Part 29 (2/2)
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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 G.o.d?
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 cla.s.sed with any sect, was really a somewhat undefined Unitarianism--or rather Islamism. He could say, with the old Moslem, ”G.o.d 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 cla.s.s and of all humanity. Why not? Poor suffering wretches! what is it to them to know that ”G.o.d is great,” unless you can prove to them G.o.d 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. ”G.o.d was great--the wicked would be turned into h.e.l.l.” Ay--the few wilful, triumphant wicked; but the millions of suffering, starving wicked, the victims of society and circ.u.mstance--what hope for them? ”G.o.d 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 cla.s.ses? 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 subst.i.tutes 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 cla.s.ses who crush us down; prohibiting all free discussion on religious points; commanding us to swallow down, with faith as pa.s.sive 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 ma.s.ses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before G.o.d 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 G.o.d.
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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sionate, kind-hearted Irishman, Mike Kelly by name, reckless and scatter-brained enough to get himself into every possible sc.r.a.pe, 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 const.i.tution 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.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE SWEATER'S DEN.
I was greedily devouring Lane's ”Arabian Nights,” which had made their first appearance in the shop that day.
Mackaye sat in his usual place, smoking a clean pipe, and a.s.sisting his meditations by certain mysterious chironomic signs; while opposite to him was Farmer Porter--a stone or two thinner than when I had seen him last, but one stone is not much missed out of seventeen. His forehead looked smaller, and his jaws larger than ever, and his red face was sad, and furrowed with care.
Evidently, too, he was ill at ease about other matters besides his son. He was looking out of the corners of his eyes, first at the skinless cast on the chimney-piece, then at the crucified books hanging over his head, as if he considered them not altogether safe companions, and rather expected something ”uncanny” to lay hold of him from behind--a process which involved the most horrible contortions of visage, as he carefully abstained from stirring a muscle of his neck or body, but sat bolt upright, his elbows pinned to his sides, and his knees as close together as his stomach would permit, like a huge corpulent Egyptian Memnon--the most ludicrous contrast to the little old man opposite, twisted up together in his Joseph's coat, like some wizard magician in the stories which I was reading. A curious pair of ”poles” the two made; the mesothet whereof, by no means a _”punctum indifferens,”_ but a true connecting spiritual idea, stood on the table--in the whisky-bottle.
Farmer Porter was evidently big with some great thought, and had all a true poet's bashfulness about publis.h.i.+ng the fruit of his creative genius. He looked round again at the skinless man, the caricatures, the books; and, as his eye wandered from pile to pile, and shelf to shelf, his face brightened, and he seemed to gain courage.
Solemnly he put his hat on his knees, and began solemnly brus.h.i.+ng it with his cuff. Then he saw me watching him, and stopped. Then he put his pipe solemnly on the hob, and cleared his throat for action, while I buried my face in the book.
”Them's a sight o' larned beuks, Muster Mackaye?”
”Humph!”
”Yow maun ha' got a deal o' scholars.h.i.+p among they, noo?”
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