VIIITHE POWERS OF THE POOR
That the poor have strange, one might almost say occult, powers, seems to me proved. The downtrodden with whom I dealt were, so far as I could judge, the very pies and daws of existence, who, one might reasonably suppose, would be grateful for whatever hips and haws and other chance berries the bleak winter of their calamities left them. Nothing could be further from the truth. They lived, rather, it would seem, on canary seed and millet, maize and sesame, not obtainable in the open marketsof the world. I fell under the strange delusion that they were to labor for me, and that, for a wage agreed upon, they were to relieve me of care. Again, how wide of the mark was this! They expected to be looked after like queen bees, and theywere! I myself laboring from flower to flower for them, and filling their cells with honey.
You may think them as stupid as you like, and as inconsiderable. Deal with them but long enough, and you shall have strange suspicions. You shall begin to note a growing and undeniable likeness in these to "Cinderella" and "The Youngest Brother." Nor are these fairy tales, mind you, safe and unbelievable, shut up there in your Grimm and Andersen on the shelf, to be taken down only at pleasure; no, but fairy tales potent and indisputable, hoeing your potatoes, walking about in the flesh in your kitchen, and hanging out your clothes of a Monday.
There is, indeed, some royalty about this class that bodes as ill for us to ignore, as it is alarming for us to contemplate. If the Lord be for them,—and there is every reason, historical and romantical, to suppose that Heis,—who then can be against them? Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, but these can never be lowered! These, I take it, are in their own manner imperial spirits, let kings and royal successions be what they may. Here, without cabinets or ministers, or executive or administrative cares to weigh upon them, yet with what authority they go clothed!
It is astounding, if one only becomes poor enough,—I say it in all soberness and sincerity,—how rich and powerful one may become. And perhaps just here it is my duty to submit a testimony I have up to this time withheld. I have said that I myself have been poor, but I have as yet said nothing of the strange unlooked-for loftiness that this circumstance lent me. While I was of the wealthy, I strongly maintained that these, and what we are wont to call the "upper classes," have the very considerable advantage, and believed it with all my heart. But no sooner was I downright poor, uncertain even where the next meals were to come from, than the potion, the charm, the necromancy, the delusion, or the truth,—have it which you will!—began to work, and I myself tohave a subtle suspicion, and at last a positive sense, of superiority.
Who never ate his bread with tears,He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers!
The wealthy, the advantageous began to dwindle in my eyes. How poor they were in real experience, in sympathy, in understanding; how wanting in fine feeling; how destitute, for the most part, of that only wealth worth acquiring,—wealth of the heart!—whereas, the poorer I was, the greater the wealth of understanding that was mine; as my moneys dwindled, I was made rich of the universe; a new sense of love and bounty was given me as by an unlooked-for legacy. The vast tired multitude going home at night, all these suddenly were my own—my brothers and my sisters; further, it may be noted, I acquired the wealthy also. These too became my brothers, more chill and starved sometimes (I knew this now) in their luxuries than the "poor" in their destitution. Could one, indeed, knowing any of the real values, feel a bitterness toward such? or could one fail to experience, having known any of the true humilities of life, a love for these also?
Let it sound as paradoxical as it may,—I do not say it unadvisedly,—poverty is an enrichment, and often enough a grandeur. Here, indeed, in this fact—I think it by no means unlikely—may lie the explanation of many a humorously high behavior and lordliness in those of whom I have more particularly told. If this be truth, as I take it to be, then it lends consistency, even if a little quaint, to what threatened to seem but unwarrantable chaos.
Is it not probable, remembering my own experience, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, and the others had with their very indigence acquired a compensating fortune and, by reason of their very destitution, inherited, as by lofty bequest, the universe? It should not be forgotten, moreover, that I had come to these distinctions only after years of comfortable living, whereas those I have told you of had been born to the purple of their poverty. I, in serving others, have never yet been able to give myself the ample airs of a Margharetta. I have never found it possible to pull pennies out of people's pockets by the Æschylean tragedy of my condition, or to draw pity atwill out of their hearts. I am smitten with silence when trouble and difficulty assail me, and I have an intolerable instinct against asking for the sympathy and commiseration of others; whereas those better accustomed than myself,—as I have shown you,—how readily are they able to requisition your sympathy, to appropriate wholly your pity, and to confiscate your possessions, your theories, and your ethics!
Yet we, mind you, in the face of these abilities, have assumed them to be our inferiors, and have organized for them frankly a society for the improvement of their condition! That we can mitigate their sufferings and inconveniences, lessen their cold or their hunger, I willingly admit; but I am not of so bold an intellect as to believe that we can improve their condition, or that their condition, take it for all in all, can be improved upon.
If you doubt such testimony as I have borne, and think it too personal, there is other more general and considerable. Were not Egypt and all her power despised and triumphed over by "a colony of revolted Egyptian slaves"? Did not proud Rome go down,also, to a like downtrodden people? Picture what Rome was in her might—Rome tracing her ancestry to the gods! And then look upon her bowed down in slavish subserviency to kiss the shoe of a poor fisherman!
And the poor then, who called themselves Christians—as now you would have called them underlings, menials, subalterns. Yes, and so they were. And they lived precariously in caves and catacombs under the surveillance of the emperor's guards, as our most scurvy poor under the police. Yet see them to-day, with dominion over palm and pine, and with control of the earth's continents. And where now are the Roman emperors?
History teems with such instances. With what scorn do you suppose the mighty Persians in their glittering armor might have looked upon those few youths who in the dawn "sat combing their long hair for death" before Marathon? When the nameless poor murmured outside the gates of Versailles, what would any of us have given for the brief lineage or trumpery royalty of a Marie or a Louis? It would not have sold for a franc to any one with a head for business. Even asthese poor people shook the gates, almost the haughtiest queen of history was already on her way, then, and at their bidding, to become the Widow Capet. And that, too, for only a little while, and by sufferance, before they hurried her on to the last level of all.
There may seem to be about them at first a marked futility. Only wait, and you shall see what a power they have! Is there need that they should pique or plume themselves or strut? They have no need to cut a dash. The herald's office could add nothing to their stature. Here is no newness or recency, no innovation; here rather are tradition, custom, something time-honored, however little you may think it venerable. Here is immemorial usage, "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary."
And have these continued in the world in predominating numbers, despite misfortune, calamity, catastrophe? No; mind you, rather because of these! Think of a race with that ability! Since Cain fell into misfortune and was shielded of the Almighty, and Lazarus, for a like reason, lacked not a divine advocate, have these not had the special protection ofGod? Can you show me any people of lands and property, of thrift and saving habits, of full granaries and honest provident stores laid by, who were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night? who had manna and quail supplied them; and an entire land swept clean of its rightful owners by the Lord's hand, so that they might come into it instead, to enjoy the wells they had not digged, and the fruits thereof which neither had they planted?
Were it not of too great a bulk, the testimony of literature could be brought to corroborate that of history. When you read "The Jolly Beggars," you are informed without squeamishness which is the most free and powerful class in the world; and when you have read that other document by the same hand, "The Twa Dogs," you have perused a fine bit of testimony as to which is the happiest. Or if there lacked these, and there were left us but Arden and its gentle beggars—who could be in doubt? How they triumph over the rich and the successful and lord it felicitously in their poverty! What would you look to find these but broken and saddened—these who are not only beggars, mind you, but wrongedmen: the Duke, Orlando, Rosalind, all suffering injustice; Adam starving; Touchstone, Jaques, Amiens, and for the most part all of them, too well acquainted with the rudeness of the world; men who had known but too well the unkindness of man's ingratitude, the feigning of most friendship, the bitterness of benefits forgot. And yet, turn only to that first scene in the forest. If ever I set eyes on independent gentlemen, here they are! And who doubts too, reading of these, that Shakespeare wrote of them out of his own Arden, out of the enrichment of his own poverty, and the splendors of his unsuccessful years!
The powers of the poor! This is a matter to which I have often lent my speculation, and have striven to perceive by what rights, as of gods in exile, they have maintained their dignity and their supremacy; and I have wondered whether one of these may not be that necessity laid upon them to touch more nearly than we the realities of life. We have set guards at our gateways, to turn away Poverty or Misery or Cold or Hunger, yes, and Human Brotherhood and Life and Death themselves. Death, it is true, and some others, will notbe altogether gainsaid, but enter at last into the lives of all of us, bringing invariably—this is to be noted—a great dignity to the house which they have visited. But to the poor the "heavenly powers" come, whether welcome or no, and like the gods visiting mortals, they do not depart, save from the entirely unworthy, without bestowing enrichment.
I have sat at the table of an old Philemon and Baucis, whose condition of poverty appeared not to be bettered by their entertainment of the great realities of life; whose pitcher poured as scant as ever it did, though Death and Calamity had but lately visited them. But when you thirsted for a better draught, a draught not to sustain the body, but the spirit—then, then the miracle was evident enough! They filled your cup to its trembling brim, nor, pour as they would, could they empty their hearts of love and understanding.
These are, indeed, good gifts, and of the gods, and there are many others; and it would take little to prove how much more bountifully the poor receive of them than the wealthier classes.
Another possession, which I have notedoften among the poor, is that gayety, that lightness of heart, that almost inconsequent gayety, so often seen, amazingly, among them. Where you and I might be crushed by calamity, they can raise their heads and be glad, and that over some trifle. Where you might have gone sad and sober for weeks, Mamie could dance her little ragtime songs; Margaret could be gay with the pig; and Margharetta, fresh from a new downfall, could gather the children of her heart to her as a hen its chickens, and in blissful content think nothing of the morrow. This I have seen again and again. They are as recuperative as King David. Let them sin and blunder and suffer and be cast down, it is but for a brief season; soon you shall hear the plucking of their harp and the sound of their psaltery, and a new song unto the Lord.
As further testimony, this is, I believe, the place to confess that it was not in the days of my prosperity and happiness, but in the days of my poverty and sorrow, that I myself became possessed of this good gift of the gods. The laughter and gayety of heart of prosperous years, though they may be of no meanorder, seem to me but pallid things compared with those of a more tested season. To have seen the total wreckage of one's hopes, to have known despair and the bleak winds of the heath of the world, and to delight still, and more than ever, in the little and the gay, and to taste with a keener relish than ever before the fine-flavored humor of the world, this is to be rich, though one were in tatters; this is to be gifted, though to the last farthing one has been robbed.
But there is another endowment besides all these, even more precious—I mean that unconscious grace and dignity of spirit possessed by some of the poor; I mean that quiet and gracious acceptance of a lot which, to our reckoning, seems but bare and difficult; that gentle and persistent kindliness of men and women toward a world which, it seems to us, has so roughly and despitefully used them.
This I take to be the greatest of the gifts that the gods confer upon the poor; and being so, it is fitting that it should not be indiscriminately bestowed. You shall not meet it commonly or often; yet here or there will be found some true ruler of his kind, looking outon the world with this kindly and gracious spirit. I have known some few such myself, and one notably; though my acquaintance with him was but of short duration, yet it summed up for me and made whole the fragmentary virtues of the poor, and set a lasting seal upon my love and understanding of them.