The apprentice cried “Clubs?” and cracked his neighbours’ heads with
the precision and fineness of touch which only manual craftsmanship can
give. The housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how
much or how little, cold meat there was in the house. The sailor who
defied discipline by mutinying at the Nore did not defy discipline in
the sense of falling off the rigging or letting the water into the hold.
Similarly the modern proletariat, however little it may know, knows what
it is talking about.
But the curious thing about the educated class is that exactly what it
does not know is what it is talking about. I mean that it is startlingly
ignorant of those special things which it is supposed to invoke and keep
inviolate. The things that workmen invoke may be uglier, more acrid,
more sordid; but they know all about them. They know enough arithmetic
to know that prices have risen; the kind Levantine gentleman is always
there to make them fully understand the meaning of an interest sum; and
the landlord will define Rent as rigidly as Ricardo. The doctors can
always tell them the Latin for an empty stomach; and when the poor man
is treated for the time with some human respect (by the Coronet) it
almost seems a pity he is not alive to hear how legally he died.
Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering
classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for
certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as
history, reverence, the love of the land. Well, it might be no bad thing
to have something, even if it were something narrow, that testified to
the truths of religion or patriotism. But such narrow things in the
past have always at least known their own history; the bigot knew his
catechism; the patriot knew his way home. The astonishing thing about
the modern rich is their real and sincere ignorance--especially of the
things they like.
No!
Take the most topical case you can find in any drawing-room: Belfast.
Ulster is most assuredly a matter of history; and there is a sense in
which Orange resistance is a matter of religion. But go and ask any of
the five hundred fluttering ladies at a garden party (who find Carson so
splendid and Belfast so thrilling) what it is all about, when it began,
where it came from, what it really maintains? What was the history
of Ulster? What is the religion of Belfast? Do any of them know where
Ulstermen were in Grattan’s time; do any of them know what was the
“Protestantism” that came from Scotland to that isle; could any of them
tell what part of the old Catholic system it really denied?
It was generally something that the fluttering ladies find in their own
Anglican churches every Sunday. It were vain to ask them to state the
doctrines of the Calvinist creed; they could not state the doctrines
of their own creed. It were vain to tell them to read the history of
Ireland; they have never read the history of England. It would matter as
little that they do not know these things, as that I do not know German;
but then German is not the only thing I am supposed to know. History and
ritual are the only things aristocrats are supposed to know; and they
don’t know them.