Alton Locke

Front matter

ALTON LOCKE TAILOR AND POET. Alton Locke TAILOR AND POET Jin JUttobios|ra}jhB BY CHARLES KINGSLEY LONDON : RICHARD EDWARD KING, 88, Curtain Road, E.C. PRINTED BS' RICHARD EDSVARP KINO, CURTAIN ROAD, LONDON CONTENTS. CHAP. TAUJE I. A Poet's Childhood l II. The Tailors' AVorkroom 15 III. Sandy Mackaye ... 28 IV. Tailors and Soldiers 35 V. The Sceptic's Mother ... 45 VI. The Ddlwich Gallery 53 VII. .First Love 65 VIIL Light in a Dark Place 73 IX. Poetry and Poets 82 X. How Folks Turn Chartists 88 XL "The Yard where the Gentlemen Live" 101 XII. Cambridge 100 XIII. The Lost Idol Found 118 XIV. A Cathedral Town 138 XV. The Man of Science 145 XVI. Cultivated AA^omen 150 XVII. Sermons in Stones 153 XVIII. My Fall 158 XIX. Short and Sad 165 XX. Pegasus in Harness 167 XXI. The Sweater's Den 175 XXII.

An Emersonian Sermon VI CONTENTS. cuap. M«" XXIII. The Freedom of the Press 192 XXIAr. The Townsman's Sermon to the Gownsman I98 XXA'. A True Nobleman 207 XXA'I. The Triumphant Author 212 XXVII. The Plush Breeches Tragedy 218 XXVIII. The Men who are Eaten 228 XXIX. The Trial 245 XXX. Prison Thoughts 254 XXXI. The new Church 263 XXXII. The Tower of Babel 266 XXXIII. A Patriot's Reward 274 XXXIA\ The Tenth of April 288 XXXAr. The Lowest Deep ... 294 XXXArI. Dreamland 303 XXXVLI. The True Demagogue 320 XXXA'III. Miracles and Science 331 XXXIX. Nemesis 337 XL. Priests and People 342 XLI. Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood *-»'*___>>«F5«^-»

Chapter I

A POET'S CHILDHOOD, I AM a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey hills, of whose loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairyland, whose gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two journeys, never to be forgotten, my knosvledge of England is bounded by the horizon svhich encircles Richmond Hill. My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious ugliness ; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty, stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests ; my only wild animals, the dingy, merry sparrows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my window-sill, ignoraht of trap or gun.

From my earliest childhood, through long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight brightened into dawn, and the glaring lamps grew pale, I used to listen, with a pleasant awe, to the ceaseless roll of the market-waggons, bringing up to the great city the treasures of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for svhich I have yearned all my life in vain. They seemed to my boyish fancy mysterious mes sengers from another world : the silent, lonely night, in which they were the only moving things, added to the wonder. I used to get out of bed to gaze at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish svomen who attended them, their labour among verdant plants and rich brown mould, on breezy slopes, under God's own clear sky. I fancied that they learnt what I knesv I should have learnt there ; I knew not then that " the eye only sees that svhich it brings svith it the power of seeing."

AVhen will their eyes be opened ? When svill priests go forth into the highsvays and the hedges, and preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there, too, in every thicket and fallow lield, in the house of God, — there, too, the gate of Heaven? I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is God's gift. He made me one, that I might learn to feel for poor svretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms drinking is disease with every breath, — bound in their prison house of brick and iron, svith their own funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke, from their cradle to their grave. I have drank of the cup of which they drink. And so I have learnt — if, indeed, I have learnt — to be a poet — a po*t of the people. That honour, surely, was worth buying svith asthma, and rickets, and consumption, aud worst of all to me — with ugliness.

It was God's purpose about me ; and, therefore, all circumstances combined to imprison me in London. I used once, svhen I worshipped circumstance, to fancy it my curse, Fate's injustice to me, which kept me from developing my genius, and asserting my rank among poets. I longed to escape to glorious Italy, or some other southern climate, svhere natural beauty svould have become the very ele ment svhich I breathed ; and yet, svhat would have come of that? Should I not, as nobler spirits than I have done, have idled away my life in Elysian dreams, singing out like a bird into the air inarticulately, purposeless, for mere joy and fulness of heart; and, taking no share in the terrible questionings, the terrible struggles of this great, asvful, blessed time — feeling no more the pulse of the great heart of England stirring me ; I used, as I said, to call it the curse of circumstance that 1 ss*as a sickly, decrepit Cockney.

My mother used to tell me that it svas the cross svhich God had given me to bear. I knosv nosv that she was right there. She used to say that my disease was God's will. I do not think, though, that she spoke right there also. I think that it was the will of the world and of the devil, of man's avarice, and laziness, and ignorance. And so would my readers, perhaps, had they seen the shop in the city svhere I svas born and nursed, with its little garrets reeking svith human breath, its kitchens and areas svith noisome sesvers. A sanitary reformer svould not be long in guessing the cause of my un healthiness. He would not rebuke me — nor svould she, sweet soul! now that she is at rest in bliss — for my wild longings to escape, for my envying the very flies and sparrows their wings that I might flee miles away into the country, and breathe the air of heaven once, aud die.

I have had my wish, I have made tsvo journeys far asvay intothe country, and they have been enough for me. My mother was a svidosv, my father, whom I cannot recollect, was a small retail tradesman in the city. He svas unfortunate ; and svhen he died, my mother came dosvn, and lived penuriously enough, I knew not how till I gresv older, down in that same sub urban street. She had been brought up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it as I do, an absurd and impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children of the devil till they have been consciously " con verted," to baptise unconscious infants and give them the sig-n of God's mercy on the mere chance of that mercy being intended for them.

AVhen God had proved, by converting them, that they were not reprobate and doomed to hell by His absolute and eternal will, then, and not till then, dare man baptise them into His name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself, and call it. "charity." So, though we had both been christened during my father's lifetime, she purposed to have us rebaptised, if ever that happened — svhich, in her sense of thesvord, never happened, lam afraid, to me. She gloried in her dissent, for she was sprung from old Puritan blood, svhich had flowed again and again beneath the knife of Star- Chamber butchers, and on the battlefields of Maseby and Sedgemcor. And on winter evenings she used to sit with her Bible on her kuee, svhile I and my little sister Susan stood beside her and listened to the stories of Gideon and Barak, and Samson and Jephthah. till her eye kindled up, and her thoughts passed forth from that old Hebrew time home into those English times svhich she fancied, and not untruly, like them.

And we used to shudder, and yet listen with a strange fascination, as she told us how her ancestor called his seven sons off their small Cambridge farm, and horsed and armed them himself to follow behind Cromwell, and smite kings aud prelates with "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. ' AAThether she were right or wrong, what is it to me ? AVhat is it now to her, thank God ? But those stories, and the strict, stern Puritan education, learnt from the Independents and not the Baptists, which accompanied them, had their effect on me, for good and ill. My mother moved by rule and method ; by God's law, as she con sidered, and that only. She seldom smiled. Her svord was absolute. She never commanded tsvice svithout punishing. And yet there svere abysses of unspoken tenderness in her, as svell as clear, sound, svomanly sense and insight.

But she thought herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some ascetic of the Middle Ages — so do exti ernes meet ! It was " carnal " she considered. She had as yet no right to have any " spiritual affection " for us. A\re were still " children of wrath and of the devil," — not yet "convinced of sin," "converted, bornagain." She had no more spiritual bond with us, she thought, than she had svith a heathen or a Papist. She dared not even pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear logical sense svould yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided from all eternity ? AAre were elect, or sve were repro bate. Could her prayers alter that ? If He had chosen us, He would call us in His own good time: and, if not, — Only, again and again, as I aftersvards discovered from a journal of hers, she used to beseech God svith agonised tears to set her mind at rest by revealing to her His will towards us.

For that comfort she could at least rationally pray. But she received no answer. Poor, be los'ed mother ! If thou couldst not read the answer, written in every flosver and every sunbeam, svritten in the very fact of our ex istence here at all, what answer svould have sufficed thee? And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest svatch over our morality. Fear, of course, svas the only motive she employed -, for hosv could our still carnal understandings be affected with love to God ? And love to herself was too paltry and temporary to be urged by one svho knesv that her life svas uncertain, and svho was alsvays trying to go down to the deepest eternal ground aud reason of everything, and take her stand upon that. So our god, or gods rather, till sve svere tsvelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten commandments, and public opinion.

Yet under them, not they, but something deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural character, conformation of the spirit, — conformation of the brain, if you like, if you are a scientific man or a phrenolo gist. I never yet could dissect and map out my own being, or my neighlxiur's, as you analysts do. To me, I myself, ay,and each per son round me, seem one inexplicable whole ; to take asvay a single faculty whereof is to destroy the hai mony, the meaning, the life of all the rest. That there isaduality in us — a life long battle between flesh and spirit — sve all, alas! know well enough; but which isflesh and svhich is spirit, what philosophers in these days can tell us ? Still less had sve tsvo found out any such duality or discord in oursels'es ; for sve were gentle and obedient children.

The pleasures of the world did not tempt us. AVe did not knosv of their existence ; and no foundlings educated in a nunnery ever gresv up in more virginal and spotless innocence, if ignorance be such" — than did Susan and I. The narrowness of my sphere of observation only concentrated the faculty into greater strength. The fesv natural objects which I met — and they, of course, constituted my svhole outer svorld (for art and poetry were tabooed both by my rank and my mother's sec tarianism, and the study of human beings only develops itself as the boy grosvs into the man) — these fesv natural objects, I say, I studied svith intense keenness. I knew every leaf and flower in the little front garden ; every cabbage and rhubarb-plant in Batter sea Fields was svondei ful and beautiful to me. Clouds and water I learnt to delight in, from my occasional fingerings on Battersea Bridge, and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting above rich meadosvs and wooded gardens, to me a forbidden El Dorado.

I brought home svild flowers and chance beetles and butterflies, and pored over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but of a poet. They were to me God's angels, shining in coats of mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I envied them their beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the simple tenderness of a child's conscience, that it svas wrong to rob them of the liberty for svhich I pined — to take them asvay from the beautiful broad country whither I long-ed to follow them ; and I used to keep them a day or two, and then, regretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the first opportunity, with many compunctions of, heart, when, as generally happened, they had been starved to death in the meantime. They were my only recreations after the hours of the small day school at the neighbouring chapel, where I learnt to read, write. and sum ; except, now and then, a London walk, svith ray mother holding my hand tight the whole way.

She svould have hood winked me, stopped my ears svith cotton, aud led me In a string — kind, careful soul ! — if it had been reasonably safe on a crowded pavement, so fearful svas she lest I should be polluted by some chance sight or sound of the Babylon svhich she feared and hated — almost as much as she did the Bishops. The only books which I knew svere the Pilgrim's Progress and the Mible. Tbe former was my Shakespeare, my Dante, my Vedas, by which I explained esrery fact and phenomenon of life London svas the City of Destruction from which I svas to flee ; I was Christian ; the AVicket of the Way of Life I had strangely identified svith the turnpike at Battersea Bridge end ; and the rising ground of Mortlake and Wimbledon svas the Land of Beulah — the Enchanted Mountains of the Shepherds.

If I could once get there, I was saved : — a carnal view, perhaps, and a childish one ; but there svas a dim meaning and human reality in it nevertheless. As for the Bible, I knesv nothing of it, really, beyond the Old Testament. Indeed, the life of Christ had little chance of becoming interesting to me. My mother had given me formally to understand that it spoke of matters too deep for me ; that "till converted, the natural man could not understand the things of God ; " and I obtained little more explanation of it from the two unintelligible, dreary sermons to which I listened every dreary Sunday, in terror lest a chance shuffle of my feet, or a hint of drowsiness. — the natural result of the stifling gallery and glaring svindows and gaslights, — should bring dosvn a lecture and a punishment svhen I returned home.

Oh, those " Sabbaths ! " — days, not of rest, but utter sveariness, when the beetles and the flowers svere put by, and therewas nothing to fill up the long s'acuity but books of which i could not understand a word ; when play, laughter, or even a stare out •f windosv at the sinful, merry, Sabbath-breaking promenaders, were all forbidden, as if the commandment had run, " In it thou shalt take no manner of amusement, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter." By what strange ascetic perversion has that got to mean " keeping holy the Sabbath-day " ? Yet there was an hour's relief in the evening, when either my mother told us Old Testament stories, or some preacher or tsvo came in to supper after meeting ; and I used to sit in the corner aud listen to their talk ; not that I understood a word, but the mere struggle to understand — the mere watching my mother's earnest face — my pride in the reverent flattery svith svhich the worthy men addressed her as " a mother in Israel," svere enough to fill up the blank for me till bedtime.

Of " vital Christianity " I heard much ; but, with all my efforts, could find out nothing-. Indeed, it did not seem interesting enough to tempt me to find out much. It seemed a set of doctrines, believing in svhich was to have a magical effect on people, by sav ing them from the everlasting torture due to sins and temptations which I had nes'erfelt. Now and then, believing, in obedience to my mother's assurances, and the solemn prayers of the minivers about me, that I svas a child of hell, and a lost and miserable 6inner, I used to have accesses of terror, aud fancy that I should surely svake next morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a moment into the fire, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, have done, not only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it svould be so very dreadfully painful ; svith what conclusions the reader may judge. . . .

Still, I could not keep up the ex citement. Why should I ? The fear of pain is not the fear of sinr that I know of : and, indeed, the thing svas unreal altogether in my case, and my heart, my common-sense, rebelled against it again and again ; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's part, and saying that if she was to die, — so gentle, and obedient, and affectionate as she svas, — God svould be very unjust to send her to hell-fire, and that I was quite certain he would do no such thing — unless He were the Devil ; an opinion svhich I has'e since seen no reason te change. The confusion betsveen the King of Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared up, thank God, since then ! So I was whipped and put to bed — the whipping altering my secret heart just about as much as the dread of hell-fire did.

I speak as a Christian man — an orthodox Churchman (if you require that shibboleth). Was I so very wrong ? What svas there in the idea of religion which svas presented to me at home to captivate me ? AVhat svas the use of a child's hearing of " God's great love manifested in the scheme of redemption." when he heard in the same breath, that the effects of that redemption were practically confined only to one human being out of a thousandr and that the other nine hundred and ninety-nine svere lost and damned from their birth-hour to all eternity — not only by the absolute will and reprobation of God (though that infernal blasphemy I heard often enough), but als-o, putting that out of the question, by" the mere fact of being born of Adam's race. And this to a generation to whom God's los-e shines out in every tree, and flower, and hedgeside bird ; to svhom the daily discoveries of science are revealing that love in every microscopic animalcule svhich peoples the stagnant pool !

This to working-men, whose craving is only for some idea which shall give equal hopes, claims, and deliverances to all mankind alike ! This to working-men, who, in the smiles of their innocent children, see the heaven which they have lost — the messages of baby-cherubs, made in God's osvn image ! This to me, to whom every butterfly, every look at my little sister, contradicted the lie ! You may say that such thoughts svere too deep for a child ; that I am ascribing to my boyhood the scepticism of my manhood ; but it is not so : and what svent on in my mind goes on in the minds of thousands. It is the cause of the contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Christianity altogether, has fallen, in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, svho anathematise us for wandering into Unitarianism — you, you have driven us thither.

You must find some explanation of the facts of Christianity more in accordance svith the truths which we do know, and will live aud die for, or you can never hope to make us Christians ; or, if sve do return to the true fold, it svill be as I returned, after long, miserable years of darkling error, to a higher truth than most of you have yet learned to preach. But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from them lessons svhich I never svish to unlearn. AVhat .ever else I saw about them, this I sasv, — that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and injustice from which the child's heart, — "child of the devil" though you may call him, — instinctively, and, as I believe, by a divine inspiration, revolts. Moses leading his people out of Egypt ; Gideon, Barak, and Samson slayiug their oppressors ; David, hiding in the mountains from the tyrant, svith his little band of those svho had fled from the oppres sions of an aristocracy of Nabals; Jehu, executing God's vengeance on the kings — they svere my heroes, my models ; they mixed them selves up with the dim legendsabout the Reformation martyrs,Crom svell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth, which I had heard at my mother's knee.

Mot that the perennial oppression of the masses, in all ages and countries, had yet risen on me as an asvful, torturing, fixed idea. I fancied, poor fool ! that tyranny was the exception, and not the rule. But it svas the mere sense of abstract pity and justice svhich was delighted in me. I thought that these were old fairy tales, such as need never be realised again. I learnt other svise in after years. I have often wondered since, svhy all cannot read the same lesson as I did in those old Hebrew Scriptures — that they, of all books in the world, have been wrested into proofs of the divine right of kings, the eternal necessity of slas-ery ! But the eye only sees svhat it bi -rags with it the posver of seeing. The upper classes, from their first day at school to their last day at college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and Marathon, of freedom and of the old re publics.

And what comes of it ? No more than their tutors knosv will come of it, when they thrust into the boy's hands books svhich give the lie in every page to their osvn political superstitions. But svhen I svas just turned of thirteen, an altogether nesv fairyland svas opeued to me by some missionary tracts and journals, which svere lent to my 'mother by the ministers. Pacific >> coral islands and volcanoes, cocoanut groves and bananas, graceful savages with paint and feathers — what an El Dorado ! How I devoured them and dreamt of them, and svent there in fancy, and preached small sermons as I lay in bed at night to Tahitians and New Zealanders, though I confess my spiritual eyes were, just as my physical eyes would have been, far more busy with the scenery than with the souls of my audience. However, that was the place for me, I saw clearly.

And one day, I recollect it well, in the little, dingy, foul, reeking,twelve-foot-squareback-yard,where huge smoky party-walls shut out every breath of air and almost all the light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt and the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be re nesved only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvæ and kicking monsters which made up a large item in my list of wonders : all of a sudden the horror of the place came over me : those grim, prison-svalls above, with their canopy of lurid smoke ; the dreary, sloppy, broken pavement ; the horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools ; the utter want of form, colour, life, in the whole place, crushed me down, without my being able to analyse my feelings as I can now ; and then came over me that dream of Pacific Islands, and the free, open sea ; and I slid dosvn from my perch, and bursting into tears threw myself upon my knees in the court, and prayed aloud to God to let me be a missionary.

Half fearfully I let out my svishes to my mother svhen she came home. She gave me no answer ; but, as I found out afterwards, — too late, alas ! for her, if not for me, — she, like Mary, had " laid up all these things, and treasured them in her heart." You may guess then my delight when, a few days aftersvards, I heard that a real live missionary was coming to take tea with us. A man who had actually been in Nesv Zealand ! — the thought svas rapture. I painted him to" myself over and over again ; and svhen, after the first burst of fancy, I recollected that he might possibly not have adopted the native costume of that island, or, if he had, that perhaps it svould look too strange for him to svear it about London, I settled within myself that he was to be a tall, venerable-looking man, like the portraits of old Puritan divines which adorned our day-room ; and as I had heard that " he was powerful in prayer," I adorned his xight hand with that mystic sveapon, " all-prayer," with which Christian, svhen all other means had failed, finally vanquishes the fiend — svhich instrument, in ni}' mind, was somesvhat after the model of an infernal sort of bill or halberd — all hooks, edges, spikes, and crescents — which I had passed, shuddering, once, A L TON LOCKE. in thc hands of an old suit of armour in AVardour Street.

He came — and svith him the tsvo ministers who often drank tea with my mother; both of svhom, as they played some small part in the drama of my after life, I may as1 well describe here. The elder was a little, sleek, silver-haired old man, with a bland, weak face, just like a white rabbit. He loved me, and I loved him too, for there svere always lollipops in his pockets for me and Susan. Had his head been equal to his heart !— but what has been was to be — and the dissenting clergy, with a fesv noble exceptions among the Independents, are not the strong men of the day — none know that better than the ss-orkmen. The old man's name was Bosvyer. The other, Mr. Wigginton, svas a younger man ; tall, grim, dark, bilious, svith a narrosv forehead, retreating suddenly from his eye brosv-s up to a conical peak of black hair os-er his ears.

He preached " higher doctrine," i.e. more fatalist and Antinomian, than his gentler colleague, — and, having also a stentorian voice, was much the greater favourite at the chapel. I hated him — and if any man ever deserved hatred, he did. Well, they came. My heart svas in my mouth as I opened the door to them, and sunk back agaiii to the very lowest depths of my inner man when my eyes fell on the face and figure of the missionary — a squat, red-faced, pig-eyed, low-brosved man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very ears ; sensuality, con ceit, and cunning marked on every feature — an innate vulgarity, from which the artisan and the child recoil with an instinct as true, perhaps truer, than that of the courtier, showing itself in every tone and motion ; I shrunk into a corner, so crestfallen that I could not even exert myself to hand round the bread and butter, for which I got duly scolded aftersvards.

Oh ! that man ! how he bawled and contradicted, and laid down the law, and spoke to my mother in a fondling, patronising way, which made me, I knew not why, boil over with jealousy and indignation. How he filled his teacup half full of the svhite sugar, to buy which my mother had curtailed her yesterday's dinner — .hosv he drained the fesv remaining drops of the three-pennyworth of cream, with which Susan was stealing off to keep it as an unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast the next morning — hosv he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of his converts, but as a planter might of his slaves ; over laying all his unintentional confessions cf his osvn greed and pro sperity,with cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to see throuo-h while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with a jumble of old English picked out of our translation of the New Testament.