But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the
last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no
very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is
simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy
often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions.
The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel
or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong.
Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad
traditions; it does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream
of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might
as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not
tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you
wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it
in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the aristocrats never have customs;
at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has
customs.
The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the
opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes
is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is
called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite
easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances
of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a
luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the
past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for
the future.
But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was
their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most
talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were
on the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against
the Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of
the manufacturing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the
increased power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business. But the
immediate effect of this fact upon the question we are studying is
somewhat singular.
In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for
some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning
and discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years
he had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and
savagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven
men. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places
he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the
army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the
soldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told
him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a
seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant’s fence and
stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I
or James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and
thus diverted the simple peasant’s attention. The great Puritan lords
created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved
their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money,
by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were
doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized
this easy aristocratic habit--
You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can
only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they
reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed
to get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great
nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured
everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a
newly discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with
their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in
public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at
by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism.
For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the
pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
to live to-morrow.
*****