i have shown, in the previous chapter, how futile and empty are most of the struggles toward charity and reform carried on by the wealthy class. this brings me, in my train of thought, to one of the most melancholy reflections that can be conceived. it has come to me very often, under all sorts of circumstances.
the fact of the matter is that wealthy society in america, as everywhere else, is pursued by a demon of futility. it does not matter what we do, whether we work like any other man or woman, whether we play like normal men, whether we study,198 whether we idle, or whether we work as other men, or fritter away our time in idleness; whether we spend our money on charity and reforms, or throw it away in the pursuit of pleasure; whether we study hard and seriously, or merely regale our minds and appetites with frivolous novels and salacious plays; whether we play or whether we don’t—nothing seems real, nothing seems earnest, nothing has any result. too often our lives are empty of anything permanent, anything honest, anything simple and human.
we live in a world of dreams, peopled with passing phantoms—men and women that come and go and leave in our hearts no trace of real affection, no honest, sincere, and heart-felt impulse of friendship, no lasting shadow of reality. it all seems sham and pretence. it cloys in time, and often in sheer desperation we plunge into extremes for which we have no genuine taste, no real desire, no inborn impulse at all.
but of all the futile things in the world none is more futile than wealth itself. if you rest on the things you have won, and set yourself down in idleness to enjoy them, they turn to ashes on your lips. they are flat, tasteless, like fruit picked long ago. i remember an incident in which i took a part, not very long ago, that showed me the opposite results in all its horrid semblance.
i was at a very brilliant social function in the london social world. i met at that reception a woman whose name i had heard as a household word in society for many years. she was esteemed a brilliant woman; she was reckoned a leader in the most splendid society of the world. she was wealthy beyond all human need. she occupied a powerful place in a political world where everything human had its part. she was a companion of princes and the equal of peers. we were talking alone, immediately after our introduction, when she said:
“oh, mr. martin, you are an american. you are a wall street man. you could help me to get some of your american gold!”
i was astounded, and i showed it in my answer:
“why, my dear lady, surely you have gold enough. if i am not mistaken, you rank amongst the wealthiest women of the nation. why should you want gold? moreover, you have social standing and are famous throughout england. of what possible use could more gold be to you?”
i can still see the haggard face, the quivering 201lips, the blazing eyes of this great society woman as she answered me.
“oh, mr. martin, you do not know me—i am almost ashamed to confess the truth. i dream night and day of gold. i want to have a room at the top of my house filled with it—filled with gold sovereigns. i would like to go into that room night after night, when every one else is asleep, and bury myself in yellow sovereigns up to my neck, and play with them, toss them about, to hear the jingling music of the thing i love the best!”
think of it! picture a woman, wife of a man, mother of splendid children, born with the beautiful instincts innate in her sex, sinking to such a depth as that! think of the awful shallow emptiness of a life and a training that bore such fruit as this!
yet, it is all so very natural. most men and women in this world are kept clean, sane, and normal in the pursuit of little things. the trivial household joys that fill so full the happy life of the normal woman, the little business triumphs that keep alive in the heart of the normal man the spirit of personal ambition, the human lust for a fight, the ever-changing, ever-interesting, ever-luring struggle for advantage—these are at once the burden and the safety of mankind. in them is true happiness; in them is true humanity.
the class of which i write has lost them in its very birth. the mother of a boy in the middle class looks forward with delight to the day when that boy will go forth into the world to battle against circumstances. from his earliest childhood onward he learns the necessity of labour, he comes to regard it as his birthright. with eagerness he prepares for it. the little triumphs of boyhood, the trivial victories of college days, are joy unbounded to his mind, because they are but steps in that long climb toward greatness, renown and wealth, that are his birthright; and when at last he goes forth from college halls, from labour on the farm, from some little clerical position that he has held in his adolescence, to strike out for himself into the great open world, to blaze out paths of his own choosing, his life is filled in its every moment with new thrills of excitement, of happiness, of accomplishment—of life, real life, not imitation.
look at the other side. think of the boy born, as they say, with a golden spoon in his mouth. perhaps, in his infancy, he does not know that he can have everything in the world for which he asks. perhaps his parents are humanly wise—for many of the wealthy are; yet, even in his very tender boyhood, the truth will come home to him. he will learn before he is ten years old that there is a difference between him and other boys whom he sees at play in the park. he will discover that the difference is money. he will discover that his parents can get whatever they like, spend as much as they please, waste fortunes on their pleasures, throw gold away as though it were dross. he will learn, on the other hand, that the children of the poor can have no expensive toys like his, that they cannot be dressed as he is dressed, that their parents must win every dollar that they spend by some hard work, while his own parents, apparently, receive as much as they want and more without any labour whatever.
that boy will be more than human if, 205by the time he is a young man, he has not passed the entrance to the paths where the true happiness of life is to be found. either money will mean nothing to him, and he will have settled down to be one of the idle rich, simply taking what the gods send him and doing his best to enjoy it, or else a most unholy lust for gold will have taken possession of his soul. eliminate the necessity for struggle, and you remove from money all its true value. it becomes either dross, to be thrown away for other things better worth while, or it becomes an idol, a god, the very sum and substance of the world’s desire.
i know, of course, that there are marked exceptions. i have in my mind as i write a young man of a western city, born to an enormous fortune, married to another, and trained and nurtured in the lap of luxury. almost everything conspired to make him either an idler or a money worshipper. he is neither. it is an accident. in his early youth he became an invalid, and was sent out by his father to live on a ranch. the ranchman’s wife was a real woman, and instinct taught her how to handle that boy. he was put to work. at first, when his father learned through his letters that he was spending his time mending fences, feeding pigs, watering horses, and milking cows, he objected strongly. he wrote to the ranchman to this effect. the ranchman rebuked his wife, and set the boy to work at other gentler things.
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 everything209 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 women211 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 in212 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.
i am not going to dwell upon this theme;for it is a beastly thing. i have only mentioned it because it is a logical climax to this chapter on futility. and i regard futility as the real nemesis of society. it turns our lives to nothing; it makes of our fairest garden a desert; it robs us, in our very cradles, of our lives, our liberties, and our happiness. it leaves us groping about in a world of shadows, longing for the substance, dreaming of realities we never can know, wishing always for change, sighing always for worlds that are out of our reach. of all the grim jokes that ever were perpetrated, the grimmest of all, in my estimation, is the time-honoured coupling of the words wealth and happiness in the formal blessing of a new-made bride.
“if the wealthy classes so often come off second best in a struggle with the democracy, the cause is generally to be found in their disinclination to submit to leadership. it has always been a failing of rich and educated men to have too high an opinion of their own abilities. the prospect which faced the roman conservatives at this moment (88 b. c.), when the revolution, in the person of marius, had made itself complete master of the state, was indeed dark enough to close up the party ranks. yet it was only by accident that they discovered in sulla a fit champion for their cause.”
—ferrero.
