Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two--vulgarity and
affectation. It may be said of them truly that 'thin partitions do their
bounds divide.' There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an
innate meanness of disposition than to be always talking and thinking
of being genteel. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is
always trying to avoid: whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty
contempt for anything, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves
very nearly on a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I hardly
know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the
genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to
distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are
always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the
more fortunate of their less happy neighbours with contempt. They
are habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their
pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought
(only reversed by the relative situation of either party) occupy
their whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve, and
outraging common sense, to be thought genteel; the others have no other
object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is
but poor spite; a very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely not that
which one heartily despises is a very humble claim to superiority: to
despise what one really is, is still worse. Most of the characters in
Miss Burney's novels--the Branghtons, the Smiths, the Dubsters, the
Cecilias, the Delvilles, etc.--are well met in this respect, and much of
a piece: the one half are trying not to be taken for themselves, and the
other half not to be taken for the first. They neither of them have any
pretensions of their own, or real standard of worth. 'A feather will
turn the scale of their avoirdupois'; though the fair authoress was
not aware of the metaphysical identity of her principal and subordinate
characters. Affectation is the master-key to both.
Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It
cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up
and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges
of the worth of everything by name, fashion, and opinion; and hence,
from the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction
in itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the
wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always
suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the
'Great Vulgar and the Small' is mostly in outward circumstances. The
coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at
the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the
backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest
resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love
elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers:
scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to
ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what
we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and
decency.(1) True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies
of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity,
instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it.
Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a signpost, nor Homer
hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub Street bard.
Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority;
nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse
and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and
affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen
and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications,
and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders
or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its
inferiors. Thus a fashionable Miss titters till she is ready to burst
her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet or the abrupt drop of a
curtsey (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country-girl who comes
to be hired by her Mamma as a servant; yet to show how little foundation
there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of
herself and contempt for the untutored rustic, she would herself the
next day be delighted with the very same shaped bonnet if brought her by
a French milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in a week's time
will become quite familiar with the maid, and chatter with her (upon
equal terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour together. There
is no difference between them but that of situation in the kitchen or
in the parlour: let circumstances bring them together, and they fit
like hand and glove. It is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their
thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dislikes are the same. The
mistress's head runs continually on dress and finery, so does the
maid's: the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does the
maid, if she could; Miss forms a _beau-ideal_ of a lover with black eyes
and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from that of her attendant; both
like a smart man, the one the footman and the other his master, for the
same reason; both like handsome furniture and fine houses; both apply
the terms shocking and disagreeable to the same things and persons; both
have a great notion of balls, plays, treats, song-books, and love-tales;
both like a wedding or a christening, and both would give their little
fingers to see a coronation--with this difference, that the one has a
chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is dying with envy that
she has not. Indeed, this last is a ceremony that delights equally the
greatest monarch and the meanest of his subjects--the vilest of the
rabble. Yet this which is the height of gentility and consummation of
external distinction and splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony.
For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of virtue is required in
the individual who is so distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying
this idle and imposing parade of his person? Is he delighted with the
stage-coach and gilded panels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at
it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty, and symmetry of the eight
cream-coloured horses? There is not one of the immense multitude who
flock to see the sight from town or country, St. Giles's or Whitechapel,
young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to
admire the same object. Is he delighted with the yeomen of the guard,
the military escort, the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign
power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon and the judge's robe,
the array that precedes and follows him, the crowded streets, the
windows hung with eager looks? So are the mob, for they 'have eyes and
see them!' There is no one faculty of mind or body, natural or acquired,
essential to the principal figure in this procession more than is common
to the meanest and most despised attendant on it. A waxwork figure would
answer the same purpose: a Lord Mayor of London has as much tinsel to be
proud of. I would rather have a king do something that no one else has
the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has
the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign
than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's
idea of him in his being made a show of: if the pageant would do as well
without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings
have been declared to be 'lovers of low company'; and this maxim,
besides the reason sometimes assigned for it, viz. that they meet with
less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be
found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they
also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and
thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward
symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual
delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupidest slave worships
the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross
capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility
of the dependant; whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual
refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and
inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the
divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would
probably end in mortification on both sides!--There is little to
distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout--if he loses
that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the
wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.--But enough of this.
'I like it,' says Miss Branghton(2) in _Evelina_ (meaning the opera),
'because it is not vulgar.' That is, she likes it, not because there
is anything to like in it, but because other people are prevented from
liking or knowing anything about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq., laugheth
to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic
criticisms in the _London,_ for a like exquisite reason. I must
therefore make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics.
He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to
Sadler's Wells ('a place he has heard of'--O Lord, sir!)--because
I notice the Miss Dennetts, 'great favourites with the Whitechapel
orders'--praise Miss Valancy, 'a bouncing Columbine at Ashley's and them
there places, as his barber informs him' (has he no way of establishing
himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber's bad
English?)--and finally, because I recognised the existence of the Coburg
and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries 'Faugh' with
great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet
he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a
well-bred critic. _C'est beau ca._ Now this appears to me a very crude,
unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale, and vulgar way of thinking.
It is prejudicing things in the lump, by names and places and classes,
instead of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real
qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or
delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and
making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority.
It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the
world else. To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially
vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste
or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense,
and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon
agree with my barber as differ from him; and why should I make a point
of reversing the sentence of the Whitechapel orders? Or how can it
affect my opinion of the merits of an actor at the Coburg or the Surrey
theatres, that these theatres are in or out of the Bills of Mortality?
This is an easy, short-hand way of judging, as gross as it is
mechanical. It is not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste
by consulting the map of London, or to prove your liberality by
geographical distinctions. Janus jumbles things together strangely. If
he had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at Exeter or Taunton, he
would have thought it vulgar to admire him; but when he had been stamped
in London, Janus would no doubt show his discernment and the subtlety
of his tact for the display of character and passion by not being behind
the fashion. The Miss Dennetts are 'little unformed girls,' for no other
reason than because they danced at one of the minor theatres: let them
but come out on the opera boards, and let the beauty and fashion of the
season greet them with a fairy shower of delighted applause, and they
would outshine Milanie 'with the foot of fire.' His gorge rises at the
mention of a certain quarter of the town: whatever passes current in
another, he 'swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all.' This is not
taste, but folly. At this rate, the hackney-coachman who drives him, or
his horse Contributor whom he has introduced as a select personage to
the vulgar reader, knows as much of the matter as he does.--In a word,
the answer to all this in the first instance is to say what vulgarity
is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions,
words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own
feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or
shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement,
together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and
numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to
ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing
we shall secure the suffrages of those we associate with. To affect
a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large
number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set
of persons very little, if at all, better informed cry it down to
distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal
vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is
common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is
vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not
vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity;
but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the
authority of others, or to fall in with _the fashion_ or the company we
keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as
well spurn the clod under our feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse
enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing
real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator
of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a
Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life
of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He
might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the
definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon
of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. If he were a mere
blockhead, it would not signify; but he thinks himself a _knowing hand,_
according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought
up, and which he thinks _the go_ everywhere. In a word, this character
is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made
up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of _slang_ in it. All
slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing
vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the
looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a
vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs
of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High
Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is
vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble; nor is it a bit
purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth
of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling
on any subject than the crude, blind, headling, gregarious notion
acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious
minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as
indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious
pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they
resolve to differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of
the unfashionable in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the
_servum pecus imitatorum_--the herd of pretenders to what they do not
feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life.
To belong to any class, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a
very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Refinement will in all
classes be the exception, not the rule; and the exception may fall out
in one class as well as another. A king is but an hereditary title. A
nobleman is only one of the House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman
is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter
Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make
another Author of _Waverley_. Princes, heroes, are often commonplace
people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. To
be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.
An author! 'tis a venerable name:
How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!
Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy or a Fellow of the Royal
Society is but a vulgar distinction; but to be a Virgil, a Milton, a
Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of humanity but once! I do
not think they were vulgar people; though, for anything I know to the
contrary, the first Lord of the Bedchamber may be a very vulgar man; for
anything I know to the contrary, he may not be so.--Such are pretty much
my notions of gentility and vulgarity.
There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed mob, both which I hate. _Odi
profanum vulgus, et arceo._ The vapid affectation of the one to me is
even more intolerable than the gross insolence and brutality of the
other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to
show their disregard of the company, a set of fashionable coxcombs are,
to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough
breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and
misguided, which is something; the others consult only appearances,
which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in
his prints has trimmed the balance of pretension between the downright
blackguard and the _soi-disant_ fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not
appear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it may do in the genteel
letter-writing of Lord Chesterfield or the chivalrous rhapsodies of
Burke) that vice by losing all its grossness loses half its evil. It
becomes more contemptible, not less disgusting. What is there in common,
for instance, between his beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquettes,
and the men and women, the true heroic and ideal characters in Raphael?
But his people of fashion and quality are just upon a par with the low,
the selfish, the _unideal_ characters in the contrasted view of human
life, and are often the very same characters, only changing places. If
the lower ranks are actuated by envy and uncharitableness towards the
upper, the latter have scarcely any feelings but of pride, contempt, and
aversion to the lower. If the poor would pull down the rich to get
at their good things, the rich would tread down the poor as in a
wine-press, and squeeze the last shilling out of their pockets and the
last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and
unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we
say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the
callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather
see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom)
expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling
of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth,
cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional
politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other
is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the
contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought
good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy,
gratuitous assumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity,
honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental and moral
_costume_ of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for
the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures,
treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated
society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den; or, to put
this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men
in a rude state of nature outraging the human form than I have with apes
'making mops and mows' at the extravagances they have first provoked.
I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better than the
inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a fire; the
insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and is more
fatal and inevitable. The slow poison of despotism is worse than the
convulsive struggles of anarchy. 'Of all evils,' says Hume, 'anarchy is
the shortest lived.' The one may 'break out like a wild overthrow'; but
the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines
the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek, and
stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony and woe.
It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated multitude
stung by the sense of wrong and maddened by sympathy; it is more
appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of
the whisper echoed by other assenting whispers, which doom them first to
despair and then to destruction. Popular fury finds its counterpart in
courtly servility. If every outrage is to be apprehended from the one,
every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without regard
to justice or decency. The word of a king, 'Go thou and do likewise,'
makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink before it.(3) If
there are watchwords for the rabble, have not the polite and fashionable
their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome, unmeaning jargon as well? Both
are to me anathema!
To return to the first question, as it regards individual and private
manners. There is a fine illustration of the effects of preposterous and
affected gentility in the character of Gertrude, in the old comedy
of _Eastward Hoe,_ written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in
conjunction. This play is supposed to have given rise to Hogarth's
series of prints of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice; and there
is something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view both of vulgar and of
genteel life here displayed. The character of Gertrude, in particular,
the heroine of the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and
meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic
ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and
infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than
anything in real life. Cinderella and her glass slipper are common-place
to it. She is not, like Millamant (a century afterwards), the
accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of
the character. It is the honeymoon with her ladyship, and her folly
is at the full. To be a wife, and the wife of a knight, are to her
pleasures 'worn in their newest gloss,' and nothing can exceed her
raptures in the contemplation of both parts of the dilemma. It is not
familiarity, but novelty, that weds her to the court. She rises into
the air of gentility from the ground of a city life, and flutters
about there with all the fantastic delight of a butterfly that has just
changed its caterpillar state. The sound of My Lady intoxicates her
with delight, makes her giddy, and almost turns her brain. On the bare
strength of it she is ready to turn her father and mother out of doors,
and treats her brother and sister with infinite disdain and judicial
hardness of heart. With some speculators the modern philosophy has
deadened and distorted all the natural affections; and before abstract
ideas and the mischievous refinements of literature were introduced,
nothing was to be met with in the primeval state of society but
simplicity and pastoral innocence of manners--