The Way of All Flesh

Fortune, we are told, is a blind and fickle foster-mother, who showers her gifts at random upon her nurslings.  But we do her a grave injustice if we believe such an accusation.  Trace a man’s career from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him.  You will find that when he is once dead she can for the most part be vindicated from the charge of any but very superficial fickleness.  Her blindness is the merest fable; she can espy her favourites long before they are born.  We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be in a London alley or those whom she is resolved to ruin in kings’ palaces.  Seldom does she relent towards those whom she has suckled unkindly and seldom does she completely fail a favoured nursling.

Was George Pontifex one of Fortune’s favoured nurslings or not?  On the whole I should say that he was not, for he did not consider himself so; he was too religious to consider Fortune a deity at all; he took whatever she gave and never thanked her, being firmly convinced that whatever he got to his own advantage was of his own getting.  And so it was, after Fortune had made him able to get it.

“Nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam,” exclaimed the poet.  “It is we who make thee, Fortune, a goddess”; and so it is, after Fortune has made us able to make her.  The poet says nothing as to the making of the “nos.”  Perhaps some men are independent of antecedents and surroundings and have an initial force within themselves which is in no way due to causation; but this is supposed to be a difficult question and it may be as well to avoid it.  Let it suffice that George Pontifex did not consider himself fortunate, and he who does not consider himself fortunate is unfortunate.

True, he was rich, universally respected and of an excellent natural constitution.  If he had eaten and drunk less he would never have known a day’s indisposition.  Perhaps his main strength lay in the fact that though his capacity was a little above the average, it was not too much so.  It is on this rock that so many clever people split.  The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not enough to puzzle them.  It is far safer to know too little than too much.  People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

The best example of Mr Pontifex’s good sense in matters connected with his business which I can think of at this moment is the revolution which he effected in the style of advertising works published by the firm.  When he first became a partner one of the firm’s advertisements ran thus:—­

   “Books proper to be given away at this Season.—­

“The Pious Country Parishioner, being directions how a Christian may manage every day in the course of his whole life with safety and success; how to spend the Sabbath Day; what books of the Holy Scripture ought to be read first; the whole method of education; collects for the most important virtues that adorn the soul; a discourse on the Lord’s Supper; rules to set the soul right in sickness; so that in this treatise are contained all the rules requisite for salvation.  The 8th edition with additions.  Price 10d.

   * An allowance will be made to those who give them away.”

Before he had been many years a partner the advertisement stood as follows:—­

   “The Pious Country Parishioner.  A complete manual of Christian
   Devotion.  Price 10d.

   A reduction will be made to purchasers for gratuitous distribution.”

What a stride is made in the foregoing towards the modern standard, and what intelligence is involved in the perception of the unseemliness of the old style, when others did not perceive it!

Where then was the weak place in George Pontifex’s armour?  I suppose in the fact that he had risen too rapidly.  It would almost seem as if a transmitted education of some generations is necessary for the due enjoyment of great wealth.  Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.  Nevertheless a certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last.  It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.  Hence it oftens happens that the grandson of a successful man will be more successful than the son—­the spirit that actuated the grandfather having lain fallow in the son and being refreshed by repose so as to be ready for fresh exertion in the grandson.  A very successful man, moreover, has something of the hybrid in him; he is a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile.

And certainly Mr Pontifex’s success was exceedingly rapid.  Only a few years after he had become a partner his uncle and aunt both died within a few months of one another.  It was then found that they had made him their heir.  He was thus not only sole partner in the business but found himself with a fortune of some 30,000 pounds into the bargain, and this was a large sum in those days.  Money came pouring in upon him, and the faster it came the fonder he became of it, though, as he frequently said, he valued it not for its own sake, but only as a means of providing for his dear children.

Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also.  The two are like God and Mammon.  Lord Macaulay has a passage in which he contrasts the pleasures which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to which he may be put by his acquaintances.  “Plato,” he says, “is never sullen.  Cervantes is never petulant.  Demosthenes never comes unseasonably.  Dante never stays too long.  No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero.  No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet.”  I dare say I might differ from Lord Macaulay in my estimate of some of the writers he has named, but there can be no disputing his main proposition, namely, that we need have no more trouble from any of them than we have a mind to, whereas our friends are not always so easily disposed of.  George Pontifex felt this as regards his children and his money.  His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and did not spill things on the tablecloth at meal times, or leave the door open when it went out.  His dividends did not quarrel among themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages should become extravagant on reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he should have to pay.  There were tendencies in John which made him very uneasy, and Theobald, his second son, was idle and at times far from truthful.  His children might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in their father’s mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not infrequently knocked his children.  He never dealt hastily or pettishly with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so well together.

It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the relations between parents and children were still far from satisfactory.  The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex’s “Pious Country Parishioner,” but the type was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely.  The parents in Miss Austen’s novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le pere de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings.  In the Elizabethan time the relations between parents and children seem on the whole to have been more kindly.  The fathers and the sons are for the most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does the evil appear to have reached its full abomination till a long course of Puritanism had familiarised men’s minds with Jewish ideals as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday life.  What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of Rechab offer?  How easy was it to quote and follow them in an age when few reasonable men or women doubted that every syllable of the Old Testament was taken down verbatim from the mouth of God.  Moreover, Puritanism restricted natural pleasures; it substituted the Jeremiad for the Paean, and it forgot that the poor abuses of all times want countenance.

Mr Pontifex may have been a little sterner with his children than some of his neighbours, but not much.  He thrashed his boys two or three times a week and some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing their boys.  It is easy to have juster views when everyone else has them, but fortunately or unfortunately results have nothing whatever to do with the moral guilt or blamelessness of him who brings them about; they depend solely upon the thing done, whatever it may happen to be.  The moral guilt or blamelessness in like manner has nothing to do with the result; it turns upon the question whether a sufficient number of reasonable people placed as the actor was placed would have done as the actor has done.  At that time it was universally admitted that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, and St Paul had placed disobedience to parents in very ugly company.  If his children did anything which Mr Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father.  In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take.  It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too young to offer serious resistance.  If their wills were “well broken” in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through till they were over twenty-one years old.  Then they might please themselves; he should know how to protect himself; till then he and his money were more at their mercy than he liked.

How little do we know our thoughts—­our reflex actions indeed, yes; but our reflex reflections!  Man, forsooth, prides himself on his consciousness!  We boast that we differ from the winds and waves and falling stones and plants, which grow they know not why, and from the wandering creatures which go up and down after their prey, as we are pleased to say without the help of reason.  We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not?  I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.