The Compensations of Poverty
Who are the worse off — those who have been poor all their lives, or those who,having been rich, suddenly lose all their fortune ?
I have often heard this discussed, and have taken part in these discussions, but have mostly remained alone in my opinion. The general voice says that, if you are bred in poverty, you do not feel its hardships and privations as much as when, habit having accustomed you to the good things of life, you have suddenly to do without them. With this reasoning the whole question is exhausted for the majority. I do not gainsay that the transition from riches to pauperism is a rough one, and that, of course, this phase is spared the born poor; but I assert that there are other experiences of poverty, where the former rich score over the poor of class.
Let us analyze the transition period. It is the case of Humpty Dumpty having a great fall, and must, of course, be recognized as a painful plunge; but, if ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ cannot put Humpty Dumpty on the wall again, why should Humpty Dumpty not do something for himself, and adapt himself to living happily at the foot of the wall? So many do. Having always had a bird’s view from the top, an outlook from below is not without vivid interest.
In the beginning the fall stuns you, and there is this to say for it; you are so hard hit that you do not realize what has happened—there being a wide difference between knowing a fact and realizing it. You are dazed by a feeling of unreality, and the edge is taken off your suffering by the impossibility for you to grasp the exact meaning of the situation. How can you understand what it is to be a pauper — you, whom want never touched? How can you realize the consequences of a complete overturn of fortune — you, who never gambled, never risked, never knew material uncertainty or anxiety? This gives you a respite and slows down the suddenness of the mental shock — of the overwhelming consciousness of disastrous reality. Certainly you feel the material privations, the mean surroundings, the new squalor and discomfort, the nausea of your uncleanliness. You feel hunger and cold, the absence of privacy in the shared room, the hard, makeshift bedding. You feel it all, but as in a dream. You are not yourself, but a phantom dreamer passing through a dream. You will awake, and all will be well. When, at last, the awakening comes, fitfully, gradually, an inner process has been accomplished in us — we have gained our equipoise, we can stand erect.
The born poor are crushed by a lifetime of squalor and privation. They do not believe in the possibility of rising out of the grip of poverty that has held them down ever since they can remember. They may now and then revolt, but they do not hope — that blessing is mostly denied them. We, on the contrary, — the former rich, — have hope: the hope born of knowledge of better things; the hope belonging to experience, to retrospection; the hope that lies in ourselves, not in mere indefinite surmises or expectations. We mean to thrive, to obtain; and that is our immense privilege, because, where there is conscious resolve and effort, a resolute fight with adverse circumstances, there we have also inner satisfaction, the content of self-respect, pride in the accepted challenge of fate. We learn a lesson in real values, and it is worth paying for. There are all the reserves of a lifetime of unhampered leisure, of unstinted energy, to fall back upon. Else of what use all our privileges, our spiritual and intellectual attainments, if they are not to serve us now at the supreme moment of our life? Surely, noblesse oblige, and if the ci-dcvants, the martyrs of the French Revolution, showed their butchers how nobles die, we, the victims of Bolshevist crime, who have yet escaped with our lives, shall show them how to live.
The poor as a class are hampered by ignorance, by false notions, by envy of the rich. We who have been rich know the exact value of riches. Much as we may appreciate their advantages, for us they offer no illusions. We know that what is most worth having in life cannot be bought or sold — it stands outside the material plane. Therefore, the venom of envy, the aches of covetousness, such as tantalize the poor, need never be ours; we need not carry this load and be handicapped by it—we can make the start in our new life unshackled. And our recollections of bygone prosperity, far from being a reason for present repinings, ought, in justice, to be the reason for present thankfulness. We have had, we have known, pleasures uncountable, which more than half of humanity goes without. Ought not that make us humble and grateful, and compel us to reflection? Why, having already enjoyed so much, should we consider it a reason for our continuing always in an abundance of which so many others are deprived? Why should we think ourselves illused by fate for having lost what we were allowed to enjoy for so long? What we have once made ours in spirit, by conscious appreciation, is ours for always: nothing can really take it from us but our own discontent and repinings, which mar our memories and blur our inner vision. The poor of class have never had, have never known. Theirs is the dull void, the aching pain for something longed for but never attained. We are richer than they, — and not poorer, — in that we have possessed and lost, if only we will understand the object lesson our present life can teach us.
Life is made up of fleeting moments — gone as soon as born; leaping into existence only to sink away directly into the depths of time. The present of to-day — to-morrow, already the past. We cannot hold back a single moment. We live in thought-pictures, which alone give connectedness and permanency to our unstable fleeting existence; mind-pictures, which gather up the transient moments into abiding memories. Alike the moment filled with the plentitude of joy, as of sorrow, disappears with the rapidity of the falling star — ephemeral, both of them. The supreme moment of love’s first avowal, so vivid and real for us at the moment, fades with time, just as the indifferent greeting of mere acquaintance. If the one outlives the other, if the first stands forth in undying glamour through the long years while the other leaves no recollection, it is but the resurrecting power of memory that gives enduring life to the one supreme moment which, in reality, was as transient, as the other.
The longevity of a moment depends on the degree to which it pierces to our inner consciousness, and is appropriated there. In fact, it is no paradox to say, that only that exists for us that finds a response in our inner consciousness. No luxury, no beauty, no love, can properly be said to exist for us, if they do not awake in us a conscious appreciation. The beauty we do not understand, the love we do not requite, the luxury we have grown indifferent to, are no real possessions of ours because, though we have them, we know them not, and no quantity of red tape can ever make them ours. No act of possession can make us enter into our heritage, if the inner appropriation fails us. No law and no force can bind to us possessions alien to our spirit. Possessiveness is a spiritual process, the result of spiritual assimilation. We want the transubstantiation of spirit before the alchemist’s stone can turn to gold. We must assimilate in spirit, be conscious in our mind and feelings, before we can claim whatsoever for our own. Therefore, not every one who possesses riches is rich, but only he whose inner consciousness is awake to the gift and blends with it.
Are there many of whom this is really true? If so, then why are there so many discontented among the rich, and why is it just among them that we find the blasé, the ‘spleeny,’ of all sorts, and that there weltschmerz and toska hold their sway— every country having its special appellation and type of the same degenerate species of the rich? What numbers of these envied wealthy ones are sick with satiety—bored by the sameness of gratified whim and desires! Nowhere so many hypochondriacs — misanthropes — as among those for whom their great wealth is an hereditary state, a privilege of centuries. It is as if Nature had set a limit to the hoarding of unbounded wealth in the same hands; as if it had put a price to be paid, which nullifies a too great advantage.
We see that families possessing unusual wealth are liable to die out sooner than others, and that, after a few generations, the members of such families degenerate bodily and mentally. It is different with big fortunes earned, not inherited. Here the possessor has every chance to get enjoyment out of his riches, because the moral conditions are here present that make for a conscient appreciation of the attained. There has been effort, struggle, strenuous exertion, a gradually developing understanding of the advantages gained. Here there can be no satiety, no boredom; here all is movement, progress.
In America, the land where perhaps the greatest fortunes in the world are made and lost, where money is in a rolling state, and not held, as with us, by possessors occupied mostly with their rent-rolls, afraid of any diminution or risk to their capital — in America, the millionaires who make their fortunes may well enjoy them; for have they not often risen from deepest poverty, passed through all the successive phases of penury, and competence, only finally to wrest crowning success from feeble fate? They can well appreciate the riches they have stamped with the value of their own personality.
Shall we Russian ci-devant rich not learn something from the American millionaire, who loses fortunes as superbly as he makes them, overhauling them, perhaps, not once but twice or thrice in a lifetime, while with us the enormous sums they represent would probably lie barren, in safe but unproductive seclusion? Shall we not emulate some of the American pluck in losing, of their energy in gaining, and refuse to accept our present destitution as irretrievable? Of course, we need not all of us expect to become millionaires; neither should I say is it necessary. I dare say we can manage very well with a little less. The thing is, to do the start in the right spirit, with the right thoughts. It is that which chiefly matters and decides, whether our life is to be miserable or not. We can achieve nothing by vain regrets, and by allowing our energies to fritter away in sorrowing and lamenting. If we want to achieve, we must take our stand resolutely, and act.
We have a double work to do— one on the outward plane of life, the other in ourselves. We fail so often in our endeavors toward success and achievement because we concentrate only on the outward effort, and ignore the most important one of inner preparation and adaptation. There is a law that rules our mind and consciousness, as there is a law that rules acoustics, and electricity, and the like. It gives us the means to shut out from our consciousness the thoughts that sadden and weaken us, and to put in their place thoughts that give us strength, and that carry us forward by their impetus. Only we must have recourse to our spiritual faculties and power of will to utilize this law. We often do so intuitively, but we can learn to do so with understanding and system; and then, of course, our success will be all the greater.
When we are freed from the burden of vain repining, and have lightened our load of sorrow by throwing off dismal and disintegrating thoughts, we experience a great relief, a great recuperation of energy, and we make the new start, a liberated being. Buoyant in resolve; determined to win the race; heart and mind open to all the chances; grateful for every result — how much satisfaction, how much enjoyment, do we not glean on the way! Humble joys, perhaps, but how genuine. The satisfaction of a set purpose; the exultation over the first work found and of a task well done; the thrilling joy over an unexpected extra job that opens out the possibility for some long denied comfort. Pleasant anticipations, planning absorbing projects, hopes — does not all that tend to make our life intensely lived every minute, full of a vivid interest, which our former uniform existence, running in fixed grooves, never gave us? All is relative, nothing has fixed, unchanging, intrinsic value, but only that worth which circumstances stamp into it, and the individual is capable of deriving from it. No gift in the time of our riches gave us such pleasure as we now, in our destitution, derive from every small acquisition, from every small bargain successfully concluded.
Puerilities, you may think. No, nothing is puerile that helps us fight the good fight and claim the victory; makes us the masters of life, not its slaves. Not by despising the material, but by assigning to it its right place of subordination and correlation to the spiritual, can material values give us true satisfaction; and the material world once approached from this standpoint gives us wealth of enjoyment undreamed of by those who have only the materialist’s perceptions.
If thus, in our poverty, we are buoyant and strong and hopeful, instead of chronically discontented and fretful; if our soul is singing, our pulses throbbing to the exigencies of a new life of work and exertion — then, surely, this is our privilege: the privilege of the former rich — not of the brokenhearted, long-suffering, exhausted poor, who have never known joy nor expected it, who have been crushed from their cradles, and are a terrible reproach to the social organization of humanity, a sad object lesson of the deficiency of that system of grasping covetousness, of egotistical self-love, of force and violence, which has led humanity into the bondage of materialism, of loveless competition and crimestained possession.