J. Ewing Ritchie

“ I was not happy, but I was happier than when vainly seeking to pursue an impossible career. I know more of the world now. I have more measured myself with my fellows. I see what ordinary men and women are, and the result is—fortunately or not, I cannot tell—that I have now a better conceit of myself. I often wish some one would ask me to occupy a pulpit now. How grand the position! how mighty the power! You are out of the world—in direct contact with the living God, speaking His Word, doing His work. There in the pew are souls aching to be lifted out of themselves ”

“ The pleasures of sin, says the preacher, are only for a season, but a similar remark, I fancy, applies to most of the enjoyments of life. It is true that in the outside crowd there were in rags and tatters, in degradation and filth, shivering in the cold, wan and pale with want, hideous with intemperance, homeless and destitute, and prematurely old, withered hags, whom the policemen ordered to move on—forlorn hags, who were once habitués of the Argyle and the darlings of England’s gilded youth—the bane and the antidote side by side, as it were. ”

“ The pulpit of to-day differs in one respect in toto from the past. The preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin. He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he must cling to the skirts of some public agitation—in fact, his light must be seen and his voice heard everywhere.
It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do with the London pulpit than I have now. ”

“ According to the latest utterance of Mr. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, in this age of ours faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, love is regarded as but a spasm of the nervous system, life itself as the refrain of a music-hall song. At the Tabernacle the pastor and people were of a very different way of thinking.
And Mr. Spurgeon was no windbag—vox et præterea nihil; no darling pet of old women whose Christianity was flabby as an oyster. He was an incessant worker, and taught his people to work as well in his enormous church. ”

“ When Greek meets Greek there comes, we are told, the tug of war. When literary men meet, as a rule, the very reverse is the case. I belonged to the Whittington Club—now, alas! extinct—for it was the best institution of the kind ever started in London, of which Douglas Jerrold was president, and where young men found a home with better society than they could get elsewhere, and where we had debates, in which many, who have since risen to fame and fortune, learned how to speak—perhaps a questionable benefit in those days of perpetual talk. ”

“ He was a good talker, as times went—conversation not being much of a gift among the members of the club, save when the ladies cheered us with their presence. As a Scotchman he had a good share of the dry humour of his nation. But chiefly did he shine when the brethren met. Foremost of the party were Sloper of Beccles, who had talked on things spiritual with Mrs. Siddons, Crisp of Lowestoft, Blaikie of Bungay, Longley of Southwold, and others, who discussed theology and metaphysics all the evening, till their heads were as cloudy as the tobacco-impregnated room in which they sat. ”

“ James Taylor was always cheered as he showed his hearers how a man who drank a quart of ale a day engulfed at the same time a yard of solid earth. Land at that time was to be had remarkably cheap, and great profits were made by the early investors, and the moral benefit was great. Men learned the value of economy and thrift, and were all the better for gaining habits of forethought and self-denial. In our days the societies have become chiefly building societies, the political need of getting a vote in that way not being of so much importance as it was then. ”

“ Once a reviewer on a leading London morning newspaper referred to me as a young lady. I refer to that soft impeachment simply as an illustration of the carelessness with which London reviewers often write. I can quite understand such blunders. A reviewer has so many books to look at, and such little time allowed him for the right discharge of his duty, that it is no wonder he often errs. ”

“ The excitement of war was over, and the lavish outlay it occasioned being stopped, life was stagnant, farmers and manufacturers alike were at low-water mark, and the social and religious and political reforms required by the times were as yet undreamed of. However, one good thing my parents did for me. They lived in a country village in the extreme east of Suffolk, not far from the sea, where I could lead a natural life, where I could grow healthy, if not wise, and be familiar with all the impulses which spring up in the heart under the influences of rural life. ”

“ He likes the sound of his voice, and he sits down with a self-satisfied smile—if he be an old hand—as if he had made it self-evident that he knew a thing or two, and that he was not the sort of man you could make a fool of. But heckling, as it is called, is a science little understood. It is one of the fine arts. A candidate, for instance, likes to make a statement when he replies to a question. ”

“ In Fleet Street there was the Temple Forum, and at the end, just out of it, was the Codgers’ Hall, both famous for debates, which have long ceased to exist. A glance at the modern music-hall will show us whether we have much improved of late. It is more showy, more attractive, more stylish in appearance than its predecessors, but in one respect it is unchanged. Primarily it is a place in which men and women are expected to drink. The music is an afterthought, and when given, is done with the view to keep the people longer in their places, and to make them drink more. ”

“ One of my intimate friends at one time was the late Peter Taylor, M.P. for Leicester. He was as liberal as he was wealthy, yet he never spent a farthing in demoralising his Leicester constituents by charity, or, in other words, bribery and corruption. The dirty work a rich man has to do to get into Parliament—especially if he would represent an intelligent and high-toned democracy—is beyond belief.
The ups and downs of a literary career are many. Without writing a good hand it is now impossible to succeed. It was not so when I first took to literature ”

“ I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to. There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other. ”

“ At length I am in the home of the free, where all men are equal, where O’Donovan Rossa may seek to blast the glories of a thousand years, where a Henry George may pave the way for an anarchy such as the world has never yet seen, where even Jem Blaine, as his admirers term him, passes for an honest man, and claims to have a firm grip on the Presidential chair. ”

“ Was not Sir Robert Peel a Tory of the Tories and the friend of Wellington, so beloved by the people that he had to guard his house with iron shutters? At that time the public was rather badly off for heroes, with the exception of Orator Hunt, who got into Parliament and collapsed, as most of the men of the people did. Yet I was a Liberal—as almost all Dissenters were with the exception of the wealthy who attended at the Poultry or at Walworth, where John and George Clayton preached. ”

“ A man who masters shorthand may get a living in connection with the Press, and he may rise to be editor and leader-writer; but the pure literary gent, the speculative contributor to periodical literature, is out of the running. If he is an honourable, if he is a lord or M.P., or an adventurer, creditable or the reverse, he has a chance, but not otherwise. A special correspondent may enjoy a happy career, and as most of my work has been done in that way, I may speak with authority. As to getting a living as a London correspondent that is quite out of the question. ”

“ And the worst of it is that Glass as a company director and promoter is worshipped as a great man, especially if he secures a gratuitous advertisement by liberality in religious and philanthropic circles, and exercises a lavish liberality in the way of balls and dinners. Society crawls at his feet as they used to do when poor Hudson, the ex-draper of York, reigned a few years in splendour as the Railway King. Glass goes everywhere, gets into Parliament. ”

“ If there was an ancient sandpit in the neighbourhood how we loved to explore its depths, and climb its heights, and in the freshness of the early spring what a joy it was to explore the hedges, or the trees of the neighbouring park, when the gamekeepers happened to be out of sight in search of birds’ nests and eggs; and in the long winter evenings what a delight it was to read of the past, though it was in the dry pages of Rollin, or to glow over the poems of Cowper. ”

“ In London there was such a man in the shape of Thomas Binney, who had come from the Isle of Wight to the p. 189King’s Weigh House Chapel, now swept away by the underground railway just opposite the Monument. Binney was a king among men, standing head and shoulders above his fellows. All that was intelligent in Dissenting London, among the young men especially, heard him gladly. Yet all over the land there were soulless deacons and crabbed old parsons, whose testimony no man regarded, who said Binney was not orthodox. He lived long enough to trample that charge down. ”

“ John Burnett of Camberwell, always dry in the pulpit, but all-victorious on the public platform, by reason of his Scotch humour and enormous common-sense; Mursell in the Midlands was a host in himself; and Edward Miall, whose earnestness in the cause led him to give up the Leicester pulpit to found the London Nonconformist. John Childs, the well-known Bungay printer, assisted, an able speaker himself, in spite of the dogmatism of his face and manner. When the society became rich and respectable, and changed its name, I left it. I have little faith in societies when they become respectable. ”

“ Cottages were mostly in an unsanitary state, but the labourer, in his white smock, looked well on a Sunday at the village church or chapel, and the children at the Sunday-school were clean, if a little restless under the long, dry sermon which they were compelled to hear, the caretaker being generally provided with a long stick to admonish the thoughtless, to wake up the sleepy, to prevent too much indulgence in apples during sermon time, or too liberal a display of the miscellaneous treasures concealed in a boy’s pocket. ”

“ It was often there that a young and giddy girl, with good looks and a good constitution, and above all things set on fine dresses and gay society, and weary of her lowly home and of the drudgery of daily life, learned what she could gain if she could make up her mind to give her virtue ”

“ Hence their power in the pulpit, their success in the ministry. But they failed to understand childhood and youth; childhood, with its delight in things that are seen and temporal, and youth with its passionate longing to burst its conventional barriers, and to revel in the world which looks so fair, and of which it has heard such evil. ”

“ In an active life, we see much of the world and the men who help to make it better. Many ministers and missionaries came to my father’s house with wonderful accounts of the spread of the Gospel in foreign parts. At a later time I saw a knot of popular lecturers and agitators—such as George Thompson, the great anti-slavery lecturer, who, born in humble life, managed to get into Parliament, where he collapsed altogether. As an outdoor orator he was unsurpassed, and carried all before him. After a speech of his I heard Lord Brougham declare it was one of the most eloquent he had ever heard. ”

“ A dear old city was Norwich, with much to interest a raw lad from the country, with its Cathedral, which, as too often is the case, sadly interfered with the free life of all within its reach, with its grand Market Place filled on a Saturday with the country farmers’ wives, who had come to sell the produce of their dairy and orchard and chickenyard, and who returned laden with their purchases in the way of grocery and drapery ”

“ Gladstone—or as when staying at the Duke of Beaufort’s, from whom he had a commission, he had the honour of escorting the Duchess into the drawing-room—an honour on which I never forgot to chaff him as I used to sit in his studio watching him at work. He must have had to work hard to make both ends meet; and when I went to see him on his death-bed, as it proved to be, I was shocked with grief to see a man of such rare and lofty genius have to sleep in a little room at the very top of the house. ”