who was a Fellow of Trinity Hall at the time of which I am speaking. The
story of his blindness is well known. It was only just after his degree
that he was out pheasant-shooting with his father. In a rather thick
covert the father fired at a bird, unknowing that his son was standing
in the line of fire. Two small shot struck the latter—one entering into
each eye—a strange and fatal chance. It was the father, I think, who
told me that as soon as Henry knew that he was permanently blinded he
said “Well, it shan’t make any difference in my plans of life!” And
certainly it made very little. As may be guessed from that, Fawcett was
a man of astounding pluck and vitality—a vitality which would have been
almost overbearing if it had not been tempered by extreme good
nature—and his force of character, combined with very democratic
sympathies, enabled him despite his blindness to do valuable work in
Parliament and in connection with the Post Office. The adoring gratitude
of the father at the public success of the son whom he had so badly
crippled was most touching, and he would follow his son about the
country and attend his public meetings for the mere pleasure of
witnessing his success. As Fawcett was member for Brighton—and my father
lent his support to his candidature—he, and Mrs. Fawcett, used
frequently to dine with us at Brunswick Square, and I saw a good deal of
them both at Brighton and at Cambridge. Fawcett’s pluck and vitality
were however sometimes a trial to his friends. I have a rather _too_
vivid recollection of riding with him, over the Brighton Downs or along
the green lanes of Cambridgeshire. “Carpenter,” he would say, “this is a
nice piece of grass, isn’t it? Let’s have a canter.” Then he would set
off at an amazing rate, and I would have to keep close alongside of him,
with a sharp look-out and warning for unexpected ditches and stoneheaps,
and in momentary fear of a headlong fall—which for a man of his weight
would have been a terrible thing! Or he would insist on my coming to
skate with him, in winter, on the Cam. We would go five or six miles
down the river, and back—he holding one end of a stick and I the other.
That was all very well if the ice was sound, but every one knows what
river ice is; and I have often skated with him when I, being a light
weight, passed over easily, while he, holding on to the stick and a pace
or two behind, was cracking through at every other step. The prospect of
having to fish a public man, weighty in every sense, out of a flowing
river was certainly not pleasant. However I am happy to say that I was
not present with him at any disaster. Except once. That was at a public
meeting when he was speaking, at Brighton. I was on the platform. A
stone was thrown by some one at the back of the hall, which struck him
on the forehead, causing blood to flow. Great sensation ensued. For the
moment he felt a little faint and relapsed into a chair. Ladies rushed
up on all sides with smelling salts. However in a few minutes he was all
right, and resumed his speech. Afterwards he said to me “I didn’t mind
the stone; but those scent-bottles made me sick!” So it will be seen
that he and I had points in common! Since his death Mrs. Fawcett and I
have still met not unfrequently—generally perhaps as joint speakers on
some Women’s Suffrage platform.
Charles Wentworth Dilke was a ‘Hall’ man. He had just taken his degree
when I arrived as a ‘freshman’; but he stayed up in College for a year
or so more on account of some law-examination or other. He never became
a Fellow, but was an enthusiastic lover of his College; and was always
very good to us undergraduates. I remember breakfasting with him at his
rooms, and his showing me, pencilled on his door-jamb, the record of his
hours of work, day by day, for the last year or so—_seventy hours per
week_, as regular as clockwork! He was, then and afterwards, always an
amazing worker—his room even in those youthful days pigeon-holed all
over with notes and documents. He was also a man with a high sense of
chivalry and honour, and I have no doubt that the _contretemps_ which
threw him for a time out of public life—and which his chivalry forbade
him to explain—weighed pretty heavily on him. His love of facts and
statistics, so conspicuous throughout his political life, was shared by
his brother Assheton; and it used to be said that the two brothers never
enjoyed themselves more thoroughly than when sitting knee to knee they
spent an hour or so in ‘imparting facts to each other’!
Another politician of my time, though a little younger than myself, was
Augustine Birrell. Even in those days he was chiefly known for his
quaint humours and jokes—though the term ‘birrelling’ had not then been
adopted. But being, as an undergraduate, somewhat interested in politics
and not at all interested in rowing, he did not bulk largely in the eyes
of his contemporaries, and I fear was a little neglected. In a late
letter to me he chaffs me in his own native style on my academic and
clerical past, saying “I have the most vivid recollection of you as
Junior Tutor. The marvellous neatness of your now discarded _white tie_
lives especially in my untidy mind!”
Socialism and Millthorpe, I need hardly say, swept me out of these
academic and semi-political surroundings into a different world—the
world of a new society which was arising and forming within the
structure of the old. William Morris represented this new society more
effectively and vitally than any one else of that period; because away
and beyond the scientific forecast he gave expression to the emotional
presentment and ideal of a sensible free human brotherhood—as in _John
Ball_, or _News from Nowhere_. His sturdy, brusque, sea-captain-like
figure, with his fine-outlined face and tossing hair, his forcible
unpolished speech, yet all so direct, sincere, enthusiastic—brought
inspiration and confidence wherever he went; and for a time, as I have
already said, there was a widespread belief that the Socialist League
was going to knit up all the United Kingdom in one bond of new life.[23]
Having set the “Sheffield Socialists” going in ’86, he came one day not
long after to speak at Chesterfield, and stayed at Millthorpe a night or
two. I remember his arriving from the train with Jefferies’ book _After
London_ in his hands—which had just come out. The book delighted him
with its prophecy of an utterly ruined and deserted London, gone down in
swamps and malaria, with brambles and weeds spreading through slum
streets and fashionable squares, and pet dogs reverting to wolfish and
carrion-hunting lives. And he read page after page of it to us with glee
that evening as we sat round the fire. He hated modern civilization, and
London as its representative, with a fierce hatred—its shams, its
hypocrisies, its stuffy indoor life, its cheapjack style, its mean and
mongrel ideals; with a hatred indeed which, I cannot but think,
thousands and hundreds of thousands following him will one day share.
Once he said to me, talking about his own life: “I have spent, I know, a
vast amount of time designing furniture and wall-papers, carpets and
curtains; but after all I am inclined to think that sort of thing is
mostly rubbish, and I would prefer for my part to live with the plainest
whitewashed walls and wooden chairs and tables.” He certainly was no
drawing-room sort of man. His immense energy did not run to small talk.
As a rule in conversation, seized by his subject, and oblivious of the
arguments of others, he would jump from his chair and stride up and down
the room in ardent monologue—condemning the present or picturing the
future or the past. I once asked his daughter, May, what he did in the
way of recreation. “My father never takes any recreation,” she said, “he
_merely changes his work_.” And so it was. When he had been toiling at
Merton Abbey all day, and preaching Socialism at a street corner all the
evening, then at night—sick of the ugly life around him—he would come
home and dream himself away into the fourteenth century, and for his
recreation produce a masterpiece like _John Ball_. Be it said,
nevertheless, that he did sometimes relax, and that when in the humour,
no one enjoyed a pipe and a glass and the jovial company of friends and
the telling of good stories, more than William Morris.
He certainly did not like anything resembling sentimentality. A friend
tells me that he used to recite the following stanza, apparently
delighting in its quaintness—but whether Morris composed it himself or
had found it elsewhere he does not know:—
I sits with my feet in a brook,
And if any one asks me for why,
I hits him a crack with my crock,
For it’s sentiment kills me, says I.
Among those who came from time to time to speak for our Socialist group
in Sheffield or to stay at our “Commonwealth” Café were, besides William
Morris, two notable personalities—Peter Kropotkin and Annie Besant.
Their work and influence, both world-wide—the one in the Anarchist, and
the other in the Theosophist, field—have been really important. Though
never myself strictly identified with either of these movements I have
been in touch with them, and consequently in more or less friendly
relation with their two leading spirits during a long period—now nearly
thirty years. Both characters are certainly remarkable for their vigour,
their sincerity, their ability and devotion. Kropotkin at the age of
seventy and after fifty years of passionate conflict with ‘government’
and ‘authority’ still retains his sunny and almost childlike temperament
and still believes in the speedy oncoming of an age of perfectly
voluntary and harmonious co-operation in the human race. Indeed it is
mainly due to him that this magnificent dream has spread so far and wide
over the world, and has done so much as it has towards its own
realization. The dramatic circumstances too of Kropotkin’s own life have
greatly helped—his early escapes from prison and from death, his
abandonment of a princely inheritance to become the companion and
fellow-prisoner of criminals and outcasts, his later life spent in
poverty and among obscure circles of enthusiasts—these things combined
with encyclopædic knowledge and a high scientific reputation have
compelled attention and respect. As in the case of many ardent social
reformers, and certainly in the case of most notorious Anarchists, there
is a charming naïveté about Kropotkin. It is so easy—if you believe that
all human evil is summed up in the one fatal word ‘government’ (or it
may be that the word is ‘white-slave-traffic,’ or ‘war,’ or ‘drink,’ or
anything else)—to order your life and your theories accordingly.
Everything is explained by its relation to one thing. It is easy, but it
is misleading. And Kropotkin’s writings, despite their erudition, suffer
from this naïveté. Whether it be History (his _French Revolution_), or
Natural History (his _Mutual Aid_) or economic theory (his _Paroles d’un
Revolté_) the reader finds one solution for everything, and the
countervailing facts and principles consistently—though certainly not
intentionally—ignored. This detracts from the value of the writings;
though in justice it should be said that the principles on which
Kropotkin so vigorously insists—i.e. individual liberty and free
association—_are_ of foundational importance. In a country like
Russia—obsessed by authority and officialism—it is not unnatural that
its reformers, such as Tolstoy and Kropotkin, should be almost
over-conscious of the governmental evil; and this fact rather encourages
the hope that Russia may one day after all be the leader in the great
European reaction towards a freer and more voluntary state of society.
The naïveté of the social reformer explains too the common fact that the
Anarchist who is in theory “thirsting for the blood of kings” and
occasionally perhaps capable of perpetrating a deed of violence himself,
is generally (like Kropotkin) the gentlest and mildest of men, who
“would not hurt a fly.” It is only such men—having the love of humanity
in their hearts—who are able to believe in the speedy realization of an
era of universal goodwill; and again it is only such men—being innocent
enough to believe that the only impediment to the realization of this
era is a certain wicked person in ‘authority’—who can spur themselves on
to the bloody dispatch of such person.
If the career of Kropotkin has been romantically varied in one way, that
of Mrs. Besant has been equally so in another. To begin as a curate’s
wife, with a vivid strain of religious devotion; to break away into
Broad Churchism and then into boundless disbelief; to become an ardent
Secularist, companion of Bradlaugh and propagandist of antipopulation
doctrines; to suffer imprisonment, persecution, and embitterment of
spirit; to espouse the cause of Socialism and do battle in the ranks of
Labour; to float into the haven of Theosophy and be made the mouthpiece
of invisible Mahatmas and of the by no means invisible Mme. Blavatsky;
and finally to complete this quaint circle by becoming the
high-priestess of a religious movement and the guardian of the herald of
the coming Christ—such a career ought to satisfy the most picturesque
ambition. Yet it would be unfair to doubt Annie Besant’s sincerity.
Having known her so long as I have I feel sure that she has been urged
onward from point to point by a perfectly genuine mental evolution,
largely directed no doubt at each turn of the road by some dominant mind
whom she has met, and largely coloured by that naïveté of which we have
already spoken—a naïveté indeed which has made it possible for her to
take herself very seriously and to fulfil her adopted rôle always with a
strong sense of duty and a comparatively weak perception of the humour
of the situation.
From the hour when, alone in the pulpit of her husband’s church, Annie
Besant discovered her own great oratorical gift, her future career, one
may say, was decided. With an excellent capacity for logical and clear
statement she became the exponent in succession of large and important
blocks of modern thought. She helped to batter down the ruins and
remains of the stupefied old Anglican Church; she gave the general mind
a wholesome shock on the Malthusian question; she dotted out clearly the
main lines of the Socialist movement; she formed a new channel for
religious thought by making the words ‘Karma’ and ‘re-incarnation’
familiar; and she sought to bring the Western public into touch with the
great age-long ideas and inspirations of the old Indian sages. In all
these ways she has done splendid work, and helped vastly in the
construction of that great twentieth century bridge which will in its
due time lead us into another world. Only in the last item—her touch
upon the ideas and inspirations of the ancient East—does she seem to me,
curiously enough, to have failed. With all her enthusiasm for the
subject, Mrs. Besant does not appear to have the intuitive perception,
the mystic quality of mind, which should enable her to reach the very
heart of the old Vedantic teaching. Her intellect, clear and systematic
in its structure, has little of the poetic or original or inspirational
in its composition, and it may be doubted whether it has ever quite
fathomed the religious writings with which it has been so much occupied.
Anyhow Mrs. Besant’s own writings on these subjects are—unlike her
general lectures—dull to a degree. She analyses the composition of the
human personality, or the order of general creation, or the various
life-rounds of our mortal race; but in all she seems to be repeating or
corroborating some pre-established formula, never to be describing
something which she has herself perceived; system and formula prevail,
unseen ‘authorities’ are hinted at, the pages bristle with sanskrit
jargon, but no living or creative _idea_ moves among them, and the
reader rises from their perusal void of inspiration or of any really
vital impulse towards new fields of thought and life. Nevertheless,
taking it all in all, and especially in her expositions of Socialism and
Theosophy, Mrs. Besant has done, as I have said, a great work; and one
cannot sufficiently admire the courage with which she has carried it
through, as well as her kindliness and helpfulness towards others,
and—in later years—her own inner mental calm, contrasting with the
somewhat restless bitterness of an earlier time.
In 1884 or so the founding of the _New Fellowship_ in London (from which
afterwards the Fabian Society sprang) brought me into touch with
Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner. As I think I have already said,
Ellis discovered in the proverbial penny box of a second-hand publisher,
and soon after its publication, the little first edition of my _Towards
Democracy_; and rescuing it wrote to me. Thus began my friendship with
him, and afterwards with the authoress of _The Story of An African
Farm_. A prophet is seldom acclaimed in his own country; and the work
which Ellis has done in that most important field of Sexual Psychology
is even yet by no means recognized in England as it ought to be—even
though the subject is becoming extremely ‘actual’ here in the present
day, and though elsewhere over the world his pioneer work is most
honorably received and respected. The six massive volumes of his
_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_ form a masterpiece of large-minded
and yet extremely detailed observation and generalization, and provide a
survey of the most impartial character over this vast realm, and such as
can be obtained nowhere else. For though the Germans have written
extensively in this field their books—_more Teutonico_—are generally
overladen with detail, huge jungles through which it is difficult to
find one’s way. Ellis combines with the Englishman’s perspicacity and
love of order a remarkable erudition and command of particulars. And at
the present juncture when the world is waking up to the absolute
necessity of a reasonable understanding and frank recognition of
sex-things, the appearance of his book may almost be characterized as
‘providential.’ This quality may indeed be suspected in the fact that
the author began making notes for his _magnum opus_ at a very early age,
driven thereto by some sort of instinct, nor finished his work till he
was about fifty. I know of few things in literature more touching than
the postscript to his last volume—the _Nunc Dimittis_ after some thirty
years of toil: “It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at
the outset to foresee all the perils that beset my path. I knew indeed
that those who investigate sincerely and intimately any subject which
men are accustomed to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to
misunderstanding and even obloquy. But I supposed that a secluded
student who approached vital social problems with precaution, making no
direct appeal to the general public, but only to the public’s teachers,
and who wrapped up the results of his inquiries in technically written
volumes open to few—I supposed that such a student was at all events
secure from any gross form of attack on the part of the police or the
government under whose protection he imagined that he lived. That proved
to be a mistake. When only one volume of these _Studies_ had been
written and published in England, a prosecution instigated by the
Government put an end to the sale of that volume in England, and led me
to resolve that the subsequent volumes should not be published in my own
country.[24] I do not complain. I am grateful for the early and generous
sympathy with which my work was received in Germany and the United
States, and I recognize that it has had a wider circulation, both in
English and the other chief languages of the world, than would have been
possible by the modest method of issue which the government of my own
country induced me to abandon. Nor has the effort to crush my work
resulted in any change in that work by so much as a single word. With
help, or without it, I have followed my own path to the end.... He who
follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was not made by man, and
is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity on his side, and
can afford to be both patient and fearless. Men die, but the ideas they
seek to kill _live_. Our books may be thrown to the flames, but in the
next generation those flames become human souls.”
The personality of Havelock Ellis is that of a student, thoughtful,
preoccupied, bookish, deliberate; yet unlike most students he has a sort
of grand air of Nature about him—a fine free head and figure as of some
great god Pan, with distant relations among the Satyrs.
Those early meetings of the New Fellowship were full of hopeful
enthusiasms—life simplified, a humane diet and a rational dress, manual
labour, democratic ideals, communal institutions. Indeed one or two
little practical efforts towards colony groups were at that time
made.[25] Herbert Rix, W. J. Jupp, Percival Chubb, Edith Lees
(afterwards Mrs. Ellis), Mrs. Hinton, widow of James Hinton, Caroline
Haddon, Ernest Rhys were among the early members.
Edith Lees was one of the most active and vigorous of this group. She
helped to organize and to carry on for some time a joint dwelling or
co-operative boarding-house near Mecklenburgh Square, where eight or ten
members of the Fellowship dwelt in a kind of communistic Utopia.
Naturally the arrangement gave rise to some rather amusing and some
almost tragic episodes, which she has recorded for us in a little story
entitled _Attainment_. After her marriage she took a farm near St. Ives
in Cornwall, which became a helpful retreat for her husband as well as
herself from the strenuousness of London life. With her extraordinary
energy and directness she plunged into and soon mastered all the details
of cattle and pig breeding and farming; and I shall never forget the
impression she produced on one occasion when staying with me at
Millthorpe, when we took her round to the public-house in the evening.
The delight and amazement of the farm men at finding some one more or
less resembling a lady who really understood and would talk freely about
such things, and her at-home-ness among that company were most
refreshing. They were fascinated by the directness of her intense blue
eyes, her sturdy figure, her vigorous gestures, and the evident equality
of her comradeship with them. And to this day they not unfrequently ask
us, “When is that little lady coming again, with that curly hair, like a
lad’s, and them blue eyes, what talked about pigs and cows? I shall
never forget her.”
Edith Ellis not only became a help to her husband in his literary work,
but herself spoke and wrote on subjects of Eugenics and Sex-psychology.
Of late years she has made a considerable study of James Hinton, and has
done me the honour to associate my name with his and with Nietzsche’s in
a little book entitled _Three Modern Seers_.
One evening as we sat round a table (in Rix’s rooms at Burlington House)
I saw a charming girl-face, of _riant_ Italian type, smiling across to
me. It was Olive Schreiner. She had arrived from South Africa only a few
months before, had published her _African Farm_, and though only
twenty-one or twenty-two years of age was already famous as its
authoress. Juvenile in some ways as that book was, somewhat incoherent
and disjointed in structure, written by a mere girl of eighteen or
nineteen, and with a title which gave no idea of its real content, yet
its intensity was such that it seized almost at once on the public mind.
The African sun was in its veins—fire and sweetness, intense love of
beauty, fierce rebellion against the things that be, passion and pity
and the pride of Lucifer combined. These things too Olive Schreiner’s
face and figure revealed—a wonderful beauty and vivacity, a
lightning-quick mind, fine eyes, a resolute yet mobile mouth, a
determined little square-set body. It was right—since alliances are so
often knit by contrast—that she and Havelock Ellis should have become
friends and maintained a close correspondence with each other for over
thirty years; and it was a privilege to me to share in the friendship of
them both.
Naturally, with such gifts of body and mind the arrival of the authoress
of the _African Farm_ excited almost a _furore_ of interest. Quite a
procession of the young literary men of the day arrived in hansom-cabs
at the door of her Bloomsbury lodgings to pay their homage to the new
genius, and Olive herself often told me with considerable amusement of
the dismay and severe disapproval of more than one of her landladies,
who certainly were not inclined to believe that mere literary talent
could cause so much attraction! Anyhow, at that time of day, before the
suffragette had arrived, and when ‘ladies’ took the greatest care to
bridle in their chins and speak in mincing accents, a young and pretty
woman of apparently lady-like origin who did not wear a veil and seldom
wore gloves, and who talked and laughed even in the streets quite
naturally and unaffectedly, was an unclassifiable phenomenon, and laid
herself open to the gravest suspicions! We may congratulate ourselves
that the pioneer women of to-day have made a return to some of these
inhumanities of the Victorian era impossible.