Snobbishness is one of the causes which lead to the Eighth Year,
and not the least among them. It is an essentially middle-class
snobbishness, and has grown up, like a fungus growth, with that immense
and increasing class of small, fairly well-to-do households who have
come into being with the advance of material prosperity during the past
twenty-five years, and with the progress of elementary education, and
all that it has brought with it in the form of new desires for pleasure,
amusement and more luxuries. These young husbands and wives who set up
their little homes are not, as I have said, content to start on the same
level as their parents in the first years of their married life. They
must start at least on the level of their parents at the end of their
married life, even a little in advance. The seeds of snobbishness
are sown before marriage. The modern son pooh-poohs the habits of his
old-fashioned father. They are not good enough for him. He has at least
twice the pocket-money at school compared with the allowance of his
father when he was a boy. He goes to a more expensive school and learns
expensive habits. When he begins work he does not hand over most of his
salary as his father used to hand over his salary a generation ago, to
keep the family pot boiling. He keeps all that he earns, though he is
still living at home, and develops a nice taste in clothes. One tie
on week-days and another tie for Sundays are still good enough for the
father, but the son buys ties by the dozen, and then has a passion
for fancy socks, and lets his imagination rove into all departments of
haberdashery. He is only a middle-class young man, but he dresses in the
style of a man of fashion, adopts some of the pleasures of the man about
town, and is rather scornful of the little house in the suburbs to which
he returns after a bachelor’s dinner in a smart restaurant, or after a
tea-party with gaiety girls. He becomes a “Nut,” and his evenings are
devoted to a variety of amusements, which does away with a good deal
of money. He smokes a special brand of cigarettes. He hires a motor-car
occasionally for a spin down to Brighton. His mother and father are
rather scared by this son who lives in a style utterly beyond their
means.
The girl is a feminine type of the new style. She has adopted the
new notions. At a very early age she is expert in all the arts of the
younger generation, and at seventeen or eighteen has already revolted
from the authority of her parents. She is quite a nice girl, naturally,
but her chief vice is vanity. She is eaten up with it. It is a consuming
passion. From the moment she gets out of bed in the morning for the
first glimpse of her face in the looking-glass to the time she goes to
bed after putting on some lip-salve and face enamel, she is absorbed
with self-consciousness about her “looks.” Her face is always occupying
her attention. Even in railway trains she keeps biting her lips to make
them red. At every window she passes she gives a sidelong glance to see
if her face is getting on all right. Her main ambition in life is to be
in the fashion. She is greedy for “pretty things” and sponges upon her
father and mother for the wherewithal to buy them, and she will not lay
a little finger on any work in the kitchen or even make a bed, lest her
hands should be roughened and because it would not be quite “lady-like.”
A pretty education for matrimony! A nice couple to set up house together
Poor children of life, they are doomed to have a pack of troubles.
Because as they began they go on, with the same ideas, with the same
habits of mind, until they get a rude shock. Their little household is
a shrine to the great god Snob. They are his worshippers. To make a show
beyond their meansj or up to the very limit of their means, to pretend
to be better off than they are, to hide any sign of poverty, to dress
above their rank in life, to show themselves in places of entertainment,
to shirk domestic drudgery, that is their creed.
In the old days, before the problem of the Eighth Year had arrived, the
wives of men, the mothers of those very girls, kept themselves busy by
hundreds of small duties. They made the beds, dusted the rooms, helped
the servants in the kitchen, made a good many of their own clothes,
mended them, altered them, cleaned the silver. But nowadays the wife of
the professional man does none of these things if there is any escape
from them. She keeps one servant at a time when her mother did without
a servant. She keeps two servants as soon as her husband can afford an
extra one, three servants if the house is large enough to hold them.
Indeed, a rise in the social scale is immediately the excuse for
an additional servant, and in the social status the exact financial
prosperity of the middle-classes is reckoned by them according to the
number of servants they keep. And whether it be two or three, the little
snob wife sits in her drawing-room with idle hands, trying to kill time,
getting tired of doing nothing, but proud of her laziness. And the snob
husband encourages her in her laziness. He is proud of it, too. He would
hate to think of his wife dusting, or cleaning, or washing up. He does
not guess that this worship of his great god Snob is a devil’s worship,
having devilish results for himself and her. The idea that women want
work never enters his head. His whole ambition in life is to prevent his
wife from working, not only when he is alive, but after he is dead. He
insures himself heavily and at the cost of a great financial strain upon
his resources in order that “if anything happens” his wife, even then,
need not raise her little finger to do any work. But something “happens”
before he is dead. The woman revolts from the evil spell of her
laziness. She finds some work for her idle hands to do--good work or
bad.