Robert Elsmere
prejudiced, more given over to crude theorising, than his North-country
brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and
tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline of
intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly speaking,
means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its
contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he never
valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is _nil_; and his life
supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of
'other-worldliness.' Religion has been on the whole irrationally
presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational
breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.
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
class--elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. 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 passed 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 illustrated 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 illustrating 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
Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its
humours, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or
Cumberland--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 ships 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 passion for intellectual or social novelty; and
this passion 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 spaces 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 repetition 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 class, 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 assistant. 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 class 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 class, were of the poorest class. 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 passed 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 coarsest 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 Passion 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 hoarding 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 Passion 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 passed.