IV

The compilation of anything like a detailed record of my first two

years in London would be a task to alarm a Zola. I could not possibly

face it; and, if I did, no good end could be served by such a

harrowing of my own feelings.

Such a compilation would be a veritable monument of squalid details;

of details infinitely mean and small, and, for the most part,

infinitely, unredeemedly ugly. Heaven knows I have no need to remind

myself by the act of writing of all those dismal details. Mere

poverty, starvation itself, even, may be lightsome things, by

comparison with the fetid misery which surrounded me during the major

part of those two years.

People say, with a smile or a sigh, as their mood dictates, that one

half the world does not know how the other half lives. So far is that

truism from comprehending the tragic reality of what poverty in London

means, that I have no hesitation in saying this: there is no wider

divergence between the lives of tigers and the lives of men than lies

between the lives of English people, whose homes in some quarters I

could name are separated by no more than the width of a street, a

mews, and, it may be, a walled strip of blackened grass and tree-trunks.

It is not simply that some well-to-do people are ignorant regarding

details of the lives of the poor. It is that not a single one among

the cultivated and comfortably off people, with whom I came to mix

later on, had any conception at all regarding the nature and character

of the sort of life I saw all round me during my first two years in

London. I consider that London's cab horses were substantially better

off than the section of London's poor among whom I lived in places

like South Tottenham, the purlieus of that long unlovely highway--the

Seven Sisters Road.

Had I been of a more gregarious and social bent, the experience must

have broken my heart, or unhinged my mind, I think. But, from the very

first day, I began systematically to avoid intercourse with those

about me; and in time this became more and more important to me. So

much so indeed that, as I remember it, quite a large proportion of my

many changes of lodgings were due to some threatened intimacy, some

difficulty over avoiding a fellow lodger. Other moves were due to

plagues of insects, appalling odours, persistent fighting and

screaming in the next room, wife-beating; in one case a murder; in

another the fact that a sodden wretch smashed my door in, under the

impression that I had hidden his wife, by whose exertions he had

lived, and soaked, for years. I must have removed more than a score of

times in those two years, and more than once it was to seek a cheaper

lodging--cheaper than the previous hell!

No, it would never do for me to attempt a detailed record of this

period. Even consideration of it in outline causes the language of

melodrama to spring to the pen. Melodrama! What drama ever conceived

in the mind of man could plumb the reeking depths of the life of the

vicious among London's poor? Things may be a little better nowadays.

Beyond all question, the way of the aspirant in Grub Street appears

vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they

say--schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort

and another. But with regard to the life of the very poor, of the

submerged, I have seen signs in the twentieth century which to my

experienced eye suggested that no fundamental change had taken place

since I lived among these cruelly debased people.

One would never dare to say it in print, of course, but I know very

well that, while I lived among them, I was perfectly convinced that,

for very many--not for all, of course, but for very many--there could

be no fundamental improvement this side of the grave. For them the

only really suitable and humane institution, I told myself a hundred

times, would be a place of compulsory euthanasia--comfortably equipped

lethal cubicles. For some there would be little need of the compulsory

element. Police court officials (especially the court missionaries,

the only philanthropic workers who earned my admiration; and they, of

course, belonged to a properly organised corps, working on salary)

know something of these people; but the big, bright, busy world of

cleanly, educated folk know less of them than they know of prehistoric

fauna.

I have lived under the same roof with men who beat their wives every

week of their lives, and figured in police courts every month of their

lives, when not in prison; with women who, in their lives, had

swallowed up a dozen small homes, through the pawn-shops and in the

form of gin; with men and women who, so degraded were they, were like

as not to kick an infant as they passed if they saw one on the ground;

with human beings who had fallen so very low that on my honour I had

far liefer share a room with a hog than with one of them. Yes, the

close companionship of swine would have been much less distasteful;

and, be it noted, less unwholesome. I have written articles about

Australian wattle blossom, about the bush and the sea--oh, about a

thousand things!--with nothing more than a few inches of filthy lath

and plaster between my aching head and such human wrecks as these.

'Quite brutal!' one has heard some ignorant innocent exclaim, when

accident gave him a fleeting glimpse of a denizen of the under world.

Brutal! I know something of brutes, and something of London's under

world, and I am well assured no brute known to zoology ever reaches

the loathsome depths touched by humanity's lowest dregs. It would

sicken me to recall instances in proof of this; but I have known

scores of them. The beast brutes have no alcohol. That makes a world

of difference. They are actuated mainly by such cleanly motives as

healthy hunger. They have no nameless vices; and they live in

surroundings which make dirt, as dirt exists among humanity's under

world, impossible. In changing my lodging I have fled from neighbours

who, at times, sheltered acquaintances of whom it might literally be

said that you could not walk upon pavement they had trodden without

risk of physical contamination.

Drink! A man occupied a room next to mine, at one time, of which his

mother was the tenant. Somewhere, I was told, he had at least one

wife, upon whom he sponged, and children. (His kind invariably beget

children, many children.) This man was in middle life, and his mother,

a frail creature, was old. She had some small store of money; enough,

I was told, for the few more months she was likely to live, and to

save her from a pauper funeral. She had some lingering internal

complaint. When the man had finished drinking his mother's little

hoard away, he drove her out of doors--not merely with shameful words,

but with blows--to get work, and earn liquor for him. Incredible as it

seems she did get work, and he did take her earnings, and drink them,

for a number of weeks. Then came the morning when she could not leave

her bed. That week the rest of her furniture was sold, and the son

drank it. On Saturday night he threw his mother from her bed to the

floor, removed the bed and bedding, and drank them. She was dead when

he returned, and on Sunday morning he took from his murdered mother's

body the wedding ring which she, miraculously, had preserved to the

end, and drank that. No one slew him. There was no lethal chamber for

him. He did not even figure in a police court for this particular

murder.

People think _L'Assommoir_ dreadful, horrible. I cannot imagine what

stayed Zola's hand; I am at a loss to account for his astonishing

reticence, if he really knew anything of the worst degradation for

which drink is accountable. In two short years I must have come upon a

score of instances in every respect as horrible as that I have

mentioned. And some that were worse; yes, more vile; too vile to

recall even in thought. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters,

mothers and sons-- Oh! shame and degradation unspeakable! I do not know

if any section of the community is to blame. I do know that the glory

and brightness of life, the romance and the splendour of life--beauty,

chivalry, loyalty, pomp, grandeur, nobility--all have been for ever

robbed of some of their refulgence for me, as the result of two years

in the under world of London. Life could never be quite the same

again.

I stood at the base of a statue and watched the stately passage among

her cheering subjects of the most venerable lady in Christendom. My

very soul thrilled loyalty to Queen Victoria, loyalty that was proud

and glad. And on the instant it was stabbed by the thought of another

widowed mother, flung from the death-bed her worn fingers had toiled

to save, and flung to die on the floor, by her son. The shame of it,

in Christian London!

Were the poor always with us? Probably. But the awful human vermin

that I knew, were they always with us? I doubt it; nay, I do not

believe it. I believe they are part of England's sin, of England's

modern wickedness. I believe they are the maggots bred out of the sore

upon which our modern industrialism is based. When I looked upon the

vilest of this city spawn, if my rising gorge permitted thought at

all, I always had visions of little shrinking children whipped to work

in English factories and mines and potteries; of souls ground out of

anaemic bodies that Manchester might fatten. Free trade--licensed

slaughter! The rights of the individual--the sacred liberty of the

subject! Oh, I know it made England the emporium of the world, and

built up some splendid fortunes, and--well, I believe it gave us the

human vermin of our cities.

There is no cure for them in this world. Nor yet for their damned and

doomed offspring--while the individual liberty shibboleths endure,

while mere numbers rule, or while our degenerate fear of every form of

compulsion lasts. And the present tendency is, not merely to stipulate

for complete freedom of action for the poor wretches, but to invite

them to govern, by count of heads. So marvellously enlightened are we

becoming!

Those nightmarish two years seem a long way off. I must be careful not

to mislead myself regarding them. I have used such phrases as 'The

poor of London.' I think I would delete those phrases if I were

writing for other than my own eyes. I would not pretend that I like

the poor of London, as companions. But they have, as a class, notable

and admirable qualities. And many of the very poorest of them have

more of courage, and more I think of honesty, than the average member

of the class I came to know better later on: the big division which

includes all the professional people. The human wrecks are of the

poor, of course. But the really typical poor people are workers; the

wrecks, their parasites.

Nothing in life is much more remarkable to me than an old man or an

old woman of the poorer working-class, say, in South Tottenham, who,

at the end of a long, struggling life remains decent, honest, cleanly,

upright, and self-respecting. That I think truly marvellous. I am

moved to uncover my head before such an one. The innate decency of

such people thrills me to pride of race, where a naval review or a

procession of royalties would leave me cold. I know something of the

environment in which those English men and women have lived out their

arduous lives. Among them I have seen evidences of a bravery which I

deliberately believe to be greater than any that has won the Victoria

Cross.

I once had a room--which I had to leave because of its closeness to a

noisy street--immediately over a basement in which one old bed-ridden

man and two women lived. The man had been bed-ridden for more than

thirty years, and still was alive; for more than thirty years! His

wife and daughter supported him and themselves. The daughter made

match-boxes, and was paid 2 1/4d. for each gross; but out of that

generous remuneration she had to buy her own paste and thread. The

mother lived over a wash-tub. They all worked, slept, and ate, in the

one room, of course, and the man was never outside it for a moment.

At the time of my arrival in that house, the daughter had recently

taken to her bed. She was a middle-aged woman, far gone in

consumption. It happened that a notorious inebriate, a woman, during

one of her periodical visits to the local police court, told a

missionary about my neighbours. He visited them, and was impressed,

though accustomed to such sights. But he could do nothing to help, it

seemed. They were very proud, and the mother washed very well; so well

that she had work enough to keep her going day and night; and, working

day and night, was able to earn an average of close upon eleven

shillings weekly, of which only four shillings had to be paid in rent,

and a trifle in medicine, soap, fuel, etc., leaving from five to six

shillings a week for the two invalids and herself to live upon. So

there was nothing to worry about, she said. She had stood at the tub

for thirty years, and ...

Well, the missionary spoke to other folk, and other folk were touched,

and finally a lady and a gentleman came, with an ambulance and a

carriage, and twenty golden sovereigns. The old woman's liberty was

not to be interfered with. She herself was to have the spending of the

money. She was to take her patients to the seaside, and rest for a few

weeks, after her thirty years at the tub. I find a difficulty in

setting the thing down, for I can smell the steamy odours of that

basement now.

This remarkable old woman quite civilly declined the gift, and

explained how well she could manage without assistance; proudly adding

that she had no fear of failing in her weekly subscription to the

funeral club, so that her husband was happy in the knowledge that no

pauper funeral awaited him. She was barely sixty-two herself, and had

managed very well these thirty years and more, and trusted, with

thanks, that she would manage to the end without charity.

Argument was futile. So the lady and gentleman drove away with their

bright sovereigns; and when my next removal came the old woman was

still at her tub, the other two helpless ones still on their beds, and

living yet. One need not consider the wild unwisdom of it; but in the

astounding courage and endurance of it, I hold there is lesson and

ensample for the bravest man in British history. And among the working

poor such incidents cannot be very rare, because I knew of quite a

number in my very brief experience.

That the England from whose loins such master men and women have

sprung should have bred also the festering spawn of human vermin that

litters many of the mean streets of London, aye, and the seats in its

parks and gardens, is a tragic humiliation; an indictment, too, as I

see it. Charity may cover a multitude of sins. It can never cover this

running sore; or, if it should ever cover it completely, so much the

worse; for I swear it can never heal, cleanse, or remove it. Nothing

sentimental, personal, and voluntary, nothing sporadic and spasmodic

can ever accomplish that. And to approach it with bleatings about the

will of the people, universal suffrage, old age, or any other kind of

pension, dole, or the like, is to be guilty of a cruel and

contemptible kind of mockery.

V

Looking back across the long succession of crowded years upon the

period of my struggle to obtain a foothold in the London world of

journalism and literature, I see a certain amount of pathos, some

bathos, and something too in the way of steadfast, unmercenary

endurance, which is not altogether unworthy of respect.

In my humble opinion a foothold in that world was at least rather

better worth having in those days than it is to-day for a thinking man

of literary instincts. It was certainly vastly harder to obtain, in

the absence of any influence or assistance from established friends.

Of late years I have met representatives of a type of young journalist

which had not yet come into existence when I arrived in London. In

those days (when the published price of novels was still 31s. 6d., and

halfpenny dailies were unknown) there were three kinds of newspaper

men. There were the hacks, very able fellows, some of them, but mostly

given to bar and taproom life; there were thoroughly well qualified,

widely informed, sober pressmen of the middle sort, who often spent

their whole lives in one employ; and there were literary men,

frequently of high scholarly attainments, who wrote for newspapers.

To-day, there are not very many representatives of these three

divisions. The modern host of journeymen, with their captains, keen

men of business, may represent a great advance upon their

predecessors. Since I am told we live in an age of wonderfully rapid

progress, I suppose they must. They certainly are different. To

realise this fully one has only to come in contact, once, with one of

the few surviving practitioners of the earlier type. They stand out

like trees in--shall I say?--a flower-bed.

Ignorance of journalistic conditions and requirements, combined with a

foolish sort of personal sensitiveness or vanity, had more to do with

my early hardships and difficulties than anything in the quality of my

work. In the light of practical knowledge acquired later I see that I

might with ease have earned at least five times the amount of money I

did earn in those first years by doing about half the amount of work I

did, and--knowing how to dispose of it. I concentrated my entire stock

of youthful energy upon writing and reading, and really worked very

hard indeed. That, I thought, was my business. Some vague, benevolent

power, 'the World,' I suppose, was to see to it that I got my reward.

My part was to do the work. Good work might be trusted to bring its

own reward. And, in any case, I asked no more than that I should be

able to live with decency and go on with my work. I no longer had the

faintest sort of interest in the idea of saving money. That ambition

died with the end of my saving days in Sydney. I never thought about

it at all. It simply had ceased to exist.

Well, my work, as a matter of fact, was not at all bad, and it was

amazingly abundant. I would wager I wrote not less than three hundred

articles, sketches, and stories during my first year, probably more,

and always in the most hostile and unsuitable sort of environments.

And my reward in that first year was slightly less than twenty pounds

sterling, something well below an average of two guineas each month. I

suppose I might have starved in that first year if I had not had some

twenty pounds in hand at the beginning of it. I had not twenty

shillings in hand at the end of it, and yet I had already learned what

hunger meant; not the bracing sensation of being sharp set and

enjoying one's meal, but the dull, deadening, sickly sensation which

comes of sustained work during weeks of bread and butter (or dripping)

diet, and none too much of that.

The devilish thing about an insufficient dietary is that it saps one's

manhood. Few people whose circumstances have been uniformly

comfortable realise that the stomach is the real seat of self-respect,

courage, dignity, good manners, and the higher sort of honour, not to

mention the spirits and emotions. Most would scoff at the suggestion,

of course, feeling that it showed the low nature of the suggester. And

the thing of it is they cannot possibly test the truth of it. For,

given an average share of self-control and will-power, any educated

person can starve him or herself for a week or more, deliberately and

of set purpose, without much inconvenience, with no difficulty, and no

loss of self-respect.

It is starvation, or semi-starvation _from necessity_, combined with a

hard-working routine of life, and without the soul-supporting

knowledge that one can stop and order a good meal whenever one

chooses; it is continuous and enforced lack of proper nutriment,

endured throughout sustained and unsuccessful efforts to overcome the

poverty that enforces it, that tells upon one's humanity and coarsens

the fibre of one's personality. There is a certain sustaining

exhilaration about voluntary abstinence from food, due to the

contemplation of one's mind's mastery. The reverse is true of the

hunger due to the unsuccess of one's efforts to obtain the wherewithal

to get better food and more of it.

Poverty is a teacher, a most powerful schoolmaster, I freely grant.

But the most of the lessons it teaches are lessons I had liefer not

learn. As a teacher its one vehicle of instruction is the cane. First,

it weakens and humiliates the pupil; and then, at every turn, it beats

him, teaching him to walk with cowering shoulders, furtive eyes, a

sour and suspicious mind. I have no good word to say for poverty; and

I believe an insufficient dietary to be infernally bad for any

one--worse, upon the whole, than an over-abundant one--and especially so

for young men or women who are striving to produce original work.

I have heard veterans criticise their sleek juniors, with a round

assertion that if these youngsters had had to fight their way on a

crust, as the veteran said he did, they would be vastly better men for

it. I do not believe it. Hard work, and even disappointment and loss,

are doubtless rich in educational and disciplinary values; but not

that wolfish, soul-crushing fight for insufficient food, not mere

poverty. I have tried them, and I know.

Every day a procession of more or less battered veterans in life's

fight straggles across the floors of the police courts, from waiting-room

to dock and dock to cells. 'How extraordinarily vicious the poor

are!' says some shallow observer. In reality, a very large proportion

of these battered ones are there as drinkers. And, in any case, the

whole of them put together (including the many who require not penal

but medical treatment), supposing they were all viciously criminal--all

violent thieves, say--what a tiny handful they represent of the

poor of London!

The enormous majority of the poor never set foot in a police court.

And yet, for one who knows anything of the conditions in which they

live, how marvellous that is! Most educated people, after all, go

through life, from cradle to grave, without once experiencing any

really strong temptation to break the law of the land. The very poor

are hardly ever free from such temptation; hardly ever free from it. I

know. I, with all the advantages behind me of traditions,

associations, memories, hopes, knowledge, and tastes, to which most

very poor people are strangers, I have felt my fingers itch, my

stomach crave woundily, as I passed along a mean street in which

food-stuffs were exposed outside shop windows; a practice which, upon a

variety of counts, ought long since to have been abolished by law.

Oh, the decency, the restraint, and the enduring law-abidingness of

London's poor, in the face of continuously flaunting plenty, of gross

ostentation! It is the greatest miracle of our time. The comparative

absence of either religion or philosophy among them to-day makes the

spectacle of their docility, to me, far more remarkable than anything

in the history of mediaeval martyrdom. When I come to consider also

the prodigiously irritant influences of modern life in its

legislation, journalism, amusements, swift locomotion, and, not least,

its education for the masses, then I see wireless telegraphy and such

things as trifles, and the abiding self-restraint of the very poor as

our greatest marvel.