Ought one to give money to a hand-organist, who is manifestly making
himself a nuisance before the door of some one else? I have asked
myself this when I have been tempted, and I am not yet quite clear
about it. At present, therefore, I give only to the inaudible street
minstrels, who earn an honest living, and make no noise about it. I
cannot think that a ballad-singer on Sixth Avenue, who pours forth his
artless lay amid the roar and rattle of the elevated trains, the jangle
and clatter of the horse-cars, the bang of the grocers’ carts, and the
thunder of the express-wagons, is practically molesting anybody; and
I believe that one can reward his innocent efforts without wronging
his neighbors. It is always amusing to have him stop in his most
effective phrase to say, “Thank you, thank you, sir,” and then go on
again. The other day, as I dropped my contribution into the extended
hat, I asked, “How is business?” and the singer interrupted himself to
answer, “Nothing-to-brag-of-sir-thank-you,” and resumed with continuous
tenderness the “ditty of no tone” that he was piping to the inattentive
uproar of the street.
It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not making himself heard
is earning his money; but, on the other hand, it may be asked if he
is not less regrettable for that reason. A great many good people do
not earn their money, and yet by universal consent they seem to have a
right to it. We cannot oblige the poor to earn their money, any more
than the rich, without attacking the principle on which society is
based, and classing ourselves with its enemies. If people get money
out of other people, we ought not to ask how they get it, whether it
is much or little; and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the
honesty of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will I
question the gains of those silentious minstrels who grind small, mute
organs at the corners of the pavement, with a little tin cup beside
them to receive tribute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose
Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively anything. How they
can sit upon the cold stone all day long without taking their deaths,
passes me to say; and I am inclined to think that they do really earn
their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments of human endurance.
The average American grandmother would sneeze in five seconds, under
the same conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. But
these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or wet, light or dark.
One night I came upon one sleeping on her curbstone,--such a small,
dull wad of out-worn womanhood!--her gray old head bent upon her knees,
and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. It was very chill that
night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department
had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her
trying to imagine her short and simple annals; a dim, far-off childhood
in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood
with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains--the whole round of
woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this last result of
houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more--if,
indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! I sighed, as
people of feeling used to do in the eighteenth century, and dropped a
dime into the tin cup. The sound startled the beldame, and I hope that
before she woke and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and
luxury for the rest of her life. “_Bella musica!_” I said, with a fine
irony, and she smiled and shrugged, and began to feel for the handle of
her organ, as if she were willing to begin giving me my money’s worth
on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day how impossible
they would seem!