be brought to corroborate that of history. When you read "The Jolly
Beggars," you are informed without squeamishness which is the most free
and powerful class in the world; and when you have read that other
document by the same hand, "The Twa Dogs," you have perused a fine bit
of testimony as to which is the happiest. Or if there lacked these,
and there were left us but Arden and its gentle beggars--who could be
in doubt? How they triumph over the rich and the successful and lord
it felicitously in their poverty! What would you look to find these
but broken and saddened--these who are not only beggars, mind you, but
wronged men: the Duke, Orlando, Rosalind, all suffering injustice;
Adam starving; Touchstone, Jaques, Amiens, and for the most part all of
them, too well acquainted with the rudeness of the world; men who had
known but too well the unkindness of man's ingratitude, the feigning of
most friendship, the bitterness of benefits forgot. And yet, turn only
to that first scene in the forest. If ever I set eyes on independent
gentlemen, here they are! And who doubts too, reading of these, that
Shakespeare wrote of them out of his own Arden, out of the enrichment
of his own poverty, and the splendors of his unsuccessful years!
The powers of the poor! This is a matter to which I have often lent
my speculation, and have striven to perceive by what rights, as of
gods in exile, they have maintained their dignity and their supremacy;
and I have wondered whether one of these may not be that necessity
laid upon them to touch more nearly than we the realities of life.
We have set guards at our gateways, to turn away Poverty or Misery
or Cold or Hunger, yes, and Human Brotherhood and Life and Death
themselves. Death, it is true, and some others, will not be altogether
gainsaid, but enter at last into the lives of all of us, bringing
invariably--this is to be noted--a great dignity to the house which
they have visited. But to the poor the "heavenly powers" come, whether
welcome or no, and like the gods visiting mortals, they do not depart,
save from the entirely unworthy, without bestowing enrichment.
I have sat at the table of an old Philemon and Baucis, whose condition
of poverty appeared not to be bettered by their entertainment of the
great realities of life; whose pitcher poured as scant as ever it did,
though Death and Calamity had but lately visited them. But when you
thirsted for a better draught, a draught not to sustain the body, but
the spirit--then, then the miracle was evident enough! They filled your
cup to its trembling brim, nor, pour as they would, could they empty
their hearts of love and understanding.
These are, indeed, good gifts, and of the gods, and there are many
others; and it would take little to prove how much more bountifully the
poor receive of them than the wealthier classes.
Another possession, which I have noted often among the poor, is that
gayety, that lightness of heart, that almost inconsequent gayety, so
often seen, amazingly, among them. Where you and I might be crushed by
calamity, they can raise their heads and be glad, and that over some
trifle. Where you might have gone sad and sober for weeks, Mamie could
dance her little ragtime songs; Margaret could be gay with the pig; and
Margharetta, fresh from a new downfall, could gather the children of
her heart to her as a hen its chickens, and in blissful content think
nothing of the morrow. This I have seen again and again. They are as
recuperative as King David. Let them sin and blunder and suffer and
be cast down, it is but for a brief season; soon you shall hear the
plucking of their harp and the sound of their psaltery, and a new song
unto the Lord.
As further testimony, this is, I believe, the place to confess that it
was not in the days of my prosperity and happiness, but in the days
of my poverty and sorrow, that I myself became possessed of this good
gift of the gods. The laughter and gayety of heart of prosperous years,
though they may be of no mean order, seem to me but pallid things
compared with those of a more tested season. To have seen the total
wreckage of one's hopes, to have known despair and the bleak winds of
the heath of the world, and to delight still, and more than ever, in
the little and the gay, and to taste with a keener relish than ever
before the fine-flavored humor of the world, this is to be rich, though
one were in tatters; this is to be gifted, though to the last farthing
one has been robbed.
But there is another endowment besides all these, even more precious--I
mean that unconscious grace and dignity of spirit possessed by some of
the poor; I mean that quiet and gracious acceptance of a lot which, to
our reckoning, seems but bare and difficult; that gentle and persistent
kindliness of men and women toward a world which, it seems to us, has
so roughly and despitefully used them.
This I take to be the greatest of the gifts that the gods confer
upon the poor; and being so, it is fitting that it should not be
indiscriminately bestowed. You shall not meet it commonly or often;
yet here or there will be found some true ruler of his kind, looking
out on the world with this kindly and gracious spirit. I have known
some few such myself, and one notably; though my acquaintance with him
was but of short duration, yet it summed up for me and made whole the
fragmentary virtues of the poor, and set a lasting seal upon my love
and understanding of them.
IX
HORATIO
I saw him first selling papers by a subway entrance. The day was
cold, and he had that peculiarly pinched look of those who are both
ill-nourished and ill-clad; and yet you could not without presumption
have called him pitiful. There was a kind of simple grandeur about
him which I am at a loss adequately to describe: a thing rather to be
embodied in myth and legend.
The "envy of the gods" has been variously set out in tale and story.
Prometheus defying divinity is a moving enough figure, hurling curses
back at his superior, and visited by Asia, Panthea, and the nymphs and
Oceanides. But it would need a new legend, it seems to me, to embody
that loftiness which, in a similar bondage, hurls no curses, breathes
no complaint, nor asks even to be spared, if that be possible; a
gentleness which, without the least leaning to humility, preserves a
generous outlook, triumphant in its persistent kindliness as Prometheus
in his unconquered might; unbroken, unlowered; bound, yet attaining
somehow to a continued generosity and bestowal.
It might seem, by the look of this man, that Fate had come to hate one
she could so little bend; for not only was he ragged and pinched, but
there was about his delicate face and the great slenderness of the
body, only too certainly, the mark of some physical ravage, and of an
overborne endurance. To the casual observer, he was but a man selling
newspapers at the entrance to the subway; to those of thoughtful and
speculative observation, he was a man standing within a few feet of
his grave, and likely at almost any moment to feel on his shoulder,
or dimly on his chilly hand, the summoning touch of Hermes, Leader of
Souls.
There was about him a most amiable patience and courtesy which had
not at all the color of resignation. Indeed, to speak of resignation
in his case would have been to impute to him riches and hopes he had
not. I can give you no idea how much more courteous he seemed than his
destiny. The only Asia who ever visited him, I am sure, was a woman,
fat and comfortable looking, who sold papers also, at the other end of
the subway entrance, behind the shelter of its glass. She used to come
over sometimes while I was buying my paper of him, to ask him to make
change, blowing on her hands in a wholesome manner, or beating her arms
like a cabby. That she never sympathized with him, I felt sure, not
alone because of the general look and contour of her, but because--as I
have tried to show you--he was not the man to whom one would presume to
tender sympathy.
As I came to know him better, I began to take the keenest pleasure in
his smile, which was always ready. He never let the salutation go at a
mere "good-morning." To my banal "Pretty cold to-day!" he would reply
smiling, and even while turning his shoulder to receive the cut of the
wind less directly, "Yes, but bracing"; or, while his blue fingers
fumbled for change, "Not quite so cold as yesterday"; or it was,
"Well, the children like snow for Christmas"; or, "This snow will give
work to the poor, cleaning the streets"; or, if the white flakes turned
to threads of rain, "This will save the city a great deal."
There never was any bravado in this, only the incomparable gentleness
and the winning smile. If Fate lingered about, malicious, hoping
to hear him at last complain, she might as well have given over
her eavesdropping. I, going to him for the daily "Times," and not
infrequently with a tired spirit and a heavy heart, would find that,
in return for my penny, he had given me, not only the morning paper,
but a new courage, or a heartening and precious shame of my own
discouragement, or, oftener still, a new faith in the world. So it was
that he stood there, day after day, in the freezing weather, dispensing
these benefits, a peculiar and moving royalty legible in his person.
If those who read of him here pity him, it can only be because my words
give but such a poor idea of his great dignity. Those who saw him with
a clear eye, could they pity him, do you think? And I--I who had cried
out more than once, under how much less provocation, against the duress
of fortune--was it my right to give him commiseration? Marry, heaven
forbid! Again and again, as I went from him, my mind suggested, rather,
noble likenesses, and sought to find some simile to match him. Once it
was, "The gods go in low disguises"; again, "Great spirits now on earth
are sojourning"; and once the words of Amiens, addressed to the Duke,
seemed to me to blend in with his behaviors:--
"Happy is your Grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style."
And again, I thought once that the royal Dane, addressing Horatio,
offered me words befitting:--
"For thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Has ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please."
One day I bought him a pair of woolen gloves, and all the way to his
corner I kept rehearsing an absurd speech of presentation, designed
to relieve both him and me of embarrassment. He must not know that I
had bought them for him! I wanted to spare myself that! So I concocted
what is currently known as a "cock-and-bull" story; but, as I look back
on it and its results, I lean to believing that I never perpetrated a
finer bit of fiction. I give it now without shame.
"My husband," said I, fumbling for my penny, "has been very ill--a long
while."
"Well, now, I'm sorry!" said Horatio gravely, and without the least
wonder, apparently, why this should have been proffered.
"And the doctors think," I stumbled on, digging in my purse, "there's
no likelihood in the world at all he will be out of his bed before the
summer."
"Ah, that's very hard for a man if he's active," said Horatio, speaking
with full sympathy, as of one who knew.
"And _so_," said I, putting my penny in his hand, taking the "Times,"
and mentally beshrewing me the clumsiness of language, "and _so_, you
see,"--here I brought them forth,--"there's a pair of gloves of his he
won't have even the chance to wear; and they're _almost_ as good as
new, and--I just thought--may be--"
Here words deserted me. I appealed directly to his eyes. These were
fixed, kind and gray, on the gloves. He was already taking them.
"Indeed, I'd like very much to wear them," he said, "but I'm sorry he
can't be wearing them himself. May be he'll be well sooner than you
think, though. Sickness is a bad thing. These are very warm,"--this
with his delightful smile, and he began drawing one of them on,--"I'm
very much obliged. But may be he'll be well sooner than you think. I'm
sure I hope so."
It was a busy morning. The early subway was pouring forth its crowds
as an early chimney, just started, its smoke. I was glad to mingle and
fade among them.
The next morning, he was ready, may be even a little eager, as I
approached. He had my paper doubled and waiting for me, and waiting
too, his gentle inquiry, "Is he better?"
"Yes," said I, "I think so--a little."
Some one else wanted a paper and we said no more. But each day after
that he asked me, and I gave him a cautious, not too enthusiastic
report, for my patient must remain indoors till sharp weather and all
possible need of gloves were past. So, he was only a _little_ better. I
took pains once to add, "A long illness is very discouraging."
"That it is," Horatio assented. "But you'll forget that when he's well."
So we continued in our courtesies and our sympathies; I very pleased
and hardly conscience-stricken, to have been able to give him what
I knew he must have cherished a good deal more than the gloves,
something, indeed, for the warming of his heart--the chance, say rather
the right, to extend his so experienced sympathy, and the opportunity
to give, to one in need of them, some of the stored-up riches of his
spirit. So, his own days growing short, and the shadow of his own cares
lengthening, he yet smiled daily, as he gave me of these riches, and
wished me a happy sunrise of my hopes and a good-morrow.
One day he was not there. His fine spirit had fared forth. I can still
feel the shock and sudden loss it was to me. I went over to Asia, or
Panthea, selling her papers, and questioned her. Was he ill?
"He went very sudden, ma'am, I believe. His wife came to say so. I'm
selling his papers now. What will you have? The 'Times'?"
Hermes, the kindly, had beckoned him from his "undefeated, undishonored
field," and he had gone, eager and gentle there, too, I have no doubt.
It was but a little while that I knew him, but the influence of him
abides. He has lent something to life which even the least noble cannot
take from it. The sorry old derelict, his poor old red lantern eyes
looking out of his dark face, when I give him a dole, receives it, not
from me, I think, after all, but from some gentleness which Horatio
lends me as a legacy.
He was, of course, supreme of his class; but by that very supremacy
he made plain to me many things concerning those less than himself,
but of his same lineage. It is by no means unlikely, I think, that
Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, Margharetta, and the rest, so much less
worthy than Horatio, yet glimpsed their heritage also, though in some
dim adumbrated manner of their own, and were unconsciously affected and
aggrandized by it.
Although I have spoken of them throughout with lightness, and have
laughed at their amazing follies, yet I know well that there is a
solemnity forever attendant upon the poor. There is without doubt
some unexpected endowment in suffering and privation, some surprising
enrichment in the common lot. Have it as you will, there is no honor so
high, or distinction so covetable, as to be a sharer of human joys and
sorrows, and an intimate, even though it be in misery and solitude, of
the hearts of men; and to this brotherhood, sharing the common lot, the
poor undeniably contribute by far the greater numbers.
There is, to the very end, something tinsel and tawdry in the trappings
of special privilege. The splendors of the wealthy are but a brief
pageant--stage properties, donned for a little while to lend some
height and dignity to those of but human stature after all. The beggar
who looks on, as did Horatio, at this pageant, without envy, and who,
looking on, gives a gentle patronage to the rich, does so not without
warrant. The greater splendors and possessions are his own. Let them
decorate their stately halls; let them transport, as I have known them
to do, entire ceilings from Venetian palaces, tapestries from chambers
of those who also, long ago, once were great--the glory of the sun will
not be subsidized, the halls of the morning are lit with unmatchable
splendors, and the palace chambers of the night are hung by mightier
ministrants with tapestries of a finer weave, and ceiled with stars
for the mere vagrant and the vagabond who shall sleep some day beneath
them, without monument and unremembered.
Do not these know life more nearly? Who has flattered them? Who has
shielded them from infancy, from the great powers? Who has defended
them? Have not these, like Œdipus and other kings' sons, been
exposed upon the very rocks of time; and have they not survived that
circumstance? Have these not dealt more intimately with the elements?
Who had enabled them to avoid the cut of the winter, or to evade
the stroke of the summer? to elude the arrows of sickness that fly
by night, or the pestilence that walks in the noonday? Sorrow and
Death have dealt with them more nearly, and without ambassadors. They
have had audience with reality; they have talked with Life without
interpreters.
He who loves this world, and has found it good on such terms, may be
allowed his reasonable preference; he who speaks fondly still of life,
who has had such communings, may speak with some authority. Horatio's
smile was worth the pleasantness and optimism of a thousand who have
never made change with blue fingers, or shrunk from the cut of the cold.
There are those who would patronize and pity such as Horatio. It
can only be, then, that they know this world but little, and still
childishly count riches to be but money, and poverty to be but lack of
it.
And if you tell me that none but a sentimentalist would call poverty
an enrichment, then I can only assume that you have never been poor;
and if you tell me that the high behavior of Horatio is at the best but
endurance, even then, could I grant you so much, the argument still
would hold. Even so, Horatio endured life with a noble grace, and
helped others to do so; even so, he was able still to find pleasure
in a fate from which the wealthy would shrink in horror, and lovable
traits in one they would have called his bitterest enemy. He had
blessed the life which had cursed him, and had loved it though it had
despitefully used him.
So he triumphed--yet without pride; nor did one hear in his spirit's
victory any hint of animosity, or talk of reprisals, or bitterness,
or demand for indemnities, or hidden hate. Rather, he was to be found
each day undefeated in his impregnable gentleness, that still unfallen
province in which he dwelt. His were some incalculable riches of
the spirit which Poverty had heaped up and amassed for him through
those years when his fingers handled without complaint the miserable
pennies; his was some towering strength under the disguise of the weak
and broken body; like that Olympian glory fabled inevitably to appear
some time, under the mortal humility of gods in exile. There was about
him, for all his slenderness, something grand, something epic, and
allegorical. He might have stood as a symbol of a downtrodden people,
such nations as the world (be it said to our shame) sees still, and
that not in small numbers--crushed, oppressed by the arrogant, the
strong, yet still surviving and giving to the other nations their gifts
of gay song or heroic endurance, and out of an incredible bounty still
bestowing love and kindness and beauty on the world which has behaved
toward them without mercy.
Look, if you will, at the beggar nations of the world, and search the
heart of the poor among peoples, and I am convinced that you will
find in these also corroborative evidence of truths I have tried here
to touch upon but lightly. Let be their follies and their mistakes
and all their incredible assumptions: who shall declare that poverty
has not enriched them likewise? And among them, shall you not find
high and royal and single spirits, who, like Horatio, have both known
and loved the world and triumphed over it without animosity? To have
known and yet to have loved the world! Is not this the real heart of
the matter? Is not this the true test after all, and the indisputable
mark of a king's son? And shall you not find it oftener among the poor
than elsewhere? For he cannot be said to know the world who has never
been at its mercy; even as only he can be said to have triumphed over
it, who, having suffered all things at its hands, yet loves it with
unconquerable fidelity.
GUESTS
I
RELATIONS OF THE SPIRIT
In his essay on "Character" Emerson points to the mutation and
change of religions and theological teachings, and then thunders
characteristically, "The moral sentiment alone is omnipotent." Now,
Emerson never takes away anything traditional and cherished, but he
puts something nobler into your hands in place of it. Hear him: "The
lines of religious sects are very shifting, their platforms unstable;
the whole science of theology of great uncertainty. No man can tell
what religious revolutions await us in the next years." Then with
thundering assurance he gives us the coveted reassurance. "But the
science of ethics has no mutation. The pulpit may shake, but this
platform will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral
sentiment."
I wish it were given me to speak with some such force and truth of
what we are wont to call education. Theories are very shifting; the
whole science of instruction is of great uncertainty. No man can tell
what pedagogic revolutions await us. But the educational value of life
has no uncertainty. Schools may come and go; this, the school of life,
remains--the greatest of them all. The highest attainments of mankind
are due to its teachings.
In still another essay, Emerson, depicting, we suppose, the ideal not
the academic scholar, declares with the same tonic forcefulness that
"his use of books is occasional and infinitely subordinate; that he
should read a little proudly, as one who knows the original and cannot
therefore very highly value the copy." Always, life is to Emerson the
greater art, and learning, literature, and all other arts whatsoever,
but lesser things. "You send your child to the schoolmaster," he flings
out, "but it is the schoolboys who educate him."
Precisely. When shall we have taken wholly to heart the so obvious
truth? It cannot be but the author of the "Greatest Show on Earth" was
right. The world _likes_ to be humbugged; else why all this elaboration
of educational systems and theories, educational forms and creeds, this
multiplication of modern methods and "didactic material"? These are,
indeed, but things that change and fluctuate, and already are on the
way to being superseded. Meanwhile the older and larger schoolroom of
Life never closes its doors, makes no bid for patronage, retains its
old teachers, changes its methods not at all, and still turns out the
best pupils.
My own education is generally thought to be above the average. It is
my belief that it would be far less considerable but for those various
circumstances which in my childhood denied me much schooling, and
accorded me a good deal of staying at home.
The home of those days had, it is true, a far greater educative value
than can be claimed justly for the home of the present day, owing
mainly--I hold it almost beyond dispute--to the fact that it was more
given to the practice of hospitality and the entertainment of guests.
Of the homes of my day my own was, I believe, fairly typical. Though a
full description of it and of the men and women who frequented it would
make a colored recital, so would a like description of the homes of
many others besides myself, who were children also at that time. I do
not mean that such homes were entirely the rule; yet there were enough
of them certainly to constitute a type. They were not likely to be
luxurious; those of people of less position nowadays are far finer.
The old house of my childhood was a large and comfortable one, with
low-ceilinged, well-proportioned rooms, and wide verandas. Its
furnishings were in taste, and contributed greatly to its character.
The big Holland secretary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer,
was a very piece of romance; the tall clock, with its brass balls and
moon face, the old clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa,
the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as mellow in tone as the
old Martin guitar on which men and women, beaux and belles of a past
generation, had played; or the harp that stood in a corner, all gold in
the afternoon sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front room, a
true grandee in its day. Several really well-painted portraits looked
down from the walls, and added a certain stateliness to the warmth of
every welcome.