A traveler newly returned from the Pacific Ocean tells pleasant stories
of the Patagonians. As the steamer he was in was passing through
Magellan's Straits some natives came out to her in boats. They wore no
clothes at all, though there was snow in the air. A baby that came along
with them made some demonstration that displeased its mother, who took
it by the foot, as Thetis took Achilles, and soused it over the side of
the boat into the cold seawater. When she pulled it in, it lay a moment
whimpering in the bottom of the boat, and then curled up and went to
sleep. The missionaries there have tried to teach the natives to wear
clothes, and to sleep in huts; but, so far, the traveler says, with very
limited success. The most shelter a Patagonian can endure is a little
heap of rocks or a log to the windward of him; as for clothes, he
despises them, and he is indifferent to ornament.
To many of us, groaning under the oppression of modern conveniences, it
seems lamentably meddlesome to undermine the simplicity of such people,
and enervate them with the luxuries of civilization. To be able to sleep
out-o-doors, and go naked, and take sea-baths on wintry days with
impunity, would seem a most alluring emancipation. No rent to pay, no
tailor, no plumber, no newspaper to be read on pain of getting behind
the times; no regularity in anything, not even meals; nothing to do
except to find food, and no expense for undertakers or physicians, even
if we fail; what a fine, untrammeled life it would be! It takes
occasional contact with such people as the Patagonians to keep us in
mind that civilization is the mere cultivation of our wants, and that
the higher it is the more our necessities are multiplied, until, if we
are rich enough, we get enervated by luxury, and the young men come in
and carry us out.
We want so many, many things, it seems a pity that those simple
Patagonians could not send missionaries to us to show us how to do
without. The comforts of life, at the rate they are increasing, bid fair
to bury us soon, as Tarpeia was buried under the shields of her friends
the Sabines. Mr. Hamerton, in speaking of the increase of comfort in
England, groans at the "trying strain of expense to which our extremely
high standard of living subjects all except the rich." It makes each
individual of us very costly to keep, and constantly tempts people to
concentrate on the maintenance of fewer individuals means that would in
simpler times be divided among many. "My grandfather," said a modern the
other day, "left $200,000. He was considered a rich man in those days;
but, dear me! he supported four or five families--all his needy
relations and all my grandmother's." Think of an income of $10,000 a
year being equal to such a strain, and providing suitably for a rich
man's large family in the bargain! It wouldn't go so far now, and yet
most of the reasonable necessaries of life cost less to-day than they
did two generations ago. The difference is that we need so very many
comforts that were not invented in our grandfather's time.
There is a hospital, in a city large enough to keep a large hospital
busy, that is in straits for money. Its income from contributions last
year was larger by nearly a third than its income ten years ago, but its
expenses were nearly double its income. There were some satisfactory
reasons for the discrepancy--the city had grown, the number of patients
had increased, extraordinary repairs had been made--but at the bottom a
very large expenditure seemed to be due to the struggle of the managers
to keep the institution up to modern standards. The patients are better
cared for than they used to be; the nurses are better taught and more
skillful; "conveniences" have been greatly multiplied; the heating and
cooking and laundry work is all done in the best manner with the most
approved apparatus; the plumbing is as safe as sanitary engineering can
make it; the appliances for antiseptic surgery are fit for a fight for
life; there are detached buildings for contagious diseases, and an
out-patient department, and the whole concern is administered with
wisdom and economy. There is only one distressing circumstance about
this excellent charity, and that is that its expenses exceed its income.
And yet its managers have not been extravagant: they have only done what
the enlightened experience of the day has considered to be necessary. If
the hospital has to shut down and the patients must be turned out, at
least the receiver will find a well-appointed institution of which the
managers have no reason to be ashamed.
The trouble seems to be with very many of us, in contemporary private
life as well as in institutions, that the enlightened experience of the
day invents more necessaries than we can get the money to pay for. Our
opulent friends are constantly demonstrating to us by example how
indispensably convenient the modern necessaries are, and we keep having
them until we either exceed our incomes or miss the higher concerns of
life in the effort to maintain a complete outfit of its creature
comforts.
And the saddest part of all is that it is in such great measure an
American development. We Americans keep inventing new necessaries, and
the people of the effete monarchies gradually adopt such of them as they
can afford. When we go abroad we growl about the inconveniences of
European life--the absence of gas in bedrooms, the scarcity and
sluggishness of elevators, the primitive nature of the plumbing, and a
long list of other things without which life seems to press unreasonably
upon our endurance. Nevertheless, if the _res angustæ domi_ get straiter
than usual, we are always liable to send our families across the water
to spend a season in the practice of economy in some land where it costs
less to live.
Of course it all belongs to Progress, and no one is quite willing to
have it stop, but it does a comfortable sufferer good to get his head
out of his conveniences sometimes and complain.
There was a story in the newspapers the other day about a Massachusetts
minister who resigned his charge because someone had given his parish a
fine house, and his parishioners wanted him to live in it. His salary
was too small, he said, to admit of his living in a big house, and he
would not do it. He was even deaf to the proposal that he should share
the proposed tenement with the sewing societies and clubs of his church,
and when the matter came to a serious issue, he relinquished his charge
and sought a new field of usefulness. The situation was an amusing
instance of the embarrassment of riches. Let no one to whom restricted
quarters may have grown irksome, and who covets larger dimensions of
shelter, be too hasty in deciding that the minister was wrong. Did you
ever see the house that Hawthorne lived in at Lenox? Did you ever see
Emerson's house at Concord? They are good houses for Americans to know
and remember. They permitted thought.
A big house is one of the greediest cormorants which can light upon a
little income. Backs may go threadbare and stomachs may worry along on
indifferent filling, but a house _will_ have things, though its
occupants go without. It is rarely complete, and constantly tempts the
imagination to flights in brick and dreams in lath and plaster. It
develops annual thirsts for paint and wall-paper, at least, if not for
marble and wood-carving. The plumbing in it must be kept in order on
pain of death. Whatever price is put on coal, it has to be heated in
winter; and if it is rural or suburban, the grass about it must be cut
even though funerals in the family have to be put off for the mowing. If
the tenants are not rich enough to hire people to keep their house
clean, they must do it themselves, for there is no excuse that will pass
among housekeepers for a dirty house. The master of a house too big for
him may expect to spend the leisure which might be made intellectually
or spiritually profitable, in acquiring and putting into practice fag
ends of the arts of the plumber, the bell-hanger, the locksmith, the
gasfitter, and the carpenter. Presently he will know how to do
everything that can be done in the house, except enjoy himself. He will
learn about taxes, too, and water-rates, and how such abominations as
sewers or new pavements are always liable to accrue at his expense. As
for the mistress, she will be a slave to carpets and curtains,
wall-paper, painters, and women who come in by the day to clean. She
will be lucky if she gets a chance to say her prayers, and thrice and
four times happy when she can read a book or visit with her friends. To
live in a big house may be a luxury, provided that one has a full set of
money and an enthusiastic housekeeper in one's family; but to scrimp in
a big house is a miserable business. Yet such is human folly, that for a
man to refuse to live in a house because it is too big for him, is such
an exceptional exhibition of sense that it becomes the favorite
paragraph of a day in the newspapers.
An ideal of earthly comfort, so common that every reader must have seen
it, is to get a house so big that it is burdensome to maintain, and fill
it up so full of jimcracks that it is a constant occupation to keep it
in order. Then, when the expense of living in it is so great that you
can't afford to go away and rest from the burden of it, the situation is
complete and boarding-houses and cemeteries begin to yawn for you. How
many Americans, do you suppose, out of the droves that flock annually to
Europe, are running away from oppressive houses?
When nature undertakes to provide a house, it fits the occupant. Animals
which build by instinct build only what they need, but man's building
instinct, if it gets a chance to spread itself at all, is boundless,
just as all his instincts are. For it is man's peculiarity that nature
has filled him with impulses to do things, and left it to his discretion
when to stop. She never tells him when he has finished. And perhaps we
ought not to be surprised that in so many cases it happens that he
doesn't know, but just goes ahead as long as the materials last.
If another _man_ tries to oppress him, he understands that and is ready
to fight to death and sacrifice all he has, rather than submit; but the
tyranny of _things_ is so subtle, so gradual in its approach, and comes
so masked with seeming benefits, that it has him hopelessly bound before
he suspects his fetters. He says from day to day, "I will add thus to my
house;" "I will have one or two more horses;" "I will make a little
greenhouse in my garden;" "I will allow myself the luxury of another
hired man;" and so he goes on having things and imagining that he is
richer for them. Presently he begins to realize that it is the things
that own him. He has piled them up on his shoulders, and there they sit
like Sindbad's Old Man and drive him; and it becomes a daily question
whether he can keep his trembling legs or not.
All of which is not meant to prove that property has no real value, or
to rebut Charles Lamb's scornful denial that enough is as good as a
feast. It is not meant to apply to the rich, who can have things
comfortably, if they are philosophical; but to us poor, who have
constant need to remind ourselves that where the verbs to _have_ and _to
be_ cannot both be completely inflected, the verb _to be_ is the one
that best repays concentration.
Perhaps we would not be so prone to swamp ourselves with luxuries and
vain possessions that we cannot afford, if it were not for our
deep-lying propensity to associate with people who are better off than
we are. It is usually the sight of their appliances that upsets our
little stock of sense, and lures us into an improvident competition.
There is a proverb of Solomon's which prophesies financial wreck or
ultimate misfortune of some sort to people who make gifts to the rich.
Though not expressly stated, it is somehow implied that the proverb is
intended not as a warning to the rich themselves, who may doubtless
exchange presents with impunity, but for persons whose incomes rank
somewhere between "moderate circumstances" and destitution. That such
persons should need to be warned not to spend their substance on the
rich seems odd, but when Solomon was busied with precept he could
usually be trusted not to waste either words or wisdom. Poor people
_are_ constantly spending themselves upon the rich, not only because
they like them, but often from an instinctive conviction that such
expenditure is well invested. I wonder sometimes whether this is true.
To associate with the rich seems pleasant and profitable. They are apt
to be agreeable and well informed, and it is good to play with them and
enjoy the usufruct of all their pleasant apparatus; but, of course, you
can neither hope nor wish to get anything for nothing. Of the cost of
the practice, the expenditure of time still seems to be the item that is
most serious. It takes a great deal of time to cultivate the rich
successfully. If they are working people their time is so much more
valuable than yours, that when you visit with them it is apt to be your
time that is sacrificed. If they are not working people it is worse yet.
Their special outings, when they want your company, always come when you
cannot get away from work except at some great sacrifice, which, under
the stress of temptation, you are too apt to make. Their pleasuring is
on so large a scale that you cannot make it fit your times or
necessities. You can't go yachting for half a day, nor will fifty
dollars take you far on the way to shoot big game in Manitoba. You
simply cannot play with them when they play, because you cannot _reach_;
and when they work you cannot play with them, because their time then is
worth so much a minute that you cannot bear to waste it. And you cannot
play with them when you are working yourself and they are inactively at
leisure, because, cheap as your time is, you can't spare it.
Charming and likeable as they are, and good to know, it must be admitted
that there is a superior convenience about associating most of the time
with people who want to do about what we want to do at about the same
time, and whose abilities to do what they wish approximate to ours. It
is not so much a matter of persons as of times and means. You cannot
make your opportunities concur with the opportunities of people whose
incomes are ten times greater than yours. When you play together it is
at a sacrifice, and one which _you_ have to make. Solomon was right. To
associate with very rich people involves sacrifices. You cannot even be
rich yourself without expense, and you may just as well give over
trying. Count it, then, among the costs of a considerable income that in
enlarging the range of your sports it inevitably contracts the circle of
those who will find it profitable to share them.
[From _Windfalls of Observation_, by Edward Sandford Martin.
Copyright, 1893, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]