ial life in its highest and its lowest
forms. Mr. H., as I will call this person, said that the dismal
pictures drawn by social novelists of life among the very poor were
true in fact, but wrong in perspective. Novelists described what their
own feelings would be if they were condemned to live the life of the
disinherited city drudge, rather than the actual feelings of the drudge
himself. A man of education, accustomed to easy means, would suffer
tortures unspeakable if he were made to live in a single room of a
populous and squalid tenement, and had to subsist upon a wage at once
niggardly and precarious. He would be tormented with that memory of
happier things, which we are told is a 'sorrow's crown of sorrow.' But
the man who has known no other condition of life is unconscious of its
misery. He has no standard of comparison. An environment which would
drive a man of refinement to thoughts of suicide, does not produce so
much as dissatisfaction in him. Hence there is far more happiness
among the poor than we imagine. They see nothing deplorable in a lot
to which they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents
before their eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to
take a less mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to
whom the refinements of European civilisation are objects of ridicule
rather than envy.

I quote this opinion for what it is worth; but it has little relevance
to my own case. I am the only competent judge of my own feelings. I
know perfectly well that these feelings were not shared by men who
shared the conditions of my own life. There was a clerk in the same
office with me who may be taken as an example of his class. Poor
Arrowsmith--how well I recall him!--was a little pallid man, always
neatly if shabbily dressed, punctual as a clock, and of irreproachable
diligence. He was verging on forty, had a wife and family whom I never
saw, and an aged mother whom he was proud to support. He was of quite
imperturbable cheerfulness, delighted in small jokes, and would chatter
like a daw when occasion served him. He had never read a book in his
life; his mind subsisted wholly upon the halfpenny newspapers. He had
no pleasures, unless one can count as such certain Bank Holiday
excursions to Hampstead Heath, which were performed under a heavy sense
of duty to his family. He had lived in London all his days, but knew
much less of it than the country excursi