A Patent of Nobility

RENAN, speaking of his ancestors in Recollections of My Youth, said of them that ‘one proof of their nobility was that whenever they attempted to engage in any commercial business they were defrauded.’ He explained the apparently paradoxical statement thus: ‘There are some people who are born to be rich, while there are others who never would be so. The former have claws, and do not scruple to help themselves first. That is just what we have never been able to do. When it comes to taking the best piece out of the dish which is handed round, our natural politeness stands in our way.’ He asserts, in fact, that the pursuit of wealth is not the pursuit of a gentleman; and that it is a more respectable and honorable position, indicative of a higher breeding and a finer taste, to be decently poor than to be even decently affluent. Long ago, and without any assistance from him, I came to the same conclusion.

Do not, my affluent reader, say ‘sour grapes’ to me, if you please. I admit they are ripe and luscious, and out of my reach, but protest that it is with no fox’s eye that I regard them. I know it is next, to impossible for a moneyed person, in his wildest flights of fancy, to imagine a human being who does not want money — almost as impossible as for a mother to believe the childless woman who blesses her freedom from maternal cares; and I seem to feel the inevitable smile that I cannot see, prepared to blight, my little thesis in the bud. I beg you to take my sacred word of honor that I never made a more conscientious profession of faith. Like Renan, with whom I do not presume otherwise to compare myself, I have had a long time to work the matter out, and it is my sober, settled, and sincere conviction that it is better to have small means than a large superfluity.

No use. The smile only broadens. I might as well talk to a stone wall. Very well, I say no more to you. I remember that I am writing for a magazine which does not address itself to the wealthy lower orders. Its high standards are set for, and appeal to, those whose ideals of life are high, the truly high class of the civil and social as well as intellectual worlds, the high-thinking, who are almost necessarily the plain living, and almost impossibly the nurslings of the lap of luxury, accustomed, as they say, to having the best of everything. In short, I may as well say it first as last, for you and me, dear impecunious brothers, to whom I now turn with instant confidence that I shall be listened to and understood.

Not, mind you, that I regard the best of everything as other than the best. Wealth is wealth, if words are to have meaning. No one can more keenly appreciate a daintily ordered domestic life, or be more clearly aware of the ill effects upon character of grubby tablecloths and threadbare clothes, not to speak of debts and hunger. The poverty I am referring to as a state of grace is not squalid poverty, the illgotten poverty that is as discreditable as ill-gotten wealth; it is the decent poverty that can pay its way without taxing time and strength, a sufficient provision for one’s reasonable daily needs, but not enough to deprive one of food for hope, stimulus to effort, the pleasures of anticipation, which transcend all the pleasures of possession; freedom to call one’s soul one’s own, and to do with it exactly what seemeth to one good. Conversely, my conception of wealth as applied to this argument is not that of the multi-millionaire. He has put himself outside the pale of decency, and it is of the decently affluent that I speak; plebeian, of course, more or less, according to how he got his tidbits out of the dish, but not shameless in his clawings and gras pings, like the most notable of the world’s so-called self-made men (as if money ever made a man since the world was).

I have in mind the polished gentleman of leisure, who reads in his fine library, and buys pictures with discretion, a lover of good horses, a judge of good wine, a patron of the arts; husband of a stately lady, who gathers about her every evidence of cultivated modernity; father of university sons, and traveled, linguistic daughters; master of servants trained to the last point of perfection. A charming establishment! I have visited it many a time, and delighted in it. To arouse from sleep in my soft and delicate bed at break of day and find the fire to dress by already burning brightly; a little later the exquisite tea-tray; a little later again the warm bath on the feather-soft blanket, and all its forethoughtful adjuncts, by the glowing hearth where I sat last night to read my novel and toast my toes in an arm-chair of indescribable comfort. Then, after delicious breakfasting, the huge and cunningly furnished motor, that runs like oil without jar or sound; cushioned from my feet (on the foot-warmer) to the back of my head, befurred to the eyes, reclining at utmost, ease and idly surveying the liveried men in their glass compartment or the common herd scurrying up and down the street.

Yes, it is charming — for a little while. But I never can stand it long. I begin to feel alien and oppressed. I have a vague sense of something unsatisfactory, something wrong, as if I had taken to drink or opium-smoking, or some other secretly immoral course of conduct. And I find the lap of luxury not only frightfully enervating, but a place where I should be bored to death in no time.

Of course, I am not used to it. But it is not that. I am sure it is not that, because I have a love of elegance as great as anybody’s. It is because I feel in the marrow of my bones that the moneybloated form of elegance is vulgar. What do you think, poor brothers, who never had motors and yachts and diamonds, and never will have? Is the note of true refinement in it? As an expression of human culture, it is certainly very primitive. Lafcadio Hearn even calls it ‘savagely bourgeoise,’ and contrasts it with a civilization which, although barbarous to us, is far more finely-mannered and dignified, and, moreover, had been thousands of years in existence when ours was still that of the stone axe and the cave. ‘ Carpets, dirty shoes, absurd fashions, wickedlyexpensive living, airs, vanities, gossip; how much sweeter the Japanese life on the soft mats, with its ever dearer courtesy and pretty, pure simplicity.’

But a patron of the arts? Only a rich man, who can encourage the artists by buying their works, is accounted such. We say of one who uses his personal wealth in this enlightened fashion, that he, at least, deserves to have it; that he, at least, is doing good with it. But let us think before we say it again. Does he? Is he? No. In face of the most firmly-established and respectable of our social beliefs, I emphatically say no. Considering how, as a general rule, true art elevates and money debases almost everything they severally touch, it must logically be assumed, as a general principle, that the less they have to do with each other the better. Also everybody can see that, as between the artist and his patron, the volume of supply and demand is not in any way conditioned by the worth of the commodity.

There is art and art. Simplicity and sincerity are the bases of all beauty, of whatever kind, and there are more beautiful things yet to be conceived and created for the uplifting of the esthetic sense than houses and furniture, dresses and jewelry, even pictures and statues. The world is young yet, and the human race still in a state of childhood, the stage of toys and gewgaws.

Then take science. For a long time after I had ceased to believe in the power of money to better things in general, I had one good use for it: to endow scientific research. I did think that there was that channel in which it could flow beneficently, a fructifying irrigator, not a blighting poison-water, like the stuff they pour on gravel walks to kill the weeds. I have quite given up thinking it now.

There is science and science, as there is art and art. There is the science that invents cunning collar-studs and magnificent engines, and takes out patents for them, and puts them on the market, and gets fortunes out of them, according as they make for the public convenience, and only contingently and accidentally for the public good. And there is the science of bacteriology and hygiene, the science that searches into the bases of life, the laws of the universe, to the one end that man may learn his highest duty, which is also his highest welfare, and the best means by which he may attain to a faithful performance of it. The first needs no patronage from wealth, for money is already its inspiration and reward. The second can and does do its work as well without it as with it, and better; it is work for the work’s sake solely. When it is done, and money can serve in applying its benefits to the public, it is the duty of the state to supply that money, since it is in discharge of a public debt.

Thinking back along the chain of cause and effect, one sees more and more clearly that the claw-hand is at the bottom of all the mischief in the world, and that in few ways has it done more mischief than in its perversion of science to ignoble ends.

When we got railways and steamships and telegraphs and things, and began to travel about and live in and trade with all countries as if they were one, and to know foreign peoples as they knew themselves, and to see that the interests of each were the interests of all, one would think the time had come then for nations to learn that their mediæval provincialism was not patriotism, and to teach their governments, in their international dealings, to play the game as sportsmen and gentlemen. But now, to get (through science) this great new privilege of aerial flight, the freedom of that celestial, hitherto-unsullied neutral world, where there are no boundaries, no shores, no obstacles between man and man, and to use it straight away, and (one might suppose from appearances) for no other purpose than, to drop dynamite on defenseless ships and towns!—one wonders that the very babes of the kindergarten of the twentieth century do not rise up to denounce the contemptible rascality of the very thought.

I have often stolen out at night to some deserted garden bench or balcony chair, to look at the illimitable and divinely peaceful sky, as a way of cleaning my soul of the dust of the day, and generally renovating its ragged furnishings. The stars of the Infinite have seemed to see me there, as I saw them, a heavenly host of heavenly intelligences, to which my little world belonged. I have visualized my little world as a wee point of light spinning on its path amongst them, and myself as “flagging’ them from some upper or outer window, some projecting outpost, to apologize for our presence in their majestic company, so diseased and blood-stained as we are, and unfit for their pure eyes. I have wanted to tell them that the human heart is in the right place; that the Moral Law is known, although it is not acted upon; and that some day, when the mutations of taste and thought bring the vogue for high-mindedness, they will see a change, if they can bear with us so long.

Then that wonderfully-imagined story of Rudyard Kipling’s, ‘The Night Mail,’ has come into my head, and I have thought of the nearer sky as our blessed heritage of peace and purity, come to us when we are dying for something uncorrupt and incorruptible, some place where the claw-hand finds nothing to clutch. It has been my ambition for years to make one aerial voyage before I die. I read not long ago a little magazine article which described how a lady went up in a balloon one evening with her husband, wandered through moonlit clouds all night, and came down in a field next morning. There was nothing striking in the narrative beyond its record of the feat, but there were unspeakable suggestions in it for me; it haunts me still when I gaze at the sky at night. I feel myself floating in that uncharted sea like a disembodied spirit: ‘safe from all evil,’ as we say of the dead; to all intents and purposes in heaven. And now the sharksand pirates are going there. Some night I may look up with the old sense of adoration, and suddenly find myself saluted with a bursting bomb. It is quite a possible thing to happen to me, old as I am.

Well, it is not the ‘nobles’ of the scientific world who spend precious life and genius pandering to the worst vice in men and nations, adding by their very knowledge to the crimes of ignorance which work all our woe. Their science knows no frontiers; it knows that the cosmic forces are for all, everywhere potent to recreate and unite; and the true scientist, like the true artist, never uses them for any other ends. No money that was ever coined could bribe him to it.

That he is ‘good for trade,’ is an argument always pat and ready for adverse criticism of the excesses of the modern sybarite; but (although it is not for me to meddle with high matters of political economy) I cannot think so. For one thing, wealth in its patronage of trade is responsible for worldwide waste and misery of a singularly atrocious kind. It is gradually exterminating whole races of lovely creatures that we shall never get back, accelerating the process at times in sheer wantonness, as when somebody says it is going to be the fashion to have muffs three times larger than can conveniently be carried. It would exterminate the angels if they came within gunshot, and it could get good feathers from their wings.

Do I, then, mean that the unearned increment should be given to charity? I do not. I mean that less than anything. No, whatever you do with money, do not give it away, to corrupt those who maybe have not yet bowed the knee to idols. And do not put it in the sea, which may seem to be indicated as a last resource. Put it in its proper place. Let it be but the useful adjunct of life’s work, and not the aim and end. In its right place it is, of course, not only legitimate but indispensable. The dish handed round was prepared for healthy appetites. Money, like opium and brandy, is an excellent thing in itself, and there is no moral law against one having more than another (in reason) if he has worthily come by it. This is no brief for socialism. The earth is the mother of all, and eternal justice demands the freedom of the common home and equal rights of sonship for all; but the same eternal justice decrees that each child’s status shall match his ability and deserts, or it has no right to its name. The whole object of this disquisition is to try to define what the word ‘status,’ in such connection, means.

But what is the use? I know all the time that it is a voice crying in the wilderness to ears plugged with wax and cotton-wool. There is none so deaf as he who will not hear, and all my good advice will be thrown away except on those who do not need it. The Bible is piously quoted in defense of the existing situation. ‘The poor [meaning the indigent] ye have always with you.’ It is conveniently assumed to be a divine institution. To those who hold this view, the divinest thing on earth is the multi-millionaire.

So it will be in my time, and perhaps to the third and fourth generation after me. But the world moves fast on its upward way, and we will hope not.

There would still be a little something to say for this vulgar passion of mankind, and its dominance over all others in the present state of society, if it brought any joy to its votaries on their own account. The pursuit of wealth is, I suppose, in the last resort , the pursuit of happiness; and the luxuries they will stick at nothing to obtain represent to them the raw material of which that precious thing is made. Well, when they have all their luxuries in possession, are they happy?

No. They are not even happy. Consider, my unburdened and untrammeled comrade, whose life is peppered and salted, full of flavor and nourishment, what it must mean to be stuffed with sweets from morning till night, and have the liver of a Strassburg goose in consequence. To me, the idea of being in the position of having nothing to do, nothing to want, nothing to build air-castles with; no holiday, which presupposes work; no rest, which presupposes active energy; no novelty, no liberty, no interest, no pleasure but to chase pleasure, which is never, never to be captured by force or fraud, — to me, I say, the idea is horrible. The immense and utter boredom of such an existence, to say nothing of its ignominiousness, appalls one. Poor things! Poor, blind, plebeian things, spiritually low-born, intellectually low-bred: the only excuse for them is that they know no better.

Thank Heaven, and perhaps a nobler ancestry, we do. Ay, let us be Pharisaical for once, my brothers, and congratulate ourselves that we are not as these other men are. We have the best of them in every way. While they wallow in their soul-deadening swamp of wealth, we sprint along our hard road of poverty, in light marching order, through scenes of beauty and realms of knowledge that they will never know, and that in any case it is not in their limited intelligence to appreciate. And in the end, please God, we shall not die lonely as a camel in the desert, when the vultures gather to pick his bones, the waiting heirs, our own friends and children, counting days and hours to the reading of the will; not die with the accusing spectres of starving mothers and shivering babes in rags about our bed, and with the shame in our failing hearts of having been worse than merely unprofitable servants in the world we were born to serve. It will be with us, I hope, as with Huxley, when his splendid work, which had nothing to say to money, was accomplished. Looking back upon it from the peaceful arm-chair of his old age, the peaceful garden which it was his last occupation to tend, he said, ‘I have warmed both hands at the fire of life.’ Or, as with Renan, whose inherited politeness was conspicuous in his parting remark: ‘I have had so much pleasure out of life that I am really not justified in claiming a compensation beyond the grave.’