| <20 September 1918>
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The other day a little circle gathered no matter
| where - let us say in the Gove of
| Dionysos - commenced discussion upon
| Literature and Labor. The talk waxed warm. From
| gentle "pardon me," and deferential "permit me to
| correct" the tone of the controversy sadly and
| rapidly deteriorated, until "Philistine," "mental
| prostitute" and other similar terms of endearment
| re-echoed amid the trees. At last a learned gentleman
| capped all with an ill-mannered simile involving some
| unsavory ladies, and the gathering was on the point
| of breaking up (or out) in disorder, when the
| ivy-crowned deity himself appeared. Appealed to by both
| sides for a decision, he replied, diplomatically, but
| nonetheless truly, that neither party knew much about
| the subject under dispute; unfortunately, he himself
| was busy over a by-election, but he would be pleased
| to depute his trusted votary "Vigilant" to attend to
| the matter.
| For the above, or some equally sufficient reason,
| "Vigilant" has prefixed the heading
|
| "Great Poems of Progress"
| to this article. The gentle - or
| should it be "patient" - reader will
| no doubt recollect that at various times this column
| has been devoted to some great poem ~~ great as a
| poem, and great as an intellectual impulse to the
| people's cause. Robert Browning's
|
| "Lost Leader," Shelley's
| "Masque of
| Anarchy," Edwin Markham's
|
| "Man with the Hoe," have in
| turn served as themes.
| "The Cry of the Children," by Mrs.
| Browning, is therefore the fourth on the list
| - not, of course, in order of merit,
| for although we might easily pick out our first
| choice, we render due and sincere thanks that we are
| not called upon to mark our order of preference
| against the remaining candidates. We prefer to think
| of them as of the Three Saints of Ireland, who all
| were equal in glory - but Patrick was
| the greatest.
| Like Shelley's
| "Masque of Anarchy," Mrs. Browning's
| poem memorialises a critical phase of working class
| history. In 1819 the masses of England, weltering in
| the starvation backwash of the Napoleonic wars united
| in great meetings of protest throughout the land. The
| story of the brutal treatment of a gathering in
| Manchester, the peaceful nature of which was
| guaranteed by the presence of the wives and children
| of the demonstrators formed the incentive of
| Shelley's poem. The men of England, of course did
| not, for many a long year, hear the sound of the
| stirring appeal that he addressed to them,
| nevertheless,
| In 1842 the penal laws against trade unionism were
| repealed, and the unions, which had managed to live a
| sort of life as secret societies, commenced to
| blossom forth in startling fashion. Nine years of
| rapid progress, including several successive stages
| of federation, led to the actual realisation, in
| 1833, under the guidance of Robert Owen, of the One
| Big Union, preamble, constitution and all. On the
| political side the Chartist movement had been
| hammering away at the crumbling fortress walls of
| privilege, and between the two forces, a distinct
| advance was made in the direction of awakening, not
| only the class-conscience of the worker, but also
| (and of equal importance) the ethical conscience of
| the community in general.
| One outcome of the spirit of the hour was the
| first Factory Act. It limited the employment of women
| and children in factories to twelve hours per day,
| and prohibited the employment of children under nine
| years of age. The measure was bitterly opposed, not
| only by the employers, but also by the parents of the
| wretched little slaves, to whom the loss of the
| miserable pittance earned by their offspring meant
| the difference, not between life and death, but
| between less acute starvation and more acute
| starvation. Its champions were the unions, the
| Chartists, and a small group of humanitarians in
| Parliament. Dissatisfied with the Act of 1833, the
| various progressive groups carried on an agitation
| for another decade. Their first success was the
| granting of a commission, under the championship of a
| close friend of Mrs. Browning (then Elizabeth Barret
| - she did not marry the poet, Robert
| Browning, until 1846). The revelations of Horne's
| commission are fairly well known. They horrified all
| England - except the philanthropic
| employers who, then as now, kept their "hands" at
| work only out of kindness of heart. Little mites,
| barely able to toddle, worked day and night in these
| industrial hells. The shift coming off duty were
| immediately herded into the beds just vacated by the
| on-coming shift, so that neither dormitory nor
| workshop lost an hour's usance. In the mines boys and
| girls of tender age performed the work of brute
| beasts, harnessed to heavy trucks by means of a rope
| attached to a leather belt round the waist. But
| needless to dwell on these horrors. That the
| limitation of hours of labor to twelve per day could
| be regarded as an improvement is itself a stern
| enough indictment of the conditions that
| prevailed.
| Mrs. Browning was not, typically, a singer of
| songs of revolt, as Shelley was. But for
|
"The Cry of the
| Children" scarcely a line can be found in her
| works that would indicate that her thoughts ever
| dwelt anywhere but among flowers and streams, and the
| magic and color of the brave days of old. But
| perchance this very fact makes her contribution to
| the Poetry of Progress all the more valuable. That
| Shelley should voice the dumb throat of suffering
| would be but the expected. Of Burns, of Hood, the
| same applies. But that a singer of beautiful nothings
| (yes, call me Philistine!) should leave her Lotus
| Land of pleasant phantasy to enter the lists on
| behalf of a cause, in its hour of need, speaks more
| for that cause even than all the eloquence of its
| lifelong votaries.
|
|
| This fragment will serve, let us trust, not as a
| substitute for the whole poem, but to whet the
| appetite of the reader for more.
| Mrs. Browning lived through the first sixty years
| of the past century. She was, therefore, contemporary
| Shelley, although the latter died at an early age in
| 1822. Incidentally her last years were, like his,
| spent in Italy, where the stirring events of that
| country's wars of independence keenly excited her
| interest. She died in 1861.