A STUDY IN WORKING-CLASS BIOGRAPHY.
THERE come to us here and there men and women who are like windows let into the narrowed cabin of our humanity, and help to restore our outlook. There lately lived, first in a village and afterwards in the unattractive surroundings of a mining town, a skilful artisan,—a black- smith. Met in the street in his grimy clothes, with a handkerchief about his neck and an old cap on his head hiding the high brow, there was little to distinguish him from hundreds of men to be met hurrying along in the dinner-hour of an industrial town, unless he himself happened to meet some one the sight of whom reminded him freshly of interests which he shared, and the never-to-be-forgotten look of intense inner life came into his eyes. Alone with a friend in a quiet room where he could freely utter himself—so far as the keen struggle for expression might allow, and where he could quicken the deepest thoughts of the other—he was another man. His face wore the seal of manhood's noblest energy.
It is not easy to recall much of what he actually said. Utterance was not fluent ; it was at once animated and slow, and with all its tone of eagerness to communicate, its note of profound inner genuineness lent it a little of the character of soliloquy. The charm of his intercourse lay a good deal in the sincerity and insight with which he would discuss the common incidents of passing days. Perhaps the most memorable of his sayings, for one who could feel the force of it, was a passionate exclamation about death. "I hate death !" he said with energy ; " I hate it with perfect hatred !" Yet here his meaning could scarcely be inter- preted, save by one who knew with what thoughtful, almost unearthly, calm he had lately faced bereavement. Such a one might realise that his meaning could not possibly be that which might seem to lie upon the surface, but must lie deeper, and was, in fact, unfathomable. His early schooling was meagre, and he never seemed to take much interest in educating himself by reading or in gathering information, except as it bore on his business or on the ultimate interests of heart and life. Some part of what he did read seemed scarcely worthy of his intellect, but perhaps meant more to him than it did to the writer.
The occupation of a blacksmith was to him no mere trade, but a cherished craft, and even a branch of religion. His successes and failures were to him a spiritual discipline. He long remembered with profound dissent the remark of a brother-blacksmith, perhaps somewhat voluble in public in matters of religion, that " there was no time to think of spiritual things when you were shoeing a 'oss." Times of intense pressure, attended by a sense of responsibility as a " public servant "—so he put it—with the business of others waiting idle on his speed, were the times of danger, when balance was easily lost, and the fatal "bustle" might supervene. At such times the felt presence of spiritual reality was specially needed, and the restraining influence of spiritual vision came at need. This glimpse of inner working life was given in one of those confidences that made his friendship so rare a treasure. At a time when he felt his own position as a journeyman in a declining business precarious and rather disquieting, some horses which had usually been sent to a smithy in another village were brought in for shoeing. He saw a chance of more business, to his own advantage, and laid himself out for a special effort to show how much better work could be done there than was done at the other forge. But a translation he had lately heard of j art , (e) Caas?—" love does not enter into rivalry"—recurred to him; and it was his way to prefer the opportunity to keep his solid sense of what it meant to the other possible gain.
When a little less than thirty years of age, he took the step of purchasing a business in a neighbouring mining town. His wages as a journeyman in his native village had been 18s. a week, with certain meals found, and the question was not unnaturally raised of his means of borrowing capital to make up the required sum of £65. The reply was unexpected, but the position was characteristic of the man. He would not have to borrow. He had enough. And in discussing his situation in the world, and his attitude to the monetary side of life, he said that he had not stinted himself ; he had been able to buy what he wanted. But then it may be observed that a man whose most cherished recreation is truth-hunting, whose patent of nobility is found in his vision of reality, whose dignity is in his service, and whose felt dishonour would lie in imitating the ways and fashions of people whose interests in life were not really his own,—such a man spends less than some who have less to spend. He bought the business, however the thing had been done.
Some little time after he had taken it over he mentioned, perhaps with a little restraint of tone in speaking of it to a friend, that he liked to think of doing the work, not for the sake of the money it brought, but for the sake of doing it well. He had been warned by those who thought they understood the business and the town that this would not mean prosperity, —people would rather have the work done out of hand, and not so perfectly. He maintained his ideal, and established his position abundantly. For some time the ideal seemed to include what was in essence an artistic element. But it happened one day that a customer brought a horse which had been shod by another blacksmith, and contrasted the work unfavourably with what was being done at the smithy. The craftsman was by no means insensitive to praise, but he was very sensitive to truth. Examining the work, he told the man that he could not honestly say it was inferior for its proper purpose to his own, though his was more highly finished. And instead of availing himself of the advertising possibilities of work that bore a better appearance than other men's, it seemed that from that time he changed the form of his ideal, and wrought more simply for utility and aptness to the purpose for which his labour was required.
It troubled him, as illness grew upon him, that he could only deal with the work brought to him, and no longer with the living men who brought it. One can imagine rough and reckless men leaving the smithy,—going not as they came, but made silent, and for the moment thoughtful, by some reply, unexpected as truth itself, from that profound and truth- loving mind. It might have been -very difficult to give any account of what lay, for the man himself, at the root of living which impressed one at the time as so true, and which now leaves behind an impression of truth through and through. Labels are fit for things bottled off and for principles so passed into customs that they can be con- sidered apart from their vitality. This man's beliefs were not of that kind. It was a thing utterly foreign to him to speak of his religions convictions as if they were elements of mathematics. One would shrink from attempting them in summary. And yet with nothing said these notes might be themselves so untrue to the man's real being that they were better suppressed. It so happens, however, that the narration of an incident in his life can solve this dilemma. One Saturday afternoon, having suffered some delay and annoy- ance, and riding his bicycle in petulant haste, he found too late that the road was not clear round a sharp bend, and collided from behind with a brake. It was a grave accident with lengthened consequence. Half stunned and bleeding, he felt the life apparently oozing from him; and the thought arose of passing straight from his dark petulance into the Unseen Presence. Then he remembered One Whose teaching he loved to ponder, and in Whom he found security, and his awful disquiet was soothed, his spirit reassured. This inner aspect of what was for outward observation a rather sickening road-accident remained before him as a type, and even a kind of disclosure, of the faith that was in him.
The village knows that a man of blameless life was lately laid to rest in the little cemetery. Of genius, moulded to the fashion that the world most needs, perhaps it never dreams.
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