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The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum.
"Daniel's black outside, but there's many stuck-up women I know whose white man is black inside." Absorbingly interesting was the quest opening up one vista of life after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life saw flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after destiny squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift, respectability.
The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be seen.
Instead of halting at the palatial Adelphia, we halted at the obscure Crown and Miter." "Ha, ha, ha! Good! that was very good! But why did you do this? Not that I care for her. I care not. But my curiosity. And it must have inconvenienced you, this squalor." "Well, it did.
In the mean time, his companion, having employed divers pailfuls of water in cleansing himself from the squalor of jail, submitted his face to the barber, tinged his eye-brows with a sable hue, and, being dressed in his own clothes, ventured to visit Peregrine, who was still under the hands of his valet-de-chambre, and who gave him to understand that his escape had been connived at, and that the condition of their deliverance was their departure from Paris in three days.
The frost had not so stiffened the old father Jew's fingers but that he could count gold fast enough; he had thriven uncommonly during our reverses. That sort of gentry lives in squalor and dies in gold. She was as white as snow, she had eyes like velvet, and dark lashes to them like rats' tails; her hair was so thick and glossy that it made you long to stroke it.
Again he came upon throbbing life; but of quite another type. Once more he met people in abundance, noisy, chattering human beings; but more frequently than his own he now heard foreign tongues that he did not understand, and did not even recognize. No longer were the pedestrians well dressed or apparently prosperous. Instead, poverty and squalor and filth were rampant.
The paces of the cob, the dazzle of the silver-plated harness, the fine lines of the cart, the unbending mien of the driver, made a glittering cynosure for envy. All around was grime, squalor, servitude, ugliness; the inglorious travail of two hundred thousand people, above ground and below it, filled the day and the night.
And out of the rotting soil rose the strange new blossoms we call Faith, and Hope, and Charity. For Folly cried, 'I know not, but I believe'; Squalor, 'I am vile, but I hope'; and the oppressed, 'I am despised, but I love. That was the Christian Trinity, the echo of man's frustration, as the other was the echo of his accomplishment. Yet both he needs.
Now, with the torn-down houses, the swept-away quarters, one has not only views of hills and river and bridges, and of gardens and palaces and loggias, hidden once and to be hidden again, but into the very life of the people: the squalor of back streets revealed, of yards looked into, of the open places turned into immondezzaio and play and grazing ground, showing the barbarism and nakedness of the land showing one that there is here no tradition of anything more active, decent or human than this present demolition.
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