Books: Our Old Home
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home
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The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the sidewalks
and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life,
the unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic
rule, and the street be the one locality in which every scene and
incident should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot,
conspiracies for robbery and murder, family difficulties or agreements,--
all such matters, I doubt not, are constantly discussed or transacted in
this sky-roofed saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of
coal-smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the English climate, the only
comfortable or wholesome part of life, for the city poor, must be spent
in the open air. The stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at
night, whole families and neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one
another in the daytime, when a settled rain drives them within doors, are
worse horrors than it is worth while (without a practical object in view)
to admit into one's imagination. No wonder that they creep forth from
the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or
scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see
the grimy housewife, before the shower is ended, letting the raindrops
gutter down her visage; while her children (an impish progeny of
cavernous recesses below the common sphere of humanity) swarm into the
daylight and attain all that they know of personal purification in the
nearest mud-puddle. It might almost make a man doubt the existence of
his own soul, to observe how Nature has flung these little wretches into
the street and left them there, so evidently regarding them as nothing
worth, and how all mankind acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of
her offspring. For, if they are to have no immortality, what superior
claim can I assert for mine? And how difficult to believe that anything
so precious as a germ of immortal growth can have been buried under this
dirt-heap, plunged into this cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I
beheld the scene, it affected me with surprise and loathsome interest,
much resembling, though in a far intenser degree, the feeling with which,
when a boy, I used to turn over a plank or an old log that had long lain
on the damp ground, and found a vivacious multitude of unclean and
devilish-looking insects scampering to and fro beneath it. Without an
infinite faith, there seemed as much prospect of a blessed futurity for
those hideous hugs and many-footed worms as for these brethren of our
humanity and co-heirs of all our heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a
mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping at the bottom of a deep,
noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward to the surface, bearing
the half-drowned body of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for
its life, and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these slime-clogged
nostrils can be made capable of inhaling celestial air, I know not how
the purest and most intellectual of us can reasonably expect ever to
taste a breath of it. The whole question of eternity is staked there.
If a single one of those helpless little ones be lost, the world is lost!
The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their cat-like rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, fanned and blear-eyed
with the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it being
too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them
sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we
will glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood,
because the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in
these dark abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it
to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more
grief and pity (all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with
an inclination to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding
herself on the pretty ways of her ragged and skinny infant, just as a
young matron might, when she invites her lady friends to admire her
plump, white-robed darling in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly
characteristic seemed to have altogether perished out of these poor
souls. It was the very same creature whose tender torments make the
rapture of our young days, whom we love, cherish, and protect, and rely
upon in life and death, and whom we delight to see beautify her beauty
with rich robes and set it off with jewels, though now fantastically
masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to handle. I
recognized her, over and over again, in the groups round a doorstep or in
the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious earnestness about
intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest, sympathizing at almost
the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and another's shadow, wise,
simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed, and breaking into small
feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes of a
moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of her silken-skirted sisters,
though smothered into propriety by dint of a well-bred habit. Not that
there was an absolute deficiency of good-breeding, even here. It often
surprised me to witness a courtesy and deference among these ragged
folks, which, having seen it, I did not thoroughly believe in, wondering
whence it should have come. I am persuaded, however, that there were
laws of intercourse which they never violated,--a code of the cellar, the
garret, the common staircase, the doorstep, and the pavement, which
perhaps had as deep a foundation in natural fitness as the code of the
drawing-room.
Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been uttering folly in the last
two sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of
feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's
novels. For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and,
for no reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff
his ears,--an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, only
snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where a
sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of
their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words
in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All
English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than
ourselves by this simple and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement,
to batter one another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of English
ladies (for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week)
will be satisfied that their belligerent propensities are kept in
abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the part of society. It requires a
vast deal of refinement to spiritualize their large physical endowments.
Such being the case with the delicate ornaments of the drawing-room, it
is the less to be wondered at that women who live mostly in the open air,
amid the coarsest kind of companionship and occupation, should carry on
the intercourse of life with a freedom unknown to any class of American
females, though still, I am resolved to think, compatible with a generous
breadth of natural propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them (of
all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that could just toddle across
the street alone) going about in the mud and mire, or through the dusky
snow and slosh of a severe week in winter, with petticoats high uplifted
above bare, red feet and legs; but I was comforted by observing that both
shoes and stockings generally reappeared with better weather, having been
thriftily kept out of the damp for the convenience of dry feet within
doors. Their hardihood was wonderful, and their strength greater than
could have been expected from such spare diet as they probably lived
upon. I have seen them carrying on their heads great burdens under which
they walked as freely as if they were fashionable bonnets; or sometimes
the burden was huge enough almost to cover the whole person, looked at
from behind,--as in Tuscan villages you may see the girls coming in from
the country with great bundles of green twigs upon their backs, so that
they resemble locomotive masses of verdure and fragrance. But these poor
English women seemed to be laden with rubbish, incongruous and
indescribable, such as bones and rags, the sweepings of the house and of
the street, a merchandise gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown
away, a heap of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's bundle of sin.
Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain gracefulness among
the younger women that was altogether new to my observation. It was a
charm proper to the lowest class. One girl I particularly remember, in a
garb none of the cleanest and nowise smart, and herself exceedingly
coarse in all respects, but yet endowed with a sort of witchery, a native
charm, a robe of simple beauty and suitable behavior that she was born in
and had never been tempted to throw off, because she had really nothing
else to put on. Eve herself could not have been more natural. Nothing
was affected, nothing imitated; no proper grace was vulgarized by an
effort to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere. This kind
of beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is probably vanishing out of
the world, and will certainly never be found in America, where all the
girls, whether daughters of the upper-tendon, the mediocrity, the
cottage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and deportment,
seldom accomplishing a perfectly triumphant hit or an utterly absurd
failure. Those words, "genteel" and "ladylike," are terrible ones and do
us infinite mischief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we are in a
transition state, and shall emerge into a higher mode of simplicity than
has ever been known to past ages.
In such disastrous circumstances as I have been attempting to describe,
it was beautiful to observe what a mysterious efficacy still asserted
itself in character. A woman, evidently poor as the poorest of her
neighbors, would be knitting or sewing on the doorstep, just as fifty
other women were; but round about her skirts (though wofully patched)
you would be sensible of a certain sphere of decency, which, it seemed to
me, could not have been kept more impregnable in the cosiest little
sitting-room, where the tea-kettle on the hob was humming its good old
song of domestic peace. Maidenhood had a similar power. The evil habit
that grows upon us in this harsh world makes me faithless to my own
better perceptions; and yet I have seen girls in these wretched streets,
on whose virgin purity, judging merely from their impression on my
instincts as they passed by, I should have deemed it safe, at the moment,
to stake my life. The next moment, however, as the surrounding flood of
moral uncleanness surged over their footsteps, I would not have staked a
spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet the miracle was within the
scope of Providence, which is equally wise and equally beneficent (even
to those poor girls, though I acknowledge the fact without the remotest
comprehension of the mode of it), whether they were pure or what we
fellow-sinners call vile. Unless your faith be deep-rooted and of most
vigorous growth, it is the safer way not to turn aside into this region
so suggestive of miserable doubt. It was a place "with dreadful faces
thronged," wrinkled and grim with vice and wretchedness; and, thinking
over the line of Milton here quoted, I come to the conclusion that those
ugly lineaments which startled Adam and Eve, as they looked backward to
the closed gate of Paradise, were no fiends from the pit, but the more
terrible foreshadowings of what so many of their descendants were to be.
God help them, and us likewise, their brethren and sisters! Let me add,
that, forlorn, ragged, careworn, hopeless, dirty, haggard, hungry, as
they were, the most pitiful thing of all was to see the sort of patience
with which they accepted their lot, as if they had been born into the
world for that and nothing else. Even the little children had this
characteristic in as perfect development as their grandmothers.
The children, in truth, were the ill-omened blossoms from which another
harvest of precisely such dark fruitage as I saw ripened around me was to
be produced. Of course you would imagine these to be lumps of crude
iniquity, tiny vessels as full as they could hold of naughtiness; nor can
I say a great deal to the contrary. Small proof of parental discipline
could I discern, save when a mother (drunken, I sincerely hope) snatched
her own imp out of a group of pale, half-naked, humor-eaten abortions
that were playing and squabbling together in the mud, turned up its
tatters, brought down her heavy hand on its poor little tenderest part,
and let it go again with a shake. If the child knew what the punishment
was for, it was wiser than I pretend to be. It yelled, and went back to
its playmates in the mud. Yet let me bear testimony to what was
beautiful, and more touching than anything that I ever witnessed in the
intercourse of happier children. I allude to the superintendence which
some of these small people (too small, one would think, to be sent into
the street alone, had there been any other nursery for them) exercised
over still smaller ones. Whence they derived such a sense of duty,
unless immediately from God, I cannot tell; but it was wonderful to
observe the expression of responsibility in their deportment, the anxious
fidelity with which they discharged their unfit office, the tender
patience with which they linked their less pliable impulses to the
wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide them whithersoever it
liked. In the hollow-cheeked, large-eyed girl of ten, whom I saw giving
a cheerless oversight to her baby-brother, I did not so much marvel at
it. She had merely come a little earlier than usual to the perception of
what was to be her business in life. But I admired the sickly-looking
little boy, who did violence to his boyish nature by making himself the
servant of his little sister,--she too small to walk, and he too small to
take her in his arms,--and therefore working a kind of miracle to
transport her from one dirt-heap to another. Beholding such works of
love and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so impossible, after
all, for these neglected children to find a path through the squalor and
evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven. Perhaps there was
this latent good in all of them, though generally they looked brutish,
and dull even in their sports; there was little mirth among them, nor
even a fully awakened spirit of blackguardism. Yet sometimes, again, I
saw, with surprise and a sense as if I had been asleep and dreaming, the
bright, intelligent, merry face of a child whose dark eyes gleamed with
vivacious expression through the dirt that incrusted its skin, like
sunshine struggling through a very dusty window-pane.
In these streets the belted and blue-coated policeman appears seldom in
comparison with the frequency of his occurrence in more reputable
thoroughfares. I used to think that the inhabitants would have ample
time to murder one another, or any stranger, like myself, who might
violate the filthy sanctities of the place; before the law could bring up
its lumbering assistance. Nevertheless, there is a supervision; nor does
the watchfulness of authority permit the populace to be tempted to any
outbreak. Once, in a time of dearth I noticed a ballad-singer going
through the street hoarsely chanting some discordant strain in a
provincial dialect, of which I could only make out that it addressed the
sensibilities of the auditors on the score of starvation; but by his side
stalked the policeman, offering no interference, but watchful to hear
what this rough minstrel said or sang, and silence him, if his effusion
threatened to prove too soul-stirring. In my judgment, however, there is
little or no danger of that kind: they starve patiently, sicken
patiently, die patiently, not through resignation, but a diseased
flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do mischief to those above them,
it will probably be by the communication of some destructive pestilence;
for, so the medical men affirm, they suffer all the ordinary diseases
with a degree of virulence elsewhere unknown, and keep among themselves
traditionary plagues that have long ceased to afflict more fortunate
societies. Charity herself gathers her robe about her to avoid their
contact. It would be a dire revenge, indeed, if they were to prove their
claims to be reckoned of one blood and nature with the noblest and
wealthiest by compelling them to inhale death through the diffusion of
their own poverty-poisoned atmosphere.
A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has an unconquerable
dislike to poverty and beggary. Beggars have heretofore been so strange
to an American that he is apt to become their prey, being recognized
through his national peculiarities, and beset by them in the streets.
The English smile at him, and say that there are ample public
arrangements for every pauper's possible need, that street-charity
promotes idleness and vice, and that yonder personification of misery on
the pavement will lay up a good day's profit, besides supping more
luxuriously than the dupe who gives him a shilling. By and by the
stranger adopts their theory and begins to practise upon it, much to his
own temporary freedom from annoyance, but not entirely without moral
detriment or sometimes a too late contrition. Years afterwards, it may
be, his memory is still haunted by some vindictive wretch whose cheeks
were pale and hunger-pinched, whose rags fluttered in the east-wind,
whose right arm was paralyzed and his left leg shrivelled into a mere
nerveless stick, but whom he passed by remorselessly because an
Englishman chose to say that the fellow's misery looked too perfect, was
too artistically got up, to be genuine. Even allowing this to be true
(as, a hundred chances to one, it was), it would still have been a clear
case of economy to buy him off with a little loose silver, so that his
lamentable figure should not limp at the heels of your conscience all
over the world. To own the truth, I provided myself with several such
imaginary persecutors in England, and recruited their number with at
least one sickly-looking wretch whose acquaintance I first made at
Assisi, in Italy, and, taking a dislike to something sinister in his
aspect, permitted him to beg early and late, and all day long, without
getting a single baiocco. At my latest glimpse of him, the villain
avenged himself, not by a volley of horrible curses, as any other Italian
beggar would, but by taking an expression so grief-stricken, want-wrung,
hopeless, and withal resigned, that I could paint his lifelike portrait
at this moment. Were I to go over the same ground again, I would listen
to no man's theories, but buy the little luxury of beneficence at a cheap
rate, instead of doing myself a moral mischief by exuding a stony
incrustation over whatever natural sensibility I might possess.
On the other hand, there were some mendicants whose utmost efforts I even
now felicitate myself on having withstood. Such was a phenomenon
abridged of his lower half, who beset me for two or three years together,
and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members, had some
supernatural method of transporting himself (simultaneously, I believe)
to all quarters of the city. He wore a sailor's jacket (possibly,
because skirts would have been a superfluity to his figure), and had a
remarkably broad-shouldered and muscular frame, surmounted by a large,
fresh-colored face, which was full of power and intelligence. His dress
and linen were the perfection of neatness. Once a day, at least,
wherever I went, I suddenly became aware of this trunk of a man on the
path before me, resting on his base, and looking as if he had just
sprouted out of the pavement, and would sink into it again and reappear
at some other spot the instant you left him behind. The expression of
his eye was perfectly respectful, but terribly fixed, holding your own as
by fascination, never once winking, never wavering from its point-blank
gaze right into your face, till you were completely beyond the range of
his battery of one immense rifled cannon. This was his mode of
soliciting alms; and he reminded me of the old beggar who appealed so
touchingly to the charitable sympathies of Gil Blas, taking aim at him
from the roadside with a long-barrelled musket. The intentness and
directness of his silent appeal, his close and unrelenting attack upon
your individuality, respectful as it seemed, was the very flower of
insolence; or, if you give it a possibly truer interpretation, it was the
tyrannical effort of a man endowed with great natural force of character
to constrain your reluctant will to his purpose. Apparently, he had
staked his salvation upon the ultimate success of a daily struggle
between himself and me, the triumph of which would compel me to become a
tributary to the hat that lay on the pavement beside him. Man or fiend,
however, there was a stubbornness in his intended victim which this
massive fragment of a mighty personality had not altogether reckoned
upon, and by its aid I was enabled to pass him at my customary pace
hundreds of times over, quietly meeting his terribly respectful eye, and
allowing him the fair chance which I felt to be his due, to subjugate me,
if he really had the strength for it. He never succeeded, but, on the
other hand, never gave up the contest; and should I ever walk those
streets again, I am certain that the truncated tyrant will sprout up
through the pavement and look me fixedly in the eye, and perhaps get the
victory.
I should think all the more highly of myself, if I had shown equal
heroism in resisting another class of beggarly depredators, who
assailed me on my weaker side and won an easy spoil. Such was the
sanctimonious clergyman, with his white cravat, who visited me with a
subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in a case of
heart-rending distress;--the respectable and ruined tradesman, going from
door to door, shy and silent in his own person, but accompanied by a
sympathizing friend, who bore testimony to his integrity, and stated the
unavoidable misfortunes that had crushed him down;--or the delicate and
prettily dressed lady, who had been bred in affluence, but was suddenly
thrown upon the perilous charities of the world by the death of an
indulgent, but secretly insolvent father, or the commercial catastrophe
and simultaneous suicide of the best of husbands; or the gifted, but
unsuccessful author, appealing to my fraternal sympathies, generously
rejoicing in some small prosperities which he was kind enough to term my
own triumphs in the field of letters, and claiming to have largely
contributed to them by his unbought notices in the public journals.
England is full of such people, and a hundred other varieties of
peripatetic tricksters, higher than these, and lower, who act their parts
tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive effect. I knew at
once, raw Yankee as I was, that they were humbugs, almost without an
exception,--rats that nibble at the honest bread and cheese of the
community, and grow fat by their petty pilferings, yet often gave them
what they asked, and privately owned myself a simpleton. There is a
decorum which restrains you (unless you happen to be a police-constable)
from breaking through a crust of plausible respectability, even when you
are certain that there is a knave beneath it.
After making myself as familiar as I decently could with the poor
streets, I became curious to see what kind of a home was provided for the
inhabitants at the public expense, fearing that it must needs be a most
comfortless one, or else their choice (if choice it were) of so miserable
a life outside was truly difficult to account for. Accordingly, I
visited a great almshouse, and was glad to observe how unexceptionably
all the parts of the establishment were carried on, and what an orderly
life, full-fed, sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary
exercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Possibly, indeed, it was
that very orderliness, and the cruel necessity of being neat and clean,
and even the comfort resulting from these and other Christian-like
restraints and regulations, that constituted the principal grievance on
the part of the poor, shiftless inmates, accustomed to a lifelong luxury
of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild life of the streets has perhaps
as unforgetable a charm, to those who have once thoroughly imbibed it, as
the life of the forest or the prairie. But I conceive rather that there
must be insuperable difficulties, for the majority of the poor, in the
way of getting admittance to the almshouse, than that a merely aesthetic
preference for the street would incline the pauper-class to fare scantily
and precariously, and expose their raggedness to the rain and snow, when
such a hospitable door stood wide open for their entrance. It might be
that the roughest and darkest side of the matter was not shown me, there
being persons of eminent station and of both sexes in the party which I
accompanied; and, of course, a properly trained public functionary would
have deemed it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to exhibit
anything to people of rank that might too painfully shock their
sensibilities.
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