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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843
It has been admirably remarked, by some one whose name we forget, that the grand advantage of high birth is, placing a man as far forward at twenty-five as another man is at fifty. We might, as a corollary to this undeniable proposition, add, that birth not only places, but keeps a man in that advance of his fellows, which in the sum of life makes such vast ultimate difference in the prominence of their position.
This advantage enjoyed by the aristocracy of birth, of early enrolling themselves among the aristocracy of power, has, like every thing in the natural and moral world, its compensating disadvantage: they lose in one way what they gain in another; and although many of them become eminent in public life, few, very few, comparatively with the numbers who enter the arena, become great. They are respected, heard, and admired, by virtue of a class-prepossession in their favour; yet, after all, they must select from the ranks of the aristocracy of talent their firmest and best supporters, to whom they may delegate the heavy responsibilities of business, and lift from their own shoulders the burden of responsible power.
One striking example of the force of birth, station, and association in public life, never fails to occur to us, as an extraordinary example of the magnifying power of these extrinsic qualities, in giving to the aristocracy of birth a consideration, which, though often well bestowed, is yet oftener bestowed without any desert whatever; and that title to admiration and respect, which has died with ancestry, patriotism, and suffering in the cause of freedom, is transferred from the illustrious dead to the undistinguished living.
Without giving a catalogue raisonné of the slow fellows, (we use the term not disrespectfully, but only in contradistinction to the others,) we may observe that, besides the public service in which the great names are sufficiently known, you have poets, essayists, dramatists, astronomers, geologists, travellers, novelists, and, what is better than all, philanthropists. In compliment to human nature, we take the liberty merely to mention the names of Lord Dudley Stuart and Lord Ashley. The works of the slow fellows, especially their poetry, indicate in a greater or less degree the social position of the authors; seldom or never deficient in good taste, and not without feeling, they lack power and daring. The smooth style has their preference, and their verses smack of the school of Lord Fanny; indeed, we know not that, in poetry or prose, we can point out one of our slow fellows of the present day rising above judicious mediocrity. It is a curious fact, that the most daring and original of our noble authors have, in their day, been fast fellows; it is only necessary to name Rochester, Buckingham, and Byron.
Among the slow fellows, are multitudes of pretenders to intellect in a small way. These patronize a drawing-master, not to learn to draw, but to learn to talk of drawing; they also study the Penny Magazine and other profound works, to the same purpose; they patronize the London University, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as far as lending their names; for, being mostly of the class of fashionable screws, they take care never to subscribe to any thing. They have a refined taste in shawls, and are consequently in the confidence of dressy old women, who hold them up as examples of every thing that is good. They take chocolate of a morning, and tea in the evening; drink sherry with a biscuit, and wonder how people can eat those hot lunches. They take constitutional walks and Cockle's pills; and, by virtue of meeting them at the Royal Society, are always consulting medical men, but take care never to offer them a guinea. They talk of music, of which they know something—of books, of which they know little—and of pictures, of which they know less; they have always read "the last novel," which is as much as they can well carry; they know literary, professional, and scientific men at Somerset House, but, if they meet them in Park Lane, look as if they never saw them before; they are very peevish, have something to say against every man, and always say the worst first; they are very quiet in their manner, almost sly, and never use any of the colloquialisms of the fast fellows; they treat their inferiors with great consideration, addressing them, "honest friend," "my good man," and so on, but have very little heart, and less spirit.
They equally abhor the fast fellows and the pretenders to fashion. They are afraid of the former, who are always ridiculing them and their pursuits, by jokes theoretical and practical. If the fast fellows ascertain that a slow fellow affects sketching, they club together to annoy him, talking of the "autumnal tints," and "the gilding of the western hemisphere;" if a botanist, they send him a cow-cabbage, or a root of mangel-wurzel, with a serious note, stating, that they hear it is a great curiosity in his line; if an entomologist, they are sure to send him away "with a flea in his ear." If he affects poetry, the fast fellows make one of their servants transcribe, from Bell's Life, Scroggins's poetical version of the fight between Bendigo and Bungaree, or some such stuff; and, having got the slow fellow in a corner, insist upon having his opinion, and drive him nearly mad. All these, and a thousand other pranks, the fast fellows play upon their slow brethren, not in the hackneyed fashion which low people call "gagging," and genteel people "quizzing," but with a seriousness and gravity that heightens all the joke, and makes the slow fellow inexpressibly ridiculous.
It is astonishing, considering the opportunities of the slow fellows, that they do not make a better figure; it seems wonderful, that they who glide swiftly down the current of fortune with wind and tide, should be distanced by those who, close-hauled upon a wind, are beating up against it all their lives; but so it is;—the compensating power that rules material nature, governs the operations of the mind. To whom much is given of opportunity, little is bestowed of the exertion to improve it. Those who rely more or less on claims extrinsic, are sure to be surpassed by those whose power is from within. After all, the great names of our nation (with here and there an exception to prove the rule) are plebeian.
OF THE ARISTOCRACY OF POWER
In their political capacity, people of fashion, among whom, for the present purpose, we include the whole of the aristocracy, are the common butt of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.
They are accused of standing between the mass of the people and their inalienable rights; of opposing, with obstinate resistance, the progress of rational liberty, and of——but, in short, you have only to glance over the pages of any democratic newspaper, to be made aware of the horrible political iniquity of the aristocracy of England.
The aristocracy in England, considered politically, is a subject too broad, too wide, and too deep for us, we most readily confess; nor is it exactly proper for a work of a sketchy nature, in which we only skim lightly along the surface of society, picking up any little curiosity as we go along, but without dipping deep into motives or habits of thought or action, especially in state affairs.
Since our late lamented friends, the Whigs, have gone to enjoy a virtuous retirement and dignified ease, we have taken no delight in politics. There is no fun going on now-a-days—no quackery, no mountebankery, no asses, colonial or otherwise. The dull jog-trot fellows who have got into Downing Street have made politics no joke; and now that silence, as of the tomb, reigns amongst quondam leaders of the Treasury Benech—now that the camp-followers have followed the leader, and the auxiliaries are dispersed, we really have nobody to laugh at; and, like our departed friends, have too little of the statesman to be serious about serious matters.
With regard to the aristocracy in their public capacity, this is the way we always look at them.
In the first place, they govern us through the tolerance of public opinion, as men having station, power, property, much to lose, and little comparatively to gain—men who have put in bail to a large amount for their good behaviour: and, in the second place, they govern us, because really and truly there are so many outrageously discordant political quacks, desirous of taking our case in hand, that we find it our interest to entrust our public health to an accomplished physician, even although he charges a guinea a visit, and refuses to insure a perfect cure with a box of pills costing thirteenpence-halfpenny. There can be no doubt whatever, that the most careful men are the men who have most to care for: he that has a great deal to lose, will think twice, where he that has nothing to lose, will not think at all: and the government of this vast and powerful empire, we imagine, with great deference, must require a good deal of thinking. In a free press, we have a never-dying exponent of public opinion, a perpetual advocate of rational liberty, and a powerful engine for the exposure, which is ultimately the redress, of wrong: and although this influential member of our government receives no public money, nor is called right honourable, nor speaks in the House, yet in fact and in truth it has a seat in the Cabinet, and, upon momentous occasions, a voice of thunder.
That the aristocracy of power should be in advance of public opinion, is not in the nature of things, and should no more be imputed as a crime to them, than to us not to run when we are not in a hurry: they cannot, as a body, move upwards, because they stand so near the top, that dangerous ambition is extinguished; and it is hardly to be expected that, as a body, they should move downwards, unless they find themselves supported in their position upon the right of others, in which case we have always seen that, although they descend gradually, they descend at last.
This immobility of our aristocracy is the origin of the fixity of our political institutions, which has been, is, and will continue to be, the great element of our pre-eminence as a nation: it possesses a force corrective and directive, and at once restrains the excess, while it affords a point of resistance, to the current of the popular will. And this immobility, it should never be forgotten, is owing to that very elevation so hated and so envied: wanting which the aristocracy would be subject to the vulgar ambitions, vulgar passions, and sordid desires of meaner aspirants after personal advantage and distinction. It is a providential blessing, we firmly believe, to a great nation to possess a class, by fortune and station, placed above the unseemly contentions of adventurers in public life: looked up to as men responsible without hire for the public weal, and, without sordid ambitions of their own, solicitous to preserve it: looked up to, moreover, as examples of that refinement of feeling, jealous sense of honour, and manly independence, serving as detersives of the grosser humours of commercial life, and which, filtering through the successive strata of society, clarify and purify in their course, leaving the very dregs the cleaner for their passage.
A body thus by habit and constitution opposed to innovation, and determined against the recklessness of inconsiderate reforms, has furnished a stock argument to those who delight in "going a-head" faster than their feet, which are the grounds of their arguments, can carry them. We hear the aristocracy called stumbling-blocks in the way of legislative improvements, and, with greater propriety of metaphor, likened to drags upon the wheel of progressive reform; and so on, through all the regions of illustration, until we are in at the death of the metaphor. How happens to be overlooked the advantage of this anti-progressive barrier, to the concentration and deepening of the flood of opinion on any given subject? how is it that men are apt altogether to forget that this very barrier it is which prevents the too eager crowd from trampling one another to death in their haste? which gives time for the ebullitions of unreasoning zeal, and reckless enthusiasm, and the dregs of agitation, quietly to subside; and, for all that, bears the impress of reason and sound sense to circulate with accumulated pressure through the public mind? Were it not for the barrier which the aristocracy of power thus interposes for a time, only to withdraw when the time for interposition is past, we should live in a vortex of revolution and counter-revolution. Our whole time, and our undivided energies, would be employed in acting hastily, and repenting at leisure; in repining either because our biennial revolutions went too far, or did not go far enough; in expending our national strength in the unprofitable struggles of faction with faction, adventurer with adventurer: with every change we should become more changeful, and with every settlement more unsettled: one by one our distant colonies would follow the bright example of our people at home, and our commerce and trade would fall with our colonial empire. In fine, we should become in the eyes of the world what France now is—a people ready to sacrifice every solid advantage, every gradual, and therefore permanent, improvement, every ripening fruit that time and care, and the sunshine of peace only can mature, to a genius for revolution.
This turbulent torrent of headlong reform, to-day flooding its banks, to-morrow dribbling in a half-dry channel, the aristocracy of power collects, concentrates, and converts into a power, even while it circumscribes it, and represses. So have we seen a mountain stream useless in summer, dangerous in winter, now a torrent now a puddle, wasting its unprofitable waters in needless brawling; let a barrier be opposed to its downward course, let it be dammed up, let a point of resistance be afforded where its waters may be gathered together, and regulated, you find it turned to valuable account, acting with men's hands, becoming a productive labourer, and contributing its time and its industry to advance the general sum of rational improvement.
From the material to the moral world you may always reason by analogy. If you study the theory of revolutions, you will not fail to observe that, wherever, in constructing your barrier, you employ ignorant engineers, who have not duly calculated the depth and velocity of the current; whenever you raise your dam to such a height that no flood will carry away the waste waters; whenever you talk of finality to the torrent, saying, thus long shalt thou flow, and no longer; whenever you put upon your power a larger wheel than it can turn—you are slowly but surely preparing for that flood which will overwhelm your work, destroy your mills, your dams, and your engines; in a word, you are the remote cause of a revolution.
This is the danger into which aristocracies of power are prone to fall: the error of democracies is, to delight in the absolutism of liberty; but thus it is with liberty itself, that true dignity of man, that parent of all blessings: absolute and uncontrolled, a tyranny beyond the power to endure itself, the worst of bad masters, a fool who is his own client; restrained and tempered, it becomes a wholesome discipline, a property with its rights and its duties, a sober responsibility, bringing with it, like all other responsibilities, its pleasures and its cares; not a toy to be played with, nor even a jewel to be worn in the bonnet, but a talent to be put out to interest, and enjoyed in the unbroken tranquillity of national thankfulness and peace.
Another defect in the aristocracy of power is, the narrow sphere of their sympathies, extending only to those they know, and are familiar with; that is to say, only as far as the circumference of their own limited circle. This it is that renders them keenly apprehensive of danger close at hand, but comparatively indifferent to that which menaces them from a distance. Placed upon a lofty eminence, they are comparatively indifferent while clouds obscure, and thunder rattles along the vale; their resistance is of a passive kind, directed not to the depression of those beneath them, nor to overcome pressure from above, but to preserve themselves in the enviable eminence of their position, and there to establish themselves in permanent security.
As a remedy for this short-sightedness, the result of their isolated position, the aristocracy of power is always prompt to borrow from the aristocracy of talent that assistance in the practical working of its government which it requires; they are glad to find safe men among the people to whom they can delegate the cares of office, the annoyances of patronage, and the odium of power; and, the better to secure these men, they are always ready to lift them among themselves, to identify them with their exclusive interests, and to give them a permanent establishment among the nobles of the land.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DRESS
Perhaps we may be expected to say something of the dress of men of fashion, as it is peculiar, and not less characteristic than their manner. Their clothes, like their lives, are usually of a neutral tint; staring colours they studiously eschew, and are never seen with elaborate gradations of under waistcoats. They would as soon appear out of doors in cuerpo, as in blue coats with gilt buttons, or braided military frocks, or any dress smacking of the professional. When they indulge in fancy colours and patterns, you will not fail to remark that these are not worn, although imitated by others. The moment a dressy man of fashion finds that any thing he has patronized gets abroad, he drops the neckcloth or vest, or whatever it may be, and condemns the tailor as an "unsafe" fellow. But it is not often that even the most dressy of our men of fashion originate any thing outré, or likely to attract attention; of late years their style has been plain, almost to scrupulosity.
Notwithstanding that the man of fashion is plainly dressed, no more than ordinary penetration is required to see that he is excellently well dressed. His coat is plain, to be sure, much plainer than the coat of a Jew-clothesman, having neither silk linings, nor embroidered pocket-holes, nor cut velvet buttons, nor fur collar; but see how it fits him—not like cast iron, nor like a wet sack, but as if he had been born in it.
There is a harmony, a propriety in the coat of a man of fashion, an unstudied ease, a graceful symmetry, a delicacy of expression, that has always filled us with the profoundest admiration of the genius of the artist; indeed, no ready money could purchase coats that we have seen—coats that a real love of the subject, and working upon long credit, for a high connexion, could alone have given to the world—coats, not the dull conceptions of a geometric cutter, spiritlessly outlined upon the shop-board by the crayon of a mercenary foreman, but the fortunate creation of superior intelligence, boldly executed in the happy moments of a generous enthusiasm!
Vain, very vain is it for the pretender to fashion to go swelling into the atelier of a first-rate coat architect, with his ready money in his hand, to order such a coat! Order such a coat, forsooth! order a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, an epic poem. Such a coat—we say it with the generous indignation of a free Briton—is one of the exclusive privileges reserved, by unjust laws, to a selfish aristocracy!
The aristocratic trouser-cutter, too, deserves our unlimited approbation. Nothing more distinguishes the nineteenth century, in which those who can manage it have the happiness to live, than the precision we have attained in trouser-cutting. While yet the barbarism of the age, or poverty of customers, vested the office of trouser-cutter and coat architect in the same functionary, coats were without soul, and "inexpressibles" inexpressibly bad, or, as Coleridge would have said, "ridiculous exceedingly." In our day, on the contrary, we have attained to such a pitch of excellence, that the trouser-cutter who fails to give expression to his works, is hunted into the provinces, and condemned for life to manufacture nether garments for clergymen and country gentlemen.
The results of the minute division of labour, to which so much of the excellence of all that is excellent in London is mainly owing, is in nothing more apparent than in that department of the fine arts which people devoid of taste call fashionable tailoring. We have at the West End fashionable artistes in riding coats, in dress coats, in cut-aways; one is superlative in a Taglioni, another devotes the powers of his mind exclusively to the construction of a Chesterfield, a third gives the best years of his life to the symmetrical beauty of a barrel-trouser; from the united exertions of these, and a thousand other men of taste and genius, is your indisputably-dressed man of fashion turned out upon the town. Then there are constructors of Horse Guards' and of Foot Guards' jacket, full and undress; the man who contrives these would expire if desired to turn his attention to the coat of a marching regiment; a hussar-pelisse-maker despises the hard, heavy style of the cutters for the Royal Artillery, and so on. Volumes would not shut if we were to fill them with the infinite variety of these disguisers of that nakedness which formerly was our shame, but which latterly, it would seem, has become our pride. With the exception of one gentleman citywards, who has achieved an immortality in the article of box-coats, every contriver of men of fashion, we mean in the tailoring, which is the principal department, reside in the parish of St James's, within easy reach of their distinguished patrons. These gentlemen have a high and self-respecting idea of the nobleness and utility of their vocation. A friend of ours, of whom we know no harm save that he pays his tailors' bills, being one day afflicted with this unusual form of insanity, desired the artist to deduct some odd shillings from his bill; in a word, to make it pounds—"Excuse me, sir," said Snip, "but pray, let us not talk of pounds—pounds for tradesmen, if you please; but artists, sir, artists are always remunerated with guineas!"
To return to the outward and visible man of fashion, from whose peculiarities our dissertation upon the sublime and beautiful in tailoring has too long detained us. The same subdued expression of elegance and ease that pervades the leading articles of his attire, extends, without exception, to all the accessories; or if he is deficient in aught, the accessorial toggery, such as hats, boots, choker, gloves, are always carefully attended to; for it is in this department that so distinguished a member of the detective police as ourselves is always enabled to arrest disguised snobbery. You will never see a man of fashion affect a Paget hat, for example, or a D'Orsayan beaver: the former has a ridiculous exuberance of crown, the latter a by no means allowable latitude of brim—besides, borrowing the fashion of a hat, is with him what plagiarizing the interior furniture of the head is with others. He considers stealing the idea of a hat low and vulgar, and leaves the unworthy theft to be perpetrated by pretenders to fashion: content with a hat that becomes him, he is careful never to be before or behind the prevailing hat-intelligence of the time. Three hats your man of fashion sedulously escheweth—a new hat, a shocking bad hat, and a gossamer. As the song says, "when into a shop he goes" he never "buys a four-and-nine," neither buyeth he a Paris hat, a ventilator, or any of the hats indebted for their glossy texture to the entrails of the silk worm; he sporteth nothing below a two-and-thirty shilling beaver, and putteth it not on his head until his valet, exposing it to a shower of rain, has "taken the shine out of it."
In boots he is even more scrupulously attentive to what Philosopher Square so appropriately called the fitness of things: his boots are never square-toed, or round-toed, like the boots of people who think their toes are in fashion. You see that they fit him, that they are of the best material and make, and suitable to the season: you never see him sport the Sunday patent-leathers of the "snob," who on week-a-days proceeds on eight-and-sixpenny high-lows: you never see him shambling along in boots a world too wide, nor hobbling about a crippled victim to the malevolence of Crispin. The idiosyncrasy of his foot has always been attended to; he has worn well-fitting boots every day of his life, and he walks as if he knew not whether he had boots on or not. As for stocks, saving that he be a military man, he wears them not; they want that easy negligence, attainable only by the graceful folds of a well tied choker. You never see a man of fashion with his neck in the pillory, and you hardly ever encounter a Cockney whose cervical investment does not convey at once the idea of that obsolete punishment. A gentleman never considers that his neck was given him to show off a cataract of black satin upon, or as a post whereon to display gold-threaded fabrics, of all the colours of the rainbow: sooner than wear such things, he would willingly resign his neck to the embraces of a halter. His study is to select a modest, unassuming choker, fine if you please, but without pretension as to pattern, and in colour harmonizing with his residual toggery: this he ties with an easy, unembarrassed air, so that he can conveniently look about him. Oxford men, we have observed, tie chokers better than any others; but we do not know whether there are exhibitions or scholarships for the encouragement of this laudable faculty. At Cambridge (except Trinity) there is a laxity in chokers, for which it is difficult to account, except upon the principle that men there attend too closely to the mathematics; these, as every body knows, are in their essence inimical to the higher departments of the fine arts. There is no reason, however, why in this important branch of learning, which, as we may say, comes home to the bosom of every man, one Alma Mater should surpass another; since at both the intellects of men are almost exclusively occupied for years in tying their abominable white chokers, so as to look as like tavern waiters as possible.
