pleasures that he craved. To him, as to many another Englishman,
wine was precious only because it promoted lively conversation. His
“debauches” (it pleased him to use that ominous word) were very modest
ones, for he was at all times prudent in his expenditures. But claret
gave him a headache, and Burgundy gave him the stone, and late suppers,
even of bread and butter and botargo, gave him indigestion. Therefore
he was always renouncing the alleviations of life, only to be lured
back by his incorrigible love of companionship. There is a serio-comic
quality in his story of the two bottles of wine he sent for to give
zest to his cousin Angler’s supper at the Rose Tavern, and which were
speedily emptied by his cousin Angler’s friends: “And I had not the wit
to let them know at table that it was I who paid for them, and so I
lost my thanks.”
If the young prohibitionist be light-hearted enough to read Dickens, or
imaginative enough to read Scott, or sardonic enough to read Thackeray,
he will find everybody engaged in the great business of eating and
drinking. It crowds love-making into a corner, being, indeed, a
pleasure which survives all tender dalliance, and restores to the
human mind sanity and content. I am convinced that if Mr. Galsworthy’s
characters ate and drank more, they would be less obsessed by sex, and
I wish they would try dining as a restorative.
The older novelists recognized this most expressive form of realism,
and knew that, to be accurate, they must project their minds into
the minds of their characters. It is because of their sympathy and
sincerity that we recall old Osborne’s eight-shilling Madeira, and
Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage, which Becky gave to Sir Pitt, and the
brandy-bottle clinking under her bed-clothes, and the runlet of canary
which the Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst found secreted conveniently in his
cell, and the choice purl which Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness
drank in Miss Sally Brass’s kitchen. We hear Warrington’s great
voice calling for beer, we smell the fragrant fumes of burning rum
and lemon-peel when Mr. Micawber brews punch, we see the foam on the
“Genuine Stunning” which the child David calls for at the public
house. No writer except Peacock treats his characters, high and low, as
royally as does Dickens; and Peacock, although British publishers keep
issuing his novels in new and charming editions, is little read on this
side of the sea. Moreover, he is an advocate of strong drink, which is
very reprehensible, and deprives him of candour as completely as if he
had been a teetotaller. We feel and resent the bias of his mind; and
although he describes with humour that pleasant middle period, “after
the Jacquerie were down, and before the march of mind was up,” yet
the only one of his stories which is innocent of speciousness is “The
Misfortunes of Elphin.”
Now to the logically minded “The Misfortunes of Elphin” is a temperance
tract. The disaster which ruins the countryside is the result of
shameful drunkenness. The reproaches levelled by Prince Elphin at
Seithenyn ap Seithyn are sterner and more deeply deserved than the
reproaches levelled by King Henry at Falstaff; yet the tale rocks and
reels with Seithenyn’s potations. There are drunkards whom we can
conceive of as sober, but he is not one of them. There are sinners
who can be punished or pardoned, but he is not one of them. As he is
incapable of reform, so is he immune from retribution. Out of the
dregs of his folly ooze the slow words of his wisdom. Nature befriends
him because he is a natural force, and man submits to him because
he is fulfilling his natural election. The good and the wicked fret
about him, and grow old in the troublesome process; but he remains
unchangeably, immutably drunk. “Wine is my medicine,” he says with
large simplicity, “and my measure is a little more.”
If ever the young prohibitionist strays into the wine-cellar of
Seithenyn ap Seithyn, he will have a shell-shock. It may even be that
his presence will sour the casks, as the presence of a woman is reputed
to sour the casks in the great caves of the Gironde, where wine ripens
slowly, acquiring merit in silence and seclusion like a Buddhist saint,
and as sensitive as a Buddhist saint to the perilous proximity of the
feminine. This ancient and reasonable tradition is but one phase of
the ancient and reasonable hostility between intoxicants and the sober
sex, which dates perhaps from the time when Roman women were forbidden
to taste their husbands’ wine, but were fed on sweet syrups, like warm
soda-fountain beverages, to the ruin of their health and spirits. Small
wonder if they handed down to their great-grand-daughters a legitimate
antagonism to pleasures they were not permitted to share, and if their
remote descendants still cherish a dim, resentful consciousness of
hurt. It was the lurking ghost of a dead tyranny which impelled an
American woman to write to President Roosevelt, reproving him for
having proposed a toast to Mr. John Hay’s daughter on her wedding-day.
“Think,” she said, “of the effect on your friends, on your children, on
your immortal soul, of such a thoughtless act.”
Nomadic tribes--the vigilant ones who looked well ahead--wisely forbade
the cultivation of the vine. Their leaders knew that if men made wine,
they would want to stay at home and drink it. The prohibition-bred
youth, if he is to remain faithful to the customs of his people, had
better not cultivate too sedulously the great literature, smelling
of hop-fields, and saturated with the juice of the grape. Every step
of the way is distracting and dangerous. When I was a school-girl I
was authoritatively bidden--only authority could have impelled me--to
strengthen my errant mind by reading the “Areopagitica.” There I found
this amazing sentence: “They are not skilful considerers of human
things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.”
But then Milton wrote “L’Allegro.”
Money
“As the world is, and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich,” wrote
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and her words--which sound almost ascetic
in our ears--were held to be of doubtful morality in the godless
eighteenth century which she adorned and typified. Even Lady Mary
endeavoured to qualify their greed by explaining that she valued
money because it gave her the power to do good; but her hard-headed
compatriots frankly doubted this excusatory clause. They knew perfectly
well that a desire to do good is not, and never has been, a motive
power in the acquisition of wealth.
Lady Mary did render her country one inestimable service; but her
fortune (which, after all, was of no great magnitude) had nothing
whatever to do with it. Intelligent observation, dauntless courage,
and the supreme confidence which nerved her to experiment upon her
own child,--these qualities enabled her to force inoculation upon a
reluctant and scandalized public. These qualities have lifted mankind
out of many a rut, and are all we shall have to depend on while the
world rolls on its way. When Aristotle said that money was barren,
he did not mean that it was barren of delights; but that it had no
power to get us to any place worth reaching, no power to quicken the
intellectual and spiritual potencies of the soul.
The love of gold, the craving for wealth, has not lain dormant for ages
in the human heart, waiting for the twentieth century to call it into
being. It is no keener now than it has always been, but it is ranker
in its growth and expression, being a trifle over-nourished in our
plethoric land, and not subjected to keen competing emotions. Great
waves of religious thought, great struggles for principles and freedom,
great births of national life, great discoveries, great passions, and
great wrongs,--these things have swayed the world, wrecking and saving
the souls of men without regard for money. Great qualities, too, have
left their impress upon the human race, and endowed it for all the
years to come.
The genius which in the thirteenth century found expression in
architecture and scholasticism, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries found expression in art and letters, finds expression to-day
in applied science and finance. Industrial capitalism, as we know
it now, is the latest development of man’s restless energy. It has
coloured our times, given us new values in education, and intruded
itself grossly into the quiet places of life. We should bear with
it patiently, we might even “admire it from afar,” if only we were
sometimes suffered to forget. “Money talks,” and, by way of encouraging
its garrulity, we talk about money, and in terms of money, until it
would sometimes appear as if the currency of the United States were the
only thing in the country vital enough to interpret every endeavour,
and illustrate every situation.
Here, for example, is an imposing picture in a Sunday paper, a picture
full of dignified ecclesiastics and decorous spectators. The text
reads, “Breaking ground for a three-million-dollar nave.” It is a
comprehensive statement, and one that conveys to the public the only
circumstance which the public presumably cares to hear. But it brings
a great cathedral down to the level of the million-dollar club-houses,
or boat-houses, or fishing-camps which are described for us in unctuous
and awe-stricken paragraphs. It is even dimly suggestive of the
million-dollar babies whom reporters follow feverishly up and down
Palm Beach, and who will soon have to be billion-dollar babies if they
want to hold their own. We are now on terms of easy familiarity with
figures which used to belong to the abstractions of arithmetic, and
not to the world of life. We have become proudly aware of the infinite
possibilities of accumulation and of waste.
For this is the ebb and flow of American wealth. It is heaped up with
resistless energy and concentration; it is dissipated in broken and
purposeless profusion. Every class resents the extravagance of every
other class; but none will practise denial. The millionaire who plays
with a yacht and decks his wife with pearls looks askance upon the
motor and silk shirt of the artisan. The artisan, with impulses and
ambitions as ignoble and as unintelligent as the millionaire’s, is
sullenly aware that, waste as he may, the rich can waste more, and he
is still dissatisfied. There is no especial appeal to manhood in a silk
shirt, no approach to sweetness and light. It represents an ape-like
imitation of something not worth imitating, a hopeless ignorance of the
value and worth of money.
A universal reluctance to practise economy indicates a weakness in the
moral fibre of a nation, a dangerous absence of pride. There is no
power of the soul strong enough to induce thrift but pride. There is
no quality stern enough to bar self-indulgence but the overmastering
dictates of self-respect. There is no joy that life can yield
comparable to the joy of independence. A nation is free when it submits
to coercion from no other nation. A man is free when he is the arbiter
of his own fate. National and individual freedom have never come cheap.
The sacrifice which insures the one insures the other; the resolution
which preserves the one preserves the other. When Andrew Marvell
declined the bribe offered him “out of pure affection” by the Lord
Treasurer, saying he had “a bladebone of mutton” in his cupboard which
would suffice for dinner, he not only held his own honour inviolate,
but he vindicated the liberty of letters, the liberty of Parliament,
and the liberty of England. No wonder an old chronicler says that his
integrity and spirit were “dreadful” to the corrupt officials of his
day.
There are Americans who appear to love their country for much the same
reason that Stevenson’s “child” loves the “friendly cow”:
“She gives me cream with all her might
To eat with apple tart.”
When the supply of cream runs short, the patriot’s love runs shorter.
He holds virulent mass-meetings to complain of the cow, of the quality
of the cream, and of its distribution. If he be an immigrant, he
probably riots in the streets, not clamouring for the flesh-pots of
Egypt--that immemorial cry for ease and bondage--inasmuch as the years
of his thraldom had been softened by no such indulgence; but simply
because the image of the cow is never absent from his mind, or from the
minds of those to whom he looks for guidance. The captain of industry
and the agitator, the spendthrift and the spendthrift’s wife who fling
their money ostentatiously to the four winds of heaven, the working-man
and the working-woman who exact the largest wage for the least labour,
all are actuated by the same motive,--to get as much and to give as
little as they can. It is not a principle which makes for citizenship,
and it will afford no great help in the hour of the nation’s trial.
Material progress and party politics are engrossing things; but perhaps
Francis Parkman was right when he said that if our progress is to be at
the mercy of our politics, and our politics at the mercy of our mobs,
we shall have no lasting foundation for prosperity and well-being.
The tendency to gloat over the sight and sound of money may be less
pervasive than it seems. It may be only a temporary predisposition,
leaving us at heart clean, wise, and temperate. But there is a florid
exuberance in the handling of this recurrent theme which nauseates
us a little, like very rich food eaten in a close room. Why should
we be told that “the world gapes in wonder” as it contemplates “an
Aladdin romance of steel and gold”? The world has had other things
to gape over in these sorrowful and glorious years. “Once a barefoot
boy, now riding in a hundred-thousand-dollar private car.” There is
a headline to catch the public eye, and make the public tongue hang
watering from its mouth. That car, “early Pullman and late German
Lloyd,” is to the American reader what the two thousand black slaves
with jars of jewels upon their heads were to Dick Swiveller,--a
vision of tasteful opulence. More intimate journalists tell us that
a “Financial Potentate” eats baked potatoes for his luncheon, and
gives his friends notebooks with a moral axiom on each page. We cannot
really care what this unknown gentleman eats. We cannot, under any
conceivable circumstance, covet a moral notebook. Yet such items of
information would not be painstakingly acquired unless they afforded
some mysterious gratification to their readers.
As for the “athletic millionaires,” who sport in the open like--and
often with--ordinary men, they keep their chroniclers nimble. Fashions
in plutocracy change with the changing times. The reporter who used
to be turned loose in a nabob’s private office, and who rapturously
described its “ebony centre-table on which is laid a costly cover
of maroon-coloured silk plush,” and its panelled walls, “the work of
a lady amateur of great ability” (I quote from a newspaper of 1890),
now has to scurry round golf-links, and shiver on the outskirts of a
polo-field. From him we learn that young New Yorkers, the least and
lowest of whom lives in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house, play
tennis and golf like champions, or “cut a wide swathe in polo circles
with their fearless riding.” From him we learn that “automobile racing
can show its number of millionaires,” as if it were at all likely
to show its number of clerks and ploughmen. Extravagance may be the
arch-enemy of efficiency, but it is, and has always been, the friend of
aimless excess.
When I was young, and millionaires were a rarity in my unassuming
town, a local divine fluttered our habitual serenity by preaching
an impassioned sermon upon a local Crœsus. He was but a moderate
sort of Crœsus, a man of kindly nature and simple vanities, whom
his townspeople had been in the habit of regarding with mirthful
and tolerant eyes. Therefore it was a bit startling to hear--from
the pulpit--that this amiable gentleman was “a crown of glory upon
the city’s brow,” and that his name was honoured “from the Golden
Gate to New Jersey’s silver sands.” It was more than startling to
be called upon to admire the meekness with which he trod the common
earth, and the unhesitating affability with which he bowed to all
his acquaintances, “acknowledging every salute of civility or
respect,” because, “like another Frederick II of Prussia,” he felt
his fellow-citizens to be human beings like himself. This admission
into the ranks of humanity, however gratifying to our self-esteem, was
tempered by so many exhortations to breathe our millionaire’s name
with becoming reverence, and was accompanied by such a curious medley
of Bible texts, and lists of distinguished people whom the millionaire
had entertained, that we hardly knew where we stood in the order of
creation.
Copies of this sermon, which was printed “in deference to many
importunities,” are now extremely rare. Reading its yellow pages, we
become aware that the rites and ceremonies with which one generation
worships its golden calf differ in detail from the rites and ceremonies
with which another generation performs this pious duty. The calf itself
has never changed since it was first erected in the wilderness,--the
original model hardly admitting of improvement. Ruskin used to point
out gleefully a careless couple who, in Claude’s picture of the
adoration of the golden calf, are rowing in a pleasure boat on a stream
which flows mysteriously through the desert. Indifferent to gold,
uninterested in idolatry, this pair glide smoothly by; and perhaps the
river of time bears them through centuries of greed and materialism to
some hidden haven of repose.
Saint Thomas Aquinas defines the sin of avarice as a “desire to acquire
or retain in undue measure, beyond the order of reason.” Possibly
no one has ever believed that he committed this sin, that there was
anything unreasonable in his desires, or undue in their measure of
accomplishment. “Reason” is a word of infinite flexibility. The
statisticians who revel in mathematical intricacies tell us that Mr.
John D. Rockefeller’s income is one hundred dollars a minute, and that
his yearly income exceeds the lifetime earnings of two thousand average
American citizens, and is equivalent to the income of fifty average
American citizens sustained throughout the entire Christian era. It
sounds more bewildering than seductive, and the breathless rush of a
hundred dollars a minute is a little like the seven dinners a day which
Alice in Wonderland stands ready to forego as a welcome punishment
for misbehaviour. But who shall say that a hundred dollars a minute
is beyond the “order of reason”? Certainly Saint Thomas did not refer
to incomes of this range, inasmuch as his mind (though not without a
quality of vastness) could never have embraced their possibility.
On the other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is responsible for the suggestion
that Saint Paul, were he living to-day, would be a captain of industry.
Here again a denial is as valueless as an assertion. It is much the
habit of modern propagandists--no matter what their propaganda may
be--to say that the gap between themselves and the Apostles is merely
a gap of centuries, and that the unlikeness, which seems to us so
vivid, is an unlikeness of time and circumstance, not of the inherent
qualities of the soul. The multiplication of assets, the destruction of
trade-rivalry, formed--apparently--no part of the original apostolic
programme. If the tent-maker of Tarsus coveted wealth, he certainly
went the wrong way about getting it. If there was that in his spirit
which corresponded to the modern instinct for accumulation, he did
great injustice to his talents, wasting his incomparable energy on
labours which--from his own showing--left him too often homeless,
and naked, and hungry. Even the tent-making, by which he earned his
bread, appears to have been valuable to him for the same reason that
the bladebone of mutton was valuable to Andrew Marvell,--not so much
because it filled his stomach, as because it insured his independence.
“_L’amour d’argent a passé en dogme de morale publique_,” wrote George
Sand, whose words have now and then a strange prophetic ring. The
“peril of prosperity,” to borrow President Hibben’s alliterative
phrase, was not in her day the menace it is in ours, nor has it ever
been in her land the menace it has been in ours, because of the many
other perils, not to speak of other interests and other ideals, filling
the Frenchman’s mind. But if George Sand perceived a growing candour
in the deference paid to wealth, to wealth as an abstraction rather
than to its possessor, a dropping of the old hypocrisies which made
a pretence of doubt and disapproval, a development of honoured and
authorized avarice, she was a close observer as well as a caustic
commentator.
The artlessness of our American attitude might disarm criticism were
anything less than public sanity at stake. We appeal simply and
robustly to the love of gain, and we seldom appeal in vain. It is not
only that education has substituted the principle of getting on for
less serviceable values; but we are bidden to purchase marketable
knowledge, no less than marketable foodstuffs, as an easy avenue
to fortune. If we will eat and drink the health-giving comestibles
urged upon us, our improved digestions will enable us to earn larger
incomes. If we will take a highly commended course of horse-shoeing or
oratorio-writing, prosperity will be our immediate reward. If we will
buy some excellent books of reference, they will teach us to grow rich.
“There are one thousand more millionaires in the United States than
there were ten years ago,” say the purveyors of these volumes. “At the
present rate of increase, the new millionaires in the next few years
will be at least twelve hundred. _Will you be one of them?_” There is a
question to ask a young American at the outset of his career! There is
an incentive to study! And by way of elucidating a somewhat doubtful
situation, the advertisers go on to say: “Typical men of brains are
those who have dug large commercial enterprises out of a copper
mine, or transformed buying and selling into an art. You must take a
leaf from the experience of such men if you would hold positions of
responsibility and power.”
Just how the reference books--chill avenues of universal erudition--are
going to give us control of a copper mine or of a department store
is not made clear; but their vendors know that there is no use in
offering anything less than wealth, or, as it is sometimes spelled,
“success,” as a return for the price of the volumes. And if a tasteful
border design of fat money-bags scattering a cascade of dollars
fails to quicken the sales, there is no tempting the heart of man.
Our covetousness is as simple and as easily played upon as was the
covetousness of the adventurers who went digging for buried treasures
on the unimpeachable authority of a soothsayer. The testimony offered
in a New Jersey court that a man had bought some farmland because the
spirit of a young negro girl had indicated that there was money hidden
beneath the soil; the arraignment before a Brooklyn magistrate of two
Gipsy women, charged with stealing the cash they had been commissioned
to “bless,” are proof, if proof were needed, that intelligence has not
kept pace with cupidity.