The sickly and unreasoning tone which pervades the literature of poverty is demoralizing. There is nothing helpful in the assumption that effort is vain, resistance hopeless, and the world monstrously cruel. The dominating element of such prose and verse is a bleak despair, unmanly, unwomanly, inhuman. Out of the abundance of material before me, I quote a single poem, published in the New York _Call_, reprinted in the _Survey_, and christened mockingly,--
They got y', kid, they got y', just like I said they would; You tried to walk the narrow path, You tried, and got an awful laugh; And laughs are all y' did get, kid, they got y' good!
They never saw the little kid,--the kid I used to know, The little bare-legged girl back home, The little girl that played alone, They don't know half the things I know, kid; ain't it so?
They got y', kid, they got y',--you know they got y' right; They waited till they saw y' limp, Then introduced y' to the pimp, Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn't fight.
I guess you know what some don't know, and others know damn well, That sweatshops don't grow angel's wings, That working girls is easy things, And poverty's the straightest road to hell.
And this is what our Lady Poverty, bride of Saint Francis, friend of all holiness, counsel of all perfection, has come to mean in these years of grace! She who was once the surest guide to Heaven now leads her chosen ones to Hell. She who was once beloved by the devout and honored by the just, is now a scandal and a shame, the friend of harlotry, the instigator of crime. Even a true poet like Francis Thompson laments that the poverty exalted by Christ should have been cast down from her high caste.
All men did admire Her modest looks, her ragged, sweet attire In which the ribboned shoe could not compete With her clear simple feet. But Satan, envying Thee thy one ewe-lamb, With Wealth, World's Beauty and Felicity Was not content, till last unthought-of she Was his to damn. Thine ingrate, ignorant lamb He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her This thing which qualms the air, Vile, terrible, old, Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.
These are the words of one to whom the London gutters were for years a home, and whose strengthless manhood lay inert under a burden of pain he had no courage to lift. Yet never was sufferer more shone upon by kindness than was Francis Thompson; never was man better fitted to testify to the goodness of a bad world. And he did bear such brave testimony again and yet again, so that the bulk of his verse is alien to pessimism,--'every stanza an act of faith, and a declaration of good will.'