The Crown of Wild Olive
be paid, it represents either the debtor's wealth, or his ability and
willingness; that is to say, either wealth existing in his hands
transferred to him by the creditor, or wealth which, as he is at some
time surely to return it, he is either increasing, or, if diminishing,
has the will and strength to reproduce. A sound currency therefore, as
by its increase it represents enlarging debt, represents also enlarging
means; but in this curious way, that a certain quantity of it marks the
deficiency of the wealth of the country from what it would have been if
that currency had not existed.[41] In this respect it is like the
detritus of a mountain; assume that it lies at a fixed angle, and the
more the detritus, the larger must be the mountain; but it would have
been larger still, had there been none.
83. Farther, though, as above stated, every man possessing money has
usually also some property beyond what is necessary for his immediate
wants, and men possessing property usually also hold currency beyond
what is necessary for their immediate exchanges, it mainly determines
the class to which they belong, whether in their eyes the money is an
adjunct of the property, or the property of the money. In the first case
the holder's pleasure is in his possessions, and in his money
subordinately, as the means of bettering or adding to them. In the
second, his pleasure is in his money, and in his possessions only as
representing it. (In the first case the money is as an atmosphere
surrounding the wealth, rising from it and raining back upon it; but in
the second, it is as a deluge, with the wealth floating, and for the
most part perishing in it.[42]) The shortest distinction between the men
is that the one wishes always to buy, and the other to sell.
84. Such being the great relations of the classes, their several
characters are of the highest importance to the nation; for on the
character of the store-holders chiefly depend the preservation, display,
and serviceableness of its wealth; on that of the currency-holders, its
distribution; on that of both, its reproduction.
We shall, therefore, ultimately find it to be of incomparably greater
importance to the nation in whose hands the thing is put, than how much
of it is got; and that the character of the holders may be conjectured
by the quality of the store; for such and such a man always asks for
such and such a thing; nor only asks for it, but if it can be bettered,
betters it: so that possession and possessor reciprocally act on each
other, through the entire sum of national possession. The base nation,
asking for base things, sinks daily to deeper vileness of nature and
weakness in use; while the noble nation, asking for noble things, rises
daily into diviner eminence in both; the tendency to degradation being
surely marked by "[Greek: ataxia];" that is to say, (expanding the Greek
thought), by carelessness as to the hands in which things are put,
consequent dispute for the acquisition of them, disorderliness in the
accumulation of them, inaccuracy in the estimate of them, and bluntness
in conception as to the entire nature of possession.
85. The currency-holders always increase in number and influence in
proportion to the bluntness of nature and clumsiness of the
store-holders; for the less use people can make of things, the more they
want of them, and the sooner weary of them, and want to change them for
something else; and all frequency of change increases the quantity and
power of currency. The large currency-holder himself is essentially a
person who never has been able to make up his mind as to what he will
have, and proceeds, therefore, in vague collection and aggregation, with
more and more infuriate passion, urged by complacency in progress,
vacancy in idea, and pride of conquest.
While, however, there is this obscurity in the nature of possession of
currency, there is a charm in the seclusion of it, which is to some
people very enticing. In the enjoyment of real property, others must
partly share. The groom has some enjoyment of the stud, and the gardener
of the garden; but the money is, or seems, shut up; it is wholly
enviable. No one else can have part in any complacencies arising from
it.
The power of arithmetical comparison is also a great thing to
unimaginative people. They know always they are so much better than they
were, in money; so much better than others, in money; but wit cannot be
so compared, nor character. My neighbour cannot be convinced that I am
wiser than he is, but he can, that I am worth so much more; and the
universality of the conviction is no less flattering than its clearness.
Only a few can understand,--none measure--and few will willingly adore,
superiorities in other things; but everybody can understand money,
everybody can count it, and most will worship it.
86. Now, these various temptations to accumulation would be politically
harmless if what was vainly accumulated had any fair chance of being
wisely spent. For as accumulation cannot go on for ever, but must some
day end in its reverse--if this reverse were indeed a beneficial
distribution and use, as irrigation from reservoir, the fever of
gathering, though perilous to the gatherer, might be serviceable to the
community. But it constantly happens (so constantly, that it may be
stated as a political law having few exceptions), that what is
unreasonably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into
whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or
else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful, both in being indulged by
the rich and witnessed by the poor. So that the _mal tener_ and _mal
dare_ are as correlative as complementary colours; and the circulation
of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and
full of warmth, like the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and
concentrated at a point, changes into the alternate suction and
surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true meaning
of that marvellous fable, "infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in matter of
meditation."[43]
87. It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so
that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through
whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only.
Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and
Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and
in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types
which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse,
the two primal declarers of moral discovery, Homer and Plato, are partly
at issue; for Plato's logical power quenched his imagination, and he
became incapable of understanding the purely imaginative element either
in poetry or painting: he therefore somewhat overrates the pure
discipline of passionate art in song and music, and misses that of
meditative art. There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of
Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him
dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting
the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a
rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how
right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck
that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton),
not to speak of the great sculptors and painters of every age, have
permitted themselves, though full of all nobleness and wisdom, to coin
idle imaginations of the mysteries of eternity, and guide the faiths of
the families of the earth by the courses of their own vague and
visionary arts: while the indisputable truths of human life and duty,
respecting which they all have but one voice, lie hidden behind these
veils of phantasy, unsought, and often unsuspected. I will gather
carefully, out of Dante and Homer, what, in this kind, bears on our
subject, in its due place; the first broad intention of their symbols
may be sketched at once.
88. The rewards of a worthy use of riches, subordinate to other ends,
are shown by Dante in the fifth and sixth orbs of Paradise; for the
punishment of their unworthy use, three places are assigned; one for the
avaricious and prodigal whose souls are lost, (_Hell_, canto 7); one for
the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are capable of purification,
(_Purgatory_, canto 19); and one for the usurers, of whom _none_ can be
redeemed (_Hell_, canto 17). The first group, the largest in all hell
("gente piu che altrove troppa," compare Virgil's "quae maxima turba"),
meet in contrary currents, _as the_ _waves of Charybdis_, casting
weights at each other from opposite sides. This weariness of contention
is the chief element of their torture; so marked by the beautiful lines
beginning "Or puoi, figliuol," &c.: (but the usurers, who made their
money inactively, _sit_ on the sand, equally without rest, however. "Di
qua, di la, soccorrien," &c.) For it is not avarice, but _contention_
for riches, leading to this double misuse of them, which, in Dante's
light, is the unredeemable sin. The place of its punishment is guarded
by Plutus, "the great enemy," and "la fiera crudele," a spirit quite
different from the Greek Plutus, who, though old and blind, is not
cruel, and is curable, so as to become far-sighted. ([Greek: ou typhlos
all' oxy blepon].--Plato's epithets in first book of the _Laws_.) Still
more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of
Goethe in the second part of _Faust_, who is the personified power of
wealth for good or evil--not the passion for wealth; and again from the
Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's
Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and
Competition, or Evil Commerce; because, as I showed before, this kind of
commerce "makes all men strangers;" his speech is therefore
unintelligible, and no single soul of all those ruined by him _has
recognizable features_.
On the other hand, the redeemable sins of avarice and prodigality are,
in Dante's sight, those which are without deliberate or calculated
operation. The lust, or lavishness, of riches can be purged, so long as
there has been no servile consistency of dispute and competition for
them. The sin is spoken of as that of degradation by the love of earth;
it is purified by deeper humiliation--the souls crawl on their bellies;
their chant is, "my soul cleaveth unto the dust." But the spirits thus
condemned are all recognizable, and even the worst examples of the
thirst for gold, which they are compelled to tell the histories of
during the night, are of men swept by the passion of avarice into
violent crime, but not sold to its steady work.
89. The precept given to each of these spirits for its deliverance
is--Turn thine eyes to the lucre (lure) which the Eternal King rolls
with the mighty wheels. Otherwise, the wheels of the "Greater Fortune,"
of which the constellation is ascending when Dante's dream begins.
Compare George Herbert--
"Lift up thy head;
Take stars for money; stars, not to be told
By any art, yet to be purchased."
And Plato's notable sentence in the third book of the _Polity_.--"Tell
them they have divine gold and silver in their souls for ever; that they
need no money stamped of men--neither may they otherwise than impiously
mingle the gathering of the divine with the mortal treasure, _for
through that which the law of the multitude has coined, endless crimes
have been done and suffered; but in their's is neither pollution nor
sorrow_."
90. At the entrance of this place of punishment an evil spirit is seen
by Dante, quite other than the "Gran Nemico." The great enemy is obeyed