VIIIVOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS

I know not the internal constitution of other men.... I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land.—Shelley.

THEwords quoted above would savour of self-righteousness, if put into the mouth of any one but the poet who wrote them. Coming from Shelley, they do not give that impression; for we feel of him that, as Leigh Hunt used to say, he was “a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world ... he had come from the planet Mercury.” Or, rather, he was a prophet and forerunner of a yet distant state of society upon this planet Earth, when the savagery of our past and present shall have been replaced by a civilization that is to be.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century Shelley’s influence was very powerful, not only upon the canons of poetry, but upon ideals of various kinds—upon free-thought, socialism, sex-questions, food-reform, and not a few other problems of intellectual and ethical import. The Chartist movement set the example. In a letter which I received from Eleanor Marx in 1892 she spoke of the “enormous influence” exercised by Shelley’s writings upon leading Chartists: “I have heard my father and Engels again and again speak of this; and I have heard the same from the many Chartists it has been my good fortune to know—Ernest Jones, Richard Moore, the Watsons, G. J. Harvey, and others.” What was true of Chartism held equally good of other movements;as indeed was admitted by Shelley’s detractors as well as claimed by his friends: witness Sir Leslie Stephen’s complaint that “the devotees of some of Shelley’s pet theories” had become “much noisier.” In the ’eighties, the interest aroused by the controversies that raged about Shelley, both as poet and as pioneer, was especially strong, as was proved by the renewed output of Shelleyan literature, such as Mr. Forman’s and Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s editions of the works, the biography of Dr. Dowden, and the numerous publications of the Shelley Society, dating from 1886 to 1892. It was a time when the old abusive view of Shelley, as a fiend incarnate, was giving way to the equally irrational apologetic view—the “poor, poor Shelley” period—of which Dowden was the spokesman; yet a good deal of the old bitterness still remained, and Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson’s lurid fiction, entitled “The Real Shelley,” was published as late as 1885.

It is difficult for a humble student of such a genius as Shelley to speak frankly of the debt that he owes to him, without seeming to forget his own personal unimportance; but I prefer to risk the misunderstanding than to leave the tribute unsaid. From the day when at a preparatory school I was first introduced to Shelley’s lyrics by having some stanzas of “The Cloud” set for translation into Latin, I never doubted that he stood apart from all other poets in the enchantment of his verse; and I soon learnt that there was an equal distinction in the beauty and wisdom of his thoughts; so that he became to me, as to others, what Lucretius found in Epicurus, a guide and solace in all the vicissitudes of life:

Thou art the father of our faith, and thineOur holiest precepts; from thy songs divine,As bees sip honey in some flowery dell,Cull we the glories of each golden line,Golden, and graced with life imperishable.[21]

At Eton there was little knowledge of Shelley, and still less understanding. When it was first proposed to place a bust of the poet in the Upper School, Dr. Hornby is said to have replied: “No: he was a bad man,” and to have expressed a humorous regret that he had not been educated at Harrow. I once read a paper on Shelley before the Ascham Society, and was amazed at the ignorance that prevailed about him among Eton masters: only one or two of them had any acquaintance with the longer poems; the rest had read the lines “To a Skylark”; one told us with a certain amount of pride that he had read “Adonais”; many thought the poet a libertine; and though they did not say that he was a disgrace to Eton, it was evident that that was the underlying sentiment. Several years after I had left Eton, William Cory wrote a paper for the Shelley Society on “Shelley’s Classics” (viz. his knowledge of Greek and Latin), which, in his absence, I read at one of the Society’s meetings; and I remember being surprised to find that even he regarded Shelley as a verbose and tedious writer.

From Mr. Kegan Paul, who was a friend of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, I had heard all that was known of the inner history of Shelley’s life; and as, after the publication of Dowden’s biography in 1886, the main facts were no longer in dispute, it seemed to me that the best service that could then be rendered to his memory was to show how, far from being a “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” he was a beautiful but very efficient prophet of reform. This I did, or tried to do, in various essays published about the time when the Shelley Society was beginning its work; and I was thus brought into close touch with it during the seven years of its existence. As illustrating how the old animosities still smouldered, more than sixty years after Shelley’s death, I am tempted to quote a testimonial received by me from a critic in theWestminster Review, where I found myself described as one of the writerswho grubbed amongst “the offensive matter” of Shelley’s life “with gross minds and grunts of satisfaction,” and as having made “an impudent endeavour to gain the notoriety of an iconoclast amongst social heretics with immoral tendencies and depraved desires.” There was the old genuine ring about this, and I felt that I must be on the right track as a Shelley student. I knew, too, from letters which I had received from Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law, whoseShelley Memorialswas the starting-point of all the later appreciations, that I was not writing without credentials. “For the last thirty-five years,” she wrote to me in 1888, speaking for Sir Percy Shelley and herself, “we have suffered so much from what has been written on Shelley by those who had not the capacity of understanding his character, and were utterly ignorant of the circumstances which shaped his life, that I cannot refrain from expressing our heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the comfort and pleasure we have had in reading your paper.” And later: “It is a great happiness to me to know, in my old age, that when I am gone there will be some one left to do battle for the truth against those whose nature prevents them from seeing in Shelley’s beautiful unselfish love and kindness anything but evil.”

The Shelley Society, founded by Dr. F. J. Furnivall in 1886, had the support of a large number of the poet’s admirers, among whom were Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Mr. Buxton Forman, Mr. Hermann Vezin, Dr. John Todhunter, Mr. F. S. Ellis, Mr. Stanley Little, and Mr. Bernard Shaw; and much useful work was done in the way of meetings and discussions, the publication of essays on Shelley, and facsimile reprints of some of his rarer volumes, thus throwing new light, biographical or bibliographical, on many doubtful questions. I will refer only to one of these, in which I was myself concerned, a study of “Julian and Maddalo,” which I read at a meeting in 1888, and whichwas subsequently printed in theShelley Society’s Papersand reissued as a pamphlet. Its object was to make clear what had been overlooked by Dowden, Rossetti, and the chief authorities, though hinted at by one or two writers, viz. that the story of “the maniac” (in “Julian and Maddalo”) was not, as generally supposed, a mere fanciful interpolation, but a piece of poetical autobiography, a veiled record of Shelley’s own feelings at the time of his separation from Harriet. On this point Dr. Furnivall wrote to me (April 16, 1888): “Robert Browning says he has always held the main part of your view, from the first publication of ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ but you must not push it into detail. I had a long talk with him last night.”

The greatest single achievement of the Shelley Society was the staging ofThe Cenciat the Islington Theatre, in 1886. The performance was technically a private one, as the Licenser of Plays had refused his sanction; but great public interest was aroused, and the acting of Mr. Hermann Vezin as Count Cenci, and of Miss Alma Murray as Beatrice—“the poetic actress without a rival” was Browning’s description of her—made the event one which no lover of Shelley could forget. If the Society had done nothing else than this, its existence would still have been justified.

Every literary association, like every social movement, is sure to have a humorous aspect as well as a serious one, and the Shelley Society was very far from being an exception to this beneficent rule; indeed, on looking back over its career, one has to check the impulse to be absorbed in the laughable features of the proceedings, to the exclusion of its really valuable work. The situation was rich in delightful incongruities; for the bulk of the Committee, while admiring Shelley’s poetical genius, seemed quite unaware of the conclusions to which his principles inevitably led, and of the live questions which any genuine study of Shelley was certain to awake. Accordingly, when Mr. G. W. Foote, thePresident of the National Secular Society, gave an address before a very large audience on Shelley’s religion, the Committee, with a few exceptions, marked their disgust for the lecturer’s views, which happened also to be Shelley’s, by the expedient of staying away. I think it was on an earlier occasion that Bernard Shaw appalled the company by commencing a speech with the words: “I, as a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian....” I remember how the honorary secretary, speaking to me afterwards, as to a sympathetic colleague, said that he had always understood that if a man avowed himself an atheist it was the proper thing “to go for him”; but when I pointed out that, whatever might be thought of such a course as a general rule, it would be a little difficult to act on it in a Shelley Society, he seemed struck by my suggestion. Anyhow, we did not go for Shaw; perhaps we knew that he had studied the noble art of self-defence.

Then there was sad trouble on the Committee when Dr. Aveling applied for membership, for the majority decided to refuse it—his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s—and it was only by the determined action of the chairman, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who threatened to resign if the resolution were not cancelled, that the difficulty was surmounted. This was by no means the only occasion on which William Rossetti’s sound sense rescued the Society from an absurd and impossible position; but sane as were his judgments in all practical matters, he was himself somewhat lacking in humour, as was made evident by a certain lecture which he gave us on “Shelley and Water”; a title, by the way, which might have been applied, not inaptly, to the sentiments of several of our colleagues. There are, as all Shelley students know, some curious references, in the poems, to death by drowning; and we thought that the lecturer intended to comment on these, and on any passages which might illustrate the love which Shelley felt for sailing on river or sea; we were thereforerather taken aback when we found that the lecture, which was divided into two parts, viz. “Shelley and Salt Water” and “Shelley and Fresh Water,” consisted of little more than the quotation of a number of passages. We heard the first part (I forget whether it was the salt or the fresh), and then, at Dr. Furnivall’s suggestion, the second was withdrawn. There was comedy in this; but none the less all lovers of Shelley owe gratitude to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, for he was one of the first critics to understand the real greatness of Shelley’s genius, and to appreciate not the poetry alone, but the conceptions by which it was inspired. He likewise did good service in introducing to the public some original writers, Walt Whitman among them, whose recognition might otherwise have been delayed.

But the outstanding figure of the Shelley Society was that of its founder, Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the veteran scholar and sculler, a grand old man whose unflagging ardour in his favourite pursuits might have shamed many enthusiasts who were his juniors by half a century. A born fighter, the vehemence of his disputes with certain men of letters (Swinburne, for example), was notorious; but personally he was kindness itself, and I have most pleasant recollections of the many visits which I paid him in his house near Primrose Hill, where, sitting in a big arm-chair, he would talk eagerly, as he took tea, over the men he had known or the Societies he had founded. His tea-tray used to be placed on a sort of small bridge which rested on the arms of the chair, and in his excitement over a thrilling anecdote, I have seen him forget that he was thus restricted, and springing forward send tray and tea flying together across the room. He once told me that, for hygienic reasons, he had been a vegetarian for twenty years, and had done the hardest work of his life without flesh-food: then, happening to be confined to the house with sprained ankles, he got out of health by neglecting to reduce his daily diet. Just at thatmoment a friend sent him a turkey, and he said to himself: “Now, why should this fine bird be wasted, owing to a mere whim of mine?” Thus had he relapsed into cannibalism as lightly as he relinquished it.

There was an innocence andnaïvetéabout Furnivall which at times was almost boyish; his impetuosity and total lack of discretion made him insensible to other persons’ feelings, so that he gave direful offence, and trod on the toes of many good people, without being in the least conscious of it. He ruined the Browning Society, of which he was both founder andconfounder, by an ill-advised speech about Jesus Christ, in a discussion on “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”; and in like manner, though with less serious results, he startled his Shelleyan friends, when Prometheus was the subject of debate, by asking in tones of impatience: “Whydid the fellow allow himself to be chained to the rock?Whydidn’t he show fight, as I should have done?” And certainly, when one thinks of it, there would have been trouble in the Caucasus, if Dr. Furnivall had been bidden to play the martyr’s part.

Knowing of my connection with Eton, Dr. Furnivall once came to me, in high spirits, with the news that in some researches at the British Museum he had by chance unearthed the fact that Nicholas Udall, a headmaster of Eton in the sixteenth century, and one of the recognized “worthies” of the school, had been convicted of a criminal offence—its nature I must leave my readers to surmise. I had heard this before, but I could not spoil the old man’s glee by saying so; I therefore congratulated him warmly, and asked him, in jest, whether he would not write to Dr. Warre and tell him of so interesting a discovery. “Ihavewritten to him,” he cried; and then, with a shade of real surprise and disappointment on his face: “But he’s not answered me!”

During the latter part of the Shelley Society’s career, when its fortunes were dimmed, and many ofits fashionable members had dropped off, we still continued to hold our monthly meetings at University College, Gower Street, and very quaint little gatherings some of them were. The audience at times numbered no more than five or six, and the “proceedings” might have altogether failed had it not been for two or three devoted enthusiasts who never slackened in their attendance. One of these was Mrs. Simpson, an old lady who became to the Shelley Society what Miss Flite was to the Court of Chancery inBleak House, an ever-present spectator and ally. We all liked and respected her—she was humanitarian as well as Shelleyan—but we were a little embarrassed when her filial piety prompted her to give us copies of her father’s writings, a bulky volume entitledThe Works of Henry Heavisides. It was a sobering experience to become possessed of that book, the title of which conveyed a true indication of the contents.

The Shelley Centenary (August 4, 1892) marked the climax of the cult which had had so great a vogue in the previous decade. The local meeting held at Horsham in the afternoon, when Sussex squires and literary gentlemen from London united in an attempt to whitewash Shelley’s character—those “shining garments” of his, “so little specked with mire,” as one speaker expressed it—was a very hollow affair which contrasted sharply with the London celebration held in the evening at the Hall of Science, when Mr. G. W. Foote presided, and Mr. Bernard Shaw convulsed the audience by his description of the Horsham apologetics. An account of both these meetings was written by “G.B.S.” in his best vein, and printed in theAlbemarle Review: it was in this article that he made the suggestion that Shelley should be represented, at Horsham, on a bas-relief, “in a tall hat, Bible in hand, leading his children on Sunday morning to the church of his native parish.”

That piece of sculpture has never been executed; but it would hardly have been more inappropriate thanthe two chief monuments that have been erected, the one in Christchurch Priory, Hants, the other at University College, Oxford; for what could be less in keeping with the impression left by Shelley’s ethereal genius than to figure him, as is done in both these works, as a dead body, stretched limp and pitiful like some suicide’s corpse at the Morgue? Let us rid our thoughts of all such ghastly and funereal notions of Shelley, and think of him as what he is, the poet not of death but of life,[22]that nobler life to which mankind shall yet attain, when they have learnt, in his own words:

To live as if to love and live were one.

The most human portrait of Shelley, to my thinking, is the one painted by a young American artist, William West, who met him at Byron’s villa near Leghorn, in 1822, and being greatly struck by his personality, made a rough sketch which he afterwards finished and took back to America. There it was preserved after West’s death, and reproduced for the first time in theCentury Magazinein October, 1905, with an explanatory article by its present owner, Mrs. John Dunn. By the courtesy of Mrs. Dunn, I was able to use this portrait as a frontispiece to a revised edition of my study of Shelley, published in 1913. Mr. Buxton Forman told me that he did not believe in the genuineness of the picture; but readers ofLetters about Shelley(1917) will see that Dr. Richard Garnett held a contrary opinion, and so, as I know, did Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Some account of West’s meeting with Shelley, and of his recollections of Byron, may be found in Henry Theodore Tuckerman’sBook of the Artists. His portrait of Byron is well known; and there seems to be no inherent improbability in the account given of the origin and preservation of the other picture, whichcertainly impresses one as being more in agreement with the verbal descriptions of Shelley in his later years than the almost boyish countenance so familiar in engravings.

Shelley is the greatest of the poet-pioneers of civilization, and his influence is still very far from having reached its zenith: he is “the poet of the young” in the sense that future generations will be better and better able to understand him.

Thy wisdom lacks not years, thy wisdom growsWithourgrowth and the growth of time unborn.[23]

I suffer mute and lonely, yet anotherUplifts his voice to let me know a brotherTravels the same wild paths though out of sight.James Thomson(B.V.).

POETS, as Shelley said, are “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” The surest solace for the conditions in which men’s lives are still lived is to be found in the utterances of those impassioned writers, poets or poet-naturalists as we may call them, who are the harbingers of a higher social state, and, as such, have power to cheer their fellow-beings with the charm of their speech, though it is only by the few that the full purport of their message can be understood. It is of some of these lights in the darkness, these voices crying in the wilderness, that I would now speak.

There would seem, at first sight, to be a great gulf fixed between Shelley and James Thomson, between optimist and pessimist, between the poet ofPrometheus Unboundwhose faith in the future was immutable, and him ofThe City of Dreadful Night, who so despaired of progress as to hold that before we can reform the present we must reform the past. Yet it was on Thomson’s shoulders that the mantle of Shelley descended, in so far as they were the singers of free-thought; and he was one of the earliest of all writers of distinction to apprehend the greatness of that “poet of poets andpurest of men” to whom his ownVane’s Storywas dedicated. Though we do not assent to the pessimistic contention that we are the product of a past which has foredoomed human effort to failure, we may still profit by themoodof pessimism, the genuine vein of sadness that is found in all literatures and felt at times by all thoughtful men; for in its due place and proportion it is as real as the contrary mood of joy. Why, then, should the darker mood be sedulously discountenanced, as if it came from the source of all evil? It stands for something; it is part of us, and it is not to be arbitrarily set aside.

So wonderful a poem asThe City of Dreadful Nightneeds no apology; its justification is in its own grandeur and strength: nor ought such literature to be depressing in its effect on the reader’s mind, but rather (in its right sphere and relation) a means of enlightenment and help. For whatever the subject and moral of a poem may be, there is nothing saddening in Art, provided the form and treatment be adequate; we are not discouraged but cheered by any revelation of feeling that is sincerely and nobly expressed. I hold Thomson, therefore, pessimist though he was, to have been, by virtue of his indomitable courage and love of truth, one of the inspired voices of democracy.

Over thirty years ago I was requested by Mr. Bertram Dobell, Thomson’s friend and literary executor, to write a Life of the poet; and in the preparation of that work, which involved a good deal of search for scattered letters and other biographical material, I was brought into touch not only with many personal friends of Thomson, such as Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, Mr. G. W. Foote, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Wright, Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner, Mr. J. W. Barrs, Mr. Charles Watts, and Mr. Percy Holyoake, but also with some well-known writers, among them Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr. William Sharp. I was impressed by thewarm regard in which Thomson’s memory was held by those who had known him, the single exception being a sour old landlady in a gloomy London street, of whose remarks I took note as an instance of the strangely vague views held in some quarters as to the function of a biographer. She could give me no information about her impecunious lodger, except that he had “passed away”; but she added that if I wished to write the Life of a good man, a real Christian, and a total abstainer—here she looked at me dubiously, as if questioning my ability to carry out her suggestion—there was her dear departed husband!

In another case an old friend of Thomson’s, who told me many interesting facts about his early life, detained me just as I was taking my departure, and said in a meditative way, as if anxious to recall even the veriest trifle: “I think I remember that Jimmy once wrote a poem on some subject or other.” What he imagined to be my object in writing a Life of an obscure Army schoolmaster, except that hehadwritten a poem, I did not discover; perhaps the idea was that the biographer goes about, like the lion, seeking whom he may devour.

In literary circles there has always been a strong prejudice against “B.V.,” owing, of course, to his atheistical views and the general lack of “respectability” in his life and surroundings. I was told by Mr. William Sharp that, just after theLife of James Thomsonwas published, he happened to be travelling to Scotland in company with Mr. Andrew Lang, and having with him a copy of the book, which he was reviewing for theAcademy, he tried to engage his companion in talk about Thomson, but was met by a marked disinclination to discuss a subject so uncongenial. I was not surprised at hearing this; but I had been puzzled by a refusal which I received from Mr. Swinburne to allow me to publish a letter which he had addressed to Mr. W. M. Rossetti some years before, in high praise of Thomson’s narrative poem “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain,” which he had described as possessing “forthright triumphant power.” That letter, so Mr. Swinburne wrote to me, had been inspired by “a somewhat extravagant and uncritical enthusiasm,” and he now spoke in rather severe reprobation of Thomson, as one who might have left behind him “a respectable and memorable name.” The word “respectable,” coming from the author ofPoems and Ballads, deserves to be noted.

About two years later, in 1890, the immediate cause of this change of opinion on Mr. Swinburne’s part was explained to me by no less an authority than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who had invited me to pay him a visit in order to have a talk about Thoreau. During a stroll on Putney Heath, shared by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Watts-Dunton told me the story of James Thomson’s overthrow; and as the similar downfall of Whitman, and of some of Swinburne’s other early favourites, was probably brought about in the same manner, the process is worth relating. Mr. Swinburne, as I have said, had written in rapturous praise of one of “B.V.’s” poems. One day Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him: “I wish you would re-read that poem of Thomson’s, as I cannot see that it possesses any great merit.” A few days later Swinburne came to him and said: “You are quite right. I have re-read ‘Weddah and Om-el-Bonain,’ and I find that it has very little value.” Watts-Dunton’s influence over his friend was so complete that there are in facttwoSwinburnes: the earlier, democratic poet of theSongs before Sunrise, who had not yet been rescued by Mr. Watts-Dunton; and the later, respectable Swinburne, whose bent was for the most part reactionary. A “lost leader” indeed! Contrary to the proverb, the appeal, in this case, must be from Philip sober to Philip drunk.

At the luncheon which followed our walk, Mr. Swinburne was present, and one could not help observing that in personal matters, as in his literary views, heseemed to be almost dependent on Mr. Watts-Dunton: he ran to him with a new book like a poetic child with a plaything. His amiability of manner and courtesy were charming; but his delicate face, quaint chanting voice, and restlessly twitching fingers, gave an impression of weakness. He talked, I remember, of Meredith’sSandra BelloniandDiana of the Crossways, and complained of their obscurity (“Can you construe them?”); then of his reminiscences of Eton, with friendly inquiries about my father-in-law, the Rev. J. L. Joynes, who had been his tutor and house-master; also about one of the French teachers, Mr. Henry Tarver, with whom he had been on very intimate terms. Here a few words on the poet’s adventures at Eton may not be out of place.[24]

It is stated in Gosse’s Life of Swinburne that there is no truth in the legend that he was bullied at Eton; it is, however, a fact that his Eton career was not altogether an untroubled one. Mr. Joynes used to tell how Swinburne once came to him before school and begged to be allowed to “stay out,” because he was afraid to face some bigger boys who were temporarily attached to his Division—“those dreadful boys,” he called them. “Oh, sir, they wear tail coats! Sir, they are men!” The request was not granted; but his tutor soothed the boy by reading a Psalm with him, and thus fortified he underwent the ordeal.

One very characteristic anecdote has unfortunately been told incorrectly. Lady Jane Swinburne had come to Eton to see her son, who was ill, and she read Shakespeare to him as he lay in bed. When she left him for a time, a maid, whom she had brought with her, was requested to continue the reading, and she did so, with the result that a glass of water which stood on a table by the bedside was presently dashed over her by the invalid. In the version quoted by his biographerthe glass of water has become “a pot of jam”—quite wrongly, as I can testify, for I heard Mr. Joynes tell the story more than once.

Swinburne was not allowed to read Byron or Shelley while he was at Eton. In Mr. Joynes’s house there was a set of volumes of the old English dramatists, and the young student urgently begged to be permitted to read these. “Might he read Ford?” To settle so difficult a question recourse was had to the advice of Mr. W. G. Cookesley, a master who was reputed “to know about everything”; and Mr. Cookesley’s judgment was that the boy might read all Ford’s plays except one—the one, of course, which has a title calculated to alarm. But this, it transpired, was one that he had specially wished to read!

Mr. Watts-Dunton has been well described by Mr. Coulson Kernahan as “a hero of friendship”; and his personal friendliness was shown not to distinguished writers only, but to any one whom he could encourage or help, nor did he take the least offence, however bluntly his own criticisms were criticized. In reviewingThe City of Dreadful Night, on its first appearance in book form (1880), he had said that Thomson wrote in his pessimistic style “because now it is the fashion to be dreadful,” a denial of the sincerity of the poet to which I referred in myLife of James Thomsonas one of the strangest of misapprehensions. When I met Mr. Watts-Dunton, he alluded to this and other matters concerning Thomson so genially as to make me wonder how he could at times have written in so unsympathetic and unworthy a manner of authors whom he disliked. Admirers of Walt Whitman, in particular, had reason to resent the really disgusting things that were said of him; as when he was likened to a savage befouling the door-step of the civilized man. That Whitman himself must have been indignant at the jibes levelled at him from Putney Heath can hardly be doubted: I was told by a friend of his that he had been heard tospeak of Swinburne—thesecondSwinburne—as “a damned simulacrum.”

Very different from Swinburne’s ungenerous attitude to Thomson was that of George Meredith, as may be seen from several of his letters to me, published in theLife of James Thomson, and reprinted inLetters of George Meredith. A proposal was made that Mr. Meredith should himself write an appreciation of “B.V.”; this he could not do, but he gave me permission to make use of any opinions he had expressed by letter to me or in conversation; I visited him at Box Hill in 1891, and he talked at great length on that and other subjects. Of Thomson he spoke with feelings akin to affection, exclaiming more than once: “Poor dear fellow! I bitterly reproach myself that I did not help him more, by getting him work on theAthenæum.” But he doubted if he could at that date have been reclaimed: earlier in life he might have been saved, he thought, by the companionship of a woman who would have given him sympathy and aid; praise, too, which had been the ruin of many writers (he instanced George Eliot and Dickens, with some trenchant remarks about both) would have been good for “B.V.,” who was so brave and honest. He himself, he said, had often felt what it was to lack all recognition, and sometimes, when he had looked up from his writing and seen a distant field in sunlight, he had thought, “it must be well to be in the warmth.” What above all he admired in Thomson was his resolute clear courage. There had been no mention of pessimism in their talk, except that when he had been speaking of the brightest and the darkest moods of Nature, Thomson answered: “I see no brightest.”

Meredith was evidently repelled by this gospel of despair; he said that the writing ofThe City of Dreadful Nighthad done its author no good, inasmuch as he there embodied his gloomier images in a permanent form which in turn reacted on him and made him moredespondent. He considered “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain” to be Thomson’s masterpiece, and the finest narrative poem we have: “Where can you find its equal?” I told him of Swinburne’s change of opinion about it, and he said instantly: “You know whose doingthatis.” A playful account followed of the way in which his own poems used to be reviewed by Watts-Dunton in theAthenæum. “We always receive anything of Mr. Meredith’s with respect.” “You know,” said Meredith, “what that sort of beginning means.” Of late he had ceased to send out review copies of his poems, being sickened by the ineptitude of critics. “There are a good many curates about the country,” he added, “and the fact that many of them do a little reviewing in their spare hours does not tend to elevate literature.”

Of social problems he spoke with freedom; most strongly of the certain change that is coming, when women get their economic independence. Infinite mischief comes to the race from loveless marriages. But he anticipated it would take six or more generations for women to rid themselves of the intellectual follies they now inherit from their grandmothers.

At dinner Mr. Meredith talked of his distaste for flesh food, and his esteem for simplicity in all forms, and stated emphatically that it was quite a mistake to suppose that his own experiments in vegetarianism had injured his health. Yet, if he were to try that diet again, he knew how his friends would explain to him that it is “impossible to live without meat,” or (this in dramatically sarcastic tones) that “if it be possible forsomepersons, it is not possible forme.”[25]I wasstruck by his great kindliness as host; he was in fact over-solicitous for the welfare of vegetarian guests.

The formality and punctiliousness of Mr. Meredith’s manner, with his somewhat ceremonious gestures and pronunciation, perhaps affected a visitor rather unfavourably at first introduction; but after a few minutes this impression wore off, and one felt only the vivacity and charm of his conversation. It was a continuous flow of epigrams, as incisive in many cases as those in his books; during which I noticed the intense sensitiveness and expressiveness of his mouth, the lips curling with irony, as he flung out his sarcasms about critics, and curates, and sentimentalists of every order. His eyes were remarkably keen and penetrating, and he watched narrowly the effect of his points; so that even to keep up with him as a listener was a considerable mental strain. It was in consequence of my mentioning this to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few days later, that he made his sporting offer that, if he were taken down to Box Hill, he “would start talking the moment he entered the house, and not let Meredith get a word in edgeways.” In Mr. S. M. Ellis’s biography of Meredith, Shaw is quoted as saying that the proposal emanated from Mr. Clement Shorter or myself: this, however, is quite incorrect, for the suggestion was his own, and much too reckless to have had any other source. Such an encounter, had it taken place, would not have been, as Shaw flattered himself, a monologue, but a combat so colossal that one shrinks from speculating on the result: all that seems certain is that it would have lasted till the talk-out blow was given, and that upon the tomb of one or other of the colloquists ahic tacetwould have had to be inscribed.

I noticed a certain resemblance in Meredith’s profile to that of Edward Carpenter (it may be seen in some of the photographs); and this was the more surprising because of the unlikeness of the two men in temperament, Meredith’s cry for “More brain, O Lord, morebrain!” being in contrast with Carpenter’s rather slighting references to “the wandering lunatic Mind.” Yet Meredith, too, was an apostle of Nature; his democratic instincts are unmistakable, though the scenes of his novels are mostly laid in aristocratic surroundings, so that his “cry for simplicity” came “from the very camp of the artificial.” This was the view of his philosophy taken by me in an article on “Nature-lessons from George Meredith,” published in theFree Review, in reference to which Mr. Meredith wrote: “It is pleasant to be appreciated, but the chief pleasure for me is in seeing the drift of my work rightly apprehended.”

To Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller, whose name is so closely associated with Thomson’s and Traherne’s, I was indebted for much information about books and writers of books, given in that cosy shop of his in the Charing Cross Road, which was a place of pleasant recollections for so many literary men. I had especial reason to be grateful to him for directing me to the writings of Herman Melville, whose extraordinary genius, shown in such masterpieces asTypeeandThe Whale, was so unaccountably ignored or undervalued that his name is still often confused with that of Whyte Melville or of Herman Merivale. Melville was a great admirer of James Thomson; this he made plain in several letters addressed to English correspondents, in which he describedThe City of Dreadful Nightas the “modern Book of Job under an original form, duskily looming with the same aboriginal verities,” and wrote of one of the lighter poems that “Sunday up the River, contrasting with theCity of Dreadful Night, is like a Cuban humming-bird, beautiful in fairy tints, flying against the tropic thunderstorm.”

Mr. Dobell was a man of very active mind, and he had always in view some further literary projects. One of these, of which he told me not long before his death, was to write a book about his friend, James Thomson;and it is much to be regretted that this could not be accomplished. Another plan—surely one of the strangest ever conceived—was to render or re-write Walt Whitman’s poems in the Omar Khayyám stanza: a proposal which reminded me of the beneficent scheme of Fourier, or another of the early communists, to turn the waters of the ocean into lemonade. It is difficult to speak ofLeaves of Grassand theRubáiyátin the same breath; yet I once heard the Omar Khayyám poem referred to in a still stranger connection by a clergyman who was the “autocrat of the breakfast table” in a hotel where I was staying. Suddenly pausing in his table-talk, he did me the honour of consulting me on a small question of authorship. “I am right, am I not,” he said, “in supposing that the translator of Omar Khayyám was—Emerson?”

Mr. Dobell’s experiences in book-lore had been long and varied, and he could tell some excellent stories, one of which especially struck me as showing that he had a rare fund of shrewd sense as well as of professional knowledge. He once missed from his shop a very scarce and valuable book, in circumstances which made it a matter of certainty to him that it had been abstracted by a keen collector who had been talking to him that very day, though no word concerning the book had been spoken. Dobell was greatly troubled, until he hit upon a plan which was at once the simplest and most tactful that could have been imagined. Without any inquiry or explanation, he sent in a bill for the book, as in course of business, and the account was duly paid.

ThroughSongs of Freedom, an anthology edited by me in 1892, I came into correspondence with many democratic writers, several of whom, especially Mr. Gerald Massey and Mr. W. J. Linton, showed much interest in the work and gave me valuable assistance. Dr. John Kells Ingram’s famous verses, “The Men of ‘Ninety-Eight,” were included in the book; and ascuriosity has sometimes been expressed as to how far the sentiments of that poem accorded with the later views of its author, it may be worth mentioning that, in giving me permission to reprint the stanzas, he wrote as follows: “You will not suppose that the effusion of the youth exactly represents the convictions of the man. But I have never been ashamed of having written the verses. They were the fruit of genuine feeling.” A request for Joaquin Miller’s spirited lines, “Sophie Perovskaya,” brought me a letter from the veteran author of that very beautiful book,Life amongst the Modocs(a work of art worthy to be classed with Herman Melville’sTypee), which was one of the strangest pieces of penmanship I ever received, having the appearance of being written with a piece of wood rather than a pen, but more than compensating by its heartiness for the labour needed in deciphering it: “I thank you cordially; I am abashed at my audacity long ago, in publishing what I did in dear old England. I hope to do something really worth your reading before I die.” Butthathe had done long before.

The liberality with which writers of verse allow their poems to be used in anthologies is very gratifying to an editor; the more so, as such republication is by no means always a benefit to the authors themselves. Mr. John Addington Symonds was an example of a poet who had suffered much, as he told me, from compilers of anthologies, especially in regard to some lines in his oft-quoted stanzas, “A Vista,” which in the original ran thus:

Nation with nation, land with land,Inarmed shall live as comrades free.

“Inarmed” signified linked fraternity, but the word being a strange one was changed in some collections to “unarmed,” and in that easier form had quite escaped from Mr. Symonds’s control. This error still continues to be repeated and circulated, and has practically takenthe place of the authorized text. Truth, as the saying is, may be great, but it does not always prevail.

Mr. J. A. Symonds, like his friend Mr. Roden Noel, at whose house I met him, was one of those writers who, starting from a purely literary standpoint, came over in the end towards the democratic view of life. His appreciation of Whitman is well known; and he told me that since he wrote his study of Shelley for the “English Men of Letters” series he had changed some of his views in the more advanced Shelleyan direction.

Robert Buchanan was another of Roden Noel’s friends with whom I became acquainted and had a good deal of correspondence. His later writings, owing to their democratic tendencies and extreme outspokenness, received much less public attention than the earlier ones; inThe New Rome, in particular, there were a number of trenchant poems denouncing the savageries of an aggressive militarism, and pleading the cause of the weak and suffering folk, whether human or sub-human, against the tyrannous and strong. So marked, in his later years, became Buchanan’s humanitarian sympathies, that when his biography was written by Miss Harriett Jay, in 1903, I was asked to contribute a chapter on the subject.

An anthologist, as I have said, meets with much courtesy from poets, yet his path is not altogether a rose-strewn one. When I undertook the work, I was warned by Mr. Bernard Shaw that the only certain result would be that I should draw on myself the concentrated resentment of all the authors concerned: this forecast was far from being verified; but in one or two instances I did become aware of certain irritable symptoms on the part of poetical acquaintances whose own songs of freedom had unluckily escaped my notice. Then the over-anxiety of some authors as to which of their master-pieces should be included, and which withheld, was at times a trial to an editor. One of my contributors, who had moved in high circles, was concernedto think that certain royalties of his acquaintance might feel hurt by his arraignment of tyrants: “but if the Czar,” he wrote, “takes it home to himself, I shall be only too delighted.” Whether any protest from the Czar or other crowned heads was received by the publishers of the Canterbury Poets Series, I never heard.

But if poets are the forerunners of a future society, to “poet-naturalists” also must a like function be assigned. Of Thoreau, to whom that title was first and most fittingly given, I have already spoken; and his was the genius which, to me, next to that of Shelley, was the most astonishing of nineteenth-century portents; a scion of the future, springing up, like some alien wild-flower, unclassed and uncomprehended: like Shelley’s, too, his wisdom is still far ahead of our age, and destined to be increasingly acknowledged.

It was with this thought in mind that I wrote a biography of Thoreau, in which task I received valuable aid from his surviving friends, Mr. Harrison Blake, Mr. Daniel Ricketson, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, Dr. Edward Emerson, and others. With Mr. Sanborn, the last of the Concord group, I corresponded for nearly thirty years, and I had several long talks with him on the occasions of his visiting England: he was a man of great erudition and extraordinary memory, so that his store of information amassed in a long life was almost encyclopedic. I learnt much from him about Concord and its celebrities; and he collaborated with me in editing a collection of Thoreau’s “Poems of Nature,” which was published in 1895. Mr. Daniel Ricketson, the “Mr. D. R.” of Emerson’s edition of Thoreau’sLetters, was another friend to whom I was greatly indebted; his correspondence with me was printed in a memorial volume,Daniel Ricketson and his Friends, in 1902. By no one was I more helped and encouraged than by that most ardent of Thoreau-students, Dr. Samuel A. Jones, of Ann Arbor, Michigan,who, with his fellow-enthusiast, Mr. Alfred W. Hosmer, of Concord, sent me at various times a large amount ofThoreauana, and enabled me to make a number of corrections and amplifications in a later edition of theLife. It was through our common love of Thoreau that I first became acquainted with Mr. W. Sloane Kennedy, of Belmont, Massachusetts, a true nature-lover with whom I have had much pleasant and friendly intercourse both personally and by letter.

Richard Jefferies, unlike Shelley or Thoreau, was so far a pessimist as to believe that “lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly wasted”; but while convinced that “the whole and the worst the worst pessimist could say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man,” he could yet feel the hope of future amelioration. “Full well aware that all has failed, yet side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there yet lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.” If ever there was an inspired work, a real book of prophecy, such a one is Jefferies’sStory of my Heart, in which, with his gaze fixed on a future society, where the termpauper(“inexpressibly wicked word”) shall be unknown, he speaks in scathing condemnation of the present lack of just and equitable distribution, which keeps the bulk of the human race still labouring for bare sustenance and shelter.

In a study of Jefferies’s life and ideals, published in 1894, I drew attention to the marked change that came over his views, during his later years, on social and religious questions, a ripening of thought, accompanied by a corresponding growth of literary style, which can be measured by the great superiority ofThe Storyover such books asThe Gamekeeper at Home; and in connection with this subject I pointed out that the incident recorded by Sir Walter Besant in hisEulogy of Richard Jefferiesof a death-bed return to the Christian faith, at a time when Jefferies was physically and intellectually a wreck, could not be accepted as in any way reversing the authoritative statement of his religious convictions which he had himself published in hisStory. For this I was taken to task in several papers as having perverted biography in the interest of my own prejudiced opinions; but under this censure, not to mention that my views were shared by those friends and students of Jefferies with whom I was brought in touch, I had one unsuspected source of consolation in the fact that Sir Walter Besant told me in private correspondence that, from what he had learnt since the publication of hisEulogy, he was convinced that I was quite right. I did not make this public until many years later, when a new edition of my book appeared: there was then some further outcry in a section of the press; but this was not repeated when Mr. Edward Thomas, in the latest and fullest biography of Jefferies, dismissed the supposed conversion as a wrong interpretation by “narrow sectarians” who ignored the work of Jefferies’s maturity.

I have thought it worth while to refer to these facts, not that they are themselves important, but as illustrating a Christianizing process which is often carried on with boundless effrontery by “religious” writers after the death of free-thinkers. Another instance may be seen in the case of Francis W. Newman, where a similar attempt was made to represent him as having abandoned his own deliberate convictions.

From Jefferies one’s thoughts pass naturally to Mr. W. H. Hudson. It must be over twenty-five years since through the hospitality of Mrs. E. Phillips, of Croydon, an ardent bird-lover and humanitarian, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr. Hudson and to his books. A philosopher and keen observer of all forms of life, he is far from being an ornithologist only; but there are certain sympathies that give rise to a sortof natural freemasonry among those who feel them; and of these one of the pleasantest and most human is the love of birds—not of cooked birds, if you please, associated with dining-room memories of “the pleasures of the table,” nor of caged birds in drawing-rooms, nor of stuffed birds in museums; but of real birds, live birds, wild birds, free to exercise their marvellous faculties of flight and song. From this love has sprung a corresponding bird-literature; and of the notable names among the prophets and interpreters of bird life, the latest, and in my opinion the greatest, is that of Mr. Hudson: his books, in not a few chapters and passages, rise above the level of mere natural history, and affect the imagination of the reader as only great literature can. If he is an unequal writer and somewhat desultory, perhaps, in his manner of work, yet at his best he is the greatest living master of English prose. Such books asThe Naturalist in La PlataandNature in Downland(to name two only) are classics that can never be forgotten. And Mr. Hudson’s influence, it should be noted, has been thrown more and more on the side of that humane study of natural history which Thoreau adopted: his verdict is given in no uncertain language against the barbarous habits of game-keeper and bird-catcher, fashionable milliner, and amateur collector of “specimens.”

If a single title were to be sought for Mr. Hudson’s writings, the name of one of his earlier books,Birds and Man, might be the most appropriate; for there seems almost to be a mingling of the avian with the human in his nature: I have sometimes fancied that he must be a descendant of Picus, or of some other prehistoric hero who was changed into a bird. There is a passage in Virgil’sÆneidwhere Diomede is represented as lamenting, as a “fearful prodigy,” such metamorphosis of his companions.

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