when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and
keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and
shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the
Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived.
Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough,
the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on
displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the
old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to
run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville,
"When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and
we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew
you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all
suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a
silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet." If you
encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and
thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a
schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low.
That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was
neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity.
Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end
of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to
intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way
to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the
amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been
regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.
Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with
ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a
great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of
territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they
are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and
inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer,
you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and
that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate
order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they
were related.
A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an
entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and Lord
Curzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being
the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County
society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of
the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would
not have been advanced.
The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll,
and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I
believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which
were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human
weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had
ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to
illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.
XLIV
PUBLICITY _V._ RETICENCE
The great people of old time followed (quite unconsciously) the
philosopher who bade man "hide his life." Of course, the stage of
politics was always a pillory, and he who ventured to stand on it made
up his mind to encounter a vast variety of popular missiles. "In my
situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford," said the Duke
of Wellington, "I have been much exposed to authors;" and men whom
choice or circumstances forced into politics were exposed to worse
annoyances than "authors." But the line was rigidly drawn between
public and private life. What went on in the home was sacredly secreted
from the public gaze. People lived among their relations and friends
and political associates, and kept the gaping world at a distance. Now
we worship Publicity as the chief enjoyment of human life. We send
lists of our shooting-parties to "Society Journals." We welcome the
Interviewer. We contribute personal paragraphs to _Classy Cuttings_.
We admit the photographer to our bedrooms, and give our portraits to
illustrated papers. We take our exercise when we have the best chance
of being seen and noticed, and we never eat our dinner with such keen
appetites as amid the half-world of a Piccadilly restaurant. In brief,
"Expose thy life" is the motto of the new philosophy, and I maintain
that in this respect, at any rate, the old was better.
With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt
for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one
mentioned; among them were Health and Money. I presume that people had
pretty much the same complaints as now, but no one talked about them.
We used to be told of a lady who died in agony because she insisted on
telling the doctor that the pain was in her chest whereas it really was
in the unmentionable organ of digestion. That martyr to propriety has
no imitators in the present day. Every one has a disease and a doctor;
and young people of both sexes are ready on the slightest acquaintance
to describe symptoms and compare experiences. "Ice!" exclaimed a
pretty girl at dessert, "good gracious, no! so bad for indy"--and her
companion, who had not travelled with the times, learned with amazement
that "indy" was the pet name for indigestion. "How bitterly cold!" said
a plump matron at an open-air luncheon; "just the thing to give one
appendicitis." "Oh!" said her neighbour, surveying the company, "we are
quite safe there. I shouldn't think we had an appendix between us."
Then, again, as to money. In the "Sacred Circle of the
Great-Grandmotherhood" I never heard the slightest reference to income.
Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it
as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its
odour was not displeasing. But it was not a subject for conversation.
People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they
made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale
us with statistics of profit and loss. To-day every one seems to be,
if I may use the favourite colloquialism, "on the make"; and the
sincerity of the devotion with which people worship money pervades
their whole conversation and colours their whole view of life. "Scions
of aristocracy," to use the good old phrase of Pennialinus, will
produce samples of tea or floor-cloth from their pockets, and sue quite
winningly for custom. A speculative bottle of extraordinarily cheap
peach-brandy will arrive with the compliments of Lord Tom Noddy, who
has just gone into the wine trade, and Lord Magnus Charters will tell
you that, if you are going to put in the electric light, his firm has
got some really good fittings which he can let you have on specially
easy terms.
But, if in old days Health and Money were subjects eschewed in polite
conversation, even more rigid was the avoidance of "risky" topics.
To-day no scandal is too gross, no gossip too prurient. Respectable
mothers chatter quite freely about that "nest of spicery" over
which Sir Gorell Barnes presides, and canvass abominations with a
self-possession worthy of Gibbon or Zola. In fact, as regards our
topics of conversation, we seem to have reached the condition in which
the Paris correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ found himself when Mr.
Matthew Arnold (in "Friendship's Garland") spoke to him of Delicacy.
"He seemed inexplicably struck by this word _delicacy_, which he kept
repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he; 'delicacy, surely I have
heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in
my fresh enthusiastic youth, before I knew Sala, before I wrote for
that infernal paper----.' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' said I, laying
my hand on his shoulder, 'you are unmanned.'" A similar emotion would
probably be caused by any one so old-fashioned as to protest that any
conceivable topic was ill-adapted for discussion in general society.
An extreme decorum of phrase accompanied this salutary restriction
of topics. To a boisterous youth who, just setting out for a choral
festival in a country church, said that he always thought a musical
service very jolly, an old Whig lady said in a tone of dignified
amendment, "I trust, dear Mr. F----, that we shall derive not only
pleasure but profit from the solemnity of this afternoon."
Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is
the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and
it has so impartially pervaded all departments of life that one may
plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon.
Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young
woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more
widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear
thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and
Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were
fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at
present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is
never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and
accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on
which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with
intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action.
Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen
had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's
performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington,
and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at
Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous
picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert
in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting
girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and
ride over them when they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy
cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in
respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls
do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they
skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me
a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor,
classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that
"the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis
and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the
middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not
sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I
saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team.
I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady
while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his
cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it.
Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house
not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter
were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their
cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."
Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days.
In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping
a _salon_, giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank
and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On
great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings,
and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving
pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the
ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory
banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the
"three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval
battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable
excitement, tumult, and confusion."
When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day
complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery
in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone--that stiffest of social
conservatives--exclaimed, "Mrs. W----, forsooth! I have known much
greater ladies than Mrs. W---- quite content to look down through the
ventilator."
XLV
TOWN _V._ COUNTRY
I said at the outset that I am a Whig _pur sang_; and the historic
Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race
was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his
great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting
contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord
Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the
guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion,
the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business
and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class
delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept
over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and
scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments."
This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change
which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who
had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune
of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home.
In those days the tradition of Duty required people who had several
country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had
only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof--sacred
because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and
parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure
enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word,
the country house was Home.
People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were
also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or
Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of
the Hall or the Manor.
For people who had a country house the interests of life were very
much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the
cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember,
when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their
first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty.
But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How
beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"
The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the
family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married
in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor.
Christmas decorations were an occasion of much innocent merriment, and
a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators
to be--
"Unselfish--looking not to see
Proofs of their own dexterity;
But quite contented that 'I' should
Forgotten be in brotherhood."
Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded
church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it
as a civil duty. "When a gentleman is _sur ses terres_," said Major
Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I
could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's,
whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let
me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before
the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott
had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was
indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system--and a very
comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good
assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well
remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the
wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during
divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like,"
said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating
incumbent, "but I must insist on my family pew not being touched. If I
had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."
A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up
in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village
boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in
the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a
Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till
he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and
fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back
lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant,
or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox
killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.
Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately
into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across
the village green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the
claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as
they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit
down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time.
They knew every one in the village--old and young; played with the
babies, taught the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the
old and impotent, read by the sick-beds, and brought flowers for the
coffin. Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized
relief in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for
the hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid
were pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the
young-ladies-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced
too delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom
staring his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and
exclaiming with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as
'scouted' that. 'E's nimble, ain't 'e?" And I well remember an ancient
stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old
Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very
rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the
service of one family.
Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived
amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew
up, between the family at the Hall and the families in the village,
a feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a
chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the
life and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English
peasant is too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments
were often bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is
understanding's no worse than it always were," was a ploughman's way
of saying that the old squire was in full possession of his faculties.
"We call 'im ''Is Lordship,' because 'e's so old and so cunning," was
another's description of a famous pony. "Ah, I know you're but a poor
creature at the best!" was the recognized way of complimenting a lady
on what she considered her bewitching and romantic delicacy.
But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep
vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and
four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was
the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been
offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the
daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure
to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion,
and was full of enquiries about his lordship and her ladyship, and
Miss Pinkerton the governess, and whether Mr. Wheeler was still
coachman, and who lived now at the entrance-lodge. Whether the sons got
commissions, or took ranches, or become curates in slums, or contested
remote constituencies, some grinning face was sure to emerge from the
crowd with, "You know me, sir? Bill Juffs, as used to go bird's-nesting
with you;" or, "You remember my old dad, my lord? He used to shoe your
black pony."
When the eldest son came of age, his condescension in taking this step
was hailed with genuine enthusiasm. When he came into his kingdom,
there might be some grumbling if he went in for small economies, or
altered old practices, or was a "hard man" on the Bench or at the Board
of Guardians; but, if he went on in the good-natured old ways, the
traditional loyalty was unabated.
Lord Shaftesbury wrote thus about the birth of his eldest son's eldest
son: "My little village is all agog with the birth of a son and heir
in the very midst of them, the first, it is believed, since 1600, when
the first Lord Shaftesbury was born. The christening yesterday was an
ovation. Every cottage had flags and flowers. We had three triumphal
arches; and all the people were exulting. 'He is one of us.' 'He is a
fellow-villager.' 'We have now got a lord of our own.' This is really
gratifying. I did not think that there remained so much of the old
respect and affection between peasant and proprietor, landlord and
tenant."
Whether the kind of relation thus described has utterly perished I do
not know; but certainly it has very greatly diminished, and the cause
of the diminution is that people live less and less in their country
houses, and more and more in London. For those who are compelled by
odious necessity to sell or let their hereditary homes one has nothing
but compassion; in itself a severe trial, it is made still sharper to
well-conditioned people by the sense that the change is at least as
painful to the poor as to themselves. But for those who, having both a
country and a London house, deliberately concentrate themselves on the
town, forsake the country, and abjure the duties which are inseparable
from their birthright, one can only feel Charles Lamb's "imperfect
sympathy." The causes which induce this dereliction and its results on
society and on the country may be discussed in another chapter.
XLVI
HOME
I was speaking just now of the growing tendency to desert the country
in favour of London. I said that it was difficult to feel sympathy with
people who voluntarily abandon Home, and all the duties and pleasures
which Home implies, in favour of Lennox Gardens or Portman Square; but
that one felt a lively compassion for those who make the exchange under
the pressure of--
"Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear."