"See Inebriety, her wand she waves,
And lo! her pale and lo! her purple slaves."--CRABBE.
I was joined in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed
cottage, by another lodger--lodgers of the humbler class usually
consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some
time, ere my arrival at Niddry, in a neighbouring domicile, which, as he
was what was termed a "quiet-living man," and as the inmates were
turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been
compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full
communion with his Church. Though merely a common labourer, with not
more than half the wages of our skilled workmen, I had observed, ere our
acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably
attired on week-days than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday; and so I
had set him down, from the circumstance, as a decent man. I now found
that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books--an
admirer even of the same old authors--deeply read like him, in Durham
and Rutherford--and entertaining, too, a high respect for Baxter,
Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he
differed from both my uncles: he had begun to question the excellence of
religious Establishments; nay, to hold that the country might be none
the worse were its ecclesiastical endowments taken away--a view which
our foreman also entertained; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were
as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry,
and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other
Seceders engaged as masons at the work--more of the polemical and less
of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the labourer; and
they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful
usefulness, but--as they were stronger in their language than their more
self-denying and more consistent co-religionists--of the positive
worthlessness of Establishments. The Voluntary controversy did not break
out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave
vent to many a pent-up opinion and humour among that class to which it
extended the franchise; but the materials of the war were evidently
already accumulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland; and
from what I now saw, its first appearance in a somewhat formidable
aspect failed to take me by surprise. I must in justice add, that all
the religion of our party was to be found among its Seceders. Our other
workmen were really wild fellows, most of whom never entered a church. A
decided reaction had already commenced within the Establishment, on the
cold, elegant, unpopular Moderatism of the previous period--that
Moderatism which had been so adequately represented in the Scottish
capital by the theology of Blair and the ecclesiastical policy of
Robertson; but it was chiefly among the middle and upper classes that
the reaction had begun; and scarce any portion of the humbler people,
lost to the Church during the course of the two preceding generations,
had yet been recovered. And so the working men of Edinburgh and its
neighbourhood, at this time, were in large part either non-religious, or
included within the Independent or Secession pale.
John Wilson--for such was the name of my new comrade--was a truly good
man--devout, conscientious, friendly--not highly intellectual, but a
person of plain good sense, and by no means devoid of general
information. There was another labourer at the work, an unhappy little
man, with whom I have often seen John engaged in mixing mortar, or
carrying materials to the builders, but never without being struck by
the contrast which they presented in character and appearance. John was
a plain, somewhat rustic-looking personage; and an injury which he had
received from gunpowder in a quarry, that had destroyed the sight of one
of his eyes, and considerably dimmed that of the other, had, of course,
not served to improve his looks; but he always wore a cheerful,
contented air; and, with all his homeliness, was a person pleasant to
the sight. His companion was a really handsome man--grey-haired,
silvery-whiskered, with an aristocratic cast of countenance, that would
have done no discredit to a royal drawing-room, and an erect though
somewhat petit figure, cast in a mould that, if set off more to
advantage, would have been recognised as elegant. But John Lindsay--for
so he was called--bore always the stamp of misery on his striking
features. There lay between the poor little man and the Crawford peerage
only a narrow chasm, represented by a missing marriage certificate; but
he was never able to bridge the gulf across; and he had to toil on in
unhappiness, in consequence, as a mason's labourer. I have heard the
call resounding from the walls twenty times a day--"John, Yearl Crafurd,
bring us anither hod o' lime."
I found religion occupying a much humbler place among these workmen of
the south of Scotland than that which I had used to see assigned to it
in the north. In my native district and the neighbouring counties, it
still spoke with authority; and a man who stood up in its behalf in any
society, unless very foolish or very inconsistent, always succeeded in
silencing opposition, and making good its claims. Here, however, the
irreligious asserted their power as the majority, and carried matters
with a high hand; and religion itself, existing as but _dissent_, not as
an _establishment_, had to content itself with bare toleration.
Remonstrance, or even advice, was not permitted. "Johnnie, boy," I have
heard one of the rougher mechanics say, half in jest, half in earnest,
to my companion, "if you set yourself to convert me, I'll brak your
face;" and I have known another of them remark, with a patronizing air,
that "kirks werena very bad things, after a';" that he "aye liked to be
in a kirk, for the sake of decency, once a twelvemonth;" and that, as he
"hadna been kirked for the last ten months, he was just only waiting for
a rainy Sabbath, to lay in his stock o' divinity for the year." Our new
lodger, aware how little any interference with the religious concerns of
others was tolerated in the place, seemed unable for some time to muster
up resolution enough to broach in the family his favourite subject. He
retired every night, before going to bed, to his closet--the blue vault,
with all its stars--often the only closet of the devout lodger in a
south-country cottage; but I saw that each evening, ere he went out, he
used to look uneasily at the landlord and me, as if there lay some
weight on his mind regarding us, of which he was afraid to rid himself,
and which yet rendered him very uncomfortable. "Well, John," I asked one
evening, speaking direct, to his evident embarrassment; "what is it?"
John looked at old William the landlord, and then at me. "Did we not
think it right," he said, "that there should be evening worship in the
family?" Old William had not idea enough for conversation: he either
signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an
ever-recurring ay, ay, ay; or he grumbled out his dissent in a few
explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as
tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary
explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted
emphasis, that he "wasna for _that_." I struck in, however, on the other
side, and appealed to Peggy. "I was sure," I said, "that Mrs. Russel
would see the propriety of John's proposal." And Mrs. Russel, as most
women would have done in the circumstances, unless, indeed, very bad
ones, did see the propriety of it; and from that evening forward the
cottage had its family worship. John's prayers were always very earnest
and excellent, but sometimes just a little too long; and old William,
who, I fear, did not greatly profit by them, used not unfrequently to
fall asleep on his knees. But though he sometimes stole to his bed when
John chanced to be a little later in taking the book than usual, and got
into a profound slumber ere the prayer began, he deferred to the
majority, and gave us no active opposition. He was not a vicious man:
his intellect had slept through life, and he had as little religion as
an old horse or dog; but he was quiet and honest, and, to the measure of
his failing ability, a faithful worker in his humble employments. His
religious training, like that of his brother villagers, seemed to have
been sadly neglected. Had he gone to the parish church on Sunday, he
would have heard a respectable moral essay read from the pulpit, and
would, of course, have slept under it; but William, like most of his
neighbours, preferred sleeping out the day at home, and never did go to
the church; and as certainly as he went not to the teacher of religion,
the teacher of religion never came to him. During the ten months which I
spent in the neighbourhood of Niddry Mill, I saw neither minister nor
missionary. But if the village furnished no advantageous ground on which
to fight the battle of religious Establishments--seeing that the
Establishment was of no manner of use there--it furnished ground quite
as unsuitable for the class of Voluntaries who hold that the supply of
religious instruction should, as in the case of all other commodities,
be regulated by the demand. Demand and supply were admirably well
balanced in the village of Niddry: there was no religious instruction,
and no wish or desire for it.
The masons at Niddry House were paid fortnightly, on a Saturday night.
Wages were high--we received two pounds eight shillings for our two
weeks' work; but scarce half-a-dozen in the squad could claim at
settlement the full tale, as the Monday and Tuesday after pay-night were
usually blank days, devoted by two-thirds of the whole to drinking and
debauchery. Not often have wages been more sadly mis-spent than by my
poor work-fellows at Niddry, during this period of abundant and
largely-remunerated employment. On receiving their money, they set
straightway off to Edinburgh, in parties of threes and fours; and until
the evening of the following Monday or Tuesday I saw no more of them.
They would then come dropping in, pale, dirty,
disconsolate-looking--almost always in the reactionary state of
unhappiness which succeeds intoxication--(they themselves used to term
it "_the horrors_")--and with their nervous system so shaken, that
rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working
ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to
circulate through the squad--adventures commonly of the "Tom and Jerry"
type; and always, the more extravagant they were, the more was the
admiration which they excited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was
much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them,
hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslin and Hawthornden,
and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of
gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a
farthing on the evening of Monday. And, as they were at work on Tuesday
in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a
day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteelly. Edinburgh had in
those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less
reputable localities, must have been dangerous. Burke found its West
Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after; and
from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap
exaggerated, had evidently their nucleus of truth, there was not a
little of the violent and the lawless perpetrated in its viler haunts
during the years of the speculation mania. Four of our masons found, one
Saturday evening, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a
dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street; and such was the
state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the
compression of an old apron wrapped tightly round his face, that though
they set him loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough
to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had been
foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman,
they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the
interference of my wild fellow-workmen, would soon have rendered him
permanently so. And such was but one of many stories of the kind.
There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement
among my more reckless associates at the work; and it was curious enough
to mark their very various views regarding what constituted spirit or
the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us about a singularly spirited
brother apprentice of his, who not only drank, kept loose company, and
played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even
occasionally stole, out of warehouses; which was of course a very
dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him within wind of the gallows;
whereas another of our wild workmen--a man of sense and
intelligence--not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker
brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless
scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog.
I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school
education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much
heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated
their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against
intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual
protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices--such as theft,
and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and
dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society:
there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged
in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops; and gentlemen of
birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a
bookseller's back-room; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks
must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from
what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good
intellectual education is a not inefficient protection against the
meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the "pleasant vices."
The only adequate protection against both, equally, is the sort of
education which my friend John Wilson the labourer exemplified--a kind
of education not often acquired in schools, and not much more frequently
possessed by schoolmasters than by any other class of professional men.
The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of
three-and-twenty--at least as much a blackguard as any of his
companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect,
and, with all his wildness, marked by very noble traits. He was a
strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six
feet--dark-complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which,
however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he
looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a
rich vein of humour. Charles ---- was the recognised hero of the squad;
but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns
tells us that he "often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind
commonly known by the ordinary phrase of _blackguards_;" and that,
"though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had
yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest
virtues--magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even
modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the
acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring man may select his
friends, he cannot choose his work-fellows; and so I have not
unfrequently _come in contact_ with blackguards, and have had
opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of
the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have
usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices
real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of
feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor
fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the nobler variety of
the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that
projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing his
way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found
the fast-bound wight choking in an apron, and, unloosing the cords, let
him go. No man of the party squandered his gains more recklessly than
Charles, or had looser notions regarding the legitimacy of the uses to
which he too often applied them. And yet, notwithstanding, he was a
generous-hearted fellow; and, under the influence of religious
principle, would, like Burns himself, have made a very noble man.
In gradually forming my acquaintance with him, I was at first struck by
the circumstance that he never joined in the clumsy ridicule with which
I used to be assailed by the other workmen. When left, too, on one
occasion, in consequence of a tacit combination against me, to roll up a
large stone to the sort of block-bench, or _siege_, as it is technically
termed, on which the mass had to be hewn, and as I was slowly succeeding
in doing, through dint of very violent effort, what some two or three
men usually united to do, Charles stepped out to assist me; and the
combination at once broke down. Unlike the others, too, who, while they
never scrupled to take odds against me, seemed sufficiently chary of
coming in contact with me singly, he learned to seek me out in our
intervals of labour, and to converse on subjects upon which we felt a
common interest. He was not only an excellent operative mechanic, but
possessed also of considerable architectural skill; and in this special
province we found an interchange of idea not unprofitable. He had a
turn, too, for reading, though he was by no means extensively read; and
liked to converse about books. Nor, though the faculty had been but
little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On
directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of
lepidodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped network
one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a
minuteness of observation not common among working men, certain strange
forms which had attracted his notice when employed among the grey
flagstones of Forfarshire. I long after recognised in his description
that strange crustacean of the Middle Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, the
_Pterygotus_--an organism which was wholly unknown at this time to
geologists, and which is but partially known still; and I saw in 1838,
on the publication, in its first edition, of the "Elements" of Sir
Charles Lyell, what he meant to indicate, by a rude sketch which he drew
on the stone before us, and which, to the base of a semi-ellipsis,
somewhat resembling a horse-shoe, united an angular prolongation not
very unlike the iron stem of a pointing trowel drawn from the handle. He
had evidently seen, long ere it had been detected by the scientific eye,
that strange ichthyolite of the Old Red system, the _Cephalaspis_. His
story, though he used to tell it with great humour, and no little
dramatic effect, was in reality a very sad one. He had quarrelled, when
quite a lad, with one of his fellow-workmen, and was unfortunate enough,
in the pugilistic encounter which followed, to break his jawbone, and
otherwise so severely to injure him, that for some time his recovery
seemed doubtful. Flying, pursued by the officers of the law, he was,
after a few days' hiding, apprehended, lodged in jail, tried at the High
Court of Justiciary, and ultimately sentenced to three months'
imprisonment. And these three months he had to spend--for such was the
wretched arrangement of the time--in the worst society in the world. In
sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general amusement, the
characters of the various prisoners with whom he had associated--from
the sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple
Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce
intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the
transaction--he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could,
and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives
an unintentional moral; and I cannot yet call them up without feeling
indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuous imprisonment which
so long obtained in our country, and which had the effect of converting
its jails into such complete criminal-manufacturing institutions, that,
had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the
Lord-George-Gordon mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would
have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a nobility in his
nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his
meaner associates; but he was none the better for his imprisonment, and
he quitted jail, of course, a marked man; and his after career was, I
fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this
time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brother
workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, among my
schoolfellows; but society in its settled state, and in a country such
as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy; and so
his leadership, dangerous both to himself and his associates, had
chiefly as the scene of its trophies the grosser and more lawless haunts
of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear,
a brief one. When that sudden crash in the commercial world took place,
in which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he was, with
thousands more, thrown out of employment; and, having saved not a
farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, under the pressure of actual
want, to enlist as a soldier into one of the regiments of the line,
bound for one of the intertropical colonies. And there, as his old
comrades lost all trace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an
insalubrious climate, to old habits and new rum.
Finding me incorrigible, I was at length left by my brother operatives
to be as peculiar as I pleased; and the working portion of the autumnal
months passed off pleasantly enough in hewing great stones under the
branching foliage of the elm and chestnut trees of Niddry Park. From the
circumstance, however, that the stones were so great, the previous trial
had been an embarrassing one; and, though too proud to confess that I
cared aught about the matter, I was now glad enough that it was fairly
over. Our modern Temperance Societies--institutions which at this time
had not begun to exist--have done much to shield sober working men from
combinations of the trying character to which, in the generation
well-nigh passed away, they were too often exposed. There are few
working parties which have not now their groups of enthusiastic
Teetotallers, that always band together against the drinkers, and
mutually assist and keep one another in countenance: and a breakwater is
thus formed in the middle of the stream, to protect from that grinding
oppression of the poor by the poor, which, let popular agitators declaim
on the other side as they may, is at once more trying and more general
than the oppression which they experience from the great and wealthy.
According to the striking figure of the wise old king, "it is like a
sweeping rain, which leaveth no food." Fanaticism in itself is not a
good thing; nor are there many quiet people who do not dislike
enthusiasm; and the members of new sects, whether they be religious
sects or no, are almost always enthusiasts, and in some degree
fanatical. A man can scarce become a vegetarian even without also
becoming in some measure intolerant of the still large and not very
disreputable class that eat beef with their greens, and herrings with
their potatoes; and the drinkers of water do say rather strong things of
the men who, had they been guests at the marriage in Cana of Galilee,
would have seen no great harm in partaking in moderation of the wine.
There is a somewhat intolerant fanaticism among the Teetotallers, just
as there is fanaticism amongst most other new sects; and yet,
recognising it simply as strength, and knowing what it has to contend
with, I am much disposed to tolerate it, whether _it_ tolerate me or no.
Human nature, with all its defects, is a wiser thing than the mere
common sense of the creatures whose nature it is; and we find in it
special provisions, as in the instincts of the humbler animals, for
overmastering the special difficulties with which it is its destiny to
contend. And the sort of fanaticism to which I refer seems to be one of
those provisions. A few Teetotallers of the average calibre and
strength, who take their stand against the majority in a party of wild
dissipated mechanics, would require a considerable amount of vigorous
fanaticism to make good their position; nor do I see in ordinary men, as
society at present exists, aught at once sufficiently potent in its
nature, and sufficiently general in its existence, to take its place and
do its work. It seems to subsist in the present imperfect state as a
wise provision, though, like other wise provisions, such as the horns of
the bull or the sting of the bee, it is misdirected at times, and does
harm.
Winter came on, and our weekly wages were lowered immediately after
Hallow-day, from twenty-four to fifteen shillings per week. This was
deemed too large a reduction; and, reckoning by the weekly hours during
which, on the average, we were still able to work--forty-two, as nearly
as I could calculate, instead of sixty--it _was_ too great a reduction
by about one shilling and ninepence. I would, however, in the
circumstances, have taken particular care not to strike work for an
advance. I knew that three-fourths of the masons about town--quite as
improvident as the masons of our own party--could not live on their
resources for a fortnight, and had no general fund to sustain them; and
further, that many of the master-builders were not very urgently
desirous to press on their work throughout the winter. And so, when, on
coming to the work-shed on the Monday morning after the close of our
first fortnight on the reduced scale, I found my comrades gathered in
front of it in a group, and learned that there was a grand strike all
over the district, I received the intelligence with as little of the
enthusiasm of the "independent associated mechanic" as possibly may be.
"You are in the right in your claims," I said to Charles; "but you have
taken a bad time for urging them, and will be beaten to a certainty. The
masters are much better prepared for a strike than you are. How, may I
ask, are you yourself provided with the sinews of war?" "Very ill
indeed," said Charles, scratching his head: "if the masters don't give
in before Saturday, it's all up with me; but never mind; let us have one
day's fun: there's to be a grand meeting at Bruntsfield Links; let us go
in as a deputation from the country masons, and make a speech about our
rights and duties; and then, if we see matters going very far wrong, we
can just step back again, and begin work to-morrow." "Bravely resolved,"
I said: "I shall go with you by all means, and take notes of your
speech." We marched into town, about sixteen in number; and, on joining
the crowd already assembled on the Links, were recognised, by the deep
red hue of our clothes and aprons, which differed considerably from that
borne by workers in the paler Edinburgh stone, as a reinforcement from a
distance, and were received with loud cheers. Charles, however, did not
make his speech: the meeting, which was about eight hundred strong,
seemed fully in the possession of a few crack orators, who spoke with a
fluency to which he could make no pretensions; and so he replied to the
various calls from among his comrades, of "Cha, Cha," by assuring them
that he could not catch the eye of the gentleman in the chair. The
meeting had, of course, neither chair nor chairman; and after a good
deal of idle speech-making, which seemed to satisfy the speakers
themselves remarkably well, but which at least some of their auditory
regarded as nonsense, we found that the only motion on which we could
harmoniously agree was a motion for an adjournment. And so we adjourned
till the evening, fixing as our place of meeting one of the humbler
halls of the city.
My comrades proposed that we should pass the time until the hour of
meeting in a public-house; and, desirous of securing a glimpse of the
sort of enjoyment for which they sacrificed so much, I accompanied them.
Passing not a few more inviting-looking places, we entered a low tavern
in the upper part of the Canongate, kept in an old half-ruinous
building, which has since disappeared. We passed on through a narrow
passage to a low-roofed room in the centre of the erection, into which
the light of day never penetrated, and in which the gas was burning
dimly in a close sluggish atmosphere, rendered still more stifling by
tobacco-smoke, and a strong smell of ardent spirits. In the middle of
the crazy floor there was a trap-door which lay open at the time; and a
wild combination of sounds, in which the yelping of a dog, and a few
gruff voices that seemed cheering him on, were most noticeable, rose
from the apartment below. It was customary at this time for dram-shops
to keep badgers housed in long narrow boxes, and for working men to keep
dogs; and it was part of the ordinary sport of such places to set the
dogs to unhouse the badgers. The wild sport which Scott describes in his
"Guy Mannering," as pursued by Dandy Dinmont and his associates among
the Cheviots, was extensively practised twenty-nine years ago amid the
dingier haunts of the High Street and the Canongate. Our party, like
most others, had its dog--a repulsive-looking brute, with an
earth-directed eye, as if he carried about with him an evil conscience;
and my companions were desirous of getting his earthing ability tested
upon the badger of the establishment; but on summoning the
tavern-keeper, we were told that the party below had got the start of
us: their dog was as we might hear, "just drawing the badger; and
before our dog could be permitted to draw him, the poor brute would
require to get an hour's rest." I need scarce say that the hour was
spent in hard drinking in that stagnant atmosphere; and we then all
descended through the trap-door, by means of a ladder, into a
bare-walled dungeon, dark and damp, and where the pestiferous air smelt
like that of a burial vault. The scene which followed was exceedingly
repulsive and brutal--nearly as much so as some of the scenes furnished
by those otter hunts in which the aristocracy of the country delight
occasionally to indulge. Amid shouts and yells, the badger, with the
blood of his recent conflict still fresh upon him, was again drawn to
the box mouth; and the party returning satisfied to the apartment above,
again betook themselves to hard drinking. In a short time the liquor
began to tell, not first, as might be supposed, on our younger men, who
were mostly tall, vigorous fellows, in the first flush of their full
strength, but on a few of the middle-aged workmen, whose constitutions
seemed undermined by a previous course of dissipation and debauchery.
The conversation became very loud, very involved, and, though highly
seasoned with emphatic oaths, very insipid; and leaving with Cha--who
seemed somewhat uneasy that my eye should be upon their meeting in its
hour of weakness--money enough to clear off my share of the reckoning, I
stole out to the King's Park, and passed an hour to better purpose among
the trap rocks than I could possibly have spent it beside the trap-door.
Of that tavern party, I am not aware that a single individual save the
writer is now living: its very dog did not live out half his days. His
owner was alarmed one morning, shortly after this time, by the
intelligence that a dozen of sheep had been worried during the night on
a neighbouring farm, and that a dog very like his had been seen prowling
about the fold; but in order to determine the point, he would be
visited, it was added, in the course of the day, by the shepherd and a
law-officer. The dog meanwhile, however, conscious of guilt--for dogs
do seem to have consciences in such matters--was nowhere to be found,
though, after the lapse of nearly a week, he again appeared at the work;
and his master, slipping a rope round his neck, brought him to a
deserted coal-pit half-filled with water, that opened in an adjacent
field, and, flinging him in, left the authorities no clue by which to
establish his identity with the robber and assassin of the fold.
I had now quite enough of the strike; and, instead of attending the
evening meeting, passed the night with my friend William Ross. Curious
to know, however, whether my absence had been observed by my brother
workmen, I asked Cha, when we next met, "what he thought of _our_
meeting?" "Gude-sake!" he replied, "let that flee stick to the wa'! We
got upon the _skuff_ after you left us, and grew deaf to time, and so
not one of us has seen the meeting yet." I learned, however, that,
though somewhat reduced in numbers, it had been very spirited and
energetic, and had resolved on nailing the colours to the mast; but in a
few mornings subsequent, several of the squads returned to work on their
master's terms, and all broke down in about a week after. Contrary to
what I should have expected from my previous knowledge of him, I found
that my friend William Ross took a warm interest in strikes and
combinations, and was much surprised at the apathy which I manifested on
this occasion; nay, that he himself, as he told me, actually officiated
as clerk for a combined society of house-painters, and entertained
sanguine hopes regarding the happy influence which the principle of
union was yet to exercise on the status and comfort of the working man.
There are no problems more difficult than those which speculative men
sometimes attempt solving, when they set themselves to predict how
certain given characters would act in certain given circumstances. In
what spirit, it has been asked, would Socrates have listened to the
address of Paul on Mars Hill, had he lived a few ages later? and what
sort of a statesman would Robert Burns have made? I cannot answer
either question; but this I know, that from my intimate acquaintance
with the retiring, unobtrusive character of my friend in early life, I
should have predicted that he would have taken no interest whatever in
strikes or combinations; and I was now surprised to find the case
otherwise. And he, on the other hand, equally intimate with my
comparatively wild boyhood, and my influence among my schoolfellows,
would have predicted that I should have taken a very warm interest in
such combinations, mayhap as a ringleader; at all events, as an
energetic, influential member; and he was now not a little astonished to
see me keeping aloof from them, as things of no account or value. I
believe, however, we were both acting in character. Lacking my
obstinacy, he had in some degree yielded, on first coming to the
capital, to the tyranny of his brother workmen; and, becoming one of
themselves, and identifying his interest with theirs, his talents and
acquirements had recommended him to an office of trust among them;
whereas I, stubbornly battling, like Harry of the Wynd, "for my own
hand," would not stir a finger in assertion of the alleged rights of
fellows who had no respect for the rights which were indisputably mine.
I may here mention, that this first year of the building mania was also
the first, in the present century, of those great _strikes_ among
workmen, of which the public has since heard and seen so much. Up till
this time, combination among operatives for the purpose of raising the
rate of wages had been a crime punishable by law; and though several
combinations and trade unions did exist, open strikes, which would have
been a too palpable manifestation of them to be tolerated, could scarce
be said ever to take place. I saw enough at the period to convince me,
that though the _right_ of combination, abstractly considered, is just
and proper, the strikes which would result from it as consequences would
be productive of much evil, and little good; and in an argument with my
friend William on the subject, I ventured to assure him that his
house-painter's union would never benefit the operative house-painters
as a class, and urged him to give up his clerkship. "There is a want," I
said, "of true leadership among our operatives in these combinations. It
is the wilder spirits that dictate the conditions; and, pitching their
demands high, they begin usually by enforcing acquiescence in them on
the quieter and more moderate among their companions. They are tyrants
to their fellows ere they come into collision with their masters, and
have thus an enemy in the camp, not unwilling to take advantage of their
seasons of weakness, and prepared to rejoice, though secretly mayhap, in
their defeats and reverses. And further, their discomfiture will be
always quite certain enough when seasons of depression come, from the
circumstance that, fixing their terms in prosperous times, they will fix
them with reference rather to their present power of enforcing them,
than to that medium line of fair and equal adjustment on which a
conscientious man could plant his foot and make a firm stand. Men such
as you, able and ready to work in behalf of these combinations, will of
course get the work to do, but you will have little or no power given
you in their direction: the direction will be apparently in the hands of
a few fluent _gabbers_; and yet even they will not be the actual
directors--they will be but the exponents and voices of the general
mediocre sentiment and inferior sense of the mass as a whole, and
acceptable only so long as they give utterance to that; and so,
ultimately, exceedingly little will be won in this way for working men.
It is well that they should be allowed to combine, seeing that
combination is permitted to those who employ them; but until the
majority of our working men of the south become very different from what
they now are--greatly wiser and greatly better--there will be more lost
than gained by their combinations. According to the circumstances of the
time and season, the current will be at one period running in their
favour against the masters, and at another in favour of the masters
against them: there will be a continual ebb and flow, like that of the
sea, but no general advance; and the sooner that the like of you and I
get out of the rough conflict and jostle of the tideway, and set
ourselves to labour apart on our own internal resources, it will be all
the better for us." William, however, did not give up his clerkship; and
I daresay the sort of treatment which I had received at the hands of my
fellow-workmen made me express myself rather strongly on the subject;
but the actual history of the numerous strikes and combinations which
have taken place during the quarter of a century and more which has
since intervened, is of a kind not in the least suited to modify my
views. There _is_ a want of judicious leadership among our working men;
and such of the autobiographies of the class as are able and interesting
enough to obtain a hearing of their authors show, I am inclined to
think, how this takes place. Combination is first brought to bear among
them against the men, their fellows, who have vigour enough of intellect
to think and act for themselves; and such always is the character of the
born leader: these true leaders are almost always forced into the
opposition; and thus separating between themselves and the men fitted by
nature to render them formidable, they fall under the direction of mere
chatterers and stump orators, which is in reality no direction at all.
The author of the "Working Man's Way in the World"--evidently a very
superior man--had, he tells us, to quit at one time his employment,
overborne by the senseless ridicule of his brother workmen. Somerville
states in his Autobiography, that, both as a labouring man and a
soldier, it was from the hands of his comrades that--save in one
memorable instance--he had experienced all the tyranny and oppression of
which he had been the victim. Nay, Benjamin Franklin himself was deemed
a much more ordinary man in the printing-house in Bartholomew Close,
where he was teased and laughed at as the _Water-American_, than in the
House of Representatives, the Royal Society, or the Court of France.
The great Printer, though recognised by accomplished politicians as a
profound statesman, and by men of solid science as "the most rational of
the philosophers," was regarded by his poor brother compositors as
merely an odd fellow, who did not conform to their drinking usages, and
whom it was therefore fair to tease and annoy as a contemner of the
_sacrament_ of the _chapel_.[9]
The life of my friend was, however, pitched on a better and higher tone
than that of most of his brother unionists. It was intellectual and
moral, and its happier hours were its hours of quiet self-improvement,
when, throwing himself on the resources within, he forgot for the time
the unions and combinations that entailed upon him much troublesome
occupation, but never did him any service. I regretted, however, to find
that a distrust of his own powers was still growing upon him, and
narrowing his circle of enjoyment. On asking him whether he still amused
himself with his flute, he turned, after replying with a brief "O no!"
to a comrade with whom he had lived for years, and quietly said to him,
by way of explaining the question, "Robert, I suppose you don't know I
was once a grand flute-player!" And sure enough Robert did not know. He
had given up, too, his water-colour drawing, in which his taste was
decidedly fine; and even in oils, with which he still occasionally
engaged himself, instead of casting himself full on nature, as at an
earlier period, he had become a copyist of the late Rev. Mr. Thomson of
Duddingstone, at that time in the full blow of his artistic reputation;
nor could I see that he copied him well. I urged and remonstrated, but
to no effect. "Ah, Miller," he has said, "what matters it how I amuse
myself? You have stamina in you, and will force your way; but I want
strength: the world will never hear of me." That overweening conceit
which seems but natural to the young man as a playful disposition to the
kitten, or a soft and timid one to the puppy, often assumes a
ridiculous, and oftener still an unamiable, aspect. And yet, though it
originates many very foolish things, it seems to be in itself, like the
fanaticism of the Teetotaller, a wise provision, which, were it not made
by nature, would leave most minds without spring enough to effect, with
the required energy, the movements necessary to launch them fairly into
busy or studious life. The sobered man of mature age who has learned
pretty correctly to take the measure of himself, has usually acquired
both habits and knowledge that assist him in urging his onward way, and
the moving force of necessity always presses him onward from behind; but
the exhilarating conviction of being born to superior parts, and to do
something astonishingly clever, seems necessary to the young man; and
when I see it manifesting itself, if not very foolishly or very
offensively, I usually think of my poor friend William Ross, who was
unfortunate enough wholly to want it; and extend to it a pretty ample
toleration. Ultimately my friend gave up painting, and restricted
himself to the ornamental parts of his profession, of which he became
very much a master. In finishing a ceiling in oils, upon which he had
represented in bold relief some of the ornately sculptured foliage of
the architect, the gentleman for whom he wrought (the son-in-law of a
distinguished artist, and himself an amateur), called on his wife to
admire the truthful and delicate shading of their house-painter. It was
astonishing, he said, and perhaps somewhat humiliating, to see the mere
mechanic trenching so decidedly on the province of the artist. Poor
William Ross, however, was no mere mechanic; and even artists might
have regarded his encroachments on their proper domain with more of
complacency than humiliation. One of the last pieces of work upon which
he was engaged was a gorgeously painted ceiling in the palace of some
Irish bishop, which he had been sent all the way from Glasgow to finish.
Every society, however homely, has its picturesque points, nor did even
that of the rather commonplace hamlet in which I resided at this time
wholly want them. There was a decaying cottage a few doors away, that
had for its inmate a cross-tempered old crone, who strove hard to set up
as a witch, but broke down from sheer want of the necessary capital. She
had been one of the underground workers of Niddry in her time; and,
being as little intelligent as most of the other collier-women of the
neighbourhood, she had not the necessary witch-lore to adapt her
pretensions to the capacity of belief which obtained in the district.
And so the general estimate formed regarding her was that to which our
landlady occasionally gave expression. "Donnart auld bodie," Peggy used
to say; "though she threaps hersel' a witch, she's nae mair witch than I
am: she's only just trying, in her feckless auld age, to make folk stand
in her reverence." Old Alie was, however, a curiosity in her way--quite
malignant enough to be a real witch, and fitted, if with a few more
advantages of acquirement, she had been antedated an age or two, to
become as hopeful a candidate for a tar-barrel as most of her class. Her
next-door neighbour was also an old woman, and well-nigh as poor as the
crone; but she was an easy-tempered genial sort of person, who wished
harm to no one; and the expression of content that dwelt on her round
fresh face, which, after the wear of more than seventy winters, still
retained its modicum of colour, contrasted strongly with the fierce
wretchedness that gleamed from the sharp and sallow features of the
witch. It was evident that the two old women, though placed externally
in almost the same circumstances, had essentially a very different lot
assigned to them, and enjoyed existence in a very unequal degree. The
placid old woman kept a solitary lodger--"Davie the apprentice"--a
wayward, eccentric lad, much about my own age, though in but the second
"year of his time," who used to fret even her temper, and who, after
making trial of I know not how many other professions, now began to find
that his genius did not lie to the mallet. Davie was stage-mad; but for
the stage nature seemed to have fitted him rather indifferently: she had
given him a squat ungainly figure, an inexpressive face, a voice that in
its intonations somewhat resembled the grating of a carpenter's saw;
and, withal, no very nice conception of either comic or serious
character; but he could recite in the "big bow-wow style," and think and
dream of only plays and play-actors. To Davie the world and its concerns
seemed unworthy of a moment's care, and the stage appeared the only
great reality. He was engaged, when I first made his acquaintance, in
writing a play, with which he had already filled a whole quire of
foolscap, without, however, having quite entered upon the plot; and he
read to me some of the scenes in tones of such energy that the whole
village heard. Though written in the kind of verse which Dr. Young
believed to be the language of angels, his play was sad stuff; and when
he paused for my approbation, I ventured to suggest an alteration in one
of the speeches. "There, Sir," said Davie, in the vein of Cambyses,
"take the pen; let me see, Sir, how _you_ would turn it." I accordingly
took the pen, and re-wrote the speech. "Hum," said Davie, as he ran his
eye along the lines, "that, Sir, is mere poetry. What, think you, could
the great Kean make of feeble stuff like that? Let me tell you, Sir, you
have no notion whatever of stage effect." I, of course, at once
acquiesced; and Davie, mollified by my submission, read to me yet
another scene. Cha, however, of whom he stood a good deal in awe, used
to tease him not a little about his play. I have heard him inquire
sedulously about the development of the story and the management of the
characters, and whether he was writing the several parts with a due eye
to the capabilities of the leading actors of the day; and Davie, not
quite sure, apparently, whether Cha was in joke or earnest, was usually
on these occasions very chary of reply.
Davie, had he but the means of securing access, would have walked in
every night to the city to attend the playhouse; and it quite astonished
him, he used to say, that I, who really knew something of the drama, and
had four shillings a day, did not nightly at least devote one of the
four to purchase perfect happiness and a seat in the shilling gallery.
On some two, or at most three occasions, I did attend the playhouse,
accompanied by Cha and a few of the other workmen; but though I had been
greatly delighted, when a boy, by the acting of a company of strollers
that had visited Cromarty, and converted the Council House Hall into a
theatre, the greatly better acting of the Edinburgh company failed to
satisfy me now. The few plays, however, which I saw enacted chanced to
be of a rather mediocre character, and gave no scope for the exhibition
of nice histrionic talent; nor were any of the great actors of the south
on the Edinburgh boards at the time. The stage scenery, too, though
quite fine enough of its kind, had, I found, altogether a different
effect upon me from the one which it had been elaborated to produce. In
perusing our fine old dramas, it was the truth of nature that the
vividly-drawn scenes and figures, and the happily-portrayed characters,
always suggested; whereas the painted canvas, and the respectable but
yet too palpable acting, served but to unrealize what I saw, and to
remind me that I was merely in a theatre. Further, I deemed it too large
a price to devote a whole evening to see some play acted which, mayhap,
as a composition I would not have deemed worth the reading; and so the
temptation of play-going failed to tempt me; and latterly, when my
comrades set out for the playhouse, I stayed at home. Whatever the
nature of the process through which they have gone, a considerable
proportion of the more intelligent mechanics of the present generation
seem to have landed in conclusions similar to the one at which I at this
time arrived. At least, for every dozen of the class that frequented the
theatre thirty years ago, there is scarce one that frequents it now. I
have said that the scenery of the stage made no very favourable
impression upon me. Some parts of it must, however, have made a
considerably stronger one than I could have supposed at the time.
Fourteen years after, when the whole seemed to have passed out of
memory, I was lying ill of small-pox, which, though a good deal modified
apparently by the vaccination of a long anterior period, was accompanied
by such a degree of fever, that for two days together one delirious
image continued to succeed another in the troubled sensorium, as scene
succeeds scene in the box of an itinerant showman. As is not uncommon,
however, in such cases, though ill enough to be haunted by the images, I
was yet well enough to know that they were idle unrealities, the mere
effects of indisposition; and even sufficiently collected to take an
interest in watching them as they arose, and in striving to determine
whether they were linked together by the ordinary associative ties. I
found, however, that they were wholly independent of each other. Curious
to know whether the will exerted any power over them, I set myself to
try whether I could not conjure up a death's-head as one of the series;
but what rose instead was a cheerful parlour fire, bearing a-top a
tea-kettle, and as the picture faded and then vanished, it was succeeded
by a gorgeous cataract, in which the white foam, at first strongly
relieved against the dark rock over which it fell, soon exhibited a deep
tinge of sulphurous blue, and then came dashing down in one frightful
sheet of blood. The great singularity of the vision served to freshen
recollection, and I detected in the strange cataract every line and tint
of the water-fall in the incantation scene in "Der Freischuetz" which I
had witnessed in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, with certainly no very
particular interest, so long before. There are, I suspect, provinces in
the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet
entered. Of that accessible storehouse in which the memories of past
events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but
of a mysterious cabinet of daguerrotype pictures, of which, though fast
locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar,
they seem to know nothing.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] The kind of club into which the compositors of a printing-house
always form themselves has from time immemorial been termed a _chapel_;
and the petty tricks by which Franklin was annoyed were said to be
played him by the chapel ghost. "My employer desiring," he says, "after
some weeks, to have me in the composing room, I left the pressmen. A new
_bien-venu_ for drink, being five shillings, was demanded of me by the
compositors. I thought it an imposition, as I had paid one to the
pressmen. The master thought so too, and forbade my paying it. I stood
out two or three weeks, was accordingly considered as an
_excommunicate_, and had so many little pieces of private malice
practised on me by mixing my sorts, transposing and breaking my matter,
&c. &c., if ever I stepped out of the room, and all ascribed to the
_chapel ghost_, which, they said, ever haunted those not regularly
admitted, that, notwithstanding my master's protection, I found myself
obliged to comply and pay the money."