love and appreciation of which is so deep and warm in these uncultured
minds; music which more than anything else helps to smooth away
class as well as other inequalities. I have seen rough low-class men
and women leave their active games or the swing for which they had
been waiting and cluster round the singer or musician begging for
another and yet ‘another bit.’ What they like best is a song with a
chorus, or historical songs where they can hear the words, and next
to these solemn music on a harmonium or organ; but any music charms
them, and the hostess who is either musical herself or who invites
her musical friends to help her finds the task of entertaining much
easier. An oft-repeated mistake is that the poor like comic songs
about themselves, and ‘Betsy Waring’ has been suggested and sung at
our parties more often than I like to remember. A moment’s sympathetic
thought will show, however, that the poor want other and wider
interests, and it can hardly be the kindliest method of amusing
them to sing them a song, the joke of which lies in imitations and
‘take-offs’ of their mispronunciation. It is, too, generally thought
that the uneducated cannot appreciate what is commonly understood as
‘good music,’ but this, too, is a mistake. Long years ago I remember
Mrs. Nassau Senior coming to a night-school of rough girls, held in a
rough court. That evening some street row was more attractive than A B
C, and our scholars were clustered around the heroine of the fight. I
can still see the picture made by Mrs. Senior as she stood and sang in
the doorway of the schoolroom, which opened directly on to the court,
and among such surroundings it was a deep-sighted sympathy which led
her to choose ‘Angels ever bright and fair.’ For long afterwards she
was remembered as ‘the lady who came and sang about the angels, and
looked like one herself.’
It is well if the hostess can bring her instrument to the window, so
that the people can hear as they sit on the lawn outside and enjoy
the air; perhaps she may find it possible to ask two or three of her
guests who can sing, with strong, sweet, though untrained voices, to
join her in a duet or glee, and helping, they enjoy the pleasure with
the helper’s joy. Occasionally one of the party may have brought an
accordion with which to aid the impromptu concert, or some one will
recall the piece of poetry committed to memory long years ago, and then
we have a recitation, which pleases none the less because it is ‘Jim
Straw’s one bit,’ and has been heard a few times before. If it be wet
or windy the hostess may ask her guests into the drawing-room. ‘You
did not see the drawing-room, did you, mum?’ asked one of the guests
after a party which I had been obliged to leave early; ‘it was lovely,
and we all sat there quite friendly-like and listened to the music. I
_did_ like the look of that room.’ Very pregnant of influence are these
introductions into a house scrupulously clean and tastily furnished--a
house kept as the dwelling of every human being should be kept. Do we
not know ourselves, if we go to visit a friend with a higher standard
of art, morals, or culture, how subtle is the influence; how from
such visits (albeit unconsciously, or at least hardly with deliberate
resolve) is dated the turning towards the new light, the intention to
be more perfect?
One lady, with the real feeling of hostess-ship, took her Whitechapel
guests, as she would any others, into a bedroom to take their outdoor
things off. Touching, if amusing, was the remark of a girl of fifteen
or thereabouts who, turning to her mother, said, ‘Look, mother, here’s
a bed with a room all to itself!’ ‘Has any one really slept in this
white bed?’ was asked by another of that same party. While to others
of a rather higher class, who have been servants before marriage, the
reintroduction to such a house is a great pleasure, though to them not
such a revelation as it is to those who have passed all their lives in
factories or workshops. It is a welcome reminder of their past, and
often suggests little improvements in the arrangement of their homes.
It is a means also of diffusing a love of beauty, a sense of harmony,
and an artistic taste, not to be despised among those who feel that the
‘Beauty of Holiness’ constitutes its attraction to the right living
which leads to Righteousness.
In various ways, too many to describe, but which every hostess can
devise, the hours between half-past four and eight can be pleasantly
filled, until the drawing in of the long summer evening brings the
party to a close. The announcement of supper is generally greeted with,
‘What, go home already?’ or, ‘The time don’t go so fast working days,’
but garden parties must necessarily end with daylight, and for folk up
at six in the morning ten or eleven o’clock is a late enough bed hour.
Supper is generally a small meal--cake, buns, or pastry, with lemonade,
fruit, or cold coffee--simply a light refreshment taken standing; but
some of the friends who entertain us like better to give the light
meal on the arrival of the guests, and the more substantial one later.
The first plan, though, is perhaps better, as the people leave their
homes early, and many of them miss their dinner altogether, amid the
necessary preparation for the long absence.
‘Good-night, sir, and God bless you for this day!’ was the farewell
of one of his guests to his silver-haired host, words which struck
him deeply. ‘Dear me, dear me! why did I never think of it before?’
he exclaimed; and really this means of doing good seems so simple and
self-evident that it is to be wondered at that those working among
the poor should often not know where to take their people for a day’s
outing. London suburbs abound with families hardly one of whom does not
give a garden party in the course of the summer, and yet how few of
these parties are to guests ‘who cannot bid again!’ The expense of such
a party is certainly not the reason of its rarity. An entertainment
such as I have told about, even when meat is given, does not cost more
than a shilling or eighteenpence a head. The trouble cannot be the
deterrent motive, for that is nothing to be compared to the trouble
of a dinner-party, nor even of any ordinary ‘at home.’ ‘The servants
would not like it’ is sometimes urged as a reason, but it is certainly
not the experience of those who, having overcome the objections of
their servants, have tried it, and found that they entered thoroughly
into the spirit of a party at which they had the pleasant duty of
entertaining joined to their usual one of serving, and on more than one
occasion the hearty welcome given by the servants has added much to the
success of our day.
Perhaps, amid the many difficulties to which modern civilisation has
brought us, one of the saddest is the mutual ignorance of the lives
and minds of members of the same household--an ignorance often leading
to division. It may not, I think, be the least important good of these
parties that they afford a subject regarding which master and servants
can be, anyhow for one day, of one mind and purpose.
Neither does it require the possession of a mansion or park before such
an invitation can be sent; in fact, some of the pleasantest parties
have been given in the smallest gardens, where kindliness and genial
welcome have made up for want of space. One lady, indeed, who was
staying for the summer in lodgings in the country gave happy afternoons
and pleasant memories to more than eighty people. She asked them in
little groups of twelve or fourteen, took them long country rambles, or
obtained permission to saunter in a neighbour’s garden, and when the
evenings drew in (it was in August) brought them back to her rooms,
where a good tea-supper and a few songs brought the entertainment to a
close.
The guests need not always be grown people. It is, perhaps, even
more important to give the growing girl or the boy just entering
into manhood a taste for simple pleasures. Very delightful is the
interest and enjoyment of these young things in the country life and
wonders. The evening sewing-class, consisting of big girls at work
every day in factories; the Bible class of young men; the discussion
club; the children-servants (so numerous and so joyless in our great
cities)--such little groups can be found around every place of worship,
or are known to every one living among or busying himself for the good
of the poor. All are open to invitations, and these can be entertained
even more easily than their elders. ‘Don’t you remember this or
that?’ my young friends often ask about some trivial incident long
since vanished from my memory, and when, demurring, I ask ‘When?’ the
unfailing answer, varying in form but monotonous in substance, is ‘Why,
that day when you took us into the country. You _can’t_ forget. It was
grand.’
Strangely ignorant are some of these town-bred folk of things which
seem to us always to have been known and never to have been taught.
They call every flower a rose, and express wonder at the commonest
object. ‘Law! here’s straw a-growing!’ I once heard in a corn-field,
and emerging into a fir-wood soon after, we all joined in a laugh at
the remark, ‘Why, here’s hundreds of Christmas trees all together.’
Anything, provided it is joined to active movement, without which young
things never seem quite happy, serves to amuse and to pass the time.
A competition to see which girls shall gather the best nosegays, the
proposal to the boys to search for some animal, queer plant, or odd
stone, have helped to carry the guests over many miles and through
long afternoons. Perhaps one of the nicest things which any young
lady can do, even if she is not able or allowed to attempt the larger
undertaking of a party, is to take some ten or twelve school boys and
girls for a walk on their Saturday afternoon holiday. She need keep
them, perhaps, only three or four hours, when milk or lemonade and
buns, got at any milk-shop, will serve as a substitute for the usual
tea.
But, besides these country parties which town-dwellers are quite unable
to give, there is still left to us Londoners the possibility (not to
say duty) of inviting the poor to our own houses. Our poor neighbours
have not been asked to many such parties, but the few to which
they have been bidden have been very pleasant. At one our hostess,
but lately returned from the East, had arranged _tableaux-vivants_
introducing Oriental costumes in her drawing-room, and the guests were
delighted at seeing the people of the one foreign nation of which they
knew anything--the Bible having been the literature which made them
conversant with that--as large as life, and all ‘real men and solid
women.’ Another time a little charade was got up, and proud was the
mother whose baby was pressed into early service as a play-actor. Other
friends have entertained us after a visit to the Kensington Museum or
Zoological Gardens, while some evenings have been passed in much the
same way as by other people who meet for social pleasure; with talk,
music, strange foreign things, portfolios, and puzzles, though games
may, perhaps, have occupied a somewhat longer time than is usual among
guests with more conversational interests. To all of us have these
parties given much pleasure--pleasure which is, in truth, healthful and
refreshing amid the sorrow and pain so liberally mingled in the life’s
cup of the poor. ‘This evening I’ve forgot all the winter’s troubles,’
followed the ‘Good-night’ from the lips of a pain-broken woman; and
considering the ‘winter’s troubles’ included the death of a child and
the semi-starvation resulting from the almost constant out-of-work
condition of the husband, the party seemed a strangely inadequate means
of producing even temporarily so large a result.
The efforts made to attend are one of the signs of how much these and
the country parties are enjoyed. One woman came, with her puling, pink
ten-days-old baby, and both men and women constantly get up from a
sick-bed to return to it again as soon as the pleasure is over. ‘We
can’t afford to lose it, yer see; they don’t come too often,’ is the
sort of answer one usually receives in reply to remonstrance.
But this paper will accomplish its object if ‘they do come oftener,’
and if not only the poor of our big London, to whom we owe special
duties, but if the poor of all great cities are more thought of in the
light of guests.
The duty once recognised, the method becomes plain. Every one, even
those whose work does not take them among the poor, can manage to
be introduced to some who are leading pleasure-barren lives, and to
employers of labour in factories or trades it is especially easy. The
introduction made, the rest follows naturally, and though pleasure is
in itself so great a good that I would hold the thing worth doing if
this alone were obtained, yet I think a prophet’s eye is not needed
to see the other possible good resulting from such gatherings. The
wider interests, the seeds of culture, the introduction to simple
recreations, the suggestion of ideal beauty, the possession of happy
memories, the class relationships, are the advantages one can rapidly
count off as accruing to the entertained, and as important are the
gains of the entertainers. The rich, coming face to face with the poor,
have seen patience which puts their restlessness to shame; endurance
about which poems have yet to be written; hope which is deep and
springing from the roots of their being; charity which never faileth,
including, as it often does, the adoption of the orphan child or the
sharing of the room with a lone woman, compared to which the biggest
subscription is as nothing; kindliness which, though unthinking,
spareth not itself. Each class has its virtues, but, as yet, they
are unknown to each other. It is for the rich to take the first step
towards knowing and being known; it is for them to say if the class
hatreds, which like other ‘warfare comes from misunderstanding,’ shall
exist in our midst. It is for them to make the way of friendship
through the wall of gold now dividing the rich from the poor. It is for
them to give fellowship which, crushing envy, takes the sting out of
poverty. And all this can be done, by spending some thought, a little
money, and some afternoons in being ‘At Home’ to the poor.
Great ends these to follow the small trouble and expense of a garden
party. It will not, though, be the first time in history that good has
been done by means which seemed contemptible, and it will not seem
strange to those who have learnt that it is a Life and not a law,
friendships and not organisations, which have taught the world its
greatest lessons.
HENRIETTA O. BARNETT.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI.
_UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS._[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Nineteenth Century_ of February
1884.
Once more, as happens in crises of history, rich and poor have
met. ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating
respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and
has been found wanting. Societies which helped the poor by gifts
made paupers, churches which would have saved them by preaching made
hypocrites, and the outcome of scientific charity is the working man
too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy.
Those who have tried hardest at planning relief and at bringing to a
focus the forces of charity, those who have sacrificed themselves to
stop the demoralising out-relief and restore to the people the spirit
of self-reliance, will be the first to confess dissatisfaction if
they are told that the earthly paradise of the majority of the people
must be to belong to a club, to pay for a doctor through a provident
dispensary, and to keep themselves unspotted from charity or pauperism.
There is not enough in such hope to call out efforts of sacrifice, and
a steady look into such an earthly paradise discloses that the life of
the thrifty is a sad life, limited both by the pressure of continuous
toil and by the fear lest this pressure should cease and starvation
ensue.
The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the
character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age
has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to
the rich.
It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns
of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases
resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in
which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return,
and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their
country’s good.
It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the
increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the
increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and
acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that
neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few
are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried
many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond
the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears.
It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond
the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people
within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it
is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life,
a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved
means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has
done so much to widen thought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more
than of the poor.
It is an age of the Higher Life. Higher conceptions of virtue, a higher
ideal of what is possible for man, are the best gift to our day, but it
is received only by those who have time and power to study. ‘They who
want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind,’
says the Chinese sage; and so the poor, being without those things
necessary to the growth of mind and feeling, jeopardise Salvation--the
possession, that is, of a life at one with the Good and the True, at
one with God.
Those who care for the poor see that the best things are missed, and
they are not content with the hope offered by ‘scientific charity.’
They see that the best things might be shared by all, and they cannot
stand aside and do nothing. ‘The cruellest man living,’ it has been
said, ‘could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,’ and those
who see must do something. They may be weary of revolutionary schemes,
which turn the world upside down to produce after anarchy another
unequal division; they may be weary, too, of philanthropic schemes
which touch but the edge of the question. They may hear of dynamite,
and they may watch the failure of an Education Act, as the prophets
watched the failure of teachers without knowledge. They may criticise
all that philanthropists and Governments do, but still they themselves
would do something. No theory of progress, no proof that many
individuals among the poor have become rich, will make them satisfied
with the doctrine of _laissez faire_; they simply face the fact that in
the richest country of the world the great mass of their countrymen
live without the knowledge, the character, and the fulness of life
which are the best gift to this age, and that some thousands either
beg for their daily bread or live in anxious misery about a wretched
existence. What can they do which revolutions, which missions, and
which money have not done?
It is in answer to such a question that I make the suggestion of
this paper. I make it especially as a development of the idea which
underlies a College Mission. These Missions are generally inaugurated
by a visit to a college from some well-known clergyman working in the
East End of London or in some such working-class quarter. He speaks
to the undergraduates of the condition of the poor, and he rouses
their sympathy. A committee is appointed, subscriptions are promised,
and after some negotiations a young clergyman, a former member of the
college, is appointed as a Mission curate of a district. He at once
sets in motion the usual parochial machinery of district visiting,
mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c. He invites the assistance of those of
his old mates who will help; at regular intervals he makes a report of
his progress, and if all goes well he is at last able to tell how the
district has become a parish.
The Mission, good as its influence may be, is not, it seems to me, an
adequate expression of the idea which moved the promoters. The hope
in the College when the first sympathy was roused was that all should
join in good work, and the Mission is necessarily a Churchman’s effort.
The desire was that as University men they should themselves bear the
burdens of the poor--and the Mission requires of them little more than
an annual guinea subscription. The grand idea which moved the College,
the idea which, like a new creative spirit, is brooding over the face
of Society, and is making men conscious of their brotherhood, finds no
adequate expression in the district church machinery with which, in
East London, I am familiar. There is little in that machinery which
helps the people to conceive of religion apart from sectarianism, or of
a Church which is ‘the nation bent on righteousness.’ There is little,
too, in the ordinary parochial mechanism which will carry to the homes
of the poor a share of the best gifts now enjoyed in the University.
Imagine a man’s visit to the Mission District of his college. He has
thought of the needs of the poor, and of the way in which those needs
are being met. He has formed in his mind a picture of a district where
loving supervision has made impossible the wretchedness of ‘horrible
London’; he expects to find well-ordered houses, people interested in
the thoughts of the day, gathering round their pastor to learn of men
and of God. He finds instead an Ireland in England, people paying 3_s._
or 4_s._ a week for rooms smaller than Irish cabins, without the pure
air of the Irish hill-side, and with vice which makes squalor hopeless.
He finds a population dwarfed in stature, smugly content with their
own existence, ignorant of their high vocation to be partners of the
highest, where even the children are not joyful. He measures the force
which the Mission curate is bringing to bear against all this evil.
He finds a church which is used only for a few hours in the week, and
which is kept up at a cost of 150_l._ a year. He finds the clergyman
absorbed in holding together his congregation by means of meetings and
treats, and almost broken down by the strain put upon him to keep his
parochial organisation going. The clergyman is alone, his church work
absorbs his power and attracts little outside help. What can he do to
improve the dwellings and widen the lives of 4,000 persons? What can
he do to spread knowledge and culture? What can he do to teach the
religion which is more than church-going? What wonder if, when he is
asked what help he needs, he answers, ‘Money for my church,’ ‘Teachers
for my Sunday school,’ ‘Managers for my clothing club’? What wonder,
too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes
away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the
Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by
which the best can be given to the poor?
It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common
purpose of improving the lives of the people that I make the suggestion
that University Settlements will better express their idea. College
Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but
in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to
these Missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea,
that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly
stated.
The place of settlement must of course first be fixed. It will be
in some such poor quarter as that of East London, where a house
can be taken in which there shall be both habitable chambers and
large reception-rooms. A man must be chosen to be the chief of the
Settlement; he must receive a salary which, like that of the Mission
curate, will be guaranteed by the College, and he must make his home in
the house. He must have taken a good degree, be qualified to teach,
and be endowed with the enthusiasm of humanity. Such men are not hard
to find; under a wiser Church government they would be clergymen,
and serve the people as the nation’s ministers; but, under a Church
government which in an age of reform has remained unreformed, they are
kept outside, and often fret in other service. One of these, qualified
by training to teach, qualified by character to organise and command,
qualified by disposition to make friends with all sorts of men, would
gladly accept a position in which he could both earn a livelihood
and fulfil his calling. He would be the centre of the University
Settlement. Men fresh from college or old University men would come
to occupy the chambers as residents. Lecturers in connection with the
University Extension Society would be his fellow-lecturers in the
reception-rooms, and as the head of such a Settlement he would extend a
welcome to all classes in his new neighbourhood.
The old Universities exercise a strange charm: the Oxford or Cambridge
man is still held to possess some peculiar knowledge, and the fact that
three of the most democratic boroughs are represented by University
professors has its explanation. ‘He speaks beautiful German, but of
course those University gentlemen ought to,’ was a man’s reflection
to me after a talk with a Cambridge professor. Those, too, who may be
supposed to know what draws in an advertising poster, are always glad
to print after the name of a speaker his degree and college.