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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 (1) |
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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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Louisa Sarah Bevington stood up for individual human rights as
she witnessed British Imperialism expanding its power for the nation’s good. Her life changed
dramatically in order to help her “kind.” She was not a “stammerer”; she was a poet,
essayist, and activist who represented the political as well as the literary scene of the
fin de siècle.
She was born to Quaker parents, Alexander Bevington and Louisa De Horne,
at St. John’s Hill, Battersea in the County of Surrey. The occupation of her father was described
as a “gentleman” in her birth certificate, and his ancestor, when he was only a boy of fourteen,
was known to have once suffered confinement in Nottingham Gaol with George Fox (1624-91),
a founder of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Louisa Sarah was the eldest of eight children,
seven of whom were girls. Her father encouraged her in the observation and love of nature, and,
at a very early age, she wrote childish verses about natural objects.
She made use of verse for the expression of her own thought and love for science, poetry,
music, and metaphysical thinking. Like George Eliot and Constance Naden, Bevington was
influenced by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a philosopher and sociologist, and his
evolutionist view of the universe and society gradually grew upon her. Bevington sustained
the evolutionist view throughout her adulthood, and Spencer’s sponsorship led
to her recognition among both scientific and literary circles.
Shortly after the publication of her second volume of poems in 1882,
she visited Germany, where, in 1883, she married a Munich artist named Ignatz Felix
Guggenberger, without registering the marriage in England. The marriage lasted less than
eight years; by 1890, she had returned to London and restarted her career under her
maiden name, never using “Guggenberger” in public writings. In the years leading
up to her death, she became involved with anarchist groups based in London and also
associated herself with international movements. This coincided with her contribution
of poems and articles to anarchist and socialist journals, forcefully putting forth a case
for anarchism as a viable political philosophy.
By the mid-1890s, Bevington was familiar with many London anarchists
and was a recognized anarchist poet. Politically, she condoned the use of violence as a final
resort against institutionalized injustice and, privately, remained an atheist, refusing any religious
ceremony for her funeral. On 28 November 1895, after suffering from mitral disease of the heart for
four years and dropsy for six months while dedicating her shortening life to creative as well as political
activities, she died at Willesden, Middlesex. Her death was reported a week later in London, not by
her husband Ignatz, but by a Helen Glennie, who registered the poet’s occupation as “a ‘wife’
of Ignatz Felix Guggenberger, an artist painter,” and her name as Louisa Sarah Guggenberger.
Her obituary notice was carried by the 18 December issue of Torch of Anarchy.
Bevington’s poetic career can be divided into three periods. Up until the 1870s,
she wrote naturalistic poems with Christian as well as evolutionist tendencies. Her questions were answered
by her faith, scientific observation, and transcendentalist understanding of nature. In the 1880s,
as her attention moved toward society, she left Quakerism behind and began writing critical poems
and essays while struggling to find a better solution for society’s problems. When she came back to England,
in the 1890s, she identified herself as an anarchist and wrote against the self-evident injustices
and evils of late Victorian England. Her personal evolution, from innocent Quaker to agnostic
ideologist and political activist, is expressed in her representative works of each decade: Key-Notes (1876),
Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets (1882), and Liberty Lyrics (1895).
Bevington started her poetic career in 1871 with some poems for private circulation.
Her first published verses were “Sonnet” and “A Double Sonnet” which appeared, under her initials only,
in one of the earliest numbers of Friends’ Quarterly Examiner, a Quaker journal. “Sonnet” is a religious and
romantic poem in which Bevington describes her innocent belief in God on whose Divine intentions she
“used to wonder when [she] was a child/ And saw a tempest mounting in the sky.” She eventually learns that
“Lest ’neath a too fair sky man should forget/ God sometimes in his life dark clouds doth set.” In “A Double Sonnet,”
likewise, Bevington first admonishes people for impatience with God’s holy will and, in the second sonnet stanza, asks them to
“do the duty of the hour/ Leaving results to time, and God’s unfettered power.”
Herbert Spencer read her poems and, in 1876, asked her for four more to be reprinted in the American journal,
Popular Science Monthly. “Morning,” “Afternoon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight” appeared in January 1878 as sequence poems
under the title “Teachings of a Day.” Dividing a day into four periods of progress, the poem adopts an evolutionary view of
creation. From time, when “There is effort all the morning/ Through the windy sea and sky, until midnight when
“There is action in the stillness,/ [and] There is progress in the dark,” she finds; |
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So we sing of evolution,
And step strongly on our ways;
And we live through nights in patience
And we learn the worth of days.
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| The evolutionary lesson she learns is optimistic: “Nothing hinders, all enables/ Nature’s vast awakening. |
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