The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

A week later the boy wrote an indignant letter to his father to the effect that he was coming home if he couldn’t go back to real work. The father saw a great light; and free permission was given to the ranchman’s wife to do whatever she liked with the boy. When he went home a year and a half later he was the makings of a real man. To-day his father is dead, and he has succeeded to the command of a mighty estate. He holds his place in the best Society of the land, but he holds, too, his place amongst the workers. At the age of twenty-eight he had twice refused political office, and has refused also the presidency of a bank which he controls and of which he is a director, on the ground that as a director he will not vote for the appointment of a dummy officer. He is a deep, clear-headed student of events, and money, to him, has been but the lever to move the world.

The same is true to a certain extent of the daughters of the rich. Some of them, in spite of their wealth, are splendid women, but too often wealth has destroyed in them the clear and beautiful springs of life. Either they worship it as a god or they despise it, throwing it away like water. Of the two vices, I do not know which is the worse. I do not know, in sane and sober judgment, whether I, as a man of wealth and fashion (and yet a man of business and of some knowledge), despise more deeply the outright worshipper of Mammon, or the reckless, extravagant, and foolish idle rich. Thank God, I am not obliged to choose my friends from either, for still within the barriers of gold there lies a little leaven of the old Society.

And if futility clings very closely to the very gold that is the basis of our class and our estate, it clings, too, to almost everything else that we do. Come with me to a fashionable restaurant or the dining-room of a great hotel. At the dinner hour it is crowded with hundreds of people. One might think that they are hungry and that they come to eat. It is hardly so. They come to hear the orchestra, to talk with their friends, to play with food and drink of a kind and a quantity far beyond their needs. Dinner is but an excuse. The whole occasion is a diversion, nothing more. Contrast an occasion like that with the homely gathering of a few choice spirits out in a simple country home, or in the middle-class city home if you like, and note the marvellous difference. It has been my good fortune, on far too few occasions it is true, to be admitted as a friend into what I might call a middle-class home—the home of an author, not by any means rich. I will simply say, without going into details, that every time I went there it made me homesick, and I stopped it for that reason. I do not think I could say more if I wrote a book about it.

Of all the melancholy travesties on fun, I think that the sports and games of the wealthy young men and women of our day are the finest parody ever written or acted. Drive through a country district to a fashionable out-of-town club. At half a dozen places on your way you will see groups of boys and girls playing ball, flying kites, paddling, rowing, or doing something else in the natural human way. You will hear shouts, quarrels perhaps, signs of intense and natural rivalry. When you come to your journey’s end you will find other groups of pleasure seekers. Go join the groups of young men and women in beautiful summer costumes playing golf or tennis; or sit on the piazzas over the sea and watch a game of bridge. Listen for the shouts of joy such as you heard down the road, and you will hear the cawing of the crows. Catch the drift of the conversation. In a very great number of cases the subject matter of it is that it would be a lot more fun to do something else at some other time in some other place. The dreary pleasures of the idle rich, yachting, horseracing, golf, tennis, hunting—these are not sports; they are schemes devised to keep us from being bored to death by the mere fact of living.

I met a man down town the other day who told me he had bought a farm in Alberta. For a great many years past I have met him at all sorts of functions in all the big cities of the East, in London, and in Paris. I asked him what in the world he was going to do with a farm. At first he wouldn’t reply, afraid that he might hurt my feelings, but finally he told me.

“I’m sick. There isn’t much the matter with me, but I have simply got to have a change. My nerves have gone all to pieces. Playing bridge gives me the “willies.” I’d sooner pick rags than go to another dance. Golf—the way we play it in the summer—is worse than ping-pong. Late suppers have got on my nerves. The races are a horrible bore. I’d sooner go to Hoboken than Paris. I’ve got to do something or I will die. Last winter in London I made friends with a young fellow twenty-one years old who last month got into disgrace and was banished to Alberta. Last month I heard from him—and that settled me. He swears he has found the antidote. I’m going out to try it.”

He went. I don’t suppose he’ll stay there, because he never stayed in any place in his life for any length of time, and I presume before long he’ll come back and spend a lot of money on manicures and make his hands look as if he had never worked before he plunges again into the same Dead Sea: but, sometimes, I wish I had the nerve to follow him, or to buy his farm from him when he grows tired of it.

If our wealth, and our pleasures, turn at last to nothing and weary us beyond expression, no less in the more sacred things of life—real life, I mean—does this same miserable demon of futility pursue us. As the world has read these past two or three years the low, horrible, depraved story of the marital relationships of scion after scion of one of our wealthiest families, the world has turned with disgust from the paltry record of intrigue, vile lust, dishonour, and shame. That story is but one of many. It is true that in this, the dearest and tenderest of all the relationships of life, we are haunted by futility. Our young men and maidens marry in honour and hope in a world of hope, lighted by the eternal fires of love. Too often, alas! romance becomes tragedy, or comedy, if you look at it that way.

It is the same old story. Everything is far too easy. All the comforts, all the luxuries, all the pleasures for which normal men and women have to work, drop, like over-ripe fruit, into their waiting hands. There is no struggle to hold their minds together. There is no common ambition to fill their hearts and souls with a desire for mutual help. It is all empty, frivolous, and vain. In time it is easy to slip away from the paths of convention into habits of looseness and even of vice. The old-fashioned religion is dead among us, and so one great protector of the home has passed and gone.

I cannot find it in my heart to condemn as strongly as I should the lapses of the idle rich from the paths of virtue; for I know exactly how it is. It is futile. It is empty. It is a restriction of freedom. It is a chain about your neck. You try, at first, to loosen it; at last you determine to break it. Then the patient world is treated to another tale of infidelity, of misery, of little picayune human weakness—a tale to laugh at, or to weep over, according as you will.