Yeast: a Problem Part 33

Lancelot coloured, for he remembered with how much less reason he had been lately invoking in his own cause those very words. He was at a loss for an answer; but seeing, to his relief, that Tregarva had returned to his usual impa.s.sive calm, he forced him to sit down, and began questioning him as to his own prospects and employment.

About them Tregarva seemed hopeful enough. He had found out a Wesleyan minister in town who knew him, and had, by his means, after a.s.sisting for a week or two in the London City Mission, got some similar appointment in a large manufacturing town. Of the state of things he spoke more sadly than ever. 'The rich cannot guess, sir, how high ill-feeling is rising in these days. It's not only those who are outwardly poorest who long for change; the middling people, sir, the small town shopkeepers especially, are nearly past all patience. One of the City Mission a.s.sured me that he has been watching them these several years past, and that nothing could beat their fort.i.tude and industry, and their determination to stand peaceably by law and order; but yet, this last year or two, things are growing too bad to bear. Do what they will, they cannot get their bread; and when a man cannot get that, sir--'

'But what do you think is the reason of it?'

'How should I tell, sir? But if I had to say, I should say this-- just what they say themselves--that there are too many of them. Go where you will, in town or country, you'll find half-a-dozen shops struggling for a custom that would only keep up one, and so they're forced to undersell one another. And when they've got down prices all they can by fair means, they're forced to get them down lower by foul--to sand the sugar, and sloe-leave the tea, and put--Satan only that prompts 'em knows what--into the bread; and then they don't thrive--they can't thrive; G.o.d's curse must be on them. They begin by trying to oust each other, and eat each other up; and while they're eating up their neighbours, their neighbours eat up them; and so they all come to ruin together.'

'Why, you talk like Mr. Mill himself, Tregarva; you ought to have been a political economist, and not a City missionary. By the bye, I don't like that profession for you.'

'It's the Lord's work, sir. It's the very sending to the Gentiles that the Lord promised me.'

'I don't doubt it, Paul; but you are meant for other things, if not better. There are plenty of smaller men than you to do that work.

Do you think that G.o.d would have given you that strength, that brain, to waste on a work which could be done without them? Those limbs would certainly be good capital for you, if you turned a live model at the Academy. Perhaps you'd better be mine; but you can't even be that if you go to Manchester.'

The giant looked hopelessly down at his huge limbs. 'Well! G.o.d only knows what use they are of just now. But as for the brains, sir--in much learning is much sorrow. One had much better work than read, I find. If I read much more about what men might be, and are not, and what English soil might be, and is not, I shall go mad.

And that puts me in mind of one thing I came here for, though, like a poor rude country fellow as I am, I clean forgot it a thinking of- -Look here, sir; you've given me a sight of books in my time, and G.o.d bless you for it. But now I hear that--that you are determined to be a poor man like us; and that you shan't be, while Paul Tregarva has ought of yours. So I've just brought all the books back, and there they lie in the hall; and may G.o.d reward you for the loan of them to his poor child! And so, sir, farewell;' and he rose to go.

'No, Paul; the books and you shall never part.'

'And I say, sir, the books and you shall never part.'

'Then we two can never part'--and a sudden impulse flashed over him- -'and we will not part, Paul! The only man whom I utterly love, and trust, and respect on the face of G.o.d's earth, is you; and I cannot lose sight of you. If we are to earn our bread, let us earn it together; if we are to endure poverty, and sorrow, and struggle to find out the way of bettering these wretched millions round us, let us learn our lesson together, and help each other to spell it out.'

'Do you mean what you say?' asked Paul slowly.

'I do.'

'Then I say what you say. Where thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Come what will, I will be your servant, for good luck or bad, for ever.'

'My equal, Paul, not my servant.'

'I know my place, sir. When I am as learned and as well-bred as you, I shall not refuse to call myself your equal; and the sooner that day comes, the better I shall be pleased. Till then I am your friend and your brother; but I am your scholar too, and I shall not set up myself against my master.'

'I have learnt more of you, Paul, than ever you have learnt of me.

But be it as you will; only whatever you may call yourself, we must eat at the same table, live in the same room, and share alike all this world's good things--or we shall have no right to share together this world's bad things. If that is your bargain, there is my hand on it.'

'Amen!' quoth Tregarva; and the two young men joined hands in that sacred bond--now growing rarer and rarer year by year--the utter friendship of two equal manful hearts.

'And now, sir, I have promised--and you would have me keep my promise--to go and work for the City Mission in Manchester--at least, for the next month, till a young man's place who has just left, is filled up. Will you let me go for that time? and then, if you hold your present mind, we will join home and fortunes thenceforth, and go wherever the Lord shall send us. There's work enough of His waiting to be done. I don't doubt but if we are willing and able, He will set us about the thing we're meant for.'

As Lancelot opened the door for him, he lingered on the steps, and grasping his hand, said, in a low, earnest voice: 'The Lord be with you, sir. Be sure that He has mighty things in store for you, or He would not have brought you so low in the days of your youth.'

'And so,' as John Bunyan has it, 'he went on his way;' and Lancelot saw him no more till--but I must not outrun the order of time.

After all, this visit came to Lancelot timely. It had roused him to hope, and turned off his feelings from the startling news he had just heard. He stepped along arm in arm with Luke, cheerful, and fate-defiant, and as he thought of Tregarva's complaints,--

'The beautiful?' he said to himself, 'they shall have it! At least they shall be awakened to feel their need of it, their right to it.

What a high destiny, to be the artist of the people! to devote one's powers of painting, not to mimicking obsolete legends, Pagan or Popish, but to representing to the working men of England the triumphs of the Past and the yet greater triumphs of the Future!'

Luke began at once questioning him about his father.

'And is he contrite and humbled? Does he see that he has sinned?'

'In what?'

'It is not for us to judge; but surely it must have been some sin or other of his which has drawn down such a sore judgment on him.'

Lancelot smiled; but Luke went on, not perceiving him.

'Ah! we cannot find out for him. Nor has he, alas! as a Protestant, much likelihood of finding out for himself. In our holy church he would have been compelled to discriminate his faults by methodic self-examination, and lay them one by one before his priest for advice and pardon, and so start a new and free man once more.'

'Do you think,' asked Lancelot with a smile, 'that he who will not confess his faults either to G.o.d or to himself, would confess them to man? And would his priest honestly tell him what he really wants to know? which sin of his has called down this so-called judgment?

It would be imputed, I suppose, to some vague generality, to inattention to religious duties, to idolatry of the world, and so forth. But a Romish priest would be the last person, I should think, who could tell him fairly, in the present case, the cause of his affliction; and I question whether he would give a patient hearing to any one who told it him.'

'How so? Though, indeed, I have remarked that people are perfectly willing to be told they are miserable sinners, and to confess themselves such, in a general way; but if the preacher once begins to specify, to fix on any particular act or habit, he is accused of personality or uncharitableness; his hearers are ready to confess guilty to any sin but the very one with which he charges them. But, surely, this is just what I am urging against you Protestants--just what the Catholic use of confession obviates.'

'Attempts to do so, you mean!' answered Lancelot. 'But what if your religion preaches formally that which only remains in our religion as a fast-dying superst.i.tion?--That those judgments of G.o.d, as you call them, are not judgments at all in any fair use of the word, but capricious acts of punishment on the part of Heaven, which have no more reference to the fault which provokes them, than if you cut off a man's finger because he made a bad use of his tongue. That is part, but only a part, of what I meant just now, by saying that people represent G.o.d as capricious, proud, revengeful.'

'But do not Protestants themselves confess that our sins provoke G.o.d's anger?'

'Your common creed, when it talks rightly of G.o.d as one "who has no pa.s.sions," ought to make you speak more reverently of the possibility of any act of ours disturbing the everlasting equanimity of the absolute Love. Why will men so often impute to G.o.d the miseries which they bring upon themselves?'

'Because, I suppose, their pride makes them more willing to confess themselves sinners than fools.'

'Right, my friend; they will not remember that it is of "their pleasant vices that G.o.d makes whips to scourge them." Oh, I at least have felt the deep wisdom of that saying of Wilhelm Meister's harper, that it is

"Voices from the depth of NATURE borne Which woe upon the guilty head proclaim."

Of nature--of those eternal laws of hers which we daily break. Yes!

it is not because G.o.d's temper changes, but because G.o.d's universe is unchangeable, that such as I, such as your poor father, having sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind. I have fed my self-esteem with luxuries and not with virtue, and, losing them, have nothing left. He has sold himself to a system which is its own punishment.

And yet the last place in which he will look for the cause of his misery is in that very money-mongering to which he now clings as frantically as ever. But so it is throughout the world. Only look down over that bridge-parapet, at that huge black-mouthed sewer, vomiting its pestilential riches across the mud. There it runs, and will run, hurrying to the sea vast stores of wealth, elaborated by Nature's chemistry into the ready materials of food; which proclaim, too, by their own foul smell, G.o.d's will that they should be buried out of sight in the fruitful all-regenerating grave of earth: there it runs, turning them all into the seeds of pestilence, filth, and drunkenness.--And then, when it obeys the laws which we despise, and the pestilence is come at last, men will pray against it, and confess it to be "a judgment for their sins;" but if you ask WHAT sin, people will talk about "les voiles d'airain," as Fourier says, and tell you that it is presumptuous to pry into G.o.d's secret counsels, unless, perhaps, some fanatic should inform you that the cholera has been drawn down on the poor by the endowment of Maynooth by the rich.'

'It is most fearful, indeed, to think that these diseases should be confined to the poor--that a man should be exposed to cholera, typhus, and a host of attendant diseases, simply because he is born into the world an artisan; while the rich, by the mere fact of money, are exempt from such curses, except when they come in contact with those whom they call on Sunday "their brethren," and on week days the "ma.s.ses."

'Thank Heaven that you do see that,--that in a country calling itself civilised and Christian, pestilence should be the peculiar heritage of the poor! It is past all comment.'

'And yet are not these pestilences a judgment, even on them, for their dirt and profligacy?'

'And how should they be clean without water? And how can you wonder if their appet.i.tes, sickened with filth and self-disgust, crave after the gin-shop for temporary strength, and then for temporary forgetfulness? Every London doctor knows that I speak the truth; would that every London preacher would tell that truth from his pulpit!'

'Then would you too say, that G.o.d punishes one cla.s.s for the sins of another?'

'Some would say,' answered Lancelot, half aside, 'that He may be punishing them for not demanding their RIGHT to live like human beings, to all those social circ.u.mstances which shall not make their children's life one long disease. But are not these pestilences a judgment on the rich, too, in the truest sense of the word? Are they not the broad, unmistakable seal to G.o.d's opinion of a state of society which confesses its economic relations to be so utterly rotten and confused, that it actually cannot afford to save yearly millions of pounds' worth of the materials of food, not to mention thousands of human lives? Is not every man who allows such things hastening the ruin of the society in which he lives, by helping to foster the indignation and fury of its victims? Look at that group of stunted, haggard artisans, who are pa.s.sing us. What if one day they should call to account the landlords whose coveteousness and ignorance make their dwellings h.e.l.ls on earth?'

By this time they had reached the artist's house.