indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some
impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so
reticently bring those two scenes into contrast--with all its
meaning--_all_ meaning--modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and
intelligence wedded in human speech--well, to that man I conclude by
bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man
with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but
always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose.
THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND
I
I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my
illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how
one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented
itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found
something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to
amend it.
At the beginning of this enquiry let me disclaim any _parti pris_
about the duty of an imaginative writer towards the politics of his
age. Aristophanes has a political sense, Virgil a strong one even
when imitating Theocritus; Theocritus none: yet both are delightful:
Lucretius has no care for politics, Horace has any amount, and both
are delightful again: the evils of his time which oppress the author
of _Piers Plowman_, affect Chaucer not at all: Dante is intensely
political, Petrarch, far less sublime as a poet, disdains the
business; Villon is for life as it flies, Ronsard for verse and art
(and the devil take the rest); Spenser, with a sore enough political
experience, casts it off almost as absolutely as does Ariosto.
Shakespeare has a strong patriotic sense and a manly political sense:
but he treats politics--let us take _King John_ and _Coriolanus_ for
examples--artistically, for their dramatic value. He knows about
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
and that they can be unendurable: but he does not use them for
propaganda (odious word!) whatever the minute of utterance. Milton
put all his religion into verse, his politics into prose; save for a
passage or two in _Lycidas_ and _Paradise Lost_ he excluded politics
from his high poetry. On the other hand Dryden had a high poetic sense
of politics, and it pervades the bulk of his original poetry, while the
opening of his famous _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ strikes an introductory
note as sure as Virgil’s, through whom a deep undercurrent of politics
runs from the first page of the _Eclogues_ to the last of the _Æneid_.
Our poets of the eighteenth century were social and political in the
main: since if you once take Man for your theme, you, or some one
following you, must be drawn on irresistibly to compare the position
you assign him in the scheme of things with his actual position in the
body politic, to consider the “Rights of Man,” “man’s inhumanity to
man” and so forth. _An Essay on Man_ (with the philosophy Pope borrowed
for it) leads on to _The Deserted Village_:
Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay
--to Crabbe’s Poor House, Hall of Justice, Prison; to Blake’s lyrical
laments over small chimney-sweeps, blackamoors, foundlings and all that
are young and desolate and oppressed, and the vow to sweep away “these
dark Satanic mills” (of which I shall have more to say by and by)
“and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Turn now
to Keats and you are returned upon _mere_ poetry, in the Latin sense
of _mere_. Keats has no politics, no philosophy of statecraft, little
social feeling: he is a young apostle of poetry for poetry’s sake.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
But of course, to put it solidly, that is a vague observation--to
anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms,
actually an _uneducated_ conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so
young and ardent. Let us, for a better, go on to the last and grandest
word of his last, unfinished, poem:
“High Prophetess,” said I, “purge off
Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
“None can usurp this height,” returned the Shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of this world
_Are_ misery, and will not let them rest.”
Such a spirit, preëminently, was Shelley; of whom, when the last word
of disparagement has been said, or the undeniable truth, put into a
phrase by Mr. Max Beerbohm, “a crystal crank,” the equally undeniable
fact remains that Shelley suffered tortures over the woes of his
fellow-creatures, while Byron (for a contrast) cares scarcely at all
for the general woe surrounding him, everything for his own affliction
in a world which had paid him tribute far above the earnings of common
men, and yet not only (as Shelley does) casts the blame on tyrants and
governments, but the _cure_ for his egoistical troubles on political
machinery, revolutions. I go on, taking names and illustrations almost
at random. Contrast any Radical utterance of Tennyson’s--his _Lady
Clara Vere de Vere_, for example--with poor Thomas Hood’s _Song of the
Shirt_. Why, it fades away: Hood’s passionate charity simply withers
up the other’s personal self-assertive inverted snobbery. If you have
stuff in you, contrast the note of
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread
with the whine of _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_--
The grand old gardener and his wife
Laugh at the claims of long descent
--which is just
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
--on the pianola. Observe, pray, that I am not comparing the poetic
_gift_, in which (as in other gifts of the gods) Tennyson very greatly
outweighted Hood. I am merely setting some poets against others and
contrasting the degrees in which they exhibit social or political
sensitiveness. We should all allow, probably, that Robert Browning
was a greater poet and a stronger thinker than his wife: but probably
deny to him the acute indignation against human misery, social
wrong, political injustice, evinced by the authoress of _The Cry of
the Children_ or _Casa Guidi Windows_. Of the two friends, Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, we should as probably admit Arnold to
be the better poet as Clough to be the less occupied with his own
soul, the more in vain attempt to save other men. So again among the
Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne raves magnificently for the blood of tyrants:
but when it came to lifting the oppressed, to throwing himself into the
job, what a puff-ball was he beside William Morris who had announced
himself as no more than “the idle singer of an empty day”!
One fishes in the night of deep sea pools:
For him the nets hang long and low,
Cork buoyed and strong: the silver gleaming schools
Come with the ebb and flow
Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.
Or holding with his hand the weighted line
He sounds the languors of the neaps,
Or feels what current of the springing brine
The cord divergent sweeps,
The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.
Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin,
And leaguer’st all the forest ways:
But of that sea, and the great heart therein
Thou knowest nought: whole days
Thou toil’st, and hast thy end--good store of pies and jays.
II
So far we have spoken of poets--fairly selected, I trust--and have
found that there are poets and poets; and some are Olympian in
attitude, looking down deep below the surface from a great height as a
gannet spies his fish; but high aloof, concerned rather with universal
themes than with the woman of Canaan clamorous in the street crying
for her daughter, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table.”
Now if we turn to our novelists, from Defoe to Scott, we find that the
novel from its first virtual beginning in our country and for a century
or more, has for social diseases in the body politic little concern
and practically no sense at all. Defoe has strong political sense,
but keeps it for his tracts and pamphlets: in _Robinson Crusoe_ (and
specially in the third volume, _The Serious Reflections of Robinson
Crusoe_), in _Moll Flanders_, in _Roxana_, he is always a moralist,
but a religious moralist. If--to twist a line of _Hamlet_--there’s
something rotten in the _state_ of Denmark, it does not come within the
scope of the novelist whose office is to combine amusement with general
edification. So--leaving out the edification--it is in _Tristram
Shandy_, so in _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Richardson is all for the
human heart as he reads it, and female virtue. Fielding with his genial
manly morality--Fielding, magistrate of a London Police Court, and a
humane one--discloses little sense in his novels of any _vera causa_
in our system supplying the unfortunates for whom, in daily life, he
tempers justice with mercy. You will not, I think, cite _Jonathan Wild_
against me. Noble fellow, as he drops down the Thames--stricken to
death, and knowing it--on that hopeless voyage to Lisbon, his thoughts
are hopeful for England and the glory of her merchant shipping: and
(says he) it must be our own fault if it doth not continue glorious:
for continue so it will, as long as the flourishing state of our
trade shall support it, and this support it can never want, till
our legislators, shall cease to give sufficient attention to the
protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power,
ability, and honesty to execute the laws: a circumstance not to be
apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches
shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest
corruption.
Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story
enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane
Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered
stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott,
call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the
emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign
in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through
convention, as always, into mere inanition.
III
Now if you will take, as a convenient starting-point for your enquiry,
the year 1832--the year that saw the passing of the Great Reform Bill
and the death of Scott: if you will start (I say) with that year
beyond which, when I first made acquaintance, with the English School
here, our curiosity was forbidden to trespass--you will find that
then, or about then, certain terrible diseases in our Commonwealth
were brewing up to a head. As everyone now recognises, we must
seek the operating cause of these in what we now agree to call the
“Industrial Revolution”; that is in the process as yet unrestricted
by law, encouraged by economic theory, moving at once too fast for
the national conscience to overtake or even to realise it and with a
step of doom as rigidly inexorable as the machinery, its agent and its
symbol, converting England into a manufacturing country, planting the
Manchester of those days and many Manchesters over England’s green
and pleasant land, and leaving them untended to grow as they pleased
polluting her streams, blackening her fields, and covering--here lies
the indictment--with a pall of smoke, infinite human misery: all this
controlled and elaborated by cotton-lords and mine-owners who prospered
on that misery.
The plight of rural, agricultural, England is another story. Here in
Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire was a monstrous revolution gathering
strength (as I say) beyond men’s power even to realise it. And if they
realised it, there was Political Economy assuring them that it had
to be. And it continued (as you will remember) long after poor Wragg
strangled and left her illegitimate infant on the dismal Mapperly
hills and the egregious Mr. Roebuck asked, if, the world over or in
past history, there was anything like it. “Nothing. I pray that our
unrivalled happiness may last.”
We all recognise it now, and the wicked folly of it--or at least I hope
we do. My purpose to-day, Gentlemen, is not to excite vain emotions
over a past which neither you nor I can remedy at all, but simply to
show that--as, after all, we are a kindly nation--the spectacle of
industrial England about and after 1832 became intolerable to our
grandfathers: how it operated upon two extraordinarily different minds:
and (if I can) how irresistible is the wind of literature, through what
mouthpiece soever it breathes with conviction.
IV
But before examining how two of the most dissimilar minds
conceivable--one a man’s, the other a woman’s--reacted upon it, I must
indicate the enormity of the challenge.
France had passed through her Revolution and her Terror, with graphic
details of which our public speakers and writers had taken pains to
make our country familiar enough: and England had won out of the
struggle, having taken the side she chose, all oblivious (as we are,
maybe, to-day) that victory in arms is at best but the beginning of
true victory, and that she herself was in the throes of a revolution
not a whit the less murderous than that of France, and only less
clamant because its victims, instead of aristocrats and politicians
and eminent saviours of their country following one another by scores
in tumbrils to die scenically in the Place de la République, the Place
of the Guillotine, were serfs of the cotton-mill and the mine, wives,
small children, starved unscenically, withered up in foetid cellars
or done to death beside the machines of such a hell-upon-earth as
Manchester had grown to be out of towns in which an artificer, however
humble, had once been permitted to rejoice in that which alone, beyond
his hearth and family, heartens a man--the well-executed work of hand
and brain. The capitalists of that time simply overwhelmed these towns,
expanding, converting them into barracks for workers. Who these workers
were, let an advertisement in a Macclesfield paper of 1825 attest--
To the Overseers of the Poor and to families desirous of settling
in Macclesfield. Wanted between 4,000 and 5,000 persons between the
ages of 7 and 21 years.
Yes, let us pass the hideous towns with but one quotation, from Nassau
Senior--
As I passed through the dwellings of the mill-hands in Irish
Town, Ancoats and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it was
possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes.
The towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns,
have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except
the immediate advantage of the speculative builder.... In one
place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch,
because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the
cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for
dwellings of human beings. Not one house in the street escaped the
cholera.
“Such,” wrote Chadwick, that careful observer, “is the absence of
civic economy in some of our towns that their condition in respect
of cleanliness is almost as bad as that of an encamped horde or an
undisciplined soldiery.”
But from the poor men and women--who had _sold_ themselves into these
slums and industrial slavery--let us turn to their hapless children,
who, after all, had never asked to be born. Your Malthus in that age,
and your Mr. Harold Cox in this, are positive (God forgive them!) that
a number of these brats never ought to be born. (I don’t know the price
of millstones, but they ought to be cheap and handy, and properly
labelled.) I shall lay stress on these children, Gentlemen, because--as
children do so often--they brought back the gospel--or something of it.
For these weaklings, _as they were the foundation of the manufacturer’s
wealth, by their illimitable woe enabling him to cut his wages_, in
the end brought about his exposure. To us--for always to us in our
day the past wears a haze softening it into sentiment--Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s _Cry of the Children_ is nothing, or suspected as
sentimental, to be classed alongside with anything (say) by Mrs.
Hemans or L. E. L. Listen to a couple of stanzas or three--
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
The reddest flower would look pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark, underground;
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn, our head with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places:
Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling:
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And all day the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
‘O ye wheels’ (breaking out in a mad moaning),
‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”
And well may the children weep before you!
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;
They sink in man’s despair, without its calm;
As slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,
As martyrs, by the pang without the palm....
_Let them weep! let them weep!_
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of their angels in high places,
With eyes turned on Deity.
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,--
Stifle down with a mail’d heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!”
But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath.
V
Now, I dare say some of you, even while I read this, were dismissing
it in your minds as early-Victorian humanitarianism, faded
philanthropy, outworn sentiment. Yes, but even a sentiment, if it works
simultaneously upon a generation of great and very dissimilar writers,
is a fact in the story of our literature--a phenomenon, at least, which
made itself an event--to be studied by you scientifically. One of the
first rules of good criticism, and the sheet-anchor of the historical
method, is to put yourself (as near as may be) in the other fellow’s
place: and if you take but a very little pains to do so, you will soon
discover that Mrs. Browning was not writing “for the fun of the thing,”
exuding, or causing to be exuded, any cheap tears. We are accustomed
to Manchester to-day: we take it for granted as a great community with
a most honourable Press to represent its opinions. But we only take
it for granted because it has become tolerable, and it only became
tolerable, then dignified--it only became a city--because our Victorian
writers shamed its manufacturers out of their villainies. In the
twenties, thirties, and “hungry forties” of the last century Manchester
was merely a portent, and a hideous portent, the growth of which at
once fascinated our economists and frightened our rulers. Think of the
fisherman in the _Arabian Nights_ who, unstopping the bottle brought
ashore in his net, beheld a column of smoke escape and soar and spread,
and anon and aloft, overlooking it, the awful visage of a Genie. Even
so our economists watched an enormous smoke ascend from Manchester and
said, “Here is undreamed-of national prosperity”; while our ministers
stared up into the evil face of a monster they had no precedent to
control. You understand, of course, that I use “Manchester” as a
symbolic name, covering a Lancashire population which grew in the first
twenty years of the century from 672,000 to 1,052,000. But let a very
different person from Mrs. Browning--let Benjamin Disraeli, then a
young man, describe the portent.
From early morn to the late twilight our Coningsby for several days
devoted himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a
new world, pregnant with new trains of thought and feeling. In this
unprecedented partnership between capital and science--
Mark you, not between capital and labour, but between capital and
science, still by machinery arming capital to vaster strength--
In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science,
working on a spot which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre
for their exploits, he beheld a great source of the wealth of
nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived
that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was
imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose
duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted
--“_and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted_.”
There, in Disraeli’s words, you have it. Every prolonged war raises a
new governing class of prosperous profiteers who turn their country’s
necessity to glorious gain. So it was a hundred years ago at the
conclusion of the long Napoleonic struggle: so it is to-day. So it goes
on ever. A profiteering class of speculators and (as Cobbett would
say) “loan-mongers” emerges at the top of any great war. Ex-soldiers
tramp the roads for work, for bread. Decent folk, bred in the incurable
belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and
suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing,
taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds
a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into
the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are
English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made
generous by education, forgetful of old woes. And so in time--give it
a couple of generations--the descendants of the sponge and the parvenu
will have shed the hair from the hoof, will leap to the summons of
_noblesse oblige_, and in their turn make haste to die by Ypres or the
Somme, transmitting somehow the mettle of England into a future denied
to them.
VI
But you will say that, although this revolt in the better minds of
England, a hundred years ago, may be a fact, I have as yet quoted but
the evidence of a poetess and a novelist. Very well, then: I go to Blue
Books and the reports of several commissions, reminding you that I lay
most stress on the children because it happened through their almost
inconceivable sufferings that, such as it was, victory came.
In 1831 Michael Sadler (a great man, in spite of Macaulay, and the
ancestor of a great one--if I may insert this word of long admiration
for the first senior man who spoke to me at my first undergraduate
dinner in Hall, more than forty years ago)--in 1831 this Michael
Sadler, member for Newark, introduced a Ten Hours Bill, and moved its
second reading in a speech that roundly exposed, along with other woes
of the poor, the sacrifice of child life in the mills. The Bill was
allowed a second reading on condition that the whole subject should be
referred to a Select Committee, over which Sadler presided.
Now let me quote a page from Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s recently published
study of Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who, though so many have
laughed at him, devoted his life that they should laugh if they chose,
but willy-nilly on the right side of their mouths, and not with a grin
unacceptable to any Divinity presumed as having created Man in His
image--