Horace Smith - Interludes
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Horace Smith >> Interludes
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"Our cottage is quite large enough for us, though very small," wrote Miss
Wordsworth, "and we have made it neat and comfortable within doors; and
it looks very nice on the outside, for though the roses and honeysuckle
which we have planted against it are only of this year's growth, yet it
is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers, for we have
trained scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly
beautiful, but very useful, as their produce is immense. We have made a
lodging room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor,
therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We sit in a room
above stairs, and we have one lodging room with two single beds, a sort
of lumber room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which I have papered
with newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an
old woman of 60 years of age, whom we took partly out of charity." Here
Miss Wordsworth and her brother, the great poet, lived on the simplest
fare and drank cold water, and hence issued those noble poems which more
than any others teach us the higher life.
"Blush, grandeur, blush; proud courts, withdraw your blaze;
Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays."
"I turned schoolmaster," says Sydney Smith, "to educate my son, as I
could not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned
schoolmistress to educate my girls as I could not afford a governess. I
turned farmer as I could not let my land. A man servant was too
expensive, so I caught up a little garden girl, made like a milestone,
christened her Bunch, put a napkin in her hand, and made her my butler.
The girls taught her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her
morals. Bunch became the best butler in the country. I had little
furniture, so I bought a cartload of deals; took a carpenter (who came to
me for parish relief) called Jack Robinson, with a face like a full moon,
into my service, established him in a barn, and said, 'Jack, furnish my
house.' You see the result."
Then what shall I say of the luxury of endless daily papers, leading
articles, short paragraphs, reviews, illustrated papers,--are not these
luxuries? Are they not inventions for making thought easy, or rather for
the purpose of relieving us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves.
May I also, without raising a religious controversy, observe that in
religious worship we are prone to relieve ourselves from the trouble of
deep and consecutive thought by surrounding our minds with a sort of mist
of feeling and sentiment; by providing beautiful music, pictures, and
ornaments, and so resting satisfied in a somewhat indolent feeling of
goodness, and not troubling ourselves with too much effort of reason. A
love of the beautiful undoubtedly tends to elevate and refine the mind,
but the follies of the false love and the dangers of an inordinate love
are numerous and deadly. It is absurd that a man should either be or
pretend to be absolutely absorbed in the worship of a dado or a China tea
cup so as to care for nothing else, and to be unable to do anything else
but stare at it with his head on one side. With most people the whole
thing is the mere affectation of affected people, who, if they were not
affected in one way, would be so in another. Boswell was a very affected
man. He says, "I remember it distressed me to think of going into
another world where Shakespeare's poetry did not exist; but a lady
relieved me by saying, 'The first thing you will meet in the other world
will be an elegant copy of Shakespeare's works presented to you.'"
Boswell says he felt much comforted, but I suspect the lady was laughing
at him. I like the "elegant copy" very much. It is certain that in this
world there is a deal of rough work to be done, and I feel that,
attractive and beautiful as so many things are, too much absorption of
them has a weakening and enervating effect.
I have spoken of the luxuries of the table, of the house, of travel, and
of a love of ease and beautiful surroundings. There are, however, some
people who are very luxurious without caring much for any of these
things. Their main desire appears to be to live a long time, and to
preserve their youth and beauty to the last. For this purpose they
surround themselves with comfort, they decline to see or hear of anything
which they don't like for fear it should make their hair grey and their
faces wrinkled, and their whole talk is of ailments and German waters.
Swift somewhere or other expresses his contempt for this sort of person.
"A well preserved man is," he says, "a man with no heart and who has done
nothing all his life." Old ruins look beautiful by reason of the rain
and the wind, the heat of August and the frost of January, and I am sure
I have often seen in men--aye, and in women too--far more beauty where
the tempests have passed over the face and brow, than where the life has
been more sheltered and less interesting.
But I must notice before I conclude this part of my subject one of the
principal causes of a fatal indulgence in luxury, and that is a
despairing sense of the futility of attempting to do anything worth
doing, and of inability to strive against what is going on wrong. This
is the meaning of that rather vulgar phrase, "Anything for a quiet life";
and this is the reason why with many people everything and everybody is
always a "bore." Here, too, is the secret of that suave, polished, soft-
voiced manner so much affected nowadays by highly-educated young men, and
that somewhat chilly reserve in which they wrap themselves up. "Pray
don't ask us to give an opinion, or show an interest, or discuss any
serious view of things."
"For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more
Than to walk all day, like the Sultan of old, in a garden of spice."
"Let us surround ourselves with every luxury; let us cease to strive or
fret; let us be elegant, refined, gentle, harmless, and, above all,
undisturbed in mind and body." "We have had enough of motion and of
action we." "Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil." "Let us
get through life the best way we can, and though there is not much that
can delight us, let us achieve as much amelioration of our lot as is
possible for us."
These, then, are some of the forms which luxury takes in the present
century, and these are some of the outcomes of an advanced, and still
rapidly advancing, civilization. These, too, seem to be the invariable
accompaniments of such an advance. A very similar picture of Rome in the
days of Cicero and Caesar is drawn by Mr. Froude in his _Caesar_. He
says: "With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age
stands before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the
more distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of
our own, the blossoming period of the old civilization. It was an age of
material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and
intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of
dinner parties, of sensational majorities and electoral corruption. The
rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest,
except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes
was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment.
Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of
the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would
overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things, which
alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of
personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their
hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing
splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men
spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their
opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any
serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond the circle of the
silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual atmosphere was
saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an
affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and
flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The
truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their
real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and
the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural
forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved."
Next I am going, as I promised, to consider those indulgences which
become luxuries by excessive use, and in this I shall be led also to
consider the effects of luxury. It has become a very trite saying that
riches do not bring happiness; and certainly luxury, which riches can
command, does not bring content, which is the greatest of all pleasures.
On the contrary, the moment the body or mind is over-indulged in any way,
it immediately demands more of the same indulgence, and even in stronger
doses. Who does not know that too much wine makes one desire more? Who,
after reading a novel, does not feel a longing for another?
The rich and poor dog, as we all know, meet and discourse of these things
in Burns's poem--
"Frae morn to e'en it's naught but toiling
At baking, roasting, frying, boiling,
An', tho' the gentry first are stechin,
Yet e'en the hall folk fill their pechan
With sauce, ragouts, and sic like trashtrie,
That's little short of downright wastrie.
An' what poor cot-folk pit their painch in
I own it's past my comprehension."
To which Luath replies--
"They're maistly wonderful contented."
Caesar afterwards describes the weariness and ennui which pursue the
luxurious--
"But human bodies are sic fools,
For all their colleges and schools,
That, when nae real ills perplex 'em,
They make enow themselves to vex 'em.
They loiter, lounging lank and lazy,
Though nothing ails them, yet uneasy.
Their days insipid, dull, and tasteless;
Their nights unquiet, lang, and restless,
An' e'en their sports, their balls and races,
Their gallopin' through public places,
There's sic parade, sic pomp, an' art,
The joy can scarcely reach the heart."
After this description the two friends
"Rejoiced they were not men, but dogs."
An Italian wit has defined man to be "an animal which troubles himself
with things which don't concern him"; and, when one thinks of the
indefatigable way in which people pursue pleasure, all the while deriving
no pleasure from it, one is filled with amazement. "Life would be very
tolerable if it were not for its pleasures," said Sir Cornewall Lewis,
and I am satisfied that half the weariness of life comes from the vain
attempts which are made to satisfy a jaded appetite.
There are many things which are not luxuries _per se_, but become so if
indulged in to excess. Take, for instance, smoking and drinking. One
pipe a day and one glass of wine a day are not luxuries, but a great many
a day are luxuries. So lying in bed five minutes after you wake is not a
luxury, but so lying for an hour is. The man who is fond precociously of
stirring may be a spoon, but the man who lies in bed half the day is
something worse. Then it must be remembered that a single indulgence in
one luxury produces scarcely any effect on the mind or body, but a habit
of indulging in that luxury has a great effect.
"The sins which practice burns into the blood,
And not the one dark hour which brings remorse
Will brand us after of whose fold we be."
I am surely right in noticing that the rich man is said to have fared
sumptuously _every_ day, as though faring sumptuously might have no
significance, but the constantly faring sumptuously was what had degraded
and debased the man below the level of the beggar at his gate. I feel
that to be luxurious occasionally is no bad thing, if we can keep our
self-control, and return constantly to simple habits. There is something
very natural in the prayer which a little child was overheard to
make--"God, make me a good little girl, but"--after a pause--"naughty
sometimes." It is the habit of being naughty which is pernicious. Can
anyone doubt that the man who, on the whole, leads a hardy and not over-
indulgent life will be more capable of performing any duty which may
devolve upon him than a man who "had but fed on the roses and lain in the
lilies of life."
Sydney Smith, in his sketches of Moral Philosophy, notices that habits of
indulgence grow on us so much that we go through the act of indulgence
without noticing it or feeling the pleasure of it; yet, if some accident
occurs to rob us of our accustomed pleasure, we feel the want of it most
keenly. Speaking of Hobbes, the philosopher, he says that he had twelve
pipes of tobacco laid by him every night before he began to write.
Without this luxury "he could have done nothing; all his speculations
would have been at an end, and without his twelve pipes he might have
been a friend to devotion or to freedom, which in the customary tenour of
his thoughts he certainly was not."
In Fielding's _Life of Jonathan Wild_ Mr. Wild plays at cards with the
Count. "Such was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious
persons that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the Count's pockets
though he knew they were empty, nor could the Count abstain from palming
a card though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."
If we are curious to know who is the most degraded and most wretched of
human beings, look for the man who has practised a vice so long that he
curses it and clings to it. Say everything for vice which you can say,
magnify any pleasure as much as you please; but don't believe you can
keep it, don't believe you have any secret for sending on quicker the
sluggish blood and for refreshing the faded nerve.
There is no doubt that habits of luxury produce discontent, the more we
have the more we want. The sin of covetousness is not (curiously enough)
the sin of the poor, but of the rich. It is the rich man who covets
Naboth's vineyard. I knew an old lady who had a beautiful house facing
Hyde Park, and lived by herself with a companion, and certainly had room
enough and to spare. Her house was one of a row, and the next house
being an end house projected, so that all the front rooms were about a
foot longer than those of the old lady. "Ah," she used to sigh, "he's a
dear good man, the old colonel, but I should like to have his
house--please God to take him!" This showed a submission to the will of
Providence, and a desire for the everlasting welfare of her neighbour
which was truly edifying; but covetousness was at the root of it, and a
longing to indulge herself.
The effect of habits of luxury upon the brute creation is easily seen.
How dreadfully the harmless necessary cat deteriorates when it is over-
fed and over-warmed. It may, for all I know, become more humane, but it
becomes absolutely unfit to get its own living. What is more despicable
than a lady's lap-dog, grown fat and good for nothing, and only able to
eat macaroons! Even worms, according to Darwin, when constantly fed on
delicacies, become indolent and lose all their cunning.
I will note next that habits of self-indulgence render us careless of the
misfortunes of others. Nero was fiddling when Rome was burning. And
upon the other hand privations make us regardful of others. In Bulwer's
_Parisians_ two luxurious bachelors in the siege of Paris, one of whom
has just missed his favourite dog, sit down to a meagre repast, on what
might be fowl or rabbit; and the master of the lost dog, after finishing
his meal, says with a sigh, "Ah, poor Dido, how she would have enjoyed
those bones!" Probably she would have done so, in case they had not been
her own. Of course we all know Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, and that
it is all about luxury. It is, however, very poetical poetry (if I may
say so), and I don't know that it gives much assistance to a sober,
prosaic view of the subject like the present. "O Luxury, thou curst by
heaven's decree," sounds very grand; but I have not the least idea what
it means. The pictures drawn in the poem of simple rural pleasures, and
of gaudy city delights, are very pleasing; and the moral drawn from it
all, viz., that nations sunk in luxury are hastening to decay, may be
true enough; but what strikes one most is that, if Goldsmith thought that
England was hastening to decay when he wrote, what would he think if he
were alive now.
Well then, if the pleasures of luxury bring nothing but pain and trouble
in the pursuit of them, to what end do they lead?
"Behold what blessings wealth to life can lend,
And see what comfort it affords our end.
In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaister, and the walls of dung;
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-ty'd curtains never meant to draw;
The George and Garter dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red;--
Great Villers lies--alas, how changed from him,
That life of pleasure and that soul of whim.
Gallant and gay in Clieveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
No wit to flatter, left of all his store;
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more;
There victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame; this lord of useless thousands ends."
If these be the effects of luxuries, why is it that we continue to strive
to increase them with all our might? I have already insisted that I am
not speaking of such things as are beneficial to body and soul, but such
as are detrimental. But it will be said, you are spending money, and to
gratify your longings labourers of different sorts have been employed,
and the wealth of the world is thereby increased. But we must consider
the loss to the man who is indulging himself, and therefore the loss to
the community; and further, that his money might have gone in producing
something necessary, and not noxious, something in its turn reproductive.
In Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is this passage, "Johnson as usual
defended luxury. You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to
the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury; you
make them exert industry, whereas by giving it you keep them idle. I own
indeed there may be more virtue in giving it immediately in charity, than
in spending it in luxury." He was then asked if this was not
Mandeville's doctrine of "private vices are public benefits." Of course
this did not suit him, and he demolished it. He said, "Mandeville puts
the case of a man who gets drunk at an alehouse, and says it is a public
benefit, because so much money is got by it to the public. But it must
be considered that all the good gained by this through the gradation of
alehouse-keeper, brewer, maltster, and farmer, is overbalanced by the
evil caused to the man and his family by his getting drunk."
Perhaps you will say, what is a man to do with his money, if he may not
spend it in luxury? If, as Dr. Johnson says, and as we all of us find
out occasionally, it is worse spent if given in charity, are we to hoard
it? No, surely this is more contemptible still. "What is the use of all
your money," said one distinguished barrister to another, "you can't live
many more years, and you can't take it with you when you go? Besides, if
you could, it would all melt where you're going." This hoarding of
wealth, this craving for it, is only another form of luxury, the luxury
of growing rich. Some like to be thought rich, and called rich, and
treated with a fawning respect on account of their riches; others love to
hide their riches, but to hug their money in secret, and seem to enjoy
the prospect of dying rich. I was engaged in a singular case some time
ago, in which an old lady who had starved herself to death, and lived in
the greatest squalor, had secreted 250 pounds in a stocking under the
mattress of her bed. It was stolen by one nephew, who was sued for it by
another, and all the money went in law expenses. If then we are not to
spend our money upon luxuries, and if we are not to hoard it, what are we
to do with it if we have more than we can lay out in what is useful. I
have not time (nor is the question a part of my subject) to discuss what
should be done with the money hitherto spent in idle luxury. We know,
however, that we have the poor always with us, and that we can always
learn the luxury of doing good. In one way or another we ought to see
that our superfluous wealth should drain from the high lands into the
valleys; not indeed to make the poor luxurious, but to provide them with
comfort, to give them health, strength, and enjoyment. I think then that
if we are wise men, seeing that we are placed in a world of care,
trouble, and hard work, from which no man can escape; and seeing that,
upon the other hand, we are living in a country and in an age when we are
surrounded with all that makes life pleasant and enjoyable, we shall
endeavour to find out some mode of harmonizing these different chords. It
need hardly be said how far removed luxury is from the spirit of
Christianity, and from the life of its Founder; yet it may reverently be
remembered that on more than one occasion He showed His tender regard for
the weakness of human nature by stamping with His approval the pleasures
of convivial festivity.
What then is the remedy against luxury? I would say shortly,--in work. A
busy man has no time for luxury, and there is no reason why every man
should not have enough to do, if he will only do it. And I am sure the
same rule applies to the ladies, although a very busy man once wrote of
his wife--
"In work, work, work, in work alway
My every day is past;
I very slowly make the coin--
She spends it very fast."
But speaking seriously, I am sure that in some sort of work lies the
antidote to luxury. When Orpheus sailed past the beautiful islands
"lying in dark purple spheres of sea," and heard the songs of the idle
and luxurious syrens floating languidly over the waters, he drowned their
singing in a paean to the gods. Religion often affords a great incentive
to work for the good of others; and, in working for others, we have
neither the time, nor the inclination, to be over indulgent of ourselves.
So, the desire to obtain fame and renown has often produced men of the
austere and non-indulgent type, as the Duke of Wellington and many
others:--
"Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,
That last infirmity of noble mind,
To scorn delights and live laborious days."
Nay, even the desire to obtain riches, and the strife after them, will
leave a man little room for luxury. To be honest, to be brave, to be
kind and generous, to seek to know what is right, and to do it; to be
loving and tender to others, and to care little for our comfort and ease,
and even for our very lives, is perhaps to be somewhat old-fashioned and
behind the age; but these are, after all, the things which distinguish us
from the brute beasts which perish, and which justify our aspirations
towards eternity.
A STORY.
THE READING PARTY.
CHAPTER I.--THE COACH.
Charles Porkington, M.A., sometime fellow of St. Swithin, was born of
humble parents. He was educated, with a due regard for economy, in the
mathematics by his father, and in the prevailing theology of the district
by his mother. The village schoolmaster had also assisted in the
completion of his education by teaching him a little bad Latin. He was
ultimately sent to college, his parents inferring that he would make a
success of the study of books, because he had always shown a singular
inaptitude for anything else. At college he had read hard. The common
sights and sounds of University life had been unheeded by him. They
passed before his eyes, and they entered into his ears, but his mind
refused to receive any impression from them. After taking a high degree,
and being elected a fellow, he had written a novel of a strongly
melodramatic cast, describing college life, and showing such an intimate
acquaintance with the obscurer parts of it, that a great many ladies
declared that "they always thought so;--it was just as they supposed."
The novel, however, did not meet with much success, and he then turned to
the more lucrative but far less noble occupation of "coaching." He could
not be said to be absolutely unintellectual. As he had not profited by
the experience of life, so he had not been contaminated by it. He was
moral, chiefly in a negative sense, and was not inclined to irreligion.
The faith of his parents sat, perhaps, uncomfortably upon him; and he had
not sufficient strength of mind to adopt a new pattern. He was in short
an amiable mathematician, and a feeble classic; and I think that is all
that could be said of him with any certainty. There seemed to be an
absence of character which might be called characteristic, and a
feebleness of will so absolute as to disarm contempt.
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