Becoming an inhabitant of a great English town, I often turned aside from
the prosperous thoroughfares, (where the edifices, the shops, and the
bustling crowd differed not so much from scenes with which I was familiar
in my own country,) and went designedly astray among precincts that
reminded me of some of Dickens's grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses
of a people and a mode of life that were comparatively new to my
observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceedingly
undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular interest and even
fascination in its ugliness.
Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the world, being the
symbolic accompaniment of the foul incrustation which began to settle over
and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple; ever
since which hapless epoch, her daughters have chiefly been engaged in a
desperate and unavailing struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of a
poverty-stricken English street is a monstrosity unknown on our side of
the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own limits, and is
inconceivable everywhere beyond them. We enjoy the great advantage, that
the brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep everything clean that
the sun shines upon, converting the larger portion of our impurities into
transitory dust which the next wind can sweep away, in contrast with the
damp, adhesive grime that incorporates itself with all surfaces (unless
continually and painfully cleansed) in the chill moisture of the English
air. Then the all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly intermingled
with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous coal, hovering overhead,
descending, and alighting on pavements and rich architectural fronts, on
the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's starched collars and
shirt-bosoms, invests even the better streets in a half-mourning garb. It
is beyond the resources of Wealth to keep the smut away from its premises
or its own fingers' ends; and as for Poverty, it surrenders itself to the
dark influence without a struggle. Along with disastrous circumstances,
pinching need, adversity so lengthened out as to constitute the rule of
life, there comes a certain chill depression of the spirits which seems
especially to shudder at cold water. In view of so wretched a state of
things, we accept the ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated
phenomenon, but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing
less than such a general washing-day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly
old world of its moral and material dirt.
Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the
vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of
gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who
haunt there. Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or
broken-nosed tea-pots, or any such make-shift receptacle, to get a little
poison or madness for their parents, who deserve no better requital at
their hands for having engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter
at noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions of both sexes,
stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together, and quaffing off the
mixture with a relish. As for the men, they lounge there continually,
drinking till they are drunken,--drinking as long as they have a halfpenny
left, and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be
wrought in their pockets, so as to enable them to be drunken again. Most
of these establishments have a significant advertisement of "Beds,"
doubtless for the accommodation of their customers in the interval between
one intoxication and the next. I never could find it in my heart, however,
utterly to condemn these sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I
had some better consolation to offer before depriving them of their dram
of gin, though death itself were in the glass; for methought their poor
souls needed such fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out of the
smothering squalor of both their outward and interior life, giving them
glimpses and suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of a spiritual
existence that limited their present misery. The temperance-reformers
unquestionably derive their commission from the Divine Beneficence, but
have never been taken fully into its counsels. All may not be lost, though
those good men fail.
Pawn-brokers' establishments, distinguished by the mystic symbol of the
three golden balls, were conveniently accessible; though what personal
property these wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated
in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a problem
that still perplexes me. Old clothes-men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and
hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were butchers'
shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such
generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market,
no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or muttons ornamented
with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a
peculiarly British style of art,--not these, but bits and gobbets of lean
meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels, bare
bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver, tripe, liver, bullocks'
feet, or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the smallest lots.
I am afraid that even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly
oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other little shops you saw half
a dozen wizened herrings, some eggs in a basket, looking so dingily
antique that your imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, segments
of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now and then a sturdy
milk-woman passed by with a wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a
pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which
was water and chalk and the milk of a sickly cow, who gave the best she
had, poor thing! but could scarcely make it rich or wholesome, spending
her life in some close city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have
seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one of these streets with
panniers full of vegetables, and departing with a return cargo of what
looked like rubbish and street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to
exist, except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a
worked collar, or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully
cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those regions,
with their wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own seats right in
the carriage-way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples,
toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of
crockery, and little plates of oysters,--knitting patiently all day long,
and removing their undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All
indispensable importations from other quarters of the town were on a
remarkably diminutive scale: for example, the wealthier inhabitants
purchased their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by the
peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy spectacle, when an overladen
coal-cart happened to pass through the street and drop a handful or two of
its burden in the mud, to see half a dozen women and children scrambling
for the treasure-trove, like a dock of hens and chickens gobbling up some
spilt corn. In this connection I may as well mention a commodity of boiled
snails (for such they appeared to me, though probably a marine production)
which used to be peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an article of
cheap nutriment.
The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the side-walks
and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life, the
unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule,
and the street be the one locality in which every scene and incident
should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot, conspiracies for
robbery and murder, family difficulties or agreements,--all such matters,
I doubt not, are constantly discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed
saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the
disadvantages of the English climate, the only comfortable or wholesome
part of life, for the city-poor, must be spent in the open air. The
stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night, whole families and
neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one another in the day-time, when
a settled rain drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is
worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit into one's
imagination. No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery of
their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of
their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife,
before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage;
while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the
common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that
they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It might
almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul, to observe how
Nature has flung these little wretches into the street and left them
there, so evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind
acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they
are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine? And
how difficult to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immortal
growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into this
cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I beheld the scene, it affected
me with surprise and loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I used to turn over a
plank or an old log that had long lain on the damp ground, and found a
vivacious multitude of unclean and devilish-looking insects scampering to
and fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed as much
prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous bugs and many-footed
worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of all our
heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward
to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child along with it,
and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives.
Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual of us can
reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it. The whole question of
eternity is staked there. If a single one of those helpless little ones be
lost, the world is lost!
The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their catlike rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with
the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it being too
precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit
on the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will
glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because
the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it to be in the
happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity
(all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclination
to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding herself on the
pretty ways of her ragged and skinny infant, just as a young matron might,
when she invites her lady-friends to admire her plump, white-robed darling
in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly characteristic seemed to have
altogether perished out of these poor souls. It was the very same creature
whose tender torments make the rapture of our young days, whom we love,
cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life and death, and whom we delight
to see beautify her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels,
though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit
for her to handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups
round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious
earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest,
sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and
another's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed,
and breaking into small feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and
jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of her
silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a
well-bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of
good-breeding, even here. It often surprised me to witness a courtesy and
deference among these ragged folks, which, having seen it, I did not
thoroughly believe in, wondering whence it should have come. I am
persuaded, however, that there were laws of intercourse which they never
violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the common staircase, the
doorstep, and the pavement, which perhaps had as deep a foundation in
natural fitness as the code of the drawing-room.
Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been uttering folly in the last
two sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of
feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's novels.
For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and, for no
reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his
ears,--an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, only snatching
the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where a sharp tongue
will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their
finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a
resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All English
people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than ourselves
by this simple and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter
one another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of English ladies (for
instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week) will be
satisfied that their belligerent propensities are kept in abeyance only by
a merciless rigor on the part of society. It requires a vast deal of
refinement to spiritualize their large physical endowments. Such being the
case with the delicate ornaments of the drawing-room, it is the less to be
wondered at that women who live mostly in the open air, amid the coarsest
kind of companionship and occupation, should carry on the intercourse of
life with a freedom unknown to any class of American females, though
still, I am resolved to think, compatible with a generous breadth of
natural propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them (of all ages, even
elderly, as well as infants that could just toddle across the street
alone) going about in the mud and mire, or through the dusky snow and
slosh of a severe week in winter, with petticoats high uplifted above
bare, red feet and legs; but I was comforted by observing that both shoes
and stockings generally reappeared with better weather, having been
thriftily kept out of the damp for the convenience of dry feet within
doors. Their hardihood was wonderful, and their strength greater than
could have been expected from such spare diet as they probably lived upon.
I have seen them carrying on their heads great burdens under which they
walked as freely as if they were fashionable bonnets; or sometimes the
burden was huge enough almost to cover the whole person, looked at from
behind,--as in Tuscan villages you may see the girls coming in from the
country with great bundles of green twigs upon their backs, so that they
resemble locomotive masses of verdure and fragrance. But these poor
English women seemed to be laden with rubbish, incongruous and
indescribable, such as bones and rags, the sweepings of the house and of
the street, a merchandise gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown
away, a heap of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's bundle of sin.
Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain gracefulness among 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 imitative; 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-ten-dom, 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 door-step, 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 coziest little sitting-room, where
the tea-kettle 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
foot-steps, 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 foreshadowings 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, care-worn,
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 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 spread 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 practise 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 shrivelled 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. 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 life-like 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.
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-barrelled 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.
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;--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.
* * * * *
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 life-long luxury
of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild life of the streets has perhaps as
unforgettable 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 repetition. 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.
The women, I imagine, must have felt one imperfection in their state,
however comfortable otherwise. They were forbidden, or, at all events,
lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning
themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns,
with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally, too,
they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly
alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few
of these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native American
population, individuals of whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mixing
as we do, no drop of gentle blood has contributed to refine the turbid
element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has lighted up the stolid
eyes, which their forefathers brought from the Old Country. Even in this
English almshouse, however, there was at least one person who claimed to
be intimately connected with rank and wealth. The governor, after
suggesting that this person would probably be gratified by our visit,
ushered us into a small parlor, which was furnished a little more like a
room in a private dwelling than others that we entered, and had a row of
religious books and fashionable novels on the mantel-piece. An old lady
sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance, and rose to receive us with
a certain pomp of manner and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy,
which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the genuineness of
her aristocratic pretensions. But, at any rate, she looked like a
respectable old soul, and was evidently gladdened to the very core of her
frostbitten heart by the awful punctiliousness with which we responded to
her gracious and hospitable, though unfamiliar welcome. After a little
polite conversation, we retired; and the governor, with a lowered voice
and an air of deference, told us that she had been a lady of quality, and
had ridden in her own equipage, not many years before, and now lived in
continual expectation that some of her rich relatives would drive up in
their carriages to take her away. Meanwhile, he added, she was treated
with great respect by her fellow-paupers. I could not help thinking, from
a few criticisable peculiarities in her talk and manner, that there might
have been a mistake on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial
exaggeration on the old lady's, concerning her former position in society;
but what struck me was the forcible instance of that most prevalent of
English vanities, the pretension to aristocratic connection, on one side,
and the submission and reverence with which it was accepted by the
governor and his household, on the other. Among ourselves, I think, when
wealth and eminent position have taken their departure, they seldom leave
a pallid ghost behind them,--or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few
recognize it.
We went into several other rooms, at the doors of which, pausing on the
outside, we could hear the volubility, and sometimes the wrangling, of the
female inhabitants within, but invariably found silence and peace when we
stepped over the threshold. The women were grouped together in their
sitting-rooms, sometimes three or four, sometimes a larger number,
classified by their spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all busied, so
far as I can remember, with the one occupation of knitting coarse yarn
stockings. Hardly any of them, I am sorry to say, had a brisk or cheerful
air, though it often stirred them up to a momentary vivacity to be
accosted by the governor, and they seemed to like being noticed, however
slightly, by the visitors. The happiest person whom I saw there (and,
running hastily through my experiences, I hardly recollect to have seen a
happier one in my life, if you take a careless flow of spirits as
happiness) was an old woman that lay in bed among ten or twelve
heavy-looking females, who plied their knitting-work round about her. She
laughed, when we entered, and immediately began a talk to us, in a thin,
little, spirited quaver, claiming to be more than a century old; and the
governor (in whatever way he happened to be cognizant of the fact)
confirmed her age to be a hundred and four. Her jauntiness and cackling
merriment were really wonderful. It was as if she had got through with all
her actual business in life two or three generations ago, and now, freed
from every responsibility for herself or others, had only to keep up a
mirthful state of mind till the short time, or long time, (and, happy as
she was, she appeared not to care whether it were long or short,) before
Death, who had misplaced her name in his list, might remember to take her
away. She had gone quite round the circle of human existence, and come
back to the play-ground again. And so she had grown to be a kind of
miraculous old pet, the plaything of people seventy or eighty years
younger than herself, who talked and laughed with her as if she were a
child, finding great delight in her wayward and strangely playful
responses, into some of which she cunningly conveyed a gibe that caused
their ears to tingle a little. She had done getting out of bed in this
world, and lay there to be waited upon like a queen or a baby.
In the same room sat a pauper who had once been an actress of considerable
repute, but was compelled to give up her profession by a softening of the
brain. The disease seemed to have stolen the continuity out of her life,
and disturbed all healthy relationship between the thoughts within her and
the world without. On our first entrance, she looked cheerfully at us, and
showed herself ready to engage in conversation; but suddenly, while we
were talking with the century-old crone, the poor actress began to weep,
contorting her face with extravagant stage-grimaces, and wringing her
hands for some inscrutable sorrow. It might have been a reminiscence of
actual calamity in her past life, or, quite as probably, it was but a
dramatic woe, beneath which she had staggered and shrieked and wrung her
hands with hundreds of repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres, and
been as often comforted by thunders of applause. But my idea of the
mystery was, that she had a sense of wrong in seeing the aged woman (whose
empty vivacity was like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as
the central object of interest to the visitors, while she herself, who had
agitated thousands of hearts with a breath, sat starving for the
admiration that was her natural food. I appeal to the whole society of
artists of the Beautiful and the Imaginative,--poets, romancers, painters,
sculptors, actors,--whether or no this is a grief that may be felt even
amid the torpor of a dissolving brain!
We looked into a good many sleeping-chambers, where were rows of beds,
mostly calculated for two occupants, and provided with sheets and
pillow-cases that resembled sackcloth. It appeared to me that the sense of
beauty was insufficiently regarded in all the arrangements of the
almshouse; a little cheap luxury for the eye, at least, might do the poor
folks a substantial good. But, at all events, there was the beauty of
perfect neatness and orderliness, which, being heretofore known to few of
them, was perhaps as much as they could well digest in the remnant of
their lives. We were invited into the laundry, where a great washing and
drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous with
the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the
pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state,
and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the
strange element into our inmost being. Had the Queen been there, I know
not how she could have escaped the necessity. What an intimate brotherhood
is this in which we dwell, do what we may to put an artificial remoteness
between the high creature and the low one! A poor man's breath, borne on
the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, floats into a palace-window and reaches the
nostrils of a monarch. It is but an example, obvious to the sense, of the
innumerable and secret channels by which, at every moment of our lives,
the flow and reflux of a common humanity pervade us all. How superficial
are the niceties of such as pretend to keep aloof! Let the whole world be
cleansed, or not a man or woman of us all can be clean.
By-and-by we came to the ward where the children were kept, on entering
which, we saw, in the first place, several unlovely and unwholesome little
people lazily playing together in a court-yard. And here a singular
incommodity befell one member of our party. Among the children was a
wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, (about six years old, perhaps,
but I know not whether a girl or a boy,) with a humor in its eyes and
face, which the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared to bedim
its powers of vision, so that it toddled about gropingly, as if in quest
of it did not precisely know what. This child--this sickly, wretched,
humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it
must have required several generations of guilty progenitors to render so
pitiable an object as we beheld it--immediately took an unaccountable
fancy to the gentleman just hinted at. It prowled about him like a pet
kitten, rubbing against his legs, following everywhere at his heels,
pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all the speed that its
poor limbs were capable of, got directly before him and held forth its
arms, mutely insisting on being taken up. It said not a word, being
perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle. But it smiled up in his
face,--a sort of woful gleam was that smile, through the sickly blotches
that covered its features,--and found means to express such a perfect
confidence that it was going to be fondled and made much of, that there
was no possibility in a human heart of balking its expectation. It was as
if God had promised the poor child this favor on behalf of that
individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract, or else no longer
call himself a man among men. Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for
him to do, he being a person burdened with more than an Englishman's
customary reserve, shy of actual contact with human beings, afflicted with
a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, and, furthermore, accustomed to
that habit of observation from an insulated stand-point which is said
(but, I hope, erroneously) to have the tendency of putting ice into the
blood.
So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and am
seriously of opinion that he did an heroic act, and effected more than he
dreamed of towards his final salvation, when he took up the loathsome
child and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. To be
sure, we all smiled at him, at the time, but doubtless would have acted
pretty much the same in a similar stress of circumstances. The child, at
any rate, appeared to be satisfied with his behavior; for when he had held
it a considerable time, and set it down, it still favored him with its
company, keeping fast hold of his forefinger till we reached the confines
of the place. And on our return through the court-yard, after visiting
another part of the establishment, here again was this same little
Wretchedness waiting for its victim, with a smile of joyful, and yet dull
recognition about its scabby mouth and in its rheumy eyes. No doubt, the
child's mission in reference to our friend was to remind him that he was
responsible, in his degree, for all the sufferings and misdemeanors of the
world in which he lived, and was not entitled to look upon a particle of
its dark calamity as if it were none of his concern: the offspring of a
brother's iniquity being his own blood-relation, and the guilt, likewise,
a burden on him, unless he expiated it by better deeds.
All the children in this ward seemed to be invalids, and, going up-stairs,
we found more of them in the same or a worse condition than the little
creature just described, with their mothers (or more probably other women,
for the infants were mostly foundlings) in attendance as nurses. The
matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, remarkably kind and motherly in
aspect, was walking to and fro across the chamber--on that weary journey
in which careful mothers and nurses travel so continually and so far, and
gain never a step of progress--with an unquiet baby in her arms. She
assured us that she enjoyed her occupation, being exceedingly fond of
children; and, in fact, the absence of timidity in all the little people
was a sufficient proof that they could have had no experience of harsh
treatment, though, on the other hand, none of them appeared to be
attracted to one individual more than another. In this point they differed
widely from the poor child below-stairs. They seemed to recognize a
universal motherhood in womankind, and cared not which individual might be
the mother of the moment. I found their tameness as shocking as did
Alexander Selkirk that of the brute subjects of his else solitary kingdom.
It was a sort of tame familiarity, a perfect indifference to the approach
of strangers, such as I never noticed in other children. I accounted for
it partly by their nerveless, unstrung state of body, incapable of the
quick thrills of delight and fear which play upon the lively harp-strings
of a healthy child's nature, and partly by their woful lack of
acquaintance with a private home, and their being therefore destitute of
the sweet homebred shyness, which is like the sanctity of heaven about a
mother-petted child. Their condition was like that of chickens hatched in
an oven, and growing up without the especial guardianship of a matron-hen:
both the chicken and the child, methinks, must needs want something that
is essential to their respective characters.
In this chamber (which was spacious, containing a large number of beds)
there was a clear fire burning on the hearth, as in all the other occupied
rooms; and directly in front of the blaze sat a woman holding a baby,
which, beyond all reach of comparison, was the most horrible object that
ever afflicted my sight. Days afterwards--nay, even now, when I bring it
up vividly before my mind's eye--it seemed to lie upon the floor of my
heart, polluting my moral being with the sense of something grievously
amiss in the entire conditions of humanity. The holiest man could not be
otherwise than full of wickedness, the chastest virgin seemed impure, in a
world where such a babe was possible. The governor whispered me, apart,
that, like nearly all the rest of them, it was the child of unhealthy
parents. Ah, yes! There was the mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous
mockery of the visible link which Love creates between man and woman, was
born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful Disease
its mother, and their offspring lay in the woman's arms like a nursing
Pestilence, which, could it live to grow up, would make the world a more
accursed abode than ever heretofore. Thank Heaven, it could not live! This
baby, if we must give it that sweet name, seemed to be three or four
months old, but, being such an unthrifty changeling, might have been
considerably older. It was all covered with blotches, and preternaturally
dark and discolored; it was withered away, quite shrunken and fleshless;
it breathed only amid pantings and gaspings, and moaned painfully at every
gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was the evident impossibility of
its surviving to draw many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; and
it would have been infinitely less heart-depressing to see it die, right
before my eyes, than to depart and carry it alive in my remembrance, still
suffering the incalculable torture of its little life. I can by no means
express how horrible this infant was, neither ought I to attempt it. And
yet I must add one final touch. Young as the poor little creature was, its
pain and misery had endowed it with a premature intelligence, insomuch
that its eyes seemed to stare at the by-standers out of their sunken
sockets knowingly and appealingly, as if summoning us one and all to
witness the deadly wrong of its existence. At least, I so interpreted its
look, when it positively met and responded to my own awe-stricken gaze,
and therefore I lay the case, as far as I am able, before mankind, on whom
God has imposed the necessity to suffer in soul and body till this dark
and dreadful wrong be righted.
Thence we went to the school-rooms, which were underneath the chapel. The
pupils, like the children whom we had just seen, were, in large
proportion, foundlings. Almost without exception, they looked sickly, with
marks of eruptive trouble in their doltish faces, and a general tendency
to diseases of the eye. Moreover, the poor little wretches appeared to be
uneasy within their skins, and screwed themselves about on the benches in
a disagreeably suggestive way, as if they had inherited the evil habits of
their parents as an innermost garment of the same texture and material as
the shirt of Nessus, and must wear it with unspeakable discomfort as long
as they lived. I saw only a single child that looked healthy; and on my
pointing him out, the governor informed me that this little boy, the sole
exception to the miserable aspect of his school-fellows, was not a
foundling, nor properly a workhouse child, being born of respectable
parentage, and his father one of the officers of the institution. As for
the remainder,--the hundred pale abortions to be counted against one
rosy-cheeked boy,--what shall we say or do? Depressed by the sight of so
much misery, and uninventive of remedies for the evils that force
themselves on my perception, I can do little more than recur to the idea
already hinted at in the early part of this article, regarding the speedy
necessity of a new deluge. So far as these children are concerned, at any
rate, it would be a blessing to the human race, which they will contribute
to enervate and corrupt,--a greater blessing to themselves, who inherit no
patrimony but disease and vice, and in whose souls if there be a spark of
God's life, this seems the only possible mode of keeping it aglow,--if
every one of them could be drowned to-night, by their best friends,
instead of being put tenderly to bed. This heroic method of treating human
maladies, moral and material, is certainly beyond the scope of man's
discretionary rights, and probably will not be adopted by Divine
Providence until the opportunity of milder reformation shall have been
offered us, again and again, through a series of future ages.
It may be fair to acknowledge that the humane and excellent governor, as
well as other persons better acquainted with the subject than myself, took
a less gloomy view of it, though still so dark a one as to involve scanty
consolation. They remarked that individuals of the male sex, picked up in
the streets and nurtured in the work-house, sometimes succeed tolerably
well in life, because they are taught trades before being turned into the
world, and, by dint of immaculate behavior and good luck, are not unlikely
to get employment and earn a livelihood. The case is different with the
girls. They can only go to service, and are invariably rejected by
families of respectability on account of their origin, and for the better
reason of their unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the meanest
situations in a well-ordered English household. Their resource is to take
service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom
they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious
lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their
best estate, they do but pick their slimy way on stepping-stones.
From the schools we went to the bakehouse, and the brew-house, (for such
cruelty is not harbored in the heart of a true Englishman as to deny a
pauper his daily allowance of beer,) and through the kitchens, where we
beheld an immense pot over the fire, surging and walloping with some kind
of a savory stew that filled it up to its brim. We also visited a tailor's
shop and a shoemaker's shop, in both of which a number of men, and pale,
diminutive apprentices, were at work, diligently enough, though seemingly
with small heart in the business. Finally, the governor ushered us into a
shed, inside of which was piled up an immense quantity of new coffins.
They were of the plainest description, made of pine boards, probably of
American growth, not very nicely smoothed by the plane, neither painted
nor stained with black, but provided with a loop of rope at either end for
the convenience of lifting the rude box and its inmate into the cart that
shall carry them to the burial-ground. There, in holes ten feet deep, the
paupers are buried one above another, mingling their relics
indistinguishably. In another world may they resume their individuality,
and find it a happier one than here!
As we departed, a character came under our notice which I have met with in
all almshouses, whether of the city or village, or in England or America.
It was the familiar simpleton, who shuffled across the court-yard,
clattering his wooden-soled shoes, to greet us with a howl or a laugh, I
hardly know which, holding out his hand for a penny, and chuckling grossly
when it was given him. All underwitted persons, so far as my experience
goes, have this craving for copper coin, and appear to estimate its value
by a miraculous instinct, which is one of the earliest gleams of human
intelligence while the nobler faculties are yet in abeyance. There may
come a time, even in this world, when we shall all understand that our
tendency to the individual appropriation of gold and broad acres, fine
houses, and such good and beautiful things as are equally enjoyable by a
multitude, is but a trait of imperfectly developed intelligence, like the
simpleton's cupidity of a penny. When that day dawns,--and probably not
till then,--I imagine that there will be no more poor streets nor need of
almshouses.
I was once present at the wedding of some poor English people, and was
deeply impressed by the spectacle, though by no means with such proud and
delightful emotions as seem to have affected all England on the recent
occasion of the marriage of its Prince. It was in the Cathedral at
Manchester, a particularly black and grim old structure, into which I had
stepped to examine some ancient and curious wood-carvings within the
choir. The woman in attendance greeted me with a smile, (which always
glimmers forth on the feminine visage, I know not why, when a wedding is
in question,) and asked me to take a seat in the nave till some poor
parties were married, it being the Easter holidays, and a good time for
them to marry, because no fees would be demanded by the clergyman. I sat
down accordingly, and soon the parson and his clerk appeared at the altar,
and a considerable crowd of people made their entrance at a side-door, and
ranged themselves in a long, huddled line across the chancel. They were my
acquaintances of the poor streets, or persons in a precisely similar
condition of life, and were now come to their marriage-ceremony in just
such garbs as I had always seen them wear: the men in their loafers'
coats, out at elbows, or their laborers' jackets, defaced with grimy toil;
the women drawing their shabby shawls tighter about their shoulders, to
hide the raggedness beneath; all of them unbrushed, unshaven, unwashed,
uncombed, and wrinkled with penury and care; nothing virgin-like in the
brides, nor hopeful or energetic in the bridegrooms;--they were, in short,
the mere rags and tatters of the human race, whom some east-wind of evil
omen, howling along the streets, had chanced to sweep together into an
unfragrant heap. Each and all of them, conscious of his or her individual
misery, had blundered into the strange miscalculation of supposing that
they could lessen the sum of it by multiplying it into the misery of
another person. All the couples (and it was difficult, in such a confused
crowd, to compute exactly their number) stood up at once, and had
execution done upon them in the lump, the clergyman addressing only small
parts of the service to each individual pair, but so managing the larger
portion as to include the whole company without the trouble of repetition.
By this compendious contrivance, one would apprehend, he came dangerously
near making every man and woman the husband or wife of every other; nor,
perhaps, would he have perpetrated much additional mischief by the
mistake; but, after receiving a benediction in common, they assorted
themselves in their own fashion, as they only knew how, and departed to
the garrets, or the cellars, or the unsheltered street-corners, where
their honeymoon and subsequent lives were to be spent. The parson smiled
decorously, the clerk and the sexton grinned broadly, the female attendant
tittered almost aloud, and even the married parties seemed to see
something exceedingly funny in the affair; but for my part, though
generally apt enough to be tickled by a joke, I laid it away in my memory
as one of the saddest sights I ever looked upon.
Not very long afterwards, I happened to be passing the same venerable
Cathedral, and heard a clang of joyful bells, and beheld a bridal party
coming down the steps towards a carriage and four horses, with a portly
coachman and two postilions, that waited at the gate. The bridegroom's
mien had a sort of careless and kindly English pride; the bride floated
along in her white drapery, a creature so nice and delicate that it was a
luxury to see her, and a pity that her silk slippers should touch anything
so grimy as the old stones of the church-yard avenue. The crowd of ragged
people, who always cluster to witness what they may of an aristocratic
wedding, broke into audible admiration of the bride's beauty and the
bridegroom's manliness, and uttered prayers and ejaculations (possibly
paid for in alms) for the happiness of both. If the most favorable of
earthly conditions could make them happy, they had every prospect of it.
They were going to live on their abundance in one of those stately and
delightful English homes, such as no other people ever created or
inherited, a hall set far and safe within its own private grounds, and
surrounded with venerable trees, shaven lawns, rich shrubbery, and
trimmest pathways, the whole so artfully contrived and tended that summer
rendered it a paradise, and even winter would hardly disrobe it of its
beauty; and all this fair property seemed more exclusively and inalienably
their own, because of its descent through many forefathers, each of whom
had added an improvement or a charm, and thus transmitted it with a
stronger stamp of rightful possession to his heir. And is it possible,
after all, that there may be a flaw in the title-deeds? Is, or is not, the
system wrong that gives one married pair so immense a superfluity of
luxurious home, and shuts out a million others from any home whatever? One
day or another, safe as they deem themselves, and safe as the hereditary
temper of the people really tends to make them, the gentlemen of England
will be compelled to face this question.
* * * * *