Few frailties of mankind have been more bitterly scouted than that of meanness in money matters. Of the two, prodigality has been thought the better. The man who is poor has not been censured for being careful; rather has he been praised for not being ashamed to own his poverty. But the spectacle of the rich man hoarding his wealth and not living according to his means has always excited the displeasure of mankind--not only, perhaps, because money kept in store seems for the time useless, but because if expended it would be very acceptable to its recipients. The world has commended the man who gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist.
Meanness has not been confined to the obscure; it has had some distinguished votaries--as, for example, his Gracious Majesty King James I., whose economical propensities were notorious. Of him it was admirably written that
'At Christ Church "Marriage," done before the King,
Lest those learn'd mates should want an offering,
The King himself did offer--What, I pray?
He offer'd, twice or thrice, to go away.'
Take, again, the great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet 'On a High Bridge over a Small Stream at Blenheim':
'The lofty arch his high ambition shows,
The stream an emblem of his bounty flows.'
Garrick was accused of money-grubbing, and his weakness in that respect was the subject of more than one smart jest by Foote. When somebody,
apropos of a remark made by Garrick on the parsimony of others, asked, 'Why on earth doesn't Garrick take the beam out of his own eye before attacking the mote in other people's?'--Foote replied, 'He is not sure of selling the timber.' And again, when Garrick, after dropping a guinea and failing to find it, said it had 'gone to the devil, he thought,' Foote remarked, 'Well, David, let you alone for making a guinea go farther than anybody else'--a repartee which was perhaps in the mind of Shirley Brooks when, referring to the excellence of Scotch shooting at long distances, he wrote:
'But this we all knew
That a Scotchman can do--
Make a small piece of metal go awfully far.'
Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an 'Inquest Extraordinary':
'Found dead, a rat--no case could sure be harder:
Verdict--Confined a week in Eldon's larder.'
We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over the proper pronunciation of the legal term 'lien'--the former calling it 'lion,' and the latter 'lean'--Jekyll produced the following:
'Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you mean
By saying the Chancellor's
lion is
lean?
D'ye think that his kitchen's so bad as all that,
That nothing within it can ever get fat?'
Of Lord Kenyon, another judge of like inhospitable tendencies, someone said that in his house it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour. On another occasion it was remarked that 'in his lordship's kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;' to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, 'Spits! in the name of common-sense, don't talk about his spits--for nothing turns on them!' When his lordship died, the words 'Mors Janua
Vita' were by an error of the undertaker painted on the coffin; but, someone commenting on the substitution of 'Vita' for 'Vitae,' Lord Ellenborough protested that there was no mistake. Kenyon, he declared, had directed that it should be 'Vita,' so that his estate might be saved the expense of a diphthong.
Most people know the story of Foote and Lord Stormont, the latter of whom had asked the former to dinner, and had placed before him wine served in the smallest of decanters and dispensed in the smallest of glasses. The peer enlarged upon the growth and age of the liquor; whereupon the player, holding up one of the glasses, demurely said, 'It is very little of its age!' This recalls an experience of Theodore Hook, when invited to dine with an unnamed nobleman, at the Star and Garter, Richmond. There were four of the party, and when covers were removed it was found that the fare consisted of four loin chops, four mealy potatoes, and a pint of sherry. These things despatched, the peer asked Hook for a song, and the wit responded with, of all things in the world, the National Anthem, which he gave correctly until, arriving at the line 'Happy and glorious,' he added--as if under the influence of drink--'A pint between four of us--God save the King!' A different form of stinginess, it would seem, was shown by Brigham Young, when (if we may believe the tale) he gave as a reason for marrying a certain male-garbed lady-doctor, that he would be able to have her clothes 'made down' for his boys.
The mean host has always been a special target for the scorn of his fellows. It was a Greek satirist who related how
'A miser in his chamber saw a mouse,
And cry'd, dismay'd, "What dost thou in my house?"
She, with a laugh, "Good landlord, have no fear,
'Tis not for board, but lodging, I came here."'
And since then the flood of banter has rolled on. Herrick complains of an unknown person that he invited him home to eat, and showed him there much plate but little meat. Garrick (who had evidently again forgotten the mote and the beam) wrote of a certain nobleman who had built a big mansion:
'A little house would best accord
With you, my very little lord!
And then exactly matched would be
Your house and hospitality!'
Much in the same way, Richard Graves wrote of the master of a house which was well kept but not open to company:
'If one may judge by rooms so neat,
It costs you more in mops than meat!'
Note, again, Egerton Warburton's versification of a remark attributed to Lord Alvanley. A gentleman had drawn attention to the fact that his house was furnished
a la Louis Quatorze:
'"Then I wish," said a guest, "when you ask us to eat,
You would furnish your board
a la Louis Dixhuit.
The eye, can it feast when the stomach is starving?
Pray less of your gilding and more of your carving."'
John Headley, describing dinner at one Lady Anne's, tells us that
'A silver service loads the board,
Of eatables a slender hoard;'
and the sarcasm reminds one of the address with which Theodore Hook once bore himself under somewhat similar circumstances. Invited to dine with an old lady, he was horrified when the servant, lifting the cover, displayed a couple of chops. 'Mr. Hook,' said the hostess, 'you see your dinner.' 'Thank you, ma'am,' observed Hook; 'but where's yours?'
The niggardliness which displays itself in smaller subscriptions to public or private objects than the donor's means will justify has naturally met with keen reproach. Herrick has a quatrain directed against the failing; and everyone remembers the lines about the man who declared that at the sound of woe his hand was always open:
'Your hand is open, to be sure,
But there is nothing in it.'
Perhaps the happiest satire on meanness of this sort is contained in the anonymous couplet 'On Close-fist's Subscription':
'The charity of Close-fist, give to fame:
He has at last subscribed--how much?--his name.'
[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Stings For The Stingy