The British Upper Class in Fiction

“ NOT you, but the house derides me,” said the wolf to the goat in the fable. This is the answer which society makes to any insolent or arrogant individual who happens to be out of its reach. Fortunate men everywhere are apt to fall into the goat’s mistake, and of all Swells, none cherishes the delusion so honestly as an Englishman. He stands there protected in that insouciance which the novelists admire, and which he himself deems the consummate result of history and human progress, by defenses which are none of his making. The radical claim, the fundamental distinction of an Englishman of the upper class is, that no man can get the better of him in hauteur. The neighborhood of the most oppressive or confusing personality will run off him like water. He will flush as he passes no man; no man can give him two fingers. Should by any chance his bosom acknowledge impression or trepidation, his exterior shall be calm as stone. And he is proud to think that this gift of his is not the accident of his station or his circumstances, but is an inherent virtue of his own, of which adverse fortune cannot rob him. He may be deprived of health, money, and friends; he may be baffled and beaten here, and lost hereafter; but it is his belief and consolation that the time can never come when he may be snubbed.

To this it may be said, that the courage which confronts a future or a possible evil is a very easy one. Difficulty, until we meet it face to face, is an unknown quantity. It is x; when really upon us, it becomes a + b. He who is in the midst of the difficulty he challenged from a distance, may with perfect consistency retire, claiming that when he made the engagement, he had not sufficient data to go upon. He agreed to encounter x, not a + b.

Undoubtedly the qualities which constitute the distinction in the swell are precisely not the qualities which constitute success in the great struggle of man for subsistence. The “ survivors ” of Mr. Herbert Spencer have succeeded by alert attention, rather than by an elegant inattention. The monkey that saw the apple first got it; the chimpanzee that first saw the wild cat was the first to get away from him. In the “incoherent” ages, when one man met in the forest another who was carrying a sword or a spear, he did not saunter by, relying upon his own unconscious majesty, and the impressibility of his adversary, as a protection against a blow in the back of the head. He was the best man who had the most and the quickest perceptions, rather than he who had the fewest and the slowest.

But whatever may have been true of those remote and uncertain ages, in society, as we know it, the alert, attentive man plainly gets ahead of the inattentive one. A certain suavity and deference in his dealings with others will not hurt him. He cannot ignore the man out of whom he makes money. He cannot snub a client, a customer, or a patient, with impunity. The swell, therefore, whom adverse fortune compels to take his chances with other men, has either to fail, or to relinquish his superb behavior and to change his principle of elegant unconsciousness into one of alert attention. He may say that he will die first, which would perhaps be the more heroic and graceful exit from the difficulty, providing he died at once. But he thus registers himself among the defeated, and fails, — the very thing it was the boast of his ancestors that they did not do. Should he happen to have hostages to fortune, in the shape of wife and children, the complexion of his case would he entirely altered. To take defeat for himself would be his right; to accept it for those dependent upon him would be quite another thing. It is pretty plain, then, that the swell is very much in the position of the goat upon the house-top. If he were a lawyer’s clerk, of course these fine ways would have to cease. If he were on the staff of a popular weekly, and had to dance in the liveliest paragraphs under the whip of the managing editor, or the proprietors, or the public, he would find his unconsciousness and hauteur very inconvenient. He would, no doubt, consider the editor a demagogue, an inaccurate, semi-honest, and wholly uneducated person; would gnash his teeth in secret over the failure of the proprietors duly to appreciate their own vulgarity, and would heartily despise the silly public; but when this inadequate revenge had been taken, there would be nothing left for him to do.

It was very easy to see that as a matter of fact the young Englishman of the class of which I am speaking did change his manners as soon as his circumstances changed. Men of precisely the same claims of birth had a very different behavior. Those who had to make their way acquired a more eager, and, as a rule, a more complaisant manner than their luckier cousins. Even diplomatists and private secretaries to heads of departments were evidently alive to, and anxious to conciliate the good opinions of others. At the clubs it was not difficult to pick out, from their more alert behavior, the men whose fortunes were capable of improvement, and who were on the lookout to better them. In a word, when in England, I saw that a swell, so soon as he perceives that his distinctions do not pay, relinquishes them.

It will be seen that these distinctions appeal for admiration to persons in a certain middle condition of education. Those who appreciate such graces to the full must be somewhat civilized and yet somewhat immature. A degree of impressibility in the men who look on is the condition of the exercise of the swell’s talent. What sort of impression would insouciance make upon a hungry tiger? Nor would it impress an educated and acute man who insists upon submitting reverie to the test of definition and criticism. It is to the shopboy, and the writer for the spring annual, that such graces appeal.

The aristocracy has received, from time to time, very various treatment at the hands of literature. The writers of the age of Queen Anne — a keen and critical race — never gave them any very respectful consideration. Later in the century the novelists dealt with them in a very truthful and sensible fashion. Fielding, I remember, somewhere takes occasion to explain in a foot-note that by the “ mob ” he does not mean the common people, but the coarse and the ignoble in every rank. In those days the aristocracy possessed real power. When their power had come to an end, and they retained only their social precedence, the admiration of their class superiorities seems to have begun. It is a somewhat curious fact that Bulwer, Disraeli, the Kingsleys, and other writers of the last quarter of a century, have expressed an admiration for the upper classes which is new in English literature. Nothing of the kind is to be found in their great predecessors, Scott, Miss Austen, and Miss Edgeworth. The reason is, I suppose, that blessings brighten as they take their flight. The strong need no apology, whether they be good or bad. Praise of them is rather a superfluity and an impertinence. But when power had slipped out of the hands of the upper classes, to justify the social precedence that remained, people began to look about for something of an inherent and permanent nature to admire. The gradual contraction of their privileges removed, too, the “wicked lord” from romance. His opportunities of wickedness were gone. Earls could no longer kidnap pretty women. Moreover, the rise of a powerful class of merchants, into a social prominence scarcely less than that enjoyed by them in Cromwell’s time, fixed the attention of society upon the graces of the older aristocracy. The poor clergyman was glad to feel that the people who snubbed his wife were nobodies by the side of his patron. It was perhaps rather pleasant to a banker’s clerk to know that there were persons before whom his own despot would have to take off his hat.

But the novel has been the peculiar literary staple of the last thirty years. The upper classes have been of great use to the playwrights and the storytellers. The throng of tutors, governesses, and young professional men who write for the London magazines, have relied much upon the dramatic capabilities of their unequal society. The fortunate classes anywhere will always be excellent material for art, providing those classes are known to the entire society. The people like to look at them. They take the sort of pleasure in them which they experience at a fête or a pantomime. They wish them well as they like the novels and the plays to end happily. The converse is also evident. So soon as these classes cease to appear fortunate they cease to be attractive. The cause of the queen’s recent unpopularity is to be found, not in her seclusion nor in the discontent of the tradesmen who live upon court patronage, but in the natural aversion of men to the lachrymose and the melancholy. The elegant classes here cannot be used to very great advantage, because a farmer in Illinois has a most indistinct and hazy notion of the habits of a person of fashion in New York or Boston. Moreover, here nobody knows exactly who these classes are. Abroad, this “ fine ” society is the most distinguished and conspicuous. Here it is the little set whose particular boast is that “ nobody knows anything about it. ”

The reaction which followed the French Revolution, the glory to which England attained during the first third of the present century, to which she was certainly led by the upper classes, and upon which she lived until very lately, the gradual diminution of the privileges of the upper class and the sense of security from their encroachments — all these things disposed the English people to think very favorably of their aristocracy. Their impressibility and credulity and their curiosity about the aristocracy have been fed by the novelists. Many popular mistakes concerning the manners of the “great” have thus been encouraged. Thackeray even has lent countenance to the superstition that the young men are marked by a certain graceful and reckless generosity. It would seem natural that men who have assured wealth, and a station at the top of society, should exhibit towards each other a simple friendliness and an unthinking generosity, not to be found among people who are compelled to jostle and elbow each other in the struggle for subsistence. But I did not find it to be so. Lord Kew gives Jack Belsize ever so many thousand pounds. But the Lord Kews are scarce in real life. Not only is it hard to find men who give each other fortunes, but Lord Kew’s spirit is not at all the spirit of the men I saw. The money they won from each other in the card-rooms and at the races, they were very anxious to get and very willing to keep. Indeed, men who are on stated allowances, as many of them were, are compelled to exercise a systematic forecast in the matter of expenses, which a man who can stretch his income by a little extra labor will scarcely take. As to the gracefully reckless kindness, the shop-boy is quite wrong in his notions upon this point. So far as I could see, they did not feel more kindly to one another than the brokers who scream each other hoarse in the New York Stock Exchange. Indeed, I believe that, as a rule, they are the most ready to help others who have most ably helped themselves.

Another of the misconceptions of the middle classes which the novelists have flattered is that their superiors are so accustomed to superiority that they have forgotten all about it. They think nothing of their distinction, it is said. On the contrary, they are always thinking about it and always talking about it. They roll it under their tongues like a sweet morsel. A friend of mine wrote to a certain very great and exalted person, asking whether we should or should not dress for a political dinner at Richmond. He answered pithily: “ The snobs dress; the gentlemen don’t.” I may here say that the most elegant men in dress and behavior are not those in whom pride of lineage is strongest. Your man of stern family pride rather despises any such distinction as fine clothes and fine manners can give him. When you see an individual with his hat knocked over his eyes or his collar awry, you may know that he secretly hugs an escutcheon to his bosom with a fervor and energy of which no dandy is capable.

Thackeray’s charge against the English that they are virtue-proud is certainly true. They think themselves the best people in the world, and after one notable exception has been made, I am inclined to agree with them. Of unkindness to foreigners upon their own shores they are unjustly accused. They are, however, defiant in their behavior to strangers, and at this point they have been educated in another misconception. They cherish the impression that their reserve is in some way a scrutiny of the character of the individual who is a candidate for the honor of their acquaintance. But this is a mistake. They hold back till they are sure, not that he is virtuous, but that it will help them to know him. The young Englishman chooses his friends just as the young American or the young Frenchman does. But it is the way of the world to regard success and fortune as another sort of character, and here again the English arc no exception to the rule. Gentle manners to the poor and dependent, and a conciliatory bearing towards acquaintance, are praised, if the man who possesses them is a person of consequence. The English say, “ He knows who he is; ” “ Nothing can be better than he.” In such a man rank seems to pass for a kind of virtue. But a seemly behavior is not difficult to people who have no opposition. You do see men, however, in England, in whom good manners are only another sort of heroism. Life is not to them a pleasant saunter among tolerant equals and obsequious inferiors. I have known men with strong, fierce hearts and the consciousness of power and ability, who, unrecognized and in irksome and difficult positions, are yet able to conduct themselves with propriety and dignity. There are rages which come, we know not whence, and moods in which it is difficult to remember principles, yet these men learn to control themselves. They behave with a selfrespect which does not verge upon truculence, and with a complaisance which does not approach servility. These were the men whose manners I admired.

The present tone of the fashionable novel is not that of the aristocratic romance of the early part of the century. It is not even the tone of Coningsby or Maltravers. To the story-writers of Cornhill and Fraser the nobleman is no longer picturesque or superior or haughty or aquiline. The purpose of these later writers is to present him as a good deal more like most people than anybody else. The young Bohemians laugh flippantly at the “fat old duchess;” the glib governesses pour much scorn and contempt on “ Lady Booby’s old, rattling, broken-down barouche.” The countess is deaf and has an ear-trumpet; the marchioness is an honest old termagant, with a voice and temper like a fishwoman’s. But this method of treatment insinuates a familiarity, very delightful to the average British reader. It is only another sort of admiration. The change however seems to be in the direction of truth, and the English will in time, no doubt, get back to a healthy and common-sense treatment of this subject.

E. S. Nadal.