Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

(From a portrait by J. McLure Hamilton.)

But for just that which Spurgeon wanted William Booth would have been another Spurgeon. But to his faith and enthusiasm he joined something not at all common among religious enthusiasts in this country. His heart was a chaos of crude and uncontrolled emotionalism, but he had the head of a ruler. It is a common reproach against English Protestantism that it does not understand how to harness spiritual energy. Of that art William Booth was a master, and in more favouring circumstances he would probably have been included in the list of founders of mighty religious orders. It is tempting to speculate what might have been the present position of the Salvation Army had Booth, who was brought up as a member of the Church of England, and had certainly no enmity to that Church, been encouraged to pursue his work within its communion. Left to himself, he was unable to provide his organisation with that firm philosophical basis which seems a necessary condition of permanence in a religious society. He could invent a hierarchy, but he had to borrow a theology; and the raggedness of his dogmatic formation was in pathetic contrast with the splendid “dressing” of his human cohorts. He could offer a dram to the spiritually fainting, but man cannot live by stimulants alone, and the Salvation Army had little more in the way of spiritual nutriment to offer those who began to hunger for something more solid. Its only expedient was to join the excitement of definite work to that of cloudy religion. The Army tended even in Booth’s lifetime to become more and more an organ of social endeavour and less and less a definitely Christian thing; it was in its lay and not in its religious character that it won during the Nineties the goodwill of countless excellent pagans, and was patronised by precisely the same sort of people who had at first assailed it as the blasphemous travesty of a sect.

“A bawling, fanatical, send-round-the-hatical, pick-up-the-pence old pair.” So were Booth and his devoted wife described by Truth in the early Eighties. Fifteen years later the old “General,” now a widower, was never mentioned in a reputable paper without profound respect. The inverted commas had long disappeared, and even Royalty condescended to compliment him on his fine work for the “submerged tenth.” But all this recognition was really a sign of failure. Or, to put the matter less crudely, it was a sign that the secondary object of the Army had become more important than its primary aim. Booth had set out first of all to save men’s souls, and some people threw cabbage stalks at him, while others flung him jeers and slanders. The applause only came when it was evident that, with the incidental disadvantage of brass bands and a crazy vocabulary of enthusiasm, the Army was very useful for distributing soup and getting firewood chopped.

Booth proved how thin are the partitions dividing the excess of democracy from autocratic rule. His government was at first purely paternal. When the family got too large for his personal rule he had to delegate authority, but every officer whom he put in a position of trust was given plenary power to the extent of his commission. “Government by talk” he had tried and put aside. “This method of work,” he said, “will never shake the Kingdom of the Devil”; and so he adopted the military system. In this he was probably only following the suggestion of his own imperious nature. But if he had been actuated by the deepest craft he could hardly have hit on a more certain method of keeping his converts together. Men and women care a great deal less for liberty than for domination; they will accept most cheerfully subordination for themselves if it affords them a present chance or a sure prospect of exercising despotic sway over others. “From the moment,” says Booth, “of our adopting the simple method of responsible and individual commands and personal obedience our whole campaign partook of a new character; in place of the hesitation and almost total want of progress from which we have been suffering, every development of the work leaped forward.” The brass band, the flag, and the red jersey probably had comparatively little to do with the Army’s success. These were useful to attract attention, and may perhaps have allured some simple-minded and very unæsthetic people. But apart from the deeper spiritual elements, the main point, I imagine, was the fascination of authority. Comfortable people, accustomed to deference throughout life, have little conception of the hunger for respect which reigns among those who seldom get it. Indeed, half our social troubles would be over if the “better” classes could grasp the simple fact that the “lower” classes are much more sensitive than themselves on all points of dignity. To a mere factory hand, man or woman—it was a novelty of the Army that it put the sexes from the first on an exactly equal footing—it was luxury to put off insignificance with the work-day clothes and put on importance with the Army uniform. In the Booth hierarchy there was room for the pride of the wretched and the ambition of the destitute.

It was the great talent of Booth to put to use the most unlikely things. His use of vulgarity was very characteristic. The vulgarity of some other popular preachers of the time was a natural emanation. But Booth was not naturally vulgar; no man could be with such a profile. He had really fine manners; to a king he would talk as if he were an old king himself; and there was never a suggestion in his intercourse with the greatest either of bumptiousness or servility. The vulgarity of his methods was of set purpose, like St. Francis’s hostility to worldly culture, and, though it was at once common form to inveigh against the coarse profanities of a Salvation Army meeting, I have found highly sensitive people far less repelled by their wildest extravagances than by the much more ordinary irreverence of the regulation “revivalist.” It might not be true to say that while others vulgarised sacred things Booth sanctified vulgarity. But it is true that, if one might sometimes smile at his audacities, they never made one shudder.

In other conditions, as I have said, Booth might have won immortality as a saint of the Church. In still other circumstances he might have been a most considerable statesman. His Darkest England is much more than a philanthropic manifesto. The schemes outlined in it for dealing with unemployment by training and emigration are eminently wise and practical, and, if it is permissible to indulge a regret that his great qualities were not available for the Church, it may also be suggested that something was lost by the failure of politicians to make fuller use of his remarkable insight and experience concerning social problems. The inspiration on these matters gradually passed from him to the Webbs. It was not, probably, a change for the better. For though Booth was quite hard-headed in these concrete matters, he had also that wisdom of the heart in which Fabianism was deficient. He would say, and quite justly, in reply to those who argued that the Army attracted people too lazy for regular work, and actually created a class of unemployables, that John Jones was outside in the street, without work or food, and something must be done for him at once; it was useless to wait for a social revolution. But he was under no illusions as to the nature of existing society. “There are many vices,” he wrote, “and seven deadly sins; but of late years many of the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Avarice, for instance, and Pride, when re-baptised Thrift and Self-Respect, have become the guardian angels of Christian Civilisation, and as for Envy, it is the corner-stone upon which much of our competitive system is founded.” Again: “I am a strong believer in co-operation, but it must be co-operation based on the spirit of benevolence. I don’t see how any pacific readjustment of the social and economic relations between classes in this country can be effected except by the gradual substitution of co-operative associations for the present wages system.” Assuredly the man who wrote these things was something more than a fanatic.

Booth’s decision with regard to his children’s education was most typical of the man. Certain friends offered to pay the expenses of a University training for his eldest son. No, said Booth; he should enlist in the Army at an early age, and go through the usual Salvation training. Booth was not stupid, and could have had none of the stupid man’s contempt for education. But he seemed to be a little afraid of it, and from his own point of view who can say he had not reason? In the same spirit the Churchmen of the Renaissance fought against the teaching of Greek, not because they were all fools, but because some of them foresaw the dangers that actually followed. Booth was perhaps not wrong in suspecting that the higher education of his time, while making a man cocksure about things now debatable or disproved, would tend to make him dubious or indifferent about things which in his view permitted neither of incertitude nor of lukewarmness.

But if he hoped thus to secure to the thing he had made the vitality he had temporarily imparted to it, the hope was doomed to be disappointed. It could hardly be fulfilled, in any case, if the Army was to continue in isolation; for the Army was an order rather than a sect, with a discipline rather than a creed, and in the absence of its creator’s inspiration its tendency must have been to harden into formalism. That process had, indeed, begun even before the General’s death. It was suggested above that during the Nineties the Salvation Army was wounded by kindness. In the days of its persecution it was at least free; it had the feeling that it might just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But when the suburbs threw bouquets instead of stones the Salvationists found that the respect of the respectable is a chain. They were henceforth fettered. They could expand, but they could not change. The movement was canalised and stereotyped; it had won recognition as a useful social adjunct, and it had to live up to its reputation. It became static in everything but its statistics. Gradually its tunes have grown old-fashioned; its uniforms are one with the tight military trouser and the bustled skirt; the War Cry is as definitely a paper with a past as Reynolds’s or the Referee. In its way the Army, no doubt, does as much good as ever. But the limits of that good are known. And it keeps nobody awake at night thinking of what might happen with the ferment of a revolutionary Christianity working among the English poor.

Booth was a great man of his kind—greater far than most of the Right Honourables and Right Reverends of his day—and it was a mighty thing that he built from defaced stones and nameless rubble rejected by all others. But he was too honest to fabricate a new religion, and a religious order implies a Church to order it.