Everybody of the middle rank who walks through this life with a sympathy
for his companions on the same journey--at any rate, every man who has
been jostling in the world for some three or four lustres--must make
no end of melancholy reflections upon the fate of those victims whom
Society, that is, Snobbishness, is immolating every day. With love and
simplicity and natural kindness Snobbishness is perpetually at war.
People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for
fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs.
Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming
with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst
and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish
solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to
happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows
sad as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. As I behold it I swell
with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob. Come down, I say,
thou skulking dulness! Come down, thou stupid bully, and give up thy
brutal ghost! And I arm myself with the sword and spear, and taking
leave of my family, go forth to do battle with that hideous ogre and
giant, that brutal despot in Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle
hearts in torture and thrall.
When PUNCH is king, I declare there shall be no such thing as old maids
and old bachelors. The Reverend Mr. Malthus shall be burned annually,
instead of Guy Fawkes. Those who don't marry shall go into the
workhouse. It shall be a sin for the poorest not to have a pretty girl
to love him.
The above reflections came to mind after taking a walk with an old
comrade, Jack Spiggot by name, who is just passing into the state of
old-bachelorhood, after the manly and blooming youth in which I remember
him. Jack was one of the handsomest fellows in England when we entered
together in the Highland Buffs; but I quitted the Cuttykilts early, and
lost sight of him for many years.
Ah! how changed he is from those days! He wears a waistband now, and has
begun to dye his whiskers. His cheeks, which were red, are now mottled;
his eyes, once so bright and steadfast, are the colour of peeled
plovers' eggs.
'Are you married, Jack?' says I, remembering how consumedly in love he
was with his cousin Letty Lovelace, when the Cuttykilts were quartered
at Strathbungo some twenty years ago.
'Married? no,' says he. 'Not money enough. Hard enough to keep myself,
much more a family, on five hundred a year. Come to Dickinson's; there's
some of the best Madeira in London there, my boy.' So we went and talked
over old times. The bill for dinner and wine consumed was prodigious,
and the quantity of brandy-and-water that Jack took showed what a
regular boozer he was. 'A guinea or two guineas. What the devil do I
care what I spend for my dinner?' says he.
'And Letty Lovelace?' says I.
Jack's countenance fell. However, he burst into a loud laugh presently.
'Letty Lovelace!' says he. 'She's Letty Lovelace still; but Gad, such a
wizened old woman! She's as thin as a thread-paper; (you remember what a
figure she had:) her nose has got red, and her teeth blue. She's
always ill; always quarrelling with the rest of the family; always
psalm-singing, and always taking pills. Gad, I had a rare escape THERE.
Push round the grog, old boy.'
Straightway memory went back to the days when Letty was the loveliest
of blooming young creatures: when to hear her sing was to make the heart
jump into your throat; when to see her dance, was better than Montessu
or Noblet (they were the Ballet Queens of those days); when Jack used to
wear a locket of her hair, with a little gold chain round his neck, and,
exhilarated with toddy, after a sederunt of the Cuttykilt mess, used
to pull out this token, and kiss it, and howl about it, to the great
amusement of the bottle-nosed old Major and the rest of the table.
'My father and hers couldn't put their horses together,' Jack said. 'The
General wouldn't come down with more than six thousand. My governor said
it shouldn't be done under eight. Lovelace told him to go and be hanged,
and so we parted company. They said she was in a decline. Gammon! She's
forty, and as tough and as sour as this bit of lemon-peel. Don't put
much into your punch, Snob my boy. No man CAN stand punch after wine.'
'And what are your pursuits, Jack?' says I.
'Sold out when the governor died. Mother lives at Bath. Go down there
once a year for a week. Dreadful slow. Shilling whist. Four sisters--all
unmarried except the youngest--awful work. Scotland in August. Italy in
the winter. Cursed rheumatism. Come to London in March, and toddle
about at the Club, old boy; and we won't go home till maw-aw-rning till
daylight does appear.
'And here's the wreck of two lives!' mused the present Snobographer,
after taking leave of Jack Spiggot. 'Pretty merry Letty Lovelace's
rudder lost and she cast away, and handsome Jack Spiggot stranded on the
shore like a drunken Trinculo.'
What was it that insulted Nature (to use no higher name), and perverted
her kindly intentions towards them? What cursed frost was it that
nipped the love that both were bearing, and condemned the girl to sour
sterility, and the lad to selfish old-bachelorhood? It was the infernal
Snob tyrant who governs us all, who says, 'Thou shalt not love without
a lady's maid; thou shalt not marry without a carriage and horses; thou
shalt have no wife in thy heart, and no children on thy knee, without
a page in buttons and a French BONNE; thou shalt go to the devil unless
thou hast a brougham; marry poor, and society shall forsake thee; thy
kinsmen shall avoid thee as a criminal; thy aunts and uncles shall turn
up their eyes and bemoan the sad, sad manner in which Tom or Harry has
thrown himself away.' You, young woman, may sell yourself without shame,
and marry old Croesus; you, young man, may lie away your heart and your
life for a jointure. But if 'you are poor, woe be to you! Society, the
brutal Snob autocrat, consigns you to solitary perdition. Wither, poor
girl, in your garret; rot, poor bachelor, in your Club.
When I see those graceless recluses--those unnatural monks and nuns of
the order of St. Beelzebub, (1) my hatred for Snobs, and their worship,
and their idols, passes all continence. Let us hew down that man-eating
Juggernaut, I say, that hideous Dagon; and I glow with the heroic
courage of Tom Thumb, and join battle with the giant Snob.
(1) This, of course, is understood to apply only to those unmarried
persons whom a mean and Snobbish fear about money has kept from
fulfilling their natural destiny. Many persons there are devoted to
celibacy because they cannot help it. Of these a man would be a brute
who spoke roughly. Indeed, after Miss O'Toole's conduct to the writer,
he would be the last to condemn. But never mind, these are personal
matters.