The London Club has been sitting in a judicial way on one of its members.
This member of the Club seems to have been what Thackeray's waiter called
"a harbitrary gent." The servants of the club had to complain that he
did not make "their lives so sweet to them that they (the servants)
greatly cared to live," if we may parody Arthur's address to his erring
queen. The Club has not made a vacancy in its ranks by requesting the
arbitrary member to withdraw. But his conduct was deemed, on the report
of the Committee, worthy of being considered by the Club. And that is
always something. In an age when clubs are really almost universal, most
men have had occasion to wish that their society would sit occasionally
on some of the members. The member who bullies the servants is a not
uncommon specimen of the club-bore. He may be called the bore truculent.
He has been excellently caricatured by Thackeray in the "Book of Snobs."
There we have the club-bore who makes such a fuss about his chop, and
scolds the waiter so terribly. "Look at it, sir; is it a chop for a
gentleman? Smell it, sir; is it fit to put on a club table?" These, or
such as these, are the words of the gallant terror of waiters. Now it is
clearly unjust to make a waiter responsible for the errors, however
grave, of a very different character, the cook. But this mistake the
arbitrary gent is continually making. The cook is safe in his
inaccessible stronghold, down below. He cannot be paraded for punishment
on the quarter-deck, where Captain Bragg, of the Gunboat and Torpedo
Club, exercises justice. Therefore the miserable waiter is rebuked in
tones of thunder because the Captain's steak is underdone, or because
Nature (or the market gardener) has not made the stalks of asparagus so
green and succulent as their charming tops. People who do not know the
scolding club-bore at home are apt to be thankful that they are not
favoured with his intimate acquaintance, and are doubly grateful that
they are not members of his family. For if, in a large and quiet room
full of strangers, a man can give loose to his temper without
provocation, and outroar the thunder, what must this noisy person do at
home? "In an English family," says a social critic, "the father is the
man who shouts." How the club-bore must shout when he is in his own
castle, surrounded only by his trembling kindred and anxious retainers!
In his castle there is no one to resist or criticise him--unless indeed
his wife happen to be a lady, like Clytemnestra, of masculine resolution.
In that case the arbitrary gent may be a father of a family who is not
allowed to shout at home, but is obliged to give nature free play by
shouting abroad.
There are plenty of other club-bores besides the man who rates these
generally affable and well-behaved persons, the club servants. One of
the worst is the man whom you never see anywhere except at the club, and
whom you never fail to see there. It is bad enough when you have no
acquaintance with him. Murders have probably been committed by sensitive
persons for no better reason (often for worse reasons) than that they are
tired of seeing some one else going about. His voice, his manner, his
cough, especially his cough, become unendurable. People who cough in
clubs are generally amateurs of the art. They are huskier, more
wheezing, more pertinacious in working away at a cough till they have
made it a masterpiece than any other mortals. We believe that club
Asthmats (it is quite as good a word as "AEsthetes") practise in the
Reading Room of the British Museum, where they acquire their
extraordinary compass and mastery of various notes. Be this as it may,
the cough which drives every one but its owner out of the room (though
doubtless an affliction to the proprietor) gives him rank as a club-bore
of the finest water. The bore who always enters into conversation,
though he has nothing to say, merely because you used to dislike him at
school, or college, or elsewhere, is another common annoyance. The man
who is engaged, apparently, on a large work, and who rushes about the
library hunting for Proclus and Jamblichus when other occupants of the
room wish to be quiet, is naturally detested.
Most men are the bores of some other person. People of watchful mind and
intelligent habit, who talk in the drawing-room, are regarded as bores by
fat old gentlemen who wish to sleep there. And as these gentlemen turn
the drawing-room into a dormitory, which resounds with their snoring,
they in turn are bores to people who wish to read the papers. But if
these students drop the poker with a clang, or dash down small tables in
order to waken the sleepers, they, in their turn, give a good deal of
annoyance. The man who talks about politics at great length, is only one
of the common bores of the world transported into a club. But the man
with a voice which in ordinary conversation pierces through all the hum
of voices, like a clarion note in battle, would be a bore anywhere. If
he were in the wilderness of Sinai, he would annoy the monks in the
convent near the top. His voice is one of those terrible, inscrutable
scourges of nature, like the earthquake and the mosquito, which tax our
poor human wisdom to reconcile with any monistic theory of the benevolent
government of the universe. Once admit an evil principle, however, and
the thing is clear. The club-bore with the trumpet tones, which he
cannot moderate, is possessed, on this theory, by a fiend. As men are
talking quietly of turnips in one corner of the room, of rent in another,
and of racing in a third, his awful notes blend in from the fourth corner
with strident remarks on Bulgarian philology.
The ancient Greeks were well accustomed to club life, for each of their
little cities was only a large club. They had, therefore, to deal with
the problem of bores. Some of them, consequently, had the institution of
annually devoting to the infernal gods the most unpopular citizens. These
persons were called _catharmata_, which may be freely translated
"scapegoats." Could not clubs annually devote one or more scapebores to
the infernal gods? They might ballot for them, of course, on some
merciful and lenient principle. One white ball in ten or twenty-black
ones might enable the bore to keep his membership for the next year. The
warning, if he only escaped this species of ostracism very narrowly,
might do him a great deal of moral good. Of course the process would be
unpleasant, but it is seldom agreeable to be done good to. Occasionally
even the most good-natured members would stand apart, not voting, or even
would place the black ball in the mystic urn. Then the scapebore would
have his subscription returned to him, and would be obliged to seek in
other haunts servants to swear at, and sofas to snore on. Another
suggestion, that members should be balloted for anew every five years,
would simply cause clubs to be depopulated. Pall-Mall and St. James's
would be desolate, mourning their children, and refusing comfort. The
system would act like a proscription. People would give up their friends
that they might purchase aid against their enemies. Clubs are more
endurable as they are, though members do suffer grievously from the
garrulity, the coughs, the slumbrous tendencies, and the temper of their
fellow-men.