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

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Yes, there she was, the foremost among a bevy of fair girls, "herself the
fairest far," all April smiles and tears, golden curls, snowy rosebuds, and
hovering clouds of lace--a fairy queen;--but yet--but yet--how shallow that
hazel, eye, how empty of meaning those delicate features, compared with the
strength and intellectual richness of the face which had preceded her!

It was too true--I had never remarked it before; but now it flashed
across me like lightning--and like lightning vanished; for Lillian's eye
caught mine, and there was the faintest spark of a smile of recognition,
and pleased surprise, and a nod. I blushed scarlet with delight; some
servant-girl or other, who stood next to me, had seen it too--quick-eyed
that women are--and was looking curiously at me. I turned, I knew not why,
in my delicious shame, and plunged through the crowd to hide I knew not
what.

I walked on--poor fool--in an ecstasy; the whole world was transfigured
in my eyes, and virtue and wisdom beamed from every face I passed. The
omnibus-horses were racers, and the drivers--were they not my brothers of
the people? The very policemen looked sprightly and philanthropic. I shook
hands earnestly with the crossing-sweeper of the Regent Circus, gave him
my last twopence, and rushed on, like a young David, to exterminate that
Philistine O'Flynn.

Ah well! I was a great fool, as others too have been; but yet, that little
chance-meeting did really raise me. It made me sensible that I was made
for better things than low abuse of the higher classes. It gave me courage
to speak out, and act without fear, of consequences, once at least in
that confused facing-both-ways period of my life. O woman! woman! only
true missionary of civilization and brotherhood, and gentle, forgiving
charity; is it in thy power, and perhaps in thine only, to bind up the
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives? One real lady, who
should dare to stoop, what might she not do with us--with our sisters? If--

There are hundreds, answers the reader, who do stoop. Elizabeth Fry was a
lady, well-born, rich, educated, and she has many scholars.

True, my dear readers, true--and may God bless her and her scholars.
Do you think the working men forget them? But look at St. Giles's, or
Spitalfields, or Shadwell, and say, is not the harvest plentiful, and the
labourers, alas! few? No one asserts that nothing is done; the question is,
is enough done? Does the supply of mercy meet the demand of misery? Walk
into the next court and see!

* * * * *

I found Mr. O'Flynn in his sanctum, busy with paste and scissors, in the
act of putting in a string of advertisements--indecent French novels,
Atheistic tracts, quack medicines, and slopsellers' puffs; and commenced
with as much dignity as I could muster:

"What on earth do you mean, sir, by re-writing my article?"

"What--(in the other place)--do you mean by giving me the trouble of
re-writing it? Me head's splitting now with sitting up, cutting out, and
putting in. Poker o' Moses! but ye'd given it an intirely aristocratic
tendency. What did ye mane" (and three or four oaths rattled out) "by
talking about the pious intentions of the original founders, and the
democratic tendencies of monastic establishments?"

"I wrote it because I thought it."

"Is that any reason ye should write it? And there was another bit, too--it
made my hair stand on end when I saw it, to think how near I was sending
the copy to press without looking at it--something about a French
Socialist, and Church Property."

"Oh! you mean, I suppose, the story of the French Socialist, who told me
that church property was just the only property in England which he would
spare, because it was the only one which had definite duties attached
to it, that the real devourers of the people were not the bishops, who,
however rich, were at least bound to work in return for their riches,
but the landlords and millionaires, who refused to confess the duties of
property, while they raved about its rights."

"Bedad, that's it; and pretty doctrine, too!"

"But it's true: it's an entirely new and a very striking notion, and I
consider it my duty to mention it."

"Thrue! What the devil does that matter? There's a time to speak the truth,
and a time not, isn't there? It'll make a grand hit, now, in a leader upon
the Irish Church question, to back the prastes against the landlords. But
if I'd let that in as it stood, bedad, I'd have lost three parts of my
subscribers the next week. Every soul of the Independents, let alone the
Chartists, would have bid me good morning. Now do, like a good boy, give us
something more the right thing next time. Draw it strong.--A good drunken
supper-party and a police-row; if ye haven't seen one, get it up out of
Pater Priggins--or Laver might do, if the other wasn't convanient. That's
Dublin, to be sure, but one university's just like another. And give us a
seduction or two, and a brace of Dons carried home drunk from Barnwell by
the Procthors."

"Really I never saw anything of the kind; and as for profligacy amongst
the Dons, I don't believe it exists. I'll call them idle, and bigoted, and
careless of the morals of the young men, because I know that they are so;
but as for anything more, I believe them to be as sober, respectable a set
of Pharisees as the world ever saw."

Mr. O'Flynn was waxing warm, and the bully-vein began fast to show itself.

"I don't care a curse, sir! My subscribers won't stand it, and they
sha'n't! I am a man of business, sir, and a man of the world, sir, and
faith that's more than you are, and I know what will sell the paper, and by
J----s I'll let no upstart spalpeen dictate to me!"

"Then I'll tell you what, sir," quoth I, waxing warm in my turn, "I don't
know which are the greater rogues, you or your subscribers. You a patriot?
You are a humbug. Look at those advertisements, and deny it if you can.
Crying out for education, and helping to debauch the public mind with
Voltaire's 'Candide,' and Eugène Sue--swearing by Jesus, and puffing
Atheism and blasphemy--yelling at a quack government, quack law,
quack priesthoods, and then dirtying your fingers with half-crowns
for advertising Holloway's ointment and Parr's life pills--shrieking
about slavery of labour to capital, and inserting Moses and Son's
doggerel--ranting about searching investigations and the march of
knowledge, and concealing every fact which cannot be made to pander to the
passions of your dupes--extolling the freedom of the press, and showing
yourself in your own office a tyrant and a censor of the press. You a
patriot? You the people's friend? You are doing everything in your power to
blacken the people's cause in the eyes of their enemies. You are simply a
humbug, a hypocrite, and a scoundrel; and so I bid you good morning."

Mr. O'Flynn had stood, during this harangue, speechless with passion, those
loose lips of his wreathing like a pair of earthworms. It was only when I
stopped that he regained his breath, and with a volley of incoherent oaths,
caught up his chair and hurled it at my head. Luckily, I had seen enough of
his temper already, to keep my hand on the lock of the door for the last
five minutes. I darted out of the room quicker than I ever did out of one
before or since. The chair took effect on the luckless door; and as I threw
a flying glance behind me, I saw one leg sticking through the middle panel,
in a way that augured ill for my skull, had it been in the way of Mr.
O'Flynn's fury.

I ran home to Mackaye in a state of intense self-glorification, and told
him the whole story. He chuckled, he crowed, he hugged me to his bosom.

"Leeze me o' ye! but I kenned ye were o' the true Norse blude after a'!

"For a' that, an' a' that,
A man's a man for a' that.

"Oh, but I hae expeckit it this month an' mare! Oh, but I prophesied it,
Johnnie!"

"Then why, in Heaven's name, did you introduce me to such a scoundrel?"

"I sent you to schule, lad, I sent you to schule. Ye wad na be ruled by me.
Ye tuk me for a puir doited auld misanthrope; an' I thocht to gie ye the
meat ye lusted after, an' fill ye wi' the fruit o' your ain desires. An'
noo that ye've gane doon in the fire o' temptation, an' conquered, here's
your reward standin' ready. Special prawvidences!--wha can doot them? I ha'
had mony--miracles I might ca' them, to see how they cam' just when I was
gaun daft wi' despair."

And then he told me that the editor of a popular journal, of the Howitt
and Eliza Cook school, had called on me that morning, and promised me work
enough, and pay enough, to meet all present difficulties.

I did indeed accept the curious coincidence, if not as a reward for an act
of straightforwardness, in which I saw no merit, at least as proof that the
upper powers had not altogether forgotten me. I found both the editor and
his periodical, as I should have wished them, temperate and sunny--somewhat
clap-trap and sentimental, perhaps, and afraid of speaking out, as all
parties are, but still willing to allow my fancy free range in light
fictions, descriptions of foreign countries, scraps of showy rose-pink
morality and such like; which, though they had no more power against the
raging mass of crime, misery, and discontent, around, than a peacock's
feather against a three-decker, still were all genial, graceful, kindly,
humanizing, and soothed my discontented and impatient heart in the work of
composition.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE TOWNSMAN'S SERMON TO THE GOWNSMAN.

One morning in February, a few days after this explosion, I was on the
point of starting to go to the dean's house about that weary list of
subscribers, which seemed destined never to be filled up, when my cousin
George burst in upon me. He was in the highest good spirits at having just
taken a double first-class at Cambridge; and after my congratulations,
sincere and hearty enough, were over, he offered to accompany me to that
reverend gentleman's house.

He said in an off-hand way, that he had no particular business there, but
he thought it just as well to call on the dean and mention his success, in
case the old fellow should not have heard of it.

"For you see," he said, "I am a sort of _protégé_, both on my own account
and on Lord Lynedale's--Ellerton, he is now--you know he is just married to
the dean's niece, Miss Staunton--and Ellerton's a capital fellow--promised
me a living as soon as I'm in priest's orders. So my cue is now," he went
on as we walked down the Strand together, "to get ordained as fast as ever
I can."

"But," I asked, "have you read much for ordination, or seen much of what a
clergyman's work should be?"

"Oh! as for that--you know it isn't one out of ten who's ever entered a
school, or a cottage even, except to light a cigar, before he goes into the
church: and as for the examination, that's all humbug; any man may cram it
all up in a month--and, thanks to King's College, I knew all I wanted to
know before I went to Cambridge. And I shall be three-and-twenty by Trinity
Sunday, and then in I go, neck or nothing. Only the confounded bore is,
that this Bishop of London won't give one a title--won't let any man into
his diocese, who has not been ordained two years; and so I shall be shoved
down into some poking little country-curacy, without a chance of making
play before the world, or getting myself known at all. Horrid bore! isn't
it?"

"I think," I said, "considering what London is just now, the bishop's
regulation seems to be one of the best specimens of episcopal wisdom that
I've heard of for some time."

"Great bore for me, though, all the same: for I must make a name, I
can tell you, if I intend to get on. A person must work like a horse,
now-a-days, to succeed at all; and Lynedale's a desperately particular
fellow, with all sorts of _outré_ notions about people's duties and
vocations and heaven knows what."

"Well," I said, "my dear cousin, and have you no high notions of a
clergyman's vocation? because we--I mean the working men--have. It's just
their high idea of what a clergyman should be, which makes them so furious
at clergymen for being what they are."

"It's a queer way of showing their respect to the priesthood," he answered,
"to do all they can to exterminate it."

"I dare say they are liable, like other men, to confound the thing with its
abuses; but if they hadn't some dim notion that the thing might be made a
good thing in itself, you may depend upon it they would not rave against
those abuses so fiercely." (The reader may see that I had not forgotten my
conversation with Miss Staunton.) "And," thought I to myself, "is it not
you, and such as you, who do so incorporate the abuses into the system,
that one really cannot tell which is which, and longs to shove the whole
thing aside as rotten to the core, and make a trial of something new?"

"Well, but," I said, again returning to the charge, for the subject was
altogether curious and interesting to me, "do you really believe the
doctrines of the Prayer-book, George?"

"Believe them!" he answered, in a tone of astonishment, "why not? I was
brought up a Churchman, whatever my parents were; I was always intended for
the ministry. I'd sign the Thirty-nine Articles now, against any man in
the three kingdoms: and as for all the proofs out of Scripture and Church
History, I've known them ever since I was sixteen--I'll get them all up
again in a week as fresh as ever."

"But," I rejoined, astonished in my turn at my cousin's notion of what
belief was, "have you any personal faith?--you know what I mean--I hate
using cant words--but inward experience of the truth of all these great
ideas, which, true or false, you will have to preach and teach? Would you
live by them, die for them, as a patriot would for his country, now?"

"My dear fellow, I don't know anything about all those Methodistical,
mystical, Calvinistical, inward experiences, and all that. I'm a Churchman,
remember, and a High Churchman, too; and the doctrine of the Church is,
that children are regenerated in holy baptism; and there's not the least
doubt, from the authority both of Scripture and the fathers, that that's
the--"

"For Heaven's sake," I said, "no polemical discussions! Whether you're
right or wrong, that's not what I'm talking about. What I want to know is
this:--you are going to teach people about God and Jesus Christ. Do you
delight in God? Do you love Jesus Christ? Never mind what I do, or think,
or believe. What do you do, George?"

"Well, my dear fellow, if you take things in that way, you know, of
course"--and he dropped his voice into that peculiar tone, by which all
sects seem to think they show their reverence; while to me, as to most
other working men, it never seemed anything but a symbol of the separation
and discrepancy between their daily thoughts and their religious ones--"of
course, we don't any of us think of these things half enough, and I'm sure
I wish I could be more earnest than I am; but I can only hope it will come
in time. The Church holds that there's a grace given in ordination; and
really--really, I do hope and wish to do my duty--indeed, one can't help
doing it; one is so pushed on by the immense competition for preferment; an
idle parson hasn't a chance now-a-days."

"But," I asked again, half-laughing, half-disgusted, "do you know what your
duty is?"

"Bless you, my good fellow, a man can't go wrong there. Carry out the
Church system; that's the thing--all laid down by rule and method. A man
has but to work out that--and it's the only one for the lower classes I'm
convinced."

"Strange," I said, "that they have from the first been so little of that
opinion, that every attempt to enforce it, for the last three hundred
years, has ended either in persecution or revolution."

"Ah! that was all those vile puritans' fault. They wouldn't give the Church
a chance of showing her powers."

"What! not when she had it all her own way, during the whole eighteenth
century?"

"Ah! but things are very different now. The clergy are awakened now to the
real beauty of the Catholic machinery; and you have no notion how much is
doing in church-building and schools, and societies of every sort and kind.
It is quite incredible what is being done now for the lower orders by the
Church."

"I believe," I said, "that the clergy are exceedingly improved; and I
believe, too, that the men to whom they owe all their improvement are the
Wesleys and Whitfields--in short, the very men whom they drove one by one
out of the Church, from persecution or disgust. And I do think it strange,
that if so much is doing for the lower classes, the working men, who form
the mass of the lower classes, are just those who scarcely feel the effects
of it; while the churches seem to be filled with children, and rich and
respectable, to the almost entire exclusion of the adult lower classes. A
strange religion this!" I went on, "and, to judge by its effects, a very
different one from that preached in Judea 1800 years ago, if we are to
believe the Gospel story."

"What on earth do you mean? Is not the Church of England the very purest
form of Apostolic Christianity?"

"It may be--and so may the other sects. But, somehow, in Judea, it was
the publicans and harlots who pressed into the kingdom of heaven; and it
was the common people who heard Christ gladly. Christianity, then, was a
movement in the hearts of the lower order. But now, my dear fellow, you
rich, who used to be told, in St. James's time, to weep and howl, have
turned the tables upon us poor. It is _you_ who are talking, all day long,
of converting _us_. Look at any place of worship you like, orthodox and
heretical.--Who fill the pews?--the outcast and the reprobate? No! the
Pharisees and the covetous, who used to deride Christ, fill His churches,
and say still, 'This people, these masses, who know not the Gospel are
accursed.' And the universal feeling, as far as I can judge, seems to be,
not 'how hardly shall they who have,' but how hardly shall they who have
_not_, 'riches, enter into the kingdom of heaven!'"

"Upon my word," said he, laughing, "I did not give you credit for so much
eloquence: you seem to have studied the Bible to some purpose, too. I
didn't think that so much Radicalism could be squeezed out of a few texts
of Scripture. It's quite a new light to me. I'll just mark that card, and
play it when I get a convenient opportunity. It may be a winning one in
these democratic times."

And he did play it, as I heard hereafter; but at present he seemed to
think that the less that was said further on clerical subjects the better,
and commenced quizzing the people whom we passed, humorously and neatly
enough; while I walked on in silence, and thought of Mr. Bye-Ends, in the
"Pilgrim's Progress." And yet I believe the man was really in earnest. He
was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all
the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what
was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the
confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exists even in his own
heart, much less in that of another?

The dean was not at home that day, having left town on business. George
nodded familiarly to the footman who opened the door.

"You'll mind and send me word the moment your master comes home--mind now!"

The fellow promised obedience, and we walked away.

"You seem to be very intimate here," said I, "with all parties?"

"Oh! footmen are useful animals--a half-sovereign now and then is not
altogether thrown away upon them. But as for the higher powers, it is very
easy to make oneself at home in the dean's study, but not so much so as
to get a footing in the drawing-room above. I suspect he keeps a precious
sharp eye upon the fair Miss Lillian."

"But," I asked, as a jealous pang shot through my heart, "how did you
contrive to get this same footing at all? When I met you at Cambridge, you
seemed already well acquainted with these people."

"How?--how does a hound get a footing on a cold scent? By working and
casting about and about, and drawing on it inch by inch, as I drew on them
for years, my boy; and cold enough the scent was. You recollect that day
at the Dulwich Gallery? I tried to see the arms on the carriage, but there
were none; so that cock wouldn't fight."

"The arms! I should never have thought of such a plan."

"Dare say you wouldn't. Then I harked back to the doorkeeper, while you
were St. Sebastianizing. He didn't know their names, or didn't choose to
show me their ticket, on which it ought to have been; so I went to one of
the fellows whom I knew, and got him to find out. There comes out the value
of money--for money makes acquaintances. Well, I found who they were.--Then
I saw no chance of getting at them. But for the rest of that year at
Cambridge, I beat every bush in the university, to find some one who
knew them; and as fortune favours the brave, at last I hit off this Lord
Lynedale; and he, of course, was the ace of trumps--a fine catch in
himself, and a double catch because he was going to marry the cousin. So I
made a dead set at him; and tight work I had to nab him, I can tell you,
for he was three or four years older than I, and had travelled a good deal,
and seen life. But every man has his weak side; and I found his was a sort
of a High-Church Radicalism, and that suited me well enough, for I was
always a deuce of a radical myself; so I stuck to him like a leech, and
stood all his temper, and his pride, and those unpractical, windy visions
of his, that made a common-sense fellow like me sick to listen to; but I
stood it, and here I am."

"And what on earth induced you to stoop to all this--" meanness I was on
the point of saying. "Surely you are in no want of money--your father could
buy you a good living to-morrow."

"And he will, but not the one I want; and he could not buy me reputation,
power, rank, do you see, Alton, my genius? And what's more, he couldn't buy
me a certain little tit-bit, a jewel, worth a Jew's eye and a half, Alton,
that I set my heart on from the first moment I set my eye on it."

My heart beat fast and fierce, but he ran on--

"Do you think I'd have eaten all this dirt if it hadn't lain in my way to
her? Eat dirt! I'd drink blood, Alton--though I don't often deal in strong
words--if it lay in that road. I never set my heart on a thing yet, that
I didn't get it at last by fair means or foul--and I'll get her! I don't
care for her money, though that's a pretty plum. Upon my life, I don't. I
worship her, limbs and eyes. I worship the very ground she treads on. She's
a duck and a darling," said he, smacking his lips like an Ogre over his
prey, "and I'll have her before I've done, so help me--"

"Whom do you mean?" I stammered out.

"Lillian, you blind beetle."

I dropped his arm--"Never, as I live!"

He started back, and burst into a horse-laugh.

"Hullo! my eye and Betty Martin! You don't mean to say that I have the
honour of finding a rival in my talented cousin?"

I made no answer.

"Come, come, my dear fellow, this is too ridiculous. You and I are very
good friends, and we may help each other, if we choose, like kith and kin
in this here wale. So if you're fool enough to quarrel with me, I warn you
I'm not fool enough to return the compliment. Only" (lowering his voice),
"just bear one little thing in mind--that I am, unfortunately, of a
somewhat determined humour; and if folks will get in my way, why it's not
my fault if I drive over them. You understand? Well, if you intend to be
sulky, I don't. So good morning, till you feel yourself better."

And he turned gaily down a side-street and disappeared, looking taller,
handsomer, manfuller than ever.

I returned home miserable; I now saw in my cousin not merely a rival, but a
tyrant; and I began to hate him with that bitterness which fear alone can
inspire. The eleven pounds still remained unpaid. Between three and four
pounds was the utmost which I had been able to hoard up that autumn, by
dint of scribbling and stinting; there was no chance of profit from my book
for months to come--if indeed it ever got published, which I hardly dare
believe it would; and I knew him too well to doubt that neither pity nor
delicacy would restrain him from using his power over me, if I dared even
to seem an obstacle in his way.

I tried to write, but could not. I found it impossible to direct my
thoughts, even to sit still; a vague spectre of terror and degradation
crushed me. Day after day I sat over the fire, and jumped up and went into
the shop, to find something which I did not want, and peep listlessly into
a dozen books, one after the other, and then wander back again to the
fireside, to sit mooning and moping, starting at that horrible incubus of
debt--a devil which may give mad strength to the strong, but only paralyses
the weak. And I was weak, as every poet is, more or less. There was in me,
as I have somewhere read that there is in all poets, that feminine vein--a
receptive as well as a creative faculty--which kept up in me a continual
thirst after beauty, rest, enjoyment. And here was circumstance after
circumstance goading me onward, as the gadfly did Io, to continual
wanderings, never ceasing exertions; every hour calling on me to do, while
I was only longing to be--to sit and observe, and fancy, and build freely
at my own will. And then--as if this necessity of perpetual petty exertion
was not in itself sufficient torment--to have that accursed debt--that
knowledge that I was in a rival's power, rising up like a black wall before
me, to cripple, and render hopeless, for aught I knew, the very exertions
to which it compelled me! I hated the bustle--the crowds; the ceaseless
roar of the street outside maddened me. I longed in vain for peace--for one
day's freedom--to be one hour a shepherd-boy, and lie looking up at the
blue sky, without a thought beyond the rushes that I was plaiting! "Oh!
that I had wings as a dove!--then would I flee away, and be at rest!"--