Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners Part 10

But at what period of the world was the system of political wisdom _stereotyped,_ like Mr. Cobbett's _Gold against Paper,_ so as to admit of no farther alterations or improvements, or correction of errors of the press? When did the experience of mankind become stationary or retrograde, so that we must act from the obsolete inferences of past periods, not from the living impulse of existing circ.u.mstances, and the consolidated force of the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the present instant, naturally projecting us forward into the future, and not driving us back upon the past? Did Mr. Canning never hear, did he never think, of Lord Bacon's axiom, 'That those times are the ancient times in which we live, and not those which, counting backwards from ourselves, _ordine retrogrado,_ we call ancient'? The latest periods must necessarily have the advantage of the sum-total of the experience that has gone before them, and of the sum-total of human reason exerted upon that experience, or upon the solid foundation of nature and history, moving on in its majestic course, not fluttering in the empty air of fanciful speculation, nor leaving a gap of centuries between us and the long-mouldered grounds on which we are to think and act. Mr.

Canning cannot plead with Mr. Burke that no discoveries, no improvements have been made in political science and inst.i.tutions; for he says we have arrived through centuries of experience and of struggles at one century of liberty. Is the world, then, at a stand? Mr. Canning knows well enough that it is in ceaseless progress and everlasting change, but he would have it to be the change from liberty to slavery, the progress of corruption, not of regeneration and reform. Why, no longer ago than the present year, the two epochs of November and January last presented (he tells us in this very speech) as great a contrast in the state of the country as any two periods of its history the most opposite or most remote. Well then, are our experience and our struggles at an end?

No, he says, 'the crisis is at hand for every man to take part for or against the inst.i.tutions of the British Monarchy.' His part is taken: 'but of this be sure, to do aught good will never be his task!' He will guard carefully against all possible improvements, and maintain all possible abuses sacred, impa.s.sive, immortal. He will not give up the fruit of centuries of experience, of struggles, and of one century at least of liberty, since the Revolution of 1688, for any doubtful experiments whatever. We are arrived at the end of our experience, our struggles, and our liberty--and are to anchor through time and eternity in the harbour of pa.s.sive obedience and non-resistance. We (the people of England) will tell Mr. Canning frankly what we think of his magnanimous and ulterior resolution. It is our own; and it has been the resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age, ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements--not (as is pretended) the chimerical antic.i.p.ation of possible advantages, but the intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and growing abuses. It was the experience of the enormous and disgusting abuses and corruptions of the Papal power that produced the Reformation.

It was the experience of the vexations and oppressions of the feudal system that produced its abolition after centuries of sufferings and of struggles. It was the experience of the caprice and tyranny of the Monarch that extorted _Magna Charta_ at Runnymede. It was the experience of the arbitrary and insolent abuse of the prerogative in the reigns of the Tudors and the first Stuarts that produced the resistance to it in the reign of Charles I. and the Grand Rebellion. It was the experience of the incorrigible attachment of the same Stuarts to Popery and Slavery, with their many acts of cruelty, treachery, and bigotry, that produced the Revolution, and set the House of Brunswick on the Throne.

It was the conviction of the incurable nature of the abuse, increasing with time and patience, and overcoming the obstinate attachment to old habits and prejudices,--an attachment not to be rooted out by fancy or theory, but only by repeated, lasting, and incontrovertible proofs,--that has abated every nuisance that ever was abated, and introduced every innovation and every example of revolution and reform.

It was the experience of the abuses, licentiousness, and innumerable oppressions of the old Government in France that produced the French Revolution. It was the experience of the determination of the British Ministry to hara.s.s, insult, and plunder them, that produced the Revolution of the United States. Away then with this miserable cant against fanciful theories, and appeal to acknowledged experience! Men never act against their prejudices but from the spur of their feelings, the necessity of their situations--their theories are adapted to their practical convictions and their varying circ.u.mstances. Nature has ordered it so, and Mr. Canning, by showing off his rhetorical paces, by his 'ambling and lisping and nicknaming G.o.d's creatures,' cannot invert that order, efface the history of the past, or arrest the progress of the future.--Public opinion is the result of public events and public feelings; and government must be moulded by that opinion, or maintain itself in opposition to it by the sword. Mr. Canning indeed will not consent that the social machine should in any case receive a different direction from what it has had, 'lest it should be hurried over the precipice and dashed to pieces.' These warnings of national ruin and terrific accounts of political precipices put one in mind of Edgar's exaggerations to Gloster; they make one's hair stand on end in the perusal but the poor old man, like poor old England, could fall no lower than he was. Mr. Montgomery, the ingenious and amiable poet, after he had been shut up in solitary confinement for a year and a half for printing the Duke of Richmond's Letter on Reform, when he first walked out into the narrow path of the adjoining field, was seized with an apprehension that he should fall over it, as if he had trod on the brink of an abrupt declivity. The author of the loyal Speech at the Liverpool Dinner has been so long kept in the solitary confinement of his prejudices, and the dark cells of his interest and vanity, that he is afraid of being dashed to pieces if he makes a single false step, to the right or the left, from his dangerous and crooked policy. As to himself, his ears are no doubt closed to any advice that might here be offered him; and as to his country, he seems bent on its destruction. If, however, an example of the futility of all his projects and all his reasonings on a broader scale, 'to warn and scare, be wanting,' let him look at Spain, and take leisure to recover from his incredulity and his surprise. Spain, as Ferdinand, as the Monarchy, has fallen from its pernicious height, never to rise again: Spain, as Spain, as the Spanish people, has risen from the tomb of liberty, never (it is to be hoped) to sink again under the yoke of the bigot and the oppressor!

NOTES to ESSAY XV

(1) As for politics, I think poets are _tories_ by nature, supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally _whigs._ It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that the whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.'--_Shenstone's Letters,_ p. 105.

(2) To give the modern reader _un pet.i.t apercu_ of the tone of literary conversation about five or six and twenty years ago, I remember being present in a large party composed of men, women, and children, in which two persons of remarkable candour and ingenuity were labouring (as hard as if they had been paid for it) to prove that all prayer was a mode of dictating to the Almighty, and an arrogant a.s.sumption of superiority. A gentleman present said, with great simplicity and _naivete,_ that there was one prayer which did not strike him as coming exactly under this description, and being asked what that was made answer, 'The Samaritan's--"Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!"' This appeal by no means settled the sceptical dogmatism of the two disputants, and soon after the proposer of the objection went away; on which one of them observed with great marks of satisfaction and triumph--'I am afraid we have shocked that gentleman's prejudices.' This did not appear to me at that time quite the thing and this happened in the year 1794.--Twice has the iron entered my soul. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal Crew gone over it: once as they went forth, conquering and to conquer, with reason by their side, glittering like a falchion, trampling on prejudices and marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration; once again when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus's oxen dragged backward by the heels, to the den of Legitimacy, 'rout on rout, confusion worse confounded,' with places and pensions and the _Quarterly Review_ dangling from their pockets, and shouting, 'Deliverance for mankind,' for 'the worst, the second fall of man.' Yet I have endured all this marching and countermarching of poets, philosophers, and politicians over my head as well as I could, like 'the camomile that thrives, the more 'tis trod upon.' By Heavens, I think, I'll endure it no longer!

(3) _Troja fuit._

(4) _Mr. Canning's Speech at the Liverpool Dinner, given in celebration of his Re-election,_ March 18, 1820. Fourth edition, revised and corrected.

ESSAY XVI. ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION

Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two--vulgarity and affectation. It may be said of them truly that 'thin part.i.tions do their bounds divide.' There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an innate meanness of disposition than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is always trying to avoid: whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty contempt for anything, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on a level with it. Of the two cla.s.ses of people, I hardly know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the more fortunate of their less happy neighbours with contempt. They are habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought (only reversed by the relative situation of either party) occupy their whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve, and outraging common sense, to be thought genteel; the others have no other object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is but poor spite; a very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely not that which one heartily despises is a very humble claim to superiority: to despise what one really is, is still worse. Most of the characters in Miss Burney's novels--the Branghtons, the Smiths, the Dubsters, the Cecilias, the Delvilles, etc.--are well met in this respect, and much of a piece: the one half are trying not to be taken for themselves, and the other half not to be taken for the first. They neither of them have any pretensions of their own, or real standard of worth. 'A feather will turn the scale of their avoirdupois'; though the fair auth.o.r.ess was not aware of the metaphysical ident.i.ty of her princ.i.p.al and subordinate characters. Affectation is the master-key to both.

Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up and revels in the homely pretensions of the ma.s.s of mankind. It judges of the worth of everything by name, fas.h.i.+on, and opinion; and hence, from the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction in itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the 'Great Vulgar and the Small' is mostly in outward circ.u.mstances. The c.o.xcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers: scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and decency.(1) True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it.

Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a signpost, nor Homer hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub Street bard.

Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coa.r.s.e and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors. Thus a fas.h.i.+onable Miss t.i.tters till she is ready to burst her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet or the abrupt drop of a curtsey (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country-girl who comes to be hired by her Mamma as a servant; yet to show how little foundation there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of herself and contempt for the untutored rustic, she would herself the next day be delighted with the very same shaped bonnet if brought her by a French milliner and told it was all the fas.h.i.+on, and in a week's time will become quite familiar with the maid, and chatter with her (upon equal terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour together. There is no difference between them but that of situation in the kitchen or in the parlour: let circ.u.mstances bring them together, and they fit like hand and glove. It is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dislikes are the same. The mistress's head runs continually on dress and finery, so does the maid's: the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does the maid, if she could; Miss forms a _beau-ideal_ of a lover with black eyes and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from that of her attendant; both like a smart man, the one the footman and the other his master, for the same reason; both like handsome furniture and fine houses; both apply the terms shocking and disagreeable to the same things and persons; both have a great notion of b.a.l.l.s, plays, treats, song-books, and love-tales; both like a wedding or a christening, and both would give their little fingers to see a coronation--with this difference, that the one has a chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is dying with envy that she has not. Indeed, this last is a ceremony that delights equally the greatest monarch and the meanest of his subjects--the vilest of the rabble. Yet this which is the height of gentility and consummation of external distinction and splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony.

For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of virtue is required in the individual who is so distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying this idle and imposing parade of his person? Is he delighted with the stage-coach and gilded panels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty, and symmetry of the eight cream-coloured horses? There is not one of the immense mult.i.tude who flock to see the sight from town or country, St. Giles's or Whitechapel, young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to admire the same object. Is he delighted with the yeomen of the guard, the military escort, the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon and the judge's robe, the array that precedes and follows him, the crowded streets, the windows hung with eager looks? So are the mob, for they 'have eyes and see them!' There is no one faculty of mind or body, natural or acquired, essential to the princ.i.p.al figure in this procession more than is common to the meanest and most despised attendant on it. A waxwork figure would answer the same purpose: a Lord Mayor of London has as much tinsel to be proud of. I would rather have a king do something that no one else has the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's idea of him in his being made a show of: if the pageant would do as well without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings have been declared to be 'lovers of low company'; and this maxim, besides the reason sometimes a.s.signed for it, viz. that they meet with less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupidest slave wors.h.i.+ps the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility of the dependant; whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would probably end in mortification on both sides!--There is little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout--if he loses that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.--But enough of this.

'I like it,' says Miss Branghton(2) in _Evelina_ (meaning the opera), 'because it is not vulgar.' That is, she likes it, not because there is anything to like in it, but because other people are prevented from liking or knowing anything about it. Ja.n.u.s Weatherc.o.c.k, Esq., laugheth to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic criticisms in the _London,_ for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics.

He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler's Wells ('a place he has heard of'--0 Lord, sir!)--because I notice the Miss Dennetts, 'great favourites with the Whitechapel orders'--praise Miss Valancy, 'a bouncing Columbine at Ashley's and them there places, as his barber informs him' (has he no way of establis.h.i.+ng himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber's bad English?)--and finally, because I recognised the existence of the Coburg and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries 'Faugh' with great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a well-bred critic. _C'est beau ca._ Now this appears to me a very crude, unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale, and vulgar way of thinking.

It is prejudicing things in the lump, by names and places and cla.s.ses, instead of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and making it a t.i.tle to wisdom. It is a vapid a.s.sumption of superiority.

It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank c.o.xcombry. It is nothing in the world else. To condemn because the mult.i.tude admire is as essentially vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense, and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon agree with my barber as differ from him; and why should I make a point of reversing the sentence of the Whitechapel orders? Or how can it affect my opinion of the merits of an actor at the Coburg or the Surrey theatres, that these theatres are in or out of the Bills of Mortality?

This is an easy, short-hand way of judging, as gross as it is mechanical. It is not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste by consulting the map of London, or to prove your liberality by geographical distinctions. Ja.n.u.s jumbles things together strangely. If he had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at Exeter or Taunton, he would have thought it vulgar to admire him; but when he had been stamped in London, Ja.n.u.s would no doubt show his discernment and the subtlety of his tact for the display of character and pa.s.sion by not being behind the fas.h.i.+on. The Miss Dennetts are 'little unformed girls,' for no other reason than because they danced at one of the minor theatres: let them but come out on the opera boards, and let the beauty and fas.h.i.+on of the season greet them with a fairy shower of delighted applause, and they would outs.h.i.+ne Milanie 'with the foot of fire.' His gorge rises at the mention of a certain quarter of the town: whatever pa.s.ses current in another, he 'swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all.' This is not taste, but folly. At this rate, the hackney-coachman who drives him, or his horse Contributor whom he has introduced as a select personage to the vulgar reader, knows as much of the matter as he does.--In a word, the answer to all this in the first instance is to say what vulgarity is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions, words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coa.r.s.eness or shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement, together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and numbers. It may be defined to be a prost.i.tution of the mind or body to ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing we shall secure the suffrages of those we a.s.sociate with. To affect a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set of persons very little, if at all, better informed cry it down to distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity; but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with _the fas.h.i.+on_ or the company we keep. Caliban is coa.r.s.e enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as well spurn the clod under our feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coa.r.s.e enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorks.h.i.+reman is vulgar, because he is a Yorks.h.i.+reman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon of a Bond Street lounger) is the d.a.m.ning circ.u.mstance. If he were a mere blockhead, it would not signify; but he thinks himself a _knowing hand,_ according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought up, and which he thinks _the go_ everywhere. In a word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of _slang_ in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A c.o.c.kney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble; nor is it a bit purer or more refined for having pa.s.sed through the well-cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headling, gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed mult.i.tude or with a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they resolve to differ from them. The fas.h.i.+onable have the advantage of the unfas.h.i.+onable in nothing but the fas.h.i.+on. The true vulgar are the _servum pecus imitatorum_--the herd of pretenders to what they do not feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life.

To belong to any cla.s.s, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Refinement will in all cla.s.ses be the exception, not the rule; and the exception may fall out in one cla.s.s as well as another. A king is but an hereditary t.i.tle. A n.o.bleman is only one of the House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make another Author of _Waverley_. Princes, heroes, are often commonplace people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. To be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.

An author! 'tis a venerable name: How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!

Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy or a Fellow of the Royal Society is but a vulgar distinction; but to be a Virgil, a Milton, a Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of humanity but once! I do not think they were vulgar people; though, for anything I know to the contrary, the first Lord of the Bedchamber may be a very vulgar man; for anything I know to the contrary, he may not be so.--Such are pretty much my notions of gentility and vulgarity.

There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed mob, both which I hate. _Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo._ The vapid affectation of the one to me is even more intolerable than the gross insolence and brutality of the other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to show their disregard of the company, a set of fas.h.i.+onable c.o.xcombs are, to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coa.r.s.e and misguided, which is something; the others consult only appearances, which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in his prints has trimmed the balance of pretension between the downright blackguard and the _soi-disant_ fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not appear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it may do in the genteel letter-writing of Lord Chesterfield or the chivalrous rhapsodies of Burke) that vice by losing all its grossness loses half its evil. It becomes more contemptible, not less disgusting. What is there in common, for instance, between his beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquettes, and the men and women, the true heroic and ideal characters in Raphael?

But his people of fas.h.i.+on and quality are just upon a par with the low, the selfish, the _unideal_ characters in the contrasted view of human life, and are often the very same characters, only changing places. If the lower ranks are actuated by envy and uncharitableness towards the upper, the latter have scarcely any feelings but of pride, contempt, and aversion to the lower. If the poor would pull down the rich to get at their good things, the rich would tread down the poor as in a wine-press, and squeeze the last s.h.i.+lling out of their pockets and the last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy, gratuitous a.s.sumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity, honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental and moral _costume_ of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for the lower orders, that is, for the great ma.s.s of our fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den; or, to put this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men in a rude state of nature outraging the human form than I have with apes 'making mops and mows' at the extravagances they have first provoked.

I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better than the inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a fire; the insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and is more fatal and inevitable. The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive struggles of anarchy. 'Of all evils,' says Hume, 'anarchy is the shortest lived.' The one may 'break out like a wild overthrow'; but the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek, and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony and woe.

It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated mult.i.tude stung by the sense of wrong and maddened by sympathy; it is more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of the whisper echoed by other a.s.senting whispers, which doom them first to despair and then to destruction. Popular fury finds its counterpart in courtly servility. If every outrage is to be apprehended from the one, every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without regard to justice or decency. The word of a king, 'Go thou and do likewise,'

makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink before it.(3) If there are watchwords for the rabble, have not the polite and fas.h.i.+onable their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome, unmeaning jargon as well? Both are to me anathema!

To return to the first question, as it regards individual and private manners. There is a fine ill.u.s.tration of the effects of preposterous and affected gentility in the character of Gertrude, in the old comedy of _Eastward Hoe,_ written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in conjunction. This play is supposed to have given rise to Hogarth's series of prints of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice; and there is something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view both of vulgar and of genteel life here displayed. The character of Gertrude, in particular, the heroine of the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than anything in real life. Cinderella and her gla.s.s slipper are common-place to it. She is not, like Millamant (a century afterwards), the accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of the character. It is the honeymoon with her ladys.h.i.+p, and her folly is at the full. To be a wife, and the wife of a knight, are to her pleasures 'worn in their newest gloss,' and nothing can exceed her raptures in the contemplation of both parts of the dilemma. It is not familiarity, but novelty, that weds her to the court. She rises into the air of gentility from the ground of a city life, and flutters about there with all the fantastic delight of a b.u.t.terfly that has just changed its caterpillar state. The sound of My Lady intoxicates her with delight, makes her giddy, and almost turns her brain. On the bare strength of it she is ready to turn her father and mother out of doors, and treats her brother and sister with infinite disdain and judicial hardness of heart. With some speculators the modern philosophy has deadened and distorted all the natural affections; and before abstract ideas and the mischievous refinements of literature were introduced, nothing was to be met with in the primeval state of society but simplicity and pastoral innocence of manners--

And all was conscience and tender heart

This historical play gives the lie to the above theory pretty broadly, yet delicately. Our heroine is as vain as she is ignorant, and as unprincipled as she is both, and without an idea or wish of any kind but that of adorning her person in the gla.s.s, and being called and thought a lady, something superior to a citizen's wife.(4) She is so bent on finery that she believes in miracles to obtain it, and expects the fairies to bring it her.(5) She is quite above thinking of a settlement, jointure, or pin-money. She takes the will for the deed all through the piece, and is so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion of rank and t.i.tle as a real thing that cannot be counterfeited that she is the dupe of her own fine stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken adventurer for an accomplished and brave gentleman. Her meanness is equal to her folly and her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she holds out on the strength of her original pretensions for a long time, and plays the upstart with decency and imposing consistency. Indeed, her infatuation and caprices are akin to the flighty perversity of a disordered imagination; and another turn of the wheel of good or evil fortune would have sent her to keep company with Hogarth's _Merveilleuses_ in Bedlam, or with Decker's group of coquettes in the same place.--The other parts of the play are a dreary lee-sh.o.r.e, like Cuckold's Point on the coast of Ess.e.x, where the preconcerted s.h.i.+pwreck takes place that winds up the catastrophe of the piece. But this is also characteristic of the age, and serves as a contrast to the airy and fact.i.tious character which is the princ.i.p.al figure in the plot. We had made but little progress from that point till Hogarth's time, if Hogarth is to be believed in his description of city manners. How wonderfully we have distanced it since!

Without going into this at length, there is one circ.u.mstance 1 would mention in which I think there has been a striking improvement in the family economy of modern times--and that is in the relation of mistresses and servants. After visits and finery, a married woman of the old school had nothing to do but to attend to her housewifery. She had no other resource, no other sense of power, but to harangue and lord it over her domestics. Modern book-education supplies the place of the old-fas.h.i.+oned system of kitchen persecution and eloquence. A well-bred woman now seldom goes into the kitchen to look after the servants:--formerly what was called a good manager, an exemplary mistress of a family, did nothing but hunt them from morning to night, from one year's end to another, without leaving them a moment's rest, peace, or comfort. Now a servant is left to do her work without this suspicious and tormenting interference and fault-finding at every step, and she does it all the better. The proverbs about the mistress's eye, etc., are no longer held for current. A woman from this habit, which at last became an uncontrollable pa.s.sion, would scold her maids for fifty years together, and nothing could stop her: now the temptation to read the last new poem or novel, and the necessity of talking of it in the next company she goes into, prevent her--and the benefit to all parties is incalculable.

NOTES to ESSAY XVI

(1) If a European, when he has cut off his beard and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he could possibly make it; and after having rendered them immovable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if when thus attired he issues forth, and meets with a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red oker on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fas.h.i.+on of his country, whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.'--Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Discourses,_ vol. i. pp. 231, 232.

(2) This name was originally spelt Braughton in the ma.n.u.script, and was altered to Branghton by a mistake of the printer. Branghton, however, was thought a good name for the occasion and was suffered to stand. 'Dip it in the ocean,' as Sterne's barber says of the buckle, 'and it will stand!'

(3) A lady of quality, in allusion to the gallantries of a reigning prince, being told, 'I suppose it will be your turn next?' said, 'No, I hope not; for you know it is impossible to refuse!'

(4) '_Gertrude._ For the pa.s.sion of patience, look if Sir Petronel approach. That sweet, that fine, that delicate, that--for love's sake, tell me if he come. Oh, sister Mill, though my father be a low-capt tradesman, yet I must be a lady, and I praise G.o.d my mother must call me madam. Does he come? Off with this gown for shame's sake, off with this gown! Let not my knight take me in the city cut, in any hand! Tear't!

Pox on't (does he come?), tear't off! _Thus while she sleeps, I sorrow for her sake._ (Sings.)

_Mildred._ Lord, sister, with what an immodest impatiency and disgraceful scorn do you put off your city-tire! I am sorry to think you imagine to right yourself in wronging that which hath made both you and us.

_Ger._ I tell you, I cannot endure it: I must be a lady: do you wear your quoiff with a London licket! your stamel petticoat with two guards!

the buffin gown with the tuftafitty cap and the velvet lace! I must be a lady, and I will be a lady. I like some humours of the city dames well; to eat cherries only at an angel a pound; good: to dye rich scarlet black; pretty: to line a grogram gown clean through with velvet; tolerable: their pure linen, their smocks of three pound a smock, are to be borne withal: but your mincing niceries, taffity pipkins, durance petticoats, and silver bodkins--G.o.d's my life! as I shall be a lady, I cannot endure it.

_Mil._ Well, sister, those that scorn their nest oft fly with a sick wing.

_Ger._ Bow-bell! Alas! poor Mill, when I am a lady, I'll pray for thee yet i'faith; nay, and I'll vouchsafe to call thee sister Mill still; for thou art not like to be a lady as I am, yet surely thou art a creature of G.o.d's making, and may'st peradventure be saved as soon as I (does he come?). _And ever and anon she doubled in her song._

_Mil._ Now (lady's my comfort), what a profane ape's here!

Enter SIR PETRONEL FLASH, MR. TOUCHSTONE, and MRS. TOUCHSTONE.

_Ger._ Is my knight come? 0 the lord, my band! Sister, do my cheeks look well? Give me a little box o' the ear, that I may seem to blush. Now, now! so, there, there! here he is! 0 my dearest delight! Lord, lord! and how does my knight?

_Touchstone._ Fie, with more modesty.

_Ger._ Modesty! why, I am no citizen now. Modesty! am I not to be married? You're best to keep me modest, now I am to be a lady.

_Sir Petronel._ Boldness is a good fas.h.i.+on and court-like.

_Ger._ Aye, in, a country lady I hope it is, as I shall be. And how chance ye came no sooner, knight?

_Sir Pet._ Faith, I was so entertained in the progress with one Count Epernoun, a Welch knight: we had a match at baloon too with my Lord Whack.u.m for four crowns.

_Ger._ And when shall's be married, my knight?

_Sir Pet._ I am come now to consummate: and your father may call a poor knight son-in-law.