ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.[48]
Our renowned contributor, Mansie Wauch, tailor in Dalkeith, has, for a long time past, retired from the cares of active business. We fear that, in his case, as in others which we could name, the glory and emolument resulting from distinguished literary success were the means of depriving two or three parishes of the services of a decent fabricator of small-clothes. Mansie, like Jeshurun, grew fat and kicked. Even before his autobiography had reached its sixth edition—now a traditionary epoch, as the nine-and-thirtieth is exhausted, and the trade clamorous for a new supply—Wauch began to turn up his nose at moleskin, and to exhibit a singular degree of indifference to orders for agricultural gaiters. He would still apply, with somewhat of his pristine science, the principles of sartorian mathematics to plush when ordered from the Palace, and was once known to devote three entire days to the exquisite finishing of a pair of buckskins for Mr Williamson, that famous huntsman, whose celebrity is so great, that the mere mention of his name is equivalent to a page of panegyric. And it was acknowledged, on all hands, that Mansie did his work well. The plush fitted admirably; and as for the buckskins, the master of the hounds averred, with a harmless oath, that they were as easy as a kid glove. But those testimonials, however satisfactory and unchallenged, did not avail our contributor as a perfect verdict of acquittal, discharging him from the bar of public opinion, as constituted in Dalkeith, without a stain upon his reputation as an eydent man and a tailor. Mr Hamorgaw, the precentor of the New Light Seceding Anti-pulpit Congregation, esteemed that Mansie acted under the influence of the Old Adam, in declining to reverse, propriis manibus, an ancient garment, dignified by the name of a coat, which had already been three times refreshed in the dyeing-tub, for the beautifying of him, the Hamorgaw: and Deacon Cansh, the leading Radical of the place, was sorely nettled to learn that our friend had intrusted the architecture of his new wrap-rascal to the tender mercies of his firstborn Benjamin. Not that Benjie was a bad hand at the goose, which indeed he drove with amazing celerity, sending it along at a rate nearly equal to the progress of a Parliamentary train; but his style of cutting was somewhat composite and florid, not distinguished by that severe simplicity of manner which was the glory of the earlier masters. In the hands of a Piercie Shafton, Benjamin might have proved a veritable treasure; Sir Thomas Urquhart would have descanted with enthusiasm on the quaint and oblique diversity of his shears, which seemed instinctively to dissever good broad-cloth into quincunxes more or less outrageous; but the age of Euphuism was gone, and neither elder, deacon, nor precentor, was in favour of slashed doublets. Benjamin was not only a tailor but a poet, and we fear it is a lamentable fact that the two trades are irreconcilable. The perpetrator of distichs is usually a bungler at cross-stitch: there is no analogy between the measurement of trousers and the measure of a Spenserian stanza. It will therefore be readily credited, that the business, when devolved upon Benjie, did not prosper as of old; and though Mansie did, in his advanced age, make one effort to retrieve the character of his firm by inventing a kind of paletot, which he denominated "a Fascinator," we have not been given to understand that the males of the royal family adopted it to the exclusion of all other upper garments of similar cut and pretension. Moreover, the prevailing influence and tendency of the age began to be felt in Dalkeith. Competition, as a maxim of political economy, was generally practised and understood: and a young schneider, who had served his apprenticeship with Mr Place of Westminster celebrity, opened an establishment for ready-made clothes, with a Greek title which would have puzzled an Homeric commentator. In process of time the Greek was opposed by a Hebrew, who ought to have been an especial favourite with his people, seeing that if any afflicted person had a fancy for rending his clothes, the garments supplied by Aaron and Son would have yielded to the slightest compulsion. A Polish emigrant next opened shop, and to the astonishment of the Dalkeithians, transferred their breeches' pockets from the waistband to the neighbourhood of their knees, and suggested frogs and braiding. Against this tide of innovation honest Mansie found it impossible to make head. Fortunately, being a saving creature, he had amassed a considerable sum of money, which, still more fortunately, he had abstained from investing in the Loanhead and Roslin Junction; and his annual income was such as to justify him in retiring from business to a pleasant villa on the banks of the Esk, where he now grows cabbages of such magnitude as to be recorded in an occasional newspaper paragraph, and cucumbers which have carried off the prize at several horticultural exhibitions. On the whole, Mr Wauch is a man decidedly to be envied, not only by those of his own trade, but by many of us who, in the vanity of our hearts, have been accustomed to look down, somewhat disparagingly, upon the gallant knights of the needle.
In his retirement Mansie Wauch has not altogether abandoned the pursuits of literature. He has, it is true, ceased, for a good while, to favour us with a continuation of those passages of his personal history which once took Christendom by storm; nor can we charge our memory with his having offered us any article for several years, beyond an elaborate and learned critique upon Mr Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which, though decidedly able, was rather too technical for our columns. But Mr Wauch is a gluttonous reader, especially of novels and suchlike light gear; and very frequently is kind enough to favour us, by word of mouth, with his opinion touching the most noted ephemera of the season. We need hardly say that we set great store by the judgment of the excellent old man. His fine natural instinct enables him to perceive at a glance, what more erudite critics might overlook, the fitness and propriety of the tale, and the capability of the writer to deal with the several topics which he professes to handle. He can tell at once whether a man really knows his subject, or whether he is writing, as too many authors do now-a-days, in absolute ignorance of the character which he assumes, or the scenes which he selects for illustration. So, the other day, on receipt of a couple of volumes, entitled Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: an Autobiography, we thought that we could hardly discharge our critical duty better than by despatching the same forthwith to Mansie, with a request that he would communicate to us his candid and unbiassed opinion.
Mr Locke we understand to be no more. He died upon his voyage to Texas, after having been concerned in the Chartist demonstration of 1848, and therefore his feelings cannot be aggrieved by the strictures of his Dalkeith brother. Were it otherwise, we certainly should have hesitated before recording in print the verdict of the indignant Mansie, expressed in the succinct phrase of "awfu' havers!" written at the close of the second volume, with a running commentary of notes on the margin, by no means complimentary to the practical acquirements or the intellectual calibre of the author. These we have diligently deciphered, and we find that friend Mansie's wrath has been especially excited by the discovery that it is no autobiography at all, nor anything like one, but a barefaced and impudent assumption of a specific character and profession by a person who never handled a goose in his life, and who knows no more about tailoring or slop-selling than he has learned from certain letters which lately appeared in the columns of the Morning Chronicle. Mr Wauch is very furious at the deception which he conceives has been practised on the public; and argues, with good show of reason, that any work, professing to set forth the hardships of any particular trade, and yet diverging so evidently into the wildest kind of romance—as to render its acceptance as an actual picture of life impossible—is calculated to do harm instead of good to the interests of the class in question, because no one can receive it as truth; neither can it possibly be acknowledged as an accurate picture of the age, or the state or feelings of that society which at present exists in Great Britain. "Who would have bought MY Autobiography," quoth Mansie, "if I had said that I was in love with a Countess, had been admitted to her society, and my passion partially returned? Or what think ye o' Benjie, fresh from the garret, and smelling of the goose, arguing conclusions wi' Dean Buckland about the Mosaic account o' the creation, and chalking out a new kind o' faith as glibly as he would chalk out auld Harrigle's measure on a new web o' claith for a Sunday's coat? The man that wrote you, take my word for it, never crookit his heugh-bane on a board; and the hail buik appears to me to be a pack o' wearifu' nonsense."
Notwithstanding Mr Wauch's anathema, we have perused the book; and, while agreeing with him entirely in his strictures regarding its artistical construction, and admitting that, as an autobiography—which it professes to be—it is so palpably absurd in its details, as to diminish the effect of the lesson which it is meant to convey, we yet honour and respect the feeling which has dictated it, and our warmest sympathy is enlisted in the cause which it intends to advocate. No man with a human heart in his bosom, unless that heart is utterly indurated and depraved by the influence of mammon, can be indifferent to the welfare of the working-classes. Even if he were not urged to consider the awful social questions which daily demand our attention in this perplexing and bewildered age, by the impulses of humanity, or by the call of Christian duty, the lower motive of interest alone should incline him to serious reflection on a subject which involves the wellbeing, both temporal and eternal, of thousands of his fellow-creatures, and possibly the permanence of order and tranquillity in this realm of Great Britain. Our civil history during the last thirty years of peace resembles nothing which the world has yet seen, or which can be found in the records of civilisation. The progress which has been made in the mechanical sciences is of itself almost equivalent to a revolution. The whole face of society has been altered; old employments have become obsolete, old customs have been abrogated or remodelled, and old institutions have undergone innovation. The modern citizen thinks and acts differently from his fathers. What to them was object of reverence is to him subject for ridicule; what they were accustomed to prize and honour, he regards with undisguised contempt. All this we style improvement, taking no heed the whilst whether such improvement has fulfilled its primary condition of contributing to and increasing the welfare and prosperity of the people. Statistical books are written to demonstrate how enormously we have increased in wealth; and yet, side by side with Mr Porter's bulky tomes, you will find pamphlets containing ample and distinct evidence that hundreds of thousands of our industrious fellow-countrymen are at this moment famishing for lack of employment, or compelled to sell their labour for such wretched remuneration that the pauper's dole is by many regarded with absolute envy. Dives and Lazarus elbow one another in the street; and our political economists select Dives as the sole type of the nation. Sanitary commissioners are appointed to whiten the outside of the sepulchre; and during the operation, their souls are made sick by the taint of the rottenness from within. The reform of Parliament is, comparatively speaking, a matter of yesterday, and yet the operatives are petitioning for the Charter!
These are stern realities—grim facts which it is impossible to gainsay. What may be the result of them, unless some adequate remedy can be provided, it is impossible with certainty to predict; but unless we are prepared to deny the doctrine of that retribution which has been directly revealed to us from above, and of which the history of neighbouring states affords us so many striking examples, we can hardly expect to remain unpunished for what is truly a national crime. The offence, indeed, according to all elements of human calculation, is likely to bring its own punishment. It cannot be that society can exist in tranquillity, or order be permanently maintained, so long as a large portion of the working-classes, of the hard-handed men whose industry makes capital move and multiply itself, are exposed to the operation of a system which renders their position less tolerable than that of the Egyptian bondsman. To work is not only a duty but a privilege; but to work against hope, to toil under the absolute pressure of despair, is the most miserable lot that the imagination can possibly conceive. It is, in fact, a virtual abrogation of that freedom which every Briton is taught to consider as his birthright; but which now, however well it may sound as an abstract term, is practically, in the case of thousands, placed utterly beyond their reach.
We shall not probably be suspected of any intention to inculcate Radical doctrines. We have no sympathy, but the reverse, with the quacks, visionaries, and agitators, who make a livelihood by preaching disaffection in our towns and cities, and who are the worst enemies of the people whose cause they affect to advocate. We detest the selfish views of the Manchester school of politicians, and we loathe that hypocrisy which, under the pretext of reforming, would destroy the institutions of the country. But if it be true—as we believe it to be—that the working and producing classes of the community are suffering unexampled hardship, and that not of a temporary and exceptional kind, but from the operation of some vicious and baneful element which has crept into our social system, it then becomes our duty to attempt to discover the actual nature of the evil; and having discovered that, to consider seriously what cure it is possible to apply. That there is a cure for every evil, social, moral, or physical, it is worse than cowardice to doubt. And we need not be surprised if, in our search, we find ourselves compelled to arrive at some conclusions totally hostile to the plans which the so-called Liberals have encouraged—nay, so hostile, that beneath that mask of Liberalism we can plainly descry the features of greedy and ravenous Mammon, enticing his victims by a novel lure, and gloating and grinning in triumph over their unsuspicious credulity.
The author of Alton Locke is at least no vulgar theorist, though a warm imagination and great enthusiasm have led him occasionally to appear most vague and theoretical. He has had recourse to fiction, as the most agreeable, and probably the most efficacious mode of bringing his peculiar social views under the notice of the public; but in doing so, he has fallen into an error very common with recent novelists, who have undertaken to depict certain phases of society, with ulterior views beyond the mere amusement of the reader. He has not studied, or he does not understand, what has been fitly termed the properties of a composition: he allows himself in almost every chapter to outrage probability; his situations are often ludicrously incongruous; and the language of his characters, as well as that employed throughout the narrative, is totally out of keeping with the quality and circumstances of the interlocutors. That a young and gifted tailor, who for the whole day has been pent up in a stifling garret, with the symptoms of consumptive disease unmistakeably developed in his constitution, should also devote the moiety of his hours of rest to the acquisition of the Latin language, and become in three months' time a perfect master of Virgil, is not an impossibility, though we opine that such instances of suicidal exertion are comparatively rare; but when we find the same young man, not only versed in the classics, but tolerably acquainted with the Italian and German poets, a fluent speaker of French, an accurate historian, a proficient in divinity, in metaphysics, and in natural science—a disciple of Tennyson in verse, and a pupil of Emerson in style—the draft upon our credulity is somewhat too large, and we must necessarily decline to honour it. The world has only beheld one Admirable Crichton; and even he is rather a myth than a reality—seeing that we can merely judge of the extent of his acquirements by the vague report of contemporaries, and the collections of an amusing coxcomb, who, out of very slender materials, has contrived to construct a ponderous and bombastic romance.[49] Crichton has not left us one scrap of writing to prove that his attainments were more than the results of a gigantic memory, aided by a singularly acute and logical intellect. But Alton Locke altogether eclipses Crichton. The latter had, at all events, the full benefit of the schools: the former was wholly devoid of such instruction. Crichton spent his days at least in the College; Alton sat stitching on the shop-board. So that the existence of such a phenomenon becomes worse than problematical, especially when we find that, after abandoning paletots and launching into a literary career, Mr Locke could find no more profitable employment than that of writing articles for a Chartist newspaper, which articles, moreover, were by no means invariably inserted. We take this to be the leading fault of the book, because it is infinitely more glaring than even exaggerated incident. In the hands of such a writer as Defoe, the story of Alton Locke would have assumed the aspect of woeful and sad reality. Not an expression would have been allowed to enter which could betray the absolute and irreconcilable difference between the mental powers, habits, and acquirements of the author and his fictitious hero: we should have had no idealism, at least of the transcendental kind; and no dreams, decidedly of a tawdry and uninterpretable description, which bear internal evidence of having been copied at second-hand from Richter.
Let it, however, be understood, that these remarks of ours are not intended to detract from the genius, the learning, or the descriptive powers of the writer. Where excellencies such as these exist, even though they may be of rare occurrence, anything approaching to absurdity or incongruity is far more painfully, or rather provokingly, apparent than in the work of a common hackneyed novelist, from whom we expect no better things: and the error is peculiarly felt when it is calculated in any degree to convey the notion that the pictures shadowed forth upon the canvass are rather ideal than true. This mode of dealing with a subject is by no means the best to insure sympathy. Men are naturally incredulous of pain, and unwilling to believe in suffering, more especially when it is said to exist in their own vicinity, and may be the effect of their own indifference or caprice. Many persons will read Alton Locke, not unmoved by the wretchedness which it depicts—not without feeling a thrill of indignation at the bondage under which the operative is said to labour from the ruthless system of competition—and yet lay down the book unconvinced of the actual existence of such misery, and no more inclined to bestir themselves for its remedy than if they had been the spectators of a tragedy, the scene of which was laid in another country, and the period indicated as occurring in the middle ages. Nor is it possible to blame them for this; for, as the whole tenor of the work belies its assumed character, it is hard to expect that any one shall give credence to mere details, or such qualified credence as shall enable him to accept them as accurate representations of existing facts, in the face of the evident obstacle which meets him at the beginning. The usefulness of many clever books in this range of literature has been impaired by the authors' wanton neglect, or rather wilful breach, of the leading rules of propriety. Few people will accept Mr D'Israeli's novel of Sybil as containing an accurate representation of the state of the people of England in the middle of the nineteenth century, simply because the writer is chargeable with the same error; and yet recent disclosures have abundantly proved that many of the social pictures contained in Sybil were drawn with extreme accuracy, and without any attempt at exaggeration.
We shall now attempt to sketch out the story of Alton Locke, in order that our readers may comprehend the nature of the book with which we are dealing—less, we admit, on account of the book itself, than for the sake of the subject which it is manifestly intended to illustrate. By no other method can we do justice to the topic; and if situations should occur which may seem to justify the strictures of Mr Wauch, and to provoke a smile, we ask indulgence for the sake of a cause which is here most earnestly advocated—according to the best of his ability—by a man of no common acquirements, zeal, energy, and purity of purpose, though the warmth of his heart may very frequently overpower the discretion of his head.