‘Fortunately, there is nowhere,’ said the philosopher, ‘a more excellent situation for the study of the People, than that which lies almost close to our hand. In the east of London we have the People pure and unmixed. It is better, even, than the Faubourg St. Antoine. Here there are two millions of the people all living together; there is hardly a single gentleman, or a rich man, or an artist, or a man of taste, unless it. is a Priest or Minister here and there, among them all. The English are a truly wonderful nation. What other country can show a city of two million — larger than all Paris — given over entirely to the ouvrier? To say that they have no amusements is to say that they are English. No theatres, no place to dance, no place for music, no gardens, no cafés — nothing. Or, yes, there are the churches. If it were not for the churches, we should have presented before us a unique example of people developed without control, and according to the laws of their creation.’

     ‘I think the working men do not go to church.’ said Claire.

     ‘Is that the case?’ said her father, doubtfully. ‘I thought all English people went to church twice every Sunday. If, however, they do not, it is fortunate for the observer. Allen’s business is arranged for him. It is a truly magnificent opportunity. He will discover the natural Englishman — two millions of him — the working man of England as he is, without education, knowledge, government, or religion. Yet they give him the vote; they make him elector; they make him their master.’

     ‘Allen need not go to Whitechapel to see working men,’ said Claire coldly, because she saw no necessity for the study of the People. ‘He may go to High Beech in Epping Forest on Sundays. I believe he will find them there.’

     ‘Ah! The man who drinks beer and catches his friends by the arm; he who pushes his hat to the back of his head and opens his mouth; the man who tears the branches from the trees, and would pull the hawthorns up by the roots if he were strong enough. Yes, I have seen that man; but he is not the People, Claire.’

     Claire smiled. She did not believe in the People, either with a capital letter or without.

     ‘I shall begin,’ he said, the map of London before him, and a ruler and a red lead pencil in his hand, ‘with dividing the East into districts. We will take each district in turns; we will consecrate Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon to our exploration of the People: thus we shall be among them twice a week. I estimate, Claire, that there will be one thousand five hundred miles of streets to be walked over. If we take ten miles a day, we shall accomplish the task in a hundred and fifty days, which will be exactly a year and a half. Expect, therefore, in a year and a half that Allen will have a complete knowledge of the People.’

     That same evening he partly opened his mind to Allen on the subject, keeping always something behind, like a true conspirator.

     ’My disciple,‘ he said, ’for three years and more you have followed my counsels and been guided by me. Are you satisfied, so far?’

     ‘Quite,’ said Allen. ‘You have taught me more, far more, than I ever expected to learn — more than I had the least right to expect.’

     ‘You have, my son, learned to write. Claire tells me your verses are no longer detestable but admirable. You have read a great quantity of books; you have begun to form a style of your own.’

     Allen blushed with pleasure. He was still a very young man, though between eighteen and twenty-one there is a great space, almost a gulf; but still he blushed when he was praised.

     ‘You have received,’ continued the Sage with solemnity, ‘a preparation for your work which ought to fit you for it. A poet should know the Voice of nature. You were brought up in the solitudes among the trees and the silence of the forest. A poet should know the great works of other poets. You have read the best of French and English poets. A poet should show himself ready to struggle against adverse circumstances. You have served your apprenticeship in being forced to spend your days in a City office. A poet should know the Voice of Art. You have learned to recognise that Voice, Allen; your education is complete, except one thing.’

     ‘What is that?’ he asked.

     ‘You have not yet learned to know the Voice of the People.’

     ‘Oh!’ said Will, who was also present. But he said no more, and therefore we are quite free to guess what he meant; but I think he remembered a certain saying of M. Philipon’s about Humanity.

     ‘I was myself,’ Hector continued, ‘the poet of Humanity. What else a poet exists for I know not, unless to sing of love, which is always pleasant. Go among the people. Read their heart. Study them. Make friends among them. Listen till you hear their Voice.’

     Allen nodded his head thoughtfully.

     ‘When you know them well, when your heart beats with them, you will no longer care to be a poet of love; you will be a poet of life.’

     ‘Of life?’ echoed Will. ‘Is that quite the same thing as to be the Poet of the People?’

     ‘See,’ continued M. Philipon without replying, ‘here is the map of great London. Here are the great contiguous cities, the beautiful, picturesque, and unknown of Whitechapel, Stepney, Bow, Stratford, Old Ford, Clapton, Bethnal Green, Shadwell, and Wapping. They are all of them cities of the People. They are cities of the industrious poor; they are cities of the ignorant. If their country is great they know nothing of her greatness, because nobody teaches them. You English are so proud in your greatness that you do not think it worth your while to teach your own people how great they are. If the country is rich and glorious, they see nothing of the wealth or the glory. If it is full of Art and treasures it matters nothing to them; they know nothing of Art, they are left to find out Art and everything else by themselves. They are left entirely to themselves; they are the People in naked simplicity; a more naked simplicity does not exist. It is wonderful; it is most wonderful.’

     He paused and went on with his ruler and his square.

     ‘Here, Allen, you must wander till you know the People. I have marked your country out into districts. The poet must gather materials for his song; he must be inspired by divine indignation; he must be angry. Every Saturday you must take one of my districts and walk over it slowly, and make your observations. Every Sunday, also, you must walk over; and in this way, in a year and a half, you will have seen the whole. Then, Allen, and not till then, your education will be complete. Your brain will be full, your hand will be ready, when the inspiration comes.’

     Allen accepted the map and considered it. His commission was a roving one: he was to wander among streets, and he was to observe, to watch, to see what there was to be seen. He was, in short, to learn the People. Simple directions these. He felt like Columbus setting forth on a voyage of discovery. One rule only: keep steering west.

     ‘Come, Allen,’ said Will next Saturday, ‘let us begin the pilgrimage.’

     Of course, Will went with him. He was not as yet greatly interested in the People, but he wanted to see what would happen.

     They took one of the districts, almost at haphazard, and they walked up and down its streets for the whole afternoon, looking about them.

     In the evening they reported, as the sum of their observations, that an Irishman under the influence of drink had accosted them, and cursed the Government of the country, from the Queen to the office-boy; that he had next produced a knife, which, he said, had already murdered a great many landlords, and threatened to stick it into them. No other adventure had happened to them. The streets, they remarked, were almost deserted. except for the children who played in the gutters and made boats, carts, houses, weapons, armour, out of broken bottles, bits of paper, cabbage stalks, fish bones, scraps of wood, and such things. The houses were all exactly the same, and seemed the result of a combination among the builders to be as mean as they could for the money. Now and then they came upon a chapel. There were no trees, no gardens, no green things at all; there were not many clean blinds.

     ‘The first day, Allen,’ said Will, ‘hasn’t brought us much nearer the People. Listen!’

     They were in a narrow street of small houses, dirty and ill-kept. Will stood still and held up a finger of attention.

     ‘I hear nothing,’ said Allen.

     ‘Nor I. Then let us go home and report that we have not yet heard that Voice.’

     The next day being Sunday, they made another attempt. Their district included Whitechapel Road, and there was preaching going on.

     ‘Here,’ said Will, ‘there seems a good deal of Voice, and it has got jaws of brass and lungs of cast-iron. Let us listen with all our might.’

     One man was standing in the centre of a ring, and proving quite conclusively that there was no soul, no heaven, no after-life, no Providence, no Creator, no hope, no right, no wrong, no rule of life, no reason for anything but self-preservation.

     ‘He looks,’ said Will, ‘as if he hadn’t many opportunities in early life of getting to the bottom of things. Do you think his is the Voice?’

     His audience listened to him with languid interest. They had heard the whole thing before, over and over again. They were, in fact, bored with a problem which had nothing to do, they were now persuaded, with themselves. But it wanted more than a quarter of an hour to the opening of the public-houses.

     Another stump-orator, also with his little circle, was loudly demonstrating that the Government of this country, and of all other countries, exists only for the purpose of oppressing the people and of making rich men richer. There could be no happiness, this philosopher maintained, until the abolition of all governments was finally, and once for all, carried out. He was listened to by his group with the same languid interest. The East-End people have no concern in governments. No one governs them. But they waited for the opening of the public-houses.

     ‘I wonder,’ said Will, ‘if this is the Voice.’

     In the middle of the next group was a man vehementlv gesticulating, and loudly calling upon his hearers to turn away from their wickedness and their filthy sin, and to repent. His hearers stood round him quite as much unmoved by this as by the other voices. It yet wanted a quarter to one, when the doors would be opened.

     Another man preached temperance, and drew the usual appalling pictures of misery and of money wasted which should have been money saved, and of crime, and death, and disgrace, through drink.

     ‘This,’ said Will, ‘seems the most sensible voice of the lot.’

     The workmen on the pavement had heard it all before; they knew what was coming; they stood still and listened, but paid no heed. They only smoked their pipes and remarked to each other that it was ten minutes to one.

     In the side streets the young children were playing, but no grown persons were visible at all. And the houses in this district were more squalid than any they had seen before.

     ‘There is no doubt,’ said Will, ‘that we have got to the lowest level here — the hard pan, as the Americans say. Do you feel yet at all like getting a firm grip of the People, Allen? ’

     Allen shook his head.

     They also made the discovery — made by many before them — that all the well-dressed people go to church or chapel, and that those who are not well-dressed stay away. Therefore it would seem at first as if religion begins with a frock-coat, and the man in the workman’s jacket does not feel any necessity for religion. This is a most truly wonderful outcome of civilisation. There seems no active hostility to church or chapel; religion appears to most of the people a very harmless thing, but they don’t want it for themselves. And if a man lacks the religious sense, how shall another man restore it to him? Perhaps, when one lives for ever in a great crowd, one’s own personality is destroyed, and each man thinks only of the crowd.

     Another day their journey took them among rows of streets where the houses were as monotonous, but not so mean; as ugly, but not so squalid; they had white curtains, and every house boasted something ornamental, such as a big Bible, or a desk, or a vase with artificial flowers, and most of the streets terminated with the railings of a vast great cemetery, crowded with stones, which marked for posterity — who never go to read these stones, and indeed cannot because they are railed off — the names of the obscure and long-forgotten dead.

     ‘If it is dreadful to live here, it must be more than dreadful to be buried here,’ said Will. ‘Come away, Allen. Let us think of Waltham Abbey or old Chingford Church.’

     Another day their district included Limehouse and the East India Road, and they remarked the manners and customs of the sailors, especially the foreign sailors. Also they were privileged in witnessing a little drama, got up perhaps, for their benefit. It was a drama for two, the principal part being taken by a Maltese sailor; and the second part by a Greek. The play opened with two men gambling, quietly sitting on the pavement. Naturally one was a winner and the other a loser. The latter — who, of course, was the Maltese — lost his money first, and his temper next, and his self-control last. Then he sprang to his feet, and with flashing eyes and wild gesture accused the Greek of cheating — in fact they were both cheating, but the Greek cheated best — and demanded his money back. The other rose too, and in calm and mocking tones gave him to understand that the money was safe in his own pocket and would remain there. Whereupon the Maltese drew a knife — a long, glittering knife — and swiftly plunged it into the body of that Greek, who fell with a yell, and two policemen bore down upon the Maltese, and they carried the Greek to the Foreign Sailors’ Home and the Maltese to the House of Repentance and Little Ease, and the drama was finished.

     There were a good many spectators of this one-act tragedy, and quite a little crowd of women, who seemed acquainted with sailors and their ways, and took boundless interest in a fight and a stabbing. They commented on the performance very much as if the place was the Royal Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, and they were in the gallery. They lamented that so fine a tableau as the fallen Greek and the Maltese with the blood-dripping knife in his hand had not been led up to with a more artistic finish. There should have been more dialogue; there should have been more of a fight. The Greek should have had his knife as well.

     It was too sudden, too soon over; yet delightful while it lasted. So in the amphitheatre talked the women of Rome, when some gallant young prisoner, who ought to have made play for them for half an hour, was done to death at once and with a single stroke of the tiger’s claw. Too sudden. They love fighting, these women; they long for more. They would restore the bull-fight; they would throw the enemies of their country to the lions; they would arm them to fight against each other in the arena. When they had discussed the fight, the ladies proceeded to speculate on the trial, the verdict, and the sentence. Should the Greek die — but what a thousand pities that a man can no longer go in public, amid the acclamations of his friends, to his own hanging!

     ‘I wonder,’ said Will, ‘if this is the Heart of the people?’

     They reported discouragement.

     ‘Go on,’ said Hector, ’you will find, some time or other, what you are looking for. Go on.’

     He meant that Allen would find what he wished him to find. They went on; they pursued that tramp week after week, in fine weather and foul, till the monotony of the streets seemed intolerable.

     ‘They are brought up in this,’ said Will one day, ‘they don’t feel it as we do, who have had the Forest. Do you begin to understand how they must look on life? Do you begin to see why they have no religion?’

     ‘What do you mean, Will?’

     ‘I mean,’ said Will, ‘that without some sense of beautiful things, faith must be impossible. What beautiful things can be imagined in these horrible streets?’

     It was Sunday afternoon; they were passing a little chapel, mean and ugly. There was a children’s service, or school, going on, and, as if in answer to Will’s question, the fresh voices of the little ones sang as they passed, ‘There is a happy land, far, far away.’

     ‘Oh!’ cried Will, looking round him, ‘what sort of happiness, what kind of land, can they expect?’

     But the eyes of his companion filled with tears.

     ‘We have been everywhere,’ said Will that night to the philosopher; ‘we have tramped through Hoxton and Hackney, Whitechapel and Stepney; we know Wapping, Shadwell, and Limehouse; we have seen the big breweries and the docks, and the gasworks, and the cemeteries. We have seen the People, but we cannot find out their heart and we cannot hear their. Voice.’

     ‘And you, Allen, can you not hear the Voice of the people?’

     ‘No; I am farther than ever from finding out their heart or their Voice.’

     ‘Often,’ said Hector, ‘in looking for one thing, we find another. Do not forget what you have seen.’

     They did not yet give in; they had hitherto gone only about the streets, they would go to places where the people meet together. They found there were two or three music-halls, half-a-dozen debating societies, and certain radical clubs.

     At the music-halls they heard songs so unspeakably vulgar, so inexpressibly detestable, that they ignorantly concluded they were a spécialité of the East End. Alas! even in the more aesthetic West, there is a demand for similar musical effects. The atmosphere of the halls was laden with tobacco, gas, and foul air. ’Arry was there, with Alf and George, and all their friends. They are the clubs of the lower clerkdom, the prés aux clercs.

     At the debating-club they heard a most amazing quantity of talk, but no one seemed to have taken any trouble to master his facts; no one knew anything. This ignorance to these mistaken young men also appeared a spécialité of the East End. But then they had never attended the debates in the House.

     In the chapels they heard everywhere the same exhortations and expressions, in the same words, addressed to decent people in black coats, who looked as if they were passing on the discourse to some one else, because it did not concern themselves.

     They went to the public-houses and called for glasses of beer, and they listened for the Voice there. They heard a voice, to be sure, a thick, hoarse voice, full of ugly words, and certainly not a heavenly voice. Then befell Allen something of the feeling which possessed Dante when he gazed upon the souls of the hapless lost. He became haunted by crowds of faces, processions of faces, an ocean of faces. When he slept at night these faces gazed upon him; when he walked, or read, or sat at work, these faces were always looking upon him. There were millions of them *mdash; two millions, as nearly as he could count — and he seemed to know. them all. They were all different, yet all alike in one respect, that they were all faces which lacked something. There was no happiness in them; they were dull, they had no sunshine in them; they bore no secret fountains of joy beneath them, they wanted hope. They were ignorant faces. As Allen looked on them he was seized with terror, for he saw before him the whole of East London — the mighty City, the neglected City, the joyless City, the City of the baser sort, and he trembled. If the vision of the multitudinous face, this troubled and turbid ocean of heavy brows and dull, disappointed eyes, had continued, I think the young man would have gone mad; but presently there came relief when that thing happened to him, which has also happened to Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Hood, and many others. Out of the faces, out of the multitudes which throng the thoroughfares of the Joyless City like ants upon an anthill, there presently began to detach themselves, by ones and twos, singly or in little groups, separate figures; while he looked upon them the background of faces disappeared. These figures, however, never left him, day after day, but continued shadows impalpable, yet plain to behold, and acted and talked before him. He listened and looked until he knew them, knew their very thoughts, knew why they acted and what they would do next; knew their manner of speech, their hopes, and their anxieties, their very prejudices; man and woman they stood before him and bared their souls, and were not ashamed. They were unlovely; some of them were like monstrous figments created by a fantastic artist, so hideous were they; but these were the old; some among the young were beautiful, but it seemed as if while he looked upon them, invisible fingers were taking the beauty out of their faces and the sweetness out of their eyes.

     There were young girls among them, quite a group of young girls; and one came forth timidly and said, ‘Take me, I will tell you all that is in my heart, all that I do, all that I hope, all that I know; I am yours altogether.’ He followed and watched this girl among her companions; she was in the work-room, walking with other girls on Sundays; she was quite young and full of vague hopes, but she knew nothing. She had her chapel on Sunday; and she had her lover. She played out her little story — a poor and pitiful one — to the very end, and presently that story was finished and she vanished, falling back into the crowd, and was no more seen, though Allen looked everywhere for her among the most miserable of her sex. There were children, heaps of children; presently one of these children came out and held up its arms, and became his property; and he listened to its story as he walked with it, with saddened heart; and presently this child, too, finished its tale and fell back and was lost in the great ocean of its fellows.

     There were mothers and wives — thousands of them. Presently one came to him, her baby in her arms, and told her tale, which made his fingers to clench and his teeth to grind together. Then she fell back weeping, and was lost among the waves of faces around her. And another; and another; and another.

     Always sadness, always disappointment, always unhappiness; was there then no gladness in this great City?

     There were lovers *mdash; thousands of lovers, and presently a pair came out, a workgirl and a workman; he listened to their tale and understood that there is one thing always which remains to us, even in meanness and monotony, which is love.

     As the visions grew, as the puppets of his fancy became real, so the young man’s daily task in the City became more intolerable, and he longed, like a prisoner, for the hour of his deliverance. For he could now think of nothing but the figures which moved perpetually before him, acting and talking before him as if he had no will in the matter, and as if the drama of their lives was not the creation of his own brain.

     You who have never been possessed by such phantoms, you who have never made acquaintance with any but men and women of the flesh, cannot understand the strength of such possession. For they do not leave the brain in any waking hour; they are always present, always acting and talking, always in some way carrying on their lives independently of your own will; they know nothing of time or space; the longer they stay with you the better you know them. Some of the men become your friends: you fall in love with some of the girls. Some of them you hate: you weep over the misfortunes of some, you rejoice with their joy. Yet one thing seems strange, that there is in every one of them something of yourself. They are your own children; even in unlikeness they are like you. These phantoms come only to a few; and of these few there are not many, indeed, who can describe in fitting terms what they have seen. For the phantoms pay no more respect to dramatic effect, to grouping, to situation, than the man and woman in real life. They act exactly in the same way. Every one of them wants for himself all the joy and happiness that can be crowded into the twenty-four hours of the day; every one desires for himself love, ease, pleasantness, sunshine, long life, and health. Now of all these things there is not enough to go round, by a great deal, and people have hardly as yet begun to manufacture more.

     ‘Allen, my son,’ said the Philosopher, ‘have you, then, found at last the Voice of the People?’

     ‘I do not know,’ he replied; ‘I must think.’

     ‘The people have no voice,’ said Will bluntly. ‘They want to be taught how to speak; they want the power of speech, and they want — not a poet — but a leader.’

     ‘You are right, Will,’ said Hector.

     ‘They want,’ he repeated, looking at Allen, ‘a leader who shall tell them what else they want, and what they must ask for.As for their Voice ——’ He stopped abruptly.

     ‘Oh!’ cried Claire. ‘do not vex yourself longer about their Voice, Allen. My father means that the heart of the people is your own heart, when you know them. Their Voice is your own voice, when you have learned them.’

     ‘My daughter,’ said Hector, kissing her forehead, ‘you have rightly interpreted. Listen, Allen, to your own Voice. Your education, my son, is now complete.’