For, as the old proverb, “You can’t eat your pudding and have it,” is utterly true in its bearing against Usury,—so also this reverse of it is true in confirmation of property—that you can’t ‘have’ your pudding unless you can eat it. It may be composed for you of the finest plums, and paid for wholly out of your own pocket; but if you can’t stomach it—the pudding is not for you. Buy the finest horse on four legs, he is not ‘proper’ to you if you can’t ride him. Buy the best book between boards,—Horace, or Homer, or Dante,—and if you don’t know Latin, nor Greek, nor Christianity, the paper and boards are yours indeed, but the books—by no means.
You doubt this, my practical friend?
Try a child with a stick of barley-sugar;—tell him it is his, but he mustn’t eat it; his face will express to [[315]]you the fallaciousness of that principle of property in an unmistakable manner. But by the time he grows as old and stupid as you, perhaps he will buy barley-sugar that he can’t taste, to please the public.
“I’ve no pleasure in that picture of Holman Hunt’s,” said a highly practical man of business to a friend of mine the other day, “nor my wife neither, for that matter; but I always buy under good advice as to market value; and one’s collection isn’t complete without one.”
I am very doubtful, my stupid practical friend, whether you have wit enough to understand a word more of what I have got to say this month. However, I must say it on the chance. And don’t think I am talking sentiment or metaphysics to you. This is the practicallest piece of lessoning you ever had in your days, if you can but make it out;—that you can only possess wealth according to your own capacity of it. An ape can only have wealth of nuts, and a dog of bones,[3] an earth-worm of earth, a charnel-worm of flesh, a west-end harlot of silk and champagne, an east-end harlot of gauze and gin, a modern average fine lady of such meat and drink, dress, jewels, and furniture, as the vile tradesmen of the day [[316]]can provide, being limited even in the enjoyment of these,—for the greater part of what she calls ‘hers,’ she wears or keeps, either for the pleasure of others, if she is good, or for their mortification, if she is wicked,—but assuredly not for herself. When I buy a missal, or a picture, I buy it for myself, and expect everybody to say to me, What a selfish brute you are. But when a lady walks about town with three or four yards of silk tied in a bundle behind her, she doesn’t see it herself, or benefit by it herself. She carries it for the benefit of beholders. When she has put all her diamonds on in the evening, tell her to stay at home and enjoy them in radiant solitude; and the child, with his forbidden barley-sugar, will not look more blank. She carries her caparison either for the pleasure or for the mortification of society; and can no more enjoy its brilliancy by herself than a chandelier can enjoy having its gas lighted.
We must leave out of the question, for the moment, the element of benevolence which may be latent in toilette[4]; for the main economical result of the action of the great law that we can only have wealth according to our capacity, in modern Europe at this hour, is that the greater part of its so-called wealth is composed of things suited to the capacity of harlots and their keepers,—(including in the general term harlot, or daughter of Babylon, both the unmarried ones, and [[317]]the married ones who have sold themselves for money,)—as of watches, timepieces, tapestries, china, and any kind of pictures or toys good for bedrooms and boudoirs; but that, of any wealth which harlots and keepers of harlots have no mind to, Europe at present takes no cognizance whatsoever.
Now what the difference may be in the quality of property which honest and dishonest women like is—for you, my practical friend—quite an unfathomable question; but you can at least understand that all the china, timepieces, and lewd pictures, which form the main ‘property’ of Paris and her imitators, are verily, in the commercial sense of the word, property; and would be estimated as such by any Jew in any bankruptcy court; yet the harlots don’t lend their china, or timepieces, on usury, nor make an income out of their bed-hangings,—do they? So that you see it is perfectly possible to have property, and a very costly quantity of it, without making any profit of such capital?
But the harlots have another kind of capital which you, my blind practical friend, don’t call ‘Property’; but which I, having the use of my eyes as well as of my hands, do. They have beauty of body;—many of them, also, wit of mind. And on these two articles of property, you observe, my friend, being much more their own, and much more valuable things, if they knew it, than china and timepieces—on these they [[318]]do make an annual income, and turn them over, as you call it, several times perhaps in the year.
Now if beauty of body and wit of tongue can be thus made sources of income, you will rank them perhaps, even as I do, among articles of wealth.
But, in old usury, there was yet another kind of treasure held account of, namely—Beauty of Heart, and Wit of Brains;—or what was shortly called by the Greek usurers, Psyche—(you may have heard the word before, my practical friend; but I do not expect you to follow me further). And this Psyche, or Soul, was held by the two great old masters of economy—that is to say, by Plato and David—the best property of all that a man had; except only one thing, which the soul itself must be starved without, yet which you would never guess, my practical friend, if you guessed yourself into your grave, to be an article of property at all! The Law of God, of which David says, “My soul fainteth for the longing that it hath unto thy judgments,” or in terms which you can perhaps better understand, “The law of thy mouth is dearer unto me than thousands of gold and silver.”