Pedagogues Love Poverty
THE idea that poverty is one of the cardinal virtues was always a great comfort to teachers. If they were denied luxuries, they preferred rather to think that they denied themselves luxuries, and they were apt to regard the possession of silvern gadgets and golden gewgaws, not to mention twelvecylinder rolling stock, as indicative of the Sordid Soul. When I was a struggling Assistant Professor in a small college, I had the misfortune to be presented by my father-in-law (who was a Sordid Soul) with a Lincoln roadster. It stood between me and the esteem of my colleagues. A casual conversation with one of them would be broken off as with hardened eyes he looked out of the window to remark, ‘ Here comes your wife for you, driving that movable palace of yours.’ There was pity in his voice, and as I drove off he made a point of passing me in his battered Ford and bestowing a glance on me such as only the real snob of poverty can command. He little knew how eagerly I would have exchanged my Lincoln for his Ford could I have transferred with it the bills for gasoline and tires.
In the old days it was always a treat to hear any college teacher pronounce the words ‘bond salesman.’ Half sneer, half snort, it expressed his opinion of bond salesmen, graduates who became bond salesmen, and, in fact, all the contempt that lucre can elicit or barter inspire. Whenever a promising student was graduated and became a bond salesman, it was, according to the old formula, because his father had forced him into the business. He was made for Higher Things. Poor boy! But still, all young men must have bread and butter, and most of them wish to marry. The Professor was no bigot. He would not have insisted that his pets forgo the necessities of life and defy their sordid parents. But what a pity, what a pity!
The situation had another side. Occasionally the boy, after proving himself a very incompetent bond salesman, would be permitted by his father, probably in a fit of complete discouragement, to return to the Academy and continue his studies to prepare himself for a pedagogical career. Then the discreet rejoicings appropriate to the triumph of the Higher Things of Life would burst loose. The Professor whose protégé was returning would stop his colleagues on the campus with: ‘Have you heard? Jones is coming back. He had a splendid opening before him in his father’s business, but he has turned it down to continue his research in Anthropology. Courageous of him, was n’t it?’
But now, at this present writing, Jones, who so lamentably failed as purveyor of bonds, has completed his studies, and is happily drawing his regular salary as Assistant Professor. His father’s bond business is inert, and the young man sends home monthly fractions of his surplus wealth to keep the wolf from the paternal door.
The cartoon used to represent the old Professor of Economics shambling down the Avenue in his moth-eaten raiment while past him whizzed the bloated capitalist who had been his pupil. All that is changed now. The salary once scarcely adequate for readymade clothes and secondhand Fords still comes in with clockwork regularity amid a world in which everything else has gone irregular. Prices have tumbled, and academic circles make merry where once they sipped their ascetic glass of milk and crunched their dry toast. Now down the Avenue speeds the Professor of Economics in his Packard, while shambling along the street, clad in moth-eaten raiment, wanders his ex-student who had such shining prospects in Wall Street. While urban society dismisses its servants and remembers wistfully the parties it can no longer afford, from the Professor’s house comes the blare of an expensive orchestra, and his own children and those of his colleagues gayly whirl, their cheeks flushed with vintage wines, their clothes — bought for almost nothing at the bankruptcy sales of the best tailors and couturiers — elegant in every particular.
Meanwhile the virtues of poverty are no longer insisted upon by pedagogues. They have discovered in themselves a liking for caviar and for front seats in the orchestra which hitherto they so heartily scorned in others. The fox did not jump to the grapes; the grapes accommodatingly dropped plump into his mouth. He chews them and, lo, they are sweet.
There is only one course open to the bond salesman. Surely now he is learning how vulgar are the luxuries of life, how noble the aspects of poverty. Surely in some broker’s office an old man shakes his head over a promising junior clerk who abandoned the sweet asceticism of high finance for the fleshpots of pedagogy. But when he is at his saddest his partner enters the office, face shining with triumph. ‘Have you heard the news? Young Jones has come back. His father, Professor Jones, insisted on his going into teaching and the boy had a brilliant career as teacher before him. But after a year of it he just could n’t go on. I call that pretty courageous of him, don’t you?’
MAURICE HUGHES