BEGGARS.

(From the Pall Mall Gazette.)

In cynical moments we may fancy that the arms of this metropolis should have for supporters a flunkey on one side and a beggar on the other. Certainly they are two of the most characteristic figures in our streets ; all that is vulgar and ostentatious in wealth is typified in the livery imposed upon servants, and all that is squalid and disgusting in poverty is still better represented by our beggars. For alas ! the decay of which Lamb complained has long become an established fact. Beggars have by no means vanished from our streets, but they have lost the peculiar poetical halo with which he was still able to surround them. Begging, indeed, has suffered that change which vulgarises all pursuits when they are followed as professions instead of being confined to genuine enthusiasts.

Warfare when it is carried on by a professional class loses half its picturesque attractions ; and begging, as now pursued, is as inferior to the ancient forms of the art as work turned out by machinery to the old work in which the mind of the artist is visible in every line. It is a dreary artificial business ; the beggars seldom possess even the characteristic merit of liars —that of being amusing ; Edie Ochiltree and his like, the Reynoldses of begging, the men who could give dignity to their representation of the humblest parts in life, have long been impossible ; even Burns's Jovial beggars imply free country air instead of stifling London slums. The old soldier who sings—

What tho' with hoary locks I must stand the winter shocks
Beneath the woods and rocks oftentimes for a home ?
When the tother bag I sell, and tother bottle tell,
I could meet a troop of hell at the sound of the drum,

comes of a sturdier breed than his London rival. Underneath his rags he has to show genuine scars received "When welcoming the French to the sound of the drum," and he has a blustering blackguard sort of patriotism about him still ; whereas, the bold man who should strip a London beggar—say at a casual ward—would have little chance of finding more than a wretched lump of distorted humanity; about as capable of patriotism as of sound views about the Athanasian creed. They are not stout old trees prematurely warped, or in picturesque decay, but the hideous growth of damp uncleanly recesses, shamefully crowded together, and never visited by the sun. The only poetry which can attach to such beings is not that of healthy fresh emotion, but such poetry as can be associated with the dark side of modern civilisation. There is such poetry, though the subject has scarcely received justice. Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest artist who has interpreted for us the awe produced by the corruption lurking below the surface of a great city—the mystery of iniquity of London and Paris. Yet there is something morbid, occasionally something absolutely revolting, in the atmosphere to which he introduces us ; and with all his unmistakable power, he shows the weakness inseparable from exaggeration. As we meet some of our squalid London beggars we feel disposed to ask whether one of the sturdy ruffians who assures us that he has had nothing to eat all day, may really be a new incarnation of Vautrin, and his performance merely an interlude in some dark plot against that vague entity called society. Or is the respectable old gentleman who professes to be blind, and is seated on the pavement with his back against some church railings laboriously droning forth the Bible as he follows embossed letters with his fingers—is he really a Ferragus, after the manner of the "Histoire des Treize" ? Has he got a gorgeous apartment at the end of some filthy lane, where he wallows in luxury and is visited by his daughter, the wife of some rich city merchant ?

Will he appear in the evening in the gilded halls of a bloated aristocracy as a diplomatist of distinction, and meeting a young gentleman who has rashly endeavoured to mark him down, as young Mr. Huxter marked down Captain Costigan, will he suddenly grasp the young gentleman by the hair of the head and give him a playful kind of hairdresser's rub ? And will the young gentleman go home in consequence and die miserably of the slow poison which has thus been insinuated into the pores of his skin, cursing the curiosity which led him to cross the old beggar's path ? The obvious answer to such questions is always simply no. M. Balzac was a very great writer, but a trifle too clever. There were real tragedies enough before him ; but he often missed them by his love for terrible melodramatic incidents with hideous effects of blue fire and ghastly catastrophes. Is not there tragedy enough in the plain truth, if a man has the eye to see it, without this bewildering French cockery ? Old Sandy Mackaye, in " Alton Locke," speaks very much to the point upon these matters when he puts the sentimental young poet opposite the entrance of a miserable alley and shows him there the
"mouth o' hell and the twa pillars thereof at the entry—the pawnbroker's shop o' one side and the gin-palace at the other." "Is there no heaven above them there," he asks, " and the hell beneath them ? and God frowning and the devil grinning?" Mr. Kingsley has grown less revolutionary, as do most men in time, but " Alton Locke," in spite of much exaggerated sentiment, shows a force in bringing out the really tragic side of life in a great city of which he may well be proud, for few modern writers have equalled it.

To return, however, to the beggars. It must be confessed that it requires a poetic eye to see much tragedy about them ; they are unwashed, unsavory people, who seem to carry on a tolerably good business with very little imagination, and after a singularly monotonous fashion. There are two leading styles amongst beggars, the respectable or bullying, and the piteous, appealing style. Amongst the first is the Bible-reading gentleman of whom we have already spoken, and whose only hardship is the monotony of that employment, which certainly must be trying when he gets among the genealogies. Then there is the clever young man who produces frescoes upon the pavement, representing a ship at sea, with a very blue sky and very white clouds ; he is at lowest an inferior kind of artist, whose gains are probably humble, but regular. With him may be classed the upright, military-looking gentleman, with the air of a distinguished guardsman, who concedes to our curiosity the statement that he has been " blinded by lightning," and leaves us to settle the amount of tribute merited by such a calamity. Such, again, is he paralysed commercial traveller, who goes about in a bath-chair, and the poor deformed dwarf who performs on an accordion in Trafalgar-square. To the last of these we should imagine that no man would grudge his earnings ; but it must be confessed that the others are rather a trial of human patience. Their petition savours too much of a demand, and the only apology is the worse extortion of a similar kind practised in private life. The sanctity even of a bachelor's chambers cannot secure a man from the incursions of daring lady collectors, to whose audacity there is no limits as there can be no effective reply. When, for example, a lady in the dress of some religious order appears, and directs her victim, of course in the most courteous terms, to contribute to the support of her institution, no effectual means of exorcism has been discovered short of immediately handing over the smallest acceptable sum. If we are helpless victims in such hands, is not there something mean about avenging ourselves by turning a deaf ear to the less formidable street beggar ? The art of begging is carried on to so much greater advantage by many members of the clerical profession that there seems to be something snobbish in yielding to their importunities whilst refusing help to their humbler imitators. To refuse both would doubtless be the proper thing for a stern political economist, but if from sheer weakness of mind one submits to beggars in respectable clothing, a feeble desire to be consistent, if foolish, leads to similar concessions to the beggars in rags.

The more piteous class of beggars give a severer twinge to one's feelings. For the "froze-out" men who occasionally make noonday hideous, we confess to feeling simple aversion. We cannot afford to admit that a frost at Christmas can justify able-bodied men in a hideous bellowing to which even the strains of an organ-grinder are agreeable music. "But when we encounter a mass of rags and filth painfully plodding along the pavement—especially when it is seen reproachfully glancing through dining-room windows at luncheon time—we occasionally begin to fancy that after all there may be something in Christian charity. If a few spare coppers are rattling in our pockets, we have to run over the little armory of arguments with which every man should be provided on such occasions. First, of course, comes the assertion, if we transfer this penny to the beggar's hand it will probably be turned into gin at the next public-house. But then, if it stays in ours? Say it will turn into a box of cigar lights. How are we to avoid a sneaking impression that perhaps the gin will give that poor tatterdemalion more pleasure than the cigar lights will give us ? If we had not washed for a fortnight, and our garments stuck together more from habit than compulsion, would not a glass of gin (we know the sentiment is wrong) be on the whole a blessing ? The true answer would be to have no spare halfpence. We ought to have spent all that we can spare in well-considered sets of benevolence, not in relieving the itchings of an uneasy conscience by a cheap show of good nature. In the absence of this satisfactory reply, the easiest relief is to give away all available coppers to crossing sweepers as persons in an ambiguous position, on the borderland, at least, between beggary and honest labour.

One cannot surmount such monetary spasms, and by a few of those casuistical juggles which a little experience teaches, learn not merely to refuse beggars but to feel a glow of conscious virtue for the refusal. Yet they sometimes cause an unpleasant pang to our complacency when we look at them in the coolest and most dispassionate way. We may reject Balzac as melodramatic and Mr. Kingsley as over-sentimental ; we may feel certain that every beggar retires at night to a lodging of disreputable comfort ; that he has a good supper of roast-meat, and pays well for the wretched children whom he hires for exhibition ; the beggars may be made up to act the part as deliberately as an actor ; but at least, there are plenty of genuine models for their imitation. If these outward signs of distress are factitious, like the goods sometimes exposed in a shop window, they correspond to a very extensive stock within. The fate of the decent poor, who are starved every now and then as martyrs to respectability, is all the more dismal if they are separated from us by this screen of deception. The beggars are like the plunderers who bring discredit upon an army, but they prove the existence of the great army of paupers and persons on the brink of pauperism. They carry us in imagination across the great invisible gulf that is fixed between us and our poorer neighbours, and are like the waifs and strays cast up by a great ocean of misery. According to the picturesque language of the Yankees, there is only a sheet of brown paper between California and the infernal regions. In London we feel at times that there is a partition of similar thickness between us and the purgatory of poverty. In recompense of the many sins of beggars, it is perhaps something that they keep that fact before our minds.

 smh 26/7/1868,