as closely related to his new surroundings as to his old. The same
reputation, which would draw to him fellow-scholars or old pupils,
would put him in a position to discover the work and thought going
on around him. He would become familiar with the teachers in the
elementary and middle-class schools, he would measure the work done
by clergy and missionaries, he would be in touch with the details of
local politics; and, what is most important of all, he would come into
sympathy with the hope, the unnamed hope, which is moving in the masses.
The Settlement would be common ground for all classes. In the
lecture-room the knowledge gathered at the highest sources would, night
after night, be freely given. In the conversation rooms the students
would exchange ideas and form friendships. At the weekly receptions of
‘all sorts and conditions of men’ the residents would mingle freely in
the crowd.
The internal arrangements would be simple enough. The Head would
undertake the domestic details and fix the price which residents
would pay for board and lodging. He would admit new members and judge
if the intentions of those who offered were honest. Some would come
for their vacations; others occupied during the daytime would come
to make the place their home. University men, barristers, Government
clerks, curates, medical students, or business men each would have
opportunity both for solitary and for associated life, and the expense
would be various to suit their various means. The one uniting bond
would be the common purpose, ‘not without action to die fruitless,’
but to do something to improve the condition of the people. It would
be the duty of the Head to keep alive among his fellows the freshness
of their purpose, ‘to recall the stragglers, refresh the outworn,
praise and reinspire the brave.’ He would have, therefore, to judge
of the powers of each to fill the places to which he could introduce
them. To some he would recommend official positions, to some teaching,
to some the organisation of relief, to some the visiting of the sick,
and thus new life would be infused into existing churches, chapels,
and institutions. Others he would introduce as members of Co-operative
Societies, Friendly Societies, or Political and Social Clubs. He would
so arrange that all should occupy positions in which they would become
friends of his neighbours, and discover, perhaps as none have yet
discovered, how to meet their needs.
In such an institution it is easy to see that development might be
immeasurable. A born leader of men surrounded by a group of intelligent
and earnest friends, pledged not ‘to go round in an eddy of purposeless
dust,’ and placed face to face with the misery and apathy they know to
be wrong, would of necessity discover means beyond our present vision.
They would bind themselves by sympathy and service to the lives of the
people; they would bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear
on their government, and they would give a voice both to their needs
and their wrongs. It is easy to imagine what such settlers in a great
town might do, but it will be more to the point to consider how they
may express the idea which underlies the College Mission--the interest,
that is, of centres of education in the centres of industry, and the
will of University men to acknowledge their brotherhood with the people.
If it be that the Missionary’s account of his Mission district fails at
last to rouse the interest of his hearers, and if his work seems to
be absorbed in the effort to keep going his parochial machinery amid a
host of like machines, the same cannot be the fate of the Settlement.
Some of the settlers will settle themselves for longer periods, and
those who are occupied during the daytime will find it as possible to
live among the poor as among the rich; but there must also be room for
those who can spend only a few weeks or months in the Settlement, so
that men may come, as some already have come, to East London to spend
part of a vacation in serving the people. This interchange of life
between the University and the Settlement will keep up between the two
a living tie. Each term will bring, not a set speech about the work
of the Mission, but the many chats on the wonders of human life. The
condition of the English people will come to be a fact more familiar
than that of the Grecian or Roman, and the history of the College
Settlement will be better known than that of the boat or the eleven. On
the other side, thoughts and feelings which are now often spent in vain
talks at debating societies will go up to town to refresh those who are
spent by labour, or to find an outlet in action.
There is no fear that the College Settlement will fail to rouse
interest. Its life will be the life of the College. As long as both
draw their strength from the common source, from the same body of
members, the sympathy of the College will be with the people. Nor is
there any fear lest the work of the settlers become stereotyped, as is
often the case with the work of Missions and Societies. Each year, each
term, would alter the constitution of the Settlement as other settlers
brought in other characters and the results of other knowledge, or as
their ideas became modified by common work with the various religious
and secular organisations of the neighbourhood. The danger, indeed,
would not be from uniformity of method or narrowness of aim; rather
would it be the endeavour of the Head to limit the diversity which many
minds would introduce, and restrain a liberality willing to see good in
every form of earnestness. The variety of work which would embrace the
most varied effort, and enlist its members in every movement for the
common good, would keep about the Settlement the beauty of a perpetual
promise.
If we go further, and ask how this plan reaches deeper than others
which have gone before, the question is not so easily answered, because
it is impossible to prophesy that a University Settlement will make
the poor rich or give them the necessaries of true life. Inasmuch,
though, as poverty--poverty in its true sense, including poverty of the
knowledge of God and man--is largely due to the division of classes, a
University Settlement does provide a remedy which goes deeper than that
provided by popular philanthropy.
The poor man of modern days has to live in a quarter of the town where
he cannot even try to live with those superior to himself. Around
him are thousands educated as he has been educated, with taste and
with knowledge on a level with his own. The demand for low things has
created a supply of low satisfactions. Thus it is that the amusements
are unrecreative, the lectures uninstructive, and the religion
uninspiring. It is not possible for the inhabitant of the poor quarter
to come into casual intercourse with the higher manners of life and
thought except at a cost which would constitute a large percentage of
his income.
I am afraid that it is long before we can expect the rich and poor
again to live as neighbours: for good or evil they have been divided,
and other means must, for the present, be found for making common the
property of knowledge. One such means is the University Settlement.
Men who have knowledge may become friends of the poor and share that
knowledge and its fruits as, day by day, they meet in their common
rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play.
The settlers will be able to join in that which is done by other
societies, while they share all their best with the poor, and in the
highest sense make their property common. They may be some of the best
charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach
of others, which they will have accumulated through their different
agencies. As members of various secular and religious organisations,
they may be able to compare notes after the day’s work, and offer
evidence as to how the poor live which, in days to come, might be
invaluable. They may be some of the best educators, for, bringing
ever-fresh stores of thought, they will see the weak spots in a
routine which daily tires a child because it does so little to teach
him, and they will have an opinion on national education better worth
considering than the grumbles of those wearied with most things, or the
congratulations of officials who judge by examinations. They may be
the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest
how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation;
how, one after another, all reforms fail because men tell lies and
love themselves; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the
reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create
righteousness.
There is, then, for the settler of a University Settlement an ideal
worthy of his sacrifice. He looks not to a Church buttressed by party
spirit, nor to a community founded on self-helped respectability. He
looks rather to a community where the best is most common, where there
is no more hunger and misery, because there is no more ignorance and
sin--a community in which the poor have all that gives value to wealth,
in which beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised.
SAMUEL A. BARNETT.
[This paper was read at a meeting at St. John’s College, Oxford,
in November 1883, and resulted in the foundation of Toynbee Hall,
Whitechapel, and other University Settlements in poor districts of
large towns.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII.
_PICTURES FOR THE PEOPLE._[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Cornhill Magazine_, March 1883.
‘It is folly, if nothing worse, to attempt it. What do the people
want with fine art? They will neither understand nor appreciate it.
Show them an oleograph of “Little Red Riding Hood,” or a coloured
illustration of “Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” and they will like it just
as much as Mr. Millais’s “Chill October” or Mr. Watts’s “Love and
Death.”’
Such opinions met us at every turn when we first began to think of
having an Art Exhibition in Whitechapel. But we knew that it is not
only indifference which keeps the people living in the far East
away from the West End Art Treasures. The expense of transit; the
ignorance of ways of getting about; the shortness of daylight beyond
working hours during the greater part of the year; the impression
that the day when they could go is sure to be the day when the Museum
is ‘closed to the public’--all these little discouragements become
difficulties, especially to the large number who have not yet had
enough opportunities of knowing the joy which Art gives.
‘Well, I should not have believed I could have enjoyed myself so much,
and yet been so quiet,’ describes a lesson learnt from an hour spent in
Mr. Watts’s Gallery at Little Holland House; and once, after showing
a party of mechanics a large photograph of the Dresden Madonna, I was
asked, ‘Where now can we see such things often?’ while further talk on
the picture elicited from another of the same group, ‘But that’s more
the philosophy of pictures; one wants to see a great many to learn how
to see them so.’
Such remarks, by no means isolated, and the proposal that we should
‘get up a Loan Exhibition’ from one of our active working-men friends,
turned inclination into determination.
The resources at command were hardly enough to promise success in the
undertaking. They were but three schoolrooms, thirty feet by sixty,
behind the church, not on a central thoroughfare, and approached by a
passage yard; the light was much obscured by surrounding buildings;
the doorways were narrow and the staircase crooked. But friends came
forward to help, and there was soon formed a large committee, which,
after meeting two or three times to discuss general principles and
plans, divided itself into sub-committees to carry out special branches
of a work which, though to a large extent one of detail, was by no
means slight.
The hanging committee undertook to measure space, obtain the sizes
of pictures, and see to the strength of rods and thickness of
walls, but to the general committee was left the duty of refusing
undesirable-sized or inappropriate pictures. This last was by no
means the least difficult labour, so extraordinary were some of the
loans offered to us; a dreadful portrait of an uncomely old lady was
sent because ‘she was the maternal grandmother of a man who used to
keep a shop in the High Street,’ this recommendation being considered
sufficient to obtain for the picture a place in an Art Collection; a
pencil drawing ‘done by John when he was only fifteen, and now he’s
doing well in the pawnbroking line,’ was held worthy by a proud mother.
But if, on the one side, we were somewhat overwhelmed with offers of
loans of doubtful description, on the other we were not unfrequently
surprised at the unwillingness of art owners to lend their treasures.
Vain were promises of safety and insurance. ‘I don’t fear for the
pictures, but I don’t like to have my walls bare,’ was the too common
answer; and the argument, ‘Not for a fortnight, to enable thousands of
people to see them?’ rarely penetrated the coat of selfishness which
incases such owners.
By no means had the hanging committee a monopoly of work. The
decorative committee made it its duty to provide hangings, flags,
bunting; to hide the usual schoolroom suggestions, and to make the
place attractive to the passing crowd. The advertising committee
undertook the difficult and expensive work of making the undertaking
known, always difficult, but especially so when many of the people
among whom the information has to be spread can neither read nor write.
The finance committee did the dull but necessary work connected with
money.
At the first Exhibition 3_d._ was charged for admission during seven
days, and free admittance granted for two days. On the threepenny
days 4,000 people paid or were paid for; on the free days, including
Sunday, 5,000 came to see the show. The box for donations contained on
the seven paying days 4_l._ 16_s._ 1_d._; on the two free days 6_l._
2_s._ 3_d._ The second Exhibition was opened free. In the thirteen days
26,492 people came to see it. The boxes contained 21_l._ 8_s._ 9_d._,
and 4,600 catalogues were sold at 1_d._,[2] realising 20_l._ 17_s._
1_d._, the cost of printing of which was 17_l._ 16_s._
[2] First edition was sold at 3_d._; and some on the first day at
6_d._, while a few were given away.
Not the least weighted with responsibility was the watch committee,
whose work was the safeguarding of the loans, both by night and day.
Policemen, firemen, and caretakers had to be engaged, not to mention
the organisation required to arrange for the eighteen or twenty
gentlemen who came down daily to ‘take a watch’ of four hours in
the rooms; where their presence not only served to prevent unseemly
conduct, but their descriptions of pictures and homely chats with the
people made often all the difference between an intelligent visit and
a listless ten minutes’ stare. The work of borrowing was everybody’s
work; and, on the whole, the response met with has been generous,
particularly from the artists and those owners whose possessions were
few.
The first Exhibition included--besides pictures--pottery, needlework,
and curiosities; but, interesting as these were, the expense of
getting them together, providing cases for them, and showing them
thoroughly under glass, was so great that in the second Exhibition
it was determined to exhibit only pictures and such works of art and
curiosities as the Kensington Museum would lend us, the latter already
in cases, and with their own special caretaker to boot.
The cataloguing and describing committee comes last; and its work,
though done in a hurry, bore no slight relation to the success of the
undertaking.
It is impossible for the ignorant to even look at a picture with any
interest unless they are acquainted with the subject; but when once
the story is told to them their plain, direct method of looking at
things enables them to go straight to the point, and perhaps to reach
the artist’s meaning more clearly than some of those art critics whose
vision is obscured by thoughts of ‘tone, harmony, and construction.’
Mr. Richmond’s fine picture of ‘Ariadne’ elicited many remarks. ‘Why,
it is crazy Jane!’ exclaimed one woman, following up the declaration
in a few moments by, ‘and it’s finely done, too;’ but the story once
explained, either by catalogue or talk, the interest increased. ‘Poor
soul! she’s seen her day,’ came from a genuine sympathiser. ‘Oh, no!
she’ll get another lover; rest sure of that.’ ‘’Tain’t quite likely,
seeing that it’s a desert island!’ was the practical retort, which
rather dumbfounded the hopeful commentator; but she would have the last
word: ‘Well, I would, if it were myself, and she’ll find a way, sure
enough, somehow.’ ‘The light is all behind her,’ showed a delicate
perception of what, perhaps, the artist himself had put in with the
truth of unconsciousness.
Mr. Briton Rivière’s representation of the ‘Dying Gladiator’ was the
subject of much conversation. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to
remind any one of the picture, which was in the Academy but a year or
two ago. The splendid painting of the tigers, both dead and living,
with the vividly depicted physical agony of the martyr, in spite of
which he feels triumph, as, faithful even in death, he makes the sign
of the cross in the sand, would probably make an impression on and be
remembered by those who saw it.
‘There, my boy, there’s your ancestor in the lions’ den!’ was the
paternal explanation of one of Abraham’s descendants to his small son;
but a reference to the catalogue changed his opinion on the subject,
if not on the goodness of the cause for which the gladiator suffered.
The description in the catalogue for this picture was: ‘The Romans, for
their holiday amusement, made their prisoners fight with wild beasts.
The young Christian has killed one of the tigers; but is himself
mortally wounded. His last act is to trace in the sand the form of
a cross, the sign of the faith for which he dies. The shouts of the
excited crowd, the roar of the baulked tiger, are fading in his ears.
God has kissed him, and he will sleep.’ Somewhat fanciful, perhaps, but
reaching, maybe, the spirit of the picture more truly than a plainer
statement of facts would have done. ‘“God kissed him,” it says; I
should have said the tiger clawed him,’ was the one adverse criticism
overheard on the description. As a rule, the subject of the picture
once understood, the people stood before it in thoughtful consideration.
Mr. Richmond’s ‘Sleep and Death,’ as well as Mr. Watts’s ‘Time, Death,
and Judgment,’ both ideal rather than historical or domestic pictures,
were greatly enjoyed, and this by a class of people whose external
lives are drearily barren of ideals.
An interpretation offered by any one who had studied the parable
pictures was eagerly accepted, and further thoughts suggested. ‘You
can’t see Judgment’s face for his arm,’ perhaps had, perhaps had not,
more meaning in it than the speaker meant; while in reference to the
woman’s listless dropping of her flowers from her lap in ‘Time, Death,
and Judgment,’ the remark, ‘Death does not want the flowers now she’s
got ’em,’ told of thoughtful suffering at the apparent wastefulness of
death. ‘Time is young yet, then,’ made one feel that the speaker had
caught a glimpse of life’s possibilities with which probably any number
of homilies had failed to impress him.
‘Sleep and Death,’ depicting the strong, pale warrior borne on the
shoulders of Sleep, while being gently lifted into the arms of
Death--so simple in colour, pure in idea, rich in suggestion--was good
for the poor to see, among whom Death is robbed of none of its terrors
by the coarse familiarity with which it is treated. With them funerals
are too often a time of great rowdiness, and ‘a beautiful corpse’ a
fit spectacle for all the neighbours--even the youngest child--to be
invited to see. Death treated as a tender mother-woman, hidden in the
cold grey vastness surrounding her, was a bright idea, producing,
perhaps, greater modesty about the great mystery. ‘That’s the best
of the whole lot, to my mind,’ came, after a long gaze, from a pale,
trouble-stricken man, whose sorrows Sleep had not always helped to
bear, whose loveless life had made Death’s enfolding arms seem wondrous
kind.
Sometimes there were discussions as to which was Sleep and which Death,
ended once summarily by the loudly expressed opinion, ‘It don’t much
matter which. I don’t call it proper, _anyhow_, to see a man pickaback
of an angel!’--a hypercritical sense of propriety which was hardly to
be expected from the appearance of the critic.
Munkacsy’s picture of the ‘Lint Pickers,’ lent by Mr. J. S. Forbes,
aroused much interest. In the catalogue, after a short account of the
artist’s life and works, it was described thus: ‘A soldier, with a
bandaged leg, is telling the story of the war to the women and children
who are picking lint to dress wounds. The different feelings with which
the news is received are shown with wonderful skill in the different
faces. Some are waiting to hear the worst; another has already heard
it, and can only bury her face in her hands. To others it is but an
interesting story; while the little child is only intent on his basket
of lint.
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.’
The gloom of the picture, the utter dejection of the workers, relieved
nowhere by a gleam of light--even the child (around whom Hope might
have hovered) finding a grim plaything in the lint--all combine to tell
the tale of what the artist evidently felt--the cruelty of war. Much
interest was taken in finding out, amid the darkness, the different
figures in their various attitudes of active or crushed woe. It spoke,
though, a little sadly for the want of joyousness in East London
entertainments that more than one sightseer, _before_ reading the
catalogue or being helped by a verbal explanation, thought ‘it was a
lot of poor people at tea.’
The frames of all the pictures excited wonder, sometimes admiration not
accorded to the pictures themselves; and the oft-reiterated questions,
‘What, now, is it all worth? How much would it fetch?’ became a little
wearisome, not the less so because expressive of one of the signs of
the times.
‘All beautiful! and most of them [the pictures] done by machinery, I
suppose,’ showed greater mechanical than artistic appreciation; while
the cross-examination to which we were put as to why the Exhibition
was held was sometimes interesting rather than edifying. ‘Oh, yes,
it’ll pay, sure enough, if you only go on long enough,’ was one
woman’s comforting assurance; and the answer, ‘I hardly see how,
considering that it is open free,’ carried so little force to her mind
that its only effect was to make her repeat her belief in a still
more confidently cheery tone. But many and hearty were the thanks
that were given at the end of some such chats; and the gentlemen who
explained the pictures and talked to the little groups which quickly
gathered round ‘some one who would tell about it all’ were more than
once offered reward-money--a flattering tribute to their powers, and
illustrative of the living sense of justice in the workman’s mind and
the conviction that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire.’