Robert Elsmere

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of Elsmere's venture in North R----, one of which may just be noticed here.

Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for the philanthropic pa.s.sion, as he had for many others belonging to far stranger and remoter faiths.

By profession he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice.

On this practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardours as himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them was done, she would throw herself into charity organisation cases, into efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts of ministry towards the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her face, which but for the stress of London, of labour, and of poverty, would have had a blunt fresh-coloured dairymaid's charm, became symbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining men and women.

The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make nothing of the religion of Humanity.

Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in North R----.

In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth.

And we shall see that in time Robert's energies took a direction which Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of honouring.

In the first place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a fresh centre for civilising effort had been extremely shrewd. The district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their schoolroom rose the great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north side of the river to Doulton's immense works on the south. The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of workmen's dwellings recently erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation, earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been largely instrumental in establis.h.i.+ng within easy distance of their houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working, when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and white poster in the schoolroom windows, it was the potters who provided him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock labourers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and specialised training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a ma.s.s of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the riverside streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in the neighbourhood of St. Wilfrid's.

St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses of which the district was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations went, all but extinct. The ca.s.socked monk-like clergy might preach and 'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its natural fruits.

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere's mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's was the very church where Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately after his interview with the bishop. The letter had remained unanswered, and it was by now tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer.

Elsmere's affectionate sensitive nature took such things hardly, especially as he knew that Newcome's life was becoming increasingly difficult and embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend's 'infidel propaganda,' established on the very ground where he himself had all but died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.

But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary fight apart from the organised system of English religion and English philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid's pa.s.sed them with cold averted eyes; the old and _faineant_ rector of the parish church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of Elsmere's intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious.

His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church, in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be, alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.

'Tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled;'

and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the prosaic and perplexing details of this new attempt to carry enthusiasm into life.

It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the _upper working cla.s.s_. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and intelligent among the working cla.s.s holds itself aloof--broadly speaking--from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or Dissent.

Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar material in the great towns of the North. Towards religion in general the prevailing att.i.tude is one of indifference tinged with hostility.

'Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous proportion belong to

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working cla.s.s--elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of pa.s.sion. The mere intermingling of races, which a modern capital shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

As the weeks pa.s.sed on, and after the first inevitable despondency produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun to wear off, Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and ardour of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with religion. He made himself quickly felt in the night-school, and as soon as he possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room, on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the story-telling, which had been so great a success at Murewell. The story-telling struck the neighbourhood as a great novelty. At first only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and draughts and the ill.u.s.trated papers held seductive sway. The next night the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold--the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would be stories ill.u.s.trating the dangers and difficulties of particular trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern ironworks, or from that of the Lancas.h.i.+re factories; or stories of English country life and its humours, given sometimes in dialect--Devons.h.i.+re, or Yorks.h.i.+re, or c.u.mberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the _Birkenhead_; the deadly plunge of the _Captain_; the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the s.h.i.+ps of science, exploring step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mont Blanc might be buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Chateau d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing vespers. Flaxman had a pa.s.sion for intellectual or social novelty; and this pa.s.sion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them.

His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current 'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed s.p.a.ces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough.

Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbours had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out for a repet.i.tion of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to cut the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.

'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow.

But he ain't a parson.'

'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most of 'em as comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as an egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn't catch _me_ here.

Never heard him say anything in the "dear brethren" sort of style, and I've been 'ere most o' these evenings and to his lectures besides.'

'Perhaps he's one of your d--d sly ones,' said the first speaker dubiously. 'Means to shovel it in by and by.'

'Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned his companion. 'He'd let other fellers have their say, anyhow.'

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a gasfitter--to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have brought in with him on his way from work--with eyes like live birds', and small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the man's thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling with excitement.

Another project of Robert's, started as soon as he had felt his way a little in the district, was the scientific Sunday school. This was the direct result of a paragraph in Huxley's Lay Sermons, where the hint of such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of such a supplement to a child's ordinary education is not what it was.

Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did a botany cla.s.s, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores of flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of large coloured plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a Kew a.s.sistant. These he would often set up on a large screen, or put up on the walls, till the dingy schoolroom became a bower of superb blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And then--still by the help of pictures--he would take his cla.s.s on a tour through strange lands, talking to them of China or Egypt or South America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost all of the artisan cla.s.s, were of the poorest cla.s.s. He knew it, and had laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must have something to work upon, and must penetrate downwards. He only can receive who already hath--there is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months pa.s.sed on, and he was still brooding, still waiting. At last the spark fell.

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street, rose the famous Workmen's Club of North R----. It had been started by a former Liberal clergyman of the parish, whose main object, however, had been to train the workmen to manage it for themselves. His training had been, in fact, too successful. Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it had come to be a centre of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the Church and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coa.r.s.est free-thinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the place of honour in the window and the _Freethinker_ placard flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly seasoned literature even than the _Freethinker_ to be had. There was in particular a small halfpenny paper which was understood to be in some sense the special organ of the North R---- Club; which was at any rate published close by, and edited by one of the workmen founders of the club. This unsavoury sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised through the parish as Lent drew on towards Pa.s.sion week, and the exertions of St. Wilfrid's and of the other churches, which were being spurred on by the Ritualists' success, became more apparent. Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of h.o.a.rding and every waste wall was filled with the announcement:--

'Read _Faith and Fools_. Enormous success. Our _Comic Life of Christ_ now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its kind going. Woodcut this week--Transfiguration.'

His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Pa.s.sion week he left the night-school about ten o'clock. His way led him past the club, which was brilliantly lit up, and evidently in full activity. Round the door there was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of _Faith and Fools_, and were showing the week's woodcut to those about them, with chuckles and spirts of laughter.

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, and asked for the paper. The woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like _sangfroid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully than the laughing brutality of the men he had just pa.s.sed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, in particular, containing obscenities which cannot be quoted here.

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.

'This is Wednesday in Pa.s.sion week,' he said to himself. 'The day after to-morrow is Good Friday!'

He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East, among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany, the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace such a temper of mind towards such an object--present and militant as that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible ill.u.s.tration of a great axiom: '_Faith has a judge--in truth_'?

He went home and lay awake half the night pondering. If he could but pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will not hear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more painfully from exercising.

The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in telling the legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a moment, and there and then--with the tender imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and vigorous protest in the name of decency, good feeling, and common sense, against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighbourhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant grimace or two.

When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an attack upon an inst.i.tution in which many of them were deeply interested; and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week.

Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with him had an unusual piquancy.