VIII
Do you ask “What has all this to do with literature, or what has literature to do with these things”? I answer that, as a matter of mere history, literature in the nineteenth century did immensely concern itself with these things: and I add that, as literature deals with life, so if it deserve a place in any decent state, it should deal with these things. And to this again I add, because they dealt righteously and unsparingly with these things, Shelley, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin—yes and, later, William Morris—live on the lips of men to-day. For they let in light upon dark places; not only revealing them to the public conscience, but, better still and better far, conveying light and waking eyesight in the victims themselves.
Denunciation has its uses: and if you want to hear denunciation, listen to Carlyle—
British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a Curtius’ gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun never saw till now. These scenes, which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men,—thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have seldom done,—ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind. Thirty-thousand outcast Needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers rotting in forced idleness, helping said Needlewomen to die: these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.
Thirty-thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed-in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying-bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; as I and all men hope it may. But, alas, what next? This general well and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin before night to fill itself anew.
Yes, denunciation has its uses: and public exposure is salutary, or at least sanitary, though its first revelations sicken to such despair as Carlyle’s. But the true operation of light is upon the sufferer’s own eyes, the promise in its salutation is for them. Listen to this one sentence from Porter’s Progress of the Nation, published in 1851—
In 1839, 1840 and 1841, 40 per cent. of the men and 65 per cent. of the women married or witnessing marriages in Lancashire and Cheshire could not sign their names
—and at this time Leonard Horner, Inspector of Factories, reported that in an area of thirty-two square miles comprising Oldham and Ashton, with a population of 105,000, there was not a single public day school for poor children. Consider these millions of children who grew up to be men and wives in purlieus not once penetrated by so much as a glint of the romance, the poetry, that as we look back—you a short way, Gentlemen—I a long one—we see as Heaven lying about us in our infancy. There lay the soul’s tragedy—
The singers have sung, and the builders have builded,
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded,
When all is for these but the blackness of night?
There lay the tragedy: there the seat of cure: and if, with so much left undone, it has become possible from this desk to preach, without serious rebuke, that humanism can be taught even in our Elementary Schools, and, further, that to see it is so taught may well concern even a great University, these humanitarians of the nineteenth century were the men and women who invaded the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim, until for them which sat in darkness, in the region and shadow of death, light is sprung up.