Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
companion-piece; and we shall make the attempt, though the subject is
far more difficult than the former was.
In the first place, we must state what we mean by a poor man, for it is
a term of wide range in its relative applications. A painstaking
artisan, trained to self-denial, and a strict adaptation, not of his
means to his wants, but of his wants to his means, finds himself rich
and grateful, if some unexpected fortune enables him to give his wife a
new gown, his children cheap holiday joys, and his starving neighbor a
decent meal; while George IV., when heir apparent to the throne of Great
Britain, considered himself driven by the pressure of poverty to become
a debtor, a beggar, a swindler, and, by the aid of perjury, the husband
of two wives at the same time, neither of whom he treated well. Since
poverty is made an excuse for such depravity in conduct, it would be
well to mark the limits within which self-control and resistance to
temptation may be expected.
When he of the olden time prayed, "Give me neither poverty nor riches,"
we presume he meant that proportion of means to the average wants of a
human being which secures freedom from pecuniary cares, freedom of
motion, and a moderate enjoyment of the common blessings offered by
earth, air, water, the natural relations, and the subjects for thought
which every day presents. We shall certainly not look above this point
for our poor man. A prince may be poor, if he has not means to relieve
the sufferings of his subjects, or secure to them needed benefits. Or he
may make himself so, just as a well-paid laborer by drinking brings
poverty to his roof. So may the prince, by the mental gin of
horse-racing or gambling, grow a beggar. But we shall not consider these
cases.
Our subject will be taken between the medium we have spoken of as answer
to the wise man's prayer, and that destitution which we must style
infamous, either to the individual or to the society whose vices have
caused that stage of poverty, in which there is no certainty, and often
no probability, of work or bread from day to day,--in which cleanliness
and all the decencies of life are impossible, and the natural human
feelings are turned to gall because the man finds himself on this earth
in a far worse situation than the brute. In this stage there is no
ideal, and from its abyss, if the unfortunates look up to Heaven, or the
state of things as they ought to be, it is with suffocating gasps which
demand relief or death. This degree of poverty is common, as we all
know; but we who do not share it have no right to address those who do
from our own standard, till we have placed their feet on our own level.
Accursed is he who does not long to have this so--to take out at least
the physical hell from this world! Unblest is he who is not seeking,
either by thought or act, to effect this poor degree of amelioration in
the circumstances of his race.
We take the subject of our sketch, then, somewhere between the abjectly
poor and those in moderate circumstances. What we have to say may apply
to either sex, and to any grade in this division of the human family,
from the hodman and washerwoman up to the hard-working, poorly-paid
lawyer clerk, schoolmaster, or scribe.
The advantages of such a position are many. In the first place, you
belong, inevitably, to the active and suffering part of the world. You
know the ills that try men's souls and bodies. You cannot creep into a
safe retreat, arrogantly to judge, or heartlessly to forget, the others.
They are always before you; you see the path stained by their bleeding
feet; stupid and flinty, indeed, must you be, if you can hastily wound,
or indolently forbear to aid them. Then, as to yourself, you know what
your resources are; what you can do, what bear; there is small chance
for you to escape a well-tempered modesty. Then again, if you find power
in yourself to endure the trial, there is reason and reality in some
degree of self-reliance. The moral advantages of such training can
scarcely fail to amount to something; and as to the mental, that most
important chapter, how the lives of men are fashioned and transfused by
the experience of passion and the development of thought, presents new
sections at every turn, such as the distant dilettante's opera-glasses
will never detect,--to say nothing of the exercise of mere faculty,
which, though insensible in its daily course, leads to results of
immense importance.
But the evils, the disadvantages, the dangers, how many, how imminent!
True, indeed, they are so. There is the early bending of the mind to the
production of marketable results, which must hinder all this free play
of intelligence, and deaden the powers that craved instruction. There is
the callousness produced by the sight of more misery than it is possible
to relieve; the heart, at first so sensitive, taking refuge in a stolid
indifference against the pangs of sympathetic pain, it had not force to
bear. There is the perverting influence of uncongenial employments,
undertaken without or against choice, continued at unfit hours and
seasons, till the man loses his natural relations with summer and
winter, day and night, and has no sense more for natural beauty and joy.
There is the mean providence, the perpetual caution to guard against
ill, instead of the generous freedom of a mind which expects good to
ensue from all good actions. There is the sad doubt whether it will
_do_ to indulge the kindly impulse, the calculation of dangerous
chances, and the cost between the loving impulse and its fulfilment.
Yes; there is bitter chance of narrowness, meanness, and dulness on this
path, and it requires great natural force, a wise and large view of life
taken at an early age, or fervent trust in God, to evade them.
It is astonishing to see the poor, no less than the rich, the slaves of
externals. One would think that, where the rich man once became aware of
the worthlessness of the mere trappings of life from the weariness of a
spirit that found itself entirely dissatisfied after pomp and
self-indulgence, the poor man would learn this a hundred times from the
experience how entirely independent of them is all that is intrinsically
valuable in our life. But, no! The poor man wants dignity, wants
elevation of spirit. It is his own servility that forges the fetters
that enslave him. Whether he cringe to, or rudely defy, the man in the
coach and handsome coat, the cause and effect are the same. He is
influenced by a costume and a position. He is not firmly rooted in the
truth that only in so far as outward beauty and grandeur are
representative of the mind of the possessor, can they count for any
thing at all. O, poor man! you are poor indeed, if you feel yourself so;
poor if you do not feel that a soul born of God, a mind capable of
scanning the wondrous works of time and space, and a flexible body for
its service, are the essential riches of a man, and all he needs to make
him the equal of any other man. You are mean, if the possession of money
or other external advantages can make you envy or shrink from a being
mean enough to value himself upon such. Stand where you may, O man, you
cannot be noble and rich if your brow be not broad and steadfast, if
your eye beam not with a consciousness of inward worth, of eternal
claims and hopes which such trifles cannot at all affect. A man without
this majesty is ridiculous amid the flourish and decorations procured
by money, pitiable in the faded habiliments of poverty. But a man who is
a man, a woman who is a woman, can never feel lessened or embarrassed
because others look ignorantly on such matters. If they regret the want
of these temporary means of power, it must be solely because it fetters
their motions, deprives them of leisure and desired means of
improvement, or of benefiting those they love or pity.
I have heard those possessed of rhetoric and imaginative tendency
declare that they should have been outwardly great and inwardly free,
victorious poets and heroes, if fate had allowed them a certain quantity
of dollars. I have found it impossible to believe them. In early youth,
penury may have power to freeze the genial current of the soul, and
prevent it, during one short life, from becoming sensible of its true
vocation and destiny. But if it _has_ become conscious of these, and yet
there is not advance in any and all circumstances, no change would
avail.
No, our poor man must begin higher! He must, in the first place, really
believe there is a God who ruleth--a fact to which few men vitally bear
witness, though most are ready to affirm it with the lips.
2. He must sincerely believe that rank and wealth
"are but the guinea's stamp;
The man's the gold;"--
take his stand on his claims as a human being, made in God's own
likeness, urge them when the occasion permits, but never be so false to
them as to feel put down or injured by the want of mere external
advantages.
3. He must accept his lot, while he is in it. If he can change it for
the better, let his energies be exerted to do so. But if he cannot,
there is none that will not yield an opening to Eden, to the glories of
Zion, and even to the subterranean enchantments of our strange estate.
There is none that may not be used with nobleness.
"Who sweeps a room, as for Thy sake
Makes that and th' action clean."
4. Let him examine the subject enough to be convinced that there is not
that vast difference between the employments that is supposed, in the
means of expansion and refinement. All depends on the spirit as to the
use that is made of an occupation. Mahomet was not a wealthy merchant,
and profound philosophers have ripened on the benches, not of the
lawyers, but the shoemakers. It did not hurt Milton to be a poor
schoolmaster, nor Shakspeare to do the errands of a London play-house.
Yes, "the mind is its own place," and if it will keep that place, all
doors will be opened from it. Upon this subject we hope to offer some
hints at a future day, in speaking of the different trades, professions,
and modes of labor.
5. Let him remember that from no man can the chief wealth be kept. On
all men the sun and stars shine; for all the oceans swell and rivers
flow. All men may be brothers, lovers, fathers, friends; before all lie
the mysteries of birth and death. If these wondrous means of wealth and
blessing be likely to remain misused or unused, there are quite as many
disadvantages in the way of the man of money as of the man who has none.
Few who drain the choicest grape know the ecstasy of bliss and knowledge
that follows a full draught of the wine of life. That has mostly been
reserved for those on whose thoughts society, as a public, makes but a
moderate claim. And if bitterness followed on the joy, if your fountain
was frozen after its first gush by the cold winds of the world, yet,
moneyless men, ye are at least not wholly ignorant of what a human being
has force to know. You have not skimmed over surfaces, and been dozing
on beds of down, during the rare and stealthy visits of Love and the
Muses. Remember this, and, looking round on the arrangements of the
lottery, see if you did not draw a prize in your turn.
It will be seen that our ideal poor man needs to be religious, wise,
dignified, and humble, grasping at nothing, claiming all; willing to
wait, never willing to give up; servile to none, the servant of all, and
esteeming it the glory of a man to serve. The character is rare, but not
unattainable. We have, however, found an approach to it more frequent in
woman than in man.
THE CELESTIAL EMPIRE.
During a late visit to Boston, I visited with great pleasure the Chinese
Museum, which has been opened there.