The Map of Life / Conduct and Character

by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

The value of money as an element of happiness diminishes rapidly in proportion to its amount. In the case of the humbler fortunes, each accession brings with it a large increase of pleasure and comfort, and probably a very considerable addition to real happiness. In the case of rich men this is not the case, and of colossal fortunes only a very small fraction can be truly said to minister to the personal enjoyment of the owner. The disproportion in the world between pleasure and cost is indeed almost ludicrous. The two or three shillings that gave us our first Shakespeare would go but a small way towards providing one of the perhaps untasted dishes on the dessert table. The choicest masterpieces of the human mind—the works of human genius that through the long course of centuries have done most to ennoble, console, brighten, and direct the lives of men, might all be purchased—I do not say by the cost of a lady's necklace, but by that of one or two of the little stones of which it is composed. Compare the relish with which the tired pedestrian eats his bread and cheese with the appetites with which men sit down to some stately banquet; compare the level of spirits at the village dance with that of the great city ball whose lavish splendour fills the society papers with admiration; compare the charm of conversation in the college common room with the weary faces that may be often seen around the millionaire's dinner table,—and we may gain a good lesson of the vanity of riches. The transition from want to comfort brings with it keen enjoyment and much lasting happiness. The transition from mere comfort to luxury brings incomparably less and costs incomparably more. Let a man of enormous wealth analyse his life from day to day and try to estimate what are the things or hours that have afforded him real and vivid pleasure. In many cases he will probably say that he has found it in his work—in others in the hour spent with his cigar, his newspaper, or his book, or in his game of cricket, or in the excitement of the hunting-field, or in his conversation with an old friend, or in hearing his daughters sing, or in welcoming his son on his return from school. Let him look round the splendid adornments of his home and ask how many of these things have ever given him a pleasure at all proportionate to their cost. Probably in many cases, if he deals honestly with himself, he would confess that his armchair and his bookshelves are almost the only exceptions.

Steam, the printing press, the spread of education, and the great multiplication of public libraries, museums, picture galleries and exhibitions have brought the chief pleasures of life in a much larger degree than in any previous age within the reach of what are called the working classes, while in the conditions of modern life nearly all the great sources of real enjoyment that money can give are open to a man who possesses a competent but not extraordinary fortune and some leisure. Intellectual tastes he may gratify to the full. Books, at all events in the great centres of civilisation, are accessible far in excess of his powers of reading. The pleasures of the theatre, the pleasures of society, the pleasures of music in most of its forms, the pleasures of travel with all its variety of interests, and many of the pleasures of sport, are abundantly at his disposal. The possession of the highest works of art has no doubt become more and more a monopoly of the very rich, but picture galleries and exhibitions and the facilities of travel have diffused the knowledge and enjoyment of art over a vastly wider area than in the past. The power of reproducing works of art has been immensely increased and cheapened, and in one form at least the highest art has been brought within the reach of a man of very moderate means. Photography can reproduce a drawing with such absolute perfection that he may cover his walls with works of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci that are indistinguishable from the originals. The standard of comfort in mere material things is now so high in well-to-do households that to a healthy nature the millionaire can add little to it. Perhaps among the pleasures of wealth that which has the strongest influence is a country place, especially when it brings with it old remembrances, and associations that appeal powerfully to the affections and the imagination. More than any other inanimate thing it throws its tendrils round the human heart and becomes the object of a deep and lasting affection. But even here it will be probably found that this pleasure is more felt by the owner of one country place than by the great proprietor whose life is spent alternately in several—by the owner of a place of moderate dimensions than by the owner of those vast parks which can only be managed at great expense and trouble and by much delegated supervision, and which are usually thrown open with such liberality to the public that they probably give more real pleasure to others than to their owners.

Among the special pleasures of the enormously rich the collecting passion is conspicuous, and of course a very rich man can carry it into departments which men of moderate fortune can hardly touch. In the rare case when the collector is a man of strong and genuine artistic taste the possession of works of beauty is a thing of enduring pleasure, but in general the mere love of collecting, though it often becomes a passion almost amounting to a mania, bears very little proportion to pecuniary value. The intelligent collector of fossils has as much pleasure as the collector of gems—probably indeed more, as the former pursuit brings with it a much greater variety of interest, and usually depends much more on the personal exertions of the collector. It is pleasant, in looking over a geological collection, to think that every stone we see has given a pleasure. A collector of Caxtons, a collector of large printed or illustrated editions, a collector of first editions of famous books, a collector of those editions that are so much prized because an author has made in them some blunder which he afterwards corrected; a collector of those unique books which have survived as rarities because no one thought it worth while to reprint them or because they are distinguished by some obsolete absurdity, will probably not derive more pleasure, though he will spend vastly more money, than the mere literary man who, being interested in some particular period or topic, loves to hunt up in old bookshops the obscure and forgotten literature relating to it. Much the same thing may be said of other tastes. The gratification of a strong taste or hobby will always give pleasure, and it makes little difference whether it is an expensive or an inexpensive one.

The pleasures of acquisition, the pleasures of possession, and the pleasures of ostentation, are no doubt real things, though they act in very different degrees on different natures, and some of them much more on one sex than on the other. In general, however, they tend to grow passive and inert. A state of luxury and splendour is little appreciated by those who are born to it, though much if it follows a period of struggle and penury. Yet even then the circumstances and surroundings of life soon become a second nature. Men become so habituated to them that they are accepted almost mechanically and cease to give positive pleasure, though a deprivation of them gives positive pain. The love of power, the love of society, and—what is not quite the same thing—the love of social influence, are, however, much stronger and more enduring, and great wealth is largely valued because it helps to give them, though it does not give them invariably, and though there are other things that give them in an equal or greater degree. To many very rich men some form of field sports is probably the greatest pleasure that money affords. It at least gives a genuine thrill of unmistakable enjoyment.

Few of the special pleasures of the millionaire can be said to be purely selfish, for few are concentrated altogether on himself. His great park is usually open to the public. His pictures are lent for exhibition or exhibited in his house. If he keeps a pack of hounds others hunt with it. If he preserves game to an enormous extent he invites many to shoot it, and at his great entertainments it will often be found that no one derives less pleasure than the weary host.

At the same time no thinking man can fail to be struck with the great waste of the means of enjoyment in a society in which such gigantic sums are spent in mere conventional ostentation which gives little or no pleasure; in which the best London houses are those which are the longest untenanted; in which some of the most enchanting gardens and parks are only seen by their owners for a few weeks in the year.

Hamerton, in his Essay on Bohemianism, has very truly shown that the rationale of a great deal of this is simply the attempt of men to obtain from social intercourse the largest amount of positive pleasure or amusement it can give by discarding the forms, the costly conventionalities, the social restrictions that encumber and limit it. One of the worst tendencies of a very wealthy society is that by the mere competition of ostentation the standard of conventional expense is raised, and the intercourse of men limited by the introduction of a number of new and costly luxuries which either give no pleasure or give pleasure that bears no kind of proportion to their cost. Examples may sometimes be seen of a very rich man who imagines that he can obtain from life real enjoyment in proportion to his wealth and who uses it for purely selfish purposes. We may find this in the almost insane extravagance of vulgar ostentation by which the parvenu millionaire tries to gratify his vanity and dazzle his neighbours; in the wild round of prodigal dissipation and vice by which so many young men who have inherited enormous fortunes have wrecked their constitutions and found a speedy path to an unhonoured grave. They sought from money what money cannot give, and learned too late that in pursuing shadows they missed the substance that was within their reach.

To the intelligent millionaire, however, and especially to those who are brought up to great possessions, wealth is looked on in a wholly different light. It is a possession and a trust carrying with it many duties as well as many interests and accompanied by a great burden of responsibility. Mere pleasure-hunting plays but a small and wholly subsidiary part in such lives, and they are usually filled with much useful work. This man, for example, is a banker on a colossal scale. Follow his life, and you will find that for four days in the week he is engaged in his office as steadily, as unremittingly as any clerk in his establishment. He has made himself master not only of the details of his own gigantic business but of the whole great subject of finance in all its international relations. He is a power in many lands. He is consulted in every crisis of finance. He is an important influence in a crowd of enterprises, most of them useful as well as lucrative, some of them distinctively philanthropic. Saturday and Sunday he spends at his country place, usually entertaining a number of guests. One other day during the hunting season he regularly devotes to his favourite sport. His holiday is the usual holiday of a professional man, with rather a tendency to abridge than to lengthen it, as the natural bent of his thoughts is so strongly to his work that time soon begins to hang heavily when he is away from it.

Another man is an ardent philanthropist, and his philanthropy probably blends with much religious fervour, and he becomes in consequence a leader in the religious world. Such a life cannot fail to be abundantly filled. Religious meetings, committees, the various interests of the many institutions with which he is connected, the conflicting and competing claims of different religious societies, fully occupy his time and thoughts, sometimes to the great neglect of his private affairs.