“ ‘Griggs on Struggles’—it sounds like the title of a law book,” observed Crowdie.
“You seem playful this morning,” said Griggs. “What makes you so terribly pleasant?”
“The sight of you, my dear fellow, writhing under Miss Lauderdale’s questions.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Griggs like to be asked general questions?” enquired Katharine, innocently.
“It’s not that, Miss Lauderdale,” said Griggs, answering her question. “It’s not that. I’m a fidgety old person, I suppose, and I don’t like to answer at random, and your question is a very big one. Not as a matter of fact. It’s perfectly easy to say yes, or no, just as one feels about it, or according to one’s own experience. In that way, I should be inclined to say that it’s a matter of accident and circumstances—whether men who succeed have to go through many material difficulties or not. You don’t hear much of all those who struggle and never succeed, or who are heard of for a moment and then sink. They’re by far the most numerous. Lots of successful men have never been poor, if that’s what you mean by hard times—even in art and literature. Michael Angelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Chaucer, Montaigne, Goethe, Byron—you can name any number who never went through anything like what nine students out of ten in Paris, for instance, suffer cheerfully. It certainly does not follow that because a man is great he must have starved at one time or another. The very greatest seem, as a rule, to have had fairly comfortable homes with everything they could need, unless they had extravagant tastes. That’s the material view of the question. The answer is reasonable enough. It’s a disadvantage to begin very poor, because energy is used up in fighting poverty which might be used in attacking intellectual difficulties. No doubt the average man, whose faculties are not extraordinary to begin with, may develop them wonderfully, and even be very successful—from sheer necessity, sheer hunger; when, if he were comfortably off, he would do nothing in the world but lie on his back in the sunshine, and smoke a pipe, and criticise other people. But to a man who
is naturally so highly gifted that he would produce good work under any circumstances, poverty is a drawback.”
“You didn’t know what you were going to get, Miss Lauderdale, when you prevailed on Griggs to answer a serious question,” said Crowdie, as Griggs paused a moment. “He’s a didactic old bird, when he mounts his hobby.”