The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances.
Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his tired slave throw away the bag of gold.
Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life; they have satisfied a need—morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing powers.
As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation growing strong upon him.
“After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of Dreadful Night.’”
But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his thoughts into a darker channel.
“How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”
His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first, had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence, his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as Crusoe might have written on his desert isle—for the ears of savages.
His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and mean-hearted, like themselves.
A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life, poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten, and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist conscience.