The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 7

to Oxford Circus, and the landmarks by which he
knew it were restaurants and music-halls.
The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was a
kind of joy to meet him. The sourness of my own discontent was
dissolved in the alembic of his joviality. Yet it was certain that he lived
a life of the most torturing anxiety. There were recurring periods when
his fortune hung in the balance, and his financial salvation was
achieved as by fire. When he sat silent for a moment, strange things
were written on his face. Haggard lines ran across the brow; the
hollows underneath the eyes grew deep; and one could see that black
care sat upon his shoulders. There was a listening posture of the head,
as of one apprehensive of the footfall of disaster, and though he was
barely forty, his hair was white. What happened to him finally I do not

know. I missed him for a year or two; inquired at the hotel where he
had lived and found him gone; and I thought I read in the sarcastic
smile of the hotel-manager more knowledge than he was willing to
communicate. I imagine that he went down in some financial storm,
like ships at sea that are heard of no more; the Napoleon of finance had
somewhere found his Waterloo. The reflection is inevitable; what had
he got out of life after all? He had won neither peace nor honour; he
had known nothing of the finer joys or tastes; he had enjoyed no
satisfying pleasures; such triumph as he had known had been the brief
triumph of the gambler. Upon the whole I thought the narrow tedious
life of Arrowsmith the worthier.
Reflections of this nature are usually attributed to mere envy or
contempt of wealth, which is a temper not less sordid than a love of
wealth. For my part I can but profess that I feel for wealth neither envy
nor contempt. On the contrary, I love to imagine myself wealthy, and I
flatter myself--as most poor men do--that I am a person peculiarly fitted
by nature to afford a conspicuous example of how wealth should be
employed. I like to dramatise my fancies, and the more impossible
these fancies are, the more convincing is the drama that can be educed
from them. Thus I have several times built palaces which have rivalled
the splendours of the Medici; I have administered great estates to the
entire satisfaction of my tenants; I have established myself as the
Maecenas of art and literature; and were I ever called to play these parts
in reality, I am convinced that my competence would secure applause.
The point at which I stick, however, is this: rich men rarely do these
things. It is the pursuit of wealth, rather than wealth itself, that is their
pleasure. Let us suppose the case of a man who has toiled with
undivided mind for thirty years to acquire a fortune; will it not be
usually found that in the struggle to be rich he has lost those very
qualities which make riches worth possessing? He buys his estate or
builds his house; but there is little pleasure in the business. He is the
mere slave of land-agents, the puppet of architects and upholsterers. He
has no original taste to guide or interest him: what he once had has
perished long ago in the dreary toil of money-grubbing. The men who
build or decorate his house have a certain pleasure in their work; all
that he does is to pay them for being happy. If he should adopt the rich

man's hobby of collecting pictures or a library, he rarely enjoys a
higher pleasure than the mere lust of possession. He buys what he is
told to buy, without discrimination; he has no knowledge of what
constitutes rarity or value; and most certainly he knows nothing of
those excitements of the quest which make the collection of articles of
vertu a pursuit so fascinating to the man of trained judgment but
moderate means. And, as if to complete the irony of the situation, he is
after all but the infrequent tenant of the treasure-house which he has
built; the blinds are drawn half the year; the splendid rooms are seen by
no wiser eyes than those of his butler and his housekeeper; and his
secretary, if he be a man of taste and education, draws the real dividend
of pleasure from all these rare and costly things which Dives has
accumulated. Dives is in most cases little more than the man who pays
the bill for things which other folk enjoy.
Let Dives be accounted then a public benefactor, we may say; perhaps
so, but the question still remains, does Dives get the