XXII

The day of the great presentation to Cornleigh Cornleigh, Esq., happening just now, Mr. Goring drove Felise in to Maasbury to attend the meeting. For five-and-twenty years he had avoided all such movements, retired among his trees, till at the moment when he desired to act he found himself powerless. Absolute silence⁠—absolute retirement, destroys a man’s hold on the world. Not for the best of all objects could he now obtain the attention of the well-disposed; he could call no one to assist the innocent and helpless.

Alone, a man is powerless. It is when his voice acts like a lever that he is mighty; a lever that stirs those that hear it, and in their turn they stir others, till the circle widening, an irresistible wave is formed. He had to begin again at the beginning; first, to see and be present at what was going on; next, to make friends; and finally, to set foot in the ring and do battle.

Though happy with Martial, Felise, when by herself, was greatly depressed by the loss of Mary. If I have not set forth her sorrow in so many words, it is because it must be apparent that a nature like hers would be deeply grieved. Mr. Goring did not like her to remain at home alone, and persuaded her to accompany him into the town, thinking it would be in some degree a change. Martial was to join them there and return with them.

At the door of the assembly-room, in Maasbury, they were advised to go up in the gallery, as there was a considerable gathering of the opposition party, and a fight was probable. The gallery was reserved for ladies, or those who wished to be spectators merely. They went up, and found it already crowded with ladies, many of whom felt an interest in certain proceedings which were to precede the presentation.

Rosa was there, and saw Felise immediately⁠—from that moment her eyes were fixed upon Felise⁠—her glance crossed the looks of all others in the gallery: their eyes were bent upon the platform or the scene beneath; Rosa’s glance was across their line of sight. Felise was unconscious of Rosa’s presence, and was occupied in looking for Martial in the crowd below; at length Mr. Goring pointed him out on the platform.

When an eye looks steadily across the general line of view there seems something sinister in its gaze. Have you never chanced to look aside for a moment from the stage, or the concert, and accidentally caught such a glance regarding someone pitilessly? Your thought has just been filled with noble sentiment, or the ear with sweet sound; this interrupted glance reminds you that behind the scene of life passions or resentments are still burning.

The front of the crowd in the hall beneath was composed of farmers, or the farming interest, and of respectable tradesmen of Maasbury, who supported the platform with a firm cordon of the “right sort.” For some depth it was in fact packed with the Cornleigh Cornleigh party. But on the left side there began the thin end of the wedge of opposition, which gradually thickened till at the rear it widened out and held the whole hall by the doorway.

Anyone in the gallery with an eye for tactics could see that if danger was brewing, it would take effect through the thin end of the wedge, which went up within four or five of the platform. If this end were forced forwards by the thick part of the wedge behind, the opposition might very likely succeed in storming the platform.

To defend a position like a platform effectually you require a very stout cordon in front of it⁠—a cordon equally thick everywhere, and a second body posted towards the other end of the hall to take assailants in flank. Military talent was, however, scarcely to be expected in Maasbury. Robert Godwin was on the platform, of course.

The opposition was composed of smaller tradesmen, work-people, lower middle-class people living in their own houses, men working in small factories, some very respectable persons from the villages (independent freeholders in a small way), a few labourers of strong political opinion who had stumped in and stood with their hands in their pockets, the tenants of rows of little houses that had been built in the suburbs on ground that did not belong to Cornleigh Cornleigh; in short, of “all sorts and conditions of men.”

Some rushes had occurred already, and a woman who had foolishly ventured into the hall had to be dragged out fainting.

“Quite a different scene, I assure you,” whispered Cornleigh Cornleigh’s solicitor (and prompter) to a London visitor at The House who was on the platform⁠—“altogether a different scene to what we used to have at public meetings a few years ago. We used to have such orderly pleasant meetings, and everything went off smoothly and as you would wish. This is all owing to the ballot, you know; devilish thing, sir, the ballot!”

Somehow the Maasbury world had begun to lose its reverent awe of Cornleigh Cornleigh, Esq.

Felise was full of wonder at what she saw beneath her; she could not understand it. She had read the great speeches of Demosthenes; they read so calm and composed, as if delivered in an atmosphere of perfect peace. They soothed the mind and disposed it to think, and thought is quiet. Why did these people on the floor of the hall appear to hate each other so intensely? Why did they push and jostle with brutal rudeness, and use expressions of savage violence? It did not look human.

That men, each in the same likeness, clad alike, speaking the same tongue, living in the same neighbourhood, should be ready to treat each other as blocks of timber to be kicked, pushed, shoved, and thrust about, was inexplicable to her.

The first view of an excited public meeting is very puzzling and disappointing to a mind accustomed to study and to hold opinions without rancour.

Felise felt hurt at the spectacle. It was not right. There was not the least necessity for this roughness⁠—no cause whatever. It seemed to lower humanity.

“This is mildness itself, as yet,” said Mr. Goring, replying to her. “I remember scenes at elections thirty years ago which made one’s blood curdle. The brutality used to be rather encouraged. The more brutal you could be the better you were esteemed. Now you see why the ballot is such an advance; people can honestly express their views without this personal violence.”

“Is it quite safe for Martial?” asked Felise, anxious about him; the roar of the surging crowd seemed to threaten him most, because it was of him she thought.

“Not the least danger at present.”

“I wish he would leave the platform,” said Felise. “I do not like it; these people seem as if they would crush anyone who displeased them.”

Ostensibly the meeting had been called for two objects: first, for the formation of a Society for the Encouragement of Art Culture in the Homes of the Poor; secondly, for the presentation of a testimonial to Cornleigh Cornleigh, Esq., on the completion of his twenty-fifth year of Parliamentary service. In reality it was the commencement of a series of operations designed to raise up and unite the supporters of Cornleigh Cornleigh, and the cause he represented.

It had long been felt in the select circle that worked the party thereabouts that something must be done. A certain amount of apathy had manifested itself even among the farmers; they did not exactly say so, but they seemed to lay the losses and in some cases the ruin that had overtaken them at the door of the landowners, and to the Toryism they represented. Enthusiasm was absent; there was a coldness among the sturdiest of them. A race remarkable for loyalty even to a bad cause or to a bad man, they stood somewhat aloof.

Speeches had been made by some of them of an advanced character, not at all of a resigned and praise-the-authorities-that-be description. Something must be done to stir them up, to get them together and talk to them. Much is sometimes accomplished by getting people together and talking to them.

Besides encouraging their own ranks, there was still harder work to be carried out among the small voters, who had much increased in the neighbourhood of the town; there was the terrible Ballot Act to be countermined; and lastly, there was the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourer looming within “measurable distance.”

Mrs. Cornleigh Cornleigh was in high spirits at the success of her political management. A hint had been dropped, that owing to diminished income, the Squire thought of retiring from the representation at the next election, and this, too, on the eve of his baronetcy. The fourteen other magnates were much discomposed at this; there was no one among themselves with Cornleigh’s prestige to take his place, and they did not want a stranger sent down by the London clubs; they naturally wished to keep the thing a close preserve. Accordingly purses were opened more freely than could have been expected, and a guarantee fund was formed; besides which an additional amount was subscribed for immediate political or politico-social work.

“We want to get into the houses of the working-classes and of the labourers,” said Letitia. “We want to lift up their ideas, to raise their aspirations. Let us begin with Art.”

The proposed Society for the Encouragement of Art Culture in the Homes of the Poor was to furnish the labourer’s cottage with an approved selection of prints and engravings from the works of the great masters, together with watercolours executed by members of the organization. The latter idea proved a great bait, and attracted all the amateurs in the town; every lady who dabbled in paint looked forward to seeing her picture hung at an exhibition that was presently to be held in the house of Cornleigh Cornleigh.

Of all the odd movements that have been started in the last few years, this for ornamenting the cottage with works of art is the most grotesque. To suppose that any man is likely to be the better because a picture is graciously hung on his walls above the heads of squalling children, and over the table scarcely supplied with bread, is indeed a monstrous perversion of common sense.

Unless he be a slave-man out of whom poverty has ground all independence, he is much more likely to curse it, to tear it down and trample it under foot, and to abominate the name of Art as synonymous with insult ever afterwards.

Insult it is of the cruellest and harshest kind. The wretched beings require food, and you give them a picture.

Felise gave old Abner Brown half-a-crown to purchase himself a beefsteak and a quart of good ale; that is to say, to buy himself fresh blood to circulate in those old and withered limbs.

Good beef and beer are what the poor want, and you would find it difficult to supply too much of it.

But somehow or other your modern philanthropist cannot endure the idea of beef and beer.

He organizes societies to teach the poor how to cook (ye gods, how to cook! with nothing in the frying-pan nor any lard to grease it), and offers them a cold drink from the pump. In the midst of squalling children, over the deal table scarce supplied with bread, he hangs up a picture.

For the enjoyment of art it is first of all necessary to have a full belly.

May I inquire, too, of any painter, if such chances to light on these pages, whether he would consider it likely to encourage a love of art merely to hang a picture on a wall? whether he has not known even well educated and wealthy people who possessed scores of valuable pictures without the least love of art? whether, in short, even he, a painter of pictures, considered pictures the whole end and aim of art?

Is not art rather in the man than on the wall?

Once now and then I have been into the cottages of farm labourers (who had the good fortune to possess security of tenure) and found old oak furniture; curious grotesque crockery, generally much coloured⁠—the favourite colour red; ancient brazen-faced upright clocks ticking slowly, as the stars go slowly past in the quiet hours of night; odd things on the mantelpiece; an old gun with brass fittings, polished brass ornaments; two or three old books with leather bindings; on the walls quaint smoke-tinted pictures threescore years old.

Outside, trees in the garden⁠—plums, pears, damsons⁠—trees planted by the owner for fruit and shade, but mostly for solace, since it is a pleasant thing to see a tree grow. These people, having no fear of being turned out of doors, had accumulated such treasures, a chair at a time, making the interior homelike. And out of doors they had planted trees; without love of trees, I doubt if there be any art. Of art itself in itself they had had no thought; not one had ever tried to draw or paint. They had coloured their strips of flower-garden or bordering with bright yellow flowers; that was all the paint they knew.

Yet I think this home-life in itself was something like true art. There was a sense of the fitness of things, and good instinctive taste in the selection of interior fittings, furniture, and even of colour.

Oak is our national wood, old oak, dark and deep-shaded⁠—Rembrandt oak⁠—oak is part of our national art. Brass polishes and gleams in sunlight through the window, or glows in the sparkle from winter’s fire. It sets off the black oak. Red-coloured chinaware (perhaps it is a shade of pink) is gay and bright under low-pitched ceilings with dark wood beams and no white ceiling. Yellow flowers light up the brown mould. Altogether a realistic picture painted in actual dark oak, actual brass, actual red china, and actual yellow flowers.

Here then there was art in the man. Can you put that taste in by hanging a picture on the wall? Letitia’s pictures were chiefly of the pre-Raphaelite ecclesiastical order⁠—saints, saints’ lives and deaths, such as were painted in the fourteenth century, and with which life at the present day has no sort of sympathy.

There was not a cottage-tenant on the estate of Cornleigh Cornleigh who could call his cottage his own securely for more than six months. How then was it possible for taste to grow up, or to exercise itself if it was there?

There can be no art in a people who know that at any moment they may be thrust out of doors. Art is of slow growth.

Up in the north they say there is a district where the labourers spend their idle hours in cutting out and sticking together fiddles. I do not care twopence for a fiddle as a fiddle; but still I think if a labouring man coming home from plough, and exposure to rough wind, and living on coarse fare, can still have spirit enough left to sit down and patiently carve out bits of maple wood and fit them together into a complete and tunable fiddle, then he must have within him some of the true idea of art, and that fiddle is in itself a work of art.

Nothing of the sort will ever be possible in our cottage homes till the people in them know that they can live therein as long as they please provided they pay the rent, and are not liable to be ordered off into the next county or anywhere because they have displeased someone.

However, the movement in Maasbury had proved a social success; it was already well patronized; there were many amateurs up in the gallery who had begun to study for the honour of exhibiting in the house of Cornleigh Cornleigh.

Looking down upon the crowd in the hall from the gallery, it did not appear to care much for art⁠—which is quiet. The hubbub increased, and the jostling was renewed at short intervals; the meeting was impatient and wanted things to begin.

The first speakers in nowise concern us; they were heard sometimes with cheers, and now and then with hoots; they explained the general organization of the Society.