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

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Yours ever,

C. K.

ALTON LOCKE,

TAILOR AND POET.

CHAPTER I.

A POET'S CHILDHOOD.

I am a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands
and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey Hills, of whose
loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-land, whose
gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two
journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the
horizon which encircles Richmond Hill.

My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little
shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious
ugliness; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty,
stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests; my only wild
animals, the dingy, merry sparrows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my
window-sill, ignorant of trap or gun. From my earliest childhood, through
long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight brightened into dawn, and
the glaring lamps grew pale, I used to listen, with pleasant awe, to the
ceaseless roll of the market-waggons, bringing up to the great city the
treasures of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for
which I have yearned all my life in vain. They seemed to my boyish fancy
mysterious messengers from another world: the silent, lonely night, in
which they were the only moving things, added to the wonder. I used to get
out of bed to gaze at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish women who
attended them, their labour among verdant plants and rich brown mould, on
breezy slopes, under God's own clear sky. I fancied that they learnt what
I knew I should have learnt there; I knew not then that "the eye only sees
that which it brings with it the power of seeing." When will their eyes be
opened? When will priests go forth into the highways and the hedges, and
preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there too, in
every thicket and fallow-field, is the house of God,--there, too, the gate
of Heaven?

I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is God's gift. He
made me one, that I might learn to feel for poor wretches who sit
stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every
breath,--bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own
funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke,
from their cradle to their grave. I have drunk of the cup of which they
drink. And so I have learnt--if, indeed, I have learnt--to be a poet--a
poet of the people. That honour, surely, was worth buying with asthma,
and rickets, and consumption, and weakness, and--worst of all to me--with
ugliness. It was God's purpose about me; and, therefore, all circumstances
combined to imprison me in London. I used once, when I worshipped
circumstance, to fancy it my curse, Fate's injustice to me, which kept
me from developing my genius, asserting my rank among poets. I longed to
escape to glorious Italy, or some other southern climate, where natural
beauty would have become the very element which I breathed; and yet, what
would have come of that? Should I not, as nobler spirits than I have done,
have idled away my life in Elysian dreams, singing out like a bird into the
air, inarticulately, purposeless, for mere joy and fulness of heart; and
taking no share in the terrible questionings, the terrible strugglings of
this great, awful, blessed time--feeling no more the pulse of the great
heart of England stirring me? I used, as I said, to call it the curse of
circumstance that I was a sickly, decrepit Cockney. My mother used to tell
me that it was the cross which God had given me to bear. I know now that
she was right there. She used to say that my disease was God's will. I do
not think, though, that she spoke right there also. I think that it was
the will of the world and of the devil, of man's avarice and laziness and
ignorance. And so would my readers, perhaps, had they seen the shop in
the city where I was born and nursed, with its little garrets reeking
with human breath, its kitchens and areas with noisome sewers. A sanitary
reformer would not be long in guessing the cause of my unhealthiness. He
would not rebuke me--nor would she, sweet soul! now that she is at rest and
bliss--for my wild longings to escape, for my envying the very flies and
sparrows their wings that I might flee miles away into the country, and
breathe the air of heaven once, and die. I have had my wish. I have made
two journeys far away into the country, and they have been enough for me.

My mother was a widow. My father, whom I cannot recollect, was a small
retail tradesman in the city. He was unfortunate; and when he died, my
mother came down, and lived penuriously enough, I knew not how till I
grew older, down in that same suburban street. She had been brought
up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from
conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only
sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do,
an absurd and impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children
of the devil till they have been consciously "converted," to baptise
unconscious infants and give them the sign of God's mercy on the mere
chance of that mercy being intended for them. When God had proved by
converting them, that they were not reprobate and doomed to hell by His
absolute and eternal will, then, and not till then, dare man baptise them
into His name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself,
and call it "charity." So, though we had both been christened during
my father's lifetime, she purposed to have us rebaptised, if ever that
happened--which, in her sense of the word, never happened, I am afraid, to
me.

She gloried in her dissent; for she was sprung from old Puritan blood,
which had flowed again and again beneath the knife of Star-Chamber
butchers, and on the battle-fields of Naseby and Sedgemoor. And on winter
evenings she used to sit with her Bible on her knee, while I and my little
sister Susan stood beside her and listened to the stories of Gideon and
Barak, and Samson and Jephthah, till her eye kindled up, and her thoughts
passed forth from that old Hebrew time home into those English times which
she fancied, and not untruly, like them. And we used to shudder, and yet
listen with a strange fascination, as she told us how her ancestor called
his seven sons off their small Cambridge farm, and horsed and armed them
himself to follow behind Cromwell, and smite kings and prelates with "the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon." Whether she were right or wrong, what
is it to me? What is it now to her, thank God? But those stories, and the
strict, stern Puritan education, learnt from the Independents and not the
Baptists, which accompanied them, had their effect on me, for good and ill.

My mother moved by rule and method; by God's law, as she considered, and
that only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She never commanded
twice, without punishing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness
in her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But she thought
herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some
ascetic of the middle ages--so do extremes meet! It was "carnal," she
considered. She had as yet no right to have any "spiritual affection" for
us. We were still "children of wrath and of the devil,"--not yet "convinced
of sin," "converted, born again." She had no more spiritual bond with us,
she thought, than she had with a heathen or a Papist. She dared not even
pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject.
For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear logical
sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided
from all eternity? We were elect, or we were reprobate. Could her prayers
alter that? If He had chosen us, He would call us in His own good time:
and, if not,--. Only again and again, as I afterwards discovered from a
journal of hers, she used to beseech God with agonized tears to set her
mind at rest by revealing to her His will towards us. For that comfort she
could at least rationally pray. But she received no answer. Poor, beloved
mother! If thou couldst not read the answer, written in every flower and
every sunbeam, written in the very fact of our existence here at all, what
answer would have sufficed thee.

And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest watch over our morality.
Fear, of course, was the only motive she employed; for how could our still
carnal understandings be affected with love to God? And love to herself
was too paltry and temporary to be urged by one who knew that her life was
uncertain, and who was always trying to go down to the deepest eternal
ground and reason of everything, and take her stand upon that. So our god,
or gods rather, till we were twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten
commandments, and public opinion. Yet under them, not they, but something
deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural
character, conformation of the spirit,--conformation of the brain, if you
like, if you are a scientific man and a phrenologist. I never yet could
dissect and map out my own being, or my neighbour's, as you analysts do. To
me, I myself, ay, and each person round me, seem one inexplicable whole; to
take away a single faculty whereof, is to destroy the harmony, the meaning,
the life of all the rest. That there is a duality in us--a lifelong battle
between flesh and spirit--we all, alas! know well enough; but which is
flesh and which is spirit, what philosophers in these days can tell us?
Still less bad we two found out any such duality or discord in ourselves;
for we were gentle and obedient children. The pleasures of the world
did not tempt us. We did not know of their existence; and no foundlings
educated in a nunnery ever grew up in a more virginal and spotless
innocence--if ignorance be such--than did Susan and I.

The narrowness of my sphere of observation only concentrated the faculty
into greater strength. The few natural objects which I met--and they, of
course, constituted my whole outer world (for art and poetry were tabooed
both by my rank and my mother's sectarianism, and the study of human beings
only develops itself as the boy grows into the man)--these few natural
objects, I say, I studied with intense keenness. I knew every leaf and
flower in the little front garden; every cabbage and rhubarb plant in
Battersea fields was wonderful and beautiful to me. Clouds and water I
learned to delight in, from my occasional lingerings on Battersea bridge,
and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting above rich meadows and
wooded gardens, to me a forbidden El Dorado.

I brought home wild-flowers and chance beetles and butterflies, and pored
over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but of a poet. They were to
me God's angels shining in coats of mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I
envied them their beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the
simple tenderness of a child's conscience, that it was wrong to rob them of
the liberty for which I pined,--to take them away from the beautiful broad
country whither I longed to follow them; and I used to keep them a day or
two, and then, regretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the
first opportunity, with many compunctions of heart, when, as generally
happened, they had been starved to death in the mean time.

They were my only recreations after the hours of the small day-school at
the neighbouring chapel, where I learnt to read, write, and sum; except,
now and then, a London walk, with my mother holding my hand tight the whole
way. She would have hoodwinked me, stopped my ears with cotton, and led
me in a string,--kind, careful soul!--if it had been reasonably safe on
a crowded pavement, so fearful was she lest I should be polluted by some
chance sight or sound of the Babylon which she feared and hated--almost as
much as she did the Bishops.

The only books which I knew were the Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible. The
former was my Shakespeare, my Dante, my Vedas, by which I explained every
fact and phenomenon of life. London was the City of Destruction, from
which I was to flee; I was Christian; the Wicket of the Way of Life I
had strangely identified with the turnpike at Battersea-bridge end; and
the rising ground of Mortlake and Wimbledon was the Land of Beulah--the
Enchanted Mountains of the Shepherds. If I could once get there I was
saved: a carnal view, perhaps, and a childish one; but there was a dim
meaning and human reality in it nevertheless.

As for the Bible, I knew nothing of it really, beyond the Old Testament.
Indeed, the life of Christ had little chance of becoming interesting to me.
My mother had given me formally to understand that it spoke of matters too
deep for me; that "till converted, the natural man could not understand the
things of God": and I obtained little more explanation of it from the two
unintelligible, dreary sermons to which I listened every dreary Sunday, in
terror lest a chance shuffle of my feet, or a hint of drowsiness,--natural
result of the stifling gallery and glaring windows and gas lights,--should
bring down a lecture and a punishment when I returned home. Oh, those
"sabbaths!"--days, not of rest, but utter weariness, when the beetles and
the flowers were put by, and there was nothing to fill up the long vacuity
but books of which I could not understand a word: when play, laughter,
or even a stare out of window at the sinful, merry, sabbath-breaking
promenaders, were all forbidden, as if the commandment had run, "In it thou
shalt take no manner of amusement, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter." By
what strange ascetic perversion has _that_ got to mean "keeping holy the
sabbath-day"?

Yet there was an hour's relief in the evening, when either my mother told
us Old Testament stories, or some preacher or two came in to supper after
meeting; and I used to sit in the corner and listen to their talk; not that
I understood a word, but the mere struggle to understand--the mere watching
my mother's earnest face--my pride in the reverent flattery with which the
worthy men addressed her as "a mother in Israel," were enough to fill up
the blank for me till bed-time.

Of "vital Christianity" I heard much; but, with all my efforts, could find
out nothing. Indeed, it did not seem interesting enough to tempt me to find
out much. It seemed a set of doctrines, believing in which was to have a
magical effect on people, by saving them from the everlasting torture due
to sins and temptations which I had never felt. Now and then, believing,
in obedience to my mother's assurances, and the solemn prayers of the
ministers about me, that I was a child of hell, and a lost and miserable
sinner, I used to have accesses of terror, and fancy that I should surely
wake next morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a moment
into the fire, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, have done, not
only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it would be so very
dreadfully painful; with what conclusions the reader may judge.... Still, I
could not keep up the excitement. Why should I? The fear of pain is not the
fear of sin, that I know of; and, indeed, the thing was unreal altogether
in my case, and my heart, my common sense, rebelled against it again and
again; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's
part, and saying that if she was to die,--so gentle, and obedient, and
affectionate as she was,--God would be very unjust in sending her to
hell-fire, and that I was quite certain He would do no such thing--unless
He were the Devil: an opinion which I have since seen no reason to change.
The confusion between the King of Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared
up, thank God, since then!

So I was whipped and put to bed--the whipping altering my secret heart just
about as much as the dread of hell-fire did.

I speak as a Christian man--an orthodox Churchman (if you require that
shibboleth). Was I so very wrong? What was there in the idea of religion
which was represented to me at home to captivate me? What was the use
of a child's hearing of "God's great love manifested in the scheme of
redemption," when he heard, in the same breath, that the effects of that
redemption were practically confined only to one human being out of a
thousand, and that the other nine hundred and ninety-nine were lost and
damned from their birth-hour to all eternity--not only by the absolute
will and reprobation of God (though that infernal blasphemy I heard often
enough), but also, putting that out of the question, by the mere fact of
being born of Adam's race? And this to a generation to whom God's love
shines out in every tree and flower and hedge-side bird; to whom the
daily discoveries of science are revealing that love in every microscopic
animalcule which peoples the stagnant pool! This to working men, whose
craving is only for some idea which shall give equal hopes, claims, and
deliverances, to all mankind alike! This to working men, who, in the smiles
of their innocent children, see the heaven which they have lost--the
messages of baby-cherubs, made in God's own image! This to me, to whom
every butterfly, every look at my little sister, contradicted the lie! You
may say that such thoughts were too deep for a child; that I am ascribing
to my boyhood the scepticism of my manhood; but it is not so; and what went
on in my mind goes on in the minds of thousands. It is the cause of the
contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Christianity
altogether, has fallen in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, who
anathematize us for wandering into Unitarianism--you, you have driven us
thither. You must find some explanation of the facts of Christianity more
in accordance with the truths which we do know, and will live and die for,
or you can never hope to make us Christians; or, if we do return to the
true fold, it will be as I returned, after long, miserable years of
darkling error, to a higher truth than most of you have yet learned to
preach.

But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from
them lessons which I never wish to unlearn. Whatever else I saw about them,
this I saw,--that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and
injustice from which the child's heart,--"child of the devil" though you
may call him,--instinctively, and, as I believe, by a divine inspiration,
revolts. Moses leading his people out of Egypt; Gideon, Barak, and Samson,
slaying their oppressors; David, hiding in the mountains from the tyrant,
with his little band of those who had fled from the oppressions of an
aristocracy of Nabals; Jehu, executing God's vengeance on the kings--they
were my heroes, my models; they mixed themselves up with the dim legends
about the Reformation martyrs, Cromwell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth,
which I had heard at my mother's knee. Not that the perennial oppression
of the masses, in all ages and countries, had yet risen on me as an
awful, torturing, fixed idea. I fancied, poor fool! that tyranny was the
exception, and not the rule. But it was the mere sense of abstract pity
and justice which was delighted in me. I thought that these were old fairy
tales, such as never need be realized again. I learnt otherwise in after
years.

I have often wondered since, why all cannot read the same lesson as I did
in those old Hebrew Scriptures--that they, of all books in the world,
have been wrested into proofs of the divine right of kings, the eternal
necessity of slavery! But the eye only sees what it brings with it the
power of seeing. The upper classes, from their first day at school, to
their last day at college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and
Marathon, of freedom and of the old republics. And what comes of it? No
more than their tutors know will come of it, when they thrust into the
boys' hands books which give the lie in every page to their own political
superstitions.

But when I was just turned of thirteen, an altogether new fairy-land was
opened to me by some missionary tracts and journals, which were lent to my
mother by the ministers. Pacific coral islands and volcanoes, cocoa-nut
groves and bananas, graceful savages with paint and feathers--what an El
Dorado! How I devoured them and dreamt of them, and went there in fancy,
and preached small sermons as I lay in my bed at night to Tahitians and New
Zealanders, though I confess my spiritual eyes were, just as my physical
eyes would have been, far more busy with the scenery than with the souls
of my audience. However, that was the place for me, I saw clearly. And one
day, I recollect it well, in the little dingy, foul, reeking, twelve foot
square back-yard, where huge smoky party-walls shut out every breath of air
and almost all the light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt
and the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid
which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be renewed
only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvæ and kicking
monsters which made up a large item in my list of wonders: all of a sudden
the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison-walls above, with
their canopy of lurid smoke; the dreary, sloppy, broken pavement; the
horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools; the utter want of form, colour,
life, in the whole place, crushed me down, without my being able to analyse
my feelings as I can now; and then came over me that dream of Pacific
Islands, and the free, open sea; and I slid down from my perch, and
bursting into tears threw myself upon my knees in the court, and prayed
aloud to God to let me be a missionary.

Half fearfully I let out my wishes to my mother when she came home. She
gave me no answer; but, as I found out afterwards,--too late, alas! for
her, if not for me,--she, like Mary, had "laid up all these things, and
treasured them in her heart."

You may guess, then, my delight when, a few days afterwards, I heard that a
real live missionary was coming to take tea with us. A man who had actually
been in New Zealand!--the thought was rapture. I painted him to myself over
and over again; and when, after the first burst of fancy, I recollected
that he might possibly not have adopted the native costume of that
island, or, if he had, that perhaps it would look too strange for him to
wear it about London, I settled within myself that he was to be a tall,
venerable-looking man, like the portraits of old Puritan divines which
adorned our day-room; and as I had heard that "he was powerful in prayer,"
I adorned his right hand with that mystic weapon "all-prayer," with
which Christian, when all other means have failed, finally vanquishes
the fiend--which instrument, in my mind, was somewhat after the model
of an infernal sort of bill or halbert--all hooks, edges, spikes, and
crescents--which I had passed, shuddering, once, in the hand of an old suit
of armour in Wardour Street.

He came--and with him the two ministers who often drank tea with my mother;
both of whom, as they played some small part in the drama of my after-life,
I may as well describe here. The elder was a little, sleek, silver-haired
old man, with a blank, weak face, just like a white rabbit. He loved me,
and I loved him too, for there were always lollipops in his pocket for me
and Susan. Had his head been equal to his heart!--but what has been was
to be--and the dissenting clergy, with a few noble exceptions among the
Independents, are not the strong men of the day--none know that better than
the workmen. The old man's name was Bowyer. The other, Mr. Wigginton, was a
younger man; tall, grim, dark, bilious, with a narrow forehead, retreating
suddenly from his eyebrows up to a conical peak of black hair over his
ears. He preached "higher doctrine," _i.e._, more fatalist and antinomian
than his gentler colleague,--and, having also a stentorian voice, was much
the greater favourite at the chapel. I hated him--and if any man ever
deserved hatred, he did.

Well, they came. My heart was in my mouth as I opened the door to them, and
sank back again to the very lowest depths of my inner man when my eyes fell
on the face and figure of the missionary--a squat, red-faced, pig-eyed,
low-browed man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very ears:
sensuality, conceit, and cunning marked on every feature--an innate
vulgarity, from which the artisan and the child recoil with an instinct as
true, perhaps truer, than that of the courtier, showing itself in every
tone and motion--I shrank into a corner, so crestfallen that I could not
even exert myself to hand round the bread and butter, for which I got duly
scolded afterwards. Oh! that man!--how he bawled and contradicted, and laid
down the law, and spoke to my mother in a fondling, patronizing way, which
made me, I knew not why, boil over with jealousy and indignation. How he
filled his teacup half full of the white sugar to buy which my mother had
curtailed her yesterday's dinner--how he drained the few remaining drops
of the threepennyworth of cream, with which Susan was stealing off to keep
it as an unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast the next morning--how
he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of his converts, but as a
planter might of his slaves; overlaying all his unintentional confessions
of his own greed and prosperity, with cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to
see through, while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a
man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with a jumble of
old English picked out of our translation of the New Testament. Such was
the man I saw. I don't deny that all are not like him. I believe there are
noble men of all denominations, doing their best according to their light,
all over the world; but such was the one I saw--and the men who were sent
home to plead the missionary cause, whatever the men may be like who stay
behind and work, are, from my small experience, too often such. It appears
to me to be the rule that many of those who go abroad as missionaries, go
simply because they are men of such inferior powers and attainments that if
they stayed in England they would starve.