fairly frequently—that is, when she was in England (or Europe). I saw
her in Paris early in ’87, and at Todmorden and Whitby later in the same
year; also at Alassio where she stayed for two or three months in ’88.
Those two years ’87 and ’88 were a period of considerable suffering for
her. In 1893 she was in England again, and spent three months during the
summer in a little cottage in my valley. After ’93, what with her
marriage to S. C. Cronwright, and what with the outbreak of the Boer War
and all the tragedies attendant upon that, she did not come to England
for a long period, and it was on the last day of 1913 that I saw her
again, after a twenty years’ absence.
Her father was a German Free Church Missionary—of the most tender
self-forgetful type—the original doubtless of the German overseer in
_The African Farm_. Olive herself has often told me how he would give
away his last coin to any one he deemed to be in need. His wife would
say to him:—
“John, where is that best Sunday coat of yours?” And he would say:—
“Is it not upstairs in the chest, as usual?”
“No, John, I have been looking for it everywhere.”
“How very strange” was the reply.
“Now, John, I believe you have given it away!”
“No, surely, my dear, I could not have given _that_ away—at least I
think not.”
“John! now tell me true, did you not give it to that _tramp_ that came
yesterday?”
“Well, my dear, now you mention it I think I _may_ have done so; it is
just possible you are right, but I am sure I hardly remember.”
“Oh John! John! you are indeed incorrigible.”
That was the picture of the father—soft, pitiful and dreamy. The mother,
Rebecca Lyndall by her maiden name, was of English descent, keen,
intellectual, fine featured and somewhat self-willed. The two types were
combined in their daughter; and she again in writing her novel divided
them up. ‘Waldo’ represented one side of her own character, ‘Lyndall’
the other.
Perhaps there was a tragic element in the combination of two such
different hereditary strains in the one person; perhaps there were other
causes. Certain it is that beneath the mobile and almost merry-seeming
exterior of Olive Schreiner there ran a vein of intense determination,
and that this again was crossed and countered by an ineradicable
pessimism. _The Story of an African Farm_, despite its magical and
beautiful pictures, is painful to read; and the same may be said of her
other books. They realize and force the reader to realize almost _too_
keenly the pain and evil of the world—too keenly I mean for truth and
fact. Yet what is fact but what we feel; and if Olive Schreiner _feels_
things so, so far her presentment is true. I have seen her shake her
little fist at the Lord in heaven, and curse him down from his throne,
with a vibrating force and intensity which surely must have been felt
(and surely also with healthy result) in the Highest Circles.
A lady who had spent forty years of her life working in the Mission
Schools of South Africa once said to me—and this was quite in her old
age, when she was nearing eighty—“Ah!” she said, “the Kaffirs are the
finest people on earth. You English think a lot about yourselves, but I
tell you, you are not to be compared with the Kaffirs.” Olive Schreiner
was born in Basuto Land. She grew up and spent her early life among the
natives, and in many ways her verdict was the same as that just quoted.
She loved the dark folk and their land, and she has never ceased to love
them. It has been one of the tragedies of her life that she has been
compelled to stand by and witness the crushing of this free and
fine-souled people beneath the sordid heel of Western Commercialism—or
let us say “the attempted crushing,” for indeed (thank heaven!) the
process is not yet complete. It has been her agony to see them at every
moment cajoled and betrayed of their lands, broken with labour in the
mines, deceived with drink, and mowed down with machine-guns—and all
this by the very Christian race that ought to have lent them a helping
hand; and to have been able to do so little (as it would seem to her)
for their salvation. But even though it would seem little, the fact that
one woman in South Africa has thus prophet-like stood up and (much of
the time) singly opposed Rhodes and the shoddy Imperialism of which he
was the mouthpiece, _has_ had an influence deep and wide reaching and
such as will be felt far down the years.
Another thing that has formed almost a tragedy in Olive Schreiner’s life
has been her dedication to the Cause of Women. No one can read her
_Three Dreams in a Desert_ or her _Woman and Labour_ without feeling how
in the consciousness of the sufferings of Woman the iron has entered
into her soul. If she had only been content—like some of the wilder
spirits of the movement—to unload on _men_ the vials of her wrath, and
to saddle on _man_kind alone the responsibility for these sufferings,
her strain in the cause would have had more of the delight of battle in
it. But she was too large-minded not to see that if there is to be any
blame in such a matter, the blame must be accepted by Woman herself just
as much as by Man. The two sexes are joined together, and if Man has
been unworthy has it not been because Woman his mother has made him so?
If Woman has played the parasite has that not resulted in her injuring
Man? Olive Schreiner’s perception of the slow inevitable strain and
suffering inseparable from Evolution itself in this matter of the
emancipation of women, has had a complexion of tragedy in it. She has
seen her dearest friends, like Constance Lytton and others, crippled and
broken for life by their heroic struggles and undaunted resolution in
face of prison-horrors; and yet she has felt that the evil lay deeper
than any accusation against men (taken by itself) could explain, or any
mere reform of the suffrage could mend.
It is curious how South Africa, to those who know the country well,
carries with it a fascination and an attraction which time and again
draws them back to its soil. A friend of mine who lived for some years
around Lake Nyassa told me that after his return to England he
frequently dreamt at night of all that wild region and its primitive
animal life. On more than one occasion he dreamed that he was wrecked at
sea, and swam desperately to the African coast, if only he might die as
it were in the arms of his beloved; or he would make an imaginary
pilgrimage from London to the very shores of the Lake, and there in a
kind of ecstasy would take the water up in his palms and wash it over
his face and head—only to wake up and find his features wet with his own
tears.
This was Henry B. Cotterill—a schoolfellow of mine at the Brighton
College—where indeed his father was headmaster. About the time (1875 or
so) when I was lecturing Astronomy at Leeds, Livingstone’s book came out
exposing the horrors of the black slave traffic around Lakes Tanganyika
and Nyassa—a region at that time entirely, except by Livingstone
himself, unexplored by white men. The book bit deeply into Cotterill’s
heart and soul. It said that the only cure for the Mahomedan or Arabian
trade in slaves would be the introduction of a trade by white men in the
legitimate articles of commerce; and from that moment Cotterill could
not rest, goaded on by the thought that _he_ must undertake this work.
At the time he was acting as an assistant master at Harrow School. He
started lecturing there and at other places round the country on the
subject. He collected a fund; the Harrow boys and masters gave him a
steel launch or cutter which could be taken up country in sections and
screwed together; he came to Leeds and spoke there, as well as at places
like Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool; the fund grew; and I remember
going with him to some African warehouse in London City, where he bought
bales of cotton cloth, and hundredweights of beads, and quantities of
scarlet shell-jackets (especially coveted by African chieftains as their
sole garment) for purposes of barter up country. Thus off his own bat,
as it were, he got up this strange mission, and leaving Harrow and
pedagogy behind, embarked on a career of considerable adventure and
danger. The mission succeeded, ordinary traders followed in his
footsteps, and within a few years the slave-trade engineered by Moors
and Arabs died out in the land. It was followed, it is true, by the
almost equal horrors of that commercial civilization which has since
been introduced by Europeans; but I suppose one must be thankful in the
slow and age-long evolution of human affairs for even one small step
towards better things.
At a later time Cotterill returned to England, but unable, like many
another traveler and lover of the wild, to endure the smug Philistinism
of British life, he ultimately settled on the Continent—or rather led a
somewhat roving life there, chiefly in France, Germany and
Italy—supporting himself and a small family by the not too lucrative
pursuits of literature and the teaching of languages. He has written and
edited many books, to which his encyclopædic knowledge and command of
six or seven languages have contributed; but undoubtedly his great and
monumental work has been the translation of the Odyssey of Homer
complete into English hexameters.[26] Daring is the man who ventures on
that exceedingly boggy ground of the English hexameter, and many are
those who have gone under and been gulfed in the attempt. By lightness
and speed of movement only can one keep going; but in those qualities—so
characteristic of the Greek—this translation is supremely successful;
its verbal fidelity is amazing; its presentation of the old warrior and
tribal life (made possible as he himself says by his intimate knowledge
of African customs) is such as no armchair scholar could attain to; and
the result is a gift to the whole English-speaking world—a rendering of
the immortal classic that one may read with unflagging joy and zest from
cover to cover.
XIII
PERSONALITIES—II
The part that Olive Schreiner played in trying to avert the Boer War,
and to expose the scoundrelly commercial machinations which led to it,
is well known. Curiously enough, while England was being worked up by a
lying Press into a fury of indignation against President Krüger I knew
already early in 1899 about the real state of affairs and the plot of
the financiers to force on a reckless and selfish war—not only from
Olive Schreiner herself but from a man who came at that time to
Millthorpe from Johannesburg.
This was Lisle March-Phillipps—who afterwards wrote _With Rimington_ and
other books about the war. He was a young man of about thirty, who after
an upper-class education on the usual lines had had the good sense to go
abroad and see a little of the world for himself; had drifted out to
South Africa, and had actually worked in the mines and shared the life
of the miners. Disgusted with what he saw of the Beit and Joel and
Rhodes and Barney Barnato gang—their meanness to their employees, their
slanders against Krüger, their nonsense lies about British “women and
children,” and foreseeing the inevitable conflict, he hurried
home—thinking doubtless also that he might do something to make the
actual truth known in England. For some reason, not very clear to me as
we had had no previous communication, he came straight to Millthorpe,
and walking in one afternoon sat a long time telling me all about the
affair. I saw at once that his errand was authentic and that he knew
what he was talking about, and from that time did my best in my small
way, at public meetings and lectures, to get the matter seen in its true
light, and to check the rising war-tide. All of no use of course. The
gulled sentimental sloppy British public poured itself out in a torrent
of rubbish—as a broken reservoir might pour through the slums and alleys
of a manufacturing town; and it was hopeless even to protest. It is one
of the saddest things to find how easily the great majority of a nation
may be caught and swept away by some trumped-up catchword, often of the
most flimsy character. I wrote a warning leaflet entitled _Boer and
Briton_ and circulated some twenty thousand copies of it. I spoke with
L. H. Courtney (now Lord Courtney) and others at a public meeting at
Bradford, and at various other meetings. Mr. W. T. Stead did his best to
warn the nation as to what was happening; Cronwright-Schreiner came over
from the Cape, and later H. W. Nevinson also, in a crusade through
England and Scotland. To no purpose: they only got mobbed and insulted
for their pains. Finally March-Phillipps, anxious to see at close
quarters all that was going on and unable to get a billet as
war-correspondent, went out again and joined Rimington’s Scouts; and
after the war was over—returning to Millthorpe and taking a cottage
there—remained near us a good part of the summer and wrote his very
graphic and interesting account of the campaign as witnessed and taken
part in by him.[27]
It was at an early period of the Socialist movement—in 1884 I think—that
I first came across Henry Salt and his gifted life-companion and wife,
and it is to their initiative that I owe the gain of a close and
long-enduring friendship. Salt and his brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes,
were two young Eton masters who had in their time been collegers and
scholars of Eton and afterwards graduates of King’s College, Cambridge.
Carried along on the rising tide of Socialism they both (much to their
credit) broke away from the highly respectable traditions of these
foundations. Henry George of Land Tax fame was in the country, and
Joynes actually associated himself with George, and went with him in
1881 or ’82 on a propagandist campaign to Ireland. This might well have
passed unobserved at Eton, had it not happened that at some obscure
place he and George were both temporarily arrested and had to spend the
night under lock and key. The notoriety this gave to Joynes was fatal to
his career, and he had to resign his mastership. Henry Salt and his wife
about the same time gave almost worse offence. They adopted
vegetarianism—a thing almost unheard of at Eton except in the dubious
connection of Shelley; they revolted in their personal habits from the
luxury and indulgence of the life there; and they protested against the
coursing of hares, and other inhumanities favored by both boys and
masters. It soon became clear to them that they could not remain in
surroundings so uncongenial, and that they too would have to sacrifice a
professional career and comparative affluence for the greater blessings
of liberty and a simple living; and it was at the time when they were
revolving their schemes of liberation and of migration into other
spheres of life that I came—through Jim Joynes—to know them.
Joynes and his sister were singularly unlike externally, yet singularly
alike in the depths of their hearts and in their devotion to each other.
Both were tall and long-limbed: she dark, raven-haired, with large eyes
and sensitive, somewhat sad, Dante-like profile; he red-haired, with
high complexion, small bluish eyes, heavy features. She was intensely
emotional, too emotional, but—as such people often are—highly musical;
and her literary gift was certainly one of the most remarkable I have
known—though unfortunately, except in her letters, rarely utilized. He
was intensely logical, concentrated, determined—though underneath ran a
strong current of poetic feeling—as witness his little book of excellent
verses _On Lonely Shores_ (1892). Both of them did good work in
connection with the Socialist and Labour movement, he more especially by
lecturing and writing for the Social Democratic Federation and other
such organizations; and she rather more by personal sympathy and helpful
friendship towards the rank and file of the workers; both of them were
devoted lovers of Nature, and of a natural plain way of life; and their
devotion to each other only ended with his too early death in 1893.
These two and Henry Salt were among the pioneers in the early eighties
of the great Socialist and Humanitarian and Nature movements which are
destined to play such an important part in the new Democracy. Henry
Salt’s work in founding the Humanitarian League (in 1891) and presiding
over its very various activities has been so really extensive and
far-reaching that it is difficult to estimate—the more so because unlike
so many leaders of movements he has always kept his own name
consistently in the background. As a matter of fact he has not only been
the main originator of the important work done, but has been the guiding
hand and inspirer of the many committees which have had to be formed in
order to deal with the various subjects—with Vivisection, Blood Sports,
‘Murderous Millinery,’ Reform of the Prisons, the Game Laws,
Slaughter-house Reform, Corporal Punishment, Diet Reform, Rights of
Native Races, and so forth. Besides this the long list of his
publications—on Shelley, on James Thomson (B.V.), on H. D. Thoreau,
Richard Jefferies, Lucretius, etc., shows the trend of his mind and his
liberating influence in the matters of religion and social freedom and a
large-minded Nature-study.
At one time he and I composed jointly “A Church Service for the use of
the Respectable Classes”—which I am afraid however has never yet been
properly published. It consisted of a Preface, in the manner of our
Prayer-book Preface of 1661, of a sort of Athanasian Creed (on the
Trinity of Land, Capital and Interest) called the creed of St.
Avaritius, of a Litany (on the lines of salvation through dividends and
social advancement), and a final Processional Hymn. Of this last, as it
has already been printed among some of Salt’s verses, the two first
stanzas may here be given:—
Respectables are we
And you presently will see
Why we confidently claim to be respected:
In well-ordered homes we dwell
And discharge our duties well—
Well dressed, well fed, well mannered, well connected.
We have heard the common cant
About poverty and want
And all that is distressing and unhealthy;
Some cases may be sad,
But the system can’t be bad
Which affords such satisfaction to the Wealthy.
And so on.
On one occasion a boy brought to Mrs. Salt a young rook which had been
hurt (so he said) by falling out of its nest, and as she and her husband
had been staying with us, the bird became for some time an inmate of our
establishment. But though it became familiar, as was natural, with us,
and would fly in and out of the door or window, and perch on hand or
head quite freely, its devotion to Mrs. Salt was something almost
uncanny. Indoors or outdoors it _would_ be with her; and if she went
into town for a few hours, or anywhere that she could not take the bird,
she had to escape by ruse, or by simply caging the creature first. When
she sat on the lawn it would delight to play and dance around, and to
pick daisies with its beak and place them in her lap, or bright and
shining pebbles from the gravel walk. Anything more like an engaging
human child it would be hard to imagine. And it certainly seemed to know
by some intuition of her return after absence along the road, and if
caged would become very restless, or if free would fly to meet her. Once
after a long absence, when she appeared once more—in the midst, as it
happened, of a small crowd of people—the bird with a loud cry suddenly
flew down from a tall tree and alighted forthwith upon her shoulder—much
to the astonishment of the onlookers. Later, and after some months of
this kind of life, the bird one day disappeared; nor could we ever find
out what had happened to it—whether an accident or the mere “call of the
wild” back to rook-land. It was seen no more, alive or dead; and one
human heart at any rate felt the loss very deeply.
I have mentioned 1881 as the year in which _Towards Democracy_ ‘came to
me,’ and insisted on being given form and expression. It is curious that
the same year (or 1882) saw the inception of a number of new movements
or enterprises tending towards the establishment of mystical ideas and a
new social order. Mother Shipton’s prophecy with its strange
prognostication of mechanically propelled cars and flying machines ended
up with the words:—
And the world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-one.
The world did not come to an end, but in a certain sense a new one
began; and just in those two years quite a number of societies were
started with objects of the kind indicated. Hyndman’s Democratic
Federation, Edmund Gurney’s Society for Psychical Research, Mme.
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, the Vegetarian Society, the
Anti-vivisection movement, and many other associations of the same kind
marked the coming of a great reaction from the smug commercialism and
materialism of the mid-Victorian epoch, and a preparation for the new
universe of the twentieth century. Amongst these was one which
especially claimed to fulfil the prophecies of Mother Shipton and to be
the herald of a New Age. This was the Hermetic Society. It consisted
practically of two people—Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford; for though
there was a nominal membership I think it may be said that the other
members had little or no voice in it. And its idea was to read into the
stories of Jesus, and of Moses and Abraham and so forth, their inner
significations, to interpret in fact much of the New and Old Testaments
not as historical matter but rather as eternal truths, allegories and
emblems of the drama of each human soul. Thus the miraculous birth of
Jesus, his exile in Egypt, his temptation in the wilderness, his toils
and sufferings, his Betrayal, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension
were not external histories of a certain man, but inner histories of you
and me and all mankind.
This method of interpreting the myths of past days, which we now in the
twentieth century so well understand, and which explains for us the
origin of a vast number of legends and at the same time accounts for
their popularity, was in 1881—except for some few previous hints by
Swedenborg and others—quite unrecognized. And we owe much to Edward
Maitland and Anna Kingsford that they gave it, as well as some valuable
collateral matter, to the world. Of course they did not fully
recognize—though they did in part—how much of the story of Jesus, for
instance, _is_ purely legendary and mythical. But even if they had known
it to be entirely legendary, that would not probably have greatly
altered their views—though it would certainly have deprived their gospel
of the supernatural halo with which they delighted to invest it.
It was this affectation, if I may use the term, of a supernatural
mission which rather spoilt the work of these two well-meaning people—as
it has spoiled alas! the work of so many ‘prophets’ and teachers in the
past. To the egotism of the human being there is no end; and if such an
one can only persuade others that he has some supernatural source of
knowledge and power, or persuade himself (or herself) of the same, there
is no limit to the devilry or folly into which he will plunge—as witness
the history of the priesthood all down the centuries. In the case of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland it was not devilry which was the
trouble, but the other thing! Having reached a certain insight or
intuition, or whatever you may call it, into the inner meanings of life,
they both became so inflated with heavenly conceit over their discovery
that they really grew quite foolish and intolerable. As it happened I
had known Maitland since I was a boy. When I was eighteen or twenty
years of age he a grown man, and known in the literary world as the
author of _The Pilgrim and the Shrine_, used sometimes to come to my
father’s house at Brighton. He was an interesting talker, well up in
literature and science, and always keen on some new idea or discovery;
but even then somewhat egotistically absorbed in his own thoughts and
conversation. When he met the lady, however, who became his great
life-inspiration, it must be said that he submerged all his own claims
to prophetic gifts in a whole-hearted recognition of hers. He laid his
soul at her feet.
Anna Kingsford was certainly a remarkable woman. As a young girl she had
had strange visions. When Maitland met her (she being twenty-seven) she
must from all descriptions have been singularly beautiful. He describes
her as “tall, slender and graceful in form; fair and exquisite in
complexion; bright and sunny in expression. The hair long and golden,
but the brows and lashes dark, and the eyes deep-set and hazel, and by
turns dreamy and penetrating. The mouth rich, full, and exquisitely
formed.” While Mrs. Fenwick Miller says: “I thought her the most
faultlessly beautiful woman I ever beheld; her hair is like the
sunlight, her features are exquisite, and her complexion—I can use no
other term than faultless—not a spot, not a flaw, not a shade.”