![Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 1 [of 3] cover](/books/content/36808/OEBPS/6498621989836682417_36808-cover.png)
CHAPTER VII.
THE CHARTISTS.
After the war with France, which culminated in Waterloo, England enjoyed a period of rest and repose; and she needed it, after her long struggle, which had robbed her of thousands and thousands of valuable lives, and heaped upon her a national debt under the burden of which she still groans. Then came a serious problem. The war over, what was to be done with the residuum, who, in the good old times, had been marched off to the tune of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ or ‘Rule, Britannia,’ or ‘God save the King,’ to be food for powder, and to whiten with their bones half the battle-fields of Europe?
At Sloville the difficulty was much felt, till one or two capitalists selected it as the site for manufactories. It was in one of the midland counties, where collieries abounded, and where canals offer a cheap means of transit for manufactures. The place grew like Jonah’s gourd. In the twinkling of an eye it became a town. All at once the sky was darkened with black clouds of smoke, vomited forth by the mills, whilst long rows of red-brick cottages, utterly barren of interest and comfort, spread themselves over all the adjacent fields. For a time all was couleur de rose. The neighbouring landlords kept up their rents, and the farmers made a lot of money by supplying the town; the tradesmen found business increase with no efforts of their own. Everyone was making money, and if the poor were badly off, it was chiefly their own fault, as what wages they earned were too frequently squandered in the public-house.
But prosperity in this world is seldom of long duration. The markets were glutted, because the foreigner, who had only corn to send us to pay for our wares, was prevented by the Corn Laws from sending us his corn. At the same time we had a succession of bad harvests, and bread was almost as dear as in time of war. It is hard to be happy when you are hungry. Discontent is the natural result of starvation, and democratic newspapers and writers, who had never shown their faces in the place before, were in great demand. It was an awful sight to see the people sulking in the streets, starving in their wretched homes, cursing—in some of the lowest of the public-houses—all who were better off than themselves. ‘They were,’ they were told, ‘a down-trodden people, the victims of a haughty aristocracy, or of a bastard plutocracy, that had fattened on the blood and sinew of the white slaves.’ ‘Down with the capitalist!’ was the universal cry; and so the mills were burnt, as if by the destruction of workshops there would be demand for work. Soldiers were quartered everywhere. On every side was a rich class, face to face with a hungry people, rendered desperate by poverty, and want, and wrong.
Undoubtedly there had been bad times in Sloville before. The farmers, according to all accounts, never had been able to make both ends meet, and the poor had to live on the rates, a fact which rather increased than diminished the evil, as the people who had the most children got more than their fair share, and a pauper had a poor chance of decent wages, unless he at once got married, and begot as many sons and daughters as the rest. But now there was a real crisis, as the mills had stopped, and the manufacturers and capitalists went about with as long faces as the farmers. Unfortunately, just at this time, the leading banker in the place failed, or rather took himself off with his family to the Continent, leaving his creditors to suffer greatly for their misplaced confidence, many poor tradesmen and windows losing their all. A good many of the chapel people took it as a dispensation of Providence, and in many a place the event was improved in that way. The Lord was angry with them on account of the general wickedness of the town. A new leaf was to be turned over. There was to be less trust in man—less pride in human intellect—less confidence in the spread of intelligence—a better observance of the Sabbath—a more frequent attendance at the means of grace. A good many of Hannah More’s good-meaning tracts were reprinted and distributed gratis. Alas! the times were out of joint, and some of the people refused the tracts. They said they should prefer something to eat, and all pious Sloville turned from them in horror and despair. It was actually whispered that there were people in the place who had been seen reading Tom Paine, and were not ashamed to talk of the Rights of Man. It is not much to be wondered at that such was the case. In the old unreformed times, it was seldom that politicians, whether Whigs or Tories, took much notice of the state of the people. There was no law then to stand between the mercenary millowner and his white victim. The rich made the laws, and all that the people had to do was to obey. Labourers were even punished for combining to get decent wages if possible. Wentworth, as a young man, was especially touched with a sense of the hardships inflicted on the factory children and women. The Church—I mean by it the religious of all sects—stood by the masters. It was natural, but awful nevertheless.
‘Give these poor people,’ said Wentworth, ‘more food and more justice, and we shall have a better chance of making them Christians.’
The deacons did not see it in that light at all. They were shopkeepers, and did not want to offend their best customers.
Out of this burning and undying sense of wrong on the part of the poor naturally arose the Chartist agitation. Men were taught to believe that all the ills of life would vanish—that every man, however idle and indifferent in character, would have a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, if they did but have annual parliaments, vote by ballot, the payment of members, equal electoral districts, and the abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament. Orators laid hold of the people’s hearts as they waved and shouted for the Charter.
‘If you give up your agitation for the Charter, to help the Free Traders,’ said all of them, both on the platform and in the press, ‘they will not help you to get the Charter. Don’t be deceived by the middle classes again. You helped them to get votes; you swelled the cry of “The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill;” but where are the fine promises they made you? Gone to the winds. They make dupes of you. That is all they aim at. They want now to get the Corn Laws repealed, and that not for your benefit, but their own. They cry cheap bread, but they mean low wages. They parade the big loaf before you, but, at the same time, you will find your share in it as small as ever. Don’t listen to their cant, and claptrap, and humbug. Stick to the Charter and Feargus O’Connor. You are slaves and fools if you don’t. Have votes, and then you will be your own masters. Down with the Whigs—down with the Corn Law Repealers—down with the mill-owners!’
Such were the favourite sentiments at Sloville. Nor is it much to be wondered at that men with empty pockets and bellies were ready not only to proclaim and believe such doctrines, but to fight, in their rough and imperfect way, for them. People of property were alarmed. The Government shut up a few of the leaders of the Chartists in gaol, though that did not make matters much better.
At Sloville, the poor people, instead of going to church and chapel on a Sunday, to listen to parsons who preached obedience to their betters, met to hear Chartist speeches and to sing Chartist songs.
‘Let us be patient,’ said one of the hearers, who had not outlived the religious teaching of his youth. ‘Let us be patient a little longer, lads. Surely, God Almighty will help us soon.’
Scornfully and loudly laughed his hearers.
‘Talk no more about thy God Almighty,’ was the reply. ‘There is not one. If there was one, He would not let us suffer as we do.’
In London and in all our large cities were men who felt deeply their misery and poverty, and were labouring earnestly for the removal of their wrongs and the attaining of their rights. But there were professional agitators as well, paid agents of agitation, many of them mercenary wretches, who fattened on this state of things—men who preferred to talk rather than earn an honest living. They made the best of their opportunity. Many of them were sots, and had a fine time of it in public-houses; few of their characters would bear a very close inspection. They travelled down into the country, and sowed seed, which fell upon prepared ground. It was truly sad to see the decent, sober workman, living at his best on starvation wages, keeping his wife and family, not by work, but by pawning every bit of household furniture, every superfluous article of apparel, dressing himself in rags.
‘Sunday come again, and nothing to eat,’ said one, while the poor babe sought its mother’s breast in vain.
‘Ah,’ said another, with a frenzied air, and with language too vehemently blasphemous to be repeated, ‘I wish they would hang me. I have lived upon cold potatoes that were given me these two days, and this morning I have eaten a raw potato from sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread or a cup of coffee, or I shall drop.’
There were riots, of course, for men in that state had little to fear. Now and then a parson’s house was burnt down, or a magistrate had to fly for his life, or the agent of some great landlord or millowner was in danger. The orators worked up the passions of the people to fever heat. Now and then appeared on the scene a stray Irishman, with a tremendous tongue, or a wandering Pole, with the latest device for blowing up houses, setting fire to mills, or destroying the attack of a hostile force. There was much talk of a chemical composition by which London was to be fired in five places, and which would burn stone itself. These schemers and dabblers assumed to speak in the name of the Chartists, and the Chartists assumed to represent the people of England. Never was a greater sham than the agitation for the Charter. It was all wind and fury, and utterly brainless; the concoction of journeymen printers, patriotic tailors, heaven-taught stonemasons, and one or two Methodist preachers and obscure journalists, eaten up by vanity, and urged on by the belief that a revolution in England was impending, and that they were to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. How they raved—like the madmen that they were—of the terror that would give wings to British capital to fly to other climes; of the middle-class population of our country, broken down by bankruptcy and insolvency; of the destruction of our commerce; of the awful doom of farmers, manufacturers, and landlords! We hear now of the bitter cry of outcast London; that is nothing to the cry that came from all parts of the country then.
It happened that just at this time there was to be a grand Chartist demonstration in Sloville. At any rate, so it seemed good to the editor of the Trumpet of Freedom, who found the sale of his paper falling off, and subscriptions for the national testimonial to be presented to himself not coming in so abundantly as he could wish. At any rate, the demonstration would serve to keep his name before the public, and that was something. Accordingly, the proper machinery was put in motion, and he got himself invited down, coming in a post-chaise—there were few railways then—with his secretary, as hungry a looker-out for power and pelf as himself. They put up at the best hotel in the town, and took good care not to starve either in the matter of eating or drinking.
The excitement in the place was intense. There was a lean and hungry mob all day long opposite the hotel, to cheer the great man whenever he came to the door or put out his head at the window. The local leaders seemed as busy as if the nation’s welfare depended on them. Angry posters glared on you from every wall, which the police in vain tried to pull down. The great London newspapers sent down reporters; and not a little was the indignation aroused when a myrmidon of the law managed to serve the editor with a writ for debt, which was explained to be a political dodge on the part of the Government to muzzle the great man himself, whose invective on the subject it did all the people good to hear.
The Whigs were denounced as base, bloody, and brutal; the Tories were the devils in hell. The time had come for tyrants and oppressors to tremble. Sloville was to be the first to raise the standard, to strike off its fetters, to emancipate the country from the grasp of a hireling soldiery, a tithe-fed clergy, and a bloated aristocracy.
There was a good deal of brandy-and-water in the posters, and there was a good deal of the same refreshing beverage in the speeches of the orators. A Chartist tailor took the chair—a man who had at one time done well, but who, since he had taken to politics and drink, had lost all his business, and who naturally cast an envious eye on his more successful fellow-tradesmen. He hinted at a plan for the equal division of property, which was received with immense applause, and which he assured his intelligent hearers would be realized as soon as the Charter was the law of the land.
A Chartist shoemaker followed. At home he was a terrible tyrant, dreaded by his much-suffering wife and his much-to-be-pitied children: but that was no reason why he should not denounce the tyranny of Government, which he did at some length, and with much physical exaggeration and emphasis, to his own delight and that of his hearers.
You could easily detect the Chartists in the town. They were not the best workmen, but they were the best supporters of the publicans, who at that time had not ventured to raise the cry of Beer and the Bible. However, on the night of the meeting—which was in the open air—all the workmen in the place, good or bad, Chartist or not, assembled in considerable numbers. The British operative is wonderfully influenced by the gift of the gab. It always fetches him, as Artemus Ward would say. He is not, as a rule, much of an orator himself, and fluent and fervid declamation sooner makes a fool of him than it does of the rest of the community.
The editor of the Trumpet of Freedom was aware of this failing of the working-class, of whom he constituted himself the champion, and was able to supply them with any amount of the article in question. If he was poor in ideas he was rich in words, in that respect being gifted almost as much as an Irish orator. I need not give the particulars of his speech. It was one he had often made before, and of a character very common before the Corn Laws were repealed, when the Tories were playing the game of the Chartists, and contending for all the abuses which the latter pointed to as illustrations of the need of their famous remedy for all the evils to which political flesh is heir.
The speaker was particularly severe on the lazy lives of the parsons, and the way in which they humbugged the people. They were charged with every crime. They were none of them righteous, no, not one. If a profligate prince reigned, who more fulsome in his praise than the Bishops? If a profligate war was to be carried on—a war which was to slaughter thousands of honest lads, and to reduce thousands of homes to wretchedness and want—did not the Bishops consecrate the banners, and offer up the mockery of a prayer to heaven, as if God approved of such wanton slaughter? Did they not always vote against the interests of the public? Every parson was a robber of the poor. Did they not take the tithes? Did they not take the part of the rich against the poor? Did not they preach submission to the powers that be? Did they not drive the wretched voters, at election times, to vote for the Tories? ‘Down with the parsons!’ said the speaker, and the cry was repeated angrily by the mob. Some said, ‘More pigs and fewer parsons’; others hinted it would be as well to march to the Rectory, and to taste some of the Rector’s old port; others that there would be no great harm if they were to burn down his house and hunt him out of the town.
Just as the mob were on the point of being goaded to the verge of madness by the London orator, the young man from Bethesda Chapel, as he was called, claimed to be heard. At first he was received with disfavour. He was a stranger to them all. That was against him. It was still more against him that he had on a black coat and a white choker. A still further offence was it that his tone was that of a gentleman. Angry words were heard. He was a spy—a Government informer—a wolf in sheep’s clothing—and ought to be ducked in the nearest horse-pond. It was urged that he might be permitted to speak, in order that he might show what a fool he was. The London orator especially headed all these anti-sympathetic demonstrations.
‘I am a parson,’ said Mr. Wentworth—then there was a tremendous burst of indignation—‘and I come here to show that a parson may feel for a poor man, and may aid him in his efforts to obtain political power. It is not all parsons who take tithes, but if you would abolish tithes to-morrow, the only effect would be that the landlord would be richer, that is all, as the difference would only go into the landlord’s pocket; but I come here to say, with you, that you must have political power; that it is unjust and unfair to deprive you of it; and I say so because I am a firm believer in a book which is very unpopular here, called the Bible. It is because I read that book that I wish you well. My Bible tells me that I “must love my neighbour as myself”; that I must do to others as I would have others do to me; and how can I do this so long as we have class legislation, and injustice, upheld in the name of law? I deny the right of Government to exclude you from the franchise. I agree with much that has been said. There are abuses to be remedied. There are rights to be gained. In the past you have had unjust treatment, partly owing to your own ignorance and partly to the selfishness of your rulers. You have been refused education; you have been reduced to the condition of serfs; you have been unfairly taxed; you have been denied the chance of getting an honest living; you have been sacrificed to high rents; and I think the parsons are much to blame that they have not more openly taken your part. They have been too prone rather to ask you to submit to what they call the dispensation of Providence than to assist you in your righteous efforts to get rid of bad laws and to secure better. It is to be feared that, in some respects, you have acted indiscreetly. Why turn friends into enemies by the bitterness of your invective and by the absurdity of your exaggerations?’ Here there were signs of disapproval. ‘You have been badly advised.’ (‘No, no!’) ‘You are too easily made the dupe of the designing demagogue.’ Here the London orator grew very angry, and resented the attack as personal, as perhaps it was. ‘By the violence of your attacks on those who are ready to help you, you make the gulf between you and your true friends, the Liberals, greater than it really is. Especially do you made a terrible blunder,’ continued the orator, ‘when you assume that Christianity and priestcraft are the same, and that in this respect all parsons are alike, whether they be of the Church of Rome, or of the Church of England, or Wesleyans, or Baptists, or Independents. The Master whom I serve, and whose Gospel I preach, was as poor as most of you; was the son of a carpenter; was born in a manger; had not where to lay His head; lived a life of poverty; died a death of shame. In His life and death I see the Charter of your Freedom and my own. In His promises you have solace and support in the bitterest of your sufferings, under the most grievous of your wrongs. You can have no truer friend, no nobler guide. He can make sorrow and suffering such as yours light as no one else can.’
Then the attention of the hearers relaxed. ‘They had not come there to hear a sermon,’ they said. One Freethinker went so far as to shake his fist at the speaker, while another enlightened hearer tried to make a grab at the orator’s coat-tail, in the hope to pull him down. Nevertheless, the speaker continued:
‘To a great extent I, and most Dissenting parsons, at any rate, sympathize with you. We are quite ready to go with you at any rate part of the way; but you frighten us when you talk of physical force. “They that use the sword shall perish by the sword.” What could they do against a disciplined military force? Mightier far is the force of an enlightened public opinion. You can gain nothing by violence. You can’t master the soldiers and the constables, and you will array against yourselves a public opinion which would otherwise be compelled to listen to your claims, and to treat them with the attention they deserve. Many of the leaders in politics admit them; many members of the House of Commons admit them; many of the aristocracy are coming to your side. We have on the throne a young Queen, who has a woman’s heart of tenderness for all that suffer. By rashness, by injudicious action, by unwise invective, you may play into the hands of your enemies, and thus put back the hour of your triumph for another generation at least.’
Then there was a howl which rendered further speaking impossible. The crowd was split into two parties, those who admired the young parson’s sense and pluck, and those who followed the Chartist agitators, who had their own ends to serve, and their own ways of attaining them. The speech had, to a certain extent, damaged them, inasmuch as it was clear many of the respectable operatives present sided with the speaker. The chairman, the committee, the editor from London, were as angry as they could well be. The effect of what was to have been a mighty demonstration was destroyed. It was feared the subscriptions would fall off. It was true, in the next week’s list, ‘Junius Brutus’ was down for a shilling, and ‘A Hater of Tyrants’ for eighteenpence, and others for a few sums equally small; but these were a poor response to the chairman’s appeal. In that same number of the Trumpet of Freedom was a very scorching article on the jackanapes of an Independent parson. There is a great advantage in being an editor. An editor has always the last word.
‘There goes the scorpiant,’ said the chairman, as Mr. Wentworth passed him, at the end of the meeting. ‘There goes the scorpiant.’
‘Scorpion, I presume you mean,’ said the individual alluded to.
‘No, I don’t,’ repeated the chairman angrily. ‘You are a scorpiant; that’s what I said, and that I’ll stick to.’
Said another, whose few wits had been lost in beer, he’d ‘as soon put the parson in the horse-pond as look at him.’
The gathering storm Wentworth took as a signal to retire. At the outside women were weeping and shivering in the cold. They were the wives of the Chartist committee-men, who sat nightly in the public-house, spending money which the poor deserted wives and mothers sorely needed at home. It was a grievous sight, and the young parson grieved to think how little he could do to remove the evil which existed all round. Suddenly he found himself addressed by a young woman, whose fresh, girlish face of beauty was a contrast to the weary and despairing faces that met him on every side.
‘Oh, sir,’ said she enthusiastically, ‘if you could but get the men to listen to you, how much better it would be for them! The poor fellows need a friend.’
It seemed to Wentworth as if a ray of sunlight had suddenly appeared. Naturally the young parson turned round to look at the speaker; but, startled at her audacity, the beautiful girl had suddenly disappeared, and the next face that met him wore a very different expression. If one face was a sunbeam the other was a thundercloud. It was the face of the senior deacon. For a long time after, however, the memory of that fair girl’s face haunted Wentworth as a dream. Seeing that a storm was rising, he asked the senior deacon, in his blandest tones, how he was. Harshly as a nutmeg-grater, the senior deacon replied that he was as well as could be expected, considering the state that the town was in. Severely looking at the parson, he added:
‘We missed you to-night, sir.’
‘Oh yes, at the prayer meeting. I had intended to be present, though. I find I made a sad mistake on the last occasion. You know I called on Mr. B.’—naming one of the richest supporters of the chapel—‘to engage in prayer, and what an unpleasant silence there was till the pew-opener, coming up, whispered in my ear, “Sir, Mr. B. never prays,” and I had to pray myself?’
‘Well, sir,’ said the senior deacon, ‘we have not all the same gifts; some can pray in public, others can’t. But you need not have kept away from the meetin’ on that account.’
‘Well,’ said Wentworth, ‘the truth was, I had intended to be there, but I went to the Chartist meeting instead.’
‘So it seems, sir. You had not been there long before we all heard of it. The news was over the town in a very little while. I own it quite took away my breath.’
‘Which I am glad to find you have recovered by this time,’ said the minister gaily. ‘I was not only there, but I made a speech.’
‘So I heard, sir,’ said the deacon. ‘I suppose you think human applause more precious than seeking a blessing on the means of grace. We, however, who did go, had a blessed opportunity. We remembered you, sir, thought it seems you forgot us.’
‘Well, I think I was in the path of duty, nevertheless.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ said the deacon in a very unpleasant tone of voice. ‘How do you make that out?’
‘Well, according to my idea. Chartism means something, good or bad, and I thought I would go and see what it meant. It seemed to me that the poor fellows had a good deal of bad advice given them, and I thought I would try and give them a little better. Their grievances are many, and so are the wrongs which they have to bear. You know that it is in consequence of the little sympathy that is shown them by the Churches of all denominations these people are getting not only to disbelieve Christianity, but to hate its very name. It seemed to me that it was right that I should tell them as best I could how they were mistaken in thus judging the Church. We are losing the people, and then we call them infidels, and all that is bad. I say, instead of doing this, we should seek to win them by showing them how the Church is with them in their struggle for their rights. If we are Christians, our Christianity should display itself in our political life.’
‘Well,’ said the deacon with pride, ‘all I can say is that our late minister never attended a political meeting in his life.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Mr. Wentworth.
‘Yes, sir,’ continued the deacon, not noticing the interruption, ‘and he died universally respected. He never made an enemy. He was all things to all men. Every Christmas morning and Good Friday he went to church, and it was quite beautiful to see how humble and happy he looked. “I never interfere in politics,” said he. “I am come here to preach the Gospel. I am not going to impair my usefulness by becoming a political partisan.” I am sure,’ continued the deacon, ‘if he had forgotten this, and attended a Chartist meeting, we should never have got the money from the gentry we did, when we had the old meeting-house done up.’
‘But,’ said Wentworth, ‘he might have made some of the Chartists Christians, and that would have been better. It’s no use to get the meeting-house done up if the people don’t come into it. It seems to me such conduct as you praise is the way to create the evils we deplore. In the Saviour’s time the common people heard the Gospel gladly, and why should they not do so now?’
‘Because they won’t, sir,’ said the deacon angrily. ‘Because they are dead in trespasses and sins; because they’re regular heathens—a drinking, swearing lot. Why, I should be ashamed to go near them, and if some of them were to come to chapel, I believe the members would leave the place at once. I am sure I should.’
The senior deacon was a good man, but he had his foibles. One of them was a due regard to his own worldly good. Most of the neighbouring gentry came to his shop. It was the best and the largest of the kind in the town. What would become of his customers if his minister went to a Chartist meeting? The thought was too horrible for words. Hence the interview with the parson, and his disappearance from the streets of Sloville for many a long day; not, however, till he gave a farewell address, which added fuel to the fire, or, in other words, made his deacons more implacable than ever.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN BOHEMIA.
‘What a donkey I am!’ was the exclamation of a tall, well-made young man, rather shabbily dressed—four or five years after the events recorded in the preceding chapter—as he stood clinging to a lamppost in Fleet Street very late one bright summer night. ‘I have been to Fairlop Fair, with instructions to do a gushing article, and I’m blessed if I can recollect anything about it, nor where my notes are. I was to be back by ten, and it is now midnight. Thank Heaven,’ continued the speaker, as he groped into his coat pocket, ‘my notes are there. I thought I’d left them behind in that bar-room where I was waiting, where everyone was so tight and so talkative. Steady, boy—steady, boy!’ continued the speaker, reluctantly depriving himself of the support of the lamp-post. ‘We shall be all right, and in time, after all.’
Thus summoning his energies, the individual in question appeared to revive, and moved on with a gait ofttimes deviating from the straight line, but not so much as to call for special interference on the part of the police, and with that intense expression which always accompanies a certain state of alcoholic inspiration.
Diving down a side-street, he entered a door which seemed to be open all night long, and which led to the very innermost recesses of the Daily Journal. Giving a familiar nod to the porter as he passed by, and steering for a room on an upper floor, he took off his hat, sat himself down at a writing-desk, lit his cigar, spread out a sheet of paper before him, and took a pen in his hand. The furniture of the room was of the barest description, and mostly aimed at usefulness, rather than show or comfort or luxury. There were two other men in the room, but they took no notice of the new-comer, except to ask him to be quiet, and not to kick up such a row. One was gorgeously got up in evening dress. He had come from a dinner at Willis’s Rooms, with a Royal Duke in the chair. The other was putting the final touch to a thrilling description of a fire in the Seven Dials, accompanied by great destruction of property and loss of life.
Thoroughly settling down to his work, the individual to whom I have already drawn the attention of the reader took out his note-book, and began studying its contents. At length, unable to find what he wanted, he exclaimed somewhat pettishly:
‘Where the dickens are my notes?’
‘Why, in your hat, to be sure, you old fool!’ said one of the men, who, having finished his report, was preparing to go home. ‘I saw you put them into your hat directly you came in.’
‘Well, you’re right,’ said the now sober pressman, looking into the last-named receptacle. ‘The fact is, I’ve been lushing,’ said he, ‘a little too much. Indeed, it was only as I went into the pub, and saw the people, I could get up anything worth writing about.’
‘Oh, there is no reason to explain, my dear fellow,’ replied the gentleman thus addressed.
‘No, but I wish you to understand I am the victim of circumstances over which I had no control. It was business, not love of liquor, which reduced me to this state.’
‘Of course. We all know you’re as virtuous as Father Mathew.’
But here the conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a small boy, sent by the sub-editor, to know if Mr. Wentworth was in, as he was waiting for copy.
‘Tell that respected gentleman,’ said the individual thus alluded to, ‘Mr. Wentworth is in, and in a few minutes will let him have as much copy as he requires,’ at the same time handing the boy a few slips for the printers to go on with.
The boy retired, and the speaker set to work, describing with great felicity the revelry of the night, and deploring the drunkenness which interfered with the pleasures of the day, and which marred the beauties of the sylvan spot. By turns he was humorous and moral, classical or romantic, and so effective was the article that it was reprinted next day for gratuitous circulation, and with a view to prevent the repetition of such excesses on another occasion, by an ‘Old Teetotaler’ who lived in the neighbourhood of the revelry thus condemned.
‘I think that will fetch the public,’ said the worthy proprietor of the Daily Journal, as he lingered over the breakfast-table of his well-furnished mansion in an aristocratic square next morning. ‘That, my dear,’ said he to his better-half, ‘is just what the British public likes—something light and airy, with a moral tag at the end. We are a very high-souled people, and mere flippancy soon palls. I never had any fellow for the right kind of article like poor MacAndrew. What a pity it is that he drank himself to death! One would have thought he was good for another ten years. As soon as he died we had quite a drop in our sale; but since we have got the new hand the sale has been steadily rising. Most of my writers are getting too high and mighty, and think a great deal more of themselves than the public do. But this new hand is more useful. I fancy he is rather hard up. I know he drinks a good deal, and as long as that is the case he will be glad to be on the staff of the Daily Journal.’
‘Well,’ said the lady of the house, ‘ask him to our next soirée.’
‘I would, but I don’t think he’d care to come. The Cave of Harmony, or the Cider Cellars, is more in his line, and, then, there are the girls. I’ll not have these fellows come here and make love to them.’
‘No danger of that,’ said the proprietor’s lady. ‘My daughters have been far too well brought up to fall in love with newspaper writers. It might do in Paris, but not in London.’
‘Dear old girl,’ said the fond husband, ‘you’ve not got over the prejudices of early education and the traditions of Minerva House. We’ve changed all that in these days, when illiterate young noblemen make a living by scribbling scandals for the weekly journals, or are found to appear as amateur performers, or, what is worse still, on the real stage, jostling better men off, while the tuft-hunters applaud and wise men swear.’
‘Perhaps I am a little faulty,’ replied the wife. Her father was an old-fashioned City merchant, whose one standard of merit was wealth, and who thought his daughter had quite forgotten herself when she fell in love with a man who had anything to do with newspapers. ‘At any rate, I am sure I shall be glad to do what is civil to the poor fellow, should you wish it.’
The poor fellow referred to was our old acquaintance—the pious youth, the village preacher, the brief occupant of the pulpit in Sloville. Tottering home to his chambers at early morn, he met a shabbily-dressed man whom he remembered as a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge—a grand scholar, and one of his old professors.
‘I suppose you’re not got such a thing as a half-crown to lend a fellow,’ said the ex-professor, looking, unshorn and unwashed, particularly shady. ‘I’m drying of hunger.’
‘No, I’ve not; but if you come to my chambers in Clifford’s Inn we’ll have a jolly good breakfast.’
It is needless to say that the invitation was accepted. The bachelor’s kettle was brought into play, and some good coffee was made. Soon the room was fragrant with the scent of Yarmouth bloaters, as they were being toasted, and after that came a smoke and some chat. The feast, if not stately, was satisfying, and the ex-professor, finding no more was to be had, departed with lingering steps, leaving Wentworth to moralize, ere he dropped into the arms of Morpheus, upon the strange fate that had reduced a man of such talent and standing to so low a condition; and then he went off to sleep, to dream of his early peaceful and happy home. That is what one never forgets, no matter what may be his after-life. To the last each of us may exclaim with Wordsworth:
‘My eyes are filled with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,
And the same sounds are in my ears
Which in my youthful days I heard.’
It was well on towards noon when Wentworth woke up, exclaiming:
‘Ah, if life were a dream, and if dreams were life, what happiness there would be for poor devils like myself! What an infernal fool that old professor of mine has been! He must have played his cards very badly.’
Suddenly, reflecting that he was not much better himself, he looked at the glass, and was astonished at his seedy appearance.
‘By Jove,’ said he, ‘this will never do,’ and hastily dressing himself, he rushed off to Hampstead Heath for a mouthful of fresh air.
Fleet Street saw no more of him that day. Goldsmith tells us that, in all his foreign travel, he saw no finer view than that he enjoyed from the top of Hampstead Heath, and the view there is still fine, in spite of the damage done by the smoke of London rising in the distance, and the hostile attacks of that foe to the picturesque, the speculative builder.
On the Heath Wentworth met a fellow-reporter, looking as gay and respectable as a rising barrister or successful physician. He had his wife and children with him. They nodded to each other, and the lady asked:
‘Who is that shabby, seedy-looking fellow?’
‘Oh, it is Wentworth, of the Daily Journal.’
‘He looks very sad and miserable.’
‘Of course. He is quite a man about town. I fancy he drinks more than is good for him, and leads too fast a life.’
‘What a pity! Has he no friends to look after him?’
‘I believe not. It is said he was brought up to be a parson of some kind or other, but he gave it up. He has plenty of ability, and would do well if he would settle down quietly. But he will never do that. They tell me he is quite a vagabond.’
‘Ask him to lunch, and let us see what we can do to reform him,’ said the lady, with the instinctive tender-heartedness of her sex.
‘My dear, he would not come if we did,’ and they passed on.
‘Ah, there goes Tomlinson,’ said Wentworth to himself. ‘How happy and respectable he looks! They tell me he has saved quite a lot of money, and has quite a nice little property about here. Such is destiny. He was born under a lucky star, I under an unfortunate one. Ah, if I had turned up trumps in matrimony, how different it would have been!’
Thus talking to himself, our hero found himself in the neighbourhood of a well-known inn, and a smile from the barmaid—a showy specimen of her class—was quite sufficient to induce him to enter. The fair creature, as she said, ‘was a little low, and wanted a fellow to talk to.’ Wentworth soon rose to the occasion, and when he left the hostelry, it was with a flushed cheek and a jaunty air. Indeed, he was quite mirthful till he reached a little cottage where he had spent many a riotous hour. To his consternation, the blinds were down, and there was an unspeakable air of desolation about the place, as if had come there the grim unbidden visitor whose name is Death. He summoned enough courage to enter, and came out, after a very short stay, looking pale and sad. Death had indeed been there, and taken away the breadwinner of the family, leaving wife and children desolate.
It was late when he reached the rendezvous of his companions, seedy fellows, but very happy, nevertheless, unshaven, with rather big beards and long hair, much given to smoking, and not over-clean in person or linen.
‘You’re late, young man,’ said the eldest of the party, as Wentworth entered, ‘and will have to stand glasses all round.’
‘Certainly; but hear my excuse. I promised to be here at eight; it is now ten. I want an S. and B. I have not a rap in my pocket—absolutely cleared out.’
‘Too bad! and yesterday was pay-day,’ said the chairman. ‘Wentworth, you profligate, I am ashamed of you. What an example you set these young people!’
‘Shocking, shocking!’ was the cry all round.
‘Strike, but hear,’ said Wentworth. ‘You know poor Canning?’ naming a comedian popular at the music-halls.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s dead; and there’s a wife and five children, and an invalid aunt, without a halfpenny. I happened to come by the cottage as I was coming here, and I never saw a sadder sight. In one room the poor dead body; in another, women in hysterics, children weeping, and a vile harpy of a landlady standing at the door wanting her money. I paid her something to keep her quiet. That’s why I’m cleaned out, knowing that you generous youths would give me something for the poor man’s wife and family.’
Immediately every hand was put into its owner’s pocket, and Wentworth was content with the result, and he prepared to enjoy himself after the fashion of the room, which was well patronized by gentlemen of the press, including the dreariest of shorthand writers and the most elegant of penny-a-liners. As one went out to deliver his copy another came in who had done so. The climax was reached when there came a gang of Parliamentary reporters from the Gallery with the news of a great division, a Ministerial defeat and a Parliamentary crisis, who seemed inclined to sit up late talking shop. Most of them had a cheerful glass, and when that is indulged in, it is astonishing how witty a man becomes, and what a cause of wit in other men. A good deal of profane language was used, and now and then a little Latin or a scrap of Greek. The atmosphere was as critical as it was clouded with tobacco. Wentworth took part in many a war of words, and
‘Drank delight of battle with his peers.’
The sleepy waiter, reinforced by the sleepy landlord, had hard work to clear the room, which, however, was not done till the milkman might be heard going his early rounds, and the great world of London was preparing for the business of the day.
No wonder Wentworth rather liked that sort of life. It had for him the charm of novelty. At any rate, he breathed a freer air than he had ever done before. He could say what he meant. He had lived where that was impossible. There was little free speech or thought in pious circles, either Dissenting or Church, fifty years ago. Happily, the present generation lives and moves in a freer day, when a man is not sent to Coventry on account of honest doubt. The one drawback he felt was that he was rushing to the other extreme.
When Johnson was about to write the life of Akenside, he asked Hannah More, as a friend of Sir James Stonehouse, Akenside’s contemporary at the now far-famed borough of Northampton, if she could supply him with any information concerning him. On which she tells us she made an effort to recollect some sayings she had heard reported. This did not suit the Doctor, who impatiently exclaimed:
‘Incident, child—incident is what a biographer wants. Did he break his leg?’
The great Doctor was but a superficial critic, after all. As a rule, writers nowadays care little about incident, and in this respect the public resembles them. Given a life of average duration and condition, and we know its inseparable incidents—incidents which are the general property and experience of the human family. In our day we like better to learn what is the hidden life—to see the springs and sources of action in the individual or the community at large—what are the seeds sown in the human heart, and what the fruit they bear. Nature works slowly and in order, and miracles are, if not impossible, at any rate rare. One can quite realize the feeling of the celebrated Rammohun Roy, when he contended that miracles were not the part of the Christian dispensation best adapted to the conversion of sceptics. Be that as it may, there was nothing of the miraculous in finding the ardent preacher of the Gospel now in the camp of the scorner. That was the result of causes long working unsuspected. He had been disgusted with the narrowness of the Church and people with whom he had come in contact. The God of his youth seemed to him hard, despotic, unmerciful, and unlovely. He had been bowed down to the earth with a great sorrow. Apparently the change was not for good. Once he was a preacher; now he never darkened church doors. Once he associated with the godly; now he did nothing of the kind. In the language of the sects, now he was a son of perdition.
Of course a woman was at the bottom of it all. It was in Hamburg they met. There was a fashionable English boarding-school in that ancient city, and in the course of his travels Wentworth had spent a winter there. Indeed, it was on account of the beauty of one in particular that he had stopped there wasting his time and getting over head and ears in debt. It was all an accident; going up the old Steinweg, he had seen some of the young ladies of the English school coming down. One of them was Adèle, blue-eyed, fresh and fair as the stars on a summer night. Their eyes met, and Wentworth was over head and ears in love.
In a little while he managed to make the acquaintance of the lady at an evening party, where everyone was ravished with her musical genius. He was introduced to her, and found her English charming. It was evident that immense pains had been taken with her education. He had never met so brilliant a linguist before, French, German, Italian, English—in all she was equally at home. Again, he had met her at a fête without the gates, and had the honour of escorting her home. In a little while he had sent her a letter of which it is needless to describe the contents. That letter was placed in her guardian’s hands, and the result was an interview and a betrothal.
Had our hero been equal to the situation, had he had a proper amount of backbone, had he not been trained to lead an emotional life, had he attained to the true dignity of manhood, he either would have never thought of love of one in every way so much superior, or he would have returned to England at once to fight the battle of life for himself and to fit him for her. Alas! he was weak and intoxicated with love, hardly master of himself. He fell into bad society with men richer than himself, where he learned to drink and live recklessly. Away from her, loving her with the intensest and wildest passion, he was utterly miserable. He returned to London, and got a little work to do in the way of reviewing.
In London he was worse off than in Hamburg. His mode of life lent itself easily to the wildest excesses. Had he brought back the lady with him as his wife it would have been otherwise. His was a nature that could not stand alone.
Some of his wealthy friends had married, and at their evening soirées he met men and women—authors, artists, statesmen, men of progress, men and women whose names the world yet gratefully remembers; and then away he would rush off to the lodgings of other friends—dissipated medical students as they were in those far-off days, types of the Bob Sawyer class, and with gin-and-water would pass the night, unless, as was too frequently the case, they plunged into the debaucheries of London by night, when respectability had gone to bed.
Lower and lower did Wentworth fall, and then came the end. The lady discovered how romantic had been her dream, and the dismissed lover staggered under the blow. It is hard to realise what a moral wreck that pitiable wretch had become—how with no real excuse for his drink and dissipation, now almost a necessity of his life, all hope had vanished from his horizon, all faith in God or man.
For a time he led, as many do, a dual life—decent by day, the reverse by night. London is full of such men now. Fathers and mothers living far away in the quiet country home have no idea what London is by night, or was, for I write of a wild scene of dissipation which no longer exists. A young man in business is sheltered more or less from the lowest abysses of London life. A young man in a decent home is also guarded to a certain extent. It is the stranger within the gates who, as a rule, falls the more easily to the allurements of vice. He is alone; he needs society. It is not good for man to be alone. If a man cannot have good society, the chances are he will have bad.
The Church at one time made no effort to bring back such lost ones. They drew a hard and fast line. They only admitted the hypocrite or the saint. Wentworth belonged to neither class. In reality he had little altered. He left religious society because he could not with an honest conscience conform to its ideas, or speak its language, or adopt its conventionalisms. At one time he believed in it because he had been brought up in it. He had been taught phrases, and he used them without ever thinking of their meaning, and when the meaning did not come he went on using them, believing it would come. ‘Preach faith till you have it,’ said an old divine to a young brother, ‘and then you will preach it because you have it.’ In Wentworth’s case the remedy did not answer. He preached because he thought it his duty. He did not preach because he felt it dishonesty to use terms of doubtful meaning utilized in the pulpit in one sense, understood in the pew in another. He had not found light in Little Bethel or Cave Adullam. Was it to be found elsewhere, in the gaiety and dissipation of the world? Well, that was what he wanted to find out for himself. Like most of us, Wentworth was too impatient, and could not wait for the happy surrounding which comes to all true men soon or late. Religious people and he had parted. It seemed to him as if he could do no good, and as if the attempt to do so were harm. He had aimed high and fallen low. To save himself from starvation he did a little literary work, but that was a poor staff on which to lean. He had, as most of us have, daily wants, and, to meet them, required daily cash.
Turning one night into a tavern, he found two or three seedy-looking men manufacturing what they called ‘flimsy’ for one of the dailies. They took pity on him, and taught him how to do the same. For a time he was their assistant, and they gave him a share of the pay; but evil communications corrupt good manners, and, to drown all thought, he did as they did: sat up late in public-houses—these latter places kept open nearly all night then—and the excitement of the new life came to him as a pleasurable relief from the darkness which had cast a gloom on the morning of his days.
It became in time a habit with him to spend his nights in the music-halls, such as the Cider Cellars and Evans’s, which now have long ceased to exist, where he could forget what he once was, and did not think of what he once hoped to be. At such places all classes met in boon companionship—the lord and the lout, the drunken clergyman, the greenhorn from the country, the man of business, or county magistrate, or attorney up in town for a day or two and anxious to see life, the wild sawbones, who was supposed by his anxious parents far away to be walking the hospitals and fitting himself for a useful career, reporters, students, barristers, reckless men of all kinds, over whom tailors and landlords alike grieved. Then there were haunts still more infamous, frequented by women as reckless and abandoned as the men. Some had seen better days; some had loved, and been betrayed and abandoned; some had never known virtue in any shape; all on their way down to be trodden underfoot.
‘I was gay myself once,’ says many a man of the world, as he hears of the excesses of dissipation. Alas! so much the worse for him. It is true all experience makes a man, in one sense, wiser, if he be a wise man. Yet it is a solemn truth that no tears, no penitence, no prayers, no exertions of an after-life, can restore to the sensualist or the profligate the bloom, the freshness and purity of early youth. None of us can blot out the past. The joyous aspect of innocence and grace can never be recalled, though, for all who seek it, there is a Divine mercy, lasting as eternity, broad as heaven itself.
At one time the idea of being in such company would have been shocking to Wentworth. There are thousands who, however, thus do fall away. But they do so little by little. No one suddenly becomes base, said the Latin moralist, and he is right. A real friend or two might have saved Wentworth many a bitter hour. But at that time the thing was impracticable. The line of demarcation between the Church and the world was too strictly drawn. In the parable of the Great Teacher, the tares and the wheat grew side by side. In its superior wisdom, the Church undertook to pull up and get rid of the tares, but in doing so a good deal of mischief was done. There was no halting between two opinions. You were either converted or not. A man was either the child of God or of the devil. The Church held up an impossible and an unlovely Christianity, into the belief of which men and women were terrified.. To produce that effect there was no end of excitement, and then, when the excitement was over, in too many cases came the inevitable relapse. One result of this was that the victim had to look elsewhere for the excitement which had become part and parcel of his being—to the flowing bowl, to what is called jolly companionship, to the siren voice of worldly pleasure—and the novice falls too easily a prey. Abelard is a more common character than Simeon Stylites. The songs of Circe are pleasant to listen to, and there are roses and raptures for the sinner as well as the saint, and the roses and raptures are now—not in a world to come. The world has a great fascination for a lad brought up in a pious home, to whom it has been represented as a waste howling wilderness, peopled with devils fearful to gaze on. When he steps into it, and finds how unfairly it has been drawn to him by the Church, the chance is that he runs to the other extreme. We have hardly yet emancipated ourselves from the morbid and monkish theology of the Romish Church. There come to the writer sad recollections of a dismal theology to which he was expected to give his assent. Never did men then talk of man being made in the image of his Maker—of his being vicegerent of the earth, only a little lower than the angels, covered with glory and honour. All was devilish man could say or do. In vain was education, or science, or art. The cleverer, the more useful, the more decent you were, the more mischievous, the further from God.
Such was the doctrine preached from a thousand pulpits, at any rate, not many years since. And thus it was that the churches were chiefly filled with ignorant women and old men, or with young people—who died early of consumption—who accepted everything they heard in the pulpit, who knew nothing of the world they denounced, to whom the language of passion and temptation was unknown. It is easy to be religious when all that is irreligious has worked itself out of the man—to lead a dull, decent, formal life, when the capacity for excess is gone, or the spendthrift has been turned into a miser; when old age has taken from woman her power to tempt, and robbed the wine-cup of its fascination; when all a man wants is an easy-chair by a good fire. When we cry with Tennyson:
‘Ruined trunks on withered forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you.’
But it is not everyone who cares for such companionship.
‘Where are my dead forefathers?’ asked the pagan Frisian of Bishop Wolfran, as he stood with one of his royal leg’s in the baptismal font.
‘In hell with all the other unbelievers,’ was the reply.
‘Mighty well!’ exclaimed Radbrod, removing his leg. ‘Then I will rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.’
To return to Wentworth. He was disappointed, not only as regards the ministry, but as regards love, and that is a yet more awful thing. Plotinus taught that God made women beautiful that by means of them men might be drawn to love a beauty that is divine. To one capable of strong affection no blow can be more terrible than that of a disappointed love. It is vain to doubt on the subject. To all human appearances Wentworth was lost, but God never leaves a man to fall away for ever. ‘A gracious hand,’ writes the pious Wilberforce, ‘leads us in ways we know not, not only with, but against our plans and inclinations.’ Happily, this was so in Wentworth’s case. There came to him strength to reform, to conquer himself, to rise out of his dead self to something higher and better, partly from the memory of a pious home, partly by the natural working of his soul, partly by the needs of daily life, partly and chiefly by contact with an actress, who reproached him with his idleness and want of energy and aimlessness. Both were Bohemians, but the woman supported herself and her widowed mother. Both had loved and lost, both had found the ways of transgressors hard, that pleasure is not happiness, that there is no way to escape from God’s universal law, that wrongdoing, in thought or word or deed, is never without its inseparable penalty, and that is, the worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched. You may forget much, but you can never forget, if you live till the age of Methuselah, what you have done inconsistent with the native nobility of man; if you have brought dishonour on your name, betrayed the right, trifled with a woman’s heart, brought the gray hairs of father or mother to the grave with sorrow. The memory of such acts will continue, and sting and torture as long as life and though and being last. For such a one there are no waters of Lethe, cry for them as he will. A man cannot hide himself from himself. He may deceive the world; he may lead a life of pleasure; but he cannot deceive himself, however he may try to do so. Alone in the stillness of the night, in the quiet of the sick-room, in the awful presence of death, conscience will speak, and he cannot stifle its voice. ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ is the teaching of all daily life. To be happy even in this world, as old Franklin found out, you must be virtuous. It is a false creed, that which makes us believe that man is better without God than with Him—better as a vicious than a virtuous man—better as a mild Agnostic or a gay infidel than a decent, sober Christian.
The home training in evangelical circles fifty years ago had many serious defects. It was conducted too much with reference to the future world rather than the present one. Had Wentworth been taught the beauty of work—that life was a battlefield in which the victory was to the strong—that man was here to do the best he could for himself, to enjoy the world which the good God had made beautiful—that he was to aim high, to cherish noble expectations, to do manly deeds, to be true and honest and courageous, how different would have been his life! Only the emotional part of him had been developed, and he fell an easy prey when temptation came to him and the voice of passion thundered in his ear and he fell. Why should he not, as he grew tired of sinning and repenting, he asked himself, ignore the past and find peace where peace could never be found? He would eat of the grapes of Sodom and the clusters of Gomorrah. He would sit in the seat of the scorner. There, at any rate, conscience would cease to sting. It was the old story over again. Facilis descensus Averni.
Wentworth was beginning to find this out. He had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as all must do—though some more than others—and he had found it fairer to the eye than pleasant to the palate. He was getting sick of worldly men and worldly things. There is a cant of the world as well as of the Church, and he had found it out. The cloud passed away, and then came to him a clearer spiritual insight than he had ever possessed before. He had lost the childish faith of his early home, and there came in its stead the grander and fuller one of a man who had put away childish things, who had fought his fears and gathered strength, who had fought his fears and gathered strength, who had found peace and safety, not in the pleasant places, gay with flowers and musical with the song of birds, where we never dream of danger, but in the storm and tempest of the raging sea. Old ideas, modified by hard experience, asserted themselves; old inspirations were revived; old hopes and purposes were brought to life. He would be a preacher—but from the press, rather than from the more cramped and circumscribed pulpit. Temporal things also went better with him. Some of his writings had been republished, and had brought him fame and fortune. In the accomplished actress of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, known as Miss Howard, he had met a sympathetic friend. It was she who had originally raised him from the Slough of Despond, and had recalled him to his better self.
It is told of an Indian Prince who in prosperity was too much elevated and in adversity too much depressed, that he gave notice that on his forthcoming birthday the most acceptable present that any of his courtiers could make him would be a sentence short enough to be engraved on a ring, and suggesting a remedy for the grievance of which he complained. Many phrases were accordingly proposed, but not one was deemed satisfactory, till his daughter came forward and offered an emerald on which were engraved two Arabic words, the literal translation of which was, ‘This, too, will pass.’ Warren Hastings, who told the story, adds how the sentence cheered him when on his trial in Westminster Hall. It was thus Wentworth was upheld, and ‘This, too, will pass’ was the thought that urged him on.