FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW
The concrete personal result of the civic, social, and educational
processes already described is now to be examined. The personal
contrast between the new generation of young men and women of the
middle class, most likely to strike an Englishman returned to London
after long absence. Sex emancipation. The typical physique of both
sexes has been visibly modified, amongst other agencies by bicycle
practice. The stately maiden or matron of the period was unknown to
John Leech; has been drawn faithfully by Du Maurier. Some social
ideals are unchanged, but older middle class ideals have passed out of
date.
In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social
conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his
historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the
Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete
individual product of these forces? The epithet 'middle class' is employed
in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading
because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and
educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends
increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in
tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. 'They
look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable,
unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to
be revealed hereafter.' The restlessness which in the British visitor
puzzled the Mussulman when _Eothen_ was written as a national quality has
of late increased among us.[44]
From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for
daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period
which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric
telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its
ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and
occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated
Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation,
into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the
world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding
social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character
has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes
of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our
land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought
to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his
counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an
universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day
can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of
knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that
kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied by a
growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life
less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic
hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were
on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.
Late in the seventies of our century the social craze of what was called
'rinkomania' set in. Any available buildings were laid down with floors
more or less lubricated, on which the sons and daughters of the various
sections of the great middle class, shod with a peculiar adaptation of
wheels, slipped about, and called it skating. These resorts were no doubt
admirably conducted. Acquaintances made at them were probably blameless.
They often perhaps ended in blissful and desirable marriage. But not
without a shock to her sense of maternal propriety did the English matron
of old-fashioned ideas see, or hear of, her daughter being twirled round
in the arms of some youth just introduced, or perhaps without even the
preliminary of that easy form. The young woman could cite plausible
precedent for the process. The most fond and nervous of mothers suffered
her fears to be allayed. No evil, and it may be hoped some good, to mind
and body, came perhaps from these experiences.
It was, nevertheless, an innovation on the usage of generations to which
bygone ancestors and ancestresses would not readily have reconciled
themselves. In plain words it signified the revolt of the sons and
daughters of the middle class against their exclusion from modes of social
enjoyment that to their contemporaries slightly above them in the social
scale had long been allowed. They had read of the subscription balls
planned by the astute Scot, John Almack, at Willis's Rooms, in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. More recently they had seen accounts of
subscription dances in what were then aristocratic watering places like
Scarborough, or of the more cosmopolitan revels where chaperons were
largely dispensed with by their well-born charges at Baden-Baden and
Homburg. What claim did the accident of birth constitute to a monopoly of
the more stirring and less exclusive forms of pleasure? Thus it came to
pass that the pastime which followed the generally patrician Almacks at
the interval of a century from being a romp of children became the mildly
gymnastic function of youths and maidens of maturer years.
The next stage in this progress is marked by the popularity of the
lawn-tennis ground. The private gardens of urban or suburban villadom were
soon too small for the wielders of the racquet. The common enclosure of
the crescent, the square, or the 'Gardens,' was coveted one day by the
players. It was possessed the next. After this, the transition to
lawn-tennis subscription clubs, with public grounds, and championship
matches open to all comers was easy and natural. The parlour of home soon
dwindled into an insignificant spot to the overgrown boys and girls
engaged in 'All England' tournaments of their own.
Meanwhile, the gentlemen and ladies who called themselves society, and to
whom a portion of the newspaper press was set apart, were indulging more
enterprising tastes still, in a manner duly recorded by their daily and
weekly journals. The rage for 'making up a party' for everything;
researches into the London slums, or visits to the French play, came in;
superstitious veneration for the ceremonial etiquette of a past day went
out. The mere expedition to the theatre was scarcely stirring enough
without the preliminary dinner or the subsequent supper at the modish
restaurants which cause certain quarters of London metaphorically to abut
on the Boulevard des Italiens or on the Palais Royal. They who now from
afar imitated this glittering example had not, it is true, like their
betters, any 'smart' sets of their own.
That was no reason why the favourites of fortune should have all the fun
to themselves. The daughters of the professional class and of those below
them in the social scale were as well educated, as intelligent, as
personally presentable, as those whom a partial chance had made
conventionally their superiors. Why should the persons born with the
proverbial gold spoon in their mouths alone be emancipated? Friskiness was
an attribute not confined to the born inheritors of that which called
itself society.
Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of
general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have
taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals
followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater
wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical
favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales's or the Gaiety on the
amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or Chelsea. In all things
the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were
followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were
still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan
ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the
long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it
has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of
many hundreds among Her Majesty's subjects whose special attribute was
once supposed to be, in Froissart's phrase, 'to take their pleasures
sadly.' Lord's Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde
Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of
some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a
Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the
appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is
quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.
In theory and in practice 'society' considers itself, and to some extent
is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always
easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are
more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If
this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to
say in his last novel _Endymion_ that London which during the earlier days
of the Queen's reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing
one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted
of its lighter pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made
this remark.
As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of
the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so
English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power
of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively
recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those
with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews
its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old
and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is
unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.
In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the
present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen's
Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house
wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation
of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and
might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror.
As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new regime has
involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth
is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower
charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to
leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer
succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly
without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial
magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres.
Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical
indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be
unlet; his sons' bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in
marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the
old Hall at his 'rent dinner,' the squire, one of a long race of squires,
has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton,
Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of
education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since
Lord Cairns' Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the
earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection
with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed
into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county
town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill
owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life
lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new
proprietors violates few of the old traditions.
The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of
yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient
predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the
same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of
his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his
predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county
ball. He himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions,
transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is
not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry
yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to
connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in
being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts
are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the
subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports.
The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the
new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile,
though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste
for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he
himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be
matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges
against the least commercial of the squirearchy.
This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among
all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates
in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of
classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the
keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of
levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older,
have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the
tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended
to them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of
wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of
life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to
pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all
conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its
different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has
varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains
uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the
mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of
Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as
a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues
on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the
broader and more purely social processes just described.
That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive,
inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any
section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of
gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in
the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both
sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period
of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies,
had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are
the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that
foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional
distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money, the oligarchies
of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat
in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or
from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new
order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he
would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of
the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up,
and better carried, among the young women as well.
The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du
Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically
accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the
bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is
now seen to be no figment of the artist's imagination. The feminine forms
which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down
upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have
been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of _Punch_. English
women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique
throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities,
consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and
matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion
that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not
exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the
pencil of John Leech's successor. This latter development has been an
unmixed good. The transition from the eventless purely domesticated
existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and
exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class
Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be
expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school
rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and
suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect
smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should
without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of
the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched
by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of
chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against
sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds.
The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription
ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic
happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The
percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel's valet said
of his master's crumpled neckcloths: 'These are our failures;' in other
words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of
the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the
cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the role will doubtless be played
without any misadventures.
Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the
social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which
those who are always ready to imitate their example have followed them.
The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping
critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take
their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on
their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which
flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.