TO
BOB
AND TO
EDWARD GARNETT
A few chapters, chosen from the completed work, have appeared in the
_Albany Review_, the _Daily News_ and _Country Life_. To the editors
of those periodicals the author's acknowledgments are due.
_PREFACE_
The substance of "A Poor Man's House" was first recorded in a journal,
kept for purposes of fiction, and in letters to one of the friends to
whom the book is dedicated. Fiction, however, showed itself an
inappropriate medium. I was unwilling to cut about the material, to
modify the characters, in order to meet the exigencies of plot, form,
and so on. I felt that the life and the people were so much better than
anything I could invent. Besides which, I found myself in possession of
conclusions, hot for expression, which could not be incorporated at all
into fiction. "A Poor Man's House" consists then of the journal and
letters, subjected to such slight re-arrangement as should enable me to
draw the truest picture I could within the limits of one volume.
Primarily the book aims at presenting a picture of a typical poor man's
house and life. Incidentally, certain conclusions are expressed
which--needless to say--are very tentative and are founded not alone on
_this_ poor man's house. Of the book as a picture, it is not the
author's place to speak. But its opinions, and the manner of arriving
at them, do require some explanation; the right to hold such opinions
some substantiation.
Educated people usually deal with the poor man's life deductively; they
reason from the general to the particular; and, starting with a theory,
religious, philanthropic, political, or what not, they seek, and too
easily find, among the millions of poor, specimens--very frequently
abnormal--to illustrate their theories. With anything but human
beings, that is an excellent method. Human beings, unfortunately, have
individualities. They do what, theoretically, they ought not to do,
and leave undone those things they ought to do. They are even said to
possess souls--untrustworthy things beyond the reach of sociologists.
The inductive method--reasoning from the particular to the
general--though it lead to a fine crop of errors, should at least help
to counterbalance the psychological superficiality of the deductive
method; to counterbalance, for example, the nonsense of those
well-meaning persons who go routing about among the poor in search of
evil, and suppose that they can chain it up with little laws. Chained
dogs bite worst.
For myself, I can only claim--I only want to claim--that I have lived
among poor people without preconceived notions or _parti pris_; neither
as parson, philanthropist, politician, inspector, sociologist nor
statistician; but simply because I found there a home and more beauty
of life and more happiness than I had met with elsewhere. So far as is
possible to a man of middle-class breeding, I have lived their life,
have shared their interests, and have found among them some of my
closest and wisest friends. Perhaps I may reasonably anticipate one
type of criticism by adding that I have felt something of the pinch and
hardship of the life, as well as enjoyed its picturesqueness. Since the
book was first written, it has fallen to me, on an occasion of illness,
to take over for some days all the housekeeping and cooking; and I have
worked on the boats sometimes fifteen hours a day, not as an amateur,
but for hard and--what is more to the point--badly-needed coin. It took
the gilt off the gingerbread, but it didn't spoil the gingerbread!
Would it were possible to check by ever so little the class-conceit of
those people who think that they can manage the poor man's life better
than he can himself; who would take advantage of their education to
play ducks and drakes with his personal affairs. For it is my firm
belief that in the present phase of national evolution, and as regards
the things that really matter, the educated man has more to learn of
the poor man than to teach him. Even Nietzsche, the philosopher of
aristocracy, went so far as to say that _in the so-called cultured
classes, the believers in 'modern ideas,' nothing is perhaps so
repulsive as their lack of shame, the easy insolence of eye and hand
with which they touch, taste, and finger everything; and it is possible
that even yet there is more_ relative _nobility of taste, and more tact
for reverence among the people, among the lower classes of the people,
especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading_ demi-monde
_of intellect, the cultured class_.