PEGASUS IN HARNESS.
But, in sorrow or in joy, I had to earn my bread; and so, too, had
Crossthwaite, poor fellow! How he contrived to feed himself and his little
Katie for the next few years is more than I can tell; at all events he
worked hard enough. He scribbled, agitated, ran from London to Manchester,
and Manchester to Bradford, spouting, lecturing--sowing the east wind, I am
afraid, and little more. Whose fault was it? What could such a man do, with
that fervid tongue, and heart, and brain of his, in such a station as his,
such a time as this? Society had helped to make him an agitator. Society
has had, more or less, to take the consequences of her own handiwork. For
Crossthwaite did not speak without hearers. He could make the fierce,
shrewd, artisan nature flash out into fire--not always celestial, nor
always, either, infernal. So he agitated and lived--how, I know not. That
he did do so, is evident from the fact that he and Katie are at this moment
playing chess in the cabin, before my eyes, and making love, all the while,
as if they had not been married a week.... Ah, well!
I, however, had to do more than get my bread; I had to pay off these
fearful eleven pounds odd, which, now that all the excitement of my stay at
D * * * had been so sadly quenched, lay like lead upon my memory. My list
of subscribers filled slowly, and I had no power of increasing it by any
canvassings of my own. My uncle, indeed, had promised to take two copies,
and my cousin one; not wishing, of course, to be so uncommercial as to run
any risk, before they had seen whether my poems would succeed. But, with
those exceptions, the dean had it all his own way; and he could not be
expected to forego his own literary labours for my sake; so, through all
that glaring summer, and sad foggy autumn, and nipping winter, I had to
get my bread as I best could--by my pen. Mackaye grumbled at my writing
so much, and so fast, and sneered about the _furor scribendi_. But it
was hardly fair upon me. "My mouth craved it of me," as Solomon says.
I had really no other means of livelihood. Even if I could have gotten
employment as a tailor, in the honourable trade, I loathed the business
utterly--perhaps, alas! to confess the truth, I was beginning to despise
it. I could bear to think of myself as a poor genius, in connection with my
new wealthy and high-bred patrons; for there was precedent for the thing.
Penniless bards and squires of low degree, low-born artists, ennobled by
their pictures--there was something grand in the notion of mind triumphant
over the inequalities of rank, and associating with the great and wealthy
as their spiritual equal, on the mere footing of its own innate nobility;
no matter to what den it might return, to convert it into a temple of the
Muses, by the glorious creations of its fancy, &c., &c. But to go back
daily from the drawing-room and the publisher's to the goose and the
shopboard, was too much for my weakness, even if it had been physically
possible, as, thank Heaven, it was not.
So I became a hack-writer, and sorrowfully, but deliberately, "put my
Pegasus into heavy harness," as my betters had done before me. It was
miserable work, there is no denying it--only not worse than tailoring.
To try and serve God and Mammon too; to make miserable compromises daily
between the two great incompatibilities, what was true, and what would
pay; to speak my mind, in fear and trembling, by hints, and halves, and
quarters; to be daily hauling poor Truth just up to the top of the well,
and then, frightened at my own success, let her plump down again to the
bottom; to sit there trying to teach others, while my mind was in a whirl
of doubt; to feed others' intellects while my own were hungering; to grind
on in the Philistine's mill, or occasionally make sport for them, like some
weary-hearted clown grinning in a pantomime in a "light article," as blind
as Samson, but not, alas! as strong, for indeed my Delilah of the West-end
had clipped my locks, and there seemed little chance of their growing
again. That face and that drawing-room flitted before me from morning till
eve, and enervated and distracted my already over-wearied brain.
I had no time, besides, to concentrate my thoughts sufficiently for poetry;
no time to wait for inspiration. From the moment I had swallowed my
breakfast, I had to sit scribbling off my thoughts anyhow in prose; and
soon my own scanty stock was exhausted, and I was forced to beg, borrow,
and steal notions and facts wherever I could get them. Oh! the misery of
having to read not what I longed to know, but what I thought would pay!
to skip page after page of interesting matter, just to pick out a single
thought or sentence which could be stitched into my patchwork! and then
the still greater misery of seeing the article which I had sent to press
a tolerably healthy and lusty bantling, appear in print next week after
suffering the inquisition tortures of the editorial censorship, all maimed,
and squinting, and one-sided, with the colour rubbed off its poor cheeks,
and generally a villanous hang-dog look of ferocity, so different from its
birth-smile that I often did not know my own child again!--and then, when I
dared to remonstrate, however feebly, to be told, by way of comfort, that
the public taste must be consulted! It gave me a hopeful notion of the said
taste, certainly; and often and often I groaned in spirit over the temper
of my own class, which not only submitted to, but demanded such one-sided
bigotry, prurience, and ferocity, from those who set up as its guides and
teachers.
Mr. O'Flynn, editor of the _Weekly Warwhoop_, whose white slave I now found
myself, was, I am afraid, a pretty faithful specimen of that class, as it
existed before the bitter lesson of the 10th of April brought the Chartist
working men and the Chartist press to their senses. Thereon sprang up a
new race of papers, whose moral tone, whatever may be thought of their
political or doctrinal opinions, was certainly not inferior to that of the
Whig and Tory press. The _Commonwealth_, the _Standard of Freedom_, the
_Plain Speaker_, were reprobates, if to be a Chartist is to be a reprobate:
but none except the most one-sided bigots could deny them the praise of
a stern morality and a lofty earnestness, a hatred of evil and a craving
after good, which would often put to shame many a paper among the oracles
of Belgravia and Exeter Hall. But those were the days of lubricity and
O'Flynn. Not that the man was an unredeemed scoundrel. He was no more
profligate, either in his literary or his private morals, than many a man
who earns his hundreds, sometimes his thousands, a year, by prophesying
smooth things to Mammon, crying in daily leaders "Peace! peace!" when
there is no peace, and daubing the rotten walls of careless luxury and
self-satisfied covetousness with the untempered mortar of party statistics
and garbled foreign news--till "the storm shall fall, and the breaking
thereof cometh suddenly in an instant." Let those of the respectable press
who are without sin, cast the first stone at the unrespectable. Many of
the latter class, who have been branded as traitors and villains, were
single-minded, earnest, valiant men; and, as for even O'Flynn, and those
worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were
too honest--they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like
Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become
"unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"--seeing,
indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore
off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's
clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became
just what they really were--just what hundreds more would become, who
now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to
be unrespectable as it does to be respectable; if the selfishness and
covetousness, bigotry and ferocity, which are in them, and more or less in
every man, had happened to enlist them against existing evils, instead of
for them. O'Flynn would have been gladly as respectable as they; but, in
the first place, he must have starved; and in the second place, he must
have lied; for he believed in his own radicalism with his whole soul. There
was a ribald sincerity, a frantic courage in the man. He always spoke the
truth when it suited him, and very often when it did not. He did see, which
is more than all do, that oppression is oppression, and humbug, humbug.
He had faced the gallows before now without flinching. He had spouted
rebellion in the Birmingham Bullring, and elsewhere, and taken the
consequences like a man; while his colleagues left their dupes to the
tender mercies of broadswords and bayonets, and decamped in the disguise
of sailors, old women, and dissenting preachers. He had sat three months
in Lancaster Castle, the Bastille of England, one day perhaps to fall like
that Parisian one, for a libel which he never wrote, because he would
not betray his cowardly contributor. He had twice pleaded his own cause,
without help of attorney, and showed himself as practised in every
law-quibble and practical cheat as if he had been a regularly ordained
priest of the blue-bag; and each time, when hunted at last into a corner,
had turned valiantly to bay, with wild witty Irish eloquence, "worthy," as
the press say of poor misguided Mitchell, "of a better cause." Altogether,
a much-enduring Ulysses, unscrupulous, tough-hided, ready to do and suffer
anything fair or foul, for what he honestly believed--if a confused,
virulent positiveness be worthy of the name "belief"--to be the true and
righteous cause.
Those who class all mankind compendiously and comfortably under the two
exhaustive species of saints and villains, may consider such a description
garbled and impossible. I have seen few men, but never yet met I among
those few either perfect saint or perfect villain. I draw men as I have
found them--inconsistent, piece-meal, better than their own actions,
worse than their own opinions, and poor O'Flynn among the rest. Not that
there were no questionable spots in the sun of his fair fame. It was
whispered that he had in old times done dirty work for Dublin Castle
bureaucrats--nay, that he had even, in a very hard season, written court
poetry for the _Morning Post_; but all these little peccadilloes he
carefully veiled in that kindly mist which hung over his youthful years.
He had been a medical student, and got plucked, his foes declared, in his
examination. He had set up a savings-bank, which broke. He had come over
from Ireland, to agitate for "repale" and "rint," and, like a wise man as
he was, had never gone back again. He had set up three or four papers in
his time, and entered into partnership with every leading democrat in turn;
but his papers failed, and he quarrelled with his partners, being addicted
to profane swearing and personalities. And now, at last, after Ulyssean
wanderings, he had found rest in the office of the _Weekly Warwhoop_, if
rest it could be called, that perennial hurricane of plotting, railing,
sneering, and bombast, in which he lived, never writing a line, on
principle, till he had worked himself up into a passion.
I will dwell no more on so distasteful a subject. Such leaders, let us
hope, belong only to the past--to the youthful self-will and licentiousness
of democracy; and as for reviling O'Flynn, or any other of his class, no
man has less right than myself, I fear, to cast stones at such as they.
I fell as low as almost any, beneath the besetting sins of my class; and
shall I take merit to myself, because God has shown me, a little earlier
perhaps than to them, somewhat more of the true duties and destinies of The
Many? Oh, that they could see the depths of my affection to them! Oh, that
they could see the shame and self-abasement with which, in rebuking their
sins, I confess my own! If they are apt to be flippant and bitter, so was
I. If they lust to destroy, without knowing what to build up instead, so
did I. If they make an almighty idol of that Electoral Reform, which ought
to be, and can be, only a preliminary means, and expect final deliverance
from "their twenty-thousandth part of a talker in the national palaver,"
so did I. Unhealthy and noisome as was the literary atmosphere in which I
now found myself, it was one to my taste. The very contrast between the
peaceful, intellectual luxury which I had just witnessed, and the misery of
my class and myself, quickened my delight in it. In bitterness, in sheer
envy, I threw my whole soul into it, and spoke evil, and rejoiced in evil.
It was so easy to find fault! It pampered my own self-conceit, my own
discontent, while it saved me the trouble of inventing remedies. Yes; it
was indeed easy to find fault. "The world was all before me, where to
choose." In such a disorganized, anomalous, grumbling, party-embittered
element as this English society, and its twin pauperism and luxury, I had
but to look straight before me to see my prey.
And thus I became daily more and more cynical, fierce, reckless. My mouth
was filled with cursing--and too often justly. And all the while, like
tens of thousands of my class, I had no man to teach me. Sheep scattered
on the hills, we were, that had no shepherd. What wonder if our bones lay
bleaching among rocks and quagmires, and wolves devoured the heritage of
God?
Mackaye had nothing positive, after all, to advise or propound. His wisdom
was one of apophthegms and maxims, utterly impracticable, too often merely
negative, as was his creed, which, though he refused to be classed with any
sect, was really a somewhat undefined Unitarianism--or rather Islamism. He
could say, with the old Moslem, "God is great--who hath resisted his will?"
And he believed what he said, and lived manful and pure, reverent and
self-denying, by that belief, as the first Moslem did. But that was not
enough.
"Not enough? Merely negative?"
No--_that_ was positive enough, and mighty; but I repeat it, it was not
enough. He felt it so himself; for he grew daily more and more cynical,
more and more hopeless about the prospects of his class and of all
humanity. Why not? Poor suffering wretches! what is it to them to know that
"God is great," unless you can prove to them God is also merciful? Did he
indeed care for men at all?--was what I longed to know; was all this misery
and misrule around us his will--his stern and necessary law--his lazy
connivance? And were we to free ourselves from it by any frantic means that
came to hand? or had he ever interfered himself? Was there a chance, a
hope, of his interfering now, in our own time, to take the matter into his
own hand, and come out of his place to judge the earth in righteousness?
That was what we wanted to know; and poor Mackaye could give no comfort
there. "God was great--the wicked would be turned into hell." Ay--the few
wilful, triumphant wicked; but the millions of suffering, starving wicked,
the victims of society and circumstance--what hope for them? "God was
great." And for the clergy, our professed and salaried teachers, all I can
say is--and there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of workmen who
can re-echo my words--with the exception of the dean and my cousin, and one
who shall be mentioned hereafter, a clergyman never spoke to me in my life.
Why should he? Was I not a Chartist and an Infidel? The truth is, the
clergy are afraid of us. To read the _Dispatch_, is to be excommunicated.
Young men's classes? Honour to them, however few they are--however hampered
by the restrictions of religious bigotry and political cowardice. But the
working men, whether rightly or wrongly, do not trust them; they do not
trust the clergy who set them on foot; they do not expect to be taught at
them the things they long to know--to be taught the whole truth in them
about history, politics, science, the Bible. They suspect them to be mere
tubs to the whale--mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted,
in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the
clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? Clergymen of England!--look at
the history of your Establishment for the last fifty years, and say, what
wonder is it if the artisan mistrust you? Every spiritual reform, since the
time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult,
calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from
within, but from without your body. Mr. Horsman, struggling against every
kind of temporizing and trickery, has to do the work which bishops, by
virtue of their seat in the House of Lords, ought to have been doing years
ago. Everywhere we see the clergy, with a few persecuted exceptions (like
Dr. Arnold), proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, the dogged
opponents of our political liberty, living either by the accursed system of
pew-rents, or else by one which depends on the high price of corn; chosen
exclusively from the classes who crush us down; prohibiting all free
discussion on religious points; commanding us to swallow down, with faith
as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which
their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have, in the last
three generations, alienated us; never mixing with the thoughtful working
men, except in the prison, the hospital, or in extreme old age; betraying,
in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings,
the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not
accursed before God and man. And then will you show us a few tardy
improvements here and there, and ask us, indignantly, why we distrust you?
Oh! gentlemen, if you cannot see for yourselves the causes of our distrust,
it is past our power to show you. We must leave it to God.
* * * * *
But to return to my own story. I had, as I said before, to live by my pen;
and in that painful, confused, maimed way, I contrived to scramble on the
long winter through, writing regularly for the _Weekly Warwhoop_, and
sometimes getting an occasional scrap into some other cheap periodical,
often on the very verge of starvation, and glad of a handful of meal from
Sandy's widow's barrel. If I had had more than my share of feasting in the
summer, I made the balance even, during those frosty months, by many a
bitter fast.
And here let me ask you, gentle reader, who are just now considering me
ungentle, virulent, and noisy, did you ever, for one day in your whole
life, literally, involuntarily, and in spite of all your endeavours,
longings, and hungerings, _not get enough to eat_? If you ever have, it
must have taught you several things.
But all this while, it must not be supposed that I had forgotten my
promise to good Farmer Porter, to look for his missing son. And, indeed,
Crossthwaite and I were already engaged in a similar search for a friend
of his--the young tailor, who, as I told Porter, had been lost for
several months. He was the brother of Crossthwaite's wife, a passionate,
kind-hearted Irishman, Mike Kelly by name, reckless and scatter-brained
enough to get himself into every possible scrape, and weak enough of will
never to get himself out of one. For these two, Crossthwaite and I had
searched from one sweater's den to another, and searched in vain. And
though the present interest and exertion kept us both from brooding over
our own difficulties, yet in the long run it tended only to embitter and
infuriate our minds. The frightful scenes of hopeless misery which we
witnessed--the ever widening pit of pauperism and slavery, gaping for fresh
victims day by day, as they dropped out of the fast lessening "honourable
trade," into the ever-increasing miseries of sweating, piece-work, and
starvation prices; the horrible certainty that the same process which was
devouring our trade was slowly, but surely, eating up every other also;
the knowledge that there was no remedy, no salvation for us in man, that
political economists had declared such to be the law and constitution of
society, and that our rulers had believed that message, and were determined
to act upon it;--if all these things did not go far towards maddening us,
we must have been made of sterner stuff than any one who reads this book.
At last, about the middle of January, just as we had given up the search
as hopeless, and poor Katie's eyes were getting red and swelled with daily
weeping, a fresh spur was given to our exertions, by the sudden appearance
of no less a person than the farmer himself. What ensued upon his coming
must be kept for another chapter.