PEDIGREE OF A POOR STUPID.
‘Swart then, to cast it in proper form, was of the Swarts of Norfolk,
and his family had been settled in that part of the country from an
extremely early time. They had subsequently removed to London, and had
planted offshoots in many of the great towns, but their earliest family
seat was a swineherd’s hovel on the bank of one of the Broads. Swart’s
father, Jeremiah Swart, more commonly known as “Jerry,” had assisted at
the rise of our great cotton industry, not exactly as one of the cotton
lords, but as one of the others. Swart had often heard his history from
his own lips. He was born in 1800, and in 1816 he took another infant
to wife, without the formality of a visit to the parson. Babes of every
age, from five and six upwards, were common enough in the factories at
that time, and they worked from twelve to fourteen and fifteen hours
a day. Puberty began early, for the temperature of the factories was
the temperature of Bombay, yet, even with this chance in their favour,
half the children never reached a marriageable age. They perished like
flies, and the few that were left, like flies of a certain sort, had
just time to arrange for the propagation of their species, and then to
die. Boys and girls, men and women, worked together, lived together.
Inspection was unknown; control of any sort, on the part of law,
equally so; their common lodging-houses, not to put too fine a point
on it, were common stews. They toiled for just as much as would keep
their bodies together; and the rate of pay was calculated on the sound
economical assumption that they had no souls.
‘Swart’s father seems to have taken the same interest in public affairs
as his more famous son. He would often tell the boy of his patriotic
satisfaction in the Act of 1816, which regulated the detention of
Napoleon at St. Helena. He felt, as he used to say, that they had got
Boney safe at last, and he could now breathe as freely as his fluffy
cough would allow. Swart’s infant mother was indifferent to that
great event, for she was bearing Swart in her bosom, at the factory,
within three days of her delivery of him into this joyous world.
Having performed this function, she went to join her ancestors, whose
pedigree, I regret to say, it is impossible to trace. Swart’s father
used to remark that he had been less fortunate than Prince Leopold,
who, on taking the Princess Charlotte to wife, at about this time,
secured 50,000_l._ a year with her, dead or alive. He meant to say,
of course, that the grant was to be continued to the Prince in the
event of the lady’s demise. It was a generous gift, for the nation
had been left in extreme poverty and misery by the great war. The
Marquis Camden subsequently surrendered his sinecure, “towards the
relief of the public burdens,” in the handsomest way in the world, and
the Prince Regent found he could spare 50,000_l._ a year from his own
ample revenues, for the same purpose. Swart’s father was particularly
touched by this last act of self-denial, and he expressed a hope that
his Prince might never want a meal. The wish must have been heard in
Heaven. The people at large were not so fortunate: they became like
wild beasts with hunger; they rioted at Ely, they rioted at Spa-Fields.
The country blazed with incendiary fires, as though for a second
celebration of the Peace. The hero who had conquered the Peace was not
forgotten; and Strathfieldsaye was purchased for the Duke of Wellington.
‘Swart’s father had once enjoyed the felicity of seeing his Grace,
and had taken so careful a note of him that he knew the number of
buttons on his blue frock-coat. It was not his only souvenir of
greatness:--“Father once met the Marquis of Waterford, when his
lordship was out on one of his larks. The Marquis gave father a black
eye, and half a crown.”’
Victoria knotted something again: I fancy it was ‘black eye.’
‘Darkness covers the Swarts for a brief space, but in the middle of
the eighteenth century they flash into view again with “Father’s great
grandfather,” sold into the Plantations for indigence, in the flower of
his age. Some of the workers had their fixed term of servitude, just
like the burglars now; their masters were at liberty to whip them,
and to impose additional years of servitude, if they ran away. “He got
nabbed in a rumpus,” says Swart, “when they was taking old Commodore
Anson’s treasure to the Tower. You look in the books, sir; you’ll find
that right. This here Commodore had sailed round the world, and had
made many rich prizes; and a million and a quarter in treasure was
taken down to the Tower to be stowed away. There was thirty-two waggon
loads of it, the old man counted ’em, and somehow our family’s never
forgot the number. All our sort turned out, as you may fancy, to see
the waggons go by. Father’s grandfather was a bit pushed at the time,
and used to sleep on a brick kiln, with a few other chaps out of luck.
There was no sleep that night; they couldn’t have closed their eyes,
he said, if it had been a bed of down. It was such a great day for
England! They all sat up singin’ songs out in the fields, till it was
time to start and see the procession. The old man allus said he wasn’t
a bit drunk, for he hadn’t tasted bite or sup that day. It was the
sight of the waggons, somehow, seemed to make him turn faint. Anyhow,
I suppose he behaved foolish, for they collared him, and as I told you,
he was sold off. He couldn’t give no account of hisself--they’ve allus
been very hard on you for that. Father’s grandfather’s wife went out
after him, all the way to this ’ere Plantation, wherever it was. It
took her three months to go, but she lost his address, and so she had
to come back. They never met again. She once did some washing for Mr.
Pitt, him that was made a nobleman: you’ll find that right. She died at
the washtub, that was the end of her. She was a game ’un, she was; no
mistake about that!”’
Poor Vickey! I see the great drops gathering, and I know they are just
going to roll over: so I push on.
‘“Some of our women didn’t turn out so well. I don’t want to foul my
own nest, sir, you understand, but it’s sometimes a great struggle in
a poor man’s family to get enough to eat for growing gals. They always
aimed above ’em though, our women did: I will say that. One of ’em took
up with a master bootmaker in Bond Street by the name of Simmons--made
for the Royal Family. That was my grandmother, as she might be called.
I’ve heard that I might give myself the name of Fitz-Simmons, if I
chose, but Swart’ll do for me. I only mention it to show that she had
not demeaned herself so much as some might think.
‘“Father’s grandfather was the man in the corner of one of Mr.
Hogarth’s pictures--the one ’avin’ his ’ed battered with the pewter.
Ah, they was ’igh old times!”
‘I could but regard this reference to a family portrait as another note
of antiquity of race. There was even some trace of a family library
in a street ballad sung by a progenitor of Swart at the Coronation of
George IV., and still in excellent preservation between the fly leaves
of the book of Truth. In rugged, but heartfelt and effusive verse, it
called on the whole earth to rejoice. A family museum of curios, often
another note of lineage, was wanting, except in so far as it might
be found in a red waistcoat that had belonged to Mr. Townsend, the
famous Bow Street runner, who had “once locked grandfather up.” Swart
had heard that it was worth money, but he could never get more than
sixpence on it at the tally shop, and he had offered it in vain to
Madame Tussaud.
‘Here the Bible record, and Swart’s memory of the direct oral tradition
ended, but I could not have his story stop. I, therefore, went down to
the Heralds’ College, and to the Record Office, and by liberal fees
to certain yellow men called searchers, found out a good deal more.
They proved to me beyond question, as I had long expected, that the
Swarts had been always with us as actors in the great drama of history,
only the managers had not thought it worth while to give them a line
in the bills. As soon as I made it worth while to search beyond the
bills, Swarts seemed to become as plentiful as blackberries. We found
that nothing had been done without them. Dig down into the foundation
of any fair structure of Imperial greatness, and you were pretty sure
to come upon a Swart, if only as rubbish for the filling-in. One of
them was certainly among the two-and-seventy thousand vagrants hanged,
or otherwise despatched, in the reign of Bluff King Hal. They were
enclosing a good deal at that time, and the Bluff one had broken
up the monasteries, where the Swarts had often found a meal. These
operations filled the country with vagrants, and the vagrants had to be
removed. They were flogged, and fined in one of their ears, for a first
offence, and hung up like flitches, for a second, and thus effectually
cured. A Swort or Swyrt, of Norfolk, which, as before stated, was their
country seat, had been branded as an able bodied loiterer as far back
as 1547.
‘To form an idea of their situation, one must watch a fly trying to
crawl out of a pot of jam. You leave him there in the morning: you find
him there at night. Never, never, in the summer’s day, nor in dateless
eternity, shall that fly get clear!’
‘You talk cruel on purpose: somebody just helps him out.’
‘Victoria, give me a chance! Suppose nobody helps him. When, by heroic
labour, he has cleared his forelegs, his wings are still coated with
the sugary mire; and, as he plants the forelegs down, to attend to the
rest of him, the forelegs are besmeared again. Let him resolve to leave
them behind, in his desperation, and he will but lose his balance, and
foul the wings once more. Poor fly! Poor Swart! Poor, Poor Stupids!
whose history through the ages is my humble theme. The only difference
is that the Swarts are sunk in slime instead of jam, and that they have
the power of breeding there, and leaving their heritage of fruitless
struggle to countless generations. Always the slime is peopled with
this race, and never shall they get out, till God send a brother to
scrape them. The tragi-comedy of the situation is found when one, by
miracle of discovery of a brother’s body for foothold, wriggles himself
free, and then stands on the brink, to comfort the others with Penny
Readings from the author of “Self Help.”
For full seven centuries, as I could trace it now, had the Swarts
been waiting for the deliverer with a potsherd. Their history was a
history of illusions in the belief that he had come at last. Once,
clearly, they thought it was Kett, for there was a Swart in his
rebellion in 1549. I hear him at their foolish Litany of human rights:
“Look at them and look at us! have we not all the same form, are we
not all born in the same way?” Eternal protest! Nature’s everlasting
whisper to the innermost heart of man--never sufficiently answered
by a knock on his head from the outside! The Earl of Warwick and his
mercenaries were prompt enough with this response, yet the Swarts
were still unconvinced. There was a Swyrte--I can but think it was
the same family, and I am confirmed in that opinion by one of our
kings-at-arms--in Wat Tyler’s affair, in the fourteenth century.
The conjecture is that he was one of the “landless men,” whom the
lawyers of the time were trying to bring back into serfage, after
their extremely informal manumission by the Black Death. Nearly sixty
thousand persons, it may be remembered, perished of that pest in
Norwich alone, and this had probably convinced the Swyrtes that it was
time to be stirring. A sort of insane joy in the ravage wrought by
the disorder, as in a clearance for right and freedom, by the Devil
as redeemer, is apparent in some of the sayings of the time; and the
surviving Swyrte in the train of Tyler may have felt, in his extremity,
that he was open to a fair offer from that other side. The sentiment
is perhaps hereditary, for I remember to have noticed a strange elation
in the Swart of the Victorian era, when the late visitation of Asiatic
cholera was threatened, or as, I fear, he took it, promised, to our
shores. His manner exhibited the tremulousness of a great uncertain
hope, and his reading of the telegrams from Marseilles and Paris in
his Sunday paper took a rhythmic cadence, as though they were portions
of a saga. The circumstance is perhaps, incidentally, suggestive of
his Norse descent, but we must not go too far. Local Kentish records
tend to show that the earlier Swyrte just mentioned had risen to a
certain eminence in the movement, the highest perhaps the family ever
attained, for a man of that name undoubtedly acted on one occasion, as
deputy tub-bearer to the “mad priest of Kent,” John Ball. Ball, as we
know, was preaching, five centuries ago, just what they are preaching
at Clerkenwell Green to-day. “Good people, things will never go well
in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
villains and gentlemen. But what right are they whom we call lords
greater folk than we? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came
of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or
prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us
gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
eat oat cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine
houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields.
And yet it is of us, and of our toil, that these men hold their state.”
We may easily imagine the effect of such words on one of this stupid
race.
‘When Ball was thrown into prison, his deputy tub-bearer seems to
have joined Tyler as a man of action, for the name turns up in a rude
muster-roll of the gathering at Blackheath. He was possibly one of the
band that forced their way into the Tower, and pulled the beards of the
scandalised knights, promising to be their equals and good comrades in
the time to come. He never came within touch of chivalry again, unless
he happened to be among that village remnant of revolt that fell under
its maces in the wood at Billericay, after a two days’ fight, for “the
same liberties as their lords.” But this is only matter of supposition,
and it is more likely that the Swyrte of Blackheath simply sneaked into
town on the death of his leader, to root his offshoot of this great
family in the London slime.
‘I cannot find any trace of a Swart at Cressy or at Poitiers, though
many of that sort unquestionably left their bones in France. They
were not without a monument, however, but it was in their works.
_Circumspice._ It was in the wasted fields of Aquitaine, the stretches
of utter solitude, the patches of direst poverty, league upon league
of burnt homesteads, and of famine-struck hordes going mad with misery
and rage. For the French lords being captive, the French serfs had
naturally to raise the money for their ransom, and the agony of the
operation at such a season of ravage drove them into sheer revolt. The
captive lords, after the manner of their order, exhibited an admirable
self-control; and, with much dignity, took their meals with the family
in the English castles, while they awaited the remittances that were
to set them free. So blood will always tell! The Swarts of England,
to their ruin, had wrought this ruin to the Swarts of France--as it
was in the beginning, and, probably, ever shall be, world without end.
Victoria, there is a final word!’
But she only smiled faintly, and shook her head.
‘Here, I confess, I quite lose the scent of this interesting race,
strong as it must naturally be. That some of them were doing something
at the time of the Conqueror, the heralds, and even the physiologists,
assure me is beyond a doubt. I have looked for them in the Bayeux
Tapestry; and in one prostrate figure that is being used as a foot
warmer, while his betters are presumably enjoying a view of the English
landscape, I fancy I recognise the family nose. For my own part, I am
tolerably certain that some of them were alive at Troy time, and that
somebody was sitting on them then.
‘A wonderful old family, the Swarts, the Percys of the record but a set
of _parvenus_ beside them, a family that, in all ages, has helped to
make the dark background for the picture of the beauty and the pride
of life; for the frolic group of Chaucer, for Cressy’s firework blaze
of triumph, for the Armada, for Blenheim, and for Waterloo; for the
grandiose spectacle of pomp and vanity in every field. Hey! for the
idle literature that all this while could sing its blasphemous song of
perfumed bowers, while the wynd reeked; for the idle art that could
find nothing more serious than a scheme of colour in the contrast
between these Royal purples and these beggar’s browns! And hey! for
the old, old Swarts, the true Ancients of Days! Surely they are as
venerable as the Vedas, and, beside them, the best of merely historic
stocks is but a mushroom growth. What a struggle among the tuft-hunters
to get the Swarts to dinner, could they but see this! Such a family
only want a blazon, to commend them to the world. I would suggest a
Jackass, gules, between a stick (uplifted) and a bundle of wet hay.
Motto (the same as that of the old King of Bohemia--blind, like the
whole race that bear it in good faith): “I serve.” Crest: a Fool’s cap.
Ever has that cap of the Swarts gone up for the victory, while the
caps of the Swarts’ leaders have been held out for the reward. How have
the Swarts shouted, honest folk, as province after province rolled into
the mass of Empire, till it stretched beyond the purview of the sun!
‘Whatever he had lost through the ages, Swart’s joint-stock lordship
of India remained, and he was proud of it, as I have tried to show.
A Lascar was associated with him, as a boardman, in the Indian
exhibition: they were the best of friends, but Swart made a point of
walking first. It was a question of mere precedence, and it was not
unkindly done; they always took their pipe together, at the midday
halt in the mews. The Lascar was really Swart’s hierarchical superior,
in a business point of view. He received threepence a day more than
the others, because his complexion was suited to the character of the
show. With this natural advantage, and with a turban manufactured with
rare self-denial from the tail of his own shirt, he was altogether a
specialist of publicity for such things as Indian Bitters, and the
Turkish Bath. He was more of a philosopher than Swart. He had accepted
caste as a law of Nature and of God, while the other, in the muddled
English way, only took it as it came. He could give chapter and verse
for it from his holy books. “For the sake of preserving the Universe,
the Being supremely glorious allotted separate duties to those who
sprang respectively from his mouth, his arm, his thigh, and his
foot”--Read the Dharma Sāstra; and be still!
But the difference, as he was wont to observe, did not end here,
for the foot is a thing of five toes, and there are toes, and toes.
Chancing one day to meet in the gutter another Lascar, whom he
suspected of a descent from the little toe, he spat on the ground,
and exhibited every sign of repulsion, though his countryman, who was
advertising an Arabian gum-drop, was in the same business as himself,
and, to all appearance, was as good a man. There were really three toes
between them, as he explained to Swart.
There had been an attempt to bring him into the fold of Christianity,
but it broke down. He had been led to the gate by a member of a special
mission who, without his knowing it, had given his colleague of the
little toe a rendezvous at the same place. He endured the hateful
presence as best he might, until the rite of Communion required him to
touch the cup that had just been pressed by the other’s lips. Then he
set down the untasted pledge of love and brotherhood, and turned away.
‘He had brought his lady over with him, and she lived in the seclusion
of a Whitechapel zenana, in continual fear of the effect of our foggy
climate on her lord’s remaining lung. She was far from her own people,
and if she became a widow, how could she hope to be treated with the
requisite indignity during the funeral rite? Burning was, of course,
out of the question, but who would tear out her nose-ring, and the
cartilage with it, in the regular respectable way, or buffet her, and
load her with reproaches, for daring to survive him? She knew her Manu
and her Sāstras as many of our own estimable poor know their own Holy
Books, and they had taught her that great lesson of humility to man
which, in the end, all such books are made to teach. “A woman is not to
be relied on”--she had the text by heart--“a husband must be revered
as a god by a virtuous wife.” Poor slaves of the slave! beautiful and
tender creatures, ever the most apt in the learning of subjection! when
will your turn come? Victoria, my tale is done.’
Victoria toyed with her scarf awhile as though to remember all the
points, then untied it knot by knot, in sheer weariness of soul.
‘And is that England, is that the Empire?’ she said, fixing me with her
eyes in a way I did not exactly like.
‘Oh no, not altogether. Don’t let me be unfair. There are hundreds of
square miles of beauty, refinement, luxury; exquisitely ordered homes,
fine-natured men, courteous, suave, poised, high-bred from the bone;
white women, oh, so white! some of them able to read Greek--Learning
robed and perfumed. And for parties, picture galleries, libraries, when
they give their minds to such things, they are not to be matched. We
are particularly proud of one square mile bounded by Oxford Street,
Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Park Lane; and are wont to repeat the
boast at public dinners that, for intelligence, culture, wit, and the
high qualities of civilisation, it has not its territorial equivalent
on the face of the earth.’
‘The greater shame for them; why do they leave the other square miles
as they are?’
‘There are charities, you know.’
‘Charities!--ointment for a cancer. What makes the disease? There must
be something going on that none of you find out. I know there must be.
How can all those fine people live a day, an hour, till they do find
it out? What do they talk about while they are having their dinners?
I know they could find it out, if they tried. Let us try and find it
out, before we go home: we have still half an hour left. I have been
thinking, all the time you talked: it must be selfishness. Everybody
gets what he can, instead of what he ought, and of course the clever
people get most. Then they give a little of it back to the Poor Stupids
in what you call charity, and go on making the money and the misery all
the same. That is the way it strikes me. How do the rich people get
rich? Don’t you know you can’t be rich without doing wrong, whether you
know you are doing wrong, or not. Can you now? At the best, even, if
you are not a robber, you are using your cleverness to take some one
else’s share. And to think of all those people looking so nice, and
smelling like flowers, and talking like expensive books, and trying to
get richer than other people all the time; oh! the sly things! How _do_
you grow rich? I wonder how it is done.’
‘Always, at the beginning, of course, by getting as much as you can
for yourself, and giving as little as you can to others; buying in the
cheapest, and selling in the dearest is the accepted phrase. Sometimes,
this has happened so long ago that the possessors are able to forget
it ever happened. They are usually put up to do the talking about
unselfishness.’
‘Just what I thought; so the dealer that buys the match boxes made in
Mr. Swart’s house buys them, not for what he ought, but for what he
can.’
‘Can is the only ought in practical life.’
‘I see; and that makes the poor people hungry and cold.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And when they are very hungry, and very cold, the dealer, and his
well-to-do friends give them a little soup and a blanket.’
‘That’s about it.’
‘Oh, how funny! how funny! how funny!’
‘What would you have him do?’
‘What would you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do know. Is there anything but one thing--take less himself, and
give them more?’
‘Then he would not be so rich as the other match box makers.’
‘Well?’
‘And he would have to live in a smaller house.’
‘Well?’
‘And give up his carriage.’
‘Well?’
‘Then he’ll be damned if he’ll do it, Vickey, so there!’
‘That may be; I am only talking of what he ought to do. But I think you
are wrong. He would, if he knew, only he does not know. Perhaps the
clergyman sometimes forgets to tell him. Never mind that; let us go on;
it is so amusing. Tell me some other ways of making money.’
‘Well, you invest in Companies, and take the profits as they come.’
‘Without asking how the profits are made, how the people live that make
the profits?’
‘Usually so. Now and then the question is asked, but the questioner
is called an eccentric. There was one shareholder that made a great
fuss about the tramway people, who are worked almost into brutishness
for the sake of the dividend. It was only a woman, you know; and her
out-of-the-way proceeding made her quite notorious at once. The truth
is, everybody feels that the poor people would grind each other just as
hard, if they could.’
‘Ah, the poor people would like to be just as wicked as their betters!
Is that what you mean?’
‘I think it is, Miss Socrates.’
‘But how _do_ the betters spend the money? What can be the use of it
after all?’
‘The use of it? Did you never hear of yachting, hunting, pretty
pictures, pretty women, good wine? Poor little savage, you have never
had so much as a taste of life! Why you may spend twenty or thirty
thousand pounds in getting a good breed of race-horses, if that is
your hobby. You get a hobby, that’s the way it’s done--horses, hounds,
women, pictures, or china, anything will do--and keep on sinking your
money till you have the rarest and the best.’
‘Is there any taste in that way as to improving the breed of men? Does
a rich man ever buy a slum, and keep on playing with it till he has
turned it into a paradise?’
‘No; breeding is chiefly done for the shows.’
‘Are all the people in Europe as funny as that?’ said Victoria, ‘or is
it only the English? But see, the sun has struck the big banyan: it is
dinner time! What a lot you have told me, but you have only told me
half. There are Rich Stupids, I see, as well as Poor Stupids, and I
think the rich ones are the worse off.’