But though the pilgrims often showed but little consideration for their host, in the manner and duration of their visits, he seemed to be always master of the emergency, receiving the new-comers, however untimely their arrival, with imperturbable urbanity, and gently detaching the limpets with a skill that made them seem to be taking a voluntary and intended departure. It was hospitality brought to a fine art. For many years there was a quaint division of Carpenter’s writings in the British Museum catalogue, his earlier works being attributed to one Edward Carpenter, “Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge,” and the later to another Edward Carpenter, placed on the lower grade of “Social Reformer.” There was, perhaps, some propriety, as well as unconscious humour in this dual arrangement; for Carpenter, like Morris, was not a socialist born, but one who, by force of natural bias, had gravitated from Respectability to Freedom; and his writings bore obvious tokens of the change. Another and more audacious classification was once propounded to me by Bernard Shaw, viz. that future commentators would divide Carpenter’s works into two periods; first, that of the comparatively trivial books written before he came in contact with “G.B.S.”; secondly, that of the really important contributions to literature, where the Shavian influence is discernible. I mentioned this scheme to Carpenter; and he smilingly suggested that if there were any indebtedness, the names of the debtor and the creditor must be reversed. But it would have been as reasonable for an elephant to claim to have influenced a whale, or a whale an elephant, as for either the thinker or the seer, each moving in quite a different province, to suppose that he had affected the other’s course. One common influence they felt--the desire to humanize the barbarous age in which they lived--and it is strange that Carpenter, in his book on “Civilization,” should have bestowed so fair and unmerited a name on a state of society which, in spite of all its boasted sciences and mechanical inventions, is at heart little else than an ancient Savagery in a more complex and cumbrous form. VII THE POET-PIONEER I know not the internal constitution of other men.... I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land.--SHELLEY.