[Much has been said of late years respecting the degeneracy of a very
useful and generally respectable class of persons, termed "gentlemen's
servants;" and the unjustifiable practices of tradesmen towards people
of fashion. As is usual in hasty judgments, the many have been
stigmatized with the vices of the few: the misconduct of reckless
servants has been held forth as bespeaking the habits of the whole
class, and the misdealing cupidity of a few purveyors of fashionable
luxuries has been set down as the almost uniform rule of conduct of
the worthiest classes in the empire. Such has been the exaggeration of
a certain description of evils and abuses, which appertain rather to
the manners and customs of fashionable life than to the sphere of the
useful or industrious classes; and in support of this position of
ours, we may be allowed to quote the following pertinent observations
from no less aristocratic authority than the _Quarterly Review_. They
occur in a notice of a few of the most recent novels of fashionable
life; in which the writer argues that there remains to be produced a
much more useful class of novels than has yet emanated from the
_silver fork school_. The immediate objects of the present remarks
are, however, to show that the artificial or even dissipated habits of
servants and the bareweight honesty of tradesmen, are brought about by
the corrupt manners of persons of fortune, who _believe themselves_ to
be the only sufferers by such evil courses.]
Society is so infinitely intersected and convolved,
"Cycle and epi-cycle, orb in orb,"
that observers who should be endowed with a sufficient portion of
perspicacity, might no doubt trace the consequences of the vices and
virtues prevailing in any section of it, through the entire social
chain. But, hitherto, those who have undertaken to describe the ways
of fashionable life, have not followed it even to its more direct and
contiguous relations with other classes of mankind. This is a defect
which it might be worth the while of any duly qualified writer to
supply. It might be well, for instance, if any such writer would so
far extend the sphere of his contemplations, as to observe and exhibit
_the effects of fashionable manners and customs upon the class of
servants, and the class of tradesmen_.
Under the former head, there may be found, perhaps, little to find
fault with on the score of mere manner and outward demeanour. To use
servants with harshness, or to be wanting in that species of
consideration for them which consists in a certain mildness and
amenity of manner, would ruffle and deform that smooth surface of
things which it is agreeable to the taste of people in high life to
see around them. Nor do they, perhaps, interfere with the comfort of
their dependents, by any undue or onerous exactions of service; for
their establishments, being for the most part calculated for show, are
more numerous than is required for use, and are therefore necessarily
underworked, except, perhaps, in the case of some poor drudges at the
bottom, who slink up and down the back stairs unseen, and whose
comfort, therefore, does not engage the attention of a family of this
class; and even these will not be oppressed with their labours, unless
when some impoverished people of fashion may find it necessary to dock
the tails of their establishments in order to keep the more prominent
portions entire. Nevertheless the exceptions which may be taken
against fashionable life, as affecting the class of servants, are of a
very grave description. Late hours and habits of dissipation in the
heads of a family make it almost impossible, especially in London, to
exercise that wholesome household discipline which is requisite to
secure the well-being of a servant. Luxury and ostentation require
that the servants of these people should be numerous; their number
unavoidably makes them idle; idleness makes them debauched; debauchery
renders them often necessitous; the affluence or the prodigality, the
indolence or indulgence; or indifference of their masters, affords
them every possible facility for being dishonest; and, beginning with
the more venial kinds of peculation, their conscience has an
opportunity of making an easy descent through the various gradations
of larceny, till the misdemeanant passes into the felon. In the
meantime, the master, taking no blame to himself, nor considering that
servants are for the most part what their masters make them, that they
are the creatures, at least, of those circumstances which their
masters throw around them, and _might_ be moulded in the generality of
cases, with almost certain effect, by the will and conduct of the
master--passes over, with an indolent and epicurean censure, the
lighter delinquencies which he may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at
his own laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the culprit
without a character, and relieves himself, at the expense of he knows
not whom, by making of a corrupted menial a desperate outcast. If it
be said that a man cannot be expected to change his mode of life for
the sake of his servants, it might be answered, that any mode of life
by which each individual indulging in it hazards the perdition of
several of his fellow-creatures, _ought_ to be changed, and cannot be
persevered in without guilt. But even if no such sacrifice were
insisted upon, there remain means by which the evil might be
mitigated.
In the first place, the adherence to honesty on the part of the
masters might be exemplary; whereas their actual measure of honesty
would perhaps be indicated with sufficient indulgence, if they were
described (in the qualified language which Hamlet applies to himself)
to be "indifferent honest." There is a currency of untruth in daily
use amongst fashionable people for purposes of convenience, which
proceeds to a much bolder extent than the social euphemisms by which
those of the middle classes also, not perhaps without some occasional
violation of their more tender consciences, intimate a wish to be
excused from receiving a guest. Fashionable people, moreover, are the
most unscrupulous smugglers and buyers of smuggled goods, and have
less difficulty than others and less shame, in making various illicit
inroads upon the public property and revenue. It is not to be denied
that these practices are, in point of fact, a species of lying and
cheating; and the latter of them bears a close analogy to the sort of
depredation in which the dishonesty of a servant commonly commences.
To a servant it must seem quite as venial an offence to trench upon
the revenues of a duke, as to the duke it may seem to defraud the
revenues of a kingdom. Such proceedings, if not absolutely to be
branded as dishonest, are not at least altogether honourable; they are
such as may be more easily excused in a menial than in a gentleman.
Nor can it ever be otherwise than of evil example to make truth and
honesty matters of degree.
But there is a worse evil in the manners of this country in regard to
servants. It is rarely that they are considered in any other light
than as mechanical instruments. It unfortunately belongs very little
to our national character to feel what the common brotherhood of
humanity requires of us in a relation with our fellow-creatures, which
however unequal, is so close as that of master and servant. We are not
accustomed to be sensible that it is any part of our duty to enter
into their feelings, to understand their dispositions, to acquire
their confidence, to cultivate their sympathies and our own upon some
common ground which kindness might always discover, and to communicate
with them habitually and unreservedly upon the topics which touch upon
that ground. This deficiency would perhaps be more observable in the
middle classes than in the highest, who seem generally to treat their
inferiors with less reserve, but that in the latter the scale of
establishment often removes the greater part of a man's servants from
personal communication with him. Whether most prevalent in the
fashionable or in the unfashionable classes, it is an evil which, in
the growing disunion of the several grades of society is now more than
ever, and for more reasons than one, to be regretted.
(_To be concluded in our next._)
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