According to Whitaker’s Almanac, there are something under a million of
them actually at work, which means probably that the whole race numbers
something over two millions. And, speaking broadly, no one knows
anything about them. The most modern parents, anxious to be parental in
a scientific manner, will explain to their children on the hearth the
chemistry of the fire, showing how the coal releases again the carbon
which was absorbed by the plant in a past age, and so on, to the end
that the children may learn to understand the order of the universe.
This I have seen. But I have never seen parents explaining to their
children on the hearth the effect of coal-getting on the family life of
the collier, to the end that the children might learn to understand the
price of coal in sweat, blood, and tears. The householder is interested
only in the other insignificant part of the price of coal. And this
is odd, for the majority of householders are certainly not monsters
of selfish and miserly indifference to the human factor in economics.
Nor--I have convinced myself, though with difficulty--are the members of
the House of Lords. Yet among all the speeches against the Miners’ Eight
Hours Bill in this Chamber where beats the warm, generous heart of Lord
Halsbury, I do not remember one which mentioned the real price of coal.
Even the members of the sublime Coal Consumers’ League, though phantoms,
cannot be phantoms without bowels. But has the League ever issued one
leaflet dealing with the psychology of the collier’s wife as affected by
notions of fire-damp? I doubt it.
*****
Even artists have remained unstirred by the provocative mystery of this
subterranean race, which perspires with a pick, not only beneath our
cellars, but far beneath the caves of the sea itself. A working miner,
Joseph Skipsey, had to write the one verse about this race which has had
vigour enough to struggle into the anthologies. The only novel handling
in the grand manner this tremendous and bizarre theme is Emile Zola’s
“Germinal.” And, though it is a fine novel, though it is honest and
really impressive, there are shallows in the mighty stream of its
narrative, and its climax is marred by a false sentimentality, which is
none the less sentimentality for being sensual. Not a great novel, but
nearly great; as the child’s ring was “nearly gold.” And in English
fiction what is there but “Miss Grace of All Souls,” a wistful and
painstaking book, with pages which extort respect, but which no power
can save from oblivion? And in the fine arts, is there anything but
pretty coloured sentimentalities of hopeless dawns at pit-heads? Well,
there is! Happily there are Constantin Meunier’s sculptures of miners at
work--compositions over which oblivion will have no power. But I think
this is all.
Journalistic reporting of great tragic events is certainly much better
than it used to be, when the phraseology of the reporter was as rigidly
fixed by convention as poetic phraseology in the eighteenth century. The
special correspondent is now much more of an artist, because he is
much more free. But he is handicapped by the fact that when he does his
special work really well, he is set to doing special work always, and
lives largely among abnormal and affrighting phenomena, and so his
sensibility is dulled. Moreover, there are valuable effects and
impressions which the greatest genius on earth could not accomplish in a
telegraph office. But did you ever see the lives or the swift deaths of
the mysterious people treated, descriptively by an imaginative writer
in a monthly review? I noted recently with pleasure that the American
magazines, characteristically alert, have awakened to the possibilities
of the mysterious people as material for serious work in the more
leisurely journalism. The last tremendous accident in the United States
produced at any rate one careful and fairly adequate study of the
psychology of the principal figures in it, and of the drama which a
bundle of burning hay originated.
Even if I did not share the general incurious apathy towards the
mysterious people, I should not blame that apathy, for it is so
widespread that there must be some human explanation of it; my object
is merely to point it out. But I share it. I lived half my life among
coalpits. I never got up in the morning without seeing the double wheels
at a neighbouring pit-head spin silently in opposite directions for a
time, and then stop, and then begin again. I was accustomed to see coal
and ironstone, not in tons, but in thousands of tons. I have been close
to colliery disasters so enormous that the ambitious local paper would
make special reporters of the whole of its staff, and give up to the
affair the whole of its space, save a corner for the betting news. My
district lives half by earthenware and half by mining. I have often
philandered with pot-workers, but I have never felt a genuine, active
curiosity about the mysterious people. I have never been down a coalpit,
though the galleries are now white-washed and lighted by electricity. It
has never occurred to me to try to write a novel about the real price of
coal.
*****
And yet how powerfully suggestive the glimpses I have had! Down there,
on my heath, covered with a shuttle-work of trams, you may get on to
a car about four o’clock in the afternoon to pay a visit, and you
may observe a handful of silent, formidable men in the car, a
greyish-yellowish-black from head to foot. Like Eugene Stratton, they
are black everywhere, except the whites of their eyes. You ask yourself
what these begrimed creatures that touch nothing without soiling it are
doing abroad at four o’clock in the afternoon, seeing that men are not
usually unyoked till six.
They have an uncanny air, especially when you reflect that there is not
one arm among them that could not stretch you out with one blow. Then
you remember that they have been buried in geological strata probably
since five o’clock that morning, and that the sky must look strange to
them.
Or you may be walking in the appalling outskirts, miles from town halls
and free libraries, but miles also from flowers, and you may see a whole
procession of these silent men, encrusted with carbon and perspiration,
a perfect pilgrimage of them, winding its way over a down where the
sparse grass is sooty and the trees are withered. And then you feel
that you yourself are the exotic stranger in those regions. But the
procession absolutely ignores you. You might not exist. It goes on,
absorbed, ruthless, and sinister. Your feeling is that if you got in its
path it would tramp right over you. And it passes out of sight.
Around, dotting the moors, are the mining villages, withdrawn,
self-centred, where the entire existence of the community is regulated
by a single steam-siren, where good fortune and ill-fortune are common,
and where the disaster of one is the disaster of all. Little is known
of the life of these villages and townlets--known, that is, by people
capable of imaginative external sympathetic comprehension. And herein is
probably a reason why the mysterious people remain so mysterious. They
live physically separated. A large proportion of them never mingle
with the general mass. They are not sufficiently seen of surface-men to
maintain curiosity concerning them. They keep themselves to themselves,
and circumstances so keep them. Only at elections do they seem to
impinge in powerful silence on the destinies of the nation.
I have visited some of these villages. I have walked over the moors to
them with local preachers, and heard them challenge God. I have talked
to doctors and magistrates about them, and acquired the certainty,
vague and yet vivid, that in religion, love, work, and debauch they are
equally violent and splendid. It needs no insight to perceive that they
live nearer even than sailors to that central tract of emotion where
life and death meet. But I have never sympathetically got near them. And
I don’t think I ever shall.
Once I was talking to a man whose father, not himself a miner, had been
the moral chieftain of one of these large villages, the individuality
to which everyone turned in doubt or need. And I was getting this man to
untap the memories of his childhood. “Eh!” he said, “I remember how th’
women used to come to my mother sometimes of a night, and beg, ‘Mrs. B.,
an’ ye got any old white shirts to spare? They’re bringing ’em up, and
we mun lay ’em out!’ And I remember--” But just then he had to leave
me, and I obtained no more. But what a glimpse!