This month brings the centenary of the birth of Henry Stephen Shakespear Salt. His father, son of a Banker, had, at Shrewsbury, the distinction of being the last boy to be flogged by Dr Samual Butler, who then became a Bishop.
The flogee became an officer in the Indian Army, gained distinction in the Punjab campaign, and was fond of his own company and of poetry. He invariably addressed the natives as niggers in tones which made them keep their distance.
The officer’s wife hated his inscrutable ways, and returned to England. Young Henry and his mother lived in various parts—by the Severn, in Shrewsbury (the family doctor was Charles Darwin’s father); and was coached at Sturminster Marshall in Dorsetshire by the Rev C. Kegan Paul. He developed a lasting love of English and classical poetry; often talked to Charles Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice; liked swimming, walking and riding; and gained an Eton scholarship. In due course he arrived at King’s College, Cambridge.
Kegan Paul had strange ideas. He said the Indians were men and women like ourselves. Henry, descending from John Moultrie of Charleston, Governor of Florida, was put upon inquiry. And it is strange that in later life he received a letter from Mahatma Gandhi (from the prison where he was incarcerated after his protest against, of all things, the Salt Tax) saying that he owed a great deal to Henry’s books on Thoreau, and that, by reading them, he came to the policy of non-co-operation. When that great and saintly man arrived in England in 1931, it was Henry Salt he asked to meet.
The list of Salt’s writings dizzies the arithmetic and memory. Shelley, De Quincey, James Thomson (of “Dreadful Night” fame), Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Melville, Lucretius—all these he interpreted. He translated Virgil’s story of Dido and Aeneas.
Social freedom, animal rights, cruelties of civilisation, vegetarianism, the humanities of diet, snake-feeding at the Zoological Gardens, the case against corporal punishment, killing for sport, and our vanishing wild-flowers—it is an amazing list. He was a poet, too.
He wrote his own cremation address. “I shall die, as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian. . . . I wholly disbelieve in the present established religion: but I have a very firm religious faith of my own—a Creed of Kinship.” In that creed war had no part.
His good friends included Bernard Shaw, Ramsay MacDonald, Meredith, Swinburne, Chesterton, Kropotkin, W. H. Hudson, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner, Clarence Darrow.
Shaw writes the long introduction; he completed it only the night before his fatal accident. He was “always happy at the Salts.” We never talked politics. The bond between us was that we were Shelleyans and Humanitarians.”
Salt, he says, hated being a housemaster, and kept saving enough to buy a pension of £800 a year. When he read a book in which Carpenter advocated “the simple life” on £160 a year, Salt having just accumulated that much shook the dust of Eton from his feet, and took a Tilford cottage in Surrey.
Liverpool Daily Post, September 25,1951, p. 3
Book Reviewed: Salt and His Circle