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Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt · English · Gutenberg #49336 · 476,490 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Seventy Years Among Savages

Author: Henry S. Salt


        
Release date: June 30, 2015 [eBook #49336]
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVENTY YEARS AMONG SAVAGES ***

                             SEVENTY YEARS
                             AMONG SAVAGES




                             SEVENTY YEARS
                             AMONG SAVAGES

                                  BY

                             HENRY S. SALT

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                   LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.

                RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

                       _First published in 1921_

                       (_All rights reserved._)




CONTENTS


                                               PAGE

I. THE ARGUMENT                                   7

II. WHERE IGNORANCE WAS BLISS                    16

III. LITERÆ INHUMANIORES                         36

IV. THE DISCOVERY                                50

V. CANNIBAL’S CONSCIENCE                         67

VI. GLIMPSES OF CIVILIZATION                     73

VII. THE POET-PIONEER                            90

VIII. VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS           101

IX. A LEAGUE OF HUMANENESS                      121

X. TWENTIETH-CENTURY TORTURES                   135

XI. HUNNISH SPORTS AND FASHIONS                 151

XII. A FADDIST’S DIVERSIONS                     169

XIII. HOOF-MARKS OF THE VANDAL                  185

XIV. THE FORLORN HOPE                           200

XV. THE CAVE-MAN RE-EMERGES                     219

XVI. POETRY OF DEATH AND LOVE                   231

XVII. THE TALISMAN                              239

INDEX                                           249




Seventy Years Among Savages




I

THE ARGUMENT

    A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians--Men
    who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except
      their own!--ERNEST CROSBY.


The tales of travellers, from Herodotus to Marco Polo, and from Marco
Polo to the modern “globe-trotter,” have in all ages been subject,
justly or unjustly, to a good deal of suspicion, on the ground that
those who go in quest of curious information among outlandish tribes are
likely in the first instance to be imposed on themselves, and in the
sequel to impose on their readers. No such doubt, however, can attach to
the following record, for I am myself a native of the land whose customs
are described by me. I cannot think that my story, true as it is, and
admitting of corroboration by the similar witness of others, is any the
less adventurous on that account; for, like previous writers who have
recorded certain startling discoveries, I, too, have to speak of
solitudes and remotenesses, vast deserts and rare oases, inextricable
forests and dividing gulfs; and such experiences are none the less
noteworthy because they are not of the body but of the mind. At any
rate, the tale which I have to tell deals with incidents which have had
a very real significance for myself--quite as real as any of those
related by the most venturesome of voyagers.

The seventy years spent by me among savages form the subject of this
story, but not, be it noted, seventy years of _consciousness_ that my
life was so cast, for during the first part of my residence in the
strange land where I was born, the dreadful reality of my surroundings
was hardly suspected by me, except now and then, perhaps, in a passing
glimmer of apprehension. Then, by slow degrees, incident after incident
brought a gradual awakening, until at last there dawned on my mind the
conviction which alone could explain and reconcile for me the many
contradictions of our society--that we were not “civilized” but
“savages”--that the “dark ages,” far from being part of a remote past,
were very literally present.

And here, in explanation of my long blindness to an unwelcome truth, it
must be remarked that there is a fixed and almost insuperable
superstition among my savage fellow-islanders--and, indeed, among all
the surrounding nations--that they are a cultured and highly civilized
race, living in an age which has wholly emerged from the barbarism of
their forefathers, the “good old times” to which some of them even
affect to look back with feelings of pious regretfulness. It was this
delusion, to which I was at first fully subject, that made it so
difficult for me to see things in their true light, and still makes it
wellnigh impossible to communicate the truth to others, except to those
whose suspicions have in like measure been aroused. In reality, it will
be seen, the difference between the earlier “barbarism” and the later
so-called “civilization” is, in the main, a mere matter of the absence
or presence of certain intellectual refinements and mechanical sciences,
which, while largely altering and complicating the outward conditions of
life, leave its essentially savage spirit almost entirely untouched.

It was not till I was over thirty years of age that I felt any serious
concern as to the manners and customs with which I was familiar, and
which I had unquestioningly accepted from childhood as part of the
natural order. I had heard and read of “savages,” but felt the more
satisfaction to know that I was a native of a land which had for
centuries enjoyed the blessings of civilization and of religion, which
it was anxious to disseminate as widely as possible throughout the
earth. Why the diet of my countrymen should have been the first thing to
set me pondering, I am unable to say, for as my later discoveries
convinced me, the dietetic habits of these people are not more
astonishing than many kindred practices which I still regarded without
mistrust. But it was so; and I then found myself realizing, with an
amazement which time has not diminished, that the “meat” which formed
the staple of our diet, and which I was accustomed to regard--like
bread, or fruit, or vegetables--as a mere commodity of the table, was in
truth dead flesh--the actual flesh and blood--of oxen, sheep, swine, and
other animals that were slaughtered in vast numbers under conditions so
horrible that even to mention the subject at our dinner-tables would
have been an unpardonable offence.

Now, when I began to put questions to my friends and acquaintances about
this apparently glaring inconsistency in our “civilization,” I could not
help observing, novice though I was in such discussion, that the answers
by which they sought to parry my awkward importunities were extremely
evasive and sophistical--reminding me of the quibbling explanations
which travellers have received from cannibals when they inquired too
closely into certain dietetic observances; and from this I could not but
suspect that, as far as diet was concerned, we differed in degree only
from the savages whom we deemed so debased.

It must be understood, however, that here, and in other references to
“savages,” I use that term in its natural and inoffensive meaning, as
implying simply a lack of the higher civilization and not any personal
cruelty or bloodthirstiness. What I write is just a friendly account of
friendly savages (by one of them); and I would emphasize the fact that
the kindliness and good nature of my fellow-countrymen are in one
direction quite as marked features of their character as their savagery
is in another. In their own families, to their own kith and kin, to
their personal friends--to all those whom fortune has placed within,
instead of without the charmed circle of relationship--their conduct, in
the great majority of cases, is exemplary; it is only where custom or
prejudice has dug a gulf of division between their fellow-creatures and
themselves that they indulge in the barbarous practices to which I
refer.

It may be convenient if I here speak briefly of their other customs
under two heads: first, those that relate to human beings; and,
secondly, those that relate to the so-called lower animals. In few ways,
perhaps, is the barbarism of these islanders more apparent than in their
wars and in their preparation for wars. For what they call “peace” is,
in fact, only an armed truce--an interval between two outbreaks of
hostility--during which, so far from being at genuine peace with their
neighbours, they are occupied in speculating where the next attack shall
be delivered, or, rather (for they love to depict themselves as always
standing on pious self-defence against the wanton aggressiveness of
others), how they shall repel the next attack from abroad. It is their
custom always to have, for the time being, some bugbear among
neighbouring tribes, whose supposed machinations against the richer
portions of their empire give them constant cause for unrest, and prompt
them to cement undying, but equally transitory, alliances with other
nations, so that their very friendships are based less on the spirit of
amity than on that of distrust. Under pretence of believing in an
unbelievable and, indeed, wholly ridiculous maxim--_Si vis pacem, para
bellum_ (”If you wish for peace, prepare for war”)--they keep their
minds for ever set on wars and rumours of wars, with the result that,
in spite of all their profession of benevolence and brotherhood, the
trade of _killing_ is that which is above all others respected by them.
Is money required for purposes of national welfare, such as education or
the relief of the poor? Every difficulty is at once put in the way of
such expenditure for such ends. But let there be the least suspicion,
however irrational, of some foreign slight to “the flag,” and there is
scarce a savage in the island who is not willing that the public
treasury should be depleted in pursuance of a childish revenge. To
remonstrate against such folly is to incur the charge of being
“unpatriotic.”

But comical as their foreign policy is, their social system is still
more so, for under the guise of “charity” and “philanthropy” there
exists, in fact, a civil war, in which each individual, or group of
individuals, plays a remorseless game of “Beggar my neighbour” and
“Devil take the hindmost” in mad scramble for wealth; whence results, of
course, a state of gross and glaring inequality, under which certain
favoured persons wallow in the good things of life, while others pass
their years in the pinch of extremest poverty. Thus, in due course, and
by an unerring process, is manufactured what they call “the criminal
class”--that is, the host of those who are driven by social injustice to
outlawry and violence. And herein, perhaps, more than in any other of
their customs, is shown the inherent savagery of their natures, for,
instead of attempting to eradicate the _cause_ of these evils by the
institution of fairer and juster modes of living, my fellow-islanders
are almost to a man in favour of “punishing” (that is the expression)
these victims of their own foolish laws by the infliction of barbarous
sentences of imprisonment, or the lash, or, in extreme cases, the
gallows. To inculcate habits of honesty they shut a man in prison, and
render him more than ever incapable of earning an honest livelihood. As
a warning against robbery with violence, they give a lesson in official
violence by flogging the criminal; and, by way of teaching the sanctity
of human life, they judicially murder the murderer. Many a grotesque
absurdity is solemnly and deliberately enacted in their so-called
“courts of law”; and any one who ventures to suggest that this is the
case is regarded as a fool and reprobate for his pains.

But it is when we turn to their treatment of the non-human races that we
find the surest evidences of barbarism; yet their savagery, even here,
is not wholly “naked and unashamed,” for, strange to say, these curious
people delight to mask their rudeness in a cloak of fallacies and
sophisms, and to represent themselves as “lovers” of those very
creatures whom they habitually torture for “sport,” “science,” and the
“table.” They actually have a law for the prevention of cruelty to
animals, under which certain privileged species, classed as “domestic,”
are protected from some specified wrongs, though all the time they may,
under certain conditions, be subjected with impunity to other and worse
injuries at the hands of the slaughterman or the vivisector; while the
wild species, though presumably not less sensitive to pain, are regarded
as almost entirely outside the pale of protection, and as legitimate
subjects for those brutalities of “fashion” and “sport” which are
characteristic of the savage mind. Their women go furred and feathered
with the skins of beasts and birds; and so murderous is their millinery
that whole species are sacrificed to this reckless habit. Nothing can
exceed the ferocity of the national pastimes, in which, under the plea
of affording healthful exercise to their tormentors, park-bred deer,
that have been kept in paddocks for the purpose, are turned out before a
mob of men and dogs to be baited and worried; foxes, otters, and hares
are hunted and “broken up”; bagged rabbits are “coursed” in small
enclosures by yelling savages on the eve of the weekly religious
festival; pheasants and other “preserved” birds are mown down in
thousands in an organized butchery euphemistically known as the
_battue_; pigeons are released from traps in order to be shot by gangs
of ruffians who gamble over the result of their skill; and almost every
conceivable form of cowardly slaughter is practised as “sportsman-like”
and commended as “manly.” All this, moreover, is done before the eyes
and for the example of mere youths and children, who are thus from their
tenderest years instructed in the habit of being pitiless and cruel.
Nay, in some cases they are even encouraged to take part in such doings,
and on the first occasion when they are “in at the death” are initiated
by being “blooded”--that is, baptized with the blood of the slaughtered
victim of their sport.

Nor are these things perhaps so strange as they might at first appear,
for, in spite of their boasted progress in sciences and arts, my
countrymen are still practically ignorant of the real kinship which
exists between mankind and the other races, and of the duties which this
kinship implies. They are still the victims of that old anthropocentric
superstition which pictures Man as the centre of the universe, and
separated from the inferior animals--mere playthings made for his august
pleasure and amusement--by a deep intervening gulf; and it is probable
enough that if any one of these unthinking savages who “break up” a
hare, or baptize their children in the blood of a butchered fox, were
reminded that he himself is in very truth an “animal,” he would resent
such statement of an established fact as a slight on his religious
convictions and on his personal self-respect. For, as the author of
_Hudibras_ discovered:

    There’s nothing so absurd, or vain,
    Or barbarous, or inhumane,
    But if it lay the least pretence
    To piety and godliness,
    And zeal for gospel truths profess,
    Does sacred instantly commence.

The very scientists themselves, who have in theory renounced the
old-fashioned idea of a universe created for mankind, are inclined in
practice to belie their own biological faith, for they claim the moral
right to devote large numbers of the lower animals, without scruple or
remorse, to the tortures of “research,” just as if the fact of a close
kinship between the vivisector who wields the scalpel and the dog who
lies in the trough were a notion of which Science is unaware!

Is it surprising that, to those of us who have gradually realized that
we are dwelling in a wild land among savages such as these, the
consciousness of the discovery should at times bring with it a sense of
unutterable loneliness and desolation--that we should feel cut off, as
it were, by interminable leagues of misunderstanding from all human
intercourse, and from all possibility of expressing ourselves? What
appeal _can_ be made to people whose first instinct, on seeing a
beautiful animal, full of joyousness and vitality, is to hunt or eat it?
One can only marvel how such sheer, untempered barbarism has come down
to us from the past.

But the facts, though so terrible in their first impression, are capable
of being more hopefully regarded; there is a consolatory, as well as a
discomforting, way of interpreting them. For if these countrymen of ours
are indeed savages (as who can doubt?), have we not at least reason to
rejoice that, being savages, they in many ways conduct themselves so
discreetly, and that, as far as their sense of relationship extends,
they are so civil, so kindly, so law-abiding? Instead, therefore, of too
loudly upbraiding them for hunting or eating their little brethren, the
animals, ought we not, perhaps, to feel and express some gratitude to
them that they do not hunt each other--that they have not eaten _us_?
Their self-restraint in many directions is, perhaps, quite as remarkable
as their self-abandonment in others; and the mere fact of one’s having
_lived_ for many years among savages is in itself a testimony to their
good nature. Looked at in this light, the trouble is not so much that
they are in reality savage, as that they suppose themselves to be
civilized; for it is from the false garb of civilization that the
misapprehension has sprung.

But, however that may be, they are, when the worst is said of them, a
quaint and interesting people, and it is my earnest wish that, by the
publication of this story, I may be the means of drawing to the habits
of my fellow-islanders the closer attention of anthropologists. Surely,
in an age when many wild tribes have been the subject of learned
discourse and of missionary enterprise, it is desirable that a race
which has carried into the twentieth century the primitive customs which
I have described should be critically and exhaustively studied. If such
should indeed be the result of this book, I shall be more than
compensated for whatever pain I may have felt in the writing of these
strange but faithfully recorded experiences.




II

WHERE IGNORANCE WAS BLISS

     Thought would destroy their paradise!
     No more: where ignorance is bliss
          ’Tis folly to be wise.
    _Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College._


If it be true, as scientists tell us, that the period of boyhood
corresponds, in human development, with an early phase of savagery, and
that the individual boy is himself an epitome of the uncivilized tribe,
it may be said with still greater confidence that an English public
school, or “boy-farm,” where life is mostly so ordered as to foster the
more primitive habits of mind, is essentially a nursery of barbarism--a
microcosm of that predatory class whose members, like the hunters of
old, toil not, neither do they spin, but ever seek their ideal in the
twofold cult of sport and soldiership. Certainly the Eton of the
’sixties and ’seventies, whatever superficial show it might make of
learning and refinement, was at heart a stronghold of savagery--a most
graceful, easy-going savagery, be it granted; for savages, as we know,
are often a very pleasant people.

In some reminiscences, _Eton under Hornby_, published in 1910, I gave a
description of the public-school education of fifty years ago, a system
probably not much worse than that of to-day; and the conclusion reached
was that as Eton never really changes, it is best to regard her, as she
regards other institutions, in a mood of good-natured unconcern, and as
a subject less for argument than for anecdote. Eton has been
pre-eminently the school “where ignorance is bliss,” and in a much wider
sense than that intended by the poet Gray in his famous ode “On a
Distant Prospect of Eton College.” For, if it be true of schoolboys that
“thought would destroy their paradise”--that is, the thought merely of
the personal ailments of mature age--how much more disturbing would be
the contemplation of the vast social wrongs that fill the world with
suffering! Of such sombre thought Eton knew nothing, but basked content
in the warmth of her own supreme self-satisfaction; and the Eton life
was probably the most enjoyable of all hitherto invented forms of
heedless existence. It is, then, of the pleasures of Eton that I would
speak, and of some of the more distinguished of her sons with whom it
was my privilege to be acquainted.

Long before I was admitted to Eton as a King’s Scholar, I had a personal
link with the school in the fact that John Moultrie, the friend of
Praed, and contributor to that most noteworthy of school magazines, the
_Etonian_--himself a Colleger at Eton from 1811 to 1819--was my
great-uncle. At Eton and Cambridge, Moultrie’s career had been a
brilliant one; he was the “Gerard Montgomery” of the _Etonian_--in
Praed’s words “the humorous Moultrie, and the pathetic Moultrie, the
Moultrie of ‘Godiva,’ and the Moultrie of ‘My Brother’s Grave,’”--but
his later career did not fulfil the promise of his youth. The vivid and
extravagant fancy of his early poems was succeeded by a more homely and
sober style, and the pastor-poet in his “Dream of Life” even referred
apologetically to the levities of his youthful muse.[1] Yet he still
retained in some measure the poet’s vision; and when Rector of Rugby he
was famous for the powerful interpretation which he gave to Shakespeare
in his reading of the Plays. Him I remember at his rectory in the early
’sixties, a dignified, kindly old man, with a quaint mixture of humour
and pathos, of ruggedness and gentleness, in his manner. Many stories
were current in Rugby of his eccentricities and absent-mindedness; on
one occasion when he had brought a lengthy sermon to an end, he is said
to have startled his congregation by substituting for the usual formula
the equally familiar post-prandial one: “For what we have received, the
Lord make us truly thankful.”

It was from this Etonian worthy that I first heard of Eton; and though I
little foresaw that nearly twenty years of my life would be spent there
as boy and master, it thus came about that in the summer of 1866 I found
myself being “coached” for an Eton scholarship by the Rev. C. Kegan
Paul, formerly “Conduct” (Chaplain) at Eton, who held the Eton living of
Sturminster Marshall in Dorsetshire.

Mr. Paul, afterwards founder of a well-known publishing firm, was then a
radical parson of very “broad” views, a friend of Frederick Denison
Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and many other Liberals. A man of fine taste,
he also possessed a large fund of vivacity and spirits, which, with his
unvarying kindness, made him very popular among his pupils; indeed, only
at Eton itself could there have been a more delightful life, regarded
from the boyish point of view, than that which we led in those summer
months, fishing, bathing, bird’s-nesting. The one cloud on our horizon
was the impending rite of Confirmation, which some of us had to undergo
at Blandford, and for which Mr. Paul prepared us. I have always felt
grateful to him for the simplicity of his method, which was free from
the morbid inquiries then common in schools. I think he asked me only
one question: “Is it wrong to doubt?” This was a problem in which I felt
no sort of concern; making a bold shot, I replied “No,” and was
gratified to find that I had answered correctly.

At Eton my tutor was Mr. Francis Warre Cornish, one of the gentlest and
most accomplished of men, the very antithesis of the bullying,
blustering schoolmaster of the good old type which even then was not
wholly superseded. Much loved by those of his pupils who learnt to know
him intimately, Mr. Cornish was a good deal hampered in his dealings
with boys by his shyness and diffidence; he lacked that gift of
geniality which is essential to a successful teacher. This I discovered
at an early date, when, in the course of the entrance examination, I was
told to show him the rough copy of my Latin verses. It was to these, as
it turned out, that I mainly owed my election; but it somewhat depressed
me when my prospective tutor, after reading the lines with a sad and
forlorn expression, handed them back to me with no more cheering remark
than: “Too many spondees.” Years afterwards, when Mr. Cornish, competing
for a headmastership, was described in a testimonial as “trembling on
the brink of poetic creation” (an odd certificate for such a post), I
remembered his criticism of my youthful verses, and could not help
thinking that his own poetic genius would also have benefited by a
larger infusion of the sprightly or dactylic element. His nature was
decidedly spondaic; but he was a kind and courteous gentleman, in the
best sense of the word, and in a less rough environment than that of a
public school his great abilities would have found ampler scope.

Much the same must be said of Dr. J. J. Hornby, who succeeded the rigid
Dr. Balston in the headmastership of Eton in 1868. It was a marvel that
a man who loved leisure and quietude as he did, and who seemed always to
desire to doff rather than to don the formalities of high office, should
have deliberately sought preferment in a profession which could not have
been very congenial to him. Not that he lacked the reputed qualities of
a ruler: he had a stately presence, a most courteous manner, a charming
sense of humour, and the rare power of interesting an audience in any
subject of which he spoke. But, behind these external capabilities, he
had a fatal weakness--slackness, perhaps, is the proper term--which
loosened the reins of authority, and made his headmastership a period of
which Eton had no reason to be proud. “Idleness holds sway everywhere,”
wrote an Eton boy at that time, “and _such_ idleness! As a man who has
never had dealings with the Chinese can have but a faint idea of what
swindling is, so a man who has never been at Eton has but a poor
conception of what idleness is.”[2] What wonder, when the headmaster was
himself as unpunctual as a fourth-form boy?

Hornby was too retiring, too sensitive, to govern a great school. I was
in his Division for two years, almost at the beginning of his
headmastership; and I can see him still as he sat at his oak table in
the middle of the sixth-form room, toying with a pencil, and looking at
us somewhat askance, as if to avoid either scrutinizing or being
scrutinized, for he was not of the drill-master kind, who challenge
their class and stare them down. We liked him the better for it, but
divined that he was not quite at ease; and it occurred to one of us that
he was aptly described in that terse phrase which Tacitus applied to a
Roman emperor: _Capax imperii nisi imperâsset_ (“Every inch a ruler--if
only he had not ruled”). There was a certain maladroitness, too, about
him which at times set us wondering; until some one suggested that we
should look up the cricket records, and see how he had acquitted himself
in that supreme criterion of greatness, the Eton and Harrow match. We
did so, and found that he had hit his own wicket. Thus all was
explained, our worst misgivings confirmed.

The want of discipline in some of the classrooms was appalling. My first
term was spent in the “lag” Division of Fifth Form, a very rowdy one,
then taken by a most accomplished classical scholar known as “Swage,” or
“Swog,” and a more unpleasant introduction for a new boy could hardly
have been devised. So great was the uproar, and so frenzied the attempts
of the unfortunate “Swage” to suppress it, that it was as dangerous to
be a member of the class as it is for a well-disposed citizen to be
mixed up in a street-riot; for among so many tormentors there was no
security against being mistaken for a ringleader. “Swage’s” schoolroom
was on the ground floor and close to the road; and one of the first
scenes I witnessed was a determined attempt on the part of some of the
bigger boys to drive a stray cow into the room; they got her to the
doorway, but there she was met and headed back by “Swage” himself,
shouting at the top of his voice and flourishing his large door-key.
That was the sort of game that went on almost daily. It was currently
reported, and I believe with truth, that “Swage” once set a punishment
to a bird. To sing and to whistle were common practices in his Division;
and when a bird perched near the window and chirruped in an interval of
the din, he rounded on it blindly with a cry of “A hundred lines.”

There was a story, too, that a letter which he once wrote to the
headmaster, complaining of one of his private pupils who persisted in
knocking loudly on his study door, bore a brief after-cry more eloquent
than many words: “_P.S._ He is knocking still.”

To fall into the hands of boys, as this ill-fated master had done--and
his lot was shared by several others--was to be a captive among savages:
they did not kill and eat him, it is true, but that was the extent of
their tender mercies, and every day he was brought out afresh to be
baited and worried.

Such was the state of affairs when Hornby was made headmaster; and it
became worse rather than better under his lax and listless regime. Yet
no one who has any knowledge of the history of corporal punishment will
be surprised to hear that he was a frequent wielder of the rod. Seldom
did a day pass without a visit from the Sixth Form Præpostor to one or
more of the Divisions, to bid some culprit “stay after school”; and on
those occasions the conduct of the class was a good indication of the
light in which the punishment was regarded. As the fatal hour
approached, the eyes of all would be riveted on the offender, who
maintained a dauntless demeanour to the last; pantomimic gestures would
indicate the nature of the penalty which he was shortly to undergo;
watches would be held up to emphasize the dreadful fact that, as in the
case of Dr. Faustus, time was on the wing; and there would be audible
surmises as to “how many” he would get. The victim’s friends, indeed,
were hardly so considerate and sympathetic as the circumstances might
have been expected to demand.

Flogging is an old institution which has found mention in every book
written about the school, and which could never be omitted from any
discourse upon Eton. It used to be the custom, in the holidays, for
parties of Windsor trippers to be shown over the school buildings under
the leadership of a woman--the wife, presumably, of one of the College
servants--who gave an oral explanation of the “sights.” When the
headmaster’s room was reached, the guide of course drew attention to
that awful emblem of authority, the “block”; and after pointing out the
part which it played in the correction of offenders, she would add, in a
croaking voice befitting the solemnity of the subject: “They receive the
punishment upon their seats.” That was a true, but rather inadequate
description of a practice which only a very barbarous society could
tolerate. A flogging was a disgusting sight even to the two “lower boys”
who then had to act as “holders-down”; still more so to the Sixth Form
Præpostor whose duty it was to be present; most of all, one would
suppose, to the headmaster. It has been described as “an operation
performed on the naked back by the headmaster himself, who is always a
gentleman, and sometimes a high dignitary of the Church.”[3]

The Lower Master, at the time of which I am speaking, was the Rev. F. E.
Durnford, nicknamed “Judy,” described in _Eton under Hornby_ as “a
strange, laughable, yet almost pathetic figure, with whimsical puckered
visage and generally weather-beaten aspect, like a sort of Ancient
Mariner in academic garb.” He, too, used the birch freely in his domain
of Lower School, but his castigations were of a more paternal kind, and
between the strokes of the rod he would interject moral reproofs in his
queer nasal voice, such as: “You nahty, nahty boy!” It was said that
during the punishment he would even enter into conversation with the
offender, especially when he knew his “people” personally, and that on
one occasion he was overheard to inquire of a boy on the block: “Have
you seen your uncle lately?” a question which, in the circumstances,
would at first sight seem irrelevant, but was probably intended to
awaken repentance in the criminal by directing his thoughts to some
pious and respected relative. To the upper boys, “Judy” Durnford was a
never-failing amusement; his every gesture was noted by them; as when,
in correcting exercises, if some word or phrase eluded his memory, he
would sit scratching his temples vigorously, and exclaiming: “It runs in
me head.”

Among Dr. Hornby’s assistant masters were several others whose
eccentricities have been a fruitful subject of anecdote and legend.
Russell Day, a quiet and insignificant-looking little man, had a mordant
wit and gift of ready epigram, which caused him to be dreaded alike by
master and boys. “Friend, thou hast learned this lesson with a crib: a
crib is a thing in which thou liest,” was his remark in the course of a
Theocritus lesson to a member of his Division, from whom I heard the
story full forty years later. There were two boys of the name of Bankes,
one known afterwards as a distinguished K.C., the other a lazy youth who
never knew his lessons and was wont to mumble the Greek or Latin very
slowly in order to postpone the moment of discovery. On one of these
occasions Day leaned back in his chair and said in his drawling tones:
“Bankes, Bankes, you remind me of the banks where the bees suck and with
their murmuring make me sleep.” I remember how a friend and schoolfellow
of mine named Swan, who was a pupil of Day’s, showed me a copy of his
Latin verses which had drawn the following annotation: “_Olor!_ You
_cycnus_.” Not less characteristic was Day’s curt dismissal of a youth
named Cole (report says it was the future director of the Bank of
England): “Then, Cole, you may scuttle.” Nor did he hesitate to turn his
wit against his colleagues or himself. He called his pony “Lucifer,”
because, as he said, “When you see him coming, it announces the approach
of Day.”

A still more remarkable teacher was William Johnson, author of “Ionica,”
who afterwards took the name of Cory, a man of real genius, whose
enforced departure from Eton (for he did not leave, as was currently
supposed, from some sudden whim of his own) was the tragedy of his
lifetime, a “strange wounding,” as he calls it in one of his published
letters. Of “Billy Johnson” many descriptions have been written. Here is
a passage from one of them:

     “In appearance, as in everything else, he was unlike the typical
     schoolmaster: his thoughtful, handsome, somewhat sensuous features
     were altogether out of the common; and owing to his short sight he
     had a dreamy, mystic, inquiring way of looking at you which was
     sometimes a little disquieting to the schoolboy mind. There were
     occasions, too, when we dreaded his tart sayings (the very school
     books written by him bristled with epigrams), and listened with
     some anxiety to his sharp, staccato utterances, or watched him
     during those ‘accusing silences’ by which, hardly less than by his
     barbed speeches, he could awe the most unruly class. His blindness
     led to a prevalent story (apocryphal, I believe, as it was told
     also of other persons at different times) that he had been seen
     pursuing a hen down Windsor Hill, and making futile grabs at her,
     under the belief that she was his hat; but it is certain that he
     was sometimes seen standing stock-still in School Yard, or some
     open space, apparently unconscious of all observers or passers-by,
     and wrapt in a profound daydream. Singular he undoubtedly was, to a
     degree that was inconvenient to a schoolmaster; and there were
     queer anecdotes of certain too generous suppers that he gave to his
     favourites among the boys, when he began by politely overlooking
     that they were getting drunk, and ended by unceremoniously kicking
     them downstairs.”[4]

“Formerly wise men used to grow beards. Now other persons do so.” This
sentence in _Nuces_, an exercise-book of William Johnson’s compilation,
was supposed by us to be aimed at another assistant master, a bearded
clergyman, bluff, honest, mannerless, and universally disliked, who went
by the name of “Stiggins.” He had a detestable habit of standing at
right angles to any one with whom he was conversing, while he looked
straight away in front of him, his long red beard streaming down to his
waist, and when he spoke, he jerked his words at you, as it were, from
round the corner. His rudeness was a by-word; and the attempt sometimes
made to excuse it, on the ground that it “was not intended,” did not
appeal very strongly I think, either to masters or to boys: and justly,
for surely the only sort of rudeness which can be pardoned is that which
_is_ intended. There are occasions, rare, but real, when it is necessary
and wholesome to be rude; but to be rude without knowing it is the very
acme of ill manners, and that was precisely the kind of discourtesy in
which “Stiggins” was unequalled.

The story of how “Stiggins” was once nearly thrown into Barnes Pool, a
by-water of the Thames, by a riotous troop of boys, has been told in
more than one of the books about Eton; it was a curious coincidence that
he should have almost shared the fate of his reverend predecessor in
_Pickwick_, who was dipped in a horse-trough by the infuriated Mr.
Weller. This incident was, perhaps, the greatest of the many scandals
that occurred at Eton during Dr. Hornby’s headmastership.

It has often struck me as strange that I should owe to such a plain and
unadorned barbarian as “Stiggins” my first introduction to Keats’s
poems: he gave me, as a prize, Moxon’s edition of the works. He also
“sent me up for good” (for Latin verses), an honour of which I was
rather unpleasantly reminded, some twenty or more years afterwards, when
he had retired from Eton to a country parsonage; for in order to raise
funds for a proposed “restoration” of his church, he conceived the idea
of soliciting “for the glory of God,” as he expressed it, a subscription
from every Old Etonian who in bygone days had been “sent up for good” in
his Division. There was a naïve effrontery about this proposal which was
quite characteristic of its author.

The writing of Latin verse, so highly regarded at Eton, was a curious
accomplishment. It was said by Coleridge in his _Table Talk_ that
Etonians acquired the art “by conning Ovid and Tibullus”: my
recollection is that we read Ovid but rarely, and Tibullus not at all.
Some of us certainly became proficient in making Latin verses of a kind;
but our models were the renderings of English poems in such collections
as the _Arundines Cami_ or the _Sabrinæ Corolla_, rather than any Latin
originals; and though we could turn out “longs and shorts” with
facility, and even with neatness, I hardly think our productions would
have passed muster in the Augustan age. Still, the versifier’s art, such
as it was, brought us a certain gratification; and in the summer, when,
as we all felt, the time of the leading cricketers was of inestimable
value to the school, we were glad to turn our skill to good account by
composing for them their weekly copy of verses, and so releasing them,
as it were, from a frivolous for a serious task. On “verse days” members
of the Eleven would often come up into College, where each would find
for himself a poet; and thus valuable time would be saved for practice
at the nets. It was but little we could do in so great a cause, but we
did it with willingness; and I remember the honest pride which I felt
when dictating to the Captain of the Eleven a copy of verses, made up
largely of old tags and stock phrases, which he copied down with much
satisfaction and without the least understanding. His ignorance of the
meaning of what purported to be his own composition would lead to no
trouble; for tutors and division-masters alike were aware that they must
not press a good cricketer too hard. A blue cap covered a multitude of
sins.

But that we were savages, who, looking back on those bygone times, can
doubt? _Non angeli, sed Angli._ “It was an era,” as Mr. Ralph Nevill has
well remarked in his _Floreat Etona_, “when the sickening cant of
humanitarianism, born of luxury and weakness, had not yet arisen, to
emasculate and enfeeble the British race.” The hunting and breaking up
of hares then, as now, was one of the recognized pastimes; indeed, even
as late as the headmastership of Dr. Balston (1857-68), it had been
permitted to the boys, as a variation from the hare-hunt, to pursue with
beagles a mutilated fox deprived of one of his pads.[5] In the hundreds
of sermons which I have heard preached in Eton College Chapel, never was
a word spoken on the subject of cruelty. And no wonder; for Eton had
always been a home of cruel sports.

There was the less excuse for these miserable practices, because an
abundance and superabundance of the nobler sports was within reach of
the Eton boy: nowhere else could river and playing-field offer such
attractions. Thrilling beyond all else, and crowning the glories of the
summer school-time, was the great annual cricket match between Eton and
Harrow at “Lord’s,” a drama of such excitement as nothing in mature life
could ever equal. Who, for example, that witnessed the match of 1869--C.
J. Ottaway’s year, when Eton broke a long series of defeats by a
single-innings victory--can have forgotten the delirious scene at the
close? I can still see Dr. Goodford, the venerable Provost of Eton,
dancing ecstatically, hat in hand, before the pavilion, and looking very
much as “Spy” once pictured him in a famous cartoon in _Vanity Fair_.

Athletics, of course, took precedence of all intellectual pursuits. The
_Etonian_, in our time, was but a dim legend of the past, and the genius
of Praed and Moultrie had left no direct line of succession;
nevertheless among the upper boys there was not an entire dearth of
literary aspiration, and we had a school magazine, the _Adventurer_,
which existed from the later ’sixties for about five years. One of its
editors, a Colleger named C. C. Thornton, was the author of some
extremely good verse; and among other contributors, towards the latter
part of the _Adventurer’s_ career, were Arthur A. Tilley, now a Fellow
of King’s College, Cambridge; E. C. Selwyn, afterwards headmaster of
Uppingham School; J. E. C. Welldon, the popular Dean of Durham; Herbert
W. Paul; George Campbell Macaulay; J. C. Tarver; and Sir Melville
Macnaghten, who wrote as M^{2}; also, if I mistake not, the _nom de
plume_ of “Tom” covered some early poems of Mr. F. B. Money-Coutts, now
known as Baron Latymer. One of the best essays in the _Adventurer_ was
that on “Arbitration as a Substitute for War,”[6] by Mr. Herbert Paul.
Another noteworthy contribution, which has some historical interest for
Etonians of that period, was a poem by Bishop Welldon, entitled
“Adventurer Loquitur”[7] in which the Magazine was represented as giving
some description of the several members of its “staff,” whether in
recognition of their services or in reproof of their remissness. Among
those clearly indicated, though unnamed, were A. A. Tilley, R. C.
Radcliffe, G. R. Murray, Bernard Coleridge (now Lord Coleridge), H. G.
Wintle, G. C. Macaulay, C. C. Lacaita, J. E. C. Welldon, E. C. Selwyn,
and the writer of these reminiscences. The cause of the _Adventurer’s_
decease was that it ran counter to Etonian sentiment, in acting on the
perilous principle that “it is only those who truly love Eton that dare
to show her her faults.”[8]

Apart from the _Adventurer_, the literary ambition of some of the
Collegers sought irregular expression, in those far-off days, by
supplying the Windsor press, when opportunity occurred, with exaggerated
and absurdly inflated accounts of any exciting incident such as the
outbreak of a fire. Nor was it only the local papers that allured us;
for I remember how G. C. Macaulay and I once had a daring wager as to
which of us should more egregiously hoax the _Field_ with some story of
a rare bird. He tried a too highly coloured anecdote of a bee-eater, and
failed to win credence; while I, with a modest narrative of a supposed
stork in Windsor Park (“can it have been a stork? I shall indeed feel
myself lucky if my supposition be correct”), not only saw my letter
inserted, but drew the gratifying editorial comment: “Most probably it
was a stork.” Thus we made natural history and beguiled the idle hours.

To look upon a group photograph of the Collegers of fifty years ago
brings many memories to the mind. E. C. Selwyn, before we met at Eton,
had been my schoolfellow at Blackheath Proprietary School, of which his
father was headmaster; and our friendly relations were renewed from
time to time till his death in 1919. As I once reminded him, we had but
two quarrels--the first when we were freshmen at Cambridge, about Moses,
in whom I had been rash enough to say that I “did not believe”; and the
second, at a later period, because I _did_ believe in Mr. H. M. Hyndman,
of whose socialist doctrines Selwyn as vehemently disapproved. Long
years afterwards I made what I thought was a fair proposal to him--that
if he would give up Moses, I would give up the other patriarch, and so
our two small disagreements would be mutually adjusted; but his answer
was that, though Moses need no longer delay a settlement, he could not
agree to Mr. Hyndman being given up, because his patriotic conduct
during the Great War had shown him in a new light.

We used to call Selwyn “bishop” in those days, either because of a
distant relationship to Dr. G. A. Selwyn, the well-known Bishop of
Lichfield, or because we thought him almost certainly destined to attain
to episcopal rank: his scholarship, not to mention his defence of Moses,
seemed to warrant no less. J. E. C. Welldon, who _did_ become a bishop,
was another most genial schoolfellow, famous in the football field no
less than in the examination room. I remember running second to him in a
handicap quarter-mile race, in which he was allowed a good many yards’
start, and with that advantage just managed to keep the rest of us in
the rear. Herbert Paul, unlike Welldon or Selwyn, was by no means
designated for a bishopric. I recall him, a sceptic even in boyhood,
standing in Upper Passage, where Collegers often held informal
discussion, as, with thumbs in waistcoat pockets, he would hold forth,
already a fearless disputant, on matters human and divine.

Among other figures in the group are Dr. Ryle, Dean of Westminster; Sir
Richmond Ritchie; Mr. George Campbell Macaulay; Mr. C. Lowry, head of
Tonbridge School; Dr. Burrows, Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Harmer, Bishop
of Rochester; Sir E. Ruggles-Brise, Chairman of the Prison Commission;
Mr. E. C. Tennyson-d’Eyncourt; Rev. J. H. J. Ellison, late Vicar of
Windsor; Sir Lionel Carden, of Mexican fame; and others who in various
ways have become distinguished.

Very provocative of reminiscence, too, are the illustrations, printed in
books about Eton, of the College servants, the College buildings, and
many well-remembered faces and scenes. Take, for example, a picture of
“Old College Servants” in Mr. Ralph Nevill’s _Floreat Etona_.

There stands the old College porter, Harry Atkins, whom, to our
disgrace, we used to bombard on dark winter nights in his little lodge
at the gateway into School Yard, hurling missiles at his door from
behind the pillars of the cloisters under Upper School, and trusting to
our superior fleetness of foot when he was goaded into a desperate
charge. There, too, are Culliford, the butler, and Westbrook, the cook,
who were treated by us with far greater respect than the equally
respectable Atkins, as presiding over departments in which our own
personal comforts were more closely concerned, and from whose hands, on
the occasion of banquets in the College Hall, the smaller Collegers
would try to beg or snatch dainties as they carried them up from the
kitchen. Among the least prominent members of the group is one
Wagstaffe, designated “scullion”; yet, humble though he was in
appearance, his name had become a household word among the boys; for the
somewhat unappetizing dough which formed the base of the puddings served
to the Collegers was then known as “the Wagstaffe,” on the supposition,
presumably, that the under part of the pudding was the creation of the
under-cook. I do not think I could eat that pudding now; but looking on
the worthy Wagstaffe’s image again, I feel that we wronged him in
identifying him, as we did, with an unsavoury composition for which he,
a mere subordinate, was not personally to blame.

To the College Hall there came daily, for the remnants of bread and
other victuals, a number of poor old alms-women; and if any further
proof be needed of the exceeding thinness of the veneer by which our
youthful savagery was overlaid, it will be found in our treatment of
those humble folk, who were of much more use in the world than
ourselves. We named them “the hags”; and one of our amusements was to
construct for them what was called a “hag-trap.” A large square piece of
bread was hollowed out in the centre through a hole bored in the side,
and when the cavity had been filled up with mustard, pepper, salt, etc.,
the opening was plugged, and the bread left lying on the table as a bait
for some unwary victim who should carry it to her home. Whether the Eton
Mission in Hackney Wick has so ameliorated the hearts of later
generations of Etonians that a “hag-trap” would now be an impossibility,
I do not know; but in those days we certainly had not the smallest atom
of sympathy with the working classes, except perhaps with those College
servants who were known to us personally, and who ministered to our
wants.

We did not pretend to regard the working man as a brother. Once, when I
was travelling with some Eton friends, a sweep who was standing on the
platform tried to enter our carriage just as the train was about to
start. Instantly we seized the door, and held it closed from the inside;
and after a short struggle (the black man’s anxious eyes still haunt
me), the victory remained with us, for the train begun to move, and the
sweep was left behind. That was our idea of Fraternity. Was it Waterloo
that was won in the Eton Playing Fields? I have sometimes thought it
must have been Peterloo.

But let me turn from the recollection of childish deeds done by those
who were but “scugs,” or “lower boys,” to that of the immense
self-importance of which we were conscious when we had reached the
eminence of sixth form. Surely nowhere on earth is there such a
tremendous personage as a sixth-form Eton boy; he acts continually with
that “full sense of responsibility” so dear to the occupants of the
Parliamentary front-bench. No visitor to Eton College Chapel can have
failed to be impressed by the pompous entry of those twenty immaculately
attired young men as they precede the Headmaster and the Provost in a
sort of triumphal procession, thinking of anything rather than the
religious service to which their arrival is the prelude. On speech-days,
too, when, arrayed in dress-coat and knee-breeches, we declaimed
passages from the great writers of antiquity or of modern times, we felt
to the full the colossal seriousness of our position--serious also it
was in another sense, for our self-satisfaction was then sobered by the
possibility of breaking down. To keep order in the passages at night; to
say the Latin grace in Hall; to note the names at “Absence” in the
school-yard, standing by the headmaster’s side--even to read prayers in
the Houses on occasions--these were but a few of the many duties and
dignities of sixth form. No young feathered “bloods” in red Indian tribe
could have had greater reason to be proud.

Even in the holidays our grave responsibilities did not wholly cease;
for it was a custom for sixth-form youths to be sent as tutors to lower
boys who needed “coaching” at their homes. On two occasions it fell to
my lot to perform that service for a lively but very backward boy at
Evans’s House, Charley Selwyn, nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield; and
the awe which I felt at sojourning in a bishop’s palace helped to fix
more firmly in my memory some of the impressions which I got there.

Dr. George Augustus Selwyn was the most stalwart champion of “muscular
Christianity.” His face was somewhat grim and stern, as was to be
expected in so redoubtable a preacher of the gospel of hard work; but
there was a humorous twinkle in his eyes which betokened a very kind
heart; and to any one connected with Eton, present Etonian or Old
Etonian, he extended the warmest of welcomes. In fact, New Zealand, the
scene of his missionary labours, and Eton, where he had been a
successful scholar and athlete, were the standing subjects of
conversation at his table: he and Mrs. Selwyn used often to converse
together in the Maori tongue; and had there been an Etonian language
(other than slang) it would assuredly have been spoken by them. The
world was, for the bishop, divided into Etonian and non-Etonian. I once
heard him pressing upon an old schoolfellow, who was about to leave the
Palace, some table-delicacies of rare excellence, and quoting the
Horatian line:

      Ut libet; hæc porcis hodie comedenda relinques.
    (“As you like! The pigs will eat them up, if left.”)

He explained that some other guests who were coming to Lichfield that
day were--non-Etonians.

But in spite of the large and lion-like geniality of the bishop, there
were anxious moments when the sight of some indolent or slovenly action
caused his quick temper to give way, and then one knew not whether to
tremble or be inwardly amused at the forms which his anger would take.
Once, on a dull Sunday afternoon (the Sundays _were_ dull at the
Palace), he overheard his nephew yawning wearily and saying he did not
know what to do. “What!” cried the bishop. “A Christian boy not know
what to do on a Sunday afternoon!” Then, in terrible tones: “Go and
fetch your Greek Testament.” Forthwith, while I made haste to escape
from that scene of wrath, the wretched boy had to undergo a long lesson
from his uncle.

On another occasion it was my pupil’s sister, a very beautiful child of
ten or twelve, who caused an eruption of the volcano. She had left, in
the course of luncheon, “a wasteful plate”--that is, she had put the
gristle of the meat at the side, cleverly hidden, as she thought, under
knife and fork--and the bishop, observing this, lectured her sharply on
the sinfulness of such a habit. Then, to our consternation, his anger
rising higher, he ended by seizing the girl’s plate, and then and there
himself devoured the disgusting stuff as a practical lesson in
frugality. “The bishop’s in a very bad temper, to-day, sir,” the butler
gravely remarked to me afterwards.[9]

Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was
very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had
more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow--the
difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer
term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was
to come; and when it was time to write our _Vale_--that last copy of the
weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English
for Latin--we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of
sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate.

    So I, who write, feel ever on my heart
      Such dim presentiment, such dull despair:
    Me, too, a doom awaits; I, too, must part,
      And change a careless life for toil and care.

Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did,
into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket.




III

LITERÆ INHUMANIORES

    Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow.
              MILTON.


Certainly, after the liveliness of Thames, old Camus seemed to foot it
very slowly. Heavy was the fall from the exaltation of the sixth form to
the lowliness of the freshman. A needed experience it may have been, as
correcting the natural priggishness of boyhood; but it was a change that
we little relished while we underwent it.

King’s College, Cambridge, in the early ’seventies, was in a phase of
transition from the old-fashioned system, under which it was a mere
appanage of Eton, to a new order of things which was gradually throwing
its gates open to all comers; much, however, of the ancient pettiness of
spirit still remained; the College was small in numbers and small in
tone, dominated by a code of unwritten yet vexatious ordinances, which
it was waste of time to observe, yet “bad form” to neglect. “King’s
always had a tyrant,” was a remark made to me by F. W. Cornish, himself
a Kingsman.

The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose
enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was
walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered
undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to
audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such
merriment must not be indulged in while _he_ was passing by. That he
himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility
which had not entered his mind.

Next in authority was the dean, a wan and withered-looking clergyman
named Churton, who always seemed unhappy himself and infected every one
who entered his rooms with a sense of discomfort. He used to invite
undergraduates to breakfast with him, a melancholy function in which he
often had the aid of Fred Whitting (the name was pronounced Whiting), a
bluff and more genial don whose conversation just saved the guests from
utter despair; and at these entertainments poor Churton’s one remark, as
he helped the fish, was to say with a sour smile of ineffable
wretchedness: “Whitting, will you be a cannibal?”

Very different from this chilly dean, and much more interesting, as
being genuine relics of the brave old days when Kingsmen had no need to
study or to exert themselves, inasmuch as their University career was
assured them from the first, were two portly and inseparable bachelors,
Messrs. Law and Brocklebank, whose sole employment it seemed to be to
reap to the full the emoluments of their life-fellowship, which they had
held for a goodly number of years. “Brock” and “Applehead” were their
nicknames; both were stout and bulky, but there was a rotundity about
Mr. Law’s cranial development which gave him a more imposing appearance.
As they ambled side by side about the courts and lawns, it amused us to
fancy them a pair of strange survivals from a rude prehistoric age, we
ourselves, of course, playing the part of the moderns and intellectuals.
When “Applehead” died, we were enjoined in a poetical epitaph, by some
anonymous admirer, to deck his grave with pumpkins, gourds, melons,
cucumbers and other emblematic fruits.

The literary element was not strong in King’s; but in Henry Bradshaw,
one of the senior Fellows, the College could boast a University
Librarian of much distinction. He was a kind, but most whimsical and
eccentric man, whose friendship was open to any undergraduate who sought
it, only it must be sought, and under the conditions imposed by Bradshaw
himself, for it was never in any circumstances offered. If you presented
yourself uninvited at his rooms--rather an ordeal for a nervous
freshman--you were welcomed, perhaps taken to his heart. If you did not
present yourself, he never asked you to come; on the contrary, however
often he met you on the stairs or elsewhere, he passed with a look of
blank and stony indifference on his large and somewhat inexpressive
visage. I knew a scholar of King’s who lived on Bradshaw’s staircase,
and who for more than a year was thus passed by as non-existent: then,
one evening, moved by a sudden impulse, he knocked at the great man’s
door, entered, and was immediately admitted to the cheery circle of his
acquaintance. It was useless to resent such waywardness on Bradshaw’s
part; there was no “ought” in his vocabulary; you had to take him on his
own terms, or “go without”; and the great number of University men who
came on pilgrimage to his rooms was in itself a proof of his mastery. I
recall the following lines from an epigram which some rebellious
undergraduate wrote on him:

    Throned in supreme indifference, he sees
    The growing ardour of his devotees:
    He cares not if they come, yet more and more
    They throng subservient to the sacred door:
    He cares not if they go, yet none the less
    His “harvests ripen and his herds increase.”

It was so; and Bradshaw, having a gift of very pungent speech, was well
able to keep his “herds” in order when they were assembled: he would at
times say a sharp and wholesome word to some conceited or presumptuous
visitor. Even his nearest friends could take no liberties with him. It
was said that when Mr. G. W. Prothero, then a Fellow of King’s, took to
omitting the “Esquire” in the address of letters, and wrote plain “Henry
Bradshaw,” the librarian retaliated in his reply by addressing
laconically to “Prothero”--nothing more.

To attend lectures and chapel services formed the chief duties of
undergraduates; and the lectures were much the less tedious task. It was
a chilly business, however, on a cold winter morning, to hear the great
Greek scholar, R. Shilleto, hold forth for an hour on his beloved
Thucydides; for he was an elderly man with a chronic cough, and his
enthusiasm for a Greek idiom hardly compensated his audience for the
physical difficulties with which he laboured. He would begin cheerily on
a difficult passage, and, overtaken by a bout of coughing, lose the
place for a while; then, with a drawling “yes,” catch up the thread of
his discourse, till another spasm overwhelmed him; while we, desiring
our breakfasts much more than the privilege of listening to a second
Porson, fumed and fidgeted, and took notes, or neglected to take notes,
till the stroke of the clock released us. Much more popular were some of
the lectures which we attended, in other Colleges, given by such skilled
exponents of the Classics as Henry Jackson and R. C. Jebb. Jebb was
always the same--self-composed, neat and eloquent; Jackson, on the
contrary, though not at all less competent, used to work himself into a
fever of fretfulness when he could not find the exact word he sought
for; and then, to our amusement, he would upbraid himself as “dolt” and
“idiot,” even while he was giving a most suggestive address.

The compulsory “chapels” were a great trial to some of us; and each
King’s scholar was further liable, in turn, to the function of reading
the Lessons for a week. I do not know why this should have seemed more
formidable than “speeches” at Eton, but it was an office which we would
very thankfully have escaped. It needed some courage to step down from a
stall in that spacious chapel--most of all when, as on a Sunday
afternoon, there was a large concourse of visitors--and then to mount,
by what cragsmen would call an “exposed ridge,” the steps that led up to
the big lectern in the middle of the nave. The sensation was one of
extreme solitariness and detachment, with little but the lectern itself
to give support and protection; so that we could almost sympathize with
the plight of that disreputable undergraduate who, according to a
current story (which, be it hoped, was fictitious), had essayed to read
the Lessons, in some college chapel, when he was not so sober as he
should have been. Throwing his arms round the eagle--for his lectern was
fashioned in the shape of that pagan bird--he appalled the congregation,
it was said, by exclaiming, in a pensive voice: “If it wasn’t for this
[something] duck, I’d be down.”

But practice makes all things easier; and after a time one or two of us
so far overcame our nervousness as to utilize our position at the
lectern for the benefit, as we thought, of the congregation at
large--certainly for our own personal comfort; for we ventured to dock
and shorten the Lessons as we felt inclined. “Here endeth the Lesson,”
we would cry, when we had read, perhaps, no more than a dozen verses out
of twice or thrice that number; and immediately the great organ would
sound, and the pompous choral service continued on its course. We had
private information that this irregularity did not pass unobserved by
some of the dons; but as nothing was said we concluded that they blessed
us for it in secret.

The relations between dons and undergraduates were for the most part
very friendly; but the blandness of the dons was somewhat measured and
condescending--not without reason, perhaps, for undergraduates, like
schoolboys, were apt to take undue advantage of any excess of
affability. Once, when I was walking along King’s Parade with a friend,
we saw the great Dr. Lightfoot coming from the opposite direction. “Now
just look,” said my companion, “how polite Lightfoot will be. See how
I’ll make him smile as he passes.” And sure enough, the learned divine,
in response to an audacious salute from one who had no sort of claim to
his acquaintance, was instantly wreathed in smiles and benignity, as if
he were meeting the son of his dearest friend, instead of being
impudently imposed on by a stranger.

We rather dreaded the invitations that sometimes reached us to a formal
breakfast, or worse still, a _soirée_ (familiarly known as a
“stand-up”), at the residence of some high authority. I have spoken of
the Churton breakfasts in King’s; still more serious an affair was it to
be one of a dozen undergraduates summoned _en bloc_ to breakfast at
Trinity Lodge, for Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity, was a great
University magnate, widely famed and feared for his sententious sayings
and biting sarcasms, many of which were reported from mouth to mouth. We
had heard of that deadly verdict of his on a University sermon preached
by Dean Howson, joint author of Conybeare and Howson’s _Life of St.
Paul_: “I was thinking what a very clever man Mr. Conybeare must have
been.” As a member once or twice of such a breakfast-party, I recollect
how awkwardly we stood herded together when we had entered the sage’s
presence, and how, as we passed into the breakfast-room, we almost
jostled each other in our anxiety to get a seat as far as possible away
from that end of the long table where the Master in his majesty sat. As
for the _soirées_ at Trinity Lodge and elsewhere, they demanded some
strength of limb; for the number of visitors exceeded the number of
seats, and to stand for two hours in a corner, and look as if one liked
it, was irksome even for youth. At these ceremonials, when the Provost
of King’s was the host, he used to invite undergraduates with immense
condescension to “be seated”; and when he added with emphasis: “You may
sit down _here_,” he was understood to be reflecting on the superior
comfort of a Provost’s entertainment as compared with that of Trinity
Lodge.

One thing that rather galled the feelings of undergraduates was that
none but Provost and Fellows might set foot on the extensive lawns at
King’s--a selfish privilege of the few, as it appeared, maintained to
the exclusion of the many. However that may have been, there came a
night when a small party of Kingsmen committed the sacrilegious act of
releasing a mole in front of the Provost’s Lodge, and dauntlessly
awaited the result, thus anticipating Lord Milner’s policy of “damning
the consequences.” There were no serious consequences, except to the
most innocent of all the persons concerned--the mole. We watched him
with admiration as he sank into that soft green turf, like a seal into
water; and the next morning we were thrilled to see a small line of
earthen hillocks on the sacred sward. Then followed a great to-do of
gardeners and mole-catchers; and on the third day, to our regret and
remorse, the poor mole paid the penalty for the trespasses of others. We
put a London newspaper on the track of this incident, and the editor
published some humorous speculations, for the benefit of readers
interested in natural history, as to how the mole could have found his
way to that cloistered spot.

The _Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal_ (I am now speaking of the year
1873 and thereabouts) was a fortnightly paper--edited at one time by G.
C. Macaulay, at another by Hallam (now Lord) Tennyson--in which some of
us used to try our hands at the higher journalism, and write satirical
essays on the various anomalies of Cambridge life. Compulsory chapels;
compulsory Latin and Greek; “cribbing” in examinations; antiquated
college customs; the exactions of college servants; the social functions
known as “stand-ups”--these were but a few of the topics on which we
held forth with all the confidence of youth. It was the _Adventurer_
over again, but on a more comprehensive scale; for the undergraduate
could express his feelings more openly than the schoolboy; else the
writer of an article on compulsory chapels could hardly have inveighed,
as he did, against the ordinance of full choral service, where “the man
without an ear” was doomed, for two long hours, “to sit, stand, and
kneel in wearisome succession.”

The annual competition for the English Prize Poem afforded another
opportunity for nascent ambition. The subject one year was the recovery
of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) from a serious illness;
and it was this rather snobbish theme that drew from one of the
competitors a couplet which went the round of a delighted University:

    Flashed o’er the land the electric message came:
    “He is not better, but he’s much the same.”[10]

Then there were the “Sir William Browne’s Medals,” offered annually for
Greek and Latin odes and epigrams. These prizes were usually the
perquisite of a few select scholars (my friend E. C. Selwyn had a way of
carrying them off); but as the poems were sent in anonymously, the
envelope containing the competitor’s name not being opened except when
he won the medal, it was a safe and rather good sport to try one’s luck
in the contest. One of the surprises of my life was when old Shilleto
(the coughing grammarian) walked into my room one evening, and told me
that the examiners had awarded me the medal for Greek epigram. There
being a defect in one of the lines, he sat down and corrected it, there
and then, by an emendation which was doubtless better Greek and
certainly worse poetry.

Another high Cambridge authority, at that time, was Dr. Benjamin
Kennedy, famed as former headmaster of Shrewsbury School, and as author
of a Latin Grammar familiar to many generations of schoolboys. I had
been told to call on him at his house, for my father had been under him
at Shrewsbury, and there was an old friendship between the families; and
when I did so with some trepidation--perhaps because a recent experience
at Trinity Lodge had made me fearful of “receptions”--I found him a most
benign old gentleman, quite free from the awful stateliness of a Provost
or a Master; indeed, when he asked undergraduates to dinner he relaxed
to an extent which could not but restore confidence in the most timid.
After dinner he would give us “words” to decipher, in ivory letters,
according to that rather inane Victorian pastime; or he would recite odd
verses to us in his quaint sing-song voice, something between a whisper
and a wheeze. Who could have feared even the most learned of Professors,
when he stooped to conquer by rehearsing for us such an example of an
English pentameter as the following, presumably of his own composition:

    Strawberry jam jam jam; strawberry, strawberry jam.

But even the genial Dr. Kennedy could not wholly release himself from
the rigidness of Cambridge etiquette: it was impossible, so he had
stated when he desired me to call on him, for _him_ to call on an
undergraduate. No such difficulty existed for the greatest yet least
assuming of the distinguished men then living in Cambridge, Frederick
Denison Maurice. Having heard of me as a pupil of Mr. Kegan Paul’s, he
came, though he was an old man, to my room on the top story in King’s,
and talked so quietly and naturally that I felt quite at ease with him.
On a later occasion I breakfasted at his house, alone with him, a
privilege which I much valued; for even then I was aware of his real
greatness, unlike as he was to the pompous University magnates who
figured so largely in public. If only the heads of Colleges and
Universities could know--but, of course, they rarely know--how much more
powerful is the influence of simple unaffected kindness than of the
affability which betrays a touch of patronage and condescension!

St. Edward’s Church, of which Maurice was the incumbent, was close to
the gates of King’s--and some of us undergraduates used to go there on
Sunday evenings, notwithstanding our weariness of our own chapel
services, in order to hear him preach, for we were drawn to him by the
obvious impression which he gave of quiet sympathy and strength. At a
time when the revolting doctrine of eternal punishment was still widely
held, his humanizing influence must have been very valuable within the
Church. Matthew Arnold’s clever gibe, that he beat about the bush, but
without starting the hare, left a good deal unsaid; for if he did not
start the hare he helped to silence the hell-cat.

Not very long before the time of which I am speaking, Maurice’s curate
at St. Edward’s had been a namesake of that saint’s, Edward Carpenter,
who, as is related in his autobiography,[11] resigned his Orders,
together with his Fellowship at Trinity Hall, in 1871. Some thirteen
years later I made his acquaintance in London; and I have often
regretted that I went to Cambridge too late to hear him preach, for I
have never been able quite to picture the author of _Towards Democracy_
in the pulpit, arrayed canonically in surplice or gown.

The goal of a Kingsman’s career at Cambridge was the Classical Tripos;
and for three years he would read steadily, and with increasing
intentness, keeping that end in view. It was generally thought advisable
to have a “coach”; but experience led me to doubt whether, for those who
knew how to direct their own reading, and had the necessary
perseverance, it was not a waste of time to invoke such assistance; a
good “crib” was a far speedier and more effective instructor. Some
“coaches,” moreover, were apt to be rather lazy at times, and to put off
their pupils’ attendance on the plea, perhaps, that they had to go to
London for the day, or were called off by some equally important
engagement; and now, by a curious reversal, we, who at Eton should have
been only too delighted if our tutors had perennially shirked their
duties, had become in turn the studious ones, and having ourselves paid
for the tuition were annoyed if we did not get it! One contemporary of
mine at King’s was so upset by his “coach’s” remissness that he wrote
him a letter of remonstrance, more in sadness than anger, and roused him
to fury by quoting some words from Thucydides (οί δἐ προλαβόντες τὀ
ἀργύριον), in open allusion to those who first get their fee and then
neglect to earn it.

Young men often fail to realize the sensitiveness of their elders, and
thus say and do things which cause more hurt than was intended. We used
to be resentful, in those too fastidious pre-war days, of the
considerable amount of shale, schist, and rubble which was sold to us
with our coal; and a fellow Kingsman once asked me to accompany him to
the coal-merchant’s, to whom he proposed to return a basketful of the
refuse in question. Foreseeing sport, I went; but the scene that ensued
was sorrowful rather than amusing, for the head of the firm, a
venerable-looking old man with white hair, happened to be in the office,
and when the coal-substitutes were handed to him over the counter his
wrath was so great that his hand positively shook with passion. Savages
though we were, we came away rather penitent.

There was, however, one Kingsman at that time, an undergraduate senior
to myself, who was unpleasantly famed for the remorseless devilry with
which he scored off any unfortunate person whom chance placed in his
power. His tailor, it was said, having by mistake sent him in a bill
that had already been paid, was ordered to set the matter right, on pain
of being dismissed. He did so; and then the offended customer said to
him: “And now I dismiss you just the same.” On another occasion it was a
broken-down clergyman who had the ill-luck to appeal to this young
gentleman for pecuniary aid: so rare an opportunity could not be allowed
to slip. “You trust in God, I suppose,” said the undergraduate. It was
not possible for a clergyman to gainsay it. “Then I will toss up,” said
the other; “and if you cry rightly, I shall know you deserve
assistance”; and forthwith he spun the coin, and the clergyman
cried--“heads” or “tails” as might be. But unluckily for the poor
pilgrim, the Kingsman was a skilled manipulator of the coin in hazards
of this sort, and the result was never in doubt. The mendicant was
proved, on the highest authority, to be undeserving.

But to return to the Classical Tripos. Coached or uncoached, we came at
last to that great final examination, a sort of Judgment Day in
miniature, which, for some of us, would have an important bearing on our
later lives. The examination system is in various ways open to
criticism, and critics have by no means been lacking, but it need not be
denied that intellectual benefit in many cases may result from the
sustained effort to prepare oneself for a very searching test,
necessitating a thorough study of the chief Classical writers. But the
weightiest charge against the University education is the one which
least often finds expression--that a learning which would strengthen the
intellect only, and does not feed the heart, is in the main but barren
and unprofitable, a culture of the _literæ inhumaniores_. Except from F.
D. Maurice, I never heard, during my four years at Cambridge--from
preacher or professor, from lecturer, dean, or don--the least mention of
the higher social ethics, without which there can be no real culture
and no true civilization.

I remember, with shame, that I was once so moved by the florid rhetoric
of Dean Farrar, in a missionary sermon preached before the University,
that I made a contribution to the offertory which I could ill afford. A
day or two afterwards, with the return of sanity, I felt the force of
the adage that “fools and their money are soon parted,” and I saw that
it was worse than folly to send missions to other countries, when we
ourselves were little better than pagans at home. The mischief of this
spurious religionism was that it lessened the chance of any genuine
awakening of conscience to the facts that stared us in the face. We were
made to study Paley’s fantastic “Evidences,” while the evidence of
nature, of the human heart, and of actual life, was sedulously hidden
away.

In the Tripos of 1875 the Senior Classic was Mr. Peskett, who belonged
properly to the preceding year, but owing to illness or some other cause
had “degraded” into ours, and thus robbed my friend Mr. Arthur Tilley of
an honour which should rightly have been his. Dr. J. Gow, Headmaster of
Westminster School, was third; the fifth place was shared by Mr. Gerald
Balfour and myself.

It was the custom in those days for headmasters of Eton to draw largely
on King’s College for their supply of assistants: thus a King’s Scholar
of Eton, after taking his degree at Cambridge, would often return to the
school as a Classical assistant master, and so complete the academical
round. The process might, perhaps, have been likened to the three stages
of butterfly life, but with the first and the last phase transposed. We
_began_ as the gay Eton insects, whose ignorance was bliss; and then,
after passing through the chrysalis period by the Cam, reappeared on
Thames’s bank, metamorphosed into the caterpillars locally known as
“beaks,” and usually content thenceforth to crawl soberly along on a
wingless but well-nourished career. But even a worm, as we know, will
turn; and, as the next chapter must relate, some of the grubs would at
times be so unconscionable as to take new and unsettling notions into
their heads.




IV

THE DISCOVERY

     “Why, they are cannibals!” said Toby. “Granted,” I replied; “but a
     more gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not exist.”--HERMAN
     MELVILLE.


What are the feelings of the poacher transformed into the gamekeeper?
They must, I think, be similar to those of a youth who, after studying
for a few years at the University, returns as master to the school which
he left as boy. _Quantum mutatus ab illo!_ The scene itself is the same,
but the part which he must play in it is now to a great extent reversed;
and the irony of the situation is that though henceforth an upholder of
law and order, he still, perhaps, sympathizes at heart with the
transgressors whom it is his duty to reprimand.

To be summoned as an assistant by Dr. Hornby, and at a few days’ notice
(his arrangements were frequently made in desperate haste), was to be
thrown very suddenly upon one’s own resources; for, an appointment once
completed, he showed no further interest in the matter, and did not even
trouble himself to provide a school-room in which his latest lieutenant
should teach: that the number of Divisions exceeded the number of rooms
was a trifle which did not engage his attention. A novice had therefore
to consider himself rather lucky when he was able to secure, for his
first term or two, even an apartment so ill equipped for educational
purposes as a sort of cupboard, situated under the stairs that led to
the headmaster’s room, and popularly known as “The Dog-Kennel.” Here,
with a class of about forty boys, a pleasant summer school-time had to
be spent.

It was a curious sensation, which I suppose all teachers of large
classes must have felt, to be confronted by serried ranks of boys whose
faces were entirely strange, though their names were entered on the list
which lay, like a map, upon the desk. Some time was required before each
name could be correctly fitted to the face; and in this process any
abnormality of feature or size in individuals, which might constitute a
landmark, was a great help. A red-haired boy, or a fat boy, served to
punctuate a row; and that classification of boys (I forget who made it)
into the beef-faced and the mealy-faced was a thing to be kept in mind.

Such were the auspices under which an Eton master was in those days
started on his career--shut up in the Dog-Kennel with a horde of young
barbarians, whom, in the circumstances, it was hardly possible to
instruct, and not very easy to control. There were a few masters at
Eton, as doubtless at other public schools, who had a real gift for
teaching; also a few, like our friend “Swage,” who were unable to
maintain any semblance of authority. Between these two extremes were
those, the great majority of us, who, while courteously and respectfully
treated by the boys, and having pleasant relations with them, could not
in strict truth flatter themselves that, except in special cases, they
had overcome the natural tendency of boyhood to be idle. So much has
been written about the defects of the Eton system that it suffices here
to say that while a reputation for cleverness was maintained by a few of
the boys, mostly King’s Scholars, the bulk of the school was inflexibly
bent upon other activities than those of the mind.

Nor were the masters themselves unaffected by the general tone of the
school. There were some fine scholars, it is true, on Dr. Hornby’s
staff, experts not in Classical literature only, but in various
branches of learning; yet in not a few cases these gifted specialists
seemed as artless in their outlook on life as they were skilled in their
particular department. “A d----d fool, with a taste for the Classics,”
was the too unceremonious description given of one of them by a
sarcastic acquaintance; and the epigram, however reprehensible in
expression, hit the mark. Knowledge is not wisdom; and this academical
learning often went together with a narrow and pedantic spirit which
blindly upheld the old order of things and resented every sign of
change. For example, there was one learned master who used to assert, in
those years of peace, that what England most needed was a war--a grim,
hard-fought war; and this was the sort of reckless talk often indulged
in by the mildest-mannered of men, who themselves were in no danger
whatever of exchanging the gown for the sword.

New ideas were under a ban at Eton; notwithstanding the specious
invitations given to some distinguished men to lecture before the
school. Gladstone, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris and Lowell were among those
who addressed the boys in the School Library; and it was instructive to
note the reception which they severally obtained. Lowell was the most
popular; his cheery contention that this world of ours is, after all,
“not a bad world to live in,” being delightedly received by an audience
which had good personal reasons for concurring in such a sentiment:
William Morris, on the other hand, having ventured on the then dangerous
ground of Socialism, was hissed. Gladstone discreetly kept to the
unimpeachable subject of Homer; and Matthew Arnold’s staid appearance,
with his “mutton-chop” whiskers and mechanical bowing of the head in
accord with the slow rhythm of his sentences, was sufficient to lull to
sleep any insidious doubts of his respectability. As a speaker, Ruskin
was by far superior to the rest; his lucid train of thought and clear,
musical voice could hold enchanted an audience, even of Eton boys, for
the full space of an hour.

Science lectures formed another branch of the intellectual treats that
were provided for the school; but Science was still rather under a cloud
at that date. I recollect the title of but one discussion, and that only
because I happened to be able to throw some light on the geological
problem with which it dealt. I was living in a small house (once famous
as “Drury’s”), which had a much higher one on either side; and as it was
the practice for the boys in neighbouring houses to bombard each other
with any missiles or minerals that might be handy, my garden became a
sort of “no-man’s-land” between the two rival fortresses, and its
surface was enriched with a very varied deposit. When, therefore, a
lecture was announced on the question, “Will coal be found in the Thames
valley?” I was able to solve the problem affirmatively by the production
from my own premises of some remarkably fine samples.

It would doubtless have shocked Dr. Hornby if any one had suggested that
there was a lack of religious instruction in that most conservative of
schools. Chapel services there were in plenty; and a Greek Testament
lesson on Monday morning; and “Sunday Questions” to be answered in
writing; and “Sunday Private” to be attended in the Tutor’s pupil-room;
and Prayers every evening in each House. Yet the general tone of Eton
was far from being religious, even in the conventional meaning of the
term; for the many superficial observances did not affect the deep
underlying worldliness of the place. It was Vanity Fair on Sundays and
week-days alike. There was an Eton story of a servant in a private
family who, when the bell was rung for evening devotions, was overheard
to cry in a weary voice: “Oh, dear! _Why_ do gentry have prayers?” The
reference to “gentry” shows the light in which such ceremonies are
regarded downstairs. In the same way, the religious teaching in schools
is looked upon by the boys as imposed on them for purposes of
discipline.

It was not the boys only who found the Chapel services very tedious; for
most of the masters were laymen, many of them unorthodox, and for these
it was no agreeable duty to be victimized both on Sundays and on Saints’
Days for the sake of keeping up appearances before the school.
Calculations are sometimes made of the number of years spent in prison
by some hardened criminal or “gaol-bird.” Why does no one tell us how
many hours, amounting to how many years, some zealous church-goer, or
pew-bird, has spent on such devotions? Without claiming that
distinction, I calculate that during some twenty years spent in
connection with public school and University I passed several thousands
of hours in church and chapel.

Human nature could not but chafe under the fearful dulness and length of
the sermons in Eton College Chapel. Dr. Goodford, the Provost, was a
sort of personified Doom; when once he mounted the pulpit he was in the
saddle, so to speak, and rode his congregation well-nigh to despair with
his merciless homilies, all uttered in that droning voice, with its
ceaseless _burr_ and inevitable cadence, which became to generations of
Etonians as familiar as the Chapel bell itself. Scarcely less fearsome
were some of the elder Fellows, retired masters, such as Bishop Chapman
and the Rev. John Wilder, who were often let loose on us on Sunday
mornings and blithely seized the opportunity: it was their field-day,
and they were out to enjoy themselves, quite unconscious that what was
pious sport to them was death to their unwilling audience. Small wonder
that some assistant masters used to dread the weeks when they were on
duty (“in desk” it was called); but providentially there were others
who, disliking still more the labour of correcting Latin verses, were
willing to barter “verses” for “desks”; that is, they would take so
many of a colleague’s desks, while he in return would look over a
stipulated number of exercises. Thus did the Muse come to the aid of her
devotees:

    Sic me servavit Apollo.

Perhaps the strangest form that religion took at Eton was that of
missionary zeal; we used to have sermons periodically about carrying the
gospel to “the heathen”; though if ever there was a benighted spot on
earth, it was that pleasant school by the Thames. Some of the boys were
at times infected by the passion for making proselytes: on one occasion
an extremely dull and idle youth, who had lately left Eton, wrote to
tell me, as his former tutor, that he had decided to become a missionary
“to the poor perishing heathen”--in his case, the Chinese, a people much
less ignorant and barbarous than many of their self-appointed rescuers.

“Divinity” was one of the studies most encouraged and fostered at Eton;
one would have thought the place was a training-school for theologians,
from the prominence that was given in examinations to this particular
branch of learning. The result, as might have been expected, was the
same as in the writing of Latin verses: a few boys became adepts in the
Bible Dictionary, while the bulk of the school scarcely advanced beyond
that stage of biblical knowledge exhibited by a certain Etonian who,
when invited to write an account of St. James the Elder and St. James
the Less, was able to give a brief description of the Elder, but was
reduced, in the case of the Lesser saint, to the rather inadequate,
though so far correct, statement that: “The other was another.”

We were perhaps somewhat overdone with the Saints at Eton: the masters
who had to set the Sunday Questions were nearly as tired of asking about
St. Peter and St. Paul as the boys of answering; and in the Chapel
sermons we suffered, year after year, under the whole Hagiology, until
some of us, it must be confessed, sighed in secret for the time:

    When Reason’s rays, illuming all,
      Shall put the Saints to rout,
    And Peter’s holiness shall pall,
      And Paul’s shall peter out.

But if Christianity was the nominal religion at Eton, the real creed was
Respectability. To do the “proper thing”; not to offend against any of
the conventional canons; to dress, walk, speak, eat and live in the
manner prescribed by “good form”--this was the ever-present obligation
which neither boy nor master could disregard. Any slip in matters of
etiquette was regarded as deadly. There was a dark rumour about one of
the masters, a good and worthy man, but very shortsighted, that by a
tragic error in the High Street he had taken off his hat to his cook: it
was only less dreadful than if he had failed to perform that act of
courtesy in some case where it was required.

As is usual in barbarous societies, the number of things that were
“taboo” was considerable. In the early ’eighties the bicycle and
tricycle were frowned upon, not for boys only but for masters; and a
lady living in Eton once received from Mrs. Hornby, who of course, was
at the head of the Fashions, a message that to ride a tricycle was “not
a nice thing to do.” Yet for the boys it _was_ considered a nice thing
to hunt and “break up” hares. I once witnessed the virtuous indignation
of one of the masters, a clergyman, and a follower of the Eton hounds,
when some rather “shady” incident of the hunt was reported to the
headmaster; but Dr. Hornby soon set matters right by explaining that, as
_all_ hunting was cruel, he obviously could not take notice of any
particular malpractice. That was the sort of reasoning with which any
attempts to humanize Eton customs were parried and thwarted.

Yet new ideas could not be wholly excluded, even from that stronghold
of the antique; there were, in fact, several members of Hornby’s staff
who held views too advanced to be avowed in such surroundings. One of
the least prejudiced men at Eton was the French Master, M. Roublot, who
was a close personal friend of his German colleague, Herr Griebel; and
it is pleasant to recall the fact that during the horrors of the
Franco-German War, some ten years earlier than the period of which I am
speaking, these two “enemies” had kept their friendship unbroken, and
might be seen daily taking their walk together, just as if their
countrymen were not insanely engaged in cutting each other’s throats.

Among the Classical tutors, two of the most enlightened spirits, men of
great personal charm, were Mr. E. S. Shuckburgh, afterwards lecturer at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Rev. Duncan Tovey, who a few years
later took the Eton living of Worplesdon. Shuckburgh, though himself
most impatient of the old traditions, and sympathizing largely with the
newer thought, was of a very critical habit of mind, and used to
delight, for argumentative purposes, in dwelling on the difficulties and
shortcomings of the reforms which some of us advocated. Tovey was a
literary man (his works on Gray and Thomson are well known), out of his
element in such a place as Eton, but in his happier moods a most
delightful talker and companion. Mrs. Tovey, too, had a lambent wit
which could play lightly round the anomalies of Eton life. She once
wrote a charming list of some imaginary books of fiction, the authorship
of which she assigned to various local celebrities: one of the works,
the supposed creation of an Eton upholsterer notorious for his big
bills, had a title which might make the fortune of a modern
philosophical novelist: “Man’s Time; a Mystery.”

Some of the junior masters played a useful part in challenging the old
superstitions. Mr. J. D. Bourchier, afterwards a famous correspondent of
_The Times_ in south-east Europe, was the first rider of the bicycle at
Eton, and incurred much obloquy through his persistence in a practice
which no Eton master could then countenance with safety. My
brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes, jun., was a still worse offender. He had
been impressed by Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_, and in the
summer holidays of 1882 travelled with George in Ireland. By a
ridiculous blunder of the Irish Constabulary, the two were arrested and
locked up as dangerous conspirators; and, though they were quickly
discharged when the magistrates discovered the error, the whole Press of
the country rang with amused comments. The Government had to apologize
to Henry George as an American citizen; and an account of the fiasco,
written by Joynes, and published in _The Times_, caused great scandal in
Etonian circles, where publicity was regarded, not without good reason,
as the thing of all things to be deprecated. Great, then, was the horror
of the Eton authorities when, a few weeks later, an advertisement
announced Joynes’s forthcoming volume, _Adventures of a Tourist in
Ireland_. In hot haste he was informed by the headmaster that he must
choose between his mastership and his book: he chose the latter, and
resigned his post. That was the result, as a patriotic colleague and
friend pointed out to me, of giving heed to “a mouldy American.” Thus
fallen from the high estate of an Eton mastership, Joynes became a
leading spirit in the Social Democratic Federation; and by him I was
introduced to many well-known socialists whose names will be mentioned
later on.

During the sixteen years of his headmastership Dr. Hornby dismissed no
fewer than four assistants, and was himself involved at times in serious
conflicts with the Governing Body. A weak man, he was obstinate to the
last degree when once engaged in controversy; as was shown by his
determination to get rid of Mr. Oscar Browning, who, whatever the
merits of their quarrel, was worth much more to Eton than Hornby
himself. It was not generally known that three other assistant masters
proffered their resignations as a protest against Mr. Browning’s
dismissal; a most ill-judged step, because matters had then reached a
point where either Hornby or Browning had to go. The resignations were
accepted, and the three mutineers had to ask leave to withdraw them,
which they did with as good a grace as they could muster. Thus the
headmaster triumphed; but it was a victory that brought him little
credit, and it was a lucky day for Eton when, on the death of Dr.
Goodford, he was appointed to the Provostship in 1884.

Dr. Warre, succeeding Dr. Hornby, was like King Stork following King
Log: it was as if the school, after a long period of “go as you like,”
had been suddenly placed under a military dictatorship. Warre had nearly
been appointed headmaster in 1868; and though, during Hornby’s reign, he
continued to serve loyally as an assistant, it was evident that it
galled him to watch the nervelessness and vacillation with which the
government of the school was conducted: I have heard him at a “masters’
meeting” appeal to Dr. Hornby in terms which, however respectful in
form, conveyed a reproach which could hardly have been unnoticed: “Will
the headmaster insist upon his rule being kept? Will you pull us up,
sir, if we neglect it?” We listened in amusement, knowing full well that
Hornby would himself be the first to break his own rule, if it was one
that demanded either punctuality or perseverance.

One of Dr. Warre’s earliest innovations was to visit the different
Divisions in person while a lesson was going on; a very right and proper
course to take, but one which came rather as a shock to the assistant
masters of that time, who had been accustomed to consider their
class-rooms, like the proverbial Englishman’s house, as their “castles.”
We each wondered, not without anxiety, when his own turn would come.
When mine came, I was spared a lengthy inspection owing to an incident
which was as amusing as it was unforeseen. The next room happened to be
occupied that day by a colleague who was entirely unable to keep order;
and as neither the unfortunate man, nor his rowdy Division, was aware
that the headmaster was so near them, I had hardly begun my lesson when
there rose a terrific din from next door--shrieks, catcalls, peals of
laughter, stamping of feet, all the noises of a madhouse. With a wave of
his hand to me, the headmaster slipped swiftly from the room; and a
moment later I knew what had happened, not by hearing, but by the
instant _cessation_ of sound, for that wild uproar stopped as suddenly
as if it had been cleft with an axe, and was succeeded by a deep silence
more eloquent than words.

A few days later, Dr. Hornby, the new-made Provost, came up to a small
group of masters who were standing near the school-yard, and smilingly
asked us if we had been “inspected” yet. “I’m glad,” he added, with a
sigh of relief, “that they didn’t inspect _me_.”

Dr. Warre was in every way a contrast to Dr. Hornby. Far less sensitive
and refined, he had much more real sympathy, if not with the masters, at
any rate with the boys, and under a rough exterior showed on many
occasions a practical kindness which was quite wanting in his
predecessor. For example, the setting of “Georgics” (i.e. the writing of
500 lines of Virgil), one of the most senseless punishments in vogue at
that time, was always encouraged by Hornby. When Warre heard an
assistant master remark that he was “looking out for an opportunity” to
set a “Georgic” to a troublesome boy, he interrupted him with: “You
should look out _not_ to set him a ‘Georgic.’” He had that kindly
understanding of boyhood which is of great value to a teacher; and from
the point of view of those who believe that Eton is an ideal school, and
the “hub” of the universe, it is difficult to see how a better
headmaster than Dr. Warre could have been found; but he was a Tory of
the strictest type, and his appointment meant the indefinite
postponement of reform.

Enough has now been said to show why a ten-years’ sojourn as a master at
Eton was likely to bring disillusionment, even if outside influences had
not quickened the process. Socialism was even then “in the air”; and to
have become personally acquainted with Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter,
H. M. Hyndman, Henry George, William Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion,
Belfort Bax, and other apostles of what was then termed “revolution,”
was not calculated to strengthen a waverer in the pure Etonian faith.
Still earlier, in the winter holidays of 1878-79, I had met at Coniston,
in the Lake District, an ardent disciple of Ruskin, Mr. William Harrison
Riley, who held communistic views; and in the course of some long walks
with him on the mountains, in which I acted as his guide, he more than
repaid the obligation by opening my eyes to certain facts which I had
previously overlooked. He brought me a message from another world.

This Riley, with all his fiery zeal, was a man of touching simplicity.
He was then working some land of Ruskin’s, at St. George’s farm, near
Sheffield, and he had come to Coniston to visit the Master, for whom he
felt and expressed an almost childlike veneration. By Mr. Ruskin’s
invitation I accompanied Riley to luncheon at Brantwood, and was greatly
struck by the meeting between the two--the devotion of the follower, and
the geniality of the sage. Early in the morning Riley, who was much
surprised by the luxuriance of the verdure at Coniston, as compared with
the grey desolation of the Sheffield hills, confided to me his intention
of taking as a present to Ruskin a clump of moss from a wall-top near
the hotel; but as there was hardly a wall in the district that was not
similarly covered, I suggested to him, as delicately as I could, that
it might be a case of carrying “coals to Newcastle.” Disregarding such
hints, he arrived at Ruskin’s door with a big parcel of the moss, and
gravely presented it as soon as the first salutations were complete. The
delightful charm of Ruskin’s manner was seen in this little incident: he
laughed--for who could have helped laughing?--yet took the gift--and
turned the subject--with a graciousness that could leave no hurt. A few
years later Riley migrated to Massachusetts, but took with him his
quenchless ardour for “the cause.” The last letter I received from him
concluded with the words: “My feeble hand still holds aloft the banner
of the ideal.”

I remember that one of the subjects on which Ruskin discoursed was the
poetry of Tennyson, who was still regarded by most people, certainly by
the _literati_ of Eton, as a thinker of extraordinary power. He was an
instance, said Ruskin, “of one who, with proper guidance, _might_ have
done something great”; as it was, he had written nothing of real value,
except, perhaps, _In Memoriam_. _Maud_ and _The Princess_ were
“useless,” _Enoch Arden_ “disgusting”; the hero of _Maud_ “an ass and a
fool,” and the war-spirit in the poem “downright mischievous.” Thus,
again, was sapped the simple faith of an Eton master, who knew by heart
a large portion of Tennyson’s poetry, including the whole of _Maud_.

In addition to such dangerous doctrines, Vegetarianism was now beginning
to be heard of in Eton; and this was in one respect a worse heresy than
Socialism, because it had to be practised as well as preached, and the
abstinence from flesh-foods could not fail to attract unfavourable
attention. There was a distinguished scientist among the Eton masters at
that time, Dr. P. H. Carpenter, a son of Dr. W. B. Carpenter; and when
he expressed a wish to speak with me on the subject of the new diet
which he heard I had adopted, I felt that a critical moment had arrived,
and as a novice in vegetarian practice I awaited the scientific
pronouncement with some awe. When it came, spoken with friendly
earnestness, it was this: “Don’t you think that animals were _sent_ us
as food?” I have since heard the same pathetic question asked many
scores of times. What can one say in reply to it, except that the
invoice has not yet been received?

A book of rare merit, filled with a multifarious store of facts about
the food question in relation to the humaner thought, is Mr. Howard
Williams’s _Ethics of Diet_, which was then appearing by instalments in
the magazine of the Vegetarian Society. I had the good fortune to make
Mr. Williams’s personal acquaintance, which was the beginning of a
valued friendship; I also had helpful correspondence with Professor F.
W. Newman, then President of the Vegetarian Society, and with Professor
J. E. B. Mayor, who afterwards succeeded to that post. Thus equipped, I
was not greatly impressed by the proofs which friendly colleagues
offered me of the “impossibility” of the humaner diet; nor was I
troubled when, of the two medical men with whom I was acquainted at
Eton, the one said to me: “Well, I will give you two years,”[12] and the
other, a rather foolish person whom the boys used to call “Mary,”
inquired with a look of puzzled despair at such incredible madness: “Do
vegetarians eat meat _by night_?” A vegetarian was of course regarded as
a sheer lunatic in the Eton of those days. Twenty-five years later Eton
had a vegetarian headmaster in Dr. Edward Lyttelton, who was an
assistant there in the ’eighties. “Little did I think,” he wrote to me,
“when we used to chaff you about cabbages, that it would come to this!”

It happened, in one of those years, that it fell to my lot to set the
subject for “Declamations,” a Latin theme on some debatable point, which
had to be composed and “spouted” annually by two of the sixth-form
boys, who took opposite sides in the discussion; and I chose for
subject, rather to Dr. Hornby’s disgust, the question of vegetarianism
(_An Pythagorei qui carne abstinent laudandi sint_). Another channel for
vegetarian propaganda was afforded by the Ascham Society, a learned and
select body organized by some of the masters, who met periodically to
read and discuss papers on ethical and literary subjects. It happened
that the members were hospitably invited to a dinner by one of their
colleagues, who specially announced a dish of roast veal as an
attraction: thus provoked, I could not but decline that treat in the
accredited Eton manner, a set of Latin verses, of which the conclusion
was obvious: Spare the calf, or let _me_ be excused:

    Si non vis vitulo parcere, parce mihi.

Thus gradually the conviction had been forced on me that we Eton
masters, however irreproachable our surroundings, were but cannibals in
cap and gown--almost literally cannibals, as devouring the flesh and
blood of the higher non-human animals so closely akin to us, and
indirectly cannibals, as living by the sweat and toil of the classes who
do the hard work of the world.[13] To speak of this, with any fulness,
in such a society as that of Eton, except to the two or three friends
who held a similar belief, would have been an absurdity; and I do not
think I exaggerated, in the first chapter of this book, when I described
the discovery as bringing with it a sense of being cut off from one’s
neighbours by interminable leagues of misunderstanding. I was living _in
partibus infidelium_. It became a necessity to leave a place where there
could be no sympathetic exchange of thought upon matters which were
felt to be of vastly more importance than the accepted religion and
routine.

I treasure the recollection of the interview in which I took farewell of
Dr. Warre. Most kindly he expressed his regret that I had lost faith in
that public school system to which he himself, as all Etonians are
aware, devoted a lifetime of unsparing service. “It’s the
Vegetarianism,” he gravely remarked; and I understood him to mean that
it was the abandonment of the orthodox diet that had led, by inevitable
weakening of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, to my apostasy in regard
to Education. When I told him that Socialism must take its share of
blame, as having been at least an auxiliary cause, he was really
shocked. “Socialism!” he cried, in his hearty tones. “Then blow us up,
blow us up! There’s nothing left for it but that.”

It is strange to reflect that between thirty and forty years ago the
mere mention of Socialism should have suggested desperate acts of
violence: the term was then the bugbear, for the time being, of the
respectable classes, who always keep on hand some convenient scare-word,
for the purpose of making an alarm. “Anarchism” has since served its
turn; “Bolshevism” is the latest. Something to fear, something to hate,
seems to be an indispensable requirement; hence the periodical outbreak
of war-cries and flogging-crazes; it matters little what the bogey is,
so long as there is a vendetta of some kind, even if it be only, for a
diversion, a campaign against the sparrow or the rat. There is no surer
token of the barbaric mind than this capricious state of panic,
described by George Meredith as “all stormy nightcap and fingers
starving for the bell-rope.”

My one irreparable loss in leaving Eton was not that of culture or
scholarship or social position, but of the game of Fives; for I used to
think that the evolution of the Eton fives-court, the original of which
was a flagged space between two buttresses of the Chapel (“Tax not the
royal Saint with vain expense”), was the most valuable contribution ever
made by the school to the well-being of mankind. Fives is a great game;
and to have played it with such master-hands as A. C. Ainger, E. C.
Austen-Leigh, Edward Lyttelton, or C. T. Studd, was a privilege neither
to be forgotten nor to be replaced. I used afterwards to dream at times
that I was again engaged in the game--“serving,” perhaps, or taking the
service, or enjoying a duel of long sweeping strokes on the outer court,
or mixed up in one of those close-fought rallies that centred round the
“pepper-box”; until a perfect shot from one side or the other had sent
the ball to its resting-place in “dead man’s hole.”

My parting gift to the school was an article entitled “Confessions of an
Eton Master,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in January,
1885, and led to a good deal of discussion on the Eton system of
education.




V

CANNIBAL’S CONSCIENCE

     If any one should be educated from his infancy in a dark cave till
     he were of full age, and then should of a sudden be brought into
     broad daylight ... no doubt but many strange and absurd fancies
     would arise in his mind.--From BACON’S _Advancement of Learning_.


“Do you think me a cannibal?” is the remark often made by a cheery
flesh-eater, when enjoying his roast beef in the presence of a
vegetarian; and it may not be denied that such is the thought which
commonly suggests itself, for the more highly developed nonhuman animals
are very closely akin to man. “We do not eat negroes,” says Mr. W. H.
Hudson, “although their pigmented skin, flat feet and woolly heads
proclaim them a different species--even monkey’s flesh is abhorrent to
us, merely because we fancy that that creature, in its ugliness,
resembles some old men and some women and children that we know. But the
gentle, large-brained social cow ... we slaughter and feed on her
flesh--monsters and cannibals that we are.” No apology, then, shall be
made for the heading of this chapter. There is a very real likeness, not
only between anthropophagy and other forms of flesh-eating, but between
the excuses offered by cannibals and those offered by flesh-eaters.

Forty years ago, the possibility of living healthily on a non-flesh diet
was by no means so generally admitted as it is now; and consequently
very naïve and artless objections used to be advanced against abstinence
from butcher’s-meat. Mr. Kegan Paul told me that he had once heard a
lady say to F. W. Newman: “But, Professor, don’t you feel very weak?” to
which the Professor sturdily replied: “Madam, feel my calves.” “What on
earth do you live on?” used to be a frequent question at Eton in those
days, the implication being that there is no “variety” in the vegetarian
diet; an amusing complaint, in view of what Richard Jefferies has
described as “the ceaseless round of mutton and beef to which the dead
level of civilization [_sic_] reduces us.” So obvious is this monotony
in the orthodox repasts that the _Spectator_, a good many years ago,
published an article headed, “Wanted, a New Meat,” in which it was
explained that what is needed is some new and large animal, something
which “shall combine the game flavour with the substantial solidity of a
leg of mutton.” The _Spectator’s_ choice ultimately fell upon the eland,
but not before the claims of various other “neglected animals,” among
them the wart-hog, had been conscientiously debated.

That the cannibal conscience is somewhat guilty and ill at ease seems
evident from the nature of the arguments put forward by the apologists
of flesh-eating; else why did Dr. P. H. Carpenter suggest that the lower
animals were “sent” to us for food, when, as a scientist, he knew well
the absurdity of that remark? Why not say frankly what Nathaniel
Hawthorne wrote in his _English Notebook_ that “the best thing a man
born in this island can do is to eat his beef and mutton, and drink his
porter, and take things as they are, and think thoughts that shall be so
beefish, muttonish, and porterish, that they shall be matters rather
material than intellectual”? The reckless hardihood of a simple and
barbarous people is essentially _un_conscious, just as the action of a
hawk or weasel is unconscious when it seizes its prey; but when
consciousness is once awakened, and a doubt arises as to the morality of
the action, the habit begins of giving sophistical reasons for practices
that cannot be justified. Herman Melville tells us in his _Typee_ that
the Polynesians, being aware of the horror which Europeans feel for
anthropophagy, “invariably deny its existence, and, with the craft
peculiar to savages, endeavour to conceal every trace of it.” The
existence of flesh-eating cannot be denied; but do we not see a savage’s
craft in the shifty and far-fetched reasons alleged for its continuance?

It is only fair to “the noble savage” to draw this distinction between
the natural barbarism and the sophisticated, between the real necessity
for killing for food and the pretended necessity. Commander Peary, the
Arctic explorer, once wrote in the _Windsor Magazine_, under the title
of “Hunting Musk Oxen near the Pole,” a story of the genuine hunger, and
expressed a doubt whether a single one of his readers knew what hunger
was. He was actually in a famishing state when a herd of Musk Oxen came
in view: “The big black animals,” he said, “were not game, but meat, and
every nerve and fibre in my gaunt body was vibrating with a savage lust
for that meat, meat that should be soft and warm, meat into which the
teeth could sink and tear and rend.” Here was a savagery that can at
least be understood and respected, that did not need to postulate the
“sending” of the oxen for its subsistence; yet, strange to say, Peary’s
story would be voted disgusting in many a respectable household which
orders its “home-killed meat” from the family butcher and employs a cook
to disguise it. Certainly, if there is a “noble savage,” we must
recognize also the ignoble variety that has developed the “conscience”
of which I speak.

To this “cannibal’s conscience” we owe those delightful excuses, those
flowers of sophistry, which strew the path of the flesh-eater and lend
humour to an otherwise very gruesome subject. By far the most
entertaining of them is what may be called the academical fallacy,
inasmuch as it seems to have a special attraction for learned men--the
argument that it is a kindness to the animals themselves to kill and eat
them, because otherwise they would not be bred at all, and so would miss
the pleasures of existence. This “Canonization of the Ogre,” as it has
been named, was propounded by Professor D. G. Ritchie, Sir Leslie
Stephen, Sir Henry Thompson, Dr. Stanton Coit, and other distinguished
publicists,[14] every one of whom, with the single exception of Dr.
Coit, prudently evaded discussion of the question when the flaw in his
reasoning was pointed out, viz. that existence cannot be compared with
non-existence. Of existence it is possible to predicate certain
qualities--good or bad, happiness or unhappiness--but of non-existence
we can predicate nothing at all; we must first have the actual ground of
existence to argue from, and he who bases his reasoning on the
non-existent is building upon the treacherous sands.

“The Pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon,”
wrote Sir Leslie Stephen in his _Social Rights and Duties_. Sir Leslie
was repeatedly invited to make some answer to the criticisms which this
dictum called forth; but courageous champion of intellectual freedom
though he was, he preferred in this instance to take refuge in silence.
To no one but Dr. Stanton Coit has philosophy been indebted for a full
exposition of a comfortable theory which may be expressed (with the
alteration of one word) in Coleridge’s famous lines:

    He prayeth best who _eateth_ best
    All things both great and small.

“If the motive that might produce the greatest number of happiest
cattle,” said Dr. Coit, “would be the eating of beef, then beef-eating,
so far, must be commended. And while heretofore the motive has not been
for the sake of cattle, it is conceivable that, if vegetarian
convictions should spread much further, love for cattle would (if it be
not psychologically incompatible) blend with the love of beef, in the
minds of the opponents of vegetarianism.”[15] According to this ethical
dictum, it will be seen, mankind will continue to eat cows, sheep, pigs,
and other animals for conscience sake--we must be, not conscientious
objectors to butchery, but conscientious _promoters_ of it. So far, Dr.
Coit only set forth in greater detail the argument stated by Professor
Ritchie, Sir Leslie Stephen, and the other casuists in cannibalism; but
now we come to that “psychological incompatibility” to which in a
parenthesis he referred.

     “But we frankly admit,” he continued, “that it is a question
     whether the love of cattle, intensified to the imaginative point of
     individual affection for each separate beast, would not destroy the
     pleasure of eating beef, and render this time-honoured custom
     psychologically impossible. We surmise that bereaved affection at
     the death of a dear creature would destroy the flavour.”

Nothing in controversy ever gave me keener satisfaction than to have
drawn this “surmise,” this pearl of great price, from Dr. Stanton Coit
in the very serious columns of the _Ethical World_. It shows clearly, I
think, why his co-adjutors in the metaphysic of the larder were wise in
their avoidance of discussion.

It seems to be a benign provision of Nature that those who allege
altruistic reasons for selfish actions invariably make themselves
ridiculous. “What would become of the Esquimaux?” was one of the
questions often put to advocates of vegetarianism; probably it is the
only instance on record of any solicitude for the welfare of that remote
people. Then, again, we were frequently asked: “What would become of the
animals?” the implication being that under a vegetarian regime there
would be large numbers of uneaten and neglected quadrupeds left straying
about the earth. An artist friend of mine once drew an amusing picture
to illustrate this “Flesh-Eaters’ Dilemma.” A gentleman and lady,
sitting at a well-ordered dinner-table, are terribly inconvenienced by
an invasion, through the conservatory door, of a number of such
superfluous animals: a cow is putting her head through the window; a
sheep is snatching at the bread; a pig is playing with a rabbit on the
floor; and in the distance a forlorn ox is seen lying in desperation
against the garden gate.

Such are some of the sophisms of which cannibal’s conscience is
prolific. They belong to that class of subterfuge which Bacon designated
_eidola specus_, “idols of the cave,” as lurking in the inmost and
darkest recesses of the human mind. “Fallacies of the Cave-Dweller”
might perhaps be a fitting name for them; for they seem to be
characteristic of the more primitive and uncivilized intelligence.




VI

GLIMPSES OF CIVILIZATION

     Wealth is acquired by overreaching our neighbours, and is spent in
     insulting them.--WILLIAM GODWIN.


In the ’eighties there were two movements especially attractive to one
who was breaking away from the old academical traditions, to wit,
Socialism, the more equitable distribution of wealth; and
Simplification, the saner method of living. William Godwin, in many ways
a true prophet, had foreshadowed the need of both these reforms in that
pungent sentence of his _Political Justice_.

Simplification of life has in all ages had its advocates, but it was not
till the time of Rousseau and the revolutionary epoch that it acquired
its full significance, when the connection between simple living and a
juster social state became obvious and unmistakable, and it was seen
that luxury on the part of one man must involve drudgery on the part of
another. Thoreau’s _Walden_, published in America in 1854, was beginning
to be known in England some thirty years later; and Edward Carpenter’s
essays, afterwards collected in his _England’s Ideal_ (1887), were
pointing the way to a wiser and healthier mode of life. I read some of
those essays while still at Eton; and amid such surroundings they had a
peculiarly vivid interest, as revealing, what was there quite
overlooked, that it was possible to dispense with the greater part of
the trappings with which we were encumbered, and to live far more simply
and cheaply than was dreamed of in polite society.

The removal from a public school to a cottage among the Surrey hills was
something more than a change of residence: it was an emigration, a
romance, a strange new life in some remote antipodes, where the emblems
of the old servitude, such as cap and gown, found new and better uses,
like swords beaten into ploughshares. My gown was cut into strips for
fastening creepers to walls: my top-hat, the last time I remember seeing
it, was shading a young vegetable-marrow. Servants there were none; and
with the loss of them we learnt two things: first that servants do a
great deal more than their employers give them credit for; secondly,
that much of what they do may be lessened or rendered needless by a
little judicious forethought in the arrangement of a house.

One ungrateful office that servants perform is that of protecting their
employers from personal interviews with beggars and tramps; they act as
plenipotentiaries in the business of saying No. In country districts
this certainly saves a good deal of a householder’s time, but whether it
is altogether a benefit to him may be doubted, for tramps are sometimes
an amusing folk, and by no means devoid of humour in their mode of
levying taxes upon the well-to-do. One old mendicant, I remember, who
called at my back door to solicit a small sum for a very special
purpose, and told his tale so skilfully that from admiration, not
conviction, I relieved him, as he himself expressed it, of his immediate
difficulty. Two minutes later there was a gentle knock at my _front_
door, and behold the same old rascal commencing the same old tale! He
had made the mistake of supposing that a single cottage was two
semi-detached ones, and when the door was opened by his late benefactor,
I saw him shaken by a momentary spasm of laughter, so human as to disarm
wrath.

Then there were the “tramps” in the metaphorical sense, the friends and
bidden or unbidden guests whose visits were welcomed in that secluded
region of bare heaths and hills. Edward Carpenter, as the writer of the
books which had shown such life to be possible, was, of course, the
tutelary deity of the place: Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, was the
_advocatus diaboli_, whose professed hatred of the country gave an
additional zest to his appearances there, and culminated in a
characteristic article, “A Sunday on the Surrey Hills,” in which he
described a wet walk on Hindhead and the extremity of his sufferings
until he was restored to London by “the blessed rescuing train.”[16] But
it is dangerous to jest on such subjects; and I regret to say that a
local paper, some years afterwards, in reprinting “G.B.S.’s” jeremiad,
added some scathing editorial comments, which showed a resentment
unmitigated by time, on “a cockney gentleman possessing a very fine
liver, but no soul above his stomach.”[17] In the simplification of
household life, Shaw easily held his own; he was most conscientious and
exemplary in “washing up,” and to see the methodical precision with
which he made his bed was itself a lesson in domestic orderliness. Thus
was realized the truth of what Clough had written in his _Bothie_:

    How even churning and washing, the dairy, the scullery duties,
    Wait but a touch to redeem and convert them to charms and attractions;
    Scrubbing requires for true grace but frank and artistical handling,
    And the removal of slops to be ornamentally treated.

In dealing with tramps, however, even Shaw could be at fault. We once
had a visit from a very undesirable vagrant who held forth at great
length about a fearful wound which he bore on his person; and when his
lecture was ended, Shaw, in the approved Fabian fashion, proceeded to
ask a Question or two. But in such company to question is to suspect;
and the tramp, deeply hurt at any reflection on his veracity, at once
commenced to divest himself of his clothing, so as to offer ocular
proof. “A sight to dream of, not to tell.” We were just saved from it by
an earnest disavowal of any fragment of unbelief.

Among the most welcome of our visitors was “the Wayfarer,” Mr. W. J.
Jupp, author in after years of one of the wisest and most gracious of
books, a real spiritual autobiography, a true story of the heart.[18]
Himself a devoted nature-lover, he brought us tidings of the greatest of
poet-naturalists, Henry David Thoreau, and thus laid me under the first
of the many obligations which I owe to a friendship of old date.

But refreshing though it was thus to throw off the signs and symbols of
Respectability, it is not so easy to drop “the gentleman” as one could
wish, for the tattoo-marks of gentility are almost as ineffaceable as
those of the barbarous ritual in which the islanders of the Pacific
delight. Once a gentleman, always a gentleman: the imputation, like that
of criminality, is hard to live down. I once met the author of _Towards
Democracy_ walking and talking with a very ragged tramp whom he had
overtaken on the high road. The tramp accosted me, as if wishing to
explain matters: “This gentleman----” he began, indicating Mr.
Carpenter. “I’m _not_ a gentleman,” sharply interjected the philosopher;
whereupon the tatterdemalion, with a puzzled look, and a shake of the
head that showed entire bewilderment, forsook us and went shambling on
his way.

As an organized movement, Simplification has not been so successful as
the importance of the subject might have warranted. The Fellowship of
the New Life, a society established in 1883, had the services of many
thoughtful men, among them Mr. Maurice Adams, Mr. W. J. Jupp, Mr.
Herbert Rix, Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, and Mr. Percival Chubb; but
though its protagonist, Mr. Adams, brought to the cause an exceptional
knowledge and ability, the Fellowship, after lasting a good many years,
gradually flagged and expired. This was the more to be regretted,
because simplification of life is peculiarly liable to misunderstanding
and cheap ridicule, and therefore needed to be set permanently before
the public in a rational form; whereas now it is largely associated in
people’s minds with Pastor Wagner’s book, _The Simple Life_, and similar
banalities. For it is stupid, nothing less, to represent Simplification
as merely a personal matter, and as amounting to little more than
moderation and sincerity in the various departments of life: there is a
_social_ aspect of the question which cannot thus be ignored. As Thoreau
says: “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must
first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another
man’s shoulders.” Simplicity is not only “a state of mind”: it implies
action as well as taste.

It is not very surprising, perhaps, that this doctrine has been
ridiculed by critics, in view of the unwise manner in which some of its
adherents have preached and practised it. The attractions of Rousseau’s
“return to nature” have been too powerful for the weaker enthusiasts,
who, in their desire to be “natural,” have missed the qualities in which
true naturalness consists. I remember the case of a clever young man,
fresh from the University, who, bitten by the creed of simplicity,
rented a large tract in a sandy wilderness where crops could hardly be
made to grow, and induced an experienced labourer, of the old school, to
bring his family to reside upon this model farm in the hope of there
realizing the ideal. He would be “natural”; that was his constant cry. A
Hardy would have been needed to portray the agricultural tragedies that
ensued. In the fierce heat of a fiery summer the crops withered one by
one, until the heart of the old husbandman was sick within him with a
savage despair. I recall a Sunday stroll, with the party from the farm,
to a hill which overlooked that Sahara where their hopes were buried,
and the deep fervour of the veteran’s ejaculations as he gazed across
the desolate scene. “Well, I _am_--” was his repeated remark; and the
language was quite unfitted for the mixed company at his side.

Against fiascos of this sort stood the fact that the writings of the
true exponents of Simplicity were increasingly read and pondered. In
Thoreau’s genius there was a magnetism which could influence not only
those who knew him, but a later generation of readers, among whom a
common love for the “poet-naturalist” of Concord has often been a link
of friendship (as I have reason to remember with gratitude) between
lives that were otherwise far apart. A first reading of _Walden_ was in
my own case an epoch, a revelation; and I know that in this respect my
experience was not a singular one; nor has the impression which I then
formed of Thoreau’s greatness been in any way lessened, but on the
contrary much strengthened, by my correspondence or personal intercourse
with those who were numbered among his friends.

One of the most remarkable chapters in _Walden_ is that on “Higher
Laws,” in which the ideal of humaneness is insisted on as an essential
part of Simplification. How often, from the lack of such principle, in
the efforts to lead the simple life, has simplicity itself become little
more than sentimentality! Who but a savage, for example, would include
the keeping and killing of pigs as a feature of a model homestead? Yet
in that establishment of which I have spoken, where the avowed aim was
to be “natural,” the pig-killing was a festive event. “Father sticks
’em, brother cleans ’em,” was the description vouchsafed by a charming
young “land-girl” (to use a later-invented term), who dwelt with delight
upon these unsavoury divisions of labour in her Blithedale Romance.
Well might Tolstoy use this pig-killing process in illustration of his
argument that, in any advance toward civilization, a disuse of butchery
must be “the first step.”

Socialism was at that time in its early and romantic stage, when the
menace of the Social Democratic Federation was becoming a terror to the
well-to-do, and when many a dignitary of Church and State shared Dr.
Warre’s belief that to “blow us up” was the diabolical desire of the
incendiaries who denounced Capitalism. Doubtless it was the novelty of
the attack that made it seem so terrible; for Chartism had been largely
forgotten, and Secularism had been filling up the interval as the
national bogey. Certainly in that period of the ’eighties the leading
socialist figures seemed more ominous and sinister than do any in the
Labour movement of to-day. To William Morris, indeed, as being a poet of
wide renown, a sort of licence was accorded to speak as bluntly as he
chose; but Hyndman, Burns, Bax and H. H. Champion were names of dark
import to the “bourgeois” of that date. Mr. Hyndman’s repeated
prophecies of a Revolution were none the less disturbing because they
were always unfulfilled; Mr. Burns was dreaded as a demagogue who had
been imprisoned owing to his defiance of law and order, Mr. Champion, as
a retired army officer, who might possibly turn his military knowledge
to deadly account. To one who knew those reformers personally, and their
fearless labours in an unpopular cause, it is strange to recall the
storm of obloquy which they then had to face; to them and others of like
mettle is due in large measure such progress as has since been made in
the betterment of the conditions of Labour. Their weakness was that they
could not agree among themselves (reformers seldom can); hence the
internal ruptures that wrecked the influence of the S.D.F. Round
Champion in particular the discord raged, until he was ostracized by his
former colleagues; yet no juster word was ever said of him than a
remark made to me, years afterwards, by Mr. John Burns--that if he were
ever in a tight place at a tiger-hunt there was no one whom he would so
gladly have at his side as H. H. C.

With William Morris it was impossible, even for a “comrade,” to have any
quarrel; his utter sincerity and great-heartedness forbad it. But broad
as his geniality was, he used to seem rather nonplussed by such new
ideas as vegetarianism in conjunction with teetotalism. “I’d like to ask
you to have a drink,” he would say, after a meeting or lecture; and then
would add, as in despair: “But you _won’t_ drink.”

One of the memories of those years is the great meeting held in
February, 1888, to welcome John Burns and Cunninghame Graham on their
release from prison. Apart from my admiration for the heroes of the
evening, I had some cause to remember the occasion, because, like many
others who were present, I lost a valuable watch. This placed us in an
embarrassing position; for having assembled to protest against the
conduct of the police in the Square, we could not with dignity invoke
their aid against the pickpockets.

Quite the strangest personality among the socialists of that time was
Dr. Edward Aveling. It is easy to set him down as a scoundrel, but in
truth he was an odd mixture of fine qualities and bad; a double-dealer,
yet his duplicities were the result less of a calculated dishonesty than
of a nature in which there was an excess of the emotional and artistic
element, with an almost complete lack of the moral. The character of
Dubedat in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, _The Doctor’s Dilemma_, in some ways
recalls that of Aveling, for nearly every one who had dealings with him,
even those who were on the friendliest of terms, found themselves
victimized, sooner or later, by his fraudulence in money matters. One’s
feelings towards him might, perhaps, have been summed up in the remark
made by one of the characters in _The Doctor’s Dilemma_: “I can’t help
rather liking you, Dubedat. But you certainly are a thorough-going
specimen.”

Yet Aveling’s services to the socialist cause were perfectly sincere;
and so, too, was his love of good literature, though it sometimes
manifested itself in rather too sentimental a strain. He was a skilled
reciter of poetry, and on one occasion when, with Eleanor Marx, he
visited our Surrey cottage, he undertook to read aloud the last Act of
Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_. As he gave effect to chorus and
semi-chorus, and to the wonderful succession of spirit voices in that
greatest of lyrical dramas, he trembled and shook in his passionate
excitement, and when he had delivered himself of the solemn words of
Demogorgon with which the poem concludes, he burst into a storm of sobs
and tears. I used to regret that I had never heard his recitation, said
to be his most effective performance, of Poe’s “The Bells”; for there
was something rather uncanny and impish in his nature which doubtless
made him a good interpreter of the weird.

There was real tragedy, however, in Aveling’s alliance with Karl Marx’s
daughter; for Eleanor Marx was a splendid woman, strong both in brain
and in heart, and true as steel to the man who was greatly her inferior
in both, and who treated her at the end with a treachery and ingratitude
which led directly to her death.

As a corrective of the romantic socialism of the S.D.F. arose the
soberer doctrine of Fabianism, a name derived, we are told, from the
celebrated Fabius, who won his victories on the principle of “more
haste, less speed”; else one would have been disposed to trace it to a
derivative of the Latin _fari_, “to talk,” as seen in the word
“con_fab_ulation.” In the early and most interesting days of Fabianism,
its chief champions, known as “the four,” were Sidney Webb, Bernard
Shaw, Sydney Olivier, and Graham Wallas; and assuredly no Roman three
ever “kept the bridge so well” as the Fabian four kept the planks of
their platform in all the assaults that were made on it. Rarely have
better debates been heard than at those fortnightly meetings in Willis’s
Rooms. The trouble indeed with Fabianism was that it became almost _too_
brainy; it used to remind me of Sydney Smith’s remark about some one who
was all mind--that “his intellect was indecently exposed.” Humaneness
found little place in the Fabian philosophy. Once, when visiting a
suburban villa that had just been occupied by a refined Fabian family, I
learned that the ladies of the household, highly intellectual and
accomplished women, had themselves been staining the floors of their new
and charming residence with bullock’s blood brought in a bucket from the
shambles.

Shaw was, of course, the outstanding figure of Fabianism, as he was
bound to be of any movement in which he took permanent part; but he was
a great deal more than Fabian, he was humanitarian as well; and it gives
cause for reflection, as showing how much easier it is to change men’s
theories than their habits, that, while his influence on social and
economic thought has been very marked, his followers in the practice of
the Humanities have been few. It has been noticeable, too, how, in the
many appreciations that have been written of Shaw, his humanitarianism
has been almost entirely ignored, or passed over as an amiable
eccentricity of a man of genius. Yet it is clear that if “G.B.S.,” who,
during the past forty years, has done enough disinterested work to make
the reputation of a score of philanthropists, is “not to be taken quite
seriously,” there is no sense in taking any one seriously. A man is not
less in earnest because he has a rich gift of humour or veils his truths
in paradoxes. Shaw, in fact, is one of the most serious and painstaking
of thinkers: his frivolity is all in the manner, his seriousness in the
intent; whereas, unhappily, in most persons it is the intent that is so
deadly frivolous, and the manner that is so deadly dull.

Perhaps the dulness of our age shows itself most clearly in its humour;
the professional jester of the dinner-table or comic journal is of all
men the most saddening. It is related that when Emerson took his little
boy to see a circus clown, the child looked up with troubled eyes and
said: “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Many of us must
have felt that sensation when we have heard or read some of the
banalities that pass for humorous. It is here that “G.B.S.” stands out
in refreshing contrast; his wit is as genuine and spontaneous as that of
Sydney Smith; but whereas Sydney Smith was constrained in his old age to
calculate how many cartloads of flesh-meat he consumed in his lifetime,
Bernard Shaw has been able to tell the world that his funeral will be
followed “not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine,
flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live
fish”--representatives of grateful fellow-beings whom he has _not_
eaten.[19]

If socialists had cared for the poetical literature of their cause one
half so well as the Chartists did, the names of Francis Adams and John
Barlas would have been far more widely known. It was Mr. W. M. Rossetti
who drew my attention to Adams’s fiery volume of verse, the _Songs of
the Army of the Night_, first published in Australia in 1887; and as I
was then preparing an anthology of _Songs of Freedom_ I got into
communication with the writer, and our acquaintance quickly ripened into
friendship. Francis Adams was a poet of Socialism in a much truer sense
than William Morris; for, while Morris was a poet who became a
socialist, Adams, like Barlas, was less a convert to Socialism than a
scion of Socialism, a veritable _Child of the Age_, to quote the title
of his own autobiographical romance, in the storm and stress of his
career. He had received a classical education at Shrewsbury School (the
“Glastonbury” of his novel), and after a brief spell of schoolmastering,
had became a journalist and wanderer. He was connected for a short
time, in 1883 or thereabouts, with the Social Democratic Federation, and
enrolled himself a member under the Regent’s Park trees one Sunday
afternoon at a meeting addressed by his friend, Frank Harris. In
Australia, for a time, where he took an active part in the Labour
movement, and wrote frequently for the _Sydney Bulletin_ and other
journals, he had many friends and admirers; but just as a Parliamentary
career was opening for him he was crippled by illness, and returned to
England, a consumptive, in 1890, to die three years later by his own
hand.

Of Adams’s prose works the most remarkable is _A Child of the Age_,
written when he was only eighteen, and first printed under the title of
_Leicester, an Autobiography_, an extraordinarily fascinating, if
somewhat morbid story, which deserves to be ranked with _Wuthering
Heights_ and _The Story of an African Farm_, among notable works of
immature imagination. He told me that it was written almost
spontaneously: it just “came to him” to write it, and he himself felt
that it was an abnormal book. Of the _Songs of the Army of the Night_,
he said that they were intended to do what had never before been
done--to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working
classes as he found out the hollowness, to him, of our culture and
learning; hence the pitiless invective which shows itself in many of the
poems. As surely as Elliott’s “Corn Law Rhymes” spoke the troubled
spirit of their age, so do these fierce keen lyrics, on fire alike with
love and with hate, express the passionate sympathies and deep
resentments of the socialist movement in its revolt from a sham
philanthropy and patriotism. No rebel poet has ever “arraigned his
country and his day” in more burning words than Adams in his stanzas “To
England.”

    I, whom you fed with shame and starved with woe,
      I wheel above you,
    Your fatal Vulture, for I hate you so,
      I almost love you.

But the _Songs_ are not only denunciatory; they have a closer and more
personal aspect, as in the infinitely compassionate “One among so Many,”
which endears them to the heart of the reader as only a few choice books
are ever endeared. In their strange mixture of sweetness and bitterness,
they are very typical of Francis Adams himself: he was at one moment,
and in one aspect, the most simple and lovable of beings; at another,
the most aggressively critical and fastidious.[20]

But if Francis Adams has not received his just meed of recognition, what
shall be said of John Barlas, whose seven small volumes of richest and
most melodious verse were printed (they can hardly be said to have been
published) under the _nom de plume_ of “Evelyn Douglas,” and mostly in
places remote from the world of books? When full allowance is made for
such drawbacks, it is strange that literary critics, ever on the
look-out for new genius, failed to discover Barlas; for though the
number of modern poets is considerable, the born singers are still as
few and far between as before; yet it was to that small and select class
that Barlas unmistakably belonged. His _Poems Lyrical and Dramatic_
(1884) contained, with much that was faulty and immature, many
exquisitely beautiful lyrics, the expression of a genuine gift of song.
A Greek in spirit, he also possessed in a high degree the sense of
brotherhood with all that breathes, and was ever aspiring in his poetry
not only to the enjoyment of what is best and most beautiful on earth,
but to a fairer and happier state of society among mankind. Nor was he a
dreamer only, intent on some far horizon of the future; he was an ardent
lover of liberty and progress in the present; and this hope, too, found
worthy utterance in his verse. It would be difficult to say where
Freedom has been more nobly presented than in his poem to “Le Jeune
Barbaroux”:

    Freedom, her arm outstretched, but lips firm set,
    Freedom, her eyes with tears of pity wet,
      But her robe splashed with drops of bloody dew,
    Freedom, thy goddess, is our goddess yet,
              Young Barbaroux.

Of Barlas’s _Love Sonnets_ (1889) it may be said without exaggeration
that, unknown though they are to the reading public and to any but a
mere handful of students, they are not undeserving to be classed among
the best sonnet-sequences. It was Meredith’s opinion that as
sonnet-writer Barlas took “high rank among the poets of his time”; and
that the concluding sonnet was “unmatched for nobility of sentiment.”
Nobility was indeed a trait of all Barlas’s poetry, and of his
character. Sprung from the line of the famous Kate Douglas who won the
name of Bar-lass, he was noted even in his school-days for magnanimity
and courage; and in no way did those qualities show themselves more
clearly than in the dignity with which he bore long years of failure and
misfortune, darkened at times by insanity.

The winter of 1891-1892 had brought the one occasion on which Barlas’s
name came before the public. He was charged with firing a revolver at
the House of Commons, which he did to mark his contempt for
Parliamentary rule; but when H. H. Champion and Oscar Wilde offered
themselves as sureties, he was discharged in the care of his friends. I
first heard from him, through Champion, soon after that event, in a
letter in which he spoke of his poetry as having been “three parts of my
religion”; but it was not till ten or twelve years later that I became
closely acquainted with him, and then he wrote to me regularly till his
death in 1914. His letters, written mostly from an asylum in Scotland,
are among the most interesting I have ever received; for in spite of his
ill health he was an untiring student, a great classical scholar, and
deeply read in many Greek and Latin authors whose works lie outside the
narrow range of school and University curriculum. But his genius was in
his poems; and it is to be hoped that a selection from these may yet see
the light.

Thus it was that these two poets, Adams and Barlas, though true-born
children of Socialism, were precluded, owing to the misfortunes which
beset their lives, from taking active part in its advocacy. Edward
Carpenter, on the other hand, if unattached to any one section of
reformers, has been one of the most influential writers and speakers in
the socialist cause; and his name is deservedly honoured not only for
his many direct services to the movement, but for the personal
friendship which he has extended to fellow-workers, and indeed to all
who have sought his aid--giving freely where, in the nature of the case,
there could be little or no return. His cottage at Millthorpe had
already become, in the ’nineties, a place of pilgrimage, the resort of
“comrades” who dropped down on him from the surrounding hills, or
swarmed up the valley from Chesterfield like a tidal wave, or “bore,” as
he aptly described it. His friend George Adams and family were then
living with him at Millthorpe; and those who had the good fortune to be
intimate with that delightful household will always remember their
visits with pleasure. George Adams, the sandal-maker, was as charming a
companion as the heart could desire, full of artistic feeling (witness
his beautiful watercolours), of quaint humorous fancies, and of
unfailing kindliness. His memory is very dear to his friends.

One of the strangest things said about Edward Carpenter, and by one of
his most admiring critics, is that he has no faculty for organization. I
used often to be struck by the great patience and adroitness with which
he marshalled and managed his numerous uninvited guests. He might fairly
have exclaimed, with Emerson:

    Askest “how long thou shalt stay”?
    Devastator of the day!

But though the pilgrims often showed but little consideration for their
host, in the manner and duration of their visits, he seemed to be always
master of the emergency, receiving the new-comers, however untimely
their arrival, with imperturbable urbanity, and gently detaching the
limpets with a skill that made them seem to be taking a voluntary and
intended departure. It was hospitality brought to a fine art.

For many years there was a quaint division of Carpenter’s writings in
the British Museum catalogue, his earlier works being attributed to one
Edward Carpenter, “Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,” and the later to
another Edward Carpenter, placed on the lower grade of “Social
Reformer.” There was, perhaps, some propriety, as well as unconscious
humour in this dual arrangement; for Carpenter, like Morris, was not a
socialist born, but one who, by force of natural bias, had gravitated
from Respectability to Freedom; and his writings bore obvious tokens of
the change.

Another and more audacious classification was once propounded to me by
Bernard Shaw, viz. that future commentators would divide Carpenter’s
works into two periods; first, that of the comparatively trivial books
written before he came in contact with “G.B.S.”; secondly, that of the
really important contributions to literature, where the Shavian
influence is discernible. I mentioned this scheme to Carpenter; and he
smilingly suggested that if there were any indebtedness, the names of
the debtor and the creditor must be reversed. But it would have been as
reasonable for an elephant to claim to have influenced a whale, or a
whale an elephant, as for either the thinker or the seer, each moving
in quite a different province, to suppose that he had affected the
other’s course. One common influence they felt--the desire to humanize
the barbarous age in which they lived--and it is strange that Carpenter,
in his book on “Civilization,” should have bestowed so fair and
unmerited a name on a state of society which, in spite of all its
boasted sciences and mechanical inventions, is at heart little else than
an ancient Savagery in a more complex and cumbrous form.




VII

THE POET-PIONEER

     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.


The words 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 thine
    Our 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 the _Westminster
Review_, where I found myself described as one of the writers who
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, whose _Shelley Memorials_ was
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 which was
subsequently printed in the _Shelley Society’s Papers_ and 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
of _The Cenci_ at 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, the President 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 therefore rather 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 that moment 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 and _naïveté_ about 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 and _con_founder, 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: “_Why_ did the fellow allow himself to be chained to the
rock? _Why_ didn’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. “I _have_
written 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 of its 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 in _Bleak 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 entitled _The 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 the _Albemarle 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 than the 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 the _Century Magazine_ in 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 of _Letters 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’s _Book
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, which certainly 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 grows
    With _our_ growth and the growth of time unborn.[23]




VIII

VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS

    I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
    Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
      Travels 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 of _Prometheus Unbound_ whose faith in the future was immutable,
and him of _The 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 and purest of men” to whom his own _Vane’s Story_
was 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 the _mood_ of 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 as _The City of Dreadful Night_ needs 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 the warm 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 he _had_ written 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 the _Life of James Thomson_ was
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 the _Academy_, 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 of _Poems 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 fact _two_ Swinburnes: the earlier, democratic poet of the
_Songs 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, he seemed 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’s _Sandra
Belloni_ and _Diana 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 biographer the 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 reviewing _The 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
my _Life of James Thomson_ as 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 to speak of Swinburne--the _second_
Swinburne--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 the _Life of James Thomson_, and reprinted in _Letters 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 the _Athenæum_.” 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 of _The City of Dreadful Night_ had 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 more despondent. 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 doing _that_ is.” A playful account followed
of the way in which his own poems used to be reviewed by Watts-Dunton in
the _Athenæum_. “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
for _some_ persons, it is not possible for _me_.”[25] I was struck 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 a _hic tacet_
would 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, more brain!” 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 the _Free 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 as _Typee_ and
_The 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 described _The City of Dreadful Night_ as 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 the _City 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 of _Leaves of Grass_ and the _Rubáiyát_ in 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.

Through _Songs 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 as curiosity 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’s _Typee_), 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.” But _that_ he 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 “_un_armed,” 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 taken the 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; in _The 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 concerned to 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’s _Letters_, 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 of
_Thoreauana_, an

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