Some Private Views | Page 6

of dulness at home--while, instead of
the lively, if somewhat boisterous, talk of our fathers, we have
drawing-room dissertations on art, and dandy drivel about blue china.
There is one pleasure only that takes more and more root amongst us,
and never seems to fail, and that is making money. To hear the
passengers at the Midway Inn discourse upon this topic, you would
think they were all commercial travellers. It is most curious how the
desire for pecuniary gain has infected even the idlest, who of course
take the shortest cut to it by way of the race-course. I see young
gentlemen, blond and beardless, telling the darkest secrets to one
another, affecting, one would think, the fate of Europe, but which in
reality relate to the state of the fetlock of the brother to Boanerges.
Their earnestness (which is reserved for this enthralling topic) is quite
appalling. In their elders one has long been accustomed to it, but these
young people should really know better. The interest excited in society
by 'scratchings' has never been equalled since the time of the Cock
Lane ghost. If men would only 'lose their money and look pleasant'
without talking about it, I shouldn't mind; but they will make it a
subject of conversation, as though everyone who liked his glass of wine
should converse upon 'the vintages.' One looks for it in business people
and forgives it; but everyone is now for business.
The reverence that used to belong to Death is now only paid to it in the
case of immensely rich persons, whose wealth is spoken of with bated
breath. 'He died, sir, worth two millions; a very warm man.' If you
happen to say, though with all reasonable probability and even with
Holy Writ to back you, 'He is probably warmer by this time,' you are
looked upon as a Communist. What the man was is nothing, what he
made is everything. It is the gold alone that we now value: the temple
that might have sanctified the gold is of no account. This worship of
mere wealth has, it is true, this advantage over the old adoration of
birth, that something may possibly be got out of it; to cringe and fawn
upon the people that have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the
peculiarity is not communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken
up in the same social bag with millionaires, something may be attained
by what is technically called the 'sweating' process. So far as I have

observed, however, the results are small, while the operation is to the
last degree disagreeable.
What is very significant of this new sort of golden age is that a
literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind. It is
presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a model
of propriety. It is as though the dragon that guarded the apples of
Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue. Under the pretence of
extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints money-making as the
highest good, and calls it thrift; and the popularity of this class of book
is enormous. The heroes are all 'self-made' men who come to town with
that proverbial half-crown which has the faculty of accumulation that
used to be confined to snowballs. Like the daughters of the horse-leech,
their cry is 'Give, give,' only instead of blood they want money; and I
need hardly say they get it from other people's pockets. Love and
friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they ever had any,
with these gentry. They remind one of the miser of old who could not
hear a large sum of money mentioned without an acceleration of the
action of the heart; and perhaps that is the use of their hearts, which,
otherwise, like that of the spleen in other people, must be only a subject
of vague conjecture. They live abhorred and die respected; leaving all
their heaped-up wealth to some charitable institution, the secretary of
which levants with it eventually to the United States.
This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these biographies,
the subjects of which are held up as patterns of wisdom and prudence
for the rising generation. I shall have left the Midway Inn, thank
Heaven, for a residence of smaller dimensions, before it has grown up.
Conceive an England inhabited by self-made men!
Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day?
This is not perhaps of very much consequence, since everybody has a
great deal too much to do to permit them to read it; but how full of
sighs, and groans, and passionate bewailings it is! And also how
deuced difficult! It is almost as inarticulate as an