UNEXPECTED WEALTH.
THE Dalin' News of Tuesday relates a story which, though in itself only a bit of gossip of the day, has for us a certain intellectual interest. One of its writers affirms that in 1888 a lady named Burch, then living in Kensington, went, like a thousand others, to see the fine ladies pass on their way to attend a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace. While gazing at the show, which, though not democratic, is an ex- ceedingly pretty one, she noticed an old gentleman faint and confused with the pressure of the crowd, which, being com- posed of Englishmen, pronounced him drunk. Discerning with better insight that he was not drunk, but very ill, Miss Burch led him to a seat, found him somewhere a glass of water, and in a few minutes restored his scattered energies. He thanked her warmly, asked her name, and departed,—to be heard of no more till a few days ago, when a solicitor called to inform Miss Burch that the old gentleman had bequeathed her the immense reward for such a service of £150,000. That story—if it is true, which we see no reason to doubt—is the most striking instance we can remember of the true and perfect windfall which all men, it is said, expect in their hearts, but which so rarely occurs to any one. Stories of unexpected fortunes, of course, are as common as blackberries. Somebody is always making or finding or inheriting a heap of money which seems to himself almost to have come from the clouds. Worthless shares become valuable, as happened to more than one man in the history of Devon Great Consols. A working man discovers a rich mine, as Mr. Graham did in South Australia ; or a
relative, from whom nothing was expected, suddenly heaps everything on the kinsman who bored him least, as occurred last year within our own knowledge in a Southern county. Only last week a pauper in a poorhouse was declared heir to 2300,000, a sum which he probably could not have put down accurately on a slate, bat which had been earned in Australia by a relative who died intestate. In all these eases, however, the quality of windfall was imperfect, there being some suffi- cient reason, either in the possession. of a special property, or in the performance of a feat in the prospecting line, or in re- lationship or acceptability to a near kinsman, why fortune should arrive. In the story told by the _Daily News, there is no reason, or one absurdly inadequate ; the great gift is a true windfall, a fortune poured from the blue; and one would like to know something of its re- cipient's future history. According to one of the most im- movable of popular superstitions, the money should disappear in two or three years, and we should like to be able to quote a conclusive example to the contrary. It is, we believe, one of several superstitions which are born not of recurring inci- dents giving rise to a belief—as, for example, the history of the ownership of Newstead Abbey has done—nor of any rude sense of the connection between the moral laws and the decrees of destiny, nor of that wish to propitiate unknown powers which dictated the story of Polycrates' ring, but of sheer mean-spirited envy. That ill-got gear never prospers is, at all events, an apophthegm tending to make people refrain from the pursuit of illicit gain; but the notion that money " lightly got" will " lightly go " is one having no foundation whatever, except the instinctive dislike that money should come to any but oneself without exertion. Oneself a windfall never hurts or deceives, and the belief that it is always to any one else an injury or a will-o'-the-wisp, opens a door into a very dark and dirty little cave in the general mind.
There is no et priori reason for the fancy, industry being only a virtue when industry is a duty, and, so far as we know, no foundation whatever for it. We have never, it is true, come personally across such an instance as the one which gives occasion to this article, but we have noticed in life, as most men have, a good many instances of unexpected wealth, and have observed that the effects resulting from the windfall followed one general and some- what precise law. The money set its unexpected possessor free to follow his or her bent, and lie or she did follow it with consequences produced not by the money, but by the bent. No doubt results were often disastrous, but that is because the majority of mankind are not only the better for restraining influences, but actually and greatly the stronger for them. One illustration of this truth is recognised by us all, and has actually been crystallised in a proverb, "It is hard to carry a fall cup." Everybody knows of some one who, having managed a poor income with noteworthy ability, and even dignity, has flung away a large one with something like im- becility, and has probably remarked that fortune had turned So-and-So's head. It may have done so ; but very often the only turning is this : that the man's character has been weakened by the loss of the pressure exercised by narrow means ; that he tumbles about, in fact, as he would if the weight of the atmosphere were suddenly withdrawn. The disposition towards mad extravagance, so often seen in wealthy young men, is not always the result of means to gratify over- strong desires, but of positive " foolishness," or mental incom- petence which, under the pressure of narrow means, would not only never have developed itself, but never have existed. "I have succeeded," said a very great statesman, "because I have never had enough to live on." The silly marriages the old frequently make are in just the same way the result, not of loss of judgment, but of a weaken- ing of the resisting power of the will. The consequences of unexpected wealth are, however, as often fortunate as unfortunate ; for they are the products of the natural character. We have seen a man who inherited a fortune, very large for his wants, become during the remainder of his life almost, or quite, miserly ; but that was only, on a large scale, the result of the impulse to save, which on a small one had been pronounced "wise economy," aggravated a little, it may be, by a foible,—timidity about spending, which is constantly noticeable also in men who were born rich. But we have also seen a lady, previously suspected of meanness, become habitually and rather splendidly liberal. Serenity, which we hold with the Quakers to be an eminent virtue, often comes with unexpected good, luck ; and graciousness too, the latter being the result, we conceive, of the dis- appearance either of a grudge at fate or of some inner fear of being suspected of " booing " on account of poverty. Suspiciousness is pre-eminently the foible of the poor, and frequently, though not always, disappears with wealth ; and the confidence it brings, a confidence occasionally so great and so needed as radically to improve manner. We constantly hear it said that a rise in life has improved a man's manners, when, in fact, he has only resumed a natural bearing previously kept down by fear. On the other hand, the insolence some- times developed by sudden fortune equally results from the emancipation of a kept-down quality, as also, in rare cases, does a singular timidity, previously repressed, because it interfered too much with the business of daily life. The most insolent human being we ever encountered, a City magnate became insolent in a week from an unexpected legacy; but his schoolfellows declared that, though most affable as a man, his nickname had been " Cocky" at his school. It is hard, indeed, to see how it should be otherwise, for wealth gives nothing but freedom ; and the reason why the effects of sudden fortune are so much more startling than those of wealth gradually acquired, is that in the latter case the restraining influences are continued until their impress has become indelible. Moreover, the man who makes wealth slowly rarely perceives that he has got it, the pecuniary imagination ex- panding with the money.
It is a further evidence of our theory that in the compara- tively rare cases in which the windfall is not in money, but in some other advantage in life, its effect is almost in- variably displayed in accordance with character. Sudden rank is hardly attainable by men, but it falls occasionally to women, and no two brides of King Cophetna are like each other The Duchess of Hightowers always is what Miss Plainfield was, only rather more so. In the only case so well known that it may be mentioned without offence—that of the Empress Eug6nie—there was positively no change, the Empress re- maining what Mdlle. de Montijo bad been, " beautiful and clever, but Spanish to the core." Power, no doubt, has come suddenly to men, and should, of all advantages, most change the character ; but can any one recall a case in which it is certain that the early character was changed merely by the gift of power P The allegation is always made about Nero, but that wicked artist on a throne must have been artist by temperament and wicked by nature before the illimitable power of a Caesar so intensified the aberra- tions in his character, that Senators held him a monster, the Christians declared him Antichrist, the mob revered him as a " daimon," or being outside humanity, and De Quincy called him mad. The cunning Cardinal, afterwards Sixtus Quintus, who won the tiara, according to the popu- lar account, by a fraud, and according to other accounts by promises, developed on the throne just the astute ability and love of absolute power which carried him to the top. Sadden fame is, perhaps, of all gifts that which should most intoxicate, and therefore most utterly change character; but there is no fame like the soldier's or the poet's, and we can recall no great change as occurring in either after a great victory. The Duke of Marlborough remained, after his recog- nition by all Europe, what he had always been—the suave courtier and diplomatist ; and Napoleon developed nothing new but an intensified self-will. We see no change between Scott unrecognised and Scott worshipped; and the man Shelley is the boy Shelley, except so far as that recognition had made -his peculiarities all thistronger. We can, in fact, see nothing which money acquired suddenly and in heaps can give, or fame or power, except freedom, and freedom only develops without changing the essential character. The belief that money does more is only based upon the inner grudge which money alone of the gifts has always developed in mankind.
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