THE LAST OF THE CHARTISTS.
IN Thomas Cooper, who died yesterday week, passed away, if not the last of the Chartists, at any rate the last of -the men of note who were tried and imprisoned for their complicity in the Chartist agitation. There are said to be still living in America one or two ex-Chartist prisoners ; and there are, of course, a considerable number of men alive— Mr. Mundella is one of them—who were Chartists in their youth, who sang the songs of Ebenezer Elliot, who applauded 'the lectures of Thomas Cooper, and who followed the meteoric lead of Fergus O'Connor. These, however, are but minor survivals ; and by the death of the old man who, till a week ago, lived on at Lincoln, forgotten alike by the class that once looked on him as a champion and a deliverer, and the class that dreaded him as a revolutionist and an anarchist, the Chartists may be said to have become as extinct as the levellers of the Com- monwealth. In writing of Thomas Cooper, and in comparing him with the leaders of the people of to-day, we do not think it fair to assume that the contrast is quite so unfavourable to the men of our own day as it looks at first sight. We must not forget that when we look at a man like Cooper, after a period of some forty years has gone by, the froth that is churned up in the troubled waters of a popular agita- tion has been blown off, and we are able to see what is beneath. The froth is, however, still on the modern Labour aspresentative, and we cannot tell whether or not to give him credit for anything but the ability to create a bottomless lather of soap-suds. Be that as it may, the men who thought and acted with Thomas Cooper were true Liberals, were men of high principle and profound conviction, and lastly, were determined not to be befooled and sophisticated by high-sounding phrases and verbal chimeras. They did not believe in building a new heaven and a new earth out of catch- words, or in making two and two make five by virtue of " sym- pathy for the people." They claimed justice, not indulgence ; rights, not privileges. They did not wish to erect the privi- leges of labour in place of those privileges of birth or wealth which they so greatly hated and so loudly denounced. Self- help, self-control, were their watchwords, instead of the State- help and State-control of the modern friend of Labour. That a working man who had known the extremity of poverty, and -who as a lad had often fainted over his cup of oatmeal-gruel —the miserable supper that closed a day of terrible bodily and mental toil—should not have been deluded into the primrose path of Socialism, but should, in spite of the temptations before him, have kept the light of reason burning, is something of which we may all be proud. The race that can produce men like Thomas Cooper—men whom suffering such as the poor endured in the forties, turned, not into ruthless Jacobins, but into upholders of liberty and justice—cannot have had its virtue wholly exhausted, and is still deserving of respect and admiration.
Thomas Cooper was born in 1805, and his youth was therefore passed in the period between the close of the war with France and the passing of the Reform Bill. This time was for him one of intense intellectual activity. Nowadays, the clever boy is certain to be discovered, and any tendency towards a love of cultivation and learning is almost sure to be encouraged and rewarded. It is seldom nowadays that a boy with the real scholar's instinct escapes the eager eyes of the schoolmasters, the clergymen of all creeds, and the ubiquitous philanthropists who are on the look-out to help him to help himself. The knowledge that a boy in a village, or even in a poor quarter of a town, is showing anything like extraordinary ability, is teaching himself Latin and Greek, and is reading everything he can lay his hands upon, nowadays soon comes to the ears of his richer neighbours, and there is at once a general determination to put him in the way of doing something worthy of his powers. People hardly sleep easily at night if they know of a boy with a real touch of genius in him who is learning to be a cobbler, or is blacking boots for his living. It was very different in the early days of Thomas Cooper. As he found, it was easy enough to make yourself learned in those days, and not get enough help or notice to keep you from semi-starvation. We
need hardly say that we think the present plan of getting the exceptionally clever boys scholarships from the Board-schools to the Grammar-schools, and from the Grammar-schools to the Universities, an infinite improvement. That, however, must not prevent our admitting that there was a heroism about the poor scholar of the past which is not to be found in the poor scholar of to-day. Think of the life led by Thomas Cooper, and then of the Board-school boy who a year or two ago became Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of his College. Cooper, while ap- prenticed to a cobbler, and working as an apprentice fifty years ago was forced to work, yet found time to read a multitude of books. He rose at 3 or 4 a.m. in order to carry on his studies, and the moment his work was over, he was back at his book.
" By the time he was twenty-three," says the writer of a careful obituary notice in the Times, "be had taught himself the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French languages, together with mathematics and a knowledge of English history and literature. His general reading was of the most extensive and varied character, and by way of recreation the omnivorous student would commit such masterpieces as Hamlet to memory." Yet, while Thomas Cooper was thus doing what many very able young men find it impossible to do with the aid of tutors, with the devotion of their whole time, and under the most propitious circumstances as regards food and health, he was in a condition of what we should now call the most abject poverty. Here is the way in which he lived, given in his own words :—" I not unfrequently swooned away and fell along the floor when I tried to take my cup of oat- meal-gruel at the end of the day's labour. Next morning, of course, I was not able to rise at an early hour ; and then the next day's study had to be stinted. I needed better food than we could afford to buy, and often had to contend with the sense of faintness, while I still plodded on with my double task of mind and body."
Cooper, like so many of the Chartists, had a strong
love of literature, and the two years' imprisonment which he underwent in Stafford Gaol, be devoted to the composition of a poem, "The Purgatory of Suicides." Though this work is not as bad as the first two or three lines might lead one to suppose,— "Slaves, toil no more ! Why delve, and moil, and pine, To glut the tyrant forgers of your chain ? Slaves, toil no more ! '
it certainly does not deserve the praise which men like Carlyle bestowed upon it. " I have looked into your poem, and find,"
said Carlyle, " indisputable traces of genius in it,—a dark, Titanic energy struggling there, for which we hope there will be clearer daylight by-and-by." A poem in ten books, and in Spenserian stanzas, must be very good indeed not to be actually bad ; but it is impossible to read " The Purgatory of Suicides" without weariness, and without the conviction that the writer had no real gift for verse. Perhaps the best stanza is that which begins the fourth book, but even that is laboured.
It is an address to the bird with the " red stomacher," and obviously was occasioned by the perching of a robin on the window-sill of the prison-cell :—
" Welcome, sweet Robin I welcome, cheerful one ! Why dost thou slight the merry fields of corn, The sounds of human joy,—the plenty strown From Autumn's teeming lap ; and at gray morn 'Ere the sun wakes, sing to the things of scorn, And infamy, and want, and sadness, whom Their stronger fellow-criminals have torn From freedom and the gladsome light of home,—
To quench the nobler spark within, in dungeon'd gloom ?"
There is, no doubt, a touch of real sentiment in this prison rhyme ; but it is too stodgy for poetry. "The Purgatory of Suicides" is, in form, an attempt to deal with the Labour question in all epochs of the world's history by calling up the ghosts of notable suicides. A scheme at once so pedantic and so fantastic could hardly have been the basis of a successful poem, even in the hands of Shelley. In those of Thomas
Cooper it was necessarily a• failure. To most people, Thomas
Cooper's most effective literary work is to be found in that portion of his writings which is addressed to the working classes. He was no flatterer of the labourer, but spoke out fearlessly and plainly.
Though, as we have said, Thomas Cooper's heroic struggles to raise himself intellectually, and to learn the things best worth knowing in the world, in spite of all the obstacles that stood in his way, make us admire and respect him, it is impossible not to feel the pathos of a life like his. If, instead of having to pick up his knowledge anyhow and higgledy-piggledy, he had been able to train his intelligence systematically, and to give his mind its rights, he would have made a far greater impression on the world. His independence of view, his sincerity, his ardour for knowledge, might have been made far more fruitful than they actually were. As it was, his mind, like some half-trained animal, was for ever beating itself against the bars. He had the mental energy required for great things, but not that mental self-control which it is the grand aim of education to impart. That this was so, may be seen from the way in which a rush of new thought would com- pletely sweep the Chartist poet off his feet. In 1828, Thomas Cooper was converted to Methodism, and became a local preacher. In 1845, however, he studied the translation of Strauss, and became for a time as strongly attached to free- thought as he had been to Methodist revivalism. In 1855, another wave of feeling overtook him, and he became again an ardent upholder of Christianity, and ultimately joined the Baptists, and preached to the members of that Church. But if Thomas Cooper lacked mental self-control, he never lacked honesty; and on no occasion did he do or utter aught that was base. Like all the old-fashioned Radicals, he was opposed to Home-rule, and in 1886 made a vigorous protest against Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy. His words are worth quoting, not merely because they tell in favour of the Union, but because they show the fearlessness of the man, and exhibit the plain and forcible character of his prose- writing. "I shall," he said, "not vote at the city election, because I agree with neither of the candidates. The Tory candidate knows perfectly well that the old Chartist prisoner cannot vote for him. I cannot vote for the Liberal candidate because, so far as my perception reaches, it would be voting in the dark. The Irish people share the common privileges of English, Scotch, and Welsh men. What is it they want besides P I ask the question because they never tell us what they really want. Home-rule is a vague answer, for it may have twenty meanings, and none of them be good. Lately, Mr. Gladstone has invented a new phrase,—he proposes to give Ireland a' statutory Parliament.' But what is that, and wherein does it differ from our Parliament? Why do the Irish want a separate Parliament P It would only help to make us more and more a divided instead of a United King- dom. I must declare, whatever offence it may give to some people, that the Irish cry of Home-rule means separation from England, and that would be ruin to Ireland herself and a costly war for England." Whatever may have been Thomas Cooper's faults, he at least was free from the vice of intellectual cowardice.
Previous page
