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As he walked very pompously and gravely down the village street, his heart glowed within him at the thought of the long struggle which he had maintained against misfortune. He passed over in his mind all the successive borrowings and speculations and makeshifts and ruses which the firm had resorted to.
Bit by bit the painful story came out the same familiar story, only infinitely aggravated, of high play, losses, then still higher play in a desperate hope of recovery, and finally, the confession of heavy borrowings, of notes of hand given and accepted and now falling due. "That's the devil of it the time's up and they're due for payment," wound up Tony hoarsely. "Payment!
And there began at Highcourt a régime of retrenchment, bitterly fought by Adelle the rich man's poverty where there is no actual want, but a series of petty curtailments and borrowings and sometimes a real shortness of cash, almost as squalid as the commoner sort of poverty.
Pitt's sinking fund, when borrowed money was repaid with further borrowings; so that a corresponding roundabout method for manning the navy may have had attractions for some people. A conclusive reason why it was not adopted is that its adoption would have been possible only at the cost of disorganising such a great industrial undertaking as our maritime trade.
What poet has been so alert to recognize the master-spirits of his own time and his father's? De Meung and Granson among the French Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio of the Italians each comes in for his share of praise from Chaucer, or of the princely borrowings which are still more eloquent than praise. Yet, for all this, Chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of criticism.
Such likenesses were more common in Mozart's day than they were a century ago; they were more common in Handel's day than in Mozart's; they are almost as common in our day as they were in Handel's, but now we explain them as being the products of "unconscious cerebration," whereas in the eighteenth century they were frank borrowings in which there was no moral obliquity; for originality then lay as much in treatment as in thematic invention, if not more.
His gross misrule gave rise to movements which were to exercise far-reaching effects upon his realm, while his continual and enormous borrowings, leading to a state of semibankruptcy, introduced the principle of foreign control over the finances of his empire. A conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution, finally deposed him. A fatvá of the muftí denounced his incapacity and extravagance.
Des Esseintes would gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which those marionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet's impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses.
But truly all this glory hastened to decay, after our great master had been shot with three bullets on the field of Lutzen; wherefore, finding that Fortune had changed sides, that the borrowings and lendings went on as before out of our pay, while the caduacs and casualties were all cut off, I e'en gave up my commission, and took service with Wallenstein, in Walter Butler's Irish regiment."
I suspect that both propositions are true. Each feeds on the other. I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings in English have been as mechanical and external a process as they are generally represented to have been. There was something about the English drift as early as the period following the Norman Conquest that welcomed the new words.
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