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.”
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.