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_ 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. _
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