Some Novelists and the Business Man: I. In England

WHEN contemporary American fiction brings on the scene, as it so often does, the successful business man, one might imagine in brackets, somewhere near the beginning of the piece, the Elizabethan stage-direction, ‘Alarums. Excursions.’ I speak as a foreign reader, liable to mistake the proportions of things; but surely, among the novelists of the last dozen years in the United States, a good many betray, to say the least, a disconcert ing uneasiness on this subject, and there are certainly some — and not insignificant — who impeach the business man in quite violent terms.

As I tried to recall any such disturbance in English fiction, I could think of nothing nearer than those oldfashioned Sunday-school tracts about the grocer who sands his sugar or the milkman who waters his milk, — irrelevant inslances, of course. For it was not the petty trader, but the higher commercial class, which I saw assailed in the United States; and besides, to make out anything of a parallel, I must be able to quote, instead of obscure pamphleteers, representative British writers, corresponding to such Americans as Norris, Phillips, Churchill, Sinclair, Herrick, Whitlock, Merwin, Dreiser, for instance, —which seemed to be impossible. But if there was no English parallel worth mentioning, how was one to explain it? Must commercial practice be more questionable in the United States, since the American novelists were more given to questioning it ? What was to prevent one from inferring, on the other hand, that conscience was more sensitive there? Or were there not other possible explanations, less discordant than either of these with the maxim that human nature is everywhere much the same?

The following notes on some English and American novels of the last and the present, century started from this moral question, but they are not confined entirely to it. They deal with the business man who is in a large or at least a large-ish way — the financier, manufacturer, wholesale merchant — as distinguished from the small shopkeeper, publican, and so forth, who have as a rule been rather differently treated by the novelists. One could not say, for instance, about the humble sort that they were at any time more neglected in fiction than in society; but this would be a true statement about both the English and the American business man of the larger kind.

In the United States, even though fortunes on the present huge scale are post-bellum growths, our friend must have ceased long before 1875 to be an obscure or infrequent figure; yet he was practically left out by the American novelists until that date, when Silas Lapham appeared. And alt hough he (or at least his shadow) gained admittance less recently into the older and roomier establishment of English fiction, he was still confined even after 1875 to a modest corner of it, which by no means corresponded to his contemporary position in the world outside.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century England was sufficiently commercialized to lend some color to Napoleon’s sneer about her shopkeeping; yet at the end of it our friend still appears in novels somewhat rarely, more rarely in the foreground of them, and still more rarely as himself. Let the reader search the nineteenth-century classics from Scott to Meredith for one tolerable portrait of the business man as such, — not merely, that is, as a husband or father or personage in ‘society’ or something else extraneous, but enveloped in his particular business, so that we understand it and see him forming and formed by it, even as we see the squires, clergymen, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, sailors, farmers, shopkeepers, of the same novelists through the medium of their respective occupations. I do not think the search will be successful.

If any such portrait s exist, one might expect to find a specimen in Dickens. For Dickens introduces the business man oftener than any other English novelist does; he was free from the common absorbing interest, in the uncommercial upper class, and he had some little business experience and training of his own. Now Dickens nowhere comes nearer to our mark than in Dombey & Son. Here is a novel called after a mercantile house, as Zola called one of his after a department store; Dickens even emphasizes the reference by describing the book in full, on the title-page, as ’Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.’ It is not an insignificant firm which is thus set before us as the subject of the book; Dombey & Son is a ‘great house’ with ‘dealings in almost all parts of the world,’and when it failed, ‘there was a buzz and whisper on ’Change of a great failure.’

A good deal of the action passes on its premises, ‘within the liberties of the City of London’; we are often admitted there, and Mr. Dombey himself was no idler who never visited them; he was ‘in and out all day.’ Finally, it is a gradual manipulation of the affairs of Dombey & Son by the manager, Carker, which produces the catastrophe of the plot. Yet, in spite of all these circumstances, the commercial side of the drama and of its personages remains practically a blank.

There are indeed some signs of the author’s having ‘documented’ himself about his subject. We hear a good deal about the furniture of Dombey & Son’s office, about its position in the street, the situation of the various rooms, what could be seen from the windows; we are told the names, characters, and personal appearances of most of the members of the staff; we see them at their desks, and hear their general remarks; but of the real work of the firm we learn little more than the office-boy, Walter, was able to report to the dealer in nautical instruments. ‘“Let’s hear something about the firm,” said Solomon Gills. “Oh, there’s not much to be told about the firm, uncle.... It’s a precious dark set of offices.” “No banker’s books or cheque books or such tokens of wealth rolling in?”’ Walter becomes hazy, and the reader’s curiosity on the financial point fares scarcely better than Uncle Solomon’s. Vague hints are given here and there that Carker is running schemes of his own instead of looking after the interests of the firm, and that is all. There are stages in the story when it seems as if something clear and definite must be given; when the reader is impatient to get at least one glimpse into the state of Dombey & Son’s ledgers; when Balzac, I think, would have drawn masterly narrative effects from the matter; but it remains wrapped in mystery, and Dickens glides past every opportunity of explaining it, with rhetorical phrases which at last become extravagant in their inadequacy and may perhaps console the reader by exciting his mirth. We do not even get a very clear idea of the general nature of Dombey & Son’s trade, though we do hear that ‘the firm had dealt largely in hides but never in hearts.’

Dickens did not always evade the business side in so conspicuous or (artistically speaking) so unfortunate a manner as this; but. he was always evasive about it. Sometimes this was artistically right; at other times, of little consequence; but, apart from that question, what precise information do we, as a matter of fact, possess about — not the office, or the personal appearance, or the social character, but — the business of those ‘German Merchants,’ the Cheeryble Brothers, or about the business of Jonas Chuzzlewit with his promising ‘business precept, “Do other men for they would do you,” ’ or indeed about that of any of Dickens’s commercial characters above the shopkeeping level?

Without illustrating the point further I will assume that the instance of Dumbey & Son is typical not only of Dickens but of the Victorian novelists in general, and, it may be added, of the post-Victorian as well. For the novelists of the present day in England, although in some few cases (where American influence has possibly been felt) they describe commercial affairs a little more closely than their predecessors did, — Tono Bungay, is a notable instance, — continue on the whole the tradition of silence or vagueness about the business part of the business man.

In what part, then, — in what lay part (commercially speaking) or what undress, — do the English novelists present our commercial friend?

They are not concerned with the way in which he makes his money; the point of interest for them is how he spends it, and especially how he spends it on ‘society.’ His surprising advance during the nineteenth century across the old class-divisions supplies them with their most frequent theme, and locally at least the results of this advance were important enough to justify their interest. The traditional order of the national procession,—landed gentry, professions, trade,—settled by centuries of custom and almost by the Const it ution of the realm, was sadly upset by the development of modern industry, the reduction of agricultural profits and other causes. Never before was the ascent of our friend in the social scale so rapid or widespread, and never perhaps did real life put on the old comedy of the ‘ bourgeois geniilhomme’ with more frequency or vigor than during this period in England.

The business man’s accession to external equality — equality in wealth and the power which it commanded — inspired him too often with an ambition for complete identity with the gentry. He might push or pay his way into their company, but his natural habits, ideas, and manners were seldom those of the uncommercial leisured class, and he was driven in the vain pursuit of his ambition to dissemble the differences by imitation and pretense. An early story of Maria Edgeworth’s, The Manufacturers, published in 1804, contains in brief most of the criticisms passed by her successors on this misguided proceeding.

Two cousins, William and Charles Darlay, inherit a prosperous cotton factory from their uncle. William has no higher ambition than to stay in business, but Charles considers Tradesmen and manufacturers as a caste disgraceful to polite society.' He proposes to an unattractive ‘old coquette’ of good family, who accepts him on condition of his adopting her name, giving up all connection with the ‘odious factory’ and also with his relatives, who, as she says, are ’not at all in her line,’and buying a scat in the country. Transformed into ‘Charles Germaine, Esq., of Germaine Park,’ he soon tastes disappointment . ‘The count ry gentlemen at first stared, and then laughed, and at last unanimously agreed over their bottle that he was not born for the situation in life in which he now appeared. They remarked and ridiculed the ostentation with which he displayed every luxury in the house; his habit of naming the price of everything to enforce its claim to admiration; his affected contempt, for economy; his anxiety to connect himself with persons of rank, joined to his ignorance of the genealogy of nobility, and the strange mistakes he made between old and new titles.' Happening to confuse ‘one of the proudest gentlemen in the county with a merchant of the same name,’ Charles was called out and nearly killed. He says to his wife one day:

'"It is very extraordinary that your relations show us so little civility, my dear.” “All things considered,”’ she replies, ‘“I scarcely know how to blame them.” Mr. Germaine bowed, by way of thanking his lady for the compliment; she besought him not to bow so much like a man behind a counter, if he could possibly help it.’ In the end, his fortune gives out; she dies of a nervous fever, and the prodigal, bankrupt and cured of his folly, resumes his own name and returns to the factory.

William, whose prosperity and happiness have meanwhile been steadily increasing, receives him with open arms, and points the moral by observing, '"We have no connexions with fine people. We preserve our independence by confining ourselves to our station in life, and by never desiring to quit it, nor to ape those who are called our betters.”'

The lack of self-respect, the supposition that friendship and esteem are purchasable, that a sow’s ear filled with gold is not only as good as or better than a silk purse, but may be made to pass for one, and Charles’s ostentation a nd pretent iousness,complete the usual portrait, of his kind in English fiction. Pretentiousness is the trait which perhaps comes in for the most satire, — the commercial parvenu’s sham fine manners, sham pedigrees, sham family port raits, sham libraries ordered by the yard. As Margaret, I he daughter of the poor clergyman in North and South, says, — “Gormans! Are those the Gormans who made their fortune in trade in Southampton? Oh, I am so glad we don’t visit them! I don’t like shoppy people. I think we are far better off knowing only cottagers and laborers and people without pretence.”’

Lord Melbourne, the early counselor of Queen Victoria, expressed this common feeling in much the same language. ‘I don’t like the middle classes,’ he remarked (ministersmight still venture to say such things). ‘The middle classes are ... all affectation and conceit and pretence and concealment.’

Pretentiousness being a common human fault, it may be asked why it should be ascribed particularly to our friend? The fact, that the parvenu, who is particularly exposed to the temptation, happens to be, in England and elsewhere, most often of commercial origin may be called an accident. But the possibility that the ascription rests on grounds belonging more nearly to commerce itself, and that it is not unconnected with the strenuous advertising, attention-hunting, or even bluffing met hods of some traders, may perhaps be illustrated from a homely modern picture. ‘The barber shop,’ says the cheerful chronicler of that small Canadian town, Mariposa, ’is one of those wooden structures—I don’t know whether you know them — with a false wooden front that sticks up above its real height and gives it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture much used in Mariposa, and understood to be in keeping with the pretentious and artificial character of modern business.’ Anyway, the novelists often pick a quarrel with our friend and his atmosphere on this score, in tones varying between the savage and the mildly amused.

Illustrations of so notorious a theme are unnecessary, but the reader will be glad, I think, to be reminded of Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen’s Emma — Mrs. Elton who is the daughter of a Bristol tradesman. '" There is a family in that neighborhood who are such an annoyance to my brother and sister through the airs they give themselves,”’ says she, — '"people of the name of Tupman, very lately settled there and encumbered with many low connexions, but giving themselves airs and expecting to be on a footing with the oldestablished families. A year and a half is the very utmost that they can have lived at West Hall; and how they got their fortune nobody knows. They came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much, you know, Mr. Weston. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. By their manners they evidently think themselves equal to my brother, Mr. Suckling, who has been eleven years resident at Maple Grove, and whose father had it before him. — I believe at least — I am almost sure — that old Mr. Suckling had completed the purchase before his death."'

Still milder is the attack, if it can be called an attack, in Pride and Prejudice, on Sir William Lucas, with his constant allusions to ‘the Court of St. James’s.’ ‘Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honor of knighthood by an address to t he King during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town, and quitting them both he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and unshackled by business occupy himself solely in being civil to the world. For though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercifous. . . . By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him courteous.’

When he meets the imposing Mr. Darcy, and the conversation turns on dancing, he does not fail to ask him whether he has ever danced at St. James’s, and on Mr. Darcy saying no, he inquires, ‘“Did you not think it would be a proper compliment, to the place? ’” And when he goes to visit his son-in-law, the Reverend Mr. Collins, and Lady Catherine de Burgh calls immediately and invites them to her mansion the same evening, to the vast surprise of Mr. Collins, who exclaims, ‘“Who could have foreseen such an attention as this?’”—Sir William replies confidently, ‘“About the Court such instances of elegant breeding are not uncommon.’” And when ‘Lady Catherine, Sir William, and Mr. and Mrs. Collins sat down to quadrille,’ and ‘Lady Catherine was, generally speaking, stating the mistakes of the others, or relating some anecdote of herself,’ while ‘Mr. Collins was employed in agreeing to everything her ladyship said, thanking her for every fish he won, and apologizing if he thought he won too many,'—Sir William ‘did not say much. He was storing his memory with noble names.’

As for that form of pretence which Lord Melbourne notes as ‘concealment,’ we may recall the perturbation of good Miss Jenkyns, in Cranford, when Miss Jessie Brown had made ‘the unguarded admission (à apropos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle, her mother’s brother, who was a shopkeeper in Edinburgh. Miss Jenkyns tried to drown this terrible admission by a terrible cough, for the Honorable Mrs. Jameson was sitting at the cardtable nearest Miss Jessie, and what would she say or think if she found she was in the same room with a shopkeeper’s niece!’

However, the novelists do not by any means overlook the praiseworthy cases where our friend, like William Darlay, avoids pretence and the mistaken idea that aping is rising. Writing her North and South in protest against genteel prejudice, Mrs. Gashed insists upon the manufacturer’s — Thornton’s — ‘ pride in the commercial character,’and on his freedom from ambitions foreign to it. “‘It was enough for him,”’ as his mother puts it, “’to have one great desire, and to bring all the purposes of his life to bear on the fulfillment of that — to hold and maintain a high honorable place among the merchants of his country, the men of his town. Such a place my son has earned for himself. Go where you will, the name of John Thornton of Milton is known and respected among all men of business. Of course it is unknown in fashionable circles,” she continued scornfully. “Idle gentlemen and ladies are not likely to know much of a Milton manufacturer, unless he gets into Parliament or marries a lord’s daughter.” ’

Lord Beaconsfield, in Coningsby, gives Mr. Millbank, ‘one of the wealthiest manufacturers in Lancashire,’ the same sort of free character as Thornton displays. ‘He sent his son to Eton, though he disapproved of the system of education pursued there, to show that he had as much right to do so as any duke in the land. He had, however, brought up his only boy with a due prejudice against every sentiment or institution of an aristocratic nature, and had especially impressed on him in his school career to avoid the slightest semblance of courting the affections or society of the falsely held superior class. The character of the son, as much as the influence of the father, tended to the fulfillment of these injunctions. Oswald Millbank was of a proud and independent nature, reserved, a little stern.’

Lord Beaconsfield, by the bye, was perhaps the first to introduce the ‘super-millionaire’ into fiction. Sidonia, in Coningsby, is described as ’lord and master of the money-market of the world, and of course lord and master of virtually everything else.’ Needless to say, Sidonia has an independent mind under his suave manner, though he shows Lord Beaconsfield’s own artistic satisfaction in the picturesque side of high English rank; needless to say also, we get no insight into Sidonia’s business affairs.

The sympathetic note recurs in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley about the mill-owner, Moore; and the fine selfrespect of John Halifax, a business man of humble beginnings, is the main theme of the once popular and by no means negligible work called after him. This story, which seeks to prove that ‘the Christian only can be a true gentleman,’ begins in the early years of the nineteenth century, when John Halifax is courting a Miss March, whom he has met accidentally in the country. John is at that time far from his final eminence; he is still, in fact, an assist ant-tanner, and Miss March is the daughter of an ex-colonial governor with connections in the nohility; but neither at first knows the other’s posit ion. When he discovers hers, John exclaims to a friend, '"There can be no possible hope for me; nothing remains now but silence!”’ She, still in ignorance, invites him to call on her at the home of her cousins, Mr. and Lady Caroline Brithwood. He replies, much disturbed, ‘ “Mr. Brithwood would think me unworthy of his acquaintance.” “Because you are not very rich? What can that signify? It is enough for me that my friends are gentlemen.” “Mr. Brithwood and many others would not allow my claim to that, title.”

‘ The young gentlewoman drew back a little, and her involuntary gesture seemed to have brought back all honest. dignity and manly pride. He faced her, once more himself. “It is right that you should know to whom you are giving the honor of your kindness. We are not equals, —that is, society would not regard us as such, — and I doubt if even you yourself would wish us to be friends.” “Why not?” “Because you are a gentlewoman, and I am a tradesman.” The news was evidently a shock to her; it could not but be, reared as she was. John’s voice grew firmer, prouder,—no hesitation now. “My calling is, as you will soon hear at Newton Bury, that of a tanner.” She looked up — a mingled look of kindliness and pain. “The world says we are not equals, and it would neither be for Miss March’s nor my honor did I try to force upon it the truth, which I may prove openly one day, that we are equals.” Miss March looked up at him, — it was hard to say with what expression of joy or pride, or simple astonishment.’

While the courtship is going on, his employer says to him, ‘ “Why cannot thee keep in thy own rank? Be an honest tradesman as I have been.” “And as I trust always to be,” answers John. “I am the same person whether in the tan-yard or in Dr. Jessop’s drawingroom. I should not respect myself, if I believed otherwise.”’ He marries Miss March almost at once, but makes no attempt to conciliate her amazed relations, or to improve his social position by the match.

Dickens, though very angry with Mr. Dombey for his pride, admits that it sometimes ‘showed well,’ as for instance in Mr. Dombey’s attitude toward the aristocratic friends and kin of his second wife. Though she was the daughter of the Honorable Mrs. Skew ton and niece of a peer, Mr. Dombey had no idea that he was raising himself by marrying her; and after the dinner party given in honor of the alliance, when they each invited their own list of guests, and ‘Mrs. Dombey’s list by magnetic agreement entered into a bond of union against Mr. Dombey’s list, who were left wandering about the rooms in a desolate manner and seeking refuge in corners,’—and Mrs. Dombey made no effort whatever to stop the separation, — he lectured her very firmly. “‘Some of those whom you have been pleased to slight tonight ” (they included an East India magnate and a banker “ reputed to be able to buy up anything,”) “confer a distinction upon you, I must tell you, in any visit they pay you. I beg to tell you, for your information, Mrs. Dombey, that I consider these wealthy and important persons confer a distinction upon me,” —and Mr. Dombey drew himself up as having now rendered them of the highest possible importance.’

George Eliot draws so widely from middle-class life that her continual neglect of our friend is very noticeable. Only a few business people, and those seen entirely from their social side, are scattered through her novels. One remembers the Vincys, in Middlemarch, chiefly because of their marriages and the results of them; but Mr. Deane, in The Mill on the Floss, has something of interest to say in praise of his commercial calling. Having been all his life in Guest & Co., he opens out thus to Tom Tulliver, who is about to join the firm: ‘“Why, sir, forty years ago, when I was much such a strapping youngster as you, a man expected to pull between the shafts the best part of his life before he got the whip in his hand.

. . . It’s this steam, you see, that has made the difference; it drives on every wheel double pace, and the wheel of fori line along with ’em.... I don’t find fault with the change, as some do. Trade, sir, opens a man’s eyes, and if the population is to get thicker on the ground as it’s doing, the world must use its wits at inventions of one sort or another. . . . Somebody has said it’s a fine thing to make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before; but , sir, it’s a fine thing, too, to further the exchange of commodities, and bring the grains of corn to the mouths of the hungry. And that’s our line of business. I consider it as honorable a position as a man can hold to be connected with it.’”

To the business man, regarded in his social aspect, then, I do not think the English novelists can be said to be unfair, if one strikes a balance between the censure and the approbation of him which they express. They recognize, for instance, that sometimes, when he does form ‘fine connections,’ it is through no truckling on his part, but because the fine folk hasten to meet him more than half-way, or because the general development of the community brings it about. Mrs. Gaskell praises her Thornton for not aspiring to enter parliament or marry a lord’s daughter; but the duties of his own station, as it grew in importance, might well have obliged him to become an M.P.; and as for the lord’s daughter, our friend was often sorely pressed to take her by her parents. These mitigating circumstances are not overlooked, and yet one may have a suspicion that the censure expressed by the novelists would have been more voluminous, but for two restraining influences. They would probably have said more about our friend’s lack of polish, if they had expected him to possess any polish. And secondly, and chiefly, when surveying the collision between the business man and the gentry, they were much more taken up with the defending than with the attacking force. Nothing about our friend attracts them so much as his social rise; but even that is described by them less for his sake than because of the effect it had upon the upper class. The contact brought out weaknesses in the latter, and in watching these they often forget our friend. ‘An aristocracy may be created by laws,’ says Lord Beaconsfield, ‘ but it can only be maintained by manners.’ If the novelists anticipate very little from the business man in the way of manners, they demand much in that respect from the aristocracy, and where the demand is not satisfied they are severe critics. It is the old story: it is always the leading class of a community which comes in for the most attention, pleasant and unpleasant.

Trollope and Thackeray illustrate this clearly; Dickens is something of an exception. There are two sides, of course, to the rise of the business man, the class he rises into, and the class he rises from. Dickens, whose outlook inclined toward the latter side, criticizes our friend from below rather than from above. Naturally, therefore, he expects more from him, and it is, in fact, in Dickens that one finds the harshest attacks on his vulgarity; the reader will remember, in Hard Times, the ferocious onslaught on the vulgarity of Josiah Bounderby. But nine out of ten of the novelists stand at the other point of view, and the following extract from Trollope’s Doctor Thorne is typical.

Mr. Moffat, ‘a young man of very large fortune,’ and ‘seriously inclined to business,’ but son of a tailor, is taken up by the noble De Courcys, whose purpose it is to marry him to a minor member of the family — Augusta, daughter of the Lady Arabella Gresham. This Lady Arabella, it should be observed, has opposed the love-marriage of her son, Frank, to Mary Thorne, the illegitimate child of Dr. Thorne’s brother and of a sister of Scatcherd, — a stone-mason who has worked his way up to a baronetcy, — until it turns out that Mary has inherited Sir Roger Scat chord’s wealth, when the Lady Arabella at once relent s, and ‘forgives her birth.’ Before this, it should also be observed, the Lady Arabella had meant to join Frank to a Miss Dunstable, whose father had made £200,000 in the ‘ointment of Lebanon.’ To return to Moffat. ‘The Countess (de Courcy), the Lady Arabella and Miss Augusta Gresham had been talking over the Greshambury affairs, and they had latterly been assisted by the Lady Amelia, than whom no De Courcy born was more wise, more solemn, more prudent, or more proud. The ponderosity of her qualifications for nobility was sometimes too much even for her mother, and her devotion to the peerage was such that she would certainly have declined a seat, in Heaven, if offered to her without the promise that it should be in the upper house. The subject first discussed had been Augusta’s prospects. Mr. Moffat had been invited to De Courcy Castle, and Augusta had been brought there to meet him, with the express intention on the part of the countess that they should be man and wife. The countess had been careful to make it intelligible to her sister-in-law and niece [the Lady Arabella and Augusta] that, though Mr. Moffat would do excellently well for a daughter of Greshambury, he could not be allowed to raise his eyes to a female scion of De Courcy Castle. “Not that we personally dislike him,” said the Lady Amelia, “but rank has its drawbacks, Augusta.’”

Evidently, Mr. Moffat has some reason for remarking to Miss Dunstable, when he meets her at the great Duke of Omnium’s: ‘"Yes, wealth is very powerful! Here are we, Miss Dunstable, the two most honored guests in this house. . . . Now they accuse us of being tuft-hunters; that, is what the world says about persons of our class. It seems to me the toadying is all on the other side.’”

Indeed, those cases where ‘the toadying is all on the other side’ receive most attention from the novelists, for the reason already stated. And, of course, the depreciatory remarks about our friend, which they often put into the mouths of the gentry, and which may cling to him in our memory, do not necessarily express their own opinion. Very often such remarks are meant to hit the smallmindedness, ignorance, or prejudice of those who utter them. Margaret, for instance, in North and South, displays her ingenuous wrong-mindedness when she says about Thornton, ‘"He is the first, specimen of a manufacturer — of a person engaged in trade — that I had ever the opportunity of studying, papa. He is my first olive; let me make a face while I swallow it.”’ So the Miss Bingleys, in Pride and Prejudice, — persons of unquestioned family, — satirize themselves by their remarks on the commercial relations of the Bennetts. ‘ “ I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennett,”’ says one of them; “‘she is really a very sweet creature, and I wish with all my heart she was well settled. But with such a father and mother and such low connections, I fear there is no chance of it.” “I think I have heard you say,”’ rejoins the other, ‘“that there is an uncle an attorney in Mery ton.” “Yes, and they have another who lives somewhere in Cheapside.” “That is capital!” said her sister, and they both laughed heartily. . . . They indulged their mirth for some time at their dear friend’s vulgar relations.’

How far this prejudice st ill flourishes may be suggested by an article in the English Review of Reviews for January, 1913, on ‘The Dignity of Business,’ which attracted a good deal of notice. The writer complained that the young are ‘deliberately taught to despise business,’ and to regard ‘ business men as little better than paid hucksters, and quite outside the pale’; and most of the English newspaper comments on the article upheld the complaint. This, in spite of the continual commercialization of the English aristocracy. But then, the business man who is ennobled enters the circle of the old traditions as a convert rather than as a conqueror, and he sometimes acquires, after exchanging, so t o speak, his office suit for a peer’s robes, the keenest perception of the lowness of business.

And now, after this fleeting survey of social criticism, to return for a moment to our starting-point — the moral question. The English novelists, by comparison with the American, are practically silent on the subject of commercial honesty. This docs not mean, of course, that they never introduce swindlers into their books; one can think at once of Mr. Montagu Tigg, Rummun Lal, and plenty more. But such persons have no more bearing on the subject of commercial honesty than Jack Sheppard, the highwayman, has, They stand outside of the pale; they are recognized outlaws, and illustrate nothing but the morals of thieves. What I mean is that the English novelists do not preach against the character of the business man who is within the pale. Such as it is they accept it.

The reasons for the acceptance, however, do not allow it to be inferred that silence in this case means approval. To begin with, the novelists are not interested in how our friend makes his money, but only in how he spends it; they have little occasion, therefore, to examine the morals of the former process. Secondly, they discriminate between two standards or styles of conduct, — the commercial and another, — of which t he latter, though particularly enshrined in the gentry, is a matter for universal imitation, while the former, though valid enough within its own limited sphere, they never suppose to be capable of general human application, any more than the barrister’s professional conduct in defending a man whom he believes to be guilty is capable of general human application. The commercial sphere is regarded as quite restricted and subordinate, and that being so, a discussion of its technical rules and usages is not deemed of interest to the general public. ‘Business is business,’ but it is nothing more.

Yet it is abundantly evident that they have no high opinion of the commercial standard, even though they accept its validity within its own circumscribed world. The criticism of the attitude of Sir Barnes Newcome, the great London banker, toward the Bundelcund enterprise, in The Newcomes, makes this plain. Sir Barnes withdraws his bank’s support from the enterprise at a critical moment, and Thackeray, it will be remembered, in spite of Colonel Newcome’s t irades and his own dislike of Sir Barnes, justifies the step as a proper and sound business proceeding, and blames the Colonel for losing his temper over it. Sir Barnes says of himself, “‘In business, begad, there are no friends and enemies. I leave all my sentiment on the other side of Temple Bard’ ’ And Thackeray alleges nothing else against him. He admits that Sir Barnes was, according to the legitimate commercial standard, an estimable person. Nevertheless, he does not conceal his contempt of him, and, through him, of the code which he so respectably embodies. He condemns the heartlessness of that code,—as Dickens does in Hard Times: its lack of chivalry, its disregard of everything but ‘chance and arithmetic.' He may laugh at the quixotic Colonel for denying the right of irresponsible shareholders to get out of the rotten Bundelcund Company, and for comparing them to soldiers ’applying for leave of absence on the eve of an action’; he may ridicule his folly in ignoring the legitimate exactions of business; but about business itself he was perhaps not far from expressing his own sentiments in that well-known passage in Barry Lyndon, whore the gambler compares himself with commercial people. “’They cry fie upon men engaged in play. But I should like to know how much more honorable their modes of livelihood are than ours,"' and so forth.

Let me place side by side two little instances from the same writer, in one of which the standard for general imitation, and in the other that of a technical character and limited applicability, is displayed. In Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds we read: ’Lucy Morris was a very unhappy girl. She had a second time accused Lord Fawn of speaking an untruth. She did not quite know the usages of the world in the matter, but she did know that the one offense a gentleman is supposed never to commit is that of telling an untruth.’ How absurd it would have appeared to Trollope to substitute ‘business man’ for ‘gentleman’ in this passage may be inferred from the other instance. In The Bertrams he is describing one of the most highly respected men in the London business world, Mr. George Bertram, Senior, a director of the Bank of England, one beyond reproach according to the ideals of his sphere. ‘ It was on ’Change that he was truly buried, and in Capel Court that his funeral sermon was duly preached. There were the souls that knew him.

. . . He had been true and honest in all his dealings — there at least. He had hurt nobody byword or deed — excepting in the way of trade. And had kept his hands from all picking and stealing — from all picking, that is, not warranted by City usage, and all stealing that the law regards as such. Therefore, there, on ’Change, they preached his funeral sermon loudly and buried him with all due honors.’

Certainly, these novelists have no very high opinion of commercial ideals or practice, and though no crusade against them is to be found in their works, there are many indications of the probability that such a crusade would have occurred, had the business world not been regarded as comparatively negligible, because subordinate to the world in which the other standard was set up.

To the reader who remarks the absence from this sketch of illustrations from contemporary English writers, a word of explanation is due. The typical attitude of fiction toward business in England has not undergone any great change, I think, during the last two or three decades. A detailed portrayal of commercial life is still very exceptional. And on the moral question, the Victorian point of view continues to prevail unmodified; the frankness with which the validity of an inferior code in business is still accepted gives, for instance, an almost picaresque touch of irresponsibility to the picture of the patent-medicine enterprise in Tono-Bungay. In short, such changes as are to be found may perhaps be passed over in presenting the English attitude for t he purposes of an international comparison; and that being so, I have preferred to take my illustrations a little way further back, where the stream runs clearer.

In another paper I shall go on to the American side of the comparison.