A Poor Man's House Part 28

The _Serenade_ ceased. None spoke. The light gave a great flicker.

"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l!" exclaimed John Widger. The day-dreamers awoke, as if from a light sleep. An everyday look came quickly into their eyes and each one shifted in his seat. Some even shook themselves like dogs.

A joke was made about the woman who came in to collect pence, and the conversation rose till nothing of the sea's noise could be heard.

I realised with a shock that in four days I shall not be here, and when I left the bar, I forgot entirely to say _Good-night_.

[Sidenote: _A GLIMPSE_]

It was as if, for the moment, we had all been very intimate; as if we had all gone an adventure together and had peeped over the edge of the world.

VIII

SALISBURY, _January_.

1

[Sidenote: _CONTRASTS_]

Chilliness--a social and emotional chilliness that can with difficulty be defined or nailed down to any cause--is, above and below all, what one feels on returning from a poor man's house into middle-cla.s.s surroundings. It is not unlike that chill with which certain forms of metropolitan hospitality strike a countryman. He meets a London friend, a former fellow-townsman, perhaps, who has migrated to London and whom he has not seen for a year or two. "Glad to see you," says the Londoner. "You must call on my wife before you go back. Her day is Wednesday." Or, "You must come to dinner one evening. When are you free? Next Tuesday? or Friday?" If the hospitality had begun forthwith, and the countryman had been haled off, country fashion, to the very next pot-luck meal, he would have had a pleasant adventure. It would have been like old times. The former glow of friendship would have more than revived. But the calculated invitation for a future date, the idea that the countryman will like to call for a twenty minutes' chat on generalities and a couple of cups of bad afternoon tea.... Though he may understand that a multiplicity of engagements in London renders this sort of thing convenient, he none the less feels a chill when it is applied to himself, and usually cares little whether he go or not.

He becomes conscious of the desire to save trouble, which is at the bottom of such calculations. Had the Londoner revisited the country, he would have found old friends ready to upset all their arrangements for the sake of entertaining him. The London hospitality is the 'better done,' but country hospitality is warmer. Middle-cla.s.s life runs smoother than the poor man's, it is more arranged and in many ways 'better done,' and it is chillier precisely because, for smooth running, the warmer human impulses, both good and bad, must be repressed. 'Something with a little love and a little murder' in it, was what the illiterate old woman wanted to learn to read. It is what we all want in our hearts, much more than smooth running and impenetrable uniform politeness.

Down at Seacombe we warm our hands, so to speak, at the fire of life; hunger lurks outside, and the fire is dusty and needs looking after; but it glows, and we sit together round it. Here at Salisbury, throughout the social house, we have an installation of hot-water pipes; they may be hygienic (which is doubtful), and they are little trouble to keep going; but they don't glow. Give me the warmth that glows, and let me get near the heart of it.

Voices are often raised in Under Town and quarrels are not infrequent, but the underlying affections are seldom doubted, and when they do rise to the surface, there they are, visible, unashamed. 'Each for himself, and devil take the hindmost,' is more admired in theory than followed in practice. 'Each for himself and the Almighty for us all,' is Tony's way of putting it. The difference lies there.

My acquaintances here are well off for the necessities of life. No one is likely to starve next week. Nevertheless, they are full of worry, and by restraining their expressions of worry so as not to become intolerable to the other worriers, they make themselves the more lonely and increase their panic of mind. They are afraid of life.

At Seacombe, though there were not a fortnight's money in the house, we lived merrily on what we had. In Tony's "Summut 'll sure to turn up if yu be ready an' tries to oblige" there is more than philosophy; there is race tradition, the experience of generations. The Fates are treacherous; therefore, of course, they like to be trusted, and the gifts they reserve for those that trust them are retrospective.

[Sidenote: _INSTANCES_]

All of us at Tony's wanted many things--a pension, enough to live on, work, a piano, or only 'jam zide plaate'--G.o.d knows what we didn't want! But the things that men haven't, and want, unite them more than those they have. _I want_ is life's steam-gauge; the measure of its energy. It is the ground-ba.s.s of love, however transcendentalised, and whether it give birth to children or ideas. _I have_ is stagnant. And _I am afraid_ is the beginning of decay.

It is still _I want_, rather than _I am afraid_, that spurs the poor man on.

2

For his first marriage and towards setting up house, Tony succeeded in saving twenty shillings. He gave it to his mother in gold to keep safely for him, and the day before the wedding, he asked for it. "Yu knows we an't got no b.l.o.o.d.y sovereigns," said his father. It had all been spent in food and clothes for the younger children. So Tony went to sea that night and earned five shillings. A shilling of that too he gave to his mother; then started off on foot for the village where his girl was living and awaiting him. She had a little saved up: he knew that, though he feared it might have gone like his. They were married, however; they fed, rejoiced, and joked; and 'for to du the thing proper like,' they hired a trap to drive them home. With what money was left they embarked on married life, and their children made no unreasonable delay about coming. "Aye!" says Tony, "I'd du the same again--though 'twas hard times often."

Before I left Seacombe I asked a fisherman's wife, who was expecting her sixth or seventh child, whether she had enough money in hand to go through with it all; for I knew that her husband was unlikely to earn anything just then. "I have," she said, "an' p'raps I an't. It all depends. If everything goes all right, I've got enough to last out, but if I be so ill as I was wi' the last one, what us lost, then I an't.

Howsbe-ever, I don't want nort now. Us'll see how it turns out." She went on setting her house in order, preparing baby linen and making ready to 'go up over,' with perfect courage and tranquillity. When one thinks of the average educated woman's fear of childbed, although she can have doctors, nurses, anaesthetics and every other alleviation, the contrast is very great, more especially as the fisherman's wife had good reason to antic.i.p.ate much pain and danger, in addition to the possibility of her money giving out.

Those are not extraordinary instances, chosen to show how courageous people can be sometimes; on the contrary, they are quite ordinary ill.u.s.trations of a general att.i.tude among the poor towards life. To express it in terms of a theory which in one form or another is accepted by nearly all thinkers--the poor have not only the _Will to Live_, they have the _Courage to Live_.

[Sidenote: _THE COURAGE TO LIVE_]

On the whole, they possess the _Courage to Live_ much more than any other cla.s.s. And they need it much more. The industrious middle-cla.s.s man, the commercial or professional man, works with a reasonable expectation of ending his days in comfort. He would hardly work without. But the poor man's reasonable expectation is the workhouse, or some almost equally galling kind of dependency. The former may count himself very unlucky if after a life of work he comes to dest.i.tution; the latter is lucky if he escapes it. Yet the poor man works on, and is of at least as good cheer as the other one. If he can rub along, he is even happy. He is, I think, the happier of the two.

The more intimately one lives among the poor, the more one admires their amazing talent for happiness in spite of privation, and their magnificent courage in the face of uncertainty; and the more also one sees that these qualities have been called into being, or kept alive, by uncertainty and thriftlessness. Thrift, indeed, may easily be an evil rather than good. From a middle-cla.s.s standpoint, it is an admirable virtue to recommend to the poor. It helps to keep them off the rates. But for its proper exercise, thrift requires a special training and tradition. And from the standpoint of the essential, as opposed to the material, welfare of the poor, it can easily be over-valued. Extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singularly dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle-cla.s.s. It is all right as a means of living, but lamentable as an end of life. If a penny saved is a penny earned, then a penny earned by work is worth twopence.

_The Courage to Live_ is the blossom of the _Will to Live_--a flower far less readily grown than withered. It might be argued that since apprehensiveness implies foresight, the poor man's _Courage to Live_ is simply his lack of forethought. In part, no doubt, it is that. But he does think, slowly and tenaciously, as a cuttlefish grips. He foresees pretty plainly the workhouse; and he has the courage to face its probability, and to go ahead nevertheless. His reading of life is in some ways very broad, his foothold very firm; for it is founded closely on actual experience of the primary realities. He looks backwards as well as forwards; his fondness and memory for anecdote is evidence of how he dwells on the past; instead of comparing an occurrence with something in a book, he recalls a similar thing that happened to So-and-so, so many years ago, you mind.... He knows vaguely (and it is our vaguer knowledge which shapes our lives) that only by a succession of miracles a long series of hair's-breadth escapes and lucky chances, does he stand at any moment where he is; and he doesn't see why miracles should suddenly come to an end. Hence his active fatalism, as opposed to the pa.s.sive Eastern variety. In Tony's opinion, "'Tis better to be lucky than rich." I have never heard him say that fortune favours the brave. He a.s.sumes it.

3

[Sidenote: _INTELLECTUAL TYRANNIES_]

As one grows more democratic in feeling, as one's faith in the people receives shock after shock, yet on the whole brightens--so does one's mistrust of the so-called democratic programmes increase. One becomes at once more dissatisfied and less, more reckless and much more cautious. One sees so plainly that the three or four political parties by no means exhaust the political possibilities. The poor, though indeed they have the franchise, remain little more than p.a.w.ns in the political game. They have to vote for somebody, and n.o.body is prepared to allow them much without a full return in money or domination. They pay in practice for what theoretically is only their due. Justice for them is mainly bills of costs. The political fight lies still between their masters and would-be masters; not so much now, perhaps, between different factions of property-owners as between the property-owners and the intellectuals. Out of the frying-pan into the fire seems the likely course; for the intellectuals, if they have the chance, enslave the whole man; they are logical and ruthless. The worst tyrannies have been priestly tyrannies, whether of Christians, Brahmins or negro witch-doctors; and those priests were the intellectuals of their time.

I wonder when we shall have a party of intellectuals content to find out the people's ideals and to serve them faithfully, instead of trying to foist their own ideals upon the people.

Law-makers, however, will probably continue to work for the supposed benefit of the people rather than on the people's behalf; and equally, the supposed welfare of the people will continue to be the handiest political weapon; for the property-owning, articulate cla.s.ses are better able to prevent themselves being played with. To those two facts one's political principles must be adjusted. The articulate cla.s.ses, moreover, are actually so little acquainted with the inner life of the poor that there is no groundwork of general knowledge upon which to base conclusions, and it is impossible to do more than speak from one's own personal experience. I don't mind confessing that, though I should prefer justice all round, yet, if injustice is to be done--as done it must be no doubt--I had rather the poor were not the sufferers. There is no reason to believe that present conditions cannot be bettered--to believe, with Dr Pangloss, _que tout est au mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles_. I have found that to grow acquainted with the cla.s.s that is the chief object of social legislation is to see more plainly the room for improvement, and also to see how much better, how much sounder, that cla.s.s is than it appeared to be from the outside: how much might be gained, of material advantage especially, and at the same time how much there is to be lost of those qualities of character which have been acquired through long training and by infinite sacrifice. To learn to care for the poor, for their own sake, is to fear for them nothing so much as slap-dash, short-sighted social legislation.

[Sidenote: _THE WILL TO LIVE_]

The man matters more than his circ.u.mstances. The poor man's _Courage to Live_ is his most valuable distinctive quality. Most of his finest virtues spring therefrom. Any material progress which tends to diminish his _Courage to Live_, or to reduce it to mere _Will to Live_, must prove in the long run to his and to the nation's disadvantage. And the _Courage to Live_, like other virtues, diminishes with lack of exercise. Therefore every material advance should provide for the continued, for an even greater, exercise and need of the _Courage to Live_. If not, then the material advance is best done without.

That is the main constructive conclusion to be drawn. Somewhat akin to it is another conclusion of a more critical nature.

In Nietzsche's _Beyond Good and Evil_ there is an apophthegm to the effect that, "Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a question of mental inhibition, or self-control.

The highest aim of Mental Hygiene should be to increase the power of mental inhibition amongst all men and women. Control is the basis of all law and the cement of every social system among men and women, without which it would go to pieces.... _Sufficient power of self-control should be the essence and test of sanity._[20]

[20] "The Hygiene of Mind," by T. S. Clouston, M.D., F.R.S.E., (London, 1906). Without an extension which Dr Clouston provides, though not in so many words, the definition I have italicized is psychologically a little superficial. Mental inhibition, generally, needs dividing into self-control and, say, auto-control. Where one man may _self-control_ himself by an effort of will, another man, in the same predicament, might _auto-control_ himself instinctively, without a conscious effort of will. Which is the saner, and likelier to remain so, under ordinary circ.u.mstances and under extraordinary circ.u.mstances, would be most difficult to determine. Many people are only sane in action because they know that they are insane in impulse, and take measures accordingly. They keep a sane front to the world by legislating pretty sternly for themselves.

[Sidenote: _SOCIAL HYGIENE_]

It is too gratuitously a.s.sumed by law-makers (_i.e._ agitators for legislation as well as legislators) that the poor man is woefully deficient in inhibition and must be legislated for at every turn.

Because, for instance, he furnishes the police courts with the majority of 'drunks and disorderlies,' he is treated as a born drunkard, to be sedulously protected against himself, regardless of such facts as (1) there is more of him to get drunk, (2) he prefers 'going on the bust' to the more insidious dram-drinking and drugging, (3) he has more cause to get drunk, (4) he gets drunk publicly, (5) tied-house beer and cheap liquors stimulate to disorderliness more than good liquor. The truth is that the poor have a great deal of self-restraint, quite as much probably as their law-makers; but it is exercised in different directions and, possibly, is somewhat frittered away in small occasions. The poor man has so much more bark than bite.

He fails to restrain his cuss-words for example--but then cuss-words were invented to impress fools. There is much in his life that would madden his law-makers, and _vice versa_. If control is the cement of every social system and if it is the highest aim of mental hygiene, it follows that control should be the highest aim of legislation and custom, which together make up social hygiene. And--always remembering that control is of all virtues the one which strengthens with use and withers with disuse--every piece of new legislation should be most carefully examined as to its probable effect on the self-control of the people. Control, in short should be the paramount criterion of new legislation. A proximate advantage, unless it be a matter of life and death, is too dearly purchased by an ultimate diminution of self-control.

4

Since the Industrial Revolution and rise of the press, the middle-cla.s.s has become more and more the real law-maker. The poor have voted legislators into power; the upper cla.s.s in the main has formally made the laws; but the engineering of legislation has been, and is, the work of the middle cla.s.s. And the amusing and pathetic thing is that the middle cla.s.s has used its power to try to make other cla.s.ses like itself. That it has succeeded so badly is largely due to the fact that the poor man is not simply an undeveloped middle-cla.s.s man. The children at Seacombe showed true childish penetration in treating a _gentry-boy_ as an animal of another species: the poor and the middle cla.s.s are different in kind as well as in degree. (More different perhaps than the poor and the aristocrat). Their civilizations are not two stages of the same civilization, but two civilizations, two traditions, which have grown up concurrently, though not of course without considerable intermingling. To turn a typical poor man into a typical middle-cla.s.s man is not only to develop him in some respects, and do the opposite in others; it is radically to alter him. The civilization of the poor may be more backward materially, but it contains the nucleus of a finer civilization than that of the middle cla.s.s.

[Sidenote: _TWO CIVILIZATIONS_]

The two cla.s.ses possess widely dissimilar outlooks. Their morale is different. Their ethics are different.[21] Middle cla.s.s people frequently make a huge unnecessary outcry, and demand instant unnecessary legislation because they find among the poor conditions which would be intolerable to themselves but are by no means so to the poor. And again, the benevolent frequently accuse the poor of great ingrat.i.tude because, at some expense probably, they have pressed upon the poor what they themselves would like, but what the poor neither want nor are thankful for. The educated can sometimes enter fully, and even reasonably, into the sorrows of the uneducated, but it is seldom indeed that they can enter into their joys and consolations.

[21] "The more one sees of the poor in their own homes, the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper cla.s.ses than as better or worse." ("The Next Street but One." By M. Loane. London, 1907.)

Broadly speaking, the middle-cla.s.s is distinguished by the utilitarian virtues; the virtues, that is, which are means to an end; the profitable, discreet, expedient virtues: whereas the poor prefer what Maeterlinck calls 'the great useless virtues'--useless because they bring no apparent immediate profit, and great because by faith or deeply-rooted instinct we still believe them of more account than all the utilitarian virtues put together.[22]

[22] "When one begins to know the poor intimately, visiting the same houses time after time, and throughout periods of as long as eight or ten years, one becomes gradually convinced that in the real essentials of morality, they are, as a whole, far more advanced than is generally believed, but they range the list of virtues in a different order from that commonly adopted by the more educated cla.s.ses. Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chast.i.ty, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation." ("From their Point of View." By M. Loane. London, 1908.)