Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy
ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication
with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;
there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a
reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;
a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a
purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or
sign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or
a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and
breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to
you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it. But
the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no
recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in
his direction, and never a word to excuse you.
Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the
beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning." When
complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but
what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with
more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of
manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To the
simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a
striking thing; it is significant of so much.
Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible
act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste
answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. An
elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral
_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain
number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally
translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
she naturally puts into the feminine.
Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to
English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman
who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot
recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all
speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached,
and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect
"familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman
could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity
of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so
complete the character of the sentence.
The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of
excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere in
the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to
beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can
hardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly well
known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the
rich; but about the byways and remoter places there must still be some
dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive
haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by
travellers.
In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically
as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put
themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;
but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appeals
vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does not
seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, a
scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and
the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating
that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a
simply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It
is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of
intercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress those
conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the
presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, because
fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?
We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in
the indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint," is a phrase
that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible
fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among the
most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among the
stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. The
people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and
beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted
figure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form
of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth while
to remember--is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the
portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that
of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made
to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed,
uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote,
thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to
the violence of the rich.
It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar is
still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort us
to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardly
intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance,
of no good influence upon the morals of the road. He no longer trusts
the world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholehearted
mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby
an unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind. The
merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches
of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible
to the seated and stable social world.
The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our
literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by
tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been
stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led
underground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of
the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have
ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seems
that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the
subject of a Spanish song.
That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it is
not a song of violence or fear. It is the random trolling note of a man
who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takes
it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand of
unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds,
but has not broken his own by force. It seems, therefore, the song of an
indomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyr
chance.