Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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But, altogether, I felt myself in a most distracted, rudderless state. My
mother's advice I felt daily less and less inclined to ask. A gulf was
opening between us; we were moving in two different worlds, and she saw
it, and imputed it to me as a sin; and was the more cold to me by day, and
prayed for me (as I knew afterwards) the more passionately while I slept.
But help or teacher I had none. I knew not that I had a Father in heaven.
How could He be my Father till I was converted? I was a child of the Devil,
they told me; and now and then I felt inclined to take them at their word,
and behave like one. No sympathizing face looked on me out of the wide
heaven--off the wide earth, none. I was all boiling with new hopes, new
temptations, new passions, new sorrows, and "I looked to the right hand and
to the left, and no man cared for my soul."

I had felt myself from the first strangely drawn towards Crossthwaite,
carefully as he seemed to avoid me, except to give me business directions
in the workroom. He alone had shown me any kindness; and he, too, alone was
untainted with the sin around him. Silent, moody, and preoccupied, he was
yet the king of the room. His opinion was always asked, and listened to.
His eye always cowed the ribald and the blasphemer; his songs, when he
rarely broke out into merriment, were always rapturously applauded. Men
hated, and yet respected him. I shrank from him at first, when I heard
him called a Chartist; for my dim notions of that class were, that they
were a very wicked set of people, who wanted to kill all the soldiers and
policemen and respectable people, and rob all the shops of their contents.
But, Chartist or none, Crossthwaite fascinated me. I often found myself
neglecting my work to study his face. I liked him, too, because he was as I
was--small, pale, and weakly. He might have been five-and-twenty; but his
looks, like those of too many a working man, were rather those of a man
of forty. Wild grey eyes gleamed out from under huge knitted brows, and a
perpendicular wall of brain, too large for his puny body. He was not only,
I soon discovered, a water-drinker, but a strict "vegetarian" also; to
which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness,
volubility, and sensitiveness of his mind. But whether from his ascetic
habits, or the un-healthiness of his trade, the marks of ill-health were
upon him; and his sallow cheek, and ever-working lip, proclaimed too
surely--

The fiery soul which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay;
And o'er informed the tenement of clay.

I longed to open my heart to him. Instinctively I felt that he was a
kindred spirit. Often, turning round suddenly in the workroom, I caught him
watching me with an expression which seemed to say, "Poor boy, and art thou
too one of us? Hast thou too to fight with poverty and guidelessness, and
the cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, as I have done!" But when I tried
to speak to him earnestly, his manner was peremptory and repellent. It was
well for me that so it was--well for me, I see now, that it was not from
him my mind received the first lessons in self-development. For guides did
come to me in good time, though not such, perhaps, as either my mother or
my readers would have chosen for me.

My great desire now was to get knowledge. By getting that I fancied, as
most self-educated men are apt to do, 1 should surely get wisdom. Books, I
thought, would tell me all I needed. But where to get the books? And which?
I had exhausted our small stock at home; I was sick and tired, without
knowing why, of their narrow conventional view of everything. After all,
I had been reading them all along, not for their doctrines but for their
facts, and knew not where to find more, except in forbidden paths. I dare
not ask my mother for books, for I dare not confess to her that religious
ones were just what I did not want; and all history, poetry, science, I had
been accustomed to hear spoken of as "carnal learning, human philosophy,"
more or less diabolic and ruinous to the soul. So, as usually happens
in this life--"By the law was the knowledge of sin"--and unnatural
restrictions on the development of the human spirit only associated with
guilt of conscience, what ought to have been an innocent and necessary
blessing.

My poor mother, not singular in her mistake, had sent me forth, out of an
unconscious paradise into the evil world, without allowing me even the sad
strength which comes from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil;
she expected in me the innocence of the dove, as if that was possible on
such an earth as this, without the wisdom of the serpent to support it. She
forbade me strictly to stop and look into the windows of print shops, and
I strictly obeyed her. But she forbade me, too, to read any book which I
had not first shown her; and that restriction, reasonable enough in the
abstract, practically meant, in the case of a poor boy like myself, reading
no books at all. And then came my first act of disobedience, the parent of
many more. Bitterly have I repented it, and bitterly been punished. Yet,
strange contradiction! I dare not wish it undone. But such is the great law
of life. Punished for our sins we surely are; and yet how often they become
our blessings, teaching us that which nothing else can teach us! Nothing
else? One says so. Rich parents, I suppose, say so, when they send their
sons to public schools "to learn life." We working men have too often no
other teacher than our own errors. But surely, surely, the rich ought to
have been able to discover some mode of education in which knowledge may be
acquired without the price of conscience, Yet they have not; and we must
not complain of them for not giving such a one to the working man when they
have not yet even given it to their own children.

In a street through which I used to walk homeward was an old book shop,
piled and fringed outside and in with books of every age, size, and colour.
And here I at last summoned courage to stop, and timidly and stealthily
taking out some volume whose title attracted me, snatch hastily a few pages
and hasten on, half fearful of being called on to purchase, half ashamed of
a desire which I fancied every one else considered as unlawful as my mother
did. Sometimes I was lucky enough to find the same volume several days
running, and to take up the subject where I had left it off; and thus I
contrived to hurry through a great deal of "Childe Harold," "Lara," and the
"Corsair"--a new world of wonders to me. They fed, those poems, both my
health and my diseases; while they gave me, little of them as I could
understand, a thousand new notions about scenery and man, a sense of poetic
melody and luxuriance as yet utterly unknown. They chimed in with all
my discontent, my melancholy, my thirst after any life of action and
excitement, however frivolous, insane, or even worse. I forgot the
Corsair's sinful trade in his free and daring life; rather, I honestly
eliminated the bad element--in which, God knows, I took no delight--and
kept the good one. However that might be, the innocent--guilty pleasure
grew on me day by day. Innocent, because human--guilty, because
disobedient. But have I not paid the penalty?

One evening, however, I fell accidentally on a new book--"The Life and
Poems of J. Bethune." I opened the story of his life--became interested,
absorbed--and there I stood, I know not how long, on the greasy pavement,
heedless of the passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the
flaring gas-light that sad history of labour, sorrow, and death.--How
the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation itself, and
the daily struggle to earn his bread by digging and ditching, educated
himself--how he toiled unceasingly with his hands--how he wrote his poems
in secret on dirty scraps of paper and old leaves of books--how thus he
wore himself out, manful and godly, "bating not a jot of heart or hope,"
till the weak flesh would bear no more; and the noble spirit, unrecognized
by the lord of the soil, returned to God who gave it. I seemed to see in
his history a sad presage of my own. If he, stronger, more self-restrained,
more righteous far than ever I could be, had died thus unknown, unassisted,
in the stern battle with social disadvantages, what must be my lot?

And tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear, fell fast upon the
book.

A harsh voice from the inner darkness of the shop startled me.

"Hoot, laddie, ye'll better no spoil my books wi' greeting ower them."

I replaced the book hastily, and was hurrying on, but the same voice called
me back in a more kindly tone.

"Stop a wee, my laddie. I'm no angered wi' ye. Come in, and we'll just ha'
a bit crack thegither."

I went in, for there was a geniality in the tone to which I was
unaccustomed, and something whispered to me the hope of an adventure, as
indeed it proved to be, if an event deserves that name which decided the
course of my whole destiny.

"What war ye greeting about, then? What was the book?"

"'Bethune's Life and Poems,' sir," I said. "And certainly they did affect
me very much."

"Affect ye? Ah, Johnnie Bethune, puir fellow! Ye maunna take on about sic
like laddies, or ye'll greet your e'en out o' your head. It's mony a braw
man beside Johnnie Bethune has gane Johnnie-Bethune's gate."

Though unaccustomed to the Scotch accent, I could make out enough of
this speech to be in nowise consoled by it. But the old man turned the
conversation by asking me abruptly my name, and trade, and family.

"Hum, hum, widow, eh? puir body! work at Smith's shop, eh? Ye'll ken John
Crossthwaite, then? ay? hum, hum; an' ye're desirous o' reading books? vara
weel--let's see your cawpabilities."

And he pulled me into the dim light of the little back window, shoved back
his spectacles, and peering at me from underneath them, began, to my great
astonishment, to feel my head all over.

"Hum, hum, a vara gude forehead--vara gude indeed. Causative organs large,
perceptive ditto. Imagination superabundant--mun be heeded. Benevolence,
conscientiousness, ditto, ditto. Caution--no that large--might be
developed," with a quiet chuckle, "under a gude Scot's education. Just turn
your head into profile, laddie. Hum, hum. Back o' the head a'thegither
defective. Firmness sma'--love of approbation unco big. Beware o' leeing,
as ye live; ye'll need it. Philoprogenitiveness gude. Ye'll be fond o'
bairns, I'm guessing?"

"Of what?"

"Children, laddie,--children."

"Very," answered I, in utter dismay at what seemed to me a magical process
for getting at all my secret failings.

"Hum, hum! Amative and combative organs sma'--a general want o' healthy
animalism, as my freen' Mr. Deville wad say. And ye want to read books?"

I confessed my desire, without, alas! confessing that my mother had
forbidden it.

"Vara weel; then books I'll lend ye, after I've had a crack wi'
Crossthwaite aboot ye, gin I find his opinion o' ye satisfactory. Come
to me the day after to-morrow. An' mind, here are my rules:--a' damage
done to a book to be paid for, or na mair books lent; ye'll mind to
take no books without leave; specially ye'll mind no to read in bed o'
nights,--industrious folks ought to be sleeping' betimes, an' I'd no be a
party to burning puir weans in their beds; and lastly, ye'll observe not to
read mair than five books at once."

I assured him that I thought such a thing impossible; but he smiled in his
saturnine way, and said--

"We'll see this day fortnight. Now, then, I've observed ye for a month past
over that aristocratic Byron's poems. And I'm willing to teach the young
idea how to shoot--but no to shoot itself; so ye'll just leave alane that
vinegary, soul-destroying trash, and I'll lend ye, gin I hear a gude report
of ye, 'The Paradise Lost,' o' John Milton--a gran' classic model; and
for the doctrine o't, it's just aboot as gude as ye'll hear elsewhere the
noo. So gang your gate, and tell John Crossthwaite, privately, auld Sandy
Mackaye wad like to see him the morn's night."

I went home in wonder and delight. Books! books! books! I should have my
fill of them at last. And when I said my prayers at night, I thanked God
for this unexpected boon; and then remembered that my mother had forbidden
it. That thought checked the thanks, but not the pleasure. Oh, parents! are
there not real sins enough in the world already, without your defiling it,
over and above, by inventing new ones?

CHAPTER III.

SANDY MACKAYE.

That day fortnight came,--and the old Scotchman's words came true. Four
books of his I had already, and I came in to borrow a fifth; whereon he
began with a solemn chuckle:

"Eh, laddie, laddie, I've been treating ye as the grocers do their new
prentices. They first gie the boys three days' free warren among the figs
and the sugar-candy, and they get scunnered wi' sweets after that. Noo,
then, my lad, ye've just been reading four books in three days--and here's
a fifth. Ye'll no open this again."

"Oh!" I cried, piteously enough, "just let me finish what I am reading. I'm
in the middle of such a wonderful account of the Hornitos of Jurullo."

"Hornets or wasps, a swarm o' them ye're like to have at this rate; and
a very bad substitute ye'll find them for the Attic bee. Now tak' tent.
I'm no in the habit of speaking without deliberation, for it saves a man
a great deal of trouble in changing his mind. If ye canna traduce to me
a page o' Virgil by this day three months, ye read no more o' my books.
Desultory reading is the bane o' lads. Ye maun begin with self-restraint
and method, my man, gin ye intend to gie yoursel' a liberal education. So
I'll just mak' you a present of an auld Latin grammar, and ye maun begin
where your betters ha' begun before you."

"But who will teach me Latin?"

"Hoot, man! who'll teach a man anything except himsel'? It's only
gentlefolks and puir aristocrat bodies that go to be spoilt wi' tutors and
pedagogues, cramming and loading them wi' knowledge, as ye'd load a gun, to
shoot it all out again, just as it went down, in a college examination, and
forget all aboot it after."

"Ah!" I sighed, "if I could have gone to college!"

"What for, then? My father was a Hieland farmer, and yet he was a weel
learned man: and 'Sandy, my lad,' he used to say, 'a man kens just as
much as he's taught himsel', and na mair. So get wisdom; and wi' all your
getting, get understanding.' And so I did. And mony's the Greek exercise
I've written in the cowbyres. And mony's the page o' Virgil, too, I've
turned into good Dawric Scotch to ane that's dead and gane, poor hizzie,
sitting under the same plaid, with the sheep feeding round us, up among
the hills, looking out ower the broad blue sea, and the wee haven wi' the
fishing cobles--"

There was a long solemn pause. I cannot tell why, but I loved the man from
that moment; and I thought, too, that he began to love me. Those few words
seemed a proof of confidence, perhaps all the deeper, because accidental
and unconscious.

I took the Virgil which he lent me, with Hamilton's literal translation
between the lines, and an old tattered Latin grammar; I felt myself quite
a learned man--actually the possessor of a Latin book! I regarded as
something almost miraculous the opening of this new field for my ambition.
Not that I was consciously, much less selfishly, ambitious. I had no idea
as yet to be anything but a tailor to the end; to make clothes--perhaps in
a less infernal atmosphere--but still to make clothes and live thereby. I
did not suspect that I possessed powers above the mass. My intense longing
after knowledge had been to me like a girl's first love--a thing to be
concealed from every eye--to be looked at askance even by myself, delicious
as it was, with holy shame and trembling. And thus it was not cowardice
merely, but natural modesty, which put me on a hundred plans of concealing
my studies from my mother, and even from my sister.

I slept in a little lean-to garret at the back of the house, some ten feet
long by six wide. I could just stand upright against the inner wall, while
the roof on the other side ran down to the floor. There was no fireplace in
it, or any means of ventilation. No wonder I coughed all night accordingly,
and woke about two every morning with choking throat and aching head. My
mother often said that the room was "too small for a Christian to sleep in,
but where could she get a better?"

Such was my only study. I could not use it as such, however, at night
without discovery; for my mother carefully looked in every evening, to
see that my candle was out. But when my kind cough woke me, I rose, and
creeping like a mouse about the room--for my mother and sister slept in the
next chamber, and every sound was audible through the narrow partition--I
drew my darling books out from under a board of the floor, one end of which
I had gradually loosened at odd minutes, and with them a rushlight, earned
by running on messages, or by taking bits of work home, and finishing them
for my fellows.

No wonder that with this scanty rest, and this complicated exertion of
hands, eyes, and brain, followed by the long dreary day's work of the shop,
my health began to fail; my eyes grew weaker and weaker; my cough became
more acute; my appetite failed me daily. My mother noticed the change,
and questioned me about it, affectionately enough. But I durst not, alas!
tell the truth. It was not one offence, but the arrears of months of
disobedience which I should have had to confess; and so arose infinite
false excuses, and petty prevarications, which embittered and clogged still
more my already overtasked spirit. About my own ailments--formidable as
I believed they were--I never had a moment's anxiety. The expectation of
early death was as unnatural to me as it is, I suspect, to almost all. I
die? Had I not hopes, plans, desires, infinite? Could I die while they were
unfulfilled? Even now, I do not believe I shall die yet. I will not believe
it--but let that pass.

Yes, let that pass. Perhaps I have lived long enough--longer than many a
grey-headed man.

There is a race of mortals who become
Old in their youth, and die ere middle age.

And might not those days of mine then have counted as months?--those days
when, before starting forth to walk two miles to the shop at six o'clock in
the morning, I sat some three or four hours shivering on my bed, putting
myself into cramped and painful postures, not daring even to cough, lest my
mother should fancy me unwell, and come in to see me, poor dear soul!--my
eyes aching over the page, my feet wrapped up in the bedclothes, to keep
them from the miserable pain of the cold; longing, watching, dawn after
dawn, for the kind summer mornings, when I should need no candlelight.
Look at the picture awhile, ye comfortable folks, who take down from your
shelves what books you like best at the moment, and then lie back, amid
prints and statuettes, to grow wise in an easy-chair, with a blazing fire
and a camphine lamp. The lower classes uneducated! Perhaps you would be so
too, if learning cost you the privation which it costs some of them.

But this concealment could not last. My only wonder is, that I continued to
get whole months of undiscovered study. One morning, about four o'clock, as
might have been expected, my mother heard me stirring, came in, and found
me sitting crosslegged on my bed, stitching away, indeed, with all my
might, but with a Virgil open before me.

She glanced at the book, clutched it with one hand and my arm with the
other, and sternly asked,

"Where did you get this heathen stuff?"

A lie rose to my lips; but I had been so gradually entangled in the loathed
meshes of a system of concealment, and consequent prevarication, that
I felt as if one direct falsehood would ruin for ever my fast-failing
self-respect, and I told her the whole truth. She took the book and left
the room. It was Saturday morning, and I spent two miserable days, for she
never spoke a word to me till the two ministers had made their appearance,
and drank their tea on Sunday evening: then at last she opened:

"And now, Mr. Wigginton, what account have you of this Mr. Mackaye, who has
seduced my unhappy boy from the paths of obedience?"

"I am sorry to say, madam," answered the dark man, with a solemn snuffle,
"that he proves to be a most objectionable and altogether unregenerate
character. He is, as I am informed, neither more nor less than a Chartist,
and an open blasphemer."

"He is not!" I interrupted, angrily. "He has told me more about God, and
given me better advice, than any human being, except my mother."

"Ah! madam, so thinks the unconverted heart, ignorant that the god of the
Deist is not the God of the Bible--a consuming fire to all but His beloved
elect; the god of the Deist, unhappy youth, is a mere self-invented,
all-indulgent phantom--a will-o'-the-wisp, deluding the unwary, as he has
deluded you, into the slough of carnal reason and shameful profligacy."

"Do you mean to call me a profligate?" I retorted fiercely, for my blood
was up, and I felt I was fighting for all which I prized in the world:
"if you do, you lie. Ask my mother when I ever disobeyed her before? I
have never touched a drop of anything stronger than water; I have slaved
over-hours to pay for my own candle, I have!--I have no sins to accuse
myself of, and neither you nor any person know of any. Do you call me a
profligate because I wish to educate myself and rise in life?"

"Ah!" groaned my poor mother to herself, "still unconvinced of sin!"

"The old Adam, my dear madam, you see,--standing, as he always does, on his
own filthy rags of works, while all the imaginations of his heart are only
evil continually. Listen to me, poor sinner--"

"I will not listen to you," I cried, the accumulated disgust of years
bursting out once and for all, "for I hate and despise you, eating my poor
mother here out of house and home. You are one of those who creep into
widows' houses, and for pretence make long prayers. You, sir, I will hear,"
I went on, turning to the dear old man who had sat by shaking his white
locks with a sad and puzzled air, "for I love you."

"My dear sister Locke," he began, "I really think sometimes--that is,
ahem--with your leave, brother--I am almost disposed--but I should wish to
defer to your superior zeal--yet, at the same time, perhaps, the desire for
information, however carnal in itself, may be an instrument in the Lord's
hands--you know what I mean. I always thought him a gracious youth, madam,
didn't you? And perhaps--I only observe it in passing--the Lord's people
among the dissenting connexions are apt to undervalue human learning as a
means--of course, I mean, only as a means. It is not generally known, I
believe, that our reverend Puritan patriarchs, Howe and Baxter, Owen and
many more, were not altogether unacquainted with heathen authors; nay, that
they may have been called absolutely learned men. And some of our leading
ministers are inclined--no doubt they will be led rightly in so important
a matter--to follow the example of the Independents in educating their
young ministers, and turning Satan's weapons of heathen mythology against
himself, as St. Paul is said to have done. My dear boy, what books have you
now got by you of Mr. Mackaye's?"

"Milton's Poems and a Latin Virgil."

"Ah!" groaned the dark man; "will poetry, will Latin save an immortal
soul?"

"I'll tell you what, sir; you say yourself that it depends on God's
absolute counsel whether I am saved or not. So, if I am elect, I shall be
saved whatever I do; and if I am not, I shall be damned whatever I do; and
in the mean time you had better mind your own business, and let me do the
best I can for this life, as the next is all settled for me."

This flippant, but after all not unreasonable speech, seemed to silence the
man; and I took the opportunity of running up-stairs and bringing down my
Milton. The old man was speaking as I re-entered.

"And you know, my dear madam, Mr. Milton was a true converted man, and a
Puritan."

"He was Oliver Cromwell's secretary," I added.

"Did he teach you to disobey your mother?" asked my mother.

I did not answer; and the old man, after turning over a few leaves, as if
he knew the book well, looked up.

"I think, madam, you might let the youth keep these books, if he will
promise, as I am sure he will, to see no more of Mr. Mackaye."

I was ready to burst out crying, but I made up my mind and answered,

"I must see him once again, or he will think me so ungrateful. He is the
best friend that I ever had, except you, mother. Besides, I do not know if
he will lend me any, after this."

My mother looked at the old minister, and then gave a sullen assent.

"Promise me only to see him once--but I cannot trust you. You have deceived
me once, Alton, and you may again!"

"I shall not, I shall not," I answered proudly. "You do not know me"--and I
spoke true.