It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in
the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the
existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought
and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of
patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers,
and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual
craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did
actually plumb.
When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question
whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance
of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that
the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing
that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The
modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student
further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the
chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as
its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very
moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking
heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul's
holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more
like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.
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