Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer. Elsmere's affectionate, sensitive nature took such things hardly, especially as he knew that Newcome's life was becoming increasingly difficult end embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend's 'infidel propaganda,' established on the very ground where he himself had all but died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.

But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary fight apart from the organized system of English religion and English philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid's passed there with cold averted eyes; the old and _faineant_ rector of the parish church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of Elsmere's intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious. His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church, in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be, alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.

Tasks in Hours of insight willed Can be in Hours of gloom fulfilled;

and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the prosaic and perplexing details of this hew attempt to carry enthusiasm into life.

It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the _upper working class_. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof--broadly speaking--from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or Dissent.

Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar material in the great towns of the North. Toward religion in general the prevailing attitude is, one of indifference tinged with hostility. 'Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and Dissent nowhere--_Christianity not in possession_. Such is the estimate of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts of the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more prejudiced, more given over to crude theorizing, than his North-country brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline of intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly speaking, means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he never valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is nil; and his life supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of 'other-worldliness.' Religion has been on the whole irrationally presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working class-elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The more intermingling of races, which a modern city shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun to wear off; Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and ardor of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with Religion. He made himself quickly felt in the night school, and as soon as he possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room, on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the storytelling which had been so great a success at Murewell. The story-telling struck the neighborhood as a great novelty. At first only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been two-fold--the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties of particular trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern iron-works, or from that of the Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its humors, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or Cumberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the 'Birkenhead;' the deadly plunge of the 'Captain;' the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mount Blanc might be buried without showing even his top-most snow-field above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Chateau d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them. His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current 'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough. Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbors had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to out the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.

'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbor, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow. But he ain't a parson.'

'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most of 'em as comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as an egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn't catch _me_ here. Never heard him say anything in the "dear brethren" sort of style, and I've been 'ere most o' these evenings and to his lectures besides.'

'Perhaps he's one of your d--d sly ones,' said the first speaker dubiously. 'Means to shovel it in by-and-by.'

'Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned his companion. 'He'd let other fellows have their say, anyhow.'

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a gas-fitter--to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have brought in with him on his way from work--with eyes like live birds, and small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the man's thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling with excitement.

Another project of Robert's, started as soon as he had felt his way a little in the district, was the scientific Sunday-school. This was the direct result of a paragraph in Huxley's Lay Sermons, where the hint of such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of such a supplement to a child's ordinary education is not what it was. Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did a botany class, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores of flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of large colored plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a Kew assistant. Those he would often set up on a large screen, or put up on the walls, till the dingy school-room became a bower of superb blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And then--still by the help of pictures--he would take his class on a tour through strange lands,