A Forgotten Socialist Poet

Is Francis Adams forgotten? One might almost think so, judging from the fact that his “Songs of the Army of the Night” are now rarely, if ever, mentioned in Socialist journals; yet it is difficult to believe that Socialists are so indifferent to their best literature as wholly to forget those keen, fierce lyrics, on fire alike with love and with hate, which express the passionate sympathies and deep resentments of the modern revolutionary movements as surely as Elliott’s “Corn Law Rhymes” and Brough’s “Songs of the Governing Classes,” spoke the troubled spirit of their time. For Adams, unlike Morris, was not so much a convert to Socialism as a scion of Socialism, a veritable “Child of the Age,” to quote the title of his own autobiographical story, in the storm and stress of his career; and unequal as his songs are, when judged by the usual literary standard—in parts so tender and melodious, and against, in other parts, harsh and formless to the verge of mere doggerel,—few sympathetic readers could be unmoved by their passion and directness. They were, in fact, intended to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working classes, as he found out the hollowness—to him, at any rate—of our modern culture and refinement.

THE HEART OF OAK.

What rebel poet has ever “arraigned his country and his day” in more burning words than those of the 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.

I smell your ruin out, I light and croak
My sombre lore,
As swagging you go by, O heart of oak,
Rotten to the core.

Look westward! Ireland’s vengeful eyes are cast
On freedom won.
Look eastward! India stirs from sleep at last.
You are undone!

Look southward, where Australia hears your voice,
And turns away.
O brutal hypocrite, she makes her choice
With the rising day!

But the “Songs” are not merely denunciatory; they have a closer and more personal aspect (as in the infinitely compassionate “One among so Many,” surely one of the most beautiful poems in recent literature) which endears them to the heart of the reader as only a few choice books are ever endeared. It is worth mentioning, perhaps, for those who are interested in the genesis of the book, that many alterations and additions were introduced by Adams into the text of the later issues. I have a duplicate final copy, which he gave me only a month before his death, and from which the edition of 1894 was printed. Into this copy, revised and corrected by him with minute carefulness that marked all his workmanship, he had written the characteristic verses on “England in Egypt,” and others which did not appear in the early edition. Ultimately, too, The “Mass of Christ,” which has been separately printed, should be incorporated in the “Songs.”

THE POET AS CRITIC.

It is my belief, in spite of the verdict of the critics, who knew him mostly by his prose essays, that Francis Adams’s name will in future be remembered, if remembered at all, through the “Songs of the Army and the Night” — through the “Songs” in the first place, and perhaps also through that extraordinarily fascinating, if somewhat morbid, story, “A Child of the Age,” which I would rank in the same category as “Wuthering Heights” and “The Story of an African Farm,” among the great works of immature imagination. I cannot believe that his criticism, much praised though it has been by some of those who knew him, will survive the test of time.

The truth is that Adams had far less of the critical and scientific than of the poetic and emotional nature; and his criticism, though always trenchant, and (when they chanced to hit the mark) irresistible, were in not a few cases absolutely erroneous and unjust. His own view of himself, expressed with childlike frankness and naïveté was that he possessed both qualities. “These the gods have given me,” he says in one of his letters, “the creative gift and the critical gift,” both together, a rare conjunction”; and when one ventured to question this happy concurrence, he received the incredulity with and an air of amused good-natured unconcern.

THE NECESSITY FOR SPADEWORK.

Yet, even as regards the Labour movement, though he caught and interpreted its spirit with the true poetical instinct, I cannot think that his forecasts of practical events were based on any fixed judgment; and I suspect that the idea of “catastrophic” Socialism had to the last some hold on him. He was anxious, however, to disown any “anarchist” tendencies, as witness this passage in one of his letters, written under the erroneous impression that he had been called an anarchist: “As stupid as that? No, not quite. I say this: Exactly as the clock strikes the full hour, and not one second before, and not one second after, at which there are enough of us who have grasped the scheme of workable Socialism to grasp also the helm of things and guide the ship—exactly as that sound rises do we ‘down tools’ and make the big mutiny. Let those who stop us take the consequences. Do you think we are going to go agonising and educating for ever? It’s just that damned brainless anarchism, that ignorance of what can be done to-day with what to-day provides, which has ruined us again and again.”

It is in this spirit, presumably, that we should read his “Trafalgar Square”:—

The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;
The church bells were ringing;
Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,
Tramping and singing.

Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung
As they went along:
Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung
Their defiant Song.

It was not too clean, their feminine lay,
But it thrilled me quite,
With its challenge to taskmaster villainous day
And infamous night.

With its threat to the robber Rich, the Proud,
The respectable Free
And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,
And they shouted to me!

Girls, that’s the shout, the shout we shall utter,
When, with rifles and spades,
We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,
On the barricades!

These wonderful stanzas, so imaginative yet so modern, might alone redeem Socialism from the charge of being unpoetical, and there are many other poems as full of the same qualities in the “Songs of the Army of the Night.”

Henry S. Salt

The Labour Leader, Vol. 46 No. 1, November 12, 1909, p. 1