Selections from Algernon Charles Swinburne (Poems and Ballads, 1866)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The first series of Poems and Ballads was published in 1866 and immediately met with considerable controversy and scandal largely because of its subject matter. Swinburne boldly covered topics like lesbianism, hermaphroditism, necrophilia and sadomasochism, and also made clear expressions of antitheism and pessimism more generally. In a famous review for the Saturday Review, John Morley called Swinburne a "scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair" or "the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." Swinburne's publisher withdrew the work, but Swinburne reprinted the text under another publisher accompanied by a personal justification of the work.

SUMMARY/THEMES:

A Ballad of Life
The collection begins with "A Ballad of Life" followed by "A Ballad of Death." Swinburne's imagery is immediately unexpected; in "A Ballad of Life," a woman has sorrow in her eyelids, holds a cithern of a dead lute player, and is surrounded by three men: Lust, Shame, and Fear. As he looks upon this scene, the speaker realizes that lust was love, shame was sorrow comforted, and fear was pity that was dead. Here, Swinburne revises orthodox conceptions of love, sorrow, and pity, showing their close relation to other values which may seem much more negative.
A Ballad of Death
"A Ballad of Death" continues the subject matter from "A Ballad of Life" but here, the lady has died and the speaker laments. He imagines seeing Venus, who tells him to "Arise, lift up thine eyes and see / if  any glad thing be or good / Now the best thing is taken forth of us." In the rest of the poem, the speaker fondly describes in detail the beautiful sight of the lady's corpse, with lips "Sweet still, but not now red."    
Laus Veneris (The Praise of Venus)
This poem is based on the medieval Tannhauser legend, in which the poet Tannhauser spends time with Venus in her subterranean home, emerging to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope doesn't grant it, but later realizes that he should have when the papal staff breaks out in flowers. Tannhauser has returned to Venus by that time. Edward Burne-Jones created a painting in 1879 to accompany Swinburne's poem. In the poem, the speaker can't escape his desire, though he wants escape, through death:  "Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be / Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, / Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, / Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea." The speaker also reveals clearly sadomasochistic tendencies: "Ah, with blind lips I felt for you, and found / About my neck your hands and hair enwound. / The hands that stifle and the hair that stings / I felt them fasten sharply without sound." The sharpness of desire, and its imbrication with pain directly has bearing on how the poet views his faith. Going before Christ, he realizes that he cannot receive mercy because he feels that the burning love which he feels is "more beautiful than God." The poet ultimately suggests that the intensity of his sensory and sensual experience communicated in violent yet sensual recurring images of "crushed fruit" and flames is like the intensity of Hell's fires, so what might he care that he should burn in Hell for enjoying erotic experiences in the present? Vividly, he writes, "And I forget tear and all weary things / All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings, / Feeling her face with all her eager hair / Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings..." This fire is clearly akin to "such-like flame / Shall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care, / Albeit I burn then, having felt the same?" The idea that there might be pleasure in Hell fire, if it should be like love's fire seems to be the logical extension of Swinburne's unprecedented ideas.

Isobel Armstrong succinctly reads the poem as presenting "two equally unsatisfying poles of Eros and Christ," though Eros is strong, it is not necessarily stronger than God. The matching of Hell fire with love's fire certainly suggests a kind of equality in inflicting pain.

The Triumph of Time
Written in ababccab stanzas. The speaker reproaches an unnamed lover for her infidelity: "We had grown as gods, as the gods above, / Filled from the heart to the lips with love, / Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, / O love, my love, had you loved but me!" He reflects on how time triumphs in that it perpetuates the transitoriness of all strong feelings. He laments beautifully that "It is not much that a man can save / On the sands of life, in the straits of time...Some waif washed up with the strays and spars / That ebb-tide  shows to the shore and the stars; / Weed from the water, grass from a grave, / A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme." Eventually he reaches a kind of pessimistic resolution, saying that he will surrender himself by drowning in the sea, "the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea." This is kind of a scary sweetness, though, as she is "fed with the lives of men," "subtle and cruel of heart." The speaker's reasoning, however, is that death "is the worst that comes of thee," referring to the sea, and that although she feeds on the dead, his lover has done worse by feeding on his heart. Near the end of the poem, the speaker moves abruptly to talk about how he would rather be a "singer in France of old" who had  a woman who loved him, bade him to live, and then who died right afterwards because for the speaker, "Love will not come to me now though I die, / As love came close to you, breast to breast." Ultimately though, the speaker's seemingly defiant acceptance of death doesn't really cement itself, he wonders longingly in the final lines, in reference to his lover, "...in heaven, / If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?"


Anactoria
Extreme, sadomasochistic desires are expressed in this poem which imagines Sappho's lesbian love of Anactoria: "I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated / With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead." Desire only grows, and having been satisfied, must now seek a realm beyond--the wish that the beloved may suffer pain and die: "I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, / Intense device, and superflux of pain / Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake / Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache." Cannibalism also forms a part of the speaker's desire, she expresses of Anactoria, "That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat / Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet / And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!" As suggested also in "Laus Veneris," this kind of intense love imbricated by pain is all the more attractive because it seems to rival the intensity of God: it is "crueller than Hell," "crueller than God." Ultimately it is even a resistance to God, in that the speaker refuses to be suppliant and satiated with the little things that God generally allots us with: she refuses to be "like those herds of his / Who laugh and live a little, and their kiss / Contents them, and their loves are swift and sweet..."


The Leper
In simple tetrameter lines rhymed abab, the speaker details his love of a woman who has gotten leprosy. Again his desire is in resistance to God: "Yea, though God always hated me, / And hates me now that I can kiss / Her eyes..." after she is a corpse. Everyone casts her out when she gets leprosy, but he takes her in, giving her water and bread because "such joy I had / To do the service God forbids." The poem ends with some ghastly images of her being dead for six months, while the speaker still holds "In two cold palms her cold two feet." "Her hair, half grey half ruined gold, / Thrills me and burns me in kissing it." Still, his dominion over her isn't quite enough for him, despite the radical intensity of his desire and devotion. At the end of the poem, he still envisions that "she kept at heart that other man's," and this undoubtedly yet bothers him.

Fragoletta
This poem unrestrainedly celebrates the unorthodox beauty of androgyny which the speaker claims is beautiful because of its strangeness: "I dreamed of strange lips yesterday / And cheeks wherein the ambiguous blood / Was like a rose's--yea, / A rose's when it lay / Within the bud." There's something deliciously transgressive about someone who isn't just man or woman, and the speaker feels oddly reverent towards the genitalia of a hermaphroditic individual, while also expressing sexually explicit desires without much abandon: "I dare not kiss it, lest my lip / Press harder than an indrawn breath, / And all the sweet life slip / Forth, and the sweet leaves drip, / Bloodlike, in death." The poem also connects something virginal to the strangeness ("virginal strange air") further signaling the pleasure in transgression.

Hermaphroditus
Written as four stanzas, each a modified Petrarchan love sonnet: abbaabbacdcdcd. The final sestet "cdcdcd" strongly suggests entanglement rather than the push forward of the traditional cdecde. The first sonnet describes the struggle at the center of the hermaphroditic experience: "Two loves at either blossom of thy breast / Strive until one be under and one above." There is actually quite a bit of despair in this, and the sense of entrapment paints a very different picture of hermaphroditism than "Fragoletta": "A strong desire begot on great despair, / A great despair cast out by strong desire." The second sonnet imagines a hermaphrodites as "a pleasure house" made by Love "for all the loves his kin" but ultimately a kind of mistake on Love's part because the unresolved struggle leads to Love himself not really wanting to enter in to this "pleasure house." The third sonnet offers some measure of redemption, admitting that there is yet something beautiful, other-worldly about hermaphroditism: "To what strange end hath some strange god made fair / The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?" (Yet, note that the flowers are "fruitless"). Finally, in the fourth sonnet, the speaker can't decide how he feels about hermaphrodite: there's kind of a both a love and a fear, "So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?"


Dolores (Notre-Dame Des Sept Douleurs - Our Lady of Seven Sorrows)
This poem is written in anapestic trimeter, usually a comic and light meter but in Swinburne's poem, clearly feels serious, struggling, desirous yet reverentially restrained. It is essentially an ode to Dolores, "Our Lady of Pain" (this address ends each stanza). Subtitled "Our Lady of Seven Sorrows," Swinburne makes the controversial move of linking an epithet for Virgin Mary to this pagan goddess of pain. The poet imagines briefly Dolores's origins, wondering: "Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores, / When desire took thee first by the throat?" This might suggest a development from Virgin Mary to Dolores, signaling that Dolores occupies a more advanced, mature, and ultimately more desirable way of living. Most of the poem spends time detailing the sadomasochistic pleasures that Dolores is goddess of, and prays to her to bring these pagan pleasures back to the Christ-loving world. In Blakean fashion, the speaker reverses traditional notions of virtue as a good and turns it into a vice. For example, he prefers the "raptures and roses of vice" to the "lilies and languors of virtue," associating happiness and passino with vice and laziness and wasting away with virtue. The novelty of inflicting or receiving pain is at the heart of the speaker's eagerness in what he feels to be a stilted modern age: "what new work wilt thou find for thy lover, / What new passions for daytime or night?" Here he is almost obsessive and can't help repeating the word "new" over and over again almost like a child awaiting gifts. Importantly, though, such eagerness is a result not of childishness but of great maturity: he is "wearied of sorrow and joy," key concepts of Christian morality and faith which no longer have the power to hold him. He suggests a need for a reversion back to classical times, when "the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure, / Drew bitter and perilous breath;...when the world was a steed for thy rein; / when the nations lay prone in thy porches." The speaker laments quite explicitly the Christian creed when he calls directly upon Dolores to "redeem" them, as if standing in for Christ: " What ailed us, O gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain? / Come and redeem us from virtue / Our Lady of Pain." The final line, celebrating the "Joys of thee seventy times seven" directly beats out the "seven sorrows" of Mary.

The Garden of Proserpine
This is a poem of negation in that the speaker says he is "tired of tears and laughter, / And men that laugh and weep; / Of that may come hereafter / For men that sow to reap." He rejects any sense of futurity and wishes just to sleep, the state of being which the Garden of Proserpine offers. The garden is described by a list of things that do NOT grow there, except poppies (signaling forgetfulness). Unlike many of the other poems described so far, this speaker seems completely exhausted from the intense desires which have held such a fascination before: "From too much love of living / From hope and fear set free, / We thank with brief thanksgiving / Whatever gods may be / That no life lives for ever..." Read in conjunction with poems which deal primarily with the fiery and powerful intensity of unorthodox love and its capacity for wrestling with God himself, this poem acknowledges that such intensity isn't sustainable, and calmly finds comfort in death's release from such passions.

The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Way of All Flesh, though written in the years between 1872 and 1884, was not published until 1903, after Butler's death. This was likely because the novel drew heavily from Butler's own upbringing in a strictly religious and patriarchal household. At the same time he was writing The Way of All Flesh, Butler was working on Life and Habit, a scientific work which challenges the assumption of random variation in Darwin's Origin of Species. Though an orthodox Darwinian in earlier years, Butler came to believe in the idea of "hereditary memory," unconsciously inherited from one's parents and shaped/modified throughout the generations. R.A. Streatfield, friend of Butler's and first publisher of The Way of All Flesh, suggests that the novel "ight be "taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity embodied in that book."


The publication ushered in Butler's reputation as an "anti-Victorian" and a "proto-modernist." His admirers have included late Victorians George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells as well as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce.

SUMMARY:
The Way of All Flesh is narrated by a family friend of the Pontifexes, one Mr. Overton who came to be a sort of guardian and friend of Ernest Pontifex, the oldest son of Theobald Pontifex, himself the son of George Pontifex, who made a sizable fortune as a publisher and savvy advertiser of religious texts. Though Ernest is the novel's hero, the first part of the book expends a considerable amount of space to introduce Theobald Pontifex. Theobald was the second son of George, whose strained relations with his father are in part told by the inclusion of letters between father and son. George wanted Theobald to be a clergyman, and when Theobald weakly protests, George quashes his rebellion with a threat of disinheritance. Theobald give in, and soon becomes trapped by the matchmaking Mrs. Allaby into a marriage with Christina Allaby, a woman of rather overblown romantic attachments to religion which the narrator constantly ironizes. Theobald gains a position as the rector at Battersby, and the narrator strongly suggests that Theobald isn't particularly happy with his position or his marriage, but as a generally timid character, finds a way to settle into it.

Ernest was born to Christina and Theobald in 1835. In a rather pathetic scene, George Pontifex rushes into the cellar to retrieve some water from Jordan which he had collected for the purposes of baptizing his first grandson, only to trip on a hamper and break the bottle in his haste. George's servant resourcefully sops up the water with a sponge, and at a ridiculously pompous dinner to celebrate the occasion of Ernest's birth, George pretends like nothing of the sort has happened. At this point, the somewhat secretive narrator reveals that he was in love with Alethea, Theobald's sister, but that "it is impossible for me to explain how it was that she and I never married" though "we knew that neither of us would marry anyone else." The narrator is severely critical of Ernest's upbringing: "Before Ernest could well crawl he was taught to kneel; before he could well speak he was taught to lisp the Lord's prayer, and the general confession." He offers an instance of Theobald's unjust cruelty when he beats Ernest for his inability to pronounce the word "come" (the young boy was only able to stammer out "tum"). Nevertheless, the narrator does allow that Theobald and Christina brought him up as they thought best for him.  

Christina had two more children, Joseph and Charlotte. During the unsuccessful birth of her fourth, she writes an overblown and highly melodramatic letter to Ernest and Joseph, entreating them to be pious and dutiful to their father and their God because she thought she might die. It is later revealed that Ernest wanted the narrator to include this letter (which Ernest eventually gets after Christina's actual death much later) in his account, so he does so--next to the narrator's commentary, Christina's letter is severely undercut and made light of. Soon, the Pontifexes decide to send the young Ernest to study with Dr. Skinner, the Cambridge man whom everyone knew to be a "genius" (though really a pedant, as the narrator reveals). At Dr. Skinner's in Roughborough, Ernest is subjected to monotonous and strict training in Latin and Greek. While Ernest is at Roughborough, his aunt Alethea decides to visit him, and determines also to take him on as one of her own cares. The two of them bond over their mutual interest in music, and Alethea encourages Ernest to build his own organ (hoping, secretly, that this will also help him bulk up a little and have a little more confidence as a result). Alethea even decides to move to Roughborough to further suss out if Ernest might be worthy of receiving her own money upon her death.

When Alethea falls ill suddenly, the narrator is called upon to be the executor of her will. Her conditions are that Mr. Overton would accept in trust everything which she had minus £5000 until Ernest reached the age of twenty-eight. If Ernest were to go bankrupt before then, Mr. Overton could keep the money. Additionally, Mr. Overton would be charged with investing the remaining £5000 in ways that he sees fit; these earnings would go to Ernest with Mr. Overton taking a small cut for his troubles. Back at Battersby after Alethea's death, the Pontifexes all believe that Alethea has left everything to Overton, and Theobald berates Ernest for not earning his aunt's trust enough to get her money. Ernest has some trouble in school, spending his pocket money on drinking and smoking and receiving less than ideal report cards (which the narrator includes as part of his account). Back at home for the holidays, Ernest meets a pretty servant named Ellen who, during the time when Ernest is home, gets pregnant and is sent away. Ernest doesn't know why she has been sent away, but feels bad for her, deciding to give her a silver watch (which his aunt gave him) and some money. Unfortunately, Ernest lies about what happened to the watch and his money, and his father finds out later what has happened through a pawnbroker who has received the watch from Ellen. Needless to say, he gets in no small amount of trouble with his father.


Ernest manages to make his way to Cambridge, where he does much better than at Roughborough. The narrator relays that Cambridge in 1858 was a time of relative calm, though Ernest would encounter a low-church, religiously evangelical group known as the Simeonites. Ernest at first makes fun of the Simeonites for their deliberately poor dress and austere ways, until he hears a sermon by a characteristic preacher. Ernest suddenly becomes intensely evangelical himself, experiencing a sort of sudden religious awakening which alarms his father. Ernest is soon ordained a deacon, but his religious beliefs again take a dramatic turn when he falls prey to a boy named Pryer's high church ideas when he serves as a curate. Along with Pryer, Ernest wholeheartedly embraces the idea that the masses need priestly mediation, that an elite should only have access to the Bible, and that a spiritual transformation of society on a grand scale was necessary. Their idea is to erect a "College of Spiritual Pathology" founded on systematic, scientific notions of how best to spiritually transform society. Ernest idealistically takes himself up amongst the London poor, comically trying to convert his neighbors, one of whom ends up knowing more than he does about theology. Things take a bad turn when the money Ernest gives to Pryer to put into the stock exchange is squandered and when Ernest visits a prostitute in hopes to "convert" her. In a misunderstanding of the situation, Ernest gets arrested and sentenced to six months labor. In prison, he falls ill and learns that Pryer has not only lost all of his money but also disappeared. 


In prison, Ernest turns to a more rationalistic way of looking at life. He also importantly comes to the realization that he must cut off ties with his parents, who have been responsible for his inability to have an independent mind of his own. The narrator concurs, and contends that this is actually the most Christian thing that Ernest has ever done: he was "giving up [his] father and mother for Christ's sake." After he leaves prison, Ernest decides to work his way up from the bottom of the social ladder, learning how to be a tailor. He experiences some slow but steady success. Back in London, Ernest runs into Ellen, and he ends up marrying her. The narrator reveals that he and Ellen "instinctively" don't get along; affirming how homosocial bonds inevitably become frayed when either member of a homosocial bond gets married. This antagonism that the narrator has against Ellen seems to one of the most psychologically and emotionally revealing aspects of his character thus far. The narrator's "instincts" toward Ellen turn out to be correct when Ellen ends up being an alcoholic and a bigamist--she had already been married to (and pregnant by) John, Theobald's former coachman. Between himself and Ellen, Ernest has two children, whom he sends away to be cared for, using money which Overton tell him as being from his aunt's estate. With the financial support of Overton, Ernest gets along okay, turning his attention to building up his income again and turning to literary pursuits in his spare time. Ernest even ends up making enough money to travel on the continent, and to engage in a brief (but failed) stint writing for the periodical press. Ernest is soon twenty-eight, and he inherits the money from his aunt's estate plus the profits from Overton's smart and steady investment, totaling £70,000. 


Soon after he has been made comfortable by his inheritance, Ernest receives a letter from his dying mother. He decides to visit Battersby, and finds that everything there seems the same, whereas he has changed much. He finds that subtle cutting remarks from Charlotte, Joey, or his father no longer affect him. Back in London after his mother's death, Ernest turns to writing unorthodox books "in which he insisted on saying things which no one else would say even if they could, or could even if they would." His first book proves the most successful, an anonymous collection of essays on theological and social subjects "purporting to have been written by six or seven different people," because the reviews were kept guessing that it might have been written by someone famous. Ernest books don't turn out to be successful, the narrator says, because they are "impractical," and because he didn't belong to any sort of literary "set" or "club." Ernest's only response is "wait," signaling his belief that his writings will be important to later generations. The novel concludes with the narrator calling Ernest an "advanced Radical," the first to have broken free from the molds and conventions which have shaped his family through the generations.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Butler's "anti-Victorianisms" are fairly apparent: he critiques patriarchal austerity (Theobald and George), romantic religiosity (Christina), family and marriage (tellingly, both Ernest and the narrator end up bachelors), educational systems which stunt natural development (Dr. Skinner), religious movements/fads amongst university elites (Simeonites, Pryer), and the periodical press and its reviewers, to name just a few of Butler's obvious major targets.

Butler's "proto-modernism," however, seems less apparent. I want to approach the question of The Way of All Flesh's purported proto-modernism through a view of its form. I will focus particularly on its first person narrator, his compilation techniques of letters and other historical documents from Ernest Pontifex's life, and the ways in which the account is a "bildungsroman" of Ernest Pontifex. Overall, while these different aspects of the text contribute to a potential sense of its fragmentary nature, to place Butler's work into a genealogy which culminates in Woolf or Joyce seems a bit forced. However, to say, at least, that experimental elements in Butler's novel loosens the conventions of the Victorian novel seems appropriate to what Ernest ends up doing in becoming an "advanced Radical."

The First-Person Narrator/Chronicler: All that we really know about the narrator is that he is a bachelor (though it's "impossible" for him to say why), a writer of popular burlesque drama, godfather to Ernest, and someone who has always taken a critical view of how things were done in the Pontifex family. It isn't clear why he should turn family chronicler, or why he should offer this account of Ernest as his "hero" at all. For the most part, the narrator tries to maintain some sense of distance from the story, in his telling the story through the inclusion of documents, or withholding information about his own romantic attachment to Alethea. The moment where he seems the most emotionally invested and close is his anger when Ernest marries Ellen. He concludes that his hatred for her is "instinctive" and seems to strongly indicate that he favors homosocial relationships between bachelors, and more specifically, seems to regard his relationship with Ernest as one such homosocial relationship (before this moment, the narrator styles his role as primarily guardian to Ernest). Additionally, the narrrator's attitude towards Ellen's demise is fairly callous; indeed his portrayals of other women (Christina and Charlotte, for example), with the exception of the unmarried Alethea, seem equally callous and unsympathetic. We can safely say, I think, that the narrator favors homosocial relationships between bachelors as the most enabling relationships. The homosocial desire of the narrator complicates our view of his account of Ernest: how much influence does Mr. Overton in fact have on Ernest? He suggests that Ernest ends up a bachelor free-thinker on his own, that Mr. Overton lets him "fall," and simply helps him along when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so. That Ernest ends up exactly as the narrator does, however, tends to cast some suspicion on Mr. Overton as being much more of a "guardian" than he might admit to. One wonders, finally, how sufficient of a substitute "family" this kind of homosocial community might be--after all, Alethea's bequeathal is a necessary part of what makes this possible, and also it seems good that Ernest has children who end up being productive member of society in "conventional" ways (George becomes a bargeman, and Alice marries well).

Compilations/Documents: The narrator compiles letters, report cards, sermons, musical notations, and epitaphs to support his chronicle. One letter in particular, Christina's to her sons when she thought she was going to die, is one which Ernest tells the narrator to include, which suggests a kind of collaborative aspect to the work (this notion is strengthened by the various moments where the narrator tells of how Ernest "winces" at the narrator's inclusions, as if Ernest had much to do with the narrator's writing process). This suggestion of collaboration and the inclusion of other documents don't really contribute to an overall sense of greater objectivity--practically without exception, the documents occupy a place in the narrator's text as caricatures of people who produce them or the ideologies that they represent. Christina's letter caricatures her own melodramatic religiosity, and the report card from Skinner's school tallying the number of times each boy drank or smoked satirizes its own strict inflexibility. Thus The Way of All Flesh fails to be heteroglossic in the way that many Victorian realist novels strive to be--the account is through and through Mr. Overton's because his editorship and controlling commentary subordinate these lesser texts to his master narrative.

Bildungsroman: The irony with which Overton treats Ernest's development from Roughborough to Cambridge to his "epiphany" in prison and finally to his failed marriage makes the account feel much like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist at times. Like Stephen Dedalus, Ernest gets really into certain beliefs (his Simeonite period, his high-church principles, the collaborative marriage with Ellen), only to realize suddenly that these beliefs are false. The ending reveals Ernest to be triumphant in his artistic self, a bachelor and an "advanced Radical" who cared not for the market or the present-day audience, but only to convey the ideas which he thought right despite their being likely too unorthodox for the current generation. Ernest's triumph and final incarnation is actually much more certain than Dedalus's; there isn't a "fall" coded into his name. The only potential check to this triumph is that as in the case of Bulwer-Lytton's comedy, Ernest is only finally be the kind of independent artist that he wants to be because he has the money to do so, which came to him through no exertions of his own.