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PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF
EDWARD CARPENTER
B Y
Mrs. HAVELOCK ELLIS

THE FREE SPIRIT PRESS
BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N. J.

THE FREE SPIRIT SERIES

Published by JOSEPH ISHIH

THE quickening influence of SVlrs. Havelock £llis
is vividly apparent in this brief essay as, indeed,
throughout all her 'works. Her death in the Fall of
Nineteen-hundred-and-sixteen at the age of Fifty-
five, in the very flower of her maturity, is but a
confirmation of tbe foreboding that she 'would pre
maturely drain the life-forces of a body always
frail, outstripped by the swift splendor of her spirit.
Her posthumous 'work "The f^w Horizon in
Love and Life" 'with a sympathetic introduction by
i^arguerite Tracy is an epitome of her gloriously-
audacious, forward-marching and indomitable per
sonality. This essay was originally a lecture delivered in
England and America but never before published.
IVe are indebted to Mr. Havelock Ellis for his '
acquiescence in permitting publication.

February, 1922.

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD
CARPENTER
T HAS BEEN MY GOOD FORTUNE IN A LITTLE
BOOK, "THREE MODERN SEERS", TO WRITE
AN APPRECIATION OF EDWARD CARPENTER
which seemed to Carpenter himself a
summarising of his ideals. But to ap
proach the personal moods of so individ
ual a man, and to create an atmosphere which is Inti
mate without being intrusive, is not so easy a task as to
study the poet and the prophet, presented in his books
fcrthe world to read or misread. The writer, the business
man, the artist or the clown may not move our pulses.
Yet the sudden or secret revelation of the human be
ing in any of these gives us a key, and with it we un
lock, not onltj the door of one personality, but of
many. To approach and understand a complex nature
like Edward Carpenter ought to imply a range of
sympathy akin to his own, and so the task of dis-

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
cussing him is doubly difficult. Theodosia Garrison
has in "The Joy of Life" put the difficulties of cor
respondence between a poet and his readers :
"Fire he put upon his lips.
In his heart a blarle,
^Thus,' quoth Allah to his Saints
*Are my poets made.
"Yet what use?' the Maker sighed
To his angels near;
"Since I may not give the World
"Ears, that they may hear.' "
For our consolation, however, it may be said that the
characteristics of genius in modern life do not stand
so apart from those of us who are average in brain
and heart as they did thirty years ago. Complexities
of temperament through education, the rational fee
ing of problems by the aid of science and medicine,
the increase of real democracy, and the decrease of
the cant of it, have made a minority of us more tol
erant and understanding. I can well remember Ed
ward Carpenter being described as a dangerous anar
chist, and even as a madman. In the past, "This man
hath a devil" has usually been the label put upon re
formers, from Christ to Bernard Shaw, but now it is
almost feshionable to entertain the law-breaker as well
as the law-maker, in case angels should be neglected
unawares. It is in feet growing more common to find
amongst both men and women a mingling of the prac
tical and the mystical. In Edward Carpenter the poet
and the mystic have transfcrmed or transmuted all
the so-called "common" things of life into "miracles 8

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
at our door," as Grace Rhys would call them. An
unusual humanity in the man has made those brown,
dog-like eyes of Carpenter's pierce through appear
ances, and he sees jewels where most of us see only
bottle glass. He drags off the disguises. He sees the
creature within, the real entity, trying slowly to emerge,
and he is never brutal to the shy unfolding of the
spirit. His is no Nietzschien shout fcr merely physical
or intellectual refcrm. From babe to lover, and from
lover to the one awaiting death, he watches the transi
tions, the feilures, the so-called sins, and the comedies
and tragedies of emergence from the coils of the flesh
back to the spirit, which is the warfere of earthly life.
These have no terrors for him. Neither sin nor suffer
ing nor shyness confuses his outlook. He lays a calm
hand on the anaemic or the fevered pulse, and knows
the physic prescribed by Destiny. He realises at a
glance how desire and restraint alike cause lapses and
treacheries in the work of the spirit, but he realises,
also, that Love draws upwards.
Carpenter sees how we set up fentastic theories of
slavery to indulgence or asceticism, so that our grow
ing pains shall not hurt so much. We worship money,
we want to increase our power, or intensify our ambi
tion. We love absorbingly and suffer woefully. We
bluster and bind, we seek and are led astray. We
pray for feith and remain feithless. We give small
names to great truths, we crucify where we ought to
heal and extinguish where we ought to stimulate. The
whole crazy blunder is because neither our spiritual
ity nor our humour is big enough to enable us to be
properly human. For, after all, to be human is the

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
first aid to spirituality. A man like Carpenter is of
immense value because he gives hints of what real
spiritualih; is. He knows it is not a selfish hope fcr
an exchange of good deeds fer a feir heaven. It is
simply the power to realise the one-ness of all living
things, and a need to suffer and to joy with others. It
is a realisation that love is the end, even if the way
and the means to it are painful and baffling. It is to
believe and to surrender, to be ready to live or die, to
be a saviour or to be one of the "lost", as Fate wills.
Edward Carpenter as poet and seer dreads neither joy
nor sorrow, because he knows they spring from one
root. He is many-sided. He understands music, as we find
when we read "Angel's Wings," so he knows the
value of discords. In his "Desirable Mansions" and
other essays, we realise he is a true democrat, but he
is almost aristocratic and certainly autocratic in his
plea for serene individualism in democracy. Self and
the over-self, oneself in and for others, is the keynote
of all his work. In "Love's Coming of Age", he proves
he can understand the passionate, bewildering, and
mystical heart of a woman, through realising the crude
needs of the past, and the subtle evolution in the
present of her mate, man. He sees the flux and reflux
of passion and pain, of love and death. He would
have no hurry, and yet no rest, till Love has emerged
in all its wonder and beauty. Love and desire in their
crudibj, their excess, and their ecstasy, this man ap
proaches with the courage of a mystic, and the exalt
ation of a lover. He knows that there is nothing com
mon or unclean in love, as there is nothing terrifying

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
in death. All through his books, and especially in the
"Art of Creation" and the "Drama of Love and Death",
we realise how Life, Love, and Death make the great
drama fcr Immortality. This belief in the man makes
us, while reading his poems or his prose, at one with
the babe at the breast, and with the ferns in cool
stretches of fcrest. This one-ness is at the root of his
whole philosophy. A cobbler, a thief, a saint, a coward,
a scandal-monger, and a self-righteous groper after
truth, are to him just brothers and sisters finding the
way or lamely walking in it. The greatness of Edward
Carpenter's conception is just this emphasis on the
one-ness of mankind. Perhaps the most artistically
delightful of all the things he has written, is "Squinancy
Wort," where almost the tiniest of created flowers de
mands its need of a full life as much as man.
When I have stayed with Edward Carpenter in his
little home near Sheffield what has always struck me
most, is the way the apparently incongruous in his
atmosphere appears orderly and reasonable. In the
little kitchen, where we eat and talk, there is a piano.
It seems quite in place, though in our kitchens it
would probably appear absurd. I remember smiling
to myself one night when I sat between Carpenter and
his factotum and feiend in one. One was mending his
shirt, and the other a pair of socks. No incongruity
struck me, because Carpenter's idea of life is simpli
fication and Cl real division of work. His belief is, that
what a woman can do a man can always share. He
has realised the truth that no occupation is a sex
monopoly, but a chance fer free choice, capability,
and division of labour. So that when Carpenter lakes

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF ED'WARD CARPENTER
his share in the washing-up, it seems quite as natural
as when he lights a cigarette. When he neither sews
nor smokes but plays Chopin, a curious realisation
comes over one that there is no real difference in the
arts of love, music, stocking-mending, or redeeming.
The so-called commonplace is mere vibration of the
soul to the real poet, the sinful and erring mere con
fusion of tongues spelling out the Infinite.
On one occasion when a purveyor of religious tracts
called on these two men in the little village where they
dwell, the fectotum alone was at home. "'What relig
ion," inquired the missionary, "do you profess?" The
answer was Immediate in a strong North country
voice. "What religion? Why! The same as the cocks
and hens! ^X^e love the sunshine, and the garden, and
our bit of grub." This helper and friend confesses he
has neither read the Bible nor any of Carpenter's
books, but his humorous answer strikes al the root
of the matter of the unity of all natural things. It is
this realisation of unity which makes Carpenter a vege
tarian, an anti-vivisectionist, a socialist, a suffragist, a
seer, and possibly a sinner. For, after all, the real sin
ner is only one who cannot always and absolutely
live up to the light within him, as the conventional
sinner is one who refuses to live up to the ideas of the
people around him. To pretend that Carpenter cannot
fell in word or deed would be to take a sentimental
and felse view of him. Of course he feils now and
t\er, but the wonderful thing about him is, that he
makes those of us who know him well more firmly
his friends because of this one-ness with us in spirit
ual imperfection. He neither poses as a saint nor

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
counts his conquests as a spiritual miser. He is not
dismayed at his feilures, but learns and strides on,
bearing as best he can the penalties of both success
and feilure. The man who dares to be himself never
escapes suffering and misconstruction, but Carpenter
tells us that the great order is served by these personal
tortures. Complexity of temperament implies martyr
dom, and martyrdom is a gate to mysticism, and
mysticism is Heaven's horn book on Earth.
We must remember that no man, and no woman,
trespasses into the unknown, while they bear flesh as
a burden, without a terrible dragging of the nerves,
or some complexity of temperament which, under
certain conditions, could spell madness or ruin. The
poet or the seer, or even the lover, like the dancer,
runs enormous risks if he interprets, through the body,
the bewitching ecstasies of the soul. But feilures do
not count so much as attempts and enterprises. None
of us can say where feilure begins or success ends in
the spiritual adventure of life.
My personal tribute to the work of Edward Carpenter
is, that never once for more than twenty-five years, in
whatever straits life has hurled me, either fiom joy or
pain, have I gone to his"Towards Democracy "and come
away in the same mood. It is surely the Epistle of a life,
and the Gospel of a life to be, when love has solved the
difficulties of pain, jealousy, separation, and death, and
when great Mother Nature is recognised as the real
Healer.Curiously enough, "Towards Democracy", the first edi'
tion at least, is in one mood, the mood which almost e-
clipses a message in a grief, but a grief without bitterness.
¦3

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
When either Life or Death takes what we love, expres
sion in some fcrm saves breakdown. Through loss
or death, the artist either expresses or is extinguished.
The door opens and he sees, or it shuts and he wails.
If he sees, he creates, and then we see too.
The death of his mother opened up the channels in
Edward Carpenter for the inflowing of the spirit of
"Towards Democracy". No one can read that book
and remain quite the same. From the almost con
demnatory onslaught on respectability to the last word
in the latest edition of all: "'Lo! What a world I cre
ate," the human being and the seer speak to the mortal
and the immortal within us all, and help us, as the
sun and the stars and the flowers help, by being them
selves. It is the singleness, the unaffectedness of the man and
the artist, that makes Carpenter worth while. There
is in his work, and in himself, both serenity and radi
ance. One of my most precious memories when stay
ing with him, is of one Saturday night when he took
me to the local public-house. Being the only woman
there, except the landlady, the colliers and fermers did
me honour. An old man who had drunk rather deeply
got up and sang a song in my honour to Carpenter's
vamping. Were it sung elsewhere, most of us would
probably walk out of the room, but the utter uncon
sciousness of these men, and especially of the one
who sang it, who had no idea that it was not most
appropriate to entertain an ethical prig, was refreshing,
as it was refreshing to see Carpenter as a pal of them
all. In the little public-house parlour was that curious
atmosphere of human democracy which is utterly free

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER
from philanthropy, patronage, or snobbery. "I go in
and out accepted", is true of Carpenter, as of Walt
Whitman.
Carpenter is as much at one with animals and Nature
as with men, women and children. A lovely picture
remains with me of him in his garden. In the liitle
hut by the brook at the end of the garden, where he
wrote nearly the whole of "Towards Democracy",
we were sitting one afternoon, and talking out all
things feom sex to psychism. Suddenly I realised we
had an audience. A large water-rat eyed us calmly as we
talked out the probable and improbable secrets of the
universe. The rat knew, as I knew, that all things wearing
fur or feathers or silky skins were safe with this man
whose sense of beauty and unity defended all dumb
things from evil. The rat scratched his ear, while we
scratched the Universe. None of us seemed afiaid of
the Possible or the seemingly Impossible.
When one is with Carpenter one feels that what we
call the Miraculous is no violation, but only an en
largement, of Nature's laws. It would not surprise me
in the least to find an escaped tiger lying asleep with
its head on Carpenter's sandals, any more than it
would appear impossible to me if I heard that the
little that is left of his mortal body had passed out of
sight in a way Nature might see fit to use fer her
special children at special intervals. He is one lent by
the Gods, and the Gods are omnipotent. In this age
of Materialism, as we are so fend of calling it, we
need a prophet whose humour is keen, whose intel
lect and heart are not at war, and who defies conven
tions without defying spiritual laws. We are all, either
15

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF EDWARD CARPENTER

as individualists, materialists, or moralists, concerned
with matters which come under the designation of the
spiritual. As we are exiles we are often homesick, but
we call the deadly nausea and loneliness which attack
us by many other names. The spark craves the light,
dimly remembered. This man, Edward Carpenter,
seems to remember and to foresee. He realises why
we are in prison, and he recognises the v/ay of escape.
His "Secret of Time and Satan" gives his solution,
and the key of the inner meanings of Good and Evil:
""For there is nothing that is evil except because a man has not
mastery over itj and there is no good thing that is not evil if it
have mastery over a man;
And there is no passion or power, or pleasure or pain, or cre
ated thing whatsoever, which is not ultimately fcr man and fcr
his use — or which he need he a£aid of, or ashamed at."

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