Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. The
burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my silver
plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew receiver. The
bandit sells the traveller an article of prime necessity: that
traveller’s life. And as for the old soldier, who stands for central
mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specially; for he
was the only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure for my money.
He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the sense to
cling to it, accosting strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking
patrons with a merely regimental difference, sparing you at once the
tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not
one hint about him of the beggar’s emphasis, the outburst of revolting
gratitude, the rant and cant, the “God bless you, Kind, Kind gentleman,”
which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence,
which is so notably false, which would be so unbearable if it were true.
I am sometimes tempted to suppose this reading of the beggar’s part, a
survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and
mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept
these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of life;
nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. They wound us,
I am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening (as it yet
lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a buffet; and the rant and
cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the fact
disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar lives by his knowledge of
the average man. He knows what he is about when he bandages his head,
and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with _Poor Mary Ann_ or
_Long_, _long ago_; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical
ear and sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know
what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of
cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.
This trade can scarce be called an imposition; it has been so blown upon
with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we
pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our
drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay
them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And
truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar’s
thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for
a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.
Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars? And the answer is,
Not one. My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged boots
were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him again
and again, and always gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on
the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were his method; they
were the man’s trade; without his boots he would have starved; he did not
live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public, which
loves the limelight on the actor’s face, and the toes out of the beggar’s
boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a false and merely
mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above
all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does not
go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a
penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; never
from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear
canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose
that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a
scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the working
class, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long
there will be a knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without
stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,
in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich stand
unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was
always the poor who helped him; get the truth from any workman who has
met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or
only with such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course
of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails his
passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even to the
attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable state of things in our
Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be asked to give.