carefully. Do you remember Mr. Foker, the charming young man of
fashion in “Pendennis”? His unfailing good humour, his shrewdness,
his gaudy garments, his advice to Pendennis, when he was infatuated
with Miss Fotheringay, and when he was going the pace at Oxbridge; his
love for Miss Amory and his recovery when he found out how heartless
she was? Though he plays a minor part, his character is as subtle a
delineation as any by this master hand. Now notice how we get this
blend of aristocracy and commercialism; for Foker is a true gentleman,
honourable, chivalrous, with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal of
the man of business in him, for all his idleness and eccentricity a man
not easily duped. In the “Virginians” George Warrington, when lately
married and very poor, gets to know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar
but kindly brewer, our hero’s grandfather. His father has Anglicised
himself and become Mr. Foker whose porter is of world-wide celebrity.
He marries an Earl’s daughter and yet insists on the family beverage
being served at every meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound to taste it
when he dines though the old gentleman found it disagreed with him. In
Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, we have the half-and-half beer
and the peerage, and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome we have a
less attractive type of the same class. The Newcomes are as humble in
origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. They do not parade the
family business, being bankers; but have discovered a noble ancestry.
Their family can be traced back to the “Barber Surgeon of Edward the
Confessor.” Thomas Newcome, the second founder, had however to begin
as a very intelligent factory hand who left his native Newcome, made
a moderate fortune, gallantly returned and married a girl of his own
class, and became the father of that prince of gentlemen, Colonel
Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I
confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas
flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and
philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the serious
Clapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who
marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son
is Lord Walham--all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to
this aristocratic family,--and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who
marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife
professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as
the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning
to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian
Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of
birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers,
he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now
appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s
lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd--for it
is no impeachment of a man’s natural good sense that he should have
been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But
in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred
man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial
ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of
Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening
party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by
Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher.
“The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent
haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun,
is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz
and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking
with their illustrious _confrère_ Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do
you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquent
Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped
the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after
undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew....
That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another renegade, I
deeply lament to say,--a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur
Ferchaud--”
But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could
not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself
intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was
“Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ...
the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of
three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was
the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was
amazed when with the air of the deepest humility he saluted Colonel
Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being
mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and
makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn
is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the
Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet
words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he
ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject
and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the
Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his
languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you
talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and
loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.”
Barnes is of course the villain of the piece: but the interest in his
character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect
the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow
exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness.
In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel
Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair
of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and the _motive_ is the struggle for
wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour
and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.
Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most
delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the
late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel
Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her
brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann,
to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of the young lady’s
preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would
say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever
but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted
couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an
opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank.
As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the
bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment
and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz,
when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart
... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year,
and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of
Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of
her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionable doctor
who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to
which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best
she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the
character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not
bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end.
“_Was_ my grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is:
“How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except
the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood
in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s
grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family
by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of
good family.”
Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of
society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on “some respectable
snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of
this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate
days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general
jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was
made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county
ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or
marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he
belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry
the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor
of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded
by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree
on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days
of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry that
warlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he
married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp,
the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm.
These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David
Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas
Muggins was descended.
This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that
the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having
begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang
from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose
again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron,
whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the
first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled
the land from 1100 to 1134.
One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the
delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of
Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees
as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be
regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of
Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their
ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in
his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.”
I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from
the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed,
they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the
coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at
last became a recognised power in the great world.
The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of
wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain
the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself
on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire,
and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth.
Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility.
It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt
this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and
have a _saeva indignatio_ against a great evil. This, like all his
predecessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hardness that the spirit of his
age engendered.
In all Thackeray’s novels and writings we see how ashamed the new
aristocracy was of the trades and businesses by which they made their
money and how contemptuous the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade.
Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son’s wife being a banker’s
daughter. The Newcomes conveniently forget the weaver from which they
sprang. We are sneeringly reminded that Mr. Wenham’s father was a coal
merchant; Major Pendennis conveniently forgets that his brother was a
mere apothecary. But this was not part of the old tradition of England.
A very little time before people of high birth felt no shame in being
in trade. The Nelsons are as good a family as any, yet Nelson himself
served as a common sailor before the mast, and his near relatives
kept shops in small towns. Let me read you a passage from a recently
published book on Wordsworth:
“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents,
and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held
closely indoors--serving in fact in a mercer’s shop which they kept....
In 1788 a change came, for she went to live with her uncle at Forncett
Rectory near Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon of Windsor, and in
the Summer of 1792 ... Dorothy was meeting King George III and his
family--the princesses at least ... and going to races and balls.”
Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there
was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling
of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has
had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of
employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in
integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth
in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second
generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling
of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has
put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute
prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and, before the war
at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion
as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes.
Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The
humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen,
they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to
being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they
have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present
pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former
rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree
due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced.
LECTURE VIII
SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND
I hope you will pardon the flippancy of the subject I am about to
introduce; but I may say that it is not possible to understand English
life without studying it. Though we are getting close to our own
times, yet it is evident that society has undergone an almost complete
change since the scenes were depicted in the works I am using to-day.
Surtees caught the exact moment when the change was coming; and the old
order was awaiting the signal to quit the world. In the rural England
of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ when the railway was just beginning
to invade the countryside, the hunting field was still a national
playground where neighbours met, the county family still the pivot
round which rural life moved. But everywhere are signs of the coming
change. The _nouveau riche_ was buying the old estates, and the Jewish
magnate beginning to make his appearance; but the fabric of county
society remained as yet unshaken. I can myself remember the gulf that
parted socially the county from the town, the landed gentry from the
professional classes, when the ownership of land was far more important
than the possession of wealth.
I propose to treat my subject from two aspects. First I shall take the
so-called sporting novels, which are in themselves a literature, though
I mean to confine myself practically to a single author; and, after
having touched on this subject, I shall ask you to notice how Anthony
Trollope, a writer sometimes tedious, but always observant and often
witty, deals with the hierarchy, clerical and lay, of county society.
When St. Thomas a Becket was escaping from his enemies in England,
he travelled through Flanders in humble disguise. Once, however, he
nearly betrayed himself by stopping and admiring a beautiful falcon.
Such discrimination raised the suspicion that the traveller was not a
mere peasant or itinerant merchant, but an English gentleman of rank.
However, the archbishop managed to escape detection and passed on. This
little incident, however, shows that, even in the twelfth century, an
expert knowledge of sport was deemed to be characteristic of gentility,
and Becket, who had spent his early days in the king’s court,
instinctively looked with interest on a good bird. Four centuries
later a very different archbishop of Canterbury, though he too died a
martyr’s death, was known as an excellent rider. Thomas Cranmer, the
son of a country squire, was, we are specially told, remarkable for the
firm and easy way he sat his horse. Unlike Becket, Cranmer was bred a
scholar; but, in later days, he too would have been called a sportsman.
About a century later another English primate distinguished himself
less creditably in the field. George Abbott, the Puritan predecessor
of Laud, was shooting deer; and by pure accident killed a keeper; for
which an attempt was made to declare the see of Canterbury canonically
vacant. It is much the same with less exalted ecclesiastics. In the
middle ages the clergy of England were honourably distinguished for
their morality as compared with their continental brethren. Their
besetting sin was that nothing could restrain them from hunting. The
“hunting” abbot of the middle ages was succeeded by the “hunting
parson” of later days. Thackeray’s description of the Rev. Bute Crawley
would, _mutatis mutandis_, apply to many an English clergyman, from the
earliest times down to our own days.
“A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man.... You might see his bay
mare a score of miles away from the Rectory house whenever there was a
dinner party.... He rode to hounds in a pepper-and-salt frock, and was
one of the best fishermen in the county.”
It is hardly necessary to dilate upon the sporting vocabulary
of Shakespeare; or to point out that the correct use of hunting
and shooting and hawking terms was considered as test of a man’s
gentility--nor need I appeal to the severity of the old Forest Laws and
the more modern Game Laws, both of which were powerless to restrain the
English peasants’ inveterate propensity to sport.
Little wonder is it, therefore, that there arose a veritable literature
which revolved round the pivot of sport and especially that of hunting.
I need hardly say that the conditions of the pursuit of game changed
with the state of the country. In the middle ages the greater part
of England was wooded. The greenwood was the home of the outlaw; and
it was said that a squirrel could cross England without touching
the ground. The chase was therefore pursued in glades and thickets;
and could never have been a very rapid affair. What riding was done
in the open country was connected with hawking--a very favourite
pastime. Gradually, as the country became more open and the forests
disappeared, the fox, which our ancestors regarded as vermin, began to
be looked upon as a sacred animal, because of the excellent runs he
gave. For a long time the hunting was slow and its arrangements very
primitive; those who joined in it being the squire, his friends, and
his dependants; but gradually the crack riders began to gather from
all parts to where the best hunting was to be had; and Leicestershire
became the chief centre. Fashionable hunting, as opposed to the
rural and purely local sport, seems to have begun at the time of the
Regency in the days of the “dandies”; and I have a recollection of
an oft-quoted description by “Nimrod” of the way in which a stranger
was gradually recognised and welcomed when he came among the hunting
fraternity at Melton Mowbray. But it is my intention to speak of a
later period when hunting had become a sport in which men, who had no
connection with the locality, came down from London to take part. In
olden days the town sportsman was a theme of constant derision. John
Gilpin’s ride, and Mr. Winkle’s difficulties with his horse, were
typical stories. The caricaturists were never tired of depicting the
quaint and somewhat dangerous antics of the Londoner with a shotgun,
and jokes at his ignorance of all sports were the stock in trade of the
humourist. Gradually however these began to fall flat. As the country
became accessible, first by good roads, and then by railways, men from
London joined in its pastimes, and proved themselves anything but
ridiculous where horse and gun were concerned.
“Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour” is valuable for our purpose because it
illustrates so many sides of English country life. The hero is a
somewhat shady adventurer who spends half the year in hunting and the
rest in talking about it, and is famed for being a guest whom, once you
get into your house, it is impossible to eject. He hires his hunters,
and sells them if he can at a profit; and, as he can ride almost
anything, he is able to show a vicious brute to the greatest advantage,
sell him for a good sum, and then make a great favour of taking him
back. He generally succeeds in getting invitations, partly because
he is supposed to be a rich man, and also on account of a rumour, of
which, to do him justice, he is unaware, that he is able to give
people, anxious for notoriety, a good notice in the newspapers.
One can almost smell the English country in winter time as one reads
the book and in imagination plough one’s way, as the dusk draws on,
through the muddy lanes on a tired horse after a long run, which has
left one several miles from home with the short winter day closing
rapidly. Or, one can feel the exhilaration which the sight of a fox
gives when he goes away with the hounds at his heels, apparently their
certain prey, and then vanishes as he slips through the next fence, not
to be caught, if caught at all, for many a long mile.
The author’s description of the different houses visited by Mr. Sponge
in his tour gives no bad idea of rural life and sport in the “fifties.”
The first house which Mr. Sponge honours is Jawleyford Court, inhabited
by Mr. Jawleyford, a gentleman of good lineage, but only moderate
means, on which he manages to make an appearance of living in great
state. Jawleyford, as his name implies, is a pretentious fellow,
apparently hearty and hospitable, but very deceptive to those who come
in close contact with him. He poses as a man of culture and refinement,
and also as an ardent devotee of the chase. Sponge cares for only one
thing on earth, and that is hunting; and he is emphatically a man of
one book, namely, a work on London cab fares by a certain Mogg--whether
the title is an invention or not, I do not know. When Mr. Sponge has
nothing better to do, he takes this work and studies imaginary drives
about London, amusing himself by calculating the price of each. One can
imagine how this ill-assorted couple--Sponge, who cared for nothing
but hunting, and Jawleyford, who liked to pose as a man of culture and
refinement--got on together. But Mrs. Jawleyford was impressed with the
idea that Sponge was a man of wealth and was a most eligible suitor
for one of her pretty daughters. Consequently she received her guest
with much hospitality, and gave him a hearty welcome. The first day
was unsuitable for hunting; and Sponge had to amuse himself in the
house with his host, who conducted him over his picture gallery, and
was intensely disgusted when Sponge failed to recognise the bust of
Jawleyford, which was considered a speaking likeness.