Songs Of A Revolutionary Epoch

To that section of manly England which in its golden youth went to Eton, the name Joynes is connected with Revolution much as the Bishop of London’s name is connected with the ballet. Whenever the collision between the inertia of established law and the restless urgency of change found a painful concrete expression in a collision between the Reverend Mr. Joynes and the British schoolboy, it was Mr. Joynes who represented forceful law and order, and the schoolboy who, as personified Revolution, got the worst of it. But Force, as Karl Marx said, is the midwife of progress; and there arose another Joynes at Eton, who was in course of time transmuted with considerable academic distinction at Cambridge from Eton scholar to Eton master, and seems to have for a time conducted himself in a manner worthy of his antecedents. Now Eton expects, among other things, that every master shall keep out of the hands of the police. In 1882, or thereabouts, Mr. James Leigh Joynes was discovered travelling in Ireland with no less dangerous an associate than Mr. Henry George. The two were promptly incarcerated, But the days of Mr. Balfour were not yet; and the prison doors opened abashed to the Eton master. Mr. Joynes wrote to the Times, of course, and presently published a book of Irish travel; but the expected note of contrition was absent. Eton began to suspect that she was harbouring a sympathizer with Land Nationalization. Dr. Hornby called upon Mr. Joynes to purge himself of heresy or else withdraw. Further correspondence in the Times ensued; and Mr. Joynes, under protest, renounced the substantial mammon of Eton, and burned his boats by joining the Democratic Federation, then a united body facing the world hopefully with an unblemished record and unbounded prospects. Whilst this state of things lasted, he wrote a Socialist catechism; conducted a monthly magazine called To-day jointly with Mr. Belfort Bax; and contributed articles and poems to the new paper Justice, founded by Mr, William Morris and Mr, Edward Carpenter, under the editorship of Mr. H. M. Hyndman. Shortly before the reign of fraternity in the Socialist camp came to an end, Mr Joynes left England, and in the course of a lengthy European tour continued a series of translations from the revolutionary poems of Freiligrath and Herwegh already begun in the pages of To-day. Some of these were sent to Mr. Hyndman and published in Justice. Others, sent to Mr. William Morris, appeared in the Commonweal. Finally Mr. Joynes returned; collected his translations in the volume now under notice engaged in the study of medicine at a metropolitan hospital—perhaps with an eye to the surgical exigencies of the next revolution; and settled down once more as a sober and respectable student.

Mr. Joynes has been the first to translate any considerable portion of the revolutionary poetry of the ’48 period into vernacular English. The translations collected by Mrs. Freiligrath-Kroeker, and published in a fairly well-known Tauchnitz volume, were of very unequal merit. The revolutionary spirit of a few of the poems had come safely through the hands of Ernest Jones; but the examples selected were for the most part purely romantic, and had been chosen on that account by the German-reading poets and men of letters of the romantic school. Mr. Joynes stands to Ernest Jones in the close relationship of Social Democrat to Chartist; and he hints in his preface, with refreshing frankness, that Ernest Jones is the only rival whose pretensions seem to him of any importance. This is perhaps a little hard on Bayard Taylor, whose vigorous version of “Die Todten an die Lebenden” will bear comparison with the original in point of metre better than Mr. Joynes’s, though it is hardly as sincere in feeling. The most touching poems in the collection are those of George Herwegh. They are distinguished by a woeful sense of the chronic poverty of the people, expressing itself in a characteristic note of pathos, sometimes ironic, sometimes poignant and hopeless. This note has been imitated by many of the writers whose songs are grouped at the end of the volume. It is treated with special felicity and delicacy by Mr. Joynes—for example, in his Englishing of such poems as “Der Arme Jakob” and of Püttman’s “Fliege, Schifflein, fliege.” A more difficult achievement is his version of Herwegh’s “Midnight Walk,” which might pass for a fine piece of original work.