Part 18 (1/2)
Then, in a happy day, I fell on Alfred Tennyson's poetry, and found there, astonished and delighted, the embodiment of thoughts about the earth around me which I had concealed, because I fancied them peculiar to myself. Why is it that the latest poet has generally the greatest influence over the minds of the young? Surely not for the mere charm of novelty? The reason is that he, living amid the same hopes, the same temptations, the same sphere of observation as they, gives utterance and outward form to the very questions which, vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts. And what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems. True, all great poets are by their office democrats; seers of man only as man; singers of the joys, the sorrows, the aspirations common to all humanity; but in Alfred Tennyson there is an element especially democratic, truly levelling; not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of nature. Brought up, as I understand, in a part of England which possesses not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity,--a minute infinite,--an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations.
I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime, in those flowery d.y.k.es of Battersea Fields; in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal sh.o.r.e; and here was a man who had put them into words for me! This is what I call democratic art--the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction: in Landseer and his dogs--in Fielding and his downs, with a host of n.o.ble fellow-artists--and in all authors who have really seized the nation's mind, from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and d.i.c.kens, the great tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few--towards the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust, and His sun to s.h.i.+ne on the evil and the good; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all the beasts of the field are in His sight.
Well--I must return to my story. And here some one may ask me, ”But did you not find this true spiritual democracy, this universal knowledge and sympathy, in Shakspeare above all other poets?” It may be my shame to have to confess it; but though I find it now, I did not then. I do not think, however, my case is singular: from what I can ascertain, there is, even with regularly educated minds, a period of life at which that great writer is not appreciated, just on account of his very greatness; on account of the deep and large experience which the true understanding of his plays requires--experience of man, of history, of art, and above all of those sorrows whereby, as Hezekiah says, and as I have learnt almost too well--”whereby men live, and in all which, is the life of the spirit.” At seventeen, indeed, I had devoured Shakspeare, though merely for the food to my fancy which his plots and incidents supplied, for the gorgeous colouring of his scenery: but at the period of which I am now writing, I had exhausted that source of mere pleasure; I was craving for more explicit and dogmatic teaching than any which he seemed to supply; and for three years, strange as it may appear, I hardly ever looked into his pages. Under what circ.u.mstances I afterwards recurred to his exhaustless treasures, my readers shall in due time be told.
So I worked away manfully with such tools and stock as I possessed, and of course produced, at first, like all young writers, some sufficiently servile imitations of my favourite poets.
”Ugh!” said Sandy, ”wha wants mongrels atween Burns and Tennyson? A gude stock baith: but gin ye'd cross the breed ye maun unite the spirits, and no the manners, o' the men. Why maun ilk a one the noo steal his neebor's barnacles, before he glints out o' windows? Mak a style for yoursel, laddie; ye're na mair Scots hind than ye are Lincolns.h.i.+re laird: sae gang yer ain gate and leave them to gang theirs; and just mak a gran', brode, simple, Saxon style for yoursel.”
”But how can I, till I know what sort of a style it ought to be?”
”Oh! but yon's amazing like Tom Sheridan's answer to his father. 'Tom,'
says the auld man, 'I'm thinking ye maun tak a wife.' 'Verra weel, father,'
says the puir skellum; 'and wha's wife shall I tak?' Wha's style shall I tak? say all the callants the noo. Mak a style as ye would mak a wife, by marrying her a' to yoursel; and ye'll nae mair ken what's your style till it's made, than ye'll ken what your wife's like till she's been mony a year by your ingle.”
”My dear Mackaye,” I said, ”you have the most unmerciful way of raising difficulties, and then leaving poor fellows to lay the ghost for themselves.”
”Hech, then, I'm a'thegither a negative teacher, as they ca' it in the new lallans. I'll gang out o' my gate to tell a man his kye are laired, but I'm no obligated thereby to pu' them out for him. After a', nae man is rid o' a difficulty till he's conquered it single-handed for himsel: besides, I'm na poet, mair's the gude hap for you.”
”Why, then?”
”Och, och! they're puir, f.e.c.kless, crabbit, unpractical bodies, they poets; but if it's your doom, ye maun dree it; and I'm sair afeard ye ha' gotten the disease o' genius, mair's the pity, and maun write, I suppose, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. Some folks' booels are that made o' catgut, that they canna stir without chirruping and screeking.”
However, _aestro percitus_, I wrote on; and in about two years and a half had got together ”Songs of the Highways” enough to fill a small octavo volume, the circ.u.mstances of whose birth shall be given hereafter. Whether I ever attained to anything like an original style, readers must judge for themselves--the readers of the same volume I mean, for I have inserted none of those poems in this my autobiography; first, because it seems too like puffing my own works; and next, because I do not want to injure the as yet not over great sale of the same. But, if any one's curiosity is so far excited that he wishes to see what I have accomplished, the best advice which I can give him is, to go forth, and buy all the working-men's poetry which has appeared during the last twenty years, without favour or exception; among which he must needs, of course, find mine, and also, I am happy to say, a great deal which is much better and more instructive than mine.
CHAPTER X.
HOW FOLKS TURN CHARTISTS.
Those who read my story only for amus.e.m.e.nt, I advise to skip this chapter.
Those, on the other hand, who really wish to ascertain what working men actually do suffer--to see whether their political discontent has not its roots, not merely in fanciful ambition, but in misery and slavery most real and agonizing--those in whose eyes the accounts of a system, or rather barbaric absence of all system, which involves starvation, nakedness, prost.i.tution, and long imprisonment in dungeons worse than the cells of the Inquisition, will be invested with something at least of tragic interest, may, I hope, think it worth their while to learn how the clothes which they wear are made, and listen to a few occasional statistics, which, though they may seem to the wealthy mere lists of dull figures, are to the workmen symbols of terrible physical realities--of hunger, degradation, and despair. [Footnote: Facts still worse than those which Mr. Locke's story contains have been made public by the _Morning Chronicle_ in a series of n.o.ble letters on ”Labour and the Poor”; which we entreat all Christian people to ”read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” ”That will be better for them,” as Mahomet, in similar cases, used to say.]
Well: one day our employer died. He had been one of the old sort of fas.h.i.+onable West-end tailors in the fast decreasing honourable trade; keeping a modest shop, hardly to be distinguished from a dwelling-house, except by his name on the window blinds. He paid good prices for work, though not as good, of course, as he had given twenty years before, and prided himself upon having all his work done at home. His workrooms, as I have said, were no elysiums; but still, as good, alas! as those of three tailors out of four. He was proud, luxurious, foppish; but he was honest and kindly enough, and did many a generous thing by men who had been long in his employ. At all events, his journeymen could live on what he paid them.
But his son, succeeding to the business, determined, like Rehoboam of old, to go ahead with the times. Fired with the great spirit of the nineteenth century--at least with that one which is vulgarly considered its especial glory--he resolved to make haste to be rich. His father had made money very slowly of late; while dozens, who had begun business long after him, had now retired to luxurious ease and suburban villas. Why should he remain in the minority? Why should he not get rich as fast as he could? Why should he stick to the old, slow-going, honourable trade? Out of some four hundred and fifty West-end tailors, there were not one hundred left who were old-fas.h.i.+oned and stupid enough to go on keeping down their own profits by having all their work done at home and at first-hand. Ridiculous scruples!
The government knew none such. Were not the army clothes, the post-office clothes, the policemen's clothes, furnished by contractors and sweaters, who hired the work at low prices, and let it out again to journeymen at still lower ones? Why should he pay his men two s.h.i.+llings where the government paid them one? Were there not cheap houses even at the West-end, which had saved several thousands a year merely by reducing their workmen's wages? And if the workmen chose to take lower wages, he was not bound actually to make them a present of more than they asked for? They would go to the cheapest market for anything they wanted, and so must he. Besides, wages had really been quite exorbitant. Half his men threw each of them as much money away in gin and beer yearly, as would pay two workmen at cheap house. Why was he to be robbing his family of comforts to pay for their extravagance? And charging his customers, too, unnecessarily high prices--it was really robbing the public!
Such, I suppose, were some of the arguments which led to an official announcement, one Sat.u.r.day night, that our young employer intended to enlarge his establishment, for the purpose of commencing business in the ”show-trade”; and that, emulous of Messrs. Aaron, Levi, and the rest of that cla.s.s, magnificent alterations were to take place in the premises, to make room for which our workrooms were to be demolished, and that for that reason--for of course it was only for that reason--all work would in future be given out, to be made up at the men's own homes.
Our employer's arguments, if they were such as I suppose, were reasonable enough according to the present code of commercial morality. But, strange to say, the auditory, insensible to the delight with which the public would view the splendid architectural improvements--with taste too grovelling to appreciate the glories of plate-gla.s.s shop-fronts and bra.s.s scroll work--too selfish to rejoice, for its own sake, in the beauty of arabesques and chandeliers, which, though they never might behold, the astonished public would--with souls too n.i.g.g.ardly to leap for joy at the thought that gents would henceforth buy the registered guanaco vest, and the patent elastic omni-seasonum paletot half-a-crown cheaper than ever--or that needy n.o.blemen would pay three-pound-ten instead of five pounds for their footmen's liveries--received the news, clod-hearted as they were, in sullen silence, and actually, when they got into the street, broke out into murmurs, perhaps into execrations.
”Silence!” said Crossthwaite; ”walls have ears. Come down to the nearest house of call, and talk it out like men, instead of grumbling in the street like fish-f.a.gs.”
So down we went. Crossthwaite, taking my arm, strode on in moody silence--once muttering to himself, bitterly--
”Oh, yes; all right and natural! What can the little sharks do but follow the big ones?”