How is it, will any one tell me, that all foreign Clubs are so ineffably
stupid? I do not suspect that we English are pre-eminent for social
gifts; and yet we are the only nation that furnishes clubable men.
Frenchmen are wittier, Germans profounder, Russians--externally at
least--more courteous and accommodating; and yet their Clubs are mere
_tripots_--gambling establishments; and, except play, no other feature
of Club-life is to be found in them.
To give a Club its peculiar “cachet”--its, so to say, trade-mark--you
require a class of men who make the Club their home, and whose interest
it is that all the internal arrangements should be as perfect, as well
ordered, and frictionless as may be. Good furniture, good servants, good
lighting, good cookery, well-adjusted temperature, and a well-chosen
cellar, are all essentials. In a word, the Club is to be the realisation
of what we all think so much of--comfort. Now, how very few foreigners
either understand or care for this! Every one who has travelled abroad
has seen the “Cercle,” or “L’Union,” or whatever its name be, where
men of the highest station--ministers, ambassadors, generals, and
suchlike--met to smoke and play whist, with a sanded floor, a dirty
attendance, and yet no one ever complained. They drank detestable beer,
and inhaled a pestilent atmosphere, and sat in draughts, without a
thought that there was anything to be remedied, or that human skill
could or need contrive anything better for their accommodation.
When these establishments were succeeded by the modern Club, with its
carpeted floor, silk hangings, ormolu lamps, and velvet couches, the
change was made in a pure spirit of Anglomanie; somebody had been over
to London, and come back full of the splendours of Pall-Mall. The work
of imitation, so far as decoration went, was not difficult. Indeed, in
some respects, in this they went beyond us, but there ended the success.
The Club abroad is a room where men gamble and talk of gambling, but no
more; it is not a Club.
For the working of the Club, as for that of constitutional government, a
special class are required. It, is the great masses of the middle ranks
in England, varied enough in fortune, education, habits, and tastes, but
still one in some great condition of a status, that supply the materials
for the work of a parliamentary government; and it is through the supply
of a large community of similar people that Clubs are maintained in
their excellence with us.
For the success of a Club you need a number of men perfectly incapable
of all life save such as the Club supplies; who repair to the Club,
not alone to dine and smoke and sup, and read their paper, but to
interchange thought in that blended half-confidence that the Club
imparts; to hear the gossip of the day told in the spirit of men of
their own leanings; to ascertain what judgments are passed on public
events and public characters by the people they like to agree with;--in
fact, to give a sort of familiar domestic tone to intercourse,
suggesting the notion that the Club is a species of sanctuary where men
can talk at their ease. The men who furnish this category with us are
neither young nor old, they are the middle-aged, retaining some of the
spring and elasticity of youth, but far more inclining to the solidity
of riper years. If they frequent the Opera, it is to a stall, not to the
_coulisses_, they go. They are more critical than they used to be
about their dinners, and they have a tendency to mix seltzer with their
champagne. They have reached that bourne in which egotism has become an
institution; and by the transference of its working to the Club, they
accomplish that marvellous creation by which each man sees himself and
his ways and his wants and his instincts reflected in a thousand varied
shapes.
Now, there are two things no nation of the Continent possesses--Spring,
and middle-aged people. You may be young for a good long spell--some
have been known, by the judicious appliances of art, to keep on for
sixty years or so; but when you do pass the limit, there is no neutral
territory--no _mezzo termine_. Fall out of the Young Guard, and you must
serve as a Veteran. The levity and frivolity, the absence of all serious
interest in life, which mark the leisure classes abroad, follow men
sometimes even to extreme old age. The successive changes of temperament
and taste which we mark at home have no correlatives abroad.
The foreigner inhabits at sixty the same sort of world he did at
six-and-twenty: he does not dance so much, but he lingers in the
ballroom, and he is just as keenly alive to all the little naughty talk
that amused him forty years ago, and folly as much interested to hear
that the world is just as false and as wicked as it used to be when he
was better able to contribute to its frailty and wickedness.
Not one of these men, with their padded pectorals and dyed whiskers,
will admit that they are of an age to require comfort. They are ardent
youths all of them, turning night into day as of old, and no more
sensible of fatigue from late hours, hot rooms, and dissipation, than
they were a quarter of a century back.
Can you fancy anything less clubable than a set of men like this? You
might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a
dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for associates and
companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness;
and these men contrive in their lives to reverse the laws of physics,
since it is by their very levity that they fall.
The humoristic temperament is the soul of Club-life. It is the keen
appreciation of others in all their varied moods and shades of feeling
that imparts the highest enjoyment to that strange democracy, the
Club; and foreigners are immensely deficient in this element. They are
infinitely readier, smarter, and wittier than Englishmen. They will hit
in an epigram what we would take an hour to embrace in an argument; but
for the racy pleasure of seeing how such a man will listen to this,
what such another will say to that, how far individuality, in fact, will
mould and fashion the news of the day, and assimilate its mental food
to its own digestive powers, there is nothing like the Englishman--and
especially the Englishman of the Club.
There is nothing like Major Pendennis to be found from Trolhatten
to Messina, and yet Pendennis is a class with us; and it is in
the nicely-blended selfishness and complaisance, the egotism and
obligingness, that we find the purest element of Club-life.
The Parisian are the best--far and away the best--of all foreign Clubs;
best in their style of “get-up,” decoration, and arrangement, and best
also in tone and social manner. The St Petersburg Club is the most
gorgeous, the habits the most costly, the play the highest. It is not
very long since that a young Russian noble lost in one evening a sum
equal to a hundred thousand pounds. The Vienna Club is good in its own
stiff German way; but, generally speaking, German Clubs are very ill
arranged, dirty, and comfortless. The Italian are better. Turin, Naples,
and Florence have reasonably good Clubs. Home has nothing but the
thing called the English Club, a poorly-got-up establishment of small
whist-players and low “points.”
It is a very common remark, that costume has a great influence
over people’s conduct, and that the man in his shooting-jacket will
occasionally give way to impulsive outbursts that he had never thought
of yielding to in his white-cravat moments. Whether this be strictly
true or not, there is little doubt that the style and character of the
room a man sits in insensibly affects his manner and his bearing, and
that the habits which would not be deemed strange in the low-ceilinged
chamber, with the sanded floor and the “mutton lights,” would be totally
indecorous in the richly-carpeted room, a blaze of wax-light, and
glittering with decoration. Now this alternating between Club and _Café_
spoils men utterly. It engenders the worst possible style--a double
manner. The over-stiffness here and the over-ease there are alike
faulty.
The great, the fatal defect of all foreign Clubs is, the existence of
some one, perhaps two tyrants, who, by loud talk, swagger, an air of
presumed superiority and affectation of “knowing the whole thing,”
browbeat and ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want
of that wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is
possible. Of public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any
shape; and yet it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that
society is guided in England, and the same law that discourages the
bully supports and encourages the timid, without either the one or the
other having the slightest power to corrupt the court, or coerce its
decrees. Club-life is, in a way, the normal school for parliamentary
demeanour; and until foreigners understand the Club, they will never
comprehend the etiquette of the “Chamber.”