The Representation of Business in English Literature. Группа авторов

      Timon has no sense of serving the community. He uses his wealth only to indulge his own vanity. His dining-room is described as a temple, the object of his worship being himself. Pope had to admit, however, that Mandeville had a point when he claimed that the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy stimulated economic growth. As he conceded of Timon:

      Yet hence the Poor are cloath’d, the Hungry fed;

      Health to himself, and to his Infants bread

      The Lab’rer bears: What his hard Heart denies,

      His charitable Vanity supplies.³¹

      Yet such side-effects of luxury and vanity were not as beneficial to society in Pope’s view as an economy in harmony with nature. The Man of Ross with his traditional patriarchal ways stimulated economic activity more naturally than did Timon. This is symbolised by their variant uses of water. Thus the Man of Ross conducted water from the dry rock:

      Not to the skies in useless columns tost,

      Or in proud falls magnificently lost,

      But clear and artless, pouring thro’ the plain

      Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.

      At Timon’s villa:

      Two Cupids squirt before; a Lake behind

      Improves the keenness of the Northern Wind.

      After Timon’s death the estate will be developed more in conformity with nature, so that

      Another age shall see the golden Ear

      Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre,

      Deep Harvests bury all his pride has plann’d,

      And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.³²

      Swift drew a similar contrast between a patriarchal landlord practising traditional methods of estate management and upstart landowners exploiting new techniques in the persons of Lord Munodi and his neighbours whom Gulliver met in Balnibari. Munodi is presented as an archetypal patriarch. “Everything about him,” Gulliver recorded, “was magnificent, regular and polite.” He treated the traveller with much kindness and in a most hospitable manner in his town house and then took him to his country seat, where Gulliver did not “remember to have seen a more delightful prospect.” The estate was divided into neat and prosperous farms, while the house was “a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture.” Gulliver notes that the neighbouring lands are barren in contrast, but Munodi confesses that his old-fashioned methods are derided by his neighbours and that

      he doubted he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode; destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form, as modern usage required; and give the same directions to all his tenants.³³

      The severest condemnation of businesslike methods of estate management found expression in a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. Goldsmith linked changes in the countryside to the rise of luxury which in his view caused a rise in the standard of living for the privileged classes but not to the mass of the rural population: “the rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay.” Auburn, an idyllic example of a traditional community, is transformed by a “tyrant,” “one only master” who “grasps the whole domain,” and “trade’s unfeeling train” into “The Deserted Village.” “The man of wealth and pride,” like Timon, “has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth” in order to extend the bounds of his country house. Worse still, he has enclosed “the fenceless fields” and even the common land. As a result the villagers are forced out to seek a livelihood either in a town or in the colonies.

      Thus fares the land by luxury betrayed,

      In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed;

      But verging to decline, its splendours rise,

      Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;

      While scourged by famine from the smiling land,

      The mournful peasant leads his humble band,

      And while he sinks, without one arm to save,

      The country blooms—a garden and a grave.³⁴

      Other writers were more inclined to applaud than to deplore what they saw as the refreshing of the landed classes by new entrants from the business community. Addison made this quite clear by the contrast he drew between the traditional landlord, Sir Roger de Coverley, and the policy which Sir Andrew Freeport intended to adopt towards the estate he acquired through commercial success. Sir Roger is an archetypal patriarch, “the best master in the world,” with “a mixture of the father and the master of the family.” “Family” is here used to denote Sir Roger’s household as well as his immediate kin. His servants have a particular fondness for him, greeting him with joy when he makes his way from London to his Worcestershire seat in the company of Mr. Spectator:

      some of them could not refrain from tears at the sight of their old master, and every one of them pressed forward to do something for him, and seemed discouraged if they were not employed.

      The baronet’s kindness to his servants extended to their children, so that he paid the premium for his coachman’s grandson to become apprenticed. He is kind to his tenants as well as to his servants, so that “the greatest part of Sir Roger’s estate is tenanted by persons who have served himself or his ancestors.” Being a good churchman he has given all his fellow parishioners a hassock and a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. In short, as Sir Roger confides to Mr. Spectator, he “resolved to follow the steps of the most worthy of my ancestors . . . in all the methods of hospitality and good neighbourhood.” In return he is “beloved and esteemed by all about him. He receives a suitable tribute for his universal benevolence to mankind in the returns of affection and goodwill which are paid him by every one that lives within his neighbourhood.”³⁵

      Sir Roger de Coverley’s old-fashioned values are not upheld by the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport. There is an explicit rejection of the baronet’s ideas in favour of a more business-oriented ideology in a passage wherein the two members of the Spectator Club discuss charity. Sir Andrew objects to Sir Roger’s indiscriminate benefaction:

      “If to drink so many hogsheads is to be hospitable, we do not contend for the fame of that virtue; but it would be worthwhile to consider whether so many artificers at work ten days together by my appointment, or so many peasants made merry on Sir Roger’s charge, are the more obliged? . . . Sir Roger gives to his men, but I place mine above the necessity or obligation of my bounty.”³⁶

      Sir Andrew’s practical rather than sentimental approach to such matters is extolled when he buys an estate and plans to run it along lines very different from the traditional methods employed by Sir Roger:

      “This will give me great opportunity of being charitable in my way, that is, in setting my poor neighbours to work, and giving them a considerable subsistence out of their own industry. My gardens, my fishponds, my arable and pasture grounds shall be my several hospitals or rather workhouses, in which I propose to maintain a great many indigent persons who are now starving in my neighbourhood . . . . As in my mercantile employment I so disposed my affairs, that from whatever corner of the compass the wind blew it was bringing home one or other of my ships; I hope, as a husbandman, to contrive it so, that not a shower of rain, or a glimpse of sunshine shall fall upon my estate without bettering some part of it, and contributing to the products of the season.”³⁷

      Although Robinson Crusoe extolled the advantages of the middle station of life at the outset of his career, he ended it as a substantial landowner and proprietor of an overseas colony. Walter Shandy, the presumed father of Sterne’s Tristram, was a country gentleman established at Shandy Hall at the time of Tristram’s birth, but “was originally a Turkey merchant” who “had left off business for some years in order to retreat to, and die upon, his paternal estate.”