The Simple Life And Snobbery

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 281, 17 February 1928, Page 14

The Simple Life And Snobbery

Too Many “Happy Beggars ” IWrttten for The Sun.] EVER since the first storyteller told that one about a king who looked high and low for a con- . tented man, and at length found him I in a ragged old beggar, the idea of j the happy vagabond has persisted. I But it is only in recent years that this incorrigible old scoundrel has really begun to multiply. Almost every modern minor poet and a good few of the others have helped in the process, till the poetic air is thick with the choiring of cherubic tramps, rrazy old gentlewomen, sailormen and beggars and tatterdemalion gipsies, all moralistic and benignly radiant. It is a tempting theme; but the funny part is that for all their seeming heterogeneity, these Contented Vagabonds and Mad Tom Tattermans, Dreaming Johns and Ispahan Beggarmen. peripatetic Bagmen and Tinkers of Teviotdale, together with all the simple;minded ladies who throng the paths of modern poetic beatitude — all these are the same charming but improbable persons in different guises. They are all held up to us as examples of what some form of this Simple Life business can do. One and all are either, oh! so wise, or else incredibly happy, carefree, starry-eyed, and full of ecstatic joys, due apparently to wearing decrepit underpants, eating foods uncouthly plain, and sleeping ont beneath the fog and the hail and the thunderstorms. There are many variations of this strange person: he is not always a tramp or a beggar, but whatever his walk of life his reputed inclinations are the same. It may be just De la Mare’a plain Jane, or it may be a royal personage who flings his crown aside with an antic Away to the Greenwood Tree! —but their tastes are standardised and unalterable. Occasionally, it is true., a princess with an exceptional amount of common sense is made to realise that she is quite unfitted for the life of the raggle-taggle gipsies oh; but we are always left impressed with the fact that the shortcoming is entirely on Jier own side. It seems to be a sort of mild Back-to-Nature movement sweetened by humour gone astray. No one would deny that amongst his many modern incarnations the cheerful beggar has given us charming people and poetry; yet one is ini

dined to grow tired of him. This is because such verse and such stories are for the most part completely insincere— (I hasten to except whoever may be your own favourite rapscallion). Admittedly it is quite probable that a simple soul like De la Mare would really prefer a ‘bumpity ride in a wagon of hay' to a golden coach or whatever It was at which his Jane turned up her pug nose. But I am sure that by far the majority of poetasters do not really so valiantly eschew the pleasant things of the flesh, but rather, from that inverted snobbery, so often the defence of those who find themselves in an inferior position, pretend to laugh at them.

There are in modern literature many other manifestations of this snobbery of insincere content. It runs, though in a different way, through many of our minor essayists, and for this perhaps Charles Lamb is to blame. The gentle mannerisms delightful in him become hateful when spread through a thousand of his sedulous apes; yet now we suffer a plague of essayists who parade their amiable weaknesses before us and to make money exploit the charm of their intimate poverties. Even in school magazines the blight has spread amongst those who have been introduced to the alluring grace with which our modern essayists trade on their less reprehensible vices and their elegant indigence. A favourite type of essay with schoolboys nowwiays seems to be one vaguely in the Elian manner, on some such subject as sitting in the gallery of the theatre and gloating over the unfortunates, befurred and comfortably dined, who sit in the stalls and lose all the intellectual pleasures of the Simple Lifers in the gallery. Simple snobbery! Let ns pray to the Nine Muses or whoever else takes care of literature in these sad days, that we be delivered from this posturing; and that this delightful humbug be restricted to those, like W. H. Davies, in whom it is not humbug and who can themselves truly show a* record of contented trampdom or poverty. For us others, let ns add to our vagabond songs a footnote that we’d really hate to go a-beggaring; and to our sprightly es■avs one tfcat a stall among the tinly anited, granted the memory of a handsome dinner and a leisurely car. would not prevent us from enjoying the play. 4 'VjrQLSELEY RUSSELL.