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

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Beloved sleepless hours, which I spent in picturing that scene to myself,
with all the brilliance of fresh recollection! Beloved hours! how soon
you pass away! Soon--soon my imagination began to fade; the traces of her
features on my mind's eye became confused and dim; and then came over me
the fierce desire to see her again, that I might renew the freshness of
that charming image. Thereon grew up an agony of longing--an agony of
weeks, and months, and years. Where could I find that face again? was my
ruling thought from morning till eve. I knew that it was hopeless to look
for her at the gallery where I had first seen her. My only hope was, that
at some place of public resort at the West End I might catch, if but for a
moment, an inspiring glance of that radiant countenance. I lingered round
the Burton Arch and Hyde Park Gate--but in vain. I peered into every
carriage, every bonnet that passed me in the thoroughfares--in vain. I
stood patiently at the doors of exhibitions and concerts, and playhouses,
to be shoved back by policemen, and insulted by footmen--but in vain. Then
I tried the fashionable churches, one by one; and sat in the free seats,
to listen to prayers and sermons, not a word of which, alas! I cared to
understand, with my eyes searching carefully every pew and gallery, face
by face; always fancying, in self-torturing waywardness, that she might be
just in the part of the gallery which I could not see. Oh! miserable
days of hope deferred, making the heart sick! Miserable gnawing of
disappointment with which I returned at nightfall, to force myself down to
my books! Equally miserable rack of hope on which my nerves were stretched
every morning when I rose, counting the hours till my day's work should be
over, and my mad search begin again! At last "my torment did by length of
time become my element." I returned steadily as ever to the studies which
I had at first neglected, much to Mackaye's wonder and disgust; and a vain
hunt after that face became a part of my daily task, to be got through with
the same dull, sullen effort, with which all I did was now transacted.

Mackaye, I suppose, at first, attributed my absences and idleness to my
having got into bad company. But it was some weeks before he gently enough
told me his suspicions, and they were answered by a burst of tears, and a
passionate denial, which set them at rest forever. But I had not courage to
tell him what was the matter with me. A sacred modesty, as well as a sense
of the impossibility of explaining my emotions, held me back. I had a
half-dread, too, to confess the whole truth, of his ridiculing a fancy,
to say the least, so utterly impracticable; and my only confidant was
a picture in the National Gallery, in one of the faces of which I had
discovered some likeness to my Venus; and there I used to go and stand
at spare half hours, and feel the happier for staring and staring, and
whispering to the dead canvas the extravagances of my idolatry.

But soon the bitter draught of disappointment began to breed harsher
thoughts in me. Those fine gentlemen who rode past me in the park, who
rolled by in carriages, sitting face to face with ladies, as richly
dressed, if not as beautiful, as she was--they could see her when they
liked--why not I? What right had their eyes to a feast denied to mine?
They, too, who did not appreciate, adore that beauty as I did--for who
could worship her like me? At least they had not suffered for her as I
had done; they had not stood in rain and frost, fatigue, and blank
despair--watching--watching--month after month; and I was making coats for
them! The very garment I was stitching at, might, in a day's time, be in
her presence--touching her dress; and its wearer bowing, and smiling, and
whispering--he had not bought that bliss by watching in the ram. It made me
mad to think of it.

I will say no more about it. That is a period of my life on which I cannot
even now look back without a shudder.

At last, after perhaps a year or more, I summoned up courage to tell my
story to Sandy Mackaye, and burst out with complaints more pardonable,
perhaps, than reasonable.

"Why have I not as good a right to speak to her, to move in the same
society in which she moves, as any of the fops of the day? Is it because
these aristocrats are more intellectual than I? I should not fear to
measure brains against most of them now; and give me the opportunities
which they have, and I would die if I did not outstrip them. Why have I not
those opportunities? Is that fault of others to be visited on me? Is it
because they are more refined than I? What right have they, if this said
refinement be so necessary a qualification, a difference so deep--that,
without it, there is to be an everlasting gulf between man and man--what
right have they to refuse to let me share in it, to give me the opportunity
of acquiring it?"

"Wad ye ha' them set up a dancing academy for working men, wi' 'manners
tocht here to the lower classes'? They'll no break up their ain monopoly;
trust them for it! Na: if ye want to get amang them, I'll tell ye the
way o't. Write a book o' poems, and ca' it 'A Voice fra' the Goose, by a
working Tailor'--and then--why, after a dizen years or so of starving and
scribbling for your bread, ye'll ha' a chance o' finding yoursel' a lion,
and a flunkey, and a licker o' trenchers--ane that jokes for his dinner,
and sells his soul for a fine leddy's smile--till ye presume to think
they're in earnest, and fancy yoursel' a man o' the same blude as they, and
fa' in love wi' one o' them--and then they'll teach you your level, and
send ye off to gauge whusky like Burns, or leave ye' to die in a ditch as
they did wi' puir Thom."

"Let me die, anywhere or anyhow, if I can but be near her--see her--"

"Married to anither body?--and nursing anither body's bairns. Ah boy,
boy--do ye think that was what ye were made for; to please yersel wi' a
woman's smiles, or e'en a woman's kisses--or to please yersel at all? How
do ye expect ever to be happy, or strong, or a man at a', as long as ye go
on looking to enjoy yersel--yersel? I ha' tried it. Mony was the year I
looked for nought but my ain pleasure, and got it too, when it was a'

"Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye,
There he sits singing the lang simmer's day;
Lassies gae to him,
And kiss him, and woo him--
Na bird is sa merry as Sandy Mackaye.

"An' muckle good cam' o't. Ye may fancy I'm talking like a sour,
disappointed auld carle. But I tell ye nay. I've got that's worth living
for, though I am downhearted at times, and fancy a's wrong, and there's na
hope for us on earth, we be a' sic liars--a' liars, I think: 'a universal
liars--rock substrawtum,' as Mr. Carlyle says. I'm a great liar often
mysel, especially when I'm praying. Do ye think I'd live on here in this
meeserable crankit auld bane-barrel o' a body, if it was not for The Cause,
and for the puir young fellows that come in to me whiles to get some
book-learning about the gran' auld Roman times, when folks didna care for
themselves, but for the nation, and a man counted wife and bairns and money
as dross and dung, in comparison wi' the great Roman city, that was the
mither o' them a', and wad last on, free and glorious, after they and their
bairns were a' dead thegither? Hoot, man! If I had na The Cause to care for
and to work for, whether I ever see it triumphant on earth or no--I'd just
tak' the cauld-water-cure off Waterloo-bridge, and mak' mysel a case for
the Humane Society."

"And what is The Cause?" I asked.

"Wud I tell ye? We want no ready-made freens o' The Cause. I dinna hauld
wi' thae French indoctrinating pedants, that took to stick free opinions
into a man as ye'd stick pins into a pincushion, to fa' out again the first
shake. Na--The Cause must find a man, and tak' hauld o' him, willy-nilly,
and grow up in him like an inspiration, till he can see nocht but in the
light o't. Puir bairn!" he went on, looking with a half-sad, half-comic
face at me--"puir bairn--like a young bear, wi' a' your sorrows before ye!
This time seven years ye'll ha' no need to come speering and questioning
what The Cause is, and the Gran' Cause, and the Only Cause worth working
for on the earth o' God. And noo gang your gate, and mak' fine feathers for
foul birds. I'm gaun whar ye'll be ganging too, before lang."

As I went sadly out of the shop, he called me back.

"Stay a wee, bairn; there's the Roman History for ye. There ye'll read what
The Cause is, and how they that seek their ain are no worthy thereof."

I took the book, and found in the legends of Brutus, and Cocles, and
Scævola, and the retreat to the Mons Sacer, and the Gladiator's war, what
The Cause was, and forgot awhile in those tales of antique heroism and
patriotic self-sacrifice my own selfish longings and sorrows.

* * * * *

But, after all, the very advice which was meant to cure me of those selfish
longings, only tended, by diverting me from my living outward idol, to turn
my thoughts more than ever inward, and tempt them to feed on their
own substance. I passed whole days on the workroom floor in brooding
silence--my mind peopled with an incoherent rabble of phantasms patched
up from every object of which I had ever read. I could not control my
daydreams; they swept me away with them over sea and land, and into the
bowels of the earth. My soul escaped on every side from my civilized
dungeon of brick and mortar, into the great free world from which my body
was debarred. Now I was the corsair in the pride of freedom on the dark
blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primæval
monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed
the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now
I was a hunter in tropic forests--I heard the parrots scream, and saw the
humming birds flit on from gorgeous flower to flower. Gradually I took
a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their
details into words with all the accuracy and care for which my small
knowledge gave me materials. And as the self-indulgent habit grew on me,
I began to live two lives--one mechanical and outward, one inward and
imaginative. The thread passed through my fingers without my knowing it;
I did my work as a machine might do it. The dingy stifling room, the wan
faces of my companions, the scanty meals which I snatched, I saw dimly, as
in a dream. The tropics, and Greece, the imaginary battles which I fought,
the phantoms into whose mouths I put my thoughts, were real and true to
me. They met me when I woke--they floated along beside me as I walked to
work--they acted their fantastic dramas before me through the sleepless
hours of night. Gradually certain faces among them became familiar--certain
personages grew into coherence, as embodiments of those few types of
character which had struck me the most, and played an analogous part in
every fresh fantasia. Sandy Mackaye's face figured incongruously enough as
Leonidas, Brutus, a Pilgrim Father; and gradually, in spite of myself, and
the fear with which I looked on the recurrence of that dream, Lillian's
figure re-entered my fairy-land. I saved her from a hundred dangers; I
followed her through dragon-guarded caverns and the corridors of magic
castles; I walked by her side through the forests of the Amazon....

And now I began to crave for some means of expressing these fancies
to myself. While they were mere thoughts, parts of me, they were
unsatisfactory, however delicious. I longed to put them outside me, that I
might look at them and talk to them as permanent independent things. First
I tried to sketch them on the whitewashed walls of my garret, on scraps
of paper begged from Mackaye, or picked up in the workroom. But from my
ignorance of any rules of drawing, they were utterly devoid of beauty, and
only excited my disgust. Besides, I had thoughts as well as objects to
express--thoughts strange, sad, wild, about my own feelings, my own
destiny, and drawing could not speak them for me.

Then I turned instinctively to poetry: with its rules I was getting rapidly
conversant. The mere desire of imitation urged me on, and when I tried, the
grace of rhyme and metre covered a thousand defects. I tell my story, not
as I saw it then, but as I see it now. A long and lonely voyage, with its
monotonous days and sleepless nights--its sickness and heart-loneliness,
has given me opportunities for analysing my past history which were
impossible then, amid the ceaseless in-rush of new images, the ceaseless
ferment of their re-combination, in which my life was passed from sixteen
to twenty-five. The poet, I suppose, must be a seer as long as he is a
worker, and a seer only. He has no time to philosophize--to "think about
thinking," as Goethe, I have somewhere read, says that he never could do.
It is too often only in sickness and prostration and sheer despair, that
the fierce veracity and swift digestion of his soul can cease, and give him
time to know himself and God's dealings with him; and for that reason it is
good for him, too, to have been afflicted.

I do not write all this to boast of it; I am ready to bear sneers at my
romance--my day-dreams--my unpractical habits of mind, for I know that I
deserve them. But such was the appointed growth of my uneducated mind; no
more unhealthy a growth, if I am to believe books, than that of many a
carefully trained one. Highborn geniuses, they tell me, have their idle
visions as well as we working-men; and Oxford has seen of late years as
wild Icarias conceived as ever were fathered by a red Republic. For,
indeed, we have the same flesh and blood, the same God to teach us, the
same devil to mislead us, whether we choose to believe it or not. But there
were excuses for me. We Londoners are not accustomed from our youth to the
poems of a great democratic genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious
Burns. We have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art
as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unrepresented--the
starving Scotch day-labourer, breaking stones upon the parish roads, to
write at the age of seventeen such words as these:--

Hail, hallow'd evening! sacred hour to me!
Thy clouds of grey, thy vocal melody,
Thy dreamy silence oft to me have brought
A sweet exchange from toil to peaceful thought.
Ye purple heavens! how often has my eye,
Wearied with its long gaze on drudgery,
Look'd up and found refreshment in the hues
That gild thy vest with colouring profuse!

O, evening grey! how oft have I admired
Thy airy tapestry, whose radiance fired
The glowing minstrels of the olden time,
Until their very souls flow'd forth in rhyme.
And I have listened, till my spirit grew
Familiar with their deathless strains, and drew
From the same source some portion of the glow
Which fill'd their spirits, when from earth below
They scann'd thy golden imagery. And I
Have consecrated _thee_, bright evening sky
My fount of inspiration; and I fling
My spirit on thy clouds--an offering
To the great Deity of dying day.
Who hath transfused o'er thee his purple ray.
* * * * *

After all, our dreams do little harm to the rich. Those who consider
Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, should bless and encourage them,
for the very reason for which we working men ought to dread them; for,
quickened into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they
help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among us. Here and
there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in
cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic and historic learning in a
"Purgatory of Suicides"; or a Prince becomes the poet of the poor, no
less for having fed his boyish fancy with "The Arabian Nights" and "The
Pilgrim's Progress." But, with the most of us, sedentary and
monotonous occupations, as has long been known, create of themselves a
morbidly-meditative and fantastic turn of mind. And what else, in
Heaven's name, ye fine gentlemen--what else can a working man do with
his imagination, but dream? What else will you let him do with it, oh ye
education-pedants, who fancy that you can teach the masses as you would
drill soldiers, every soul alike, though you will not bestir yourselves
to do even that? Are there no differences of rank--God's rank, not
man's--among us? You have discovered, since your schoolboy days, the
fallacy of the old nomenclature which civilly classed us altogether as "the
snobs," "the blackguards"; which even--so strong is habit--tempted
Burke himself to talk of us as "the swinish multitude." You are finding
yourselves wrong there. A few more years' experience not in mis-educating
the poor, but in watching the poor really educate themselves, may teach you
that we are not all by nature dolts and idiots; that there are differences
of brain among us, just as great as there is between you; and that there
are those among us whose education ought not to end, and will not end, with
the putting off of the parish cap and breeches; whom it is cruelty, as well
as folly, to toss back into the hell of mere manual drudgery, as soon as
you have--if, indeed, you have been even so bountiful as that--excited in
them a new thirst of the intellect and imagination. If you provide that
craving with no wholesome food, you at least have no right to blame it if
it shall gorge itself with poison.

Dare for once to do a strange thing, and let yourself be laughed at; go to
a workman's meeting--a Chartist meeting, if you will; and look honestly
at the faces and brows of those so-called incendiaries, whom your venal
caricaturists have taught you to believe a mixture of cur-dog and
baboon--we, for our part, shall not be ashamed to show foreheads against
your laughing House of Commons--and then say, what employment can those men
find in the soulless routine of mechanical labour for the mass of brain
which they almost universally possess? They must either dream or agitate;
perhaps they are now learning how to do both to some purpose.

But I have found, by sad experience, that there is little use in
declamation. I had much better simply tell my story, and leave my readers
to judge of the facts, if, indeed, they will be so far courteous as to
believe them.

CHAPTER VIII.

LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE.

So I made my first attempt at poetry--need I say that my subject was the
beautiful Lillian? And need I say, too, that I was as utterly disgusted
at my attempt to express her in words, as I had been at my trial with the
pencil? It chanced also, that after hammering out half a dozen verses, I
met with Mr. Tennyson's poems; and the unequalled sketches of women that I
found there, while they had, with the rest of the book, a new and
abiding influence on my mind, were quite enough to show me my own fatal
incompetency in that line. I threw my verses away, never to resume them.
Perhaps I proved thereby the depth of my affection. Our mightiest feelings,
are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and
the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal
love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of
the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person.

But to escape from my own thoughts, I could not help writing something; and
to escape from my own private sorrows, writing on some matter with which
I had no personal concern. And so, after much casting about for subjects,
Childe Harold and the old missionary records contrived to celebrate
a spiritual wedding in my brain, of which anomalous marriage came a
proportionately anomalous offspring.

My hero was not to be a pirate, but a pious sea-rover, who, with a crew of
saints, or at least uncommonly fine fellows, who could be very manly
and jolly, and yet all be good Christians, of a somewhat vague and
latitudinarian cast of doctrine (for my own was becoming rapidly so),
set forth under the red-cross flag to colonize and convert one of my old
paradises, a South Sea Island.

I forget most of the lines--they were probably great trash, but I hugged
them to my bosom as a young mother does her first child.

'Twas sunset in the lone Pacific world,
The rich gleams fading in the western sky;
Within the still Lagoon the sails were furled,
The red-cross flag alone was flaunting high.
Before them was the low and palm-fringed shore,
Behind, the outer ocean's baffled roar.

After which valiant plunge _in medias res_, came a great lump of deception,
after the manner of youths--of the island, and the whitehouses, and the
banana groves, and above all, the single volcano towering over the whole,
which

Shaking a sinful isle with thundering shocks,
Reproved the worshippers of stones and stocks.

Then how a line of foam appears on the Lagoon, which is supposed at
first to be a shoal of fish, but turns out to be a troop of naked island
beauties, swimming out to the ship. The decent missionaries were certainly
guiltless of putting that into my head, whether they ever saw it or not--a
great many things happening in the South Seas of which they find it
convenient to say nothing. I think I picked it up from Wallis, or Cook, or
some other plain spoken voyager.

The crew gaze in pardonable admiration, but the hero, in a long speech,
reproves them for their lightmindedness, reminds them of their sacred
mission, and informs them that,

The soldiers of the cross should turn their eyes
From carnal lusts and heathen vanities;

beyond which indisputable assertion I never got; for this being about
the fiftieth stanza, I stopped to take breath a little; and reading and
re-reading, patching and touching continually, grew so accustomed to my
bantling's face, that, like a mother, I could not tell whether it was
handsome or hideous, sense or nonsense. I have since found out that the
true plan, for myself at least, is to write off as much as possible at a
time, and then lay it by and forget it for weeks--if I can, for months.
After that, on returning to it, the mind regards it as something altogether
strange and new, and can, or rather ought to, judge of it as it would of
the work of another pen.

But really, between conceit and disgust, fancying myself one day a great
new poet, and the next a mere twaddler, I got so puzzled and anxious, that
I determined to pluck up courage, go to Mackaye, and ask him to solve the
problem for me.

"Hech, sirs, poetry! I've been expecting it. I suppose it's the appointed
gate o' a workman's intellectual life--that same lust o' versification.
Aweel, aweel,--let's hear."

Blushing and trembling, I read my verses aloud in as resonant and
magniloquent a voice as I could command. I thought Mackaye's upper lip
would never stop lengthening, or his lower lip protruding. He chuckled
intensely at the unfortunate rhyme between "shocks" and "stocks." Indeed,
it kept him in chuckling matter for a whole month afterwards; but when I
had got to the shoal of naked girls, he could bear no more, and burst out--

"What the deevil! is there no harlotry and idolatry here in England, that
ye maun gang speering after it in the Cannibal Islands? Are ye gaun to be
like they puir aristocrat bodies, that wad suner hear an Italian dog howl,
than an English nightingale sing, and winna harken to Mr. John Thomas
till he calls himself Giovanni Thomasino; or do ye tak yourself for a
singing-bird, to go all your days tweedle-dumdeeing out into the lift,
just for the lust o' hearing your ain clan clatter? Will ye be a man or a
lintic? Coral Islands? Pacific? What do ye ken about Pacifics? Are ye a
Cockney or a Cannibal Islander? Dinna stand there, ye gowk, as fusionless
as a docken, but tell me that! Whaur do ye live?"

"What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye?" asked I, with a doleful and disappointed
visage.

"Mean--why, if God had meant ye to write aboot Pacifics, He'd ha' put ye
there--and because He means ye to write aboot London town, He's put ye
there--and gien ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't; and I'll gie ye
anither. Come along wi' me."

And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time to put on my hat,
marched me out into the streets, and away through Clare Market to St.
Giles's.

It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and
greengrocers' shops the gas lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly,
over haggard groups of slip-shod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of
stale meat and frost-bitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and
bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy
pavement, sending up odours as foul as the language of sellers and buyers.
Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and
reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage
of putrefaction. Foul vapours rose from cowsheds and slaughter houses, and
the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth
out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court, and from the court
up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the
streets--those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and
sin,--the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the
dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening sickening sight it was. Go,
scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the library
which God has given thee--one often fears in vain--and see what science
says this London might be!