the younger women that was altogether new to my observation. It was a
charm proper to the lowest class. One girl I particularly remember, in a
garb none of the cleanest and nowise smart, and herself exceedingly
coarse in all respects, but yet endowed with a sort of witchery, a
native charm, a robe of simple beauty and suitable behavior that she was
born in and had never been tempted to throw off, because she had really
nothing else to put on. Eve herself could not have been more natural.
Nothing was affected, nothing imitated; no proper grace was vulgarized
by an effort to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere. This
kind of beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is probably vanishing
out of the world, and will certainly never be found in America, where
all the girls, whether daughters of the upper-tendom, the mediocrity,
the cottage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and
deportment, seldom accomplishing a perfectly triumphant hit or an
utterly absurd failure. Those words, "genteel" and "ladylike," are
terrible ones, and do us infinite mischief, but it is because (at least,
I hope so) we are in a transition state, and shall emerge into a higher
mode of simplicity than has ever been known to past ages.
In such disastrous circumstances as I have been attempting to describe,
it was beautiful to observe what a mysterious efficacy still asserted
itself in character. A woman, evidently poor as the poorest of her
neighbors, would be knitting or sewing on the doorstep, just as fifty
other women were; but round about her skirts (though wofully patched)
you would be sensible of a certain sphere of decency, which, it seemed
to me, could not have been kept more impregnable in the cosiest little
sitting-room, where the teakettle on the hob was humming its good old
song of domestic peace. Maidenhood had a similar power. The evil habit
that grows upon us in this harsh world makes me faithless to my own
better perceptions; and yet I have seen girls in these wretched streets,
on whose virgin purity, judging merely from their impression on my
instincts as they passed by, I should have deemed it safe, at the
moment, to stake my life. The next moment, however, as the surrounding
flood of moral uncleanness surged over their footsteps, I would not have
staked a spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet the miracle was
within the scope of Providence, which is equally wise and equally
beneficent (even to those poor girls, though I acknowledge the fact
without the remotest comprehension of the mode of it), whether they were
pure or what we fellow-sinners call vile. Unless your faith be
deep-rooted and of most vigorous growth, it is the safer way not to turn
aside into this region so suggestive of miserable doubt. It was a place
"with dreadful faces thronged," wrinkled and grim with vice and
wretchedness; and, thinking over the line of Milton here quoted, I come
to the conclusion that those ugly lineaments which startled Adam and
Eve, as they looked backward to the closed gate of Paradise, were no
fiends from the pit, but the more terrible fore-shadowings of what so
many of their descendants were to be. God help them, and us likewise,
their brethren and sisters! Let me add, that, forlorn, ragged, careworn,
hopeless, dirty, haggard, hungry, as they were, the most pitiful thing
of all was to see the sort of patience with which they accepted their
lot, as if they had been born into the world for that and nothing else.
Even the little children had this characteristic in as perfect
development as their grandmothers.
The children, in truth, were the ill-omened blossoms from which another
harvest of precisely such dark fruitage as I saw ripened around me was
to be produced. Of course you would imagine these to be lumps of crude
iniquity, tiny vessels as full as they could hold of naughtiness; nor
can I say a great deal to the contrary. Small proof of parental
discipline could I discern, save when a mother (drunken, I sincerely
hope) snatched her own imp out of a group of pale, half-naked,
humor-eaten abortions that were playing and squabbling together in the
mud, turned up its tatters, brought down her heavy hand on its poor
little tenderest part, and let it go again with a shake. If the child
knew what the punishment was for, it was wiser than I pretend to be. It
yelled and went back to its playmates in the mud. Yet let me bear
testimony to what was beautiful, and more touching than anything that I
ever witnessed before in the intercourse of happier children. I allude
to the superintendence which some of these small people (too small, one
would think, to be sent into the street alone, had there been any other
nursery for them) exercised over still smaller ones. Whence they derived
such a sense of duty, unless immediately from God, I cannot tell; but it
was wonderful to observe the expression of responsibility in their
deportment, the anxious fidelity with which they discharged their unfit
office, the tender patience with which they linked their less pliable
impulses to the wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide them
whithersoever it liked. In the hollow-cheeked, large-eyed girl of ten,
whom I saw giving a cheerless oversight to her baby-brother, I did not
so much marvel at it. She had merely come a little earlier than usual to
the perception of what was to be her business in life. But I admired the
sickly-looking little boy, who did violence to his boyish nature by
making himself the servant of his little sister,--she too small to walk,
and he too small to take her in his arms,--and therefore working a kind
of miracle to transport her from one dirt-heap to another. Beholding
such works of love and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so
impossible, after all, for these neglected children to find a path
through the squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of
heaven. Perhaps there was this latent good in all of them, though
generally they looked brutish, and dull even in their sports; there was
little mirth among them, nor even a fully awakened spirit of
blackguardism. Yet sometimes, again, I saw, with surprise and a sense as
if I had been asleep and dreaming, the bright, intelligent, merry face
of a child whose dark eyes gleamed with vivacious expression through the
dirt that incrusted its skin, like sunshine struggling through a very
dusty window-pane.
In these streets the belted and blue-coated policeman appears seldom in
comparison with the frequency of his occurrence in more reputable
thoroughfares. I used to think that the inhabitants would have ample
time to murder one another, or any stranger, like myself, who might
violate the filthy sanctities of the place, before the law could bring
up its lumbering assistance. Nevertheless, there is a supervision; nor
does the watchfulness of authority permit the populace to be tempted to
any outbreak. Once, in a time of dearth, I noticed a ballad-singer going
through the street hoarsely chanting some discordant strain in a
provincial dialect, of which I could only make out that it addressed the
sensibilities of the auditors on the score of starvation; but by his
side stalked the policeman, offering no interference, but watchful to
hear what this rough minstrel said or sang, and silence him, if his
effusion threatened to prove too soul-stirring. In my judgment, however,
there is little or no danger of that kind: they starve patiently, sicken
patiently, die patiently, not through resignation, but a diseased
flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do mischief to those above them,
it will probably be by the communication of some destructive pestilence;
for, so the medical men affirm, they suffer all the ordinary diseases
with a degree of virulence elsewhere unknown, and keep among themselves
traditionary plagues that have long ceased to afflict more fortunate
societies. Charity herself gathers her robe about her to avoid their
contact. It would be a dire revenge, indeed, if they were to prove their
claims to be reckoned of one blood and nature with the noblest and
wealthiest, by compelling them to inhale death through the diffusion of
their own poverty-poisoned atmosphere.
A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has an unconquerable
dislike to poverty and beggary. Beggars have heretofore been so strange
to an American that he is apt to become their prey, being recognized
through his national peculiarities, and beset by them in the streets.
The English smile at him, and say that there are ample public
arrangements for every pauper's possible need, that street charity
promotes idleness and vice, and that yonder personification of misery on
the pavement will lay up a good day's profit, besides supping more
luxuriously than the dupe who gives him a shilling. By and by the
stranger adopts their theory and begins to practice upon it, much to his
own temporary freedom from annoyance, but not entirely without moral
detriment or sometimes a too late contrition. Years afterwards, it may
be, his memory is still haunted by some vindictive wretch whose cheeks
were pale and hunger-pinched, whose rags fluttered in the east-wind,
whose right arm was paralyzed and his left leg shriveled into a mere
nerveless stick, but whom he passed by remorselessly because an
Englishman chose to say that the fellow's misery looked too perfect, was
too artistically got up, to be genuine. Even allowing this to be true
(as, a hundred chances to one, it was), it would still have been a clear
case of economy to buy him off with a little loose silver, so that his
lamentable figure should not limp at the heels of your conscience all
over the world.[14] To own the truth, I provided myself with several
such imaginary persecutors in England, and recruited their number with
at least one sickly-looking wretch whose acquaintance I first made at
Assisi, in Italy, and, taking a dislike to something sinister in his
aspect, permitted him to beg early and late, and all day long, without
getting a single baiocco. At my latest glimpse of him, the villain
avenged himself, not by a volley of horrible curses as any other Italian
beggar would, but by taking an expression so grief-stricken, want-wrung,
hopeless, and withal resigned, that I could paint his lifelike portrait
at this moment. Were I to go over the same ground again, I would listen
to no man's theories, but buy the little luxury of beneficence at a
cheap rate, instead of doing myself a moral mischief by exuding a stony
incrustation over whatever natural sensibility I might possess.
[14] The natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects
beggars. It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do
ourselves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them.--II. 152.
On the other hand, there were some mendicants whose utmost efforts I
even now felicitate myself on having withstood. Such was a phenomenon
abridged of his lower half, who beset me for two or three years
together, and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members, had
some supernatural method of transporting himself (simultaneously, I
believe) to all quarters of the city. He wore a sailor's jacket
(possibly, because skirts would have been a superfluity to his figure),
and had a remarkably broad-shouldered and muscular frame, surmounted by
a large, fresh-colored face, which was full of power and intelligence.
His dress and linen were the perfection of neatness. Once a day, at
least, wherever I went, I suddenly became aware of this trunk of a man
on the path before me, resting on his base, and looking as if he had
just sprouted out of the pavement, and would sink into it again and
reappear at some other spot the instant you left him behind. The
expression of his eye was perfectly respectful, but terribly fixed,
holding your own as by fascination, never once winking, never wavering
from its point-blank gaze right into your face, till you were completely
beyond the range of his battery of one immense rifled cannon. This was
his mode of soliciting alms; and he reminded me of the old beggar who
appealed so touchingly to the charitable sympathies of Gil Blas, taking
aim at him from the roadside with a long-barreled musket. The intentness
and directness of his silent appeal, his close and unrelenting attack
upon your individuality, respectful as it seemed, was the very flower of
insolence; or, if you give it a possibly truer interpretation, it was
the tyrannical effort of a man endowed with great natural force of
character to constrain your reluctant will to his purpose. Apparently,
he had staked his salvation upon the ultimate success of a daily
struggle between himself and me, the triumph of which would compel me to
become a tributary to the hat that lay on the pavement beside him. Man
or fiend, however, there was a stubbornness in his intended victim which
this massive fragment of a mighty personality had not altogether
reckoned upon, and by its aid I was enabled to pass him at my customary
pace hundreds of times over, quietly meeting his terribly respectful
eye, and allowing him the fair chance which I felt to be his due, to
subjugate me, if he really had the strength for it. He never succeeded,
but, on the other hand, never gave up the contest; and should I ever
walk those streets again, I am certain that the truncated tyrant will
sprout up through the pavement and look me fixedly in the eye, and
perhaps get the victory.[15]
[15] Among the beggars of Liverpool, the hardest to encounter is a man
without any legs, and if I mistake not, likewise deficient in arms. You
see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted half-way out of
the earth, and would sink down and reappear in some other place the
moment he has done with you. His countenance is large, fresh, and very
intelligent; but his great power lies in his fixed gaze, which is
inconceivably difficult to bear. He never once removes his eye from you
till you are quite past his range; and you feel it all the same,
although you do not meet his glance. He is perfectly respectful; but the
intentness and directness of his silent appeal is far worse than any
impudence. In fact, it is the very flower of impudence. I would rather
go a mile about than pass before his battery. I feel wronged by him, and
yet unutterably ashamed. There must be great force in the man to produce
such an effect. There is nothing of the customary squalidness of beggary
about him, but remarkable trimness and cleanliness.--I. 475.
I should think all the more highly of myself, if I had shown equal
heroism in resisting another class of beggarly depredators, who
assailed me on my weaker side and won an easy spoil. Such was the
sanctimonious clergyman, with his white cravat, who visited me with a
subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in a case of
heart-rending distress;--the respectable and ruined tradesman, going
from door to door, shy and silent in his own person, but accompanied by
a sympathizing friend, who bore testimony to his integrity, and stated
the unavoidable misfortunes that had crushed him down;[16]--or the
delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had been bred in affluence, but
was suddenly thrown upon the perilous charities of the world by the
death of an indulgent, but secretly insolvent father, or the commercial
catastrophe and simultaneous suicide of the best of husbands;--or the
gifted, but unsuccessful author, appealing to my fraternal sympathies,
generously rejoicing in some small prosperities which he was kind enough
to term my own triumphs in the field of letters, and claiming to have
largely contributed to them by his unbought notices in the public
journals. England is full of such people, and a hundred other varieties
of peripatetic tricksters, higher than these, and lower, who act their
parts tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive effect. I
knew at once, raw Yankee as I was, that they were humbugs, almost
without an exception,--rats that nibble at the honest bread and cheese
of the community, and grow fat by their petty pilferings,--yet often
gave them what they asked, and privately owned myself a simpleton. There
is a decorum which restrains you (unless you happen to be a
police-constable) from breaking through a crust of plausible
respectability, even when you are certain that there is a knave beneath
it.
[16] It appears to be customary for people of decent station, but in
distressed circumstances, to go round among their neighbors and the
public, accompanied by a friend, who explains the case. I have been
accosted in the street in regard to one of these matters; and to-day
there came to my office a grocer, who had become security for a friend,
and who was threatened with an execution,--with another grocer for
supporter and advocate. The beneficiary takes very little active part in
the affair, merely looking careworn, distressed, and pitiable, and
throwing in a word of corroboration, or a sigh, or an acknowledgment, as
the case may demand.... The whole matter is very foreign to American
habits. No respectable American would think of retrieving his affairs by
such means, but would prefer ruin ten times over; no friend would take
up his cause; no public would think it worth while to prevent the small
catastrophe. And yet the custom is not without its good side, as
indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient sense of
neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we are
more careless of a fellow-creature's ruin, because ruin with us is by no
means the fatal and irretrievable event that it is in England.--I. 543.
After making myself as familiar as I decently could with the poor
streets, I became curious to see what kind of a home was provided for
the inhabitants at the public expense, fearing that it must needs be a
most comfortless one, or else their choice (if choice it were) of so
miserable a life outside was truly difficult to account for.
Accordingly, I visited a great almshouse, and was glad to observe how
unexceptionably all the parts of the establishment were carried on, and
what an orderly life, full-fed, sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed
by the arbitrary exercise of authority, seemed to be led there.
Possibly, indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the cruel necessity
of being neat and clean, and even the comfort resulting from these and
other Christian-like restraints and regulations, that constituted the
principal grievance on the part of the poor, shiftless inmates,
accustomed to a lifelong luxury of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild
life of the streets has perhaps as unforgetable a charm, to those who
have once thoroughly imbibed it, as the life of the forest or the
prairie. But I conceive rather that there must be insuperable
difficulties, for the majority of the poor, in the way of getting
admittance to the almshouse, than that a merely aesthetic preference for
the street would incline the pauper class to fare scantily and
precariously, and expose their raggedness to the rain and snow, when
such a hospitable door stood wide open for their entrance. It might be
that the roughest and darkest side of the matter was not shown me, there
being persons of eminent station and of both sexes in the party which I
accompanied; and, of course, a properly trained public functionary would
have deemed it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to
exhibit anything to people of rank that might too painfully shock their
sensibilities.
The women's ward was the portion of the establishment which we
especially examined. It could not be questioned that they were treated
with kindness as well as care. No doubt, as has been already suggested,
some of them felt the irksomeness of submission to general rules of
orderly behavior, after being accustomed to that perfect freedom from
the minor proprieties, at least, which is one of the compensations of
absolutely hopeless poverty, or of any circumstances that set us fairly
below the decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house whether
he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and order among his inmates;
and he informed me that his troubles among the women were incomparably
greater than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be
quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another in ways that it
was impossible to lay hold of, and to thwart his own authority by the
like intangible methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, and
quite won my regard by so placidly resigning himself to the inevitable
necessity of letting the women throw dust into his eyes. They certainly
looked peaceable and sisterly enough as I saw them, though still it
might be faintly perceptible that some of them were consciously playing
their parts before the governor and his distinguished visitors.
This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for his position. An
American, in an office of similar responsibility, would doubtless be a
much superior person, better educated, possessing a far wider range of
thought, more naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external
observation and a readier faculty of dealing with difficult cases. The
women would not succeed in throwing half so much dust into his eyes.
Moreover, his black coat, and thin, sallow visage, would make him look
like a scholar, and his manners would indefinitely approximate to those
of a gentleman. But I cannot help questioning whether, on the whole,
these higher endowments would produce decidedly better results. The
Englishman was thoroughly plebeian both in aspect and behavior, a bluff,
ruddy-faced, hearty, kindly, yeoman-like personage, with no refinement
whatever, nor any superfluous sensibility, but gifted with a native
wholesomeness of character which must have been a very beneficial
element in the atmosphere of the almshouse. He spoke to his pauper
family in loud, good-humored, cheerful tones, and treated them with a
healthy freedom that probably caused the forlorn wretches to feel as if
they were free and healthy likewise. If he had understood them a little
better, he would not have treated them half so wisely. We are apt to
make sickly people more morbid, and unfortunate people more miserable,
by endeavoring to adapt our deportment to their especial and individual
needs. They eagerly accept our well-meant efforts; but it is like
returning their own sick breath back upon themselves, to be breathed
over and over again, intensifying the inward mischief at every
reception. The sympathy that would really do them good is of a kind that
recognizes their sound and healthy parts, and ignores the part affected
by disease, which will thrive under the eye of a too close observer like
a poisonous weed in the sunshine. My good friend the governor had no
tendencies in the latter direction, and abundance of them in the former,
and was consequently as wholesome and invigorating as the west-wind with
a little spice of the north in it, brightening the dreary visages that
encountered us as if he had carried a sunbeam in his hand. He expressed
himself by his whole being and personality, and by works more than
words, and had the not unusual English merit of knowing what to do much
better than how to talk about it.
[Illustration: _An English Almshouse._]