# Ethel Churchill/Chapter 81

CHAPTER V.
THE FÊTE AT SIR ROBERT WALPOLE'S.
Few, save the poor, feel for the poor:  The rich know not, how hard It is to be of needful food  And needful rest debarred.
Their paths are paths of plenteousness,  They sleep on silk and down;
And never think how heavily  The weary head lies down.
They know not of the scanty meal,  With small pale faces round; No fire upon the cold damp hearth  When snow is on the ground.
They never by the window lean,  And see the gay pass by; Then take their weary task again,  But with a sadder eye.
There is no denying that there are "royal roads" through existence for the upper classes; ​for them, at least, the highways are macadamized, swept, and watered. They are surrounded not only by luxuries, but by pleasures, which, at all events to the young, must have the zest of novelty. It seems to me the veriest fallacy to say that the lots in life are weighed out in equal balances: the difference is very great—to the examiner, sad: and to the sufferer, bitter! Before we talk of equality of pain, which is, in nine cases out often, only a selfish and indolent excuse for neglect, let us contrast a high and a low position together. On one side is protection, instruction, and pleasure; on the other is neglect, ignorance and hardship. Here, wants are invented to become luxuries; there, "hunger swallows all in one low want." Among the rich, body and mind are cultivated with equal watchfulness; among the poor, the body is left to disease and to decrepitude, and the mind to void and destruction. I grant that I speak of the two extremes; but it is the worst ill of social existence that there should be such extremes.
The child of the rich man sleeps in the ​silken cradle, his little cries are hushed by the nurse, whose only duty is to watch the progress of that tiny frame. The least illness, and the physician bestows on the infant heir the knowledge of a life; for every single patient benefits by all his predecessors. The child becomes a boy: Eton or Westminster, Oxford or Cambridge, have garnered for his sake the wisdom of centuries: he is launched into public life, and there are friends and connexions on either hand, as stepping-stones in his way. He arrives at old age: the armchair is ready, and the old port has been long in the cellars of his country-house to share its strength with its master. He dies: his very coffin is comfortable; the very vault of his ancestors is sheltered; a funeral sermon is preached in his honour; and escutcheon and marble tablet do their best to preserve his memory.
Take the reverse of the picture. The infancy of the poor child is one of cries, too often of blows; natural affection has given way before the iron pressure of want. The ​old proverb, that, "When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window," is true in a far more general sense than the one in which it is generally applied. They have the floor for a bed; the scant and mouldering remnant of food for dinner; the cold hearth, where the wind blows in the snow;—these physical sufferings re-act on the moral world, they deaden and embitter the sweetest of our feelings. The parent half loves, half loathes, the child that takes the bread from his own mouth; and the child looks on that as tyranny, which is only misery. It learns to fear before it learns to love.
Suppose such a childhood past: it has escaped disease; no chance chill has distorted the youthful limbs, they have, at least, health to begin life. The poor man has nothing more than his strength. God's best gifts lie dormant within him: the chances are that he cannot read even the holy page, that, at least, holds out the hope of a less miserable world. He has not that mental cultivation which alone teaches us what are ​our resources, and how to husband or to exert them. He knows only how to labour, and that not in the most serviceable manner to himself. He does not, even when he can, which is rare enough, lay by for the future, because he has never been accustomed to reflect. Life has for him no future. Perhaps he takes to drinking; and it is easy, with half-a-dozen different kinds of French wines on the table, the claret purple beside the golden sherry, to say a thousand true and excellent things on the crime of excess. If the gentleman refrains, it is from a moral restraint the poor man has never been taught to exercise; and what does the poor man drink to avoid—cold, hunger, perhaps bodily pain—always bodily weariness?
Old age comes on feeble, and often premature, when his place of refuge is a straw pallet, where, if his family keep him, it is an act of Roman virtue, the very devotion of duty and affection; for even the old man's morsel must be taken from their own. But the workhouse is the ordinary resting-place ​before the grave: and there human selfishness takes its most revolting aspect; there life has not left one illusion, one affection: all is harsh, cold, revolting, and unnatural. The difference that began in the cradle continues to the tomb. The bare coffin, a few boards hastily nailed together, is flung into the earth; the service is hurried over, the ground trodden down, and the next day the children are playing upon the new grave, whose tenant is already forgotten. So much for the equality of human existence.
But the fête of to-day belonged to a different order of things. Luxury, aided by refinement, gave every grace to the external world, at least. Villas are, I believe, a delightful invention of the Romans, who set very seriously about enjoying the world they had conquered. Sir Robert's villa would have done honour to Lucullus, who has always appeared to me the most thoroughbred gentleman of antiquity. Alcibiades was a happy union of coxcomb and conqueror; but there was in him a want of that repose, and of that superb ​self-reliance, which characterises the Roman. The climate and the scenery of England are admirably adapted to the perfection of a villa. The great charm of our landscapes is their colouring—so quiet, yet so refreshing. The fine old trees, and the fine old tree standing by itself, are peculiar to our fields; the rich sweep of grass so vividly green, the prodigality of garden flowers, and a sky whose intense blue owes the depth of its purple to the white clouds which float above in broken masses,—all these belong to a style of natural beauty which is entirely English. It is connected only with enjoyment; nothing startles as in the vast precipices of Switzerland; nothing brings the past too vividly to mind as in the sad, though lovely ruins of Greece: all is tranquil, and redolent of summer. It is the cultivated, rather than the artificial; just enough of nature for all the purposes of art.