The Miser and His Friends

It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by
some special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep a man
sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the State may
remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked; when
the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.

The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been
gibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not merely
because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an aesthete--that is,
an erotomaniac. He not only tortured other people's bodies; he tortured
his own soul into the same red revolting shapes. Though he came quite
early in Roman Imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble
emperors, yet for us the Roman Empire was never quite cleansed of that
memory of the sexual madman. The populace or barbarians from whom we come
could not forget the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth,
saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar,
and looked up and saw a statue without a head.

It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, from
which, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XI was a
very patient and practical man of the world; but (like many good business
men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and the torturer clung
about everything he did, even when it was right. And just as the great
Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, so even the silver
splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul, has never painted
out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis XI. Whenever the
unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible savour that humanity
finds still in its nostrils. Now in our time the unhealthy man is on top;
but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; or mad on statecraft, like
Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Our tyrant is not the satyr
or the torturer; but the miser.

The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote;
but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser had some
touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collected gold--a
substance that can really be admired for itself, like ivory or old oak.
An old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of the simple ardour,
something of the mystical materialism, of a child who picks out yellow
flowers. Gold is but one kind of coloured clay, but coloured clay can be
very beautiful. The modern idolater of riches is content with far less
genuine things. The glitter of guineas is like the glitter of buttercups,
the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells, compared with the dreary