Amaryllis at the Fair Part 24

If my lord duke wants a palace he cannot have it till he calls in the artist, the Alere Flamma, to draw it for him; if my lord bishop needs a cathedral he cannot have it till he calls in the poet-draughtsman, till he goes to Alere Flamma.

Our so-called architects are mere surveyors, engineers, educated bricklayers, men of hard straight ruler and square, mathematically accurate, and utterly devoid of feeling.

The princes of Italy knew better--they called in the poet and the painter, the dreamers to dream for them.

You call in your "practical" architect, and he builds you a brick box; not for a hundred thousand pounds in fees could he build you a palace or a cathedral.

The most ignorant of men are the "practical" people. It is meet and fitting that they should be wors.h.i.+pped and set on high. The calf wors.h.i.+pped of old was at least golden, and these are of lead.

But Alere could not go; he would do anything he was asked in this way; he would take infinite pains to please, but he could not leave Fleet Street for any mansion.

When a man once gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out.

Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by intemperance. The conventional type is so easy--so accepted--so popular; it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim in some way.

He was not neglected, neither was he the victim of intemperance in the usual sense.

The way to fame and fortune had always been wide open to him; there were long intervals when he did not drink, nor did drink enfeeble his touch; it was not half so much to struggle against as the chest diseases from which professional men so often suffer; I believe if he had really tried or wished he could have conquered his vice altogether. Neither of these causes kept him from the foremost rank.

There was no ambition, and there was no business-avarice. So many who have no ideal are kept hard at work by the sheer desire of money, and thus spurred onward, achieve something approaching greatness. Alere did not care for money.

He could not get out of Fleet Street. Ten pounds was a large sum in the company he frequented; he did not want any more.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIX.

SOMETHING in Fleet Street holds tight those who once come within its influence. The cerebellum of the world, the "grey matter" of the world's brain, lies somewhere thereabouts. The thoughts of our time issue thence, like the radiating spokes of a wheel, to all places of the earth. There you have touch of the throbbing pulse of the vast mult.i.tudes that live and breathe. Their ideas come from Fleet Street.

From the printing-press and the engraver's wood-block, the lithographic-stone, the etcher's plate, from book and magazine, periodical and pamphlet, from world-read newspaper.

From Fleet Street, the centre whence ideas flow outwards.

It is joyous to be in the flower-grown meads; it is sweet to be on the hill-top; delicious to feel the swell and the long roll of the hexameter of the seas; doubtless there is a wild rapture on the summit of the Himalayas; triumph in the heart of the African explorer at the river's source. But if once the mind has been dipped in Fleet Street, let the meads be never so sweet, the mountain-top never so exalted, still to Fleet Street the mind will return, because there is that other Mind, without whose sympathy even success is nothing--the Mind of the world.

I am, of course, thinking not only of the thoroughfare, Fleet Street, but of all that the printing-press means.

Alere was no leader of thought, but it was necessary to him to live and breathe in the atmosphere of thought--to feel the throb and swell around him--to be near the "grey matter" of the world's brain.

Once a man gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out. Flamma would not leave it for months of gilded idleness in any n.o.bleman's mansion.

The flame must be fed. His name had some connection with the design of the Roman lamp on the splendid bindings of the books tooled in the House of Flamma. _Alere Flammam_--feed the flame. The flame of the mind must be fed.

Sad things happen on the stones of Fleet Street; if I could but get at it all to write the inside life of it, it would, indeed, be a book.

Stone-cold poverty hovers about. The rich, living in the fool's paradise of money, think they know life, but they do not, for, as was said of the sea----

Only those who share its dangers Comprehend its mystery.

Only those who have shared the struggle literally for bread--for a real, actual loaf--understand the dread realities of man's existence.

Let but a morsel of wood--a little splinter of deal, a curl of carpenter's shaving--lie in Fleet Street, and it draws to it the wretched human beasts as surely as the offal draws the beast of the desert to the camp. A morsel of wood in the streets that are paved with gold!

It is so valuable. Women s.n.a.t.c.h it up and roll it in their ap.r.o.ns, clasping it tightly, lest it should somehow disappear. Prowling about from street to street, mile after mile, they fill their ap.r.o.ns with these precious splinters of deal, for to those who are poor fuel is as life itself.

Even the wealthy, if they have once been ill, especially of blood-thinning diseases (as rheumatism), sometimes say they would rather go without food than coal. Rather emptiness than chill.

These women know where there are h.o.a.rdings erected by builders, where shop-fronts are being rebuilt, where fires have taken place, where alterations are proceeding; they know them as the birds know the places where they are likely to find food, and visit them day by day for the sc.r.a.ps of wood and splinters that drop on the pavement.

Or they send their children, ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood.

The terror of frost to these creatures is great indeed. Frost is the King of Terrors to them--not Death; they sleep and live with death constantly, the dead frequently in the room with the living, and with the unborn that is near birth.

Alere's ten pounds helped them. The drunkard's wife knew that Flamma, the drinker, would certainly give her the silver in his pocket.

The ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood, knew that they could charm the pennies and the threepenny bits out of his waistcoat; the baked potatoes and the roasted chestnuts looked so nice on the street stove.

Wretched girls whose power of tempting had gone, and with it their means of subsistence, begged, and not in vain, of shaky Alere Flamma. There are many of these wretches in Fleet Street. There is no romance about them to attract the charity of the world.

Once a flower-girl, selling flowers without a licence in the street, was charged by the police. How this harshness to the flower-girl--the human representation of Flora--roused up sentiment in her behalf!

But not every starving girl has the fortune to rouse up sentiment and to be fed. Their faces disfigured with eruptions, their thin shoulders, their dry, disordered hair--hair never looks nice unless soft with its natural oil--their dingy complexions, their threadbare shawls, tempt no one. They cannot please, therefore they must starve.

The good turn from them with horror--Are they not sin made manifest? The trembling hand of Alere fed them.

Because the boys bawl do you suppose they are happy? It is curious that people should a.s.sociate noise with a full stomach. The s...o...b..ack boys, the boys that are gathered into inst.i.tutions and training s.h.i.+ps, are expected to bawl and shout their loudest at the annual fetes when visitors are present. Your bishops and deans forthwith feel a.s.sured that their lives are consequently joyous.

Why then do they set fire to training s.h.i.+ps? Why do they break out of reformatory inst.i.tutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar of bawling.

I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand--the ceaseless world pushes past--they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table to see how they look.

How _can_ people pa.s.s without seeing them?

Alere saw them, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket.

The rich folk round about this great Babylon of Misery, where cruel Want sits on the Seven Hills--make a cartoon of that!--the rich folk who receive hundreds on the turn of a stock, who go to the Bank of England on dividend days--how easily the well-oiled doors swing open for them!--who dwell in ease and luxury at Sydenham, at Norwood, at Surbiton, at Streatham, at Brighton, at Seven-oaks, wherever there is pure air, have distinguished themselves lately in the giving of alms, ordained by the Lord whom they kneel before each Sunday, clad in silk, scarlet, and fine linen, in their cus.h.i.+oned pews.

They have established Homes for Lost Dogs and Homes for Lost Cats, neither of which are such nuisances as human beings.

In the dog inst.i.tution they have set up an apparatus specially designed by one of the leading scientific men of the age. The dogs that are not claimed in a certain time, or that have become diseased--like the human nuisances--are put into this apparatus, into a comfortable sort of chamber, to gnaw their last bone. By-and-by, a scientific vapour enters the chamber, and breathing this, the animal falls calmly to death, painlessly poisoned in peace.