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詩人 L. S. ベヴィントン |
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L. S. ベヴィントン バイオグラフィー＆ビブリオグラフィー (2) |
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A Life of Louisa Sarah Bevington
By. Eijun Senaha Hokkaido University
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What, with this fenced human mind,
What can I do to help my kind?
I such a stammerer, they so blind! --- “My Little Task” (1882) |
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Bevington’s first major collection of poems, Key-Notes, was published in 1876 under
the Barrett Browningesque pseudonym of “Arbor Leigh” (alluding to Aurora Leigh). All the privately printed poems
were reprinted, together with others, including four poems of “Teachings of a Day.” Key-Notes contained verses
philosophically based on the theories of Darwinian evolutionism and Emersonian transcendentalism.
The title of this volume was, as cited in the epigraph, taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comment on a poet’s role:
“Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the penetrating Key-Note of nature and spirit is sounded--earth-beat, sea-beat,
heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.” Writing an elegiac dedication to
Aimèe W., to whom Bevington promises to “send some key-notes of life’s journeying moods,” she divides the volume of forty-eight poems
into twelve months. The collection is that of a nature poet who expresses her passion to the changing climates and, by transcending them,
finds metaphoric meanings of the universe, but it is also that of an evolutionist who observes cycles and progress.
In the opening January section, four poems of “Teachings of a Day” are included as they indicate not only the evolution of
a day but of the year. In the June section, “The stammerer” and “Summer Song” are included. The former is an invocation of
a young poet who manages a stricter form of Italian verse, a villanelle. In the latter poem, the poet celebrates the coming of
the season; “Sing! sing me a song that fit for to-day” that is “Full of the scent, and the glow, and the passion of June.”
Her evolutionist observation of nature concludes, “While you sing me a song of the summer that’s ancient and new.”
Bevington also wrote about woman and her situation. “For Woman’s Sake” in August introduces the poet’s dilemma
between her feminist stance and her religious faith, in which she asks Christ, or “my brother,” to “Teach her well”
because “Thy code is writ in her belief in thee.” “Love and Pride” and “Unfulfilled,” in September and October
respectively, present the poet’s patience and sorrow over the unfulfilled love for the lover and God.
The last poem of the volume, “Listening,” brings up her own religious questionings as well as those of society.
Her conclusion is that of positivism, a literary adoption of the Darwinian theory, and an evolutionary meliorism: |
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Let them not sob themselves to sleep again
Till each has felt the universal Heart
Waking within him, and the great “worth while”
Of Time and Nature claiming his least deed
To weave in fabric of a new world-blessedness. |
| The volume found favor in intellectual and scientific rather than literary circles.
According to Alfred H. Miles, “Professor Ray Lankester brought it under the notice of Darwin, who read it after
not having opened a volume of verse for fifteen years,” and Miles concludes that it “is not surprising that Mrs. Guggenberger
should have broken the spell which for fifteen years had confined Darwin to the world of prose, for her part is emphatically
that of the poetess of evolutionary science.” Miles evaluates Bevington’s first volume of poetry: |
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She has discerned more accurately than many contemporaries, the immense poetical development
which the acceptance of the evolutionary view has made possible for science, and her best poems are attempts, by no means feeble or unskillful,
to bring out the poetic significance of scientific principles. She also has abundance of human feeling and passion, which find expression in
poems having other than a scientific basis, and though the structure of her verse is artless, her diction is clear and vigorous. |
Bevington’s first collection was reissued by Kegan Paul under her own name in 1879.
In addition to publishing poems, Herbert Spencer also asked Bevington to write articles on evolutionary theory.
Her first two articles, “The Personal Aspects of Responsibility” and “Modern Atheism and Mr. Mallock,” appeared in Mind
and Nineteenth Century respectively in 1879, the latter of which refutes, from a scientific standpoint, the cynical pessimism
of W. H. Mallock’s “Is Life Worth Living?” in which the cleric attacked the morality of evolutionary theory. Her article garnered
some literary recognition and many literary friends both in England and America
“Determinism and Duty” appeared in Mind in 1881, again at the suggestion of Herbert Spencer.
In August of the same year, “The Moral Colour of Rationalism” was in Fortnightly Review in response to Goldwin Smith’s
article on the ethics of evolutionary theory entitled “Data of Ethics.” In it, she argues against Smith’s perception of
evolutionary theory as the political ideology supporting colonial exploitation, such as that of the recent suppression by Governor
Eyre of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica. “Orthodox Conservatism,” she declares, “is inclined to keep its theory of world-wide
humanity for its wife and children to listen to, duly couched in Jewish phraseology, on Sunday.” As a result, she concludes,
“one may long for the time when religion shall no longer have the power to paralyse the morality it professes to patronise.”
Bevington’s early Quakerism was being displaced by her personal ideology of evolutionism that was to become more political as well
as national later in her life. |
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