Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet Part 18

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 shine 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 Lincolnshire 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 fashionable 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-fashioned 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 shillings 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?"

We took a room, and Crossthwaite coolly saw us all in; and locking the door, stood with his back against it.

"Now then, mind, 'One and all,' as the Cornishmen say, and no peaching. If any man is scoundrel enough to carry tales, I'll--"

"Do what?" asked Jemmy Downes, who had settled himself on the table, with a pipe and a pot of porter. "You arn't the king of the Cannibal Islands, as I know of, to cut a cove's head off?"

"No; but if a poor man's prayer can bring G.o.d's curse down upon a traitor's head--it may stay on his rascally shoulders till it rots."

"If ifs and ans were pots and pans. Look at Shechem Isaacs, that sold penknives in the street six months ago, now a-riding in his own carriage, all along of turning sweater. If G.o.d's curse is like that--I'll be happy to take any man's share of it."

Some new idea seemed twinkling in the fellow's cunning bloated face as he spoke. I, and others also, shuddered at his words; but we all forgot them a moment afterwards, as Crossthwaite began to speak.

"We were all bound to expect this. Every working tailor must come to this at last, on the present system; and we are only lucky in having been spared so long. You all know where this will end--in the same misery as fifteen thousand out of twenty thousand of our cla.s.s are enduring now. We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing profits made out of that labour by the contractors who will employ us--arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings--the compet.i.tion of women, and children, and starving Irish--our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more penury, slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by fifties--almost by hundreds--yearly, out of the honourable trade in which we were brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, which is devouring our trade and many others, body and soul. Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help us--our children must labour from the cradle without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of heaven,--our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or paupers--our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by prost.i.tution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to government or parliament. I don't want to talk politics here. I shall keep them for another place. But you can recollect as well as I can, when a deputation of us went up to a member of parliament--one that was reputed a philosopher, and a political economist, and a liberal--and set before him the ever-increasing penury and misery of our trade, and of those connected with it; you recollect his answer--that, however glad he would be to help us, it was impossible--he could not alter the laws of nature--that wages were regulated by the amount of compet.i.tion among the men themselves, and that it was no business of government, or any one else, to interfere in contracts between the employer and employed, that those things regulated themselves by the laws of political economy, which it was madness and suicide to oppose. He may have been a wise man. I only know that he was a rich one. Every one speaks well of the bridge which carries him over. Every one fancies the laws which fill his pockets to be G.o.d's laws. But I say this, If neither government nor members of parliament can help us, we must help ourselves. Help yourselves, and heaven will help you. Combination among ourselves is the only chance.

One thing we can do--sit still."

"And starve!" said some one.

"Yes, and starve! Better starve than sin. I say, it is a sin to give in to this system. It is a sin to add our weight to the crowd of artizans who are now choking and strangling each other to death, as the prisoners did in the black hole of Calcutta. Let those who will turn beasts of prey, and feed upon their fellows; but let us at least keep ourselves pure. It may be the law of political civilization, the law of nature, that the rich should eat up the poor, and the poor eat up each other. Then I here rise up and curse that law, that civilization, that nature. Either I will destroy them, or they shall destroy me. As a slave, as an increased burden on my fellow-sufferers, I will not live. So help me G.o.d! I will take no work home to my house; and I call upon every one here to combine, and to sign a protest to that effect."

"What's the use of that, my good Mr. Crossthwaite?" interrupted some one, querulously. "Don't you know what came of the strike a few years ago, when this piece-work and sweating first came in? The masters made fine promises, and never kept 'em; and the men who stood out had their places filled up with poor devils who were glad enough to take the work at any price--just as ours will be. There's no use kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks. All the rest have come to it, and so must we. We must live somehow, and half a loaf is better than no bread; and even that half loaf will go into other men's mouths, if we don't snap at it at once. Besides, we can't force others to strike. We may strike and starve ourselves, but what's the use of a dozen striking out of 20,000?"

"Will you sign the protest, gentlemen, or not?" asked Crossthwaite, in a determined voice.

Some half-dozen said they would if the others would.

"And the others won't. Well, after all, one man must take the responsibility, and I am that man. I will sign the protest by myself. I will sweep a crossing--I will turn cress-gatherer, rag-picker; I will starve piecemeal, and see my wife starve with me; but do the wrong thing I will not! The Cause wants martyrs. If I must be one, I must."

All this while my mind had been undergoing a strange perturbation. The notion of escaping that infernal workroom, and the company I met there--of taking my work home, and thereby, as I hoped, gaining more time for study--at least, having my books on the spot ready at every odd moment, was most enticing. I had hailed the proposed change as a blessing to me, till I heard Crossthwaite's arguments--not that I had not known the facts before; but it had never struck me till then that it was a real sin against my cla.s.s to make myself a party in the system by which they were allowing themselves (under temptation enough, G.o.d knows) to be enslaved. But now I looked with horror on the gulf of penury before me, into the vortex of which not only I, but my whole trade, seemed irresistibly sucked. I thought, with shame and remorse, of the few shillings which I had earned at various times by taking piecework home, to buy my candles for study.

I whispered my doubts to Crossthwaite, as he sat, pale and determined, watching the excited and querulous discussions among the other workmen.

"What? So you expect to have time to read? Study after sixteen hours a day st.i.tching? Study, when you cannot earn money enough to keep you from wasting and shrinking away day by day? Study, with your heart full of shame and indignation, fresh from daily insult and injustice? Study, with the black cloud of despair and penury in front of you? Little time, or heart, or strength, will you have to study, when you are making the same coats you make now, at half the price."

I put my name down beneath Crossthwaite's, on the paper which he handed me, and went out with him.

"Ay," he muttered to himself, "be slaves--what you are worthy to be, that you will be! You dare not combine--you dare not starve--you dare not die--and therefore you dare not be free! Oh! for six hundred men like Barbaroux's Ma.r.s.eillois--'who knew how to die!'"

"Surely, Crossthwaite, if matters were properly represented to the government, they would not, for their own existence' sake, to put conscience out of the question, allow such a system to continue growing."

"Government--government? You a tailor, and not know that government are the very authors of this system? Not to know that they first set the example, by getting the army and navy clothes made by contractors, and taking the lowest tenders? Not to know that the police clothes, the postmen's clothes, the convicts' clothes, are all contracted for on the same infernal plan, by sweaters, and sweaters' sweaters, and sweaters' sweaters' sweaters, till government work is just the very last, lowest resource to which a poor starved-out wretch betakes himself to keep body and soul together? Why, the government prices, in almost every department, are half, and less than half, the very lowest living price. I tell you, the careless iniquity of government about these things will come out some day. It will be known, the whole abomination, and future generations will cla.s.s it with the tyrannies of the Roman emperors and the Norman barons. Why, it's a fact, that the colonels of the regiments--n.o.blemen, most of them--make their own vile profit out of us tailors--out of the pauperism of the men, the slavery of the children, the prost.i.tution of the women. They get so much a uniform allowed them by government to clothe the men with; and then--then, they let out the jobs to the contractors at less than half what government give them, and pocket the difference. And then you talk of appealing to government."

"Upon my word," I said, bitterly, "we tailors seem to owe the army a double grudge. They not only keep under other artizans, but they help to starve us first, and then shoot us, if we complain too loudly."

"Oh, ho! your blood's getting up, is it? Then you're in the humour to be told what you have been hankering to know so long--where Mackaye and I go at night. We'll strike while the iron's hot, and go down to the Chartist meeting at * * * * *.

"Pardon me, my dear fellow," I said. "I cannot bear the thought of being mixed up in conspiracy--perhaps, in revolt and bloodshed. Not that I am afraid. Heaven knows I am not. But I am too much hara.s.sed, miserable, already. I see too much wretchedness around me, to lend my aid in increasing the sum of suffering, by a single atom, among rich and poor, even by righteous vengeance."

"Conspiracy? Bloodshed? What has that to do with the Charter? It suits the venal Mammonite press well enough to jumble them together, and cry 'Murder, rape, and robbery,' whenever the six points are mentioned; but they know, and any man of common sense ought to know, that the Charter is just as much an open political question as the Reform Bill, and ten times as much as Magna Charter was, when it got pa.s.sed. What have the six points, right or wrong, to do with the question whether they can be obtained by moral force, and the pressure of opinion alone, or require what we call ulterior measures to get them carried? Come along!"