Business and Release: Boyhood and Youth

I

MY sister and I finished our year at Harvard, and joined the rest of our family, my father and mother and younger sister, in a jaunt abroad.

My elder sister was now about to end her high prenuptial flight; the image of the Harvard professor had been dimmed by that of the English barrister, with his grandiose scheme of bringing heaven to earth under the leadership of Gladstone and Joe Chamberlain, and beneath a banner inscribed with the great watchwords of Hegelian logic, and yet bearing the authentic papal seal. She was to be married in Oxford to this son of Balliol, and the unprecedented glory was to be hers of a wedding breakfast in that college hall, over which the great Benjamin Jowett himself was to preside. I was to be present at this ceremony, and then to be allowed a year of grace in Europe, to finish my education by spending the winter at a German university, and thus acquire some tincture of that German learning which was considered by Americans in the eighties as the flower and crown of culture.

After this European ‘jaunt’ (there was a taste in my family, as I have said, for these jaunts abroad), I was to return to that bottle business in Philadelphia which was to be my fate.

This programme was punctually carried out: my sister was married in Oxford to Benjamin Costelloe; there was a big wedding breakfast in the Hall at Balliol; the Master presided and made a speech, and to these festivities my parents invited their evangelical and especially their Quaker friends, who most of them had condoned, if they had not forgotten, the scandal of my father’s adventures with his feminine disciples. At this gathering I became aware of one curious phenomenon which at the time I failed to understand. The English Quakers who were our guests seemed unwilling to mix together, and they separated into little clans, and it was only later that I came to realize that these ‘Friends,’ as they were called, were divided among themselves by not very friendly distinctions, each group keeping aloof from the class which in wealth or social position it considered inferior to itself. The same hierarchical divisions exist, I have since discovered, among the English Jews — another race, like the Quakers, who live separated from the world, and yet in whom the worldly spirit of caste is especially acute.

I went in the following autumn to Berlin, where I lodged with a German family, and attended the lectures of some of the famous professors in that university and heard many concerts and operas, for I had been caught by the fashionable craze for Wagner, and was an enthusiastic though ignorant admirer of his music. S3ave for the German I learned, and the German books I read, I drew no real profit from my sojourn there, and only one encounter of that winter stands out in my memory with any great distinctness. In my Wagner enthusiasm I used to go sometimes to Dresden, where the great operas were performed with especial éclat, and on one of these week-end visits I happened to find in my hotel a Russian family whose acquaintance I had previously made in traveling. I joined them in the hotel dining room, and they informed me with much amusement, for they were keen observers of characters and types, that there was staying in the hotel a genuine English ‘dog,’ as they called him — a ‘snob,’ a ‘sportsman’ of the true authentic breed. The door soon opened; ‘There he is!’ they cried, as a tall figure in a suit of large checks, and with a broad face and black whiskers, marched in with the jaunty air of an English schoolmaster who likes, in traveling abroad, to assume what he considers a man-of-the-world deportment.

My amazement (indeed horror is not too strong a word for my feelings) can be imagined when this whiskered face began to display the features of my revered poet and prophet — features which I knew well from photographs. So this was the author of the Strayed Reveller and Thyrsis and many poems I knew by heart — the exquisite apostle of that doctrine of sweetness and light which I had made my own! Matthew Arnold (for it really was Matthew Arnold) approached the table at which we sat, and, slapping down a pair of big tan gloves before those Russian ladies, began to entertain them with an account of the very favorable reception he had received at the Saxon Court from certain dear princesses who were his especial friends. I looked at this large, cheerful figure, I listened to his boastful conversation, with dismay. What I had expected Matthew Arnold to be like, what Apollonian aspect I had imagined for his face, and what divine discourse I had hoped to hear from his lips I hardly know, but this was certainly not what I should have looked for, and my disillusion (I was only twenty) was almost overwhelming.

But at this time men of letters like Matthew Arnold, like Browning, and like the earlier Henry James, had formed the habit of wearing masks, which saved them no doubt from much impertinence and tiresome gush about their writings; and as the world, with its standards of good form and deportment, was then taken more seriously than anyone takes it now, the masks they assumed were worldly ones.

During my stay at Dresden I often heard Matthew Arnold impress the table d’hôte with his tales of the Saxon Court. ‘Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee,’ I murmured to myself, and I never dared to speak to him of literature, or of my passionate love for his writings. He treated me, however, with jolly kindness, and invited me to come and stay with him in England; but either because he died not long after, or because I was afraid of further disillusion, I never saw him again. Of course he did not want to talk of literature with the rather insufferable young prig he had met by chance in a Dresden hotel, and I dare say the impression of him that remains in my memory is a false one. But he certainly was very different from Walt Whitman.

I especially remember how shocked I was when, after sitting in ecstatic reverence at a splendid performance of the Valkyrie, I ventured to ask him, as we walked back together to the hotel, what impression the music had made upon him.

‘Oh, I had to go,’ he said in his offhand manner, ‘but I only went because my wife and daughters would have scoffed at me if I had n’t. But if you ask me what I thought of it — well, it seemed to me — like — what shall I say? — it seemed to me the sort of thing that I should have composed myself if I happened to try my hand at composing music.’

‘Oh, Matthew Arnold,’ I murmured to myself, ‘is this the way you strive for a many-sided perfection; is it thus that you listen with particular heed to those voices of foreign culture which are especially likely to escape us in our provincial Anglo-Saxon darkness?’

II

In the autumn of 1886, I returned with my mother and father and younger sister to America, leaving my elder sister settled in London to engage with her barrister husband in that reminting, by means of Hegelian philosophy, of the three great religious watchwords, ‘God,’ ‘Duty,’ and ‘Immortality,’under whose auspices, and that of the Catholic Church, heaven was to be brought to earth and Jerusalem to be planted in England. These processes of reminting and Jerusalem-building seemed somehow to our uninitiated eyes to have been for the moment postponed to the exigencies of our new relative’s career at the bar and in politics.

The Master of his college, Benjamin Jowett, the inspirer and guide of generations of able and ambitious young Balliol men, had formed the useful habit of pronouncing before each of his favorites as they departed some pregnant word or sentence suited to their character and prospects — a kind of apophthegm or maxim to be their watchword in their careers, and at his parting with my brother-in-law he had sententiously remarked, ‘It is most important in this world, Costelloe, to be pushing, but,’ he added, after a pregnant pause, ‘it is fatal to seem so.’ The earlier part of this wise saying my new brother-in-law seemed to have appropriated to himself with enthusiasm, but somewhat, it was said by those who did not like him, to the neglect of the hint implied in the second clause. However that might be, the newly married couple were almost lost to us in a rush of political and social engagements into which my sister seemed to enter with enthusiasm and the highest hopes, while we returned from our jaunt across the Atlantic, and I prepared with some reluctance to begin my business career.

I say ‘with some reluctance,’ for though I did not doubt the validity of the great principle on which I was acting, or question the golden nature of the prospects, my jaunt to Europe, my wanderings about the Continent, had given me a taste for life abroad which caused a certain vague repining; and above all I remembered having been present at a service in an Oxford chapel, and feeling, as one of the white-robed scholars read the evening lesson, a pang of regret that no such pleasant college life could ever be enjoyed by me. These, however, were but vague regrets; the thought would have seemed insane and monstrous of abandoning the golden plum which hung ripe for my grasp upon the family tree.

If my dream of being an apostle of enlightenment amid the family furnaces and diffusing culture among those glass blowers had, owing to my advance in age, and perhaps to my unhappy meeting with Matthew Arnold, grown somewhat dimmer, I had replaced it by the more practicable if less exalted ideal of retiring from business early — after, say, twenty years, when I had acquired a modest sufficiency of this world’s goods which would allow me to live a life of cultured leisure: not. abroad, however, but in some more cultivated American corner, for I was a good patriot, and my condemnation and contempt were great for those Americans who abandoned their country to lead idle and probably corrupt lives in foreign parts.

I have already mentioned my Baltimore cousin, Carey Thomas, who had gone abroad to study and had opened for us a window on the truer, more scholarly culture of European learning. Miss Thomas had now returned, and was busy in applying her ideals to the modeling of that new-founded Quaker college for women which has since become famous under the name of Bryn Mawr College. Miss Thomas had apparently not lost, amid this constructive work, her taste for smashing windows to let in new light; and, though extremely busy, she summoned me to an interview at Bryn Mawr.

I did not know my cousin well; she was nine years older than I was, at an age when nine years makes a tremendous difference, and the half-legendary tales of her academic success had produced in me an immense awe and respect for her person and opinions. I approached this interview with some trepidation, which was, however, nothing compared to what it would have been had I known the awful words she had determined to pronounce.

‘So you are going into the family business?’ she abruptly began.

‘Why, certainly, of course,’ I replied. ‘How could I dream of anything else?’

‘Well,’ said my cousin, ‘I’d rather shoot myself.’

Was it possible that I had heard her rightly, or had my distinguished relative suddenly gone mad? ‘But Carey,’ I protested, ‘it’s a most splendid chance — a chance in ten thousand, to take my father’s place in a great expanding business.’

‘I’d rather shoot myself,’ the awful woman repeated, and this time I could not doubt the words I heard.

‘But,’ I protested, ‘it may be a chance to make a fortune!’

‘Why make a fortune?’ was the answer.

‘But Carey— ’ I protested.

‘What’s the good of money?’ she interrupted. ‘Look at our cousins who have gone into the business; they’ve all become rather dull old men before their time. What good has their money done them? What on earth do they get out of it? Are you really going to sacrifice your life to become one of them?’

In my need to argue with this mad, misguided cousin, I fell back on my old ideal — which, though it had somewhat faded, I had not completely abandoned — of entering the family business to spread among those glass blowers the ideal of a many-sided culture. ‘Bosh!’ was, if I remember rightly, my cousin’s answer on this occasion, and to this energetic monosyllable I found I had no reply. My second ideal, of making a modest but sufficient income and retiring after, say, twenty years, seemed irrefutable, and was now put forward.

‘But why waste those twenty years?’ my cousin queried. ‘The best, the most important, the most pleasant years of life. Wait twenty years and it’ll be too late. Too late,’ she ominously repeated.

‘But Carey,’ I almost bleated, ‘I have n’t any money.’

‘You need very little money,’ she answered. ‘I lived abroad on five hundred dollars a year. Make your father give you that — he can easily give you more.’

‘And abandon my country?’ I asked. ‘Go abroad and give up America, with its need for culture and cultivated people?’

‘Bosh!’ again answered my cousin.

‘But what should I do abroad?’ I querulously inquired.

‘You might take up writing,’ Miss Thomas suggested.

‘But I have no talent, not the slightest gleam of talent for writing,’ I protested.

‘Then go and live at Monte Carlo and enjoy yourself,’ was the advice of this eminent Quaker to her young Quaker cousin of twenty-one; whereupon I was dismissed, and went away indignant and amazed. What? To give up and madly throw away the prospect of a fortune, and go and live abroad on a pittance in some shabby pension; to desert my country, and break the heart of my father, who, as he had often reiterated, had only been sustained in his toils and travails by the thought that I, his only son, should succeed him and reap the benefit of his sacrifices! All this seemed something dreadful, portentous, inexplicable — the result, perhaps, of a temporary aberration, or of some perversion my cousin had contracted abroad.

Putting aside, therefore, the memory of this interview, and trying to forget it, I cheerfully entered the temple of Mammon, and its iron gates clanged behind me. My parents had gone abroad again, and it had been conceded, since New York was more a centre of culture than Philadelphia, that I should be attached to the New York branch of the family business. I was to enter that office at the bottom, working like the humblest clerk, and being paid the most modest wage.

So to New York I went, and engaged a couple of rooms high up in one of its apartment buildings. These rooms I adorned with photographs of the Mona Lisa and a few other famous pictures; I had my books, my Matthew Arnold, my Balzac, my Blake reproductions; and then my business fife began.

III

I cannot honestly say that I was unhappy during my year in New York. Most human beings are born for harness and are melancholy when out of it too long. Like Wordsworth, they feel the weight of chance desires; the definite routine, the daily necessary task, eliminate the need for self-imposed activity, and they are freed from that irresolution, that temptation to postponement, that degrading sophistry of laziness, which are the curse of those whose tasks are voluntary and can be performed at any time.

My hours of work were long, but absolutely regular: I was at the warehouse at eight o’clock; I departed at six or seven, healthily fatigued, and ready to enjoy an evening of reading, music, or other pleasant relaxation. I was naturally industrious, and not, I think, devoid of business talent; my tasks, though uninteresting, were not difficult, and I enjoyed fulfilling them with efficiency.

If I had no favor owing to my family connections, I was aware of no jealousy on the part of my fellow clerks, and I suffered no kind of persecution from them. My modest wages, the dollar notes which I received every Saturday, were precious to me from the fact that I had honestly earned them. They seemed more valuable, more authentic, more like real money, than any of the bestowed currency which had ever before got into my pocket.

And I certainly tasted one joy during this year of business which I have never tasted since — the joy of Sunday, of that precious day of golden leisure, the memory of which, and the prospect of its sure recurrence, sweetened all the intervening days of work. Now all my days are Sundays; no one of them stands out among the others to bestow a special felicity, or shines with an illumination of its own.

Thus I underwent my apprenticeship, learning my task better and better, and apparently beginning, under the best auspices, a prosperous business career.

I have read somewhere of men who receive a wound which they hardly notice, and often carry on for a long time their ordinary activities, quite unaware that they have been stricken in a vital part. That was really my condition, although I did n’t know it, all that winter: a kind of ominous suppressed questioning, a mysterious unending argument, seemed to be going on in my unconscious self, and reverberations from it would rise every now and then into my thoughts.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ I would catch myself asserting, ‘ to say that money is no good — she knows absolutely nothing of the world.’ I began a determined process of trying to idealize money, to convince myself that I did want fine houses, opulence, and good food. Above all I tried to fix my mind on the satisfaction, so much enjoyed by my father, of dashing along with the gleam and rattle of harness behind a pair of fine horses. And yet to sacrifice one’s life, to toil day after day, year after year, till youth was over? How was my gold grown dim, my fine gold tarnished!

I read and reread Henry James’s stories of Americans abroad; pictures of my foreign travels would shine and fade in the background of my mind, and more persistently of all, perhaps, the memory of that afternoon at Oxford when I had seen a handsome white-robed youth read the lesson in his college chapel. I began to wonder if all the wealth the world could give would compensate for the deprivation of the pleasures which Europe offered; and little by little the longing for a life of cultivated leisure, or at least of vague æsthetic experience, grew upon me. But I was still the dupe of that cleverest of the Devil’s sophisms which alleges that one can comply with his behests for a limited period in order safely to defy him afterwards. Little by little, however, I began to lessen the tale of years to be spent in Mammon’s service, and to antedate my happy emancipation from business and New York.

Two circumstances did much to hasten this process towards my release. Although, as I have said, I was not made unhappy by the work in our family warehouse, the atmosphere of that office itself grew more and more disagreeable to me. My mother’s father, John Whitall, who had founded the family firm, was, outside of business, a genial, kindly old Quaker saint, the joy of his family, the dearest and kindest parent and grandparent, and one of the most publicspirited and philanthropic of the citizens of Philadelphia. But he had been, in his early life, the captain of an American sailing ship, and these captains were not famous for any excess of benevolence. Although precluded by his Quaker scruples from swearing at his men, he seems to have ruled them by other methods which had rendered blasphemy entirely superfluous. When he left the sea, he brought with him his sea severity into that world of American business where harshness and cruelty and a slavedriving spirit were almost universal.

To these Christians, to these Quaker saints, — and saints they often were, — the notion seems never to have occurred of applying the principles of their religion to the treatment of their employees. Business was business; it was a world apart, without the slightest relation to the heavenly kingdom; and this merciless tradition filled the warehouse where I worked with an atmosphere which little by little I found almost stifling. Every one of the employees lived in the fear of instant dismissal, and in the hope of profiting by the disgrace of others. A heavy, blustering bully was the tyrant of the warehouse; he reigned in a glassenclosed apartment, whither any wretch who had been caught in error was immediately summoned and subjected to a vituperation, a vilification, which reverberated loudly through the office, and was listened to by the other wretches with malignant joy and hope. ‘And it’s in this ogre’s kingdom,’ my soul would whisper, ‘that you mean to go on living! And the success you hope for is to be changed into some such tyrant and ogre yourself! ’

Thus the sense of malease grew, and has indeed remained with me so vividly that I never meet a rich, successful business American without some slight speculation about the bones he has crushed and the wretches he has eaten. These experiences have given me a certain dislike for the whole iron economic system upon which our civilization is founded — a dislike, however, which I must admit is by no means strong enough to make me forgo any of the pecuniary advantages which I derive from it. And anyhow I quiet my conscience — how honestly or dishonestly it would be difficult for me to say — by the reflection that I cannot think out any other economic scheme of things that would allow the human spirit to put forth fairer blossoms. But that these blossoms are nourished by something as ugly as manure seems plain enough to me when I think (as I try not to think) of our present social system, and the unearned gold which the world keeps on putting into my pockets.

The old Quakers had in their vocabulary several terms which vividly described their spiritual experiences; and among these the word ‘ unbottoming ’ is one of the most picturesque. An unbottoming is the slipping away and removal of the firm basis on which the solid Quaker soul is seated; and now for me an experience of this kind was rapidly approaching. This unbottoming of mine — or, to change my metaphor, this drifting away of my soul from its familiar moorings — was not due so much to the evils of the capitalist system, for to those I was accustomed, but to something unrelated to socialism and almost incompatible with it. I became aware of a tiny breeze, a faint inspiration, a dappling of the surface of my mind by cat’s-paws and tiny ripples, which took the form of the desire to write — an impulse inherited perhaps from my dim frustrated ancestors, or a desire caught perhaps from my talks with old Walt Whitman, to endure the delicate torture of trying to express in words what I felt and saw.

To sift the sands of life for another kind of gold than the gold I was earning at the bottle warehouse began to seem to me a delicious occupation, and after my long days of work I began to spend my evenings in writing an account of a sailing expedition which I had undertaken the previous summer in a small boat from Newport to New Bedford. This I sent to the Evening Post, then the most literary of the New York journals, and to my amazement it was printed in its pages. I next began to write a story which was full of crude pathos, and did not possess, I now believe, the slightest literary merit. But I thought it a wonderful story, and these stolen secret joys, this foretaste of what has been since the delight and torture of my life, made me turn away with more persistence from the den of business to peep through that window which my cousin had smashed before my panic-stricken eyes. Outside was Europe, and golden leisure, long tranquil days of writing, while inside my business stool seemed to be slipping away beneath me, and even the partners’ seat, which had been the object of my ambition, began to seem a dull and cruel throne.

IV

In the summer of 1887 my father and mother and younger sister returned from Europe, where they had spent the winter, and where at least the female members of my family had been haunted at times, I think, by a certain pity for my fate, imprisoned as I was in that New York workhouse, while they were enjoying themselves abroad. To them on their return I revealed the desire for freedom which had grown upon me; they were shocked at first, but soon joined in sympathy with my aspirations, and we began to plot together against my father, for without money from his pocket my emancipation could be nothing beyond a dream. But in every family that I have known the men are no match for the female members, who have learned how to lead these unreasonable tyrants by the nose. My mother was altogether on my side. Indeed, throughout her life she had held the conviction that what people really wanted to do was what they ought to do. When in her later life she came to be a sort of mother-confessor to the many people who used to come to her for advice in their perplexities, her advice was always, she told us, for them to do the thing they really and seriously wanted to do.

This advice she justified by the Bible text, ‘It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do,’ and ‘will’ should be interpreted as ‘want,’ she contended, in this context. But ‘surely, Mother,’ we sometimes protested, ‘this is dangerous advice to give to people!’ ‘Well,’ she would answer, ‘our Heavenly Father knows the kind of advice I give, so if He sends people to me it must be because He wants them given this advice. Besides, children,’ she would add, ‘people always in the end do what they want to do, and they might as well do it with a good conscience.’

I remember that once when she was full of years, and famous for her religious teachings, a party of schoolgirls from some pious school in Philadelphia visited Oxford, and the teacher who conducted the party wrote to my mother, who was then living at I ffley, to say that it would be a privilege for the little flock of maidens to have a sight of this venerable Quaker saint, and hear front her own lips a few pious words. The permission was granted; the schoolgirls assembled on the spacious lawn outside our house, and I wheeled my mother out in her Bath chair to address them. The spectacle of all these good young girls, being prepared, as my mother knew, for lives of self-sacrifice as daughters, or as wives of American business husbands — somehow this spectacle banished from the old lady’s mind the admonition she had intended for them, and when she opened her lips I was considerably surprised to hear her say, ‘Girls, don’t be too unselfish.’

‘Surely, Mother,’ I remonstrated with her afterwards, ‘when those girls go home their pious relations will be dreadfully shocked by what you said.’

‘Yes,’ she replied gayly and with a perfectly good conscience, ‘yes, I dare say it will make them grind their teeth.’

My mother, therefore, believing as she did that people should do the thing on which their hearts were really set, was completely on my side in my desire to leave the family business. My younger sister proved a useful ally, and steps therefore were taken to circumvent my father. The ground was carefully prepared. My father’s grievances against his partners in the management of the family business were artfully exploited, and at last a careful trap was laid. My father was encouraged to expatiate on the hopes he had been forced to sacrifice when entering on his own business career; much sympathy was shown for the indignities to which he felt he had been subjected by his partners; his dislike of the harsh traditions of the firm was called up to his recollection; I was asked to describe my experiences in the New York warehouse, my subjection to its bullying manager was dwelt on, the years in which I must remain in that subjection dismally calculated; the sadness of spending my youth thus alone, thus enslaved, thus separated from my family, was touched on, and then, as by a sudden impulse, I was asked to read my story. My poor father was moved by its crude pathos; his vanity and pride in his children made him perceive in it a quite nonexistent literary merit; and then when he was thus moved, thus worked on, thus stirred like a puppet by familiar strings, the great project of my leaving the business and devoting myself to literature was, in all its horror and splendor, finally disclosed.

My father took on as all fathers do and should do on like occasions. What? To throw away this golden plum ready for my plucking, to abandon the opportunity of making a fortune, to go and live in poverty abroad when I might be making money in my native country, was a piece of folly, a kind of midsummer madness to which he could never, never (my mother smiled at this familiar word) give his paternal assent. Next he took up the theme of pathos: had he not toiled and travailed and indeed sacrificed his life for my future? Had not that been the one consolation, the one hope, which had cheered him? And was it now to be brutally suggested that this was to be taken from him, and this bright star to be dimmed forever? Was he, the indefatigable toiler of the family, to be left desolate and disappointed, with no fair expectation to cheer his declining years ?

My father was possessed, as I have said, of an extraordinary gift of eloquence; I myself was really moved by this outburst, and almost persuaded to abandon so cruel a project; but my mother, who had long since learned to deafen her ears to my father’s periods, soon brought us back to a truer sense of things. The business, she said, was after all the business of her family; it was owing to his marriage to her that my father had been made a partner in it: if I wished to abandon it, it was principally her concern. Should her brother and her nephews feel that I had put an affront upon them by abandoning the family business, she, as well as my father, must bear the blame.

This was the deft pulling of a potent string, for my father had no love for my mother’s family, who had ignored what he considered his immense services to the firm, and who always treated him, he thought, as an outsider. Now, when his intention was to retire from the business, to withdraw at the same time his son as if worthy of a nobler fate — this began to dawn upon his dramatic imagination as a splendid gesture. He was, moreover, to do him justice, an affectionate father, and full of kindly impulses; and so, thus caught, thus entrapped, he soon yielded, declaring that if I wanted to play the fool he would not oppose me — would indeed assist me by providing the necessary funds. He offered me a good allowance, or, if I preferred it, the meagre sum of twentyfive thousand dollars, with which I could buy an annuity that would last me all my life.

Inspired either by some premature knowledge of human nature, or more likely by a hint from my mother, I chose the capital sum. The more generous allowance offered by my father he would certainly sooner or later have felt himself forced to withdraw. Being of an impulsive and sanguine nature, he plunged into speculations in which the fortune he had acquired in business entirely disappeared. The canny Philadelphia Quakers unloaded on him a mass of shares in worthless silver mines which never paid a penny; and, when he was reduced to living upon the fortune inherited from his own father, of which, being trust money, only the life income was his, the fact that he could not lay his hands on my carefully invested income became to him the source of a very grave grievance, but to me unmitigated freedom. It carried me through Oxford, it enabled me to spend years in Paris, in Italy, and in an old house in Sussex. I lived on it, in fact, very happily, for nearly thirty years.

V

In the choice then presented for my decision between slavery in an office with the prospect of ultimate wealth, and poverty with immediate freedom, any other decision than the one I made would, it seems to me now, have been real madness, nor have I ever once, for the fraction of a minute, felt for it the least regret. For money I by no means profess a reckless disregard. But while I think it almost impossible to exaggerate the misery of pennilessness, and the degradation it involves, my experience of life has taught me to believe that, with the firm foundation of a small fixed income, money in excess of this is peculiarly subject to the law of diminishing returns. I have been both poor and comparatively rich in the course of my existence; I have associated with both poor and rich people; but, given the satisfaction of one’s simple needs, I have found that, from the point of view of human happiness, the possession or absence of wealth makes very little difference — that, in fact, my poor acquaintances have been, on the whole, happier than the rich ones.

If, however, the good things of this world which wealth can purchase have come my way I have enjoyed them, as I have enjoyed such little scraps of literary or worldly success as fate has allotted to me. But my motto has always been the wise one of Aristippus of Cyrene, ϵχω, ουκ ϵχομαι, habeo, non habeor, or, to translate it into idiomatic English, I am taken by these things, but they do not take me in’; and to sacrifice one’s life for them seems to me absurd.

But if my choice of poverty on this occasion was, I feel, a wise one, I also feel that it was something like madness for my father to offer it to me as he did. I had shown no particular love of study, no intellectual brilliance of any kind; my mental development was slow and backward, and the one story I had written, though it moved my father, was surely a most flimsy basis on which to build any hopes for literary success.

Nevertheless I left the New York warehouse without misgivings, and after a few months in Philadelphia we all sailed for Europe and the unknown. This was for both my father and me our ultimate jaunt across the Atlantic. Our family, which, if I may put it so, had been gazing for so long across the ocean, which had made so many attempts to transplant itself to Europe, had now at last accomplished its dream and object, and we sailed, I think, with the ghostly blessings of all those other book-loving, poverty-stricken, frustrated Smiths who had preceded us — a family which had left England for religious motives, and which, when those motives died away, had no further reason for remaining in a land of commerce which was essentially alien to them, and in which they were exiles after all.