Part 17 (2/2)
”We have been telling Mr. Mackaye everything,” said poor Lizzy.
”A pleasant story, isn't it? Oh! if that fine lady, as we're making that riding-habit for, would just spare only half the money that goes to dressing her up to ride in the park, to send us out to the colonies, wouldn't I be an honest girl there?--maybe an honest man's wife! Oh, my G.o.d, wouldn't I slave my fingers to the bone to work for him! Wouldn't I mend my life then! I couldn't help it--it would be like getting into heaven out of h.e.l.l. But now--we must--we must, I tell you. I shall go mad soon, I think, or take to drink. When I pa.s.sed the gin-shop down there just now, I had to run like mad for fear I should go in; and if I once took to that--Now then, to work again. Make up the fire, Mrs. * * * *, please do.”
And she sat down, and began st.i.tching frantically at the riding-habit, from which the other girl had hardly lifted her hands or eyes for a moment during our visit.
We made a motion, as if to go.
”G.o.d bless you,” said Ellen; ”come again soon, dear Mr. Mackaye.”
”Good-bye,” said the elder girl; ”and good-night to you. Night and day's all the same here--we must have this home by seven o'clock to-morrow morning. My lady's going to ride early, they say, whoever she may be, and we must just sit up all night. It's often we haven't had our clothes off for a week together, from four in the morning till two the next morning sometimes--st.i.tch, st.i.tch, st.i.tch. Somebody's wrote a song about that--I'll learn to sing it--it'll sound fitting-like up here.”
”Better sing hymns,” said Ellen.
”Hymns for * * * * * *?” answered the other, and then burst out into that peculiar, wild, ringing, fiendish laugh--has my reader never heard it?
I pulled out the two or three s.h.i.+llings which I possessed, and tried to make the girls take them, for the sake of poor Ellen.
”No; you're a working man, and we won't feed on you--you'll want it some day--all the trade's going the same way as we, as fast as ever it can!”
Sandy and I went down the stairs.
”Poetic element? Yon la.s.sie, rejoicing in her disfigurement and not her beauty--like the nuns of Peterborough in auld time--is there na poetry there? That puir la.s.sie, dying on the bare boards, and seeing her Saviour in her dreams, is there na poetry there, callant? That auld body owre the fire, wi' her 'an officer's dochter,' is there na poetry there? That ither, prost.i.tuting hersel to buy food for her freen--is there na poetry there?--tragedy--
”With hues as when some mighty painter dips His pen in dyes of earthquake and eclipse.
”Ay, Sh.e.l.ley's gran'; always gran'; but Fact is grander--G.o.d and Satan are grander. All around ye, in every gin-shop and costermonger's cellar, are G.o.d and Satan at death grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained; and will ye think it beneath ye to be the 'People's Poet?'”
CHAPTER IX.
POETRY AND POETS.
In the history of individuals, as well as in that of nations, there is often a period of sudden blossoming--a short luxuriant summer, not without its tornadoes and thunder-glooms, in which all the buried seeds of past observation leap forth together into life, and form, and beauty. And such with me were the two years that followed. I thought--I talked poetry to myself all day long. I wrote nightly on my return from work. I am astonished, on looking back, at the variety and quant.i.ty of my productions during that short time. My subjects were intentionally and professedly c.o.c.kney ones. I had taken Mackaye at his word. I had made up my mind, that if I had any poetic powers I must do my duty therewith in that station of life to which it had pleased G.o.d to call me, and look at everything simply and faithfully as a London artizan. To this, I suppose, is to be attributed the little geniality and originality for which the public have kindly praised my verses--a geniality which sprung, not from the atmosphere whence I drew, but from the honesty and single-mindedness with which, I hope, I laboured. Not from the atmosphere, indeed,--that was ungenial enough; crime and poverty, all-devouring compet.i.tion, and hopeless struggles against Mammon and Moloch, amid the roar of wheels, the ceaseless stream of pale, hard faces, intent on gain, or brooding over woe; amid endless prison walls of brick, beneath a lurid, crus.h.i.+ng sky of smoke and mist. It was a dark, noisy, thunderous element that London life; a troubled sea that cannot rest, casting up mire and dirt; resonant of the clanking of chains, the grinding of remorseless machinery, the wail of lost spirits from the pit.
And it did its work upon me; it gave a gloomy colouring, a glare as of some Dantean ”Inferno,” to all my utterances. It did not excite me or make me fierce--I was too much inured to it--but it crushed and saddened me; it deepened in me that peculiar melancholy of intellectual youth, which Mr. Carlyle has christened for ever by one of his immortal nicknames--”Werterism”; I battened on my own melancholy. I believed, I loved to believe, that every face I pa.s.sed bore the traces of discontent as deep as was my own--and was I so far wrong? Was I so far wrong either in the gloomy tone of my own poetry? Should not a London poet's work just now be to cry, like the Jew of old, about the walls of Jerusalem, ”Woe, woe to this city!” Is this a time to listen to the voices of singing men and singing women? or to cry, ”Oh! that my head were a fountain of tears, that I might weep for the sins of my people”? Is it not noteworthy, also, that it is in this vein that the London poets have always been greatest? Which of poor Hood's lyrics have an equal chance of immortality with ”The Song of the s.h.i.+rt” and ”The Bridge of Sighs,” rising, as they do, right out of the depths of that Inferno, sublime from their very simplicity? Which of Charles Mackay's lyrics can compare for a moment with the Eschylean grandeur, the terrible rhythmic lilt of his ”Cholera Chant”--
Dense on the stream the vapours lay, Thick as wool on the cold highway; Spungy and dim each lonely lamp Shone o'er the streets so dull and damp; The moonbeams could not pierce the cloud That swathed the city like a shroud; There stood three shapes on the bridge alone, Three figures by the coping-stone; Gaunt and tall and undefined, Spectres built of mist and wind.
I see his footmarks east and west-- I hear his tread in the silence fall-- He shall not sleep, he shall not rest-- He comes to aid us one and all.
Were men as wise as men might be, They would not work for you, for me, For him that cometh over the sea; But they will not hear the warning voice: The Cholera comes,--Rejoice! rejoice!
He shall be lord of the swarming town!
And mow them down, and mow them down!
Not that I neglected, on the other hand, every means of extending the wanderings of my spirit into sunnier and more verdant pathways. If I had to tell the gay ones above of the gloom around me, I had also to go forth into the suns.h.i.+ne, to bring home if it were but a wild-flower garland to those that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. That was all that I could offer them. The reader shall judge, when he has read this book throughout, whether I did not at last find for them something better than even all the beauties of nature.
But it was on canvas, and not among realities, that I had to choose my garlands; and therefore the picture galleries became more than ever my favourite--haunt, I was going to say; but, alas! it was not six times a year that I got access to them. Still, when once every May I found myself, by dint of a hard saved s.h.i.+lling, actually within the walls of that to me enchanted palace, the Royal Academy Exhibition--Oh, ye rich! who gaze round you at will upon your prints and pictures, if hunger is, as they say, a better sauce than any Ude invents, and fasting itself may become the handmaid of luxury, you should spend, as I did perforce, weeks and months shut out from every glimpse of Nature, if you would taste her beauties, even on canvas, with perfect relish and childish self-abandonment. How I loved and blessed those painters! how I thanked Creswick for every transparent shade-chequered pool; Fielding, for every rain-clad down; Cooper, for every knot of quiet cattle beneath the cool grey willows; Stanfield, for every snowy peak, and sheet of foam-fringed sapphire--each and every one of them a leaf out of the magic book which else was ever closed to me. Again, I say, how I loved and blest those painters! On the other hand, I was not neglecting to read as well as to write poetry; and, to speak first of the highest, I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's ”French Revolution.” Of the general effect which his works had on me, I shall say nothing: it was the same as they have had, thank G.o.d, on thousands of my cla.s.s and of every other. But that book above all first recalled me to the overwhelming and yet enn.o.bling knowledge that there was such a thing as Duty; first taught me to see in history not the mere farce-tragedy of man's crimes and follies, but the dealings of a righteous Ruler of the universe, whose ways are in the great deep, and whom the sins and errors, as well as the virtues and discoveries of man, must obey and justify.
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