CULTURE AND CULTURE.
'I wonder, Berkeley,' said Herbert Le Breton, examining a coin
curiously, 'what on earth can ever have induced you, with your
ideas and feelings, to become a parson!'
'My dear Le Breton, your taste, like good wine, improves with
age,' answered Berkeley, coldly. 'There are many reasons, any one
of which may easily induce a sensible man to go into the Church.
For example, he may feel a disinterested desire to minister to
the souls of his poorer neighbours; or he may be first cousin to a
bishop; or he may be attracted by an ancient and honourable national
institution; or he may possess a marked inclination for albs and
chasubles; or he may reflect upon the distinct social advantages
of a good living; or he may have nothing else in particular to do;
or he may simply desire to rouse the impertinent curiosity of all
the indolent quidnuncs of his acquaintance, without the remotest
intention of ever gratifying their underbred Paul Pry proclivities.'
Herbert Le Breton winced a little--he felt he had fairly laid himself
open to this unmitigated rebuff--but he did not retire immediately
from his untenable position. 'I suppose,' he said quietly, 'there
are still people who really do take a practical interest in other
people's souls--my brother Ronald does for one--but the idea
is positively too ridiculous. Whenever I read any argument upon
immortality it always seems to me remarkably cogent, if the souls
in question were your soul and my soul; but just consider the
transparent absurdity of supposing that every Hodge Chawbacon, and
every rheumatic old Betty Martin, has got a soul, too, that must
go on enduring for all eternity! The notion's absolutely ludicrous.
What an infinite monotony of existence for the poor old creatures
to endure for ever--being bored by their own inane personalities
for a million aeons! It's simply appalling to think of!'
But Berkeley wasn't going to be drawn into a theological discussion--that
was a field which he always sedulously and successfully avoided.
'The immortality of the soul,' he said quietly, 'is a Platonic dogma
too frequently confounded, even by moderately instructed persons
like yourself, Le Breton, with the Church's very different doctrine
of the resurrection of the body. Upon this latter subject, my dear
fellow, about which you don't seem to be quite clear or perfectly
sound in your views, you'll find some excellent remarks in Bishop
Pearson on the Creed--a valuable work which I had the pleasure of
studying intimately for my ordination examination.'
'Really, Berkeley, you're the most incomprehensible and mysterious
person I ever met in my whole lifetime!' said Herbert, dryly. 'I
believe you take a positive delight in deceiving and mystifying
one. Do you seriously mean to tell me you feel any interest at the
present time of day in books written by bishops?'
'A modern bishop,' Berkeley answered calmly, 'is an unpicturesque
but otherwise estimable member of a very distinguished ecclesiastical
order, who ought not lightly to be brought into ridicule by lewd
or lay persons. On that ground, I have always been in favour myself
of gradually reforming his hat, his apron, and even his gaiters,
which doubtless serve to render him at least conspicuous if not
positively absurd in the irreverent eyes of a ribald generation.
But as to criticising his literary or theological productions, my
dear fellow, that would be conduct eminently unbecoming in a simple
curate, and savouring of insubordination even in the person of an
elderly archdeacon. I decline, therefore, to discuss the subject,
especially with a layman on whose orthodoxy I have painful
doubts.--Where's Oswald? Is he up yet?'
'No; he's down in Devonshire, my brother Ernest writes me.'
'What, at Dunbude? What's Oswald doing there?'
'Oh dear no; not at Dunbude: the peerage hasn't yet adopted him--at
a place called Calcombe Pomeroy, where it seems he lives. Ernest
has gone down there from Exmoor for a fortnight's holiday. You
remember, Oswald has a pretty sister--I met her here in your rooms
last October, in fact--and I apprehend she may possibly form a
measurable portion of the local attractions. A pretty face goes a
long way with some people.'
Berkeley drew a deep breath, and looked uneasily out of the window.
This was dangerous news, indeed! What, little Miss Butterfly, has
the boy with the gauze net caught sight of you already? Will he
trap you and imprison you so soon in his little gilded matrimonial
cage, enticing you thereinto with soft words and, sugared compliments
to suit your dainty, delicate palate? and must I, who have meant to
chase you for the chief ornament of my own small cabinet, be only
in time to see you pinioned and cabined in your white lace veils
and other pretty disguised entanglements, for his special and
particular delectation? This must be looked into, Miss Butterfly;
this must be prevented. Off to Calcombe Pomeroy, then, or other
parts unknown, this very next to-morrow; and let us fight out the
possession of little Miss Butterfly with our two gauze nets in
opposition--mine tricked as prettily as I can trick it with tags
and ends of art-allurements and hummed to in a delicate tune--before
this interloping anticipating Le Breton has had time to secure you
absolutely for himself. Too austere for you, little Miss Butterfly;
good in his way, and kindly meaning, but too austere. Better come
and sun yourself in the modest wee palace of art that I mean to
build myself some day in some green, sunny, sloping valley, where
your flittings will not be rudely disturbed by breath of poverty,
nor your pretty feathery wings ruthlessly clipped with a pair
of doctrinaire, ethico-socialistic scissors. To Calcombe, then,
to Calcombe--and not a day's delay before I get there. So much of
thought, in his own quaint indefinite fashion, flitted like lightning
through Arthur Berkeley's perturbed mind, as he stood gazing
wistfully for one second out of his pretty latticed creeper-clad
window. Then he remembered himself quickly with a short little
sigh, and turned to answer Herbert Le Breton's last half-sneering
innuendo.
'Something more than a pretty face merely,' he said, surveying
Herbert coldly from head to foot; 'a heart too, and a mind, for
all her flitting, not wholly unfurnished with good, sensible, solid
mahogany English furniture. You may be sure Harry Oswald's sister
isn't likely to be wanting in wits, at any rate.'
'Oswald's a curious fellow,' Herbert went on, changing the venue,
as he always did when he saw Berkeley was really in earnest; 'he's
very clever, certainly, but he can never outlive his bourgeois
origin. The smell of tea sticks about him somehow to the end of
the chapter. Don't you know, Berkeley, there are some fellows whose
clothes seem to have been born with them, they fit so perfectly
and impede their movement so little; while there are other fellows
whose clothes look at once as if they'd been made for them by a
highly respectable but imperfectly successful tailor. That's just
what I always think about Harry Oswald in the matter of culture.
He's got a great deal of culture, the very best culture, from the
very best shop--Oxford, in fact--dressed himself up in the finest
suit of clothes from the most fashionable mental tailor; but it
doesn't seem to fit him naturally. He moves about in it uneasily,
like a man unaccustomed to be clothed by a good workman. He looks
in his mental upholstery like a greengrocer in evening dress. Now
there's all the difference in the world between that sort of put-on
culture and culture in the grain, isn't there? You may train up a
grocer's son to read Dante, and to play Mendelssohn's Lieder, and
to admire Fra Angelico; but you can't train him up to wear these
things lightly and gracefully upon him as you and I do, who come
by them naturally. WE are born to the sphere; HE rises to it.'
'You think so, Le Breton?' asked the curate with a quiet and
suppressed smile, as he thought silently of the placid old shoemaker.
'Think so! my dear fellow, I'm sure of it. I can spot a man of
birth from a man of mere exterior polish any day, anywhere. Talk
as much nonsense as you like about all men being born free and
equal--they're not. They're born with natural inequalities in their
very nerve and muscle. When I was an undergraduate, I startled
one of the tutors of that time by beginning my English essay once,
"All men are by nature born free and unequal." I stick to it still;
it's the truth. They say it takes three generations to make a
gentleman; nonsense utterly; it takes at least a dozen. You can't
work out the common fibre in such a ridiculous hurry. That results
as a simple piece of deductive reasoning from all modern theories
of heredity and variation.'
'I agree with you in part, Le Breton,' the parson said, eyeing him
closely; 'in part but not altogether. What you say about Oswald's
very largely true. His culture sits upon him like a suit made to
order, not like a skin in which he was born. But don't you think
that's due more to the individual man than to the class he happens
to belong to? It seems to me there are other men who come from the
same class as Oswald, or even from lower classes, but whose culture
is just as much ingrained as, say, my dear fellow, yours is. They
were born, no doubt, of naturally cultivated parents. And that's how
your rule about the dozen generations that go to make a gentleman
comes really true. I believe myself it takes a good many generations;
but then none of them need have been gentlemen, in the ordinary sense
of the word, before him. A gentleman, if I'm to use the expression
as implying the good qualities conventionally supposed to be associated
with it, a gentleman may be the final outcome and efflorescence of
many past generations of quiet, unobtrusive, working-man culture--don't
you think so?'
Herbert Le Breton smiled incredulously. 'I don't know that I do,
quite,' he answered languidly. 'I confess I attach more importance
than you do to the mere question of race and family. A thoroughbred
differs from a cart-horse, and a greyhound from a vulgar mongrel,
in mind and character as well as in body. Oswald seems to me in
all essentials a bourgeois at heart even now.'
'But remember,' Berkeley said, rather warmly for him, 'the bourgeois
class in England is just the class which must necessarily find
it hardest to throw off the ingrained traces of its early origin.
It has intermarried for a long time--long enough to have produced
a distinct racial type like those you speak of among dogs and
horses--the Philistine type, in fact--and when it tries to emerge,
it must necessarily fight hard against the innate Philistinism of
which it is conscious in its own constitution. No class has had
its inequality with others, its natural inferiority, so constantly
and cruelly thrust in its face; certainly the working-man has not.
The working-man who makes efforts to improve himself is encouraged;
the working-man who rises is taken by the hand; the working-man,
whatever he does, is never sneered at. But it's very different with
the shopkeeper. Naturally a little prone to servility--that comes
from the very necessities of the situation--and laudably anxious
to attain the level of those he considers his superiors, he gets
laughed at on every hand. Being the next class below society,
society is always engaged in trying to keep him out and keep him
down. On the other hand, he naturally forms his ideal of what is
fine and worth imitating from the example of the class above him;
and therefore, considering what that class is, he has unworthy aims
and snobbish desires. Either in his own person, or in the persons
of his near relations, the wholesale merchant and the manufacturer--all
bourgeois alike--he supplies the mass of nouveaux riches who are
the pet laughing-stock of all our playwrights, and novelists, and
comic papers. So the bourgeois who really knows he has something
in him, like Harry Oswald, feels from the beginning painfully
conscious of the instability of his position, and of the fact that
men like you are cutting jokes behind his back about the smell of
tea that still clings to him. That's a horrible drag to hold a man
back--the sense that he must always be criticised as one of his
own class--and that a class with many recognised failings. It makes
him self-conscious, and I believe self-consciousness is really at
the root of that slight social awkwardness you think you notice
in Harry Oswald. A working-man's son need never feel that. I feel
sure there are working-men's sons who go through the world as
gentlemen mixing with gentlemen, and never give the matter of their
birth one moment's serious consideration. Their position never
troubles them, and it never need trouble them. Put it to yourself,
now, Le Breton. Suppose I were to tell you my father was a working
shoemaker, for example, or a working carpenter, you'd never think
anything more about it; but if I were to tell you he was a grocer,
or a baker, or a confectioner, or an ironmonger, you'd feel a certain
indefinable class barrier set up between us two immediately and
ever after. Isn't it so, now?'
'Perhaps it is,' Herbert answered dubitatively. 'But as he's
probably neither the one nor the other, the hypothesis isn't worth
seriously discussing. I must go off now; I've got a lecture at
twelve. Good-bye. Don't forget the tickets for Thursday's concert.'
Arthur Berkeley looked after him with a contemptuous smile. 'The
outcome of a race himself,' he thought, 'and not the best side
of that race either. I was half tempted, in the heat of argument,
to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old
Progenitor; but I'm glad I didn't now. After all, it's no use to
cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert's essentially a pig--a
selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated
specimen of pigdom--the best breed; but still a most emphatic and
consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is
in Ernest--a fibre or two wanting somewhere. But I mustn't praise
Ernest--a rival! a rival! It's war to the death between us two
now, and no quarter. He's a good fellow, and I like him dearly;
but all's fair in love and war; and I must go down to Calcombe
to-morrow morning and forestall him immediately. Dear little Miss
Butterfly, 'tis for your sake; you shall not be pinched and cramped
to suit the Procrustean measure of Ernest Le Breton's communistic
fancies. You shall fly free in the open air, and flash your bright
silken wings, decked out bravely in scales of many hues, not toned
down to too sober and quaker-like a suit of drab and dove-colour.
You were meant by nature for the sunshine and the summer; you
shall not be worried and chilled and killed with doses of heterodox
political economy and controversial ethics. Better even a country
rectory (though with a bad Late Perpendicular church), and flowers,
and picnics, and lawn-tennis, and village small-talk, and the
squire's dinner-parties, than bread and cheese and virtuous poverty
in a London lodging with Ernest Le Breton. Romance lives again. The
beautiful maiden is about to be devoured by a goggle-eyed monster,
labelled on the back "Experimental Socialism"; the red cross knight
flies to her aid, and drives away the monster by his magic music.
Lance in rest! lyre at side! third class railway ticket in pocket!
A Berkeley to the rescue! and there you have it.' And as he spoke,
he tilted with his pen at an imaginary dragon supposed to be seated
in the crimson rocking-chair by the wainscotted fireplace.
'Yes, I must certainly go down to Calcombe. No use putting it off
any longer. I've arranged to go next summer to London, to keep
house for the dear old Progenitor; the music is getting asked for,
two requests for more this very morning; trade is looking up. I
shall throw the curacy business overboard (what chance for modest
merit that ISN'T first cousin to a Bishop in the Church as at present
constituted?) and take to composing entirely for a livelihood. I
wouldn't ask Miss Butterfly before, because I didn't wish to tie
her pretty wings prematurely; but a rival! that's quite a different
matter. What right has he to go poaching on my preserves, I should
like to know, and trying to catch the little gold fish I want to
entice for my own private and particular fish-pond! An interloper, to
be turned out unmercifully. So off to Calcombe, and that quickly.'
He sat down to his desk, and taking out some sheets of blank
music-paper, began writing down the score of a little song at which
he had been working. So he continued till lunch-time, and then,
turning to the table when the scout called him, took his solitary
lunch of bread and butter, with a volume of Petrarch set open
before him as he eat. He was lazily Englishing the soft lines of
the original into such verse as suited his fastidious ear, when the
scout came in suddenly once more, bringing in his hand the mid-day
letters. One of them bore the Calcombe postmark. 'Strange,'
Berkeley said to himself; 'at the very moment when I was thinking
of going there. An invitation perhaps; the age of miracles is not
yet past--don't they see spirits in a conjuror's room in Regent
Street?--from Oswald, too; by Jove, it must be an invitation.'
And he ran his eye down the page rapidly, to see if there was any
mention of little Miss Butterfly. Yes; there was her name on the
second sheet; what could her brother have to say to him about her?
'We have Ernest Le Breton down here now,' Oswald wrote, 'on a
holiday from the Exmoors', and you may be surprised to hear that
I shall probably have him sooner or later for a brother-in-law. He
has proposed to and been accepted by my sister Edith; and though
it is likely, as things stand at present, to be a rather long
engagement (for Le Breton has nothing to marry upon), we are all
very much pleased about it here at Calcombe. He is just the exact
man I should wish my sister to marry; so pleasant and good and
clever, and so very well connected. Felicitate us, my dear Berkeley!'
Arthur Berkeley laid the letter down with a quiet sigh, and folded
his hands despondently before him. He hadn't seen very much of
Edie, yet the disappointment was to him a very bitter one. It had
been a pleasant day-dream, truly, and he was both to part with it
so unexpectedly. 'Poor little Miss Butterfly,' he said to himself,
tenderly and compassionately; 'poor, airy, flitting, bright-eyed
little Miss Butterfly. I must give you up, must I, and Ernest Le
Breton must take you for better, for worse, must he? La reyne le
veult, it seems, and her word is law. I'm afraid he's hardly the
man to make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning,
but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right
for a world where right's impossible, and every man for himself
is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and
darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally--he
couldn't do that--but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads,
honest fads, but fads wholly impracticable in this jarring universe
of clashing interests, where he who would swim must keep his own
head steadily above water, and he who minds his neighbour must sink
like lead to the unfathomable bottom. He will sink, I doubt not,
poor little Miss Butterfly; he will sink inevitably, and drag you
down with him, down, down, down to immeasurable depths of poverty
and despair. Oh, my poor little butterfly, I'm sorry for you, and
sorry for myself. It was a pretty dream, and I loved it dearly.
I had made you a queen in my fancy, and throned you in my heart,
and now I have to dethrone you again, me miserable, and have my
poor lonely heart bare and queenless!'
The piano was open, and he went over to it instinctively, strumming
a few wild bars out of his own head, made up hastily on the spur
of the moment. 'No, not dethrone you,' he went on, leaning back
on the music-stool, and letting his hand wander aimlessly over the
keys; 'not dethrone you; I shall never, never be able to do that.
Little Miss Butterfly, your image is stamped there too deep for
dethronement, stamped there for ever, indelibly, ineffaceably, not
to be washed out by tears or laughter. Ernest Le Breton may take
you and keep you; you are his; you have chosen him, and you have
chosen in most things not unwisely, for he's a good fellow and
true (let me be generous in the hour of disappointment even to the
rival, the goggle-eyed impracticable dragon monstrosity), but you
are mine, too, for I won't give you up; I can't give you up; I must
live for you still, even if you know it not. Little woman, I will
work for you and I will watch over you; I will be your earthly
Providence; I will try to extricate you from the quagmires into
which the well-meaning, short-sighted dragon will infallibly lead
you. Dear little bright soul, my heart aches for you; I know the
trouble you are bringing upon yourself; but la reyne le veult, and
it is not your humble servitor's business to interfere with your
royal pleasure. Still, you are mine, for I am yours; yours, body
and soul; what else have I to live for? The dear old Progenitor
can't be with us many years longer; and when he is gone there will
be nothing left me but to watch over little Miss Butterfly and her
Don Quixote of a future husband. A man can't work and slave and
compose sonatas for himself alone--the idea's disgusting, piggish,
worthy only of Herbert Le Breton; I must do what I can for the
little queen, and for her balloon-navigating Utopian Ernest. Thank
heaven, no law prevents you from loving in your own heart the one
woman whom you have once loved, no matter who may chance to marry
her. Go, day-dream, fly, vanish, evaporate; the solid core remains
still--my heart, and little Miss Butterfly. I have loved her once,
and I shall love her, I shall love her for ever!'
He crumpled the letter up in his fingers, and flung it half angrily
into the waste-paper basket, as though it were the embodied day-dream
he was mentally apostrophising. It was sermon-day, and he had to
write his discourse that very afternoon. A quaint idea seized him.
'Aha,' he said, almost gaily, in his volatile irresponsible fashion,
'I have my text ready; the hour brings it to me unsought; a quip,
a quip! I shall preach on the Pool of Bethesda: "While I am coming,
another steppeth down before me." The verse seems as if it were
made on purpose for me; what a pity nobody else will understand
it!' And he smiled quietly at the conceit, as he got the scented
sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport.
For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures
which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy
a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the
bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for
a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday's
sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his own position.