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

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"Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, "sing awa; get yoursel
wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like the rest o' the poets,
and gang to hell for it."

"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"

"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than ony
fiends' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the
pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless
peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning
it--and not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and
self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there--"

He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable alley--

"Look! there's not a soul down that yard but's either beggar, drunkard,
thief, or warse. Write anent that! Say how you saw the mouth o' hell, and
the twa pillars thereof at the entry--the pawnbroker's shop o' one side,
and the gin palace at the other--twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and
women, and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters, how
they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and anither. Write anent
that."

"What jaws, Mr. Mackaye?"

"They faulding-doors o' the gin shop, goose. Are na they a mair damnable
man-devouring idol than ony red-hot statue o' Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog,
wherein thae auld Britons burnt their prisoners? Look at thae bare-footed
bare-backed hizzies, with their arms roun' the men's necks, and their
mouths full o' vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring
the gin down the babbie's throat! Look at that rough o' a boy gaun out
o' the pawn shop, where he's been pledging the handkerchief he stole the
morning, into the gin shop, to buy beer poisoned wi' grains o'
paradise, and cocculus indicus, and saut, and a' damnable, maddening,
thirst-breeding, lust-breeding drugs! Look at that girl that went in wi'
a shawl on her back and cam' out wi'out ane! Drunkards frae the
breast!--harlots frae the cradle! damned before they're born! John Calvin
had an inkling o' the truth there, I'm a'most driven to think, wi' his
reprobation deevil's doctrines!"

"Well--but--Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these poor creatures."

"Then ye ought. What do ye ken anent the Pacific? Which is maist to your
business?--thae bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' the other side
o' the warld, or these--these thousands o' bare-backed hizzies that play
the harlot o' your ain side--made out o' your ain flesh and blude? You a
poet! True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If ye'll
be a poet at a', ye maun be a cockney poet; and while the cockneys be what
they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of old, o' lamentation and mourning
and woe, for the sins o' your people. Gin you want to learn the spirit o' a
people's poet, down wi' your Bible and read thae auld Hebrew prophets; gin
ye wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morning till night; and gin
ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and keep your eyes open,
and ye'll no miss it."

"But all this is so--so unpoetical."

"Hech! Is there no the heeven above them there, and the hell beneath them?
and God frowning, and the deevil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra
idea of the classic tragedy defined to be, man conquered by circumstance?
Canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man
conquering circumstance?--and I'll show you that, too--in mony a garret
where no eye but the gude God's enters, to see the patience, and the
fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger than death, that's
shining in thae dark places o' the earth. Come wi' me, and see."

We went on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable
house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and
rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there
in their glory. Now every room of it held its family, or its group of
families--a phalanstery of all the fiends;--its grand staircase, with the
carved balustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, converted into a
common sewer for all its inmates. Up stair after stair we went, while wails
of children, and curses of men, steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of
air from every doorway, till, at the topmost story, we knocked at a garret
door. We entered. Bare it was of furniture, comfortless, and freezing cold;
but, with the exception of the plaster dropping from the roof, and the
broken windows, patched with rags and paper, there was a scrupulous
neatness about the whole, which contrasted strangely with the filth and
slovenliness outside. There was no bed in the room--no table. On a broken
chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying that she was
warming her hands over embers which had long been cold, shaking her head,
and muttering to herself, with palsied lips, about the guardians and the
workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox
marked, hollow eyed, emaciated, her only bed clothes the skirt of a large
handsome new riding-habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were
stitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old
woman took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up,
and, with a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips,
and whispered, "Ellen's asleep."

"I'm not asleep, dears," answered a faint, unearthly voice; "I was only
praying. Is that Mr. Mackaye?"

"Ay, my lassies; but ha' ye gotten na fire the nicht?"

"No," said one of them, bitterly, "we've earned no fire to-night, by fair
trade or foul either."

The sick girl tried to raise herself up and speak, but was stopped by a
frightful fit of coughing and expectoration, as painful, apparently, to the
sufferer as it was, I confess, disgusting even to me.

I saw Mackaye slip something into the hand of one of the girls, and
whisper, "A half-hundred of coals;" to which she replied, with an eager
look of gratitude that I never can forget, and hurried out. Then the
sufferer, as if taking advantage of her absence, began to speak quickly and
eagerly.

"Oh, Mr. Mackaye--dear, kind Mr. Mackaye--do speak to her; and do speak to
poor Lizzy here! I'm not afraid to say it before her, because she's more
gentle like, and hasn't learnt to say bad words yet--but do speak to them,
and tell them not to go the bad Way, like all the rest. Tell them it'll
never prosper. I know it is want that drives them to it, as it drives all
of us--but tell them it's best to starve and die honest girls, than to go
about with the shame and the curse of God on their hearts, for the sake of
keeping this poor, miserable, vile body together a few short years more in
this world o' sorrow. Do tell them, Mr. Mackaye."

"I'm thinking," said he, with the tears running down his old withered face,
"ye'll mak a better preacher at that text than I shall, Ellen."

"Oh, no, no; who am I, to speak to them?--it's no merit o' mine, Mr.
Mackaye, that the Lord's kept me pure through it all. I should have been
just as bad as any of them, if the Lord had not kept me out of temptation
in His great mercy, by making me the poor, ill-favoured creature I am. From
that time I was burnt when I was a child, and had the small-pox afterwards,
oh! how sinful I was, and repined and rebelled against the Lord! And now I
see it was all His blessed mercy to keep me out of evil, pure and unspotted
for my dear Jesus, when He comes to take me to Himself. I saw Him last
night, Mr. Mackaye, as plain as I see you now, ail in a flame of beautiful
white fire, smiling at me so sweetly; and He showed me the wounds in His
hands and His feet, and He said, 'Ellen, my own child, those that suffer
with me here, they shall be glorified with me hereafter, for I'm coming
very soon to take you home.'"

Sandy shook his head at all this with a strange expression of face, as if
he sympathized and yet disagreed, respected and yet smiled at the shape
which her religious ideas had assumed; and I remarked in the meantime that
the poor girl's neck and arm were all scarred and distorted, apparently
from the effects of a burn.

"Ah," said Sandy, at length, "I tauld ye ye were the better preacher of the
two; ye've mair comfort to gie Sandy than he has to gie the like o' ye. But
how is the wound in your back the day?"

Oh, it was wonderfully better! the doctor had come and given her such
blessed ease with a great thick leather he had put under it, and then she
did not feel the boards through so much. "But oh, Mr. Mackaye, I'm so
afraid it will make me live longer to keep me away from my dear Saviour.
And there's one thing, too, that's breaking my heart, and makes me long to
die this very minute, even if I didn't go to Heaven at all, Mr. Mackaye."
(And she burst out crying, and between her sobs it came out, as well as
I could gather, that her notion was, that her illness was the cause of
keeping the girls in "_the bad ivay_," as she called it.) "For Lizzy here,
I did hope that she had repented of it after all my talking to her; but
since I've been so bad, and the girls have had to keep me most o' the time,
she's gone out of nights just as bad as ever."

Lizzy had hid her face in her hands the greater part of this speech. Now
she looked up passionately, almost fiercely--

"Repent--I have repented--I repent of it every hour--I hate myself, and
hate all the world because of it; but I must--I must; I cannot see her
starve, and I cannot starve myself. When she first fell sick she kept on as
long as she could, doing what she could, and then between us we only earned
three shillings a week, and there was ever so much to take off for fire,
and twopence for thread, and fivepence for candles; and then we were always
getting fined, because they never gave us out the work till too late on
purpose, and then they lowered prices again; and now Ellen can't work at
all, and there's four of us with the old lady, to keep off two's work that
couldn't keep themselves alone."

"Doesn't the parish allow the old lady anything?" I ventured to ask.

"They used to allow half-a-crown for a bit; and the doctor ordered Ellen
things from the parish, but it isn't half of 'em she ever got; and when the
meat came, it was half times not fit to eat, and when it was her stomach
turned against it. If she was a lady she'd be cockered up with all sorts of
soups and jellies, and nice things, just the minute she fancied 'em, and
lie on a water bed instead of the bare floor--and so she ought; but where's
the parish'll do that? And the hospital wouldn't take her in because she
was incurable; and, besides, the old'un wouldn't let her go--nor into the
union neither. When she's in a good-humour like, she'll sit by her by the
hour, holding her hand and kissing of it, and nursing of it, for all the
world like a doll. But she won't hear of the workhouse; so now, these last
three weeks, they takes off all her pay, because they says she must go into
the house, and not kill her daughter by keeping her out--as if they warn't
a killing her themselves."

"No workhouse--no workhouse!" said the old woman, turning round suddenly,
in a clear, lofty voice. "No workhouse, sir, for an officer's daughter!"

And she relapsed into her stupor.

At that moment the other girl entered with the coals--but without staying
to light the fire, ran up to Ellen with some trumpery dainty she had
bought, and tried to persuade her to eat it.

"We have been telling Mr. Mackaye everything," said poor Lizzy.

"A pleasant story, isn't it? Oh! if that fine lady, as we're making that
riding-habit for, would just spare only half the money that goes to
dressing her up to ride in the park, to send us out to the colonies,
wouldn't I be an honest girl there?--maybe an honest man's wife! Oh, my
God, wouldn't I slave my fingers to the bone to work for him! Wouldn't I
mend my life then! I couldn't help it--it would be like getting into heaven
out of hell. But now--we must--we must, I tell you. I shall go mad soon, I
think, or take to drink. When I passed the gin-shop down there just now,
I had to run like mad for fear I should go in; and if I once took to
that--Now then, to work again. Make up the fire, Mrs. * * * *, please do."

And she sat down, and began stitching frantically at the riding-habit,
from which the other girl had hardly lifted her hands or eyes for a moment
during our visit.

We made a motion, as if to go.

"God bless you," said Ellen; "come again soon, dear Mr. Mackaye."

"Good-bye," said the elder girl; "and good-night to you. Night and day's
all the same here--we must have this home by seven o'clock to-morrow
morning. My lady's going to ride early, they say, whoever she may be, and
we must just sit up all night. It's often we haven't had our clothes off
for a week together, from four in the morning till two the next morning
sometimes--stitch, stitch, stitch. Somebody's wrote a song about that--I'll
learn to sing it--it'll sound fitting-like up here."

"Better sing hymns," said Ellen.

"Hymns for * * * * * *?" answered the other, and then burst out into that
peculiar, wild, ringing, fiendish laugh--has my reader never heard it?

I pulled out the two or three shillings which I possessed, and tried to
make the girls take them, for the sake of poor Ellen.

"No; you're a working man, and we won't feed on you--you'll want it some
day--all the trade's going the same way as we, as fast as ever it can!"

Sandy and I went down the stairs.

"Poetic element? Yon lassie, rejoicing in her disfigurement and not her
beauty--like the nuns of Peterborough in auld time--is there na poetry
there? That puir lassie, dying on the bare boards, and seeing her Saviour
in her dreams, is there na poetry there, callant? That auld body owre the
fire, wi' her 'an officer's dochter,' is there na poetry there? That
ither, prostituting hersel to buy food for her freen--is there na poetry
there?--tragedy--

"With hues as when some mighty painter dips
His pen in dyes of earthquake and eclipse.

"Ay, Shelley's gran'; always gran'; but Fact is grander--God and Satan are
grander. All around ye, in every gin-shop and costermonger's cellar, are
God and Satan at death grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or
Paradise Regained; and will ye think it beneath ye to be the 'People's
Poet?'"

CHAPTER IX.

POETRY AND POETS.

In the history of individuals, as well as in that of nations, there is
often a period of sudden blossoming--a short luxuriant summer, not without
its tornadoes and thunder-glooms, in which all the buried seeds of past
observation leap forth together into life, and form, and beauty. And such
with me were the two years that followed. I thought--I talked poetry
to myself all day long. I wrote nightly on my return from work. I am
astonished, on looking back, at the variety and quantity of my productions
during that short time. My subjects were intentionally and professedly
cockney ones. I had taken Mackaye at his word. I had made up my mind, that
if I had any poetic powers I must do my duty therewith in that station of
life to which it had pleased God to call me, and look at everything simply
and faithfully as a London artizan. To this, I suppose, is to be attributed
the little geniality and originality for which the public have kindly
praised my verses--a geniality which sprung, not from the atmosphere whence
I drew, but from the honesty and single-mindedness with which, I hope, I
laboured. Not from the atmosphere, indeed,--that was ungenial enough; crime
and poverty, all-devouring competition, and hopeless struggles against
Mammon and Moloch, amid the roar of wheels, the ceaseless stream of pale,
hard faces, intent on gain, or brooding over woe; amid endless prison walls
of brick, beneath a lurid, crushing sky of smoke and mist. It was a dark,
noisy, thunderous element that London life; a troubled sea that cannot
rest, casting up mire and dirt; resonant of the clanking of chains, the
grinding of remorseless machinery, the wail of lost spirits from the pit.
And it did its work upon me; it gave a gloomy colouring, a glare as of some
Dantean "Inferno," to all my utterances. It did not excite me or make me
fierce--I was too much inured to it--but it crushed and saddened me; it
deepened in me that peculiar melancholy of intellectual youth, which
Mr. Carlyle has christened for ever by one of his immortal
nicknames--"Werterism"; I battened on my own melancholy. I believed, I
loved to believe, that every face I passed bore the traces of discontent as
deep as was my own--and was I so far wrong? Was I so far wrong either in
the gloomy tone of my own poetry? Should not a London poet's work just now
be to cry, like the Jew of old, about the walls of Jerusalem, "Woe, woe
to this city!" Is this a time to listen to the voices of singing men and
singing women? or to cry, "Oh! that my head were a fountain of tears, that
I might weep for the sins of my people"? Is it not noteworthy, also, that
it is in this vein that the London poets have always been greatest? Which
of poor Hood's lyrics have an equal chance of immortality with "The Song of
the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs," rising, as they do, right out of
the depths of that Inferno, sublime from their very simplicity? Which
of Charles Mackay's lyrics can compare for a moment with the Eschylean
grandeur, the terrible rhythmic lilt of his "Cholera Chant"--

Dense on the stream the vapours lay,
Thick as wool on the cold highway;
Spungy and dim each lonely lamp
Shone o'er the streets so dull and damp;
The moonbeams could not pierce the cloud
That swathed the city like a shroud;
There stood three shapes on the bridge alone,
Three figures by the coping-stone;
Gaunt and tall and undefined,
Spectres built of mist and wind.
* * * * *
I see his footmarks east and west--
I hear his tread in the silence fall--
He shall not sleep, he shall not rest--
He comes to aid us one and all.
Were men as wise as men might be,
They would not work for you, for me,
For him that cometh over the sea;
But they will not hear the warning voice:
The Cholera comes,--Rejoice! rejoice!
He shall be lord of the swarming town!
And mow them down, and mow them down!
* * * * *

Not that I neglected, on the other hand, every means of extending the
wanderings of my spirit into sunnier and more verdant pathways. If I had to
tell the gay ones above of the gloom around me, I had also to go forth into
the sunshine, to bring home if it were but a wild-flower garland to those
that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. That was all that I could
offer them. The reader shall judge, when he has read this book throughout,
whether I did not at last find for them something better than even all the
beauties of nature.

But it was on canvas, and not among realities, that I had to choose my
garlands; and therefore the picture galleries became more than ever my
favourite--haunt, I was going to say; but, alas! it was not six times a
year that I got access to them. Still, when once every May I found myself,
by dint of a hard saved shilling, actually within the walls of that to me
enchanted palace, the Royal Academy Exhibition--Oh, ye rich! who gaze round
you at will upon your prints and pictures, if hunger is, as they say,
a better sauce than any Ude invents, and fasting itself may become the
handmaid of luxury, you should spend, as I did perforce, weeks and months
shut out from every glimpse of Nature, if you would taste her beauties,
even on canvas, with perfect relish and childish self-abandonment. How
I loved and blessed those painters! how I thanked Creswick for every
transparent shade-chequered pool; Fielding, for every rain-clad down;
Cooper, for every knot of quiet cattle beneath the cool grey willows;
Stanfield, for every snowy peak, and sheet of foam-fringed sapphire--each
and every one of them a leaf out of the magic book which else was ever
closed to me. Again, I say, how I loved and blest those painters! On the
other hand, I was not neglecting to read as well as to write poetry; and,
to speak first of the highest, I know no book, always excepting Milton,
which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his
history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas
Carlyle's "French Revolution." Of the general effect which his works had on
me, I shall say nothing: it was the same as they have had, thank God, on
thousands of my class and of every other. But that book above all first
recalled me to the overwhelming and yet ennobling knowledge that there
was such a thing as Duty; first taught me to see in history not the mere
farce-tragedy of man's crimes and follies, but the dealings of a righteous
Ruler of the universe, whose ways are in the great deep, and whom the sins
and errors, as well as the virtues and discoveries of man, must obey and
justify.

Then, in a happy day, I fell on Alfred Tennyson's poetry, and found there,
astonished and delighted, the embodiment of thoughts about the earth around
me which I had concealed, because I fancied them peculiar to myself. Why is
it that the latest poet has generally the greatest influence over the minds
of the young? Surely not for the mere charm of novelty? The reason is that
he, living amid the same hopes, the same temptations, the same sphere of
observation as they, gives utterance and outward form to the very questions
which, vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts. And what
endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards
discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems. True, all
great poets are by their office democrats; seers of man only as man;
singers of the joys, the sorrows, the aspirations common to all humanity;
but in Alfred Tennyson there is an element especially democratic, truly
levelling; not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and
care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of
nature. Brought up, as I understand, in a part of England which possesses
not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call
sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the
sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of
true sublimity,--a minute infinite,--an ever fertile garden of poetic
images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as
truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions
of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of
the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations.
I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime, in those
flowery dykes of Battersea Fields; in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone
tidal shore; and here was a man who had put them into words for me! This
is what I call democratic art--the revelation of the poetry which lies in
common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction: in
Landseer and his dogs--in Fielding and his downs, with a host of noble
fellow-artists--and in all authors who have really seized the nation's
mind, from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great
tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many,
not that which is exclusive to the few--towards the likeness of Him who
causes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust, and His sun to shine on
the evil and the good; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and
all the beasts of the field are in His sight.

Well--I must return to my story. And here some one may ask me, "But did
you not find this true spiritual democracy, this universal knowledge and
sympathy, in Shakspeare above all other poets?" It may be my shame to have
to confess it; but though I find it now, I did not then. I do not think,
however, my case is singular: from what I can ascertain, there is, even
with regularly educated minds, a period of life at which that great writer
is not appreciated, just on account of his very greatness; on account of
the deep and large experience which the true understanding of his plays
requires--experience of man, of history, of art, and above all of those
sorrows whereby, as Hezekiah says, and as I have learnt almost too
well--"whereby men live, and in all which, is the life of the spirit." At
seventeen, indeed, I had devoured Shakspeare, though merely for the food to
my fancy which his plots and incidents supplied, for the gorgeous colouring
of his scenery: but at the period of which I am now writing, I had
exhausted that source of mere pleasure; I was craving for more explicit and
dogmatic teaching than any which he seemed to supply; and for three years,
strange as it may appear, I hardly ever looked into his pages. Under what
circumstances I afterwards recurred to his exhaustless treasures, my
readers shall in due time be told.

So I worked away manfully with such tools and stock as I possessed, and
of course produced, at first, like all young writers, some sufficiently
servile imitations of my favourite poets.