CHAPTER XXX.
ROSE RETIRES FROM THE STAGE
‘I think,’ said Rose to her husband that night, ‘I shall give up the stage. I have been without an engagement long; I have refused everything of the kind.’
‘Yet, darling, you are not growing old.’
‘No, it is not that.’
‘But what?’
‘That I care less and less for the artificial atmosphere of the stage. We lead such a conventional life and breathe such a conventional air; there is so much of insincerity. “Suppose any given theatre,” writes Mr. Thomas Archer in one of his clever essays, “suppose any given theatre suddenly turned into a Palace of Truth, and all the members of the company forced to state their true opinion of each other’s performances, the Palace of Truth would be a pandemonium.” And then there are other considerations.’
‘For instance?’
‘Well, to begin with, the atmosphere of self-consciousness in which the actor lives and moves and has his being. Mr. Henry James tells us the artist performs great feats in a dream; we must not wake him up lest he should lose his balance. The actor, alas! has always to be wide awake – to think of the applause to be won. I am sure too much of that sort of life cannot be good for anyone.’
‘And I have long been expecting you to say as much.’
‘But you are not sorry, are you?’
‘On the contrary; it is the very thing I have been looking for all along. It is nice to feel when the public applaud an actress that she is your own; but how much nicer to feel as I do now,’ said Wentworth, with a loving caress, ‘that she is all my own! You were happy on the stage; you will be ten times happier off it.’
‘Ah, that I know well enough.’
‘I fancy you little people of the mimic world are rather inclined to overrate your importance. By the side of it the editorial “we” is modesty itself. You actors and actresses are not such great folk after all. Admired one day, forgotten the next! As I think of all the men and women I have known upon the stage, who were lions of their day, for whom the public went into fits of madness, and then see how completely they are forgotten, it has always seemed to me that to illustrate the vanity of life and the nothingness of human applause I should point to the stage.’
One morning there came the manager of the theatre.
‘No, I shall never go back to the stage,’ replied the actress.
‘Why not, my dear?’ said the manager, a gentleman of showy manners, and suspected of being rather over-sweet.
‘Because I don’t like the life behind the scenes.’
‘I am surprised to hear that. If you knew how young ladies of really good position bother me to give them a trial!’
‘Ah, they are ignorant.’
‘Yes,’ said the manager; ‘remember the old lines:
‘“Where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise.’”
‘Folly or not,’ replied Rose, ‘my eyes have been opened by experience. Once I was ignorant as they, and thought how delightful the life behind the scenes must be; but now I know better. I only wish I could have a quiet chat with some of those stage-struck girls, and warn them before it is too late. The life is only possible for the children of parents who are on the stage. It is the atmosphere in which they have been brought up. But as to other girls, the stage is the last thing they should think of if I had my way.’
‘But what do you object to?’
‘Why, to everything: the language one is obliged to hear; the dresses, which are often actually indecent; the way in which one is persecuted by men supposed to be gentlemen – the free-and-easy way in which they attempt familiarities is decidedly unpleasant. No, I have been behind the scenes; I have no more illusions on that score. I have done with the whole affair. I am off the boards, and I have no wish to reappear on them again.’
‘No money will tempt you?’ said the manager.
‘None,’ was the reply.
‘You will be exposed to no inconvenience, you know.’
‘That is true; but I should have to give my sanction to much that I disapprove of. You must reform what goes on behind the scenes.’
‘Oh, that is impossible.’
‘That’s what I fear.’
‘Well, as you’ve made up your mind, it is no use, I fear, discussing the subject any longer.’
His appeal was in vain.
She did not want money, she did not care for applause; she had plenty of excitement in real life. She wanted time to think, and read, and feel. Behind the footlights every night, what time has actor or actress to realize the great ends of life as something real, and not a show with its pretended tragedy or farce?
‘In fact,’ said the lady, ‘I wish to live and not to act.’
‘And then return to the stage when you are getting old,’ said the manager in dismay. ‘Well, the public are indulgent, I admit. A favourite is a favourite, whether old or young. There are old men and women now on the stage who ought to have retired years ago. They cannot act decently; with all their making up they are scarcely presentable. Their memory and their power are gone, or something very like it, still the public applaud. They do not understand what failures the poor creatures have become, and they praise them as liberally as when they were in their prime and could act. One cannot much wonder that under the circumstances the veteran actor lags superfluous on the stage.’
‘But are they not afraid of the newspaper critics?’
Here the manager laughed.
‘Excuse me – that is too ridiculous. Who cares for theatrical criticism? Of course, we managers are civil to the critics, who give themselves amusing airs, and have a high opinion of their own abilities, and we get an advertisement gratuitously, which, of course, is an advantage. But a theatrical critic always swims with the stream – applauds what the public applaud, and blames what they blame. The public don’t care a rap for the theatrical critic. I often wonder newspaper editors take the trouble to print what they write. That no one reads it, except on a wet Sunday, they know as well as I. But you will come back to us soon?’ said the manager, with his most beseeching air.
‘No, I think not,’ said the lady. ‘The life is too exciting to be healthy, either for the heart or the head. It is all very well for a little while, but not for long. I have been happy on the stage, but I believe I shall be equally happy off. Let the younger ones have a chance. Every dog has his day.’
And the manager departed, thinking that the lady had made a great mistake, that perhaps she only needed a little more pressing. At any rate, he said, as he bowed himself out:
‘Madame, you shall hear from me again.’
‘It is no use,’ was her reply.
‘I am glad you have come to such an opinion. I also have obtained my freedom,’ said Wentworth. ‘My work at the newspaper office is done. It has been rather unpleasant of late. The proprietors depend on the Liberal Government; the Liberal Government fancy that to me it is due that a Tory was returned for Sloville. It was hinted to me that I was too independent – too negligent as to the interests of the party; that I was not severe enough on the sins of the opposition; that, in short, I was not enough of a party hack. Our manager is a keen party man; indeed, he expects one of these days to be knighted. And now I am free, and so are you, and we can set about a work I have long had in contemplation. You and I have often talked of Southey’s and Coleridge’s pantisocracy – I believe the time has come for some such an enterprise. It is true they never carried it out, it is true that when Robert Owen tried to do something of the kind it failed; but that is no reason why we should fail.’
‘Of course not,’ said Rose. ‘Yes, let us emigrate. Let us leave Sodom and Gomorrah to their fate. The sooner we are off the better.’
‘Let us have old Buxton down to talk over the matter,’ said Wentworth, making a signal by applying the poker to the ceiling.
In a moment or two he was in the room, a big burly man, with a big head and a big beard – given to the immoderate use of tobacco; averse to wearing new clothes, and not overfond of soap and water; rather inclined to be lazy; ready to say with Lord Melbourne, when reforming action was proposed: ‘Why can’t you leave it alone?’ Such men have their uses in a land where fussy people – as much with a view to their own personal gratification as to the welfare of the public – are always putting themselves forward; attempting to wash the blackamoor white, to have the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots.
‘What’s up now?’ said he as he shuffled in. ‘You look uncommonly grave.’
‘Listen to me,’ said Wentworth. ‘You have read my article in this morning’s paper?’
‘Not a line.’
‘Read it then.’
Buxton shrugged his shoulders and sat down.
Wentworth continued:
‘Listen to my ideas, which I have published in the paper.’
‘By all means.’
‘If in the multitude of counsellors there is safety, the England of to-day has little to fear, in spite of the undeniable facts that she is losing her trade and commerce, that her national debt seems impossible of payment, that her expenditure increases as her income declines, and that the unemployed and pauper class threaten, like the lean kine Joseph saw in his dream, to swallow up all the rest. As long as I can remember I have heard statesmen, and clergymen of all denominations, and politicians of all creeds, say something must be done; and they are still saying it in the most hopeless of tones, and with air the most dejected. We have not had our French Revolution yet. At the worst, the hungry mobs have contented themselves with an occasional raid on an unfortunate butcher or baker, or on some imprudent jeweller, whose attractive windows have proved too strong a temptation for the horny-handed. In the meanwhile, people of a hopeful turn of mind tell us – and truly – that the working classes were never better off, better paid, or better fed. But still, somehow or other, it is apparent that outside of the hopeless pauperism which the idiotic legislation of our fathers has called into existence – outside the depraved, whom drink and dishonesty have removed from the ranks of labour, to swell the bitter cry which ever ascends from city slums, where all foul things congregate, and where decent life is impossible – there are hundreds, nay, thousands, who are ready to work, but for whom, though to seek it they rise early and sit up late, no work is to be had. Is there any hope for such? Are they to be uncared for till they have lost all heart, and sink down to the pit of misery and despair, never more, till death comes to them as a friend, to rise again? Is it not time that we think of them? In Ireland, a hundred patriots would have rent the air with the story of their wrongs. In England, we take small note of them. Yet they are our flesh and blood, with honest hearts and hands. A scheme has been devised for their benefit. That it is worth a trial, few who can examine it can doubt.
‘The idea of this new remedy is that, now when agricultural land is to be had for next to nothing, farms should be bought on which home colonies may be planted, and labour provided sufficient for self-support.
‘The fact is,’ said Wentworth, ‘we have rather a grand scheme in view. A gentleman is ready to purchase land in America or Canada or one of the Colonies; to plant it with poor people who can find no work at home, nor are likely to do so, if they stop here all their lives. And he wants me to go out as manager; I am quite ready to do so. And Rose is anxious for the experiment to be tried – indeed, far more so than myself.’
‘That is a matter of course – novelty has always charms for woman.’
‘And woman,’ said Rose, ‘is always ready to lend a helping hand to any philanthropic scheme.’
‘Well, it requires a good deal of thinking about.’
‘And we have thought about it long,’ said Wentworth; ‘and the more we think about it the better we like it. But we want you to accompany us.’
‘In what capacity?’
‘As medical man.’
‘And you think I would turn my back on London, and give up my easy life, to undertake all this responsibility?’
‘Well, I don’t see why you should not,’ said Wentworth. ‘You are not doing much good here, you know.’
‘And why should I, when everyone is fussing about doing good and in the meantime doing a great deal of mischief, interfering with the working of the unalterable laws of the universe, washing blackamoors white, trying to make empty sacks stand upright?’
‘Yes, but we are going to do nothing of the kind. We are only finding homes and work for men and women who can find in the old country neither the one nor the other – to save them from sinking into hopeless pauperism, to help them to live happy and healthful lives. What have you to say against our scheme?’
‘Really, now I think about it, I can’t say anything against it, supposing that you have a proper site for the experiment, that you take proper people, and that you have sufficient capital to make a fair start.’
‘Oh, as to that, everything has been provided for. Each colonist will have a bit of ground, which he will pay for in time by his labour. We intend working on the old lines, not to be led away by communistic ideas. Each man will do the best he can for himself, and in so doing will be best for all. What do you think, Buxton, of the scheme?’
‘Why, like all her ladyship’s ideas, it is excellent.’
‘Pretty flatterer!’ said Rose.
‘He wants to cut me out,’ said Wentworth. ‘He was always envious of my superior abilities.’
‘As he had every reason to be,’ said Rose.
‘Come, that’s too bad,’ said Buxton, turning to Rose, ‘after the way in which I buttered you up just now. Two to one ain’t fair. But to return to business.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Wentworth.
‘If I had a family – which, thank Heaven, I have not – I would not stop in England a day. If I had a lad to plant out in the world as you have, I’d send him off to America or the Colonies to-morrow.’
‘Because?’
‘Because it’s all up in old England in the first place; and in the second place, because if it were not so, the New World offers better opportunities for a young fellow than the old. May I dwell upon these topics?’
‘Certainly, by all means.’
‘Well, I have met a good many Americans lately, and they have put new ideas into my head – ’
‘Not before they were wanted!’ said Wentworth.
‘Speak for yourself, sir, if you please,’ said Buxton, with an assumed offended air.
‘Oh, I beg pardon! Pray proceed.’
‘I was going to say,’ said Buxton, ‘until interrupted in this unmannerly manner, you are enthusiasts, I am not. I doubt the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. It has done good in its time, I admit. It was the thought of the Messiah that was to come that nerved the heart of the Jew as he sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion. Paul and the Apostles expected the new heaven and the new earth before they laid down their lives as martyrs for their inspiring faith. Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified God at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. “The end of all things is at hand,” is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. I feel rather inclined to believe with old Swedenborg that that day is past. The talk of a Millennium makes me sick. It is a delusion and a sham. Such men as Dr. Cumming, with their long array of dates and their wild dreams of the fulfilment of prophecy, make men like myself sceptics. It is clear to us that the odds, at any rate, are against the Christian.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘But this is a business scheme. We are not in search of the Millennium.’
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND
For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.
London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘I am now reduced to think and am at last content to talk of the weather.’ That was a sign that the Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: ‘There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which concerned the weather.’ If any one of his intimate companions told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by saying: ‘O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.’ Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over. It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day. I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the infirm or old.
‘We must get out of England,’ said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in all their wretchedness. ‘We must get out of England, and the sooner the better.’
‘Yes, I’ve long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question seriously.’
‘That is just what I am trying to do,’ was the reply. ‘We are not too old for a grand experiment.’
‘But are you prepared to give up journalism?’
‘Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.’
But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning for the mental and moral elevation of the people – ideas deeply cherished in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian minister in Shropshire, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were to win the people’s victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a discontented – and a justly discontented – nation. Young hearts burned within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O’Connell, or studied Liberal newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on the shield and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening. The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism, the effect of which was never to pass away. Buxton, as usual, continued his morning smoke.
‘Hear me,’ said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: ‘As long as I can remember, the “condition of England question,” as Carlyle called it, or, as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, “the bitter cry of the outcast,” has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working classes are not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won’t work; who won’t go where work is to be had; who come to London when they should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an appeal to the humane. “Pull down the rookery,” and the rooks won’t fly away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there he is still, a disgrace and shame – not so much, as sensational writers pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever since we have known anything of the churches – whether Established or Free – it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be – that if you lose your chance, another will take it – that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat – those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
‘It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful – for it may be taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such utter damnation as is to be found among the outcast – to find clever writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to ponder over the remedies. It is now the fashion to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people. What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent. A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling tradesman into the Gazette. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple us in our trade with foreign competitors, when they will supply the markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have little left to us but our National Debt.’
‘Go on,’ said Buxton. ‘You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves your feelings, pray proceed.’
‘Well, then,’ said Wentworth, ‘I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public market any surplus produce such as eggs, butter and poultry, far too much of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would supply all the requisite milk, cheese, butter, beef and hides every year in abundant quantities. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you weary?’ said Wentworth.
‘Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it – why not begin a scheme of the kind at once?’
‘All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry and thrift – unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and degrades the recipients; it will help the societies instituted to distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.’
‘And yet there are people who believe in Cobden still,’ said Buxton.
‘I knew him well,’ said Wentworth, ‘and a better man never lived. He was right in the main, though his enthusiasm led him astray, and no wonder. Let me, in the language of Goldsmith remind you —
‘“How wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.”’
Buxton laughed when Wentworth had finished his rhapsody. Buxton was given to laughter. He was not a man who took life very seriously. Perhaps he would have done better had he done so as far as his own personal interests were concerned. As Swift said of Arbuthnot, it might be said of him, that he knew his art better than his trade.
‘Wait a moment,’ he said, as he rushed out of the room to his own den, whence he returned with an old faded handbill, which was as follows:
SPENCE’S PLAN
for Parochial Partnerships in the Land is the only effectual remedy for the distress and oppressions of the people.
The Landholders are not Proprietors-in-Chief;
they are but the Stewards of the Public, for the Land is the People’s Farm.
The expenses of the Government do not cause the misery that surrounds us, but the enormous exactings of those
Unjust Stewards,
Landed monopoly is indeed equally contrary to the benign
Spirit of Christianity, and destructive of the Independence and Morality of Mankind.
‘The Profit of the Earth is for all.’
Yet how deplorably destitute are the great mass of the
People!
Nor is it possible for their situations to be radically amended but by the establishment of a system founded on the immutable bases of
Nature and Justice.
Experience demonstrates its necessity, and the
Rights of Manhood require it for their presentation.
To obtain this important object by extending the knowledge of the above system, the Society of Spencean Philanthropies has been established. Further information of its principles may be obtained by attending any of its sectional meetings, where subjects are discussed calculated to enlighten the human understanding; and where, also, the regulations of the society may be procured, containing a complete development of the Spencean system. Every individual is admitted free of expense who will conduct himself with decorum.
‘I never heard of Spence,’ said Wentworth.