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Page 65
In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils
were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave
decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a
grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages,
which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on
now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more
convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true
sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to
do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by
shilling numbers.
Of all such reformers Mr Sentiment is the most powerful. It is
incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to
be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the
working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized
pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr
Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less
so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people
so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby
in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper
quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though
possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate
manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's
heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's
great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and
heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must,
their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in
the street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our
friends a rattling, lively life; yes, live, and will live till the
names of their calling shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett
and Mrs Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify a detective
police officer or a monthly nurse.
"The Almshouse" opened with a scene in a clergyman's house. Every
luxury to be purchased by wealth was described as being there: all the
appearances of household indulgence generally found amongst the most
self-indulgent of the rich were crowded into this abode. Here the
reader was introduced to the demon of the book, the Mephistopheles of
the drama. What story was ever written without a demon? What novel,
what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect
without existing principles both of good and evil? The demon of "The
Almshouse" was the clerical owner of this comfortable abode. He was
a man well stricken in years, but still strong to do evil: he was one
who looked cruelly out of a hot, passionate, bloodshot eye; who had a
huge red nose with a carbuncle, thick lips, and a great double, flabby
chin, which swelled out into solid substance, like a turkey-cock's
comb, when sudden anger inspired him: he had a hot, furrowed, low
brow, from which a few grizzled hairs were not yet rubbed off by
the friction of his handkerchief: he wore a loose unstarched white
handkerchief, black loose ill-made clothes, and huge loose shoes,
adapted to many corns and various bunions: his husky voice told
tales of much daily port wine, and his language was not so decorous
as became a clergyman. Such was the master of Mr Sentiment's
"Almshouse." He was a widower, but at present accompanied by two
daughters, and a thin and somewhat insipid curate. One of the young
ladies was devoted to her father and the fashionable world, and she of
course was the favourite; the other was equally addicted to Puseyism
and the curate.
The second chapter of course introduced the reader to the more
especial inmates of the hospital. Here were discovered eight old
men; and it was given to be understood that four vacancies remained
unfilled, through the perverse ill-nature of the clerical gentleman
with the double chin. The state of these eight paupers was touchingly
dreadful: sixpence-farthing a day had been sufficient for their diet
when the almshouse was founded; and on sixpence-farthing a day were
they still doomed to starve, though food was four times as dear,
and money four times as plentiful. It was shocking to find how the
conversation of these eight starved old men in their dormitory shamed
that of the clergyman's family in his rich drawing-room. The absolute
words they uttered were not perhaps spoken in the purest English, and
it might be difficult to distinguish from their dialect to what part
of the country they belonged; the beauty of the sentiment, however,
amply atoned for the imperfection of the language; and it was really a
pity that these eight old men could not be sent through the country as
moral missionaries, instead of being immured and starved in that
wretched almshouse.
Bold finished the number; and as he threw it aside, he thought that
that at least had no direct appliance to Mr Harding, and that the
absurdly strong colouring of the picture would disenable the work from
doing either good or harm. He was wrong. The artist who paints for
the million must use glaring colours, as no one knew better than Mr
Sentiment when he described the inhabitants of his almshouse; and the
radical reform which has now swept over such establishments has owed
more to the twenty numbers of Mr Sentiment's novel, than to all the
true complaints which have escaped from the public for the last half
century.
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