Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

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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 imitative; 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-ten-dom, 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 door-step, 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 coziest 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
foot-steps, 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, care-worn,
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 spread 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 life-like 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 life-long luxury
of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild life of the streets has perhaps as
unforgettable 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.

The women's ward was the portion of the establishment which we especially
examined. It could not be questioned that they were treated with kindness
as well as care. No doubt, as has been already suggested, some of them
felt the irksomeness of submission to general rules of orderly behavior,
after being accustomed to that perfect freedom from the minor proprieties,
at least, which is one of the compensations of absolutely hopeless
poverty, or of any circumstances that set us fairly below the decencies of
life. I asked the governor of the house whether he met with any difficulty
in keeping peace and order among his inmates; and he informed me that his
troubles among the women were incomparably greater than with the men. They
were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester
one another in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to thwart
his own authority by the like intangible methods. He said this with the
utmost good-nature, and quite won my regard by so placidly resigning
himself to the inevitable necessity of letting the women throw dust into
his eyes. They certainly looked peaceable and sisterly enough, as I saw
them, though still it might be faintly perceptible that some of them were
consciously playing their parts before the governor and his distinguished
visitors.

This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for his position. An
American, in an office of similar responsibility, would doubtless be a
much superior person, better educated, possessing a far wider range of
thought, more naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external observation
and a readier faculty of dealing with difficult cases. The women would not
succeed in throwing half so much dust into his eyes. Moreover, his black
coat, and thin, sallow visage, would make him look like a scholar, and his
manners would indefinitely approximate to those of a gentleman. But I
cannot help questioning, whether, on the whole, these higher endowments
would produce decidedly better results. The Englishman was thoroughly
plebeian both in aspect and behavior, a bluff, ruddy-faced, hearty,
kindly, yeoman-like personage, with no refinement whatever, nor any
superfluous sensibility, but gifted with a native wholesomeness of
character which must have been a very beneficial element in the atmosphere
of the almshouse. He spoke to his pauper family in loud, good-humored,
cheerful tones, and treated them with a healthy freedom that probably
caused the forlorn wretches to feel as if they were free and healthy
likewise. If he had understood them a little better, he would not have
treated them half so wisely. We are apt to make sickly people more morbid,
and unfortunate people more miserable, by endeavoring to adapt our
deportment to their especial and individual needs. They eagerly accept our
well-meant efforts; but it is like returning their own sick breath back
upon themselves, to be breathed over and over again, intensifying the
inward mischief at every repetition. The sympathy that would really do
them good is of a kind that recognizes their sound and healthy parts, and
ignores the part affected by disease, which will thrive under the eye of a
too close observer like a poisonous weed in the sunshine. My good friend
the governor had no tendencies in the latter direction, and abundance of
them in the former, and was consequently as wholesome and invigorating as
the west-wind with a little spice of the north in it, brightening the
dreary visages that encountered us as if he had carried a sunbeam in his
hand. He expressed himself by his whole being and personality, and by
works more than words, and had the not unusual English merit of knowing
what to do much better than how to talk about it.

The women, I imagine, must have felt one imperfection in their state,
however comfortable otherwise. They were forbidden, or, at all events,
lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning
themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns,
with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally, too,
they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly
alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few
of these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native American
population, individuals of whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mixing
as we do, no drop of gentle blood has contributed to refine the turbid
element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has lighted up the stolid
eyes, which their forefathers brought from the Old Country. Even in this
English almshouse, however, there was at least one person who claimed to
be intimately connected with rank and wealth. The governor, after
suggesting that this person would probably be gratified by our visit,
ushered us into a small parlor, which was furnished a little more like a
room in a private dwelling than others that we entered, and had a row of
religious books and fashionable novels on the mantel-piece. An old lady
sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance, and rose to receive us with
a certain pomp of manner and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy,
which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the genuineness of
her aristocratic pretensions. But, at any rate, she looked like a
respectable old soul, and was evidently gladdened to the very core of her
frostbitten heart by the awful punctiliousness with which we responded to
her gracious and hospitable, though unfamiliar welcome. After a little
polite conversation, we retired; and the governor, with a lowered voice
and an air of deference, told us that she had been a lady of quality, and
had ridden in her own equipage, not many years before, and now lived in
continual expectation that some of her rich relatives would drive up in
their carriages to take her away. Meanwhile, he added, she was treated
with great respect by her fellow-paupers. I could not help thinking, from
a few criticisable peculiarities in her talk and manner, that there might
have been a mistake on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial
exaggeration on the old lady's, concerning her former position in society;
but what struck me was the forcible instance of that most prevalent of
English vanities, the pretension to aristocratic connection, on one side,
and the submission and reverence with which it was accepted by the
governor and his household, on the other. Among ourselves, I think, when
wealth and eminent position have taken their departure, they seldom leave
a pallid ghost behind them,--or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few
recognize it.

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