A BOOK OF THE MOMENT
A PATRON SAINT OF ORDINARY MEN
AT the end of the eighteenth century, a group of men used to meet in some private room at the back of a coffee house and discuss rather more wistfully than fierily the prospect of
giving the country some day a real constitutional government.
They were all high minded gentlemen, too well read and too deeply thinking for their time. They were greatly diluted Pyms and Hampdens, living under a tyranny that was not severe enough to call up a picturesque resistance that would arouse public imagination. Government had stopped tor- turing and branding. It only oppressed in a less noticeable way, and on the whole the public was inclined to let it do as it liked, so long as it did it quietly ; whether it represented the people more or less exactly did not much matter. A revolution such as was going on across the channel did matter very much indeed and anyone who looked at it with any sympathy at all was to be watched carefully as a dangerous person. Among these gentle humanitarians that everyone was so anxious to label " revolutionary " were Hardy, Horne Tooke and, most typical of them. all, Thomas Holcroft.
At five years old Thomas Holcroft was a little pedlar, walking twenty and even thirty miles a day with his father ; hawk- ing odds and ends, being sent on messages, having to take little responsibilities that absolutely overweighed him and reduced him to hopeless misery. He was once left, for instance, young as he was, to take a donkey and cart full of coals across some bogland in a huge rain storm. The cart sank into the mud, but there was no one to help him pull it out. It was rather that kind of unromantic difficulty that followed Hol- croft through all his life, wore him down, left him no oppor- tunity of finding any gay, irresponsible enjoyment in life. When he was ten he became a stable boy and had five years of comparative happiness, exercising and feeding the horses, which he loved, and fighting other stable boys with surprising success. But this sort of life did not satisfy him ; he had been taking lessons all , his spare time, learning music or mathe- matics or history and he read anything he could find. At sixteen he left the stable life and came to London, where he took odd jobs, and, very incidentally, married. And so he lived from hand to mouth till in the early twenties he joined Mack- lin's players. After that his income was to come almost entirely from the stage for the rest of his life. Ten years later he had hardly progressed at all as far as his position was con- cerned. He was the same sensitive, dignified, young man, gentle in manners and yet oddly abrupt in argument, self- confident because of his learning and his eagerness for know- ledge and yet with the aggressive nervousness of a man who has had to work himself up from pedlar to jockey boy and from jockey boy to strolling player. And always he was bowed down and harrassed by the impossible task of supporting a wife and four children on 30s. a week and by the terrible strain of believing in his own independence when■ he had to write daily begging letters to anyone he could :i_htisk of who had been kind to him once, or who had the reputhtion of being generous. `s.
Through all this period, from youth to early Middle age, he was working all day, acting, rehearsing, writing, articles, writing plays, rehashing other plays, translating, and yet somehow it was during this time that he managed to read enough and study enough to be able to associate with the best and keenest thinkers in London at that time. Everyone who was keen and lively minded knew him. His friends disagreed with him constantly because his austere and sometimes arbitrary manner was not always easy to bear, but he had a quality of sheer goodness and simplicity that made his friend- ship sought after and revered. He hated violence and cruelty. When he joined • the Society for Constitutional Information, he was the mildest of all its mild members, though he was one
of the most learned and advanced. He refused to associate
himself with any movement to bring about a change of government suddenly or -without the full knowledge and consent of the nation.
When he came to middle age a. certain amount of success came to him. He discovered the secret of writing moderately successful plays and novels, and this was to keep him at least half secure for the rest of his life. He had no notion of saving, though : his interests were too wide. He collected books because he loved them ; he collected pictures rather as a schoolboy collects stamps because he enjoyed collecting, and always imagined he would sell them for a fortune. And he had by now been married three times and his family was a large one. But just as the strain of making a living was lifted from him somewhat, two catastrophes occurred. His only son robbed him and committed suicide on being caught, and his name was included on the list of those members of the Society for Constitutional Information who were indicted for treason.
The warrant for his arrest had not been issued when Holcroft heard of the charge brought against him, but his sense of justice was outraged and he could not stand upon ceremony. He walked into the court and insisted upon surrendering himself so that he could be tried and his innocence proved and made public. The court was somewhat embarrassed by him. The warrant was not ready and the necessary papers had not yet been drawn up. He had to wait while a messenger was sent to his house formally to ask for him before he could be arrested and taken to prison. For there was no background for heroism in the age ; it was almost a little ridiculous. People did not like it. Yet Holcroft was heroic, as heroic as Hampden had been a century before. He had made a protest against a government which was weak and unscrupulous and would not have hesitated, had it dared, to fake the evidence and sentence an innocent and intelligent citizen to transporta- tion for life.
Holcroft was sent to Newgate for a month, and then was released without trial, since his friend Hardy had been tried on the same charge and acquitted. He was anxious to be tried and to make a public declaration in court against the injustice of his indictment, but he was not allowed to speak. Perhaps the authorities knew that they had done all that was necessary. Public opinion had been led to believe that Holcroft was a dangerous person who wanted disturbances, preferably bloody ones. Windham spoke of him in Parliament as " an acquitted felon" ; pamphlets were written about him ; the Press was full of righteous indignation. Holcroft grew desperate. No one even took the trouble to find out the facts about him. The attacks worried him to such an extent that he lost all his com- posure and raged against even the most foolish and negligible. A life of fighting against difficulties and his consciousness of his early struggles made him unable to bear injustice with self- possession. After a year or so he left England to live on the Continent, not too unhappily, but always in fear of poverty. He came back a few years before his death. He died fully conscious after a painful illness that had worn him out for many years.
Very little of Holcroft shines through Hazlitt's polite, mono- tonous biography. Mr. Elbridge Colby, the Editor of this new edition of the Memoirs, has saved him for us by adding extracts from other people's accounts of the man, by inserting Holeroft's own writings whenever possible and by his own excellent foot- notes. Holcroft wrote his own biography as far as his fifteenth year, and as he tells it, quietly and gently, it makes fascinat- ing reading, though his childhood was an uneventful one. Many of his letters are here, too, and his diary of the years between the trial and his flight abroad. His letters are generally un- sympathetic and pompous, but if he had a story to tell, as lie had in his own life and the accounts of life abroad, no one could tell it with more gentle humour, vividness and sweetness of tone.
His Memoirs are valuable because they are, in a small way, a historical document, but they are infinitely more valuable as a memorial to a patron saint of ordinary men. Holcroft was not perfect, yet he was a proof of his own unshaken, precious = belief in the " perfectibility of man." He was a man of no significance, no brilliance, and no opportunities, who simply by his desire to live more completely and more in touch with humanity climbed out of the rut and saw visions ahead.
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