THE "ROOT OF ALL EVIL."
TT is a bad thing, we suppose, that the contempt for money should die, for that contempt has helped to strengthen many noble minds ; but it must be a good thing that the affecta- tion of that contempt should die ; and it is dying, so fast that men begin to forget how very deep and general that affectation once was. It underlay all discussion upon the subject. Fifty years ago, or even forty, a clergyman who mentioned money in the pulpit thought it incumbent on him to call it "earthly dross," and to insert a remark or two about its being the root of all evil, a thing the desire of which was a snare and its possession a burden. The "rich man" in country parishes was the potentially bad man, and the poor one the potentially good. The man of letters was accustomed to contemn money and the possessors of money, to quote sentences from "Miss Kilmansegg and her Golden Leg" with gusto, and to intimate in a thou- sand ways that for a litterateur to be impecunious or ex- travagant was a proof not only of genius, but of a high
morale. He could not be expected to consider anything so low as money. In ordinary society, to mention money, except very slightingly, to say you wished for it, or to regret the want of it, or to acknowledge that it had power, was evidence of bad manners ; and the allegation, in however matter-of-fact a way, that So-and-So was poor, was accounted, except among very intimate friends, a kind of brutality. Men worked for money, as they do now, and wished for motley, and exulted in money, but to express any of those feelings openly was to be condemned. You had not only broken the curious reticence upon the subject, which to this day so prevails in certain circles, that to say a man is rich, or still more, very poor, is held to savour of immodesty ; but you had broken the conventional law that the desire for money was to be treated as a bad thing,—something which existed, no doubt, but was only to be spoken of, if at all, with a half-expressed blame. A poet was supposed to be above taking money ; an artist treated his "price" as something to be discussed in secret, like a stomach-complaint ; and a divine would repudiate altogether even the knowledge of the "earthly proceeds" of a cure. A man with llaydon's pre- tensions thanked God he was above filthy lucre ; and Wordsworth, who was always getting easy posts, would not have sung the praise of money for the world. It was thought a sign of degeneracy that while Milton sold "Paradise Lost" for ten pounds, Byron received many thousands. There was something of nobleness in this tone, but there was something of affectation too, and we are not quite sure that the prevalent obscurantism did not drive the passion in, and give it darker shades. At least, one seldom hears now-a-days, in ordinary society, of a cultivated miser, or of a man who is inordinately greedy, and still less of a man whose whole life is devoted to saving as to an art.
Reading recently, for the second time, Macaulay's Diary, as quoted in his nephew's charming biography, we were struck with the completeness of the change that has passed over society in this matter. Macaulay, though an incomplete man, was certainly a very good one, and absolutely free from all taint of avarice—indeed, when he had plenty, he was rather prodigal, giving very often without any reason at all, from mere easiness of temper and vague pity for people who were not as comfortable as himself—but he used to refer to his money perpetually in a tone which his favourite, Miss Austen, would certainly have condemned as sordid. He delighted in his receipts with a frank delight that it is quite pleasant to read of. He said openly that he had been the happier for every guinea he made, wrote letters about his big cheques, which, though playful in tone, show how they pleased him ; and whenever he sums up his reasons for thankfulness to Providence, always puts a competent fortune prominently among them. He writes with real zest of the security his Indian savings enabled him to feel as to his future, and tells his correspondents how much he gave away and to whom with the same freedom that he mentions a new course of reading he had begun, or a new language he had just acquired. He records, in fact, his progress towards a good balance at his banker's just as he records his pro- gress in learning, and with the same inner feeling that he is getting a new and very useful and pleasurable power. He may, in this respect, have been somewhat individual, or appear some- what individual, for when writing in his diary, or to his sisters, Macaulay was apt to think aloud ;• but we imagine that his tone only reproduced in a noticeable form a general tone, which has superseded the old one. We fancy we see everywhere signs of more honesty in speaking about money, more readiness to treat its posses- sion frankly, as a power, like any other, to be used or misused, and the desire for it as a perfectly natural ambition, as natural as the desire for fame or elevation in life. People confess much more easily that they like money, that they wish they could make more money, that after all, they work for money, and that with money they could and would do such and such work of an agreeable or creditable kind. The old tone of disparagement is completely gone, and money treated as what it is, a power of which every- body wants some, and the possession of which, though it will not
put in still—will give pleasure, give happiness—that is always
not necessarily of the baser kind. a he lad who in choosing a career, tells his father lie thinks be will " go in for money" is no longer lectured, and the Peer who takes money for his article in the Quarterly is no longer considered to have derogated. Why should he not take what he earns? or why should not the artist say in a grave way that "it is best to have matters of business clear, and his price is 000," when his grandfather would have left the price to his patron, and then have published a venomous song about that patron's meanness? Nobody is more ashamed of wishing for money than of wishing for power, and the cynic who called it "filthy lucre" in a drawing-room would be suspected of having lost some in some discreditable way very recently. It is open even to you to confess you have not got any, and confess it with a sigh ; and to aver that you regret it, and would alter the position if you could, has long since ceased to be immodest. The Anglo- Indian re-yime, under which every man states the amount of his income, as he would state the size of his garden, without a wince, has not indeed been reached, but the old English rural feeling, under which such a statement would indicate an evil contempt for decorum, has almost disappeared.
It is curious that this new habit of frankness about money should coincide with the growth of a greater worship of money, and therefore, of course, a greater desire to affect its possession, audit is not at once very easily explicable. We suppose it is duo to two causes,—the increase of intelligence, and the growth of the realism which, whether it is beneficial or not, is undoubtedly becoming a habit of the classes which set tone. It takes much more trouble to lie about such things than it did. People are so observant and so sceptical, and so little dis- posed to pay respect to convc,ntional phrases, that it is far easier to state the truth at once, and be rid of that much of the worry of life at least. Nobody in a day of Domesday Books and Income-Tax returns and club gossip can conceal his income long ; and as to assuming one, the next man he meets will notice some "way" or some incident of conversation which at once betrays the pretender. Everybody is " reckoned-up " very quickly, and as everybody knows that, the temptation to simulate or dissimu- late about money is amazingly lessened. It is of no use talking about " moy estates," when Domesday Book tells everybody that you possess some two hundred acres, worth 10s. an acre,—and Domesday Book is a mere sign of of the spirit of inquiry abroad. Realism, too, is in the air. Tartuffes are growing scarce, the vice of the day being cynicism rather than hypocrisy. If a man iff an unbeliever, the last thing he pretends to is belief. Money is enjoyable, and why not say so ? Poverty is a bore, but not such a bore as hiding it, and why not tell the truth ? These and such like are the ideas which pass through men's minds, and produce, with no doubt some higher motives, the change of tone to which we have alluded, and which is so marked that affectation about money has ceased to be satirised even in novels. A man in business is expected in novels of manners to be 'reticent about money and to seem rich, because the reticence and the hypocrisy directly pay him, but nobody else is expected either to simulate or dissimulate on the point. "I like to be sure of my cut of mutton," confesses the hero of the last new novel, as well as Lord Macaulay,—and truth must be good, even when truth is slightly ignoble.
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