The story of the rich man who had many friends and saw them fall away from him when he became poor, which, under various forms, reappears in every age and is common to all literatures, is explained by these considerations. Bucklaw does not find Lord Ravenswood a valuable gratuitous innkeeper; and Ravenswood is not anxious to exhibit to Bucklaw the housekeeping at Wolf’s Crag.
But quite outside of parasite guests and exhibiting entertainers, there still remains the undeniable fact that if you like a rich man and a poor one equally well, you will prefer the rich man’s hospitality for its greater convenience. Nay, more, you will rightly and excusably prefer the rich man’s hospitality even if you like the poor man better, but find his household arrangements disagreeable, his wife fagged, worn, irritable, and ungracious, his children ill-bred, obtrusive, and dirty, himself unable to talk about anything rational on account of family interruptions, and scarcely his own better and higher self at all in the midst of his domestic plagues.[10]
There is no nation in the world that has so acute a sense of the value, almost the necessity, of wealth for human intercourse as the English nation. Whilst in other countries people think “Wealth is peace of mind, wealth is convenience, wealth is la vie élégante,” in England they silently accept the maxim, “A large income is a necessary of life;” and they class each other according to the scale of their establishments, looking up with unfeigned reverence to those who have many servants, many horses, and gigantic houses where a great hospitality is dispensed. An ordinary Englishman thinks he has failed in life, and his friends are of the same opinion, if he does not arrive at the ability to imitate this style and state, at least in a minor degree. I have given the best reasons why it is desired; I understand and appreciate them; but at the same time I think it deeply to be deplored that an expenditure far beyond what can be met by the physical or intellectual labor of ordinary workers should be thought necessary in order that people may meet and talk in comfort. The big English house is a machine that runs with unrivalled smoothness; but it masters its master, it possesses its nominal possessor. George Borrow had the deepest sense of the Englishman’s slavery to his big, well-ordered dwelling, and saw in it the cause of unnumbered anxieties, often ending in heart-disease, paralysis, bankruptcy, and in minor cases sacrificing all chance of leisure and quiet happiness. Many a land-owner has crippled himself by erecting a great house on his estate,—one of those huge, tasteless buildings that express nothing but pompous pride. What wisdom there is in the excellent old French adage, “A petite terre, petite maison”!
The reader may remember Herbert Spencer’s idea that the display of wealth is intended to subjugate. Royal palaces are made very vast and magnificent to subjugate those who approach the sovereign; and all rich and powerful people use the same means, for the same purpose, though in minor degrees. This leads us to the price that has to be paid for intercourse with persons of great rank and wealth. May we not suspect that there is a heavy price of some kind, since many of the best and noblest minds in the world either avoid it altogether or else accept it cautiously and only with a very few rich men whom they esteem independently of their riches?
The answer is that wealth and rank expect deference, not so much humble and slavish manners as that intellectual deference which a thinker can never willingly give. The higher the rank of the personage the more it is considered ill-bred to contradict him, or even to have an opinion of your own in his presence. This, to a thinker, is unendurable. He does not see that because a person is rich and noble his views on everything must be the best and soundest views.
You, my dear Aristophilus, who by your pleasing manners are so well fitted for the very best society, could give interesting answers to the following questions: Have you never found it advisable to keep silence when your wealthy host was saying things against which you inwardly protested? Have you not sometimes gone a step further, and given a kind of assent to some opinion that was not your own? Have you not, by practice, attained the power of giving a still stronger and heartier assent to what seemed doubtful propositions?
There is one form of this assent which is deeply damaging to character. Some great person, a great lady perhaps, unjustly condemns, in your presence, a public man for whom you have a sincere respect. Instead of boldly defending him, you remain silent and acquiescent. You are afraid to offend, afraid to lose favor, afraid that if you spoke openly you would not be invited to the great house any more.
Sometimes not a single individual but a class is attacked at once. A great lady is reported to have said that she “had a deep objection to French literature in all its branches.” Observe that this expression of opinion contains a severe censure on all French authors and on all readers of French literature. Would you have ventured to say a word in their defence? Would you have dared to hint, for example, that a serious mind might be none the worse for some acquaintance with Montesquieu and De Tocqueville? No, sir, you would have bowed your head and put on a shocked expression of countenance.
In this way, little by little, by successive abandonments of what we think, and abdications of what we know, we may arrive at a state of habitual and inane concession that softens every fibre of the mind.