Walter Besant
The Revolt of Man
‘Presently it began to be whispered abroad that the hours were too long, the work too hard, and the association of men together in such large numbers was dangerous. Then, little by little, wives withdrew their husbands from the works, mothers their sons, and set them up with spinning-jennies and looms at home. Hand-made cotton was protected; the machine-made was neglected. Soon the machines were silent and the factories closed; in course of time they were pulled down. Then other improvements followed. The population was enormously diminished, partly by the new laws which forbade the marriage of unhealthy or deformed men, and only allowed women to choose husbands when they had themselves obtained a certificate of good health and good conduct. Formerly the men married at nineteen; by the new laws they were compelled to wait until four-and-twenty; then, further, to wait until they were asked; and lastly, if they were asked, to obtain a certificate of soundness and freedom from any complaint which might be transmitted to children. Therefore as few of the Manchester workmen were quite free from some form of disease, the population rapidly decreased.’
‘But,’ said Lord Chester, ‘is that wrong? A man ought to be healthy.’
That was, indeed, the creed in which he had been brought up.
‘I am telling you the history of the place,’ replied the Professor. ‘Marriage being thus almost impossible, the Manchester women emigrated and the workmen stayed where they were, and gradually the weakly ones died out. As for the present Manchester man, you shall see him on Sunday when he goes to church.’
They stayed in this pleasant and countrified town for some days. On Sunday they went to the cathedral, and attended the service, which was conducted by the Bishop herself and her principal clergy. As the Bishop preached, Lord Chester looked about him, and watched the men. They were mostly a tall and handsome race, though, in the middle-aged men, the labour at the spindles had bowed their shoulders and contracted their chests. Their faces, however, like those of the London congregation, were listless and apathetic; they paid little heed to the sermon, yet devoutly knelt, bowed, and stood up at the right places. They seemed neither to feel nor to take any interest in life. Some of the women looked as if they interpreted the law of marital obedience in the strictest, even its harshest manner possible.
Lord Chester looked with a certain special curiosity at a regiment of young unmarried workmen. He had often enough before watched such a regiment passing to and from church, but never with such interest. For in these boys he had now learned to recognise the masters of the future.
They were mostly quite young, and naturally presented a more animated appearance than their married elders. Those of them who came from the country, or had no parents, were kept in a barrack under strict rule and discipline, having prescribed hours for gymnastics, exercises, and recreation, as well as for labour.
They were not all boys. Among them marched those whom unkind Nature or accident had set apart as condemned to celibacy. These were the consumptive, the asthmatic, the crippled, the humpbacked, the deformed; those who had inherited diseases of lung, brain, or blood; the unfortunates who could not marry, and who were, therefore, cared for with what was officially known as kindness. These poor creatures presented the appearance of the most hopeless misery. At other times Lord Chester would have passed them by without a thought. He knew now how different would have been their lot under a government which did not call itself maternal. Neither boys nor incurables received pay, and the surplus of their work was devoted to the great Mother’s Sustentation Fund, or, as it was called for short, the Mother’s Tax. This was intended to supplement the wages earned by the husband at home in case of insufficiency. But the wives were exhorted and admonished to take care of their husbands, and keep them constantly at work.
‘They do take care of them,’ said the Professor. ‘They make them clean up house, cook meals, and look after the children, as well as carry on their trade; while they themselves wrangle over politics in the street or in some of the squabble-halls, which are always open. The men never go out except on Sundays; they have no friends; they have no recreation.’
‘But formerly they were even worse off, according to your own showing.’
‘No; because if they were slaves to their wheels, they were slaves who worked in gangs, and they sometimes rose from the ranks. These men are solitary slaves who can never rise.’
‘Is there nothing good at all?’ cried the young man. ‘Would you make a revolution, and upset everything? As for religion – ’
‘Say nothing,’ said the Professor, ‘about religion till I have shown you the old one. Yes; there was once something grander than anything you can imagine. We women, who have belittled everything, have even spoiled our religion.’
They passed a couple of young men wending their way to the gymnasium with racquets in their hands.
‘They are the sons of the doctor or lawyer, I suppose,’ said the Professor looking after them. ‘Fine young fellows! But what are we to do with them? The law says that every boy, except the son of a peeress, shall learn a trade. No doubt these boys have learned a trade, but they do not practise it. They stay at home idle, or they spend their days in athletics. Some time or other they will marry a woman in their own rank, and then the rest of their lives will be devoted to managing the house and looking after the children, while their wives go to office and earn the family income.’
‘What would you do with them?’
‘Nay, Lord Chester; what will you do for them? That is the question.’
The next day they left Manchester, and proceeded on their journey. At Liverpool they saw seven miles of splendid old docks, lining the banks of the river; but there were no ships. The trade of the old days had long since left the place: it was a small town now with a few fishing smacks. The Professor enlarged upon the history of the past.
‘But were the men happy?’
‘I do not know. That is nowhere stated. I imagine there used to be happiness of a kind for men in forming part of a busy hive. At least the other plan – our plan – does not seem to produce much solid happiness…’
Gradually Lord Chester was being led to think less of the individual and more of his work. But it took time to eradicate his early impressions.
At Liverpool they visited the convict-prison – the largest prison in England. It was that prison specially devoted to the worst class of criminals – those undergoing life sentences for wife-beating. They found a place surrounded by a high wall and a deep ditch; they were admitted, on the Professor showing a pass, through a door at which a dozen female warders were sitting on duty. One of them was told off to conduct them round the prison. The convicts, coarsely clad in sackcloth, were engaged in perpetually doing unnecessary and profitless work – some dug holes which others filled up again; some carried heavy weights up ladders and down again, – there was the combined cruelty of monotony, of uselessness, and of excessive toil. In this prison – because physical force is necessary for men of violence – they had men as well as women for warders. These were stationed at intervals, and were armed with loaded guns and bayonets. It was well known that there was always great difficulty in persuading men to take this place, or to keep them when there. Mostly they were criminals of less degree, who purchased their liberty by becoming, for a term of years, convict-warders.
‘No punishment too bad for wife-beaters,’ said the Professor when they came away. ‘What punishment is there for women who make slaves of their husbands, lock them up, kill them with work? or for old women who marry young men against their will?’
‘You must clear out that den,’ she went on, after a pause. ‘A good many men are imprisoned there on the sole unsupported charge of their wives – innocent, no doubt; and if not innocent, then they have been punished enough.’
Lord Chester was being led gradually to regard himself, not as an intending rebel, but as a great reformer. Always the Professor spoke of the future as certain, and of his project, yet vague without a definite plan, as of a thing actually accomplished.
They left the dreary and deserted Liverpool, with its wretched convict-prison. They drove first across the country, which had once been covered with manufacturing towns, now all reduced to villages; they stopped at little country inns in places where there yet lingered traditions of former populousness; they passed sometimes gaunt ruins of vast brick buildings which had been factories; the roads were quiet and little used; the men they met were chiefly rustics going to or returning from their work; there was no activity, no traffic, no noise upon these silent highways.
‘How can we ever restore the busy past?’ asked Lord Chester.
‘First release your men; let them work together; let them be taught; the old creative energy will waken again in the brains of men, and life will once more go forward. It will be for you to guide the movement when you have started it.’
As their journey drew to a conclusion, the Professor gave utterance, one by one, to several maxims of great value and importance: —
‘Give men love,’ she said; ‘we women have killed love.’
‘There is no love without imagination. Now the imagination cannot put forth its flowers but for the sake of young and beautiful women.’
‘No true work without emulation; we have killed emulation.’
‘No progress without ambition; we have killed ambition.’
‘It is better to advance the knowledge of the world one inch than to win the long-jump with two-and-twenty feet.’
‘Better vice than repression. A drunken man may be a lesson to keep his fellows sober.’
‘Nothing great without suffering.’
‘Strong arm, strong brain.’
‘When women begin to invent they will justify their supremacy.’
‘The Higher Intelligence is a phrase that must be transferred, not lost sight of.’
‘Men who are happy laugh – they must laugh. Women, who have never felt the necessity of laughter, have killed it in men.’
‘The sun is masculine – he creates. The moon is feminine – she only reflects.’
And so, with many other parables, dark sayings, and direct teachings, the wise woman brought her disciple to her own house at Cambridge.
CHAPTER VII
ON THE TRUMPINGTON ROAD
PROFESSOR INGLEBY lived on the Trumpington Road, about a mile and a quarter from the Senate House. Her residence was a large and handsome house shut in by a high wall, with extensive grounds, and surrounded by high trees, so that no one could see the garden from the main road. The house was a certain mystery to the girls who on Sundays took their constitutional to Trumpington and back. Some said that the Professor was ashamed of her husband, which was the reason why he was never seen, not even at Church; others said that she kept him in such rigid discipline that she refused the poor man permission even to walk outside the grounds of the house. Her two daughters, who regularly came to church with their mother, were pretty girls, but had a submissive gentle look quite strange among the turbulent young spirits of the University. They were never seen in society; and for some reason unknown to anybody except herself, the Professor refused to enter them at any college. Meantime no one was invited to the house: when one or two ladies tried to break through the reserve so strangely maintained by the most learned Professor in the University, and left their cards, the visit was formally returned by the Professor herself, accompanied by one of her girls. But things went no further, and invitations were neither accepted nor returned. It is therefore not surprising that this learned woman, who seemed guided by none of the motives which influence most women – who was not ambitious, who refused rank, who desired not money – gradually came to bear a mythical character. She was represented as an ogre: the undergraduates, always fond of making up stories, amused themselves by inventing legends about her home life and her autocratic rule. Some, however, said that the house was haunted, her husband off his head, and her daughters weak in their intellect. There was, therefore, some astonishment when it was announced officially that the Professor was bringing Lord Chester to stay at her own house – ‘in perfect seclusion,’ added the paper, to the disgust of all Cambridge, who would have liked to make much of this interesting young peer. However, long vacation had begun when he came up, so that the few left were either the reading undergraduates or the dons.
‘Here,’ said the Professor, as she ushered her guest into a spacious hall, with doors opening into other rooms on either hand, ‘you will find yourself in a house of the past. Nothing in my husband’s house, or hardly anything, that is not two hundred years old at least; nothing which does not belong to the former dynasty: we use as little as possible that is new.’
Lord Chester looked about him: the hall was hung with pictures, and these were of a kind new to him, for they represented scenes in which man was not only the executive hand, but also the directing head, usurping to himself the functions of the Higher Intelligence. Thus Man was sitting on the Judicial Bench; Man was preaching in the Church; Man was holding debate in Parliament; Man was writing books; Man was studying. Where, then, was Woman? She was represented as spinning, sewing, nursing the baby, engaged in domestic pursuits, being wooed by young lovers, young herself, sitting among the children.
‘You like our pictures?’ asked the Professor. ‘They were painted during the Subjection of Woman two hundred years ago. Men in those days worked for women; women gave men their love and sympathy: without love, which is a stimulus, labour is painful to man; without sympathy, which supports, labour is intolerable to him; with, or without, labour – necessary work with head or hand for the daily bread – is almost always intolerable to woman. Therefore, since the Great Revolution, there has been no good work done by man, and no work at all by women.’
She opened a door, holding the handle for a moment, as if with reverence for what was within.
‘Here is our library,’ she whispered. ‘Come, let me present you to my husband. I warn you, beforehand, that our manners are like our furniture – old-fashioned.’
It was a large room, filled with books of ancient aspect: at a table sat, among his papers, a venerable old man, the like of whom Lord Chester had never seen before. It must be owned that the existing régime did not produce successful results in old men. They were too often frivolous or petulant; they were sometimes querulous; they complained of the want of respect with which they were treated, and yet generally neither said nor did anything worthy of respect.
But this was a dignified old man: thin white locks hung round his square forehead, beneath which were eyes still clear and full of kindliness; and his mobile lips parted with a peculiarly sweet smile when he greeted his guest. For the first time in his life, Lord Chester looked, with wonder, upon a man who bore in his face and his carriage the air of Authority.
The room was his study: the walls were hidden with books; the table was covered with papers. Strange, indeed, to see an old man in such a place, engaged in such pursuits!
‘Be welcome,’ he said, ‘to my poor house. Your lordship has, I learn, been the pupil of my wife.’
‘An apt and ready pupil,’ she interposed, with meaning.
‘I rejoice to hear it. You will now, if you please, be my pupil – for a short time only. You have much to learn, and but a brief space to learn it in before we proceed upon the Mission of which you know. Will you leave Lord Chester with me, my dear?’
The Professor left them alone.
‘Sit down, my lord. I would first ask you a few questions.’
He questioned the young man with great care; ascertained that he knew already, having been taught in these late days by the Professor, the most important points of ancient history; that he was fully acquainted with his own pedigree, and what it meant; that he was filled with indignation and shame at the condition of his country; that he was ready to throw off the restraints and prejudices of Religion, and eager to become the Leader of the ‘Great Revolt,’ if he only knew how to begin.
‘But,’ said Lord Chester, stammering and confused, ‘I shall want help – direction – even words. If the Professor – ’ he looked about in confusion.
‘I will find you the help you want. Look to me, and to those who work with me, for guidance. This is a man’s movement, and must be guided by men alone. Sufficient for the moment that we have in your lordship our true leader, that you will consent to be guided until you know enough to lead – and that you will be with us – to the very death, if that must be.’
‘To the very death,’ replied Lord Chester, holding out his hand.
‘It is well that you should first know,’ the old man went on, ‘who I am, and to what hands you entrust your future. Learn, then, that by secret laying on of hands the ancient Episcopal Order hath been carried on, and continues unto this day. Though there are now but two or three Bishops remaining of the old Church, I am one – the Bishop of London. This library contains the theology of our Church – the works of the Fathers. The Old Faith shall be taught to you – the faith of your wise fathers.’
Lord Chester stared; for the Professor had told him nothing of this.
‘You may judge of all things,’ said the Bishop, ‘by their fruits. You have seen the fruits of the New Religion: you have gone through the length and the breadth of the land, and have found whither the superstition of the Perfect Woman leads. I shall teach you the nobler Creed, the higher Faith, – that’ – here his voice lowered, and his eyes were raised – ‘that, my son, of the Perfect Man – the Divine Man.
‘And now,’ he went on, after a pause, ringing the bell, ‘I want to introduce to you some of your future officers and followers.’
There appeared in answer to this summons a small band of half a dozen young men. Among them, to Lord Chester’s amazement, were two friends of his own, the very last men whom he would have expected to meet. They were Algy Dunquerque, the young fellow we have already mentioned, and a certain Jack Kennion, as good a rider, cricketer, and racquet-player as any in the country. These two men in the plot? Had he been walking and living among conspirators?
The two entered, but they said nothing. Yet the look of satisfaction on their faces spoke volumes.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the Bishop, ‘I desire to present you to the Earl of Chester. In this house and among ourselves he is already what he will shortly be to the whole world – His Royal Highness the Earl of Chester, heir to the crown – nay – actual King of England. The day long dreamed of among us, my children – the day for which we have worked and planned – has arrived. Before us stands the Chief, willing and ready to lead the Cause in person.’
They bowed profoundly. Then each one advanced in turn, took his hand, and murmured words of allegiance.
The first was a tall thin young man of four-and-twenty, with eager eyes, pale face, and high narrow forehead, named Clarence Veysey. ‘If you are what we hope and pray,’ he said, looking him full in the face with searching gaze, ‘we are your servants to the death. If you are not, God help England and the Holy Faith!’
The next who stepped forward was Jack Kennion. He was a young man of his own age, of great muscular development, with square head, curly locks, and laughing eyes. He held out his hand and laughed. ‘As for me,’ he said, ‘I have no doubt as to what you are. We have waited for you a long time, but we have you at last.’
The next was Algy Dunquerque.
‘I told you,’ he said laughing, ‘that I was ready to follow you. But I did not hope or expect to be called upon so soon. Something, of course, I knew, because I am a pupil of the Bishop, and knew how long Professor Ingleby has been working upon your mind. At last, then!’ He heaved a mighty sigh of satisfaction, and then began to laugh. ‘Ho, ho! Think of the flutter among the petticoats! Think of the debates in the House! Think of the excommunications!’
One after the other shook hands, and then the Bishop spoke, as if interpreting the thought of all.
‘This day,’ he said, ‘is the beginning of new things. We shall recall the grandeurs of the past, which no living man can remember. Time was when we were a mighty country, the first in the world: we had the true Religion, two thousand years old; a grand state Church; we had an ancient dynasty and a constitutional monarchy; we had a stately aristocracy always open to new families; we had an immense commerce; we had flourishing factories; we had great and loyal colonies; we had a dense and contented population; we had enormous wealth; science in every branch was advancing; there was personal freedom; every man could raise himself from the lowest to the highest rank; there was no post too high for the ambition of a clever lad. In those days Man was in command.
‘Let us,’ he continued, after a pause, ‘think how all this has been changed. We have lost our reigning family, and have neither king nor queen; we have thrown away our old hereditary aristocracy, and replaced it by a false and pretentious House, in which the old titles have descended through a line of women, and the new ones have been created for the noisiest of the first female legislators; we have abolished our House of Commons, and given all the power to the Peeresses; we have lost the old worship, and invented a creed which has not even the merit of commanding the respect of those who are most interested in keeping it up. Does any educated woman now believe in the Perfect Woman, except as a means of keeping men down?
‘As for our trade, it is gone; as for our greatness, it is gone; as for our industries, they are gone; as for our arts, they have perished: we stand alone, the contempt of the world to whom we are no longer a Power. Our men are kept in ignorance; they are forbidden to rise, by their own work, from one class to another; class and caste distinctions are deepened, and differences in rank are multiplied; there is no more science; electricity, steam, heat, and air are the servants of man no longer; men cannot learn; they are even forbidden to meet together; they have lost the art of self-government; they are cowed; they are cursed with a false religion; they have no longer any hopes or any aims.
‘Fortunately,’ he continued, ‘they have left man something: he has retained his strength; they have even legislated with the view of keeping him healthy and strong. In your strength, my sons, shall you prosper. But you will have to revive the old spirit. That will be the most difficult – the only difficult – task. Take Lord Chester away now, my children, and show him our relics of the past.’
In the room next to the library was a collection of strange and wonderful things, all new and unintelligible to Lord Chester. Jack Kennion acted as exhibitor.
‘These,’ he said, ‘are chiefly models of the old machinery. I study them daily, in the hope of restoring the mechanical skill of the past. These engines with multitudinous wheels which are so intricate to look at, and yet so simple in their action, formerly served to keep great factories at work, and found occupation for hundreds and thousands of men; these black round boxes were steam machines which dragged long trains full of people about the country at the rate of sixty miles an hour; these glittering things in brass were made to illustrate knowledge which has long since died out, unless I can recover it by the aid of the old books; these complicated things were weapons among us when science ruled everything; all these books treat of the forgotten knowledge; these paintings on the wall show the life of the very world as it was when men ruled it; these maps showed the former greatness of the country: everything here proves from what a height we have fallen. And to think that it is only here – in this one house of all England – that we can feel what we once were, – what we will be – yes, we will be – again.’
His eyes were lit with fire, his cheeks aflame as he spoke.
During the talk of this afternoon, Lord Chester discovered that the education of every one of these young men had been conducted with a view to his future work in or after the Revolution. Thus Algernon Dunquerque was learned in the old arts of drilling and ordering masses of men. Jack Kennion had studied mechanics and mathematics; another had learned ancient law and history; another had been trained to speak, – and so on. Clarence Veysey, for his part, had been taught by the Bishop the Mysteries of the Old Religion, and was an ordained Priest. These things the new recruit made out from the eager talk of his friends, who seemed all of them anxious to instruct him at once in everything they knew.
It was a relief at last, when the first bell rang, to be alone for a few minutes, if only to get his ideas cleared a little. What had he learned since he left London? What was before him?
Anyhow, change, action, freedom.
He found the Professor and her daughters in the drawing-room. The girls received him with smiles of welcome. The elder, Grace – a girl whose sweetness of face was new to Lord Chester, accustomed to the hard lines which a life of combat so early brings upon a woman’s eyes and brow – had, which was the first thing he noticed in her, large, clear gray eyes of singular purity. The other, Faith, was smaller, slighter, and perhaps more lovely, though in a different way, a less spiritual fashion. Both, in the outer world would have been considered painfully shy. Lord Chester was beginning to consider shyness as a virtue in women. At all events, it was a quality rarely experienced outside.
He was already prepared for many changes, and for customs new to him. Yet he was hardly ready for the complete reversal of social rules as he experienced at this dinner. For the subjects of talk were started by the men, who almost monopolised the conversation; while the ladies merely threw in a word here and there, which served as a stimulus, and showed appreciation rather than a desire to join in the argument. And such talk! He had been accustomed to hear the ladies talk almost uninterruptedly of politics – that is, of personal matters, squabbles in the House, disputes about precedence, intrigues for title and higher rank – and dress. Nothing else, as a rule, occupied the dinner-table. The men, who rarely spoke, were occasionally questioned about some cricket-match, some long race, or some other kind of athletics. This was due to politeness only, however; for, the question put and answered, the questioner showed how little interest she took in the subject by instantly returning to the subject previously in discussion. But at this table, – the Professor’s – no, the Bishop’s table, – the men talked of art, and in terms which Lord Chester could not understand. Nevertheless, he gathered that the so-called art of the Academicians was a thing absolutely beneath contempt. They talked of science, especially the square-headed youth Jack Kennion, to whom they deferred as to an authority; and he spoke of subjects, forms, and laws of which Lord Chester was absolutely ignorant: they talked of history, and all, including the Bishop’s daughters – strange, how easily the new proselyte fell into the way of considering how the highest education is best fitted for men! – showed as intimate an acquaintance with the past as the Professor herself. They talked of religion; and here all deferred to the Bishop, who, while he spoke with authority, invited discussion. Strangest thing of all! – every man spoke as if his own opinion were worth considering. There was not the slightest deference to authority. The great and standard work of Cornelia Nipper on Political Economy, in which she summed up all that has been said, and left, as was taught at Cambridge, nothing more to be said; the Encyclopædia of Science, written by Isabella Bunter, in which she showed the absurdity of pushing knowledge into worthless regions; the sermons and dogmas of the illustrious and Reverend Violet Swandown, considered by the orthodox as containing guidance and comfort for the soul under all possible circumstances, – these works were openly scoffed at and derided.
Lord Chester said little; the conversation was for the most part beyond him. At his side sat the Bishop’s elder daughter, Grace – a young lady of twenty-one or twenty-two, of a type strange to him. She had a singularly quiet, graceful manner; she listened with intelligent pleasure, and showed her appreciation by smiles rather than by words; when she spoke, it was in low tones, yet without hesitation; she was almost extravagantly deferent to her father, but towards her mother showed the affection of a loved and trusted companion. It was too much the custom in society for girls to show no regard whatever for the opinions or the wishes of their fathers.
The younger daughter, Faith, talked less; but Lord Chester noticed that as she sat next to Algy Dunquerque, that young man frequently ceased to join in the general conversation, and exchanged whispers with her; and they were whispers which made her eyes to soften and her cheek to glow. Good; in the new state of things the men would do the wooing for themselves. He thought of Constance, and wished she had been there.
When the ladies retired, the Bishop began to talk of the Great Cause.
‘Your training,’ he said to Lord Chester, ‘has been, by my directions, that of a Prince rather than a private gentleman. That is to say, you have been taught a great many things, but you have not become a specialist. These friends of ours,’ – he pointed to his group of disciples, – ‘are, each in his own line, better than yourself, and better than you will ever try to become. A Prince should be a patron of art, learning, and science and literature; but it does not become him to be an artist, a scholar, a philosopher, or a poet. You must be contented to sit outside the circle, so to speak. Now let us speak of our chances.’
