The Way of All Flesh

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Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we were
astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living
person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a very
long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our own
doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement might
indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was all right
now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and drifted deeper
in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was sometimes brought in
frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the back kitchen to see it.
I suppose there are rectories up and down the country now where the milk
comes in frozen sometimes in winter, and the children go down to wonder
at it, but I never see any frozen milk in London, so I suppose the
winters are warmer than they used to be.

About one year after his wife's death Mr Pontifex also was gathered to
his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old man had
a theory about sunsets, and had had two steps built up against a wall in
the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and watch the sun go down
whenever it was clear. My father came on him in the afternoon, just as
the sun was setting, and saw him with his arms resting on the top of the
wall looking towards the sun over a field through which there was a path
on which my father was. My father heard him say "Good-bye, sun; good-
bye, sun," as the sun sank, and saw by his tone and manner that he was
feeling very feeble. Before the next sunset he was gone.

There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the funeral
and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by doing so. John
Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered at penny loaves, and
intimated that if I wanted one it must be because my papa and mamma could
not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we did something like
fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got the worst of it, but it
may have been the other way. I remember my sister's nurse, for I was
just outgrowing nurses myself, reported the matter to higher quarters,
and we were all of us put to some ignominy, but we had been thoroughly
awakened from our dream, and it was long enough before we could hear the
words "penny loaf" mentioned without our ears tingling with shame. If
there had been a dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to
touch one of them.

George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in Paleham
church, inscribed with the following epitaph:--

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

JOHN PONTIFEX

WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH,

1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812,

IN HIS 85TH YEAR,

AND OF

RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE,

WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811,

IN HER 84TH YEAR.

THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY

IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR

RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES.

THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED

BY THEIR ONLY SON.




CHAPTER IV


In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr
George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at
Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first of these
occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that
the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he
thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and
art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by
generation after generation of prigs and impostors. The first glimpse of
Mont Blanc threw Mr Pontifex into a conventional ecstasy. "My feelings I
cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared to breathe, as I viewed for
the first time the monarch of the mountains. I seemed to fancy the
genius seated on his stupendous throne far above his aspiring brethren
and in his solitary might defying the universe. I was so overcome by my
feelings that I was almost bereft of my faculties, and would not for
worlds have spoken after my first exclamation till I found some relief in
a gush of tears. With pain I tore myself from contemplating for the
first time 'at distance dimly seen' (though I felt as if I had sent my
soul and eyes after it), this sublime spectacle." After a nearer view of
the Alps from above Geneva he walked nine out of the twelve miles of the
descent: "My mind and heart were too full to sit still, and I found some
relief by exhausting my feelings through exercise." In the course of
time he reached Chamonix and went on a Sunday to the Montanvert to see
the Mer de Glace. There he wrote the following verses for the visitors'
book, which he considered, so he says, "suitable to the day and scene":--

Lord, while these wonders of thy hand I see,
My soul in holy reverence bends to thee.
These awful solitudes, this dread repose,
Yon pyramid sublime of spotless snows,
These spiry pinnacles, those smiling plains,
This sea where one eternal winter reigns,
These are thy works, and while on them I gaze
I hear a silent tongue that speaks thy praise.

Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after running for
seven or eight lines. Mr Pontifex's last couplet gave him a lot of
trouble, and nearly every word has been erased and rewritten once at
least. In the visitors' book at the Montanvert, however, he must have
been obliged to commit himself definitely to one reading or another.
Taking the verses all round, I should say that Mr Pontifex was right in
considering them suitable to the day; I don't like being too hard even on
the Mer de Glace, so will give no opinion as to whether they are suitable
to the scene also.

Mr Pontifex went on to the Great St Bernard and there he wrote some more
verses, this time I am afraid in Latin. He also took good care to be
properly impressed by the Hospice and its situation. "The whole of this
most extraordinary journey seemed like a dream, its conclusion
especially, in gentlemanly society, with every comfort and accommodation
amidst the rudest rocks and in the region of perpetual snow. The thought
that I was sleeping in a convent and occupied the bed of no less a person
than Napoleon, that I was in the highest inhabited spot in the old world
and in a place celebrated in every part of it, kept me awake some time."
As a contrast to this, I may quote here an extract from a letter written
to me last year by his grandson Ernest, of whom the reader will hear more
presently. The passage runs: "I went up to the Great St Bernard and saw
the dogs." In due course Mr Pontifex found his way into Italy, where the
pictures and other works of art--those, at least, which were fashionable
at that time--threw him into genteel paroxysms of admiration. Of the
Uffizi Gallery at Florence he writes: "I have spent three hours this
morning in the gallery and I have made up my mind that if of all the
treasures I have seen in Italy I were to choose one room it would be the
Tribune of this gallery. It contains the Venus de' Medici, the
Explorator, the Pancratist, the Dancing Faun and a fine Apollo. These
more than outweigh the Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo at Rome. It
contains, besides, the St John of Raphael and many other _chefs-d'oeuvre_
of the greatest masters in the world." It is interesting to compare Mr
Pontifex's effusions with the rhapsodies of critics in our own times. Not
long ago a much esteemed writer informed the world that he felt "disposed
to cry out with delight" before a figure by Michael Angelo. I wonder
whether he would feel disposed to cry out before a real Michael Angelo,
if the critics had decided that it was not genuine, or before a reputed
Michael Angelo which was really by someone else. But I suppose that a
prig with more money than brains was much the same sixty or seventy years
ago as he is now.

Look at Mendelssohn again about this same Tribune on which Mr Pontifex
felt so safe in staking his reputation as a man of taste and culture. He
feels no less safe and writes, "I then went to the Tribune. This room is
so delightfully small you can traverse it in fifteen paces, yet it
contains a world of art. I again sought out my favourite arm chair which
stands under the statue of the 'Slave whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino),
and taking possession of it I enjoyed myself for a couple of hours; for
here at one glance I had the 'Madonna del Cardellino,' Pope Julius II., a
female portrait by Raphael, and above it a lovely Holy Family by
Perugino; and so close to me that I could have touched it with my hand
the Venus de' Medici; beyond, that of Titian . . . The space between is
occupied by other pictures of Raphael's, a portrait by Titian, a
Domenichino, etc., etc., all these within the circumference of a small
semi-circle no larger than one of your own rooms. This is a spot where a
man feels his own insignificance and may well learn to be humble." The
Tribune is a slippery place for people like Mendelssohn to study humility
in. They generally take two steps away from it for one they take towards
it. I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for having sat two
hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at his watch to see if
his two hours were up. I wonder how often he told himself that he was
quite as big a gun, if the truth were known, as any of the men whose
works he saw before him, how often he wondered whether any of the
visitors were recognizing him and admiring him for sitting such a long
time in the same chair, and how often he was vexed at seeing them pass
him by and take no notice of him. But perhaps if the truth were known
his two hours was not quite two hours.

Returning to Mr Pontifex, whether he liked what he believed to be the
masterpieces of Greek and Italian art or no he brought back some copies
by Italian artists, which I have no doubt he satisfied himself would bear
the strictest examination with the originals. Two of these copies fell
to Theobald's share on the division of his father's furniture, and I have
often seen them at Battersby on my visits to Theobald and his wife. The
one was a Madonna by Sassoferrato with a blue hood over her head which
threw it half into shadow. The other was a Magdalen by Carlo Dolci with
a very fine head of hair and a marble vase in her hands. When I was a
young man I used to think these pictures were beautiful, but with each
successive visit to Battersby I got to dislike them more and more and to
see "George Pontifex" written all over both of them. In the end I
ventured after a tentative fashion to blow on them a little, but Theobald
and his wife were up in arms at once. They did not like their father and
father-in-law, but there could be no question about his power and general
ability, nor about his having been a man of consummate taste both in
literature and art--indeed the diary he kept during his foreign tour was
enough to prove this. With one more short extract I will leave this
diary and proceed with my story. During his stay in Florence Mr Pontifex
wrote: "I have just seen the Grand Duke and his family pass by in two
carriages and six, but little more notice is taken of them than if I, who
am utterly unknown here, were to pass by." I don't think that he half
believed in his being utterly unknown in Florence or anywhere else!




CHAPTER V


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.




CHAPTER VI


Mr Pontifex was not the man to trouble himself much about his motives.
People were not so introspective then as we are now; they lived more
according to a rule of thumb. Dr Arnold had not yet sown that crop of
earnest thinkers which we are now harvesting, and men did not see why
they should not have their own way if no evil consequences to themselves
seemed likely to follow upon their doing so. Then as now, however, they
sometimes let themselves in for more evil consequences than they had
bargained for.

Like other rich men at the beginning of this century he ate and drank a
good deal more than was enough to keep him in health. Even his excellent
constitution was not proof against a prolonged course of overfeeding and
what we should now consider overdrinking. His liver would not
unfrequently get out of order, and he would come down to breakfast
looking yellow about the eyes. Then the young people knew that they had
better look out. It is not as a general rule the eating of sour grapes
that causes the children's teeth to be set on edge. Well-to-do parents
seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to the children lies in the
parents eating too many sweet ones.

I grant that at first sight it seems very unjust, that the parents should
have the fun and the children be punished for it, but young people should
remember that for many years they were part and parcel of their parents
and therefore had a good deal of the fun in the person of their parents.
If they have forgotten the fun now, that is no more than people do who
have a headache after having been tipsy overnight. The man with a
headache does not pretend to be a different person from the man who got
drunk, and claim that it is his self of the preceding night and not his
self of this morning who should be punished; no more should offspring
complain of the headache which it has earned when in the person of its
parents, for the continuation of identity, though not so immediately
apparent, is just as real in one case as in the other. What is really
hard is when the parents have the fun after the children have been born,
and the children are punished for this.