Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet Part 2

Soon afterwards he got upon trout fishing, which was a strong bond of union between him and me, and discoursed on the proper methods of fishing chalk streams. "Your flies can't be too big, but they must be on small gut, not on base viol fiddle strings, like those you brought down to Farnham last year. I tell you gut is the thing that does it. Trout know that flies don't go about with a ring and a hand pole through their noses, like so many prize bulls of Lord Ducie's."

Then he got on the possible effect of a.s.sociation on the future of England, and from that to the first International Exhibition, and the building which was going up in Hyde Park.

"I mean to run a muck soon," he said, "against all this talk about genius and high art, and the rest of it. It will be the ruin of us, as it has been of Germany. They have been for fifty years finding out, and showing people how to do everything in heaven and earth, and have done nothing. They are dead even yet, and will be till they get out of the high art fit. We were dead, and the French were dead till their revolution; but that brought us to life. Why didn't the Germans come to life too? Because they set to work with their arts, sciences, and how to do this, that, and the other thing, and doing nothing. Goethe was, in great part, the ruin of Germany. He was like a great fog coming down on the German people, and wrapping them up."

Then he, in his turn, drew the Bishop about Borneo, and its people, and fauna and flora; and we got some delightful stories of apes, and converts, and honey bears, Kingsley showing himself, by his questions, as familiar with the Bornean plants and birds, as though he had lived there. Later on we got him on his own works, and he told us how he wrote. "I can't think, even on scientific subjects, except in the dramatic form. It is what Tom said to Harry, and what Harry answered him. I never put pen to paper till I have two or three pages in my head, and see them as if they were printed.

Then I write them off, and take a turn in the garden, and so on again." We wandered back to fishing, and I challenged his keenness for making a bag.

"Ah!" he said, "that's all owing to my blessed habit of intensity, which has been my greatest help in life. I go at what I am about as if there were nothing else in the world for the time being. That's the secret of all hard-working men; but most of them can't carry it into their amus.e.m.e.nts.

Luckily for me I can stop from all work, at short notice, and turn head over heels in the sight of all creation, and say, I won't be good or bad, or wise, or anything, till two o'clock to-morrow."

At last the Bishop would go, so we groped our way with him into the King's Road, and left him in charge of a link-boy. When we got back, I said something laughingly about his gift of talk, which had struck me more that evening than ever before.

"Yes," he said, "I have it all in me. I could be as great a talker as any man in England, but for my stammering. I know it well; but it's a blessed thing for me. You must know, by this time, that I'm a very shy man, and shyness and vanity always go together. And so I think of what every fool will say of me, and can't help it. When a man's first thought is not whether a thing is right or wrong, but what will Lady A., or Mr. B. say about it, depend upon it he wants a thorn in the flesh, like my stammer.

When I am speaking for G.o.d, in the pulpit, or praying by bedsides, I never stammer. My stammer is a blessed thing for me. It keeps me from talking in company, and from going out as much as I should do but for it."

It was two o'clock before we thought of moving, and then, the fog being as bad as ever, he insisted on making me up a bed on the floor. While we were engaged in this process, he confided to me that he had heard of a doctor who was very successful in curing stammering, and was going to try him. I laughed, and reminded him of his thorn in the flesh, to which he replied, with a quaint twinkle of his eye, "Well, that's true enough. But a man has no right to be a nuisance, if he can help it, and no more right to go about amongst his fellows stammering, than he has to go about stinking."

At this time he was already at work on another novel; and, in answer to a remonstrance from a friend, who was anxious that he should keep ail his strength for social reform, writes--

1851.--"I know that He has made me a parish priest, and that that is the duty which lies nearest me, and that I may seem to be leaving my calling in novel writing. But has He not taught me all these very things _by my_ parish priest life? Did He, too, let me become a strong, daring, sporting, wild man of the woods for nothing? Surely the education He has given me so different from that which authors generally receive, points out to me a peculiar calling to preach on these points from my own experience, as it did to good old Isaac Walton, as it has done in our own day to that truly n.o.ble man, Captain Marryat. Therefore I must believe, '_si tu sequi la tua, stella_,' with Dante, that He who ordained my star will not lead me _into_ temptation, but _through_ it, as Maurice says. Without Him all places and methods of life are equally dangerous--with Him, all equally safe. Pray for me, for in myself I am weaker of purpose than a lost grey hound, lazier than a dog in rainy weather."

While the co-operative movement was spreading in all directions, the same impulse was working amongst the trades unions, and the engineers had set the example of uniting all their branches into one society. In this winter they believed themselves strong enough to try conclusions with their employers. The great lock-out in January, 1852, was the consequence. The engineers had appealed to the Council of Promoters to help them in putting their case--which had been much misrepresented--fairly before the public, and Kingsley had been consulted as the person best able to do it. He had declined to interfere, and wrote me the following letter to explain his views. It will show how far he was an encourager of violent measures or views:--

"EVERSLEY, _January 28, 1852_.

"You may have been surprised at my having taken no part in this Amalgamated Iron Trades' matter. And I think that I am bound to say why I have not, and how far I wish my friends to interfere in it.

"I do think that we, the Council of Promoters, shall not be wise in interfering between masters and men; because--1. I question whether the points at issue between them can be fairly understood by any persons not conversant with the practical details of the trade...

"2. Nor do I think they have put their case as well as they might. For instance, if it be true that they themselves have invented many, or most, of the improvements in their tools and machinery, they have an argument in favour of keeping out unskilled labourers, which is unanswerable, and yet, that they have never used--viz.: 'Your masters make hundreds and thousands by these improvements, while we have no remuneration for this inventive talent of ours, but rather lose by it, because it makes the introduction of unskilled labour more easy. Therefore, the only way in which we can get anything like a payment for this inventive faculty of which we make you a present over and above our skilled labour, for which you bargained, is to demand that we, who invent the machines, if we cannot have a share in the profits of them, shall at least have the exclusive privilege of using them, instead of their being, as now, turned against us.' That, I think, is a fair argument; but I have seen nothing of it from any speaker or writer.

"3. I think whatever battle is fought, must be fought by the men themselves. The present dodge of the Manchester school is to cry out against us, as Greg did. 'These Christian Socialists are a set of mediaeval parsons, who want to hinder the independence and self-help of the men, and bring them back to absolute feudal maxims; and then, with the most absurd inconsistency, when we get up a corporation workshop, to let the men work on the very independence and self-help of which they talk so fine, they turn round and raise just the opposite yell, and cry, The men can't be independent of capitalists; these a.s.sociations will fail _because_ the men are helping themselves'--showing that what they mean is, that the men shall be independent of every one but themselves--independent of legislators, parsons, advisers, gentlemen, n.o.blemen, and every one that tries to help them by moral agents; but the slaves of the capitalists, bound to them by a servitude increasing instead of lightening with their numbers. Now, the only way in which we can clear the cause of this calumny is to let the men fight their own battle; to prevent any one saying, 'These men are the tools of dreamers and fanatics,' which would be just as ruinously blackening to them in the public eyes, as it would be to let the cry get abroad, 'This is a Socialist movement, destructive of rights of property, communism, Louis Blanc and the devil, &c.' You know the infernal stuff which the devil gets up on such occasions--having no scruples about calling himself hard names, when it suits his purpose, to blind and frighten respectable old women.

"Moreover, these men are not poor distressed needlewomen or slop-workers.

They are the most intelligent and best educated workmen, receiving incomes often higher than a gentleman's son whose education has cost 1000, and if they can't fight their own battles, no men in England can, and the people are not ripe for a.s.sociation, and we must hark back into the compet.i.tive rot heap again. All, then, that we can do is, to give advice when asked--to see that they have, as far as we can get at them, a clear stage and no favour, but not by public, but by private influence.

"But we can help them in another way, by showing them the way to a.s.sociate.

That is quite a distinct question from their quarrel with their masters, and we shall be very foolish if we give the press a handle for mixing up the two. We have a right to say to masters, men, and public, 'We know and care nothing about the iron strike. Here are a body of men coming to us, wishing to be shown how to do that which is a right thing for them to do--well or ill off, strike or no strike, namely, a.s.sociate; and we will help and teach them to do _that_ to the very utmost of our power.'

"The Iron Workers' co-operative shops will be watched with lynx eyes, calumniated shamelessly. Our business will be to tell the truth about them, and fight manfully with our pens for them. But we shall never be able to get the ears of the respectabilities and the capitalists, if we appear at this stage of the business. What we must say is, 'If you are needy and enslaved, we will fight for you from pity, whether you be a.s.sociated or compet.i.tive. But you are neither needy, nor, unless you choose, enslaved; and therefore we will only fight for you in proportion as you become a.s.sociates. Do that, and see if we can't stand hard knocks for your sake.'--Yours ever affectionate, C. KINGSLEY."

In the summer of 1852 (mainly by the continued exertions of the members of the Council, who had supplied Mr. Slaney's committee with all his evidence, and had worked hard in other ways for this object) a Bill for legalizing Industrial a.s.sociations was about to be introduced into the House of Commons. It was supposed at one time that it would be taken in hand by the Government of Lord Derby, then lately come into office, and Kingsley had been canva.s.sing a number of persons to make sure of its pa.s.sing. On hearing that a Cabinet Minister would probably undertake it, he writes--

"Let him be a.s.sured that he will by such a move do more to carry out true Conservatism, and to reconcile the workmen with the real aristocracy, than any politician for the last twenty years has done. The truth is, we are in a critical situation here in England. Not in one of danger--which is the vulgar material notion of a crisis, but at the crucial point, the point of departure of principles and parties which will hereafter become great and powerful. Old Whiggery is dead, old true blue Toryism of the Robert Inglis school is dead too-and in my eyes a great loss. But as live dogs are better than dead lions, let us see what the live dogs are.

"1.--The Peelites, who will ultimately, be sure, absorb into themselves all the remains of Whiggery, and a very large proportion of the Conservative party. In an effete unbelieving age, like this, the Sadducee and the Herodian will be the most captivating philosopher. A scientific laziness, lukewarmness, and compromise, is a cheery theory for the young men of the day, and they will take to it _con amore_. I don't complain of Peel himself. He was a great man, but his method of compromise, though useful enough in particular cases when employed by a great man, becomes a most dastardly "_schema mundi_" when taken up by a school of little men.

Therefore the only help which we can hope for from the Peelites is that they will serve as ballast and cooling pump to both parties, but their very tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and moderation make them fearfully likely to obtain power. It depends on the wisdom of the present government, whether they do or not.

"2.--Next you have the Manchester school, from whom Heaven defend us; for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and anarchic and atheistic schemes of the universe, the Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst. I have no language to express my contempt for it, and therefore I quote what Maurice wrote me this morning. 'If the Ministry would have thrown Protection to the dogs (as I trust they have, in spite of the base attempts of the Corn Law Leaguers to goad them to committing themselves to it, and to hold them up as the people's enemies), and thrown themselves into social measures, who would not have clung to them, to avert that horrible catastrophe of a Manchester ascendency, which I believe in my soul would be fatal to intellect, morality, and freedom, and will be more likely to move a rebellion among the working men than any Tory rule which can be conceived.'

"Of course it would. To pretend to be the workmen's friends, by keeping down the price of bread, when all they want thereby is to keep down wages, and increase profits, and in the meantime to widen the gulf between the working man and all that is time-honoured, refined, and chivalrous in English society, that they may make the men their divided slaves, that is-perhaps half unconsciously, for there are excellent men amongst them--the game of the Manchester School."

"I have never swerved from my one idea of the last seven years, that the real battle of the time is, if England is to be saved from anarchy and unbelief, and utter exhaustion caused by the compet.i.tive enslavement of the ma.s.ses, not Radical or Whig against Peelite or Tory--let the dead bury their dead-but the Church, the gentlemen, and the workman, against the shop-keepers and the Manchester School. The battle could not have been fought forty years ago, because, on one side, the Church was an idle phantasm, the gentleman too ignorant, the workman too merely animal; while, on the other, the Manchester cotton-spinners were all Tories, and the shopkeepers were a distinct cla.s.s interest from theirs. But now these two latter have united, and the sublime incarnation of shop-keeping and labour-buying in the cheapest market shines forth in the person of Moses & Son, and both cotton-spinners and shop-keepers say 'This is the man!'" and join in one common press to defend his system. Be it so: now we know our true enemies, and soon the working-men will know them also. But if the present Ministry will not see the possibility of a coalition between them, and the workmen, I see no alternative but just what we have been straining every nerve to keep off--a compet.i.tive United States, a democracy before which the work of ages will go down in a few years. A true democracy, such as you and I should wish to see, is impossible without a Church and a Queen, and, as I believe, without a gentry. On the conduct of statesmen it will depend whether we are gradually and harmoniously to develop England on her ancient foundations, or whether we are to have fresh paralytic governments succeeding each other in doing nothing, while the workmen and the Manchester School fight out the real questions of the day in ignorance and fury, till the '_culbute generale_' comes, and gentlemen of ancient family, like your humble servant, betake themselves to Canada, to escape, not the Amalgamated Engineers, but their 'masters,' and the slop-working savages whom their masters' system has created, and will by that time have multiplied tenfold.

"I have got a Thames boat on the lake at Bramshill, and am enjoying vigorous sculls. My answer to 'Fraser' is just coming out; spread it where you can."

In the next year or two the first excitement about the co-operative movement cooled down. Parson Lot's pen was less needed, and he turned to other work in his own name. Of the richness and variety of that work this is not the place to speak, but it all bore on the great social problems which had occupied him in the earlier years. The Crimean war weighed on him like a nightmare, and modified some of his political opinions. On the resignation of Lord Aberdeen's Government on the motion for inquiry into the conduct of the war, he writes, February 5, 1855, "It is a very bad job, and a very bad time, be sure, and with a laughing House of Commons we shall go to Gehenna, even if we are not there already--But one comfort is, that even Gehenna can burn nothing but the chaff and carcases, so we shall be none the poorer in reality. So as the frost has broken gloriously, I wish you would get me a couple of dozen of good flies, viz., c.o.c.k a bondhues, red palmers with plenty of gold twist; winged duns, with bodies of hare's ear and yellow mohair mixed well; hackle duns with grey bodies, and a wee silver, these last tied as palmers, and the silver ribbed all the way down.

If you could send them in a week I shall be very glad, as fishing begins early."

In the midst of the war he was present one day at a council meeting, after which the manager of one of the a.s.sociations referring to threatened bread riots at Manchester, asked Kingsley's opinion as to what should be done.

"There never were but two ways," he said, "since the beginning of the world of dealing with a corn famine. One is to let the merchants buy it up and hold it as long as they can, as we do. And this answers the purpose best in the long run, for they will be selling corn six months hence when we shall want it more than we do now, and makes us provident against our wills.

The other is Joseph's plan." Here the manager broke in, "Why didn't our Government step in then, and buy largely, and store in public granaries?"

"Yes," said Kingsley, "and why ain't you and I flying about with wings and dewdrops hanging to our tails. Joseph's plan won't do for us. What minister would we trust with money enough to buy corn for the people, or power to buy where he chose." And he went on to give his questioner a lecture in political economy, which the most orthodox opponent of the popular notions about Socialism would have applauded to the echo.

By the end of the year he had nearly finished "Westward Ho!"--the most popular of his novels, which the war had literally wrung out of him. He writes--

? "_December 18, 1855_.

"I am getting more of a Government man every day. I don't see how they could have done better in any matter, because I don't see but that _I_ should have done a thousand times worse in their place, and that is the only fair standard.

"As for a ballad--oh! my dear lad, there is no use fiddling while Rome is burning. I have nothing to sing about those glorious fellows, except 'G.o.d save the Queen and them.' I tell you the whole thing stuns me, so I cannot sit down to make fiddle rhyme with diddle about it--or blundered with hundred like Alfred Tennyson. He is no Tyrtaeus, though he has a glimpse of what Tyrtaeus ought to be. But I have not even that; and am going rabbit shooting to-morrow instead. But every man has his calling, and my novel is mine, because I am fit for nothing better. The book" ('Westward Ho!') "will be out the middle or end of January, if the printers choose. It is a sanguinary book, but perhaps containing doctrine profitable for these times. My only pain is that I have been forced to sketch poor Paddy as a very worthless fellow then, while just now he is turning out a hero. I have made the deliberate _amende honorable_ in a note."

Then, referring to some criticism of mine on 'Westward Ho!'--"I suppose you are right as to Amyas and his mother; I will see to it. You are probably right too about John Hawkins. The letter in Purchas is to me unknown, but your conception agrees with a picture my father says he has seen of Captain John (he thinks at Lord Anglesey's, at Beaudesert) as a prim, hard, terrier-faced, little fellow, with a sharp chin, and a dogged Puritan eye.

So perhaps I am wrong: but I don't think _that_ very important, for there must have been sea-dogs of my stamp in plenty too." Then, referring to the Crimean war--"I don't say that the two cases are parallel. I don't ask England to hate Russia as she was bound to hate Spain, as G.o.d's enemy; but I do think that a little Tudor pluck and Tudor democracy (paradoxical as the word may seem, and inconsistently as it was carried out then) is just what we want now."

"Tummas! Have you read the story of Abou Zennab, his horse, in Stanley's 'Sinai,' p. 67? What a myth! What a poem old Wordsworth would have writ thereon! If I didn't cry like a babby over it. What a brick of a horse he must have been, and what a brick of an old head-splitter Abou Zennab must have been, to have his commandments keeped unto this day concerning of his horse; and no one to know who he was, nor when, nor how, nor nothing. I wonder if anybody'll keep _our_ commandments after we be gone, much less say, 'Eat, eat, O horse of Abou Kingsley!'"

By this time the success of "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia" had placed him in the first rank of English writers. His fame as an author, and his character as a man, had gained him a position which might well have turned any man's head. There were those amongst his intimate friends who feared that it might be so with him, and who were faithful enough to tell him so. And I cannot conclude this sketch better than by giving his answer to that one of them with whom he had been most closely a.s.sociated in the time when, as Parson Lot, every man's hand had been against him--

"MY DEAR LUDLOW,

"And for this fame, &c.,

"I know a little of her worth.

"And I will tell you what I know,

"That, in the first place, she is a fact, and as such, it is not wise to ignore her, but at least to walk once round her, and see her back as well as her front.

"The case to me seems to be this. A man feels in himself the love of praise. Every man does who is not a brute. It is a universal human faculty; Carlyle nicknames it the sixth sense. Who made it? G.o.d or the devil? Is it flesh or spirit? a difficult question; because tamed animals grow to possess it in a high degree; and our metaphysician does not yet allow them spirit. But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad: only bad when misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between good and evil. Else why has G.o.d put His love of praise into the heart of every child which is born into the world, and entwined it into the holiest filial and family affections, as the earliest mainspring of good actions?

Has G.o.d appointed that every child shall be fed first with a necessary lie, and afterwards come to the knowledge of your supposed truth, that the praise of G.o.d alone is to be sought? Or are we to believe that the child is intended to be taught as delicately and gradually as possible the painful fact, that the praise of all men is not equally worth having, and to use his critical faculty to discern the praise of good men from the praise of bad, to seek the former and despise the latter? I should say that the last was the more reasonable. And this I will say, that if you bring up any child to care nothing for the praise of its parents, its elders, its pastors, and masters, you may make a fanatic of it, or a shameless cynic: but you will neither make it a man, an Englishman, or a Christian.

"But 'our Lord's words stand, about not seeking the honour which comes from men, but the honour which comes from G.o.d only!' True, they do stand, and our Lord's fact stands also, the fact that He has created every child to be educated by an honour which comes from his parents and elders. Both are true. Here, as in most spiritual things, you have an antinomia, an apparent contradiction, which nothing but the Gospel solves. And it does solve it; and your one-sided view of the text resolves itself into just the same fallacy as the old ascetic one. 'We must love G.o.d alone, therefore we must love no created thing.' To which St. John answers pertinently 'He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love G.o.d whom he hath not seen?' If you love your brethren, you love Christ in them. If you love their praise, you love the praise of Christ in them. For consider this, you cannot deny that, if one loves any person, one desires that person's esteem. But we are bound to love all men, and that is our highest state.

Therefore, in our highest state, we shall desire all men's esteem.

Paradoxical, but true. If we believe in Christmas-day; if we believe in Whitsunday, we shall believe that Christ is in all men, that G.o.d's spirit is abroad in the earth, and therefore the dispraise, misunderstanding, and calumny of men will be exquisitely painful to us, and ought to be so; and, on the other hand, the esteem of men, and renown among men for doing good deeds will be inexpressibly precious to us. They will be signs and warrants to us that G.o.d is pleased with us, that we are sharing in that 'honour and glory' which Paul promises again and again, with no such scruples as yours, to those who lead heroic lives. We shall not neglect the voice of G.o.d within us; but we shall remember that there is also a voice of G.o.d without us, which we must listen to; and that in a Christian land, _vox populi_, patiently and discriminately listened to, is sure to be found not far off from the _vox Dei_.

"Now, let me seriously urge this last fact on you. Of course, in listening to the voice of the man outside there is a danger, as there is in the use of any faculty. You may employ it, according to Divine reason and grace, for enn.o.bling and righteous purposes; or you may degrade it to carnal and selfish ones; so you may degrade the love of praise into vanity, into longing for the honour which comes from men, by pandering to their pa.s.sions and opinions, by using your powers as they would too often like to use theirs, for mere self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, by saying in your heart--_quam pulchrum digito monstrari el diceri hic est_. That is the man who wrote the fine poem, who painted the fine picture, and so forth, till, by giving way to this, a man may give way to forms of vanity as base as the red Indian who sticks a fox's tail on, and dances about boasting of his brute cunning.

I know all about that, as well as any poor son of Adam ever did. But I know, too, that to desire the esteem of as many rational men as possible; in a word, to desire an honourable, and true renown for having done good in my generation, has nothing to do with that; and the more I fear and struggle against the former, the more I see the exceeding beauty and divineness, and everlasting glory of the latter as an entrance into the communion of saints.