Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt - David Graham Phillips - Страница 4

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You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley.

Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara.

The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect working of the law of combination which steam and electricity established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities. First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business, the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now; the rest must soon come.

The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide—from Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief. There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly.

A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels, apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings, from two to six millions.

And the whole city—business quarters and industrial, rich quarters and poor—is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes.

Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels.

As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers. To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of luxury—enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers. Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred thousand for a string of pearls—these are prices which salesmen will give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale.

Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a country place in summer?

The explanation is—the multi-millionaire.

There are in New York City to-day upward of a thousand fortunes of two or more millions. About one-fourth of these are of more than ten millions. There are no less than forty-eight fortunes of more than forty millions, about twenty of these being more than seventy-five millions, and half a dozen of them between seventy-five millions and the mountainous aggregations of the Oil King—three-quarters of a billion, with an income beyond forty-five millions a year.

There is no way of estimating the number of fortunes of from three-quarters of a million to two millions. The income of a million dollars, safely invested, is about forty thousand a year. Many New York men—several thousands—have from their profession or their business annual incomes, available for living expenses, of forty thousand or thereabouts, yet their holdings of property are small. But they belong in the millionaire class because they spend money like the millionaires and are of the most strenuous part of the plutocracy.

It is the multi-millionaires who set and force the pace—the families with incomes of more than a quarter of a million a year. “A man with a hundred thousand a year,” said the late Pierre Lorillard, with humorous seriousness, “is in the unhappy position where he can see what a good time he could have if he only had the money.” And he added that easy circumstances meant “a thousand dollars a day—and expenses.”

Properly and comfortably to live in the style which New York most envies and admires and encourages, a family should have an income of three-quarters of a million at least. But by economy and abstention from too great self-indulgence, and by Spartan resistance to many fascinating temptations, they may keep up the appearances of a very high degree of luxury on a quarter of a million a year. Of course, they cannot have very many or very grand houses; they must not think of racing stables; they would do well to keep out of yachts; they must expect to be frequently and far outshone in jewels and in entertainments; they must keep down their largess, their benevolences. But they can have a small house in town, one or two more in the country, can entertain creditably if they do not entertain too often, and can live—if they are prudent—free from the harassments of money cares.

The quickest way to get at the reason for this curious state of affairs, that may seem to many a flamboyant jest rather than conservatively presented reality, is to look at the life of the typical New York multi-millionaire of the extravagant class. There are multi-millionaires, scores of them, who do not belong in this extravagant class; but there are not so many outside of it now as there were five years ago.

Our up-to-date, luxury-hunting, luxury-teaching Mr. Multi-Millionaire has a fortune which is estimated at thirty millions, but is ten millions more or less in the widest fluctuations of the stock market. His income is about a million and a half a year, but he usually spends three-quarters of a million, and relies upon speculation to put him in funds for extraordinary expenditures, such as a new house, a large gift to education or charity, a large purchase of pictures or jewels.

As human beings compare themselves only with those in better circumstances, he counts himself poor rather than rich—his fellow-citizens, the Oil King, and the Copper King, and the Sugar King, and the Steel King, and the Telegraph King, and the Tobacco King, and the Real Estate King are what he calls rich. He thinks himself unlucky rather than lucky; he avoids intimacy with men of smaller fortunes and no fortunes unless he has known them long, because he suspects that he is usually sought with a view to exploitation—and he is not far from right. He thinks he is opposed to ostentation, severely criticises his richer neighbors and loudly applauds frugality.

He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard; a daughter nine years old.

They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences.

First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until the first of October, and when the various members of the family make flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season. They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings.

Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the Adirondacks—the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have a place in the Berkshire Hills—but they do not go there now and they are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an ocean greyhound—last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded his father to start a racing stable—a small one with fifteen or twenty thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand dollars a year—he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries, fifteen to twenty thousand a year.

Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means.

For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!

There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards—house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts—are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up.

In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view.