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

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* * * * *

I complain of no one, again I say--neither of judge, jury, gaolers, or
chaplain. True, imprisonment was the worst possible remedy for my disease
that could have been devised, if, as the new doctrine is, punishments are
inflicted only to reform the criminal. What could prison do for me, but
embitter and confirm all my prejudices? But I do not see what else they
could have done with me while law is what it is, and perhaps ever will be;
dealing with the overt acts of the poor, and never touching the subtler
and more spiritual iniquities of the rich respectable. When shall we see a
nation ruled, not by the law, by the Gospel; not in the letter which kills,
but in the spirit which is love, forgiveness, life? When? God knows! And
God does know.

* * * * *

But I did work, during those three years, for months at a time, steadily
and severely; and with little profit, alas! to my temper of mind. I gorged
my intellect, for I could do nothing else. The political questions which
I longed to solve in some way or other, were tabooed by the well-meaning
chaplain. He even forbid me a standard English work on political economy,
which I had written to Mackaye to borrow for me; he was not so careful, it
will be seen hereafter, with foreign books. He meant, of course, to keep my
mind from what he considered at once useless and polluting; but the only
effect of his method was, that all the doubts and questions remained,
rankling and fierce, imperiously demanding my attention, and had to be
solved by my own moody and soured meditations, warped and coloured by the
strong sense of universal wrong.

Then he deluged me with tracts, weak and well-meaning, which informed
me that "Christians," being "not of this world," had nothing to do with
politics; and preached to me the divine right of kings, passive obedience
to the powers--or impotences--that be, &c., &c., with such success as may
be imagined. I opened them each, read a few sentences, and laid them by.
"They were written by good men, no doubt; but men who had an interest in
keeping up the present system;" at all events by men who knew nothing of
my temptations, my creed, my unbelief; who saw all heaven and earth from a
station antipodal to my own; I had simply nothing to do with them.

And yet, excellent man! pious, benignant, compassionate! God forbid that I
should, in writing these words, allow myself a desire so base as that of
disparaging thee! However thy words failed of their purpose, that bright,
gentle, earnest face never appeared without bringing balm to the wounded
spirit. Hadst thou not recalled me to humanity, those three years would
have made a savage and madman of me. May God reward thee hereafter! Thou
hast thy reward on earth in the gratitude of many a broken heart bound up,
of drunkards sobered, thieves reclaimed, and outcasts taught to look for a
paternal home denied them here on earth! While such thy deeds, what matter
thine opinions?

But alas! (for the truth must be told, as a warning to those who have to
face the educated working men,) his opinions did matter to himself. The
good man laboured under the delusion, common enough, of choosing his
favourite weapons from his weakest faculty; and the very inferiority of his
intellect prevented him from seeing where his true strength lay. He _would_
argue; he would try and convert me from scepticism by what seemed to him
reasoning, the common figure of which was, what logicians, I believe, call
begging the question; and the common method, what they call _ignoratio
elenchi_--shooting at pigeons, while crows are the game desired. He always
started by demanding my assent to the very question which lay at the bottom
of my doubts. He would wrangle and wrestle blindly up and down, with tears
of earnestness in his eyes, till he had lost his temper, as far as it was
possible for one so angel-guarded as he seemed to be; and then, when he
found himself confused, contradicting his own words, making concessions at
which he shuddered, for the sake of gaining from me assents which he found
out the next moment I understood in quite a different sense from his, he
would suddenly shift his ground, and try to knock me down authoritatively
with a single text of Scripture; when all the while I wanted proof that
Scripture had any authority at all.

He carefully confined himself, too, throughout, to the dogmatic phraseology
of the pulpit; while I either did not understand, or required justification
for, the strange, far-fetched, technical meanings, which he attached to his
expressions. If he would only have talked English!--if clergymen would only
preach in English!--and then they wonder that their sermons have no effect!
Their notion seems to be, as my good chaplain's was, that the teacher is
not to condescend to the scholar, much less to become all things to all
men, if by any means he may save some; but that he has a right to demand
that the scholar shall ascend to him before he is taught; that he shall
raise himself up of his own strength into the teacher's region of thought
as well as feeling; to do for himself, in short, under penalty of being
called an unbeliever, just what the preacher professes to do for him.

At last, he seemed dimly to discover that I could not acquiesce in his
conclusions, while I denied his premises; and so he lent me, in an
ill-starred moment, "Paley's Evidences," and some tracts of the last
generation against Deism. I read them, and remained, as hundreds more have
done, just where I was before.

"Was Paley," I asked, "a really good and pious man?"

The really good and pious man hemmed and hawed.

"Because, if he was not, I can't trust a page of his special pleading, let
it look as clever as the whole Old Bailey in one."

Besides, I never denied the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, or his
apostles. I doubted the myths and doctrines, which I believed to have been
gradually built up round the true story. The fact was, he was, like most of
his class, "attacking extinct Satans," fighting manfully against Voltaire,
Volney, and Tom Paine; while I was fighting for Strauss, Hennell, and
Emerson. And, at last, he gave me up for some weeks as a hopeless infidel,
without ever having touched the points on which I disbelieved. He had never
read Strauss--hardly even heard of him; and, till clergymen make up their
minds to do that, and to answer Strauss also, they will, as he did, leave
the heretic artisan just where they found him.

The bad effect which all this had on my mind may easily be conceived. I
felt myself his intellectual superior. I tripped him up, played with him,
made him expose his weaknesses, till I really began to despise him. May
Heaven forgive me for it! But it was not till long afterwards that I began,
on looking back, to see how worthless was any superior cleverness of mine
before his superior moral and spiritual excellence. That was just what
he would not let me see at the time. I was worshipping intellect, mere
intellect; and thence arose my doubts; and he tried to conquer them by
exciting the very faculty which had begotten them. When will the clergy
learn that their strength is in action, and not in argument? If they are
to reconvert the masses, it must be by noble deeds, as Carlyle says; "not
by noisy theoretic laudation of _a_ Church, but by silent practical
demonstration of _the_ Church."

* * * * *

But, the reader may ask, where was your Bible all this time?

Yes--there was a Bible in my cell--and the chaplain read to me, both
privately and in chapel, such portions of it as he thought suited my case,
or rather his utterly-mistaken view thereof. But, to tell the truth, I
cared not to read or listen. Was it not the book of the aristocrats--of
kings and priests, passive obedience, and the slavery of the intellect?
Had I been thrown under the influence of the more educated Independents
in former years, I might have thought differently. They, at least, have
contrived, with what logical consistence I know not, to reconcile orthodox
Christianity with unflinching democratic opinions. But such was not my lot.
My mother, as I said in my first chapter, had become a Baptist; because
she believed that sect, and as I think rightly, to be the only one which
logically and consistently carries out the Calvinistic theory; and now I
looked back upon her delight in Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jehu, only as
the mystic application of rare exceptions to the fanaticism of a chosen
few--the elect--the saints, who, as the fifth-monarchy men held, were
one day to rule the world with a rod of iron. And so I fell--willingly,
alas!--into the vulgar belief about the politics of Scripture, common
alike--strange unanimity!--to Infidel and Churchman. The great idea that
the Bible is the history of mankind's deliverance from all tyranny, outward
as well as inward; of the Jews, as the one free constitutional people among
a world of slaves and tyrants; of their ruin, as the righteous fruit of a
voluntary return to despotism; of the New Testament, as the good news that
freedom, brotherhood, and equality, once confided only to Judæa and to
Greece, and dimly seen even there, was henceforth to be the right of all
mankind, the law of all society--who was there to tell me that? Who is
there now to go forth and tell it to the millions who have suffered, and
doubted, and despaired like me, and turn the hearts of the disobedient to
the wisdom of the just, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come?
Again I ask--who will go forth and preach that Gospel, and save his native
land?

But, as I said before, I read, and steadily. In the first place, I, for the
first time in my life, studied Shakspeare throughout; and found out now the
treasure which I had overlooked. I assure my readers I am not going to give
a lecture on him here, as I was minded to have done. Only, as I am asking
questions, who will write us a "People's Commentary on Shakspeare"?

Then I waded, making copious notes and extracts, through the whole of Hume,
and Hallam's "Middle Ages," and "Constitutional History," and found them
barren to my soul. When (to ask a third and last question) will some
man, of the spirit of Carlyle--one who is not ashamed to acknowledge the
intervention of a God, a Providence, even of a devil, in the affairs of
men--arise, and write a "People's History of England"?

Then I laboured long months at learning French, for the mere purpose of
reading French political economy after my liberation. But at last, in my
impatience, I wrote to Sandy to send me Proudhon and Louis Blanc, on the
chance of their passing the good chaplain's censorship--and behold, they
passed! He had never heard their names! He was, I suspect, utterly ignorant
of French, and afraid of exposing his ignorance by venturing to criticise.
As it was, I was allowed peaceable possession of them till within a few
months of my liberation, with such consequences as may be imagined:
and then, to his unfeigned terror and horror, he discovered, in some
periodical, that he had been leaving in my hands books which advocated "the
destruction of property," and therefore, in his eyes, of all which is moral
or sacred in earth or heaven! I gave them up without a struggle, so really
painful was the good soul's concern and the reproaches which he heaped, not
on me--he never reproached me in his life--but on himself, for having so
neglected his duty.

Then I read hard for a few months at physical science--at Zoology and
Botany, and threw it aside again in bitterness of heart. It was too bitter
to be tantalized with the description of Nature's wondrous forms, and I
there a prisoner between those four white walls.

Then I set to work to write an autobiography--at least to commit to paper
in regular order the most striking incidents and conversations which I
could recollect, and which I had noted down as they occurred in my diary.
From that source I have drawn nearly the whole of my history up to this
point. For the rest I must trust to memory--and, indeed, the strange deeds
and sufferings, and yet stranger revelations, of the last few months, have
branded themselves deep enough upon my brain. I need not hope, or fear,
that aught of them should slip my memory.

* * * * *

So went the weary time. Week after week, month after month, summer after
summer, I scored the days off, like a lonely school boy, on the pages of a
calendar; and day by day I went to my window, and knelt there, gazing at
the gable and the cedar-tree. That was my only recreation. Sometimes, at
first, my eyes used to wander over the wide prospect of rich lowlands, and
farms, and hamlets, and I used to amuse myself with conjectures about the
people who lived in them, and walked where they liked on God's earth: but
soon I hated to look at the country; its perpetual change and progress
mocked the dreary sameness of my dungeon. It was bitter, maddening, to see
the grey boughs grow green with leaves, and the green fade to autumnal
yellow, and the grey boughs reappear again, and I still there! The dark
sleeping fallows bloomed with emerald blades of corn, and then the corn
grew deep and crisp, and blackened before the summer breeze, in "waves of
shadow," as Mr. Tennyson says in one of his most exquisite lyrics; and then
the fields grew white to harvest day by day, and I saw the rows of sheaves
rise one by one, and the carts crawling homeward under their load. I could
almost hear the merry voices of the children round them--children that
could go into the woods, and pick wild flowers, and I still there! No--I
would look at nothing but the gable and the cedar-tree, and the tall
cathedral towers; there was no change in them--they did not laugh at me.

But she who lived beneath them? Months and seasons crawled along, and yet
no sign or hint of her! I was forgotten, forsaken! And yet I gazed, and
gazed. I could not forget her; I could not forget what she had been to me.
Eden was still there, though I was shut out from it for ever: and so, like
a widower over the grave of her he loves, morning and evening I watched the
gable and the cedar-tree.

And my cousin? Ah, that was the thought, the only thought, which made
my life intolerable! What might he not be doing in the meantime? I knew
his purpose, I knew his power. True, I had never seen a hint, a glance,
which could have given him hope; but he had three whole years to win her
in--three whole years, and I fettered, helpless, absent! "Fool! could I
have won her if I had been free? At least, I would have tried: we would
have fought it fairly out, on even ground; we would have seen which was the
strongest, respectability and cunning, or the simplicity of genius. But
now!"--And I tore at the bars of the window, and threw myself on the floor
of my cell, and longed to die.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE NEW CHURCH.

In a poor suburb of the city, which I could see well enough from my little
window, a new Gothic church was building. When I first took up my abode
in the cell, it was just begun--the walls had hardly risen above the
neighbouring sheds and garden-fences. But month after month I had watched
it growing; I had seen one window after another filled with tracery, one
buttress after another finished off with its carved pinnacle; then I had
watched the skeleton of the roof gradually clothed in tiling; and then the
glazing of the windows--some of them painted, I could see, from the iron
network which was placed outside them the same day. Then the doors were put
up--were they going to finish that handsome tower? No: it was left with its
wooden cap, I suppose for further funds. But the nave, and the deep chancel
behind it, were all finished, and surmounted by a cross,--and beautifully
enough the little sanctuary looked, in the virgin-purity of its spotless
freestone. For eighteen months I watched it grow before my eyes--and I was
still in my cell!

And then there was a grand procession of surplices and lawn sleeves; and
among them I fancied I distinguished the old dean's stately figure, and
turned my head away, and looked again, and fancied I distinguished another
figure--it must have been mere imagination--the distance was far too
great for me to identify any one; but I could not get out of my head the
fancy--say rather, the instinct--that it was my cousin's; and that it was
my cousin whom I saw daily after that, coming out and going in--when the
bell rang to morning and evening prayers--for there were daily services
there, and saint's day services, and Lent services, and three services on a
Sunday, and six or seven on Good Friday and Easter-day. The little musical
bell above the chancel-arch seemed always ringing: and still that figure
haunted me like a nightmare, ever coming in and going out about its
priestly calling--and I still in my cell! If it should be he!--so close to
her! I shuddered at the thought; and, just because it was so intolerable,
it clung to me, and tormented me, and kept me awake at nights, till I
became utterly unable to study quietly, and spent hours at the narrow
window, watching for the very figure I loathed to see.

And then a Gothic school-house rose at the churchyard end, and troops of
children poured in and out, and women came daily for alms; and when the
frosts came on, every morning I saw a crowd, and soup carried away in
pitchers, and clothes and blankets given away; the giving seemed endless,
boundless; and I thought of the times of the Roman Empire and the
"sportula," when the poor had got to live upon the alms of the rich, more
and more, year by year--till they devoured their own devourers, and the end
came; and I shuddered. And yet it was a pleasant sight, as every new church
is to the healthy-minded man, let his religious opinions be what they
may. A fresh centre of civilization, mercy, comfort for weary hearts,
relief from frost and hunger; a fresh centre of instruction, humanizing,
disciplining, however meagre in my eyes, to hundreds of little savage
spirits; altogether a pleasant sight, even to me there in my cell. And
I used to wonder at the wasted power of the Church--her almost entire
monopoly of the pulpits, the schools, the alms of England; and then thank
Heaven, somewhat prematurely, that she knew and used so little her vast
latent power for the destruction of liberty.

Or for its realization?

Ay, that is the question! We shall not see it solved--at least, I never
shall.

But still that figure haunted me; all through that winter I saw it,
chatting with old women, patting children's heads, walking to the church
with ladies; sometimes with a tiny, tripping figure.--I did not dare to let
myself fancy who that might be.

* * * * *

December passed, and January came. I had now only two months more before my
deliverance. One day I seemed to myself to have passed a whole life in that
narrow room; and the next, the years and months seemed short and blank as a
night's sleep on waking; and there was no salient point in all my memory,
since that last sight of Lillian's smile, and the faces and the window
whirling round me as I fell.

At last a letter came from Mackaye. "Ye speired for news o' your
cousin--an' I find he's a neebour o' yours; ca'd to a new kirk i' the city
o' your captivity--an' na stickit minister he makes, forbye he's ane o'
these new Puseyite sectarians, to judge by your uncle's report. I met
the auld bailie-bodie on the street, and was gaun to pass him by, but he
was sae fou o' good news he could na but stop an' ha' a crack wi' me on
politics; for we ha' helpit thegither in certain municipal clamjamfries o'
late. An' he told me your cousin wins honour fast, an' maun surely die a
bishop--puir bairn! An' besides that he's gaun to be married the spring.
I dinna mind the leddy's name; but there's tocher wi' lass o' his I'll
warrant. He's na laird o' Cockpen, for a penniless lass wi' a long
pedigree."

As I sat meditating over this news--which made the torment of suspicion and
suspense more intolerable than ever--behold a postscript added some two
days after.

"Oh! Oh! Sic news! gran news! news to make baith the ears o' him that
heareth it to tingle. God is God, an' no the deevil after a'! Louis
Philippe is doun!--doun, doun, like a dog, and the republic's proclaimed,
an' the auld villain here in England, they say, a wanderer an' a beggar. I
ha' sent ye the paper o' the day. Ps.--73, 37, 12. Oh, the Psalms are full
o't! Never say the Bible's no true, mair. I've been unco faithless mysel',
God forgive me! I got grieving to see the wicked in sic prosperity. I did
na gang into the sanctuary eneugh, an' therefore I could na see the end of
these men--how He does take them up suddenly after all, an' cast them doun:
vanish they do, perish, an' come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream
when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.
Oh, but it's a day o' God! An' yet I'm sair afraid for they puir feckless
French. I ha' na faith, ye ken, in the Celtic blude, an' its spirit o'
lees. The Saxon spirit o' covetize is a grewsome house-fiend, and sae's our
Norse speerit o' shifts an' dodges; but the spirit o' lees is warse. Puir
lustful Reubens that they are!--unstable as water, they shall not excel.
Well, well--after all, there is a God that judgeth the earth; an' when a
man kens that, he's learnt eneugh to last him till he dies."

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE TOWER OF BABEL.

A glorious people vibrated again
The lightning of the nations; Liberty
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er France,
Scattering contagious fire into the sky,
Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay;
And in the rapid plumes of song
Clothed itself sublime and strong.

Sublime and strong? Alas! not so. An outcast, heartless, faithless, and
embittered, I went forth from my prison.--But yet Louis Philippe had
fallen! And as I whirled back to Babylon and want, discontent and discord,
my heart was light, my breath came thick and fierce.--The incubus of France
had fallen! and from land to land, like the Beacon-fire which leaped from
peak to peak proclaiming Troy's downfall, passed on the glare of burning
idols, the crash of falling anarchies. Was I mad, sinful? Both--and yet
neither. Was I mad and sinful, if on my return to my old haunts, amid the
grasp of loving hands and the caresses of those who called me in their
honest flattery a martyr and a hero--what things, as Carlyle says, men will
fall down and worship in their extreme need!--was I mad and sinful, if
daring hopes arose, and desperate words were spoken, and wild eyes read in
wild eyes the thoughts they dare not utter? "Liberty has risen from the
dead, and we too will be free!"

Yes, mad and sinful; therefore are we as we are. Yet God has forgiven
us--perhaps so have those men whose forgiveness is alone worth having.

Liberty? And is that word a dream, a lie, the watchword only of rebellious
fiends, as bigots say even now? Our forefathers spoke not so--

The shadow of her coming fell
On Saxon Alfred's olive-tinctured brow.

Had not freedom, progressive, expanding, descending, been the glory and the
strength of England? Were Magna Charta and the Habeas Corpus Act, Hampden's
resistance to ship-money, and the calm, righteous might of 1688--were they
all futilities and fallacies? Ever downwards, for seven hundred years,
welling from the heaven-watered mountain peaks of wisdom, had spread the
stream of liberty. The nobles had gained their charter from John; the
middle classes from William of Orange: was not the time at hand, when from
a queen, more gentle, charitable, upright, spotless, than had ever sat on
the throne of England, the working masses in their turn should gain their
Charter?

If it was given, the gift was hers: if it was demanded to the uttermost,
the demand would be made, not on her, but on those into whose hands her
power had passed, the avowed representatives neither of the Crown nor of
the people, but of the very commercial class which was devouring us.

Such was our dream. Insane and wicked were the passions which accompanied
it; insane and wicked were the means we chose; and God in his mercy to us,
rather than to Mammon, triumphant in his iniquity, fattening his heart
even now for a spiritual day of slaughter more fearful than any physical
slaughter which we in our folly had prepared for him--God frustrated them.

We confess our sins. Shall the Chartist alone be excluded from the promise,
"If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness"?

And yet, were there no excuses for us? I do not say for myself--and yet
three years of prison might be some excuse for a soured and harshened
spirit--but I will not avail myself of the excuse; for there were men,
stancher Chartists than ever I had been--men who had suffered not only
imprisonment, but loss of health and loss of fortune; men whose influence
with the workmen was far wider than my own, and whose temptations were
therefore all the greater, who manfully and righteously kept themselves
aloof from all those frantic schemes, and now reap their reward, in being
acknowledged as the true leaders of the artizans, while the mere preachers
of sedition are scattered to the winds.