Yeast: a Problem

‘Why, you talk like Mr. Mill himself, Tregarva; you ought to have been a political economist, and not a City missionary.  By the bye, I don’t like that profession for you.’

‘It’s the Lord’s work, sir.  It’s the very sending to the Gentiles that the Lord promised me.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Paul; but you are meant for other things, if not better.  There are plenty of smaller men than you to do that work.  Do you think that God would have given you that strength, that brain, to waste on a work which could be done without them?  Those limbs would certainly be good capital for you, if you turned a live model at the Academy.  Perhaps you’d better be mine; but you can’t even be that if you go to Manchester.’

The giant looked hopelessly down at his huge limbs.  ‘Well!  God only knows what use they are of just now.  But as for the brains, sir—in much learning is much sorrow.  One had much better work than read, I find.  If I read much more about what men might be, and are not, and what English soil might be, and is not, I shall go mad.  And that puts me in mind of one thing I came here for, though, like a poor rude country fellow as I am, I clean forgot it a thinking of—Look here, sir; you’ve given me a sight of books in my time, and God bless you for it.  But now I hear that—that you are determined to be a poor man like us; and that you shan’t be, while Paul Tregarva has ought of yours.  So I’ve just brought all the books back, and there they lie in the hall; and may God reward you for the loan of them to his poor child!  And so, sir, farewell;’ and he rose to go.

‘No, Paul; the books and you shall never part.’

‘And I say, sir, the books and you shall never part.’

‘Then we two can never part’—and a sudden impulse flashed over him—‘and we will not part, Paul!  The only man whom I utterly love, and trust, and respect on the face of God’s earth, is you; and I cannot lose sight of you.  If we are to earn our bread, let us earn it together; if we are to endure poverty, and sorrow, and struggle to find out the way of bettering these wretched millions round us, let us learn our lesson together, and help each other to spell it out.’

‘Do you mean what you say?’ asked Paul slowly.

‘I do.’

‘Then I say what you say.  Where thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.  Come what will, I will be your servant, for good luck or bad, for ever.’

‘My equal, Paul, not my servant.’

‘I know my place, sir.  When I am as learned and as well-bred as you, I shall not refuse to call myself your equal; and the sooner that day comes, the better I shall be pleased.  Till then I am your friend and your brother; but I am your scholar too, and I shall not set up myself against my master.’

‘I have learnt more of you, Paul, than ever you have learnt of me.  But be it as you will; only whatever you may call yourself, we must eat at the same table, live in the same room, and share alike all this world’s good things—or we shall have no right to share together this world’s bad things.  If that is your bargain, there is my hand on it.’

‘Amen!’ quoth Tregarva; and the two young men joined hands in that sacred bond—now growing rarer and rarer year by year—the utter friendship of two equal manful hearts.

‘And now, sir, I have promised—and you would have me keep my promise—to go and work for the City Mission in Manchester—at least, for the next month, till a young man’s place who has just left, is filled up.  Will you let me go for that time? and then, if you hold your present mind, we will join home and fortunes thenceforth, and go wherever the Lord shall send us.  There’s work enough of His waiting to be done.  I don’t doubt but if we are willing and able, He will set us about the thing we’re meant for.’

As Lancelot opened the door for him, he lingered on the steps, and grasping his hand, said, in a low, earnest voice: ‘The Lord be with you, sir.  Be sure that He has mighty things in store for you, or He would not have brought you so low in the days of your youth.’

‘And so,’ as John Bunyan has it, ‘he went on his way;’ and Lancelot saw him no more till—but I must not outrun the order of time.

After all, this visit came to Lancelot timely.  It had roused him to hope, and turned off his feelings from the startling news he had just heard.  He stepped along arm in arm with Luke, cheerful, and fate-defiant, and as he thought of Tregarva’s complaints,—

‘The beautiful?’ he said to himself, ‘they shall have it!  At least they shall be awakened to feel their need of it, their right to it.  What a high destiny, to be the artist of the people! to devote one’s powers of painting, not to mimicking obsolete legends, Pagan or Popish, but to representing to the working men of England the triumphs of the Past and the yet greater triumphs of the Future!’

Luke began at once questioning him about his father.

‘And is he contrite and humbled?  Does he see that he has sinned?’

‘In what?’

‘It is not for us to judge; but surely it must have been some sin or other of his which has drawn down such a sore judgment on him.’

Lancelot smiled; but Luke went on, not perceiving him.

‘Ah! we cannot find out for him.  Nor has he, alas! as a Protestant, much likelihood of finding out for himself.  In our holy church he would have been compelled to discriminate his faults by methodic self-examination, and lay them one by one before his priest for advice and pardon, and so start a new and free man once more.’

‘Do you think,’ asked Lancelot with a smile, ‘that he who will not confess his faults either to God or to himself, would confess them to man?  And would his priest honestly tell him what he really wants to know? which sin of his has called down this so-called judgment?  It would be imputed, I suppose, to some vague generality, to inattention to religious duties, to idolatry of the world, and so forth.  But a Romish priest would be the last person, I should think, who could tell him fairly, in the present case, the cause of his affliction; and I question whether he would give a patient hearing to any one who told it him.’

‘How so?  Though, indeed, I have remarked that people are perfectly willing to be told they are miserable sinners, and to confess themselves such, in a general way; but if the preacher once begins to specify, to fix on any particular act or habit, he is accused of personality or uncharitableness; his hearers are ready to confess guilty to any sin but the very one with which he charges them.  But, surely, this is just what I am urging against you Protestants—just what the Catholic use of confession obviates.’

‘Attempts to do so, you mean!’ answered Lancelot.  ‘But what if your religion preaches formally that which only remains in our religion as a fast-dying superstition?—That those judgments of God, as you call them, are not judgments at all in any fair use of the word, but capricious acts of punishment on the part of Heaven, which have no more reference to the fault which provokes them, than if you cut off a man’s finger because he made a bad use of his tongue.  That is part, but only a part, of what I meant just now, by saying that people represent God as capricious, proud, revengeful.’

‘But do not Protestants themselves confess that our sins provoke God’s anger?’

‘Your common creed, when it talks rightly of God as one “who has no passions,” ought to make you speak more reverently of the possibility of any act of ours disturbing the everlasting equanimity of the absolute Love.  Why will men so often impute to God the miseries which they bring upon themselves?’

‘Because, I suppose, their pride makes them more willing to confess themselves sinners than fools.’

‘Right, my friend; they will not remember that it is of “their pleasant vices that God makes whips to scourge them.”  Oh, I at least have felt the deep wisdom of that saying of Wilhelm Meister’s harper, that it is

“Voices from the depth of Nature borneWhich woe upon the guilty head proclaim.”

Of nature—of those eternal laws of hers which we daily break.  Yes! it is not because God’s temper changes, but because God’s universe is unchangeable, that such as I, such as your poor father, having sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind.  I have fed my self-esteem with luxuries and not with virtue, and, losing them, have nothing left.  He has sold himself to a system which is its own punishment.  And yet the last place in which he will look for the cause of his misery is in that very money-mongering to which he now clings as frantically as ever.  But so it is throughout the world.  Only look down over that bridge-parapet, at that huge black-mouthed sewer, vomiting its pestilential riches across the mud.  There it runs, and will run, hurrying to the sea vast stores of wealth, elaborated by Nature’s chemistry into the ready materials of food; which proclaim, too, by their own foul smell, God’s will that they should be buried out of sight in the fruitful all-regenerating grave of earth: there it runs, turning them all into the seeds of pestilence, filth, and drunkenness.—And then, when it obeys the laws which we despise, and the pestilence is come at last, men will pray against it, and confess it to be “a judgment for their sins;” but if you ask what sin, people will talk about “les voiles d’airain,” as Fourier says, and tell you that it is presumptuous to pry into God’s secret counsels, unless, perhaps, some fanatic should inform you that the cholera has been drawn down on the poor by the endowment of Maynooth by the rich.’

‘It is most fearful, indeed, to think that these diseases should be confined to the poor—that a man should be exposed to cholera, typhus, and a host of attendant diseases, simply because he is born into the world an artisan; while the rich, by the mere fact of money, are exempt from such curses, except when they come in contact with those whom they call on Sunday “their brethren,” and on week days the “masses.”

‘Thank Heaven that you do see that,—that in a country calling itself civilised and Christian, pestilence should be the peculiar heritage of the poor!  It is past all comment.’

‘And yet are not these pestilences a judgment, even on them, for their dirt and profligacy?’

‘And how should they be clean without water?  And how can you wonder if their appetites, sickened with filth and self-disgust, crave after the gin-shop for temporary strength, and then for temporary forgetfulness?  Every London doctor knows that I speak the truth; would that every London preacher would tell that truth from his pulpit!’

‘Then would you too say, that God punishes one class for the sins of another?’

‘Some would say,’ answered Lancelot, half aside, ‘that He may be punishing them for not demanding their right to live like human beings, to all those social circumstances which shall not make their children’s life one long disease.  But are not these pestilences a judgment on the rich, too, in the truest sense of the word?  Are they not the broad, unmistakable seal to God’s opinion of a state of society which confesses its economic relations to be so utterly rotten and confused, that it actually cannot afford to save yearly millions of pounds’ worth of the materials of food, not to mention thousands of human lives?  Is not every man who allows such things hastening the ruin of the society in which he lives, by helping to foster the indignation and fury of its victims?  Look at that group of stunted, haggard artisans, who are passing us.  What if one day they should call to account the landlords whose coveteousness and ignorance make their dwellings hells on earth?’

By this time they had reached the artist’s house.

Luke refused to enter. . . . ‘He had done with this world, and the painters of this world.’  . . .  And with a tearful last farewell, he turned away up the street, leaving Lancelot to gaze at his slow, painful steps, and abject, earth-fixed mien.

‘Ah!’ thought Lancelot, ‘here is the end of your anthropology!  At first, your ideal man is an angel.  But your angel is merely an unsexed woman; and so you are forced to go back to the humanity after all—but to a woman, not a man?  And this, in the nineteenth century, when men are telling us that the poetic and enthusiastic have become impossible, and that the only possible state of the world henceforward will be a universal good-humoured hive, of the Franklin-Benthamite religion . . . a vast prosaic Cockaigne of steam mills for grinding sausages—for those who can get at them.  And all the while, in spite of all Manchester schools, and high and dry orthodox schools, here are the strangest phantasms, new and old, sane and insane, starting up suddenly into live practical power, to give their prosaic theories the lie—Popish conversions, Mormonisms, Mesmerisms, Californias, Continental revolutions, Paris days of June . . . Ye hypocrites! ye can discern the face of the sky, and yet ye cannot discern the signs of this time!’

He was ushered upstairs to the door of his studio, at which he knocked, and was answered by a loud ‘Come in.’  Lancelot heard a rustle as he entered, and caught sight of a most charming little white foot retreating hastily through the folding doors into the inner room.

The artist, who was seated at his easel, held up his brush as a signal of silence, and did not even raise his eyes till he had finished the touches on which he was engaged.

‘And now—what do I see!—the last man I should have expected!  I thought you were far down in the country.  And what brings you to me with such serious and business-like looks?’

‘I am a penniless youth—’

‘What?’

‘Ruined to my last shilling, and I want to turn artist.’

‘Oh, ye gracious powers!  Come to my arms, brother at last with me in the holy order of those who must work or starve.  Long have I wept in secret over the pernicious fulness of your purse!’

‘Dry your tears, then, now,’ said Lancelot, ‘for I neither have ten pounds in the world, nor intend to have till I can earn them.’

‘Artist!’ ran on Mellot; ‘ah! you shall be an artist, indeed!  You shall stay with me and become the English Michael Angelo; or, if you are fool enough, go to Rome, and utterly eclipse Overbeck, and throw Schadow for ever into the shade.’

‘I fine you a supper,’ said Lancelot, ‘for that execrable attempt at a pun.’

‘Agreed!  Here, Sabina, send to Covent Garden for huge nosegays, and get out the best bottle of Burgundy.  We will pass an evening worthy of Horace, and with garlands and libations honour the muse of painting.’

‘Luxurious dog!’ said Lancelot, ‘with all your cant about poverty.’

As he spoke, the folding doors opened, and an exquisite little brunette danced in from the inner room, in which, by the bye, had been going on all the while a suspicious rustling, as of garments hastily arranged.  She was dressed gracefully in a loose French morning-gown, down which Lancelot’s eye glanced towards the little foot, which, however, was now hidden in a tiny velvet slipper.  The artist’s wife was a real beauty, though without a single perfect feature, except a most delicious little mouth, a skin like velvet, and clear brown eyes, from which beamed earnest simplicity and arch good humour.  She darted forward to her husband’s friend, while her rippling brown hair, fantastically arranged, fluttered about her neck, and seizing Lancelot’s hands successively in both of hers, broke out in an accent prettily tinged with French,—

‘Charming!—delightful!  And so you are really going to turn painter!  And I have longed so to be introduced to you!  Claude has been raving about you these two years; you already seem to me the oldest friend in the world.  You must not go to Rome.  We shall keep you, Mr. Lancelot; positively you must come and live with us—we shall be the happiest trio in London.  I will make you so comfortable: you must let me cater for you—cook for you.’

‘And be my study sometimes?’ said Lancelot, smiling.

‘Ah,’ she said, blushing, and shaking her pretty little fist at Claude, ‘that madcap! how he has betrayed me!  When he is at his easel, he is so in the seventh heaven, that he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, but his own dreams.’

At this moment a heavy step sounded on the stairs, the door opened, and there entered, to Lancelot’s astonishment, the stranger who had just puzzled him so much at his uncle’s.

Claude rose reverentially, and came forward, but Sabina was beforehand with him, and running up to her visitor, kissed his hand again and again, almost kneeling to him.

‘The dear master!’ she cried; ‘what a delightful surprise! we have not seen you this fortnight past, and gave you up for lost.’

‘Where do you come from, my dear master?’ asked Claude.

‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,’ answered he, smiling, and laying his finger on his lips, ‘my dear pupils.  And you are both well and happy?’

‘Perfectly, and doubly delighted at your presence to-day, for your advice will come in a providential moment for my friend here.’

‘Ah!’ said the strange man, ‘well met once more!  So you are going to turn painter?’

He bent a severe and searching look on Lancelot.

‘You have a painter’s face, young man,’ he said; ‘go on and prosper.  What branch of art do you intend to study?’

‘The ancient Italian painters, as my first step.’

‘Ancient? it is not four hundred years since Perugino died.  But I should suppose you do not intend to ignore classic art?’

‘You have divined rightly.  I wish, in the study of the antique, to arrive at the primeval laws of unfallen human beauty.’

‘Were Phidias and Praxiteles, then, so primeval? the world had lasted many a thousand years before their turn came.  If you intend to begin at the beginning, why not go back at once to the garden of Eden, and there study the true antique?’

‘If there were but any relics of it,’ said Lancelot, puzzled, and laughing.

‘You would find it very near you, young man, if you had but eyes to see it.’

Claude Mellot laughed significantly, and Sabina clapped her little hands.

‘Yet till you take him with you, master, and show it to him, he must needs be content with the Royal Academy and the Elgin marbles.’

‘But to what branch of painting, pray,’ said the master to Lancelot, ‘will you apply your knowledge of the antique?  Will you, like this foolish fellow here’ (with a kindly glance at Claude), ‘fritter yourself away on Nymphs and Venuses, in which neither he nor any one else believes?’

‘Historic art, as the highest,’ answered Lancelot, ‘is my ambition.’

‘It is well to aim at the highest, but only when it is possible for us.  And how can such a school exist in England now?  You English must learn to understand your own history before you paint it.  Rather follow in the steps of your Turners, and Landseers, and Standfields, and Creswicks, and add your contribution to the present noble school of naturalist painters.  That is the niche in the temple which God has set you English to fill up just now.  These men’s patient, reverent faith in Nature as they see her, their knowledge that the ideal is neither to be invented nor abstracted, but found and left where God has put it, and where alone it can be represented, in actual and individual phenomena;—in these lies an honest development of the true idea of Protestantism, which is paving the way to the mesothetic art of the future.’

‘Glorious!’ said Sabina: ‘not a single word that we poor creatures can understand!’

But our hero, who always took a virtuous delight in hearing what he could not comprehend, went on to question the orator.

‘What, then, is the true idea of Protestantism?’ said he.

‘The universal symbolism and dignity of matter, whether in man or nature.’

‘But the Puritans—?’

‘Were inconsistent with themselves and with Protestantism, and therefore God would not allow them to proceed.  Yet their repudiation of all art was better than the Judas-kiss which Romanism bestows on it, in the meagre eclecticism of the ancient religious schools, and of your modern Overbecks and Pugins.  The only really wholesome designer of great power whom I have seen in Germany is Kaulbach; and perhaps every one would not agree with my reasons for admiring him, in this whitewashed age.  But you, young sir, were meant for better things than art.  Many young geniuses have an early hankering, as Goethe had, to turn painters.  It seems the shortest and easiest method of embodying their conceptions in visible form; but they get wiser afterwards, when they find in themselves thoughts that cannot be laid upon the canvas.  Come with me—I like striking while the iron is hot; walk with me towards my lodgings, and we will discuss this weighty matter.’

And with a gay farewell to the adoring little Sabina, he passed an iron arm through Lancelot’s, and marched him down into the street.

Lancelot was surprised and almost nettled at the sudden influence which he found this quaint personage was exerting over him.  But he had, of late, tasted the high delight of feeling himself under the guidance of a superior mind, and longed to enjoy it once more.  Perhaps they were reminiscences of this kind which stirred in him the strange fancy of a connection, almost of a likeness, between his new acquaintance and Argemone.  He asked, humbly enough, why Art was to be a forbidden path to him?

‘Besides you are an Englishman, and a man of uncommon talent, unless your physiognomy belies you; and one, too, for whom God has strange things in store, or He would not have so suddenly and strangely overthrown you.’

Lancelot started.  He remembered that Tregarva had said just the same thing to him that very morning, and the (to him) strange coincidence sank deep into his heart.

‘You must be a politician,’ the stranger went on.  ‘You are bound to it as your birthright.  It has been England’s privilege hitherto to solve all political questions as they arise for the rest of the world; it is her duty now.  Here, or nowhere, must the solution be attempted of those social problems which are convulsing more and more all Christendom.  She cannot afford to waste brains like yours, while in thousands of reeking alleys, such as that one opposite us, heathens and savages are demanding the rights of citizenship.  Whether they be right or wrong, is what you, and such as you, have to find out at this day.’

Silent and thoughtful, Lancelot walked on by his side.

‘What is become of your friend Tregarva?  I met him this morning after he parted from you, and had some talk with him.  I was sorely minded to enlist him.  Perhaps I shall; in the meantime, I shall busy myself with you.’

‘In what way,’ asked Lancelot, ‘most strange sir, of whose name, much less of whose occupation, I can gain no tidings.’

‘My name for the time being is Barnakill.  And as for business, as it is your English fashion to call new things obstinately by old names, careless whether they apply or not, you may consider me as a recruiting-sergeant; which trade, indeed, I follow, though I am no more like the popular red-coated ones than your present “glorious constitution” is like William the Third’s, or Overbeck’s high art like Fra Angelico’s.  Farewell!  When I want you, which will be most likely when you want me, I shall find you again.’

The evening was passed, as Claude had promised, in a truly Horatian manner.  Sabina was most piquante, and Claude interspersed his genial and enthusiastic eloquence with various wise saws of ‘the prophet.’

‘But why on earth,’ quoth Lancelot, at last, ‘do you call him a prophet?’

‘Because he is one; it’s his business, his calling.  He gets his living thereby, as the showman did by his elephant.’

‘But what does he foretell?’

‘Oh, son of the earth!  And you went to Cambridge—are reported to have gone in for the thing, or phantom, called the tripos, and taken a first class! . . .  Did you ever look out the word “prophetes” in Liddell and Scott?’

‘Why, what do you know about Liddell and Scott?’

‘Nothing, thank goodness; I never had time to waste over the crooked letters.  But I have heard say that prophetes means, not a foreteller, but an out-teller—one who declares the will of a deity, and interprets his oracles.  Is it not so?’

‘Undeniably.’

‘And that he became a foreteller among heathens at least—as I consider, among all peoples whatsoever—because knowing the real bearing of what had happened, and what was happening, he could discern the signs of the times, and so had what the world calls a shrewd guess—what I, like a Pantheist as I am denominated, should call a divine and inspired foresight—of what was going to happen.’