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:

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 “confabulation.” 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.”

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”:

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:

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.