The poor have pleasures, because they draw more than we can from pleasures; they anticipate more, because they are less spoilt by the experience of pleasures, and have not yet found out that these have mutable faces. To make their good fortune more complete, they are even capable of anticipating pleasure without being disappointed when they attain it. Their pleasures are keen, because they are rare. They are keen, because they obtain very little pleasure without paying for it, and as they have little money they must scheme, plan, save; so pleasure becomes a thing to strive for, a true reward; they have to climb the fig tree to secure the figs; they are not cursed with the ownership of the fig tree, cannot lie under its boughs until a ripe fig drops into their mouth.
We must not forget, too, that poverty has psychological reactions. Mr Bernard Shaw says that poverty is a disgusting disease, and, on the whole, he is right, but the sufferer has marvellous moments of recovery. In those moments the poor man does what the rich man, by long education, has been taught not to do: he lets himself go. He can hold arms with half a dozen companions and proceed uproariously along a pier, singing abominably an excellent music-hall tune, to the inefficient accompaniment of a concertina or mouth-organ; he can reel out of public-houses in a state of complete indifference to public opinion, instead of being secreted by the club waiter and paternally controlled by a taxi-driver; indeed, the poor man can derive much vanity from his condition, and rise in the esteem of his fellows next day, because he took part in such a spree. (In this country, if you can’t be great, be drunk.) Above all, he can make love in public. He can, unashamedly, sit upon a bench in the park, complicatedly intertwined with his beloved, sometimes with two beloveds; nobody minds, and the little god of love will, for a moment, blind the policeman’s bull’s eye. He needs no Sussex down, nor footmen, nor thermos flasks, to make a picnic; with the Daily Mirror beneath the bough, a flask of ginger beer, and her beside him singing, ‘Who were you with Last Night?’ Battersea Park is Paradise enow.
Their social functions, too, are more social, and less functional. They do not, in our sense, entertain, that is to say they do not, at given intervals, go through their address book and say: ‘We can’t ask Lady So-and-So, because she has refused our last two invitations, and I suppose we must ask the Fitz-Thompsons. Or do you think we could get out of it?’ No, they don’t entertain; they prefer to be entertained, and so, on strictly scheduled occasions, namely, Christmas, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and engagements, and on no others, the whole family and a few very old friends are asked to a spread. And it is a spread. It is not compulsory jellies from Gunter’s, or game pie from the Café Royal, or, still worse, a dinner no better than every day’s dinner, but merely a little longer; it is a real spread comprising three times the food that is normally eaten, choice food, such as tinned salmon, lobster, trifle with real brandy, stuffed loin of pork, likely to be remembered. If there is wine it is port wine, the real article. The real article and not the rotten routine. So the people they bring together are not the frigid crowd we call acquaintances, whom most of us ask because they have asked us, or because they threaten to do so, people whom we do not know very well and whom we don’t want to know very well, people, therefore, on whom our display cannot make a great impression. The poor ask the people they know well, people who know their exact income. Thus they attain a great human pleasure: ostentation. The life of the poor is harsh, but their joys are keen. I used to know a woman who called them the poor poor. What a fool she was!
VIII
STONES
CHAPTER VIII
STONES
A critical foreigner, whose impressions of London I collected, (a thing one does to foreigners because that at least is common ground), gave words to the usual complaint of the Continental: London was a mean-looking city; its bricks were dirty; it used so little stone; lacked we stone? And the buildings were low. And some stuck out beyond the common frontage, while some set back. And so on, the whole served with the usual sauce made up mainly of respect for our practical spirit and our commercial success, the things we are not proud of because, indeed, they are ours.
Almost every foreigner has that impression of London, and he mistakes the spirit of our city so much that, to restore him, one has to show him typical American architecture such as Selfridge’s, Kingsway, or older buildings of greater majesty, such as the Quadrant or the terraces round Regent’s Park. Failing stone, we exhibit stucco, and the intelligent foreigner discerns no irony in the epigram on Nash:—
‘Augustus, at Rome, was for building renowned,
And of marble he left what of brick he had found;
But is not our Nash, too, a very great master?
He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster.’
Now stucco is an unfairly scorned material; it produces a pleasantly smooth surface, which weathers to creamy-olive, and, indeed, its only crime is that it conceals brick. Brick and tile are two of our most delightful materials; people do wrong to sneer at them just because poor cottages are so built. Red brick, when not too large, such as the delightful little Tudor brick, is smiling and domestic. The progress of building has, in this case, proved a retrogress for art. Nowadays, the big red bricks are so angular, so perfectly cemented that most blocks of flats approximate to workhouses, while the yellow brick now current should be reserved for public buildings of special distinction, such as national memorials and academies of painting. But the little red brick that you could hold in your hand, the irregular lines of which bespoke a temperament, which fitted tenderly into patchy cement, as an almond of alabaster into the green velvet of its sheath, was quite another kind of stone. Still, we must take our stones as we find them, and I do not agree with the intelligent foreigner who thinks London a mean city. Many of us find the fine Continental cities, such as new Paris, new Barcelona, and new Frankfurt, as painful to live in as might be the Agricultural Hall. The houses are too high, their flanks too white, their alignment dull as a righteous life. When one considers towns like New York, one wonders how the inhabitant finds his way home. By scent, I suppose, for little can his eyes help him among those vast buildings, all alike.