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Chapter VII
EDWARD CARPENTER, A PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY
There is something specially precious in the memory of a phrase that one finds after many days in all the majesty of print and covers. The printed word seems to give some subtle ratification to the remembered speech; at the same time the infusion of life by contact with the source, or by some link other than cold print, imparts a strange vitality to the utterance. I cannot imagine what the poetry of Tagore would be to me if I could read the printed page without the memory of the ceremonial voice and illuminating hand of Mr. Yeats as he chanted " Gitanjali" to me in the small hours of the morning in a home of the spirit and the arts in France before Tagore had become famous in western literature : compelling, no doubt, the printed word would be, fully of beauty and vision and perfect utterance—but different.
The same shock of happy surprise came to me in familiar phrases in Edward Carpenter's book," The Healing of Nations," when it reached me in India, and carried me back to a garden in the Derbyshire dales in which I heard living words, straight from one of the world's master minds, as it sought for the real causes of the Great War, words that are now set out in print to share the immortality of Ruskin for style, Carlyle for thought, and Carpenter himself for dreams that the future will translate into actuality.
When I first met Edward Carpenter in his country home a few miles west of the great, ugly, but pleasantly environed city of Sheffield the European war was a twelve month in the future. When I met him again, it was in full blast—yet it did not seem to make much difference. When one has spent the conscious part of a lifetime of seventy years in battling by tongue and pen against " Man's inhumanity to man"—and woman, a change of locality and objective in struggle does not count for much. Number and bulk, and the realization that comes from nearness in time and place, are effective to the rudimentary mind ; but to the seer, who has power to call the distant near, and see the present as though it were the past, only principles matter. So it came about that while the war touched the heart of the poet of democracy, it did not turn his head. Like his illustrious and equally venerable French contemporary, Anatole France, he sought for ways to be of service to wounded soldiers, and asked me to find a post in a hospital where, if necessary, he would sweep the floors ; but on the subject of warfare itself he was too finely fixed in the truth that behind the phenomenon stands the vicious system that he has pilloried in his book, " Civilisation, its Cause and Cure," to become a mere echo of transitory passions, of new love for the old enemy, France, or new hatred for the old ally, Germany. His book to which I have referred is marked by the classic repose, and detachment from partiaL allegiances through which alone the conditions of the ' peace past understanding ' may be glimpsed.
But my mind goes back with greatest clarity to my first tramp across the hills to Holmes-field and down into the valley where the hamlet of Milthorpe lies in which the author of " Towards Democracy " built his plain but commodious home thirty years ago, and in which that literary embodiment of the thoughts
and feelings of an intrinsically simple and therefore honest life grew up, less as a book" by Edward Carpenter than as a spiritual comrade who gathered up the essence of the poet's life, and left the accidents to perish with each day.
What struck me most vividly about him as he welcomed me on the doorstep among the lights and shades of trees and creeping plants, was a curious blend of youth and age. His hand had the tremble of many winters, but his eye had the steady clearness of eternal spring. I had figured him mentally from his writings as four-square in general and smooth of grain —that was the prose view—but cut irregularly with notches along the edges like a human ogham-stone —that was the view derived from the Whitmanic method of his poetry. I found him, instead, rather nearer the mathematical definition of a line, length without breadth ;but the definition ends with the tall and slender physical frame : it has no equation with the spacious mind. His litheness and straightness were astonishing in one to whom the whole intellectual world of the West was about to do honour on his reaching the end of his seventieth year. When he sat down beside me on the sofa in his writing-room to discuss the Irish literary movement, he tucked his legs up undent him like an Indian. Later in the evening, in a neighbouring barn where a club of country boys and girls met under Carpenter's presidency for social intercourse and the occasional performance of a play, the aged poet with the head and beard of Meredith led off a, dance with, a suffragette who had twice been in prison.
It is likely that Carpenter's flexibility of body and some measure of his flexibility of mind as shown in his new book, arise from his simple and natural life. He refuses to be branded a " vegetarian on principle," since many of the things that people regard as principles are only infirm props of self-righteousness. He is a vegetarian because he—the whole man physical and psychical--prefers the colours, odours and atmosphere of nuts, fruits, cereals and vegetables to decaying flesh. He will set no rules and regulations around himself or anyone else. Conduct, to earn his admiration, must be the natural -expression of the inner life. For this reason he himself had resigned collegiate honours and a career in the church, and taken to market-gardening as a means to diminishing the enforced economic dependence of people on one another.
This is one of the keys to his life. It explains his socialism and his feminism,and lifts his work above the narrow, and at present necessary, sectarianism of any aggressive reform. He would set every soul free to achieve its own destiny, with just enough sympathetic guidance to keep it from injury to or by itself or others. It is in full freedom that he sees the condition of human progress and the possibility of attainment of a social poise that is not only stable but fluidic and adaptable. He regards the notion that force is the final assurance of social order as a crass stupidity fostered by a dominant parasitic class. To Carpenter, force is not a safeguard but a menace; and he would not merely suppress its immediate expression, but would annihilate its instruments of armed organisations, and extirpate its roots in a slave class or sex which is driven by a class or sex that is itself enslaved by the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life. Yet, deeper than this his vision goes, as we shall see.
In Edward Carpenter the claims of modern feminism in its more spiritual connotation found a natural sympathiser. He is one of those in whose physical and mental make-up, as in the case of Tagore and AE, the sexes seem to meet as equals. He was denied the marriage association which, in the majority of human beings, accentuates the sex difference between men and women. According to the common notion, the female celibate is apt to develop masculinity, and the male celibate to become old-maidish. The observation touches a truth of human psychology. The exigencies of life call for a co-operation of faculties that are normally the separate possession of either sex— predominantly, but not exclusively. Where such co-operation is not available exteriorly, some effort towards interior development of its-missing constituent will be made. Carpenter has all the feeling of womanhood, even of motherhood ; and if it is old-maidish to rise at 7.30 and brush out his room and clean the-doorstep, he is an old maid, and the world would be the better for more of her. The supreme purpose of his work is the mother-aim of moulding life beneficently, and not life in its forms only, be they ever so admirable, but in its spiritual essence.
Literature and the arts are the hand-maids of the soul, and being so, cannot be too worthy; but they are not the soul itself. The Kingdom of Heaven within must first be sought, and all things else will fall into their natural place. That was why, as we climbed the steep road back from Milthorpe to Holmesfield, when the tall, limber, handsome old gentleman in knickerbockers, with the slight professorial air, carried my bag, there was nothing of pose or condescension in the act, but just the natural sharing of burdens between an eider brother and a younger.
Edward Carpenter is perhaps most widely known through his writings on sociological subjects and through certain frank and illuminating books on human relationship. His " Adam's Peak to Elephanta " is treasure-trove to those who love the philosophy of India, and would fain see something of her life through sympathetic eyes. But it is in his monumental poem, " Towards Democracy," that the quintessence of the poet's revelation is contained.
Here Edward Carpenter will be found to be radically different from other exponents of the doctrine of human freedom, which is-the aim of his life work ; different from passionate claimants for a burning necessity, like Shelley or patient,almost cold-blooded,trackers of the footsteps of Freedom along the chill hilltops of logic like John Stuart Mill; different even from Whitman with whom he shares much in common. He is not a man in search of freedom : he is a man who has found freedom, or, to be accurate, the maximum of freedom that can be conceived as possible in a relative world of interdependent beings.
In his young manhood he felt the pinch of enforced obligation on the material and intellectual degrees of a sensitive and unusually honest nature. He made a bid for freedom by renouncing a College Fellowship and a career in one of the freest of the churches, and by taking up market gardening as a contribution to the productivity that he saw to be essential to truly prosperous national life. The rest of his life has been a consolidation of his position in front of the Capitalist Spirit which he regards as the arch-enemy to human Freedom.
It is this latter conviction that has led to a somewhat narrow interpretation of his great life-work, Towards Democracy, on the part of those who have never undertaken the intellectual discipline of reading it. Their idea of democracy is restricted to economics, whereas Carpenter's Democracy is a spiritual comradeship that includes economics, as it also includes the arts. Moreover, there is a notion that an interest in economics connotes a somewhat arid and sharp propagandism ; whereas to Carpenter, there is only one form of propaganda, that is, life—but it may include, as a legitimate function, not as an obsession, some indulgence in missionary enthusiasm. That is the note of his life and work; and it adds immensely the value of his utterances on the subject of Freedom to know that they are not echoes from other minds, or questionable conclusions from partial premises, but the free expression of his own soul.
The veil between the man and his work is of the thinnest material. This is set out in his reply to an address on his seventieth birthday on the 1st September, 1914, a copy of which I have the honour to possess as one of the signatories to the address. He says :
I have sometimes been accused of taking to a rather plain and Bohemian kind of life, of associating with manual workers, of speaking at street-corners, of growing fruit, making sandals, writing verses, or what not, at great cost to my own com fort and with some ulterior or artificial purpose as of reforming the world. But I can safely say that in any such case I have done the thing primarily and simply because of the joy I had in doing it, and to please myself. If the world or any part of it should in consequence insist on being reformed, that is not my fault. And this perhaps after all is a good general rule : namely that people should endeavour (more than they do) to express or liberate their own real or deeprooted needs and feelingsr . Then in doing so they will probably liberate and aid the expression of the Iives of thousands of others
I do not think that Carpenter, with his scrupulous sense of word-values, used the word " endeavour" in the foregoing in a haphazard way. I am quite sure from what I know of the man that in it he implied a recognition of the fact that the endeavour was about as far as the bulk of the British people could get. Hence there is no dogma about his utterance. He is quite clear that his way is the right way; but he recognises that his entry to it was aided by circumstances that others could not command, and he has given of his substance, his energy, his thought, to modify the social structure in such wise that all men and women will find freedom from the tyranny of artificial inessentials that form the hulk of the monstrous caricature of life in Europe.
Early in his life—at sixteen he tells us—he suddenly became aware of the futility of most of what was called " life." He also saw that that futility was achieved at the expense of the whole community, to the deprivation of the free sufficing life—sweet comradeship, a few needs and common pleasures—the needless endless burdens all cast aside. . . . the simple need and hunger of the human heart. He sought and found that free comradeship, and out of it gave his great songs of a soul's discovery, with their swift glances into the heart of the mystery of things that are so melted into the imagery of the poet and the long vistas of the prophet that one looks in vain for phrases that may be taken from their vital association without destruction.
Short quotation from "Towards Democracy" is difficult, and long quotation is impossible. Headers are recommended to study the following poems in the order named : " After Civilization," " The Word Democracy," " In a Manufacturing Town," " The Curse of Property," "The Meaning of it All," "These Populations," " Underneath and After all," "I Behold well-pleased," " The Elder Soldier." These are key-poems, and their sequence follows the line of presentation of Carpenter's thought as laid down in this chapter.
Out of the wealth of idea, reference, pictures of nature, unflinching details of life, one central theme emerges, the theme of Liberty :not a little transient expansion of permission to sate the senses on things forbidden, or gaze timidly on Kings and Queens; but the stripping away ruthlessly of all fripperies that smother the free play of soul or body, and hide the vision of the Eternal that follows full self-realisation. Edward Carpenter is no mere ethical thinker : he is a spiritual seer. He is not a mere improver of human conditions : he is a preparer of the Way of the Lord, and that way is Freedom:
There—in the region of equality, in the world of Freedom no longer limited, standing on a lofty-peak in heaven above the clouds, From below hidden. Yet to all who pass into that region most clearly visible— He the Eternal appeared. And how shall we find the way ? The answer is the world-old one, so familiar to those who have touched the Wisdom of the East:
As when one shuts a door after long confinement in the house—so out of your own plans and purposes escaping. Out of the mirror-lined chambers of self (grand though they be, but O how deary !) in which you have hitherto spent your life—. . . To pass in and out forever, having abandoned your own objects, looking calmly upon them, as though they did not exist.
Elsewhere he sings of the Curse of Property that shuts people out from what they possess; and again he sings of Love as the only true Property-holder:
Seek not the end of Love in this act or that act —lest indeed it become the end. But seek this act and that act and thousands of acts whose end is love—
So shalt thou at last create that which thou now desirest;
And then when these are all past and gone there shall remain to thee a great and immortal possession, which no man can take away. 129 It is his life-ideal of Freedom that is the shaping influence in Edward Carpenter's book with the felicitous title The Healing of Nations already referred to. With characteristic patience and fairness he cuts down through the immediate causes of the conflict in Europe, and through the more remote influences behind the causes. Commercial greed he sees as the tap-root:
And this, equally evidently, springs out of the innumerable greed of individuals... The desire of private persons to get rich quick at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses...And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which still have sway among us. ...
What a different tale of the earth would have to be told if, instead of the tyranny of selfishness, which is the foe to personal and corporate freedom, everyone of us thought and lived in the spirit of this Grand Old Man, who replied in the following terms to those who did themselves honour by doing him honour on his seventieth birthday:
.. . .The lives of all of us are so built and founded one on the work of another that it is impossible to assign any credit to one whose name happens to be k nown, which is not equall y due to the thousands or miflions of nameless ,and unknown ones who really have contributed to his work.
That is the note of the great soul free from the tyranny of the personality. It is echoed and re-echoed throughout his latest book, " My Days and Dreams—Autobiographical Notes." In this fascinating volume there is no suspicion that Carpenter's recording of his life is due to any sense of having carried to a successful stage the process sung of by Longfellow of making our lives sublime. It is, indeed, his doctrine that any attempt to manufacture sublimity would most likely only achieve ridiculousness, certainly self-righteousness. Hence his record is not that of deliberate effort towards personal sublimation, but simply of a life lived.
The sense of average in the work of Carpenter, the absence on the one hand of vulgarity and on the other of ecstasy, is seen in his life's record to be the natural expression of his temperament; and it reduces the incidents of a long career from the level of drama to that of narrative. The glimpse, for example, of the psychic realm which Mr. Carpenter has enjoyed, would have given a more exaggerated nature material for much writing. His decision to renounce his academical career, which promised him position and wealth, but at the expense of sincerity and honesty in thought,, came to him in a Paris train as a direct voice from the inner worlds. When at last he settled-down to the "simplification of life" in a country village, and had exchanged the company of Augustine Birrell, Fawcett, George Darwin, and other co-Fellows of Cambridge, for the hearty good-fellowship of artizans and farmers-, he was haunted by an image, " a vision within me, of something like the bulb and bud, with long green blades, of a huge hyacinth just appearing above the ground. I knew that it represented vigour and abounding life. But now I seem to see that, in the strange emblematic way in which the Soul sometimes speaks, this image may have been a sign of the fact that my life had really at least taken root."
These " supernormal" experiences, the hearing of voices and the seeing of visions, take-their place quite naturally in the orderly evolution of Mr. Carpenter's genius, with little or no emphasis, but with the impartation of some slight and continuing tint to the atmosphere of his life. In others they would have given a start to self-development along special lines: in Mr. Carpenter's case they beckoned him towards a truth that he has not yet reached in its fulness, taking him to India en route.
India, indeed, has had a quite large share in the life of Edward Carpenter. Close readers of his personal revelation in " Towards Democracy" have noticed its points of mental affinity with the " Bhagavat Gita." Now we learn from the autobiographical notes that the ' Gita ' was one of two events that united to bring into being one of the greatest modern influences in English literature : the other event was the death of his mother. Of the latter he says :—
...We were bound by a strong invisible tie. For months, even years, after her death I seemed to feel her, even see her, close to me—always figuring as a semi-luminous presence, very real, but faint in outline, larger than mortal......Her death at this moment exercised perhaps a great etherealising influence on my mind, exhaling the great mass of feelings, intuitions, conceptions, and views of life and the world which had formed within me, into, another sphere.
Then came his illumination : The ' Bbagavat Gita' about the same time-falling into my hands gave me a keynote. And all at once I found myself in touch with a mood of exaltation and inspiration—a kind of super-consciousness—which passed all that I bad experienced before and which immediately harmonised all those-other feelings, giving to them their place, their-meaning, and their outlet in expression. And so it was that ' Towards Democracy' came to birth. He had received the " Gita " from his "almost life-long friend Arunachalam," whom he first came in contact with when the latter was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and who became finally a member of the Ceylon Legislative Council. In 1890, on the invitation of Mr. Arunachalam, Mr. Carpenter paid the visit to Ceylon and India which he has recorded in his delightful book " Adam's Peak to Elephanta." " This visit to the East in some sense com -pleted the circle of my experiences," he says. It brought him into living contact with Eastern thought and experience through a Gnana Yogi, and, as he puts it, " concatenated " his work— and to some extent, the work of that extreme Westerner, Walt Whitman—with the Eastern tradition.
deepest expression of it in " Towards Democracy," comes before us not as the critic of contemporary error and abuse or as the polite essayist on music and art, but as the prophet of democracy.
of self by love that in its units and groups it expresses the abstract beauty and truth, justice and freedom of the spiritual whole.
Such vision could never be the vaporous imagining of a mind out of touch with life. Carpenter has lived, laboured, and travelled. He has touched " reality," but he has had the good fortune to possess a centre of calm in which to perform the balancing and distilling process that distinguishes the judgment of the thoughtful from the shifty findings of those who are mainly under the domination of the automatic mind. The artist, to get a true perspective, must step back out of the range of the detail of his picture ; the thinker must get beyond reach of the things that provoke his thoughts if he would comprehend their full significance. This is the process through which Carpenter's genius has expressed itself. It oscillates between detail and generalization. It dips down into the evidence of the senses : it withdraws and transmutes the sense of the evidence into vision.
His vision is, therefore, closely related to life. It is, in the best meaning of the term, modern, for it sees with the evolutionary eye the stupendous process of development along the surface of life; and it sees also with the inner; eye the accumulation of faculty and consciousness that lifts thought from degree to degree towards a divine culmination. Carpenter's vision is not over the head of to-day, but through it. His revolt is only against civilization in so far as its elements of selfishness and ugliness are barriers to the expression of the ideal harmony which is somewhere concealed in the totality of things, and involved potentially in every atom of diversity.
In short, the democracy which Edward Carpenter is looking towards is none other than the spiritual goal of every mystic from Prince Siddhartha, who became the Lord Buddha, and his precursors to James Macbeth Bain, the Scottish mystic poet, and his contemporaries ; not excluding the Rajput Princess Mirabai and. the Catholic saints, Teresa, Catherine and their sisters—union of outer and inner: but the mysticism of Carpenter is of a more integral and less remote order, and the more dangerous to things as they are because its altar light is no shaded glimmer, but a naked flame among the wood, hay, stubble of the world.
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