"Sir," said Johnson, "all the arguments which are brought to represent
poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find
people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a
plentiful fortune."
He knew what he was talking of, that rugged old master of common sense.
Poverty is of course a relative thing; the term has reference, above all,
to one's standing as an intellectual being. If I am to believe the
newspapers, there are title-bearing men and women in England who, had
they an assured income of five-and-twenty, shillings per week, would have
no right to call themselves poor, for their intellectual needs are those
of a stable-boy or scullery wench. Give me the same income and I can
live, but I am poor indeed.
You tell me that money cannot buy the things most precious. Your
commonplace proves that you have never known the lack of it. When I
think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my
life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I
stand aghast at money's significance. What kindly joys have I lost,
those simple forms of happiness to which every heart has claim, because
of poverty! Meetings with those I loved made impossible year after year;
sadness, misunderstanding, nay, cruel alienation, arising from inability
to do the things I wished, and which I might have done had a little money
helped me; endless instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed
or forbidden by narrow means. I have lost friends merely through the
constraints of my position; friends I might have made have remained
strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is
enforced at times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often
cursed my life solely because I was poor. I think it would scarce be an
exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be paid
for in coin of the realm.
"Poverty," said Johnson again, "is so great an evil, and pregnant with so
much temptation, so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you
to avoid it."
For my own part, I needed no injunction to that effort of avoidance. Many
a London garret knows how I struggled with the unwelcome chamber-fellow.
I marvel she did not abide with me to the end; it is a sort of
inconsequence in Nature, and sometimes makes me vaguely uneasy through
nights of broken sleep.