Chapter V: Introduction (4)

‘Good-night, sir, and God bless you for this day!’ was the farewell of one of his guests to his silver-haired host, words which struck him deeply. ‘Dear me, dear me! why did I never think of it before?’ he exclaimed; and really this means of doing good seems so simple and self-evident that it is to be wondered at that those working among the poor should often not know where to take their people for a day’s outing. London suburbs abound with families hardly one of whom does not give a garden party in the course of the summer, and yet how few of these parties are to guests ‘who cannot bid again!’ The expense of such a party is certainly not the reason of its rarity. An entertainment such as I have told about, even when meat is given, does not cost more than a shilling or eighteenpence a head. The trouble cannot be the deterrent motive, for that is nothing to be compared to the trouble of a dinner-party, nor even of any ordinary ‘at home.’ ‘The servants would not like it’ is sometimes urged as a reason, but it is certainly not the experience of those who, having overcome the objections of their servants, have tried it, and found that they entered thoroughly into the spirit of a party at which they had the pleasant duty of entertaining joined to their usual one of serving, and on more than one occasion the hearty welcome given by the servants has added much to the success of our day.

Perhaps, amid the many difficulties to which modern civilisation has brought us, one of the saddest is the mutual ignorance of the lives and minds of members of the same household--an ignorance often leading to division. It may not, I think, be the least important good of these parties that they afford a subject regarding which master and servants can be, anyhow for one day, of one mind and purpose.

Neither does it require the possession of a mansion or park before such an invitation can be sent; in fact, some of the pleasantest parties have been given in the smallest gardens, where kindliness and genial welcome have made up for want of space. One lady, indeed, who was staying for the summer in lodgings in the country gave happy afternoons and pleasant memories to more than eighty people. She asked them in little groups of twelve or fourteen, took them long country rambles, or obtained permission to saunter in a neighbour’s garden, and when the evenings drew in (it was in August) brought them back to her rooms, where a good tea-supper and a few songs brought the entertainment to a close.

The guests need not always be grown people. It is, perhaps, even more important to give the growing girl or the boy just entering into manhood a taste for simple pleasures. Very delightful is the interest and enjoyment of these young things in the country life and wonders. The evening sewing-class, consisting of big girls at work every day in factories; the Bible class of young men; the discussion club; the children-servants (so numerous and so joyless in our great cities)--such little groups can be found around every place of worship, or are known to every one living among or busying himself for the good of the poor. All are open to invitations, and these can be entertained even more easily than their elders. ‘Don’t you remember this or that?’ my young friends often ask about some trivial incident long since vanished from my memory, and when, demurring, I ask ‘When?’ the unfailing answer, varying in form but monotonous in substance, is ‘Why, that day when you took us into the country. You _can’t_ forget. It was grand.’

Strangely ignorant are some of these town-bred folk of things which seem to us always to have been known and never to have been taught. They call every flower a rose, and express wonder at the commonest object. ‘Law! here’s straw a-growing!’ I once heard in a corn-field, and emerging into a fir-wood soon after, we all joined in a laugh at the remark, ‘Why, here’s hundreds of Christmas trees all together.’ Anything, provided it is joined to active movement, without which young things never seem quite happy, serves to amuse and to pass the time. A competition to see which girls shall gather the best nosegays, the proposal to the boys to search for some animal, queer plant, or odd stone, have helped to carry the guests over many miles and through long afternoons. Perhaps one of the nicest things which any young lady can do, even if she is not able or allowed to attempt the larger undertaking of a party, is to take some ten or twelve school boys and girls for a walk on their Saturday afternoon holiday. She need keep them, perhaps, only three or four hours, when milk or lemonade and buns, got at any milk-shop, will serve as a substitute for the usual tea.

But, besides these country parties which town-dwellers are quite unable to give, there is still left to us Londoners the possibility (not to say duty) of inviting the poor to our own houses. Our poor neighbours have not been asked to many such parties, but the few to which they have been bidden have been very pleasant. At one our hostess, but lately returned from the East, had arranged _tableaux-vivants_ introducing Oriental costumes in her drawing-room, and the guests were delighted at seeing the people of the one foreign nation of which they knew anything--the Bible having been the literature which made them conversant with that--as large as life, and all ‘real men and solid women.’ Another time a little charade was got up, and proud was the mother whose baby was pressed into early service as a play-actor. Other friends have entertained us after a visit to the Kensington Museum or Zoological Gardens, while some evenings have been passed in much the same way as by other people who meet for social pleasure; with talk, music, strange foreign things, portfolios, and puzzles, though games may, perhaps, have occupied a somewhat longer time than is usual among guests with more conversational interests. To all of us have these parties given much pleasure--pleasure which is, in truth, healthful and refreshing amid the sorrow and pain so liberally mingled in the life’s cup of the poor. ‘This evening I’ve forgot all the winter’s troubles,’ followed the ‘Good-night’ from the lips of a pain-broken woman; and considering the ‘winter’s troubles’ included the death of a child and the semi-starvation resulting from the almost constant out-of-work condition of the husband, the party seemed a strangely inadequate means of producing even temporarily so large a result.

The efforts made to attend are one of the signs of how much these and the country parties are enjoyed. One woman came, with her puling, pink ten-days-old baby, and both men and women constantly get up from a sick-bed to return to it again as soon as the pleasure is over. ‘We can’t afford to lose it, yer see; they don’t come too often,’ is the sort of answer one usually receives in reply to remonstrance.

But this paper will accomplish its object if ‘they do come oftener,’ and if not only the poor of our big London, to whom we owe special duties, but if the poor of all great cities are more thought of in the light of guests.

The duty once recognised, the method becomes plain. Every one, even those whose work does not take them among the poor, can manage to be introduced to some who are leading pleasure-barren lives, and to employers of labour in factories or trades it is especially easy. The introduction made, the rest follows naturally, and though pleasure is in itself so great a good that I would hold the thing worth doing if this alone were obtained, yet I think a prophet’s eye is not needed to see the other possible good resulting from such gatherings. The wider interests, the seeds of culture, the introduction to simple recreations, the suggestion of ideal beauty, the possession of happy memories, the class relationships, are the advantages one can rapidly count off as accruing to the entertained, and as important are the gains of the entertainers. The rich, coming face to face with the poor, have seen patience which puts their restlessness to shame; endurance about which poems have yet to be written; hope which is deep and springing from the roots of their being; charity which never faileth, including, as it often does, the adoption of the orphan child or the sharing of the room with a lone woman, compared to which the biggest subscription is as nothing; kindliness which, though unthinking, spareth not itself. Each class has its virtues, but, as yet, they are unknown to each other. It is for the rich to take the first step towards knowing and being known; it is for them to say if the class hatreds, which like other ‘warfare comes from misunderstanding,’ shall exist in our midst. It is for them to make the way of friendship through the wall of gold now dividing the rich from the poor. It is for them to give fellowship which, crushing envy, takes the sting out of poverty. And all this can be done, by spending some thought, a little money, and some afternoons in being ‘At Home’ to the poor.

Great ends these to follow the small trouble and expense of a garden party. It will not, though, be the first time in history that good has been done by means which seemed contemptible, and it will not seem strange to those who have learnt that it is a Life and not a law, friendships and not organisations, which have taught the world its greatest lessons.

HENRIETTA O. BARNETT.

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VI.

_UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS._[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Nineteenth Century_ of February
1884.

Once more, as happens in crises of history, rich and poor have met. ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and has been found wanting. Societies which helped the poor by gifts made paupers, churches which would have saved them by preaching made hypocrites, and the outcome of scientific charity is the working man too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy.

Those who have tried hardest at planning relief and at bringing to a focus the forces of charity, those who have sacrificed themselves to stop the demoralising out-relief and restore to the people the spirit of self-reliance, will be the first to confess dissatisfaction if they are told that the earthly paradise of the majority of the people must be to belong to a club, to pay for a doctor through a provident dispensary, and to keep themselves unspotted from charity or pauperism. There is not enough in such hope to call out efforts of sacrifice, and a steady look into such an earthly paradise discloses that the life of the thrifty is a sad life, limited both by the pressure of continuous toil and by the fear lest this pressure should cease and starvation ensue.

The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to the rich.

It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return, and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their country’s good.

It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears.

It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life, a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has done so much to widen thought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more than of the poor.

It is an age of the Higher Life. Higher conceptions of virtue, a higher ideal of what is possible for man, are the best gift to our day, but it is received only by those who have time and power to study. ‘They who want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind,’ says the Chinese sage; and so the poor, being without those things necessary to the growth of mind and feeling, jeopardise Salvation--the possession, that is, of a life at one with the Good and the True, at one with God.

Those who care for the poor see that the best things are missed, and they are not content with the hope offered by ‘scientific charity.’ They see that the best things might be shared by all, and they cannot stand aside and do nothing. ‘The cruellest man living,’ it has been said, ‘could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,’ and those who see must do something. They may be weary of revolutionary schemes, which turn the world upside down to produce after anarchy another unequal division; they may be weary, too, of philanthropic schemes which touch but the edge of the question. They may hear of dynamite, and they may watch the failure of an Education Act, as the prophets watched the failure of teachers without knowledge. They may criticise all that philanthropists and Governments do, but still they themselves would do something. No theory of progress, no proof that many individuals among the poor have become rich, will make them satisfied with the doctrine of _laissez faire_; they simply face the fact that in the richest country of the world the great mass of their countrymen live without the knowledge, the character, and the fulness of life which are the best gift to this age, and that some thousands either beg for their daily bread or live in anxious misery about a wretched existence. What can they do which revolutions, which missions, and which money have not done?

It is in answer to such a question that I make the suggestion of this paper. I make it especially as a development of the idea which underlies a College Mission. These Missions are generally inaugurated by a visit to a college from some well-known clergyman working in the East End of London or in some such working-class quarter. He speaks to the undergraduates of the condition of the poor, and he rouses their sympathy. A committee is appointed, subscriptions are promised, and after some negotiations a young clergyman, a former member of the college, is appointed as a Mission curate of a district. He at once sets in motion the usual parochial machinery of district visiting, mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c. He invites the assistance of those of his old mates who will help; at regular intervals he makes a report of his progress, and if all goes well he is at last able to tell how the district has become a parish.

The Mission, good as its influence may be, is not, it seems to me, an adequate expression of the idea which moved the promoters. The hope in the College when the first sympathy was roused was that all should join in good work, and the Mission is necessarily a Churchman’s effort. The desire was that as University men they should themselves bear the burdens of the poor--and the Mission requires of them little more than an annual guinea subscription. The grand idea which moved the College, the idea which, like a new creative spirit, is brooding over the face of Society, and is making men conscious of their brotherhood, finds no adequate expression in the district church machinery with which, in East London, I am familiar. There is little in that machinery which helps the people to conceive of religion apart from sectarianism, or of a Church which is ‘the nation bent on righteousness.’ There is little, too, in the ordinary parochial mechanism which will carry to the homes of the poor a share of the best gifts now enjoyed in the University.

Imagine a man’s visit to the Mission District of his college. He has thought of the needs of the poor, and of the way in which those needs are being met. He has formed in his mind a picture of a district where loving supervision has made impossible the wretchedness of ‘horrible London’; he expects to find well-ordered houses, people interested in the thoughts of the day, gathering round their pastor to learn of men and of God. He finds instead an Ireland in England, people paying 3_s._ or 4_s._ a week for rooms smaller than Irish cabins, without the pure air of the Irish hill-side, and with vice which makes squalor hopeless. He finds a population dwarfed in stature, smugly content with their own existence, ignorant of their high vocation to be partners of the highest, where even the children are not joyful. He measures the force which the Mission curate is bringing to bear against all this evil. He finds a church which is used only for a few hours in the week, and which is kept up at a cost of 150_l._ a year. He finds the clergyman absorbed in holding together his congregation by means of meetings and treats, and almost broken down by the strain put upon him to keep his parochial organisation going. The clergyman is alone, his church work absorbs his power and attracts little outside help. What can he do to improve the dwellings and widen the lives of 4,000 persons? What can he do to spread knowledge and culture? What can he do to teach the religion which is more than church-going? What wonder if, when he is asked what help he needs, he answers, ‘Money for my church,’ ‘Teachers for my Sunday school,’ ‘Managers for my clothing club’? What wonder, too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by which the best can be given to the poor?

It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common purpose of improving the lives of the people that I make the suggestion that University Settlements will better express their idea. College Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to these Missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea, that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly stated.

The place of settlement must of course first be fixed. It will be in some such poor quarter as that of East London, where a house can be taken in which there shall be both habitable chambers and large reception-rooms. A man must be chosen to be the chief of the Settlement; he must receive a salary which, like that of the Mission curate, will be guaranteed by the College, and he must make his home in the house. He must have taken a good degree, be qualified to teach, and be endowed with the enthusiasm of humanity. Such men are not hard to find; under a wiser Church government they would be clergymen, and serve the people as the nation’s ministers; but, under a Church government which in an age of reform has remained unreformed, they are kept outside, and often fret in other service. One of these, qualified by training to teach, qualified by character to organise and command, qualified by disposition to make friends with all sorts of men, would gladly accept a position in which he could both earn a livelihood and fulfil his calling. He would be the centre of the University Settlement. Men fresh from college or old University men would come to occupy the chambers as residents. Lecturers in connection with the University Extension Society would be his fellow-lecturers in the reception-rooms, and as the head of such a Settlement he would extend a welcome to all classes in his new neighbourhood.

The old Universities exercise a strange charm: the Oxford or Cambridge man is still held to possess some peculiar knowledge, and the fact that three of the most democratic boroughs are represented by University professors has its explanation. ‘He speaks beautiful German, but of course those University gentlemen ought to,’ was a man’s reflection to me after a talk with a Cambridge professor. Those, too, who may be supposed to know what draws in an advertising poster, are always glad to print after the name of a speaker his degree and college.

Thus it would be that the head of the Settlement would find himself as closely related to his new surroundings as to his old. The same reputation, which would draw to him fellow-scholars or old pupils, would put him in a position to discover the work and thought going on around him. He would become familiar with the teachers in the elementary and middle-class schools, he would measure the work done by clergy and missionaries, he would be in touch with the details of local politics; and, what is most important of all, he would come into sympathy with the hope, the unnamed hope, which is moving in the masses.

The Settlement would be common ground for all classes. In the lecture-room the knowledge gathered at the highest sources would, night after night, be freely given. In the conversation rooms the students would exchange ideas and form friendships. At the weekly receptions of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ the residents would mingle freely in the crowd.

The internal arrangements would be simple enough. The Head would undertake the domestic details and fix the price which residents would pay for board and lodging. He would admit new members and judge if the intentions of those who offered were honest. Some would come for their vacations; others occupied during the daytime would come to make the place their home. University men, barristers, Government clerks, curates, medical students, or business men each would have opportunity both for solitary and for associated life, and the expense would be various to suit their various means. The one uniting bond would be the common purpose, ‘not without action to die fruitless,’ but to do something to improve the condition of the people. It would be the duty of the Head to keep alive among his fellows the freshness of their purpose, ‘to recall the stragglers, refresh the outworn, praise and reinspire the brave.’ He would have, therefore, to judge of the powers of each to fill the places to which he could introduce them. To some he would recommend official positions, to some teaching, to some the organisation of relief, to some the visiting of the sick, and thus new life would be infused into existing churches, chapels, and institutions. Others he would introduce as members of Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, or Political and Social Clubs. He would so arrange that all should occupy positions in which they would become friends of his neighbours, and discover, perhaps as none have yet discovered, how to meet their needs.

In such an institution it is easy to see that development might be immeasurable. A born leader of men surrounded by a group of intelligent and earnest friends, pledged not ‘to go round in an eddy of purposeless dust,’ and placed face to face with the misery and apathy they know to be wrong, would of necessity discover means beyond our present vision. They would bind themselves by sympathy and service to the lives of the people; they would bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear on their government, and they would give a voice both to their needs and their wrongs. It is easy to imagine what such settlers in a great town might do, but it will be more to the point to consider how they may express the idea which underlies the College Mission--the interest, that is, of centres of education in the centres of industry, and the will of University men to acknowledge their brotherhood with the people.

If it be that the Missionary’s account of his Mission district fails at last to rouse the interest of his hearers, and if his work seems to be absorbed in the effort to keep going his parochial machinery amid a host of like machines, the same cannot be the fate of the Settlement.

Some of the settlers will settle themselves for longer periods, and those who are occupied during the daytime will find it as possible to live among the poor as among the rich; but there must also be room for those who can spend only a few weeks or months in the Settlement, so that men may come, as some already have come, to East London to spend part of a vacation in serving the people. This interchange of life between the University and the Settlement will keep up between the two a living tie. Each term will bring, not a set speech about the work of the Mission, but the many chats on the wonders of human life. The condition of the English people will come to be a fact more familiar than that of the Grecian or Roman, and the history of the College Settlement will be better known than that of the boat or the eleven. On the other side, thoughts and feelings which are now often spent in vain talks at debating societies will go up to town to refresh those who are spent by labour, or to find an outlet in action.

There is no fear that the College Settlement will fail to rouse interest. Its life will be the life of the College. As long as both draw their strength from the common source, from the same body of members, the sympathy of the College will be with the people. Nor is there any fear lest the work of the settlers become stereotyped, as is often the case with the work of Missions and Societies. Each year, each term, would alter the constitution of the Settlement as other settlers brought in other characters and the results of other knowledge, or as their ideas became modified by common work with the various religious and secular organisations of the neighbourhood. The danger, indeed, would not be from uniformity of method or narrowness of aim; rather would it be the endeavour of the Head to limit the diversity which many minds would introduce, and restrain a liberality willing to see good in every form of earnestness. The variety of work which would embrace the most varied effort, and enlist its members in every movement for the common good, would keep about the Settlement the beauty of a perpetual promise.

If we go further, and ask how this plan reaches deeper than others which have gone before, the question is not so easily answered, because it is impossible to prophesy that a University Settlement will make the poor rich or give them the necessaries of true life. Inasmuch, though, as poverty--poverty in its true sense, including poverty of the knowledge of God and man--is largely due to the division of classes, a University Settlement does provide a remedy which goes deeper than that provided by popular philanthropy.

The poor man of modern days has to live in a quarter of the town where he cannot even try to live with those superior to himself. Around him are thousands educated as he has been educated, with taste and with knowledge on a level with his own. The demand for low things has created a supply of low satisfactions. Thus it is that the amusements are unrecreative, the lectures uninstructive, and the religion uninspiring. It is not possible for the inhabitant of the poor quarter to come into casual intercourse with the higher manners of life and thought except at a cost which would constitute a large percentage of his income.

I am afraid that it is long before we can expect the rich and poor again to live as neighbours: for good or evil they have been divided, and other means must, for the present, be found for making common the property of knowledge. One such means is the University Settlement. Men who have knowledge may become friends of the poor and share that knowledge and its fruits as, day by day, they meet in their common rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play.

The settlers will be able to join in that which is done by other societies, while they share all their best with the poor, and in the highest sense make their property common. They may be some of the best charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach of others, which they will have accumulated through their different agencies. As members of various secular and religious organisations, they may be able to compare notes after the day’s work, and offer evidence as to how the poor live which, in days to come, might be invaluable. They may be some of the best educators, for, bringing ever-fresh stores of thought, they will see the weak spots in a routine which daily tires a child because it does so little to teach him, and they will have an opinion on national education better worth considering than the grumbles of those wearied with most things, or the congratulations of officials who judge by examinations. They may be the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation; how, one after another, all reforms fail because men tell lies and love themselves; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create righteousness.

There is, then, for the settler of a University Settlement an ideal worthy of his sacrifice. He looks not to a Church buttressed by party spirit, nor to a community founded on self-helped respectability. He looks rather to a community where the best is most common, where there is no more hunger and misery, because there is no more ignorance and sin--a community in which the poor have all that gives value to wealth, in which beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

[This paper was read at a meeting at St. John’s College, Oxford,
in November 1883, and resulted in the foundation of Toynbee Hall,
Whitechapel, and other University Settlements in poor districts of
large towns.]

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VII.

_PICTURES FOR THE PEOPLE._[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Cornhill Magazine_, March 1883.

‘It is folly, if nothing worse, to attempt it. What do the people want with fine art? They will neither understand nor appreciate it. Show them an oleograph of “Little Red Riding Hood,” or a coloured illustration of “Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” and they will like it just as much as Mr. Millais’s “Chill October” or Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death.”’

Such opinions met us at every turn when we first began to think of having an Art Exhibition in Whitechapel. But we knew that it is not only indifference which keeps the people living in the far East away from the West End Art Treasures. The expense of transit; the ignorance of ways of getting about; the shortness of daylight beyond working hours during the greater part of the year; the impression that the day when they could go is sure to be the day when the Museum is ‘closed to the public’--all these little discouragements become difficulties, especially to the large number who have not yet had enough opportunities of knowing the joy which Art gives.

‘Well, I should not have believed I could have enjoyed myself so much, and yet been so quiet,’ describes a lesson learnt from an hour spent in Mr. Watts’s Gallery at Little Holland House; and once, after showing a party of mechanics a large photograph of the Dresden Madonna, I was asked, ‘Where now can we see such things often?’ while further talk on the picture elicited from another of the same group, ‘But that’s more the philosophy of pictures; one wants to see a great many to learn how to see them so.’

Such remarks, by no means isolated, and the proposal that we should ‘get up a Loan Exhibition’ from one of our active working-men friends, turned inclination into determination.

The resources at command were hardly enough to promise success in the undertaking. They were but three schoolrooms, thirty feet by sixty, behind the church, not on a central thoroughfare, and approached by a passage yard; the light was much obscured by surrounding buildings; the doorways were narrow and the staircase crooked. But friends came forward to help, and there was soon formed a large committee, which, after meeting two or three times to discuss general principles and plans, divided itself into sub-committees to carry out special branches of a work which, though to a large extent one of detail, was by no means slight.

The hanging committee undertook to measure space, obtain the sizes of pictures, and see to the strength of rods and thickness of walls, but to the general committee was left the duty of refusing undesirable-sized or inappropriate pictures. This last was by no means the least difficult labour, so extraordinary were some of the loans offered to us; a dreadful portrait of an uncomely old lady was sent because ‘she was the maternal grandmother of a man who used to keep a shop in the High Street,’ this recommendation being considered sufficient to obtain for the picture a place in an Art Collection; a pencil drawing ‘done by John when he was only fifteen, and now he’s doing well in the pawnbroking line,’ was held worthy by a proud mother.

But if, on the one side, we were somewhat overwhelmed with offers of loans of doubtful description, on the other we were not unfrequently surprised at the unwillingness of art owners to lend their treasures. Vain were promises of safety and insurance. ‘I don’t fear for the pictures, but I don’t like to have my walls bare,’ was the too common answer; and the argument, ‘Not for a fortnight, to enable thousands of people to see them?’ rarely penetrated the coat of selfishness which incases such owners.

By no means had the hanging committee a monopoly of work. The decorative committee made it its duty to provide hangings, flags, bunting; to hide the usual schoolroom suggestions, and to make the place attractive to the passing crowd. The advertising committee undertook the difficult and expensive work of making the undertaking known, always difficult, but especially so when many of the people among whom the information has to be spread can neither read nor write. The finance committee did the dull but necessary work connected with money.

At the first Exhibition 3_d._ was charged for admission during seven days, and free admittance granted for two days. On the threepenny days 4,000 people paid or were paid for; on the free days, including Sunday, 5,000 came to see the show. The box for donations contained on the seven paying days 4_l._ 16_s._ 1_d._; on the two free days 6_l._ 2_s._ 3_d._ The second Exhibition was opened free. In the thirteen days 26,492 people came to see it. The boxes contained 21_l._ 8_s._ 9_d._, and 4,600 catalogues were sold at 1_d._,[2] realising 20_l._ 17_s._ 1_d._, the cost of printing of which was 17_l._ 16_s._

[2] First edition was sold at 3_d._; and some on the first day at
6_d._, while a few were given away.

Not the least weighted with responsibility was the watch committee, whose work was the safeguarding of the loans, both by night and day. Policemen, firemen, and caretakers had to be engaged, not to mention the organisation required to arrange for the eighteen or twenty gentlemen who came down daily to ‘take a watch’ of four hours in the rooms; where their presence not only served to prevent unseemly conduct, but their descriptions of pictures and homely chats with the people made often all the difference between an intelligent visit and a listless ten minutes’ stare. The work of borrowing was everybody’s work; and, on the whole, the response met with has been generous, particularly from the artists and those owners whose possessions were few.

The first Exhibition included--besides pictures--pottery, needlework, and curiosities; but, interesting as these were, the expense of getting them together, providing cases for them, and showing them thoroughly under glass, was so great that in the second Exhibition it was determined to exhibit only pictures and such works of art and curiosities as the Kensington Museum would lend us, the latter already in cases, and with their own special caretaker to boot.

The cataloguing and describing committee comes last; and its work, though done in a hurry, bore no slight relation to the success of the undertaking.

It is impossible for the ignorant to even look at a picture with any interest unless they are acquainted with the subject; but when once the story is told to them their plain, direct method of looking at things enables them to go straight to the point, and perhaps to reach the artist’s meaning more clearly than some of those art critics whose vision is obscured by thoughts of ‘tone, harmony, and construction.’

Mr. Richmond’s fine picture of ‘Ariadne’ elicited many remarks. ‘Why, it is crazy Jane!’ exclaimed one woman, following up the declaration in a few moments by, ‘and it’s finely done, too;’ but the story once explained, either by catalogue or talk, the interest increased. ‘Poor soul! she’s seen her day,’ came from a genuine sympathiser. ‘Oh, no! she’ll get another lover; rest sure of that.’ ‘’Tain’t quite likely, seeing that it’s a desert island!’ was the practical retort, which rather dumbfounded the hopeful commentator; but she would have the last word: ‘Well, I would, if it were myself, and she’ll find a way, sure enough, somehow.’ ‘The light is all behind her,’ showed a delicate perception of what, perhaps, the artist himself had put in with the truth of unconsciousness.

Mr. Briton Rivière’s representation of the ‘Dying Gladiator’ was the subject of much conversation. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to remind any one of the picture, which was in the Academy but a year or two ago. The splendid painting of the tigers, both dead and living, with the vividly depicted physical agony of the martyr, in spite of which he feels triumph, as, faithful even in death, he makes the sign of the cross in the sand, would probably make an impression on and be remembered by those who saw it.

‘There, my boy, there’s your ancestor in the lions’ den!’ was the paternal explanation of one of Abraham’s descendants to his small son; but a reference to the catalogue changed his opinion on the subject, if not on the goodness of the cause for which the gladiator suffered. The description in the catalogue for this picture was: ‘The Romans, for their holiday amusement, made their prisoners fight with wild beasts. The young Christian has killed one of the tigers; but is himself mortally wounded. His last act is to trace in the sand the form of a cross, the sign of the faith for which he dies. The shouts of the excited crowd, the roar of the baulked tiger, are fading in his ears. God has kissed him, and he will sleep.’ Somewhat fanciful, perhaps, but reaching, maybe, the spirit of the picture more truly than a plainer statement of facts would have done. ‘“God kissed him,” it says; I should have said the tiger clawed him,’ was the one adverse criticism overheard on the description. As a rule, the subject of the picture once understood, the people stood before it in thoughtful consideration.

Mr. Richmond’s ‘Sleep and Death,’ as well as Mr. Watts’s ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ both ideal rather than historical or domestic pictures, were greatly enjoyed, and this by a class of people whose external lives are drearily barren of ideals.

An interpretation offered by any one who had studied the parable pictures was eagerly accepted, and further thoughts suggested. ‘You can’t see Judgment’s face for his arm,’ perhaps had, perhaps had not, more meaning in it than the speaker meant; while in reference to the woman’s listless dropping of her flowers from her lap in ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ the remark, ‘Death does not want the flowers now she’s got ’em,’ told of thoughtful suffering at the apparent wastefulness of death. ‘Time is young yet, then,’ made one feel that the speaker had caught a glimpse of life’s possibilities with which probably any number of homilies had failed to impress him.

‘Sleep and Death,’ depicting the strong, pale warrior borne on the shoulders of Sleep, while being gently lifted into the arms of Death--so simple in colour, pure in idea, rich in suggestion--was good for the poor to see, among whom Death is robbed of none of its terrors by the coarse familiarity with which it is treated. With them funerals are too often a time of great rowdiness, and ‘a beautiful corpse’ a fit spectacle for all the neighbours--even the youngest child--to be invited to see. Death treated as a tender mother-woman, hidden in the cold grey vastness surrounding her, was a bright idea, producing, perhaps, greater modesty about the great mystery. ‘That’s the best of the whole lot, to my mind,’ came, after a long gaze, from a pale, trouble-stricken man, whose sorrows Sleep had not always helped to bear, whose loveless life had made Death’s enfolding arms seem wondrous kind.

Sometimes there were discussions as to which was Sleep and which Death, ended once summarily by the loudly expressed opinion, ‘It don’t much matter which. I don’t call it proper, _anyhow_, to see a man pickaback of an angel!’--a hypercritical sense of propriety which was hardly to be expected from the appearance of the critic.

Munkacsy’s picture of the ‘Lint Pickers,’ lent by Mr. J. S. Forbes, aroused much interest. In the catalogue, after a short account of the artist’s life and works, it was described thus: ‘A soldier, with a bandaged leg, is telling the story of the war to the women and children who are picking lint to dress wounds. The different feelings with which the news is received are shown with wonderful skill in the different faces. Some are waiting to hear the worst; another has already heard it, and can only bury her face in her hands. To others it is but an interesting story; while the little child is only intent on his basket of lint.

Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.’

The gloom of the picture, the utter dejection of the workers, relieved nowhere by a gleam of light--even the child (around whom Hope might have hovered) finding a grim plaything in the lint--all combine to tell the tale of what the artist evidently felt--the cruelty of war. Much interest was taken in finding out, amid the darkness, the different figures in their various attitudes of active or crushed woe. It spoke, though, a little sadly for the want of joyousness in East London entertainments that more than one sightseer, _before_ reading the catalogue or being helped by a verbal explanation, thought ‘it was a lot of poor people at tea.’

The frames of all the pictures excited wonder, sometimes admiration not accorded to the pictures themselves; and the oft-reiterated questions, ‘What, now, is it all worth? How much would it fetch?’ became a little wearisome, not the less so because expressive of one of the signs of the times.

‘All beautiful! and most of them [the pictures] done by machinery, I suppose,’ showed greater mechanical than artistic appreciation; while the cross-examination to which we were put as to why the Exhibition was held was sometimes interesting rather than edifying. ‘Oh, yes, it’ll pay, sure enough, if you only go on long enough,’ was one woman’s comforting assurance; and the answer, ‘I hardly see how, considering that it is open free,’ carried so little force to her mind that its only effect was to make her repeat her belief in a still more confidently cheery tone. But many and hearty were the thanks that were given at the end of some such chats; and the gentlemen who explained the pictures and talked to the little groups which quickly gathered round ‘some one who would tell about it all’ were more than once offered reward-money--a flattering tribute to their powers, and illustrative of the living sense of justice in the workman’s mind and the conviction that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire.’

The pathetic pictures were, perhaps, the most generally appreciated. Israels’ ‘Day before the Departure,’ lent by Mr. J. S. Forbes, was described thus: ‘The widow, utterly sad, has shut her Bible and seems heartbroken and hopeless. The child does not understand everything, but she knows her mother is sorry; the toy is forgotten, while she nestles close in her desire to comfort. Her love may be the light which will brighten the future,’ often reduced the beholders to sympathetic silence; while warm was the praise given to Salentin’s ‘Foundling,’ a pretty picture of an old yeoman giving the forsaken babe into the arms of his kindly daughters. The bright evening sky, the tender spring-time, the interest of the farm-boy, and the curiosity of the sheep, all hopefully express that the little one’s short, troublous day is over, and that its happier spring-time has dawned.

‘Our Father’s House,’ by Wilfrid Lawson: the little, ragged girl peeping wistfully round the church pillar at the fashionably dressed congregation, who too often monopolise ‘Our Father’s House,’ had always around it some quiet and earnest students. It aroused in them, perhaps, the sleeping sense, now so often forgotten that it is almost ignored, that the church is the people’s possession, and, maybe, it awakened the hope, deep down (if sometimes visionary) in every breast, of the coming of the ‘good time’ when all class and unworthy distinctions will be lost in the Father’s presence.

Israels’ works, of which in the last Exhibition there were five, were duly appreciated, not perhaps by the mass, but by the more thoughtful of the spectators. ‘The Canal Boat, a picture full of sadness; the man and woman look weary and worked. Nature is in tune with their hard life; still there is progress,’ said the catalogue. I overheard one man say, ‘Ah! poor chap, he’s got into a wrong current, but he’ll get out all right. Pull away.’ The picture, sketchy as it was, had taught in Israels’ style the lesson he loves to give--the pain and dreariness of life interlaced with the bright thread of hope--

Which is out of sight:
That thread of all-sustaining beauty,
Which runs through all and doth all unite.

Mr. Walter Crane’s picture of ‘Ormuzd and Ahriman,’ which he kindly lent, awoke much interest. The people read, or had read to them, the description which told that the Persians believed in two gods--the god of good, Ormuzd; the god of evil, Ahriman--and how the picture expressed the fight between the two; a fight going on in every nation and every heart, all nature being represented as standing still during the conflict; while the river of time wound gently on past the ruins of the Memnons, the Acropolis, the Grove, the Altar, and the Abbey--the symbols of the world’s great religions. ‘I expect that’s true, but we don’t seem to see much of the _fight_ about here,’ was one cogent remark. Most frequently, though, a picture will draw forth no expression--for with the unlettered all expression is difficult, and we know how, in the presence of death, of a grand sunset, or of anything deeply moving, silence seems most fitting.

Sometimes, though, one overhears talks which reveal much. Mr. Schmalz’s picture of ‘Forever’ had one evening been beautifully explained, the room being crowded by some of the humblest people, who received the explanation with interest, but in silence. The picture represented a dying girl to whom her lover has been playing his lute, until, dropping it, he seemed to be telling her with impassioned words that his love is stronger than death, and that, in spite of the grave and separation, he will love her _forever_. I was standing outside the Exhibition in the half-darkness, when two girls, hatless, with one shawl between them thrown round both their shoulders, came out. They might not be living the worst life; but, if not, they were low down enough to be familiar with it and to see in that only the relation between men and women. The idea of love lasting beyond this life, making eternity real, a spiritual bond between man and woman, had not occurred to them until the picture with the simple story was shown them. ‘Real beautiful, ain’t it all?’ said one. ‘Ay, fine, but that “Forever,” I did take on with that,’ was the answer. Could anything be more touching? What work is there nobler than that of the artist who, by his art, shows the degraded the lesson that Christ Himself lived to teach?

The landscapes were, perhaps, the pictures least cared for; and this is not to be wondered at, considering how little the poorer denizens of our large towns can know of the country, or of nature’s varied and peculiar garbs, which artists delight to illustrate. ‘How far is it to that place?’ was eagerly asked before a picture of Venice, by R. M. Chevalier, a picture of which the description told how the Grand Canal was the ‘Whitechapel Road’ of Venice, and further explained the relationship of gondolas to omnibuses and cabs--a relationship not understood at once by the untravelled world. ‘Would it cost much money to go and see that?’ was often provoked by such pictures as Elijah Walton’s picture of ‘Crevasses in the Mer de Glace,’ kindly lent by Mr. H. Evill, or Mr. Croft’s ‘Matterhorn,’ lent by Mr. T. L. Devitt, and described: ‘A peak in the Alps too steep for snow, and until lately too steep for mountaineers. Chains have now been placed at the most difficult places, and several English ladies have reached the top. The artist shows the loneliness of greatness:--

The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and to the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun rises, and alone
Spring the great streams.--MATTHEW ARNOLD.’

With the knowledge of the indifference, because of the unhelped and inevitable ignorance of the town poor in respect to landscape art, special pains were taken with the descriptions, endeavours being made to connect the landscape with some idea with which they were already familiar, or to connect it with some moral association which would attract notice to its qualities; for instance, Mr. John Brett’s ‘Philory, King of the Cliffs,’ was brought nearer to the spectators by the suggestion that ‘the coast of England was, like its people, cool and strong, and not to be hurt by a storm’; and Mr. W. Luker’s picture of ‘Burnham Beeches,’ lent by Mr. S. Winkworth, gained in interest because the catalogue said it was ‘A forest near Slough, about eighteen miles from London, bought by the City of London, and made the property of the people.’

Mr. W. S. Wyllie’s ‘Antwerp,’ a grey, flat picture, had its idea partly embodied in ‘Sea and land seemed to end in the cathedral spire’; while the familiar proverb, ‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,’ drew attention to Mr. W. C. Nakkens’s ‘Harvesting in Holland’; and the suggestion that ‘the horses are enjoying the wind which is blowing up the rain, the farmer’s enemy in harvest,’ showed the standpoint from which the picture could be looked at.

Not that the catalogue was intended to contain exhaustive explanations of the pictures, but only indications of the lines along which the people could make their own discoveries. Full, however, as some of the descriptions were, they were not full enough to prevent misconceptions. A little copy of Tintoretto, lent by Mr. E. Bale, depicting the visit and embrace of the Virgin Mary and Elisabeth, simply entered in the catalogue as the ‘Meeting of Mary and Elisabeth,’ was mistaken for an interview between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth, and produced the reflection, ‘I suppose that was before they quarrelled, then’--a sign that historical had, in this instance, made more mark than Bible instruction.