Reformers and Lecturers

In the development of the new democracy many things occurred in the extreme north of England of which I was personally cognisant. The times were undouhtedly exciting. Sixty years ago news travelled and was, perhaps, somewhat affected by the medium through which it reached the residents of remote districts. I can hardly forget the dismay with which we heard that one violent speaker had declared at a great public meeting, known as a “torchlight procession,” that for some reason or other, hest known to himself, he would preach “Edinburgh into flames and Glasgow into ashes.” Some of us could hardly conceive what a “torchlight procession” was like. We had read of the Lord George Gordon nocturnal demonstrations and uproars, hut it was impossible for us to connect the name of a

Weslevan minister with aiiTthing so scandalous and appalling. The name of the Weslevan minister was Joseph Rayner Stephens. We did not mention the name either freely or loudly, but always in a significant undertone. Many of us had an inhorn suspicion of men who had three names. Most of the people — say ninety-nine hundredths — round about us had two names only, and never showed any desire to have more. It would have been easy to persuade the less enlightened of us that the threefold name belonged to a set of ideas seditious and revolutionary. If Stephens could preach “Edinburgh into flames and Glasgow into ashes,” what would he do with a tiny town like ours, a mere handful of chips that could be destroyed in an hour? Probably this man’s name would have brought disrepute upon the whole body of Methodism if we had not been assured that he had been expelled from the Wesleyan Conference on the ground of the implacable attitude he assumed towards the Established Church. Even now the Wesleyan Conference is not a branch of the Religious Liberation Society, but at the time of Stephens it was almost a branch of the Church of England. Stephens was an out-and-out Dissenter, and the AYesleyan Conference blew him out of a gun, as if he had been an ecclesiastical sepoy convicted of open mutiny. The Wesleyan Conference has repeatedly had occasion to use its expulsive apparatus. Stephens became so notorious for his violent adjectives that the admiring and grateful public insisted upon having his portrait produced at a popular price. This portrait was engraved and eagerly bought by the noisy and ever-increasing democracy. My father bought the portrait, framed it in maple, with an inner gilt bead, and hung it above a chest of drawers in the principal spare bedroom. There I often silently gazed upon it with wonder and awe. The man looked innocent enough in his black coat and white neckerchief, but, as in the case of the Roman Catholic priest, that look of innocence was the very point at which the wickedness came in. Here was a man who threatened to preach “Edinburgh into flames” and “Glasgow into ashes” if the Government withheld such and such rights from the working classes, and yet this wolf in sheep’s clothing looked all over, from top to toe, like a Wesleyan minister accustomed to class-meetings and hymn-books! It was generally felt that the sedition of the man was infinitely aggravated by the impious pretence of the minister. One class-leader, who insisted that repentance towards God was incomplete until it was followed by a penny a week and a shilling a quarter, remonstrated with my father for having the portrait of Joseph Rayner Stephens in his house, adding, almost with tears, “It is enough to poison your Joseph’s mind.” My father confidentially told me afterwards that this class-leader had offered to exchange the portrait of Stephens for the likeness of an early Methodist minister, hinting that he (the class-leader) would soon preach Stephens himself into flames, and even the maple frame into ashes. Surely, in the judgment of this class-leader, the latter days had come wherein foundations might give way in the night-time and violence might usurp the seat of righteousness.

No inhabitant of a great city can have the faintest idea of the alarms created by reports of the speeches of the leaders of Chartism. Imagine our seeing in print that on January 1, 1838, Stephens said that if certain enactments were put in force “NeAvcastle ought to be, and should be, one blaze of fire, with only one way to put it out, and that with the blood of all those who supported this abominable laAV.” And this next door to our own little quaking town! There were griffins in those days! Stephens must have been a man of ability, for he became so large a figure in current politics that when his arrest was ordered by the Government, and he was threatened with Botany Bay, or with solitary confinement in Van Diemen’s Land, the chief of the Chartists declared that if Stephens were transported “the Government would have to drag the prisoner over the dead body of Peargus O’Connor.” What self-respecting Government could face such a tragedy? Feargus O’Connor was then in the very zenith of his glory. He had not only a “land scheme” which fired the imagination of the populace, but he was at the head of the Northern Star, a newspaper which had the then unprecedented sale of sixty thousand a week. The “dead body” of such an editor must have been a formidable impediment in the way of the transportation of Stephens. Peargus O’Connor was a force to be reckoned with, and he knew it. A man may have a fine theory and be despised, but a man cannot in a loud and strident voice promise the freehold of solid land for next to nothing without securing a large and miscellaneous following. Acres are eloquent arguments. Even Abram took up his staff and went forth, not knowing whither he went, when he heard of “land” flowing with milk and honey of which he might have the freehold for nothing, and his children — what we now call heirs, administrators, and assigns — after him for ever. Offer the working classes some abstract theory and they may laugh you to scorn; but offer the unintelligent section of them lands which they may sow and reap, without paying rent, rates, and taxes for the right to do so, and they will receive you with loud and unprofitable acclamations and “one cheer more,” followed in all probability by a well-known couplet which always seems to have about it the flavour of an epitaph, Peargus O’Connor knew how to make poor men rich — at least in imagination; in his propaganda he had the advantage of the hopefulness of an Irishman, the voice of an avalanche, and the fearlessness of a bandit. Hundreds of thousands of excited men applauded him. Cabinet Ministers dreaded him, the Queen was uneasy when she heard of him, and Stephens knew that the dead body of such a man would save him from expatriation. Then the red light waned, the conjurer lost his wand, the idol of that infinite baby called the Pul)lic fell into low estate, but the noble-hearted democracy rose to the occasion and piled a national testimonial to the height of thirty-two pounds sterling to save this political Messiah from poverty, but not, alas! in the long run from a private lunatic asylum. The redoubtable Feargus, who had intended to make a national monument of .his dead body, found his way into contemptuous oblivion, silently taking with him his land scheme into the landless Land.

All this is now forgotten, but some of us can never forget the alarm and terror of the time. When we heard of midnight riots, towns set on fire, mills and factories of all kinds pulled down, and still the storm growing louder and louder, it would have been affectation to attempt to conceal the unspeakable horror which we felt. The vicar was so excited, though in a way compatible with the grateful drinking of sufficient port wine, that he preached a hastily composed sermon bearing, as he thought, upon the moral situation, probably taking some such text as, “These sought their register among those that were reckoned by genealogy, but it was not found: therefore were they, as polluted, put from the priesthood” (Neh. vii. 64). In the context he found much interesting matter referring to the children of Darkon, and the whole body of the Nethinims; but the churcliAvardens declared that he had added new terrors to the situation without knowing it, and some of them suggested that he should publish the discourse in order to clear his own reputation. So hot and so sensitive were the times! One young man became so excited that he declared, not only on village platforms, but in going up and down the stairs of his ovn house, that he still was an Englishman and would die a subject of the Queen. He only knew Virgil through the medium of a liorrowed translation, but anything was welcome to him that assisted him in expressing his patriotic indignation. For this reason alone he stunned his inoffensive mother by exclaiming, without notice or provocation:

“Had I a Imncbetl mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass inspired by iron lungs, I could not half those horrid crimes repeat. Or half the punishment those crimes have met.”

The broader history of Chartism is known to everybody; but its local influence, especially in out-of-the-way places, can only be known to those who lived under it. In my own little sphere the effect was palpable. One daring man proposed that the Northern Star be taken into a public news-room, and he was expelled for his insolence, the vicar and several persons of property ostentatiously passing him on the road as if he had lost any little chai’acter which he might once have had. A well-known atheistic shoemaker set up a Sunday class of his own, and took for his text-books the Northern Star and Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason.” This was the large-faced and discredited shoemaker already reluctantly referred to. He was hated by the banking respectability of the whole town — so much so, that when he was seen coming along the road, men of property either went to the other side, or, to their own inconvenience, suddenly disappeared into passages that had no outlet. Paine’s “Age of Reason” was regarded by those who knew least about it as blasphemous and utterly wicked, — the same “Age of Reason” that Bishop Watson answered with an “Apology” that is now practically forgotten, — the very “Age of Reason” that some honest Christian preachers, whose mission it is to put down rationalism and unbelief, would not hesitate partially to commend. So goes the whirligig of time.

The whole town and neighl)ourhood was in one way or another seriously affected by Chartism and its cognate iniquities. Sunday schools hurled impotent thunder against it, ministers delivered courses of lectures upon it, vicars and curates shuddered over it.

REFOParERS AND LECTURERS 55

mothers pondered these things in their hearts. At last there came a chance of our seeing aS real live Chartist, a Chartist who had suffered for his principles, and who, metaphorically, took his chain along with him wherever he appeared in a j)ublic capacity. I can never forget the eventful day on which that live Chartist and his chain entered our expectant and nervous town. At this distance of time I may say that I slyly stole out of our hack door, and went down to the railway station to see the terrible creature alight from the train. The train was two minutes off when I caught sight of its cloud of steam — the white pennon of democratic progress. “There he comes,” said I to my own palpitating heart; “there he is. Is he first-class, or second, or third? How shall I know the man who has hazarded his life for his Chartist principles?” The man was known to he not only a Chartist, but an avowed anti-Christian. He had publicly ridiculed the Christian religion. Chartism and Atheism were often ridiculously confounded. He had denounced with violence the whole claim of Christ. The train stopped! That was the moment of agony! Out came a largo, pock-marked man; a man with a swinging walk, and a kind of smile which divided itself between

A PEEACHER’S LIFE

hope and doubt as to the public reception in store for him. He had all the appearance of a man who knew that he was being watched. I thought I saw a blush of self-consciousness tingeing the pits which the small-pox had left. Yes, there he was! And I, at a safe distance, quivered with doubtful pride as I walked behind Thomas Cooper, the author of the “Purgatory of Suicides” — the man who had been long imprisoned in Leicester jail on account of his politico-socio-religious aberrations. As a Sunday-school teacher I felt that my momentary relation to this man cast some doubt upon my integrity, yet I was proud to walk alone behind the ex-prisoner, the quondam shoemaker, the genuine poet, the effective orator. So much of a hero-worshipper was I that I endeavoured to put my feet into his footprints, and to catch the swing of his noble walk. What a night my fellow young men had as they thronged the floor of the Mechanics’ Institute! The lecturer came briskly in. His long hair fell upon his ample shoulders, and soon we heard a voice that proclaimed a man. The subject was Milton, and the body of the lecture was a recitation of the most of one book of “Paradise Lost.” In its own way

the effort was out of sight not only the finest rhetorical exhibition I had ever listened to, but the finest I had ever dreamed of. I do not know what effect such a lecture would have upon me now, but I distinctly remember that at the time my best intellectual ambition was so excited that I registered an emphatic vow — which I never kept — to transfer the whole works of Milton to my ambitious but treacherous memory. When nearly forty years afterwards the venerable Thomas Cooper called upon me after one of my Thursday morning services in the City Temple, and spoke kindly of what he had heard, he little thought that when I was in my teens he had shed a new light on my life. Why did I not tell him this? Simply because the Thomas Cooper then before me was not the Thomas Cooper that I heard in my youth. As I have said, Thomas Cooper as I first knew him was an “unbeliever,” if not an atheist, and I hold that there are circumstances in which a man should be a consenting party to his own resurrection. At the moment of his calling upon me, after the Thursday morning service, Thomas Cooper was an eloquent upholder of the faith which he had once sought to destroy. He was a humble believer in the infinite mercy of the Christ he had derided, and it was no business of mine to revive a past which he himself would be only too glad to forget. I did not, therefore, tell him of my obligation to him; but I, unknoAviugly to himself, did something, though pitiably small, to relieve the embarrassment which befell him in his latest days.

It cannot be denied that such discussions and such lectures as I have described had a distinct effect upon the intellectual life of young men. Not, however, from clergymen or ministers did the young men receive the new intellectual wine. Clerical leaders have always l)een disposed to tell men to obey their pastors and masters, and to be content with that station in life to which it has pleased God to call them. The wisest heretical leaders have, on the contrary, told men to rise out of their inferior condition into a higher enjoyment and responsibility, but to effect their ascent by legitimate and honourable means alone. This is the nobler teaching. Before such teaching opposing sovereignties, hierarchies, and despotisms must eventually give way. The sovereign who wishes to save himself from deposition must live up to the doctrine that the best things are always to come. Age must make itsell* young by sympathy, and aristocracy can only continue to hold its own by insisting that other people shall be assured of the rights and lilerties that belong to them.

Sixty years ago, eighteen shillings a week i was thought good wages for twelve hours I a day. When wages went up to a guinea a week for the same hours it was felt that the working man’s millennium had come! Once a pound a week was considered excellent pay for a miner, but in later times, to my own knowledge, a miner passed a fruiterer’s shop in the north of England, and, l)eing told that jnne-apples were fifteen shillings each, he quietly told the fruiterer that he would take two of tlicm, for which he paid on the spot. Forty years ago a cloth-Aveaver was paid under twenty shillings a week as wages, yet on a recent visit to Lancashire I found that if the shop-keeping middle classes wanted a picnic conveyance on a Saturday, they must speak for it something like a week beforehand, because all the conveyances were engaged by the mill-Avorkers. These are not tilings to be complained of, but certainly they are things that ought to be accounted for. Feargus O’Connor is dead, but O’Connorism was never so mncli alive as it is at this moment. Men may set themselves in one of two attitudes towards these social and economic changes: first, men may resent such changes with the result of alienation, distrust, and reprisal; or secondly, men may accept such changes and direct them with the happy result of co-operation, and harmony, and brotherhood. Statesmanship should study providential signs and cheerfully follow, at whatever temporary sacrifice, the mystic cloud which by many a sign indicates to vigilant men when the camp must arise and go if it would not fail of the Canaan of optimistic prophecy.

Thinking of Thomas Cooper’s memorable visit, I am reminded, not in sequence of time, but in some eccentric way, of another visit to my native town quite as notable. It is a broad-browed man who, in my awakening imagination, is on the platform; the man is dark in complexion, large-eyed, with every sign of intellectual alertness. His hair is as long as Cooper’s and falls as curlingly and amply over his broad shoulders. Nothing like him was ever heard by that provincial audience. I remember well that the elite of the town were present — that is to say, the leading cheesemonger, the dainty draper and his daughters, and the principal barber, who shaved the suburban aristocracy and made comments in his own shop upon the meanness of big houses. The speaker suggested no man with whom we could compare him. Without action, without emphasis, without the faintest sign of taking any interest in his own speech, he held the little crowd enthralled for more than an hour. It was certainly not a comforting lecture. According to that lecture, society was wrong from top to bottom — the rich were fools, the poor were slaves, reputation was a lie, and social eminence was the acutest stage in the development of tomfoolery. According to that lecture Cosmos was infinitely worse than Chaos; the devil was a fiction, yet the world was soaked in devilishness; theology was a swindle, and deluded men delighted in the rehearsal of the knavery; the Church was an incubus, and the throne was only to be tolerated lest in its removal nests of noxious creatures should be brought to light. The lecture was denunciation without passion; its cruel satire without one relieving ripple in all its river of gall. The lecturer was the frankest of men. John E/Uskin himself was never franker, though he did certainly say some plain things to the people of Bradford. According to the lecturer I am now descril)ing, the people before him were all fools, and he said they looked it without knowing it, and their supreme act of folly was to come out that night and pay for the luxury of having their follies exposed. The lecturer was honest from end to end if honesty means defiant contempt of your audience, and the assurance that tlje infatuated lecture-committee represented the very sublimity of idiocy. The long-haired ‘’’lecturer, the man with the large, fine eyes, the man whose voice distilled vitriol upon the tingling ears of his listeners, was George Dawson, of Birmingham, — the same George Dawson who (quotingly) said that Henry Vincent mistook “perspiration for inspiration,” the same George Dawson who condemned all eloquence as quackery, and then made a livelihood out of the iniquity he condemned. The young men were all fascinated by Dawson, some of them going so far as to grow their hair after the fashion he set, and to try the trick of condemning others as the only quack medicine that could recover the whole world of its fatal plague.

After many years — indeed, during his very last public visit to London — George Dawson was my guest. He had to lecture at the City Temple. Just before entering the lecture-room he turned to me and said, “By the way, what is the subject?” I answered, “Ill-used Men.” “All right,” said he; “go ahead.” It was the same old sixpence, the same satire, the same ridicule, the same quiet banter and fun; and we all enjoyed it — enjoyed it to the full, enjoyed it the more keenly that the lecturer evidently did not care a button either for his subject or for his audience. But George Dawson was not the same man at home. In the house he was simple, gentle, kindly, and entertaining, loving all the children, and doubling the portion he gave to the girls. For many years he conducted a vigorous and unique ministry in Birmingham, and to my surprise a year or two ago I heard that the church he had so long maintained was bought by the Primitive Methodists! One can never tell into whose hands property may fall.