CHAPTER I PERSONAL AND INTRODUCTORY

" I am an acme of thinga aocompUih'd, and I am an enclofier of things to be." — Walt Whitmam.

ARGUlfEMT

At ihô âge of iwefUy-five, Edward Carp&nUr received the créative imfnUse, and abandaned his profession io place himself ai Us disposai. Witk the assistance of Walt WhUman's ** Leaves of Grass " he was delivered of his spiritual child, It took extemal form in the poem '* Towards Démocracy," in which he célébrâtes his expérience, and proclaims it as the promise of an arriving worldexpérience. The justification of this announcement lies in the fact that the Whole expresses itself in each of its parts in a particular way ; and Car- Penter, by revealing what had conte to be in him, opens a door and discloses that which is coming to be for the race.

OF Comish descent on his father's side, and of Scottish on his mother's, Edward Carpenter was bom at Brighton in the year 1844. He graduated at Cambridge, took

s THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

Holy Orders, and for several years occupied the position of curate to Frédéric Denison Maurice.

The$e brief notes suffice to indicate his extemal history up to the âge of twenty-five.

Âbout this time he began to feel the pressure of a désire to

Write some sort of a book which should address itself very personally and closely to any one wlio cared to read it — establish, so to speak, an intimate personal relation between myself and the reader.^

This désire, in some shape or form, is not uncommon with young men of eager and artistic tempérament. It is the désire to create, to issue one's self as logos spertnatikos, to bury one's self as a seed in the matrix of common himian expérience, to incarnate one's self, to beget children of one's own spirit. Often — ^perhaps most often — thèse créative puises pass xmrealized, partly because of the hardness of the heart, and partly because of the pitiless dominance of mechanism and organization in modem Ufe. With Carpenter, however, the désire was so strong and so vital that, although, in spite of several attempts, it found no inunediate outlet, it became in him, in the course of time, as a swelling, budding, multiplying mass of spiritual plasm maldng itself felt in consciousness as a vague, insistent, and increasing urgency.

He was faithful to the calling.' He loosened

^ Towards Democracy (Pocket Edition, 1909), p. 511. » Cf. T. £)., pi 376.