Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck
the meditative mind--particularly that class of meditative mind whose
wealth consists chiefly in meditation--to what thoroughly commonplace
uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief,
with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination,
he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking
thing with it.
On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his
fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions--houses in Fifth
Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera,
diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good
use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good
or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist
or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of
initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame
imitative way.
The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem
usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even
something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had
usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of
the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever
else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere
mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for
splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The
princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of
the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to
seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an
artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a
poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the
modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with
such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa
Medici--those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display
of Medici money--"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say--whimsical wit
and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's
famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last
spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we
must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with
his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure
house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which
produced "Vathek."
I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate
the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's
paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain
millionaire's _penchant_ for collecting fleas--he, it is rumoured,
having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a
particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand,
but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more
comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little
originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to
literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay
the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then
gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something
refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived
on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or
so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally
amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into
the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which
deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or
waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of
Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful
England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in
the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic
company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing
but minor rôles; but lovers of Gautier's _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ will
see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream
into a reality--though his creditors probably did not take that view.
Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate
his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred
were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and
beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were
among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large
personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these
unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it
hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit,
particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand
into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with
uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his
companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The
Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented,
as I have hinted--by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too,
by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to
that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of
mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we
lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the
memory of his fantastic lordship.
These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend
their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my
argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general
rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very
necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the
man with but little money who more often provides examples of the
delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis
will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection.
Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his
writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not
yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time
which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively
prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is
happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years
ago--and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the
world--that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise
message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived
the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan
Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped
across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing
Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as
casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row,
and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far
travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a
receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid
by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that?
Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New
York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and
much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint
whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually
out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his
poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and
surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without
drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had
saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would
have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his
pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking
neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his
arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls,
literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the
miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for
creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public
traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic
occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly
removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic.
Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along
Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and
joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a
certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against
a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man
was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply
pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly
he was very unhappy--unhappy over some mysterious something that one or
two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood
helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the
lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift
look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget
it"--no more--and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled
the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look
on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something
supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of
that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up
the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up
with him--for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger
thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the
like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so
small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that.
Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young
lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening,
studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar
bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even
smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any
other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an
economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by
the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the
artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example,
you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with
hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know
what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is
dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any
more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin--at peace
in Potter's field--who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence,
mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some
strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer--as like as not
supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some
newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through
the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual
deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up
your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a
hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery
"Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so
to say, kindly legs up the street--gone almost before you knew he was
there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a
quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that
there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might
almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then--well, what would it
matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my
friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor
means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich
men.
After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of
great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it
much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend--that is, in the
artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a
moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by
which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of
a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be
appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed,
the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most
fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it.
The mention of the great caliph suggests a rôle which is open to any
rich man to play, the rôle of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a
wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the
club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly
multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and
listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of
human destinies--bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour
as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden
lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of
human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the
darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by
the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a
word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number
Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again
into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that
wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of
the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary
workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft
beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip
a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him
wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy--all
unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is
being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and
say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A
boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will
buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready."
And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in
some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for
one's money, something worth while having money for!
I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free
of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be
incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human
story--how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy
he would thus have brought to so many lives--all, too, in pure fun,
himself having had such a good time all the while!