The liberality with which writers of verse allow their poems to be used in anthologies is very gratifying to an editor; the more so, as such republication is by no means always a benefit to the authors themselves. Mr. John Addington Symonds was an example of a poet who had suffered much, as he told me, from compilers of anthologies, especially in regard to some lines in his oft-quoted stanzas, “A Vista,” which in the original ran thus:
Nation with nation, land with land,
Inarmed shall live as comrades free.
“Inarmed” signified linked fraternity, but the word being a strange one was changed in some collections to “unarmed,” and in that easier form had quite escaped from Mr. Symonds’s control. This error still continues to be repeated and circulated, and has practically 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, and enabled me to make a number of corrections and amplifications in a later edition of the Life. It was through our common love of Thoreau that I first became acquainted with Mr. W. Sloane Kennedy, of Belmont, Massachusetts, a true nature-lover with whom I have had much pleasant and friendly intercourse both personally and by letter.
Richard Jefferies, unlike Shelley or Thoreau, was so far a pessimist as to believe that “lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly wasted”; but while convinced that “the whole and the worst the worst pessimist could say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man,” he could yet feel the hope of future amelioration. “Full well aware that all has failed, yet side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there yet lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.” If ever there was an inspired work, a real book of prophecy, such a one is Jefferies’s Story of my Heart, in which, with his gaze fixed on a future society, where the term pauper (“inexpressibly wicked word”) shall be unknown, he speaks in scathing condemnation of the present lack of just and equitable distribution, which keeps the bulk of the human race still labouring for bare sustenance and shelter.
In a study of Jefferies’s life and ideals, published in 1894, I drew attention to the marked change that came over his views, during his later years, on social and religious questions, a ripening of thought, accompanied by a corresponding growth of literary style, which can be measured by the great superiority of The Story over such books as The Gamekeeper at Home; and in connection with this subject I pointed out that the incident recorded by Sir Walter Besant in his Eulogy of Richard Jefferies of a death-bed return to the Christian faith, at a time when Jefferies was physically and intellectually a wreck, could not be accepted as in any way reversing the authoritative statement of his religious convictions which he had himself published in his Story. For this I was taken to task in several papers as having perverted biography in the interest of my own prejudiced opinions; but under this censure, not to mention that my views were shared by those friends and students of Jefferies with whom I was brought in touch, I had one unsuspected source of consolation in the fact that Sir Walter Besant told me in private correspondence that, from what he had learnt since the publication of his Eulogy, he was convinced that I was quite right. I did not make this public until many years later, when a new edition of my book appeared: there was then some further outcry in a section of the press; but this was not repeated when Mr. Edward Thomas, in the latest and fullest biography of Jefferies, dismissed the supposed conversion as a wrong interpretation by “narrow sectarians” who ignored the work of Jefferies’s maturity.