England Part 7

A dominant note of the English character is kindliness. Animals are treated in England better than anywhere else in the world; the ordinary sleekness of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in the national character. This kindliness makes more tolerable, and softens considerably what would be otherwise the intolerable gulf between rich and poor. England, taking into consideration population and area, is the richest country in the world, I suppose; yet it has a proportion of its population sunk in poverty--"the submerged tenth" one social observer (making a rather pessimistic calculation) called them. English statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the pauper population, and the even more pitiful cla.s.s which struggles grimly on the edge of pauperism; but the English kindliness attempts to mollify the situation with vast organised charities, private and public, and makes it just tolerable. But even so it is painful: yet has to be faced to get to a true picture of England.

I spent the late months of autumn one year in looking into the case of the unemployed and the casual workers; tramping the north country with them and following them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game heads for London. In the summer and the autumn he has wandered the country-side, working more or less regularly as he tramped, in potato fields, turnip fields, hop gardens, cornfields.

It is a steadily narrowing opportunity, this casual agricultural work. With each year more and more of England's fruit, hops, vegetables, roots, and corn are grown abroad. To some extent, also, labour-saving machinery is displacing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives.

But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as compared with that of Canada, the United States, and Australia. The very small farms do not allow of the economical use of machines. Some crops are still cut by scythes; a reaper and binder is less common than the simple reaper which cuts the corn and leaves it to be gathered and tied by a harvest hand.

It is astonishing how close the agricultural land comes to London. One may see, within half a mile of Hampstead "tube," odd hayfields, and after leaving the Midlands, approaching London from the north, the pall of smoke lifts and the heavens appear as a broad belt of agricultural land intervenes. It would seem as if the traveller were pa.s.sing away from, not approaching, the great industrial centre. Leaving Luton and coming through to St. Albans the country smiles in green pleasantness within sight and sound, almost, of London. Birds see the sky and rejoice. Hayricks warm the landscape with their golden yellow, and over the stubble fields st.u.r.dy plough-horses pa.s.s and repa.s.s, painting the fields with broad brush strokes a rich chocolate brown. The hedges in the autumn are glowing with berries--blackberries and the scarlet spots of the hawthorn berry. With close search even hazel-nuts can be found, and this within the area tapped by London motor-buses and trams.

Sometimes the nuts and the berries give some sort of temporary relief to the casual worker. I remember one typical man of the "submerged tenth" who was making a harvest of the berries. He was a poor old tramp, hobbling along quickly in spite of the stiffness of rheumatism. He had a can to fill with what he gleaned from the hedges. He hoped, he told me, to get a shilling for the berries at the next town. His age was sixty-six, and he had been in his young prime a navvy and road labourer. Now he was past all hope of further employment as a labourer, and navvying work was impossible.

Proudly he boasted that he had never been "in trouble," and had never actually begged, though in the main he lived on charity. His winters, it seems, were spent in the workhouses. With the coming of the spring he turned his face towards the green fields, and lived somehow through the summer on what he could pick up as the reward of doing odd jobs or as the dole of charity. He was one of a cla.s.s I found common enough on the roads, past all steady and useful work, going with crippled gait steadily to the end.

The same day I encountered, among other wayfarers, a man who suggested this old and desolate tramp in the making. He was a young, vigorous, and capable fellow, civil, intelligent, and eager for work. He had walked from Manchester, having been on the road since the previous Sunday (the day was Sat.u.r.day), and the golden goal at the end of his journey was a week's work at the Islington Agricultural Show, which had been promised to him. For the week he would get 30s. After the Islington Show he had the chance, perhaps, of getting another job in the same line. He followed agricultural shows around the country, for he understood cattle and horses.

Another type of the poor I met outside of Durham, plodding patiently along two miles out of the old cathedral city. He was something a little higher than a casual labourer, and had a "trade," if one might call it so: that of a porter. He was making out from Durham, where "things were very bad," to a country place, unspecified, where there was work.

A brave and cheerful soul he was. At the age of four his leg had been broken and badly set, and he had grown up a little lame. That was over forty years ago, when the poor had less chance of good medical attention than now. The accident had frustrated the wish in him for an outdoor life.

He confessed that all his thoughts turned to the soil, and while he was working in Durham as a casual porter he would in slack times always try to get out to the fields. He had never married; there was no hope of married life in his calling. He had tried to get a more steady sort of job as a painter, as an ironmonger's a.s.sistant; but his leg was against him. He had not a grumble in his whole composition, and talked cheerfully of the green gra.s.s and confided that he was forty-six. "But I don't look it a bit, do I?" I lied manfully that he did not seem more than thirty-five, though, poor, wizened little chap, I would have put him down at ten years above his age.

He was a patient little fighter, and had, with his lame leg, kept up somehow with the ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a shilling in his life, and was, in a way, happy for all his frustrated longing for the open life of the country.

Out from Newcastle-on-Tyne another day of my tramp I picked up with a worker in the building trade. He was not a tramp, for he had a house of his own and a wife of whose house-wifery he was very proud. But he was unemployed, and had been for some months. That morning he had got up at five o'clock to tramp eight miles to a suburb of Newcastle in the hope of getting a place on a little church-repairing job employing three masons. He had not succeeded, and was tramping the eight miles back again. A penny fare on the tram would have saved him some two miles, but pennies were not to be spent lightly.

A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and 2:1:6 a week at his trade, "steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went as fast as he made it. After one long spell on 2:1:6 a week he had nothing at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for some of it back in the middle of the week like some men did. Thirty shillings she had, regular, when he was in work, and she saved some of it."

Whatever the balance was, 5s. or 7s. 6d. or 11s. 8d., was for himself. That was his pocket-money, and he spent it in a moderate and sensible roystering, and on other comforts of the manly life.

The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of st.u.r.dily. Such a thing as baker's bread--"nasty, unwholesome stuff"--was never seen in his house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material"

of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that 11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in his bread--not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE]

A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably, too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work!

Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compa.s.sion, and cunning "wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to work.

To the "professional unemployed," I believe, the autumn entry into London is a blessed relief. He knows all the charities which can be worked for food and shelter. He has put in his penitential period in the country to give a reasonable air to the tale that he has been in work, and prepares with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be discussed and the state of the nation learnedly argued; amusing tests of his skill in bamboozling charitable societies. To the genuine seeker for work a first impression of London must be terrifying. The place is so vast, so inchoate. It seems to suggest a great organised ma.s.s into which no newcomer can hope to penetrate.

The day I tramped in--on my mission of investigation--a thin rain filled the air with a blurring mist and made a horrible mud underfoot. My too realistic boots gave this mud entrance to my feet. The soft, suggy sound and feel of this mud making its way in and out was at once depressing and enraging. I cursed the weather, and London, and the resolution which had brought me on the enterprise. It seemed as if it would be just heaven to have clean feet, and stout soles between them and the loathsome dirt. I was wet through as regards clothes. That did not matter. The rain from above was clean except for a little soot. But this stuff beneath--faugh! If other men think and feel as I do, when you wish to "lift" a man out of the mire of hopelessness give him first a stout pair of boots.

The Spitalfields "doss" to which I had been directed looked too much like the mud beneath felt. It was stale and dirty, from its ceiling to its floor; and all the air between was stale and dirty. The men steaming and smoking in the thick atmosphere were sympathetic to the place. I pa.s.sed on.

That dossery could be investigated another time, on some night when the streets were dry. At a "Rowton House" in Whitechapel I found a clean and endurable lodging, paying ninepence for a night's lodging. There were good facilities to wash and to eat and to cook one's food, and a reading-room even. One could be, clearly, comfortable enough here--if one had the ninepence.

There are much cheaper lodging-houses, and one absolutely free one, Medland Hall, on the Ratcliff Highway near Stepney Station. I visited it one November evening at five o'clock. Under a railway arch there was drawn up a tattered regiment of men some 300 strong. Now and again a late-comer arrived and took his place in the rear rank. Two police officers attended to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for disorder. Like a cl.u.s.ter of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of the arch which gave some little shelter from the driving rain. There was not one touch of colour in all the dark ranks. Each man seemed to be dressed like his fellows, in something that was black, either originally or made so from the struggle in the mud of life. It was a patient crowd. Now and again a harsh cough sounded from some man, and always he seemed to be trying to smother it, as if unwilling to break into the silence of the common misery; or a lame man shuffled uneasily on his feet, and he also seemed ashamed a little of the noise.

At six, when the great bulk of the crowd had been waiting an hour (some of them probably much longer), the order was given to march, and the men filed into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread with a little b.u.t.ter. That was his meal for the night, and, like his bed, it was absolutely free. The bed was a box on the floor, with a seaweed mattress and an oilskin covering.

Most of the men were young. Few of them had gone past the labouring age.

Some were obviously tuberculous, others crippled with rheumatism. The gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk, and who still wore a "boxer" hat in place of the usual cap of the unemployed, was the aristocrat of the doss.

This winter (1912) the London authorities, at last awake to the scandal of homeless men wandering or sleeping in the streets, have inst.i.tuted a system by which the police will find shelter for all who are found without homes.

But even that will not remove all the scandal.

For many years the charitable provision for the homeless in London has been ample, and I could not at first find an explanation for the Thames Embankment miserables who huddled on the seats throughout the nights and had their shivering sleep disturbed again and again by the police, or for the unfortunates who haunted "the Dark Arches" of the Strand and other places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all the miserable army, there seemed to be always one of two explanations for haunting the Embankment--either the desperate sense of shame of the man who has come down from a position of some comfort and decency and shuns a shelter because it means a display of his misery; or the dull lethargy that comes from extreme hardship and kills every suggestion of self-help.

One unemployed with whom I conversed, or tried to converse, at midnight just near the Temple Pier was sunk in such apathy that he, I verily believe, would not have walked 400 yards to get the most comfortable bed in London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead to any idea of effort.

"With the use of any intelligence" a man can get shelter--yes. But the man who is down often loses his intelligence as he sinks. The "cunning"

unemployed, on the other hand, flourishes.

In China they have a term "rice Christians" for heathen who pretend conversion to Christianity in order to secure food from the missionaries.

The cunning unemployed is usually a "rice" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the point of bigotry. But should he have a wife and household to maintain by the sweat of his brain it will often happen that, while he is a rice Anglican of the most uncompromising type, she is a rice Wesleyan or professor of some other type of Nonconformity.

For the man who has made a study of the art of living without work London offers a vast field. There are so many charities that by going the round it is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of them, and since there is no effective safeguard against overlapping it is easy to be getting help from two or even more sources simultaneously.

This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds, live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady industry.

The life of "toiling for leave to live," using up to-day for just as much reward as will allow you to be fit for work to-morrow--and that is the life of thousands--has, after all, not much attraction, considered dispa.s.sionately. The tramp in Mr. Wells's story who explained that it was followed only by people who had been "pithed"--_i.e._ had had their brains extracted while at school--had some grim reasonableness in his fancifulness. When honest work offers a hope of progressive betterment the enthusiasm for it is natural. When, as for too many, honest work offers nothing but a subsistence fractionally better than that of the dishonest loafer it is surprising not that there are so many but so few of the "cunning unemployed." Only a very strong innate sense of duty and self-respect can account for the fact that millions keep pressing desperately on in the ranks of the workers with no more real reward for their efforts than the pride that they have never been to the "workhouse"

or taken alms from any one.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TOWER FROM THE TOWER BRIDGE, LOOKING WEST]

Recognising that, it is possible to come away from a study even of the "submerged tenth" in England with some cheerfulness. The mistakes of the past which have allowed that inundation of misery can be rectified, and, serious as those mistakes have been, they have left the character of the English people in the main st.u.r.dy and self-respecting. Of the "submerged tenth" I think only a tenth, _i.e._ one per cent of the total population, is actually hopeless and helpless. The others will respond to a wiser organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the poor--the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing a.s.sociations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the a.s.sociations for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not one, challenged to it, could truthfully claim that the sum of all this work was remedial in any real sense of the word. Not one of them could deny that most of it directly attacked the principle of self-reliance. The wretched were kept alive, and that was all. No future was opened out for the great majority of them, and very very rarely did any future mean useful citizenship of Great Britain, but rather the export of the young citizen to some other land in the hope that it would give him a chance.

Yet all agreed that as a matter of reasonable probability most of the men who are down could be saved and are worth saving. The proportion that is absolutely hopeless was variously stated. It may be averaged, in their opinion, at 5 per cent. The other 95 per cent could be brought to useful lives, these clergymen who are close students of the matter agreed.

That leaves, in the opinion of the men who have made a life study of the subject, not my one per cent, but only one-half per cent of the total English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one thinks that every human creature is a temple of the Divine, but it is not so gloomy a position as most imagine. And it can, and it will be stopped.

CHAPTER XI

THE ARTS IN ENGLAND

That the English are an "inartistic" people, without true appreciation of pictures, music, the drama, is a statement commonly made and commonly accepted without any very serious examination of the evidence for and against. A just judge giving the benefit of a close and impartial inquiry to the case of Madam England, indicted for that she is a Philistine without any true taste in, or proper love of, the arts, would be able to go no further than the Scottish verdict of "not proven." But few of those people who find England guilty without leaving the box have attempted to make any sound examination of the evidence available. They have heard of a Hanoverian monarch of past days, who despised "boetry und bainting," and have come to a settled conviction that that represented the English mind then and represents it now.

Elsewhere I have maintained that a nation which has such a n.o.ble taste in parks and gardens as have the English must be "aesthetic" at heart; and "aesthetic" and "inartistic" are not compatible. But apart from Nature love and delight in gardening, there is a great deal of evidence to be cited in the Englishman's favour as a lover of the arts.

It could certainly have been said with truth a few years ago, and probably could be said now, in spite of the recent rush of American buyers into the picture market, that the finest collection of Italian Masters of painting outside of Italy could be made from English galleries and English houses, and also the finest collection of Spanish Masters outside of Spain, of Flemish Masters outside the Low Countries, of French Masters outside of France. In short, one might get the finest and most complete collection representative of all the painting schools of the world from English collections.

One ungracious explanation is easy: that the English have been the rich people and have been able to buy. But a rich nation does not buy pictures without some national love and appreciation of pictures. I hesitate to write that in these days when one hears of a _nouveau riche_ commissioning a friend "to buy him 10,000 worth of pictures by those old jossers"; and in any well-regulated fashionable furniture shop you may buy with the pots and the pans and the indubitably old worm-eaten antique furniture, pictures of the right age; and even books in the proper tone of binding for your old oak book-shelves. Still, taking a view by centuries and disregarding the crazes of a season or a generation, it is fair to conclude that a nation which consistently buys pictures, and good pictures at that, has some love of and taste in painting.

The lordly young Englishmen of past generations who, "doing the grand tour," came home with examples of the great continental Masters of painting for their halls, had not the motive of a blind and vulgar obedience to a pa.s.sing craze. They must have known good pictures and liked good pictures.

Year by year, generation by generation, they carried on their work until English collections came to have representative examples of all the great schools of the world. The while, there was no lack of English painters of distinction, and though the English schools of painting may not claim the same degree of achievement as English schools of prose and verse, they have done enough to rescue their country from the reproach of being careless as a nation of the art of painting. There are, let it be agreed, "Philistine"

cla.s.ses in England; and these "Philistines" have had more authority and opportunities of rule in England than in most European countries, a fact which has carried with it artistic disadvantages to weigh something in the balance against advantages in other directions. But it is absurd to attempt to represent England as a lost country artistically. The visitor who is interested chiefly in art will find in the various public galleries (not alone in London, but also in the provincial cities) many great examples of painting. If he chooses to carry his curiosity further he will find most of the private collections open to the inspection of any one who will take the trouble to ask courteously for permission to visit them.

In regard to music, it is probably just as easy to clear England of the charge of ignorance and want of sympathy. But I cannot undertake the task with any skill, for I know little of the musical world, not enough even to distinguish surely in Simonetti, the famous Italian conductor of the Athanasian orchestra (the names are laboriously fict.i.tious), the excellent Simpson of Brixton, S.W. But the evidence (I plead always for a judgment on evidence, not on the hasty impression founded on a prejudice) would seem to show that England at one time was musical enough in a sweet wholesome way, producing a music of the open-air and the green fields. Then there came the great industrial epoch, and the people turned from the fields to the factories, and dug under the soil instead of tilling its surface; and that stream of thrush-melody was choked, and there came nothing notable to take its place, with no prompting to madrigal and pastoral, with not enough of neurasthenia to produce anything notable in the music of morbidity.

But the charge against musical England is carried further. Not only does she produce nothing, but she appreciates nothing. Dumb herself, she is resolutely deaf also to the song of others. I find it difficult to believe this in view of the fact that the hall-mark of London is still sought eagerly by the singers of the world, and is regarded as the final stamp of approval. If England were such a barbarian of the musical world as some would have us believe, why this eagerness for an English verdict of approval, an eagerness which is to be met with all over Europe, America, and Australia?