themselves at our feet.  It is certainly not pleasant to see them there; but silence or a storm of impersonal protest—a protest that appeals vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police—does not seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them.  We have, it may be, a scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a simply human word.  Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two.  It is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of intercourse—the last outrage.  How do we propose to redress those conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, because fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in the indifference of the wise.  “Have patience, little saint,” is a phrase that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among the most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among the stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread.  The people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted figure.  Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest—it is worth while to remember—is the most effectual.  An indignant tourist, one who to the portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture.  They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to the violence of the rich.

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared.  If a beggar is still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort us to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardly intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance, of no good influence upon the morals of the road.  He no longer trusts the world with a sight of his gaiety.  He is not a wholehearted mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby an unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind.  The merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible to the seated and stable social world.

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led underground.  The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world’s ears.  But it seems that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the subject of a Spanish song.

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw’s or a robber’s, it is not a song of violence or fear.  It is the random trolling note of a man who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takes it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand of unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds, but has not broken his own by force.  It seems, therefore, the song of an indomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyr chance.

THE LADIES OF THE IDYLL

Little Primrose dames of the English classic, the wife and daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady.  It is given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to them in the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reason that he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom he marries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen.  Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, but certainly fit for membership of that large class of various fortune within which the name makes a sufficient equality.

He, their author, thought them sufficient.  Having amused himself ingeniously throughout the story with their nameless vulgarities, he finally hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the convention of heroes in love.  He plays with their coarseness like a perfectly pleased and clever showman, and then piously and happily shuts up his couples—the gentle Dr. Primrose with his abominable Deborah; the excellent Mr. Burchell with the paltry Sophia; Olivia—but no, Olivia is not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready for her in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere in the background—the unhappy man whom, with her father’s permission, this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing might pluck forward the lagging suit of the squire.

Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, her father conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstration of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal of the squire be not after all forthcoming.  But it is so evident her author knew no better, that this matter may pass.  It involves a point of honour, of which no one—neither the maker of the book nor anyone he made—is aware.  What is better worth considering is the fact that Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters of a scholar.  The education of women had sunk into a degradation never reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.  It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose “could read any English book without much spelling” if her husband and son were as definitely limited to journeyman’s field-labour as she was to the pickling and the gooseberry wine.  Any of those industries is a better and more liberal business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.  Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of that century or of an unlettered state.  What is really unhandsome is the new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent, foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost innocently natural, in Goldsmith’s story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is all this.  He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly humorous passage in the book, to praise her for her “prudence, economy, and obedience.”  Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her husband an occasion for rebuking her as “Woman!”  This is done, for example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unlucky schemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her by the sallies of a kitchen sarcasm.

She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt.  She has given them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest the paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burchell, who had saved her life; for he has no fortune.  Mrs. Primrose begins grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and she ends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regard to securing the head of the table.