Essays in Rebellion Part 6

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

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

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

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

And will they not repay the treasures lent?

No; down with everything, and up with rent!

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When wilt thou save the people?

O G.o.d of mercy! when?

Not kings and lords, but nations!

Not thrones and crowns, but men!"

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

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

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

"Child, what hast thou with sleep to do?

Awake, and dry thine eyes!

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

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

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

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

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

where the first verse runs:

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

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

Or shall we take one verse from the terrible "Easter Hymn," written by the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom:

"Like royal robes on the King of Jews, We're mocked with rights that we may not use; 'Tis the people so long have been crucified, But the thieves are still wanting on either side.

_Chorus_--Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John, Swell the sad burden, and bear it on."

The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect, and the idea comes close to Swinburne's ode, "Before a Crucifix":

"O sacred head, O desecrate, O labour-wounded feet and hands, O blood poured forth in pledge to fate Of nameless lives in divers lands, O slain and spent and sacrificed People, the grey-grown speechless Christ."

Time would fail to tell of Linton's "Torch-Dance of Liberty," or of Ma.s.sey's "Men of Forty-eight," and there are many more--the utterance of men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering was. But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also reared in hardship's school, had learnt to succour misery. Speaking at the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this question of the people:

"From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question among others, Who made the Land of England?

Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies: who did make it? 'We,' answer the much-consuming Aristocracy; 'We!' as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray: 'It is we that made it, or are the heirs, a.s.signs and representatives of those who did!'--My brothers, You? Everlasting honour to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for our famine bids you Hold!"

So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten. It is all very long ago, and the Protectionist says that times have changed. Certainly times have changed, and it was deliverance from Protection that changed them most. But if landowners have changed, if they are now more alien from the people, and richer from other sources than land, we have no reason to suppose them less greedy or more pitiful; nor can a nation live on the off-chance of pity. Seventy years ago the net encompa.s.sed the land.

We have seen how the people suffered under its entanglement. In the sight of all, landowners and speculators are now trying to spread that net again. Are we to suppose the English people have not the hereditary instinct of sparrows to keep them outside its meshes?

XIV

THE GRAND JURY

When Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, received a summons to attend the Grand Jury, or to answer the contrary at his peril, he was glad.

"For now," he thought, "I shall share in the duties of democracy and be brought face to face with the realities of life."

"Mrs. Wilson," he said to the landlady, as she brought in his breakfast, "what does this summons mean by describing the Court as being in the suburbs of the City of London? Is there a Brixton Branch?"

"O Lordy me!" cried the landlady, "I do hope, sir, as you've not got yourself mixed up with no such things; but the Court's nigh against St.

Paul's, as I know from going there just before my poor nephew pa.s.sed into retirement, as done him no good."

"The summons," Mr. Clarkson went on, "the summons says I'm to inquire, present, do, and execute all and singular things with which I may be then and there enjoined. Why should only the law talk like that?"

"Begging your pardon, sir," replied the landlady, "I sometimes do think it comes of their dressing so old-fashioned. But I'd ask it of you not to read me no more of such like, if you'd be so obliging. For it do make me come over all of a tremble."

"I wonder if her terror arises from the hideousness of the legal style or from a.s.sociation of ideas?" thought Mr. Clarkson as he opened a Milton, of which he always read a few lines every morning to dignify the day.

On the appointed date, he set out eastward with an exhilarating sense of change, and thoroughly enjoyed the drive down Holborn among the crowd of City men. "It's rather strangely like going to the seaside," he remarked to the man next him on the motor-'bus. The man asked him if he had come from New Zealand to see the decorations, and arrived late. "Oh no," said Mr. Clarkson, "I seldom think the Colonies interesting, and I distrust decoration in every form."

It was unfortunate, but the moment he mounted the Court stairs, the decoration struck him. There were the expected scenes, historic and emblematic of Roman law, blindfold Justice, the Balance, the Sword, and other encouraging symbols. But in one semicircle he especially noticed a group of men, women, and children, dancing to the tabor's sound in naked freedom. "Please, could you tell me," he asked of a stationary policeman, "whether that scene symbolises the Age of Innocence, before Law was needed, or the Age of Anarchy, when Law will be needed no longer?"

"Couldn't rightly say," answered the policeman, looking up sideways; "but I do wish they'd cover them people over more decent. They're a houtrage on respectable witnesses."

"All art--" Mr. Clarkson was beginning, when the policeman said "Grand Jury?" and pushed him through a door into a large court. A vision of middle-age was there gathering, and a murmur of complaint filled the room--the hurried breakfast, the heat, the interrupted business, the reported large number of prisoners, likely to occupy two days, or even three.

Silence was called, and four or five elderly gentlemen in black-and-scarlet robes--"wise in their wigs, and flamboyant as flamingoes," as a daily paper said of the judges at the Coronation--some also decorated with gilded chains and deep fur collars, in spite of the heat, entered from a side door and took their seats upon a raised platform. Each carried in his hand a nosegay of flowers, screwed up tight in a paper frill with lace-work round the edges, like the bouquets that enthusiasts or the management throw to actresses.

"Are those flowers to cheer the prisoners?" Mr. Clarkson whispered, "or are they the rudimentary survivals of the incense that used to counteract the smell and infection of gaol-fever?"

"Covent Garden," was the reply, and the list of jurors was called. The first twenty-three were sent into another room to select their foreman, and, though Mr. Clarkson had not the slightest desire to be chosen, he observed that the other jurors did not even look in his direction.