The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns.
As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free
winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the
furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and
the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so
Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses,
inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys,
and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he
toiled on in the solitude of neglect. The local circumstances were
diametrically different, to show that the spirit in both was the same.
They were men of the same stamp, and destined for the same great work;
and, therefore, however different were their immediate environments,
the same operating causes penetrated through them, and stirred within
them the spirit of the prophet. They were both of that chosen class
who are disciplined in pain, that they may learn that it is a
prevailing evil, and are stimulated to free not only themselves, but
their whole cotemporary kindred. Of poets, says Shelley:
"They learn in suffering what they teach in song;"
and the names of Milton, Chatterton, Byron, and of Shelley himself,
remind us how true as well as melancholy is the assertion. Burns and
Elliott were to be great teachers, and they both had their appointed
baptisms. The same quick and ardent passions; the same quivering
sensibility; the same fiery indignation against tyranny and
oppression; the same lofty spirit of independence, and power of
flinging their feelings into song, strong, piercing, and yet most
melodious, belong to them. They are both of the people--their sworn
brethren and champions. For their sakes they defy all favor of the
great; they make war to the death on the humbug of aristocratic
imposition; to them humanity is alone great, and by that they stand
unmoved by menace, unabashed by scorn, unseduced by flatterers. As
messengers of God, they honor God in man; and if they show a
preference, it is for man in his misery. They are drawn by a divine
sympathy to the injured and afflicted. The world knows its own, and
they know it, and leave the world to worship according to its worldly
instinct. For them the gaudy revel goes on, the chariot of swelling
property rolls by, the palace and the castle receive or pour out their
glittering throngs, unmarked save by a passing glance of contempt; for
they are on their way to the cabins of wretchedness, where they have
their Father's work to do. In their eyes, "the whole need not a
physician, but those that are sick." They leave the dead to bury their
dead, and have enough to do to soothe the agonies of the living; of
those who live only to suffer, the martyr mass of mankind who groan in
rags, and filth, and destitution, under the second great curse--not
that of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, but of not
being able to do it.
England owes a debt of thanks to a good Providence, who, affluent in
his gifts of honor and beneficence, has raised up great men in every
class and every location on her bosom, where they were most needed. In
that magnificent work which England has assuredly to do in the
earth--that of spreading freedom, knowledge, arts, and Christianity
over every distant land and age, gross errors have been committed, and
malignant powers have been developed, like pestilential diseases in
her constitution; but these have not been suffered to stop, though
they may have retarded her career. New infusions of health have been
made, new strength has been manifested; out of the pressure of
wretchedness new comfort has sprung; and when hope seemed almost
extinct, new voices have been heard above the wailing crowd, that have
startled the despairing into courage, and shed dismay into the soul of
tyranny. As the population has assumed new forms and acquired new
interests, out of the bosom of the multitude have arisen the poets who
have borne those forms, and have been made familiar with those
interests from their birth. Byron and Shelley, from the regions of
aristocracy, denounced, in unsparing terms, its arrogant assumptions;
Burns, beholding the progressing work of monopoly and selfishness,
uttered his contempt of the spirit that was thrusting down the
multitude to the condition of serfs, and haughtily returning glance
for glance with pride of rank and pride of purse, exclaimed--
"A man's a man for a' that!"
But the work of evil went on. While war scourged the earth in the
defense of the doting despotism of kingship, and monopoly shut out the
food of this nation in defense of the domestic despotism of
aristocracy, millions and millions of men were born to insufferable
misery, to hunger, nakedness, and crime, the result of maddened
ignorance; and that in a land teeming with corn and cattle, and the
wealth that could purchase them; and in a land, too, that sent out
clothing for a world. The work of selfishness had proceeded, but had
not prospered; wealth had been accumulated, but poverty had been
accumulated too, a thousandfold; rents had been maintained, but ruin
looked over the wall; there was universal activity, but its wages were
famine; there was a thunder of machinery, and a din of never ceasing
hammers; but amid the chaos of sounds there were heard--not songs, but
groans. It was then that Elliott was born, and there that he grew, in
the very thick of this swarming, busy, laborious, yet miserable
generation. He saw with astonishment that all that prodigious industry
produced no happiness; there was pomp and pauperism; toil and
starvation; Christianity preached to unbelieving ears, because there
were no evidences of its operation on hearts that had the power to
bless; and thus famine, ignorance, and irritation were converting the
crowd into a mass of ravenous and dehumanized monsters. There needed a
new orator of the patriot spirit. There needed a Burns of the
manufacturing district, and he was there in the shape of Elliott. Had
Burns been born again there, and under those circumstances, he would
have manifested himself exactly as Elliott has done. He would have
attacked manfully this monstrous bread-tax, which had thus
disorganized society, disputing the passage of God's blessings to the
many, and stamping a horrible character on the few. He would have
vindicated the rights of man and his labors, and have sung down with
fiery numbers all the crowding bugbears that armed monopoly had
gathered round the people to scare them into quiet. Elliott has done
that exactly; done that and no less. In the unpresuming character of
"A Corn-Law Rhymer," of "The Poet of the Rabble," he sent out, right
and left, songs, sarcasms, curses, and battle-cries, among the people.
His words, never ceasing, fell like serpents among the multitude
deadened by long slavery, and stung them into life. His voice once
raised, never faltered, never paused; wherever the multitude met they
heard it; wherever they turned they saw it embodied in largest
handwriting on the wall. "Up! bread-taxed slave! Up! our bread is
taxed--arise!" It was Elliott who sounded from day to day, and month
to month, these ominous words in the nation's ears. He took the very
form of Burns's patriot song, and instead of "Scots, wha ha' wi'
Wallace bled," exclaimed--
"Hands, and hearts, and minds are ours;
Shall we bow to bestial powers?
Tyrants, vaunt your swords and towers!
Reason is our citadel.
"With what arms will ye surprise
Knowledge of the million eyes?
What is mightier than the wise?
Not the might of wickedness.
"Trust in force!--So tyrants trust!
Words shall crush ye into dust;
Yet we _fight_, if fight we must--
Thou didst, Man of Huntingdon![5]
"Heirs of Pym! can ye be base?
Locke! shall Frenchmen scorn a race
Born in Hampden's dwelling-place?
Blush to write it, Infamy
"What we are our fathers were;
What they dared their sons can dare:
Vulgar tyrants! hush! beware!
Bring not down the avalanche.
"By the death which Hampden died
By oppression mind-defied!
Despots, we will tame your pride--
Stormily, or tranquilly!"
[5] One Oliver Cromwell, a brewer.
These brave words were not uttered in vain. The Burns of Sheffield did
not speak to the dead. The fire which he scattered was electric. It
spread rapidly, it kindled in millions of hearts, it became the soul
of the sinking multitude. It was slower to seize on the moist and
comfortable spirits of the middle classes and master-manufacturers;
but the progress of foreign competition soon drove even them into
action against the landlord's monopoly. The League arose. The
prose-men took up the cry of the poet, and with material and ground
prepared by him, went on from year to year advancing, by force of
arguments and force of money, the great cause, till at this moment it
may be said to be won. The prime minister of England pronounced the
doom of the Corn-Law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honor
to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honor should be
shown to him who began it? To the man who blew, on the fiery trumpet
of a contagious zeal, defiance to the hostile power in the pride of
its strength, and called the people together to the great contest? In
that contest the very name of Ebenezer Elliott has of late ceased to
be heard. Others have prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who
first raised it seems to be forgotten; but not the less did he raise
it. Not the less does that cause owe to him its earliest and amplest
thanks. Not the less is it he who dared to clear the field, to defy
the enemy, to array the host, to animate them to the combat, and
proclaim to them a certain and glorious victory. And when the clamor
of triumph shall have ceased, and a grateful people sit down to think,
in their hours of evening or of holyday ease, of the past, they will
remember the thrilling songs of their poet, and pay him a long and
grateful homage.
In comparing Ebenezer Elliott to Robert Burns, I do not mean to say
that their poetry is at all points to be compared. On the contrary, in
many particulars they are very different, but the great spirit and
principles of them are the same. In the felicitous power of throwing a
popular sentiment into a popular song, Elliott can not come near
Burns; nay, in the lyrical portion of his composition, we do not find
the full stature and strength of Elliott; it is in his larger poems
that he more completely presents himself, and no one can read them
without feeling that he is not only a true but a great poet.
There are many people who have read only his corn-law effusions in
newspapers and periodicals, who are at a loss to find the warrant for
the high character assigned by others to his writings. These give them
an idea of a fierce, savage, and often coarse demagogue. And when they
add to the expression of these compositions that of the only portraits
hitherto published of him, they are perfectly confirmed in the idea
that he is a stern, hard-souled, impetuous, and terrible man of iron.
Such are the false judgments derived from a one-sided knowledge, and
the cruel calumnies of bad artists! Ebenezer Elliott is one of the
gentlest, most tender-hearted of men; and, however strange it may
seem, it is this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this
lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that has roused him to
his loftiest pitch of anger, and put into his mouth his most terrible
words. It is the noble and feeling soul, which creates the patriot,
the savior, and champion of men. It was Christ, who died for the
world, and prayed for his enemies, and taught us to pray for ours,
that uttered those awful and scarifying denunciations--"Woe unto you,
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is impossible that it should be
otherwise. It is impossible that a feeling soul, endowed with power as
well as feeling, should not rise into the battle attitude at the sight
of oppression, and with the sledge-hammer of a great indignation
demolish the gates of cruelty, when the poor are crying within. But it
must never be forgotten, that it is out of the excess of love that
springs this excess of zeal. It is this that marks the great
distinction between the tyrant and the savior; the one is inspired by
cruelty, the other by mercy.
Whoever sees Ebenezer Elliott, having first only seen the portrait
prefixed to some of his works--a vile caricature--and having read only
his Corn-law Rhymes, will see with wonder a man of gentle manners, and
in all his tones, the expression of a tender and compassionate
feeling. But those who have read the whole of his poetry, will
_not_ be surprised at this. It is what they will expect. Elliott,
though born in a manufacturing town, and having lived there most of
his life, displays, like Burns, the most passionate attachment to
nature, and what is more, a most intimate acquaintance with her. He
possesses a singular power of landscape painting; and what he paints,
possesses all the beauty of Claude, and the wild magnificence of a
Salvator Rosa, with the finest and most subtile touches of a Dutch
artist. In his landscapes you are not the more amazed by the sublimity
of the tempest on the dark and crag-strewn moorland mountains of the
Peak, than you are by the perfect accuracy of his most minute details.
In the woodland, on the vernal bank, and in the cottage garden, you
find nothing which should not be there; nothing out of place, or out
of season; and the simplest plant or flower is exactly what you will
find; not nicknamed as the poor children of nature so often are by our
writers. There is one instance of Ebenezer Elliott's taste that meets
you everywhere, and marks most expressively the peculiar, delicate,
and poetic affection of his feelings. It is his preeminent love for
spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snow-drop, "the
woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how
constantly do they recur. In what favorite scene has he not introduced
the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's
garden--
"Still nature, still he loves thy uplands brown--
The rock that o'er his father's freehold towers!
And strangers hurrying through the dingy town
May know his workshop by its sweet wild flowers.
Cropped on the Sabbath from the hedge-row bowers,
The hawthorn blossom in his window droops;
Far from the headlong stream and lucid air,
The pallid alpine rose to meet him stoops,
As if to soothe a brother in despair,
Exiled from nature, and her pictures fair.
Even winter sends a posy to his jail,
Wreathed of the sunny celandine; the brief,
Courageous wind-flower, loveliest of the frail;
The hazel's crimson star, the woodbine's leaf,
The daisy with its half-closed eye of grief;
Prophets of fragrance, beauty, joy, and song."--P. 63.
Or in this passage, as remarkable for the sweet music of its
versification as for its suggestive power, winging the imagination
into the far-off woodland with the plover's cry--
"When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew;
When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue;
When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,
And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard
When melt the mists on mountains far away,
Till morn is kindled into brightest day,
No more the shouting youngsters shall convene
To play at leap-frog on the village green," etc.--P. 87.
These are beautiful; but Elliott can be strong as beautiful, and
sublime as strong; and the great charm of all his poetry is, that he
makes his description subservient to the display of human life and
passion, human joys, and sorrows, and struggles, and wrongs. He deals,
as the poet of the people, with the life of the people. The thronged
manufacturing town,--thronged with men, and misery, and crime, but not
destitute of domestic virtues, nor precious domestic
affections,--lives nowhere as it does in Elliott's pages. The village
and the cottage, with its gardens, and their inhabitants, all come
before us with their beloved characteristics, and also with their
tales of trial and death.
Elliott has been said to have copied from Crabbe and Wordsworth, and
heaven knows who. Every page of his tells that he has read and loved
them, and been deeply impressed with their compositions; but he is no
copyist. Like a fine landscape, he is tinted by the colors and
harmonies of the sky, the sun, the season, and the hour; but like
that, his features and lasting beauties are his own. In his earlier
poems, he often reminds you, by the tone and rhythm of his verse, of
Campbell and Rogers; but anon, and he has molded his own style into
its peculiar and native beauty, and like a river for a while
obstructed by rocks and mounds, he at length finds his way into the
open plain, and in his full growth and strength goes on his way
vigorous, majestic, and with a character all his own. He delights in
the heroic measure, varying and alternating the rhymes at his
pleasure; and in this versification he exhibits a singular breadth of
scope, and pours forth a harmony grand, melancholy, and thrilling.
Beautifully as he clothes his themes with the pathos and the hues of
poetry, they are yet the stern themes of real and of unhappy life.
They are, as he tells us, and as we feel and know from our own
experience, all drawn from actual knowledge. He finds his fellow-men
oppressed by the false growth of society, and he boldly and vehemently
lays bare their calamities. He draws things as they are, and with the
pencil of a giant. The misery that springs out of the corn-laws, and
other measures of monopoly and unjust legislation, he denounces and
deplores with unceasing zeal. He assaults and wrestles with the
monster growth of injustice with undying and unappeasable hatred. He
limns England as it was, and as it is; and asks the aristocratic and
the millocrat if they are not ashamed of their deeds? If they do not
blush at their philosophy; if they do not recoil from these scenes of
woe, and crime, and ferocity, that they have created?