On Being Mean
By STRIX MY friend's game-keeper was inveighing against a man whose house, surrounded by a large garden, stood in the middle of the estate and who was alleged to shoot any pheasants that strayed within range of his dining-room window. 'There's one lucky thing, though,' said the game- keeper philosophically. 'He's too mean to give his gardener any money to buy raisins with.' Raisins, as. every single one of my readers will be well aware, are a lure as supposedly irresistible to pheasant's as mink is to ladies.
The remark set me pondering, as I drove home that evening, on the whole question of stinginess. 1 suppose it would be no easier to find a man who knew he was mean than one who admitted that he had no sense of humour. The timid and the reck- less, the choleric and the greedy, the absent- minded and the unpunctual—these are generally aware, in some degree, of their failings. The mean man is mercifully but rather unfairly protected from self-knowledge. He will confess, he may even boast, that he is prudent, thrifty, economical; the suspicion that he is mean never crosses his incl.
Perhaps it is partly for this reason—because he sees no cause to hide a fault which he does not acknowledge—that meanness is so readily discernible. Though normally betrayed only by small acts or small omissions, it almost always sticks out a mile. It is sometimes diagnosed where it may not in fact exist. When, for instance, I raised the question at the dinner-table that night, a man claimed that his elderly uncle was mean because he always travelled by bus to the City, where he is a person of great consequence; it was implied that he could, and should, have been transported in a car provided for the purpose by his firm or if necessary by himself.
But true meanness should surely have a victim. For all anybody knows this outwardly parsi- monious tycoon likes travelling in buses, or takes pride in observing a long-established routine, or has some other good personal reason for doing what he does. The point is that nobody suffers, nobody is bilked or disappointed or given short measure, as a result of his austerity. It would be different if he took a taxi from the West End to the City every morning and consistently under- tipped the driver. Then you would say with cer- tainty that he was mean.
After this conversation a slight feeling of uneasiness. began to creep over me. I think of my- self as a reasonably open-handed man, but is this conception valid? If mean men never know that they are mean, how do I know that I am not? Almost everybody is parsimonious about some- SPECTATOR, NOVEMBER 21, 1955 thing. My grandmother, for instance, although generous by nature and extremely well off, used when she sent us a pound note on our birthdays to post this largesse in an envelope without a stamp on it. Someone had told her (1 do not know if it is or was true) that an unstamped envelope left in its transit through the mails a spoor as clearly marked as a registered letter and if it went astray could be traced as easily as the more costly missive. By this stratagem she effected a small, superfluous saving.
She was also extremely economical with note- paper; having covered both sides of a sheet with her bold, exclamatory, scarcely legible script she would fill in the open space above the letter-head and any other virgin territory round the margins until the whole thing became a calligraphic maze Here (now I come to think of it) I detect the baneful influence of heredity in my own habits at the escritoire. I am pot mean over notepaper. But confront me with a blank sheet of foolscap and the hidden streak of avarice is revealed. 1 do not want to save paper by squeezing as many lines on to a page. as I can. I know it is directly eon• trary to my interests to do this, for it leaves rife insufficient room to make insertions and alters. tions in the deathless prose and by the time the manuscript reaches my secretary's typewriter parts of it are barely decipherable. I used (when' ever I remembered in time) to leave proper spaces . between the lines when I began a fresh page, but as soon as I got under way the subconscious urge to pack the little strips of prose together as though they were sardines took control and the end" product was .another overcrowded palimpsest.
Involuntary and atavistic though it may have, been, this practice conformed to my definition 01 meanness because it had, in the person of mY luckless secretary, a victim. I am happy to saY I have overcome it. Like an uncertified lunatic ordering a straitjacket from the Army and Na'Y Stores (their Christmas catalogue advertises Easi. Kneeler Stools, Tele Fireside Chairs, Cosy Travel' ling Footmutfs, and other artefacts which suggests that this great emporium could, if it wished le, claim to be the Maniac's Friend), 1 have procured a great mass of paper with lines ruled across it and a margin marked out in red. Since then, 85 old-fashioned advertisements used to say, I have used no other. The raw material produced by mY pen, however banal, is tractable, convertible into a typescript. The snake of my meanness has 81 last been scotched.
But probably I, like everybody else, am Meen in other, unsuspected ways. Admittedly we are set a bad example by our rulers, to whichever faction, they happen to belong. A Minister may aPPeer' fleetingly, to be generous when concessions are announced, subsidies increased, pension-sealer reviewed. But in fact all those in charge of public funds—and most of those in charge of other i people's money' in any form—keep a tight 11°Id on the purse-strings, as is their duty. They often are, and they almost always think they orte's generous; but even to the successful applicants for their bounties they appear to be mean. „ was never their intention to appear so. Nor, If it comes to that, was it ours. • Whether he likes it or not, whether he klic45,,' it or not, homo sapiens has a streak of meanoe' in him.
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