GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
The reader will perhaps say that the kind of miseries recounted in the
previous chapter are more imaginary than real. Many thousands of
people subsist in London upon narrow means, and do not find the life
intolerable. They have their interests and pleasures, meagre enough
when judged by a superior standard, but sufficient to maintain in them
some of the vivacity of existence. No doubt this is true. I remember
being struck some years ago by the remark of a person of distinction,
equally acquainted with social 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 excursionist. He had never visited
St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; had never travelled so far as Kew or
Greenwich; had never been inside a picture gallery; and had never
attended a concert in his life. The pendulum of his innocuous
existence swung between the office and his home with a uniform
monotony. Yet not only was he contented with his life, but I believe
that he regarded it as entirely successful. He had counted it a great
piece of luck when he had entered the office as a youth of sixteen, and
the glow of his good fortune still lingered in his mind at forty. He
regarded his employers with a species of admiring awe not always
accorded to kings. The most violent social democrat could have made
nothing of Arrowsmith; there was not the least crevice in his heart in
which the seed of discontent could have found a lodgment. As for
making any question of whether he was getting the best or most out of
life, Arrowsmith was as incapable as a kitten.
The virtues of Arrowsmith, which were in their way quietly heroic,
impressed me a good deal; but his abject contentment with the
limitations of his lot appalled me. I felt a dread grow in me lest I
should become subdued to the element in which I worked as he was. I
asked myself whether a life so destitute of real interests and
pleasures was life at all? I made fugitive attempts to allure the
little man into some realms of wider interest, but with the most
discouraging results. I once insisted on taking him with me for a day
in Epping Forest. He came reluctantly, for he did not like leaving his
wife at home, and it seemed that no persuasion could induce her to
undertake so adventurous a jaunt. He was no walker, and half a dozen
miles along the Forest roads tired him out. By the afternoon even his
cheerfulness had vanished; he gazed with blank and gloomy eyes upon the
wide spaces of the woodland scenery. He did not regain his spirits
till we drew near Stratford on the homeward journey. At the first
sight of gas-lit streets he brightened up, and I am persuaded that the
rancid odours of the factories at Bow were sweeter in his nostrils than
all the Forest fragrances. I never asked him again to share a pleasure
for which I now perceived he had no faculty; but I often asked myself
how long it would take for a city life to extirpate in me the taste by
which Nature is appreciated, as it had in Arrowsmith.
I have taken Arrowsmith as an example of the narrowness of interest
created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for
him, which I, for one, would most heartily endorse. The poor fellow
was very much the creature of his circumstances. But this was scarcely
the case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known how
to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many cultivated
tastes. He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same village as
myself. By some curious accident he was flung into the vortex of
London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in a reputable firm of
stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street. He rose rapidly, speculated
largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at
thirty. I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we
had sat upon the same bench at school. I can see him still;
well-fleshed and immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of
gold; a prop of music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants;
flashing from one to the other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a
man envied and admired by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to
whom he appeared a kind of Napoleon of finance. I will confess that I
myself was a little dazzled by his careless opulence. When he took me
to dine with him he thought nothing of giving the head waiter a
sovereign as a guarantee of careful service, or of sending another
sovereign to the master of the orchestra with a request for some
particular piece of music which he fancied. He once confided to me
that he had brought off certain operations which had made him the
possessor of eighty thousand pounds. To me the sum seemed immense, but
he regarded it as a bagatelle. When I suggested certain uses for it,
such as retirement to the country, the building of a country house, the
collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at me. He informed
me that he never spent more than a single day in the country every
year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm. He loathed
the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year an
infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once,
but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his
eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette
table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was
avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not
live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of
Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am
unhappy if I leave it for a day.' So far as knowledge of or interest
in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith.
His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus,
and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.
The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was
a kind of joy to meet him. The sourness of my own discontent was
dissolved in the alembic of his joviality. Yet it was certain that he
lived a life of the most torturing anxiety. There were recurring
periods when his fortune hung in the balance, and his financial
salvation was achieved as by fire. When he sat silent for a moment,
strange things were written on his face. Haggard lines ran across the
brow; the hollows underneath the eyes grew deep; and one could see that
black care sat upon his shoulders. There was a listening posture of
the head, as of one apprehensive of the footfall of disaster, and
though he was barely forty, his hair was white. What happened to him
finally I do not know. I missed him for a year or two; inquired at the
hotel where he had lived and found him gone; and I thought I read in
the sarcastic smile of the hotel-manager more knowledge than he was
willing to communicate. I imagine that he went down in some financial
storm, like ships at sea that are heard of no more; the Napoleon of
finance had somewhere found his Waterloo. The reflection is
inevitable; what had he got out of life after all? He had won neither
peace nor honour; he had known nothing of the finer joys or tastes; he
had enjoyed no satisfying pleasures; such triumph as he had known had
been the brief triumph of the gambler. Upon the whole I thought the
narrow tedious life of Arrowsmith the worthier.
Reflections of this nature are usually attributed to mere envy or
contempt of wealth, which is a temper not less sordid than a love of
wealth. For my part I can but profess that I feel for wealth neither
envy nor contempt. On the contrary, I love to imagine myself wealthy,
and I flatter myself--as most poor men do--that I am a person
peculiarly fitted by nature to afford a conspicuous example of how
wealth should be employed. I like to dramatise my fancies, and the
more impossible these fancies are, the more convincing is the drama
that can be educed from them. Thus I have several times built palaces
which have rivalled the splendours of the Medici; I have administered
great estates to the entire satisfaction of my tenants; I have
established myself as the Maecenas of art and literature; and were I
ever called to play these parts in reality, I am convinced that my
competence would secure applause. The point at which I stick, however,
is this: rich men rarely do these things. It is the pursuit of wealth,
rather than wealth itself, that is their pleasure. Let us suppose the
case of a man who has toiled with undivided mind for thirty years to
acquire a fortune; will it not be usually found that in the struggle to
be rich he has lost those very qualities which make riches worth
possessing? He buys his estate or builds his house; but there is
little pleasure in the business. He is the mere slave of land-agents,
the puppet of architects and upholsterers. He has no original taste to
guide or interest him: what he once had has perished long ago in the
dreary toil of money-grubbing. The men who build or decorate his house
have a certain pleasure in their work; all that he does is to pay them
for being happy. If he should adopt the rich man's hobby of collecting
pictures or a library, he rarely enjoys a higher pleasure than the mere
lust of possession. He buys what he is told to buy, without
discrimination; he has no knowledge of what constitutes rarity or
value; and most certainly he knows nothing of those excitements of the
quest which make the collection of articles of vertu a pursuit so
fascinating to the man of trained judgment but moderate means. And, as
if to complete the irony of the situation, he is after all but the
infrequent tenant of the treasure-house which he has built; the blinds
are drawn half the year; the splendid rooms are seen by no wiser eyes
than those of his butler and his housekeeper; and his secretary, if he
be a man of taste and education, draws the real dividend of pleasure
from all these rare and costly things which Dives has accumulated.
Dives is in most cases little more than the man who pays the bill for
things which other folk enjoy.
Let Dives be accounted then a public benefactor, we may say; perhaps
so, but the question still remains, does Dives get the most and best
out of life? The obvious answer is that the best things of life are
not to be bought with money; it would be nearer the truth to quote the
prophetic paradox, they are bought 'without money and without price.'
I was present once at a dinner given by a millionaire newspaper
proprietor to a crowd of journalists, on the occasion of the founding
of a new magazine. The millionaire ate little, spoke little, and sat
throughout the feast with an anxious cloud upon his brow. I recognised
the same furtive look of apprehension in his eyes that I had seen in
the eyes of my stock-broking friend long before. As I glanced round
the room I found myself able to pick out all the men of wealth by that
same look. It would seem that the anxieties of getting money only
beget the more torturing anxiety of how to keep it. That, I am
persuaded, was the dominant thought of my millionaire host throughout
the meal; he knew the fear and fever of the gambler risking an enormous
stake, the agitation of the soldier on the eve of a battle, in which
victory is highly problematical. But that crowd of hungry journalists,
how they did eat! What laughter sat on those boyish faces, what zest
of life, what capacity of pleasure! There was not one of them whose
daily bread was not precarious; not one perhaps who had a decent
balance at the bank; yet they were so gay, so resolutely cheerful, so
frankly interested in life and in themselves, that I could fancy those
gloomy eyes at the head of the table watched them with a sort of envy,
I think there must be something fatal to gaiety in the mere
responsibilities of wealth; I am sure that there is something
corrupting in the labours of its acquisition. I think I had rather be
a vagrant, with a crust in my knapsack, a blue sky above me, and the
adventurous road before me, than look upon the world with a pair of
eyes so laughterless as his who was our host that night.
Again I protest that I make no railing accusation against wealth in
itself. I am so far convinced of the truly beneficent utilities of
wealth, that I would quite willingly take the risks of a moderate
competence, should any one be disposed to make experiment with my
virtues. There is some magnanimity in this offer, for I can no more
foretell the effects of the bacillus of wealth upon my moral nature,
than can the physician who offers his body for inoculation with the
germ of some dire disease that science may be served. It argues some
lack of imagination among millionaires that it has occurred to no one
of the tribe to endow a man instead of an institution, if it were only
by way of change. It would at least prove an interesting experiment,
and it would be cheap at the price of the few unmissed thousands which
the millionaire would pay for it. To such an experiment I would be
willing to submit, if it were only to ascertain whether I have been
right or wrong in my supposition that I am better qualified by nature
than my fellows for the right administration of wealth; but there is
one thing I would never do, I would never undertake that laborious
quest of wealth, which robs men of the power to enjoy it when it is
obtained.
It is there that the pinch comes; granted that some degree of
competence is needed for a free and various use of life, is it worth
while to destroy the power of living in attaining the means to live?
What is a man better for his wealth if he does not know how to use it?
A fool may steal a ship, but it takes a wise man to navigate her
towards the islands of the Blest. I am told sometimes that there is a
romance in business; no doubt there is, but it is pretty often the
romance of piracy; and the pleasures of the rich man are very often
nothing better than the pleasures of the pirate: a barbaric wading in
gold, a reckless piling up of treasure, which he has not the sense to
use. As long as there are shouting crews upon the sea and flaming
ships, he is happy; but give him at last the gold which he has striven
to win, and he knows nothing better than to sit like the successful
pirate in a common ale-house, and make his boast to boon companions. I
believe that the dullest men in all the world are very rich men; and I
have sometimes thought that it cannot need a very high order of
intelligence to acquire wealth, since some of the meanest of mankind
appear to prosper at the business. A certain vulpine shrewdness of
intelligence seems the thing most needed, and this may coexist with a
general dulness of mind which would disgrace a savage.
The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in
money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who
can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker,
values nothing that he buys. There is a subtle pleasure in the
extravagance that contests with prudence; in the anxious debates which
we hold with ourselves whether we can or cannot afford a certain thing;
in our attempts to justify our wisdom; in the risk and recklessness of
our operations; in the long deferred and final joy of our possession;
but this is a kind of pleasure which the man of boundless means never
knows. The buying of pictures affords us an excellent illustration on
this point. Men of the type of Balzac's _Cousin Pons_ attain to
rapture in the process because they are poor. They have to walk weary
miles and wait long weeks to get upon the track of their treasure; to
use all their knowledge of art and men to circumvent the malignity of
dealers; to experience the extremes of trepidation and of hope; to deny
themselves comforts, and perhaps food, that they may pay the price
which has at last, after infinite dispute, reached an irreducible
minimum; and the pleasure of their possession is in the ratio of their
pains. But the man who enters a sale-room with the knowledge that he
can have everything he wishes by the signing of a cheque feels none of
these emotions. It seems to me that money has lost more than half its
value since cheques became common. When men kept their gold in iron
coffers, lock-fast cupboards, or a pot buried in an orchard, there was
something tangible in wealth. When it came to counting out gold pieces
in a bag, men remembered by what sweat of mind or body wealth was won,
and they had a sense of parting with something which was really theirs.
But a cheque has never yet impressed me with the least sense of its
intrinsic value. It is a thing so trivial and fragile that the mind
refuses to regard it as the equivalent of lands and houses and solid
bullion. It is a thing incredible to reason that with a stroke of the
pen a man may sign away his thousands. If cheques were prohibited by
law, and all payments made in good coin of the realm, I believe we
should all be much more careful in our expenditure, for we should have
at least some true symbol of what expenditure implies.
In an ideal state all incomes beyond 10,000 pounds per year should be
prohibited. Almost all the real luxuries of life may be enjoyed on
half that sum; and even this is an excessive estimate. Such a
regulation would be of vast advantage to the rich, simply because it
would impose some limit at which economy commenced. They would then
begin to enjoy their wealth. Avarice would decline, for obviously it
would not be worth while to accumulate a larger fortune than the State
permitted. We might also expect some improvement in manners, for there
would be no room for that vulgar ostentation in which excessive wealth
delights. If a man chose to exceed the limit which the law prescribed
he would do so as a public benefactor; for, of course, the excess of
wealth would be applied to the good of the community, in the relief of
taxation, the adornment of cities, or the establishment of libraries
and art-galleries. It would no doubt be objected that the great
historic houses of the aristocracy could not be maintained on such an
income; five thousand pounds a year would hardly pay the servants on a
great estate, and provide the upkeep of a mansion. But in this case
the State would become the custodian of such houses, which would be
treated as national palaces. It is by no means improbable that their
present owners would be glad to be rid of them on generous terms, which
provided for a nominal ownership and an occasional occupation. However
this may be, it is certain that the rich would profit by the change,
for their chance of getting the most and best out of life would be much
increased by the limit put upon cupidity and ostentation.