), AGE THIRTEEN.
]
MY DAYS AND DREAMS
BEING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
BY
EDWARD CARPENTER
_Author of “Towards Democracy” “Civilization: its Cause and Cure,” &c._
WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET W.C.
_First published June 1916_
_Second Edition October 1916_
(_All rights reserved_)
PREFACE
Old St. Pancras Churchyard even now, though dominated by the huge
gasometers of Wharf Road and backed against the roaring traffic of the
Midland Railway, preserves something of the sylvan beauty which a
hundred years ago made it the frequent trysting-place of Percy Shelley
and Mary Godwin. As it happened, in the summer of 1890, when staying in
London, I used to make the garden my resort for writing purposes; and
one day in July of that year I started some autobiographical notes. In a
very casual way, and with long intervals between, the notes have been
continued down to the present time. The volume therefore to which this
is the Preface has been composed in somewhat disjointed fashion; and the
discerning reader will probably perceive slight differences of style and
outlook in its different portions, and perhaps also experience some
uncertainty as to the proper chronology of the events which it records.
In order to mitigate the latter trouble I have from time to time
inserted in square brackets the date of the year in which the
corresponding portion was written.
[Illustration: Edward Carpenter signature]
_May 1916_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE 7
I. BRIGHTON 13
II. MY PARENTS 36
III. CAMBRIDGE 45
IV. UNIVERSITY EXTENSION AND NORTHERN TOWNS 79
V. BRADWAY AND “TOWARDS DEMOCRACY” 99
VI. MANUAL WORK AND MARKET-GARDENING 109
VII. SHEFFIELD AND SOCIALISM 124
VIII. TRADE AND PHILOSOPHY 137
IX. MILLTHORPE AND HOUSEHOLD LIFE 147
X. MILLTHORPIANA 167
XI. THE STORY OF MY BOOKS 190
XII. PERSONALITIES—I. 210
XIII. PERSONALITIES—II. 234
XIV. LONDON AND LECTURES 254
XV. TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSLATORS 269
XVI. RURAL CONDITIONS 282
XVII. HOW THE WORLD LOOKS AT SEVENTY 301
APPENDIX I. CONGRATULATORY LETTER AND REPLY 318
APPENDIX II. BIBLIOGRAPHY 323
INDEX 333
ILLUSTRATIONS
E. C. (1857), AGE THIRTEEN _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
MY FATHER, CHARLES CARPENTER 36
MY MOTHER, SOPHIA WILSON CARPENTER 44
MY SISTER LIZZIE 71
SELF, IN ABOUT 1875 79
ALBERT FEARNEHOUGH AND “BRUNO” 103
E. C. (1887), AGE FORTY-THREE 109
G. E. H.—ONE OF THE FIRST “SHEFFIELD SOCIALISTS” 131
THE HUT AND THE BROOK 146
GEORGE MERRILL 161
MILLTHORPE COTTAGE AND ORCHARD 168
G. M. FEEDING THE FOWLS 176
SELF IN PORCH (1905). (_Photogravure_) 208
CARTOON, “SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE” 257
LILLY NADLER-NUELLENS WITH HER DAUGHTER 272
MARCELLE SENARD 280
E. C. (1910), AGE SIXTY-SIX 304
MY DAYS AND DREAMS
I
BRIGHTON
My life hitherto [7th July 1890] divides into four pretty distinct
periods—first, my early life up to the age of twenty, during which time
I lived mainly at Brighton, embedded in a would-be fashionable world
which I hated; secondly, the period from ’64 to about ’74, during which
time I was mostly at Cambridge, in a more or less intellectual
atmosphere; thirdly, from ’74 to ’81, when I carried on the Extension
lectures and made acquaintance with the manufacturing centres and
commercial society of the North of England; and fourthly, for the ten
years from ’80 and ’81 down to the present time, when I have lived
almost entirely among the working masses, and been largely engaged in
manual labour.
It may seem ungrateful to say so, but my abiding recollection of early
days is one of discomfort. Not but that I had on the whole good times at
school, in the classes and in the games; not but that at home I was
lapped in the ease and attentive service of a well-to-do household, and
had a hundred advantages denied to an ordinary child of the people; but
that after all at home I never felt really at home. Perhaps I was unduly
sensitive; anyhow I felt myself an alien, an outcast, a failure, and an
object of ridicule.
The social life which encircled us at Brighton was artificial enough;
but it was the standard which we children had to live to. My parents
were the best people in the world, but they could not fly out of the
conditions in which they belonged. I hated the life, was miserable in
it—the heartless conventionalities, silly proprieties—but I never
imagined, it never occurred to me, that there _was_ any other life. To
be pursued by the dread of appearances—what people would say about one’s
clothes or one’s speech—to be always in fear of committing unconscious
trespasses of invisible rules—this seemed in my childhood the normal
condition of existence; so much so that I never dreamed of escaping from
it. I only prayed for a time when grace might be given me to pass by
without reproach. I was never a daring or rumbustious child. Timid and
sensitive, my spirit was sadly lacking in the inestimable virtue of
revolt. I suffered and was stupid enough to think myself in the wrong.
There was a curate at one of the churches to which we used to go—a
smooth-haired, carefully shaven, meek young man, probably of feeble
mind; but all I knew was that people praised him: such a good-looking,
well-mannered fellow he was, and preached such nice sermons! “Happy Mr.
Cass,” I used to think, for even now I remember his name—“Oh, happy Mr.
Cass, if only I could be like _you_ when I grow up.” I was then about
fourteen, and I fancy that the mere sight of Cass in his spotless
surplice must have worked upon me, for it was about that time or a
little later that I began to make up my mind to take Orders. No doubt
from the first there was a fatal bias towards religion. I remember
distinctly—and it must have been about the same period—thinking as I lay
awake in bed at night that if the house were on fire I would save my
_prayer-book_! I saw myself in my mind’s eye in heroic attitude rushing
into my mother’s room where the sacred volume lay, and bearing it out
through flames and smoke into the street. It was not my mother or
sisters that I was going to save ... but my prayer-book! Alas! what a
defect of nature, or of teaching, must have been there!
Curious, the covered underground life that some children lead! I never
remember, all those years at Brighton, till I was nineteen or twenty, a
single person older than myself who was my confidant. I do not remember
a single occasion on which in any trouble or perplexity I was able to go
to any one for help or consolation. My mother, firm, just, and
courageous as she was, and setting her children an heroic example,
belonged to the old school, which thought any manifestation of feeling
unbecoming. We early learned to suppress and control emotion, and to
fight our own battles alone: in some ways a good training, but liable in
the long run to starve the emotional nature. Masters at school in those
days did not “draw boys out”; education was mainly a nipping of buds;
older friends outside the family, who may so often play a useful part in
the development of boy or girl life, never came—that I remember—to the
rescue; and so my abiding recollection of all that time is one of silent
concealment and loneliness.
Nevertheless of course there were joys. Though a town-house is not a
congenial nursery for a child, yet we were comparatively fortunate.
There was a large space at the back, where we kept, in succession,
endless pets—pigeons, seagulls with clipped wings, rabbits, tortoises,
guinea-pigs, and smaller fry (I was especially fond of an aquarium);
while in front was the large garden of Brunswick Square, overrun,
despite the efforts of the gardener and other authorities, by all the
children of the surrounding houses. A fearfully active family, boys and
girls, we kept a sort of proud superiority over the other children in
running races, prisoners’ base, etc.; while inside the house, and for
wet weather, we had a sport entirely our own, and which consisted in one
pursuing the others up the front stairs and down the back stairs, or
_vice versa_, with endless shrieks and uproar—a terrible affair, which
nothing but the noblest self-sacrifice could have ever nerved our
parents to endure! Also there was hide-and-seek in the dark, a grisly
game, dangerous both to limbs and to furniture; and occasionally a
battle of the giants—as when, on one occasion, an elder sister having
with the greatest care built up a beautiful dummy man round a long
smooth pole, my eldest brother came on the sly and drew the backbone
out! Then there was earth-shaking conflict, which I, quite a small boy,
witnessed from a distance, and with quaking limbs.
As to school life, I suppose it is a general experience that what one
learns at school does not count for much. At the age of ten I began at
the Brighton College. My eldest sister had taught me a little Latin
grammar before that. My eldest brother Charlie was already at the
College. He was a kind of hero there. At that time (or possibly a year
or two later) he was easily first in _everything_. In mathematics,
classics, foreign languages, in cricket, football, athletics—no matter
what it was—he took all the prizes. Withal he was so friendly, so
sociable, that he was a universal favorite; so generous and so
humorous—so naturally full of fun and comedy—that I really think he
disarmed all jealousy in others—nor felt a spark of jealousy or vanity
in himself. Seldom I should think has there been such a boy; and when at
the age of nineteen or twenty he took his final leave in order to join
the Indian Civil Service, his memory lingered long and long behind him
in the school.[1]
My reception under those circumstances was naturally favorable. One day,
shortly after my arrival, I was playing by myself in a corner of the
entrance hall, when a big boy with a pleasant face came up to me and,
making a suitable gesture, said, “Sweep up the Chips, sweep up the
Chips.” Then I knew that my nickname was Chips—a family nickname indeed,
since my father and my brothers at different times bore it.
The College was a large school of 150 or 200 boys—on public school
lines. I went through the classes in due order from the lowest upwards;
and the personality of each master in turn impressed its unconscious
weight upon me. I remember distinctly the agonized effort and the
triumph of passing the “Asses’ Bridge” in Euclid. The name of the master
who got me over was Newton, and for some years I firmly believed that he
was no other than the celebrated Sir Isaac. I joined in the games and
athletics—and not without success, though I was never very partial to
cricket; I climbed slowly up through the classes; I rubbed shoulders
with all the queer, red-haired, pock-marked, fat, lean, mean, generous,
handsome, clever, tyrannical, cross-eyed, gentle, good-natured,
specimens of fellow humanity—the other boys—whose influence on one at
that age is so strange and incalculable, and whose characters and deeds
appear at the time so mysterious and inexplicable; though when one looks
back upon them at a later date, they seem transparently clear and
simple. I cannot remember anything very heroic that I did, though I can
remember some mean things. I remember joining with the others in teasing
the French master—that ever defenceless quarry; and I remember what was
much worse, taking a kind of delight in privately tormenting an idiot
boy. That was indeed a strange experience. I don’t know why the boy was
allowed in the school; he was certainly quite weak-minded and incapable;
and besides there exhaled from him an odd and fearsome odour. That boy
convulsed me with alternate rage and pity. At one moment I was seized
with the greatest sympathy for his weakness, and the next I was filled
with wrath at his odour and his idiocy, and found or invented excuses
for slapping him! Then after that I would sometimes lie awake at night
remorseful over my conduct, and planning little schemes of reparation;
but in the morning the sight of him would launch me on the waves of
irritation again. It was quite a little tragedy to me—and I mention it
because this savage and instinctive dislike of anything malformed, which
is so very marked in boys, no doubt accounts for much of their cruelty.
It remains in the mind of course to a much later age, but is gradually
covered over by the growth of sympathy and understanding. As a rule my
better deeds were done in defence of the weak. Timid for the most part,
I regained my courage on these occasions—as in delivering a small boy
from a big bully; or once in sticking up for two brothers, the dirtiest
and most stupid boys in the class, against the gibes of the master; or
another time in helping a poor man in the street with his bundle—on
which last occasion the said Sir Isaac Newton passing by, instead of
scolding me as I expected, actually said, “That’s right, my boy”—a
remark for which I felt ever so grateful to him—for indeed I was feeling
rather ashamed of myself.
I think that was about the only occasion on which a master exercised any
directly helpful influence. Schools were odd places in those days. The
idea of really reaching the boy and drawing out his interest seems never
to have occurred to the masters. When I arrived in the Sixth Form, the
Headmaster was a certain Dr. Griffith—a burly, headstrong,
muddle-headed, perhaps rather good-natured man. As often as not he would
arrive in the class-room late, with his hair a-tumble, and looking as if
he had not slept all night, would complain that some naughty boy in the
Fourth Form was preoccupying his mind, and would leave us again alone
with our books. Then presently his study door would open, and he would
push the said boy into the room, saying, “I wish one of you gentlemen
would _cane_ this boy,” and throwing a cane in over the boy’s head would
close the door again. Once, drawing a handful of silver and gold out of
his pocket, he asked me to cane a boy for him—and afterwards I felt
sorry I had not accepted the bargain. I think he must have been a little
touched in the head. It is certainly aggravating to think that we used
to read Homer and Virgil and the Greek plays, and _never_ that I
remember was any attempt made to make us understand the subject or the
plot or the literary interest of these works—nothing but grammar and
syntax. As to mathematics the neglect was worse—and I left school at
eighteen or nineteen having done nothing beyond Euclid and Algebra.
My record in the classes was on the whole, I suppose, good—though
nothing remarkable. I gained the usual number of prizes, and kept about
an equal interest in classics and mathematics. With regard to the
former, my father—who had progressive ideas on such subjects—gave me a
word for word _crib_ to Horace, saying that the best way to learn a
language was to use such a crib. Naturally after that I rejoiced in it
freely in my preparation-work at home of an evening. But one day I could
not resist taking it to school and showing it to some of my class-mates.
Of course we were pounced upon, and the crib confiscated. The
form-master at that time was E. C. Hawkins—a really fine type of man,
father of Anthony Hope Hawkins the novelist. But when he asked me where
I got the crib from, and I replied quite truthfully and simply “My
father gave it me,” he was struck dumb! He certainly thought I was
lying, but could make no reply. And for a long time after that would
hardly speak to me.
Cricket I never took to much. Being a bad player I voted it ‘slow.’
Probably it gave too much rope to my dreamy tendencies, and I got into
trouble missing unexpected catches. But hockey and football I was fond
of, and fives, as being more lively.
When I was about thirteen an event important to us children happened,
which I must not pass by. My parents determined to spend a year in
France, and they actually transported the whole household, nine children
(i.e. all except my brother Charlie) and two servants, to Versailles. I
remember only too well that awful night journey by Newhaven and Dieppe,
the raging sea, the arrival drenched, the dim lights of the Customhouse,
the cries of lost children, the journey by train to Paris and onwards.
How my mother survived it I do not know. We settled in a house in the
Avenue de Sceaux, amid barracks, and continual fanfaronades and
trampings of military, near the great Palace with its endless galleries,
and the Park with its fountains and music. All very exciting and
delightful. And we found some good and friendly French neighbours. At
first they did not the least understand our household. It never occurred
to them for a moment that it was all one family, and for some time it
was supposed that my father and mother kept a school! But when the truth
at last dawned upon them, their delight and amazement knew no bounds,
and we became the centre of the greatest interest. I and my younger
brother, Alfred, went as day-boys to school at the Lycée Hoche (then
Imperiale)—a great place of five hundred boys—where we learned French by
sheer necessity. I do not think we learned much else. In the matter of
lessons the instruction was much on a par with that at the Brighton
school, and the playground life and social organization of the boys were
far less pregnant of good influences.
I don’t know how the Lycées are now, but at that time the school methods
were only poor. The boys sat an outrageously long time at their
desks—ten hours a day or more—either construing or preparing lessons;
but got through very little work, spending most of their time in furtive
games or conversations with each other. Everything was done in set and
military style—marchings along corridors from class-room to class-room,
or from class-room to refectory, or from refectory to playground. In the
latter a master (always called ‘pion’) was present to see that there was
no bullying, or to disperse knots of boys (who might of course be
talking sedition) or to prevent individuals approaching the playground
wall within a set distance (lest they should escape). The games were
limited and regulated. Everything was regulated. It was said that the
Minister of Education at Paris could at any hour of the day place his
finger on the line of Virgil that was being translated, or the
proposition of Geometry that was being proved at that moment in all the
Lycées alike over the face of the land. One very curious custom
prevailed, which has probably now gone out of date, but which had a
strong suggestion about it of the Church system of Indulgences. At the
end of the week the marks gained by each boy during the week were added
up and announced by the master. Then those boys who were credited with
more than a certain number of marks were told they might write out for
themselves a certificate of satisfaction, good for exemption from one,
two, or even three hours’ punishment, according to circumstances! Great
excitement prevailed. You cut yourself a neat square of paper, adorned
it with lines and flourishes, and inscribed on it “Témoignage de
Satisfaction—Elève Carpenter—bonne à une heure”—and left a space at foot
for the signature of the master. When signed you treasured this up in
your desk—and at some later date when the hour of punishment came,
produced it, and unless your crime was very heinous were duly let off!
It was a curious arrangement, but one which had perhaps the advantage of
discouraging a boy from being _too_ good—since obviously it would be a
mistake to collect a greater number of such tickets than you were likely
to make use of.
My brother and I, as day-boys, escaped a good deal of the general school
routine and regulation, and on the whole had not a bad time. The boys
received us decently, and as we could play leap-frog or prisoners’ base
(Les Barres) as well as any of them, paid us due respect; and one of the
masters, Llandais by name, was quite kind and thoughtful towards me. Out
of hours we careered through the woods of Satory, watched military
evolutions on the plain above, or at dusk chased and caught the great
stag-beetles—a thrilling joy. We wandered through the huge
statue-adorned Park and the shady Bosquets of diamond-necklace
celebrity, and learned swimming—as did also my sisters—in the fine
open-air swimming bath, which used to be the bath of the pages of Louis
XIV’s Court. After a year thus spent, the family returned to England,
and we boys to the Brighton College.
As I say, it is probably a common experience that mere school teaching
does not leave a very deep impression. Probably a good deal really _is_
learned—but these are the more indirect things which slip into the
background or foundation of the mind and character and so pass
comparatively unobserved. Only three or four subjects of interest stand
out in my memory as belonging to my school-days, and these all lay
outside school proper. The earliest of these was music. At the age of
ten I desired mightily to learn the piano; but music was not considered
appropriate for a boy—besides there were six sisters who had to be
taught, poor things, whether they liked it or not—and so my appearance
on the music stool was treated rather as an intrusion, and I was
generally hustled off again forthwith. However I got my way by playing
late of an evening, when they were all upstairs in the drawing-room; I
never had any regular teaching, but my mother took pity on me and taught
me my notes; and from that time I stumbled through the “Marche des
Croates” and the “Nun’s Prayer” till at last I emerged on the far
borderland of Beethoven’s Sonatas. This hour of piano practice to myself
was for a long time one of the chief events of my day. Indeed, it is
curious, but I took to composing, or attempting to compose, music before
ever I thought of composing or attempting to compose poetry. Of course
with a juvenile mind, and no musical training, nor even a particularly
keen ear, my compositions were of no value, and I hardly ever troubled
to write them out; still the habit of making up pianoforte pieces, and
the love of doing so, continued all my life, and forced its way out from
time to time. It is only in quite late years that, with more technical
knowledge, I have written some of these down—perhaps twelve or twenty in
all—and even occasionally thought of printing them.
I was also fortunate enough, when I was about fifteen, to come in for
the reversion of a cupboard full of chemical apparatus, which had
belonged to my eldest brother, and here in a little room with retorts
and test-tubes I spent many a half-holiday, carrying out important
experiments and prosecuting valuable inventions, which ended almost
invariably in bad smells and worse headaches. Perpetual motion, as usual
in such cases, was one of my chief objects; and I could not for the life
of me tell why a solid cylinder of wood, placed with its axis horizontal
in the side of a box containing water, and so carefully fitted that it
would turn on its axis without allowing the water to run out, would not
revolve perpetually—seeing indeed that the one half of it which was in
the water, being lighter than water, would continually tend to rise, and
the other half of it which was in the air would continually tend to
fall. I invented an arrangement for the pianoforte after the Morse
telegraphic system, by which extemporaneous effusions could be written
down in the act of playing—an invention which luckily has not been
generally adopted; and was engaged on various other little patents at
different times. Sometimes I gave a lecture—though it must be confessed
that it was with difficulty that any of the household could be induced
to attend! The lecture was small, but the danger from explosions and
horrible smells was great. My remarks were not very lucid or
explanatory, but consisted mainly of expressions like “Now I will show
you something else” or “You needn’t be frightened, there is no danger.”
These investigations were however very absorbing and excited far more
interest in my mind than anything I learned at school; and I remember
that they led me to think quite seriously about being a doctor (I
suppose from some vague notion about the connection between chemicals
and medicine)—a profession which my father was inclined to recommend to
me, and which I have sometimes regretted that I did not adopt.
Towards the later part of my time at Brighton the natural _épanchement_
of youth led me often to seek consolation and an escape from the wounds
of daily life in intercourse with Nature. The Brighton social life—with
its greetings where no kindness is—was to me chilly in the extreme, and
I often used in later years to feel that I “caught cold” (morally
speaking) whenever I returned to it. The scenery and surroundings of
Brighton are also bare and chilly enough; and trees, whose friendly
covert I have always loved, do not exist there; but the place has two
Nature-elements in it—and these two singularly wild and untampered—the
Sea and the Downs. We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its
voice was in our ears night and day. On terrific stormy nights it was a
“grisly joy” to go down to the water’s edge at 10 or 11 p.m.—pitchy
darkness—feeling one’s way with feet or hands, over the stony beach,
hardly able to stand for the wind—and to watch the white breakers
suddenly leap out of the gulf close upon one—the “scream of the madden’d
beach dragged down by the wave,” the booming of the wind, like distant
guns, and the occasional light of some vessel laboring for its life in
the surge.
But the Downs were my favorite refuge. On sunny days I would wander on
over them for miles, not knowing very clearly where I was going—in a
strange broody moony state—glad to find some hollow (like that described
in Jefferies’ _Story of my Heart_) where one could lie secluded for any
length of time and see only the clouds and the grasses and an occasional
butterfly, or hear the distant bark of a dog or the far rumble of a
railway train. The Downs twined themselves with all my thought and
speculations of that time. Their chaste subdued gracious outlines and
quiet colour have a peculiar charm. Their strongest line is generally
some white edge of cliffs or curve of the shore itself, their deepest
tint the blue of the sea or occasionally a field of red clover or one
overgrown with charlock. For the rest they wear the faint blue-green
colour of thin turf through which the chalk almost shows. Over the
velvety sward and among the fine herbage cropped by plentiful sheep run
innumerable tiny flowers dwarfed by salt wind and scanty soil—thistles,
whose chins rest on the ground out of which they grow; patches of sweet
thyme which the wild bees love, of pink centaury and thrift and madder
and dwarf-broom, and that sweet yellow lotus or bird’s-foot trefoil,
which runs all over the world, in Siberia and Alps and Himalayas the
same, one of the commonest and friendliest of all the flowers that grow.
Overhead the lark sings, the clouds drift through the untampered blue,
the bee and the butterfly sweep past on the breeze. Three or four miles
from Brighton, and one is in a world remote from man. Except an
occasional shepherd there is hardly a human to be seen. Here and there
in a hollow nestles the tiniest hamlet—an old farmhouse, one or two
cottages, a dwarf church faced with rough work of flints, a few trees
and a well. Taking its character from the sky—as all chalk and limestone
countries largely do—this land has an ethereal beauty in summer weather;
but on wintry and gray days it is monotonous and sad. The shepherd then
huddles himself in his cloak in the lee of the gorse-bush, the cloudy
rack drives over the backs of his sheep, line behind line the Downs
stretch, colorless, unbroken by any hint of tree or habitation; the wind
whistles among the thin grass stems with a peculiar shrill and mournful
pipe, and in its pauses the sullen and distant roar of the sea is heard.
How can I describe, how shall I not recall, the thoughts which came to
me as I wandered, towards the close of my school time, over these same
hills—the brooding ill-defined, half-shapen thoughts? The Downs were my
escape; even in their most chill and lonely moods they were my escape
from a worse coldness and loneliness, which, except for a few boyfriends
at school, I somehow experienced during all that time. Nature was more
to me, I believe, than any human attachment, and the Downs were my
Nature. It was among them at a later time that I first began to write a
few verses. But at the time I mention, and till quite the end of my
school days, I never wrote anything at all. If the thought of writing
had occurred to me I should have deemed it, in my then state of mind,
monstrous presumption—but I doubt whether the thought ever did occur to
me. I did not even read poetry. Mozart and Beethoven were familiar to
me, but I must have been eighteen years old before I was roused to any
interest in Tennyson (the poet of the day) by a lecture at school on “In
Memoriam.” After that I read “In Memoriam” and loved it well. This was
followed (at Cambridge) by Wordsworth; and then by Shelley, who excited
in me the same passionate attachment that he has excited in so many
others. After that Whitman dominated me. I do not think any others of
the poets—unless Plato should bear that name—have deeply influenced me.
As to friends—that absorbing subject—I can trace the desire for a
passionate attachment in my earliest boyhood. But the desire had no
expression, no chance of expression. Such things as affection were never
spoken about either at home or at school, and I naturally concluded that
there was no room for them in the scheme of creation! The glutinous
boyfriendships that one formed in class-room or playground were of the
usual type: they staved off a greater hunger, but they did not satisfy.
On the other hand I worshipped the very ground on which some, generally
elder, boys stood; they were heroes for whom I would have done anything.
I dreamed about them at night, absorbed them with my eyes in the day,
watched them at cricket, loved to press against them unnoticed in a
football melly, or even to get accidentally hurt by one of them at
hockey, was glad if they just spoke to me or smiled; but never got a
word farther with it all. What could I say? Even to one of the masters,
I remember, who was a little kind to me, I felt this unworded devotion;
but he never helped me over the stile, and so I remained on the farther
side.
I often think what a fund of romance, and of intense feeling, there is
in this direction latent in so many boys and capable even of heroic
expression—and how much will have to be done some day in the matter of
directing and giving a constructive outlet to it. Already however there
is a great difference in the tone of the public schools themselves on
this subject, from what there was twenty-five or thirty years ago. The
trouble in schools from bad sexual habits and frivolities arises
greatly—though of course not altogether—from the suppression and
misdirection of the natural emotions of boy-attachment. I, as a day boy,
and one who happened to be rather pure-minded than otherwise, grew up
quite free from these evils: though possibly it would have been a good
thing if I had had a little more experience of them than I had. As it
was, no elder person _ever_ spoke to me about sexual matters—no mother,
father, brother, monitor or master ever said a word. I picked up the
usual information from the talk of my companions, and made up my own
mind unbiased by any person or book. I suppose it was in consequence of
this that I never saw anything repellent or shameful in sexual acts
themselves. From the earliest time when I thought about these things
they seemed to me natural—like digestion or any other function—and I
remember wondering why people made such a fuss about the mention of
them—why they told lies rather than speak the truth, why they were
shocked, or why they giggled and stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths.
It was not till (at the age of twenty-five) I read Whitman—and then with
a great leap of joy—that I met with the treatment of sex which accorded
with my own sentiments.
Nevertheless though these desires were never to me unclean, yet during
all that time of later boyhood and early university life they were
strangely discounted by that other desire of the heart. I could not
think much of sex while the hunger of the heart was unsatisfied—and
_that_ for the time being occupied all the foreground of my life. Indeed
at times it threatened to paralyse my mental and physical faculties. It
was like an open wound continually bleeding. I felt starved and unfed,
and unable to rest in the chilling contacts of ordinary life. As to the
usual attractions set before the eyes of middle-class youth, the
hopeless, helpless young ladyisms, or the bolder beauties of the gutter,
they were both a detestable boredom to me.
For indeed the life, and with it the character, of the ordinary “young
lady” of that period, and of the sixties generally, was tragic in its
emptiness. The little household duties for women, encouraged in an
earlier and simpler age, had now gone out of date, while the modern idea
of work in the great world was not so much as thought of. In a place
like Brighton there were hundreds, perhaps, of households, in which
girls were growing up with but one idea in life, that of taking their
“proper place in society.” A few meagre accomplishments—plentiful balls
and dinner-parties, theatres and concerts—and to loaf up and down the
parade, criticizing each other, were the means to bring about this
desirable result! There was absolutely nothing else to do or live for.
It is curious—but it shows the state of public opinion of that time—to
think that my father, who was certainly quite advanced in his ideas,
never for a moment contemplated that any of his daughters should learn
professional work with a view to their living—and that in consequence he
more than once drove himself quite ill with worry. Occasionally it
happened that, after a restless night of anxiety over some failure among
his investments, and of dread lest he should not be able at his death to
leave the girls a competent income, he would come down to breakfast
looking a picture of misery. After a time he would break out. “Ruin
impended over the family,” securities were falling, dividends
disappearing; there was only one conclusion—“the girls would have to go
out as governesses.” Then silence and gloom would descend on the
household. It was true; that was the only resource. There was only one
profession possible for a middle-class woman—to be a governess—and to
adopt that was to become a _pariah_. But in a little time affairs would
brighten up again. Stocks went up, the domestic panic subsided; and
dinner-parties and balls were resumed as usual.
As time went by, and I gradually got to know what life really meant, and
to realize the situation, it used to make me intensely miserable to
return home and see what was going on there. My parents of course were
fully occupied, but for the rest there were six or seven servants in the
house, and my six sisters had absolutely nothing to do except dabble in
paints and music as aforesaid, and wander aimlessly from room to room to
see if by any chance “anything was going on.” Dusting, cooking, sewing,
darning—all light household duties were already forestalled; there was
no private garden, and if there had been it would have been “unladylike”
to do anything in it; _every_ girl could not find an absorbing interest
in sol-fa or water-colours; athletics were not invented; every
aspiration and outlet, except in the direction of dress and dancing, was
blocked; and marriage, with the growing scarcity of men, was becoming
every day less likely, or easy to compass. More than once girls of whom
I least expected it told me that their lives were miserable “with
nothing on earth to do.” Multiply this picture by thousands and hundreds
of thousands all over the country, and it is easy to see how, when the
causes of the misery were understood, it led to the powerful growth of
the modern “Women’s Movement.”
During my school-days, however, this tragedy had, so far as our
household was concerned, hardly developed itself, or at any rate become
at all serious; and a charming recollection of that period is that of my
companionship with two of my elder sisters. With one of these—my sister
Ellen, afterwards Mrs. Hyett—I used to go long country walks. She had an
eye for landscape and animal painting, and sometimes brought her
sketch-book with her. Occasionally on hired hacks we rode together over
the Downs. Her mind had an adventurous outdoor quality about it; and our
conversation turned mainly on what we saw on our explorations, and on
speculations about foreign lands. The other sister (Lizzie, afterwards
Lady Daubeney) was never much of a walker; but she stayed at home and
played Beethoven’s Sonatas, and these were a continual delight to me. I
stood quietly by and turned over the pages by the hour. The “Sonata
Appassionata” was a dream of wonder. This sister had a highly poetic,
sensitive temperament. When the younger ones of the family were children
she told us absorbing fairy-tales. At the time I speak of she was the
one in the household who gave to the atmosphere a touch of sympathy,
tenderness and romance; which was of priceless value. As my mind
expanded we even talked a little poetic philosophy together, and
discussed Tennyson and Shakespeare.
My younger brother, Alfred, who was my schoolfellow at the Lycée at
Versailles, went to the Brighton College with me (I joining for the
second time) when the family returned to Brighton in 1858. But at an
early age (fourteen) he joined the Navy, and after a preliminary year on
board the _Britannia_ training-ship, went away to sea. Consequently he
was not so much at home during those early years. The sea-life suited
him, I think. With a rather dare-devil temperament as a boy he was
always getting into scrapes at school. [Once, I remember, he had the
brilliant idea of lighting a fire in his locker in the schoolroom, and
then sitting, all innocence, on the seat—until the crackling of sticks
and the curling smoke drew all eyes that way, and he was discovered like
the phœnix in apparent peril of being consumed!] In the Navy, at an
early period, he distinguished himself by saving life under risky
circumstances. In one case a man had fallen overboard at night in the
Tagus from another ship, and in the darkness was being swept by the
current seawards past the _Warrior_, on which ship my brother was—when
the latter, who was on deck at the time, jumped in to the rescue, at the
same time calling to some of the bluejackets to man a boat and follow.
Of course he and the drowning man were immediately lost to sight in the
gloom, and when the boat did get under weigh it was only by his distant
shouts that its crew could be guided. The two men had drifted half a
mile or more before they were picked up; but it was not too late, and
their rescue was safely effected. In another case off the Falkland Isles
he swam to the rescue of an ordinary seaman under even more perilous
conditions, and for this act gained the Albert medal—which may be called
the V.C. of life-saving medals.
At a later period [1875–76] my brother Alfred was lieutenant on board
H.M.S. _Challenger_, and it was under his management that the deepest
sounding effected up to that period was taken. He obtained 4,475
fathoms, or nearly 27,000 feet in the vicinity of the Ladrone Islands.
After the _Challenger_ he had several commands in China and elsewhere,
including charge of the Marine Survey of India; and as commander of the
_Investigator_ he spent several years surveying and making charts of the
coasts of India and the Andaman Islands. In 1885, in connection with the
Burmese expedition against King Thebaw, the important duty was assigned
to him of leading the War Flotilla up the river Irrawaddy. As an officer
he was well liked, being considerate of the men under him, but firm in
their management, and in moments of danger plucky and reliable.[2]
In later years he published not a few papers on nautical and
astronomical matters, and in 1915 a more popular illustrated handbook
for travellers, entitled _Nature Notes for Ocean Voyagers_ (Griffin,
5s.).
Such, roughly summed together, are the main outlines of my early
days—full after all of tenderest recollections. A large family is a
roughish training school, but it is a valuable one. Over-sensitive and
of a clinging disposition by nature, I early learned the profound
lessons of suffering and of self-dependence. My spirit concentrated
itself, and partially overcame its inherent vagueness and weakness in
years of silence. The tension of those early days, the unexpressed
hatred which I felt, though I did not understand it, for the social
conditions in which I was born, was destined, when its meaning gradually
realized itself in my consciousness, to become one of the great
directing forces of my after life.
II
MY PARENTS
My father (born in 1797) had a curious early life. He came of a family
which had lived in Cornwall (Launceston) for some generations. He was
the eldest son—though he had three sisters—of an Admiral in the Navy,
and appears to have taken to his father’s profession, when a boy, as a
matter of course. He was not, however, at all suited to it, for he was
of a rather studious temperament, and the rough life of the Navy of
those days was probably very distasteful to him. He was in one or two
skirmishes with the French off the American coast, and I remember his
telling me of the painful feeling which he experienced once when being
in a small boat and coming across some French sailors in another small
boat he had to take aim and fire at them. To his relief, however, no one
was hurt!
[Illustration:
MY FATHER: CHARLES CARPENTER.
]
When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German
and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he
were destined to remain long on board ship! As a matter of fact he left
the Navy when he was about twenty-five. The bad climate of Trincomalee,
where he was stationed for two years, damaged his health. He came to
London and set about reading for the Chancery Bar. In due course he was
called and for some years practised with success—so much so indeed that
on his retirement he was greatly complimented by the presiding judge. In
1833 he married; and this it was which, curiously enough, led to his
retirement from the Bar. For his father-in-law—Thomas Wilson—who had
also been in the Navy, and who was then a widower, only consented to the
marriage on condition that his daughter should remain at home, and that
the married couple should therefore take up their abode at his house at
Walthamstow. This they did, and the distance from London, a considerable
matter in those days, combined perhaps with a little anxiety about my
father’s health, which still remained unsatisfactory, brought about the
abandonment of his profession—a great mistake as it appeared, for of
course as soon as he lost his regular occupation he began to worry
badly. Then, when Mr. Wilson died, in 1843, a move to Brighton (which
just then was growing into importance, and yet retained some of its
old-world character) was thought advisable, both for my father’s sake
and for that of the little family which now had to be considered. But as
far as my father was concerned this did not mend matters, and my mother
has often told me that this was the worst period of their married life.
He got more and more anxious and restless—to a degree which seemed
almost a danger to his mind—till at last my mother induced him to let
himself be appointed magistrate and take his seat on the Brighton bench;
after which his serenity returned, and he remained one of the most
active and probably the most public spirited of the members of the
Brighton and afterwards of the Hove magistracy till a year or two before
his death. The death of his own father in 1846 freed him from any real
cause for pecuniary anxiety—though from time to time all through his
later life he was liable to fits of considerable depression and
nervousness about his monetary concerns. He settled down permanently at
Brighton (No. 45 Brunswick Square) into the life of the respectable
_rentier_, with its usual aims and ideals as far as his family was
concerned, though for himself his aims were very different from those of
the society round him, and his conception of life was as broad as it
could well be upon the foundation of that particular social status to
which he belonged.
His early life in the Navy had given my father that honest, somewhat
simple, cast of mind which belongs to sea-faring folk. He was always
ready to be impressed by a tale of distress—especially if it came from
the lips of one of the fair sex. At the same time his active brain had
carried him far in most fields of thought. Though having a strong
religious feeling, he soon emancipated himself from current orthodoxies
in religion, and seldom in later life went to church—a fact which to the
mild respectabilities around us was a sufficient justification for
calling him an Atheist. For Frederick W. Robertson, who was then
preaching at Brighton, and who not unfrequently came to our house, and
for Frederick D. Maurice, however, he had a great admiration; and his
own views were—as far as I remember what he said when I was a boy—a kind
of Broad Church mysticism, derived at first from reading S. T. Coleridge
(whom he had met occasionally in former years in London), and gradually
broadening out under the influence of Eckhardt, Tauler, Kant, Fichte,
Hegel and others into a religious and philosophic mysticism without much
admixture of the Broad Church at all.
In politics he was a strong Liberal—indeed in his most active period a
philosophic Radical of the Mill school, and gave strong support to Henry
Fawcett during the time when the latter represented Brighton. Though
occasionally asked to stand himself he never as far as I know felt
inclined to do so, and indeed a certain lack of glibness and difficulty
of expression which he experienced always made him disinclined from
taking part in any kind of public speechifying. In his quite latest
years he veered round to the support of Beaconsfield’s Government; but
this, if partly due to the reactionary tendency of old age, was also
caused by his keen perception of the hypocrisy (unconscious or
otherwise) of Gladstone, whom in the last few years of his life he never
ceased to vilify.
Almost all general literature interested my father—especially works on
natural history, travels, and science of any kind; but art and music
were never much in his line. Any tale of heroism, or prodigy of science
would bring ready tears to his eyes; and his love of reading—as in the
case of his own father—lasted to the latest years of his life; for when
he was over eighty years of age he would not unfrequently sit up till
one or two in the morning, conning the last new book or running over
favorite passages of his philosophical authors.
In a letter of his (written in ’73) I find the following passage:
“Circumstances have been leading me to think a good deal lately about
Instinct. I do not see how any distinction can be drawn between what we
call Instinct in the lower animals—such as the insect when she deposits
eggs and then brings to the place of deposit the food needful for the
support of her offspring grub, and covering them up (eggs and food)
together, flies away to perish—and that power in Plants that causes them
to send forth their roots often to a great distance and in a special
direction, in search of the material needful for their nutriment, the
mineral perhaps without which they could not live. This can only be
understood, as it seems to me, upon the assumption of there being a
Life, an intelligent Life, in the Plant or Insect, of which they are
unconscious. Think of the Swallow going to Egypt perhaps, and then at
proper season returning to its old nest under the eaves of some cottage
in England. The possession of sense-organs, therefore, does not expel
from the Bird or Fish this Intelligent Life within them, which orders
their migrations, etc., but of which they are unconscious. And why
should it be otherwise with man? That he should be conscious of this
life will one day be his highest blessing.”