Paris, a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin, considerable literary
ability and a generous and undisguised use of cosmetics, and you have a
strange but powerful combination. Edward Maitland met her in 1874 (he
was then fifty and she twenty-eight), and practically thenceforward
dedicated his life to her. (It must however be remembered that the
intimacy caused no estrangement from Mr. Kingsford, the husband, who
remained a close friend to them both.) The reinforcement of Anna
Kingsford’s intuitive and prophetic gift by Maitland’s incisive and
logical mentality certainly had a valuable result, and their combined
work left a notable mark on the time. Jointly from 1881 (to 1888 when
Anna Kingsford died) they carried on a strong Crusade against
Vivisection—one of the earliest protests made; and they published
besides a series of works—_The Perfect Way_, _Clothed with the Sun_,
_The Virgin of the World_, etc.—bearing the esoteric and theosophic
message to which I have already alluded. Of these _The Perfect Way_,
which shows both the systematic clearness of the one mind and the
inspiration of the other, is perhaps the most important. It embodies in
fairly clear outline those ideas of Indian and Gnostic origin which were
at that time curiously descending upon the Western world, and which no
doubt quite independently began about the same time to be spread abroad
by Mme. Blavatsky and the Theosophic Society. Portions of this book, and
large portions of _Clothed with the Sun_ were apparently spoken by Mrs.
Kingsford under trance conditions, and have a certain fine quality and
atmosphere about them. They seem to indicate things actually seen in the
inner world of being; but they suffer, as such communications must do,
from the medium through which they come. Large portions of _The Perfect
Way_ degenerate into mere drivel, and large portions of _Clothed with
the Sun_ are offensive (as their authoress herself often personally was)
with a kind of spiritual arrogance. It is curious that those two
prophetesses Anna Kingsford and Sophie Blavatsky—though so very
different in personal exterior—should have been so like each other in
many respects. Both undoubtedly had access to trance-conditions and to
some region of astral intelligence or earth memory; both (as happens in
such cases) dug out for us some shining jewels of truth, but mixed at
the same time with a huge mass of rubbish. (No words can describe the
general rot and confusion of Blavatsky’s _Secret Doctrine_.) Both were
emotional in their different ways to an abnormal degree; and both were,
fortunately for themselves, associated with coadjutors of cool and
intellectual temperament—Mrs. Kingsford with Maitland, and Blavatsky
with Mrs. Besant. Both had really great and remarkable gifts; and both,
notwithstanding their high calling, descended to strange and unworthy
subterfuges—Blavatsky to common juggleries and Anna Kingsford to a most
deliberate and disagreeable ‘pose.’ At the Hermetic Society’s meetings
the latter would take the chair in state—after the style of the Great
Panjandrum—and if any humble member of the audience asked a simple
question like “Do you think, Mrs. Kingsford, that the soul survives
after death?”—she would draw herself up, close her eyes, and say “_I
know_,” and sit down again! On one celebrated occasion I remember that
at the close of the meeting, Edward Maitland rose and referring to the
epoch-making speech of the Lady-president on “The finding of the
Christ,” pointed out that that very meeting was indeed a world-event.
For just as the _Kings_ of the East came across the _ford_ of the Jordan
to lay their treasures at the feet of the infant Saviour, so now the
treasures of Eastern thought were being brought across the world for the
birth of a new Redeemer in the West, and by one whose name was most
appropriately and prophetically none other than _Kingsford_!! After that
we could naturally do nothing but dissolve along our different lines—in
tears, or laughter, or through the doorways and passages, as the case
might be. We poor little mortals must be grateful for what illuminations
we can get, however quaint or queer the mediating personalities may be.
The years from 1881 onward were certainly a new era for me. They not
only brought me _Towards Democracy_, but they marked the oncoming of a
great new tide of human life over the Western World, and so—partly
through the book itself—brought me into touch with a number of people
and movements. It was a fascinating and enthusiastic period—preparatory,
as we now see, to even greater developments in the twentieth century.
The Socialist and Anarchist propaganda, the Feminist and Suffragist
upheaval, the huge Trade-union growth, the Theosophic movement, the new
currents in the Theatrical, Musical and Artistic worlds, the torrent
even of change in the Religious world—all constituted so many streams
and headwaters converging, as it were, to a great river. To be in fairly
close touch, as time went on, with these movements and their (English)
representatives—with men and women like John Burns, Cunninghame Graham,
Mrs. Despard, H. M. Hyndman, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, the Bruce
Glasiers, Pete Curran, Ramsay Macdonald, Walter Crane, Sydney Olivier,
H. W. Nevinson, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, F. R. Benson, Granville
Barker, Iden Payne, Mona Limerick, Isadora Duncan, Margaret Macmillan,
Lowes Dickinson, G. P. Gooch, G. M. Trevelyan, Roger Fry, Rutland
Boughton, Granville Bantock, Laurence Housman, William Rothenstein, R.
J. Campbell, E. W. Lewis, the Sidney Webbs, Olive Schreiner, Isabel
Margesson, Edith Ellis, Alfred Russel Wallace, Oliver Lodge, George
Barnes of the A.S.E., C. T. Cramp of the A.S.R.S., Stephen Reynolds of
the Fisheries, Raymond Unwin of Garden Suburbs, Cecil Reddie of
Abbotsholme, James Devon of the Prisons Commission, Edward Westermarck,
Havelock Ellis, and so forth—was indeed an extraordinary inspiration and
encouragement. Practically all these (and I have not mentioned the
foreign friends and coadjutors) were giving their lives to the
furtherance of some tributary of the great movement, and each of them
represented hundreds or perhaps thousands of others who were doing the
same. One felt that something massive must surely emerge from it all.
It was no wonder that Hyndman—whose name I have put near the beginning
of this list—becoming conscious as early as 1881 of the new forces all
around in the social world was filled with a kind of fervour of
revolutionary anticipation. We used to chaff him because at every crisis
in the industrial situation he was confident that the Millennium was at
hand—that the S.D.F. would resolve itself into a Committee of Public
Safety, and that it would be for him as Chairman of that body to guide
the ship of the State into the calm haven of Socialism! The S.F.D. was
constituted in the early eighties; when 1889 was impending it was
obvious that that year, as centenary of the first outbreak of the French
Revolution would be the fateful date. I remember his telling me, not
without gleeful rubbing of hands, that the whole Society of London
Stevedores (whom he had been addressing at the Docks) was behind him to
a man, and would come without fail to his support. 1889 however passed,
with nothing more effectual than the Socialist Congress at Paris—at
which a great deal of dissension and difference of opinion was
manifested. Then came ’99, the last year of the century and clearly big
with destiny; and he piled his hopes upon that. But it alas! only gave
birth to the Boer War—which put things back for many a year. And after
that 1909 and other dates did but provide further material for
disappointment. And yet all the time the Socialist clock was really
going forward, and though there was no sudden revolution or conversion,
the nation steadily and almost unconsciously became saturated with the
new ideas. Hyndman—though no doubt disappointed from time to time—stuck
gamely to his ‘cause’—and it was largely through his personal exertions
that the educational work begun by him in ’81 was carried to such
fruition that in 1914 with the German War the Government and the country
suddenly adopted large sections of the Socialist programme (without
calling them Socialist of course) as the most natural thing in the
world!
That neither Hyndman in his time, nor Morris in his, nor the Fabian
Society in theirs, nor Keir Hardie, nor Kropotkin, nor Blatchford, nor
any other individual or body, succeeded in capturing the social movement
during these years and moulding it to his or their hearts’ desire, must
always be matter for congratulation. For once pocketed by any clique it
would have pined and dwindled into an insignificant thing; but, as I
have just tried to show, the real movement of this period has been far
too great for such a destiny. It is like a great river, fed by currents
and streams flowing into it from the most various directions and
gathering a force which no man can now control and a volume too great to
be confined.
One regrets that Hyndman’s efforts to get into Parliament have never
been crowned with success. Not that he would have been any use in the
House as a party-leader (Labour or Socialist). Much the reverse; for
though personally the most good-natured man in the world he had an
extraordinary gift for falling foul of all his friends in the political
arena. But because it would have been a satisfaction—and there would
have been a certain poetical justice in it—to see Hyndman face to face
with the bogeys of his own propaganda, the representatives of the
established order, and trouncing them to his heart’s content. With an
excellent command of statistics and finance, a good knowledge of
political conditions and the diplomatic _personnel_ over Europe, two
great causes close to his heart in the championship of our colored
subjects in India and our white wage-slaves at home, and with a vigorous
and ready tongue, he would surely, off his own bat, have made the House
sit up, and compelled its attention to some neglected things.
Nevertheless he would never I think under any circumstances have been a
great force in politics; for curiously enough notwithstanding his mental
vigour and energy there was a certain want of _weight_ about his
personality which prevented his influence carrying very far. On the
platform, with his waving beard and flowing frock-coat, his high and
spacious forehead and head somewhat low and weak behind, he gave one
rather the impression of a shop whose goods are all in the front window;
and though a good and incisive speaker his frequent gusts of invective
seemed out of keeping with the obvious natural kindliness of the man and
rather suggested the idea that he was lashing himself up with his own
tail.
The frock-coat and tall hat were always of course _de rigueur_ with
him—not I imagine that they were particularly congenial to his Socialist
ideals, but because they were a necessary part of his outfit and
‘make-up’ on the stage of the Stock Exchange; for no doubt the Stock
Exchange as the centre of our Commercial system will cling to these old
symbols of the industrial capitalist era to the very last.
A young friend of mine, who was at one time clerk to Albert Grant of
City fame, told me the following story. One day while he was sitting in
Grant’s office H. M. Hyndman was announced, and walked in, frock-coat
and all. My friend left the room while the two conferred—the well-known
Socialist with the even more well-known German Jew and Company-promoter.
Grant’s reputation was not of the highest—or if it could be called
“high” at all it was only in the sense in which game is sometimes so
called. When the visitor was gone and my young friend returned to the
room, Grant said, rubbing his hands “Do you know who that is? Do you
know who that is? That is Mr. Hyndman, the great Socialist. You see, you
see, with all their talk, even _they_ cannot get on without _me_.”
I do not for a moment suppose that Hyndman’s dealings on this occasion
were anything to be ashamed of; but Albert Grant’s transactions were
commonly thought to be of a shady character. Perhaps to make up for
that, he bought with some of his gains the site of Leicester Square,
converted it into a public garden, and presented it to the public. In
consideration of this, and possibly other things, he was made a
Baron—Baron Grant. Whereupon some wag wrote the following distich:—
Princes can Rank confer, but Honour can’t;
Rank without honour is a barren (Baron) grant.
I have mentioned Walt Whitman more than once in the foregoing pages, and
I think I ought not to let this chapter pass without referring to the
ardent little coterie at Bolton in Lancashire who for many years
celebrated his birthday with songs and speeches and recitations, with
decorations of lilac-boughs and blossoms and the passing of loving cups
to his memory. J. W. Wallace was the president, and Dr. Johnston, Fred.
Wild, J. W. Dixon, Charles F. Sixsmith, were some of the earlier members
of this little club, which met quite frequently from 1885 onward for
twenty years or more. If there was a somewhat Pickwickian note about its
revels still no one could doubt the sincerity of its enthusiasm. It
helped largely to spread the study and appreciation of Whitman’s work in
the North of England; it welcomed Dr. Bucke on his arrival from Canada
with congratulatory addresses and hymns of its own composing; some of
its members (the two first-mentioned) crossed the Atlantic on a
pilgrimage to the good grey poet; and Dr. Johnston wrote a quite
excellent little book _A Visit to Walt Whitman_ descriptive of Whitman’s
personality and surroundings, which I believe is now being reissued from
the Press in conjunction with some Notes on the same subject by Wallace.
In later years I have been able to count Dr. Johnston and Charlie
Sixsmith among my own constant friends.
I will conclude this chapter with a few brief notes on my almost
lifelong friend Arunáchalam. I feel that I owe a great debt to him
because long ago, in ’80 perhaps or ’81 he gave me a translation of a
book, then little known in England, the _Bhagavat Gita_—the reading of
which as I think I have said before, curiously liberated and set in
movement the mass of material which had already formed within me, and
which was then waiting to take shape as _Towards Democracy_. As when a
ship is ready to launch, a very little thing, the mere knocking away of
a prop, will set her going; so—though it was something more than
that—did the push of the _Bhagavat Gita_ act on _Towards Democracy_. It
gave me the needed cue, and concatenated my work to the Eastern
tradition.
I first came across Arunáchalam at a meeting of the _Chitchat_ or some
such society at Cambridge, when he was an undergraduate of Christ’s and
I a newly made Fellow of Trinity Hall. As in the case of other Hindus
his extraordinary quickness and receptiveness of mind had very quickly
rendered him _au fait_ in all our British ways and institutions. With
engagingly good and natural manners, humorous and with some of the Tamil
archness and bedevilment about him, he was already a favorite in his own
college—and at that time these early comers to the Universities from
India were certainly received by our students with more friendliness and
sense of equality than they are to-day. His father having been a wealthy
man and occupying a good position in Ceylon, Arunáchalam had received a
good education and was fairly well up in Greek and Latin, French and
German, and their literatures, besides his own Eastern languages, like
Tamil and Sanskrit. Altogether he was a very taking, all-round sort of
fellow, capable of talking on most subjects, and full of interested
inquiry about all. Many were the afternoons or evenings we spent
together—walking or boating or sitting by the fireside in College
rooms—and I learned much from him about the literature of India and the
manners and customs of the mainland and Ceylon. When he left Cambridge
he went to London and studied Law for some years, and then going out to
Ceylon joined the Civil Service there, and in due time became Judge,
Registrar-General, and finally Member of the Legislative Council. In
1890 he wrote to me about the Gñani Ramaswamy whose acquaintance he had
made, and asked me to come out and meet him; and I gladly went—for it
just chimed in with my wishes at the time; and, as I have told in my
_Visit to a Gñani_ and elsewhere, for six weeks or so we called on the
Guru every day and absorbed all he had to say on the traditional
esoteric philosophy of India in general and of the Tamils in particular.
After settling in Ceylon, Arunáchalam paid from time to time various
visits to England, at one time to bring his wife over, at another to put
his sons to College, and so on. The last occasion was in 1913 when he
received a tardy recognition of his really important services to the
Crown in the form of a knighthood.
On these occasions, whether he was conversing with the humblest of my
friends at Millthorpe or at Sheffield, or with high officials and “great
ladies” in London his manners had always just the same charming
frankness and grace about them, which established at once the _human_
relation as the paramount thing. And yet this man, whose artistic
culture and practical knowledge of the world was miles above most people
he met, had often to suffer from the boorish rudeness of Anglo-Indians
in his own land, or of belated Britishers on board ship. Alas, for the
vulgarity of my countrymen!
I cannot leave him without one little anecdote. Being a guest on some
occasion at a Mansion House dinner he was duly of course introduced to
the various bigwigs present, and took his seat with the rest; but
immediately caused consternation (being a vegetarian) by refusing
turtle-soup and other carnivorous dishes in favour of spinach, potatoes
and the like, and finally nearly wrecked the whole show by asking for a
glass of water! Such a thing had never been heard of before. Waiters
hurried to and fro, but water could not be found; and at last, with many
apologies, he was asked to put up with a bottle of Apollinaris
(“Whiskey, sir, with it?” “No, thank you”)!
XIV
LONDON AND LECTURES
Having many friends in London, and a good many relations, I naturally,
during all the years of my sojourn at Millthorpe, have been in the habit
of paying fairly frequent visits to the big city. It is good to have
one’s roots in the country, but it is also necessary to have one’s
branches in the great towns where one can come into contact with the
winds and storms of human life.
A considerable social storm at which I was present was that of the
so-called “Bloody Sunday” in November ’87. A socialist meeting had been
announced for 3 p.m. in Trafalgar Square, to protest against the Irish
policy of the Government, and the authorities (for conscience doth make
cowards of us all) probably thinking Socialism a much greater ‘terror’
than it really was, had vetoed the meeting and drawn a ring of police,
two deep, all round the interior part of the Square. Of course the
Socialists had to make an active protest, if only in order to bring the
case into court; and three leading members of the S.D.F.—Hyndman, John
Burns and Cunninghame Graham—agreed to march up arm-in-arm and force
their way if possible into the charmed circle. Somehow Hyndman was lost
in the crowd on the way to the battle, but Graham and Burns pushed their
way through, challenged the forces of ‘Law and Order,’ came to blows,
and were duly mauled by the police, arrested, and locked up.
I was in the Square at the time, and like most of the crowd there more
as a sightseer than anything else. Indeed, though a large crowd it was
of a most good-humored and peaceable kind; but the way in which it was
‘worked up,’ provoked and irritated by the authorities, was a caution;
and gave me the strongest impression that this was done purposely, with
the intention of leading to a collision. If this was not so the only
explanation must be that abject _fear_, on the part of the authorities,
was the moving cause. As I say, the crowd was a most good-humored,
easy-going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment
of mounted police came cantering up. The order had gone forth that we
were to be ‘kept moving.’ To keep a crowd moving is I believe a
technical term for the process of riding roughshod in all directions,
scattering, frightening and batoning the people—the idea no doubt being
to prevent the formation of knots or the consolidation of organized
bodies among the crowd. In this case there was really no sign of any
organized movement on the part of the people against the police, nor had
I heard of any plan to that effect, further than the march-up of the
three leaders already mentioned. I was standing—with my friend Robert
Muirhead, Cambridge mathematician and Smith’s Prizeman, two peaceable
enough members of society as may be supposed—on an island-refuge just
where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square, when we found
ourselves violently pushed about by mounted and foot police and told to
‘move on.’ Whether Muirhead did not move on fast enough, or what the
trouble was, was never explained; but the next moment I saw him seized
by the collar by a mounted man and dragged along, apparently towards a
police-station, while a bobby on foot aided in the arrest. I jumped to
the rescue and slanged the two constables, for which I got a whack on
the cheekbone from a baton (which distressed the more respectable
members of my family for some weeks after), but Muirhead was released,
and we soon regained our footing on the refuge, from which for some time
we watched the police continuing, at considerable risk to life and limb,
to circle round and insult the ‘mob.’ I mention these little details
just to show the kind of thing that happens. Purely as the result of
this ill-timed action there were one or two ugly rushes I believe and a
few broken heads; but the damage of ‘Bloody Sunday’ did not after all
amount to much.
The case came into Court afterwards, and Burns and Graham were sentenced
to six weeks’ imprisonment each for “unlawful assembly.” I was asked to
give evidence in favour of the defendants, and gladly consented—though I
had not much to say, except to testify to the peaceable character of the
crowd and the high-handed action of the police. In cross-examination I
was asked whether I had not seen any rioting; and when I replied in a
very pointed way “Not on the part of the _people_!” a large smile went
round the Court, and I was not plied with any more questions.
[Illustration:
_MORNING LEADER_ CARTOON, 13 MARCH, 1906.
“If Society people had to make their own clothes there would be some
curious scenes in
the streets, and many would go about attired in simply an Indian
blanket.”—Mr. EDWD.
CARPENTER at the meeting of the Humanitarian League at Essex Hall.
(By courtesy of the _Daily News_.)
]