Part 6 (1/2)

”With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet, till fair England be your sepulchre.”

Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidee and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines:

”Year after year they voted cent. per cent., Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent!

They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England--why then live?--for rent!

And will they not repay the treasures lent?

No; down with everything, and up with rent!

Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent, Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!”

The men who uttered such lines were driven from their cla.s.s, their homes, and their country. They were despised and hated, like all who protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable things. But they were great poets. One of them was our sweetest singer, the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and the most shattering force. Even England, which cares so little for her greatest inheritance of pa.s.sionate intellect, cannot yet forget them.

But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators.

Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Ma.s.sey, who so lately died.

They were not high-born, nor were they s.h.i.+ning poets like the twin stars of freedom whom I have quoted. Little scholars.h.i.+p was theirs, little perfection of song. Some had taught themselves their letters at the forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the words. Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were persecuted for righteousness' sake. For maintaining the cause of the poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their reward. The governing cla.s.ses whose comfort they disturbed wished them dead; so did the self-righteous cla.s.ses whose conscience they ruffled.

That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil, too long skimmed over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still, at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo of the Corn-law Rhymer's anthem:

”When wilt thou save the people?

O G.o.d of mercy! when?

Not kings and lords, but nations!

Not thrones and crowns, but men!”

Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived under Protection--the sort of life the landlords and their theorists invite us to enact again. From his ”Black Hole of Calcutta” we take the lines:

”Bread-tax'd weaver, all can see What that tax hath done for thee, And thy children, vilely led, Singing hymns for shameful bread, Till the stones of every street Know their little naked feet.”

Or let us take one verse from the lines, ”O Lord, how long?”

”Child, what hast thou with sleep to do?

Awake, and dry thine eyes!

Thy tiny hands must labour too; Our bread is tax'd--arise!

Arise, and toil long hours twice seven, For pennies two or three; Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven-- But England still is free.”

Or we might recall ”The Coming Cry,” by Ebenezer Jones, with its great refrain:

”Perhaps it's better than starvation,--once we'll pray, and then We'll all go building workhouses, million, million men!”

Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his ”Song of the 'Lower Cla.s.ses,'”

where the first verse runs:

”We plow and sow, we're so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain And the vale with the fragrant hay.

Our place we know, we're so very, very low, 'Tis down at the landlord's feet; We're not too low the grain to grow, But too low the bread to eat.”