Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography by Charles Kingsley (best short novels txt) 📗

too much inclined to behave himself like a beast,
  In spite of our glorious humanity, which requires neither God nor priest,
  Yet is daily praised and plastered by ten thousand fools at least—
  Request Mr. Hughes' presence at their jawshop in the East,
  Which don't they wish they may get it, for he goes out to-night to feast
  At the Rev. C. Kingsley's rectory, Chelsea, where he'll get his gullet
      greased
  With the best of Barto Valle's port, and will have his joys increased
  By meeting his old college chum, McDougal the Borneo priest—
  So come you thief, and drop your brief,
  At six o'clock without relief;
  And if you won't may you come to grief,
  Says Parson Lot the Socialist Chief,
  Who signs his mark at the foot of the leaf—thus"

and, at the end, a clenched fist was sketched in a few bold lines, and under it, "Parson Lot, his mark" written.

I don't know that I can do better than give the history of the rest of the day. Knowing his town habits well, I called at Parker, the publisher's, after chambers, and found him there, sitting on a table and holding forth on politics to our excellent little friend, John Wm. Parker, the junior partner.

We started to walk down to Chelsea, and a dense fog came on before we had reached Hyde Park Corner. Both of us knew the way well; but we lost it half a dozen times, and his spirit seemed to rise as the fog thickened. "Isn't this like life," he said, after one of our blunders: "a deep yellow fog all round, with a dim light here and there shining through. You grope your way on from one lamp to another, and you go up wrong streets and back again; but you get home at last—there's always light enough for that." After a short pause he said, quite abruptly, "Tom, do you want to live to be old?" I said I had never thought on the subject; and he went on, "I dread it more than I can say. To feel one's powers going, and to end in snuff and stink. Look at the last days of Scott and Wordsworth, and Southey." I suggested St. John. "Yes," he said, "that's the right thing, and will do for Bunsen, and great, tranquil men like him. The longer they live the better for all. But for an eager, fiery nature like mine, with fierce passions eating one's life out, it won't do. If I live twenty years I know what will happen to me. The back of my brain will soften, and I shall most likely go blind."

The Bishop got down somehow by six. The dinner did not last long, for the family were away, and afterwards we adjourned to the study, and Parson Lot rose to his best. He stood before the fire, while the Bishop and I took the two fireside arm chairs, and poured himself out, on subject after subject, sometimes when much moved taking a tramp up and down the room, a long clay pipe in his right hand (at which he gave an occasional suck; it was generally out, but he scarcely noticed it), and his left hand passed behind his back, clasping the right elbow. It was a favourite attitude with him, when he was at ease with his company.

We were both bent on drawing him out; and the first topic, I think, raised by the Bishop was, Fronde's history, then recently published. He took up the cudgels for Henry VIII., whom we accused of arbitrariness. Henry was not arbitrary; arbitrary men are the most obstinate of men? Why? Because they are weak. The strongest men are always ready to hear reason and change their opinions, because the strong man knows that if he loses an opinion to-day he can get just as good a one to-morrow in its place. But the weak man holds on to his opinion, because he can't get another, and he knows it.

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 association 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 amusements. 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 God, 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 noble 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